CHAPTER FORTY

Helen had given us ample warning. The Minotaur was knitting itself together from the flames, growing taller and more solid by the moment. It was extremely dramatic, but slow as molasses. Mike and I had plenty of time to position ourselves on either side of the fire.

When the monster finally took form, it stared at me, fury burning in its eyes. It huffed and puffed a couple of times, and then let out a savage bellow that shook the grand orrery above us.

“Eeek,” I said, and stabbed the Minotaur in his thigh with my sword.

Mike hit the monster at the same time. He got the Minotaur’s left side; I got its right. We maimed the monster using Helen’s system, with long slashes through the meat.

Mike even mimicked the little fishhook at the end of the scar on the beast’s left arm.

The Minotaur collapsed into the fire, yelping like a hurt puppy before it vanished.

“I know I’m tempting Fate here,” I said to Mike, “but I expected more from a mythical monster.”

“He is a couple thousand years out of practice,” Mike replied, almost apologetically.

“East corner!” Speedy shouted from the top of Helen’s statue.

We turned towards where the koala was pointing. This time, the Minotaur appeared at the far end of the room in a single mighty puff of smoke, reforming into flesh almost instantly. It lowered its head and charged.

“Now that’s what I’m talking about!” I said, as I brought my sword up to guard.

There was no doubt that the Minotaur was rusty. It made plenty of rookie mistakes as it relearned what it meant to have mass. Its feet would get crossed as it turned. The weight of its horns kept twisting it off-balance. Sometimes it remembered it was carrying a labrys, and sometimes it didn’t.

But…

As we fought, the Minotaur slowed its attacks. It would wait for me or Mike to close, watching our technique before responding. This made the Minotaur a much better fighter.

Still not a great fighter but, you know. It tried.

Let me give you an example.

Mike’s taller and has more upper-body strength than I do: he’s got the reach and the heft. Me, I’m light and quick. When we first started fighting, Mike would go in high to do damage, while I went in low to cripple its legs. Each time, the Minotaur would roar and swing at Mike, who made a larger target, and I’d take it down. This strategy worked pretty well for about fifteen minutes, with Mike whamwhamslash! on the Minotaur’s arms and torso, while I’d ziiiiiiphamstrings!

On the fifth exchange, Mike and I made the nearly fatal mistake of assuming that the Minotaur would swing at him instead of me. I came in close and low, and was nearly cut in two as the Minotaur changed its overhand attack to a very effective underhand swing.

“Whoa!” I shouted, as the labrys came at me like the world’s biggest, sharpest golf club. I rolled to the side, and felt the edge of the labrys pass through the back of my jacket.

“Too close!” Mike yelled.

“Yup!” I yelled back, as I kicked the Minotaur hard enough to shatter its nearest ankle. The monster went down but didn’t cry out; Mike followed this up with a clean swing which decapitated it. The head and body stayed put for all of five heartbeats before they disappeared, and then reformed, whole, in the fire pit. “It’s learning!”

As Mike and I kept picking it to pieces, the Minotaur began to show some intelligence. Its attacks became less about rage and more about precision, with the beast using its size and mass as secondary weapons. Mike would go in to hit it low, and the Minotaur would start to swing its labrys to retaliate, then turn that into a feint and come in with its horns. I’d bring up my sword, and it would aim a kick at where it thought my chest would be. And so on, and so on, and continued for what seemed like forever.

It was like sparring with a very gifted child.

A very large, heavily-armed gifted child who would never get tired, and who was gradually learning that pain was nothing but a state of mind.

Mike and I began to work the Minotaur in shifts. It was a delaying tactic, nothing more; the person fighting the monster had to expend twice as much energy, so it’s not like the one who was resting got that much more value out of it than when we worked together. During these breaks, the one who was resting went over our game plan with Speedy, which could be summed up as: Any new ideas on how we can get out of this situation? and Fuck no, just try not to get killed.

During one of these shifts when I was fighting the monster, I came in close and…

Slipped.

I don’t know on what, okay? I guess someone left a banana peel lying around the Labyrinth.

I face-planted. Right in front of the Minotaur.

Mike was there to cover me almost as soon as I hit the ground, but it wasn’t necessary—the Minotaur wasn’t attacking. Instead, it was making a little huffing noise.

It took me a moment to realize the Minotaur was laughing.

“Hope?” Mike said, his eyes fixed on the monster. “Move about twenty feet away, then come at me.”

I was still trying to catch my breath. “What?”

“Fight me. Bow and attack.”

I pushed myself away from the Minotaur, slowly. Mike did too, backing up, gladius at the ready but no longer directed at the monster.

The Minotaur watched us with its blue-black eyes, but didn’t move.

When we were a safe distance away from the beast, Mike and I bowed to each other, just as if we were in his dojo back in Maryland. Then we went at it, hammer and tongs.

Or, saber and gladius. Whatever.

We came in hard, metal on metal, and pushed off as if that first contact hadn’t shaken both of us more than the entire last hour of skirmishes with the Minotaur. Mike used the gladius like a katana, two-handed with long, serious swings. My saber was light and flowed like water, and I was in and out, in and out, faster than thinking.

He swung; I shot in close. I turned; he was right there, his blade bearing down on me, his size and reach making up for my speed. He’d step; I’d follow. Up, down, up, down, the sound of ancient steel ringing in the room as we struck and parried.

Neither of us were trying to get past each other’s defense; it was a tournament to see which one of us would make the first mistake.

It was me.

I’m not Mike’s equal—nobody is. I overextended, just a fraction of a fraction, but it was enough for Mike to slide in past my blade and tag me with the flat side of the gladius.

He stepped away, his sword at middle position.

We bowed.

Speedy, perched atop the bare breasts of marble Helen, hooted and cheered.

I turned to the Minotaur and bowed.

I’ll be damned if the monster didn’t return it.

And then I took the Minotaur to school.

Our first few formal exchanges were pathetic. The Minotaur had been fighting me and Mike for over an hour, and it seemed determined to use the same hack-and-slash techniques that had allowed us to pick it apart. On most of our exchanges, I had to hold back from seriously hurting it: the Minotaur kept extending its labrys too far, or it failed to guard its neck, or any one of the many hundreds of careless combat errors that it couldn’t seem to avoid.

“Dude,” I finally said. “Stop. Just stop!”

The monster froze in place.

I showed the Minotaur a mistake it had been making with its feet by mimicking its pose, then shuffling into a stronger fighting stance. “It’s all about the core,” I explained, as I tapped my sternum with my thumb. “You have to get your central body aligned before you can concentrate on anything else.”

Speedy, standing on top of Helen’s boobs, translated this into ancient Greek.

The Minotaur whipped its head towards Speedy, Mike and I forgotten. The monster stared at the koala as a sad crooning noise escaped from its throat.

“Oh my God,” I whispered to Mike. “This is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”

The Minotaur glanced at me and Mike, then back up at Speedy, whimpering.

Over the last hour of combat, I thought that maybe we were getting through to Theseus, that maybe there was something of that man left within the monster. But that whimpering… Oh God, that whimpering! There was nothing sane in that noise—it was the sound of pure agony. Whatever kind of man Theseus had been? He didn’t exist. Not anymore. Countless centuries spent in what amounted to solitary confinement had stripped him of his mind and personality.

Worse? There was still something human within the monster. Something that had a sense of humor, that was trying to socialize, that was reaching out to connect with the language it recognized…

I suddenly knew why Archimedes had chosen to come here when he had the alternative of his cozy library sanctuary, and why he had built a window to the stars a mile underground.

“Speedy?” Mike said. “Talk to him. Tell him we’re travelers who’ve heard stories of a great warrior living in a mountain. Say that after fighting him, we’re convinced those stories are about him, and we’d like to learn more about how he came to be here.”

“And if you want to get out of this alive, don’t be a wiseass,” I added.

“Really?” Speedy snapped. “I thought I’d just cut to the chase and tell it that its immortal enemy sent us here to destroy it. You don’t think that’d go well for us?”

The koala resumed speaking in ancient Greek.

The Minotaur panted in shallow gasps, grasping the air around the statue as if Speedy’s words could be felt as well as heard.

“It’s not answering,” Speedy said.

“Keep talking,” Mike said. “It’s the familiarity more than the conversation.”

Mike approached the Minotaur, very, very slowly. Then, as he was standing beside the monster at the base of Helen’s statue, he laid a hand on the Minotaur’s arm.

The Minotaur’s blue-black eyes moved from Speedy to Mike, and its bull’s nose flared.

“Would you like to sit down and talk?” Mike asked, before gesturing to a spot on the ground near the fire pit.

I sat, smiling like an idiot with the saber across my lap, just in case the Minotaur didn’t quite get the gist of Speedy’s translation.

The monster’s eyes shot between me and Mike, unable to process what was happening. Mike cupped a gentle hand under its elbow, and guided the Minotaur to where I was sitting by the fire. The beast stared at my legs, then the ground under its own bare feet, as if the concept of sitting was too alien to imitate. It had to watch Mike stand and sit a couple of times before it bent at the waist and pressed its hands against the ground, then crabwalked on all fours until it got the hang of a flat surface under its limbs.

Those horns must have been heavy. It fell over twice. Both times, Mike helped it back to a sitting position.

Neither Speedy nor I laughed.

Then, Mike began to talk.

He spoke of peace, mostly, and those traps we create for ourselves. He didn’t lunge right into it, of course—he started with a story called the Lost Son. Long story short? A man was convinced his son was dead, and when the son turned up alive, the man decided the boy couldn’t be his son. The moral of the story is that our assumptions of what is true and what is not true can deprive us of happiness.

That’s what Mike talked about. For hours. Hours. He talked until his voice was all but gone, and even Speedy with his superhearing had to come down from the statue to make sure he caught all of the details.

Speedy translated every single word.

I sat and watched the Minotaur.

(Along the way, the Minotaur’s head began to droop. When Mike was busy with hand gestures and something about an Eightfold Path, I elbowed the creature in its side. Those horns came up, and I pointed at Mike. “Listen to him,” I said, as sternly as I could without interrupting the story. “You will hear what he has to say.” The monster gave a pained sigh, and fixed its full attention on Mike.)

Mike spoke of love, and loss, and the human experience. He spoke of ideals that we all hold on to as children, concepts such as being better—larger—than ourselves.

Of grief. Of grieving. Of fighting when we shouldn’t.

And knowing when to let go.

And then, as easy as sugar dissolving in the spring rain, the Minotaur slipped out of our existence.

The three of us stared at the space where the Minotaur had sat. There was nothing left of it. No labrys, no semisolid mist. Nothing.

“Um…” I began, as I gazed around the room for any trace of ghostly blue. “Did it…go to bed?”

Beside us, the fire in the pit snuffed itself out.

It took our eyes a moment to adjust to the change in the lighting. The flashlight that Speedy had left as a lantern on the hidden ledge was still on, but it was a tiny beam of light in a very large room. We flipped on a few more flashlights, and shone these around to see if we could spot the Minotaur.

“Whoa,” I said, as my light hit Theseus’ black dagger. It was crumbling into pieces. “I’m going to take that as a positive sign.”

“Yeah,” Mike said, as he stood and stretched. “That was our good deed for the decade. Let’s get out of here before we learn if that was a load-bearing monster.”

“One sec,” I said. My legs were so deeply asleep they might as well have been made of wobbly bees. I staggered over to the base of Helen’s statue.

Helen wasn’t in her mirror.

“Well, goodbye to you, too,” I said, as I wrapped the three beads around the handle of my Puukko knife. I placed it and the beads on the mirror, and tried to ignore how I felt a little emptier than I should. “Happy hunting in…wherever. I hope you’ve finally made it to your own personal version of the Elysian Fields. Try not to murder anyone who doesn’t deserve it.”

I turned to rejoin the boys, and knelt so Speedy could climb to my shoulders. He buried his face against my neck.

“Tired?”

He whuffled softly before saying, “Like I just ended a week-long bender at the zoo. Can you imagine the power it took to keep something like Theseus’ ghost imprisoned? Damn.”

“Yeah, Helen was something special, that’s for sure,” I said as I fell in beside Mike, both of us dragging our swords along the ground. “Let’s go home.”

We paused to collect Atlas’ body, because recently famous handsome men and last known associates and oh God we were so tired and we still had to lug a corpse up a hollow mountain. I used my sword to chop off his head and its hard-to-explain bullet hole, just to make it that much easier for us. I guess I put a little more strength than I needed to into the swing, and that’s all I’ll say about that particular experience, other than I absolutely do not need to repeat it. Ever.

Damascus steel, man. Incredible edge on that stuff.

We left Darling in the Labyrinth. [25] Along with the treasure. All of it. Swords included; we stuck those back in the racks where we had found them. On our way out of the treasure room, we recovered Mike’s and Darling’s packs, and the three of us fell on the water and energy bars like ravenous wolves.

I really don’t remember how we got Atlas’ body up those narrow stairs to the first level of the maze. Rope was involved, and more than a little swearing.

When we finally reached the first level, we knew we were on the home stretch, and we retraced our path in exhausted, blissful silence. It wasn’t until we were nearing the entrance to the Labyrinth when I realized that Mike was humming softly.

“What’s up?” I asked quietly, so as not to wake the sleeping koala clinging to my chest.

“I feel good,” he said. “I helped to right a very old wrong. That’s a rare opportunity.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I don’t even want to think about what might have happened if you weren’t here.”

“Good lesson to learn, though,” he said, elbowing me playfully. “Compassion over cruelty.”

Behind us, Atlas’ body gave a particularly hard lurch to the side as we hit a steep part of the slope, and we fell quiet as we put our backs into it. Speedy muttered a few obscenities in his sleep.

“I think Helen had a different solution in mind,” I said, as the light of day appeared at the end of the tunnel. “But yours was better.”

I left it there. I didn’t know the ending that Helen had envisioned, but I knew she wouldn’t approve of how Mike had handled the Minotaur. Too nice. Too polite. Not enough suffering.

As for Mike, I would never dream of telling him he had probably managed to bore a ghost to death.