Icarus

By Adam Wing

A myth as old as civilization.
The boy who donned wax wings and flew too close to the sun. Follow the tale of Icarus. And that of the father who tried to save him ... but brought his life to an end.
You will come to love him. Then you will watch him fall. Live the tragic story as you never imagined possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adam Wing
• Release date: Oct 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781773702438

Book preview

A Note on Accuracy

My goal for this book (though I didn’t realize it until I finished) was to tell a human story, to take this myth—this fable, almost—populated more with archetypes than actual characters, and make it about people. I wanted readers to feel for Icarus (and to a lesser extent his father), to wish for the characters’ success. And because it’s the story that it is, to dread what is to come.

To this end, I took some artistic licence. Less than you’d expect, but some. I added a few characters. I imagined events that might have led up to those described in the myth.  I offered motivation. Beyond that, I tried to stay as true to the story as possible.

But there’s accuracy, and then there’s accuracy, and in striving for either, I found myself beholden to three separate masters:

These were the lines within which I tried to colour. Unfortunately, in the story of Icarus, at any given time, at least two of these three are at odds. I had to maintain a delicate balance, sacrificing one form of accuracy for another, constantly switching which was important. So my dates might be closer to Pre-Palatial than Neo-Palatial Crete; maybe my Pasiphaë didn’t actually have sex with a bull; and maybe you CAN strap feathers to your elbows and use them to fly too close to the sun. Compromises. Life is full of them. So is storytelling.

(I did make a few changes just for narrative purposes. My Minos bears little resemblance to Ovid’s, my Labyrinth is a bit more dangerous than it should be, and my Minotaur has not yet been killed by Theseus. But it’s my novel, damn it. Get over it.)

Enjoy.

All royalties on the first 10,000 sales of this book will go to help displaced families seeking safety. Not every story has to be a Greek tragedy.

To anyone who’s flown too high.

To those who fall with nothing to catch them.

CHAPTER 1

BRACED BACK BEHIND YOUR TREASURES AS THEY FACE OFF WITH MINE,

UNCONVINCING IS YOUR COURAGE AGAINST THE HELLS OF YOUR DESIGN.

BY FEAR OR FALL OR DARKNESS, I VOW TO YOU, YOU’LL LOSE

THE CHILD OF YOUR BODY, TO THE FURNACE OF YOUR MIND.

- Hades the Unseen, Lord of the Underworld – 1982 BCE

SON

EVERYONE knew Ik was a moron. They tittered over his intelligence—his lack of intelligence—in the lounges and judicial chambers of the royal apartments. In ornate halls and decorated courtyards at Knossos, and rich green gardens and groomed pathways steeping the grounds at Phaistos, he was derided by servants and bureaucratic stooges alike. In shacks and huts, farmers, fishermen and merchants cracked callow jokes at the boy’s expense. Highborn or peasant, it mattered little; Ik served as a collective joke across the small island kingdom to anyone unkind enough to tell it. Which was more or less everyone. Sorcerer’s Son, they named him. As batty as his father and clever as a bowl of figs.

None suspected the truth.

Ik, rightfully Icarus, son of the king’s inventor and chief architect, Daedalus, was not the joke that the people of Crete believed. Laughing, they were fumbling into his deception. And they were in fact, protecting him. For Ik, as it turned out, was far cleverer than anyone suspected. And it was the joke that served the boy.

Today, Ik was catching octopuses.

Strictly speaking, he was catching jellyfish—and really, he was just gathering them—but the final result would be the same, a bevy of meaty tentacles, as ready to be cooked and devoured as he was to oblige them.

The design of his traps was simple: shallow holes in the ground, reinforced with thick bands of kelp. He had sprinkled the bottoms with shredded bits of fish, patting a thin spread of sand over top. As the tide came in, his snares bore Poseidon’s swell unaltered. But then the waves began their retreat, drawing ribbons of earth back with them, down into the heart and bowels of a hungry ocean, leaving the bait exposed. And so came the jellyfish. Tightly clustered, the slow gluttons feasted, refusing to abandon their bounty even as the water dropped. And as the holes became landlocked, the jellyfish found themselves trapped, confined into pools growing shallower by the minute. Oblivious to the danger, they indulged their greedy appetites just waiting for Ik to come claim them.

Dragging a long, woven basket tied loosely about his waist, Ik cut a crooked line from trap to pregnant trap. Of the fourteen he dug this morning, he had checked eleven so far. Nearly all had proven fruitful. Scooping his quarries in the fingers of a three-pronged crop, he puddled them together in his basket. When he finished collecting them, he would carefully remove their stingers then cut them up to be used in a second set of traps. These would garner him the octopus he so desired. In the end, four measly rotting fish will have yielded him at least seven or eight good sized octopuses.

Ik dropped down at the next trap. A last bastion for sea life in the sun-scorched desert above the waves, the slow-shrinking pool had become little more than a sunken patch of damp earth. A wealth of clear, swollen bulbs lay clustered along its bottom. Two big ones and five medium. Not so bad. He scooped them into his basket, ignoring the dozen or so tiny jellies filling the spaces between. Too small, he thought, closing the lid. And indeed, his crop would not even have been able to hold them. Not worth the effort to pick them out of the sand. Hopping up, Ik moved away down the beach.

The day was getting on. Apollo had begun his evening plummet back to his resting place beyond the horizon, igniting ribbons of scarlet, like luminous waves, across the burning sky. The afternoon’s crushing heat was ebbing into a calmer, almost agreeable warmth. And the tide was coming in. Ik hurried along the water’s edge, anxious to clear the last of his traps before the sea rose again to steal what was his. Idly following the dive of a swooping gull, he glanced back the way he had come and his eyes landed on a boy, seventy or eighty paces behind him, following his tracks in the sand. Ik spun away, so startled he nearly tripped on his own ankle. How long has he been there? He wondered nervously. Was he behind me when I stopped at the last trap? He could not recall whether he had turned to look back then or not. Has he been watching me this whole time? An uncomfortable chill tickled his spine.

Pretending a calm indifference to the presence of the stranger, Ik hurried on. I didn’t look at you. I didn’t see you. He closed his eyes and bit hard into his lip. You don’t know me. I’m no one. I’m nothing. Just another kid on the beach, a dummy who can’t even talk. It was no good though; he could feel the boy’s curious gaze on his flesh, as good as stripping the skin from his shoulders and back. Walk casual, he ordered his legs, but his strides fell poignant and deliberate into the sand; clenched fists swung past his hips like loaded pendulums, clinging to arms held stiff and unnatural.

The marker for his next trap appeared in front of him. Marching toward it, Ik resisted a boiling urge to peer back. He knelt over the sandy bowl and was glad to find only a single large jellyfish waiting there. Good. He would just as soon go quickly now, before whoever that was had a chance to catch up. As he scooped it into his basket, he could not help stealing another peek over his shoulder.

The boy was much closer, barely forty paces back, ambling toward him in the same leisurely gait Ik had, a moment ago, failed to counterfeit. He was taller and at least a few years older than Ik, maybe even fifteen or sixteen. His long, strong legs devoured the sand with consummate ease. Ik knew he would have to run to match pace. Piss off, he heard himself hiss, scrunching his face in frustration. He jumped to his feet and plunged ahead, wicker basket skating and bouncing in the sand beside him.

It was not that Ik was afraid of the newcomer. Not exactly. That was not why he fled. It never occurred to him that his pursuer might want to hurt him, or that he was in some kind of trouble. How could he be? No, the disquiet pouring like poison into his mind had nothing to do with fear of harm or of punishment. It was simply being in the presence of another person that so deeply unnerved him, absorbing their questions and words, facing the chisel of curious eyes. It was ever a trial to hold tight to his subterfuge, to maintain what he had been taught all his life. People were dangerous, he knew, traps set to snare him, as insidious as his own were for the jellyfish.

Never speak. Two words he had heard more than any others in his lifetime, repeated over and again by his father. Since before he could speak. Not to strangers, not people you know. Not anyone. Should some fool natter in your direction, question you and demand answers, by all the gods, hold your tongue, Boy. Cozen the face of a fool and be … silent! None must suspect you so much as understand their words. Never. Speak. Two small words. Yet the entirety of Ik’s existence fell into their edict. Father’s mandate, as much a part of him as the skin that wrapped his bones, or even the bones themselves.

So Ik never opened his mouth, except to his father when no one was around. Anyone who approached him, found him a dullard and a mute, unable to maintain the most basic of conversations. He mostly avoided people altogether. It was simply what he did.

And this was exactly what he meant to do now.

The last trap awaited Ik beyond the next bend in the shoreline. He muscled toward it with all the strength he could pry from his child-sized—almost avian—bones, but he quickly realized he had no hope of reaching it before the other boy caught him up. Daring another look, he saw the boy still behind him, closing fast, very clearly following him now. The boy met Ik’s gaze and offered a subdued half-smile and a slight wave of his hand. Ik blinked and turned away. He snapped the cord up off his waist and threw his shoulder forward to haul on it even harder.

Forget the trap, Father’s imagined voice scolded. Leave the bloody hole and go.

Ik tossed a lingering glance at the marker ahead. It’s really not so far, he considered, tempted to go on. But … it was too far, all the same. He had no choice. He split away and headed inland. There was a nearby goat trail, he knew, that would take him up into the hills; if he could reach it, perhaps the older boy—maybe just out for a stroll—would lose interest and stop following. Burying his heels, kicking mountains of sand up behind him, he made his hasty escape.

Off the beach, Ik stopped and peered back, hoping to see the boy continuing past. If need be, he could abandon the basket of jellyfish for a swifter flight, but he was not prepared to do that just yet. To a boy with no friends—no other boys to fight, race or joke with, no girls to torment or spy on—and no family save a stern and distant father, it was into the constructs of his mind, his efforts, plans and dedicated works, that his passions fell. There was more tying Ik to his catch than just the cord about his waist, and he would leave it behind only as a last resort. In fact… Maybe if I wait, he hazarded just for a second, I could go collect from the last trap after he passes. Maybe…

As Ik had hoped, the other boy continued past his veering trail, tracing instead the winding, wet strip that marked the island’s outer most bound, where ocean and land struggled against each other, back and forth in eternal conflict. To Ik’s growing alarm though, he now seemed to be headed straight for the fourteenth and final jelly trap. That’s mine. He bit his lip angrily, vaguely aware how irrational it was to worry over a trap he had just abandoned. Even so… He had better leave it be or … or…

The older boy stopped at the marker. Copper light glanced off the arch of his back as he crouched in for a closer look. Don’t you touch that, Ik murmured, far too quietly to be heard. Don’t you… His heart had begun to race. He could feel it, not just in his chest, in his fingertips, his toes, in the blood pulsing behind his eyes. His palms were wet. Ik felt angry; he felt … eager. He wanted to hit someone. And then the boy reached his hand into his trap.

He-ey! Ik jumped, startled by the sound of his own shouted voice. "Stop that!" And it was as though a fissure had opened inside him; powerful, raw emotions pulled themselves free from bindings he had never known existed. A part of Ik watched from a distance, not believing what it saw. Tugging at his basket, he stomped down toward the boy, not entirely certain who was controlling his body. Bludgeoned by conditioned panic, this watching part begged him to stop, but something else seemed to be guiding him. Another part of Ik wanted more than the life he knew, wanted to stand face-to-face with someone, to hear their words and speak—and scream—his own back at them. I want to … I want… And at that moment, Ik was struck with just how tired he had become, how heavy his silence had grown. He realized that he could carry it no longer. He needed his voice to come out, needed to be heard. He had not simply been alone his whole life; he had