هزارتو

The Labyrinth

Once upon a time, there was a nobleman named Francisco Ayuso who liked to hunt in the forest near his palace. It was an old forest, very old, and he felt so young among its trees.

One day Ayuso and his men were following a rare stag with fur as silvery as the light of the moon. His men lost the stag’s track near an old mill, and when Ayuso dismounted his horse to refresh himself at the mill’s pond, he found a young woman asleep on the ground between the watercress and dragon lilies. Her hair was as black as a raven’s feathers, her skin as pale as the petals of the whitest rose in Ayuso’s palace gardens.

She woke with a start when he touched her shoulder and backed away from him, hiding behind a tree, like a deer chased by his hounds. It took Ayuso a while to convince her of his good intentions. She looked like she hadn’t eaten for days so he told his men to bring her food. When asked for her name, she told them she couldn’t remember it, so one of his soldiers suspected she might be a surviving victim of the Pale Man, a creature who roamed the area stealing children from the surrounding villages and dragging them to his underground lair.

Only two victims were known to have escaped the Pale Man, bringing back terrible tales of children being eaten alive and a monster so horrible that they didn’t dare fall asleep for fear they’d meet him again in their dreams. However, when Ayuso asked the young woman about the Pale Man, she just shook her head and the expression on her face was so lost, he spared her any further questions, worried they would stir memories she’d been wise enough to forget.

She clearly had no home, so Ayuso invited her to his palace. He gave her a room and new clothes and called her Alba, as her memory was as blank as a white sheet. She soon walked in his gardens and enjoyed his roses, and after just a few days they both wished for nothing but each other’s company.

After three months Francisco Ayuso asked Alba to be his wife, and she accepted, as she loved him as much as Francisco loved her. A year later she gave birth to a son. Alba loved the boy as tenderly as she loved her husband, but each time she looked at the child she felt a great sadness because she couldn’t tell him who she was or where she came from. She became restless and started to spend hours wandering through the forest or sitting by the pond of the old mill.

Not far from the mill lived a woman called Rocio, who had a reputation for being a witch. She lived with her daughter and son in a hut near the Split Tree, which was said to house a poisonous toad between its roots. People whispered that Rocio’s potions could grant true love, a long life, or, if desired, the death of an enemy, but most women who came to see her asked for help with an unwanted pregnancy, as they could barely feed their living children.

One afternoon, the soldier Ayuso had secretly ordered to follow Alba to make sure she was safe in the forest came back with the news that Alba had been visiting Rocio. Ayuso was very upset and confronted Alba, who begged him to understand she’d only asked Rocio to help her find out who she was. Rocio had told her the answer to her question would only be revealed on a full moon night in a labyrinth that must be built behind the millpond from the stones of a nearby village, which had been deserted ever since three children had been taken by the Pale Man.

Ayuso loved Alba more than anything else in the world, so he had Rocio the witch brought to him to learn exactly how to build the labyrinth. Rocio took him to the place where she’d envisioned it. She marked the four corners with stones and drew the patterns of the walls with a willow branch onto the forest soil. At the center, she told Ayuso, he’d have to build a well and, inside, a staircase leading down to its bottom. Ayuso didn’t like the way she looked at him. It felt as if she could see his darkest desires—as clearly as if his heart were made from glass. She frightened him, and he despised her for that.

“I will do as you say,” he said, “but if you make a fool of me, and my wife does not find what she has lost, I will have you drowned in the millpond.”

Rocio answered him with a smile.

“I know,” she said. “But we all have to play our parts, don’t we?”

Then she walked back to her hut.

It took two months to build the labyrinth. Ayuso’s workers used only stones from the deserted village, as the witch had directed, and built the walls, the well, and the stairs exactly as the witch had described them.

Alba had to wait seven nights until the moon rose like a silver coin above the finished labyrinth, casting the shadow of the arch the workers had crafted to span the entrance onto the mossy forest floor. They adorned the arch with the horned head of Cernunnos, a pagan god who had once been worshipped in these woods. Rocio, it was said, still prayed to him.

From dusk till dawn that night Alba stayed in the labyrinth, walking its crooked paths, even though her infant son was crying for her milk in her chambers. Ayuso didn’t follow her, afraid the labyrinth wouldn’t reveal the answers his wife so desperately yearned for in his presence. He waited all night in front of the labyrinth and when Alba finally came out, Ayuso saw in her face that she hadn’t found what she’d been looking for.

Every month for the next twelve months, on the night of the full moon, Alba went back into the labyrinth, but all she found between its stone walls was silence, and her sadness grew and grew until one moonless November night, she fell gravely ill. She died before the moon was full again, and one hour after she drew her last breath, Ayuso sent five of his soldiers to the witch’s hut. They dragged Rocio through the woods and into the millpond, although the miller begged them not to curse his mill with such a deed. It took three men to drown her. They left her body drifting between the lily pads for the fish to eat.

Fifteen years later, Ayuso’s son walked into the labyrinth hoping to find his mother there. He was never seen again, and it took another two hundred and twenty-three years until the prophecy of the witch came true and the labyrinth revealed his mother’s true name when she once again walked its ancient corridors as a girl called Ofelia.