He Saw the Sun

The maze itself was dark and perpetually dusty. The air was dirty from the smoke billowing from the furnace in the corner; it was thick enough to choke on. Their chamber, hidden away in some never-seen corner of the maze, was small and derelict. Icarus called it home, and he hated home. High above his head, at least a hundred feet, he could see the sky, dull and grey, obscured by the smoke that just wouldn’t leave. He spent day after day looking upwards at the sky, trying to find the birds that were too far away for him to ever really see; he gazed at the clouds and the obscure shapes they made. But mostly he stared at the sun. It was the only thing he could see with any amount of clarity, not losing its incandescence even though they were deep within the ground. The sun, that was so bright that he could see it’s image burned into the back of his eyelids every time he closed his eyes, that was the singular focus of his thoughts, day and night and night and day. Sometimes, if he looked hard enough, he thought he could see the chariot that rode across the sky, that was pulled by horses made from fire and driven by the golden god Apollo, the sun himself. It felt like a punishment in of itself, being able to see the open sky, but never able to reach it; the sun taunted him in its freedom, while Icarus was trapped inside this damned maze, slowly withering into a husk of himself, unable to do anything but watch and envy the beautiful sun. 

They had been in the maze for more than a year, or two, or three, Icarus had lost count. All he knew was that he had grown since they had arrived. His father, Daedelus, had been with him, his father had been the cause for everything that had been done to him, but he never told Icarus what had happened or why they were where they were. Every day, Icarus would ask, and every day, his father would refuse to tell him. All he knew was that the King Minos of Crete had banished them to the centre of a maze of Icarus’ father’s creation, a maze that, along with them, housed the Minotaur - a monstrous child of Pasiphae, the Queen of Crete. He deserved to know why he was being punished. He deserved to know the reason behind the injustices that defined his life. 

Sometimes, his father’s lack of trust made him angrier than his imprisonment. 

Every evening, Daedalus would stand at the makeshift furnace Icarus had helped make, with bricks that had taken them hours of painstaking work, drying mud over a fire that died every few minutes, blown out by the ever-envious west winds that blew a cold, dry draft through the maze at night. Stooped over and shaking in his ancient body, the man looked more like a faded shadow than the genius inventor of the greatest piece of machinery that the Earth had ever seen. Keeping himself to himself, sometimes his father wouldn’t talk to him for days on end, instead preferring to mutter to himself about calculations and wax and flight. 

Icarus had made peace with the fact that the maze had driven his father to the edge of madness, and he satisfied himself with forcing the man to eat what food the guards gave them, and sleep when Daedelus looked like he would drop from exhaustion. Icarus had taken the task of keeping both himself and his father alive while they were in the maze; he bartered with the guards for more food, he kept the cold winter night at bay with a fire made from what twigs he could find, and he made sure that if either one of them fell ill, there was extra food and water to be had. 

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They hadn’t received food in over two days. Their water was running dangerously low, and however hoarse Icarus shouted himself, screaming for the guards’ attention, it felt like they had forgotten that he even existed. Daedalus was having one of his episodes and hadn’t spoken for weeks, the longest he had ever stayed mute, and Icarus was getting worried, both for his father and for himself. ‘Closer...we’ll be flying soon..wax wings...only last so long’, Daedalus muttered to himself, hurrying to and from the furnace, his hands flying, working on some contraption or another with more purpose in his step than Icarus had seen in a long time. King Minos had left them with a pile of scrap metal when they had first been imprisoned. Maybe it was a kernel of kindness on his part, or maybe part of a sick joke, you built this maze with nothing but metal, he seemed to say let’s see you build yourself out of it. Daedalus had been gradually working on getting rid of it all through failed projects and melted figures.

Icarus inched closer to the man, ‘father?’ he asked, ‘what are you doing? Do you need any help?’ Even he didn’t know why he had asked, Daedalus’s work was always kept secret, but Icarus was desperate in his efforts to get his father to speak. Daedalus paused, stopping his work and looking at Icarus, really looking at him, like he used to before the maze, before his eyes had gone white and milky with cataracts, and before he had developed a permanent hunch in his back from bending over the furnace. ‘We’ll be out of here soon, son, we’ll be flying away soon and we’ll never need to come back again,’ he said, gripping the boy’s shoulders and shaking him. His words were deadly serious, without the shakiness of mental instability. ‘What - what do you mean?’ Icarus asked. He didn’t need any false hope, in fact, he shouldn’t have even asked, he had more important things to do, like yelling at the guards for food, or at least water, or anything, anything but listen to his father and his senile mutterings. Even if he did seem sane. ‘I didn’t say anything before. I didn’t want you to hope. It would have been safer for you not to know - we don’t know how much Minos sees.’ Daedalus trailed off at the end, more talking to himself than Icarus. 

Icarus tried not to put too much weight in his father’s words, for they could easily have been the futile ramblings of the failing mind. Still, he couldn’t help but hope. The sun had just risen, and the sky he could see was a burning orange, streaked with pale pink and purple clouds that made the sky look like it could either have come from the nightmarish hellscapes of Tartarus, or from the idolized dawns and evenings of the islands near Naxos. He left Daedelus, shaking himself from the old man’s grip and slumped down in a corner. The guards weren’t going to come. They couldn’t get out. His father was no help, and he himself was just as useless, when it came down to it. They were going to die inside this cursed maze, and there was nothing he could do about it. The fire was burning brighter in the forge, at least his father would die doing what he loved - building things and ignoring the world outside his own mind. 

He might have sat there, lost in his own despair, for minutes or hours or days. His eyes were closed and his mind was repeating the same images and words over and over again in a never-ending symphony of hopelessness that would have made the muses themselves cry. 

When the King came, brandishing a burning torch and wearing a gilded purple cape, leading a chorus of guards wielding enough weaponry to win a small war, Icarus would have died quietly; he might not have even noticed the searing pain in his sides as different from the pain in his mind. 

If his father had not come to his side twenty minutes before the army, offering a set of golden wings that were the most beautiful things the young man had seen in his life, fitted with wax strips that grafted onto his skin easily enough that Icarus could almost imagine himself an eagle, sacred to Zeus himself and bound to no one, free to fly the skies as wild and untamed as he was now trapped. If his father had not said to him, low and urgent, ‘we need to leave, boy, now. We need to leave and get away as far and fast as we can, for the King is coming, and the King will kill us both. I have served my purpose. The Minotaur is dead, and so shall we be.' If not for his father, Icarus would have been dead. 

Had his head not been clouded with anguish and pain, Icarus might have asked his father what he had meant, or how the wings were to work, or a million other questions that he only had time to remember on the banks of the Styx. The pain of hot wax on his skin was searing. His shoulders burnt and blistered, but there was fresh hope in his heart as he looked at his father's determined frame; finally, finally, they were leaving. The hope and happiness that bubbled up inside numbed him to the despair that had consumed him mere moments ago. The distant sounds of clattering feet and angry shouts were just that - distant, and therefore ignorable. Once they left this hellhole, Icarus would never set foot inside a walled area again. He would live in the open like those wanderers who claimed to be the chosen ones of the gods - except he really was chosen. If he survived the maze, then he could do anything. ‘Be careful son, the wings are fragile, and we must make them last all the way to Sparta across the sea. You fly too high, the wax will melt, you fly too low, the sea will break the bonds. We can’t make any mistakes now, not after we’ve made it this far’ his father's warnings were as distant and unimportant as the increasingly loud shouts of the royal guards. Icarus had not left the ground yet, but his head was already in the clouds. 

The King’s shouts reverberated through the maze, and Icarus could tell he was getting closer, bringing with him all his soldiers. The King’s words were slurring and loud; his speech was not the refined, elegant prose of royals - he sounded more like a madman, drunk on both alcohol and anger. The wax was dry and hard, stuck to his shoulders, and Icarus could feel the extra feathered weight on him as he attached the wings to his father. The man was old and so very weak, Icarus was starting to worry about his making it across the Gulf of Lycaonia; every step his father took seemed like a minor miracle, and Icarus needed to save his miracles for the flight they had ahead. 

Daedelus had planned their escape thoroughly, and as every step of his plan unfolded, Icarus understood more and more of the man’s pacings and mutterings that had convinced Icarus of his father's senility. In the epicentre of their rooms was an updraught, where Daedalus told him to stand, and flap his arms, and take off.

Finally, the incredibility of what they were doing started to catch up on him, and Icarus grew more and more sceptical of his father’s bold words. He began silently resigning himself to his death; it wouldn’t be pretty and it wouldn’t be quick but at least once it was over he could forget he had ever lived, one of the many peacefully heedless shades wandering the fields of Asphodel. His father shoved him roughly, to where he believed the updraught was, and Icarus waved his arms as told, halfheartedly, trying to think of any bargaining chips he had that could convince the King to spare them, even if it meant staying stuck in this cell. His own line of thought disgusted Icarus, that he would be willing to stoop such lengths for even the highest prize - life. However, at the end of it all, the need to survive superseded everything, even his own honour. 

The moment his feet lifted the ground, he couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe it. The moment his body started tilting so that he took the horizontal stature of the birds, his mind blanked with elation. The moment his father’s feet lifted from the ground, Icarus felt warm tears of joy dripping from his cheeks. They had done it, they were free, they had made it and they could do anything that came before them yet. His head tilted to the sky, his thoughts trailing from his head so his mind felt as weightless as his body. He rose higher than their cell, but paid no heed to the glittering emerald sea, or the bustling city below him. The shouts of the king as his soldiers fruitlessly shot their arrows behind them, and the shouts of Daedelus as he repeated his warnings, and tried to direct Icarus’ flight towards the ocean were equally meaningless against the beauty of the sky, the beauty of the sun.  

He was flying, he was soaring, he was going higher and higher and higher. He was fearless. He was faultless. If he wanted, the power that surged through his limbs and took him closer and closer to the sun could take him straight to Mt Olympus. The gods themselves would have been in awe of him, at everything he’d survived and everything he’d become. He was flying higher than the clouds, he didn’t mind that the air was thinner and colder - it was just another trial that he would inevitably overcome. 

Below him, Daedalus shouted to him, yelled to him, cried as he stared at him in horror. Icarus was deaf to his words - as he was deaf to the mortal world, with his eyes fixed upon the heavens, upon the sun that glowed brighter and hotter and bigger. He could see him again, and his golden chariot pulled by the horses made from light. They weren’t made from fire, as he had thought, but pure, golden light. Icarus could see the sun, in all of its glory. Apollo had made himself known to him. Apollo, the god of light and healing and all things good, who glowed as brightly as the sun, who embodied the sun, who had enraptured Icarus’s body and mind and soul, had made himself known to him. A word came to his mind, that he had never been able to put a meaning to; he had a definition to the word ecstasy, the feeling that was a drug more addictive than liquor or war or life itself. 

There was heat on his shoulders; it was dripping down his arms, his back, his stomach, but Icarus did not care. Flames licked the feathers on his wings, but he was higher than any mortal had been, and he could see the sun in all of its otherworldly glory. How could he be anything less than all-powerful, all-consumingly powerful? His head was bright and light, filled with images of fire and the sun and Apollo. Those images would forever be burned into the back of his irises, everything from there on out would be bathed in the warm golden light of those blessed by the sun himself. Icarus did not fear death - death was an impossibility. His mouth was full of blood, that was still red, as markedly belonging to the earth as the gods, with their golden ichor, belonged to the Aether. 

Icarus plummeted downwards, the sun shrinking slowly, but still - always - bearing the image of the god Apollo. Daedalus watched, now below him, now next to him, now above him, watching as Icarus fell. Fire licked his wings, his skin, his hair. There was a fire that lit his eye from within, that filled his bones and filled his soul. There was hot, golden wax that fell to the sea along with droplets of blood, so that he was not just a man fallen, but a meteorite, crashing down to the earth from heaven above, having seen everything and coming to embrace the earth and the sea as one would a long lost friend. Icarus fell, and he laughed the whole way down.