Daedalus’s Daughter
by Nora E. Derrington
Almost no one remembers Daedalus’s daughter, and fewer still speak of her. And yet here she is, skimming across the water, through the trees, in a contraption of her own invention. She shares her father’s skill with artifice and crafts, and her mother’s desire to keep her head down and stay out of the story. She watched her father and brother escape from the labyrinth, watched them soar high into Apollo’s realm. She saw Icarus’s flight, his fall, his rapid demise. And she learned from it. She calculated. The labyrinth had not claimed her as it had her father and brother—instead she made her home in one of Crete’s cypress groves. Daedalus’s lament for his lost son reaches the gods’ ears, and they weep for him—his daughter knows this because a crystal goblet that rests on a small table near the door of her home, in the carved-out trunk of a behemoth cypress, serves as her connection to him. She could weep and fill the goblet with her tears, and on the surface of the water observe her father in his travails. Now that Icarus has fallen, the gods’ tears fill the goblet instead—it rapidly overflows and spills out the daughter’s door and into her cypress grove, until the trees’ trunks stand in a meter of water.
The daughter duly understands what she must do. She learns from her father’s mistake—from her brother’s joyous flight soon turned to tragic plummet—and builds herself a method of escape. She takes her chapeau and lengthens it, stretches it, such that she can scoop it beneath herself as a watercraft, its keel sitting just under the water’s surface. She’s kept aloft by wings, but these are modest compared to those with which Daedalus and Icarus made their escape. In their shadows she learns, and she strives not to echo their mistakes. She’s concocted a compass, which she sets before her on a dashboard she pulls from the brim of the hat, and drawn a map, which she tucks in a pocket to her side. The ravens study her with interest from their nests in the cypresses—they don’t prefer the company of humans, but this one is more birdlike than most, gathering bits and bobs from the grove with which to feather her nest, while still leaving the shiniest objects for them. They don’t know what to make of this strange contraption with which she has outfitted herself, but they quork their best wishes at her anyway.
She’s crafted a few steering mechanisms; strings across her shoulders pierce through the hat-boat and stretch up to the wings, while a rope through the back of the hat-boat connects to the rudder and wraps forward to her waist, where she can control direction by pulling on the end to her right or the end to her left. She is calm, determined—she will not follow her father to Sicily, where his tears prompt those of the gods’ to flood her cypress grove, the only home she’s known for so long. She will go east, toward the rising sun, beyond the reach of the Moirai, into a land where no one ever knew her name.
Nora E. Derrington has an essay in the anthology Fat & Queer, which is available now.