Labyrinth of Shadows

	I stepped into the next chamber hoping that it would have a bench or something to sit on.  My feet were beginning to hurt.  I was used to long days of work, but not to long days of walking.
	
	Since leaving the sphinx I'd walked for several hours through what I'd originally expected the whole Labyrinth to be like, winding corridors turning and branching with no logical pattern.  I had not encountered anything truly strange. The corridors were carved with depictions of all sorts of mythological creatures, which was interesting, but not too weird.  Several times when I'd reached a dead end and had to back-track I'd found myself returning to intersections I knew I'd visited before and finding carvings I'd never seen.  That was a little strange, but after the way my chalk mark has moved I had pretty much expected it.
	
	Now I once again encountered the bizarre. Though I suspected that most of the heroes who made it this far had no idea how truly weird this courtyard was.
	
	It was square, and all four walls had doorways in them, resembling the entrance to the Labyrinth itself, but on a much smaller scale.  And with the lintels still intact and not fallen.  That was ordinary enough.  What was extraordinary was that the entire chamber, from the ground to the tops of the walls, was completely covered in swallows' nests. In some places they had even built nests atop previous nests, forming precarious tangles.
	
	Swallows are territorial.  I'd had a few of them build nests on my cottage, and found them welcome lodgers, as they ate insects that could damage my garden.  I'd never seen swallows' nests closer than half a meter to each other, certainly never touching.  And here were thousands upon thousands of them, crammed into this tiny place.  It was bizarre.
	
	I didn't get time to meditate on the strangeness of swallows' nests, however, for as soon as I stepped into the room I heard somebody near my feet say, "Finally!  You took your sweet time getting here."
	
	I looked down.  Standing just in front of my well-worn shoes was a male barn swallow.  His back was a gorgeous dusty metallic indigo, with a splash of rust red across his face and chin, and a paler rust shading to cream on his underside.  His wings and tail were folded, but I could still see the long tail feathers that marked him as a male.
	
	"What are you staring at?"  
	
	"Sorry," I said, flushing.  It had never occurred to me that it might be rude to stare at a bird, but now I felt embarrassed at having done so.
	
	"Well, now that you're here, let's get going."
	
	"What?"
	
	"You are the gardener, right?"
	
	"Yes..."
	
	"Well, then let's get a move on.  I don't have all year you know.  I should have migrated ages ago.  Let's go."
	
	"Go where?"
	
	"What are you, stupid?  To the heart of the maze, of course.  Where else were you thinking of going, Timbuktu?"
	
	"You know the way to the hear of the maze?  But I thought nobody could tell me how to get there."
	
	"I can't.  I'm not that sort of guide.  But there's lots I [i]can[/i] tell you.  Now time's a-wasting, are you going to move that fat green butt of yours or not?"
	
	I stared down at the swallow.  From anything human-looking I probably would have been annoyed at the insult, but somehow coming from something that barely came up to my ankle it was amusing rather than offensive.  "I've been walking all day, and I think I'm going to sit down and rest for a bit.  Then we can go."
	
	"Humanoids," said the bird, saying it the way most people might say "cockroaches."  "You waste so much time and energy walking around on the ground.  It's pathetic."
	
	"Well, pathetic or not, I don't show any signs of sprouting wings in order to do things your way, so I'm going to take a break."  Suiting actions to words I lowered myself to sit on the grass that carpeted the ground here.  It was dull, obviously dormant for the winter, but not dead and dry the way the grass in the outer chambers had been.  It made a relatively comfortable seat.  I took my shoes off and wiggled my toes in the grass.  It was cool and soothing on my swollen soles. 
	
	When my feet felt a little less abused I pulled socks and shoes back on.  I got to my feet and looked down at the swallow.  With a hop and a flurry of wings he flew up to my shoulder and perched there.  
	
	"You said something about being a guide," I said.
	
	"Yeah.  That's why I stayed.  She asked me to guide you."  The swallow's tone was slightly less caustic than it had been previously.  Something like reverence touched the little bird.  "I've never not migrated before, but when she asks you to do something, it's hard to say no.  You know that, or you wouldn't be here either."
	
	"She?"
	
	"The goddess."
	
	I suddenly found myself face to face with something I hadn't really wanted to think about.  I'd felt around the edges of it, at the back of my mind, but had avoided contemplating it in depth.  I'd called her a Child, and the capital letter had meant something special, something more than a village waif, but I hadn't wanted to say what.  "You worship her?" I asked the bird, feeling my way carefully around the edges of knowledge I wasn't sure I wanted.
	
	"I guess you could say that.  We belong to her."
	
	"And she's a... a child, with green eyes, your goddess?"
	
	The bird cocked his head to one side and regarded me from mere centimeters away.  "She is whatever she needs to be.  But yes, she has green eyes."  He cleared his throat, a little embarrassed sound, as though he wasn't really comfortable with his devotion.  "You've rested, now let's go, greenass."
	
	I laughed.  "All right. Which way should I go then?"  I gestured at the three choices ahead of me.
	
	"Go whichever way you like, I don't care" said the bird in a sarcastic sort of tone.
	
	"Some guide you are," I shot back.  "You can't tell me which way to go?"
	
	"Sorry, not allowed.  I can only tell you which way [i]not[/i] to go."
	
	I pondered that.  "Doesn't that amount to the same thing?"
	
	"You really are stupid," said the bird.  "And can you not talk and walk at the same time or something?  Pick a door, get moving."
	
	"All right, all right."  I picked at random, the one straight in front of me, and set off.  "And since I'm so stupid, why don't you explain to me what the difference is between telling me where to go, and telling me where not to go?" I asked while I walked.
	
	"I'm just here to make sure you don't get your fat green butt eaten by something even stupider than you are.  Not every dangerous creature in the Labyrinth can talk you know.  So I can tell you when a path leads to something that will kill you without stopping to ask if you're the gardener.  Other than that you're on your own, greenass."	
	
	I chuckled.  I might as well give as good as I got.  "All right shorty.  I guess that will be pretty useful."
	
	"Hey!  That's a low blow.  You don't have to mock my inadequacy!"
	
	I gave the bird a somewhat surprised glance.  Shorty was mocking his inadequacy?  "I only meant that you're shorter than I am.  That's fairly obvious."
	
	"Oh.  Well... don't call me shorty.  I don't like it."
	
	"Tell you what, I'll stop calling you shorty if you stop calling me greenass."
	
	"If that's what it takes."  The bird sounded morose.  Then he perked up a bit and added "I'll call you greenbutt instead."
	
	I just laughed.