She held the hem of her tunic up to her chin, so her eyes could see, and let it drop again, veiling her face.

"Phaedra!" she called. "Phaedra, come here! Quickly, quickly!"

In a moment a small, dark and elfin girl came running the few short yards from the palace portico to the tree where the naked Ariadne hung. Seeing her sister hanging by her knees, she stopped short, and her shock was evident.

"Ariadne!" she gasped, her voice incredulous. "What are you doing? Come out of there! What if someone should see you?"

"What do I care," Ariadne said tartly.

"What if a man should come by," Phaedra protested.

"Let him come," said Ariadne defiantly. "How I would welcome a man to touch me." She caressed the golden triangle of her sex. "Oh, Phaedra, how I would welcome it. I have never had a man touch me here."

"Ariadne, you're just trying to shock me," Phaedra said. She plunked herself down at the base of the tree. "I don't like it, you're always teasing me."

Ariadne laughed. "Ah, but you're so young, my sweetling, so easy to tease."

"I'm twelve," said Phaedra petulantly. "You're only three years older. That's not so much."

"But those are the most important years of your life, Phaedra," Ariadne said seriously. "At fifteen I am a woman, and you're still a child."

"Hmph. I'll have breasts soon."

"Breasts don't mean anything," Ariadne said impatiently. "What you lack is a woman's deeper wisdom."

"And you have it, I suppose."

"Yes," Ariadne said proudly.

"And where did you get it?"

"From Aphrodite herself. I feel Her desire for Love rushing in my body like a great wind."

"You read that someplace," Phaedra said.

"Did not."

"Then you got it from Daedalus," Phaedra insisted. "He's always talking like that."

"Daedalus is a very wise man," Ariadne said. "He's the wisest man in the world, you know."

"That doesn't make him right, though," Phaedra said.

"He knows everything," Ariadne said. "Look, Phaedra, that's why I'm here. That's why I called you, anyway. Daedalus said if you look at the sunrise from upside down, the colors are more brilliant. And they are! Just look!" She turned her attention away from her sister, scrutinizing the sun that seemed, from her position, to be falling from the upside down horizon.

Phaedra got up from her cross-legged position and for a moment contemplated whether the branch would hold another sister. She decided against it, and bent over, looking upside down between her legs.

"That won't work, silly," Ariadne said. "You have to be upside down."

"I am upside down," Phaedra said.

"No, I mean your legs and everything."

"I don't see with my legs," Phaedra said. "Anyway, it does work. The sunrise is more brilliant. All the colors are deeper or brighter or something." Her voice had lost its tone of little-sister banter and was replaced by soft wonderment. "How does he know all these things?" she asked.

"I told you," Ariadne said. "He's the wisest man in the world. Mother says so, too."

"What does it mean to be wise? I mean, what does it really mean?"

"He thinks about things."

"I think about things, too," Phaedra said, a little resentfully. "But I'm not wise."

"You're just a girl, that's why," Ariadne said smugly. "Girls can be clever, but only a grown woman can be wise."

Phaedra did not deign to answer. She looked at her sister's honeyed body, blooming mysteriously into full ripe softness, but still with the lean muscles of youth beneath. Upside down she looked like a statue of the Goddess, impervious to gravity, buoyant, the sweet curve of thigh swelling upward. Sometimes Phaedra thought her sister was the most beautiful creature in the world. Not long ago she had been a simple -- person, like Phaedra herself. Where does the magic come from? Phaedra wondered. This magic that transforms a girl into a woman, into the Goddess.

She looked wistfully at her own thin arms. So -- dry, they were, like sticks, compared with Ariadne.

She stood and walked over to the tree. Leaning over, she kissed her sister softly , as she had done a thousand times before. Ariadne murmured.

"Ariadne," Phaedra said, hesitantly. "Tell me something."

"All right," Ariadne said. Gracefully she lowered her hands to the ground and rolled down as lightly as a feather. She leaned against the trunk of the tree and looked down at her sister. "What do you want to know?" she said.

"When we chant the story of Inanna. There's the part before she's really a goddess yet, you know, in the garden."

"Yes," Ariadne said.

"When it says she leaned against the tree and worshipped her own vulva. And then after, she was the goddess. Ariadne -- what does that mean?"

Ariadne picked up the hem of her tunic. She looked down past the gentle swelling of her belly to the soft triangle of her sex. She caressed herself as Phaedra watched. After a moment, she turned to her sister, and her eyes were uncertain, almost frightened.

"I don't know," said Ariadne. "I don't know."