Alcestis (11 page)

7

ON THE DAY of the feast, I did not rise in time to watch the sacrifice. Admetus liked to have me with him, despite custom, and on some days he would call me out from the palace before the killing was done. But on this day he left me in bed, too eager to greet the visiting men to wait for his wife. I slept until half the day had passed; there were some privileges, at least, reserved for the mistress of a house run by slaves who didn’t need or care for my instruction.

When I stood up from the bed, I felt so dizzy that I staggered like a drunken man. I put a hand to my forehead and took a deep breath through my nose. My stomach cramped in a sudden sick wave, and I squeezed my eyes shut hard, panting a little. The slave girl who had just come in with the oil and strigil rushed to support me. Her hand was cool on my arm.

“Lady?” she said.

“I’m fine,” I told her, aware that my words might seem more truthful if I could wrench my eyes open. I did: she was staring at me round eyed, her duties forgotten. I tried to smile. “I’m only tired. I’ll be fine.”

Unconvinced, she made me rest my hands on her shoulders as she stripped off my shift, tugging it one handed down my arms and over my hips. Her eyes swept appraisingly over my belly, and I could see that she wanted to ask me about my sickness, wanted some bit of knowledge to hold over the other girls. But the stretch between my hip bones was still flat and hard, and I wouldn’t let myself hope until my belly grew.

She oiled her hands and rubbed them over my skin, then scraped me clean with the strigil, the dull blade bumping over my bones. Her hands slowed on my stomach; so much hope these women had for me, who might hold the future of the house of Pherae in my womb. I touched her shoulder, just lightly, and her eyes fluttered up to my face. I shook my head. She flushed immediately and ducked back to her work, her hands brisk on my legs, almost harsh. I stood and listened to the men calling to each other in the courtyard, their words too distant to be heard, only the tone audible. I could hear my husband among them, shouting directions to the slaves and greetings to his friends.

When the slave girl had finished, I called for my older body servants, the Cretan women who knew how to twist my mess of hair into a respectable braid. They worked in silence, too wise or too tired to twitter about my nausea, and when they had finished I was wrapped in red and gold, the colors I’d worn to be wed. They dressed me like a virgin again, my breasts bound up tight in the high-cut bodice. They daubed rose oil into the short, wavy strands of hair at my temples and pulled the rest back, threading heavy locks of it together. The weight of the hair made my head wobble on my neck and I nodded with each pull and slip. I was hot, even with the chill late fall air slipping around our feet, and I could feel sweat mixing with the oil on my body, long, slow drips sliding down my spine.

I sat down heavily on the bed when the women finished pinning my braids. My hair murmured like a nest of metallic snakes. I reached up to touch it and then pulled my hand away, pinching at the bridge of my nose. The subtle thump of a headache was growing brighter and sharper.

“You should rest, lady,” one of the slave women said, and her tone was perfectly even, like the flat of a sword.

I shook my head gingerly, the beads singing. “Tomorrow,” I said.

In the kitchens I did not eat. I could smell the sacrifice burning in the courtyard and it turned my nervous stomach. Admetus had not yet sent a slave to bring me to the feast. He’d promised that I could accompany him, muttered it into my hair in the night, but he had forgotten. I had expected him to forget.

I heard Admetus and the men make their way from the courtyard into the palace, the crowd of bodies moving up the stairs, entering the megaron. I stayed in the kitchens with the slaves and watched their hands, the practiced movements of cleaning and cooking, the clever dance of fingers around bronze blades. I should’ve been waiting in the hall beside the megaron, ears open to my husband’s voice, but I felt cold and quivery and didn’t want to share that hall with the little wind gods who swept along it. I leaned against the kitchen wall, where the air felt thick with grease and the smell of char. Like the smell of the god on my husband’s skin. It hung there for days after Apollo visited, the scent of sunlight on his shoulders, the tang of laurel in the soft hair behind his ears.

In the megaron, my husband called out my name. I could hear the slave’s feet slap on the stone as he hurried to fetch me, but I waited until he came through the kitchen door before stepping away from the wall.

“Will you come, lady?” he asked. I followed him.

The men in the hall were whooping and shouting to each other, no different from the men who’d attended my father’s feasts. They sat in lines on each side of the long wooden table, picking meat from the platters in front of them, pitching bones across the table with bursts of laughter or cursing. They were gaily dressed and flushed with drink. I stepped between the slave girls who surrounded the table, their arms full of platters and jugs and their hips probably sore from pinches, and wondered how many of those girls would no longer be devotees of Artemis after this feast night.

The men did not quiet when I appeared, which suited me, for I didn’t want their attention. My husband’s attention, as always, was elsewhere. Admetus slipped an arm around my waist when I slid onto the bench beside him, but did not look away from the brown-haired man to his left. Some neighboring king? Half the faces at the table were unfamiliar. The half-Olympian Heracles had not come; Admetus had received word weeks ago that he was in Egypt and would not reach Pherae in time for the feast. Creon nodded to me when I sat, but he was the only visitor I recognized well. He had arrived dusty and tired the previous day and had earned only a few moments with Admetus before my husband had abandoned him to return to planning the layout of the visitors’ tents. Godlike in looks he was, but not a god, and even he could not rely on Admetus’s love. As on the day before, we looked on one another with cold sympathy.

I glanced over the men once more and calmed a little. Apollo had not come to the feast. I had been certain that he would. For the last several days I’d waited for the signs of his arrival: the scent of burnt air rising from his heels, the way the palace grew hot with my husband’s joy. Lust is as pungent as a roasting sacrifice. It tightens the throat and roils the stomach, makes you ravenous until you remember that the flesh does not burn for you.

My husband’s father, seated across the broad expanse of the table, gave me a wavering smile, the droop of his right cheek half hidden by his beard. He’d spilled something on his tunic and his wife was rubbing at it tenderly with a wet thumb.

The men had been drinking for hours, even before the sacrifice; the table was sticky with wine, and they’d progressed to the stage of toasting when any phrase seemed worthy of a drink. While I sat, they had toasted to the favorable wind given by the sea god, to a peaceful winter (though it was still autumn), to the first hard frost, and to Admetus’s well-trained servants.

“To your lady wife!” cried a red-haired man at the far end of the table, hoisting his goblet above his head. The men turned to look at me and I fought the urge to put my hands over my face.

“To my lady wife,” Admetus agreed, and drank, then kissed my forehead hard just as my father used to do. When he glanced my way again, I forced myself to smile. The wine made his dark face soft and ruddy, as if he were a wax figurine set too close to the fire. His full mouth looked sweet as a boy’s when it was stretched wide around a laugh or round in amazement at some tale of a great beast or a fine plunder. Sometimes I was still struck by his beauty, hollowed out by it until I went weak and pliable in his arms.

Now his arm dropped from my waist: he’d turned back to the brown-haired man. I picked at the meat set out before me and sipped my watered wine, willing my stomach to settle. Artemis would be pleased by this celebration. The feast would end without another plague of snakes, and I would spend one more night lying on my back alone in the middle of the bed, staring up at the patterns of distant torchlight on the painted ceiling of our bedchamber.

I looked up at the ceiling of the megaron as I thought this. That is why I saw him first.

The god came through the palace roof, soundless and slow. He didn’t look like Apollo or like my sea-god grandfather. He was Hermes of the winged heels and gentle smile, and his cheeks were smooth, as if rubbed sleek by the rush of air against his skin. He lit on the ground with a murmur of cloth and came to stand at the head of the feasting table. The hall seemed airless, the torches flickering as all the mortals drew in giant breaths, as if we could hold in that air, hold in life against the will of the Fates. The roomful of kings went faint like maidens at the sight of the quiet god. I choked on air and clutched at the table just as the rest of them did. Still, for a moment I was glad—glad that Hermes had come rather than Apollo, glad that I would suffer loss instead of betrayal. Loss was as familiar to me as the god’s worn gray cloak. I was close enough to see the hem of it swirl around his feet. There were ragged threads along its edge, threads I had not been quick enough to see when Hippothoe died.

Hermes looked over the guests, his eyes resting above their heads as if he saw some marker floating there, some blot on a soul that might indicate which man should die—which man or which woman. The knowledge seemed to echo in him as in a quiet hall of fitted stone or a grove of wintry trees standing bare against the cold. I let out a long breath and waited.

The god pulled his moon-horned wand from beneath his cloak, lifted it, pointed. “Admetus,” Hermes said. “Come.”

Someone shrieked, and I pressed my hand to my mouth but found my lips closed—I hadn’t made that sound. I looked to my husband and saw the terror in his face.

Admetus
, the god had said.

My husband’s mouth was open, soft as a baby’s, still wet with wine. He’d gone white around the lips and sweat darkened his beard and dampened his curls. I touched his arm and felt it twitch beneath the layer of fine cloth. I’d picked out his tunic the morning before—he’d wanted to try it on before the feast—and sat squinting from the bed as his body servants had laced it along the sides of his ribs. He’d seen me looking and smiled at me, that tender crooked curl to his lips, and I’d remembered how I had looked on him with wonder on the day we were wed. I couldn’t stop thinking of it as the god stood waiting—the tunic, the shape of his body beneath it, that flash of memory tinted with happiness.

He was staring at the god. “Apollo told me I would not die,” he said, and he sounded uncertain, like a child who’s just been given a frightening truth and told to swallow it as easily as a sip of wine. “He swore that someone else could go in my place.” He had never told me of that requirement; under the froth of my fear, I felt a stab of surprise and resentment.

Hermes nodded, a little flicker of agreement. “It is true.” The wand did not waver. “I honor the word of Apollo. But you must find a sacrifice to go in your place. A life for yours.”

Panic tightened my husband’s face. “I must choose?”

The god inclined his head and blinked his round, dark eyes. He stood impassive and tall, remote and solid as a mountain. He was utterly without human restlessness. Only the little wings at his heels fluttered, stirring the heavy cloth of his cloak, as if at any moment he might burst from stasis into flight. “A death for a death,” he said softly.

Admetus had turned away, eyes sweeping over the people at the table. His hands flexed on the edge of it. I watched his fingers instead of his face; I couldn’t bear to see whom he would choose. “Creon,” he said, voice rising, and a little more air leaked into the room. The faces of the other kings lightened. Creon would die for him, surely; it was the stuff of youthful oaths and sworn blood brotherhood. They didn’t know, then, what it was like between Admetus and Creon, what it was like between Admetus and me. Admetus said, “Creon, you—”

Creon’s pretty head dipped slightly, the smallest movement of chin toward chest. He didn’t shake his head or look away, but I felt Admetus flinch. He wanted immediate love, immediate sacrifice, or he would not be satisfied, even with Hermes waiting there only an arm’s length away. I felt the god’s presence beside me like the whir of a hummingbird’s wings.

One of Admetus’s hands had risen from the table, reaching out to his friend, but now he flung that hand toward the other side of the table and pointed, trembling, to his parents. I thought he must have been mistaken—he must have meant to point to Theomenos or the redheaded man—but his hand did not shift. “My lord Pheres,” he said quickly, “my lady Melanira.” His voice was unsteady. I suppose that was to his credit.

I was shaking my head and I couldn’t seem to stop. This was not my husband; this was some other man, some shepherd, some slave. This was unworthy.

“You will take my place,” my husband said to his aged parents, and now his voice grew edged. Even his face looked sharper, the bones standing out beneath his skin as if he had already died. “You’ve had good lives. The gods will bless you for this. You must save me. You cannot let me die.”

Pheres lifted his head, the left side of his mouth quivering. Melanira’s hand was tucked into the crook of his elbow, her other arm around his bent back. She too was shaking her head, slow motions back and forth, like the rub of her fingers on her husband’s tunic. “No,” Admetus’s father said finally, the sound garbled but harsh. “No, my lord.”

Admetus gasped. It was a weak little noise, the sound made by a slapped child. If this went on much longer, it would not matter if he did go with Hermes in the end—he would be remembered only as the king who’d tried to use a god’s favor to cheat death, and I would be the cowardly woman who whimpered over his body. His shame would doom me to starve. His parents might house me out of pity, but when they died I would be cast out of Pherae, and Pelias would never take me back, not when my husband had brought dishonor to all of Tyro’s children. I might rely on the hospitality of strangers, but no Achaean man would wed me, stained as I would be by Admetus’s weakness. I’d wander aimless and alone; it would be a death on earth.