Alcestis (12 page)

I stood, tangled in my skirts, the bench pressing against the backs of my knees. It took the men a moment to notice me. It took Admetus a moment longer than that. I was watching him, to see how long it would take; I had never learned to look away when I should. “I will go,” I said.

Admetus’s mouth worked silently. I waited to hear his words. My blood was thrumming in my ears like discordant lute strings, wild as a wine dance.

“You cannot. I forbid it,” he said. “Alcestis, sit down.”

I looked away from him to the quiet face of the god, who had lowered his wand when I spoke, as if I had truly surprised him. Now he lifted it again and flicked it once. The bench slid backward and I stepped away from the table. Admetus made a grab for my arm, but his hand slid off me, as if Hades already possessed me and I were fading from the world. My husband was seated and I was standing—it was wrong, and I had to resist the urge to sit again, to bow my head and study my hands like a good wife. I was a good wife. My hands were trembling, but I didn’t feel the fear that made them shake. He grabbed for me again. I stepped back, and a pin slid from my hair and rattled against the floor, loud in the silence.

I reached out for the god. Hermes’ palm was smooth and cool, and his fingers folded around mine. He pulled me close, his cloak brushing my ankles, and his arms settled heavily around my ribs. His body was warm all along my back. I’d never been held like that before, nor had I ever been so close to a god, not even my sea-god grandfather. He smelled like the pale green of new growth, like spring flowers still folded in their leaves. Like the fresh sweat of young girls. Like Hippothoe. I began to shiver.

“The woman shall go down to the dwelling of Hades,” the god said, stirring the air by my ear. So they breathed; I had wondered. “Her death for yours, Admetus.”

“No! I said I forbid it! She is my wife, mine to command, and I say she will not go.”

“No longer.” Hermes tightened his arms until I thought my bones would crack. I did not make a noise. I was not braver than my husband, but I’d had more practice at staying silent. “She belongs to death.”

“Alcestis,” my husband cried, “why have you done this? Do not go in my place. I will go. I will honor the Fates. At least take me with you! Do not leave me here alone.”

Alone in this great palace, I thought, as he would leave me if he died. His voice was full of a new terror; he had not considered the idea of being left. I was a little gratified that it frightened him.

“Do you not love me? Alcestis!”

I could not speak. Hermes bent his mouth to my ear and said, soft as air, “Bid farewell to your husband, Lady Alcestis.”

I lifted my head from Hermes’ shoulder. It was growing heavy on the soft stalk of my neck. I looked over the assembled lords, the echoing megaron, the palace that had never really become my home, the husband who had never really become my own.

Admetus’s face shifted, the corners of his mouth moving up toward the corners of his eyes, terror shifting into a mask of grief. Tears shone on his cheeks. The knowledge of my death was on him now, and he could not bear it—yet he could not look away. He wanted something from me, some gesture of departure, some soft thing to fold around his hurt when I was gone.

Under the cloak, I curled my hands around the god’s hard forearms. I looked at my husband and smiled, and then I looked away. If there was relief in his eyes, I did not want to see it.

Hermes launched toward the ceiling. The stone bore the same painting as the ceiling of my bedchamber, five-armed white stars on a blue field, and they seemed to distort and lengthen as we hurtled toward the roof. I was dizzy again, but sudden panic cut through the blur. I would die. I was going to die. I struggled in the god’s arms and then cried out, for it felt as if his hands would sink through my flesh to fasten around my bones.

We went through the roof. I had time to draw one more breath, and the air above the palace whistled cold through my nostrils. Then a sudden rush, a sickening lift of my stomach, and we plunged toward the earth, plunged through the earth, and under it.

8

HERMES’ HANDS DID not hurt my bones any longer. I had no bones to hurt.

Entering the underworld was like coming into a dark room from the sunlit outdoors—not just any room but a quiet storeroom so old that its contents have all been forgotten, where dust drifts in the slanted light from the opened door and settles on the lips of abandoned vessels once shaped by human hands. Like the last stretched moment before one falls heavily asleep. Like being swallowed. And yet like none of those things at all.

We flew, the god and I, wrapped in his fluttering cloak. The space around us was uniform as a cloud, but I saw shapes and patterns below us, patches of darkness, ribbons of gloom, glints of metal or stone. Lines of strange-colored light. I felt as if I were trying to make out the floor of the sea by looking through deep water.

My feet dangled free, skimming over the drab landscape below. I knew I should be frightened, but I wasn’t, not of the great height at which we flew, nor of the god who held me. A great, gray calm had settled on me.

“Where will you take me?” I asked the god Hermes. There was no wind in this false sky, no little god to whip the sounds from my mouth.

“To the shore,” he said in my ear. “To cross with the others. Have you a dagger or a bit of bronze to give the boatman?”

“I have nothing.” And I didn’t, not even a studded hairpin. My hair had come loose and hung down around my face like a maiden’s, swaying as we went. I imagined the pins scattered on the palace floor like a constellation, my husband picking them up, cradling them in his palm, staring up at the ceiling. I felt no sorrow when I thought this, no yearning, no anger. I thought of Admetus alone, and then the thought fell from my mind, just as I would plummet to the ground if Hermes dropped me.

But Hermes shifted his grip, and I didn’t clutch at him—he could’ve released me and I would have closed my eyes and fallen. I couldn’t feel my body as I had when above ground, the effortless, constant knowledge of all its small irritations and twitches and pleasures. Fallen asleep, we say, when our limbs feel prickly and dead, but this was a different kind of slumber—my body had gone quiet all at once. I should’ve been frightened, but the blankness felt like relief.

“You must pay the toll, or he will not let you cross,” Hermes said as we drifted lower, the dark shore rising up to meet us. Along the edge of the river—for that was the first gray ribbon, the Acheron, running softly through the floor of the underworld— crowded a mass of shades. From above they blurred together, but as we approached I could see their individual bodies. They looked like shadows tangled on the ground. Did I look like that beneath the god’s cloak?

“Here you’ll stay if you cannot pay Charon,” Hermes said.

“Then I will wait with the others who cannot pay.”

Hermes was silent, suddenly distracted, as if listening to a far-off call. We hovered over the shore. I strained to hear, twisting my head against his shoulder until I could just barely catch the sound, a low, deep murmur that was not coming from the crowd of shades milling beneath my feet.

“I will take you to Hades and Persephone,” Hermes said, and we ascended again. “They wish to see you.”

“But I must cross the river to enter,” I said. “Am I not dead then?”

“Lady,” the god said, “you are.”

The stranded shades looked up as we skimmed over their heads, some of them standing with their mouths open like baby birds or amazed children. Some of them were children. Their faces were worn away by death, their features soft as rubbed stone. They looked like a group of clay figures, each one similar to the next.

The boatman was coming toward the dark shore, his empty boat skimming the surface of the water. His back hunched as he shoved his pole down into the silty riverbed, his white head bent downward, and he didn’t look up as we flew above. He looked like an old grandfather, like an old king. Faintly I remembered Admetus’s parents at the feast table, how they had clutched each other and stared at their son with watery eyes. The shades on the dark shore reached out for the ferryman’s boat, reaching out like Admetus had then, their hands closing on nothing.

On the opposite bank, a broad path led toward the rest of the underworld. A few shades lingered and stared across the water as if they might beg Charon to return and ferry them back to life. Beyond them paced the black hound Cerberus, a creature of nightmares and of stories told in the frightened haze of half sleep, dragging his long chain back and forth in front of the entrance to a dim little cave. He was smaller than I had expected and skinny around the ribs. His middle head sighted us first, then all three heads lifted to snarl at the god’s winged heels. His six black eyes shone wet.

Hermes shifted me in his arms and snapped his fingers at the dog, firing a bright spark that made the beast’s two outer heads snuffle subserviently in the dirt. The middle head let out a protesting howl.

“Quiet,” Hermes said, and Cerberus subsided, circling on his chain, his middle head lowering with a choral growl. I looked back as we flew over the beast—his tail had begun to swing back and forth, back and forth, like that of any hound recognizing a frequent visitor.

We’d passed the guardian; we were in the underworld proper, Hades’ domain. Here were the wide, pale fields, filled with asphodel. The flower of the dead stood out from the ground in clumps, stiff and prickly, sticking up between the forms of the shades that wandered over the fields. I’d seen the flower by graves; I’d planted it by my sister’s grave myself, pressing dirt around its roots. I remembered the little starlike tufts of petal, the burst bulbs, the way the slave boys had heated them in the fire and knocked them against stones to make them explode. Hippothoe had learned the trick of it—

She was here, somewhere, among the flowers of the field, among the dead who wandered in their pale robes. They dotted the landscape as far as I could see. They seemed to look straight ahead as they walked, but I watched them knock into one another, stumble slightly, and move on without a word. From this height their faces were as interchangeable as masks, and I felt the first cold touch of something like despair stroking at my gullet. There were so many dead, so many. Where was Hippothoe? How would I find her?

It seemed that we sped over leagues of field, asphodel and shades thronging below us. Ahead the ground flattened and the left edge of the field seemed to fall off into darkness—not a gray darkness like the rest of the underworld, but a hungry black depth like the yawn of a giant mouth. To the right stretched a forest, lit from within with a white-gold glow like sunrise on a wintry day. It was a light like Apollo’s. I closed my eyes against it, but my eyelids seemed faintly transparent, as if a thin veil of skin couldn’t keep the underworld out.

I saw the palace through my lifting eyelashes. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it immediately, for it sat equidistant between the cold light and the dark pit, behind a towering gate of gray shimmering stone. It was Hades’ palace; I knew it at once. It bore no carven lions or marks of kingship but was built of stone blocks with surfaces smooth as ocean-rounded pebbles. I wondered if the earth had worked these stones in her mouth for Hades, softened and then spit them out for his use. The walls of the palace were enfolding as a grave, but I almost liked the look of them. Here Hermes would deliver me; here I would be greeted by my new lord. This was a process I knew, the act of being transported by a man from one palace to another, given as a possession between kings.

Hermes twisted, swerving sideways, and the adamantine gate rose up before us. It stood free at the end of the plain, an arch of stone with no walls winging out from its sides—the king and queen of the underworld would never be besieged in this palace. We lit on the ground. I hardly felt my feet touch the dirt. Hermes moved away, his cloak slipping from my shoulders, and I looked down at my quiet body. My clothing had disappeared when I left the world, and instead of bright finery, I wore a colorless shift made of some thin, plain fabric beneath which I could see the curves of my breasts and hips. This was no garment for an Achaean woman—it was not a matron’s bodice, cut for display, but it was not a maiden’s careful wrapping either. I put my hands to my breasts in shock, thinking to cover them, but my palms were dead and dull, and I could barely feel the bumps of my nipples under the cloth. I look like a slave girl, I thought, and then: I look like a shade.

My hands fell to my sides. I looked to Hermes, who stood, watching me. His sleek face was troubled, his fine brow twisted in puzzlement.

“There is no shame here,” he said. “It is strange that you should feel it.”

At first I didn’t understand his words. No shame? I was a queen and a wife and I stood dressed like a slave girl in the courtyard of a god’s palace. I stared, incredulous, but Hermes looked on me without embarrassment. No shame. He turned finally and pointed to the nearest pillar of the great gate, which arched above our heads. Its surface was dully reflective, like stirred water, and in it I was a tall, pale smudge distorted by the bumps and twists in the metallic rock. Even the paint on my face had vanished. The metal showed me a white oval, my cheekbones stark, my lips pink-gray.

I looked like Hippothoe had when last I saw her. I was dead.

“So you see,” Hermes said at the same moment that I turned to him and asked, “What must I do?”

The god swept his cloak back around his body, preparing to leave. Again I felt the hum of his presence, heard the sound of him like a stirring of feathers in an empty room.

“Lord Hermes—where are you going?” There was nothing for me to fear here; there was nothing here, nothing but the dead and the gods who ruled them. But still I did not want Hermes to leave. “What must I do?”

“I go back to the world,” he said.

If he’d been my husband, I might have folded my hand around his arm, held onto him until he relented, but I couldn’t touch a god like that. “Will you not stay?” I asked him, looking away from his dark, silent eyes. “Only to escort me to the palace.”

“I do not venture inside that palace.” His voice was soft as rock-tumbled linen, not fluting sweet like Apollo’s. I wanted to ask him again to stay, but I could not. I didn’t know what subterranean enmity or alliance kept him out of the royal house. The only story of the underworld I knew well was the goddess Persephone’s—the bards were always singing it and the kitchen women talking of it, and Phylomache, who talked of the gods just as she talked of any gossip-worthy mortal event, had sighed over it in my hearing.

“The king and queen await you,” Hermes said, and then he did reach out to me the way I’d once dreamed a god might, laying his thumbs along my cheekbones and turning my face up as he bent to kiss it. His lips were like a spark on my forehead, and for a moment I could feel my body as that spark jolted through my blood. Then it was gone, the light pressure of his hands gone also, and I was left staring up at him in a daze as if I were one of the shades by the river. He crouched and sprang, the cloak billowing around him, and flew into the gray dome of the underworld.

I put my hands up to my cheeks, brushed my temples. I could feel some ghost of my own touch, some memory of skin, but no real sensation. I turned back to my blurred reflection in the pillar’s surface: pale, thin face; hair the color of dirt; eyes like discs of battered copper. I touched the gate, trying to recall when I had seen that stone before, when I had learned its name. My brother Pelopia had brought a piece of it home once, a gift from some sea nymph he had met on the shore. I remembered the way he’d cupped the smooth, glossy pebble in the palm of his hand, how his touch had made it steam. He’d chipped at the courtyard wall with the round pebble and knocked bits of stone free. “It’s adamant,” he’d said. “She gave it to me.” He’d folded his fingers around the pebble as if it were the nymph’s hand he held in his own. I don’t believe he saw her again.

I stepped through the gate and stood before the broad doors of the palace of Hades. It was no taller than my father’s palace or my husband’s, the roof standing at the height of four men. It was not a grand and carven building like the eastern palaces spoken of by visiting seamen. But the walls were smoky crystal, and when I moved toward the window set into the wall beside the closed doors, it wavered and vanished, the wall around it smacking shut.

At first I thought the courtyard was empty, but I saw a clump of shades standing near the palace wall. They turned when I approached them, though my feet were silent on the ground, and whispered to each other in grass-dry voices. They didn’t speak to me. I took another step toward them, and the group swayed drunkenly toward me. I put my hands out and they split around me like a wave, most of them stumbling through the adamantine gate. One remained, just out of my reach.

I couldn’t tell exactly how old she’d been when she died— older than I had ever gotten. I wanted to touch her the way one might want to touch a corpse, to feel the change in the density of the flesh, the cold, altered solidity of death. But she wasn’t solid. I couldn’t see curves or bone beneath her shift, only a hazy human shape like something a child might scratch in the dirt with a stick. I lifted my hand to trace the line of her jaw and felt a tickle like goose down beneath my fingertips. Eddies of shade spun off of her, tendrils of self dissipating into nothing, and I jerked my hand back, resisting the urge to wipe my fingers on my shift. She did not recoil. She tilted her head and regarded me, and the look in her eyes reminded me of some of my father’s slower hunting birds, a glossy, alien stupidity.

I could not possibly look like that.

I backed away from her and stumbled up the steps to the heavy palace doors and touched the great bronze knot set in the center of the right-hand door. It felt warm, and wrong somehow, and my stomach sank the way it had when I’d had to push on Phylomache’s belly to force out the afterbirth. Dizzy, I put my other palm against the door; it was fashioned of some dark wood rather than crystal, a rich brown-red like dried blood, and I could almost feel the grain.