Alcestis (14 page)

The ground was hilly now, and there were ghosts in the lines of the hills, shades who sat on the dirt quiet as shrines. They didn’t move when I approached. Some of them were weeping, their shoulders trembling and their heads bowed. Women walked with babies in their arms, but the babes were too calm, silent and inhuman as cloth dolls, and the mothers crooned idiot songs that had long since lost any semblance of language. I’d seen their hollow-eyed look in the faces of starving villagers come to supplicate at my father’s kingly feet, in slave boys with bare-ribbed bodies who had taken ill of a white fever and died laughing and thrashing in the funerary circle, where they’d been abandoned so they would not sicken the entire palace. I had seen this look in Hippothoe’s slackened face, and I’d known that the look was death, but always it was a passing look, succeeded by peace and silence. Here all faces wore the look of death and wore it forever.

I could hear the hound Cerberus barking, his fearsome voice reduced by distance. Where had I wandered? From above, the asphodel fields hadn’t looked so large, but all things seem easy and near when one is being transported by a god. I stood as tall as I could and tried to look over the hills. I couldn’t see far, but I noticed a faint bluish light rising beyond a distant hill, a light that looked like no god I knew.

I turned toward the light and walked for what seemed like hours, though my body did not tire. Eventually the field grew rocky and bare, the asphodel rising up weakly between the stones. I came to the crest of a hill and beyond the hill I saw the vale of mourning.

It needed no marker. Along the rocky valley bottom lay the Phlegethon, the river of fire, and shades stood by the river’s bank, wavery in the heat, the flames shining blue-white through their bodies, like water churned into froth. Pelopia had told me once that a smelter’s flame burned blue when he cast bronze, but I hadn’t believed him. From the hill, the flames of the Phlegethon looked cool and pure, like a mist so enveloping it seems to erase the world.

I climbed over the ridge of the hill and made my way down into the sloping valley. A girl’s shade looked up at me as I passed the rock where she sat. She was silent and strange, but there was a calm in her eyes, a reflected gleam from the river that gave her face a look of contentment. I felt myself smile, but she did not smile in return.

The Phlegethon cast a pale glow into the gray sky, the light I had seen from the hill. I stared up at it, dazzled. A loose group of shades stood near the flames. They would catch fire, I thought, standing so close to the bank—they leaned toward the heat as if they wished to—but the matter of a shade’s body was not quick to ignite. Memory does not go up in flames.

“Girl,” someone called in a croaky, rough-edged voice. “Pelias’s daughter. Girl. Come here.”

The voice had come from behind me. I turned, stepping around two shades who stood like twin trees, their feet nearly touching but their torsos swaying apart. A woman lay on a flat patch of ground near the river’s edge, stretched out like a sleeping servant, her arms folded peacefully across her belly. She’d lifted her head slightly. When she saw me looking at her, she lay back down, as if the effort of leaning up from the ground had cost her dearly. Slowly, reluctantly, I went to her.

In the glow of the fiery blue river, Tyro looked like a woman seen by moonlight rather than a shade. She had broad cheekbones and wide-set eyes, and my father lurked in the fine line of her nose, the strong chin. I could see where wrinkles had once seamed her face—they were still visible as tiny feathered lines of light, the way fine cracks glow in an old ivory jar when one places a candle inside it. I understood what Hades had meant when he spoke of newly dead shades appearing brightly in his mind; my grandmother was faded, but she had yet to lose her light.

She squinted at me from the ground. I must have looked strange with the glow of the river behind me and my odd half-solid body dense inside my shift. “Daughter of my son,” Tyro said. “Vessel of seawater. Sit.”

I settled beside her, pulling my bent legs up to my chest under my shift and wrapping my arms around my knees. I could feel the faintest brush of bare flesh against bare flesh, the softness of my breasts against my thighs. “Mother of my father, honorable Tyro,” I said. “I don’t like this place.”

“No, nor should you.”

“I’ve been looking for you. I saw—there are awful things here.”

“Look at the river,” she said. “Do you not think it beautiful?”

I looked at the river. It was indeed beautiful. “Yes,” I said.

“Do not speak to me of awful things,” she said. “I birthed your father, you know. He bit me when I nursed him. As if I were a sow.” She rolled her head sideways, smiled at me. “But now you have no need to worry. He lives.”

“He does.”

“Childbirth or illness,” she said suddenly. She meant it as a question, I saw, and I shook my head, unsure how to explain. “Strange. You look too fresh for murder. I see no marks of blood upon you.”

“No blood,” I said. “The god Apollo—he promised my husband that he’d intercede with the Fates when death came for him. When it was his time. He was—we were holding a feast for Artemis when the messenger arrived. I took his place.” It was easier to say this time, without Persephone’s confusing presence, but still I stumbled when I recalled Admetus’s cowardice.

My grandmother looked away. “Brave girl,” she said, though she didn’t sound entirely approving. And then: “You have the reek of god upon you.”

“The god Hermes brought me here.”

“Not that god,” she said. “When did you come? Only just now?”

I nodded, glancing at another shade who stared at us and then moved on. Few of them seemed to notice us on the ground, though none of them had trod upon us yet. I wondered if their misty feet would sink through my body or if their toes would bump against my hips, slip on my thighs. “Hermes took me to the palace. I was sent for.”

A long silence.

“Lie down, child,” she said finally, jerking her head toward the ground by her arm. I unfolded my legs and stretched them out on the powdery dirt, my ankles emerging pearly gray from beneath my shift. I lay down and looked up at the pale bluish sky-ceiling. There were no stars above us here.

Her hair was spread out on the ground between us like a dull silvery net, loose like a maiden’s. Perhaps she had died in the morning, before a slave could braid her hair. Or maybe she too had left her hairpins behind on the floor of some echoing room in her villa when Hermes came to spirit her away.

“Where is my sister?” I whispered, half afraid of her answer. “Where is my mother? Do you know them? Have you seen them? Do you know where they wait?”

“Of course I know them. Seen them, that I have not. No—your mother, Anaxibia, I saw once, and she spat at me. Tried to, at least.” Tyro was chuckling. It sounded like the rasp of wheat chaff in the wind. “Never forgave me for having more life than she did. Not the forgiving kind.”

“How is it you know me?” I rolled onto my side so that I could study her face. She smiled again, and I thought her skin might crack like the shell of a cooked egg rolled between a servant girl’s palms. Her lips spread over gray teeth.

“Your blood,” she said. “And the gods’ favor. It marks you.”

“I’ve earned no favor,” I said, stricken. Admetus had earned favor, and favor was the scent of laurel in the sunlight, bitter when crushed. I wanted no favor from a god.

“Dying in a man’s place? You should be in Elysium, child, drinking wine from a two-handled cup. You should have a slave boy to kiss your hand when you lay it along your thigh, as a dog kisses the hand of its master. You have earned favor.” She looked at me through narrowed eyes, little slits of murky light. “Had you not, yet you might still have drawn her eye. You have the look of Poseidon about you.”

I twisted my head to look at the river, where the flames rushed past quick as water. Did she come here to stare into the blue light and remember her Olympian lover? Had she once smelled of salt water and wakened in the morning to find sand in the creases of her fingers? I felt a flash of sympathy for Cretheus, the one whom she had left in a cold bed to stare at the constellations on the ceiling.

“Nothing to say to that, Alcestis?” My father’s mother made a rattle like one of Hippothoe’s coughs; it might have been a laugh. She shifted and stood—a slow, creaking process even in death, as if her bones had not forgotten their aches—and crossed her arms over her breasts the way the head maid in Iolcus always had before she’d scolded me. “Call me Tyro,” she said. “None of the others can remember my name, and I like to hear it now and again. Reminds me of days when I lived and wore it.”

I scrambled up to stand next to her. She reached out with both hands and her fingers felt like cool mist against my cheeks. “Watch for your mother, but do not hope for much. She is overfull of blame even now, and spills it at the slightest touch. You have little enough of life left in you. Spend it on something else.”

“And what of Hippothoe? My sister. What of my sister?”

“What of her? Nothing, I expect. And I know nothing more. Pelias yet lives, and Iolcus stands. Nothing else concerns me.”

I touched her thin gray shoulder and shivered at the downy feel of her body. “You could accompany me, Tyro. To help me look for them.”

“What good would that do?” she asked, shaking off my hand.

“Come,” I said again, feeling suddenly desperate. “Please. I don’t want to go alone through the asphodel fields. The others frighten me.”

“Frighten you?” She turned away, looking toward the river. Blue light cast sideways shadows across her face. Her voice had gone distant and when she looked back at me, her eyes were like cloudy marbles. “What have you to fear, granddaughter of the sea?” she asked me, and I could not answer.

10

I LEFT MY grandmother in the deep vale and walked along the rocky bank of the Phlegethon. I felt dizzy, but I didn’t spread my arms for balance. What did it matter if I fell? My body would not break.

I climbed out of the valley, where the river fell in a strange bright stream from the plain above, and found a smooth boulder near the top of the cliff. I pulled myself up onto it and sat, folding my legs before me and peering down into the vale. From this height I couldn’t recognize my grandmother among the gray forms on the bank. I could pretend, at least for a moment, that no one here knew me. I still felt naked, though I wasn’t cold. The atmosphere was windless, the air perfectly neutral in temperature. It was not late fall here; this place was perpetual and without seasons.

I rested my temple on my knee and closed my thin eyelids. I wished for the warmth of my husband’s hands on my shoulders. There had been a morning once, not long after we were wed, when he had awakened me with a series of dry kisses along my shoulders and trailed his hands along the furrow of my spine. I had been smiling before I opened my eyes, and it was only when I rolled over to kiss his mouth that I had seen the look of uneasy determination on his face. I had kissed his cheek and stroked the silky skin between his shoulder blades until he lay warm and quiet against me, and the slave girls had given me envious looks when they attended me late in the morning.

It was one of the better memories I had of Admetus.

If what I had seen of the underworld was true, that memory would vanish. I could clasp my recollections to me as tightly as I was able and still they would slip from my mind as the feeling of touch was slipping from my fingers. I wouldn’t remember the savor of his skin or the rough tangles of Hippothoe’s hair, how it had snagged on my fingernails and made my face itch as I slept. Already I found it difficult to keep him, or Hippothoe, in mind without effort. If I tried to conjure them up, I saw Persephone’s face.

I slid off of the boulder and picked my way down the rocky hill into the asphodel fields, unsure where to go. It was hard not to feel that my freedom to roam the underworld must be some kind of test—that if I toured obediently through its dark regions, I would be rewarded with Hippothoe.

Eventually I entered a dark cypress wood. The forest felt empty, no leaves on the ground, no broken twigs. No calling birds. I plucked at a branch, bending a feathery leaf between my fingers, and it sprang back to its original shape with no mark on it. I’d been in a forest only once, not long after Hippothoe died, when I had bothered Pisidice to let me come along with her when she went out to supervise the washing. I’d gotten myself covered in pine sap, and the slave girls had had to wash me too, while Pisidice stood over me and shouted. Now I touched one of the cypress trunks and my soft fingers came away clean and dry.

I slipped around the low-hanging branches, pushing them away from my face. Then the woods came to an abrupt end, a line of trees so sudden and straight that they must have been placed by the gods, and I walked into a clearing full of chilly light.

Around the heroes’ quarter stood a glowing barrier like a broad-lit circle cast by a torch to keep the dark at bay. But the light of Elysium burned too brightly, flaring in my eyes like perpetual lightning and whitening the figures within. The light was cold, like eternal dawn that never blossoms into day, but it drew the dead just as the flaming river had. Shades lined its edges, their hands smudges on the wall of light. I peered over the shoulder of the tall shade in front of me.

A great table sat in the courtyard of a great palace, far grander than the smoky crystal building that housed the king and queen. Behind the palace spread golden-green fields of wheat, grass dotted with grazing horses and cattle, pens holding sheep and goats. There were stands of white beech trees and dense pine, and a neat, pleasant stream ran along the side of the courtyard. I could see a sunlit sky just streaked with cloud and long late-afternoon shadows stretching from the men’s feet. The scene looked like a mural, pretty and static.

This was Elysium: a continuous feast, a table piled high with meat and every man served the hero’s portion. Nothing but heroes’ portions in these fields, no man made to feel less than godly. At the table sat men clothed in the skins of wild beasts, with spectral swords still buckled to their sides and greaves strapped to their shins. Their armor clinked and sang when they moved, and they moved like gods, easy in their bodies, not one of them aged or wounded or sobbing into his hands. They looked like living men. From time to time, one of them hooked a serving girl or boy into his lap and pressed his face into the slave’s hair. The boys smiled and twisted in the men’s laps, and the girls giggled and covered their mouths as if to hide delighted grins. Every girl, every boy, every hero—all perfectly joyous.

I pressed closer among the throng of observers. I didn’t recognize the men at the table, though I knew their lazy, proud expressions and the cut of their royal muscles. My brother Acastus had looked like this before he left for Mycenae, skin tanned golden by the sun and always bearing a faint slick of oil, as if he had just come from wrestling a friend. But beneath the joy I saw strain in their immortal faces, in the tautness of youthful flesh in a world full of dissipating mist. They did not belong in the underworld, and though the brilliant world within the bubble looked nothing like the gray landscape outside it, they were not fooled. One hero’s hand pressed hard at his temple as if to stave off a headache; another man sat with a slave girl on his lap and touched her, and yet looked away from her with frightened eyes that didn’t match his obscene grin. When she stood, she moved with the rolling ease of a shade.

The heroes looked out toward us often, little glances cast furtively between jokes. They couldn’t see us, but perhaps they could feel us watching them the way the slaves watched royal feasts from the kitchen hall, hungry and wistful and resigned.

I pushed around the shade in front of me and put my hands on the curtain of light. It crackled beneath my touch, tiny bolts of light dancing away from my fingertips. Slowly, the men at the grand table looked up, looked at one another, looked toward me.

I backed away, knocking into shades who had come up behind me to watch the heroes and muttering a choked apology. The other shades took no notice as I stumbled back into the forest. The palace must be to my left, I thought, and I tried to run in that direction, but the woods darkened around me and, without a sun to guide me, I couldn’t tell which way to go. I faltered and spun as I ran, batting at the thin branches that whipped across my face and watching for a path, and finally I caught my foot on a cypress root and tumbled to the clean ground.

I sat for a moment with my hands braced on the dirt and my eyes closed. My foot tingled slightly; I’d knocked it into something when I rolled on the ground. I touched my ankle, grateful for the sensation, and when I opened my eyes I saw a small wooden arch twined all about with gray-brown vines and white flowers and a path of flat stones proceeding from it. It had not been there before I fell.

I got up ungracefully and went to the arch. When I touched the gnarled wood, I felt something strange—a more delicate sensation than the imperious summons I’d received in the palace of Hades, but similar, as if a soft hand were stroking the surface of my heart. I knew whose touch I felt, and I didn’t think to resist. I went through the arch.

On the other side was a garden in which all the trees were dead and all the flowers wilted. Immediately behind the arch stood olive trees heavy with black fruit, hard beneath my fingers. I tried to tug an olive from its branch, but it wouldn’t come away in my hand. The berries farther along the path clung just as fiercely to their stems. The flowers smelled of cold: the spike of air in your nostrils when winter seizes the world.

The queen of the underworld sat beneath a pomegranate tree, its branches forming a bower over her head. This tree, like the others, was stiff and dead, and beneath its arched covering the goddess shone jewel-bright.

I took a step and Persephone lifted her golden head. She held a pomegranate poised halfway to her mouth, and its juice dripped down her white hand, over the fine bump of her wrist and along her forearm. The fruits on the tree were pinkish gray, their waxy skins shriveled and bumpy, but the fruit in her hand had a soft, glossy skin and plump red kernels in its honeycomb of pith. I wasn’t hungry, but I could not pull my eyes away from the pomegranate in her pretty hand, the juice like blood in runnels on her skin.

She raised her arm, licked at the line of juice, and smiled at me with stained lips.

“Alcestis,” she said. “Do come sit.”

“You can’t eat that,” I said, startled into rudeness.

She lifted one eyebrow in genteel confusion.

I dropped to my knees before her, gesturing toward the pomegranate. “The fruit, my lady. I’ve heard the story. I know what it must mean if you eat.”

“Oh,” she said with a laugh slow as water over stones, “this holds no danger for me now. The deal has been struck, you see, and all have agreed to its terms. So I may consume whatever I wish, and no one may forbid me.”

The golden chain had vanished and now she wore a bronze circlet about her throat, its fit snug enough that a mortal might have had trouble breathing. It didn’t seem to cause her discomfort, though, and the rub of the metal raised no color on her skin. She lifted her free hand to touch it as I stared, leaving a smudge of juice on her neck, and smiled at me again when I ducked my head in embarrassment.

“Charming.” She licked her fingers. “Yet not obedient. I asked you to sit, not to kneel like a supplicant, Alcestis of Pherae. There is plenty of grass to share.” The grass freshened and greened when she patted it. I thought of my grandmother lying on the rough ground by the Phlegethon, of how the light in her eyes had dimmed when she rose. Persephone’s gray eyes were brilliant with amusement. She held the pomegranate out to me as I crawled up to sit beside her.

“Will you eat?” she asked. Her sly smile lightened her face, made it young and mischievous, less stone carven. I had no stomach for the fruit, but my fingers itched to take it, to dig into the red kernels until their juice burst on my hands. Such color in this place—I hadn’t thought it possible. Still, I shook my head. I knew her story.

“What is this place?” I asked her. “I fell in the woods and when I looked up there was a gate. But there are no walls, not like the heroes’—” She was giving me a curious look, not entirely friendly. I swallowed the rest of my thought. “Not like a mortal palace.”

“No, there is no need for such barbarities here. I wished you to see it, so you did.” She picked several kernels from the fruit and crunched them between her teeth, spitting the seeds delicately into her cupped palm and then dropping them in a neat pile beside her.

“You say you have heard my tale,” she said. “And who told it to you?”

“The village bard in Iolcus knows stories of the gods. He came to the palace for feasts when my father wanted to hear tales. But he tells mostly of Poseidon and the Olympians.” She was still watching me expectantly, the pomegranate forgotten in her hand. “I do not know much,” I said. “My husband did not even talk often of Apollo. And no man likes to speak of goddesses overmuch.”

“That I know well. They call on us readily enough when they need us, but they never give us honor. Their fear is unbecoming.”

I was not sure that I thought the men’s fear so unreasonable now, sitting on the grass beside this goddess in a dead garden, watching her suck the juice from the fruit that had doomed her. But I nodded. I didn’t want to anger her. I could imagine that beautiful face contorted in rage, with a vase figure’s twisted lips and black eyes, her hair flying out around her.

“I will tell you my tale,” she said, almost gaily. “The mortal singers get so many things wrong in the telling, trying to fit our deeds to their ghastly music. It sounds like dying goats. I wish they would choose some other way to honor us, but one cannot argue with devotion. We are not ungrateful.”

I’d thought the bard’s tunes fine, but I murmured agreement.

“I lived with my mother then. She was always overcareful with me, and I did not like it. I thought I knew what was safe. I was a maiden, and she had given me girls to attend me when I went down from the mountain of Olympus. They were pretty girls, but not as pretty as I. In the field below the mountain there were flowers. We often went to pick them, my girls and I. The lord of the gods had a liking for me and I thought he would always protect me if I needed it. I went out to pick flowers that day, and I did not worry. I did not know that Hades was watching me. I had met him when he came to Olympus, but his visits were rare and his manner unpleasant, and I had never considered him as anything but an uncle.

“He took me for his wife. He took me,” she repeated, and glanced over at me as if to be sure that I was listening. I nodded. I understood well enough. She looked down again, her golden eyelashes fluttering against her flushed cheeks. Her smile grew wider, but her fingers dug into the pomegranate’s flesh. “And we were wed, and I was queen, and there are rewards due a queen. You know this.”

I nodded again, watching her hands.

“I ate the fruit. No one had warned me. I did not think. It looked so beautiful and sweet, and the garden was empty. I did not even think anyone had seen me eat. It did not taste quite right,” she added suddenly. “Nothing here does. But I have learned to like the taste. It tastes like dust, and memories, and there is salt in it, like mortal tears. I cannot explain it to one who will not eat. But it lingers in the mouth.

“I thought I could still go back. My mother was miserable, you see, and so the mortals grew miserable, and misery pours no libations. But when Hermes came to order me back, my husband had the seeds in his hand. He had been carrying them ever since I ate.”

She looked at me, her eyes glossy and flat like a sea becalmed. I wanted to ask her why she was telling me this—it was the story I knew—but I recognized the acid edge to her voice. Phylomache had done this when my father had insulted her in some fashion: told the story over and over, like opening a wound to bleed it clean. But some wounds never bleed clean, and Persephone, her mouth and fingertips reddened with juice, did not look eager to forgive.