Alcestis (15 page)

She seemed to be waiting for me to speak.

“It is fall now,” I said, “in the world above. The winds had changed on the shore, the slaves told me. Before I died.”

Persephone smiled. The leaves above her head glistened waxy green for a moment and then faded. “Yes, now my mother grieves and cools the world, and when I return all will begin to blossom as if I had never left.” She looked down at the fruit in her hands and let out a frustrated sigh. “Every year it is the same, in the light with her and then in the dark with him. Sometimes I think I shall just stay here, in the underworld. I will refuse when Hermes comes for me, and if Zeus dislikes it so much he can come to fetch me himself. I should like to see Cerberus bark at him when he comes, old god with his old lightning bolts, as if he could hurt us here.” By the end of this speech, she was muttering like an old woman. I stared at her, thinking of winter eternal, frozen crops and storm-lashed seas and ground so hard no pick could dent it.

“You cannot stay,” I said, but she cut me off with an airy wave. She had so many smiles, like differently weighted blades.

“I would not, I know it. If I chose a place to stay, I would live with my mother in the sunlight and pick flowers in the field with my girls and let them weave my hair with vines. We would bathe in the river and hang our clothes from tree branches, and no one would dare interrupt our peace.”

I could see the field as she spoke of it. And then I began to see things that I could never have imagined on my own: a black chariot rattling over the edge of a gaping chasm in the earth, a rainbow broad and flat as a road, a ring of golden thrones around a roaring column of fire, and a woman petting the flames with the tenderness reserved for a child. I saw Hades reach out for Persephone’s hand, saw her frozen for a moment as she considered, and then saw her arm rise away from her side and float toward him as if she could not control it.

Something touched my shoulder, and I started, blinking and shivering. Persephone had dropped the pomegranate and it lay forgotten near her foot. She touched my arm again—not to rouse me this time, but with a look that would’ve rested easily on the face of Phylomache’s two-year-old daughter, a look that said:
I will do this, and you will not stop me.
Her fingers were sticky and her touch made light burst beneath my skin. I could feel my skin again, could feel the burning line she left as she trailed one finger from my shoulder to my elbow. I watched her fingertip move and my cheeks tingled hot and cold, like fever in summer.

“Alcestis,” she said, considering, “you listen well. It is a good trait in a mortal, knowing when to be silent.”

I laughed, then shut my mouth abruptly. “It is only because I do not know what to say, goddess.”

“Oh, do not call me that. You shall call me Persephone. If you must title me, call me your queen, and I will be satisfied.” She pulled her hand away and peered at it as if searching for some remnant of my shade flesh on her white fingertip. I stole a glance at my arm; it looked almost solid, almost pearl colored, not gray. The place where she had touched me glowed faintly pink.

“Did you find your father’s mother?” The challenge in her eyes had vanished. She looked younger than I, like a barely bleeding girl wed and broken too early, and concerned for me. I put my hand on the dry grass between us, steadying myself, then drew it back quickly; I couldn’t stand to have her touch me again, not so soon. I couldn’t think when she touched me.

“I did,” I said. “She was where the lord Hades told me to look.”

A small gesture: of course, said her graceful hands. She had that kind of confidence in her husband’s power. “And did she know you?”

“Yes,” I said slowly. I didn’t know how to describe my god-beloved grandmother. She was dead, that was all. A little glow left to her still, but she would set like the moon in morning, the horizon gulping up her shine. And what of my sister, whom even Tyro had not seen? How had I sat so long beside the queen of the underworld and forgotten to ask of her?

Persephone didn’t seem to have noticed my hesitation. “And you knew her. Good. She will help you if you have need. The first days—the first days are not easy. I remember.” She bent forward and retrieved the errant pomegranate, picking idly at the membrane between the seeds and peeling pieces of it away.

“But I have not found my sister. My Hippothoe, who died when I was young.”

Persephone’s fingers stilled and then began plucking at the fruit again. “You will find her. You must be patient.” Her voice was light and almost cloying. I thought of touching her white hand, the tiny angled hollow at the base of her thumb.

“Lady—Persephone,” I said, pleading.

Her gray eyes flicked up. “Lady Alcestis,” she said. I listened for mockery; it was a habit born of years of conversing with Pisidice. She would have spoken derisively, but Persephone did not. She looked at me gravely, waiting.

“She is all I have.”

“Your father’s mother,” she said mildly. “The lady Tyro. You told me—”

“Tyro is a shade,” I said. “I want my sister.”

“The feeling will pass, Alcestis.” Her eyes were bright again, the sheen in them like the gloss of fever or tears. “All feelings do.”

“I know that,” I said. “I see the others here; they have no feelings. They have nothing. But I have not forgotten my life yet. I do not feel—I don’t feel like I am dead. I don’t think I died the right way.” My voice grew fierce. I was certain she would laugh at me.

“The right way,” Persephone said faintly, as if startled. “Oh, Alcestis. There are so many ways to die, and most are terrible or boring or terrible and boring. You have been lucky. It did not hurt much, and you arrived here as you were when you left the world. It is like a song, your death.”

I was silent. She touched my arm again, a quick tap, a flint strike.

“Tell it to me again. Your death and how it came about.”

“I told you of it when I arrived here,” I said. I should have called her queen, but I couldn’t say it.

“Tell it,” she repeated. “I want to remember it.”

Then I understood. “Even when I forget?”

“Even so.”

“I married Admetus to escape my father,” I said. “He loved Apollo, and Apollo loved him and swore to save him from death. But he didn’t tell Admetus how he would be saved. I saved him, and I came here.”

“To me.”

“To death,” I said. Persephone looked down at the pomegranate in her hands, and for a moment I saw it as she did—the flesh, once so tempting, now robbed of its danger and pleasure, tasting of dust.

“And then?”

“And then I don’t know what happens,” I said snappishly, forgetting myself, forgetting the goddess. Her cheeks grew pink, and now she laughed, a sound that stirred the branches above her shining hair.

“Well, I am no seer to tell the future. But I can,” she said with a confiding air, “often recall the past. And I see that you can as well, for I could tell you knew your grandmother’s story when I spoke of it in the palace.”

“My father did not let us forget it.”

“No,” Persephone said. “Indeed. So you are the child of a child of a god, the lord Poseidon. And you lived sixteen years in the world without knowing yourself different in any way?” She put the pomegranate down again and leaned toward me. “You woke in the morning, every morning, and you did not feel yourself filled with the force of the universe and your godly ancestors?”

I hadn’t felt myself filled with anything but exhaustion most mornings. Occasionally my head had ached with wine or the residue of tears. On rare mornings, I’d risen with a sense of vague and unfocused joy, as if the sun had leapt up in my chest instead of in the sky, but those days had come infrequently after my father’s marriage and even less frequently after my own. I shook my head.

The goddess frowned and the leaves over her head drooped. “You were only—Alcestis?”

“Yes.”

She reached out suddenly and put one sticky, sparking hand on my knee. “How lovely,” she said with the force of a spear thudding into earth. Then, wondering: “How strange.”

11

“YOU MUST COME to the palace,” the goddess said, and laughed when I did not respond. “Come! You are reluctant as a maiden. What have you to fear, Alcestis? I shall not lift you above my shoulders and cast you down into the pit. That is my lord’s sport, and he plays only with men. Come, come. We shall feast tonight.” She stood at once and shook a few pomegranate seeds from her skirts, letting them tumble into the dying grass.

“How long have I been here?” I looked around the garden. “How do you know it is night?”

“It is what time I choose, and I choose night.” Persephone bent and picked up the half-eaten pomegranate, her hair pouring around her face like honey. She looked at me as she straightened, and tossed the pomegranate into the air and caught it, tossed it and caught it, then held out her other hand. “Well?”

I reached out hesitantly, and she seized me, pulling me up from the ground without effort.

“You pay me little attention, Alcestis,” she said, and tugged on my hand, sending a pulse of feeling along my arm and into my chest. I opened my mouth to apologize, but she shook her head magnanimously and smiled as broadly as a man. “I forget that you are dead. I am sorry. You must still dwell on thoughts of your husband.”

I hadn’t thought of my husband since before I found the Elysian Fields. “No,” I said, looking down at our joined hands. “He fades from my mind. But there is not much to forget.”

“I do not think I believe you, that your husband could be so easily dismissed. A king of the Achaeans.” She tossed the pomegranate once more. “Yet you were fallow when you died, and it is a woman’s right to hold her mind back, though she cannot reserve her body as her own. Even if there is not much to forget, I shall help you do it.”

My father had said that while it was unfortunate to ask for a goddess’s help, it was worse to receive it unasked, for Olympian women always had dark motives lurking in their hearts. Persephone wore her darkness as Hermes wore his cloak, wrapped ragged around her body, but her eyes were soft now, compassionate. She knew I had not yet conceived. I moved my fingers slightly and her grip tightened.

“Come,” she said again. “We will go to the palace. There is little else for one like you to do in this place.”

I let her pull me along. She led me out of the garden into the wood, and there were shades around us again, as pallid and thin as the cypress trunks. They looked toward us as we passed, dimly curious.

We left the woods and the palace rose like smoke ahead of us. Persephone still gripped my hand, the pad of her thumb pressed against the center of my palm. I would have thought a goddess would stride quickly, long legs stretching over her domain as she walked, each step new evidence of her conquering power, but Persephone kept a slow pace. Her hips rolled as she walked and the rippling hem of her shift skimmed the brown grass.

We came to the adamantine gate. It hummed discordantly as Persephone passed beneath it, like the sound of an ill-tuned lyre, strings warped by heat or damp. I looked at Persephone as the note sounded. Her chin was held high as she walked, the slant of her cheekbone cliff sharp. She didn’t seem to hear it.

The courtyard was empty of shades. Hades stood by the palace doors wearing a bleak expression and a silver torque to match Persephone’s bronze. He did not look especially threatening, standing there with his big hands at his sides and dark strands of hair falling over his eyes. He looked like a sad youth. Yet still I shrank back, straining against Persephone’s grip. She stopped and turned until her eyes met mine.

“Welcome,” she said, looking into my face. She spoke in a deep voice; it wasn’t her own. “Good day, my lady. I am glad to see you have returned. Good day, Lady Alcestis.”

Movement: Hades inclining his head, agreeing, mouthing the same words she spoke. I looked toward him, but Persephone squeezed my hand hard enough that I felt a flash of something, white cold and close to pain.

“Good day,” I whispered.

“Will you not come in?”

I couldn’t speak to Hades while looking at his wife, couldn’t keep my head raised as I addressed a god. I looked down at the silver straps of the goddess’s sandals. She swung our entangled hands forward and nodded toward the palace. “Enter,” she said. Hades’ lips moved to echo her command.

She released my hand and walked toward her husband with her head bowed. The palace doors opened for her, and he watched her go inside, still moving at a slow and swaying pace. She did not hurry for his pleasure.

He spoke to me without looking away from her. His voice was rough as if from sickness. “Enter,” he said, and then went through the doors.

I did. The dark hall swallowed me, and I followed their glowing forms until we reached the megaron, where I had seen them first. Inside there were no thrones now but plates of food on a long wooden table and a stone bench behind it, where Persephone and Hades sat. Persephone gestured: another block of stone sprang free of the wall and screeched across the floor to the table. The gap in the wall sealed itself with a wet sound like a mouth closing.

The king and queen sat, waiting. I stared at the table, the familiar-looking spread of food. Like an Achaean feast, but without the roar of men’s talk and the splatter of spilled wine. Elysium had felt more familiar to me than this. I looked to Persephone, unsure what I should do.

“Sit,” she said, and when I did, the stone felt soft as wool.

No slave girls circulated with platters: the gods served themselves and offered me nothing. I ascribed this to politeness at first—they wouldn’t wish to give me food that I could not eat—but I began to wonder if they even remembered my presence. They didn’t look at me nor did they look often at each other, but it seemed they did not need to. They moved in unison, or near it, just a slight discordance to their movements, like the sour note of the adamantine gate. Hades lifted a piece of meat to his lips, and Persephone paused for the length of a breath before mirroring his motion. It was the very slightest kind of deference.

I waited while they performed this ritual. I thought Hades might chastise her, but he said nothing, and he smiled, a little, when she held a sliver of fig before her mouth for long moments before biting into it. This game was not new to them nor was it brief. I sat in silence, no longer expecting to be offered the hospitality a mortal host was bound to give. They would not give me anything and they wanted to be sure I knew it.

Persephone put down her bronze goblet and looked to her husband. As she turned, her gaze swept across my face, her eyes glowing with interest. It didn’t matter if she looked at me, of course; I was a woman and dead, so I was doubly at her mercy. It was her right to look. But she didn’t direct her glances with care as a mortal woman would. The women I knew lowered their lashes to veil their eyes and looked at men sideways. Persephone treated the world as if it were there for her to see.

She and Hades stared at one another with eyes sharp as teeth. Then the goddess shifted her gray eyes to me and began to speak. Her voice wasn’t honeyed as it had been in the garden, but flat and bespelling, like the murmur of an oracle. Hades, intent, did not interrupt her once. These are not the things one tells when one recounts a speech: her fingers plucking at her skirt, the slip of a lock of hair across her cheek, the weight of the god her husband’s eyes on her throat as she swallowed. Any bard would leave them out. But I noticed them.

This is what she said:

“I told you, Alcestis, the story of my abduction from the world above. But I did not tell you all, and the bards do not either. It is not a fault of theirs; they do not know. Only those who were there know what occurred, and now you shall know also.

“It was a warm day. Now I would say it was summer, but there was no summer then—my lord made summer, as he made winter—there were only warm days and cool ones, better growing weather and worse. This was good growing weather. It had been good for a long time, and I had been growing. I would go into the fields with my maidens, away from my mother’s eye, and lie beneath my uncle’s light. I would stay out until the horses had crossed the horizon and carried the sun away, and when Selene came from the east to sing her cold songs, I would sit in the gray grass and listen, unheeding all else.

“That day I had flowers in my hair. My maidens had just braided it, all the stems woven in and the blossoms above my ears and down my back. I was happy in the sun, with my flowers. I did not see him when he burst from the earth. I heard my maidens shriek, a sound I had never heard a woman make, and I opened my eyes to see my uncle above me, dark as a thunderhead.

“I did not try to run away or plead the aid of a relation. I could not rely upon any god to help me—they were as likely to transform me as save me, and I was not made for a vegetable life or the crawling existence of an insect in the dirt. The flowers I spoke of—when he stole me, they fell all over the field and into the pit, and when we landed, the flowers were spread over the ground below us. They had wilted when they touched the soil. The merest touch and they faded. Then I knew where we were and what he had done.

“He pulled me from the chariot. I allowed myself to be pulled, for it was the only action I could imagine. Alcestis, you will know what I mean. He took me to the palace and the shades thronged around us. They nudged like sheep. I was not right to their eyes. I was unchanged. I could not dampen myself, as you cannot.

“I stayed with him, for I could not escape. I thought I could preserve myself from ruin, and so I did not let him touch me. I did not let him claim me. I had that power. I was pure when my mother came to bring me home.

“Above the ground, I had eaten what I liked, for it was all of my mother’s making. I ate the pomegranate seeds, and though their taste was strange, I did not think I had done wrong. I thought no one had seen me. That is the part of the story you know, Alcestis.

“I have a temple above the ground. Many temples, but there is one I love best. Men come to the temple and pray to me, for they think I will aid them. They think the temple was built for that purpose. They pay no attention to the maidens who serve, for they are maidens consecrated to a goddess, and cannot be captured or slaughtered or beaten until they cry. They are the maidens who were with me that day when he came into the field. They serve me as they did when I lived with my mother; they are always overjoyed to see me when I return from below the earth.

“They wear white shifts and flowers in their hair, like brides, but they are my brides, brides only to me. No man shall have them, and no god either. The touch of a man would repulse them, for they have known my touch and my kiss. The flowers in their hair shall never fade, but if a man were to smell them, to press his nose against those flowers in their hair, to him they would smell like ash in a cold hearth.

“In the summer I live with my maidens. I surround myself with them, and they are very beautiful and very fresh, as I once was. They are as tempting as fruit. Yet since I am wed I do not kiss them or touch them, even when I am above the ground. I let them serve me, and the serving pleases them and gives them purpose, all the purpose they need and more purpose than they would gain as wives of men.

“You, Alcestis,” she said, her voice lightening, “you would have made a good maiden.” Her eyes were on me; she had been watching me as she spoke, delivering her speech slowly and with relish, as if each word tasted honey-sweet. She expected me to smile and thank her, to sit in stupefaction as I had in the garden. And I did want to thank her—I did want to smile. But I would not.

“I was a good maiden,” I said, “till a man took me. But I have told you that story.”

She blinked. “Defiant,” said the goddess. “The tiniest flame, the smallest pile of kindling smoldering in the dark.”

She reached out to her husband and Hades folded her hand in his own. They stared at me across the spread table, over the fruit and the meat, and the bread and the cakes.

“Shall I tell you another story?” I asked.

Her eyes brightened, as I had known they would. She pulled her hand free of her husband’s and leaned toward me, her hair brushing the table.

“It is the tale of a young girl,” I said, “a granddaughter of the sea god, who came to the underworld before her time. She died in the night unexpectedly, and the house was quiet with mourning for her. They buried her in the grave circle, performed the correct rituals. But there was one who looked for her always, who was made miserable by the girl’s death and believed it a mistake of the gods.”

Persephone had laid her hand upon the table, beside a red-juiced platter of meat. Her fingers crept forward as I spoke, scaling the grain of the wood. My hands sat in my lap; I could have touched the rise of her knuckles, where bone shone like marble through her divine skin.

“You have a stronger trust in your husband than you would admit,” she said.

“That one was not my husband. It was me. I watched over my sister when she died, and spoke to her grave after she was buried.”

She sat back and took her white hand away. I bent toward her, clenching my hands in my lap, hot with a sudden hatred. “Why this retreat? You ask me to tell my story, but the story of my sister holds no interest for you?”

“Your sister does not sit before me,” the goddess said. “And that is enough and should satisfy you. But I will answer you further. She died of a fever?”

“A cough.”

“And she was young, a virgin, unmarried?”

“She was ten years of age.”

Persephone waited.

“She was skinny as a larch, and noisy, and not pretty,” I said. “She didn’t have to fear marriage yet.”

She leaned toward me again, her voice entreating. “You see, Alcestis—you must see—how little fascination her story holds. It is like many others. Children die, and are mourned, and come among the other shades. We think on them when they arrive, and yet they fade quickly. I do not even remember her name. But you, Alcestis, you I have no trouble recalling. You stay in my mind.”

I bolted up, half stumbling over the block of stone I’d been sitting on. Persephone watched me the way a man might watch a fractious yearling horse: indulgently, but with an edge of concern, a worry that I might require effort to tame. I believe she’d thought her words would make me soften in adoration. “Her name was Hippothoe,” I said. “And I don’t care if her story is so dull it sends you to sleep. She is my sister and I will find her whether you help me or not.”