Alcestis (18 page)

“Shall I swear? Choose a river.” She buried her hands in my hair and pulled me into another kiss. With each taste her mouth grew sweeter, or I grew more accustomed to its taste. I couldn’t help arching against her, pressing up into her hands. When the kiss broke, I had to breathe for a long moment before I could speak, my nose in the hot hollow under her jaw.

“Swear on the Phlegethon,” I panted, trying to chill my voice. “I do not like the Styx.”

“By the flame of the Phlegethon, I swear,” she whispered into my skin. “I will tell you what I have promised.”

“You will tell me of my sister Hippothoe—” I wanted to keep repeating her name—I was suddenly terrified that I would forget it forever, that Persephone would make me forget.

“I will tell you of your sister Hippothoe. So distrustful,” she said sadly, and bit my ear. I cried out. The sound seemed to echo for a moment before the garden swallowed it and I wondered if Hades had heard it. He must know where Persephone had gone, I thought, if he had managed to rouse himself yet.

She was talking of him, but I was only half listening. My shift jerked higher on my legs and she spread her knees to push my legs apart. Every motion was just a little too fast, too sudden. “This is where he touched me, and how,” and she touched the slickness between my legs in slow, knowing strokes. My hips followed her hand. I couldn’t control my body, couldn’t control myself. She would touch me like this and talk of her husband, and I could not make her stop.

“Do not say it,” I hissed. “Oh, do not say it.” My legs pulled her closer, my ankles hooked around hers. The back of my head rubbed hard on the ground, and I could imagine the disorder of my hair, brown blades of grass entwined in it rather than flowers. Just as ruined as she was, just as reduced. Was this to be my story now—a tryst with a goddess in a poisonous garden?

“But I promised.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because I want to,” she said, calm, and pulled my shift up over my hips and dropped kisses on my quivering stomach. I couldn’t feel each kiss as a spark anymore—I was a pile of kindling already lit, and each brush of her mouth was like a breath on embers. In between kisses she spoke, and I, trapped, listened to her and cried out for her and seized beneath the power of her touch. I will not tell you what she did, for that is mine, not to be sung or painted. But this is what she said:

“He brought me to the castle after my mother left, and there was a bed in the throne chamber. He had created the bed for me in advance, as I have made this bed of grass for you, Alcestis, because he had thought of me and wanted me before he snatched me from the world. As I have been thinking of you in my arms. Alcestis. You do not believe me, I know—but I have. Oh, do not look at me so angrily. Do not, do not, please. Come here.

“He kissed me at the gate, and the gate sang, and I thought I was happy. I knew nothing. You would not have recognized me, Alcestis; I was so quiet and shy, and I obeyed him whenever he spoke. He did not order me about. He was too frightened. My dark uncle, afraid. But he showed me what he wanted. He took my hand, and he put it—here—yes. Alcestis, yes. And his mouth was on my throat and his teeth in my skin, and at once I thought I knew everything, and I felt like a wife, and I liked it. Oh, as you must have liked it some time, when it was new. The newness is enough. You like this, do you not? I see you do. I saw that you would when first I met you. The way you looked on me then— though you know I could appear as a man to you if you wished. I could appear as anything you like, and you would forget it was not my true shape. But I want to show you myself, Alcestis.

“In the mortal world I am sure they think he forced me, but he did not have to hurt me. I liked everything he did, and soon I found that I could make him do it whenever I wanted, and I could make him do other things as well. I could make him do my bidding. And now I am making you, but I do not want to make you, Alcestis. I want you to come to me of your own will, as a goddess might. I want you to come to me, Alcestis, come—”

Through the trees I saw that the barrier protecting the garden was crowded thick with shades. They were not watching us— the garden was hidden from their sight—but they’d thronged to its edges just as they gathered at the walls of Elysium or the palace. They had gathered to feed. I thought of the fiery light spreading through the palace walls, and I cried out—I felt as though I might crumble into ash under her fingers and lips.

But her damp fingers on my chin turned my face back to her, her slick lips pressed and opened mine. Her tongue was heavy with my taste. “Do not look,” she said. “They cannot see. Only you can see, Alcestis, Alcestis.”

The lightning she’d spoken of built in my belly. I fought it as I had fought despair when I was alive, for I was so furious that she was right—and yet I was grateful, so grateful, if only she would—

It was nothing like death. It was too-bright sunlight and whirlwinds and other things the gods control. I lay gasping on the grass, my hands in her golden hair, and thought that I hated her, and that I loved her, and that she had better keep her promise to tell me of my sister. But I said nothing. It was as if words had died within me.

She did not speak either. She slipped her head from beneath my hands and lay beside me, stretched out lionlike, propping herself on one slim arm, waiting to see what I would do. What did women usually do when taken by a god? Usually, I thought, they did not enjoy it so much. But our knees were almost touching, knocking together awkwardly when she moved, and she was watching me with a grave look in her eyes, and her cheeks were still pink and her chin shiny with my wetness. I wanted to kiss her. Instead I smoothed my shift down over my belly, trying not to notice how my thighs trembled. I looked down at my bare knees; looking at her for too long was unwise. She was lit with a scattery radiance, as if her very form were fragile, barely holding together.

“This is what I know of your sister,” Persephone said. “She walks beside memories, on occasion.”

I waited, as I had waited for the old seer to clarify his words, but she didn’t unseal her lips again. “That is all you will tell me?”

“That is all I can tell you.”

My body was still humming with the lightning of her touch. I’d thought I would feel betrayal as a stab to the gut, but it was only a dull surprise. “You are as bad as Tiresias. You are worse,” I said, and pulled my legs away from hers.

She sat up and the lines of her body wavered. “You have spoken to Tiresias? But that is not right.”

“It didn’t help me, if that’s what you fear. He said only confusing things. But he hadn’t just—he wanted to tell me, and you do not.”

“No, I do not,” she said, and her voice became soft and maternal. Was it her mother’s voice she mimicked? She was as maternal as a foaming river of rapids. “Alcestis, it is not something you can comprehend—”

“I’ll make you tell me,” I said, and pulled her to me, twining my arms around her and kissing her white neck, where she smelled of granite and of me and tasted like crushed flowers. A maiden Apollo loved had become a rooted tree to escape him; I could become a conqueror. I touched the winglike bones of her shoulder blades, the bumps of her spine. She twitched; the dark cloud I had seen when she was with Hades swept over her flesh once, like a traveling shiver. I pulled back to look in her eyes and her sun-colored eyelashes fluttered. Tears? I wanted her to cry. “Persephone,” I said, and the little thrill of naming her familiarly ran through me, angry as I was.

“Alcestis,” she said in a quiet, small voice.

“I swear by the Phlegethon, I will make you tell me.”

She let out a soft cry, struggling in my arms. “Oh, you must not swear,” she said, low. “You must not. You do not know what it shall mean.”

“I told you,” I said, “I don’t care. Nothing means anything here. It doesn’t matter.”

She jerked out of my grasp and sprawled on the grass, and now she was panting, her chest heaving. I had wanted to see her upset, but now it made me feel sick. I reached for her, but she slipped away.

“I did not mean—”

“Yes, you did,” she said. She rose and stood over me. She did not seem to tower; she was not terrifying, but she was a god and I her mortal. I put my hand on her ankle and she allowed it. “But it is no matter. I forgive you.”

“Do you?” I said, the words spilling out. “It is kind of you. Then I shall forgive you for making me mortal once again.”

“How cruel you are,” she said wonderingly. “Are you angry? For I have kept my promise. And I will leave you now to search for that which you desire. It is not my search, after all.”

I pushed myself up, thinking I would follow her, but she lifted one foot and pressed it to my shoulder, pushing me back against the dirt.

“Stay,” she said, “if you like. If it means anything to you.”

She left me on the grass as she swayed away in her shift, once again looking untouched and pure. I’d left no traces on her skin. She’d go out into the forest, among the shades, and none of them would know what she’d done, or what she’d done to me. She would go back to the palace, where Hades waited to greet her, and settle into her adamantine throne, spreading her unwrinkled shift over her unbruised knees.

I closed my eyes then, sure in my condemnation of her. But now I imagine that she raised her hand to her temple as she walked away, that she stopped to lean against the gate as if dizzy, collecting herself.

I lay on my back in the grass, my shift still rucked up around my legs and my thighs wet, and stared up at the gray ceiling of the underworld. Half of my mind was chattering about the sensation of Persephone’s tongue against the crease of my hip, and the other half was numbed, silent, heavy with shock and distress. I felt as though she had opened me up and yanked the lightning from my belly. All that—all that, and I still did not know how to find Hippothoe.

She walks beside memories, I thought. Always riddles and half thoughts. Did the gods think the same way they spoke? When she remembered kissing me in the garden, would she think of that too in circular words and broken images? How would she tell this story, when she told it?
A mortal woman
pressed into the ground like a new seed. Furrows in the soil. I gave her
a bit of knowledge, left behind like sand melted into glass after Zeus
throws his lightning, earth made sacred, and she scrabbled for it when
I left her, eager, desperate, shameless, her fingers in the dirt.

I would remember it wholly, I thought, no matter what befell me here.

And then I saw what she had meant: Lethe. Hippothoe walked by the bank of Lethe.

14

THE GATE ALLOWED me to pass. I had no energy for fighting, and I walked up to it slowly, still unsteady on my feet, but my outstretched hand passed right through its boundary and I stumbled out, shaky, into the woods. The mass of shades who had come to warm themselves with our sex milled about, a field of drooping flowers with no sun toward which to turn their hopeful faces. Persephone was not among them. Had they seen her as she passed? If so, she’d left as little mark on their faces as I had left on hers.

Behind me, both gate and garden had vanished. I swiveled to look for the best way out of the muddle, and in the crowd, I saw my father’s mother, Tyro. I’d thought her so vibrant when I first saw her, so touched with life, but now she didn’t look much different from the others to my mortal eyes. The dry mud cracking of her face had faded, and where she had been stippled with light she now seemed murky and worn, no marks of favor left in her countenance.

“Girl,” she said. “Do you know where the queen has gone?”

Stricken, I stared at her. “The queen of the underworld?”

“What queen of the underworld?” She laughed, her voice a crackling mess. “The underworld is no place for a woman. No, I seek the queen of Iolcus. The one—the one who died.” She was looking about the crowd as if she might see the face she wanted, leaning forward to peer over my shoulder. I reached for her arm to steady her, and my hand passed through the amorphous stalk of her forearm. She looked down at my fingers in her arm as one might glance at a fly that had landed on one’s skin. I took my hand away.

“Do you know the lady I seek?” she asked me.

I said gently, “Lady Tyro—you are the queen of Iolcus. You were. You left when I was young.”

The other shades swirled about us.

“And what are you now?” She squinted at me, then turned slowly, as if rotating on a spit, to look over her shoulder.

It was a fair question. I found it hard to answer. “I am your son’s child, Pelias’s girl. Alcestis.” Here I choked a bit. “Admetus’s wife.”

“Alcestis,” she said, considering, then shook her head. “No, not that one. He had girls, though—one died. Name like a horse. Face like a horse too.”

“Hippothoe,” I said. “Yes. I’m looking for her, Tyro. I am—I am told she walks by the river Lethe sometimes.”

“Better for her if she swam in it,” Tyro said. “Takes away the pain, you know, the water does.”

“I’ve heard that.” I felt light-headed, thinking of Hippothoe rising from the water, her hair wet and her eyes quiet.

“It is true. One of the few things you will hear that is. Have you gone yet?”

I shook my head and said, lying, “I have nothing I need to forget.”

“You are the lucky one then.”

I pushed my hand through my disheveled hair, fingers catching on tangles and bits of the garden entwined in it. “Lady Tyro, there’s something I must ask you.”

“Ask, child,” she said. “I must seek this woman, the queen. You should not detain me so long. It is important, you know. She has things to tell me.”

“When you met my grandsire—”

“Who, girl?”

“The lord Poseidon,” I said as patiently as I could. “When you met him, did he know you? Did he already know who you were? Had he sought you out?”

“Oh, yes, he knew,” she said. “He knew, all right. Laid his plans well. Or maybe he had no plan, maybe just took me, but no one likes to think that. Not such an honor as the men say, inciting lust in Olympian loins.”

“No,” I said slowly.

“They will trick you. He was a clever one. Tricked me that night—I had not gone out to meet him, not him. But, you see—I fell asleep.” She said this conspiratorially, as if it explained everything she had previously said, and she didn’t want this private truth spread. “On the bank, fell asleep. I was waiting for my lover, but he came instead, and what could I do? Resist him?”

My body went still, almost as still as death had left it, except for the pounding of blood in my head. Her lover? She had not loved the god? “You were not—you were not waiting for Poseidon?”

“Had never seen him before, not once in my life. Never saw him again. Never wanted to.”

“But you bore his children.”

“Many thanks they gave me for it too,” she said. “Bad as their father. Bad as both their fathers. It is not good, having so many men. We will need the war to kill them off.”

“War?” I asked her absently. There were skirmishes at the barriers between kingdoms, messy encounters at sea, but Iolcus had known no war while I lived. Pelias had always ascribed this to Poseidon’s protection, had talked of the love the god held for our land, the love for his children and their worthy mother. We had built our lives on the tale of their love.

She was silent. Then her eyes suddenly focused on me and she said: “What?”

“Never mind, lady,” I said, my voice as rough as hers.

She nodded sharply and then turned her head. “It is an old story. An old story. Always repeating.” The energy had gone out of her voice, and she raised one spectral hand to her face, patting at her chin as if to be sure she hadn’t crumbled away. When she turned back to me, she blinked in surprise, seized by a new confusion.

“But you, girl, you smell like the sea.” She looked at me suspiciously. “Do you come from him? From that god?”

I smelled like a storm over water, like shellfish cracked against rock. “I suppose I do,” I said.

She turned away from me, then turned back, unsure. “And you do not—you are sure you have not seen the Iolcan queen? None of you?” Her voice rose as she spoke, and the other shades watched us curiously and said nothing.

“No,” I said. “Goodbye, mother of my father.”

She tottered away without bidding me farewell, the curve of her spine like a bent bow, never to be released.

The other shades too began to drift away. I was not enough to hold their attention.

There was a pattern to these events, an accepted path. A god saw a beautiful woman, desired her, raped her, and left her alone except for the half-Olympian children in her belly. The lucky ones perhaps were wed and didn’t die in the bearing of children or the breaking of oaths or the collapse of ruling houses, and the luckiest were forgotten by the gods and never visited again. And yet a god had desired my husband and disregarded me, and there would be no children from that union, no curse haunting my line. In the eyes of men I was a virtuous wife. Had I not died a chaste woman?

But now I’d stepped into the embrace of a goddess, sunk into her dizzying kisses. That wouldn’t fit the story; it could not be neatly slotted into a line of poetry. Out of rhythm, out of tune, as I’d always been. Now I was the lover of the queen of the dead, alive in the underworld, and I could taste her dusty sweetness when I ran my tongue over my lips.

I turned from the vanished garden gate and stalked away through the forest, away from the place where the goddess had pinned me to the ground. Shades scattered around me, then fell in behind me as I pushed through the trees. Finally I emerged from the forest onto the bank of the river Lethe.

I’d known of this river forever, or at least since childhood, when I’d haunted the kitchens and listened to the servants and the slaves complain of their lot. They’d talked of Lethe with longing; they said they wanted to forget their lives, the families they’d lost or hadn’t lost, the mistreatment at my father’s hands or at the hands of his men. They spoke of this river the way Acastus’s young friends spoke of Elysium, like a god who would swoop down to save them, a name to invoke whenever they felt that they couldn’t go on.

I had expected a crowd, a flock, some herding mass struggling for the riverbank, but instead I found slow-moving lines of shades waiting to sip the waters in turn. They didn’t shove or push—they didn’t even fidget as a group of the living would have, didn’t lift hands to touch their hair or adjust their shifts. They merely stood, sometimes looking incuriously at one another, sometimes staring at some point in the distance, thinking of the living perhaps, of lost families and beatings and oatcakes and songs. Which of you were servants, which warriors? I wanted to ask them. Which among you have dreamed of this since your birth?

Down the line I walked, ducking amongst them when I had to, peering into their faces. I looked into the soft eyes of old men, and strong boys gone transparent and sad, and women. Many women. I walked along the entire line. None of the waiting shades were Hippothoe.

I began to ask them if they had seen her. A little girl, I said, about this tall, big mess of hair, skinny, noisy laugh.

“Laugh?” said the shade of a young man faintly.

I came to the river’s edge. The shades fanned out when they reached it, each one finding his or her own place at the bank. I knelt beside them and waited as they drank, watched the water run from their cupped hands. Some of them braced their palms on the bank and bent to lap at the river like dogs, blurry, hunched shapes. Servants and warriors, all single-minded and dumb and thirsty. As I watched them drink, the shades still waiting in line watched me, wondering, perhaps, why I did not take the water myself.

I didn’t want the water. I was terrified of forgetting and terrified of being forgotten. What if Hippothoe had already knelt at this bank, already lifted this water in her spidery hands and drunk it?

I followed a long swoop of the river down into the asphodel fields, looking at every shade, and Hippothoe was not there. My face felt hot again and I was fisting the cloth of my skirt in twitching fingers. I was worried, but also I was angry, and it was a god’s anger, boiling and immediate. I’d walked far enough that I could see the roof of the palace beyond the fields. “Let me think,” I snapped, as if the queen could hear me, as if she were listening for my voice. I couldn’t think. I was scattered as chaff. Each thought was swallowed at once by another; I couldn’t even hold my sister’s face in my mind. Yet if I loved my sister, wouldn’t I wait by the riverbank until she wandered past? For Hippothoe would come, if I trusted what Persephone had told me; if I believed that she had traded knowledge for my assent; if I believed that my assent mattered; if I believed that she wanted me enough to barter with me like an equal.

I did not want to wait. I wanted to go to the palace. I wanted Persephone.

I looked at the dead lined up to receive oblivion, the water sluicing down the pale arms of those who drank. When they rose, they looked like children just awakened from anxious dreams, their faces nearly slack, still clinging to the slightest remnants of fear and worry. I’d stepped back from the river only a few paces, only the length of a body. By the time they’d walked as far from the bank, those traces had vanished, leaving their faces stripped of shadows, their foreheads the flat gray of winter skies.

My stomach stirred, unsettled, and I averted my eyes from the shade nearest me—only to find another an arm’s length away, watching me. Calm. No smile, no grimace, no fear. Her wet shift hung damp over dark breasts and a gray mass that had once been a gravid belly.

I backed away, and her gaze slid off me; I was no longer interesting because I was no longer in her path. She still walked like a woman with child, her feet turned out and her hand at her hip for support, carrying her forgotten loss before her. I wanted to ask if she’d given the child a name, but I knew without uttering a word that she would not remember the name, or the child, or the father. She knew the path through the asphodel and she knew the river. That was all.

I was beginning to see. But then I knew only that I couldn’t bear to watch the shades any longer. I turned and bolted into the fields, left the path, and ran through the spiny asphodel, my hair whipping against my back and my shift flapping open over my breastbone. I slipped on the sloping hill to the royal road, catching myself hard on my palms. The gravelly dirt stuck to my hands, and sweat slicked the back of my neck and under my breasts—the places she had touched.

My chest began to ache and I wanted to cry with joy at the feeling of air whistling in my lungs. I remembered chasing Hippothoe up the stairs to the women’s quarters, giddy, our skirts bunched around our knees and our fingers scraping the stone walls. The adamantine gate gave a dissonant grumble as I ran beneath it.

I burst into the palace, all sense of decorum forgotten, and the spatter of my footsteps echoed in the dim, silent entrance hall. Panting, I ducked into the long hallway that led to the megaron—but then I stopped. Beneath the golden curtain I could see a circle of light swimming on the floor at the far end of the hall, like the aureole of a lamp. I took a hesitant step toward it, and the light shivered and pulsed, rolling sideways and back through the filtered gloom.

Then came a noise like a dragon sighing, a long purr of violent contentment. I was frozen, my chest all thunder, one hand on the wall. The noise—I heard it again, this time followed by a quiet and slippery sound, like a strigil on oil-covered flesh. Whispery. Or was it actually a whisper?

I crept down the hall, grazing the cool crystal with my fingertips, until I reached the hanging curtain. I put out my hand, mesmerized by the light glinting on the jewels, and pushed the curtain aside. Then I saw Persephone—and Hades. The gods stood in the middle of the room, arms slung around each other’s waists, Persephone’s head on her husband’s shoulder and her crown tilting slightly toward the floor. She was still wearing the same thin shift. Just above them hung a small globe of coppery light, a lamp with no oil and no base, its rays slanting like the long reach of the sun on a summer afternoon. They had captured that light just as they had the brilliance of the stars, tamed it and confined it here, where it would please them most. The radiant, lazy circle I had seen was the glow of the miniature sun, reflected by Persephone’s slipping crown. She lifted her hand and touched the back of Hades’ head, her fingertips disappearing into his dark curls. Her eyes were closed. That was merciful.

I’d hated it when she whispered his name into the crease below my earlobe. This was worse. This made me ill. The way she talked of him, even when she spoke into my hair, was not loving—not tender, not equal. She’d spoken of him as an adversary, perhaps worthy but never trusted, and certainly never to be touched with affection. Never to serve as a sanctuary. But again she’d deceived me. Perhaps the garden was her retreat, but this was her home.