Alcestis (19 page)

I stared at the back of Hades’ head. I’d thought that he was like the surface of a river, throwing her reflection back, shining dully as armor does in the sun. She was so much brighter than he. But I could see her face, and he was reflected in it, like the sun circle on the floor. Her fingers were still in his hair, and she was humming—the dragon murmur of happiness.

I’d thought I understood her. Such a stupid mortal way to think—I had been more blind than the seer. She was not a human. She was not to be understood. Layers of her came off like sunburnt skin. If I touched her, I would be left with a sheath, an impression, a lie.

I stumbled and caught myself against the wall. My skin was white against the smoke-colored stone. Then my breath stopped: for behind my fingers sat the hand of a shade, pressed to the translucent side of the palace. Wondering, I lifted my fingers slowly from the wall and stared at the smudge dark fingertips, the lighter gray of the tapering fingers, the dense darkness of the palm, the evidence of some tiny bit of fumbling mortal life.

Hippothoe, I thought. I shot one last desperate glance toward the throne room. Behind the sparkling curtain they still stood entwined, eyes closed, uncaring. Bronze-green ripples crossed the surface of the ball of light, slow as shallow waves.

I ran, my feet slapping on the stone floor. I felt the moment when Persephone heard me—it was as if the building took a breath—and I felt it when she realized that I had seen her.

“Alcestis, no,” she cried. Her feet were silent on the stone, but I knew she was following me. I thudded against the broad door, my forearms bruising on wood. It wouldn’t move. I pounded on it with fists still sore from hitting the garden gate.

She came into the entry hall with a rush of wind, blowing my hair up around my face. She didn’t speak; she waited in the doorway, expecting me to confront her. Wanting me to address her as a supplicant might. I was suddenly exhausted by the gods and their stubborn doors and their hidden motives and their incomprehensible loves. Slumping, I turned to face her.

She looked breathless; that was clever, and maddening.

“Stay out of my mind,” I told her.

Now she looked displeased. “Where are you going?”

“Outside,” I said. “It’s my sister. She’s come to find me. Will you not let me
go
?”

“It is not your sister,” she said.

“How do you know? Oh, don’t look at me like that. I don’t care if you are a god. You don’t know my sister. Let me out!”

She looked at me impassively for a moment, then flicked her fingers at the door, which swung open. I hurried through it.

“Go,” she said to my back, “you will see—”

But I didn’t hear the rest. I raced around the side of the palace, my breath stinging in my chest, to find the shade whose hand had almost touched mine. It still stood there at the wall, its hand pressed against the crystal. It was small, nearly the right size—and hooded; that was strange—and I threw myself toward it, as much a tackle as a greeting.

My hands went through the cloak, through the shade’s thin shoulders. “Hippothoe,” I cried, and the hooded face lifted. The eyes were soft, unfocused, and the smile simple. Persephone was right, of course: those were not my sister’s eyes. That was not my sister’s smile. This shade had been a boy once, some anonymous shepherd or stablehand, clothed for a journey it had never completed. It had been mesmerized by my shadow, like a baby or a sheep or a horse might be. Now it lifted its small hand to touch my face. Stunned, I stood and let the hand breach my cheek, cold as a splash of water from the river where memories sink.

The shade’s smile dripped away.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I turned and walked back to the front of the palace, stumbling a little on nothing, my heart gone quiet.

Persephone stood in the open doorway. I think she expected me to slink back in, chastened and apologetic, to curl up at her feet like a hound and raise my face to be petted. I walked away from her.

She caught me at the gate, flashing into substance in front of me with a soft pop of air. I knocked into her and reached up instinctively to steady myself—that made her smile and raise her hands to my arms. But I shook her hands away and shouldered past her, bumping my knee against the gate, which chirped curiously at the contact.

“Alcestis, this is madness,” she said. “Come back. You will find her when you must. There is no sense in making yourself upset.”

I would not be provoked.

“You will come back,” she said then, with certainty. But it was a mortal-sounding certainty, not the prophesying voice of a god; it was the certainty a wife had in her husband’s fidelity, the certainty a father had in his daughter’s love. I twisted to look at her over my shoulder. She stood with her arms crossed over her chest.

“And what do I have to come back for?” I asked.

She was silent, but she fixed her eyes on me, blue hot, and I knew what she would say. I swallowed a surge of fury.

“Go back to your husband,” I told her, and just then her husband appeared behind her, watching from the doorway to the palace. He didn’t look angry. Mild, vaguely curious, bemused. Did they have no expressions between fury and boredom? They’d watched mortals live and die for years. Could they not have studied our reactions a bit more closely, made some attempt to speak with their faces as we did? Could he not show a little hate for me, a little envy, some twitch of the lips to reassure me that I had not imagined her love for me?

“Leave me be, both of you,” I said. “I don’t want to be your plaything. I want my sister.”

I meant to sound strong, but the last words came out plaintive and young, barely above a whimper. My hair was hanging in my eyes, and when I pushed at the strands, my fingers snagged in grass-furred knots. Persephone watched; I wanted to see her fingers twitch or her teeth sink into her lip with wanting, but her face was marble smooth. Then she lifted a hand and swept it through the air between us, and I was neatened, my shift dry and straight, my hair hanging smooth, no longer tangled by her touch.

“Do you deny it then?” I said to her. “You can’t unmake the past so easily.”

“I do not seek to.”

“I do not believe you. You lied to me about my sister. I searched, and she was not there. I think I will not ever find her,” I said. “I think I am in Tartarus, and this is my eternal duty, to look for her.”

“No, that is not the case,” she said. “You place yourself too high, Alcestis. The underworld changes for no man and no woman either. What I told you was truth.”

“You placed me high. I didn’t ask to be chosen as your pet. And still you keep lying,” I said. “I’ve seen it change. I’ve been to the river Lethe, and I saw what happens to them when they drink. What would you call that?”

“Mercy,” Hades said from the doorway.

“You would,” I said to him. He shrugged. I turned away again, tired of arguing, but Persephone grabbed me and would not let me slip free of her grip.

“What will you do now? Wait and hide forever?” she said. Her cheeks were streaked with red, and her voice trembled, as if she were on the verge of tears. “There is nothing to do here, Alcestis. Nothing ever happens.”

“I don’t care—”

Her fingers dug into my arms, crackling around my bones.

“But you happened,” she said. “You came. You are here, and you shall be mine, as was destined.”

“I’ll be no one’s,” I said. “And you’ll go to see your mother in a few months and forget me entirely, and all the pleading in the world will not change that.”

Her fingers unclamped. “No. But that is why you must not go now. You must stay here with me.”

“To entertain you?”

“To
love
me,” she moaned.

“You have maidens for that,” I said. “Now let me go.”

She fell back against the adamantine gate, bracing herself there as if I had shoved her. Now she bit her lip; now she stared at me with wounded desire. I did want to go to her, to pull her against me and press my hands into the small of her back. I wanted to sit beside her in the palace, ensconced in a smaller throne, her consort forever. I wanted her to stop my breath. But I left.

15

I EXPECTED HER to follow—and then I expected her to curse me—and then I expected her to kill me—but she did not. I walked down the road slowly as a sick old woman and tried to believe that I was free. I’d never heard a story of a woman abandoning a god. Fleeing, yes—and the transformations that followed—but I would not run from her now. I walked out of the palace courtyard, and my fingers didn’t lengthen into branches, nor did my limbs sprout feathers or my heels harden into hooves.

I left the road and crossed into the asphodel field, slipping in among the shades there, then looked back at the palace. Persephone and Hades had vanished and the gate stood empty. I was safe, for the moment, whatever that meant. And I was tired. There were no stones on which to perch, so I crossed my legs beneath me and sat on the dirt.

My stomach clenched and rumbled, and I pressed my hands to it, startled: I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten for—for as long as I’d been dead, but now my body remembered its emptiness and want.

Once I began thinking about eating I could hardly stop. I could tear into a pomegranate, pluck the webbing apart and pop the seeds free, and even one seed split between my teeth would render me doubly hers. How happy Persephone would be when she found me sprawled under that tree in the garden, my mouth stained and my fingers sticky. I could almost feel the squirt of juice on my tongue—the juice, and then the kiss. I lost myself in thinking of it, my fingers falling away from my belly, skimming across my thighs.

But my hands stilled. I thought of the platters spread on the gods’ table and how she’d swept them to the ground (for I knew she had done it) to spread Hades on that table too, for her consumption. She was the serpent Tiresias had prophesied, the snake coiled within the fruit, and still I would eat. It was useless to pretend otherwise. It wouldn’t matter, in the end, if I waited until the arches of my ribs pressed against the thin cloth of my shift before I took the fruit. The stories told of me in the world above would be the same.

The shades had thinned around me. I looked up to the road and saw a banner of dust moving down it—Hades on a black chariot pulled by four dark horses, ghost horses, beasts of wind. Was the wrath I thought I had escaped coming to meet me?

The chariot approached. I looked around frantically for a clump of souls to screen me, hoping to hide until the horses had passed, but I heard the chariot murmur to a stop on the road beside me.

Hades called my name. I stood slowly and brushed dirt from my shift. The god towered above me, looking more imposing than he had in his own palace. He appeared more powerful when Persephone was not around.

“Alcestis,” he said again. “You halt like a startled deer.”

“I will not go,” I told him. A brave little noise, for he could force me to do whatever he liked, just as Persephone could.

But he shook his head—choosing not to force me. Choosing to let me choose. And that made him even more incomprehensible, for what god, when his blood floated with such a surfeit of power, would restrain it? “You are going to the river Lethe. I am going. I will take you.” He spoke as a woman might speak to a child, with slight impatience, slight fondness. Not a bit of wrath. Even his dark horses stood uncannily still, not stamping or tossing their bridled heads.

I hadn’t decided to go back to Lethe, but when he said it I knew he was right. I could think of nowhere else to go. “No, you shall not,” I said.

“You are contrary. Why?”

“I’ll share nothing with you, not even your chariot.”

“Ah, so you are jealous,” he said. “It is charming how you lack all sense of proportion.”

“What do you mean?”

“She is my wife, Alcestis, and you, dead though you may be, belong to a mortal.”

“I belong to death.”

“Then you belong to me,” he said. “So you will listen. You are walking to the river Lethe. I will take you there in my chariot. Do you understand?”

“No,” I said. Then: “I’ll go with you to the Lethe.”

“Was that so difficult?” His voice was flat.

“Perhaps not for you.”

“How little you know,” he said. “The world is always startling to mortals. Every day new.”

“Do not mock me.”

“Oh, I do not,” said Hades, and a darkness stole over his face, like the traveling cloud that had swept Persephone’s skin. “I forget, that is all. The ones I see no longer suffer mortality, and they have no more new days to startle them. We have few enough ourselves.”

“You have thousands of days,” I whispered, thinking: thousands of days with her.

“Yes, precisely. And the days must be marked. She has her fancies, and they do not trouble me. But this is not a fancy.”

“No, this is a selfish desire. She wants to keep me from my sister.”

“Yes, she does.”

“Then you’ll admit it, that you have kept me from Hippothoe.”

Hades raised his hand, and the ground before me shifted into a smooth ramp from field to road. “I have done nothing,” he said. “Poor mortal, do not think of it. Come and seek your sister. I tire of shouting to you from this height.”

I glared at him. He waited. I walked up the ramp and took his outstretched hand, and he pulled me up onto the chariot, his grip a hot vise. I thought I ought to say something, some mixture of thanks and apology and curse, but I could not imagine what words might suit. Hades urged the horses on.

Shades clustered along the edges of the road, staring up at him as the villagers had stared at my father during his infrequent tours of the Iolcan town. The same fear, the same dull thrall. I couldn’t survey their faces quickly enough to see them all, but I couldn’t stop myself from looking. I suppose I still possessed a little hope, or it possessed me. First I thought I saw a slave girl who had worked in Pelias’s kitchens. I thought for a moment that I saw Pelias, but it was another man, tall and heavy shouldered, slumped like a bear at rest. No Hippothoe. Never Hippothoe.

We crossed the Phlegethon on a bridge of black wood that hardly seemed sturdy enough to bear the weight of chariot and horses. Between the gaps in the bridge’s floor, I saw blue flame only cubits below the horses’ hooves, but they trotted on, unbothered by the bright river. Where had Hades gotten these horses? Had he dragged them from the world above as well, dead in their prime, and trained them with his own hands so they could serve him here? Horses that never tired, never spooked, never grew swaybacked from age.

Beyond the river the road sloped toward a great swallowing pit, then circled its edge. From the depths came a long, grating sigh that smothered the horses’ hoofbeats. The pit was Tartarus—the sigh the sound of eternal torment.

Hades halted the chariot at the lip of the pit. On its terraced floor lay more cells than I could count, cells bounded not by walls but by glowing envelopes like the barrier that sealed Elysium. The cavern glowed with a light from which no shade could escape. Shades packed into some of the cells, dark clots of cloud, while other cells held single prisoners. The cells seemed to breathe as a flopping fish breathed, expanding and contracting in fast, shuddery jerks.

I saw the hill and the stone, and the receding water; I watched the tree lift its fruit out of reach; I saw beasts besetting shades, spiders crawling upon their cloudy forms. From above, they resembled mural figures, and I felt no more sorrow for them than I would have felt for paint and plaster. I knew their stories—stories enacted for the lord Hades whenever he desired to view them and now enacted for me. Yet if my sister had been among them, I would’ve thrown myself into the pit to rescue her, would’ve sprawled prostrate before Hades for his mercy and help.

Still I watched them calmly, and after a long moment, the chariot rolled on.

Soon we came to a hill over the Lethe’s bank, just by the edge of the forest. Hades stopped the chariot there, and the dust stirred by the horses’ hooves overtook us, billowing like a sail. I coughed and wiped at my eyes, but Hades stood unmoving as the cloud swirled past him, waiting for me to breathe again.

“My thanks,” I said when the dust had passed, “for the ride.”

He nodded.

“Lord Hades,” I said, and he waited again, stone still. “Why do you not punish me?”

“I do not punish.” He looked out over the souls gathered by the riverbank. “I have the judges for that, if punishment must be done. But any punishment can be forgotten here by those who suffer it. The mortals can forget.”

“And you cannot,” I said, thinking of Persephone’s hands on my arms, the low echo of her plaint as I left her. He would always remember it.

“The marks of life cannot be erased from my sight. But there are many here, and their lives are indistinct.” He looked at me sidelong, and I began to mistrust what he had said about not punishing me, for he looked as though he were judging some element of my nature. Appraising me. I lifted my chin and stared back at him, and he smiled, though his eyes did not soften.

“Here, I will show you,” he said, and touched my temple. A film slid over my vision, like the finest linen waxed for transparency. I closed my eyes to blink the film away, but Hades said, “No. You must look. You have wanted to see what we see.”

I opened my eyes and looked out at the shades—they seemed to stand in two layers, their dark bodies the same, but a new brightness swarming around their heads and shoulders, like a sheet of clouds around hilltops. It cast a delicate and smothering radiance upon their faces, a light that flattened their features and made them look alike as soldiers in their faceplates looked alike, unnamed, interchangeable. This was how I’d seen them at first, but I had never seen this light.

“What is that?” I breathed. “That—light.”

The chariot lurched forward and the sudden motion made me clutch at the rail. Hades’ fingertips pressed hard against my skull. “Look now,” he said.

It was not one cloud, but hundreds, thousands. Over each shade’s head hung an enveloping mass of light, knotty and pulsating, stuck about with images too small to see clearly, like tiny figures tied to a warp, woven together. Spangled strings of memory and life. And all trailing loose at the edges, where they had been cut out of some greater fabric—each shade a patch of life, removed.

I peered at the closest shade: his tangled strings of light looked like a net draped over his shoulders. Fish swung in the net, and lightning, and a curved bronze knife; and an image of a boy, slim and smiling, his brown hair haloed by sun. Death had eroded the shade’s features, and I couldn’t tell whether the boy was his son or his brother or his favorite lover, but I saw now that it did not matter. The ties were still there.

The shade beside him had been a girl, and her cloud was studded with baby faces, smiling or sleeping or screwed up in furious tears; not her own children, I guessed, but siblings or a mistress’s brood. She’d just come from the river, wiping her mouth and still swallowing the last of the water, and I watched to see if her cloud would wither as her memories disappeared. Her face smoothed; the cloud didn’t fade, but slipped back a little, like a loosely moored ship bobbing away on slackening ropes. The babies kept on crying or beaming or squalling; beside her cloud, the pretty brown-haired boy whom the man had loved ducked his head and grinned.

All so similar—the men and the women, the slaves and the sailors. Lives reduced to images and the images all equally bright, though some were of family and some of objects, some of sunrises or of a tree branch loaded with snow. It was a misleading simplicity, but I felt it nonetheless—how alike we were, mortals, and how easy to understand. We were made of pieces. I was not whole as Persephone was whole; I was what Pelias and Hippothoe and Phylomache and Admetus had made me. I tried to twist, to see what mess of fate hung over my head, but it seemed to hover just at the edge of my vision, a bright cloud swerving away when I shifted. “I can’t see,” I said, turning to Hades, and gasped at the sight of him.

Hades was stone and earth in the shape of a man, his muscles rough and massive like worn hills, his eyes black as the gloom of caverns, untouched by Apollo’s or Selene’s light. He was not merely hard—he was bedrock, the great heaviness of the stone that lies beneath the world, the immovable mass of death.

I jerked away from his touch, and he slipped into a man’s form again, not shrinking but lessening. I could see a faint remnant of his granite heart, but I saw it as if through the crystal walls of the palace, dull and obscured. I had thought him beautiful before; I had feared him in this mortal-looking form, while the truth of his nature had waited, hidden from me. How could I have seen what he meant to Persephone when I could not see him? It struck me how unfair it was, as a mortal, to love a god. A fly might as well love the horse whose tail swatted it to death.

“What do you see upon me?” I asked Hades, unsure what answer would please or frighten me most. Did I want to think of a tiny image of Persephone’s face shimmering among my sisters and brothers, my husband, my life?

“Uncut knots,” he said. “Straight threads. Your sister.” And there he stopped, studying me again.

“My sister—”

“You love her. That is all I can see. I do not lie to you,” he said, to my obvious distrust. “You are not like the others. Do not be angry at me because I cannot see.”

But he could see, even if he didn’t see my whole life shrouding me, and I envied him his sight.

“What does Persephone look like?” I whispered.

For a long time he did not answer. I stared out at the shades, at their simple gray bodies, and I didn’t know if I wished to see their lives or if I was relieved not to see them. Did the clouds knock into each other as the shades walked—brush and tangle and leave strands behind, like a lock of wool caught on a bush?

“Like sun,” he said, “sun that punishes, first blushes, then burns. Breezes that sting. Flowers that smell sweet and kill the bee that sucks at them. Vines. With thorns, and soothing sap, and more thorns. Fruit gone soft and fermenting and gaseous in the belly.” He looked at me closely, and I thought he might touch me again, but I didn’t shrink back. He seemed to reconsider; his hand, fisted by his side, uncurled. “You cannot see it.”