Alcestis (21 page)

“Do not touch me,” I hissed at her. “Do not come near me. You should’ve told me, Persephone, and you said nothing. You tempted me as you were tempted.”

“But I love you,” Persephone said, sounding anguished. Her cool face had gone flushed and splotchy, as if she were the one who had just run from the river to the palace. “I wanted you to stay, though I knew you must go. What good would it have done for me to tell you of this when I could not stop it?”

“If you had known the seeds would bind you here, would you have eaten them?”

She didn’t pretend to be confused. “Yes,” she said, the word soft as breath. “So you see. It would not have mattered.”

I began to say that I was not like her: I wouldn’t have eaten. But with her cheeks red as if they had been rubbed, her mouth thin and tight with distress, and her eyes shifting from gray to green like the sky before a storm, I could not lie. It was unthinkable that I might not have wanted her, that I might have been offered her fresh-swollen kiss, turned her down, and walked chastely away. Now I would not leave her for anything. But neither would I forget Hippothoe.

“I must find my sister before he comes,” I said.

“I wish you would give up this search,” Persephone said, fretful. “It will do you no good. You do not see, Alcestis, why I worry for you.”

“You won’t have to worry for me much longer if Heracles crosses the river and passes the beast at the gate.”

“I know that,” she said. “Do not be cruel.”

A fine instruction from you, I thought, but I said: “Then you will tell me now.”

“It does not matter,” she said sadly, “whether I tell you or not.”

“You lie.”

“No, Alcestis. I do not. All you must do is wait.”

I loved her. I had been waiting long enough. I put my hand on the table, palm up, and lifted my eyes to her face. Her smile fell apart. She reached out and slipped her hand into mine, her fingers curling over the rise of my thumb, the bones of her wrist light atop my fingers. My knuckles pressed against the table’s surface.

Hades sat, watching us, silent, smiling a little.

A wail broke in through the windows, a low sound at first, then growing louder. I opened my mouth to ask what it was, but just then the sound split and split again, resolving into a chilling tripartite howl, each throat open on a different tone. It was the hound Cerberus, crying out against the invasion of his home, calling to Hades to announce the presence of an intruder. Heracles had come.

17

WE SAT, THREE silent figures, as the great room echoed with the sound. The dog’s howl made the crystal walls hum, and Persephone clutched at my hand but did not speak. She looked like a frightened maiden, and I felt another flash of fury—I seemed always to cycle between adoration and anger with her. She had no reason to fear him.

“Will you wait then?” I asked her, my voice taut. “Will you sit and wait for him to come?”

“What else ought we to do?” she said.

I pulled my hand from hers, ignoring the way she clutched at me, the hot scratch of her nails across my palm. I couldn’t wait. Not to find Hippothoe, not to face Heracles.

“I will go to him and meet him in the fields,” I said. “You know he must be coming here. He will know where I am.”

“Yes,” said Hades. “It is good that you go.”

He spoke as if to drown out his wife’s objection, but Persephone was silent, her eyes downcast. I looked at the slope of her eyelids, the sad flutter of her lashes against her carven cheeks.

“I will bring him to you,” I said, and stood, and turned my back on the gods.

The adamantine gate sang to me as I passed beneath it. I paused and looked out over the plain, at the moving clumps of shades and the distant rivers. He’d passed the guarding hound, and now he would be coming toward the palace, for in the underworld as in life, the first thing one must do in a new territory is visit its royal house.

A shade brushed by me. I saw tangled hair and turned, but it was a boy with a long braid half loose from its tie. Was I to leave this place without ever seeing my sister? Wait, Persephone had said. You only have to wait.

I walked down the road toward the river Styx and the hound Cerberus, looking for my husband’s friend, the son of Zeus.

I saw him in the distance, striding toward the palace and me, his arms up and tensed, prepared to strike at any assailant. A pack of shades floated after him, dully curious, and he glanced back at them every few moments. It seemed he thought they might attack him, and his steps grew quicker until he was half trotting down the road. His curls bounced on his shoulders and his tanned skin seemed to twitch like that of a horse beset by flies. Heracles, the hero.

A noise came out of my mouth: a snort of angry laughter, stinging in my nostrils. He was only a chariot length from me now, perhaps two, and he faltered at the sound of the laugh, his eyes slipping over the shades moving on the road until he saw me standing still in the center of it.

“Lady Alcestis,” he said, disbelieving. “Is it indeed you?”

I didn’t acknowledge him, though I met his eyes. Let him see the answer he wanted there, I thought. It was the only thing he would see in my eyes, after all, no matter what I said.

“I did not expect to find you so easily,” he said. “The way from the world above was long and dangerous, and the underworld is full of shades. I had not thought it so full.”

He looked at me with expectation, still believing that I would answer him as a polite girl of a royal family would, that I would make approving noises and then be silent until spoken to again, as I had in the world above. He didn’t know that women too could choose different types of silence.

“You look almost as one alive, lady,” he said, though with little wonder. I imagine that he was used to extraordinary treatment and saw my lively appearance as just another instance of his deserved luck. “Will you not speak?”

He didn’t look frightened of me at all. I wished I could frighten him—wished I could appear to him as Hades looked to me, with a face of thunder and doom. Instead I must have looked tired, and worried, and angry, and none of those were expressions likely to surprise him when seen on a woman’s face.

Heracles gestured to me, making pulling motions in the air as if he could haul me in like a ship. He came closer, slowly, approaching me as he might a spooked horse, his hands out before him.

“I will lead you home, Lady Alcestis.”

It is not my home, I thought fiercely. When he reached for me I slipped back, and his arms closed in the air before me. Three times he sought to embrace me, and three times I evaded him, though his hands did not pass through me as mine had through Tiresias and Tyro. I just stepped back. But he didn’t understand my reluctance—his eyebrows twisted up and his mouth puckered.

“What is this enchantment?” he muttered. “She cannot speak, and she escapes me.”

So he thought that death had bound my tongue? I wanted to speak then, to tell him precisely what sort of enchantment lay upon me and what sort of torture he deserved for breaking it. But he wasn’t speaking to me, and he wouldn’t have listened if I had spoken honestly. He expected this, I saw, to be a transaction between men—he intended to fight Hades for me, win me, and return to the mortal world in a glow of triumph and loyal friendship.

“Come then,” he said, trying to calm me. “I will lead you out of this place. Come.” And when I would not move, and could not be grasped, he said again, “Will you not speak?”

I watched him for a moment longer. Then I said roughly: “Give me the blood sacrifice. You’d do it if I were a man.”

“What?”

“The blood sacrifice. Bleed for me, and I will speak.”

“But you speak now,” he said, perplexed.

I glared at him for a moment. Then I took a step toward him, opened my mouth, and screamed. He jerked, startled, and raised a hand to hit me before he remembered that I was a woman, and a wife, and the object of his search. His hand lowered.

“If it will please you,” he said stiffly; pleasing a woman was something he could understand. He drew the bronze dagger from his belt—a tiny thing, snub and harmless looking in his big hand—raised it to his forearm, and cut.

The blood made a red runnel on his rough skin, skipping down his arm, around the bone of his wrist, and across the back of his hand. I came toward him and bent, reaching for his hand, reaching for the sacrifice. He shuddered when I touched him, shuddered again when I opened my mouth. I lapped at the blood dripping from his knuckles: it tasted like blood always does, metallic and blunt. I let him go and stood, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand. I could feel his blood smudged hot around my lips, its half-dilute Olympian power. I looked at the stain on my hand, then turned it over and looked at the scratches still raised pink on my palm, the marks of Persephone’s nails as she’d tried to hold onto me.

“Speak, speak,” Heracles said, a little unnnerved. Still not frightened enough. “Are you well? Did you eat anything? Did you? Did he make you drink—make you do anything that would keep you from returning to your husband?”

“I ate my life for him,” I said.

I could see him growing angrier and less uneasy.

“Not Hades,” I said, “or Persephone. For Admetus I ate my life. Let me be. I do not want to go. I am done with life.” As I spoke, I felt a small wild hope, a tiny flame flickering in my chest: that he might hear me, might comprehend. I watched his face, and I saw him hear my words, understand them, then reject them in the length of a moment.

I danced back, in case he tried to seize me. I wasn’t ready to be forcibly taken. And he did reach out for me, but only halfheartedly, staring at me as he did, the look in his eyes curiously flat. Blood still ran sluggishly down his arm, drops falling from his fingertips, and other shades, smelling it, had drifted into a half circle around us.

“You should not be here,” he said. “You belong with Admetus, and I will bring you to him. I came to fight death for you. You are under some thrall, and I will break it. Lead me to the lord Hades and let me challenge him.”

I suppose I could’ve tried to mislead him, directed him on curling paths through the fields and the forests, taken him to the banks of the rivers and told him he had to cross. But it was hopeless. If Persephone and Hades thought he was meant to take me, if Tiresias knew of his journey, then a detour along the Phlegethon would make no difference in the end. I’d bring him to the palace and let him speak with Persephone and Hades, as they sat silent at the great table, holding hands.

I stood back and crossed my arms. “All right. But you must walk behind me once we reach the adamantine gate, and you must let me go into the palace to announce you first. You wouldn’t go into a royal home unannounced, whatever your errand.”

“My errand—,” he said, indignant, then subsided. “You are right. I follow.”

And he did follow, meek and ponderous as a cow. I looked back at him as we walked, just as he’d looked at the crowd of shades shadowing his path. I didn’t trust him, though that was silly, for if Heracles was anything, he was worthy of trust.

I led him up the slanting road to the palace, but my steps were short and slow. I couldn’t have made my feet move quickly if I’d wanted to; my legs were heavy, my body resistant. Even my knees did not want to leave.

I felt Heracles stirring restlessly behind me. He didn’t like this pace, nor did he like the shades that thronged behind us as village children might follow a caravan of warriors. I forgot how I too had sometimes disliked them; I gave them fond looks as we walked. I’d almost grown used to their quietness, their smooth or cracked faces, their lack of feeling and lack of want. Everything that frightened Heracles about the underworld now seemed familiar to me, in the way that absence becomes familiar, or the loss of what one values. Heracles feared death as a woman fears marriage—in uncertainty and trembling.

We came to the gate, and I turned on him like a dog might, with a half snarl. “You must wait. I will call for you when the king and queen have agreed to receive you.”

He didn’t like being told to wait, but he was too polite to argue with me, a woman, his object. I left him at the gate and went into the dark palace, down the long hall, and past the golden curtain, which twinkled only faintly as I pushed it aside.

The table was gone, replaced by the thrones of jet and obsidian. Persephone and Hades wore lush gray robes and adamantine jewelry, draped in finery as if armed with it for battle. They looked like statues adorned for a feast day, their faces remote and perfect, unmarred by mortal distress. But they stood when I entered, stood as one, and when I came stumbling toward their thrones, they came to me with their arms open and pressed me between their bodies. It was like being lifted by eagles, their wings enfolding me. But Hades and Persephone had no wings to bear me away.

I sobbed out two bursts of sorrow on Persephone’s shoulder. Then I pulled back, sniveling, and looked at their solemn faces.

“He’s outside,” I said. “He is waiting. I said I would call him in. But I don’t want to.”

“I know,” Persephone said, and kissed my damp brow.

“And still you will not help?” I grew tearful again. “Still you will not aid me?”

“We cannot,” said Hades, his arm strong around my back. I wriggled against his touch, wanting him to leave us, to stand by his throne and wait. And, strangely, he did. I burrowed against Persephone, pressing my hot face against her neck. Her necklace dug a cool line into my cheek, and I knotted my hands in the thick fabric of her robe, searching out the firmness of her flesh beneath the cloth.

She took my face in her slim white hands and kissed me. Her lips quivered on mine.

“He awaits us,” Hades said, though not impatiently.

“Let him wait,” Persephone said, and kissed me again, soft and clinging. “He has time.”

“But she does not.”

Persephone lifted her head, and I saw that her cheeks too were tear streaked. “I know that,” she said, forceful. “You and he and all the world can wait.” She slid her arms around me again and leaned down to rest her temple against mine. Her breath puffed unsteadily on my jaw.

“It’s all right,” I murmured to her. “Let him come.”

“I am not yet ready to receive him.” This time her voice carried a hint of panic. “He must wait until we call. I am not ready.”

But he would not wait. Persephone and I, entwined, hadn’t heard his footfalls in the corridor—Hades, if he heard, said nothing. The jeweled curtains sang gently in the doorway, and Heracles, the hero, entered the throne room of the palace of Hades, eager to wrest me from the grasp of death.