Alcestis (22 page)

18

HE WAS NOT prepared, however, to see me in the grasp of the crying queen. He gave a little gasp like a girl and stepped back, brushing the golden curtain and making it chime again. I turned in Persephone’s arms, leaning against her. Her breasts were soft and warm against my back.

Hades, now sitting regal on his throne of jet, nodded to Heracles. That was his only greeting, bare by the standards of Achaean grace. Heracles returned the nod and stood with his hands hanging awkwardly at his sides, as if he wanted to reach for a weapon but felt it would be rude.

“Lord Hades,” he said, confusion making him bold, “I have come to fight for this woman and to restore her to life and to her husband, the lord Admetus.”

Hades waited, calm as granite, as he spoke. I had never loved Hades, but I began to love him a little then for his stony silence and his imperturbable manner. I tightened my fingers in the cloth of Persephone’s robe and watched.

“I challenge you,” said Heracles, sputtering into uncertainty under Hades’ gaze, “to fight me, for the right to the lady Alcestis’ life.”

“No need to grapple like beasts,” Hades said. “She is not a brood cow.”

Heracles flicked a look at me, at Persephone; his eyes rested upon us for a moment, then flicked away. His cheeks had grown ruddy with heat, and he cleared his throat before he spoke to Hades again.

“Then you will not answer my challenge? You give up without even a fight?”

“Without even a fight,” said the lord Hades.

This bemused Heracles. He looked around anxiously, twitching when a window opened in the palace wall behind him, as if he were expecting an ambush—an army of shades swarming through the hall.

“So I may take her to the surface without harm,” he said.

“You may.”

Heracles looked at me again.

“Why does your queen coddle Alcestis so?” he asked softly.

“That,” said Hades, “you had better ask my queen.”

But Heracles did not dare. I saw him shrink under the suggestion, paling.

“I will ask,” I said, and relished his open-mouthed stare. Now he feared me. I twisted in her embrace again and put my hands on her cheeks, framing her face as she had mine. I studied the wide line of her lips, the rounds of her eyes, felt the edges of her cheekbones under my thumbs. She had tiny freckles below her left eye, like sprinkles of kohl—I hadn’t noticed them before. Such a little time to grow a love.

“Alcestis,” she murmured, and I leaned up to kiss her. Then I asked: “Why do you coddle me so, Persephone?”

“Because I want to,” she said. “I did not want you to know— what it means to be among the dead.”

“But I do know.”

She smiled. Her fingers dug into my arms, and she shook her head once, quickly, as if shaking away tears.

“You,” she said sharply to Heracles, “can wait a moment longer.” She turned back to me, eyes brimming. “I must tell you.”

“Yes.”

“You shall bear two children, Alcestis, a boy and a girl. The boy shall be his father’s son.” She spoke hurriedly, as if the boy did not matter, and I listened in disbelief. “But the daughter shall be mine, and yours. She shall marry a king as you did, and she shall seem to live in seasons, bright one day and gloomy the next, and you shall love her but never understand her. And that way you shall always remember me.” The last words came in a ringing tone, the clear, terrible voice I had always imagined gods to have, and her eyes were nearly unrecognizable beneath their film of tears.

“I shall always remember you,” I said fiercely, and though I had distrusted her words before, I believed this prediction. I knew I would not forget her, knew it more purely and concretely than I had ever known anything else.

“I shall see you in years and years. Die in your bed an old woman, and come to meet me,” she whispered, and kissed me again. Her tears tasted strong and hot, like unmixed wine.

“Farewell, Alcestis,” she said. “You will find her now.” Her voice did not sound as strong as it should have, but she smiled again as we stepped apart and brushed a loose piece of hair from her eyes as if it were the sole reason they watered.

My heart spun in my chest. I knew what she meant, and as much as I loved her, a small part of me wanted to race out through the halls into the fields right then, finally to find my sister. But I chose to trust her and to wait a moment longer. I wrapped her in my arms and crushed her to me—she felt as thin as Hippothoe, all bird bones and heat. “Farewell,” I said into the curl of her ear. “Farewell, Persephone.”

Then I turned to Heracles, unsmiling. “You may lead me.”

He looked uneasily at Hades, at Persephone, and finally at me.

“I speak for myself,” I said. “And I will follow.”

Heracles turned and pushed the curtain aside.

I looked my last. I saw her beauty, saw Hades’, saw the way her hand lifted and stretched toward him before I’d even turned away. That was right. And I had been wrong, wrongly placed and wrongly killed, and now I must leave.

“Come,” said Heracles, more quietly than I would have expected. I went.

The courtyard was empty, but beneath the adamantine gate stood a small figure, sapling slim.

As soon as I saw her, I knew her as Hippothoe. She was dressed in the shift she had worn the night she died, her knotty hair hanging down around her thin face, hiding her eyes. She was looking at the ground, at her own bare gray feet on the dirt, and she didn’t look up as I followed Heracles out of the palace.

“Hippothoe,” I cried, breaking into a run. “Hippothoe!” I stumbled to a halt beside her. She was so short, the tangled crown of her head only reaching my collarbone. I reached out and stopped, my hand hovering over her bony shoulder; I wanted to touch her, but I was struck with sudden fear, recalling how my fingers had sunk into Tiresias’s misty form.

She did not raise her head.

“Hippothoe,” I said as gently as I could, “it is Alcestis, your sister. I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Where have you been? I have searched for you.”

“Sister?” she mumbled to the ground. The warmth had bled out of her voice, though it was still gravel rough, the mess of her throat and chest unmended by death.

My hands fluttered above her shoulders—I couldn’t seem to control them. I wanted to put my fingers beneath her pointed little chin, lift her face to me to see if she would know me, even grown, a woman and a wife, but again that creeping fear gave me pause. “Yes, your sister, as you are mine. And I’ve found you. Look at me, Hippothoe—will you not look at me?”

She blinked once, twice. I could see the slow dip of eyelashes beneath her veil of hair. “Look?”

“Look,” I said, desperate, and put my hands to her cool, crumbling cheeks. Her pale mouth fell open, and inside there was darkness like the darkness of an empty room, and I thought of the empty room in which our mother had died, in which I had lain as a child, waiting: waiting for Hippothoe, waiting for this moment, waiting for death.

Her eyes were closed, her lashes dark gray smudges against her pale gray face. Unlined skin, no cracks for light to creep through. No light beyond the smallest flicker, the glow that remains in the eye after a tiny flame has guttered out.

“Look at me,” I whispered. “Hippothoe.”

Her eyelids lifted, and her mouth closed, and the corners of her pale lips twitched toward a smile. I thought—I thought I saw her work to form a name, and I thought it was my name, and I thought I could save her, take her with me, if I had to leave, and bring her back to life.

“Hippothoe?” she murmured, and her voice, her dear, rough, ugly voice, held as little knowledge as a baby’s wail.

“No,” I breathed, but I knew as I spoke that the denial was useless. Her eyes held nothing. No wit, no reassurance, and no recognition. She did not know me, and she did not know herself. Speaking to her grave had given me more hope, for then I could at least imagine my words sinking into the soil, finding their way to her ears. Now I saw that my words went into her like pebbles into an empty vessel, rattling as they fell and then settling, silent and heavy. She had become an empty vessel. She was exactly like the others. I had been wrong to hope.

For years she had languished here, walking amongst the asphodel flowers and weaving between the trees. She had drunk the Lethe water, had cupped it in her palms and gulped it down as I remembered her gulping hot honeyed wine to soothe her throat. And she had forgotten me—forgotten everything she knew, but especially me.

This was why Persephone had kept her from me: to keep from me the truth of death. I had only been stopped, hovering, waiting to return to life. But death was the land Persephone ruled, and to this land I would come, an old woman, to be her subject. And I too would become exactly like the others. I wouldn’t know Hippothoe or Tyro or Tiresias; I wouldn’t know Persephone. She would look on me as I looked on Hippothoe now, her love absorbed and reflected as blankness. She would know me as I had been and see me as I was. That was the nature of a god’s sight.

The shade of my sister was still waiting, her face lifted, though the faint questioning look had disappeared from her eyes. She had probably forgotten the question.

“Hippothoe,” I said softly. Not even a blink answered me. “Sister. Hippothoe.”

Was this the girl I had known and loved, who had let me curl around her skinny body in the night and stroked my hair when I pressed, whimpering, into her arms? The nightmare soother, the undimmable light?

She was not. But she smiled again, just slightly, when I touched the crackling mass of her hair. Death had rendered it transparent as spider silk, and I smiled too to think of the head maid’s great grievance with Hippothoe finally settled. When I tried to stop smiling, I could not—my face felt frozen as a statue’s, my lips hard in that little curve that indicated life. And so I was smiling as I watched her leave, her small feet shuffling on the dirt and her head sinking down, down, to see the mesmerizing pattern of her own steps. Always forward. Always wandering.

When Heracles took me by the wrist to lead me away, I did not fight him.

I said nothing, saw nothing, until we approached the bank of the Styx. I didn’t know how he expected to cross it, nor did I care. He stopped just before we reached the river, and I waited in numb patience. After a moment he turned to me with a look of confused concern.

“Was that—was that someone you knew?” he asked. It took me a moment to understand that he was talking about Hippothoe. Had he not been listening? Perhaps he’d found it easier not to listen.

“No,” I said. “Not any longer.”

“But you said—”

“She was my sister. She’s not my sister now. She is a shade like the others.” He still looked uncertain. “Have you seen nothing here?” I asked in sudden frustration.

“I have seen many shades,” he said. “But you do not fade as they do.”

“No,” I said. “I do not. And that is why you have come to retrieve me.”

He nodded but slowly, as if unsure whether I should be allowed to describe his quest so lightly. Then he turned, and I thought he meant to lead me to the river, but again he stopped and shifted and looked back at me with a shadow of compassion in his eyes.

“What about the river?” he asked.

“It is just there,” I said.

“The river Lethe.” He looked away when my gaze sharpened. “If you were to drink, perhaps—perhaps it would go easier for you. Upon your return.”

The kindness of his suggestion startled me, but I thought of the shades lining the banks, the water running from their hands like blood, and wrapped my arms around myself. “No,” I said. “I don’t want to forget.”

He stood, silent. He didn’t pretend to understand, but he didn’t rail at me or growl like my lion-father either. His mother too had been tricked by and beloved of a god. It seemed that those two acts went together, that a god’s loving could not be had without tricks.

“We must go,” said Heracles, the son of Zeus, and he marched toward the river Styx as if he believed its waters would part. Again I followed.

Even the hound Cerberus did not try to stop the hero, but slunk instead into his cave. His six eyes glistened like wet coins as we passed.

Charon took us over the marsh, having accepted the bronze dagger from Heracles with a look of childish pleasure. The boatman hummed as he lifted the pole and pushed it through the water into the muck on the bottom of the marsh; hummed as he guided the boat toward the shore crowded with shades waiting for passage. It was a tuneless song, a little joyous, a little sad.

Heracles leapt off the boat when it touched the shore, and turned to help me, impatient. I looked back once toward the distant palace and saw the edges of its walls gleam sharp.

Refusing his hand, I stepped down onto the living dirt.

19

WITH HERMES, I had flown from life to death; with Heracles, I walked away from death with trudging steps. The path was long and gray, with indeterminate edges beyond which it fell away into dark confusion. Heracles walked in the precise middle of the road, talking.

When I died, he told me, Admetus did all the right things. He cut the throats of young beasts and spilled their blood on the altars and burnt the meat in hot towering piles until the palace smelt of roasted offal. He dedicated all to the gods, not only the best cuts, and the villagers, upon hearing of this wasteful piety, had thought to riot until informed that the sacrifices were for the honor of my soul. (I had not thought the villagers knew my face, much less cared for my soul, but this touched me in a distant way.)

Admetus had called on Apollo, but the god had not appeared to him. Nor had fleet Hermes, nor strict Artemis, and by their absence, Admetus knew that his sacrifices were not large enough. These things Heracles told me as we walked from the underworld to the surface world above. He didn’t tell me all—indeed he didn’t tell me most of it, for he was not garrulous as some warriors are, but I could imagine the rest as he spoke. I knew enough of poems to fill in the expected phrases, finish out the lines.

He said that Admetus had sworn great oaths—of celibacy, of devoted love. Since I was dead and Apollo did not come, no one present could have known how easily those oaths came to his lips. We were the only two Admetus had ever loved. He went about the palace in mourning wear, suited in a gray tunic as if he were the shade, and had a slave girl shear off his lovely hair, leaving his head rough and pitted with stubble.

He had been wearing this tunic when Heracles first arrived at the palace, barely three days after my death, on the eve of the funeral games planned to mark my departure. Admetus had invited him to stay—my husband was always hospitable, no matter the circumstances. (Three days—I was shocked to hear it. I had been in the underworld, owned by Hades, in thrall to Persephone, for just three days of mortal life? It had taken her only three days to split me open, to pluck me apart as easily as peeling a pomegranate. In the timeless underworld, I couldn’t have known how days were passing in the world above—but still I felt the first stirrings of shame when I learned this.) Heracles soon discovered the source of Admetus’s misery and declared that he would travel to the underworld, fight death for me, and bring me home to my husband that very day. For this brave boast, the best portion of the next cow slaughtered was reserved for him, rather than being burned in honor of the still-absent gods.

Heracles’ story was about Heracles, who found the cause of his friend’s woe and sought to make all right. His was a narrow and particular kind of right: it demanded that I be found and captured (though he would say rescued) and returned whole (which meant unraped). He had gone bravely to a cave that held an entrance to the underworld, and he had not turned back at the threshold. He had steeled himself and walked inside. Entering the underworld had not hurt him, though he had grimaced as if it did. (I am sure of this.)

About his struggles in the underworld, there was not much to tell: he bribed the ferryman, tamed the hound at the gates, which he had subdued before on an earlier journey to the realm of the dead, and met me on the road. He had not gone astray; he had encountered no monsters other than Cerberus. (Though here he gave me a sidelong glance, as if he suddenly doubted.) He did not see Elysium, but if he had seen it, he would have thought its glow calming and pretty—if such a man could think anything pretty but a boy’s smooth thigh or a woman’s curling hair or the arc of light from an axe as it is swung.

We had been walking for several hours. I could tell that now—my sense of time was returning faintly, like a scent. (Three days. I couldn’t stop thinking of it.) The landscape, what there was of it, had not changed, though the cloudiness surrounding the road seemed brighter. Heracles had stopped talking. I did not mind the silence at first, for I had grown unused to the manner of living men, and when he began to walk faster and pulled ahead of me, I trudged along behind him. But soon I began to feel weary, dragged down, as if my grief were growing heavier, binding my throat and weighing on my shoulders. With each step I grew more solid. I looked down at my white ankles, my thin wrists with their twin pulses of blood, channels just beneath the surface. Life did not feel sweet.

“I cannot go on,” I said quietly. Heracles didn’t hear, but I hadn’t spoken for him. I slowed and stopped, turning to look over my shoulder. The Styx, the shades, the ferry—all had receded into distance and obscurity.

Heracles noticed that I wasn’t trailing at his heels like a puppy any longer. He ran back to me, seized my arms, and shook me once sharply. I turned my face to him and he let me go. “What is it?” he asked, and his voice was surprisingly mild.

“I cannot go on,” I repeated. “I’ve grown too heavy.”

“You can,” he said. “You must go on. It was not your time to die. And now you are saved. The gods have shown their agreement by allowing me to rescue you.”

“Do not call this a rescue. I wanted you to leave me. I was happy there.”

“You are upset, and disordered in your mind,” he said. “The gods of the underworld have put mighty spells upon you. But I will lead you home nonetheless, and there you will heal, and heal your husband, who is lost without you.”

“Three days of being lost,” I said, “how miserable.”

Heracles shook his head. He spoke to me now as if speaking to a child, all caution and patience. “Forget the darkling gods, the lord Hades, and the—the queen Persephone. Admetus loves you and will honor you.”

I looked away.

“And I will not dishonor him with—what I have seen,” he said.

“What dishonor? How can it matter to anyone alive what happened when I was dead?”

“You must keep your shame to yourself,” Heracles commanded me.

“I will not tell him anything,” I said bitterly, and pushed past Heracles toward the waiting world.

The road, which had been flat and broad and nondescript, grew rocky. At first there were only small stones mixed into the dry dirt, pebbles that bruised but did not sting my bare feet. Then finger-sized rocks, then palm-sized, tumbling down from the lifting sides of the road. It became a narrow valley, damp and lichen crusted, through which we had to walk with gingerly steps. Soon my feet began to bleed, leaving red prints on the green-gray lichen. I bent down to peer at the growth, and Heracles stopped, and saw my bloody feet.

“Come, I will carry you,” he said, and wobbled toward me over the rocky ground.

“No, I shall walk.”

“Your feet bleed.”

“I don’t care. I shall walk.”

He let me be. I’d thought he might sling me over his shoulder like an overeager bridegroom, but he seemed to have a sense of embarrassment, of some unheroic dignity, that kept him from handling me violently. He walked, and I walked, and the air grew fresher and lighter around us. I thought I felt the smallest suggestion of a breeze, though I could not identify its origin.

“There,” said Heracles, halting, and pointed above our heads.

I hadn’t looked up once as we walked—I’d grown used to the dull ceiling of the underworld and had forgotten the sky. This was just a patch of sky: a roughly round hole punched through from one world to the next, bare rimmed, vacant. No one was looking over the edge.

“There?” I whispered.

He leapt, arrowing up from the dirt, his arms spread to seize some purchase on the rim. I watched him struggle and wondered if he would fall and die. If Hermes came to take him down, could I clutch the hem of the god’s cloak and beg him to take me too?

Heracles hung from the edge, his fingers whitening at the knuckles, his grip on the rock tenuous. “Take my hand,” he said. “I will pull you up.”

I didn’t reach for him. I raised my hand, but I couldn’t stretch out my arm to be taken from the underworld, even though I knew I could not go back to Persephone. With a grunt of frustration, he swung down and caught my arm, wrenching me up off the road. I thrust my other hand toward him and he seized it—the pain in my shoulder lessened, and Heracles lifted me into the world.

I felt both alive and dead. The breath seemed to reverse in my chest, air rushing out of my lungs, then flooding back as the underworld relinquished me. The sun stabbed at my eyes—I had forgotten its white-gold fury, the color of Olympian beauty and Olympian wrath. My eyelids squeezed shut involuntarily and my lashes prickled with water. My body felt terribly heavy.

“Sit, lady,” said Heracles, and his hand curled warm around mine. He led me to a rock and pressed me down until I sat. “I will bind your feet.”

In the sunlight my cut soles looked worse. I let him wipe the blood from my skin, barely heeding the sting. He tore strips from his own robe and wound them around my ankles and my arches. He treated me as I expected he might treat a young wounded soldier, as if we were compatriots, brothers in arms. Perhaps he sensed the similarity between us: the hero and the sacrifice, both marked for death, both marked by it.

“This will need water and wine, but I have neither,” he said, in the brusque tone of the head maid in Iolcus. “But you will be well looked after, lady, when you are brought home.”

He stood and looked me over, seeming satisfied. I looked down: my shift was clean. I was pristine as a virgin, except for the heat in the skin around my eyes, the feeling of tears spent and tears waiting. I supposed I would suit for a wife brought back from the dead.

For the first time I looked beyond the rock on which I sat to the small scrubby trees around us and the ocean thundering cubits away. I knew this place vaguely—a rocky cove I could see from the higher rooms in the palace at Pherae. Heracles saw me looking about and spoke. “Your husband is only a short way away. I can carry you, if you are too tired or footsore.”

I was tired, but I shook my head.

“Wait,” he said, and bent to tear a wider strip from his robe. He handed me the cloth—it was worn thin but not transparent.

“What is this?”

“For a veil,” he said. “That you may pass along the road unmolested, and that even Admetus may not know you by sight.”

“Why should—my husband—not know me?” I choked on the words.

“That you may know his loyalty and be received with perfect truth.” He said this perplexedly. “Do you not wish it?”

I did not wish it. I needed no proofs of Admetus’s devotion; I knew he cared for me, but devotion would change nothing now, when I’d had love. So he had been alone, without me, without Apollo, for a short time. So he had suffered to think of me wandering in the underworld. I could summon no sympathy for him—he hadn’t been separated from his god forever. He did not know what it would mean to die.

I looked back through the cave’s entrance at the waiting chasm within. I could see the rocks faintly and the gray enveloping light of the underworld.

“This pathway,” I said, “has it always been here?”

His face darkened. He shook his head once angrily. “It appeared for me. It will vanish when I leave it.”

He insisted that I wear the veil, and I didn’t argue. As we left, climbing over rocks, I lifted an edge of it and looked back toward the entrance to the underworld. He was right. I was trapped here, alive.