Radiant Darkness (2 page)

   To take them to the temple, like mortal girls do. To lay them before Artemis and tell her I want to let them go. I can weave. I'm as tall as my mother. I'm ready to enter the world of women.

   My mother's eyebrows look like they're yanked up by a rope. "I don't think that's necessary just yet." She pauses, then says in a soft voice, "Why, I remember when I brought those foxes home and how happy you were when you opened the box."

   I think of all the mortal girls who have ever gone to that temple. I imagine them in one long line. Their hair is woven with ribbons and flowers. They're wearing bright chitons and unscuffed new sandals. Their baskets are heavy with clay dolls and wooden dolls and fabric dolls, with carved animals and old rattles. Their mothers walk proudly beside them. The parade heads up a hill toward towering columns.

   My mother turns back to the loom and her hand resumes its rhythmic work, back and forth, back and forth. "Don't be in such a rush," she says. "Give yourself a little longer to enjoy being a child."

   The other girls file past olive trees and lavender. I hear their breath, short and heavy, on the steep path.

   "Mortals have to make their little sacrifices. You're the daughter of a goddess. You can keep your dolls." She smiles, as if this were a gift.

   They pass through gleaming marble pillars into cool, dark shade. Now they're laying their armloads in front of the statue. The air hangs heavy with incense. Their mothers stand straighter.

"But, Mother—"

   "Go ahead; put them back in your trunk. I don't think we need to talk about this again."

   She's not looking at me anymore. I whirl around and rush back to my room.

I slam the door and hurl the basket. Everything goes flying. The doll lands on the bed, burying her face in the covers, and the top goes skittering across the floor. One of my red foxes crashes against the trunk and breaks into a million pieces.

   I slump down and start to pick up the fragments one by one.

   She's never going to let me grow up. Another thousand years will go by and I'll still be sitting here with my doll and my spinning top.

   "Mortals have to make their little sacrifices," she says.

   Well, if someone came to me with mortality in a box, I'd open it. Childhood and Adulthood would be sitting there, next to gray-haired Age, his beard trailing behind him. Grief would be shrouded in black, and Death would hold a knife by his side, ready to cut off each and every life at the stem. I'd see them all there and I'd still grab that box, because then I'd get to change.

   
She
got to change, didn't she? Ripening into her godnature, becoming the all-powerful goddess of the harvest. Having me. Then, and only then, did she stop, as if her essence was set in stone. That's how it is for most of the gods: they grow into their full power and then stay that way for eternity, never aging, never lessening.

   But what if
this
is as far as I get? Look at Eros, the boygod of love: he's a child and always will be. What if that's my lot? Frozen on the cusp of life. Demeter's daughter and nothing more. For eternity.

   I put the shards on top of the trunk and stare at the plants outside my window. I can almost see them stretching their roots into the soil and their stems up to the sun, getting ready to blossom and seed. I'm the only living thing in this whole damn vale that doesn't get to grow.

   Gods! I can't believe how stupid I was. I had one chance to meet a man, and I ran away. Who was he? Why was he here?

   I can't even ask my friends. They'd talk. My mother would find out and twine herself around me like ivy, so tight I couldn't move. I'd be trapped in this room forever.

M
y friend Kallirhoe lives in the stream near the linden tree. Moss carpets the broad stepping-stones in a patchwork of small stars and little furred trees. Water ripples around the rocks, bubbling with Kallirhoe's laughter. When she comes out, she's still part of the stream. Her arms trace curves like lines on water, and she walks like she's flowing over the ground.

   Kallirhoe knows everything that's going on. All the nymphs and dryads sit by her stream, and she overhears what they're saying. I'd like to say she can't help it, but that's not true. She loves knowing secrets about broken hearts and longing glances.

   But she also knows everything because she's so easy to talk to. She looks so innocent, with those wide blue eyes and that little curved mouth. She asks all the right questions, and you feel like she really cares and understands. If you're not careful, all your secrets just pour out of you. The next thing you know, she's sitting around with everybody saying, "Did you hear? Did you hear?" And everyone's laughing and having a great time. I really think she can't help it. Talk flows around her like water, too. It's hard to keep water closed up.

   I love Kallirhoe, but you won't catch me telling her anything personal. I don't need my life spread all over the vale. If someone else saw the golden chariot, let
her
say something.

   Right now she's dipping her toes in the lake. We're all lying around on the shore. Our bodies are still wet from swimming, but the sun is drying us fast. "Did you hear the latest about Zeus?" she asks.

   I run my fingers through my wet, tangled hair, easing the knots out, and try to pretend my heart isn't beating so fast. Could it have been Zeus in the chariot? After all, only an immortal would have winged horses. I smell the white flower again, as if it were right in front of me. I see the man's smoldering eyes, his black hair, the purple-banded tunic draped over one bare, brown shoulder.

   Admete raises her eyebrows. She's a stream naiad, too, but a wild mountain stream, rambunctious and hard to keep in its banks. "Not again! What did he turn himself into this

time? Another shower of gold, to show off his flaxen hair?"

Flaxen? So it wasn't Zeus after all.

   Not that it matters. The chariot wasn't in the high meadow yesterday when I went back to gather plums, or when I strolled by this morning. He was only there once by mistake, I bet. He was passing over on a long journey and the horses needed to graze and he saw the field. That's all.

   I turn my attention back to Kallirhoe.

   She's shaking her head. "Not gold. A swan."

   "A swan!" I snort. "What kind of romantic disguise is that? What's she going to say, 'Now there's an attractive bird! I'm really into long necks and webbed feet.' I don't think so."

   "Persephone! Be quiet!" says Ianthe, the gentle meadow violet. "What if your mother hears you?"

   "Let her hear me. I'm not a child anymore. Lots of girls my age are married already."

   If only I had the guts to say that to her face.

   "I wouldn't want her mad at me," says Kallirhoe. "Drought dries up my stream."

   I tug up a long grass and nibble on the softer green at its base.

   "So let's hear about this lovesick bird," says Galaxaura, braiding her long white hair. She's a mist-clearing breeze, so she likes to get right to the heart of things.

   Kallirhoe lights back up. "He's a rotten husband. Hera's always watching to see when he's going to go after another woman. He thinks if he disguises himself, she won't know what's happening."

   "Like the time he was a bull," says Admete. "I felt sorry for Europa, carried off to sea on his back."

   Kallirhoe tosses a handful of pebbles in the water. "Here's what I heard. Zeus had his eye on this mortal named Leda. A really beautiful mortal. He couldn't stop thinking about her. He couldn't even sleep at night. Every time he looked over at Hera, she was staring at him. She knew something was up. But Zeus, being king of the gods, expects to get whatever he wants. There was a lake where Leda always went swimming. And Zeus figured, what's more natural at a lake than a swan? She must have thought he was a pretty attractive swan, because after a while she laid a big egg—"

   "No!" We all gasp at the same time.

   "Yes! Can you even imagine? How do you think she hatched it?"

   My hair is almost dry now. I shake it back from my shoulders. "If he wanted her to go with him, he should have come out and said it."

   "Right, and have Hera breathing down his back."

   Admete looks disgusted. "You're such a goody-goody, Persephone."

   "Am not!" I throw a cupped hand of water at her.

   "Are too!" She splashes me back. Soon we're all soaking

wet again, dripping, tangle-haired, lying back on the grass and laughing.

   The cool water clears my brain, and for a moment I think I should come out and tell everyone what I saw. I should tell my mother. But then I see his face again, and his hand holding the reins, and the heat starts to soak back into me, evaporating all my good intentions into steam.

   
She takes my hand. We walk to the place where the seeds were
just planted. The soil is wet and black. A spade has turned it
upside down, so the buried earth meets the sky and the sky brings
its breath underground. It feels like I could fall right into that
deep, rich place. I crouch, pick up a handful of dirt, and rub
it between my fingers. I breathe in the mineral smell of leaves
rotting to make a bed for the new. The smell of change.

   
Then there's a song thrumming through my veins. It's a
calling song. Calling seeds to crack open. Calling shoots to
push past pebbles and worms. Calling moisture into their
roots and up through their stubborn, determined stems.

   
I realize the song is pulsing through my mother. Her mouth
is moving, and the song is in her and from her. But it's more.

   
She smiles at me. "Do you hear it?"

   
I lie on the ground and press my ear to the earth. There it
is: the steady pulse of roots, the swishy sound of heads uncurl
ing upward. All of it vibrates like the air around a beating
drum.

   
When the song is over and I open my eyes, my mother holds
my hand and helps me up. Then she shows me the first one: a
tiny spot of brilliant green, so bright I think a piece of the sun
is glowing inside. It looks so soft. The round ball at the top is
bursting open into leaves, reaching as fast as they can from the
soil to the sun.

I
wake up with a strange feeling. Maybe it was seeing my mother smile in that dream. That's how she used to look. But each time she noticed I was taller, her lips grew tighter. And now I look her in the eye.

   But I had that dream. Maybe today can be different.

   I throw off my covers, open my trunk, and rummage around until I find a wooden box with irises painted on the lid. I take out the golden brooches my mother gave me for my birthday. They're etched with crocuses, poppies, roses—the flowers that grow in our vale. I pull on a chiton and fasten the brooches at my shoulders.

   As I walk past her room, I see the goddess clothes spread out on the bed. She must have a festival today. Something flutters in my chest. Maybe, if I ask just right, she'll let me do something for once. Go somewhere. Grow.

   It's dark in the shuttered entry hall. I open the door and stand for a minute blinking in hot, bright sun. Then I see her, halfway out the courtyard gate.

   She turns back to look at me. She still has on her everyday chiton, and she hasn't put up her hair yet, so it flows behind her like a golden river. Everything about her is graceful: the long, elegant neck, the slender bare feet.

   She sighs. "Yes, Persephone?"

   I forget what I wanted to say. If there was ever anything to say in the first place.

   "Do you need something? Speak quickly," she says. "I'm in a hurry. I have the Thesmophoria, remember?"

   I scuff the ground like I'll find words of my own down there below the pebbles.

   Another sigh, more impatient this time. "I have to go now, or I won't have time to gather green energy from the vale, and I still need to change. . . ."

   Her words hang in the air between us. I grab the last one and throw it back before I can stop myself.

   "I want to change, too."

   I walk over so she can see my brooches glinting in the sun. "I want to do something new. Something different."

   She looks puzzled, then exasperated. "Not now. I have to get ready. Let's talk when I return."

   I don't want to let go. "Maybe I could come with you this time."

   For a moment she looks like she's going to start a thunderstorm, but then a corner of her mouth twitches, and loosens, and she's actually laughing.

   Isn't this what I wanted, to see her smile? So why does my chest feel so tight?

   "The idea!" she says, catching her breath. "You at the Thesmophoria!"

   "What's so funny about that?"

   She sees my face and tamps her laughter down.

   "It's my most important festival of the year," she says. "It lasts three days."

   "And that's a long time to leave me here," I persist. "Let me come. Maybe I could learn something."

   "Do you have any idea—" The last vestiges of her smile disappear. "This is not a game, Persephone. If not for me, crops would wither in the heat. If not for me, rain wouldn't fall gently, nurturing the new seedlings; no, torrents would scour the very soil off the earth. Do you want people to starve?"

   What? Where did that question come from?

   Her voice gets stronger; she seems to grow taller. "Why do you think mortals build me temples? Why do women leave their homes and spend these three days begging for my blessing before seeds are sown? They want to see plump flesh on their children's bones, that's why. They want grain enough to last the year."