Alcestis (13 page)

The door stuck at first and then pulled open easily. The hinges, like everything else in the underworld, made little noise. Even the entrance hall didn’t ring with silence the way it would have in a mortal’s palace. Any sound was smothered, as if the room were hung with tapestries, but there were no weavings, only a faint light bouncing from the crystalline walls. From within the walls seemed thinner, and through them I saw shades moving like clouds outside the palace. The hall seemed plain and low until I glanced up at the ceiling and saw a field of stars rotating slowly over my head, endless darkness and ribbons of light. So this was what we mimicked with our lapis and lead, this tamed celestial beauty? I stretched my hand out, but the ceiling was too high to reach—all I managed to do was block out the stars.

There was a slight grinding noise, then a clack like the sound of closing teeth, and a window opened in a solid stretch of wall to my left. I snatched my hand down and fell back a step, startled. But the window remained. Through it I saw the shade-crowded plain, and beyond it a structure like a king’s dais built hundreds of times too large. I knew it must be the throne of the judges, where old kings dispensed with the recently dead— where Admetus would have gone to be judged for his cowardice, had I not spoken in his place.

When I turned away from the window I felt faint, too light, as if I could float like the other shades did. But I looked down and saw that my feet were still on the ground, bare on the palace floor. I still had the same high arches and long, skinny toes, even if they did appear pale and insubstantial.

My heart jerked in my chest. Just once, first, like the yank of a rope, or like hearing from a distance the sound of a voice I loved. I listened as I had listened before in Hermes’ arms, but I heard nothing, just the swallowing silence of the place, the insulation of earth.

The second heave pulled me bodily forward. I stumbled on the smooth stone floor and threw my arms out for balance. It felt as though a ghostly finger were hooked beneath my ribs, drawing me toward the center of the palace.

The king and queen wanted to see me, Hermes had said. I believed him now.

The long pillar-lined hall I stepped into seemed to terminate in a golden mist. Uncertain, I watched it hover at the hall’s end. It seemed harmless enough, but it might be a god in disguise, a trap, some subtler guardian than the three-headed beast. I crept toward it. As I approached the end of the hall, I saw that what I had thought was like a golden cloud was actually a set of woven golden hangings, each thin strand bright with jewel chips. I touched one of the curtains and it rolled and sparkled like a cold wave. Through it I saw the faintest impression of the room within, a great dark space with two bright figures at its center.

The ache in my chest sharpened. I parted the golden curtains and entered the megaron.

They sat on thrones of adamant and ebony—thrones of equal size, the curled armrests inches apart—and their hands, hanging between the thrones, were loosely entwined. Hades looked as grave as I had imagined him—bearded, his eyes sad and liquid as a deer’s. He wore a tunic of some thick gray material that appeared as sleek as fur, and beneath it his bare legs were muscular and pale against the base of his ebony throne. His hair fell about his shoulders in dark ringlets as neat as a woman’s, and he wore a silver crown that seemed to twist into the strands of his hair.

I looked to him first because he was king—because men spoke first and women waited in silence. I belonged to him and I owed him my obeisance. I knew the ways of royal women. His queen might have her limited power in this world, but I had none, and she would pay me no mind. I dipped my head to the lord Hades, my hands by my sides, wishing for a skirt to spread around my suppliant knees.

I waited for Hades to speak. He did not, but when I raised my head he was smiling a little as his thumb stroked his wife’s fingers. He seemed to be waiting. I looked to the queen, my eyes slipping up her slender white arm to the fine arch of her shoulder and the pale column of her neck.

The sight of her face undid me. My fists clenched around handfuls of my shift and I felt the cloth fold between my fingers, felt the prickling of my flesh beneath—the waking of my lifeless body.

9

THE GODDESS PERSEPHONE’S eyes were gray and reflective as adamant, set wide in her girlish face. Her cheek was leached of color, but its curve was apple sweet. Her hair was golden and smooth as flax, her thin lips the stunning red of pomegranates. Her crown was neither gold nor silver but a narrow sharp-edged circlet of adamant, and she wore a dress almost like my shift, fine gray cloth that clung to her slim body. Like me, she was a queen dressed as a slave or a shade. But she was not like me. She had a remote and dreamlike beauty, a feverish loveliness that called Hippothoe’s face to mind. It was the kind of beauty death lends to a beloved face, a beauty that spoke of last looks and last kisses, of tears falling unheeded onto cooling skin.

She said my name, and her voice was as clear as the ring of a blade against armor. I stared at her, my mouth open.

“The wife of Admetus,” the goddess continued, “who so loved him that she died to preserve his life. Is that who you are?”

Suddenly, with her gaze upon me, I didn’t know. “I believe so, lady,” I said with an unsteady formality.

“Alcestis,” she said again, and smiled. Her smile was crescent shaped and cold as the moon, and she pronounced my name as sibilantly as a snake might. “And you have come here to take his death as your own.”

I nodded.

“You do not seem convinced. And for my part I would have you certain, Alcestis.” Her voice grew dry as she spoke and her fingers flexed around her husband’s hand. The rope of gold encircling her neck twisted and slipped against her skin.

“What other reason might I have to die?” I asked. I had not had a quiet voice in the world above, but here all my words sounded like whispers. The entire room was quieter than anything alive. No servants moved about, no animals lowed outside the palace. Always, in the world above, I had felt myself surrounded by life. Here there was none.

“What other reason,” she said, amused, and tilted her head to give the king a sideways look. “She loves her king so much, husband, that she would live as well as die for him.”

Hades looked back at her. His eyes were fire-bright, and his fingers moved out of her grip, up and over her wrist in a slow caress.

“Be silent,” Persephone said to him, but she did not tug her hand away. Hades lowered his head and I saw the part of his dark hair, like a split in armor. This was what my father had always feared, that even a slip of a girl like me might see a king’s weakness. When the queen turned back to me, her face was soft. She looked happy. She leaned toward me and asked, “Why did your husband fear death so? All must die.”

“Apollo promised, lady.” I looked down. “To spare him from the Fates.”

“Ah,” Persephone said. “Apollo promised. Apollo makes many promises, but rarely does he make them to kings. Though I have yet to see your husband.” She said it musingly, an anticipatory flavor to her words, as if she were looking forward to questioning Admetus herself. I thought of my husband standing in my place, the queen’s stone-gray eyes pinning him here, and I felt a little swell of satisfaction. She would force him to speak about Apollo; she would not be ignored.

The queen smiled, a curl of her lips that felt like a curl of her arms reaching out to touch or examine me. Did she know my thoughts? I tried to shrink back, but she caught me easily, absentmindedly, with another yank in my chest. Her eyes drifted away from me toward her husband, the dark and silent king.

“Did you truly choose to die for Admetus for the reason of love?” she asked, a hint of wistfulness in her tone.

I looked to Hades again, flustered, but he had not raised his head.

“Look at me, Alcestis,” the queen said sharply, turning back. “It is I who ask, not he.”

“It was my duty to go in his place. He is my lord—he is worth more than I.”

“Surely not,” she said, amused again. “A death is a death, Alcestis. Some are better earned than others, but all shades hold the same value. To believe otherwise is mere self-love.”

Admetus didn’t love himself nearly so well as he loved Apollo, but Persephone wore her calm like a loosely pinned cloak. I couldn’t argue with her. I nodded and looked down at my feet. I would’ve knelt before the lord Hades in supplication if I had thought he could halt this game of questions, but I knew the goddess would stop me before my knees touched the stone. I might have spoken to Phylomache about things such as this, but never to anyone else, never in front of a man. Persephone was not an Achaean woman—not a woman at all. But she knew our ways, and she must have known her questions would upset me. She did not seem to care.

“You must have imagined,” she said, “that if one of you was ever threatened with death, your husband would have chosen to sacrifice himself for you, as befits a lord of the Achaeans.”

I raised my head. Her eyes widened, her fine eyebrows flick-ing up. My voice came out strangled. “What do you want of me? I cannot explain my husband’s behavior. It is not for me to judge.”

“We want nothing of you.” Hades had spoken, not his wife, and I flinched at the sound of his voice, for he sounded at once like my father and my husband. When he looked at me, his face was serious, almost sad. He did not seem as easily amused as Persephone. “No wanting, and no judging. Not for you.”

“Then what must I do?” I asked desperately, as I had asked Hermes. Everything was wrong: the improper questions and missed cues, the way Hades bent his head to Persephone, the feline look she wore now, as if preparing to pounce. I couldn’t guess my place in their kingdom and I wanted them to instruct me. I had always been told what to do.

“There are no duties here. Not for those in the asphodel fields. In Tartarus,” Persephone said, smiling again, “and in the fields of Elysium, yes. But not for those who simply die. And not for you, Alcestis, for you are a wonder. You still know yourself.” Her gaze had softened, and her eyes glistened like the edges of melting ice.

I was tempted to tell her that I was the only person I had ever known well, besides Hippothoe, and that it was perhaps no surprise that I would not let myself go easily. But she was right. I’d seen the blank eyes of the other shades, the depths of emptiness in their once-lively faces. I was not yet so reduced.

Hades released his wife’s hand. She frowned as he leaned toward me, his hair falling around his dusky throat. “Yet there is something you want of us.”

I shook my head.

“Come, Alcestis,” he said, and his low voice was as warm as Persephone’s was cold. “Do not dissemble. You are so newly dead, I cannot help but know your mind.”

The idea made me feel dully ill, but I would not show it. I lifted my chin in the manner that had earned me many a slap from Pelias. “If you could tell me, my lord—where is my sister?”

“Which sister?”

“The only one who—do you mean that Pisidice has died?”

Hades thought for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “Not that sister. The wild-haired girl with evil in her chest. Hippothoe.”

There was no evil in her, I thought fiercely, staring at the ground so that I wouldn’t insult the god with my anger. Only sickness, and weakness, and youth.

“I do not think she likes that, husband.” Persephone smiled down upon me graciously; it was the smile I’d been trained to give to slaves and village children. “Perhaps a little gentleness for one so recently dead, if you have learned that in our years together.”

Thoughts flitted between them like arrows, volleys of meaning tossed back and forth. Hades looked away first and Persephone shifted on her throne, triumphant.

“Forgive me, Lady Alcestis,” Hades said, almost humbly. “I cannot tell you where your sister wanders. She has been dead these seven years. She does not appear brightly in my mind.”

I didn’t understand. “You do not know her?”

“I am sorry,” said the god.

“But—my mother? Are there any here whom I might find? Any from Iolcus?”

Persephone was watching me, her lips slightly open in fascination. “There must be one, husband, of all the Iolcan royal dead,” she said slowly.

Were there so many then? Our line was not ancient; my father’s father had built the palace, his men laboring to cart in the blocks and raise the walls against invaders. Before him there had been nothing, only a good port wasted in the hands of villagers who offered no resistance to Cretheus’s men.

“Your father’s mother,” Hades said. “The lady Tyro. She is not long dead, and I remember her well.”

The lady Tyro dead and I had not heard of it? After all the rituals, all the times Pelias had invoked her name in appeal to his father, he had not sent word of her death to his brother, or to her grandchildren.

Or perhaps Admetus had not thought it necessary to tell me.

“Where does she—” I paused, unsure what to say. “Where is she?”

Hades’ eyelids slipped low for a moment, giving his lean face a sleepy cast, and after a moment I realized with a shudder that he was tracking her in his mind. “She wanders past the asphodel fields, by the vale of mourning,” he said, “though she does not mourn. You shall go and find her, and she shall know you. All your ancestors shall.”

“How shall I know her?” I asked, not certain I wanted to know what sort of woman would have loved Poseidon and produced my father.

“By her history,” Persephone said, in a voice gone sweet with delight. Her eyes were not sleepy; they were round and bright, fixed on me. “For she dared great things for love, as you have done.”

“I have done no great things,” I mumbled.

“No? Then perhaps you shall yet. Go now, and see your way to your grandmother.” She flicked a dismissive hand at me, and suddenly my eyes seemed clearer and the lines of her slim body sharper. She watched me, still smiling. Her smile felt like an invitation and a vivisection, as if she wanted first to take me in her arms and then to split open my chest with her narrow white hands, to read me like an omen, to pull meaning from every visceral wrinkle.

I dipped my head to her and then to the dark lord Hades, who still sat brooding and silent at her side. She turned her face away as I bowed and left me to go; I felt her hold on me loosen, like fingers slipping free of my heart.

I wanted to look back at her, but I fled instead. The edges of the golden curtain scraped against my bare head as I left the megaron, and I ran down the long hall and beneath the entry’s whirling stars, my feet still terribly silent on the stone floor. Then out, shoving at the heavy door while its hinges protested with a shriek like a child’s. Once free I bolted for the adamantine gate, pushing past the blurry bodies of the shades milling in the courtyard.

One of them caught my arm as I passed, dead hand sliding reptile cool over my bare arm. I threw it off, twisting around a shudder, and looked up into its blank face. The shade was a man, or had been, thick waisted and thin haired, no mark of death on him other than the gray softening of the underworld. He groped for my hand and I yanked it away. Some hint of hurt surfaced in his murky eyes and I stared at him, fascinated and confused.

“Lady, do you know my boy?” he said heavily, words slurred together. He lifted his hand again and I flinched. “Do you know my Timios? Only as tall as this, as my hand here.”

We both looked at his hand, fluttering between us like a trapped bird.

“How is it that you speak?” I asked, as gently as I would have spoken to one of Phylomache’s daughters. “Have you just now come from the world above?”

“Just come?” he echoed, and looked over the courtyard as if he had never seen it before. His eyes narrowed, and then the stunned look seeped back into them. “I don’t know. But do you know my boy? You must tell me. I’ve looked everywhere. I cannot find him. I call for him and he doesn’t answer.” His eyes grew darker as he talked, hollows beneath his brows.

“I don’t know him,” I said. I reached for his hand, but he drew it back, folding his arm against his chest as if it enclosed his son. “Perhaps the lord Hades—”

The man backed away. “Speak not of him,” he whispered. “He takes. He only takes.”

I thought of Hades, with his hand soft on his wife’s wrist and his eyes contrite and all the newly dead still shining in his mind. What could he take from me?

I said, “I will look for the boy Timios. I’ll tell him that you search.”

Again the pitiful spark in his eyes. He seized my hand, his touch almost solid, and kissed it like a slave might, his lips a moth brush against my knuckles. “I thank you, lady, I thank you. May the gods bless you. May they give you many children, and a fine house, and . . .” But there his voice failed, as if he could not recall the blessings life had once held. “I thank you,” he said again, in a small, broken voice. I fled.

Past the gate I stopped running. There was no struggle or intensity in it now; it was as easy as dying. My chest was still and my shift unstained with sweat. I wanted a body, a body that would know how to be properly afraid. I wanted heaving breath or a living heart to drum against my ribs. This was freedom, but it was the freedom of an unmoored ship floating lost on a mirrored sea.

I took the path that led from the gate to the asphodel fields; I didn’t know what else to do. I was to go past the asphodel fields, Hades had said, by the vale of mourning—as if one part of the world’s underbelly were more melancholy than another. And how would I know this vale? Perhaps it would be marked by a stone stele with a carven tear. Or perhaps a funeral slab engraved with the names of the dead, all the dead, the silenced boys and vanished girls, the lost fathers and the weeping mothers. Even if the gods did honor us in that way, I’d never be able to read the names—not even my own.

I stepped off the path into the field, brushing stalks of asphodel with my fingertips. Shades moved in front of me with the slow purposelessness of grazing sheep. Following some imagined trail, maybe, a lover’s feet on the ground. I knew slave girls who swore they could recognize the outline of a friend’s foot in the dirt, the silly dots of toes, the sinuous curve of the lifting arch. The ground of the underworld bore no footprints. When I looked up, some of the shades had turned to look back at me. I was beginning to see little differences among them, hints of intelligence in the eyes of some.