Alcestis (23 page)

20

THE GUARDS LET us through with no trouble. They didn’t recognize me; no one on the road had, though they had regarded me with curiosity, unused to seeing veiled women led by heroes. I wouldn’t have expected the veil to conceal me so well, but it seemed that few here knew me. They did know Heracles, and they admired him, their worship clear in their wide-stretched smiles.

He didn’t stop to speak to them, but nodded curtly and led me on. I’d been trailing behind him as we walked along the road, keeping a respectful distance. After the rocks, the pounded dirt felt soft under my torn feet, though the cuts gave out little jags of pain that made my eyes water.

The fragment of Heracles’ robe rubbed against the end of my nose, and I could see through it, though it gave the world a blurred look and made the faces of the people we passed seem as smudged as the faces of shades. I could watch them without their knowledge, without their recognition. I thought they might appear different to me now that I knew how they would look when they were dead, but they looked like villagers and guards and slaves. Like Pheraeans. My people.

I hadn’t looked at the palace yet. I didn’t want to. Around us were all the marks of my death—the scorched piles of bones, the tents of guests come to attend the funeral games. But it was late in the day, the sun lowering in the west, and the courtyard was quiet, the slaves and guests having retired to doze in the afternoon sun. The palace would be quiet too, except for the kitchens; my bedchamber would be quiet, the stars on the ceiling silent and still. And where was Admetus? What would he do when Heracles brought me to him? Did he sit now on his throne, gazing at my empty place beside him? I imagined Apollo installed in my smaller throne, his golden haze drifting over the faces of the slaves, drying their tears like sunlight. I wondered if Admetus was imagining this too.

Soon I would know.

We came to the base of the stairs to the great hall. I paused, staring up them with resignation. Heracles stood me there, his hands on my shoulders, moving me as if I were a solid mass, carved from wood or stone. “Stay here,” he said, “and I shall call your husband.” He waited a moment, watching me cautiously, and then he turned and mounted the broad stairs, taking them two at a time, his legs pumping.

I thought of running but I did not. I waited, as he had ordered. But I didn’t know how to stand unnoticed in my own courtyard. I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands. I clasped them before me, then behind my back. My feet throbbed. I felt terrifically, miserably alive.

A slave hurried past me, not looking at my veiled face. I lifted my chin; it was habit, to tilt my face up, seeking attention from those I ruled. I was standing in that manner, bold as any queen, when Admetus emerged from the palace, hand shading his eyes as he crossed into the sunlight.

He lowered his hand. He had been weeping, and his fine golden-brown skin looked weathered, like old cloth. He had shaved off his beard too, and he had a growth of stubble on his soft cheeks. I imagined putting my hand on the curve of his cheekbone, then thought of the sharpness of Persephone’s face, the silky glide of her skin.

Heracles stood behind him like a silent mountain.

Admetus saw me at once. “What is this, Heracles?” he said with surprising fury in his voice and surprising restraint. “I will have no wife. I told you that when you arrived. My wife is dead.”

“Listen, I beg you, to her tale.” Heracles passed Admetus and came down the stairs to stand beside me, his hand hovering over my shoulder as if he were afraid it would pass through my flesh. “She has traveled far to come to you.”

Admetus’s eyes flickered to my wrapped feet, then back to the veil. Men could not keep their eyes from it; the cloth made me a mysterious blank, and I suppose that appealed to them. I wondered if they would find the smoothed face of a shade as compelling. “I will have none of her,” he said. There was strength in his voice, and the ruin of tears. “I am married yet, and I will not break the bond.”

I looked on my faithful husband, who had feared death more than dishonor, who had been willing to sacrifice me to save himself. I wanted to tell him that he had nothing to fear, that death wasn’t terrible for the dead, and that he would have no fear when he died. Death was terrible only for the living and for me.

“Speak, lady,” Heracles urged. “Tell him your story.”

The veil stirred over my mouth, for I was breathing heavily as if winded from a run, but I didn’t speak.

“Lady—”

“Do not force her,” said Admetus, ever gentle. “You have brought me a mute bride, Heracles? Take her away, please. You may give her to the maids to house and take her when you leave after the games.”

Heracles stared at me, frustrated. He wanted to help Admetus; he wanted to be honored, and I wouldn’t submit. I smiled beneath the veil; the cloth was a freedom like death. I waited to see what he would do.

Admetus turned away and Heracles bounded up the stairs to stop him, putting a hand on his arm and turning him back. I watched Admetus’s familiar profile, the noble line of his nose, his beautiful boyish face grown sad.

“Wait,” Heracles said, “wait. You will wrong her if you do not take her.”

“How can I wrong her? I wrong myself if I betray my wife.”

“Do you not know her then, after so short a time?”

“What—,” Admetus began, and then he closed his mouth. He began to realize what Heracles meant. The wrinkles around his eyes relaxed and his dark eyelashes fluttered. His hands, which he had raised to fend off Heracles, fell to his sides. He looked as shocked as the shades waiting for Charon, but his eyes were not blank. I saw joy, relief, and fear there, mingled.

Heracles descended the stairs and tugged the veil from my head. It caught on my hair, and then the torn edges of the cloth brushed over my skin like wind. I was revealed. There was no general hush in the courtyard, no strike of a far-off gong to mark the moment. I heard Admetus take a short breath, a swallow of stabbing air.

“It is she,” said the hero. “Your wife, Admetus. The lady Alcestis. I have brought her back to you, living. Will you not welcome her?”

“My wife—” Admetus put a hand to his mouth, then lowered it. He came down the stairs slowly, falteringly, as if they were shifting beneath him. “My wife?” He paused. “Alcestis?”

I lifted my head a little, but still I said nothing. I could not imagine what to say. I am come home, though I did not want to come?

“You are Alcestis,” he said wonderingly, “though you are silent. How can this be? How did you do it?” He looked at Heracles, not at me, when he asked.

“I won her back from death.”

That might have tempted me to open my lips. But why should I ruin a hero’s tale? I looked at the ground and thought of Hades on his black throne, smiling to hear Heracles celebrated for my rescue.

Admetus’s fingers grazed my cheek, and I jerked my head up, surprised. His eyes seemed alight as they never had before my death—touched with a fire directed only at me. I didn’t like it. I wanted to squirm away, but I stayed still. “You fought death to save her?”

“He did surrender her to me, and I have brought her to you, to her home,” said Heracles. “You will not refuse her?”

“What kind of man do you think me to be?” Admetus said to Heracles, but he spoke distractedly, without heat. He stared at me: the willing sacrifice. He didn’t seem to consider that I might’ve been an unwilling prize. “Alcestis,” he said again, as if testing the word.

I was silent. My silence comforted me; it felt like the numb wrapping of the underworld, the endless calm. If I determined to be silent, then I didn’t have to think about what to say, or how to say it, or where to direct my eyes while I spoke. I did not have to address the growing crowd of onlookers. The slaves and servants had begun to notice Admetus’s distraction, his interest in the woman brought by Heracles, and when my veil was removed, they gathered as the shades had gathered, curious, feeding on the energy of royal distress.

“Still she does not speak,” Admetus said, concerned—and nervous. “What has happened to her?” He touched my cheek again and I didn’t flinch away. His fingers were cold. They didn’t strike fire under my skin.

“Why, she died.” Heracles gave me a desperate look. “It is the shock of it, Admetus, the strain of death. She may not speak for several days, until she is recovered. You must be careful with her. Do not startle her or excite her too much. And do not let her leave the palace walls.”

“Why not?” Admetus asked absently. He lifted my hand and examined it, with an air half of love and half of curiosity.

“The business of the village will overtax her,” said Heracles, but he was looking at me as he spoke, and I knew that he had seen me look back toward the chasm in the earth. “Until she is healed.”

“Is she ill then? Does she need care? I can send for the maid.” Admetus’s voice was still uneven, heightened with elation and terror. He was not entirely eager to be alone with me, then. I was glad.

“Only a husband’s care,” Heracles said. “You must touch her, speak to her, as your wife. It will remind her of her earlier life.”

“Remind her? Does she not remember?” Admetus looked stricken. I wondered at this. We had shared some affection, many habits, and a fair amount of desperation. Did he truly think that losing my memory of our short marriage would be a terrible blow? But I would once have thought it so, I remembered suddenly. I would’ve wept his loss as if I loved him true.

“No. She remembers all.”

I looked to Heracles, whose face was all fury, though he tore his eyes away when I met his stare.

Admetus touched the center of my palm. The callus on his thumb scraped at my skin, and I felt sweat rising in the tiny creases of his fingerprints, chill as the touch of a shade.

“I shall leave you now.” Heracles backed away; only two steps or three, but it was a clear abandonment.

“Now?” my husband cried. “Heracles, what is this sudden retreat?”

“I’ve done you the service I could, and I must go back to my home. I must—I want to see my wife.”

Admetus released me and stepped toward Heracles. “But you must stay. You must stay and be celebrated. We’ll have the games already planned, but we shall honor you as well, good Heracles. You can’t simply leave us after such a feat.”

“I’m wanted elsewhere.” Heracles spoke gently. “I have other duties. As do you, Admetus, king of Pherae. The games are a worthy and a pleasant rite to honor your wife’s homecoming, but you must not draw the attention of the envious gods with too much celebration. Keep her safe and rejoice in her return, but do not make spectacular shows of your good fortune. Be quiet and careful.”

Admetus looked back at me. The flame in his eyes had cooled. What had we that was worthy of envy? What had I to tempt the jealousy of a god? A little mortal life, a little mortal marriage. A quiet bed, unstirred by the furor of Olympian love.

Heracles looked to the stables, then to the gaping arched door of the great hall. “Take your wife into your home,” he said. “I will call my servants and take my leave.”

Admetus could not argue: to refuse a guest the right to leave was nearly as inhospitable as denying shelter. But he looked at Heracles with obvious longing, wishing for a friend to support him—he seemed as nervous as he had when we wed, the skin around his mouth gone pale and his hands trembling. They embraced once, fiercely. Heracles stretched out his arms exactly as he had when trying to capture me.

“Be thankful,” said Heracles, in a voice meant for my husband’s ears. “She who was lost has come back to you. You lose no honor in this, Admetus.”

Admetus’s dark head lowered. It was a kindness, what Heracles had said—but it was not true, and we all knew it.

“May the gods protect you.” Heracles clapped Admetus on the arm, flexed his fingers around the muscle. Then he turned to me.

“Farewell, lady,” he said. The manners of my birth and his dictated that he ought to have knelt before me, taken my hand, and spoken to me without meeting my eyes. Then I ought to have dipped to my knees, covered his hand with mine, and spoken just as obliquely. But I didn’t mind his gruffness; we had no politeness between us. I looked into his troubled eyes, and then I looked away. That was my farewell to Heracles.

The hero left the courtyard speedily, as if pursued. The crowd of silent watchers parted to let him through, then turned their faces back to us, waiting for the story’s end.

Admetus stood, watching Heracles go, and I watched Admetus. I saw that he wanted to call out to Heracles, to call him back, to ask what he ought to do next. But then Heracles passed through the gate, nodding to the guards, and Admetus straightened, as if Heracles had actually vanished, as if the gate were a barrier to another world.

We stood, side by side but hardly together, before the entrance to the palace we ruled, the village we owned, the life we had traded, and sundered, and now shared again.

My husband looked at me, still uncertain.

“Will you come in, Alcestis?”

He reached out for me, his fingers vibrating slightly in the air, as if the whole world were trembling. All the courtyard seemed to quiet: the slaves, the guests, all were waiting and expecting me to lift my tender white hand and place it on my husband’s open palm. I looked at his palm, at the lines I had once thought to memorize, patterns I had traced with the edge of my fingernail, patterns that now looked as incomprehensible to me as writing.

A breath of wind stirred in the courtyard, lifting my freed hair. Some god inhaling in anticipation or poignant pleasure. For were we not a picture, his hand outstretched and his face open and me standing pure in my slip of cloth? Was this not the moment in which I ought to return, fully, to life?

21

OUTSIDE WAS REVELRY and drunkenness and the sound of joy. The athletes had been told that the funeral games were canceled, due to my sudden return from the underworld. To soften this disagreeable news, they’d been given sacks of wine and allowed to stay for one more night before departing. They’d set about celebrating my freedom from death with vigor, and their shouts and songs echoed in the courtyard and tumbled in through the open window of my bedchamber. The songs were dirty—lyrics to sing to a prostitute rather than a queen—and I liked them, though I was sure that Admetus, wherever he was, was blushing to hear me feted so.

I had not lifted my hand to let my husband lead me to the royal bedchamber. I had stood wordless until Admetus, finding the wait unbearable, had grasped my hand and raised it with a brave smile, as if he’d caught me just before the moment when I would have taken his hand.

He’d led me into the palace accompanied by the cheers of the assembled slaves, the prayers and cries of the now-unneeded funeral guests. They’d pressed around us as we climbed the stairs, hot bodies smelling of oil and sweat and garlic, hot breath weaving around us like a fog. So many bodies! So much life. And their brief touches, fluttering on my arm, my hip, my ankle—liberties they would never have dared before I rose from the dead—felt pleasant, harmless, like the nudging of children. But Admetus had spun and snapped at them, ordered them away from me. I was delicate yet, he said, and they might damage my health. So it was that we’d come into the palace alone, passed through the great hall, and gone to our chamber, where the bed waited, and the starred ceiling waited, and the stone windowsill waited. Then my husband had walked me to the bed, sat me down upon it, and fled, saying that he would fetch the head maid to care for my feet.

He had not yet returned. After an hour had passed—a numb hour, dull with disbelief—I limped over to the windowsill to look out on the world below.

The slaves hadn’t cleaned the bedchamber since I’d died. The windowsill bore a thin layer of dust, stirred by the travelers’ arrival in the courtyard, and beneath that a thinner but darker layer of burnt sacrificial grime. I licked the tip of my finger and touched it to the dust-smeared stone, looked at my stained skin. I could skim my fingertips around my eyes, mark out tears in char, darken my lips until they looked swollen, press my thumb into the dirt and smudge my throat to record each touch of Persephone’s mouth. I could tell my story with dust, never needing a word.

If I had been dead, captured, never to return, Admetus would’ve kept troth: pledged his life to me, pledged never to accept another bride. When he’d needed a son, he might have adopted a boy, some promising child from the village, perhaps, with golden hair and golden skin and a charming downturned smile like the curve of the sun cresting the horizon. I knew these things about him, as I knew that his denials to Heracles had been heartfelt. He had missed me. He did honor me. In my absence he’d slipped into misery, and his sorrow marked our chamber still. There were clothes dangling from the headboard of the bed, sandals lying tangled by the door. He had dropped a cloak on the floor, and it pooled there, dusty, like the ghost of a billowing cloud. He didn’t like disarray. Had my death truly caused this minor chaos? Was this the grief of a widowed husband, or of an abandoned lover?

I couldn’t smell Apollo in the room at all. Only smoke, and the sea, and the dustiness of drying grain.

The harvest had been finished just before I died, the stalks of grain sliced through and tumbled on the ground, the fields cut to stubble. All the air had been full of chaff before Admetus had filled it with smoke. Beyond the bonfires in the courtyard, beyond the heat of wine in young men’s veins, the villagers would be cold in their small houses. The air was already crisp. Soon would come fall apples, their red skins covering flesh with only a pale sweet crunch, no succulence, no seeds that burst like joy on the tongue. Persephone would remain under the earth for months to come, shining at the heart of the palace beside her shining husband, cut off from the rest of their kind, twin thunderstorms raging unseen. She was as distant from me now as the floating islands of the north or the backward-flowing rivers of the south, distant as the road outside the palace gates.

I sat on the dusty windowsill, glad to dirty my pristine pale shift, glad that I was still wearing the cloth she’d touched. I tried to pay attention to the men below, but I couldn’t stop thinking of her, and under the muffling blanket of shock I felt sadness rise. Persephone! I mourned for her, my heart beating like a funeral drum against my ribs. But also I mourned for myself, who had found death and love together. I’d never loved life, but it was all I had now.

When the door opened, I was still perched on the sill, my hands in my lap, my face unstreaked by tears. I knew at once that it was Admetus, finally having gathered the courage to speak to me, as a hero might prepare for battle with a deadly beast. In the same instant I thought of how Persephone would’ve entered: the sweep of her skirt, the slow spread of her gentle and insinuating smile, the white hand floating in readiness to touch my skin. Admetus came in carrying cloth, a jug of wine, a pitcher of water. He’d slopped water over his hands and onto his tunic. When he saw me sitting by the window, he nearly dropped the pitcher and another wave of water sloshed from its wide mouth. Dripping, he put the water and wine and cloth on the trunk at the end of the bed, then looked up at me. His face was white.

“Alcestis,” he whispered, and winced at a prolonged yell from the men below. “Are you all right?”

I looked out the window again. Fires leapt in the courtyard pits, and men danced around them, their shadowy bodies blocking out the light.

“I know you,” Admetus said, “and I know what Heracles said to be true. You are my wife. But you are changed. I cannot quite believe it, seeing you here. I went to find the maid, and—I half thought I’d come back to find the room empty.”

I turned back to him. He had come nearer, though not close enough to touch. Afraid of frightening me, probably. As if I would kick or snap like a startled animal. I did not ask if he had wanted to find the room empty.

He said, “I do not know what I would have done, if you had vanished again. I do not know what I have done in your absence. I did what was expected. That was all I knew how to do. But Heracles did more than that. He took my place. He did what I should have done.

“And now you are—here. Rescued. And I still do not know what to do. I cannot quite—” Here he looked away, just a flash of his eyes, as if distracted. I think he was embarrassed. If I hadn’t been absorbed in my own sorrow, I might’ve been embarrassed too. We did not speak this way, my husband and I. “I cannot believe it, without your voice.”

I waited, letting the sound of his own hoarse voice sit in the air. I couldn’t speak.

He took one step closer. “I will not ask again after this. But I must ask once more. Are you my Alcestis?”

I was his Alcestis. Returned and owned. Alive and married. And he was waiting. His eyes, in the dim light, were as dark as Hades’, as round and tear powered as Persephone’s. He was filled with fear, as he had been when the god arrived at the feast, filled with anticipation, waiting for me to speak.

I didn’t speak. But I let him take my hand again, and when he’d waited nearly long enough (for it would never be truly long enough) I bent my head forward, just slightly, so that my hair slipped over my cheeks, and then I looked up at him. It was not quite a nod, but I knew he would interpret it as assent; he was interpreting all my actions now, ascribing meaning to the barest motion of my hand or mouth. He read me as an augur reads the skies, as a woman reads the face of her father to know when the time for marriage has come. My silence made me remote as a god. It gave me a distance I had never been allowed. But I could not keep it forever.

Three days. I would take three days of silence to mark the change in me. Three days for Persephone. Three days for Hippothoe, silent now in her wanderings, with no one to echo. Three days for death in life. I made this decision as I’d done everything since I returned to the world above: wordlessly, giving no sign. Unaware, Admetus lifted my hand to his lips. They were rough and dry and scraped against my knuckles.

“I will take the answer you give me now,” he said hesitantly. “Still you do not speak. But I will not press you. I trust that when you are healthy, you will speak again.” There was a little relief in his voice, as if he feared what I might say to him. I felt a grim certainty of the power I had over him, the thrall in which I held him, and with that knowledge came a rush of sympathy, unwanted. I would’ve taken his hand then, if only I could have pressed it into Apollo’s.

He released my hand. I flexed my fingers instinctively, and he stared at the small movements with wonder, as Phylomache used to watch her babies. I folded my fingers into my palms, out of his sight. I wasn’t ready to be cherished in that way—not by him. He pulled his hand away and looked down at my feet. The paleness had left him; he was flushed now, like a youth alone with a woman for the first time. Death had reduced us to this, the formal dance of the newly married. I took a small amount of pity on him and lifted my bound feet.

At once he knelt before me and touched an ankle gently. “Of course,” he said, still flushed. “I will do it.” He rose, went to the end of the bed to fetch the wine and water and cloth, and came back to sit before me again.

I don’t know if he had ever seen my blood before; I hadn’t bled the first time, after all my subterfuge with the sheets to please the servants. I’d passed through a year of married life uninjured. Now he peeled back the strips of Heracles’ robe binding my cut feet and sucked in a sharp breath as if the mere sight hurt him. I imagine that it did. This was the only sign of my sacrifice that he could see: the real sacrifice, not my resignation at the feast.

“Does it hurt?” he said, looking into my eyes. I closed them, just for a moment, and when I opened them, I saw that he had looked down again—embarrassed or perhaps ashamed—as if he had been answered.

ON THE FIRST night I lay stiff and silent beside Admetus, unwilling to sleep. I feared I might talk in my slumber and release some secret of my death. I couldn’t tell him about Persephone; I knew that. But I suppose I could have told him of Hippothoe, in vague terms that would not have revealed to him the truth of death. I could’ve said: I met my sister in my last moments in the underworld, and I had to leave her. I could’ve cried. Tears he might have understood. But I lay in the dark with my dry eyes open, unable to call them up. The bedchamber seemed so small and familiar, so enclosed, so ringing with life. I listened to the rustling of animals in the courtyard, to slaves moving about as the night shaded toward gray morning, awake hours before we were meant to rise. How had I slept through these sounds before?

But finally I slept through them again. I woke to an empty bed, my muscles aching from the effort of holding myself apart. I hadn’t moved since nightfall.

I spent the day in my chamber. The servants refused to enter—neither the slave girl nor the Cretan women arrived to dress me, and my meals were delivered with a timorous tap on the door. I left the food sitting in the hallway, an offering to the local gods, but even they hardly touched it.

In the evening I heard my husband shouting at the slave girls in the courtyard. He came back still angry, slamming the chamber doors and breathing like a warrior, ferocious huffs through his nose. I was sitting on the bed, my bandaged feet on the cool stone floor, and when he saw me, the anger seeped out of him at once. He came to me, halting barely an arm’s length away, unsure.

“They’re just silly girls,” he said, his words strangled and gruff, as if he were trying to speak in my father’s voice. I bent my head. After a long moment he put a hand on my hair, his touch light as the veil I’d worn. But I leaned away from him and lay down again, pulling the bedclothes up to cover my face, my breath heating and thickening the air. I heard him move, heard the clank and shift of his scabbard on his hips, the sigh he let out when he realized I still would not speak.

I fell asleep under the covers. In the middle of the night I thrashed awake in the grip of dreams that didn’t wake Admetus, dreams of shades and goddesses. I studied him in the darkness, hovered a hand’s length away from his calm face and tried to remember how I’d felt on the day I married him, how I’d lain awake alone and wished for him to touch me, wished for him to want me, my entire body clenching in misery and desire. There had been a time, I remembered, when all I wanted was his love and the physical mark of it, the round of a swollen belly that would prove me a good wife.

I sat up for the rest of the night, my back against the wall, staring at the ceiling’s flat, immobile stars.

Admetus shouted at the servants on the second day as well, and halfway through that afternoon, the slaves came to clean the chamber, hesitant as children. Most of them ignored me, but I saw that they wished me gone, though some of them looked sorry for it. They moved in skittering groups like shades, the slower ones trailing after. The chamber had never been neatened so quickly or so poorly. They too kept silent as they cleaned, as if my reticence had spread to them, but I heard them whispering outside the door when they left and hushing each other at the slightest sound from within my chamber. After they were gone, scuttling off down the hall to the kitchens, I limped to the door and waited, waited for some sound to stir the quiet. I wanted to call them back, those soot-marked girls, the quick ones and the slow ones, to tell them they had nothing to fear from me—for if I couldn’t say it to my husband, not without knowing that I lied, at least I could reassure someone.