Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories) (12 page)

The image blossomed in her mind: Karl grayed and elderly, like herself, but still dear to her eyes. “We walked to the trees,” she said, keeping her eyes shut. “That forest, where the pomegranates grow.”

“Yes.” He sounded almost breathless. “What did we say?”

She exhaled, massaging her temples, letting the memory unfold. “I said…something about the trees being neglected.”

“And I answered,
The orchard needs you
…” he prompted, in a whisper.

“…
Persephone
,” she finished. With a gasp, she opened her eyes and stared at him.

He held her gaze, his dark eyes sparkling. “Right.”

Chapter Nine

A
DRIAN’S HEART DRUMMED MADLY.
S
OPHIE’S
heels skidded against the trunk as she shoved herself upward until she stood, hands braced against two large branches. She stared down at him, wearing the same expression of astonishment he must have worn when Rhea guided him to the same truth. He still remembered the feeling—like Earth and heaven had been broken into jigsaw puzzle pieces and rearranged into a completely new picture.

“But that doesn’t make sense,” she protested. “We couldn’t have
been
Persephone and Hades. The myths weren’t real.” Even as she said it, her gaze wandered away from him, as if her own thoughts were contradicting her, which he knew they must be.

“True, the myths largely aren’t real,” he said. “None of us could throw lightning bolts, or walk on rainbows, or turn into animals. But the things we did do—well, I think you’ll be impressed.”

“Hades stole Persephone. It wasn’t a happy marriage. Why would you want to be him, or have me be her?”

“Being them isn’t an option. We
were
them, period. We can’t change it. As for the kidnapping, the unhappy marriage—those are part of the myth, which, again, wasn’t quite accurate.”

“Persephone
liked
being kidnapped?”

He almost smiled, but managed not to, reckoning it could look creepy. “I shouldn’t explain today. I’d be giving away too much.”

“But—what does it matter now? Even if it really happened, it was thousands of years ago. No one’s going to worship us and I don’t want anyone to.”

“I don’t want anyone to, either. But it matters now because, for the first time in centuries—in millennia—we can both remember while we’re alive. We could only remember between lives before, in the Underworld. All those other lives when we knew each other, we couldn’t remember what we were; we were just ordinary people. But this time, we can be like Hades and Persephone again.”

Sophie breathed in shallow gusts, looking up and around at the tree branches. “What does that mean, be like them? I can’t remember anything about being her. Only talking about it, after being Grete. I can’t remember…”

“No, of course you can’t,” he assured. “It’s buried down deep in that bag, beneath all the other oranges. You’ve got to do some digging before you get to it.”

“But when I try to remember, it’s all confused. I can’t concentrate. Real life keeps getting in the way—and by the way, I have a
lot
of real life to concentrate on right now.”

“I know. That’s why I said to look to your dreams. Dreams are much more reliable for this exercise. You can really live in the memory, and if you go to bed thinking, ‘I’m going to control what I see,’ you can skim backward and forward much faster.”

“How long will that take?” she asked. “Before I get to whatever-it-was B.C.?”

“My best guess is 1700 B.C. We’re talking something like seventy-five lifetimes between then and now, so even if you get skilled at skipping backward through the lives, it’ll probably still take you several nights.”

She leaned back against a branch, looking stunned. “Thirty-seven hundred years?”

“Hard to wrap your mind around, yeah.” Adrian picked a fern frond and brushed it back and forth against his hand. “Honestly, I’m not sure of the exact figure. I’ve tried to work it out—how long each of my lives was, how long I spent in the Underworld between them—but I just can’t be sure, especially in the earliest lives. Back in the old days, people often lost track of exactly how old they were. So that’s my rough estimate. The year itself doesn’t matter much, anyway. We don’t need to punch a date into a time machine.”

“But…” She frowned. “If we were gods, how could we have died?”

A chill shivered through Adrian. How he wished he could spare her that memory. “That, I shouldn’t explain. You’ll trust the memories better if they come from your own head.”

“Oh, fine.”

“You’ll know soon. Really. So…” He dropped the fern and laced together his fingers, taking on a humble expression. “You forgive me for the pomegranate stunt?”

“I’m going to need more time for that,” she grumbled. But the flicker of teasing in her tone gave him hope. She sighed, and pulled out her phone to glance at the screen. “I need to get back soon, if you’re not going to tell me anything else.”

“All right. I’ve given you enough to think about today.” He clambered down the tree’s trunk, and held up his arms to her.

She sat at the edge of a branch, swinging her legs down. “Do I jump?”

“Sure. I can catch you.”

Still frowning, she sprang out of the tree. Adrian caught her around the middle, her arms colliding with his shoulders and head, her breasts in his face for one pleasantly distracting second. He lowered her to her feet, and they dusted bits of moss off their clothes.

“Did you used to be in a wheelchair?” she asked abruptly.

Caught off guard, he felt the old defensiveness lock across his face like a shield. “How’d you find that out?”

“The Internet. There was an article from a while back, about you and Kiri, and other assistance dogs.”

“But how? I mean, I never told you my last name or what city I was from or anything.”

“I saw your name and address on Kiri’s dog tags, in your bathroom. In the Underworld.”

Realizing he’d left those in plain sight, he spread his palm over his face. “I am so bloody stupid.”

“So when you got your superpowers…that made you able to walk?”

Ugh. This was a can of worms he did not feel like reopening. “Yeah,” he said, dropping his hand and looking off at the horizon.

“Sorry. Maybe it’s none of my business.”

It was kind of her to apologize, when she was under no obligation to do so. He pushed a smile to the surface. “I think I did nothing but run for about two weeks when I got cured. Must’ve run a thousand kilometers in all. Gave Kiri a nice workout.”

She smiled down at the dog. “I can imagine.”

“Come on, let’s take you back.” He reached out and clasped her hand, not even thinking what he was doing until he felt her fingers tense in his grasp. Rather than pull his hand away, though, he lingered to see what she’d do. And in a moment she relaxed, and allowed him to hold her hand as they walked back to the stake with the orange flagging.

When they reached it, she gasped and dropped his hand, staring at him.

“What?” he asked, alarmed.

“I
slept
with you!”

“Oh. Which time are you thinking of?”

“As Grete and Karl—I was married and I slept with you!”

“Just the once. I was leaving forever. It was our only chance.”

“Hang on, what do you mean, ‘which time’?” She sounded shocked. “How many other times—other lives—”

Now he couldn’t keep from grinning. “How many? In all the lives together? Oh, my. I’d have to be counting a long time to come up with an answer to that.”

With a short shriek of outrage, she turned away.

“You’re only
just
remembering this?” he asked.

She spun around to him again, shaking her fingertips as if to get something off them. “This is weird! You have no idea how weird it is to remember doing something you haven’t done.”

“Actually, I have a good idea what that’s like.”

Sophie scowled. “Yeah, I guess you do.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t laughing at you, or at the memories. In fact, I quite like those memories. But I don’t mean that in a sleazy way.”

“I know. You’re a guy.” She grumbled the words in resignation.

“Well. I’m human.”

She lifted her face to study him. “Yet you’re Hades.”

He gazed into her eyes, almost shivering at how familiar they were. “Pretty much.”

“You’re Hades and you kidnapped me—Persephone—and dragged me away to the Underworld in a chariot pulled by black horses. Then you tricked me into eating a pomegranate so I’d have to come back to you.”

“Funny how that worked out, isn’t it?”

“Is that how you did it the first time around?” she asked.

“Go to sleep and find out.”

Chapter Ten

W
HAT
A
DRIAN REMEMBERED OF
H
ADES’
life, he was at first inclined to doubt, because how could anything so far-fetched, from so long ago, and so influenced by his own knowledge of mythology be accurate? But comparing his memories with those of Rhea, Nikolaos, Sanjay, and others showed him it was real, for they all matched up. Soon Sophie’s memories would fall into place too.

Hades was born on Crete sometime around 1700 B.C., to Adrian’s best estimation. Adrian knew the island was actually called Keftara by its citizens at the time, and his own name was Aidisi—or those would be Adrian’s guesses at the spelling, since he rarely wrote at all back then, and when he did he used his civilization’s hieroglyphs rather than the modern Latin-based alphabet. But the familiarity of mythology and geography led him and the other immortals to refer to their past selves and countries by the names found in modern books. “Hades” had a certain cachet to it and Adrian had come to like it.

Besides, he didn’t fancy an eternity of correcting people: “Actually, it’s ‘Aidisi.’”

Hades’ parents grew barley and figs, and kept pigs and goats, in a village half a day’s walk from the palace city of Knossos. Hades was married at age fifteen in an arranged match, and, following the local custom, moved to his wife’s village on the other side of the valley. His bride was nearly a stranger when they underwent the rites together, but they quickly grew fond of each other. So it devastated him when, barely a year later, she died in childbirth, and their baby son with her.

Hades blamed himself, and suspected his wife’s family blamed him too. Hades had always been unusually and unnaturally strong. He had never once been ill. A huge sow bit into his wrist when he was a child, and everyone expected his hand would be crippled for life. But it healed completely within a day. At age ten he could lift the sow by himself. It frightened his parents and cousins to see him do such things, so he hid his abilities whenever he could. He knew his family loved him, but they seemed relieved to see him go when he married and moved away. Having him around made them uneasy.

His strength grew along with him. When a scaffold broke during the construction of the house he was helping build for his new wife, and a giant cube of stone went tumbling down the slope, Hades leaped forward and stopped it before it flattened a little boy. His new neighbors appreciated his strength that time, but they still feared him. He heard muttered invocations to their household goddesses, thanking them while requesting protection from eerie forces—which he knew referred to him, not to whatever force made the scaffold break. The accident wasn’t unnatural; that kind of thing happened from time to time. But Hades’ invincibility most certainly didn’t.

So couldn’t his bizarre strength be the reason his son was too much for his wife to bear?

It was a bad year already for the island. The winter had brought only a few showers of rain, the spring even less, and now, in the baking heat of summer, the springs and wells were drying up. Animals, crops, and people languished. The usual supplications to the goddess of the harvest and the god of weather garnered no divine response. So the high priestess at the palace of Knossos took drastic action, and put out a call for a human victim to be sacrificed.

In Hades’ memory this had only happened once before—when he was a small boy—to end a series of earthquakes that had rattled the island. A young woman, one of the junior priestesses, had stepped forward to offer herself. Hades and his parents had joined the crowd in the palace grounds to witness the rite, and his father had held him up on his shoulders so Hades could see over the heads of the citizens. But when the high priestess had raised her knife and the masked male attendant had stepped forward with his shining axe, small Hades covered his face, shuddering so dramatically that his father lost his grip and the boy fell to the ground. He was, of course, unhurt. Meanwhile the crowd’s voices rose in a wail as the young woman collapsed in a pool of blood.

And the earthquakes, as far as he remembered, stopped.