Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories) (24 page)

Hermes and Hades nearly bowled each other over in jumping forward to take it from her.

“I’ve got it,” Hermes said, while Hades said at the same time, “May I take this for you?”

She laughed, relinquishing the basket, and watching as Hades finally wrested it free from Hermes. “It’s for you, actually, Hades. And you needn’t worry. I carry such things all day.”

She was less glamorously attired than she’d been for the equinox feast. Her hair was twisted into a knot and gathered back in a small net, and her gown was a weathered plain white wool with a grass stain at the knee. Still, she had a pair of violets tucked behind her ear, and with that face she couldn’t possibly, in Hades’ eyes, look less than divine.

He cradled the basket of vegetables in one arm. “Thank you very much. Where’s Demeter?”

She folded her hands behind her back. “Off to help with a birth. There’s a woman on the other side of the hills who’s expecting twins, and arranged for my mother to attend her. She won’t be back for a few days yet.”

Hermes turned to him with eyebrows arched. “Well, I really must be going. You two have fun.”

Hades managed not to glare at him. “Don’t you need a ride somewhere?”

“We brought my horse, remember? I’ll detach it from the team and be off.” Hermes kissed Persephone on the cheek, his arm around her waist rather tighter than Hades thought necessary, then he turned and kissed Hades on the mouth. “Be good. Or not.” Smiling, the trickster stepped into the other realm, leaving only a gust of wind swirling to fill the space where he’d been.

Persephone gazed wistfully at the spot. “I’d love to be able to do that.”

“Perhaps someday we’ll discover a way.”

“I hope. Well, shall I show you around?”

She acted so natural about being there alone with him that he relaxed, forgetting Demeter and her possible disapproval. After all, as Hermes had rightly stated, Persephone was a grown woman, one who could have been married by now if she wished. (Did she not wish it, then? Hades couldn’t help wondering.)

She showed him around the orchards and gardens, pointing out new plants they’d acquired from markets near the docks. Crouching, she touched a branch on a potted tree no higher than their thighs. Its leaves were glossy dark green and smooth-edged, and its flowers white and fragrant. “This one came from Asia. The man who sold it to me said it grows ‘golden apples,’ but clearly it isn’t an apple tree. Those were just the closest words he could think of in our language. I can’t wait to taste the fruit.”

“Looks like it’s thriving. You’re excellent with these plants. I only know a few crops, the ones we grew on Crete. And, I suppose, the ones I remember from other lives, elsewhere.”

“I’m sure the souls in the Underworld could tell us about lots of crops. What they use different plants for in their country, what to call them…”

“Indeed. You should come talk to them.” The invitation was out of his mouth before he realized it.

She rose to her feet, beaming. “Agreed. Let’s go.”

“Hah. Your mother would sense you suddenly heading southwest, wouldn’t she?”

“Only if she thought about it. Isn’t that how it works?”

“Yes, but…”

“And haven’t I heard that the hillside containing your cave is thick with oaks? So she wouldn’t be able to track my whereabouts once I was there.”

“True.” He studied her not-quite-innocent smile. “I’m beginning to think you invited me here today because you knew Demeter would be gone.”

She turned to the arbor beside her, curling a vine of a climbing flower around her finger. “Let’s say I wanted to avoid an argument about it. The truth, whether she likes it or not, is that I’m an adult and can go where I wish. She wants to protect me, but she overdoes it. If I could switch realms, I’d visit the Underworld myself on a day like today, when she’s not here. But I can’t.”

“I’d love to take you. It’s only, she’s my friend, and if she felt I’d betrayed her…” He thought of Hermes’ suggestion involving pigs, and shivered.

“You talk as if she’d find out.” Now looking fully as mischievous as Hermes ever did, Persephone pulled Hades’ arm around her shoulders. Holding onto it with both of her cool hands, she stepped up close against him. “Come on, take me.”

As if he could resist her, of all people, saying that.

“Gracious, woman, all right.” Balancing the basket of vegetables in one arm and Persephone in the other, he swept them into the spirit world.

Chapter Twenty

S
OPHIE STARED AT HER LAPTOP
in Communications—her least favorite class so far, taken only because it was required for practically all students—and watched the cursor blink while she failed to take notes. The professor lectured on, his voice a background drone, and she knew she’d better start paying attention or she was going to have to do an extra hour of remedial textbook reading to figure out what he said. But the more dominant part of her mind danced and whirled in the Elysian Fields—did they call them that back then? No; the name was added in mythology later.

Communications couldn’t possibly compare with this, with Persephone discovering the land where all the dead of the world converged and shared their knowledge and their bittersweet memories, their glow lighting the plants and trees, all of which contained magic that had lain inaccessible and forgotten for centuries…

P
ERSEPHONE DREW HER
eager steps up short when she first saw all the souls. These were real departed people and pets. Would her beloved cat who died five years ago be here? Or the man from the village who died last week, whom Demeter and Persephone helped care for in his final illness?

She leaned closer to Hades both for support and warmth—the cave was chillier than the warm spring air above ground—and felt comforted when he hooked his hand around her elbow.

“One of the first souls I found down here was my wife,” he said. “I asked the crowd if they knew of her, and they spread the word among themselves and brought her to me.”

She now remembered hearing that Hades had been married, long ago, before offering himself up as the sacrifice at Knossos. Yes, that was why he volunteered, she supposed—he lost his wife and felt he had nothing to live for. “How old was she when she died?”

“Sixteen. I was the same age at the time.”

The same age Persephone was now. She shivered. “How sad.”

“By the time I discovered this place, however, I was—let’s see—forty-five. It had been a long time, so it wasn’t as painful as it might have been. And by then she had her parents to keep her company.”

Forty-five when he discovered the Underworld. Persephone had been eight at the time, so now he was perhaps fifty-three, not that he looked it. Was that already too old for him to be interested in someone young like her, or did age not really matter for the immortals?

Hades added, “Our infant son, though, who died with her…” His voice went quieter, and Persephone’s heart ached. She had utterly forgotten there was a baby who died too. “My wife had let him return to the living to be reborn, not long after they died. He was so young, he’d had no real life at all. It seemed only fair to give him one.”

In the face of such grown-up concerns, she felt hopelessly young and useless. She wished she could at least find the courage to stroke his hand or face, the way Aphrodite or another self-assured woman could. “He’s probably someone very smart and happy now,” she said, hoping that might help.

He smiled, looking more thoughtful than sad. “I like to imagine so. Since he’s of my blood, I could track him if I like, but…well, I never knew him really, and he has other family now. I’ve chosen to let him be. Ah—you were after the plants? Look at these.” He led her to a vale between hills, where flowers carpeted the ground.

She knelt to examine them. “Violets, only they’re red! And narcissus that are purple.” She sniffed them, finding the scent was sweet as she expected from those flowers, but with the dank smell of cave rocks beneath it. “You never see these colors in the living world, not on these flowers. May I pick some?”

“Of course.”

She stood with her handful of flowers. “And the pomegranates? Where do they grow?”

“The grove’s this way.” It was a long walk, especially since she couldn’t move as fast as he could, but they filled the time with her many questions and his answers. Finally the path brought them beneath the boughs of a forest so dark and thick she could only see as far as ten or twelve tree trunks in any direction, and nothing above but branches. The souls seemed to avoid the grove; she only spotted one or two wandering through it, and without their glowing light it was especially dark within.

“These aren’t pomegranates.” She studied leaves and bark as they walked over the crackling dry leaves and bumpy roots. “They’re all kinds of trees.”

“Yes—those willows are part of what we use to harness the horses. We braid them together with—”

“Ivy,” she filled in. “I’ve examined the ropes.”

“Very good. Ivy. Some of the tree trunks are covered with it.”

“Ah. That’s a pomegranate.” She stepped off the path, reaching for one of the fruits above her head.

“Whoa.” His hand closed around hers, stopping her before she picked it. “Do you want Demeter to know you’ve been here?”

She let her hand drop, with a pout. “If I eat the pomegranate, you’ll tell her?”

“No, if you eat the pomegranate, she’ll know, because you’ll never act the same again. It’s impossible, with the memories flooding your mind. Think it over. Don’t do it on your very first visit.”

She grimaced. Then, after a pause, she lifted her eyebrow. “You mean I can have more visits?”

He only smiled in answer. And there seemed no way he could be over fifty now, because that was the coy, radiant smile of a young man invited to come court her again.

“
M
OTHER,
I
’VE FOUND
a new tutor. He knows lots of languages and plant lore from other countries, and I’ve arranged to go learn from him. Perhaps half a day every four or five days, as you can spare me.” Persephone recited her story as she cut greens from the garden with a knife.

It was two days after Hades’ visit, and Demeter had returned that morning after delivering the twins. She leaned on the door frame of the house, squeezing water out of her freshly washed hair. “Slow down, girl. What is his name? Where does he live?”

Persephone parted her lips to give the answer she had made up (though Hades had urged her not to lie)—the invented name, the tale of him being an elderly traveler from the north. But her tongue went limp at the idea of such untruth. She laid the greens in her basket and looked straight at her mother. “His name is Hades, and he lives in the Underworld.”

Dismay clouded Demeter’s eyes. She wrung her hair, twisting it tighter. “I might have guessed. The way you two were talking at Aphrodite’s house—I suppose he invited you then.”

“I invited myself.” Persephone moved to the next row of greens. “And I’ve already been there.”

Demeter growled, delivering such a hard shake to her gathered-up hair that drops rained upon the herb garden. “And it didn’t appall you? You want to go back?”

“It’s beautiful. Or at least, strange in a magnificent way. How can you judge it when you’ve never been there?”

“For most people, the fact that all the dead souls in the world dwell there is reason enough to find it appalling, and to stay away.”

Persephone sat back with her heels beneath her. “This is the argument I would rather have avoided, and could have avoided by lying to you. But there should always be truth between us, you’ve said.”

“Yes, and therefore I’m being honest too, and not pretending I like the idea of you spending your time under the earth, among spirits, with only one slightly insane immortal man for living company, when I do
not
like it.”

Persephone climbed to her feet. Pain flared in her weak hip, and she winced and settled her weight on the other leg. “Why do you call him insane?”

“Precisely for reasons such as wishing to live among the dead when there’s an entire living world that needs attention and is better suited for us all.” Demeter stepped into the garden, closing her warm, damp hands upon Persephone’s bare arms. “Darling, isn’t it bad enough that mortality exists, and tortures even us few eccentric immortals by taking away everyone else? It’s a frightening, disturbing thing for a living girl to want to spend her days with the dead when—” Voice weakening, Demeter checked her words, and cast her glance aside.

Persephone understood the unfinished sentence:
when someday all too soon you’ll have to die and go there as a soul yourself.
She hugged her mother. Persephone’s mortality tormented Demeter, as Persephone well knew. Their time together would be brief, in the span of Demeter’s living existence. Now having seen the Underworld, Persephone felt no fear about returning there as a soul. But a parent could never feel anything other than grief about losing a child. Even Hades, remembering the lost baby son he had never known, had been affected that way.

She rested her cheek on Demeter’s shoulder, breathing the smell of her clean wool tunic and sweet skin. “For goodness’ sake,” Persephone said, “I don’t plan to live there. Only visit sometimes, and learn.” She stepped back, smiling at her mother. “It’s
this
world I want to learn about, and living people I want to help. The souls can tell us things the living can’t, that’s all. And the plants down there can do things no other plants can.”