The Dark Wife (8 page)

“Rebel.”
I whispered the word and stood, cast my gaze about the bower, stared long at the flowers—so adored and familiar—and the pretty things: candles and precious stones my mother and I had collected over the years we shared together. I knew I would take nothing; there was nothing that I needed. I did not need the beautiful shell comb or the strand of pearls the sea nymphs had given me. I did not need the first flower my mother had ever grown for me, preserved and perfect as the day it bloomed. Perhaps my mother would need it. Perhaps it would comfort her.

I took myself, and I stepped out of the bower, into the Immortals Forest, empty-handed, alone.

I couldn’t let my mother see me leave, and I couldn’t say goodbye. Already I felt haunted by her hopeless face, her trembling hands. It would be best for both of us if I were to simply vanish, like stars winking out at the break of day.

So I crept along the line of trees and found the great oak. “Farewell,” I whispered into her rough bark, wrapped my arms around her great trunk. She had held me from the beginning and until the end.

I suppose that I had always sensed the location of the entrance to the Underworld. It was the one spot that I—and all of the forest inhabitants—evaded, as if by instinct. Now I stole away into the deepest center of the Immortals Forest, those dark thorny paths that I had always skirted, never stepped upon. They were overgrown and eerie, and wide-eyed animals stilled and watched me as if I were a ghost passing through.

The trail twisted and turned beneath gnarled branches that arched over my head, interlocked. I remembered laughing and running with the nymphs, and I remembered the hush that overtook us when we came within feet of these pathways, how we could not force ourselves to enter, could not bear to stay.

Now my heart thundered, and I felt a pushing, something invisible urging me to turn around, go back to my life, back to the light, but I walked on, stubborn and one-minded. The trees around me grew closer and older, and woody vines tripped me at every opportunity.

Gradually, the air began to change. There was a feeling of held breath, of looming greatness, and the tightly laced brambles gave way to an expansive clearing.

I paused.

The surrounding trees cast shadows that flickered over the hard-packed earth, and there, on the far side… As the sun slipped away from the day, and the first star stole into the sky, I saw it: a stony cavity leading down into darkness, wide enough for a chariot and pair of horses. The columns were old, older than I could understand, and the soft gray rock that formed the dome was carved with likenesses of men and gods from the beginning of the world.
The beginning of everything.
A soft gust of chilled air wended its way out of the opening and teased at my hair, brushed cool fingers over my face. Beckoning me, it seemed.

My eyes moved as if spellbound to the single pomegranate tree thriving alongside the entrance, or, more truly, as part of the entrance itself. The roots and rocks twined together, inseparable, and—as anxiety over my impending descent squeezed my heart and weakened my knees—I reached up and held onto the tree for support.

My fingers stroked the smooth red curve of a fruit. I could tell with a touch that it was ripe, and I tugged it from its branch, held it in my palm, cherishing
its
comforting weight. It was of my mother’s kingdom, yes, but it was of mine, too. And though I had left everything else behind, I tied the pomegranate into a fold of my tunic—food for the journey, I reasoned with myself, but of course I had no need for food. I was simply afraid, and I wanted something I could hold, smell, taste that would remind me of the earth, of growing things, of light. Light makes a pomegranate. I needed to carry some of that light with me, even as I turned my back on it and chose the darkness.

I crossed one foot over the threshold between above and below. There was a vastness before me, and the air made me shiver, but I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. The skin prickled at the back of my neck, and—one hand on the cool rock of the entrance—I moved forward, picked up my slow, cautious pace to something a bit faster and stepped down, down, down.

Time passed—how much I could not say—and I was lulled into a thoughtless state, my steady advance as involuntary as my heartbeat. I could see, though just barely. All was cold and quiet until, suddenly, a soft sound startled me. Like sandal on stone. I waited in the darkness, squinting. A shadowy, person-shaped form detached itself from the gloom, swept closer,
evolved
into the glimmering, shimmering silhouette of a young man with one hand grazing the cool wall.

Hermes. Somehow, he illuminated the space around us with a gentle glow.

“You began without me,” he remarked wryly, picking bits of leaves from his tunic. “They never begin without me.”

I flinched. “Why are you here?” Fear climbed and clung to my bones.
Another god in this forsaken place?
Had Zeus sent him? It seemed unlikely, but—

 “Don’t be foolish.” Hermes tapped my forehead and raised a brow. “Hades asked me to fetch you. I’m here to take you to the Underworld.”

 “I don’t need to be taken. I’m already going.” I sounded braver than I felt, and his flashing eyes softened.

“Allow me to accompany you, then, Persephone.” He could sense my fear, my worry, I was sure. He offered his arm, and I took it with some relief. I was grateful for his presence. The rigidity of my spine eased, and I exhaled a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

Hermes winked at me and pointed a finger at his feet. His sandals sprouted wings—white as doves—and he grabbed me about my waist and hoisted me onto his hip as if I were a child, and we
flew
. My vision warped and flickered. My stomach fell away within me, and I gasped and closed my eyes, buried my face in his shoulder. He laughed. “You’re quite safe, I assure you.”

And then…only an instant later—

 “You can let go,” Hermes said, still laughing. I detached my limbs from his body, found solid ground beneath my feet and opened my eyes.

We stood in a narrow cave brightened by wall torches that burned with strange green fire. The space before us stretched away to a pinprick of black; it seemed never-ending. I began to wonder how deep down we
were,
and the weight of the earth—my earth—seemed to press upon my shoulders, my head. I felt suffocated, so removed from the wide-open spaces and forever sky of my forest. After a few desperate gulps of air, I placed a hand over my heart, willed its beat to steady.

Hermes stamped his feet, and the little wings folded back.

 “Are we here?” I asked him. “Is this the Underworld?”

 
“Almost.”
He stretched, hands overhead, and then bent forward, shaking out his arms. “I showed off,” he confessed, grinning. “It normally takes longer to get here. But you were nervous, and I didn’t want to prolong your journey.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

“It was the least I could do.” He smiled at me for a moment. “You’ve done well, Persephone. And you’re nearly there.”

“Where are we now?”

He gestured widely. “This is the hall that will take you to the gateway that will take you to the river that will take you to the Underworld.” He nodded toward the endless corridor.
“Ever forward.
You can’t miss it.”

We began to walk together, and I counted torches to the rhythm of our sandals scuffing stone. I gave up at two-thousand-forty-three, and we seemed no nearer to…anything.

“I can only take you as far as the gateway,” Hermes finally murmured beside me.

 “How far is the gateway?”

He pointed.

My face was a handbreadth from a dark metal gate. It hadn’t been there a moment ago, I was certain. The sharp-tipped rails were draped in a moss I had never encountered before; it
glowed
green beneath the torchlight. I touched the iron, hesitant, and it burned my skin, but the gate opened, swinging outward without a
creak
.

The air here smelled of shadowed water, of forgotten things.
Of Hades.

“Well, always nice to see you, Persephone—good luck.” Hermes was turning to leave, and I gripped his arm automatically, so tightly he winced.

“Please don’t leave me, Hermes,” I whispered. “Please.”

 “You know, you’re very pretty when you pout.” He was floating above the ground, winged sandals fluttering, and he bent forward to brush a kiss on my cheek. “You must enter the Underworld alone, Persephone. A symbolic journey, if you will.”

 “But I’m afraid.”

He wriggled out of my grasp, drifted down the corridor, the planes of his face shimmering in the ghostly green light.

 “Of course you’re afraid,” his words echoed around me. “This would not be so precious if it came without cost.”

 “Hermes!”

He disappeared.

I was alone, at the beginning of the Underworld.

I waited.

I don’t know why I waited, but I waited—waited for him to come back, to say he had only been teasing me, that of course he would guide me right to Hades’ palace—or cave, or whatever sort of abode she dwelled in down here. My faltering bravado had vanished along with my half-brother.

He didn’t come back, and at last I felt foolish, just standing there, waiting to be saved.

I bit my lip, turned, and I stepped through the gateway, stepped from rock to more rock, and nothing looked different, but the pull of air was stronger now, cold and luring. It wound round my legs like rope, and I obeyed its tugging, impatient to be done, to be
there
, to see Hades. Soon enough, I began to run.

There was nothing but the unending passage and the cool wind, the green fire, the hard earth under my sore feet. I stopped once or twice, pounded my palms against the craggy walls in frustration, but I didn’t consider turning back. If this cave went on forever, I would walk forever.

Then I smelled water.

I almost slipped into the liquid blackness roiling and boiling and licking at my feet, but somehow I caught myself, gripping the edge of the wall with white-knuckled hands.
Before me stretched a wide river.
I could just make out the shifting waters and, above it all, an unending nothingness of black.

To enter the land of the dead, you must cross the river Styx. I knew this, had heard mention of it here and there, but had never given the mortals’ customs concerning death much thought. There were stories of a mysterious boatman,
Charon
, who exchanged safe passage over the river for golden coins. I had no coins, nothing precious. I felt a rising panic; I would not be able to cross. I would be trapped here at the edge, stuck between two worlds.
Nowhere.

Whispers.
Distant, hollow whispers.
They rose gradually, hushed at first, but soon enough my ears were swept up in a crescendo. The noise surrounded me like the wind, and I was buffeted back and forth by the tiny urgent words. When the last syllables echoed, echoed, faded, and were gone, I felt their absence, feared the silence, and shivered, stealing backward from the lapping water.

He poled across the river on a broken barge that should have sunk but didn’t. I couldn’t see him, not really: his appearance kept shifting, and one moment he was an old man with a beard, the next a skeleton with bits of flesh dangling between his ribs, the next a small, sad child.

“Welcome to the Underworld,”
came
the whispers, as before, and I realized they were made up of hundreds, thousands of different voices coalesced into one. He/she/it—
Charon
—held out to me a skin-tangled hand.
“Coin for passage.”

I recoiled. This was horrible, more horrible than I could have ever imagined. My heart seemed to have stopped beating. My mouth was dry, my tongue useless. I coughed and stuttered, “I have no coin. But Hades invited—”

 “It matters not why you are here, only that you are.” There was amusement in the lazy susurration. “You must pay me, or you cannot cross.”

 “What can I give you? What will you take?”

 “From one dead beggar, I took an eye.” And within the maelstrom of flesh and bone, I found a single blue eye staring out at me, glistening. “From another, I took a heart.” I heard the heart beat, too slowly. “What part of your flesh, Persephone, would you offer me that I do not already have in multiples?”

I despaired, thought wildly. My hands pressed against my collarbones, grazed my neck, gathered up fistfuls of night-black hair.

 “Will you take this?” The hair pooled in my palms, its bluish sheen shifting so that the light from the torches behind me slid like green oil over its surface. The floating blue eye ogled me, watched as I offered up my hair to the ferryman of the dead.

 
“Done.”
It was quick, the cut, though not painless. I touched a hand to my cheek and felt blood gather along the thin slice
Charon
had made with his blade. He held my fallen locks in one hand, and the whispers rose again, grew louder now, like wails, or keening, but higher, uniting in a single piercing moan. I felt naked, cold, but I stepped away from the earth and down into the boat, and
Charon
poled into the dark waters.

Sometimes I caught a glimpse of my hair in
Charon’s
ever-changing, pieced-together body as he navigated the river. But the
sight made me feel
sick and dizzy, so I looked away, up into the black or down into the water. It was only hair; it would grow back, must grow back, though I didn’t know for certain that it would. It had never been cut before.

I remembered Hermes’ words about the cost of choice and realized I had made my first payment.

The barge did not glide smoothly. We collided with things that made the creaking boards bump together and jar my feet. The sound was wet, what we hit solid. I saw faces beneath the water, hands reaching out, as if pleading: drowned souls, bodies in the waves. I closed my eyes, rubbed at my skin to warm it.

When we neared land, I scrabbled out of the boat and up onto the rocky bank.
Charon
,
whisperless
, turned from me and poled off, back into the blackness and the far end of the shore. I stood trembling, watched him fade away. Once my nerves had calmed, my heart steadied, I turned my head to face fully my destination, the kingdom of the dead.

It stretched, flat, bare earth, as far as my eyes could see. Despite the torches, there was blackness above and all around me, and in the distance loomed a great spindly structure, a gathering of white towers and keeps and tall, wide walkways, lashed together as if with plans drawn from a mad architect’s dream. The palace at Olympus was something the mortals had imagined for us, made real with their beliefs. This was a creation no mere mortal could conjure, so chaotic that my eyes ached when they traced its maze of bridges and stairs. The towers were tall, narrow, leaning. Was it all made of marble? It listed and seemed to hunch, like a crippled animal. This broken-down thing must be Hades’ home, the palace of the Underworld.

I hesitated, afraid.

Across the dark plain came a quiet avalanche of voices—whispers again, though less distressing than
Charon’s
cobbled-together tongue. I wrapped my arms about myself, chilled to the bone, and forced my legs to move away from the water, toward the white palace and, I hoped, Hades. My skin prickled with
goosebumps
; a shudder raced up and down my back, as if someone invisible stroked the spokes of my spine. I needed to finish this. I needed to rest. Tense and frightened as I was, listening to dislocated voices, I feared I was in danger of losing my sanity. “Almost there,” I spoke softly to myself, and I hurried onward.

The palace was pure white marble, and, as I neared it, I saw the cracks, so many cracks. One of the smaller towers had fallen and crumbled, now a jagged, sad path of broken marble on the ground. I edged around its sharp pieces, crouched to pick up in my hand a cool, soft shard that disintegrated to dust when I squeezed it. Everything here, even the stone, was dying or dead. I felt the dead all around me, felt their eyes watching me, heard their voices speaking of me. But I didn’t see any of them, not yet, and I was glad for it. I crawled through a tunnel in the broken tower and found myself before a staircase leading to the doorway of the palace.

If I had assumed Hades would meet me at the entrance, greet me, usher me in with a smile and a bow, I was mistaken. No one was there. I paused at the threshold, uncertain, heart beating faster than a hummingbird’s wings.

“Hades?”
I called out, cursing myself when my voice shook. I took deep breaths, reminded myself that I had completed my quest, had done what no other god before me had dared to do. I was afraid, but I was here, free of Zeus, and that was—had to be—enough.

“Hades?
Are you here?” I tried again, mustering up the courage to shout. My voice echoed back to me in mockery of a reply:
are you here, are you here,
are
you here…

 “All right, then,” I whispered, and I walked uninvited into the palace of the Underworld.

The hallways twisted and looped around like the tunnels of a rabbit’s warren. I thought I was heading in one direction only to find myself veering in a great curve, until I’d made a circle and returned to the beginning again. It was maddening, but I didn’t have the strength to be angry. I kept one hand on the marble wall and walked up and down, around and around, hoping that I would find Hades, worried that I would find something horrifying.

When I neared one bend in the corridor, I heard music, and I paused to listen. It was a soft melody from strings, soothing; it drew me forward. I peered around the corner into the open doorway of a large room.

She was dressed in black, all black, and in the fashion of a mortal man. Her feet were bare on the stone-tiled floor, and she’d drawn her hair back into a twist behind her shoulders. She didn’t notice me; she was moving in gentle arcs around the room. Dancing, I realized, as I admired her careful gestures and gazed, hypnotized, at the cloud of light she held and whirled and tossed: it separated and coalesced, changing form from a hoop to an orb to a shower of light, flickering over the shadows in the darkened space. And the music—it came from everywhere and nowhere. I felt it in the floor, the walls, inside of myself.

I drew in a quick breath—perhaps I gasped—and then there was silence, and she stood frozen, mid-turn, looking straight into my eyes, lips parted in an expression of surprise. Surprised that I was there, I assumed, spying around corners in the tilting palace of her deep, dark kingdom.

“Hello,” I whispered, and I almost laughed, the word sounded so ordinary and out of place. My legs were shaking, but I held her stare and half-smiled. “I’ve come.”

“So you have,” Hades replied, straightening. With a flicker of her fingers, the cloud of light winked out. She stood still for a long moment, and then, haltingly—as if uncertain—she held out her arms to me, opened them wide.

It seemed like a dream, all of it—my descent, the horrors of the Styx, Hades’ light dance. But my heart was pounding so hard that I heard it as well as felt it, and my tunic was damp and stained, and my hair… I pressed what little remained of it against my neck, shamed suddenly to stand before the goddess of the Underworld in such disarray.

But I could bear it no longer, and I ran across the room to her, buried my face in her shoulder. I did not sob, did not weep, though I wanted to, could feel my lingering strength pool out from the soles of my feet onto the cracked marble floor. I pressed my mouth to her neck, against the dark fabric of her garment, and I breathed her in.

She held me, and it was not a warm embrace, but it was an embrace, nevertheless. When I loosened my grip on her, she backed away, rested her hands on my shoulders at arms’ length, and looked me over.

 “You chose this,” she said simply, and I nodded. She drew me near again, though gingerly, as if she did not know how to comfort but wished to try. My ear pillowed against her breast, I listened to her heartbeat, and its rhythm reminded me of a song I knew.

“Hermes brought you?” she asked, arching back to catch my gaze.

 “Yes.” And then, because I needed to tell her, needed to explain: “Zeus meant to take me with him to Olympus.”

 “I see.” Shock first, and something akin to anger, stirred the flat pools of her eyes. “Well, he won’t have you now.”

 “No, he won’t.” I shivered.

 “Come with me.”

Hades took my hand purposefully and led me down a series of long, dark hallways. I tried to remember our turnings but soon gave up, confused and lost, grateful for Hades’ sense of direction. Finally, she stopped before a doorway, and beyond the doorway, there was a small room with a smaller bed and a single oil lamp.

 “Sleep,” she said, soft and low. “You’re safe.”

Safe.

I closed my eyes to savor the word and cherished the sensation of Hades’ steady presence beside me. “I can scarcely believe I’m here,” I whispered. “I’m truly here, inside the earth.
With you.”

 “Sleep now, Persephone,” she intoned, as if the words were a spell, and she touched my arm so gently, I felt a tear sting my eye.

 “Good night,” I whispered, and her skin left my
skin,
and I knew without looking that I was golden, golden all over, and then she left, every part of her: her scent, her eyes, her voice like music from another world. I lay down on the bed and stared up at the darkness.

My head and heart were full, but my body was exhausted, and within moments, I fell fast asleep.

Four: Underworld