Alcestis (20 page)

I shook my head. I couldn’t see what he had described, but I knew that his words were true. Persephone contained those things. She’d ruined me with her envenomed touch. I couldn’t blame her for acting as her nature required. I could’ve resisted her; I could’ve fought. But I didn’t want to fight. I would have swallowed poison from her mouth to feel the slickness of her lips once more.

“Unfair,” he said, and I started at the sound of my own thoughts coming from his lips. “She ought not to destroy you.”

“I cannot be destroyed,” I said softly, growing frightened. “I am living in the world of the dead.”

“That is why—,” he began, then stopped, shook his head and laughed, a scoured sound. “I will leave you here. You know that she will find you.”

I knew. But I thanked him and took his hand when he offered it and stepped down to the ground with a lightness I had not previously felt. It was the sort of lightness I recalled from my wedding day, a dizzy frothing like a swirl of foaming water closing over my head. The world for me was ending, and a new world coming, as it had when I left my father’s house and wed. She would find me and Hades would not stop her.

Hades looked down at me once more from the chariot, swiveling as he turned the horses around, then stopped them again. “You will be punished enough,” he said, so quietly that the slow lapping of the river Lethe nearly drowned his words. The horses stirred uneasily in their harnesses, their heavy black bodies coiling with lifelike distress.

Hades slapped the reins down on the horses’ rumps. They bolted, rattling the chariot wheels, which were not made to shake, against the hard surface of the road. Shades stared as the chariot flew by; they were probably used to seeing the chariot, but I doubted they had ever seen it shudder as if it might break apart. As if Hades himself might break apart.

I too was staring, almost against my will, as I had done so many things in the underworld. I watched the chariot shrink, Hades dark and the horses darker, rounding the curve that would lead them back to the palace. Even he could not resist her.

As the chariot passed out of sight, a paler figure appeared, coming slowly up the road.

Persephone? My belly clenched. Could she have come to find me already, walking on foot as a mortal would? That would be her kind of penance, misdirected and irrelevant. But the figure was not stalk slender, upright, or lovely. It was crooked and hunched; it shuffled.

So came Tiresias, leaning on his staff, to usher me into my next new world.

16

I DIDN’T KNOW then what he wanted, but I knew he sought me. Another godlike thought, full of my own importance. As it happened, I was right. He slowed as I ran to meet him and lifted his ugly gray head in greeting. His wrinkles and radiance were unchanged since I’d last seen him. I tried to guess what images studded the cloud hanging invisibly over his slumped shoulders: visions of future life, scenes yet unplayed? Murder and doom?

Worry made me brusque, and I didn’t welcome him by name, only asked, “What have you to tell me now?”

“Lady Alcestis,” the old seer said. Though I knew it unlikely, he seemed short of breath. “The end of the journey.”

“Yes, you have found me,” I said. “What news, Grandsire?”

His blank eyes rolled toward me and I stepped back just slightly, startled. I had the sudden sense that he knew everything I’d done with Persephone, each word and touch and thought, that he knew everything to come, and that it mattered little to him except as a cause of frustration.

Tiresias leaned toward me, gripping his staff, tilting perilously. He said, “When two leaves fall together, one must still land on the bottom.”

“My sister,” I said, my worry receding a bit. His voice was kind. I convinced myself that he must care for my welfare, or he would not have come to speak to me again. “I’m waiting for her here. Do you know where she’s fallen?”

“It is not the dirt that matters, but the seed. The growth,” he said.

I looked to the asphodel across the road. “Am I to seek her in the field?”

He shook his head fiercely. “No. The roots do not grow.”

“I shouldn’t seek her in the field.” Again his head shook. “All right. I shall not stray. I shall wait for her here. But that’s what I intended. There was no need for you to come, Grandsire.” I put my hands out toward him, looking around for some rock I could usher him toward, some place where he could rest.

Tiresias turned his head toward the river. “No,” he said clearly.

The dread returned. I felt it first in my hands—my palms tingled and then went numb—then in my feet and calves, as if a coat of ice or a slick of molten bronze were forming on the inner surface of my skin. The dread seized my stomach and choked my throat.

“You came to tell me something,” I said, and each word felt as if it were covered in burrs.

He turned his blind eyes to me again. He blinked slowly, as if he were as reluctant to speak as I was to hear him. As if he could forestall whatever he saw by forcing me to wait.

“Say it,” I told him. “Say it now.”

“You will not like,” he ground out, and had to pause to collect himself. “You will not—”

“Slowly, old man, if you must,” I said, trying to keep my breath even. “I listen.”

“What you find,” he said. “You will not like it.”

The look he wore was horrible. I screwed my eyes shut. Better to see darkness than to see that I was pitied by a shade. Better to think my fear might be unjustified. Better to think of Persephone—or Hippothoe—

My eyes opened. “Go on,” I said.

“The lions are tamed and spread beneath the hero’s feet. When the horses stamp their feet in the stable, their hooves ring on rock.”

“The lions? There are no lions here. What hero?”

“The man with poisoned blood. The snake in the vein. The trophy borne up. Betrayed, but forgiving. There is too much to see,” he said, suddenly angry, his mouth working as if he tasted something bitter. “Too much. The way is blocked. I cannot say.”

“I do not understand,” I said. “I am trying. But I don’t understand. Is there anything you can say? Any piece you can give me? I’ll take anything.”

Tiresias was rocking now, swaying from toe to heel, the end of his staff boring a hole in the soil.

“Please, Grandsire,” I whispered. “There must be something.”

He stopped swaying abruptly enough that I thought he might topple. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” But then he fell silent again, and I despaired of ever knowing what he meant. Out of habit, I turned to look at the shades now lining the banks of the Lethe—I was so close to knowledge. How strange it would be if I found her now; I had grown used to looking. But still I had to look.

Tiresias’s mouth hung open and his eyes had closed, their milk swirls hidden. He looked like an old man drifting to sleep in late afternoon. I will learn nothing here, I thought, and my gut constricted in rage.

But as I turned away from him, the old seer’s eyelids snapped open, and his blurry stare caught me.

“He—is coming—for you,” he said in a strangled growl, and his hand fell away from his staff. I moved to catch him before I remembered that my arms would pass through him, that I could not hold him up. He fell away from my grasp and crumpled to the ground like a folding cloud. His eyes roved in his head, twisting as if he would see, somehow, if only he found the right place to look.

I knelt beside him, grit pressing against my knees through my thin shift. “Who, Grandsire? Who comes here?”

His chest heaved as if with mortal breath. He wheezed, “I cannot. It is—”

“You must tell me. Please, you must.”

“The hero,” he said. Then, gusting against my cheek like a real breath: “Heracles.”

He went limp; had he been alive, I would’ve said that he had fainted, his senses taken by the gods. But I think he was simply drained, nothing left, all his tiny store of energy used in fighting to speak.

I tried to touch him, tried to shake him, but my fingers closed on chilly air.

“Tiresias,” I said, “Tiresias, Grandsire.” My voice came out flat, smooth, like the road that led to the palace. He didn’t respond, and after a long moment I stood, wiping my hands on my thighs mechanically. Heracles? My husband’s friend? He was hardly a hero. I’d seen him drunk and drooling on the floor of our hall, and though I could imagine him in battle, I could also imagine him stumbling over his own huge feet when the charge was called. And yet he was loyal and senseless and strong. If any mortal could cross the barrier between the world above and the underworld, it would be Heracles, favored child of Zeus.

There was only one reason for a mortal hero to venture into the underworld: to retrieve what had been taken. I’d been taken. He was coming for me, Tiresias had said. Coming to take me back. I felt no joy at this, no bursting of brightness in my chest. I felt bronze heavy and cold and I couldn’t think. Heracles. Here. To take me back. To take me from her.

The ferryman will refuse him passage, I told myself. He’ll drown in the river Styx, fall face-first into the marsh. If he does cross, the hound at the gate will catch him, sink its teeth into his thighs, herd him back to the boats. He’ll lose his way among the asphodel flowers and find himself in Elysium, and he will never wish to leave.

I will tell him, I thought, that I do not wish to leave.

I stood over the fallen seer and watched the shades meandering in their pathless ways, unaware. The happy dead, the forgetful dead, dripping with Lethe water. For the first time, I looked to the river with a kind of desperate hope. Heracles wouldn’t want to return me to Admetus a blank-faced and blank-minded wanderer; if I drank from the Lethe, he might leave me. But I wouldn’t remember why I had drunk—I wouldn’t be able to argue my case, or to recall why I wanted to stay. I would forget even the taste of her skin. I would never find my sister.

“He cannot have me,” I said aloud. “I will stay. There is nothing for me in life.”

“Nothing,” mumbled Tiresias from where he lay. “The circle on the ground. The grip.” His eyes were closed, and he spoke as an idol speaks, his mouth hardly moving.

I bent again, and asked, “How long before he comes?”

“How long?” the seer echoed. “How long?” He repeated the question again and again, chanting it like a prayer, until the words ran down to senselessness. How long? It didn’t matter. Heracles was coming, had probably already left my husband’s house to make his awful journey, and I was to wait until he arrived and then allow myself to be led, docile, to the surface world.

I felt a chill on my ankle. Tiresias had struggled up enough to wrap his insubstantial hand around it, his fingers hovering over my skin, threatening to pass through me.

“Go,” he said in that broken growl, and released me, his arm falling back to the dirt.

Go
.

I ran, following the tracks of the chariot on the road. When I looked back over my shoulder, Tiresias still lay supine by the river, other shades gathering around him, staring down like the servants had stared at Hippothoe the night she died. I couldn’t stay with him—I had to get to the palace, to tell Persephone what I had learned and to beg her aid. Heracles wouldn’t listen to me if I pleaded with him to be left behind, but he would listen to a goddess. He’d listen when her voice rose up in echo after mine, when she told him that I was hers.

My feet pounded on the packed dirt. The road curved and I raced across the shallowest part of the curve, slipping on the crumbling bank. My hair flew around my face, bits of it sticking to my eyes and mouth and smacking against my sweaty neck. I was tiring when I saw the palace and the adamantine gate rise up before me. The chariot stood empty in front of the gate, the horses gone. One of its wheels sat crooked. I ran past it, touched the dark wood with my fingertips, touched the gate beyond it.

The gate chimed at my touch, like the sound of perfect blades striking. The tone rang in my ears as I pushed the doors open and ran through the entrance hall and toward the draped golden curtain. I heard nothing from the throne room, and I didn’t know what sort of scene I might burst in on—Persephone naked? Hades naked? The two of them sitting and smiling, playing at the dotage of an old king and queen? It didn’t matter. I needed them now, and I would see them.

The throne room was dim, the golden ball of light vanished and the room lit only by the gray seep from moving windows. No thrones, only the table—and there, the gods, sitting opposite me. Persephone had her hands in her lap as if she had been waiting; Hades sat beside her, his back straight and his eyes lowered to the empty surface of the table.

They looked up when I came in, observed my disordered shift and my sweat-stuck hair.

“Sit,” Persephone said. Her eyes were pink rimmed, the irises azure gray. She nodded to the bench on my side of the table, pulled back just far enough to allow me to slide in gracefully. But I wouldn’t sit. There was no time for a civilized discussion about Heracles’ arrival—there was no time at all.

“I have seen Tiresias,” I said. “He came to find me, to tell me that Heracles is coming.”

They watched me. Hades nodded. Persephone’s mouth trembled, I thought, but she did not speak.

“He is coming to take me. For my husband. He is my husband’s friend, and he comes here to take me away, back to the mortal world.” Persephone didn’t react, so I kept talking, waiting for her to speak and anguished by every moment that she remained silent. “He is a hero. He will come soon.”

“Yes,” Hades said. “He plans to wrestle death for you. It is a little sweet.”

All the air went out of me. “You know?” Persephone had cast her eyes down, and I wanted to dive across the table and yank her chin up, force her to look at me. “
You
knew?” I asked her, my voice sharp.

“Only just—,” she said faintly, but she was lying.

“You knew that he was coming, and that means you knew that I wouldn’t stay. You let me think I was dead when you knew I was not.”

“I was not sure,” she said, raising her face. Her cheeks were pale. “I did not know what the Fates would decide. They are capricious, Alcestis. They are not to be relied upon.”

“I relied upon you!” I cried. “I would curse you by the gods if you weren’t a god yourself.”

“Do not say such things—”

“Why not? Why did you not tell me of this?”

“I did not want to,” she said.

I stared at her. This girl-woman, this goddess. She sat watching me, slim and gilded and sharp as a blade, just as cruel as her husband had promised. I’d thought she must have been angling for some new destiny for me, some trick for the Fates, but I had been wrong. She did not want to, and so she did not.

“Sit down,” Hades said to me. He was leaning forward, elbows on the table. For a moment I saw him as that mass of rock, as if he’d tapped a finger against my temple and given me a god’s sight again. Then he was Hades, the husband, carefully not looking at his wife.

I wouldn’t have sat down if Persephone had ordered me, but Hades I obeyed. I went numbly to the bench and sat before them. “You will fight him,” I said to Hades. “When he comes to fight for me, you will defend me.”

“I will do what I must.”

My stomach sank. But what more could I demand? He was not my husband. If Persephone wouldn’t force him to help me, I could not either. But surely she would help me. She would keep me. She couldn’t have seduced me intending to let me go now.

“Then you’ll entrap him.” I turned to Persephone. “Show him Elysium. You would teach me to stay—teach him. Don’t let him take me.”

“Oh, I would not,” she said, her voice rich and sad. “Were it in my power to prevent.”

“You are a god. It must be in your power. He will listen to you, to both of you. Tell him that I do not want to leave. I don’t want to go back to the world of mortals. He came alone, he can return alone. You will not have to hurt him.”

“No,” Hades said.

“No, you will not hurt him? Or no, you will not help?”

“No,” he said again, “it is not in her power, nor is it in mine.”

I wished he had never shown me the world through a god’s sight, for I wanted to argue with him, to shout that he was wrong. But I couldn’t argue with what I knew to be true. Had he given me that burst of vision so I would be quiet and pliable now? When she kissed me, had she thought of kissing me farewell? They had both known Heracles would come for me; I could trust nothing they had said or done.

“Then I must leave with Heracles, for you will not save me.” I said it as much to punish Persephone as to hear their reactions. Hades nodded, and though I was expecting that nod, I choked on the breath I’d drawn. Persephone lifted her hand, reaching across the table as if to stroke my brow.