Harvest Moon (11 page)

But this would turn things upside down here—and while she had been breaking heads down in Tartarus, she had gotten the measure of the things that were im
prisoned down there. It was only Hades's strength, backed by The Tradition, that kept them chained. If she did
anything
that muddled The Tradition or weakened Hades—

Kronos and the Titans would break free, and bring with them an unpleasantly large number of monsters. The battle that followed would ravage this land, and if Kronos won, she didn't think he would care to rule over blighted Olympia. He and the others would look elsewhere.

She was
not
going to have that on her conscience.

Finally she nodded decisively. “I like this plan of yours, death god. Summon your mate, and she and I will go to look at this poor little tree. I will see what I can make of it.”

What she did
not
say aloud—because Lily, in educating her and Leo about how The Tradition worked, had been very emphatic that when you had an edge over The Tradition, it was wise not to voice any part of that edge out loud—was that it was not as absurd for her to tend a plant as it might appear to be on the surface of things. Yes, she was a minor goddess whose main tasks had been to fetch and entertain the worthy dead. Yes, she was, indeed, better suited to wielding her sword than figuring out why a plant would not bear fruit to ripeness.

But despite that, her father Wotan's wife was the rather formidable Fricka, and despite that she had been known to refer to Fricka as “mother,” in actual fact, her mother—as all of the Valkyria—was Erda, Goddess of the Earth. And unless Bru was dreadfully mistaken, she had the feeling that there was more than a little of her mother's power in her.

Certainly Bru was reasonably acquainted with the
husbandry of a land where there was no goddess meddling with the passing of the seasons, and where it took sweat and hard work to wrest food from the ground. Poor Persephone had likely never even seen a plow in action, much less gotten any notion of what a plant needed; Bru might not have been a patron goddess of farm holders, but she had watched them at work and admired their skill. Maybe farmers in the north didn't get carried off to Vallahalia when they died—but without them, the warriors wouldn't have the strength to fight, and certainly there would be no mead or beer in the festive drinking horns. Bru paid more attention to some of these small things than her father did, and often rewarded some of these fellows with spoils from the battlefield so that they could make themselves new tools and plows out of them.

“Excellent!” Hades beamed. “If you would wait here, I shall find her and send her to you.”

Bru was not loath to take a seat on one of Hades's fine, comfortable couches that were placed about the courtyard. She would have expected stone, but instead, there were things more suited to indoors rather than out. Then again, there was no weather here. She rather liked the style of this place. If she and Leo ever were to settle down, she thought she'd get some furnishings made in this measure for their Hall.

Persephone looked both dubious and hopeful when she came out of the great palace to join Bru in the mist-wreathed courtyard. “I hope this Elysium of yours is more pleasant than Tartarus,” Bru told her by way of preamble as she stood up to greet the young Olympian. “While I enjoyed thumping skulls, I didn't enjoy doing
so in a pit so dank and dark it seemed as if night itself would have found itself groping in the darkness.”

“I have not been there—” Persephone said doubtfully.

Bru shook her head. “Trust me, you won't miss anything if you don't go down there. Your mate asked me to explain to some of his old enemies just how ill advised their attempts to escape were, so admittedly, I was in the deepest part, where the monsters and the creatures called Titans are, but in a way, the region where mortals are punished is just as bad.” She motioned to Persephone to take the lead, and the pretty little creature nodded and struck off in a purposeful manner. The girl had become very much a woman over the last several—weeks? At least. Maybe months. It was hard to tell time down here, when there was no day or night, and she slept when she was exhausted enough that even the ache of being without Leo was dulled. No matter how long it had been, that ache had not lessened in the least, and only the prospect of seeing him made as “immortal” as herself could have allowed her to endure it. “The darkness is bad enough, but the despair would be enough to make the Fenris-wolf howl with grief.” That despair had come close to infecting her. She'd only kept it away by giving vent to a full-on rage. Tartarus was a dangerous place for someone in her position.

She was glad that Persephone knew where to go; within moments of leaving the courtyard, the two of them had been engulfed in mist. There did seem to be some sort of path there, though; a bit of moss winding through those ever-present white lilies.

Persephone shivered, as a dark shadow loomed ahead of them, and Bru wondered what was casting it. “I have
enough despair of my own,” she replied. “I don't need to seek any more out. Here we are.”

What Bru had thought was a shadow turned out to be a sheer cliff face; in the midst of the rock was a plain wooden door with a simple bronze handle.

“This leads to the Fields of Elysium,” Persephone explained. “It's where the worthy dead go.”

Bru blinked as she took that in, then frowned. “Oh, no. You mean Heroes, don't you?” She sighed. “Which means we'll be wading through a sea of hearty bone-heads who think they have the right to grab anything that takes their fancy.”

Persephone paused with one hand on the door. “Not…entirely. You have to be
interesting
to go to the Elysian Fields, not just heroic. There are a great many philosophers there. Rhadamanthus says that there are a few women, poets mostly, though I have never seen them. But…yes, some of the men are quite rude.”

Bru smirked as she remembered that she was not subject to the same rules here that governed what she could do in Vallahalia. “Oh,” she said with a certain relish. “I certainly do
hope
so.”

Persephone gave her an odd look, then shrugged, and opened the door.

 

The bright light of Elysium was always a little bit of a shock after the mist of the Fields of Asphodel. As Persephone let her eyes adjust to the light, the warrior-goddess stared about her with an air of relief. “If I had known this place was here, I'd have been less testy,” she told Persephone. “I've been going half mad for a bit of sun.”

“It's not a real sun,” Persephone felt impelled to point
out. “It doesn't move. When night comes, it just winks out.”

“Yes, but there's real light here, and none of that confounded mist.” The woman stretched her arms up toward the sky, as if she was reveling in the bright air. “If I'd known your tree was in a place like this, I'd have come
offering
to help instead of you having to ask. Speaking of which, where is your tree?”

“It's a long walk,” Persephone began, apologetically.

“Not for me,” the woman replied with a grin. “We Valkyria are a sturdy lot. Lead on. And you might as well call me Bru. I might still want to thump that numbskull Thanatos, but you and your mate have been doing your best for me, and I appreciate it.”

Persephone winced a little as she led the way to her pathetic little trees. “If it wasn't for me, you wouldn't be stuck here. I know I would be going half mad if I'd been taken from Hades. I don't know how you stand it.”

“It hasn't been good. Believe me, I have been well employed taking out my frustrations in Tartarus,” Bru said darkly. “I have to get fighting mad to keep from blubbering like a puling infant. Still…I
am
getting the chance to earn immortality for Leo, and that in the end is going to be worth all of this.”

Persephone decided not to say anything about her mother being the only person who knew how to bestow true immortality. After all, there was no telling how Demeter would regard these two when it was all over. She might well decide to go along with the decision to reward them.

Still…better make sure that no one but she and Hades knew Bru was helping him to keep Persephone here.
The warrior had been badly treated, and she deserved to get the reward she wanted.

As they followed the path to the half-barren spot where the stunted trees were, they began to collect quite a crowd. Word spread quickly that a woman who was
not
Persephone had turned up in Persephone's company, and predictably, every Hero in Elysium had to come and have a gawk.

It quickly became evident that not all of them were inclined to restrict themselves to a gawk.

At first they limited themselves to posing and posturing. When Bru ignored that, they seemed to take it as a challenge, and called out to her, lewd comments that quickly went far beyond mere “suggestions” of what she could expect from an hour or so in their company. Persephone was soon scarlet with embarrassment, but Bru continued to act as if she couldn't even hear them.

But then one of them got bold enough to make a grab for her.

Persephone didn't even see what happened. One moment, the overly muscled oaf was reaching for her arm. The next, he was on the grass, gasping in pain. Persephone stopped cold, staring. So did the others. Bru looked down at her victim dispassionately.

“In my land,” she said without any inflection at all, nor any sign of even minor annoyance, “the man who tries to force himself on a woman counts himself lucky to get off with only
temporary
pain. I suggest that you lot go back to what you were doing, and leave me and Hades's wife to get on with our work.”

The stunned silence, punctuated only by the whimpers of the “hero” curled in a ball on the ground, was broken by the sound of solitary applause.

Persephone looked in the direction it was coming from, and spotted Rhadamanthus standing at the top of a bit of slope, looking down on the path.

“Well said, barbarian,” he called out. “You've saved me from having to chastise these fellows, and possibly even banish one or two for being
ordinary.
There's certainly nothing
worthy
about behaving like he-goats in season. You are acting worse than centaurs who've gotten into the wine. Even satyrs have more sense than you lot are showing right now.”

The expressions on the faces of the men surrounding the two women were as varied as the men themselves. Chagrin, guilt, annoyance and alarm predominated. Alarm, because of Rhadamanthus's threat—no one wanted to be banished to the Fields of Asphodel, or worse, Tartarus.

The annoyance, of course, was because, like rude boys, they had been caught.

But the expressions directed toward Bru were all alike—respect. Wary respect. Maybe a touch of fear. Aside from Athena, Persephone had never heard of any female warriors in Olympia, and a woman who looked like Bru and fought like a she-cat crossed with a snake was a new thing to these shades.

Well. Rhadamanthus definitely had the situation well in hand, so Persephone decided to let him deal with it. After all, he was their “king,” and they were his subjects. She turned back up the path and struck out again, Bru following. As soon as they were out of earshot, she turned to her companion.

“Was that true?” she asked. It seemed incredible; even in relatively idyllic Olympia, even her mother could fall prey to the whim and will of a more power
ful male god. And had. “Are women really treated with such respect where you come from? Are they all taught to fight like that?”

“No, actually,” came the cheerful reply. “I was lying through my teeth. But now they'll think twice about giving me anything other than a polite greeting. I intend to come here on my own for some sun every day, and I
don't
feel like having to run a gauntlet every time I do so. How far are we now?”

“Not far,” Persephone assured her, and pointed up to the cleft they were heading toward. “See that? It's on the other side.”

Bru quickened her pace, until Persephone had to run to keep up with her. They came out into the sad little clear area with Bru well ahead; Persephone caught up to see her looking at the poor little trees thoughtfully.

With despair, Persephone saw that yet another of the fruits had withered and fallen from the branch.

“I just don't know what I can be doing wrong!” she cried. “I water them, I tend them, there are no insects here to trouble them, and I even found scrapings of bird dung to feed them with!”

“Huh,” Bru said after a moment. “I'll be damned. I know just what your problem is.”

Persephone stared at her.

“Or actually, two problems, but the ground is both of them.” Bru knelt down, pulled a little knife out of the sheath at her belt and prodded at the ground beneath the tree. “Look at it! Hard as flint. You're watering the poor things, yes, but the water just runs away. And the other problem is there's no…sustenance in this ground.” She chuckled mirthlessly. “There's
one
way to provide it, but that's a bit nasty, and there is a danger of damag
ing the tree by giving it too much of a good thing, so I think I'll go around to the kitchen—I know you have a kitchen—and claim some vegetable scraps. Meanwhile, you and I have some digging to do. This ground has to be cultivated and carefully, so as not to damage the roots.” She examined the last three fruits carefully. “It's going to be touch-and-go, but I think we can count on getting you one all the way to ripe.”

Persephone almost danced with joy.

By the time Bru declared the ground “fit,” however, she was aching with exhaustion—not just physical exhaustion either. Both of them had concentrated all their will on the tree, coaxing it to flourish, as they had worked. Persephone was familiar enough with this sort of thing; this was how she had managed to save three of the six fruits in the first place. It was very hard work, and by the time they were done, they were both drained physically, mentally and magically.