Twisted Winter (10 page)

The waters of Lethe are black. This is the river of forgetfulness. No mortal leaves the underworld without drinking from that river. Would they return to the wheel of birth and suffering if they recalled
how it must end? Who would willingly enter Hades?

At last we come to the river of hate: the Styx.

The ferryman is waiting. He expects nothing from me and receives nothing; we exchange no words or glances. I step into the boat and cold coins stamp themselves into the soles of my feet. The faces of kings lie blindly staring, tarnish creeping over their proud visages, an indistinguishable army of forgotten empires.

The water is flowing slowly and inevitably. The oar enters the water, the boat slides, the oar lifts and falls again. There are no lilies, only waving weeds, reaching up from below to seize and trap and tangle the unwary traveller. Strange that you must pay to enter a realm that is so loath to let you go.

On one side of the river the shore is empty, on the other multitudes of ghosts wander listlessly through the dead lands. In life they were heroes, their story one of action and adventure, the world shaped by the choices they made. But now they have come to the end of choices and decisions. The scent of sacrifices drifts to them from the living world, blood quickening briefly with remembered lusts and passions, the incense drifts past and the memories die.

This is the end all must come to. Is it worse to come to it from a life where you were the actor or one where you were acted on? For the heroes this is the ultimate dread. But when were their wives and daughters ever anything but lambs to be shepherded or sacrificed? No women wander in the wasteland. What fear can the loss of power hold for those who were ever powerless?

But what power do any of us have whose lives are determined by the actions of the High Gods? Compared to them all lesser beings are as mayflies. Heroes shine in their hour of glory. Kings stamp their face on the world. Demigods rise to notice for their deeds. But in the end everything falls beneath the sway of the three sons of the Titans: Zeus, Poseidon and Hades.

Between them they divided up the sky, the sea and the land of shades. Who received the greatest portion? All that is born must die.

The boat arrives on the far beach and I step on to the shore.

The sand is white and gritty, ground from bone. Larger bones are flotsam scattered across the beach: the spines of fish, the ribs of animals, the arm and
thigh bones of men. I walk through a cathedral arch of whalebone and am swallowed by the land of the dead.

The road is dusty and dry. The air is still.

Three roads converge at a crossroads. Hecate, the witch, curtsies to me. Three-faced, serpent-tongued, dressed in darkness. She bows to me, the Summer Girl, with baleful eyes and a jealous sneer.

Hecate is the goddess of boundaries and meetings. Perhaps I should have prayed to her as I was dragged across the line between life and death. Would she have answered my prayers, I wonder. Would she have fought for me as fiercely as Summer and Winter fought over me? My story ends in other people's choices. Half a daughter, half a wife. My boundary runs across the world like a scar.

I don't weep at the crossroads. Any tears I shed were lost in Acheron long ago. I don't wait for judgement. I have been judged and portioned.

The last road, the final road, leads to the Castle of Bone. Its ramparts loom before me. The phantoms that have padded and skirted behind me all this way resolve out of the gloom. To my left a monstrous three-headed hound paces alongside me. Its slavering jaws drip blood and foam and saliva, its hair bristles
like porcupine quills and fragments of flesh cling to its claws.

Cerberus turns his horrible heads towards me, alert for my command. I have no desire he can fulfil but I allow him to walk in my shadow as we approach the last gate of hell.

Skeletons bow down to me. Demons fold their wings. Horrors do me homage. I walk through their midst and they draw back. Here at the heart of darkness the only light comes from me. The glow of gold from my hair, silver from my skin, bronze from my dress: the currency that summer pays to winter.

The walls are stone and bone. The floors are bone and stone. The ceiling is a black void extending upwards to infinity. All is lifeless, dead, unchanging. Empty.

All but the orchard garden, a tangle of vines and trees, an oasis in the darkness: a grove of pomegranate trees. In the underworld, in the deadlands, this copse of greenery exists in mocking contrast to the bonegarden.

I reach out and my hand closes around a fruit, feeling the resistance as I twist it from its parent stem.
It is soft and warm in my hand, a small red sun in the dark land.

After my abduction the days lengthened into weeks, the weeks cast a long shadow into months and I began to fear that years might pass in that unchanging empty land. The Fates themselves had ruled that anyone who ate or drank in the underworld must remain there forever. When the minions of the deadlands brought me their delicacies I pressed my lips shut and shook my head.

Then the lord of the underworld brought me a pomegranate, my favourite fruit. A familiar taste and scent and touch, a little round world of my own.

What power these little globes hold. A woman eats a fruit and the world changes. Was it greed or did a serpent tempt her? One bite of the fruit, four seeds, and she is complicit in her own disaster.

When it was revealed that I had eaten those four pomegranate seeds, Zeus determined that I must spend a quarter of the year underground in payment. From then on I would not belong to myself but to my story: daughter of summer, bride of winter, a shuttle on the loom of fate.

My white teeth bite into the sweet flesh. What harm can come to me now? I could strip the orchard bare and gorge myself sick on pomegranates if I wished. I spit the seeds on to the cold earth.

I enter the Hall of Hades. It is majestic, overpowering, threatening. The hosts of hell draw back from the red ribbon of my pathway, sheathing their claws and fangs and mandibles, folding their wings and closing their carapaces, their seething snakes and barking dogs quieting as I walk among them.

I draw my hands through my hair and away fall the flowers, the dead leaves, ice crystals, spiderwebs, bone dust and pomegranate blossom. My summer gold hair cloaks me, my skin glows honey sweet in the halls of bleached bone, my eyes are the blue of a clear and endless sky.

The wine velvet carpet is soft beneath my feet as I approach the throne. Cerberus pads past me to lie down at his master's feet. The host does not dance or sing or cry out but they are celebrating their own rituals in their own fashion.

He is waiting for me. He has waited an eternity, a season, a portion of a year. The winter king, the lord
of the deadlands, the third son of the Titans. Hades. My husband.

His skin is pale as ashes, as dry as bone, as cold as ice. His body is a skeleton in a shroud of flesh – as is all that is mortal – a disguise for a god. He is clothed in shadow and smoke. His hair is raven black, his eyes are winter grey, his mouth is pale and bloodless.

Death claims all of us eventually. With black wings he stoops from the sky, lifts us from the earth and drags us away from home. Is it a sin to surrender when he will triumph either way? No one asked me my desires when they decided who would own me and how.

What if they asked me now? What would I say, what would I choose? No one ever does ask.

I think my mother is afraid to ask my about my life in the dead lands because she doesn't want to hear about the horror, the terror and the dread. She prefers pretence: a beautiful dream is better than an ugly reality.

My husband fears nothing, or so he would claim. But he does not ask either. I think he knows no woman would ever choose this desolation over the sunlight world above. Why else did he steal me? He
could have come as a suitor. He could have asked – but he never asked and so I never said yes or no.

It is too late for choices. I am at the end of my story. My tale is told. The decisions made for me by distant powers. Still I ask myself the question. I ask it every season. If I could choose, what land would I call home? If love was mine to give, not theirs to take, where would I gift it and to whom?

I climb the steps to the dais. The host abases itself before us. I take my seat beside the dark lord.

He turns his skull-like visage towards me; his eyes are dark stars in the hollow sockets, his touch is as cold as the grave.

And his mouth tastes of pomegranates.

Catherine Butler
was born in Hampshire, where she grew up in a small market town near the New Forest. As a child, she spent most of her time wandering woods, trying to learn musical instruments, and learning about myths. She also loved reading ghost stories (both fictional and real) and scaring herself silly. Catherine now lives in Bristol, where she teaches English at a local university. As well as writing books for children and young adults, Catherine writes books about children's books. Some people think her obsessed. Her books (most of them published under the name Charles Butler) are fantasies, but they are fantasies set in our own world – or in worlds set at a slight, disconcerting angle to our own. They include
Calypso Dreaming
,
The Fetch of Mardy Watt
,
Death of a Ghost
and
The Lurkers
.

Susan Cooper
wrote the classic five-book fantasy sequence
The Dark Is Rising
, in which one quiet little scene still scares people. She grew up in England but now lives in America, on an island in a Massachusetts saltmarsh. Besides novels and short stories, she has written screenplays and (just once, as co-author) a Broadway play. Her latest book for young adults is called
Ghost Hawk
, and yes, of course, there's a ghost in it.

Frances Hardinge
was brought up in a sequence of small, sinister English villages, and spent a number of formative years living in a Gothic-looking, mouse-infested hilltop house in Kent. She studied English Language and Literature at Oxford, fell in love with the city's crazed, archaic beauty, and never found a good enough reason to leave.

Whilst working full time as a technical author for a software company she started writing her first children's novel,
Fly by Night
, and was with difficulty persuaded by a good friend to submit the manuscript to Macmillan.
Fly by Night
went on to win the Branford Boase Award, and was also shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Award. Her
subsequent books,
Verdigris Deep
,
Gullstruck Island
,
Twilight Robbery
and
A Face Like Glass
are also aimed at children and young adults.

Frances is seldom seen without her hat and is addicted to volcanoes.

Katherine Langrish
is the internationally published author of several children's fantasy novels including the Viking trilogy
Troll Fell
,
Troll Mill
and
Troll Blood
(HarperCollins), recommended in the School Library Association's ‘Top 160 Books for Boys', republished in one volume as
West of the Moon
. Her fourth book,
Dark Angels
(US title
The Shadow Hunt
, HarperCollins) was listed as one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Books for Children 2010, and the US Board on Books for Young People's Outstanding International Books 2011. Her writing is strongly influenced by folklore and legends, and has often been compared with Alan Garner's. Katherine lives in Oxfordshire and is currently writing a two-part YA dystopia.

Rhiannon Lassiter
is an author of science fiction, fantasy, contemporary, ‘realist magicism', psychological horror and thriller novels for juniors,
teenagers and young adults. She was born in 1977 and is the eldest daughter of award-winning children's author Mary Hoffman.

Rhiannon's first novel,
Hex
, was accepted for publication when she was nineteen years old. She completed the book and a sequel while at university reading English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Rhiannon has published eleven further novels, a non-fiction book about the supernatural and co-edited an anti-war anthology of poetry and prose,
Lines in the Sand
. Her psychological horror novel
Bad Blood
was nominated for six awards including the Guardian Prize and the BookTrust Prize. Her most recent novel,
Ghost of a Chance
, was published in February 2011.

Her favourite authors include Ursula LeGuin, Margaret Mahy and Octavia Butler. Her own novels explore themes of identity, change and becoming.

Rhiannon lives and works in Oxford, United Kingdom. Her ambition is to be the first writer-in-residence on the Moon.

Frances Thomas
was born in Wales, but brought up in South London. She has written many books, including, for children,
I Found Your Diary
and
Polly's Running Away Book
. Her most recent adult book is a
A Bracelet of Bright Hair
and her biography of Christina Rossetti has also just been reissued. She has won the Tir na nOg prize four times for her children's books. Before she retired she used to also work as a teacher of dyslexic children. Now she lives with her husband in the middle of Wales.

Liz Williams
is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in Glastonbury, England, where she is co-director of a witchcraft supply business. She is currently published by Bantam Spectra (US) and Tor Macmillan (UK), also Night Shade Press, and appears regularly in Realms of Fantasy, Asimov's and other magazines. She is the secretary of the Milford SF Writers' Workshop, and also teaches creative writing and the history of Science Fiction.

This electronic edition published in September 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing

Collection copyright © 2013 Catherine Butler
Stories copyright © 2013 Katherine Langrish, Susan Cooper,
Liz Williams, Frances Hardinge, Frances Thomas,
Catherine Butler, Rhiannon Lassiter