rolled in bed, the leather straps creaking beneath her as she turned. Pale gray light streamed through the smoke hole in the ceiling, lighting up the hearth and the tattered, blackened blossom that lay at its edge. Demeter’s breath left her in a long sigh, and she shifted her gaze to where Persephone still lay in her bed on the other side of the hut. Even in sleep, a small groove marred the skin between the girl’s brows.
Demeter threw back her covers, rose, crossed to Persephone and knelt at her side. When Persephone didn’t stir, Demeter pressed a kiss to the small indentation on her daughter’s forehead and waited to see if she would wake. Her eyes remained closed.
Sighing again, Demeter got to her feet, returned to her pallet and pulled the coarse wool blankets up over it. As she smoothed them down, the material snagged on her red, work-roughened hands. If their ache wasn’t a constant reminder that they were indeed attached, she would scarcely believe they belonged to her. Her hands should be lily-white, petal smooth, free of pain, and capable of so much more than the dreary labor she used them to accomplish every day.
Bitterness, black and viscous, leached through her, driving out all her earlier contrition. She looked at her daughter once more. Persephone’s eyes fluttered open. Demeter spun and hurried toward the door. With this mood on her, it would be best for both of them if she was gone before Persephone fully woke. Demeter had caused enough hurt the evening before. No need to risk another disagreement.
When Demeter exited the hut, she almost stepped on a basket containing a loaf of bread and a small wheel of cheese that had been placed outside the door. A smile turned her lips, but it wasn’t a pleasant one. The villagers’ simple offerings of gratitude were nothing compared to all Demeter would have now if Persephone had only been a boy. Leaving the items for Persephone to collect, Demeter made her way to the outskirts of Henna.
Although the day was still pale gray, Helios not yet riding the sky, some of the villagers already toiled in the fields. Despite their many shortcomings, Demeter could say this for the Sicani: they listened well when she showed them how to determine which soil was best for growing, how to irrigate it, and how to cultivate the crops. These bounteous fields were proof of that.
Before joining the villagers in their work, Demeter strode through the grain to check the health of the plants. A sticky, light brown substance coated some of them. She squatted to study it. It was, as she feared, the blight that displaced seed heads, leaving dark purple or black growths in their stead. Without intervention, it would spread to the entire crop.
Demeter’s hands hovered over the infected stalks. She could cure them with a single touch, but it would cost her dearly, a depletion without repair, for she no longer had her Immortal essence or the power provided by her worshippers on which to draw.
Demeter raised her head and looked in the direction of her home. She looked back at the plant, at its fellows clustered around it also suffering from the same disease.
Demeter cursed. Her gaze traveled once again to her hut, but no. No matter the cost, Persephone must be kept from the knowledge of her Immortal heritage and abilities. Any use of them could draw the notice of those on Olympus. Then they would come here, fetch Persephone, and leave Demeter forsaken and utterly alone among the mortals.
Demeter called to two of the villagers. “These plants are diseased. This quadrant must be ripped up by the roots and the earth here left fallow for a year at least.”
“But, Lady,” one of the men protested, “surely there must be another way.”
Demeter turned her chill blue stare on him and lifted one eyebrow.
Bobbing his acquiescence, he set to work pulling up the plants.
A scream rang out through the early morning silence, a sound of pain, of violence. Eyes wide, heart thumping, Demeter turned in the direction from which it came.
Thais bolted from her hut and ducked into her daughter’s home. Moments later, she emerged again, supporting Nadira who wept and lolled against her mother’s shoulder. The pair of them stumbled toward the House of the Mother Goddess as Thais shouted, “It’s Nadira’s time.”
In answer to Thais’s call, women came out of huts all over the village, grouping together as they moved toward the temple. Instead of the good cheer and camaraderie that was usual before a birthing, the women were subdued, hardly speaking to one another. No doubt they were frightened because Doso wasn’t here to help the laboring woman, but at least Demeter wouldn’t be called upon to attend. The Sicani women had learned better.
Demeter took up a hoe and hacked at the earth around the infected plants to make it easier to remove them. After much too short a time, her back protested. She winced, put a hand to it, and straightened. As she did so, she caught sight of Persephone striding purposefully toward the House of the Mother Goddess, Doso’s basket over one arm. Surely, her daughter wouldn’t be so foolish, but, after a short pause to let some children race past, Persephone continued on her course, walking toward certain disaster.
Demeter dropped her tool and set out to intercept the girl. She must be stopped before she came to harm.
When she was close enough that her daughter would hear, Demeter called, “Kore.”
Persephone stopped, turned, chin tilted, lips set in a grim line that said she wouldn’t be easily persuaded to keep away from Nadira’s birthing.
As Demeter feared, Persephone proved to be unusually recalcitrant, insistent on moving forward with her ridiculous plan despite its risks. Demeter had no recourse but to offer to attend the birth in Persephone’s stead. Even that wasn’t enough to dissuade her. It was only when Thais emerged from the House of the Mother Goddess and reminded Persephone just how deeply the Sicani feared and loathed her that she at last relinquished Doso’s basket.
Demeter meant to watch until she was sure Persephone was on her way back to their hut but then the girl asked why Demeter didn’t call her Persephone when the villagers could hear. There was too much history, too many secrets and too much old pain wrapped up in why Demeter named her daughter as she had and why she kept that name a secret between the two of them. It wasn’t a conversation Demeter ever meant to have with her daughter so she followed Thais inside, allowing the bang of the door to serve as response to her daughter’s question.
The moment she found herself shut in the temple, Demeter gagged at the combined smells of smoke, unwashed bodies, and old blood. The stench, the rush-covered floor, and the dark red walls with their ominous, black figures were the same as they had been when last she was here.
Contrary to that night, however, a throng of women, their dark eyes expectant as they looked at her, waiting for her to guide them in one of the basest of mortal processes, one of blood and pain and sacrifice that had brought Demeter to depths from which she’d never risen. A pulse pounded in her temples. Sweat trickled down her back. She couldn’t do this. Wouldn’t do this.
She turned back to the door and put out a hand to push it open but paused. If she left, Persephone would once again attempt to take up this task, and there was no guarantee Demeter could again dissuade her. If Persephone entered this building, she wouldn’t leave it unharmed.
Gripping the basket handle, Demeter forced herself to turn back around. The crowd of woman parted. Thais took Demeter’s arm and led her toward the center of the room. Nadira lay on a pallet in the middle of the floor, writhing and moaning.
Sights, sounds, and sensations Demeter never wanted to revisit rolled over her. When she labored with Persephone she’d also lain on the ground, contractions racking her body, but she hadn’t moaned. She’d screamed Hera’s name when her traitorous sister left her laboring in the cavern in Nysa. Demeter also hadn’t had a room full of attendants as Nadira did. Not at first. She’d been alone until a shadow had separated itself from the deeper darkness at the back of the cave and approached her.
Demeter thought it a creature sent by her sister to end her life. Far from being afraid, she welcomed it. Death would have meant an end to her suffering. As the shadow approached, however, the light from the cavern’s entrance revealed it to be only an old woman.
The crone came to Demeter’s side, rolled her to her back, and slapped her legs apart. The pain when the old woman stuck her fingers up Demeter’s cunny and prodded at her had been excruciating, though only a fraction of the agony that was to come.
Nadira, too, was just taking the first steps down the long, arduous path to motherhood and she was managing them no better than Demeter had. With each contraction the young woman’s eyes rolled wildly, as she wailed and thrashed as though she could somehow flail free of her suffering.
Thais turned to Demeter, eyes huge in her pale face. “Help her.”
Demeter looked around. Surely someone else, someone with the necessary knowledge and skills would answer this woman’s plea, but the other Sicani only blinked back at Demeter out of faces wrinkled with worry. They truly expected her to act as midwife. The fools.
“Chant. Pray,” Demeter snapped, flapping a hand. After a moment, Thais began a litany. The other women soon joined in, their voices gaining in certainty and volume as they voiced the familiar words.
Demeter wasn’t sure what more to do. She set Doso’s basket on a nearby table and pawed through packets of herbs and small stoppered jars. She plucked up container of oil scented with mint and lavender, the only thing in the entire basket she knew the use of. She should. Doso had used it often enough on Demeter’s aching hands.
Demeter held it out to Thais. “Knead this into Nadira’s lower back. It will help loosen the muscles there and ease her pain.”
Thais thrust out her palms and shook her head. “It must be you, Lady.”
Nadira sobbed and moaned. The other women’s chanting grew ragged, the young woman’s distress affecting them. If Demeter couldn’t calm Nadira the others would soon give way to hysteria. The absurdness of the situation maddened Demeter. She shouldn’t be here. Persephone and her foolhardiness bore all the blame for Demeter’s current predicament.
Demeter pursed her lips and huffed out an impatient breath through her nose. “Very well. Help Nadira kneel and rest her upper body on one of the benches against the wall.”
Thais did as Demeter commanded. Demeter went to her knees behind the young woman, raised Nadira’s tunic above her waist, poured a measure of oil onto her lower back, and began to work it in.
During her next contraction, Nadira whimpered, but gone were her earlier hysterics. The other women formed a semi-circle behind them, their chanting regular and in unison once again.
Demeter’s hands were cramped and aching from ministering to Nadira by the time the young woman’s moaning and shifting indicated that, not only were her contractions coming closer together, they were also gaining in strength and length. Surely now, one of the Sicani women would take over, but they, it seemed, were content to chant while Demeter bungled the birth.
Demeter had no choice but to harken back again to her labor in the cave as it was the only birthing experience she had. At this point in the process, Doso had hauled Demeter to her feet and chivvied her to make the long walk across Nysa through the forest to Henna. It made for a brutal journey, Demeter cursing and weeping every step of the way, but it had helped her progress in her labor.
Demeter addressed Thais. “Nadira needs to walk.”
Thais stepped forward out of the circle of women, reached for her daughter’s arm, and pulled her upright. Another woman hurried to Nadira’s other side, tucked in next to Nadira, and drew the girl’s other arm over her shoulder. Demeter rose from her knees. The chanting women moved back against the walls to make room for Nadira to pace. As much as she hated to, Demeter slotted herself in amongst them.
Nadira sobbed and pleaded to be set back down at first, just as Demeter had done. Eventually, however, the girl settled as she shambled in slow circles around the perimeter of the room.
Though the walk was difficult, the hardest work was yet to come. There would be no rest for the girl at the end of her trek to nowhere, just as there hadn’t been for Demeter when she and Doso had finally reached Henna. Doso had dragged Demeter up to and through the doors of the House of the Mother Goddess. Soon after, the village women trickled in to attend Demeter.
Doso again subjected Demeter to the indignity of having her nether parts bared to strange eyes, though by that time Demeter hadn’t cared. Indeed, she begged them to pull or cut the thing out before it killed her. Nadira would likely feel the same in her extremity.
Nadira’s walk turned into more of a shuffle. The women holding her arms paused more frequently to allow for her contractions. Her moans carried over the Sicani’s prayers. Finally, the trio came to a stop in front of Demeter.
“Is it time to see how her labor’s progressing?” Thais asked.
“Yes, I think that would be best,” Demeter responded, her voice confident, though she wasn’t so sure. When would these dolts realize she hadn’t the necessary skill to deliver this child?
Thais and the other woman lowered Nadira back to the pallet on the floor, then encouraged her to bend her legs, draw them up, and part them.
After Nadira complied, the women looked at Demeter. Making a small sound of dismay and disgust that reached only her own ears, Demeter sank to her knees in front of Nadira. She extended a hand toward the juncture of the girl’s legs, but before Demeter even touched her, Nadira cried out, arched, and bucked. A small dark moon appeared for a moment, nudging at the threshold of the world.
Demeter gasped, and in her shock reverted to her native tongue. “I see the head.” The other women stared at her blankly. She repeated the phrase in Sicani.
“She labors quick,” Thais said. “Time for the stool now, I think.”
At last, the woman seemed to have comprehended Demeter wasn’t suited for the role the Sicani wanted her to play here. Obligingly, Demeter moved out of the way as Thais helped Nadira to her feet and led her to the birthing chair. Thais lowered her daughter onto its low, narrow seat so Nadira’s nether regions were framed by the empty circle of wood. Then she moved around to the seat back and reclined it until Nadira was in a position to best facilitate her child’s emergence.
“Will you catch the babe, Demeter?” Thais asked.
Sighing, Demeter nodded, then went, once again, to her knees in front of Nadira.
When the next contraction tightened the muscles of the young woman’s belly, Thais commanded her daughter to push. Nadira shook her head and sobbed that she couldn’t.
Demeter had said the same words as she’d squatted on the same stool, the scent of her own blood in her nostrils, certain she would die there because she could fight no longer to expel the child from her body. In a misguided attempt to give Demeter strength, one of the women had put a simulacrum of the Mother Goddess in front of Demeter. With its bared breasts, flounced skirt, and upraised hands twined about with serpents, it looked so much like Hera, Demeter wanted to strike it to the floor. She had been so exhausted, however, she only slumped on the birthing chair and sobbed, no better than any other weak, puling mortal.
Gods, she wanted to be free of this place, free of these memories.
Demeter grabbed Nadira’s hands and bore down until Nadira groaned and focused her rolling eyes on Demeter’s face.
“You must do this. Hold to me and push.”
Seeming to take strength from Demeter’s determination, Nadira drew in an enormous breath, tightened her grip on Demeter’s hands and, with a grunt, bore down. She ended the push with a shout that quavered up to a high keening note.
The cry of another female voice, low and harsh with fear, mingled with Nadira’s scream. Cold fingers traced their way down Demeter’s spine. She looked around. The cry certainly hadn’t been Nadira’s but none of the other women showed any signs of distress.
“Demeter?” Nadira panted.
Demeter gripped Nadira’s hands again, snapping, “Save your breath to push, girl. No more screeching.”
As Nadira grunted her way through another contraction, the call came again: a throbbing cry of abject terror. This time there was a word in it, but Demeter couldn’t make it out.
Half rising to her feet, Demeter looked once again around the room, “What was that? Which of you called out?”
“Nadira, of course,” Thais said.
“No, the other cry. Didn’t you hear it? The low …”
The women began to shift and mutter, their eyes moving quickly around the room, peering about for omens and portents. Their suspicions would soon get the better of them, and the temple would descend into chaos, delaying the birth and Demeter’s departure.
Demeter smoothed the worry from her face, then turned once more to Nadira and said, “Bear down now, with all your might.”
Demeter had received no such niceties from Doso. Instead, the old woman slapped Demeter and, with burning eyes, commanded Demeter give into her body’s demands. So, Demeter pushed until it felt like her eyeballs would burst from their sockets and her teeth would crack. Past the point of utter exhaustion, she strained and cried out into a void that seemed to have no beginning and no end.
A void, it seemed, Nadira wouldn’t descend into. With just one more push her babe entered the world, sliding into Demeter’s hands as neatly as an egg into the nest. A hush settled over the room, waiting for the cry of a living child to break it.
Nadira’s babe was as well formed as Persephone had been, all his limbs and fingers and toes present and in the correct number, but he was silent, still. Thais snatched him from Demeter, laid him belly down over her forearm and vigorously rubbed his spine. The infant began to cry, a lusty, healthy sound. It was quickly followed by the laughter and chatter of the Sicani women. They could celebrate now it was apparent this child wasn’t affected by the curse they believed Persephone had brought on their town.
Persephone had cried in the same full-throated indignant way: ugly, purple-gray, and howling in Doso’s hands. A healthy child hadn’t been enough for Demeter though. She sobbed when Doso showed her what was between the babe’s legs.
Ignoring Demeter’s obvious distress, Doso deposited Persephone into Demeter’s arms. Rather than curling her babe to her body, Demeter held Persephone away from her, sure she couldn’t have produced something so hideous.
Her cries spiraling higher, Persephone flung out both slime-covered arms. One of them dashed the statue of the Mother Goddess out of the hand of the woman who held it. It fell to the floor and shattered. It had given Demeter great satisfaction, but the village women screamed and cowered away from the babe. That was the origin of Persephone’s status as a blight on Henna, a blight which, according to the villagers’ ridiculous superstitions, could only be held at bay if the laboring mother was attended by one they thought had the Mother Goddess’s favor. One such as Demeter, inept as she had proven herself to be.
Persephone, rejected by her mother, reviled by the villagers, was accepted by only one after her birth. Doso stepped forward and reclaimed the infant from Demeter, a beatific smile on the old woman’s face.
Nadira reached for her child just as Doso had reached for Persephone, and Thais passed him into his mother’s arms, then prepared to attend to the afterbirth.
Nadira’s tears dampened a face already wet with sweat. She smoothed a hand over the little head, pressed a kiss to his brow, and looked up with shining eyes. “He’s beautiful.”
This girl comprehended more quickly than Demeter what a miracle her child was, but Demeter had realized it eventually. Doso presented the infant to Demeter again once she was cleaned and swaddled. This inclined Demeter to hold the child no more than right after the birth, but a dangerous glint in Doso’s eyes convinced Demeter to cooperate. Once Doso settled the babe in the curve of Demeter’s arm, she pushed back the blankets so Demeter could see her child’s face.
From the curl of eyelashes on Persephone’s rounded cheek to the opening of her little hand, like the blossoming of some rare and precious flower, this child was painted with the brush of perfection. She was Goddess born, though fully encapsulated in her mortal form.
Tears had pricked Demeter’s eyes. “My kore.”
Doso patted the babe on the head, and ground out with her stump of a tongue, “Kah.”
Demeter wasn’t naming the babe, only stating what she was, girl, daughter. Eager to correct the old woman’s misunderstanding, Demeter had said, “No, I mean to call her ...”
It was a cruel name, though, one that seemed especially harsh for such a tiny being. It was also a name that made it clear how unkind Demeter’s feelings had been toward her own child. No one need know she thought of her daughter in such a way and so she’d finished the sentence with a whisper for her ears alone. “Persephone.”
But it seemed her daughter heard and understood, for she opened her mouth and wailed.
Someone jostled Demeter, pulling her from her reminiscing. It was Thais. She pushed in front of Demeter, shouldering her away from the birthing stool. With abrupt, jerky motions, Thais plucked her grandson from Nadira and passed him off to another of the women. Then, grasping her daughter’s arm, she barked, “Help me lay Nadira down.”
A woman hurried to Nadira’s other side. She and Thais pulled Nadira from the birthing stool then settled the girl back on her pallet on the floor. Blood oozed from Nadira’s nether part and soaked the rushes around her.
“What’s happening? What’s wrong?” Demeter asked.
Thais looked up. “She’s bleeding too much. We must stop it.”
Thais commanded the women to pack Nadira’s cunny with cloths, then said to Demeter, “Doso has a tincture for this. Look in her basket,”
Demeter gave the woman a hard, cold look. She wasn’t to be ordered about like some slave, but it was wasted. Thais paid no attention, just returned to frantically packing more rags around Nadira’s lower body. They became saturated at an alarming rate, and Nadira had gone as pale as the limestone walls of Zeus’s palace. Her eyelids fluttered and her eyes rolled back in her head. The girl was dying.
“Demeter, please!” Thais shouted as her grandson began, once again, to cry.
Demeter moved to the basket. She picked up jar after jar in her shaking hands but there was nothing to indicate any of their uses. That knowledge was lost with Doso’s desertion and Demeter’s banishment of Persephone.
The women began to keen, a wild ululation of grief, Thais’s voice spiraling higher than all the others. Demeter turned.
Nadira, head lolled to the side, arms outflung, lay pale and motionless on the floor. The cloths were soaked with blood and still it continued its slow, lethal ooze.
There was no doubt the girl had died, her shade likely falling out of her body, sinking through the ground to the Underworld. There she would stand on Styx’s bank and wait for the inexorable ride across those dark waters, a journey Demeter had set her on in her zealousness to protect her own child. No, the blame for this couldn’t be laid at Demeter’s door. The Sicani should have seen Demeter didn’t know what she was about here and taken over.
Thais, on her knees at Nadira’s side, clutched her hands to her chest. Her long, graying hair dragged back and forth over her daughter’s torso as the woman rocked in a paroxysm of grief. Nadira was Thais’s youngest child and only daughter, the child her heart had longed for, as she often said.
Thais’s pain at the loss was unbearable and yet bear it she must, as would Demeter if Persephone was ever taken from her. Though death would never steal Demeter’s Immortal daughter, Zeus could choose to reclaim her at any time should he be reminded of her existence. These thoughts were ridiculous, of course. Persephone was safe at home, completing her daily tasks, but still Demeter spun away from the grieving women, flung open the door of the House of the Mother Goddess, and hurried toward her hut. She wouldn’t feel easy again until she looked on Persephone’s face.
As Demeter walked, memories cascaded over her: Persephone sitting up by herself for the first time, screeching for the sheer joy of hearing herself; Persephone wobbling about the hut on unsteady legs, undaunted in her determination to walk by even the most painful falls; Persephone’s sparkling green eyes flitting from Demeter’s face to some wooden tops spinning on the table between them which Demeter set to turning over and again merely for the reward of Persephone’s little girl laughter.
For every good moment, however, there were thousands of bad ones: so many nights when Persephone refused to settle to sleep and Demeter could scarcely refrain from shaking the child until her teeth rattled, and so many days when Persephone whined from dawn until dusk and beyond. Then, as she’d grown older, Persephone proved herself unable to accomplish many of the tasks so necessary to survive in the mortal world or completed them so shoddily Demeter had to set to rights what Persephone had done wrong then do the rest of the work herself. More recently, it was disagreements like the one this morning, when Persephone needed to be argued out of some foolish plan that would result in danger to herself and inconvenience to Demeter. On nearly all of these occasions, rage rose up to choke Demeter, and she wasn’t able to stop herself from striking out at Persephone, sometimes just with angry words but other times with a pinch or a slap.
Guilt burrowed like a tick into Demeter’s mind. She had to find some way to quell her bitterness, to quash her anger. Now that Doso and all the comfort she gave Persephone was gone, Demeter needed to be kinder to the girl. If those on Olympus tried to lure her daughter away, Demeter’s love would be all she could offer to tip the scales in her favor. Thus far, that love had tussled with resentment and most often came up the loser. That had to change. Demeter had to show Persephone it was going to change. Perhaps she could give Persephone some token of her resolve, something akin to the many little favors the girl had showered upon Demeter over the years.
Demeter stopped and looked about. Flowers grew just off the village path. Demeter dropped to a crouch to pick them. She could weave them into a garland for her girl and perhaps undo some of the hurt she caused by burning the crown of flowers Persephone had given her the previous night.
Persephone had never seen a Goddess-woven garland before. Its intricacy and beauty were sure to please her. It would be better if it were made with blossoms from Nysa, that place Persephone knew only as the Mother Goddess’s Meadow. The blooms there were almost as beautiful as those that grew on Olympus. It was no wonder Persephone sought them out for the crown she made for Demeter. It had been a beautiful gift, but its destruction was necessary to make Persephone understand she wasn’t ever to visit Nysa again.
The burning of the garland had likely been what led to Persephone’s uncharacteristic disobedience that morning. An uneasiness slithered under Demeter’s skin, but she was being foolish. Persephone wouldn’t dare break her vow to Demeter and visit Nysa again. Even if she had, Demeter had no reason to believe her daughter was in any danger. Except those cries, the low terror-filled cries she’d heard not once but twice while helping Nadira bring her child into the world, chilled her. The chaos of the birth and all that followed had driven them from her mind and yet, now, thinking of them, she felt sure it had been Persephone’s voice she’d heard. Some harm had come to her daughter.
Heart stuttering in her chest, Demeter hurled herself down the path toward Nysa.