Lazy as a sunbeam I wander through the meadows in the dying days of summer. My bare feet sink into the warm brown earth. The fields are gold and green and buzzing with butterflies and bees. The sky is an azure bowl upended over the world.
I wind white water lilies into a chain and plait them into my sun-streaked hair. My dress is white muslin, simple as a shroud. Beneath it my skin is nut brown, hot and dry.
High in the dome of the sky a black bird wheels and I shiver, goosebumps rising on my skin, seeing that predatory shadow.
This was where it all began, here in the water meadows. Imagine us seen from above, maidens scattered through the greenery like the wildflowers we are gathering, our hair and clothes bright and festive. The watcher descends, a long slow swoop, taking time to pick his target.
I am the target. Unwary, oblivious, innocent. In my memory the dark shape falls from above, the earth splits open beneath my feet, my mouth opens in an O and a scream escapes as I am caught.
This is where my story begins. Perhaps you already know how it must end.
Now the memories pale in the flood of sunshine, the distant shadow is cleared from the sky, I am alone in the fields. I choose to leave the river bank, walking through the stubbled fields where the short stalks lash my ankles and prickle my feet.
Fruit hangs heavy in the vineyards and orchards, dragging down the vines and boughs. My mother is waiting for me under the trees. She is Demeter, the goddess of fertility. She is larger than life, glowing with health and vitality. She reaches out to claim me and twines her strong brown arms around my neck. She strokes my hair, gathering it through her hands like harvest wheat.
“It’s so good to have you here,” she says. “Do you see how happy everyone is when you’re home? You make us happy.”
She speaks as though it is my choice to stay, to leave, to bestow happiness like a gift. She speaks as though a whistle will summon me home – and so it will. But when summer ends it won’t be her tune I dance to.
In the fields farmers bring home the harvest. Children chase each other through the maize and the older ones play games at the edge of the woods that are just becoming dangerous.
I watch as a young shepherd boy chases a nymph into a grove of cherry trees, bearing down on her until they fall laughing together into a drift of leaves. Their bodies intertwine and I turn away. The games of kiss chase are all part of the late summer madness that falls over everyone. It’s only me who sees the shadow of the trees and the drift of leaves as sinister. The shepherd and the nymph leave the grove hand in hand, leaning on each other.
Girls flare suddenly into womanhood, a harvest to be gathered. One second a child, a clocktick later a nubile nymph; suddenly part of someone else’s story. Heroic men reach out and take.
The trees are aflame with autumn colours: the red of burning coals, orange tongues of fire, scorched yellow. I wear a crown of golden leaves at the harvest dances: spinning and whirling like a leaf in the wind. The peasant girls and nymphs form rings around me. The boys and men dance circles around us.
Food is abundant. All the fruits of the field and the orchard are spread in a feast. Apples, pears, wild cherries; plums the colour of bruises; melons ripe and succulent – but no pomegranates.
My mother is seated at the head of the high table, presiding over the festival. Her clothing is wine red and beaten gold and the women around her sink down in awe when she looks at them. Demeter is Queen of the Summer and her smiles fall like rays across the company.
When the black god hid me under the earth she roamed the earth in quest of me, a madwoman calling constantly for her lost child. Famine followed in her footsteps. The earth was barren as an empty womb. All creation cried out for succour but Demeter cared for nothing but the daughter she had lost. In the end the Great Gods were forced to intervene to save humanity – but too late to save me.
Now at the harvest dance Demeter seems radiant with joy. She is surrounded by her worshippers, she has her daughter once again, these are her rites that are celebrated. Am I the only one who sees it cannot last? Children grow up, belief fails as doubts are sown, and I am not the same girl who was snatched from the wildflower meadow. For half a year he held me hostage. Demeter chooses to forget, but I don’t have that luxury.
The harvest cups run red with ruby wine. Faces are flushed with it, speech slurred, eyes brightened – or dulled. As the music becomes wilder and the drink stronger, Dionysus arrives with his company: goat-footed men and loose-limbed women with satirical smiles.
I eat bread soaked in honey mead. My lips are sticky with it: my body heavy with the drug. The God of Wine catches me around the waist, daring where others dare not.
“Is it Persephone or Kore?” he asks. “Or Melindia or Hagne or Despoina?” His right hand tangles in my hair while his left draws me closer to his body. “How old are you now, anyway?”
“Old enough to be married,” I remind him and his hands drop away like dead leaves.
At the edge of the company I stand apart, the woods at my back as I watch the revelry. In Spring the nymphs and dryads danced among the green buds and white blossom around a slender stem of an olive tree hung with laurel. Now it’s Autumn and they dance again in drifts of fallen leaves around a blazing fire.
It’s my story they are telling in the beat of drums and the rhythmic pounding of feet. It’s my return they celebrate in springtime and my departure they grieve in the fall.
My story – but it doesn’t feel as though it belongs to me. Perhaps because they never asked for my version. Our poets, like our heroes, are men – and it does not occur to them to ask.
It seems distant; a myth of long ago, a story with an ending everyone knows, a closed book. I draw away, under the shadow of the trees, the warmth of the fire at my back. These last few weeks whenever my mother sees me at the edge of the woods she comes running, her hair streaming behind her like a banner, her dress dishevelled into a flag of despair. She clutches at my hands, my feet, rocking me with her body, keeping me rooted to the earth.
Her moans and cries mean that she loves me. But what is love but the desire to have and to hold? She says that his love is only passion, possession, power. I have not told her he says the same of her.
The wind whistles: a shrill chilly sound that echoes through the forest. The trees shake their branches, casting their rustling garments to the ground to emerge stripped bare and skeletal. The dead leaves catch in my hair, dry and crackling. I step into the shadow of the wraith wood.
I am not sure if I am following a path or if the path is created as I walk. Beneath my feet the earth is cold and rimed with frost. The forest is ghostly, half-glimpsed shapes slip in and out of the shadows. The rustle of leaves, the crackle of dead twigs, the moan of the wind: they whisper to me, speaking of subjects that summer cannot know.
There are stones on the road, sharp-edged flints that slice my feet. If I looked back would I see a trail of my own blood? But I do not look back.
I have walked this road before, in both directions. I know what lies at either end.
The road is steeper too. The trees thin down as the hillside rises, their trunks stunted or twisted against the battering onslaught of a cold wind. Above, the countenance of the sky is dark and stormy, frowning down at me.
A flurry of snow casts itself into the air, dusting my hair with ice crystals, chilling my skin and damping my dress. A freezing fog descends and the mountain steps spill gravel and hailstones in a rattling hammering scree. I brace myself against the storm, needles of frost stab down from the sky and are whipped away by the wailing wind. My face is reddened with the slap and sting of the cold. My lips are numb with its kisses.
Night is falling, like a black god descending through the heavens. It is a winter night, cold and bleak and terrible. Spring is a long-gone memory, distant as childhood. Summer is erased as though it never was. Autumn has been left behind. Now there is only the stark face of night, the burning eyes of the stars, the world a blank page on which winter has written his name.
Ahead a black mouth yawns open in the hollow hill. The stone road leads through it: a lane to the land of the dead. Still my footsteps do not falter. There is nowhere to go but forward.
As I descend into the dark, the stone walls close in over and around me with a cold heavy embrace. Down into the depths, where the light dwindles and life decays, into the land of husks and rinds.
The first time I came this way was not so easy, no smooth passageway, no open road. Caught in the thunderous embrace of the lord of the underworld the earth shook and burst apart, a chasm opened, the swoop became a plunge, the air screamed past and we fell together into the dark.
This time I am granted the illusion of choice. The road winds slowly down into the mountain, taking its time, secure in the inevitability of its own ending.
I am alone on the road. But beside and behind me I hear the scrape of scales on stone, paws padding, insectine legs clacking and clicketing in a sudden scurry of movement. Leathery wings flap overhead, moths blunder blindly across my face kissing me with dust, webs cling and tangle in my hair.
The light is dying but this is a path I could walk blindfold. Emptiness gapes around me, the path thins down to a thread unreeling through the void of blackness. My steps are sure on the span of stone across the dizzying depths of the abyss.
I can hear water dripping, the trickle growing to a flow, drawn down as I am into the dark.
Acheron is the river of sorrow, it flows with the salt water of tears, the clay bed red as tear-stung eyes. Cocytus is named for lamentation, a howling waterfall that hurls itself from stone to stone, careless of itself as it plunges down. Phlegethon is a river of fire, the world broken open, as molten stone rages along well grooved channels.
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.