Hades and Seph

by Eileen Glass

  And the ferries destined for Tartarus will need to be doubled. They will have to pack the souls on until there is barely room to stand. But they will make it work. He will run a continuous line of boats if he has to, if there is some great war, and the ones who jump early will never make it the shore. The current is too strong and the river too wide. But he doesn’t like to terrify them so much so early.

  The giants especially don’t like to hear the constant tears and screams.

  But they can double the amount with minimal panic, he thinks. The extra boats will have to be attached to the track before the influx of souls is to arrive.

  They can ship the barges half full until then, though this will increase the amount of fear and early swimmers. Humans are actually easier to control in a crowd than they are as small groups.

  He lands the horses outside the paddock and guides them in through the opening gates, their hooves kicking up dust.

  “Welcome back, sir!” Alfric calls. The little soul is delivering lunch to Taushev, his friend, because if there are no chores to do for Hades, Alfric will start serving the people around him. Even if those people technically don’t need to eat or dress. Alfric was shunned in his life for the disfigurement of his face, and is too happy to be useful to the ones who love and accept him now.

  He is a good sight to see so frequently in his palace, so Hades smiles.

  “Where is young Persephone, sir?” asks Alfric as Hades approaches the stable, letting Taushev take control of the horses.

  “Up in our room, I imagine,” Hades answers, removing his gloves. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, he is not in the room, sir, and I wanted to show him the new clothes we got him. He asked that we lengthen his chitons, but we kept a style you’ll find quite nice.”

  Hades lets a smirk creep onto his face, forgetting his recent dilemma of perhaps loving Seph too much. Perhaps such things can wait until tomorrow, or another month. Their marriage is still young. Seph will be forgiving to hear of how his rabbit ended up. And Hades would suddenly very much like to see him in a new chiton. And then to kneel and put his head underneath it.

  He still has not finished the young god in his mouth, and he’s looking forward to it.

  “I will find him and dress him, Alfric,” he says, tucking the gloves into a pocket.

  So perhaps this new niceness is not going to leave him quickly after all.

  What is happening to me?

  Perhaps it is like a virus, and I just have to let it play out.

  Will I ever grow bored of my husband like all the other gods do in their marriages?

  No. He can’t see himself being disloyal to Seph. He was never disloyal to Minthe or any of the lovers who came before, even if they were not serious. He just doesn’t usually like so many people, so finding someone to have an affair with would be huge chore to take up his time. And then how would he get so much done in his studies?

  Life is better simple. Boring to others, perhaps, and maybe he bored himself when he was alone for so many years. But Seph is all he needs.

  If only I can stop acting so foolish!

  Seph is still not in the room, he discovers, nor is he in the private bath house, nor is he in the courtyard or in the private den. These would be the common areas to find him. Hades expected to find him weeping on the bed, or close by.

  But there also the public gardens.

  He is not there.

  And there is also the public library, which the scholarly souls add to all the time, writing down magnificent tales from all the cultures of the Earth, some already told and most of them new creations that will never materialize in the upperworld.

  He is not there. Nor is anyone but a group of wine-sipping creatives, for even the most ghastly hunt won’t keep the true artists and craftsmen from their work.

  “Have you seen my husband?” he asks.

  They are all small children, barely old enough to hold a ink-dipped brush in the upperworld, yet they are pouring over several pages of refined, complicated work, coauthoring a great masterpiece.

  “Never seen him here, my king,” answers Bion in his newly young voice. Another plague sufferer from his time. There are so many of those.

  “Hm. Send him to the rooms, if you see him. Tell him I’ve requested him. If any of the servants pass through, make sure my orders are heard.”

  “Yes, my king,” Bion answers, and starts a chorus among the others.

  Hades leaves them.

  Perhaps… the kitchen?

  One of a hundred sitting rooms?

  What else is there?

  While there are many interesting places in the palace for his children to wander into when they visit, this place was not built with the young handsome god in mind. There are no spectacles to attract him.

  Where might a young man wander, if he is sad and looking for comfort?

  The city parks, perhaps. Or just out. Maybe he wanted to converse, and there are not many here.

  He’s relieved to find Verah. She and several others she’s rounded up are watering plants throughout his enormous home.

  “Verah, have you seen Seph?”

  “Seph? Oh, the new one? No. He is missing,” she says, and Hades eyebrows shoot up.

  “Missing? And no one is looking for him? No one told me about this?”

  “No, no, no!” she puts her watering pitcher down and waves her hands, her eyes wide. “Mis—misunderstanding, my king. I am saying—he is with you, no? Or with others? He is not here.”

  “Oh.” For a moment, Hades thought wildly of Minthe and concocted a purpose to find and destroy the nymph at once. That was a quick assumption on his part. But… Seph is still missing. And Minthe is an unbalanced little thing, like a wine cup wobbling on a table next to a fire.

  “Verah, take these girls and have everyone searching for Seph—and for Minthe—at once.”

  Now she looks confused. “The mean one? I not seen him many years.”

  “Yes. He was here today, and I want to make sure he’s gone.” I saw him run into the woods. It was the right direction. Perhaps I’m paranoid?

  The watchful souls of his palace already know Minthe is not allowed. It would be difficult for his ex-lover to return. But… there are so few in the halls now. And Hades already saw him in his palace.

  Could he…?

  But what could he do to Seph? Even a weak god is more than a nymph can handle.

  He could lead him away.

  “King?” Verah calls as Hades leaves. “Anything else to do?”

  “No!” he says back over his shoulder, not stopping his strides. “Find my husband for me! Make sure no one is in this palace who shouldn’t be!”

  He returns to the stable. A short ways into the journey, he decides he is not above running, which he will almost always avoid since it makes his subjects fearful and prone to gossip. But there are not too many of them to worry about anyway, and Verah will soon inform the entire palace that they are looking for Seph and Minthe. This news will spread around the city too, and his lovely people will not stop searching until the god is found. They do not need to sleep or perform maintenance rituals like living humans do.

  They will do a thorough job, making a game out of the young god’s disappearance. But Hades has something better.

  He ignores the welcomes of Alfric and the stable hands, going straight to Cerberus’s stall and unlatching the door.

  “It’s me again, boy. Yes, you’re free.” His dog is very excited to meet him, and Hades bends over for a proper, but rushed, greeting. “Yes, you’re a good boy! Of course you are! My favorite hound. But now we have work again to do.”

  He takes his short lead, a thick chain with a leather-covered handle, off a hook in the stall and attaches it to his dog’s collar. While well-trained, Cerberus can get excited, and Hades doesn’t have time for him to greet every servant they pass as they go back into the palace.

  When the lead is clipped, Cerberus loses his excited demeanor, two of his thr
ee heads closing their mouths with their tongues inside. The other one, the left one, has always been a little slower on the uptake.

  They proceed back to the palace at a fast jog, the dog keeping pace. They do not stop to greet the girls who have abandoned the water pitchers and are now searching room by room, opening every closet and looking underneath table cloths.

  Cerberus takes the steps up to the private wing confidently, his tail wagging. And in the solarium, the left head tries to make an extended sniff at the flowers growing by the fountain. The place where Hibus spent a lot of his time. While the right head sniffs suspiciously at the door and the middle, his always serious guardian, only looks at it with impatience and duty.

  They go in. The left and right heads seem to want to pull in opposite directions, but the middle guides them directly into the bedroom. Where even he is finally distracted by the new smells, and he noses underneath the bed, growling.

  “Not now, boy. Verah will mop the scent away for you later. I need you to find this.”

  Cerberus paws and pulls on the chain briefly, wanting to crawl under the bed. But he is obedient as soon as he notices the pillow Hades drops in front of him. All three heads sniff eagerly, taking in the scent, the left one slurping the fabric twice.

  Hades gathers the face of the middle one in his two hands.

  “Find him.”

  He speaks slowly and clearly. Find is not as often a command as hunt is. Usually the citizens of the underworld are well looked after and accounted for! Only since Seph has arrived and Hades has apparently become nice has so much chaos happened in the space of a few days.

  Hopefully he is just at a park or something.

  And hopefully Cerberus doesn’t immediately switch into hunting mode once he discovers that Seph is a new someone who does not belong. Hades has trained the dog to sniff out and attack Zeus’s trespassers.

  But he will try to keep command of him to prevent that.

  And then, when all of this is settled and Hades accepts that he’s probably overreacted, he is going to find Minthe and put an end to him anyway. Probably. An exile to the upperworld will do.

  That is what a god of the underworld should have done in the first place, since kindness leads to faulty judgment and foolish mistakes.

  Thirty-One

  Seph clings to the rock, far below where Minthe was perched, only able to avoid falling into the never ending pit thanks to the wind that pushes everything, including himself and the water, up against the walls. He is bruised. Bones might be broken. But thanks to his strength, he manages to secure a hold in the grooves of the wall.

  He clings here, helpless, wave after wave of water pelting him mercilessly, slamming against his back. It is like being beaten by a slave master’s whip and paddle—relentlessly until his death.

  “Minthe!” he calls up, his voice surely too weak to be heard over the sound of rushing water. Still, he calls desperately, “Help me!” And then, sobbing because he knows Minthe lured him into the pit in the first place, “Please!”

  He hugs the wall, withstanding tremendous pain, a pebble falling loose from the trembling grasp of his fingers. He claws for a new hold, water slamming against his arms and against the back of his head, some of it coming at an angle as though the slave master is trying to pry him off.

  He looks up, but he can only see water, the sky sometimes, and that distant, so far away ledge sticking out where Minthe is.

  And then a speck of bright blue hair, wispy like a flame.

  Echoing in the giant pit, coming to his ears like a whisper over the sound of crashing water, Seph hears a high-pitched child-like giggle.

  “You are quite stupid you know!” says that distant voice. He must be shouting into the pit as loud as he can. Even Seph’s own terrible sobs and gasps are physical sensations to him, unable to be heard unless he shouts.

  “You are not a thing that belongs! You are nothing like him! Saving a bunny… What were you thinking?! Break its neck and spit it over the fire if you must! Rabbits are not useful or loyal like dogs.”

  This is all over Hibus?!

  No, it can’t be.

  Another massive wave rushes after him, spinning through the pit, beating against the rocks like a charging bull.

  Seph shouts with all his strength, before the giant wave overtakes him.

  “Why?!”

  It hits him, and he ducks his head, praying that the water won’t sweep him off the wall. If he loses his grip now, he will be lost. He has to do something, he has to crawl out, but every attempt to move up only makes his grip more precarious, and there’s nothing but slick smooth granite above him.

  He can barely hear Minthe answer until the giant wave moves on.

  “Because I love him, stupid! And you’re not meant for him. You’re not even meant for this world! You’re doing bad things to him, you know? I thought when he discovered the bunny, he would put you out of the rooms for good, realizing his mistake. But then he didn’t! Oh well.”

  Above him, two pale feet dangle off the ledge and kick in the air. Minthe has sat down.

  Bastard.

  He’s crazy.

  I can’t stay like this forever.

  “You wouldn’t have loved him anyway,” the deranged nymph shouts at him. Somewhere a barge is being dangled over the waterfall again, and souls are screaming, dropping in.

  I’m going to become one of them.

  He can feel this horrible… scraping. This prying, this abrasive scouring. It’s inside him, and Seph feels himself weakening. Soon he will lose his grip. And not because he lost his strength—he has plenty of that, due to his lineage. But because more and more his body and himself seem to become two separate things. The connections he uses to control the muscles and his grip…

  Well, they feel far away. Thin.

  He feels like he’s spiritually stretching.

  I have to make this count. Do this one last thing Seph, or you’re going to be torn away.

  He has this image of himself swept away from the rocks at last, swirling in the current, and then watching his own body, lifeless like a doll, drop away from the wall and be carried into the pit after him. A separate thing.

  It is how he feels. It’s what’s going to happen.

  So I have to make sure he hears me.

  Summoning energy into those thin, breaking connections—imagining himself tied to his body like ropes to a ship in the harbor, and then those lines breaking away one by one, snapping loose—Seph shouts, “I am your king! Obey me, nymph! Make me a rope!”

  A gasping woman gets her head above water. She is far from Seph, but close enough that he can see the wild terror in her eyes. And then he sees her fading. Quickly, like a light is snuffed out. At first it is only the color in her irises, gone in a second. All souls have expressive eyes in pale colors, usually brown or blue and no green.

  Hers start out with a blue tint and then quickly fade to ash. Her pupils too, the black dulling, but slower, until she truly looks like a ghost. An aged corpse. Her voice fades as well, her mouth remaining open. But then, the eyes fade even further. Physically. They disappear into holes, her sockets empty, and her head lops forward lifelessly onto her chest. Like a puppet that’s been set down.

  She’s gone. Though she didn’t drown. She was above water, so she could have kept fighting the waves for awhile. Her connections, the ropes to her ship, have been cut. And Seph eyes the frothy waves again with terror and new understanding.

  Somewhere among the white waves are all the souls that have been ‘reborn’. They’ve had their ego stripped away. The essence, Hades called it. It’s swirling all around him, and when he dares to look further down into the darkening pit, he cannot see the water’s shape anymore, but he can continuously see the swirl of white, glimmering, dizzying lines, which must be glowing as they spiral down and down into the pit.

  Seph is a god. He can hold on longer than most. But Tartarus is a place where even gods die. Easily.

  “Nymph! I comm
and you to help me!” Surely that will work. His voice is deeper and rougher than he has ever heard it before.

  He wants to add, I am your king! to ensure obedience, but his strength is spent. He manages to croak, “I am—” and then another massive charging wave, enough to cover his head and deprive him of breath, sweeps past.

  His two fingers on his left hand don’t work anymore. He’s losing his grip.

  Focus. Maintain. Those connections… Don’t lose them!

  He keeps his head down, too weak to even look up, as Minthe begins to talk again. His words drift in and out, unimportant, as Seph just tries to hold onto his body. More and more it feels like a separate thing. Like a shell.

  “You are not even a god with any powers! Do you know how insulting that is?” By the tone of Minthe’s voice, Seph has failed to compel him, and the nymph speaks lazily, “Here you are, pretty and stupid—just some dumb lump of a thing calling yourself god—really, you’re retarded, you know?—and you’re married to my Hades! Mine! Why—you aren’t even as good as a human as far as I’m concerned!”

  He hears a strange sound. A plunk-plunk that disappears into the waves. Seph looks up briefly and sees falling pebbles. He can barely make out Minthe above and beyond him, blurry from the water running over his eyes, and the figure is throwing rocks down.

  “Hades deserves the best if he’s going to end up with anyone except me! I love him too much to let him do otherwise. And a nymph is the most perfect match, in my opinion. If he’s not going to choose me, he should choose another one. Only a nymph can understand Tartarus and love Hades more because of it!

  “Admit it! You were horrified by what I showed you! You didn’t understand at all. And you would have blamed him. You would have tried to make him change it!”

  Rocks skitter down the walls above him but get swept up in the current. Seph went around twice before he was able to grab on and hold himself here, almost directly underneath where he was pulled over.

  If he had dropped any further he would also be drowning right now.