Receiver of Many

by Rachel Alexander

  “You are with me.” Persephone looked up to see Aidoneus standing in the doorway, his forehead etched with pain from listening to her sobs. A plain black tunic covered his chest, and a heavy dark gray himation was slung across it from his right hip over his left shoulder. His hair was bound back with a simple gold band. Three rings with enormous red stones glinted on his left hand as he motioned for Hecate to leave.

  She narrowed her eyes at Aidon and looked down at Persephone, petting her hair. “I’ll return if you need me,” Hecate said, and bowed her head as she stepped away, “my queen.”

  Aidoneus watched Hecate leave; confused by the way she glared up at him when she passed by. He slowly walked over to Persephone and sat beside her on the bed. Her skin glowed in the lamplight. She wiped her tears away, trying not to look him in the eye. They sat in silence, Aidon searching for the spot on the floor Persephone seemed to be staring at so intently.

  “I couldn’t sleep either,” he finally said. Sleep never came easily for Aidoneus under any circumstance. But restlessness and strange dreams had plagued him in his own room until he finally gave up on sleep and waited for Persephone to wake. He ran a hand down her shoulder, cautiously trying not to touch her too much. Aidon was mildly surprised that she didn’t shrink away from his touch. Seeing her wrapped in the bed sheet, her back and bare shoulders exposed to him, started to inflame him. He had heard her cry out in pain in the dark of Erebus, and dared not be so intimate with her so soon. It was bad enough as it was, knowing that he’d hurt her. There would have been no blood at all if he had done as he should have— been gentle, been a good husband. But his guilt warred with the desire to hold her as close as he could as soon as he could. His body was drawn to hers like iron to a lodestone. He needed to get them out of this bedroom.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispered.

  “Tell you what?”

  “You said your name was Aidon. You are Hades,” she said aloud, his true name heavy on her tongue. “Why did you lie to me?”

  He found the will to put distance between them and stood, facing her. “I prefer to be called Aidoneus; Aidon for short. Hades means too many things. It was the name my father gave me. It is the name the mortals give my realm,” he said, kneeling in front of her and lifting her chin to face him. “It’s a name that would have lost you to me.”

  The sadness and fear in her pale eyes cut through him like a knife. “Don’t you think I at least deserved to know?”

  “I wanted you to know me: Aidon. The person I am; the man who is your husband. If you had known me only as Hades, Ruler of the Underworld, would you have let me hold you? Would you have kissed me in our dream last night?”

  Persephone turned away and blushed, heat rushing into her as she remembered Aidon caressing her, his hands running along her skin, and his tongue parting her teeth as they tasted each other. The heat flashing through her started to lessen the pain at her core. She cursed her traitorous body. “That’s not a good excuse. You lied to me.”

  “Hades is also the name your mother would have used to turn you against me; to lie to you about me.”

  “She only told me your name and your title once, and said that the mortals cannot call your true name above ground. She never said anything further about you,” Persephone said, narrowing her eyes at him. “Maybe she should have. And do not speak ill of her: ever. You stole me from her.”

  His mood darkened as she unknowingly mentioned the woman who had shattered all his careful plans. Aidon had prepared everything— he would appear to her in the living world just before sunset, ferry her across the Styx at dawn when his kingdom was at the apex of its beauty, and gently guide both of them when they consummated their marriage that night. Demeter and her madness were the reason he had been forced to abduct Persephone and hastily couple with her in the first place. “She doesn’t own you.”

  Persephone stood up in a flash of anger. “Oh, so you own me, then?”

  Aidon came up from his crouch to rise in front of her, standing a head taller than Persephone. Calm dark eyes stared down at her. His hands moved gently to her shoulders, dancing over her hot skin. She shuddered, inadvertently dropping the clutched sheet and revealing herself to him. Aidon inhaled sharply before he averted his eyes, trying to look anywhere in the room that wasn’t her inviting body.

  He turned back to her and stared directly at her frightened face and nowhere else. “You may be my wife, but no one owns you, Persephone.”

  “Then let me go home.”

  “This is your home.”

  “You know what I mean!”

  Aidon released her shoulders and turned his back to her. Once he’d offered her some privacy, he spoke again. “It isn’t that easy. One cannot just cross the River here and go back to the corporeal world.”

  Persephone gathered the sheet around her again and sat down on the bed. “You flew me here; you can fly me back."

  “If I do, then we might never see each other again,” he pleaded with her. Aidon thought about all the other ways Demeter could separate them forever. He softened his voice. “Your mother would— she already did too much to prevent our union.”

  “Then why am I even here? Who says we’re even married?”

  Aidon turned and looked her in the eye. “Your father.”

  She creased her brow, thinking of Zeus—the distant and powerful god she hadn’t seen since she was a young child. This was the way of the world. If Zeus had given her to Hades, then that was the end of it. Her shoulders slumped in acceptance. “At least take me to my mother so I can tell her what happened.”

  “Persephone, I cannot—” he stopped and sat next to her again, moving her long hair over one shoulder to stroke her back. He fought to keep calm. “I can’t surrender you to Demeter. You’re my wife; I need you here.”

  “Then I am your prisoner.”

  He pursed his lips and stood up, walking to the door. “Please get dressed,” he said with a backwards glance. “As long as we’re both awake, I might as well show you some of your new home. Our home.”

  Her prison. But this was the way of the world. Her mother had told her so just yesterday. Women were passed from father to husband. It was inevitable.

  Persephone watched him leave and looked back to the folded black fabric on the chair. She slowly wrapped it over her body, then fastened the cloth at her shoulders with the fibulae before winding the golden ribbon so it girded her waist and wound under her breasts. She pulled at the fabric, draping it around her slim curves into an elegant chiton. Persephone looked down, sumptuous layers of fine black cloth cascading from her hips to her feet. She decided against wearing the necklace.

  ***

  Outside in the long hallway, Hecate stood next to the door, her arms folded and an eyebrow raised. Aidon glared back at her. “What?”

  “I am not the Oracle at Delphi, Aidon, but next time, perhaps, you will trust that I don’t need to be in order to give you a clear foretelling. She was not glad to awaken to me. You were in her heart, and you should have been beside her.”

  “I had my reasons.”

  “She is alone here—”

  “She has me!” He spat at her.

  “Now, or soon? By the time you arrived, certainly. But not this morning, when she needed you,” Hecate said quietly.

  “I couldn’t stay with her. If I was tempted again so soon, I— I wouldn’t have been able to…” Aidon was afraid of what he might have done to her, what little control he would have had if both of them awoke in the same bed. He had barely been able to rein himself in when the bed sheet fell and exposed her to him.

  Hecate watched each unfamiliar emotion dance across his face. She gave him a pained smile and shook her head. “How little you know about women.”

  “I think you’ve made my lack of experience abundantly clear to me over the last two days,” he said through his teeth.

  “In that way the two of you are well matched. The river before you flows wide and wild. You can swim out
alone, and be swept away by its currents,” she said looking up at him, “or you can build a boat together.”

  ***

  Wherever she stepped, the plants withered and died. Hoary frost covered the fields of Nysa, each shocked blade of grass sparkling with ice under the waning full moon high overhead. Cloaked in indigo, her lustrous copper blonde hair newly streaked with brittle strands of white, Demeter carried a torch in her hand and cried out on the wind. Her voice was thin and hoarse, her words torn and scattered by the howling gales that whipped around her as she walked.

  “Kore!” Demeter walked into the valley away from the sacred groves that stood on the hilltops. Rivulets of tears were dried on her face. “Kore! Where are you?”

  She had to be somewhere. Demeter cursed Athena and Artemis, and then cursed herself for trusting Kore with Zeus’s virgin daughters. When she had arrived in Nysa at sunset, both had told her they thought Kore was already with Demeter.

  They were lying to her. She could feel their lies.

  “Kore!” Storm clouds moved across the surface of the moon and the only light Demeter had now was her torch. She looked frantically around her, hoping against hope that her daughter would come running out of the darkness and into her arms.

  She tripped forward, falling over freshly uplifted earth. The clouds parted again and Demeter saw a great scar running through a small stone circle filled with trampled flowers. She could see the gaping outline of the earth where it had been pushed apart from below. Her eyes watered as she surveyed the ruined remains of the secret garden her daughter had planted as a young girl. “No…”

  Demeter stumbled to the widest part of the crack in the center of Kore’s garden and fell to her knees, her eyes brimming with fresh tears. “No! My Kore!”

  She beat her fist on the cold ground, as the mortals did when they wanted answers from the dark god. “Hades! Hades Aidoneus, I know you can hear me!”

  There was no answer.

  “Hades!” she yelled, beating the ground with each word, “Cold-hearted ravager! Return her to me at once!” She opened her bruised fist, clenching the earth, fingers sinking into the upturned dirt. Tears fell down her face again and she shook, sobbing. “Aidon, please! You could have had anyone. She was all I had left…”

  She looked skyward and wept, the wind churning around her as dark clouds rolled across the firmament and blotted out the moon. Lightning arced in a fan across the base of a cloud. “Is there nothing you cannot take from me? I’ve only ever asked you for one thing! And still—”

  “We swore…” his voice answered her on a soft rumble of thunder.

  Lightning illuminated the field and the trees, their leaves shriveling and falling to the wasted ground. Demeter pulled herself to her feet. “And you swore yourself to me, long ago! How can you answer for that?”

  A loud boom split the air as a bolt crashed to the ground, its force nearly knocking Demeter off her feet. Zeus stood in its wake, his brilliant white himation wrapped around him as a cloak and hood against the icy wind.

  “I couldn’t take you as my queen, Demeter. The earth did not yield any help against the Titans, and you did not seek aid outside your province.”

  “You know I tried,” Demeter cried to Zeus. “Gaia would not help me.”

  “No, indeed. Instead, she spit out Typhoeus, who nearly destroyed us all. The Titanomachy would have been lost if I had taken so weak a consort for my wife.”

  “It didn’t mean you had to stop loving me!”

  “We settled this aeons ago, Demeter!” he turned his gaze away from her and spoke under his breath. “You would not want me for a husband as I am now, anyway.”

  The truth stung her. “Yet you couldn’t leave me one thing. Just one reminder of how much you once loved me!”

  “Is that what our daughter is to you? A token of my affection, to be preserved forever in sentimental reflection? The toll on her was too great, Demeter. You sought to keep Persephone an ignorant child forever.”

  “Childlike innocence was her nature—”

  “It was the only nature you gave her!” he yelled, the sky cracking with blinding light.

  Demeter fell to her knees in fear, her head bowed. “Mighty Zeus—”

  “Do not interrupt me, woman!” he bellowed, the thunder rolling and echoing through the hills. “You taught my eldest child nothing! I did not choose to keep Persephone ignorant to her divine destiny. But because of the love I once bore you, I allowed you more leeway with our child than I allowed the mothers of any of my other children. Including my own wife!”

  She was weeping. He loved her once. Zeus placed a hand on Demeter’s shoulder as she knelt, shaking in front of him. He knew her; anger was not the way to appeal to her. Her once golden hair was turned white with grief. The storm calmed.

  “Demeter, Persephone is a queen now, and Aidoneus is not an unfitting husband. He rules over the richest part of what we divided at the end of the war.”

  Demeter raised her head to meet his gaze. Zeus’s bold blue eyes softened.

  “You must let her go,” he said softly, the wind starting calm. “You are the mother of the fertile fields. The earth’s people will be your children for all eternity.”

  Demeter stood up slowly before the king of the gods, her eyes narrowed, her voice iron. “I forsake them. Just as you abandoned your child, I forsake mine.”

  “You cannot,” he growled, thunder rolling again across the sky.

  “Stop me, then,” Demeter replied, icily. The wind howled fiercely, turning cold, stripping more leaves from the trees, their dried edges cutting past them. “Return my daughter from the Pit, from the hands of that monster, and I will tend the earth. Until that time, your worshippers, and all the worshippers of the Olympians who betrayed me, will feel my wrath.”

  7.

  The palace was beautiful and cold. Each room was different, displaying one rich color after another. Each step she took echoed empty and hollow, and she felt the profound silence closing in around her. Wide pillars and reliefs decorated each room, quartz giving way to marble, marble giving way to onyx, malachite, and granite. While the memory of Mount Olympus from her one childhood visit was hazy, she most clearly remembered stark white walls, absence of color, and an abundance of people. The Palace of Hades was its opposite.

  One passage opened to an immense quartz-domed great hall with gold columns. Woven tapestries hung on each wall, their threads telling the story of the war long ago. She ran her hand along one such panel, tracing the outline of a golden chariot wheel, then stepped back to view the entire scene. Hecate stood to one side of her, Aidoneus to the other. He paid no attention to the tapestry, only to the wispy lock of hair on her neck that had escaped her chignon.

  A warrior stood on the chariot, holding a raven-crested standard before a host of the Underworld. The threads told a tale of frightening creatures— a dark haired woman wrapped in black standing with towering Cyclopes, bronze armored men with black and silver wings hovering in front of dark, unknown creatures, their hulking forms hidden in the shadows. A small girl dressed in white with strawberry blonde hair and a silver half moon hanging on her forehead stood ahead of their ranks, her arms outstretched and holding up a massive golden helm.

  “The Helm of Darkness; our gift to Aidoneus to render him unseen to whomever he chooses. That was me, long ago,” Hecate said, pointing at the small girl, “But not so long ago…”

  That surprised Persephone. Intuitively, she had guessed from the way Hecate carried herself and spoke that she was ancient. If she were just a child when the Titanomachy happened, it would make her not much older than Persephone. Her eyes followed the upheld helm and looked at the warrior’s familiar face. She moved to the widest of the panels. The central scene was wreathed in laurel branches. It showed the gods’ victory over Typhoeus, the deadliest of the Titan's allies, before her father buried him under Mount Aitne. In each corner was a depiction of the Olympian alliance. On a bottom corner stood three figures. A man and
a woman dressed in white stood on one side of a river, and the helmeted warrior dressed in black stood on the other, his hand outstretched toward the woman’s swollen womb. Persephone peered at the woman’s face and her copper blonde hair.

  She felt Aidon’s hand come up to hold her at the small of her back. “Do you recognize them?”

  “My mother… the man next to her is my father…”

  “And you,” he said pointing at young Demeter’s belly. “And I.”

  She felt a chill crawl up her spine. If their betrothal was as old as the alliance of the Olympians, why didn’t her mother ever tell her?

  “This is where we started, Persephone. And one day,” Aidoneus said, pointing at the vast empty wall opposite the entry, “Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos will finish weaving the tapestry that tells our story.”

  Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, Persephone thought. The Fates themselves. Mother knew of this; swore it on the Styx. Why didn't she tell me? The last question repeated over and over again in her head. The walls felt suffocating and close, trapping her. A lump formed in her throat. She turned to Aidoneus, who was still smiling down at her. “Can we go outside? I… I want to see what it looks like beyond the walls.”

  “You’ve never lived indoors, have you?”

  “No. Even the shrines and temples I rested in were open to the sky.”

  Aidoneus cursed himself for forgetting where she came from and what she had known all her life. At the very least he should endeavor to make his wife more comfortable with her new home. He smiled at her and pushed the stray lock of hair back behind her ear. “It would be my honor to show you the Fields.”

  Hecate followed them down the corridors through the portico to the gardens. Aidoneus opened the door before them and stepped out with Persephone while Hecate hung back. She watched him introduce the young queen to Askalaphos, the pudgy little gardener who knelt to one knee before Persephone touched him on the shoulder. Hecate smiled. Once they had moved on, Hecate walked to where the gardener was pulling at something near the enclosing walls.