Receiver of Many

by Rachel Alexander

  “Great Lady,” Celeus said, his voice soft and measured, “just name what it is you want us to do— anything at all— and we’ll do it. My sons would be dead right now were it not for your kindness and wisdom. I will do anything I can to repay you.”

  She stilled and the room calmed. In the background Demeter could hear the baby Demophon bawling in his cradle. She slowly walked to the crib and leaned down, picking the infant up in her arms. “Sh-sh shh… they didn’t mean to scare you, glyko agoraki.”

  “My Lady—” he started again.

  “You will refashion your home, the Telesterion, as my temple. Propitiations from the fruitful earth are the only thing that will save your boy,” she said without looking up. Demophon started to calm as Demeter bounced him in her arms. “There, there, precious little one…”

  “Fruitful earth? B-but how—”

  “I will restore fertility to Eleusis. Only to Eleusis. The crops will call your people home from Ephyra, Thebes and Athens.” She walked over to trembling Metaneira and knelt down to her, the baby still in cradled in her other arm. Demeter grabbed her roughly by her chin. “Swear yourself to me,” she rasped. “Swear to never call on the servants of the One who stole your daughters and mine ever again.”

  “I swear myself to you and only you, Great Lady,” she said, tears still streaming down her face. Demeter put her calmed babe into her arms. “You are wise and merciful.”

  Let Zeus come to her. If he would not listen, if Aidoneus would not listen, if the other gods would betray her and if lowly tricksters like the sorcerer king of Ephyra would make a mockery of all the deathless ones, then she would restore order. The fertility of the earth was hers. The mortals needed her gifts more than they would ever need thunder and lightning.

  You are the mother of the fertile fields. The earth’s people will be your children for all eternity.

  Let the people of the earth come to her, until all her children cried out to the heavens in one voice to bring her Kore home. Let Zeus hear them. Let her reign as Queen of the Earth and the Harvest start here.

  She walked over to Triptolemus, his head still bowed. “Your son, who believed in me.” She let a smile lift a corner of her mouth. “I made him immortal this afternoon. His honor is greatest among you, Celeus, and he will show your people all they need to know to restore your kingdom. Rise, Triptolemus.”

  Triptolemus felt her hand, warm and comforting on his shoulder. He lifted his head to look upon her true form for the first time. She was radiant. Beautiful. Powerful. A Goddess. Just as he’d seen her in his visions, when her glamour would fade in front of him, allowing him to see her for what she was. He rose to his feet and stood next to her unbowed body, only half a head taller than her now. She smelled like sunshine and freshly threshed fields. “How may I serve you?”

  “Well, my Prince,” she said with a thin smile. “Your priestess was right all those years ago; you are to become a great teacher of men, after all. And your gifts to them will bring back my Kore.”

  17.

  Dusk lit the Styx in a brilliant fire of purple and gold, reflecting them back into the mists that hung over the palace. Hypnos had arrived that afternoon, if the latter part of light in the Underworld could be called that, to wake Merope from the deep sleep that had healed her mind enough to restore her to coherency.

  At Persephone’s request, he would be returning with his brother this evening— after she had questioned the wife of Sisyphus. Persephone had changed her lightly colored chiton to a burgundy peplos earlier and tied her hair back with a simple matching ribbon. Dressing simply but with the air of a queen, she thought, might give her more of a measure of authority to ask the nymph questions. She lingered on the balcony, listening to Merope shake like a leaf behind her, her breath shuddering. The traumatized nymph quaked as Persephone turned to face her and walk back into the torchlit amethyst room.

  Persephone hadn’t been someone who would have even been respected, much less feared. She had only ever been Kore— a child woman, living in Demeter’s shadow. It was the outside world that was to be feared, a world where venturing from the shelter of Eleusis was forbidden. Now Merope lay in her antechamber, and the emotion that most frequented the nymph’s face when she looked at Persephone was terror.

  The rescued nymph hadn’t stopped shivering since her arrival, and had remained silent since Hypnos had awoken her. Persephone had paced for an hour from her chamber to the amethyst room and back, wondering if her husband knew that their guest had arrived, fearing and anticipating his return and his pronouncements of what should be done.

  She sighed. It could wait no longer.

  Merope’s eyes tracked her as she approached. Her berry lips looked cracked and raw, the only mar on her otherwise flawless olive-complected skin.

  “Please…” Merope said quietly as Persephone stood over her. “Please don’t send me back, my queen.”

  Persephone knelt down next to her. The nymph cowered, shrinking further beneath the blanket. She gave Merope a dry, reassuring smile. “I wouldn’t dream of sending you to Tartarus again.”

  The nymph winced from a pain in her side, and Persephone wished that she had poppies to help ease her discomfort. But, she remembered, the nymph before her was dead; and the pain she felt existed only in her mind— in the consciousness of her shade. It would have been far worse without the deep stupor provided by Hypnos when she’d exited Tartarus.

  Persephone started. Merope had spoken to her— and all the other shades she had ever encountered were mute to her ears! “Why can I hear you?”

  Merope looked up at her, wondering if this was a trick question. “I… I did not drink the waters of the Lethe, my queen. My voice, my memories, are still my own.”

  The Queen bristled at the idea that a prisoner of Tartarus knew more about how these things worked than she did. Aidoneus could hear the shades. When they had walked to the Styx, he had heard a little girl running across their path and held Persephone back to let her pass before she could even be seen. She shook her head. In the course of her stay, there had only ever been two days worth of meaningful conversation between her and her husband about the workings of his kingdom. One of those days was her ill-fated attempt to run across the River of Forgetfulness.

  “How long were you in Tartarus?” Persephone began, silently wondering what she was doing. Who was she to ask these questions anyway, and how would she even know what to ask?

  “It’s hard to tell. There is no day or night in Tartarus, and every day seems to last… a lifetime. The only light is the glow of Ixion’s Wheel. The others said the only way to mark time was the Keres leaving for the world above each year when mortals celebrate Anthesteria.”

  “Who are these others?”

  Merope looked at her curiously and swallowed. “The damned.”

  Persephone kept a mental note to ask her husband about Ixion’s Wheel and who the Keres were when she next saw him— if she ever saw him. A month of lifetimes in Tartarus. She stroked the nymph’s forehead, brushing back tight curls of hair from her face. “I’m so sorry. You’ll never have to suffer through that again.”

  Merope squinted at her. “Kore?”

  Persephone drew her hand back as if from a flame.

  “Kore, my lady, is that you?”

  Her mouth went dry. “H-how do you know me by that name?”

  “We played together in Nysa. You and I, and Leucippe, and Ianthe… We were all so young back then— aeons ago, it seems. Your mother asked us to watch over you, and we would keep Apollo and Hermes away. My sisters were there too; Alcyon and Celaeno…”

  She looked down, remembering those innocent days of her adolescence amidst the valleys and groves of the gods. Demeter had surrounded her with nymphs, thinking they would provide ample protection from the Olympian men. And, Persephone realized belatedly, they would warn her mother if Hades ever dared to visit her. There were five or six nymphs with her at any given time, cycling throughout her life, their faces and voices
interchangeable. She scarcely remembered their names. “Merope, I’m sorry. I— there were so many of us back then…”

  The nymph nodded with a smile. “It’s all right; I wasn’t there for long. Maybe a decade. I wove flowers into your hair a few times.”

  One of the Oceanid nymphs— she hadn’t figured out which— got with child by Poseidon, and that promptly ended Demeter’s experiment in keeping Kore innocent of the ways of the world. Her rotating troupe of nymphs was disbanded to be replaced with Demeter herself, and less frequently Cyane, Demeter’s faithful servant before she retired and dissipated into a favorite spring. After that, constant Minthe would watch her when Demeter was called to Olympus. Just a year after the nymphae left, Kore had her first flow of moon blood and her mother promptly moved them to Eleusis— the place of her birth.

  Persephone continued with a new question. “What happened after you left Nysa?”

  “I went back to my mother’s home in Thessaly. We lived in a very small village by the sea called Antikera. I watched two of my sisters bear Poseidon’s children. Three more attracted the attentions of Zeus and bore his children. I did not want to follow in their footsteps. One day, about twenty years ago, I saw a man riding a horse along the beach near my mother’s home. He stopped when he saw me. To me, he was very handsome; not in the usual way, but he was charismatic. Eyes as blue as the Aegean. I ran away from him the first time I saw him, thinking that he would try to force me in the same manner Zeus took my elder sister, Taygete. He called out after me, but I was already gone.”

  “Go on…” Persephone sat on the divan at Merope’s slender feet.

  “The next day I saw him again, this time staring out at the sea toward the place Ephyra would one day stand. He asked me for my name and I gave it to him, almost without thinking. I was enraptured. He told me his name— Aeolides, son of Aeolus who was king of all Thessaly. He was gentle to me and gave me a polite nod when I refused his kiss. He came to my mother’s house asking after me. Not just to take me as a fleeting companion as the gods would, but to make me his wife. I was overjoyed, needless to say. I knew that I would outlive him— he was only mortal after all— but I didn’t care. I’m a nymph; our likely lot is to be loved for the length of an afternoon. With Aeolides, I could be loved for thirty or forty years, if the Fates were kind. I could be happy at least for a time.

  “For the first few years, our lives were beautiful. Aeolides traveled south with many of the slaves his father captured in wartime. We built our beautiful city of Ephyra where farmers had once herded pigs. Aeolus fell into disgrace, so my husband renamed himself Sisyphus, King of Ephyra, to distance himself from his father’s legacy. Our ports were full of gold and saffron, ebony and date plums, and the tax on them made us wealthy beyond my wildest dreams. It seemed like every week he would give me one marvelous trinket or another. One day, Sisyphus woke me by dangling an emerald over me the size of a ripened fig. And so we continued. I happily gave him sons and remained blissfully ignorant of what he was doing.”

  “What was he doing?” Persephone asked, enrapt with Merope’s story. She suddenly felt embarrassed by her innocent isolation all the aeons of her life— the nymph’s tale standing in stark relief with her pastoral, sheltered existence.

  “Sisyphus was well learned. He had a keen interest in studying things that were a bit more… esoteric. Scrolls arrived with his guests, and the scrolls remained with him. Later I found out that the guests who brought them didn’t leave either— at least, not alive. He aged more slowly than other men, but watched me stay evergreen, and would often comment on that fact. When I finally confronted him about our missing guests, and how he had acquired the Book of Tantalus from one of them, he very carefully said that he was devising a means by which he could live with and love me forever. He said that his methods were necessary— if anyone knew of the library of arcane scrolls he had spent years procuring, it would make us vulnerable. Naturally, I trusted him. To my eternal shame, I trusted him.”

  “Forgive me,” Persephone said, “but what is the Book of Tantalus?”

  “It was a set of five clay tablets. Written down by Tantalus himself in the old tongue. They explained his philosophies, and buried within his writings were the directions for creating ambrosia and the rituals that grant immortality— closely guarded secrets that only the six Children of Kronos were supposed to possess. He was once a trusted friend of the Olympians, helped them during the Gigantomachy, but he secretly despised them. He fed them the flesh of his own son and tried to share the secrets of the gods with all mankind. The book my husband had was the last copy in existence. Sisyphus shared some of its secrets with me, assuring me he trusted me implicitly and said that if I loved him, I should likewise trust him in all things. But he didn’t love me. He never loved me. I was a means to an end. A nymph consort for a king who wanted to be a god and hold sway over life and death. It wasn’t until I realized that he was trying to bring down the gods themselves that I saw him for what he truly was.”

  Persephone shuddered. “How can a mortal bring down the gods?” she thought out loud.

  Your parents are Olympians, Hecate’s voice rang in her head, so you won’t ever die, as long as there are mortals who worship you…

  “I may have ended up in Tartarus just the same as him for what I was taught— what forbidden knowledge and heresies I came to believe…”

  “It cannot be as bad as all that.”

  “Sisyphus taught me one truth that mortals aren’t supposed to know— that the gods need mankind far more than mankind need the gods. The cosmos is a paradox. Gods created the mortals, and mortals created the gods.”

  The Queen of the Underworld was silent.

  “Please don’t send me to Tartarus for saying that,” she said meekly.

  Persephone shook her head. “I can’t. In some ways, what you say is true. Not for all gods, but those in the world above need the worship of mortals. And if souls were sent to Tartarus simply because of what they thought, then surely the Pit would overflow. So please do not worry. I would never hold against you the things you tell me about Sisyphus.” Persephone wondered if these things were also true of her and her husband. She contemplated the idea of existing in a world without mortals and knew she would regret her next question. “Which gods did he speak of?”

  “All of them. Ephyra is a busy port; its overland waterway straddles the Isthmus. We had traders sailing through with spices from half the world away. Jewelry. Linen. And they brought their stories with them. There are other lands outside Hellas where the gods have other names. Sisyphus taught me that all are one and the same. Before you came here, the Arcadians and Thracians didn’t call you Kore. They called you Despoina. In the easternmost islands of Hellas and the lands of Phrygia your name isn’t Persephone— it’s Perephatta. Beyond Phrygia, in the crescent land of the two rivers, you are called Ereshkigal. And in the desert sands, across the water to the distant south, you are called Nephthys and also Isis. The stories they tell about you are different, but The Lady Beneath the Earth is one and the same. The same divine role; and in the end, the same destiny…”

  Persephone blanched. “But I haven’t even been here a month…” she said quietly.

  “Is it really so strange, when you are already known in Tartarus?” Merope said. “Where their name for you is Praxidike? When your husband Hades Aidoneus Chthonios— Isodetes, Plouton, Euboleus, Polydegmon, second only to Zeus, an immortal with a hundred names— rules the place of his namesake?”

  She walked to the portico columns leading out to the terrace and stared into the darkness of Hades… Chthonia… Erebus… her realm… her home. All beyond the balcony was oblivion but for the torches and braziers of the palace reflecting in the still waters of the bottomless river Styx.

  “Merope, how did you end up on a pyre?” Persephone said, her voice small and shaking as she tried to change the subject.

  “Tyro.”

  “Who…?” Persephone trailed off, coming back into the
soft light of the amethyst room.

  “The daughter of Salmoneus; who was Sisyphus’s brother. My husband wanted to destroy his brother and expand his kingdom, so he lay with Tyro. Unbeknownst to me, he raped two sons onto her who were prophesied to kill Salmoneus and claim his throne for Sisyphus. She murdered them when they were born, then ended her own life, knowing even as she did it that she would be sent to Tartarus as a kinslayer. My lord husband kept his hands clean because he knew the laws of the gods above— what would incite their wrath and what would not. And he knew that even if Tyro did kill their children, his actions would destroy his brother all the same. After I learned of this, I went to his library. He didn’t deserve immortality. He didn’t deserve to live another wretched day. I destroyed the Book of Tantalus— the tablets that would render him deathless— before he could finish deciphering them.”

  “And he burned you for it,” Persephone said darkly.

  “No. He kept me alive— terrified and alive. He threatened that he would kill our youngest son, Glaucus, if I ever questioned him or went into his library again. For years after I destroyed the tablets, I lived in abject fear. I was forced to obey his every whim, fulfill his every need, was to always appear to the public as his dutiful wife and doting queen, the immortal nymph whose sisters had borne the progeny of the gods. I appeared less with him in public and he isolated me further still— from our guests, our servants—” her voice hitched. “—Our children.

  “When statues of him started appearing in the temples in place of Almighty Zeus, I finally understood what he was doing. All his arcane texts, marrying me, then keeping me alive after I betrayed him, his plans had been set in motion long ago. Because he had committed offenses against Zeus himself before he met me, Sisyphus already knew he was bound for Tartarus. He was, he is, terrified of death. If he wasn’t able to find a way to make his own soul immortal, he would just use mine instead. Sisyphus wasn’t happy just being a king. He wanted to become a god.