The Queen of Flowers and Roots

by Io

  “We liberated Olympus, mother. Now we have to leave.”

  Demeter stopped smiling. She clasped the little girl to her breast, kissed her provoking another cascade of giggles.

  “Must you?” Gently, I explained: “The Avernus has been without rulers for too long.

  Among the damned, there are some that could be dangerous after death: think of Typhon, whose punishment imposes the whole weight of Trinacria. If he can break free, he would provoke a massacre; and I don’t think I need to speak of the Titans to you. Hades keeps them subjugated precisely to prevent disasters, you know.”

  Demeter’s mouth twitched. She didn’t want us to leave, there were good reasons, so I stopped arguing. Firmly I took Kore, who barely recognized me, she gave me one of those huge toothless smiles, of an infant, that always melt the hearts of their parents. Who knows if it would have that effect even on Hades. I was really curious to find out.

  “I will bless every root and will send all my love to you,” I promised Demeter, “and please, tell the mortals that anyone who perished in this famine has obtained the eternal bliss of the Elysian fields. No matter what crimes they have committed: if the Earth does not feed her children, they are not responsible for the suffering that leads them to do things that would be inexcusable under any other circumstance. You will tell him?”

  “I’ll tell him.” Promised Demeter, and it is since then that those who in the world die of starvation pass judgment and reach paradise. To my knowledge, no such souls have ever drunk the pure waters of the Lethe, to be reborn into the world; I suppose that is understandable.

  We hugged one last time, all three, the golden sprig of wheat sparkled between us, then Hecate reassumed her individual identities. I smiled, Kore kicked. My mother had tears in her eyes, and told me to turn around so that she could tie my shawl, so that I could carry my daughter.

  “Going down into the underworld will be a great change, poor child. Take care, seeing that he does not shine in that respect, in such circumstances.”

  I flew over the barbs, knowing that I would spend eternity doing so. I said goodbye to Cyane and the other nymphs, one by one, they embraced me making the flowers blossom that they blessed, and finally I clasped hands with Mentha, even asking her to forgive me.

  “I have found the reason and the way thanks to your perfume. I will consider your plant sacred to the Avernus, if you agree.”

  She replied with a great hug full of joy, which made me suspect that the myth, from then on, would be that Minthe and I were lovers. The irony of what had passed instead has always made me laugh, in the ages that would come, at least as much as it has horrified Minthe.

  Eventually, Demeter resigned herself and, after making me promise to write every time Hermes came down to accompany a lost soul, she gave me the gift basket. It was filled to the brim with ambrosia for Kore, a glittering treasure that made me smile.

  My mother cried as I walked away, but I noticed that she did not offer to accompany me. She preferred to shorten the time together rather than have to meet Hades yet again. I could only hope this would improve with time.

  I was out of breath when I reached the altar on the other side of the mountain, a little sad, yes, but mostly relieved it was over.

  Finally it was beginning.

  The farmers had already returned to work in the fields, up to the horizon. My mother would have had much to tell at Eleusis, and she garnered many honors, for her, for me, for my daughter. And for our shadow.

  Hades had at that moment finished attaching the reins to the dim harness, the rust color, the powerful neck of the lead horse. As soon as he saw me, Abaste whinnied so strongly that even the god of the dead was startled.

  “Oh, my treasure!”

  Just to please me, I passed Hades at a rush and hugged the horse that pawed with his hooves in front and he rubbed his head on my shoulder, while the other three stretched their muzzles to be caressed.

  “Aetone, Meteo, Nonio, you been good? Yes? Oh, I missed you so much!”

  Kore sniffed cautiously, almost with reverence. The little one looked on with fascinated eyes, without any fear, until Hades coughed ostentatiously and took the basket from my hand. In feeling its weight, he frowned.

  “Demeter had perhaps been afraid that I would let her die of hunger, in the Avernus?”

  “It is ambrosia for Kore, for me and for you too, if you...”

  “Thank you,” he interrupted, “I’m too ancient to still need it, and the same goes for you. You can write to your mother, when we get there.”

  An eternity to endure the taunts. For that, no Mysteries were able to help me. I pulled the forelock of Aetone one last time, and he tried to burn my hair, then I reached the chariot. I looked at the polished interior with a nostalgic smile, the other time was so different, yet so much the same.

  Hades snapped the reins, and the horses, with no need for lashes or cries, whinnied in unison and raced forward. I made sure that Kore was held tightly wound in the shawl, while the horses increased their pace to a speed no mortal horse could ever have achieved.

  “Now, Abaste” he called to his horse. Hades spoke with a steady voice, and the stallion pounded his hooves on the ground, strong enough to split it.

  When we went down into the abyss, the chariot tilted so that, like last time, I clung to Hades’ hand, holding Kore with the other. Hades squeezed back, as we crossed the smell of burning, where the horse’s hooves had hit, and white roots sank into the huge clods of soil.

  For a while I contemplated the roots that ran over us, so close that I could touch them, before looking ahead, to the speeding horses. Beside the chariot, the darkness was absolute, it was Erebus, impenetrable to anyone’s eyes. But I knew I would soon began to see a suffused glow, which did not come from any place even though it was everywhere.

  The spring could see it. It was already reflected in Kore’s eyes.

  Afterword

  Being able to talk about this novel without falling into complacency more narcissistic than you can imagine is very difficult for me. Queen of flowers and roots It is one of those stories that you know have been a challenge only when, the last line has ended on the last page, you must remove the smile from the author’s face who is thinking – “Ah! And now, all of you, put this in your pocket!”

  Where ‘everyone’ is a vague and broad term that includes a range of people who have largely even forgotten. The one that I really remember is my Greek teacher at fourth year high school.

  After a quick rundown of mythological themes, in which Hades and Persephone were liquidated in a few words, a classmate raised his hand and asked the question that all of us, fourteen were anxious to put the facts straight in these matters, we had already prepared to ask:

  “Prof, but Persephone what did she think about all this?”

  The teacher gave the standard answer: “It did not matter. Those were different times.”

  ‘Those were different times, meant that the lesson did not relate to the opinion of a mythological character and even to the opinion of all the other mythological characters. In fact, every time one of us asked for an outline on the opinion of Helen of Troy, or Cassandra, or even Aphrodite and Hera (whose marital situation would have required at least good couples’ therapy), the answer was always ‘ it was of other times’.

  Challenge posed and harvested.

  The myth of Persephone and Hades is quite atypical in the panorama of classical mythology.

  The linear complexity of this story is that even today it influences fantastic collective imaginary. The theme of the girl forced to live in a magnificent palace, where she was treated like a queen by someone who could be a monster, and it reveals much more than appears, as is well known. The helmet of invisibility, which in many parallel myths becomes a cape or cloak, need no introduction. The forbidden fruit, which should not be eaten on pain of irreparable consequences, exceeds the fantastic fiction and becomes religion, even today.

  But that is not why the
story of the goddess of spring, crowned Queen of the Underworld to the king of the Underworld, has fascinated me to the point that I wanted to tell it.

  The fact is that, in classical mythology, there are few stories in which it is possible to find a heroine, in the modern sense of the term. I think in school we all studied how Greek society was sexist and how little freedom women had, not even the goddesses were exempt. Except for a few, that are ‘punished’ by depriving them of sexuality (Athena, Artemis, Hestia), the mythological women who were unable to stay in their place generally came to a bad end: death or dishonor, more often both.

  The goddess Persephone was an exception.

  She was a hugely popular and beloved deity, her faithful never wanted to see her defeated. If spring is defeated, the world is lost. If the seed is not buried at the beginning of winter, no crops can grow. She was not a goddess who could be crushed.

  The more I thought about it the more it seemed impossible that she, Persephone, had been just a metaphor embodied by the seasonal cycle, as suggestive as you want, but with the same spirit of initiative as a duckling. There are too many details, buried under one myth, that challenge the hasty ‘they were different times’.

  There was a rat in Pergusa. That is beyond doubt. But actually before and after there is nothing except the divine quarrel between Hades and Demeter, between brother and sister, between son-in-law and daughter-in-law (the gods of Olympus boasted a kinship that was a little mixed)?

  No one has ever asked Persephone her version of the facts, but something emerges anyway. It is not what the teacher told us.

  Persephone made her steps towards Hades, no less than he did: the narcissi, which in the myth attracts her away from safety, to the clutches of the monster, are his, as well as the land in which they are born. Does the myth really want me to believe that the flowers have betrayed the goddess of spring, instead of following her will?

  And why, in the wonderful Hymn to Demeter, the queen of the Avernus jumps up full of happiness not when Hermes says that he will take her to the surface, but when Hades assures her that she will always be able to return to him?

  The pomegranate seeds (or three, or six) that bind her to her fate were not imposed on her either by force or by fraud, as many subsequent interpretations have established: Hades gave them to her, she accepted them.

  Then, if I want to believe that the queen of the underworld did not know the laws of her own realm, her, a goddess, then the problem is no longer ‘they were other times’, but rather ‘she seems to have been a little stupid’.

  Changing perspective, how credible is that Demeter, grief-stricken at the fate of her daughter, would agree to leave her three (or six) months a year with her tormentor? She was ready to kill every single living being, to save her, and Zeus had no way of stopping her. But maybe, if Persephone had given her own version of the facts, which calmed Demeter enough to reason with her...

  No, nothing, however you look at it, everything carried us in one direction.

  The myth of Persephone exquisitely describes a modern heroine, as well as an extremely powerful deity – the rebirth and regeneration of the world, that is impossible without her. The heroine that has crossed centuries and millennia, down to us, to arrive with us today, is still a heroine, after two thousand years, she has something to say.

  Not that Hades has been revealed as any less.

  We have been accustomed to consider that the god of the dead and the Underworld was never the monster that Hollywood needs – a villain is more necessary than the hero who will defeat him.

  For he is not very talkative, the god of the Underworld differs markedly from the other Olympians, in a total reversal of values: if in ancient Greece Apollo, Zeus, Poseidon and Hermes, were revered, our sensitivity is gratified just by what Homer called ‘the most hated of the gods’.

  Unlike the main divinities, in fact, Hades never indulges in excesses, does not seek to conquer cities and empires, does not in any way alter the equilibrium of the cosmos. His revenge is always proportionate to the offense and is always provoked. His relationship with the other deities are very relaxed: his every interaction with his younger brothers – Poseidon and Zeus – or with the Olympians in general, talks about requested and granted favors, not of clashes. The rare times that you see him take action is when he is opposed to an alteration of the same equilibrium. He governs the afterlife and nothing distracts him from this task.

  Nothing, that is, except Persephone.

  The only occasion that he is acting in defiance of all laws and all rules is when, in love with the goddess of spring, he literally moves the world, to keep her with

  him. And not to seduce her, as was, famously, Zeus’ habit: what Hades designs and implements is to marry her, crown her, spend eternity with her, she alone.

  In short, the god of the dead who was so hated at the time of the ancient Greeks is the romantic hero par excellence of our time.

  Okay, maybe my teacher was right, at least about this. They were other times, really.

  And then, challenge accepted. I have tried to respect the spirit of the story, at the same time taking much narrative freedom, or inventing from the whole cloth: from at least twenty years of passion for fantasy. And, if it is true that fantasy is a genre born in modern times, it is truth that borrows heavily from the mythology that we also studied in school. Hades and Persephone, as well as the plot of their story, are among the archetypal foundations on which modern writers have built.

  I do not know if I’ve met my personal challenge, which is perhaps not even the one I unknowingly picked up that day. After all, this is a fantasy novel. It makes no claim to instruct about mythology, growth, love, self-awareness, the courage to take our place in the world, that others believe in you or not. It’s only a story.

  If the challenge was that, though, I think I have met it: I have been able to tell the story to the end.

  Thanks for listening.

  Acknowledgements

  As always, the amount of people whom I owe a decisive help in being able to arrive to the end is such as to make me feel embarrassed. I mean if it is you that I serve? I’m just the one who wrote the story, fine.

  And therefore, in strict order, because even alphabetical order is unfair, because of the importance that each of you has had, thank you:

  Serena Marina Marenco, Strix. To write knowing that someone will read you and believe in you so much as to create beautiful things such as the cover of this book is extraordinary. I love you

  Gianpiero ‘Jack Shark’ Possieri. That message almost five years ago I will have always here, at the mid-point between the heart and the lump in my throat. Do you know it too?

  Andrea ‘Munky’ Alfonso, best troll ever.

  Linda Rando, because yes.

  Readers of my site, Stella Scarlet: there are people who pay to have articulated comments as intelligent as yours, and you help me just because you want me to continue to write. And no, now I am becoming emotional.

  Stefano Charybdis, who came all the way, gave me wise counsel and continues to have respect for me although I have never placed mouth-brain filters. And for the photo of Kore for which he made me jump for a full day.

  Anna, Francesco and Jess: don’t tell me I have to tell you why, right? I say this only for the benefit of those who read the acknowledgments. Because you are wonderful people and whoever meets you is lucky. So either readers of this page thanks, hold down the large paws: they are mine.

  Leone, Isolde and Sheherazade, indispensable servants of every fantasy author who without a cat on the keyboard cannot write gquhefuYIGKDSTYGYFABfafàààààààààààààààààààà

  Finally, and this means that I cannot pass over them because they are the most important and therefore must be impressed:

  Andrew, the Lemmarito can be a saint now;

  David and Arianna, masterpieces still unbeaten in my life (and will stay that way). You are present in each row.

  Bibliography

&nbs
p; Ovid, Metamorphoses (Book IV, 435-445; Book V, 340-570; Book X, 1-75);

  Homer, Hymn to Demeter;

  Ann Sutler, The Narcissus and the Pomegranate: An Archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter - the book is freely available at: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015056909636; view = 1up; seq = 50

  and here is my review of the book itself: http: // www .stellascarlatta.com / 2015/05/04 / the-narcissus-and-the-pomegranate-an-archeology-of-the-Homeric hymn-demeter-to- /

  Karl Kerenyi, Dionysos - Archetype of indestructible life (Adelphi);

  Robert Graves, The Greek Myths;

  Saint Seiya - the myth of Hades © Shiori Teshirogi of granting Masami Kurumada (oh Rega, but REALLY thought that a story about Greek mythology I would not put quotes from Saint Seiya like rain? Sweet summer child ...)

  P. S. (Kore)

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