Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories)

by Ringle, Molly

  As she sat in orientation meetings, the dream kept unfolding and strengthening in her head, presenting new details about the life of this last-century German dream-Sophie. Strange. Usually dreams faded until you couldn’t remember them by mid-morning.

  So her Kiwi friend’s name was probably Adrian Watts, she mused while she jogged back to the dorms through a cool rain shower. She had that much on him.

  In the last life it was Karl Hirrmann, her mind helpfully added.

  Wow. That was odd. Dreams didn’t usually invent entire names for their characters. She didn’t know her own German name from that dream.

  Sure I do, she thought. I was Grete Sommer Meier.

  Hmm.

  As she climbed the stairs in the dorm, she wondered whether anyone with that name had ever existed. Even if reincarnation was real—which it certainly might be, she suspected, given her glimpse of the Underworld—she wasn’t supposed to be able to access those lives. Not without eating the magic pomegranate.

  In the dorm room, Melissa and another girl sat on Melissa’s bed, watching an episode of a TV show on the computer. Sophie exchanged hellos with them, then dumped her backpack on the floor and settled down at her desk with her own laptop.

  Grete Sommer Meier, she typed, putting quotation marks around it to search on the phrase as a whole. Before hitting “search,” she paused to think of some other indicator that would prove it was a real memory and not a coincidence.

  What year was Grete born? she considered.

  1901, her mind supplied with ease. And I died in 1985. And Meier was my maiden name; my married name was Huber.

  Nervousness twisted her stomach. The search wouldn’t turn up anything. No need to get antsy.

  She added “1901” and “Huber” to the search, as extra terms outside the quotation marks. She hit “search.”

  At once the page listed several dozen links, mainly to genealogy sites. Clicking on two or three of them was enough to prove that, indeed, a Grete Sommer Meier had been born in Germany in 1901, married a Franz Huber, and died in 1985.

  Her fingers felt icy. She clicked another link, which turned out to be a brief obituary copied in from an old newspaper. Only after reading the whole article did she realize it was written in German, which she was reading with as much ease as she read English.

  She quit the browser with a quick keystroke and jumped up from her desk.

  Melissa and the other girl sent her a glance. “Going out?” Melissa asked.

  “Yeah. I’m going to walk over to the, uh, library.” She shut her laptop, tucked it into its case, and hustled out.

  Chapter Eight

  ADRIAN HUDDLED IN THE BACK of the bus with his laptop computer, draining its battery by looking up places he could buy some kind of caravan to live in. He wanted to stay near Sophie, rather than commuting back and forth from the Underworld. But camping in the chilly damp outdoors was growing uncomfortable, and would only get worse as autumn advanced.

  His phone interrupted, vibrating with a new text message. Seeing it was from Sophie, he closed his computer and read the text.

  Hey, random question, it said. Why the hell can I speak German? ANSWER ASAP.

  Rapture and guilt braided themselves together to form his new mood. A low chuckle flowed from his throat.

  The pomegranate juice had worked.

  Kiri lifted her head to look at him, and he ruffled up her neck fur. “All right, here we go,” he told her.

  Ah. Indeed, he texted back. I take it the dreams have started. Grete Meier and Karl, is it?

  He waited. His phone rang with an incoming call in less than a minute.

  “Hi,” he answered.

  “What is happening to me?” She sounded really, really angry.

  “Yeah…about that.”

  “How did you know the name Grete Meier?”

  “I think you can answer that.”

  “It—” She gave a frustrated huff. “It feels like Karl Hirrmann was you. Or you were him.”

  “Yes.”

  “How? These past lives you mentioned?”

  “Exactly. But Grete and Karl and everything—look, I don’t mean to say they don’t matter. Every life matters. But they’re only the start and I’m going to ask you to let them go for now, and move farther back.”

  “What are you talking about? Why am I even having these dreams, these—these memory-like things?”

  “They are memories. Real ones. And, okay…” He rose and walked to the end of the bus. “You’re having them because you did consume some pomegranate. There was some of its juice in the bottle you drank from.”

  “What?” she shrieked.

  “Do you want to talk in person? That might be best.”

  He heard only a shaky series of breaths from her for a few seconds. When she answered, she sounded less angry and more scared. “Not if you’re planning to take me halfway across the world again.”

  “No. Nothing like that. We’d still slip into the spirit realm, to be safe, but we could stay right here in Oregon.” She didn’t answer, so he added, “We’ll just sit under a tree, if you like. You don’t have to go near the bus.”

  “Okay. I need to understand what’s happening.”

  SOPHIE ROCKED UP and down on her brown-and-white sneakers, hugging herself in the cool air even though she’d put on a sweatshirt and a rain jacket. Nervousness made you damn cold sometimes, she observed. She waited in the random corner of concrete behind the restaurants, glancing around suspiciously, still rather expecting a camera crew to jump in and say, “Surprise! You’ve been pranked. Did you believe it? The whole Underworld thing?”

  But it was looking less and less likely that anyone could have faked this experience. How did you insert a whole foreign language into someone’s head?

  The sudden breath of wind carried a handful of leaves across the concrete. A person stood there. Sophie lifted her gaze and found Adrian watching her, once again wearing his flannel-lined coat and muddy black boots.

  He approached and gathered her up against him gently. “Hey.”

  She declined to answer, looking away as he lifted her out of one world and into the other. The meadow sprang up around them. As soon as she recovered her balance, she yanked herself free of him.

  He let go. Kiri sat by the stake with the orange flagging, and woofed in greeting. Sophie looked around at the cloud-shadowed landscape, the strange wilderness.

  The vastness of how little she understood about this realm, and about Adrian, swept over her and transformed itself into rage. She swung around and slapped him as hard as she could.

  He reeled back two steps, seemingly more in surprise than from the force of the blow. Kiri whined, looking to Adrian as if for instruction on whether to sink her teeth into this rude person’s calves. He calmed the dog by laying his hand on her head.

  Sophie’s palm stung and grew hot, and she shook it at her side, now furious with herself as well as him. Violence. Real nice.

  He blinked, widening his eyes, then cleared his throat. “Okay, I probably deserved that.”

  “You drugged me. I said no to the pomegranate and you gave it to me anyway.”

  “You’re right. I apologize. But—”

  “So now my mind is getting opened to past lives and messing me all up, like you said?”

  “Well. Yeah.” Both his palms shot up in defense. “But I’m going to help you.”

  “Good. Make it stop.”

  “There is no way to stop it. Well, there’s one, but…”

  “What is it? Let’s do it.”

  He shook his head, briefly but with urgency. “You’d have to die.” While the chilling words skittered over her, he added, “That is…we don’t know of any other way to clear the slate. Sorry. You’re stuck with these memories till next time you’re reborn.”

  “Well. Crap.”

  “Therefore try to make peace with them. I did this so you can get some of the answers you want—and so I can talk to you about them. The answers are
in there, most of them.”

  “Answers. Right.” Sophie wandered aside, hugging herself again in the wind, distracted by the mélange of thoughts about Grete, Karl, herself, Adrian, and this world of ghosts. A grove of huge gnarled oaks nearby looked like a possible refuge from the wind, and she moved toward it as she sorted through her confusion.

  Adrian walked with her.

  Beneath the trees, she found a calmer patch of air and leaned against a mossy trunk. “You were Jewish. I helped you escape the Nazis.”

  “You had the money. We bribed the right people.”

  “I got you a ticket on a train to France. Then…”

  “A boat to New York,” he finished. “Sailed in May of 1939.”

  Exactly the date she was about to say. Feeling weak, she rested her weight against the tree. “This is crazy.”

  “We never saw each other again. Just letters.” He looked down at his boots. “I remember missing you so much, knowing I shouldn’t be unhappy; I should just be thankful to be alive.”

  The ache in Sophie’s chest told her a similar truth: as Grete, she had loved Karl. But she had been married, with children, and couldn’t ever be with him. The tragedy, the sweetness, and the increasing conviction that she really had been Grete (and he really had been Karl) all began swaying her toward forgiving him.

  She could see herself searching him out too, if she had this knowledge and he didn’t. Not that she’d admit it out loud.

  “I’m sorry I hit you,” she said, grudgingly.

  “It’s all right. You had good reason.”

  “Grete and Karl—is that why you went looking for me? Because we were them?”

  Adrian hummed a dismissive note, glancing up into the tree. “They’re only the tip of the iceberg. Come up here, let’s sit.” Before she could accept, he had hooked his arm around her middle and hoisted her up to where the branches split out from the trunk, six or seven feet off the ground. Though this time she anticipated his strength, it still impressed her. He lifted her as easily as she would have lifted a kitten.

  As she seized the nearest branch, he pushed against the soles of her shoes, and she scrambled into the tree’s central cup. It was soft under her hands, carpeted with moss and small ferns. She chose a seat on a mostly-flat area with one of the branches against her back. Adrian pulled himself up and sat opposite her. They both bent their knees up, but the confines of the oak crowded their feet against each other. From below the tree came the contented sounds of Kiri chewing on a stick.

  “We can sit in the bus if you’d rather,” he said. “I promise I won’t drive it anywhere.”

  “I’ll take my chances with the tree.”

  “All right. So…” He spread his palms over his knees. “We’ve both lived many, many lives and seen all kinds of things. But there’s one particular life, a long time ago, that’s especially important. It’s the main reason I came looking for you, and got you to drink the juice, and it’s the one I want you to remember.”

  She closed her eyes to concentrate. “Okay. I don’t—everything’s all jumbled in my head, but—how far back? What year?”

  “Uh…I can’t be sure exactly. A few thousand years.”

  Her eyes flew open. “What?”

  “And here’s the trouble: you won’t be able to remember it right here, today. Your memories only just got opened up, and the first ones to come back are the most recent.”

  “So it’s going to take days, weeks—longer?—before I get to this ancient life you’re talking about?”

  “Not necessarily. See…” He shifted in the tree, straightening his back. His fingers danced upward from his kneecaps as he explained. “This huge collection of memories, of lifetimes your soul has lived through, it’s like a big bag of—of pomegranates.”

  “Enough with the pomegranates.”

  “Oranges, then. Now, the first orange you pull out is the one on top, the last one that was put in.”

  “Yes…”

  “You could sit down with that orange, peel it, pull it into sections, examine it all day. Or you could put it aside, reach into the bag, and get the next one. Then put that aside, and take out the next, and the next, and so on, until you get to this amazing, shining, huge, golden orange. That’s the one you sit down and open up.”

  “How will I know which one it is?” she asked.

  “Oh, you’ll know.”

  She grunted in impatience.

  “Although,” Adrian added, and drummed his fingers on his knees, thinking. “Yeah. Okay. I can give you a hint. Another thing the pomegranate makes you remember is the time you spent between lives.”

  “Between?” She suddenly understood. “In the Underworld?”

  He smiled. “You’re even calling it the right name now.”

  Whispers of images sprouted at the back of her mind, ideas and memories moving like shadows, just out of reach. She sighed. “Great. Now I’m remembering the language of the Underworld, too.”

  He answered in the musical, vowel-rich words of that language, “Congratulations. You can now talk to anyone who’s down there.”

  “Just what I always wanted,” she responded, in the same tongue. The sounds felt strange in her mouth, but she knew the translation was right. She closed her eyes again and furrowed her eyebrows. “So what is it I’m supposed to remember from the Underworld?” she asked, switching back to English.

  His low voice guided her. “Not very long ago, before being born into this life, after dying as Grete, you and I met there, in the fields. We mostly stayed with our families—the souls of our children, spouses, siblings, and so on—but there was one day we took a walk together, just the two of us.”

  The image blossomed in her mind: Karl grayed and elderly, like herself, but still dear to her eyes. “We walked to the trees,” she said, keeping her eyes shut. “That forest, where the pomegranates grow.”

  “Yes.” He sounded almost breathless. “What did we say?”

  She exhaled, massaging her temples, letting the memory unfold. “I said…something about the trees being neglected.”

  “And I answered, The orchard needs you…” he prompted, in a whisper.

  “…Persephone,” she finished. With a gasp, she opened her eyes and stared at him.

  He held her gaze, his dark eyes sparkling. “Right.”

  Chapter Nine

  ADRIAN’S HEART DRUMMED MADLY. SOPHIE’S heels skidded against the trunk as she shoved herself upward until she stood, hands braced against two large branches. She stared down at him, wearing the same expression of astonishment he must have worn when Rhea guided him to the same truth. He still remembered the feeling—like Earth and heaven had been broken into jigsaw puzzle pieces and rearranged into a completely new picture.

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” she protested. “We couldn’t have been Persephone and Hades. The myths weren’t real.” Even as she said it, her gaze wandered away from him, as if her own thoughts were contradicting her, which he knew they must be.

  “True, the myths largely aren’t real,” he said. “None of us could throw lightning bolts, or walk on rainbows, or turn into animals. But the things we did do—well, I think you’ll be impressed.”

  “Hades stole Persephone. It wasn’t a happy marriage. Why would you want to be him, or have me be her?”

  “Being them isn’t an option. We were them, period. We can’t change it. As for the kidnapping, the unhappy marriage—those are part of the myth, which, again, wasn’t quite accurate.”

  “Persephone liked being kidnapped?”

  He almost smiled, but managed not to, reckoning it could look creepy. “I shouldn’t explain today. I’d be giving away too much.”

  “But—what does it matter now? Even if it really happened, it was thousands of years ago. No one’s going to worship us and I don’t want anyone to.”

  “I don’t want anyone to, either. But it matters now because, for the first time in centuries—in millennia—we can both remember while we’re alive.
We could only remember between lives before, in the Underworld. All those other lives when we knew each other, we couldn’t remember what we were; we were just ordinary people. But this time, we can be like Hades and Persephone again.”

  Sophie breathed in shallow gusts, looking up and around at the tree branches. “What does that mean, be like them? I can’t remember anything about being her. Only talking about it, after being Grete. I can’t remember…”

  “No, of course you can’t,” he assured. “It’s buried down deep in that bag, beneath all the other oranges. You’ve got to do some digging before you get to it.”

  “But when I try to remember, it’s all confused. I can’t concentrate. Real life keeps getting in the way—and by the way, I have a lot of real life to concentrate on right now.”

  “I know. That’s why I said to look to your dreams. Dreams are much more reliable for this exercise. You can really live in the memory, and if you go to bed thinking, ‘I’m going to control what I see,’ you can skim backward and forward much faster.”

  “How long will that take?” she asked. “Before I get to whatever-it-was B.C.?”

  “My best guess is 1700 B.C. We’re talking something like seventy-five lifetimes between then and now, so even if you get skilled at skipping backward through the lives, it’ll probably still take you several nights.”

  She leaned back against a branch, looking stunned. “Thirty-seven hundred years?”

  “Hard to wrap your mind around, yeah.” Adrian picked a fern frond and brushed it back and forth against his hand. “Honestly, I’m not sure of the exact figure. I’ve tried to work it out—how long each of my lives was, how long I spent in the Underworld between them—but I just can’t be sure, especially in the earliest lives. Back in the old days, people often lost track of exactly how old they were. So that’s my rough estimate. The year itself doesn’t matter much, anyway. We don’t need to punch a date into a time machine.”