Metamorphica

by Zachary Mason

  They drifted away from Thebes and into the wild. She showed him a desert where the wind had scoured the stones into the shapes of clouds and they scrambled up the rock-faces of rough granite to perch high on the boulder-piles and listen to the wind and the ravens. She showed him her cache of ancient arrowheads, some crumbling and verdigrised, others razor-sharp and new; she said she’d been collecting them from battlefields since the first wars among men.

  They stalked animals through a deep forest whose name he never knew. She’d stop him and they’d listen to the sighing branches and then to barely audible motion in the distant brush. They inched toward their unsuspecting prey over the course of hours and the boar or hind had to be close enough to touch before she finally said, Run, her low voice filling the hush, and the animal would startle and crash away into the trees as they pursued with drawn bows and killed it with their arrows.

  One day they crested a hill at dusk and below them was a city in a valley of light. It was the biggest city he’d seen, though it was in the middle of the desert and the heat was only bearable at night. He worried they’d stand out with their torn clothes, tangled hair and sun-burned faces, but she told him not to mind it, and the adults moving among the palaces and the casinos hardly seemed to see the ragged pair of children watching the flute girls and the drunks and the fireworks over the theaters. It was as though the true life of the city were hidden behind a veil through which they peered with detached interest, much as they observed the lives of animals, and when they were done they lay in a culvert at the city’s edge and watched the stars.

  In the silence of desert places there was nothing to do but tell stories. She told him about the dawn of time, the old things lingering in the shadows of the world, and how her brother knew the future, while he, having nothing else to offer, invented stories about himself and what he’d do.

  One day he said he had to go back. Why, she’d said, for there’s time enough, but he said he had to, that he’d been gone too long and they’d be missing him, and then he walked away. She didn’t think he meant it and waited for him in the desert and then in the forest and finally she looked for him in the hills around Thebes, but he was gone, and the woods were a waste without meaning, the site of the reckless pursuit of things she didn’t need, but it was summer, and she’d lost friends before, and she forgot him.

  * * *

  Years moved like waves over the world and when next she saw him she was swimming in the green pool in the forest outside Thebes. There was a crashing in the undergrowth and when he emerged from the trees she saw that he was taller and wider and had muscles like a wrestler’s, the kind to slow him down. Waist-deep in the freezing water she smiled up at him and for the first time felt his eyes’ pressure.

  They sat on the bank and spoke of their old hunts and the places they’d been. He told her about his importance in the city and the women who admired him, and then the conversation flagged, and they sat there in a silence she tried to interpret as companionable. She saw a strange dullness in his eyes and then he was on top of her, pushing her into the moss, his mouth at her breast.

  She writhed like a fish and slipped away, leaving him on hands and knees trying to apologize but she’d already disappeared. He was looking for motion in the gaps in the foliage and calling her name when he heard a bowstring creak behind his ear. Run, she said.

  PART VII

  DEATH

  39

  LIMITS

  Zeus, Poseidon and Death were brothers. After defeating the giants they had the disposal of the world.

  Zeus, Poseidon and Death met to settle the limits of their kingdoms.

  Zeus said, “I claim the islands in the seas.”

  Poseidon said, “Take the islands. I claim the seas around them.”

  Death said, “Take the islands and the seas. I claim the emptiness within them.”

  40

  PERSEPHONE

  Persephone, a cyclical goddess, was sometimes queen of Hell.

  It’s night now and raining harder, the rain drumming on the roof and water streaking the windows that reflect the firelight and the blurred crowd of celebrants through which I see Death passing through the garden. I know him at once, though he can’t have been invited, and the young bloods pressed around me sense my abstraction and talk the louder, but Death, pale and distant, holds my eyes, and I feel my old life start to recede.

  I scan the crowd for my mother but can’t find her and then I hear her laughter rising high and sharp over the crowd’s babble and in that moment I push past the startled beaux and staring ladies and out into the garden where the hard rain stings my face and the wind tears the white trees but there’s no one there, and then I glimpse him through the thrashing branches. As I pursue him the garden gives way to stone cliffs and fields of talus falling steeply toward the churning clouds that ring the mountain, and for a moment I feel the isolation of my mother’s high house on this peak like an island in an ocean of storms. I plunge down the path, finding my footing through luck and intuition, but he’s a black shadow on the wet rock below me and then disappears into the clouds.

  My legs are trembling as I descend into the white blankness. A nocturnal hunter howls high above me and for some reason the despair and fury in its cry make me think of my mother saying Death was of an ancient family, his lineage as great as ours, but that he’d broken with them long ago and now was never received, and the hatred in her voice had overwhelmed her carefully mannered gentility.

  The rain picks up as I come down out of the cloud and the sun is rising when I reach the hills and I think of my mother’s house and the maids singing as they light the fire for my morning bath but then I see him in the distance and forget about home.

  It’s the first time I’ve left the mountain. I’ll be all right, I tell myself, repeating the words as I walk down the road through a world that’s emptier than I’d expected, seemingly full of nothing but the silence of the woods and in the evenings the lights of homesteads in the valleys. I lose him for days at a time but whenever I’m on the verge of giving up I see him watching me from a hilltop.

  The days get colder and at night I take shelter in haystacks and ramshackle barns and as I shiver I remind myself I’m having an adventure. I think of Death often but more often I think of nothing as winter settles in and snow subsumes the fields and the orchards bear nothing but ice, and at some point in the hazy insupportable days I stop noticing the cold. My pride won’t let me go knocking at farm-house doors, and when I’m exhausted I remind myself of the hardness behind my mother’s elegant airs, of her unending critique of my manners and mores, of her inflexible ambition to wed me to “some plausible boy from a reasonable family, and if they aren’t quite us, my dear, well, who is?” Sometimes at night I think I hear her calling me and abandon whatever nest I’ve made to hurry on for she’s relentless and has no interest but me in the world.

  Winter deepens and it seems a long time since I’ve seen the sun or even firelight and the snow on the road is as high as my waist when a witch finds me weeping at a crossroads. She lifts my chin with a gnarled finger and asks, “For whom do you weep?” to which I say nothing.

  She says, “All women are my sisters, and through the grace of Hell’s queen I have power over men, so tell me his name and he’ll open his arms for you.”

  “Swear it,” I say, and she does, on the Styx and on her mistress, but when I do tell her she falls silent and I have to press her on her oath before she finally leads me into the wood where she roots in the snow for a waxy green plant with red berries.

  “Eat six,” she says, “then walk toward the sound of the river, and you’ll find the way to him.” My stomach clenches but I keep the berries down as I wallow through the snow toward a roaring that grows louder as the light fades and my eyes are drawn to the shifting boughs, the insubstantiality of the snowy verdure, and I come out of the woods by a cave-mouth and a black river.

  The sound of water follows me down into the cave as I leave the ligh
t behind and then I’m groping my way. I’m in a tunnel that goes on for miles and when the walls finally recede I put my hands out before me like a somnambulist. No sound but the rasp of my footsteps on sand, and no light at all, but somehow I sense vastness. I could be going in circles—in any case, I walk a long time, and then my outstretched hands find his face.

  I say something but my words disappear like coins dropped in a well, and he never speaks at all. I know him by his hands on me, his cold breath, the contours of his face. He holds my hand as we ford freezing rivers in the dark. We lie together on the coarse, dry sand and I trace his body with my fingertips and try to remember that somewhere the sun is in the sky.

  * * *

  Sometimes his affairs call him away and I’m left to wander listlessly through his kingdom of absences. I clutch my arms to my chest, and tell myself it was worth the sacrifice as I aimlessly push on. Sometimes there are ghosts but they’re often confused, sometimes mistaking me for their queen, and it’s a black hour like every other when I hear someone calling my name and then I say, “Mother?”

  Then she’s clutching me, enveloping me in her heat and strength. “You’re leaving, right now,” she says in a voice of iron, and I weep helplessly into her shoulder, for my lover is a stranger to me, and I want to go home.

  “We can’t,” I sniffle. “The surface is miles away, and the passage is dark.”

  “You’re going.”

  There’s a presence in the darkness and Death says, “She stays,” in a voice like the rattling of dry stones. “She came willingly to my kingdom, and the number of my subjects will never decrease.”

  “I will stay. I will stay in her place,” my mother says. I mean to tell her not to, that I won’t let her, but she gives me a last kiss and pulls her hand out of mine.

  “Are you there?” I cry, and listen, but there’s no sound, no sense of motion, and then in the distance I see a faint grey light and feel the faintest breath of wind. If I were brave I’d stay but my courage fails and I take the chance she’s giving me.

  I go up through miles of tunnels and then see a lozenge of pale blue sky. Walking into daylight is like rising out of water; winter is gone, and I lie gratefully in rank grass and flowers, the sun hot on my skin. It’s quiet, but the quiet isn’t absolute—birds chatter, wind whistles through the branches, the river burbles. A plume of smoke rises from the cave-mouth, furls in the wind, dissipates.

  Having nowhere to go, I go home. I’m sick in the mornings, and tell myself it’s nothing, but by the time I see the mountain I’m starting to show.

  I can see from a mile away that the house is abandoned. I kick down the front door and within find decay—the filthy solaria are full of glaucous light, the garden choked with crow’s nests and weeds. The ballroom is a wreck, the pillars cracked, shards of glass ankle-deep on the floor. There are the basements and galleries deep in the mountain but I leave these locked and keep to the rooftop arcades where I watch the sun and moon rise and the clouds coming in over the sea.

  I clean a few rooms and cede the rest to dust and spiders. As my term approaches even this tiny domain is too much to manage until the day one of my mother’s maids shows up on my doorstep. I open the door a crack and peer out cautiously but she curtseys and bustles in, taking up her work without a fuss or, thankfully, any questions, and a week later the next maid arrives, and it isn’t long before the house is full of life again. I doubt my right to be there, but they treat me as mistress as a matter of course.

  I give birth in the bed where my mother bore me. The maids take my daughter and wash her and then put her in my hands; I kiss her, hush her, give her my breast and swear that what happened to me will never happen to her, that she’ll have the life I threw away and never be lost in the dark.

  I raise her in my mother’s house, which I have to learn to think of as my own, and it’s not long before she’s chasing butterflies among the rooftop colonnades, planting delphinium in the garden, lying in the sun and watching the waves roll in on the sea. She grows up tall and strong, and though I’d expected my vitality to flag as hers waxed I find I’m only growing stronger, my muscles hard as iron, my will absolute.

  I never let her leave the mountain. We receive only the best people, the scions of ancient families full of grace and light; we are never at home to bounders, social climbers or mortal kings.

  One day when she’s still a child but only just, she solemnly informs me of her intention to marry her nurse’s son. I say, “My dear, I’m very sorry, but that’s not possible. I don’t mean to be a snob but we really must find you some suitable boy of plausible family, and if they aren’t quite us, my dear, well, who is?”

  As her beauty grows so does my strictness for I’m determined to see her into a good marriage and the happiness I discarded whether she likes it or not, but as though intoxicated by her own bloom she fights me at every step—she won’t be polite to guests, won’t come down to dinner, won’t anything. She says she wants to see the world. “And what will you find there?” I ask her. “I’ll know when I get there,” she says. “You’ll only know when it catches you,” I say. I have to compel the ingrate child to attend the balls that are her best opportunity to meet our sort of people, and am cursed for my pains.

  One night there’s a party in the ballroom by the garden to which I had to threaten to drag her. The ballroom is full of candle-light and dancers and it seems even her sullenness must be overcome. The heirs of great houses flock around her, but even from across the room I can see she can’t be bothered to be civil. A grizzled Sea-lord accosts me with an anecdote and I look away from her for a moment, and when I look back she’s gone, the pouring rain framed by the open garden door.

  My cry snuffs candles, shatters windows, cracks stone. The Sea-lord asks something and puts his massive paw on my shoulder but I send him sprawling and then I’m in the garden but she’s already gone and then I’m running down the path through the clouds into the hills but I can’t find her anywhere though I look for her all that night and the next day and the next. The world is wide, and there’s no sign of her, but my one certainty is I’ll never let her go.

  One night I’m in the mountains of Thessaly and see a fire down in a valley and hear someone calling my name. I find a granite altar before a bonfire, still wet with the blood of a black heifer, and once again the witch lifts her voice to call to me.

  “I hear you, little sister,” I say, still beyond the fire-light, and she starts violently and looks for me in the dark.

  “I’m looking for my daughter,” I say. “Have you seen her?”

  “How would I know her?” she asks, her voice shaking, and the way she speaks is strange, almost incantatory, like she’s performing a ritual.

  “She looks much like me,” I say, stepping into the firelight.

  “I know her. I’ve seen her. She sought her lover.”

  “His name,” I say, and on the slope above us talus clatters down the mountain.

  The wind whistles in the rocks and whips the fire and finally the witch says, “Death is her lover,” as I knew she must, and I cover my face with my hands.

  I find the cave by its plume of sulfur and walk down into the dark. The way seems shorter this time, and soon I’m wandering in the endless night of his kingdom, calling for her, and at last I hear a small voice say, “Mother?”

  I rush toward her, my hands finding her face and thin shoulders. “You’re leaving, right now,” I say as she collapses into me, weeping, my foolish, lovely girl, whom I would have spared this.

  “We can’t,” she says. “The surface is miles away, and the passage is dark.”

  “You’re going.”

  Then there’s a pressure in the air and Death is with us. “She stays,” he says in his raspy little voice. “She came willingly to my kingdom, and the number of my subjects will never decrease.”

  I lunge for him and catch his wrists and he’s as strong as night but I won’t let him go no matter how the struggle hurts me, and
in his ear I whisper, “Let her go, or I will make you let her go,” and he says, “None leave, and none compel me,” and then I bend the fullness of my strength against him, and he gives perhaps an inch, which is little enough but I’m happy to think how even this must hurt his vanity, and then I can move him no more. My daughter is crying hopelessly. I say, “I will stay. I will stay in her place,” and he softens, and our melee becomes an embrace, and he says, “I’ve missed you,” but I’m watching her shadow move toward the grey light where the way lies open.

  41

  ORPHEUS

  Orpheus was the best singer. Even the gods admired him. Eurydice was his lover.

  We rarely spoke, but we were always together. We were young then, Eurydice and I, and had no care, and slept where the night overtook us. Every day I woke at dawn, for I loved her best asleep, with the light making geology of her hips’ and thighs’ curvature. When I was with her my voice was a bird startled into flight. I gave concerts, and they flocked to hear me, immortal faces sometimes shining in the crowd, but I sang only for her.

  One night I dreamed of a cave-mouth where we stood eye to eye as she pulled her hand from mine; the sun lit her eyes for what I knew was the last time and then she turned and walked down into the dark. I woke beside her on the grass, found the pulse in her neck and watched her as the night passed, but was uncomforted, for the dream had the feeling of prophecy, and I could only think of the first day of all the days I’d wake alone.

  In the morning I told her I’d be away for a while but wouldn’t tell her where I was going. It was a long road to Thrace and the wild country where Death had his temple. Rain sluiced through the rotting roof and there was no one to mend it for Death disdains sacrifice and is deaf to pleading.