by Linda Talbot
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The head of Persephone shone in the Macedonian sun. Soon another, identical head, lay beside it. Then, to the incredulity of the archaeologists, eighteen more were unearthed. She lay multiple; evidence of a lost cult; an invocation to Spring?
Through the night, her many faces rested, implacable, silvered by the moon. Secrets were sealed behind her eyes. The years had passed in dream, man enacting his fulminating follies until finally the land had retaliated and Poseidon, a sprawling opportunist, had risen.
It may have been the white play of moonlight, but Persephone appeared to smile with increasing conviction, even pleasure at being released from the Underworld into the twenty second century of man.
The next day when the archaeologists returned, only nineteen heads could be accounted for.
Persephone, apparently flesh, yet her veins filled with ichor, the life blood of the gods, was borne back to her native Greece; shocked by the shorn hills, the lack of trees, the exhaustion of the undulating land.
A heavy pall of pollution obliterated Athens. The Acropolis stood bravely, yet unbreathing. Then Persephone perceived, on Boreas, the north wind, intimations of her mother Demeter, distantly striving to sustain fertility.
Persephone willed a passage across Poseidon. She was a memory, a figment of man's conjecture, breathed onto the air he had destroyed. She passed above the Alps; their perpetual snows thrusting through cloud vapour, while distant paths wound like bright ribbons through precipitous valleys. And then the patchwork fields of France.
She crossed the Channel and a sallow sun penetrated cloud to fall on a land grown pale and denuded of its ancient trees. Seeds had been unable to germinate or had died in fire or drought. The ash tree had been carried north by river and wind, the small-leaved lime also flourished. Deciduous oaks and beeches, that had already declined from forest to copse, had vanished. Willows and alders were sickly and scarce.
Instead, Persephone saw scrub high on the Sussex Downs. Planes trees were ranged with sycamores, poplars, pines and rowans. Then, as though she had not left her native land, she glimpsed in ordered plantations, the silver-leaved olive and the cork oak.
The sun rose strongly. She was elated yet apprehensive. The time and place were disorientating. Man's warming of the atmosphere had brought wetter weather to the north and west. The south east languished, adapting to the demands of the Mediterranean, yet dying each day. The changes now were rapid. And along the east coast, Poseidon plunged, pillaged, devouring the shingle and low cliffs, relishing the loss of life, claiming at last, the land denied him in the lost era of the gods.
Demeter, responding to an inexplicable instinct, had already reached the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic lands. She would have relished the long fields, that, not long ago, had moved in whispering seas across East Anglia, interspersed with the lushness of trees, nurtured by countless waterways above and below ground.
But now she perceived the dryness of the seedlings and saw sadly rank river beds. Bleached reeds rasped dryly and the wild life, once rife, had succumbed to insecticides. Dawn had broken without the sound of birds with their melodious defence of territory.
Man had no such means at his disposal. She considered the philosophy of the Gnostics; that some perverted spirit had interceded to demolish good will. And when Prometheus gave fire to man, he handed him his destiny. For by fire, man threatened self-destruction and if he should survive, it would ironically be the death of the Sun's far fire that would end existence.
She thought of Persephone. As climate changed, Persephone had ceased to surface from the Underworld. The sense of regeneration was replaced by a perverse impetus of growth at unprecedented times.
The eerie air, permeated by debilitating chemicals, oppressed her. She walked among the blue-grey flints that littered the dry soil. Once, farmers believed they grew as they lay in the fields. Some were huge, like ancient bones, or shaped, as though for tools, by an unseen hand. They lay around the olives and under the planes; obdurate elements that would exist beyond the fall of man.
Demeter shrank from the Underworld. She felt its pulse beneath her feet; the workings of the subsoil and its creatures. And, more deeply, sinister stirrings. Even violent vibrations were intermittently perceptible.
Demeter envisaged Hades; the slothful River Styx, three-headed Cerberus. She recalled Persephone's account of the Asphodel Fields, the limbo where many would eternally remain. She visualised the Judging and those condemned to the horrors of Hades. And on pondering the Elysian Fields, she was moved by memories of old Greece; green with vegetation inhabited by gods. The lushness had gone. Now the Earth was marred by harshness. The old harmonies had died.
The stirring beneath Demeter's feet increased; a restlessness difficult to define and which filled her with foreboding.
There was no sign of man in the countryside, although the small plantations seemed cared for. Modest copses remained, but little wild life was perceptible. The trees stirred petulantly in the wind.
Demeter had little indication of encroaching Spring. Although in sluggish growth, the land seemed in shock. She sank wearily beneath a spreading plane and, drifting into desultory sleep, was beset by despair. She relived the day when Persephone was raped and abducted by Hades.
Demeter wanders for nine days. Her hair is lank, her skin hardens, ages. She grows crooked and creased. She is gnawed by physical pain. She is obsessed by the image of Perspehone enslaved in darkness. Her bitterness stultifies the land. People starve.
Zeus sees, and pitying man, sends the goddess Iris to Demeter. She folds golden wings and pleads,"Demeter, please relent. Save man from starvation.”
“Not until I see Persephone," replies Demeter. A succession of gods follow Iris, begging her to reconsider.
"No." Demeter is adamant.
She woke. Shivered. The earth trembled. The enslaved souls of man might be moving beneath her. She walked wearily into another copse of withered trees. She perceived fresh sounds. Moving towards them, she found in a clearing, ten people seated silently in a circle. In the centre was a woman, her black hair elaborately arranged and intricately strung with leaves. She wore vivid layers of cloth, sewn with shining objects and a striped scarf wound and trailed around her. She sat cross-legged, motionless, as the people about her, similarly clad, except for the strange structure of leaves in the hair, began to sway slowly, inclining their heads to her. Demeter knew instantly she was, in their eyes, a goddess.
The woman focused, saw her. Her subjects sensed her response, ceased swaying and followed her gaze.
"Who are you?" the woman asked. Demeter sensed her mortal fear. She told them and, as she expected, their fear fled and they laughed.
"You've escaped from the hidden city, haven't you?" said the woman. Demeter knew then what she had felt beneath her feet. She smiled, shook her head. "I come from Greece. One day I may nourish the land again.”
The woman clearly considered her deranged. "I'm Gaia. I am the land. It will be saved without your help," she retorted. Now Demeter regarded a demented woman. Gaia, the Earth Goddess, had been Demeter's grandmother. "Tell me about the hidden city. Who lives there?" she asked.
"How do you not know?" asked Gaia.
"I told you, I've come from Greece," said Demeter.
The company, ranged in their coloured cloths like woodland gipsies, stared at her suspiciously, but were willing to enlighten her about the hidden city.
"It's where the technocrats and the lemmings went when the going got hard up here," said Gaia.
"Technocrats?" Demeter queried.
"The people who relied on technology and ruined the planet," said a young man whose fair hair fell about his face like the tendrils of a tender plant.
"We stayed to restore the Earth," said Gaia.
"Are there others like you who tend the trees?" asked Demeter.
"Yes, we live in the woods. There's enough food for us if we work hard. We grow herbs and berry-bearing trees as well as olives."
"How do those in the hidden city live?" asked Demeter.
"They have their chemistry. Their diet is entirely man-made. They no longer need nature," said the young man.
Demeter knew she had come in search of Persephone, but why, after so long? Their annual encounter belonged to ancient myth.
"Why are you really here?" Gaia asked.
"I'm looking for my daughter."
Gaia laughed. She had been a classics scholar. "Now I know you are mad," she said.
"How can you call yourself Gaia?" said Demeter calmly. How this had happened clearly escaped the young woman. Shadows, like faint recollections of a former life, moved across her face and, momentarily, she seemed baffled. But she regained composure and slipped again into the role she had created. It rendered the dying Earth bearable. "You may stay with us if you like," she said to Demeter, sensing in spite of herself, a like spirit, compelled to make sense of calamity.
Persephone moved lightly across the harrowed land. Beneath her feet fresh grass sprang. The crocus, once venerated in the Cyclades, unfurled in her path. And like a balm, a light spring rain began to fall. Parched olive, plane, lentisk and myrtle lifted leaves to receive rejuvenation.
In the wood Demeter, dressed in the cloth of the gipsies, raised her face to the freshness. Memory moved her. The lyrical renewal of life had come with Persephone's appearance in Spring. She did not dare believe her daughter would come again. Yet she felt her presence.
"What is it?" Gaia noted Demeter's attitude of listening, as though straining to detect some significant sound. Demeter did not increase her lack of credibility by explanation. She merely smiled, her face transfigured.
Persephone perceived the unnatural summer possessing the land. It was a season beyond the renewal she had engendered; a protracted dehydration denying life.
Sadly she passed through the dry groves, stirring like brittle bones. She heard the hollow wind; the sound of Harpies drained of predatory desire. She felt the earth stir beneath her feet.
As dusk deepened, she dimly perceived an opening in the ground. It lay beneath a broad span of planes, sloping steeply into a well of blackness. A memory perturbed her. Some dark event had marred her past; an oppressive obligation, bearing with it brief hope.
She was startled by the man who appeared at the mouth of the passage. He was dressed in a loose suit of a smooth grey substance. His skin was white, drained by lack of daylight. He paused on seeing Persephone. She froze, possessed by the sensation of someone long ago, seizing and abducting her.
She was unable to run, to prevent a repetition of the past. The man said, "Do you come from the woods?" He believed her to be one of the gipsies.
"Yes," said Persephone, feeling again the fragile deprivation of the copses. The man wondered why she should venture so close to the city. The gipsies despised the life of the technocrats. Looking into her unworldly eyes, he thought then she was somewhat retarded. He seized her. Persephone cried out, overwhelmed by the dark repetition of the deed.
The man carried her down an airless passage. His clothing was cold, untouched by the renegade sun. They reached a city of translucent domes, shot with colour shed by artificial lights in the reinforced roof of the excavated space. Inside some domes, hybrid plants, alien to Persephone, reached for the man-made light. Other domes contained people, clad coldly like her captor and intermittently talking; suspended in lethargic limbo. Where before had she encountered such a pause between past and future?
"Why are they waiting?" she asked the man.
"To be housed. The committee will decide who will go where," he replied. Dim ghosts plucked the perimeters of her mind. Then she saw the people waiting in the Asphodel Fields, destined for Elysium or Hades, according to how they had lived. And, reconstituted from drifting shadow that spread with dark dominance, she saw the King of the Underworld.
The man restrained her as she turned to flee. He confronted her, tracing with white fingers whose touch had a fungal feel, the sun-warmed contours of her face.
"You're not a gipsy are you?" he said. "Who are you?" As he loosened his hold, she stood apart and gained stature. She expanded, her flesh golden in the gloom, her face composed.
"Persephone."
Somewhere, in an unreal past, the name had significance. But too much had intervened. The ancients had succumbed to the technocrats. Myth had moved aside; disregarded or feeding fantasies.
The man grasped her arm once more. They passed the people in the domes, sealed like sad automatons with blind eyes.
"How long will they wait?" asked Persephone.
"Sometimes years," said the man.
Persephone saw again the mist-filled meadow of Purgatory, where people lost their past and felt the wind of the gods whistle through a void.
Later they would be judged by Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and taken down one of three paths. Many returned to the Plain of Asphodel, a few would enter the Elysian Fields, the rest would endure the torture of Tartarus.
"Why did you abandon the Earth?" asked Persephone.
"It had nothing left to give," replied the man uneasily.
The sterility of the man-made cave closed about Persephone like a harbinger of death. Now she clearly recalled the seizure from the Sicilian field by Hades and the violation in dank semi-darkness.
The Styx crawls, a sullen ribbon of river and from its dimmest reach looms Charon the ferryman. He ducks deeply to Hades, who, exempt from the toll, steps with Persephone into the rotting boat.
Images of Spring, abandoned with the world above, interact with the dry rustle of demise and the milling of those who wait and on the far bank, to prevent them leaving, stands the three-headed dog, Cerberus.
“What's your name?" Persephone apprehensively asked the man.
"Hal."
The man's eyes lacked humanity. They were not the imperious eyes of Hades, but they had relinquished life. Warmth was replaced by the cold need to manufacture the means of survival.
Yet he took her arm without pressure. A flicker of feeling lit his face. "Come."
They walked on. The domes flattened into long units. Bizarre plants sprawled and reached for the artificial light. Some bore unwholesome blooms.
"Oil." said Hal brusquely.
"You have all the sustenance you need?” asked Persephone.
"Yes, we're entirely self sufficient." But some element was lacking. Dimly Persephone recalled the reverence for beauty and an aptitude for art. She looked at the plastic panelling of the roof, studded with perpetual lights. As they moved on, the air grew cold. The lights dimmed. In two long rows people sat at squat computers, their screens flickering with concepts and colours; a kaleidoscope of ingenuity and change.
"Paradise," said Hal.
"Are they alive?" Perspehone recalled the languid Elysian Fields.
"Of course. We have eradicated death. Citizens are frozen when they draw their last breath and re-awakened later. How else can man learn from his mistakes?"
Perspehone knew man would never learn from the history he had made. Yet she thought it ironic that he should have achieved, after so long, the immortality he had always desired and which she took for granted. She pitied the men and women absorbed at their screens and who would never die. For humanity lacked the other gifts of the gods that rendered eternal life tolerable.
The regimented rows ended, the room narrowed. Hal led Persephone into a dim ante-chamber, with pale cushions of some plastic substance, piled high. Abruptly he pushed her down among them and she felt the lowering of his hot weight. Summoning her powers, she withdrew her true identity, so the woman he savaged was a godlessly sensuous archetype; adapting, initiating, capable of boundless response.
Hal wearied, withdrew, was incredulous at her capacity, then apprehensive, suspecting some inhuman trickery. Persephone smiled, untouched, freshly feminine, engendering that timeless suspicion of women that had rendered men brutish.
Beneath the olives Demeter stirred i
n her sleep. Some brash act had been perpetrated on someone close to her. Persephone. Demeter sat up, starkly aware now of the movements under the earth.
Gaia stirred too, rolled over and woke. She reached a strong hand to touch Demeter's arm. Demeter recoiled. Gaia moved closer, placed her arm around Demeter's shoulder and impulsively kissed the immortal skin of her face. Then she sought her lips. The substance she found within Demeter's mouth, had the unearthly smoothness of ambrosia. It ran into her, warmly penetrating, promising; an inducement she could not, however, pursue.
Demeter had reduced herself to a shadow. Her woman's form slipped along the ground; enticing and evading, a foil to the seeping moon silver.
"Demeter, I love you!" Gaia pleaded and cast helplessly about. Demeter's shadow slithered silently away from the copse. She heard the subterranean stirrings more clearly now she was close to the ground. Instinctively, she reached the entrance to the city and with intimations of her daughter growing stronger, she resumed her human shape. She looked with dismay at the domes and their hopeless occupants. She reached the room of leisure. No one noticed her. She entered the dim ante-chamber. It was empty.
Hal led Persephone along a passage to another open area cut from rock and sub soil and filled, once more, with pallid people. They peered at torn books, drew thread through coarse cloth and strove to coax music from unfamiliar instruments.
"This is Hell," said Hal. Persephone was baffled. These people were pursuing activities that once ranked high in the life of man. The gods had given him such gifts. And while he had fought and forgotten he was not immortal, squandering his brief span in pettiness and greed, he had simultaneously nurtured the arts.
"But this is good," said Persephone.
Hal's suspicion that she was some kind of changeling from beyond the sun-blighted present, grew. How could the old tedium that once touched every aspect of man's life, compare with the alacrity of technology?
Persephone helped a woman close a simple seam, the slim fingers of the goddess moving with dexterity. But the people here were too dulled by fruitless endeavour to take much heed. Those striving to read and relate pages of their books to Hal, had been treated with memory lapsers, so letters had no significance. Others instructed to paint a canvas were given paint that faded when in contact with the surface, so their task was unending.
Persephone and Hal passed on to reach a series of rooms with more pale cushions and transparent units on which stood machines that silently winked as though conveying some significant secret.
"Sit." Hal indicated a white cushion in one corner. Consumed with a mortal exhaustion, Persephone complied. She considered Hal closely, her unearthly perception penetrating his bravado. Beneath the brusque mastery, she saw the fear with which man perverted each coherent course he proposed. She saw fear above all in the eyes that had relinquished green growth for technology. The means man had devised to serve him, had rendered him a slave.
Demeter heard the woman shouting. The sound reverberated eerily through the city. Gaia dispensed with taboo. She ran, distracted, through the domes, rousing their lethargic occupants. The people at the processors stirred uneasily. Some turned. Most pursued, unheeding, their imposed leisure.
When Gaia reached the ante-chamber, Demeter had vanished. Yet her presence remained in the clinging damp of the walls, the impacted rock of the floor. She moved too in the subsequent passage shining ahead to where Persephone and Hal had begun to establish an understanding.
Hal was apprehensive, yet relieved to confide at last the pressures of his position. He talked of how pollution had seeped into the lifeblood of humanity until discomfort - and death - had driven him below ground.
"There are other cities. We communicate through our technology," he said.
"And what will become of Earth?" asked Persephone. "The gipsies still have faith. They haven't abandoned her. You should have stayed to rectify the negligence."
"It's too late. We cared more for a money-based economy at the expense of survival," he said.
Persephone perceived a trace of her mother, rapidly absorbed in the dankness. She slept.
She woke to find Hal leaning over her. He was curious, beginning at last to accept her allegiance to some other world. His consciousness expanded into the past, absorbing folly and endeavour. He experienced the future; contracting, fearful. He had intimations of how to convey his insight to the people. He fell on Persephone, as though to draw from her flesh, the strength to act.
She withdrew her essence, while her body countered his. He believed she was magically motivating him and as he moved more deeply, he encompassed the pathetic and profound, the terror and the benevolence of time.
He withdrew. She had been silent. But her eyes were eloquent.
Demeter turned to the left, hurrying along a wide passage, ablaze with light. Gaia saw her turn and followed, fevered and resolved. Demeter could no longer sense Persephone. She contemplated turning back but was compelled to continue.
The passage reached an impasse. There were signs that it would be extended but for some reason building had stopped. Materials lay heaped and abandoned on the damp earth. There was an insidious odour of decay. She heard Gaia closing. She turned her back to the wall and saw the gipsy running; arms wide and high. She reached Demeter. Her face, roughened by the sun, tautened hysterically. She grasped Demeter's shoulders. Her mouth closed on the light lips of the goddess.
"You must return. I can never be yours," said Demeter. Gaia, consumed by a lust that had been suppressed by the need to lead and survive despoilment, tightened her calloused hands around Demeter's neck, intending only to intimidate her. But the earthly shell of the goddess broke. She exhaled the fragile breath, sustaining her while in the world, and fell like a broken doll. Beyond this shell she would survive, although she would not walk again on Earth.
But Gaia did not know this. She recoiled from the flesh that now darkly disintegrated. She stumbled back, anxious to regain the dying Earth. But she was drawn to the ante-chamber. There, Persephone and Hal were seated in silent communication. They looked up as she entered. No one spoke.
Then, "She's dead," Gaia said. Persephone rose, knowing instinctively Demeter's outer self had been destroyed by an earthly lack of constraint. She knew too that the land she and her mother had watched over, was also about to die. The earthly death of Demeter was symbolic of the planet's demise. She would not walk the land again as a woman. How could the Earth survive?
Persephone witnesses briefly, with horror and hope, the ancient act of sacrifice; a king killed to restore fertility, as Spring approaches.
She gazed at Hal until he was immobilised, sitting upright still but unable to move. He resembled one of the technological components he had helped devise; now vacant and invalid.
Gaia knew what was required. Now she released her loathing of Hal's denial of life, advancing on him with hands primed for mutilation.
"We must take him above," said Persephone. Beneath her silent influence Hal rose and walked stiffly before them along the passage, past the paradise of automated leisure, the baffled creators, the pallid people trapped in limbo.
They climbed the way towards stars, unnaturally bright in the blackness. The night held a heavy breath. The shapes of trees expanded as though grotesquely turned by the weight of darkness, into parodies.
They walked to the top of a hill. They glimpsed the flat fretwork of fields, once large, now reduced to the modest proportions of the Mediterranean.
Persephone panicked. Without Demeter, how could she cope? Persephone was a visitor to the land. Although Demeter had imposed the symbolic death of Winter, when Persephone was released for part of the year from the Underworld, she became custodian of the land's fertility. But now the Earth was dying. Demeter, influencing the tentative Spring growth, harvesting invisibly among the men and spreading her fructifying shadow over the newly-tilled land, would come no more.
"Here!" Persephone turned to Gaia and at her words Hal paused. He tur
ned to face them; an automaton with blind eyes.
"Die. Now!" Persephone softly commanded. Gaia watched, aghast, as Hal was reduced, cell by cell, his face falling, streaked by the moon's cold light, the disintegration rapid and uncanny. His unseeing eyes flickered as they closed. His flesh, white from life below ground, puckered and peeled to reveal the pulsing of internal organs; the raw red essence of life that persisted despite his denial of humanity.
They merged, as his cry of anguish echoed over the conspiratorial groves. Then every vestige of him vanished as though plucked clean by scavengers.
Gaia watched the death of technology without the relish she had anticipated. She felt sickened and infinitely sad - as dismayed by her ungovernable lust for Demeter as by the cold alternative of the city.
Would the land be saved? Could a primitive sacrifice performed through panic have relevance in the twenty second century?
"We must bring up the others," said Persephone. She returned with Gaia to the city. The people in limbo readily rallied, relieved their wait was over. Those striving to create in ways alien and locked in time, also came without query. But the people in the soulless "paradise" of diversion, recoiled; distressed and unable to comprehend. Finally, as one relented, drawn by the entreating of Persephone, the others slowly followed. The screens flickered and died.
The people glimpsed the uncertainty of the dark exit in the over-heated night. As day dawned, the fearful were beset by bleak memories of want, waste and annihilating war. They looked anxiously to Gaia, who seemed now a green and russet aspect of the earth and Persephone, serenely pale and soon destined to return to Hades. No one dared ask what became of Hal. But the instinctive knowledge of some sacrifice; inevitable and performed by immortal means, possessed them.
Gaia led them to the gipsies, who initially rose, alarmed and ready for confrontation. Gaia motioned them to calm. They saw contrition in the people's eyes.
As summer passed and the people felt their way back to a respect for the land, Persephone prepared to return to the Underworld. She mourned Demeter. Now man must take responsibility for the land. This would be his second season; an opportunity to rectify his negligence. And Persephone would return each Spring; a confirmation of renewal. Would she find a land steeped again in life, or a man-made waste, hurtling prematurely to extinction?
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