Metamorphica

by Zachary Mason

  I tuned my lyre in the lee of shattered pillars and sang of finding her with every morning and losing her with every night, how this would go on till I lost her for good. I’d never sung better, and when the light had faded I felt someone standing behind me in the dark. Death said, “Leave off. Enough.” I let a last note dissolve in the air and then said, “O king of a bleak country, you rule ghosts enough. They say you grant no favors, but don’t take Eurydice away.”

  “Why should I spare her, her among all of you?”

  I said, “Without her, the world is empty, and my mouth is shut.”

  Death looked like he was going to argue but then said, “I will never take anything you love.”

  * * *

  She might have been asleep. Her skin was unblemished, soft, cooling. I held her head on my lap, stroked her forehead, sang to her as the minutes passed. The wedding guests circled us, speaking in low voices, but I ignored them until the sun was setting and I took her hand, which had clutched the grass, and saw the blood pooled under the skin of her palm like a wet vermilion stain. Some cousin said, “She’s gone,” and laid a hand gently on my shoulder but I threw him off and said, “Death has robbed me, and he will pay.”

  The wedding guests stood over her body, watching me walk away.

  * * *

  I went back to Death’s temple but he wasn’t there. I found oracles and asked the way to his kingdom, but they only spoke in tongues, or sent me off to explore shallow caves that held nothing worse than bats and cold water, or said I’d find him soon enough.

  * * *

  I wound up in a city, a great metropolis where it was easy to disappear. I was out of money and felt empty and when I made myself pick up my lyre my fingers were numb. I didn’t want to see old friends, or anyone at all, so I slept in forgotten basements, in the warrens of rotting factories, in the alleys behind stately houses where I’d once been a guest, and sometimes in those abandoned, in-between places a chill lingered in the air where Death had passed by.

  Crowds grated on me and I was only calm in the dark places beneath the city, the cellars and underground stairways with their quiet, graffiti and dust, and the corridors there went on forever, branching and re-branching endlessly, drawing me ever downward, until I forgot the blinding glare of the sun. Now and then I stumbled on other outcasts sitting in silent congeries, staring into scrap fires in deeply buried smoke-filled rooms. Sometimes I sang for them—not the classics, but new songs of loss and rage and distance, and some of the songs had no words. Though they were outcasts and pariahs they attended raptly, and sometimes there was a tall figure standing in the deep shadow, listening, but he never spoke and I never saw his face.

  I drifted deeper into the service tunnels, the ventilation shafts, the forgotten sub-basements, and I was alone absolutely, weeks slipping silently by. I’d forgotten Eurydice’s voice, though I still remembered her face, and she seemed like someone I’d known in a dream. Sometimes I heard a faint singing, filtering up through a grating or rising tinnily from a pipe, and it could almost have been one of my songs, blurred and echoing, but it always faded quickly and I could never be sure.

  I found a store-room carpeted in broken glass and in one wall my scrap of candle illuminated the mouth of a narrow chute with TO THE UNDERWORLD scrawled over it in red paint beside a crudely drawn arrow pointing down. From the chute came a faint clattering as of distant machinery. Resigned, I felt my way in.

  The shaft was furred with dust, and very steep, and when I slipped I slid headlong, and wondered if I’d find her waiting at the end. My velocity would have been alarming if I’d been able to see, but presently the chute leveled out and dumped me onto a stone floor. It was pitch black—I listened, hands extended, palpating the dark. I stood there a long time, everything perfectly still, and then said, “Is anyone there?”

  Death said, “I’m here.”

  “I’ve been looking for you a long time.”

  “I heard you singing in my kingdom’s upper reaches. This isn’t a place for living men, but for your music’s sake I’ve blessed and kept you.”

  “You broke your promise. You swore you wouldn’t take her.”

  “I broke no promise, but I’ll break my own law to give you what you want,” and beside me someone choked and inhaled raggedly. “Take her, if you want her,” said Death, “and lead her into the sun.”

  I lit my candle and saw the mouth of a passage going up and Eurydice standing beside me. I was afraid she’d turn to ash and shadow when I touched her but her hand was warm and solid.

  As we climbed she started talking. She’d never spoken much before, a reserve I’d attributed to serenity, or perhaps to wisdom, but now it seemed she couldn’t stop, as though she were defying death’s silence, and soon I knew her better. She was simpler than I’d thought, simpler than I’d have thought possible; she was kind enough, but understood nothing; she liked that I was famous, and was happy to be with me again, but only mildly, in the accepting way of animals. She’d been less a lover than a trope of literature.

  The tunnel emerged into a shallow cave. The fields beyond the cave-mouth shone in the sun.

  “Wait,” I said.

  We spoke quietly in the shadows.

  We clasped hands, and then she pulled away. I tried to read sadness in her empty eyes but found nothing. I watched her back recede into the dark.

  Here, I thought, is matter for a song.

  42

  ORPHEUS DREAMS

  Orpheus dreams he’s drifting down a river. With him in the water is everyone he’s ever known—his parents, his brother, the old man who taught him the lyre, the boy whose name he’s forgotten who lived down the road from the house he now sees on the low bank passing by. The river rings with their cries, splashing, laughter, and the water is warm, and a torpor settles over them as the hours pass, and finally they float on in silence. He floats on his back, the sun hot on his face, and closes his eyes.

  When he opens them again he’s left everyone behind. There are voices upstream but no one close by now, and he wonders how he could have lost them so quickly, but then he sees Eurydice and forgets them. She hasn’t seen him yet, and she’s younger than he remembers, floating along like someone drowned. For a moment he can’t bring himself to make a sound and risk shattering her repose, but then he swims toward her, and when he takes her hand she returns the pressure, turns her face to his, opens her eyes.

  They drift together, their clasped hands his sole point of reference. They pass through dappled light filtering through overhanging branches, the stillness of silent pools. There are others somewhere, splashing and calling, but their voices are faint and getting fainter. He maneuvers through the water to embrace her, and they hold each other as the current carries them along.

  The afternoon winds on, and he wants nothing to change, but then the river’s voice rises. He hears white water, and the current strengthens, and then he’s pulled under for a moment and loses her. He fights back to the surface, gasps, sees her just out of reach, but the water is swift now and the gap widens. She watches impassively as he struggles against the flow. He’s determined not to give up, but his shoulders burn and he’s soon exhausted. The river pulls him ahead, and as he rounds a bend he calls out to her, but the rapids submerge his voice. It doesn’t seem possible that this parting could be forever, and he tries to swim back to her, fails, rests, tries again, but he makes no progress, and she doesn’t appear, and finally he gives up and drifts.

  The river is lonely now, no noise but swift water and strangers shouting far away. He lets the flow carry him along, not caring where he goes. He sees his parents then, far ahead; he calls out, but they don’t seem to hear him; he calls again, louder this time, and at last they look up, wave, shout something he can’t hear, and then they vanish behind a bend, lost for good in the river’s wending.

  Floating on his back, he watches the branches pass overhead, the leaves shadows on the greying sky as the rain sifts down, and he tries to discipline
his mind, to think only of the water, of the image of blown leaves and rain falling toward him, for this is the present, and he has nothing else, and time seems suspended, but then in the distance he hears a roaring. He turns in the water and raises his head as he rounds the last bend; the trees are thinning on the banks, and there’s the ocean, and before him the river disappears under a white line of breakers. He thinks yes, of course, it couldn’t end any other way, every river must come to the sea.

  There’s someone on the shore, a woman, watching him, and he can’t see her face, but she waves to him, is waving still—goodbye, goodbye!—as the low ragged waves engulf the river’s smooth flow, and at the point of transition he feels the rip take him, sees the tall waves rising, starting to fall.

  43

  ORPHEUS AT THE END

  After Eurydice, Orpheus became a recluse. He rejected the maenads of Dionysos, who killed him.

  The dark wood gave way to a river pouring into the sea, and there was no farther to go. He built a shelter out of fallen branches; it let in the rain, but poverty was an old friend, and the cold cleared his mind as his voice twined around the rain drumming on the leaves, the gusting wind, the blurred roar of the water.

  He’d thought he’d escaped Hell unscathed when he left the cave-mouth for the sun. He’d gone to Athens and practiced his art and been much caressed, but it wasn’t long before he learned to despise his audience for applauding music whose tiny flaws and underlying monotony were readily apparent and agonizing to his ear, and he’d despaired, knowing he was still lifetimes from real mastery. He’d sought out old friends but they seemed to be speaking across a gulf, and he’d been unmoved as he watched the city’s life go by, and finally he’d left.

  In the mornings he woke on the cold ground, grateful to escape the dreams of Eurydice, how he’d wasted her life, how he’d never loved her at all, of her face as she turned away. Sometimes he thought he should seek her out again, beg her pardon and stay with her in the dark.

  At night he heard the ghosts whispering, saw the shadows of the predators creeping through the trees and sometimes torchlight flickering through the branches, but still he went walking in the wood. He swam in the black water of the frigid river and sat with his eyes closed in a lightless meadow, listening to the sigh and blowing of the wind, to the world’s subtle music, to the rush of his blood.

  One night by the riverbank he heard someone coming through the wood. He knew it wasn’t a safe place, and he could have run, but he was certain the women rushing out of the trees had nothing to do with him. When he started to sing again their heads snapped up. They gathered around him, staring, clad in thorns and mud and crowns of vines. When he turned his back on them one of them screamed, her voice as raw and ragged as a child’s, and threw a stone that hit his head.

  There was a moment of pain and then he didn’t want to move. The grey sky through the black branches seemed unreal and remote—then they jostled him and he saw the wet sand inches from his eyes. He felt what might have been teeth, and then he felt what might have been a knife, and then he was just cold. Someone put a hand over his face, to protect his mouth and eyes, he thought, and he focused on that as the women worked, and was grateful, for with that hand there it seemed that nothing very bad could happen, and in any case his body had become nothing but a formless chill. Then the women were gone, their cries receding into the wood, and as the hand came away he looked up into Death’s face.

  He smiled, or tried to, and said, “So this is the end. I wonder if Eurydice will forgive me,” but Death gravely shook his head. The sky was lightening then, enough for him to see the rags and tatters of flesh that were all that was left of some dismembered animal. Death said, “No. This is not the end,” and caressed his hair, and for a moment Death couldn’t meet his eyes.

  Orpheus laughed and said, “I’ve seen enough now, and am due in your kingdom.”

  “You have seen next to nothing,” said Death. “There are billions of years yet to come.”

  “It’s time for me to die.”

  “I promised never to take anything you love.”

  “But nothing is left.”

  “You can still sing,” said Death. “And now there are no distractions. Now there will never be any distractions.”

  “For whom would I sing?”

  “I’ll always be listening,” said Death, and picked him up and put him in the river.

  The water closed over his eyes and filled his mouth and he tried to say forget the promise, forget everything I’ve ever said or sung, don’t bar this last door against me, this is more than I can bear, and then he thought he heard Death say, “But you will bear it.” He panicked, screamed, sobbed, but it made no difference, and he drifted along. He implored Death to take him, prayed to all the gods who’d ever loved him, called upon his mother, his father, the god of the river, but no one answered, the river quickened and he tumbled on.

  Apathy then, and time passing. The worst having happened, there was nothing left to fear, and he closed his eyes. Dawn came, the sand grains shining as they drifted through the bars of light in the water, the riverbed slipping by, but Orpheus slept and dreamed of nothing.

  On waking he panicked because his nose and mouth were full of water, then panicked again because it didn’t matter. The current was stronger then, and the taste of the water changed as he floated out into the sea.

  He drifted for days, praying incessantly for release, reciting his prayer over and over, the words fading until it was little more than music, a sound stripped of meaning reflected in his mind, and he kept changing it until the music was right, which pleased him, and perhaps pleased the gods, but they, having ignored him, were of less concern.

  Days, he watched the sky—the gulls flying by, the mutable clouds, the sunlight distorted in a few feet of water, and felt like he was learning to see. Nights, he listened to the ocean.

  Finally he let go of everything—his grief, his prayer, even Eurydice. Drifting, knowing he’ll always drift, he starts to sing.

  44

  THESEUS

  In his youth, Theseus killed the Minotaur. Later he was king of Athens. He feared no one, not even the gods, and thought there was nothing he couldn’t do. His best friend was Pirithous.

  White stars burn in empty immensity over the sparse snow on the frozen earth. As my shivering subsides I want to lie down and turn my face to the sky but instead I clutch my spear in my hands, force my eyes open and take a step forward, and then another, though my mind feels vacant and the only certainty is I’ve been lost a long time.

  Fire-light blooms before me and in front of the flames is the shadow of a man who is calling my name and I realize I know him. Slurring despite myself, I say, “Pirithous?”

  He sits me so close to the fire that the heat and light are almost unbearable. Snow-flakes disintegrate in the glowing air over the rippling flames and somewhere in the distance I hear a river rushing. Still freezing despite the fire’s heat I say, “I hadn’t thought it could be so cold.”

  “It will be warm when the sun rises,” he says, smiling across the flames.

  Silence then, as I hold my hands to the fire, calmed by his presence, and as the chill finally subsides a shard of memory rises and I say, “I was hunting.”

  “It will keep,” says Pirithous. “Hunt tomorrow. For now, stay here with me.”

  He hands me a wine-skin from which I drink greedily, the wine like hot blood as it pours down my throat and as I drink I remember more and I look up and say, “I know who I’m hunting. It’s Death who I’m hunting.”

  His face hardens and he says, “These words are luckless. Drink and hold your tongue.”

  Bitterness wells up and my words come in a flood as I say, “What good this fire, this river, this bitter night, when we’re caught in another river bearing us to a black sea from which there’s no returning?”

  “There’s good in friendship,” Pirithous says quietly, “and in women, and in wine, and in war’s intensity. There’
s good in a respite from a long road.”

  “Friends perish, and women and wine are used and soon forgotten,” I say. “To make war on men is to fight shadows to no purpose, for Death is the only real enemy.”

  “Enough. My friend, no more,” says Pirithous, almost begging me. “Leave it for morning. For now, we’re here together; let that suffice.”

  “Do you think I can’t do it?” I ask, voice shaking. “Do you think I’m not equal to the task? I was just a boy when I came back to Athens with the Minotaur’s blood on my hands, when no one expected me to come back at all, and I have yet to meet the man who is my equal. I scorn the powers of the night, and my will has no limit, and I see nothing worth having but life without end.”

  He suddenly seems weary, the fire-light seething redly on his face as the wine-skin falls from his hand into the ash and something has gone out of him as he says, “You always tried to do too much. But who could blame you? From your first youth you were a conqueror and you learned early on that defeat is the province of others. You shone in those days, but were too much alone, for you could only ever speak of your ambition and of your victories, and the boys who would have been your friends shied away from you, and for all your excellence you had no one but me.

  “We were always together, so much so they said we were one person, and we seemed to be untouchable. We defeated famous men and hunted in the back-country and razed the walls of proud cities, and in the end we always came back to Athens unscathed. We went on like that for years, and it seemed we’d go on like that forever, and even when the grey was spreading through our beards you swore it meant nothing, that age couldn’t touch us, that our true selves would never change.

  “And then there was your third wife, that little Cretan girl, and what happened with your son…”

  “Hippolytus,” I say, choking back a sudden spasm of grief.

  “We left Athens then, at your insistence; you needed an adventure to put bad luck definitively in the past. Do you remember the hunt for the black bull of the mountain?”