Dazzling Brightness

by Roberta Gellis

  “Perhaps you cannot call everyone—but I ‘heard’ you. It nearly frightened me out of my wits. I never thought it might be you. First I thought it was my mother, trying to get me down to the docks so she could use that as an excuse to forbid me coming into the town. And then I thought it might be Poseidon, because the call came from the sea—”

  “You said he had not troubled you.” Hades’s face went stiff, his voice cold.

  “He has not,” Persephone said with a shrug, “but I never trusted him, and after I thought about it I was sure the calling came from the sea, and the sea is his place.” She smiled. “I was so frightened I did not stop to think it might have come from a ship. Ah, some good things come from the sea…oysters would be nice, and fried shrimp—I thought they were grubs when I first saw them, but they taste delicious, and fieldberries if they have them.”

  Hades shook his head. “I do not understand why you do not weigh as much as a horse. You eat like one.”

  “I do not,” Persephone said indignantly. “I never eat raw oats or hay, and I never saw a horse eat shrimp.”

  He burst out laughing and caught her into his arms again. “You are sweet in bed, my love, but I feel as if I have not laughed since you left me—and that is what I miss the most, the way you lighten my whole life.”

  “Yes, yes. I am very glad you love me in bed and out, but just now my stomach rules my heart. Do you have copper or iron with which to buy food? Silver and gold from a beggar man might be suspicious.”

  Hades hesitated, as if surprised by her answer, but he only said, “I am not going as a beggar man. I had no idea what roles I would need to play before I found you, and I think my contrivances very clever. If you will turn my cloak inside out, I will become a moderately respectable trader.”

  She did that, discovering a good, dark blue cloak that had served as a lining to the ragged, stained brown. When they were reversed, only a thin edge of the brown garment showed, looking rather like a decorative edging. Persephone realized that the patches and stains were all on the upper part and shoulders, invisible when the cloak was reversed and worn even if it should flap in the breeze.

  Meanwhile, Hades had extracted a comb and a thong from a purse that Persephone guessed he had worn on a long cord, hidden under the back of the ragged tunic, which still lay on the floor. While he combed his hair and tied it back, she picked up the tunic and hung it behind the curtain with Pontoporeia’s discarded clothing, thinking how clever he was. The purse was safe from keen eyes under the tunic and cloak and made Hades look hunchbacked when he bent over. Now he pushed his heavy belt through the double loops of the purse and fastened it. Then he combed out his beard so it looked full and glossy rather than ragged. Last, he wrenched at the staff, which he had dropped when he embraced her, and the top parted from the lower section, exposing a rather narrow short sword, which he slid through a loop of the belt.

  “Well,” Persephone said, “you are too tall and strong, but you are supposed to be a foreigner, so you should pass. Do not forget to bring back something to drink too. There is not even water in the house.” She giggled. “I am sorry to ask you to do woman’s work, but I dare not go outside.”

  “What if your mother comes while I am gone?”

  Persephone glanced out the window at the angle of the sun. “It is too early. Sometimes I would join her and we would break our fast together, but more often I ate alone in my room. She will not think to look for me for some time yet.” She laughed again. “And it would not matter. If she does come, I will tell her my lover will soon return and ask her to sit down and wait for him. Go now, dear heart, I am starving.”

  Finding himself almost thrust out the door, Hades walked up the lane, away from the cliff, below which lay the docks. He did not wish to believe it, but surely she was in haste to be rid of him. And if it were because she was hungry, why had she not bothered to tell him where he would find the market? Common sense presented the simple reason that the road he was on, coming from the docks into the town, would naturally pass through the market.

  Oddly, the fact that the road did lead to the market only exacerbated his feeling of injury and his suspicion that his wife had thrust him out of the house because the time had come for her to meet someone else—and not her mother—there. He reminded himself of the damp and musty bed, which clearly had not been used in weeks or moons. That soothed him sufficiently that his mind was temporarily diverted by his stomach, which insisted he pay attention to a delicious aroma. It was when he began to bargain for the fried shrimp that Persephone had requested that he realized he had forgotten something essential—vessels in which to carry the food.

  In the end, that was far from a disaster. The oversight not only identified him as a foreigner but provided him with a good reason for explaining himself. He was a merchant with two partners, one of whom had fallen aboard ship and injured himself and was now in a house near the docks being physicked. He needed a meal, or several meals perhaps, for himself and his healthy partner, who was with the sick man.

  He bought the food and left extra metal for the pots, which would be returned if he brought back the vessels. One vendor passed him—and his explanation—along to the next, establishing the “truth” of his tale.

  That was convenient in the market, but it raised the question of whether and how quickly the story would get back to the palace, and his description with it. No stranger could pass into Plutos without being reported to him, but he did not know whether that was true for Aegina. If it were, he could only hope that the brown dye he had applied to his skin and his plain clothes—his pallid complexion and the ornate and bejeweled accoutrements he normally wore when he visited Olympus were well known—would be a sufficient disguise.

  He was still thinking about whether he had been wise to say his sick partner was in a house near the docks rather than still on the ship as he started back. Naturally his next thought was whether he and Persephone should leave the house, whereupon he recalled that she said it was bespelled and she could not leave without falling under the observation of a scryer. And as night follows day, black doubts about her hurry to be rid of him overshadowed his mind again.

  Chapter 21

  Hades was not the only one who had fallen prey to doubt. Once he was gone, Persephone felt her confidence draining away. She felt imprisoned and wished she had gone with him. That was ridiculous, of course. If the scryer should mention that she was with a man and be asked to describe him, her mother or Poseidon might well recognize the description of a man with black eyes, hair, and beard, much larger than a native, and guess that Hades had come for her. The thought was unsettling and brought back all her fear. She wished he had gone as a beggar; no one would have suspected him in that form, but big and strong as he was, people would notice him.

  For something to do, she pulled the bedding off the bed and spread it over the litter to air, then turned the straw-filled pallet that padded the leather straps. She heard voices and froze, her eyes on the window. A group of men was coming up the road from the docks. Persephone cowered back, though she knew they should see nothing if they looked in the window. If the spell were working, she could see out but only darkness would meet eyes looking in. If the spell were working… Breath held with horror, she pressed back against the wall.

  In her confusion of joy and fear and lust, she had failed to feed power to the spell when she entered the house. The men passed, but none had turned his head, so she could not tell whether the interior of the room were visible. She swallowed hard. If the spell had failed and the scryer had found her, her mother would know that Hades was with her. Fool that she was, she had called him by name more than once. Persephone had no doubt that Demeter would tell Poseidon at once. She ran to the door and touched the frame. It seemed she could feel the magic, and she poured more power into the spell, but what good would that do now? And Hades had been gone so long—surely too long. But when she glanced at the window, the light had not changed at all.

  She trie
d to fix her mind on what had to be done. She checked on the pot of sleeping potion she had carefully covered with oiled leather, checked on the cloth for wrapping and binding Demeter, looked out the window at the sun again. It still had not moved. She sat down with her back to the window and clasped her hands. She waited and waited and waited. And turned to look at the sun—and it had not moved.

  No one could stop the sun, she told herself. Not Poseidon, not Zeus, probably not even the Goddess could stop the sun. Could She? But why should She? Had she been wrong and her mother right? Could that great gift of power have been meant as a warning?

  “Mother,” she prayed, rising slowly and lifting her arms, “if I have misunderstood and disobeyed, it is I who am at fault. Do not let harm come to my Hades.”

  Before she lowered her arms, a heavy thud came from the door. Persephone gasped. The thud was repeated. She looked wildly around the room for a weapon, then snatched up the bottom half of Hades’s staff. A third thud. She ran to the window—and choked on laughter. Hades was kicking the door. He was safe and sound, but too festooned with pots, loaves of bread, and a skin of wine to knock—and even such an idiot as she should have realized he could not call her name. She dropped the staff and hurried to open the door.

  “What is wrong?” Hades asked tensely.

  In the same moment he saw the cloth draped over the litter and he flung away the large earthenware pot he had been balancing in his right hand so he could draw his sword.

  Persephone leapt to catch the pot, which she barely managed because she had not been far from him, crying, “Nothing is wrong.”

  The eyes he turned on her as he came forward as far as the table were so black and cold that she was struck mute with terror and could not even ask why he was so angry. She merely stood, clutching the pot to her breast, blank with shock, as he shifted his eyes back to the bedding hiding the litter.

  “I am glad all is well,” he said, pushing aside with his elbow the large unfired vessel standing on the table, but his voice was colder than the look he had given her, and Persephone still could not speak.

  Meanwhile, his eyes still on the bedding, Hades began to set down the chunk of ham, two loaves of bread, and two small pots he had been carrying by their handles. Last, he unlooped a skin of wine from over his shoulder. When he was free of impediments—eyes still on the litter—he smiled. Persephone shivered.

  “Who is behind that draping?” he asked.

  “Behind the draping?” Persephone echoed faintly.

  Hades stepped softly around the edge of the table and past the end of the bed to make his way to the litter clear. Following him with her eyes, Persephone took in the bed and was reminded of his jealous questions. A huge breath of relief whooshed out of her. She had been imagining a whole new set of fears, the two most prominent that the Mother had driven him mad to punish her or that Demeter or Poseidon or both had cast a spell on him. She shook her head, wondering what had turned her loving and trusting husband into a jealous lunatic.

  “There is no one there, Hades,” she said, smiling now. “I just decided to air the bedding.”

  To her horror he only looked angrier, angry with that cold, black fury she had not sensed in him since she had refused to be priestess in Plutos on the day he had first abducted her. He took a step forward. Persephone shrank back, wondering again if he were mad or ensorcelled.

  “I will ask you again, Persephone. Whom have you concealed from me?”

  “You can ask me a thousand times.” Her voice came out thin and high. “You will get the same answer. When you left I decided to air the bedding. Mother knows,” her voice gained strength as her exasperation increased, “it was damp and musty enough to make me sorry we had not used the floor.”

  His eyes flashed to her, back to the litter, and with a swiftness she had forgotten he could use, he thrust her aside so hard she fell. The lid flew off the pot she was still holding and half the shrimp were catapulted all over her and the floor.

  Unnoticing, Hades leapt forward and thrust his sword through the bedding. There was a crack as a panel of the litter split and the bedclothes fell to the floor. Hades jumped forward again and tore open the panel, bent to open the secret panel to the bottom section, and then rushed around to look between the litter and the wall. Even a thin mouse would have had a problem hiding there. Slowly, looking extremely sheepish, he sheathed his sword, came back, and looked down at Persephone.

  She lay with the pot on her belly, speckled with shrimp, and looked up at him. “Well?”

  “I am very sorry,” he said.

  She picked a shrimp off her shoulder and popped it in her mouth. “Pick them up,” she said, “the ones on me, at least, and put them back in the pot.”

  He knelt beside her and picked up shrimp. When she was free of them, he took the pot and offered his hand. She ignored it and got to her feet. He put the pot on the table and repeated, “I am very sorry. I did not mean to knock you down, only to prevent you from leaping in front of me.”

  “You did not wish me to sacrifice my life to save the litter from being stabbed? I value fine workmanship, but not to the point of suicide.”

  He looked at her sidelong, then went and picked up the bedding, shook it to free it from the dirt of the floor, and rehung it over the litter. “It is less musty already,” he remarked in a carefully neutral tone. “Your decision was very wise. Perhaps if you had come to the door as soon as I kicked it, I would not have had time to entertain such…ah…erroneous ideas.”

  “Perhaps ‘outrageous’ would be a better word.”

  He did not answer and looked meekly down at his toes, but Persephone had the feeling that he was more involved in an effort to hide incipient laughter than shame. A single shrimp had landed on the table in the general upheaval, and he picked it up and ate it. Persephone sighed.

  “If you want to know why I did not come to the door, it was because I was frightened. I remembered I had not renewed the spell. I was afraid that I had betrayed us and that you had been seized in the market. When you kicked the door instead of knocking, I thought it must be guards sent from the palace to take me.”

  Hades’s eyes, holding no amusement now, met hers. “How great is that danger?”

  She bit her lip. “I hope not very great. When I touched the place where the spell is lodged, I thought I could feel it. Even if it had worn thin, it would garble the scryer’s vision. He or she might have recognized me, since the scrying spell is fixed to me, but I doubt what we said would have been clear, or the vision of you.” She blushed faintly. “Whoever watched would have known what we were doing, though.”

  Hades grinned. “I am not ashamed of that. I think we make love well.”

  She felt like asking, “Then why are you so jealous?” but she knew from personal experience that jealousy was not reasonable. She had scolded Hades more than once for looking at women she knew he would not touch, so all she said was, “The spell is fully powered now.”

  He did not answer sharply, as she had half expected, that powering the spell after they were betrayed was like locking the house after it was robbed. Instead, as if what was foremost in his mind was her association of the spell with their lovemaking, his eyes flicked from her to the bed to the bedding, but he did not suggest that the bedding had aired long enough. His eyes dropped and he asked, “When would the scryer usually start looking for you?”

  “Not until after the household had broken its fast.”

  “Broken its fast,” he repeated. His eyes moved to the food on the table and he suddenly swallowed. “That seems long enough ago to me that we would have seen some sign if anyone wished to come for us. Let us move the table to the window, where we can see the road in both directions, and eat.”

  Persephone was far less confident that enough time had passed to indicate that the scryer had not passed on news of Hades’s presence, but she could not think of anything more practical to do than to follow his suggestion—and she was hungry too. She helped him move the t
able, and then sat down on the stool he solicitously presented. He fetched plates from a shelf on the wall and served her, asking anxiously whether his selection was satisfactory, apologizing because the berries she had requested were not available, nor any other fresh fruit; offering stewed fruit instead.

  Persephone resisted as long as she could, but at last she burst out laughing. “Oh, sit and eat your own meal,” she said. “You are forgiven. When we have eaten I will agree that the bedding has aired long enough. And you are a fool, too. You should know by now that I can never resist you.”

  “I know you have never refused me,” he said, bringing another stool and sitting down. “But that is not the same thing at all.”

  She was somewhat startled at the grimness of his tone, having thought he was playfully trying to “make up” with the overdone attentiveness, but all she said was, “For me it is.”

  She knew it was pointless to say more. Jealousy was not cured by words. At first she had been flattered; Hades had never shown a flicker of that demon, although all the men in Plutos fawned on her. Then she had felt somewhat indignant because he did not trust her. Her recollection of her own unreasonable accusations had cured that, but she knew she would soon grow very tired of having continually to pacify him. A flicker of sympathy for his exasperated denials touched her, but she dismissed that to wonder why he should be jealous now? Perhaps, she thought, it was really the outer world of which he was jealous, thinking that because she had lived in it all her life before he took her, she liked what it offered better than what she had in Plutos. If so, the quicker they were home, the happier they would be.

  Persephone swallowed the rather large mouthful she had been chewing and asked, “If I can get my mother here this afternoon, can we leave tonight?”

  “I do not know,” Hades replied. “The ships departures depend on the tides, and I did not inquire about the tides because I had no idea how long it would take me to find you.”