“Among the dead!”
“But—” Persephone began.
“You will not see the dead,” Hades interrupted. “I will ward them away from you, I promise.”
“I will feel them,” Demeter whimpered. “I cannot bear it. I cannot! I swear I will wait for you in Eleusis.”
“You will be within Poseidon’s reach in Eleusis,” Hades pointed out.
“You can hold Poseidon in the underworld,” Demeter said.
“It is not reasonable for us to travel to Plutos and then for me to come back to Eleusis, mother. We can reach Olympus in a few days from Plutos, whereas travel from Eleusis may take weeks, and if we do not come soon to Olympus, the crops will be late there and I might not have time to bless those of Plutos at all.”
“Then you go to Olympus. You do not need me. The Mother will give you strength—you said so yourself.”
“Lady Demeter, you must go to Olympus until you can come to some arrangement with Poseidon,” Hades put in. “I cannot keep my brother in Plutos for long. He did me no real wrong. As soon as Persephone and I are safe, he must be returned to his own realm.”
“And I cannot be high priestess of two temples. You must make your peace with Zeus, as you said yesterday you would,” Persephone said. She looked at Hades and he shrugged slightly. “If you will bind yourself beyond any hope of breaking that oath to be reconciled with Zeus and go to Olympus with Hermes when he is sent to fetch you, we will not force you to accompany us to Plutos.”
“Zeus did wrong when he gave you to Hades—” Demeter began.
“You may think he did you a wrong,” Persephone interrupted, laughing and reaching for Hades’s hand, “but he did no wrong to me.”
Demeter made an impatient gesture. “So you say, but I had not finished. I was about to acknowledge that I, too, did wrong when to spite Zeus I would have let Olympus starve. So if he will allow me to live in peace—”
“I have assurance of that, Lady Demeter,” Hades said. “When I went to ask him where was my wife and we spoke of the possibility of your return to Olympus, he swore to me that in the future he would leave the priestesses of the Corn Goddess and all the avatars of the Mother to their own devices. Zeus will not seek to meddle with your temple again—and if he does, you need only send me a message and I will remind him of his promise.”
“Why should Zeus fear you?” Demeter asked, her head atilt.
They had been working too hard to remove her fear, Hades thought. She was taking him too lightly. With Demeter that could be dangerous. She would try again to keep his wife from him. He knew there was no way she could do that, not in Olympus, but it would breed less bitterness for her to remain too afraid to try than that she try and fail. He did not answer her question at once, merely looked at her until she shrank away and shuddered.
Then he said mildly, “There is no reason for Zeus to fear me. He is my youngest brother and I love him.” Demeter shuddered again, and Hades was satisfied and smiled slightly as he added, even more gently, “But even the Mage-King of Olympus knows it is unwise to ignore the advice of the King of the Dead.”
Persephone blew lightly in his ear. “Only the Queen of the Dead can be that silly.”
“Quite true,” Hades admitted. “Why not, since it is my feet that get burnt carrying her away from a pretty spill of lava she wished to see closer—against my advice.”
His face and voice had remained unchanged; no one, except perhaps Persephone, could have guessed he was so happy that he had to wage a fierce struggle not to caper around the tiny shelter like an idiot. He had had a doubt when he set out to frighten Demeter that Persephone would not understand and would try to make his words seem less threatening. But she was closer to him than the one flesh and blood and bone a wife should be; beyond that, they were one mind and one soul. She had left the threat intact and yet proved that it did not apply to her so her mother’s fears for her would not be awakened anew.
He came suddenly back to earth from the place where his spirit was dancing in the sun as the captain shouted and the ship changed its motion. Persephone was already leaning over Poseidon, knife in hand, but he signaled her to wait. There had been no alarm in the captain’s voice and he could hear the sound of breakers.
“I think we are coming ashore. I will go out. If I do not call a warning, close the litter. Either bind and gag your mother or take from her an oath that will hold her to the promises she has made.”
“I will give any oath you like,” Demeter said crossly, “but you are wasting my time and yours. You cannot get to the caves tonight. It is almost dark already. You will get no bearers to go up that road in the dark. Why do you not take me to the temple and start out in the morning?”
Hades stopped at the door and blinked at her, then nodded. “You are quite right, Lady Demeter,” he said. “But I fear no bearers would carry the litter to the caves even in the daylight. I will ask the captain to give us one of the carts sent down to carry the cargo to take the litter up to the temple. After what he has seen on this voyage, he will think that a most reasonable request.”
He started to open the door, hesitated, and turned back, coming close enough to speak very softly. “Lady, you played a game with me that has cost me dear. Because I, too, love your daughter, I understand your desire to keep her with you—although that is unnatural in a mother—and I am willing to forgive the hurt done me. I beg you, for your own sake, because my wrath is very long and very cold, play no more games.”
There was a long silence after he stepped out of the shelter, broken by the calls of the sailors and the groaning of the oars driving the ship to land. Then Persephone said, “He is very patient, very slow to anger, and very indulgent to me, but I think I have reached the limit of my influence with him. Do not press your luck with Hades further, mother.”
“I will not. I have told you already that I will help rather than hinder your safe arrival at the temple. I swear that by the black Styx which will cover me and by the favor She will withdraw from me if I do not keep faith.”
Persephone wished her mother had not been so specific in her oath, but she no longer feared Olympus would threaten Plutos. She could, and would, provide fertility for Olympus until a new priestess was trained and accepted by the Goddess. Still, everyone would be much more at peace if Demeter publicly accepted her as Persephone, queen and high priestess of Plutos, and took her own place as high priestess of Olympus. She tried one more warning.
“Mother, for me the underworld is a place of exquisite beauty and great pleasure and excitement. It is the best of all possible homes. I may choose when I wish to play in sunlight or make love by cavelight, but there are places of eternal dark and painful punishment deep under Plutos—and Hades is master of those places too. He is merciful—but I have heard of prisoners confined in the depths. I—”
A muffled sound from the litter made her jump to her feet and jab Poseidon with the knife. “Be still!” she hissed. “Another sound and you are dead.”
To make sure that no one would hear if he did not obey her—he must realize that once the litter was closed her knife could not reach him—she heaped blankets around him, muffling his head. His feet moved feebly, and with tight lips she pulled the blankets aside to make a narrow space for air to reach him before she closed the secret compartment of the litter. Hades would never forgive himself (and perhaps never forgive her) if his brother suffocated.
Poseidon had been listening to the arguments of Hades and Persephone and the promises of Demeter with considerable amusement. All that effort expended to calm Demeter into willingly going to the underworld where she was headed will she nill she. After a while he listened with only half an ear, wondering petulantly whether Hades and Persephone would still be King and Queen of the Dead after they, themselves, had become one of them. Or would the furious wraiths reject their once-fleshly rulers, perhaps out of resentment at past bondage, and eternally torment them?
That would be only just after the way they had t
reated him—bound like a sacrificial animal to be released at their pleasure. That the tritons should tear them apart would be a sweet revenge, which would have the additional benefit of bringing down Zeus and Olympus. With no fertility goddess to enrich their poor valley soil, they would have to abandon their shining city and live in their temples cheek-by-jowl with the stinking natives as he did. And no one would blame him. If Zeus wanted a target for his lightnings, he had provided Celeus, whose men would outnumber the tritons.
His attention was drawn more fully to the others by the signs of the ship coming close to the shore. The soft warning Hades gave to Demeter came to his ears too, and he felt a chill creep slowly down his spine. He told himself it was impossible for the tritons, aided by Celeus’s men, to fail. Hades did not even have a sword with which to defend himself. But he might get one from the captain or crew before they left the ship and…and he had heard how Hades fought when Kronos fell in Olympus.
Who knew whether those tales were true, Poseidon told himself. Besides, in Olympus Hades had been surrounded by the dead, and they had struck such fear into any who met them that a ten-year-old girl with a stick could have defeated Hades’s opponents. But what Persephone said of the depths of the underworld he knew to be true. He had been one of those who condemned Tantalus, and he himself had seen Hades’s face when he agreed to the doom. Involuntarily, Poseidon cried out in protest, felt the prick of Persephone’s knife, and then the smothering folds of the blankets around his head.
Poseidon’s hold on the tritons wavered. They had been coming toward the town from the uninhabited coastline to the west, where they had been hidden among the rocks fallen from the cliffs. Now they began to hesitate and mill about. One looked toward the sea but another, who had carried the message, remembered the woman he had not been able to touch and some bright shining things on the merchant’s table with which he had wished to play. He called to the others and they all continued eastward at a quicker pace.
Aware of his creatures’ new purpose, Poseidon struggled with himself. Fear that Hades would again make the impossible come true and escape urged him to send the tritons back into the sea. But the knowledge that he would never have another chance as good as this to free himself of the threat that some day Hades would betray him, to have revenge for all the years he had felt a sinking in his gut when Zeus smiled at him, drove him to seize control of them again. They were now headed a little north of east, into the heart of the town. He must force them south to where the ship had come ashore.
The litter tilted and jerked as it was lifted. Panic at the thought of being taken into Hades’s dark world seized him. He was so shaken by the realization that he would be completely at his brother’s mercy that he lost all contact with his creatures. As the litter swayed across the deck, his hands moved and the cord cut at him. Rage burned in him, intensified by his sense of helplessness. Where were Celeus and his men? Why were they not down at the shore seizing the litter? Had Celeus failed him?
Let the tritons come, he thought. Let them ravage the town. It was no more than Celeus deserved. The litter jerked upward as the ropes of the pulley lifted it over the ship’s side, swayed more wildly as a sailor drew it outward toward the waiting ox-drawn cart. The mass of the blanket shifted, closing the fissure Persephone had arranged to supply air. Poseidon tried to shout and struggle free, gasping for breath out of fear of lack of air rather than because he could not find air to breathe. The muffled sounds he made were completely swallowed up by the groan of the pulley and the creak of the cart as the weight settled into it. The ox protested too as its driver applied the goad. By the time its grunts and low moans had been stilled by resignation, Poseidon had lost his senses.
In fact, Celeus’s men were on their way. It was inevitable that they should come upon the tritons in the center of the town wreaking merry havoc, bashing doors and seizing whatever caught their eyes within, dragging out women, whose screams of fear and pleas for mercy they did not understand at all. To them the cries and writhings were no different from the playful shrieks and struggles of the menvomen they pursued in the sea.
Because twilight was rapidly changing to full dark, it took a few minutes for the captain to take in what was happening. His first thought was that the tritons were angry because they had not been given the litter as soon as they came out of the sea. The captain began to shout an explanation, but before he was finished one of the men screamed, “That is my sister!”
A triton had playfully released his hold upon a girl, who fled toward the armed troop, wailing with terror. The triton, laughing gleefully, pursued, intent on his game, ignoring the men who were momentarily motionless with shock. Whether the captain would have tried to hold his men to their original purpose was never put to the test. The brother had leapt to intercept his sister’s pursuer. He struck the triton with his sword. The triton picked him up and threw him away. His body collided with the captain, who fell, hit his head, and was stunned. Without contrary orders the men fell upon the triton, who had dismissed the attack on him as that of some puny rival and returned to his merry pursuit.
The triton was very strong and his scaled skin was hard, but twenty armed men were too much for him. When the first blow really hurt him, he shouted with surprise, and though several swords pierced him immediately thereafter, he still had time to cry out to his fellows for help.
The four remaining tritons abandoned their amusements and rushed into the crowd of soldiers. Battle had been joined in earnest when Hades, with Demeter and Persephone walking beside the cart, came up the eastern road from the shore. Because of the irregular placement of the houses, making the road twist and turn, and the increasing darkness, the small party did not realize a battle was taking place. They had emerged right into the market square just north of the thickest of the fight before they could see enough to understand what the babble of shouts and cries meant. “Back!” Hades snarled at the ox driver. “Go back!” The man was only too willing to obey him, but an ox is a slow and stubborn beast. His efforts to make the animal back up resulted only in a dead stop, and his second attempt, to get the beast to circle around, had brought the cart broadside across the road, blocking it. This new position exposed the litter to the eyes of the captain, who was just regaining his senses. He was still half stunned, only just struggling to his feet and standing, sword in hand, staring at his men being mauled and thrown about by the enraged tritons, who were bleeding and battered, but far from subdued.
While the springless ox cart was traveling up the rutted street, the heavy jolting of the litter had caused the blankets around Poseidon’s head to flap up and down, uncovering his face. His own semiconscious state had eliminated the panic that had earlier made him struggle senselessly for breath. He was almost fully aware, although still somewhat confused, by the time the cart encountered the fight. The violent emotions of the tritons flooded into him, restoring both his energy and his sense of panic and helplessness. “To me!” he demanded silently. “To me!” Such was the strength of his will, fueled by his terror and need for freedom—freedom to move, freedom to breathe—that even the fighting rage of his creatures was overwhelmed. As one being, the tritons thrust away the men with whom they had been struggling and rushed to the cart.
“Out! Get me out! Set me free!”
The will of their master tore at them, his need lanced into them like hot knives, but they did not know how to fulfill his desire. Poseidon was himself too confused by their emotions echoing back his own violent need to visualize to them how to take the litter off the cart and open the secret compartment. All they knew was that he was confined and must be brought out. They smashed the cart to bits and then ripped and tore at the litter, scattering wood and leather and then the enveloping blankets until Poseidon was exposed.
Although the tritons were strong, tearing apart the solidly constructed cart and litter took considerably longer than opening the panels. Poseidon was no longer confused by the time they reached him, but his need to be free of the sh
ameful and painful cords binding him was no less overwhelming. Forgetting Hades completely, he concentrated on mental images to show the tritons, who had no knives, how to bite through the cords without hurting him.
When Hades saw the ox stalled and the cart blocking the road back to the shore, he had swept Persephone and Demeter behind him as close to the buildings as they could get and begun a strategic retreat up toward the temple on the hill beyond the palace. He had got his party free of the men and tritons and on the road out of the market square before the captain remembered the second part of his instructions—to kill those who accompanied the litter.
He had seen them escaping, but at that moment was still dazed and trying to absorb the sudden way the tritons had abandoned the fight. By the time they went for the litter, the captain’s head was clear and he remembered Celeus’s order to give the litter to the tritons. His men, however, were caught in the heat of battle and about to attack again when they saw the tritons begin to destroy the cart.
It took the captain a little while to convince them that what the tritons did with the litter was no business of theirs. Their orders were to give the litter to the creatures, no more. That the tritons had taken it on their own was satisfactory; certainly it would be stupid to fight them to get it back so they could give it to them again. It was then that he recalled the fleeing figures, connected them with the second part of his orders, and bade the men follow.
The pursuit was not as swift as it might have been and only twelve of the original twenty could follow at all, the others being crippled by broken bones. And even those who could pursue were sore and bleeding from their encounter with the tritons. However, they were less hindered than Hades, Persephone, and Demeter by the full dark because they were more familiar with the road, and they came up with the party just below the entrance to the temple.
“Stop!” the captain shouted. “Do not dare enter the sacred temple. It will not save you. I do not wish to soil the holy precincts with blood, but I will pursue you within if I must. My orders from King Celeus are to take you.”
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