“You were the cause of his destruction!” I can’t contain the rage in my voice.
“No, I only allowed the inevitable to happen, the harpies to kill him. I finally accepted his fate and allowed him to come to me.”
“But the ship, the corpses. Why did you do that to my friends and me? You could have kept us from coming without tormenting us.”
“Actually, I thought you’d be grateful for that. Consider it a warrior’s training. Facing her own madness. Burying her old self so her new self may be reborn. Even though you passed these tests, I never believed you were the chosen one. Now my brother the king has made it true.”
What did he say to her?
Hex flashes a glance at me. It burns like fire, singeing the hairs that are standing up on my arms.
“I will consider your request,” Xandra says. “I will give you one more night and then I will decide.”
The torches go out and when they flare again she and Acacia and the king are gone.
The dogs are blocking the single exit from the cave, the snake draped like a collar around their necks. I squat down and look into their eyes.
* * *
Three black puppies in a basket in front of a supermarket. The girl is going in to buy groceries for her mother. She sees the puppies and kneels by the basket. There is a sign that says FREE. The puppies are huddled so close they look like one dog with three heads until the smallest one sniffs the girl’s fingers and then hops up on hind legs to kiss her face. The others are too listless with hunger and thirst to move. She strokes their heads, the velvety indentations on their brows.
“Cerberus,” she says. She touches each one as she names them.
“Sir. Burr. Us? No, Uzi.”
She picks up the basket and carries the dogs home. Later she goes back to the supermarket for groceries and dog food.
She bathes and feeds them and lets them sleep on her bed. The next day she takes them for their inoculations but doesn’t have them neutered because it sounds too barbaric. She treats them like her own babies and they are devoted to her. Sometimes she wonders if they think she is their mother.
It is for this reason, in part, that she poisons them when she kills herself. So as not to leave them alone. But also, she wants their company when she descends to the underworld. She does not want to be alone either.
But what does this mean for these strong, healthy young dogs? And the snake that ties their throats?
It means a life under the ground; it means darkness; it means becoming guardians of the damned.
* * *
Argos was in Venice’s arms but somehow he’s escaped. He is running toward the dogs. I try to stop him but trip and fall on the slimy rock. When I look up Argos is standing in front of the dogs, barking up at them. All three lower their heads and back away, making a mewling sound.
“I think we can leave,” Venice says.
I place my hand between his shoulder blades. “Go!”
Venice scoops up Argos and dashes toward the tunnel that leads back up.
“You too,” I say, pushing Ez and then Ash.
I wait for Hex but he only looks at me coolly. He holds up the sword the king gave him and for a second I’m afraid he might strike me with it. But his only attack is with his eyes and voice. “Get out of here.”
“You’re coming, though?”
Hex shrugs. “Exchange one hell for another?”
“But at least we’ll have each other,” I say. “So everything will be okay.”
“How?” His voice is softer now. I can almost imagine this Hex in tears.
“Because I love you,” I say. “And that’s all we really ever have.”
He shakes his head. No.
So I take off into the recesses of the tunnel, praying against all the odds that Hex is following, afraid to look back and discover that he has disappeared.
In the myth of Orpheus, when his beloved Eurydice was bitten by a snake and taken to the underworld, he had to go below to rescue her, using the charm of his music to lead her back up. But doubting, he looked back and lost her. Even the power of love and art, the two greatest powers that we have, cannot always save us. The black-glistening walls of the tunnel are telling me: death is more powerful.
Don’t look back, Pen.
Cold sweat is slicking my body and it’s hard to breathe in the close space of the tunnel. I can’t tell if I’m ascending at all; the climb is incremental and there are no steps, only rough rock hollowed out, perhaps, by the flow of ancient waters. How did Orpheus feel as he returned without his beloved wife? He was ripped to shreds by the wild women, the maenads, when he emerged. Perhaps he was grateful for being put out of his misery.
If maenads tore me to pieces I might not even feel it, so dead am I already.
When I arrive above ground Ez, Ash, Venice, and Argos are waiting for me. We embrace in the cold wind. Saltwater spray clings to my face.
“Where’s Hex?” Venice says.
I don’t want to turn around. What if I sent Hex to hell? What if he will never return? That’s a worse hell for me than being chained with him to Xandra’s ankles for eternity. At least if we were together down below, I could tell him how sorry I am forever.
“We have to go,” Ash says softly into my ear. “If the boat’s still there. He can catch up with us.”
When he and Ez put their arms around me I remember that the wound on my shoulder has healed. Acacia the healer. If only my heart could be mended this easily.
We make our way over the rocks. Someone has built a kind of city out of trash. Tall clay columns are inlaid with bottle caps, broken glass, shattered china, mechanical parts, pieces of plastic toys. Dismembered furniture is arranged as if for some mad tea party. Plastic bottles are lined up in a row, as if for our taking. So we take as many as we can carry.
We move on, toward a grove of small young saplings. There’s a pool of fresh water and we all fall to our knees and slurp until our stomachs can hold no more. I wonder how we survived so long underground, without food, or water especially, after having only phantom food and water on the Island of Excess Love. Maybe we really were dead for a while.
We fill the bottles with water, gather berries, leave the trees, and head for the sea. Our small boat is there, waiting, moored to a rock.
Ash and Ez get in first and take up the oars. I get in and Venice goes last with Argos. We hesitate for a moment, staring at the rocky island with its tide pools and new young growth, its mysterious trash city. I know we’re all thinking the same thing.
Hex.
“Maybe we should wait for him overnight,” I say.
“They might come after us.” Ez’s shoulders shudder. In a softer voice he says, “He’s made his choice.”
“No! I made a choice. And it was the wrong one. And I lost him because of it.” I’m trying not to cry but it’s pretty hopeless.
I rub at my eyes and when I open them again Argos’s tail is wagging. I look toward where his nose is pointing, reading the stories of the air. Nothing. What does he smell?
And then I see Hex coming over the rocks, stumbling, running, wielding the sword the king gave to him. I stand in the boat and call his name.
Orpheus never really came back from the dead, but not so for Persephone, or Proserpine as she is called in The Aeneid, who became queen of the underworld. She was abducted and brought there by Hades but her mother, the earth goddess Demeter, was able to get her back for half the year, so that she could restore spring to the earth. In this myth love won over death, at least by half.
Hex and I were dead once, corpses on the Island of Excess Love. Now we are reunited, if tenuously. In this moment I imagine our graves on that island, the ones we dug for each other and ourselves. The graves are empty. We are here. We are alive.
* * *
As Hex jumps into the boat, avoiding the help of my outstretched hand, and Ez and Ash begin to paddle away, I see a group of figures coming over the rocks toward the beach. There are six young m
en and six young women, of different skin tones, their lower bodies draped in animal skins, their chests bare, wreaths of leaves in their long wind-whipped hair. Six of them are on the backs of white horses and the others so sure-footed on the rocks, it is as if their feet are cloven hooves.
* * *
The island has risen out of the sea. It is still young; the trees are small. Mostly the landscape is just rocks. There is trash on the shore, from the ocean. When the twelve arrive here—washed up from various places and in different ways, but all similarly broken—they know they have been saved for something but they have no idea what it could be.
Running, running, always running. They’ve lost their families, their homes, everything. Half naked, they keep running, over the rocks until their bleeding feet toughen like horn. Finding fresh water, finding nuts and berries and small animals to eat, finding each other, forming a band of wild folk. Six white horses come to them one night as they are sleeping, standing there in the dawn like a dream, allowing themselves to be mounted and ridden over the rocky landscape. The Fauns and the Nymphs the young men and women call themselves. They gather the trash they find on the island. Each piece reminds them of the sins of their lost world. They try to make it into something of use and beauty.
They begin to forget the time when they thought they were dead. Riding their white horses across the island where purple flowers have begun to grow, they wonder if the twelve of them may actually be alive.
Until that ghost girl, the Queen of the Shades with her three black dogs, the one who summoned them in the first place, makes herself known to them.
* * *
Just as when I first saw Acacia I know that these young men and women need us. As they stop and stand on the rocks, watching, the sun beginning to sink behind them, there is a desperation in their eyes that I know well. I had that look, too, until I returned to my home and was reunited with my loved ones.
“They need our help,” I say but everyone pretends not to hear me, except for Venice.
“We’ll come back someday,” he says. He’s not looking at me, though. His eyes are on the small girl who has broken through the formation of twelve young men and women and is running toward the boat.
It’s Acacia.
She dives into the water and swims toward us, disconcertingly fast. Venice goes to the side of the boat and reaches out for her. He takes her hand and hauls her in.
I can hear the chattering-ring of her teeth and I put my arms around her.
“She can’t come. We don’t have room,” Hex says.
Venice faces him. My brother has grown taller and he is already nearing Hex’s height. “She helped us.”
“How? By taking us to the Queen of the Damned, there? We don’t have room for one more hungry, miserable stray.” He flings up his hands. “You all keep bringing more along for the ride.”
“She healed Pen’s arm,” Venice tells him.
Hex glares at me. “Awesome. Really great. She healed Pen’s arm.”
“Shut up,” Venice mumbles.
Hex’s whole body registers surprise; Ven has never talked back to him. I expect a response but Hex is quiet.
Acacia escapes my embrace and leans over the side of the boat. She holds up one hand toward the young men and women on the shore.
“Who are they?” I ask her. The torch-smoke scent of her hair is still in my nostrils.
“The brothers and sisters,” she says in a small voice, through the chattering.
“What do they want?” Their fervently poised bodies haunt my retina even though I’ve turned away. I know what they want, but I need to hear Acacia say it.
“They want you to come back here one day, and rescue them from the Island of the Shades.”
“Fucking great. Let’s just ask them to come along, too,” Hex says. “And hey, the horses might fit on our boat if we all pile up.”
“Just stop,” says Venice, not mumbling now.
Hex is silent and Ez and Ash row the boat farther out to sea away from the twelve figures on the shore. The sky flares red with the setting sun’s last cry.
Something rips at my insides and I wonder if this is what my mother felt when she was separated from me as the earth shook. I shouldn’t feel this way but I do.
Island of Bone, Sea of Blood. Someday I’ll return to you.
* * *
Later Hex and I are at the oars. Ash with his knowledge of the currents of air and Ez who understands the earth were able to discern the longitudes and latitudes and point the boat toward home. Now they and Argos are sleeping and Venice and Acacia are at the helm, phosphorescent beams from her eyes lighting the way over the night sea. I didn’t want to row with Hex but Venice called us all to take a turn and somehow, after standing up to Hex, my brother has become our captain. I think of him in the vision I had and I’m not surprised by who he is now or who I’m sure he will become.
Hex and I are silent for a long time, the waves and wind our only form of conversation. My arms feel weak, as if they’re made of wind-shaken leaves, but I know I can’t give in to the exhaustion, nor can I afford to use up too much energy by speaking.
“I’m sorry,” I say to Hex finally, unable to contain myself, and my voice blows away on the cold wind, blows into the firmament, but I keep talking, louder now. “I will say it forever until you hear me.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Will you ever acknowledge my apology?” I plead, biting back a sob. “Is there anything I can do? Ever?”
Silence.
My words are useless. But maybe Virgil’s will have power, and there are some I remember. They are Dido’s words when she begs her mistress to help her find a love spell to win Aeneas back. Although Hex, not I, was betrayed like Dido, I wonder if these words will touch him.
“I have been in touch with a priestess … who once … was used to
Feed the dragon which guarded their orchard of golden apples,
sprinkling its food with moist honey and sedative poppy-seeds.
Now this enchantress claims that her spells can liberate
One’s heart, or can inject love-pangs, just as she wishes;
Can stop the flow of rivers, send the stars flying backwards,
Conjure ghosts in the night: she can make the earth cry out
Under one’s feet, and elm trees come trooping down from the mountains.”
“Not bad Virgilese,” Hex allows. “‘Inject love-pangs.’”
“Yes.”
We row through until dawn, the stars disappearing, the sun rising as if it’s erupting from the core of the earth. I blink into the red light streaking the horizon.
I wish I could inject love-pangs into Hex’s heart and send the stars flying backwards. Why did I share a bed with the king of the Island of Excess Love? Even if I was under a spell, what I did was wrong. I would not be able to forgive Hex if he did the same thing to me. And yet … And yet, somehow it feels inevitable. But is that only an excuse for my betrayal?
“Do you know the color blue never existed in ancient times?” Hex says, startling me so that I almost stop rowing. He’s addressing me? It’s not exactly an acceptance of my apology but at least he’s speaking.
I gather myself and register what he’s just said. “What do you mean it never existed? What about the sky? And the sea?”
“It went unnamed in the ancient texts. Homer said the ‘wine-dark sea,’ never once ‘the blue sea.’”
“Maybe he was just avoiding clichés,” I try to joke. Hex ignores me. “What about blue eyes?” I try not to remember the king’s.
“It’s not in the literature. Anywhere. Until later,” he says. “Virgil says indigo-colored rain cloud, for example, and ‘dark-blue chariot.’ But not Homer. If you see something all the time, if it’s omnipresent, you don’t have to name it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sometimes we don’t see what’s most constant and beautiful around us. We take it for granted.”
He’s tryin
g to tell me something. My heart feels like an empty amphora filling with the nectar of relief. “Yes,” I say. “And when it’s gone, and night comes, or an Earth Shaker, it’s hard sometimes to imagine that a blue sky ever existed at all.”
He motions toward the sky over our heads. “A little gray now, but there it is.”
“And here you are,” I say.
We’re silent again. I don’t know if this was just a brief reprieve; I imagine so. What can I say to keep him engaged?
Venice comes over with bottles of water and some berries. The smell of the juice makes my mouth water but my stomach is queasy. I suppose it’s from the motion of the boat. “Are you guys okay?”
“Fine.”
“Really?”
“Getting a little tired, I guess,” I admit.
Hex grunts and my brother goes to wake Ez and Ash.
“Thanks for taking the shift,” Ez says as I stand, stretching out my cramped limbs, and hand him my oars. “You feel all right?”
“Hex spoke to me,” I whisper. Even saying it makes my heart fill again.
“What did he say?”
“Um, that blue never existed in ancient times?”
“What the hell? Blue’s a primary color. Of course it did.”
“He has some theory about not seeing what’s there all the time.”
Ez frowns. “I guess he was trying to make a point.”
“I guess.”
“At least he talked.”
Ash has taken Hex’s place and I watch Hex move toward the stern of the boat. His shoulders are hunched as if he’s protecting his heart and his black hair falls over his face, the way, when he held me, it once fell over mine.
“Go talk to him some more,” Ez says.
I feel like a thirteen-year-old getting boyfriend advice, which I never did since I liked girls and didn’t want anyone to know. If I’d had Ez around I would have talked to him. “What should I say?”
“Remember when Venice said that thing about storytelling helping us see the outcome?”
That seems so long ago, back at the pink house, before the ghost ship and the Island of Excess Love and the Island of the Shades, the death of the king, the death of Merk, whose body I was not even able to bury. The death of Hex’s trust in me.
The Island of Excess Love Page 13