The God Beneath the Sea

by Leon Garfield

  ‘Is that the message from my great brother?’

  Immortal Hermes sighed, and put away tact. ‘My father bids you free Persephone, Lord Hades.’

  ‘No . . . no . . .’

  The god’s whisper seemed to fill his terrible palace so that all its dead substance whispered with him. ‘No . . . no . . .’

  Then Hermes raised his herald’s staff and reminded the huge, crouching Hades that he, like all creation, was subject to the thunderbolt. Hades raised his eyes. There was bleak hatred in them; and a grief as wild and savage as Demeter’s.

  ‘Persephone . . .’

  Once more the brazen labyrinth echoed with the god’s whisper, till it seemed to waiting Hermes that all the kingdom of the dead was muttering, ‘Persephone . . . Persephone . . .’

  Then she came. The layered air began to move as a vague warmth stole upon it. The cracked columns that stood at the chamber’s entrance like an iron forest began to wink and gleam as if to a wandering sunrise in a flowered gown.

  ‘Persephone!’

  The child of Zeus and Demeter stood before the dark throne. She swayed slightly and touched at a rent in the shoulder of her gown. Then she raised her bright, sad eyes and stared at her terrible lover while her radiance softly flooded the room. The gold began to gleam and shine and the vaulted ceiling blushed into a sky of jewels that danced in the light. The dull chamber seemed changed into a marvellous casket, most intricately wrought. It was full of nymphs and Tritons and ferns and strange stories told in the devious walls.

  ‘Persephone!’

  Hermes marvelled and understood why grim Hades had dared to challenge the power of Olympus.

  She had come from the gardens that stretched beyond the palace . . . and a withered, white-haired creature had followed her in. He was a gardener and his name was Ascalaphus. Painfully he watched her, with eyes like a pair of blasted moons.

  His arms, long and sinewy from reaching up to prune the black, quiet trees, now hung down, and his thin fingers were spread as if everywhere in the young goddess’s wake he found the ghosts of flowers.

  ‘Since I cannot make you happy, Persephone, you must return.’ Hades’ words came slow and gratingly, as if they were being forced from cracking iron.

  Demeter’s child looked unbelievingly at the huge dark god. Her lips parted in the amazement of her joy.

  ‘I loved you, Persephone,’ whispered Hades. ‘But that was not enough.’ Tears as red as blood were coursing down his shadowy cheeks.

  ‘Go! Go!’ he shouted suddenly; and his voice sent the brazen echoes rolling down the corridors till the columns trembled and the walls shook.

  ‘You’ll not regret this, uncle,’ murmured Hermes hastily; and began to draw bright Persephone back from the throne and towards the pillared entrance of the chamber. ‘All creation will applaud your wise and generous act.’

  But the god, watching the sweet light go, groaned only, ‘Perse-phone . . . Persephone . . .’

  Already she was among the iron trees and the eternal chamber of Hades was sinking into its gigantic, gilded gloom. The bright stars died and the stories in the walls ended in the weight of hanging nightmare.

  ‘The gods will honour you,’ came Hermes’ dwindling voice, winding back among the pillars, ‘and even the hard Fates will nod their heads, uncle. For this is their wish, too. Persephone must return, they decreed, if she has eaten no food of the dead.’

  No food of the dead . . . The herald’s voice seemed to ripple among the columns like a tide receding.

  ‘No food of the dead?’

  Ascalaphus, the hideous gardener, awoke from his withered dream with a shriek. He began to choke and cough and shout with malignant laughter.

  ‘Seven seeds!’ he screeched. ‘She ate seven seeds! I saw her! Pomegranate seeds – red as her blood!’

  The dreadful creature was capering up and down in triumph and waving his arms like shabby wings. ‘Now she must stay! Now she must walk my gardens and gather my flowers for ever!’

  They met at Eleusis; the goddess and her lost child. And though the frantic joy of their meeting seemed to make a little summer in the midst of the stricken land, it was only at Eleusis. Such joy as this could neither spread nor endure. Its substance was tears; its purpose – farewell. Persephone was for the kingdom of Hades; Demeter was for the eternal winter of the world.

  ‘The Fates! The Fates!’ screeched the hellish gardener, whose tongue had damned Demeter and her child. He clung to the rim of the great goddess’s chariot-wheel as if to prevent its escape. Dead, bent and dusty, he blinked enviously in the light of day.

  ‘I was the instrument of the Fates!’

  ‘Then be forever hated,’ cursed wild Demeter, ‘like the malignant hags themselves!’

  She raised her hand and struck him across the mouth. At once, that venomous thing split and gaped. The skin shrivelled, and hardened into beaked bone. Then the face about it shrank and darkened till the bright, spiteful eyes all but engulfed it. His long arms, beating and flailing against horrible pain, bent and cracked and splintered into changed shapes – and the flesh was torn into feathers. He shrieked and screamed – but no longer in words.

  ‘Foul creature, begone!’

  At the goddess’s command, it rose, still screaming, from her chariot-wheel and beat raggedly away to hide itself for ever in those gnawed-off scraps of hell that still littered the world of day. A screech-owl ever doomed to hoot disaster in the midst of joy!

  Demeter forsook the company of gods and men. She wept no more, as if she feared her very tears might nourish the world she’d cursed. Haggard and terrible, she broke through the naked forests where the beasts died and the streams froze. Sometimes she would kneel and gaze down into the thick ice to where the caught nymph or genius of the waters lay staring up, pierced with needles of broken crystal. Anguish answered anguish, and the goddess moved on.

  One by one her sisters and brothers in immortality pleaded with her, but to each and all of them she had given the same reply:

  ‘Core – Core! Give me back my child!’

  At last she trailed her desolate gown back into Attica. She wandered across the barren lap of Mount Hymettus where the wild bees used to make honey for the gods. The once fair garden of ancient Prometheus crumbled under her feet. Suddenly, she stumbled and cried out in pain. A potshard had cut her heel. She bent to pick it up. Was it from the very jar in which the Titan had kept the substance he had fashioned into man? Demeter shook her head. What did it matter now? All labour was in vain . . .

  ‘Demeter, my child.’

  The goddess looked up. Though sinking into ruin, parts of the Titan’s house still stood. The voice that called her had come from within.

  ‘Demeter – great goddess of the harvests!’

  Slowly, she entered the house. It was cold and rank. Rooms had fallen one into another, and all that remained of the strange chamber where Prometheus had laboured was the withered fig-tree.

  ‘Demeter.’ A mighty figure was crouching beside its trunk. It was Rhea, mother of Creation and of Demeter herself.

  ‘Great goddess – you must relent!’

  ‘Give me back my child!’

  ‘I, too, lost children – even you, Demeter.’

  ‘But they returned.’

  ‘Only to be lost again.’ Rhea’s unfathomed eyes stared at her daughter whose grief was destroying the world. ‘Listen,’ she whispered. She held up her hand, and Demeter heard from high amid the ragged mountains of the north the screaming of Prometheus in his chains.

  ‘The vulture still flies,’ muttered Demeter.

  ‘Not the vulture,’ said Rhea, ‘but you, my daughter. Prometheus weeps for the world.’

  Demeter bowed her head, and sank at her mother’s feet. ‘Give me back my child.’

  Rhea’s hand lost itself in the rich gold of her daughter’s hair. ‘Yes . . . yes . . . She will return, and return again. There will be meetings, Demeter. There will be great broad days of joy. But the
re must be partings, too. We cannot escape the Fates, my child.’

  ‘Core . . . Core! Where are you?’

  The bright poppies nodded in the golden field.

  ‘Core!’

  Then they exploded into a laughing scarlet storm as Core, goddess of the spring, flung herself fiercely into Demeter’s arms, once more to be armisticed with kisses.

  The world was in summer and the days were long. Demeter smiled, all disaster forgotten in her vast nature and love. Then the screech-owl hooted his tale of the pomegranate seeds and the harsh necessity of the Fates. It was time for Demeter and Core to part. Three long, dark months must Core stay with Hades. Three long, dark months must Demeter wander the world, calling her child in vain. ‘Core . . . Core . . .’

  But she would come again. Great Rhea had promised. In spite of the Fates, each year Demeter’s child would return.

  SIXTEEN

  A CHARMING LAD

  It was in the days of Core. The world was green and the river nymphs, freed from ice, flashed laughing among the nearby thickets – only to fall into eager arms. Zeus, unchanging Zeus, seemed everywhere . . . as quail, swan, eagle, cloud and even as a shower of gold. His ceaseless, winged passion hovered, spied and pounced on the world below till it seemed to the careless nymphs that every bird and every gust of rain contained the god. Nor were the nymphs the only ones who looked askance at sudden changes in the weather. Mighty Hera watched with cloud-piercing eyes and divine anger as the great god littered the earth with Zeuslings . . . But the day would come when even Zeus would be called to account. The queen of Heaven brooded in her lonely bedchamber, while laughter from below tinkled in the air as the nymphs tumbled like blown petals to a warm wind.

  Mortal women, lacking the nymphs’ lightness and speed, were more circumspect; they needed time for their passions to give them wings; they needed flattery and courtship. Such was Chione, a girl of high family who lived in Attica, between Eleusis and Athens.

  She was very lovely, in a mortal fashion, and called to mind the disturbing beauty of Pandora. She wandered by the lilting streams – dreaming of lovers rather than with them.

  From between the leaves the hot nymphs watched her, half-puzzled, half-pitying. When she bathed she kept to the shadows as if she were frightened by her own nakedness; and then walked on, closely gowned.

  But Apollo had glimpsed her. No less than his almighty father, the sun-god was in love with love and often burned with more than his duty’s fire. The foliage was nowhere thick enough to keep out his beams, and the god had peered through with abruptly kindled desire. The sun burned bright – and seemed to hurry as Apollo sped on to stable his fiery horses and be free to meet Chione on her own ground, in her own night.

  Immortal Hermes had seen her too. In the shape of a crane he’d perched among the branches and had a closer, longer look.

  ‘I saw her first!’ shouted Apollo angrily, leaning from his blazing chariot while his unwatched horses pawed the high clouds and tossed them across the sky in golden shreds.

  Hermes smiled and stared as Chione dried herself and put on her gown, tying the girdle firmly against the light-fingered breeze. Like his great brother and his great father, Hermes was a lover too . . . a lover with a sideways smile and an eye that twinkled with shrewd dreams . . .

  ‘She’s for the arms of Apollo!’ came the sun-god’s voice, from farther in the west.

  ‘And why not?’ murmured Hermes, measuring the distance that his mighty brother had yet to go. ‘But workaday gods must keep workaday hours – and wait till the night.’

  So Chione, wandering on and dreaming of impossible lovers, met with a handsome shepherd who wore gold-coloured sandals that were ornamented with wings.

  ‘Were I a god,’ said this shepherd, accosting her, ‘I would imprison you with the fire of my eyes and make you my goddess for an hour.’

  Chione tossed her head and drew her gown close – for the shepherd’s eyes did indeed burn bright.

  ‘Were I a god,’ pursued this shepherd, seeming to flicker into her path to a disturbing, uncanny way, ‘I would make a green palace for you, under the trees, where nymphs would sing you love-songs and—’

  ‘If you were a god,’ interrupted Chione coldly, ‘you would do these things instead of talking about them!’

  So Hermes smiled – and did.

  The sun-god’s horses panted and dragged their chariot blazing down into the west. There was a distant thunder as the fiery wheels grumbled over the brazen floor of the stables . . . then quietness and night.

  With mighty strides and still drenched with the golden sweat of his labours, Apollo came.

  ‘Brother,’ said Hermes, flickering out of a thicket and meeting him by the stream. ‘Has it not been rather a short day?’ No one knows what tale Chione told to her proud Athenian father when she came home just before the next day’s dawn. No one knows whether he believed it – or locked her up in a fury for the rest of that spring.

  But when two sons were born to her, even the stern Athenian yielded a little. Not the hardest heart in the world could have resisted one of them: a bright-eyed, charming lad who could have wheedled the gold out of his grandfather’s tooth. His name was Autolycus . . .

  Immortal Hermes, flying between Olympus and Parnassus, looked down on the tiny house by Athens. He smiled with unusual tenderness – and then sped on. The world below was in winter. Persephone was with her grim lover, Hades; and Demeter mourned while the screech-owl cried. Great Zeus, turning from the frozen nymphs, cut a golden swathe through the daughters of men. Sometimes Hermes glimpsed him, blazing out of some maiden’s bedchamber like a wayward star . . . and then he saw the maiden, all soft and amazed, leaning out into the night. Had it been a god, a dream, or a lover telling lies? Mighty Hera saw him too; and when morning came, the last night’s love lay cold and dead, pierced by the feathered arrows of the virginal moon. Fierce Artemis, huntress and bringer of sudden death, had ranged herself beside the injured queen of Heaven whose desire for revenge was ever growing . . .

  Hermes frowned and longed for the coming of the spring; everywhere his sharp ears heard the busy clatter of the Fates as the cold days killed and killed.

  But his Autolycus did not die. Instead, he grew into a sleek and handsome boy who left behind a trail of indulgent smiles that never quite knew what they’d smiled at when afterthought declared they should have frowned. Long and often the god lingered above the little house by Athens . . . and added yet another smile to young Autolycus’s stock, till at last the great god of make-believe could contain himself no longer and went down to meet his charming son.

  It was on a summer’s day and the slippery child was walking by the banks of a certain stream when he met with a tall shepherd who wore golden sandals ornamented with wings.

  Courteously Autolycus stepped aside; but the shepherd’s courtesy coincided exactly with his own. They were still face to smiling face. Again Autolycus moved – and again they moved together. So Autolycus said, ‘Sir, I will stand still. Pass whichever side you will.’

  The shepherd looked him up and down; observed his neat limbs and thick dark curling hair. He nodded.

  ‘Were I a god,’ he said humorously, ‘I’d be pleased to own such a son.’

  ‘Were you a god, sir,’ said young Autolycus, smiling sideways at the stream, ‘I’d be pleased to own such a father.’

  The shepherd turned his head to hide the laughter in his eyes. Then the boy, being, after all, a boy, picked up a stone and threw it in the stream, and knelt down to see what fish he’d flushed and whether they were worth catching. The shepherd watched him; then with a crinkled look at the sun, sat cross-legged beside him and helped by prodding the straining weeds with a long, ribboned staff. ‘If I were a god,’ he murmered idly to the racing stream, ‘and I could do such things and change such things as they say gods can do, what would you like, Autolycus?’

  The boy frowned and thought deeply. He was of the age when nothing surprised. Streams mig
ht turn to gold and nursery chairs become wild beasts, crouching at his feet. From time to time he turned his head – to find his sidelong glance met by the waiting shepherd’s.

  ‘Would you like to be loved, Autolycus?’

  ‘I am,’ said the boy honestly. ‘People like me, you know.’

  ‘Certainly you’ve inherited good looks—’

  ‘And charm, too. Everyone agrees I have much charm. Also I’m musical. Already I can play the lyre and pipes.’

  ‘Would you like to be modest, Autolycus? Would you like the gift of modesty?’

  ‘Why, sir? What should I do with it?’

  ‘Wear it as a cloak, Autolycus. It might save you from many a bitter wind.’

  The boy shrugged his shoulders as if the shepherd’s advice was all very well, but for somebody else. The shepherd sighed. ‘When old Prometheus made men and women, he gave them life but not much else besides. Every little helps . . .’

  ‘But that was a long time ago. They say the gods have helped since then . . . Between you and me, sir,’ said Autolycus, sitting back on his heels and eyeing the shepherd’s quaint sandals, ‘I’d hope for something better from a god than what I could do by myself. I am modest. Everyone says so. I’d sooner be rich, and—’

  ‘And what, Autolycus?’

  ‘– and not get caught.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ The shepherd glanced rapidly at the sky and then back to Autolycus with a mixture of brightness and suspicion.

  ‘Well, sir – I’ve thought a lot about it. Palaces and kingdoms are all very well; but they’re easily lost, or – or stolen. And unless you’ve the strength of a Titan, it’s hard to hold on to what you’ve come by. You’d not believe it, but people round here, if so much as a cow is missing, track it down with sticks in their hands and murder in their hearts.’