Chapter Text
Her Momma tells her, “Girl, these things happen.”
Well, no. Point of fact, no she doesn’t. If Persephone were fool enough to go talk to her Momma about these things, about anything to do with her life beneath, Demeter would probably sneer and say she knew it would come to this, baby why dontcha come on back home, I’ve got your room set up right the way you left it, come on back home and forget that bastard even exists, just stay here all year round. And then she’d tuck her in with a cup of hot chocolate, like Persie’s still about twelve and not a married woman with power of her own, and set off to beat sense into her littlest brother. Given those two share a temper if nothin’ else, only way that’d end would be murder, and there’s plenty of places to hide bodies, above and beneath.
It’s tricky, talking to her Momma about her husband and to her husband about her Momma. They’re too much alike, for all there’s near ten years between the two of them. Though really they’re all mad, all of them, Uncle Zee and Auntie H living and loving and fighting up in the mountains, Uncle Don living like a beach-bum even with all those pearls hidden away everywhere, and the cousins. Well, hell. The less said about them the better. It’s a sad comment on her life, really it is, that Persephone’s the sanest of the lot, even if there was such a great lot of talk about her marrying her Uncle. He’s never felt like it, really, but then Momma and Auntie Tia are so much older and sensible-like, their brothers and sisters just read a lot younger, and Persie’s the oldest of the kids, so there ain’t much more than fifteen years anyway, between her and Hades, and that’s not so much, when you’re in love. And he’d been away when she was a kid, so it’s not like they’d ever connected that way, like it would be strange if she went to bed with Uncle Don, he’d just been there one day, standing outside of Momma’s garden wall, and Persie’d stared and stared and just wanted him so badly she could hardly breathe, and then he’d come up and grasped her between his hands and that’d been that, all without a word spoken. Just like that, like all the stories of Uncle Zee and Auntie H, though really that was strange in a way that left a bad taste in the mouth, that marriage and the way they justified it, the way Persie justified hers. And the way Uncle Zee looked around a little too often, and did things without much speaking of them. And the way Auntie H got about it, when she saw him with some girl.
The way Persie’s getting. The way her husband had been staring at that girl in his newest watering-hole, Cocytus; the girl he’d dug up from nowhere-land and set up with her own bar. Persie doesn’t even know her name, and she’s the hands-on type, learnt that from Momma before she learnt her letters, on your knees with your hands in the dirt, that’s the only way to make your garden grow. Ain’t nothing she doesn’t know about life beneath, ain’t much she doesn’t know about life above. Except this girl’s name. Her name, her name, Persie needs to know her name, try and think of her as a human being and not do any of the things to her that Auntie H would do if it were her in Persie’s shoes, has done when it was her in Persie’s shoes. The things that Persie wants to do.
She goes to Cocytus one night when Hades is away looking after Lethe. Not Persie who likes nothing better than sunshine and the sweet smell of good soil, but Persephone who walks in the dark, who is light in the dark, who is queen in the dark. Never ceases to surprise her how they know it, any time she walks in the doors, who she’s decided to be. They do, unerringly, every time. Girls she’s pulled shifts and carried plates with lower their eyes and their heads and step away, men who’ve laughed and asked her for a dance bow and scrape their chairs from her path. The girl in the green dress sitting at the piano keeps playing. Whoever was singing has had better sense, and having swallowed her song, now puts a hand on the girl’s shoulder. A hard hand, turning her around. Turning her to look at Persephone, who wants nothing better than to blast her to cinders, bury her in one of Hades’ mines, turn her into a diamond and set her in her crown.
She’s got a diamond resting in the hollow of her throat, a tiny chip of a thing like a bead of sweat between her collarbones, like a pin fastening an invisible cloak. She’s got skin so pale it hurts the eye to look at her, milky white like a pearl or an overcast sky, like the whey they skim off milk in the morning, bare all the way up to thin shoulders. She’s got hair fair like the gold they mine in the mines in Hadestown, like the sun when Paulie goes riding in the mornings, glittering under the lights like Ditty’s favorite belt that makes men fall in love. She’s got long lashes and green eyes deep-set in her pale skin like coming upon deep pools in the ice lands, like a flash of life in the desert. She’s got a pair of lips like the first blush of love, like rose-petals unfurling, like the curve of a well-strung bow. She’s got a dress of green to match her eyes, like a sheaf of leaves stitched together, like a well-watered plant in the love-light of the afternoon. She’s got a throat that’s tender like a child’s, downy like the skin on a herb struggling to see sunshine, working like she’s got something to say.
Persie smiles at her, big like she means it, big like she wants to bite the arteries outta her throat. “I wanted to come visit my husband’s newest acquisition,” she says, voice even, still smiling while her cheeks ache. “I’m Persephone.”
The girl stares at her till her singer tips her carefully into a curtsy, the hand on her shoulder gripping her tight and pushing her down, spine straight, knees bent, like a bucket into a well, like a coal-cart into the mine. She comes up with lowered eyes, only beginning to be afraid. “My name’s Minty,” she says, and dips her head like a flower withering on its stalk.
Persie, well, she knows what’s in her blood, no point in arguing that, and obeisance makes her feel immediately better, like the world has righted itself and her place in it is still secure and all things are as they ought to be. She sweeps past Minty and takes her place at the piano. It’s a new one, perfectly in tune, and fails to be discordant even when she stabs at the keys at random. (Persie is Paulie’s utter despair, she’s got a passable singing voice but that’s about it, but hell compared to Paulie they’re all kinda disasters.)
The girl, Minty Minty she came here to know the name, no point disregarding it, says, “Would you like a song, Lady?”
By the time she goes back home, a new shift of workers has headed to the mines, to the mint, to man the long railroads that bridge life beneath with business above, and the old shift has trudged to Cocytus and must be trudging into Lethe, Acheron, Phlegethon. In Cocytus they sing, in Acheron weep, in Phlegethon rage, in Lethe drink to forget. Into Styx they do not venture, none of the workers, beyond the first time when the trains stop at the far bank and the ferry brings them over; Styx is her husband’s own domain, where he goes for conversation with his friends who could venture above if they chose and sometimes do, but choose to live beneath. Persephone visits it twice a year, coming and going: brings Hecate autumn leaves when she returns, wreaths of russet and red to crown her; takes spring flowers from Hermes when she leaves and holds his hand while Charon takes them up above.
She goes home and stands before her silver mirror. Before she left she had dressed carefully, dragged all the splendor with which her husband has endowed her from their places, the careful wrapping that preserves the luster of silver, of silk. In the end she had worn black the color of darkness in the deepest mines, no points of illumination on her, no light, no ornaments, a long fall of black cloth against her skin. It would look ascetic above, but here in the world beneath it is the badge of power. Hades wears black, only black, save on the first day of spring and the first day of autumn, when he dresses to please her. Persie wears black when she sits in judgment, when she is angry, when she is lonely, when she wants to feel his arms about her in an embrace of cloth. Standing before her silver mirror now she is alone among her things. Hades is not present in her mind, no phantom hand presses warmly between her shoulder-blades. She strips off the dress and looks at herself.
She looks nothing like the girl. She looks like her Momma, some, and some like her aunts. A bit like Uncle Zee, but not overmuch. Skin dark like the newly-furrowed earth; eyes dark like the wine-dark sea; hair dark like storming clouds; mouth dark with secrets and bright with smiles. She does not look tender. She does not feel it. She feels unyielding like rock that the rains have not changed in a hundred years. She feels angry. She feels like a man would who has won great honor and sees it slipping through his fingers. She feels like a woman who has given her life to her husband and sees him looking at another girl. Like Auntie H must feel, must have felt all that time Persie was rolling her eyes and calling her dramatic beyond belief I mean it’s just looking. With Uncle Zee it was never just looking, any rate, and even Hades looking at any other woman even the thought of it makes the blood beat against her skin and sets it throbbing like a good drum skillfully handled. There’s plenty of places to hide bodies, beneath and above.
Hades walks with a quiet step, here among the dead things, the things that can hear breath and life a league away. He is in her room before she can turn at the sound of his step hesitating at her door, his knuckles rapping perfunctorily at her door. He is not a giant, her husband, like his uncles or her mother’s, but a kingly dread cloaks him here among the forgotten, the dead-in-memory. When she met him first in the gentle light of her mother’s garden she had simply thought him handsome. In the silver light of her chambers, the silver pool of her mirror shows a tall man, austere in his sartorial choices, grave in manner even unto melancholy, and beautiful with it all, enough to make one weep. There is the quiet suggestion of a crown among his curls, and an unbecoming air of diffidence in the way his hands ghost over her shoulders, touching her body only through the displacement of air between his skin and hers.
He only says, “You’ve had a busy day.” He sets his hand on her back, between the wings of her shoulder-blades that long for his touch, and stoops to smile against her shoulder.
“I met your newest acquisition,” she says, and smiles at his reflection before turning to meet his eyes. “I hear she’s half-way in love with you, Lord.”
Always, between them, there has been honesty. Even when it hasn’t been kind, even when it’s been downright savage, when he’s held her between his hands and sworn on everything above and beneath that he’s never going to let her go, even when she’s taken pomegranate seeds from his plate and eaten them one by one while Hermes stood watching, always, always honesty. It’s the root, the bedrock of their marriage.
The bedrock of their marriage and now she can see the lie lurking in his drowning deep eyes. But he looks at her, and he smiles at her, and he presses her closer to his body with his hand on her back, and kisses the hair that springs from her brow in a widow’s peak, the tilted angle of her cheekbone, the determined curve of her chin. He puts his mouth to her ear and he murmurs, “She only wants me for my car.”
She rears away from him. Strikes out, hits his shoulder with her fist, stands panting when he catches it lazily when she raises her hand for a second blow, body twisted away from him. He is laughing at her and saying something, and she can hear nothing over the beating of blood—oh, such blood, his and hers, a touch richer than the rest—in her ears. This, she thinks distantly, is how her cousins feel, in battle, in the hunt. She could kill him now, even here in his place of strength. His car, he says. His car.
She thinks, he is afraid. It doesn’t give her joy. Her husband should be unafraid, here in his wife’s chambers, here where he is king, everywhere. But he is afraid now, and cannot meet her gaze. She says, ‘You could give her the car.”
“She isn’t worth that much,” he says. He says, “Persephone, it’s a joke. Persephone, you’re my wife.” He says, rising to anger, letting go of her, stepping away, burning cold with fury, “I’m not my brother, Lady.”
“No,” she says, and turns away to sit on her bed, arms wrapped around her knees. It’s a child’s pose more than a woman’s, and Persie’s careful to look a grown woman hereabouts, but she wants her mother’s arms around her something awful, and that lovely, sunlit home and the spreading fields about it dotted with men and women she’s known from childhood, and to wander in the woods with Missy and go on drives with Paulie and sit in Auntie Tia’s kitchen for hours and go carousing with Dio and deep-sea diving with Uncle Don. All the world above keeps calling out to her, even with a month to go till she’s supposed to leave, all the joy to be found among living, breathing things.
“No,” Persie says again, very young all of a sudden, and very cruel, unthinking with it the way children are and all of her kin. “But you are his brother, Lord.” The mirror fogs with his breath. He pants like a bull before it, held to silence by her uplifted hand. “You are a King, and cruel as a King, your laws are stronger than steel, encircling walls, you speak and the beautiful earth is gutted, you speak and walls are raised, you speak and men fall in step. All your machines are set to work from your thought, and from your speech the laws of the underworld spill, the world beneath the happy feet of people living in ignorance, in bliss. Your mines are peopled by the starving poor, the singing poor, and the work you put in their hands and the food you put in their bellies strikes them dumb, turns them numb and still yearning for home. But they can’t go above, they can’t go back, it’s a one-way track, to Hadestown.”
“I give them work, and I give them wages. I give them food and they cry because their full bellies stop their mouths. They cry endlessly, above about lack of work, beneath about a plenitude of it. They want laws and freedom, death and life, all at once, and then they complain when I give it them.”
“You give them life in death and endless sorrow. You give them work and wages and wine to spend it on and women to wait on them and to sing. You give them laws and you set them to building walls and you set them free in chains. You are their Lord and they worship your name. You are their King.”
“But not yours.” He circles the room, the bed, and sets the length of his body sprawling on one of her straight-backed chairs in an imitation of ease. It doesn’t suit, the chair or the room or him. Or her.
“You’re my man and I love you as any woman can love her man, but you ain’t the boss of me and I don’t gotta stand for it if you make eyes at a girl and I ain’t gonna stand it if you look at a girl whose heart is brimming over with love for you and pretend she just wants your car. You’re not my King; I’m free to go.”
He puts a hand out towards her, and then stops, sets his feet firmly on the ground and shifts his body straight, sits like he’s in judgment, King Hades now in very truth and not her husband who grows her silver flowers of asphodel because daisies don’t do so well in his lands. “You can leave only when it’s time for spring.”
Persie, well, she laughs at that, can’t really help it, for it’s funny for all that it ain’t. Hades, her husband, here among the dead things and the dead folk, here in this unchanging dead land that he mines for his riches, he forgets that the world above is different, that it changes, blooms and ripens before it withers, forgets that it’s a big world and not all of it comes to life all at once, forgets that only half the world grieves with her mother and the other half with her husband, that even now it is forever summer in some lands and just because she stays with him half the year doesn’t mean that she’s bound by those words, that she can go when it is time for spring and that it is always spring when it is time for her to go.
She gets up outta bed, he looks so miserable sitting there all bones and brown knuckles and skin stretched tight over his clenched jaw and clenched hands, and goes over to him, stands before him skin clad and pulls his head to rest against her shoulder, his mouth ghosting breath over the peaking swell of one nipple. His hair is coarse with curls under her stroking hand and catches at her fingers the way his arms come up to catch at her skin, encircle her waist. He dips his head down to kiss the tender skin beneath her breasts, up to kiss between them, and sighs a little contented sigh when she pushes him back down with her hand in his hair, and mouths at her nipple.
He makes her knees go weak. He always has. Those first days when she was new to the gloom and longing for home, even then when she was fresh out of tears from all the weeping she’d done for her mother, he’d come into her room and her breath would catch and her blood quicken, he’d smile at her and she’d want to throw discretion aside and jump him while he sat in full splendor in his court; the first time they fucked was barely out of sight of her home, rutting desperately in the shadow of a tree, of a train, of every alcove and hollow place above and beneath as they ran: the show they must’ve given Paulie, she still shudders to think, no wonder he withheld information till things got real bad.
He puts his hands on her hips and draws her away from him just enough that they’re not clutching like they’re children, like they’re scared, and kisses her skin in trembling arcs of hot breath and a hint of teeth. He kisses her till she’s shuddering, runs his thumbs over the hollows at her hips, his fingers over the curve of her buttocks, his mouth over her breasts and sides and stomach till she’s wet with wanting him, till her knees are buckling under her weight and it would be easy, so easy, to forget it all, just shelve it. These things happen.
She wrenches his head away by the hair from where he’s suckling her, her hand tight in his curls, nails digging into his scalp, and says, “Minty, can she go above?”
He says, “She can. Tomorrow, she’ll be gone. I’ll send her the minute I get outta bed. Tomorrow.” His voice is a match for hers, is as wrecked as hers, as hoarse with love, his eyes heavy-lidded with desire. He doesn’t look stern now, doesn’t look austere, Hades King of stone and steel, wall and street, mines and long railroad tracks. He looks like her husband, like the brother of his brothers.
She kisses his curls, his brow, his temples, cheeks, jaw, the cleft of his chin, the bridge of his nose, the curl of his mouth. She runs her hands over the strength of his shoulders, the lean muscle of his arms beneath the black layers of his clothes, the length of his throat tipped back for her touch. She kisses his mouth like she’s starving and like she’s storing up against starvation, and steps away from him, out into the centre of the room before he can grasp her between his hands and pull her down onto his lap.
He doesn’t look at her when she speaks, sets his hands on the arms of the chair and holds on like he ain’t too sure what he’ll do if he’s not. He inclines his head while she’s speaking to indicate attention, and then deeper when she’s done to indicate acceptance, resignation, despair.
She says, not quick like she wants to but as steady as she can make it, “Spring’s coming early this year.”