Dazzling Brightness Read online

  He was long gone and Demeter eating a midday meal with small appetite when she realized that Poseidon had left her without any way to prove who she was or that he would approve any help given her. Nerus might have money for her and the right to order a ship to sail to Eleusis, but Nerus could not give her any personal token from Poseidon that would identify her as one it would oblige Poseidon to help. What appetite she had vanished, and for the first time since she had left Olympus, she had the urge to fling herself to the ground and scream.

  Her despair was intensified when she sensed a subtle pressure on her to leave. No one was rude, the service accorded her was just as gracious, but baskets for packing the possessions she had accumulated appeared, and she was told whenever a ship crossing to the mainland near Eleusis was ready to leave. She resisted for half a moon, but then realized it would only annoy Poseidon to be denied his own palace by her presence in it and if she annoyed him enough, he would simply give orders that she be removed.

  This was a battle, Demeter reasoned out one sleepless night, that she could not win. She had no weapon to use against Poseidon. He had helped her because he enjoyed spiting Zeus and because if it could be proved Zeus had taken Kore, Zeus’s reputation in Olympus would be badly damaged. It was a source of mild amusement among the Olympians, except perhaps to Hera, that Zeus stole native girls. It would be far less amusing that he stole the daughter of the high priestess of the Corn Goddess, particularly after he had sworn a mighty oath before them all that he had not. However, Poseidon could gain no points with the Olympians if Hades had taken Kore—and Poseidon was afraid of Hades, so afraid he did not want to be associated in any way with anyone who crossed the will of the King of the Dead.

  In the morning Demeter told Nerus that she would take the next ship to Eleusis. Although she was not urged to stay longer than the three more days before a ship would sail in the direction of Eleusis, sufficient gold and fine gowns were pressed upon her to mark her as a person of importance, as well as bracelets and necklets and earrings—but not of nacre or of pearl or of any substance that belonged to Poseidon’s realm.

  The rich garments and accoutrements accorded her a very civil welcome in Celeus’s city, but when she asked whether someone would take her to the caves that opened the way into Plutos, she met a stone wall. The townsfolk denied any such place existed. One told her it was a confusion of Eleusis with Eutresis, far inland. Another said it was a foul calumny propagated by a neighboring kingdom that hoped to spoil their trade by giving them an evil reputation. When she went to the palace with her request, she was turned away. King Celeus was not in Eleusis, she was told, and his servants did not know when he would return. She persisted, asking in shops where she saw displayed metal bowls, fine weapons, or other fruits of the underworld. The merchants indignantly denied that they dealt with the dead. The townsfolk became less friendly and accommodating. Again she saw the winks and nods, the sly smiles and pointing fingers that marked her as a madwoman.

  Distraught and despairing, Demeter took to wandering in the countryside searching for the place on her own, but there was nothing close to Eleusis that could hold the entrance to a cave, except some blue shadows off to the west that hinted of hills. Days passed into weeks. Having exhausted all nearer possibilities, Demeter decided to look in the hills. But she had never traveled so far, even in the valley of Olympus, and there she was accompanied by priestesses and servants who saw to her comfort.

  Besides that, Demeter was reduced to near witlessness by her terror of confronting Hades. Her mind was completely filled with memories of his stone-hard face with its down-turned bitter lips, his heavy-muscled arm rising to strike, and his dripping, bloody knife. And each time she tried to throw off those memories and assure herself that Hades’s actions had been merciful, that he would have only prolonged the agonies of the dying by passing by the mortally wounded, she remembered Poseidon’s fear of any conflict with the King of the Dead. Frightened into thoughtlessness, clinging only to the fixed idea that she must have Kore back, she set out without food or even a cloak.

  Near evening, hungry and footsore, she sat weeping by the side of the road that led west. She heard the voice of a girl and started upright at a familiar tone, but caught her heel in the ragged hem of her gown and fell.

  “Oh, poor lady,” a gentle voice cried while two pairs of hands helped her upright. “What are you doing here all alone when it is so near night?”

  Beyond caution, Demeter said, “I am seeking my daughter, and the only one who can give me news of her is Hades.”

  One girl’s breath caught. The other said softly, “But if she is dead, Hades cannot send her back even if his stone heart should be touched and he should wish to help you.”

  “She is not dead.” Demeter sighed, too worn to do more than weep quietly, “I have sought her from fabled Olympus to the isles of the sea. In King Poseidon’s palace I saw a clear, stiff substance that can be set into a window and will keep out the wind and rain, although it is so clear one can hardly believe it is there. I have seen that stuff far away and I know it is made by Hades himself. And King Poseidon told me he traded salt fish to King Celeus for it. But the townspeople say they know nothing of dark Plutos and King Celeus will not receive me. So I will seek in the hills myself until I find the cave where one may speak with the dead.”

  The girls had been examining her while she spoke.

  Both saw her fairness and the set of features that appeared on the statues in the temples of the gods. Also, under the dust her garments were of the finest cloth and the richest embellishment. She spoke their language well, but with a strange accent. They glanced at each other. Both had heard cautionary tales about terrible punishments meted out for lack of courtesy to beautiful foreigners, who were gods in disguise—and the woman had spoken of fabled Olympus.

  “Why do you say King Celeus would not receive you?” the smaller of the girls asked.

  “I went to his palace and they said he was not there and did not know when he would return.”

  “His palace in Eleusis?” the taller girl asked.

  “Yes.”

  “But he is not there,” she said, touching Demeter’s arm almost pleadingly. “He is here. We came here two moons since because my mother, Queen Metaneira, was heavy with child. She was lightened of son three weeks ago, and we will stay where the air and water is pure until little Demophoon has a strong hold on life.”

  Demeter smiled faintly. “You are Celeus’s daughters?”

  “Yes, great lady.” The smaller girl’s voice shook. “Do not be angry with my father. He did not know.”

  So they recognized her as one of the mighty. Demeter felt hope and fear in equal proportions. Now the way to confront Hades was open to her, she would have to find the strength. Then she realized her silence and her rigidity had frightened them even more. Touching gently first one anxious face and then the other, Demeter smiled again.

  “No. I will not blame King Celeus. If he will tell me where I may call forth the King of Plutos, I will swear never to tell another where the place is or that King Celeus knows of it, and I will go my way and trouble you no more.”

  That, however, was a promise Demeter discovered she would not be able to keep. King Celeus came out to her in the porch after one daughter ran in to tell him who she feared had been walking his road dusty and neglected. The other girl seated Demeter and called a slave to wash her feet. The king nodded approval of his daughters’ courtesy. He had had dealings in person with Poseidon, Demeter guessed, seeing the way his eyes touched her and dropped, and he recognized her kinship to that Olympian. When she asked him flatly for the way to the entrance to Hades’s realm and told him why she sought it, he did not withhold the information she desired. He told her, however, that she would have to wait about half a moon for an answer to any question or demand.

  “Unless, of course, you have a way to enforce your will that we have not,” he said. “But if you do not wish to use your power to that purpose, we wou
ld be honored, madam, if you would be our guest while you wait.”

  Two weeks, Demeter thought. She would have two weeks before she must face Hades’s dripping knife. She shook her head. “Who can force proud Hades?” she replied and began to say, “I am grateful for your kindness—” but she breathed in sharply and looked down at the slave who was untying her sandal thongs.

  The touch had communicated the woman’s Gift, and it was a well of fertility. Demeter laughed aloud. “What is this woman’s name?”

  “Iambe,” Celeus said uncertainly.

  Demeter laid her hand on the slave’s bowed head and stroked her hair. “I will repay you richly for your hospitality,” she said to Celeus, stroking the woman’s hair. “I will teach Iambe certain rites, and in the coming years you will have such crops as your land has never seen before.”

  King Celeus bowed. “At your will, great lady.”

  His respect for her was so profound that Demeter thought of demanding that he send a servant to ask for Kore, but she put the notion aside, knowing it would accomplish nothing. Hades could simply ignore any demand by a messenger. However, a mother’s curse in the Mother’s name delivered in person might give pause even to the King of the Dead.

  The very next day a guide took her to the cave entrance, leading—of all unlikely sacrifices—a sow in farrow.

  When Celeus had told her of the sacrifice demanded before the dead would reply, she had asked, “Is there some special knife I must use to kill her?”

  Demeter had barely managed to keep her voice steady for she had never in her life killed even a dove. On the altar of the Corn Goddess she had laid the first fruits of the ploughed field and the tended garden. Her Lady desired no living sacrifice—unlike the bloodthirsty Maiden, also an avatar of the Mother, that Artemis worshipped—and Demeter did not believe she could kill the sow.

  To her enormous relief, Celeus had replied, “You do not kill her at all. In the cave there is a trough graven in the stone across the mouth of a dark passage. Do not cross that. One messenger did, and he did not return. Call out that you have brought a sacrifice. If there is no answer, you must wait and call again. Eventually the passage will begin to glow. Drive the sow over the trough. She will pass through the glow and then disappear, and one of the dead will appear to speak to you.”

  Even with the assurance that she would not have to kill the sow, Demeter hardly managed to maintain her dignity when the guide pointed to a black mouth in the side of the hill they were climbing. She was so frightened that she took the sow’s lead and sent the guide away. Go she would, she knew, even if her legs would not hold her and she had to crawl into that open maw, but she did not want King Celeus’s guide to see her weeping and trembling.

  From the outside, the black of the cave seemed impenetrable, and Demeter stopped some ten steps away from the entrance, unable to drive herself closer. It was the pig, whose nose had started to twitch and twist, who bumped into her and pushed her the last few steps.

  Inside, the cave was not nearly so black as she had thought because it was a shallow place and the daylight behind her illuminated a fan of the floor and wall above it. Demeter was able to see a black mouth in the wall and the gouge in the stone that marked the forbidden territory. In fact, the sow would have dragged her right over the trough, which was closer to the outer entrance than she expected, had horror not locked her muscles tight. She stopped in time, hauling back on the ringed nose so that the animal squealed in pain, but it was her shriek of terror that summoned the dead rather than any intended call.

  The sow was making angry grunts and squeals, pulling on the lead until pain halted her again, when a sickly pale light rose from the floor and a ruin that had once been a man—a terrible creature, in tattered rags besmottered with black stains that Demeter knew were long-dried blood, black hollows for eyes, and what seemed like a ragged hole where its mouth and chin should have been—seemed to ooze from the wall. The lead slipped from Demeter’s nerveless fingers, and the sow charged forward—and disappeared beyond the lighted area.

  “Wait.”

  The word echoed softly. The dead thing passed back into the wall. Despite the determination that had driven Demeter to defy Zeus, ignore the scorn of her fellow Olympians, and even leave the safe haven in which she had spent her life, she would now have fled—except that her feet would not move. She stood frozen, panting with fear, mind-blank except for the screams that burst in her head but would not come out of her mouth. And then—nothing happened.

  The pale light was steady in the corridor, no shrieks of an animal dying in pain and terror came out of the dark, no worse spirits came to afright her. Such fear cannot last with nothing to feed upon. The peak of her terror passed and with it her paralysis. Her knees gave way, she sank to the cold stone floor, and her eyes closed. How long she sat she did not know, but moment by moment the resolve that had nearly been routed by fear strengthened. The horror she had seen was not so terrible as black-eyed Hades with his bitter mouth and red-stained knife.

  “The sacrifice is accepted. What do you desire of the dead?”

  The soft hollow voice brought Demeter to her feet. The question lashed her into fury, bringing back the agonies of the whole year past. “My daughter!” she shrieked.

  For a long moment, that which had once been a man was silent, as if it were thinking. Then slow words, almost reluctant, came. “The dead do not return to the outer world.”

  “But my daughter is not dead!” Demeter exclaimed, drawing herself up, and went on, her voice ringing in challenge. “I am Demeter, high priestess of the Corn Goddess. Tell your master Hades that he had no right to steal Kore. I demand that he return my daughter to me. King of the Dead he may be and master of the riches of the earth, but the Mother reaches even into his realm and She will not endure this abomination. By the law of the Mother, he must deliver Kore up to me, her mother.”

  Chapter 12

  Spring was turning into summer. Returning from a day at the temple, Persephone gave a last look over her shoulder at the valley below the cave entrance. The bottom of the valley was almost dark in the shadow of the mountain, which blocked the last rays of the evening sun, but she knew the grain grew so thick that it was like a solid mass of green. This second spring she had ruled as Hades’s queen, there were two smaller temples in two other valleys presided over by fully trained priestesses, and in those valleys the crop was as rich.

  Persephone did not resent that. She was high priestess, but unlike her mother she did not want to keep the blessings of the Goddess in her own hands and herself quicken the grain for each small valley. The Goddess had given her two surer ways to hold her place. At each solstice all the priestesses gathered at the great temple, and Persephone fed their Gifts so they could perform their duties in full. Fortunately, it was not her strength she gave; she was only a conduit from the Goddess, who filled and refilled her with a shimmering power that lifted her spirit and garbed it in a golden joy. And the Goddess had given her Hades’s heart.

  She stopped and turned, looking gratefully toward the gleaming temple. There would be more bread in larger loaves this autumn. Perhaps next spring it might be possible to take some cows in calf as sacrifices or capture some of the very young calves of wild cattle and tame them. She looked up to the flanks of the hills which were too steep for planting, but no wild cattle would browse there. Instead, squat dappled bodies moved under the gnarled mountain oaks.

  Chuckling aloud, Persephone turned back and walked on toward the cave. Nothing could better define Hades’s wish to please her—and his good sense—than his reaction when she first urged him the past autumn to demand sows in farrow as a sacrifice.

  “Sows?” he had said, black brows climbing almost into the black curls on his brow. “Sows are not dignified. To demand that an ox’s blood be spilled into the trough to summon the dead…that is right, an action full of mystery and magic. The dead come, they listen to the suppliant and send him away. Then when the natives cannot see them, th
ey dismiss mystery and magic, drag the ox back into the cave and butcher it, set the spells of keeping, and send the meat back to Plutos. But a sow? If you must have pork, there is more meat on a boar—but that is still less meat than on an ox.”

  “Do not be so silly. I do not want the sow slaughtered. There are ten to twenty piglets inside a farrowing sow. And there are lots of acorns on the mountain oak trees, even if they are dwarfed, and other nuts and berries and roots that we do not favor but pigs will eat gladly as they will eat the mushrooms in the blue-light caves. Soon there will be many full grown pigs to slaughter, whereas it will be years before we have grain enough for cattle fodder and years more before there are cattle enough to use for meat, because they breed so slowly.”

  Hades had frowned. “How can my folk maintain a sense of terror if they are seen chasing a squealing sow?”

  “You will need to open a chamber behind the lighted place in the passage and put in it huthnon. The suppliants will not smell it, but the pigs will. They will run past the light and seem to disappear. That will have to be mystery and magic enough. If you are so worried about your dignity, say that the pig is sacred to the queen of Plutos.” She remembered licking her lips as she said, “Roast crackling is worth more than dignity.”

  Persephone’s smile broadened again as she remembered Hades’s sigh and the shake of his head and twinkle in his eyes when he said, “I do not understand why you are not too fat to waddle. All you think about is food.”

  “Is that not why you brought me here?” Persephone had asked with a giggle.

  Hades had seized her in his arms and kissed her. “It is not why I keep you here,” he had murmured, pushing her back toward the big bed.

  Remembering that kiss and what followed, Persephone quickened her stride toward the cave. She stepped into the dark eagerly. A strong arm reached out and steadied her against the gale that always blew. She smiled at the man as he helped her to the stair down the sinkhole. So many now passed through the entrance because of the need to care for the growing crops and the herd of pigs that Hades had ordered guards to be on duty, some to be sure the wind and steep stair caused no accidents, but others to watch across the valley for any stranger who, hunting or traveling, might stray into the valley. Those folk must “die” so that Plutos would remain inviolate.