In time she rose and made her way out onto the deck of Lady Grey who turned in languid circles around her anchor point. The rising sun had taken the chill away with it, but Persephone knew her mother’s melancholy would linger a little longer each day until she had gone and come back again. She turned her gaze in the direction of Mount Olympus and wondered; Can you see all the way across the seas? Are you watching me now? There are weeks yet left for me on this Earth, Mother. You are mourning for a daughter who hasn’t yet gone.
She sighed. Demeter had never been one to bend. Or to forgive easily. How many centuries had they played this game? When she was gone, Demeter’s wailing would turn to storms and she would languish in her rooms not to be roused for any reason and the earth would die. When she returned, Demeter would sow the world with flowers, and rage that Persephone would not see her, and send summer storms to rock her Lady Grey, but mostly she would be content. And the seasons would turn over and over in a giant circle that never wavered. And never broke.
Still she was much freer now than she was as the girl in the field. Then she was hardly able to stray from the shadows of Mount Olympus, watched over by a dozen woodland spirits when the earth suddenly split open before her astonished eyes and six ebony horses rose from the chasm, pulling him on his chariot behind them. He had stood before her silently and she had taken in all of him; his long dark hair, and his flowing black robes embroidered with a thousand silver faces, and especially his eyes – deep wells taking her in anxiously, hardly knowing what to say to her until she smiled. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she told him, this tall handsome stranger.
He smiled too and it became him. “I’m sorry I made you wait,” he said.
He stayed with her all that summer and it was the happiest summer of her life. They played in the forest and swam in the rivers. She wrote him love poems and wove him flowers crowns out of the bluebells and daisies and tiger lilies that grew in the meadows. She told him of all her deepest secrets and how she wished to see the world in a little sailboat.
“What stops you?” he asked her.
“My mother prefers to keep me close to her,” Persephone sighed wistfully.
Hades chuckled. “Demeter is a force of nature,” he agreed. “But she is not your keeper. You are the daughter of Zeus and niece of Poseidon – the skies and sea are limitless. Trust me, you weren’t meant to be kept in one place.”
She smiled. He made her sound so strong. “Would you go with me?” she asked.
“If only it were possible.” He sighed. “Sadly, I have … responsibilities at home.”
“Yet here you are,” she teased.
“Yes, but the summer can’t last forever,” he responded.
“Then we must enjoy every moment of it while it’s here.”
She watched his worries fade away with each passing day and his stern, solemn looks give way to laughter. He made love to her under the stars and whispered love stories in her ear while she fell asleep. “Aphrodite herself has not been loved as much as I love you,” he promised her. When November came and the earth opened back up to take him away, she went with him.
The underworld wasn’t nearly as gloomy as she had been told. Hades’s palace overlooked the island of Elysium in the west and the River Styx encircling them in its seven rings. The shadowy parts of the underworld lay to the south across Stygian marshes. From the gardens she could see the Asphodel Meadows and its wandering souls and if she looked especially hard she could almost make out the beginnings of the road to Tartarus. Some of the gods and goddesses that also resided in the underworld were unpleasant, but mostly they just seemed strange and indifferent. Cerberus was certainly a fearsome beast to behold but he tamed easily to her affections and often lay contentedly at her feet.
The first night, unable to sleep, she made her way into the court yards, the only part of his palace that had any life in it at all. The lush green field was dotted with foot paths, and babbling streams, and fruit trees with benches to sit on underneath. They reminded her of her mother’s gardens as she walked among them, finally coming to rest under a leafy pomegranate tree.
That was where Hades found her some time later. He looked regal with his pale skin and his robe billowing behind him. For the first time, she thought he looked like a King.
“Trouble sleeping?” he asked as he took his seat next to her.
She could not hide from him. “Everything has changed,” she told him. “I have left everything behind. I have left my mother alone. And it was easy to do. I can’t help but feel it should have been harder to abandon her.”
He brushed her cheek with his knuckle. “If I’d been selfless I would have left you alone in that field,” he admitted.
“I am glad you didn’t.” And it was true. “But Demeter will not let me go so easily.”
“I have thought of that, and I have something for you.” He held his opens hands out to her. In each palm were twelve pomegranate seeds. One for each month of the year. She looked at him questioningly. “Those who eat the food of the underworld must always return to it,” he explained. “No matter what forces pull them away, they will be bound to this place … and to me.”
He fed them to her one at a time. She ate them off his fingertips and felt them burst juicy sweet on the back of her tongue. But when she had finished the sixth, he closed his hand over the rest. “In case you ever decide to sail the world,” he told her.
They were married on the golden shores of Elysium. They wrote their own vows and read them at sunset with Thanatos and Hecate as their witnesses. Persephone fixed a silver ribbon around each of Cerberus’s three necks and he carried their rings to them on a pillow. When it was over she found Hecate standing knee deep in the waters of memory.
“You make a beautiful bride,” Hecate called to her. “And he happier than I have ever known. It’s a pity you will leave him one day.”
Anger flashed through Persephone. “I will not. I love him,” she said defensively.
Hecate laughed. “I don’t doubt it. But you love to be free also. You’ve chosen a hard life, Persephone, always at crossroads. Caught between being the Queen of the Underworld and the daughter of every living thing.”
Persephone looked to her husband and wondered if it might be true. “Can’t I have them both?” she wondered, but when she looked back Hecate was gone.
Her prophesy was quickly forgotten in the tides of marital bliss. Their honeymoon lasted six perfect months and in truth might have gone on a hundred years had it not been cut short when Hermes arrived with news from the world above.
“Your mother Demeter has fallen into a terrible depression,” he told her. “She swears you have been taken against your will and spends every day and night searching the earth for you. She has neglected her duties and the lands have become cold and infertile. Thousands of mortals have died because nothing will grow. Your father Zeus commands you return to her or many more will perish.”
“He’s not shown so much as a hint of fatherly concern before now,” she said bitterly. She fled from them to the courtyard. She sheltered under their pomegranate tree where Hades found her still sitting hours later. “He won’t leave until he has your response to take back to Olympus,” he told her.
She laughed bitterly, wiping tears from her eyes. “My response? They’ve never cared much about what I want.”
He took her into his arms. “What will you do?”
“People are suffering because of us,” Persephone told the faces on his robes. She was afraid to look at him and see the sadness she felt settling into his beautiful eyes. “So I will go back. I’ll live on the surface. She will see that I am alive and content.” She finally met his gaze. “But I will not go to her. I will live among the mortals, but I will never see Mount Olympus again. And I will return here.” She said it so fiercely she could hardly believe it was her voice. “I am bound to you, my husband. She will have to content herself with that.”
He smiled sadly. “I will build you a beautiful garden then,” he told her. “So that I can walk in it and think of you while you are gone. But tell me, what will do with your time among the mortals?”
She held his hands in hers and thought about what it would be like to wake up without them every morning. He had been little more than a stranger a year ago, now she couldn’t imagine one moment without him. “Perhaps I will sail the world.”
“A fine plan. I knew when I married you, you could not be kept in one place.” They laughed quietly to themselves.
Preparations were made and by the end of April she was ready for her return to the living. Hades called his chariot with his six ebony horses to carry her back to the surface.
“Where will they take me?” she asked him.
“Somewhere you can be free.” Right before she left, he kissed her so hard she could still taste him when she found herself washed up on the shores of a sandy cove and nothing but a fast closing crack in the ground to indicate where she had come from. For the first time in months, the sky above her was blue and the sun touched her with its warmth. She had forgotten she had missed these things. Lady Grey was waiting for her there, moored just off the beaches, her husband’s final gift to her.
For the first time she felt true excitement. She threw herself to the oceans. In May and April she sailed the coast of Greece and in June she turned her sails towards Africa. She drank honey wine and danced with the locals. She wrote poems of everything she saw to take back to Hades. Her mother followed her in many forms; in the joyful blooming of spring flowers and thriving crops, and in the rage of storms that threatened to capsize her. But they never saw each other. At night she sat on the deck of her little vessel and let her feet hang in the water, imagining there was a string tied to each ankle that sank deep into the ocean, right through the earth straight back to Hades. By October she could taste pomegranate on the back of her tongue. She could smell it on the wind. It invaded her dreams. She thought of nothing but the underworld and grew melancholy for it night after night.
In November she returned to find her husband was not as carefree as she had left him. The old worries had crept back into his face, and the solemnity too. But she slid back into his arms as if she had never left and he breathed in the salty ocean scent of her hair. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he sighed.
She smiled, feeling her melancholy fade away. “I’m sorry I made you wait.”
And so it continued, year after year. For six months the mortals of the earth suffered and she slept contentedly in her husband’s arms. For the next six she roamed utterly free, not as Demeter’s daughter or as the Queen of the Underworld. She was free to be whatever and whoever she wanted to be. And she was happy, though her husband was not. She knew he was lonely without her and felt guilty that she loved the solitude of her boat. She spent golden summers free at sea but was happy when the winter came and she returned home to her duties as his Queen.
All the cycles of heaven and earth turning to bring her back to this point, standing on the deck of Lady Grey, waiting for summer to end so the earth would open its jaws and swallow her back down into it. As if in her response to her yearnings, the water lapped at the side of her boat as if to pull her back down beneath the water.
“Not yet, my Love,” she whispered.
But soon.
***
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xxKathleen
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