Chapter 6 Gates of Bronze
It was difficult to gauge their progress with no light to guide them.
Danae had given up counting the twists and turns in the passage, struggling to adjust to the sightless world of touch.
Every sound was amplified, Orpheus’ ragged breath grating on her ears.
She could no longer visualize the rocky tunnel around her, could not tell if the walls were narrowing or widening.
The darkness itself seemed to take on a viscous quality, its heaviness weighing on her chest, squeezing her breath.
If she had not been so aware of her body, it would have felt like being drawn into the omphalos shard’s vision realm, her consciousness suspended in the void of nothingness.
Suddenly, she stopped moving.
‘What is it?’ Orpheus’ grip tightened on her hand.
She groaned. In the aftermath of the shade attack she had been so distraught by Hylas’ capture, she’d not given thought to the horse’s saddle bag being taken with him. She’d lost the omphalos shard.
‘All my belongings were with Hylas.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Orpheus squeezed her fingers, ‘I have enough coins for the ferryman to take us both across the River Styx to the Asphodel Meadows.’ This was the realm of the Underworld supposedly populated by the virtuous dead, where Alea and Eurydice should be.
You should never have come here, said the voice. You should have turned back, while you still could.
‘Shut up,’ she spat.
Orpheus flinched.
‘Not you, I meant … it doesn’t matter.’
Strangely, now she couldn’t see Orpheus, her suspicion of him waned.
She could feel the truth of his terror through his grip, the way he clung to her as though she were saving him from drowning.
He was a man willing to walk into the jaws of death because he couldn’t live without his wife. Surely he was no agent of the Twelve.
‘We’ll find them, Orpheus. Eurydice and my sister.’
His grip softened a little as they continued to feel their way along the passage.
After several paces he asked, ‘What’s her name?’
Danae hesitated before answering. ‘Alea.’
Her heart ached. She had not spoken her sister’s name aloud for a very long time. She hoped her family still talked of Alea; she could not bear the thought that her sister might be forgotten. Or remembered only as a whore who danced with the Maenads.
‘That’s a lovely name. It means “she of the sweet voice”, does it not?’
‘Yes,’ Danae whispered.
‘She’s lucky to have a sister like you.’
Danae could not bring herself to reply.
They trudged on, a pair of pounding hearts and echoing footsteps in the darkness.
After a while Orpheus squeezed her hand. ‘Can you hear that?’
They both grew still and Danae strained to listen. There were vibrations rumbling from somewhere far away: a low rhythmic humming.
‘Daeira, I think … it’s a song.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘It sounds just like an old Thracian tune my grandfather used to whistle.’
Danae’s pulse quickened. ‘Let’s follow it.’
As they felt their way towards the vibrations, the darkness seemed to fade from an inky black to a grey gloom. Then something shifted across her vision. She froze, imagining it was a shade, but then the movement came again. A pulse of white light up ahead.
‘Orpheus –’
‘I can see it.’
The quality of the air had changed too. It was ripe with a mildewy musk.
They stumbled towards the faint light like moths to a flame. After being in the dark for so long, when the bursts came Danae was forced to squint against the sudden brightness.
When they grew close enough to make out the source, it was revealed to be tiny pulses of light travelling along strands of hair-thin roots laced over the tunnel wall.
‘The music’s stopped,’ said Orpheus.
Danae did not care. They had found light. She reached out with her free hand and touched the rock between the strands. It was damp. Tentatively she prodded one of the strings. The light changed direction, darting from her touch back along the network of roots, like a ripple across a pool.
‘They’re beautiful,’ breathed Orpheus.
‘The wall’s moist. There must be water coming from somewhere. Perhaps we’re near the Styx.’
As they walked on, the roots thickened, and the beats of light became bright enough to make out the shape of the widening passage.
Even so, she and Orpheus kept hold of each other’s hand.
Soon, they found themselves clambering over twisting roots as thick as human limbs.
Then, all of a sudden, the tunnel came to an abrupt end.
Ahead of them was a space so vast, it felt as though they had travelled to another world.
For a moment Danae thought they had somehow reached the surface, for far above their heads were lights that shone in the blackness like stars.
But these heavens were not the ones she knew, their constellations as alien to her as the strange glowing roots.
Below this unfamiliar sky, the pulsing tendrils peeled away from the mouth of the passage, entwining over the rocky ground, leaving a clear pathway towards a pair of gigantic bronze doors at least forty feet high.
On either side of these metallic gates, the roots knotted together, mounting into a tangled wall, so tall it was impossible to see what lay beyond.
‘This must be it.’ Orpheus let go of Danae’s hand and took a step towards the doors.
She grabbed his tunic and drew him back into the relative gloom of the passage. Then she crouched down, searching the ground. When her fingers found a loose stone, she hurled it into the middle of the pathway and waited.
Save the gentle throbbing of the roots, there was no movement. No shimmering distortions in the air.
After lingering for what felt like an age, Danae nodded to Orpheus, and they both re-emerged from the tunnel. With each step along the tendril-lined path, her heart fought harder to escape the confines of her chest. If this was the entrance to the Underworld, why was it apparently left unguarded?
As they drew nearer the bronze door, she could see it too was webbed with finger-thin roots. There were no markings or any sign of a knocker or handle. Below the glowing strands, the great doors seemed to be just slabs of plain metal.
The surface world was littered with statues, murals and effigies of the Olympians. She had expected a vast likeness of Hades to preside over the entrance to his kingdom, something to state his ownership. But the Lord of the Underworld seemed surprisingly unostentatious.
‘How do we get in?’ whispered Orpheus.
Danae ran her hands over the crease in the doors, then pushed. Unsurprisingly the bronze did not move.
‘Get back.’
Orpheus did as she bid him. She summoned a swell of life-threads into her hands and hurled a blast of wind at the doors. The bronze shuddered, ringing like a great bell, but remained in place. The roots recoiled where the concentrated air had struck them, then slowly snaked back into place.
‘Gods, it’s like they’re some sort of creature,’ breathed Orpheus.
Danae glanced behind her, searching for any crimson eyes looming from the passage. None came.
‘Keep a look out for shades, I’m going to try and climb over.’
She waded through the roots to the right of the door, then began ascending the twisted wall, all the while trying not to think about the surprisingly warm, flesh-like quality of the coils.
‘They’re holding my weight. Come on,’ she called to Orpheus when she had almost reached the top. ‘I’m coming, Hylas,’ she murmured under her breath.
Then the tendril beneath her moved. Quick as a heron darting for its prey, the root whipped from under her feet and, before she hit the ground, caught her around her waist. She barely had time to cry out before it had tossed her into the air to land in a heap back on the path.
‘Are you all right?’ Orpheus ran over to her.
Danae sat up, bruised but otherwise unharmed. She took the musician’s outstretched hand, and he heaved her to her feet.
‘I’m really starting to hate those roots.’
Danae sat on the path, sweat prickling her brow as she glared at the bronze doors.
She and Orpheus had made several more attempts to climb the root walls and each time were unceremoniously tossed back to the ground.
She had returned to trying force, rumbling the earth and whipping torrent after torrent of air into the glowing tendrils, but each time she cleared a hole, they immediately wove back into their original pattern.
And no matter how many life-threads she flung at the doors, the bronze gates remained steadfast.
Weariness began to weigh heavy in her limbs.
She couldn’t keep using her finite supply of life-threads, not with the risk of more shades appearing at any moment.
She had given thought to draining threads from the network of roots, but they were so strange and otherworldly, she was afraid of what they might do to her if she consumed them.
Orpheus crouched beside the tangled tendrils, gazing at their undulating lights and giving them the occasional prod.
‘We could wait for someone else to open the door?’ he offered. ‘There must be someone behind there who needs to come out at some point.’
‘Gods know how long that will be.’ Danae pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. This was almost worse than being lost in the dark.
‘Daeira!’
She jerked her hands away from her face.
Orpheus was on his feet, his face shining with excitement. ‘It’s the roots!’
She opened her mouth to question his meaning, then realized she could hear the vibrations again.
‘They’re making the music.’ Orpheus grinned, staring at the tendrils like they were the chorus of a play.
As she watched him, her eyes widened. Force evidently wasn’t going to work, but charm might.
‘Orpheus, sing!’
‘What?’
She pushed herself to her feet. ‘My powers evidently aren’t much help here. If the roots can make music, they may respond to it. We’ve got to try. Or we can sit here and wait for more shades to come through those doors and kill us.’