CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
HERMES STANDS BEFORE ME, still in that tower in Argos but it’s empty now – no one else, not even the stone bodies of Perseus’s own men hit by Medusa’s gaze.
‘What happened?’ I demand. The pain has vanished, my tongue my own again.
But he winces – no, more than that. There are tears shining in his eyes that he’s not allowing to fully fall.
‘I don’t know, Ariadne,’ he says, scarcely above a whisper.
‘We need to help,’ I say, pushing past him, but he catches my wrist.
‘Ariadne,’ he says again. His gaze fixes on something behind me and his voice breaks.
I turn to find my own face looking back, arms outstretched. Only my despair tempering the obvious agony – all of me hardened to soft grey stone.
‘I ferry souls to the Underworld,’ Hermes says.
I look back at him. ‘Oh.’
I run. I don’t care – if Dionysus is out there, if the thiasus are fighting then I can help, somehow. Surely.
Hermes snaps his fingers and something in my core hurls me back into his vice-like grip. ‘I wouldn’t recommend that,’ he says. ‘Sisyphus is spending eternity rolling boulders for a similar attempt.’
‘Hermes –’
‘You can’t help them. This isn’t … it’s not quite the world. It’s more a space that runs through it, where the threads of fate are woven and time churns on and a version of me comes to collect souls. I can step between those worlds but you can’t. The thiasus aren’t out there.’
‘I’m really dead?’
I see the answer in his expression – an immortal sort of reluctance. Grief and nostalgia all at once, like the inevitable ending is something the immortals make peace with the moment they meet us.
‘I really don’t want to do this. Not for you. But there are laws … sacred rules even gods must abide by.’
‘I understand.’ But I don’t – my voice is small and I want to be held, want to be comforted, want Dionysus.
Dionysus, who I’ll never see again … Fates, so much time spent dreading his immortal future without me but don’t I have one without him too?
Trapped in the Underworld, knowing he will never join me there.
Hermes releases my arm and takes my hand instead.
‘Ready?’ he asks.
I nod – letting him lift us into the air, the space around us warping so there is no city to fly over, no land to traverse, just a short stretch of spinning earth until we plunge into a dark cave, the wings of his sandals whirring with each flap.
At once the world solidifies into a loud cacophony. People – no, not people. Souls. Thousands of them, milling and calling, bartering, and some just shouting, screaming for help. A river rushes alongside us, each churn an echoing wail.
I’d expected darkness but the sky above is the orange-touched wash of sunset, like someone has painted it into existence.
I can’t see the sun – perhaps if there is one it has already vanished – but that hurts me too.
The sun is gone and I am dead and I am in this alone – even Hermes releasing me, stepping back.
‘Wait,’ I say, realizing he’s about to say goodbye. ‘Have you … have you had to bring anyone else from the thiasus?’
I think of those screams … the calls for help.
Hermes lowers his gaze. ‘Not as many as I feared. But a few.’
‘Who?’
My heart is pounding – and what does it matter, really? If other people have died, do I mourn them, or do I mourn the living I am separated from?
‘Only one you’d know, I think,’ he says gently. ‘Opora.’
I’m not sure what my soul is made of – but it lurches. No body with which to cry, and so my grief is physical, and I stumble right into Hermes’s outstretched arms.
‘I don’t want to leave you like this,’ he says. ‘But this is as far as I can take you. You’ll need Charon to ferry you across the Acheron. Find him once your coin appears – and on the other side you’ll be whole and … assigned your realm. You’ll find paradise. Fates only know, you deserve it.’
Paradise? That is the lilting beat of the thiasus, the heat of the campfire flames, dancing until the sun rises.
And it is Dionysus – his arms, his lips, his laugh …
Hermes clutches me tight – and faces turn our way as people must wonder who this girl is, inspiring such a response from a god. But when he says his final farewell they turn their attention back to one another and the bartering picks up once more.
‘I have a spare. What will you offer me on the other side?’
‘Does anyone know the rate? Will copper do?’
‘I was buried with jewellery – is there a place I could exchange it?’
Oh. Of course.
They’re trying to get hold of coins to pay the ferryman.
‘Ariadne!’
When Opora collides with me, I’m taken aback by how solid she feels. How solid we both feel. Around us, the other spirits appear hazy and insubstantial. Pale imitations of how they were in life. But we still seem flesh and blood.
‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she says, drawing back but not letting go. She startles, eyes wide. ‘Oh gods, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant I’m glad I’m not here alone – although, not that I wanted anyone else to die either, I –’
I squeeze her hand. ‘I don’t think either of us is getting a coin any time soon. Let’s go find somewhere quiet.’
We trek away from the crowds to where the river branches into the Cocytus.
Out here, people have set up makeshift camps. They lie on the banks, chat in small huddles, and there’s even a woman leading a group in some sort of dance.
‘Come on!’ she laughs. ‘We can make our own paradise.’
But it all reminds me far too much of the thiasus and the world we left behind, and for perhaps the first time in my life, I do not feel like dancing.
Opora and I continue past them, to where the ground is solid and dry enough that we can lie down upon it and maybe, if we screw our eyes shut tightly enough, we could pretend we are back in one of those tents, the thin sheets of fabric separating us as we whisper through the night.
‘So what happened?’ I ask.
And she tells me that it was only the disorganization of Perseus’s own men that saved the thiasus.
That when the archers began stringing bows once more, they clearly hadn’t conferred with the soldiers on the ground.
That when they began shooting they hit more of their own army, charging into the fray, than people trying to flee.
She doesn’t remember being hit, only that she was shielding Apollonia, the young villager she had given her drum to.
She saw Silen take an arrow to the thigh right before Hermes appeared in front of her.
‘They’re a satyr,’ she says, choked. ‘They’ll probably heal but … but if they don’t … if they died too then they won’t go to an afterlife. Immortals have one life and if it ends, it’s just over. Calybe will join me one day. The others too. But I’ll never see Silen again.’
‘I know.’
Opora looks up at my answer, the mirrored despair, and realizes I am in a similar predicament.
She reaches her hand out and entwines her fingers with my own. ‘We really didn’t think this through, did we? Falling in love with immortals …’
‘I’m not …’
The silence swells in the Underworld – that expanse above us feels eternal, even though I know that beyond that sky and the layers of earth is the very world I left behind. A way out, just not always in the direction you’d expect …
Only this time it’s truly futile. There, but just out of reach.
The ground presses beneath me, solid and irrefutable. To the sky, I confess: ‘I think even if I’d thought it through, I still would have made the same choice. Dionysus, every time.’
Hours pass. And then days. We have nothing else to do but sit and talk and reminisce and try to comfort each other through our grief. I do understand what Opora meant – I’m glad she’s here too, even with all that it means.
But with each cresting sun, she fades more and more – and when I look at my hands I see they’re starting to pale too.
‘Do you think they’re coping?’ Opora asks.
Do you think they even made it? But I don’t ask – of course they did; if not, we’d have already been reunited with them all.
And if Dionysus fell, surely they all would have.
‘No,’ I admit. ‘But I think with time they might. I think we might too.’
I am not altogether convinced of that. Even if I weren’t a shade of the Underworld, I’d be doomed to walk the Fields of Asphodel lingering in my regret.
‘Oh … oh gods …’ She startles, holding her palm out. A gold coin materializes within it, shined and polished yet so scratched I cannot work out the city state or the – Oh. The scratches are letters – a word. Philia. Love.
A last letter to the Underworld.
More time passes – and I have no idea how to even track it. Days? Weeks? It hardly matters down here. But we dwindle further and my own coin doesn’t come.
Can they even perform burial rites for a statue? If they managed to grab my stone corpse before they fled at all. Perseus is probably using me as a cloak stand.
He’s not here, after all. So Dionysus didn’t manage to kill him. Did he only have time to run with the others, leaving my body behind?
But I don’t quite believe that.
Burial rites are how you make peace with loss. They are how you grieve. How you begin to move on.
Dionysus, I suspect, has no interest in doing any of that.
The coin lands in my palm long after I’ve ceased tracking the days. I turn it over, looking for a message, but it’s so aged and scuffed that I can’t even identify whether it’s bronze or gold.
Opora is so hazy at times I can scarcely see her. She’s staunchly refused to move on without me, even though I’ve begged her to. Whatever divinity laces my blood has slowed the process for me, so even though I’m still fading I’m nowhere near as hollowed.
‘Finally,’ she says, holding her hand out, and together we race towards the bank of the river.
‘Ariadne!’
I turn, searching for the caller – and a child bursts out of the crowd. He is so faded it takes me a moment to recognize him.
‘Icarus.’
My brother’s best friend. Daedalus’s son.
Dionysus said he escaped the labyrinth with Daedalus. That he flew – and fell.