Nightsong Read online

  Orpheus put a gentle finger to his servant’s lips.

  The poet paid the ferryman in gold, far more than the toll of two simple coins a shade would require. Charon looked away, as though loathing the touch of a living mortal, and kept his knobby hand extended until it was full of treasure.

  The fine gold reflected no luster in the poor light. The ferryman gave a grunt of assent, at length, and emptied the fistful into a long, weighty purse at his belt.

  The poet lifted a hand in farewell, Biton lingering to watch the ferry depart for the opposite bank.

  The servant scampered off, on his way back to daylight, and Orpheus felt the damp rise up around him.

  Orpheus already missed young Biton badly.

  The poet felt all the more alone when the ferryman let his glance flicker over him, his fire-rimmed eyes dismissing the poet, but finding him again with an air of baleful curiosity.

  “She’s a plucky vessel, is she not?” Orpheus forced himself to say, believing that bright manners were likely to succeed anywhere. The ferry was malformed from an age of working the hard current, so badly warped its deck was uneven, although, Orpheus judged, the craft was surely sturdy enough for another eon of service.

  Charon made no response.

  Orpheus backed away, toward the center of the broad, ungainly craft as the current lapped up over the ferry’s sides, cold and smelling of carrion.

  All of this made Orpheus look forward to seeing Eurydice all the more fervently – whatever effort it required. He was certain that soon he must surely free her from this domain.

  His determined reverie was shaken by the sound of baying on the far side of the river. Barking and growling echoed fiercely across the sullen current, and it sounded as though three ravening mastiffs were hard on the heels of some quarry.

  Surely not, Prince Orpheus tried to console himself. Surely such legendary monsters cannot await me.

  The three-headed dog Cerberus snapped and lunged at the approach of the ferry.

  The threefold beast grew all the more frenzied as Charon’s pole touched the quay, and the ferryman gave a bow and a sweep of his arm, indicating that his passenger was free to make his way.

  The monster was restrained by the iron loops of a chain, but the chain was long and did not look strong enough. The three heads erupted from a single, muscular body, and the heads were so ill-tempered that they bit at one another, slavering and disagreeing over which head was the master.

  At last the head in the center vanquished its fellows with growls, and turned its fangs in the direction of the poet. Cerberus dragged the iron links with little effort, all the way to their limit, the slavering beast rising up on its hind legs.

  However, Charon had allowed Orpheus to disembark farther up the quay than the use-worn stones, shiny with centuries of wear, indicated was customary. The poet was safely ashore.

  So perhaps, thought Orpheus, a cheerful tone was not entirely wasted, even along this murky and disagreeable river.

  “Thank you, good ferryman,” called Orpheus.

  Charon offered no courtesy in return, but simply shoved hard against the quay, turning the vessel back into the current.

  The pathway rose upward from the river, puddles glistening in the glow permeating the darkness.

  The source of this illumination was the palace in the distance, its lamps and fires offering dim promise. Shapes flitted through the dark near the towering walls, wings arcing and dodging, and Orpheus could only guess what these flying creatures might be.

  Within a few paces, and before Orpheus could allow some tentative hope to kindle in his breast, a fearsome rumble stopped him in his tracks.

  It was the grumble of a stone, grinding and bounding down an unseen slope, smashing to a standstill.

  Orpheus proceeded along a curve in the path and stopped, unwilling to go farther, taking refuge behind a rocky outcropping.

  The sound echoed in the half-dark, the sound of a massive stone being rolled, forced along bedrock, scraping and gritting over an unyielding surface.

  Orpheus steeled his nerve, and stepped forward.

  TWENTY

  A bearded figure in a ragged mantle shoved and heaved a massive, irregular boulder up a hill.

  The slope was rutted with the passage of this same stone, and the man laboring to work the boulder to the summit of the hill was powerfully built. Even so, he was just able to inch the boulder halfway up the incline when he was forced to fall to one knee, gasping for breath.

  Orpheus recognized Sisyphus, damned to this toil by great Jupiter.

  As the poet watched, the condemned mortal renewed his effort, powering the boulder upward with sweaty zeal, and with a degree of desperate speed. The boulder was manhandled all the way to the peak of the hill, only to sway unsteadily, and then slowly bound all the way to the base of the incline, back where it had begun.

  The figure returned, too, all the way down the slope, trudging heavily but with an air of resignation. The stories Orpheus had heard explained the supposed crime this human being had committed, but the tales did little to make the punishment seem fair. Jupiter had run off with Aegina, daughter of a river god, only to have Sisyphus, a wise and well-liked mortal, disclose to the water deity the place where his daughter had been secreted. For this, Jupiter had decreed an eternal penance: pushing a boulder up a slope that would forever return the stone back to its starting place.

  “Sisyphus, may I help you for a while?” asked Orpheus.

  The bearded figure gave no sign of having heard, and so the poet asked again.

  Sisyphus glanced up from the boulder. “Help me – in what way, traveler?”

  “Two of us might make the boulder seem a little lighter.”

  To the poet’s surprise, Sisyphus gave a weary laugh.

  “Surely someday,” offered Orpheus, “the gods will decide against your punishment, good Sisyphus.”

  “Do you call this punishment?” asked Sisyphus, putting his shoulder to the massive stone.

  “The songs describe you as kind and fair-minded,” Orpheus said. “No mortal feels you should suffer in this way.”

  “What is that frame of silver you carry on your shoulder?” asked Sisyphus, heaving the boulder upward an inch, and then another.

  “My lyre – a gift from Apollo,” Orpheus answered, feeling how out of place the name of the sunny divinity sounded.

  “And you carry it everywhere, do you?”

  “Of course – I am happy to,” the poet answered in some puzzlement. He introduced himself, and told quickly of his love for Eurydice.

  As he spoke, he was startled by a pair of wings that darted through the darkness, followed by another.

  The poet ducked his head, and stepped closer to Sisyphus’s boulder for brief shelter.

  “Those are the Erinyes,” said Sisyphus with an air of unconcern. “The Furies – relentless spirits of revenge.”

  “What do they want of me?” asked Orpheus shakily.

  “If you have killed a member of your family,” replied Sisyphus, laying both hands on his boulder with something close to affection, “they will see to it that you pay for your crime.” Sisyphus leaned forward, heaved, and the boulder rolled slowly upward.

  “Dear Sisyphus, do they add to your torment?” asked Orpheus, putting one shoulder into the boulder and helping to shove it higher up the slope.

  “Torment!” echoed Sisyphus with a laugh. “Do I seem to be in misery, traveler?”

  “Not misery, perhaps, dear Sisyphus,” Orpheus was forced to respond after a moment of thought. “But I myself would hate your pointless task.”

  “The day may come, poet,” said Sisyphus with a chuckle, “when you remember me as much like you.”

  “How am I like you, friend Sisyphus?”

  The condemned mortal strained against the great, uneven stone, compelling it upward. “Prince Orpheus,” added Sisyphus, through gritted teeth, “someday you may find Apollo’s lyre to be heavier than any boulder.”
r />   The poet brooded over Sisyphus’s remark as he hurried toward his destination.

  Another winged shape sliced the air, fluttering phantoms, Furies gathering at the unaccustomed scent of living flesh.

  “What breathing wayfarer is that?” came the echoing question from above in a primordial tongue, the Furies questioning and commenting with each other.

  “Oh, let him be a wight who murdered his mother,” said one, “or did sunder his father’s throat.”

  Added another, in a tone like rapt anticipation, “So we can tear out his belly and make him writhe.”

  But another Fury broke off from the rest, and winged her way hard toward the palace.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Orpheus traveled on, toward the still-distant walls.

  Feeling hope ebb within his heart, he passed the dimly illuminated shapes of beings in torment.

  Tityus, a hoary giant, who long ago tried to violate one of Jupiter’s lovers, stretched over several acres of dark ground while vultures plucked at his liver. Tantalus, who once in ages past stole food from Olympus and offered it to mortal men, stood bound forever starving and parched, in a bubbling pool of water.

  Orpheus stopped and nearly called out in anguish at the sight of this creature’s torture. When the prisoner struggled to take a sip of the water all around, the spring receded, and when he craned his neck to take a bite of the ripe fruit suspended over his head, the nourishment shrank back, just out of reach.

  Orpheus hurried on, tears of compassion in his eyes.

  Ixion, the first human being to murder another, Orpheus recognized by his particularly agonizing punishment – bound to a wheel that rolled around and around, crushing him but never extinguishing his life.

  The poet closed his eyes against the sight, stirred to helpless anger that the powers of this place could be so cruel.

  Orpheus’s optimism had become increasingly thin, and now as he approached the looming walls of Pluto’s palace, he wondered if his quest would, indeed, prove entirely futile. He was unable to keep from hunching his shoulders as yet more Furies swooped down.

  The air was even colder now, and its smell was like the wet earth after a heavy paving stone has been lifted – all around, the permeating moisture of minerals and decay.

  Beyond the walls and towers lay the plain where the once living slept. A few shades lifted from the expanse and lofted, fragile as breath, above the mute resting place. Never had Orpheus felt so in need of warm-blooded companionship.

  As the gates before him opened silently, Orpheus wondered once more if he had been wise in coming here.

  He entered the palace, a quaking trespasser in a huge, echoing fortress.

  TWENTY-TWO

  One of the Furies trailed behind him, joined by one or two others, not attending him so much as spying over him, a slim, winged form, drifting near and circling the poet wonderingly.

  “Don’t stay out there in the entryway, Orpheus, son of the immortal muse,” intoned a woman’s voice from an unseen interior. “Come in here – and quickly.”

  Nonetheless Orpheus hesitated, tiptoeing forward, across the chilly, polished slabs of the stone floor.

  “In here, dear poet,” insisted the pleasing voice, which seemed to come from all directions at once.

  An inner door fell open with a sound like a sigh, and two figures on thrones sat half shrouded in the lamplight.

  Orpheus recognized Persephone from the many poems celebrating her.

  She was robed in a green fabric so dark it was nearly black, and her head was encircled with a leafless wreath of ebony stems. She was pale, her lips without color, but her smile and her warm and curious eyes were very much those of a tenderhearted woman as she said, “We welcome you, Prince Orpheus.”

  A presence sat beside her on a separate throne, a broad-shouldered figure, taller than any human the poet had ever encountered. Only his hands were exposed, large and colorless, adorned with rings of gleaming jet and transparent diamond. This being could only be the lord of the underworld. He was mantled and hooded, his features hidden, and he looked away, pointedly refusing to offer his youthful, mortal visitor so much as a glance.

  Orpheus fell to his knees. Even in this citadel, the faraway rumble of Sisyphus’s stone could be heard, and the bickering of the distant, hungry vultures.

  Being so close to the most profound god touched Orpheus deeply. While uneasy to the point of breathlessness, the poet was filled with reverence. Often known by the more ancient name Hades, Pluto was brother to Neptune and Jupiter, and like them he had lived since the beginning of mortal time.

  The uselessness of the poet’s pilgrimage here began to dawn all the more deeply upon the bereft traveler.

  “How is it, Queen Persephone,” he asked in quaking tones, “that you know who I am?”

  “My lord and I both extend our greetings to you, Orpheus,” replied the queen, with every show of kindness – even as the divinity beside her made neither sound nor gesture. “And we can easily guess the reason you have paid a visit to our realm.” She answered his query only then by adding, “Do you think that at least one of the timeless Furies could not recognize the grandson of Jupiter?”

  Orpheus had all but lost the gift of speech, his last hope vanishing. It was with effort that he recalled his habitual good manners. He climbed to his feet as he found the power to say, “All the creatures of daylight, Queen Persephone, honor you.” He hastened to add, “And we honor your lord, too.”

  This last remark was little more than a weak courtesy – and a vain attempt to flatter. In truth, men and women never did raise a temple to Hades, or hold even the briefest festival in his name. Of all the gods he was the one thought to be the least concerned with human beings and their pleasures, not evil in character so much as abysmally indifferent. Within his peaked hood his features were veiled, and this figure turned resolutely away from his visitor.

  “I don’t forget what it was like to be a mortal woman,” Persephone was saying, her voice gentle and low, but carrying into the recesses of this palace, and softly echoing. “I remember the sun on my shoulders, and how it warmed my hair.” She laughed at this memory, as though surprised at it, and touched the naked wreath around her head.

  The queen straightened on her throne, like a woman stirring herself to more serious and present matters. She leveled her gaze at the young poet. “But we anticipate your reason for journeying so far into our world, and we must warn you, good Orpheus – what you want is impossible.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  “How can you steal the request from my lips?” Orpheus found the power to protest.

  “We respect your steadfast love, Prince Orpheus,” she responded, “but no human soul can be returned to life once it sleeps in our kingdom. Not even someone as noble-natured and beloved as your Eurydice.”

  Hearing the name of his bride spoken in this cold palace gave Orpheus such pain, and filled him with such longing, that he struggled to keep from groaning aloud.

  “Queen Persephone,” said the poet, his voice hoarse with feeling, “I have come to sing for you.” Orpheus despaired now that any poetry could stir compassion from such a place, but he would not depart without lifting his voice.

  “Will you play us a tune,” asked Persephone, with something very much like hope, “on that gift from Apollo?”

  Orpheus cradled the lyre. Even here in this chill, the silver frame was warm beneath his touch.

  “I pray that I may,” Orpheus managed to respond.

  Persephone clasped her hands thoughtfully, as though weighing the consequences of music in such a place. She turned to look at her husband, but Lord Hades continued to give no sign that he was aware of their guest.

  “You may sing for us, Orpheus,” said Queen Persephone at last, “and play Apollo’s lyre – but only with my lord’s permission.”

  She turned her head and waited for the grand, hooded figure beside her to make a sound. The god showed no sign of having heard – except to turn, al
most imperceptibly, even farther away.

  Persephone waited for the immortal husband to show some sign of permission, but at last she turned to Orpheus and parted her hands.

  There is nothing I can do.

  Orpheus touched the strings, accidentally, as he turned away from the king and queen, ready to set down the silver instrument. This grazing touch, a chance chord, made such a sweet stir in this shadowy chamber that he could not keep his hand from plucking the chord again – a beautiful sound.

  The shadow of your hand,

  Eurydice,

  among the shadows of the birds

  on a summer morning.

  Orpheus lifted this quiet verse to the murmur of the lyre.

  He had not intended to sing at all, and indeed his voice was barely above a whisper. But this soft fragment of song, created in the moment, was enough to cause a drifting shape to scurry toward him, eyes sharp, joined at once by another, the Furies gathering, so fierce with curiosity that Orpheus nearly dropped his lyre.

  He touched the strings again.

  I stir,

  Eurydice,

  thinking you have touched me –

  forgetting.

  The Furies hurried into a circle around him, winged apparitions like winged women, now that the poet beheld them clearly. In an uncanny way, they possessed a stark beauty. Their black eyes were hungry, silently insisting to Orpheus, Sing, sing.

  Their fierce attention prompted the poet to raise his voice, as his fingers remembered the chords he had learned from the lord of daylight.

  The poet sang of Eurydice, and of his love. He offered verses that he would later find lost to memory.

  When he was done, he stood with the lyre still vibrating from the last chord, and became aware again of the Furies around him, and the now-tearful eyes of Queen Persephone.

  I came to sing poetry, thought Orpheus, and so I have.

  He was resigned, in his sadness, to whatever requirements the powers of this kingdom might command. But Orpheus realized then what a deep silence now surrounded the palace.