The Dark Wife (2 page)

“We’ll leave,” I told her later, when we lay twined together like grapevine. She nuzzled my cheek with her nose and kissed me softly, and I felt like I knew everything, that I could run away from my vile destiny and be happy: truly, forever happy. “We’ll leave before my mother takes me to Olympus,” I whispered, and she agreed, and that was that. The plan was made, and my heart sang. We would, both of us, be free.

Each day, we came together, beat new paths through the forest together, and each night I left my mother’s bower to be with
Charis
beneath the stars. The days passed as we formed our plans. One month before Olympus, on the night of the full moon, we would leave in a little coracle of the nymphs’ making. We would slip down the river and out of my mother’s blessed garden, and we would find our way to the caverns in the northern mountains. Together, there, we would live and love.

In those lazy, golden afternoons, with
Charis’s
black mane pillowed in my lap, listening to her heartbeat, winding my fingers with her own, the arrangement seemed flawless—perfect, like her skin and her scent and her laugh. I did not worry over the small detail that every place on this earth belonged to my mother, that there was, in reality, no place we could hide where Demeter would not find us and steal me back. I did not think about food—gods do not need to eat, but nymphs must—or shelter.
Charis
and I believed that the world would provide for us, as it always had, here in the Immortals Forest—here, where I was a goddess, and all creatures and green life must curtsy to me. I did not believe I would ever know anything less than that sweet privilege I had been born into.

The last morning was like any other. I rose and greeted the sun, sat impatiently while my mother combed out my curls and made me recite her favorite words: “I will be the greatest of all the gods, greater than Hebe and
Harmonia
. I will be the queen of Olympus.” I muttered half-heartedly as she braided vines in my hair, spread my skin with nectar and flower oils. I sidestepped her embraces, pecked her cheek and walked out into the woods to find my beloved.

Everything was golden. It always was. The birds sang, and the animals lay, cooled by the springs and pools, as nymphs trilled songs of everlasting love and fed each other grapes from purpled fingers. “Have you seen
Charis
?” I asked them as I passed, and they said they had not, so I ran, deeper into the woods.

It was not like
Charis
to be absent from our favorite meeting place, the arms of that old oak where all of this, where we, had begun. But she was not there. She was not at the mirror pool. She was not further down the stream, and she was not in the
willow grove
, another of our favorite haunts. My heart thundered in my chest as I made ever-widening circles around the Immortals Forest, calling out her name. I stood in the center of a meadow, hands balled into fists, fear—for the first time—lodging itself deep in my belly, unfamiliar butterflies twisting and turning and beating against my bones.
Charis
was nowhere to be found.

I was trudging back to my mother’s bower, heart pained, when I heard it. If I had not been on edge, my every breath an ache, I never would have heard so small, so soft a sound. I stood very still and listened harder—there it was again.
A whimper.
It was close, and though my heart skipped, I stood and listened until I heard it, placed it. There, there… It was there.

I had not yet looked for
Charis
amongst the briars, and the sound was coming from beyond the hedge. I slipped closer and peered through thorns and red flowers, expecting to spy a nymph and a satyr, expecting anything else, anything but what was there.

Charis
lay on the ground, on our sacred ground, stomach pressed against the earth, mouth ensnared by vines that wrapped themselves about her body, twining and twisting, even as I watched. Behind her, over her, in her, was a man—a golden man who shimmered and flashed like lightning as he grunted and pushed. Over and over, he pushed. Tears fell and the vines tightened, cut into perfect ankles, wrists. My
Charis
was held captive as he did what he wanted with her.

Anger rose in me before I could think or make sense of what I was seeing, and I was shouting, shouting loud enough, I was sure, to be heard on Olympus, half a world away. I was moving through the hedge one moment, prepared to scratch and tear, when the man turned and looked at me, and I crumpled to my knees.

He was smiling, teeth dazzling white in a leering, dripping mouth, when he pulled out of her, stood, grew. He was taller than the tallest trees in my mother’s forest, and then, with a great laugh, he fragmented, splintered into a thousand rays of light too bright—a thousand times brighter than the sun itself. I screamed
,
covered my face with my hands, and when I could see again, he was gone.

Charis
, too.

I fell, dumbstruck. Where she had been, where that violent blasphemy had taken place, stood a small rosebush. The roses were white, dewy, and, as I watched, they moved in an unfelt wind.

I had heard tales of Zeus’ conquests. He would zap down to earth, lustful, in need of something his wife, Hera, could not provide—or, perhaps she could, and she simply found him despicable. He had his way with whatever creature struck his fancy, and if they were not obliging, he punished them. Hundreds of times he had done this, perhaps thousands. I knew of
  these
stories—the nymphs whispered them to one another—but, shamefully, they had never concerned me. They had never applied to me. But now, here—here was
a nightmare come
to life. The girl I loved had been raped before my eyes, and she was no more.

In that simple, ordinary space of time, I had lost everything.

I ran until the air burned in my lungs like fire, until I reached my mother’s bower. “Persephone, what’s happened?” she asked, holding out her arms to me so openly.
My mother, my mother who could grow a forest from a seed, who could breathe a world to life.
How I wished, hoped, that she could undo what had already been done. I wept and I told the story, and she listened, paling.

When I was done, she held me close, patted my shoulder stiffly. “Persephone…I’m so sorry.
So…sorry.
Zeus—he gets what he wants, and the poor creature cannot be changed back.”

 “She’s gone?” I whispered. “But…”

All my life, I’d believed my mother could make the impossible possible. In my childhood imaginings, she could sing the moon down, change the pattern of the stars, unmake the world and build it new again, if she wanted.

Demeter removed her hand from my shoulder, moved away.

“There’s nothing we can do.” Resignation weighted her words. Her face was expressionless, hands shaking. “Please forget her. Forget
Charis
. It’s what she would have wanted. You don’t know Zeus—you don’t know what he’s capable of…”

There were tears in her eyes. I had never seen my mother cry. She reached for me, but I recoiled from her touch, stepping back once, twice. My mother was crying. It was unfamiliar, frightening. She seemed a stranger.

“Zeus did this,” I spat, carving my fingernails into the palms of my hands. I felt anger grow and tighten within me, an invisible knot. “Zeus…”

Demeter opened and shut her mouth. Her face crumpled. “Zeus gets what he wants,” she repeated, dully.

“How can you say that? What if that had been
me
?” I couldn’t breathe, held my chest as if my heart was falling, falling, falling down upon the perfect emerald grass. “You wouldn’t be standing there, you wouldn’t say that, you would come get me, you would…”

She was staring at the ground, and the sudden realization devoured me. I stopped speaking, blinked at my mother.

“You would… You would come get me,” I whispered. “Wouldn’t you?” The words lingered between us for heartbeats, and then she shook her head, rubbed at her eyes with long, trembling fingers.

“He wouldn’t do anything like that to one of his daughters,” she said. “I don’t think.”

There was silence for a very long time. The loudest
silence,
and the sharpest. My mother kept her eyes on the wall of her bower, and I felt a thousand things shift between us.
So many words unsaid, thorn-snagged, broken.

I was Zeus’ daughter.

“You never told me,” I whispered. “I thought you’d just created me—like one of your trees or your fields.”

“I’m not that powerful.” She worried at the edge of her garment, shifting it this way and that, staring down at the cloth and not me. “Persephone,” she murmured. “I’m sorry… There’s nothing we can do.”

“Zeus is my father,” I said, stringing the words together quickly, gulping in great
lungfuls
of air. “If he was raping me, you wouldn’t come to my aid. My beloved is gone now, killed by Zeus, and you are going to do nothing to help me.”

“That’s wrong. Please…” She lifted a hand to touch me but dropped it when, again, I backed away. Tears trailed down her cheeks in bright, silent lines. “He can be so cruel, Persephone. You don’t know. There’s nothing I can do. Nothing anyone can do. I’m sorry. Please believe that I am sorry.” And then, my mother, the goddess Demeter, held out her hands to me. Her voice cracked when she said, “Forgive me—I am glad it was her and not you.”

What could I do? What could I say? She’d spoken her truth, and there was nothing left in either of us. All of the anger, the rage,
the
deep, abiding pain pooled from my body and drained into the earth. I was empty.

I turned, and I left my mother’s bower. She tried to say something to me, but I didn’t hear it, perhaps didn’t listen, and I began to run when my feet felt the forest floor beneath them. I ran back—back to the briar hedge. I knelt down beside the rosebush, and I wept until my tears ran out. The rose leaves fluttered, though there was still no wind, and I felt everything I was break apart into tiny, tiny pieces. I had lost
Charis
, and I had lost our beautiful future.

My stomach churned as I dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands again and again, feeling the prick of them against my sore skin. I couldn’t think about my mother, my mother with her tears and wide eyes and paled skin. But all I could see was her face, her mouth forming that most hated word: “Zeus.”

I brushed a finger over the white petals of a rose, held it until I was white, too, hollow and formless, until I had become a beginning. Then, blank, I stood and turned, seeing, unseeing, the stars that had come out, the night sky that arched over me, blotting out the day.

In the sky swung the sickle moon and a myriad of constellations. My mother had told me once that the stars were uncountable, that Zeus had fashioned them endless—endless, like me.

Pain was slowly being replaced by something else in my heart, in my body, that I did not yet understand, and wouldn’t—not for a while yet. That seed was growing, twining around my being, shifting the broken pieces into some new semblance of what it once was.

Zeus—my father—was king of all the gods, and he could do as he pleased.

And I would repay him, someday, for all he had done.

I, Persephone, swore it.

I left
Charis
where she was, roses and leaves waving beneath the grinning moon. Soon, soon I would be brought to Olympus, compared by the gods to my peers, driven from the only home I’d ever known to spend an evening in the same bright palace that housed Zeus.
Zeus, the merry, golden god who raped and destroyed without regret.

What would I do when I saw him? What would I say? Would he punish me for the truths that might tumble from my mouth? My mother had looked so afraid.

I had to stop this.

I put my head in my hands, leaned against the old oak, tried to sooth the scattered aches within me.

Who does a goddess pray to? I sat very still, my head spinning in tight circles. We have nothing and no one to ask for help, save ourselves. I did not believe in myself enough.

The stars shone, silent as always. I folded and lay on the black earth, feeling the empty, lonely places in me crumble until nothing remained but blackness and the scent of white roses I could not see in the dark.