Psyche
I made my way into the forest, which was little more than a tangle of naked branches against a bone-white sky. There were no other travellers along the road, and I marvelled at how empty the Underworld was. For the destination of all living souls, it was an intensely solitary place. Then again, the living world could be quite lonely as well.
I looked up at the branches and thought of Eros. If Demeter’s words were true, he too had passed through these desolate paths, and he had done so to pave the way for me. My heart skipped, and I picked up my pace.
It was not long before I came upon a man on the road. He tugged unsuccessfully at a heavily burdened donkey that shied away from his touch. I could see the sweat on the man’s brow and the flick of the donkey’s tail, but their appearance seemed oddly out of place. They were as real as anything else here – which is to say, as ephemeral as mist.
I noticed that the man had tied the bundle incorrectly. A few more knots in the correct places and he could distribute the weight more evenly over the animal’s back. I opened my mouth to instruct him but recalled Medusa’s warning against speaking. He would need to find a way to carry his own burdens.
Then I blinked, and the scene before me shifted. I realized the bundle was not composed of sticks for kindling but instead of every grief that encumbered a human life. Sorrow, injury, guilt, doubt, disease, loss …
Another eyeblink, and they were nothing more than ordinary bundles once again. The donkey nearly toppled the man, who swore at the beast and continued to tug.
I skirted around them. I knew perfectly well how one thing might stand in for another, how the wind might be a youthful god, or one’s own husband the nexus of all desire. Why couldn’t one type of burden be a symbol for another? Either way, there was no use in taking on more than I could carry.
I continued through the silence of the withered forest. The trees were leafless and parched; spring never came to this infernal place. The sky was milky grey and wreathed in mists, neither day nor night. The only sound I could hear was the soft crunch of my feet against the dry dirt of the path.
After some time, the road widened. The stick-like trees fell away, making room for something ahead, a dark mound that I thought was an old ruin or a small hill. Until I saw its ears twitch.
I had been concerned I’d miss Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the Underworld, but now I saw those fears were moot. The massive beast slumbered with its heads on its paws, though it stirred at my approach. One of its noses twitched wetly, drawing up the head with it. Yellow eyes as large as my palm opened. Disturbed from their slumber, the other two heads followed suit and I watched the dark bulk of an impossibly large creature unfurl before me. He was bigger than the drakonis, bigger than any monster I had ever seen before. His pricked ears reached higher than the tops of the trees. When Cerberus took to his feet, it was like watching a mountain unfold.
Six eyes focused on me.
Cold terror sluiced through me. Craven instinct compelled me to flee back to the tree line, but I knew better than to run from such a beast. I pulled one of the biscuits Demeter had given me from my satchel; it was the size and heft of a discus. She had made it herself from barley meal moistened with honey, just what Cerberus liked.
Or so Demeter had said. If Cerberus preferred living flesh over bread, I would soon find out.
I threw the biscuit into the air. Cerberus’s ears pricked towards it, and one of his heads – the farthest to the right – snapped it up, sending gouts of drool from its mouth. The other two heads did not pay me mind, whirling on their companion, biting and snarling, a sound like thunder. I took advantage of the confusion and crept past.
I kept walking. Eventually the forest thinned, and a river came into view. It was wide and colourless, black waters lapping soundlessly at the shore. This was Styx, greatest of the rivers of the Underworld. On the far shore I could see that palace of unearthly majesty, all white marble and soaring towers, but my attention was pulled away by the crowd gathered along the riverbank.
This was the first time I had seen humans in the Underworld, and there were thousands of them, blanketing the shore like a colony of ants. They were not solid like living people, but fleeting impressions, like the dragons that seem to dance in the smoke rising from temple incense.
I could make out glimpses of many different peoples: Persians in their wide trousers, flaxen-haired barbarians from the northern wastes, dark-skinned people from Egypt, as well as the more familiar Greeks. I wondered if I would see the bandits I’d killedamong them – or worse, Iphigenia. But mercifully, I recognized none of the faces around me.
Some bore the wounds that had caused their deaths, dripping phantom blood onto the cold sands, while others appeared whole. Some of the dead paced the shore and howled, while others crouched in stunned silence. Many of them wailed. I only understood the ones who spoke Greek, but that was enough to fill my ears with a host of litanies.
‘I loved my husband, but he thought I slept with the village butcher,’one cried.‘He strangled me to death.’
‘My son watched me die,’the ghost of an old man howled. ‘He could have called a healer when the fever took me, but he wanted his inheritance.’
‘I died in childbirth,’said another.‘The pain was horrible …’
I drew back. These were the ones who had no coin to pay their passage, who had never received proper burial. I fought the urge to do something – anything – to alleviate their bitter distress, but I was helpless before the enormity of their loss. Their grief felt like a millstone around my neck.
In this sea of lost lives, what hope did I have? I wanted to join those lonely shades and howl my own losses – my parents, Iphigenia, Eros himself – until they were like tears washed into the ocean. I might lose myself in half-remembered sorrow until I succumbed to dehydration or starvation, and my shade stepped out of my mortal body the way a living person shrugs off a robe. I would live on only in Eros’s memory, a mortal girl he had loved once before their sudden separation and her ignominious death, nothing more than a brief dream he recalled on moonless nights. Aphrodite would win, and my child would never know what it was like to walk upon the green earth.
Anger flared. My essential nature reasserted itself. No, I would not be barred from my goal by foolishness and self-pity.I watched a single small boat make its way across the mirrorlike waters and took note of where the ferryman must be docked. I took off running, shouldering my way through throngs of shocked and staring ghosts, parting them like clouds.
At last I stood before Charon, shaking off the chill residue of other people’s souls.
The ferryman considered me. He was as old as darkness and as unknowable as night. He wore a shabby black robe and a hood that obscured his face under a heavy cowl. The hands that emerged from his sleeves were so sinewy and skeletal they might have belonged to a corpse, and I shivered. I wondered how many centuries had passed since those hands first took up the oars they held. I wondered at the face hidden behind that hood, whether it possessed the uncannily perfect symmetry of a god or the ruined grin of a corpse.
I pulled a coin from my satchel and handed it to Charon. His wiry hands reached out to take it from me, and the abyss under the cowl regarded me thoughtfully.
‘You are still alive,’ rasped a voice like the stirring of dry leaves.
I prepared to argue my case before I recalled Medusa’s warning against speaking. I crossed my arms and planted my feet on the rickety wood of the dock.
