Harvest Moon (4 page)

“I've asked you not to do that, damn it!” Hades snapped. “Don't just sneak up on people, do something
to announce yourself when you know they can't see you!”

A boat's prow appeared, poking through the mist, and soon both the boat and its occupant were visible. The ferryman plunged his pole into the river and drove the boat up on the bank with a crunch of pebbles against wood. He had swathed his head in a fold of his robe, and bowed without uncovering it.

“As you say,” the ferryman intoned, pushing his boat closer to the bank, so that it lay parallel to the beach. With his foot he pushed a plank over the side to the dry beach. “Do you need my services, oh, Lord?”

“No, we'll just walk across,” Hades replied with irritation. “Of course we need your services!”

“Wait a moment.” Persephone was pulling off her rings, her necklace, her bracelets, even the diadem in her hair. Gold all of it, and pearls, which Demeter thought proper for a maiden. She'd put them on this morning on a whim, thinking it would be nice to be married in them. She offered all of them now to Charon. “How many will these pay for? To go across?”

The hooded head swung in her direction. Slowly Charon removed the covering, revealing his real face. He was exceptionally ugly, with grayish skin, a crooked nose and very sad eyes. “I—uh—” The dread ferryman appeared unaccountably flustered. “I mean—”

Hades brightened. “Give her a discount rate,” he said with a low chuckle. “After all, she's buying in bulk. It's the least you can do.”

The ferryman swiveled his head ponderously, from Persephone's face, to her hands full of gold, to the suddenly silent throng of spirits, and back again. “I—uh—I am not accustomed to—uh—” The ferryman gave up.
“All of them,” he said, sounding frustrated, and a bony hand plucked the jewelry from Persephone's hands.

With an almost-silent cheer, the spirits flooded into the boat. Although, as far as Persephone could tell, they were insubstantial and weighed nothing, the boat sank lower and lower into the water as they continued to pour across the little gangplank. Finally the last one squeezed aboard—or at least, there were no more wisps of anything on the shore—and with a sigh of resignation, Charon pushed off.

“Don't blame me when Minos gets testy about all the extra work—my Lord,” Charon called over his shoulder as he vanished into the mist, poling the boat to the farther shore.

“And that is why I love you,” Hades said, pulling her into his arms for an exuberant kiss that was all out of keeping with the gloom of the place. “You see what needs doing, know I can't do anything about it, and deal with it yourself. What a woman you are!”

His arms about her felt warm and supportive, a bulwark against the dank chill of the mist that surrounded them.

She flushed with pleasure. “I know they'll only start piling up again,” she said apologetically when he let her go. “But I just couldn't stand here and do nothing about them.”

He considered this. “Perhaps something can be worked out,” he suggested. “Put a definite end to their time of waiting. Shorten it if the living will do something for them. Sacrifices or…something. Maybe even pay ahead of time when they are still alive.” He pondered that a moment. “I shall put that into the minds of the priests and see what they come up with.”

They watched the mist for a while, listened to the wavelets lapping against the stones at their feet. This was a curiously private, if chilly, space—the most private time they had ever had together. When they had met in the meadows it was always possible that someone would stumble upon them, or her Otherfolk friends would come looking for her. And it occurred to her at that moment that this was as good a time and place as any to ask some rather troubling questions. The most pressing of which was—

“Are you really my uncle?” Persephone asked suddenly, to catch him by surprise.

“Wait—what? No!” He looked and sounded genuinely shocked. Persephone sighed with relief. That was one hurdle out of the way, at least.

“Then why do all the stories say you are?” she asked with an air that should tell him she was not going to accept being put off, the way Demeter always tried to put off her questions.

He groaned, and shook his head. “Mortals. And that damn Tradition. And—it's a long story.”

“We have time,” she pointed out. “Mother never tells me anything. She always says she will, later, but she never does.”

He looked a little aggrieved, but then visibly gave in. “All right, I'll start at the beginning.” He pondered a bit. “The truth is, gods are just—immortals that mortals
say
are gods, or at least, that's what
we
are. We're half-Fae, the offspring of Fae and mortals. I don't know how it came about, but there happened to be a concentration of us here in Olympia. Some of us eventually became the gods, and some became the Titans.”

Persephone nodded, and waited for him to continue.
She had never actually
seen
any Fae, only Otherfolk, but she knew they existed, if only because the Otherfolk talked about them a great deal. She had the impression that the Fae were, more or less, keeping a watchful eye on Olympia to see that the gods didn't get themselves into something they couldn't get out of.

“The original six of us—me, Zeus, Poseidon, Demeter, Hera and Hestia—fought and confined what the mortals decided to call the Titans, which were also half-Fae, but were mostly from Dark parents…” He paused. “They were making life pretty hideous for the mortals here. Rounding them up and using them for slaves, and even eating them, like cattle, for one thing. You do know that not all Fae are particularly pleasant, right?”

She nodded at that as well.

“Well, someone had to put a stop to that, and we decided that we would. Besides, it was only a matter of time before they ran out of mortals and came after us.” He gave her a wry smile. “Not all of the Titans were bad, of course, and the ones that sided with us as allies didn't get imprisoned. In fact, Zeus—”

He stopped, flushing. She squeezed his hand. “No surprise that the ones that sided with you were mostly female?” she suggested. “The only ones I can think of that are male are Prometheus and Epimetheus.”

“Uh—er. Yes. Zeus can be very—persuasive.” He hastily continued. “We built ourselves a nice little complex of palaces and villas up on Mount Olympus, flung a wall around it to keep mortals from straying up there uninvited and thought that was the end of that. Then—the first of the Godmothers, the fully Fae ones, had started turning up, and Zeus suggested we study them and see if we wanted to do what they were doing, you
know, steering The Tradition and all that. It seemed like a good idea.”

“Well, I don't know what else you could have done, really,” she replied as an eddy of mist wrapped around them. “Someone had to, right?”

“We all thought so. The thing is…we were used to thinking in Olympian time.” He laughed ruefully. “We thought we had plenty of time to figure things out, what to do, who would deal with what, you see. But the mortals here have particularly strong wills and good imaginations, and before you know it, I literally woke up down here as Lord of the Underworld, Poseidon found himself in a sea cave and Zeus woke up alone except for the women, and there was an entire Traditional mythos built up around us and compelling us to do what it wanted.” He sighed. “Which ended up with poor Prometheus on that damned rock. How fair is that? Bloody-minded mortals. And, of course, every time another half-Fae turned up, the mortals dreamed up some role for him that fit into the mythos and the family.”

“Or not,” Persephone said sourly.

“Or not,” Hades agreed. “There are some wretched bad fits. I wouldn't be poor Prometheus under any circumstances. So no, the long and the short of it is, I am not your uncle. Poseidon is your father, not Zeus, no matter what the mortals say. And none of us are Demeter's brothers by blood. Not even half brothers.”

“That's good, because I wouldn't want our children to have one eye or three heads,” Persephone replied, hugging his arm and patting his bicep admiringly. He flushed. “There are more than enough Cyclopses about, and your dog is the only three-headed creature I would care to meet.”

“Oh, he's a good puppy.” Hades softened. “I suppose since you guessed who I was, you've already figured out why I wanted Thanatos to abduct you, right?”

She nodded with enthusiasm. “And it's horribly clever. Thanatos is the god of death, and if he takes me, I'm dead and belong here, right?”

“Exactly.” He actually grinned. “Well, you'll have to help me figure out some other way to keep you here. I'm sure that between us we can do it.”

“I wonder, why doesn't every one of the Olympians know that they're really only half-Fae? The ‘gods,' I mean, not the Otherfolk and the mortals.” To her mind that was a very good question. Of course, she knew very well why Demeter wouldn't have told her—Demeter always assumed she “wasn't ready” anytime she asked a tricky question, and this was certainly the trickiest of all.

“Ah, good question. Two reasons, really. Well…. two and a half.” He nodded gravely. “The first is the mortals and their Tradition, as I said, it is very strong, and once a role has been picked out for you, it becomes harder and harder to remember that this role wasn't always what you were. You really have to work at it. Some of the Olympians aren't comfortable working at it and would really rather just fall into the role.”

“Like Zeus?” she prompted.

“Ah, that is where the half part of the two and a half reasons comes in. Over there—” he waved his hand vaguely at the mist “—I have two fountains. Lethe and Mnemosyne.”

“Forgetfulness and Memory?”

He nodded. “I, for one, take great care to have a drink of Mnemosyne whenever I feel my memories of what
I really am start to slip. Zeus, on the other hand…” He paused. “In fact, one of these days we'll be going to one of Zeus's feasts, and when we do, at some point Hebe will ask you if you want the ‘special cup.' That's ambrosia mixed with Lethe water. Drink that, and all you'll remember about yourself is what The Tradition says you are.”

She shuddered. “No, thank you. Do the others know this?”

Hades nodded. “Or—well, they know it before they take the first drink. After, it hardly matters, does it? I'll say this much for Zeus, he will generally explain it all to the newcomers before they are offered the option. I'm just not sure he'll explain it to you, especially not if your mother—” He broke off what he was going to say.

“That's a good point.” Persephone scuffed her bare toe into the pebbles. “I can't always predict what Mother will think, and I honestly don't know what view she'd take, whether it was better for me not to know, or better for me to know and fight what I don't want this ‘Tradition' to do to me.” She heard a splashing—it sounded deliberate—and looked up to see something out there on the water. “Oh, look, there's Charon.”

A dark shape loomed out of the mist, resolving into the boat and the ferryman. “Well,” Charon said, sounding a tad less lugubrious, “that was interesting.” He toed the plank over the side, and it slid onto the gravel.

“Good interesting, or bad interesting?” Hades asked, handing Persephone into the boat, which was surprisingly stable.

“Good, I think. Minos is going to have his hands full for a little.” Charon chuckled. “I confess I am rather
surprised that I carried over quite a few who are neither destined for Tartarus nor the Fields of Asphodel. The friendless and poor on earth may not be such paltry stuff after all. In fact,” he added thoughtfully, “a good many of them are, in their own way, heroes. Leaving them on the bank is doing them a grave—” he chuckled again at his own pun “—disservice, perhaps.”

Hades looked to Persephone. “We might be able to think of something,” she said, in answer to his unspoken query, as he handed her into the boat. “We were just talking about that, in fact.” Hades got into the boat beside her, which rocked not at all under his weight.

Charon poled them through the mist to the opposite shore. It wasn't as far as Persephone had thought, and yet it was very difficult to tell just how much time actually had passed; Hades remained silent, and Charon wasn't very chatty.

On the other side…if Persephone had thought that the banks of the river were crowded with souls, here there were shades in uncounted thousands.

As far as she could see in either direction, a thinner mist hung over endless fields of pale blossoms. The shades wandered among them. They seemed particularly joyless as they gathered the white flowers of the asphodel, marked with a blood-red stripe down the center of each petal. They did not seem sad, just…not happy.

Until the fields themselves hazed off into the mist, the asphodel blossoms waved, pallid lilies standing about knee-high to the shades. They seemed to have no other occupation than to pick and eat the blossoms, showing neither enjoyment nor distaste.

This apparently infinite stretch of ground, flowers and mist, she knew already, was the part of Hades's
realm called the Fields of Asphodel, where the souls of those who were neither good nor evil went. In a way, the penalty for being ordinary was to be condemned to continue to be ordinary. Every day was like every other day; the only change was in the comings and goings of new souls, and the Lords of the Underworld.

Charon pushed off once they had gotten out of the boat; there were always new souls to ferry across, it seemed.

The mist still persisted everywhere, making it impossible to judge distance properly, or to make out much that wasn't near. She and Hades made their way on a road that passed between the two Fields, and the shades gathering and eating flowers paid no particular attention to them. But as they traveled, hand in hand, she saw that there actually was a boundary, a place where the Fields ended. The asphodel gave way to short, mosslike purple turf, and like two mirrors set into the turf, she saw two pools, one on the left of the road, and one on the right. The one on the right was thronged with more shades; only a few were kneeling to scoop water from the one on the left.