“Maybe I’m not old,” she said, “but I am fairly sure that I love you, whatever you call yourself. And I think you are certainly old enough to be sure you love me.”
“Oh, yes,” he said fervently, and if it hadn’t been that this was a cave, the floor was cold and not very pleasant, and neither of them wanted Demeter to somehow find them before they got into his realm safely, they might just have torn the chitons off each other and consummated things then and there.
But Hades was not Zeus, and after breaking off the fevered kiss in which tongues and hands and bodies played a very great part, he stroked the hair off her damp brow, smiled and turned toward the back of the cave. With Hades holding her hand, a door appeared in the rock wall, as clear and solid a door as any in her mother’s villa. It swung open as they approached, then swung shut behind them.
“Are we there yet?” she teased.
He laughed. “Almost. But Demeter can’t follow us now.”
There was a long, rough-hewn passage with bright light at the end of it, which brought them out on the banks of a mist-shrouded river.
It was a sad, gray river, with a sluggish current, and had more of a beach of varying shades of gray pebbles than a “bank.” Mist not only covered its surface, it extended in every direction; you couldn’t see more than a few feet into it. Tiny wavelets lapped at Persephone’s bare feet. The water was quite cold, with a chill that was somehow more than mere temperature could account for.
“The Styx!” Persephone exclaimed, but Hades made a face.
“Everyone makes that mistake. It’s the Acheron. The river of woe. The Styx, the river of hate, is the one that makes you invulnerable. When you see it, you won’t ever mistake the one for the other. Look out—”
The warning came aptly, as a flood of wispy things, like mortals, but mortals made of fog, thronged them.
Spirits! Persephone had never actually seen a spirit, and she shrank back against Hades instinctively. There must have been thousands of them. They couldn’t actually do anything to either her or Hades, but their touch was cold, and Persephone clutched Hades’s comfortingly solid bicep. “What are they?” she asked, her voice dropping to a whisper—but still loud enough to sound like a shout over the faint susurrus of the voices of the spirits, too faint for her to make out anything of what they were saying. They tried, fruitlessly, to pluck at her hem, at her sleeves, to get her attention. “Why are they here?”
“They’re the poor, the friendless. They’re stuck on this side of the Acheron. Charon charges a fee to take them over, everyone knows that. You’re supposed to put a coin in the mouth of the dead person when you bury him so the dead can pay the ferryman’s fee. It’s not much, but if they don’t have it…” Hades’s voice trailed off as she gave him a stricken look. She glanced at the poor wispy things, and their forlorn look practically broke her heart.
“I have my standards, you know.” The sepulchral voice coming out of the mist made her jump and yelp, and the poor ghosts shrank back from the river’s edge. Hades turned toward the river in irritation.
“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,