Eurydice

On our wedding day, my husband played his lyre and we danced and danced in the tall grasses of the meadow under a full moon. He was a good player, my husband. Before I met him, before we married, before I died, I heard about him in stories. In one story, they set him to sing against the Sirens, and he played so wondrously, so beguilingly, that all the Sirens stopped to listen and his ship went by without harm. I should have known then, as I know now, my husband was a charmer.

He told me: "Your hair is like midnight, your eyes like the Aegean sea, you move like liquid fire." I believed him. When he said, stumbling over his words: "I have conceived a passion for you," I believed him. And when he said: "Marry me, Eurydice, and you will make me the happiest man on earth," I believed him. So we got married because he left me no space for doubt.

As it turned out, he left me no space at all.

It started off innocently enough. Me, going out to market, him, holding my hands, a lock of hair curling on his forehead, sweetly: "Stay Eurydice, let me go out for you instead." Me, waking early to walk to my mother's house, him, an arm around my waist, a sprinkle of freckles on his nose, playfully: "Stay Eurydice, don't go out today." Eventually I did everything he asked and believed as he did that if I ever left the house, if I left his side if only for a moment, I would never come back again.

I asked him once about Calais, the son of the wind god Boreas, and his face hardened almost imperceptibly, but I, attentive to the moods flickering across his face, caught it at once. "What do you want to know about him?" He asked, and I was surprised. My voice had become almost husky with disuse. He preferred to watch me dance. "Well," I ventured, thinking of the stories I had heard, "what did you like about him?"

"Calais was a breath of fresh air," he said and sighed. "He was a friend from my boyhood and we travelled together with the Argonauts seeking adventure. He was wild and quick-tempered, quick-witted; always up for a good laugh. We liked to hold races in the sacred groves and Calais always won because he had wings, but one day he tripped and ... " His voice trailed off abruptly, dried up, became cool.

"Oh Eurydice, sweetheart," he said, murmuring against my hair, "you ask too many questions."

But it was too late. I had heard the wistfulness in his voice. And that was how I learned that he yearned for him then and yearned for him still. My husband the poet could never speak of Calais except in the plainest terms. If he had compared him to the changeable moon or the intractable sea, perhaps I would been more at ease. As it was, the more the longing gnawed at him, the more he sought to contain it, but in the end it was me whom he caught and tamed.

----
On the evening of the Festival of Dionysus, I wore my finest chiton pinned with my favourite fibulae - made of gold and glass paste patterned like sheafs of ripe wheat that would never be harvested. A gift from him. "To remember me by," he said, the time before we were married, and the tears ran down my face because he was leaving, and I could not remember what the spaces in the time before him had been filled with.

"Eurydice," he said, brushing the tears from my cheeks, "remember me."

I remember the way the Maenads threw their heads back and let out long stirring cries of ecstasy; beating their restless feet against the earth, tossing the Thyrsus staff in the air. I remember him on the wooded slopes of Mount Ismara where he sat and played the lyre, singing odes to Dionysus. His voice was irresistibly sweet and sorrowful, full of brute madness and longing, getting stronger and stronger until it seemed as if we too would surely burst if we did not join the Maenads in their wine-soaked joy.

I remember I danced in my finest chiton and my favourite fibulae, raising my arms to the sky, swaying and spinning like fire when it first catches and spirals into being. A wild, unstoppable, burning force. His song was a thing of urgent, feral beauty, as he was, dressed in skins with his dark head bent over his lyre. And most of all, I remember when his gaze finally snagged mine. It felt like flying.

----

"Eurydice," he said, "come with me."

----

Before I met him, before I married, before I died, I had intended to become a Maenad.

But then I met him, then I married him, then I died.

----

"Eurydice," he said, "you're dreaming."

----
I dream that that fool Aristaeus is chasing me. The beekeeper from Thrace, he runs after me down the grassy slopes of Mount Ismara. In my left hand I hold a cluster of anemones, wind flowers, we called them. They are the colour of the sky when the sun sets.

"Oo-ryu-dee-seee!" He yells, "Dee-seee."

"Go away!" I yell back, still running, "GO AWAY!"

"Don't be unreasonable!" He yells. "You know he'll come for you." He stops now, panting, his waist bent, his back bowled, his head bent over his knees.

I, too, have stopped running because I have come to a three-way crossroad shaped like a crow's foot. And where I am going, no man can go.

"Let him try!" I shout back. I want to crack his jaw. And if I hadn't been so giddy from my flight, if I hadn't been so distracted by Aristaeus, and if he hadn't given me those flowers in the first place, then whatever happened next wouldn't have happened next.

I step in a nest of vipers.

----

"It didn't really happen," he tells me, urgently, "it was only a small injury, a tiny injury."

But it doesn't explain the gasping, gaping, aching hunger in me, or the long, messy gashes on his forearms. They are bright with blood running down his wrists in little rivulets onto my tongue.

And then I am drinking him in like rich wine, my husband, he tastes like honey and iron and salt. And the pain it gives as it pulses through me is like dying all over again. But it is also like living. He binds me in another way.

----

"Daughter of earth and starry sky, parched with thirst and dying, drink quickly the cold waters, from the Lake of Memory."

----

I never properly understood the story about the anemones until I met him. The one about Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Adonis, her beautiful human lover, and how one day a boar gored Adonis to death on a hunting trip, and Aphrodite held him in her arms and cried and cried. Wherever she wept, wherever her tears fell, she left a trail of anemones bright with grief.

I hadn't understood it then—what it meant to cry over someone and to have the tears drip down your face and splotch on the ground, blue with bewilderment, red with anger, white with sorrow—the colours of anemones.

But then I saw him with Aristaeus, so I had to know.

----

The waters from the Lake of Memory are so cold and so sharp, they sear through me. I stumble forward blindly into his waiting arms. And when I finally lift my eyes to his, the air crackles with my anger, my fury, my —

"Eurydice," he says, and his eyes are dark and cold like the black stones of Hades' palace holding me in place, "I've come for you."

"NO —" I scream, and the dried leaves around us skitter and lift and fly until we are caught in the centre of a wailing vortex of wind.

He holds me fast. I, who was a wraith, have drunk his blood and become something more substantial than smoke but frailer than a corpse. And the ghouls that occupy the netherworld with me, sense our emotions and shriek and scream around us in a chorus of agony.

"Enough." He snaps. The power in his voice is such that we all stop abruptly.

"What do you want." I hiss.

"You remember me, Eurydice," he says, and to my annoyance, I nod. A memory comes to me: he always phrased his questions as commands. "I am your husband," he says now, "I've come to take you home."

"No," I say again. "No, I'm not coming with you." Never in my life have I rejected him so directly, not even when I ran away. But something in this cold, dank place steels me, gives me courage. I ask him again: "What do you want."

"It was a mistake." He finally says, looking straight into my eyes, willing me to believe him as he always did, "A mistake. I want you back with me. We had good times, Eurydice."

"As it happens," I tell him, "I did not. I'm not coming with you."

He laughs, incredulously. "You aren't serious. I played a melody so sweet, so haunting that Cerberus the dread-hound fell asleep while guarding the gates. I played my way through the River Styx and all the way up to Hades and Persephone. They were so filled with sorrow when they heard me, they gave permission to let you leave—"

Typical. My husband did like to show off. "Well, you didn't ask me. I didn't give my permission," I tell him. "I'm not leaving." I try to move away, but the life in him burning so bright, so vibrant, draws me still. I am so thirsty I want to drink him dry. He notices.

"You aren't being fair," he says. He raises a bloodied wrist to hover before my lips. The gash on his forearm curves like a thin smile. "Take a tiny sip, and let's talk. We didn't get a chance to talk before you left. You did poison me."

----

It wasn't difficult to find poison. The difficulty was figuring out which one to use.

It was Aristaeus who provided it. Sweet-faced Aristaeus the itinerant beekeeper; golden-haired Aristaeus whom nobody denied. Aristaeus who helped me see I had to leave, and of course, did not know I'd seen the two of them together.

He came to our house bearing his pots of honey and wild anemone flowers. "For the most beautiful lady I've ever seen," he announced, hoping to flatter me and indirectly flatter my husband. He was obsessed with his bees, and wanted my husband to play for them so they would produce better honey. My husband, initially, was amused, but then I watched the longing in him grow and expand. He wanted Aristaeus' youth; his lighthearted carefreeness that signalled a different sort of wildness.

I tried to warn Aristaeus away, but he was a fool, he went and fell under my husband's spell. And when he did that, when I saw the enchantment drawn tight around him, when he came blushing with his honey pots and lingered around my husband as a bee drawn to light, my husband's influence on me lessened. The chance to leave came soon enough.

----

"You gave me poppy milk," he says, flatly.

"Yes." I press my mouth to his wrists and drink delicately, and the life in his warm blood shudders through me. He gazes solemnly at me. I grin at him. But then my grin fades as I feel the connection to his life strengthen until it becomes a burning desire to follow him and follow him into the light. My feet take a few steps forward of their own accord.

"Yes," he says and turns his head away. "Come along Eurydice, we cannot look back."

----

Scarlet poppies don't look so different from red anemones. It wasn't difficult to tell Aristaeus that I wanted to compare what they looked like. He came the next day cheerfully carrying a mix of poppies and anemones. "See if you can tell the difference, Eurydice!"

I grew up with witches. And sometime, when my husband didn't overwhelm my mind, I could almost remember what it was like in the time before him. Gathering flowers and herbs for the goddess Hecate, the laughter, brewing potions, like the one that would give a sleep so deep it was like death.

Now I know that nothing is quite comparable to death, but as it was, I had to try or go mad.

----
My feet obediently follow his path. Wherever he steps, I follow, but my mind strains against the invisible hold he has over me. I am seething with anger and the ghouls catch my emotions and set up a wailing, babbling chorus of accusations as we go along. I see the way he tries not to flinch at the sounds that come our way.

"You never said why you wanted me back."

"It doesn't matter now."

"It does. What, you think we're going back being happily married once we reach the land of the living?"

"It'll be back to normal."

"And what's normal?" I ask him, sneering. "Me, unable to say a word because it gets twisted into something completely different? Me, unable to take a step out of the house because you won't let me?"

"We never used to be like this." He says carefully, but then he sighs, and his coolness gives way. "Oh Eurydice, can't it just be like before?"

"Then let me go where I go. Let me go."

"I can't," he says, iron in his voice. "You know how it is. I can't give up my music, and you are my muse."

The rage in me boils into something so thick and viscous it threatens to pour out of my mouth.
I know, I know, that if I am finally going to be rid of him, he will have to turn around and face me.
----

I slipped it into his drink one afternoon, before Aristaeus arrived. My husband held my hand as I gave him the cup. "Eurydice, everything is alright between us. Aristaeus means nothing, you know that." My skin crawled at his betrayal, at the lies on his tongue, at the mind-numbing control he exerted over my thoughts. I caught sight of the anemones glowing in the sunlight, in a little jug of water on the table, and some violent emotion caught hold of me, and his words lost their effect.

"Yes," I tell him, brushing the curls off his face, for the last time, "it means nothing."

I left him for dead on the floor, shouldered my pack, and at the last moment, grabbed the flowers to remind me of the powerful rage and grief that stirred me still.

Aristaeus came running after me a long while later. "What have you done!" He shouted.

"He'll live," I yelled right back in the distance between us, but the gap was closing. He was young, while I was not used to being outside with the vast sky above and the green grass all around. It made me almost dizzy to think of how much my husband had kept me back from.

And that's how, desperate for answers, Aristaeus ended up chasing me, and I stumbled back onto a nest of vipers in the tall grasses of Mount Ismara. A sharp pain in my right heel, something cool and dry coiled around my ankle, and then I was flying into peaceful nothingness.

I definitely cursed his bees.

----
In the nothingness that is the underworld, you have talking, you have wailing, you have screams, but you do not have tears.

We are nearing the sunlit world now, leaving behind the dim labyrinthine palace of Persephone, and I feel myself solidifying, becoming more mortal with each step. I am vulnerable again, trembling with rage, with fear.

As I think about the heartache, and the disappointment, and the despair but the joy, oh the joy he had brought me, once, a long time ago, something in me cracks and breaks and spills over. An angry tear falls in the land of the dead.

It falls and lands with a sound so loud it seems as if the sea had come rushing down into the narrow passageway where we stand, and he whips around and finally looks at me, looks at me with the terror stark in his face.

My hair rises around me as if whipped by a storm, my white dress flails in the wind, around us the sounds of howling begin. The tears won't stop coming. There is an trembling ache in me that whole oceans could not fill.

“What is it, what madness, Orpheus," I force out, "Was it that has destroyed us, you and me?"

Around us, the barren walls of the passageway are swelling and dripping with flowing water.

"I'm sorry, Eurydice." He says, stopping. We are so near the sunlight. "I'm so so sorry. But I need you. You're the only one who inspires me to compose. You must see how it is."

"The truth is," I say, crying and crying, "You would have walked into Hades to drag me out, but you would not have died for me."

He looks at me, and works his throat, but the words don't come.

That was the truth. He didn't love me as I had hoped. Perhaps he did, or had in his own way, as a child loves a caged bird, but not enough to die for me, certainly not enough to set me free.

----

There is a story I heard as a child, about Pandora and her jar. Once upon a time they told Pandora, "Don't open the jar, dear," and of course she went and opened the jar. All at once, sickness and jealousy and other evils flew out. When she finally managed to shut the lid, only hope remained. But it wasn't the good sort of hope. It was deceptive.

---

So I take a breath, the nearest breath I've had to being human in a while, and with all my will, uncover the jar of my heart and let the hope go. I let him go, the mad desire he stirred in me, the control he had over my mind, all to be washed away by the tears and darkness sweeping in. I break the chain that ties me to him and him to me.

"You should go," I tell him to his face, as I should have told him a long time ago, before I married him, before I died, at the Festival of Dionysus, as my tears cool on my face, and the awful darkness rushes in, "I am leaving."

I don't look back.