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6th Hekatombaion
When I was a young girl my mother put a box under her bed and told her husband never to touch it. I say her husband, but he wasn’t, really; he was the man who had taken us in that year, bewitched by my mother’s beauty and willing to overlook the gangly bug-eyed girl trailing after her. “You must never look inside,” she told him, but I was ten that year and old enough to keep a secret, so to me she opened the box.
It was a lovely box, a blue so deep and dark it seemed as if the wood must have grown that way. The lid was inlaid with shells that sparkled in the light. The inside was plainer but no less beautiful, finely worked and smooth, and it was empty.
“There’s nothing in it,” I said to my mother.
“Precisely,” she said, and wouldn’t say anything more.
Months went by and I forgot the box. I had important things to do, running in the olive groves with the other children of the neighborhood and helping when it was time to bring in the harvest and avoiding my mother’s lover when he was in a temper. I only remembered the box when I happened to be playing on the floor of my mother’s room, or when my mother’s lover brought it up. “You know you don’t have to keep secrets from me,” he would say, touching her chin lovingly, and she would laugh and kiss him and tell him no.
One day we came home and he was in a worse temper than usual and wouldn’t speak to us for hours. After dinner he finally burst out with it. “Woman, your secrets are nonsense! Why did you tell me not to look in the box when there’s nothing in it?”
“It must have been stolen by one of the servants,” she said, and when he asked her, she described it: a necklace of her mother’s, too precious for her to wear.
“You could have just told me about that,” he said, and she laughed and said it was so, and that perhaps someday someone—with a saucy look—someone would buy her a necklace to make her forget the one she’d lost.
She said all that, and then in the middle of the night she woke me and we stole out of the house like thieves, with all the coin we could lay our hands on and the beautiful empty box at the bottom of my mother’s satchel.
“A man’s heart is like a porcelain bowl,” she told me as we walked the countryside. “You may trust in it as long as it is safe in your hands. But if it slips out, invisible cracks will form, and then you must never put your faith in it again.”
Now you know, Orpheus, why you must never read what’s inside of this beautiful notebook you gave me.
I don’t know if I’d leave, honestly. I want to say I would, but when I touch you I feel I have been hungry for you my whole life, and if the choice comes I don’t know which way I will fall. I would like to think that it won’t come at all. That you will never make me choose between turning myself out into the wilderness or staying in a house that will turn me empty inside, empty and beautiful like the box that set my mother free.
I don’t want to be set free. It’s the strangest feeling; I’ve always wanted to be free, ever since I was old enough to feel how much smaller I had to make myself to sit at the tables of my mother’s lovers. I keep thinking of her today, the day after my wedding. What would she say to her daughter who has given herself away forever in exchange for a hand and a song?
She pulled the trick with the box three more times before I lost her. Once it took only one night before we were on the road again, sleeping hungry for two weeks before my mother managed to scrape together enough from day work to make herself beautiful enough to catch a new lover. Another time we almost didn’t get away. Her lover was already planning to sell us into indenture, determined to wring out every drop of value from a woman who had grown too old in his eyes to be attractive and the daughter he’d never wanted at all.
The third time it wasn’t the box her lover tried to intrude upon, it was me, and that was the end of our time in the houses of men.
I thought, that winter when I lost her, that my world had been destroyed. But I didn’t know how wide the world was; I didn’t know that a new love could feel as strong as an old one, as immovable, a bowl made of iron that no crack can damage. I hope she would not think I am foolish for it.
8th Hekatombaion
Summer has come! Like a wedding gift, only a few days belated. I woke up this morning to see sunlight shining through olive leaves that weren’t on the trees yesterday. I felt like dancing in the tiny grove, and so I did, like a silly child, grabbing your hands and pulling you with me.
“We should plant,” I said, “now that the frosts are gone.”
“We don’t need to plant,” you said.
“Did you plant before the cold came?” I asked. I have only the vaguest understanding of plants that you can put into the earth in the fall and they grow in the spring: one of my mother’s men did it, with something called bulbs that he imported from lands to the north.
“No,” you said with a laugh. “You don’t need to plant in this field. It just grows.”
I didn’t believe it. I’m still not sure I do. It feels like a fireside tale, fields that grow without you having to put your hand to them to make them sprout. And you are a fireside tale, maybe, you with your shining eyes and your hands full of love and your song that makes the flowers bloom—but a whole field is a lot of flowers, and they don’t make good eating.
You must have seen how worried I was, because you took my hands and pulled me down into the grass. “Don’t worry,” you said. “I’ve lived on this land my whole life. It’s never failed me yet.”
“Maybe it will, now that I’m here,” I said. It seems like the kind of thing that would happen to me: blighting a field so fertile it doesn’t even need to be planted.
But you kissed me and you said, “You’ll make the barley grow so high it will tumble under its own weight, and we’ll have a harvest festival where no one will leave hungry.” And then you kissed me again, and I couldn’t help but believe it. After all, you are the kind of thing that happens to me, now. Doesn’t that cancel out the rest of it?
7 before Metageitneion
I keep forgetting to write. I intended to fill this notebook with words when you gave it to me. But I’m too busy with you to think of it.
All our days are full of music. You sing me awake; you sing while we make breakfast; you sing while we clean and fix the thatch upon the room and go outside to reap the olives that are ripening already despite the summer that just began. You sing so much it seems to make extra time around us, so that we have space in our day to wander the fields and do nothing but feel the sun upon our faces and lie down in the growing grasses and make love.
The field has sprouted, like you said. The barley and wheat are growing high. It’s not a lot of land, but it’s growing so thickly I can see how it could keep us in food to survive the winter. The harvest will be a lot of work, but it’s work I can do. And you will be singing the whole time.
I asked you to sing that song again today, the one that first caught my heart. “It’s not finished yet,” you said.
“But summer is here,” I replied.
“It won’t be for long,” you said. And I know you’re right. Last winter was long and bitter and I haven’t forgotten. It’s just so hard to imagine, sitting in the sunshine and listening to your music.
15th Metageitneion
We had a visitor today. Not one of the neighbors who come every once in a while, to sit and drink a glass and relieve their own boredom and comment enviously on the state of our fields. It was the old man—though, having written that, I’m doubting myself. Is he old? He seems old in my mind, yet when I try to think of a sign of age on his face, I can’t come up with one. He is one of those middle-aged people who seem ageless, perhaps.
Anyway, he was here, the man who was there the first day Orpheus and I met. Hermes is his name. He wanted to hear Orpheus’s song, and he and Orpheus disappeared into the fields for Orpheus to sing to him. I tried not to be jealous; Hermes is not the sort of man you say no to.
Hermes came into the house after a while, leaving Orpheus outside. I poured him a glass of wine, and he looked at me with a sharp eye that made me nervous. “You must be careful of him when winter comes,” he said.
“I won’t let him starve,” I said—sharply, I’m sure.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “Perhaps I should have said, you must be careful of you. Orpheus will not understand.”
I still don’t know what he meant. I think that’s why I’m writing this down, instead of falling asleep like Orpheus in the bed next to me. It keeps going around in my head, a riddle I can’t solve.
Did he mean that I should be in charge of the harvest? Sound advice, though I would have done that regardless. I don’t need to be told that Orpheus doesn’t have any kind of head for numbers. If it’s not music and it’s not me, it doesn’t stay in his mind long enough to be useful in figuring. Of course I will be the one to make sure our food will last us through the winter.
Perhaps Hermes was saying that we wouldn’t have enough. But I have walked through our fields and I have seen what is growing. Before winter comes, it will be enough to feed ourselves and even help our neighbors if need be. So it couldn’t be that, either.
I should stop my wondering and go to sleep. Riddles are for cold winter nights in front of the fire, and we have time enough before those arrive.
4 before Pyanopsion
I should have listened to Hermes. But then, what could we have done?
Winter arrived yesterday. Not even three months past the start of summer. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t been there to see it myself. If I were saying fall had come, it might sound more believable; but of course there hasn’t been a proper fall in years. And in any case this was most definitely not fall.
I woke already knowing something I was wrong. My muscles ached from clinging to Orpheus, both of us twisted under the blanket like we could make ourselves warmer if we made ourselves smaller. I got up and lit the fires with the firewood Orpheus had left over from last year; we hadn’t bought any new yet. I thought we’d have two more months at least.
“It’s too early,” Orpheus kept saying, sounding bewildered, as I went around and stuffed lamb’s wool in all the crevices in the walls and around the windows.
“You’ll have to finish that song,” I said. It still seems incredible, that a song could affect the seasons. But I saw the flowers sprout with my own eyes, and I’ve seen the way the fields have grown, after Orpheus has sung to them. And winter this early is no more believable. Something is wrong in the world, with the gods, and if they can bring winter so early, why couldn’t a song change their minds about it? Nothing else has worked.
We were in the fields for most of the day yesterday, trying to bring in what harvest we could before the frost that would come that night. I was harvesting half in a panic. The barley was barely big enough to be worth cutting down. It was heartbreaking, pulling down those stalks that could have been such rich eating and trading if they had had even four more weeks. Better in than blighted, but not by much.
Most of it didn’t make it in, anyway. At the end of the day, when dusk was falling, the storm came.
I’m still listening to it howling even now, almost a full day later. Snows like we shouldn’t have gotten for months yet. I’m supposed to be counting our harvest, but what does it matter? I can see even without counting that it’s not enough. Not for the nine months that winter will last, if summer doesn’t come until the solstice like it did this year. Not even enough for a normal winter. Not enough at all.
I can hear the faint sounds of Orpheus’s singing coming from the tiny storeroom where he’s closeted himself with his music. I want him to come in here and sing over our poor undergrown frost-marred harvest. But I know what he will say if I ask him: the song isn’t finished yet. It’s not enough to save us. He didn’t get it done in time, and now the winter has come.
We only have three days’ worth of firewood if we burn it at this rate. I’ll stretch it as far as I can. We can trade some of this harvest for more, but what will we do after that? No one will have much worth trading, and we won’t have much to trade with anyway. We’ll need it all to survive.
1 before Pyanopsion
I went into town to trade today. The winds were lower, so lots of people were venturing out, and I found plenty who wanted my half-grown frost-blighted barley. I got us firewood for two weeks at the cost of three days of food, and I counted myself lucky. When those two weeks of wood run out…well, I have more food I can trade then. I can keep this game going for a little longer. And by then, maybe the song will be finished.
I feel like a foolish child, writing about a song when I sit in front of a single bare stick of burning wood trying to pretend my muscles aren’t cramping from the cold. But it helps a little, imagining that I have something to keep going for. That when our food and fuel run out, long before the winter is over, we won’t necessarily die. If I didn’t have that, I’d be tempted to lie down right now.
Orpheus has barely come out of the storeroom. I know he’s alive, because I can hear the singing over the wind. I can’t blame him for not coming out. If I had something like his music to take refuge in, I would do it, too. Anything to escape this god-smitten cold.
3rd Pyanopsion
I have come up with a plan to burn the furniture. It seemed so obvious as soon as I thought of it; I don’t know why I didn’t think of it immediately, except that I have never lived in a house where the objects inside of it were mine enough to burn. Technically all of this is Orpheus’s, but he is barely here, lost in his music even when we lie down together at night, and he will not stop me keeping us alive.
I don’t want to burn it. There’s not much of it, and it’s all finely made, pieces that came to us from Orpheus’s mother. He’s never said much about her, only that she was beautiful and sang like the sky in summer and walks among the gods now. I don’t know if that last part is the truth or his fancy. If she does walk among the gods, surely she would have thought to send us some better weather. But maybe those who walk among the gods are so dazzled by the beauty around them that they don’t want to take time to peer into the dark cubbyholes of us mortals upon the earth. I wouldn’t want to, if I had the beauty of the gods to look at.
Burning the furniture feels like stripping the last remaining pieces of beauty out of my own life. I certainly don’t feel beautiful myself; I crouch indoors all day at an inadequate fire, my hands chapped from scraping what barley I can find from under the snow and my body cramped and stooped from the effort to stay alive. I long for the days of sunlight when Orpheus would spread me out on the grass beneath him. Everything felt lush then: the earth, the sky, my body, his touch. I could see my own beauty in his eyes when he looked at me. Now I sit alone and look into the flames of a fire that does not love me but seeks to die every chance it gets.
Sometimes I think that it’s better that Orpheus doesn’t see me this way, made shriveled and old and shapeless from the cold. That it’s better that he rediscover me in springtime, in summer, when my body will be open to him again. Other times I feel like I will die if he doesn’t come to me, look at me, place his hands and his attention upon me again. But it’s no use; whichever I prefer, the outcome is the same: he is closeted with his song, and comes into the bed after I’ve collapsed onto it, and slips away before dawn. Some nights I think he doesn’t come to bed at all.
I have finally counted. Thirty days of food left, with what I expect to be able to scrape from the snowbanks. I was afraid to count, because I thought it might be less than it looked, and it turned out to be less still. In thirty days we will begin to starve, if we haven’t frozen to death first.
14th Pyanopsion
I tried burning the furniture today. I took the least lovely of the pieces, a small chair with one leg a bit broken off so that it doesn’t sit evenly. It took some coaxing to burn, despite seeming dry enough, but within a quarter hour the flames were rising, a startling purple and blue, and I was warm again.
For another few moments. After that, I started coughing and could not stop, my mouth and throat filled with a taste like death. I had to douse the fire and then go stand outside, with the door open, and take in great lungfuls of cold air until my head stopped spinning.
So I won’t be burning the furniture. A part of me is relieved, but it’s only a small part, a part that doesn’t care about death. The rest of me knows that death by poisonous smoke is only a quicker way to go than death by cold and starvation.
I went to check on Orpheus after my head had cleared. He wasn’t in the storeroom; he was outside already. “Did you smell the smoke?” I asked.
“What smoke?” he asked, and seemed surprised when I told him the story. “But why were you burning the furniture?”
“To keep warm,” I told him—probably not very nicely. I was very cold at that point and worried about what I was going to do about another fire.
“Why didn’t you buy more firewood?”
“With what money?” I asked.
He looked at me like the question was puzzling, and then he was really looking at me, for the first time in weeks. “You’re so beautiful,” he said, and put his hand on my face.
I have to admit that I felt warm, even though his hand was as cold as my face. It has been so long since I’ve felt beautiful, and since I felt Orpheus looking at me like that. “Beauty doesn’t buy firewood,” I said.
“No, it’s something better than money,” he said, and his hand on my face still warmed me, and at the same time I wanted to turn my face up into the clouds and scream.
I still have two days’ worth of firewood left, if I can manage to start the fire again after I doused it with my cooking water.
15th Pyanopsion
Today I went into town to look for work. It’s what I should have done this summer—what I would have done, if I hadn’t met Orpheus. I’ve always been able to scrape together something to get me through the winter, and while it’s never been as bad as it is this year, it hasn’t been gentle, either. This year…this year I let myself be foolish. I thought that living with a man who had a house and a field of his own would mean I didn’t need to store up coin against the winter. I thought the harvest would be better than any coin I could earn. I forgot to be frightened.
If I had gotten a job this summer, maybe I would still have it and they wouldn’t have let me go. As it is, there weren’t any jobs to be had. No one wants help bringing in the harvest when there’s a foot or more of snow on the ground, and the inn isn’t getting enough custom to hire an extra pair of hands. All of town was deserted. I managed to trade some more of our food for firewood—down to sixteen days’ worth—but almost no other trades were happening. No one has anything left to sell or buy with.
“Are you staying in town?” asked the woman who sold me the firewood.
“What do you mean?” I said. There wasn’t anywhere else to go.
“A lot of people are headed down. You know,” she said, meaningfully, and then I did.
Once when I was little, a child I was playing with mentioned Hadestown. I asked my mother that night why we didn’t go. We’d just had to leave one man’s house and were still looking for another. If we went to Hadestown, I thought, we wouldn’t need to find a man to take us in. We could earn our own money and sleep in our own beds. The child I’d talked to had made it sound like a paradise.
My mother was a soft-spoken person. She was sweet to everyone, and persuaded where someone else might have used force. But she answered me more forcefully than I’d ever heard her. “I will die first,” she said.
I was shocked, and I didn’t understand. I bothered her and bothered her for more, and finally she turned me toward the open field we were standing by and said, “You see the sun? You see the sky, and the earth, and the green growing things? Those are our birthright. I will never give them up to become a cog in a machine of death.”
I still didn’t understand, not until years later when I heard the stories of what Hadestown was really like. And then I was grateful that my mother never let us go there. That she’d pulled us through without giving in.
After talking to the woman with the firewood, I headed further downtown, past the train platform, and I saw why the rest of town was so deserted. The platform was full of people: crowded together, waiting, their faces and their clothing gray with despair. Some of them had children with them, families; none of them had any luggage. Why would you go to Hadestown, if you still had anything left on this earth?
I couldn’t stay and look at them. I was afraid I would see someone on the platform whose face I recognized. I hurried home with my firewood.
Sixteen days to figure out how to survive.
17th Pyanopsion
Is it possible for someone to live without eating?
I feel foolish even writing that question down. Of course every living thing has to eat. The gods themselves are said to eat. But this morning I counted the food and realized that we didn’t have fourteen days left as I thought; we had over twenty. I’ve been eating lightly, but not that lightly, so I went to ask Orpheus if he’d been depriving himself.
“The food?” he asked, like he had no idea what I was talking about.
“Yes, the barley and the olives and the pickled vegetables,” I said.
“What about it? Do you want some?” he asked, like he thought I was coming to say I was hungry.
“No, I’m asking if you want some,” I said.
“Not right now, but you should go ahead if you want to,” he said, and finally I managed to pry out of him that he hadn’t been eating it.
“But…what have you been eating instead?” I asked him.
He looked at me like he didn’t even understand the question. “I’ve been writing,” he said.
He’s been writing. Yes, I know he’s been writing, it’s all he’s been doing, but it never occurred to me that that could keep someone from wanting food. “You don’t need to eat while you’re writing?” I asked.
“Well, sometimes I like to,” he said. “But really, you should go ahead and eat if you want. I’m not hungry.”
He looked at me so eagerly, like he wanted to make sure I did this nice thing for myself. I felt baffled, and annoyed, and most of all like I’d stepped sideways out of reality and was looking at something not quite entirely human. Even now, I have the fire built up again—at least as much as usual—but I’m still chilled by it. The casual way he said it. He doesn’t need to eat while he’s writing, but sometimes he likes to.
I’ve always known, since the beginning, that Orpheus isn’t ordinary. There’s never been any ordinary man who could captivate me like he did. But I thought that he was out of the ordinary in, well, ordinary ways: that he was more beautiful than most men, more kind, more gifted in song. It never occurred to me he might not be entirely human.
I’ve lain down with him countless times, touched him all over his body. I know that it is a body like other men’s. But do the maidens know, in the stories, when they’re lying with gods?
Who is it I have married?
8 before Maimakterion
If Orpheus is a god, he should be able to get me some food to eat or some god-blasted firewood.
3rd Maimakterion
The song isn’t finished yet. The food isn’t either, but it’s getting close.
It helps, not having to worry about feeding Orpheus. I feel halfway mad every time I think about it, but it helps—and at the same time I resent him for it. It doesn’t make sense, the resentment. If he needed to eat, we would starve twice as quickly. But perhaps he’d be out here with me, trying to find a way to save us, instead of closeted away with his song.
His song. If he finishes his song, will it actually save us? I once believed it would. But I don’t remember what it felt like to hear his notes and see the flowers bloom. My body is too cold for a memory like that. What if I imagined the whole thing? I would sell that memory, if I could, if it would win me one bright moment in that sun.
The sun is shining today, but it’s thin, like soup that’s been watered down over and over. I would still drink it down if I could. I would drink until my belly was bursting.
18th Maimakterion
I’ve been so stupid.
That’s nothing new. I’ve been stupid this whole time. But this time there may be no going back.
We’re out of food. Almost, almost—we have one tiny serving left of barley mash. It’s in a pouch at my belt even now. We ran out of everything else yesterday, and I lay in bed alone last night, wondering what I was going to do. There’s still barley out there, somewhere under the snow. But how can I thaw it, without firewood? How can I even get it without freezing to death?
When the sun rose this morning—thin, weak—I went in to talk to Orpheus. He was outside. He hadn’t come to bed at all last night, but he didn’t look tired. His eyes had that transported look that meant it was going to be almost impossible to reach him through the music in his head.
“We don’t have any food left,” I said. I was trying not to cry, and I felt stupid for it.
“Oh,” he said. He seemed to focus on my face a little better. “Do you want me to get you some food?”
“Yes,” I said. I felt so relieved in that moment. I had always thought, if things got really bad, Orpheus would finally understand, and here he was, understanding. Being willing to help me. He was—some kind of genius, a god maybe, and he was going to fix it all.
“All right,” he said. “I just have to finish this song first.” He turned back to his notebook.
I waited, to see if anything else would happen. I spoke again, to see if he’d say anything meaningfully different. He didn’t.
I must have stood there for…I don’t even know how long. It just didn’t seem possible that that was it. That I’d finally gotten him to see I needed help and that was all he gave me.
I truly was stupid. I am. A stupid girl who, after everything, still thinks there’s a way out.
I went into the town after I finally turned away from Orpheus. I went to the inn, the only place people have been gathering other than the train station, and I found a table and I just sat there, because I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have anything to trade. No one would hire me to do any work. There wasn’t any work to be done. So much of the town had left on the train, but fewer workers somehow meant less work overall, not more.
That was when he sat down across from me.
I was startled at first. The whole inn was so empty; no one was bothering me for sitting at a table without ordering anything, because so few tables were filled. This man could have sat at almost any other table he liked; he didn’t need to sit with me. And he was a rich man, dressed in finer clothes than anyone I’d seen up close since my childhood.
“Hey, little songbird,” he said. “Why so sad?”
I’ll admit that my first thought was that we could sell him Orpheus’s furniture. I’d had that furniture on my mind every since I tried to burn it: the only thing of any value we owned, but who would buy it in a winter when no one had enough food to live on? A rich man, that’s who.
But then I saw the way he was looking at me, and I realized there was another way out for me. My mother’s way.
I hated the thought as soon as I had it. It cramped in my belly and made me want to go outside into the cold just to be farther away from it. I was married, unlike my mother. If I was going to become beautiful again, to be laid out lushly on a bed, I wanted it to be Orpheus there with me, not this man with his predatory smile. But Orpheus couldn’t give me food, and this man would.
Surely, I told myself, Orpheus didn’t want me to die. He didn’t understand, but that didn’t mean he wanted me dead.
I looked at the man and—didn’t smile, exactly. I lightened my face, though, and it was strange, feeling it lift out of the lines of cold misery it had settled into. “Less sad now,” I said, and then I waited to see what he would do.
Curse my mother for teaching me how to play that game. Oh, she never taught me directly, but she let me see, and it was all too easy to learn without meaning to. All too easy to copy the movements and expressions she would have made, to make sure this man knew exactly what I was trying to tell him. All too easy to focus on that, and not think to ask the obvious question: what sort of rich person would deign to visit our town, where no rich person had been seen before? Who was he?
I didn’t ask, not until he brought me to the train platform. I’d tried to wheedle him into getting me something to eat at the inn, but he just laughed and told me he had much better food waiting for me where he came from. I was planning to follow him anyway, so I let him lead me away, into the street, and it was only when we’d been walking for a few minutes that I thought to wonder about a carriage. Surely such an important man hadn’t come on foot?
“Of course not,” he said, with another one of his deep laughs. “I have a carriage right here.” And he led me onto the train.
I should have said no. That was my true moment of stupidity. I was frozen in fear, his black eyes on me, and now I sit in his train carriage, cursing myself as I scribble this story. I don’t even know why I’m bothering to write it down; maybe I think somehow that Orpheus will find it if I don’t make it out of here. Orpheus—
Surely most of the stories they tell about Hadestown aren’t true. The ones about stealing your face and your name and the life from your eyes. It’s hard to fully believe them, sitting on a plush sofa in a private train car with heated air around me. Hades isn’t even here; he disappeared after the train started, and there’s no one to enjoy this luxury except for me. But I’m not that stupid. I know you don’t get luxury like this without a price. I know I’m the one who’ll have to pay.
18th Maimakterion—later
Well, that didn’t go anything like I thought it would.
Have you ever been really scared, Orpheus? The kind of fear that grips your bones and makes it impossible to move? You probably haven’t. I can’t imagine that kind of fear getting its grip on you. But that’s how I felt when the train drew close to its destination and we got our first glimpse of Hadestown.
The stories call it a hell. I don’t know what a hell would look like, but I can imagine it being something like the dark shapes that rose up around me. There’s a red glow that surrounds everything, like you’re driving straight into the embers of a fire, and lightning crackles through the underground sky like an offense to Zeus himself. Even describing it like that—I’m doing a terrible job. My hands are so frozen I almost can’t write anyway. But I feel like I have to capture that feeling, or else it will still be rattling around in me: the awful claustrophobia of driving into those buildings like entering the maw of a hideous beast; the knowledge that I would never get out again, and that even death by starvation would have been better than life in this darkness.
I didn’t want to get off the train. Nothing out there was going to be an improvement on the fancy sofa I was sitting on. But Hades himself came to get me after a while. He smiled at me and held out a hand, and he led me through streets that made me want to shudder and curl in on myself and then into an office.
This is where I had my piece of good luck. I’m not quite sure what happened: Hades led me into a building like none I’d seen, with impossibly high ceilings and walls of some kind of hard material that wasn’t wood and wasn’t stone. I followed him through echoing halls into a room with chairs in it, and I could see beyond that a room that looked like an office. His office. I didn’t know what would happen once we went in there, but I knew it would be awful, and I knew I couldn’t escape it. And then someone stopped him, another man, and whispered in his ear. Hades cursed. He turned to me and told me to sit here and wait for him, and I sank gratefully into a chair and didn’t question it.
And then she came in. Persephone.
I didn’t recognize her, exactly. I don’t know the gods by sight. I knew she was someone, though—someone other than us little human grubs that crawl around down here trying to survive. She was bright and golden and spilling out of her dress and her hair bands like a caricature of abundance, an Olympian beauty walking the earth. I stared at her, and she flashed me a smile, dismissive, and sat down on a sofa across from me. And then I saw her case.
It wasn’t my mother’s case. Not quite. But my mother’s might have been a copy of it, made by a craftsman who was very very good and yet not quite up to the task. The wood of this case was more glowing, the carving more intricate, the sparkling gems set into it like the stars in a deep night sky. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
“Better not open that,” she said, and I startled.
“No, I know,” I said without thinking, and then—did I laugh? Was I hysterical enough for that? “I know better than to open strange cases.”
“Do you,” she said. For the first time I thought she sounded slightly interested. “So you’re a wise one.”
“No,” I said.
“No?”
I laughed again. It felt good, that laughter, like letting out something ugly from inside of me. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Hm.” Her gaze was sharp on me now. “You’re one of my husband’s songbirds, aren’t you? I thought so,” she said, when I flinched at the word. “Don’t worry, I’m not angry. I know what he does with girls like you. I don’t think you’re going to like it, though.”
“I don’t want it,” I said. The spark of recognition of seeing the case had faded in me, and all the despair was pressing on me again, the heavy walls of the building and the dull red glow outside the window hemming me into my doom. “I didn’t want it.”
“You didn’t want it,” she repeated. “Then why are you here?”
“I ran out of food,” I said. “I thought…I didn’t know who he was.” I wasn’t quite brave enough to say what I’d really thought, which was that Hades was a rich man who might make me my mother’s bargain.
“But you knew he was rich,” she said, so she saw the whole story anyway. “Yes, I imagine it’s a hard winter for you up there. My husband was greedy this year.”
“Greedy?” I repeated.
“Keeping me down here.” She patted the suitcase. “Keeping this down here.” Her long, painted fingernails tapped the carvings. They were green and glittering. “Doesn’t do any good to open it down here, I’m afraid. But without it…it’s getting grim up top, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“I thought so. No, it’s a shame that it can’t be opened down here.” Her fingers were still tracing the patterns. “It would have to be brought up top and opened there for it to do any good. But I can’t go back until the spring—if my husband even lets me then.”
Her fingers were moving, back and forth and back and forth. I felt dull, deadened by my despair. I wouldn’t be going up top even in the spring, and Persephone couldn’t help us.
“Child,” she said more sharply, and I looked up. She was looking at me intently, leaning forward. “If you really don’t want to be here, there’s another way out.”
There was no one else around us; the man who’d whispered to Hades was gone. “There is?” I asked.
“It’s not well known,” she said. “You’d have to find the crack in the wall.”
I hadn’t even noticed a wall when we were driving in on the train. “Where is it?”
“Down the far end of town, as far as possible from the train tracks.” She sketched with her finger on the suitcase. “Past the steelworks and behind what used to be a grape arbor before we lost the sun.”
“Behind a grape arbor,” I repeated.
“That’s right,” she says. “If you hit the river, you’ve gone too far.”
“Thank you,” I said, or I hope I said. My heart was racing, and my toes and fingers were tingling like life was coming back into them. I wanted to spring up and go right that second, but some instinct of politeness held me back. “Thank you so much.”
“It won’t be an easy journey,” she said. “Past the wall, it’s going to be cold and dark, and you’ll have to follow the train tracks out, which means someone might catch you. And you won’t want to eat anything,” she added. “Not anything from down here, or drink, either. Trust me, wouldn’t end well.”
That was fine. I didn’t care about food. As long as I could get out, I would worry about starvation later.
“Well,” she said, bestowing another smile upon me. “Good luck.” She stood up and stretched luxuriously, and then she went out. Leaving her suitcase behind.
I stared at it, and then opened my mouth to call for her. But the words died on my tongue. My brain was moving again, sluggish but alive. It wouldn’t do any good to open it down here. But I can’t go back until the spring.
I didn’t quite believe she could mean it. I’m still not convinced I do. But I stood up and wrapped my hand around the handle of the suitcase and waited, just for a second. When nothing happened, I lifted it and walked out of the room, coolly and casually, as if I had every right to be there.
No one stopped me on the way outside. No one seemed to pay attention to me at all, not in the building, not on the street. For all the noise—and I can still hear it now, far past the wall, the booming thuds that shake the whole land, the high-pitched clanging—there weren’t very many people around at all. I walked down the street, heart thudding and hand sweating on the handle of the suitcase, and no one stopped me.
There were a few wrong turns on the way, and once I almost did cross the river before realizing my error. But finally I found the arbor, clogged with dead grape vines, and behind it was the dark surface of the wall and the even darker line of a crack.
I wouldn’t have fit through it if I were much larger. As it was, I had to hold my breath and maneuver carefully to keep the suitcase from scraping against the jagged edges. Once I let it bang against an outcropping and I froze for long seconds, panting, listening, but no one came.
And then—I was out.
I still can’t believe it’s true. I’m expecting to hear bells clanging behind me, voices shouting at me to stop, even though it’s been hours since I left. I spent those hours walking parallel to the train tracks, far enough from them that I hopefully wouldn’t be spotted but near enough not to lose my way. The ground out here is hard to walk on: big awkward-shaped rocks and scraggly trees everywhere. And it’s cold, holy gods, is it cold. And dark: I’m writing in the dim glow of the city, and between that and the way my hands are shaking I’m sure this will hardly be legible. But I have to write it down or I won’t believe it happened.
Persephone’s case is next to me. It hardly sparkles at all, this far from the lights, but I know what it looks like. I remember her nails stroking the surface. When I lay my hand on it now, it feels warm—the only warm thing in this landscape, except for me.
My legs are rested now. I should keep moving. I have no idea how long it will take me to get out of here, and I don’t want to freeze to death here next to the summer sunshine.
Will it really work? If I bring this case out of Hadestown, into the world above, will the summer come back? It seems impossible. But this is all impossible. If Hadestown is real, it’s only fair that this should be, too.
19th Maimakterion (probably)
I should really be sleeping, but I’m so angry, I have to write it down.
I should have known you would come after me. You always do the impossible thing. And I’m grateful, I am, but—Orpheus. Why do you always have to be so complicated?
You scared me half to death when you showed up. I hadn’t seen anyone in hours, and I was starting to think I was in endless torment, the line of rocks and scrub and train tracks so constant and unvarying it might last to the end of the world. Then a sudden footstep behind me, and I spun around so fast I almost knocked you out with the case.
It was so good to see you. I felt like I hadn’t properly seen you in months. You looked like you always do, so innocent, like the troubles of the world never touch you. It was surreal, and it felt like—breathing again.
I’m not sorry I sobbed on your chest. I’m so relieved that I got to hold you again. I’ll do it again if we get out of this place. But—
I’m getting ahead of myself. I hugged you, and then I asked you what you were doing here, of course, and you said you were looking for me. Hermes told you; Hermes knew, somehow, he must have seen me following Hades out of the inn and onto the train. Ridiculous to be embarrassed by that when we’re lost in this cold underground wasteland, but apparently I’m exactly that ridiculous.
“He knew a way inside, too,” you said. “A crack in the wall—”
“I know,” I said, “that’s what I came out of,” and I told you the story of Persephone and the case.
Oh, the way you looked at that case. “A suitcase full of summertime,” you said, and in your voice it sounded like the words to a song. “We have to open it.”
“Up top,” I said.
“No,” you said. “Here, now.”
I might have thought you were joking when you first said it, but you looked so earnest. Like the sunshine was already shining out of your face. “That’s the exact thing she told me not to do,” I said.
“I don’t mean all the way,” you said. “But don’t you get it? If I peek inside here, I’ll see it. I’ll know how to finish my song.”
I must have been clutching the suitcase to me by this point. I was so afraid you would just grab it. “Persephone gave me this to bring summer back to the world outside. We’ll open it there.”
“No, it won’t be the same.” The light that was in your face. “This kind of thing—it’s different down here. Don’t you feel it? We’re outside of the mortal world. It’ll be visible here in a way it won’t be up top. If we don’t open it down here, I won’t be able to see it at all.”
I didn’t feel it. Maybe because I’m not someone who can eat music and warm up the world with a song. But looking at your face in that moment, I almost believed what you were saying.
Thank the gods for the train. We heard the whistle just then, and it brought me back to myself enough to remember that whether you were right or not, it didn’t matter. We dove behind a pile of rocks, and I said, “I don’t care if this helps you finish your song. This suitcase is going to bring back summer. That’s what you wanted the song for in the first place. I’m not risking one for a chance of the other.”
“I would be so careful with it,” you said, but I said no again, and you stopped arguing. I thought I’d won. I thought you would listen to me, and do the thing that I said.
Oh, Orpheus, Orpheus. I should have remembered that you’ve never been someone who can be persuaded. You always want the world to bend to you, not the other way around. I don’t think you’ve read my notebook—I really don’t—but I feel sure now that you would have, if there had been anything inside of it that you didn’t think you could get any other way.
I was watching to make sure the train was out of sight. And then I felt your fingers tug on the latch.
I got it away just fast enough, and then I stood choked by my own outrage. I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry in my life. If I could shoot lightning bolts from my eyes, I would have struck you down right there. “I said no,” I spat out, and in that moment I had the terrifying realization that if you wanted to, you could get the suitcase away from me and open it without any subterfuge at all. You’re bigger than I am. You’re stronger. If you want to exert your will on me, you can.
It was the first time I’ve ever been scared of you. I didn’t like it. And so I found myself using my mother’s line, botched and charmless and shaky with fury. “If you want me to come back home with you,” I said. “If you want me to ever love you again, you will not open this suitcase.”
I don’t think you understood why I insisted. You looked baffled and hurt, like you couldn’t imagine why I would stand against you like this. But you must have understood that I was serious, because you stopped asking.
Now you’re sleeping beside me, and I’m lying on top of this suitcase, afraid to fall asleep because I don’t know when you might wake up. Do I actually think you’ll try to take it from me and open it? I’m not sure. If you think I’m asleep and you can do it without me knowing, maybe. You’re worried about me not coming back with you, but you don’t believe me about the suitcase itself. After all, what do I know? I’m only a mortal girl, and you’re—whatever you are.
But I know what Persephone said. I trust her to know the truth of her own summer. This is too important to risk.
I suppose I should be grateful that you’re here anyway. You brought me water—if not food—and the news that it’s only half a day’s journey back to the surface. I even feel halfway warm again, lying next to you on the cold rocks. But I liked it better when you were my capricious enigmatic boy who practiced his fancies on the trees and sky and music, not on anything I depended on for survival. I liked you better when it wasn’t winter.
If we return and I open the suitcase, will the winter go away? Will I be able to feel like I did before?
4 before Poseidon
I’ve put off writing this long enough. I wanted to give it time, to let it settle, but I don’t want to forget the details. It’s already becoming blurry, mixed up with the dreams I keep having. I don’t want to forget, and so I’ll write.
I’ll start with that morning. We woke up—both of us; I’d fallen asleep sometime in the night, and I moved when Orpheus did. “It is,” you said, when I asked if it was morning, and we shared the rest of the water and the last few mouthfuls of barley mash from my pouch. “We’ll be out soon,” you said, cheerful—I remember that you sounded cheerful. I walked beside you, and I felt the glow of your presence like I used to, even though the world was cold and dark and we were hungry and thirsty. I felt like it was all going to be all right soon.
And then, the moment that ruined it all.
I tripped on a rock. Just that: I tripped on a rock. It wasn’t even a bad fall. I dropped the suitcase and I stumbled forward and caught myself on my hands. “I’m fine,” I said—I think I said—and then a flash of light, and the world changed.
The air was different all around me. It was sweet, full of the smell of honeysuckle. It cradled me, instead of trying to shut me out like the numbing cold for a moment before. Birds were singing by my ear. It was warm.
“What in the gods’ names,” I said, whirling around, and there you were. There you were. Holding the suitcase, already shut again, the guilty expression on your face still visible in the fading glow.
“It’s fine, I just had a peek,” you said. Like that would make it all right.
“You weren’t supposed to open it!” I said, snatching it back.
“It was—Eurydice, did you feel it?” You were practically dancing on your toes, you asshole. “The summer, it’s—that’s exactly it. That’s what was missing. I can finish the song now.”
“Fuck you,” I said, but I was relieved, too. The suitcase was closed again, and nothing had happened. I think we both thought the danger was over then, that the worst thing we’d have to deal with was my anger. “I told you not to open it.”
“It was fine, most of the power is still in there. I can tell.” The unnatural glow was gone from the air but not from your expression. “It was amazing. I’ve never felt anything like it. All of summer, inside a single suitcase…”
That was when I felt the rumbling. “What’s that?” I asked.
“What?” you asked, still in your daze. Still seeing summer, that fucking summer, the summer that was going to destroy us.
“It’s in the ground beneath us,” I said. Then, “Duck!” Search lights were coming on from Hadestown, from towers closer than that that I hadn’t seen in the gloom. One of their beams was passing near us. We scuttled behind some rocks. “Someone’s coming,” I said.
“It’ll be fine, we can fight them,” you said.
I don’t know if you were trying to make me feel better or if you actually believed that. “No, we can’t,” I said. “These are gods.” The rumbling was louder now, and I could see vehicles coming closer. “Orpheus, run!”
We ran, but there was no point. Like I said: these were gods. The vehicles coming for us were trucks, the big bulky kind I’ve only ever seen a couple of times up top, and even on the rocks they could outrun us. They hemmed us in until we had to stop.
Oh, it was good to have your hand in mine then. I was still angry but I was more frightened than angry, and I was glad to have you beside me as Hades got out of his truck and walked toward us.
“So, my missing songbird was trying to make off with summer,” he said. His voice made the ground rumble almost as much as the trucks had. “I was wondering what had happened to you.”
“Stay back,” you said. Still so brave. So pointless.
“Or what?” Hades said. “You’re a singer, aren’t you? I hear music in your voice.” He laughed. “I don’t think you’ll get very far by singing at me, boy.”
“Stay back,” you said, “or we’ll open it.”
You held up the suitcase. I stiffened. So did Hades.
His voice was more careful when he spoke again. “I don’t think you want to do that,” he said, silky.
“I think we do,” you said.
“No, we don’t,” I said. “Orpheus, give it back. He’ll give it to Persephone, it’ll be fine.”
“I’m not letting him get us,” you said.
So brave. So stupid. Why couldn’t you have listened? Why couldn’t you have trusted someone else’s judgment for once in your life?
Why couldn’t I have been fast enough to keep you from doing it?
I wasn’t, and you did. Hades took one step forward, and fast as a thought, you lifted the suitcase and opened the clasp.
It was nothing like the first time. This wasn’t a crack to let out a beam of light, a whiff of summer air, a faint trace of power that only the gods would notice. This was a blazing sun unleashed in your hands, and a blast of power even I could feel. It drove me flat against the rocks. I lay there buffeted by wind, by sunshine, by the glorious smells of summer. There were screams filling the air, and over them was birdsong, the happy chirruping of busy summer trees. I even felt grass under my hands. For a full minute, two, I was trapped in a maelstrom of summer light.
And then it began to fade. I could lift my head again. The rock under my hands was bare again. I looked up to see Orpheus standing there, the only upright thing around; even the trucks had been tumbled away from us. Hades and whoever else had been with him was gone.
“What did you do?” I said, scrambling to my feet.
“It worked, didn’t it?” you said. “Hades is gone.”
“He’ll come back,” I said. I was pretty sure summer couldn’t destroy a god.
“He will,” said a new voice, “but that’s not your main problem.”
We looked around to see Persephone walking toward us from a low purple sports car. Unlike the trucks, it hadn’t been toppled by the wave of summer.
She looked at me. “You know the problem, don’t you?”
“It’s empty.” I wanted to cry. The suitcase was hanging open from Orpheus’s hand, and there was nothing inside it anymore. “Why didn’t you stop us?”
“Sorry, sugar, I’m not as fast as my husband,” she said. “I just got here.”
“That’s okay,” Orpheus said. So optimistic. “You’re Persephone, aren’t you? You can fill it up again.”
“What do you think the gods are, boy?” she said. “Do you think our gifts are limitless?”
Her face was cold when she looked at him, nothing like the arch smiles she’d been giving me inside. My stomach got colder to match. “Do you mean that’s it?” I said. “That’s all of summer?”
“All I’ve got,” she said, her eyes still on Orpheus.
“But…you’ll have more,” I said. I think I was begging. I didn’t want to believe it was true.
“Oh, eventually,” she said. “But it’ll be a long time before I can fill that suitcase up again. A long time where a lot of people unluckier than you are going to die,” she said to Orpheus.
Orpheus, you idiot, you were still trying to brazen her out. Or did you not understand, even then? “You wouldn’t have given it to Eurydice if it meant that much,” you said.
“I liked the way she thought,” Persephone said. “Didn’t see you coming.”
“Please,” I said. I felt cold and weak all the way to my toes and fingertips, the horror of it starting to set in. I was thinking, Is this it? Is this how the summers end? “There has to be something you can do.”
“Not me.” She pointed to Orpheus. “You.”
The first whiff of poisonous smoke. “What do you mean?” you said.
“You have a song, don’t you?” she said. “Let’s hear it.”
I think this time you understood before I did. The look on your face. I wish—I wish I’d understood sooner. I don’t know what I would have done, but I would at least have tried to use those last few moments better. But I didn’t.
You put the suitcase on the ground. You opened your mouth, and you began to sing.
Oh, that song. It will live in me forever, and at the same time I remember almost none of it. It wasn’t the kind of song you can remember. It was the kind of song that fills up your whole body and the air around you; the kind that’s like liquid sound pouring from the throat of the singer. It grew and grew, layering over itself like you were singing it outside of time, like you were many singers at once. The whole world, given over to song.
The air around us started to grow warm. The smell of flowers filled the air. And the suitcase began to glow.
How long did it take? It feels like an hour in my memory, but it was probably less. You started to glow, like the suitcase, and as I watched you became so bright that I could barely look at you. The light was pouring out of your skin, your eyes, your fingertips, the top of your head. You were on fire with your song. I knew by then that you’d been right before: it hadn’t been finished. That little snippet you sang for me when we met, that was nothing. This was so far beyond anything I’d heard you sing before that it was like the first time anyone had ever made music. You were pouring your very soul into the song, everything inside of you.
The suitcase was filling up. We were bathed in your music. And I began to be afraid.
I couldn’t look, at the end. Not out of fear; it was just too bright. My eyes weren’t made for light like that. I’m a human who needs food to survive, not music, and I couldn’t look at your song. You sang the air into a glowing star around you, and when you reached the end, the last perfect high note, the star winked out, and you were gone.
I looked then, through the spots that blinded my eyes. “What happened?” I said.
“He brought back the summer,” Persephone said. She handed me something. The suitcase, closed again.
I took it. It was warm to the touch. I felt dazed. “Orpheus…?”
“You heard him.”
I had heard him. I had watched him pour himself into the song. I looked down at the suitcase. “Is he…”
“Do you want to open it,” she asked, “and find out?”
I did want to. I wanted to open it, and I wanted to cry, and I wanted to hurl the suitcase at her and tell her and her limitations of the gods where to get off. I wanted to feel anything besides the numb disbelief that was filling me. I wanted Orpheus.
But my hands were full of summer.
“He could never sing it again, could he,” I heard myself ask, like it was someone else.
“Some things we can only do once,” she said. “He has some of the blood of the gods in him. He probably would come up with a new song eventually.”
I heard the “but” in her sentence. “So I can’t open it.”
“There’s always a choice,” she said, with a little of that archness from before.
I just stood there stupidly, not speaking. What else can mortals do, when the miracles of gods rampage through their lives? When the choices placed before them are too much for their hands to carry?
Persephone stood there in silence with me for a while. Eventually she nodded at the suitcase again. “Better get that to the surface,” she said. “My husband won’t be gone for long.”
And then she turned and left. Got into her purple car and drove away, back to her city and her husband and her glowing prison of night. I stood there, holding her fucking suitcase full of summertime.
I started walking eventually. I don’t remember doing it. What I remember, every step of the way, is the desire to open the suitcase. To get you out of it. I even tried to convince myself to do it: to ignore the other things that would happen if I did, just to hold you in my arms once more time. Those things were far away, on the surface, not anything I had to worry about right now.
But I’ve been too hungry for too much of my life. I can never stop thinking of the winter. I kept walking.
Eventually the train tracks led to a glimmer of light. I climbed out over boulders and scree into a wintry day. I walked a ways away from the tracks, far enough to be sure I was in the mortal world, and then I opened the suitcase.
Nothing happened. It was like Orpheus had said: there wasn’t anything to see or feel inside of it, here in the world under the sun. It was just an empty case.
I think I screamed. I kicked it a little, not enough to break it. Then I picked it up again and walked away. And that’s when I heard the first chorus of birdsong.
2 before Posiedon
Am I glad it happened? No. And yes. And no. I sit here beneath an olive tree in fruit a week after a snowstorm and the birds sing around my head and I want to burn it all down and scatter the ashes to the winds. I want to shout at the world that it doesn’t know what it’s been given, and who gave it to them. All the stupid people in the street, the happy cheerful ones who’ll never have to choose between Hadestown and death, I want to scream at them until my throat or their ears bleed. But what good would it do? You’re gone.
If you hadn’t come to find me—if you’d loved me less, or loved me more sooner when it would have counted—if you’d listened to me when I told you not to open the case. If you’d loved your music less and the summertime more.
But I suppose you did, in the end. You loved me, and the birds and the sky and the other people and every bit of the earth that needed summer to survive, and you gave it to us with your last breath. And so I can bear to remember you, whatever else you might have done. You gave me that: a breath of summer in my memory, to get me through the winter of missing you.
I suppose it will be winter again, soon. I don’t understand the ways of the gods. I’m harvesting again: filling up the storeroom against the winter months. It’s hard, when all I want to do is lie down and weep, but I am a mortal who needs food to live. I will not squander your gift to me.
Oh, why couldn’t your gift to me have been only yourself? Why couldn’t you have stood with me when the storm came? Could that not have been you, a different version of you, one I could have loved even more? I paint endless versions of you in my head, and I think about what I would trade for just one of them to return, and I know it’s no use. When I had the choice before me, I didn’t choose you. It was the right choice, and yet, and yet.
I still have the suitcase. It sits in the storeroom, bare and beautiful like my mother’s box. I don’t know what I will do with it, any more than I know what I will do with myself. Fill another notebook, maybe—I’m almost done with this one you gave me. I’ll buy endless notebooks, and sit and write, and wish you were here to read them.
The sun shines bright today. I take it in, as mortals can, alongside my daily bread. When I listen hard, some of the birds sound like you. I hope that someday it will be enough.