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The necklace sits heavy around her neck like a noose. It is made of two gold bands that take the form of snakes that twine their scaly bodies around the other in a constant embrace, their heads meeting at the front, not quite close enough for their mouths to meet, with glowing red eyes, and emeralds in their flanks. It is perfect, without fault. It is beautiful. But oh god is it cold, is it heavy!
Cadmus’ hand feels warm in hers, slightly damp. There is a bead of perspiration on his brow as Ares claps him on the back and laughs happily, and Harmonia is reminded that her new husband is mortal, with all those mortal frailties. He looks at the necklace and has no words to describe it. Mortals cannot see these things clearly. He looks at it closely, but without understanding, and says,
“Oh, it’s very pretty, my dear. It suits you. But it could never be as beautiful as you.”
She laughs and strokes his downy hair. “You’re sweet.”
She must admit, she’s surprised that she received a wedding gift from Hephaestus. He wasn’t known to be a man who let go of grudges easily. But he had humbly held out his present with almost shyness, patches of red on his face and neck. Oh, he’s blushing, he fancies you, how sweet, Cadmus had teased. Do be quiet, she’d scolded her young husband. He’s just trying to be nice.
When her eldest daughter Agave is married to the earth-man Echion, she passes the necklace on as a wedding present. In all those years, its shine hasn’t dimmed, the stone hasn’t been chipped. It still looks as it had done on her wedding day, in Hephaestus’ hands. Agave is delighted, claps her hands together and her mother fastens it around her neck while her sisters look on, envious. Agave preens herself slightly; Semele is the pretty one, the one that gets the men looking at her, for which Harmonia knows Agave is endlessly jealous. Here, at last, she triumphs over her younger sister. Harmonia wishes her girls wouldn’t be so bitter, so jealous towards each other, that Agave would lose the vitriolic edge to her tongue. Ino and Autonoe copy her, of course, they look up to her. Now they both crowd around her, asking to see her beautiful present.
When Agave’s boy Pentheus is born, she still glows with youth. She bounces him on her knee for a moment, having taken him from the nursemaid. Harmonia is glad to see the fondness with which she treats her son, when she isn’t too busy. Echion watches on, smiling. Always perfectly groomed, perfectly in control. The perfect man, of course, this soldier designed for war. What a good match for her daughter. Pentheus reaches out with curious hand for the necklace that lies across her breast, and Agave laughs and gently unfastens it and holds it in front of him. He runs his hands over it, fascinated, holding the cold metal against his cheek, and Agave drapes it over him, laughing and calling him pretty. Harmonia smiles.
Of course, how could she have known – poor trusting thing – that the necklace bore a curse. She was kind, she was innocent – it was her nature, she couldn’t help it. If she had known, she wouldn’t have bestowed it upon her daughters. All she knew, all she had been told, when she was in her wedding robe, was that it gave all who wore it eternal youth and beauty, so she insisted all her daughters share it.
Poor Semele was struck down first, the sweetest and the prettiest, the most like her mother. She had fallen pregnant, although she was not married, and had claimed the father was Zeus. One day the stench of burning flesh filled the palace, and a charred stain on Semele’s floor by the bed that could never be wiped away.
Then Ino, poor Ino, her and her husband stung into madness, so he killed their son Learchus like a hunter pursues a deer, and she cooked up a final meal for him on his homecoming – their other boy, Melicertes. She jumped into the water when she realised what she’d done, and Harmonia hears she became a goddess, but some human part of her daughter died that day.
Agave too was stung by the madness, their eldest daughter and their most honourable, the one to whom power and control meant the most. She lost her self-control, her power, and then her son, tearing him limb from limb in the mountains. The final thing she lost was her home in Thebes as she fled as an exile, stateless and homeless as the bacchant’s she’d mocked.
Finally Autonoe. What to say about Autonoe, other than her son died through no fault of her own, and surely that was the most pitiable fate of all. He went hunting one day with his hunting hounds and never returned. She didn’t find him at first, searching as she was for human bones, until she stepped on the fragile white lace of a fawn’s skeleton and her son, in her dreams, told her that was him, that was Actaeon, who had lost his human form and was hunted down by his own dogs he had raised by his own hand.
Of course, she shouldn’t be surprised at her own fate, she thinks in those final moments as she watches scales harden over her skin like the petals of a flower closing for the night, as her husband writhes beside her, half-human tongue flickering pitiably. He still has a man’s eyes. To be turned into snakes is an indignity, she thinks with wry amusement, and also some kind of sick joke. She remembers the snakes on the necklace.