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Gods. Gods.
Odysseus had known the Underworld would be bad. He had worried for his crew, had taken care to brief them as much as he could without scaring them senseless. He’d known, in an abstract way, that he might see the ones he’d lost— that he might see Polites—but he realized now how naive he’d been.
He had thought he knew what he was getting into. He’d been wrong.
Erebos loomed around them, huge and imposing. Poplar trees stretched up into the gloom far above them, massive, spidering limbs stretching into the shadows. There was barely any light here, and what little there was pale and stark, cast by the river itself, but Odysseus could see that even the leaves were a pallid grey. They drifted down every now and then, shriveling to dust as they hit the water. The Styx didn’t take kindly to life.
A whimper behind him; one of his men had begun to quietly weep. Odysseus didn’t blame him. It was a battle to keep his eyes open and locked in front of him. He swore he could see faces in the water below them.
And then, gods be kind, he could see faces. Human forms rose, pale and smoky, from the river to surround the ship like sentinels. Dozens upon dozens, overlapping and mingling, pressing up against them from all sides. He recognized them.
He didn’t think he’d have to count to guess there were exactly 558 souls before him, their hands raised beseechingly, their mouths agape.
Captain! They mouthed. Captain!
Odysseus succumbed. He squeezed his eyes shut, hiding like a child from the monsters in the dark.
But the monsters were real.
The weeper behind him had quieted. The silence, somehow, was worse. Odysseus didn’t think he could raise his voice to cry out if he’d wanted to. He’d spent a decade in combat, but not even the worst of ten years of atrocity could touch this kind of awful, seeping horror.
He wondered if his nightmares from Troy would be here too. Iphigenia, proud and terrorstruck and so, so young; Patroclus, his body tortured and torn as they pulled him from Hektor’s spokes; the infant Astyanax falling, falling—his mother screaming below—striking the ground—
The quiet broke suddenly, like his ears had popped, and then he could hear them: his dead men’s voices were raised in lamentation. Some were weeping, or wailing, or screaming. Others spoke to him, accusing, begging.
“Why?” They asked him, their watery, distorted voices overlapping and melding together. “Captain, why?”
“Monster,” one of them hissed, and it rippled through the ranks. “Monster. Monster.”
Odysseus took a breath and fought the urge to cower.
“Full speed ahead,” he called back to his men, and they picked up the command like a lifeline, chanting it, staving off the accusing dead.
Then, as one, the masses drew apart. Odysseus couldn’t help but to look to his side. Stepping towards him through the rift was a single shade. This one’s face was clearer, and stretched instead in an expression of joy. His arms reached out to him, but it looked more like an invitation than a grasping supplication.
Odysseus recognized him. And then tears were filling his eyes, and the world blurred into color. He counted it a mercy. “Polites,” he breathed. Gods, even his voice, replaying those words he’d told him over and over—greet the world with open arms, my friend!—sounded the same.
He blinked the tears away, suddenly frantic to see him clearly again. “Polites,” he said again, reaching out over the side of the trireme’s hull to try to touch him, to grasp him, to pull him aboard and never let him go. Damn it, he thought, furious, heartsick. Answer me!
Polites’ eyes were as blank and dead as they hand been in the cave, staring out of his pale, red-splattered head. All this way, all this torment, and he wasn’t even here. This was a memory. Odysseus prayed this was just some last projected memory, a defense against invading mortals, or a trophy of the Styx herself. He couldn’t bring himself to imagine that this might be all that was left of his friend’s soul.
He had no funeral. An awful voice spoke in his mind. No coin; no pyre. None of them did. How can the dishonored dead reach Elysium?
No. He needed to believe Polites had been taken to the Judges, that he’d been granted his paradise. But all the same, as desperately awful as it was, he clung to the belief that Polites could see him now. That they might get a real goodbye. Odysseus stretched, rising onto his toes to try to reach him—
“Captain!” He heard, and then there was an arm around his waist pulling him back. They overbalanced and fell, and Odysseus hit his arm painfully on an oar. “I’m sorry,” he heard a man—Stenelaus?—babble, “I thought you were going to fall!”
“Man the oar,” Odysseus grunted, picking himself up. His arm ached, and he used the pain to ground himself. He covered his eyes with his hands and granted himself a moment to recoup his nerve.
Close your heart, he thought. Put your emotions aside.
He needed all the divine wisdom he could get here. He needed to survive. If he was going to get home, to get his men home, he could not give in to grief tonight.
Again he called, “Full speed ahead,” and again he heard the chant catch on as his men clung to the tether he’d thrown them as tight as they could. They would get through. They would get each other through.
So they went.
The prophet had spoken. He didn’t have a choice.
Prophecies were never simple things, but Tiresias’ had not been opaque; if he wanted to get home—and he would get home—he had no choice but to change himself. No, more than that, he would have to destroy a part of himself. He’d have to chip his soul into the shape of the god-thing that had massacred his brothers, to burn out whatever was left of the boy Penelope had fallen in love with, the one he’d been before this gods-damned, pointless war had begun.
He had to destroy every part of himself Polites had loved. Any piece he had touched.
He didn’t know if he could do it.
He didn’t have a choice.
Odysseus pulled his arms around himself, self-soothing the way he hadn’t since his father had given him the throne, and he sucked in a breath as pain spiked on his forearm. He looked down, startled to see blood striping his arm. It had colored the thin linen of his chiton, and even now, he watched it drip down his wrist to his hand, uncomfortably hot against his skin. He’d forgotten the wound he’d taken earlier. He didn’t think he’d even noticed it in the moment, but here in this gloomy, sun starved place, the frantic red of his blood was hard to ignore.
Warmth at his back, like a bolt of sunlight. Odysseus turned, nonplussed, and the shock nearly took him off his feet as he took in the shade of Polites behind him, still dead-eyed, his face still half-caved in and cut in a smile.
“Why are you doing this,” he begged it. The ghost didn’t answer, but those flat, bloodshot eyes moved from their sightless revery, locking onto his arm. He stumbled backward as it moved toward him, faster than he could process, and he cried out as it slammed into him, somehow corporeal but as clammy as a— well, as a corpse. He opened his mouth to yell again its mouth hinged open, but horror stuck the sound in his throat and he slammed his eyes closed against the sight of it, hot tears conspiring behind his eyelids as that cold, awful skin touched his own—
It was gone. And for a long moment, he didn’t know if he was alone again, if he had imagined it all or if he’d retreated so far from his fear and disgust that he just couldn’t sense it at all anymore, but when he found the nerve to open his eyes the shade was several steps back, its own hands covering its face. Odysseus froze, watching it, the skin of his arm still itching with the lingering sense memory of clammy lips.
And then the arms came down, and it wasn’t smiling anymore. It wasn’t bloody. Odysseus watched, breathless, as Polites looked up at him with bright, living eyes, and breathed.
“Captain?” He whispered, out loud, right there, alive, and Odysseus—
Odysseus turned and ran.
“Captain, wait!” He heard behind him, but he couldn’t stop, fleeing with all the pent-up adrenaline that had been building like water behind a wall since he’d gotten to this place. But the Underworld was dark and labyrinthine, and without a destination in mind, with only the thoughts of fleeing Polites and Tiresias and the crew he’d failed over and over again, he didn’t get far before indecision and the fear of getting lost entirely slowed him down. He drew to a stop, his chest heaving, and could only stand still, trembling with exhaustion and residual shock.
“Captain,” he heard, behind him, and he didn’t even have the energy to flinch. The shade must have seen it regardless, because he corrected himself. “Odysseus. My friend, it’s me. I swear to you, I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Prove it,” he said, his voice raw. He didn’t want to turn around.
The ghost with the voice of his dearest companion laughed a little, sad. “I guess I can’t blame you for that.” A shuffle, like a corporeal foot scuffing on the hard stone ground. “The first time I kissed you, we were seventeen.”
Odysseus was crying again. He gripped his hair with his hands and fought the urge to fucking lament, to scream to the gods how unfair it all was. What had he done to deserve this? What had he ever done to earn him the torment of seeing the broken, demented ghost of his best friend, of his lover, of being forced to relive one of the worst days of his life while he was living out another? “Polites,” he begged. He didn’t know what he was begging for. For him to stop, maybe. For him to keep going.
“Your father had told you to spend the day preparing for your trip to Sparta—” The visit that had started everything. It felt like a lifetime ago. “—and I snuck you out to the bluffs to get a moment away.” The sun had been setting, and his stomach had been eating itself with the anxiety of his first real diplomatic trip as king. Polites had always been able to put him at ease.
Odysseus sniffled out a laugh. “You were so afraid Penelope would ask you to leave court.”
“And you thought she’d have you sleeping in the dovecote when I made you bring it up.”
She hadn’t. I’m from Sparta, Odysseus, she’d said to him, looking amused and aggrieved at his obvious worry. I’d have thought it strange if you didn’t have a companion. He found himself smiling at the memory, and old habit had him turning to share the moment with Polites before he realized he was doing it.
Polites’ dark eyes were almost golden in the low light. Seeing him there, whole and perfect and solid, the truth of it all hit him like a stone.
“Are you really here?” He asked him. Even worse than afraid, worse than desperate, he found himself struggling to suppress the swell of thorny, stubborn hope filling him.
“Yeah,” Polites breathed, stepping closer. He hesitated, waiting for Odysseus to step away, but when he didn’t he raised a hand to hover over Odysseus’ cheek.
“What—” Odysseus’ voice caught. His heart was pounding. “What happened?”
Polites drew back slightly, his eyebrows drawing together. Odysseus had a moment of absurd recollection; Polites had made that precise face when they were ten, and Polites had stolen a basket of imported delian sweets from the kitchen, before he’d realized they were a surprise for Odysseus’ birthday. His mother had—
He shoved the memory away with force.
“Shades don’t remember the living,” he said quietly. “We— they—” he paused, looking conflicted, and started again. “Shades, in Asphodel, at least, exist with the emotions they felt as they died. Some play out the moments of their deaths in a loop forever, or repeat their dying thoughts. Some just… drift.”
Odysseus swallowed hard. He couldn’t imagine. He’d have to imagine, one day, wouldn’t he? Wasn’t this the fate that waited for him, for all of them? He shuddered away from the thought. “What changed?”
“Living blood restores.” He spoke quietly. In the dark, in the silence, his voice was dulcet. “A sacrifice—a bull or a sheep—might restore consciousness and memory." Or open the door. Circe's direction, the blood of a ram and a ewe to enter the Underworld- he'd thought it was a sacrifice. "But blood of a living man…” he shook his head. For a split second, Odysseus could only call the look on his face hungry. “Life is the only thing the dead remember well enough to crave.”
Odysseus drew his hand up to clasp the wound on his shoulder. It stung. “And it it… permanent?”
Polites shrugged, helpless. Odysseus hated seeing him look so lost, so far from the determinedly joyful man who had led him through ten years of war with a light in his eyes Odysseus had never seen extinguished. “I don’t know.” He flexed his fingers in front of him, and tried for a watery smile. There was blood on his teeth.“I feel alive. I can remember. I can breathe. I don’t think I’m a shade, anymore. But I don’t know if I’m…”
Odysseus steeled himself and reached toward him. A shade might pass through him, but if he could touch Polites again, if he could instigate contact—
Polites shied away. Odysseus drew back too, and they stood for a long moment in painful silence.
“Ithacan,” called a voice behind him, commanding in a way no mortal he’d ever met could claim, and Odysseus spun around. There was a woman there, and though she was several paces away, Odysseus had to raise his chin to meet her eyes. He only needed a glance to recognize her.
He took a knee. “Lady Persephone,” he said, his pulse spiking. He had never heard her described, but there was no doubt in his mind. He lowered his head respectfully, but he found it hard to pull his eyes from her. Her elegant red hooded chiton caught the dim light, and the delicate floral circlet tracing her forehead framed tumbling golden hair, running down to her hips. She didn’t look like a being of the Underworld, but there was something in the hardness of her eyes or the steel in her spine that was unmistakable: this was the Iron Queen, without mistake.
“Polites,” she said. Her voice didn’t change, but Odysseus thought there was something softer in it now. “What have you done, child?”
“My lady,” Polites whispered, “I… what’s happening to me?”
“You’ve escaped death,” she told him, tipping her head. “You are no longer a shade. But you are not among the living, either.”
“What does that mean?” He begged. Odysseus wanted to reach out to him, to hold him close and make it all okay. He hated hearing the tears build in his voice.
Persephone’s face splintered into a little smile. Odysseus’ nails bit into the flesh of his hand. “It means,” she said, reaching out to lay a hand on Polites’ head in benediction. “You are no longer mine. I know not what you are, but I have no right to keep you, should you not like to be kept.”
Polites looked at Odysseus, to Persephone, back again. He bunched his fingers around his thumb over and over, in staccato. It took Odysseus back: the early years on the training fields, just the two of them at first, before Eurylochus had joined them. Polites had broken his left hand twice before he’d ever seen war, and once in Troy, from poor form in his punch. His thumb had run a crooked line since they’d been fifteen. That old nervous habit was muscle memory. He’d never quite bested it all the way.
That bend in his finger was the first scar either one of them had borne. Now, Odysseus could name them all. He could tell the story of every inch of Polites’ body. The only person in the world he knew as well as he knew him was Penelope, and himself.
All those years together. All those battles, all those long nights in his tent after the councils of kings, all those days together under the Ithacan sun, under the Trojan one. All that fear and pain and wasted time, and Polites had never forgotten how to smile. He’d never lost his faith in a kindly world, and he’d never quite let Odysseus give up on the idea, either. It had kept him sane.
And how had Odysseus repaid him?
He hadn’t even gotten a funeral. He hadn’t only led him to a torturous death; he’d left him to an endless, wandering eternity beyond it.
He knew he deserved the look Polites gave him, like he was hesitating. Like if he had the choice, he might choose the Underworld over him. It didn’t stop it from hurting, like a wound left to rot.
“I just,” Polites started, and Odysseus was the man of words, the voice of the Achaeans, but he couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop the words coming out in an ugly rush.
“You don’t have to. I know—” he broke himself off with a great force of will.
But the look Polites turned on him wasn’t uncomfortable or grateful or apologetic, it was— it was the look of a man at the end of a sword, only just realizing their lifeblood was the wetness on their hands, and the ground under their feet was their grave. It was shocked, and it was wounded.
His mouth opened and closed, and Odysseus watched his throat work as he tried to form the words. Thank you, he would say. I can’t do it. Polites reached up to touch his own shoulder. Had that been the first place the club had struck him? Had that been the first of his mortal wounds?
“I don’t know,” Polites whispered, sounding wrecked. “I’m afraid that I’d…” die again, Odysseus filled in. Of course he’d be afraid to follow him again. How could he not be? Polites turned, the movement jerky and unpremeditated (like he had when they’d stolen into the kitchen when they were eight, intent on getting to the handpies before anyone else had the chance), back to Persephone. “Would it be safe?” He plead with her. “Would it be permanent?”
Persephone hesitated. “I don’t know, child, if this thing you’ve done is permanent,” she told him. “But it is done. It needn’t be done again.”
Done again? What needn’t be done again? Dying? Was she asking him to stay, after all?
“And I wouldn’t hurt them?”
“No,” Persephone said, thoughtful. “I don’t believe you would.” She stepped forward and bent down, and this time Polites didn’t object to the hand that reached to touch his face. “A second chance,” she said. “I didn’t think it possible.”
Odysseus could hardly breathe.
“I could, then?” Polites asked, barely a breath. “I could leave with him?” With him. With him. Odysseus’s heart beat out the rhythm of it. Leave with him.
“You might still suffer, there,” Persephone said. Her hand was gentle on Polites’ face. “There is nothing in the Underworld to hurt, or to mourn. Would you trade that away?”
“For him?” Polites broke eye contact. He looked away from the goddess before him to meet Odysseus’ gaze. His eyes were on fire. “Of course I would. I’d do anything.”
All gods.
“Go, then,” Persephone said. She swept a hand once more through his hair, and then she stepped away. “You have my blessing.”
“Thank you,” Polites said after her. “Thank you, Mother. Thank you.”
“I’ll see you again, child.” She smiled again, so gentle, so kind, and a chill ran down his spine. “Until then.”
His eyes went dry, and he couldn’t help but to blink. When he opened them again, she was gone. Polites reached out toward him, shaking only slightly. Odysseus gathered himself and took his hand. It was firm under his fingers. Cool, but not cold. It was real. And then Polites pulled him in, folding him into an embrace. Odysseus tucked his head under Polites’ chin, vestigial muscle memory older than his grip on a sword, and for a moment he was little again, shorter than Polites by a head, young and carefree, nothing to carry but the weight of his dreams.
Polites pulled back to smile at him. Odysseus felt tears gather again, felt his heart ache — fragile joy, now, brushing away the stains of fear and grief. “Shall we, Captain?”
He couldn’t bear not to ask. Not to make sure. “Are you certain? This is what you want?”
The look he gave him was so scolding, so fond, that it pulled a wrecked little laugh from Odysseus’ chest. “Come on, Odysseus. I want to see the sun.”