30 minutes ago
Chapter 12
Where He Fell
The cupbearer's breath showed white.
She stood flat against the passage wall with the rest of his brother's household to give the two kings room, and each breath hung before her bloodied mouth for a moment before it thinned. Beside her, a steward's did the same. In all the years since the first fixtures were lit under the ice, no one in Erebos had seen their own breath.
The cold had followed them in from the court.
Hades turned in at the first doorway past the entrance, walking backward with Ares's shoulders in his arms. It was the room where the watch on the Sovereign's court took its meals: bare walls, a shelf beside the door, and a table cut from a single slab of grey stone, long enough for six men to sit at. Someone had left a cup on it. Zeus knocked it to the floor with his elbow, and they laid his son down.
Ares lay with his head toward the door, but Hades took him under the shoulders again and turned him on the stone until his head lay to the wall and his feet to the door. The lamp slid on his chest, and Hades caught it.
"What are you doing?"
"What was done for Hephaestus."
Psyche had done it for his nephew, and sat on the floor beside the lamp afterward.
Zeus looked at him across the table.
Hades moved the lamp to Ares's feet. The eyes were a little open, the way a man's are when he is listening hard, and he laid his palm over the lids to ease them shut. The jaw had begun to sag. His nephew's had been bound with a strip of linen knotted at the crown, and there was nothing in this room to bind it with.
"I need linen to bind his jaw."
Zeus looked at his son's mouth. Then he took the hem of his own feast tunic in both hands and tore a strip from it the length of his arm, and held it out across the table.
Hades took it. He drew the linen under the jaw and up on either side of the face, and knotted it at the crown, in the dark hair. He laid the hands one over the other on the chest. They were broad across the knuckles, and the bronze bracers were still buckled at the wrists. Above them the feast linen had dried stiff and brown to the elbow. None of it was Ares's own blood.
He had kept his brother's household in the court until his brother asked. Ares had died while they argued.
Hades straightened the legs, one and then the other.
Thanatos had followed them in. He took the oil flask down from the shelf without being told and set it on the end of the table for Hades to fill the lamp. Thanatos struck a light and held it to the wick, and the flame took, small and upright, at Ares's feet.
Zeus unpinned his mantle. He laid it over his son from the chest down, the gold thread dull under its soot, and drew it straight across the bracers.
Out in the passage, a woman began to sing.
It was the lament for the dead, sung low enough not to wake the children at her knee, and every weight along the passage stopped shifting to hear it. Hades knew the voice. He had heard it once before, forty years ago at a wedding on Olympus, raised with her sisters' in the marriage hymn, and a hall full of gods had gone still for it then. At the end of each verse she sang Ares's name, and two or three women farther down the wall answered it after her, softly.
Zeus stood at his son's head and kept his eyes on his face. When the women answered Ares's name, he shut his eyes.
Hades turned to Thanatos. "Send for the Embalmer."
Thanatos bowed and was gone.
For centuries, the man Hades had named had helped Thanatos with the hounds, and no one had ever sent for him to do anything else.
"Who?" Zeus asked.
"A guest of mine."
"You don't keep guests."
"I keep one."
Hermes had brought him through the Greek Pyle long ago and paid Charon the fare for them both. By the time word reached Hades and he walked down to the Gates, the hounds were lying at the stranger's feet, and the third had its head on his knee. Hermes had asked him, for once, to let the man stay, and to leave his name out of the record if he did. Hades had granted both requests. The record named him by his work, and so did Hades.
Hades left the table and took the place just inside the door. Zeus stayed at his son's head.
Hermes appeared in the doorway. Apollo's lyre was still slung across his back. He looked at the table, and at his father, and came no farther than the wall beside Hades, where he set his back to the stone and crossed his arms. Zeus's eyes remained low.
From the door Hades could see down the passage, where his brother's household had sunk down along the walls, too tired now to stay on their feet. Aglaea sat among them with her daughters asleep against her, still singing. Thanatos turned in from the stair at the far end, and a man walked a pace behind him. She sang on as they passed.
He was tall and narrow through the shoulders, his skin a dark, even brown, his black hair swept back off his forehead. His face was young, as young as it had been the day Hades found him at the Gates. The brows lay heavy and straight, and his mouth was set a little down at the corners. He wore the black of Hades's court, but in linen. Nothing fastened his coat. A broad band of the same black crossed him from one shoulder to the opposite hip and was wound once about his waist, and its end hung loose to his knee and swung as he walked. There was no metal on him anywhere: no clasp, no ring, no pin.
He stopped in the doorway, an arm's length from Hermes.
Hermes uncrossed his arms. He said one word, low, in a language Hades did not know. The man's hand closed on his wrist, once, and let it go.
Then he turned to the king and inclined his head, no lower. The scent of dry salt and cedar followed him in. He looked past Hades to the table, and Zeus, after a moment, gave up his place at the head of it.
The Embalmer set his bundle on the end of the table beside the oil flask and turned back its cloth to reach the folded linen at the bottom of it. Above it lay the rest of his trade. A bronze hook. Linen rolled tight in narrow bands. A stoppered jar. A knife of black volcanic glass, knapped to an edge. Hades knew the kind; the islanders on Melos worked it. But when he read it, it answered like none he had touched before. It had come out of no rock in his kingdom, nor any he had walked across in the world above.
The Embalmer lifted the mantle from Ares, folded it in three, and held it out to Zeus.
"I laid that on him."
"Nothing of wool goes with the dead."
His Greek was plain and exact. He stood with the folded mantle held out between his hands, and waited.
Zeus took the mantle.
The Embalmer unpinned the bronze wheel at Ares's shoulder, drew the oxblood cloak out from under him, folded it close around the brooch, and held that out as well. Zeus took it. Then the Embalmer turned Ares's wrist on the stone and found the strap that closed the bracer.
Zeus put his hand over the stranger's.
"Leave them."
The Embalmer looked at him. Then he took his hand from the bronze and inclined his head.
Zeus's eyes went over the instruments in the open bundle beside his son.
"What is he going to do with my son?"
Zeus had put it to Hades, but it was Hermes who answered from the wall.
"Keep him as he is. It takes seventy days."
Zeus looked at him then, for the first time since he had come in. Hermes looked back at him and said nothing more.
"Seventy days. And then what?" Zeus said to his brother.
"He will rest in a tomb in Erebos."
"No. He goes home."
"To what? Olympus is dark."
"I will light it again."
"In seventy days?"
Zeus looked down at the folded wool in his arms.
"He will be entombed as a king's son. You have my word."
Zeus looked at him for a long moment. Then he let his breath out hard through his nose, the way he had when they were young and Hades had won an argument Zeus meant to win himself.
His eyes went to the wall, toward the court beyond it.
"Then he rests where he fell. Not some hole."
Hades looked up at the ceiling for the space of a breath, and then back at his brother.
The Embalmer's eyes went from one king to the other, and then to Hermes at the wall. Hermes's mouth moved at one corner, the nearest thing to a smile his face had held all night.
Hermes, it seemed, had been talking about the family.
The Embalmer drew the folded linen from the bottom of his bundle and shook it out. He wound it about Ares over his stained feast clothes, from his feet to his crown, the bracers under it, and closed the bundle over the rest of his tools.
In the passage, the three Kakodaimones left standing of the twelve came with a bier. They lifted Ares onto it between them and carried him out, the Embalmer leading their path down toward his house by the Gates on the city's lowest tier. The household pressed back against the walls again to let them by. Hermes followed the bier out with the lyre on his back. Zeus stood in the doorway with his son's cloak and his own mantle in his arms, and watched them to the stair.
On the empty table, the lamp burned on.
Hades crossed back through the entrance into the court.
The palace guard were bringing out the dead. They had laid his own along the foot of the wall beside the entrance, nine grey cloaks in a row, and the Atharim lay heaped where they had fallen at the edge of the ring. Morpheus stood among the guard directing them, his black cloak torn at the hem, the sword Hades had given him held point down at his side. The only sounds were the scrape of the dead being drawn across the stone and the guards' breathing, harsh in the cold.
The court was colder now than it had been at dawn. Under the dead fixtures the pylons stood grey in the half dark, and frost had started in the joints of the paving, a white line in every seam, spreading out from the ring toward the entrance.
He walked the row of his fallen Kakodaimones. He had chosen every one of them for this court himself. At the last of them he stopped, and drew the grey cloak straight over the man's chest where it had folded back.
The captain of the palace guard stood at the heap of Atharim, looking from the bodies to his king.
"Put them out on the ice beyond the Gates, and leave them."
The captain bowed. Two of his men had already stooped to the nearest body. They straightened, and looked at each other, and stooped again.
Morpheus left the guard to their work and crossed to his king.
"My lord. Icelus has been alone on the elm since the night began."
"Go."
Morpheus bowed and was gone through the entrance, his sword still bare in his hand.
The four stakes lay where they had tipped in the sagging paving. Hades crouched beside the nearest. Its foot was wrapped in a thin collar of stone where the silver bands held it, and in the light from the far end of the court he could see what was in it: grey overworld rock with a few threads of violet through it, the poorest baetylus he had seen worked in a long time.
Scraps. With scraps like these they had killed the Pyle he had kept for his brothers, and every light in this end of his court.
Four stakes like these had held a ring he could cross in twenty strides. A field reached only as far as the quality of the baetylus could carry it, and stone this poor would carry it no farther. Wherever the Atharim had found this stone, they had found nothing better. At least their fields would be small.
He rose, and for the first time since the guest room he drew a full breath.
The Antistrophe lay across the court where he had flung it. He stood over it. It was a bar of dark iron the length of a man's arm, banded with silver at its foot where the stone was held, the same make as the stakes. It had taken Ares's voice and turned it back into him, mid-word.
He had a guardsman carry it away with the stakes, down to Kleitos in the Deep Works, to be taken apart.
The chamberlain was waiting at the entrance when Hades turned back to it, a single roll held out in both hands and the rest gathered in the crook of his arm.
"Majesty. The names of everyone who came through the Pyle." A breath. "The living, and the dead, as far as I could learn them."
Hades took it and unrolled a hand's breadth. The writing was small and even. Ares's name headed the dead. Below them, the living ran on in the same hand to the foot of the roll.
"You wrote this since dawn."
"It is my office, Majesty."
Hades rolled it closed and put it inside his coat, against the lead.
In the guest rooms off the passage, the fixtures had warmed to their full gold. Frost lay on the two upturned cups on the side table, white over their bases, and in the grain of the quartz between them. He laid his palm flat on the wall the room shared with the court. The cold came through the stone into his hand.
The fixtures that had kept the ice out of the court were dead, and nothing would wake them. Until his artificers cut new ones, only stone would keep that cold out of his palace.
When the court was empty, he read the palace for iron. Iron in a man's hands was weight like any other; only driven into his stone did it leave a blank in his reading. There was no blank anywhere. He cut a block from the bedrock beneath the threshold and drew it up, and the court dropped from sight behind it.
He turned back down the passage.
The children were asleep along the foot of the wall under a steward's cloak, the smallest of them with her head in Aglaea's lap. Aglaea was still singing, so quietly now that the words reached Hades only as he passed. Farther on, Zeus sat on the floor among his people with his back to the wall, the mantle and the oxblood wool folded across his knees, and the bronze wheel in his fist.
Hades stopped beside him.
His brother looked at the far wall. His fist tightened on Ares’s brooch until the pin stood out between his knuckles.
Hades stood there a while longer. Then he walked on.
Every soul in Hades's kingdom had its place by law. These had come under none of his.
Thanatos stood at his shoulder again.
"Ask the queen to come to Erebos."
Thanatos looked down the passage at the children asleep against the wall, and back at his king.
"My lord."
The binding told Hades where she was: awake, in her own palace in Elysium, crossing a room.