I sang to them. Oh, did I sing!
The bloodless ghosts wept as they heard me, and wheel-bound Ixion ceased his pushing, and Sisyphus too halted in his endless task to listen, and even Tityus’ vultures looked up from their bloody work to give me what must be, for vultures, a glance of compassion. The inexorable Furies themselves, those hideous crones with black bat-wings and bloodshot eyes and the heads of dogs, stopped their vengeful shrieking and came almost timidly up beside me to touch the hem of my robe. Tears were rolling down their shriveled cheeks.
“Come with us,” these grim sisters said, and, gamboling ahead of me like a pack of cheerful schoolgirls, led me through the meadows until the gates of Hades’ royal palace rose before me.
Queen Persephone herself received me. I was grateful for that, for softening the heart of her pitiless husband would have been a much harder task. But Persephone knows what it is like to be swept off into Tartarus in the prime of one’s youth, for she herself, the happy daughter of Demeter who brings fruitfulness to the fields, was carried away by stark Hades as she played in the green fields to be his queen in the infernal regions.
“I am Orpheus,” I said. “You know why I am here.”
“Yes. You seek your wife.”
I gave her no chance then to tell me that I could not have her. I knew I had to reach her heart before she could utter any word of prohibition. Wielding my lyre as Zeus wields his thunderbolts, I wove a spell of song around the dark world’s queen. I sang her the song of the love of Orpheus and Eurydice and I sang her the song of the death of Eurydice and I sang her the song of my despair and my wanderings and the song of my hope of a reunion, and I implored her, in the name of that aspect of God that goes by the name of Love, to restore her to me, so that once again I could go through the world singing of love’s wonder and joy.
I knew I had won my case. There had to be some shred of pity in her, queen of Hell though she was, and there was. Even if it had not been foretold, I would have known that my music had moved her, for I could see a flush come to her lovely cheeks, as though she were thinking of what her life had been like in her happy youth in the fields of Demeter before cold Hades had come for her in his black chariot.
She said, because it was necessary for her to say it, “Orpheus, surely you must know that the dead may not leave here once they have come.”
“I know that. I ask you to make an exception, O Queen. I implore you: release her from your husband’s cold grasp.” And I struck my lyre again, quickly recapitulating the themes of each song, the song of love, the song of death, the song of mourning, the song of yearning for reunion with my beloved. “Her time will come again, for she is mortal, and Tartarus will have her once more,” I told her. “But she was taken too soon.”
“You know that that is untrue.”
“I do,” I admitted. “But I beg you to let me have her until she grows old. And then she will be yours again.”
Sadly she shook her head, and said that that was impossible. But I could see from her eyes that our words were only a ritual, that in fact we were playing out a conversation that would end in her capitulation.
“If you will not release her,” I said, “then I will not return from this place alone. And so you will have my death as well as hers.”
But it is not my destiny ever to die, at least insofar as death is most commonly understood, and Queen Persephone knew that. With a little sighing sound she turned to one of her handmaidens and asked that Eurydice be brought forth; and shortly forth she came slowly forward out of that group of newly arrived spirits by the pool of forgetfulness beside the white cypress.
She was limping a little, for the injury to her foot had not yet healed, and she was very pale, and her eyes, that had been so bright and clear, had the dull hopeless look of death in them. But I knew that she still had not tasted the waters of forgetfulness, for a look of shock and surprise came upon her face as she saw me, and she trembled and wept and came running in her limping way toward me and flung herself into my arms.
I held her while she sobbed.
“Oh, Orpheus, have you also died?” she asked, at last. And I told her that I lived, and that I had come to fetch her out of Tartarus, for by special favor of the gods she would live again as well. As I spoke I looked beyond her to Queen Persephone, and begged her with my eyes, and the Queen of Tartarus said, “Yes. She is yours.”
Just at that moment, of course, that stark monarch Hades emerged from some chamber deeper within the palace and, knowing at once what had taken place among us, glowered at the two of us and at his queen in a cold fury, and for a moment I thought all was lost. But Persephone turned upon her husband a look of such tender supplication that even the frigid heart of King Hades was melted by it. For a time he stood silent, unrelenting, intractable, but one could see that gradually his stern resolve was falling away; and in the end he yielded, with a brusque nod of approval, to his wife’s request. Eurydice had his leave to depart from his kingdom.
But it would not be as simple as that, as anyone might have anticipated. He said, in a voice as black as the blackest night, “There is a condition, Orpheus.”
Yes. It was no surprise. The gods are not gentle, and this one is the least gentle of them all. And I knew that he would attach a condition, and what that condition would be.
He is a terrifying deity, Hades is: black-bearded, sharp-featured, with a hard, cold face and dark eyes that flash like lightning. Like his brothers Zeus and Poseidon he is of towering stature and strength, and like them he bears himself with a regal presence befitting his power in the universe. Every aspect of him is frightening. But would one expect any softer look for the lord of the land of the dead? If I had not been born without fear I would have fallen to my knees before him. But I stood firm. Without releasing Eurydice, who stood coiled trembling against me, I stared steadily at him and awaited the pronouncing of the sentence.
I could go, he said.
I was free to make the journey upward into the land of the living, and Eurydice could go with me.
I must not turn to look at her, though. Not the slightest backward glance until we reached the upper air, or he would reclaim her in that instant and never relinquish her again.
Well, yes: it was as I expected. Nor did I dare quarrel with his decree. One does not negotiate with the king of Hell. I offered proud Hades my thanks, and made my grateful obeisance to gracious Queen Persephone, and turned from them, with Eurydice at my side, to begin the journey to the world of living men and women.
7
We said nothing as we set out on our way. The foggy haze of death still swirled about her spirit, and as for me, I moved as though moving within a dream. In the early stages of the journey I neither spoke nor touched my lyre’s strings; scarcely did I do so much as think. Onward we walked, Eurydice always following a few paces behind me; and though the denizens of the Netherworld peered at us with a kind of blank-eyed curiosity as we passed, I did not meet their glances, nor did I pay heed to the idle questions they called out to us.