Alcestis: A Novel

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Review “[A]n engaging, subversive reimagining of the tale of the eponymous Greek heroine who is upheld as a shining example of the dutiful wife for her selfless sacrifice.  Katharine Buetner’s Alcestis is a far more willful heroine, and her encounters with the gods of the underworld resonate with a genuine sense of the numinous.”—Jacqueline Carey, Namaah’s Kiss and Kushiel’s Dart “Beutner renders her multilayered heroine with beauty and delicacy, and concerns herself with no less than the intricacies of the soul.”—Publishers Weekly “Everyday life in the ancient world, a no-escape-clause afterlife in the underworld, vulnerable mortals, and passionate and tormented gods—all are imagined with intense actuality in a novel that is as intoxicating and hypnotic as the sacred smoke inhaled by the oracles.”—Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner’s Luck “Beutner spices up this classic tale with a decidedly Sapphic flavor.”—Booklist About the Author Katharine Beutner grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She earned a BA in classical studies from Smith College in 2003 and an MA in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin, where she is currently a PhD student in eighteenth-century British literature. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PrologueThey knew the child’s name only because her mother died cursing it, clutching at the bloodied bedclothes and spitting out the word as if it tasted sour on her tongue. After a few minutes her tongue stilled, and her limbs too, until she lay on the bed gray and cold as stone. The servants stood around the bed in a rough circle, looking down at the tangled mess the queen had made and thinking of the rituals her death would require, the sacrifices, the burning herbs nailed in clusters to the mud-brick walls. The room smelled of copper and sweat, as if a great battle had been fought within it. Anaxibia had warred with death and lost; for the moment, at least, her baby daughter had won.They’d wiped the babe off, tied the cord, and swaddled her in a blanket. She squalled at fi rst, face purple with incoherent rage, but then she lay quietly in her cradle as her mother’s body hardened and cooled. She knew nothing of death. She came into the world as any girl might, unexpected, tolerated. If she hadn’t been a royal child, she might have been left alone on a hillside to die nameless beneath the summer sun. As it was, Pelias had no time for the naming of girl children. The king would abandon the palace after hearing of his wife’s death, taking a group of his best fi ghting men to hunt boar for the funeral feast, and would not return until the morning of her burial day. For two days the palace would be empty except for the children and the servants and the slaves and the animals and the body of the dead queen, swelling in the heat. The queen’s spirit had already departed, trailing after the god Hermes like a cloak in the dust. The god had looked down at the baby in her cradle, a long, silent look, but she had not seen him—or if she had, she had not cried at the sight.But now the baby wriggled, bleated like a lamb. The queen’s body servant sighed and wiped her bloody hands on her shift. Stirred out of reverie, the other women shook their heads and blinked in the low light.The women leaned down and rolled Anaxibia’s body over so they could strip the linens from the bed. The queen lay slumped on her side, her brown braids mussed and tangled, her face smooth. She was twenty-four years old. The baby girl in the cradle was her fi fth child, and the other children had been waiting for hours, clustered outside the bedchamber, to see their mother and new sibling. Their thin voices slipped into the room beneath the closed door. The women looked at each other. “Go on,” said the head maid, nodding to two of the others. “They must be told. And the king too.”The chosen messengers left. After a moment, the children began to wail outside the door, their cries fading as the maids hurried them out of the women’s quarters. The head maid turned back to the dead queen, then looked at the serious faces of the two other serving women who’d stayed behind, looked over at the baby in the cradle. She bent down to pick up the child and balanced the baby’s small damp head against her shoulder. “Alcestis,” she said and looked to the others for confirmation. “That what you heard too?”Dry eyed and solemn, they nodded. They’d seen this bloody struggle too often to weep. “Alcestis,” said Anaxibia’s body servant, and looked at the baby, who had fallen asleep in the head maid’s arms. “Poor thing.”The head maid put the baby down on her back in the crib. She sent a servant to fetch the kitchen maid who’d just borne a son, sent another to call the men to bring oils and cloths. The wet nurse took some time to arrive, but Alcestis did not cry. She lay in the cradle and listened to the skim and slap of the women’s hands spreading oil on her mother’s fl esh, the silky whispers as they combed out and rebraided her mother’s hair. She breathed in the smell of the room, the bodily stench of failed combat with the gods, the reek of a thread snipped. The women watched the baby with nervous eyes as they worked. The two who lived to hear of Alcestis’ death—if one could call it death—would recall her birth then, and mutter to each other about the way the girl had opened her tiny mouth to suck in the fouled air as if it could replace her mother’s milk. Perhaps she’d grown used to death then, they’d say. Perhaps she’d been hungry for it all her life.I don’t remember those moments, those sounds, those smells. But this is what I imagine from what I was told as I grew older. This, said the maids, the servants, my sisters—this was how your story began.When I was eight years old, I lived with my sisters in the stuffy upper quarters of the palace at Iolcus. We had a small room to ourselves, a chamber that adjoined thefemale servants’ quarters, big enough to hold the bed, a bench, and a small table. It was the room we’d all been born in, the room our mother had died in, though only Pisidice was old enough to remember the disaster of my birth. The room no longer held any traces of our mother. It was a girls’ room now, temporary and  unembellished, a place for princesses to sleep and grow until we were old enough to be married and carried away.I slept with Hippothoe and Pisidice, jammed in the middle because I was the smallest. Pisidice came to bed smelling of crushed fl owers and wet linen and kicked in her sleep. Hippothoe smelled of garlic and sweat, but it was a warm smell, not unpleasant,and on this night I’d fallen asleep curled up against her bony shoulder with my nose pushed into her skin. The bedchamber was dark and quiet when her writhing woke me. I felt the hot point of her elbow in my chest, quickly withdrawn, and then a light hesitant touch on my arm. I sat up half alert in the darkness and scrubbed at my face with my palms. Hippothoe looked up at me, eyes panic-bright, hands fluttering between us in time with her wheezing breath. She shook her head once and I understood.She was always sorry for waking me, always spent her regained breath on apologies I didn’t need. She had these panting fits often, sometimes only nights apart, and I knew we would both be limp and lazy in the morning—but it was my duty to get help, like Hippothoe’s own little goddess of health, and I’d grown so used to the role that I almost enjoyed it. I squeezed her hot hand, climbed down from the bed, and stumbled off to wake the servants in the outer room.The head maid sighed when I touched her, a low, miserable sound, as if she could not bear being dragged from sleep. But she hauled herself out of bed and followed me into the bedchamber to fetch Hippothoe. My sister sat on the edge of the bed, shoulders hunched and heaving, the ends of her hair brushing her hands as they twisted in her lap. She leaned on me to stand, her body shaking as we walked, and I felt strong as a tower beneath her arm.The head maid led us bleary eyed to the hearth, stepping over slaves sleeping in the halls. We stumbled down the stairs and past our father’s empty throne. In the kitchens the head maid boiled water so Hippothoe could breathe the steam andrubbed cut garlic under her nose as she gasped and coughed.The air grew thick and my shift clung to my body, clammy with steam and fear. The head maid and I prayed to Apollo, running through the chant we said so often that I worried the god would tire of our entreaties. I believed then that he listened to me when I prayed. I imagined him stealing silently among us, reaching out to touch Hippothoe’s chest with one golden-glowing hand, calming her, fixing her. I held my breath when Hippothoe choked and let it out only when her wheezing smoothed and slowed.In the bedchamber, Pisidice still slept heavily, only muttering a little when Hippothoe and I collapsed onto the bed and tucked our damp bodies together. I put my cheek against my sister’s shuddery chest and my arm along her neck. We looked like one gray-limbed creature, one divine monster, one flesh. I thought we would never be separated.“Sorry,” Hippothoe whispered to me as faintly as if she spoke across a great distance, while I stroked her forehead. “Alcestis, sorry.”*In the morning Hippothoe’s breath smelled faintly sweet, like a baby’s, from the honey the head maid had given her for her roughened throat. I lay beside her, my back to Pisidice and my cheek hot on the linens. I had to pee. I’d been thinking of gettingup to use the privy by the kitchens before the heat made the smell too terrible. I liked to walk through the quiet palace, to watch the servants and slaves twitch in their dreams like puppies, to watch my sisters snort and toss in the bed. But I waited, for I wanted Hippothoe to wake enough to pet my hair. On some mornings she’d drift into sleep again with a hand curved around my skull while I listened to her heart thud beneath her ribs.Now she stirred, restless and exhausted, and I felt Pisidice bolt into alertness with an allover twitch of her limbs. My eldest sister yawned, rolling, and kneed me in the back. Then she slipped out of bed and went to sit by the narrow window, settling in to watch the shepherds in the distant fi elds and gaze hungrily at the road as if she expected a visitor. Pisidice did this every morning.She was twelve years old and desperate for marriage. “No one’s coming, you know,” Hippothoe said, and coughed hard, jarring me. She rested her thin hand on top of my unruly head.“No suitors today, Lady Pisidice,” I echoed, emboldened by Hippothoe’s words. Pisidice did not look away from the window; I wasn’t worth her attention. She’d left her comb and jar of oil on the sill and now she rubbed the oil between her palms and smoothed it over her hair, combing it through while she looked out over the royal road. The oil made her braid heavy and sticky; it made her smell like every other woman in thepalace. I did not like it.I began to tell her so, but Hippothoe hushed me and eased me up to sit, levering herself out of bed. “Let her be, Alcestis,” she said, only half mocking. “She has to prepare herself.”Hippothoe didn’t bother with her hair. It stood out around her head like a cloud, wavy fi ne and softer than wool. On some mornings she let me braid it and I wove the light brown strands about my fingers like rope. My own hair grew in bristling waves just past my chin. I’d had a bad fever the year before, bad enough that I had prayed to Apollo for my own health, and the head maid had chopped it off. Now I tugged a comb through it a few times before giving up. Pisidice turned her sharp eyes toward me.“Really, put on a headband,” she said. “You look like a boy. No man’ll ever want to marry you.”Hippothoe, standing over the basin of water by the door, barked a laugh. “Perhaps she’ll have better luck finding a husband if she does look like a boy.” Pisidice pitched the comb at her. Neither of them would tell me what they’d meant, though Hippothoe began snickering again as she yanked her shift over her head.Our mother’s body servant helped us dress. Pisidice was old enough to wear a maid’s bodice, though she hardly filled it out. She was lucky she still had time to grow some breasts before she’d have to wear a matron’s open bodice. I plucked at the lacings until she whirled around and smacked my fingers.The body servant waited, hands hovering in the air, until we’d settled down, then fi xed each lace so they lay in a neat ladder across Pisidice’s narrow back. Pisidice turned, cupping the servant’s hands in her own, and nodded at her as graciously as aqueen. Practicing. I rolled my eyes and chewed on the skin next to my thumbnail while Hippothoe tied back my mess of hair. I had to look presentable for the ritual.It was the tenth day of the new year, the day of the dead vessel, and Hippothoe and I could not work or eat until we’d done the ritual in honor of our grandparents, Poseidon and the lady Tyro. My stomach already felt hollow. I hung near Hippothoe as we went downstairs, shoving my hand into the crook of her elbow. The skin below her eyes looked purplish gray, stained with weariness, but still she smiled and let me press close.Pisidice was too busy to help. At twelve she ran the kitchens and supervised the slaves and decided our chores for the day, whether we ought to weave or spin, direct the washing or work in the kitchens. When we married, we would be mistresses of our own palaces, and Pisidice wanted nothing more. I watched her confer with the head maid, Pisidice’s dark head tilted up toward the older woman’s, her face serious. The slaves had prepared a place for the dead vessel; the omens of the skies had been propitious. It was the right hour for honoring the god of the sea, our grandfather, our household lord—and our absent grandmother. Tyro still lived, but elsewhere; Pelias was not a man who thrived on the care of his mother, and when his father, Cretheus, had died he’d installed her in a smaller villa in the mountains, given her thirty slaves, and sent my young brothers to see her on days when she would need help to perform the family rituals. I had seen her only once, several years before, and even then she’d been a stooped, gray woman, few signs left of the beauty that had drawn Poseidon to her. She had shouted at Pelias; I remembered that because I had enjoyed it so much. But despite their rancor we celebrated her often in ritual, reminding Poseidon of his love for her and his duty to Iolcus.“It’s ready,” Pisidice said to us, distracted. “Go on.”I peered through the kitchen doors to the hall. I had not heard Pelias that morning; he never spoke more quietly than a bellow, and my sisters and I tracked him by sound. If we could, we kept away from him in the mornings, when he shouted atthe servants who woke him. We’d retreat to our quarters before he returned to the palace for his midday meal, sit on the bed together, and pick at our haul of cakes and cheese until a slave came to fetch us again. But today was a ritual day, and it wouldnot be easy for us to avoid our father.Hippothoe waited, silent. Finally Pisidice sighed. “He’s in the stables,” she said, and Hippothoe glanced at me and nodded. She took my hand and led me through the hallways to the great hall. A few villagers stood by the doors, awaiting our father; in the afternoons, Pelias sat court here and settled the quarrels of his subjects. He did not yell much. Men would leave with chastened looks, like misbehaving boys called to task, and walk down the broad porch steps speaking of Pelias’s fairness, his calm, kingly demeanor. I wanted to roll my eyes whenever I heard them talk of his virtues, but I was convinced that Pelias would appear to catch me before my eyes had made one revolution in my head. Even though I hadn’t heardPelias’s voice, even though Pisidice had said he was elsewhere, I looked for him nervously as we entered the great hall. I saw Hippothoe look too.The two-handled vessel sat by the round hearth, where Hippothoe had placed it on the fi rst day of the new year after the slaves brought it up from the shore; we girls were forbidden to walk into the water, even for ritual purposes. The seaweed circling the vessel’s base had stained the clay white. Hippothoe knelt before the jar, picking the seaweed away and passing it to me as she whispered thanks to the local gods of the shore for giving us their harvest. I wound the crackling black-green strands into a loose coronet and placed it ceremoniously on her bent head. She made a little ugh face. We both preferred the laurel garlands of Apollo to our grandfather’s brackish crowns.Most of the seawater in the jar had disappeared into the air, but some still sloshed in the bottom. It smelled like Iolcus concentrated: salt and fi sh and stagnation. We hefted the vessel between us, but it wobbled as I fl exed my pinched fingers, spattering water onto the stone floor. Hippothoe shot me a dark look. The seawater was a gift, and if Pelias saw it slop—but he hadn’t. He wasn’t there. We hobbled out through the entrance hall and the open doors to the porch and slaves bustled around us as we put down the vessel. One of the kitchen boys brought out a mallet and set it beside Hippothoe, bowing as its head clunked on the fl oor. She smiled up at him. The rest of the porch was empty, which was only right, for it was our territory in this warm season. Here we sat in warm weather, spinning wool, letting the wind gods stroke our faces. The work of spinning heated the calluses on my fi ngers and cramped myhands, but on the porch we could whisper to each other without distracting the men inside the hall, without being shouted at for our noisiness or dragged back to our bedchamber by our furious father.Hippothoe knelt again, facing the sea and the jar. She motioned to me to fix my hair and held out her hand for mine. The creases of her palm sparkled with sweat. I swept hair out of my eyes, knelt, and gripped her hand, my head bent for prayer. “Earth-shaker, sea-controller, grandfather,” she said, her voice still scratchy. “We ask your protection this year, for the house of Tyro’s children. For years you have given it, in recognition of your love, and for years we have repaid your protection with honor, foryou are mighty and just, Grandfather, and we know it well.”While she spoke I studied the black painting on the sides of the jar, the warriors crouching there, their wedge-shaped beards. They had frightened me when I was younger, but the god my grandfather frightened me more. I imagined him grapplingwith my faded grandmother on the sands and was struck with a giddy terror that made me sink my teeth into my lip. If I laughed and Pelias heard me—or if Poseidon did—Hippothoe continued: “We ask your care for the house of Iolcus, for Pelias and Pelias’s children. Poseidon, Grandfather, accept this vessel we have made for you, to show how we honor your love. We offer you fealty, lord. For the house of Iolcus, I, Hippothoe, granddaughter of Tyro, second youngest, blessed by your hand, do consecrate this vessel to you.”She let go of my hand, pulled the crown of seaweed from her head, and pushed it through the mouth of the jar, then looked up, almost instinctively, toward the walls and the shore beyond.We drew breath at the same moment and held it, waiting, our chests full of uncertainty. Would he come? Would he be kind to us if he did? Would Pelias be pleased to see his father? Would I be pleased?I’d seen my grandfather only once that I remembered, though Pisidice said he’d come to the palace after my birth. He had come too for Acastus’s growth-day ritual. He had been great and fearsome, more fearsome than my father, and he’d left his trident humming in the corner of the great hall all day. Ever since, the stones in that corner had been swollen and crusted with salt; the kitchen slaves would scrape it off sometimes, those who dared to touch it, but it still crept back, glittery white. Mostly I remembered Poseidon’s thick sea-clogged smell, and the way his black hair lay dull and damp against his skull, and the pattern of drips he’d left on the fl oors, like stories marked out in the stars. I didn’t expect him to appear now—there was a reason the words of the prayer contained no specific invitation—but he might. He always might come, always might be submerged offshore, circled with Nereids, waiting to burst from the surf or to drag down some girl careless enough to edge her toes into the water.We’d waited long enough. Hippothoe stood and ushered me behind her, then bent for the mallet. She swung it over her head and down: the jar shattered, seawater sprayed our ankles, pieces of clay clattered wetly on stone. Hippothoe’s skirts were soaked.The silence of the courtyard seemed to swell for a moment, as if we’d been swallowed by some invisible wave, and then the noise of slaves and stable boys broke in upon us. The ritual was done. Our brothers were watching us from the edge of the courtyard,tall Acastus staring, Pelopia darting sideways glances as if embarrassed. I nudged Hippothoe, who was shaking out her wet clothes. “They’re here,” I hissed at her, and she nodded—quick, angry jerks of her head.“I see them,” she said. “Behave yourself, Alcestis.” It was a fair warning. I was already drifting away from her toward the boys. Acastus was eight years older than I and Pelopia six—my mother, Anaxibia, had produced a child every two years until my birth, first two boys, then two girls, then me, taking a boy’s place. I saw my brothers at meals and sometimes glimpsed them in the mornings if we got out to the courtyard quickly enough, but I had hardly spoken to them for over three years. Before I turned five I’d been allowed to roam the palace without a sister to escort me; a quiet girl child could move about as freely as a shade. Acastus had been constantly surrounded by a group of young men, boys from the countryside whose fathers had sent them to the palace to earn our father’s favor. They lay about in the courtyard, drinking wine and eating the food the servants brought them and talking of shooting contests or women or animals they’d killed, and rarely noticed me fi ngering the pommels of their swords and tracing the grommets on their leather armor. When Acastus caught me, he used to swing me into his arms and let me pat at his cheek like a baby, feeling the prick of his golden stubble beneath my hands. Acastus looked like none of Anaxibia’s other children. He was burnished as a god, blond-brown hair falling to his shoulders, and everyone said then that he was the only child of Pelias in whom Poseidon’s blood ran true.The young men were warriors now. They didn’t spend so much time drinking and I wasn’t allowed among them. I was little heavier at eight than I’d been at fi ve, but if I stood close to Acastus at dinner, he’d cross his hands behind his back and step away from me. He acted more like a king every day. Pelopia didn’t have Acastus’s serious beauty or godlike carriage; he had a crooked nose and a crooked grin, and his hairstuck out funny all over his head, a mass of half-knotted dark curls. I liked his eyes best, for they were coppery in the right light, like ingots set beneath his lashes. They were our mother’s eyes, the servants told me, murmuring to me in the kitchens or in the women’s quarters late at night when I couldn’t sleep, and mine were the same. I’d look like Anaxibia living if I’d only pay attention to my clothing and stop playing in the dirt whenever the mood struck me. My father, the king, would be ashamed, they said, and it was true. Pelias always looked on me with distrust, even before I did anything to earn it.I was halfway across the courtyard when Hippothoe caught up with me. “Stop it,” she said. “You know Pelias is near, and he won’t like you bothering them. Come inside and get something to eat. Aren’t you hungry?”“No,” I said, lying. I took another step away and Hippothoe’s hand curved around my shoulder.“I’m hungry,” she said. I saw how faint she looked, and how gray. Reluctantly, I let her draw me in against her side and guide me back into the palace. We passed the slaves collecting the broken bits of the jar and the splattered seaweed, leaving the saltwater to dry. I sulked for the rest of the morning. We wove on the porch that afternoon, until the sun grew low. Then we climbed the stairs to our bedchamber to wait for the evening meal. Pisidice was already sitting by the window, looking for her imaginary suitors, and when she turned to us her eyes shone like the water in the dead vessel. “Did you do it right?” she asked shortly, and turned away when Hippothoe nodded.Hippothoe fell gratefully onto the bed and propped herself up against the wall, holding her arms out to me. I fell asleep with my head in her lap. Her skirts smelled of the sea. When I woke later, she was still drowsing, her head dangling forward like a slaughtered calf’s, her lips open and dry. I sat up.I heard Pisidice’s skirts whispering as she moved about the room, and knew I should wake Hippothoe for the meal, but I didn’t want to. I knew what would happen at dinner. Pelias would demand an account of the ritual, but wouldn’t notice Hippothoe’s faintness or pray for her health. We’d rise from the table when he rose and wait in a silent, trembling line for his ritual kisses: Acastus’s fair cheeks, Pelopia’s, Pisidice’s forehead (his hand skimming her braids), Hippothoe’s brow. Then our father would kiss me hard on the crown of my head, never looking at me, while I tried to resemble my mother as much as possible, or as little—and he would leave without speakingto me at all.*