I guide her through the halls, her eyes big and round as she looks at the paintings hanging from the walls, the sculptures tucked in crevices, the flowers climbing the marble columns, the ivy hanging from the ceiling.
‘You didn’t do all this,’ she says, glancing at one of the woven tapestries.
‘The Underworld is an inspiring place,’ I say, hoping the sentence is vague enough to imply I might have found hidden talents down here or the gods of the Underworld are a talented bunch – anything to draw her away from suspecting Hades.
I take her to the large front doors and, when they open, even I’m impressed. I’ve been rushing around so much lately, pulling myself from flower to flower around the Underworld. But the garden I planted has grown rapidly. It’s no longer just an orchard – plants crawl everywhere, every patch a vivid splash of colour.
My mother stops walking. Her eyes dart around like she can’t take it in quick enough.
‘This isn’t what I was expecting from the land of the dead,’ she says.
‘It wasn’t like this when I got here.’
‘You did this? You’ve only been here for a few months.’
‘I know.’ I smile. It’s quite nice, actually, showing my mother what I’m capable of. I can still hear her voice in my head: ‘I love you, my dear, but you are not powerful.’ Proving that wrong feels like the final shedding of ‘Kore’.
I take her out of the garden towards the mortal lands, trailing through flowers that tickle my bare ankles.
My mother glances down at the touch of them. ‘These are new.’
She noticed. She knows my flowers – knows them so well she can recognize a new creation.
Everything will be okay. This is exciting now. I take her hand and pull her to walk quicker. ‘Yes. I made them when I got here. Aren’t they lovely? I had to figure out how they’d survive. The sky didn’t have a sun when I first arrived.’
‘Excuse me?’
I point to the horizon, where the blue sky above the human lands spills out, the sun a distant burning speck.
‘That’s where we’re going. I built that.’
‘Don’t be so silly.’
‘I’m not.’ I scowl. ‘I told you, Mother, I have power. When I got here it felt like the land was begging me to bring it to life. So I did, slowly with flowers and then with restoring the decaying mortal souls and then … I built that. I reached right into the threads of this world and I changed the very realm itself. I’m the goddess of life, Mother. I can do incredible things.’
She says nothing.
She stares.
She glances down to the ground then gazes in the distance.
After a while I break. ‘Well?’
‘What happens,’ she asks, ‘when you stop loving your husband?’
‘What?’
‘Don’t be naive, Persephone. I thought you’d discarded that name. What’s your contingency plan? When you stop loving your husband, or he finds another young girl in need of rescue, what will you do then?’
‘He wouldn’t –’
‘Name a single man who wouldn’t.’
I hesitate. Because he is the single man who wouldn’t. And perhaps some of the other gods of the Underworld but I don’t know that for sure.
‘I trust him.’
‘Really?’ she sneers. ‘You truly believe in his love enough to think it will last forever?’
