Page 34 of Katabasis

“Can’t you hear it?” She marched around the embankment.

Someone was hiding, lurking, she knew it—only everywhere she turned she saw only rock.

The nearest Shade was Bill Cadeaux, and he was well up the slope by now.

Still the laughter intensified. It was so clear now; she couldn’t have imagined it.

Archimedes, too, had sensed something. The cat froze in its steps, eyes like slits, tail stiff as a board.

“Alice, stop.” Peter grasped her arm. “Sit down, have some water—”

She wriggled away. “ Stop , listen—”

Archimedes yowled.

A flurry of color emerged out of the rock—rippling skeins of reds and pinks and purples, truly, an attack on the senses, after all that endless gray and burning red.

At first Alice thought they’d been swarmed by butterflies, or sentient rosy clouds, until the silks stopped ballooning and settled against the form of a tall and slender woman.

“Hello, there.” She beckoned to them, waving. “Come closer.”

Alice froze, unsure whether that was the kind of “come closer” mermaids uttered before they dragged you underwater.

“I’m sorry I’ve been rude.” The woman lifted a sleeve to her lips and giggled in a way that was not sorry at all. “I get so nosy. Don’t run, dears.” Her silks rippled, and suddenly she was right in front of them. “I don’t bite.”

She was terribly beautiful. A dimpled smile against a round, open face.

Black hair so shiny it was reflective, drifting weightless around her waist. She floated within robes changing colors as quickly as water dappling under sunlight.

She held skeins of thread in both hands; as she spoke, her fingers worked quickly, pulling them through some loom that floated on its own, and the cloth she produced seemed to disappear just as quickly into the rippling folds of her dress.

Alice racked her mind but could not match this woman to any of the descriptions of Hell’s deities. The woman lifted a sleeve to her brightly painted mouth and tittered. “Cat got your tongue?”

The silks at her waist arced back and forth in the air. Some bell rang faintly in Alice’s mind; some half-forgotten footnote, some arcane mention she hadn’t bothered chasing up. Not Arachne, not the Yellow Emperor’s wife. A deity of stars, feathers, and longing.

“You’re from above.” Alice remembered now.

She hadn’t run across the Weaver Girl in any of her research on Hell, but rather in an undergraduate seminar on translated mythologies.

The Weaver Girl, a daughter of the stars, fell in love with the mortal Cowherd, and their love was forbidden by the gods.

Only on one day of the year were they permitted to reunite, and when they did, a flock of magpies formed a bridge beneath their feet.

“You’re the goddess of lovers reuniting. Lovers long separated.”

The Weaver Girl beamed. “Very good!”

“But what are you doing here? Your sort don’t die.”

“Right again,” said the Weaver Girl. “But mortals do.”

“Your lover,” Alice realized.

“My Cowherd.” The Weaver Girl’s silks flashed blood-red, brown, then listless gray.

“My star sisters warned me his hair would whiten, that his bones would crumble, that one day I would look into that face and feel no passion at all. But it all happened so quickly . One day, the strapping man I adored. The next, a skeleton. Then one night his heart stopped. I followed him to the next world. But this was not enough!” Her silks turned pitch-black, heavy.

“He wanted to reincarnate. I could not. Our souls are not like those of humans; to be washed clean and plopped into new bodies to try again. I begged him to stay here with me. But he grew bored by sands with no ocean and a sky without stars. We thought once we had conversation enough to last through eternity. It turns out we couldn’t even last the year.

” The Weaver Girl’s voice shook. “One day, I awoke and found he had abandoned me for the Lethe. Ever since I have roamed these fields alone. At the crossing from Desire to Greed, where desire runs dry, and lovers think only of themselves.”

A tear trickled glistening down her cheek. The effect was very tragic, though Alice thought she was rather hamming it up. Perhaps this was how immortal deities passed the time, perfecting their own mythologies.

The Weaver Girl pointed up, and the two ends of her sash did a spiraling dance toward the sky. “The next chance you have, look up at the night sky. It’s missing a constellation. A bridge is broken.” Her sash collapsed. “Darkness, now.”

“Haven’t you ever tried to find him?” asked Peter.

“We aren’t allowed, dear boy. And in any case, he would not know me. He’s washed all memory of me out of his mind.”

“Oh,” said Peter. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re so sweet.” The Weaver Girl reached out and tweaked his nose. Peter’s entire face turned red.

Alice was not sure how she was supposed to react to all this. The Weaver Girl was talking quite a lot. But this at least offered her some respite—it gave her time to assess whether this deity wanted to play with them or kill them.

“But still I am a romantic!” The Weaver Girl spread her sleeves.

A magnificent display of color. “It was never wise for a deity to wed a mortal, I see that now. One needs a shared perspective on time. Deities do not love so fleetingly, so hopelessly, with every ounce of their soul. But humans—you live for a breath, you die, and you spend your whole lives wondering how you might stay together in the afterlife, when you don’t even know if that’s what you truly want. ”

She drifted closer—uncomfortably close—and her long fingers stretched out to dance over their shoulders. Alice had the absurd fear she might knock their heads together and make them start kissing like dolls.

“I see so many of you. Murder-suicides, that’s common. Or accidents. Sometimes both parties die natural deaths, and one party waits years in the Fields of Asphodel until the other dies of old age.” The Weaver Girl sighed. “Everyone thinks their love is eternal. I like to let them keep believing.”

“So let us through,” said Peter. “Love isn’t a crime.”

“Indeed it isn’t,” said the Weaver Girl.

“I do not inflict punishment, dear boy. I offer a solution.” She clasped her hands together.

“I offer you a test. No arduous quest; only the answer to a question. I test your loyalty. If you pass, I build a bridge.” She brought her hands together.

Her fingers moved quick, and threads spilled out between them, conjuring just for a moment a fabric that rippled and glittered; twinkling gold and silver against velvety black.

A carpet made of stars. “My bridge will lead to any place you wish. Any boundary, any court. The Rebel Citadel, if you wish. Or straight to Lord Yama’s throne.

Pass, and I will let you walk this bridge just once, to any place you wish to go. ”

“What if we fail?” asked Peter.

“Then, into the Lethe you go.”

“But we’re not dead,” said Alice. “We aren’t Shades.”

“Oh, you’re sojourners !” The Weaver Girl’s hands flew to her mouth. Her eyes shone huge. “But even better. Then you must really need safe passage.” Her fingers danced; the bridge rippled over the abyss. “These rocks are tricky, my loves. Prove your faith, and I’ll send you safely through.”

Alice did not like this. The Weaver Girl in her simpering giggles reminded her of the heroines from Chinese dramas her mother liked to play when she was a child—scheming, nefarious creatures who were always trying to shove their rivals down wells.

And though she could not fit the Weaver Girl into her schema of Hell, she knew of every tale about bargains and wagers with the divine.

Orpheus failed Hades’s challenge. Sisyphus tried to cheat Hades as well, and failed.

There had to be a catch, there was always a catch.

“Can we consult?” she asked. “In private?”

The Weaver Girl flicked her sleeve. “Be quick.”

Alice tugged Peter by the arm until they were out of earshot. “I don’t trust her.”

“We don’t need to trust her,” he said. “We just need to play. What’s the worst that can happen?”

“Well, amnesia, weren’t you listening?” Alice was not certain about the extent of her tattoo’s protection, but she did not want to test it against submersion.

“Then we’ll just win, it can’t be hard—”

“And that’s supposing she’s telling the truth,” said Alice. “Deities above don’t wander often in Hell, you know—she could be in disguise—”

“What else would she be?”

“I don’t know. Could be the sorcerer—”

“If she’s the sorcerer, we’re screwed anyways! Look, Law.” Peter spread his hands. “This is a godsend. We’re struggling enough as is, and she’s promising safe passage—”

“I don’t want to get dropped into the river,” said Alice. “Which is, by the way, exactly what will happen, since we are not in love.”

“But can’t you pretend?”

She stared into his face. Open, beguiling—how long had it taken him to master that hangdog look? How could he possibly look at her like this, intending what he did?

But maybe she could pretend too. Maybe she could beat him at his own game. She had one great advantage, after all, which was that Peter didn’t know that she knew the truth. “You want me to pretend that I love you.”

“It’s easy,” he said. “Just assume our wills are united.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, that we want all the same things. That we want what’s best for each other. That we take one another’s ends as our own, and that our ideal outcome is one in which we’re together. Haven’t you ever been in love?”

“No. Have you?”

“Well, no. But it can’t be all that hard to imagine, can it?”

“I think being in love might be the hardest thing to imagine.” She paused, considering. “I mean, the erotic complications alone. I haven’t even seen your penis.”

“Oh my God,” said Peter. “Law. We do not have time to articulate a philosophy of love.”

“How else do we decide our dominant strategy, then?”