DEMETER

When the Greek goddess Demeter is cruelly robbed of her daughter, she is determined to find her - whatever the cost

- JENNIFER SAINT

Persephone’s scream echoes through the balmy air; its high note quivering in the golden-hued stillness. It reverberates across the lush slopes of the rolling mountains, startling birds from the leafy tops of the trees, carrying on the warm currents of the breeze all the way past the slanting rays of the late-afternoon sunshine, into the hazy blue skies.

In my home on the highest peak of them all, the cloud-cloaked Mount Olympus, I hear the last disappearing gasp of it and I pause mid-conversation, the laughter dying in my throat. When she was small, I was attuned to that sound all the time, any cry or shriek that she made alerting me at once so that I’d be by her side in an instant. Back then, it could have been the prick of a thorn while she gathered flowers that prompted it, or the fear of lurking shadows when she woke in the night – always something I could soothe away with a song or a kiss. She may be a young woman now, but that maternal instinct responds before I even realise what I’m hearing. I recognise the sound of her scream and the terror I hear in it has me in its freezing grip at once.

I drop the sheaves of wheat that were in my arms; they scatter across the marble floor but I don’t stop, not even to explain myself to the other goddesses. I run in search of my daughter’s voice.

There’s nothing left but a faint ringing in the air. I search all of her favourite places, from the wildflower meadows of Sicily to the rocky hills of Crete to the sweeping Nysian plains, but I find no trace wherever I go. In increasing desperation, I scour caves and sweep every inch of sprawling forests, I interrogate the bewildered nymphs who frequent the streams and rivers whose waters I worry could have swallowed my daughter whole but no matter how far I go, I cannot find her.