No Season but the Summer by Matilda Leyser

Author:Matilda Leyser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000, FIC010000, FIC077000, FIC045000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2023-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

16

Demeter

It has taken me six days to reach Download Festival, but as soon as I arrive, I’m glad I came. They call it a rock and heavy metal festival on the posters pinned up on the fence, as if in tribute to everything beneath us, but I do not believe they are in love with Hades. Even if they dress like death, they do not want it. I look at the band names on the posters: Iron Maiden; The Offspring; Hot Milk — these people long for life.

I am too old for climbing fences but do not have the money for a ticket, so I make my way to the ‘Press and Guest’ entrance — tell the lad on the door I am Iron Maiden’s backstage shaman. He looks afraid, nods me in.

I walk into a great, long grassy arena with four huge stages at each corner. The warm-up acts are on. I pass fire jugglers; hoop dancers; a sword swallower in sequins, sliding blades down her throat up to the hilt. People sit on the grass, drinking, or stand, queuing for their hot dogs. They wear silver, gold, black, red. They have painted their faces, dyed their hair. Once the gods were worshipped at festivals like this, not stuck in cold, stone buildings. I’m glad to smell sweat, make-up, the yeast of beer, to be amid people ready for dance and song so ecstatic it makes their hair stand on end. I did not know how much I had missed this.

I wander through the crowds, and I wonder where Zeus is. I am nervous, like a young girl, as if Zeus were my new man, instead of being a brother I have long resented, a lover I never meant to take. I feel more hopeful than I have done in weeks, maybe years. As day darkens, the people’s priests appear — musicians, shown large on lighted screens either side of every stage. The beats begin and the crowds turn into oceans that crash against the stages.

I cannot see Zeus, but there are signs of him — in the lights that wheel across the sky, in the stature of the musicians, in their thunderous drums, in the way everyone is lusty, glad of having arms to hold, hips to swing. It was the people stopping their dance and song that bothered Zeus when winter came — not the cold or hunger. Surely he will be here somewhere. He would be up on a stage if he could; I like to be among people, he likes to be above them. If he is not on a stage, he will be somewhere set apart.

It is night now, but there is light aplenty — electricity pumped across the site. I walk away from the crowds through a few pine trees, past the loos, a water point, the beer tents, off into a camping field. I look among the many tents. He is not there.

Suddenly, away from the festival’s euphoria, I feel foolish. There

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