Disclaimer: Let me check my stocking… nope, no rights to Percy Jackson and the Olympians. (The extended passages from The Canterbury Tales are, of course, public-domain.)
"No!" Pluto thundered. "I tell you, Hazel, I won't hear of such a thing."
"But Daddy," Hazel wheedled, pouring all the old-fashioned Southern charm she could muster into her manner, "it's Christmas. What good is it to be the soul of Western civilization if we can't celebrate Christmas? I'm not asking you to turn into Fezziwig or anything; I just want a nice little party, with a tree and carols and mirliton pie and…"
"The answer is no, Hazel," said Pluto firmly. "What sort of death-god would I be, if I permitted my children to celebrate the birth of death's Conqueror? What sort of god would I be at all, if I let you decorate this palace with tokens of my jealous Hebrew rival? Ask to celebrate the old Saturnalia, and I'll accede with pleasure, for all Saturn's recent crimes – but so long as I rule in the Underworld, these depths will hear no whisper of the Mass of Christ."
Hazel pouted. "They aren't so strict on Olympus," she said.
"I'm not interested in the doors my brothers may have opened to Mary's Son," Pluto retorted. "Jupiter has always been as light-minded as the wind, and Neptune as unstable as water; if they've convinced themselves that they can tame the Lion of Judah, it's no more than may be expected of them. But this is the Underworld, Hazel; we deal in solid realities here, stone and death and the fruitfulness of earth. The earth remembers, though all the gods forget."
And Hazel knew it was no good arguing. She glanced at Proserpine, hoping faintly that she might be willing and able to put in a softening word, but that hope died when she saw the proud, steely light in the Under-Queen's eyes. If her father had replied coldly to her proposal, her stepmother's response was downright frigid – which seemed odd, from what Hazel knew of the warm-hearted daughter of Ceres, but there it was.
She sighed in defeat, and dropped a submissive curtsy. "As you wish, Father."
As she arrived back on the nether bank of the Styx, Charon chuckled sympathetically at the sight of her crestfallen face. "No luck, eh?" he said.
Hazel shook her head. "He wouldn't even consider it," she said, "and Proserpine was worse than he was. I don't know why," she added, a little peevishly. "I know she doesn't like me personally – and I can't really blame her for that – but I thought she'd at least be open to the idea of sprucing things up down here. Does she have something against holly, because it doesn't bloom in the spring?"
"Oh, no," said Charon. "But ever since Swinburne wrote his Hymn to her, she's been especially standoffish about anything Christian. 'Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take' and all that, you know."
In fact, Hazel didn't know; what formal education she had received hadn't extended as far as the poetry of the late Pre-Raphaelites. Rather, however, than make herself feel even stupider by saying so, she climbed into the rowboat and seated herself without a word.
"That's one of the downsides of being a mythical figure," Charon remarked chattily as he began to ply his oars. "You only exist because of your role in the culture of the West, so naturally you're very susceptible to becoming whatever the great artists of that culture see fit to make you. I remember back in the Middle Ages, when…"
Then he paused suddenly in his rowing, and cocked his head thoughtfully. "Huh."
"What?" said Hazel.
Charon gazed at her speculatively, and pondered the notion that had just occurred to him. It was completely against the rules, of course, and his King would surely make him pay for it after the effects wore off – but, still, if it helped a pretty demigoddess have a merry Christmas…
"Tell me, Miss Hazel," he said, "have you ever read the Merchant's Tale?"
Hazel stared at him blankly. "What merchant?"
"Chaucer's," said Charon. "The one who was on the pilgrimage to Canterbury, with the Knight and the Miller and all the rest of them."
"Oh," said Hazel. "Um… no, I've never read that."
"Well, you should," said Charon. "He's a good fellow, Chaucer, and the West wouldn't be the same without his Tales. Swinburne's all very well, but for sheer cultural influence, it's hard to beat Geoffrey Chaucer – at least, if one sets one's mind properly to applying that influence." And he winked significantly at the abysmal princess before him.
Hazel couldn't guess what he was driving at; what could there be in the Canterbury Tales that would make her father more inclined to throw a Christmas party? But, still, she could appreciate friendliness when she received it, and she gave the infernal ferryman a grateful smile. "Okay, then," she said. "I guess I'll have to look into that. The Merchant's Tale, you said it was?"
"The Merchant's Tale," Charon confirmed.
And so, after Hazel had emerged from the nether gate and taken the bus from L.A. back to San Francisco, she made her way to the nearest library, located a copy of the Canterbury Tales, and settled down to read the Merchant's Tale.
The going was rough at first; she had procured a copy with medieval and modern English in parallel columns, thinking this would make things easier for her, only to find that the modern text didn't actually say quite the same thing as the original. Apparently Chaucer had relied rather heavily on words and rhymes that didn't exist in either of Hazel's centuries; the very first couplet of the Tale, it seemed, depended not only on "Pavia" being a rhyme for "Lombardy", but also on the reader's understanding that "whilom" didn't mean the same thing as "while". For the first thirty lines or so, therefore, Hazel's gaze kept wearily darting back and forth between the two columns, and her head kept trying hopelessly to absorb both versions of the story while still keeping them distinct.
It was only when she finally gave up on this, and went back to the poetry shelf and exchanged her parallel Chaucer for a single-column edition with footnotes, that she started to make some progress. She found that, if she just went slowly and sounded out each word under her breath as she went along, middle English wasn't as bad as she had thought; the bizarre spellings turned out to fall into fairly consistent patterns, so that, once she got into the habit of reading Y's as I's and ignoring doubled O's and (except for scansion purposes) final E's, she didn't generally have to stop and check the footnotes more than once in ten lines or so. Moreover, once she got into the rhythm of the poem, her Jazz-Age instincts came to her aid, and she found herself grooving to the free-and-easy English of the 14th Century with a readiness that a more rigid formalist might well have envied; in some of the smoother passages, she actually caught herself snapping her fingers in time to the meter, and had to sternly remind herself that she was in a library.
Even so, she was only about two hundred lines in when a librarian came to give her the five-minutes-till-closing warning, which left her no closer than before to understanding why Charon had recommended the story to her. (Indeed, since most of those 200 lines had been taken up with a general peroration on how important it was for a man to have a wife, she had only the vaguest idea yet of what the story was even about.) Accordingly, she hurried to the desk to check out the book; then, slipping it under her arm, she took it back with her to Camp Jupiter that evening – to Frank's distinct amusement, when he met her at the mouth of the tunnel – and, after breakfast the next morning, curled up on her bunk and immersed herself in the Tale in earnest.
Her immediate impression, once she got into the meat of it, was that it was a positively atrocious story for Charon to have recommended to a well-brought-up young lady. (Granted, it wasn't as bad as most of her own family's history – but that, she reflected ruefully, was a pretty low bar.) It concerned a knight named Januarius, who at age sixty or so decided that his life would be perfect if only he had a wife, and so, despite the sage warnings of his one sensible friend, he went out and married a pretty young thing named May ("Oh, Mr. Chaucer, how cute you are," Hazel murmured when she reached that point). Of course, in no time at all his squire Damian had fallen in love with May, who, upon finding out, decided she would far rather fool around with a lusty young squire than warm the bed of a rheumy old knight she'd only married for his money anyway. And then Januarius went blind, and got jealous and possessive without ever actually guessing what was going on, and May and Damian started arranging sneaky little tricks so they could canoodle unsuspected, and it was all so drearily reminiscent of certain goings-on in the New Orleans of Hazel's childhood that it quite put the young demigoddess off her feed. By the time, early that afternoon, that she had reached the bottom of page 251, and May and Damian were plotting a tryst up one of Januarius's fruit trees while the old man himself wandered obliviously about the garden, she was sincerely hoping that some much larger Kuiper-Belt object would collide with Charon's and pulverize it into tiny Christmas snowflakes, just to teach him for playing such a nasty trick on her. She was sure there were plenty of decent stories in the Canterbury Tales; what did the old ghoul mean by giving her this one to read?
With an effort, she made herself turn the page, and cast her gaze up to line E 2225 – and then her mouth fell open, and she began to read with genuine attention and enthusiasm. For thus ran the lines that met her eyes:
And so bifel, that brighte morwe-tyde,
That in the gardyn in the ferther syde
Pluto, that is kyng of Fairye,
And many a lady in his compaignye,
Folwynge his wife the queene Proserpyne…
It wasn't the first reference, of course. Chaucer had been far too good a storyteller to simply drop figures of classical myth into his tale without any foreshadowing – but Hazel, having been so thoroughly disgusted by that point with the shape the story was taking, had skimmed relatively quickly over the original description of Januarius's garden, and the bit about Pluto and Proserpine holding regular dances by the well had escaped her notice completely. And, even if it hadn't, she probably would have taken the reference to "al hire fairye" as some odd medieval metaphor; it wouldn't have crossed her mind that Chaucer had literally bestowed fairy attendants upon the rulers of the Underworld.
But there was no doubting it now. The poem even reiterated the point in line 2234: "This kyng of Fairye, thanne…" The evidence was unambiguous: so far as one of the great literary classics of Western civilization was concerned, Pluto was no grim and brooding death-god, but an Oberon minus the love-in-idleness; she, Hazel Levesque (and she shivered with pleasure at the thought), was a potential princess of Elfland.
Still, she reflected as she read on, that by itself didn't help her much just now. She knew enough about fairies to know that they were no more inclined to celebrate Jesus than Greco-Roman gods were, what with all that business of not having souls and fearing church bells and whatnot. If that was all that Charon had in mind… but what was this? Pluto had sat down on a garden bench, and was proceeding to upbraid Proserpine for the dishonesty of her sex, as evinced by the adjacent May and "ten hondred thousand" other examples he knew of – and who was the primary authority he cited?
"…O Salomon, wys and richest of richesse,
Fulfild of sapience and of worldly glorie,
Ful worthy been thy wordes to memorie
To every wight that wit and reson kan.
Thus preiseth he yet the bountee of man:
'Amonges a thousand men yet foond I oon,
But of wommen alle foond I noon'…"
All right, then. So Chaucer's fairy Pluto at least respected the Old Testament – and a specifically Christian Old Testament, at that, since "Jhesus filius Syrak" was appealed to further on. But was that really enough? If her father were really determined to play Scrooge, he could always argue that respecting the Old Covenant didn't in any way imply welcoming the New, so no noels for you, young lady. If only Chaucer could have worked some specifically Christian references into this scene…
"Ye shal?" quod Proserpyne. "Wol ye so?
…I woot well that this Jew, this Salomon,
Foond of us wommen fooles many oon.
But though that he ne foond no good womman,
Yet hath ther founde many another man
Wommen ful trewe, ful good and vertuous.
Witnesse on hem that dwelle in Cristes hous;
With martyrdom they preved hire constance…"
Proserpine said that? Oh, this was getting better and better…
"…I prey yow take the sentence of the man;
He mente thus, that in sovereyn bontee
Nis noon but God that sit in Trinitee.
Ey, for verray God that nys but oon…"
Well, well, well. So much for Miss No-God-Found-Stronger-than-Death, then. (For Hazel had skimmed the Hymn to Proserpine at the library the previous day, before settling down with the Tales.)
"…What make ye so much of Salomon?
What though he made a temple, Goddes hous?
What though he were riche and glorious?
So made he eek a temple of false goddis;
How myghte he do a thyng that moore forbode is?
Pardee, as faire as ye his name emplastre,
He was a lecchour and an ydolastre…"
Hazel whooped so loudly that a young son of Bacchus, who happened to be passing by outside her cabin, nearly jumped out of his skin. She couldn't help herself; the idea of a Roman goddess condemning a Bible character for idolatry (however justly) just made her happy on some very deep level.
And it was authoritative, that was the thing. This wasn't just a half-forgotten lyric by some random Dark-Age poetaster; this was – officially, according to Mortimer J. Adler – one of the Great Books of the Western World. Hazel, now that she was aware of it, could feel it lying deep with her own being as a daughter of Pluto, like a thin but sturdy thread of potentiality amid the tangle of myths and traditions of which her father's essence was composed. And she knew, moreover, that, if she just tugged hard enough on that thread, it could, for a brief time – say, a night and a day – overwhelm all the other myths and traditions, and Pluto and Proserpine would become in the living world what they had been in the garden of Januarius of Pavia.
She smiled to herself, and fingered the thread with her mind. Yes, she could do it; that was the privilege of being half-mortal – of belonging, through her mother, to the race that made myths, and not merely to the myths themselves. And, come sunset on Christmas Eve, she would do it: she would go down to her father's palace again, call upon the power of off-color medieval poetry, and then stroll across to the throne room and winsomely ask the newly medievalized Pluto to reconsider his prior iteration's veto on decking the halls. It would be a bit short-notice, admittedly, but there was no doing anything about that – and it wasn't as though being transformed within hours into a Yuletide wonderland was beyond the resources of the Underworld.
Beaming with satisfaction at the prospect, Hazel breezed through the remaining 120 lines of her new favorite story, laughing aloud at May's shameless resourcefulness when Pluto abruptly restored Januarius's sight; then, having no more urgent demands on her time, she spent the rest of the afternoon – and much of the rest of the week, when she wasn't busy with her duties as praetrix – flipping at random through the rest of the book, sipping from now one and now another of the flowers in Chaucer's meadow of tales. After all, she owed the great man some consideration – and, anyway, who didn't love talking chickens and flying robot horses?
Came 24 December, and all went off without a hitch. The Fairy King and Queen readily agreed that it would be disgraceful to let so holy a feast as that of Christ's Nativity pass without commemoration, and all the illustrious souls in Asphodel and Elysium, and even those in Tartarus who could be trusted so far, were summoned forth to assist in the decorating and the celebrations. (Chaucer himself hung a fair quantity of the semi-precious tinsel, and subsequently distinguished himself among a group of other classic writers by his skill at knocking empty wine glasses off their heads with carefully thrown dinner rolls.)
And so it came about that, when the sun rose over California on Christmas Day, Princess Hazel Levesque of Faerie was found standing in front of an ornately carved manger scene, sipping mead with several of Jupiter's long-deceased mortal flames, and listening to her father thanking Charon for having inspired her to bring his present self to the forefront. "I wot well it must have been ye," he said, "for that there lay none else upon my daughter's path to the upper world so full of lore and so ingenious in devising. Wherefore, noble Charon, I pray you by Saint Mary, sitteth ye at my right hand, and be second master of this feast, as you are its first begetter."
"I thank ye, lord," said Charon with a bow. "Yet I must decline. Even on this blessed day, mortal flesh is subject to death; even now the newly dead tarry before the Styx, awaiting their conveyance hither. Shame would it be upon me if I were to forsake my duty to them for the indulgence of the flesh."
"Bit stilted, isn't he?" Europa murmured in Hazel's ear. "More like some overflown Pre-Raphaelite than a true medieval."
"Well, he can't help it," said Sara Roosevelt tolerantly. "He wasn't mentioned in the poem, after all, and he never lived in England during the Middle Ages. I think Olympus was in Florence throughout Chaucer's lifetime, wasn't it?"
"Then he ought to just talk normally and stop posing," Europa retorted. "He knows what comes of people trying to do things they aren't equipped for; all he has to do is look at this girl." And she pinched Hazel's ancestrally Phaethon-singed cheek.
Hazel just giggled. She had been giggling more or less non-stop all morning – partly out of giddiness at her success, partly because of the mead (of which she hadn't actually had all that much, but the strength of Olympian/Underworld brewing was a revelation to the Prohibition-born girl), and partly from sheer effervescence of Christmas cheer. It was such a pleasure, once in a way, to get to celebrate a God who couldn't be remade at a mortal's whim.
"So be it," said Proserpine. "Go then, and our thanks, that is mine and my lord Pluto's, go with you. And may the joy of God's birth, that now we mark with such high solemnity, be to you and them that ye ferry, and, shortly, to every wight that is."
This chance word, coming so soon after Europa's Phaethon reference, set Hazel giggling afresh. Including this black wight, she thought. Because that's right, isn't it? If wight just means person, then I'm pure wight – solid wight – as wight as wight can be. Woe to them who don't call blacks wights… and then she lost control completely, and had to cling to the Wise Man behind her to keep from collapsing in laughter.
"Hazel?" said a familiar voice. "Are you okay?"
Hazel looked up, and beamed. "Nico!" she said. "Hello!" She sprang forward and kissed her startled half-brother on each cheek. "Peace on Earth, good-will toward men! Have some mead."
Nico blinked vacantly at the glass she held out to him. "Mead?" he repeated.
"Yes, mead," said Hazel. "You know, when you ferment honey and make a drink out of it. Per ministrorum manus, de operibus apum… oh, no, that's Easter, isn't it? Never mind."
"Hazel, what is going on down here?" Nico demanded. "I feel like I've woken up in some sort of surreal Christmas pantomime. First I had half a dozen revenants standing over my bed singing O Come All Ye Faithful; then I looked in the mirror and found out I'd grown pixie ears."
Hazel grinned, and reached up to stroke her own newly peaked helices. "Well, of course you had," she said. "What other kind would a prince of Faerie have?"
Nico stared. "Faerie?" he repeated. "When did I become a prince of that?"
"About fourteen hours ago, I think," said Hazel. "It's like this." She pointed to the other end of the room. "You see that plumpish Englishman in a tunic throwing ciabattine at Baruch Spinoza? Well, he wrote a great work of Western literature saying that Pluto and Proserpine weren't Christmas-hating pagan deities at all, but a fairy king and queen with a healthy respect for the Triune God. I decided he should be right for a little while, and… well, here we are."
Nico digested this for a moment. "Wow," he said. "Dad's going to kill you tomorrow, you know that? And Persephone… man, she's going to kill you repeatedly."
Hazel waved a careless hand. "Oh, that doesn't bother me," she said. "I know how to deal with her. Just don't look in the box, right?"
"Foiled again!" said a passing bat-winged fey-creature, on whose womanly head a holly wreath teetered unsteadily. "Boy, is she smart!"
"Was that one of the Eumenides?" Nico exclaimed.
"Well, of course," said Hazel. "Today's all about the 'umanities, right? The 'umanities saved Christmas. Everyone should study the 'umanities!" And she smiled brightly at Nico, sublimely pleased with the quickness of her own wit.
Nico stared at her for a long moment, then shook his head. "Okay, you know what?" he said. "I'm just going to get out of here right now, before my own brain starts turning to fermented honey. Don't wait up." And he turned and strode briskly back down the corridor whence he had come.
"I'll save you a slice of pudding!" Hazel called after him.
"Yeah, sure, okay," came a sardonic voice from the shadows.
Hazel, her high spirits in no way dampened by this encounter, took another sip from her drink and twirled ebulliently in place. "E'en so here below, below," she caroled, "let steeple bells be swungen! And 'io, io, io' by priest and…"
"Pardon?" said a comely woman in the robes of a priestess of Juno.
Hazel giggled again, and shook her head. "Nothing, Io," she said. "Go back to sleep."