Oracle (25 page)
Authors: Jackie French
She sat on Pegasus, an arrow nocked in her bow, another three in her hand, ready to fire. But this was not the girl he’d left at the Mother’s temple, in a dead man’s trousers and stained with travel.
This woman sat on a red-dyed saddle. Her tunic and trousers were red leather too, polished till they shone, and over it all she wore the gold apron of the Mother. But its colour was the result of no yellow dye. It shone true gold. Her plaits were tied up on her head with a gold band. Even her arrows were gold tipped, like darts from the sun.
‘Well?’ Euridice’s voice was almost amused. ‘Is anyone going to argue?’
‘Who are you?’ Only the Chamberlain seemed to have found his voice.
He doesn’t recognise her, thought Nikko, half in triumph, half in wonder. No one who looked at this woman would ever remember the wild horse girl of Mycenae.
‘I am Euridice, of the Temple of the Mother. I defend any of the Mother’s servants. I am also,’ her glance passed over Nikko with an almost smile, ‘going to be your Oracle’s sister. And I tell you in the Mother’s name that
you will not move the Oracle from her home, her true home, here in Delphi. And if you do, it will do you no good, because she will speak no more.’
The King of Delphi almost danced in triumph. ‘So,’ he said to the Chamberlain, ‘if you want to consult our Oracle, you must come here.’
Euridice lowered her arrow. She nodded at Dora. ‘Get the men to carry her back to her house. Quickly, before she lies down like the goats and never rises again. That gas can kill if you breathe it too long. And don’t breathe as you do it, you fools,’ she added as the men began to run up the hill, ‘or you’ll fall down too.’
She kneed Pegasus gently. The big horse began to walk forward. She whinnied at the sight of Nikko, then bumped him companionably with her head.
Euridice looked down at Nikko, and grinned. ‘I came back,’ she said.
‘Why?’ Nikko’s head still spun slightly from the effects of the gas.
He and Euridice sat together on a stool just inside the wide front door of the Pythia’s house. Below them the view was a wild sweep of cliffs and trees, with a smudge that was Krissa and the endless glitter of the sea. On the other side the great shining cliffs shone gold, kissed by the afternoon light.
The mountain air smelled of cold tin and flowers.
The guards on either side of the doorway were to keep people out. The King of Delphi’s orders had been clear. There was no more talk, it seemed, of taking the new Oracle away from Delphi. Thetis lay on her bed in the inner room, still drowsy from the gas, while Dora spoonfed her mutton broth.
‘Why did I come back?’ Euridice reached over and took his hand. He hadn’t quite dared to touch her first. That ambassador of the Mother had looked too strong for any mortal to reach for.
But her hand felt just the same: callused, muscled and warm.
‘I am still a priestess. I always will be dedicated to the Mother. But the Mother has three faces,’ said Euridice.
‘The maiden, the mother, and the hag. It seems I am not content to stay a maiden. And,’ she added, ‘I am definitely too young to be a hag. When you sent Pegasus to me…I hadn’t realised then how long you’d waited.’ She glanced at him, now almost shy. ‘Or how much I would have lost if I had let you go. The elders of the temple agreed. So I came up here to look for you.’
‘And found Thetis on the mountain.’
Euridice nodded. ‘The gas up there—it’s happened before. There’s even a cave near the shrine where gas seeps out. People who smell it lose control, as though they are drunk.’ She glanced into the inner room. ‘I suppose when Thetis breathed it she lost her control over her voice, and began to speak again.’
‘You heard this at the Temple?
She nodded. ‘I learned a lot. And I will learn more when I visit there again,’ she added. ‘I am one of their priestesses, even if I’m not to live there, or stay a maiden.’
‘Then you will really marry me?
She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps. As long as you understand that if anyone ever calls me “wife of Nikkoledes” I will cut out their living tongue and feed the still-squirming pieces to the pythons.’
Nikko laughed. ‘If you plan to keep your bow by your side, and your arrows on your back, I doubt anyone will dare to call you “wife of Nikkoledes”.’
‘No.’ She touched his cheek gently. ‘I think it more likely that both our names will slowly be lost, as we become nothing more than the guardians of the Oracle. We must protect her, Nikko. Make sure no one forces her to breathe the gas too often, or she may die.
‘We must build her a temple there, with a curtain so she is hidden from view, and no one can intimidate her, and make her give the prophecies they want. The King of Delphi will help,’ she added. ‘This may make Delphi the richest town in Greece because of supplicants’ gifts to the Oracle. But it will be our job to keep her safe, to give her the knowledge of what’s happening in the world so she can give her judgements.’
‘Do you mind?’
She shook her head, her plaits bobbing at her shoulders. She had loosened them—and put her weapons down—when she came inside. ‘My life was dedicated to the Goddess, and it seems it shall be. But it will be here, not at the Temple, as I had thought. And your life: you will be giving up all other choices now too, to stay here with Thetis.’
‘I have always watched over my sister.’ He hesitated, but continued. ‘But if we have a daughter…’
Euridice met his eyes. ‘We will pray that she inherits the art of seeing, but not of always having to tell the truth. Let others’ daughters become the Delphic Oracle, not ours.’
‘You think there will be others?’
‘Oh yes.’ Her voice was confident. ‘Men need a woman’s eye, a woman’s voice, to tell them how things truly are. And in all of Greece, there is now one woman’s voice any man can listen to and obey, and keep his honour. There will always be an Oracle at Delphi,’ she smiled, ‘until perhaps other women’s voices are heard and the affairs of men become everyone’s concern.’
An eagle hovered low outside, floating on the air,
close enough for them to see the bronze wing feathers, the savage slash of beak. It was almost as if we’ve come home, thought Nikko. And suddenly this was home—he could see it as clearly as if Thetis had told him as the Oracle: him and Euridice and their children, laughing, sitting by their hearth fire. And up on the hill the Oracle of Delphi, sitting in her white temple on her tripod, guiding men.
But not alone. Not while he lived. And if Euridice had her way, every Oracle to come would have guardians as well.
‘She should be stronger now. Come on.’ Euridice stood, still holding him by the hand, and led him into Thetis’s room. Dora was sitting by the bed now, the empty bowl in her lap.
Thetis was a small ball among the furs of the bed, her face to the wall, but she rolled over as they came in. He kneeled beside her.
‘Thetis, can you hear me?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was a hoarse whisper, like a frog’s. She smiled slightly. ‘The gas hasn’t worn off. It will soon, I think. Then I will only speak when I am near the chasm.’
‘You don’t want to speak?’
The tears were there again. ‘No. Speaking the truth is hard, Nikko. I learned that when I was small. Hard for people to listen to. Harder still to speak.’
And hard to live with, thought Nikko, hard for you, but just as hard for me. His sister had led him on a long journey, and a difficult one.
Perhaps it was the effects of the gas, perhaps just the feeling that today he had lived for fifty years, his mind
bruised. But for the first time he knew exactly what he felt for Thetis, what he had always felt.
He hated her, just a little: this girl who had robbed him of a normal life. He feared her a little too: this woman who would see and listen and analyse it all, and tell the truth. Always, no matter how agonising the results, she’d tell the truth.
And he loved her still. The love had always been there, and always would. No matter what, he would always give his life for his sister.
He stroked the damp hair from her forehead. ‘Do you need anything?’
She looked up at him. Suddenly this was the Oracle who stared at him, not the sister. ‘You want to ask me a question. But you won’t.’
‘How did you know?’
An almost-laugh, soft as the brushing of a feather. ‘The way I know everything, Nikko. The way I always have. I listen and I watch and I think. I know you best of all, my brother. You want to ask, will you be happy?’
Nikko tugged Euridice closer, and put his arm around her. ‘Well, little sister, will we be happy?’
Thetis raised herself up on the furs. She looked at them a moment. There were dark rings around her eyes, and a blue tinge around her mouth. Her skin looked shiny and pink but not a healthy pink. She was silent so long that Nikko was sure that the effects of the gas had worn off, that her iron control over her voice had closed off all possibility of speech.
And then she spoke. Is it still the gas? Nikko wondered, even as he listened to her words. Or was
Thetis choosing to speak now, just once of her own accord, a gift of love?
This voice was like a knife rasping across stone, almost impossible to make out. ‘I see happiness, and a long life, and many sons and daughters.’
‘And you?’ Euridice’s voice was urgent. ‘What will your life be?’
Thetis lay back. Behind them women were muttering, stopping the King from entering. Another handed Dora a bowl of scented water to wash Thetis’s feet.
Thetis smiled. It was a true smile, but for some reason Nikko felt tears spring into his eyes. Beside him Euridice was weeping too.
Thetis’s whisper was almost soundless now. ‘And me? No lover, no children, no dancing for the moon. I am the beginning of a thousand years of women. I am what I will always be, just this and nothing more. I am the woman who must tell the truth.’
This is a story made up of whispers and legends, and history buried under the earth: the powdery remains that are all we have of that strange time when the walled fort of Mycenae was the greatest power in Greece. It is almost from
beyond
history, in fact. I have put the echoes of the past together as best I can. But there is no way I, or anyone else, can accurately and completely recreate that world.
Some people who read this story will object to the way I’ve characterised some aspects of the Oracle of Delphi. The Oracle was dedicated to Apollo, not to an earth goddess. She lived in a white temple.
These things are true. But the Oracle of Delphi was dispensing her wisdom long before the worship of Apollo arrived in Greece.
The only written records from the age of Mycenae that we understand are accounts figures, listing what was collected in tributes, what was spent on dependants of the palace, what was traded and how much. We can take information from scenes portrayed on walls, or pots, or the ruins of cities that had long been covered by the earth. There are also legends, often told as stories of ‘gods’ or superhuman heroes
descended from gods, which may well be an ‘oral history’ based on real events.
This story is set in a land quite unlike the Greece we know today, or even the Greece of ‘the golden age’ of science and philosophy, which began in about 400 BC. The land I am writing about had a different language, a different culture and a very different appearance too. There were no groves of oranges and lemons; no great amphitheatres for Greek plays. There was no moussaka, baklava, coffee, and possibly not even lamb kebabs, though like all hunting societies they probably cooked meat on sticks by the fire.
We believe that the ancient Greeks of the time when the trading empire of Mycenae was at its peak (1400–1200 BC) had writing and a sophisticated culture. But, for some unknown reason, around 1000 BC their written language and much else was lost. Their cities were destroyed or abandoned.
Perhaps there were droughts, earthquakes or other disasters, or an invasion of people from the north. Possibly all of these happened—so many disasters in such a short time that the culture vanished, except from stories of the past, told while sitting by the fire.
Certainly life in ancient Greece changed dramatically at that time. And one place where things changed most was Delphi.
The earliest ‘Oracle’ at Delphi was probably a priestess of Dia, Gia or Demeter, the Earth Mother. She may also have been a seer with no particular religious affiliation. It was only later, when northern invaders brought herds of cattle, long-legged horses, and the
worship of Zeus the thunder god, and Apollo god of wisdom, youth and the moon, that the Oracle of Delphi became part of Apollo’s temple.
There is a legend that Apollo wrestled with a giant snake or dragon at Delphi, which could be interpreted as the overthrow of one temple, the Pythia’s, by the priests of Apollo.
The earliest recorded stories about the Oracle claim that a rift opened in the earth after an earthquake. The goats wandered in a daze, and people began to babble. The rift and its gases was fenced off, but one woman, the Oracle, was allowed to breathe the gases once a month—any more might have been fatal—to prophesy. Eventually the role was probably shared, to save any one woman from too much exposure.
But the words that have been handed down to us from the Delphic Oracle weren’t only prophecies. The Oracle was known as much for her wisdom as for her gift of knowing what might happen. If you asked the Oracle for advice she would just as likely tell you something about yourself as about what might happen to you. Her gift was for insight, rather than prediction.
This is the oracle I have depicted here: not a magician, not a prophet—except in the sense that a clever and intellectually honest person can predict many events—but a wise woman, at the centre of the political world of ancient Greece, the one who told the truth even when it wasn’t what her listener hoped to hear.
There is no political advisor in the world today who has what the Oracle possessed—the power and utter independence required to tell the truth, with no
repercussions, as well as being in a position to know possibly more than anyone else about the politics of the web of ancient Greek states. Delphi became a place of truce, where political discussions and conferences were held, and the Oracle and the women who tended her would have had access to all that was discussed, both there and at the guesthouses where the dignitaries stayed.