What had he been expecting? An old woman, to be sure. Wisdom went hand in hand with age and prophesy, and he remembered now that the previous sibyl’s trance had turned her into a wild animal, thrashing and groaning as she frothed on the floor, to die only a few hours later. Would that happen now? Listening to drumbeats and doves cooing curiously close-by, Laertes was transfixed by the frail figure bent over her tripod, still dressed in the wedding robes of her marriage long ago to long-haired Apollo. To his shame, his strong limbs were trembling.
“Dost thou wish to enquire of the Lord of Light and Prophesy, whose arrows of knowledge shine into the future?” she quavered.
“I do.”
“Art thou pure of body and heart?”
“I am.”
“Then Apollo will speak to thee through the vessel of my body. What is it thou wish to know?”
“My question…” He cleared his throat. He was a general, after all. A commander of men. “My question is this.”
His mouth was dry. Was it the smoke, the vile smell, or the fact that this was the first time he had voiced his intentions so bluntly?
“The king who rules the city-state from which I come is a weak man. He puts the good of himself before the good of his people, and I want to know if… if…” The words did not come easily. “…I move to unseat him—”
“Whether thy campaign will succeed?”
He didn’t feel better, now it was out in the open. His heart still pounded harder than a blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil. “Yes,” he said eventually.
“Then shall ye know.”
With a twirl of her wrist, an explosion erupted from the tripod, a flurry of sparks flew into the air. Then she hugged her arms tight to her chest and began rocking back and forth, keening softly. Swaying himself in the abominable heat of this underground tomb, Laertes watched the flames from her fire reflect in the Pool of Prophesy at her feet and sensed the past and the future fusing together. It wasn’t only the crack on his head, he thought, that was making it throb.
Time passed. The Oracle rocked, wailed, muttered, and reeled. The flames in her tripod guttered and died. In their place, smoke, white and sweet, welled from the walls, from the floor, from the ceiling. Laertes’ tunic clung, sodden, against his skin.
“When a guest of wood doth pass through thy portals…” When she spoke this time, it was not in a voice tremulous with old age. This voice was low, deep, and even. “…then must thou build a city of metal walls and woollen roofs, and set it beside the dancing pebbles.”
The sweat on his back turned inexplicably cold.
“Sacrifice in this place a creature that makes both music and food, and I, Apollo of the Lyre, will surely march at thy side.”
With a jerk, she slumped forward. The drumbeats fell silent. The cooing of doves ceased at once.
“Leave me,” the old woman quavered, and her voice was so weak he had to strain to hear it. “Leave me, for I am spent.”
Perhaps he should have thanked her, but she seemed barely conscious, so he turned, and the last sight was of her thin breast rising and falling with unnatural rapidity. He did not understand the riddle, but as he clambered up the rope ladder that had been lowered through the hole he knew there was a priest in the temple, a seer called Periander, who would help him unravel the mystery. With the seer’s help, and with Apollo’s, there was no doubt in his mind that his revolt would succeed.
Tumbling back into the real world, Laertes was positively breathless with relief.
Below, in the underground sanctum, the Oracle threw off the veil that filtered the fumes and stretched her slender arms high.
“How many more?” she asked the wall.
The wall parted, spilling a thin finger of light into the cavern. “Five,” the young man said, consulting his scroll by the glow of his candle. “Though none of the other petitioners require such elaborate theatre.”
“Good. I was half-choked with that smoke.”
“You were?” The young man laid his drums aside and squeezed through the gap in the false wall. “When you tossed those herbs into the tripod and set off that explosion, I had to pinch my nose to stop myself sneezing.”
Cassandra smiled with him. “Next time, I’ll stow a smaller bunch of borage up my sleeve, but at least Laertes should have no trouble interpreting the riddle.” She pulled off her old woman’s mask and blotted the sweat off her face with her sleeve. “I made it simple enough, I thought.”
When a guest of wood doth pass through thy portals — in other words, when a ship enters harbour — that’s the time to build a city of metal walls and woollen roofs — i.e., set up camp, since soldiers use spears to support their blankets. And if this didn’t make it plain that this undertaking should be conducted in the spring, when the seas opened once more for trade, beside the dancing pebbles, she had added firmly. It wouldn’t take much working out on Laertes’ part to understand that this meant when the first snowmelts cascade down the mountains, and as for sacrificing a creature that makes both music and food — well, what other animal’s flesh is succulent when roasted and shell makes the perfect soundbox for a lyre but a tortoise?
“Laertes is a soldier, not a politician, my love.” Jason began to knead the muscles in her neck that tightened from hours bent over the tripod. “Men like him think in straight lines. Not too rough?”
“No, that’s lovely,” she purred.
“I’ll bet you a chalkoi to an obol that Laertes heads straight for Periander.” He moved down to massage the knots in her shoulders. “He’s the very sort who needs a seer to solve the puzzle for him — and ho, ho, talk of the devil.”
An older man in ankle-length robes, whose craggy face was softened by a beard, shinned down the ladder with the skill of a ship’s rat.
“Father!” Cassandra embraced him warmly. “What a delightful surprise!”
She hadn’t seen much of him over the past six months, and he had never, in her recollection, come down here to see her. Was this because she was too engrossed in her new appointment, she wondered? Or because the memories that this sanctum held were too painful for him?
“Did you solve the riddle for our rebellious general? Because all in all, I thought it went rather well,” she decided.
The admission fee, the costs of purification, one gold statuette, plus, what? a silver wine cup, perhaps, for the seer’s deciphering. Traitor or not, the Delphic Treasury would welcome Laertes back anytime.
“I suppose, Cassandra, that depends how one defines the word ‘well.’ ” Periander’s eyes were grave, but then they always were. “Laertes collapsed at my feet.”
“And?” she cried.
“And he’s dead,” her father said quietly.
Ever so softly, Night threw her cloak over the mount of Parnassus. Flexing the stiffness out of her legs, Cassandra paced the portico as, one by one, the priests and attendants made their way home to their wives and their supper and bed. The last of the petitioners was long gone, the temple swept with purifying hyssop in readiness for tomorrow, and the only sound that broke the silence was the grinding of bolts as the sanctuary was locked up against thieves. She paced and paced until only the creatures of darkness prowled the Sacred Way that zigzagged its way up to the shrine. Fox, jackal, hedgehog, and caracal. They moved from shadow to shadow.
Dead? How could Laertes be dead?
In the Pool of Purification, she saw a young woman with hair blacker than a raven’s wing and eyes darker than an adulterous liaison. Plunging her hands into the cool, clear water, Cassandra splashed her face with her own reflection.
With the temple physician laid up in splints after a fall, there was no one to confirm or refute the cursory diagnosis that cause of death was a weak heart. Several witnesses testified to the chills and sweats that Laertes experienced beforehand, but then most supplicants suffered similar effects at the prospect of coming face-to-face with the gods. As for being breathless after his consultation, there was nothing unusual about that, either. The higher a petitioner’s status, the harder the temple worked at disorientating him, because farmers, for instance, eager to know the most auspicious time to plant their beans or bring in their harvest, were far less worldly than kings or insurgent generals. Deeply religious, highly superstitious, the peasant folk believed with all their hearts that Apollo’s spirit spoke to them straight through the mouth of the Oracle. They didn’t need further convincing.