But a crown is not held in place by thin air. Kingship requires plotting and scheming, travel and trade, just as it requires war and diplomacy. Such sophisticates are not easily fooled and are even less likely to trust. Hence, the magic that is brought into play.
Senses manipulated by darkness, by narcotic fumes, by strange, haunting music. Rituals take on even greater importance. The petitioners are passed from one priest to another before they are able to take stock of their surroundings. They’re given goblets of wine that will supposedly make them forget everything except the focus of their question yet remember clearly the Oracle’s prediction. Then they are left alone to commune with the gods, and who would imagine that an old woman’s hands could grip their ankles and drag them into the void? Disorientated by their fall every bit as much as the blackness, they do not see the old woman hurry back to her stool. But—! (And it was always possible.) One of these days, this chicanery might just bounce off their defences. In which case, keeping the petitioner outside the inner sanctum, where there was no possibility of him seeing that the face was a mask, was essential.
As indeed was the Oracle’s constant monitoring of the supplicant’s body language and expression from beneath her veil…
High overhead, Hercules wielded his olive-wood club and the moon rose full and white through the pines. Cassandra sat on the steps of the temple and buried her head in her hands. Weak heart be damned. While she was teasing Laertes with her riddles, what she had mistaken for nervousness and disorientation were, in fact, the symptoms of a man who was dying. Dying in front of her eyes.
And manifesting all the symptoms of poison.
“Jason.” She had to shake him twice to rouse him. “Jason, wake up.”
When he saw her, fully dressed and her hair still pinned up, he was on his feet in an instant. “What’s wrong?”
“Laertes was murdered,” she explained, while he pulled on a tunic. In the lamplight, his skin shone like bronze. “I need you to go down to the temple mortuary.”
She did not need to elaborate. Women, even the most important woman in Delphi, were forbidden to set foot inside.
“Examine his body, check his eyes, his skin colour, look in his mouth, his ears, under his nails, then report back to me on your findings.”
She was pretty certain she knew what had killed him, having ruled out corn cockle, since Laertes had suffered no abdominal cramps, while aconite would have had him throwing up, and with hellebore he’d have been salivating like a rabid dog. Other poisons were either too slow or too fast and so, given the time frame in which he died, Cassandra concluded that only belladonna could have taken his life. But confirmation would not go amiss.
“I love you, I adore you, I would give my life for you,” Jason said, combing his tousled hair with his hands. “But frankly, my darling, I’d rather face the Minotaur in Hades than ask the Keepers of the Vigil to stand aside while I poke and prod their dead charge at this ungodly hour of the night. What excuse am I supposed to give them?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” she said, smiling in spite of herself. “But you did so well today, with the drumbeats and doves, that I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”
The invisible doves of prophesy were Cassandra’s idea, but the drums and the white smoke had been Jason’s. All it needed, he’d insisted, was a bowl of hot water and some terracotta pipes to filter the steam. Delphi, after all, was founded on the principle that the quickness of the hand deceives the eye.
“Ah, the birds.” He clucked his tongue. “I wasn’t sure it would work,” he admitted. “I feared blocking the light from my one tiny flame would make no difference when I threw the sheet over their cage, but bless you, my love, you were right. They stopped talking at once.”
“I wish you would,” she said. “We have so little time.”
“Why the hurry?”
She pressed her lover’s hand in urgency. “I’ll explain later,” she said. There wasn’t time now to go into why she needed to unmask Laertes’ killer during her first trance of the morning.
“For you, O Prophetic One—” He kissed her lightly on the nose — “I will borrow Hermes’ winged sandals and fly like Pegasus himself.”
Watching him sprint across the courtyard, she thought it wouldn’t be the first time that the Oracle had delivered a prophesy only for it not to come true. Accuracy wasn’t essential. Had Laertes died trying to overthrow his sovereign, it would only prove that, although Apollo had been with him, Zeus or Poseidon had sided with his opponent. When it comes to gods battling it out, no one argues.
In addition, many riddles were deliberately open to misinterpretation. Some for political reasons. Some because bribes had been passed (the Treasury was no slouch when it came to filling its storehouses). And some because, quite simply, Cassandra had no idea how to answer. Thanks to the meticulously maintained library of files at Delphi, she knew who the supplicants were, where they came from, the political background. But there was never any advance notice of their question.
And today the Oracle had quite clearly foretold that Laertes would set up camp beside the river next spring.
The Oracle could not afford to be that wrong.
Outside, Selene’s silver light spilled over the rooftops, bathing the theatre, the shrines, the fountains in silver as bats squeaked on the wing. With a thousand city-states constantly at war with one another, Delphi remained spectacularly neutral. In fact, it thrived on optimism, Cassandra decided as she waited for Jason to return. And it was her job to keep it that way. Without optimism, one tiny shrine could not have grown into the most prestigious religious centre in the world, bursting with treasuries, overflowing with marble, and where eight hundred statues stared out to sea. Thanks to its oracles, a federation of small (and otherwise insigificant) city-states had grown to become the most powerful council in the Greek world. Today, it was not so much a case of consulting the Oracle as obtaining sanction. Kings would not make war without it.
But Cassandra was only one link in the chain and, incredible as it may seem, not even the most important.
If anything happened to her — and the sibyls had a curious habit of dying in agony — there were other girls trained to step into her bridal robes and take that famous seat over the tripod. Girls like her cousin Hermione, for example, who’d been primed to take over, had it not been for Cassandra’s outstanding aptitude for deception. She smiled in recollection. The Governing Council, always eager to stock a new treasury, revelled in the fact that each new generation brought fresh ideas to the role. Cassandra’s proposal to enclose her lover, Jason, behind a partition to add to the drama cast poor Hermione into oblivion.
“Great Zeus, what are you doing out alone this time of night?”
She spun round. “Father! You frightened the life out of me!”
Grey eyes stared solemnly at her in the moonlight. She tried to remember the last time he’d smiled, but could not. “Can’t you sleep, child?”