Oracle
Authors: Jackie French
To Socrates,
who took me to Ancient Greece,
and taught me to examine the world
The wind smelled of rock and ice the night their father took Nikko’s sister out to die. The wind whispered between the cold stone huts, as though it told stories to the cliffs above.
Nikko peered out of the goat shed as his father pushed aside the goatskin door of their hut. He held a small pale shape. As Nikko watched, his father carried it away from the hut’s red coals of fire light, into the darkness.
His father had ordered Nikko and his brother to sleep in the goat shed when the midwife had arrived that night. He was supposed to be asleep as his mother cried and strained. Even his brother thought Nikko was too young to know what was happening.
He knew.
The goats muttered at their tethers, their yellow eyes shining through the dark, and then grew quiet again.
Nikko slipped back to the pile of hay and goatskins and nudged his brother. ‘The baby has been born!’
‘Go back to sleep.’ Aertes’s voice was a sleepy mutter.
‘Father’s carrying it away.’ Maybe there was a ritual when a baby was born, thought Nikko; just like you sacrificed a dove on the Mother’s stone before you cut
the first sweep of barley, or spat three times if you dropped bread on the ground. ‘Where’s he taking it?’
‘Shh! Up the mountainside.’
‘Why?’
‘Why…why…You ask too many questions.’ Aertes rolled over, pulling the goatskins with him.
‘But there’s nothing on the mountainside!’ The rocky mountain heights were too barren even to graze goats. ‘Why take a baby there?’
‘There is no baby.’
‘But—’ Nikko stopped as Aertes sat up.
Aertes brushed the hay out of his hair impatiently. ‘If father is taking the baby away, then it’s a girl. Understand?’
Nikko shook his head.
‘Who needs a girl? A girl can’t watch the goats or hunt for meat. A sister needs a dowry too, so someone will marry her. A dowry of goats, or land that should come to us.’
Nikko shook his head, bewildered. ‘Girls do the cooking. They grow the barley and get the firewood. A girl would help our mother—’
Aertes spat. The goats muttered again. One of the kids began nudging at its mother. ‘In a few harvests I will have a wife. She will help our mother.’
‘Will I have wife?’ It hadn’t really occurred to him before.
Aertes’s lip curled. ‘We don’t have enough barley and olive trees to feed a wife for you too. You’ll have to find a wife with land for her dowry, or go without.’ Aertes settled back into the hay again. ‘When the village wakes up, there won’t be a baby.’
‘But people knew a baby was coming. The midwife has seen it—’
‘Shh! They’ll keep their mouths shut too. Chances are they’ve taken some of their own up there. Too many to feed and we all go hungry. But up on the mountain…’ His brother shrugged. ‘A wolf will get her. Or a fox. There’ll be nothing to see, nothing to find by tomorrow. Now go to sleep.’
Nikko lay back and tried to think. Was his brother right? Women and goats got fat when they were going to have a baby. He wrinkled his forehead. Had other women in the village who had been fat suddenly got thin, but with no baby in their arms?
A sound seeped through the darkness. His mother, over in the hut sobbing softly, trying to choke the noise with her cloak. Yesterday he would have run to her. But not tonight.
He had looked forward to the baby. Aertes was too big to play with him. Aertes cuffed him when he got things wrong, and stole his barley cake when no one watched. A baby would be young, like him. A brother to help him watch the goats. A sister.
Sisters made you fig cakes, and hot posset when it was cold. Demetri Limp-leg’s sister made him honey cake, and rubbed his leg when the cold made it hurt.
His mother’s sobs grew louder. Another woman’s voice murmured soothingly.
A wolf, sneaking through the darkness…he had seen a wolf rip up a young goat once. The kid had strayed from its mother in the night and had fallen from the cliff. Nikko couldn’t reach it; had had to watch as the wolf tore
at its throat, then gouged the belly open. His father had beaten him for the loss of the kid.
A baby ripped at by the hard jaws of a wolf. His sister.
He shut his eyes. He had no sister! Only a glimpse in the darkness. His mother’s cries in the night.
He tried to sleep. But it was as though the world had stretched since the afternoon, making room for one more person. A sister, small and helpless, alone on the hill…
Nikko waited till his brother’s snores grew even, then slipped past the goats and out of the shed.
The moon was high above the valley as he ran between the rough wooden huts. The moon was the Mother, though somehow the earth was the Mother too, and she was young and old and a mother all at the same time. Nikko felt that sometimes grown-ups got a bit confused about religion.
Every night the moon spinners spun more of the Mother’s bright moondress away, till it was a tiny sickle in the sky, then nothing at all, as they wove their thread into the light that made the stars. But tonight the spinners must be sleeping too, for the moon was as round as a cheese.
He passed the headman’s house, with its painted lintel above the door, and its wooden seats outside where the village men sat to make decisions.
Footsteps. Nikko stood still, a shadow among other shadows, pressed against the high wooden fence that protected the village from wolves and bears and strangers. Skins hung next to him, drying out before they were tanned, stinking of rotting meat and goat.
The shadow was his father. His hands were empty.
Nikko waited till his father passed and the village was silent again, then hurried around to the village gate. He unbarred it and pushed it open, just wide enough to slip through.
The moonlight seemed even brighter outside the village. Nikko was glad. He knew the land nearby well enough to find his way in darkness. But he had only been up the mountain a few times, hunting pigeons with the other boys.
He trod carefully from rock to rock across the stream, the moonlight winking at him from the water, past the pool where the women did their washing, then up the hill, past the flat sacrifice rock. Nestled into the hillside, it was dark with long-dried blood where the headman’s wife slit the throats of doves and goats to please the Mother so she would send them rain and sun, deer to spear and fat heads of barley for their bread.
The wind breathed ice on his bare legs as he began to climb, making him wish he’d brought a goatskin as a cloak. It smelled of cold rocks and faintly of herbs, and other scents too that he couldn’t identify. Sometimes Nikko lifted his face to the wind, hearing in it the music of the places it had crossed: the High King’s palace down at Mycenae, or even the sea, that almost unbelievable endless sweep of water.
But not tonight.
Suddenly the earth began to shake under his feet, a tiny tremor lasting only as long as it took to take two breaths. Nikko stopped, and held his fist to his forehead in homage to the earthshaker below.
An earthquake might be a portent, telling humans of things to come. This was just a tiny earthquake. But it was a tiny baby.
Something slid between the rocks. For a moment his heart turned colder than the night. Was it a wolf? Or a wild pig? A wild pig would eat a baby too. He blinked. The shadow vanished.
He began to run.
Twisting between the boulders, the flint-sharp stones tearing at his bare feet, juniper bushes scratching his skin…black shapes all around him…How could you see a baby among the rocks, even in the moonlight? The wind snickered as it twisted across the hill.
He reached the top, panting, and looked down. Still no sign that anything lived in the jumble of stone. His heart twisted. Was he too late? Had a wolf already found the tiny body, and carried it off?
A bird trilled in the trees along the stream. He tensed. Not a nightingale, but a lark. He hadn’t realised so much time had passed. He glanced behind him at the horizon. Daylight was already a grim, grey glimmer across the sky. He’d waited too long before leaving the familiarity of the goat shed. He should have run as soon as his father left. Should have followed him, to see where he had left the baby.
Aertes is right when he says I’m young and stupid, he thought.
And then he heard it, small and shrill under the song of the bird. A baby’s cry.
Where was it? The wind snatched at the noise, carrying it across the hill. Impossible to tell where it came from.
A shadow moved below him. A wolf, its nose lifted to smell the wind. It was an old one, its fur tinged with grey, thin after winter.
He yelled, grabbed a stone and threw it. It missed. He should have thought to bring his sling.
The wolf looked up. He could almost hear it cursing, indecisive. Run from the danger up on the hill, or grab the food so temptingly hidden among the rocks? Nikko could sense when it decided that he was too small, too far away, to be a threat to a big wolf. Grab the meat and run…The wolf began to pad between the boulders.
Nikko had to get there first! He tried to leap from rock to rock, his feet sliding on the stones. The cry came again. Over there by those two big rocks!
Why had he climbed so high? His father had just left the baby on the first bare patch of mountainside. Why sweat carrying it further up the slope? Nikko must have run past the baby in the dark.
The first ray of sunlight speared over the valley, then slid its way across the hill. The birdsong was a chorus now.
The breath tore at his throat. He was nearly at the baby now. So was the wolf. The wolf glanced up, then began to run toward its prey.
He wouldn’t make it. Couldn’t make it. But he had to try. A shadow crossed his face. He glanced up as the eagle dropped, its talons down. No! He had a sudden image of the baby, carried like a rabbit in those claws.
The eagle landed on the rock above the baby. The crying broke off, as though she sensed danger. The wolf stilled, eyeing the eagle.
Nikko bent again, grabbed another rock. This one didn’t miss. The wolf yelped as the stone hit its ear. It shook its head, as though to clear it. Then suddenly it vanished among the rocks.
Nikko skidded on a loose slide of pebbles, then stopped. The baby stared up, her eyes impossibly blue, her small mouth open. His father must have taken the covering—why waste a goatskin, he thought bitterly—for she was naked, her arms and legs waving like a frog’s. He bent and grabbed her to him. Her head lolled strangely, so for a moment he thought that the neck was broken. But as he gathered the soft little body to him he felt her heart beating steadily against his.
He turned, and saw the eagle.
It was still there, on the rock, no more than a spear’s length from them. It stared at him unwinking, then hunched, and launched itself back into the sky, wings beating at the air until it was high enough to ride the wind.
Nikko stared up, the baby in his arms. It was almost, he thought, as though the eagle had been waiting for him, guarding the child.
But that was impossible. Eagles didn’t—
The baby gave a sort of hiccough, then began to cry again; the sound was weak but almost unbearably sweet. Nikko opened his tunic and wrapped her against his chest as best he could to keep her warm, then began the walk home.
The village gate was open as he crossed the stream. Already women sat on their doorsteps, grinding the flour
for today’s bread in their quirns. They watched him as he carried his sister into the village, the women in the doorways, the boys milking the goats, the men lounging in the early sunlight eating their barley cakes, or mending the hunting nets or spears.
No one spoke. Even those who had been talking broke off as he came near.
I am carrying the dead, he thought. I am carrying the person who never was, who was never supposed to be. I am bringing the things hidden by the night into daylight.
It was the longest walk he’d ever known.
The baby flailed her arms against his chest, and kicked him with her tiny toes. She was surprisingly strong. Despite himself he smiled down at her as she batted him again.
His father waited for him in the doorway. He was a big man, hunched by work, a scar along one arm from a battle with a wild pig. (His father won. The pig’s skin was now a mat by the hearth fire, and its tusks were strung up in triumph by the door.)
His father folded his arms as his son drew near.
Nikko stopped. He opened his mouth to say ‘I’m sorry.’
But he wasn’t. He shook his head instead. ‘I—I’ll share my food with her. I can find wild herbs while I watch the goats. I’ll snare more hares and bring back more pigeons. I promise I’ll find enough for both of us. Please don’t make me take her back—’;
Someone moved in the hut behind. His father stepped aside as his mother stumbled out. There was blood on her tunic. She gave a cry, and held out her arms. Nikko
passed the baby to her. She cradled it, murmuring something, and glanced up at her husband. His face was expressionless as she carried the baby back into the dimness of the hut.
His father still said nothing. He didn’t look back at his wife, but out at the village. Nikko followed his gaze along the road. Everyone was watching, silent too. Aertes stood in a group of other young men, spears in their hands, as though they had been about to go hunting. They too stood silent, staring at him. And suddenly he understood.
Things done in darkness could be ignored. But it was daylight now. An emotion he couldn’t name flooded through him.
His sister was safe.
‘Milk the goats, then take them out to graze.’ His father hesitated. ‘We will call her Thetis.’ He turned back into the hut.
‘Yes, Father.’
Above him the eagle gave a harsh cry. Nikko had rarely heard an eagle’s voice. It almost sounded as though it was amused.