The Double Tongue (17 page)

‘The women?’

‘There weren’t many women.’

‘Menesthia. You may go now.’

The girl curtsied and withdrew.

‘Somebody will have to take her in hand.’

‘Your job, First Lady. I don’t envy you.’

‘Most men would.’

‘Would they? Yes, I suppose so. She’s a pretty little’ – and again, that wince and shudder – ‘thing.’

We were defeated. Menesthia proved as intractable as a wild ass. Even her ‘funny times’ became less frequent, and I am quite sure that she ended by pretending that she had them. As spring broadened out from the lowlands and climbed the winding road up to Delphi she became pale and tearful and whiny. In the end she begged so hard to go home that we had to let her go for she was a free woman, and her father agreed to take her back, dowry and all. He was soft and entirely unlike my own father. He made me wonder about myself far more than she did. For she was quite easily understood – a spoilt priestess. He on the other hand was a man – little more than a smallholder – who spoilt his animals, let alone his children.

I did wonder about Menesthia’s ‘funny times’. They made me uneasy because though I had been First Lady for many years I had never experienced anything like them. I needed the smoke of laurel leaves, yet their magic power seemed to lessen. The Olympians seemed to be going farther and farther away. I had become – but by fits and starts – increasingly uneasy about them and in particular Apollo. I had read a great deal by now and was confused. Nobody seemed to know precisely who the Olympians were and whether Apollo had originally been one of them. I communicated this unease to Ion who had very little counsel to give. He said to go on as I was and hope that there would be light shed by the gods themselves. In addition to this worry there was the question of some girl to select as a possible Second Lady, for, as I said to Ion, I was not going to live for ever.

‘Dear Lady! Will not the oracle look after itself?’

‘I wish I could be sure of that.’

‘If you are not, who is?’

‘You of course!’

Ion gave me a long, critical look.

In the end we repaired the roof of the Pythion properly and left the sodden corner of the bookroom, which had been the librarium, remain ‘a temporary solution’. It did mean that the whole great room was colder and Perseus complained that he would snuffle the whole year round. But as I told him, what would Delphi be without a Pythia and he had to agree.

Phocis sent us a girl. She was a skinny little thing and we caught her at the moment when she was about to shoot up, which she did. She was dark as I was and called Meroe. I think she had some connection with Egypt. She was a solemn creature and extremely pious. Indeed, I made up my mind that I would not be intimidated by her piety, but I never quite succeeded in ridding myself of the feeling that she disapproved of her First Lady. She had no ‘funny feelings’ but did not think she should learn to read until Serapis indicated that she should. Serapis was a new god, not one of the old Egyptian ones, and it made me uneasier still. If we were about the business of inventing gods where would it end?

Then Ionides disappeared. It was some time before I noticed that he was missing, having got so used to his presence I supplied it unconsciously even when he was not there. There was a confusion when I went to the tripod to utter the oracular response and realized that Ion wasn’t there. In the end one of the Holy Ones stood in for him but I had to prompt him for he could not manage the hexameters. It was not edifying. People had begun to expect the verse form from me and, though I used it, this untrained young man gave out a lame version in prose. So what some people were kind enough to call ‘the revival of the oracle’ suffered a setback as they say. I was eager for Ionides to return. I had learnt to lean on him. Then I discovered that Perseus had been missing, too. I learnt this because he asked to see me and confessed that he had been absent.

‘Why?’

‘I went with His Holiness, First Lady.’

‘Where?’

‘Epirus.’

‘But – I think you had better explain.’

So it all came out. The information gathering, the speed of communication, the couriers, the whole organization I had thought was for the support of the oracle, had been turned by Ion and some of the Holy Ones into a plot against the Romans. I do not expect anyone who has bothered to read this far to credit the situation. But Delphi and some of the lesser-known oracles were trying to persuade mainland Greece to shake itself free from Roman rule! What made the whole scheme preposterous was that there was nothing wrong with Roman rule! Of course there are rotten apples in any barrel, but the Romans were giving Greece what she had never been able to give herself. For hundreds of years mainland Greece had been nothing but a collection of large villages fighting each other with every kind of trickery and treachery and savagery. Now there was the rule of law and peace. Of course the Romans made us pay cash for it, but we were glad, too. Even now when it looks as if the Romans themselves are going to have a civil war and fight it out in our country rather than their own, the situation is more peaceful than it was in the days when every village thought it had a holy duty to fight its neighbour. I used to think – but privately – that we should have avoided two hundred years of bickering if the Persians had only conquered us the way the Romans did. And now here was Ionides of all people meeting conspiratorially in Epirus with other madmen against the most powerful country in the world!

Not that the conspiracy got very far. There was a certain pathos about it. Perseus – whom Ion had just ordered to go along without telling him more than ‘he needed to know’ – Perseus told me what happened. They reached the place where they were supposed to meet with the other conspirators – passwords and all – and no one was there. They waited, sitting on a rock in the middle of nowhere and examining the future by means of birdwatching. The future was exceptionally favourable it appeared. But then what appeared was Romans who rose, apparently out of the ground, and arrested them both. They were searched in a most humiliating and unnecessary way, for Ionides was not carrying anything and Perseus was carrying some food and all the relevant papers in a leather bag. A further humiliation, said Perseus, was that the officer in charge wasn’t even a colonel. But they knew everything – why the other conspirators were not there, who they were and what the plan was. The Romans had been – to use a Latin word for which Greek has no exact equivalent – efficient.

‘I know I’m a slave,’ said Perseus, ‘and I was resigning myself to the probability of being tortured since they couldn’t torture His Holiness. Even so I have my pride and it was the last humiliation when they told me to run along.’

‘They let you go!’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘How could you leave him?’

‘Indeed, First Lady, I did all the things you read about. You know – faithful slave stuff – but it didn’t work. Even when I tried to follow they prodded me in the tum with the butt end of a spear.’

‘They took him away –’

‘The last I heard of him he was declaiming. He said he was in the hands of god. The officer said, “Come, sir, Your Holiness, it’s not as bad as that!”’

‘Oh – what shall I do?’

‘It’s not for me to say, First Lady. I shall go back to the bookroom which I should never have left.’

He paused in his going and turned to me again.

‘He said to give you this.’

It was a silver key, but of an extraordinary shape. The two ends were each shaped as a labrys, the Cretan double axe. But this was doubly doubled.

‘Which end is which?’

‘I don’t know, Lady. I thought you would. The officer was most respectful of it, wouldn’t touch it. Oh, every courtesy as they say, after they’d searched us.’

I had no idea what to do with the key, or even if it was more than symbolic. I threaded a silver chain round the barrel to remind myself what it was and put it away. What to do? It was an ideal moment for the obvious recourse – ask the oracle of Delphi! But how can a Pythia ask herself a question and then transmit to herself the god’s answer, if, if – if there is a god to give the answer? I thought to myself, the seven wise men of Greece might well be asked in vain for an answer to that situation. Even in my anxiety for Ion I could not but think the situation unique and in a rueful kind of way, amusing. Nevertheless I was drawn towards the building. I veiled myself and stole along to it. The great doors set back in the colonnade whined loudly as I pushed one leaf open enough to let me through. Here it was, the steps down, the niches in the wall, each for a Holy One, and the last niche for the holiest of all, the High Priest of Apollo, his Holiness the Warden of the Holy Ones. There was the tripod, by it, the brazier, empty now, since the seventh day of the month was past. There beyond and behind the tripod were the curtains, the drawstrings hanging down the right-hand side. A stiff, not to say crude image of Apollo woven into the stuff of the left-hand curtain faced some misshapen monster in the right. As always they made the goose pimples rise on my skin, and the rhythm of my breathing quickened. It was a holy place, the most holy in Greece, most holy in the world. I tried to explain this to myself, said to myself that I was the Pythia faced with temptation. No. I was Arieka, the little barbarian afraid of the dark. But dark herself, oh yes. I went on tiptoe through the dusk of the adyton and stood close to the curtain, so close I felt my breath might stir it – and had a convulsion of pure fear when I thought that my breath might lend the monster breath and he/she start into life and overwhelm me. I did not think of Apollo in the other curtain but only of the monster, surely now stirring into life. I began to back away, keeping my eye on him, and presently he stilled and my breathing slowed and I knew some woman had woven him and woven the god, some woman of flesh and blood, even a Pythia perhaps, instructed by the god to make this image of him and the darkness he had faced.

Let it be. Let the curtains hang there. Apollo send Ionides back to me! He is more than a husband, that quicksilver, quicksand, learned mountebank of the gods! I believe in him, liar, soothsayer, self-deceiver, fool, the eighth wise man –

Well, Arieka, what did you expect?

A god, that’s what you expected.

They turned their backs on you.

They vanished and there was grief before the void. The Void.

Presently I came out of that unprofitable feeling and found myself walking down the street, my face bare and people looking strangely at me. So with an automatic gesture I veiled myself and entered the Pythion.

He was sitting on one of the chairs like a woman. Or like an ancient statue. His eyes were shut.

‘Ion. Ionides, oh you, you fool. You moron, you, you –’

‘Get up, for god’s sake. No, not that. Just get up. Stop wetting my feet. I’ve had enough. I shall kill myself –’

‘Ion –’

‘I know, I know. Imagine. They let me go. Lucius Galba, that Roman bastard. He let me go. He said the secret of Roman Power was that it robbed men of their dignity. Then they were nothing. Oh God, the Father of Gods and Men, strike him blind! Apollo spill his seed with your arrow – Artemis freeze his bed – You demons that I called up, torment him!’

‘Ion –’

The strange man clasped himself with his arms and began to chant.

‘Ion. Ion. Ion. Ion. Ion. Ion –’

Then I knew what he was doing. He was finding a place to hide, to draw into and away from himself, his shame the last bit of clothing to be dropped before the void, where at last there is the peace of not-god, not-man – nothingness –

‘Ion. Ion. Ion –’

Suddenly he stopped. He wiped his eyes and stood up. Spoke briskly.

‘Well, that’s that, then.’

He stood, looking down at me.

‘Well, Pythia. That’s that. You don’t understand do you? You with your knack of suffering. I can’t. I mean I can for a bit, like just now and before you came in. Real, genuine – shame. And now it’s over. That’s the difference between us.’

‘You’re back –’

‘No I’m not.’

So that was how His Holiness came home. But, as he said, he wasn’t home. And the little that had really come did not last long. I saw him dwindle. Presently it became plain that he would dwindle right away. I asked the god if it was possible for him to live. And I knew what the god’s answer was, for it was the same as my own. I had taken, indeed, not to addressing an Apollo out there – somewhere in the empyrean it may be – but that woman’s image, as a child would. So I suppose that at last the Pythia did indeed answer herself.

Perseus said something acute.

‘If His Holiness was a slave he would live.’

I saw that was true; and it was in a way a compliment to Ion, so I passed it on to him. He laughed crazily when he heard it.

‘Perseus thinks there is a man in here!’

‘So there is, Ion. Be a man.’

‘You lack conviction. How wonderful, though, if something real like dying because I had lost my dignity actually happened to me! No, no, my dear. I shall totter on, growing senile and finding not death but oblivion. You may have the leavings burnt.’

That is what happened more or less. He did become silly, not in the way he always had been at times, but a silliness without any wisdom in it. There was oblivion and presently his body died. I did not suffer with him because as so often in these cases of extreme age he had really died a long time before.

The day his body died I went and sat in his niche for the first time in my life and, I think, the last time. There was nothing. He did not come back. It seemed to me that with his death, though I was the Pythia with a Second Lady ready to take over my duties, nevertheless with Ion the oracle died. I let her go through the motions. I understood that old First Lady I had known so many years ago. Sixty? More, I think. I have lost count. But the world has changed. Sixty will do.

When the winter came and the Second Lady ceased giving oracles and the young man who sat in Ion’s niche had ceased interpreting her noises for the questioner – when, I say, that deadly wind blew down and sifted the unmelting snow along the cobbled street, I returned to the oracle, as was my right, and opened one leaf of the door. I passed through the colonnade, down the steps past the niches, round the tripod and stood before the curtains. The key with the double labrys was hanging round my neck. I pulled the drawstrings slowly and the curtains slid back. There was a double door behind them. I stood before it for a long time but the only thought that came to me was that whatever happened it did not matter much. So I put the silver labrys into the silver lock and turned the key. The doors were easy enough to open. There was the solid, impenetrable rock of the mountain behind them.