by Ken Parejko
But Drusilla, grabbing up a long dry branch brushed the cobwebs aside and stepped bravely into the opening.
The long entrance hall to the Cumaean oracle ran parallel with the hillside, lit at intervals by small openings cut from the rock and facing the sea, so that the long corridor we peered down was alternately dark, then light, then dark and light again and again, leading far back into the darkness. We'd brought short pine-tar torches along, and in a small covered cup, a smoldering coal to light them. As we carefully made our way inward our eyes adjusted to the darkness.
Along the corridor we saw the dried bones of sacrificed animals and ancient pots tipped over, their contents long-spilled and scavenged by the rats and mice who for a thousand years shared this sacred place with the sibylline spirits Drusilla sought out. My mind vibrated between a natural fear of the dark and half awe that I should be penetrating the depths which so many before me, the famous few and the anonymous thousands, had entered.
Seemingly unafraid, she led the way. It appeared that no one else had come this way for months or years. Often she had to reach in front with her branch to brush aside thick, clammy cobwebs. After a while I turned to look back. The entrance was far behind us, a small triangular opening of light at the end of the corridor. We were more than halfway down the corridor's length. Here the windows cut into the stone were less frequent, and the dark more impenetrable. We stopped to lift a glowing coal and light a torch. She cupped the feeble coal in her hands and blew on it. An acrid smoke first hit my nostrils, then the torch caught fire and flamed up and cast a growing light around us. On the damp, moldy stones we could now see the dim outlines of ancient symbols and rough drawings, of Daedelus, the labyrinth, and the Minotaur. I remembered Drusilla’s son, and the pantomime of Theseus killing the Minotaur, then losing Ariadne to Dionysos. Our victories over the dark side, I thought, are illusionary, pyrrhic.
Beneath the ancient painted and carved symbols lay the rock itself, the flesh of the earth, whose presence we could feel around us almost as fetuses still in the womb sensed the body of their mother.
At last we reached the end of the corridor. A small chamber opened around us, the sanctum sanctorum of the oracle with many shallow recesses cut into its walls. We stood in front of the largest recess, which held a throne, the throne of the sibyl, from which she spoke her oracles. Drusilla moved to the throne, put a hand out to touch its seat, cool hard stone slowly dissolving in the moisture all around us. She lifted the torch inward and upward, to reveal the room’s details.
Suddenly from out of the darkness to one side came a voice. Drusilla turned a torch towards it, revealing deep in the recesses of a side-room a shining pair of eyes set in an old woman's face. We drew together; was this only a vision, woven like a spell from out of the darkness, the anxiety of our hearts, and the intimate weirdness which hovered around us? But the vision came towards us, revealing a woman of flesh.
“Why are you come?” she asked in an ancient Greek barely understandable. Her eyes were deep caves themselves, entrances to further grottoes in which other eyes held even deeper secrets, in an infinite journey to unknown worlds. Again I felt that vertigo, as though peering down into a deep bottomless abyss. The old woman spoke not to me, but to Drusilla.
“I've come to seek the oracle,” Drusilla said.
The eyes did not move. “Why?”
“To learn.” Drusilla answered.
“What to learn?
“Myself. I wish to learn myself.”
The old woman stepped between us and the throne, her bare feet finding their way in the dark as though they knew the floor of the room inch by inch, bare feet of flesh which seemed yet of the same matter as the stone on which she stood, as though through the many years she'd lived in the cave she had turned it to flesh, or herself to stone. Her hair was tangled, her clothes filthy; her ancient feet stuck out of the long cloak she wore like gnarly roots from the trunk of an old oak.
“Where from do you come?” she asked, turning suddenly to face us. In the light of the torches glancing off her eyes I saw the lion of Puteoli.
“Alexandria, and Pompeii, where I was initiated into the mysteries. This morning, from Misenum.”
“Misenum?”
“It's to the south, not far.”
“This Misenum, this is a place you could not find yourself?” the old woman asked. She slipped in front of the throne and I wondered if she would sit on it, and become the sibyl Odysseus had consulted. I was among a gathering of dark powers I 'd hardly known even existed. “The road of my life brought me here,” Drusilla said.
“Will you follow that road wherever it leads?” the woman asked. Her and Drusilla’ eyes were locked together.
“I will.”
“Then go, and come back when the sun has fallen into the sea. Eat nothing all day. Drink only water, purest.”
She turned her eyes to me.
I cleared my throat. “I came to speak with your cult.”
“Yes?”
“About the sacred grove.”
“You wish to cut it down.”
“Only a few trees, for our fleet.”
“A man came here a long time ago to ask for our trees. You waste your time,” she said.
I had done my duty, and was not disappointed.
She turned and in a few steps returned wherever she'd come from. Once again we were wrapped in a chill, black silence.
We made our way out the long dark gallery. I was physically and emotionally exhausted. As I re-entered the bright sunlight I had to squint. But it was comforting to be able to root myself in a more common world. Suddenly I felt cold, and let the bright warmth of the sun wash over me.
Drusilla said she would spend the day in Cumae. In the evening she would climb to the acropolis and make reverence to the waning sun. As it set she would re-enter the grotto.
“How long will you stay?” I asked, the workmen busy with their repair-work around us. It seemed such a contrast. Two hundred feet into the grotto a deep, mysterious, almost timeless world, and right here, the busy mundane world.
“I don’t know,” she said.
So it was time for us to say goodbye.
“If you need, I’ll send a boat for you. You’re welcome at my house.”
“Thank you. Maybe I’ll return to Pompeii and Antonius. I will see. But thank you, for helping me,” she said. She held my hand a moment, kissed me on the cheek, picked up her basket, then turned to pass down the steps into the tunnel toward the town on its other side. I watched as she disappeared. She moved with the graceful self-assurance of nobility. She wore the precious jewelry of her inheritance ostentatiously, around her neck a rich emerald necklace and on her arms and hands rings of gold, which made her an easy target for thieves. Yet she seemed not to notice, or care.
I watched til she'd disappeared down the path to Cumae.
I stood a moment in the bright morning sun. The jar she’d brought full of milk lay smashed on the ground, focus of a loose cloud of flies. I sighed, turned and made my way alone now down the many steps to the port below. Though going down was easier than walking up, still I stopped now and again to catch my breath. The day had grown hot, a heat made more oppressive by the cool cavern we’d just left. Light and dark, hot and cold, clear and obscure, myself and herself, dyads which hovered around me and energized me emotionally, while my body grew tired and thirsty.
The boat cast off, the men rowed us out of the harbor then out into the surf of the open sea, rougher now than it had been in the morning darkness. We tacked off out away from the land. I watched the mainland recede. She would already be somewhere in the city. Perhaps she would decide to live there among the sibyl’s followers, and I would never see her again. Or she might, as she had said, return to Antonius in Pompeii, then perhaps to Misenum. Who could tell? The future was a great darkness.
The cry of a gull, which seemed angry at the ship’s invasion of its territory, reminded me of the lovely sea-falcon Horus who I’d so admired bu
t which she saw only as a vehicle of her redemption. Did killing the bird, and the little rituals she practiced do her any good? Would Horus her parhedros lead her to the land of the gods? Where were the gods, if not here among us? What good would it do her, or anyone else, to find these gods, if they even existed?
If she went to the land of the gods, would she meet Vespasian? It would be good to have some way to find him, again. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps there were worlds unknown to me, which deserved exploring.
Now the heights of Monte Prochida rose beside me. It must be the fourth hour of the day already, I thought. I closed my eyes, looked forward to the business of the day which awaited me in the calm, familiar rooms of the admiralty.
Chapter 24
Aug. 25, 79 C.E.
on the Bay of Naples
You wait, are awaiting the one thing
that will add infinitely to your life;
the powerful, the extraordinary,
when stones awaken
and the depths turn towards you.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Remembering
The savage winds which had blown us off course the day before and danced and howled the dirty night long like angry squalling dervishes slipped with the dawn into a slow steady breeze bringing Vesuvius’ proffered gift: foul gases and fine, choking dust. Into the morning I lay on the beach on the tattered sail, face covered with my tunic, hovered over by the faithful Lucius. Against the wind my asthmatic breath worked irregularly and shallow. I was aware of the catastrophe going on around me, but found myself strangely unconcerned. Only a small part of my brain kept a tenuous connection to the outside world, as though I were standing in a theater engaged in an interesting conversation while watching the stage from the corner of my eye.
The conversation was with myself. Yet even that dialogue seemed somehow distant. There was the mayhem of the outside world; there was the growing irregularity of my breathing which I noted but did not concern myself with; there was, too, a vague but growing sense of change in my own being. It was this chimeric subtle transformation which interested me most, a natural history of dying. Out of habit more than anything it seemed important to me to dictate my experiences to someone. While Lucius bent to listen I muttered something about the chaos of sensory experience and the immense distances to and between things, a rending of the fabric of life in which I could sense a growing subtle passageway out. My voice was no stronger than my breathing. Lucius asked what I’d said. But now what had felt so important seemed equally trivial, whether anyone heard me or not. I closed my eyes again, rested.
Lucius ran his hand over my hair, rested it on my forehead. I opened my eyes a moment, smiled slightly.
Lucius leaned down. “Forgive me, master, but one thing I must do.”
He lifted his hand from my head, picked up the water-jug he’d brought from Pomponianus’, from which I'd sipped now and again all night. But the jug was empty. He lay my head carefully down and disappeared into the smoke and ash beyond the refuge of the sail. In a moment or an eternity he was back.
He shook the ash off his hair and shoulders, sat beside me. The old man who'd stayed with us all night watched as Lucius let sea-water, cloudy with the sky’s angry vomit, drizzle over my head.
“I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” Lucius said, quietly. My eyes were closed but I heard him.
I heard him set the water-jug aside, then felt him place a light kiss on the dampness of my hair.
I was me, still, observing the corruption of my body, concentrating on the irregular rise and fall of my chest as my breathing slowed, then sped, then slowed again. The splash of Lucius' water took me back for a moment to the lake on which I’d grown up, whose water I now felt as a kind of soothing wash of light. I wanted to tell Lucius about it, the water of light, but the chasm between things had grown between us and, finally, there was no reaching Lucius.
I focused again on my breathing. It was something to do while I waited, unsure of what I was waiting for, but what was there to do but wait? I was struck by how irregular my breathing had become. Long moments would go by, which grew into near eternities, without any sign of another breath. I waited, and waited, until finally would come a short gasp, or a long deep breath. It was something I’d never experienced before, and it was fascinating, really, the way my body fought its dissolution.
A deep breath. I waited for the next. Was I no longer breathing, or was this just a trick of time? The next did not come. Well, body, breathe if you're going to. Don’t keep me waiting forever. But the body had given up. So I let go of my breathing, no sense wasting myself on that, I thought, and let my mind collapse into a deep, comforting silence. I let myself fall into, and wrapped myself with, the silence. It was pleasant there in the quiet. I wanted to stay in that quiet, and never leave it, free at last from the bother of breathing and hearing and thinking, to just float in the silence as a disembodied self. I’d finally found and slipped through that tear in the tapestry of life, and it was perfect.
So, I thought, this is it, the perfection of death. It was a simple thing, really, nothing to be afraid of. Like our destiny, an easy thing, if we only let it happen. I would have liked to tell everyone about it, only it occurred to me that eventually they would find out on their own. It seemed that I’d just settled into it when from some far corner of my awareness there came a low impatient buzz which like a moth fighting to rise from the surface of a lake broke the placid waters of my being. I found it, this intrusion, in my ears, and what had started quietly in a short time had become a deep insistent roar. I resented it, but could not ignore it. I decided, and my decisions now came naturally, as water pours out of an overturned basin, to focus on the intrusion, to identify it.
My mind was coming apart, I realized, for the sound I heard was only the sighing of the wind, and to my great surprise, the sound of another breath rising out of the depths of my body. Then on top of that the voices of men, leaning over me. One voice, I was quite sure, was Lucius', and another Pomponianus'. I tried, once, to open my eyes to see if I was right, but the ash and dust had cemented them shut.
Enough with the fussing, I wanted to tell them. I'm fine. It’s very interesting, really, what’s happening. If you just leave me alone I’ll be fine. But it seemed so important to them, this fussing they were doing, I decided to let them go on with it.
Only I was thirsty, so thirsty it seemed my body was a dried-out husk, a leaf shriveling in a hot wind, a seed longing for water. I wanted to ask them for water. Then I felt in my mouth a few drops, which I did not have the energy to swallow. And I wondered if I had asked them, or not.
The pesky roar in my ears continued. I focused on it, tried to pick out its individual elements: the sound of my renewed breathing, raspy, irregular, the tides of blood in my ears, the wind, the concerned chatter of my friends, the hiss of falling dust and pebbles, the splashing of the sea, the distant screams and shouts of a thousand men and women frantically trying to escape the same death I saw no reason to run from. For an instant I held each element separate but then could not hold them apart. They all collapsed together and merged into a steady roar, a roar which lifted me up and became a great wind I rode at dizzying speed, like ravens I’d watched, scudding gracefully down high alpine ridges. It had been years since I’d felt such a sense of speed, when as a cavalry officer I’d sat astride Lightning at full gallop. I rode this phantom horse, this crying wind, this winged spirit faster, and faster. It was exhilarating. But it was frightening, too, this speeding through the dark with no idea what lie ahead.
But just as that whisper of anxiety crossed my mind, I broke suddenly out of the darkness and into a brilliant, beautiful landscape. My eyes, which had been closed, broke open. My face mirrored my astonishment. To my friends, bent lovingly over me, this would be the moment of my death.
Before me, a meadow of grasses and yellow flowers dotted with groves of tall trees. Nearby, beside a cool bubbling spring a tall cedar-tree. The air
was calm and pleasant and sweetened with the aroma of cedars and flowers. I walked easily down a narrow path toward the spring, whose quiet song reminded me of my thirst, a nagging sharp thirst. I wanted to slip beside the stream and dip its water to my lips, but somehow knew I shouldn’t, knew to the core of my being in a way I'd never known before, that destiny was a subtle, liquid thing, and to pause now for a drink might put an end to this journey, a journey I meant to take as far as it would go.
Ahead, under a quiet grove of pines and cedars which ranged beside the stream, a small gathering of souls. I studied their faces, which seemed at the same time both intimately familiar yet unknown. I seemed to recognize one of the women but could not connect her to who she was. Oddly, as tranquil as the scene was, and as nonchalantly as I strode along, as though only taking a walk along the familiar path from the admiralty to the harbor, or on the familiar paths of my childhood along the lovely lake, still I knew that this time I'd left everything familiar far behind.
The small communion of spirits I approached was in some way important. They smiled to me as I came up. They were, I knew, but how I knew I did not know, custodians of the gates of death and eternal life, who greeted souls who'd made their way to the land beyond life.
One of the men was Drusus, from far back in my life, my dream-life, along a river in the wilds of Germania. Another, Vespasian. Good old Vespasian. And my father, and Plinia’s husband Cilo, Castor, my tutor Pomponius. They'd come to welcome me.
The threads of my life had come undone, but I was re-weaving them now, into a new and more lasting pattern. I'd brought with me the most important threads, the Orphic hymns, with which I would play out my destiny. My fate depended on remembering my part. So once again, as so often in life, it was Mnemosyne, my legendary memory, which I could rely on, this time not over some trivial anecdote or the proper weave of a part of the German wars into the tapestry of history. This time I must find the right invocation of the dying, the simple charm which would release me from the cycle of reincarnation.
