The Oracle of Cumae

by Melissa Hardy

  “When do they turn back into beautiful women?” Pasquale wanted to know.

  “Not until Monday, when the Pope says Mass,” Papa said. “Now today’s Monday, but has the Pope said Mass?” He shrugged. “Who knows? Perhaps he is ill. Perhaps he is en route somewhere. Perhaps he is relaxing at one of his country estates. So, you see, gentlemen, there’s no way of telling what you might encounter up there on the crag. Ours is the last farm beyond Montemonaco. Take supper with us and a night’s rest and continue on your way in the morning.”

  “We accept your generous invitation,” Padre Eusebio said, glancing daggers at Cesare. “Now, where can I sit down? I feel all at sixes and sevens! If the Pope cares so much about this witch, why doesn’t he come and deal with her himself? He’s a younger man than me, yes, by a dozen years. Besides, leave well enough alone! Let sleeping witches lie!” Seizing Rinardo by one elbow and Emilio by the other with hands that did not so much shake as vibrate, he cried querulously, “Lads, take me to a chair!”

  Cesare looked at Pio and shrugged. “May as well humor him. Only a priest can perform the banishing ritual; we need him for that.” He turned back to my parents and bowed with a flourish. “It would seem that we are accepting your kind invitation to stay the night. And now, Signor Umbellino, perhaps you might do me the honor of introducing your beautiful daughters to me.” His gaze, rheumy and red-rimmed, fixed on pretty Concetta. “Unless they are not daughters at all, but Lamiae!”

  Concetta blushed and cast her eyes down. Then she looked up to meet his gaze. To my surprise, she looked pleased, even very pleased.

  “This is my eldest daughter, Concetta,” my father told him. “And this tadpole of a girl here…” He ruffled my unruly hair. “This is Mariuccia.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” the Prior said, bowing, it must be noted, more in the direction of my sister than myself.

  “Pleased to make yours,” said Concetta and blushed again.

  “Take care of the donkey, while I see to Padre,” Pio told Pasquale and headed over to where my brothers had deposited the old priest in a chair under a big oak tree close to the house.

  “Is there somewhere I can stable the donkey?” Pasquale asked Papa.

  “Mari will show you,” replied my father.

  “This way,” I said to Pasquale and started toward the stable.

  The boy followed. “Are there really such creatures as Lamiae?”

  “Of course.”

  “Have you ever seen one?”

  “Never. If I had, I would not be alive today.” Here I became inventive. “You can hear them, though. The Lamiae. At night. They make a most peculiar noise—very shrill.” In fact, peacocks were plentiful on our mountain and could frequently be heard—day or night—uttering their distinctive shrill cry. “If you hear such a sound,” I warned him solemnly, “you must be very sure not to go outside, not for anything. Not if you wish to live to see another day.”

  “Who would have known that the countryside was full of such terrors?” Pasquale wondered. He crossed himself.

  The evening that followed lives on in my memory as a disjointed series of overheard conversations, intrigue, and stolen moments. It began with a pitched, if surreptitious battle between Concetta and myself up in the loft that served as our bedroom and concerned her hairbrush—a terrific bone of contention between us. Papa had made it for her from the bristles of a wild boar; he had fashioned a similar one for Mama when they were first married and had promised me my own brush when next he felled a boar. However, boars, as it turned out, were few and far between that year; fully six months had passed since his crossbow had taken down the one from whose bristles he had crafted Concetta’s brush. In the meantime, I was supposed to make do with a comb carved from the bone of a deer. In my opinion this was incredibly unfair.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I demanded. “You know how thick my hair is? Do you want me to look like a walking bramble bush?”

  “Why should I care what you look like? It is me that has to look good, not you!”

  “Who for? That fat Prior?”

  “He is not fat!”

  “With that big belly and those spindly legs? He looks like a puffed-up pigeon!”

  “You’re just jealous because he likes me, not you. It’s my brush and I don’t want your greasy hairs all through it!” I’ve said that Concetta was sweet, but she had her moments—all big sisters do—and this was one of them.

  “But I’ve got mats!” I protested.

  “You’ve also got lice and burrs—more reason for me not to let you use it!”

  “I do not!”

  “Do so!”

  “Concetta!” my mother trilled from downstairs. This was her fake voice, put on for show. “I need your help preparing a bed for our guests!”

  The Prior’s evident interest in my sister had not been lost on my parents. How could it have been? He had been making eyes at Concetta from the moment of their introduction—big, wet dog eyes. Sickening, I thought, but she evidently liked it. I suppose that the fact that he came from faraway and clearly possessed both means and social standing made him that much more attractive to her. I am told that these things matter to girls, though they have never mattered much to me.

  Just before we had climbed up the ladder to the loft to tidy ourselves up and put on fresh aprons over our red skirts, I had overhead a whispered exchange between my mother and my father. “What a good match!” my mother said. “You don’t suppose he’s married, do you?”

  “I’m one step ahead of you,” replied my father. “I asked him…in a very offhanded way, of course…whether he was the Bacigalupo or the Son in Bacigalupo & Son. And he replied, ‘I was the son until my father died and now I am the Bacigalupo. There is, at the present moment, no son, there being, as yet, no wife.’”

  To which my mother had replied, “Perfect! A Prior and a prosperous business owner! Too bad that he lives so far away. Still, it can’t be helped. Listen to me, Umberto, we must make certain to put her in his path as often as possible.”

  In retrospect, I don’t blame my parents for their conspiring in the matter of my sister and Cesare Bacigalupo. They had two marriageable daughters and Montemonaco was a small mountain village—remote and isolated. If there is one thing people who keep livestock know, it’s the danger of too much inbreeding and there was no boy our age in the village who was not some kind of cousin to us. Still, the fact that they would so blithely entertain the notion of sending my sister to live so far away from us and with such a ridiculous man struck me at the time as somehow traitorous.

  Concetta gave her long lustrous hair a couple of concerted brushes and tied a white embroidered scarf around her shoulders before thrusting the disputed hairbrush under her pillow. She adjusted her corselet, tightening the red laces so that her figure might be shown to its best advantage, then, “Coming!” she cried—sounding all sweetness. To me she hissed, “I mean it, Mari! Don’t you dare use my brush!” And she climbed hand over hand down the ladder from our loft.

  I responded by sticking my tongue out at her. “Or you’ll do what to me?” Retrieving her brush from under her pillow, I proceeded to brush my coarse mop of hair vigorously before returning the brush to its hiding place. There were a few burrs in it, I must admit—this evidence of my crime I removed from the bristles, dropping them out the casement window onto the yard below—but there were most emphatically no lice and never had been. So there, I thought, and, righting my skirt, straightening my apron, and tying my own scarf around my shoulders with a sigh—for I always felt ridiculous in that getup—I followed my pretty sister down the ladder to where Mama was standing beside the clothes press, a towering heap of bedding in her arms.

  No sooner had she divided the heap between the three of us, however, than Carmine ran into the house and announced, “Papa says to stop what you’re doing and come outside. Padre Eusebio
has something amazing to show us!”

  We rushed outside with our armful of bedding to find our guests seated in chairs dragged by my brothers from the house to a spot underneath the big oak tree. My father had provided the Castelduranteans with small earthenware cups filled with mistà and I could see at a glance that the brew had begun to have the desired effect; Pio, Pasquale, the Prior, and my father seemed relaxed, cheerful, and expansive. Only Padre Eusebio, slumped in his chair with his arms folded tightly across his chest and a scowl on his face, appeared petulant and aggrieved.

  “What is it?” my brothers clamored. “What does Padre have to show us? We want to see it! Show it to us!”

  Cesare cleared his throat. “It is something truly wondrous. His Holiness himself lent it to Padre for the duration of this mission. A relic of St. Alphonsus De Ligouri. It will serve to protect him should the need arise.”

  “Pfftt!” Padre Eusebio made a disdainful gesture involving his hand and his chin. “St. Alphonsus is the patron saint of arthritis. I very much doubt his powers extend to warding off witches.”

  “Still…a relic!” My father was impressed. “You have to admit it: A relic is something you don’t see every day!”

  I leaned over and whispered to Mama, “What’s a relic?”

  “A piece of a dead saint’s body,” she whispered back.

  “Ew!”

  “Go on, Padre,” Pio urged the priest. “Show everyone the relic.”

  “Oh, all right! If I must!” The priest removed a small, elaborately carved ivory box from inside his cassock and, opening it, held it out for us to see. Inside was something resembling a cigar butt.

  “What is it?” Carmine asked.

  “Why, it’s the blessed saint’s big toe!” Cesare replied. “His left one.”

  Eusebio snapped the lid of the box shut and replaced it inside his cassock. “Do you know what I think? I think His Holiness gave me this toe as a prank. That scoundrel bishop, the one who sent us on this accursed mission, he must have told him about me. You know the one I’m talking about. Adeodatus the High and Mighty. That man has never liked me.”

  “Come, girls, we must prepare beds for our guests,” my mother reminded us. Concetta and I started to turn away, which brought Cesare instantly to his feet.

  “Do you mind if I accompany you?” Cesare asked Concetta. “I have a cramp I should like to walk out.”

  My parents exchanged a glance and Mama said, “Of course,” whereupon the four of us headed off in the direction of the lean-to where we put up stray travelers, the occasional peddler, or revelers who had drunk too must mistà to make it safely home—it was spare, but dry and possessed of both a roof and a place out of the wind to make a fire.

  And so it continued for the remainder of that evening. Cesare strutted and postured and pontificated and fawned, falling all over himself to impress Concetta, while my sister, for her part, demurred and blushed and allowed herself to be impressed—all this under the watchful and deeply interested gaze of my parents. By the time Papa, lantern in hand, escorted our visitors to the lean-to and Mama blew out the last candle, I had had it up to here with the whole Concetta and Cesare courting thing and was ready to see the last of the Castelduranteans and to return to life on the mountain as usual.

  But, although I did not know it at the time, that was never again to be the case.

  That night, after everyone else in the house had retired, Mama crept out of bed, climbed up the ladder to our loft, and gently shook me awake. “What…?” I began, but she laid a finger on my lips, shook her head and looked pointedly at Concetta who lay beside me, her dark hair spread out across the pillow, her chest expanding and contracting gently with her breath. Mama jerked her head to one side, indicating that I was to follow her.

  Probably something to do with the goats, I reckoned. Maybe Diana, our newest little mother to be, was having her baby, although it was surely too early for that. When Mama needed help with her herd, I was the one she relied on. The boys were too rough and Concetta didn’t care for goats—which I couldn’t understand, there being few more dependable or, for that matter, more charming creatures than goats.

  I rubbed my eyes, hastily threw a shawl around my shoulders and, still stupid with sleep, followed Mama down the ladder and out of the house. It was the time of the new Willow Moon and very dark. She fetched the bull’s-eye lantern from its nail by the door, lit it, and, by the pale yellow light it cast, set out not for the goat barn, to my surprise, but in the direction of the olive grove. I ran after her and, catching hold of her sleeve, tugged on it. “I don’t understand. Where are we going?”

  “To warn Lady Sibylla.”

  If she had doused me with a bucket of icy water, it couldn’t have woken me up faster. Visiting the Oracle was something women did, not girls, and I had just turned fifteen. “But what about Concetta?” I asked.

  “Concetta is too timid. You do not frighten so easily. Now come along and hurry. We have only until the dawn to do what we must do.”

  Beyond the stone mill where Papa ground his olives to paste before pressing them for oil, was the steep and twisting goat path that led from our farm to the grotto. It was a secret shortcut, known only to Montemonaci—by taking the path instead of the main road, a supplicant could bypass the Gola dell’Infernaccia entirely and arrive at the grotto in half the time.

  Accordingly, some thirty minutes after we set forth, we arrived at the grotto’s shield-shaped entrance high up on the mountain. Dropping to her knees and holding the lantern out before her, Mama crawled through the opening (it was only three feet high) and into the Oracle’s antechamber. This was a low-ceilinged and damp smelling place, perhaps ten feet long and six wide, unremarkable save for a pair of ornate bronze doors that glinted at its far end. On either side of the antechamber a rough bench had been hewn out of the rock. Mama placed the lantern on the bench and we sat down gingerly. “We will wait here,” she told me.

  “Will she come out? Or do we go in?” I asked.

  “Neither. When Milady consents to an interview, those doors there creak slowly open and you hear a voice coming from someplace deep inside the mountain. It doesn’t sound quite human. More like the wind would if the wind had a voice.”

  “Just her voice?” I was disappointed.

  Mama nodded. “No one has actually seen the Lady Sibylla for…I don’t know how long. From before my grandmother was born. I have twice called upon her, once to assist me in minimizing the ill effects of a particularly stubborn case of mal’occhia that had affected my entire herd of goats—that was before you were born—and once in an effort to save the life of a dear child who had fallen ill with typhus. You remember little Giuseppe?”

  I nodded. Giuseppe was buried in the cemetery of our small church, alongside little Rosaria, the baby who had lived for not even a week.

  “One does not come to the Oracle for every little thing,” Mama told me. “You have to be selective, to pick and choose. ‘I am not a wishing well!’ she told me once, and I have tried to respect that. Tonight, however…tonight is an altogether different matter. Tonight, we come to warn her of the danger to come.”

  Twenty long minutes passed and I was beginning to wish that Mama had chosen Concetta rather than me or, at the very least, that I had taken something warmer than my red shawl—it was cold and the bench very hard—when we heard a slipping, sliding noise near the cave’s entrance and saw by the lantern’s golden light an emerald green serpent gliding rapidly toward us—a Lamia, the first I had ever seen.

  Mama greeted the snake. “Good evening to you.”

  “Good evening to you,” the snake hissed in reply.

  “I see that the Pope has yet to say Mass.”

  “Apparently. He’s a bit of a slacker, that one. But what brings you to Milady’s antechamber at this time of night, Esperanza Umbellino? And who is this child? You know how Milady feels
about children. She finds them tedious in the extreme.”

  “Bad news, I’m afraid,” Mama replied. “And this is my daughter Mariuccia. She looks younger than her years, but she is fifteen, scarcely a child, and I hope she shall prove a help to me and Milady in this dark hour.”

  “Bad news? Dark hour? What are you talking about? You’re frightening me!”

  “Holy Father has sent a foolish old priest and a pompous prior to seal up this cave. They think Sibylla is a witch. We did our best to frighten them out of it, but I think they will do it all the same. Tomorrow morning, most likely.”

  “Catastrophe!” shrilled the Lamia, and, in her dismay, she began to wriggle frenetically about. Lamiae, as a species, are easily excited, fearful by nature, and much given to hysteria and hyperventilation. This one was no exception. “Disaster! Utter, utter calamity!”

  “Calm yourself, please!” Mama implored the serpent. “Now is not the time to lose our wits. We haven’t much time if we are to save Sibylla. Now, listen up. I thought, perhaps, we could take her home with us—”

  “Oh!” replied the snake and stopped wriggling. “Oh, Esperanza and Mariuccia Umbellino, I don’t know if such a plan would work. You see, Sibylla, well, she’s very…how shall I put this? She’s shy!”

  “Given the direness of the situation, shyness is a luxury she can ill afford.”

  “You don’t understand.” It was evident that the Lamia was attempting to choose her words with the utmost care. “Sibylla hasn’t been…well, seen by anyone for I don’t know how long! Do you take my meaning?”

  “I don’t!” I could tell Mama was becoming increasingly exasperated with the empty-headed, mincing serpent. “What? Is she concerned she doesn’t look her best? She’s more than a thousand years old!”

  “I think it’s fair to say that Milady Sibylla…”

  At this the bronze doors creaked suddenly open and the Sibyl demanded, “Snake! Are you telling tales out of school?”

  The serpent reared up, emitted her shrill peacock cry, then undulated rapidly out the entrance of the grotto and into the night.