Oracles of Delphi

by Marie Savage

  “I was anxious to come to Delphi because it was your father’s last wishes. But, yes, I had my suspicions that Thea would be here, too. I try to keep track, to know where she is, how she is. So when I heard the priestesses would be gathering here, I knew she would be among them.”

  “You never answered my question,” Praxis said. “Why did you avoid her? How long has it been since you last spoke?”

  Theron paused, his voice tight when he finally spoke. “Almost thirty years.”

  Thirty years? Althaia stayed her hand. She wanted to reach out to him, to reassure herself that he was still her own Theron as much as she wanted to comfort him and encourage him to go on.

  “I did not go to our mother’s funeral. As her message said, I saw her last at our father’s funeral, but I didn’t speak. As children, my sister and I were taught to worship Gaia blindly, without question, without thought, and to follow my mother’s every command completely. My father, a soldier and a farmer, was a good man, but he left us to my mother’s care. My sister had little choice but to follow in our mother’s footsteps, ultimately taking her place as priestess. My footsteps, as you well know, led me in a different direction. When I left, I was … well, I was an innocent. When I returned, when I saw my twin over the funeral pyre, I could not bring myself to speak. I was no longer that innocent boy and I wondered if I even had a right to reclaim my place in the family.”

  “Thirty years … you would have been about fifteen. What made you leave home so young and why have you never returned?” Althaia couldn’t resist the question.

  He drew in his breath. “That story is best left for another day.”

  “But—”

  “More important, at least for now,” Praxis interrupted, “is why Kleomon would think either you or the priestesses of Gaia would have anything to do with the girl’s murder.”

  “I don’t know. No one familiar with the cult’s traditions would suspect such a thing. They would never sacrifice one of their own.”

  “You said Delphi is sacred to the cult of Gaia,” Althaia said. “But today at the theater, it sounded like the priests of Apollon are not on good terms with the priestesses of Gaia.”

  “They’re not. And the tension between them may explain why Kleomon was anxious to point the finger at Gaia’s followers when he most likely knew better.”

  “Why don’t they get along?” Althaia asked. “Priests and priestesses worship side by side at temples all over Hellas.”

  “The fact that Delphi is sacred to both cults is precisely why there is such animosity, and the reason many are no longer aware the Oracle of Gaia still exists. While Apollon’s influence has grown, Gaia’s has faded. Gaia’s followers now amount to no more than a few isolated clans scattered here and there. In fact, today most of the priestesses serve more than Gaia. Nikomachos’s mother, the priestess of Dodona, for instance, serves Zeus and Gaia. The priestess of Argos: Hera and Gaia. My own sister: Demeter and Gaia. But the enclave here in Delphi refuses to acknowledge Apollon’s rights because they are so tied to the sacred land here where Gaia’s oracle was stolen by Apollon.”

  “Yes,” Althaia said, “every child knows the story of how Apollon slew Gaia’s protector, her sacred drakon, and took control of the site. But that was a long time ago, back when the gods walked the earth.”

  “To Gaia’s followers in Delphi, it could have been yesterday. They live in a state of fear, constantly blaming Apollon’s priests for their fading influence. There are some among them who believe Apollon and his priests are plotting against them to this day. Because of this, the Pythia of Gaia will only meet and prophesy for those who are true believers in the founding myth of Gaia.”

  “As usual, paranoia, seclusion and fear breed hatred.” Praxis muttered.

  “Exactly. Kleomon is probably suspicious of the priestesses precisely because they are suspicious of him.” He picked up the scroll again and read aloud:

  “Suspicion and ambition gnaw at the heart of Gaia’s young pythia and she hopes to enlist your aid in seeking swift retribution for the girl who, as you may have guessed, was one of our own. We are divided and I fear everything is at stake.”

  “I still don’t understand why there is such a rivalry or competition between the priests and priestesses,” Althaia said. “If Delphi is sacred to both Apollon and Gaia, so be it. Delphi is also home to a Sacred Precinct of Athena. One cannot honor one god above all others or honor one to the exclusion of the others. Even the gods are not so selfish as to demand such singular devotion, and if the gods themselves do not demand it, then how can a priests or priestess dare demand it in their names?”

  “I can think of two reasons,” Praxis said. “Power and money.”

  “For many, those are the only two reasons for getting up in the morning,” Theron said.

  “I’m not naïve,” Althaia protested.

  “I’m not suggesting that. But remember Delphi is no ordinary sacred place. It is the omphalos, the navel of the universe, with a power that both the priests and the priestesses want to wield. Before the fissure in the mountainside through which the sacred pneuma issues forth was claimed by Apollon, anyone could come and experience the guidance of the goddess for themselves. The Pythia of Gaia, a priestess who has the gift of sight, simply helped seekers interpret their visions. But once Apollon claimed the oracle for himself, he appointed priests to build a temple over the fissure, and, from that point on, anyone who sought wisdom or guidance had to go through Apollon’s priests and the voice of the Oracle of Apollon, the Pythia. And they had to pay.

  “This enraged Gaia as her oracle had always been open to the sky, the air and the wind. But most of all, Gaia was enraged because no man has the right to charge a fee to anyone seeking the wisdom of Mother Earth. Even today, the Oracle of Gaia demands no payment.”

  “Even today?” Althaia asked. “How is it that the so-called Pythia of Gaia gains access to the fissure beneath Apollon’s temple?”

  “She doesn’t. Gaia was so enraged at Apollon, she asked her consort, Poseidon, to cause an earthquake. When the earth shifted, the site of the oracle shifted, too. They believe each time there is an earthquake in Delphi, it is Poseidon punishing Apollon for some additional slight toward Gaia. And each time the earth shakes, the site of the true oracle moves. The sacred fumes issue from the earth in a new place. Gaia’s followers seek this place and their pythia sets up shop, so to speak, at this new location.”

  “An itinerant oracle,” Praxis suggested.

  “Well, I hadn’t thought of it like that, but yes. To followers of Gaia, the Oracle of Apollon, locked away in the bowels of a stone temple, is a sacrilege, Apollon’s pythia a poor, misguided woman who is generally drugged into submission, and the priests are money-grubbing pretenders manipulating the rich, powerful and gullible from behind the temple curtain. The true oracle, the Oracle of Gaia, is still open to anyone who seeks wisdom. It is somewhere,” Theron waived his arm, “up there on the mountainside. Only Gaia’s true followers know where.”

  “This is all so strange,” Althaia said.

  “The priestesses’ meeting. You told Nikomachos of Dodona you would go,” Praxis said.

  At the mention of Nikomachos’s name, Althaia felt the blood rise in her cheeks. The image of him standing in the room just moments earlier came back unbidden and she found herself comparing Nikomachos to Praxis and Theron.

  She could picture the three of them standing there, sizing each other up. While Praxis was the slave, any stranger might think he was master of the house. He was tall, broad shouldered, and carried himself with an easy confidence. His dark complexion and full head of dirty blond curls contrasted sharply with intelligent blue eyes. His beauty was pure, statuesque, as though one of Praxilites’ acclaimed figures had sprung to life. Her father always teased that he had named Praxis after the sculptor. Theron, at about forty-five, was fifteen years older than Praxis and he wore every year as if in both testimony and defiance of his age. He was lean and leathery a
nd his well-muscled body looked as if it had been chiseled from ancient bedrock. When he was serious, his face was as hard as stone, but when he was lighthearted; it lit up like a child’s and Althaia loved him the more for it. Nikomachos of Dodona, in contrast, was younger than Praxis, closer to Althaia’s own age. Though just as powerfully built, he was not as tall as either of the other two men. Where Praxis was as refined as polished marble and Theron as weathered as ancient stone, Nikoloas was as fluid as quicksilver. She thought of how the cats in the stable yard back home stalked their prey and then pounced in a lightning flash.

  But there was something more in his face, a hint of sadness, or maybe more like the wistfulness she sometimes saw in Praxis. She had, she realized, wanted to comfort him when she realized the dead woman had been a friend, but yet just being near him had made Althaia’s pulse quicken. It dawned on her that he, in the few moments she’d been in his presence, had awakened deeper feelings than Lycon had in their thirteen months of marriage. Of course she had always known Lycon’s interests lay elsewhere. Where did Nikomachos interests lie?

  Theron’s voice brought her back to herself. “Heraklios seeks my help in resolving the murder and, according to Thea’s note, the Pythia of Gaia will soon request my help as well. Therefore, I think I must—or rather, we must go. I want you both with me. Three sets of eyes and ears are better than one, although I fear the priestesses will not welcome strangers.”

  “Especially since we were not invited,” Althaia said. She wondered if Nikomachos would accompany his mother to the priestesses’ meeting.

  “Nevertheless, I am inviting you. And, Althaia, I think we must press them to allow you to examine the body.”

  Althaia studied Theron for a moment, and the vision of the girl’s body floated before her eyes. “You’ll ask, but you don’t believe they’ll allow it,” she said.

  “There may be some among them who will understand the purpose of an autopsia, and not fear it as a violation.”

  Althaia knew one thing was certain: now that Heraklios had pressed Theron into his service, the murderer would be quickly discovered and held accountable. And, the prospect of Theron asking for her assistance, asking her to use the skills she learned in Egypt, was thrilling—if a little frightening. It had been over five years since that summer in Naukratis and, besides using them on a few dead cats, a couple of birds and fish, and one or two still-born pigs from the farm, she hadn’t touched her autopsia instruments since then.

  “Perhaps my skills will finally be put to good use.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Nephthys watched Althaia open the olivewood case and set out her instruments one by one. Two scalpels, one with a long bronze handle and one with a short one. Two hooks, one sharp, one blunt. A bone drill and forceps. Spring scissors and a scoop Hippokrates called a spoon of Diokles. Nephthys had seen such tools before. Egyptian priests used them during the mummification process, but they always looked like instruments of torture to her. What a strange woman, she thought. Why would Althaia, a beautiful, rich Hellene, want to learn the secrets of the body? In Egypt, such knowledge was the province of priests and physicians. What good would it do Althaia? As an Athenian woman, she would have no opportunity to use it. And who would have taken the risk to teach her?

  “Here,” Althaia handed Nephthys one of the scalpels and a piece of linen. “Never use a filthy instrument on a body made in the likeness of the gods. That’s what my teacher said. He was from Naukratis, you know.”

  “An Egyptian?”

  “A priest of Amun-Ra.”

  “How did you come to know this man?”

  “Theron. We spent a season in Egypt. The winter of my sixteenth birthday. Papa rented a house for the winter. Papa, Theron, and Praxis spent most of the time meeting and negotiating with merchants, but Theron also made sure I kept up my studies. One evening when the house was full of guests, he came to my room with this box. For years I had begged him for an opportunity to learn more about anatomy, and although Theron encouraged it, there were few opportunities for me to try anything new. I was tired of dissecting dead cats and still-born pigs. I wanted more. I don’t know why it fascinates me. I can’t explain it.” She breathed on the blade and wiped it with her cloth. “Anyway, just as the wine started flowing and the performers started arriving, Theron made his excuses and slipped out. Then we rode out to the home of Inaros, the priest.

  “I had no idea what to expect. We rode past the edge of the city toward a ramshackle series of connected huts all leaning precariously over the Nile as if the hot breath of the Sahara was blowing them into the river. I think they floated during the annual floods. I’m not sure; but I’d never seen anything like them before.”

  “Probably made of reeds.”

  Althaia nodded. “Anyway, once we arrived, Theron led me into a small, squat building glowing with what seemed to be hundreds of dripping, flickering, smoking oil lamps. I could hardly breathe.” Althaia stared into the distance, remembering. “There was a naked body, a man, pale, ghostly, like a shade from Hades. He was laid out on a narrow table. Later I learned Inaros had long been suspected of digging up the recently dead, those who couldn’t afford mummification, for midnight dissections.”

  Nephthys shuddered.

  “At first, we stood quietly against the wall watching. Inaros’s eyes flickered over us, acknowledging our presence, but he said nothing. He was preoccupied with some sort of ritual, lighting incense, casting out the evil eye, praying to the cadaver’s relatives and asking for their forgiveness. I’ll never forget his face: it was gaunt. He had surprisingly alert eyes, though. Bulging from sunken sockets, they peered into the smoky room as if they could see through the pretense of this world and into the reality of the next. He had sharp cheekbones that jutted out like little mountain peaks,” she chuckled. “Such a strange man. I’ve seen cadavers that looked healthier. His shoulders permanently arched forward as if designed for tending the bodies laid out on his dissection table. He seemed to be among the waking dead, as if he had already been mummified without being informed and was going about his business until he simply fell into the nearest open grave.”

  “I know old men like that. It’s the remorseless Egyptian sun that does it. The older they get, the more they seem to shrivel in on themselves.” Nephthys thought of her husband, thirty years her senior, whose body had already begun yielding skin and bone to the sun. She thought of his hands, as brown and weathered as old leather, and how they had touched her skin and claimed her body as his own.

  “Inaros finally completed his ritual. He stepped to the table and motioned to me. I moved closer. I didn’t want to miss anything. He took a gleaming blade in hand, bent over the body, and sliced open the man’s abdomen in one stroke. Then I threw up.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He smiled.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all. He never even spoke to me that first night. But over the course of the next two months, I spent much of my free time bent over his dissection table. I don’t know what Papa would have done if he’d known about Inaros. Killed him? Fired Theron? Had us both flogged? I have no idea. I do know he would not have been pleased.”

  “And now you hope to use what you learned to try to discover how this girl died?”

  Althaia smiled. She realized it felt good to talk to someone her own age. It felt good to talk to a woman. “I’ve spent my whole life in the company of three men: My father, Praxis, Theron. They told me I could do anything. Ride, hunt, swim, study. Anything. But they were wrong. I think at the end, when I had to marry my cousin Lycon, right before my father died, he realized the one thing he had raised me for was disappointment. In reality, my life is completely proscribed by the rules of citizenship, of property, of propriety. In Athens, a woman has no rights. Even a woman from a family like mine. But this knowledge I have, these skills I learned from Inaros, no one can take them away from me.”

  The room was quiet. Althaia glanced over at Nephthys. W
as there even the slightest possibility that Nephthys was warming up to her? That they could become friends? Of course, Nephthys had to sit there and listen to her ramble on and on. She was a slave. She had no choice. But Althaia couldn’t help that. She hadn’t made Nephthys a slave. That was just the way it was. “So, the answer to your question is yes. I hope to use what I know to reveal the secrets of Charis’s last moments. Perhaps, Nephthys, you could help me.”

  Nephthys could feel Althaia looking at her expectantly. She kept her eyes lowered, focused on her fingers as she buffed the steel blade of the scalpel. Did her mistress expect her to jump for joy because she was being asked to help her? What did she want from her, anyway? So Althaia was raised with high expectations and now lived with disappointment. So what? Althaia had never once asked how she was raised or what disappointments she had experienced. Althaia never asked who she was or where she came from or who she might long for. She had never asked if she were scared or sad. Or lonely. She never asked anything.

  After a moment, Althaia continued. “Two days ago Charis was as alive and vibrant as we are now. Her body responded to touch, to hot and cold, to fear and desire just as our own bodies still do. Now she is dead, and we may have the opportunity to give her a chance to speak one last time, to reveal the secrets of her last moments. The moment when all her mortal dreams and possibilities died. She deserves that. She deserves to know somebody cares about who she was before.”

  “Everyone deserves that.” Nephthys whispered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Chapter Twelve

  A stiff breeze whipped through the pass and Althaia’s hand flew up to keep her traveling hat snug on her head. She pulled at the ribbon and re-knotted it under her chin. It was six stadia from Delphi to the Korycian Cave and though they’d been walking since daybreak, they still had at least an hour to go because of the steep terrain and rocky, narrow path. They’d reach the cave by midmorning and, if the gathering didn’t last too long, they’d be able to eat the lunch Nephthys had packed before heading back down to Delphi and the dreaded dinner with Philon.