The Oracle

by D. J. Niko

  “I was the priestess”— she smiled wistfully—“the human form of Gaia, as Delphinios liked to say. That was before Isidor came.”

  “Isidor?”

  “The high priest. His knowledge of Apollo and ancient Greece was extraordinary. Eventually, my role diminished and Isidor took the lead. And then . . .” Her eyes misted, and she looked down.

  Sarah put a hand on Lydia’s bony shoulder. Like a tiny bird away from its nest, the woman was trembling. Sarah felt strangely close to her, perhaps because she, too, had known loss. “If you’d like to talk, I’m willing to listen.”

  Lydia reached inside her bosom and pulled out a locket hanging from a long chain. She opened it and showed Sarah a photo of her with a young girl. “Delphinios took her from me six years ago. He believed she was a special child with a higher purpose, so he was going to hide her from the world.” Her voice cracked. “He said he’d come for me when he was ready, and we could be a family again.”

  The hairs on the back of Sarah’s neck stood on end. A mother’s hope was so inextinguishable, she could not fathom the truth: she had been used.

  The barman swung open the door and gestured wildly at Lydia. “Get back inside. People are waiting.”

  She shrank at the admonition. Without a good-bye or even a glance at Sarah, she scurried in.

  Sarah let a moment pass and entered the room. The haunting melody of an amanes, a song with distinct oriental sounds harkening back to the Ottoman occupation of Greece, had the audience rapt. Sarah stood in the shadows until she caught Lydia’s gaze. When the woman glanced her way, Sarah lifted a hand.

  It was more a sign of solidarity than a good-bye. Sarah didn’t know why, but she felt for this frightened, lost woman. There was no doubt in her mind: they would see each other again.

  Thirty-three

  The message sent to Interpol was unambiguous in its reference to Delphi. The eternal springs of Castalia sat in a ravine between “the earth’s fangs”—the Phaedriades, twin rocks that encircled Apollo’s sanctuary, built into the rocky belly of Mount Parnassus. “The air no longer smells of sweet earth” surely referred to the sacred pneuma, the ethylene vapors the priestess Pythia supposedly inhaled before prophesying. Ethylene, a sweet-smelling gas, likely rose from a volcanic fault during ancient times. That fault was no longer active, so any trace of the gas had disappeared.

  The most promising clue was the reference to a concrete date: On the seventh night after the new moon of elaphebolion following nine years of spiritual famine. In the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, the Greeks kept a calendar that began with the new moon after the summer solstice. The calendar, whose purpose was to mark the nation’s festivals of sport, culture, and worship, contained twelve months, each named loosely for the festival it marked. Elaphebolion, named for the deer-hunting practices of the Dionysia festival, would have fallen between March and April, depending on the lunar cycles.

  The reference to the seventh day was significant, as well: the seventh of each month was dedicated to Apollo and marked with ceremonies, and sometimes sacrifices, celebrating the god’s birthday.

  The clues led to a date that was nearing. It was March 4, two days after the moon’s first sliver had appeared in Delphi’s indigo sky. If the message were to be taken literally, the cycle of rituals had begun; in another five days, the bearer of the key would be called forth.

  Sarah pondered the facts while sitting at a kafeneio at the edge of town, away from the busy restaurants and bars on the main strip. After nightfall, the place was frequented by elderly Greek men who sat idle at small round tables, canes by their sides, nursing shots of watered-down ouzo.

  She was the only woman there, but her presence went mostly unnoticed. Most of the men carried on playing backgammon, shouting obscenities when the dice didn’t favor them. A pair of octogenarians talked openly about her, probably unaware the blonde English woman was fluent in Greek.

  “Women have no shame these days. What is she doing in a men’s house?”

  “She’s a tourist. She doesn’t know.”

  “Where do you think she’s from? Russia?”

  “Maybe. She’s pretty.”

  “Bah! Too skinny.”

  And on it went. Sarah acted as if she didn’t hear a word of it. She wanted to be alone, invisible. It was what she needed to focus on her work, but there was more than that. She felt profoundly detached from people with ordinary lives—people who got married and had mortgages and went on summer holidays—like a ghost among the living.

  The waiter, a wide-eyed chap from somewhere in the Balkans, came around the corner, a handled aluminum tray dangling from his finger.

  “Double Greek coffee, no sugar.” He spoke English with a thick accent. Albanian, she figured. “That’ll keep you up all night.” He winked.

  “Maybe.” She gave a weak smile and handed him five euros. “What goes on late at night in Delphi?”

  He raised a thick, black eyebrow and pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “I have a motorcycle. I could show you.”

  “No, thanks.” She blew on the surface of the coffee until the skin that had formed receded, revealing the black liquid beneath. She took a sip.

  He counted out some coins and offered them to her. She waved them away. “Nothing goes on in Delphi at night. It’s a ghost town. Eleven o’clock, everyone sleeps. You should go to Athens. I have some friends who could show you around.”

  “Thanks,” she said, “but I’m fine here.”

  He shrugged. “As you like.” He walked away.

  Sarah took another sip of the strong coffee, fortifying herself for the night ahead. The streets of modern Delphi might be dead still by midnight, but beyond the city limits, when the moon was highest, something sinister was unfolding.

  She sat back on the metal chair and gazed at the sky. The silver crescent was waxing, indicating the third day of the lunar cycle. She considered what she was about to do: reconnoiter the sanctuary of Apollo in the dark of night, hoping to find evidence of a practicing cult and its leader, the American known as Delphinios. She would study their movements and, when the moment came, come forth with information leading to the navel stone in exchange for Daniel’s release. Every way she looked at it, it was folly.

  She thought of the exchange with her father in Athens. He had handed her a pair of earrings embedded with a tracking device so that Interpol officers could pinpoint her coordinates.

  “You’ve helped enough already.” Staring at him coldly, she tossed the earrings onto the table. “I will do this my own way.”

  Though at that moment she needed all the support she could muster, she felt good about her actions. For the first time in her life, she had not allowed her father to rattle her. Unlike him, she was driven only by a need to do the right thing and was strong enough to walk that road alone, without any crutches.

  She drained the coffee cup to the mud-like sediment and gathered her things. She slung her backpack over one shoulder and launched into the dimly lit street. Taking the long way to the ruins, she figured, would be about an hour’s walk. No matter. She had all the time in the world.

  And no time at all.

  In the hours before dawn, Sarah sat beneath a platanus tree on the foothills of the Phaedriades, leaning against the cracked bark of its ancient trunk. The lushly leafed branches of the old specimen bent toward the earth, providing good disguise.

  From that spot she had a good view of the sanctuary, some hundred meters below. In the wan light of the waxing moon, the broken columns looked like apparitions, stone sentries from another world, guarding what was left of their civilization.

  Nothing stirred that night; not a nocturnal creature, not an insect, not even the wind that tore through the slopes of Parnassus on its way down to the valley. It had been a long time since she’d experienced such stillness. She tried to embrace it, to feel it in the depths of her heart, but it was for naught.

  Steeped in the eternal stillness of the mountain, she felt at once protec
ted and exposed, forced to be honest with herself. She admitted something circumstances hadn’t allowed her to accept before that quiet moment: she was truly afraid. Not afraid of what would unfold that night in ancient Delphi or how she would pull off the mission she’d been charged with. She feared for Daniel.

  He had been in jams before—chased, shot at, beaten, imprisoned—and had always managed to come out on top. But this time was different. He was vulnerable in a way she’d never seen in him. She agonized over the potentially lethal combination of benzodiazepines and alcohol with which he was toying, and the demons he insisted on fighting alone.

  If he was indeed abducted, he was in bona fide trouble. It was difficult enough to fight against a powerful enemy with every wit intact, but nearly impossible to do so when compromised. His captor could easily detect a weakness and use it against him.

  She touched the Tibetan prayer strand Daniel had given her and rolled the yak bone beads between her fingers. She closed her eyes and sent him a silent message: I’ve got your back. Whether he knew it or not, she would put everything on the line for him.

  A light flickered downhill. Then another and another, all in a row, flames trembling like soldiers being marched to an uncertain fate. Sarah tensed. Though she’d known in theory she could encounter some sort of ceremony, watching it unfold was appalling. She struggled to reconcile her contempt for the defilement of an ancient place with her mandate to stay back and keep quiet.

  The posse traveled a short distance up the mountain before stopping at the forecourt of the sanctuary and arranging in a semicircle. Sarah picked up her night-vision binoculars and trained them on the group. She counted about twenty heads, both male and female. They wore long white tunics, consistent with the costume of the ancients, draped at the shoulders and cinched at the waist. Long veils covered the backs of the women’s heads but not their faces. The men wore simple headbands—except for one, presumably the high priest, who was crowned by a laurel wreath. All carried branches of laurel in one hand, a burning torch in the other.

  The priest stepped out of the semicircle and approached a tripod perched within the temple. He walked to it and poured a liquid, possibly oil, into the vessel, moving his hand in a spiral pattern to cover the entire surface. When he finished, he extended his hands and raised his face to the sky. She could hear the faint whispers of a chant—an offering, she assumed, to the sun god.

  He placed his torch on the bowl of the tripod and took a step back as it erupted into a flame several feet high. The other worshippers, hands crossed at the breast and faces glowing like molten gold in the firelight, began to chant a somber melody.

  Sarah zoomed in on the illuminated faces. Though the image was grainy and detail was scant, her impression was that this was a multinational group. Whoever was behind this elaborate setup was open-minded enough to recognize polytheism wasn’t an exclusively Greek ideal.

  She trained her binoculars on the priest. In the style of the ancients, his black hair was cropped close to the head yet extended into tightly curled strands that rested upon broad shoulders. A short black beard followed the sharp angles of his jaw. From a distance and in artificial light, he looked like one of the marble statues that crowded the archaeological museum at Delphi.

  As the flame in the tripod diminished to a low, slow burn, the priest stepped down to a flat-topped stone structure. He dipped the laurel branch in a bowl that sat at the edge of the structure and swept it across the stones, presumably anointing them with it.

  From the dark edge of the Sacred Way, a cloaked figure approached. Sarah could not tell whether the person was male or female. The visitor walked slowly, with head bent toward the earth, holding something. She tried to zoom in but had already pushed the lens to the limit.

  It wasn’t until she heard a feeble bleat that she realized what it was. She felt nauseated at the thought of a living thing being slain to appease a deity. As an archaeologist, she had encountered the concept of sacrifice countless times and had accepted it as part of ancient ritual worship. But in modern, and presumably more enlightened, times, the act was no sacrament; it was wanton slaughter.

  After a few minutes of chanting and gesticulating toward some unseen force, the priest circled the stone structure three times and stopped in front of the hooded figure. He accepted the small animal—a lamb or a goat, Sarah could not tell—and placed it on the flat surface.

  The priest raised his arm over his head, and the object in his hand glinted in the firelight. The animal bleated more loudly, a final plea to be spared from the cruel blade. Sarah put down the binoculars and looked away, unable to watch the taking of a life.

  In a moment, there was silence—complete, reverential, unbearable silence. She looked up. The men and women of Apollo engaged in a dance unaccompanied by music. Their bodies moved in unison as they orbited the altar, their arms flailing overhead and their gowns billowing as they pirouetted at the four points of the compass. In the copper glow of the ebbing fire, they looked like wraiths from the underworld.

  The dancing stopped, and each disciple approached the tripod holding an oil lamp. With heads bowed, they accepted the fire—presumably the flame of knowledge—from the high priest. Then, one by one they fell into a line and followed the priest down the Sacred Way. Two acolytes stayed behind to extinguish the fire and erase any traces of the ritual.

  Sarah used a strap to fasten the binoculars onto her head and ducked through the thicket of platanus and pine as she descended, following a wide arc to stay out of view of the sanctuary. The night-vision lenses allowed her to step with relative confidence over the rocky terrain, so she pushed the pace, her hurried steps in stark contrast with the slow, measured gait of the group following the snaking path downhill.

  She reached a vantage point above the way and crouched behind a boulder, watching the procession of light approach from the opposite direction. The tap of the priest’s staff and the rhythmic swish of fabric were the only sounds fouling the stillness of the mountain.

  As they walked past, she could see their faces more clearly. The priest was hypervigilant, his gaze darting across the rocky landscape. He was younger than he had appeared at a distance—somewhere in his thirties, she figured.

  Behind him was the hooded visitor, followed by seven men and seven women, each face marked by the same expression of trance—or stupor. Despite the ancient directive, Know thyself, that had long been the mantra at Delphi, the modern-day adherents seemed less like self-actualized souls and more like sheep responding to the bell of a faceless master.

  Sarah watched the priest lead them around a bend she hadn’t noticed before. She craned her neck for a closer look. The procession stopped. A low murmur among the disciples escalated into a cadenced chant. Among the classical Greek utterances, she could make out the phrase “By the grace of the god”; the rest was unintelligible.

  Through the wall of disciples, she could no longer see the priest. She surveyed the vegetation around her and zeroed in on an old platanus with twisted branches. She skulked up the trunk and onto a thick branch and wrapped her limbs around it.

  The priest was nowhere. If this was indeed an oracular ceremony, he and the visitor had probably withdrawn into a secret chamber, perhaps an improvisation of the adyton—the room within the sanctuary in which the Pythia of ancient times delivered her prophecies—that had long since been decimated.

  It was a long while before the priest and visitor emerged from the crags. Somewhere back there was a place of worship; she could not tell what or where, but it wouldn’t be difficult to find out once the crowd had dispersed. She lay on the branch, motionless, and waited.

  The priest sent his adherents away, and they all disappeared down the hill. The visitor lowered his hood—he appeared to be of Arabic descent—and bowed at the priest. He offered him a bundle and backed away, retreating in a different direction.

  The holy man stood alone. Sarah studied his face. There was a sadness in his dark eyes she found oddly disconnect
ed to the scene that had just unfolded. She found herself staring at him, drawn into his melancholy gaze. Was this Lydia’s Isidor?

  He pulled out a small golden bell from the folds of his robe. He rang it once, releasing a delicate chime that echoed across the mountain like the chirp of a bird.

  Another figure wrapped in a thick blanket from head to toe emerged from the shadows, shuffling across the dry brush. Sarah felt a sharp pang in her gut at the sight of the modern-day Pythia. She imagined the woman beneath the woolen covers—drugged, exhausted, exploited—and silently cursed the men who’d put her in that spiritual prison.

  The priest put his arm around her hunched form and led her down the mountain. It was a scene both tender and revolting: the perpetrator and the victim in an embrace, walking in step toward a shared reality.

  They disappeared around a bend. Sarah checked the time: it was going on five o’clock. Soon the sun would peek through the distant mountains, heralding the advent of a new day. She let herself hang from the tree limb, then jumped and landed with a soft thump.

  She checked her surroundings—all clear—and crept down to the area from which the Pythia had emerged. Her heart knocked against her rib cage, protesting what she was about to do. It was risky, but she needed answers.

  In the dead quiet, she could hear her own breath rise and fall as she searched for evidence of an oracular chamber. Nothing was obvious. Her gaze traveled up the Sacred Way to the sanctuary. Her intuition told her the Pythia’s new lair was located directly beneath the spot where the adyton once was. At the height of the oracle’s power, priests supposedly used a network of tunnels that connected the adyton with antechambers. Because archaeologists had tried to find the network to no avail, it had long been assumed that either it never existed or it had been destroyed in earthquakes.

  And yet something was there, deep within the thicket and crags, invisible to the untrained eye. Sarah was determined to find it.

  She ducked into a wooded area and walked until she came to a dead end. It had to be the place. Her eyes registered every square inch of the landscape, looking for an entry in the jumble of boulders and gnarled tree branches.