Black Ships (3 page)

I slid into the shadow of a shed and then looked around.

The moon was rising over the sea, which spread in little ripples, kissing the shore with waves that came only to my knees, smooth as the surface of a mirror.

I walked into the sea. The sand felt good beneath my feet, and the waters splashed nearly to my waist, sweeping against my knees. The moon made a path across the water.

Something filled in my heart, something for which I did not have words. “Great Lady,” I whispered, but did not know what to ask. I knew only that something was answered, service given and accepted.

“I will go out from the dance,” I said. “I will stand apart. None shall praise my beauty and call me beloved.”

Nor would they, in any event, an ugly dark girl with a twisted foot.

“I will walk in the dark places. I will tend the dead.” I felt the wind stir my hair like a caress, like a mother’s hand.

I went back to the temple and slept soundly on my pallet that night.

The next day I was dedicated, as is proper. I remember very little about it—the ceremony is short, and something of an anticlimax after the great festivals. But Pythia nodded, and seemed satisfied that it was properly done.

A
FTER THAT
I began my training in earnest. I had to learn all the rites by heart, all the parts, for there is no part of them that is written down. When I asked why not, Pythia looked appalled.

“The language of the islands is for tallies of grain and measures of oil! It is not for the sacred words! If these things were written, then any person might learn them, fitted or not fitted!”

“May I learn then, the writing of the tallies?” I asked.

“You have no need for such things,” Pythia said. “They may be useful for clerks and for those who record what measures are due, but if you train your mind you will remember all you need to know. You do not need such laziness!”

And so I learned instead how to remember. Reciting became a pleasure to me, to make the words as beautiful as they might be. The stories themselves were a pleasure to me and beginning a new one was a treat.

I learned how the paints are made, the rendering of fat and its mixing with olive oil, with charcoal and chalk. I learned how the incense that smokes on the brazier is made, and how its most precious ingredients are the resins that come from over the sea and cannot be made here.

“The right trees do not grow,” Pythia said. “And while the cypress and the pine have resins that are useful and may be used in extremity, the resins of myrrh are better.”

I learned how to watch the people who came seeking the oracle’s guidance, and how to understand.

Once a fat man came with his daughter, who was a little older than I. He was the owner of many olive trees, and his land was rich and prospered. He had no son, and his wealth was his daughter’s dower. He came to ask of the oracle if there was wisdom in a marriage between his daughter and the son of his friend who had been lately working there, helping him with the harvest.

Dolcis brought them into the cave and spoke with them of farming and weather while I made great Pythia ready. While I painted her eyes, we heard the farmer and Dolcis talking about pressings and speaking of the young man’s frugality. And the daughter said nothing. When we came into the room with them Dolcis withdrew; the coals were heaped and the incense scattered. The farmer and his daughter knelt, and I saw that her hair was as golden as the sun, but her face was pinched, and she chewed on her lower lip as her father asked, “Ela, Pythia, is it well that I shall give my daughter in marriage to this man, Elotes?”

I watched her lean forward over the coals. She was silent a long while, but I felt no chill upon me, no sense that She spoke. At last Pythia reached out one long white hand toward the farmer. “The lioness draws down the deer, but the lion eats the carcass entire, and the cubs mew with hunger, and may not even gnaw on the entrails.”

The farmer went white.

“I see no more,” Pythia said.

Dolcis bustled in and took charge of the two fine jars of first-pressed oil he had brought.

The farmer looked at his daughter, then at Pythia. “Does this mean what I think it does? That my daughter brings all the wealth to this marriage, and she and her children will grow thin while her husband prospers?”

“Her ways are strange,” Pythia said. “This I saw. The lion feasted upon the kill, while the lioness and cubs waited in vain.”

He went away vowing that there should be no betrothal, and the girl smiled as they rounded the curve of road below, her voice coming back high and clear on the evening air.

I watched them go, and then went back inside to Pythia. She was cleaning the paint from her face with oil.

“Did She speak to you truly?” I asked.

Pythia looked at me sharply. “The Lady of the Dead has given us eyes, so that we might see the truths about us in the world. She does not speak directly save at need, and not for every question that may trouble us. The girl did not wish it. For whatever reason, she feared the man, and she has known him these many months. There is no joy that can come of such a marriage, and the faster it is put from her father’s mind, the better.”

Pythia took me by the shoulders. “She has given you a gift. You are a true seer. But wisdom is something that comes with age, and you must earn that. It cannot be given as a gift. Sometimes you are Her vessel. But most of the time you must act from the knowledge in your heart, not from Her direction.”

But still there were places I did not go. In the back of the cave there was a passage leading down. Pythia had hung a curtain of black linen across it, and Dolcis did not go that way. When once I went to it and pulled the veil aside, Pythia drew me back. “Not yet,” she said gently, and I desisted.

I
N THE SPRING
when I was not quite twelve, after we had returned from the Feast of the Descent, Kyla woke me in the middle of the night.

I had seen her rarely since I had left the river, for she had her work and I mine, only when I visited my mother by Pythia’s leave. It was hours until dawn, and she was crying.

My mother had been walking beside the road and had stepped upon an adder, which had bitten her heel. I went with her, but there was nothing to be done. My mother took her last breath even before Kyla reached the Shrine. I came at dawn with Kyla and saw her laid out, the women of Wilusa and Lydia wailing about her, as is right and proper. It seemed to me that she had not been more fair, her hair combed and spread around her, though she was nearly thirty.

In the heat of the day Triotes came, and the pyre was laid. He wept and clasped her hand and cut locks of his fair hair to mingle with hers as though she had been a beloved wife, not a linen slave.

I stood there in my black tunic, watching the heat shimmer above the fire, my heart too full for weeping. I did not know what to say, or whom to talk to. Across from me Triotes stood with his arm around my brother, six years old, as small and as fast as a young kestrel.

When the weeping was done and the ashes scattered, Triotes told him to bundle his things, his spare tunic, and whatever he needed. “I will keep my promise to your mother,” he said. “You will live in my house, and in a year or so you will be a page to some friend of mine, who can teach you what it is to be an Achaian and a man.”

I did not speak, for what should I say? I have known that my brother and I were different since he was a baby. And I thought that Pythia would say that what Triotes offered was just. He would keep his promise, and my brother would be known as the son of Triotes, and he would not be a slave.

I did not stay. Instead, I walked back to the Shrine at night. It was hard going, uphill, with my foot, but I managed it. I realized as I walked beneath the hard, clear stars of heaven, that I could do it more easily than before. My leg was strange and ugly, but the muscles had healed to serve me well enough. I could walk, though I limped. I did not need my mother to carry me where it was steep.

I stopped at the turn in the road where I had first seen the sea and wept.

Then I climbed the rest of the way until dawn, lay down on my pallet, and slept.

I
WOKE AT EVENING
. Dolcis came in to see if I wanted some of the lentils she had stewed, and I ate them ravenously.

Pythia watched me and chewed upon her bread.

When we were done she took my hand. “It is now,” she said, and led me to the curtain in the back.

I didn’t want to go, but she held my hand and pulled the veil aside. “What is here?” I asked.

“You will see,” Pythia said, and dropped the curtain behind us.

It was dark. It cannot be this dark outside, where even in stormy weather there is some light. It was the utter blackness of the deep earth, where stars have never shone. She took my hand again and led me down.

It was cold. Pythia put my hand on the wall to my left. “You must count,” she said. “You must count your steps so that you do not get lost. There are many caves and many turnings, and you must use that memory you have trained to remember your way.”

And so we counted. As our steps descended, it seemed very far to me. I could not stop trying to see, my eyes widening and widening in the darkness. “Is this the gate to Hades?” I asked.

“This is a womb,” she said. “A gate. A tomb. They are the same thing. We descend and we return. We cross and recross the River. You know the story.”

I nodded, though she could not see it in the darkness. “The Lady descends and the land withers. She returns and it greens.”

“You have nothing to fear here,” Pythia said. “Alone among mortals. Because you are Her handmaiden, and you come and go at Her pleasure.”

The floor leveled beneath our feet, and I felt the movement of air, as though the ceiling was much higher. Then my bare toes encountered fur. I gasped. Then I realized that it was a wolf skin spread on the floor of the cavern. My hands encountered it, and then another. They were soft and well cured, put here on purpose, not accidental carrion.

“Stay here,” Pythia said. “Stay here and dream until I come for you.”

And she left me.

I waited. At first, the darkness seemed to press on me, breathing like a great beast. I could imagine Cerberus waiting not far away, padding toward me with heavy, rending jaws.

When the last faint sounds of Pythia’s passage had stopped, and the cold sweat began to dry on my face, the dark seemed less intense. I closed my eyes, and there was no difference.

I could retrace my steps, I thought. I remembered the turnings, how many steps between. There were not so many, only three or four. I could return if I wished, find my way back from the abyss to my own bed. I knew the way back. Pythia had made sure I did.

I stretched out on the wolf skins, and they were soft beneath me. Some hint of Pythia’s scent clung to them. She had lain here then. Perhaps many times. She had waited here for some word from her Lady, like a handmaiden who sleeps in the antechamber, always within hearing lest something be needed in the night.

I waited in the dark until I slept, and if I dreamed I did not remember it.

THE AVATAROF DEATH

O
ld King Nestor died at the height of the rains, the winter after I turned sixteen. I had the shape of a woman and my full height now, though I would barely come to the middle of a warrior’s chest. My hair had never been cut since I came to the Shrine, and was long enough that unpinned it reached halfway down my thighs. Pinned up, I could make it approximate the fullness of the wig. Pythia was right. I would not need to wear it.

In the palace they were wailing and rending their clothes, as is proper. I walked behind Pythia, with her clothes and herbs, her black bag around my waist, a black mantle pulled over my head. I stood behind her at the funeral rites, which were held in the great courtyard during a lull in the rain.

They had kept the wood for the pyre under shelter, so it caught quick and hard, but the ground beneath was sodden with water and steamed. I looked about as much as I could, hoping to see Aren among the boys, but he wasn’t there.

The High King had not come from Mycenae. I didn’t wonder why he had not at the time. It was the season of rains, and the roads were very bad. Instead, he sent a kinsman to do the Old King honor, Neoptolemos, the son of their hero Achilles. He was a high-spirited youth some three or four years older than I was, with dark red hair and long limbs that he had not quite finished growing into. His clothing was splendid and his breastplate was worked with silver. During the most sacred parts of the rite he was shifting his feet and whispering with his friends. I thought that a hero’s son should behave in a way that was more seemly.

Later, as the feast was ending, I was making my way through the palace corridors to where Pythia was in council with her nephew, Idenes, the Young King. I saw Neoptolemos and two of his friends and would have passed them without speaking, but one of them caught at my arm.

“Come here, girl.”

I jerked away, but Neoptolemos blocked me. “Come into the light and let me see you.”

“Let me go,” I said. If I had been older I would have thought to explain who I was.

One of his friends shoved me back against the wall. “She’s not so pretty, but she’ll do.”

Neoptolemos put his hand around my neck to lift my face to the light. “Yes, she’ll do.” He was smiling.

I struck his hand away and his eyes darkened. “You should be honored, girl,” he said.

One of his friends grabbed my arms. I did not think to scream. I was still too much the slave girl for that.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said a mild voice behind them. It was Triotes, who had been my mother’s lover. He stood at ease in the hallway, a warrior in his prime, not a boy. “That one is dedicated to the Lady of the Dead. She could shrivel your manhood so you’ll never have use of it again.”

One of the friends let go immediately, but Neoptolemos hesitated. “I don’t fear Death.”

Triotes walked up and stood between us. “That’s not wise,” he said quietly. “When you have seen the ways that Death can take you, you will be slow to offend Her.” He glanced at me. “Go,” he said.

I drew my chiton up over my shoulder and went. I did not stay to see what he said.

I went back to the Temple of the Sea and said nothing. For in truth, what was there to say?

S
OON
I had other things to think of. Pythia had taken a chill at the funeral, and she was ill for many weeks. We stayed at the temple while she recovered. Even when she was well enough to go back to the Shrine, she was frail. Her hands were thin and her nails bluish. The veins stood out in the backs of her hands. She was only a few years younger than her brother the Old King, and he had been very old indeed when he died.

We had been back at the Shrine a few days when I asked her if she would go down into the caves with me.

Pythia looked up at me from her place beside the fire. “I don’t think so,” she said. Her gaze grew sharper. “Go yourself, if you hear Her calling.”

“I...”

“Go,” she said. “You can walk in the dark without me.”

And so for the first time I took that way in darkness alone, going down into the deep caves without a lamp, with only my breaths and my steps to tell me how far I had gone. I was not afraid. I had been well prepared.

When I returned I sat at her side beside the brazier. It was heaped with charcoal to dispel the chill in the room, but Pythia was still wrapped in her cloak.

“Pythia,” I said, “I don’t want you to die.”

She put her hand on my head. “Was it my death you saw down there in the dark?”

“No,” I said. “And yes. I stood on the deck of a ship with the veil blowing out behind me, my face painted white and black. I was Pythia, which means that you were not.”

Pythia smiled. “But that is what I want. To know that you will be Pythia after me. That you will keep this Shrine and serve Her faithfully. I have feared...” She stopped, and unwound her hands to warm them at the flame.

“Feared what?” I asked.

Her eyes fixed on the flame, very blue. “That She is leaving us. That She has withdrawn Her favor from this land.”

I was horror-struck. “But why? Why would She do that?”

“I will tell you,” she said. “Because you must know. But it is a story of kings, and they do not like if we tell it.” She stretched out her hands.

“I was born in the palace of Pylos and dedicated when I was eight years old. This you know. In those days kings sought Her favor with the best of their harvest, even to the daughters of their house. There were other princesses who were dedicated this way, even the daughter of the High King, Iphigenia.” Pythia sighed. “I knew her. She was younger than I, but we were together at the great festivals, since we were both in Her service and of equal rank.

“This was in the days when her father, the High King, led all of the men of the Achaians against Ilios, that you call Wilusa. They assembled together, all their men and ships, but the wind and the sea were against them, because that city was beloved of Aphrodite, the Lady of the Sea, and She held the seas against them. So the High King called together his priests and advisers, who served Athene and the Lord of the Storm, and asked them what he should do. They told him a terrible thing.”

Pythia’s blue eyes met mine. “He sent to the Shrine at Dodona, where his daughter served the Lady of the Dead, and ordered her brought forth from the Shrine, saying that she was to marry a mighty hero and cement his alliances. They brought her to Aulis, where the fleet waited, garlanded as a bride, like the Maiden in the Feast of the Descent. And there he sacrificed her living upon the altar and shared out her flesh among his men to eat like a young kid.”

I gasped. I clasped Pythia’s hand.

She nodded, and her face was stern. “Yes. The Lady of the Dead sent a mighty curse, a curse upon his house and all of his blood that even now is consuming the last of his heirs with madness. And all the men there, everyone who shared in that dark feast, She cursed as well. For they had killed Her Maiden and eaten the flesh of Her servant. All of the heroes, all the princes. Most of them never returned from Ilios, for the Lady and Her Sister made common cause. Those who did return descended into madness, or watched their sons rend their houses apart.”

“But King Nestor?” I asked.

Pythia squeezed my hand. “My brother was a pious man. When they dragged Iphigenia screaming to the altar he turned his back and walked away. He had no part in her death, and did not eat her flesh. And thus he escaped the curse, and our house endures.”

“But he did not prevent it,” I said.

Pythia sighed. “I know. I have asked myself, what could he do, one man among many, and the king of a lesser city, not high in the king’s favor? But it remains that while he did not participate in this greatest blasphemy, he also did not prevent it. And while She did not curse him, She turned Her face from him and walked away. It is just.”

“Yes,” I said. “He had turned his face from Her servant.”

“Just so,” she said. “But since that time we have been in a slow decline. You have seen the palaces and temples at Pylos, the wealth of my brother and his many ships. But you did not see them thirty years ago, when I was young. My brother has left Idenes six warships. There were twenty that went to Aulis. Idenes can count the jars of olives, the amphorae of wine in his storerooms, but I tell you that they are not the tenth part of what was there when I was young. My brother brought back many slaves to weave and work the flax on the river, as you know, my Linnea. But slaves do not replace the men who went to Ilios and never returned. Those fields have young trees in them now, and will not be planted again. It used to be that in times of peace our ships traded linen out to the islands, even to Krete and Millawanda and the Lydian coast. Now there are too many pirates, desperate men who attack honest merchants, steal their goods, and sell them as slaves in faraway ports.”

“What must we do?” I asked.

Pythia patted my hand. “That is the energy of youth. To do something, anything, in the face of the gods’ disfavor.”

“We must do something,” I said.

“What can we do? Can I rid the seas of pirates or raise men from the dead to plow fallow fields?”

I did not answer. I had not thought of these things before.

“Yes,” Pythia said. “Now you must think. You must think about the causes of things, about the shape of the world, even though you will never leave this place. You must understand such things if you are to give counsel to kings as well as country people.”

“But I will leave this place,” I said. “I saw myself on a ship.”

Pythia frowned. “Sometimes we are called to come to where the king is to give him counsel. That is it, surely. For once you are Pythia, you may not go forth long from the Shrine where you serve. Surely you do not wish to go?”

“No,” I said. “I am happy here with you and Dolcis. This is my home. Why should I wish to go?”

And yet as I said it, there was something that strained inside, some yearning for shores I had never seen, for the songs I had heard as a child, in my own tongue. For someone like me. Perhaps, I thought, everyone feels this. But we are all still alone.

“Like calls to like,” she said. “And you have the sea in your veins, the blood of the Sea People. Perhaps you would have been better as Cythera’s servant rather than mine. But She led you to me, so we take what is given.”

“I have never been unhappy here, Pythia,” I said. And it was true that I loved her, almost as a second mother, or as the grandmother I had not known. “I would not wish to go to Pylos and Cythera’s service if you offered it.”

She kissed my brow. “You are a good child,” she said. “You are my Linnea, and I die content knowing that you will be Pythia when I am gone.”

“You will not die for many years,” I said, and knew it was not true.

S
HE DIED
a year later. In the fall, at the beginning of the sowing season after the Kalligenia, she fell to the ground and a paralysis took her right arm and leg. It dragged down the corner of her mouth and slurred her speech so that Dolcis and I could hardly understand her. It made it difficult for her to eat, so Dolcis cooked grain in milk from our goat and I fed her with a spoon.

“It is Her hand,” she whispered, though I could barely understand the words.

Four months later I woke in the night to find her dead. The Lady’s hand had touched her again, and taken her in her sleep.

I knew what must be done. I sent for Cythera and her handmaidens, for Dolcis could not go beyond the veil, and I could not carry Pythia to the place she must go alone. We wrapped her in black, and Cythera held the silver mirror for me while I painted my face for the first time.

White as bone. Black as night. My hair was pinned up with the copper pins Pythia had worn, pinned into the elaborate puffs and curls of the wig, like a painting from the islands that are lost beneath the sea. I did not need the wig. My hair was dark and thick and had no touch of gray.

When I looked in the mirror She was looking back.

I led them into the darkness. I went in front, and Cythera and her two maidens came behind with She Who Was Pythia. Down into the darkness we went. Through the great chamber with the wolf skins, through the narrow passage that dripped with moisture. The sound of running water echoes far in darkness. I could hear that and the choppy breathing of one of Cythera’s acolytes, terrified of the dark, of carrying a body to the very Underworld itself.

The body of Pythia cannot be given to the fire, like these lately come Achaians. It must be returned to Her.

There was no odor in the chamber. Thirty years and more She Who Was Born the Sister of Nestor had been Pythia. Her predecessor was dry bones. We laid her in the chamber. I do not know how many were there. Twenty-seven skulls I had counted, but there may have been more who were crumbled beyond recognition. Twenty-seven lives of women. Four hundred years? More? Since before the bright land people came, with their horses and their bronze. Since before Wilusa burned, or the palace at Pylos was wrought. Before there were High Kings in Mycenae.

Someday my skull would lie here in the darkness.

We laid her with her predecessors, She Who Had Been Pythia, and in the darkness I said the words that called Her to me. Her avatar. Her voice. As I was meant to be. She came out of She Who Had Been Pythia and dwelt in me.