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I avoid the center of Patras town, heading east with the bay as soon as we land. Soon its outskirts give way to villages, poorer ones than those I passed through yesterday: these are squat mud-and-clay houses, with small rough statuettes outsidethe doors for protection. I see that the villagers here pray to Hestia and Hecate for the most part. Hestia, to keep their fires burning and their homes tended. As for Hecate, the goddess of darkness, I cannot say; perhaps fearful things happen here in the night. Open fires have been lit here and there along the road, and flies congregate in pockets above what smells like goat meat. Children play on the dirt path, and their parents call at them to stay clear as I ride by. I ride through the night again, and on the third day, I begin to spot other travelers headed to Delphi.
They stand out—they’re pilgrims, like me. There is a hum of anxiety about them; in some cases, desperation. Some are sick, or carry sick children with them. The sight pulls at me. It is not hard to imagine what questions they bring for the oracle.
But it is not only the poor who go this way. I see rich men, too, borne along in fine carriages with many servants. Rich and poor, young and old: I spot more and more of them, and by the fourth day, there are a flood of us. Military men and others who look like farmers; women from all walks of life, accompanied by their husbands or servants, and two who ride with no male companion at all—I see their curious glances find me, perhaps wondering the same of me as I am wondering of them. A man and a young boy; a group of soldiers on horseback; a man in shackles, shorn: I guess at all the questions these many people carry with them for the oracle. Some questions will be life-changing, some seemingly small. Some querents come to be relieved of their fears, others to confirm them. Some will beg for miracles they do not really want.
Perhaps, like me, they seek and fear the truth in the same degree.
*
The town of Delphi is small, a cluster of innkeepers andmerchants selling trinkets to the pilgrims. But the crowds! I had expected some, but not this! It is busier than I had ever imagined. The temple is above the town, high on a mountainside, and from down here, milling with the crowds, I can only see flashes of color amid the foliage. A winding path leads uphill, a series of switchbacks toward the shrine at the very top where the oracle sits. ThePythia, they call her. They say she can answer any question you ask, but that does not mean shewill.
There are priests and priestesses in red robes, trying to impose some order on the crowds swarming around the foot of the hill.Zealots,a man next to me mutters under his breath. I understand what he means. Now and again we had passersby come to visit our temple in Sikyon, but they were nothing like this. Here, the crowd is full of intensity, the air practically hums with it. I, too, am unnerved by those who make too much of religion; the kind who become glassy-eyed, like sleepwalkers, when they talk about their god. I think there will be many such here.
“An orderly line, please,” someone is calling, and two priests walk firmly down the path, maneuvering stragglers, forcing us into some semblance of a line.
I’ve had to pay a man at an inn to keep Ajax under his watch; everyone must climb to the oracle’s shrine on foot, there is no other way. Paupers and princes, all must go the same path.
“Look here!” A wealthy-looking man with a gold coronet and a retinue of military men catches one of the priests by the edge of his robe. “We have gold, and plenty of it. I come on an errand of the king of Thebes. Can’t you show us to a place further up this line?”
The priest looks at him.
“We have many errands here, from many kings. And what good is your coin to us? Here we live on the mercy of the gods.”
The man falls back in line with a snort of disgust, and soon he’s bargaining with those lined up ahead of him, exchanging coins to move a place or two along.
We wait, and the hours pass; the sun moves through the sky. Finally I am near the top of the line—surely it cannot be long until I am brought forward—and now that I’m so close, half of me has the urge to disappear. Not everyone believes in the oracle’s proclamations, and perhaps I will not believe her myself, once I know what she has to say. But I’m very much afraid that Iwillbelieve her…and that I may not like what I hear. Like everyone else, it seems I am afraid to know the truth, when it comes down to it.
A priestess with a coil of braids crowning her head comes down the line. “The oracle cannot see everyone, you are too many today. Some of you will have to come back tomorrow.”
I don’t know whether it’s disappointment or relief that makes my heart clench, but the rest of the crowd seems to feel no such indecision. They are angry: there is murmuring, then arguing, then shoving. When I feel a hand on my shoulder, I am sure someone is about to throw me to the ground. They want my place in the line, and don’t care how they get it. But then I realize the hand is a woman’s, and a voice, low and soft, is saying my name.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I whirl around. She’s familiar, but for a moment not familiar enough at first for me to place.
“Melite,” she says, seeing the uncertainty in my eyes. “Melite Georgiou.”
Georgiou.Of course. She’s little Hector’s mother. Memories flash through my mind, sudden as a knife. Yiannis helping me into the chariot, Father hoisting Melite’s son up to stand beside me in our chariot. Everyone smiling, proud in the sunshine.
Another lifetime. Another world. I swallow down the memory.
Melite looks older than she did before. She is perhaps only ten years my senior, but the blue shadows around her eyes have the look of someone with years more than that.
“Your cloak hides you well,” she says. “I was not sure…I thought my eyes must be playing tricks on me. They play many tricks, these days.”
“You thought me dead.”
“I heard differing accounts,” she admits. “Some said you had been carried off by a demon. Some said by a god. Some said you were swallowed whole by a serpent.” She looks at me. “Either way, I did not expect to see you again.”
“Nor I you,” I say honestly, but if she asks for the truth of what happened to me, I must lie.
“I doubted whether I would ever see anyone from Sikyon again.”
Her large brown eyes look at me with such a heaviness, it’s hard to meet her gaze.
“You know what happened to us, then?”
I nod. Does she blame me for it? Does it anger her, to find me well and unharmed?
