Oracle's War
Page 28
Manto wrecks that by disrobing.
I’ve already noted that she’s an extraordinary-looking woman: to see her naked, bar a small loincloth, is enough to freeze your breath. I hear every man present utter a small growl in the back of his throat. Maybe I do too.
‘She’s mine,’ I hear Alcmaeon mutter. ‘If the city falls, she’s mine.’
‘If the city falls’, I note. Not ‘when’. He’s losing faith.
‘Is that necessary?’ I call out to her. ‘Or are you just displaying your wares?’
‘Bare skin helps us interact with the spirits, Ithacan,’ she responds. ‘I’d have thought you knew that.’
Bitch. I pull off my leather jerkin and tunic as nonchalantly as I can, leaving only my own loincloth, and unstrap my boots. I may be short but I’m well made, and there’s no spare fat.
She looks me over. ‘Shame you’re so small,’ she says. Her tone implies that smallness describes everything about me. I feel myself colour, and my inner equanimity vanishes – exactly as she intends, I don’t doubt.
‘Ithaca’s all man,’ Bria replies. As if she knows. ‘Unlike your father, whore.’
The two women exchange dagger looks, and I feel a little better at the show of support Bria’s given me.
Tiresias steps to the front of the platform, and his voice rings out over the spire of stone. ‘Chariclo!’ he calls, in a penetrating voice. ‘It is I, Tiresias, thy son! Open thy gate, holy guardian! Let those of vision walk your ways!’
At first nothing happens, but then there’s a collective intake of breath, including my own. Some kind of foxfire is rising up through the pool, emerging from the depths in a whorl of pale blue light. Great swirls emerge onto the surface in a double spiral, running in ever-tightening curves from right before my feet – and hers. I realize that the swirls are made up of thousands of tiny phosphorescent water snakes, barely a finger in length, wriggling just below the surface and lighting a path to a ball of liquid fire in the centre of the pool. And something about the water changes, almost as if it’s true crystal, not water at all. Even so, I’m stunned when Manto places a bare foot onto the surface, right on top of the thread of light before her – and it takes her weight.
‘What’s happening?’ I breathe, my words carrying across the water.
‘This place is now in two worlds, Ithacan,’ Manto replies in her deep, sensuous voice. ‘The path lies before you. Walk the thread of light to the centre, where we will learn the truth.’ She takes another step, and now both of her feet are on the surface of the pool, which ripples but bears her weight.
I tentatively place my left foot on the water, above the shimmering snake creatures. And lo, it does take my carefully pressed weight, and then all of me as I place my right foot ahead of the left. The surface shifts and I lurch, for a moment unsure of my balance, but then I capture the feel of it and steady myself.
‘That’s it,’ I hear Bria call. It’s good to have at least one vocal ally. I’m further heartened when Diomedes echoes her, but Alcmaeon and his men are silent. I daren’t risk glancing back, needing all my concentration to put one foot before the other.
On the other side of the pool, about twenty yards away, Manto is doing the same – doubtless with a lot more grace – as we follow the spirals of light towards the middle. We’re both circling to our left, remaining on opposite sides of the pool from each other. I reach a point halfway round the pool, walking under the eyes of Tiresias and his men on the platform.
‘Chariclo, hear me!’ the old seer is calling. ‘Show us thy truth! Reveal the fate of Thebes!’
I can feel the weight of his gaze bearing down on me, and then his voice whispers into my brain. ‘Do you think your sister has been ravished yet by that Cephalonian pig that your false father inflicted on her?’
I can’t stop myself throwing an enraged look his way… and almost lose my balance. For one sickening moment, I think I am going to fall but somehow I manage to beat the whispered words aside, drawing on the same inner strength to resist him that I found back in Delos.
Focused once again, I go on, now sweeping back towards my own party, as Manto does the same towards hers. We complete a second circuit, much closer to each other now, and the sound of Tiresias’s chanting and Bria and Diomedes’s calls of encouragement are strangely distorted. Now I can hear Manto’s breathing so clearly it’s as if my ear is pressed to her lips. I risk the occasional glimpse in her direction and her face is creased in a frown; she too is having to concentrate, however many times she may have done this.
We complete another circuit, then another, and approach the middle from opposite sides, to the place where our two threads of light merge into the central ball of liquid fire at the spire’s heart. We’re only a few feet apart when she stops, facing me across that knot of light. She raises her arms, facing me, her majestic body lit by the blue light. She looks like a Queen of Earth and Sky, descended from Olympus to claim a mortal’s soul.
‘Chariclo,’ she calls in her throaty, resonant voice, gazing down into the intense blue light at our feet. ‘Come to us! Reveal thy truth!’ Her eyes flash to mine. ‘Repeat those words, Ithacan. She needs to hear both our voices.’
I drag my eyes from her, to stare, as she has, down into the light. ‘Chariclo,’ I call. ‘Come to us! Reveal the truth.’ I don’t know if the words matter, but I sense Manto’s hostility when I say ‘the’, not ‘thy’.
Then something changes in the character of the light, and I forget to breathe.
A shapeless, amorphous form emerges from the vortex below us, rising from the water, bearing some of the fluid with it, a female shape that’s never still, staring at us, arms forming as she reaches out to us both, looking both ways at once, forefingers extended…
What those watching can see, I have no idea, but for myself, I’m staring at this strange being’s finger as it reaches for the centre of my forehead, and her voice fills my senses. ‘Odysseus, son of Sisyphus,’ she says in a curious, hungry voice, then turning to Manto and adding, ‘Granddaughter, welcome back.’
Then her fingertip touches my forehead and light explodes through the inside of my skull. I feel a connection form, like a jagged blade of lightning, from my head through to Manto’s, joined by the spirit being before us. I cry out in shock and hear Manto do the same as our minds collide. I’m inside her, she’s inside me, and suddenly it’s as if I can feel her fingers around my throat, squeezing. For a few heartbeats I’m floundering, flailing, and she’s bearing down on me, her eyes blazing, but then I gain some kind of purchase and reach back, grab at her now ghostly form and begin to throttle her in turn.
At that point, the real battle begins: it’s not about physical muscle or technique in wrestling, and it’s not about determination, because believe me, I am adamantly not going to succumb. We’re contending with raw spiritual energy, and that is a very bad thing, because Manto’s been doing this sort of thing for decades, and I’ve barely set foot across the threshold of that path.
In barely a moment, I’m on my knees, and she’s roaring, ‘Thy truth! Speak thy truth!’
Thy truth…
To my horror, I feel a bubble of words form in my tortured throat, and then a disembodied voice rings out, androgynous and clear, echoing across the pool and the rocky outcropping around us.
‘The Delos woman lied! Thebes is impregnable!’
Manto’s majestic face hovers above me, close as a lover, her glorious, azure eyes blazing in triumph. Her fingers crush into my windpipe, and the solidity of the surface beneath me wavers, and then dissipates. As the world begins to fray and come apart in blurred, wet smears, I feel the pool engulf me as the darkness does, swallowing me as Chariclo drags me down to her watery lair…
14 – Duels of Wits and Blades
‘Nor did I ever flee from the dreadful war cries of battle, but plunged immediately into the struggle and fought in the front line.’
—Homerica, The Batrachomyomachia
Boeotia
My reaction is purely instinctive. Last year my father – my real father, accursed Sisyphus – took me to see the suffering of my ancestor, Prometheus. During that encounter, the fallen god gave me all the gifts possible for a theios, transforming me from a mere champion – and not the best at that – by awakening other theios powers I didn’t know I had, and which Athena had either not been aware of or hadn’t wished me to gain: seer, sorcerer… and avatar?
An avatar is the flesh vehicle of his or her god. I’ve never dreamt of doing this before, and I don’t even know if I can, but with my dying mind I scream, ‘PROMETHEUS!’
My inner vision alters instantly, and I am seeing desolate slate-grey skies. My wrists are in agony, my shoulders dislocated and shrieking, and a great open wound in my torso is like molten fire, blood streaming from the gaping gash. An eagle is flapping away, my liver in its beak, the bird so immense it blocks out the silver sun.
I am Prometheus, and I am in Hades’s realm.
But then I’m underwater again, deep, deep beneath the surface of the pool, in a chamber which daylight has never glimpsed, where bones, shattered crockery and tarnished scraps of bronze cover the floor. I’m locked in the grasp of a being made of spirit and hunger so ravenous she’s barely sane. Her ghastly greenish-grey face looms over me, her fangs and talons black as dark night. With inexorable force she drags my throat to her maw as I fight with failing strength.
But my divine ancestor is now strong within me…
Flames gush from my mouth, burning despite the water, raging into the gelid spirit-flesh of Chariclo as she cries out in shock, screaming on and on and on, as the intense heat of Prometheus’s divine fire pours through her, consuming her in slow, agonising waves as I cling to her, somehow breathing, somehow still alive. She shrieks, and wails…
Then she begs…
…and then she’s gone, blasted to nothing, and I’m floating in darkness, lighting it with my scarlet glow.
‘Odysseus,’ my great-great-great-grandsire murmurs. ‘I am well pleased in thee.’
My mind becomes his mind, my sight his, as he presents me with a vision of Thebes. But this is not the one I know already, or think I know – this is an echo of Chariclo’s insight, an afterglow of her dying consciousness that Prometheus is able to pass on to me, the true situation as Chariclo perceived it. Not just of Thebes but other places too, and other times. It’s shocking, mesmerising, galvanising…
Then that vision fades, and with an affectionate brushing of minds my divine ancestor is gone, and I’m exploding up through the water, gasping for air when I reach the surface.
I flail desperately to avoid going under again as I struggle towards the far edge of the pool, away from the platform, where I throw myself on the rocky ground and lie there panting, grateful for blessed life.
* * *
It takes me some time to realize that I’m the only one here. Tiresias, Manto and their party have vanished; so too have Alcmaeon and his. In fact, eerily, the sun is rising into a cloudless sky, the dawn illuminating this high, rocky place with golden light. Somehow, I’ve been underwater, caught in what seemed like a brief life-and-death struggle, for at least a day and a night.
Everything is gone, including my clothes and weapons. The upper pool looks as though no one has ever been there to disturb its calm tranquillity. I have a sudden, sickening thought. What if I’ve been fighting Chariclo for weeks, months, even years?
I stagger to the brink of the steep slope down to the lower pool. It too is deserted but to one side there is a row of low earthen mounds. Graves: they can’t be anything else. I clamber down the winding path to the bottom and examine them. There are eight in all, the soil freshly dug and piled up. But who lies in them? We slew eight men here, not counting the two theioi scouts back down the mountain. Alcmaeon wouldn’t have stopped to bury anyone, so I guess these are the Theban dead, and that Alcmaeon and Bria and the others have either fled or were killed and their bodies dumped elsewhere.
But there are no spent arrows, churned-up grass or mud, no blood on the cataract side of the upper pool, no more blood down here than the four sentries shed. I turn my attention to the mule dung and then hunt around for tracks. The grass around the pool has been flattened by passing feet; otherwise it yields up nothing specific. But the start of the path up to the hillock shows me what I seek. Several people set off up the hill in haste, including Diomedes and Bria – I recognize the mark of their boot soles – though most of the prints are overlaid by others travelling at a slower pace. My heart lifts a little. It looks as though my friends escaped, along with at least some of Alcmaeon’s men.
As far as I can tell, everyone left a day ago.
They all think I’m dead…
At first I’m fearful: how will Eurybates and my Ithacans will take this? And will Diomedes and Bria continue to protect not only each other but Menelaus too? What about the Great Bow? Will the siege now fall apart? Has my failure doomed us? Alcmaeon will now believe that I lied and that Thebes really is impregnable. I’ve perpetuated that lie.
For you did lie, Tiresias! When I saw inside the dying Chariclo’s mind, deep in the cavern below the pool, I discovered that Doripanes was right: Tiresias walked the Serpent’s Path in Pytho, and has done so at every oracular shrine in Achaea, propagating his ‘truth’ to protect Thebes. He’s warped the oracular visions given to every other seer for the past thirty years to create the illusion that Thebes cannot be overthrown.
I now know that Arnacia’s vision is the real truth: Thebes is strong, very strong indeed, but vulnerable. We can win this war, but only if I can turn around what will now be a military disaster unfolding beneath her walls. As soon as Alcmaeon returns to camp, convinced he’s been lied to and that this war is doomed, he’s going to order a retreat. And if they’re smart, the Thebans are going to emerge from behind their walls and destroy the Epigoni, sealing their ‘impregnability’ myth forever.
The only man that can now stop that disaster is me – wearing nothing but a loincloth, in hostile lands and miles from where I need to be. I have no choice but to run as I’ve never run before, barefoot over the stony ground, if I’m to reach the camp and save this mission.
So I run.
The way down the mountain is hard, the day clear and hot, the sun cruel. I retrace our inward route, for fear of the spells Tiresias has set to guard the mountain. My companions have come this way too – a hasty retreat, judging by the tracks they have left. To my relief the ropes down the cliffs are still in place – there would have been no time to remove them – and the coarse fibres burn my palms as I almost throw myself down them.
And then I sprint, barefooted as I am along the gorge, leaping boulders, and head out across the plain. I’ve been active all my life, my feet are hardened, my lungs and legs strong and I’m fuelled by need. I’m also a theios champion, with that extra strength, speed and endurance that lesser men lack.
I’m not too bothered about caution – Tiresias and his guards are hardly likely to be watching out for a dead man coming after them. On the other hand, the seer or his daughter might somehow have sensed the demise of his patron spirit, but there’s nothing I can do about it if they have.
Regardless, speed matters most right now. I need to find Alcmaeon and Adrastus as soon as I can and persuade them that the words I spoke were lies placed in my throat by Chariclo.
I was a good runner before I was awakened as a theios, and now I’m better still, despite suffering a bad leg injury last year. But I’m sweating profusely, the skin of my upper legs and belly – usually covered by a tunic or a kilt – is burnt red by the sun and I have no water skin. I cover the
distance in a dogged, muscle-sapping endurance test.
It’s ten miles from the mouth of the gorge at the base of Mount Cithairon to Thebes. I don’t have quite that far to go – our main camp was set up on and around a low rise to the south of the city. But even before I draw close, I can tell that the camp has been abandoned. Smoke is rising from the burnt remains of the huts built for Adrastus, the Epigoni and the higher-ranked officers. I approach more cautiously, darting from one piece of cover to the next, my heart in my mouth, until I am at the outskirts of the camp.
There are no bodies here and the canvas lean-tos we used as kitchens and eating places have been dismantled and removed. It seems to have been an orderly retreat, as far as these things go, but where have they retreated to? I climb up the rise on the side facing away from Thebes, take in the plains and curse at what I see.
There’s been a battle – not close to the walls, but out on the plain to the north-east. I should have realized that already, from the crows hovering and settling there. The Argives clearly broke camp as soon as Alcmaeon and the rest of our small party returned from Cithairon, and the Thebans must have followed them, urged on by Tiresias to finish this feud forever.
The Argives had no choice but to fight then, and it’s not hard to see who had the victory, though it must have been hard-won. From my vantage I can now see the city, where there’s a steady traffic of men and women coming and going, many of them dressed in mourning white. I can almost hear their mourning cries. The battle must have been yesterday afternoon, and today the victorious Thebans are burying their dead.
And the Argives? Are there any of them left to give their fallen comrades the same dues? And what of my Ithacans? And Menelaus, Bria and Doripanes? I shudder as all my fears strike me at once.
I strain my eyes, desperate for signs of our army. To the east, a low cluster of wooded hills stretches out into the hazy distance. If the Epigoni fled into its shelter, I won’t be able to see them, but some instinct tells me they’re not there. And to the west, our route from the Gulf coast to Thebes, the landscape is empty.