by Judith Tarr
One morning she came back into her body to find something round and leathery-soft nestled between her breasts. It was a serpent’s egg. As she sat up, cradling it in her hands, the eldest snake, the Mother’s beloved, kissed her cheek with its forked tongue and slithered away into the shadows.
She wrapped the egg in a scrap of wool and tucked it back into the fold of her tunic. It was a gift from the Mother, a sign of favor. It lightened her heart.
It was a promise, too, though of what, she could not be sure. Something new was about to be born. She had learned as a child in this temple that she had only to wait; the Mother would make all things clear.
Patience was a difficult art. She practiced it as best she could, kept the egg close and performed her duties and took her bits of freedom where she could find them. And every night she dreamed of mysteries.
Four
The egg hatched on the day of midsummer, when the day was at its longest and the night, though sweet, was short. In Dodona’s temple the ancient rites were only partly observed. They sang the songs and offered the gifts of fruit and grain and danced the decorous parts of the dance, but the deep mysteries, the great dance and the sacred marriage, they passed by.
Polyxena had always found these observances both beautiful and satisfying. This year, under the influence of her dreams, she understood how hollow they were. They were honest as far as they went, and their devotion to the Mother was heartfelt, but it was only a shell of a rite.
There was more to it by far, more depth and more passion and more mystery. This bloodless ritual, this polite and pleasant celebration, left her deeply frustrated. It was not simply that she knew there was more, or that she wanted it. She needed it. Down in her heart, she lived for it.
The fire of her heart stirred the egg into life. As she lay alone in her bed, not quite so far gone that she would seek out the one man in this place—such as he was—the membrane split and the small blunt nose pushed forth, tasting the air with its tongue.
She cradled it in her palm. It was dark, all glistening black—not at all the gentle spotted creature she had expected. She had not seen its like before.
It coiled in her hand, exploring her fingers with the soft tickle of its tongue. She ran a light finger from its head down its supple body. It arched against the touch.
She smiled. Snakes were cold creatures, narrowly focused on food and intermittent mating, but the Mother loved them. So did Polyxena, for their simplicity. There was nothing complicated about a snake.
The life she needed was both more and less simple than the one she lived here. Still cradling the hatchling, she sought out a basket small enough for it, lined with new wool, and laid the creature gently in it. It stirred—not fretful; snakes did not fret. But it seemed to miss the living warmth of her hands.
She knew she should not relent, but the pouch in which she had carried the egg was more than large enough for the infant snake. It lay quiet there, hanging around her neck next to her heart.
She laid her hand lightly over it. The Mother’s blessing was warm inside her. It held a promise that she had not much longer to wait.
* * *
That serene resolve carried through a single day and part of a night. As it faded, Polyxena felt a kind of despair.
The sense of emptiness—of hunger—had grown worse. It was not the hatchling’s fault: she had fed it from a nest of mice that the priestesses kept for just that purpose. The itch in the back of the skull, as if eyes followed her wherever she went, was so strong that she kept spinning about to catch the spy. But there was never anything to see.
In the spring, when she dreamed, the oracle had taken possession of her. Attalos had told her how her aunt found her, naked and burning hot in the snow. She remembered the dream but not the discovery; she had awakened in her bed, decorously covered, and but for Attalos would have thought the whole of it was a dream.
She had had enough of dreams and studied patience. The oracle did as it pleased—that was doctrine. And yet she had heard the priestesses talking now and then, especially the two elders, of turning the power of that place to their purposes.
It was always a high and noble purpose. They framed the questions carefully and shaped the responses to fit the best needs of those who asked. It might be a city seeking advice on a matter of trade, or a king asking whether he should choose peace or war. The answer they gave was truthful, but they might not divulge the whole truth—or they might make it larger and clearer and stronger. Sometimes they might do both.
Even they did not see what was increasingly clear to Polyxena. The oracle was more than the play of wind in a clutter of dangling pots, that only the priestesses knew how to interpret. For all anyone else knew, the priestesses invented all their oracles, and only pretended to hear the gods’ voices in the ring and clatter of bronze.
Polyxena knew in her bones that it was real. Whoever, whatever spoke in that place, it was both a guide and a counselor. And maybe, if one’s question was framed exactly, it was a shaper of things to come.
She had no proof of that but the slant of an implication. She did not know the rite or the incantation that would rouse the power. All she had to guide her was a knot in her belly and a memory of dreams.
She had years of training and close study; and she had the blood of the ancient ones in her. Her foremothers had served the Mother since the dawn of time. She was bred and raised and trained to bend the oracle to her will.
The priestesses would beg strongly to differ, if they knew. She was only an acolyte, and a rebellious one at that. Even Attalos, lowly male though he was, was more suited to the task than she.
All the more reason to make the oracle tell her what she was supposed to do. This was not her place or her fate—but what those were, she needed desperately to know.
Even in desperation she could cling to patience. She waited the rest of the night and the day after, kept her mouth closed and her eyes down and did nothing to attract notice. Such preparations as she could make, she made on the few occasions when she could be alone.
She fasted—someone might have noticed that, but she pretended to eat, slipping the bread and cheese and fruit into her gown and feeding it to the birds and the dogs afterwards, and pouring out the watered wine with a whispered invocation to the Mother. As she worked, she let herself become a prayer; when she attended Timarete in the sanctuary and Nikandra by the Mother’s tree, she filled herself with the sacredness of the words and the place.
By evening her belly was a singing emptiness. If she had done it properly she would have fasted for three days, but she could not trust to remain undetected for that long. Then it would all be for nothing.
Polyxena waited an endless time for the sun to wander down the sky. The light lingered, it seemed, forever; the day did not want to let go. She slept a little, restlessly, and fed the snake, offering it a newborn mouse. It stalked and throttled and swallowed the tiny wriggling pink thing with single-minded determination.
When it had coiled in its pouch again, with a lump in its middle and sleep washing over it, Polyxena had no more patience left. There was still a glow of light along the western horizon, but all the priestesses were asleep. Attalos snored softly in his cell across from Polyxena’s.
She wrapped herself in a dark mantle: the day had been hot but the night was almost cold. Softly on bare feet she slipped out of the priestesses’ house.
* * *
The sky was wild with stars. There was no moon, though Polyxena felt it coming like the brush of cold flame across her skin. The wind was all but still.
She passed like a shadow through the grove. The stream was silent, its bed empty as it always was at night. She crossed it, slipping slightly on the still-wet stones.
The Mother’s tree whispered to itself. Its bronze adornments made no sound, but the broad-lobed leaves stirred ever so gently.
She had brought a jar of wine and a honeycomb to offer the oracle. She laid the honeycomb on a jut of root and poured out t
he wine as a libation. The earth drank it thirstily. She fancied she could hear the smacking of lips and the sound of swallowing.
There was nothing remarkable about the wine, but something about the night and the errand made its fumes so strong she reeled. Her body was as warm as it was in her dreams; her limbs were loose. She let fall her mantle and then her chiton.
She had done this before in the cold of winter, under a frost-pale moon. These summer stars were much gentler. Their light caressed her.
The steps of the dance were ingrained in her bones. There was a song, too, a chant, a wild ululation, but a last remnant of caution kept that within, in the safety of silence.
Divinity was in her. It did its best to rule her. But even in ecstatic trance, she kept a remnant of herself.
She turned the dance to her own will—slowly, against powerful temptation to let go, to surrender, to become the gods’ plaything. She willed the oracle to wake.
Her feet stamped the earth before it. Her hands clapped the rhythm. The ringing of cymbals echoed it: a wind had risen to shake the vessels along the branches.
Then at last she ventured words. “Tell me,” she said in the old language, the language of the Mother. “Show me.”
The leaves whispered to one another. Bronze rang on bronze. Faint and high and far, the stars sang.
“Tell me what you see,” she said.
The whisper rose to a roar, the ringing to a deafening clamor. The oracle was obedient. It told—everything. Every oracle. Every fate. Every—
Her hand swept through the hanging vessels, throwing their song into confusion. “My oracle,” she cried. “My fate. Tell me what I am. Where am I supposed to go?”
The tumult of voices stopped abruptly. The silence was so complete that she pressed her hands to her ears in dread that the gods had struck her deaf.
The hatchling stirred in its pouch and began to struggle. She freed it before it harmed itself.
Once her hands surrounded it, it quieted. When it moved again, it was only to raise its head. Its eyes sparked like embers in the starlight. It opened its mouth and hissed.
The sound was strikingly like the rustle of wind in leaves. “Mysteries,” it said. “The Mother and the Son. The Mother takes the Bull of Minos to herself and gives birth to the sun.”
Polyxena looked into those sparks of eyes. They swayed slightly, back and forth, as if with the wind. “That is not an answer,” she said.
“Mysteries,” said the hatchling. “Oracles.”
That was an answer, of a sort.
“The Mother and the Son,” it said. Its body coiled tightly. With no more warning than that, it struck her palm.
There was a brief, burning pain, then a slow and delicious languor. Polyxena had no desire to fling off that tiny, unexpectedly venomous thing. She was not afraid. Even if she died, that was her fate.
Better dead than moldering away in this grove. The hatchling twitched itself free with another but more distant stab of pain, and slithered back into its pouch.
Polyxena’s knees gave way. She did not mind. She knelt with her cheek against the rough bark of the oak. Above her head, leaves murmured. They were full of secrets, if she cared to remember them.
She lowered her hands, the one that stung and burned and the one that felt nothing, and pressed them flat to the mould of leaves. The earth breathed beneath. Small blind things crawled and ate and bred. They knew nothing of the sun but that it burned.
And yet they fed the oak that stood so high under heaven. Without them it could not have thrived.
The smallest thing had meaning. The priestesses had taught her that. In order to read oracles, one had to look far down below the surface of things. One had to see and feel and smell and taste, and above all understand.
In order to perceive the full light of the sun, one had to immerse oneself in darkness. The Mother was the earth and all that lived in it, and the sky and the sun and every light of heaven. The Son was—what?
That was the mystery. The world changed. The moon grew old. The Mother never died, but She might choose to withdraw from Her creation—to rest, to amuse Herself, who knew?
Polyxena’s awareness spread like roots through the earth and grew like a sapling toward the sky. She reached for the sun, drawing it from the womb of the night. She cast it above the horizon.
Five
When Polyxena touched the sun, its fire leaped through her. It struck like a bolt of the gods.
The earth shook. The oak swayed as if in a gale. The mountains trembled; deep in their hearts, fire called to fire.
Too late Polyxena snatched at the powers she had loosed. The ground beneath her pitched and rocked. Somewhere perilously close, she heard the cracking of stone.
The sun reeled in the sky. Human voices cried out; an ashen rain began to fall. Rivers of mud and fire ran down the mountainsides. The earth yawned, gaping to swallow them all.
Polyxena had no spells or incantations, not even a prayer for this. Her wits barely sufficed to fling her flat while the world went mad around her. She had never expected—she could not have imagined—
“Peace,” said a voice so soft, so ordinary, that it struck more powerfully than the braying of trumpets. “Be still.”
One last time the earth heaved before it sank back into stillness. On the mountain above, even as the fire died, a steep slope crumbled; a fall of rock roared down into the valley. The air was full of noise and dust and terror.
Yet again Promeneia spoke, clear and steady above the tumult. “It is done. Rest now. Sleep.”
In the silence that followed those gentle and impossibly powerful words, not even a bird sang. Polyxena ached in every bone. She would gladly have lain buried in ash and tumbled earth until her mind and self all went away, but her body insisted on rising unsteadily to its knees.
The oak had a slight but distinct tilt. The ground had risen on one side of it, forming a new if shallow hillside. The temple stood intact, but a crack ran slantwise from top to bottom of the wall. The stream beside it was as empty as it was at night; no water bubbled in it.
Polyxena staggered to her feet. All three priestesses stood watching her. The younger two were haggard but hale. Promeneia had aged years.
She leaned heavily on the white and silent Attalos. Her body shook with a palsy, but her eyes were clear and quiet. There was no anger in them.
Nor was there in Nikandra’s—and that was surprising. Nikandra spread her hands. “This battle you’ve won,” she said. “Pray the Mother you find it worth the price.”
Polyxena was braced for wrath and dire punishment. It dawned on her slowly that she had been punished. The longer she stood upright, the worse the pain was.
She was bruised in every muscle and bone, and in parts of her that she had not known existed. When she tried to think past the moment, her mind felt scraped raw. If she had been turned inside out and beaten, she would have felt no worse.
Somehow she walked, because she was too stubbornly proud to crawl. None of the priestesses offered to support her, nor would Attalos so much as look at her. They had enough to do with carrying Promeneia into the temple.
If Promeneia died, it would be on Polyxena’s head. She stumbled toward the priestesses’ house, but before she reached the door, her feet carried her away from it. She made her way, hobbling like an old woman, through the grove and around the wall toward the king’s house.
It was not that she meant to run away from the temple. She was no use to them there. If she faced the truth, she was worse than useless.
She had only meant to demand an oracle. No one had warned her that the earth would try to break because of it. She had done something—raised something—that was not in any of the lessons she had learned so arduously.
And yet the priestesses must have known she could do such a thing. Their lack of surprise and the air of—not ease, but certainly familiarity, with which Promeneia had dealt with the earth’s all-but-breaking spoke of knowledge they had not seen f
it to share with Polyxena.
What else did they know that she did not?
No one in the king’s house could answer the questions that crowded in her, but she would rather have their ignorance than the secrets the priestesses had kept so conscientiously. She hoped they were sorry for it.
Yes, she was angry. Not quite angry enough to do anything worse than she already had, but the sooner she left the temple, the better for them all.
* * *
The palace had escaped destruction. There was ash on the floors, jars of wine and oil broken, and men limping or nursing bruised or broken limbs, but the walls had held. In the queen’s house, Troas’ ladies swept and scrubbed and made the rooms clean again.
Few of them were hurt. The Mother had protected them.
The queen sat in her accustomed seat with a basket of wool and a spindle. She looked flustered, as if she had just sat down.
She smoothed a stray curl off her forehead and smiled somewhat shakily at Polyxena. “You’re well. Good. Go and get clean, then help me spin. No matter how angry the gods are, we still need clothes on our backs.”
She was wise. Two of the queen’s ladies took Polyxena in hand and carried her off to the bath.
The water that streamed down her body was black with ash and mud. Her hair was clotted with it. Troas’ women scrubbed her until her skin stung, then anointed her with sweet oils and dressed her in soft clean wool.
She only stirred when they tried to take the hatchling’s pouch away. She snatched at that and glared until they sighed and let her keep it, though she had to hold it in her hands while they washed her breast and shoulders. She did let them string a new, clean cord through its neck, blessing the snake’s stillness through all that upheaval. When it was safe around her neck again, it stirred and stretched before it went back to sleep.