Oracle

by Jackie French

  ‘I think…I think it’s all right,’ whispered Nikko behind their trainer’s back. But how had Orkestres convinced the Chamberlain to let them go?

  Thetis touched her throat, and then pointed at Orkestres.

  Nikko peered up at the acrobat into the darkness. Thetis was right. Orkestres’s gold chain was gone.

  The dark was thick by the time they reached the two gates again, though the stone walls and road reflected enough starlight for them to find their way. Down through the right-hand gate now, along another high-walled road, then suddenly their feet no longer trod on stone, but on what felt like soft green grass, the sort that grew by the stream, not the wiry tussocks of the hills.

  They were in a courtyard with long buildings on three sides. Most were dark, the doorways and windows shut against the night, but the flicker of flames or slush lamps through the cracks in some of the shutters gave enough light to see.

  ‘Home,’ said Orkestres softly. ‘Come on. This way.’ He lifted Thetis up, just as a voice called out of the nearest door. ‘Orkestres, you son of a she-pig, is that you? You promised you’d be back half a moon ago. You’d better have brought me a decent gift, this time, or it’ll be a cold bed for you come swallow time.’

  The door opened. Beyond it a fire had sunk to glowing coals, with a few hastily thrown sticks beginning to flare in the dimness.

  The woman was as fat as the Chamberlain, and even shorter. Her hair was a bright gold, unlike any other hair Nikko had ever seen, plaited and wound on top of her head. She wore trousers like the ones Orkestres performed in, but these were down to her ankles, and of some soft cloth, woven in squares of red and cream and yellow, and her shirt was red as well. A chain of red stones sparkled like the sunlight around her neck. She held up an olive-oil lamp like the ones used back in the hall, and stared at them, looking them straight in the face instead of sideways, with her face modestly averted. ‘Well, what have you brought me?’

  Orkestres laughed. He hugged her, taking care to avoid spilling the oil from the lamp, and kissed her round red cheek.

  ‘A string of pearls as large as pigeons’ eggs, and a bolt of silk as well.’

  ‘Humph. Time was when that might even have been true.’ She held the lamp up higher. ‘Who are these? Little lambs you’ve brought me for the pot?’

  ‘These, my dearest Dora, are the children who are going to make our fortune all over again. The girl can leap, the boy can catch. He’s a fair singer too, and makes his own music. The next time the King sends me out it won’t be to squalid villages. It will be to the King of Athens—’

  ‘And pigeons will lay those pearls instead of eggs,’ said the woman, Dora, dryly. ‘Well, come on, come in, don’t stand there like cracked statues. The girl—what is your name child?—must be frozen.’

  ‘Her name is Thetis. She doesn’t speak,’ said Nikko. ‘And I am Nikko, her brother.’ Once he would have added ‘son of Giannis’. But not now.

  Dora gave them a sharp look, shepherding them into the narrow door. ‘Why doesn’t she talk? Bewitched? Or born like that?’

  Nikko tried to think of the safest answer. ‘Our father made her swear she wouldn’t speak,’ he said at last.

  ‘Why in the name of the Mother’s three faces would he do that?’

  Nikko shrugged.

  ‘That’s men for you. And I include you, Orkestres. Look at you, just one thin cloak and your legs and chest still bare, showing off your muscles like a strutting pigeon for the world and his donkey to see. Tomorrow your bones will be aching and you’ll be calling for me to rub them with myrtle oil.’

  She put her arms round Nikko’s and Thetis’s shoulders, and ushered them into the room, shutting the door quickly against the chill.

  ‘Warm yourself by the fire while I get this dumb ox of mine into a hot bath. There is nothing like hot water for easing sore joints.’ She nudged Orkestres. ‘And I bet you that string of pearls I didn’t get that yours are aching like rats are nibbling them. I always keep a couple of big pots by the fire so there’s warm water in plenty,’ she added to Nikko and Thetis. ‘You can bathe too as soon as Orkestres is out.’

  She bustled out through another door, carrying the lamp and pushing Orkestres before her.

  Nikko looked round. The fire in the centre of the room was flaring brightly again, lighting the room with a dim red glow. The walls were painted, like those back at the hall, but they were too far from the fire to make out the scenes. The floor was stone covered with bearskin carpets, warm and soft under his feet. There was a table—he had learned that word on the journey—made of shiny wood and with its feet carved into what looked like lion heads, and another rug under wooden seats. They too shone with polish. A big loom—larger than any he had seen at home—stood at one end of the room, and coils of thread hung from the walls.

  There was no bed platform. Nikko sat on one of the chairs, and lifted his hands to warm them by the fire. Thetis sat on the rug at his feet.

  ‘They seem kind,’ he whispered.

  Thetis thought for a moment. She nodded, but held her hands up too in a who knows? gesture.

  There were noises all around them, now they had relaxed enough to hear: far-off sounds of laughter and music, stools being scraped on stone, a man yelling in anger. In the next room Nikko could hear low voices, water being poured into a bath, and then Orkestres’s sigh. The scent of something fragrant filled the room, like herbs up on the mountainside.

  Dora came in again, her small fat feet surprisingly quiet. They were soft white feet, with smooth heels. The feet of someone who has never had to push a plough or gather wood, thought Nikko.

  ‘Well, let’s have a look at you. Food first I’d say, and then baths too. Who knows what bugs you’ve picked up on your travels and I’m not having fleas in my good blankets. I’ve filled the pots to warm again. You sit here while I bring back some food.’

  She laughed at the expression on their faces. Her teeth were good, with only a few missing at the sides. ‘No, I’m not going hunting to bring you back a deer to roast. There’s food in the palace kitchens for anyone who wants it, after the King has been served of course. You sit here and rest, hmmm?’

  Nikko nodded. Thetis’s head already leaned against his legs. She was almost asleep.

  His eyes were closing too when Dora slipped back, shutting the wooden door behind her to keep out the autumn draught. She put her bundles down on the table and threw another log on the fire from the pile on the corner.

  ‘Orkestres not come in to eat? That one has the sense of a swallow. If he’s gone to sleep in the cooling water he’ll be too stiff to move tomorrow. Oh, there you are.’ As Orkestres wandered out, wrapped in a red wool cloak with a green border.

  Nikko stared. Suddenly Orkestres’s hair and beard were grey, not black, and his eyes seemed smaller too.

  Orkestres saw the stare. ‘I will rub the colour back in tomorrow, or Dora will. She has a better hand with dyes than me…Ah, it’s young men the audiences want to watch, not greyheads like me.’

  ‘But your eyes?’

  Orkestres smiled. ‘Tricks to make you beautiful. Dora will show you those too. Now what have we got?’

  ‘Roast meat—mutton, I think—and wheat bread—the fancy breads had all gone—I was lucky to get this. And figs and grapes and pomegranates. I had stewed quinces,’ Dora added with satisfaction, ‘and roast piglet too. It serves you right, coming back so late. You deserve to get so little.’ Dora handed Orkestres a pitcher of wine as she spoke.

  ‘So little?’ whispered Nikko. Thetis was awake now, staring at the food. Dora stroked her hair, then handed her some bread and meat. ‘You eat up, child, then we’ll get you to bed. And there’s no need to gulp it down, either.’ Thetis looked up at her, automatically chewing more slowly. ‘Poor half-starved little lamb. There’s all you want to eat from now on, so you can take your time and chew it slowly. Oh, we live well here,’ to Nikko. ‘Food, cloth, oils, wine, firewood and rooms to live in. Everything we nee
d, we servants of the High King.’

  Nikko thought of the prisoner who’d died that afternoon. He put down his meat, and picked up bread instead, and grapes. He felt he would be sick if he ate more.

  ‘We’ll have pallets brought down for you tomorrow, but the furs should be here any moment; you can snuggle up in those beside the fire—’ She broke off at a scratching on the door. A man came in, wearing the burnished kilt of a soldier, furs piled high in his arms.

  ‘Welcome back, Acrobat.’

  Orkestres nodded.

  He’s keeping his face away from the fire light so the soldier doesn’t see him with grey hair, thought Nikko. Suddenly he was glad Thetis was silent. How much would she have seen and spoken of already?

  For a second he had an image of her small body hanging bleeding and lifeless by the road that was so clear he shivered.

  ‘Time for baths, and then for bed,’ said Orkestres quietly, as the sound of the soldier’s footsteps faded away up the cobbled road.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Dora. She reached up on tiptoe and kissed her husband’s cheek. ‘I think I am happy with my little lambs,’ she said softly. ‘Far better than that rope of pearls.’

  The furs were soft, and thicker than any he’d ever felt. Maybe from one of those woolly animals, the sheep, thought Nikko. He could hear murmuring from the room next door, where Orkestres and Dora must be getting ready to sleep. Thetis was curled up against him, her breathing soft and steady. Her hair smelled of flowers from the bath, and from the scented oil Dora had combed through as it dried by the fire. He had just plaited his, without waiting for it to dry. The bath had made his body feel fresh and rested at the same time, and his stomach felt at peace with the good food.

  Life here seemed full of luxuries…

  …as long as you pleased the High King.

  CHAPTER 12

  Orkestres had left already when they woke late the next morning, exhausted by the journey and the strangeness. Dora was sitting in the corner of the room, quietly spinning wool onto a distaff.

  ‘He’s off telling tales of his journey to his friends, and if they’re lucky some will even be true. But he won’t tell anyone about you. The less anyone suspects the greater the surprise when you first perform—assuming you have as much talent as he thinks. No food,’ she added quickly, as Nikko automatically reached for some of last night’s leftovers. ‘It’ll make you feel sick if you exercise hard straight after eating. Do your morning stretches first, then food after.’ She grinned. ‘Let’s see what I can teach you.’

  ‘You?’ He flushed. He hadn’t meant to sound insulting.

  But the fat little woman laughed. Her hair was out of its plaits today, held up with bronze clips in a tumble on top of her head. It looked even brighter in the daylight.…‘Look at your sister. She isn’t sitting there giggling at the idea that I might be an acrobat. You see something big brother doesn’t, don’t you, lambkin?’

  Thetis nodded.

  ‘You’re a knowing one, aren’t you? Well, it’ll stand you in good stead here.’ Dora stuck her head out the door and called up to one of the sentries on the walls. ‘Boasis! Lend me your sword, there’s a darling.’

  A sword? Why would a woman want a sword? And how dare a woman call out to a man like that?

  But to Nikko’s surprise the soldier just laughed. His voice was affectionate as he answered. ‘Anything for you, Pandora darling.’

  He threw his sword down. Dora caught it by its hilt before it hit the ground, then blew him a kiss.

  She came inside again, then wedged the sword’s point and handle between logs of firewood, edge upwards, and nudged it with her foot, as though to make sure it was firm. She looked at the children.

  ‘Watching? Good.’ She lifted the hem of her trousers, showing legs as thick as an ox’s with blue veins below her knees. She had put a faint red colour on her heels this morning. No, thought Nikko, those soft feet had never trod the dirt, harvesting barley.

  Suddenly her feet moved, back and forth in a strange bouncing dance step. Higher and higher, her feet flashing almost knee high now. And then she leaped—

  Nikko caught his breath. Beside him Thetis screamed, choking off the sound, as though the shock was too great to keep silent.

  Dora stood steadily, one foot in front of the other, their softness pressed onto the sharp blade of the sword.

  How can she stand there so still? thought Nikko dazedly. Why aren’t her feet bleeding, cut to the bone?

  Slowly—almost too slow to see—Dora lifted her arms. They were straight above her head now. All at once she slammed them down, like a bird about to take wing. At the same time she jumped again, down onto the floor.

  Nikko gazed at the sword. It gleamed in the light from the doorway. Not even a trickle of blood marred its surface.

  Thetis kneeled and touched the sharp sword edge. She turned to Dora, her face questioning, then pointed to her own feet and then to the sword.

  Dora laughed again, her voice proud now. ‘Yes, my lamb, I can show you how.’

  ‘No!’ Nikko’s cry had come before he knew what he was going to say.

  Thetis stared at him and lifted her chin. She doesn’t have to say, ‘I want to learn’, thought Nikko. Not aloud.

  ‘It’s a matter of balance,’ said Dora quietly. ‘Of learning how to spread your weight evenly, and all at once, so no bit of your feet touches the blade before the rest. You might be able to learn the trick of it, boy. But to perform before a king—well, it’s an act, as much as skill. You have to work out what will impress the audience most.

  ‘A boy slowly stepping onto a sword—that might get a gasp or two, before they go back to chewing their meat. But if you dance with two swords balanced on your shoulders, with your sister standing on the blades, and if you smile as though you didn’t carry death—that will have the crowd screaming, and garlanding you with jewels. Half of which you’ll give to Orkestres and me,’ she added. ‘As is right and proper, seeing as how Orkestres discovered you and we’ll be training you. But there’ll be gold enough for all of us, and when we die what we have will come to you, as our apprentices, as we have no lambs of our own.

  ‘It’s a good life here,’ she added more gently. ‘Even when you’re too old to interest the High King he doesn’t send you away, not when you’ve given him some good years. When I got fat he had me taught to be a weaver—only wool, not that smelly linen stuff that tears your fingers—and I get to do it here too, not in the shed outside the walls with the slaves. Orkestres and I get all we need as long as we live—’

  Thetis took a step toward her, and tugged her trousers. Dora seemed to know what she was saying even without the words.

  ‘Except the glory. Yes, you’re right, little lamb. Once you have heard the screams, that little gasp of breath as though they can’t believe what they are seeing…it’s hard to live without those. Harder for Orkestres than me, but that’s men for you. Now I’ll show you the stretching exercises, and a dance step or two, otherwise you’ll faint from hunger before we’ve even started.’

  CHAPTER 13

  And so they practised, always confined in the two rooms of Orkestres and Dora’s quarters. Stretches and leaps at first, and simple dances to the rhythm of Dora’s finger drum, both on the ground and with Thetis on Nikko’s shoulders. They learned to place their feet onto the sword blade too, but not to move about on it. You needed months of practice, said Orkestres, to do that safely, and they’d only have one chance to impress the High King.

  In between practice sessions they helped Dora, combing wool to get out the grass seeds and bits of dung, twisting the wool into big loops as she spun it on her distaff, or stirring the pot when she brewed up the barks and lichens for dyes. The sound of her loom was a constant background to their practising, as she kept one eye on them and another on her work. Dora’s weaving produced a cloth so thin you could draw it through a needle, with patterns of fish and waves and birds, far finer than anything seen back in their village, where clo
th dyed even one colour was a luxury.

  Nikko longed to explore the palace grounds, and Thetis sat peering out the door for hours. But Orkestres was firm.

  ‘No one must notice you. I want the Chamberlain, the guards, anyone who has ever seen you to forget that you’re here.’

  Nikko hugged his knees and looked up at him. ‘Why?’ Orkestres liked being asked questions, instead of responding to them with a cuff on the ear.

  ‘If the High King hears about you he may get curious, and want to see you perform. And if you dance for him before you are properly trained, before you can bring gasps to the audience, a smile to the High King’s face, you may never be called again. Do you really want to go back to herding goats, this time for the King? And as for your sister…’

  Nikko nodded. There was no need to say more. Dora had gossiped about the High King’s women. Not just his wife, the queen and mother of his sons, who was rarely seen beyond the women’s courtyards, and his sister Xurtis, the High Priestess, who made the sacrifices to the Mother, and took the omens from the house snake, but the other women who shared the King’s bed, and bore him children.

  It was an honour to share the bed of the High King, said Dora. But it wasn’t what Nikko wanted for his sister, nor a life as a servant or a weaver in the sheds beyond the walls.

  In between practice sessions they peered out of the gap in the window shutters. Even those small glimpses of the life beyond their rooms were fascinating. Many others, it seemed, lived in rooms about their courtyard: retired soldiers with scars up their arms and on the legs below their leather kilts; dancing girls trudging back tired from a night at the palace, shadows under their eyes and filmy tunics that left their breasts bare, and everything else besides almost as plain to see.

  Other performers lived in this courtyard too. Sometimes they might even practise outside where the children could watch them: Herakles the strong man, who could break a bronze chain tied around his chest just by flexing his muscles; Simonedes the juggler, who could keep ten daggers in the air at once. Wrinkled men, too old to perform any more, gathered on the stone benches under the trees, and watched the acts or gossiped as they drank their watered wine.