Oracle

by Jackie French

A mouse. As Nikko watched she handed it to Thetis.

  The snake pounced. The mouse was gone.

  She was his sister…but still he shivered. A few seconds ago that mouse had been warm and breathing. Now it was inside the snake.

  But snakes must eat…and he ate meat. He’d hunted, killed animals much larger than a mouse.

  Xurtis was exclaiming with approval. This was the very best of omens. His shivering stopped. But still he looked at his sister with new eyes.

  CHAPTER 22

  Autumn came: the tribute time. This time, when the teams of tribute gatherers went out, Nikko and Thetis went with them, accompanied by Orkestres and Dora as well as their own servants—not on ponies this time, but on a ship for Athens.

  The High King smiled as he gave the orders after their dance. ‘Athens’s tributes are high, you see. It is a rich city on a rich plain. It is only just that I send her my best, my Butterfly, as she gives me her best in oil and wheat as well.’

  Sometimes, after their dance, as the afternoon shadows grew, Thetis and Nikko would be invited to sit at the King’s table. It was almost unknown for a woman—much less a girl—to sit at the men’s table—much less the High King’s.

  But Thetis was the Butterfly. Somehow even the fact she did not talk added to her mystery. Sometimes Nikko would look at his sister’s face and wonder what she was thinking. The watching child had said uncomfortable things back in their small village. Now the two of them listened to lords discussing the hunt, and kings discussing alliances, troubles on the borders, and a possible attack on the rival trading nation across the seas at Troy.

  Thetis’s eyes watched; you could almost feel the intensity of her thinking. Thetis’s words could kill them.

  She had been dangerous enough as a child in the village. What things could Thetis say if she spoke now?

  But she stayed silent. And she was happy, Nikko thought, far happier than either of them had ever dreamed was possible back in the village. Loved by Dora and Orkestres; adored by those who watched her dance; praised by the High King; given all the comfort and glory of the greatest kingdom in the world.

  And now they would see Athens as honoured guests, and emissaries of the High King.

  And he would see the sea close up.

  CHAPTER 23

  The sea smelled of sweat and fish. One moment it could be brighter even than Thetis’s eyes as she danced; the next moment a cloud would cross the sun, and the sea looked like a child sulking.

  And it moved. Just when you thought you saw which way it was going, a wave would slap in another direction.

  Nikko was glad the ship was large, almost as long as the High King’s terrace. The figurehead was a lion with gold-painted fangs and golden eyes. There was a bridge for the captain and the rowing master, and then there were lines of rowers, slaves of the High King, each shackled to his oar by a bronze chain. Many of the rowers had black skins, like some of the servants and guards Nikko had seen back at Mycenae. But these didn’t wear lion skins across their shoulders, just the stained loincloth of a slave.

  The rear of the ship was divided into two sections. The first, with a goat-hide cover, was for the soldier tribute collectors and the servants; the hindmast, a little higher in the ship, was for Thetis and Nikko, together with Dora and Orkestres, who would guide them through their Athens mission. Nikko had dined with kings, but he was scarcely experienced enough to be an ambassador. Orkestres might no longer have the suppleness to be a great performer, but he and Dora had been honoured guests in many palaces before. They could faithfully guide Thetis and Nikko on the etiquette expected by provincial kings.

  The wind whipped passed them, the birds yelled in the sky. Sometimes dolphins raced the ship, diving under the bow then leaping out, so Thetis clapped her hands and laughed, following them with her eyes. She’ll add them to her dance, thought Nikko. And no one but me will know that the Butterfly is leaping like a dolphin.

  Other times they caught sight of a village on the shore, and human figures small as dolls or the corn kings and maidens the priestesses made each year. They were smoking fish above the fires, or mending nets. Once they saw a ship beached on the sand. Nikko wondered if it was wrecked, but the captain laughed.

  ‘Pirates. If you and the girl weren’t here we’d head shoreward and burn the lot of them.’ He shrugged. ‘They may still be about when we get you safe to Athens. We’ll come back and have a look before we take you back.’ He glanced at the shore again. ‘The High King does not care for pirates stealing from his people.’

  Nikko felt Thetis slip her hand into his. He looked down. She smiled up at him: a crooked smile, that almost said, ‘The High King is the only one allowed to rob his people.’

  Athens’s port, Piraeus, was like the port they had just left, though much smaller: stone jetties with wooden stanchions where the ships tied up; fish huts and drying fish; warehouses to shelter goods before they could be taken to the palace; women in thin dresses smiling at the sailors.

  Piraeus was used to ships but not, it seemed, a ship as grand as this. The big trading vessels from Troy, Crete, Egypt or the Hittites only docked at Mycenae, not here. A crowd gathered as the captain and the crew master tethered the High King’s ship: women peering from the doorways, forgetting their modesty in their excitement; children squeezing between their legs, eyes wide at the strangers.

  Suddenly Nikko realised what they saw: a girl with the presence of a princess or a priestess, holding her head high, clothed in silks. Her hair was bound in silver; gold circled her neck and wrists and ankles; her feet were soft white palace feet that now knew nothing rougher than a carpet or polished stone tiling on a terrace. Amethysts gleamed on the hem of her robe.

  And when they looked at him? His hair was braided in a dozen plaits and oiled till it shone, his eyes were outlined in kohl, his waist was nipped in with a gold belt. His kilt glittered with amethysts and silver thread and his skin was shaved and oiled till it shone like his hair.

  They were not mountain children now. They were the greatest honour the High King could bestow upon his vassal the King of Athens—his Butterfly, and the brother who was the rock beneath her dance.

  Chariots waited for them, the charioteers in burnished leather so the guests would know these were the King’s own drivers, and giant horses, like the ones the lords rode at Mycenae, so different from the barrel-backed ponies that had brought them from the mountain.

  Thetis rode with Dora as her chaperone; Nikko and Orkestres were in separate chariots on either side of hers. Their journey was smooth: the ruts in the road were filled in with pebbles. Once past the port the grass was browning in the autumn sun, ready to be cut for hay; the olives gleamed dustily; and above it all, between green hills, was the giant Rock of Athens. A dark line that must be a path led upward. High on the rock’s vast top were red columns and pink walls, with squares of blue and white.

  The charioteer saw him stare. ‘Our rock was put up by giants before man ever trod the earth.’

  They drew closer. Through the dust raised by their wheels Nikko could see the wooden walls that surrounded the rock—surprisingly like the walls of his village, though far more massive. The gate stood open, its arch tall enough to let a chariot through. Inside the walls, familiar stone and thatch houses were clustered around a marketplace with squealing piglets and jars of oil.

  The road continued, tracking back and forth up the steep slope. And then the slope grew steeper still.

  But there was no need to walk. Chairs perched on two poles were waiting: ebony inlaid with turquoise, with embroidered cushions of soft wool—and slaves to man each end of the poles. Above them guards looked down, javelins in their hands, leather helmets and burnished kilts much like the ones the High King’s soldiers wore. Far below were fields of grain and olives and, further off, the sea; the ship in which they’d come was too small now to pick out. Then they passed under the palace lintel, which was like Mycenae’s but painted with a serpent, not a ram.

  T
here were stone houses around now, painted bright colours, just as at Mycenae, and then the big door into the palace itself. Even the tiles and pictures on the walls reminded Nikko of the High King’s home.

  He slipped off his chair, and held out his hand to help Thetis down—a courtesy, as she could have leaped from one chair to another, and done somersaults in between. And then they were shown to their rooms, smaller than at home, but with every luxury Athens could produce; servants bringing grapes and figs and pomegranate juice; water to wash their feet with soft warm cloths, even though they hadn’t been allowed to touch the dust of the road; and at last an alabaster bath and scented oils.

  It was so much like Mycenae. Even the feasting hall that night was almost the same—the clatter of cups, the yell as a slave spilled the wine. The main difference was the clothing—leather jerkins for men instead of bare oiled skin, and swords at their sides as though at any time these men might have to defend their palace.

  This is what it means, thought Nikko, to be only a king instead of a high king.

  The other differences were just a blur—the patterns of the tiles, and King Menestheus himself, an old man with a grey beard, curled in ringlets, and sword scars just above his elbows, on the skin that wrist guards and leather jerkin couldn’t protect. A few women attended the feast here too, though they sat at another table and were not introduced. The King’s wife and daughters, perhaps, thought Nikko, and the senior priestesses of the Mother.

  No new dance tonight—why bother, when no one in Athens had seen them perform before? The gasps, the cheers, the coos at Thetis’s grace and flight were the same as back home; as were the women’s eyes on Nikko, appraising and wondering exactly how old he was.

  And then the feast.

  Back in Mycenae the King’s guests had already eaten the main part of the meal before entertainers were called to dance. Here, as an honour to Thetis and Nikko, the dance was first, so that they would be able to share the feast.

  They were seated in chairs on either side of the King, with the rest of the court on benches further down. Roast after roast was brought in. Servants struggled under a spit of whole roast bear, dripping hot grease onto the tiles; other servants with more modest burdens of roast goat, sheep, piglet or haunch of ox, platters of pigeons on beds of watercress or sorrel. The King himself pointed to the choicest portions for the carver to slice for his guests.

  The feasting seemed to go on forever, especially as neither Nikko nor Thetis was used to eating rich food after their dance.

  Platters of grapes, sesame pastries, figs and pomegranates were put on the table, with rounds of fresh white sheep’s cheese. The King was talking: something about a hunt and his best horse. Nikko stifled a yawn. He had nothing in common with anyone here, except those he’d come with.

  ‘…we thought we’d lost him then,’ the King was saying. ‘But Axehead galloped through the brush and—’ He stopped, his mouth open, a piece of fig sticking to one brown tooth.

  Nikko followed his gaze. Something moved along the blue and white tiled floor, something patterned like the tiles, but in shades of brown and olive. Something longer than a man, as thick as his forearm, its slender head raised and questioning.

  The crowd was suddenly silent.

  Nikko glanced at Thetis, whose slim fingers were tearing off a crust of bread. She didn’t look at the floor, didn’t even glance aside as the snake twined up her chair.

  But she knows it’s there. She knew it was coming, thought Nikko. She knew before they all did. How did she know?

  Because she watches. The others talk and listen, but Thetis thinks and sees.

  The snake coiled itself into her lap. Its head rose above the table; the tongue flickered, as though sensing if there was anything interesting there. And then the great body sank down again onto Thetis’s lap. It seemed to go to sleep, lulled by her warmth.

  No one spoke. The silence was so sharp it seemed the palace walls would crack.

  Why? thought Nikko desperately. All the rest of Thetis’s wonders that astounded the world—he understood all those.

  But why should the snake go to her?

  Suddenly she cast him up a small and private smile. It said, ‘Silly brother. Think! The others are whispering it’s a message from Mother Earth, sending the King of Athens’s snake to meet the High King’s Butterfly. But you should know why any snake might come to me.’

  The smell of snake, he thought. Thetis plays with the House Snake back at Mycenae. And now, here in Athens, their House Snake follows the scent of its cousin, and comes to her.

  Not magic.

  Only smell. And a girl who stayed silent, smiling.

  Nikko glanced around. Should he tell them? Even whisper the secret to the King of Athens, who still sat open-mouthed.

  No, he realised. They don’t want the truth.

  Thetis would have told them the truth, he thought. Once again he was glad his sister didn’t speak. For now the lords sitting here, the guards and serving slaves, all had a story to tell their grandchildren, a story to be passed on again and again.

  Someone will write a song, he thought. He looked back at his sister, sitting calmly with the great reptile on her lap. But even if I won’t tell the truth, I won’t lie either. The song won’t be made by me.

  CHAPTER 24

  They were the Years of the Butterfly.

  Six years of dancing, each audience still gasping, leaving them with dreams of butterflies, glimpses of a joyous world not bound by the rules of earth. Six harvests each better than the last, six journeys to this palace or that—Tiryns, Thebes, Orchomenos, Epidaurus, Pylos—all the great cities of the empire, calling in on smaller towns along the way to make the King or headman proud, and make the peasants gasp in wonder.

  The old men said the land was the most prosperous it had ever been, now the Butterfly danced for the soul of the High King.

  Thetis was nearly a woman now, no longer the waif from the mountain in dirty goatskins, but still small and slender, her arms as slim and graceful as a waving sheaf of wheat. Her hair hung in a dark cloud when Dora washed it and sat her to dry it in the sun on their terrace, or on the marble hearth by the big long fire when it was cold.

  Nikko had worried what would happen when her courses came. But somehow the High King never called them to perform on those days, and at last he realised that Dora must whisper to Xurtis, and Xurtis to her brother, for a woman’s courses were sacred to the Mother, and ill luck to any man who might glimpse the blood.

  Nikko’s voice had broken in their third year at Mycenae, but by then it no longer mattered. Others had sung his songs while his throat was unreliable, and played the harp or lyre as he gripped Thetis’s feet and became the steady rock below her dance.

  The old harper had died in their second year at Mycenae. Already tales were springing up: that his music had made stones stand on end up in the land of the Hyperboreans; that he had died young, but played so beautifully in the underworld that the Mother had allowed him back into the light.

  No musician in Mycenae was his equal now. But he had taught Nikko how to listen to the music in his mind, how to find tunes from the air and sea and sky. Sometimes Nikko felt he was weaving music with his fingers, or with his new, richer voice, like Dora’s threads on her old loom. Dora’s threads might have been more tangible; but songs, he thought, could last longer than wool cloth.

  Some of the songs he sang as Thetis danced were ones the old harper had created. Most were songs he made himself. A few he had learned from other teachers—the history of the world in songs—that Nikko too might one day pass on. For that was the way of things, how the deeds and inventions of men and women could pass to others over the years: through the masters of the song.

  There was another way that knowledge was passed on, here in the palace: by marks made on clay tablets, or glazed onto pots. Only a few in the palace knew their meaning, perhaps not even the High King himself. But it was the way the Chamberlain (even fatter now, and generous
to the High King’s favourites) kept a record of the tributes—the wine from Naxos, the figs and oil from Athens, the grains and slaves and gold—that came by ship or donkey, across the world to Mycenae. Dora, who had learned to write a little to keep the records of her weaving, had offered to get a teacher for Thetis, so she could speak at least with marks on clay. But Thetis shook her head, her face sombre.

  Words could still hurt, thought Nikko, whether scratched on clay or spoken.

  Nikko had grown too. His father had been tall; with better food and less hard toil Nikko was a head taller again, strong from the dance. He kept his hair shoulder length—long enough to tie neatly to keep it out of his eyes when dancing. These days when they visited kings or lords as emissaries of the High King he rode a horse, one of the big northern beasts, twice as high as the small mountain ponies he had known before, while Thetis was still driven in a chariot by one of the High King’s charioteers. Only the steadiest of hands, the most practised of swords, was allowed to guard the Butterfly of the High King.

  By now Nikko knew he would never make a great acrobat like Orkestres, even if he’d had the chance. He was too broad, too tall and muscular—supple enough for a back somersault, but the wrong build to draw gasps from the audience by himself. He was the catcher, the strong steady one, not the bright flight through the air.

  These days he had another chamber for himself, further along the terrace from the others’. The Chamberlain had granted his request with a raised eyebrow and a smile. What young men did at night, sometimes, was not for little sisters to know. And the women who admired the Butterfly’s catcher—highborn, jewelled and painted, with gold flounces on their skirts and red rouged breasts—needed discretion too.

  It was autumn today, and tribute time, but Nikko and Thetis were not on an embassy accompanying the tribute gatherers this year. This time the High King had invited the subject kings to come to him. There would be a great feast—the greatest ever seen—to celebrate the autumn harvest, as well as a sacrifice for the season to come.