The Gate of Days - Book of Time 2

by Guillaume Prevost

  “See that?” shouted Lydias. “He tried to escape! That’s certainly proof!”

  “Metaxos,” continued the priest in a patient voice. “Metaxos, listen to me and stop sniffling. Did you steal the Navel of the World from the Treasury of the Athenians? Yes or no? Tell me the truth, Metaxos. It’s your only chance!”

  His eyes full of tears, the shepherd looked at him. “I didn’t do anything, good priest! I swear I didn’t do anything!”

  The priest shrugged in annoyance. “The archon will surely want to question them. It’s too bad, but we have to take them to prison!”

  5 The Stranger

  When Sam emerged from the valley and saw the city, it took his breath away. Delphi was a white pearl surrounded by stone, a majestic eagles nest in the heart of the mountains. Houses with tile roofs clustered around gleaming structures whose angular facades shone in the sun. The scene was all the more striking because the town seemed lost in a world of cliffs and precipices. There were no villages or farms nearby, just jagged rock and empty sky.

  Delphi may have been isolated, but it was hardly deserted. A dense crowd thronged its streets, and the yellow path snaking below it was jammed with carts and pilgrims.

  After three-quarters of an hour of silent walking, Sam and Metaxos were escorted into a building guarded by soldiers with tall metal lances. They shoved the two prisoners into a windowless room in the back, with no furnishings beyond a few straw mats tossed on the ground.

  “I’m going to get the archon,” the priest said. “In the meantime, think carefully about what you are going to tell him.”

  He closed the door, and the two youths were plunged into darkness. Metaxos huddled in a corner, sniffling, and Sam stretched out on one of the mats. He was now positive that he was in Greece. Athens, Apollo, tunics, temples, columns — it all fit. But in what century? That was a mystery. From a conversation Sam overheard at the gates of the city between a soldier and a priest, he deduced that Delphi must be some kind of holy place where the Greeks came to consult the Pythia, or oracle, who gave his — or rather her — opinion on various questions. Like in The Matrix, except this was the original!

  But far more important to Sam was that fact that his father had come to Delphi. Better yet, he had come to Delphi just three days earlier. Three Greek days didn’t mean much in the big picture, of course; his father could have made the trip several months ago in his original time. Just the same, Sam had missed him by a hairsbreadth today. He imagined for a moment what such a meeting might look like. Once the first moments of astonishment and emotion had passed, they would find a quiet spot — in front of Metaxos’s hut, say — and tell each other about their adventures. Allan would explain what had brought him to Delphi with a drill, and Sam would warn his father of the dangers awaiting him in Bran Castle. Together they would return quietly to Sainte-Mary — back to square one, and back to normal life!

  Of course things hadn’t turned out that way. Still, Allan’s visit to Delphi gave Sam a new perspective on events. What if he really did meet his father during his time travels? It wouldn’t be who his father was now, of course — it might be the college-aged Allan, when he was studying in Egypt, or the Allan of just a few months ago, when he was first beginning to use the stone statue again. Still, whenever it was that they ran into each other, all Sam had to do was warn him not to go to Wallachia in the future — and then there’d be no need to chase after the seven coins, or to go risking his life with Dracula!

  But there was some bad news too, and it was called the Navel of the World. Sam didn’t know exactly what that was, but he remembered the Sainte-Mary Museum guards comment: “Did you read about that Greek thing they auctioned in London? The Navel of the World or some such. Ten million dollars in less than ten minutes!”

  So the Navel of the World had recently been stolen in Delphi and even more recently — a few thousand years later, actually — sold in England. Between those two events, his father had come here with a drill. His father, whom Metaxos had surprised committing an act so reprehensible that he didn’t dare talk about it. His father, who would lose the house, the bookstore, and the stone statue unless he could make an impossible mortgage payment. His father, who had become a thief— unless there was some other explanation.

  “Samos!” whispered Metaxos. “Are you still here?”

  “Of course I’m here,” answered Sam, annoyed.

  “Samos, I’m afraid. They’re going to kill me.”

  “Don’t be silly. They just want to know where the Navel of the World is. Can you tell me what it looks like?”

  “You know less about it than your father,” Metaxos remarked. “At least he —”

  “All right, all right,” Sam interrupted. “I know less about it than my father — I get it! Just be nice and tell me what it is.” “It’s the stone that shows the center of everything, Samos! When Zeus wanted to know where the center of the world was, he sent two eagles flying from opposite ends of the earth. The two eagles met above Delphi. They dropped the stone. That’s how we know Delphi is the navel of the world.”

  “And this stone — where is it exactly?”

  “The original is in Apollo’s Temple. But the Athenians carved their own stone and covered it with gold. They were going to offer it to the god at the great feast. They stored it in their Treasury in the meantime. That’s where your father …”

  He started sniffling again, and Sam instinctively reached in his pocket for a handkerchief. He found only the museum coin and the statuette’s cloth dress.

  “Can you tell me what happened three days ago, Metaxos? Did my father tell you something? Like what he planned to do with the Navel of the World?”

  “No, no!” the shepherd protested. “If I talk, I’ll never go to the hills again, never! I’ll never see my goats again, or my dog! I won’t talk about your father, ever!”

  Just then, the door flew open. “Are you two finished moaning? Come along. The archon is here.”

  The soldier led them to an oval room with a domed ceiling. A fat man with a chubby face sat at a marble table, his arm shuttling rhythmically between his mouth and a bowl full of grapes. The white-haired priest was pacing behind him, looking angry.

  “Ah,” said the priest, as he saw them approach. “So, Metaxos, have you been thinking? If you are the thief, you better tell us right away, my boy, so we can get the object back as soon as possible.”

  The shepherd fell to his knees imploringly. “It wasn’t me, good priest! By Apollo and Hermes, it wasn’t me!”

  “So who was it, then?” snapped the old man. “Several people saw you prowling around the Treasuries that day, and you left town at nightfall clutching something in your arms. Can you tell me what you were carrying so carefully?”

  “Don’t… no,” babbled Metaxos. “I… I…” He could no longer say anything intelligible.

  “Do you realize what we’ve done for you all these years?” exploded the priest. “Who took you in when you were just a squalling baby on the temple steps? Who raised and fed you, and gave you your goats? Is this how you thank us, by robbing our best ally’s Treasury?”

  He grasped Metaxos under the armpit and forced him to his feet. “Do you know what will happen if we don’t find the Navel of the World, Metaxos? In three months the Athenians will take their things and abandon the city. The Thebans, Boetians, and Corinthians will go next, and then all the others! Delphi will be deserted, the oracle silenced, and you’ll be pasturing your goats among ruins!”

  Metaxos looked terrified. “Good priest, good priest… don’t kill me! I didn’t do anything!”

  “Who is this boy with him?” asked the archon, without pausing in swallowing his grapes.

  “A friend of Metaxos,” answered the priest. “Samos of Samos, I believe. They were both at the hut when we caught them.”

  “Does he know anything?”

  “Metaxos claims he only arrived this morning.”

  “Is that true, Samos of Samos?” asked the a
rchon without looking up.

  “It’s true,” Sam said in a voice that he wished sounded more confident.

  “And you don’t know anything?”

  Sam summoned all the courage he could muster. He was about to try something risky, but there was nothing else to do if he wanted to get out of this quickly.

  “I think Metaxos found out something and he’s very frightened,” he said all at once.

  “No, Samos!” the shepherd protested. “Keep quiet or I’ll never go back to my hills!”

  Sam ignored him and instead took the statuette’s dress from his pocket and held it out. “Metaxos picked this up when he came to Delphi.”

  The archon deigned to look at him for the first time. “What is it?”

  “A kind of map, I think.”

  At a nod, one of the guards stepped forward and brought the piece of cloth to the marble table. The archon looked at it every which way while making a sucking noise, as if he had something stuck between his teeth, and finally spat out a seed.

  “It’s a map of the city, all right,” he said. “Crudely drawn, with names: ‘theater,’ ‘temple,’ ‘Treasury of the Athenians.’ That last one is marked with a cross. You say Metaxos picked this up on the Delphi road?”

  Sam nodded.

  “What if he had drawn it himself, instead of finding it?”

  The priest, who had approached, shook his head. “Impossible. We were never able to teach Metaxos to read, much less write. Moreover, the shape of the letters looks like the way Greek is written in distant cities, not here.”

  “Cities more distant than the island of Samos?” asked the archon, glancing suspiciously at Sam.

  “Much more distant, yes.”

  “So the thief would be a stranger, is that right?”

  “It would seem so. Besides, Metaxos would hardly need a map to find his way to the Treasury of the Athenians. He spent his entire childhood in that neighborhood!”

  “That’s true,” admitted the archon. “In that case … Tell me, Samos of Samos, do you have any idea what could have so frightened your friend?”

  Sam cleared his throat as discreetly as possible. He had to come up with a convincing lie while making sure Metaxos didn’t contradict him — no easy task. He stared hard at the shepherd, trying to send brain waves: Trust me! Just repeat everything I say!

  “From what Metaxos told me,” Sam began, improvising wildly, “he saw the map, got suspicious, and went to the Treasury of the Athenians. But when he got there, someone attacked him and threatened to kill him if he talked.”

  “Someone? Did you see someone at the Treasury of the Athenians, Metaxos?”

  The shepherd opened blank, staring eyes as if his brain were momentarily disconnected: Tm sorry, the number you are calling is temporarily out of service. Please try again later.

  The archon leaped to his feet and raised his fist to Metaxos. “Did you see the thief? Can you describe him? Speak!”

  “It was a man,” shouted Sam, to keep the archon from striking Metaxos. “About fifty years old, with short gray hair, a square jaw, and blue eyes.”

  The description had simply popped into his head. It was different enough from his father’s appearance that it wouldn’t cause Allan too much trouble if he ever came back here. Sam quickly went on: “Metaxos wasn’t able to tell me more because everything happened too fast. The man had a knife and almost stabbed him, I think.”

  “Is this true?” asked the archon, his fist mere inches from the shepherd’s face. “Was that the stranger you saw?”

  It took a few moments before Metaxos’s gaze showed a flicker of life. Then he nodded slowly. “Yes, that’s … that’s what I saw.”

  “Why did you refuse to talk? We’ve lost valuable time!”

  “I — I was afraid. The stranger’s knife, yes.”

  Sam heaved a sigh of relief. Apollo and his fellow gods had apparently taken his side.

  “When did this happen, exactly?”

  “After … after consulting the oracle,” murmured the shepherd, as if under the effect of a powerful drug.

  The archon stepped back, and the priest smiled slightly.

  “That seems to fit. The lock at the rear of the building was broken at about that time, at the changing of the guard. It didn’t take the thief more than a few moments to enter the Treasury and seize the Navel of the World.”

  “We still don’t know how he was able to break the bolt, though,” remarked the archon, reaching for another cluster of grapes. “Besides, nothing proves that Metaxos wasn’t the thief’s accomplice— and the Athenians won’t be satisfied with his good looks or his simpleton manners. If they aren’t given proof of his innocence, they will demand that he be punished.”

  Metaxos began to moan softly, like a dog unfairly reprimanded by its master.

  “There may be a way to provide that proof” the priest suggested. “A proof that the Athenians themselves couldn’t argue with.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “If this boy is truly guiltless, the oracle will declare him innocent,” said the priest. “Otherwise …”

  6 The Oracle

  Actually reaching the oracle turned out to be no mean feat. At the foot of the temple, a dense crowd jammed a walkway lined with trophies: six-foot-high vases and shields, inscribed white pillars, a gilded statue of a lion, a bronze palm tree with a glittering owl perched in its fronds, and so on. You would have thought the people were extras for a scene in Ulysses Against Hercules.

  The area was so crowded that the arrival of Sam and Metaxos, surrounded by the archon, the priest, and two guards, didn’t go unnoticed.

  “No shoving!” shouted one man.

  “In Apollo’s name,” complained his neighbor, “you can’t cut in line ahead of us!”

  “We’ve been standing here for two hours,” agreed the first man. “Wait your turn or —”

  “It’s the archon,” interrupted a woman behind them. “Be quiet!”

  They climbed the sacred path, making their way as best they could among the grumbling faithful. The organizers of the temple had clearly forgotten to arrange for VIP access. As they reached the first steps of the temple, the priest spoke into Sam’s ear: “The two men holding their helmets over there are Athenians. They are here to keep an eye on us, so watch what you say or Metaxos could pay the price. Here — when you enter, give this as an offering.”

  He put two roughly circular bronze coins in Sam’s hand. They didn’t have holes, but Sam couldn’t help but be startled: Each bore the head of a ram with long, curving horns. Two ram’s heads! That was what his father gave Metaxos to buy his silence: two coins of the local money.

  “I must go speak to them,” said the archon, who went to confer with the representatives of Athens. Meanwhile, over to the left, two temple attendants were splashing water on a goat and watching its reaction. Sam had heard the priest at the city gate explain this to the soldier as well: If the animal shook itself vigorously, it was a favorable sign, and the visitors could be admitted. As Sam’s group was waved forward, one of the attendants recognized the priest and hurried over to him.

  “Master, it’s you! If we had only known! Come this way, we will —”

  “No, Selemnos, it is important that we proceed by the proper stages. We are being watched,” he added, glancing at the Athenians.

  The attendant followed his gaze and seemed to understand. “Well, in that case, please be good enough to make your offering.”

  Maybe it was seeing the goat, but Metaxos’s good humor gradually returned. He started to hum as he threw the two coins that the priest had given him onto a cloth.

  “I gave my two ram’s horns too! They aren’t as beautiful as my beautiful earrings, but I’m going to see the oracle!”

  From a mental-health standpoint, things weren’t looking so good.

  They stepped under the portico, a soaring, sculpted marble canopy supported by massive columns, then entered the temple proper. The archon soon joined t
hem, followed by the Athenians.

  “We have reached an agreement. None of the four of us must approach the boys while the oracle renders her judgment. We will stand ten paces behind them and keep totally silent. Each will listen to the answer and submit to the verdict. If the words’ meaning is not clear, we will ask the usual interpreters for their opinion.”

  “Who should speak directly to Apollo?” asked the priest.

  “Our Athenian friends want it to be Metaxos himself. He was the First to be accused, so he must confront the god.”

  “And the other one?”

  “Samos of Samos? Our friends have trouble believing his version of the facts. They wonder about his connection with the stranger. It is essential that he also be present.”

  “And what guarantee do we have that they will not be bothered afterward?”

  The younger Athenian, whose sharp eyes had been scrutinizing Sam, came forward, his helmet clanking.

  “The representatives of the most glorious of Greek cities have given their word. If the two suspects have not stolen the Navel of the World, they will be free to go. This Athens has decided!”

  The two boys were asked to step deeper into the temple, where a smell of burned wood and aromatic herbs reigned. A servant had them sit on a wooden bench in front of a white curtain, as if to watch a puppet show.

  “Shes going to come,” Metaxos whispered, suddenly very excited. “She’s going to come!”

  “Do you know what you’re supposed to do?” Sam asked. “Of course! With the oracle, I’m never afraid!”

  Sam would have liked to share Metaxos’s enthusiasm. He knew he was innocent, but he was afraid the Pythia would suddenly declare his father to be the real thief— in which case, the best way to recover the stolen goods would be to imprison his son.

  There was a rustling behind the curtain, and the servant nodded gently. “Apollo is prepared to listen to you, young men.” “Is that right?” the shepherd exclaimed. “Is the oracle there? Back there?”

  “Metax?” hissed a low voice on the other side of the sheet. The curtain parted slightly, and Sam saw a middle-aged woman in a gray robe looking at them in surprise. She had stepped down from a three-legged metal stool and was standing next to a wide crack in the ground — perhaps a scar from an ancient earthquake. Her part of the sanctuary was lit by torches, and in the shadows you could make out a tree, a twisted, bullet-shaped stone — the original Navel of the World? — and various other objects. When she saw the archon and the priest a few yards away, she snapped the curtain shut. It clearly wasn’t usual for the oracle to show herself to her visitors. But the servant acted as if nothing was amiss and tiptoed out.