So, I’m going to try something I haven’t done for a while, which is to write a story in serial installments. It’s going to be a rough draft, so please be forgiving of typos, etc.
An amica/us usque ad aras is a “friend all the way to the altars,” an ancient Roman expression designating a soulmate to whom your loyalty is only exceeded by your devotion to god; it can also mean a friend until death. It’s kind of quirky and complicated how the idea for this story came together, and I don’t think explaining it would add much to the experience of reading it, so I’ll just get straight to it: after it’s done, you can always ask questions in the comments if you’re curious about anything.
I’m planning two installments a week for six weeks; we’ll see how it goes.
Part 1: Dionysia
The first time I saw Phemonoe, she was standing over me with a marble votive statuette of Dionysus in one hand. I couldn’t see her face; she was wearing a black mask. In fact, she was all in black–wearing a man’s short black chiton, arms and legs smeared with black paint. But I knew she was a woman from her body, the way she stood. I sat up in bed, opened my mouth to scream, but she just shook her head at me once, and I shut my mouth. “I need your help,” she said, quietly, as she set the statue back in its niche by the bed. “Sit on his legs.”
She was talking about my master Archon, who a moment ago had been on top of me, crushing the air out of my lungs as he tried to tear off my peplos and force his wine-sodden tongue in my mouth. Now, he was face down on the floor beside the bed with a lump rising on the back of his head.
Because I was used to doing what I was told–I was a slave, after all–I immediately scrambled off the bed and plopped down on top of Archon’s legs. Phemonoe stuffed sheepskins under his face, sat on his back, pinning his arms to the floor with her knees, and pressed her weight down on the back of his head. Nothing happened for a moment. Then, Archon’s body started shaking. I realized she was suffocating him. I bit back a giggle at the way his legs bucked beneath me, like a donkey stung by a bee. Archon was old and fat, and he had been very drunk, so he didn’t fight his death for very long. In a minute or two, his body went completely slack. When Phemonoe was sure he was dead, she stood and smeared some of the blood from the back of his head onto the pointed tip of the post at the foot of the bed. Then, she held out a blackened hand to me. “Come.”
She led me to the window of the bedchamber. After that, I remember the moon being almost full; I remember the smell of the wisteria blossoms. I don’t remember the rest of how we got out of Archon’s compound without being seen. But it doesn’t matter: I’m never going back there.
I never learned exactly what my master had done to anger the Oracle at Delphi and thus earn his execution at the hands of one of her Holy Ones. Nor did I ever know exactly why Phemenoe took me back with her to Delphi. Archon’s estate was near the coast in Antikyra, a long, hard day’s walk from Apollo’s sanctuary. I had never been farther than the flax fields behind the compound, so long before we got to the Castalian spring that marked the start of the Sacred Way to the oracle, my eyes already ached in their sockets from slanting back and forth to peep at all the new sights beneath the hem of my hood: donkeys laden with kindling piles, merchants hawking copper pots, Hermes pillars with people rolling dice to read their fortunes, sundials, date palms, purple- and yellow-dyed linen hanging to dry, mosaics of dogs hunting deer, shrines housing statues of gods so brightly painted they looked alive, lemon trees, fishmongers with their dried squid speared on sticks. Phemonoe stopped in one little town and bought some bread, sheep cheese, and oranges for us to eat. She had washed all of the black paint off her body in the ocean and covered her black chiton with a red peplos and tablos. She looked like a wealthy matron traveling with her slave, though she couldn’t have been a day over 18 at the time.
When we arrived at Delphi it was already night, and yet along the Sacred Way it was bright as day with all the votive tripods lit and their fires dancing on the white stone and off the gilding on statues and the frescoes of the treasuries of powerful cities like Athens, Delos, places I had only ever heard about. My feet felt like split grapes skewered on my burning legs, and still my jaw dropped at the Naxian sphinx soaring above us, the gleaming serpent pillar, the colossal golden statue of Apollo, his hulking black marble altar reeking of burnt sacrifices. We passed all of that, and then Phemonoe turned us in at a little door between two laurel trees.
The house behind it was luxurious despite its modest size. A marble fountain played in the courtyard paved with blue-and-white glazed tiles and set round with fig and pomegranate bushes. A woman came out of the house to meet us arrayed in shining white linen, with two attendants. She was the age of Archon’s wife, plain-featured, but from her eyes I felt a power like the heat of a black torch on my face. She looked at me, and what came out of her mouth wasn’t a question, like “Who is this?” or “Why did you bring her here?” but rather an answer:
“She will be called Dionysia. She is a thirsty one, like that old god.”
That was how I met the Oracle at Delphi. And how I began my journey to becoming one of her Hosioi, like Phemonoe was. But I began that journey by doing much the same as I had in Archon’s house: fetching water and wood, helping bake bread, washing linens and mending sandals. Unlike in Archon’s house, the people in Delphi were kind: they never kicked or beat me, they never even shouted. If I broke a dish or rolled my eyes, they just clucked their tongues or tugged my braids. When they were truly tired of me, they sent me up the hill to pick herbs for medicines.
I didn’t see the Pythia again for a year after my arrival at Delphi: I spent the days working in the many workshops and kitchens around the sanctuary. Delphi bustled, even when there weren’t hoards of tourists for the many festivals during the year, with a battalion of porters and cooks and servants and scribes and couriers and accountants and delegates from the various cities of the Amphictyonic League whose sacred duty it was to maintain Apollo’s sanctuary. Nights, I spent down at the dormitory at the gymnasium with the other girl acolytes, about a dozen of them. After a few weeks, Phemonoe coaxed me into training with them when my work was done for the day. I did it because I loved Phemonoe and would do anything for her after she had saved me from Archon’s. Also, I wanted the other acolytes to like me. I had found this was the easiest way to keep myself safe since my mother had died of a fever in Archon’s house when I was five: smile, flatter, joke and caper, bring little gifts of flowers and fruit. In this way, I made a cushion around myself of people who would protect me, hide me if Archon’s wife was on a rampage or if he was drunk. It worked most of the time. Not always.
I took to the acolyte training. I was particularly good with the bow, and on the running track. I was good at vaulting and climbing, passable at wrestling. I could cross a creaky wood floor without making a sound. I was skilled with darts, clumsy with knives. As for the finer arts, my voice was pure and sweet, and the harp came to me easily. Reading and writing remained obstacles; the letters just all tangled together in front of my eyes into a hedge of thorns. And I could never concentrate well enough to learn the formulas for drugs and poisons reliably. But when trials came in the fall, I somehow found myself among the top three acolytes.
Before the final round began, Phemonoe pulled me aside. “You’ve never once asked me what these trials are for. Why?”
I shrugged. What did I need to know? I wasn’t being beaten or called a little whore. No one was trying to grab my breasts or push their hands between my thighs. And I had Phemonoe. I realized that most others wouldn’t have thought her beautiful, or even charming. She had stern features offset by a spray of freckles and frizzy brown hair that wouldn’t stay in its braid. And yet her determination, her strong sense of herself–even if she hadn’t saved me, I would have loved her for those things alone.
Now, she laughed, a rare event. She had a laugh that rang out like the bronze bell at the temple of Athena Pronoia below the gymnasium. She reached down–not so far down as a year ago–and tousled my hair. “Dia,” she chuckled–that was her pet name for me, “these trials are for the Hosioi, the Pythia’s personal guard.”
“Are you one of the Hosioi?” I asked.
“I am.”
“Then I will be one, too,” I said. Phemonoe put a hand to the back of my neck and shook me, gently.
“This last round will be the hardest, mikré. If you fail…you can never be a Hosioi. But,” and here she paused, and in her brown eyes I saw something I couldn’t describe, something I couldn’t remember seeing in someone’s eyes before, “that won’t mean you have failed me. Do you understand?”
I nodded, but I was thinking: I won’t fail. I won’t.
I wondered when the final round would start. None of the three of us seemed to know. Then, one afternoon when we were resting in the dormitory before our evening exercises, a Hosios, a willowy, dark woman named Tyche whom I had seen with Phemonoe at trials, came in and told me to follow her. She brought into the kitchens at the dormitory and pointed out into the dining hall, where one of our dormitory mothers was sitting eating a bit of bread and an orange. “This woman has betrayed our Pythia,” Tyche murmured in my ear. Tyche pushed in front of me a cup full of steaming, fragrant tea. “Take her this poison. Make sure she drinks it all.”
The dormitory mother had been nothing but kind to me. When I had come down with a fever over the summer, she had nursed me back to health with a tea that smelled very much like this one, told me stories of her grandaughters and their kittens in Arachova. I picked up the cup and walked into the dining room. I chatted with the woman, flattered her and cajoled her into drinking the tea. It took less than two minutes. I came back to the kitchen with the empty cup. Tyche just nodded curtly at me with no expression in her eyes and told me to go back to the dormitory.
I don’t remember even feeling relieved to see the old woman walking around hale and hearty the next morning. I did hiccup out a giggle when she winked at me. Phemonoe came for me that afternoon. “You didn’t even ask Tyche why the woman had to die,” she said. “Why not?”
“I knew you wanted me to pass the test,” I said. “What else mattered?”
“Dia,” Phemonoe sighed. “It’s not your loyalty to me that matters. It’s your loyalty to the Pythia.”
“Whatever you say.”
One of the three of us failed the test. The other two were taken up to the sanctuary to stand before the Pythia in the adyton, so she could discover from Apollo which of us should become her newest Hosios.
I had never been inside the sanctuary. We passed a line of petitioners waiting outside to make their sacrifices at the altar before they entered: the smoke curled into the early air thick and black as a cloud of squid ink. The Pythia sat only once a month for consultation, on an auspicious day chosen by augury, and as many as 30 petitioners would visit her on that day. I had been told the gold that plated Apollo’s statue came from the purses of those striving to be among those 30, and I was smart enough to know this meant only rich men like Archon or states like Athens could seek the god’s will. I also knew enough Greek to read the inscription carved into the threshold of the sanctuary as we crossed it: Gnōthi seauton, know yourself.
The soaring space within was completely silent except for the shuffling sandals of the prophetae, the Pythia’s male assistants. Scores of votive tripods and statues donated by grateful petitioners glinted in the darkness clotted between the limestone columns. I did my best not to trip over the hem of my long, white peplos as we descended a narrow run of stairs into a sort of cave under the main temple floor. It was cold and damp here, but it smelled strangely sweet–perhaps something burning in the two braziers that flanked the steps.
The ceiling was so low that I nearly had to duck. I tried to imagine a great king like Croesus coming here, how he would have to stoop before the god, before his Pythia. She was seated on her tall bronze tripod beside the omphalos, the navel stone that marked Delphi as the center of the world, draped in its fine net of white wool and glittering jewels. In one hand she held a branch of sacred laurel, a bowl in the other. I could see only the lower part of her face; her eyes were hidden by a fold of her tablos. As we had been instructed, each of us stepped forward and placed into the Pythia’s bowl a stone that we had brought with us; mine was black; Selene’s was white. I saw her hand shook a little, and her stone rattled into the bowl.
Nothing happened for quite a while. I spent the time taking the measure of the room: its size, the fact that there was only one way in or out, and that way had been closed with a wooden door. Two Hosioi stood behind the Pythia, practically invisible in their black peploi, which I now knew to be dyed that way with bone ash from Apollo’s altar: I didn’t know these women, but I made out the sheath of a dagger peeking out from above one of their ankles. Off to the side of the adyton sat a prophetes ready with a slab of damp clay and a stylus to record whatever the Pythia might say for posterity.
The oracle started shaking the laurel in her hand over the bowl then. She didn’t chant or sing. The scratching, whispering sound of the leaves went on for so long my head started feeling light. Then suddenly the Pythia reached into the bowl and pulled out a stone. She opened her palm to show it to us. It was black. She said, in the same voice I had heard her use the night I came to Delphi, a voice that, though it was quiet, always seemed to my ears to howl like the wind in the Castalian cleft above us, where Apollo slayed Gaia’s python, “Aftós o dipsasménos tha eínai o ‘osios mou”: This thirsty one will become my Holy One.
There were eight Hosioi in total, though only five actively served the Pythia at any given time. Right now they were seven: a woman named Erbe had recently left the guard to be married; that was the reason for the trials and my selection as her replacement. That very night I moved my small bundle of possessions into the Pythia’s house, where the Hosioi lived, guarding the oracle day and night, tasting her dishes before she ate them, bringing her whatever she asked for, taking her to the Castalian spring to bathe, keeping would-be petitioners and curious tourists out of her gates. And the next day I began training with the Hosioi at the stadium where they held the Pythian games. It was like night and day to training with the acolytes. I went to bed each night exhausted, with new bruises from having been thrown to the ground or hit with a staff. But I loved every minute. When the Hosioi weren’t on duty or training, they lived up to the reputation of their namesake god–laughing, playing the lyre and singing, dancing, gaming. They ate and drank as lustily as men. Though Tyche was their captain, I noted they teased her as often as anyone. They were a band of equals.
All except for me. They trained with me, and they tolerated my presence at their festivities, but no one other than Phemonoe spoke to me beyond asking me to pass the wine. They came and went on missions, but no one told me where to or what for. Partly this was because I wouldn’t officially be one of their number until after my hosioster, the induction ceremony at winter solstice. But I could tell the chasm between us ran deeper than that. The Hosioi were all–Phemonoe included–scions of aristocratic families in the Amphictyonic League. I wasn’t. There was nothing I could do about that. So, I set about charming them with my usual antics and waited to see what if any changes the hosioster might bring.
The day of the ceremony was bitter with snow blowing sideways in an icy veil. We sloughed up the hill to the crumbling temple of Dionysus, the patron god of the Hosioi, who I was told was guardian of this site even before Apollo stuffed the python’s corpse in a crevice below the adyton and built his temple on top of it for good measure. The vapors the python’s rotting body gave off were what gave the Pythia her powers, or so the legends had it. But from the start Dionysus’s Hosioi had overwatched it all. Now, we stood high on the slopes of Parnassus, with the snow piling on our hair and shoulders, as a sleek black bull was led up the steps to the altar. I hadn’t cried when my mother died. I hadn’t cried when I thought I had killed the dormitory mother. But I cried when they cut the bull’s throat, and it gasped in shock, and its black blood ran down the white stone into the trough. It was Phemonoe’s job to take the blood on her fingertips and dab it on my eyelids, my earlobes, my lips. “What is it, Dia?” she murmured, wiping away my tears with a red thumb.
“He didn’t do anything,” was all I could say, tasting the metallic tang of the bull’s blood on my tongue.
She looked back and forth between my eyes for a moment. “This life is a hard burden to carry. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for someone is to take it off their shoulders.” And as I looked back at her I saw she believed this, that this was what made her able to do what she did for the Pythia. I also saw that in some way she was carrying her own black bull. I swore at that moment I would do whatever it took to lift it from her shoulders, even if it meant giving my life in the exchange.
The Rookery 