Part 1: Phemonoe
I was with the Pythia the morning that Archon attacked her. Though nothing like that had happened during her ten years in office, it didn’t come as a complete surprise. Archon came in drunk and belligerent–bellowing like a bull through the sanctuary on his way in about being kept waiting. But there had been no other sign of trouble that consultation day–the sacrificial goat had shivered as expected when doused with the water of the Castalian spring–so the prophetae allowed Archon through to the adyton where the Pythia waited.
He posed his slurring question–a pedestrian one about the success of some merchant trip or other to Phoenicia–and as usual the Pythia concentrated her attention and waited for Apollo’s answer. As the minutes dripped on, I saw the trouble brewing in his reddening face, but his speed took us by surprise, for such a fat, old man. He had the Pythia off her tripod by the front of her peplos before either Tyche or I could stop him. Her bowl shattered on the floor, scattering its black and white stones. Her laurel branch dangled in her hand. “Answer me, you wrinkled old bitch!” he shouted in her face, shaking her. “I’ve been waiting all damn day. Does my gold mean so little?”
In two steps Tyche had Archon knocked back on his ass, taking one of his attendants down with him. I caught the Pythia in my arms and helped her back up onto her tripod. “Are you hurt, my lady?” I searched her face, her arms for bruises. But she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring at Archon where he floundered on the floor like a turtle on its back, and her eyes had the black fire in them that told me the god was upon her. Her voice boomed through the adyton:
Gold with no one to spend it is a heap of yellow teeth.
Archon staggered to his feet, his face sallow now with terror. Tyche, her sword out and pointed at the man’s throat, glanced over at me. I looked at the Pythia. She nodded to us once, as Archon’s servants hurried him up the steps from the adyton. Then, her ladies in waiting helped her back to her house.
After we were sure he was good and gone from the sanctuary, Tyche went after the prophetae on duty at the temple portal. I followed, catching up as she slammed one man straight back into the inscription that read “Nothing in excess.” I put my dagger to the throat of the other prophetes, not caring about the line of petitioners gawking at the scene behind us.
“Greedy swine,” Tyche hissed in the man’s face. By now everyone knew what had happened. The man shook so badly his teeth chattered together, and he could not speak. The one at my dagger point stammered out:
“The man Archon, he comported himself well during the sacrifice, I swear it, Hosioi. It was only afterward when we went forward into the sanctuary that we saw something was wrong. We tried to stop him, but his servants overpowered us.” I spat that lie out on the pavers at my feet and pressed my blade into the man’s throat until it drew a thin red bead. He gurgled in fear.
By now, the head prophetes had come, a man named Ouson whom I had found to be persnickety and arrogant but honest so far as I knew. “Hosioi.” He dropped to his knees, put his forehead to the pavers. “The blame is mine.”
“Yes, it is.” Tyche shoved the prophetes she was holding away. I let mine go as well, and they scrabbled down on the floor beside their master. “And if I ever see the faces of these two in Apollo’s sanctuary again, Ouson, we shall have a longer dialogue on that point, you and I.”
“Yes, Captain.” He stood and dragging his men off by their robes as he shouted down to the prophetae taking the petitioners’ offerings: “No more consultations. Tell them to come back next month.”
There was an outcry, of course, but Tyche and I stood to each side of the portal and glared down, blades naked and glinting in our fists, on the line of unhappy men with their bags of gold and wine, their cages of doves. They had all heard the whispered stories of what happened to you if you defamed the god or his Pythia on our watch. So, the outcry quickly faded to disgruntled mumbling, and the crowd trickled off down the Sacred Way.
Tyche turned to look at me as she sheathed her sword. “Wait for him to arrive back home in Antikyra.” Naturally, she knew where he was from. It was our job to know those details about anyone allowed close enough to the Pythia to do what he had done. Tyche didn’t have to say the next thing: kill him; make it look like the judgment of the god.
And so it was. I did believe that, even though I bore the hands and blades and garottes and poisons that meted out that judgment. I believed that Apollo, in seating his Pythia here, meant Delphi to be a sanctuary for all women in our brutal world. And I would die defending that sanctuary from men like Archon.
So, when I arrived two nights later in the upper chamber of Archon’s house and found him raping his slave girl, I felt nothing but a vague sense of professional satisfaction as his skull cracked against the marble of the statue I swept out of its alcove, as the pulse in his throat stuttered to a stop under my hands. It was when I looked into the girl’s eyes and saw the resignation dulling their light that rage shook me, stem to stern, and I made the rash choice to take her out of that house, even though she would be a liability on the road, even though I didn’t know if the Pythia would allow her to stay at the sanctuary, if Tyche would discipline me.
After Dionysia had been at the sanctuary a month, the Pythia called me to her. She was sitting in the fall sunlight on the rim of her atrium fountain, listening to the water and working a piece of embroidery. She patted the sheepskin beside her, and I sat. I had served her since the beginning of her office ten years ago–first as an eight-year-old page sent from the Alcmaeonid tribe, then as one of the Hosioi. In that decade I had seen much more of her and, in truth, felt much more warmly toward her than I did my own mother.
“How is your new pet settling in?” she asked me with a wry smile.
I smiled back. Dionysia had blossomed under the care of the dormitory mothers, who had been only too pleased to take my foundling under their wings. It had been hard to see it in her cowering figure at Archon’s, but the girl was beautiful, strong, witty, and graceful–utterly irresistible, in fact, to anyone she targeted with her charm. “She is intelligent, healthy, strong. But it is her chári tis peithoús, her way with others, that is her greatest potential attribute to Delphi. I would like to start her in acolyte training, with your permission.”
The Pythia arched a brow. “She is not from a noble house.”
“Neither are you, my lady.”
The Pythia shot me a sideways glance sharp as an obsidian arrow point. Then, a great, gusty peal of laughter erupted from her lips. “Oh, my Phemonoe. Everyone else minces around me as if I were made of glass. I sit down on the tripod, and they all suddenly forget I pulled a plow in the field beside my father. Very well. If you can convince Tyche, you may have the girl as an acolyte.”
Tyche just looked at me as Tyche always looks at me, as if she is running an abacus behind her eyes. She became our captain on the strength of just this ability to dispassionately and rapidly calculate the chances of success of any operation, an ability she honed in her father’s temple school in Thebes before coming to serve the Pythia as her tribe’s tribute. After a moment, she flicked one of her elegant brown hands skyward, and because had known each other so long and so well–though we did not love each other so well–I knew exactly what she was thinking: Dionysia’s chances of passing the trials were so low that Tyche didn’t deem it worth fighting with me over a venture that was going to fail of its own accord.
But Dionysia didn’t fail. And so after she passed the final round, Tyche pulled me aside in the shade of the gymnasium stoa after Hosioi training. “She can’t be one of us, Noe.”
I mopped my face with my chiton as I thought of how to respond: we were both stripped down to strophion and perizoma, as usual when we trained in warm weather. This was one of the many freedoms we enjoyed in Delphi that we never could have outside the sanctuary–using our bodies as men used theirs. Tyche leaned back against the cool stone of the wall: “You should have seen her pick up that tea cup and take it to Demetria as if she were taking her a bouquet of flowers. There’s something wrong with that girl.”
“I’m sorry, Captain, you’ve lost me. You’re disturbed because Dionysia passed your trial? With flying colors?”
She shot me a glance like a dart. “Are you in love with her? Is that it? Keep her as long as you want, Noe, I won’t stop you. Make her a maidservant, a cook, a dorm mother. She can’t be one of us.”
I ignored the bait Tyche was throwing out and cocked my head at her. As ever, it was so easy to read her, to hear what she was really saying: She’s not from one of the Amphictyonic houses. Purity was everything to Tyche: in her clothing, her movement, her intention, her strategy, her Hosioi. This snobbery didn’t surprise or enrage me; I had been bred into it, in fact. Everyone in the damned Alcmaeonid tribe felt the same, with even more justification than the Thebans, they avowed. Our lineage went straight back to the Trojan war and beyond, after all. And I didn’t give a dried-out fig for any of it. That’s why I was here at Delphi, to escape that ludicrous weight of history, expectation. I threw my chiton over one shoulder, switched my braid over the other, and said, “That’s for the Pythia to decide, Captain.” And I left Tyche standing there and walked on down the stoa to the bathhouse.
But as I went, Tyche’s taunt echoed after me. Was I in love with Dionysia? I frowned at the question. I’d never been in love. I wasn’t sure what it meant, how it felt. I pictured in front of me, as if in a bronze mirror, Dia’s face, mischievous and full of life, her full lips, straight white teeth, flashing black eyes, lithe, strong limbs. Every part of her seemed perfectly balanced on a pivot, exactly where it should be, so flexible and elegant it felt dangerous. It was fairer to say, I thought, that I wished I were her. Dia was everything I wasn’t. And she had a chance to become everything I never could, chained as I was to this awkward face and body, my Alcmaeonid heritage.
And so, when I stood in the snow at Dia’s hosioster and wiped away her tears with a bloody thumb, I made her a silent vow–that I would do everything I could to give her that chance. And I would stop anyone or anything that tried to take it away from her, even if it meant my life.
The Rookery 