Phemonoe
The day that was set for the start of the Pythian Games dawned stormy, fitful, and indeed the Pythia’s augury determined that the opening ceremony should be postponed. This wasn’t entirely unwelcome news among the Hosioi, as we had to prepare not only ourselves for competition but also the oracle’s security. That extra day gave us the time we needed to gather intelligence from our runners and spies about where the members of the Amphictyony were staying, which of the major cults had sent delegations, what if any trouble was brewing among the camps of athletes and tourists that littered our mountainside from the sanctuary all the way down to the hippodrome at the Cassotis river.
“Here,” Tyche used the stick in her hand to stab a spot in the map of the area she had just sketched in the sand of the palaestra. “This is the hot spot–Oenophyta. Not them, but they’re camped between Eretria and Chalcris, who are at odds over the refugee we’re protecting: Eretria says he’s a Chalcrian spy; Chalcris says he’s a defecting shipbuilder with evidence of how Eretria cut corners in the triremes they built Chalcris; one sank on their spring trading run to Philippi, and the Chalcrians are livid. The refugee’s trial by the Amphictyony will happen after the games. We tried to get them to hold it before, but they said their slate was full. And so Oenophyta has asked us to help manage the trouble this week as the wine really starts to flow. We’re sending more patrols through that part of the mountain, but after your part of the competition is over, I want you down there at night keeping an eye out if you don’t have other duties. We learned from the Phocian revel how quickly a small fight can get out of control.”
I nodded. At the revel two years ago, the drunken brawling among the region’s camps ended with several of the votive tripods on the lower Sacred Way toppled, a minor treasury sacked, and two of our patrolmen dead. The Amphictyony had to pay to restore the treasury–Sikyon’s, maybe, I couldn’t remember. I did remember that it was a humiliation no one wanted to repeat.
But in spite of all this tension leading up to them, the Games went as peacefully as their reputation. The opening procession up the Sacred Way to the sanctuary, ending with girls garbed in white peploi casting flowers on Apollo’s feet, was bright and moving. The choir singing the god’s famous Hymn, the beginning of all the competitions here at Delphi hundreds of years ago, made the hair stand up on my arms:
Lord, since you have brought us here far from our dear ones and our fatherland, – for so it seemed good to your heart, – tell us now how we shall live.
Rhea recovered from her injuries in time to take a laurel in the women’s chariot races: we drank to her and called her draka, since the old myths were that Erichthonius invented the chariot to disguise his dragon feet. Melissa narrowly missed a laurel in the lyre competition and was devastated, but we all told her without lying that her performance had been best. “You filled the whole amphitheater with your voice like a cup of honey wine,” swore Iris, wiping away tears.
The first false note in our Pythian symphony came when Tyche twisted her foot in the dolichos, the seven-stadion race that wound its way through the sanctuary grounds. That meant she couldn’t run her leg of the final four-stadion relay. It was too late to find anyone else, so the officials permitted Dia to run both Tyche’s leg and hers, allowing our argument that if anything it was a disadvantage to the Delphian team.
I never fully got used to the crowded stadium. Usually this was the quietest part of the sanctuary, perching as it did at the very top, a long climb up from the amphitheater and one that most tourists wouldn’t bother to make just to goggle at an empty arena. I loved it up here: the wind soughing in the cypress trees, the shadows of the clouds streaming over the Castalian cliffs, the Cassotis valley lying snug in its bluish mists below.
Now, it was packed to overspilling with spectators shouting, eating, waving banners. The noise squeezed my throat shut. I glanced over at Dia to see how she was handling it all, and predictably she was soaking up all the attention like a sea sponge. She waved her golden baton at the crowd. In her short runner’s chiton with her long bare legs and her hair braided back, she looked like Apollo’s sister, ready to call her silver hounds and bound off to hunt Orion. The crowd must have thought so, too, because they roared for her, and I heard someone shout, “Artemis!”
The officials dropped the rope, and she was off like a shot. My heart hammered in my ears as I stepped up to the relay position and glanced at the women on each side of me–one from Athens and one from Thebes. I was a fighter, not a runner. But there was nothing to be done. Dia came flying around the curve first, held out the silver baton, and then it was in my hand and I was running.
The Athenian girl caught me easily, but I managed to swerve as I ran the curve and block her passing. She finally got by me on the second straight, but I dug in hard and limited the loss as best I could, and the others never caught us. The sense of relief I felt when Gemma the acolyte snatched the baton from my hand was more intense than the relief I felt coming back from an assassination alive and in one piece.
Gemma did her best, but the Athenians were a quarter-stadion in the lead when Dia took the baton for the last lap. It didn’t matter. I have never seen a mortal run as fast as that girl: she shot down the track like an arrow from the goddess’s bow, passing the Athenians on the last curve and sailing across the finish with a world-eating smile on her face. The crowd leapt to their feet. Dia didn’t stop running. She turned back toward us in a big arc, arms wide like a bird’s wings, chiton flying, baton still glinting in her hand. To this day, even with everything that came after that, that is how I see Dia when I think of her.
When she got to me, she threw her arms around my neck. “Noe! We did it!” she sobbed.
“You did it, mikré,” I said, and kissed her rosy cheeks, wet with happy tears. Then, Gemma and I lifted her on our shoulders and paraded her around the stadium. As we went, the crowd shouted “Artemis Delphinia!”
It was the last day of the Games, so our wreathing happened during the closing ceremony. I stood smelling the fragrant laurel on my brow, watching the smoke curl up from the altar, and suddenly felt exhausted. It could have been all the training and drama of the last weeks. It could have also been because I spotted my father and brothers in the crowd.
I wanted to slip away as soon as I saw them, but the Pythia always attended the closing sacrifice, her face safely ensconced from prying public eyes in the gold-embroidered red hood of her festival tablos. So, I was pinned at her side. As I escorted her back to her house after the ceremony, my father stepped squarely into our way. No one else would have dared to do so, but Simon Alcmaeonides wasn’t anyone else.
He inclined his luxurious silver beard, curled and gleaming with fragrant oil, in the slightest bow he could manage without appearing rude. “Chaire Apollon Pythios. And all hail to his Pythia, the namesake of our Phemonoe. The god’s blessing be ever upon you.”
“And upon you, father of the Alcmaeonidae.”
“A word with my daughter if you will grant it, my lady.”
“Naturally. Come into our house.”
When my father and two brothers and their servants had been served refreshments, I was left alone with them in the shade of the portico. “Phemonoe,” my father began, twisting his enormous onyx signet on his hand. “The god’s honor once again rests on you.”
I stopped myself from reaching up and pulling the laurel from my head. “Thank you, Father.” I tried not to wince at the feeling of the word in my mouth, all cutting edges, like a throwing knife. “How does my mother, and my sisters?”
“They are well,” my older brother Callias said, impatiently pulling at a beard that looked very much like my father’s had 20 years ago. “Noe, we are here to talk about….”
“Watch how you speak to me,” I cut him off. “I am a Holy One of Apollo, Callias Simonides, not your serving girl.”
Callias’s face reddened, and his beard bristled as he bit his lips together. My father raised a hand. “Do not take offense, daughter. It is your brother’s love for you that makes him speak thus.”
My brother’s love for me…. What I remembered of my Callias’s love for me was learning to make my body go limp so that when he threw me into a wall, it wouldn’t break my ribs again. I hid my hands in the black folds of my peplos to hide the shaking my battle-blood set off in them, and I locked eyes with my brother. Try it now, you bastard. Please. I’ll cut off your head and stuff your body in the fissures under the adyton like Apollo did with the Python. He looked to my father. I glanced at my younger brother, Cleinias’s, face, then, and found it as blank as a closed cellar door. My rage evaporated as if he had poured water on it. I no longer had to guess if Callias had found someone else to take his spite out on once his favorite target had left the house. Fortunately, my sisters had been born after Callias had married and moved on. But still they had to contend with the man who had taught Callias his ways…. I turned stony eyes to my father, who said:
“You have been a devoted servant to the Pythia, daughter, but it is time for you to take your rightful place in the Alcmaeonid line.”
“My rightful place,” I echoed. “As a piece of your property, you mean. Who’s the buyer?”
My father neither flushed or flinched as he said, “Now it is my turn to remind you to watch how you speak.”
“I’ll speak as I wish, Simon Alcmaeonides,” I snapped. “I’m not in your house anymore.”
“Oh, aren’t you?” My father cocked his head to one side, just slightly. Just as in combat, that move telegraphed the moves to follow. I would refuse marriage. He would tell the League he was withdrawing his financial support. The League would put pressure on the sanctuary and on the priests of Dionysus. Did they enjoy their soft Ithakan woolen robes and Thracian wine? Did they want their number halved and those men thrown out on the street to seek their own fortune? Then, they needed to return Simon Alcmaeonides’s daughter to his house. Even the Pythia couldn’t stand against my father’s tribe. As powerful as her spirit was, she was just as she had said–the daughter of a plowman. She had no money, no power, no leverage to turn the heads of Attic politics the way her father turned the heads of his oxen. The office was designed that way for a reason, so that the sanctuary wouldn’t do the bidding of this or that faction.
I felt a familiar despair welling up, trying to suck me down like the dark, cold water at the bottom of the Castalian spring. But I wasn’t an eight-year-old girl anymore, lying awake in my father’s house listening for his footsteps outside my door, praying to the god that they would pass this one night, this one time. I was a Hosios. No matter how hopeless a situation appeared, I was trained to breathe, to open my eyes and ears and mind with that breath, to find myself a way out. And I had. So, I breathed. I relaxed my hands on my thighs. I straightened and met my father’s gaze with level eyes and said in a steady, smooth voice:
“My sincerest apologies, father of the Alcmaeonidae. Who is the suitor you have found for your oldest daughter?” My father just watched me for a moment. I thought I saw a spasm of uncertainty convulse one side of his face. I suppressed a grin.
“Adrastos Philippides,” Callias piped up. I swore his chest puffed out like a pigeon’s with the words.
Of course. My father had always slavered over the Philippidae vineyards, which separated our Athenian estate from the sea. Most scions of the Eupatridae, the noble families descended from the ten original demes of Athens, would have married a she-mule before a Hosios. But Adrastos Philippides was a decrepit lech who had burned through two wives, a half-dozen mistresses, and the better part of his patrimony and thus couldn’t afford to be choosy.
I stood. “An auspicious match. I thank you for your care, father, and I will carefully consider the proposal. And now, I must return to the Pythia. Shall I walk you out?”
As if I had called for them, Dia, Nyx, and Iris suddenly appeared in the gloaming atrium. And the sight of them, standing vigil in their black robes, made the Alcmaeonidae contingent stand up and allow me to lead them to the portal. “When will I have your answer?” My father tried and failed to muster the same tone of command as they went out into the street, shining with torches and filled with laughing athletes and celebrants.
“In good time,” I said and shut the portal behind them.
I turned and kissed each woman in turn, pressing my forehead to theirs. “Thank you,” I said, and now I could let my voice shake.
“Come sit,” Nyx dragged me back to where the servants were building the fire in the atrium against the coming chill of the night, laying out the sheepskins.
“We’ll bring the wine,” Iris said, and she and Nyx headed off into the house, calling for the rest of the Hosioi.
“Noe,” Dia clasped my hands in hers and pulled me down next to her on the fountain’s rim. In the firelight, tears shone again on her cheeks, but they were tears of fear now, not triumph. I felt my heart crack in my chest at that. “Are you really getting married? Are you really leaving? You told Tyche…”
“Of course not, mikré. I just said that to buy time while I think of a way out of my father’s trap without causing the Pythia problems. Adrastos Philippides? I’d rather marry the Python’s corpse.”
“I don’t care if it’s Apollo himself,” Dia took my face in her hands. “You can’t leave me. I’d die if you did.”
I laughed and took her hands in mine, kissed them. “No, you would not. You’re tougher than that.” Dia opened her mouth to protest. “I’m not leaving you, mikré. You and I will stay here at Delphi. And when we can no longer lift a sword for the god, we will plant a vineyard on Parnassus and make wine and watch the sun set together like Baucis and Philemon.”
“Do you swear it?”
“I do.”
“No swearing in the sanctuary of Apollo, you heathens.” It was Tyche, leaning on Rhea’s shoulder and grinning wickedly as she limped out into the atrium surrounded by the rest of her Hosioi, all carrying wine cups and skins, lyres and flutes and dice, still wearing the laurels they had won.
“Ay, Captain,” I said and made space for her next to us on the sheepskins in front of the fire.
The Rookery 