Phemonoe
The portal opened, and Dia stumbled through it–drunk, laughing, and half-naked with the missing Pelios wrapped around her like her tablos. She looked up and saw us standing by the fire–me, the Pythia, and the Dodona guard captain–and a flock of emotions flushed from cover to fly across her face: shock, shame, hatred, lust, fear, anger, sorrow. Ioannis, the Pelioi captain, barked something at his man in Epirusian dialect, and the boy’s hands flew off Dia’s hips as off a hot kettle. He bowed stiffly, pulled himself together, and came to stand behind his captain alongside the third guardsman–a golden bear whose beard I thought smelled suspiciously of Melissa’s hair oil but who had been standing guard at the portal righteously when we emerged from our conference. Our boy-craziest Hosios, for her part, was nowhere in sight.
“So,” the Pythia said to me, folding her arms under her tablos. “Whom did you say you were taking with you on the Philippi mission again?”
I couldn’t even laugh at that: it was like all the birds that had flown from Dia’s heart were lodged in my throat. Suffocating, I watched the last months since Tyche had left flicker dizzily in front of my eyes like a shadow play of nightmares.
Really, there were only three nightmares: Dia, my family, and the League. When I became captain, I became privy to where Tyche had gone and what she had done all those times she had simply disappeared behind closed doors and come back with our orders laid out as neatly as a shopkeeper’s bill. The experience deepened my respect for her (not the first time) and made me miss her (definitely the first time). If I hadn’t exactly relished some of our missions as a member of the Pythia’s private guard, as her captain I came to loathe both them and the men who, I learned, were largely responsible for sending us on them. The men of the League–particularly the local Phocian and Thracian delegates–were constantly seeking to use us to avenge their own petty humiliations and promote their own avaricious ends: go and threaten this merchant so he stops undercutting the sanctuary’s oil supplier (who just happened to be a delegate’s brother-in-law); make it look like that delegate’s wife’s lover took a wrong step off the Parnassian road; the outer Theban provinces are late with their tribute again–go and bring it back with you. I said no to as many of these sordid ventures as I could, which wasn’t many. The Pythia, to her credit, refused to order us to the worst tasks but could not in the end gainsay the men of the League, who were in essence her masters.
Honestly, it all made me think about walking out past the glittering Bull of Corfu and never looking back–which is what had made Dia’s barb about Tyche limping away sink in so deeply. But where would I go once I left Delphi? Back to my family? That meant marrying the Philippides revenant…. My family was, thank the gods, down in Athens for the winter, but my father had taken to sending runners once a month asking for my answer. It was getting harder and harder to concoct convincing reasons why I simply could not travel to Athens to marry: the snows, the roads, the impending Dodona visit…. Each missive from my father was shorter and more impatient. Now that summer was coming, the family would soon be back up at the Delphian estate, and there would be no more escape. My father would send my mother, I knew, and that would break me–for reasons I despised but could not resist anymore than I could resist Dia weeping in front of me and begging me to forgive her cruelty again, just this one more time. I had spent so much of my childhood protecting my mother from my father by whatever surreptitious means were at my disposal–hiding her, creating a distraction, goading him into beating me instead of her–that I no longer could fully tell where I stopped and my mother started. So, when she started crying and begging, it was as if my own heart were doing it. It was the same with Dia. I knew all this, and yet I was powerless to stop it.
I prayed in the sanctuary for Apollo and his sister to help me, to have mercy on me, to spring me from this trap I was stuck in, but they just stared down at me out of their painted eyes, in their halos of incense curling up to where the doves cooed in the beams, and said nothing in return. I spilled wine and lamb blood on the altar of Dionysus where the craven priests were too mired in their own pleasures to take any care for their Hosioi or stop the corruption of the League. None of it did anything. Nothing changed.
I truly could not understand what had come over Dia. I tried. I turned it this way and that, trying to understand what offense I had offered, but I could never figure it out, and just when I thought I might, the ground suddenly shifted underneath me, and she was angry with me for something new. It was like what she wanted was to be angry with me. I couldn’t for the life of me understand it. It was as if the god had transformed her back in time to a five-year-old who stomped her foot and pouted when her mama wouldn’t drop the wheat she was threshing and play jacks. Except of course now Dia’s tantrums were outfitted with a woman’s cunning and vocabulary. I saw how her eyes glittered as she draped across Gemma’s lap in the atrium and watched me watching her. I knew she saw my jealousy, my heartbreak, my confusion, and it gave her pleasure. It was sick. And yet somehow when she squeezed my hands in hers, wet with tears, and told me how awful she had been, how sorry she was, how much better she would be for me, I kept believing her. I went on trying to make her happy, though every new attempt was just an opening in my defenses that she could jab a dagger into.
And then into the midst of the whole mess strode the Pelioi, down from their dusty grove, muscled like bullocks with their golden skin and their drawl that worked on my Hosioi like a pharmakos, like black magic–and, bringing bad news to boot.
“This girl in Philippi is claiming to be a new pythia,” said Ioannis as he wiped wine from his beard. Our Pythia, sitting picking through a bowl of almonds without eating them, gave that a musical laugh.
“Who isn’t? I halfway expect Phemonoe to claim to be me tomorrow.” She winked at me, and I smiled distractedly at the joke as Ioannis shook his head.
“She’s drawing huge crowds. I saw it with my own eyes. She’s saying Apollo has taken his power from Delphi and put it on her. People say she’s telling them things about themselves there’s no way any human could know. Her masters–they’re throwing silver, gold, jewels at them just for the chance to have them look at her.”
Ouson wrung his hands. “No wonder the Philippian tribute is late again this season. Perhaps it will not come altogether. That will be a problem with the funds we have committed to rebuilding the Castalian fountain….”
Ioannis raised a hand. “I don’t know that it will come to that. Philippi knows their commitment to the god. I just thought if I knew this, Delphi should.” I liked him. Despite his brawn, he was a circumspect, stolid soul–much like me. But when I turned to the Pythia, the smile on my face faded. She was staring into the darkness caught between the lantern stands in the room, chewing absently on the inside of one cheek. Our Pythia was a strong and sensible woman, but if she had an Achilles’s heel, it was her pride. Even the Delian oracle couldn’t claim to outrank her for Apollo’s favor. And here was this upstart child in Philippi telling everyone it had wafted off Delphi like incense, or a cloud, and onto her.
All the tension of the last months erupted in my stomach, red hot like Sicilian lava. I said, much more loudly than I meant to, “I won’t kill a child. A girl. If that’s what you think Dionysus’s Hosioi are for, you can take my sword and cut my throat with it on his altar.”
Ouson muttered something about blasphemy and clasped his hands to his forehead in supplication. Ioannis just looked at me with humor dancing faintly in his eyes like a lantern wick, as if he both admired me for being so stubborn and scorned me for being so dramatic. The Pythia reached out and clasped my hand where it was bunched into a fist on my knee. “Of course not, Noe. She’s just a naive child. It’s her masters who are abusing her, who need to be punished.”
I stiffened. This was how she did it, I thought. Read people, tell them what they thought no one else knew about them, what they longed to hear. Was I that easy to read and light to move, like an open scroll of papyrus on a table?
The Pythia must have seen some of this in my eyes because hers iced over like the Castalian spring in wintertime. She drew herself straight. “It is the will of Apollo, Hosios.”
I had to swallow twice before I could open my throat enough to get the words out: “Akoúo kai ypakoúo.” I hear and I obey.
And now here I was choked up again in the atrium, facing Dia, who even as she stood holding her torn chiton over her breasts and awaiting her punishment shifted before my eyes, Protean, from a defiant woman to a hopeless slave girl to a temptress to a goddess to a lethal assassin to a sleepy little sister…. But behind all the changes, I saw the same thing in her eyes–steady, constant, blacker than pitch. Fear. She was terrified, of what, or of whom, I didn’t know. I took a deep breath, let it out.
“Dionysia, my lady,” I said. “I shall take Dionysia with me to Philippi.”
Dia didn’t talk to me for most of the week-long voyage to Philippi, not about anything more than when to stop for the night and what to eat. We first rode cross-country to Thermopylae disguised as farmers with a donkey-load of olive oil to sell (the jars held our clothes and small weapons, and our swords were bundled in blanket rolls on the donkey’s back). Then, we switched to merchant clothing and boarded a ship that would travel up the coast of Thessalonika to Philippi. We sailed with a captain we had used before, but of course I slipped him some extra silver to quell any onboard talk about us. I didn’t want to have to kill any more people than necessary on this mission.
On our third night on board, I was watching the Scorpion come up in the south at the aft railing, trying to stay out of the sailors’ way, when I saw a shadow loom beside me. I moved my hand to my dagger, but Dia’s creamy cheek appeared in the torchlight beneath the shadow of her hood; she had taken off her goathair beard for the night. I swore under my breath and lifted my wine cup. “Lucky for you, I’m slow on the draw tonight.”
She said nothing for a moment, and then she asked, in a voice so soft I could barely hear her over the wind in the sails, “Why do you do it? Why do you keep giving me another chance, vouching for me, after all the shit I’ve done? I don’t understand it.”
I sighed and spun my cup in my hands. “Dia. Nothing you ever do will ever make me stop loving you. I know you don’t believe it, but it’s true.”
She was quiet for so long I thought she left. I turned to look for her, and she took my face in her hands and kissed me. Then, she threaded her arm through mine where it braced on the railing and leaned her head on my shoulder. After a moment, I felt hot tears soaking through the wool of my cloak under her cheek and onto my skin.
The Rookery 