The Double Tongue (7 page)

There was a long pause while he ate and drank, the sentence hanging uncompleted in the air. At last he touched his lips with a napkin and spoke.

‘He will, of course. But when and how and through whom and to what end – for an end is very desirable. Necessary. Can you understand what I mean?’

‘I think so. You want true prophecy.’

‘I want you to help.’

I spoke simply and from my heart.

‘I would do anything, anything in the world to help you.’

‘I believe you. Bless you, child. Delphi is the centre of the world. Once, I should say, Delphi was the centre of the world. In those days Athens was the intellectual and artistic centre of the world. I want them, both places, revived. Oh yes, the city of Delphi is well enough. Here we are an enclave, a small protected place where there is a level of civilization, a level of sophistication which is to be found nowhere else in the whole world. But the centre no longer speaks. The Pythia is silent. Men and women dare to ask silly questions that are an insult to the oracle: “What shall I call my unborn son?” “Where shall I find the brooch I lost?” The answers are as trivial as the questions. We need the old voice that men would accept as the voice of god. Of the god Apollo.’

‘You said “If Apollo will not do it – ”’

‘Wait. I have seen a Roman legion you see. I was present, a spectator at the sacrifice. Six hundred men moving as one man, silent, slow, deadly. They make fools of us all. Did you know their javelins have a point of soft iron? They will pierce flesh but bend on a shield. So the javelin is useless for throwing back. Neat, isn’t it? The enemy, naive creatures that they are, throw sharp, shiny javelins that can be thrown back. There’s many a barbarian that has been killed by his own javelin. Before they’ve recovered, the Romans are on them, thrusting with their huge shields and thrusting with the broad, short swords at the enemy’s groin, the one place any man will protect no matter what, and, before he’s recovered, that short, sharp broadsword is up and stuck between his breastplate and his chinstrap, clean through his throat. Then the legion moves on one pace and repeats the process. Simple. They’ll conquer the world. So we need Apollo to hearten us and advise you. You see?’

‘Yes, I do see. What are we to do?’

‘Make the god do what we want.’

‘Who can compel the gods?’

‘Any man – or woman.’

‘You?’

‘No, not really. I can contribute to the process that is all. Others must move him – them. You see, I don’t believe in them.’

I still don’t know how serious he was. Or, if I put it another way, for how long this would be the claim he was putting forward, the tune he was singing this week, his present mode. The claim suited him at the time. He needed to shock a naive girl and he certainly did. That some people did not believe in the gods was common knowledge. But these people were supposed to live somewhere else and be so outrageous as to be inhuman. If you ask how human our family was, down there by the sea, with its brutal father and obedient mother, its children happy always to get away, I would have to reply by asking you how happy you think Greece is or was, Greece, Hellas in totality? Certainly we all feared the gods. You couldn’t be sure of any god being on your side unless it was small and personal as a good-luck charm. So when I first heard a grown man declare his disbelief I was not so much frightened as shocked and disbelieving in his disbelief. But the shock gave place to bewilderment at what he said next.

‘Well, yes, yes. Of course I do. I am incurably flippant. Don’t trouble yourself.’

‘No.’

‘We do need him. Yes. It’s so difficult a question one should be able to put it on one side. Let’s do that. Are you willing?’

‘Anything.’

‘It’s a question of hexameters. Um-tiddy um-tum.’

‘I don’t understand you at all.’

‘You believe Homer was inspired by the muse – by Apollo – by the god? Of course you do, like everyone else. Yet they – people, I mean – expect the god to reply to a question, “Look in the back cupboard, dear, on the left-hand side.” Of course that’s not the voice of god! In the old days, when Hellas was great, the replies to questions came in hexameters, poetry, elevated speech, because the questions were elevated ones. “How shall we defend the gods of Hellas against their enemies?” Or “Since we cannot truckle to the Persians how can we defeat them?” Sometimes the god asked for a man’s death. That priest. He was told the battle needed – but you don’t know, do you? They gave the reply in hexameters.’

‘But I could not do that!’

‘The god touched you twice. Yes?’

‘No. The stories were – made up. Not by me but they escaped from me. Or rather, I let them go.’

‘Why are we talking like this? It doesn’t really matter what you think. There’s a sense in which it doesn’t really matter what I think either. All that matters is that we should both move towards the desired end. The first step is the hexameters. If the god should never speak through you, so be it. But the instrument shall be ready. Yes?’

‘But the gods are real, aren’t they?’

‘Yes, yes. Of course. How not? Why make such a meal of the question? You have said it. There are twelve Olympians, with the odd later attachment. But they’re like hexameters – like poetry – life is like that. You can make a debate about everything, question everything and anguish over it like, well, Socrates. In that sense he was wise. But do you notice here and there when he stopped people in the street – not his friends but passers-by – they were anxious to get away? It wasn’t their world you see. They themselves didn’t question each footstep because walking came naturally.’

‘I haven’t heard about Socrates.’

‘And you lived all your life by the road up to Delphi! It’s criminal.’

At this Ionides glanced at me and gave a visible start.

‘My dear child! What have I been thinking of? You must be dead on your feet! I’ll see you again tomorrow after you are rested. Farewell.’

So that was the beginning of freedom. It was strange that I who had had nothing to do, who had thought myself a prisoner, now found I had everything to do and thought myself free! But the strangest feeling of all, and one that grew only slowly, was that I was happy. It was like those times in very early childhood when one is too young to be anything but happy, not seeing threats before they became facts. Ionides did teach me about hexameters and about many other measures too. But I was never alone with any man except him. A man came who taught me how to speak so that a whole roomful of people could hear. He taught me how to make the great movements of the body which are a language and can be read further away than a man’s voice can be heard. Another man showed me the flowing script which I use in writing down this. Wrapped, muffled, unrecognizable, I followed Ionides through the streets of Delphi as an obedient and well-mannered wife follows her husband or a girl her father. We saw the temples and treasuries, the empty treasuries, we saw the stadium and the theatre, the streets and alleys, the great houses and the small ones, the beer houses, houses of pleasure and the hostels for travelling men. Every day I spent hours in the bookroom. Sometimes strange men came and consulted with Perseus or eyed poor Chloe where she was yawning, her face carelessly bared. No one bothered to look at me, a muffled figure poring over an unrolled scroll. It was for me an enchantment. After a while, whenever I met Ionides – and he came to the palace of the Pythias almost every day – he would address me with an hexameter and wait, his head on one side, ready to assess the answer. I was very shy at first and could hardly stammer out a phrase as he wanted. But he would say, ‘Oh, come along, a half-line, even just an umtiddy um-tum!’ Then one day I tried to explain that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to or didn’t know what he wanted, I was shy, that was all – and found myself falling into the measure as easily as slipping into something loose, and he gave a great shout which echoed in the bookroom and brought Perseus running from his cell. Ionides gave me the victor’s salute.

‘A great step forward!’

After that we sometimes carried on quite long conversations in the measure and I began to think in it as well as speak it. I don’t know whether I have recorded anywhere that the Pythia used to give the answer in hexameters. Ionides thought that if only the questions could be made great enough the speech would follow. I was eager to please him as I suppose any girl would be. I planned to get rid of Chloe. She was too pretty. When I told Ionides he agreed. So we sold her to her great relief. I myself was so relieved that I gave her the smaller of the two Egyptian necklaces which had come down from my mother’s mother. There was no possibility of my wearing them myself. But I shocked Ionides by this.

‘Why, in the name of god?’

‘Whenever I used to look at her neck I would think first of the necklace lying round it and second of strangling her.’

‘Have you any conception of what that necklace is worth? She could buy her freedom with it! But that old fool who has bought her could make his fortune if he had the wit.’

‘She is gone and I want to forget her.’

Ionides showed me another place too. I do not know what to call it. I think the columbarium would be as near as anything. It was a small building and this is because there was a cave behind it, so that you never knew when you were in the open but in a building, or when you were under the earth and in a cave. The cave had been so altered. He instructed me in vivid terms that I was not to speak of anything I saw, ever. Indeed, I don’t think he showed me the columbarium because the knowledge of it would be useful to me but because he wanted to impress me with his cleverness and importance. Oh yes, I had seen round Ionides already and liked him all the more for it. Any woman feels all the more secure with a man – with her man, and if Ionides was anyone’s man it was mine – when she sees a little further round him and into him than he thinks. Quite a number of men, slaves of course, worked in the columbarium. It was a building with many ladders, or stairs as I learn I must call them. We climbed them all and they were so built that a woman, or for that matter a man, could use them without indecent exposure to below. At the top there were many cages for pigeons and the first time we reached them, a bird fluttered in, rang its bell as it did so, then flopped in the bottom of the cage. Ionides reached in and took a tiny roll of paper from its leg.

‘Smyrna. All the way across the Aegean Sea and Attica. Here you are, Ariston, take it.’

‘That bird carried a message all the way from Asia?’

‘Yes. You see there are places, you’ve probably heard of them. They like to keep in touch with Delphi, still the centre of the world. And one day –’

‘What messages?’

‘That’s a secret, Young Lady. But you’ve heard of other oracles besides us? Dodona for instance?’

‘Of course.’

‘Tegyra, Delos, Patarae? Branchidae, Claros, and Gryneum? Siwa over in Africa?’

‘A bird can’t fly all the way here from Africa!’

‘Of course not. There’s measure in all things as your – our – god said – says. You’d need a Phoenix for that.’

‘What messages? From the god? Why?’

‘The price of corn perhaps. What the tribes are doing. Who’s in, who’s out, who up, who down.’

‘Surely the god doesn’t need to be told what is happening!’

‘Reminded, shall we say. It’s a good theological point. What does the god need to know? After all he needs to know what the question is. Therefore he needs to know something. Therefore there is no reason why he should not need to know what is happening in Asia, or Africa, or Achaia …’ He paused for a while, ‘… or Rome.’

‘I see.’

I thought I did see.

‘I don’t think you do, child. Still you are safe from too much knowledge until you are fifty.’

‘But I should be an old woman!’

‘The Pythia used to be an old woman. No not like our First Lady. She’s about a hundred. Ten decades. Judging by the state of the Second Lady, I think the process will have to be hurried up.’

‘How much?’

‘Would you accept forty?’

‘Thirty.’

‘Thirty then. You and I, privately, will agree that the Third Lady in waiting shall become the Second Lady when she reaches the advanced age of thirty. First, Second, Third Lady – you know, my dear, I always feel when I talk about the three Ladies as if I am talking about a particularly uxorious, or should I say gynoecious, potentate. Now, this afternoon you observe I am not in a very pious mood. Indeed the god was brusque with the First Lady, not to say brutal. He raped her. I am shocking you. Don’t mind, my dear, we’ve made an honest trio of you. That, by the way, and to change the subject, is the fountain of Castalia. You are supposed to drink from it before you prophesy. I’m afraid it’s sometimes not very clean. You see the little building built across it? You go in there and a small boy gives you to drink out of what ought to be the gold cup donated by Queen Olympias in thanksgiving for the birth of her son. Unfortunately your compatriots of that time removed it along with some other trifles such as a life-sized image of the Pythia in solid gold. The history of Delphi is to be read in the chopping and changing over the nature of the cup you will drink from. You’ll find the cup we have at the moment is made of wood and secured by an iron chain. It has the words “A present from Dodona” incised on it. No, I’m wrong. My memory! This is Cassotis of course. The spring of Castalia is where you bathe. It’s fearsomely cold – comes right out of the frozen heart of the mountain and is given up to the god very grudgingly. Now, if you look, you’ll only see a trickle. That’s why there aren’t any prophecies in the three months of winter. You won’t be able to see the ritual, in fact, for another two months or so. Of course, if someone of heroic stature, a pharaoh, say, or a Mithridates, wanted a quick reply, it’s astonishing how adaptable the mountain can be. This year, by the way, is a festival year – one in four or eight according to the oracle given at the spring solstice. It’s very good for tourism.’

‘Tourism?’

‘Groups of travellers who come to see our – your – sights. I’m afraid they keep the economy alive, but you can’t expect them to do so in the winter months. I dare say, though, we may see the first gorgeous butterfly of spring in a month, there are always a few early ones.’