In the Shadow of Heroes Page 13

  So Silvanus hadn’t died of fever at all. He had been bitten. Poisoned.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Killing him didn’t solve anything. They found the fleece, after all.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ she said again.

  Cadmus wasn’t sure how he felt. He didn’t like the idea that Silvanus had threatened the young woman – and he knew the man sometimes had a short temper – but surely that wasn’t reason to kill him?

  ‘I don’t understand. The shrine you sent him to – are you saying it was Medea’s grave? Or not?’

  She didn’t reply to that.

  ‘Do you know where the other heroes are buried? And the other relics?’

  More silence. Orthus had lain down next to the altar, nose on his paws, basking in its warmth. The embers popped occasionally.

  ‘Maybe I didn’t say that right,’ Cadmus corrected himself. ‘I mean, can you see them?’

  ‘See?’ The priestess cocked her head, faintly amused.

  ‘I don’t mean see with your eyes. I mean see. Into the future. Isn’t that why people come here? There are some people who call you a—’

  He broke off.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘What do they call me?’

  ‘They say you’re a Sibyl.’

  She broke into raucous laughter, so loud and jarring it made Cadmus wince.

  ‘A Sibyl? Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’ Her laugh dwindled to a gurgle in the back of her throat. ‘There hasn’t been a true Sibyl among mortals for hundreds of years. This is an age of iron, an age of dark – the Olympians abandoned us long ago.’

  There was a pause that lasted so long Cadmus thought she had forgotten he was there, or perhaps had fallen asleep. Her snake curled lazily around her shoulders.

  ‘No,’ she continued. ‘I am not a Sibyl. You might say I am the kind of Sibyl the world deserves these days. I am a handmaiden. I serve the Hecate, our Lady of the Crossroads. Like my mother did. Like all of my ancestors have done. We have all had the gift.’

  ‘The gift?’

  ‘Of, as you say, seeing.’ The priestess frowned suddenly, as though physically pained. ‘Only my sight is not as clear as theirs. Pieces. Fragments. Past and present and future. And the flames. Always the flames.’ She paused. ‘So many people come to me for answers, but the goddess shows me many things I do not fully understand.’

  Her tone had changed. It sounded more human now – the voice of a young girl more than of a prophetess. Cadmus felt unexpectedly sorry for her. She seemed a different species from the prophets and astrologers who loitered in the Roman Forum, making money from the hopes and fears of the unwary. She seemed to carry a terrible burden.

  ‘But you’ve seen me before?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Many times. Only glimpses. But enough to know you.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you could . . . share some of what you’ve seen? Knowing my future would be very, very helpful right now. I’m in quite a lot of trouble.’

  A frail smile suddenly formed on her face, like a crack shivering across a vase.

  ‘You have the fleece, don’t you?’

  How did she know? He hadn’t mentioned that he’d taken it from Nero. He also hadn’t mentioned that he’d promptly lost it on his way out of the baths. An age seemed to pass before he spoke again.

  ‘I used to have it,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I had it this morning. Then someone took it from me.’

  ‘Took it? Who?’

  ‘A slave.’

  She shook her head violently. ‘No, no, no, no, no. You were meant to bring the fleece to me. You are bound to it. Your fate . . . the thread . . . I can’t see the thread . . .’ She plucked at the air blindly with thumb and forefinger.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Cadmus, feeling stupider than ever. ‘I had to let it go. Nero would have caught me and killed me.’

  The priestess suddenly became perfectly still. Cadmus watched the snake tighten its coils through her hair. It was probably the last thing Silvanus had seen before those fangs found their way into his flesh.

  ‘Nero,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right. I stole it from him.’

  ‘And what did this fleece look like?’

  Cadmus was baffled. ‘Golden. Fleecy. What else would it look like?’

  To his surprise, the priestess smiled again.

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Interesting.’

  Suddenly she sat up very straight. She cocked her head on one side, then the other, like a bird listening for something.

  Then he heard it too. Footsteps, voices, out on the road. He went to the door of the farmhouse and peered around the edge of the broken frame. Outside, lights bobbed in the darkness like boats far out to sea. He saw the outlines of giant men. The heroidai had arrived.

  ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Cadmus, for what felt like the fiftieth time that day. His heart felt like it was pumping nothing but air. ‘I knew they were coming. I should have told you.’

  ‘I should have seen it myself.’

  ‘We need to go. They’re looking for a lot more than just the fleece, and they’ll be a lot less polite than Silvanus.’

  She didn’t move.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I know how to deal with unwelcome visitors.’

  XVII

  Cadmus quickly climbed through the hole in the wall and went around the back of the farmhouse. The priestess didn’t follow him. Where the main portion of the building had been demolished there were several large piles of rubble, where he could hide and watch the courtyard. The dog joined him, panting quietly. Cadmus could feel his warm, thin ribs pressed against his thigh.

  The heroidai emerged from the night, moonlit and fire-lit and weirdly iridescent. There was one who stood out among them. He wore the Golden Fleece over his shoulders, and a mask of gold to match it. He was a good head shorter than the others. He also wore a set of armour that had been specially contoured to accommodate his considerable gut. Nero had come in person.

  The emperor and his heroidai were followed by perhaps twenty slaves and two old men. Cadmus recognized both of them, too.

  The first loitered at the back of the group, scroll in hand, his face somehow grey despite the red pulse of the torches. However much he tried to hide himself, he was unmistakably Gaius Domitius Tullus. Chastened, but alive, Cadmus was glad to see. He was staring at his sandals and seemed to be deliberately avoiding looking at the priestess.

  The second man was even older than Tullus. He arrived several moments after everyone else had assembled, bent almost double, propped up on two slaves. His head was veiled, as it had been before, and all Cadmus saw was the man’s chin, tufted and greenish like fruit left to rot. It was Polydamas. Cadmus found himself thinking of the cranes he’d seen on Roman building sites, or water pumps, or siege weaponry – there was something mechanical and angular about the way the soothsayer moved, like he had been poorly engineered and might fall apart at any moment.

  The priestess came out of the doorway and stood before the assembled men. She looked so small, swaddled in her many robes. A child, almost.

  Polydamas limped over to the emperor and spoke something into his ear. His lips curled like leaves in winter, then he withdrew. Nero lifted his mask.

  ‘Good evening, my dear,’ he said. He licked his lips. ‘Perhaps I should offer you my thanks, first of all. For helping me to find my inheritance.’

  He gave the fleece a little flourish. The priestess said nothing. Nero stepped closer. Uncomfortably close.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, waving his fingers in front of her blindfold. ‘You cannot even see it. You don’t even know who I am! Or maybe – ’ he leant into her ear – ‘you know me by the sweetness of my voice?’

  From where he was crouching, Cadmus saw the priestess’s snake twitch underneath the mounds of her hair. It slithered down her neck and began winding its way up Nero’s bronze-clad forearm.

  It was a moment bef
ore the emperor himself realized. He jerked backwards, squealing and swinging his arms wildly. He hurled the snake over the wall of the farmhouse, and fell over with the momentum. The snake landed a little way away from Orthus, hissing furiously. Cadmus froze and nervously watched it trying to untangle itself. The dog didn’t seem at all concerned.

  Nero picked himself up from the floor, the fleece wrapped around his head. Even with masks on, the heroidai looked faintly embarrassed.

  ‘Now listen,’ Nero said, trying to free his mouth from the folds. ‘Listen to me. You will tell me what I want to know. You will tell me where to find all the things that are rightfully mine. You will speak when I command you to speak. Do you understand?’

  The priestess shook her head fractionally.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘The goddess does not speak on demand. There are rites to perform. You must purify yourselves.’ She paused. ‘You are unclean.’

  ‘Unclean?’

  She bowed a little. The emperor stared at her. A grin grew upon his face, wide and ugly and fixed as his mask. He took two steps forward and seized her around the throat. He forced the fingers of his other hand into her mouth.

  ‘You will deliver the goddess’s words to me,’ he seethed, ‘if I have to pull them one by one from your lungs.’

  Orthus, who had been growling softly since Nero’s arrival, suddenly stood up. Before Cadmus could stop him, he lurched through the broken walls and went bounding towards the emperor. Nero shrieked and released the priestess as the dog jumped up at him. The heroidai still seemed faintly bemused.

  Orthus barked and snapped, prancing this way and that and flinging strings of saliva from his muzzle. Nero straightened up and drew his sword, a gold, bejewelled trinket that hung from his belt. He advanced cautiously, as though unsure of his invulnerability, and directed the point of the steel at the dog’s jaws. The dog feinted left, then right, then sunk his teeth into the emperor’s arm.

  Cadmus barely saw what happened in the ensuing scrap. He still had one eye on the snake. Nero howled in pain, and the dog came at him again. Somehow the two of them ended up rolling in the dirt of the courtyard, and the Golden Fleece became tangled in their flailing limbs. Nero tried to tug it back with his one uninjured hand, but the other end was clamped in the dog’s jaws.

  Cadmus heard a drawn-out whine, but he couldn’t be sure whether it was the man or the animal. Then, beneath that, a tearing. The sound was short and irregular to begin with, then it suddenly widened. Nero held one half of the fleece in his fist. Orthus held the other in his mouth. Even after that, the dog continued snapping at the fabric, tossing it with his whole head, until in the space of a few heartbeats the fleece was in shreds on the floor.

  The rest of the party looked on, motionless, unsure of what this meant. Cadmus held his breath. A real animal hide wouldn’t have torn like that.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ screamed Nero. ‘Kill it! Kill it!’

  One of the heroidai eventually stepped forward. Orthus quickly realized he was outnumbered, and after a few more defiant barks, ran off into the shadows. The priestess also bolted and stumbled blindly back into the house. Two of the heroidai caught her as she reached the threshold of her ruined shrine and dragged her back to the emperor with her arms pinned to her waist.

  Nero shook with rage. He picked up the torn fragments of the Golden Fleece and shook them in her face. Even from where Cadmus was crouching, he could see the frayed edges catch the firelight. It wasn’t a hide at all. It had been woven.The fleece was a fake.

  ‘What is this?’ Nero screamed. ‘What is this piece of trash? Where is the real thing?’

  He rounded on Polydamas.

  ‘You knew, didn’t you? You knew it was a trick and you didn’t tell me!’

  The soothsayer bowed low and wrung his hands.

  ‘Tullus?’ The emperor spun again. ‘Is this your doing? Yes, yes, you planned it with Silvanus, didn’t you?’

  ‘I, ah, assure you, Caesar, I knew nothing—’

  ‘Or did you plot it with the boy?’

  ‘There was no plot—’

  ‘If this is a fakery,’ said Nero, ‘then the Golden Fleece is still to be claimed. And the boy is still out there to claim it.’

  Cadmus’s whole body was getting cramps, he’d been still for so long. All he wanted to do was run, but that would only have drawn attention to him. He glanced beside him. The snake had gone, but he had no idea where.

  Nero turned back to the priestess.

  ‘You’re going to tell me everything,’ he said quietly.

  She didn’t move.

  ‘Let me guess, the goddess doesn’t feel like talking? Well, let’s see if we can’t encourage her a little.’ He nodded to Polydamas. ‘You. Wretch. Redeem yourself.’

  The soothsayer bowed again and spoke a handful of rasping words to the slaves. They disappeared into the room with the altar and emerged carrying the priestess’s bronze dish and tripod, which they set up in the courtyard. Others went to the fringes of the farmhouse and began hacking down the olive trees and piling them at the woman’s feet.

  When all was ready Polydamas lit the kindling and placed the tripod over the flames, then seesawed his way around the fire on legs that seemed to be of wildly different lengths. He threw handfuls of herbs into the bronze dish, and lastly produced a small clay phial that he had tied around his wrist. He pulled out the stopper and emptied its contents, and the dish coughed up gouts of dirty smoke.

  The soothsayer leant into the fire and picked up the bronze dish with his bare hands. Cadmus could see every bone standing out in the soothsayer’s skeletal hands, could see the smoke where his white skin was burning, but the man never flinched. He brought the bowl around to where the priestess was standing. She was tensed now. She tried to pull back from what Polydamas was offering her.

  One of the men holding her put a hand to the back of her head and forced it over the blue-green vapours. Her body shuddered for a moment as she tried to resist. The rest of the heroidai looked on with their blank, bronze faces.

  The farmhouse went quiet. No cicadas, no birds, no wind in the trees. Nero stepped forward and addressed her.

  ‘Now, my dear. Perhaps you might like to tell us the truth. All of it.’

  Polydamas muttered something in the emperor’s ear, but he swatted him away.

  ‘Shut up! You’re like my mother all over again! I will ask whatever questions I like!’

  The priestess went slack suddenly, and for a moment Cadmus thought she had been put to sleep. Then, from her feet to the top of her head, she stiffened, as though in agony. She threw off the two men grasping her arms and they staggered back as she went raving around the courtyard, eyes rolling in her head, white foam flecking her lips.

  When she spoke, the sound that left her mouth was not a human voice. It was as though the earth itself were speaking. The ruins of the farmhouse shook, and the vault of the sky and the caverns of the Underworld echoed her words back at her. Cadmus had never seen or heard anything like it.

  ‘The bearer of the Golden Fleece, sacred to the Sun, and to Ares, and to Poseidon, and to Hermes above all, shall have dominion without limits of time and space; all peoples shall kneel to him, and as the generations grow and die like leaves on the trees he shall not fade, but ever grow in strength and wisdom and enjoy green old age, and youthful vigour without end.’

  Cadmus listened closely. This was the same oracle that Tullus had mentioned when they were in Nero’s palace, but he felt much less inclined to dismiss it as fantasy when it came from the priestess’s lips. The words resonated through the earth and boomed around the inside of his skull, as though she was talking to him and him alone.

  ‘I know all of this,’ said Nero irritably. ‘Tell me where the damn thing is or I’ll have you spitted like a pig!’

  The priestess went on whirling around the fire like a spinning top, writhing, jerking, clawing at her hair and clothes.

 
‘You will travel far from this country, to the very edge of the world, where the land breaks and breaks again, and the pieces are devoured by the cold and frothing sea; by a great voyage, and through many trials, will the bearer of the fleece prove himself worthy of his inheritance. On the island of Mona you will find her, Medea, descended from the Sun, in a grove of oak, under a crown of stone. The thing you seek is in her grave.’

  The priestess suddenly pulled a grotesque smile, then slumped to the floor, her mouth still foaming. The courtyard was swallowed in silence. The heroidai creaked awkwardly in their armour.

  ‘Is that it?’ said Nero after a moment. ‘Is that what I came all of this way for?’

  He took a few steps forward and nudged the priestess’s body with his foot. When she didn’t respond, he bent down and began violently shaking her limp form.

  ‘Speak to me! I am your emperor! I am the heir to the fleece! It belongs to me!’

  Nero finally grew tired and flung her body to the floor. He rounded on Tullus.

  ‘Mona? Did she say Mona?’

  Tullus looked up, startled. ‘Ah, I believe, Caesar, it is an island in Britannia.’

  Britannia. Cadmus’s heart leapt with excitement on Tog’s behalf, before he realized that she wasn’t there and he had no way of telling her.

  ‘I know the bounds of my own empire, you old fool,’ Nero snarled. ‘What does Britannia have to do with any of this?’

  ‘Well,’ said Tullus, wringing his hands. ‘She spoke of Medea. It would seem that the fleece is buried with her, as we thought. But her grave is not where we thought it was. At least, not where Silvanus thought it was.’

  Thoughts and memories of Tog quickly faded as the logical gears of Cadmus’s mind began to whir. This was all new to him. He didn’t know of any versions of the myths in which Medea ended up in Britannia. Even if Medea had really existed, the details of the end of her life were very thin. Some said she stayed in Athens. Some said she returned to the east, to Colchis. But most simply never mentioned how or where she died.

  If she were a fugitive, though, it made sense that she would flee to the furthest ends of the earth. And Mona was renowned for the magic of its inhabitants.