The Outcast Page 12

  Chapter Eleven

  When he saw the damage I had done, and heard why, Didymus did not pass judgment, even to reprove me for breaking my oath, but washed and dressed my bleeding knuckles, and gave me something to help me rest. Yet I did not want to lie down, to be anesthetized; it was time to end this torment.

  Then my fever returned, and the old terrors flooded back in. What was wrong with me? I was not a child who, fearing monsters of the night, huddled under the blankets, but a grown man trying to make amends with the gods and get on with his life, however much of it remained.

  A hero and king’s son stood on his feet and faced the enemy; he took his wounds to the front, never to the back. And when he died, he made a brave end.

  That was what untried youths believed. Ask any veteran, though, and the unvarnished truth became a fearsomely ugly thing. What hero had ever died well? Father had been naked and unarmed, trapped under a net like an animal, and coughing up blood. Achilles had died vomiting and convulsing from the poisoned arrow in his heel. Ajax had died in welter of his own entrails after falling on his sword. And what would they say about me, when my tale was told? I knew. Orestes died shitting himself in abject terror. He whimpered like a babe, and screamed, and kicked his heels all the way down to Hades. The priests had to drug him to get him to the altar, and once there, they had to tie him hand and foot.

  Even so, I strove against the inevitable, because my dignity was all I had left. Iphigenia, they said, had made a very dignified and graceful exit; surely I could do the same. So I obeyed Didymus, drank the herbal teas and slurped down the hot soups he brought, kept myself clean, tried to get enough sleep, and close my mind to the furious Erinyes; when the time came, they would have me, but not before. I even tried to dictate a reply to Hermione, as it might be the last chance I ever had to speak to her.

  Didymus took down the rambling fever-dream that was my dictation, although it was not long before he expressed his misgivings. “Are you sure you wish to say all this? Your candor will make the lady blush.”

  “Then let her blush. I must tell her everything.”

  Afterward, I could not recall the exact substance of what I had dictated, only a vague impression that I had, yet again, said all the wrong things. Hermione would blush, indeed, and dismiss me as a raving madman and lovesick boy and embittered suitor. And for some bizarre reason, the priest had actually sent the letter! Why had he not kept it back until I was well enough to review it, or simply refused to send it altogether?

  As my fever broke, he brought me word from without. “High Priest Eurymakos has consulted the Pythia.” I braced myself for the inevitable death sentence. It would almost certainly be a burnt offering; the priests would not want to touch my blood or body. “You will undertake an ordeal a week before the harvest moon.”

  I needed a moment to absorb that, and even then could not quite believe what I heard. “There is to be no sacrifice? No fire?”

  Didymus slowly shook his head. “I told you before that no unclean thing may be offered.”

  A curious disappointment washed over me. Had I wanted so much to burn to death, then? “What sort of ordeal must it be?”

  “You will be taken into a certain sacred cave nearby and for a day and night be left there alone to face the Erinyes.”

  I groaned aloud. It was far better to burn under the open sky than be buried alive. “They will devour me!”

  “Then you are lost already.” Didymus’s demeanor grew very grave, very ominous; he stood there like a god pronouncing judgment. “Where you are going, it will be black and cold, you will be as naked as the day you were born, and you will be utterly alone. I won’t be there to stop you from going mad and tearing your flesh. You, and only you, can save yourself down there.”

  “And how would you have me do that?” I asked hotly. “No man can go before the monstrous Daughters of Night and live.”

  “All you can do is admit your guilt, humble yourself before them, and beg for their mercy.”

  “They have no mercy!”

  Again, he shook his head, and repeated, “Then you are lost.”

  Did he have nothing better to offer? I had consented to the sacrifice, to the purifying fire, and yet the Pythia came back with this? Eurymakos must have lied; he must have devised this punishment to spite me. “Three months.” Waiting was worse than dying; waiting stripped men of their courage. “Must I truly wait so long?”

  “It isn’t for you to question that which the god has spoken,” he answered, “only to obey.”

  *~*~*~*

  As summer neared, I started to crave the outdoors with a new fervor. I drank in the heat and light as a man condemned to soon lose both. Outside, under the blazing sun, with insects buzzing in my ears, I at last found it possible to examine my own shadows and confront the horrors I had fought so long to avoid.

  I was guilty. Of that, there was no doubt. Murderer. Matricide. I had sworn to see Mother dead, and had gone into the palace that day to carry out justice; it did not matter, then, that her actual death was premature, accidental.

  She, too, had been a murderer, a betrayer! She had deserved death. Did it even matter now? Had the Erinyes considered me justified, they would not have hounded me. Mother would be judged for her crimes, as I would be for mine.

  And did it matter that the same laws which forbade me to harm my mother also demanded I avenge my father’s death? An impossible choice. My head was no clearer now, after the deed was done, than it had been when I first recognized the paradox years ago. I questioned the logic behind it all.

  There was no more time for excuses. I had gone too far in exacting my vengeance. Pylades was not to blame for leaving me, or Elektra for urging me on. I had behaved like a savage, an animal, rather than a civilized man. Had I been innocent, Apollo would have absolved me, driven the Erinyes away, and not demanded an ordeal.

  “You’re being given the chance to live,” the priest pointed out sternly. “You have no right to complain because you find the ordeal difficult. If it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t be an ordeal, would it? Now, come, and exercise with me. You spend too much time sitting and brooding, when it’s such a glorious day outside.”

  Didymus had been an excellent athlete in his youth, I learned, and had maintained his physique and energy at an age when many other men let themselves go to arthritis and pot bellies.

  He brought oil and himantes, and we stripped down under the glaring morning sun to limber ourselves and box. After their long, enforced idleness, my muscles and sinews rebelled. I pushed ahead, anyway, stretching and straining, jabbing the air with my fists, and jogging in place.

  Didymus kept pace with me, blocking my feints and jabs, while twice getting past my guard and demonstrating that I was, indeed, out of practice. Afterward, I complimented his skill, “You fight well. Have you ever competed?”

  “Priests aren’t allowed to compete in the usual games.” He retrieved a towel from the bench and wiped his face with it before slinging it over his shoulder. “But we do sometimes hold our own private competitions. Apollo encourages his priests to develop their bodies as well as their minds. A man is complete when his mind, body, and spirit are all in harmony.”

  Sweat rolled down my temple. “If that’s true, then most men are incomplete without ever knowing it.”

  “Who says they don’t know?” Didymus tossed me the towel. “Men are incomplete when they are restless without knowing why, when they have everything and still aren’t satisfied, when they don’t know themselves.”

  I rubbed the towel against the back of my neck. Pink splotched my arms. Sunburn. I had been too long indoors. “When men cover themselves in lies,” I added. “When they pretend to be what they are not.”

  “That, too.” Didymus motioned me into the shade where we had left our clothes. “So you know something about Apollo’s teachings?”

  “I know about liars and cheats,” I answered, reaching for my tunic. A breath of night-cooled air slid along my skin, and raised
goose pimples. A shiver went through me, more than merely the sweat evaporating on my body. “Didymus, how much am I to blame for my mother’s murder?” I slapped the towels against the soles of my feet to loosen the dust before donning my sandals. “If the Fates weave our threads, then where is our choice?”

  My answer had to wait while he slipped on his tunic, and then, as his head with its disheveled gray hair emerged through the neck, he wore a disapproving look. “You wouldn’t be the first guilty man to try to use that argument to win absolution.”

  “That’s not what I meant!” I exclaimed. “You know I’m not a liar or a coward. I’m simply confused. I examine my guilt, try to understand it, but the harder I think, the more my head aches, and the more confused I become.” I spread both hands wide to emphasize my helplessness.

  At that, he paused; his belt hung limp in his grasp as he considered my words. “The Fates don’t determine every single little thing. They don’t, for example, decide what you’ll eat for supper on a particular day, or whether you’ll choose a red tunic over a blue one. They spin and measure out a man’s life-thread. They know when and where to cut it to end his life. At times, they may steer his course in one direction or another, according to their immortal design, through that which we call destiny. Yet much of the journey, with all its many small choices, is directed through a man’s own free will, and it’s from all those choices made over his lifetime that he’s judged thereafter.”

  It all sounded very convoluted and overly rationalized. “How can anyone know for certain?” I asked. “Perhaps the Fates are nothing more than a mere mortal invention, smoke and shadows devised by the priesthood to explain why some die young and others old, why some prosper while others fail.”

  Even as the words fell from my lips, the priest made the sign against blasphemy. “Hush, lest the gods hear you!”

  I spread wide my arms. “Then let them blast me with lightning. They know where to find me.”

  Didymus raised a cautionary finger. “Don’t tempt them. I may not be wide-traveled, but those who come here are, and they have told tales of their lands. What I have learned is that all people, no matter how foreign, believe that the gods shape men’s destinies. True, their gods aren’t our Moirai, but rather the Hatti tablets of Fate, and the Egyptian divine craftsman who shapes each mortal on his cosmic potter’s wheel. And like us, those people believe men are given a certain measure of free will, so they may choose between good or ill, and be judged accordingly when the time comes. So you see, when the belief is universal, then there is some truth in it.”

  Part of me believed him, found his argument reasonable, yet, caught in a web of fate versus free will, I continued to resist. “So what is it—three sisters with spindles and shears, or tablets, or an immortal potter? What is it that rules my life, that says ‘Orestes will kill his mother and be damned,’ because it was decided before I was ever born?”

  “I think,” Didymus answered softly, “that the gods manifest themselves according to the people who worship them, and take on the names those people give them. In their divine substance, they don’t change. There’s always a lord of the heavens, and a great goddess of the earth, a gatherer and judge of the dead, and a shaper of men’s fates. Whether you remain here and undertake your ordeal, or flee to some foreign land hoping to leave the gods behind, they are everywhere. You can’t escape them.”

  I sat down on the bench, and crossed my arms. “Have these travelers you met said it was so?”

  “Indeed.” Didymus finished dressing, then sat down beside me. “Once, a man tormented by demons came here seeking sanctuary. Not for matricide, mind you, but for a crime almost as heinous. He was Theban, this man, and in his youth had fought for Eteokles against the Seven. But his brother, you see, had gone over to Polyneikes, and so when the battle was joined on the plain below Thebes...” The priest nodded, affirming my conclusion that this had been a crime of fratricide. “It was no accident, as can happen in the chaos of battle. This man deliberately sought out his kinsman, and stabbed him from behind, and denied him burial afterward, to salve the family’s honor.

  “After the battle, he went home, where all seemed well, until the Erinyes came, and brought with them his murdered brother’s restless shade. They plagued him day and night. He couldn’t conduct business, or find a wife, or even leave his house. So he fled. Went down to Athens, found a ship willing to take him on, and went from island to island, hoping to lose the Erinyes and his brother’s ghost. They came on, though, lashing at his heels, tormenting his dreams, so the people among the islands and the sailors knew he was cursed. From Crete, he went south into Libya, where there are deserts, great white wastelands that extend from horizon to horizon in every direction, where the wind can whip the sand into fierce storms that have buried entire caravans.

  “He emerged alive from the desert, this man, and straggled into Egypt, where the gods have the bodies of men and the heads of animals. All those who saw him knew he was mad. He told me how the priests took him into their temple, gave him drugs such as your aunt’s nepenthe, examined him, and determined that he wasn’t living within the principles of that which they call Ma’at.”

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “‘Ma’at’ isn’t a word which translates into our tongue, but it means a certain correctness and rightness, a maintaining of order and harmony. All men, even the king, must maintain Ma’at, or chaos will come. When a man murders unjustly, or commits adultery, or steals, or defies the gods—those things upset the balance of Ma’at.” Didymus frowned, pressed a finger to the side of his nose, and nodded as if remembering something. “Ma’at is also the goddess who embodies these principles. When a man dies, he goes before the god of the dead, but before he can enter the hereafter, his heart must be judged. It is weighed on a scale against the feather taken from Ma’at’s headdress. If he has lived his life righteously, then the feather and heart will balance, and he may pass safely into the next world. But if he has sinned grievously, if he has murdered and lied and cheated, then...” His voice trailed away ominously. “Then his heart is heavy with sin. It weighs down the scales. So the gods throw the black heart to a fearsome serpent that devours it right there, and the man dies a second, more permanent death.”

  “A feather!” Egyptians were outlandish, inscrutable, and had nothing to do with the world I knew. “What man can live such a perfect life that his heart won’t outweigh a feather?”

  Didymus sighed, “Only the young can afford to sneer. I sincerely hope you live to an age when the notion won’t seem so ridiculous to you.

  In truth, the idea troubled me deeply. I knew where my heart would go, should it be weighed against a feather of righteousness and harmony. “What happened to the Theban man?” I asked cautiously.

  “The priests did what they could to cleanse his demons, and when he well enough, they urged him to go home and make his peace with his gods, but he was young yet, and most young men are never quite ready to reflect and admit their mistakes.” Was that a subtle dig at me? I held my tongue. “He didn’t do as the priests advised, and go home, but continued to wander, to search for the peace which eluded him. He visited the Canaanite lands, distant Babylon and Assyria, Hatti, and the wild lands around the Euxine Sea. No matter where he went, though, the demons followed him. Sometimes they wore hideous animal faces, sometimes the faces of men he had known, until the day he could live with the torment no longer. He was older then, wiser and sadder, a bit more humble.

  “During his long absence, the world he knew had changed. Thebes was no longer the great city it had been. The Epigoni had thrown down its walls, and slain its royal family. His own family was dead or scattered to parts unknown. With no priests there to cleanse him, or kinsmen to sponsor him, he came to Delphi and begged sanctuary. He was exhausted and heartsick when he came. It was a while before he was well enough to submit to an ordeal.”

  I did not ask what that ordeal had been; the priest’s tone indicated it was a mystery. His t
ale was without a doubt a cautionary fable, a glimpse of things to come if I fled my demons rather than faced them; as to its veracity, it might not even be true. Still, I would play along. “So did he survive, this man who killed his brother and spent his life wandering?”

  Didymus gave me a shrewd and piercing look. “Yes,” he answered with deliberate slowness. “He still lives on the mountain, not far from here, and herds goats.”

  *~*~*~*

  Untroubled by the rhythm of the outside world, time moved slowly within the sanctuary. When the sounds of celebration interrupted the usual calm, Didymus had to remind me that it was the summer festival of Apollo. “This is the third day,” he said, “when the priestesses who attend the Pythia salute the kouros with their joyful paean.”

  It was not until late afternoon that I realized that today was also my name day, and that I was now twenty-one years old.

  Neither gifts nor messages awaited the occasion; the world had buried and forgotten me already. I hunkered on the floor where it was cooler, my back pressed to the wall, and tried to sort through the welter of emotions coursing through me. So there were no gifts, no congratulatory letters, so be it. I had no need for gold or silver, vessels or weapons, clothes or horses when in five or six more weeks I might be dead. And twenty-one did not feel any different than twenty; it was simply a new label, signifying another year of mortal existence.

  A short while later, Didymus found me still sitting on the floor. “You didn’t tell me it was your name day,” he chided affectionately. “I’ve brought you messages from your kinsmen.” He handed the packet down to me. “I should go find some wine and cakes to celebrate.”

  With the longer days, the light lingered. I stood, wincing at the soreness sitting on the hard floor elicited, undid the twine binding the packet, and went to stand near the window; the radiance of the late afternoon sun burnished the sill with gold, and the air outside was aromatic with charbroiled meat and the smells of the mountain.