Oracle (21 page)

The big horse gave a whinny, and butted at Euridice’s hand. It’s almost, thought Nikko, as though she agrees.

He glanced at the trees around them, their leaves turning from silver to grey as the sun dropped below the sky. About half the fruit had been harvested. The rest gleamed blackly on the trees. But you couldn’t eat raw olives.

His stomach growled. If only they’d stopped among grape vines…but the vines would be too low to hide them.

‘How will darkness help us get a knife?’

She didn’t even bother looking at him. ‘We’ll steal it. And anything else we need.’

‘But—’

She touched one of the turquoises on the reins. ‘And leave one of these for payment. Trust me, city boy, any peasant will think the Mother has blessed them with riches like one of these.’

‘I’m no more a city boy than you are,’ said Nikko, finally stung by her contemptuous tone. ‘I was ten when they brought me to Mycenae.’

‘Six years and you never thought to escape?’

‘Why should we? Mycenae was our life.’

But their life in Mycenae had vanished, he realised. Even when they rebuilt it, even when he found Thetis, there was no way he could return. From the moment he had galloped through the gates of Mycenae he was an escapee, a thief who had stolen the new King’s property: himself, the horse, Euridice.

So what was left? A life as a tumbler, going from village to village to earn a crust of bread and a handful of olives? Or perhaps a lord would hire him as a guard…but not with Thetis to look after…

‘Well, you’ll have a good life now. With these,’ she added patiently, as he stared at her. ‘We have enough jewels here for you to claim as much land as you want, as long as it’s beyond the next High King’s reach. Find a good valley in the north. Hire men to build your house, with thick walls to keep out bandits. You have more gold at your throat than most kings keep in their treasury.’

He hadn’t thought—had never even realised the jewels’ and necklaces’ real worth. She’s right, he thought. Or almost right. Part of me is a city boy, soft with city living, where everything we want appears, because we pleased the King. There has been no real value to anything, these last years, except the smile of the King.

‘They’re your jewels too. Half the gold as well.’

She shrugged. ‘The Mother has jewels enough, deep within her. She has no need of these. We’ll go to the shrine together, all right? Then you can go on by yourself, find your sister. If you’ve any sense you’ll head even further north after that, where no one will ever associate you with Mycenae.’

‘We stay together now?’

She sighed again. ‘We have only one horse. You can take Pegasus after you leave me at the shrine. And it’s safer travelling together.’

‘Not safe at all, for a girl on her own.’

Euridice flushed suddenly. ‘I’ll find men’s clothes. They’ll take me for a boy, if I don’t speak. But yes.’ Her voice was almost a whisper. For the first time since they’d left Mycenae she dropped her eyes. ‘I would…rather…travel with you.’

Nikko felt something sweet seep through him. It was as though the grubby air he had breathed for so long was suddenly clean again. ‘I’m glad,’ he said simply.

He helped her take the saddle off. They sat side by side, as the shadows thickened into darkness, watching Dapples—no: Pegasus—graze between the trees.

The moon was a pale goat’s cheese, flirting with the clouds, as Pegasus clopped slowly down the road, its dust yellow in the moonlight.

We must be nearly at the sea, thought Nikko. He could smell salt and the unmistakeable scent of rotting logs and seagulls, boats and smoke-dried fish. But despite the moonlight he could see only darkness ahead.

They had passed two villages, both with the gates of their wooden stockades closed against intruders. If Euridice hoped the village stockades might have fallen in the earthquake, he thought, she’s out of luck.

He had an itchy feeling she was going to propose he perform for some village tomorrow, turning cartwheels and doing backflips while she crept into someone’s house to steal the things they needed.

He had an even itchier feeling he was going to agree. Euridice was right—she knew more than he did about how to survive without servants and palace cooks.

She rode in front of him now, handling the reins. They had abandoned the saddle—it was just another weight for Pegasus to carry—leaving only the saddle cloth and blanket, bridle and reins. Luckily the gems on the saddle had been threaded on in haste, and had been
easily pulled off. The reins still glittered with moonlit garnets.

‘Can you hear something?’ Euridice pulled the horse to a halt. Pegasus stopped, shaking her head then twitching her ears, as though she too listened.

‘No, I—’ Nikko stopped. He
could
hear something, or rather feel it: a rumble far away…

Another earthquake? At least they were in the open now.

The rumble became a roar, like all the flocks of swallows in the world rushing toward them.

‘Turn!’ Nikko reached around Euridice and tugged the reins before she could stop him. He kneed Pegasus’s flanks.

The big horse hadn’t needed his order. She was flying, almost like her namesake, her breath tearing as she galloped back the way they’d come.

‘Why?’

Euridice’s voice was a scream above the growling roar behind them. She didn’t try to stop us, thought Nikko in relief. She too was crouched low, to give Pegasus all the speed she could.

‘A thunder wave,’ he yelled, above the noise of horse and water. ‘They come after earthquakes sometimes. I may be a city boy,’ he added, ‘but I’ve heard harper’s tales in palaces.’

‘But a wave couldn’t come this far inland.’ She glanced behind them, then gasped, turning back and urging Pegasus even faster.

Nikko looked back too. At first there was only darkness. And then he realised it was real darkness—something so huge it blotted out the stars. Only the
moon still floated high above, oblivious to the mass of water rearing up below her.

How fast could a thunder wave surge? Faster than a horse could gallop? Harpers never tell you details like that, thought Nikko desperately, just how whole cities were washed away, clasped back by the ocean to lie crumpled in the sand.

The noise filled the world. A drift of spray splattered on his cheek. But the wave was still far behind him; it was the wind that threw the spray.

Onward…and further on…Pegasus’s breath came in tearing gasps. How long could she go on like this?

The world behind them exploded. The roaring changed into a crash. Suddenly water swirled around them, a giant swirl of foam in front, almost glowing in the moonlight. It was around Pegasus’s feet, then rising to her knees. Nikko could feel his legs wet too. But still the big horse struggled to keep going.

The water grew shallower the further on she fought. Then all at once it began to move again, sucking like a giant slurping at a gourd. They could feel Pegasus struggle to stay standing, not to topple backward and be washed with the thunder wave back into the sea.

Then it was gone. The water, the noise. The stars were back. Someone screamed, far inland, but behind them all was quiet.

Pegasus stopped, her breath labouring. Her skin was white with foam, whether sweat or seawater they couldn’t tell. And there in the darkness Nikko and Euridice clung together, the only two humans left it seemed in a world of devastation.

No one behind us, thought Nikko, could have survived a wave like that.

Suddenly Euridice pulled out of his arms as though only now aware of what she was doing. ‘What do we do next?’ Pegasus’s breathing was nearly normal again, though she occasionally shivered.

‘Keep going. A little way at least.’ He vaguely remembered a harper’s tale where another thunder wave had followed the first. ‘Wait till daylight.’

He felt rather than saw Euridice nod as she urged Pegasus a little further up the road, then off into the trees.

It was wild country here, too rocky for the plough or vines or olive trees. But there were bushes that would hide them from the road. Best of all, as Nikko and Euridice slipped off her back, Pegasus stepped forward cautiously on the strange ground and found a tiny stream, wending its way through the rocks.

Nikko checked the water for salt, then let the horse drink and they drank themselves. Euridice took off her robe to rub the sweat and spray and salt from Pegasus’s coat. The blanket was damp, but it was wool, so should help keep her warm till morning. Euridice tore a strip off the bottom of her tunic to tie the horse’s bridle to a tree. It would keep the big horse from wandering off in the darkness, but still allow her to crop at the grass between the trees.

As for them: Nikko had only his kilt. His chest and arms were bare apart from his jewels. Tomorrow they might be worth a fortune. Tonight they sat cold on his skin. Euridice’s butterfly wings are heavy silk, he thought. They would be warm.

‘Come here,’ she said gruffly.

He had wondered what it would be like to touch her. He had never dreamed it would happen like this, both of them shivering with shock and exhaustion. They sat together against a tree, wrapped in the folds of the costume, dozing rather than sleeping, till dawn grew grey at the edges of the sky.

The world was grey too. No birds sang. Nikko had expected the thunder wave to have covered the earth with sand. But instead there was only silt—or silt and sand perhaps, for surely dirt would have been darker.

He stepped over to the road, and looked around. They had been nearer to the sea than they realised, for he could see it a short ride away, grey as the sky, but flat now, as though it had never had the power to rear over the land. He could just make out dark blobs bobbing in the water. The sea had stolen the shapes of the drowned it seemed, as well as their lives. Suddenly he realised Euridice was standing behind him. Pegasus was tearing at the grass as though it was the most important thing in her world. Which Nikko supposed it was.

Life is much easier for a horse, he thought, with your decisions made for you. ‘Come on. Let’s get away from here.’

To his surprise Euridice shook her head. ‘No.’ She waved at the greyness the sea had left. ‘We need to search out there.’

Nikko stared. ‘Why? There’s no one left alive.’

‘Exactly. There’ll be bodies.’ Euridice gestured at a goat he hadn’t seen before, its head at a strange angle,
lying tangled against a bush. Her voice was almost steady as she added, ‘We can take what we need from them.’

‘Steal from the dead!’

‘They don’t need it now,’ said Euridice fiercely. ‘We do. And we can scatter dirt upon anyone we see, and say the words to give them safe passage to the Underworld.’

She’s right, thought Nikko. His skin crawled at the thought of going back into that desolation. What if another thunder wave rose from the sea? He gazed around. A pair of swallows darted overhead, hunting flies. But the feeling they were crossing into the realm of the dead stayed with them. Even Pegasus baulked, and they had to lead her the first few steps, before she allowed them up to ride.

But in the end it was nowhere near as bad as he had feared. The sea’s strength had scoured the worst back into its own realm, leaving a world almost washed clean.

Almost. He stared down at two men, twisted together around a tree, almost looking like one man with four arms and legs. Only one head was visible, the mouth open in a scream no one would ever hear. But both men had swords, and spears and knives belted to their sides—good ones, bronze with wooden handles traced with silver—and one had a bow and arrows on his back.

Euridice kneeled down. ‘Have you ever used a sword?’

‘No.’

‘A bow and arrows?’

‘No.’

‘Soft city boy,’ she mocked again. ‘A boy with a beard coming who’s never held a spear.’

‘I’ll learn,’ he said fiercely. ‘And I can use a spear.’ Or I could years ago, he thought. He hadn’t handled a weapon since he was ten.

She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I think you will. You take the spear, and a knife and a sword. I’ll take the bow. Their clothes should fit you. Me too, with a bit of tuck and trimming.’

Nikko tried not to shudder. ‘I’ll undress them. Not you.’

‘Yes.’

At least, thought Nikko, she knows how unseemly it would be for her to see a man naked. And yet it was women who laid out the dead, who brought babies naked into the world.

He shook his head. He was hungry, so hungry his stomach has stopped growling and his mind was giddy. It must be the same for Euridice.

He stripped the men quickly while she looked the other way. They must have been guards, though Nikko didn’t recognise either from the palace. Perhaps they served one of the minor kings. The tunics and trousers were good leather, and one of the men had a pouch too, with flint and sky iron to start a fire, and a leather bag of shelled pistachios.

At last it was done. He used his hands to shovel silt over the bodies, muttering the words of prayer, hearing Euridice mutter different words behind him. He pressed turquoises into each man’s armpits, where thieves—other thieves, he thought grimly—wouldn’t find them. At least now the dead men’s spirits could rest, instead of roaming the world forever. The precious stones would
give them comfort and status in the underworld, and help pay the ferryman across the river. Suddenly he felt calmer. They had done their best for them, as the dead guards had unwittingly done for them. But despite their hunger, neither he nor Euridice began to eat the pistachios until they were well away into the clean land untouched by the thunder wave, heading north east, up toward the mountains.

The nuts hardly scratched the edges of their appetites. But to Nikko’s delight he brought down the first game of the day, with a slingshot made of a bit of leather found amongst the debris.

It was a hare, fat from summer eating. They stopped to make a fire to cook it. Although they still kept away from the road, they had lost the first desperate terror of pursuit. With the earthquake, the wave, and the death of the High King, whoever was in charge at Mycenae would be thinking about far more than two escaped performers.

His mind drifted to the Chamberlain. Had the man really waved at him to go? You can know a man half your life, almost, thought Nikko, pulling a dry dead branch from a tree, and never know him at all.

Even Thetis was no longer a threat to anyone at Mycenae. Her prophecy was in the past now. Nikko made an automatic fist of homage to the earth, in thanks that his sister hadn’t thought to make a second prophecy as she stood up on the parapet at Mycenae.

Their main danger now would be bandits, or even village men who might guess that no one would miss two travellers—or their valuables. It was still best to stay out of sight.

Nikko skinned the hare and gutted it, then threaded a branch of green wood through its mouth and legs, and held it over the flames to cook. The air above the fire shimmered with heat, but without much smoke. They waited as long as they could bear, then tore at the meat half cooked, roasted the bones in the coals and sucked out the marrow.

They slept that night in a cave that smelled of long-gone wolf, with dust for a floor and small piles of animal bones in the corners. Outside rain flung tiny hammers onto the ground.

Nikko would have liked to spread the saddlecloth for them both to lie on, while they used Euridice’s robe for a cover. But there was no way he could suggest it. They no longer needed the warmth of each other’s bodies. It would be too easy to wake in the night, to pull her drowsily closer. If Euridice was to go to the temple she must stay a maid.

He glanced over at her, asleep already, wrapped in the grimy silk wings. Something else had stopped him too. This was a new Euridice, freed of any need to pretend to her captors. Perhaps he too would be different, away from the expectations of Mycenae. He couldn’t touch her now, not while the shock held them both, when she might accept him for comfort or, even worse, from pity. In a few days, a half moon perhaps, when the dust of Mycanae and their lives there had been washed away, they might both see thing differently.

We are all changed, he thought, as the world drifted away. Me, Euridice. Even Thetis, wherever she is, must face a different life now.

Pigeons plucked at the autumn grass seeds outside the cave when he woke next morning, despite the drizzle thickening the air. Nikko’s sling got two of them on the ground, and a third in the air.

They lit a fire at the mouth of the cave, away from drips from the overhang, and cooked the pigeons, and ate them with handfuls of watercress from the stream down the hill, while Pegasus tore at the damp grass. Nikko would have tethered her again, but Euridice seemed to assume that the big horse would now stay. She had been right, for when they’d woken Pegasus was sheltering at the front of the cave, the smell of wet horse and droppings stronger now than the scent of wolf.

They took it in turns to wash in the creek, then ate the leftover pigeon, nibbling at the bones as the rain lifted like a shield from the valley, leaving the morning blue and gold.

‘Nikko?’

‘Yes?’ He looked up from the bone he was chewing to find her watching him.

‘Why do you protect your sister? Give up your whole life for hers?’

‘Not all of it.’

‘Most of it then.’

He looked out over the trees, gleaming diamonds on their leaves after the rain. ‘A brother owes duty to his sister.’

She snorted, sounding a bit like a horse. ‘You owe duty to your King, but you’re not back there repairing the Lion Gate.’

He looked at her impatiently. ‘Well, do
you
have an answer?’

‘Love,’ she said, after a pause. ‘I’ve watched you. Everything you do is for love. For your sister, for Dora and Orkestres.’

He laughed. ‘What about the times I rode out of Mycenae by myself, just to feel the wind in my hair?’

‘That was love too,’ she said positively. ‘Like my love for the Mother.’ She saw he didn’t understand. ‘The Mother is everything that lives, the barley shoots, the heads of summer wheat, the lambs in spring.’

‘So every time I rode, or danced, or played the lute, I was doing it for the Mother?’

‘Yes. For love of the world around you. You are the only man I have ever known, Nikko, who does things for love. Not for anger, or pride, or gain. Just love.’

He was silent, not knowing what to say. ‘What about you?’ he said at last.

She stood up, and brushed the dust and horse hair from her trousers, not looking at him. ‘I will go to the shrine a maiden,’ she said softly. ‘That was what was promised, and that was what I’ll give. Come on. We’d better make the most of the daylight, so we can find another place to shelter us tonight.’

They travelled north, using the sun and moon as their guide, hoping that they could ask for directions to the shrine when they were well past the Isthmus and the lands controlled by the King of Thebes, who, if he had survived the destruction of Mycenae, would certainly remember the pair whose act had heralded the quake.

Storms flung the last of the autumn leaves onto the ground. The wind grew teeth as winter strengthened; at times sleet stung their faces; at other times they had to detour nearer to the coast to avoid a mountain pass full of snow; but mostly they tried to stay in the high country, where there was less likelihood of being seen. No one from Mycenae would be chasing them—not in winter, or possibly at all. But there were bandits to worry about, even though they had hidden the gold and jewels in their blanket rolls.

It should have been hard; travellers risked their lives, wandering in winter. But Euridice seemed to find caves almost by instinct, and somehow the blizzards were always behind them or in front, and small animals coming out to graze in the sparse winter sunlight were easy prey for Nikko’s sling. Some nights they spent in summer huts, where herd boys took the goats or cattle up to graze in the heat, leaving them now for the warmer weather of the plain.

Several times Nikko rode into a village alone, pretending to be a lost messenger on some king’s business. He could trade a piece of turquoise or a garnet the headman could give his wife in return for bread or flour if no one had baked enough for strangers. Flour was lighter, but it spoiled too easily when it rained. At least they could dry the bread again, toasting it on the fire.

Meat there was in plenty, from his sling and her arrows, and there was grass enough for Pegasus under the frost. They made sure that she had ample time to graze each day, never taking her too far. If the way was steep Euridice would slip off, and Nikko follow her, so the
three of them were on foot, instead of two riding and one carrying.

Sometimes, when they came to a stretch of grass, they would let Pegasus have her head and gallop till she chose to stop, her riders yelling for the sheer joy of speed and freedom. Yet Euridice never played any of her horse-dancing tricks now, though Nikko never asked her why. Perhaps, he thought, this journey is all the challenge she needs.

Some mornings Nikko would find her whispering to the horse, as though telling her secrets she couldn’t share with him. Pegasus would snuffle at her fingers, and nod or paw the ground, almost as if she understood.

He had never thought he would feel friendship with a horse. But as the weeks went by Nikko realised that was what she was—a friend. Horses too, it seemed, did things for love.