Black Ships Read Online Free PDF Page A

bread.
    When we were done she took my hand. “It is now,” she said, and led me to the curtain in the back.
    I didn’t want to go, but she held my hand and pulled the veil aside. “What is here?” I asked.
    “You will see,” Pythia said, and dropped the curtain behind us.
    It was dark. It cannot be this dark outside, where even in stormy weather there is some light. It was the utter blackness of the deep earth, where stars have never shone. She took my hand again and led me down.
    It was cold. Pythia put my hand on the wall to my left. “You must count,” she said. “You must count your steps so that you do not get lost. There are many caves and many turnings, and you must use that memory you have trained to remember your way.”
    And so we counted. As our steps descended, it seemed very far to me. I could not stop trying to see, my eyes widening and widening in the darkness. “Is this the gate to Hades?” I asked.
    “This is a womb,” she said. “A gate. A tomb. They are the same thing. We descend and we return. We cross and recross the River. You know the story.”
    I nodded, though she could not see it in the darkness. “The Lady descends and the land withers. She returns and it greens.”
    “You have nothing to fear here,” Pythia said. “Alone among mortals. Because you are Her handmaiden, and you come and go at Her pleasure.”
    The floor leveled beneath our feet, and I felt the movement of air, as though the ceiling was much higher. Then my bare toes encountered fur. I gasped. Then I realized that it was a wolf skin spread on the floor of the cavern. My hands encountered it, and then another. They were soft and well cured, put here on purpose, not accidental carrion.
    “Stay here,” Pythia said. “Stay here and dream until I come for you.”
    And she left me.
    I waited. At first, the darkness seemed to press on me, breathing like a great beast. I could imagine Cerberus waiting not far away, padding toward me with heavy, rending jaws.
    When the last faint sounds of Pythia’s passage had stopped, and the cold sweat began to dry on my face, the dark seemed less intense. I closed my eyes, and there was no difference.
    I could retrace my steps, I thought. I remembered the turnings, how many steps between. There were not so many, only three or four. I could return if I wished, find my way back from the abyss to my own bed. I knew the way back. Pythia had made sure I did.
    I stretched out on the wolf skins, and they were soft beneath me. Some hint of Pythia’s scent clung to them. She had lain here then. Perhaps many times. She had waited here for some word from her Lady, like a handmaiden who sleeps in the antechamber, always within hearing lest something be needed in the night.
    I waited in the dark until I slept, and if I dreamed I did not remember it.

THE AVATAROF DEATH
    O ld King Nestor died at the height of the rains, the winter after I turned sixteen. I had the shape of a woman and my full height now, though I would barely come to the middle of a warrior’s chest. My hair had never been cut since I came to the Shrine, and was long enough that unpinned it reached halfway down my thighs. Pinned up, I could make it approximate the fullness of the wig. Pythia was right. I would not need to wear it.
    In the palace they were wailing and rending their clothes, as is proper. I walked behind Pythia, with her clothes and herbs, her black bag around my waist, a black mantle pulled over my head. I stood behind her at the funeral rites, which were held in the great courtyard during a lull in the rain.
    They had kept the wood for the pyre under shelter, so it caught quick and hard, but the ground beneath was sodden with water and steamed. I looked about as much as I could, hoping to see Aren among the boys, but he wasn’t there.
    The High King had not come from Mycenae. I didn’t wonder why he had not at the time. It was the season of rains, and the roads were very bad. Instead, he sent a kinsman to do the