Bring Down the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page A

large enough for the infant snake. It lay quiet there, hanging around her neck next to her heart.
    She laid her hand lightly over it. The Mother’s blessing was warm inside her. It held a promise that she had not much longer to wait.
    *   *   *
    That serene resolve carried through a single day and part of a night. As it faded, Polyxena felt a kind of despair.
    The sense of emptiness—of hunger—had grown worse. It was not the hatchling’s fault: she had fed it from a nest of mice that the priestesses kept for just that purpose. The itch in the back of the skull, as if eyes followed her wherever she went, was so strong that she kept spinning about to catch the spy. But there was never anything to see.
    In the spring, when she dreamed, the oracle had taken possession of her. Attalos had told her how her aunt found her, naked and burning hot in the snow. She remembered the dream but not the discovery; she had awakened in her bed, decorously covered, and but for Attalos would have thought the whole of it was a dream.
    She had had enough of dreams and studied patience. The oracle did as it pleased—that was doctrine. And yet she had heard the priestesses talking now and then, especially the two elders, of turning the power of that place to their purposes.
    It was always a high and noble purpose. They framed the questions carefully and shaped the responses to fit the best needs of those who asked. It might be a city seeking advice on a matter of trade, or a king asking whether he should choose peace or war. The answer they gave was truthful, but they might not divulge the whole truth—or they might make it larger and clearer and stronger. Sometimes they might do both.
    Even they did not see what was increasingly clear to Polyxena. The oracle was more than the play of wind in a clutter of dangling pots, that only the priestesses knew how to interpret. For all anyone else knew, the priestesses invented all their oracles, and only pretended to hear the gods’ voices in the ring and clatter of bronze.
    Polyxena knew in her bones that it was real. Whoever, whatever spoke in that place, it was both a guide and a counselor. And maybe, if one’s question was framed exactly, it was a shaper of things to come.
    She had no proof of that but the slant of an implication. She did not know the rite or the incantation that would rouse the power. All she had to guide her was a knot in her belly and a memory of dreams.
    She had years of training and close study; and she had the blood of the ancient ones in her. Her foremothers had served the Mother since the dawn of time. She was bred and raised and trained to bend the oracle to her will.
    The priestesses would beg strongly to differ, if they knew. She was only an acolyte, and a rebellious one at that. Even Attalos, lowly male though he was, was more suited to the task than she.
    All the more reason to make the oracle tell her what she was supposed to do. This was not her place or her fate—but what those were, she needed desperately to know.
    Even in desperation she could cling to patience. She waited the rest of the night and the day after, kept her mouth closed and her eyes down and did nothing to attract notice. Such preparations as she could make, she made on the few occasions when she could be alone.
    She fasted—someone might have noticed that, but she pretended to eat, slipping the bread and cheese and fruit into her gown and feeding it to the birds and the dogs afterwards, and pouring out the watered wine with a whispered invocation to the Mother. As she worked, she let herself become a prayer; when she attended Timarete in the sanctuary and Nikandra by the Mother’s tree, she filled herself with the sacredness of the words and the place.
    By evening her belly was a singing emptiness. If she had done it properly she would have fasted for three days, but she could not trust to remain undetected for that long. Then it would all be