Oracle of the Dead(4)

The women became truly frightened, even Julia. We men maintained our stout Roman facade of Stoic impassivity to hide the quaking of our bowels. For make no mistake about it, we were all frightened. The hazards of battle and politics, the terrors of the natural world, these things may be dealt with employing one’s physical bravery, strength, and resources. But what may a mortal man do in the face of the supernatural?

Not that I truly believed that these people could take us to the underworld and communicate with the dead, but those feelings of dread are easily aroused under the right circumstances, and they had the circumstances in the form of that tunnel. Thoughts flitted through my mind like those flickering lights, of cleverly manipulated mirrors and hidden holes to bear the voices of whispering confederates. At the Museum in Alexandria I had seen many wonders, all of them performed openly by philosophers without the slightest recourse to supernatural means, but that had not been amid such surroundings.

The tunnel still took us down. It may be that the smoke and drink distorted our sense of time and distance. Sometimes the flames of the torches seemed to draw far ahead of us and every word spoken or chanted seemed to echo endlessly. As always when venturing underground, I found that the weight of earth and stone above me seemed to press down and I had to slow my breathing, knowing that it would take little for me to burst into panic, a state far too undignified for a praetor.

Just when I thought the whole ordeal had become unbearable, the air grew humid and there was a smell of sulfurous water. The tunnel opened somewhat and divided, one way sloping up, the other downward. We came to a room that would have seemed intolerably small for a proper shrine, but after the suffocatingly cramped tunnel it was almost like emerging into open air, though the light was still dim and the air full of smoke and mist.

In the center of the chamber was an altar decked with dead foliage and covered with innumerable bones that piled high and spilled onto the floor. Some of the bones were human, among them the skeletons of infants. Julia and Circe turned away in horror, but Antonia stared in fascination. She was as demented as the rest of her family.

“Here we pay tribute to the shades of the dead,” intoned Iola, “and to their queen, Hecate.” At that, one of the priests walked to the back of the chamber and thrust his torch into a bowl that contained twigs and brush. The flames rose, revealing an image of the goddess, hewn from the same stone as the surrounding walls. The women gasped, though it was only an archaic carving. The goddess was depicted holding her leashed hounds and she was three-faced, with the face on one side that of a young woman, that on the other an old hag, and the one in the center that of a mature matron, all of it done so crudely that it must have been made long before people in these parts knew anything about Greek sculpture.

The priest, if that was what he was, cast a handful of incense upon the fire and we were wreathed in fragrant smoke. Iola shouted what sounded like a prayer in some incomprehensible language, although I thought I caught a Marsic word or two.

Circe gasped. “The goddess moved!”

“Just the flickering light,” I muttered. Julia turned and glared at me.

“The goddess grants us permission to approach the Styx and summon her subjects for questioning,” Iola said.

The Styx? I thought. It was a long walk, but surely we haven’t come that far!

Now Iola took us down a side passage that descended just a short way and the smell of sulfur water grew more pronounced and the mist more dense. This time the other black-robed figures did not accompany us. There was a sound of rushing water and even my hardened, Skeptical faculties deserted me. We were headed for the Styx, and I wasn’t ready to cross it yet. I didn’t even have a coin beneath my tongue.

At last we came to a chamber full of steam and there before us was a rushing stream of water, literally boiling as if it had run through Vulcan’s forge before entering the chamber. We could not see the far side of the stream, for the fog obscured it. I had the impression that the distance was not great. In an odd way this was of some comfort to me. I had always heard that the Styx was a wide, slow-moving, black river, but if this was not the true Styx, it was certainly something uncanny.

I could see that most of my party were quite convinced that they were standing beside the river over which the gods swore their most solemn oaths, but their minds did not work like mine. I was puzzled by something else, something to me as strange as any supernatural manifestation: Somebody, long ago, had driven this tunnel, at the cost of great difficulty, straight down to this underground river, with absolute sureness and no hesitation. In the entrance tunnel I had seen no side shafts or exploratory excavations, as you see when miners search for metal-bearing ore. Whoever cut the tunnel knew exactly where he was going, and accomplished it in such a fashion that the doorway was precisely aligned with the sunrise on Midsummer Day.