The wine was finished, and the small village was perfectly still. The old woman waited patiently for me to formulate a question.

  “You are having some difficulty?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you do not believe in my abilities, we can conduct further trials, if you like. I have many suggestions, if you are struggling to come up with convincing ways of testing me.”

  I did not doubt her abilities. Even before she showed me she could dig into my past. There was simply something about the way she told her story. Not even her confidence, just the choices she made. The details she added, the ease with which she recalled them when necessary.

  “I’m not sure what’s wrong”, I whispered.

  “How long have you been at sea, Pamphilos?”

  “Almost ten years, I think.”

  “As long as Odysseus. It’s not easy to come home after such a long time.”

  As she spoke, she idly took the breadknife from the table and placed it by her side.

  “Like I said. There are many painful truths ahead. Why don’t we work up to the bigger questions. We could start with why it is that you are here. I told you that you are important to me. We could start there.”

  “Very well, go ahead.”

  “It would be better if you ask me.”

  “Of course” I mumbled, “In what way am I important to you?”

  “It is as your father always told you, Pamphilos. You are the memory of the Ardiae. When the Romans come, the royalty cowers, or faces them head on in a mad gamble. It’s your people that always beat them in the end. You know the land well enough to hide in the hills, to attack carefully and pick away, never giving open battle. It’s your people who sail from so young an age, and who know the water and the winds so well, that your triremes can face down the Roman navy.

  Between you in the east, and Carthage in the west, the Romans are kept in their place, and the world… well, what you think of as the world: the powers around the great sea, Carthaginian, Egyptian, Roman, Greek, keep each other perfectly in balance.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “You need to ask the questions Pamphilos. I know it’s not easy opening your wounds yet again. But you need to ask, or you will never be convinced.”

  “I am the memory of the Ardiae, and the Ardiae keep the Romans in place. Is that why I am important to you? Because you want this balance to be preserved?”

  “No.”

  “Well, why then?”

  “Be precise in your questions. Please.”

  “Why then, am I important to you? What role do you want me to play in this careful balance?”

  “Simply the opposite of what you suggested. What I want, and what will happen, is that the balance is upset. And for the Romans to be the ones to upset it. They will take Illyria. They will take Macedon. Eventually, they will come to encircle the great sea. They will rule all parts of the world that you and your countrymen know about. It will be an empire that will put Alexander’s to shame.”

  I felt a rage build in me. Somewhere deep inside me, my love for Illyria, and my hatred of the Romans still smouldered after all these years, and she was fanning the flames with her nonsense.

  “Why? These people brutalized my country. Why would you want them to have the world?”

  “Because you have all brutalized each other. Not one of you is a hair better than the other. You Illyrians were nothing more than pirates, for the Gods’ sake, before one of you decided to start calling himself king. Your precious Alexander, loved by every single man and woman this side of the Metzovon. I’ve seen him Pamphilos. I’ve told my Priestesses to ask about him, again and again, until I could see him and his soldiers right there before my eyes. Butchering whole villages, and celebrating the same evening.”

  “It’s like that everywhere. Everywhere and all the time. That is my true curse. To see the whole world, throughout all of time. To see the true face of man. Deep into the past, and far into the future. And that is where I made my great mistake.”

  She had been speaking with a force that I hadn’t seen in her so far, but now her demeanor turned. If we had not been speaking in the cold dead of night, I probably would not have been able to make out her words. She breathed them rather than enunciating.

  “I was still young. I had my priestesses, but I did not fully understand what I was doing. After seeing exactly how much of life in the past and present consisted simply of people being ravaged by warfare, I began to look into the future. I wanted to have some hope, I suppose. To see that it would change. That people learned.”

  “Through the first of my priestesses, I asked myself a question. I asked what the worst war of the next three thousand years would look like.

  As soon as I had said it I realized my mistake. But I was not quick enough to stop my priestess from repeating the question to me. As the white light hit, I seized up. This was an answer I had too much influence over. It depended far too much on my own actions. I had so much influence over the way the world would turn out, if I chose to use it. And that choice, would depend almost entirely on what I saw then and there as I lay convulsing on the floor.”

  “Let me die here, I thought, even before the images flooded into me. If a question can kill me let this be it. Because whatever I answer, I will be responsible. Of course, as much as it taxed my body, the curse would not let me die. I had to answer, that had been my wish. I tried to hold out. With any strength still left in me, to wait for an answer that was not so horrific as what I was seeing. Something I could say that was true, that would give us some hope.”

  “But it was no use. Perhaps no such answer was possible. Perhaps nothing I could have done in my lifetime would have saved humanity from the horrors it will inflict on itself. That’s what I try to tell myself most of the time. But I must consider the possibility that by asking this question, and answering it, I made my answer the truth.”

  “What did you see?”

  She looked up at me with a look in her eyes that changed her face entirely. It was suddenly she who was at my mercy. Begging me for some kind of salvation.

  “I tried. As hard as I could, I tried to keep my answer vague. It’s the answer that needs to be true, you see, not what saw. So long as the answer was vague, there might still be room for change.”

  She had avoided answering my question, and the strain was becoming too much to bear.

  “I saw millions die. As many as all the people in the Roman empire, all the people around the great sea. Every last one of them, snuffed out. Vast machinery, on land, in the air, all built with the single purpose of taking the lives of as many people as possible. Gas, fire, disease, all at the command of man, to put whole generations to death at the stroke of a pen.”

  She looked down as she spoke. The emotion evaporated from her voice. She looked up at me.

  “But soldiers have always killed soldiers. If there are more people, then there will be more soldiers, and they will eventually all kill each other. The worst is always what soldiers do to the rest of us. Whole people, eradicated, mothers, children, elders.”

  She chose her words carefully. I realized later that she was repeating exactly her answer from the first time she had answered the question. Being precise in every word, so as not to add details.

  “Not to win a war, or claim some land. Eradication for the sole purpose of eradication. Millions.”

  We sat in silence for a long time. My rage was gone, and I felt a strange need to comfort her.

  “This was not your responsibility.”

  “You are damned right it’s not!”, she snapped. “I’ve seen their faces. The men who will happily guide children to their death. Those who glory in it. Do not think for a damned minute that I will sit here, two thousand years in their past and shoulder the blame while they laugh as they recount to each other what they did.”

  Silence again.

  “Nevertheless, if I ever had the opportunity to guide the world of man towards a better path than this, I squandered it that day.”

  “Did you ever ask? Whether things could have been different?”

  “Occasionally, but I never received an answer. Too vague I think. Once something has happened, there rarely seems to be any real truth one way or another to any statement about what might have happened if I’d acted otherwise.”

  She took a deep breath and composed herself.

  “In all my misery, however, I was left with a purpose. I had pinned one part of the thread to the wall, but before and after that pin, the tapestry hung loose. There were still possibilities. And anything before and after this moment that I had seen, I still had some influence over.

  I had learned my lesson, to be sure. I planned my questions more carefully. I quickly learned to ask about what possibilities I had to shape the future, before actually asking any questions. And so I came to the Romans.”

  “And they are our best path forward? If they rule, we will live in peace?”

  “No.” She spoke softly. “There is little I can do in the near future. The Romans will be as brutal as anybody else.”

  “What then? Why do they need to win?”

  “Because of their veneration of the Greeks, Pamphilos. It’s the Greek ideals that need to survive. Take solace in that, if you think of yourself as a Greek. Not that the Greeks cannot be brutal or petty. But somewhere in your societies are ideas. Ideas that need to be kept alive. Ideas that are now like fragile seeds, but that someday can germinate truly in the minds of men. The basic dignity of people governing themselves. The pursuit of truth and beauty. The idea that anybody can be held to account by their peers. These notions are nascent, flawed, among the Greeks, but they are there, and when they grow, they may prove our salvation.”

  “Then why not the Greeks? Why should we subjugate ourselves to the Romans in order to keep our ideals alive?”

  “You have seen that yourself, in the past 10 years. The Greeks are a splintered people. Browbeaten and defeated. Decadent, with no vision or ability to weather hardship. Any power they have they spend on pointless feuds. They do not value what they have. They do not remember Socrates and Plato. Or Hypathia and Aristarchus. They remember Alexander and Agamemnon. They dream only of another grand empire. If the Greeks win the great sea, there will simply be another line of cruel royalty. The temples will come to control the King, and in the name of virtue, your history will be wiped away.”

  “But if the Romans win, they will take your culture home as spoils of war. They will scarcely notice your brutality, since they have plenty of their own. They will see your statues, your architecture and your writing. They will bring them home, and in the light of your achievements, they will feel like brutes. The Greek ideals will take a hold of them, more than they ever did with the Greeks, and as the truth of Greek culture fades into history, its ideals will blossom.”

  “And then?”

  “They will fade again when the Roman empire does. But by then, their legacy will be indelible. The most powerful temples in the world will try and fail to erase the ideas alive today in the heads of these Greeks.”

  They will be rediscovered. They will inspire again and again. They will not stop people from brutalizing each other. But we will see, in stark contrast to what we are, what we could be. After each atrocity, after each genocide, when we again come face to face with ourselves, confronted unmistakebly with what we are capable of, we will know what to turn to. We know the ideals we should live by even if we don’t, and each time we try, they will take root more strongly in our laws, and in our culture.”

  “And all this will take thousands of years?”

  “At least. I have not dared to look any further. Two millennia is enough responsibility for any one person.”

  “And without the Romans, these ideas will not take hold?”

  “Not in the lands around the great sea, and to the north. Many other people throughout time will hold to these ideals, and many more useful ones. But in the end what matters is the people to our north. Eventually, whatever they think, what they believe, the world will suffer. Somehow, some grain of empathy, some notion of human dignity must end up somewhere in their view of the world. Even if they don’t act on it, they should know that they should have done.”

  “So the Romans need to take Illyria. And after that the world.”

  “A large part of it.”

  “But I can stop them.”

  “Think of the empire as a boulder, held in place by just enough pebbles. You were one of those pebbles.”

  “Were?”

  She gave me a sympathetic smile, as I slowly locked eyes with her.

  “Now, we come to the painful part.”

  The fire was back in my chest, as I began to realize what I should have seen much sooner. My mind raced. For the first time, I felt the urge to take control over the conversation.

  “Your plan for me… to get me out of the way. It’s already in motion.”

  “Be sure, Pamphilos, that you are ready for what comes next.”

  “Tell me.” I said, teeth clenched.

  “Then ask me.”, she replied calmly.

  “Did you take my son?” I was no longer hesitant to open old wounds.

  “I was responsible, ultimately, for him being taken. But that is not where my influence on your life started. This will be easier for you if we start at the beginning.”

  “When was the beginning? When did you start playing around with my life?”

  “From my perspective, before you were born. I found my purpose the same year Illyria first submitted to the Romans. Your father fought for the queen. In him I saw the memory of the Ardiae. I saw you.”

  “From my perspective. Where did it start for me? Did you kill my father?”

  “No. You must remember, Pamphilos, that I am not a God. A man does not die because I want him to. I cannot send people where they do not want to go. I can only answer questions.”

  “You had a clear intention: to remove me from the path of the Romans. What was the first thing you did to achieve that purpose?”

  “I sent you Ana, Pamphilos.”

  And with that one name, she had quelled the fire again.

  “I did not do it out of kindness. But still, I take some solace in the fact that I brought you love among the misery.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why any of it? Why did you need Ana?”

  “You were an unhappy man. Without Ana, you would have had a son eventually, with a slave also, but not out of love. And you would not have been kind. It would have been sufficient. You would have trained a strong, and angry leader, and in a few years, when your current king blunders into another war, you and he would have been there, to make the passage through Illyria just enough of a miserable experience for the Romans, to stop them from fully conquering you.”

  “I needed somebody gentle. Somebody clever and attractive. Somebody who could unpick you before it was too late. It wasn’t easy you, know. I found her in Egypt, and if not for me she would probably have stayed there. It took me five years to get her to Illyria.”

  “How can that happen? How can you change the fates so much, just by answering questions?”

  “I asked. I asked who it should be, and how to accomplish it. I started my temple, and let people ask me questions. I sent people away to distant cities. You will travel to Alexandria, you will meet a handsome stranger, you know the sort of thing. It’s easy to be vague enough that it will be true. Then, it’s a simple matter to add small requests of my own. If you travel to Alexandria, and tell a slaver named Apollodorus about this oracle, then you will meet a handsome stranger. I rarely need to be subtle.

  So I slowly brought people to me. Slavers, traders, the rich and the poor. And I sent them on their way, to bring me more people. With every question I was asked, I increased my control over the traffic across the great sea, and with my priestesses I could plan months ahead.

  When things finally came together, I had directly changed, and sometimes ruined, the lives of hundreds of people so that one slave boy in Cairo would neglect his duties for a night of passion with a young prostitute. True love, mind you, but they never would have met if a sailor I had called to me a year before, had not decided to give her a beating for declining her services just as the young boy passed by on an errand. He saved her, and she gladly rewarded him with the only means she had.

  This one magical night cost him dearly, as the linen he was meant to be guarding was stolen. This left a silk trader who was visiting the next day without a return cargo. Instead he found a slave girl to sell back in Ephesus.

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  From there to Athens, and to Illyria. That part was easy. The further north, the more exotic her dark skin made her, so the traders could make a neat profit by buying slaves like her and moving them north.

  Then I needed to put her before Midas, and to convince him to make the purchase. That was perhaps the biggest puzzle. His visit to the market was a month after she’d been moved on, originally, and her price was well above what was reasonable for a simple house slave. Moreover, Midas had a preference for a young boy, since he was looking for a slave that could help with the more intensive labor.”

  I could not entice any of the traders to come to Naxos beforehand. This was one point of the world, where at this moment of time, I had little direct influence.

  I knew it could be done, since I had asked, but whenever I asked how, the answers were frustratingly vague. For the longest time, I could not get the picture clear enough.”

  She fell silent for a minute.

  “It was the only way. I asked, I tried to find other options. There were none. To put Anaximene in your life, I killed 36 slaves. It was an Egyptian mercenary. A carrier of a dormant disease. It’s common in the south of Egypt, but not around here. I found him and put him on the wrong ship. He was captured by pirates in the Aegean, and sold into slavery at Lissos. Within two weeks, most of the slaves, and three of the traders lay dying.”

  “Anaximene had come into contact with the disease at a younger age, and was now no longer susceptible to its effects. She survived where her captor did not, and when Midas finally came, she was by far the healthiest option at the market. The price was still steep, but he had travelled too far to return empty handed.”

  There was remorse without regret. I could see in her eyes, the determination that must have faced Agias when he found her sitting on his chest with a knife to her throat. She knew, with greater certainty anybody else was ever afforded, what her path ought to be. And she was determined to follow to the end.

  “That’s what it took. Five years, and 36 or so lives, but after that, Anaximene was in your life, and I needed to interfere no more. All the threads were pinned in place, and it was still five years before you or Ana would even be born.

  When everything was prepared, I had my priestesses ask what your future would be and I gave the answer that I knew I would. You would fall in love with Anaximene, marry, have a son, she would die, and you would lose Hyllus, and then yourself. After that, your future was set in stone.”

  “All this to remove me. Why not send the mercenary to my door? Have him infect me instead of those 36 boys, or just have him kill me directly. Anybody with a purse could have arranged for that.”

  “Such drastic action rarely has the desired effect. I needed you out of the way, Pamhilos, but not your house. If you had died, there would have been a hundred would-be nobles eager to take your place. With no successor, the king would have given your lands to whatever high-ranked soldier had most recently pleased him. No, I needed you out of the way, but your house needed to remain in place. An empty villa managed by a senior slave.”

  Silence again.

  “Ask me, Pamphilos. Ask me about your son. It’s time to end your suffering.”

  When I finally spoke, I realized I was crying.

  “I don’t understand. You said you took him…”

  “I said I was responsible. I knew what would happen. I planned for it to happen. I could have stopped it, and didn’t. I could have given you love and let you keep it. But Hyllus would have been a fierce and glorious leader for the Ardiae.

  Ask me what happened to him.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was taken by Gordias. One of your slaves. You beat him almost to death a few years before, when you caught him stealing on the day of Ana’s funeral.”

  “Gordias? There is no sense in that. He was sold off. Midas made sure that he would end up in Byzantion at least. Are you suggesting he escaped? That his desire for revenge was so strong that he made it all the way back to Illyria to torment me by taking my son? All that for a simple beating?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. Just that Gordias was the man who took your son. It would help, if you accepted that slaves are never as loyal as they seem. Your slaves had secrets from you.”

  “Midas lied to me?”

  “Frequently. In this case, he set Gordias free. He told you that he had sold him to a trader bound for the east. The boy escaped to the hills, and tried as best he could to live from what the forests provided.”

  “Why? Midas loved Ana as we all did. Why would he take pity on that wretch after he stole from her on the day of her funeral?”

  “Because Midas knew why Gordias took the necklace. It was a memento for him as well as for you. And for the same reason. It was the necklace she wore when she wanted to look beautiful. It was the necklace she wore whenever she went out to meet him.”

  “You’re lying. I don’t believe a word of it.”

  “Then ask me, Pamphilos.”

  “This is nonsensical. She loved me. I know she loved me!”

  “She did. I promise you that she did. She simply loved him as well. She saw no difficulty in that. I will explain, but you need to ask me first.”

  “Did Ana betray me?”

  “She lay with another man. To her mind this was not a betrayal, although she knew you would consider it such.”

  “How can you say she loved me, when she did that. Did she love me?”

  “Yes, Pamphilos. She loved you. But she was a very special woman, with a particular view of the world. After tonight, when this is all over, the one truth that you’ll struggle most to accept in the days to come is that you never truly knew your wife, and that you never really wanted to find out.”

  “I knew her. She had my child. We raised…”. Emotion got the better of me.

  “Yes, some parts of her you knew well. And some she kept hidden. Did you ever ask her what her life was like before she met you? Her life as a slave, for instance? How she came to be a slave?”

  It seemed unnecessary for me to answer.

  “I suppose it is to be expected. A million slavemasters in the past and present have turned away their eyes as you have. And will continue to do so for thousands of years to come. It’s rare that love should blossom between a master and a slave, but I shouldn’t expect that to cause you to open your eyes any further.

  Her life as a slave was dismal. She was first sold at 12. I don’t suppose I need to tell you what happens in the trade routes to a pretty young girl, with such an exotic appearance. You may not have asked, but you felt those scars on her back, on her arms and on her legs.

  How about before she became a slave? Did you know she was of minor royalty?”

  Again, no answer seemed required.

  “The lands to the south of the Ptolemaic kingdom are as contested as your own Illyria. Anaximene was one of the cousins of the ruler of a minute kingdom. The king had sworn allegiance to Ptolemy, so that he could maintain his status. When the area changed hands again, Ptolemy did not send armies to come to his vassal’s aid. Instead, he used the conquering of the kingdom to buy time to amass his forces on its northern border.

  The king made an attempt to switch his allegiance, but you can only do that so many times, Pamphilos, before the gesture becomes meaningless. He was publicly humiliated, put to death, and his household sold into slavery. Among them Ana.

  Can you really blame her, after such a life, for holding nothing sacred? For doing whatever she could get away with. Taking what little fruit life would give her and letting not a drop of juice go to waste? She had a gift that one, a gift for reading people. And she learned to use it soon enough. To stay alive, and to keep out of trouble as much as possible.

  She had a gift, and she used that gift on you, Pamphilos, when she finally came to Illyria 14 years later. And the gift bought her freedom, and even luxury.”

  “Is that what I was to her? A way out of slavery? You said that she loved me.”

  “No, you were much more than that. That was why she was so special. Plenty of slaves learn to manipulate their masters. But Anaximene, she never became cynical. She always read people accurately. Not as a means to an end. She always saw the whole of you, for better or worse. She could care for you and use you at the same time. Perhaps it was because she had once had slaves of her own, that her view of the world and the people she met was so complete, and yet so detached.”

  “Then how could she betray me? If she knew what it would do to me?”

  “To her it was not a betrayal. She saw two very different things in two different men, and she took what little life had to offer her. She knew it was a betrayal to you, but… I suppose the best way to put it is that she knew you, but you didn’t know her. She saw in you all the kindness and bravery, all the insight that you were capable of. She saw how much you loathed yourself, and how little of that good you could see yourself. She had met so many brutal, cruel men. She saw in you, for the first time, how much self-loathing is reserved for the best of men. And this inspired her to love you.

  But this love was one sided, incomplete. She saw so much of you, but you saw so very little of her, and she knew you never would. She needed someone to confide in. Someone who could understand her, the way a slavemaster never could. And she found it in Gordias.”

  At the mention of his name I suddenly became angry. I was done with the play.

  “Enough of this. Tell me what I came here to hear. What happened to my son?”

  She took as deep a breath as her curse allowed before answering.

  “Your son, Pamphilos, was stillborn. You and Anaximene buried him in the old rose garden.”

  I was too angry to notice the subtlety in her emphasis. I blundered on, in blind anger, deeper into the fish trap.

  “Stop playing these games. My second son, what happened to him.”

  She gave me a pitying look.

  “I’m afraid, Pamphilos, you only ever had one son. And he is buried among the roses.”

  It was, I suppose, a truth I had been trying to escape from for the past ten years. Every time I carved the question into a slip of lead, whispered it in a dark temple to a smoky figure of a priestess, with every dark cave I descended into, I convinced myself ever more that the question was unanswerable. The greater I made the mystery for myself, the deeper I buried the simple truth that I had everything I needed to answer the question myself.

  We sat in silence for a long time.

  “Would you like me to tell you the details, Pamphilos? I think it’s important for you to hear.”

  “Very well.”

  “I think it’s best if you ask me.”

  I didn’t care. I felt numb. The obsessive desire to escape the truth that had driven me across the Aegean had been crudely pulled out of my chest. I was finally entirely empty. I wanted her to tell me what she felt it was necessary to tell me. But I couldn’t think of a way to phrase that as a question.

  “What happened to Hyllus?”

  “His father came back to take him. Gordias tried to leave Illyria, many times. He tried to tell himself that Hyllus was better off with you. Well fed, well cared for by a dozen slaves. He even recognized, despite his jealousy, that you were a far more loving father than any other slavemaster in Illyria would have been.

  But he remembered what Anaximene had told him, when she was still alive. He was the father. If she would ever have to choose, she would choose him. If they ever had the opportunity to escape safely, she promised him, she would do it. If it was at all possible, they would live together as a family. No matter how much it would hurt you, Pamphilos, and how much it would hurt her to do that to you, Hyllus came first. And to her, Hyllus needed Gordias.”

  “Did she mean it when she said that?”

  “Yes. But all of it, Pamphilos. The thought of doing that to you, of leaving you was unbearable. But she was prepared to do it for the boy.

  That is why Gordias ultimately did what he did. Not out of jealousy. Not to hurt you. For her. To honor the memory of the woman you both loved.

  He knew the house of course. And Hyllus knew him. When you were away, he and Anaximene took every chance they could to spend time with the three of them. Hyllus knew that his mother trusted this man, so he trusted him as well.”

  “Hyllus. Is he alive?” I said through my tears.

  “Yes. Gordias did eventually travel to Byzantion, and found work there with a maritime trader. When he was young, the trader’s wife took care of Hyllus, together with her own children, while the men were out at sea. From his twelfth year, he joined his father. He is 18 now, and regularly captains the ship. He is a very accomplished sailor.”

  “Does he remember? His time with Anaximene? Does he know who I am?”

  “Yes. I think that Gordias would have preferred to keep the details from him, but that would have entailed withholding the details of his mother and her life. And Gordias was determined that Hyllus should know as much of his mother, and her life as he himself could remember. And that included her time at your house. He was honest. He told Hyllus that after a long list of cruel and brutal masters and traders, she finally found herself in a villa in Illyria, under a master who hated himself, but was kinder to her than anybody she had ever met. He told him that she loved that master before she loved his father. And that the worst thing she was ever going to do was to break his heart and run away with Gordias.

  Those stories shaped him a lot. He knows that the Illyrians are the finest sailors on the great sea, and he considers that part of his heritage. He thinks about his mother most of all. She has inspired in him a desire to live away from society, to have as little to do with its structures and rules as possible. His sailing life gives him that freedom.”

  “Eighteen.” I it said with a tearful smile. Different emotions rolled over me like waves over a beach. For all this time, I had imagined him frozen in time, six years old, like he was the last time I saw him. I had never truly dared to dream that he was still alive, so I had never thought to imagine him growing up. I was buffeted between the fear of his death and the impossible fantasy of us continuing our lives exactly where we had left off. I had never let myself think anything so realistic as this. That Hyllus was leading a perfectly good life, with only a dim memory of me, while I slowly destroyed myself for no good reason.

  Above us, the sky had turned from deep black to a dark purple. On the horizon was a faint, orange glow. A cold wind came in from the sea.

  “So what happens now?”

  “Now we discuss your future. I will make you an offer and you will take it. But, please, Pamphilos, be careful with such broad questions. I cannot always control what the answer will be.

  You have had a lot to endure. You may feel now like you’ve accepted what I have told you, but over the next weeks you will come back to it again and again. You will realize how angry you truly are with me for manipulating your life. That anger will not die easily. You will think of travelling to Byzantion to see Hyllus. Or back to Illyria, to wait for him to visit. These are bad ideas.”

  “Why? Why should I not meet him?”

  “You would trade one obsession for another Pamphilos? So soon after you’ve been relieved of your burden? It’s a bad idea to visit him, because he has his own life. He is detached, and he is happy to be detached. His memories of you are the memories of his mother. That is the very best you have to offer him. That is what you can be to him. Meeting him now would only erase that.”

  “What then? What is your offer?”

  “While you come to terms with what you’ve heard tonight, you can stay on the island. There will be many times in the weeks to come when you will want to confront me. That will be a lot easier to do if you’re not halfway to Illyria. There is a free hut at the north end of the village. It’s not very big but it gets shade in the morning and sun in the evening. Eventually, you’ll need to help out with the daily labors of the village, but it’s generally light work. You may see me whenever you like, if I’m not otherwise engaged, and I’ll answer any questions you need answered.”

  “And you’re sure I won’t try to hurt you? Or myself?”

  “My dear Pamphilos, if there were any risk of that, I would never have let you come here. It was not necessary for my purposes that we meet. You are here by invitation. Even a man like you, desperately searching for every oracle that the Aegean has to offer would never find this island if I didn’t want him to.”

  “So why did you bring me here? Out of guilt?”

  “In a word, yes. I do not always enjoy the things I need to do. Whenever possible I try to make my confession. And while I cannot make amends for what I don’t wish to undo, I can do my best to offer you some comfort in the rest of your life, if you would accept it.”

  “What comfort is there for me? After this life, what possible comfort could I hope for?”

  “Like I said, I can help you come to terms with what has happened to you. Or, let us not mince words, with what I have done to you. And then, when things have settled down, I can offer you… questions.”

  I did not understand immediately.

  “I mean, I would allow you to ask me questions. Not at any moment of the day, I am very busy. But say, once every two weeks, for a short while, you may ask me a series of well-considered questions. Perhaps about Hyllus, to see how he is doing. About Midas, perhaps, or Anaximene’s past.

  But also about the world. You may ask me what the planets and the stars are made of. Which of the gods are real. Whether there are people on the other side of the earth. I offer you anything you may wish to know. What the Roman emperor thinks about when he masturbates. So long as it doesn’t interfere with my intentions, I’m happy to let you ask what you want.

  There are a few like you on this island already. I always look forward to speaking with them. I have mined this curse for everything I could think of, but you people, you somehow always manage to come up with questions I have never thought of before.”

  “It doesn’t seem like a particularly appealing offer.”

  “It will, in time. For now, hold on to the thought that I can tell you where Hyllus is and how he is doing. You are free to leave the island, but that is what you would be giving up. That should be enough to see you through the next month or so.”

  She raised herself up with difficulty.

  “It has been a long time since I spent a night awake. I don’t think it agrees with this old body of mine. For you, sleep will not come easy today, but I suggest you try anyway. Diotima over there will see you to your hut.” A young girl was standing, eyes downcast, by the well.

  “Among the few luxuries we have on this island is a liberal stock of papyrus. If you have trouble sleeping, may I suggest you write down your thoughts, or simply write down anything else that comes to mind. I find that the process of writing can be helpful for people in a position like yours.”

  That is where you find me now. In my hut, which is indeed surprisingly comfortable. Several of the villagers have offered to help me turn it into something that will be suitable for winter, should I decide to stay. She told me I will, and I have no reason to doubt her, but I do not feel it yet.

  As I write, it has been eight weeks since I came to the island. So far everything she said has come true. The acceptance and relief I felt at the end of that night were short lived, and inspired by exhaustion. After eventually finding sleep, I found my fury refreshed. I had many heated confrontations with her. She was mostly patient with me, and said what she needed to say to help me through my anger. It’s a frustrating experience to attempt an argument with somebody who has been able to plan the confrontation in advance, but she seems to have my interests at heart.

  I was not angry for what she chose to do. I cannot think what I would have done in her place. I also admitted, however angry I was, that she brought me everything that was good and worthwhile in my life. I could not even wish that she had chosen somebody else in Illyria, for that would have been to wish I had never met Anaximene.

  I suppose I was simply angry. Everything happened as it should have. Everybody did what they should have done. And I just happened to be angry about it. I still am. But I no longer feel the need to direct the anger to her. I no longer expect to get some resolution out of a confrontation with her. My anger simply is, and I will let it be.

  She still allows me to see her quite often, but now I am asked to prepare my questions in advance. She already knows what they will be, of course, and tells me whether any of them are disallowed. She allows many things, but questions about anything further than the immediate future are usually forbidden. I asked once, what she would do if I ignored her, and blurted the question out anyway. She said in that case I would be removed from the island long before I could even speak to her. Most likely, our first meeting never would have happened in the first place.

  There is no such impulse in me. I mostly ask about Hyllus these days, and about Ana. Just as she suggested. It is painful and embarrassing to learn how little I knew her, but there is solace in coming to know her now.

  Yesterday, the Oracle told me that the blue hippopotamus that she made for Hyllus was the symbol of her royal house. Apparently, her childhood palace was filled with statuettes and of the animal, elegantly carved in Lapis Lazuli. The floor of the palace’s throne room was a vast and sparkling blue mosaic, showing the full body of a hippopotamus, that cast an otherworldly light over the place.

  The villagers let me be. It’s easy to tell her other victims apart from her priestesses and accomplices. They keep to themselves, write, take long walks. There is one I speak to occasionally. He used to be a soldier in the Seleucid empire, but it seems to be an unspoken rule that we do not discuss our histories in too much detail.

  He told me that he too, spent a long time using his questions to find peace with what had happened. But then, as he settled in, he had started to wonder what things are made of, ultimately if we could see small enough, what would we see. It seemed a simple question, so he asked the Oracle. Her answer was so exceedingly vague that he couldn’t help but ask a series of further questions, even though he was only allowed three in total. She was patient with him, but the more she answered, the less he understood. Before long this was the problem that occupied his mind, to understand these answers. He has made great progress, he says, and suggests that sunlight and rain are both made of the same substance, which is in part like a missile from slingshot and in part like a wave on the sea.

  This seems to be how most of them spend their days. They use the oracle to answer great and profound questions, and then spend their days attempting to understand the answers. Much is written, but we all accept that it is most likely that she will not allow any of it to survive, or to escape from the island. We are allowed to satisfy our own curiosities, but the days when we might have some effect on the course of history are behind us. We are not dead yet, but we are by no means fully alive. Whatever grand discoveries we make, they die with us.

  I wonder, is she content with the same fate? Has she decided to make her exit from this world gracefully, with nobody ever to know what part she played in our history? Two-thousand years, she said. That is enough responsibility for any one person to shoulder. Perhaps she would allow something to remain hidden. Something, she could make sure we would only find in time. Something to let them know that there was some order, some choice, that the world they suffered through, as bad as it was, was not the worst possible. That there was somebody, in the depths of time, making sure that though they erred and suffered, someone somewhere would at least learn from their suffering. Someone who made sure that that lesson stayed alive.

  I feel that they should know. And for all she’s done, I feel that she deserves for it to be recorded.