The Arrows of Hercules
L. Sprague de Camp
One – CUMAE
It was spring. A blustering boreal wind whistled clown from the flanks of the snow-crested Apennines, making the umbrella pines nod and the slender cypresses sway. It roared across the dark green Campanian plain, drying the brown mud of the fields around the villages and ruffling the sky-blue puddles left by the recent rain.
The wind rushed on over the Phlegraean Fields, a weird, legend-haunted region of sharp-ridged volcanic craters, of hot springs and sulfur-breathing lakes, of mysterious caverns which, men said, led to the underworld. It stirred the dense, dark thickets of ilex that crowded round the base of the citadel of Cumae. It flapped the woolens of those who clustered about the door to the Sibyl's chambers, on the seaward side of the Kill. It billowed the Campanian magnate's scarlet cloak, the Roman knight's chalk-whitened toga, the white cloaks of the bourgeois, and the brown cloaks of the soldiers and workers. It fluttered the threadbare shirts of the shivering slaves. It stirred the Tyrrhenian Sea at the foot of the hill until the water sparkled in the reborn sun like the swords of a distant battle. Overhead, the leaden pall of the last ten-day rolled away to southward, leaving a deep bright sky streaked with snowy plumes of cirrus.
On this morn of the tenth of Elaphebolion*(*Approximately March.), in the first year of the ninety-fifth Olympiad, when Laches was Archon of Athens, a runner pounded south on the coastal road, panting as he ran. As he sighted the acropolis of Cumae, he slowed and glanced back along the road by which he had come. No pursuers were in sight.
Above him, unaware, the crowd of seekers milled about, clutching their cloaks against the blast. The priests ushered out of the grotto a pair of swarthy, hook-nosed, long-robed Phoenicians, with rings in their ears and conical caps on their curly heads. As the Phoenicians went their way, murmuring in their own guttural tongue, men in the crowd began waving their arms, snapping their fingers, and calling out:
"Next!"
"It's my turn!"
"Take me next, O priest! I pay the god well!"
The clamor swelled until a priest beckoned the trio of Tarentines. One of these was a stooped, elderly man with a wreath on his scanty white hair. The other two were young, wearing hooded cloaks and high Thracian boots. One of the two was short and stout, with soft, rounded features. The other was tall, bony, knobby, and angular. Deep-set eyes looked out between his craggy, overhanging brows and wide cheekbones. A prominent nose, like a curved knife, divided his face, and the curly brown beard beginning to sprout from cheek and chin did not yet fully mask the sharp angles of his big jaw.
At the priest's gesture, the three started forward. The oldster moved slowly and painfully, with the short one bouncing on one side and the tall one shambling on the other. The Campanian magnate said loudly in Oscan:
"By the gods and spirits, I have waited long enough! After all, I am Gavius Trebatius!"
The priest smiled blandly. "All in good time, my lord."
"Surely a man in my position should precede these polluted foreigners!"
"My dear sir, you will hardly dispute precedence with the Archon of Taras!"
"Most reverend sir ..." The voices of the two dropped to an undertone as they continued their argument face to face, with gestures of angry impatience. The Tarentines paused uncertainly. At the elbow of the tall young Tarentine stood a big Celt in tunic and trews, checkered with a gaudy pattern of yellow, red, and green.
Grinning through his luxuriant bronze mustache, he murmured in accented Greek:
" 'Tis a good point that the holy father has, my lad. Did I not hear you say the old fellow was a king, now?"
"Not exactly. That's what the title means, but in our city the Archon has only priestly duties. Nothing political."
"You mean the poor man cannot have the head off anybody he thinks would look prettier without it?" The Celt clucked. "If that's your civilization—"
The red-cloaked Trebatius turned back into the crowd, scowling. The priest said in his oily voice: "You may come now, my friends."
"Wake up, Zopyros!" said the elderly Tarentine. "Are you doing figures in your head again?"
The tall youth grinned sheepishly. "I was working out how many oboloi a word the Sibyl's prophecy will cost our treasury."
"Abandoned scoffer! Come along."
The three paced sedately behind the priest, who led them to the tunnel hewn out of the rock of the hill. At the entrance, the other priest stood with his hand out. The Archon fumbled in his scrip and brought out a small, thin-leather sack, which he dropped with a clink into the upturned palm.
The first priest led them into the tunnel. At the threshold, Zopyros stumbled. The priest and the others frowned at the omen, but Zopyros quickly recovered and walked on as if nothing had happened.
This tunnel was sixteen feet high, several plethra*(*A plethron=100 feet.) in length, and of peculiar form. The lower third was roughly square in cross section, while for the upper two thirds the walls leaned inward, forming a trapezoid with a narrow strip of ceiling along the top. Light came through from a series of lateral galleries of the same six-sided form, cut through to the surface of the hill on the right. The stretches of light and dark tunnel made a series of concentric hexagonal patterns, which drew Zopyros' entranced gaze down towards the audience chamber at the far end.
Zopyros walked in a daze. It seemed that there must be some cosmic meaning to this piece of mountain-hewn geometry. Could he but grasp the pattern in its entirety ... The volume of a trapezoidal prism, he thought, would be—let's see—the length, times the height, times one half the sum of the width at the base and the top ...
Still pacing slowly, they reached the audience chamber. This was a large rectangular room, dark except where a shaft of sunlight slanted down through an overhead skylight and lit a patch of the rocky wall. Off to the left were more rock-hewn chambers, where the prophetess lived.
In the center of the chamber, an elderly woman—large, strongly built, and swathed in many cubits of black woolens—sat on a fantastically carved oaken throne. Stray strands of the woman's gray hair picked up the splash of sunlight on the wall. The air was heavy with incense.
Beside the throne stood yet another priest. The two priests murmured together in the dimness. Then the priest who had been standing beside the throne said:
"O Sibyl, the Archon of Taras seeks counsel for his city."
For a hundred heartbeats the woman sat silently, staring at the Tarentines. Then her keen gaze filmed over. Her eyelids drooped; her breath came heavily. She gasped, faster and faster, and burst into speech. She spoke in a loud, harsh voice. It sounded to Zopyros like some peculiar Oscan dialect, but the Sibyl spoke so fast that he could not be sure whether it was such a dialect or mere gibberish.
The woman ceased. The priest beside the throne said: "This is the word of the Sibyclass="underline"
The Sibyl also has a personal message for you," the priest concluded. "Wait."
They waited, while the wind whistled in the skylight and the galleries. The woman gasped, trembled, and again burst into speech. This time the priest said:
"For the Archon, she sees an Etruscan candle, burnt nearly to its end. For the short youth, she sees seven golden crowns. For the tall youth, she sees an immense bow. It is the bow of Hercules himself. Many men try to bend the bow but fail. Then this youth steps forward.