The oracle, p.23
The Oracle, page 23
“I will,” Karl says.
An ax hacks at the door. Sharpened steel punches through the wooden planks. Splinters form.
Smoke billows into the air. There’s a burst of flames as the fire reaches a tray with paint brushes soaking in mineral turpentine on the workbench.
Shadows move around Karl. Wraiths swirl through the smoke. At first, Karl’s confused. There are other people in the warehouse. He coughs, struggling to make them out in the haze.
Niko slumps forward, crumpling over. He sprawls out on the floor without making any attempt to catch himself. It’s as though someone has cut the strings of a puppet. And with that, he’s dead.
A hand grabs Karl’s shoulder, but it’s kind. He’s not being held, he’s being helped.
“Get to the door,” someone yells over the crackling of the fire spreading. Karl turns to see an old man with a wrinkled face and straggly grey hair. The man’s hands are massive, with thick, sturdy fingers honed from decades of fishing in the gulf. Around him, men grab crates, carrying them to an open door at the far end of the warehouse. The wooden boards on the front door break inward under the blows from the ax. An arm reaches through the gap and undoes the lock, opening the door. Karl grabs a small crate and rushes out the other door and into the night. Dozens of men are organizing outside, rushing to empty the warehouse as flames break through the roof.
Smoke rises into the air. Burning embers fall from the sky. Several of the crates are smouldering. Someone’s yelling, trying to organize the effort. Buckets are dipped into the ocean and handed off to men throwing water on the burning timber.
Karl puts his crate down next to the others and steps into the shadows on the far side of the breakwater. He rummages around, searching for the Omphalos.
“What are you doing?” someone asks him.
He bluffs. “Looking for embers. We need to protect the paintings.”
“Yes, yes,” the man replies, turning away from him and rushing back to the warehouse as it is engulfed in flames. Still, men emerge from the smoke carrying crates between them. A line forms. Buckets are passed from one person to another with water sloshing around as it’s thrown on the fire.
The Omphalos calls to Karl.
He can feel it drawing him in. The hair on his arms rises. He pries open the top of a crate, fighting against the nails holding the lid in place. Karl grabs a stick and uses it to gain some leverage. With the top raised on an angle, he slips his hand into the straw. In the darkness, Karl feels something familiar. Rope. Tiny splinters of metal brush against his fingers, causing his vision to blur. He has to fight to stay conscious. His hand closes around the rope, and he hauls the bag out of the crate.
Karl’s trapped. He’s at the end of the breakwater. There’s no way to slip past the dozens of men fighting the fire raging within the warehouse. Armed men carry rifles slung over their shoulders. There’s shouting and yelling as people struggle to make sense of the confusion. Sections of the roof collapse, sending embers cascading into the air.
Karl does the only thing he can.
Even though he can’t swim, he slips silently into the sea.
The Gulf of Corinth
Flames leap from the warehouse. Smoke rises high in the air. Burning wood crackles as various people drag out statues and paintings, rushing to save them from the fire. The gendarmerie arrives from Itea in two cars, followed by a truck full of villagers to fight the fire as it spreads to the surrounding buildings.
With the Omphalos slung over his shoulder in its knotted rope bag, Karl pushes his way through the water. He can’t swim, but he doesn’t need to. The water isn’t too deep. He slips beneath the waves lapping against the breakwater and pushes off the sand, soaring forward beneath the ocean, kicking with his feet and pulling with his hands, coming up for air after twenty feet. His head bobs on the surface. If he extends his toes, he can touch rocks on the bottom of the shallow bay. At a guess, he’s fifty feet from shore, far enough that he can’t be easily seen. He pushes himself along the bottom, sweeping his hands around him, moving away from the raging inferno on shore. Part of the roof collapses, sending embers flying into the dark sky like stars exploding in the night. Several nearby trees catch alight.
There’s a wooden jetty several hundred yards further west. With a crowd gathering around the burning warehouse, the focus is on containing the fire. Volunteers line up near the shore, passing buckets full of water between them to douse the flames.
The sky is still dark, but dawn is approaching. With the stars still radiant above him, the pitch-black of night is slowly fading in the east, turning blue as dawn edges closer. In the distance, he can see fishing boats anchored in the bay or tied up on the various docks spread between the two towns.
The prophecy of the Oracle haunts Karl. He saw himself alone in one of those boats, and that told him Niko would die, and yet he didn’t warn the young Greek. He could have—should have—sent Niko away and headed into the warehouse alone. As easy as it is to oversimplify all that has happened, Karl knows Niko would have never left him for one simple reason: he felt he had to redeem himself. Besides, Karl would have never made it inside the warehouse without Niko.
It’s a strange point to consider during a war, but Karl feels there has been too much death. In the space of 24 hours, he’s seen well over a dozen people die on both sides of the conflict. And he’s killed several of them himself. When is it enough? And Karl feels for the country he loves. He doesn’t need the Oracle to tell him Adolf Hitler won’t be satisfied until the last German soldier has fallen beneath the treads of a Russian tank or the tires of an American Jeep.
Karl pushes his way through the sea, feeling the current pulling him on. The tide is changing. There’s a slight undertow, drawing him further out into the bay, but he can still touch the bottom if he submerges slightly between steps. As best he understands it, the tide is going out.
On reaching an old wooden jetty, he climbs up between a few fishing boats, using them for cover. Karl stays low, trying to hide his profile from anyone watching from the shore, and slips into one boat and then another. He checks the weight of the large steel fuel tanks, lifting them slightly to gauge how full they are by their weight and how fuel sloshes around within them.
The third boat he slips into has two full tanks. It’s a small boat, not more than twenty-five feet in length. There’s a wheelhouse above a diesel engine built into the hull, but the rear of the cabin is open, allowing the skipper to steer with the rudder while tending to the engine. Nets and crates have been stacked on the open deck, ready for use.
With dawn breaking and the light rising around him, Karl searches for a spare key to start the engine. He reaches beneath the seat, searches above the awning on the cabin and checks in various storage boxes, but he can’t find the key anywhere. He’d hoped that the fishermen would keep a second key handy on the vessel, but where?
There’s talking on shore. The village is coming to life.
And it’s then Karl sees it—the key.
It’s in the ignition.
Karl shakes his head.
Quietly, he slips over the edge of the boat and back onto the dock. Working quickly, he unties the ropes, tossing them onto the deck. Already, the boat is drifting with the tide. Karl has to step across a gap of a few feet to make it back into the fishing boat before it floats away. He turns the rudder, bringing the bow around so it’s facing parallel with the shore and waits with his hand on the ignition key, urging the boat to float out into deeper water. He feels conflicted. On one hand, he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself by starting the engine. On the other, the longer he drifts close to shore, the more likely it is that someone is going to spot him. The wind decides for him—it’s blowing him toward the next jetty.
Karl has driven tractors on his grandfather’s farm. Although they’re entirely different from a fishing boat, he figures the diesel engine must be roughly similar, being an industrial machine rather than a slick commercial engine like those in his mother’s Volkswagen. It’s probably going to have a similar starting procedure.
He turns the key by one notch and waits for the glow plug light to come on. Then he turns the key further to the right. The engine cranks but doesn’t start.
Karl releases the key for a moment and then tries again.
Nothing.
He’s making noise—too much noise—and noise travels over water, especially in the calm of the early morning. He’s going to attract attention, if he hasn’t already.
Karl panics.
He knows he needs to calm himself down and think carefully. Engines are designed to start. Starting comes naturally to them. Panicking isn’t helping. He just needs the right sequence. The red hue coming from the glow plug tells him the battery is providing power. Fuel. The problem has to be fuel. And that’s when he feels like an idiot. Of course, an engine needs fuel. There are two fuel tanks. Each of them has a small brass tap that turns by 90 degrees. They’re both off. He opens one and then squeezes a bulb on the hose running into the engine. Two squeezes. He needs just enough fuel to prime the engine, not enough to flood it.
Karl turns the key again.
The engine turns over.
Nothing.
The second jetty is looming close in the darkness. He’s going to clip one of the boats docked there if he can’t get the engine started.
He releases the key, gives the rubber bulb one more pump, trying to find the right balance of fuel, wanting to avoid flooding the engine, and turns the key again.
The diesel engine coughs and splutters into life. Black smoke billows into the air, but the engine quickly settles. Karl adjusts the throttle and slips the engine into gear in much the same way he would his grandfather’s tractor on the farm. There’s a clunk within the gearbox, and the boat lurches forward.
Working with the rudder, Karl quickly realizes he has to push it the opposite way from where he wants to go. To head left, he pushes the rudder to the right. That’s going to take some getting used to.
Karl smiles. The gentle rhythm of the engine chugging away and the sound of the dark water swirling behind the boat have a calming effect. He breathes easy. Karl steers out into the harbor and slowly increases the throttle. He wants to get as far away as he can as quickly as he can without drawing attention to himself. He needs to sound like any other fishing boat heading out to sea.
In the east, the first rays of the sun are lighting up the clouds, giving them a golden hue. As he’s sitting sideways, facing the coastline as he heads west, Karl can see the way the hills are coming to life. Somewhere up there, Sophia’s grave is catching its first sunrise, with the light warming the earth. And it hurts to think that she will never see another day. For her, all that is left is a memory and a handful of words engraved on a wooden cross. War came to Greece, and, one by one, her entire family was killed. First, her father was shot by the Italians, then her mother died of a broken heart, then she was shot accidentally, and finally her brother died saving Karl’s life.
Karl doesn’t know what he’s going to do next. All he knows is that he needs to protect the Omphalos from the communists and return it to Delphi, but that’s not something he can do immediately. There’s too much chaos. He needs to wait until the war is over.
With the Omphalos lying in its netted bag on the seat beside him, he sails out of the bay and into the Gulf of Corinth. All around him, there are mountains. If he didn’t know better, he’d think he was in a lake, but Sophia told him there’s a passage to the sea. He looks to the west, using the sun at his back as a compass, knowing that at some point the view before him will match what he saw in the vision of the Oracle.
And it’s then he realizes…
The Oracle.
It was wrong.
“What are you?” he asks, raising the rope bag and looking at the way sunlight glistens off the golden orb within. There’s no response. He could touch it. He could see if it will provide him with any more insights into the future, but deep down, he doesn’t want to know.
Karl holds the Omphalos in his hands, looking at the way thousands of fine golden strands rise from its surface, trying to reach his palms, but the rope is too thick. He can feel the sway of the Oracle. It calls to him, longing to interact with him, but Karl can’t—he won’t touch it. He doesn’t trust it. Sophia described the Omphalos as the gateway to the Oracle, but Karl doesn’t understand what that means. He remembers the way the Oracle seized her mind before he descended into the cave. That it could reach out and control her when she was merely nearby scares him.
Karl puts the bag down on the wooden planks lining the hull of the fishing boat. He has to. If he continues holding the Omphalos, he knows its siren song will overwhelm him and force him to touch it.
Sophia trusted the Oracle. Karl is not so sure. Far from being precise, its prophecies seem surreal, being dream-like. And this particular prophecy was wrong.
Karl is in the wrong boat.
In his vision, Karl saw himself sailing out through the headlands on either side of the Gulf of Corinth. He had a sail raised. It was white, made from heavy canvas with thick stitching. The boat he was in didn’t have a motor. Or, if it did, it wasn’t running, as the boat was sailing quietly, leaning to one side, rushing through the water with ease. He remembers being surprised by how peaceful it was to hear the gulls flying overhead and the gentle splash of water against the hull. After the chaos of war, which is always occasioned by thundering booms and the smell of burnt oil, it was refreshing to feel the cool air on his face and the fresh smell of the ocean. He remembers being relieved to have escaped from the bitter stench of war.
But he’s in a fishing boat.
There’s no mast.
Besides, Karl doesn’t know how to hoist a sail even if he had one. Where do the ropes go? Which ones does he need to pull? Which ones need to be released? Or tightened?
Looking back, he can see other fishing boats dotted across the vast stretch of water, but no one is following him.
He’s done it.
He’s free.
“Oh, Sophia… you should be here,” he says to the wind, watching as a gull lands on the bow. The bird sits on the wooden deck for a few minutes, resting before flying off. Watching the seabird winging its way over the water, he thinks about what it means to be free.
“I never knew,” he says to the ghost of a woman he only met yesterday, imagining her sitting opposite him on the deck of the boat with the wind whipping her dark hair around her face. “I—I thought I… Before I met you, I thought I was free. That’s the crazy thing. I was sure. Convinced. I grew up in a loving family. I went to church on Sundays. I went to boarding school. I worked with Grandpapa on the farm over the summer. I went to work with my father in the Reichsministerium der Finanzen. I read Greek philosophy with my mother. I was free. I was sure I was free, but birds will always sing, even in a cage.”
Karl’s never been on a boat before, but he decides he loves it. Why? Because he’s truly free. With the wind in his hair and waves slapping at the hull, the thrum of the engine and the creaking wood, his world has changed.
“Back then, I was sure I was free, but I was caught in the rapids, swept along through the white water, rushing toward the edge of a thousand-foot waterfall. Germany is a lie—a lie I believed, a lie I loved, a lie I never questioned. Were it not for you, I’d be marching to my death like so many others.”
He leans gently on the rudder, changing course, staying roughly in the center of the waterway, looking out at the rugged Greek mountains disappearing into the sea on either side of him.
“And now… what should I do? I have it. The center of the world. The key to unlocking the Oracle. The Omphalos.”
Karl looks at the golden artifact lying in the water that’s gathered at the bottom of the boat, still wrapped in its rope-knot bag.
“I promised. I promised you… But what did I promise? To protect you? I failed at that… and now?”
Karl doubts himself. He doubts not only his future but the future of humanity.
“I could wait… I should wait. I’ll wait until the war is over, until the communists have been defeated like the Nazis. And then what? Return to Delphi? What bitterness is there in those dark olives? Me? I would wait until nightfall and then climb up through the ravine to return the Omphalos, but who would look after it? The lineage is dead. There are no more women to serve as the high priestess of Pythia—no one to protect the Oracle.”
Karl hangs his head. He looks down at his boots.
“But it’s safe now, right? The Omphalos. Only it isn’t. It might be safe for a day, a year, a decade, perhaps even a century, but not forever. What happens when it is found? What then? Who is there to guide us?”
Karl hates himself. He wipes tears from his eyes as he talks to her ghost, longing for her to reply but knowing she never will.
“It lied, Sophia.”
He shakes his head in despair.
“Of all the possibilities, it’s the one we never considered… Not you. Not me. Not the professor. I dare say none of those charged with its care have ever stopped to think about what it is really doing… To us, it’s a god. To us, it’s miraculous—providing a glimpse into the future. Only it can’t see the future, not really.”
He smiles.
“Oh, it’s good, but it doesn’t know, it guesses. Now, it’s far better than I am at guessing, but it is no god. And I think Apollo knew that… I saw him, you know… the Oracle showed me what happened when it first landed here thousands of years ago. And Apollo saw the Oracle with perhaps more clarity than any of us.”
A warplane flies low over the gulf. The drone of its engine is like an angry hornet’s nest. The plane banks, revealing a circular insignia—British. It’s carrying a single bomb hanging from its fuselage, looking for German boats. As quick as it came, it’s gone, still searching for targets.
“Have you ever played chess, Sophia?”
There’s no reply. Karl’s not expecting one, but speaking aloud helps him settle his thinking.
