The Sibyl
When you reach the city of Cumae…there you will see the prophetess in her frenzy, chanting deep in her rocky cavern, charting the Fates, committing her vision to words, to signs on leaves.
– The Aeneid, by Vergil. Translated by Robert Fagles
The king finds her in a hollow of trees. The sibyl sits with her laurels and ink. Her eyelids flicker, though she is wide awake, and she dreams onto the leaves.
“I want to know my future,” he says. “My kingdom’s—There’s war on our borders, famine and drought. Please—”
She sees him through a haze of myrrh and writes her vision on a laurel leaf. A breeze like a god’s breath blows through her shrine, inhaling the incense, then exhaling, scattering the leaves across the ground.
The king’s cries echo as he crouches among the leaves, searching for his prophecy. “Which one is it?” he asks the oracle. He strains to read riddles in the half-light, all the same to mortal eyes.
Her eyes open halfway. “What’s the difference between one dream and the next? Only the feeling upon waking.” She blinks. “I’ve already forgotten.”
“But you must help me. I’m a king—”
“They’re all kings,” she says. “Kings, generals, and priests. I’ve foretold great plagues and holy wars. Mere leaves blowing on the breeze.” Her voice is hoarse from eons of smoke. “It does not matter. Your Fate will be the same whether you know it or not.”
“Don’t you care?”
The oldest prophecies are dust, a whiff of decay, and fading memories written in her youthful hand. Back then, she’d been beautiful and beloved by a god, his chosen to weather the ages. And weather them she did, until even old age was a distant memory. She did not have a choice, her Fate long since crunched underfoot and rotted away.
“Not anymore,” she says. “Not now, when I have nothing left but dreams.”
The king leaves with a handful of prophecies, hoping his is among them. There’s nothing else he can do.
She dreams decades away, writing her riddles, peering through veils of prophecy, waking and sleeping one and the same. Questions and answers stream together. Incense fills her nostrils, and offerings of wine coat her tongue. Inquisitive, fearful, and angry faces peer at her, all in shadow. All the same.
An old man approaches her, bent and gnarled as the sacred laurel tree, his skin like loose bark. He asks no questions and makes no move to snatch the leaves from her hand.
“I’m not here for a prophecy,” he says. “When you’re my age, only one question remains, and I’d rather not know the answer.”
Time sways in the wisps of scented smoke, and she sees again the face of the young king, beseeching her with a handful of leaves. “Why have you come back?” she asks.
“I don’t know if I took the right prophecy or which one it was, but I ruled for decades without knowing. I’ve seen the wars and survived the famines and droughts. Now my succession is sure, my grandchildren grown, and my borders secure.” The king smiles. “There is nothing left for me but dreams.”
So he sits beside her in the hollow, her self-appointed attendant, and he dreams with her.
He asks her to read her riddles, and they are more real spoken aloud. He holds her withered hand when she wanders lost in visions. He bids her pause and truly taste the fine wine she is offered. “Some things are better with age,” he says, and her crackling laugh echoes. And he makes sure supplicants leave with the right prophecy.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “They’ll realize too late to change anything.”
“It matters,” he says. “You don’t remember how it feels.”
Decades shrink to years, to months, to moments. Now the future isn’t a veil, but a dark shroud. What will she do without him? He doesn’t want to know when, though she knows.
“Does it matter less because you can’t change it?” he asks.
She sets down her stylus and blinks with clear eyes. They look out over the sea of dead leaves together. One day, when the last mortal goes down to Hades and the gods themselves are forgotten, she will finally dry up and blow away with them.
“I’ll remember you,” she says.
“But will you dream of me?”
“I hope so.”
He smiles and closes his eyes. “And I will dream and dream…”
* * *
Ⓒ Anna Dallara