The Double Tongue by William Golding

killing herself with honeycakes. We’ll have to carry her to the oracle and throw her down the steps.’
    ‘Ionides Peisistratides!’

IV
     
     

     

 
     
    But the gods had other plans. The new First Lady died that very night in her snorting sleep. It is not good luck for the people to know too much about the living and dying of the Pythias. They are there, or not. People there, having accustomed themselves, though unconsciously, to refer to the Two Ladies now found themselves having consciously to refer to The Lady, concerning whom those with any knowledge of the oracle’s history would find themselves exclaiming amusedly ‘It’s quite like old times!’ The old times for the oracle were some six thousand years ago at a modest computation. There was, as well as this, a matter of no more than two weeks between the death and the festival of the spring solstice, combined with the Games and the Questions, a hundred other questions and the transfer of my few personal belongings from the apartments of the Second Lady to those of the First.
    I was terrified. The terror was not of this world. As far as this world was concerned nothing made much difference. I was a shrouded figure, the one woman now in Delphi whose face was never bared. I was aware of a rumour that I was younger than any First Lady had ever been though how young they did not know. But the explanation given was that I was a virgin, not a married woman living apart from her husband, and well on in years – fifty or so. The rumour attached was that I had already given signs of the god’s choice. That fresh, bright air of Delphi seemed to be able to create stories out of nothing. For the people did not believe in the Olympians alone. It seemed sometimes that every street corner had its arguing group who swore to the reality of this demon or that, this or that nostrum for either seeing the demon or alternatively not seeing him. My information was that the new First Lady was rumoured to have, literally, eyes in the back of her head. She was said to be accompanied by a whole troupe of demons whose bidding she was compelled to do. Delphi, in fact, was a muck heap of nonsense. I refused to have anything to do with it. To be a Pythia, to be educated in the hexameter in case the god should choose to revert to using it, was trouble enough. I buried myself in the bookroom and spoke to no one but Perseus. Perseus spoke all languages that there are. This did not prevent his Greek from having a curious malformation in which the ‘p’s became ‘k’s. It was also thick, so that his ‘k’ was never sure that it was not a ‘kh’. By now when I sometimes spoke – especially if we were discussing books as we frequently were – I would observe a smile flit over his darkling face. Learned and distinguished man as he was, he was still a slave and I did not feel it proper to admit him to such intimacy as I enjoyed – the right word – with Ionides. If we were not married – I mean Ionides and I – if he still had and would always have that shuddering distaste for a woman’s flesh which made any physical intimacy out of the question, I doubt if any married couple ever approaches the intimacy of thought and feeling that we sometimes enjoyed – or, and I must make the qualification – that I for my part felt we enjoyed. One day he came to the bookroom when Perseus was hidden away in his own place, trying as usual to make sense of the picture writing on a Cretan brick. Ionides was jubilant.
    ‘First Lady – two things! First – they are bringing the Ion of Euripides! You will see your first tragedy! Second, they feel that the death in succession of two Ladies means that the god has a special purpose and need – imagine a god having a need, oh Athens! – a special need of the current First Lady. They are organizing the greatest, most brilliant pomp that Athens has ever sent!’
    ‘A pomp?’
    ‘The city fathers, all the priests of all the gods new and old, the