“Aszi, you will come with me. Your elder brothers must remain here and guard this entrance. If we can make no progress below, this crevasse will be our only avenue of escape.” Turning to the sheer cliff, she added undaunted, “I shall make the first descent.”
But he’d taken her by the wrist. His handsome face searched hers with great concern. Then he drew her to him and he gently kissed her forehead.
“No, let me go down first, Clio,” he said. “I was born on the rocks, you know, carita, I can climb like a goat. My brothers will lower you after me.” When she shook her head, he told her, “No matter what your father sketched out on this map before he died, it’s just one man’s scholarly opinion, formed from reading dusty books. Through all his travels, your father could never find the place. And you know well that oracles are often dangerous. The one at Delphi kept a brood of deadly pythons in her cave. You can’t know what we’ll find in the shrine you imagine is down there, in the dark.”
Clio shuddered at the thought, and the two strapping men nodded in support of their brother’s bravery. Aszi lit a second lamp, which he clipped onto his own helmet. The men secured the heavy rope to a rock and their younger brother, with only his bare hands on hemp, used his hobnailed boots to clear the wall and vanished with a brief, flashing smile into the darkness.
After what seemed a very long while, the rope swung loose, so they knew he had touched bottom. Clio passed her own rope between her legs to form a harness, which the brothers secured to the main line as double protection if she slipped. Then she, too, went over the side.
As Clio descended the sheer rock face, alone in silence, she studied the schist in the light of her lamp as if it contained the key to some riddle. If walls had ears, she thought, this one might reveal thousands of years of mysteries. Just like the Sibyl herself, a woman who could see all of the future and the past.
The oldest oracle in history, a woman who lived in many lands over dozens of generations, the Sibyl was born on Mount Ida, from which the gods once overlooked the war on the plains of Troy. More than five hundred years before Christ, the Sibyl traveled to Rome, where she offered to sell to King Tarquin the books of her prophecies spanning the next twelve thousand years. When he refused to meet her price she burned the first three volumes, then the next three, until only three books were left. Tarquin did buy these, and he enshrined them in the Temple of Jupiter, where they remained until that structure, too, burned to the ground, in 83 B.C., along with its precious contents.
The Sibyl’s vision was so profound and far-reaching, she had been granted any wish by the gods. She asked to live for one thousand years, but she forgot to ask for youth. As the end of her life approached, she had shrunk so small that nothing remained but her voice, which still prophesied from a little glass ampulla placed in this ancient cave of the mysteries. People traveled from far and wide to hear her song—until Augustus silenced her, for eternity, with Neapolitan clay.
Clio hoped beyond hope that the information her father had gleaned from his wealth of readings in ancient texts, a vision he’d only really understood on his deathbed, would prove true. Whether true or not, to follow the overriding wish of a dying man had already cost her everything she’d known in her young life.
When she reached bottom, she felt Aszi’s strong hands grasp her waist, helping her to gain her footing on the slippery rocks that bordered the onrushing underground river.
They made their way for more than an hour through the caverns beneath the volcano, following the directions her father had laid forth on the map. At last they came to the hollow, high in the rock, beneath which the Sibyl’s successors, young country girls, had for centuries sat on a golden throne—now a mass of crumbled stones—transmitting the prophecies passed down through them from the mind of the ancient goddess.
Aszi stopped beside Clio, then he unexpectedly bent to her, and he kissed her on the lips. He smiled. “You are nearly free,” he said.
Without another word he bounded up the crumbled pile of rock to the hollow, scaling the last length of cliff with his hands. Clio held her breath as he gained purchase against the rock with his boots and she saw him stretch his arm to reach his hand into the high hollow, feeling about in the dark hole above his head. After a long moment he drew something out.
When he returned, he handed it to Clio. It was a shimmering object, like a tiny vial, not much larger than her palm. Clio had never believed that the Sibyl’s voice was contained in an ampulla, but rather that the ancient vial held her prophetic words. Her prophecies, Plutarch had said, were written on small bits of metal, so light and fragile that, when released, they were borne away on the wind.
Clio carefully opened the vial and the tiny leaves tumbled out into her palm, each the size of a fingernail and each inscribed in Greek. She touched one leaf and looked into Aszi’s dark purple eyes gazing into her own.
“What does it say?” he whispered.
“In Greek, this one says ‘En to pan’,” she told him. “It means ‘One is all.’”
The Sibyl had foretold what would happen at each critical turning point in history—and, more important, how it was connected to each critical event of the past. It was said that she’d predicted
