As always, dawn came late to me, well after all the rest of the world had begun to stir and hum. The sun’s rays made a gentle, lazy surmounting of the weathered bricks that rimmed the mouth of the well above my head, sending glow and gleam floating down to my blinking eye on rafts of dust. I had scarcely time to yawn (cavernously, to a degree that would’ve broken a lesser being’s jawbones and spine alke) and scrape my fangs clean of sleep-drool before the first light of my morning was obscured by the shadow of someone’s head.
“Oracle,” the head whispered quickly, “mother of mindfulness and father of foresight, the open eye in the dark, I put a question to your ear in fair exchange for payment.” It said the empty, silly titles with no formality or respect at all, something that I heard all too rarely. From its timing, haste, quiet, and twitchiness, I could almost guess the question before it was asked. “The daughter of the carpenter, who lives a half-mile from our home, is she…umm…”
Yes, I knew the question. I also knew the answer, but giving it to him at this point would be too easy. “Payment before answer. And it’s customary to finish the question before the answer is given as well.”
I could practically smell the blush bloom. “Right, right, sorry. Sorry.” There was a rustling of feathers, a strangled “awk!” cut short, and a freshly throttled chicken plummeted onto the rock at my side. “The daughter of the carpenter, who lives a half-mile – or maybe two-thirds of a mile – from our home, is she, ah… expecting?”
I was half-tempted to prompt further clarification, but felt merciful. The chicken was a good fat one too; he’d be hard up to explain just how it had gone missing from his father’s coop. “No. But only through luck and luck alone. Don’t try it again; her father already thinks something’s up, and I don’t have to say anything about what he thinks of you. Find a new girl, speak nicely to the carpenter, or be more careful.” A lot more. If he’d had a bit more fortitude for another fifteen seconds, he’d be getting a different answer. Saved from adolescent impulses by adolescent lack of control.
“Right! Thank you! Thank you!” The relief filled the air, but I couldn’t so much as smell it under the rich blood of the chicken. The bird really was succulent. “Uh, goodbye, oracle.”
“Go,” I mumbled through a mouthful of feathers.
The last bone had barely vanished down my throat when another set of footsteps arrived, much heavier and more stolid than the youthful skip-step of my last observer.
“Oracle,” it said, flat and impatient together. “Mother of mindfulness father of foresight open eye in the dark, question for payment: how many days ‘till the first real frost?”
Trickier. But doable. A bloodied rabbit from above was a good step towards earning my efforts as well; it must’ve nosed around the fields a little too closely. “Sixteen give or take. There’ll be at least three mellow ones in a row just before it strikes, so watch for those and be ready to save the crops.”
“Hm,” said the client. He left without thanks, a practical man. Too practical for ritual, or far-flung thoughts, or basic manners. A good sort, and I’m glad there aren’t more like him.
There was a lull then, now that the early risers had done and had their questions. An hour or two squirmed by, during which I ate the rabbit organ by organ, as much to pass the time as for the nourishment. I lounged against the rocks at the bottom of the well, sides fitting squarely into the worn-through grooves my bones had forced into the stone.
“Oracle,” said a soft, startling voice, and I was forced to admit that I’d been napping. Surely I wasn’t that old yet? “Mother of mindfulness, father of foresight, the open eye in the dark, I put a question to your ear in fair exchange for payment.” Down came a handful of mice. Lovely for a snack, but a poor meal. They’d last the day much better than rabbit giblets. “Did that louse that calls itself my neighbour’s son touch my little girl?”
I thought over my phrasing. “No,” I said. She was bigger than her father, I wouldn’t call that especially little, for a human.
“Are you sure?” he asked. His hands were on the well-rim; I could fancy nearly seeing the knuckles whiten.
“Yes.” Doubting me, even on so dear an issue? That was something new. I’d have thought with over a hundred years of accuracy behind me, I was past the stage of the skeptic. About the only people nowadays whose minds refused to change at my sworn-in word were proud parents.
“He must’ve done it. I’m sure he did it. She won’t look me in the eye proper now. He touched her, didn’t he”
“I have answered your question.”
I must have added just enough weight to that last sentence to head him off, as he slowly released the well and left without another word. I dislike rants. I also dislike hearing people’s life stories. Everyone has one, they’re all different, shining, brilliant examples of the human condition etcetera etcetera, but in the end I just can’t care enough. In this, I was in company of thought with most other humans. Besides, they were all window-dressing, mere trappings. The same ten questions, the same sets of clothing, all draped over one big request: will it be alight? That’s not any question, that’s The Question. Sometimes it’s phrased very funnily, but it’s all the same. A thousand thousand times in a life everybody asks it, and around here they all get asked of me.
Oracle, mother of mindfulness, father of foresight, the open eye in the dark, I put a question to your ear in fair exchange for payment.
“Is my son still alive, over the sea?” Yes, but he’s probably picked up a few minor problems from the local ladies of pleasure, as sometimes happens with soldiers and other men on the move.
“What’s wrong with my dog? It snaps at my hands whenever I come near – is it ill? Should I kill it?” No and no; it just hates you. You tormented it when it was a puppy and claimed it was to “toughen it up,” remember?
“Does the carpenter’s daughter favour my courtship?” I can say “no” with rock-solid certainty.
“Where’s the best spot to fish today?” Down by Little Lake’s western shore, where the island is near. Bring back a spare for your next question, hmm? I don’t often feed on fish.
“Are you quite all right down there?” I’m quite sorry?
“I said, are you quite all right down there?”
I craned my neck upwards for the first time in hours, hauling my body from its rut. “What kind of a question is that? And you haven’t brought payment in exchange.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, but I’m in no need of fortunes at the moment. I was just thinking that it seemed awfully dark and lonely down there.”
“Dark and damp,” I replied. “I don’t mind.” Though a bit of loneliness is a pleasant thing during the day.
“You poor thing. Why do you stay down there?”
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
“Moved in last winter, my wife wouldn’t stop talking about you. Very secretive about the details though, said I wouldn’t understand it. But why do you stay down there?”
“Well, that’s a proper question, and it needs proper payment. But not the usual, I think. Tell me, are there any sticks up there?”
“There’s some twigs.”
“Twigs will do. Throw them down here.”
A moment’s scraping scratching, and a little neat bundle dropped down, disintegrating into midair chaos. I regathered them as I spoke.
“I stay down here because I was put down here, and I was put down here so that the town would have an Oracle, to give them their answers and take their questions. In that order, sometimes.”
“But how were you put down there?”
“A few sharp stones will set that right. Just a little larger than pebbles will do, but with an edge is best. Toss down a handful.”
“Won’t you be hurt?”
“I’m tougher than I look.” And don’t I look it. Spik spak spang, down came the rocks, clicking off my head and tapping off my sides.
“I was put down here because I was very small. I was a newborn when an old man found me, under the open sky and the fresh air in the mountains, and he brought me here and put me in my well, because he was old enough to remember those sorts of tricks. If I were bigger, maybe they wouldn’t have worked, and I wouldn’t have come.”
“That’s horrid.”
“That’s life,” I said. “I know what I am and I know what I do: I am the Oracle, I answer questions. I’ve answered yours, haven’t I?”
“Poor thing,” he said. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”
That night, to distract myself, I made music. In the daylight hours too many people came by, too many nagging interruptions – and besides, this was a private thing, none of their business. But in the night I could sing and hum and whistle ‘till my tongue fell out and my teeth ran red, moving my head from side to side and up and down to find just the right pitch and blend of echoes. I would accompany myself with percussion, drumming like a fiend on the walls and floor. A few month’s drumming would wear apart the rock and leave it all uneven, and I’d have to polish it flat again. I usually kept two or three new surfaces in varying states of polish, if I could manage it. It gave me something to do during the daytime.
The sticks and stones added a most pleasing depth to it all, a whole new range of sounds and scrapes and scratches. Most times I asked for them the first thing I heard would be “why?” and that led to all sorts of awkwardness. Thank goodness for the naturally obedient.
The music always had a special rhythm to it on the nights I could see the moon, especially a full one. There was just something naturally delicious about it. It looked the way I supposed the wind felt.
The next day I was awoken before my time as some sort of breaded thing bounced off the tip of my nose.
“You’ve got to ask first,” I said, rubbing my face – more for show than anything, not that anyone could see it.
“I’ve brought you some breakfast,” called down a familiar voice, a touch too loudly. Sound carries much more easily down here than you’d think, no matter what you think.
“Oh. What is it?”
“It’s a scone. You put butter on them. I think it’d make a bit of a mess if I dropped some down there, though.”
I ate some. The lack of bones made it unusually uncrunchy to my taste, but there was something there, some flavor I was pleased to meet with. It was a pity it was encased in some sort of planty brick. My stomach felt leaden.
“Do you like them?” asked the voce.
Technically, I hadn’t been given the oath yet. But I had been given payment and asked a question, so… “They’re the best thing I’ve eaten today,” I said, rooting around behind a tooth with my tongue for a lingering, semiliquid fragment of scone.
“It’s my mother’s recipe. My wife can never quite get it right – not that they’re bad when she makes them, oh no.”
“Hmm.” The scone was clinging on with stubbornness hitherto unknown to me, even by that one rat I’d eaten while still living. Nothing with that much of its torso missing should’ve been able to bite as hard as it had.
“Why don’t you come out? I’m sure you’d like it. There’s nothing down there that’s very nice at all.”
“It’s soothing,” I said.
“It’s nothing but hard stone. And there’s rain coming today! Won’t you be flooded out?”
“It’s what keeps the mushrooms blooming. You’d better run home before it comes, I can already feel the air changing.”
“How deep down there are you? It’s awfully dark.”
I shrugged. “Thirty-five feet, maybe? Not so deep.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said, and left.
Shortly afterwards, the storm hit.
It was good for the mushrooms indeed. Besides me and the occasional still-wriggling payment, they were all that lived down here. They were bright and cheerful, vibrantly flush with happy colours that would kill an ox that dared nibble or nip at one. I knew better, and merely watched them soak up the water that didn’t escape through the little cracks in the floor. Where those cracks went was one of the few things I didn’t know about my well, and it irritated me that no one asked me about it. I couldn’t ask them to ask me, of course. That isn’t how it works. I’d spent many hours with one eye pressed tight against the crannies, watching the drip and dulled decay of the water as it tottered its way into the bottom of the world, hoping to see firsthand. Maybe if I looked hard enough, I could stare through it and out the other side.
The rain had another mark in its favour: it kept the day calm. Few questions, fewer answers. But when the only questions you can get are from people who can’t possibly wait ‘till the storm’s past, they grow a bit intense.
“Can the carpenter’s daughter become…uh….if we, that is..”
“-Yes. But not with the other thing you were about to say. But wash thoroughly before and after.”
Some people always have to have that last bit of common sense spelt forwards and backwards for them. And the people who say there’s no such thing as a stupid question are only half right: nothing stupid, surely, but plenty of room for persistent ignorance. At least the answers stay simple.
“Will she marry me?”
“Yes.”
“Will he marry me?”
“He’ll try.”
“Whose fault is it all?”
“Your parents’.”
The last didn’t go over well. Sometimes the best thing you can say is nothing, but that’s never an option for me.
The last question of the day was from an old woman who wanted to know if anyone loved her. “Yes,” I said. Then I had to sit through an hourlong rant on how they didn’t love her enough and her grandchildren were ungrateful old so-and-sos and on and on and on. My head ached as I bedded down for the night on dampened stone, and it may have been that that led to the peculiar dreams I had. Endless, boring dreams, floating through blank masses of something-or-other-or-not and always a humming drone in the ears and eyes, a whisper of a thousand voices. This. That. The other. The Question. Always The Question.
I felt old in that dream. A lot older than a hundred-and-a-bit years. Too many worries, too many echoes down the well, always too loud.
“Look out down there!” dropped from above.
“What?” I said, stupider than any request I’d ever taken. It was well before sunrise, early even for me. Not even the moon shone in the sky now, hidden behind black clouds that thicketed a blacker sky.
The rope smacked me square in the face on its way to the floor, coiling extravagantly across the cracks.
“Hurry up hurry up,” said the voice from above. “The way is clear! Come up the line, friend! Come along!”
“I like it here,” I said. “I do,” I told myself.
“Come on!” insisted the voice from above. “Come on!”
I thought. It was the longest thought of my long life, though it only took a second or so of time. I thought about all the echoes down the well, I thought about all the times I’d answered The Question, and I thought about making music at night, where no one can hear it.
So up I went. It was hard going, heavy as I was and thin as the rope, but I managed. Inch by inch, up and up, up and up, and then I was almost there, which was when I heard The Question again, which was “Hey, what are you doing?”
“What? Oh, nothing, nothing, sorry. Just thought I’d measure how deep it is, and it said it was all right only I didn’t want to be in the way so I –”
“You shouldn’t do that! You don’t do that!” Rustles, struggles, shuffles, the cursing and panting of men objecting to other men very strongly.
I came up in haste, breached the stone ring that was my world since infancy, and saw that it was, of course, the beau of the carpenter’s daughter. Who knew what question could’ve been so indecently embarrassing as to bring him out at this hour. He and my attempted rescuer, a shortish, stoutish man, had laid hands on each other, though things had not yet gotten beyond that.
“Stop it,” I snapped, releasing the rope from my mouth. Strong as my jaws were, nearly my entire body had rested on their power for some minutes, and I was cramped and sore.
They looked up, and saw me coiled about the rim of my home, scales flat black under the moonless sky, as misplaced as a fish on a cloud.
The boy looked shocked, awed, puzzled into horror at the violation of common sense. He was young, much younger than I’d thought he would be.
The man though… oh, the man. I had forgotten: his wife had told him little about me.
At that moment, The Question going through his head was so strong I could reach out and see it, close as it was. What are you, what are you? Why are you this serpent? And I knew then, of course, that serpents have been associated with oracular activities for time out of mind, in particular Python of Delphi, whose Oracle was most famous.
And I opened my mouth to answer, of course, because that is what I must do. I am the Oracle. I have been given payment. I must perform the fair exchange.
It did not reassure them. The boy struggled to move away, the man struggled opposite him, they reversed, seized, grappled, fumbled, tripped over my tail, and over they fell, head over heels, down, down, down into the well, the rope slapping futilely at their faces all the long way to the dismal halt, where they pressed their eyes to the cracks. I wonder what they saw.
I left the town, of course, for the far, unremembered mountains. I was gone before the thud of the well that left a last echo in my ears, before their carefully-mended clothes pressed flat my mushrooms and squeezed the colour out of them in surprised rivulets. It had been one Question too many, and an answer that had helped no one. I was through.
It took a long time to dig a pit deep enough. It took longer still to narrow up the entrance properly to that little slit-hole view of the sky. And of course I’ll never have that little ring of bricks to frame the blue above again, not unless I go clay prospecting one day.
But I did it. I can creep out if I wish and find my own food, and I can sit in here all day while the sun burns hot. There’s a patch of stolen soil where I can already imagine some mushrooms blooming, and smooth, clean stone that clicks off my teeth like a violin string. It’s dark, and it’s damp, and the rock is hard against my back and belly both. There is quiet, and no Question.
And I can make music at the sun.