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were crumbled beyond recognition. Twenty-seven lives of women. Four hundred years? More? Since before the bright land people came, with their horses and their bronze. Since before Wilusa burned, or the palace at Pylos was wrought. Before there were High Kings in Mycenae.
    Someday my skull would lie here in the darkness.
    We laid her with her predecessors, She Who Had Been Pythia, and in the darkness I said the words that called Her to me. Her avatar. Her voice. As I was meant to be. She came out of She Who Had Been Pythia and dwelt in me.
    T HERE IS SOMETHING dreamlike about that winter in memory, as though while the world stirred and grew, I remained in silence and quiet. I had reached for Her and She was silent. Now I waited.
    I spent much time in the caves that winter, descending belowground to walk without a lamp in the deep places. I explored passages I had not learned before, counting carefully so that I would not get lost, one hand trailing along icy stones wet with the faintest slick tracks of the rain that fell above.
    Only it was not this season’s rain. Perhaps last year, perhaps when I was a child, this rain had fallen on the mountains and slowly, very slowly, trickled down into the caverns. Perhaps I would be as ancient as Pythia had been before it found its way to the river and tumbled at last over rounded stones in the green light. Perhaps I would be long dead.
    I felt as ancient as mountains, and as still.
    Dolcis worried, I know. I hardly spoke, and when I did it was nothing of consequence. Long before the Feast of the Descent she cleared her throat one evening and suggested that we go down to Pylos, to stay at the temple of the Lady of the Sea. “They’d be happy to have us,” she said. “She Who Was Pythia used to do that sometimes, before you came to us. There’s company there, and any who want to find us will know where to go.”
    I looked up at her over the fire. “Maybe,” I said. “Perhaps later.”
    Should we leave the anteroom because our Mistress was long absent? I went back down into the caves. I slept on the wolf skins in the great empty chamber. Lying alone in the dark, I felt no hint of Her presence, nothing to tell me what I must do. So, like a dim-witted handmaiden who has not been directed in her work, I simply did nothing. I waited.
    Spring came. Country people came seeking Pythia for omens about babies, marriages, good harvests. I told them each what I thought was best according to my wisdom, and hoped that I did not err.
    The Feast of the Descent came. Dolcis and I went to Pylos, and I slept beneath the linen awnings of the temple. I had grown so pale from spending time in the caves that Cythera gasped when she saw me and urged me to eat.
    “Surely you have been ill,” she said, but I shook my head.
    The truth was that I could not cast off this silence, this sense of unreality, as though I walked only half on this side of the River, but could not reach the other shore. I hoped to find this missing half in the Feast of the Descent. I painted my face carefully, and Dolcis arranged my hair in the elaborate pins, the thin veil over it all. I sat with eyes downcast waiting to speak, waiting for that coldness along my spine, waiting for Her touch. But it did not come.
    The time came, and I spoke my words cleanly and clearly, as She Who Was Pythia had taught me to do, but there was no sense of Her about me. I did not feel Her presence. It was only me, saying the words as I was prepared to.
    Afterward, Cythera sat with me in the temple and tempted me with almond cakes. “You have been so long away from town,” she said. “Will you stay awhile?”
    “No,” I said. “We will do the Farewell tomorrow, and then we will return to the Shrine.”
    “You should stay longer,” she said, her keen blue eyes resting on me. “It would do you good.”
    “I do not know what would do me good,” I confessed. “I am waiting, but I do not know what I am waiting for. It is as though everything