I looked up. Finally, a name I knew. “As in, the Great?”
“Yes. One of the few to ever dare lay hands on a Pythia.”
“He assaulted her?”
Rhea nodded. “He’d visited another sybil, who had flattered him by telling him he was divine—a son of Zeus, who had supposedly visited his mother Olympias one night—and he wanted the Pythia to confirm it. She chose to say nothing, rather than to enrage him with the truth, but it didn’t help. And his army had surrounded the temple complex, and she knew she couldn’t fight them all, and she feared for her people. . . .”
“Well? What did she do?” I asked when Rhea trailed off.
Her lips twitched, and, okay, yeah. She’d hooked me. “She told him what he really wanted to hear: that he was unbeatable.”
“Oh.” I felt irrationally let down.
“She didn’t tell him that he would die of poison before he had a chance to enjoy any of his conquests.”
I perked up. “Well, he should have been nicer.”
Rhea laughed. “Yes. He should have been! Like the Emperor Nero, who was thrown out of the temple by a later Pythia because he’d killed his mother. Go back, matricide! The number seventy-three marks the hour of your downfall!”
“Damn.” I’d have liked to have seen that. By all accounts, Nero had been a murderous little snot. “But living to seventy-three doesn’t seem so bad.”
“That’s what Nero thought. Until he was killed a few years later by a general named Galba—who was seventy-three at the time!”
“Sweet.”
“Pythias are even said to have commanded the gods. Well, demigods,” she amended. “Xenoclea I ordered Hercules to be sold into slavery for a year, to compensate for killing a man while a guest under his roof. His sale price was to go to the children of the slain.”
I started to protest that Hercules was only a myth, but considering my life lately, I just went with “Really?”
She grinned. “She even decided who he would be sold to.”
“And that’s funny because?”
“Because she selected Queen Omphale of Lydia, who was known for having a sense of humor. The queen took away his lion skin and weapons, and dressed him in women’s clothes. And made him stand around holding a basket of wool while she and her handmaidens did their spinning!”
“For a year?”
“For a year.” Rhea looked satisfied. Probably because this Xeno-whoever couldn’t have come up with a better torture for a musclebound he-man.
“Why haven’t I heard any of this before?” I asked.
Rhea’s smile faded. “I don’t know,” she said, her brows drawing together. But she threw it off in a minute. “And it was a Pythia, Aristonice IX, who helped to broker the treaty between the Circle and the vampires that still holds today.”
“She must have really been something,” I said, wondering how she’d managed to balance those two groups, who usually loathed each other. And if the current consul remembered her.
Guess she would, considering she was old as hell.
I sighed.
“No,” Rhea said, a little fiercely.
“No?”
“No!” She shook her head, sending a storm of fuzzies into the air. “We have to learn Pythian history growing up, and she’s taught because of the treaty. But other than that, there was nothing unusual about her. She didn’t go about battling gods, for instance!”
“Well, maybe she didn’t have any to battle.”
“No.” She was tugging little pockets inside out so fast I was afraid she was going to rip something. “None of them did. None of them had to face what you face. They didn’t have to elude Circle assassins or battle demigods or face Apollo himself—”