The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)(29)

Grover glanced in the rear-view mirror at a BMW riding our tail.

‘Don’t Pintos explode if they’re hit from behind?’ he asked.

‘Only sometimes,’ I said.

Back in my sun-chariot days, riding a vehicle that burst into flames was never something that bothered me, but after Grover brought it up I kept looking behind me, mentally willing the BMW to back off.

I was in desperate need of breakfast – not just cold leftovers from last night’s enchilada run. I would’ve smote a Greek city for a good cup of coffee and perhaps a nice long drive in the opposite direction from where we were going.

My mind began to drift. I didn’t know if I was having actual waking dreams, shaken loose by my visions the day before, or if my consciousness was trying to escape the back seat of the Pinto, but I found myself reliving memories of the Erythraean Sibyl.

I remembered her name now: Herophile, friend of heroes.

I saw her homeland, the Bay of Erythrae, on the coast of what would some day be Turkey. A crescent of windswept golden hills, studded with conifers, undulated down to the cold blue waters of the Aegean. In a small glen near the mouth of a cave, a shepherd in homespun wool knelt beside his wife, the naiad of a nearby spring, as she gave birth to their child. I will spare you the details, except for this: as the mother screamed in her final push, the child emerged from the womb not crying but singing – her beautiful voice filling the air with the sound of prophecies.

As you can imagine, that got my attention. From that moment on, the girl was sacred to Apollo. I blessed her as one of my Oracles.

I remembered Herophile as a young woman wandering the Mediterranean to share her wisdom. She sang to anyone who would listen – kings, heroes, priests of my temples. All struggled to transcribe her prophetic lyrics. Imagine having to commit the entire songbook of Hamilton to memory in a single sitting, without the ability to rewind, and you can appreciate their problem.

Herophile simply had too much good advice to share. Her voice was so enchanting it was impossible for listeners to catch every detail. She couldn’t control what she sang or when. She never repeated herself. You just had to be there.

She predicted the fall of Troy. She foresaw the rise of Alexander the Great. She advised Aeneas on where he should establish the colony that would one day become Rome. But did the Romans listen to all her advice, like Watch out for emperors, Don’t go crazy with the gladiator stuff or Togas are not a good fashion statement? No. No, they didn’t.

For nine hundred years, Herophile roamed the earth. She did her best to help, but, despite my blessings and occasional deliveries of pick-me-up flower arrangements, she became discouraged. Everyone she’d known in her youth was dead. She’d seen civilizations rise and fall. She’d heard too many priests and heroes say, Wait, what? Could you repeat that? Let me get a pencil.

She returned home to her mother’s hillside in Erythrae. The spring had dried up centuries before, and with it her mother’s spirit, but Herophile settled in the nearby cave. She helped supplicants whenever they came to seek her wisdom, but her voice was never the same.

Gone was her beautiful singing. Whether she’d lost her confidence, or whether the gift of prophecy had simply changed into a different sort of curse, I couldn’t be sure. Herophile spoke haltingly, leaving out important words that the listener would have to guess. Sometimes her voice failed altogether. In frustration, she scribbled lines on dried leaves, leaving them for the supplicant to arrange in the proper order to find meaning.

The last time I saw Herophile … yes, the year was 1509 CE. I’d coaxed her out of her cave for one last visit to Rome, where Michelangelo was painting her portrait on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Apparently, she was being celebrated for some obscure prophecy long ago, when she’d predicted the birth of Jesus the Nazarene.

‘I don’t know, Michael,’ Herophile said, sitting next to him on his scaffold, watching him paint. ‘It’s beautiful, but my arms are not that …’ Her voice seized up. ‘Eight letters, starts with M.’

Michelangelo tapped his paintbrush to his lips. ‘Muscular?’

Herophile nodded vigorously.

‘I can fix that,’ Michelangelo promised.

Afterwards, Herophile returned to her cave for good. I’ll admit I lost track of her. I assumed she had faded away, like so many other ancient Oracles. Yet now here she was, in Southern California, at the mercy of Caligula.

I really should have kept sending those floral arrangements.

Now, all I could do was try to make up for my negligence. Herophile was still my Oracle, as much as Rachel Dare at Camp Half-Blood, or the ghost of poor Trophonius in Indianapolis. Whether it was a trap or not, I couldn’t leave her in a chamber of lava, shackled with molten manacles. I began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Zeus had been right to send me to earth, to correct the wrongs I had allowed to happen.

I quickly shoved that thought aside. No. This punishment was entirely unfair. Still, ugh. Is anything worse than realizing you might agree with your father?

Grover navigated around the northern edge of Los Angeles, through traffic that moved almost as slowly as Athena’s brainstorming process.

I don’t wish to be unfair to Southern California. When the place was not on fire, or trapped in a brown haze of smog, or rumbling with earthquakes, or sliding into the sea, or choked with traffic, there were things I liked about it: the music scene, the palm trees, the beaches, the nice days, the pretty people. Yet I understood why Hades had located the main entrance to the Underworld here. Los Angeles was a magnet for human aspirations – the perfect place for mortals to gather, starry-eyed with dreams of fame, then fail, die and circle down the drain, flushed into oblivion.