The Double Tongue

This extract is from 'The Double Tongue', an extraordinary short novel that was left in draft form when William Golding died suddenly in 1993

An aged prophetess at Delphi, the sacred oracle of ancient Greece, looks back over her long and bizarre life as the mouthpiece of the god Apollo. From the start, she is initiated into the political and practical, as well as the spiritual, aspects of the rituals; Golding gives a vivid, tactile account of her experiences, her weird gifts and her relationship with the High Priest, her protector and mentor, whose intrigues against the Romans bring trouble to Delphi. This is the only one of Golding's novels in which the story is narrated by a woman. Here, Arieka is still a young girl, a plain and bookish misfit in her worldly family, who already suspect her of psychic powers; she remembers one of the incidents that led her family to hand her over, with relief, to the service of the shrine:

I learnt about love and grief when my brother Demetrios went away for the second time. I don't know whether I was a scrawny little girl before he went away but I am very sure I was soon afterwards. My face has always been uneven, the one side not properly balanced by the other. Generally people say that girls of my kind are redeemed by animation or a pair of beautiful eyes, but I wasn't. Leptides, the son and heir of the smaller estate which marched with ours, was just as scrawny, but seeing that he was a boy it didn't matter. He had light sandy hair and light brown freckles all over his pink face. He called himself a "light-haired Achaian" as in the war story. He and his two sisters were allowed to play with me but that all came to a sudden end. Leptides used to make up games in which I and his sisters were his army and sometimes his wives or his slaves. His army was Alexander's, of course, and far more strictly disciplined than the Macedonians ever were as far as I've heard.

My nurse was supposed to be supervising these games, but she was getting fat and foolish and slept most of her life away, a natural slave and only worth punishing for the look of the thing. One day when I was his slave, he said that since I was no longer a free woman I should be beaten on my bare bottom. Of course in real life, and particularly in a great house like ours, the house slaves are never beaten. They are more or less adopted into the family, at least the girls are. It hurt a great deal though I didn't mind it as much as you might think. Looking back I believe Leptides was jealous of our house and estate. That makes sense, but of course it's the kind of insight you only get when you are much older; or perhaps you know it when you are young but don't know it - there you go, Arieka, getting things muddled again! But you can see how ignorant or innocent a child I was in that I asked my nurse whether a house slave could really be beaten on her bare bottom or whether she would be allowed to draw her himation tightly over her bottom. I was not prepared for the following questions nor the commotion my answers started. Nurse had palpitations and hot flushes and breathlessness. How she summoned up courage enough to tell my mother what was going on I cannot think. Not only was I forbidden to play with Leptides any more but I had some more bread and water and hemming to teach me something or other.

When I came out again I had to stand in front of my honoured father with my hands properly clasped in front and my eyes looking at the floor midway between us. My mother started to speak but my father silenced her with a gesture.

"In this kind of situation, Demetria, it is almost always the girl's fault."

There was a long silence after that. My father broke it at last.

"I suppose you know, young lady, that you've got young Leptides into trouble? He's been sent off to do three months' military training. I don't wish to see you any more. Now go."

So I curtsied and went to my place. Of course, whatever my father said, the military training was not really a punishment like bread and water, solitude and plain hemming. My mother said it would get all the nasty thoughts out of his head and he might even form a lasting friendship with one of our brave soldiers. Of course the men of our degree are cavalry. Indeed, boys who get sent early to military training think it's a holiday and come back boasting of being on watch in the middle of the night "like the other men". I was very lonely at this time and became acutely aware of my own insignificance. In addition to being scrawny with a lopsided face I am on the sallow side. My nurse told me that my father would have to pay an extra large dowry to get me off his hands, which is why he was so stern. She said it was enough to make any man stern because what did he get out of it? The proper dowry for a girl of my degree - provincial aristocrat - would be a thousand silver pieces. He would have to pay more like two thousand.

There were times, as I moved towards my courses, when I still had hopes that the gods and in particular Aphrodite would work their customary miracle and turn a child with my natural disadvantages into a flower-like creature and do it more or less in a single night. There is a dread insult in our part of the world, and I sometimes thought I saw it behind the faces of the people responsible for me - the thought that I should have been disposed of at birth, though of course no one ever uttered the words and I dare not myself. But the thought was there, behind their faces.

I was brooding on all this one day and going towards the fish tank when one of our boughten slaves came whining out of her place with a child in her arms and thrust it at me. She was howling by the time she reached me. My arms came up automatically to cradle, but almost as quickly I used them to push the child back at her for it was covered with spots. She, curious creature, fell silent at that, ducked a lame reverence and walked back again into her own place. But I had felt something in the instant between holding and letting go. I should be hard put to describe it further. So my simplest recourse is to tell you baldly that the girl believed I had some power and that once I had touched the child it would get better, which it did. This goes back to the half-cooked fish, a story which was now a bit of family history and, like most family history, simplified and exaggerated. I do not think I am a healer and I am the one to know, surely!

! 'The Double Tongue' is published by Faber at pounds 14.99 on 19 June.