Etruscan swan song

CHAPTER 1

  Legend has it that Thetia, the famous Sybil of the Sacred Forests of the Cimina mountains, lived isolated from the world for thousands of years in a dark, windswept cavern under the gaunt Acqua Zita crag to the north of the Cimini Mountain chain. Her only companions were wolves, bears and a beautiful white lion that her mother, the nymph Athea, had given her. Her den was an intricate labyrinth of tunnels hollowed out of the volcanic rock which stretched down to where a hot spring bubbled from the bowels of the earth.

  Among her collection of archaic documents written on palm leaves an ancient roll was found, half scorched, which claimed in mysterious verse that the world was created from the Cimina mountains.

  Each year, on the seventh day of the harvest month, in the darkest hours of the night, Divine Thetia climbed the highest peak of the Cimini. She went barefoot, pale, with staring eyes, her thin, wiry body as slight as a dried thistle clothed in a long, simple robe of sackcloth. In the absolute silence of the heights she observed the stars and far-flung galaxies unfurling against the black sky. She crouched like a hare on the naked rock for hours, her soul intent on penetrating the concealed mysteries pulsating at the source of creation, until she was warmed by the first rays of the newly-born sun. Only then did Thetia shift her gaze from the skies to the earth, marking the flight of the migrating birds, the mist in the vineyards, the lazy drift of smoke above the primitive dwellings and the ripple of ripe grain in the fields.

  Like an eagle whose burning eye observes the flock before swooping down on his prey, Thetia read the omens in all things, in the harsh croaking of a frog, the silken murmur of ships cutting through the sea beyond the fog, even in the raucous shouts and curses of the sailors. There on the heights her spirit laid bare her heart and soared over the miseries of the world. When she had meditated at length she drunk the bitter chalice of life and death from the Sacred Fountain of Gold and descended, exhausted, from the mountain heights to the crag above the chasm of the valley there to sing her divine prophecies. Her voice pierced the deep ravine of the Nine Loaves like a thorn from a wild rose and then echoed out onto the plain magnified a hundred times by the crevices in the rock.

  That seventh day was eagerly awaited by the native tribes who lived in the valley. The women came out of their miserable wattle and daub huts with their children clustered around their skirts and the men abandoned their fields and vineyards to make their way all together to the foot of the crag and listen with bated breath to the dark echo, the burning lament, which sang of epidemics, wars and impending betrayals in sibylline verse. And all invoked her name, invoked her tragic music, which spanned the visible and the invisible in the eternal miracle of mystery.

  Today the local boys still dare each other to climb the steep Acqua Zita crag with its beautiful silver-coloured stone twisted into fantastic battlements and turrets, and when they emerge from the narrow ravines they see the ancient figure of a lion sculpted on the rock face in the midst of gryphons, eagles and boars. Some ancient sculptor has left us the image of Thetia’s white lion for all time. The tale goes that on those days when there is no trace of mist, when the hot wind from the south-east roars straight from the African deserts like a grizzly around the Acqua Zita crag bearing seeds, spore and red sand and rips the leaves off the chestnut trees in its rage, on those days if you look the lion in the eye and know how to listen, you can hear a soundless voice whispering from the intricacies of the cracked rock. A whisper that lives and breathes with the moss, coasting slowly over the stone to drench the trees and bushes, her whisper, her voice that will never die even if her body has been dust for centuries, she is still there, predicting the future. Her song is in the mists, in the very soil, in the scent of lilac; it is scattered with the cob nut pollen, penetrates the roots of the trees and soars to the stars.. it will be there until the end of time.