Sacred Games (36 page)

Silence while everyone absorbed that. I could almost feel the ideas rearrange themselves in the minds of my audience.

I said, “Someone took the club from the fake Heracles and used it to kill Arakos.”

“You still have no proof,” said Exelon.

“You’re right, Chief Judge. It’s not certain proof, but it was enough to make me look for certain proof.”

I held up the twisted bit of metal for everyone to see. “This is the linchpin from Iphicles’s chariot.”

Then I turned to the murderer.

“You made one mistake, Markos. As soon as you knew Iphicles had seen you, the chariot driver had to die. You remembered the story of Pelops and King Oinomaos, and how the groom Myrtilus pulled the linchpin. So you pulled the linchpin straight after the crew had checked the equipment. I even watched you crouch to do it. The entire pit crew can swear you were the only man who could have pulled this pin.”

Silence. Everyone waited for Markos to speak. His expression gave nothing away.

Without a word, Markos pulled out a handful of coins. He placed them in a single pile on the table, where everyone could count them. Fifty drachmae.

Markos was no fool; he knew the door would be heavily guarded.

So he ran for the window.

Gorgo stood between him and his escape. Markos raised his arm to strike her out of the way, and I gasped. Even a slight blow could kill the weak queen, but there was no time to reach him.

Diotima threw her priestess knife. The blade slid across his arm and sliced the skin. Markos yelped and skipped around Gorgo and dived through the open window.

“After him!” A dozen voices shouted.

I ambled over to watch.

Markos ran down the narrow lane. Standing at the end, blocking the path, was Pythax. Pythax snarled. Markos had no club with which to beat a larger man now. He skidded to a halt, turned, and sprinted in the other direction.

Straight into Dromeus, who advanced from the other end. Dromeus hammered him hard. Markos staggered back.

Pythax and Dromeus converged on Markos. They beat him with their fists. As far as they were concerned, Markos was a dead
man. Markos, to his credit, took it in silence and hit back when he could. I’d always admired him.

“Gentlemen! If we could have him alive, please?” I shouted.

“H
ERE
’
S WHAT
I think happened,” I said, after a dazed, bruised, and bleeding Markos had been hauled back between Pythax and Dromeus.

“Even before the Games began, Xenares gave Markos orders to stir up trouble between Athens and Sparta, because the ephors want a rallying cry to take down Athens.”

“But Markos is a member of the hippeis!” Pleistarchus objected. “Not the krypteia.”

“Actually, Pleistarchus, he works for both. A double agent. When we interviewed Xenares about the krypteia, Xenares assumed automatically that Markos had told me there were krypteia at Olympia. He hadn’t; it was your mother, Queen Gorgo, who discovered it through her own sources. Markos belongs to the hippeis, and the krypteia are famously secretive. Why would Xenares assume Markos could say where they are? On its own it might not have meant much, but combined with the proof that Markos had performed the killings, and that Gorgo confirmed there was no particular motive for any Spartan to murder Arakos, and that Markos barely knew his victim, the only remaining reason was to cause trouble between Athens and Sparta, which it certainly did. The man at Olympia who hates Athens the most is Xenares, and the krypteia take their orders from Xenares.”

Every eye turned to Xenares. He stood, unrepentant. “I remind you, Pleistarchus, that a serving member of the ephors cannot be indicted for any crime.”

“Your term has only six months left to run,” said Pleistarchus coldly. “Then you are vulnerable.”

“That’s as may be. Much can change in six months.”

Pleistarchus and Xenares stared at each other, both men full of hatred. It was going to be a frosty trip back to Sparta.

I said, “Arakos wasn’t killed for rivalry in either sport or love. He was killed to start a war between Sparta and Athens. The philosopher Empedocles told me strife and love move everything. Arakos wasn’t killed for love; he was killed for strife. It almost worked, too. How close are we to open fighting?”

“Close. Very close,” Pericles said, and Pleistarchus nodded.

“So Markos arrived at Olympia already with an eye out for opportunities to cause trouble. What’s the first thing he sees? Timodemus attacks Arakos during the opening ceremony, in front of thousands of witnesses. It was a genuine case of rivalry between two great athletes, in a squabble over a woman. Then and there, Markos has his plan. He will murder Arakos in such a way that everyone believes only Timodemus could have done it.

“My guess is, Markos was inspired when he ran into the fake Heracles. Weapons are banned under the Sacred Truce, but no one considers those clubs a weapon. Markos snatched the club from the fake Heracles, just as I did when he swung it at Diotima and me earlier that same afternoon. I imagine Markos threatened the fake Heracles. He said the krypteia would slit his throat if the Heracles said anything, and the fake Heracles, being from the Peloponnese, would be aware of the charming Spartan custom known as the krypteia, of cutting the throats of irritating locals.

“Markos lured Arakos into the woods with the false message, then beat him to death with the club. Astonishingly simple, really. But Olympia is a very crowded place. There was always the risk someone would see something.

“Iphicles, dead drunk, followed a man into the forest. As soon as Iphicles told us this, before the race, Markos crouched, ostensibly to inspect the chariot, but in fact to hide his face before Iphicles recognized him. While he crouched, Markos had to think quickly. He pulled the linchpin, with the reasonable hope Iphicles would have a terrible accident on the track, and so it proved.

“That would have been the end of any hope of solving the
crime, except the fake Heracles overcame his fear long enough to write me the two messages.”

“Why didn’t the fellow approach you directly?” Pleistarchus asked.

“He tried, twice,” I admitted ruefully. “After he watched me take the Olympic Oath and once when I walked through the agora. But both times he ran away. Now I know why: he ran both times because I was with the murderer. After that, he resorted to anonymous messages. It was sheer bad luck that Markos was with me when I received the second message.”

“What about the eyes?” asked Pericles.

“Markos tore out the eyes of Arakos because it made the killing look more like the work of an angry pankratist. Putting the extra eyes on the body in the temple was his little joke. His sense of humor runs that way.”

I turned to him. “I’m sad, Markos. I thought we were friends. A couple of days ago I thought to myself, I’d like to have you for a brother-in-law.”

Markos smiled through his bleeding lips and broken teeth. The flesh about his eyes was already puffing up.

He said, “For my part, I thought you were an idiot. Congratulations, the way you hid your intelligence fooled me completely.”

I decided not to tell him it was mostly Diotima who had out-thought him.

“I suppose you’re not as inept as you appear,” he went on. “But I must say, keeping you alive was hard work. I had to save you twice. First at the hippodrome, then with Skarithos.”

“Why did you?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

“Because the whole point was to make Athens look guilty. With you alive, either you’d agree that Timodemus the Athenian was guilty, or you’d blatantly whitewash your man in a way no one believed; either way, Athens would look terrible, and Sparta would have her rallying cry, as my orders demanded. But if you’d
died, then Athens would have looked less guilty, and other cities might have had some sympathy for Sparta’s enemy.”

Gorgo was visibly shaken. She said, “You, a Spartan, chose to murder a child of the Three Hundred?”

Hung between Pythax and Dromeus, Markos turned his head to speak to her. “It’s not murder when you’re acting under orders,” he said. “Is it not the case, Queen Gorgo, that sometimes an officer will sacrifice a man, perhaps many men, perhaps even himself, if it’s the only means to win the war?”

“Do not seek to lecture
me
on the nature of sacrifice, young man,” Gorgo said.

“Then you’ll understand, Queen Gorgo, that the death of Arakos served Sparta more than his life could ever have done. What would have happened if he’d lived? He would have come in
second
in the pankration. You said it yourself, my Queen: coming in second means coming in last. But by his death, Arakos gave Sparta the chance to come in first in a much more important contest: the competition for Hellas. That’s what my orders demanded, to begin that contest between Athens and Sparta.”

Every eye turned to Xenares. The ephor remained impassive under our united glare. Xenares the ephor wasn’t on trial here. He couldn’t be, because he had killed no one. But I guessed from the expression of extreme anger on the face of Pleistarchus that the ephors of Sparta would be in some difficulty the moment the Spartans were all back home.

Markos had spoken with no trace of remorse. There was no reason why he should. A good soldier doesn’t feel guilty for what happens on the field of battle, and Markos was the best of the best. The Spartan ritual of the krypteia was a test of silent killing, and Markos had excelled at it. That test had marked Markos for a duty far removed from the common lot of a soldier in the ranks. Markos had been given the most demanding duty any elite trooper can be asked to perform: targeted assassination for political ends.

The difficulty was that Markos seemed to enjoy his work. But then, what man doesn’t take pride and pleasure from doing what he does best?

Pericles cleared his throat for attention. The chatter ceased. He said, in a pleasant voice, “I think we can all agree Arakos was not killed by an Athenian?”

Every eye turned to King Pleistarchus.

Pleistarchus said, “Sparta acknowledges that the murderer was a Spartan. There’s no need to continue this trial. This is now an internal matter for Sparta. We’ll deal with it.”

“No need to continue?” exclaimed Exelon, angry. “After all we’ve been through? After this man almost started a war on sacred Olympic soil? I don’t think so!” Behind him the other judges nodded. “The crime was committed at Olympia. It’s an Olympic matter.”

“It’s Spartan,” said Pleistarchus. “The victim is Spartan. The murderer is Spartan.”

“Olympic, I say,” Exelon repeated. “We can enforce this.”

“You and whose army?” Pleistarchus said quietly.

And there it was, out in the open. The threat of armed force against the religious authority of the Sacred Games.

I noticed Pericles couldn’t keep the self-satisfied smile from his face. I should have been pleased at his happiness, but I wasn’t. I held my breath.

Exelon said, “You wouldn’t dare. All of Hellas would fight such sacrilege.”

“Wait.” It was the voice of an old woman. Gorgo stepped forward, slowly. Her steps hesitated for a moment, and Diotima took her arm to support the dowager queen of Sparta.

Gorgo’s hawklike eyes took in the entire party as if we were prey. She said, “Before you men start slaughtering each other, let me make a point. If Sparta committed sacrilege, then you are right, Exelon; even our closest allies would turn against us. But think of this: have these Games truly been Sacred? Forgive me
for mentioning it; I know the young woman is your daughter, but the Priestess of these Games is about as ritually clean as a sewer.”

Ooh, that was a low blow. When it came to political pankration, Gorgo was Olympic strength.

Klymene laughed. Timodemus scowled and stepped toward Gorgo, but One-Eye hauled him back.

Exelon stood as if stunned.

Gorgo said, “Is it not possible the Gods cursed these Games because of the state of the Priestess? If they heard the story, the other cities might think so. Better, don’t you think, for us to sort out these problems quietly?”

Exelon looked ready to kill, but he whispered, “Perhaps, under the circumstances, this matter is best left to Sparta.”

Gorgo smiled. “Very wise. Now, Exelon, I notice this beautiful new Temple of Zeus puts the rest of Olympia to shame. The place needs brightening up. My son was about to mention that.”

“I was?” said Pleistarchus.

“You were, my son,” said Gorgo firmly. “I’m sure Sparta would like to send a gift to Olympia. Something substantial.”

“Oh! Yes, I see. Good idea, Mother. Exelon, Sparta would be pleased to donate. I’m not quite sure what yet. If you have any ideas—”

“Perhaps some new statuary?” I put in quickly.

Everyone looked at me in surprise.

“I can recommend a good sculptor,” I explained.

“You can?” Pleistarchus laughed. “I feel we all owe you, Nicolaos. Very well then, Sparta would love to commission new statuary for the grounds in the spirit of our eternal friendship. What do you say, Exelon?”

“That would be agreeable,” Exelon grated. “And now, before my happiness at this outcome can grow too great to bear, I must insist we depart for the stadion. The next event is the pankration, and it’s long overdue.”