The Marathon Conspiracy (12 page)

Diotima looked about us.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. “We’re here to help. If nothing else, we can swear to observe the rituals for this man.” But I, too, looked about nervously.

“You’re right,” Diotima said, and in a louder voice, as if to someone farther away, she continued, “Hear me, Artemis, my Goddess of Brauron and Athens, as I am your priestess, so I swear to observe the rites for this man. I will place the coin, and build the pyre, and carry the remains in a fine urn, and with my own hands I will carry him to the cemetery at Ceramicus, where dwell the Athenians for eternity.”

We waited. Nothing happened. Which was exactly the response we both wanted.

Then an idea occurred to me. I lay down on the ground.

“You’re feeling tired already?” Diotima asked.

“Would you say this skeleton is longer than me?” I asked.

Diotima stood back for a better look. She glanced from me to the skeleton and back again. “Yes,” she said. “By a hand’s length.”

“That’s what I thought. This is the skeleton of a man. Men are taller than women.”

“Either that, or it’s the skeleton of an unusually tall woman.”

“You only said that to be difficult.”

“Tall women do exist, you know. But you’re right, I was only being difficult. It probably is a man.”

“Where does that get us?”

“Nowhere. Did you know that half of all dead people are male? Besides, I thought we’d already agreed this was Hippias.”

“All we know for sure is that scrolls that were probably written by Hippias were found beside this skeleton. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could confirm it?”

“Bones don’t come with names engraved, Nico.”

I sat up. “There must be
something
we can discover. What about damage to the bones?”

“Like what?”

“Like … if someone killed him with a club, there’d be broken bones.”

We both looked down. What we could see of the bones showed they were unbroken.

“What about nicks and cuts?” Diotima suggested.

“If he was killed by a sword? Good idea.”

With enormous distaste, we peeled back the rags that had once been a fine chiton. We picked up the pieces between thumb and forefinger and dropped them on the floor, to reveal what was left of the body beneath. The ribs lay where they had fallen, flat on the bottom of the board. They formed an odd travesty of a human being.

We both got down on hands and knees to inspect the bones.

“There are cuts and nicks on most of them,” Diotima said.

“Rats and mice,” I said. “They ate him.”

“What about these?” Diotima pointed to several cuts, deeper than the others, in the ribs, about where the heart would have been.

I squinted. “Maybe. Not a sword, though.”

“A knife?”

“Or a really big rat.”

“What’s this?” Diotima pointed. There was something amongst the bones and muck at the bottom of the board. It had been covered by the tattered clothing, and even with the rags removed, it was almost identical in color to the dust and, like the bones, was long and thin. Easy to miss.

“I’ve done my bit, it’s your turn,” Diotima said.

I apologized to the psyche that surely was watching, then put my hand between the ribs to hold what looked remarkably like a very tarnished knife.

I removed it from the jumble of bones. It was a knife—not one for cutting food, but the long, thin type for killing people.

Diotima and I shared a triumphant look. This was progress. I rubbed at the dirt with the edge of my chiton, and though most of it came away, the deep, dark tarnish remained. My futile attempt at cleaning did, however, reveal something important.

“There’s something scratched into the blade,” I said. “I can feel it when I rub.”

We both peered at the blade. The scratches appeared to be letters, but neither of us could see enough to read it. Diotima tried to trace the indents with her more sensitive fingers, but that didn’t work either. Then, by dint of holding the blade up to the light at the window so that the sun reflected off the debased metal, we managed to make out these words:

Harmodius and Aristogeiton.

“The names of the killers?” Diotima suggested.

It was a good theory. There was only one problem. “Unlikely,” I told her. “Harmodius and Aristogeiton died twenty years before the Battle of Marathon.”

Harmodius and Aristogeiton were famous. They had attempted to assassinate Hippias and had been executed for their pains. Though they’d failed miserably, they were credited with starting the movement that eventually succeeded. Their statues stood in the agora.

“Turn the blade over,” Diotima said.

I did. On the other side, using the same method, we read:

“Leana?” The word meant “lioness.”

“It’s also a girl’s name,” Diotima said.

“Who’s Leana?”

“I’ve no idea.”

What was important was that the men named Harmodius and Aristogeiton had died on the orders of Hippias. It made the death of Hippias look like a revenge killing.

“Did you find what you’re looking for?” a voice said from the doorway.

We both looked up, startled. Neither Diotima nor I had paid the slightest attention to who might be listening in. There, standing in the doorway, was Sabina, the treasurer of the temple, the woman who had taken the skull from the skeleton and sent it to the Basileus.

I hid the knife behind my back.

“I’m glad you’re here, Sabina,” I lied. “I wanted to ask: What made you tell the Basileus about this skeleton?”

“Isn’t it obvious? A find like this is far beyond the remit of the priestesses of Brauron. Our task here is to turn girls into young ladies. Clearly it was for the archon in charge of all the state’s temples to decide what to do. That’s the Basileus. My action was the only responsible one.”

Her answer was perfectly reasonable on the face of it, and yet I didn’t believe it for a moment.

“Didn’t the High Priestess order everyone to let the matter rest?” I asked.

“She suggested something along those lines.”

“You disobeyed your high priestess,” Diotima pressed, making it clear what she thought of that.

Sabina lifted her chin. “Thea
advised
that it was better to ignore the matter. I thought otherwise.” She sniffed. “I report to the Basileus,” she said, making much of her once-yearly report. “In any case, Thea won’t rule here much longer.”

“What do you mean?”

“Thea’s an old woman,” Sabina said. “Old women die.”

She spoke with relish. Naked ambition can be ugly, and Sabina’s ambitions were written across her face.

“Did you look inside the case?” I asked to change the subject.

“We had to know what was in there.”

“Did you read the scrolls?” Diotima asked.

“Only part of the first, enough to see that this was something that needed to be dealt with by Athens. I never even opened the other four.”

“You mean the other three,” I corrected her.

She looked at me with an odd expression. “I mean four.”

“There were only four scrolls in the case.”

“There were five, tightly packed.”

“Are you sure?”

“Is this some sort of test to see if I’m telling you the truth? You’re not going to fool me that way. There were five scrolls, as you know perfectly well. I’m not the only person here who saw them.”

Diotima and I shared a look. I knew what she was thinking.

There’d been five scrolls at the sanctuary. There were four scrolls in the office of Pericles ten days later. Here at last was proof that the killer was among us: not a stranger, but someone trusted.

The scrolls had traveled from the priestesses at Brauron to the Basileus, then to Pericles himself. Every one of those people was trusted, and yet somewhere along the line, someone must have removed a scroll, because Sabina had sent
five
scrolls, and a skull.

“Why did you send the skull along?” I asked Sabina, genuinely intrigued. “It wasn’t the sort of thing most people would think of.”

“I thought no one would believe me if I didn’t. I imagined some fool assistant to the Basileus would read my note and think it a case of a silly woman having the vapors, not realizing that I’m one of his trusted representatives. But you can’t ignore a skull.”

No, you couldn’t. The skull had gotten exactly the reaction she
wanted: attention from the men who ran things, so that when it came time to choose the next High Priestess at Brauron, Sabina’s name would be the one everyone knew. Sabina was no fool.

O
UR NEXT PORT
of call was the jetty over the hill. Just because Doris said the rowboat couldn’t be used by a child, didn’t make it true. Sabina showed us the way.

In the north field, there was a burnt patch of ground. It looked like there’d been an intense fire, but isolated to one spot.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“That’s where we cremated Allike,” Sabina said. “Her parents came to collect the ashes.”

“Oh.” I should have thought of that. “What did her father say?”

“The mother was very upset. The father seemed more put out, if you know what I mean. He demanded compensation from the sanctuary, but really it wasn’t our fault. I pointed that out to him.”

“It was you who spoke to the parents, not the High Priestess?”

“Thea apologized to them. She really has little understanding of legal process. I’ll leave you here. The jetty is over that hill.” Sabina pointed.

Our feet sank into the same soft dirt that had made my steps so quiet the night before. Now I saw why: the hill was built from silt that had heaped up over long years. It curled about the toes of my bare feet and was pleasant to walk upon.

On the opposite side, the bushes struggled to live, not because of the soil but because the hill protected the sanctuary from the strong, dry winds that descended from the north every summer. The side facing the inlet was windswept. And inlet it was: narrow, almost pointy where we stood, and no wider than a
stadion
, it slowly widened out as it stretched from us until the coast curved away to the left and right, fully into the Aegean Sea.

The jetty was plain to see, a small affair but solid-looking: pylons driven into the seabed and weathered timbers to walk
upon. The boat that floated at the end was tethered by a thin line. It all seemed terribly peaceful. The craft was larger than the small rowboat I’d imagined, but smaller than a fisherman’s workboat.

We stepped onto the boards, walked gingerly along in case one of the boards should be ready to snap, and stopped at the end. The oars had been shipped on board, and I saw at once that Doris was at least partially right. No child could have lifted those oars.

But an adult with a child could. If Ophelia had left this way, it could not have been on her own. It was possible, though, if someone had helped her. Or if an adult had kidnapped her.

“Have you found anything?” a voice shouted to us. Diotima and I turned to see Doris. She carried wicker baskets and trudged the same path we’d taken to the jetty.

“Did you come looking for us?” Diotima asked.

“No. I’ve come to take the boat to Brauron. It’s easier than walking if there’re goods to carry, and faster than the cart.”

“You row?”

Doris laughed. “On rare occasions, when I can’t avoid it. Usually I’d take a slave along to row for me and carry the purchases in town, but Zeke has them all busy today, rebuilding fences.”

Doris bent to load the baskets into the rowboat, a somewhat undignified posture for a lady her age. I took them from her, to load them myself.

I said, “Doris, we need to ask about this marriage of Ophelia’s. It’s a complication for us.”

“It caused us quite a problem, too!”

“Why didn’t you tell us about it?” Diotima asked.

“Because it was all over and done with long before there were any skeletons. About a month ago, Ophelia’s father came to visit. We don’t encourage family visits, it only makes the girls homesick—or more determined never to return home, one or the other; both are a problem. But it’s not unusual for a girl’s father to make an unexpected call in the final months.”

“Why?”

“Polonikos brought another man with him: the father of a young man.”

“Oh, I see.”

Doris shrugged. “Ophelia was within months of officially becoming of marriageable age. A graduate of Brauron is considered a superior catch. She wouldn’t have been the first girl to return home to discover her future has been decided for her while she was away. It’s normal too for the father of the groom to want to meet the prospective daughter-in-law before the contract is concluded. The High Priestess doesn’t like such dealings to be negotiated within the sanctuary, she feels it upsets the girls, but she can hardly refuse when a girl’s father insists.”

“So Ophelia’s father and father-in-law turned up to inspect the merchandise,” Diotima said. She sounded bitter.

“
Prospective
father-in-law, my dear,” Doris corrected. “These things are never certain until the contract’s sworn, and there’s no point getting upset with me, young lady. We all do our best, but the world can’t be to our liking.”

“Yes, Doris. I’m sorry,” Diotima said, contrite, and for a moment I saw the adolescent girl that was, standing before her mentor.

“How did Ophelia take this?” I asked.

Doris shrugged again. It seemed to be her way of dealing with unpleasantness. “She didn’t cry, and she didn’t smile. Who can tell what a child truly thinks? Both fathers spoke with her. The second man asked Ophelia to demonstrate her skill at weaving with the loom, and at sewing cloth, and spoke a few words with the child. He went away happy, I think. There was no problem until the son arrived.”

“That was Melo?”

“Yes. You may well be surprised. We certainly were. A young man rode in a few days later. He said he was Melo, the son of Thessalus, and that he was betrothed to Ophelia. Then, without even pausing for breath, he demanded to see his fiancée. In private.”