The Marathon Conspiracy (19 page)

“What happened to the little sister of Harmodius?”

Callias shrugged. “With her brother Harmodius gone, and his lover Aristogeiton captured and under torture, she had no male protector left. I expect Hippias had her killed. Don’t look at me like that, Nicolaos! You know better than most men how these things work. Maybe family friends spirited the girl out of Athens. I like to think so. But the odds are her body lies in an unmarked grave outside the city walls.”

“Was the girl’s name Leana? That’s the name on the other side of the blade.”

Callias said, softly, “No, Leana was someone else again.” He refused to say another word, but led me by the arm away from the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. He led me out of the agora and along the Panathenaic Way, which wound south and then twisted up to the Acropolis. Callias led me all the way to the top.

The Acropolis was a disaster area of fallen pillars and charred timbers. The temples had been burned to the ground when the Persians sacked the city twenty years before. The Athenians had resolved to leave the place as a ruin for the rest of time, in remembrance, though recently Pericles had talked of a rebuild, an idea with which I agreed completely. I wanted to build for the future, not dwell in the past.

But the Acropolis as it stood was a ruin. A ramshackle temple had been erected to house the cult statue of Athena, and here and there among the black, rotted beams and fallen masonry were a few small statues that had survived the destruction. Callias led me to one of these.

It was a statue of a lioness, made in marble. The paint had blistered and peeled in the fires of the sacking, giving it a wretched color that would have made the figure look pathetic, were it not for the open, snarling mouth.

“Read the plinth,” Callias instructed me.

I did. Etched into it was the name Leana.

“
This
is Leana?”

“This is her statue. Leana was the only woman member of the conspiracy against Hippias.”

Callias rested against a fallen pillar that lay beside the lioness. The color had left his face again, as it had just before he fainted.

“After Aristogeiton died,” he said, “Hippias ordered Leana arrested. I don’t know how Hippias knew she was involved; perhaps she was seen during the assassination attempt, perhaps she was unlucky. One thing I’m sure of: Aristogeiton didn’t betray her. In any event, she was arrested and bound, hand and foot.

“Hippias put the same questions to her as he had to Aristogeiton. Who else had plotted against him?

“Rather than betray her fellows, Leana bit through her own tongue and spat it out. She died shortly after.”

I imagined what it must feel like, to press my teeth into that sensitive organ, and then to keep biting until I’d sliced it through, my mouth filling with the metallic taste of blood and the pain, and not stopping until I’d finished the self-amputation. My imagination carried me away and I gagged.

Callias continued in a calm voice, as if he were discussing some minor point of interest. “Have you ever noticed, Nicolaos, the sudden-death nature of Athenian politics?”

“It’s come to my attention.”

Callias said, “If you look in the lioness’s mouth, within the statue, you’ll see she has no tongue. The statue was ordered by the city authorities, but I commissioned it myself.”

A lioness seemed fitting. I said, “A statue upon the Acropolis … you did her great honor, Callias.”

“Not at all. One of the names she protected when she bit through her tongue was my own.”

“You?”

“Me. I was one of the young men Harmodius and Aristogeiton recruited to help them destroy the tyranny,” Callias said. The tears ran down his face. “You wanted to know who Leana was? Leana was my lover.”

I
LEFT FOR
B
RAURON
next morning, before first light. I’d learned as much as I could in Athens, and been too long from whatever was happening at the sanctuary.

“What’s
he
doing here?” was the first thing Diotima asked when I returned to Brauron. She pointed at Socrates, who stood behind me.

“Don’t ask,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

Socrates grinned and said, “Hello, Diotima. I got expelled from school!”

I ignored his obvious attention-seeking gambit and asked, “How did the search for Ophelia go?”

Diotima frowned. “Melo took control of the temple slaves, as Thea agreed he could. He had them scouring the countryside in regular sweeps. I must say, what Melo lacks in intelligence he makes up in energy. But he didn’t turn up a thing. At least we know where she
isn’t
.”

“Which is?”

“Just about everywhere. It turns out Melo really does know this countryside. I watched the way he spread out the searchers, and I was impressed.”

“What does Melo think now?”

“I don’t know. After he turned up a blank, I made the same comment to him—about us knowing where Ophelia isn’t. He took it as a slight on the way he’d led the search and got offended, which I hadn’t meant, but I suppose I must have put it badly. He said he’d have to try something else and went away, and I haven’t seen him for a couple of days.”

“Maybe he’s given up and gone back to Athens.”

“Not him. But he might be sulking somewhere. Then again, I haven’t left the sanctuary, and his presence here isn’t exactly encouraged.”

We walked as we talked. The best security from eavesdroppers was to keep moving, the sanctuary being such a crowded place, with so many nooks and crannies. At that moment we came to something I’d been thinking about, and stopped before it.

“There’s one place we haven’t looked for Ophelia,” I said.

“Where?”

I pointed at the Sacred Spring. “In there.”

I
T WAS THE
obvious conclusion. If everyone who guarded the sanctuary swore that Ophelia could not have passed them—and they all swore by Artemis that it was so—and if a thorough search of the sanctuary failed to find her—and it had—and if Melo’s extensive search force had turned up nothing in the surrounding countryside—and I was prepared to believe he’d been thorough—then logically there was only one place left to look. We would have to dredge the Sacred Spring.

It didn’t take long for a crowd to appear. First we needed the permission of the High Priestess. Doris sent one of the girls to fetch Thea, who came at once.

“Absolutely not,” she said without a moment’s hesitation. “This spring is the most sacred place in the entire sanctuary. It must not be polluted by swimming, particularly not by the body of a male.”

“What about a female, then?” I asked, and the priestesses looked at me in astonishment, even Diotima. Thea said, “You’re not suggesting a woman go in there, are you?”

No, I wasn’t. Not now that I thought about it. It was obvious who’d be the one to go in, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

I said, “Thea, this needs to be done. If Ophelia’s in there …” I trailed off, not wanting to say it. We all still hoped to find her alive.

Doris said into the uncomfortable silence, “Thea, think on this: Which is worse, to have a man swim in the spring, or to have the body of a child lie there forever? A child who, if she’s in there—may Artemis avert it—was probably murdered? Which is the greater sacrilege?”

We were clustered about the edge of the spring as we argued. This inevitably caused passersby to notice and stop to listen. The small crowd nodded after Doris spoke. Thea must have seen the sentiment among her people and, more to the point, the irrefutable logic of the words. The High Priestess hesitated for a moment, then she too nodded, but it was clear she didn’t like it.

It didn’t take long for news to spread that a naked man was about to swim in the Sacred Spring in search of a dead body. Before I had stripped off, the few men at the sanctuary, and every woman and child, had gathered to watch.

As I pulled off my exomis and tossed it aside, I said nervously to Diotima and Socrates, “I hope I don’t drown. I can swim, but not very well.”

“You don’t need to swim,” Socrates pointed out. “You need to sink.”

Terrific. But Socrates was right. I didn’t need to go sideways, I needed to go down, and going down would be all too easy.

I stepped to the edge and looked in. The water was clear to a certain depth, but beyond that I couldn’t see anything of interest—such as, for example, the bottom.

Standing around thinking about it didn’t make the job any easier.

I dived in.

I came up spluttering.
“It’s freezing!”

“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” Diotima called from dry land, wrapped in her warm chiton. “Can you feel anything?”

I called back, treading water, “No, I’m numb all over!”

“No, you idiot. Can you feel anything
on the bottom
?” And before I could answer, she added, “Don’t tell me about your bottom. Is there anything at the bottom of the spring?”

“My feet don’t reach the bottom. I’ll have to dive.” With that, I took a deep breath, turned tail like a duck, and aimed for the bottom.

Except I didn’t get there. Pressure kept pushing me back up. I couldn’t kick hard enough to make my way, and after struggling for a short time I ran out of breath and had to return to the surface.

“Dear Gods, how does anyone manage to drown?” I said after the third attempt.

“Is it because they’re weighted down?” Socrates suggested. “Maybe you could jump in wearing armor?”

“Thanks anyway.”

But Socrates had given me an idea. I scrabbled out of the spring and up onto the surrounding grass.

In the audience, one of the older girls whispered something to the others and pointed at my crotch. I looked down. In the cold water, my penis had shrunk to the size of a pea. The girls giggled behind their hands—Doris ordered them to hush, but she herself was smiling as she scolded them—and Gaïs appraised me with a contemptuous smile.

Dignity demanded that I ignore them all. I walked to the base of the hills directly south of the temple. I selected the largest stone that I could comfortably lift and hauled it back to the Sacred Spring. With the water dripping off me, I shook uncontrollably, not from the weight of the stone, but from the wind against my wet skin. Suddenly I couldn’t wait to get back in the water.

But there was one more thing to do. I took the length of rope that Zeke brought at my request and tied it about my waist. I handed the other end to Zeke’s assistants.

“Pull me up if I tug on the line, or if I’m down there too long,” I said to them. They nodded in a vague way and showed no signs of even paying attention, but I knew Diotima would see me safe.

I picked up my rock, waded back to where the ground fell away, and stepped over the edge.

The water that was so cold before now seemed strangely warm. My friend the rock carried me to the bottom. I was upside down, and I could feel that even my feet were thoroughly underwater. I let go of the rock, immediately began to float up, grabbed the weight again, and felt around with my right hand.

Slimy mud slipped between my fingers. I ignored it and kept sweeping in the dark. My fingers touched something hard. Not a rock—it felt man-made. Perhaps a weapon. I was beginning to feel the need to breathe. I got the fingers of my right hand around it, gathered up my rock-weight in the crook of my left arm, because I knew I’d be coming back, and tugged on the rope.

The first thing I did when my head broke the surface was suck in a lungful of air. The second was to toss my discovery onto the grass along the edge, where it rolled once or twice before coming to a halt on solid ground.

“Found that at the bottom! I think it’s metal!”

I waded to the shallows while Diotima picked it up, whatever it was. She turned it over, and over again. I saw at once that it wasn’t a dagger or a sword, which had been my first thoughts. It looked more like a plate.

“It’s covered in slime,” Diotima said. She used the hem of her chiton to wipe away the worst of the muck and algae. When she had finished, she said in wonder, “It’s a statuette. It’s a bronze statuette of a woman.”

Diotima held the statuette at arm’s length and considered. “It doesn’t seem all that old,” Diotima said. “If I saw this cleaned and polished and for sale in the agora, I wouldn’t look twice.”

I said, “So the priestess and the women supplicants threw all these things into the Sacred Spring as sacrifices to the Goddess?”

“Yes,” said Diotima. “Mostly silver and gold. Some finely-wrought bronze.”

Terrific. I would have to bring up every single item, because in the muddy depths I couldn’t tell a murder weapon from a piss-pot. I took a deep breath and dived.

The ghastly business continued all afternoon. Piece by piece, two or three at a time when I could manage it, the Sacred Spring of Brauron gave up its secrets. It reached the point where I no longer cared what it was that I carried. I tossed them to the bank, and Diotima took each one and inspected it closely. If it was thoroughly covered in algae and mud, then it almost certainly wasn’t of any interest, because it must have lain there for a long time. But she was careful.

At the very bottom, underneath all the other pieces, I came across something long and hard. At first I thought it was an oddly shaped rock, but when my fingers traced the outline of a hilt, I knew what I had. I hauled it up, and this one I handed over, so as not to accidentally hit Diotima.

“A sword?” Diotima said, puzzled. “That’s an odd thing to find in a spring.”

“Maybe it’s something to do with us,” I said.

“No, Nico,” Diotima said, as she held it up in some disgust. “It’s absolutely covered in slime. This thing’s been down there since forever.”

“Is it iron?”

“Yes.” Diotima wiped at it with the edge of her chiton.

I dived again and swept the deepest part of the spring with eyes closed and arms outstretched.

My hand encountered flesh.

Even purely by feel I knew it for what it was, soft and resistant to my touch, cold but not at all slimy. My hand slid over the discovery and I clenched automatically; my palm felt a projection beneath it that my imagination said at once was the shape of a nose.