The Marathon Conspiracy (7 page)

“And the naked woman running through the woods,” I said.

“And the naked woman running through the … what?”

I pointed. Diotima gaped.

Running alongside the road, weaving between the bushes and moving at impressive speed, was a naked woman. At least, if she was wearing a shred of clothing, I couldn’t see it. She ran like an athlete in training, slim and trim and in tip-top condition. She leapt a fallen log with an easy stride, and her breasts bounced.

“You’re right, Diotima, the local wildlife is fascinating. I’m looking forward to seeing more of it.”

The running woman turned away from the road and sprinted out of sight, back amongst the trees, without slackening her pace for even a moment. She’d shown no sign of noticing us.

Diotima whispered, “Dear Gods. What’s she doing here?”

“I assume that’s not the girl we’re looking for.”

“Did she look fourteen to you?” Diotima said.

“Not even close,” I said happily. Her hair had been long and straight, not at all like a pampered lady’s, but her skin had been as clean as could be while running through the forest. “Do you think there might be a flock of women in the hills around here somewhere?” I asked in hope.

Diotima didn’t deign to answer.

The road split ahead of us. The main road curved right. It would soon take us to Brauron if we stayed on it. Our path, however, was to the left, down the narrow, tree-lined road, where we would come to the sacred sanctuary.

I heard the arrow before I saw it. Before I could even react it had thunked into the side of the cart, a mere hand’s breadth from Diotima’s right leg and right in front of me. If I’d taken one more step before it came in, I’d’ve been a dead man.

I shouted, “Ride!”

I kicked Blossom so hard up the behind even he got the message. Or perhaps he’d heard the fear in my voice, because Diotima was a target, high in the cart. Either way, the donkey took off as fast as a donkey can while pulling a protesting woman in his wake. I screamed, “Stay low!” at her rapidly disappearing back, and then took my own advice and flattened myself on the ground. Diotima pulled on the left rein, and the cart sped around the curve and out of sight on the road to the sanctuary. She was no longer a target. I breathed a sigh of relief. I would just have to hope there was no one waiting around there for her.

The attack had come from the right, from a copse of trees a hundred paces away, at the point where the road forked, and that was probably what had saved us. The ground between the road and the trees was clear of all but barley plants, knee-high, not nearly tall or thick enough to hide a man who must stand to shoot a bow. The trees were the closest a shooter could approach. The
good news was I couldn’t see a band of brigands. If it had been highway robbers, they would have rushed me, and I wouldn’t have stood a chance. This had the look of a single assassin.

I was in the middle of a road, with no cover about me and a bowman within range. I considered running away, but rejected the idea. It would expose my back to a lucky shot, and besides, I wanted to know who was trying to kill us, and why.

I felt beneath my exomis for my knife. It was the only weapon I had. I could have borrowed my father’s spear and shield and short sword before I left home, but who goes armed to find a missing girl?

There’s a technical term for a man who charges a bowman wielding only a knife. The term is
corpse
. I couldn’t run away, I couldn’t charge without being hit, but I could crawl. I dragged myself off the road, in the direction of the trees, flat to the ground, until I was by the roadside amongst the first of the barley. Here I had some minimal cover. Another arrow flew overhead, in the right direction and barely above me. That would change in a moment, when he found his range. I dragged myself, I hoped out of sight, not forward or backward, but sideways, parallel with the road and going back in the direction of Athens. I moved slowly, careful not to make the knee-high plants sway against the breeze. I’d moved five paces when an arrow embedded itself in the ground, exactly where I’d been hiding. I moved farther to the right. Carefully.

A few more shots came in, falling in a cluster about where the shooter had seen me disappear into the grass, and I thought myself lucky that he and I were on the same level. If he’d been higher—on a hill, for example—I’d’ve been totally exposed.

If he were on a hill. Or if he were up a tree. And the bowman was hiding in woods.

At that moment the shooting stopped.

What were the odds my attacker was climbing a tree? If he got a decent purchase on a high limb then I was a dead man. But
while he was climbing, he couldn’t shoot at all. He might not even see me if I rushed him.

I prepared myself to run, then was assaulted by fear: What if he wasn’t climbing? What if the shooter was merely waiting to see what I did? I’d take an arrow through the head the moment I raised it.

Which was he doing: climbing or waiting?

I had to do something. No decision was worse than guessing wrong.

If he was climbing, then my only chance to survive would be gone within heartbeats.

I grabbed a handful of the local dirt in my left hand—it was gray, dry dust that I scraped from the surface—because there’s nothing a bowman hates worse than grit in the eyes. Then I took a deep breath, tensed my legs, and pushed off.

I ran five steps before I remembered to zigzag. I thought to myself, irrelevantly, that my old army instructor would have been ashamed of me if he knew.

Well, if I died here, he’d never find out.

It was lucky I remembered when I did, because at that instant an arrow whizzed by exactly on the line I’d been charging. I’d gotten it wrong. He wasn’t climbing a tree at all. He was waiting for me, and now I was committed.

I yelled a blood-curdling scream, hoping to put him off his aim, and changed direction again. Another shot went by. I remembered that old sergeant telling us to change direction at random. “Otherwise the enemy will guess where you’re about to be and shoot there,” he’d said grimly to us raw recruits, and we hadn’t paid the slightest attention because none of us had ever expected to be pinned down in a barley field by a deadly bowman.

I swore as I ran that I’d never get caught like this again, but my fervent promise to correct my inadequate life planning wouldn’t be worth spit if I didn’t make the next fifty paces into the trees
ahead. If only I could get some solid wood between me and my attacker, we’d be on an even field.

I scanned the woods as I ran, but I couldn’t see him. That meant he was further within, perhaps behind some shrubs. I changed direction for the last thirty paces, to approach on a broad curve. I hoped that by moving sideways I’d put trees or at least bushes between us from time to time to interrupt his sighting. Also, a man moving across the field of vision is harder to hit. The expectation of feeling an arrow in my side at any moment was a wonderful goad.

There were no more shots until I made the first of the trees. I wanted to stop and gasp for air—in fact I did stop for the briefest moment and heaved in the extra air I desperately wanted—but I had to keep moving. I dodged from tree trunk to tree trunk, searching for the man I now had the advantage over. Unless he had a sword, in which case I was in big trouble.

But I couldn’t find him at all. There were no more shots, and all was silence.

I searched all over, stepping carefully from cover to cover, constantly aware of the danger of ambush, but the shooter was gone.

“W
E HAVEN’T EVEN
arrived yet, and someone’s already trying to kill us,” I said. I’d caught up with Diotima along the path to the sanctuary. Or rather, we’d found each other, because she’d tethered Blossom out of sight and pulled out her own bow and quiver of arrows, and was running back to help me. She’d had to retrieve the bow from where we’d cleverly packed it: underneath everything else in the cart. There was another lesson learned.

“It does seem a little premature,” Diotima agreed. “We’ve hardly had time to annoy anyone yet.”

“That’s a good point. Who
have
we annoyed?”

“Polonikos, the father of Ophelia, seems to be the only candidate.” Diotima paused to think about it. “He wouldn’t seriously try to kill us to stop us finding his own daughter, would he?”

“Also, he’s back in Athens,” I said. “Come to that, anyone we might have annoyed is back in Athens. Whoever that attacker was, he must have run out the back of the woods as I entered from the front. The woods are smaller than they look from the roadside. There’s another open field beyond, then more trees. I was slow moving through, for obvious reasons. He had ample time to reach the next copse.”

“You didn’t follow?”

“Across another open field, when I knew someone on the other side was armed with a bow? No thanks.”

“He’d probably run out of arrows. That’s why he retreated.”

“I wasn’t keen to test that theory.”

Diotima sniffed. “Whoever he is, he’s not so good. I could have hit us at that range.”

“Maybe,” I said. I doubted whether she could pull a flat trajectory out to a hundred paces. Diotima’s bow was a custom-made marksman’s weapon in reinforced bone. It had been the gift of her birth father, crafted by a master bowyer at mind-boggling expense. Diotima hadn’t the strength of a man, so the bowyer had cleverly scaled down the pull to the level of a healthy woman. Her bow had inevitably lost power, but within her range, Diotima was an absolute dead shot. I’d seen her consistently bullseye at fifty paces.

Diotima frowned. “The shooter must have been someone from Athens who got ahead of us on the road. Who else knew we were coming?”

“Doris, and everyone at the sanctuary,” I pointed out. “Plus anyone
they’ve
told.”

“So you think the sanctuary called us in to help them, and then tried to kill us to stop us from helping them. Yes, I can totally see that.”

“No need to be sarcastic. But you have to agree, the attack happened much closer to Brauron than Athens. In fact, we’re almost there.”

Indeed we were. We’d traveled as we talked, with a wary eye to each side of the road for any more ambushes. After we rounded a blind corner, there lay before us a small river crossed by a stone bridge, almost as wide as it was long. On the other side was a temple, new-built in good stone and brightly painted, and beside it, another new building in stone. We’d come to the Sanctuary of Brauron, where lived the most marriageable girls of the highest families of Athens.

Some of those girls saw us before we reached the bridge—I guessed they’d been sent to look out for us, since the sanctuary knew we were arriving today—and they quickly ran off, to return with a figure I recognized: Doris the priestess.

“Welcome,” she said as we pulled up.

“Did you know there’s a naked woman running around in the woods?” I said, by way of greeting.

“A naked woman?” Doris said, surprised. Then, “Oh! That’s just Gaïs. Don’t mind her. She’s one of our priestesses.”

“Oh, really?” I said, my interest quickened. “I may need to meet her. For the investigation, you understand—”

“Did you know there’s also someone out there with a bow? He tried to kill us.” Diotima quickly blocked any attempt to meet naked women. Instead she told Doris of the encounter with the bowman.

“Oh no!” Doris said. “It must have been robbers. We do get them on the main road from time to time. I’ll warn Zeke to keep an extra lookout though, in case they come this way.”

“Zeke?”

“Our chief maintenance man. There he is.” Doris pointed to a tall, thin man loping across the green grass.

If Zeke was the sanctuary’s first line of defense, then they were in big trouble, because he was sixty if he was a day. Maybe even older, with white hair and white whiskers and skin that had seen the sun every day of his long life. Zeke smacked his lips and looked thoughtful when Doris told him our story. “Sounds
to me like a poor attempt at highway robbery. Not a professional. Probably some local who thought he’d try his luck.” He shrugged. “It happens. There are poor folk in these parts. Too many of them are desperate.”

“Then why didn’t he try to waylay us on the much narrower tree-lined path to the sanctuary?” Diotima asked. “He couldn’t have missed us there.”

“ ’Cause most folk are on their way to Brauron town,” Zeke answered. “Besides, the sanctuary’s too well respected, even by cutthroats.”

“So you’re not worried?” Doris asked.

Zeke shook his head. “Not now this feller’s had his taste of highway robbery and failed. I doubt he’ll try again, not if he ran away. He’ll go back to scrabbling in the dirt for a pittance, like all the other poor folk.”

I could see Doris’s shoulders relax with Zeke’s very reasonable explanation. I couldn’t fault him, but somehow I doubted he had it right.

“Come,” Doris said. “The High Priestess commanded me to bring you to her private office as soon as you arrived.”

T
HERE WERE ONLY
two buildings at Brauron: a small temple to Artemis, before which Doris stood when she greeted us, and a larger stoa—that is, a covered porch—surrounded by rooms. Doris led us past the temple and across a courtyard of well-kept green grass to the other side of the stoa. She stopped at a closed door, where she announced our arrival by calling out, “It’s me. They’re here!”

The door opened to reveal an overweight middle-aged woman, and I thought this must be the High Priestess until I saw another beyond, an old lady sitting on a dining couch.

Thea, the High Priestess, was a woman of delicate features, gray, frizzy hair, and a determined set of the mouth.

She rose from the couch when we entered, Diotima leading.

The High Priestess took her by the hands, looked up into her face, and said, “Diotima, it’s good to see you again. So few of our girls return to see us. You’ve grown.”

Diotima wasn’t a tall woman, yet she had to stoop to be on a level with the High Priestess. Diotima said, “The last time I stood in this office, I was a scared little girl.”

“Not any longer,” Thea said.

“High Priestess, I wish to present Nicolaos; son of Sophroniscus, who is to be my husband.”