by JM Alvey
‘Mikos’s Alke gave me some. I fetched her water from the fountain by way of a trade.’
That prompted me to fetch a jug of water from our own big storage jar, along with a basin and a sponge. Stripping, I washed my arms and hands as thoroughly as I could before searching my tunic for stains. Once I was satisfied there was no trace of the dead man’s blood soiling me or my clothing, I pulled my tunic back on.
Zosime was pouring watered wine from a mixing jug into three cups. Her hand was shaking. ‘Who do we pray to tonight?’
‘Erectheus.’ Turning towards the distant Acropolis, I raised the wine to the earth-born god who shares that sanctuary with holy Athena. I silently commended the murdered Ionian to the mysteries that await the dead. Anger kindled beneath my breastbone. This was hardly the open-handed welcome that visiting Hellenes should expect from our city. Whoever had done this had insulted every Athenian, as well as Dionysos’s sacred festival.
Zosime and Kadous echoed my prayer to the gods and we ate our belated dinner. The sardines were tasty, the barley bread was soft and the spring salad leaves were crisp and refreshing. Zosime had chosen a fragrant amber wine from my small stock of amphorae in our unused dining room. On any other night, it would have been a wonderful meal.
We ate sitting on stools around the brazier, glad of its warmth. As Kadous rose and cleared away our plates and cups, I stretched out a hand to Zosime. She laced her fingers through mine, looking mournful. ‘That poor man. His poor family.’
I shook my head. ‘Don’t dwell on it. Didn’t you hear the Scythians? They said it was most likely a robbery. Nothing to do with us.’
Zosime pulled her hand away. ‘You don’t believe that any more than I do.’
I sighed. ‘No, but I don’t know what else to think.’
Dumping our scraps into a bucket, Kadous paused. ‘We never thought to check if he still had a purse.’
‘I’d wager we’d have found one,’ I said grimly. ‘That wasn’t a robbery. Any thief worth the name would have taken those shoes, even if his clothes were too bloody to steal.’
Not so long ago, my brother had mentioned a neighbour’s son who’d been robbed and left naked in some local alley. Such victims are rarely killed outright, because their families are far more inclined to track down a murderer than a mere thief.
‘Cloak-snatchers don’t often use knives,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘A club to the head does the job just as well and doesn’t damage the plunder.’
‘He wasn’t rich. His cloak was homespun and his tunic was a cheap one.’
So Zosime had taken a good look at the dead man while I was fetching the Scythians. I suppose I should have expected that.
‘That brocade panel of leaves though,’ she persisted. ‘That was old work, stitched onto newer cloth to make a good showing for the festival.’
I nodded. My mother had heirloom pieces of weaving laid aside in layers of linen with plenty of herbs to deter moths. Such fabrics were carefully resewn for each new head of the family and only ever worn on special occasions. But whoever the dead man’s heir might be, he wouldn’t be inheriting that finery.
I was more concerned with whatever legacy the murder might have left for this household. I glanced in the direction of the Areopagus where Orestes stood trial for murdering Clytemnestra. That’s when Athena persuaded the Furies to forgo their pursuit of bloody vengeance by promising them justice for the unjustly killed. I wondered uneasily what those divine goddesses of retribution were expecting me to do for this murdered man. I didn’t relish facing their displeasure if I failed them.
‘So he came from Ionia and had dealings with the Persians, or at leastwith someone trading in Persian leather. What does that tell us?’
After six years without those wolves coming down from the hills, thanks to the peace Callias won for us with the Emperor Artaxerxes and his satraps, there’s plenty of day-to-day trade between Ionia’s coastal Greeks and the Imperial hinterland. Medes, Persians, call them what you like, they’re one and the same. Every Athenian knows they’re only waiting for some new excuse to march to the sea. Every ruler they’ve had since Cyrus the Great has been intent on seizing those Ionian cities, which Hellenes have held since before the fall of Troy. ‘If he wasn’t killed for his money or his fancy shoes, why slit his throat?’ I looked at them both.
None of us had any answers.
I shook my head. ‘We’ll have to wait and see what the Polemarch finds out. Now we really must go to bed.’
Zosime nodded, though I could tell she was still unhappy. ‘You’ve a busy day tomorrow.’
I couldn’t think of anything to say to make this awful business any better, so we headed for our room in silence. Stripping off and falling into bed, I snuffed the lamp.
Chapter Two
Rosy-fingered dawn was barely plucking at the bedroom shutters when I woke up to lie staring at the ceding. Zosime slept peacefully, curled up at my side with the blankets drawn up to her chin.
I let her sleep. She’d earned that over these past nine seemingly interminable months. Celebrating with me when I won my commission to write a play for the Dionysia. Enduring my initial, endless debates over which of my ideas to use. Tolerating my agonising as I shaped and reshaped the plot. Listening to me read snatches of dialogue as I shuffled the words around before mostly returning to where I’d started. Endlessly patient when I prompted her to tell me which were her favourite scenes, or to reassure me that my characters sounded like real people, that their schemes and concerns would truly engage an audience.
Today was our final rehearsal. Tomorrow, we’d show off our masks and costumes to the city’s eager theatre-goers. The day after that, they’d see our play. The culmination of all my work, of all our work, would be a single performance for the Dionysia, judged against this year’s other comedies. The drama competition was all or nothing, win or lose.
Yesterday I’d been fretting that I’d be remembered for a comedy that failed so spectacularly it was greeted with silence or groans or booing, fearful that the joke on me would spread from Lycia to Sicily as visitors travelled home. Every Hellene in the civilised world would learn my name. Philocles Hestaiou Alopekethen. The fool whose hubris in challenging the greatest comic playwrights of Athens had ended in greater tragedy than any blood-soaked tale of heroes felled by divine wrath.
This morning I remembered Zosime bringing me gently back down to earth whenever my fears reached such exaggerated heights. Life would go on, she pointed out with loving ruthlessness, however my play fared at the festival.
Meantime we’d stumbled across a real-life tragedy the night before. I wondered who the dead man was, and how he had come to die outside my door. What would the gods of the city and the dead expect me to do, to see his killers brought to justice?
A noise caught my ear, I rose onto one elbow and the rope-strung bed frame creaked. Was that someone knocking at our gate, turning up with answers just as I’d wished for them? That coincidence of timing would have theatre audiences throwing derisive nuts.
But no, I wasn’t mistaken. There was definitely someone in the lane. I slid out of the bed, careful not to drag the blanket off Zosime. Shivering, I found my tunic on the stool, pulled it over my head and belted it tight.
Going out into the porch that shaded the width of our small house, I looked across the modest courtyard. Our dining room stood to the left of the gate, the slave quarters on the right. Kadous’s door was still closed and his window was shuttered. Looking up at a cloudless blue sky, I felt the promise of the sun’s warmth on my face. The pot herbs we grow were waking from their winter sleep and I breathed in the faint scent of spearmint, oregano and thyme. The reassuring perfumes of home. The knock came again. The chickens in the coop in the corner stirred and chucked to themselves, disturbed by the noise.
‘I’m coming.’ I didn’t want the hens stirred into a frenzy and waking the neighbours. I opened the gate and found the last person I expected to see. ‘Epikrates?’
> The wiry slave stood there, anxiously wringing his hands. As one of three slaves who work leather for my family around the city, each with his own modest workshop, this morning he should have been taking my brothers our share of his last month’s earnings. Then everyone could enjoy a well-earned rest as Athens’ businesses closed up shop until after the festival.
I blinked. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘I’ve run out of hides,’ Epikrates burst out. ‘Dexios has been promising a delivery for three days, but every morning it doesn’t turn up. Every time I send my yard boy to ask, he just says that he’s so sorry and swears by all the gods that his finest leather will be with me first thing tomorrow. But the delivery never comes!’
Watching Epikrates wretchedly twisting his hands around each other, most people wouldn’t believe a word he was saying. We’ve all seen deceitful characters on stage shuffling their feet and looking here, there and everywhere except straight ahead. I’ve written them myself, discussing the best gestures to convey their dishonesty with actors and chorus masters alike. In this case, I knew better, having known Epikrates for years. Though we know nothing of his life before Father came across him in the slave market. He’s a Hellene and his accent’s Peloponnesian, but he’s never spoken of his childhood. As my father told the story, he was a scrawny youth in filthy rags belted with a fine piece of leatherwork, which he swore he’d made himself. He assuredly had the bruises from fighting off anyone who tried to steal it.
I swallowed an impulse to ask what he thought I could do, today of all days.
‘Do you want me to talk to Dexios?’ I guessed Epikrates had been the first customer to go short. Dexios would have known the slave could be easily cowed, at least for a few days. But the tanner had to know my brothers wouldn’t stand for this.
‘I need to tell the masters.’ Epikrates looked as if he expected to be whipped bloody. He always does whenever the slightest thing goes wrong, even though none of us have ever raised a hand to him. We’ve never had any cause. First, he proved himself in Father’s workshop. Later, we set him up with his own premises in return for a share of his earnings. We’ve assured him he’s free to marry and he need never fear losing his family to the slave traders, but after seventeen years in his own home, Epikrates still lives alone.
‘What’s amiss?’ The door to our right opened and Kadous appeared, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
‘I need to go into the city, to see my brothers before I go to the rehearsal.’ I went to find my cloak on the bench in the porch and sat down to lace up my shoes. ‘Make sure you walk Zosime to her father’s, whatever she says.’
‘Of course.’ Kadous might be a Phrygian but he’s lived here long enough not to let a pretty girl walk Athens’ streets without an escort with a forbidding scowl. Certainly not during a festival and especially not when Zosime lacks the legal protections of a citizen woman.
‘Come on, then.’ I fastened my cloak brooch on my shoulder and nodded to Epikrates. ‘Watch your step…’
I broke off, puzzled. I’d been about to warn the scrawny slave to avoid the bloodstains in the lane, where our gatepost met the outer wall. None of us needed to risk that pollution, or to draw the attention of whatever vengeful Furies might be hovering to see that justice was served and ready to hound those who failed the dead.
‘Master?’ Halfway to the hen coop with the dinner scraps bucket, Kadous turned his head.
‘Where’s all the blood?’ I pointed at the dusty, scuffed earth where the dead man had sprawled.
Kadous came over. There was no need for me to explain, now that we had the daylight. We had endured the carnage of Boeotia’s battlefields together. When you’ve seen a spear point slash open a man’s neck, you know that anyone within arm’s length gets splattered from helmet to greaves.
The stranger’s precious brocade tunic had been soaked with his blood. I remembered the leafy pattern on his chest obscured by that dark stain. His homespun cloak had soaked up a fair amount as well. But a dead man’s blood doesn’t flow as readily as it does when someone’s still busy dying, frantically gasping as his heart beats its last.
I gestured to Kadous. ‘Go and look up and down the lane for any sign of where he was murdered.’ I suppose there was always the chance he’d dragged himself to our gate.
‘Murder?’ Epikrates whimpered.
‘No one we know,’ I reassured him.
We watched Kadous walk down the lane as far as the bend beyond Sosistratos’s house. He returned and went in the other direction up to the Hermes pillar where the lane meets the road, studying the beaten earth all the while. He walked back to join us, shaking his head.
‘No sign of blood. No signs of a fight.’
‘So who brought his body here?’ I wondered aloud. Why would the dead man’s killer do such a thing? Or rather, the killer and his accomplices. Carrying corpses and wounded men during my military service had taught me the true meaning of ‘dead weight’. No lone man had done this. So these killers had run the risk of being caught carrying a murdered man, even if they’d wrapped him up in his cloak to hide their crime. Though I had no idea how far the poor bastard had been carried from wherever he’d been killed. Each new discovery about this death brought me more questions I didn’t have time for. Not with today’s rehearsal to get to. Not with the problem of Epikrates’ missing leather to tackle.
‘Shall I go and tell the Scythians?’ Kadous asked. ‘In case they hear about some unexplained pool of blood?’
I shook my head. ‘They’ll find a hundred false scents down back alleys.’
Athenian citizens would soon be feasting on gifts of meat from the Dionysia’s public sacrifices, but resident foreigners and visitors have to throw their coins into a common pot and buy a sheep or a goat to slit its throat behind someone’s house and celebrate their own rites.
‘Master?’ Epikrates quavered.
‘Come on,’ I said, trying to curb my exasperation. ‘Let’s see what Nymenios and Chairephanes make of Dexios’s games.’
The walk would give me time to think of ways to persuade the Scythians to tell me the dead man’s name when the Polemarch found out who he was. No one would come all the way from Ionia to the Dionysia alone, so someone would surely go looking for him when he didn’t turn up for breakfast. The magistrate’s office was the first place they’d go for help. Unless his travelling companions were the ones who’d cut his throat over some quarrel. Though that didn’t explain why they’d dumped their carrion at my door.
We left our quiet side street, turning on to the broader road running northwards to the city. Birds tweeted and fluttered along the scrubby verges or hopped across the hard-packed gravel, pecking at seeds or insects.
As Epikrates and I went on our way, I guessed that most of the men I could see out this early were slaves. Their masters would want them reaching the agora as soon as the market’s traders set up their stalls, ready to buy the freshest and finest provisions for their household’s celebrations. Other slaves would be buying up bundles of firewood and sacks of charcoal, brought in from Attica by the cartload to feed the city’s hearths and cooking braziers.
After reaching the city walls, we waited our turn to go through the gate, guarded by this year’s contingent of young warriors called up for training. These lads would soon be kicking their heels on garrison duty somewhere on Attica’s borders. I envied them. Better to be bored by days of drills than be thrown into battle barely used to the weight of your shield.
Things had been very different for me and my phalanx mates. There’s scant chance of perfecting such skills when your shield wall’s braced against roaring Boeotians all intent on ramming a spear point into your eye and out through the back of your skull.
‘Good morning.’ I greeted the youth approaching us and gestured at Epikrates cowering a few steps behind me. ‘This is my slave.’
‘Good day to you.’ Hearing my Athenian accent, he waved us through the gate with a smile.
We still
had a fair walk ahead of us. My family’s home is overlooked by the Hill of the Nymphs, some way to the south-west of the agora and to the north of the Hill of the Pnyx, where the People’s Assembly meets. We’re registered outside the walls in the Alopeke district because that’s where my great-grandfather lived, back when Cleisthenes established the voting tribes to secure popular rule. That’s merely one of the ways our Athenian democracy ensures this city won’t ever succumb to aristocratic tyrants again.
Anyway, as Grandfather’s leather-working business prospered, he moved inside the city to be closer to his customers. Father always reminded us to give thanks for that decision every Epitaphia festival when we commemorate Athens’ honoured dead. Father remembered the fates of those people he’d known as a child, who’d still been living outside the walls when his family moved within the city. Those unfortunates had lost everything when the Persians invaded and devastated Attica with fire and sword.
When I knocked on that familiar gate, my eldest brother, Nymenios, opened up.
‘Oh.’ He looked at me, blank-faced with surprise.
‘Who were you expecting?’ I was equally startled. A slave usually manned the entrance.
He glanced over my shoulder at Epikrates. ‘I should have guessed he’d go running to you.’
‘What’s going on?’ We went into the courtyard. Broad, sloping roofs on either side sheltered piles of leather, baskets of offcuts and racks of tools, as well as wide workbenches. This is where our household slaves turn out their share of the shoes, belts, purses and everything else that earns our family’s bread. I could smell the familiar scents of oils and freshly cut leather and glimpsed two of the household’s ferrets scampering around. With so many temptations to lure mice, my brothers need more than my mother’s hens to hunt down all the vermin.
I glanced across at the front door, opposite the gate and sheltered by the wide porch where my mother’s tall loom had been set up for as long as I can remember. A new striped blanket was wound around the uppermost beam, waiting for my mother or Nymenios’s wife to return to it after the festival. There’s always weaving to be done for a growing household.