He also heard that the Rhodian commander, Polemecles, was advocating for negotiations. Philopoemen sent for the former high priest, and then sent him back, with an apology.
‘Best send him to Epidauros,’ Philopoemen said laconically in his letter.
So when the next pilgrim ship from the Peloponnese landed, Alexanor sent it back to Epidauros with a request for another senior priest, and a long series of four scrolls documenting the former high priest’s crimes. He sent along a sanctuary freedman as a witness, and two of the Boeotian mercenaries who were once again the garrison of the towers; witnesses against the accused and jailors too.
When his books came from Alexandria, they arrived with the news that the Spartan king, Cleomenes, had committed suicide after a failed attempt to take Aegypt for himself. Alexanor winced at the idea of the man’s suicide, but filed it in the dead place in his heart with his father’s letter. Instead of considering his father, Alexanor devoured Herophilus’ On Pulses and all eight of his other works on anatomy.
But the next time a slave died and his body was unclaimed, Alexanor did not hesitate. He took the body with Leon’s help, carried it to the palace that the former high priest had used, and the two of them dissected it for two days under the stoae amid the untended roses and unwatered rhododendrons. He and Leon took turns cutting and drawing, and the impiety, as well as the risk, brought them still closer together, so that when they were done, any lingering division of rank was buried with the slave’s corpse.
Alexanor felt guilt; Leon, apparently, none.
‘Poor bastard led a rough life,’ Leon said, early enough in the dissection.
The man was not as old as he had seemed when Alexanor first inspected him; abuse and neglect, poor diet and long hours had forced him into age.
‘In death, he performs a noble act, saving others,’ Leon said.
Alexanor thought that Leon was making a sophistry, a rationalisation, but when he looked up from the man’s abdomen, he saw that Leon was crying.
Alexanor reached out a bloody hand, and Leon blinked slowly.
‘Sometimes it’s fucking bad,’ he said. ‘By Zeus who saves, Alexanor. May you never know …’
Alexanor nodded. But as the cuts went deeper – as they lifted organs from the cavity of the abdomen, guessing their function – Alexanor found that he was describing to Leon his father’s anger, his letter. And his own failures with Aspasia. And Leon told him too much about slavery – about the petty humiliations and the endless betrayals and the casual abuse.
After two days, Alexanor began to train his novices to dissect frogs from the marshes to the east. He used the little creatures to show them the flow of blood and the fine tissues that supported muscle and tendon.
A hunter brought them a boar from the mountains, as an offering, and Alexanor purchased it, ostensibly for his table. He and Leon took it to pieces carefully, examining the muscular processes and marvelling at the linkage of muscle to bone. Alexanor was very tempted to ask one of the masseurs on the staff to join them; only massage professionals seemed to exactly understand the way the mechanical process of the body functioned.
And eventually circumstance, or the gods, sent a drifter who died in the agora and the temptation was too much for both of them; Alexanor took the body and they dissected it in the former high priest’s rose garden. They both had duties they could not abandon, and they could not reveal what they were doing, and so, when the fine tissue had begun to decay in the heat, and dogs bayed outside the palace courtyards, smelling the corpse, and Alexanor could stand it no more, they closed the man up and buried him in the temple’s cemetery with honour, washed carefully, and then drank wine together while they discussed how to teach their priests what they had learnt.
‘I feel as if I know less than before,’ Alexanor said.
Leon smiled. ‘Well, I know now how the hand works, and I had no idea before. It’s like the first time you see a woman undress …’
‘That’s the oddest allegory I can imagine for the world inside that corpse.’
Leon laughed. ‘I don’t feel like a slave today. I feel like a priest of the god. Thanks, Alexanor.’
‘I don’t feel like such a fool,’ Alexanor said slowly. ‘Thanks, Leon.’ He shrugged, and washed his hands again.
Over the next week, he and Leon began to teach their people the wonder of muscle processes. Teaching them helped him understand the processes himself, and he found that he didn’t agree with everything the master taught in his essays. To him, it was clear that the brain was the seat of reason: a man hit in the head lost the ability to think; a man hit in the heart simply died, often with clear eyes and full cognitive powers.
‘If Herophilus had spent more time on battlefields,’ Alexanor said with a smile, ‘he’d have understood even more.’
Theophilus was the best of the novices. He was the big lad who’d used a dagger in the fighting at Petra. He had the strongest stomach and the best mind, and his passion for Omphalion drove him to feats of medical emulation and piety unequalled among the other novices.
‘He is a superior boy,’ Omphalion would say, amused, in his high-pitched, feminine voice.
More than once, Alexanor wondered if Omphalion was a woman in disguise; it had happened before at the school on Kos. But whatever Omphalion’s gender, he was the best of the priests at treatment, and the only one acceptable to most women.
Epidauros and Kos had female massage professionals and female assistants, and Kos had women priests. Alexanor wrote a pair of letters, one to Chiron and one to the hierophant at Kos, requesting a female priest for Lentas. Many of the women pilgrims had complaints that were purely academic to men. Alexanor wanted to do better.
Word reached the sanctuary from a Messenian pilgrim that the Achaean League had been defeated by the Aetolians near Messene; that Sparta’s new king Lykourgos had attacked the Achaean League.
Autumn passed into winter, and Alexanor heard that Philopoemen had mounted a series of raids into Knossian territory; that he’d seized Petra again and used it as a base to steal thousands of heads of cattle and sheep from the valleys around Knossos.
Alexanor also received six new male novices, but no girls, and a polite letter from Philopoemen, praising his work, mentioning, in the most flattering terms, the new fame of the sanctuary, and signed ‘Hipparchos of Gortyna.’
The messenger was Lykortas. He had Kleostratos and another Thracian as companions, and Kleostratos went straight to the baths and then to Omphalion to have a cut on his right bicep taken care of, as it was infected.
‘Hipparchos?’ Alexanor asked.
‘He could call himself Tyrant and no one would complain.’ Lykortas sat back, his riding boots stretched out before him. ‘He is, to all intents and purposes, ruling Gortyna.’
‘How did that happen? He’s not even a citizen.’
‘We’re all citizens now. If you ask, you can be, too.’
Lykortas leant so far back that his head rested on the wall, and Alexanor thought the younger man might go to sleep.
‘And is he good at ruling?’ Alexanor asked.
Lykortas sat forward. ‘Too good, if you ask me. He’s like one of the ancient Greeks – like Solon the Lawgiver, or Lycurgus the Ancient. He speaks, they listen. He thinks, and suggests, they obey. They wanted to execute all the oligarchs – he advocated for ransoming them to Knossos. The Knossians declined to ransom them.’ Lykortas shook his head. ‘So Philopoemen sent word to the Rhodian admiral, of all people, and suddenly the Knossians changed their tune. It turns out that Phila told him that most of them owed huge amounts of money to banks on Rhodes. Of course the Rhodians paid their ransoms! They can’t afford the financial loss. So now the treasury is full, and the citizens of Gortyna have a radical at the helm.’
‘Phila …’ Alexanor said aloud, before he could clamp his teeth on her name.
‘She’s coming to Crete in the spring. Perhaps even sooner. Oh my. What an attractive young man.’
The soldier was looking out the window at Theophilus.
Alexanor raised an eyebrow.
‘Any reply? I’d rather not ride back today unless I must,’ Lykortas said. ‘Kleo needs a rest, and that wound …’
‘I agree. Have dinner with me,’ Alexanor said.
After the young Athenian was gone, he sat staring out of his open window at the sea. He thought of Phila, and Aspasia, and his father, and the idea of Philopoemen as a politician. Then he took a stylus and wrote his friend a letter, requesting citizenship in Gortyna.
Winter closed their little port. A handful of small ships still came; they received an entire shipload of sick men and women from Cyprus in the coldest month, and Crete was sufficiently close to Africa that there was always sea traffic, sails visible from the port. The soldiers changed their guard and held exercises, the older novices taught the younger, and his two priests read their way through Herophilus and dissected small animals with barely concealed distaste. Alexanor wrote several replies to his father, but sent none of them.
And then the jasmine burst into flower on the hillside, and the tufts of yellow flowers were picked by swains, and girls wore flowers in their hair. Alexanor tried not to stare as every young woman seemed more beautiful than the last, and threw himself into work; pilgrims arrived like the burst of water flowing down the hillsides. The little harbour was full of ships. A ship came from Kos, full of news of the world, and with two newly minted priests, both young, arrogant, and yet eager to please. Alexanor put them to work.
A few days later the pace began to slow. Alexanor put the lectures on a more orderly basis and had Leon and the new priests take turns teaching. It gave him time to read, and to do some diagnostic work with the pilgrims.
Another week and the oregano was in bloom, and every member of the order who was not actively teaching or healing was out on the hills, picking the herb; they used the blossoms in almost every concoction. Most of them were on the hills whenever they could be, gathering the blossoms, competing with the matrons of the town, who wanted the same blossoms for cooking.
He came in from a beautiful morning picking oregano and went straight to giving a lecture on improved diet to a room full of overweight men. They didn’t listen, and he went back to his small cell and workroom, feeling frustrated, and sat at the long table he used as a desk. Sitting in front of his chair was a scroll tube that someone had placed on his wax tablets.
Leon leant in. ‘He couldn’t wait – said he has a cargo for Polyrrhenia. Name Diophanes. Said he was a marine with you.’
There was a note on Aegyptian papyrus attached to the scroll tube: ‘Hope I’ve done the right thing. Buy me a cup of wine some time. I’m a metic in Alexandria now. Diophanes.’
Alexanor smiled. ‘I haven’t seen him in ten years,’ he said to Leon, who was leaning in the doorway, scratching lecture notes on his own wax. ‘Only four of us … survived. I thought Diophanes died of his wounds.’ He smiled. ‘Gods! What a wonderful thing. If only he could have stayed.’
‘He said he’d be back this way later in the sailing season,’ Leon said. ‘He was very happy to know you were here, and a little put out that we wouldn’t bring you out of the treatment rooms.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry – those are your orders.’
‘So they are.’
Alexanor had opened the scroll tube. There was no address, no top note, and no heading.
He’d never seen the writing before – very careful, and very neat.
He read a sentence, stopped, looked at Leon, and blinked.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Leon said. ‘Is it Kos, telling us we’ll never get another senior priest?’
Alexanor let out a breath and took another, counted, and then tested his pulse.
Alexanor,
I risk my life writing to you, but my life is worthless anyway. Perhaps you never think of me; I think of you every day. I can no longer sit silently at my loom and dream. If you feel as I do, talk to me again! I am not Medea. I have no children to abandon, no friends, and no life here. I would as soon be a slave to a bad master as queen in this house.
I have thought a hundred times about what we said at the gate. Listen, then. Your father sold me to my husband for two warehouses on the waterfront and a house in town; my husband is a cheat who takes your father’s money in every transaction. Imagine, then, what my life is.
I imagine it would be death, if this letter was found. So be it.
Aspasia
Alexanor read the letter three times. Then he put it down, stripped, and went for a run. He swam out of the bay and back, walked dripping up the beach, his head still a tumble of thoughts.
He sat through an interminable town meeting on the need for repairs to the roads and emerged without a thought in his head.
He emerged to find that Lykortas was holding court in the yard of the sanctuary. He was sitting in the sun, flirting with Theophilus while another slim young man gazed with admiration at the sacred statues. Most of the novices were standing about awkwardly; it was the break between lectures in the afternoon, and even the temple cats were awake.
‘Shouldn’t you be working?’ Alexanor said gruffly, feeling like a hypocrite. Theophilus blushed and ran off to his studies.
‘Must you be always corrupting the youth?’ Alexanor asked.
Lykortas shrugged. ‘I’m bored. Besides, I was only corrupting one. And he’s very pretty.’
‘How can you be bored, with me around?’ the slim young man asked. Alexanor looked, and it was not a man at all. It was Phila, in a short chiton and chlamys.
Alexanor noted the increase in both his pulse and respiration, the outpouring of sweat, the moistening of his palms.
‘Phila,’ he said with false calm.
‘It became clear you weren’t coming to visit me,’ she said.
She stepped up and kissed him on the lips, in front of most of his novices and an immediately fascinated Omphalion, who turned away with a barely hidden smile.
Phila, in a chitoniskos that barely covered the swell of her hips. Phila, her slight weight against his chest.
‘Philopoemen needs you,’ she said. ‘Lykortas failed to fetch you. I thought I’d have a go.’
‘So you rode all the way here …’
‘I was hoping for a reward. Perhaps some medical advice.’
‘My memory is that you healed me,’ Alexanor said.
‘Perhaps we could arrange an exchange,’ she said with a smile, and he noted that his heartbeat leapt.
Two hours later, she lay across him on his narrow pallet.
‘Now that we’ve made love, will you come to Gortyna?’
He sat back and ran his hands through her hair.
‘I want to. But I have so much to do here …’
‘Do you, though?’ she asked. ‘The whole place seems to run like one of those amazing mechanical devices that follow the movements of the stars and tell us festival dates. Leon can direct anything – don’t deny it. He’s more organised than you are. Why are you hiding?’
‘I’m not hiding. I am the acting high priest of an important sanctuary …’
She rolled over and looked at him. ‘I left a household with forty slaves to help Philopoemen win Crete. I own a dozen businesses and I run a spy network bigger than bloody Rhodes. I built it to run without me. You have a sanctuary with ten novices and four priests. Hmm?’
‘And you made love to me just to get me to come with you?’ Alexanor asked.
She looked at him for a moment. ‘Yes. Besides, you needed it. Diagnosis: personal confusion, depression, denial of self, hiding from the world. Prognosis: if not dealt with, patient might develop into a self-important mediocrity. Treatment: conversation, straight talk punctuated with sex.’ She ran a hand steadily down his abdomen. ‘And I’ll repeat the treatment until you recover.’
Alexanor shook his head. ‘Tsk, tsk, young woman. One of the very first lessons a priest learns is not to threaten the patient with a repeated treatment he w
ill enjoy more than recovery. Why do you think we make the opium taste bad and make massage a little unpleasant?’
‘Unpleasant for who?’ she whispered.
Alexanor emerged in the morning to find his students wreathed in smiles. Leon laughed aloud.
‘I’m glad everyone is so … relaxed,’ Alexanor said testily.
Leon raised both eyebrows.
‘Amused!’ Alexanor snapped. ‘I …’
Leon put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Are you going to Gortyna?’
‘Yes,’ Alexanor said.
‘Good. You are an excellent high priest – but we need a break and so do you.’ He physically turned Alexanor and gave him a gentle shove out of the lecture hall. ‘Go and prepare your horse and I’ll pack for you.’
Alexanor came back to his cell to find his military pack ready, and his sword and riding tunic laid out.
‘Why is everyone smiling at me today?’ he asked. ‘Even the slaves in the stable?’
Leon handed him his heavy cloak, rolled tight.
‘Sound carries inside the sanctuary,’ he said. ‘Have a good trip.’
CHAPTER THREE
Crete
SPRING AND SUMMER 219 BCE
Philopoemen sat at a table surrounded by wax tablets and scrolls under one of the four great stoae in the precinct of Apollo by the agora of Gortyna. He didn’t look like a tyrant. He looked more like an athletic scribe, or a professional letter-writer. His table was surrounded by men, most of them young; Alexanor recognised Telemnastos and Dinaeos, but there were dozens of others of all ages, and a handful of women too, and all of them seemed to be speaking at once.
Phila knew them all, and they made a space for her as soon as she walked in.
‘Welcome to the Revolutionary Council of Crete,’ she said.
‘We don’t call it that, Phila,’ one of the men said.
‘More’s the pity,’ said a tall, dark-skinned woman with blue-black hair and a rakish look. Her eyes were dark; she had heavy eyebrows and long legs heavy with muscle, but she was thin as a farmer’s fence rail.
The New Achilles Page 27