“As the vine is taken at harvest,” Ralla cried, “so Dionysos was devoured by the Titans, who gained his spark of divinity.”
I need to find Calisto, Aculeo thought, scanning the crowd, the wound in his side a dull, aching throb. We need to get out of here. He noticed a woman standing off to the side dressed in a bright red peplos and a bee mask, an ornate gold and topaz necklace around her fleshy neck, a fringe of scarlet hair sticking out from the edge of her mask. Panthea, he thought. He slipped through the surging revellers until he stood behind her, feeling the sour heat from her body as she swayed back and forth. He felt for his knife, readying himself to grab her, drag her into the shadows, force her to tell him where Calisto was.
“The initiate,” Panthea cried. A figure clad in purple robes, a myrtle crown and a dove mask was dragged onto the platform by the dragon-masked slaves. Aculeo’s heart stopped when he saw her – the way she held herself, the shape of her hands bound before her, the slenderness of her ivory neck, the curve of her hip … Calisto!
“In madness, we are released,” Ralla cried from his giltwood throne. “We start to comprehend the majesty of the universe revealed, the joy as our souls are freed from the shackles of this life!”
“Take her, take her, take her,” Panthea chanted drunkenly, rending her own robes as she writhed to the mad, grating music. “Take her!”
“Murderous whore,” Aculeo hissed, knocking Panthea to the ground. She looked around in shock, her mask askew, as she struggled to her feet. Aculeo shoved past the swaying, inebriated worshippers clustered about the platform. Two slaves noticed him then and made their way towards him as he continued towards the platform, towards Calisto.
The dragon-masked slaves dragged Calisto towards the barren tree. Aculeo was steps from the platform’s edge now. One of the guards seized him by the shoulder, trying to restrain him.
“Dionysos enters his worshippers through their eyes, their ears, their blood,” Ralla cried.
Aculeo swung his elbow against the guard’s head, grabbing the man’s short sword from his belt as he fell. The other guard ran at him, sword raised to attack. Aculeo stabbed him in the neck and the man went down, blood spouting like a fountain onto the platform as he collapsed. Avilius Balbus, his flushed face suddenly sprayed with the dying slave’s blood, looked about in horror like a child awoken from a nightmare and began to bawl, a sound few noticed over the screams of mad revelry. Other slaves noticed, though, and moved to protect the Prefect’s son.
The girl in the goat mask was dragged from the cage and now stood next to Calisto. She was terribly slight, with thin arms, child’s ankles – Tyche! Aculeo realized desperately. Ralla threw a pair of ropes over the highest branch of the barren tree, then slipped one of them in a noose about Tyche’s slender neck, the other about Calisto’s.
“We know true joy as our souls are freed from the shackles of this life and we become one with him!” cried Ralla, then he pulled Tyche’s rope taut, the noose squeezing against her pale throat as she lifted into the air.
The crowd cried out “Euoi!” in delight, their blood-lust rising to a feverous pitch.
“No!” Calisto screamed, struggling in vain against her captors.
More slaves were coming, too many now. There was no time. Aculeo grabbed a blazing torch from a sconce in the rock wall and threw it on Ralla’s throne, the bone-dry wood immediately catching fire. The tapestries draped about it ignited seconds later, orangey-yellow flames that crackled and leapt to set fire to several branches of the barren tree, inches from where Calisto stood. Tyche kicked her feet frantically, twisting in the empty air as she choked to death.
Someone screamed, then the revellers paused their mad dance, their bloodlust suddenly doused, twisting instead into blind panic as smoke filled the cavern. They pushed and shoved at one another as they tried frantically to escape, knocking Ralla to the ground. The rope released, Tyche dropped to the rock floor in a heap. Aculeo climbed onto the platform and knelt beside the girl, releasing the noose, slipping it off her head. Her lips were blue, her cheeks pale and lifeless. He laid her on her back and breathed into her mouth until at last the girl coughed and gasped for breath.
“Aculeo, how did you…? Oh, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” Calisto cried, wrapping her arms about him from behind, kissing his neck as she wept. “Is Tyche alright?”
“I think so. Tyche, are you okay?” The girl felt her throat, blinking, and nodded, slowly climbing to her feet, disoriented.
The High Priest Ralla tried to stand as well, his mask askew, his worshippers gone. He seemed unaware that everything had just fallen apart around him. “We call … call upon Dionysos and beg you look on us … with favour,” the man said, his voice faltering.
Aculeo grabbed him by the tunic and tore his mask off. He looked at Zeanthes’ face in disbelief.
“No!” the sophist snarled, his face twisted in rage as he tore himself free, disappearing into the shadows of the catacombs.
“Let him go!” Calisto cried, coughing from the smoke. “We have to get out of here while we still can.”
They were caught up in the crowd of panicked, coughing revellers swarming up a stairway carved into the rock wall, fleeing the smoke-filled cavern to the villa above. They came to the top of the steps and through the doorway into the villa. Fresh, sweet air filled their lungs at last. They stood in a small ala at the edge of the atrium, the walls still decorated with olive branches and lit with torches. It was virtually abandoned, the revellers had all fled.
“What happened here?” Aculeo asked Calisto, weak from exertion and pain.
“I’m not sure,” Calisto said as she clung to him. “Ralla told me to come here tonight. I thought it was just another symposium but they seized me as soon as I arrived, bound me, drugged me ...”
“You’re lucky to be alive. But where’s Ralla?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t see him,” she said.
“Wait,” Aculeo said, looking around. “Where’s Tyche?”
“She came up from the cisterns with us, didn’t she?” Calisto asked. Her eyes widened with sudden alarm. “Didn’t she?”
Aculeo looked back towards the stairway leading down into the cisterns. Down to the underworld, where Dionysos was still Lord.
Aculeo grabbed a torch and he and Calisto descended the stairway into the dark catacombs, the torchlight reflecting off the uneven rock walls. They could find no sign of Tyche. The smoke was still thick enough to burn their eyes and make them cough. Aculeo’s entire left side was throbbing in pain. He made his way to the walkways overlooking the great cistern.
“Tyche?” he called, his voice echoing off the cold stone walls. “Tyche?”
“Where is she?” Calisto asked desperately.
Aculeo spotted a dim light deep in the catacombs, moving away from them. His heart sank. “There,” he said.
“But she wouldn’t go there on her own,” Calisto said. “She’d have no reason.”
“Zeanthes must have taken her,” Aculeo said. “I have to stop him.”
“But look at you, you can barely stand!” She looked down at his tunic and gasped. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’m fine,” he said, his left side throbbing with agony.
“Don’t lie to me! What happened?”
“It doesn’t matter now. Just go home and gather Idaia. We have to leave tonight before Ralla comes after us.”
“But what if…?” She trailed off, not daring to utter the words.
“If we’re not back by dawn you’re to leave without us.”
“Aculeo, no!”
“Promise me,” he demanded.
Calisto hesitated a moment, then held him close, kissed his cheeks, tears streaming down her face. “Be careful.” She headed back up the stone steps.
Aculeo moved as quickly as he could along the narrow pathways through the darkness, the only sounds the sloshing of water in the cisterns below and the echoes of his own footsteps. The catacombs were prac
tically endless, a shadowy web beneath the city. Still, Zeanthes appeared to know its routes well enough, for even with Tyche in tow the distance between them never seemed to close. He was like a firefly always flitting just out of ...
The ground suddenly disappeared beneath Aculeo’s feet. He twisted around and was barely able to catch the edge of the walkway before he fell into the water below. He gasped in anguish, his left side radiating with pain, soaked with blood. He managed to haul himself back up onto the pathway. It was completely, utterly dark. His torch must have fallen into the water. He lay there, trying to catch his breath, pain washing over him in aching, nauseating waves, afraid he might black out. Focus, he thought. Remember Tyche, the way she’d followed me into the alley from the Blue Bird that day so long ago, risking herself to help me find Neaera. She came to me, trusted me, and I let her fall into Zeanthes’ hands. He forced himself to sit up, then to stand, ignoring the dizziness and the pain.
Aculeo looked around. There was no sign of Zeanthes – the beacon of his torchlight had disappeared. He made his way tentatively along the pathways again, running his hands along the cool, dripping cavern walls until he came to a narrow opening in the rock wall. It was a fissure of some sort, the height of his shoulders, barely as wide. He could see a dim light emanating from within. Zeanthes, he thought. They must have gone in here.
He crouched down and reluctantly squeezed inside, the walls tight, pressing against him, the air stale and chalky with dust. The fissure’s ceiling dropped lower and lower the deeper he went, the passage tightening around him until he feared he’d become stuck if he went any further. He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled, following the fissure as it cut deeper and deeper into the earth. And what if I’m wrong? he thought bleakly. What if I’ve taken the wrong path, a path that leads to nowhere? What if I get stuck in here beneath the earth? Tyche is murdered, Zeanthes escapes, all of this in vain? I can’t breathe, the walls are so tight, pressing on me, what happened to the fucking air? Enough! he thought, forcing himself to keep moving, to stop thinking, to just move!
At last the fissure widened and his lungs filled with fresh air. He climbed to his feet and looked around, blinking in the sudden gleam of light, trying to orient himself. On the ground glowed a small, gleaming silver disc. The moon, he realized, or its reflection in a pool of water at least, the ground surrounding it littered with shards of shattered rock. The night sky stood suspended between two craggy walls. He was standing at the bottom of a crevice deep in the earth. Is this the light I followed, he thought wretchedly. A mere reflection of the moon?
“Apollo has emerged,” a man’s voice proclaimed.
Zeanthes stood perhaps ten cubits away in a patch of moonlight. He was almost unrecognizable, his eyes gleaming and wild, his robes soiled with dirt and soot. Tyche knelt trembling before him, wrists bound before her. The sophist held a knife to her throat. She looked up at Aculeo, not daring to speak, her eyes pleading with him silently.
“Zeanthes, she’s just a child,” Aculeo said. “Let her go.”
“Have you learned nothing in our time together, Aculeo?” the sophist asked with a desperate smile. “I taught you of Persephone, of Dionysos. I guided you, gave you my Ariadne.”
Ariadne? Aculeo wondered. Wasn’t she Dionysos’ wife or something? What the hell is he talking about?
“Don’t pretend you cannot see the splendour of it all,” Zeanthes cried.
“The splendour of what?” Aculeo demanded. “Of kidnapping and murdering innocent women? All to satisfy some sick fantasy of yours?”
“Fantasy? No, it’s an exploration, a journey to reality, a voyage to the greater truth!”
“What truth?”
“All of it of course. Do you not see that?”
“No. Nor do I care. It doesn’t matter anymore, Zeanthes. It’s over.”
“O dear Apollo, there is no such ending,” the sophist said. “There is only this life and the divine.”
“You want to speak to me of this? You want me to understand? Fine,” Aculeo said, stepping closer to Zeanthes, his hands held up, clearly empty. “Let the girl go and we’ll talk of it all you like.”
“Stay where you are,” the sophist warned, pressing his knife against Tyche’s throat. She gasped in pain.
“Zeanthes, please don’t hurt her.”
“I can do no real harm to her. Human souls are immortal.”
Aculeo looked at the girl, so young, so terrified, pleading with him with her eyes. “But why cause her suffering?”
“The Gods require their sacrifice.”
“Then take me instead.”
Zeanthes looked at him in surprise. He licked his lips, thinking. “Apollo as the sacrifice?”
“Yes.”
“A beautiful construct. But foolish.”
“How is it foolish to save your own life? Your own soul?”
Zeanthes yanked the girl’s head back sharply, making her cry out. “It’s not my life that rests on the edge of a knife, dear friend.”
Aculeo removed his knife from his belt and laid it on the ground between them. “I give you my oath, Zeanthes. Release Tyche and my life is in your hands to do with as you will. Hurt her and I’ll cut you down, piss on your scattered ashes and give sacrifice to every god there is that your divine, immortal soul be fucked for all eternity. Your choice.”
“No,” Tyche whispered, shaking her head at Aculeo. “Don’t …”
“It’s alright,” Aculeo said, smiling at the girl, tears stinging his eyes.
The sophist stared at him for a moment, licked his lips, considering the offer. He slowly nodded. “Alright, kneel before me then.”
“Let Tyche go first.”
“Oh? And trust you to simply keep your word?”
“I come to you alone and unarmed,” Aculeo said. “My only wish now is to save the girl. After that I’m yours.”
The sophist glared at him, his breathing heavy and uneven. He cut the ropes binding Tyche and shoved her to the ground. She climbed unsteadily to her feet, looking at Aculeo, her eyes filled with dread.
“Don’t worry,” Aculeo said. “Just get yourself to safety.” He watched her take a hesitant step away, then another before she finally slipped into the shadows.
“On your knees, hands out before you,” Zeanthes demanded, his face pale in the reflected moonlight, his eyes like empty holes cut in the sky. Aculeo complied, the sharp rock on the ground cutting the fragile flesh of his knees, as his wrists were bound behind him. “Embrace Dionysos, the beast god within,” the sophist whispered hoarsely, stepping behind Aculeo, pressing the knife to his throat. “Become one with the primal herd, be as one with him, the twice-born.” Aculeo could smell the man’s sour sweat, felt the edge of the cold blade against his flesh, a sick shock of pain rippling through him. He closed his eyes, ready to die.
A shriek of fury pierced the darkness. He opened his eyes just as a demon flew from the shadows and launched itself at Zeanthes. The man cried out in surprise, spun around to confront his assailant, knocking Aculeo to the ground. Aculeo twisted his head around in time to see Tyche step away from Zeanthes, a razor sharp rock clutched in her trembling hand, the edge of it stained with blood, her eyes filled with loathing. The sophist’s right bicep was gouting dark blood where the girl had cut him. He looked down at it in astonishment.
“Tyche, please, just get away,” Aculeo cried.
Zeanthes lunged at the girl. Tyche took half a step sideways, then slashed him again. The sophist dropped his own knife, looking down in bewilderment at the blood gushing like a fountain down his arm. His hand had been sliced open at the base of the thumb, almost severing it, exposing a web of pink-white bones and tendons. Aculeo struggled to his feet, trying desperately to free himself. Zeanthes grabbed the girl by the neck with his good hand and pulled her close. She swung the rock up in a short arc, cutting his stomach open. The sophist bellowed in shock and staggered back. Tyche thrust the razor-like rock into the side of his neck again an
d again. Zeanthes gave a strangled cry, fell to his knees, blood spouting from the gaping wounds. He held out his bloody hands in desperation, squealing like a beast in a slaughterhouse as the girl hacked at his face, his cheeks, his neck, his eyes. He curled in a ball on the ground, trying frantically to protect himself. Tyche plunged the rock into his back and neck over and over, crying “Osti! Osti! Osti! Osti!” until Aculeo finally managed to pull her off.
Tyche looked up at him, her face and robes soaked in the slaughtered sophist’s blood, trembling, eyes lit with waning fury. “Osti,” she whispered, then collapsed into Aculeo’s arms.
The moon was shining into the open atrium as Aculeo and Tyche entered Calisto’s villa. There were no lamps lit and the furniture was covered with sheets, which snapped and rippled like restless spirits in the breeze scattering sand blown in from the street. Peacocks ran wild through the empty halls, filling the darkness with their eerie cries, pecking occasionally at the handfuls of seed left for them on the marble floors which were spattered with the birds’ waste.
Aculeo heard the sound of footsteps and looked up to see Calisto hurrying towards them. “You found her,” she said. “You’re alive!”
Aculeo collapsed on a nearby couch, his face slick with sweat. “Where’s Idaia?” he asked.
“I’ve no idea, she’s not here!”
“I sent her away,” Tyche said simply. “She’s safe.”
“Gods be praised,” Calisto said.
“We need to gather her and leave tonight, understand?” Aculeo said. “Ralla will come after us. It’s not safe to stay any longer.” He groaned, grinding his teeth against another sickening wave of pain that washed over him.
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