Demeter's Gold

by Meghan Ray

  Phil shrugged, “I didn’t say I wouldn’t meet you, but I want to be clear. You aren’t doing me a favor. You asked me for this, right?”

  It was Glaucon’s turn to shrug. “I’m just saying that I can not discuss this here. Can you meet me tonight or not?”

  Phil nodded.

  “Good, then we should meet up in the Kerameikos at around eleven- on the Street of Tombs, at the stele for Dexileos, the big one with the warrior on a rearing horse. You know where I mean. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah, sure, I can but the question is- why would I? Come on, Glaucon. Don’t be so mysterious. Sure, I’ll meet you but why does it have to be all the way up there? Why so late? You are making this much harder than it has to be. Let’s work on finding the easy way, okay?” Phil was trying to sound casual but he really didn’t want to go to a meeting in an empty cemetery in the middle of the night with a man in whom he had never really had much faith and now actually distrusted.

  The Kerameikos neighborhood was the potter’s district from the Agora to the city walls but once outside the walls, it turned into the city’s main cemetery and included the Street of tombs where the city’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens were buried. The important families had gorgeous marble monuments built to mark the graves of their loved ones. Some of the sculpture was excellent, the tomb of Dexileos that Glaucon had mentioned, for one. You had the idealized Dexileos, handsome and victorious, on his horse with the defeated enemy prostrate at his feet. It was certainly an impressive place. But for all its solemn beauty, Phil didn’t like it there at night. It reminded him of dead people. Still he would probably go if Glaucon insisted. He would go because he had let his curiosity drag him this far and he supposed he would let it drag him a little further.

  As if he had read Phil’s mind, Glaucon said, “Sorry Phil but I am going to have to insist. We have to do this part my way.”

  “Okay.” Phil managed a cynical little smile, “It’ll be a nice outing for us.” He walked out of the shop in disgust.

  “Don’t forget, eleven,” Glaucon called out after him.

  He was irritated with himself and with Glaucon and Xenodora and even with Critias for getting himself killed so inconveniently. He went to the gymnasium worked out with his trainer for the rest of the day. He liked to work with his trainer who was mean and silent when he was in a bad mood, and mean and silent when he was in a good mood, it was just the way he was but he was a great trainer, maybe for that reason. The workout helped Phil to calm down and think clearly. It was a trade though, a clear head in exchange for a stiff and bruised body. When they were finished and he had a bath, he realized what he wanted was some company, just to relax and have an ordinary night. Especially since, not to be overly dramatic, it might be the last ordinary night for a while.

  He decided to get over his scruples and go see Leonidas for a drink and an evening meal. He stopped at his room to drop off the coin, stowing it under some boards in a small space he had made in the floor. Satisfied that the floor would pass inspection if no one knew where to look, he set off. He figured it would be okay if he was very careful and took a circuitous route to make sure he wasn’t followed. He knew he was taking a risk but he wanted to spend a normal evening and Leonidas was about the only person around who could make that happen. They grew up together. At school, they were both social outcasts and had hung around each other with the regularity of boys with few other options.

  Phil had been an outsider on account of his birth. His family was foreign, and he was a metic and, as his schoolmates made sure to tell him, that wasn’t as good as being a citizen with a tribe and a family name. His family was wealthy and they could pay for the privilege of sending their son to a good school. But while the money could buy admission, it couldn’t buy acceptance. So he learned to fight, and to run, and to keep his own company.

  Leonidas was another case. He was a member of an ancient Athenian family and should by right of birth have had acceptance and respect. But, even though the family was old, they had lost the favor of fortune and with that their land and with the land went most of their money. He was poor and his family always had to scrape to afford the school fees. They were often in arrears to the teacher and, of course, that kind of thing got around. Then, added to the family’s relative poverty was Leonidas’ pride and prickly character. These facts all combined to make him an easy target for the other boys.

  So, although they came from different backgrounds, Phil and Leonidas understood each other and found themselves with a similar set of problems. They also had a lot in common. They were both smart and inclined to be wild. Leonidas was always worse, taking every prank a little farther and pushing every joke to the limit. Phil put it down to his aristocratic background, always sure that they could get away with murder because of the importance of their parents and their connections. But Phil was never far behind, since money also bought some slack, and between the two of them the teacher had been ready to resign.

  The boys learned to write and read and play the lyre from a stiff, proud man called Theophrastus who believed that he was undervalued and unappreciated. Most of the time he was right, since the families of his students had little respect for him and they passed their opinion on to the children. But it was his lack of humor that sealed his case for Phil and Leonidas. While they mastered Homer and learned music together, the boys kept busy trying to see who could get who into the most trouble without making Theophrastus to involve their parents. He beat them instead but they took their beatings as their due.

  In this way, they got through their elementary education and continued in the same vein at upper school. But when they turned eighteen, they were sent to separate gymnasia, for even Phil’s family money couldn’t get him into the Academy or the Lyceum. So, they went their separate ways but a lasting bond had formed between them and as adults, they treated each other as brothers.

  So when Phil was in need of a friend, someone he could really trust, he instinctively looked to Leonidas. “Hey, Phil,” Leonidas said when he saw Phil come into the courtyard, “What are you doing around? I heard you where here but then I heard that you went back down to the Piraeus…”

  “Yeah, I did and did but I have something up for later and I thought I would stop by…” He looked around for Leonidas’ wife, the children and not seeing them asked, “Where is everyone? Are you going out?”

  Leonidas shook his head, “Family visiting family, it’s just me here. And now you.” He smiled and motioned for Phil to come into the andron. The servant brought wine and some food as they settled in.

  Tonight, Phil didn’t want to talk about his troubles, he wanted to forget them. He knew he could trust Leonidas to figure this out. All he needed to do was to look at Leonidas’s broad open face, smiling at some stupid remark and he felt better. The two drank wine, ate dinner and talked about old school days, their best pranks, and women and so spent a pretty good evening. When Phil had to go, he almost asked Leonidas to go with him. He hesitated, not because he was afraid Leonidas would say no but because he knew that he would say yes. Because it might be okay to risk your own neck on a whim but you can’t ask anyone else to risk his. Leonidas had figured that there was something on his mind and he left a few openings for Phil to open up and tell him what was going on but he didn’t push, waiting for Phil to go first. Phil let those moments pass, and when they were done with the wine, he got up and left alone. He set off through the city and down along the road to the Kerameikos.

  Phil passed back through the Agora and out the Dipylon gate. The night was clear and the moon was bright. He almost enjoyed the walk, admiring the tombs decorated with sculptures showing the wealthy of Athens the way they wanted to be remembered. He knew the way and it didn’t take him long to get to the meeting place. As he had planned, he arrived early, leaving plenty of time to search out a good hiding spot. He might be a sucker for showing up but he wasn’t planning to be taken by surprise. First he tried the rise behind the Dexileos monument but
wasn’t satisfied either with the view or his unprotected back. While he was looking around, an idea came to him and he quickly pulled himself up the back of a ten-foot, white marble stele directly across the way. The top of the monument was uncomfortably small and narrow but he liked the view. The marble was cold and he wrapped his cloak tightly around his shoulders. Then he settled in to wait.

  The hard marble, the uncomfortable position and the chill night air reminded him of the army. He definitely had mixed feelings about his military service. It was true that he had acquired many skills. He learned how to fight, with weapons and without them, in a way that you never did in contests or the gymnasium. Those skills had come in very handy. But fighting wasn’t the only thing he had learned, there had been other lessons as well.

  For one, he had learned discipline, then restraint and, most of all, patience. To Phil, it seemed as though he had spent most of his army service sitting in a filthy camp for weeks on end, fighting fleas and lice for his own blood, scrounging for food and clean-ish water, all the time waiting for some general to tell him when it was time to pack up and march into the next crappy spot. It had definitely tested his patience.

  Camp life might have been sordid and boring but far, far worse had been laying siege to an enemy city, a nightmare for any soldier, inside the city walls or out. Waiting to starve out your enemy seemed like the least honorable type of fighting to him, then and now. The misery and the stench of it were fixed in his memory. That was the kind of war that made him hate the army, knowing that being anywhere, doing anything else would be better. Even now he couldn’t shake the horror of it.

  And while siege warfare had been the worst and camp life second, even on the move, a soldier’s life called for discipline, and patience. There had been times when they had ridden for days searching for an enemy in the hills of northern Greece, unable to find them because of bad information from their spies and their own poor intelligence. And Phil knew he had been lucky. Aimless marching might be hard on the men in the cavalry but it was murder on the hoplites, the foot soldiers that trudged along on foot with their heavy equipment.

  He had joined the cavalry in part because he was rich enough to do so but also because his parents wanted it. Horses and skilled horsemanship played a large part in Lydian military tradition and he had been taught to ride from his earliest days. But, in Greece, from a strategic point of view, the cavalry was never as important as the infantry. The hoplite was the backbone of the army and the center of the action. Sometimes this was a function of geography. Since the skirmishes were often conducted on steep terrain there wasn’t room to effectively deploy the horses. So generally the horsemen were used as a harrying force along with the archers, and helped to corral and irritate the enemy rather than to muster for full frontal attacks. And Phil didn’t mind missing out on the glory.

  Once they were deployed, the hardest thing was waiting in the face of a charging army, staring at the enemies’ mercenaries advancing with spears and swords drawn, just standing by, waiting until his general gave the signal to the charge; that had been the most difficult thing to learn. The discipline required went against every instinct for self-preservation and every rational thought. But they learned to stand there, stand and let those men get that close, all the while holding with their weapons drawn, unmoving. You could understand how one or two brave men could manage that, but hundreds of soldiers followed orders, maintained discipline and held the line. If he hadn’t seen it for himself he wouldn’t have believed it.

  Part of him didn’t regret any of that time. It all goes to experience. On the other hand, he still hated the army, not the fear or even the drudgery but the waste. The waste of time and life made him sick and he couldn’t think about friends he lost, young with everything ahead of them, without thinking that they were needlessly wasted. Now, with so much time between him and then, he could look back with more detachment but it still bothered him. The Greek city-states were constantly at war with each other squabbling over this or that, wasting their men and their money.

  A snapped twig brought him back to the present. He listened carefully to the night around him. He heard the sounds of men moving before he could see anyone. The moon shone over the tombs and the road. He started to make out shadows. After he had seen how many men there were, he was glad of his hiding spot. There must have been a dozen men drifting around the tombs. It was difficult to get an accurate count but he saw enough to know that he was in big trouble. He knew one of them was sure to spot him, once they stopped moving and found their positions around the site.

  First he cursed Glaucon, condemning him and his children to unspeakable torture, forgotten in this world, doomed to roam nameless in the next. Then he tried to decide on a plan. After trying and failing to get an accurate idea of the enemy positions, he waited for the moon to pass behind a cloud and launched himself off his tomb into the night. So much for planning. As he ran from tomb to tomb in the darkness, he had the crazy idea of trying to hide in one of scenes on the monuments, up against the stone, playing servant to some long dead aristocrat or vanquished enemy to some warrior. He had to fight the urge to laugh and was pretty sure that was because he was panicking.

  He tried to move silently, running in a crouch, using whatever cover was available. Whenever he saw anyone, he froze and waited for them to pass before moving on. He went from tree to tomb to shrub to rock. He got pretty close to the city walls. He was standing behind a large grey marble, waiting for his next opportunity to move forward when someone hit him from behind. His last conscious thought was that he really had to find a better way to spend his evenings.

  -7-

  It was light when he woke up. He was in a drainage ditch just outside the walls and he was covered with filth. His purse, so recently replaced, his dagger and his shoes were all gone as well as his rings. It looked like an ordinary robbery and he knew he would have trouble convincing anybody any different. He stood up slowly and felt around for breakage. His head was splitting and he felt nauseous. He also stank. Otherwise, he seemed essentially undamaged.

  He moved himself carefully along the road, trying simultaneously to dodge the carts that were bouncing into the city and to avoid moving his head. He went through the gates and directly to the baths. He cleaned off the worst of the muck and had a boy at the bath take away the stinking rags that were his clothes, hopefully to burn them. Then he borrowed a tunic from an attendant who knew him. Later, he would have to deal with Glaucon but that would wait. He was tired. He needed to get some sleep and some food. He decided to go down to Piraeus. He could check in at the bank, pay the watchmen, see if anyone had been looking for him. But first and most of all he wanted to get rid of the coin and the endless trouble that it brought him.

  He picked up the miserable thing at the apartment and started immediately for Xenodora’s house. He knew she would be disappointed but he reasoned all he had promised was to offer the coin to a dealer and he had done so. He couldn’t be responsible for success or failure beyond that. It was a little weak, he knew, but he wanted to be rid of the coin so bad he was willing to compromise his principles a little bit and to tell himself he had tried his best. Even carrying the thing around made him feel itchy.

  The street in front of Xenodora’s house was strangely empty of suitors and Phil soon found out why. Xenodora and company had decamped for Samos, to ‘take the healthful sea airs’ the door slave informed him with an ironic wink. The slave wouldn’t say more, clearly impatient to get back to enjoying the master-less house. Damn. All right. Clearly Xenodora had known that, once he found her gone, he would find another way to get rid of the coin. She had abandoned him and the coin and, by doing so, she had given Phil discretion concerning its disposal, in his opinion anyway.

  He would return it to the cult, simple as that. He would find a way. Give it to some priest and say, “Here you go. I got this from a guy…” Absurd as it seemed, that was what he would have to do. It was awkward, he knew, and he would have preferred
not to give Xenodora’s coin away without her permission, but she hadn’t left him much choice.

  He also hated the idea of going to the priests. Since he wasn’t an initiate of the cult of Demeter, they were going to be suspicious from the start, and the cult priests weren’t famous for welcoming outsiders, and he had something that he was most definitely not supposed to have. So, all in all, it looked like it could be a difficult exchange.

  Phil wasn’t against religion. He always played his part as a foreign witness in the Panathenaea, the birthday festival for Athena. During that celebration, the foreign residents of Athens marched in the great procession along with everyone else, playing their role as observers, carrying offerings, and joining in the sacrifices until the procession reached the Acropolis. From that point on, foreigners were forbidden to take part in the ceremony but he always enjoyed the games and the spectacle leading up to the ritual. He especially enjoyed the dramatic festivals that capped the ceremonies.

  He was also an initiate in several other cults in Athens and Piraeus. Those he had joined for business, because it was expected. Spiritually, he felt closest to his family’s religion. His family had always practiced the old religion of their Lydian ancestors and his strongest religious feelings were directed toward these traditional rites. It was an old religion, rich in mystery and symbolism and it felt more natural to him than the cults of the Greeks. Their cults often seemed to him like a patchwork, woven together of bits and pieces of other older religious traditions.

  He might not think much of the cult itself but the priests still made him uneasy. They were powerful men with a lot of contacts and, in his experience, they were usually both sanctimonious and unfriendly. And he was pretty sure that they were going to be pissed that he had their coin.

  He considered returning the coin to the Eleusinium, the temple of the cult at the base of the Acropolis right in here Athens but two things stopped him. First, when he went to the temple, the doors were locked and no one answered his call. Second, as he was walking away from the deserted temple he started to get the feeling he should leave town for a while. The feeling was caused partly by the thick arm around his neck and partly by the knife blade pressing into his back.