by Peter Tonkin
I had expected Odysseus to approach the corpse at once but yet again he did not meet my expectations. Instead, he turned and began to look more closely at the dead bushes. ‘These have been crushed by some considerable weight,’ he observed, then he looked around, turned his back on the cliff altogether and examined the ground once more. The pine needles were disturbed by a wide track, as though something heavy had been dragged through them. ‘There’s something strange here,’ he said. ‘Ikaros, can you follow those tracks? Don’t go too far but stop and alert us if you discover anything that strikes you as odd.’ The trees were not so tight-packed down here and the bushes between them were sparse. Even so, Ikaros vanished amongst them in a moment.
At last Odysseus turned to the corpse. ‘Eyes first and most,’ he said. ‘Hands next and least. What can we see on and about our poor subject just as she is before we move her for a closer personal investigation?’
‘Her neck and arm are broken,’ said the High Priestess, the slight unsteadiness in her voice the result of outrage, I suspected, rather than shock or horror.
‘Just so. Most of her ribs as well, judging from the shape of her chest and the way whatever has pierced her is standing so far out of her back. I should observe also that there is a most unusual amount of blood staining her tunic, even allowing for the terrible damage done to her body. Like the bushes, she has been crushed by something heavy. Probably at the same time as the bushes were squashed and by the same weight falling from the same place.’ Odysseus pulled the bushes further aside and approached the body, his gaze, strangely – at least strangely to me – seemingly looking everywhere except at the subject of his investigation. This approach almost immediately bore fruit. The cliff above the dead girl’s oddly-angled head seemed to have been scraped by a set of claws, as though a gigantic eagle, had attacked it. Odysseus’ attention focused on this and he followed it downwards, until, with a grunt, he reached into the mud and pulled something free. He held it up so that we could all see it. At first I thought it was a tooth almost the length of his thumb or the tusk of a wild boar, for it came to a point like the fang of a massive wolf. But then he rubbed it, clearing away the caked mud. As he did so, he explained, ‘It’s a piece of an antler.’
As the mud came off, even in the dull and shaded light, we could see a gleam of gold.
iii
Elpenor and Ikaros’ companion helped Odysseus and me pull the dead bushes further back still. The captain stepped right up to the body’s side and went down on one knee in the mud. The young priestess was wearing the clothing associated with her goddess – the chiton tunic ending at her knees which was designed to give the goddess freedom of movement when she went on the hunt herself. It was belted at the waist, something we could only see because her cloak was bunched against the face of the mud-cliff, except for the part of it anchored by the stub of wood which stood above that massive puddle of dry blood. Nephele wore no rings nor any jewellery that we could see. Her sandals were unusually solid – but that was, no doubt, to allow the priestesses to move through the wild places sacred to their special deity. I glanced at the High Priestess’ sandals – they were equally robust. I looked back just in time to see Odysseus reach out and touch the dead girl’s tunic just above her hip, testing the edge of that great bloodstain. ‘Damp,’ he said. ‘She’s clearly been here since the weather changed – not that there’s been a huge amount of rain, just the overcast and the storm wind.’ He leaned back, never taking his eyes off her. ‘I think we need to turn her over now,’ he said. ‘But, High Priestess, if I am going to help you and the High King unmask whoever did this, I am going to have to look beneath her clothing at some point.’
‘I had expected that to be the case,’ said the High Priestess matter-of-factly. ‘Some servants from the temple will be here soon with a litter to carry Nephele back there. Once certain rituals have been observed, you will have the chance to examine her more closely.’
‘As long as the rituals do not include washing her before I have examined her,’ said Odysseus.
‘I will consult the oracle,’ said the High Priestess.
‘Very well,’ said Odysseus. ‘We need to turn her over now.’
The four of us took gentle hold of the poor girl’s corpse and rolled it towards Odysseus, away from the foot of the cliff. It seemed to me that the body moved strangely, though I had not dealt with many corpses. ‘Because so many bones are broken,’ said Odysseus when I mentioned my impression. But his tone was pensive, his attention clearly not on me and my observations. I fell quiet, therefore, and did my best to apply some of the suggestions he had made earlier. Eyes first and most… The dead girl’s face was dark; in fact the front of her body seemed somehow duskier than the back. Her shins seemed darker than her calves; her toes darker than her heels – but not arrestingly so. Nevertheless, her wide eyes and gaping mouth, both at a strange angle like her face and head, were disturbing to look at so I focussed my attention elsewhere. The foot of the cliff we had uncovered was not a precise angle, such as the bottom of the temple walls made with the flagstones on which it was built. Rather it was rounded; seeming to suggest that when Nephele fell she started a small landslide. Beyond the edge of this, the ground was dry, apart from a circle of deep brown where the mud had been given an autumnal hue by the poor girl’s blood. This was echoed on her tunic itself, because the entire front of the garment was covered in dust and pine-needles which slid off when we moved her. Only that red circle seemed to cling to these things, turning the dry dust to sticky sludge. The red circle was centred towards the inner slope of Nephele’s left breast as far as I could judge but there was something about it that disturbed me. I couldn’t work out quite what this was until Odysseus observed, ‘There’s nothing there.’ And I realised I had unconsciously looking for the flights of what I assumed to be an arrow, for I couldn’t imagine what else the stub of wood sticking out of her back could be.
‘How could that be?’ I wondered.
‘Either it snapped off as she fell, like the point seems to have done, or it was driven further in when she landed. Or, I suppose, it might have been pulled further through by whoever or whatever snapped the shaft sticking out of her back. Whatever happened seems to have drained her of blood at a great rate. I have seen corpses on the battlefield a day or two after death who are white on the upside but black on the downside. It can only be the way the blood settles. But we are getting ahead of ourselves…’
Whatever the captain was going to say next was interrupted by the return of Ikaros. ‘I think you ought to see this, Captain,’ said the old hunter.
Odysseus continued to stare at the corpse for a few more heartbeats then he turned. ‘Very well, Ikaros. What have you found?
***
It didn’t really need the skills of a hunter to follow the trail that started beside the corpse and the dead bushes. Whatever had made it – presumably the stag whose gilded horn Odysseus had just found – must have been severely injured itself, not least by the uncharacteristically clumsy tumble off the cliff. But just because the trail was easy to follow did not mean that we should pay no attention to it. For instance, it seemed that there were footprints right at the very edge of it, heading one way and then another, but these were almost impossible to see and only Ikaros commented on them with any confidence. And then a stadion or so from the cliff, Ikaros paused and pointed to something a little more obvious.
‘I see,’ said Odysseus. ‘A man leading a horse joins the track here. Presumably the hunter from the top of the cliff. He follows the deer deeper into the forest. But he doesn’t come back this way - not with the horse, at least - does he Ikaros?’
‘No, Captain. That’s part of what I have to show you.’
‘Very well,’ said the High Priestess. ‘Lead on then.’
Ikaros led Captain Odysseus, the High Priestess, myself and Elpenor even deeper into the forest. ‘These are the most sacred groves of all,’ said Karpathia quietly. ‘Reports abound of men and women se
eing the Goddess herself here; sometimes in her own shape with her huntresses and hounds in attendance, sometimes in the shape of a deer. Pythia the oracle has even suggested that it was in these woods, not on Mount Kithaeron that the hunter Actaeon discovered the Goddess bathing – so she turned him into a stag and had his hunting dogs tear him to pieces as he tried to run away.’
‘I see,’ said Odysseus carefully. ‘It is clearly a very dangerous thing to get on the wrong side of Artemis.’
‘It is dangerous even to call her by name in these woods,’ warned the High Priestess.
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ said Odysseus.
‘Here we are,’ announced Ikaros.
We had just entered a clearing. It was disturbingly circular in nature as though drawn by some great mathematician - or formed by some deity. At its centre stood the tallest cypress tree I had ever seen. Ikaros led us straight to it and stopped. ‘This is the heart of the sacred groves,’ said Karpathia quietly. ‘This is the sacred cypress. The Goddess inhabits every element of it. We need to be very careful what we do and say here; very careful indeed.’
‘But the deer came here,’ said Ikaros. ‘And so did the hunter.’ He stood looking expectantly at the captain. Odysseus stood, eyes busy, forehead folded in a frown of concentration. ‘The deer made it to the tree,’ he said slowly. ‘That much is clear. And the hunter with his horse followed it.’ He fell silent, then squatted, observing the ground at the base of the tree-trunk. ‘And this is where the deer died.’ Suddenly he stood up and strode perhaps ten podes away from the rest of us. ‘Blood spatters here,’ he observed. ‘Stretching further away still. It was clearly crippled, but it wasn’t dead so he cut its throat and let it bleed. I’ve seen horses killed that way after being hurt in battle and the blood can spurt up to thirty podes with astonishing force.’
Still frowning, he walked back to the tree. This time he looked up. There was a solid branch sticking out perhaps ten podes above the ground – one and a half times Elpenor’s height. ‘When it was dead, he slung a rope up there, you can see where it has damaged the bark; the branch is bleeding balsam. So he obviously lashed one end of it to the deer’s hind legs and pulled it up off the ground. He must be very experienced and well-equipped, and have his horse well-trained, because he was able to make it stand still here while he lowered the carcase onto its back, retrieved the rope and led his laden horse away. The hoofprints going this way are much more pronounced than the ones we looked at earlier.’ As he spoke, so he followed the hoofprints, no doubt seeing the hunter and his laden horse in his imagination. But then, right at the edge of the strange circle, he stopped.
‘The horse stopped there,’ said Ikaros. ‘I couldn’t work out why…’
‘Maybe he needed to adjust the carcase,’ I suggested.
‘He needed to do something to the carcase,’ said Odysseus, looking all around himself. Then suddenly he swooped, like an eagle diving on a lamb, thrust his hand into a nearby bush and straightened. In his fist was the barbed head of a long hunting arrow.
iv
The temple servants who brought the litter had also brought a sheet of linen to cover its passenger. They appeared almost immediately after we had returned to the site of the murder – the first murder, insisted the High Priestess in whose eyes cutting the deer’s throat ranked as high as killing the girl. As Artemis’ earthly representative in Aulis, she felt this especially because the act was done at the foot of the Goddess’ most sacred tree – to which her sacred animal had no doubt pulled itself seeking celestial aid. She shared every obol of Artemis’ divine outrage as she made clear on the walk back from the sacred tree to the dead priestess.
‘So,’ said Odysseus almost to himself as the litter was making its careful way down from the clifftop, ‘what can the site of the crime tell us before we and the victim must leave it?’
‘Surely the site has told us everything it can,’ I said. ‘The corpse must tell us her story next…’
‘No,’ said Odysseus. ‘There is more here.’ He stared at the young woman fixedly, his mind clearly racing. As he did so, the bluster of the wind increased, finally reaching us down here and blowing a little cloud of dust from the dead priestess’ clothing. As it did so, a large drop of rain found its way through the roaring branches and fell on the dead breast, just beside the hole in her tunic which no longer quite covered the wound made by that part of the arrow still in her chest. ‘Of course!’ he said. ‘The dust!’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Karpathia.
‘Her back was damp – it had been made wet by the rain that arrived with these storm clouds. But her front is dry. The ground beneath her is dry, except for the area soaked by her life-blood. The storms must have arrived almost immediately after she and the deer were killed!’
‘That will be the rage of the Goddess,’ said the High Priestess. ‘It’s all just as Pythia the oracle predicted. And there will be more to come until this matter is resolved and the blood-debt paid.’
At this point I had another flash of insight like the sudden realisation that if Father had been the man who did this, then my own life would be in danger - like for like. And my moment of revelation was about Father and his business once again. For it suddenly seemed to me that unless and until the Goddess was satisfied then his ships would be every bit as trapped here as Agamemnon’s. Indeed, he could well find himself in the High King’s situation, seeing his stores of wealth and provender vanishing while he had no way to replace them. It was in that moment, I suppose, that I stopped being a mere observer and decided I had better start playing a more active part in the investigation alongside my Captain – to the best of my ability at least.
In the heady grip of this new determination, I followed the litter back to the temple, walking at Odysseus’ left shoulder while the High Priestess walked at his right. There was nothing new for us to observe, or discuss, it seemed – for we all walked in silence. We arrived at the temple steps and went up until we were level with the first raised section but still outside the columns. Karpathia went in to consult the oracle because – in spite of her wide experience and the decisive confidence it brought – she had never faced a situation like this before and was concerned that if she allowed the body to enter the temple itself she might be guilty of some kind of desecration. And, as we were becoming equally convinced, if the Goddess actually existed and wielded divine power, she was a very dangerous being to get on the wrong side of.
So we waited outside the temple as the rain which had warned us of its approach with that one great drop finally arrived. Odysseus frowned with frustration. ‘Elpenor,’ he commanded, ‘help me move the litter into some shelter.’ Elpenor obeyed without hesitation and I too stepped forward to help while the temple servants stood aghast at the apparent sacrilege. But no sooner had we moved the litter out of the downpour than the High Priestess returned. ‘The Goddess is content for us to bring Nephele into the temple and to examine her there,’ she said. ‘There is no need for special ceremonial at this stage. The body will be washed and prepared in the cold room below the temple in due course.’
‘The Goddess is content that we examine the girl down to her naked skin?’ Odysseus said, his tone questioning.
‘Down to the skin,’ agreed the High Priestess, ‘if it will speed the process of finding the murderer and avenging his crimes.’
***
First of all we moved one of the tables in the outer chamber into the strongest light. Then the servants carrying the litter held it steady while we lifted the corpse and moved it onto the table. It lay face down, as it had on the litter, because of the arrow-shaft sticking out of its back. Odysseus lifted the linen cloth clear but told the attendants to keep it handy. There was the dead girl’s modesty to be considered when we did get down to her skin. Once she was on the table, the captain gently straightened her broken neck so her head was no longer at that disturbing angle then he did the same for her arm. He looked down at her, lost in thought. I did the same but
I saw nothing of any importance. If my eyes were idle, my nose was working – the body was emitting a stale smell. So were my ears; it seemed that I could hear furtive movements of tiny creatures that I could not see.
‘Right,’ said the captain after a few moments. ‘Let us begin.’
Working slowly and methodically, calling on my help and Elpenor’s as he needed, the captain first removed the cloak, sliding the pierced cloth up off the clotted shaft, folding it and putting it aside. This revealed the entirety of the huge stain on the girl’s tunic which had been partially covered before. He paused pensively, starting down at it.
‘You observed that she had lost a lot of blood, Captain,’ I said quietly.
‘I did, lad. But I don’t think this is all hers.’ As he spoke, he brushed away several ants busily foraging the edges of the stiffened circle. ‘It is obvious that the deer landed on top of her after they fell together. Its blood has been added to her own, clearly; and that explains the excessive quantity we observe.’
While we had been dealing with the cloak and discussing the quantity of blood on her tunic, the High Priestess silently gestured for the temple servants to remove her sandals. So, as soon as the back of the tunic was revealed, we were in a position to start removing it and once Odysseus had completed his examination of the blood-stain and given the footwear a cursory glance, we began to do so.
I was by no means old in those days but I was unusually experienced for my age. In various ports and cities which I had visited in my voyages aboard my father’s trading vessels, I had seen athletic competitions of all sorts, from the leaping of bulls in Minos to competitions of running, wrestling, jumping and throwing stone balls, javelins and discoi. I had also attended gymnasia in many places, both to exercise myself and to observe athletes going through their paces. These had been performed by young men and women equally – all of them either partially clothed or naked. True, I was just of an age to consider courtship and marriage, but that part of my life had been frustrated by the damage that had been done to my face and body on the docks at Troy. However, the simple fact was that the unclothed female form held neither secrets nor any great allure for me. So I was able, I believed, to view the dead girl simply as a kind of challenge appealing to my intellect rather than to any other part of me, even as we removed one layer of her clothing after another.