by Marie Savage
“All I’m saying is that you should be careful. We don’t know what Theron is up to, and no matter how taken you are with Lysandros’s daughter, you don’t know her. You don’t know if you can trust her, let alone if she trusts you. We’ve got ourselves in a mess because of your willingness to be taken in by a woman. Granted, Charis was more a hound from Hades than a woman, but still….You must tread carefully. You can’t let your cock get you into any more trouble. Next time, I may not be able—or willing—to help get you out of it.”
Nikos looked Diokles in the eye. It wasn’t the first time, he’d wanted to plow his fist into his partner’s face and he’d wager it wouldn’t be the last.
Diokles sensed he’d pushed the conversation too far. He watched the muscles of Nikos’s jaw clench and unclench. “I’m just pointing out the obvious,” Diokles said quietly.
“I don’t want to hear this again.” Nikos muttered through gritted teeth.
“Your problem is you’re obsessed with women. My problem is I always have to manage your messes.”
“It was an accident. I didn’t kill her.”
“It is of little matter, Nikos. I’m not just talking about Charis and you know it. Besides, she had it coming. I wouldn’t have put up with it for as long as you did. I only hope you were man enough to finally taste her treasures before she tried to cheat you out of ours.”
The memory of Charis leading him into the old shed, promising, finally, to give him what he’d been dreaming of—if only he’d be a bit more generous with the tiara—washed over Nikos. Diokles need never know, she said as her fingers traced the musculature of his arm. It will be our secret, she murmured as she unpinned his cloak. We will be a team, you and I, she whispered, her hot breath tickling his ear. She had played him for a fool for months. It’s not that he loved her. Gods, no. It was that he couldn’t have her. The need for her would have been over as soon as it began if only she had kept her promises. Each time they met, she took him right to the edge and then left him there. Each time she’d brush up against him, shake her hair loose, let her chiton slip to expose the swell of her breast. He remembered that night and how he could have taken what she promised … but he didn’t.
“Ah,” Diokles sighed. “Don’t tell me you didn’t—”
“Shut up.”
“Come, my friend. You tried reasoning. You tried kindness. You even almost persuaded me to give her a bigger cut on the stolen goods we got from that rat of a brother of hers. But none of that was enough. She wanted more. You always say a little kindness works? A compliment or two? Where has that gotten you? By the gods, I’ve never heard such drivel. Kindness and compliments got us in this mess. Kindness and compliments embolden women, they breed an avaricious need for more and more until you are on your knees asking forgiveness just for being a man. Meanwhile, the object of your desire smiles as she squeezes your balls and schools you on the proper way to run your business.”
“Always the voice of experience, Diokles.”
“That’s right. I run a very profitable business and I know how to take care of troublesome women—and men.”
“Your way is not very pretty.”
“It may not be pretty, but it is effective. And final.”
“Nothing’s final,” Nikos said. At least not yet, he thought. Someone would find the remains of Charis’s brother under that stack of hay in the shed. And someone had picked up Charis’s body from the temple steps and moved her to the altar in the theater. That same person had stripped her naked, a violation he couldn’t bring himself to even when he had the chance. But who had moved her? And why? Had they seen him leave the body? If so, why hadn’t he heard from them? Why hadn’t he been accused? Exposed? Blackmailed? Could it have been Kleomon? If so, did the man sitting across the desk from him know about it? It had been Diokles’s and Kleomon’s business from the beginning. They had started selling temple treasures to overseas collectors before the last Sacred War was even over. He was the latecomer. Was Kleomon trying to cut him out?
As he looked across the table at his oldest friend, it hit him. He wanted out. He wanted out of everything. He had only joined the venture to make enough money to leave Dodona and get away from his mother once and for all. Now, he wanted to start over. Away from Diokles, away from priestesses and prophecies, and most especially, away from the guilt. By the gods, he had just as good as killed an unarmed woman and with each hour that passed since he left Charis on the temple steps, that reality ate a little deeper into his gut. Burrowed a little further into his brain. What would Thea say if she knew? How could I have let it go this far? But he knew he couldn’t leave now. There were too many questions and none of this nightmare would be over, would be final, until he found the answers. And now there was another consideration: Althaia of Athens.
“Face it, Nikos; your method for dealing with women is flawed,” Diokles paused and then said, “And, as hard as you try, it will never make your mother love you.”
Nikos exploded. His chair clattered backward across the floor as he slammed his fists on the table and leaned over Diokles. “How many times do I have to tell you? I will not have this conversation.”
Diokles looked up at him calmly. “We’ve been friends since we were boys, Nikos, and every time I see you it gets worse. In fact, it’s pathetic. The more you cater to that old harpy, the worse she treats you. Sometimes I think I ought to arrange a tragic accident as a gift for you.”
“A gift? Diokles, what kind of man are you?”
“Since you’re not man enough to take your freedom for yourself, maybe you need a friend to give it to you.”
“By the gods, sometimes I wonder if I even know you.”
“Come now, if she were my mother ….”
“She is not your mother. And I am not another Orestes and Melanippe of Dodona is not another Clytemnestra!”
“Orestes only did what needed to be done.”
“I will not murder my own mother—whether for revenge or for convenience.”
“Remember, Orestes was acquitted.”
Chapter Twenty-six
As her fingers slid along the string, Althaia wondered about Nikos. He must think the examination in the storehouse complete—when in fact it hadn’t yet begun. And he must have had no idea where it was really taking place. He probably thought she was back at Menandros’s, not walking blindly through the deep corridors of the temple complex with nothing more than a piece of string to guide her. That is, if he thought about her at all. Maybe she had read too much into the appraising way his gaze caught hers. Maybe she should stop thinking about his green eyes, broad shoulders, and how her fingers might feel in his thick curls. After all, no matter what she thought about Nikomachos of Dodona, she was married to Lycon. And that was that.
She began counting her footsteps again. They made their way along a straight but slightly inclined corridor. After twenty-three steps, they began to veer to the right. Seven more steps and there was a knot in the string and a sudden turn right followed by fifteen more steps. Sliding her fingers along the string, she suddenly came across a great, thick knot. She stopped and stuck her foot forward, feeling with her toes that just ahead there were steps hewn into the stone floor. One, two, three, four, five, she counted as they ascended slowly and then came to another thick knot. The floor was flat and smooth and they shuffled forward a few steps until she felt the third thick knot. This time, she could sense something was different. She took a deep breath and noticed the distinct fragrance of myrrh in the air. She put her hand out before her face and pushed forward into the black emptiness until she felt it. A thick wall of fabric hung before them. She squeezed Nephthys’s hand, pushed the fabric aside and there before them, in the flickering lamplight, was the adyton of the Temple of Apollon with Charis’s body, deformed in its death pose and sheathed in a pale linen shroud, stretched out on a long table.
Nephthys stepped through the curtain and stood beside Althaia. Their hands, still clasped, followed the string until they saw t
he end tied to the table leg. They let it drop and looked about the room. Large lamps, already lit, sat on pedestals in the four corners of the room. Sitting next to the lamps were incense burners from which thin wisps of smoke rose to fill the room with the clean, faintly bitter scent of myrrh used to mask the smell of death.
On the opposite side of the room, another wall of thick fabric hung from a series of hooks fastened in the frame of a wooden doorway. The supplicants must stay on the other side as they descend from the temple, Althaia remembered. Althaia imagined the Pythia sitting upon the tripod over the fissure and listening as her father posed his question from the other side of the fabric. That had been the summer after her mother died. What had her father asked? And what had the Pythia answered?
The room had a low painted ceiling with a single slender column supporting it. It was smaller than she had imagined. The floor was bare rock scarred only by the jagged crevice that opened to the womb of the world below and a narrow, shallow trough through which poured the sacred waters of the Spring of Kassotis. Now, however, the trough was dry.
Nephthys tugged at Althaia’s sleeve and pointed at the trough. In the middle of the far wall, where the floor and the wall met, waters from the spring normally flowed through a drain and into the small channel from which the Pythia could drink. There, peeking out from just above the plane of the floor, two eyes gleamed at them in the darkness and a little hand poked out and waved. Zenon. Just as Theron and Praxis had planned. They both smiled, but dared not acknowledge the boy any further. He was sitting in the damp drain with a rope tied around his waist, positioned out of sight and ready to alert the others in case they were discovered or overcome by the sacred vapors.
Althaia turned her attention back to the adyton. Just beyond the table and straddling the crevice was a block of stone. The three legs of the tripod were fitted securely into three holes drilled into the stone. They Pythia would sit atop the tripod and breathe in the sacred vapors, preparing to deliver Apollon’s messages. The tripod itself was tall and simply decorated. The pockmarks of the hammered bronze reflected the flickering lamplight, and she could well imagine Herakles and Apollon fighting over it. In front of the tripod, also resting on the stone block, sat the famous omphalos, the navel stone of the earth. It was from a hole at the top of the omphalos that the sacred pneuma of Apollon issued. The Pythia would lean over and breathe in the vapors and fall into her trance. It was only then, when she became the nexus between god and man, that she could give the supplicants what they came for.
She took in the gold, silver, and bronze treasures—an ornamental kithara carved in ebony, inlaid with ivory and mother of pearl and strung with golden filaments, the eagles of Zeus, and a small figure of Apollon as a boy standing over the simple bronze garland of grape leaves marking the grave of his dark-natured brother, Dionysos. Born of Zeus and Semele, killed by his enemies, resurrected and taken into the heavens by Zeus himself. Light and dark, day and night, reason and abandon; the two brothers represented the opposite natures of the human spirit. Althaia whispered a prayer to both.
Nephthys slipped the tablet from the linen wrap around her waist, and Althaia removed her box from the binding around hers and laid it carefully on the floor under the table. Together they rolled Charis’s body sideways and pulled the shroud away until only one layer remained between her body and the table. As they removed the shroud, Althaia noted the abrasions, scrapes and dirt on her shoulders, back and buttocks.
Finally, she lay naked before them, and Althaia thought of Inaros and his respect for the souls of the dead. Instinctively, she placed her fingertips on Charis’s cold lips and whispered part of the prayer from the Egyptian Book of the Dead that Inaros taught her. Startled, she heard Nephthys join the recitation:
May my mouth be opened by Ptah; may the cords,
the cords belonging to my mouth, be untied by the god of my city.
May Thoth come, provided with words of power, to untie the cords,
the cords of Set which guard my mouth.
Atum is driven back; he has cast away they who guard it.
May my mouth be unfastened, may my mouth be opened by Shu,
with that piece of iron of heaven with which he opened the mouths of the gods.
Althaia looked inquiringly at Nephthys. Of course she knew Nephthys was Egyptian, and knew that she could read and write, but that didn’t explain how she could recite random passages from the Book of the Dead.
“My husband was a priest of Amun-Ra in the Sacred Precinct of Karnak in Thebes on the banks of the life-giving Nile,” Nephthys whispered. “I was a temple wife and chantress.”
Althaia’s eyes widened in shock. The wife of a priest! A chantress from the famous temple at Thebes? How could it be that a woman like that could become a slave? Althaia read a flash of bitterness in Nephthys’s eyes as if to say, “What, did you not guess I was an educated woman? Did you not wonder who I was and from whence I came? Did you not think I could be worthy of being your companion?”
But perhaps Althaia read those things in her own heart, for Nephthys had already reached down to Althaia’s box and handed the probe to her.
“Let us see if Ptah will open Charis’s mouth and tell us who sent her to the afterlife before her time,” Nephthys whispered.
Althaia walked around the body as she had done at the theater. She kept her mind focused, listening intently, willing Charis to speak to her, to reveal her last moments. Althaia was sure the answers they sought were within reach, hidden somewhere within the mortal envelope that had been Charis.
Nephthys stood across the table as Althaia pointed out the bruising on Charis’s cheeks and shoulders. Someone had hit or slapped her. Someone, a man with hands large and strong enough to grip her shoulders and clasp his fingers around her arms had left mottled bruises on her fair skin. She tipped the body sideways and noted the blackened skin where the blood had pooled on her backside. She leaned over and pointed to fine abrasions on the skin of her buttocks. Althaia moved down to examine the inner thighs. If Charis had been raped, there might be blood or bruising on her pubis or legs. But Althaia could see no sign of a forced assault.
Althaia examined the girl’s hands, and looked carefully at her fingers. She motioned for Nephthys to hand her a probe and then ran it under the girl’s finger nails. She held the probe up to the lamplight for Nephthys to see. Dried skin, flecks of blood. Charis had fought for her life.
She continued around the body and ran her fingers through Charis’s hair and along her scalp to feel for any hidden cuts, bumps or abrasions. Her fingers loosened more bits of straw and dirt ground into her hair, but did not discover evidence of any blow that could have killed her. Charis’s neck was distended and her shoulders still arched back as they had been when she was found draped across the altar. Her head was cocked backward, her face colorless, and her skin puffed and pulled tight on her cheekbones. Because her head had been upside down and hanging off the edge of the altar as the death stiffness set in, her mouth was frozen into a bizarre smile. Althaia laid the probe on the table and tested her jaw.
The clench was problematic, still stiff and difficult to move. Althaia could tell the body was in the process of accepting its death. Usually, that began with the face, the eyelids, lips, and jaw. Inaros said the timing of tissue relaxation depended upon the deceased’s willingness to leave this world and join the next. And it also depended upon the deceased’s age and the temperature in which the body was stored. Charis was young, and the weather was still cool in the day and could get quite cold at night. So, stiffness may have set in early, but in the warmth of the storehouse and adyton, the body may have begun to relax more quickly. According to Inaros’s timetable, Charis had not yet been dead three full days. However, Althaia reminded herself, they did not actually know when Charis had died—only when she had been discovered. She had been found nearly two days prior, but had she died much earlier than that?
Althaia stuck the probe in Charis’s mouth and worked i
t up between her teeth. Using it as a lever, she pulled the jaw down while Nephthys held the head still. Once the jaw was open, she motioned for Nephthys to bring a lamp over and hold it above the table. Her fingers swept and probed the interior of the mouth. Althaia remembered in the theater that, although her skin had a slight blue tint, it was not as blue as she thought a choking victim would be. While Inaros had talked about choking, Althaia had never actually seen someone who had died that way. She just imagined the body would be blue enough for it to be obvious. But, maybe, Charis had died earlier than they thought and was moved to the theater later. Maybe the blue tint fades quickly once the death pallor sets in. There was so much Althaia still didn’t know.
Then, she felt something odd. She pulled out her fingers and wiped them clean. She then opened the jaw as wide as she could and tried to peer into the girl’s throat. Even with the lamplight, it was too dark. She put her fingers back down into the throat and probed as far back as she could get them until she felt it again. There was definitely something different down there. It was slick and she couldn’t get her fingers around it.
Althaia tried the probe and then the hook, wiggling them around, trying to catch whatever was lodged to drag it up into the mouth. All she did was push whatever it was farther down into the trachea. She pulled the instruments out and wiped them on her cloak. Then she pressed against the base of the throat. Perhaps there was something she could feel with her fingers. She couldn’t be sure, though did seem to be something that she could push back and forth. There was only one thing to do.
Althaia motioned to Nephthys to hand her the scalpel. Physicians in Egypt had long performed tracheotomies, although Hippokrates spoke against them for fear of damaging the carotid artery and killing the patient. That’s why she was interested in dissections—not operations. She didn’t want to be responsible for the life or death of anyone under her scalpel. Neither the physician nor the midwife at her mother’s bedside had been able to do anything to save her mother or her baby brother. Althaia didn’t want to have to stand by and watch her patients die knowing she could do nothing. That’s why it was so important to discover how the body worked, how it was constructed, how organs were connected. Like now, if Charis died choking on something, no one would have known simply by staring at the body and lamenting the girl’s untimely death. No, you have to go in there and find out what happened. “It’s the only way,” she whispered as she pressed the scalpel into the skin and pushed down into the trachea.