by Gary Corby
“Does he have much work?” Diotima asked.
“Lots, the way everything around here rusts so quickly,” Damon said. “Then there are all the visitors at peak season. There are always a few people who need stuff fixed, and the ship captains who need repairs before they move on. Frankly, Mandro is overworked.”
Damon’s talk of repairs reminded me of something else. “The villagers do all the maintenance?” I asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“Does that include fixing squeaky gates?” I asked. “Because almost every gate on this island has a problem.”
Damon’s smile dropped a little. “Yeah, sorry about that. Every time Anaxinos is making up a list of things we need, to send to Athens, he asks me what I want. I always tell him oil, and he writes oil, and then Athens sends us highest-grade quality cooking oil. It never occurs to those Athenian idiots that we might need to grease a hinge . . . no offense intended.”
“None taken.”
“We tried using fish oil, but it just isn’t the same.”
“When I get back to Athens I’ll make sure they send you some real oil.”
“Thanks. I knew you were a good man, Nicolaos.”
Coming off the main road were narrow lanes, whose sole purpose was to lead to other cottages set back from the thoroughfares. The houses were only spread out enough to allow for small market gardens between each. As we walked, everyone we came across waved and bid us good day. One woman mentioned a boil that had been troubling her. It seemed an odd thing to say, but Damon nodded and sympathized.
I realized after a while that Damon was being careful to be seen by all the villagers in our company. He was sending the villagers a message; he was telling them that Diotima and I were all right to talk to. Yet he hadn’t explicitly said a single word. Damon had done all this by example. When a man passed by going the other way, Damon mentioned the woman with the tricky boils. The other fellow nodded.
“Thanks for letting me know. I’ll see her this afternoon,” and he walked on.
“That’s our doctor,” Damon explained. “We’ve got a good one, on account of all the visitors who come here.”
What Damon had done, directing a doctor to see a sick woman, was what anyone would expect of a village headman, but if so then Damon was the most unassuming village chief I’d ever met.
“What’s that over there?” Diotima asked. She pointed inland, at a large, unusually flat piece of land. In the middle of it were three forlorn-looking tents.
“That’s where the visitors camp,” Damon said.
“Visitors?” I asked blankly.
“You don’t think we keep an inn for everyone who comes here, do you?” Damon said. “Delos gets hundreds of visitors every year, maybe thousands. I don’t know, I can’t count that high. So they got to sleep somewhere, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, that’s the camping ground,” he said. “Not that anyone’s there at the moment. At peak season that field is full of tents,” Damon said.
“How come there aren’t many visitors at the moment?” Diotima asked.
“It’s harvest time,” Damon said promptly. “In most places, people are working hard, bringing in the food.”
“Not here?” I asked.
“Do you see anything to harvest?” Damon asked. He swept his arm across the barren landscape. The stony ground on Delos rose towards the central spine, where there was either a very low mountain or a very big hill, depending on how you looked at it.
“We call it Mount Kynthos,” Damon said, when I asked.
“Is there a stream that runs off the mountain?” I asked.
“Not even a small one,” Damon said unhappily. “When it rains, which isn’t often, the water flows down that slope in every direction and straight into the sea.”
“Then what do you do for fresh water?”
“We conserve water like you wouldn’t believe. There’s a small lake north of the temples which is our only supply—”
“The Sacred Lake?” Diotima interrupted. “The place where Apollo and Artemis were born?”
Damon nodded. “That’s it.”
Diotima was shocked. “Don’t tell me you drink from a holy place!”
Damon laughed. “Since the alternative is to die of thirst, yeah, we drink holy water. I wonder if that makes us more blessed? We pull water from the Sacred Lake in small buckets. Because when that runs out, there’s nothing else. Have you seen the lake yet? No? Come along then.”
“Is there some way we can avoid that road again?” Diotima asked. By this time we had returned to the beach next to the village dock. “Even with the donkey it’s hard going.”
“Are you all right?” I immediately asked, and held her hand.
“Just tired,” she said. “And a little bit sore in the legs.”
“No wonder,” I said. I pointed to a weathered rowboat that was beached not far away. The boat was chained to a heavy rock so that in a storm it could not be lost to the sea. I was surprised no one had stolen the oars, which lay within. “We could take that,” I suggested.
Damon looked where I pointed. “Oh no we can’t. That’s the emergency eject system.”
I didn’t understand what he meant. “The what?”
“You know it’s forbidden to die here,” he said.
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, if someone’s got a bad illness, then we can ship them off to Mykonos to be treated, and if they die, they can die there. But if someone starts dying unexpectedly—you know how old people will have those seizures—they clutch their chests and keel over real quick.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “Every month or so that happens in the agora, back in Athens, always to an old person who has lived a full life.”
“Right.” He nodded. “Well if that happens on Delos, then we’re in trouble. We carry whoever’s dying down to that rowboat quick as we can, and we row them off the island.”
“Does it work?”
“Usually. A couple of times we’ve had to be bit loose about the definition of dead. But we figure, as long as they’re still warm, they might still be alive. Right?”
“Sure,” I agreed amiably.
“You never know when that rowboat might be needed. It’s ready to go at a moment’s notice. It’s also illegal to move it, except to eject someone off the island.”
That left us no choice. Damon led us up the Sacred Way, with Diotima riding the donkey. I was beginning to understand why the Sacred Way was such a well-trodden path. Almost anything that anyone wanted to do on Delos involved traveling along it. There seemed to be a rule that no matter which end of Delos I was at, what I wanted to do required me to be at the other end. I had already lost count of how many times I had walked that route.
As we walked along it yet again, I was struck by just how constrained life was on this island. I wondered that the people who had lived here all their lives hadn’t gone mad. It must be like living in a jail.
We reached the sanctuary. Here business was returning to something that approached normality. Priests and priestesses walked back and forth on whatever business they were upon. I noticed that the Athenians, who had filled the sanctuary the night before, were now entirely absent. It was almost as if nothing had happened, except that the charred remains of the bonfire pits left a reminder of the night’s excitement.
Damon led us across the sanctuary grounds to the low wall on the other side, the one into which I had stumbled the night before. The wall was completely obvious in broad daylight. In the center was a gate that I had missed. Damon opened the gate, which squealed, and we walked through to another complex of small buildings.
“What are these for?” I asked.
Damon shrugged. “Not much, these days,” he said. “You’d have to ask Anaxinos, or maybe Karnon; he runs the administration. You k
now Karnon?”
“Yes, we’ve met him.”
“I think this used to be where they ran the island and made all the decisions, you know? But now all that’s done at the Oikos.”
We passed by the small old buildings to reach an open area. To our left, in a long line above our heads, was a row of lions.
“Oh, they’re magnificent!” exclaimed Diotima.
Indeed they were. The lion statues sat upon their haunches, their heads raised, all of them facing east, with expressions of the greatest reverence.
“That’s the Terrace of the Lions,” Damon said. “They salute the Sacred Lake.”
The Sacred Lake turned out to be more like the Sacred Pond.
“That’s it?” I said, incredulous. The lake lay on the right side of our path. If I had come across it anywhere else, I would not have given the lake a second glance. I had seen watering dams on farms that looked more impressive.
“It isn’t much,” Damon admitted, and rubbed his chin. He sounded slightly embarrassed.
“Not much?” Diotima said. My wife slid off the donkey and stood beside me, completely entranced. “Not much?” she repeated. “My Goddess was born on that lake.”
She stepped down to the water’s edge. I hurried to follow her.
Diotima stopped when her toes were wet. “Where?” she asked the single word.
Damon pointed. “You see the barge?”
We could hardly miss it. The barge occupied the center of the small body of water. It was well-built and rose from the water as a solid platform.
“The priests say that’s where they were born,” Damon said.
Diotima began to sing. She sang a hymn, a paean, that spoke of the birth of divine Artemis and her brother, Apollo, and of the blessings that they had brought to the world.
Damon and I listened in silence.
When she finished, Diotima continued to stand there, silently. After a while, Damon offered a polite cough. He had work to do, he said, and he had now shown us the entire island. There was nothing north of where we stood but empty land.
I thanked Damon for his courtesy. Then I offered him, as politely as I could, a reward for his guided tour. He looked at the coins in my hand, grinned, and shook his head. “What would I do with those?” he asked. Then he took his leave. He walked back the way we’d come, whistling a tune. It took me a moment to realize he was whistling the hymn that Diotima had sung. I listened to it fade into the distance.
Diotima had stood there throughout the exchange, admiring the lake. “I could look at this all day,” she said simply.
“You might get tired,” I said.
She solved that by sitting down. I sat beside her.
“It’s difficult to take in,” she said. “Artemis, my goddess, was born right here.”
“Is it that special?” I asked. “We’ve stood on the spot where Athena stood when she gave the olive tree to Athens. You’ve worked in the same temple where the Amazons used to worship. We’ve been to Olympia, where countless demigods have walked the ground. None of those places made you as excited as you are now.”
“Oh, Nico, that’s different,” Diotima said. “None of those were so important to my goddess. Can you imagine what it must have been like here? Back when . . .” She paused. “Well, whenever it was . . . on this spot there was a Titan giving birth to two Olympian Gods.”
“It’s not the sort of thing you see every day,” I admitted.
“There you are then. This place is sacred beyond all imagining. I knew it was before we came, but now I feel it.”
The breeze blew a little stronger. It pushed back her hair from her face as she gazed at the Sacred Lake.
“I totally understand why people dedicate their lives to this place,” she said.
“I hope you’re not thinking of moving here!” I said, alarmed.
“No, of course not,” Diotima said. “It wouldn’t be good for our baby.”
“Speaking of which, we need to think about how long this is going to take,” I said. “We need you back in Athens before anything . . . er . . . drastic happens.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Diotima said with feeling. “We do have leads, Nico. More than we had this morning.”
This was true. “Anaxinos has to be on the suspect list, after that strange conversation this morning.”
“I hate to admit it, but you’re right,” Diotima agreed. “As I pointed out before, Karnon the accountant might conceivably have wanted Geros out of the way.”
“Yes.”
“What about your friend Damon?” Diotima asked.
“What about a motive?” I replied.
“Personally, I think he’s strange enough that he could have done something unpredictable.”
“It’s my turn to say, I hate to admit it, but you’re right.” I sighed. “Damon’s on the list, then.”
We trudged away from the lake, me supporting Diotima with my arm.
“This donkey needs a name,” Diotima said, when we reached the patiently waiting beast.
“Blossom?” I suggested. It was the name of our donkey back in Athens.
“You can’t have two donkeys with the same name,” Diotima said. “Why don’t we call this one Pericles?”
“While I appreciate the sentiment, the real Pericles might not,” I pointed out. “What if you say something like ‘Don’t poo on my foot, Pericles’ while the two-legged one is present?”
“That would be a problem,” Diotima agreed.
“Apollo’s Steed?” I suggested.
We both turned to look at the completely stationary, utterly unimpressed creature.
“Plod?” Diotima said.
“Done.”
Diotima climbed up on Plod, with my assistance. We worked out a good system. Plod stood beside the raised Terrace of the Lions. Diotima walked up the steps, from which it was an easy step down to get on his back. We began the journey back to the cottage.
When we came to the low wall I had tripped over the night before, Diotima made a joke about it being my own personal Nemesis.
“I don’t think the wall is the killer,” I said.
“It did you a decent injury though,” said my wife. “I notice you’re still limping.”
“It will get better,” I promised. But her small joke put me in mind of something else. “You know, I noticed Philipos has developed a limp, too.”
“That’s because Athenian men are clumsy,” Diotima explained.
Walking across the sanctuary, with flowers in her arms, was Meren, the young priestess who had escorted Diotima to the cottage on the night of the protest.
I pointed her out to Diotima and said, “I saw her at the sanctuary when I ran here to report Geros’s death.”
“Nico, the girl’s a priestess,” Diotima said. “Priestesses do tend to frequent temples, you know.”
“At dawn?” I asked. “After a long night of protests? She mustn’t have had much sleep.”
“She came with me all the way back to the village, and I left early.”
“That’s true,” I agreed. “But the point is she was here when Geros died. I wonder what she saw?”
“You mean, as in a killer running away?” Diotima thought about it.
“It doesn’t have to be that good a clue. Even if she saw someone hanging around who isn’t normally here, that would help us. Who knows? Let’s find out.”
The Priestess of the North
Meren had come up the Sacred Way and was walking towards where I had last seen her, after Geros’s death. I hailed her as she passed. She stopped and looked from one to the other of us quizzically. “Can I help you?”
I said, “Only a simple question. Meren, when Geros died, I saw you at the sanctuary.”
“Yes, I remember. I watched you run past me like a scared rabbit,” sh
e said.
I decided to let that pass. “Did you happen to see anyone else running around?”
“No, only you.”
“On that morning, before you saw me, did you notice anyone around the sanctuary who isn’t normally there?” I asked.
“No. Why do you ask?” Then she answered her own question. “Oh, you wonder if I saw the murderer.”
The young priestess was quick-witted.
“Yes, or maybe some other witness,” I said.
Meren thought for a moment. “I saw the slaves who work in the Oikos of the Naxians. But they’re usually here early. We always wave hello. I saw Karnon too, he passed me by on the way. He’s the accountant of the League.”
“Yes, we know.”
“I commented that he was up early. He said he had to start planning for the treasury to move. He was yawning a lot.”
That was consistent with what Karnon had told us.
“Anyone else?” I asked hopefully.
“No.”
We had got nothing new.
“What were you doing at the sanctuary so early in the morning?” Diotima asked.
“Oh, I’m here early every morning,” Meren replied. “One of my assignments is to tend the graves of the Hyperborean Women. Once the supplicants arrive it’s too crowded to do anything. Of course, at the moment we have no visitors, but it’s a habit.”
“Tend the graves of whom?” I asked blankly.
“You do not know of the Hyperborean Women?” she said. “Come, I will show you.”
Meren led us across the grounds to the tiny temple in the northwest corner of the sanctuary. This temple was close to the gate that led out onto the graveyard. Like most temples, it faced east.
“There are two deities worshipped here on Delos,” Meren said darkly. “But you would never know it to listen to those priests of Apollo.”
“You don’t serve Apollo?” Diotima asked.
“By no means. I am like you, Diotima. I serve Artemis. This is her temple.”
The contrast could not have been more stark. There were two temples to Apollo at our backs, in the middle of the grounds, one new, the other a century or so old, both large, and both wonderfully elegant. The Temple of Artemis, on the other hand, was small and looked like it had been there since Artemis herself was a babe.