Still Waters

by Marilyn Todd

  ‘For gods’ sake, you’re a priest! How could you leave her there, knowing her soul will never rest?’

  ‘What options were open to me?’ he asked miserably. ‘She’d been stabbed through the heart. Murdered. If I reported the crime, it would look like I was guilty. Who else could have done it? On the other hand, if I ignored it, I would have to live with the consequences of a soul damned to hell. I opted for self-preservation.’

  ‘Is that why you warned me off? Why you tried to make Jocasta leave, too? And Calypso.’

  ‘Too often you hear tales of men who kill for sexual pleasure. My Zabrina is a gentle goddess. I will not have her tainted by such baseness.’

  Thanks very much, though at least it explained why he hadn’t tried to discourage Hermione. He obviously didn’t deem her capable of firing sexual passions, no matter how perverted the killer.

  ‘So now you hang around the Pool of the Virgins, to protect other girls from coming to the same sticky end?’

  ‘No, madam.’ Sandor stood up and drew a deep, juddering breath. ‘I go there to make sure she is never alone.’

  Twenty-Six

  Diversionary tactics. Brilliant. Just what the gold thief was after.

  Once the altercation in the yard broke up, it was back to work with much catching up to be done. Heads down, the workers returned to their duties, the grooms currying horses and strapping mules at double their normal speed, and even the merchants and couriers, distracted by the impromptu entertainment, needed to compensate for the time wasted gawping. As a consequence, the flurry in the courtyard was even more chaotic than usual. It made a gold thief’s heart swell.

  Only the soldiers of Lynx Squad, standing guard at the stables, remained rigid and watchful at their posts. Battle-scarred hands rested over their short-swords. The eyes behind the faceless helmets glittered in vigilance.

  ‘Fire! Fire in the stables!’

  No one was able to say how it started. Milling about, trying to catch up, they’d been either concentrating on the backlog of work, or thinking about what had just happened. Drama on that scale doesn’t come round every day. That would be something to talk about long after the autumn rains had set in, that was sure. So the first wisp of smoke passed unnoticed. As did another, and another. Only when straw began to crackle and flames were licking the beams did any one realize what was happening.

  ‘FIRE!’

  The alarm horn blew then, long, low and piercing, sending the horses into a frenzy of rearing and whinnying, as dogs barked, men shouted and women screamed. In a flash, thick plumes of smoke had smothered the courtyard, spreading panic, fear and confusion.

  ‘Fetch buckets,’ the soldiers from Lynx Squad ordered. ‘Form a chain to the lake, each of you an arm’s span apart. The rest of you, use water from the troughs. Towels from the bath house. Anything you can find to douse it and smother the flames.’

  But the hay was dry. Within minutes, the stables had become an inferno.

  ‘Faster,’ the guards urged, as the flames crackled and spat. ‘If we don’t contain it, the whole station will go up!’

  ‘Cadur,’ Lisyl cried, as he dipped a cloth in the trough and covered his mouth. ‘For gods’ sake, what are you doing? Don’t be stupid!’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said, tying it round the back of his head. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  One of the terracotta roof tiles cracked and shattered at her feet. Lisyl screamed. ‘This is madness, Cadur!’ The smoke was stinging her eyes. ‘Don’t go in there.’

  ‘Get back, ma’am.’ One of the soldiers pushed her roughly aside, as his colleague formed the head of the chain. When she looked round again, Cadur had gone.

  Inside, Lysander, too, had covered his mouth with a cloth. The wolf waited.

  He did not have to wait long.

  ‘The gold’s not there,’ he said, when a hand pushed through the smoke to grab at the saddlebags.

  ‘What?’

  Torn between turning round to see who was speaking and checking the saddlebags, the gold thief failed to notice the rake handle coming towards him. Then a thousand stars exploded inside his head, and nothing mattered any more.

  *

  Iliona noticed the smoke from the top of the cliff. As she hurtled down the path towards the station, she saw a human chain swinging leather buckets up and down to the lake. Not particularly well organized, a lot of water was slopping, but panic makes for enthusiasm. The chain was nothing if not fervent. In the yard, the smoke had driven people and animals into the fields. It was pandemonium, with roof tiles raining down, people coughing and yelling, money-changers scrabbling to gather up coins, scribes trying to save their vellums and parchments, grooms trying desperately to calm panicking horses.

  ‘Cadur,’ Lisyl screamed. She pointed. ‘He’s inside and no one will go in to help.’

  Iliona thought of Lysander setting his trap. Did he sacrifice the stables to catch the man who tried to cheat Sparta? Or was this the mastermind’s idea, setting a fire so he could switch the gold while the guards were distracted?

  ‘Come away from there, Lisyl.’ She tried to pull her away from the door. ‘There’s nothing you can do.’ Smoke and flames licked up the sides of the building. There was an ominous crack of timber deep in the stables.

  Then a figure emerged from the inferno. His chiselled cheekbones were black, his tunic scorched down one side, his forearms were blistered and raw.

  ‘I couldn’t leave them.’

  In his hands sat four tiny kittens.

  Lisyl looked at them. Blinked. Then did the only thing she could sensibly think of. She fainted.

  *

  Praise be to Apollo, the building survived. Of course, twelve professional soldiers plus twelve helot auxiliaries soon made short work of the job, and its very size also helped to save it. With central supports made from giant oak trees, they just smoked a bit, charred a bit, looked like a crocodile afterwards, but were thankfully too thick to catch fire. Only a dozen stall partitions were lost. Those, the hayloft, a few carts, some tools, and a whole load of straw. Everything else just needed elbow grease, along with a hammer, some chisels and nails.

  But with crisis comes change.

  Sudden death had already adjusted their values once. Now people were forced to assess them again.

  For Iliona, this moment of clarity had come earlier, up at the Shrine of the Blue Goddess, when she realized, silly bitch, she had been reading everything here back to front.

  Those theatrical warnings of Sandor’s should have alerted her. With so few duties to perform, what he did have, he took seriously. Any sacrifices and prayers were undertaken with finely honed dramatics, which had gradually been absorbed into his priestly persona.

  You would do well not to compare yourself to the Olympians, madam. Arrogance does not become you.

  Such pomposity!

  First you swagger, then you lie, until finally the Oracle shows her true colours.

  He’d accused her of ‘making magic’ to curse the posting station, causing Nobilor’s death, and it was well known that he’d be happy to see the place closed. Could he, she’d wondered, have messed with the wrestler’s chariot to serve his own ends? Stealing the gold to finance a string of covert sabotage operations that would guarantee the trials were not working?

  If he’d asked Yvorna to sacrifice her virtue on the ‘altar of love’ (or whatever Dierdra had called it), wasn’t it also possible he’d either sweet-talked, brainwashed or blackmailed the female groom into working with him? Even to the extent of killing Gregos?

  But she had misread the signals, and once she looked at the thing from the proper perspective, Iliona found herself looking at a man who hid beside pools, not to spy on naked physicians, but to protect other girls from suffering the same fate as the groom, as well as keeping vigil over her grave.

  Make no mistake, priestess. You will rue the day you came to Phaos.

  For all the bluster and bluff, Sandor wasn’t a bad man. Hell, he wasn’t eve
n a weak one. Just a lonely one, out of his depth, and frightened that if the enterprise became successful, the shrine would be enlarged and embellished, Zabrina’s cult would grow stronger—throwing him out of a job. For a man for whom that shrine was his life, there would be nothing left if he lost that.

  Afterwards, of course, everything else fell into place.

  Like the Lake of Light, you think you’re looking at the placid, bountiful kingdom of a beautiful, gentle goddess. But the clarity, colour and light are deceptive. The lake can be a very dangerous place, and Zabrina is a goddess who feasts with the dead.

  *

  Treating the fear, as much as the various cuts, burns, blisters and scratches that queued at her treatment table in the kitchens, Jocasta was coming to terms with Iliona’s bombshell about Sandor.

  ‘So who killed the female groom?’ she asked Iliona.

  By necessity, the conversation was as brief as it was hushed. Lisyl had fainted, Cadur was burned, and Iliona’s arms were full of squirming, terrified kittens. On top of that, their mother, whose survival instincts had forced her to abandon them, was now suffering a clear case of conscience, and was howling and trying to climb Iliona’s robe to reclaim what was rightfully hers. There was little Jocasta could do about that, but she sat Lisyl up, stuffed her head between her knees and ordered the groom to stand with his arms in a bucket of cold water until she told him to move.

  Iliona picked the ginger kitten off her shoulder. ‘My guess is that she must have been killed by some traveller on his way through.’

  Lisyl was still too stunned to take in what they were saying, and was it surprising? She’d been through the wringer, with her parents last winter, the shock of Yvorna, the terror of seeing a friend walk into the flames, and, the last straw, her fiancé thrown out of a job.

  ‘These—’ cat claws don’t make for smooth conversation—‘opportunists can strike anywhere,’ Iliona told Jocasta. ‘Wrong place at the wrong time, poor girl.’

  Something about that didn’t quite add up, but Jocasta wasn’t sure what. After all, if he was an opportunist killer, why bury his victim? Why go to all the trouble of taking a shovel along? And how did he know about the spring in the first place?

  ‘This is lavender oil,’ she told Cadur, applying it carefully to his arms. ‘It will soothe the burn, relieve the pain and reduce the inflammation. Give it an hour or two in the air, then come back and I’ll put on a light, porous dressing with calendula cream to prevent any infection.’

  ‘This’ll be fine.’ He looked at her through his fringe. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Do I look the type who starts jobs, then leaves them half-finished? You’ll bloody well come back in an hour, is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  She turned to the next patient. A small girl, with not so much as a blister, but her soot-blackened face was streaked with tears and her hands were shaking with terror. Jocasta washed off the dirt with elderflower water, tied a bandage round a finger that hadn’t seen so much as a scratch, then gave her a honey cake from the griddle.

  ‘That’s not a burn, it’s a boil,’ she snapped to the next in the queue. ‘Go and put a baked onion on it and stop wasting my time.’

  The stables catch fire, the station’s in crisis, and what do they do? Whinge about a bloody pimple.

  Applying ointments and salves to the various injuries, she regretted kicking Sandor so hard in the balls, and punching him twice in the kidneys. Get in first, was her father’s maxim. Guilty until proven innocent in emergency situations. Remember that, and you won’t go far wrong. Well, now the priest had been proven innocent, so maybe she should mix a special painkilling cream for him to rub in? Even though it would deplete her precious stocks of balm of Gilead, it seemed the least she could do—

  The hell, no. However righteous he might be when it came to standing watch over graves, she hadn’t forgotten the lies he spread about Iliona bedding the Cretan.

  His bruises could bloody well take care of themselves.

  *

  Hermione and Calypso were fanning the smoke out of Nobilor’s window when Iliona burst into the bedroom. The wrestler’s quarters were twice the size of her own, and sumptuously decorated with green marbled basins, chairs inlaid with ivory, copper mirrors, and ornate bronze lamp stands. Rare aromatics burned in sconces and the walls were painted with intricate theatrical scenes, still life, rustic images of goatherds and shepherd boys that didn’t seem to differentiate between Bulls and Eagles anywhere.

  ‘Where is he?’

  Both women jumped. The dog yelped and ran under the couch.

  ‘Who?’ they chorused.

  ‘I have neither the patience nor the time to play games with you two. Nobilor. Where is he?’

  Hermione had turned red. Calypso had turned pale. They both looked at each other. ‘He’s dead, lovey.’

  ‘Please don’t insult my intelligence. Your son staged that accident, choosing a bend where the incline would be too steep to recover a body. Though just to be safe, you had the hillside burned to hide the evidence—’

  ‘Begging your pardon, dear, it was the station master who arranged barrels of burning tar to be rolled down. The stench was putting travellers off.’

  ‘Hector organized it, but only because you suggested it to him. And since it was in your own interests that he took the credit, you cleverly let him think the idea was his.’

  ‘This is very rude of you, Iliona,’ Calypso declared. In spite of the panic, the smoke, the fear of the station burning down, her strawberry blonde hair was immaculately coiffed, her pink robe looked like it had just come out of the chest and her jewels were perfectly in place. ‘Barging in unannounced, making horrid accusations. Poor Pookie’s scared to bits.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re worried about the dog. Never mind my poor old heart might give out at any minute—’

  ‘Stop it, the pair of you.’ Most of the time, she’d enjoyed their comic squabbling, found it most entertaining. But now was not the time. ‘I won’t ask again. Either you tell me where Nobilor and the girl are hiding out, or I go straight to the authorities with this.’

  She expected Calypso to be the one to cave in, but it was Hermione who crumpled into a heap on the bed.

  Like they say. Confession is good for the soul.

  Twenty-Seven

  Consciousness didn’t come quickly to the gold thief. For one thing, there was a blinding light behind his eyes, when he tried to open them. For another, a vicious pounding inside his head. He tried to move, but his limbs were stiff and refused to budge. It took a moment before he realized he was bound.

  Tied to a log in the forest, no less.

  He also became aware of a lump on his temple, from the pole that spiralled him into oblivion. The lump was throbbing and hot, and there was a stiffness on his cheek, probably blood that had dried.

  When he eventually managed to focus, he discovered his clothes had been stripped from him and were hanging neatly in the trees, like washing out to dry. The spookiness of it made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle, but when he struggled against the ropes, he found he’d been lashed tightly as well as horizontally. The bark of the tree trunk was rough. It chafed his spine raw. He stopped trying. There was no sense fighting what he could not win. He would need other tactics to escape.

  Looking beyond the clothes, he could see the first changes in the leaves. Saw a squirrel scamper through the branches with an acorn wedged in its mouth. He smelled mushrooms and hazelnuts, apples and leaf litter. With a faint hint of leather and wood smoke.

  A horse snickered. From the corner of his eye, he could see a tail swishing. Obviously, the means of transporting a comatose body to a nice, quiet and extremely remote spot. At least from his captor’s viewpoint.

  ‘What amazes me is that you thought you could get away with it,’ a gravel voice rumbled.

  From the corner of the other eye, he saw a chest emblazoned with a scarlet lambda. The definitive emblem of Sparta. Shit.
<
br />   ‘You have balls, I’ll give you that,’ the voice said.

  With the tip of his sword he dangled the tunic of the Cretan banker above the gold thief’s face.

  Shit, shit, SHIT.

  ‘Where’s the best place to hide a pebble?’ Lysander’s knuckles cracked. ‘Among scores of other pebbles, so that one particular stone won’t stand out.’

  Warriors served two years in the Krypteia, where, among other things, they learned camouflage skills. A test that separated the men from the boys, but more importantly identified future generals. The new commander of the gold train, for example, could hide in the fields, using mud and leaves as camouflage, and never be found. Lysander, on the other hand, would pick up a hoe and get stuck in among the labourers, where he’d gather information and equally never be rumbled.

  ‘The bolder the move and the brighter the colours, the less people question or look.’ He let the Cretan garb fall. ‘I was in plain sight in the yard, and you didn’t see me. Yet I saw you.’

  His sword tip lightly nudged each of the garments hanging in the trees. The brightly bejewelled turban. Red leather slippers. The Babylonian tunic with its somewhat effeminate fringe.

  ‘But then that is why I’m head of the secret police, Gregos.’

  He paused to look into the face of the man he had trusted with this mission. Not just the gold, but his own reputation, as well as Sparta’s. How could he have been such a fool?

  ‘Strange as it may seem, I do admire the planning and precision you put into this heist.’

  ‘Bloody brilliant, wasn’t it?’ Gregos grinned. ‘Right back in the spring, when there was only talk about trading horses and iron for Macedonian gold, I began laying the groundwork.’

  Newly promoted from platoon leader, and while still serving in the Krypteia, he cultivated a friendship with his boss. Not too difficult. The families were connected, albeit distantly, but with Lysander’s wife and kid dead, even a hard-boiled commander needs company sometimes. He’d shown him his secret hideaway, knowing right back then how he would stage his own murder. He made sure it would be a night Lysander remembered. A night they both did, for that matter. They drank, played dice, darts, then drank a lot more. That night was the first time in a long while that Gregos had actually enjoyed himself. Ironically enough, it was the last time, as well.