Later that day, Father George went to the dead man’s house to console his widow and daughters. Anna met him at the door and gave him an earthenware cup of wine. She was dry-eyed now, dry-eyed and grim. “We are as well as we can be,” she said when he asked. “I’ll give you another few days to catch the killer. If you don’t, I’m going down to Amorion.” She sounded unbendably determined. In that, she’d been a good match for Theodore.
“I’m doing all I can, all I know how to do.” George knew he sounded harried. His training was to fight sin, not crime. “If you go to Amorion ...”
“The holy images are dear to me, too,” Anna said. “But justice and vengeance are dearer still.”
Father George bowed his head. He had no good answer for that, and no way to stop her if she chose to go. “I’ll do all I can,” he repeated. He finished the wine, gave her the cup, and turned to go.
Demetrios was already hammering away again. When George walked past his house and the smithy by it, Sophia came out and stopped him. “Have you heard?” the smith’s wife asked.
“I don’t know,” Father George said. “But I expect you’ll tell me.”
Sophia put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side as she studied George. Her dark eyes flashed. She remained one of the prettier, and one of the livelier, women in Abrostola. Fifteen years before, she’d been the prize catch in the village, as Zoe was now. George had eyed her back before she married Demetrios. So had a lot of the young men in Abrostola. She knew it, too, and used it now, making him pay more attention to her than he would have were she plainer. “Why, the lies John’s spreading, of course.” Her tone was intimate, too, as if she were the priest’s wife, not the smith’s.
“You’d better tell me more,” Father George said. “John hasn’t said anything to me.” That was true. It didn’t mean George hadn’t heard anything, though he hoped Sophia would think it did.
She tossed her head. “Oh, no. He wouldn’t tell you. That’s not his way. He’ll put poison in other people’s ears, and let them put it in yours.”
“I haven’t heard any poison I know of,” George said.
Sophia went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “The mill Demetrios built last year has been sitting idle ever since, because the water it took out of the Lalandos kept Theodore’s wheatfields from getting enough.”
The priest nodded. “That’s what the Farmers’ Law says you do if a mill takes too much water out of a river—not that the Lalandos is much of a river, especially in summertime. It’s a fair law, I think.”
“So do I.” Sophia reached out and set a hand on his arm, a startling intimacy. “And so does Demetrios. He never said a word when he had to let it rest idle. And why should he have? We make a good living from the smithy as is.” Pride rang in her voice, as Demetrios’ hammer rang off hot metal.
“I’m sure you do,” George said, truthfully enough: Sophia’s earrings were gold, not brass, and her tunic of fine, soft wool from the sheep near Ankyra.
“Well, then—Demetrios wouldn’t have any reason to hurt Theodore, and so he couldn’t have.” Sophia made it sound simple.
Father George wished it were. “By all the signs, nobody had any reason to hurt Theodore. But someone did.”
“Someone certainly did,” Sophia said sharply. “You might ask John about his dealings with Theodore. Yes, you might indeed.”
“I intend to,” George said. Sophia nodded. For a heartbeat, he thought she would kiss him. For half a heartbeat, he hoped she would. She didn’t. She just turned and walked away. Shame filled him. Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery already with her in his heart. He repented of his sin, but he would have to do penance for it, too.
As soon as the sun rose the next day, Father George went looking for John. He wasn’t astonished to discover John walking toward his house. The farmer nodded to him. Like Kostas, John was a scarred veteran. Unlike Kostas, he was actively bad-tempered. “All right,” he said now, by way of greeting. “I know that miserable bitch Sophia’s been spreading lies about me, but I don’t know what kind yet. I suppose you’ll tell me, though.”
“You didn’t think she was a miserable bitch before she married Demetrios,” Father George said. “None of the young men did.” I certainly didn’t. He remembered, and grimaced at, his own desirous thoughts the day before.
John dismissed that with a snort and a wave. “Just tell me what she said.”
“That you were going on about Demetrios’ mill, and why it’s idle,” the priest answered.
“By the Virgin, that’s the truth,” John said. “It’s not like what she’s been doing—talking about that ox of mine Theodore killed three years ago. He said it was in his field, and so he had the right, but the carcass was on my land. Farmers’ Law says he should have paid me, but he’s a big sneeze here. Did I ever see a copper follis? Not me.”
“Why tell me this?” George asked. “Do you want me to think you bore a grudge?”
“Of I course I bore a grudge.” John tossed his head in scorn. “Like I’m the only one in Abrostola who did.” George had to nod; he’d already seen as much there. John went on, “I’ve had it for years. Why should I all of a sudden decide to smash in his stinking, lying head? One of these days, I’d’ve found a revenge to make his heart burn for years. I want to kill whoever did him in, is what I want to do, on account of now I won’t get the chance.” He spat in the dirt. “What do you think of that?”
“I believe you.” It wasn’t what Father George had intended to say, but it was true.
“All right, then. Don’t waste your time coming after me. Don’t waste your time at all.” John stalked off, leaving the priest staring after him.
“He could have done it,” Irene said that night, over a supper of hot cheese pie with leeks and mushrooms. “He could be covering his tracks.”
“John? I know he could.” Father George nodded to his wife. He wasn’t so sure about John as he had been that morning. “But so could plenty of other people. The longer Theodore’s dead, the more it seems everyone hated him.”
“Who hated him enough to kill him?” Irene said. “That’s the question.”
“I don’t know,” George said unhappily. “And if I don’t find out soon, Anna will go down to Amorion, and the strategos or his people will come back up here, and ...” He sighed. “And Abrostola won’t be the same.” He didn’t dwell on what would happen to him, even if the Emperor Constantine and his officials weren’t kind to priests who venerated images.
“It’s not fair. It’s not right,” Irene said. Then she gave a small gasp and grabbed for their daughter, who was helping herself to cheese pie with both hands. “Wash yourself off!” she exclaimed. “You’re a horrible mess.”
“Mess.” Maria sounded cheerful, no matter how glum her parents were. She grabbed a rag and did a three-year-old’s halfhearted job of wiping herself off. “There!”
Irene shook her head. “Not good enough. See that big glob of cheese on your left hand?”
Maria looked confused. “My best hand, Mama?”
“No, your left hand,” Irene said, and cleaned it herself. The two words were close in Greek—aristos and aristeros. Aristeros, the word for left, was a euphemism, Father George knew: in pagan days, the left side had been reckoned unlucky. He looked down at his own left hand, on which he wore a wedding ring—to him, a sign of good luck, not bad.
He stared at the ring in dawning astonishment. Then he crossed himself. And then, solemnly, he kissed his wife and daughter. Maria giggled. Irene looked as confused as Maria had a moment before, till George began to explain.
Abrostola hadn’t seen such a procession since Theodore’s funeral, and not since Easter before that. Father George led this one, too. Kostas and John followed him like a couple of martial saints: they both carried shields and bore swords in their right hands. Basil capered along behind them. He had a light spear, the sort a shepherd might use against wolves—not that he got much chance t
o herd sheep these days. Several other villagers, all armed as best they might be, also followed the priest.
They stopped not at the church, but at Demetrios’. As usual, the blacksmith was pounding away at something—a plowshare, by the shape of it. He looked up in surprise, sweat streaming down his face, when Father George and Kostas and John strode into the smith. “What’s this?” he demanded.
Sadly, George answered, “We’ve come to take you to Amorion for trial and punishment for the murder of Theodore.”
“Me?” Demetrios scowled. “You’ve got the wrong man, priest. I figure it’s likely John here, if you want to know the truth.”
But Father George shook his head. “I’m sorry—I’m very sorry—but I’m afraid not, Demetrios. Theodore wouldn’t think anything of seeing you with a hammer or an iron bar in your hand, because you carry one so often. And it would have been in your left hand, too, for the blow that killed him was surely struck by a left-handed man.”
Demetrios stood over the anvil, breathing hard. As always, the tongs were in his right hand, the hammer in his left. With a sudden shouted curse, he flung that hammer at Father George. Quick as a cat, Kostas leaped sideways to ward the priest with his oval shield. As the hammer thudded off it, Demetrios ran past Kostas and John and out of the smithy.
John swung his sword, but missed. “Catch him!” he shouted. He and Kostas and Father George all rushed after Demetrios.
The smith hadn’t got far. He’d knocked one man aside with the tongs, but the rest of the villagers swarmed over him and bore him to the ground. “Get some rope!” somebody shouted. “We’ll tie him up, throw him over a mule’s back, and take him to Amorion for what he deserves.”
“They’ll put him to the sword, sure enough.” That was Basil, brandishing his spear so fiercely, he almost stabbed a couple of the men close by him. “Sure enough.”
From under the pile of men holding him down, Demetrios shouted, “I gave Theodore what he deserved, the son of a pimp. Thought his turds didn’t stink, screwed me out of the profit I deserved for the mill. His soul’s burning in hell right now.”
“And yours will keep it company.” Three or four men said the same thing at the same time.
Kostas patted Father George on the back. “You did well here.”
“Did I?” the priest asked. He wondered. Murder didn’t come under the Farmers’ Law, but this one had sprung from its provisions.
Just then, Sophia came out and started to shriek and wail and try to drag the villagers off her husband. A couple of them pulled her away from the pile, but not till after she’d raked them with her nails.
“What else could you have done?” Kostas asked.
Father George sighed. “That’s a different question,” he said, and started back toward his house.
OCCUPATION DUTY
It seems pretty likely that the area of southwest Asia just north and east of the Sinai Peninsula would be a bone of contention no matter what happened and no matter who lived there. It’s too strategically placed not to be. It offers access to Egypt from Syria—or, conversely, depending on who’s holding it, it offers access to Syria from Egypt. The breakpoint in this alternate history goes back a long way: more than 3,000 years. But, as Al Stewart says in “Nostradamus,” the more it changes, the more it stays the same.
Theidas wasn’t thrilled about going upcountry from Gaza—who would have been? But when you were a nineteen-year-old conscript serving out your term, nobody gave a curse about whether you were thrilled. You were there to do what other people told you—and on the double, soldier!
He got into the armored personnel carrier with all the enthusiasm of someone climbing into his own coffin. None of the other young Philistinians climbing aboard looked any happier than he did. The reason wasn’t hard to figure: there was a small—but not nearly small enough—chance they were doing exactly that.
The last man in slammed the clamshell doors at the rear. The big diesel engine rumbled to life. “Next stop, Hierosolyma,” the sergeant said.
“Oh, boy,” said Pheidas’ buddy Antenor.
He spoke softly, but Sergeant Dryops heard him anyway. “You better hope Hierosolyma’s our next stop, kid,” the noncom said. “If we stop before we get there, it’s on account of we’ve got trouble with the Moabites. You want trouble with the stinking ragheads? You want trouble with them on their terms?”
Antenor shook his head to show he didn’t. That wasn’t going to be good enough. Before Pheidas could say as much, Dryops beat him to the punch.
“You want trouble with them on their terms?” he yelled.
“No, Sergeant,” Antenor said loudly. Dryops nodded, mollified. And Antenor’s reply not only took care of military courtesy, it was also the gods’ truth. The Moabites caused too much trouble any which way. As far as they were concerned, their rightful border was the beach washed by the Inner Sea. The Philistinians? Invaders. Interlopers. Never mind that they’d been on the land for more than three thousand years. In the history-crowded Middle East, that wasn’t long enough.
They don’t even believe in Dagon, Pheidas thought as the APC clattered north and east, one of a long string of armored fighting vehicles. It wasn’t that he wanted the miserable Moabites worshiping the same god he did. If that didn’t ruin the divine neighborhood, he didn’t know what would. But too many Moabites didn’t believe Dagon was a god. Some thought he was a demon; others denied he was there at all. They felt the same way about the other Philistinian deities, too.
Antenor’s mind must have been running in the same direction as Pheidas’, for he said, “They’re jealous of us. They’ve always been jealous of us.”
“Sure,” Pheidas said. You learned that in school. Right from the beginning, the Philistinians had been more progressive than the tribes of the interior. They were the ones who’d first learned how to work iron, and they’d done their best to keep the hill tribes from finding out how to do it. Some things didn’t change much. The Moabites were still backward . . . but there were an awful lot of them, and they didn’t mind a bit if they died in the service of their own grim tribal gods.
Around Gaza, the land was green and fertile. The Philistinians had always had a knack for making the desert bloom. That was why so many nasty neighbors had coveted their country, almost from the very beginning.
Pheidas nudged Antenor. “Hey!” he said.
“What?” Antenor had been about to light a cigarette. He looked annoyed at getting interrupted.
“You were good in school. What was the name of that guy Lord Goliath knocked off ?”
“Oh. Him.” Antenor frowned, trying to remember. After a moment, he did—he had been good in school. “Tabitas, that’s what. Tabitas of the Evraioi.”
“That’s right!” Pheidas nodded. He couldn’t have come up with it himself, but he knew it as soon as he heard it. “Crazy, isn’t it? Here we are all these years later, going off to do the same cursed job all over again.”
“Miserable mountain rats don’t go away,” Sergeant Dryops said. “They want to make us go away, but that ain’t gonna happen, either.” He paused. “Is it?”
“No, Sergeant!” This time, all the troopers in the APC sang out as loud as they could. Once bitten, twice raucous. Dryops not only nodded, he even smiled a little. Pheidas wondered if the world would end. It didn’t. The world was a tough old place.
As he peered out from time to time through the firing port by his head, Pheidas watched it get tougher, too. The people of the hills and the people of the coast had been enemies since the days of Goliath and Tabitas, maybe longer. Sometimes it seemed the landscapes were enemies, too.
Things went from green to brown as soon as the land started climbing and getting rougher—as soon as it went from a place where more Philistinians lived to one where there were more Moabites. Chickens and goats and skinny stray dogs roamed the streets of Moabite villages. The houses and shops looked a million years old despite their rust-streaked corrugated iron roofs. Pheidas wouldn’t
have wanted to drive any of the ancient, beat-up cars. The sun blasted everything with the force of a tactical nuke.
Spray-painted squiggles in the pothook Moabite script marred whitewashed walls. Pheidas could read it. Learning enough Moabite to get by was part of basic training. PHILS OUT! was the most common graffito. Pheidas didn’t mind that one so much. He didn’t like the Moabites any better than they liked his people. He would have been happy to stay out if his commanders hadn’t told him to go in.
But then he saw one that said CHEMOSH CUTS OFF DAGON’S SCALY TAIL! Chemosh was the Moabites’ favorite god. For lots of them, he was the only tribal god. A few even said he was the only god, period. You really had to watch out for fanatics like that. They were the kind who turned terrorist.
The scrawl that really raised his hackles, though, was THE SWORD BUDDHA AND THE FOUR WITH CHEMOSH! The Turks of Babylonia were newcomers to these parts; they’d brought the Sword Buddha down off the steppe hardly more than a thousand years ago. But Aluzza, Allat, Manah, and Hubal had been worshiped in Arabia for a very long time. And Babylonia and Arabia were both swimming in oil, which these days counted for even more than the strength of their gods.
Sergeant Dryops saw that one, too. He muttered into his gray-streaked red mustache. Pheidas couldn’t make out all of what he said. From what he could understand, he was surprised the steel by Dryops’ head didn’t melt.
“We’ve got friends, too,” the veteran noncom said when his language grew a little less incandescent. “The Ellenes in Syria don’t like the Moabites any better than we do. And they really don’t like the Turks.”
That made Pheidas feel a little better—till Antenor went and spoiled it by saying, “They don’t have much oil, though.”
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