‘Flavia,’ said Jonathan, ‘it says here that there’s a sanctuary to the goddess Demeter at Eleusis, about fifteen miles from here. There’s an oracle there, too.’ He looked up at her. ‘You don’t suppose Aristo would stop to ask another oracle how to be free of the blood guilt, do you?’
‘Oh!’ groaned Flavia, flopping back on her cloak and looking up at the leaves of the poplar. ‘I hope not. He got clear instructions from Apollo to go to Athens. But maybe we should go and investigate.’ Flavia closed her eyes. ‘Lupus could disguise himself as a beggar-boy and sneak in.’
‘Bad idea,’ said Jonathan, sitting up. ‘It says here that the penalty for trespassing is death. Eleusis is the site of the famous Mysteries.’
‘Oh,’ said Flavia, and opened her eyes as she felt Lupus tapping her. He was holding his wax tablet inches from her face.
I’M TIRED OF DRESSING UP AS A BEGGAR
‘There’s nothing wrong with beggars,’ said Nikos, who had leaned over to read the message. ‘Beggars help rich people to be generous and comfort the poor by reminding them they could be far worse off.’
Flavia saw Lupus narrow his eyes at Nikos.
Jonathan hissed and held up his hand for silence. He was staring out over the meadow, and as they watched he slowly picked his bow and arrow from the grass, took aim at something and loosed his arrow. ‘Got it,’ he muttered, and then: ‘Fetch, Tigris!’
Tigris sped off silently and a few moments later he sat beside Jonathan with a dead rabbit in his mouth.
‘Good dog,’ said Jonathan, stroking the glossy black fur on Tigris’s head. ‘Would you sharpen some twigs, Lupus?’ he said, as he pulled the arrow out of the rabbit and wiped the shaft on the grass. ‘If Nubia makes a fire we can have this rabbit cooked by the time Atticus gets back from the village.’
Lupus nodded and searched in his knapsack as Nubia cleared a space beneath the spreading branches of a nearby cedar tree.
‘Good idea, Nubia,’ said Jonathan. ‘If it rains later we’ll want to be under cover. Lupus,’ he said suddenly, ‘where did you get that knife?’
Lupus stopped sharpening the twig and a look of alarm flitted across his face. He quickly hid the knife behind his back.
Flavia crawled forward and twisted Lupus’s arm so that the knife fell onto the brown blanket. It had an iron blade and an ebony handle set with mother-of-pearl zigzags. As she reached out to pick it up she heard Nikos gasp.
‘Where did you get this, Lupus?’ said Flavia. ‘Ugh! There’s dried blood here in the cracks between the mother of pearl and the wood.’
‘Great Jupiter’s eyebrows!’ exclaimed Jonathan. ‘It’s the murder weapon!’
Flavia screamed and dropped the knife.
‘I mean it’s the attempted-murder weapon,’ said Jonathan. ‘I remember Aristo dropped it, but when I went to look for it the next morning, it had disappeared.’
He stretched forward to pick up the knife.
‘Lupus!’ cried Flavia. ‘Have you had that since the night of the crime?’
Lupus hung his head and nodded.
‘Why didn’t you tell us? It could be an important clue!’
Lupus shrugged.
‘Wanted it for his knife collection, no doubt,’ said Jonathan to Flavia.
‘That is not Aristo’s knife,’ said Nubia, coming up to them. ‘Aristo has knife with bronze boar’s-head handle.’
‘Maybe he bought a new one,’ said Flavia.
‘I think you’re right,’ said Nikos to Flavia. ‘I recognise that knife. I mean, I know where he bought it. There’s only one shop that sells knives like that.’
‘Where?’ said Jonathan.
‘The shop of Pericles the Cutler,’ said Nikos, ‘in the town of Corinth.’
Lupus looked up as Atticus came across the field from the road. The sun was so low that the shadows of the poplars were twice as long as the trees.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘they’ve seen our two fugitives in the village.’
‘They have?’ Flavia jumped up. ‘Both of them?’
‘Both of them,’ said Atticus. ‘I didn’t have Master Lupus’s tablet but the baker said he saw a young man jogging down the middle of the road twittering to himself and then an hour later a man who might have been his twin bought some bread and olives. He was riding a donkey.’
‘When?’ cried Flavia.
‘Not long. One, maybe two hours ago. He’s only one step ahead.’ Atticus crouched beside the fire and handed some flat bread to Nubia. ‘Nice fire,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I’ve got some bread. Olives, too.’ He tossed a papyrus cone of olives onto the blanket.
‘Come on!’ cried Flavia. ‘There’s no time to eat. Let’s go!’
‘No, Flavia,’ said Jonathan. ‘It took me a long time to catch and skin and gut these rabbits. They’ll be done in half an hour.’
‘But that’s too late! It will be dark by then.’
‘Miss Flavia,’ said Atticus. ‘Those mules have put in an extremely long day. So have we. There’s no moon to speak of tonight and it looks like those clouds are coming rather than going. We can’t very well carry torches. Besides, I think all of us have lost the feeling in our backsides.’
‘I know,’ said Flavia. ‘I’m sore, too. But it’s just so frustrating!’ She slumped down again. ‘He always seems to be just one step ahead.’
‘Two,’ said Jonathan, tossing Tigris a piece of offal.
‘What?’ said Flavia.
‘Two steps ahead,’ repeated Jonathan. ‘Aristo is two steps ahead and Dion is one step ahead.’
‘I wish we could at least catch up with Dion,’ said Flavia. ‘He might be able to tell us why Aristo did it.’
‘I’m surprised Dion hasn’t caught him by now,’ said Nikos, through a mouthful of olives, ‘and that he’s riding a donkey. He’s won prizes for running at the Isthmian games and could go twice as fast on foot.’
‘You can’t run for three days without a break,’ said Jonathan.
Nikos nodded. ‘A few years ago Dion ran all the way from Corinth to Olympia to compete, and the next day he took the prize.’
Lupus turned his head to look at Nikos. The boy’s pale skin was flushed with sunburn, made even pinker by the light of the setting sun. With his big brown eyes and full lips, he looked almost beautiful. Lupus looked down at Nikos’s sandals, neatly placed beside his own, and he noticed with a start that they were the same size.
Suddenly Lupus gasped and sat up straight. He felt as if someone had tipped a bucket of cold water over him.
He knew what was wrong about Nikos.
‘Ow!’ cried Nikos as Lupus leaned over to poke him in the chest. ‘That hurt!’
‘Lupus!’ cried Flavia. ‘Why did you do that? What’s got into you?’
Lupus handed her his skewer, picked up his wax tablet and wrote:
NIKOS IS A GIRL NOT A BOY
‘What?’ cried Flavia, reading the tablet. ‘Nikos’s a girl?’
‘Ah!’ said Nubia.
‘Huh?’ said Atticus.
‘Of course!’ said Jonathan. ‘That explains the cloak covering your chest, all those trips to the bushes on your own, and the fact that you scream like a girl.’
‘I do not scream like a girl,’ said Nikos, making his voice deep, ‘because I am not one. I’m a boy and soon I’ll be a man.’
‘Oh, yes?’ said Jonathan, handing Atticus his skewered rabbit and rising to his feet. ‘Then come behind the tree with me and Lupus. Show us your witnesses!’
Lupus nodded and leapt to his feet.
Nikos glared up at the boys. Then his shoulders slumped.
‘All right,’ he said quietly. ‘You win. I’m a girl.’
‘I knew it!’ cried Flavia.
‘No, you didn’t,’ said Jonathan. ‘Lupus figured it out.’
‘Well then, I suspected it without realising that I suspected it.’
‘What is your name?’ asked Nubia softly.
‘Megara. My name is Megara.’
‘Lik
e the name of the town we passed through two days ago?’ said Jonathan.
‘Yes. Like the name of the town.’
‘You love Dion, don’t you?’ said Nubia. ‘That is why you come with us.’
Everybody looked at Nubia in amazement then their heads turned towards Megara.
‘Yes. I’m in love with Dion,’ said Megara at last. ‘I have been ever since I was your age, Nubia. Ever since I was twelve.’ She sighed again and shrugged off her cloak and Lupus chuckled.
He could just make out the breasts of Megara, gently swelling beneath her tunic.
‘Oh, it’s such a relief not to have to pretend anymore,’ said Megara. She ran her fingers through her feathery dark hair, and Flavia suddenly wondered how she could ever have taken Megara for a boy.
‘Why did you disguise yourself as a beggar-boy?’ asked Jonathan.
‘To follow Dion,’ said Megara. ‘To help him catch Aristo. To make sure he came to no harm. My parents would never have approved of my going, even with a bodyguard, so I knew I’d have to go without their permission. It’s suicide for a woman to travel from Corinth to Athens on her own, so I decided to become a boy.’ She glanced at Flavia and sighed. ‘If I’d known how independent Roman girls are, I wouldn’t have bothered with this disguise.’
Jonathan grinned. ‘Most Roman girls aren’t like Flavia,’ he said.
‘What did you do to make yourself a boy?’ asked Flavia.
‘I chopped off my hair with a knife, and rubbed dirt on my face and took one of my father’s old tunics and our cook’s cloak. Also I strapped my breasts, not that they need much strapping.’
‘I believe some kind of dung was involved, too,’ said Jonathan.
‘Yes, I wanted to smell like a beggar so I rolled in some dried mule dung. Do you think I overdid it?’
‘Just a little,’ said Jonathan. ‘If you were to take a quick dip in the stream nobody would object.’
‘I thought if I disguised myself as a beggar-boy I’d be safe – it works in the plays . . . but those men . . . If you hadn’t saved me when you did, then I don’t know what would have happened to me.’
‘So those men who were hurting you, they guessed you were a woman?’ asked Flavia.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Megara. ‘I don’t think it would have mattered to them either way.’
Flavia shuddered and made the sign against evil. ‘And you know so much about Aristo and Dion because . . .?’
‘Because I grew up in the house next to them,’ said Megara.
‘I still remember the moment I fell in love with Dion,’ said Megara. ‘It was the evening of his fourteenth birthday, four years ago. That was before Aristo went away. I had just turned twelve. Dion’s only desire in life was to please his parents. He gave a dinner party for neighbours and family and after the feast he played a song on the lyre. He had been practising for months. He played it nicely, but it was a terrible mistake.’
‘Why?’ asked Flavia. The sun had set and in the trees the birds were twittering sleepily.
‘Aristo had never even heard the song until that night, but when Dion finished he picked up his own lyre and played it again so beautifully that everyone was in tears. Everyone except me.’
‘How cruel!’ said Flavia.
‘Yes,’ said Megara. ‘Especially as Aristo was always the golden boy and didn’t need any more praise. Everything came easily to him: maths, poetry, hunting, wrestling, music. Especially music. Poor Dion . . .’ She sighed and gazed into the fire. ‘The only thing he’s good at is running and making furniture. I wasn’t invited of course, being a girl, but I was watching from the roof, and I saw his face when Aristo played that song on his lyre. My heart melted for him.’
‘Does he love you, too?’
‘Dion?’ Megara dropped her head. ‘He barely knows I exist. My parents are old fashioned, not like the Roman families in Corinth. They make me stay veiled at home and never let me speak to men. Even if Dion did notice me he’d never love me. He always likes the wrong ones. The sort of girls who fall in love with Aristo.’
‘How does Aristo get girls to fall in love with him?’ said Flavia. ‘He hardly spends any time here in Greece. Only a few weeks a year.’
‘He doesn’t need long,’ said Megara. ‘Let me tell you what happened this year. A few months ago a girl called Tryphosa moved to our street with her family. She comes from Sparta and she’s such a—’ Here Megara used a Greek word that Flavia was not familiar with.
Flavia opened her mouth, then shut it again. She could guess what the word meant.
‘She’s one of those girls who thinks they’re far more beautiful than they actually are. She stains her lips pink with blackcurrant juice and never wears a veil and always lets her hair accidentally come unpinned and then tosses it around.’
‘That doesn’t sound very Spartan,’ remarked Jonathan. ‘Aren’t the women from Sparta as tough as the men?’
‘Don’t forget, Jonathan,’ said Flavia. ‘The most beautiful woman in the world was from Sparta: Helen of Troy.’
‘True,’ said Jonathan, and Atticus chuckled.
‘Oh, Tryphosa is very Spartan,’ said Megara bitterly. ‘She would always talk about how independent Spartan girls are and then give Dion a long smouldering look. He swallowed her bait and also her hook and her line.’ Megara poked the fire with her skewer, watching the branches fizz and hiss. ‘But I could see she didn’t really love him. She just enjoyed the attention and all the gifts he gave her. When Aristo arrived in Corinth a month ago, she took one look at him and licked her berry-stained lips and tossed her hair and went after him.’
‘Weren’t you happy about that?’
Megara nodded. ‘At first. But Dion was so besotted with Tryphosa that he didn’t realise what was happening. She pretended she still loved him, so that he would keep giving her things, but she was secretly seeing Aristo, and he went with her even though he knew Dion loved her.’
‘Aristo went with Tryphosa?’ asked Nubia in a small voice.
Jonathan turned to her. ‘That means—’
‘I know what it means,’ said Nubia.
‘Well,’ said Jonathan, ‘Aristo was probably just trying to console himself. He’s in love with . . . someone he can’t have, too. Back in Italia.’
‘Aristo in love?’ said Megara, arching an eyebrow. ‘She must be a goddess.’
‘She’s the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen,’ said Flavia. ‘When men see her their jaws drop and they can’t stop staring.’
‘And she doesn’t love Aristo?’
‘No,’ said Flavia. ‘Anyway, she’s married now.’
‘Ha!’ Megara laughed. ‘Not only beautiful but discerning. It serves Aristo right. The gods do show justice sometimes.’
On the other side of the fire, Nubia quietly put down her skewer, rose and moved away into the green dusk.
‘Poor thing,’ whispered Megara. ‘It’s so obvious she’s in love with Aristo, too. Well, she’d better join the queue.’
Nubia found a spot beneath a weeping willow further up the stream and out of sight of the others. She sat beneath it, looking out through a parting in the curtain of tender green branches. Before her lay a grassy meadow dotted with wildflowers. At the far end of this meadow was a strand of the bushy pines she had come to love, and beyond them lay mountains silhouetted black against a thin green sky, still clear on the horizon. She saw a gust of wind run across the tops of the pines and by the wavelike ripple of grasses in the meadow she could see it coming towards her. Then the breeze touched her face and she smelled the fresh, clean smell of coming rain. In the branches above her a dozen tiny birds began squittering with excitement.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Aristo’s voice.
Nubia turned her head and gasped. Was he a vision or had her longing brought him here?
He stood there in the pearly light, staring towards Athens, showing her his profile. He looked pale and tired and unbearably handsome.
Nubia did not trust her voice, so she nodded. She did not trust her face either, so she turned to look back towards the meadow. He came to sit beside her, not quite touching, but close enough for her to feel the warmth radiating from his shoulder. He was real.
‘Flavia thinks I did it, doesn’t she?’
Nubia nodded. She didn’t trust her voice.
He sighed. ‘That complicates matters. You don’t think I did it, do you?’
Nubia shook her head.
‘So where are you headed now?’
‘We are going to Athens,’ she said, and was amazed to find her voice sounded normal.
He nodded. ‘That’s what I thought. Tonight?’
‘No,’ said Nubia. ‘I think we will camp tonight and go tomorrow.’
‘Praise Apollo!’ He breathed a sigh of relief. ‘That means I’ll have time, if I go now. I just need to find him, to find out why.’ He turned his head and she could feel him looking at her. ‘Thank you for believing in me,’ he said softly.
Nubia watched the diaphanous curtain of rain sweeping towards them. It bent the grasses of the meadow, parted the tendrils of the willow, and was suddenly upon them, covering their uplifted faces with a thousand tiny wet kisses. The birds in the tree were pouring down juicy cheeps and behind them the stream chattered with an urgent liquid excitement. Nubia closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them, drinking in the thousand different shades of green before her. Everything was green: the sky, the grass, the trees, the rain. Even the gurgling of the stream and the birdsong sounded green.
‘It is green,’ she said. ‘So green.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s green.’
They sat quietly together, not speaking, not moving, just staring out at the wet green dusk and letting the billows of rain softly drench them. It felt so natural. Like being with a brother, a friend, someone she had always known.
In that moment Nubia knew that he would always be there, even if she never saw him again in her life. He would always be beside her, watching what she watched, hearing what she heard, knowing without being told what she was thinking and how she was feeling.
‘Nubia! Where have you been? Are you all right? We were beginning to worry about you. I know you like the rain, but really! Look at you. You’re soaking wet. Come over here by the fire and put this dry blanket around you. Try some of Jonathan’s rabbit. It’s delicious. See? I’ve been roasting your pieces and they’re perfectly done. Hurry and eat it, because it’s almost dark and we need to get some sleep. Tomorrow we’re going to Athens.’
The Roman Mysteries Complete Collection Page 139