by Corby, Gary
“HOW IN HADES did he get in there?” I said loudly.
There was no point in asking. No one knew any better than I did.
“This is very depressing,” I said.
“Especially from Melo’s point of view,” Diotima added, which was true enough.
I said, “We need to determine how he died.”
“He drowned,” said Zeke, frowning.
“Did he?” I asked. “We found him in the spring. It’s not the same thing.”
“Are we sure Ophelia’s not in there too?” Doris asked.
“I’m sure,” I said. “The spot where I found Melo was the last left on my sweeps. Why didn’t he rise to the surface? I thought bodies did that.”
“Not necessarily at once, I believe,” Zeke said. “We live close to the coast. Every now and then I’ve been in town when a drowned man was brought in. They seem to stay under until they bloat. Then they rise.”
“How long had Melo been in the water?” Doris asked.
“It can’t be more than three days,” Diotima said. “We spoke to him then, after we gave up the search.”
“And how in Hades did he manage to drown without being seen, in the middle of a sanctuary full of girls and women walking back and forth?”
Then Diotima and I answered my question in unison. “He fell in at night.”
“But Nico,” said Socrates, frowning, “didn’t you say it yourself?”
“Didn’t I say what?”
“When you tried to dive. You said, ‘How does anyone manage to drown?’ ”
It was a fair point. “You’re right, Socrates. Something’s … er … fishy. We’ll have to inspect the body. But not here in front of the girls.”
Zeke ordered the slaves to carry the body to the same storeroom where was stored the skeleton of Hippias. In the absence of a courtyard not inhabited by young girls, the storeroom would have to do for observance of the rites. The slaves would place Melo’s feet toward the door, and the priestesses would clean his body and place the coin. I wondered if they’d find room enough for both bodies. If things kept on like this, the sanctuary might need to build an extension.
“What do we do with all this other stuff?” Diotima asked. She sat amongst a small fortune in gold and silver ornaments. No, not a small fortune: a large one. A family could probably live for a hundred years on the value of what she had scattered on the grass. Pots, vessels, statuettes, a whole pile of mirrors made of bronze, tarnished beyond repair, rings, gems, wooden spindles and spindle whorls, a case of sewing needles made of bone.
“Throw it back into the spring,” Thea said.
“You must be joking!” I said it without thinking, before I could stop to think I was correcting the High Priestess.
Thea was not amused. “No, young man, I’m not joking. Everything you see lying on the grass was dedicated to the Goddess. Women long dead gave their most precious possessions to our Goddess, that she might grant them favor in life. They might be dead, and their psyches in Hades, but their gifts were forever, and I will not see that undone.”
The lady had a point. I sighed and reached for the first, a beautiful statuette of a young child.
“I’ll do this, Nico,” Diotima said. “You go get yourself warm.”
I smiled in gratitude, because I was shivering beyond control. As I left, I saw Diotima begin. Gaïs bent to help her, and together the two priestesses blessed each object with all their power before each was returned to its home.
It had been clever of me to strip. I used my exomis as a towel and then, in the absence of anything else to wear, put it on. I was damp, but at least I wasn’t frozen and the shivers had left me.
I took Socrates with me to see the body.
A slave guarded the entrance. I told him there was little chance of the occupants escaping, and he replied that Zeke had ordered him to stay, not to keep the bodies in, but to keep the more curious girls out.
“They’re already playing dare games to see who’s willing to come closest,” he said.
So much for protecting the children’s innocence. I opened the door and we went inside. Socrates had seen death before, and I didn’t expect such a clean body to be any concern.
He didn’t disappoint me. But he stood back, looking somewhat askance, and said, “Nico, what do you look for? How do you inspect a body?”
“Like this.” I knelt beside Melo and heaved him over. He’d been a light man in life, but in death he was heavy as a sack of rocks.
Despite having been in the water, the exomis he wore had nettles and seeds stuck to it. Well, that was no surprise. He’d spent his days wandering the countryside in search of his betrothed.
I pulled down the tunic and ran my fingers over his body. I said to Socrates, “I’m searching for any sign of a wound.”
Socrates gave a moue of distaste. “Can’t you just look?”
“With some wounds you have to find the broken bones beneath.”
It was the idea of touching a dead body that upset him. We Hellenes have a horror of touching the dead. A man who’s been in contact with a corpse is forbidden to eat or have sex or enter the holy places until he’s been ritually cleansed.
“What’s this?”
At the corpse’s back, beneath the leather belt of his exomis, was something solid. I pulled it out, to find it was a piece of broken pottery. I held it up to Socrates and said, “Easy to see how a killer missed it.”
“Nico, there are words on the other side.”
I flipped it over. Socrates was right. Scratched into the fired clay were these words: caves hills fields coast boats farmhouse. A line had been scratched through the first four words. The final two were inscribed in the same hand but with slightly thicker lines. I guessed they’d been added later.
People used broken pottery to scratch notes all the time. This, it seemed to me, must have been notes Melo had scratched for himself. It didn’t take much imagination to realize this was his checklist of places to search for Ophelia.
I said, “Socrates, don’t tell anyone else about this, except for Diotima of course. All right?”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because …” I was stumped for an answer. “Because you shouldn’t give away information unless you need to.”
Socrates nodded, but I could tell he didn’t believe me.
My prodding and my close inspection of the body provided nothing more, either front or back. It was when I touched his head that I made progress. The bone beneath the hair moved. I poked around, gently at first, then more firmly, until I was certain. The skull at the back of his head had been broken. There was no blood, but then nor should there be, since the body had spent at least a day in cold running water.
I took Socrates out and returned to the spring for another look, and then we joined the others in Thea’s office. It was crowded with everyone present, but at least the Little Bears couldn’t hear us.
As I walked in, Thea was speaking. “The explanation is obvious,” she said. “This annoying young man was in the habit of skulking around the sanctuary. Obviously, he fell into the water in the dark and drowned. It’s happened before, and sadly, it will probably happen again.”
They all stopped and turned to me as I entered.
Diotima said, “What did you find?”
“Melo was knocked on the head,” I said. “From behind.”
There was a pause before they understood the implication, then startled gasps from the women, except for Diotima. She’d expected as much.
“Are you sure?” Thea asked.
“It’s certain,” I said. “His skull is broken inward. Anyone can feel it.”
Zeke nodded. He understood.
“Is there a chance he fell backward, knocked his head on a rock, and rolled in?” Doris asked in hope.
I shook my head. “Find me a rock on the edge with blood on it. You won’t. I looked.”
“Then Melo was murdered,” Doris said sadly. “How long will this go on?”
Thea, Doris, and Sabina seemed upset, or if they weren’t they acted it well. They pulled at their hair or clothing. Zeke clenched his hands in anger. Of them all, Gaïs seemed the least concerned. But that was consistent with her personality.
“Yes, Melo was murdered,” I said. “I’ve touched a dead body, that makes me unclean. Ritually, that is.”
Thea understood. Of course she did, she was a High Priestess. “We have plenty of cleansing water on hand,” she said. “It’s …” Her voice faded to a mumble, and she blushed. “I’m afraid our ritually clean water is the Sacred Spring. The spring from which you pulled the body.”
It was an interesting theological point. Was I already clean because I’d had my head under sacred water for most of the day?
“Am I spiritually clean?” I asked Thea.
“Perhaps if you wash your hands, just to be sure.”
Gaïs said, “High Priestess, is there not a larger question? Has the Sacred Spring been polluted by the presence of the body, or was the body cleansed of impurity when it touched the water?”
Thea, Doris, and Sabina all stood there, thunderstruck. “You know,” Doris said at last, turning to her colleagues, “I don’t think in all the history of the Hellenes there’s ever been a case like this. A murdered corpse is the ultimate pollutant. A sacred spring blessed by a goddess is the ultimate cleanser. What happens when one touches the other?”
Sabina said, “If the spring’s polluted, we have nothing to clean it.”
In the background I could see Socrates frown. He began to mutter to himself and stared vacantly out the window. I knew that he was thinking about the priestess’s question. We didn’t have time for a long-winded explanation that no doubt wouldn’t finish until midnight, so I took him by the shoulders and said quietly, “Socrates, pay attention to me, will you? Don’t go bothering these people with your wild ideas.”
“But Nico, don’t you want to know the answer? The priestess asked—”
“I don’t care what the priestess said—”
“I’ve solved it already, Nico. It’s obvious.”
“Socrates,” Diotima said gently, “don’t you think you should leave the ecumenical questions to the experts—”
But the priestesses had overheard us. They stared at Socrates in astonishment.
Thea said, “Did the child say he knows the answer? Yes? Speak up, lad. Is the spring polluted or clean?”
Socrates said, “Well, the water was polluted when the corpse hit it. So that water couldn’t cleanse anything.”
“This is your idea of a solution?” Diotima said, exasperated. “Socrates—”
“But that’s a big sacred spring,” Socrates plowed on. “Some of the water touched the corpse, and other parts of the water didn’t.”
Everyone nodded in unison.
“The water that didn’t touch the corpse was never polluted. Which means the unpolluted water cleansed the polluted water.”
“That’s really very clever,” Sabina said, half to herself.
“What made you think of such a thing?” Diotima asked.
“I remembered when Nico and I talked to that philosopher last year, the one who works for Pericles. Remember, Nico? He said everything was made of tiny particles? Well, if the water’s all tiny particles, then obviously the tiny particles that never went near the body never had a chance to be polluted.”
“What about the dead man’s psyche?” Sabina asked.
Thea said, “It must still be here.”
“Probably in the spring,” Doris added. “It’ll terrify the girls every time they go for water unless we do something about it.”
I exploded. “Do we care more about the religious problems here, or the killing?”
Diotima looked at me coldly. “This is a religious community, you know, Nico. I suppose you noticed that big building out there? They call it a temple.”
“Did anyone see anything in the night?” I asked the room in general. “Or hear anything?”
Silence. It had been a silly question—obviously if any innocent person had known something, they would already have spoken up—but I had to ask it to make my next point clear. Doris saved me the trouble.
“This means the murderer is among us,” Doris said. “Whoever it is, they’re here.”
Thea put her head in her hands. “This could end the sanctuary.”
“Permanent guards,” Zeke said. “I’ll set the men to guard every point. It means we won’t get any work done, but …” He shrugged.
“But staying alive is more important,” Gaïs said matter-of-factly. “I hope we can. Above all else, we must protect the girls.”
THE MEETING BROKE up in confusion. The priestesses left the room in a daze. Diotima left with Gaïs to see to the girls, and to arrange matters so that no child was ever on her own. The absence of both women gave me a chance I’d been hoping would come.
I asked to speak to Thea privately. She looked at me oddly but nodded. We remained in her office as the others left. They went with backward glances, obviously wondering what I was up to.
When we were alone, I said, “I wanted to ask you, High Priestess, what it is between Gaïs and Diotima.”
Thea had the grace not to look surprised at my question. “I thought I was the only one who’d noticed,” she said. “I don’t know. Perhaps it’s something that happened when they were children.”
“Gaïs said to me that something went wrong at Diotima’s initiation ceremony.” I was unwilling to repeat Gaïs’s claim that Diotima had cheated; not until I knew what had really happened.
Thea frowned. “If it did, I don’t know about it.”
“Then could you tell me what the initiation ceremony truly means?”
Thea, who had been standing, put a hand out to the desk beside her and used it to ease herself down to a chair. She said, “I understand you have no sisters? Well, when a girl is born we call her kore, which means maiden. This you know.”
“Yes.”
“When she is ready to be betrothed she becomes a nymphe, and nymphe she remains until motherhood, when we call her gyne. These are the three phases of a woman’s life: the maid, the nymph, and the mother. Every girl you see at this sanctuary is kore. They are children, we teach them as children, we treat them as children. Because they are children. But when they leave this place, they leave as nymphe. Brauron is a place of transformation.”
“When does it happen?”
“At that rite of transformation you mentioned. Each child enters the temple with those girlish things that were important to her in childhood.”
“You mean her toys?”
Thea gave one sharp nod. “The transformation to womanhood is one of the deepest mysteries in a woman’s life. At the end of her year with us, she marks her new status by dedicating her toys to the Goddess. She is no longer a child, you see, so she no longer needs them. When she leaves the temple, she leaves as a woman who has left her childhood behind her.”
“I see.” I thought about it. It seemed harsh, perhaps as harsh as a man’s time in the army, but at least it was over quickly.
“Don’t the girls ever fight?” I asked. “Nasty tricks? Booby traps? I know what happens when you lump boys together.”
“We’ve had catfights aplenty in the courtyard, when arguments overheat. We’ve had scratching and hair pulling and bared claws going for faces, but never, I say never, has one girl tried to kill another. Girls don’t fight with their fists, as boys do, Nicolaos; they do it with cold words and ugly behavior.”
“What do you do when a girl comes to you with such a problem?”
“I tell her to sort it out, and send her back to the other girls.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“I am. These girls must learn to deal with each other. It’s essential. The girls we teach are destined to marry the most powerful men in Athens. I can’t be there for the rest of their lives to protect the weak ones. Somehow they have to find that balance for themselves. No, Ni
colaos, I want as many personal issues as possible sorted out here at Brauron, where I can keep an eye on things, and that means letting nature take its course.”
I said, “You must end up with some unhappy girls.”
“I’m not here to make them happy,” said the High Priestess. “I’m here to turn them into the backbone of Athens. The men might make the decisions at the ecclesia, and they fight the wars, but where would the men be, where would we all be, if the women weren’t running the homes and raising the children and nudging the men in the direction they need to go? There’d be no point to life, would there? Men might deny it in public, but in the privacy of their homes they listen carefully to their wives. Sons respect their mothers. Husbands respect their wives and care for their daughters.”
I’d never thought of this before, but of course, the High Priestess was right. Out here, in the backwoods of Attica, at a tiny temple few ever thought about, this remarkable woman was inventing our future.
I said, “Gaïs was an orphan. Does the sanctuary take in many?”
“No. The sanctuary’s taken in a mere handful of foundlings over the years. There are restrictions on whom we’ll accept. To start with, the babe must be a girl! There must be no possible legal guardian for the child. There must be a high likelihood the child is born of citizens.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody wants to encourage slaves to have illegitimate children and then abandon them on our steps. An awful ethical position.”
“Oh,” I said, taken aback. “Of course.”
“Also, a girl-child raised by us has almost the same status as the daughter of a well-born citizen. A poor father with too many mouths to feed might be tempted to try his luck, to give his daughter a chance at a better life. One of the first things we do when a child turns up is check to see which local family is missing one.”
“How is it that Gaïs isn’t married?” I asked.
Thea raised her arms in despair. “We tried. Believe me, we tried. But every time a prospective suitor arrived with his father, Gaïs would run in and … well, you’ve seen how she looks after those wild runs. And then she says those strange things that often sound slightly threatening … The men can’t wait to get away from her. One time I ordered her to be held down; we brushed her hair and made her put on a pretty dress. It didn’t help. She still managed to scare away the suitor. You and I know there’s no harm in her—”