The Marathon Conspiracy

by Corby, Gary

  This was the inspiration that had struck me on the sands of Marathon: that only a large mirror would answer. The source of the mirror was vital.

  “Men don’t use mirrors,” Callias said.

  “No, but women do.”

  Aeschylus frowned. “What woman? There were no women with the army, we ordered our families to stay in Athens.”

  “Perhaps a local lady?” Callias suggested.

  Aeschylus scoffed. “Where would a local woman find a mirror the size of a shield?”

  “How about just over here?” I said. I walked across to the temple entrance. I lifted the mirror off the wall, the one that the girls used to touch up their hair before their womanhood ceremony.

  I held it up for all to see. The angle reflected light from the entrance, and the room brightened.

  “This mirror, ladies and gentlemen, is the right size to have flashed the signal at Marathon.”

  They stared at it in silence for a moment, then Callias spoke up. “You’re saying the signal was sent by someone from the temple.”

  “Yes. To explain why, I must delve into an entirely different mystery. It’s the key to removing all the irrelevant clues. The moment I met him, I was intrigued by the question of who Zeke was.”

  Every eye turned to Zeke. He stood beside Thea with a face like stone.

  “No one knows where Zeke came from,” I said. “He won’t say. Thea won’t say. Have you wondered about his accent? I have. Then there’s the sword that I dredged up from the bottom of the Sacred Spring. It’s Persian. How did it get there?

  “This put me in mind of an interesting idea: that Zeke might be from Persia. I remarked to Diotima, very early on, that the way Zeke had set guards around the sanctuary was up to the standard of a top-notch camp commander. How did a man whose last thirty years had been spent as a jack-of-all-trades at a temple acquire such expertise?

  “Fortunately there was an event that explained everything. It’s called the Battle of Marathon. You’ll recall I asked you, Aeschylus and Callias, whether Zeke had been at Marathon. You told me he wasn’t on the memorial list. But Zeke did fight at Marathon. He fought on the Persian side. And given his expertise, I suggest he was an officer. Notice, too, that Zeke appeared at Brauron some time after the battle, but well before the second invasion ten years later. The timing fits.”

  Gasps from about the temple. Zeke stared at me, expressionless, as one might an enemy.

  “Are you indeed a Persian?” Callias asked Zeke.

  Zeke turned to Thea.

  “We may as well tell them, dear,” Thea said, and she held his hand. “We’ve nothing to be ashamed of.” She paused, then added, “And even if we did, we’re too old to regret it now.”

  “Then I admit it. It’s true,” Zeke said, with obvious reluctance. “I was once an officer of the Great King. After Marathon I decided to settle here, to be with Thea. For obvious reasons, I couldn’t do so openly. For thirty years I’ve been Zeke the maintenance man, and that’s how I intend to remain. I’ve committed no crime.”

  “No crime? You fought against Athens!” Aeschylus almost exploded. He advanced on Zeke and Thea. Zeke, seeing the threat, stepped in front of Thea to protect her and prepared to strike Aeschylus. I quickly put myself between them and pushed them apart. Callias grabbed Aeschylus by the arm.

  Aeschylus spat. “My brother died in the rush to take their ships. This Persian might have killed him.”

  “As a soldier of his own country,” I said. “Zeke’s right, Aeschylus. That’s no crime.”

  “If it’s any compensation, I couldn’t have killed your brother,” Zeke said. “After our line broke, I was cut off and had to retreat south. I took no part in the ship action. As it turned out, I was lucky. It meant when I saw Thea’s signal, I could go to her.”

  “It was I who flashed that signal,” Thea said. “To tell Zeke that I loved him. To ask him to come to me, if he would.”

  “How did you meet?” said Callias, intrigued. “How could a woman who spent her whole life in this sanctuary manage to meet a Persian officer?”

  “I should imagine a scouting party?” I said. “This is, after all, the hometown of Hippias, the safest place to land advance scouts.”

  Zeke nodded. “When the Great King decided to attack Athens, he sent an advance force to scout the path.”

  “No doubt,” said Callias.

  “I led that force. We landed at Brauron, because it was the home of Hippias, as Nicolaos says. He told us of places where a team might land quietly. One of these was the bay close by the temple. I landed with eight men in the dead of night. There, as the gods would have it, my force of Persians ran straight into a priestess, a woman of the greatest beauty. It was Thea, walking by the seaside in the moonlight, and I loved her the moment I saw her,” Zeke said quietly. “My men hid while I spoke with her.”

  “You had to learn Greek,” Aeschylus pointed out.

  “I already spoke it. That was why I was chosen to lead the advance. My father, who was a senior officer of the Great King, married a Hellene woman of Ionia.” Zeke smiled. “It seems the men of my family have a fondness for Hellene women.

  “She saw in me what I saw in her. I know this only happens in the songs of peasants, but the truth is, we fell in love that night. Thea never gave us away.”

  Thea held Zeke’s arm and said, “I couldn’t support the Persians. I could never do that. But nor could I give Zeke away.”

  Zeke said, “In the days that followed, my men and I hid during the day and moved about in the dark, scouting paths for the coming invasion.”

  “Where did you hide? Surely not at the temple.”

  “No. In a nearby cave that we discovered.”

  “Not—”

  “Yes, in the same cave in which the remains of Hippias were found.”

  Thea said, “I went to visit him there, often. We sat and spoke of our different lives, and what we’d do after the war. Zeke said he would have to return to Persia. He asked me to go with him. I refused.”

  “We argued about it,” Zeke said. “The only time we have argued in thirty years.” The old soldier and the old priestess smiled at each other.

  Thea said, “Nothing could cause me to join the Persians. Not while they supported Hippias. But Zeke was honor-bound to return to his own army. It seemed fate would separate us.”

  “I told her that I must return,” Zeke said. “But I thought long and hard, and I confess my heart was not in it. I told Thea that if she still wanted me after I had fought against her own people, then she should signal from the mountain.”

  “Which I did,” Thea said simply.

  Callias and Aeschylus both gasped. Aeschylus said, “It was you I saw?”

  Zeke ignored them, intent on his story, now that it was revealed. “I expected our side to win at Marathon,” he said. “But if I disappeared at once, straight after the fighting, men would assume I had perished in the fight, and there would be no stain on the honor of my family. As it happened, our heavy defeat made it that much easier to desert my country. When Thea flashed the light, I could see where she was, and I joined her. We made our way back here.”

  “Zeke couldn’t join us at Brauron immediately,” Thea added. “It would have been too obvious. We waited months while he camped out.”

  I said, “You see, Aeschylus, the signal at Marathon had nothing to do with political conspiracy. It was a love letter.”

  Aeschylus rubbed his chin and thought, and then said, “I must believe you. But don’t think this means Athens trusts you, Persian.”

  I said, “This leads us to the next question, the one for which Pericles and the archons commissioned me. Who killed Hippias, and why?”

  “You’re about to tell us that Hippias recognized Zeke in Brauron,” Aeschylus said, “and to protect his identity, Zeke killed Hippias.”

  “That certainly could have happened,” I said. “But I don’t think it did, because of the evidence of the knife and the scrolls. The fifth scro
ll is missing. That must be because it incriminates someone still with us. But whoever took the fifth scroll left the first four. In the fourth, Diotima found these words. She read them to me before ever we came to Brauron. I’ll read a part to you now.” I opened the fourth scroll and read.

  Have discovered via local source that the girl was hidden near my own estates. She will go on the next execution list. The last thing I require is another Elektra.

  I closed the scroll. “There’s an execution list that follows shortly after. In it, there’s a line that reads merely ‘the girl.’ Hippias didn’t know her name, despite which he wanted her dead. Who is this girl, to threaten a tyrant? In the legends, Elektra, the daughter of Agamemnon, grew up to avenge her father. Elektra could only be a reference to the sister of Harmodius. Hippias feared that the sister of Harmodius would grow up and return to avenge her brother.”

  “So the sister of Harmodius was indeed killed,” Callias said sadly. “I always thought it.”

  “This note comes at the very end of scroll four,” I said. “Shortly before the second rebellion—organized in part by you, Callias—had succeeded in overthrowing Hippias. It’s possible that last list of victims was never executed. Maybe “the girl” survived. Let me speculate for a moment on who she might be. Where were the estates of Hippias?”

  “Here at Brauron. But they were sold immediately after he was expelled.”

  “Even so, this girl was hidden near his estates, which means Brauron, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Elektra was the sister of Iphigenia. Iphigenia founded the Sanctuary of Brauron. If Hippias was thinking of the sanctuary, it’s only reasonable this would put him in mind of Iphigenia, and thence her sister who wreaked revenge for murder, particularly since that’s his own fear.”

  “It’s possible,” Aeschylus said. “People allude to the characters in Homer all the time. I’ve been known to do it myself.”

  “Just so. And who here at Brauron today was also here that long ago? Who was raised here as an orphan?”

  I put my hand on Thea’s shoulder. “I introduce you to the sister of Harmodius, whose expulsion from a public ceremony in Athens, when she was seven years old, commenced the series of assassinations that brought us to this pass.”

  Thea sat mute. When it became clear that she had nothing to say, Callias asked, “Is this true? Are you the sister of Harmodius?”

  Thea sighed. “It’s true, Callias. You knew me when I was a child.”

  “I wish I could say you haven’t changed at all, but I didn’t recognize you,” Callias said sadly.

  “Age does terrible things to us all, my friend.” Thea gripped Zeke’s hand even tighter.

  “This is an enormous coincidence,” Aeschylus said.

  I said, “Not so! In fact, when you look at the facts, it was almost inevitable. You said to me, Callias, that you didn’t know what had happened to the little sister of Harmodius.”

  “She disappeared.”

  “But you hoped someone had smuggled her out of the city.”

  “A forlorn hope.”

  “But that’s exactly what happened. Thea was hidden in the most obvious place possible. All they had to do was change her name, and Thea became one girl among many. Better yet, the sanctuary has a history of caring for orphans. Like Gaïs, for example.”

  Aeschylus said, “I concede you’re right, Nicolaos. That does seem inevitable.”

  Callias clasped Thea’s left hand. With tears in his eyes, he said, “I cannot tell you how much it pleases me that you survived. I only wish you’d come to me before. I could have helped you.”

  Thea shrugged. “I’ve tried so hard to forget those times. To this day, I still have nightmares. I see myself ejected from the ceremony, and then I see my brother cut down. It’s kind of you, Callias, but I had everything I needed here. The sanctuary succored me, and I’ve served the Goddess.”

  I said, “We now come to the next part of the sequence. Hippias was dropped at Brauron because he’d been wounded at Marathon. He needed a doctor, and quickly. The evidence of the doctor proves Hippias survived the battle. He probably even survived the doctor.

  “Tell me,” I said, “what do most people do to get their strength back when they recover from a wound?”

  “They go for walks,” Aeschylus said. “They start with short ones, then make them longer as they become stronger.”

  “Yes, and if you were Hippias, in Attica, after the battle at Marathon, when would you go for a walk?”

  “On the darkest nights possible,” said Aeschylus grimly. “The tyrant would hide for fear that I or someone like me would run into him.”

  “Correct! And who did we just hear was walking about the countryside at night?”

  Aeschylus frowned. “Zeke?”

  “No, Zeke scouted the countryside before the battle. Afterward, he was in hiding, waiting for the Athenian army to disperse. There was one very important find that came with the skeleton, one that Sabina didn’t send along with the scrolls. If she had, everything might have turned out differently. Among the ribs, hidden amongst them and the dirt, was a knife. Scratched into one side were the names Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Scratched into the other side was the name Leana. It’s overwhelmingly likely that this was the murder weapon. Those names were the killer’s motive. Now that we have discovered the sister of Harmodius, the name of the killer is obvious.”

  “Not Thea!” Callias exclaimed.

  “Thea,” I said.

  “Is this true?” Callias asked. “Are you, Thea, the true Tyrannicide?”

  Thea said in a small voice, “It is as Nicolaos says. One evening I was walking back from visiting Zeke—I went to see him every spare moment—when I saw coming in the other direction an old man. He shuffled along. It was dark, I didn’t recognize Hippias until he was upon me, and he never recognized me at all.” She stopped and looked at us each in turn. “You must remember, I was thirty-one then, and in my prime. He hadn’t seen me since I was seven.”

  Several heads nodded at her explanation.

  “Hippias said, ‘Good evening, Priestess.’ I’d never thought to have such a chance. He shambled, like a sick, weak, old man. I boiled with anger that welled up until I couldn’t control it. I drew my knife and I stabbed him in the heart. I stabbed him over and over.” Thea shuddered. “Then, when he was dead and I’d come to my senses, I scratched into the blade the names of the people I’d avenged. I wanted his shade to know why he’d died. I pushed the knife back into him and then I went to tell Zeke what I’d done. Together we carried him to the cave where Zeke and his men had hidden. That’s the entire story. I only regret that I couldn’t kill him before he destroyed my family.”

  Callias said, “With your permission, Zeke?”

  Zeke nodded.

  Callias wrapped Thea up in a massive hug.

  “All of Athens owes you a debt, lady, and I look forward to paying it. I shall commission your statue and have it raised upon the Acropolis. You shall stand next to my Leana, whom you avenged.”

  Thea pushed Callias back in horror. “Please, no, Callias! I’d prefer no one to ever know. I want my brother Harmodius and his friend Aristogeiton to be remembered as the Tyrannicides.”

  “But it’s not true,” Callias said, puzzled. “You know it’s not. This makes no sense.”

  “They died for it; I didn’t. Leana too. I remember her.” Thea stopped to wipe away a tear.

  “What of my Allike?” Aposila said. “Did you kill her, too?”

  Thea shook her head violently. “No! Of course not. I’d never harm a child. Not after what I went through.”

  “Thea’s right,” I said. “It’s impossible for either her or Zeke to have hurt Allike. Neither has the strength to dismemb—” I realized Allike’s mother was in the room. “That is, to hurt someone. But luckily for us, the answer to the worst of crime of all—the murder of a child—becomes simple once we remove all the distractions of those other mysteries. There can be only one
person who hurt your daughter, Aposila. It had to be a man. It had to be a man who knew of the discovery of the skeleton. That narrows the suspects. What’s more, it had to be a man who stood to lose from the discovery.

  “I asked you before, Callias and Aeschylus, what would happen to the man who killed Hippias. You said he’d be a certain winner in the elections.”

  “Yes.”

  “But what if the man who protected Hippias was up for election? What if we could prove it?”

  “He certainly wouldn’t win any election,” said Callias.

  “Dead men can’t,” Aeschylus added grimly.

  “I thought as much. Then tell me, who is the only man in this case who knew of the skeleton, who has property in Brauron, and who might have hidden Hippias?”

  Thea got there first. “Glaucon?” she said.

  “Glaucon. Glaucon must have harbored Hippias. It’s the only explanation consistent with everything we know. When Glaucon saw the message from Sabina, he must have opened the scrolls and seen his own name prominently displayed at the end of scroll five. The discovery would have destroyed his chances at the election. In fact, it would have killed him! Glaucon pulled the fifth scroll.”

  Callias scratched his head. “But you told me Glaucon confessed, and you didn’t believe him.”

  “Glaucon confessed to killing Hippias. When I mentioned the girls, he acted like he’d never heard of them. But that had to be false, because he was the first one to read the report Sabina sent to Athens. Glaucon lied to me. He took credit for a killing he didn’t commit, and then denied all knowledge of the perfidy he did commit.”

  “Raiders! Raiders!”

  The voices came from outside. Girls screamed.

  “Dear Gods, it’s happening again,” Thea whispered.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I WAS FIRST OUT the door, but only because I was closest. Sabina was right behind me. Everyone piled out behind us in an untidy heap.