Cleopatra's Heir

by Gillian Bradshaw

  Snaggle-Tooth agreed. “I think we may have killed the other fellow on the boat. If we get caught, the Romans will crucify us. We can’t risk it. Sell the bitch to Kinesias: at least we know that’s safe.”

  The old woman cackled suddenly. “I know! We go to the one that started it, tell him that there wasn’t any cargo or any money, and all we got was his enemy’s daughter. We tell him we want another four hundred or we sell her back to her father.”

  There was a silence around the room, then wide grins. “That’s good!” exclaimed the leader appreciatively. “He’ll pay. He’s boiling with hate, that one.”

  “And when he’s paid,” said the old woman, “we sell her to Kinesias. Six hundred, clear profit, plus whatever we can get for the chest.”

  “No! Please!” cried Melanthe frantically. “Please, my father will pay you more than Aristodemos!”

  “Oh, Aristodemos, is it?” said the leader. “And you know about him?”

  “He hates my father,” Melanthe said, trembling. “He told lies about us before. He got us arrested by the Romans, but they found out that he was lying, and they said they would charge him if he didn’t take it back. My father has a letter from the Roman general Gallus saying what happened, and he’ll try to get Aristodemos arrested, I know he will. You can’t count on getting anything from Aristodemos!”

  “He won’t be arrested,” the leader replied confidently. “Not because of some Egyptian with a letter. He’s a gentleman. Still, I’m interested. Where’s he from?”

  “Coptos, like my father. He’s angry because Papa took his place with a Red Sea trader. He swore, right in the marketplace, that he wouldn’t endure that.”

  “That’s enough.”

  “Please, you …”

  “Quiet, you!” ordered the leader. “—Thrason, tie her up and keep her quiet. I’ll go find Aristodemos. Zeuxis, you go and talk to Kinesias.”

  Thrason, who turned out to be the big man, pulled a coil of rope out of one of the boxes and tied Melanthe’s hands and feet. By the time he’d finished, she was crying, so he did not gag her, merely shook the remaining rope at her and assured her that she would be both gagged and beaten if she made any noise.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon lying in the corner of the dirty room among the boxes while the robbers drank and talked among themselves. She was afraid at first that they would rape her, but—perhaps because of the old woman—they showed no interest in her at all. The old woman, it gradually emerged, was the mother of two of them—including the leader, who appeared to be called Nikokrates—and the aunt of Thrason. She sold the proceeds of the men’s robberies to a variety of shops around the Mareotic quarter of Alexandria, and she debated with them where to sell the clothes and the earrings. Melanthe listened fearfully for some discussion of the “Kinesias” who was her intended purchaser, but none was forthcoming.

  Zeuxis, a tall thin man with a black eye from Melanthe’s kick, returned early in the evening in a good mood, carrying a fresh jug of beer. “Kinesias is interested!” he announced to his friends. “He says he’ll pay two hundred for her if she’s sound and a virgin. And the best part is, he’s sailing tomorrow morning!”

  Melanthe lifted her head from the floor with a whimper of terror. Sailing. Of course. Selling a free person as a slave was difficult, if not impossible, in their own country. It was a crime which the enslave person was almost certain to disclose. However, cross the sea, and free birth became impossible to prove. Victims of piracy or kidnapping could end up on the block next to those born to slavery and prisoners of war. Selling to Kinesias meant getting less than a pretty young girl would normally fetch because Kinesias was a ship captain who had to transport his wares—and he was sailing in the morning.

  “I thought he wasn’t going to do another trip till the end of the month!” said Thrason.

  “Somebody changed his mind,” replied Zeuxis. “Somebody with a lot of money, by the look of things. They were putting carpets in the passenger cabin when I was there, and silver lampstands. Is the little bitch a virgin? I told Kinesias she was, but he’s sure to check.”

  They checked. Thrason and Zeuxis held Melanthe down while the old woman examined her. She curled up in her corner afterwards, sobbing bitterly. Sailing in the morning. Sailing off to a life of slavery, where her virginity was merely an increment on her price, and she would never see anyone she loved ever again.

  Nikokrates, the robber leader, arrived back while she was still weeping. With him was Aristodemos.

  Melanthe swallowed her sobs and tried to sit up straight: she would not give this wicked man anything more to gloat about than she could! Aristodemos came straight over and stared down at her, his eyes half-lidded, his lips curled in distaste.

  “Well?” asked Nikokrates.

  “It’s his daughter,” Aristodemos admitted grudgingly. “But the shameless wretch still has the documents! He’s been waving them at the harbor authorities and accusing me! I paid you to destroy them!”

  “You paid us a hundred drachmae to hit the boat,” replied Nikokrates. “You said the god-hated thing was loaded with spices and ivory, and that we’d easily make a fortune from it. But all we’ve got is the girl and trouble from the guard. We’re going to have to spend every obol you gave us on bribes to keep them off. I tell you, the best thing for us would be to sell the girl back to her father cheap, because then they’d leave us alone. It’s only because you paid us that we’re even giving you a chance to get your revenge. If you don’t want it, we’ll sell her back to her father, and he can go away happy and stop bothering us.”

  Aristodemos bit his lip.

  “Why do you hate my father so much?” Melanthe asked in agonized bewilderment. “He never cheated you. You got rich out of cheating him!”

  “You filthy little bitch!” snarled Aristodemos. “He’s an upstart Egyptian peasant who thinks he’s better than a Greek. He never knew his place, and he refuses to learn it!”

  “You know he’s a better man than you,” Melanthe said, suddenly understanding.

  Aristodemos bent over and slapped her, then spat on her. “Very well,” he said, turning to Nikokrates. “I’ll give you the four hundred. But if I’m buying her, I keep her and do whatever I like with her.”

  Nikokrates looked at Zeuxis. Zeuxis made a cupped-palm gesture with one hand, then held up two fingers.

  “Do you think that’s a good idea, Lord Aristodemos?” asked Nikokrates smoothly.

  Aristodemos gave him a look of startled alarm, and Melanthe realized that he hadn’t told Nikokrates his real name. No wonder the robber had been interested in what she had to say about Aristodemos: it gave him a hold on the man.

  “You’re a known enemy of this man Ani,” Nikokrates went on. “You’ve already been in trouble because of it. One of those papers you’re so worked up about is a letter from a Roman general detailing how you made a malicious accusation against your enemy. I don’t think it’s a very good idea for you to take charge of the girl, do you?—Particularly not if he’s already accused you to the harbor authorities.”

  Aristodemos’ face darkened. “I won’t be threatened by the likes of you!”

  “Threatening you? Me? I’m simply pointing out that you don’t want to dirty your hands. Let us dispose of the girl.”

  “How?” demanded Aristodemos. “I don’t want her father to get her back.”

  “There’s a ship leaving for Cyprus in the morning,” said Zeuxis.

  “In the morning?” asked Nikokrates, startled. “I thought not until the end of …” He checked himself.

  “In the morning,” Zeuxis repeated, with a confirming nod to Nikokrates. “We’ll get the girl aboard, and the captain will sell her in the market at Paphos.”

  “There you are,” said Nikokrates, turning back to Aristodemos. “Aphrodite’s city always needs fresh whores. You’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that your enemy’s daughter is servicing sailors in a foreign port, and no one will be able to say a word agai
nst you.”

  Melanthe was unable to stifle her whimper of horror. Aristodemos glanced at her quickly, and his lips curled in satisfaction. He was however, still reluctant to pay out more than he had to. “Get the girl aboard?” he asked suspiciously. “Sell her, you mean!”

  “The captain doesn’t pay much,” warned Nikokrates. “It’s not like a legal business. His arrangement with the port authorities costs him plenty.”

  “If I’m paying for the girl,” Aristodemos said mulishly, “I ought to get the money from this captain.”

  They argued about it for a while. Eventually Nikokrates agreed to split the purchase price with Aristodemos—except that the purchase price quoted was a hundred drachmae.

  Melanthe didn’t correct him. She didn’t feel able to speak. Her thoughts went battering about her head like a frightened bird in a cage. She had to come up with some way to escape from this nightmare soon, or it would be too late.

  Aristodemos didn’t trust the robbers, and insisted on seeing the ship captain Kinesias for himself. Nikokrates eventually agreed to this as well. Melanthe, it seemed, should be moved to the ship that evening anyway, as the captain wanted to leave early.

  They set out at once. Melanthe had hoped that perhaps she could summon help or slip away from her captors while they crossed the city, but she was given no opportunity. Nikokrates gagged her with a rope, selected an empty crate from the stacks along the wall, and stuffed her into it, still bound hand and foot. He fastened a lid on top, and in this fashion, blind and half suffocated, she was carried down the stairs, loaded onto a handcart—she knew it was a handcart, because there was no sound of an animal—and jolted across the city.

  She thought, oddly, of the dancing animals from the terrace by the Canopic canal. “Why do they have to do that?” Serapion had asked, as the Romans packed the statues away. Papa’s response, she saw now, didn’t really answer the question. Serapion had meant, Why do people have to take things that other people love? and Papa had only replied, “Because they can.”

  The cart stopped after a while and sat still for what seemed hours. Melanthe tried not to cry, because that made it hard to breathe. At last she felt herself lifted and carried up an incline, then lowered again. The lid of the crate was removed to a glow of lamplight, and Melanthe blinked up at a sour, big-nosed man who was gazing down at her.

  “This is the girl,” said Nikokrates. “Pretty, eh?”

  The big-nosed man only grunted and waved for people to take her out. Nikokrates and Zeuxis heaved her out of the box and set her down on the floor. She looked around, and saw that she was in a room made of wood—thick, dark wood—and that besides the two robbers and the big-nosed man there was a thin old man holding the lamp. Aristodemos was watching from the doorway. Iron shackles lay heaped into a pile in a corner.

  The thin old man handed the lamp to Big-Nose and knelt to untie Melanthe’s bonds.

  “Stay still if you know what’s good for you, girl,” growled Big-Nose, glaring at her. He picked up the length of rope the old man removed from her ankles, doubled it, and slapped it significantly against the wall.

  Melanthe lay still while the old man examined her, looking at her eyes, her teeth, her hair, pulling up her tunic and touching her breasts, and finally checking, as Zeuxis had expected, whether she was a virgin. The other men all watched. She felt sick and frantic and wanted to lash out and run, but she forced herself to behave like a fledging bird grounded, seeking invisibility by the absence of motion. Let them only think that she was too frightened to move!

  At last the old man nodded at Big-Nose, whom she was now nearly certain was the ship captain Kinesias. “Healthy and intact,” he proclaimed, in a reedy voice. “Do you want to test her with the wheel?”

  The test for the hidden defect of the sacred disease. She thought wistfully of Arion, wished that she’d slipped up to him one evening and suggested that they go for a walk along the riverbank … wished that she had had the chance to kiss him more than just the once … far, far better to have lost her virginity to him than to a sailor in a brothel.

  Kinesias shook his head. “Never caught anyone like that anyway.” He turned to Nikokrates. “Very well. You …”

  Melanthe leapt to her feet in one convulsive motion and ran straight for the door. Aristodemos threw wide his arms in startled denial, and she turned sideways without breaking step, raised her arm and smashed her elbow into his face with all the weight of her body behind it. He screamed and fell backward. She vaulted over him. Her left foot came down on his chest, making her stumble, but she regained her balance and dashed along a dark, narrow hall where men and women lay shackled amid crates and huge amphorae—the ship’s hold, she realized. Behind her, the shouting had begun.

  There was a ladder at the end of the hold and she pelted up it, emerged in another narrow passageway, this one flanked by doors and lit dimly by a lantern halfway along. One of the doors opened, and a man’s head poked out. She glanced up: there was another ladder beside her, disappearing into the dark. She shot up it, hearing the sound of feet scrambling up the first ladder just below. At the top of the ladder was …

  … a solid barrier. She fumbled at it frantically, found hinges, pushed at the side opposite them …

  It refused to budge. She fumbled again, this time searching for a bolt. A hand from below seized her ankle, and she screamed.

  She clung to the rungs of the ladder, but was dragged, still screaming down to the corridor floor just below. There were more doors open now, more shocked faces staring. Nikokrates grabbed her hands and wrestled them behind her back, and Kinesias slapped her.

  A door at the end of the corridor, behind the ladder, opened in a flare of lamplight. “By all the immortal gods!” exclaimed a voice—a beautiful, cultured, educated, familiar voice: “What is going on?”

  “Arion!” she screamed, searching for him with her eyes, and he replied, in amazement, “Melanthe!”

  He was standing framed in the doorway, dressed in a dark tunic that caught the light here and there with a glitter. There was another man in the light behind him.

  “No need to trouble yourself, sir,” said Kinesias, moving between them. “It’s simply a slave-girl, trying to run off. If you just …”

  “That is an outrageous lie,” Arion said sharply, pushing him out of the way. “I know this girl. Her father saved my life. Melanthe, what are you doing here?”

  He was right in front of her. He was real—the same cropped hair, the same ready show of blood in the cheeks, the same proud eyes. Only the tunic was different—a black tunic, worked with gold, very rich. She wanted to throw herself into his arms, but Nikokrates was holding her arms twisted behind her back, and she could only gasp at him.

  “Lord,” the man who’d been behind Arion said urgently, “let me handle this.” He’d come out of the cabin behind Arion, a slim man, older than Arion, dark-haired and bearded, soberly but expensively dressed.

  “This is not your business,” Kinesias told the two of them. “Go back to your cabin, sirs, and let me get on with my trade.”

  “I told you, this girl’s father saved my life,” Arion replied. “She is to be released and returned to her family at once. There is no bargaining to be done.”

  “Lord!” protested Arion’s friend, looking warily at Kinesias. “I said, let me handle this!”

  Kinesias was shaking his head. “She can’t be released. The guard are looking for her already. If she goes back, they’ll come here to see what else I’ve got.”

  “You assured us that the authorities had been bribed,” said Arion disdainfully.

  Kinesias grimaced. “Silence comes in quantities. I paid for only so much of it. This would cost more than I can afford.”

  “You can sell the girl to my friend, though, surely?” said Arion’s friend, with a false smile. “All that will mean is you getting your money here instead of at Paphos, and her traveling to Cyprus in the cabin instead of the hold.”

  Kinesias at once loo
ked far less forbidding, but: “No,” said Arion flatly.

  His friend shot him a look of annoyance. “Be reasonable!” he protested. “The girl will be safe and well treated, the captain will be happy, and our security will be preserved.”

  “You didn’t listen to me,” Arion said sharply. “She isn’t a slave. She’s the free daughter of a merchant who saved my life. Her father adores her. Am I supposed to repay him by enslaving her myself?”

  “Keep her as your free concubine, then, if you want her so much!” cried the friend in exasperation. “But we can’t afford trouble with the guard!”

  “How am I to learn what neither blood nor nurture will teach me?” Arion asked, with an edge to his voice that seemed to bring his friend up sharp. “The answer, Rhodon, is that I might have encountered such things elsewhere—only, you know, I never did, until I met Melanthe’s father.” He turned to Kinesias. “You can be reasonable. Say you bought the girl in good faith, that you didn’t know she was freeborn. I will pretend to believe it. If you’ve paid out money. I will reimburse you. I will repay you twice what she cost you. You will have your profit from her, and my custom as well. Otherwise I will take her back to her family myself, and you will lose both.”

  “This is not wise!” protested Rhodon. “Not if the guard are looking for her. And we cannot afford to wait and look for another ship!”

  “You could let me go in morning, when you leave,” Melanthe offered, very faintly. “Then I could go to the guard, and say I was hiding on the docks all night, and I never even saw the ship.”

  “What about us?” demanded Nikokrates suddenly. “Kinesias, you pimp, you don’t sell us like this! You don’t take this bugger’s money for what you haven’t yet paid for yourself!” He glared at Arion. “Who are you?” he demanded. “I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

  There was a thump from the next ladder, and then Aristodemos struggled up, helped by the old man. There was blood all over his chin and down the front of his tunic, and he had a hand clasped to his mouth. He glared venom at Melanthe—then recognized Arion.