The Ionia Sanction

by Gary Corby

  “No, you don’t understand. I—”

  “He’s hiding from his girlfriend,” said Asia.

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” I said quickly.

  But the lady had only one interest. “You haven’t come for our services?”

  “No, I said it was an accident.”

  “Well, you can’t stay here. Out.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t care. Heracles!”

  Heracles was well-named. He was a hulking great man in Persian dress. He was at least a hand’s width taller than me and wide, so wide he almost waddled. There was almost no hair on him, no sign of a beard. His facial skin was as smooth as a woman’s. I suspected I’d met a eunuch for the first time, but I was not tempted to lift his tunic and see.

  “You leave now, master.” He spoke Greek heavily accented with Persian. The words were polite but the tone was unmistakable. It left no doubt I was leaving now.

  To assist me in my understanding, Heracles picked me up by the neck of my chiton, and carried me, using one hand, through the doorway and into the courtyard. Asia walked alongside. I dangled like a kitten in the mouth of its mother. There he dropped me.

  “Try to keep him out of trouble, dearie,” the brothel keeper called to Asia from the doorway.

  “I’ll do my best,” Asia promised.

  The door slammed behind us.

  We stood in the courtyard with the well. The paved path descended on a gentle slope back to Marble Road. Diotima was out there, somewhere on the street, probably about to pass by at any moment. To give her time to walk past, I said to Asia, “Why don’t we drink from this well?”

  “You mean that? Oh, master! But—”

  “Don’t argue, just drink, and take your time about it.”

  I pulled up the bucket and used the tureen tied to the well wall to proffer a drink to Asia, then took a large drink for myself. The water was cool, even more than I expected, and tasted pure and did a great deal to calm me down. I dropped the tureen. Heracles stood at the entrance to the brothel. I congratulated myself I had delayed long enough to be sure Diotima would be gone.

  She stood there, with her back to us, staring at the house opposite the brothel. I squealed in surprise and she whirled about.

  “Nicolaos!” Diotima cried in delight, a broad smile appearing. “You’ve come to see me. Have you just arrived? Listen, I have a case to solve. A missing man and, oh, I’m so pleased to see—”

  She stopped, realizing where she stood, where I stood. She’d been living in Ephesus long enough to know all the businesses on the main street. I watched her eyes as they followed my path back to the building I had exited. The scantily clad lady who had ordered me thrown out walked into the courtyard to collect water. She gave me a friendly wave and retreated. Diotima’s smile vanished. She looked down, to see pretty little Asia holding my hand and looking up with wide, innocent eyes.

  “Hello Diotima,” Asia said. “I’ve heard so much about you!”

  8

  But curb thou the high spirit in thy breast, for gentle ways are best, and keep aloof from sharp contentions.

  “You vile, disgusting goat, you make me sick!”

  Diotima delivered a well-chosen curse on behalf of her deity, the Goddess Artemis, one which involved certain parts of my anatomy catching boils and falling off. Men who walked down the street smirked as they passed. This probably wasn’t the first time they’d heard a woman curse a man outside this particular address. She finished with, “I suppose you were hiding in that brothel, waiting to jump out at me.”

  “No. Well, I was hiding, but—”

  “I thought as much. You traveled all the way to Ephesus to make me miserable. Desperate to flaunt your new woman in my face, were you?”

  “Asia? She’s a slave.”

  “Is that supposed to make it better?”

  Asia had been looking from one to the other of us as we argued. “Can I make a suggestion?”

  “No,” Diotima and I said in unison.

  Diotima said, “I suppose you picked her up in some brothel?”

  “No, but I saved her from one.”

  “Oh, sure. I’ve heard that before!”

  “I’m on a case, Diotima. There’s been a murder. She’s my clue.”

  “That means if I weren’t with him, he’d be clueless,” Asia said.

  Diotima ignored Asia and said to me, “She reminds me of Socrates.”

  “You mean the way she interrupts with irritating comments?”

  “Yes.”

  “At last, something we can agree on. She’s not a witness—she didn’t see a thing—but her presence must mean something, like leaving your cloak at the scene of the crime, only a cloak that talks too much.”

  “You don’t seriously expect me to believe you came here for a murder?”

  I told her of the death of Thorion in as few words as possible. “No one you know. The victim was our proxenos for Ephesus. Now I’m looking for his equivalent on this side of the sea, the proxenos for Athens here. His name is Brion.”

  “You won’t find Brion,” she said with such utter certainty it made me angry.

  “Oh, come on, Diotima. What makes you think an experienced agent like me can’t find one simple man, a public official at that?”

  “Because he’s the missing man I told you about, my case I told you I’m investigating.”

  My jaw dropped. I closed it. It dropped again.

  “You look like a dying fish, Nicolaos.”

  I said, “There’s something you need to know.” I explained to her about the odd pottery in Thorion’s room, and how Brion had shipped it to Thorion. I finished by saying, “There has to be some connection.”

  “Maybe.”

  “When did Brion go missing?”

  “It could be as many as six days ago. He’s a merchant, he has interests all over the place, it took a while for people to realize he wasn’t anywhere.”

  I counted back. “The timing’s tight, but it’s doable, Brion could have been taken here, and then the same man could have made it to Athens in time to murder Thorion. Is Brion the sort of man who would stare death in the face to protect the privacy of the mail?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “What say we share? You can have half my murder. We can be a team again!”

  “I wouldn’t want your poxy murder if it was the last one on earth. We were a team. What did I get out of it last time?”

  “You avoided being forcibly married to an uneducated boor who would have beaten you every day.”

  “Besides that.”

  “What more do you want?”

  “You promised your father would negotiate for me, and then came back next day, looking like some naughty boy who’d been caught stealing food from the kitchen, and said no he wasn’t after all. How do you think I felt?”

  “That was my father’s doing, not me.”

  “You made me feel like dirt when you told me why.”

  “You can’t blame me for your parentage.”

  “I’ve spent my whole life not being my mother, and I still can’t escape her. Anyway, who’d want you now? That was before you took to traveling with this—” She looked down at Asia. “This combination child and floozy sexpot.”

  “I resent that!” Asia said. “I’m not a child, I’m fourteen. Besides, we drank from the well.” She pointed up the path to the well that stood before the brothel.

  Diotima looked stunned.

  “I don’t see that you have any basis for complaint,” I pointed out. “What claim do you have on me that I shouldn’t do what I want, or see who I want?”

  Perhaps not the most intelligent thing to say, but Diotima’s tirade had turned my confusion and awkward feelings to anger. What I had meant to say was, we might still be friends if she’d stayed in Athens. It was the wrong thing to say, but I’d said it, and I wasn’t going to back down and unsay it.

  She said, “That includes having children with this girl, does it?” />
  “Who said anything about having children?”

  Diotima pointed at Asia. “She did. Just then. The Goddess Aphrodite charmed that well … any local could tell you … if a man and woman drink from the well together, then the woman will bear the man’s child. Congratulations.”

  Asia looked up to me with those big, round eyes of hers. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said with a smile.

  Diotima turned and walked away.

  I called, “Wait, Diotima, wait!”

  She turned, already twenty paces away. “Yes?”

  “You need to listen to me,” I said.

  “But Nicolaos,” she said sweetly. “What possible claim do you have on me, that I should do as you say?”

  Diotima turned her back on me for a final time and flounced off in a cloud of anger so palpable men coming the opposite way walked around rather than risk being within her arm’s length.

  “That didn’t go too well, did it?” Asia observed.

  “Shut up,” I suggested, feeling morose.

  “Yes, master.”

  * * *

  I spent the rest of the day and all of the evening drowning my sorrows at the inn. My life was destroyed: Pericles would sack me for incompetence when I returned—I couldn’t hide from the fact that my error had cost two men their lives; I was estranged from my father over a woman, and I admitted to myself—now—that I’d been hoping to patch things up with Diotima, but that chance was gone too.

  I left Asia in our room, but I suppose she became bored, or hungry, because she came to me and watched as I sat, getting drunk.

  She said, “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No. You’re my slave, not my mother.”

  I downed my cup in one draft, slammed it down on the table, and beckoned for the house slave to refill it.

  “How come you two broke up?”

  “I asked my father to negotiate for her. He refused. I looked like a total idiot in front of the girl I wanted to marry.”

  “Oh.” She knew as well as I did, it was unheard of for a man to marry against the will of his father. Not that it was unusual, but that it never happened. “Then she really isn’t your girlfriend.”

  “I keep telling you that.”

  “I think you need to move on, master. You should find someone else. Then you’ll stop thinking about her.”

  Now I was getting relationship advice from a fourteen-year-old. How low can a man sink?

  I refused to talk anymore to Asia. After a while she tired of watching me drink and went back to bed.

  The only time I spent away from the bar that night was when I went to see to Ajax. He whinnied happily and ate the apples I brought him. Then he nuzzled my shoulder. I put my arms around his neck. At least my horse still loved me.

  9

  It is not right to glory in the slain.

  The innkeeper woke me next morning with a sharp kick in the back. I groaned, rolled over, and opened my eyes to see another drunk beside me, a drooling unshaven man with blood-red eyeballs and the sallow look of a plague victim. He stared back at me. No, that was me; I stared with gritty eyes at my reflection in a polished bronze urn.

  I must have slid off the bench at some point in the night and not noticed. My head was pounding, pounding, pounding with the curse of cheap red wine. The world spun around, and around, and around, and that was while I lay flat on my back in the urine-soaked straw of the dirty floor. The Gods only knew what would happen if I sat up. Focusing only made it worse. I felt nauseous.

  The only solution was a trip to the baths, if I could make it that far.

  I left Asia at the inn—I had sufficient trust in her common sense now to expect her to stay out of trouble as long as she didn’t wander—and shambled, a decrepit creature, down the road to the gymnasium and baths that we had passed on the day we arrived, close by the docks.

  The bath attendant smirked—he’d seen it all before, especially at that hour of the morning. He was a slave, but I paid him extra coins because I knew if I didn’t, my clothes would go missing, and because I knew what he would soon be cleaning up. He knew too; he handed me a bowl, which I carried to the cold pool. I ordered the slave to fill two buckets with the cold water.

  Best get it over with quickly. I picked up the first bucket and poured it over my head. The icy water ran over my head, down my back and front, cleaning off the grime of the inn, washing away the sour smell of the wine, and waking me up as nothing else could have.

  That was the last straw for my poor stomach. I doubled over by reflex and heaved the contents into the bowl and across the floor. I used the second bucket to wash out my mouth while the slave sluiced away the mess with a resigned expression of distaste.

  “That’s better,” I said. My head was still pounding, but I knew that with the poison out of my system I would heal faster. I was fit now to walk into the pool, shivering as I did, but kept on walking until I was immersed up to the neck. I closed my eyes and let the water support me for I don’t know how long, concentrating on surviving the throbbing in my head until it subsided to a manageable level.

  I stayed until my lips and fingers were blue, then hauled myself out, shivering, and stepped into the next room. This was the laconica, shaped like a cone, with a round hole in the high, pointed ceiling. Trays of coals glowed in the semidark and heated the air so hot that I passed within a few heartbeats from shivering, to a comfortable glow, and then to sweating. I sat on the shelf that ran around the edge of the room.

  A slave approached me, a naked and very thin slave. No surprise since he worked in this oven every day. He carried a tray with a hydria full of water and a cup. I drank three cups in a row without pausing. He put down the tray and brought out the real tools of his trade: a flask of oil, a sponge, a strigil, and soap.

  I said at once, “The rest is fine, but skip the soap.” I hate soap. It’s made from goat fat and ashes. Even if the man who cleans you is thorough about scraping away every bit, you still walk out of the baths smelling like a dead goat.

  The slave nodded and began to rub olive oil from the flask into my back. I lay facedown on the bench so he could do the same for my arms and legs. When I was fully oiled, he picked up the strigil and proceeded to scrape away from every part of me the oil, dead skin, and the grime of my travel, leaving behind fresh, clean skin. A bad strigil man can pinch and cut you until it feels like torture, a skilled man can make being washed one of life’s great pleasures. This man was competent. The last vestiges of my hangover were gone.

  He began to rub me down, soothing the skin where the strigil had scraped, over my back and chest, arms and legs. Then his hands began rubbing areas the strigil hadn’t touched.

  “What are you doing?”

  “If the master wishes, for a few coins I can relax him some more.”

  Paying a slave for sex? I was desperate, but not that desperate.

  I shook my head and said, “No thanks.”

  He let go.

  I drank more water, then left the laconica for the fresh air, where I found my chitoniskos and dressed.

  The commercial agora was right across the road from the baths. Men were standing about the edge, mostly in pairs but sometimes in small groups, talking with one another, arguing, waving their arms, or bent over scrolls. Some were doing all four things at once.

  Other men stood in the center, each shouting at the top of his voice.

  “Grain, fifty baskets!”

  “Ceramics, in the warehouse and ready to go!”

  “Dolphin, solid ship, empty hold!”

  “Wine! Two hundred amphorae of the best!”

  I asked after Pollion, son of Hegerandros, and was directed to a statue of Hermes looking down upon the merchants, larger than life high on a plinth. Standing beneath was a man carrying scrolls tucked under his left arm and one open before him in which he scratched notes.

  “Are you Pollion, son of Hegerandros?”

  “I am.” A tall man with graying hair, he looked me up
and down, trying to place me.

  “I am Nicolaos, son of Sophroniscus, come from Athens. I’m sorry to tell you, Pollion, that your brother-in-law Thorion is dead.”

  “Dear Gods, I didn’t even know he was sick.”

  “He was murdered.”

  Pollion raised an eyebrow. A man approached wanting to do business but Pollion waved him away.

  He grabbed me by the arm and led me to sit on the low boundary wall of the agora. “Tell me everything,” he ordered.

  I didn’t. I carefully omitted Thorion’s note claiming to be a traitor.

  When I finished my edited tale Pollion said, “This is terrible. Who killed him?”

  “That’s why I’m here. I have some questions.”

  “Go on.”

  “I need to understand the work Thorion did as proxenos.”

  “You suspect a disgruntled trader?”

  “It’s a possibility,” I said. “Did you yourself trade with your brother-in-law?”

  Pollion laughed. “Your question is less than subtle. How did an inexperienced young man like you get such a responsible job?”

  “My employer is correcting that mistake.”

  “Oh? Well let me give you a piece of advice, young man. Never do business with relatives.”

  “I see. Did you learn that the hard way?”

  “Many years ago, and my teacher was a worthless cousin, literally worthless as it turned out when he went down with his ship, taking my loan with him.”

  “Do you know of anyone with reason to hate Thorion?”

  Pollion thought for a moment before saying, “There are always disputes. Litigation is constant. But I know of no one who’d risk harming a proxenos. Word gets around and it’s not the sort of reputation any trader can afford to have.”

  “How did Thorion come by his position?”

  “Through my father, at the time my sister married. Our family is prominent, and everyone agreed a proxenos with family ties to Ephesus gives him a certain interest in our welfare.”

  “It must be an advantage for you personally.”

  “Thorion looked after my interests in Athens for no fee, in court cases for example.”

  “Did that happen?”