Death Ex Machina

by Gary Corby

  The new third actor, Kebris, proved to be a find. He was an old trouper, and looked it when his mask was off. He had thinning hair and deep lines in a face that seemed perpetually sad. But he picked up the lines with such speed that even Sophocles was pleased. “I’ve never known an actor to fall into a part so easily,” he said.

  The truth was that Romanos had worked extra time outside the rehearsals to get Kebris ready, which Diotima and I knew perfectly well because we’d met Romanos that rainy night, leaving the theater after working with Kebris. Diotima and I discussed Romanos in low whispers as we sat in the stalls, out of earshot of the cast and crew.

  “He took your advice,” I said to Diotima.

  “What advice?” Diotima asked.

  “Don’t you remember? Under the stoa in all that rain. You advised him to become as indispensable to the Athenians as your father. Well, he’s doing it. If he goes on like this, Sophocles will be insisting that they make Romanos a citizen,” I said.

  Diotima nodded. “He deserves it.”

  THE MORNING BEFORE the Great Dionysia wasn’t a rehearsal day. Instead every single act—not only the play of Sophocles, but the other two tragedies as well, and the comedies, and the ten choral performances—everyone was due to arrive to set up their pieces. The Dionysia was held over five days. The people today would organize the logistics of moving their acts in and out in order.

  Diotima and I arrived at the theater with Socrates in tow, just as Apollo’s light peeked over the east. We found both guards slumped against the back wall, sound asleep and snoring.

  I kicked them awake.

  “Get up, you idiots. What do you think you’re doing?”

  They opened their eyes, but they were still sleepy. They stared up at me in confusion for a moment. Then their state of confusion turned to horror when they realized it was me staring down at them, and that they had fallen asleep.

  They scrambled to their feet and stammered, “We’re sorry, master, we don’t know what happ—”

  “Don’t bother,” I interrupted. “Pythax will hear of this.”

  They trembled. Pythax was a stern disciplinarian. One of the toughest men in Athens, he expected every man he commanded to be his equal in application to duty. I foresaw many long disciplinary marches for these two, in full armor, through the day and night without rest, so that they could learn how not to fall asleep.

  I myself had once drilled with the Scythians, at the insistence of my future father-in-law, so that he could teach me how to stay alive in a street fight. The memory of Pythax’s brutal training still haunted my nightmares, but I had never forgotten his lessons, and I hadn’t been killed yet either.

  “Come with me,” I said. “We’ll have to check every tiny thing backstage, to make sure nothing’s been tampered with. And when the stage manager arrives, he’ll have to check it all again, because he might spot something that we’d miss.”

  We did that, the two guards and Diotima and me. We picked up every prop and every mask. Not only the ones for Sisyphus, but the props and masks for the comedies and the other tragedies. I had to stop Euboulides and Pheidestratos from playing with the pig’s bladders that the comedians used. They made a farting noise that the guardsmen thought was hilarious. I thought it was funny too, but Diotima didn’t. Nor did I want the guards to be caught playing with the props when the actors and crew arrived, which would be at any moment.

  I crawled across every part of the backstage floor in search of booby traps. There were none.

  I stood up and dusted off my hands and knees.

  “All right, that’s about it. You two can think yourselves lucky nothing went wrong.”

  “What about that thing, sir?” Euboulides pointed at the machine.

  We all stared at the mechanism, but none of us had any idea how it worked. There was a chock between two of the cogs, but it was easily visible and for all I knew it was supposed to be there.

  “It looks all right to me,” I said hesitantly. “We’ll have to have Kiron check it before anyone uses it.”

  Socrates said, “Nico, the machine’s not in rest position.”

  “What?” I said, startled. “That’s impossible. Nobody’s holding it.”

  Socrates pointed to the machine’s arm. “It should rest level. But the arm’s up and over the skene.”

  So it was.

  I walked over to the mechanism. It looked the same as always. Yet the short end was pressed down as far as it could go.

  I found the answer at the hinge. Someone had pressed down the short end lever and then pushed a chock into the hinge. I’d seen Melpon the doctor do the same thing, when he wanted to lock his healing machine in place. I understood what had happened here. The arm was up because it couldn’t descend.

  I turned to the guards. “How was it set last night?” I asked. Maybe the arm had been left this way by the actors.

  The guards looked at each other, both waiting for the other to speak.

  “The arm was level?” Euboulides guessed.

  I sighed. “We’ll check the stage.”

  We walked around the skene onto the stage and looked up. The arm of the god machine poked thoroughly over the skene and high above us.

  Hanging from the arm was a man. Or rather, a god. Because whoever was up there was dressed as Thanatos, the god of death, slumped over exactly as he appeared when he made his entrance during the play.

  Romanos, I thought, must be practicing his part. He had worked like a slave over the last two days to get everything right. I’d come to appreciate what a stickler Romanos was for getting things right.

  I called up, “Are you practicing early, Romanos?”

  Then I realized what a stupid question that was. There’d been no one working the machine when we walked in. It was impossible for Romanos to be up there.

  At that moment the first of the actors and crew arrived to begin their day. They walked in from the audience end. Aeschylus and Sophocles walked in, and a gaggle of men followed. One of the men pointed and screamed. The body slowly rotated in the air.

  “Get him down!”

  A voice roared across the theater. It was Aeschylus.

  “Get him down now!” Aeschylus shouted again.

  Aeschylus had seen what I already knew: that Thanatos, the god of death, was dead.

  SOME FOOL SHOUTED, “Is he still alive?”

  Whoever was up there obviously wasn’t, but there was the slimmest chance and we had to act on it.

  I turned to Euboulides and Pheidestratos. “You two,” I said. “Get back there, pull the chock and let him down. Socrates, show them how.”

  Both guards sprinted backstage as if their lives depended on it. Which they might well. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so angry at anyone. Their lax work had led to this death. Worse, the safety of the theater had been my responsibility. Pericles was going to blame me for this disaster.

  A brief moment passed. From behind the wall I heard Socrates issuing instructions—a daunting prospect at any time—followed by swearing that was the guards. Then the arm above me made rapid up and down movements. The body jerked in the air like a dying fish as they tried to control the machine. I guessed one of them was pulling on the arm while the other tried to dislodge the chock. I spread my arms, ready to collect the body as it descended.

  I heard a yell of triumph, followed by some anxious swearing and then a voice yelled, “Look out!”

  The distraught call made me look their way. But nothing was happening there.

  When I looked up again it was to see the underside of Romanos’s feet, approaching rapidly.

  The dead man fell on me.

  SCENE 13

  JUST HANGING AROUND

  “ARE YOU ALL right, Nico?” Diotima asked.

  “Never been better,” I said. I’d fallen backward onto the hard stage. Now I found myself staring into the dead eyes of Romanos. He stared back. His eyes bulged slightly. His tongue poked between his teeth, disturbingly close to my
face. His lips were blue. There was a stream of dried saliva coated on his chin.

  “It’s a good thing you broke his fall,” Diotima said. “He might have been hurt.”

  I decided not to point out the illogic of that. Instead I rolled the corpse off me, then knelt. I wanted to apologize to Romanos, but it was too late for that.

  I turned over the body. I looked at the noose tight about his neck. Romanos had been hanged, and now he was dead. There was no doubt about it.

  I was struck—as I always was in these circumstances—by how still were the dead. The slight movements of the living were entirely absent, the chest as it breathes, the small involuntary twitches, things that go unnoticed until they’re gone. Romanos was as flaccid and unremarkable as any corpse.

  “I DON’T SUPPOSE it could be suicide?” Aeschylus said hopefully. “Men have hanged themselves before now.”

  “Not unless you know of a way to raise the lever at one end, chock the hinge in the middle, and get the noose around your neck at the other end.”

  “It does seem unlikely.” Aeschylus rubbed his chin.

  Diotima, Sophocles, Aeschylus and I stared down at the body.

  “If it wasn’t suicide, what happened here?” Sophocles demanded angrily. “Nicolaos, I thought you had guards posted. You said nothing could happen while they watched.”

  He was right. I had indeed said that. I had promised him the theater would be safe. I had said there would be no more “accidents.” I had failed.

  “Sophocles, I will see this put right,” I said.

  “Young man, my actor is dead. The play is in ruins. The Great Dionysia is probably at a halt. We are shamed before the whole world who have come to watch this debacle. Which of those things do you think you can put right?”

  “We’ll start with finding out how this happened,” I said. I grabbed Euboulides and Pheidestratos by the arms and dragged them away from the others. Diotima joined us.

  “All right, now tell me how you both managed to be sleeping on the job while one of the men we’re supposed to be protecting was murdered.”

  They looked at each other. Already I could see the lies forming.

  I said to them, “If you lie to me and I find out you lied, Pythax will be the least of your problems.”

  “We were drinking, master,” Euboulides said at once.

  I’d already guessed that.

  “How?” I demanded. “Do you mean to tell me you left your post to get a drink?”

  “No sir,” said Pheidestratos. “We never left the theater. Honest. There was a woman with us.”

  I groaned. “This is getting worse.”

  “No sir, he means the woman came to us,” Euboulides corrected. “She wanted to sell us a drink—”

  “But we didn’t have no money,” Pheidestratos broke in. “On account of us being slaves. So she said, seeing as how we were only slaves, that she’d give us a cup for free.”

  “A strange woman offers you a drink, and you just take it, no questions asked?”

  “Yes sir!” They said in unison.

  “We’re slaves, sir,” Euboulides added helpfully.

  If I’d been them, I would have drunk alcohol at someone else’s expense too.

  “It was cold in the middle of the night, master,” Pheidestratos said. “We didn’t think it would do any harm. One little drink to keep us warm.”

  Pheidestratos was begging for forgiveness. I could ignore that, but not the information that came with it.

  “One drink?” I repeated.

  “Yes, master.”

  “She didn’t leave an amphora or a wineskin?”

  “No, master.”

  “Do you both swear by Zeus and Athena that you each drank one normal cup?”

  They both swore.

  “Then we got tired, master.”

  “After just one cup?” I repeated.

  “Yes, master.” Euboulides frowned. He was the smart one. “It don’t normally take only a cup to knock me down, master. Normally it’s more like … uh … ten.”

  There was no way that a normal healthy man could be felled by one cup. Nor were these ordinary men. They were the Scythian Guard of Athens, under the care of Pythax, whose idea of light exercise was an all-day march in full armor. It was impossible that these men could have been knocked out by a single drink.

  Diotima looked at me and I looked at her.

  “A pharmacis,” she said. “A witch woman.”

  I nodded. A pharmacis was a woman expert in herbs and medicines … and in poisons. How many pharmacai were there in Athens? A hundred? My mother would know. Pregnant women were among the biggest buyers of pharmacis medicines. There must be a pharmacis in every deme, two in the poorer demes where people couldn’t afford a doctor, and would turn to their local pharmacis for help.

  But why would a witch woman want to kill an actor?

  “What did this woman look like?”

  “Don’t know, sir!”

  “Why not?”

  “She wore a cape, sir. One of the ones with a hood.”

  “Was she tall or short?”

  “Kind of stooped, sir,” Euboulides said.

  There wasn’t the slightest chance of identifying her, whoever she was.

  “Come with me.”

  I returned to Sophocles and Aeschylus, and told them what we knew. Sophocles looked disgusted.

  I grabbed an ostrakon—a broken shard of pottery—that lay on the ground amongst the seats of the theater. I scratched a message into it, then handed the ostrakon to Euboulides. I said, “Take this to Pericles.”

  Euboulides nodded. “Yes, sir.” He left at a trot.

  “What was the message?” Sophocles said.

  “That we have a problem,” I said. “My commission is with Pericles. He needs to know.” I winced.

  “You’re worried?” Aeschylus asked.

  “Sympathy for failure is not one of Pericles’s strong points.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Aeschylus consoled me. “I’m sure Pericles will understand.”

  I wished I had his confidence.

  A reply came back sooner than I expected, carried by a slave runner. He handed it to me.

  PERICLES SAYS THIS TO NICOLAOS. I HAVE CALLED AN EMERGENCY COUNCIL TO DISCUSS THE CRISIS. WE MEET AT NOON AT MY HOUSE. THAT WILL GIVE MEN OUTSIDE THE CITY TIME TO ARRIVE. IT WILL ALSO GIVE ME TIME TO THINK WHAT WE ARE GOING TO SAY TO ALL THE DISTINGUISHED GUESTS FROM OTHER CITIES WHEN THEY LEARN OF THIS DEBACLE. SAME SUMMONS TO MEET IS GOING TO THE ARCHONS, TO THE CHOREGI, TO THE WRITERS, AND ALL OTHER SENIOR MEN OF THE DIONYSIA. INFORM EVERYONE AT THE THEATER WHO FITS THAT DESCRIPTION. PERICLES.

  I silently handed the ostrakon to Aeschylus, who read it with raised eyebrows. He handed it to Sophocles, who handed it to Lakon, who handed it to Kiron. The ostrakon made its way around the producers, writers, and actors of every comedy and every tragedy.

  “Thank you,” I said to the messenger slave. “Tell Pericles we’ll be there.”

  “Sir, I also have a message for you,” said the slave.

  “For me?” I said. “What does Pericles say?”

  “My master Pericles says you are to arrive early, if you can manage to do that simple thing without tripping over your own feet, you incompetent moron.”

  The slave grinned as he said it.

  I had little doubt that the slave had passed on the message exactly as Pericles had spoken it, but I was equally sure it was the slave’s own special touch to repeat it in front of all these leading citizens.

  Aeschylus broke the embarrassed silence. He squinted up at the sun. He said, “Noon. That gives us plenty of time before the meeting.”

  “I’ll need it,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “I have to inform a family that they’re bereaved. Where did Romanos live?” I asked, then added, “Does he have family here?”

  “Not as far as I know,” Kiron said. He turned to Sophocles, who shrugged.

  “I hired him because h
e’s a good actor, not because he’s a friend,” the playwright said. “I have no idea about his family.” Sophocles turned to the man beside him. “Do you know, Lakon?”

  “I’ll need to think about that,” Lakon said. He immediately struck a thoughtful pose, hands behind his back, chin sunk to his chest. After a few moments he said, “Yes, I do believe the poor fellow lived in Melite.”

  Melite was a deme to the west of Athens but within the city walls. It was a place of narrow lanes and crowded tenements. Finding the victim’s home amongst them would be a nightmare.

  I said, “I don’t suppose you know where in Melite he lived?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to ask around. I said I knew the man, not that I socialized with him.”

  “You mentioned that before,” Diotima said. “Was there some bad blood between you?”

  Lakon turned to her. “Not at all, dear lady, but being a woman, you wouldn’t understand.”

  I quickly stepped between Lakon and Diotima, in case Diotima decided to punch out our lead actor. I’d seen her hit before in anger and we needed Lakon to remain conscious. But Diotima showed creditable restraint.

  “Why don’t you try anyway,” Diotima said, through gritted teeth. “Despite my obvious limitations.”

  “I am a citizen actor,” Lakon said. “I do not act for money. That would be demeaning.”

  “What about Romanos?”

  “He acted for money.”

  SCENE 14

  DESCENT INTO MELITE

  IT WAS ESSENTIAL we find the family of Romanos, if he had one, and if not, his home, so that we could search it. Someone, somewhere, had a reason to want Romanos dead. Someone, or some evidence, was going to have to tell us why.