by Gary Corby
“Of course you didn’t. I know that. It won’t stop a jury finding against you. Did they tell you the Archon himself is leading the charges? How many jurors do you think will go against his word?”
“Sorry, Father.”
“I told you this could happen. Didn’t I say politics in Athens was a rough game? Didn’t I warn you losers are killed or exiled?”
“You told me, Father. I knew the risks.”
Sophroniscus sighed. “I’ve been to see Conon. It’s normal in these cases to give the accused a chance to run; exile for life rather than execution. Conon refused, wouldn’t even listen to me. He’s determined to see you dead. You’ve made yourself a serious enemy, son.”
“Sorry about that.”
“You’ll be even sorrier when they pronounce sentence.” He pushed a parcel through the hole. “Here, eat this.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, thank your mother. Personally, I thought a little hunger might remind you not to play political games when there’s proper work to be done. Phaenarete is distraught, by the way. She’s refused all food since we heard the news and shut herself up in her quarters, says she won’t eat until you’re free. I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you again. I’ll be preparing the way for your exile.”
“I thought you said Conon wouldn’t allow it.”
Sophroniscus looked left and right and lowered his voice. “We might be able to bribe the guards. I’m trying to raise some money, we don’t have many relatives to help, and there’s the debt to Callias, but perhaps I can borrow.”
“Avoid the Antisthenes and Archestratus Savings and Loan Company,” I advised him.
“As to where you go, I know a man in Corinth who might be able to take you in. He’s a decent sculptor who should be able to start you in the trade I failed to teach you.
“Goodbye, son,” he said gruffly. He reached through the door and gripped my hand.
“Thank you, Father. I…”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been a disappointment.”
“That would be putting it mildly. Oh, by the way, that girl you were chasing came to see us.”
“I wasn’t chasing her.”
“She apologized and said the whole thing was her fault. I told her not to worry, you were an idiot long before she met you.”
“Oh Nico, it’s all my fault!” Diotima sobbed. She was the next to come to see me. She had dressed in priestess regalia and I heard her tell the guards she had come to deliver an oracle. They stepped aside, and as she passed, one said he wouldn’t mind if she could do him a service too. She walked on with her nose in the air while they laughed.
“It’s all my fault!” she repeated.
“Yes, I know.” I tried not to be too obviously upset about being imprisoned for a capital crime because of her blunder. “You went ahead and tried to blackmail the Eponymous Archon and Pole-march, and their instant response was to arrest not you, but me.”
“The Archon says he’ll drop the charges if I hand over all the incriminating evidence against him and swear by my Goddess never to breathe a word.”
“Which means you would have to marry Rizon, and your mother loses her house.”
Diotima nodded silently.
“So it’s a choice between my life or your future.”
“I’m afraid so. I told Mother. She said you were a bad influence on me, and extolled the virtues of a married life.” Diotima paused. “You know I couldn’t let them kill you, Nico!”
“So you’ll hand over the parchments?”
She chewed at her thumbnail. “I can’t let Mother lose her house. There has to be a way to get both. I don’t know what it is, but don’t worry, Nico, I’ll find it.”
“Why would I worry?” I asked sarcastically.
“Take this.” She passed through a parcel. More food.
She left me to my thoughts, which consisted mostly of worrying about what she was up to now. With Diotima, there was no telling.
I unwrapped the food and placed it alongside the parcel sent by Mother. I wasn’t hungry but I picked at it anyway. I would have to keep up my strength if I was to defend myself in court.
No one had told me when the trial was to be. I assumed it wouldn’t be the next day, but Athenian justice is speedy, and I needed to be prepared. The prosecution would be given the morning to make their case. I would have the afternoon to defend myself. The jurors would make their decision on the spot and I would be a free man or a condemned one as the sun set.
What defense should I use? Should I defend myself by declaring the real murderer? Or should I stick to the much simpler plan of proving it couldn’t have been me? I considered the difficulty of taking 501 jurors through the labyrinthine logic of the case. It didn’t seem possible to persuade normal men with that, not when they hadn’t been living with the case for days as I had. There were too many details to absorb. I wondered if a straightforward, “It wasn’t me,” would be enough to get me off. I thought back glumly over the case for the prosecution as Pythax had put it in the street, considered Sophroniscus’ words about the Archon leading the prosecution, and concluded I was probably doomed. I decided then and there that if I had to die, then at least it would be telling the truth. I would tell the jurors of Athens what really happened to Ephialtes.
Oddly enough, accepting that there was nothing I could do to avert my fate gave me a feeling of calm. I was able to lie down and sleep.
“Move over, little boy.”
I was awoken rudely by Pythax, shaking the rickety cot. He held a wineskin in his hand. He gave the cot another shake, and it was sit up or be rolled off.
“What time is it?” I moaned.
“How should I know? It’s the middle of the night. Move over.”
Pythax plumped down his heavy behind and for a moment I thought the pinewood was going to shatter. It held. I put my bare feet on the cold stone floor and sat beside him.
“Gah!” I choked in horror. A swarm of rats covered the food parcels. And I’d been sleeping right beside them. I kicked out and the rats ran away to the dark recesses. I could see their eyes staring in the dark. The food was a rotten, half-eaten mess.
Pythax barely seemed to notice. He had always been tough and menacing. Now he was maudlin and menacing. He held the wineskin out to me. A certain aroma drifted across.
“Are you drunk?” I asked in amazement.
“Not yet,” he grunted. “Drink.”
I took a swig, a small one, in case this was some form of exotic trap, and handed back the skin. Pythax showed no such reticence. He upended the skin and gulped.
“To what do I owe the honor? Come to gloat over the condemned prisoner?” This wasn’t perhaps the most diplomatic thing I could have said, but I’m always grumpy when I’m awoken in the middle of the night by a drunk barbarian.
“Don’t be more of an asshole than you have to be, boy. You’ve already got more enemies than most men twice your age.” He shook his head in wonder. “Shit in Hades, you did it all in a month. I admire that, boy, I really do.”
“So you’re a friend, are you? You have a strange way of showing it then. You’re the one who put me in here.”
“Orders, boy, orders. A soldier’s got to follow orders.”
“You don’t think I killed them then?”
“Hades, boy, I know you didn’t kill one of them.” He hesitated. “It was me popped Aristodicus. I dunno if you did the others. I doubt it.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Whoever did for Ephialtes was a professional. Professionals aren’t usually smartasses.”
“Gee, thanks, Pythax.”
I held out my hand and he gave me the wine. This time I took a decent swig before handing it back.
“Tell me something, Pythax. Why are you here?”
“I don’t like to drink alone.”
“No, I mean, why are you here in Athens?”
“I’m a slave, or hadn’t you noticed?”
“You are a slave in the same sense I am the King of Persia. If you decided to walk through the Dipylon Gates tomorrow morning who’s going to stop you?”
Pythax took another drink and contemplated his feet for so long I began to feel embarrassed. I was on the verge of telling him to forget the question when he suddenly said, “I did that once, walked through the gates, then I walked back again.
“I used to be headman of my village, up to the northwest of Macedon.” Pythax sat back so that he leaned against the damp wall, and he turned his head to look at me as he spoke. “It wasn’t anything special, just the usual huts, we had pigs, goats, a few sheep, a cow. The men would raid the neighboring villages, they’d raid us back. There was always a border dispute. I was the biggest man and the toughest fighter, so I was in charge. My father had been headman before me. I settled the disputes between the families before they came to blows, encouraged the odd raid to keep the men’s spirits satisfied, and had nothing else to do but hunt, scratch my ass, and watch the women and kids tend the animals. It was a good life.
“Sometimes we’d see armies come close, but I kept the men well clear of them. Even the toughest dog hides when there’s a lion about.
“Then the Persians came. There wasn’t no hiding from them. You never saw such a river of men! But locusts was more like it when it came to victuals. They stole everything in their path. We slaughtered the cow and salted the meat and buried it. We set the pigs free, figuring we could catch them later. Then I took the people and the remaining animals, and hid up in the mountains where only the goats could follow us.
“Only it turned out some of those Persians had goats for mothers. They knew we had food and they climbed after us. They’d already reaped our fields for the corn. They found where we’d hid the meat, the bastards. I guess they did it by looking for fresh-dug dirt. Now they wanted the sheep and the goats.
“I couldn’t let them have it. We were already facing a tough winter, and if we lost the last animals we wouldn’t have enough to feed everyone, we’d starve for sure. What we do then is, we boil a large pot of hemlock, and the old men and women, and the mothers with grown children and the small children and the girls all drink it, and then the rest of us have a chance of making it through to start afresh. We’d had to do that once when I was a boy, when the crops failed and some disease killed a lot of the animals. I don’t remember much about it but I remember my ma holding me and crying, and then walking away, and that was the last I ever saw her.
“I didn’t want to do that. My woman had been with me many years, and she’d even survived having four kids, and three of them were still alive, a boy and two girls. If we had to brew the hemlock they’d all be gone but for my son.
“So I took the strongest men, and told the rest to go high, really high, so high I knew the old ones and maybe a few of the kids wouldn’t make it back, and then I took our best men and staked out a position where I knew the Persians had to come, ’cause it was the only good route up.
“We took the first few easily. We were above them and they were easy meat when they reached up. After that, they learned. Two of them were shooting arrows at us, not so much to hit us as to pin us in position. We threw rocks back. I hit one of the bastards and he rolled down the mountain. Didn’t do any good though, because those bastards did find another way up. I’ll never know how they did it, they must have climbed a vertical cliff face. Next thing we know, we’ve got Persians above us and below us. I shouted at my son to retreat to our people and take command there-we were going to die, you see-and he shouted something back I didn’t hear, and then the man beside me goes down with a spear in his throat and I think a rock must have knocked me on the head, ’cause the next thing I know I wake up bruised and cut with my arms numb ’cause of how they tied them behind my back, and I’m told now I’m a slave of the Persian King.
“Well, you know how the war went. When the Persians were beaten at Plataea there was a lot of confusion. I managed to escape the chains and wrung the neck of our guard, then I made off. I was picked up later by an Athenian patrol and they brought me back here.
“I was happy enough at first. They made me a member of the Scythian Guard, and that seemed good enough for me, seeing as I figured my village and my woman and my children must all be dead. I rose in the Guard, I was good at it, and the man who was chief told me when he retired he reckoned I’d be the man to take over. But I was homesick, you see. Before I did that I had to know what had happened. So I walked through those Dipylon Gates, just like you said.
“There was a village there, same place it used to be, but when I walked in I didn’t recognize but one or two of the men, and none of them knew me at all. Then my son comes out of the largest hut and stands before me. He knew me, all right. He says, ‘Father…’ and then stops like he ran into a wall. So I asked where was my woman, and what had happened to his sisters, and he says, ‘The Persians took all the animals, there wasn’t anything we could do.’
“That’s when I realized I couldn’t hear any kids crying, and the only women in the fields were young.
“I took a long look at my son, standing there like I would have when I was his age. I knew I could take him. He knew it too. But he stood his ground, and he was proud. So I turned and walked away. I walked all the way back to Athens. I didn’t want to kill my son, you see.”
Pythax shrugged. “Besides, I like it here. I learned to speak Greek like they speak it in Athens. And I like those plays, not the sad ones, the ones that make a man laugh. And here I have a whole city to look after ’stead of a small village.”
There wasn’t much I could say after a story like that, so I kept silent while Pythax drank. I thought, compared to him, my life had been shallow.
He handed me the wineskin, now only a quarter full.
“Problem is, little boy, who am I working for, really? Am I looking after Athens, or the people who live in Athens?”
“It’s the same thing.”
“No, it ain’t,” he said earnestly. “Listen, if I’m looking out for the city, then who tells me what the city needs?”
“Er, the government?”
“Right. And who’s the government?”
“Well, the Ecclesia decides what will be done.”
“But you know what? Not one of those common citizens has ever given me an order, and if they did I wouldn’t be supposed to take it.”
“All right then, the Council of the Areopagus. Aren’t the Scythians supposed to protect them in time of riot? That’s why your barracks is on the side of the rock.”
“Yeah, that’s right, but none of them are the government, are they? They used to be archons, but they aren’t anymore. And then Ephialtes took away their powers, so they got nothing to do now but scratch their asses and find idiots like you guilty of murder. Doesn’t sound like no government to me.”
“Okay then, the archons.”
“Yeah, the archons. But they get chosen by a sort of gambling, and Zeus, boy, you should see some of the idiots we get. Give me back that wine.” He drained the remainder of the skin and crushed it to get the last drops.
“You know about these things, boy. You reckon there’s going to be a break between the Ecclesia and the Areopagus?”
“I don’t know, Pythax. If we don’t tell the people a story they can believe about what happened to Ephialtes, the riots are going to get worse.”
Pythax nodded. “There was another riot today. We squashed it. But that’s the problem, boy, about who I’m working for. Am I supposed to defend the Council, or should I tell my men to join the people of Athens, who happen to be the ones tearing apart the city in fear of what the Council might do?”
“When you put it like that, I understand your problem much better, Pythax.” I thought for a moment. “I think it’s like when the Persians attacked your village. Sometimes you have to do things that will be bad now, but are the right thing to do for the future. Only it’s not the archons or the Council that has to decide what’
s right. It’s you.”
Pythax stood, remarkably steady on his feet.
“I’m not sure how it is, little boy, but somehow you remind me of me.”
As soon as Pythax left I lay back on the cot and stared up at the rock ceiling. I found myself wondering how they would they do it, if they were going to…kill me. What it would feel like to die was beyond my imagination. I knew there were different ways of executing criminals, depending on the crime. The death of Brasidas was serious, but not of course as serious as the death of Ephialtes, who was a citizen. The slaves amounted to little more than destruction of public property. So it was the death of Ephialtes that would determine the manner of my own death.
Probably I’d be taken to the execution ground outside the Dipylon Gates, along the northern road to Piraeus, off to the side, behind trees. The executioners would clamp a metal collar around my neck. Then they would slowly screw it tighter while I strangled and struggled for breath and my tongue stuck out and my face turned blue. But I wouldn’t suffocate, because before that happened the collar would probably snap my neck.
I decided I would have to quickly stop this train of thought before it sent me into a blind panic. I told myself to think of something else, and drifted off to sleep thinking of Diotima.
I woke before the dawn next morning feeling distinctly queasy. The wine had gone to my stomach and I hadn’t slept much for fear the rats would come back and crawl on me.
My little brother squeezed his way past the legs of the guards.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, surprised. “How did you get in?”
“They said I could come in and say goodbye to you since you’re going to be executed,” he explained.
“Terrific.”
“Nico, are they really going to kill you?”
I bit my lip, uncertain what to say. “I don’t know, little brother. I hope not.”
“I hope not too.” He scuffed his feet in the dirt. “Nico, are you going to be all right?”
“Don’t worry about me, little brother. There’s going to be a trial, and then I get to explain everything about what really happened, and then the people who listen to the evidence-they’re called dicasts-will realize I did nothing wrong and vote to let me go.”