Strong Wine

by A. J. Demas

  “Um … ”

  Dami gave him a stern look. “No, you can’t, because it’s unimaginable. I would hate it.”

  “Then you shan’t have it.” Varazda made a little flinging motion, as if tossing away the whole idea.

  He came and sat on the bed next to Dami, wanting suddenly to feel him near, to feel secure in his presence. Everything Varazda had said last night, when he had sounded so sure of himself and what he wanted, that had all been true. But it didn’t mean his worries had gone away entirely. You really did have to fight for every bit of happiness.

  “He landed on his feet, didn’t he?” said Dami, looking around the palatial atrium of Bion’s father’s house.

  “I guess so,” said Varazda.

  The slave who had let them in returned, followed by Eurydemos, wild-haired and messily mantled as usual.

  “Ah!” he exclaimed, coming toward Varazda. “It is you—I thought it might be, when the girl announced ‘A Sasian.’ And in your more accustomed garb, I see. It suits you far better than our Pseuchaian raiment, I must say.”

  Varazda gave him a brief, unfriendly smile. Also makes it easier to kick you in the head.

  “Ah!” Eurydemos was saying again, as he spotted Damiskos. “We meet again! Damiskos from the Quartermaster’s Office, I believe? Are you also investigating poor Helenos’s demise? Don’t tell me he’s suspected of having stolen some army rations or something!”

  “No, not exactly.” Dami rubbed his chin and did his thing where he pretended to be much more rough-around-the-edges than he actually was. “The thing is, I happened to see Helenos on the day of his death—like you, I hear—and I’ve been charged in connection. So I’m interested in finding out what really happened.”

  Eurydemos blanched and took a step backward. “Immortal gods. I knew that you and Helenos had a quarrel, but murder?”

  “No, you see, I didn’t kill him. That’s why we’re looking into the whole thing.”

  Eurydemos’s gaze flicked from Dami to Varazda. “You … two … are … ah. There you are, Bion!”

  The young man with the sleepy eyes had come out of a hallway into the atrium. He looked much less like Eurydemos’s slave today, and more like the young master of the house, dressed in a sumptuous red tunic and the kind of elaborate sandals that Ariston and his friends favoured. His curly hair was slicked back in a way that made him look older and less decorative, and he carried a basket.

  “I thought we were going out,” he said, looking discontentedly at Eurydemos.

  “Patience, my dear boy. Now, let me see.” He addressed Dami. “You are here to find out what I know, but I can assure you—”

  “Do you want me to ask them the riddle?” Bion whispered loudly.

  “Shh!”

  “I found the letter you wrote to Helenos,” said Varazda.

  Eurydemos stared at him. “You what?”

  Bion was staring at Eurydemos. “You what?”

  “It was in his room,” said Varazda. He produced the letter from the folds of his sash and held it open for Eurydemos to see.

  Eurydemos peered at it for a moment, then recoiled. “That’s—that’s not my writing!”

  “Isn’t it?” said Bion, leaning in to look at it himself. “It’s very like your writing, Master.”

  “I didn’t write it!” Eurydemos cried, swatting at the young man. “You don’t even know how to read.”

  “I—I—” Bion looked pathetically hurt.

  “It is a little like my writing,” said Eurydemos, “but only as if someone with a passing familiarity with my hand attempted to imitate it.”

  “It sounds like something you’d write,” said Varazda. He flipped the tablet around to read from it. “‘No man of your talents would be permitted to be exiled from the Ideal Republic … ’”

  “Oh, no no no—I would never say such a thing, not now. Once, I grant you, I might have held such a view, but—”

  “Master doesn’t believe in the Ideal Republic any more,” Bion spoke up again, sounding proud.

  “Don’t interrupt, darling. You see, I have repudiated my past teachings. They were subject to dangerous misinterpretation in the wrong hands. And Helenos’s, I am sorry to say, were very much the wrong hands. I did hope, when he wrote to me, that he might be rescued from his errors, but he … he did seem more interested in what I might do to help him. If he had received this letter, that would explain much. But who wrote it?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Then Bion said, slowly, “They could think that you wrote it as a trick, Master. Because, well, you and I know that you’ve re—repoo—uh, what you said, but Helenos wouldn’t know it. So if you wanted him to come see you, you would probably write to him like your old self, wouldn’t you?”

  “Shut up, you stupid clod!” Eurydemos hissed. “You imbecile, you useless piece of—”

  “That’s enough,” Damiskos rapped out in his First Spear of the Second Koryphos voice. When Eurydemos froze, mouth snapping shut, Damiskos addressed Bion, at an ordinary volume. “I don’t believe we’ve met. My name is Damiskos Temnon.”

  “Oh, um. Bion Doliades. Pleased to, um.”

  “This is your house, Bion?”

  “My dad’s. Well, sort of mine.”

  “Right. And how long have you known Eurydemos?”

  “I fail to see what—” Eurydemos tried unsuccessfully to interrupt.

  “Not very long. Just, maybe, a couple of months.” He added, proudly, “He’s letting me help him with his new teaching.”

  “Yeah?” said Dami sceptically. He cocked an eyebrow at Eurydemos.

  “It represents a complete departure from my former path,” said Eurydemos. “So you see, for me to write to my former pupil in such a style … ” He gestured at the tablet in Varazda’s hands. “Unthinkable.”

  “Let’s see a specimen of your handwriting to compare,” said Varazda, not so much because he thought this would prove anything as because he wanted to keep this conversation going, to make Eurydemos uncomfortable for as long as possible.

  “Ah, yes. Bion, fetch me a tablet and stylus, and I will write something to show these suspicious—”

  “Don’t you think I should find something you already wrote, Master? That way you couldn’t try to change your writing or, you know … ”

  “I’m not going to try to change my writing!” the philosopher yelped.

  “Yes, I know, I know, but they might think you did.”

  “That’s well thought of, Bion,” said Varazda. “Thank you.”

  Bion flashed a nervous smile and took off into the house, thrusting his basket into Eurydemos’s hands before he left.

  “Divine Emanations,” Eurydemos muttered.

  “He’s looking out for you,” Dami remarked. “That’s good of him.”

  That was much more polite than what Varazda had wanted to say, and he wondered how Dami had managed it.

  “You have an imperfect understanding of me, I realize that,” said Eurydemos smoothly. “You remember who I was in my old life—”

  “It was only a couple of months ago,” Varazda remarked dryly.

  “Yes, yes, but I have emerged as a butterfly from a chrysalis since then—the change has been total. Am I sorry for the harm done by the man I was? Yes, yes I am. But am I in a position to do as much good now as I did ill then? Yes, resoundingly yes. As I said to Helenos, on that fateful day, ‘Philosophy has led us astray—we must abandon Philosophy like a sinking ship. The spar to which we must cling now is the Search for Truth.’”

  “Isn’t that,” said Dami, “the same thing?”

  Eurydemos chuckled indulgently. “I see how you could think that. But no. That is a simplistic view. It can be summed up in the riddle which I like to pose to seekers of Truth who come to me: ‘What lies—’”

  “Here you go, master!” Bion came loping back into the atrium, brandishing a tablet. He moved in a way that made Varazda wonder if he was some kind of athlete, maybe a runner. “Here, look.”


  He opened the new tablet and set it on a little marble table in the middle of the atrium. Varazda laid the letter to Helenos open beside it. He scanned the two pages of writing.

  “Ooh, they’re very close, aren’t they?” said Bion, bending over the table beside Varazda.

  “Nonsense!” Eurydemos scoffed, gesturing at the tablets but not really looking at them. “What would you even know about it? He really doesn’t know how to read—and before you protest, yes, I have tried to teach him, as have others before me. He’s impervious to instruction.”

  Bion had looked up from the tablets and his sleepy blue eyes met Varazda’s unexpectedly at close quarters. He looked apologetic, as if perhaps he knew Varazda wanted to tell him he deserved better than this—as if he might be about to beg Varazda not to.

  “I just … ” he said in a small voice, “I can look at the shape of the letters, and see whether they’re the same—look, here. These ones are different.”

  He pointed with a long, slender finger, and Varazda, following the gesture, saw that Bion was right. Eurydemos, damn his eyes, might be telling the truth. The handwriting was very similar, but it was not identical. Some letters, in fact, were quite different; perhaps they had not occurred in the text the letter-writer was copying from.

  Varazda straightened up. “He’s lucky to have you looking out for him,” he said to Bion. “I don’t think I would have seen that on my own.”

  Not least because he hadn’t wanted to see it. It would have suited him very well for the letter to have been written by Eurydemos.

  “What wouldn’t you have seen?” Eurydemos crowded Bion out of the way to stare anxiously at the tablets.

  “Oh, but look,” said Bion, warming to his subject, “these two words look different, but they’re both ones that you wrote, Master! That’s interesting, isn’t it?”

  Eurydemos looked at Bion as if he was contemplating the philosophical ramifications of biting him.

  “Here’s another one,” Bion went on, oblivious. “Sometimes you write the big sigma like this, and sometimes like this.”

  “Bion,” said Eurydemos in a martyred tone, “are you suggesting that you think I did write this letter?”

  “No, Master. You said you didn’t write it, and you wouldn’t lie.”

  “Of course not, of course not,” said Eurydemos impatiently. “More importantly, the man I am now would never have written such a letter. I told Helenos so at the time—I said, ‘I have consigned all my former teachings to the abyss of Primordial Chaos, so how could I have written such a thing?’”

  He paused, mouth open, and looked up at Varazda as if to see whether Varazda had noticed what he just said. Varazda just raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh, Master,” said Bion despairingly, “but you told him you didn’t know about the letter, before.”

  “You cretin!” Eurydemos roared at him. “You—”

  Dami’s hand landed heavily on Eurydemos’s shoulder, and the philosopher—Seeker of Truth, whatever he was—made a strangled noise and looked fearfully back at Dami.

  “Eurydemos,” said Dami evenly, “you’re a turd. You’re a liar and a grifter and a waste of space. If you speak one more word of insult against your inexplicably loyal boyfriend, I’ll hurt you.”

  “You are hurting me,” said Eurydemos, wriggling under Dami’s grip.

  Dami just rolled his eyes. “Varazda, will you give me that letter?” Varazda passed it to him, and Dami held it in front of Eurydemos. “Look carefully at the writing. Can you think of any of your former students who might have written this?”

  “No! None of them. Any of them. I don’t know. Gelon—Gelon could have done it. He’s always been good at copying things. Pictures and so on.”

  “You know Gelon is dead,” said Varazda.

  “What? Him too?” Eurydemos looked around wildly. Dami had let go of him but still stood threateningly close.

  “No,” said Varazda dryly, “he wasn’t murdered—he did a murder, remember? He killed a prominent Boukossian aristocrat. He was executed for it.”

  “Oh. Oh, yes. I do recall now. Of course.”

  “I thought you said … ” Bion began, then gave up with a sad shrug.

  “So, as it wasn’t Gelon who wrote the letter,” Varazda persisted, “and you claim that it wasn’t you—can you think who else it might have been?”

  “I don’t know! Why should any of my students do such a thing?”

  “What about Phaia?” Dami suggested. “She was Helenos’s girlfriend, and he didn’t exactly do well by her.”

  “She is imprisoned on Choros Rock,” Eurydemos reminded him pityingly.

  “Yeah? How sure are we of that?”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Eurydemos, “my sister just returned from a pilgrimage there. I had sent her with a copy of my most recent treatise for the poor girl—I thought she might find it edifying—and she reported that Phaia received it with thanks.” He looked smug. “An entirely changed character—unlike poor Helenos.”

  “What about Giontes?” Dami prompted.

  “Who?”

  Dami rolled his eyes. “He was one of your students. Tall fellow.”

  “Oh, him! No. Not very promising at all, I am sorry to say. Though from a very good family. His late father served a term as Third Archon, I believe.”

  “When did your sister visit Choros Rock?” Varazda asked.

  “Oh, it was … ” Eurydemos waved a hand airily. “Bion?”

  “Yes, Master? Last week. Last week Moon’s Day was when she came to see us—you, I mean. I remember because we had eels for dinner, and we’d got them that morning in—”

  “Yes, yes. This is the sort of thing he fills his head with, you see.” Eurydemos caught the look Dami was giving him and blanched. “Yes, well. As for the letter. It was probably … ”

  “Yes?” Dami prompted.

  “It was Lysandros Stesanos.” Eurydemos said it with the air of a dramatic revelation, as if the name had been wrung from him under torture.

  “Who’s that?” said Dami.

  Eurydemos gave him a scornful look. “You don’t know who Lysandros Stesanos is?”

  “No. That’s why I asked.”

  “He’s a philosopher,” said Bion, who had gone still at the mention of the name.

  Eurydemos waved a hand. “Young firebrand at the Marble Porches—popular among the radical set. His ideas of course are utter … disastrous … what can one even say?” He didn’t appear to know.

  “And you think he had some reason to want to bring Helenos Kontiades back to Pheme and kill him?” Varazda prompted.

  “Oh, to frame me, of course.”

  “I see. He bears you a grudge, does he?”

  Eurydemos gave a harsh laugh. “I can only assume so.”

  “That’s … vague,” said Varazda. “Can you tell us a bit more?”

  “Why should I?” Eurydemos turned peevish.

  “Because they want to find out who killed this other fellow,” said Bion. “And right now they still think it might have been you. And … I was just thinking … Lysandros wouldn’t have been able to copy your writing, would he? Because you didn’t send him that letter after all. Did you?”

  “What? No, no, of course I didn’t send him that letter, darling. But I did, later, send him other letters.”

  “Other letters?”

  “Yes—purely about philosophy, nothing that you would have been able to understand or need have concerned yourself with.”

  “But,” said Bion, “you told me you weren’t going to write to him at all, after Sosia found that first letter and read it to me. And … I don’t believe you, that you only wrote to him about philosophy. You don’t even believe in philosophy any more. I think you wrote to him about his thighs and his glistening whatever, like in the letter Sosia found. I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid.”

  For a moment Eurydemos looked winded. Then he rallied, as apparently he always did. “You are entirely, entirel
y mistaken, my dearest boy. I will explain everything.” Glancing around, he said haughtily, “I feel it deeply inappropriate for this conversation to have witnesses.”

  “Sure,” said Dami easily. He turned to Bion. “Want us to escort him out?”

  “Oh,” said Bion, looking a little surprised. “Yes. Would you?”

  Chapter 15

  “I could wish,” said Nione’s lawyer, wiping his fingers delicately on his napkin, “that you had not gone and found that out. It weakens the case against our principal suspect considerably. But, as I do in fact prefer to see justice done, I must own that it was the right thing to do.”

  “Thank you,” said Damiskos dryly.

  He liked this man. Chariton was his name, and he was worlds apart from the aggressive buffoon Olympios. He was an older man, white-haired and thin, with skin as dark as Nione’s. They had met him over lunch at Aradne’s house.

  “So then,” he said. “Our most promising suspect vanishes in the face of your thorough investigation, and what are we left with? Remind me, if you will.” He turned to Varazda.

  Varazda ticked off items on his hennaed fingers. “There’s the pickle-seller, the strange neighbours, some philosopher suspected by Eurydemos on very questionable grounds—and the possibility that Helenos killed himself.”

  Chariton nodded. “In other words, nothing. It doesn’t matter. My task is to defend Damiskos, not assign the blame elsewhere—though it is always nice to be able to do that. I must commend you both for the work you have done to make sense of this thing. However, I believe our defence—and it will be a strong one—must hinge on the unlikelihood that Damiskos, a man of impressive military background, who routinely carries a sword and was doing so at the time, should resort to poison if he wished to kill the deceased.”

  Damiskos shot Varazda a wry look. It was almost exactly what he had said himself, but he didn’t feel like saying “I told you so.”

  Varazda looked like he wouldn’t much care to hear “I told you so,” but he nodded at Chariton and said, “That makes sense.”