Strong Wine

by A. J. Demas

  “It may be that someone who visited Helenos that day sat down to drink with him, and poisoned only the cup intended for the victim. Damiskos, recall, did not sit down to drink with Helenos—he was not in the house long enough, as several neighbours can testify. Or it may be that the poison belonged to Helenos himself, and that he drank it voluntarily.

  “My colleague places great significance on a silver object which was found in Helenos’s room. He has told us that it is the stopper of a flask, and that this flask must have contained the poison which killed Helenos. Either of these things may be true—it may be a stopper from a flask, or it may be a game piece or a good-luck charm. The flask, if there was a flask, may have contained poison, or it may have contained perfume. What is certain is that the silver object, whatever it was, has no connection to my client. He had never seen it before my colleague waved it in front of us a short time ago, he never possessed the flask—if there was a flask—to which it belongs. He did not, in fact, enter Helenos’s room. It is an interesting fact that the scorpion design on the silver object—and I will have to take your word for it that it is a scorpion, as from this distance to my eyes it looks more like a lobster—that this design is one found occasionally in cult statues of the god Terza, whom my client worships. That is an interesting fact, but it proves nothing.”

  While Chariton was still speaking, Damiskos noticed an olive-skinned young man with a mop of black curls making his way rather clumsily through the assembly, to arrive breathless at the base of the dais on Damiskos’s side. He wasn’t anyone Damiskos knew. He wore the carelessly wrapped mantle that Damiskos had come to associate with philosophers, though he managed to make it look almost elegant. He stood there watching the proceeding with fierce attention.

  The women at the brothel across the street were vague about Ruta, and Varazda wasn’t sure if it was because they didn’t trust him or they genuinely hadn’t known her very well. He was beginning to form a picture of her: a woman alone and friendless in a foreign country, doing what she could to survive. He hoped she’d found the peace or clarity or whatever it was she sought at the island convent. He hoped she was not in fact dead.

  The prostitutes weren’t sure, or wouldn’t say, where Ruta had gone, but when Varazda suggested that it might have been Choros Rock, they admitted that they thought that was true.

  "She used to talk about it,” one of them said, toying with the string of glass beads she wore. “She’s very religious.”

  “You wouldn’t have thought,” said another, “that she’d have wanted to go to a Phemian convent, would you? Being Karganian. But she did tell me that’s where she was going.”

  He asked if they knew where Ruta had lived when she was in Pheme. At first they didn’t want to tell him that either, and he gathered that was because she had not moved out permanently but was expected back. That was exactly what he had hoped to hear, so he waited patiently for more. Finally the woman with the beads mentioned a room above a sandal-maker. It was just up the hill, she said, near the new armoury.

  Trying not to appear ominously eager, Varazda forced himself to linger a few more minutes, diverting the conversation into other channels, although he was itching to be off, his mind straying to what was going on back at the Hall of Justice, whether Dami had got his note, how hurt he must feel that Varazda wasn’t there if he hadn’t.

  Had the advocate for Helenos’s family produced the damned scorpion stopper yet? Had he tried to make a connection with the cult of Terza? It was only by chance that Varazda even knew about that; he remembered Marzana and Chereia’s elder son pedantically listing all the cult symbols of Terza one night over dinner, and Remi asking what a scorpion was. But Sorgana was full of trivia about religion. Maybe this wasn’t the sort of thing that most people knew about.

  Finally Varazda excused himself casually and left the brothel. He hurried up the hill, further into the warren of the Skalina, looking for a sandal-maker’s shop across from an armoury.

  It took him longer than he would have liked to find it, and when he did, he was not entirely sure he could find his way back. The armoury, a forbidding building bristling with armed guards, looked out of place in the neighbourhood. The shop was closed, only the painting of sandals above the shuttered window alerting him to its identity. But that suited him well enough. It was a small, squat building, without even a full second storey; Ruta must have lived in the attic.

  If time had allowed, he would have tried to talk to the neighbours, find out what they knew about the sandal-maker’s tenant. Had they seen her recently, going about in her distinctive checked cloak, pretending not to know them? Or had she given the key to her room to a friend, who had been staying there in her stead?

  He didn’t have time for that. He satisfied himself that the sandal-maker’s property looked empty, and went around the back to find the wall that edged the small paved yard. It was not much overlooked by the surrounding buildings, which were also low shacks unlike the ramshackle towers down the hill. The top of the wall was toothy with jagged shards of pottery. Varazda rolled his eyes at them and sloughed off his mantle. He folded up the thick wool cloth, tossed it over the pottery teeth so that he could grab hold of them, and swung himself up. One of the shards cracked under his hand, and he wobbled, but caught himself in a crouch on the narrow lip of the wall. He swivelled to perch sideways, hanging onto the opposite edge with one hand, contemplating his options.

  He could attempt to shuffle cautiously over the teeth to the other side, but perhaps not without cutting himself on the way over, and he didn’t even have the slight protection that would have been afforded by trousers. It just seemed like an opening for some kind of bad eunuch joke. He settled for planting his hands as well as he could on the opposite side of the wall and doing a slow backflip over into the paved yard.

  He landed beautifully, and wished he’d had some sort of audience. He was thirty; he couldn’t always do that as well as he’d been able to when he was eighteen.

  He was also freezing cold in his short tunic, but he couldn’t stop to rewrap the stupid mantle now. He tugged it down off the wall and hid it in a wheelbarrow in the yard before trying the back door of the sandal-maker’s house. It was unlocked.

  He slipped into a dim, leather-scented workshop, and found the stairs leading up to a trap-door in the ceiling. This was not locked, either; perhaps there had been no need for Ruta to lend anyone her key after all.

  Before pushing the trap door up, Varazda cast his gaze over the room below. It was very tidy, with no pieces of leather left out on the counter, no tools lying ready for the day’s work. It looked as though the sandal-maker had left for something more than a day off. Varazda pushed open the attic door and went through.

  The room above the shop had a few pieces of simple furniture: an unmade bed, a chest with its lid flung open, a small table littered with nutshells and fruit peels. Clothes—a blue gown and a stained white scarf—were draped over a wicker chair with a red leather cushion. When Varazda moved these, he found underneath an oilcloth travelling bag, tied shut. He tugged it open and withdrew a small silver flask.

  It was an ugly object, moulded in the shape of a woman’s head, with beetles for earrings. The scorpion stopper had been a sort of headdress, holding up a veil—the flask was now closed with a wad of cloth, somewhat stained with its dark brown contents. No doubt Sorgana could have told him who the head was supposed to represent; it had the look of some unpleasant Pseuchaian goddess. Varazda sniffed it cautiously. He didn’t know what thorn-flower smelled like, but whatever was in the flask certainly stank, and that was good enough for him.

  If she had chosen to keep her poison in something unobtrusive, she could have left the whole damn flask of it in Helenos’s room and it wouldn’t have helped lead Varazda to her. But he remembered this thing because it was so ugly. He had last seen it at Nione’s villa in the summer, when he was searching for the stolen documents in Phaia’s room.

  She should have been an obvious suspect
from the beginning. He knew she was ruthless and vengeful, and that she felt betrayed by Helenos. For that matter, she had been betrayed; he’d been her lover, and she thought he believed in their common cause, but he hadn’t. He’d left her to her fate and escaped from justice himself. That she would come after him, lure him with a forged letter supposedly from their old master, and murder him with the same poison that had been used to execute their old associate Gelon, was entirely to be expected. It was just that everyone had been so sure she was confined to an inescapable prison on Choros Rock.

  But Choros Rock wasn’t really a prison; it was a temple complex and a convent, and it should have occurred to someone that a woman like Phaia would not have much trouble talking her way out of a place like that. There were any number of ways she might have done it: pretending to be repentant to win herself more liberties; befriending the lonely Ruta and telling her some sad story to get her to offer the use of her lodging, perhaps even assist her escape. And someone—maybe Ruta, maybe another woman who had looked more like Phaia—had posed as her when Eurydemos’s sister had visited.

  He replaced the ghastly flask in the oilcloth bag, retied it, and returned it to its home under the pile of clothes. Glancing over the table, he saw a folded tablet amid the debris, and gingerly brushed aside a couple of nutshells to flip it open.

  Helenos Kontiades Diophoros to Eurydemos, greetings.

  I was surprised to receive your letter, my former master, but since you seem desirous of a reunion, I will not deny you. I wonder how you found out my current residence. I will travel to Pheme in a week, if the wind is favourable, and you will hear from me when I arrive.

  It was exactly the kind of letter one would expect Helenos to write, its arrogance masking his desperation, expressing no affection for his former master, no apology for the way he had betrayed and tried to supplant him (not that Eurydemos hadn’t deserved it), no gratitude for the forgiveness which Eurydemos was apparently willing to extend. Varazda wondered how Eurydemos would have reacted if he had actually received it.

  Phaia’s forged letter had ended with an innocuous-sounding phrase about sending a reply by the messenger who had delivered it, which was how she had ensured she would receive this letter herself. Perhaps she’d already been in Pheme by that time. When Helenos wrote to tell Eurydemos of his arrival, he would presumably have sent that letter to the Marble Porches, but Phaia must have found a way to intercept it and learn where Helenos was staying. That wouldn’t have been difficult either. Varazda could think of several different ways he might have done it himself.

  He closed the letter, flicked the nutshells back to their prior place, and was heading for the trap-door when he heard the sound of a door opening and closing in the shop below. He paused for a moment, glancing around the attic room, then he headed for the window.

  Chapter 19

  The curly-haired philosopher type came up the steps to speak to Chariton during the recess after his speech was finished and before the witnesses were presented.

  “My name is Lysandros,” he said. “I understand Eurydemos is speaking as a witness against you? I would be delighted to help discredit him for you. Your friend Pharastes sent me.”

  “You teach at the Marble Porches?” said Damiskos.

  Lysandros shot him an interesting look. “I teach in a lot of places. Wine shops, mostly. But also the Marble Porches. I was there just now—that’s where your friend found me.”

  “What would you say, to discredit Eurydemos?” Chariton asked.

  “It would depend what he says himself. I am good at thinking on my feet.” The philosopher had a wolfish smile rather like Chariton’s own.

  He also looked young enough to be Chariton’s grandson. Chariton gave him a stern look. “I am not prepared to let you speak as a witness if I do not know what you are going to say.”

  “I think I know what he’s going to say,” said Damiskos. “He’s going to say that Eurydemos is a washed-up charlatan with a grudge against me for helping to destroy his career.”

  “I thought I might lean a little more on his intellectual bankruptcy,” said Lysandros. “I’m not sure he actually holds grudges, as such. He’s too far up his own ass.”

  “That … yeah. That rings true.”

  “But I know all about his Great Disillusionment, and I know you had something to do with it. I can certainly say that. Also, if he tries to ask that fucking stupid riddle, I know the answer to that, which will take the wind out of his sails.”

  “I think we should let him testify,” said Damiskos to the lawyer. “But it’s up to you.”

  “Why not?” said Chariton. “If nothing else, it will give Varazda more time to find whatever it is he’s looking for.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. I, er, appreciated what you said about him—about us. In your speech.”

  Chariton gave him a rather sad look. “It was all true. We lawyers don’t have a reputation for frankness, but I meant every word of that.”

  “I, um. I thought you did. Thank you.”

  “It was a splendid speech,” said the philosopher enthusiastically. “Convinced me.”

  “You were not present to hear the opposing speech,” Chariton pointed out.

  “No. But I got the gist of it from hearing yours. What was the story about the silver scorpion, or lobster, or whatever it is?”

  “They found it at the scene,” said Damiskos. “He was holding it when he died. We didn’t know about it until their advocate brought it out at the end of his speech. He tried to make the case that it’s mine because scorpions appear in images of Terza.” Damiskos shrugged. “Which they do, sometimes.”

  “More likely to be one of those things of the Daughters of Night, don’t you think?” said Lysandros. “Bug earrings and scorpion jewellery and so on. I’ve never seen one done in silver, but I suppose if you were morbid and rich, why not?”

  Chariton pursed his lips. “I should have thought of that,” he muttered.

  “Don’t worry,” said Damiskos. “Your speech was great. Really.”

  A gong and an announcement from a court official signalled the return to the proceedings, the jury filed back into their seats, and the audience quieted and composed themselves again to listen.

  “Kontios Diophoros, you may now summon your witnesses!”

  Helenos’s father stood up briefly and waved a hand at his advocate, giving him formal permission to proceed on his behalf.

  The first few witnesses were predictable. A man who had seen Damiskos knock Helenos down in the street described what he had seen, which accorded well with what Damiskos remembered himself, and one of the neighbours from the building testified to seeing Damiskos go upstairs with Helenos, adding that he had not seen either of them come down, because he’d been on his way out himself. He referred to Helenos as “that nasty young fellow on the fourth floor,” and began to advance his own theory that Helenos had been blackmailing Damiskos before Eulios cut him off and called his next witness.

  The next witness was Damiskos’s former subordinate from the Quartermaster’s Office. He began his testimony by stepping on his mantle and nearly falling on his face as he got up from his seat, and it went downhill from there. He actually drew laughter from the audience for his attempt to describe Damiskos as a bad superior officer.

  Among the rest, Damiskos thought he caught the sound of his father’s laughter, and looked out to see him indeed grinning broadly. Timiskos, who had been standing with him at the beginning of the trial, was nowhere to be seen.

  The slaves who had actually come to remove Helenos’s body from his rented room could not testify, of course, but someone seemed to have thought of that at the time, and a freedman from the household had gone with them. He stood up to give an account of the finding of the silver scorpion, which had not been in Helenos’s hand, as Eulios had implied, but lying concealed under his body. The object itself was passed around to the jurors, and a discussion about the differences between scorpions and lobsters
ensued, to the advocate’s obvious impatience.

  “But are lobsters a symbol of Terza? That’s what I want to know.”

  It went on for some time, and was never really settled to anyone’s satisfaction.

  Eurydemos was the final witness for the Diophoros family. The advocate, obviously rattled by the long scorpion/lobster digression, introduced him as, “The famous philosopher and Damiskos Temnon’s former master,” whereupon Eurydemos interrupted him with an indulgent laugh.

  “Oh, no. Damiskos Temnon was never a pupil of mine. No, no. Nor would I characterize my reputation today as ‘fame.’” He gave a martyred sort of sigh. “I would rather characterize it as ‘infamy.’ My students have deserted me—and how should they not, when I have repudiated my own teachings? I no longer teach—I lead. Helenos Kontiades was one of my pupils, a fact which I lament. Had he never sat at my feet, he might never have devoted himself to the unworthy cause which he chose … ”

  “What in the hells is he doing?” Chariton hissed. “Is he using this trial as an opportunity to commit public suicide?”

  “I don’t think,” said Lysandros dryly, “that I’ll need to say anything to discredit him.”

  The Diophoros advocate tried to intervene, to redirect Eurydemos to something, anything relevant. Eurydemos treated him as if he were a student asking interesting but rather dim-witted questions. He debated definitions, quibbled about phrasing, went off on long tangents about abstract concepts. He dismissed Damiskos as a blockhead and rhapsodized about Varazda’s beauty. He discussed the merits of suicide and seemed—it was hard to tell—to come down on the “pro” side.