The Siege of Syracuse

by Dan Armstrong

  Some fifty lashes later, the soldiers carried what looked to be a corpse from the platform. As the crowd dispersed in the warm rain, Moira came out of the throng. Her hair was wet and pushed back from her face.

  “What was that?” she asked. “Why are you so pale?”

  I explained what had just happened without going into the gory red details. She didn’t seem as upset by the flogging as I was, but she also hadn’t witnessed it.

  Feeling sick to my stomach, I sagged onto the bench beside the platform.

  “Do you know where the baby is?” she hushed as she sat down beside me and dropped a handful of figs in my lap. I could see rain drops intermingled with the freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose. She squeezed up close. “It’s a boy, isn’t it?” she asked.

  I put a finger to her lips. “Don’t say another word. I’m pledged to silence.” I imagined myself being flogged for what I knew about Eurydice’s child

  She started to speak.

  I held up my hands. “No more questions. Not a word of this to anyone.”

  She was as serious as I had ever seen her. It allowed me to see beyond the cute imp that she was to the pretty young woman that she would become.

  “Is it a boy?” she asked as though her life—not mine—depended on the answer.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and nodded.

  She took hold of my hand excitedly.

  “Please,” I begged, “not another word.”

  She whispered into my ear. “I’ll bet I can get you to tell me the whole story.”

  I looked at her angrily. “No, you can’t.” Then I thought of the kiss she’d given me and how close her face was to mine now.

  She smiled as though she’d read my mind. “But I respect your pledge,” she said, touching me on the tip of my nose with her index finger, “for now. You can tell me all about it when the danger has passed.”

  I nodded, overcome by her graciousness. We walked back to the market sharing the figs, then parted before reaching her grandfather’s stand.

  CHAPTER 38

  I didn’t need to warn Lavinia about the search for the king’s son. When I went down to the pantry that afternoon everyone was already talking about it. Agathe stated her opinion as I came off the last stair. “They’re going to question every young woman in town and send a soldier into every household, looking for any sign of an infant.”

  Hektor saw me standing at the bottom of the staircase. His eyes darkened. “You haven’t said anything, have you, Timon? Somehow the king knows something.”

  “No,” I lied, proving to myself that I had no honor. I had been entrusted with a secret and had blabbed to the first person who’d asked me. Worst of all, it was a girl I wanted to impress. How could I have trusted a wild girl like Moira to keep it to herself?

  Hektor glared at me as though he were reading my mind, then turned away when Lavinia spoke.

  “They will start by questioning the chambermaids. I’m sure of that. If the king is serious, he will interview them himself. Surely he must know where he scattered his seed.”

  Hektor scoffed. “Let’s hope our young king was so drunk he’s lost track of which holes he’s filled.”

  “Let’s hope Eurydice can stand up to a grilling.” Agathe looked right at me. “For our sake as well as hers.”

  With the child hidden at her daughter’s house, Lavinia was the one in the most danger, but Hektor seemed more upset. “Too many of the palace staff know that Eurydice was pregnant. And most of them know she’d been accosted by the king. But only a handful were told about the miscarriage.” He slammed his fist on the counter. “Mark my words, in the end we will be the ones paying for the actions of that monster.”

  Agathe and Hektor were certain the king would kill the infant if he found it. Somehow I felt that I was partly to blame. Looking back, it was unlikely that my few words to Moira would have gotten to the palace or anyone who mattered. At the time, however, I felt like a traitor and a fool for having said anything at all. I imagined soldiers coming into the kitchen and taking all of us to be tortured. That was the reputation our young king had acquired in less than a year on the throne—quick to torture, quick to execute, and quick to mount the chambermaids.

  I slept little that night. Throughout the next day I expected to hear that Eurydice had confessed or that they had found Gelo. Two days later, we learned that the interrogation of the palace slaves had begun. So far nothing had come out. The whole thing hovered over us, more immediate and more personal than the anxiety generated by the impending war. While I went about my work wondering if I would be implicated, the rest of the kitchen staff assumed their days were numbered.

  CHAPTER 39

  A week after the birth, without any notice, Lavinia didn’t come in to work. Hektor didn’t remember her ever missing a day. “If she’s not here, it must be something bad.”

  “Must have something to do with the child,” growled Agathe.

  I suspected the same.

  Hektor shook his head. “I don’t know who I’m more worried about—that baby, Lavinia, or myself. They could be coming for all of us at any moment. And I don’t like the way Hieronymus treats his enemies.” He reached for his cup of kykeon, finished off what was left, and refilled the cup with watered wine.

  We were on edge all day waiting for Lavinia to appear. She never did. I worked that morning and evening to fill in. Hektor drank way too much, and Agathe muttered constantly about Eurydice and little Gelo. She even showed some slight sentiment for Lavinia. Whenever a slave appeared from the palace, Agathe prodded them for gossip. Nothing came up about the baby or Lavinia. Most of the talk was about the war.

  “If she’s not here tomorrow morning, I’ll go to Orestes’ woodshop and see what I can find out,” I volunteered at the end of the day, though I would need a letter from Archimedes to leave Achradina.

  Hektor said he could do it when he went shopping for vegetables.

  It wasn’t necessary. Lavinia was there at the usual dark hour the next morning. But our concerns had been real. Lavinia explained her absence over several cups of kykeon.

  “Two nights ago,” she began, clearly as eager to tell us as we were to hear, “word got around that the king’s guard would be going through the homes in our neighborhood the next day. It wasn’t announced, it just got out. And while everyone was certain this was because of the missing baby, no one really knew for sure.” She paused to sip from her cup. Agathe, Hektor, and I huddled around her, sitting on bags of grain, hanging on her every word.

  “Dara lives with her husband a few blocks from my house in the Tyche district. She came running over after I’d gone to bed and woke me up with the news. She had little Gelo in her arms and was crying. She was certain Gelo’s red hair would be a giveaway. Orestes was still awake. He settled Dara down and came up with a plan.” Lavinia took a deep breath, as if reliving the tension of that night.

  “Dara would take the child home and go about life as usual—as best she could.” Lavinia tilted her head—as though she could never be too sure about her daughter. “Orestes and Cales would go out to scout the neighborhood at daybreak, looking for the king’s guard, trying to determine which house, ours or Dara’s, would get searched first. Orestes figured we could move the baby from one house to the other and back, avoiding the search parties at both ends.”

  “So what happened?” asked Hektor.

  Lavinia shook her head. “Not what we expected.” She grinned at the three of us holding our cups of kykeon, our faces glowing yellow in the otherwise dark basement room. “The king’s guard was out at daybreak. Orestes and Cales were ready, but the guard broke up into four groups, two soldiers to a team, going in four different directions. There was no way Orestes could guess which of the two houses would be searched first, so he decided to wait outside Dara’s house. Cales remained out in the neighborhood, hoping to give his father any kind of advance notice he could.

  “Cales saw two of the soldiers go into Orestes’ woo
dshop. They searched it and went on. They were still several blocks from Dara’s home, so Cales grabbed his father’s tool bag from the shop and flagged Orestes down in the street. They both went to Dara’s house and hatched a scheme. They would take the tools out of the bag and put Gelo in. Orestes would carry him back to the shop like a load of tools and no one would be the wiser.”

  “And it worked?” pried Hektor.

  “Barely,” exclaimed Lavinia. “Orestes was headed down the street when he spotted a team of guards coming his way. They would pass within a few feet of him. The child had cried out several times already. Twice Orestes had to open the bag to quiet him. There was no telling when this might happen again, but Orestes had no choice. He couldn’t just reverse direction. Then the soldiers passed. Gelo was quiet and all went well. The soldier’s searched Dara’s house and found nothing. But there were some tense moments.” She shook her head. “Has anyone seen Eurydice?”

  “We’ve heard nothing,” said Hektor. “We don’t even know if she’s been questioned.”

  “Then it isn’t over,” said Agathe.

  We looked at each other, knowing she was right.

  CHAPTER 40

  The announcement came the next day. I heard it in the pantry before sunrise when the first group of slaves arrived from the palace. King Hieronymus was preparing to leave that afternoon for Leontini with fifteen thousand soldiers. Hippocrates and Epicydes had secured three cities in southeast Sicily in the two weeks they had been gone. Prompted by the success of these men and the flattery of his uncles, Hieronymus was now out to prove himself a warrior king.

  Leontini was twenty-five miles north of Syracuse, protected by a small Roman garrison. With an overwhelming advantage in numbers, the sixteen-year-old king would seize the city and earn his due laurels. This was a flagrant thumbing of his nose at Rome—and signaled imminent trouble for Syracuse, and yet another poor choice by the young regent. But the war be damned. I thought of it as a reprieve. If the king was engaged in war, the search for baby Gelo might be forgotten.

  Archimedes sent me out that morning to pick up a letter and to retrieve some materials from Orestes. I didn’t have any money to spend, but I rushed across the city to the market anyway. I would visit Moira, then pick up the woodwork. I’d get the letter on my return to Achradina. I was in good spirits for all the reasons the rest of the city was on edge.

  At the guard stations, along Via Intermuralis, in the milling market crowd, everyone was talking about the same thing—King Hieronymus’ first military campaign. Some felt as he must have—that his bloodline made him invincible, that he was a natural born general living out his destiny. Others saw it as I did; he was a spoiled boy playing soldier with an entire city at stake. Some people clowned about it in the streets, waving sticks like swords and wearing their goat skin caps backwards, pretending to be the king. It made for a carnival atmosphere, but behind it all steeped apprehension for a coming war.

  Moira spotted me in the crowd as I hurried down the market aisle to her fruit stand. Her face immediately lit with a smile, and she raced up to me in a way that caught her grandfather’s eye.

  “Moira,” he called out after her, “where are you going? There’s work to do.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, Grandfather. This is my friend, Timon, the fig thief.” She laughed and danced a little jig around me.

  “I’m not a thief,” I said, looking at her grandfather, and then at the frolicking Moira, who seemed so much more fun than anything else in my life.

  “And what do you think, Mr. Thief?” asked Moira. “Our king is going to war. Isn’t that silly? Why, he’s no older than you are!”

  “Stop, Moira,” her grandfather commanded, “not another word about the king.”

  “You stop, Grandfather.” She put her hands on her hips, playfully angry. “We have a paying customer here. He wants thirty figs.” She attacked my hand with her fingers as though she were going to pry out two copper coins.

  I pulled back, trying to show respect for her grandfather. “I’m sorry, Moira. But I don’t have a single copper today.”

  “Then why are you here?” she teased.

  I blushed. “I was just walking by.”

  The old man turned away to help a customer. Moira laughed. “You weren’t just passing by.” She took a fig from the jar beside the stand. She came up close to give it to me. “Any news about the baby?” she whispered, suddenly serious.

  “Not another word,” I gasped, touching a finger to her mouth. “Not now, not here.”

  Two more people stopped at the stand. Her grandfather became impatient. “Please, Moira, we have customers.”

  She whispered. “Can you meet me at the auction stage in a little while?”

  I had two errands to run, but there was no way I could refuse. “If you hurry, yes.”

  I waited on the bench beside the auction platform longer than I wanted. I was very anxious by the time Moira came running out of the crowd. She sensed it immediately and took my hand, pulling me to my feet.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To my favorite place in the world.”

  “How far is it? I’ve got errands to run.”

  “I don’t want to give it away. We’ll go as fast as we can.”

  This was so typical of Moira. I think it was what I loved most about her. No matter what we’d done in the handful of times we’d been on our own, it had always been an adventure—and like today, pressed up against a shortage of time.

  Once we were through the market crowd, we began to jog down Via Intermuralis through Neapolis, all the way to the south gate. I’d never left the city since coming to Syracuse, and I hesitated when Moira started out the gate. “I’m not certain this is a good idea, Moira. Are you sure they’ll let us back in?”

  She thought I was being silly. “My grandfather and I come in and out of this gate all the time. The guards know me. They won’t trouble us.” She grabbed my hand. “Come on, we don’t have much time.”

  Still I resisted. “But where? How far are you thinking of going?”

  She made a face. “It’s best as a surprise. We can be there in no time if we hurry—and back just as soon.” She tugged on my hand and I gave in.

  Once out the gate, we ran west along the walls of the city until we reached a stone bridge. The bridge took us south over the Anapus River into the farmland. I was about to resist again, thinking we were going too far, when we passed a small hillock. A valley opened up to the west. At the far end, nestled into the hills, sitting on top of a two-tiered stone plinth, was the Temple of Zeus.

  I had seen the temple many times from the staircase above Neapolis, but up close, it was even more impressive. Like most temples in the region, it was a rectangular building circuited by Doric columns, peaked by a roof of terracotta tiles. I stood at the bottom of the east stairway looking up at the gigantic temple. Two enormous chariots, sculpted in stone with a driver and two horses each, bracketed the top of the stairs.

  Moira skipped up the stairs ahead of me. I raced after her, so absorbed in the adventure I forgot about the time. At the top of the stairway, I stopped cold. A fifty-foot marble statue of Zeus, clothed in a golden robe and golden sandals, sat before me on a cypress throne, inlaid with precious stones and fine metal work. Zeus gripped a long, golden scepter in his left hand. An ivory statute of the Winged Victory, that was nearly as tall as Moira, stood like a doll in his right.

  Moira came up beside me. “Well? Was the secret worth it?” she teased.

  “Oh, yes,” I said, wondering to myself what was more beautiful—the temple or Moira. “I should have trusted you.”

  “And why wouldn’t you?” she laughed. “Look to the sea.”

  It was a view fit for Zeus himself. Built on a rise at the end of the valley, the temple looked east over an expanse of lush farmland to Syracuse’s Great Harbor and the Mediterranean Sea. To the north was the fortress of Syracuse. For the first time I saw the entirety of the magnificent
city. Its colossal, crenellated walls stretched for miles along the southern perimeter to Fort Euryalus in the west. The top three floors of the tower on Ortygia stood out over the island’s protective walls in the east.

  “Our farm is out there,” said Moira, pointing to the south toward a cluster of small buildings in the distance. We stood there awhile, just taking in the magnificent view, until Moira turned and took off at a run. I chased her around the columns until we were both hot and sweaty. If there was a priest in the temple, he must have been too busy to notice.

  Moira suddenly came to a stop at the top of the stairs on the north side of the temple. A light breeze blew up the stairway. We stood beside each other, turning this way and that, allowing the upward draft to cool us from our horseplay.

  “Now that we’re away from the market, can you tell me about the baby?” Moira asked.

  I shook my head. “I’m bound by a pledge. I promise to tell you when I can. But not yet.”

  She gave me a stubborn look. “Alright, I can wait.”

  A gust of wind blew up the staircase. It lifted our tunics out from our bodies and high up our legs. For Greeks the naked body was a common sight, but my eyes lingered on Moira’s thighs and abdomen in a way I couldn’t resist. She saw that I was staring and pushed her tunic down against the wind, then darted off to the other side of the temple.

  We chased each other around the temple far too long. All of a sudden we both knew that we had overstayed and took off at a run back to the city.

  As Moira had promised, we had no trouble entering the gate at the south end of Via Intermuralis. We walked north on this main thoroughfare hand in hand and began to talk. I told Moira about the night I was kidnapped. Up to that point neither of us had spoken in any detail about the loss of our parents. I had been thinking about telling her the story ever since our trip into the tunnel, but it was more than just confiding in her. I wanted her to know about Adeon. Working at the market, she saw a lot of people and that could be helpful.