Furies (40 page)

The recluse lay curled up on a pile of straw on the floor, his breathing rough, laboured. Flies swarmed about his festering wounds, filling the hot, fetid air with their relentless buzzing. His skin was sallow, his wounds puffy with a greenish haze blooming beneath the flesh.

“Apollonios!” Aculeo growled. The recluse started, squinted up at him, his glassy eyes slowly coming into focus. Aculeo held out his fist. The man flinched, drawing away in fear. “Do you remember this?” Aculeo opened his hand, revealing the necklace he’d taken from Philomena.

Apollonios looked at it, blinking. “So pretty,” he whispered, then resumed muttering to himself.

“You stole this from Neaera, didn’t you?” Aculeo said.

“Such a pretty thing,” the recluse whispered.

“Then you gave it as a gift to the porne Philomena. Your Eurydice.”

A flash of recognition, touched with regret. “She loved me.”

“She’s a porne, fool. You paid her to love you. Not to let you almost kill her though.”

“Eurydice…” Apollonios whispered, tears running down his filthy, wounded face.

“Yes, well, she’s alive at least, not like the others, eh?” Aculeo weighed the necklace in his hand, looking down at the broken man before him, trying to piece the horrific pieces of the puzzle back together. How could I have gotten myself mixed up in all that madness about Ralla? Spinning twisted fantasies, trying to make sense of things when it was this filthy wretch behind the women’s murders all along! “What did you do with Neaera? Did you toss her body in the canal as well?”

Apollonios hugged his knees to his chest, his eyes closed, rocking back and forth as he muttered nonsense to himself.

“How did you even take her in the first place? Did you lie in wait for her? Attack her when she was alone on the street then murder her and steal her necklace?”

The recluse looked at him in confusion. “I took the necklace from the slave. Sarapis provides … gives me sanctuary. I must give sacrifice.”

“You’re tripping over your own lies now, fool,” Aculeo growled. “The necklace belonged to Neaera, not the slave.”

“I went to the temple of Sarapis to … to seek forgiveness. To give worship. To pray. Please, I must give sacrifice … sacrifice … I must give sacrifice.”

“Is that it then? You killed them in sacrifice to Sarapis?”

“Nononononononooooo …” Apollonios said as he covered his ears, closed his eyes and rocked back and forth.

“Their blood still stains your tunic. The supplicant Cleon saw you murder that slave.”

“The necklace … the necklace was the slave’s. I … I gave her my bracelet so that Sarapis would save her. Fair trade,” Apollonios said weakly, then he seized Aculeo’s hand with a frantic fury. “Do you know of the Great One’s divine purpose in this world?”

“To Tartarus with your Great One! Tell me what you did!”

“The Furies,” Apollonios cried, pointing a quivering finger over Aculeo’s shoulder. “Do their eyes not drip with the sickness of their desire for vengeance?”

Aculeo glanced warily over his shoulder, then spat on the floor just in case. Pah, listen to him, getting me tangled again in his lunacy like some black foul muck. He grabbed the recluse by his grubby tunic and threw him up against the mud-brick wall. “Here I was thinking it couldn’t possibly be a mad recluse like you who killed those women,” he whispered hoarsely. “It had to be another. Gurculio, perhaps, or even Albius fucking Ralla, no less, a Friend of the Prefect’s!”

“Please …” Apollonios gasped.

Aculeo could smell the man’s foul breath, his flesh feverish to the touch. “Tell me what happened, damn you, before I feed you my knife and let your filthy blood drain into the dirt.”

“Hail O Great One,” Apollonios choked, tears running down his scarred face. “May others learn to worship you as I so humbly do.”

Aculeo shoved his forearm against the man’s throat, choking him. “Pray all you like, but your god has abandoned you. We’re all alone here, just you and me, facing what you’ve done at last.” Apollonios looked up at him, his confusion suddenly cleared like a passing storm, replaced by the oddest expression – a gentle smile. “What are you grinning about?”

The recluse snatched the knife from Aculeo’s belt with startling speed.

“No!” Aculeo cried, breaking free of the lunatic.

“Hail Sarapis,” Apollonios cried, his eyes now lit with a fervent glow, then turned the blade and shoved it into his own belly. A gush of blood spilled from his mouth and he slid down the wall, gasping for breath.

“What did you do?”

“I … I give … sacrifice!” Apollonios whispered.

Aculeo stumbled retching from the cell, stinking of blood and death, and called to the guards for help.

“There was nothing anyone could do,” Sekhet said solemnly, closing Apollonios’ eyes. “Even if I’d gotten here in time, he was too far gone to begin with.”

Aculeo said nothing as he looked down at his trembling hands, the front of his tunic still sticky with the other man’s blood.

“He was a soldier?” she asked, examining the heavy scarring on the man’s wasted limbs.

“Many years ago,” Aculeo said. “A hero in the Battle of Teutoburg, his brother claimed.” The healer looked at him, puzzled – the battle’s name clearly meant nothing to her.

Sekhet summoned the guards. “Take the body to the Necropolis, ask for the priest Paheri,” she said. “And don’t try to dodge this, it’s not a good idea to deceive those in charge of guiding your journey into the afterlife, understand?” The guards grudgingly carried Apollonios’ body from the cell. The healer looked at Aculeo and frowned. “
When’s the last time you had something solid to eat?”

“I can’t remember. Yesterday sometime I think.”

“Come. We can talk of these things while you eat.”

Sekhet’s home was a single story,
mud-brick structure on the end of a row of similar houses built along the edge of the winding blue Draco River
in Rhakotis
. She led Aculeo through the anteroom into a large central room with a simple table and four mud-brick benches along the walls cushioned with reed mats. Behind that was another room with a low bench and two sets of stairs, one leading to the roof, the second down underground. She brought him a basin of water to wash up and a fresh tunic to change into.

When he was done he went out to the back of the house where an open garden looked over the river. Half a dozen women, young and old, sat in the courtyard beneath the shade of a sprawling acacia while an old man sipped beer slowly from his clay jar. Gurculio’s little dog Felix sat on the old man’s lap, growling when it spotted Aculeo. A number of children ran up from where they’d been playing alongside the canal and gathered excitedly around Sekhet. The adults offered Aculeo polite nods of greeting, though they seemed not to have a single word of Latin or Greek among them.

“My family,” Sekhet explained. “Too many names. You’ll never remember them.”
She spoke to them all quickly in Demotic. The other women laughed and chattered to one another, while the old man cast Aculeo a suspicious glare.

“This way,” Sekhet said, and led Aculeo up the back stairs to the roof, where they sat beneath a sun-bleached canvas awning. They had a fine view of the river from there, a winding sapphire ribbon feeding out towards the dark Egyptian Sea.

Aculeo told her of the porne Philomena, Neaera’s necklace and of his final interrogation of Apollonios. Sekhet listened quietly, the sun warming her lined, weary face as she gazed out towards the sea. When Aculeo was done, the healer remained silent, her eyes closed, as though she was sleeping. She looked up at him finally, staring at him with her dark, penetrating eyes. “Why should Apollonios have wanted to kill himself?”

“He feared prison, trial, execution …”

She snorted. “
I doubt whether
he was even capable of committing these murders much less almost getting away with it,” the healer said calmly.

“Oh? And what do you think happened then?”

“Let’s define exactly what we know. First, the river slave’s murder. The Temple of Sarapis is a destination for the ignorant who seek to be healed. We know for a fact she’d been mortally wounded days before she ever reached the temple. She may well have gone there on her own accord to pray to the god to mend her wounds. By the time she reached the sanctuary, she was almost dead.”

“A witness saw Apollonios attack her there.”

“Your so-called witness sounds confused at best,” Sekhet said with a dismissive wave. “He was frightened, it was dark, and much time had passed when he finally spoke to you about what he saw. The mind often fills in details over time, changes them, trying to rearrange them to make sense of chaos.”

“We know for a fact that Apollonios attacked the porne Philomena,” Aculeo said. “He tried to murder her.”

“Yet for that he had a motive. A deranged one, I admit, but a motive nonetheless. What motive did he have to murder a dying slave?”

“The same one he had for all the other murders!”

Sekhet shrugged. “Again, I question whether he murdered anyone.”

“You say that so easily!”

“You may be a Roman but that doesn’t give you the privilege to stop using your head. How many
pornes do you know that would have gone with a man like him in the first place? None. They’re not fools. Apollonios was clearly deranged, an unwashed, scar-faced beggar. Pornes learn early on to judge who to go or not go with, else they don’t survive on the streets long.”

“Philomena went with him, didn’t she?”

“And when he turned on her she stabbed him in the throat,” Sekhet said. “One of the first things pornes learn is how to defend themselves. They can still fall victim, clearly, but not at the hands of a man like Apollonios. It’s inconceivable.

“And then there are the hetairai. Petras, and after her Neaera, then Myrrhine. Do you honestly think Apollonios could have seduced any of them, drawn them away from their world of symposia, sophists and song, made them vanish with barely a trace, even thinking to send and pay for one of them to be embalmed at the Necropolis?” She stared at him, her black eyes glittering and fierce.

Aculeo leaned back in his chair, hands covering his face, exhausted all of a sudden. “My head’s spinning from it all.”

“Think about it – a man like him wouldn’t have been permitted near a hetaira. They’re never alone when they’re in the street – they have slaves and bodyguards protecting them at all times, guarding their owners’ investment. No, it had to be someone closer to them instead. Someone who can move in their circles, not draw suspicion.”

Two women arrived then, carrying platters of unleavened bread, lentils, pickled cucumbers, onions, and long strips of saltfish. The old man followed, truculently bearing a large jar of beer that he practically threw on the table, letting it slosh over the sides of the jar. He muttered something under his breath to Sekhet, who shot him a scowl, sending him scuttling back down the stairs after the women.