The Marathon Conspiracy (3 page)

It was my turn to be perplexed. “You don’t know?”

“I’d appreciate it if you could announce my guilt as soon as possible,” Glaucon said. “Could they schedule my trial for this month, do you think?”

The door slammed open. There stood a complete stranger, an older man with gray hair, who if his straight back and wide shoulders were anything to go by was in good shape. The house slave stood obscured behind him, jumping to see over the intruder’s shoulder. Our slave was beside himself with anxiety. “He pushed his way in, master! I couldn’t stop him. I’m sorry—”

“What has this mountebank been telling you?” the stranger demanded, glaring at Glaucon.

“Who are you?” I said.

“My name is Hegestratus. I’m a candidate for the post of city treasurer in the next election.”

“So?”

“So Glaucon is running, too.”

“I fail to see the relevance,” I told him. “Glaucon has this moment confessed to the murder of Hippias, the last tyrant of Athens.”

“That’s utter bull droppings,” snapped Hegestratus.

“How do you know?” I challenged him.

“Because
I
killed Hippias. I’ve come to confess.”

A
S THE DAY
progressed, a small queue of men lined up outside our door, all waiting to confess to the murder of Hippias. They had one thing in common: every one of them was a candidate in the coming elections. Every one of them wanted to enhance his chances by being known as the killer of the most hated man in the city’s history. There wasn’t the slightest danger to the men in confessing. No jury in Athens would convict them.

There were so many I had to enlist Diotima to take notes.

“It’s ridiculous,” I groaned. “Why are we doing this?”

“Because everyone wants to know the name of the man who killed Hippias,” Diotima said. “So they can congratulate him.”

“We’ll have to work out who really killed Hippias, and then announce the lucky winner.”

“That will be tricky, since it probably happened thirty years ago, and we don’t even know how he died,” Diotima pointed out. “The skull’s nice, but a body would help, even if it’s only a skeleton.”

“Yes, it would.” I’d taken the remains with me, Pericles not having any use for an extra skull. I set it on the table, and Diotima and I had stared at it in fascination. The one thing we knew for
sure was that the victim hadn’t been knocked on the head: the bone was all in place.

“How many confessions does that make?” I asked Diotima.

Diotima ran her finger down the list and frowned. “Thirty-six,” she said.

“It must have been a crowded murder scene.”

“Very,” Diotima agreed. “Especially since four of them claim to have decapitated Hippias with their swords. Ten knifed him in the chest, eight used spears, and most of the rest strangled him. I wonder if that was before or after the first four had cut off his head?”

There was nothing we could do about it now. We heard a banging on the door, huge resounding thumps. I’d recognize that ham-fisted knocking anywhere: it was Pythax, Diotima’s stepfather, and with him would be Diotima’s mother, Euterpe.

Diotima and I looked at each other in despair. We were scheduled to marry at the next full moon; our fathers had signed the agreement. Now our parents were about to meet, all four together, for the first time.

I
LIKED THE IDEA
of
being
married, I just didn’t like the idea of
getting
married.

Getting married meant a ceremony. I disliked ceremonies at the best of times. But worse than that, planning our wedding required my family to talk to Diotima’s family, and that was a disaster of such epic proportions as to make the Trojan War look like a mild disagreement.

“A small, private affair, with close friends attending,” my mother, Phaenarete, said.

“I was thinking more along the lines of all the best families in Athens,” said Euterpe, the mother of my bride. Euterpe was a former high-class courtesan and desperate to establish herself in respectable society.

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” said my mother. She’d been quietly respectable all her life. “We couldn’t possibly find room for that many people.”

What she left unsaid was that we couldn’t possibly afford to feed them either.

“We gotta have my guardsmen there,” said Pythax.

“You want to invite
slaves
to a citizen wedding?” said my father, Sophroniscus, utterly aghast.

“They’re my buddies,” Pythax growled. “They’d be insulted if I didn’t.” Pythax was a new-made citizen, who through his enormous merit had risen from being a slave himself to command of the Scythian Guard of Athens, the men who enforce the peace. Pythax had a foot on each side of the social divide:
not comfortable in his new milieu, but no longer at home in his old.

“I forbid it!” said Sophroniscus, his face purple.

“Who’s paying for this?” Pythax demanded.

“We both are,” Sophroniscus replied.

It was part of the wedding contract. Each of our fathers thought the other was the richer. They both thought they’d gotten a good deal in the marriage contract. Little did they know they were each as poor as the other, and Diotima and I weren’t about to tell them. It meant both our fathers were constantly thinking of reasons why the other should pay for things.

“Pythax, dear husband,” said Euterpe. “We couldn’t possibly have your friends at the ceremony. Think what the good families would say.”

“My friends aren’t good enough for you?” Pythax said to his wife.

All four parents fell to arguing.

Diotima and I stood to the side, listening to this disaster in the making. “They can’t agree on one single thing,” Diotima whispered to me.

“No.”

Diotima looked close to tears. This was her wedding day they were destroying. I caught her hand and led her from the house. Even when we stood outside the house, we could still hear the raised voices. So we walked away.

Diotima and I sat, disconsolate, on a low wall at the end of the street. Beside us was a herm, a bust of the god Hermes with an erect phallus carved into its base. The city was dotted with herms; they were meant to bring good luck to those who passed, but I doubted they could do much with difficult parents.

“This is going to be the worst wedding ever,” Diotima said. I’d heard men condemned to death sound more cheerful.

I put an arm around her. “No it won’t. The worst wedding
ever was the one we performed for ourselves, when we were stuck in that prison.”

Diotima looked up at me. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t look back on what we did in that prison as the happiest moment of my life. No, that was my true wedding.”

“We thought we were about to die,” I pointed out.

“Irrelevant.”

I didn’t recall thinking so at the time, but I wasn’t about to argue.

Some small boys had been sidling up to the herm beside us, obviously wondering how they could vandalize it without us noticing. I picked up a handful of pebbles and threw them at the junior criminals. “Go away.”

They scattered.

“That was cruel, Nico.”

“Nah. There’s another herm on the corner they’re running toward. They can vandalize that one. But they won’t be able to break off its phallus.”

“Why not?”

“I did it myself, when I was their age. No one ever fixed it.”

A woman walked up the street. She stopped outside our house, hesitated for a moment, then knocked on the door. She looked up and down the street, then started to walk away. At that instant the house slave opened the door. The slave and the woman talked. The slave shook his head.

I said, “That’s odd. I wonder who she is?”

“Who?” Diotima had been watching the boys run down the street.

“That woman just knocked on our door, but then she walked away.”

Then I remembered that Pericles had sent a priestess to tell me more about the mysterious skull. This must be she. In the excitement of Glaucon coming to confess, I’d forgotten all about it, forgotten even to tell Diotima.

Diotima looked, and looked again, and then her jaw dropped.

The lady came our way. She stopped in front of us.

“Hello, Diotima,” she said. “You’ve grown since I saw you last.”

“You know this lady?” I said to Diotima.

With the muffled voices of our parents arguing in the background, which surely the lady could hear but was too polite to mention, Diotima said, in slightly strangled tones, “Nico, I’d like you to meet Doris. She was my teacher.”

“I
AM THE
priestess Doris, from the Temple of Artemis in the deme of Brauron,” she said to me.

The priestess Doris was a lady of late middle age. Her hair was gray, held back with a simple clasp of silver that was designed for practicality rather than display. The chiton she wore was of heavy linen and the oldest style; it covered her from shoulders to ankles, respectable and unpretentious. Her sandals were heavy-duty and very dusty, as well they might be since that same day she had walked to Athens.

It was obvious from her carriage, her gentle accent, and the manner of her speech that here was a well-born lady of a certain age; everything about her was simple and composed. I found myself liking Doris, and I was deeply intrigued that she had known Diotima long before I had.

We had escorted Doris to the town house that had once belonged to Diotima’s birth father, and which Diotima had inherited a year ago. At the town house we had privacy. The alternative was to take Doris to my home, where our parents continued their long, loud argument over the wedding plans.

Diotima was an heiress. Technically, once we were married, the town house would become mine to manage on her behalf. In practice, I didn’t know if we could afford the upkeep. Although Diotima was coming to me with property, there was no income to speak of at all; we would have to rely on my earnings as an
agent—those would be the earnings Pericles hadn’t paid—and the upkeep on a city house is expensive. Besides which, the pressure on us to move in with my parents was enormous. That was the tradition for newlyweds.

Diotima’s town house was empty but for three slaves to maintain it. The chief of these was Achilles, a dapper little man with crippled ankles, whence his slave name.

I had promised Achilles his freedom if Diotima survived our first assignment, an adventure in which he’d had some minor involvement, but Diotima had preempted me by herself offering to free him. Achilles had refused; a slave doesn’t have to accept freedom if he doesn’t want it. Achilles had explained with these words: “I’m an old man, Mistress Diotima,” he’d said. “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if you freed me now. Please don’t send me away.”

What he’d not said, in his slave’s pride, but which Diotima had divined at once, was that a free man can starve, while a slave will be cared for so long as the family has food to put on the table. It’s a sacred obligation. So Diotima had sworn an oath to Achilles, that she would care for him to the end of his days and never sell him, and Achilles in his gratitude had become her devoted servant.

Thus it was that Achilles opened the door to us, and we led Doris the priestess into the inner courtyard of what had once been Diotima’s father’s home. Achilles hobbled off to bring us wine. Diotima took his arm as he went and whispered to bring the best her father had stored. I knew the quality of the cellar in this house, and that told me as much as anything the high esteem in which Diotima held this priestess.

I said, “It’s an honor to meet you, Doris. Pericles said you can tell us what happened at the temple.”

“Do you know about the sanctuary at Brauron?” she asked me.

I shook my head. “It’s a girl thing.”

Doris laughed. “And therefore men don’t need to know about it? Wait until you have daughters.”

Achilles brought in a tray of food and set it before Doris: olives and bread and sliced quince and a bowl of lentils. He returned with a krater of wine mixed with water. Achilles ladled a cup for each of us.

Doris was hungry. She dipped her right hand into the lentils. “I haven’t eaten since breakfast, and that was before first light. I hope you’ll excuse me.”

“That’s why the food is there,” I said.

Diotima said, “It’s wonderful to see you, Doris. I often think back to my time at Brauron.”

“For our part we’ve been following your career with the greatest interest. You made quite a spectacle of yourself in that court case last year—our High Priestess wasn’t entirely pleased about that, by the way; she felt it might reflect on the temple—and the word we hear is something happened at the last Olympics. The truth is, my dear, that in the small world of our sanctuary, you’ve become something of a celebrity.”

Doris spoke between mouthfuls.

“Our temple has always been a haven for girls,” she said to me, licking her fingers. “The wealthiest and most powerful families in Athens send their daughters to us. The girls are called the Little Bears. For most of them, it’s the first time they’ve ever lived away from home. It’s good training for marriage.” Doris paused. “In fact, the reputation of the sanctuary for turning out young ladies of quality is unsurpassed. Fathers have been known to offer bribes and even fight to have their daughters admitted.”

“Yet
Diotima
got in?” I grinned.

“Thank you very much!” Diotima said, in mock anger. She threw a cup at me. I caught it easily, as she intended, and I set it aside.

Yet the question was genuinely asked, because although Diotima was a perfect lady in her manners and her education, and although her father had been a statesman of the highest regard, it was all too well known that her mother had also been at the top
of
her
profession. Which was, unfortunately … prostitution. Or more accurately, until she married Pythax, Diotima’s mother had been a courtesan.

Diotima’s birth was as irregular as you could get. It meant she wasn’t even a citizen: Diotima was a metic, a resident alien, in the city of her birth.