The Marathon Conspiracy (9 page)

I waved to the leader of the pack. “Gaïs! Can we have a word with you?”

Gaïs started. She hadn’t noticed us, standing in the dark. She told the girls to keep going and walked over to us. She was dressed in a priestess chiton, but one she had torn down to fit her slimness. She stood before us and said nothing.

I said, “Gaïs, did you shoot an arrow at us this afternoon?”

“No, was I supposed to?” She looked at us as if we were the mad ones.

“They say Allike was torn apart,” I said to her. “I’m sorry to mention it, but I must. They say there’s a bear out there. Do you think a bear might have killed Allike?”

Gaïs almost recoiled. “Never! The Goddess would never allow the greater servant to harm the lesser.”

“Huh?”

“She means a bear wouldn’t have hurt Allike,” Diotima translated for me. “When Artemis walks the earth, she’s attended by the wild bears of the wood, who are her sacred servants. That’s why the girls here are called the Little Bears, Nico, because they’re the little servants of Artemis. Gaïs is saying that the larger servant—the bear—wouldn’t harm the smaller, Allike.”

“Then why couldn’t she just say so?” I said, exasperated. I turned back to Gaïs. “Are you by any chance related to the
Pythoness?” I asked, because the Pythoness at Delphi is the priestess who speaks for Apollo, and she always speaks in riddles. I’d never been to Delphi, but I imagined dealing with her must be as irritating as having to talk to this woman.

Gaïs shook her head. “I’m a child of the temple.”

“So I heard. Have you no idea who your mother and father might be?”

“The temple is my mother.” Gaïs looked over my shoulder at the marble building behind me. “It’s beautiful.”

Indeed it was. With the crickets chirping and the still night under the stars, and even just enough disruption from the noisy girls to give the place some life, the Temple of Artemis Brauronia was a good place to be, if you liked a quiet life.

I said, “With all this running you do, if there were a bear, do you think you might have seen it?”

Gaïs shrugged.

“Have you seen anything unusual out in the woods?” I asked.

“No,” Gaïs said. “Not unless you count that strange man.”

“
What strange man?
” Diotima and I said simultaneously.

“He follows me.” Gaïs seemed utterly unconcerned. “When he sees me in the woods, he runs after me. I get away every time.” Gaïs shrugged. “I think he might be crazy.”

Well, she’d be in a position to know.

“E
VERY TIME WE
interview a suspect, they give us someone else to suspect,” I moaned as we walked away, leaving Gaïs to rejoin the dance. “This can’t go on.”

“If only because we’ll run out of people,” Diotima said coolly. “The problem is that we’re so removed from everything that’s happened. We haven’t been anywhere near a fresh crime, we haven’t even seen a body! All we have to work with is what people tell us. It’s frustrating!”

A gaggle of girls sat on the lawn, playing games and talking nonstop. We remained silent while they were in earshot. “What
do you think of this bear everyone keeps talking about?” Diotima asked me in a quiet voice when we’d passed.

“It’s obviously rubbish,” I said. “There haven’t been bears in Attica for decades, maybe even a century or more.”

“What happened to them?”

“People hunted them to extinction.”

“And by people, you mean men.”

“Well, yes.”

“What about the fathers?”

“No, they haven’t been hunted to extinction.”

“I mean, why aren’t the fathers of those two girls down here with us, looking for their children?”

“Polonikos seems to be shifty. He has some reason for staying in Athens but wouldn’t say what it was. The father of Allike I don’t know about. But I’m not sure talking to him will help. Why would he have anything to do with this?”

We stopped outside the dorm rooms for the girls, where Diotima would sleep for the night. I had another hundred paces to the wooden shack out the back where the slaves slept on pallets on the dirt floor.

I said, “We’ll have to talk to this stranger in the woods.”

“We’ll have to find him first.”

I
DREAMED OF
Allike screaming as she was torn apart. The nightmare wouldn’t let me rest. I rolled over into the man beside me. He snored and blew hot air straight into my face.

That woke me up.

But the screaming didn’t stop.

I scrambled up, tripped over the man beside me, got up again, and banged my head into the door. My hand fumbled in the dark for the handle, and I finally got out. The stars were bright and the moon brighter. The noise was coming from the girls’ dorm, where Diotima was. I reached for my knife, realized I’d left it on the ground in the dark shack, and decided to go without it.

I ran to the stoa, down the corridor, and into the girls’ room, ready to grapple.

Diotima stood in the middle of the room, a knife in her right hand, the point red with blood. But for the knife she was naked. The girls in the room were backed up in their beds. They were the ones screaming.

Diotima pointed with her left hand. “He went that way.”

Exactly the way I’d come from. No, that was impossible. I ran out, looked around quickly, and realized the intruder, whoever he was, must have turned left and headed toward the river. I instantly knew what he’d done. He’d entered the sanctuary by walking down the riverbed, where the banks hid him from view, then climbed up when he was closest to the stoa.

I padded softly along the top bank, in the hope of catching him. Well ahead I saw a silhouette scramble up the gentle slope that rose behind the sanctuary. I picked up to a run. He saw me and ran too, over the top of the hill that separated the sanctuary from the bay before I did, and then he was out of sight.

I stopped. Diotima caught up. She said, “He’s hiding behind the bushes on the hill. I saw him bend over, and he’s moving right to left.”

If this was the man who’d shot at us the other day, then we were terribly exposed where we were, in this moonlight. I said, “Does he have a bow?”

“If he does, I didn’t see it,” Diotima said. “But then, I wasn’t exactly looking. He crept into the room and leaned over me. I don’t know what made me wake up, but I did. I opened my eyes, and I was staring straight into his.”

“So it was your scream that woke me.”

“No, it was his. Good thing I keep a knife beside my head. I think I only sliced him, though. If that’s our bowman, he can still shoot.”

“Diotima, go back to the sanctuary. I can stalk him.”

“Not with this much moonlight. I’ve got a better plan. I’ll divert his attention while you rush him.”

“I said to run back to the sanctuary.”

“No.” Diotima turned away to run up the slope, not toward the target but well to his right. She made no attempt to hide herself. If the intruder was watching, he couldn’t miss her.

This wasn’t the time to argue, but I could see I’d have to deal with her lack of obedience later. I moved as quickly as I could to the left. This put me behind the creeper. When I felt I was far enough behind, I turned and ran up the slope. For the first time, I looked for my target.

I couldn’t see him, but I could see a clump of bushes that swayed
against
the breeze.

Our creepy character had his eyes fixed on Diotima. I was relieved to see he held no bow. But that was my future wife he’d crept up to in her bed, and for that reason alone I was going to kill him.

He was crouched behind a bush, almost kneeling and with his hands on the shrubbery to create a gap to peer through. I knew now why he’d slowed down. The soil here was extremely soft and my feet sank in, the one advantage being that it made me silent. I bent low and walked rapidly. Now I was above and behind him, and I crouched to watch. He was a man I guessed to be thirty—certainly older than me. He had short hair and wore an exomis. He didn’t have the look of a highwayman. He might be an artisan, or he might be the son of a wealthy man. Or he might be a well-paid assassin.

Diotima stood on the crest. How she had the nerve I don’t know, knowing a stranger was watching—maybe the one who’d shot at us the day before. She was exposed as a silhouette. A silhouette with wide hips and perfect breasts.

That got our attention, both mine and the intruder’s.

I had to tear my gaze away from my fiancée—swearing as I did that I’d do something about that beautiful woman that night, no matter what Sabina had to say about it—and turned back to the stranger. He was still staring at her. There was no bow, but
hanging at his side was a short sword. That was an expensive piece of equipment.

From my crouch I began running, then straightened up as I got faster.

He heard me coming. He turned, saw me, and gave a startled cry. Then he drew the sword.

I dove into him. Hard. My shoulder went into his chest, and he grunted as I wrapped my arms around him and we both went flying downhill in an untidy ball. Somewhere on the way down, he lost the sword. I knocked my head on something and saw stars. We struggled to strike at each other as we rolled down the slope and onto the hard dirt.

The gravel stopped our movement. We finished with him on top of me, legs straddling me. I couldn’t get up, or get out of the way. Then something large and brown seemed to descend from the sky and whacked him in the side of the head. His eyes rolled up, and he slid sideways off me to reveal Diotima standing behind him, holding in her right hand a large and rather nasty-looking lump of wood, which was now spotted with blood and a few tufts of hair.

She tossed the wood aside. “Are you all right?” she asked me.

“Never been better,” I groaned.

The same couldn’t be said of the stranger. His movements were confused, and his arms and legs jerked about. As we watched he rolled over onto his front, pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, and then threw up. He was heartily sick for some moments, then with a final heave he fell back to a sitting position and stared hatred at us.

“What did you do that for?” he said in an aggrieved tone.

“Who are you?” I countered.

“My name is Melo.”

“What are you doing out here, Melo?” I asked.

“I don’t have to tell you,” he said.

“I’ll just hit him again, shall I?” Diotima suggested.

Melo glared at Diotima, eye to eye, but then his gaze traveled south. So did mine.

“Diotima, you’re dressed like Gaïs,” I told her.

“What?” Diotima said, confused. “But Gaïs doesn’t wear—” Diotima suddenly realized she might be missing something, such as clothes. She blushed. “Whoops.”

Diotima ran back to the sanctuary. I heard the loud voices of Doris and Gaïs as they calmed the girls, the deeper and even louder voice of Zeke, demanding to know what was going on, and Diotima’s equally loud voice doing some quick explaining.

“I’ll ask you again,” I said to Melo. “What were you doing?”

“I was looking for a girl,” Melo admitted.

This Melo must be one very sick character. Whoever had taken Allike and Ophelia must have crept into the sanctuary, exactly as Melo had done.

He must have read my thoughts, because he said in a defensive voice, “Look here, it’s not what you think it is. The girl I’m looking for is missing. Her name is Ophelia.” He put his head in his hands. “Did you have to hit me so hard?” he moaned as Diotima returned, now dressed in a chiton that she’d thrown on. She was barefoot, and her hair was still in the single braid she put it in for sleep.

“Who
are
you, Melo?”

“I’m Melo, as I said, the son of Thessalus. I’m the man who’s betrothed to marry Ophelia.”

This was the first I’d heard of a marriage!

“What are you doing here?” I said warily. “Why did you creep up on my fiancée?”

“I wasn’t creeping up on her. When I saw, through the window, someone in that bed, I thought Ophelia must have returned. I was happy! I crept in to see if it was her.”

“Staring through a window at sleeping children isn’t exactly a good way to prove your fine intentions.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Twenty-nine. I’ll be thirty in three months.”

That was the usual age. As a man approached thirty, pressure mounted on him to marry. Melo might be almost thirty, but his actions and manner made him seem much younger. I wondered if he might be a trifle simple.

Diotima had brought back a cup of water from the sanctuary. She gave it to Melo. He took a mouthful, swirled it in his mouth, then spat out the sand and grit and leftover vomit that was in there. He took another mouthful, and this he drank.

“You’re in search of a girl you barely know,” I said as he drank.

“That doesn’t matter. She’s my responsibility.”

“She’s her father’s problem until you’re married,” I said.

“Have you met her father?” he demanded.

“Yes.”

“Well, then.”

“All right, point taken,” I conceded. Thea—or was it Doris?—had said the same thing yesterday. Polonikos, the father of Ophelia, seemed to make a bad impression on everyone he met.

“I’m her only hope,” Melo said. “Besides, the way I see it, soon I’m to be married. That makes me a man with responsibilities. I’m not going to shirk my duties just because they’re not official yet.”

This was so close to how I felt about Diotima that I could only agree with him. Suddenly Melo seemed a lot more mature. I switched my evaluation of him from simple to just plain dumb.

Diotima said, “So you’re a concerned friend, are you? If you want us to believe any of this, you’ll have to tell us everything you know.”

“Why? Who are you, anyway?” he said.

I explained who we were, what our mission was, and finished, “So you see, you’re not the only one looking for Ophelia. Are you from around here?”

“My family has an estate not far from Brauron. My father lives in Athens, of course.”

That was normal. Wealthy landowners always kept a city house and lived there as much as possible; anyone who spent all their time in the country was dead to civilized life. Besides, the agora at Athens was the only place to hear the latest rumors and stay close to the political action.