A PIG IN THE ROSES
Peter Alan Orchard
Smashwords Edition Copyright 2011 Peter Alan Orchard
For more information on the author, visit
http://www.peteralanorchard.net
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PROLOGUE
Over the rock-strewn country of Attika, over the goat-tracks, the fresh vine-shoots and the dew-misted carpet of spring flowers, hung the stench of destruction. Smoke rose from abandoned farms, from wheat fields torched and left to smoulder in the dry breeze, from olive-trees laboriously hacked to the ground and turned into bonfires. A Spartan guard, rough-bearded and uneasy away from home, rested his heavy round shield on the hacked stump of an olive tree. He spat into a wild rosebush and peered into the night. Behind him the marauding Spartan army, orderly in its leather tents, comforted by its iron helmets, its scarlet cloaks and murdering spears, grumbled and snorted in its sleep.
Through the cold air came the crunch and swish of bare feet running through brush and scrub. Pink petals fell from trampled rockroses, stones flew and bounced. The scent of thyme and sage, crushed underfoot, billowed in the air, mingling with the tang of wood smoke and salt from the sea. Voices argued briefly, panting, then the running began again, feet pounding into the darkness.
Further to the south-east, the sea-breeze rattled the door of a coastal farmhouse and the farmer Sosigenes twitched in his sleep. Under a sheepskin fretted with holes his grasshopper legs shuffled. His nose wrinkled at a familiar scent, a dangerous scent, and his dreams darkened. He snored and turned over.
Across the farm and down to the sea the grass whispered in the blue-dark of early morning. From the water’s edge below Aïxone village the scent of mud and salt fish curled over the roofs of the squat village houses and out into the fields beyond.
A sound outside the door. Bare feet drumming towards the house - no, past and across the field. Sosigenes sat up, stark awake.
‘Themisto!’
‘All the gods - what now?‘ Sosigenes’ wife rolled sleepily onto a sharp elbow, joints creaking, eyes gummed with sleep. ‘The goats again?’
‘Listen, woman! It was men’s feet I heard outside, not goats. There were voices. And I’m sure I can smell smoke.’
‘At this hour! Sparta already, eh?’
Sosigenes rolled stiffly from his bed and turned a grey-whiskered ear to the door. There was no more sound outside. ‘No jokes. The Spartans have hated us for generations and will spare no-one caught out here in the country. Perikles himself said it was time to leave. No point staying on here alone to get hacked to death.’
Themisto sighed and fell back onto her pallet . ‘So it’s up to the city tomorrow then, husband. Athens at last.’
Sosigenes gave her a thin smile, invisible in the darkness. ‘Today. Get up and help load the cart.’
Three days passed, three more days of rumour and gossip, of country folk sucked into the city, of fear prising open the grasping fingers of home and habit. As the third night paled into the dew-sweet staleness of early dawn, the stonemason Makron leaned against a damp wall, huffed into his hand and sniffed. Too much wine, too much food. Should have gone home. He belched, swayed into a walking position and wandered a few steps further. Damn him. Damn all brothers. At the top of an alley somewhere in the Potters’ Quarter he heard a gasp, then a sudden hush of voices. There was muttering from around the corner, urgent, almost in panic. Makron inched forward to investigate.
They attacked him at speed, rushing him off his feet and onto the cobbles. One of them hit him hard on the back of the head. A blade flashed cold in the brittle early sunlight. A voice screamed like a girl‘s, No! No! Not like that! Then they were gone, leaving the fading echo of bare feet running, the rattle of pebbles. Again there was silence.
His hand to the back of his throbbing skull, Makron sat up carefully and thought, Why me? I was just going home, doing no harm to anyone. He shook his head to clear it, shuffled to his feet and peered around the corner. All clear, thank the gods. .
In the next street a dog started barking and a sharp voice with a foreign accent swore at it. Athens was waking up. To the crows with them, Makron thought sourly. Must go home.
CHAPTER 1
For a few days the wind had blown steadily off the Aegean. Protected by the fast armed triremes of the Athenian navy, merchant ships, the first of spring, began to dock at Peiraieus, the commercial port of Athens. They came from the grain ports of Egypt and the Bosporos, from the allied islands of the east Aegean, from the rugged coast of Thrace to the north.
Diokles of Athens, merchant, opportunist, father and citizen, sucker-up of knowledge and occasional nuisance, leaned against the side of a squat freighter hired in Miletos, pushed stubby fingers impatiently through curly black hair and scanned the harbour. The sea-wind cut through his woollen tunic and chilled a body softened only a little by home cooking and sitting too long at bankers’ tables. Behind him a shouted order came to lower the sail. The helmsman worked long steering oars like a madman, bringing the ship around, and a small boat bobbed out of the main harbour to pilot the Milesian in. Painted marble eyes, one on each side of the prow of the freighter, seemed to watch it coming.
The Athenian navy was everywhere. One side of the harbour was packed with bobbing triremes, trim and deadly, each with a spar for a proud square sail, three banks of oars for speed and a ram beneath the prow to crush enemy timber amidships. More were out on the Aegean, carrying generals to negotiate treaties, chasing pirates or escorting grain ships from Egypt or south from Byzantion.
In the clear morning air, Diokles’s inquisitive grey eyes took stock of the figures scattered along the quay: small traders, prostitutes, slaves, customs officers. He rubbed his hands, keen to be ashore, ready for the brisk, familiar walk home to Athens, bursting as usual to talk about the voyage. The new cloth from Miletos, strong but as delicate as a butterfly's wing, was his best purchase. Wine, iron tools, copper and rope, too, would be unloaded once the customs had taken their usual cut of the profit.
Too big a cut, of course, but there was little point getting angry about it. A hot head never made a good merchant and Diokles, a shrewd and compact sprinter in his athletic youth, knew the value of cool judgment in pursuit of a prize. He reached into his tunic, hefted two bags of coins and grinned with satisfaction. One bag contained the cash from his normal trading, surplus to the new goods about to be unloaded. The other contained the result of a deal made on the far side of the Aegean on behalf of an old friend whose interests did not include risking travel by sea. For Diokles, the pleasure of coming off best in a complex and enjoyable bout of negotiation in a foreign port had almost outweighed his delight in taking the money.
'Master!' As Diokles bounded from ship to quay, the bandy-legged Karian slave who ran his warehouse in Peiraieus ran up to receive orders.
'Work to do, Margis,' Diokles said. 'The wine in the hold goes to Theagenes - he knows it's coming and how much, so if there's a cupful less I'll have your thumbs. The Chian jars in the sand ballast are for Herakleides. Everything else is mine. Put samples on the quay as usual and the rest in storage until I find buyers. Be careful with the cloth. My father, is he at home?’
‘No, master. He sailed yesterday, to Egypt. A new opportunity, he said, corn freighters. And your mother is out with the ladies.’ He sidled closer. ‘Your uncle Makron has been drinking again, Hylas says, miserable drinking. He was carried home twice in the last few days.’
‘Corn, yes. We will need all the corn we can get if the war lasts.’ Diokles rubbed his chin. And no need to visit his mother either. Not if she was with the ladies, a determined crew of gossips amongst which his intelligent, wispy mother was a prime mover. Relieved of family duty, in the Peiraieus at least, he dismissed Margis with a wave and concentrated on home.
The Potters' Quarter began at the corner of the Agora where the Panathenaic Way passed the Painted Colonnade with its shaded panel pictures, became a normal road and made a run for the Double Gates. Alongside the road the Quarter broke like a wave climbing a pebble beach as it spread towards the city wall. By now the sunlight had reached even the narrower alleys of the Quarter and was sliding along Artemis Street, warming the plastered walls. Halfway up the street, in the women’s room of a small but well-appointed house, Diokles’ wife Helike ran a purposeful brown finger along the edge of a shelf. She held the finger up to the nearest window and squinted at it.
‘Kharis!’
A limber girl with a lively expression and the close-cropped hair of a slave peered around the door. ‘Mistress?’
Helike waved the grubby finger. ‘Not good enough for the master.’
‘No, mistress. It will be cleaned immediately. Hylas - ’
‘No, Kharis. You. Hylas can sweep the courtyard. And tell him to feed the master’s carrier pigeon. It just flew in, so he’ll be home soon.’
Knuckling sleep from her eyes, Kharis fled down the steps to the ground floor and vanished into the slaves’ quarters in search of a broom and cloth.
Helike reproached herself. Her hasty young husband was overdue after a long voyage and she missed his inquisitive, windburnt face, but Kharis was a bright young Karian with good Greek, not to be spoken to like an idiot.
To distract herself she cast expert hazel eyes around the room. Clothing lay flung over a decorated linen-chest. A double flute lay in a corner alongside a pair of Persian slippers, left there after her daughter Xanthippe's dancing practice. A huddled shape on one of the beds, recognisable by its dishevelled greying hair, was the nurse Gorgo, her uncle Makron’s woman. Gorgo was ill again, sucking a leathery thumb in her sleep, her fingers curled alongside her hawklike Phrygian nose. On the farm where she grew up, Helike would just have walked outside and picked the right herbs to heal her. But that was before her parents died, before Diokles, before this coming war.
And now her uncle had started drinking again like a fool, a thing he had never done in Aïxone. At least there he only let himself get stupidly drunk once a year at the time of the first new wine, but most of the village men did that. Now it was different. Today he had woken the household at dawn by shouting and banging on the street door, vomited in the courtyard, thrown water over his head, gathered his tools and stomped grimly back out into the morning.
Helike shook her head and went to the top of the steps to call to Kharis again, but there was more shouting and the door onto the street began to rattle. As she bustled down the steps into the courtyard, Hylas appeared from nowhere to open the door. The young man made calming gestures to the visitor, stooped to catch a few words in Karian, then turned to face Helike, his broad, open face distraught.
‘Mistress, it’s one of the slaves from the pottery shop, Hipponikos’s. Something’s happened! You must come!’
Helike turned on her heel and shouted upstairs. ‘Kharis, look after the children and wait for the master. Gorgo can look after herself. Hylas, come with me.’
CHAPTER 2
Along the road to Athens, a narrow corridor protected from attack with walls on each side all the way from Peiraieus to the city gate, travellers were streaming in both directions. Peddlers carried trinkets to sell in the smarter streets. Guards dispatched to watch their sections of the walls, mostly green lads in their first year of service, trudged in the opposite direction, spear and shield in hand. With luck, they would be decently trained before Sparta moved from torching crops and skirmishing to real combat.
Diokles’ route home took him along the edge of the Agora, the central marketplace, and by the time he reached it the sun was already high. Temples, courts, fountains, shrines and colonnades formed a wide square. To the south reared Ares’ Hill, the place of trial and judgement for murderers, a long mound of rocks and heat-stunted shrubbery. Above it lounged the temple of Athene, red, blue and gold on white marble, proud and glistening on the Akropolis hill, and below it the frenzied lower world of Athenian commerce and officialdom: the tables of bankers and market officials, the public mint and a well house beyond.
Today the Agora was its usual multi-coloured shipwreck of stalls for jewellers, leather-workers, purveyors of fish, pans or herbs. Women selling greens shrieked at men selling sausages. Inspectors in clean tunics tested the weight of coins or the number of nuts in a bowl. Slaves lingered on errands. Courtesans lounged across jewellers' counters, gossiped and dabbed perfume behind their ears.
In a cleared space a dozen or so young cavalry recruits practised inexpert mounts and dismounts under the disapproving eye of an officer who stood well back from the dust kicked up by hooves, boots and dropped weapons. At a stall not far away, small boys tried on helmets too big for them.
Everything seemed, for the moment, eerily normal, yet it was not. The tough, humourless and superior Spartans, long ago shocked by revolt into turning their whole community into a barracks, had simmered for years within their borders, afraid to slacken their grip on a beaten population but longing to break out and put a torch to rich, meddling, democratic Athens. Now the time had come. When Diokles left the city on this first voyage of the year, the streets were already filling with the pugnacious faces of villagers drawn from the countryside into their mother city for safety.
In the warm breeze, the leaves of plane trees swished like wavelets on a pebble shore. It still seemed strange on such a day, warm, clear and fragrant with spring, to be thinking of war.
Distracted briefly by the scent of fried onions drifting from a stall, Diokles almost walked past a group of stonecutters working on the Altar of the Twelve Gods, but stopped short when he noticed Helike’s uncle amongst them.
Makron was roughly shaping a stone block with a flat chisel and a heavy mallet. A thin fringe of yellow-grey hair, once red, separated his hat from his sunburnt neck. Diokles watched him slip the new block between the old, giving the gods a fraction more of their pride back, then leaned beside him, one hand on Makron’s sweating back. 'I thought you were still working on graves, uncle. You were up at the cemetery when I left.'
Makron squinted into the sun. 'I finished with them two days ago. Next year there may be more days' work in it for me.' One hand knuckling the small of his back, he jerked his head towards the altar. 'This should have been repaired right after the Persians left. The gods won't look after us if we don't look after them, but people forget. So another war comes and we need them, so it gets done.'
Diokles ran a thumb appreciatively down the edge of a fresh block. ‘Careful work, uncle, and skilled,’ he said. ’It needs a man with a good eye and a clear head. You don’t look at your brightest this morning. Is there something I should know?’
Makron grunted and turned to face him. ‘Just a sore head. A bit of an accident.‘ He lifted his hat. ‘There, someone hit me last night. Satisfied?’
Diokles raised an eyebrow and spread his hands.
’All right, Diokles,’ Makron went on, ’so I’ve sunk my wine with less water lately and I’ll tell you why - Sosigenes is living with Themisto’s daughter at the bakery. We’ll be at each other’s throats again, like the old days. Hah! Who needs brothers?‘ He put on his hat and took up his mallet again, pointing it at a small bundle in Diokles' hand, gifts for the children. 'Let me finish this now. Go and give whatever that is to my niece, or she’ll boil over.'
Diokles left Makron and followed the broad paved road leading to the main city gate. Beyond the great double gate lay the ancient cemetery full of heroes, the holy groves and streams of the Academy, and the road which led ecstatic worshippers every year to the Mysteries at Eleusis, next year perhaps with his wife amongst them.
Some way short of the gate Diokles turned into the intimacy of his own neighbourhood, a familiar maze of irregular walls and dusty alleys starkly blocked out in sunlight and shadow. A breeze danced around the narrow streets, carrying the scent of thyme and rigani, of olive oil, leeks and warm dust. His own modest house lay close by, and he almost believed he could hear his son Euphemos playing knucklebones with his sister Xanthippe, muffled but indignant squealing in the shaded courtyard.
Upstairs in the women's quarters Helike would be waiting for him, maybe in one of those playfully disapproving moods he always enjoyed. He would tell the children about the fish that skimmed like silver coins across the water west of Samos. Smiling at the thought, he turned towards Hipponikos’ shop, further into the Potters‘ Quarter. His visit would not take long, then he and Helike would have the rest of the afternoon.
Diokles spent only minutes at the house, then left in a flat panic. What was it Kharis had said? Something about danger, and the mistress, and Hylas going, too, to the pottery shop. Before long he was running hard, dodging through the narrow, twisting alleys and tiny squares of the Potter’s District, the blank walls and blind doors of the houses mocking his frenzy with their calm indifference.
Panting, Diokles pulled up at Hipponikos‘ shop and scratched at the door. There was no reply, so he pulled it open and went in. Inside, the walls were lined as usual with winejars, bowls of various sizes and delicate two-handled cups in various stages of completion. There was no-one in the workshop: no slaves, no family, nobody.
'Hipponikos!' No answer. Diokles went through to the courtyard. From the broken branch of a small tree a mask of spectacular ugliness hung, frightening off the malevolent spirits who ruined firing. A young slave, small and beardless, sat in the far corner, watching the kiln intently like a guard over a prisoner, his mouth moving in a nervous repetitive chant. He rose and half-ran towards Diokles, shepherding him out into the street.
'Master - down - fountain. I -' The slave fell quiet, his eyes everywhere but on Diokles. 'Go, master, look.'
Almost defeated by the boy's poor Greek and heavy Syrian accent, Diokles followed his pointing arm towards a small drinking fountain on the next corner. In front of its rough miniature portico a hunched and silent group had gathered, backs towards him, looking down. Helike was there - praise all the gods, he thought, she’s safe - and Hylas with her. The others were all men, the tallest of them Hipponikos, with his broad shoulders and dust in his hair.
Diokles hurried up and caught Hipponikos by the arm. 'There are customers outside the shop, my friend. Skylax is there alone. What's wrong?'
Hipponikos was an old friend of Diokles, big and solid, with a mat of hair like rain-battered wheat and a surprisingly delicate way with a brush for a man whose hands were the size of most people’s feet. He freed his arm without a word, moved aside and let him in. Diokles joined the silent group and stared with them. On the ground, sprinkled with clear water blowing from the tiny fountain, lay the twisted angular body of the farmer Sosigenes.
The group stood around the body for a moment, unwilling to touch it. Then someone sneezed, a sign of good luck, and the atmosphere broke.
'Who is he?' one of the men asked of no-one in particular.
'Some slave.' The young man who answered was slender but athletic, dressed in a linen tunic and short cloak of the best silk. Clearly fresh from the public bath-house, he carried a small round flask of anointing oil on his belt. 'No-one important.'
'Important to someone,' said Helike quietly.
The group looked at her, caught by the soft certainty of her voice, a woman‘s voice amongst men.
'He was Sosigenes, my uncle’s older brother. He owned land in Aïxone. He stayed there as long as he could and only came to Athens a few days ago.'
'Stubborn old fool.' The young athlete looked down at him.
Helike looked away with tears in her eyes, and Diokles gave the youth a sharp look. 'There's nothing wrong with loyalty to your home village. You people cling to your fashionable suburbs like geckos to a warm wall.’
Without a word, the young man turned his back on Diokles and walked away, leaving a sweet but astringent fragrance behind. His slave, a small but stocky young man, tattooed and sandy-haired enough to be Thracian, detached himself from the group and followed at a respectful distance. The group of onlookers began to drift away, some sprinkling water over themselves, washing away their fear of death.
'None of them saw anything.' Hipponikos jerked his head in the direction of the vanishing youth. 'That one's off to find his boyfriend, no doubt. A strange bunch, the aristocrats.'
Sosigenes’ dead face stared up at them, its lines fixed in a grimace of pain and bewilderment. A fly landed unhindered on the old man’s open left eye. Disconcerted, Diokles nudged the body with his foot and it rolled over.
‘Oh!‘ Helike covered her mouth with her hand and backed away. Out of the farmer's neck, close to the base of the skull, a short length of metal stuck out. Diokles knelt, reached out his hand and drew the metal out slowly, a fine punch used by a sculptor or mason for delicate work. Its thin iron blade had been driven violently upwards, deep into Sosigenes' brain.
Diokles wiped the punch distractedly on a tuft of grass and weeds, but could think of nothing to do with it afterwards and Hipponikos took it gently from his fingers. The potter stuck it in his belt, shook his head and breathed deeply. 'May the Furies hunt the man who did this to the end of his days.'
’They will,’ Helike said, grim-faced. ’Oh, they will!’ Pulling distractedly at her copper hair, she turned away from the scene and strode for home.
Diokles knelt and touched the dead face, still warm but damp from the fountain. As he moved Sosigenes’ head away from the water, the mouth fell open and Diokles gasped. 'Look at this!'
They were alone now in the alley. Hipponikos bent his knees and peered down. On the old man's tongue lay an obol, the small coin traditionally placed there as payment for the spirit's boat journey over the River Styx. 'That,’ said Diokles, ‘was put there by whoever killed him, who certainly kept a cool head. If it had been Sosigenes' small change, it would have been safely under his tongue, not on top. You know how these country people are.' He looked up at Hipponikos. 'Whoever killed Sosigenes must have been cold to do such a thing and then wait afterwards to pay the ferryman.'
Hipponikos ran a massive hand across his forehead, then wiped the sweat from it onto a tunic red with clay-dust. 'Helike, where was Sosigenes staying?'
'With his wife’s daughter, Myrrhine. Married to Simon the baker.‘ Helike suddenly clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide. ’His wife - what am I thinking of? Someone must tell Themisto!'
Hipponikos started back to the shop. 'You guard the body, Diokles. I'll send Skylax. Taking a message is one of the things he’s good at.’
Diokles picked Sosigenes’ cap out of a corner and laid it over the old man's empty, staring eyes.
CHAPTER 3
Themisto's daughter Myrrhine, baker and seller of bread, lived with her husband Simon and small son only three streets away. Beginning from the moment Skylax arrived until late afternoon the bakery was scoured clean of its hot and dusty energy, hollowed out, cooled and filled again with death, its only sound the thin keening of the hunched Themisto and Myrrhine, spare and tearful.
By evening Sosigenes' body was lying neatly on a bed, shrouded in funereal white. Spring flowers and herbs from the small garden were piled on the corpse. Someone with no flowers to give had taken down the olive branch from the street door and propped it at the foot of the bed.
'It doesn't matter to me about the war now,' Themisto said in a flat voice, looking down at Sosigenes. 'My husband is gone already.'
Diokles, his hands still damp from the purifying water-bowl by the door, was suddenly almost ashamed of being alive. He could think of nothing to say. Helike silently wrapped her arms around Themisto’s bony and shaking body. She looked down at the old woman's shorn head, at the clipped locks of hair lying amongst the flowers. Myrrhine had found black clothing for Themisto to wear, and she wore it, but it did not hang right.
The old woman looked up. 'If it had been the war, it would have been better,' she said. 'Like this... nothing.'
'After the grieving is over,' Helike said softly, 'you will be content some day. I think of my mother and father as still alive in my memory, not dead at all. We are both country girls, Themisto. We know how to survive.'
Themisto's eyes hardened. 'In three days we must bury him. Murdered, but who by? I have no-one to accuse, no-one to walk up to and say "You, son of somebody, from somewhere, killed my husband, Sosigenes son of Kleinias, of Aïxone village".' She glanced around the room as if seeing it for the first time. ’Where is Makron? Where is his brother?’
Helike and Diokles glanced at each other and Diokles said, ’When we told him he said nothing, simply went out into the town. Maybe -’
‘Maybe nothing.‘ Themisto paced up and down beside the bed, then turned her back and left the room. The aroma of the morning's bread wafted through the door and mingled with the scent of herbs, but there would be none baked for tomorrow.
Helike and Diokles walked home through the darkening streets, with Kharis and Hylas holding torches bought at a bar. A group of boys passed them in their best tunics and cloaks, heads inexpertly garlanded, escorting a very young and tipsy flute-girl to a party. An old woman screeched and a dog shot out of a doorway, followed by a handful of soil. Two rats fought desperately over a chicken head.
The scarlet light of the torches flickered on blind house fronts and the shadows were shaking, full of ghosts. When they reached home, Helike stopped in the porch and took a torch from Hylas, sending the slaves ahead into the house. She gave Diokles an inquiring look.
'If the murderer is found, could you help?'
'As a witness, yes,' Diokles said. 'But it is the job of Sosigenes’ family to bring his killer to trial. There has to be a man to speak for her before the court, but it must also be a relative. Since they had no sons and her brother died of the fever, it will be Makron, or her daughter’s husband.'
'She will want her day up on Ares’ Hill, before the judges.' Helike's mouth turned down at the corners. 'She won't let it rest.'
'Then she, or her family, must find the murderer.'
CHAPTER 4
'Don't lean on the pole, you young idiot - you'll have the awning down!'
The barber Kleitias, already warm from the morning sun and now indignant in his neat brown tunic, stood in his booth at the edge of the Agora and waved his bony arms at a boy, the gesture of a market gardener shooing a neighbour's pig out of her vegetable patch. The boy backed off and sauntered away, knowing that Kleitias, not the most athletic of men and long past the bloom of youth, would not be chasing him. Kleitias glared at him, feverishly working a pair of scissors in a cutting motion.
There had been a constant flow of customers, though, most of them new. Smart young men, freshly signed up into the cavalry, wanted their hair fashionably short. Farmers, sent by their wives, left the choice to him, haggled over the price and gave him small sticky coins from under their tongues.
Two tall young girls with Lydian accents had just left arm in arm, both now dyed an unlikely blonde, cheeks tastefully rouged with alkanet. Kleitias watched them appreciatively, bright eyes narrowed, until they disappeared into the mêlée, and turned back to find Diokles sitting on his stool.
'Sometimes I wish I was ten years younger,' he said.
'Take one of those to bed and you would be,' said Diokles with feeling. 'And ten years older in the morning.' He nodded to the other side of the Agora. 'Over there sits a banker I have to argue with. I need a trim first, Kleitias, but just the beard. Gorgo is ill again and my Helike is out of patience, so your sex life is of no interest today.'
The corner of Kleitias' humorous mouth twitched faintly. 'You youngsters have no sympathy.' He tilted Diokles' head back and went to work with the scissors around the edges of his wiry black beard. 'Before you start talking about the price of corn, I hear there was a killing in the Potters' Quarter.'
'Yesterday, and it was my wife’s uncle.' Diokles had no need to ask how Kleitias had heard the news, because barbers learnt everything before the rest of humanity. Kleitias, as an outsider, needed a citizen to sponsor his residence in Athens and, as that sponsor, Diokles often benefited from early gossip.
‘What?’ Kleitias stopped clipping, his mouth open in shock. ’Not Makron?’
‘No, his older brother, Sosigenes. He was a farmer down in Aïxone, next to Helike’s parents’ land.’
'Who did it, Diokles?'
'No-one knows.'
Kleitias sighed. 'Old scores get settled when a war starts.' Silenced for a moment, he stared without interest through the market stalls towards a crossing where a corn-dealer was arguing violently with a market inspector.
'Farmers thrive on hating their neighbours,' Diokles said. 'But most of them survive. I know no-one in Aïxone who hated Sosigenes enough.'
'There was family? Someone to look after his wife?'
'His wife came to Athens with him to stay at her daughter's house. There’s no son.' Diokles twisted on the stool and looked Kleitias in the eye. 'Why should anyone in Athens decide to kill him? He and his wife came to Athens only a few days ago, up the Peiraieus road with all their household goods on a cart. Sosigenes could hardly have made that deep an enemy here in the few hours he stayed alive. The brothers irritated each other beyond reason, but no-one really hated him.'
Kleitias turned Diokles around and pointed over the young man's shoulder to the new temple of Hephaistos, solid and elegant on the Agora Hill. His hand made a wide sweep around the public buildings, resting on the Akropolis. 'Athens is rich, Diokles. It makes people, citizens, even tax-paying old Corinthians like me, even slaves, expect things. Some are lucky, but others just make enemies. Are you sure he knew no-one here who hated him? Most farmers do, and it’s usually other farmers.’
‘No.’ Diokles sighed. ‘I can’t be sure, but he hardly came to Athens at all. Said he had no need, living near Peiraieus and on the eastern side at that.’ He scratched the back of his head in frustration. ‘Kleitias, somebody has to do something about this, somebody has to at least try to find the truth. Themisto’s family stay in the bakery and Makron just works. It can’t be right to leave it so…unfinished.’
‘If you want to help, why not ask some questions? Go round talking to people up the street where he was staying. Somebody will have something to say - after all, this is Athens. Everyone talks.‘
‘There’s a better reason for asking questions. Maybe someone saw the murderer. Nobody said so at the time, but who knows?’
‘Be careful,’ Kleitias said. ‘Your curiosity will get the better of you one day. Talk about something else now, because this character is curious, too.’
The corn-dealer had given up arguing with the inspector and was treating a small group of the curious to gestures of deprivation and misery. A man in cavalry uniform detached himself from the crowd with a dismissive wave of the arm and marched towards Kleitias’ booth.
'Here comes my friend Aristarkhos,' Kleitias muttered behind his hand. 'Lives up there in Skambonidai, so he has money. Aristarkhos is a very close friend of Perikles himself. He also knows another merchant, your friend Pamphilos.'
A man with contacts. Diokles’ enquiring grey eyes looked Aristarkhos up and down briefly, from the leather thigh-boots to the gleaming breastplate, to the helmet balanced in the crook of a muscled arm. The man's face was weather-beaten and inscrutable. Behind him a lean boy with curly dark hair appeared and hovered on the balls of his feet, sweating, perhaps fresh from training. His face was an immature version of Aristarkhos’ own, so this presumably was his son.
Kleitias beamed. 'I’m nearly finished, Aristarkhos. This is Diokles from the Potters’ Quarter, a young man with a future.’
At first Aristarkhos looked through Diokles as if he was a wicker fence obscuring something more interesting. Then he focused on the merchant’s homespun garments and a faint curl appeared in his upper lip. ‘A merchant no-one knows, from a disreputable district.’
Diokles’ beard jutted in anger. ‘Merchants like us feed you, cavalryman. When the Spartans burn the fields and cut down the trees, then you’ll take food from the likes of me and be grateful.’
‘The Potters’ Quarter,’ Aristarkhos repeated calmly. ‘The only men worth knowing from that district are already buried in the cemetery outside the Double Gates.’ He tucked a stool underneath him and turned his back. Kleitias signalled briefly, don’t start anything. The boy had already disappeared without a word - father and son had simply not acknowledged each other.
Simmering, Diokles made Aristarkhos wait until every last hair in his beard was perfectly trimmed, then rose and paid Kleitias with slow courtesy.
'Come and eat this evening,' he said. 'I’ll send for you. And for Pamphilos, of course. I have something to give him.‘
'You know where I live, Diokles.' Kleitias watched Diokles exchange a polite greeting with the inspector then, intent on the distant bankers' tables, pass the booksellers' stalls without breaking step. He reminded himself to lend the intelligent but ill-read young merchant one of his books: something practical, perhaps a herbal to practise on the sick Gorgo with. One day, he thought sadly, he might persuade that inquisitive young man to buy his own.
The chatter of business still rippled through the Agora like a winter stream over stones. Out of the crowd a small boy caught Diokles’ eye, the self-possessed son of one of his richer clients, homeward bound after school with an elderly slave at his heels. Diokles smiled diplomatically at the child but was thinking instead of the bile-ridden father.
Phileas, who owned land all over Attika, had recently taken a poorer but tougher neighbour to court there over the ownership of two olive trees and a stretch of ruined field wall the length of Kleitias' booth. He had lost. Derkaios, the fox-faced neighbour, had rushed across the court, stuck his toothless face two inches from Phileas' and shrieked with laughter. Out in the villages life was measured in such victories, life-long hatreds nurtured over corners of land too small to grow a vine or plant a tree, blood spilt two generations after the theft of a year-old goat. Had something like this happened between Makron and Sosigenes?
His mind still on the murder, Diokles spent most of a warm but strangely ominous afternoon in the colonnades, passing the time of day with bankers and other merchants. Finally the moneychangers' slaves began to fold tables away and Diokles rose stiffly to his feet, tired of the day.
Sosigenes was still on his mind. He realised that anyone who intended to kill the old farmer must have known not only that he was coming to Athens, but where in Athens he would go first. Sosigenes, slowed down like a corn-ship by his laden cart, was as suspicious as any other farmer in town, and nervous about townsfolk. He would have allowed no stranger to follow him too closely. He was killed, Diokles decided, by someone who knew him well enough to know where his daughter lived and exactly where Sosigenes himself would be at midday on his first day as a city-dweller. Someone who lay in wait.
Old scores, Kleitias had said. Something, perhaps curiosity, perhaps a sense of duty towards Helike's dead uncle, made Diokles turn towards the road through Melite and behind the Agora Hill, where Sosigenes would have led his cart on the last stretch of his journey to Myrrhine’s.
The road was narrow without being quite an alley, letting more light into the houses along its route than usual, and ran in a wavering curve. After Melite the road opened out briefly and straightened before narrowing again and winding into the Potters' Quarter. Behind the upper window of a house ahead of Diokles a jar crashed to the floor, then came a slap and a squeal. A woman’s voice shattered what was left of the young merchant’s train of thought: ‘To the crows, child, you’re worse than the enemy. A pig in the roses, that’s what you are, a pig in the roses!’
Helike's father used to call me that, Diokles remembered. and he had always howled with laughter afterwards. In the days when Diokles' bustling city ways were new to the village and the frolicking outrage of escaping livestock in the herb and flower patch was the talking point of a day, it had been a good joke, but with an edge to it. The old man had never grown used to having an Athenian-born Peiraieus trader for a son-in-law. But Helike had been past a country girl's first bloom, nearly nineteen, and Diokles himself, a bright-eyed healthy young man with a successful father, was too good a prospect to turn down.
He could still remember Parmenon's bitter words to Helike, spoken in Aïxone after the farmer’s first enthusiasm for the marriage had gone sour. 'Be careful of him, daughter,’ the old man had said, turning his back on Diokles. ‘He's going to be rich one day, but he'll never be one of us. And the children will grow up playing with Egyptians and Phrygians, not honest Athenian country folk.' Then he had spat into the border of the herb patch, rue and celery, for luck. 'Good as a foreigner himself, nothing but trouble, always stirring things up.'
Maybe he was right, Diokles thought, but I never listened to him then and he is not here to complain now. If Sosigenes is to be avenged, Themisto will need help, more than Makron or her own family, even Simon, can offer. If someone has to be curious enough to cause trouble, it should be someone close but with more knowledge of the world, which probably means me.
If I get involved, Diokles thought, will Helike and the children be in danger? He squinted at the low sun, concentrating his mind. Then he ducked, under a hanging bunch of malodorous dried fish, into an alley at the edge of the Potter's Quarter. It would do no harm to anyone, he decided, if he were to ask a few questions.
CHAPTER 5
Hipponikos finished the design on one side of a wine-cooler, put down his finest brush and stood up. The picture was the normal sort of thing for a wine-cooler: a party scene with reclining guests, garlands, drinking-cups lifted in welcome, flute-girls. The other side, already sketched in detail, showed an indignant Herakles about to club the brains out of some African king for trying to make a human sacrifice of him. It could wait. The foreign buyer who commissioned it had lost interest, but it would be a pity to waste an excellent piece of potting.
Inside the workshop the light was fading and delicate work was becoming impossible. In the yard a kiln stacked with perfume jars was finishing its second firing. He lumbered stiffly to the door and looked up the street, where the sharp late-afternoon light was deepening gradually from a crisp yellow to pale blue and gold.
Time to clear up. He shrugged off the nostalgia and began bustling about the shop, checking each painter's work. Satisfied, he ambled through to the courtyard.
'How long now, Daos?'
Daos, an elderly slave with bad knees from crouching next to the kiln, tilted his head back and squinted up at Hipponikos.
'Almost done, master.'
Hipponikos looked from Daos to the ugly mask on the tree, then through the door into the workshop. He could see Skylax in the semi-darkness, worrying at the rim of a large jar with a small stone, rubbing off blemishes. Skylax looked like a hunted beast, Hipponikos thought. Why did it have to be Skylax who found the old man's body? He was too young, too nervous. And too useful to sell.
He stalked back through the shop and into the street.
'Spartan, Spartan!' From the next corner a sudden noise came, a shout of laughter. The three boys skidded back into the alley, chasing a dog. The dog had a leg missing, but was still too fast for them. As it bounced, rolled and hopped down the alley, Hipponikos watched it with admiration. On either side of him the boys pelted past, whooping and flailing arms and legs.
Beyond the whirl of dog and boys, Hipponikos caught sight of Diokles striding towards him, his body tired but his eyes glinting with purpose.
'Hipponikos, I must talk to you.'
'A cup of wine first, Diokles.'
'No, not here. Something has been in my head all day and I can't quite grasp it, or get rid of it. About Sosigenes.'
Diokles’ habit of chasing at ideas like a dog after a thrown stick made the big potter, an older and calmer man, feel indulgent. 'You've been to see Kleitias. I can tell from your beard.'
'It was something he said.'
'It always is.' Hipponikos looked back towards the shopful of slaves. 'Invite me to your house this evening for a taste of Kharis’ cooking and we'll talk in private.'
'I'm not going home yet. I’ve been talking to people in the houses up here, by the fountain and up the street. Everyone has people from the country staying with them, every room is full. And not one of them saw anything. A sunny day, a murder by the fountain where most of them draw their water, and the whole lot of them must have been as blind as a sloughed snakeskin.’ He thumped the doorframe with his clenched fist. ‘Yes, yes, come and eat. Kleitias and Pamphilos are coming, too.’
Diokles hurried away past the workshop. Hipponikos, distressed for his friend, watched him disappear down a side-alley. First Skylax hopping about like a nervous frog, then Diokles nosing about looking for his uncle‘s killer: everyone was on edge today.
The children had stopped singing. Above the houses at the end of the street a few thin clouds had appeared, low and moving fast under a sky of gilded iron. Hipponikos felt a shudder creep over his skin and he ducked into the shop for warmth.
Helike heard muffled but animated conversation outside in Artemis Street, then the sound of Hylas opening the door to let in Diokles. She went down to the ground floor to find Diokles and Makron already on their way to the men's dining room, accompanied by the burly Hipponikos, now in a clean tunic, Kleitias and behind him, robust but portly, Pamphilos the merchant. Pamphilos had traded successfully over the years that Diokles had known him, but the prospect of war was not a happy one for a man whose contacts in Persia and the far Aegean coastline were beginning to side with Sparta. To Helike’s sympathetic eye his clothes had a depressed hang to them and needed a wash. From somewhere amongst them she could hear the clink of coins.
'Pamphilos, my friend,' she said with genuine pleasure and some curiosity. 'And Hipponikos, too, and Kleitias. Diokles, I must speak to Kharis.'
In the brief moment she spent with Kharis, she doubled the quantities of food to be cooked, sent Hylas to fetch more wine from the storeroom, ordered everything served in the men's room apart from Gorgo's portion and clipped Euphemos smartly around the ear for dipping his finger in the sauce. Then she returned calmly to join her husband.
'Perikles is a shrewd one,' Diokles was saying, stroking his freshly trimmed beard. 'Now he says he'll donate his country estate to the people if the Spartans don't destroy it first.'
A small, mischievous light began to play in Pamphilos’ eyes. 'He's afraid his friend King Arkhidamos will leave it untouched, just to embarrass him. Which, of course, he will.'
Most of the house in Artemis Street was given over to storage, courtyard and rooms where the women took charge - kitchen, bathroom, family room, larder - so it was Diokles’ pride that he could still spare a room for the disreputable activities of menfolk. This room, on the ground floor backing onto the street, was sparingly but tastefully equipped with the paraphernalia of moderate debauchery: stools, small tables and a large one to take the weight of wine and water jars, space for entertainment, a target for the messy and popular wine-throwing game of kottabos. Most of the jars and pots were from Hipponikos’ workshop, some of them seconds.
The five men were already reclining on the couches usually reserved for those parties at which respectable women like Helike were never present. It was strange for her to be in this room without feeling that somehow she had broken into her own home. More often it was Hylas in here, stooping to mop up wine spilt on the floor or retrieving the mislaid undergarments of flute-girls.
While Hylas and Kharis laid food on the low central tables, Helike sat on Diokles' couch alongside him. 'You are all very welcome,' she said, ‘but my husband must have brought you here for something other than a drinking-party at such a sad time.'
Diokles looked up at her. 'I wanted to discuss the death of your uncle Sosigenes. Themisto insisted on burying him this morning back in Aïxone. It will have taken hours in the dark to get him all the way out to the village in the family cart. But she had a spear carried in front among the torches to show she was after vengeance, and Sosigenes will find no rest in Hades until she gets it.'
Hipponikos nodded slowly. 'Some of my slaves won’t go to that fountain now. Skylax was the one who found Sosigenes' body and fetched me. When I got there, he just stood gaping at me like a madman, so I had to send him back to the shop. He goes out of his way now to avoid that part of the street.'
Makron, sitting with his back to the door, wrapped scarred and muscled arms around himself, but not to keep out the cold. 'I would carve my brother’s gravestone if Themisto asked me, but she will not. I would help to find his killer, but she will keep me away if she can. A different man might say “I’m his brother and I will do it”, but I’m not the kind of man who fights a grieving widow.‘
'We would all help if we could,' Helike said softly. 'But we cannot.’
'You have a sharp eye, Diokles,’ Kleitias said, ‘Could you tell anything from his body?'
Helike saw Diokles staring at the door behind Makron, and knew from his expression of concentrated puzzlement that he was trying to paint the murder scene in his mind. 'He was struck with a lot of force and skill,' he said quietly. 'If he was standing, it would be difficult to drive the point of a fine punch like that, even, that deep through the bones of his neck. The tip is blunt, see, to stun the marble. Rough punch first, then finer and finer, but never fully sharpened.' His boyhood military training had been with more traditional weapons, and seemed long ago now.
'He may have been bending,' Hipponikos said, a piece of squid poised in his fingers. 'Drinking from the fountain. After Skylax found Themisto, he brought her to my shop to rest and take a little wine. She said very little, but remembered that her husband refused to drink on the way between the Long Walls. Said he didn't trust the water.'
Helike leaned forward, pushing dishes around the table to encourage eating. She took more bread and dipped a piece of squid into the sauce. 'So my poor uncle was drinking at a fountain on his first day in Athens after the winter and some enemy walked up, killed him and went away. In the middle of the day. Why?'
There was a brief second of silence, then Helike heard a scuffling in the courtyard, the sound of Hylas running. Next came a fierce banging on the street door, the crash of the door being flung back, the sound of raised voices. Everybody in the room rose and rushed outside. Hylas and Kharis, sticks in their hands, Kharis with the glitter of fear in her eyes, stood by the altar in an instinctive move to protect the family shrine. Two armed men with lanterns confronted them.
'What is this?' Diokles roared above the noise. The faces of Gorgo and Xanthippe appeared above them, one olive-skinned and sleepy, the other fresh, pink and fiercely curious, staring down from the window of the women's room.
A third man, tall and tattooed, with a cudgel in one giant hand and a bow across his back, stepped forward. His accent was thick and recognisably Skythian, which made him a threat at once: the city always used such people for security matters. 'We are from the Eleven,' he said. 'We have a woman here. She wants us -'
'She wants justice.' Themisto, wild-eyed, prowled the courtyard like a caged animal. 'That man murdered my husband!'
Her stabbing finger split the group and they stood aside. The finger was pointing at Makron.
CHAPTER 6
'Never, never! I never killed him. He was my brother!' Makron forced the words out through clenched teeth, his face red.
Diokles, suddenly chill in the night air, followed his uncle’s glance up at the window and saw Gorgo staring back at her ageing bedmate, feverish tears pouring down her cheeks, Xanthippe's arm around her shoulders. Xanthippe's strong young face, dark eyes hot with indignation, made him proud.
The Skythian reached out a massive hand and gripped Makron by the upper arm. One of the officials, experienced in arrests, grabbed Makron's other arm. The other drew his short sword and raised his lantern, ready to guide or to defend.
Diokles sensed, then saw, Helike stepping forward. She walked slowly towards Themisto, her hair unbound, eyes gentle in the lamplight.
'Do you really mean to do this, Themisto? Can you believe that Makron could even think of killing Sosigenes? His own brother?'
'I know he did. I know what men can do when greed takes them. He did it, may the gods curse him blind.' Themisto’s jaws clamped hard in her stone face, biting down on the words.
Hipponikos glanced at Kleitias helplessly, but could say nothing. Then Kleitias leaned towards the potter and Diokles just caught his whispered words. 'Murder is a family matter,' Kleitias was saying. 'Diokles must do his duty.'
His duty. The word struck Diokles between the shoulders. He barred the door to the street. 'This man is my wife's uncle. I will speak for him anywhere, even on the Hill of Ares. He cannot have killed his own brother!'
‘It is the woman’s right to accuse. Brothers hate. Brothers kill.' The Skythian braced himself, poised to push Diokles to the ground. 'The Eleven will deal with this.'
Diokles thought of the safety of Helike and the children and knew that at that moment he could do nothing. Feeling himself begin to prickle with sweat, he stood aside and let them pass. Makron himself, trapped between his captors, was not struggling. The official with the lamp strolled in front as if murder charges were commonplace, while behind the group Themisto almost hopped with excitement, a spider shadowed at the edge of the web, hardly able to contain herself.
In Diokles' mind, shocked by the speed of events, time froze. The earlier tragic tableau had given way to the last scene of some rustic comedy, where victorious revellers march off stage, sticks waved aloft, as some crazed actor prances among them. He felt disbelief change rapidly to red frenzy, then to a sense of personal insult. Some demon, he told himself savagely, had got into Themisto's old head while she was grieving. Except on occasion when he drank too much, Makron was a man as gentle as Helike herself, a man who hurt no-one.
The small procession had almost disappeared from view. As it finally vanished, a drunken voice somewhere ahead spewed words into the dirty street: 'Go on, Skythian, pulverise ‘im, beat ’im into a wineskin. Scum d’serves everything that's coming, wha’ever ‘e's done...muss d'serve something...'
Diokles felt the bones in his fists tighten and he raced up the street, but there was no-one. From another street the hollow thud of a drum floated, mocking, wreathed with the jangle of bells. Sullen, defeated, he walked slowly back to the house. Themisto must be wrong, he thought. It could not be true. It could not.
'Helike, I must go now,' he heard Kleitias saying. 'I really should be somewhere else.' The barber slipped out through the doorway and passed Diokles with a nod, then followed the track of Makron and the guards for a short way. In another moment he was gone, around a corner into the darkness.
The young slave Skylax lay awake in Hipponikos' workshop and wished he was home in Syria. Every night his master, before disappearing into the living quarters above and behind the shop to spend the night snoring amongst his family, chose a slave to sleep behind the workshop door to protect the shop from intruders. Tonight it was Skylax’s turn.
The slave sat up and touched the bolt, the hasps, the hang of the strap. Safe. Then he turned his back to the door and closed his ears with his hands. An hour ago the street outside had been comfortably noisy as usual, but now it was filled with a dark and unfriendly silence. Somewhere buried deep in his being, somewhere beyond logic and sense, he just knew that beyond the door lay was a black pit full of demons with green eyes glittering and sharp red teeth, spirits who wished him ill.
What had he seen? A poor man dead in the street, and then what? Had he watched the living or the dead? Was it a cloak he saw, dark in the shadows as it flew round a corner and was gone? Or was it the beat of a black wing, some fleeing creature from beyond life itself?
At his neck he wore an amulet with words from the gods scratched on it, words spoken by the great Baal himself in his glory. His mother had made him remember them when he was small, but then she had sold him and he could not read them now. His grubby hand clutched the amulet, printing the words of Baal into his flesh. Why had he been sent here, to these strange people who laughed at their gods and ate pigs?