Funeral Games (10 page)

 

They were another day riding to the sea at Gorgippia, a small town that owed allegiance to no one. The town existed to make fish sauce for the Athens market and not much else, and the smell hit them ten stades away. In the harbour, vats of fish guts gave vent to a stench so strong that the twins gagged and breathed through their mouths.

‘Poseidon!’ Melitta swore. ‘I can taste it on my tongue!’

Satyrus was glad to see her make a joke. It had been a quiet ride.

Philokles was on edge from the moment they entered the town, but there were no boats in the harbour except local fishing craft, and after some careful probing in wine shops, he grew more confident.

‘No one has been here,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘Eumeles may have given up.’

Coenus was gasping like a man suffocating. Philokles remounted and supported his friend. ‘He needs cool baths and a doctor,’ he said.

Normally, a party of gentlemen would look for the richest house and try to arrange guest-friendship. Normally, the children of the Lady Srayanka would have had no trouble finding lodging. But Philokles didn’t want to show his hand yet. He took them to the best of the waterfront wine shops and paid a few obols for some beds in a wooden barn behind the drying sheds. The straw was clean, and the smell of animals was refreshing compared to the overpowering odour of rotting fish.

Coenus went to sleep the moment he was off his horse.

‘That is a tough man,’ Theron said.

‘He thinks he’s a pompous aristocrat, though,’ Philokles said. He had a clean, wet linen towel, and he wiped the Megaran’s face. ‘He’s far gone, Theron.’

Theron put his head down on the bigger man’s chest and listened, and then felt this wrists. ‘We need to change his bandages,’ he said. ‘I doubt that there’s much that a doctor can do that we can’t,’ he said to Philokles. Eight days of rain and silent children had caused them to pool their knowledge about many things, and they had each other’s measure.

Coenus didn’t wake up as the two men and the twins rolled him over, sat him up and unwrapped the bandages. The cut that went high across his ribs looked better, with new pink flesh along the dark red line of the scab.

The lower cut that had, as best they knew, not quite penetrated his guts, was infected along its whole length, the skin inflamed above and below the line of the wound and two long tendrils of angry red tissue like the trailing legs of a squid. There was pus at the ends of the wound.

Theron put his head down and smelled the wound, and shook his head. ‘Wet and dry and wet and dry for eight days? It’s a miracle that he lives. Apollo’s arrow is doing him more damage than the original wound - the infection is deeper than when we crossed the ferry. Send the children to make a sacrifice to the golden archer, and let you and I do what we must do.’

Satyrus knew, even as a queen’s son, when he was being dismissed so that adults could do adult things. He bowed and caught his sister’s hand. ‘We’ll find a temple,’ he said.

They walked out of the barn into the first sun they’d seen since the fight at the river. Hand in hand, they walked along the smooth pebbles of the beach that gave the town its existence. If it hadn’t been for the smell of fish, the place would have been pleasant. As it was, it was like Tartarus.

‘The smell will kill him,’ Melitta said. ‘I’ve read it - it is a miasma, and it will choke his lungs.’

‘Let us go and make a sacrifice,’ Satyrus said.

Melitta nodded, head high to hide tears. Then she said, ‘Do you believe in gods, brother?’

Satyrus glanced at her and squeezed her hand. ‘Lita, I know things are bad - but the gods—’

She pulled at his hand. ‘Why would gods be so childish?’ she asked. ‘Satyrus, what if Mama is dead? Have you thought about it? If she is dead - it is all gone. Everything. Our whole lives.’

Satyrus sat on a wooden fish trap. He pulled her down next to him. Then he put his head in his hands. ‘I think about it all the time - round and round inside my head.’

She nodded. ‘I think Mama is dead.’ She looked out to sea. ‘There’s been something missing - something gone—’ She lost her battle with tears and subsided into his shoulder.

Satyrus wept with her, clinging to her. They wept for a few minutes, until the tears had no point, and then they both stopped, as if on cue.

‘Coenus is still alive,’ Satyrus said.

‘Our father’s friend,’ Melitta added. They got up together. Hand in hand, eyes red, they walked up the shingle towards the town, such as it was.

Behind them, a long triangular sail cut the horizon.

 

They found the Temple of Herakles two stades outside of town, on a small bluff that looked over the bay and seemed free of the smell. It was the only temple that the town had, and the priestess was old and nearly blind, but she had a dozen attendants and a pair of healthy slaves. She received them on the portico of the temple, seated on a heavy wooden chair. Her attendants gathered around her, sitting on the steps.

Satyrus thought that she looked friendly, but she scared him too. It was Melitta who first gathered the courage to speak.

‘We need to make sacrifice for a friend who is sick,’ Melitta said. They were still holding hands, and they bowed together.

‘Come here, child,’ said the crone, raising her head to look at them around her cataracts. ‘Handsome children. Polite. But unclean. You are both unclean. At your age!’ She sniffed.

Satyrus bowed his head. ‘Unclean, despoina?’

She gripped his right hand in hers, and he felt the bite of her nails in his palm. She raised it to her nostrils. ‘I can smell blood even through the fish sauce, boy. You killed. You have not cleaned yourself. And your sister - she too has killed.’ She raised her head again, and smoke from the temple brazier behind her rose in a fantastic curl behind her head like a sign from the god.

Satyrus made the satyr’s head sign with his left hand to avert misfortune. ‘How may I become clean?’ he asked.

She tugged at his hand. ‘You are a gentleman, I can see that. Where are you from?’

He didn’t want to resist her tug. He looked into her eyes, but the cataracts made them hard to read. He felt a rush of fear. ‘We - we come from Tanais,’ he said.

‘Ahh,’ she said, as if satisfied. ‘And how do a pair of children come to me soaked in blood?’

‘Men tried to kill us,’ Melitta said. ‘Bandits. We shot them with bows.’

‘One of them was a girl,’ Satyrus said, the words coming from deep within him. ‘I shot her to end her pain. She had an arrow in her guts and she begged—’ He sobbed. He could see her sweat-filled hair.

The priestess nodded. ‘Life-taking is a nasty business,’ she said. ‘Horrible for children.’ She turned to her attendants. ‘Bathe the boy for the ritual. Then bathe the girl.’ To Satyrus, she said, ‘When you are clean, you may sacrifice a black kid - each - and I will say the prayer lest some uncleanness cling to you.’ She looked unseeing out over the bay. ‘Where is your friend?’ she asked.

‘Friend?’ asked Satyrus, who was still thinking of the girl he’d killed. He wondered if her face would ever leave him.

‘You have a friend who is sick, yes?’ the priestess asked. Her voice rasped like the sound of a woman scraping cheese with a grater. ‘This temple also serves Artemis and Apollo. Did you not know?’

‘We did not,’ Melitta said. She saw now the statue of her patron goddess among the Greeks, a young woman with a bow. She bowed deeply to the priestess. ‘We have a sick friend in town.’

The priestess nodded. ‘The men in the trireme are searching for you. You will be safe here, and nothing is more important than that we make you clean. I will send a slave to your friends. They must come here.’

Satyrus turned and for the first time saw the trireme coming into the harbour under sail.

 

Coenus came up the bluff in a litter while the trireme was performing the laborious task of turning around under oars and backing her stern on to the beach. She was full of men - Satyrus could see the warm wink of sun on bronze on her deck. Philokles put the horses in a stand of oaks behind the temple.

‘You bet your life on an old priestess,’ he said.

Satyrus stared at the marble under his feet. ‘You didn’t lie to the people in the wine shop.’

Philokles nodded. ‘I didn’t tell them the truth, either. They assumed that we were small merchants from up the coast, and I let them think it.’ He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. The navarch on that fucking trireme will be on to us in twenty questions.’

Theron dumped a heavy wool bag inside the precincts of the temple. ‘Are we asking sanctuary? Or running?’

The old priestess emerged, supported by the larger of her two slaves. ‘The children are bathing to be clean in the eye of the gods,’ she said, ‘a process that would benefit you too, oath-breaker.’ Then she pointed at Coenus with a talon-like finger. ‘Take him to the sanctuary. We will not give him up, nor will those dogs from Pantecapaeum have him. The rest of you should ride as soon as you are clean. He’ll only slow you.’

Philokles bowed. ‘As you will, holy one. Why do you help us?’

She shook her head in annoyance. ‘I can tell the difference between good and evil. Can’t you?’

‘Then you know why I broke my oath,’ Philokles said.

‘I?’ she asked. ‘The gods know. I am a foolish old woman who loves to see brave men do worthy deeds. Why did you break your oath?’

‘To save these children,’ Philokles said.

‘Is that the only oath you’ve broken?’ she asked, and Philokles winced.

She turned. ‘The girl is bathed and clean,’ she said. ‘Come, boy.’

He followed the old woman into the sanctuary, which was sumptuous beyond anything in Tanais, with walls picked out in coloured scenes showing the triumph of Herakles, the birth, the trials of Leto and more than he could easily take in. There was a statue of Apollo as a young archer, in bright orange bronze, his eyes and hair gold, and his bow of bronze shooting a golden arrow. In the centre of the sanctuary was a pool. The water moved and bubbled. Above the pool stood a great statue of Herakles, nude except for a lion skin, standing in the first guard position of the pankration. The sight of the statue made the hair stand up on the back of Satyrus’s neck, and he smelled wet fur, a heady, bitter smell like a cat. Or a lion skin.

‘This is the pool of the god,’ she said. ‘It was here before there was a temple. We do not let just any traveller enter this pool. Remember as you go in that Herakles was a man, but by his deeds he became a god.’

An attendant took his chiton, unpinned the pins and threw the garment into the fire that burned on the altar. He dropped the brooches - not his best pair, but solid silver - into a bowl on the altar, and the fire on the altar flared and smoked.

‘The god accepts your offering and your state,’ the priestess said. ‘Into the water with you.’

Satyrus thought that his sister had just done this. He wondered why he hadn’t seen her.

Strong hands grasped him and he hit the water and was under it in a moment. The water was warmer than blood and bubbled fiercely, fizzing around his limbs and with bubbles rising between his legs and up his chest. He rose to the surface and took a breath, eyes tightly closed, and somebody placed a hand on his head. ‘Pray,’ he was commanded, and the hand pressed him down into the pool.

He could hear the voice counting above him. The bubbles continued to rise around him and he was on the edge of panic, his hair rising in the water and his skin scoured and his breath stopped so that coloured flashes came before his eyes, and still the hand pressed on his head. The pool was too small for him to stretch his arms. He was trapped.

‘Pray!’ the voice said.

Lord of the sun, golden archer
, he began. What was he praying for? He wanted to live! Not drown!

Coenus.

Golden archer, take your shaft from the side of my friend Coenus
, he prayed.
And forgive me for killing that girl. I only did it because - she begged - I couldn’t stand her pain!

But what if she, too, could have been healed?

Lion killer, hero, make me brave!
He prayed fervently, and an image of the golden statue of the god at pankration filled his mind.

The hand on his head released him and he shot up from the pool, then the temple slaves pulled him on to the marble and a towel began to rub him vigorously.

‘Did you hear the god?’ the old woman asked.

‘No,’ Satyrus said.
Or perhaps I did.

The woman nodded. ‘That’s as well. Your sister did.’ She held something under his nose, something with a strong scent. Like hot metal. ‘You are clean. Do you know how to sacrifice an animal?’

Satyrus, who had sacrificed for his family since he was six, was tempted to make a childish retort, but he bit it back. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Good,’ she said. The slave led him out of the back of the sanctuary, to an altar at the top of wooden steps that led down to the oak woods. His sister was drying her hair.

An attendant - a young priest, he thought - handed him a blade - a narrow blade of stone with a gold-wire handle. ‘It is very sharp,’ he whispered. ‘And as old as the stars.’

Satyrus took it. The kid was tethered to the altar. Satyrus put a hand on the young beast’s head and asked its forgiveness. He raised his eyes to the sky and cut its throat in one pull, stepping clear of the fountain of blood.

The attendants caught the animal and slaughtered it with the precision of long practice.

‘Well done,’ the priestess said. ‘Now go. I will look to your friend.’

Satyrus went down the steps, wiping the blood from his left hand on the grass at the bottom.

Melitta mounted first and tossed her wet hair over her shoulders. Her eyes were sparkling. ‘There are gods!’ she said.

Satyrus got up on the horse he had named Platon for its broad haunches. ‘I know,’ he said.