Funeral Games (19 page)

There was a chuckle from the doorway, and Nestor, the guard captain, came in. His armour was off, and he was just another big man, now wearing a handsome chiton of Tyrian purple wool. ‘Let her alone, Athenian,’ he said. ‘She’s a titan.’

The doctor sighed. ‘She needs to be in bed.’

Nestor chuckled again. ‘She nearly gutted one of my men. Girl, you’ll get a husband faster if you wave that about less.’

‘I am
not
waving it about. This is the low guard, and my hands are steady!’ She wished she hadn’t sounded quite so anxious.

Nestor stepped fully into the room and his grin flashed in the lamplight. ‘Sheathe the weapon, my lady. As a favour. The doctor means no harm and neither do I.’

Melitta bowed. ‘My pardon,’ she said. She really was tired.

‘A chair,’ he said to the slaves.

‘Where is Kallista?’ Melitta asked.

‘The other girl? In the slave quarters. Is she yours? I’m sorry - I took for granted she was Kinon’s. Shall I ask her to attend you?’ Nestor made a motion and another slave ran from the room.

‘Where is Philokles?’ she asked.

‘In the next room, with the other man,’ Nestor said.

Melitta nodded. ‘When Kallista comes, I will go to bed,’ she said.

Her brother lay unmoving, as pale as the Aegyptian linen on which he lay. His lower right leg was wrapped in bandages that were slowly becoming the colour of Nestor’s chiton.

‘He’s not going to die,’ she said.

Nestor met her eye. ‘Good. I honoured his courage.’ He was very serious.

‘He doesn’t think he has any courage,’ Melitta said.

Nestor gave a small smile. ‘Many men who appear brave suffer from the same failing,’ he said. ‘Sometimes they die trying to prove themselves brave when no one has ever questioned their courage,’ he added.

‘That’s my brother,’ she said proudly.

Nestor shook his head. ‘Make sure you save him then,’ he said to the doctor, as if he could just order such a thing.

When Kallista came, she looked more like Medusa than Helen of Troy, her make-up smeared, her eyes wild and her hair unkempt. She stepped straight into Melitta’s arms. ‘They killed everyone!’ she said. She burst into tears.

Melitta held her while she sobbed, and then started to walk her to the door. ‘Take me to my room,’ she said.

‘I’ll take you to the women’s wing,’ Nestor said.

‘I want to be right here,’ Melitta said.

Nestor nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said with a yawn. With two slaves, he took her past where Philokles lay unsleeping on a couch, past Theron’s snores and into a darkened room. The slaves moved about, filling the pitchers with water and wine, lighting lamps, turning down the linens on her sleeping couch.

‘Shall I make up a pallet on the floor?’ one of the palace slaves asked.

‘If you would be so kind,’ she replied. Kallista kept right on crying.

Nestor bowed. ‘If my lady will permit, I, for one, intend to get a few dreams through the gate of horn before the sun rises.’

Melitta returned his bow. ‘Thanks for your courtesy, sir.’ She paused. ‘How long has the Athenian been a doctor here?’

Nestor thought a moment. ‘Not long,’ he said. ‘Why?’

Melitta bit back her answer, born of fatigue and unreason, she was sure. ‘No matter,’ she said. ‘Thank you for all your help, Nestor. May the gods be with you.’

He smiled and patted her head, which she normally hated. This time, it was somewhat reassuring.

When he was gone, she waved her hands at the slaves. ‘Go!’ she said.

They both looked at her. Kallista continued to sob.

‘Now,’ she said. ‘Go and attend the doctor!’

Both slaves left silently. She steered the other girl to the bed.

‘It’s my fault!’ Kallista said through her sobs.

Melitta had suspected something like this. ‘Why were you in my brother’s room? At Kinon’s?’ she asked, and her voice was sharper than she meant.

‘Tenedos told me to fuck him,’ the beautiful girl sobbed. ‘I was supposed to take a lamp and leave it burning outside the room!’ she wailed. ‘We would all be free! That’s what he said!’ She looked around wildly. ‘And now they’re all
dead
.’

Melitta got up from the couch and went to the table, where, as she expected, the doctor’s poppy juice was freshly prepared by the ewer of wine. She mixed the two, filled a cup and handed it to Kallista.

‘Listen, girl,’ she said. ‘Do you want to live?’

Kallista nodded. She sobbed and choked again.

‘You are my slave. Listen! You came here with me. There’s no one to say otherwise. Right?’ Melitta called upon her dwindling reserves. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow. Drink this.’

Obediently, the older girl took the cup and drank.

‘Good,’ Melitta said. ‘You can start by tasting my food and wine.’

The slave girl was asleep in minutes.

Melitta watched the darkness and blood behind her eyes until the sun rose.

At some point she must have slept, because she woke to the bright light of a noon sun pounding through the courtyard outside and into her room. For a long moment, she didn’t know where she was. Her back hurt like fire, and she was in a chair.

Kallista was snoring in her bed, a breast bare in the reflected light, her usual beauty restored by sleep. Melitta got up and found that every muscle in her body hurt. She limped across the room and pulled a cloak over the slave girl. Then she stood in the middle of the room, rubbing her hips and buttocks.

She stretched, and remembered that her brother was dying - might already be dead. She was out of the door of her room, flying along the row of pillars. Philokles’ room’s door was covered by a curtain of beads that dazzled in the sun, and her brother’s was tied back. There was a slave asleep in a chair with a Thracian cloak over his legs.

Satyrus was as pale as unworked clay. Her hand went to her mouth and a sob escaped her. She stepped up beside him, reached out a hand and hesitated.

As long as she didn’t
know
that he was dead - the world would not end.

She put a hand on his forehead.

It was cold as ice.

She pulled it back as if it had been burned, and another sob escaped her.
I should kill myself
, she thought.
I’m really not sure that I can deal with this.
The problem was, as she realized immediately, that she didn’t want to kill herself, any more than she had wanted to do so in the dark and flame of the fight.

But with her mother and brother both gone . . .

His chest moved.

The sound of his exhalation seemed to echo inside her head for some time, like the west wind in the halls of Olympus.

‘Philokles!’ she yelled in her joy.

 

She slept again and woke to softer evening shadows, with Kallista sitting by her bed, fanning her. ‘Mistress?’ she said, as soon as Melitta’s eyes fluttered open.

‘Kinon gifted you to me,’ Melitta said. Her brain was running at a high speed, like a chariot rolling effortlessly on a smooth road. She could see a great many things, and one of them was that Kallista was in as much danger as the twins themselves. ‘That’s why you are mine. He gifted you at dinner last night. Understand? And you were in
my
room when the attack started.’

‘Yes, mistress,’ the other girl said. There were dark smudges under Kallista’s eyes, as if she had been punched, and the whites of her eyes lacked their usual clarity, but otherwise she was unaffected.

Melitta rose on one elbow. ‘Tenedos told you to go to my brother’s room and leave a lamp outside?’

‘Yes,’ Kallista replied.

‘So that his murderers could tell what room he occupied,’ Melitta said.

‘You must believe me, mistress. I knew nothing of what he intended.’ The beautiful girl shuddered.

‘You understand, Tenedos may still be alive. He needs you dead. What do you know of this Stratokles?’ Melitta asked.

The older girl shook her head. ‘He’s Athenian. Kinon spoke of him with - contempt.’ She shrugged. ‘He wasn’t one of our friends.’

Melitta nodded. ‘Get some more slaves,’ she said. ‘Make up the room, bring me something to wear and fetch me Nestor.’ She took one of the other girl’s hands. ‘Stand by me, and I’ll see you free before the year is out. Fuck with me, and I’ll see you dead.’

‘I swear—’ Kallista began.

‘You’ll do anything to survive,’ Melitta said. She nodded, mostly to herself. ‘I must not hold that against you. Let me tell you that I think you know more about this than you are telling. Now go!’ She shooed the slave out of her rooms.

Melitta shrugged into a chiton, cursing the foolishness of Greek female garments. Then she ran down the hall and looked at her brother. He had a little more colour in his face, and he was still asleep. She watched his chest rise and fall for a while.

‘How soon will I be shouting at you for something stupid you say to hurt my feelings?’ she said aloud. ‘How long before I slap you?’

‘Any time now, I would think,’ Philokles said. He was sitting where the slave had been sitting, and she’d missed him. Now she ran and embraced him.

‘We got off easy,’ he said.

‘Not so easily,’ she said, still hugging him.

‘True enough. Kinon is dead,’ he said. ‘And Zosimos, whom I liked. And many other men and women. All of the Bosporan marines.’

‘Marines?’ she asked.

‘The armed men who attacked us were mostly the marines off the trireme.’ Philokles sighed. ‘Whatever god told me to kill their wounded, I feel like a murderer today. None survived. So we will never know who ordered their attack. It must have been Heron.’

‘It was Stratokles, the Athenian. I heard him.’ Melitta stepped away from her tutor. ‘And Kallista was ordered to leave a lamp burning outside my brother’s door when she went to - to make love to him.’

Philokles started. ‘Ordered? By whom?’

‘Tenedos - the steward.’ Melitta went back to watching her brother.

Philokles was silent for several breaths. ‘I must tell the tyrant,’ he said. ‘How do you know that Stratokles was involved? He was the man Kinon was going to use to get us to Athens!’

‘I heard him. He talks like a man with a cold, because of the scar across his nose. I heard other men call him by name. And he has my arrow in him,’ she said proudly.

‘He may be dead in the house,’ Philokles said. ‘The tyrant’s bodyguard were not kind.’ He got to his feet, and Melitta could see that he was as stiff as she, or worse. ‘Gods, I am old,’ he said.

‘You are a hero,’ she said.

‘Just a killer,’ he said. ‘You were a hero. Your father’s daughter.’

Melitta caught his hand. ‘Why do you never praise my brother like that?’ she asked.

‘Men don’t need to be praised,’ Philokles said. ‘He is Kineas’s son. Of course he’s brave.’

Melitta shook her head. ‘He thinks - I don’t know. I have only his silences to go on. I think he thinks that he is a coward, and that you think the same.’

Philokles grunted. ‘I was raised in a barracks,’ he said. ‘No one praised me. I survived.’

Melitta shook her head. ‘And look how little it affected you,’ she said.

Philokles paused for a second at the curtain, as if to retort, but then he thought better of it, and went out.

Kallista came with a flock of palace slaves, and her room was cleaned and her bed made. Kallista continued a fawning devotion to her new mistress, but Melitta was very careful with the beautiful girl.

Slaves brought food, and Kallista tasted all of it. Slaves turned down her bed, and Kallista offered to share it. ‘I like to sleep with someone, mistress,’ she said. ‘I’d be happy to warm your bed - or more.’ She smiled, and the artful winsomeness was slightly offset by the fatigue and the desperation.

Melitta wasn’t interested. ‘On the floor, please,’ she said.

She lay awake until Kallista began to snore softly. Then, right hand clutching her short sword under her blanket, she fell asleep.

 

Her brother was awake in the morning. His leg was infected, but the doctor seemed unconcerned and let him hobble about on it. He proved his fitness by hobbling into her room just after sunrise. His nose was still red.

‘We’re alive!’ he said. He hugged her, gathering her in his arms where she lay, and she woke up slowly, already happy at the sound of his voice. ‘I didn’t even know I was wounded, Lita. Oh, I feel so - alive!’

‘My muscles still hurt,’ she said. ‘By Artemis, goddess of all maidens, I’ve never been so stiff. Your skin has colour!’

‘Most of it in my nose!’ he laughed. ‘The doctor says I’ll be pale for days,’ he said. ‘I’m to eat all the meat I can find. The tyrant is giving us a public dinner tonight. Philokles says that Stratokles has fled the city. I saw him - noseless bastard, as if he was a leper!’

‘I think you need to slow down, brother. How’s Theron?’ she asked, throwing her legs over the side of the bed and wriggling past her brother, whose eyes seemed to have strayed to Kallista’s body. ‘Did you make love to her?’ Melitta asked.

Her brother shrugged. ‘We started. Then the attack came.’ He shivered.

‘She was ordered into your bed, brother. To show the attackers where you slept.’ Melitta put her fingers on his cheek. ‘Remember what our mother says about slaves. She’ll do anything to survive. Anything.’

Satyrus watched her. Then he looked at his sister and smiled his old ‘let’s go and make some trouble’ smile. ‘I hear everything you just said,’ he admitted. ‘And then I look at those feet - that leg.’ He grinned. ‘I just want her.’

Kallista reached out an arm, gave a snort and rolled over.

Melitta gave her brother a mock slap. ‘She’s mine now. Hands off.’

‘Yours?’

Melitta leaned close. ‘I’m telling everyone that Kinon gifted her to me at the dinner,’ she whispered. ‘It’ll keep her alive.’

‘I’d forgotten,’ Satyrus said, straightening. ‘Okay, she’s yours. Can I have her when you’re done?’