Furies

by D. L. Johnstone

  Anchises dared not even look at her sister, she could only stare at the ground, her face flushed, expressionless. We’ll get away, Tyche had promised her silently, whatever happens, I’ll find you, we’ll get away and we’ll find our way back home. Don’t worry – everything will be alright. I give you my oath. She had listened vaguely as the woman haggled with the trader before they’d finally settled on a price, and Tyche went with their new owners. She hadn’t seen Anchises since.

  Aculeo led her out of the crowded Agora to the palace district along the northwestern shore of the city, up broad, winding lanes where the villas were set well back from the street, the air spiced with the perfumed smell of the lush pink flowers and ornamental trees that capped the tall garden walls. Why are we here? she wondered anxiously. She couldn’t fight the feeling that Aculeo was planning to sell her. He had seemed like such a good, kind man, her only hope in this vast, terrifying city, but how could she be certain? Perhaps he’s found a buyer for me already and is taking me to him now. She wanted to turn and run but her legs felt leaden and weak as she followed him helplessly along the winding streets.

  Aculeo slowed as they neared a particularly lovely looking villa near the Shrine of Ares, where a pair of perfect plum trees grew on either side of the entrance, their branches bowing under the weight of the ripe violet fruit. They approached the gates and an enormous, black-skinned slave silently examined them before allowing them to enter.

  They stepped into the gatehouse through the elegantly decorated fauces to the atrium. The compluvium in the centre was filled with pretty fish and bordered with carefully tended box hedges and ornamental figs and acacias. Beyond the atrium was a marble peristylium, with what appeared to be a garden behind that. The tapestries hanging on the walls undulated in the warm breeze that wended its way from the sea to the hilltop and through the broad hallways of the villa. Tyche was quite certain she had never seen a more beautiful house in her life.

  A dark-haired little girl of perhaps eight years watched her from behind a column in the peristylium. The girl’s eyes were wide with curiosity, a small smile dancing on her pretty lips. She reminded Tyche so much of Anchises she felt her heart catch in her throat.

  She heard the sound of nearing footsteps and looked up to see a woman approaching the atrium. The woman was young and elegant, almost regal-looking with dark, unpinned hair that fell just past her shoulders and large, intelligent eyes, the sort that took everything in. She was dressed in a simple but expensive looking cream-coloured silk chiton elaborately knotted at the breast. The woman smiled when she saw Aculeo. She took him by the hands and let him kiss her cheek, lingering a few extra moments in his arms when they embraced, both of them reluctant to let go. Finally she pulled away.

  “And who is this?” she asked as she looked at Tyche, her voice rich and exotic as her eyes.

  “This is Tyche,” Aculeo said, then briefly explained her story. Tyche stared down at the stark geometric patterns of the mosaic floor, only half-listening, not daring to let herself believe what might be happening. That Aculeo might not be selling her after all. That something else was taking place. Was it a dream?

  After a few moments, Tyche felt someone touch her gently on the shoulder and glanced up. Calisto took her hands in her own soft, perfect ones, offering a warm, welcoming smile. She turned her head towards the peristylium and called out “Idaia.”

  The little girl appeared at her side within seconds, barefoot and breathless, beaming shyly up at Tyche. Calisto introduced them to one another.

  “Would you like to stay here for a while with us?” Calisto asked Tyche in Phrygian.

  Tyche could scarcely believe her ears – the most wondrous words, and spoken in a tongue she hadn’t heard in far too long. She nodded desperately. Idaia squealed in delight, almost dancing on the spot she was so elated.

  Calisto smiled and embraced the girl, kissing her on the cheek. “Welcome to your new home, Tyche.”

  The waves slapped against the sides of the boat as the oars swept through the calm waters of the bay. The day was fair, the light Etesian winds from the north-west smelling of the sea and distant shores. The sea was clear and deep indigo, with great schools of fish glittering in the sun like handfuls of silver coins scattered in its depths. The pilot steered the little dorry through the muddy shallows of the harbour basin where fronds of mauve anemone undulated in the waves, and rowed southwest from Cape Lochias around the reefs and the breakwaters, then headed out towards Pharos.

  Aculeo had met with the sophist at the Museion to pick his brain. Zeanthes had suggested a small adventure was more in order. And so they’d walked to the eastern harbour and hired a small boat to taxi them out to Pharos, the island of the Lighthouse. Zeanthes closed his eyes as he sat back in the boat and seemed to be dozing. Aculeo sat back as well and let the sun warm his face, listening to the rhythmic creaking of the oars, the lap of the waves and the raw cries of the bone white herring gulls and pelicans as they wheeled through the clear blue skies, darting down to pluck up any fish that ventured too near the water’s surface.

  The slate blue waters were dotted with fishing vessels and trading ships almost as numerous as the fish themselves, for this bay in the mouth of the Egyptian Sea was by far the busiest in the world, surpassing even Athens at its peak. The bay at Pharos itself had historic fame, for its safe anchorage and favourable winds had been written about by Homer himself centuries before, long before there had even been an Alexandria. And what the Gods had provided, Ptolemy Soter, Alexander’s successor in Egypt, had improved on by creating two distinct harbours.

  To the southeast was the Great Harbour, which consisted of three inner ports, the Port of Augustus, the Port of Lochias, where most commercial vessels moored, and the Port of Poseidon, where several Roman warships were moored. To the northwest was the Eunostos Harbour from which the Heptastadion had been built, like a long, crooked finger pointing towards the island of Pharos. The seven-stade long quay had been commissioned at great cost to allow ships to move from one anchorage to another to provide the best protection in all weather and sea conditions, passing through channels split along its length.

  “Such a lovely day,” Zeanthes said with a gentle smile. “I’m so pleased you came to see me. You seem troubled, though. Is everything alright?”

  “Gurculio was murdered a few days back.”

  “I heard as much.”

  “Did you know he was castrated and tortured before he died?”

  The sophist turned pale. “Men like Gurculio have their enemies I suppose. But why would he have been tortured?”

  “I don’t know. And now there’s yet another murder to investigate – another girl murdered in a similar manner to Myrrhine and the river slave.”

  “Ah?”

  “This one was murdered three months ago though. Perhaps you knew her. Petras, she was Neaera’s cousin.”

  Zeanthes closed his eyes and nodded. “Yes, yes of course, I remember her well. A lovely girl.”

  “Any idea who her patron was?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “She was stabbed,” Aculeo said. “A single killing wound to the abdomen, like Myrrhine.”

  “Our visit to Pharos should allow us to consider the matter from a different perspective,” Zeanthes said.

  The little dorry approached the wooden docks built out from the rough-hewn limestone blocks of sloping embankments on the shore. Aculeo followed Zeanthes ashore. Crowds of tourists and foreign sailors milled about the little island, with its sunbaked limestone shoreline edging the blue-green sea, sparse golden sea grass, warm winds and, of course, the Lighthouse itself, enormous and brilliant white in the midday sun. It was, he had to admit, an even more impressive sight up close than from the shore. Broad steps at the base led to a low platform, around which the gawking tourists gathered to pass through the entrance, housed within a square-shaped wall that surrounded the tower itself.

  The tower was two hundred cubits high, the height
of fifty men, and Aculeo’s neck ached as he looked up towards its soaring peak. It had been commissioned almost three centuries ago by the Greek Pharaoh Ptolemy Philadelphus, constructed of native white limestone, but with enormous solid pink granite blocks, polished to a high sheen, themselves ten cubits high, interposed around the lintels, supporting the towering structure. The base tier was a square-shaped tower a hundred cubits high, with rectangular windows cut into its surface at regular intervals, atop of which stood the second tier, an octagonal-shaped tower that stood another fifty cubits. The third and final tier was a tall cylindrical tower which housed the beacon, capped with cupola. On the very peak was an enormous marble statue of Zeus Soter staring out to sea, welcoming all arriving ships. The beacon, which had remained lit every hour of every day for the past thirty decades, could be spotted ten leagues out to sea.

  As they awaited their turn to pass through the entrance gates, Aculeo looked around at the enormous statues that stood atop the wall surrounding the lighthouse. Six soaring Aswan pink granite statues of three Ptolemies, Soter, Philadelphus and Euergetes, he dimly recalled, portrayed as ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, sat on their thrones alongside their loving sister-queens, facing out to the open sea, their vast shoulders brushed by the fronds of tall palm trees wafting in the winds. And alongside them were statues of Poseidon with his trident, and Isis Pharia holding a great sunbleached cloth sail that billowed and snapped in the wind, in honour of sailors seeking safe harbour.

  “Lovely, isn’t it,” Zeanthes said. “The world is full of such great wonders of course. The Great Pyramids of Giza. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Collossus Helios of Rhodes, a marvel even in ruin. Who knows how long before even this too crumbles to magnificent dust? Such is man’s recurring folly. Look out there.” Zeanthes pointed out to sea, where a number of ships sailed, like specks on the water. “What do you notice about the ships on the horizon?”

  Aculeo looked at them, then back at Zeanthes. “What do you mean?”

  “We lose sight of them as they grow more distant of course. But what do you notice about how they disappear?”

  Aculeo looked carefully. “Their hulls disappear first, but their masts are still visible.”

  “Remember the ship with the red sails,” Zeanthes said with a smile, then he led the way through the entrance into a great courtyard. The grounds within were lovely, filled with more statuary, sphinxes, towering columns of white marble shot through with rich grey veins and obelisks covered with hieroglyphs, remnants of ancient Egypt looted from Heliopolis to adorn this modern wonder.

  In the centre of the tower itself was a spiralling stone staircase for visitors and pack animals to climb. Broad platforms had been built at various stages along its height inside the tower, with windows for visitors to pause and look out at the city or the sea. Alongside the staircase was an elaborate system of platforms, ropes and pulleys, a lift device to transport fuel for the beacon fire.

  They began their ascent along with the other crowding, sweating tourists, a few of them riding up on donkeys. They paused to rest at the top of the first tier, where a platform had been set up like a small marketplace, with food and wine vendors, portrait painters, jugglers, musicians and merchants at their little booths selling souvenirs.

  They continued their climb, finally reaching the top of the second tier where an observation deck had been constructed. The deck was thick with milling tourists, all craning to get a look at the city and the sea from the finest vantage point in the world. Graffiti adorned the walls, carved by countless visitors before them. Aculeo looked down on the city. The view was breathtaking. He could see everything – he spotted the Agora, then followed the lines of streets to his own humble neighbourhood, then along the Canopic Way to the Crossroads at the Street of the Soma, then east to the Museion. He could see the Harbour of the River and thought he could almost see to the farthest shores of the inland sea. The canals wrapped through the city like roots of a tree, out to Canopus in the east, Rhakotis in the west and Lake Mareotis in the south, all fed by the Nile, which seemed to stretch forever into the distance.

  “Now, let’s find the ship with the red sails,” Zeanthes said, looking out at the horizon. “There, you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you notice?”

  “It’s travelled further out, but I can see the hull now.”

  “Excellent. Why do you think that is?”

  “Our height enables us to see the ships better, I imagine.”

  “But for that to be possible, the sea must be curved, such that the horizon is actually higher at ground level than from this vantage point. One might conclude, in fact, that the world must therefore be spherical in shape. The great Eratosthenes once calculated the arc of the world using his theory of shadows. If his calculations are correct, another seven-eighths of the world remains for us to discover and explore.”

  “Is that true?” Aculeo asked.

  “Truth is another question entirely. A Skeptic can never truly know anything, not even the nature of truth. Right now, we are simply exploring what potential conclusions may be made from our observations. Yet as we untangle the thorniest questions, we come across even more difficult problems. For example, if the earth is spherical, how is it secured in the heavens? What forces keep men, the waters, the land, the sky affixed to the earth’s surface? What of the nature of space and time? And what does it say of the heavenly bodies? According to Aristarchus, the only body in the heavens to move about the Earth is the moon. The Earth, Mars, Venus and the rest actually move about the Sun.”

  “But how could that be?”

  “It is proposed in quite elegant treatises,” Zeanthes said. “There’s another explanation of course. That our perception of reality is imperfect. That the purity of the Divine cannot be grasped here in this world, but only in the heavens. That the heavens are not a cold universe of mathematics, measurements and Pythagorean formulae wherein planetary spheres shuffle about the skies in musical harmony, but are instead the thrones of the Gods, from which they watch our goings on. Why else might the universe have been created at all, if not for the Gods’ divine pleasure?”

  “If you call what they do pleasure, I suppose.”

  “Such are the reasons the Ptolemies first commissioned the Library, and why the Caesars continue to patronize so many great minds at the Museion. With knowledge comes power, especially if it is unique and self-owned knowledge. Now, how does all this relate to the questions that you seek to unravel? Let’s explore the questions surrounding the murders.”

  “What, here?” Aculeo asked, looking around the crowded observatory.

  “Why not?” the sophist said. “What do we know? A slave is murdered in the Sarapeion. Her killer seems obvious at first, like the ship on the horizon. A recluse was seen in the temple, his act of murder witnessed. And if he murdered that girl, he must have murdered Myrrhine and Petras as well, for their murders appear connected by design if not by time or circumstance. What could be clearer?

  “Yet your former associate, Iovinus, was also murdered, the tablets he carried were stolen, his lover gone missing, and though we know not Neaera’s fate, the coincidence makes one fear that she too may have suffered some terrible end.

  “What else do we know? Some of the murder victims were hung, all were stabbed, some several times, tortured perhaps, while the slave in the Sarapeion was struck across the head. One girl was murdered three months ago. The others only in the past few weeks. And then there are the pomegranate seeds, of course. So we must accept there are differences – correct? The question is … why? What differed between them? Why were some of the victims hanged, tortured and butchered and others not?”

  “Apollonios had less time in the Sarapeion with the river slave,” Aculeo said. “The witness Cleon interrupted him. He altered his method, but not the result.”

  “But why were they murdered in the first place? And what of the three-month gap? Is there even a gap? Were there in fact other girls murde
red during that time period? Or before? Or since? You only just discovered Petras, after all. How many others might there be?”

  “I don’t know,” Aculeo allowed, feeling a sickening sense of despair at the thought.

  “There’s something different about the girls, the situation, or else the killer.”

  “Could there have been two killers?”

  “A possibility,” Zeanthes mused. “The way you describe this Apollonios, I find it difficult to understand how he could have committed any of these murders other than that of the slave.”

  “He’s a lunatic. He scalded one of the men with boiling water when we tried to take him. It was like trapping a rabid beast.”

  “That’s the point of my argument. Why would any sensible woman have gone with a man who is clearly mad? Yet we must presume that he was successful not only once, but over and over again, and in almost complete secrecy? And then there’s Gurculio’s murder.”

  “That’s a different matter. The brothel-keeper Panthea did that.”

  “You base that on guesswork or some specific knowledge?”

  “I heard them arguing at the symposium. I was attacked by her slave that night and her brothel was cleared out the next day.”

  “A false deduction,” Zeanthes said. “You cannot assume Gurculio’s murder is not connected to the murders of these women. Especially given that he had his manhood stripped from him at the end, did he not? Which implies it is part of the pattern. And if it is connected, where then does your recluse fit? He was in prison when Gurculio was murdered.”