Death on Delos

by Gary Corby

  The whole craft slowly, majestically turned over. Damon and I dived out. It was that, or stay where we were and be trapped beneath the hull. I was careful not to swim underneath the descending sail.

  The sail entered the water and rotated until it was pointing vertically down, which was the direction I would probably soon be going myself.

  The only thing above water now was the bottom of the boat, a tiny island far from safety. Damon and I clambered aboard, with some difficulty because it was covered in slime and barnacles. We sat there, on the upturned hull, tired from the effort and with our skin cut by the barnacles.

  I watched as the fishing boat we were chasing, inexpertly handled by two criminals whom I desperately wanted to question, slowly vanished into the distance.

  I sighed.

  “Can you swim?” Damon asked.

  I turned my head to tell Damon I could swim, but not all the way back to shore. Delos was a tiny dot in the distance. Then over Damon’s shoulder I saw something behind us.

  “We’re being followed.”

  Whatever came our way was barely larger than the dot of Delos, but the small vessel that had begun so far away grew rapidly to become a trireme.

  “I think it’s one of ours,” I said, for the trireme had rounded Delos from the direction in which lay our fleet.

  All we could do was sit on the upturned hull and wait to be rescued.

  The trireme slowed as it approached. I stood up, unsteadily, upon the bottom of the boat, waved wildly and pointed in the direction our quarry had gone.

  A head appeared over the side of the trireme. It was Captain Semnos. This boat was Paralos.

  “Don’t stop!” I shouted. “Chase the other fishing boat!”

  “Can you catch a line?” Semnos shouted back.

  I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I shouted, “Yes.” I raised my arms to show that I agreed with whatever Semnos proposed.

  A sailor appeared over the edge of the fast-approaching trireme. He held a long rope, which he proceeded to pay into the sea beside him. Soon there was a long line trailing behind Paralos. Paralos’s path shifted slightly toward us. Semnos had clearly directed his boat so that it would pass by our crippled vessel.

  “Do you want help, Nico?” Damon asked.

  “Help to do what?” I asked.

  “To grab the line as it passes,” Damon said.

  So that was what Semnos had said, to which I had agreed.

  “I’ll be fine,” I told Damon confidently. “You go first.” I wanted to see how Damon caught the rope.

  Damon shrugged. “See you on board then.”

  At that moment Paralos passed by. It was like an enormous, rapidly moving wooden wall that missed us by a hand’s breadth. I gasped. Any closer and it would have crushed us. Either the steersman on Paralos was supremely skilled, or else Damon and I were incredibly lucky. But by luck or skill, we were still alive.

  Now the scary wooden wall had passed us by, and the rope was sliding across our hull. Damon dived after it. He grabbed the rope and was swept across the swell into the distance.

  It was my turn.

  I licked my lips—they tasted of salt—and wondered what would happen if I missed the rope.

  Semnos was leaning over the stern. He waved at me. I saw that the rope was about to come to an end. If I dived and missed, I was probably going to drown.

  I threw myself in and hoped for the best. I grabbed the rope and it slid through my hands. I let go and grabbed again, at the very end, this time with both hands, and this time I held on. I felt like my arms had been jerked from their sockets. Paralos was towing me at an incredible pace. I’d never understood from onboard just how quickly a trireme swam.

  I screamed but I was underwater. I took a mouthful.

  I automatically swallowed the enormous mouthful of sea. The salt burned my throat. That action made me gasp, and more sea washed in. I gulped mouthful after mouthful, until I managed to close my mouth and keep it shut. My head just didn’t seem to rise above the sea. That made me concentrate on surviving. I kept my mouth and my eyes firmly shut, I thought I would drown down there, until some fluke of the sea brought me to the surface. I gasped air, and gasped again, and almost choked on the sea water that now came gushing back up from my abused stomach.

  By the time I had finished I felt awful, my stomach muscles ached with the amount I had vomited, but I also felt like I might live, as long as my throat didn’t collapse from salt and sea.

  It was only now that I realized sailors were hauling on the line. It was a good thing, because without them I could never have clambered along the rope. Someone had dropped a fishing net down the side of Paralos. I saw it beside me with red-misted eyes. I grabbed the net with one hand and didn’t let go of the rope with the other until I was sure I had a firm grip. I was still traveling a hundred times faster than any man could swim.

  I was dimly aware that the sailors were shouting at me. I grabbed the net with my second hand, and instantly the net began to rise, and me with it.

  They hauled me over the gunwale and onto Paralos. I stood there shaking, and then I felt my intestines spasm.

  I had thought my stomach was empty, but I was wrong. I bent double and was copiously sick.

  Someone said angrily, “Over the side, you moron! Don’t hit the gold!”

  But it was too late.

  The sailors gave me a black look. They were the ones who would be scrubbing my mess off the deck and wiping the contents of my stomach off the ship’s gold fittings.

  I looked up, feeling ashamed.

  Damon stood there, dripping wet and grinning broadly.

  “That was fun!” he said.

  “Thanks for saving us,” I managed to croak to the captain.

  Semnos shrugged. “They might not let us fight, but we’re still the best damned sailors in the Navy. When your wife turned up in a rush to say you were on a chase and probably in trouble, my men were the first to launch,” he said proudly.

  “Diotima made it to the Athenian camp?” I said, perplexed. I couldn’t imagine how she had gotten there. Had she run? I was worried she might have hurt the baby. “How did she manage it?”

  “Carried by four priests, on her orders,” Semnos said. “Apparently she was shouting at them to go faster every step of the way. They were sweating like pigs when they arrived. What’s our target?” he finished.

  “Somewhere ahead of us there’s a fishing boat, manned by two soldiers,” I told him.

  “Soldiers trying to sail?” Semnos smiled. “That sounds like the start of one of our onboard jokes. Don’t worry, Nicolaos, we’ll catch them easily.”

  Semnos turned to speak to the steersman, who in turn roared orders that were echoed by the port and starboard officers. At midships were two aulos players, musicians who played the double flute. They increased the tempo of their song to match the increased urgency of the mission. Men pulled harder in time to the music, the sail went up, and Paralos surged. Having been mercilessly towed along by this mighty beast, I could only imagine with what speed we were cutting through the water now.

  “We’re close to Mykonos, aren’t we?” I asked.

  Semnos pointed. “That way, well north of us.”

  “Oh. Then where are those guards going?”

  “Maybe they’re as lost as you.”

  The proreus—the officer who commanded at the front of the trireme—was on his usual watch, standing on the very pointy front end. His arm was wrapped around the smooth wooden pole that rose there for that very purpose.

  Now the proreus pointed to starboard and yelled, “Captain! Captain, there!”

  “Aye!” Semnos bellowed back into the breeze.

  “Small vessel, sir!”

  I stared where the officer pointed. Sure enough, there was the fishing boat. It couldn’t possibly escape
Paralos, a fast and mighty warship.

  The proreus paused, then added, “And a major vessel, Captain.”

  Out of the sea mist beyond the fisher boat emerged another vessel; a large one, and it didn’t look Hellene. The other ship was also heading straight for the fishing boat.

  Our Captain examined this new arrival with narrowed eyes.

  “Who are they?” I asked Semnos.

  “The hull looks Phoenician,” he said. “It’s a galley, not a trader. Which means they’re either pirates, in which case they might run, or they are enemy.”

  The Phoenicians claimed to be the best sailors in the world, though everyone knew we Hellenes were better. Yet the Phoenicians were the only other sea-going people that Hellene commanders feared. It didn’t help that Phoenicea had long been a subject state of the Great King of the Persians. When the Great King had invaded us, twenty-six years ago, the Phoenicians had provided the core of his fleet. If this Phoenician was a fighting ship, then it meant trouble.

  Another two boats came into view—they had been hidden behind the first—all three of the same type.

  I said, “Three?”

  “Usual contingent for pirates, if they have a base near here,” Semnos said. “Don’t worry, Nicolaos, those three together are no match for us.”

  I asked, “Are they heading for the fishing boat too?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Semnos,” I said urgently. “We have to get there first.”

  “Pull hard. Maximum speed.” Semnos spoke it almost softly, but the effect on his men was instantaneous. The tempo of the aulos music increased to a frenetic pace. The rowers were sweating for their drachma-a-day.

  It was going to be a tight race. We were fast, but the Phoenician was closer.

  I suddenly realized the fishing boat would come alongside the other vessel at the exact moment we got there.

  The guards bumped into the other boat, midships. I saw someone aboard throw down a line.

  “Disengage,” Semnos ordered.

  “But Captain,” a man objected, “We can take those scum.”

  “I said disengage!” Semnos shouted.

  All around me, I could feel the men’s shoulders slump. They were disgusted. And resigned.

  But I wasn’t. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. An Athenian captain in a powerful ship of the line had just refused to take on a smaller galley.

  “What? You cannot be serious, Captain,” I said. “Why aren’t we fighting them? We’re a ship of Athens.”

  Semnos grabbed me by the front of my chiton. “Don’t you remember what my standing orders are?” he said angrily. “Paralos is forbidden to engage. If you want to fight, then you’re on the wrong boat.”

  The steersman diverted the steering oar, but only by the tiniest margin necessary to miss the Phoenician. He wanted them to know that we could have sunk them, but chose not to, and he growled as he did it.

  I was forced to watch while Paralos skimmed so close to the fishing boat I had chased that I could almost have reached out and touched it. Instead, we passed it by at such a high speed that we were gone in an instant. The two criminal guards made rude gestures at our backs.

  Semnos stood alone to the starboard side and swore. “By the balls of the dog, by the guts of a constipated goat, by the hairy bum of a—”

  “Captain, I apologize,” I said, interrupting him.

  “What for?” He was puzzled.

  “When you said that Paralos was not allowed to fight, I took that for a hollow complaint. Now that I’ve experienced it, I completely understand your frustration. How do you stand it?”

  He shook his head. “I ask myself that same question every time this happens.”

  “The other boat was Phoenician, all right,” I said to Diotima and Pericles. The two of them had waited together for our return in Pericles’s tent. That must have been interesting, considering their mutual dislike. On the other hand, Diotima was surrounded by empty bowls. I guessed she had spent the time wisely, eating Pericles out of supplies.

  Pericles turned to Semnos for confirmation of my statement.

  Semnos nodded. “I got a clear view of their deck. That’s my evaluation, Pericles.”

  Pericles visibly relaxed. He had been honest with Anaxinos when we first arrived: his greatest fear was that the Persians would use their newly recovered base in Egypt to launch an attack from the south.

  “Three ships isn’t anywhere near enough for an invasion,” Pericles said. “For that you would want two hundred. It might be a raid, of course. Athens runs constant raids against Persian cities on the coast, though usually we’d send more ships than three to hit a city! That’s the sort of complement you see from a pirate base. If so, we have nothing to fear from them, with all our ships of the line.”

  “On the other hand, it could be a scouting party prior to an invasion,” Semnos said.

  That thought was mildly alarming. Pericles certainly thought so.

  “I will order the triremes to patrol Delos,” he said. “Those sailors sleeping on the beach every day may as well be doing something for their drachma a day.

  Semnos left, to carry Pericles’s orders to the other trierarchs.

  Diotima and I stood to go, but Pericles waved at us. “Stay, Nicolaos. You too, Diotima.”

  Diotima bristled; she didn’t like taking orders from Pericles. I hoped an argument wasn’t about to break out. Fortunately my wife held her tongue.

  Pericles said, “What’s this I hear about Philipos becoming your apprentice? He came to me babbling about such a thing. You know he’s my closest assistant.”

  “He wants to learn investigation,” I said.

  Pericles frowned. “This doesn’t sound like you at all, Nicolaos. You prefer to work alone. What are you playing at?”

  No one ever accused Pericles of being slow.

  I explained to Pericles that his assistant, by his own admission, would have killed the victim if he’d been a little more competent. “Philipos is the only man on the island who not only had a motive but was in the right place to do it,” I finished.

  “So you gave him a job?” Pericles asked.

  “I put him in a position where I can keep an eye on him,” I said. “What do you know about him?”

  “He comes from a good family,” Pericles said at once. This was something I’d noticed before about Pericles: he often judged men by who their fathers were.

  “Military man?” I asked.

  “Only in the sense that he’s served when the state needed brave men,” Pericles said. “Philipos is an adequate line officer, but he has no initiative. He’s not command material, Nico. He’s not like you.”

  That statement took me aback so completely that I almost staggered. Had Pericles just offered me a compliment? If so, it was the first time in our long association.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, because I could not credit what I had heard. “I’ve never commanded men in my life.”

  That wasn’t strictly true. I had once commanded the city guard during a crisis, but at every moment I had been acutely aware that I had no idea what I was doing. I had never commanded men like Pericles did every day, or like my father-in-law.

  Pericles shook his head. “That’s not the point. You act on your own initiative, Nico. Usually you act too much on your own initiative. That’s something Philipos will never do.” Pericles closed that statement with a hint of contempt.

  Pericles was not a man to hide his feelings about an underling. He had probably made clear to Philipos, every day that the lesser man hung around Pericles’s house, that he considered Philipos good only for following instructions. Yet Philipos had kept returning, because he wanted to help. It would have been like kicking a faithful dog.

  Suddenly I understood why Philipos had acted as he did to try to kill Geros. Philip
os had acted on his own initiative, probably for the first time in his life, purely to prove Pericles wrong.

  And now this had happened.

  I felt sorry for the man. If Philipos proved to be the killer, I was going to blame Pericles.

  “Is there any chance those two guards could have been the killers of Geros?” Pericles asked.

  “It’s possible,” Diotima said. “When the protest began that night, the guards made themselves scarce, and who can blame them? Geros might have ordered them to defend the treasury against the entire fleet. “

  “So they might have done it?” Pericles pressed. That answer would be very convenient for him.

  “They might have gone to the Old Village,” Diotima agreed. “In fact, they almost certainly went somewhere out of the way. Nobody saw them all night.”

  “Then they might be the thieves too,” Pericles said.

  “Not a chance,” I told him. “Accomplices, yes—”

  “Almost certainly,” Diotima added.

  “But to get so much money off this island and then know what to do with it requires skill. Skills a common soldier wouldn’t have. Whoever did this knows finance and accounting. In particular they knew how Karnon accounts for the funds. From the evidence this has been going on for some time.”

  “Then let’s move on to the theft of League funds,” Pericles said. “How are we supposed to explain this to the people of Athens?” He threw his arms up in despair. “Not to mention that an entire Athenian fleet was present when the theft was discovered. That’s not going to sit well with the other member states.” For a moment I thought he would tear out his hair. Instead he turned on us. “How much is missing?”

  Diotima spoke up. “We won’t know until Karnon has finished his accounting. His initial estimate is thirty talents.” Diotima hesitated, then added, “Pericles, when you keep in mind that there are four thousand talents in that treasury, thirty talents doesn’t seem so much.”

  “It’s enough to build three entire war ships!” Pericles exclaimed. “Did the killer take the money?” He asked.