Funeral Games

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Much like,’ Diodorus agreed, pleased that his gift was so well received.

  Philokles came in, still in armour, and glanced at the display. ‘Goodness, Achilles is going to fight right next to me. Young man, see that you don’t blind me.’ He turned to Diodorus and Eumenes. ‘So?’

  ‘Leon’s man followed the assassin,’ Diodorus said.

  ‘I think I can find him,’ Eumenes said. ‘I need fifty men.’

  Philokles shook his head. ‘This whole city is right on the edge of a violent explosion,’ he said. ‘The news isn’t public, but two of our senior officers have fled to Demetrios - this morning. And just now, Ptolemy announced that he will march. We’ll set off tomorrow - the Phalanx of Aegypt at the rear.’ He smiled grimly. ‘If we send ten files of cavalry into the market, the war will start right here.’

  Diodorus nodded. ‘I agree. What do we do?’

  Philokles looked at Satyrus. ‘We ask our Aegyptian friends to find them for us. The tannery district is almost entirely native. The native populace is so disaffected with the Macedonians tonight that they may rise against Ptolemy himself - foolish as that would be, that’s where they are. Satyrus? Any ideas?’

  Satyrus was looking longingly at his new armour. ‘Namastis - the priest of Poseidon. He’ll help. I wish I knew where to find him, but the temple is the place to start.’

  Accompanied by Diokles and a dozen cavalry troopers whose military gear was inadequately disguised by borrowed civilian cloaks, Satyrus went to the Temple of Poseidon.

  Namastis greeted him from the top of the steps, as if they’d made an appointment. ‘I heard what happened!’ the Aegyptian said.

  ‘That’s what I’m hoping you’ll help with,’ Satyrus said. ‘Listen - my uncles say our city is on the edge of civil war - Aegyptians against Macedonians.’

  Namastis’s face closed. ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that, lord.’

  ‘Satyrus! Call me Satyrus, by the gods! By Poseidon Earth-shaker, priest, this is about our city! Your city and my city! Men are manipulating the thetes. Alexandria cannot stand without Lord Ptolemy. He is not the enemy. The enemy is Antigonus One-Eye and his army - if they come here, they will sack the city no matter what promises he makes.’

  Namastis nodded. ‘I know that. But desperate men make poor choices.’

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘These men who attacked me—’

  ‘Who are they? And why? No man of Aegypt would do it. I have let it be known - that is to say, it is known that you are a friend.’ Namastis looked deeply disturbed by his slip.

  Satyrus ignored it. ‘They serve One-Eye. Understand?’

  The priest shook his head. ‘No, I do not understand. Explain it to me.’

  Satyrus had to smile. ‘To be honest, I’m not positive that I understand myself. One-Eye is enemies with Cassander, the regent of Macedon - yes? But it appears that they have a secret agreement - to give Aegypt to One-Eye.’

  ‘Yes - that’s a common enough rumour. Why kill you?’ Namastis asked.

  Satyrus shrugged. ‘I’m an old enemy,’ he said. ‘My father and mother left me a claim to be king of the Bosporus.’

  ‘The king of the grain trade!’ Namastis nodded. ‘Ahh! But then, you are no more an Alexandrian than the Macedonians!’

  ‘What - do I seem to you to be an ingrate? A barbarian? I am a citizen. No matter what my birth. Don’t be as bad as the Macedonians, priest. So what if I was born somewhere else?’

  Namastis grinned - the first honest display of emotion that Satyrus had seen him show. ‘So,’ he said. ‘And so. How can this poor and unworthy priest help you, King of the Grain Trade?’

  Satyrus explained it to him. The priest listened carefully, and then nodded.

  ‘There are men who stand close to you all day,’ he said. ‘And you don’t know their names, or where they live. But they will spend the night searching on your behalf. Does that tell you something?’

  ‘It tells me that I should learn their names,’ Satyrus said.

  Namastis grunted. ‘That would be a start,’ he said. He produced an oyster shell from under his robes. ‘I’m not sure that I should give you this, given what you have told me. Except that now I understand why the lady of Heraklea has to do with an upstart Alexandrian gentle man.’

  Satyrus snatched the oyster shell, the conflicting emotions of the last one banished.

  ‘I am to say, tonight.’ Namastis raised an eyebrow. ‘I won’t ask if you will go.’

  Satyrus took a deep breath. ‘That’s right, friend,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask.’

  At the base of the steps he looked out over the sea wall and thought about his sister. Why can’t you be like this all the time? she’d asked at sea. He nodded and made the sign of Poseidon.

  Eloping wasn’t as difficult as it might have been for another girl. First, Melitta wasn’t afraid of the world outside Sappho’s women’s quarters. She knew the streets and she had clothes in which she did not look like a rich Greek girl. Second, she had weapons and a strong desire to use them. Third, she had somewhere to go. Xeno had offered to meet her and be her escort, but that’s not what she wanted.

  She dropped off her balcony on to the beach and froze as she heard movement to her left. Barefoot in the sand, she moved slowly and carefully back into the shadow of the house, at the same time drawing her Sakje akinakes.

  She saw her brother drop to the sand from his own balcony and she almost laughed aloud - but she couldn’t be sure that they were on the same side when it came to her running away. She wondered where he was going, and then she caught a glint of gold. He was well dressed. Amastris.

  She gave the superior smile of the sister, crouched down on her haunches and waited for him to vanish up the beach. When he was gone, his footsteps lost in the noise of drunken sailors, she picked up her armour and the leather wallet that held the rest of her boy’s clothes, and ran off along the strand, past the beached squadrons of Ptolemy’s fleet until she reached some lower and thus less opulent houses, where she cut inland. She leaned against a stable to clean her feet before pushing them into Thracian boots. Other expeditions in boy’s clothes had taught her that her hands and feet gave her away more than her breasts - carefully bound and now almost flat under her Sakje jacket.

  Just short of the northern agora, she stopped, straightened her clothes and began to walk purposefully, like a man in a hurry. Not like a girl running away.

  The agora was busy, despite the darkness, and she wanted to linger. There were torches everywhere and the heady odour of burning pitch filled the air along with the reek of patchouli and the smell of burning garlic and unwashed people. She wanted to be part of everything.

  The night market was a strange world where the thieves and the pornai and the beggars ruled, where soldiers were customers and slaves paid to be entertained. In some ways, it was the daytime world stood on its head, as Menander had so rightly observed. Menander was sometimes a denizen of the night market himself, and his plays were full of night-market expressions.

  She bought a skewer of meat - probably rats or mice - from a girl no older than five, who took the money with the concentration a young child gives to an adult task, while her mother serviced a noisy soldier in the booth behind her.

  ‘I couldn’t - I had to come,’ Xeno said beside her, and she looked up into his eyes.

  ‘You found me in the night market? You must be part dog!’ she said. She ought to have been angry, but instead she squeezed his hand.

  They wandered from stall to stall, paid a blind singer with a kithara for his songs and watched a troupe of slave acrobats perform for free what their master charged heavily for them to perform at a symposium or a private house.

  ‘The archer-captain is sitting over there with his mates, drinking wine and telling lies,’ Xeno said with a smile. ‘I told him a bit about you - not about you being a girl, of course. About how you were small and you can shoot.’

  She kissed him on the nose, as she had seen boys do with th
eir men, even in public. ‘I take back all those things I say about you behind your back,’ she said.

  Xeno winced. There was some fear in him, some hesitation, and it annoyed her.

  ‘Let’s go and meet this captain,’ she said.

  They wandered across the agora, avoiding a deadly brawl so sudden and explosive that Xeno was splattered in blood and Melitta found that she had her akinakes in her fist before she thought to draw it.

  ‘This your little archer, Master Xenophon?’ asked a deep voice, while Xeno was still wiping the blood off his face. He was looking at the body as if he’d recognize the victim any moment, but he turned.

  ‘Captain Idomeneus!’ he said. ‘My friend—’

  ‘Bion,’ Melitta said, offering her hand to clasp the archer’s. He was a Cretan by his accent, and he looked like a caricature of Hephaestos - his face was handsome enough, but he was short and wide, with powerful arms and short legs. Indeed, he only topped her by a couple of fingers.

  She must have looked at him too long, because he gave a fierce grin. ‘Like what you see, boy? My dick is short and broad, too. Hah!’ He had a mastos cup in his hand, and he drank wine from it. ‘No offence, boy. You can shoot?’

  ‘Anything,’ Melitta said. ‘I’ve been shooting since I was four years old. I can hit a target seven times out of ten at half a stade. I can—’

  ‘You can string a bow? Avoid bragging, boy, it’s too fucking easy for me to test you tomorrow. What kind of bow do you have? Let me see it.’ He didn’t seem drunk, but a whole life spent with Philokles had taught her that some men could operate efficiently through a haze of wine.

  She took her bow from its gorytos and handed it over.

  He whistled. ‘Sakje? Maybe you ain’t so full of shit, boy. It’s your size. Made for you?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘You Sakje, boy?’ he asked. ‘People going to come looking for you?’ There was something in his tone that she liked - a firmness that showed his command skills. So she told him the truth.

  ‘I have family here,’ she said. ‘They might look for me. Even if they find me, I doubt they’ll make a fuss.’

  ‘Rich kid?’ Idomeneus asked.

  Melitta shrugged. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, trying to roughen her voice and sound tough.

  The Cretan grabbed her by the ear and pulled her face close to a torch. She flinched, grabbed his hand in a pankration hold and rotated his arm, using the hand as purchase.

  ‘Whoa!’ the Cretan called. ‘Hold!’

  She let him go. He rubbed his shoulder. ‘I think you speak like a boy who had a tutor,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to waste my time visiting magistrates and archons. And,’ he shrugged, his eyes flashing in the torchlight, ‘if I didn’t know better, I might wonder if you were a girl. Not that I particularly give a shit, you understand. Just that if an outraged father or brother kills me, I’ll haunt you. You as good as that bow says you are?’

  ‘Yes,’ Melitta said.

  The Cretan shrugged. ‘Okay. I’m desperate, which this young animal has no doubt told you. We need archers the way a man in the desert needs water. You’re on. If your father comes for you, though, I’ll hand you over in a heartbeat. Understand me, boy?’

  Melitta stood straighter. ‘Yes, sir!’

  ‘Pluton, none of my boys call me “sir”.’ Idomeneus grinned, his teeth glinting in the torchlight. ‘Can I buy you two a cup of wine to seal the bargain?’

  Melitta wanted to accept, but Xeno shook his head. ‘I thought I’d go to the slave auction,’ he said.

  Melitta flinched. ‘You know how Uncle—’ She reconsidered her sentence. ‘What do you want with a slave?’ she asked.

  Idomeneus gave her a steady look. Xeno glanced around nervously. ‘I want a shield-bearer,’ he said. ‘I have all my share from the ship. All the rich boys have a shield-bearer.’

  ‘A fool and his money,’ the Cretan muttered. ‘Listen, boys - never buy anything at the night auction. Half those poor bastards were just kidnapped off the street, and the other half are shills who follow you home just to help their allies rob your house.’

  ‘I can’t afford anything at the day market,’ Xeno said. He was avoiding Melitta’s glares.

  ‘Go without,’ the archer-captain said, with all the firmness of age and experience. ‘Oh, fine. I’ll go with you - otherwise you’ll both end up on the block. Argon?’ he called, and another Cretan stepped away from a big fire, downed the wine in a cheap clay cup and handed it to another man.

  ‘With you, humpback. Who’s this boy?’ Argon was taller and handsomer and didn’t look very bright.

  ‘Bion - just joined. We’re going to the night auction. Come and cover my arse.’ Idomeneus grinned and the two men slapped each other’s backs.

  The four of them made their way to the auction, where a deep throng of onlookers - many of them slaves themselves - gathered to bid on the dregs of the dregs of the city of Alexandria. Melitta was disgusted by the whole process - she shared her uncle’s views on every aspect of the trade. Most of the people on auction were hopeless - the kind you saw on the fringe of the agora in the daytime, begging and stealing, many scarcely capable of speech. They were scrawny, ill fed, most had few teeth and all flinched whenever a free man came too close. The only healthy, normal-looking specimens were children, and their version of normality was abject terror at being sold. One boy sobbed incessantly.

  What kind of parent sells her child? Melitta asked in her head, but the answer was plain before her, as two of the children were auctioned off by a toothless bastard with an evil smile. The two children he sold were bruised and silent, watching the torch-lit crowd with all the interest of dead souls watching the living.

  Melitta found that her right thumb was rubbing the hilt of her long knife. She wanted to kill the man.

  The next lot was a single boy, the one who kept sobbing. Under his dirt and his scrunched, unhappy face he was healthy, blond and larger than most of the other children.

  Xeno was shifting nervously, aware, like most boyfriends, that he had annoyed his lover, and unable to think of a way to make it right without giving up his precious project of buying a slave.

  Melitta could read him so easily that it hurt her - hurt her opinion of him. But without weighing the morality of her actions, she smiled up at him. ‘Buy that boy,’ she said. ‘He looks strong enough.’

  ‘My aspis is taller than that kid!’ Xeno said, but he looked at the boy again. ‘He’s whimpering.’

  ‘Zeus Soter, he’s big, and in a few years he’ll be strong. Besides, he’s just the sort a certain uncle of ours tries to rescue. Don’t be a git, Xeno.’ Melitta tried to whisper, but the crowd was hooting for the next lot to be stripped - two whores being sold for debt.

  Idomeneus caught something of what she said, because he leaned in. ‘That boy? He looks all right. I’ll go and look him over.’ The Cretan shrugged. ‘Boy that size is like having a kid, though. Have to teach him everything - but if he lives, a good investment.’

  The crowd was so anxious to see the pornai that the hawker was having trouble getting bids on the blond child.

  ‘I fucking hate seeing kids sold,’ Argon said. He spat at the man who had sold the two children, now standing at arm’s length from them counting his silver coins. The man felt the moisture and whirled in anger.

  Argon didn’t move. ‘Fuck yourself, clod.’

  The clod flinched and backed away. Argon was a big man.

  Melitta nodded. ‘I wanted to kill him,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ Argon asked. ‘Want to?’

  Melitta realized then that she was in a different world - that Argon meant just what he said.

  ‘Three silver owls,’ Idomeneus said. ‘Argon, don’t make trouble. Bion, did you stir him up, the stupid lout? Argon, take a deep breath and back off.’ The Cretan shook his head. ‘He’s the kind of man who makes other people call us Cretans.’

  Xeno handed the officer three big s
ilver coins, and Idomeneus made them vanish. ‘Never flourish money like that at night,’ he said. ‘You boys should get some training in real life. Anyway, boy’s yours.’ He reached out and took a leash from the hawker. Xeno took it and pulled, but the boy didn’t move, and the crowd was howling for the prostitutes to be stripped.

  Melitta put her arm around the boy’s shoulder. ‘Come on, boy,’ she said.

  He sobbed and hunkered down.

  Idomeneus picked him up as if he was made of feathers. ‘Let’s go somewhere bright and quiet and look at what you bought,’ he said. ‘Camp.’

  Satyrus dropped from his balcony to the beach with a minimum of fuss, except for the pain in his side over his ribs, which burned anew as he hung from his fingers for a moment. Then he gathered the bundle he’d thrown from the balcony moments before and sprinted off down the beach, the sound of his feet covered by the shouts of the men and women on the beach.

  The Golden Lotus was stern-first on the beach between the Hyacinth and the Bow of Apollo, her bow awash, ready for action in minutes, and her crew were drinking and enjoying the company of hundreds of Alexandria’s waterfront whores, who had turned the beach into an outdoor market, with wine and food and other delights for the thousands of oarsmen from Ptolemy’s fleet.

  Satyrus had no difficulty slipping through them in a plain cloak, ignoring a few offers of companionship and his own sense of what he ought to be doing, and seizing hold of the rope that led to the ship’s boat, moored alongside the oar box. He pulled off his boots and climbed aboard, loosed the rope and rowed away.

  Satyrus rowed across the harbour in the light of a new moon, the upside-down crescent that the Sakje and the Aegyptians both called the ‘maiden with her legs spread’. Whatever powers Sophokles and Stratokles possessed, Satyrus didn’t think they could track him across the harbour.

  He rowed right past the guard post at the palace without a challenge - not the first time - and coasted silently into the tiny harbour, scarcely larger than a courtyard, where Ptolemy’s own barge loaded and unloaded. What he was doing was insane, but he was smiling, for the first time in days.