The Marathon Conspiracy

by Corby, Gary

“Of course. The High Priestess wrote to me on the day she disappeared.”

  “You didn’t go to Brauron at once?”

  “Urgent business matters held me in Athens.”

  “You sent your own agent, then?”

  “No.”

  I struggled not to show surprise. If I had a missing daughter, I’d be tearing the hills apart looking for her.

  I said, “It was the priestess Doris who asked us to find Ophelia.”

  “Us?”

  “My fiancée and I.”

  Polonikos frowned.

  “I realize you’ve never heard of me, Polonikos, but I’m an experienced investigator, and my fiancée’s been of the greatest assistance in the past. Also, she was once a Little Bear herself, and her knowledge will be invaluable in finding your daughter.” It wouldn’t hurt to mention that. Polonikos was acting like he doubted our qualifications. “Rest assured, sir, we’ll find your daughter.”

  “Yes, very kind of you both, I’m sure. But there’s no need to trouble yourselves.”

  It took me a moment to realize what he’d said, and then I thought I must have misheard. “Huh? What did you say?”

  “I said, you don’t need to bother searching for Ophelia. I have the matter well in hand.”

  “Er … sir … didn’t you just say you’d done nothing?”

  “I’m sure my daughter merely ran away from a situation she disliked,” he said, in a tone that suggested no other thought was possible. “You know how children will do these things. She’ll find her way home eventually, take her beating, and then all will be forgotten and life will go on.”

  “You’re asking me to stop?” I repeated, unable to believe what I was hearing.

  “I don’t think you’ve quite understood, young man. I’m not asking you anything.” His tone moved from polite to angry in one breath. “I’m telling you that your services are not required.”

  “Doesn’t it worry you that your daughter’s friend Allike has been brutally murdered? Sir, we know that for sure. Are you not afraid your daughter has met the same fate?”

  “I think it more likely this other girl’s death spooked my daughter—understandably—and she’s run off to hide. Trust me, I know my own child.”

  Polonikos was clearly a man not used to having his will opposed.

  He continued, “I appreciate your concern, young man, and also that until this moment you didn’t know my wishes in this matter. Please send me a bill for whatever actions you’ve taken to date, and I’ll pay you.”

  “I’m afraid you’re not my client, sir. I’m acting in the interests of the Sanctuary of Brauron, and they want Ophelia found.”

  “You refuse me?” he said, incredulous.

  “I must. Only the temple can ask me to stop.”

  “Then I shall write to the High Priestess at the temple and require her to sack you, in which case there will be no compensation from me whatsoever.”

  “I never asked for it, sir,” I said, becoming angry. I certainly couldn’t stop him writing to the High Priestess. “I must say, sir, you seem to have a relaxed attitude to missing children.”

  “If it were a first-born son, that would be different,” he said. “Losing a mere girl isn’t the same thing at all.”

  I was suddenly glad that Diotima wasn’t with us.

  He stood. “I must go. My final word is this: you are not wanted and I will thank you not to poke your nose into my business. I expect to see your settlement bill in the morning. I’m prepared to be generous.”

  I saw the father of Ophelia to the door, where two slaves waited to escort their master home. Like many men of dignity, Polonikos wouldn’t have been seen dead in the streets of Athens without a couple of slaves in attendance. He was obviously a man who liked to do things the traditional, old-fashioned way. I watched Polonikos walk down the street until he turned the corner before I shut the door.

  One thing was certain. I’d been dubious about taking on this job, but now that I’d spoken to her father, I was absolutely determined to find Ophelia.

  DIOTIMA SAT IN the courtyard, chewing her lip and reading the four scrolls from the case.

  “Anything there?” I asked her.

  “Plenty, if we want to blackmail men who were dead long before either of us was born.” Diotima threw down the scroll she was holding in disgust. “These are all Hippias’s private dealings. He couldn’t stop himself writing down all the sordid things he did. This one”—Diotima picked up the scroll in front of her—“this one is all about when he first became tyrant. He expresses hope for the future, even tells himself he wants to be a fair ruler.” Diotima touched the next two scrolls. “In these, the tyranny’s in full swing. He mostly records who’s vulnerable to what pressure, who he can blackmail, who hates whom so he can use one man against another. It’s depressing.

  “This final one,” she said, picking up the fourth scroll, “begins with the death of his brother. There was a plot against them. The brother was killed, but Hippias survived. Hippias becomes paranoid … well, I guess if everyone hates you, it’s not really paranoia, is it? He writes copious notes about who his enemies are. Imagines plots everywhere.” She sounded distraught. “It’s the arbitrary way he decides life and death that’s simply horrific. Listen to this.” She rolled through to the end.

  Have discovered from local source that the girl was hidden near my own estates. She will go on the next execution list. The last thing I require is another Elektra.

  Diotima put down the scroll. “Then in the next section, he wrote her into an arrest list.” She looked up at me. “He was killing people on a whim, Nico, or if he feared them, or if he merely disliked them. He was even executing children. Athens was right to rebel against him.”

  I said, “I don’t understand the reference to Elektra.”

  Diotima shrugged. “Elektra was the daughter of King Agamemnon of legend. When he was murdered, Elektra grew to avenge him. Perhaps Hippias had killed this girl’s father and he was afraid that, like Elektra, the girl would come to avenge the father.”

  There were tears in her eyes.

  I put an arm around her. “That’s why we’re a democracy now.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he write after he was exiled?”

  “Nothing. The fourth ends with the growing rebellion against him. He saw it coming, Nico, but he couldn’t stop it. Then it ends abruptly.”

  “Hippias was exiled twenty years before he died.”

  “There’s a spare slot in the case. You’re thinking what I’m thinking, aren’t you?”

  “There’s another scroll. I wonder where it is.”

  THAT AFTERNOON, DIOTIMA and I rode to Brauron. Or rather, she rode and I walked. To my surprise, Blossom proved capable of pulling the cart over a long distance. He was stronger than he looked. There was only room for my girl on the driver’s bench. I tried riding Blossom, but from the way he staggered it was soon apparent Blossom was more likely to need me to carry him. I got off and walked alongside and thought longingly of the high-performance racehorse.

  The wheels on the cart had creaked and squealed with every turn on the way home from the rental yard. I’d turned the cart over with the help of a slave and coated the axle with lavish amounts of the pig fat we kept in barrels for the statuary sledge. If there was one thing our family knew about, it was how to move large blocks of stone, for which we kept a heavy sledge and many barrels of grease to ease its way. By the time I’d finished, both I and the cartwheels had been smothered in grease. Which is probably why Blossom was able to pull it. The rims of the wooden wheels were chipped, but sturdy enough to get us to Brauron and back. While I worked on the cart, Diotima had washed the donkey and then fed him so much hay I thought he might explode.

  At first Blossom wasn’t in any hurry, possibly because of his full stomach. I prodded him a few times and discovered he had more spirit than appearance suggested. But then, if someone called me Blossom, I’d probably bite him too.

&nbs
p; I grumbled all the way. I’d spent much of the last six months out of Athens, but I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed the place until I returned. Now here I was leaving my city once again, though it was the job I’d accepted, and we weren’t going far. Still, I hated the idea.

  Diotima, who had made this trip with her birth father when she was a girl, treated it like a happy outing. She took great delight in pointing out the sights she remembered and prattled on like a delighted child. I grunted from time to time in reply.

  She eventually became exasperated by my surliness.

  “You should have more appreciation for nature, Nico. There’s so much to see: the birds and the flowers—they’re pretty, aren’t they? The trees and the small animals and—”

  “And the naked woman running through the woods,” I said.

  “And the naked woman running through the … what?”

  I pointed. Diotima gaped.

  Running alongside the road, weaving between the bushes and moving at impressive speed, was a naked woman. At least, if she was wearing a shred of clothing, I couldn’t see it. She ran like an athlete in training, slim and trim and in tip-top condition. She leapt a fallen log with an easy stride, and her breasts bounced.

  “You’re right, Diotima, the local wildlife is fascinating. I’m looking forward to seeing more of it.”

  The running woman turned away from the road and sprinted out of sight, back amongst the trees, without slackening her pace for even a moment. She’d shown no sign of noticing us.

  Diotima whispered, “Dear Gods. What’s she doing here?”

  “I assume that’s not the girl we’re looking for.”

  “Did she look fourteen to you?” Diotima said.

  “Not even close,” I said happily. Her hair had been long and straight, not at all like a pampered lady’s, but her skin had been as clean as could be while running through the forest. “Do you think there might be a flock of women in the hills around here somewhere?” I asked in hope.

  Diotima didn’t deign to answer.

  The road split ahead of us. The main road curved right. It would soon take us to Brauron if we stayed on it. Our path, however, was to the left, down the narrow, tree-lined road, where we would come to the sacred sanctuary.

  I heard the arrow before I saw it. Before I could even react it had thunked into the side of the cart, a mere hand’s breadth from Diotima’s right leg and right in front of me. If I’d taken one more step before it came in, I’d’ve been a dead man.

  I shouted, “Ride!”

  I kicked Blossom so hard up the behind even he got the message. Or perhaps he’d heard the fear in my voice, because Diotima was a target, high in the cart. Either way, the donkey took off as fast as a donkey can while pulling a protesting woman in his wake. I screamed, “Stay low!” at her rapidly disappearing back, and then took my own advice and flattened myself on the ground. Diotima pulled on the left rein, and the cart sped around the curve and out of sight on the road to the sanctuary. She was no longer a target. I breathed a sigh of relief. I would just have to hope there was no one waiting around there for her.

  The attack had come from the right, from a copse of trees a hundred paces away, at the point where the road forked, and that was probably what had saved us. The ground between the road and the trees was clear of all but barley plants, knee-high, not nearly tall or thick enough to hide a man who must stand to shoot a bow. The trees were the closest a shooter could approach. The good news was I couldn’t see a band of brigands. If it had been highway robbers, they would have rushed me, and I wouldn’t have stood a chance. This had the look of a single assassin.

  I was in the middle of a road, with no cover about me and a bowman within range. I considered running away, but rejected the idea. It would expose my back to a lucky shot, and besides, I wanted to know who was trying to kill us, and why.

  I felt beneath my exomis for my knife. It was the only weapon I had. I could have borrowed my father’s spear and shield and short sword before I left home, but who goes armed to find a missing girl?

  There’s a technical term for a man who charges a bowman wielding only a knife. The term is corpse. I couldn’t run away, I couldn’t charge without being hit, but I could crawl. I dragged myself off the road, in the direction of the trees, flat to the ground, until I was by the roadside amongst the first of the barley. Here I had some minimal cover. Another arrow flew overhead, in the right direction and barely above me. That would change in a moment, when he found his range. I dragged myself, I hoped out of sight, not forward or backward, but sideways, parallel with the road and going back in the direction of Athens. I moved slowly, careful not to make the knee-high plants sway against the breeze. I’d moved five paces when an arrow embedded itself in the ground, exactly where I’d been hiding. I moved farther to the right. Carefully.

  A few more shots came in, falling in a cluster about where the shooter had seen me disappear into the grass, and I thought myself lucky that he and I were on the same level. If he’d been higher—on a hill, for example—I’d’ve been totally exposed.

  If he were on a hill. Or if he were up a tree. And the bowman was hiding in woods.

  At that moment the shooting stopped.

  What were the odds my attacker was climbing a tree? If he got a decent purchase on a high limb then I was a dead man. But while he was climbing, he couldn’t shoot at all. He might not even see me if I rushed him.

  I prepared myself to run, then was assaulted by fear: What if he wasn’t climbing? What if the shooter was merely waiting to see what I did? I’d take an arrow through the head the moment I raised it.

  Which was he doing: climbing or waiting?

  I had to do something. No decision was worse than guessing wrong.

  If he was climbing, then my only chance to survive would be gone within heartbeats.

  I grabbed a handful of the local dirt in my left hand—it was gray, dry dust that I scraped from the surface—because there’s nothing a bowman hates worse than grit in the eyes. Then I took a deep breath, tensed my legs, and pushed off.

  I ran five steps before I remembered to zigzag. I thought to myself, irrelevantly, that my old army instructor would have been ashamed of me if he knew.

  Well, if I died here, he’d never find out.

  It was lucky I remembered when I did, because at that instant an arrow whizzed by exactly on the line I’d been charging. I’d gotten it wrong. He wasn’t climbing a tree at all. He was waiting for me, and now I was committed.

  I yelled a blood-curdling scream, hoping to put him off his aim, and changed direction again. Another shot went by. I remembered that old sergeant telling us to change direction at random. “Otherwise the enemy will guess where you’re about to be and shoot there,” he’d said grimly to us raw recruits, and we hadn’t paid the slightest attention because none of us had ever expected to be pinned down in a barley field by a deadly bowman.

  I swore as I ran that I’d never get caught like this again, but my fervent promise to correct my inadequate life planning wouldn’t be worth spit if I didn’t make the next fifty paces into the trees ahead. If only I could get some solid wood between me and my attacker, we’d be on an even field.

  I scanned the woods as I ran, but I couldn’t see him. That meant he was further within, perhaps behind some shrubs. I changed direction for the last thirty paces, to approach on a broad curve. I hoped that by moving sideways I’d put trees or at least bushes between us from time to time to interrupt his sighting. Also, a man moving across the field of vision is harder to hit. The expectation of feeling an arrow in my side at any moment was a wonderful goad.

  There were no more shots until I made the first of the trees. I wanted to stop and gasp for air—in fact I did stop for the briefest moment and heaved in the extra air I desperately wanted—but I had to keep moving. I dodged from tree trunk to tree trunk, searching for the man I now had the advantage over. Unless he had a sword, in which case I was in big trouble.

 
But I couldn’t find him at all. There were no more shots, and all was silence.

  I searched all over, stepping carefully from cover to cover, constantly aware of the danger of ambush, but the shooter was gone.

  “WE HAVEN’T EVEN arrived yet, and someone’s already trying to kill us,” I said. I’d caught up with Diotima along the path to the sanctuary. Or rather, we’d found each other, because she’d tethered Blossom out of sight and pulled out her own bow and quiver of arrows, and was running back to help me. She’d had to retrieve the bow from where we’d cleverly packed it: underneath everything else in the cart. There was another lesson learned.

  “It does seem a little premature,” Diotima agreed. “We’ve hardly had time to annoy anyone yet.”

  “That’s a good point. Who have we annoyed?”

  “Polonikos, the father of Ophelia, seems to be the only candidate.” Diotima paused to think about it. “He wouldn’t seriously try to kill us to stop us finding his own daughter, would he?”

  “Also, he’s back in Athens,” I said. “Come to that, anyone we might have annoyed is back in Athens. Whoever that attacker was, he must have run out the back of the woods as I entered from the front. The woods are smaller than they look from the roadside. There’s another open field beyond, then more trees. I was slow moving through, for obvious reasons. He had ample time to reach the next copse.”

  “You didn’t follow?”

  “Across another open field, when I knew someone on the other side was armed with a bow? No thanks.”

  “He’d probably run out of arrows. That’s why he retreated.”

  “I wasn’t keen to test that theory.”

  Diotima sniffed. “Whoever he is, he’s not so good. I could have hit us at that range.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I doubted whether she could pull a flat trajectory out to a hundred paces. Diotima’s bow was a custom-made marksman’s weapon in reinforced bone. It had been the gift of her birth father, crafted by a master bowyer at mind-boggling expense. Diotima hadn’t the strength of a man, so the bowyer had cleverly scaled down the pull to the level of a healthy woman. Her bow had inevitably lost power, but within her range, Diotima was an absolute dead shot. I’d seen her consistently bullseye at fifty paces.