The Marathon Conspiracy

by Corby, Gary

  Diotima frowned. “The shooter must have been someone from Athens who got ahead of us on the road. Who else knew we were coming?”

  “Doris, and everyone at the sanctuary,” I pointed out. “Plus anyone they’ve told.”

  “So you think the sanctuary called us in to help them, and then tried to kill us to stop us from helping them. Yes, I can totally see that.”

  “No need to be sarcastic. But you have to agree, the attack happened much closer to Brauron than Athens. In fact, we’re almost there.”

  Indeed we were. We’d traveled as we talked, with a wary eye to each side of the road for any more ambushes. After we rounded a blind corner, there lay before us a small river crossed by a stone bridge, almost as wide as it was long. On the other side was a temple, new-built in good stone and brightly painted, and beside it, another new building in stone. We’d come to the Sanctuary of Brauron, where lived the most marriageable girls of the highest families of Athens.

  Some of those girls saw us before we reached the bridge—I guessed they’d been sent to look out for us, since the sanctuary knew we were arriving today—and they quickly ran off, to return with a figure I recognized: Doris the priestess.

  “Welcome,” she said as we pulled up.

  “Did you know there’s a naked woman running around in the woods?” I said, by way of greeting.

  “A naked woman?” Doris said, surprised. Then, “Oh! That’s just Gaïs. Don’t mind her. She’s one of our priestesses.”

  “Oh, really?” I said, my interest quickened. “I may need to meet her. For the investigation, you understand—”

  “Did you know there’s also someone out there with a bow? He tried to kill us.” Diotima quickly blocked any attempt to meet naked women. Instead she told Doris of the encounter with the bowman.

  “Oh no!” Doris said. “It must have been robbers. We do get them on the main road from time to time. I’ll warn Zeke to keep an extra lookout though, in case they come this way.”

  “Zeke?”

  “Our chief maintenance man. There he is.” Doris pointed to a tall, thin man loping across the green grass.

  If Zeke was the sanctuary’s first line of defense, then they were in big trouble, because he was sixty if he was a day. Maybe even older, with white hair and white whiskers and skin that had seen the sun every day of his long life. Zeke smacked his lips and looked thoughtful when Doris told him our story. “Sounds to me like a poor attempt at highway robbery. Not a professional. Probably some local who thought he’d try his luck.” He shrugged. “It happens. There are poor folk in these parts. Too many of them are desperate.”

  “Then why didn’t he try to waylay us on the much narrower tree-lined path to the sanctuary?” Diotima asked. “He couldn’t have missed us there.”

  “ ’Cause most folk are on their way to Brauron town,” Zeke answered. “Besides, the sanctuary’s too well respected, even by cutthroats.”

  “So you’re not worried?” Doris asked.

  Zeke shook his head. “Not now this feller’s had his taste of highway robbery and failed. I doubt he’ll try again, not if he ran away. He’ll go back to scrabbling in the dirt for a pittance, like all the other poor folk.”

  I could see Doris’s shoulders relax with Zeke’s very reasonable explanation. I couldn’t fault him, but somehow I doubted he had it right.

  “Come,” Doris said. “The High Priestess commanded me to bring you to her private office as soon as you arrived.”

  THERE WERE ONLY two buildings at Brauron: a small temple to Artemis, before which Doris stood when she greeted us, and a larger stoa—that is, a covered porch—surrounded by rooms. Doris led us past the temple and across a courtyard of well-kept green grass to the other side of the stoa. She stopped at a closed door, where she announced our arrival by calling out, “It’s me. They’re here!”

  The door opened to reveal an overweight middle-aged woman, and I thought this must be the High Priestess until I saw another beyond, an old lady sitting on a dining couch.

  Thea, the High Priestess, was a woman of delicate features, gray, frizzy hair, and a determined set of the mouth.

  She rose from the couch when we entered, Diotima leading.

  The High Priestess took her by the hands, looked up into her face, and said, “Diotima, it’s good to see you again. So few of our girls return to see us. You’ve grown.”

  Diotima wasn’t a tall woman, yet she had to stoop to be on a level with the High Priestess. Diotima said, “The last time I stood in this office, I was a scared little girl.”

  “Not any longer,” Thea said.

  “High Priestess, I wish to present Nicolaos; son of Sophroniscus, who is to be my husband.”

  Thea looked me up and down. Her only comment was a noncommittal, “Hmm.”

  I felt like I’d failed a test.

  The overweight woman spoke up. “I’m Sabina,” she said.

  This was the woman who’d sent the original package of skull and scroll case to Athens and started all the trouble. I made a mental note to interview her later, and noted too the way Doris and Thea tried to ignore Sabina.

  I said, “I understand you’re a priestess here too?”

  “I’m the treasurer of the sanctuary.”

  “Is that permitted?” I asked. For a woman to manage accounts was almost unheard of.

  Sabina said, in a voice that bristled, “Administration of the Sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia falls within the office of the Basileus, who is back in Athens. The Basileus trusts me to manage things here.”

  Doris, in the background, rolled her eyes. Thea chose not to comment. I guessed Sabina’s claim to manage the sanctuary was a sore point.

  “I see.” The Basileus had more than enough to do in Athens without having to worry about a small complex on the other side of Attica. He probably sent an assistant once a year to sign off on the books and approve funding for the next, and then tried to forget that Brauron existed.

  “What can you tell us about the missing girl?” I asked.

  Thea the High Priestess said, “She’s the daughter of a wealthy landholder named Polonikos—”

  “I’ve met him. Are all fathers that unconcerned when their children go missing?”

  “We don’t lose many girls, so I can’t form a general opinion. But to answer your real question, I wrote a letter to Polonikos the moment we knew Ophelia was missing. I sent the letter by runner and instructed him not to stop for anything but water. A return message arrived next day. Polonikos asked me to let him know when the girl showed up.” Thea grimaced. “Since then, I’ve had no news to send him.”

  “Have children gone missing before?” I asked.

  “Yes. They always turn up the next day, usually in the company of a passing merchant who found the child walking the road back to Athens. They get homesick, you see. But I knew right away that Ophelia’s case was different.”

  “Why?”

  “She liked it here. Besides which … You said you met the father?”

  “Oh. Right.” It was hard to imagine the girl would be welcomed home.

  Sabina said, “Of course, the whole matter might be much simpler than everyone thinks, given the unusual state of Allike’s body.”

  Thea glared at her treasurer. “Sabina, there’s no need to bring that up.”

  “Anything might be relevant,” I said. “What unusual state?”

  “Didn’t Doris tell you? I thought she told you everything.”

  “Tell us what?”

  “That Allike, when we found her, she wasn’t just dead—”

  “Sabina!” Thea shouted. Doris had turned green.

  “She was ripped to little pieces. Torn limb from limb. Like some wild animal had gotten her. It took ages to find all the bits.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NO WONDER DORIS had been upset, back in Athens, when we asked her how Allike died. Doris had been first to see the body of Allike. She must have been one of the ones who had to pick up what was left of he
r former student and put the pieces in a sack.

  After that revelation, no one was inclined to say anything more.

  As we emerged from Thea’s room, a skinny, naked woman with hair flying behind her leaped over the fallen logs that served as a boundary to the sanctuary. She skidded to a halt. She was breathing heavily, and not merely at the sight of me. Her hair was straggly and unkempt, her face thin and dripping. She was the runner from the woods.

  We all stopped dead; it was that or walk into each other in the narrow corridor. She eyed me up and down. A slight smile crossed her lips.

  “This is Gaïs, the youngest of our priestesses,” Doris said helpfully. “Gaïs, do you remember Diotima? You were both children the last time you met. And Gaïs, this man is Nicolaos son of Sophroniscus. Nicolaos and Diotima are to marry next month.”

  “I remember her, and no, they won’t marry,” Gaïs said at once.

  They were the first words I ever heard Gaïs speak, and I was taken aback by her strange ferocity. It was like I’d been dropped into a conversation whose first half I’d missed.

  “What did you say?” I said.

  She ignored me. Gaïs transferred her attention to Diotima. “The Goddess will stop you.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Diotima said. “Nico’s the most important thing in my life. Nothing will stop me marrying him.” But somehow, though her words were strong, my betrothed didn’t sound as confident as I expected.

  Everyone but Gaïs turned to look at me. I blushed. Why were we suddenly having this conversation about our private lives with a stranger? What did she care about our marriage?

  Gaïs stayed fixated on Diotima. She said, “If that were true, you’d have given up everything else, wouldn’t you? But I know you didn’t. She’ll stop you, somehow. Maybe she’ll kill one of you. Arrow-shooting Artemis can’t be denied.”

  Diotima stepped back as if Gaïs had struck her.

  “Are you threatening us?” I said, confused and angry at the effect these words had had on my girl.

  Gaïs turned to me, but her eyes looked right through me, and it was clear her mind was in another place.

  I said, to bring her back to reality, “Allike’s dead, and Ophelia’s missing. What do you think happened to them, Gaïs?”

  Gaïs said nothing.

  I repeated, “Gaïs, what happened to the girls?”

  “Do you know what they drink in Hades?” Gaïs asked.

  “What?”

  Gaïs crouched to scrape her hands across the ground between us, then she raised her cupped hands in front of my face.

  “They drink dust.”

  She opened her fingers, and the dry, dry dust fell between us.

  GAÏS HAD WALKED off, after that extraordinary statement, leaving the rest of us to stare at one another. Thea and Doris were obviously embarrassed by their young priestess but said nothing. Sabina seemed to enjoy their discomfort. We made small talk before Diotima pointed out that the sun had fallen below the horizon.

  In a single day, we had hired a cart and donkey, traveled the breadth of Attica, interviewed men, women, and a crazy priestess, and been attacked by an unknown archer. I reflected that this job didn’t pay enough. In fact, since I was still waiting on Pericles, it didn’t pay anything at all. But now it was evening, there was nothing else we could do, and Diotima and I were exhausted.

  Sabina had assigned us sleeping spaces.

  “You’re not married?” was the first thing she asked.

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Then you certainly won’t be sleeping together.”

  I protested, “But—”

  “I don’t care what you do back in Athens,” Sabina snapped. “Though I’m shocked to hear one of our own, a former Little Bear no less, could so forget herself as to descend into debauchery. Did we teach you nothing about proper conduct, girl?” Sabina glared at Diotima, who blushed bright red.

  Sabina said, “Here, you will conform to the proprieties. We have standards to maintain before the girls.”

  Diotima said, “Please, Sabina, we are betrothed, and soon we’ll be—”

  “I’m not interested in your rationalizations either. That’s for your own conscience. Now where was I? Oh yes, accommodation … beds. You can sleep with the maintenance men,” she said to me. “There’s a wooden hut out back.”

  “Is there a bed there?” I asked.

  “I’m sure you’ll make do. I’ve never looked inside, myself. The smell of all those unwashed men drives me away.” Sabina turned to Diotima and frowned. “Normally a visiting priestess would be housed with the rest of us, in the east wing, but there are no spare beds at the moment. We could make up a pallet, of course, but you’d be sleeping on the stone floor. We do have two spare beds in the west wing, if you don’t mind sleeping with the girls in a dorm room.”

  “That might be better,” Diotima said at once, and I knew she was thinking the farther away she was from Sabina, the better. She probably didn’t realize when she said it, but the two spares must surely have belonged to Allike and Ophelia.

  Dinner that night was an interesting affair. Diotima ate with the women and girls, while I ate with the men. The conversation among the men was, predictably, about the women. Not that much of what they had to say was useful, nor repeatable if it came to that, though the speculation about what Sabina might do in her lonely bed was amusing and, based on what I knew of her, quite possibly correct.

  There were eleven men, some of them slaves, some of them free men so poor they had to work at the temple for the few coins it paid. The slaves were the better off; they at least had guaranteed food and a place to sleep at no cost.

  Zeke puzzled me. Normally you can tell which city a man is from by his accent, but Zeke I couldn’t place at all. He wasn’t from Attica, of that I was certain. I wasn’t even sure whether he was a slave or a free man. His job was menial; normally a foreign man with a menial job must be a slave, yet Zeke neither behaved nor was treated like one. He was clearly the leader, by age, by experience, by force of personality. Zeke kept apart, spoke little, except to tone down with his soft voice any argument that threatened to become a fight, treated slave and free man alike, and let the men have their way. He reminded me of Pythax, my future father-in-law: a man who lived outside the system, while supporting it to the core.

  Diotima and I met after dinner on the lush, green grass of the courtyard. A quarter of the girls had set about clearing up, while the others sang and danced in the moonlight. We sat and listened to the girls’ voices. The moon was beautiful in the sky, and a soft, warm breeze blew across the sanctuary.

  Lying back on the grass, I said, “It’s hard to believe such a lovely place could harbor evil.”

  “Clearly you’ve never been to a girls’ school before,” Diotima said.

  I looked over at her. “You didn’t like it here?”

  “I loved the place. I didn’t like the other girls.”

  “Did you really know Gaïs when you were children? Was she always crazy?”

  “Yes to the first. She was here before I arrived. She was still here when I left. But she’s changed a lot.”

  “You mean she wasn’t always crazy.”

  “I don’t remember her like this,” Diotima admitted. “She was always something of a loner. But then, so was I.”

  “You didn’t become two loners together?” I asked.

  Diotima snorted. “Not with her. I remember she was arrogant even back then. She always pushed people away.”

  “How come she’s still at Brauron? I thought everyone stayed for a year.”

  “The sanctuary takes in a few orphan girls, ones with nowhere else to go. Gaïs was one of those. She grew up here.”

  “It’s a wonder she isn’t married,” I said. “She certainly should be.”

  “Yes, I wondered about that too,” Diotima said. “I never expected to find her still here.”

  It was the norm for girls to have marriages arranged for them by the time they we
re fifteen. Any significant age past that, and eyebrows were raised: people would start to wonder what was wrong with the girl. Diotima had been preserved to twenty because of her unorthodox parentage, but that was all to the good, because it had saved her for me, who otherwise would never have met my perfect girl. Gaïs had no such excuse.

  I thought about the temple complex. Although it was beautiful, it was also very small; a world totally enclosed, with the same priestesses, who never came or went, and children who were replaced every year. A child who lived here had no chance to make any permanent friends. It was no wonder Gaïs went crazy. Then I thought about what the crazy woman had said. I hesitated, slightly afraid to ask, but I wanted to know.

  “Diotima, why did Gaïs say that Artemis would prevent you from marrying?”

  “I’d rather not talk about that, Nico.”

  “Oh.” I was taken aback. I’d thought we had no secrets.

  “Didn’t we just agree she was crazy?” Diotima said. “Crazy people say crazy things.”

  I asked, “What was she going on about, with all that talk of the dead drinking dust in Hades?”

  “It’s true,” Diotima said.

  “The subject doesn’t usually come up in casual conversation.”

  Diotima hesitated. “I don’t know. It sounded to me like she thinks Ophelia’s dead.”

  “Or she knows Ophelia’s dead.”

  “You might be right,” Diotima admitted. “I don’t like Gaïs, but I’d hate to think she had something to do with this.”

  “Let’s find out.” I nodded in the direction of the Sacred Spring. Torches had been set up there, the spikes of their long, thin wooden poles pushed into the soil. In the flickering yellow-red light, I could see only silhouettes, but the shape of Gaïs was distinctive, even when she was wearing clothes. She was taller than the girls, but thinner than every other priestess. No one could miss her as she jumped and spun. A handful of the Little Bears were with her. They all weaved in and out of the light, and as they moved they sang. I could barely hear the words, but it sounded like a hymn to Artemis. Gaïs seemed to have a thing for Artemis even above what you might expect of a priestess.