Athena's Son

by Jeryl Schoenbeck

  Archimedes reached for it, but Farrokh quickly snatched it back. “Let us go below deck where we can view it more privately.” They looked around and moved from the railing.

  The sun was burning off the mist and the sea air was fresh. It was too bad they would have to go down into the dismal confines. But it would be worth it to witness the upcoming spectacle.

  In a dark corner of the hold, Farrokh tapped on a nearby trunk. “I keep the gold chain in here. The trunk has no lock, but the chain is safely concealed under a loose board. A lock would only attract thieves like Pollux.”

  Farrokh knew thieves only too well. His booth at the marketplace was continually preyed upon by shoplifters and Farrokh had to keep a constant vigil. Farrokh produced the necklace again.

  “It is worth over 100 drachmas,” Farrokh boasted proudly. Down here no one would hear him so he spoke confidently. He lifted the stout wood lid; the heavy metal hinges squeaked in protest. “I must put it away; there is a false bottom to the trunk.” Farrokh winked, quickly deposited a knife with it, and closed the lid. “The knife is there for protection.”

  Hidden in the shadows with the rats, Pollux smiled. How stupid can people be? What could be easier than an unlocked trunk and a knife out of the hands of its owner? After he caught a glimpse of that gold chain Farrokh waved around, he trailed them down into the murky hold and now was waiting for them to leave. One hundred drachmas was a year’s worth of sweating aboard a stinking ship and he would have it with two swipes of his knife.

  “I can stay with the trunk for the rest of the trip,” Archimedes said. “It will only be another day. Consider it repayment for being so kind to me. You go up and enjoy the fresh air.”

  “That is considerate of you,” Farrokh said. “But I will stay with you. We can discuss more about my profits and treasures in the privacy of this hold.”

  That posed a problem for Pollux. He was not the patient type. His methods were direct and cowardly. But with the promise of easy riches, he would have to pounce now. He put his hand on his knife and came out of the shadows.

  “You two! Captain wants to see you both up at the tiller. Go on, see what he wants before he whips me for your insolence!” Pollux sneered.

  Archimedes and Farrokh glanced at each other in shock and then looked back to Pollux. He moved threateningly toward them.

  “Well, we…we can wait a while,” Farrokh stammered. “We were just inspecting my cargo. It will be a while.”

  “Oh, no. I’m not about to get speared by the captain like some eel. Up!” Pollux pointed up the stairs.

  Archimedes held his palms out in compliance. “Okay, Pollux. Thank you for delivering the message. You can tell the captain we’ll be up soon.” While Archimedes stalled, Farrokh moved toward the trunk.

  Pollux’s limited patience had run out. He drew his knife in a swift, practiced motion. “Never mind, you two weasels. Just step away from the trunk, Persian. Farther back, go!” He thrust the knife toward Farrokh. “You’re as stupid as a clam, merchant. The few trinkets I stole from you are nothing compared to that gold necklace. Here’s my offer. I’ll take the necklace and you both get to leave the ship alive.”

  Archimedes knew his real offer was taking the necklace and killing them. “You can put the knife away, Pollux. We don’t want any trouble. The necklace isn’t worth our lives. I’ll get it for you.” He sidestepped toward the trunk.

  “Never mind, goat turd,” Pollux said. “I trust you like I’d trust a snake. I know there’s a knife in there. I’m not the fool you think I am.” He brandished the knife again. “You two step away from the trunk. Not toward the steps, idiots! Back against the wall. If I can reach you with this blade, you’re too close.”

  Archimedes and Farrokh stepped back. Pollux grew up on the streets and knew the enterprise of stealing and intimidation better than these two did.

  “Now sit down.” When he was sure they were far enough away, Pollux reached down to the trunk. He kept the knife pointed toward them and lifted the lid.

  It was heavier than it looked. He bent his knees, grunted and opened it with one arm. He glanced down. It was dark inside, but the trunk was empty. A proficient thief, he easily spied the false bottom. Taking one more quick, menacing glance at the two dupes, he got down on his knees and put his head inside to retrieve the necklace.

  His hand swept the bottom and he noticed an unusual odor. Then a soft click. Pollux instinctively pulled his head back.

  It was too late.

  It all happened sudden and smooth.

  Two pulleys whirred, a false wall snapped up from inside the crate, its curved edge slamming into Pollux’s neck and a duplicate coming down from the lid. Two gears spun the decoy bottom around and up. The false bottom pushed into Pollux’s face and on it was a pile of very dead and very rotten rats. Pollux had the strong stomach of a cutthroat, but the putrid corpses stung his eyes, the maggots squirmed into his mouth, and the stench filled his nostrils. He fought, twisted, pushed. His stomach protested, his insides began to spasm, and his chest heaved. He vomited onto the rats, the mess could go nowhere, and it splattered back into his face. The convulsions repeated, the results recurred, and Pollux, for the first time in his life, screamed.

  Archimedes and Farrokh slowly got up and watched in astonishment. It worked flawlessly: Catching the rats, setting the necklace as bait, building the mechanical trunk. It was all leverage, human and machine, and it worked perfectly. While Farrokh watched Pollux shudder and squirm on the floor, Archimedes stepped over the writhing body and inspected one of the pulleys. With the discerning eye of an artist, he determined it could have worked even better.

  Chapter 4

  On a ship at night a person can feel very insignificant. Night amplified the vastness of the sea and the stars revealed how boundless the sky was. Somewhere across the dark deck, a sailor was playing a sorrowful, simple melody on a bone pipe.

  Farrokh broke the quiet with a deep laugh. “I don’t think Pollux will want to work on any ships for a while.”

  They were eating their last meal before they arrived in port next morning. Earlier Farrokh traded one of his cheap baubles to a sailor for some anchovies. The salted fish were from the rations the sailors received, but it was poorly cured with too little salt and too much time in the barrel.

  “Tell me Archimedes, how did you think up this whole scheme to trap that thief?” Farrokh asked.

  Archimedes drank some watered wine to wash down the stale taste and belched. “I just used whatever resources were on the ship. I had rats, my alchemy kit, and your jewelry.”

  “That cheap necklace is one of the many trinkets in my crates,” Farrokh said. “I noticed some unusual items in that box you carry around. I’ve never seen wheels like that before.”

  “Do you mean the pulleys and gears?” Archimedes asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Farrokh said. “What are pulleys and gears?”

  “I’ll show you.” Archimedes got up and walked over to the alchemy kit. He dug around and came back with two small wheels the diameter of his hand. “A pulley is a simple machine I’ve been developing. You know how a wheelbarrow makes hauling something easier than carrying it? The wheels are doing much of the work. That’s what pulleys do. If you hand me that piece of rope…” Archimedes pointed to a length of worn hemp rope coiled on the deck.

  He attached the first wheel to a hook on the spar and the second wheel to the top of his alchemy kit. He tied one end of the rope to the mast and wound the rope through both wheels and handed the end to Farrokh.

  “This kit weighs about 20 pounds,” Archimedes said.. “But when you use two pulleys,” he indicated to Farrokh to pull, “it is only half that weight.”

  Farrokh pulled tentatively at first, and then easily pulled the alchemy kit off the deck. “This is amazing! It is as if the wheels are pulling for you.”

  “Basically, the pulleys split the weight of the box, but you need more rope to move it. You’re trading distance for energy.
” Archimedes steadied the rope while Farrokh lowered it to the deck. “And the more pulleys I use, the less the box would weigh.”

  Archimedes unwound the rope, put the pulleys back in the kit and took out a gear. “Gears are a little different because they have these interlocking teeth. Gears can change the direction of a force, reduce it, or increase it. For the trunk, the gears increased the power of the lid.”

  He put the gear back and locked the alchemy kit. “There wasn’t enough weight to power everything, but fortunately Pollux was strong, so in his hurry to lift the lid, he unwittingly provided the force to wind the trap. The lid was not really heavy; the gears just needed to be cranked so the pulleys had the power to release everything. When he swept the bottom of the trunk with his hand, he tripped the switch to unleash the hidden rats and shove the stocks around his neck.”

  “And the leverage for him to be duped was simply his greed,” Farrokh said. “But you still didn’t answer my first question. How did you think up the whole plan?”

  Archimedes let out a slow sigh. “It’s almost harder to explain how I think this stuff up than to actually do it.” He looked up at the sky. “If you look at the stars, those are my thoughts and dreams. They don’t seem to make any sense, just thousands of bright specks. Do the stars seem to have any order to you?”

  Farrokh looked at Archimedes for a moment, and then followed his gaze to the sky. “No, Archimedes. There are too many. They are just random.”

  “That’s exactly how my ideas start, just stars floating in the sky. But astronomers use those random stars to make constellations of our gods, goddesses, and heroes. I’ll show you one, Orion, the hunter.”

  Archimedes took some fish bones, snapped them into various lengths, and formed a crude angular shape on the deck of a man holding a club and a shield. “This is roughly what we are looking for.” He peered up at the stars. “Now follow my arm. Look at the bright star, over this way, just….there.”

  “Yes, I see it.”

  “That star is Orion’s knee and the brightest star in his constellation. Once we find that star the other ones are easy to find. Next I want to show you his belt, and the rest of Orion will come into shape.” Archimedes’ finger moved imperceptibly. “Follow his knee just a little to the left, and there are three stars close together that form his belt. Do you see them?”

  A slight pause. “Yes! Yes I do.” Farrokh said.

  “Good. Above the belt, slightly to the left, is a dull red star. It is the right arm of Orion. It continues up, to those two smaller stars, which form the club he is holding in his right arm. His left arm holds his shield and is formed by those two stars.”

  “Wait, you’re going too fast.” Farrokh squinted and slowly repeated Archimedes’ information as his arm moved from west to east. “Good, I see it.”

  “The other small stars make his head and legs.”

  Farrokh glanced at the figure made of bone, then back up to Orion. “I do see it. So what you’re saying is that the constellations represent your ideas.”

  “No,” Archimedes said. “Those constellations are already there. What I’m saying is that I want to move the stars to make my own constellations.”

  Chapter 5

  The pressure on Damokles was growing. He was one of the foremen in charge of building Pharaoh Ptolemy’s lighthouse, and they were falling behind the construction timetable.

  Workers continued walking off the job as more dead men were found and the murders were increasing to nearly one a week. Pharaoh Ptolemy brought over hundreds of skilled Greeks like Damokles to make sure this type problem wouldn’t crop up.

  Damokles’ expertise was not specifically construction, but rather making sure the men kept working and did not loaf or sneak in naps. Ten years as a platoon commander in the Macedonian army gave him the aptitude to get men to do what he wanted.

  But he was finding that threatening laborers was different than commanding hoplite soldiers. Once in a while a hoplite might be put to death to get the fear of the gods in the others.

  Now, a god was already killing the laborers. There was no more fear to hand out.

  “These are not jackal tracks,” the hunter hired by Damokles told him. The hunter, Shenti, was a tracker by trade. Rich merchants and nobles of Ptolemy’s court paid the hunter to track large game in Egypt. “At least, not a jackal of this world. They are too large.”

  The hunter was on one knee and gently tracing the outline of a print that lead to and from the latest victim. The dead man was one of the more reliable workers, and now he was as cold as the stone he helped move.

  He was found under the same circumstances as the previous ten. He was laid out on one of the massive stones used to build the base of the lighthouse. His arms were crossed and there was the carefully placed turquoise scarab amulet on his chest.

  Great Zeus, Damokles thought, the gods don’t actually come down to kill simple workers. “Perhaps it is a rogue lion,” Damokles offered.

  Shenti laughed dismissively. “No. Not a lion, or panther, or cheetah. Cats have their claws retracted while they walk, or stalk. Dogs or jackals cannot retract their claws and so the claws are evident in the tracks they leave. Like these.” He pointed as he got up and looked around, as if sniffing for the predator.

  “So they are dog tracks,” Damokles hoped to put an end to the rumors.

  “No dog tracks I have ever seen,” Shenti said. “These are twice the size of a dog. Besides, the throat would be torn out. That’s how dogs attack. This poor soul has no wounds. Look at the depth of those tracks. The weight of the…,” Shenti paused, thinking what to call it. “The creature that made these tracks has to be about the weight of a man.”

  Here it comes, Damokles thought.

  “I have hunted and tracked every predator in Egypt since I was a boy,” Shenti said. “I know how they hunt and I know how they kill. No animal or man killed this worker.” Damokles was about to interrupt, but Shenti did not give him the chance. “You may want to ignore what is happening, Greek, but your Egyptian workforce is not. Anubis is walking the earth and these are his tracks.”

  Even Damokles had to admit the tracks were large and no mutilation was apparent on any of the 11 bodies that have been found. For a moment he wished he was back in the army, fighting an enemy he can see and dealing with men who bleed when they die. He would have to go to Pharaoh Ptolemy and report more bad news.

  Chapter 6

  Alexandria’s harbor was like an overturned anthill. Dozens of piers jutted into the harbor, hundreds of ships jostled for space, and thousands of men swarmed over all of it. Small ships were ferrying men back and forth. Larger ships were loading or unloading cotton, pottery, spices, timber, grain—and the ants were transporting all of that.

  Earlier, Archimedes was transported by one of the small ships from the Calypso to shore. Before he left, Farrokh gave him a final warning. “On this ship there was one Pollux. On the docks of Alexandria, there are 100 of his ilk. They will cut your throat and steal your money before any blood leaves your body.” Farrokh gave him directions to where his stall was in the teeming bazaar of Alexandria and Archimedes promised he would visit once he was settled in.

  Now that he was back on land, Archimedes had to be careful where he put his sandals. The ground was covered in decaying fish, horse dung, and even sleeping men. Occasionally a fresh breeze or slight scent of an exotic spice would temporarily relieve him.

  Helios, the Greek sun god, drove his blazing chariot across the blue sky and the darting shadows of seagulls moved across the ground like lazy purple leaves. The seagulls shrieked continuously, fighting over bits of bread or spilled grain. Archimedes was trying to carry his crates through this heat and chaos and wasn’t having much success.

  He remembered a time he kicked over a large colony of black ants. They scurried about moving grains of red sand or cream-colored eggs back to the proper place. They seemed to move as one dark mass controlled by one thought. Now he was amidst the turmoil of
that same colony of ants he admired.

  The difference was, unlike indistinguishable ants, the people here were a fascinating blend of Egyptian, Jew, Greek, and Roman. Alexandria’s population was nearly half a million people. It was the melting pot of the Mediterranean and its trade brought people and products from all corners of the world.

  One moment there was a flash of colorful clothing similar to Farrokh’s and a heated argument in Hebrew over the price of grain. Next there were bare muscular backs laughing in a melodic Egyptian accent.

  Archimedes caught a snippet of his native Greek. Two middle-aged Greeks were complaining about the militaristic Romans conquering more land around Italy and worried when they would set their sights on Greece.

  Unlike the rocky terrain of Greece, Egypt was flat, as if the Titans trampled it. In Greece a person could measure distance by rocks, peninsulas, or hills. Here, well, there were only buildings. However, the level land did allow a better view of the stunning city and no one besides Archimedes seemed to be mesmerized by the skyline. They were all moving to some unknown rhythm.

  Archimedes was an ant that did not understand the dynamics of the anthill. He was pushed, shoved, and cursed at. Twice his crates nearly were knocked out of his arms. He wondered how such a motley mass of humans and horses, ships and wagons, could have any semblance of order or control.

  Most of the workers were Egyptians, wearing only a kilt in the afternoon heat. Beads of sweat glistened from their shaved heads. Their eyes stood out from the black outlines of kohl used to keep the blazing sun from blinding them.

  A pile of gigantic fangs caught his attention and he set down his crates. Each fang was about two feet from blunt end to sharp point. He reached out and stroked the smooth ivory. These must be the teeth of Cerberus, the giant three-headed dog that guarded the underworld.