The Mammoth Book of Classical Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  Epictetus approached the victim ahead of the old sailor, who had been taught by decades of superstition to be wary. The poplar was larger than most, healthy and alone in a depression of grass and undergrowth. It stood with its back turned towards the distant city as if it were shy with the secret treasure that it had been nurturing for so long. Only as Epictetus rounded the trunk did he begin to see the pale white arm that had grown straight out from a gnarl of bark like a stubborn fungus. The face came later, turned as it was slightly away from the single hand that could never quite reach even raindrops to the eager lips. They had been told in town that the dead man would be released from his life sentence tomorrow when the authorities came to dispose of the body and start their inquiries. Until then, poor Felicio would have to spend one last night, staring out into a darkness that must have looked soft and shining compared to his endless night inside the tree. Not even the sailing moon would have stood still long enough to hear his prayers.

  For all the sorrow of his confinement, the dead brother was as well situated as could have been expected. The tree had swept up around him like a second womb, its rough shell protecting him from mice and beasts, but leaving him enough space to breathe and shake his head free from pests. With only his face and right arm exposed, the young man might have only leaned up against the tree in a brown cloak and been magically transformed by contact into a camouflaged wing or a forgotten pelt. His face was fine, though scarred by more than twenty years of exposure, and his arm was as trim as a girl’s from lack of work. Up close, he seemed to be at peace, musing silently over a remembered melody that only he could hear. But from a few paces back, he became what he was, a man whose whole life had been a tree’s life, lethargic and dull. Seeing him propped up by the wood that had grown all around him, Epictetus did not care to think about the encased legs and abdomen, wilted as tendrils and soiled by years of absolute, incomprehensible misery.

  The philosopher could see how it must have been. As a boy, he would have come out here to play. Perhaps he even planted or tended the very tree that was to become his prison. Someone surprised him. Then, as a lark, or out of a black sickness no one could understand, someone bound the boy tightly in the crotch of the young sapling. He would have lifted him through the crease as some country parents ritually passed their naked sons through split trunks before tying the halves back together again. He would have tied the boy at first, ignoring his cries, not seeing the days of wailing and the nights of moaning to come. Later, as the leather straps gave way to chains of bark and weakness, he might have looked upon the growing boy almost as a work of art, a sculpture so alive that it gradually shaped itself through helpless struggles. There would have been something almost holy about the scene – the solitary meadow, the metamorphosis of boy into plant, the frenzy of hopelessness, the devoted watching. Then, through years and years and years, someone would have returned here every day with food and drink, for a talk even, for observations about the city or the weather, for a captive ear to share plans and grievances with as the slow, slow years passed on. There would have been friendship here, one-sided and mad, but comradeship, even love. Over time, it would have become harder to tell the warden from the prisoner as both men declined into an awful parody of a couple, feeding off each other’s anguish not unlike a parasite and a host.

  It was the irrationality of the act that plagued Epictetus into silence on the long walk back. No one, he had always believed, would sacrifice his own humanity for no reason. There would be nothing to gain from the torture and the murder, nothing to enjoy. Even wild animals would never toy with their prey for so long, until their hunger would have died before their food. Nothing that he knew about in nature would ever indulge itself in such infinite cruelty. Even trees sometimes let their branches twine and grow together towards the same shared sun.

  The woman’s hut at the city gate was squirming with fowl. Cantankerous quail argued and spat at his legs as he approached her door, and he almost lost his footing on rounded droppings and slick cobbles that sprang to life beneath his sandals. Never very comfortable with open nature in action, Epictetus cowered at the open door, calling out the woman’s name as desperately as a suitor. The quail simply would not leave him alone, and he had almost decided to retreat when a vague figure came clucking out of the shadows inside.

  ‘Calm yourself,’ Aprulla began, apparently to both the Stoic and the birds. ‘Can’t a mother be left to grieve for a time on her own?’

  ‘Forgive me,’ Epictetus nodded respectfully at her. ‘But the death of your missing son has stolen my sleep from me these past few days, and I was wondering if I might not speak to you for a moment about it? I am not connected with the city,’ he reassured her. ‘My only interest is what I might learn from the incident and what I might help teach others.’

  Such a strange request disarmed her, and she welcomed him into the hut for some wine. In the only room, at a table that might have been made out of the twin of her son’s tree, they sat in the fluttering light of afternoon and talked like cautious strangers. Aprulla was a worn woman, a body stooped from years of feeding quail and a heart battered by nights of regrets. Her voice came out of the dark as if from a great distance or from the depths of a forest where she had lost her way longer ago than even she could remember. Epictetus had no right to question her about anything. But for his own peace of mind, he knew he had to try to find out why.

  ‘Your son – poor Felicio – went missing at what age exactly?’ he began.

  ‘Six? Seven?’ she muttered uncertainly. ‘Who remembers the past? With other boys, with a life of work and illness, who has the time to count anything but losses?’

  ‘His brothers must have been devastated,’ the Stoic assumed. ‘After having been together in the womb and then in childhood, it must have been like waking up without a limb.’

  The mother only shrugged. ‘Who can say? Boys are wolves. Kore, of course, was lonely without his favourite brother. But he’s hardly ever happy. And Kunos,’ she went on with a frown at her visitor, ‘never sees anything that doesn’t please him or pay him for his bother. Felicio might have been out on a long journey, for all the notice that his brothers or the town took of him.’

  Aprulla spoke with the chronic suspicion and anger of the poor and the defeated. Her eyes in the shadows seemed clouded by tears, or they might have been aged by having seen more than any eyes should have seen in one lifetime. Epictetus hesitated, unsure about going on. But Aprulla encouraged him with her silence. She might have been a tree herself, stolid and unthinking as bark or buried roots.

  ‘Does anyone know,’ the Stoic went on, ‘who might have wanted to treat an innocent boy so viciously? Are there any families set against yours or your late husband’s? Was your husband’s death in any way mysterious? Perhaps there was something in it that might help explain this other tragedy.’

  Aprulla disagreed. ‘Florus went hunting. He took an arrow through the eye. He died. The triplets never missed him. They had each other. They had an uncle. What more did they lack? My quail are satisfied with half as much. And they live and die just like us,’ she observed dully. ‘Only their fighting is worth a bit more, though hardly to them.’

  ‘And there’s no one else?’ Epictetus persisted. ‘No ugly neighbour or tradesman who has a grudge over a debt? Nothing in your past that might have given rise to a hatred that could have continued for twenty or more years? You understand,’ he went on more urgently, ‘that I have no direct interest in any of this. It’s just that I can’t bear to see such unreasonableness running about our countryside like a bandit’s orphan. It goes against my soul somehow, until I wonder if what I am trying to teach my students makes any sense at all. If I can’t see something like this clearly,’ he fumed, ‘if I can’t comprehend its premises and conclusions, then I might just as well limp on home and turn everything over to my wife. As if I haven’t done that already . . .’

  The imperturbable mother stared across the table at the greying thinker. He remi
nded her of those women who spent all their lives studying cooking, but never handled a pot or a ladle. The Stoic was gazing out of the window and down the road that led to the market as if he expected one of her boys to come striding home with an armful of answers, a mouthful of explanations. But she knew better than anyone that life itself was never anything but a question.

  ‘What’s to know?’ she reasoned in the dark. ‘Boys are born. Boys yell. Meanness exists in this world. Boys die. Don’t we all? So what are we supposed to do? Tell God that we don’t want to go? Isn’t all this His party, after all? Isn’t He the one who invited us to His festival, who invited us to join in on His holiday dancing and His merrymaking? Wouldn’t it be ungrateful of us to hang back when He decides it’s time for us to leave? He doesn’t want the peevish or the cowardly, one of those guests who idles about all evening and then won’t recognize when it’s time for him to go to sleep. Why can’t we see when we’ve worn out our welcome? Why can’t we give way to others who need our places and our time? Why should we want to crowd the world?’

  ‘But your children?’ Epictetus went on, thinking of his adopted son. ‘Surely you miss your firstborn son who was kept away from you for so long and who was killed so horribly?’

  ‘He wasn’t mine to miss,’ Aprulla responded. ‘He was God’s. Why shouldn’t He call him back to Him in His own good time? What else is death but the universe simply rolling along on its own track, replacing one form with another? Oh, it may look like the monster’s mask mothers use to frighten their children into minding them. But we grown-ups know better, don’t we? I had the triplets. Now I have the twins. Later I’ll have one. Then none.’ She drained her wine, rattled the cup on the table, and smiled weakly at her confused visitor. ‘Then it will be just me and the quail. Then only the quail. But the quail!’ she said mysteriously with a glance out the window. ‘Oh, the quail will never die.’

  Epictetus followed her eyes, but all he could make out was floating dust.

  ‘Still,’ the philosopher made one final effort to reach her, ‘you do want the city fathers to discover who did this to your son, don’t you? You must want justice for what’s been taken away from you.’

  ‘What business is it of mine,’ she said, ‘whose hands God uses to take back what is His? If I’m left with less, I’m left with less. Every morning I clean the birds,’ she added reflectively. ‘The lice I see and catch I leave behind. But what I miss, I carry away. It’s more than enough for me.’

  After some more inconsequential conversation, the philosopher turned to go and saw in an obscure corner a small table spread with knickknacks. He noticed at once a pattern to the articles. He saw tridents and three-pronged mattocks, plant and metallic caltrops, toy triremes, treatises on the Athens Thirty and the Thermopylae Three Hundred, stalks of red mullet in tripods, oil vats full of honey and milk and wine, a stuffed buzzard hawk, a miniature of Triton, a three-obol piece in a wrapping of trefoil, and a box containing a preserved anchovy and three hair-eating moths. As his eyes took in the rest of the room, he counted three couches arranged in a triangular design and the makings of the sacrifices slated for the third day after the funeral. Over all spread a crude triglyph that showed a boar, a goat, and a ram all coming together to meet in a common slaughter.

  At the door, Epictetus observed sympathetically, ‘I take it all these are mementoes of your three sons. I’m only sorry that now their numbers have been so sadly reduced.’

  The old quail-woman glanced about the room and waved her hand through the dark air.

  ‘Not for the boys,’ she informed him. ‘For their father. He was mad about threes. He had to have them everywhere I only thank God that I was able to give him triplets and that his death came before he could feel their subtraction.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Stoic said thoughtfully as he stepped back into the pool of birds. ‘Superstitions like that are sometimes almost impossible to satisfy.’

  ‘It’s not so hard,’ Aprulla noted. ‘Like actors and their masks, you only have to pretend to be something for a long time in order to become it. Habit can make you believe in anything.’

  He hobbled slowly towards his home, haunted and uneasy. The town of Nicopolis greeted him with the usual carnival of humanity that he never failed to find enthralling. Before he reached his house, it greeted him, too, with the news that Kore – the one member of Aprulla’s triplets who had always been loved by all – had gone missing and would probably never hear the cries of quail or mother in this world again.

  The only one who was not surprised at the appearance of the new student was the Master himself. All the other young men surged forward to see, then recoiled, ashamed of their morbid curiosity. The newcomer was allowed to enter their circle with his harsh features and the anger of a martyr in his knotted shoulders. He was even given the foremost place under the colonnade, Arrian being more than willing to stand aside in the presence of such infamy and suffering. The rest of the class did the same, most of them only staring awkwardly down at the schoolbags that they had not even remembered to open.

  When Kunos, the last remaining son of the quail-trainer, was finally settled onto the stone bench, he gazed up at the teacher as if he expected Epictetus to open the discussion. After a long silence passed with no sign of interest from the philosopher, the intruder let out an impatient sigh and looked up at everyone from under weary eyelids.

  I’m told,’ he said to the Master, ‘that you may be the only man in Nicopolis who might be able to help me.’

  ‘I have helped many,’ Epictetus agreed. ‘So why not you?’

  ‘As you say,’ returned Kunos. ‘At any rate, the authorities have it in their heads that these deaths of my brothers –’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Masurius, a local jurist, interrupted. ‘From what Symphorus and Numenius tell me, poor Kore is as yet only missing, not presumed dead. They hear everything that goes on in the city, and they have never lied to me yet. If I were you,’ he cautioned professionally, ‘I’d watch my words more closely in the future.’

  Nodding, Kunos continued, ‘As I say, some think that I might know more about Felicio’s death and Kore’s disappearance than any loving brother should. Suddenly, everyone is referring to us as Eteocles and Polynices, as if I can’t be trusted even in my own family. The next thing I’ll be hearing, I suppose, is that I had something to do with my father’s death, even though I was only a few months old at the time and only one of three naked babes.’

  ‘I know of no one who has gone to such unreasonable lengths,’ Epictetus said to be fair to his fellow townsmen. ‘Rumour, of course, is none of your concern. Only say that they who talk of such matters are ignorant of your other faults, else they would not have mentioned this alone.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ the brother conceded with a suspicious glower at the Stoic. ‘But it’s still an injustice that such accusations may fly through the streets of Nicopolis without proof. It hurts my mother and disgraces me, until I begin to wonder if my two brothers weren’t more fortunate than I in the end. At least their honour is forever safe from harm.

  ‘Which is why,’ Kunos hurried on, ‘I’ve come here to your school today, to your wisdom, Master, and your students. I’ve come to beg your help, to tell me what I can do to turn aside the distrust of my neighbours and help my poor mother to put an end to all this, once and for all. Why should the unhappy woman be made to suffer for a third time over a single set of sons?’

  Epictetus took a turn around the walkway, lengthening his beard and glaring at the woods on the horizon. Then he stopped and stood before both his visitor and his waiting students.

  ‘The most logical course,’ he advised, ‘would be to find Kore. In that way, fears about his safety could be answered, and he could probably vouch for your actions during the past twenty or so years, when Felicio was out there growing old in his tree. With one stroke, you could put both mysteries to rest, like the citharoedes who sing and play their harps at the same time and give such perfect pleasure to all of us.
’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ the brother said doubtfully. ‘What with all the robbers working the roads these days, I doubt if we’d ever be able to find Kore again, much less come up with any new information about Felicio’s long agony. Is this your best thought, Philosopher?’ he added in a critical voice. ‘I must say I’d expected better from the school that’s supposed to keep this town’s name alive throughout the centuries to come.’

  The wrestler, Bato, brandishing a lethal strigli, was about to come to his Master’s defence, when the Master himself lifted his hands in temporary defeat.

  ‘Schools change,’ Epictetus admitted, ‘seven times a day, as often as the currents between Euboea and Boeotia, if not more. We do what we can with the time and the materials that we are offered. But there is no argument that convinces quite as completely as eyesight. And there are no proofs more telling than those that come walking back into town with you, safe and sound.

  ‘So, if you want to save yourself from hasty justice,’ the Stoic declared, apparently dismissing the subject from his day’s schedule, ‘then you should act first to put all the doubting minds to rest. You should find your brother, dead or alive, and find the steps he took when he disappeared from your mother’s home. Only then will you be free to defend yourself like a man, and only then will a final peace come to Aprulla and what remains of her family.’

  Under the gossiping vines overhead, the coarse brother softened for a moment as if a rip in a fabric let show a more delicate viscera within. Sitting there in the falling sun, he seemed to teeter between the bullying strength of an unthinking body and the gentler suppleness of a contemplative soul. For a long moment, his better nature won out, and another, less beastly man appeared in his place. Then the veteran hunter shook himself, sharpened himself to a point again, and pushed back the leering students with a threatening glance.