The Mammoth Book of Classical Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  ‘You may be right,’ he murmured to the philosopher. ‘Even if we never find Kore again, I should at least make the effort to look for him. It is expected of me, I suppose?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Epictetus nodded, ‘that he would do the same for you.’

  Aprulla’s last son looked up quickly, frowning. But the Stoic was only toying with a leaf.

  ‘But where would we begin searching?’ Kunos relented. ‘It’s a very large world, and who knows where any kidnappers or robbers might have taken him. How would we even know where to start?’

  ‘Oh,’ the Master said softly as he turned his head towards the open country, ‘I don’t think there’s any wonder about where he’s gone. Where does each of you wind up in the end?’

  Rolling up the papyrus rolls of their notes, most of the students prepared to follow the two into the forest. But, explaining that too many eyes sometimes saw more than what was truly there, Epictetus chose to accompany them only Arrian, his notetaker, and Naso, a leatherworker whose dream oracles had led him to philosophy. The rest of the students were dismissed. All they could do was to stand anxiously beneath the colonnade and watch the four men vanish into the forest as if the men had changed their backs and had the backs of birds.

  Past the boundary marker of Hermes on a four-cornered pillar, through a patch of fragrant hellebore whose petals were said to dispel insanity, the Master steered his company directly to the central tree from which the body of Felicio had only recently been removed. On the way, he spoke only vaguely of unrelated matters, of the harmony between woods and meadows and of the bonds that existed among men and families. No one, he announced, could contradict himself and still be regarded as a member of the community of thoughtful adults. No one could wish for and despise the same thing at the same time. Any man who wanted to be both Socrates and Domitian had no right to the respect of his fellow citizens. ‘A pot and a stone,’ Epictetus insisted as they left behind the nearby city of Cassiope, ‘do not go together. Anyone who pretends that they do should spend the rest of his life on Gyara, the island of exile, and leave daily life to the rest of us. A man who is tired of being who he is will never be enough of a man for me. Or for the world.’

  As the company walked on, conversing and feeling the summer’s late evening falling upon their shoulders, the quail-woman’s last son seemed to flicker in the dying light like the shadow of a fire. He saw enemies in every sweeping branch. He overheard conspiracies in the rattle of mice through the vegetation. He imagined his two brothers as loose souls in the night, calling to him in barbaric syllables that only he could hear. In answer, Kunos babbled of a dead father, dead before he was a father, of a brother who was lost before he could even become a brother, of little Kore and of his dull goodness that was never enough to win him either friends or lovers downtown. As the black-green forest grew up around them like a smothering sheath, Kunos fractured into pieces of confusion and dread, until he was barely able to keep his two feet moving straight beneath him.

  At one point, Epictetus happened to lead them through a pass where hunters had strung a line hung with brightly coloured feathers to frighten deer into their hanging nets. The classmates simply swept the obstruction away, but Kunos suddenly felt the cord cross his throat as if it were a noose and flailed backward, clawing at the empty air in a blind, gulping panic.

  ‘Whose are these hands at me?’ he wailed. ‘Help! Someone has killed me here!’

  The philosopher stepped towards him and calmly plucked the line off his chest.

  ‘What, man? Haven’t you ever seen a hunter’s snare before? When did you hunt? Only by daylight? No wonder they say you never caught anything but your own mother’s crippled quail.’

  The final brother might have argued, but now at last they had come upon the death tree in its hollow. Turned as it was away from them, they did not see the obtruding arm until everyone of them had nearly circled the tree completely. Then they all ground to a halt, unmanned by the sight of the body that by now was supposed to have been decently buried.

  ‘What is this?’ exclaimed Naso fearfully. ‘Do you mean to tell me that they haven’t taken Felicio back to his mother yet? Here’s a new crime.’

  ‘This is intolerable,’ Arrian commented, and promised everyone that the city bureaucrats in charge of such matters would hear from him personally in the morning.

  Epictetus stepped boldly forward. ‘Let’s bear him home ourselves. If the city won’t do its proper work, then at least its citizens should act their part.’

  The students shook their heads, then followed their Master’s lead.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t –’ Kunos whimpered, starting to retreat.

  ‘Nonsense,’ the philosopher said, tugging hard at his arm and pulling him forward.

  ‘Master –’ Arrian began.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I thought I heard –’

  But then, before anyone could speak, the arm before them suddenly shifted in the dark.

  ‘Sweet Zeus above us!’ screamed Naso.

  ‘Run!’ someone yelled out.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Anywhere but here!’

  The company broke apart like a bush in a gale. The students and the brother all scrambled backward like crabs, but the Stoic peered around the tree for a closer look at the face. He begged everyone to please stay calm.

  ‘It’s only Kore, I expect,’ he said with relief. ‘Someone’s gone and imprisoned him here in his brother’s tree. I’m afraid this is getting to be something of a family tradition for you,’ he added with a light laugh, turning back towards Kunos to lead him up to the tree. ‘But he’s all right. He’s awake now. You can ask him yourself.’

  But the brother did not share in the general easing of tension. Instead, he kept reeling back in hysteria, grunting incoherently, convinced that the living arm outside the trunk had to belong to the cadaver of Felicio rather than to the breathing Kore. He screamed and retreated, refusing any aid. In a helpless delirium, Kunos fell to his knees and began tearing at the sod with his nails, frothing about the muzzle and barking inhumanly at the back of his throat. His shoulders hunched, and in the dark he might have been mistaken for any peasant who had angered the gods and been transformed into a snuffling animal or a monster that the world had not yet even named.

  Then, as the swaying arm suddenly pointed its middle finger insultingly at him and a voice of wood began echoing his cries, Kunos broke down completely. His heart could take no more.

  ‘For the love of God!’ he sobbed. ‘Please! Help get me out of this tree!’

  As Epictetus motioned the others to stand back and watch, the distracted brother leapt to his feet and attacked the tree. He tore at it until his nails bled, as the brother in the tree continued to moan wordlessly out at him and fend him off with his free hand. In the gloomy forest, the scene soon became a nightmare. The madman danced and beat upon the tree in a mindless ceremony, an ancient pantomime of frustration and awe that frightened everyone who saw it. In a moment, the free brother had become someone else entirely. No longer the swaggering hunter or the roistering street drunkard, he was now only a frightened child who had forgotten who he was. As if he had only now been roused from a long dream, the Kunos outside the tree began imploring the Kunos inside the tree for mercy, telling him of his hidden love for the brother who since birth had always been closer to him than his own breathing. ‘If only,’ he whispered hoarsely on his knees, ‘if only I could have been no one else but me . . .’

  Finally, after the Master had seen and heard enough, he led his two students forward, and they pried Kunos away from the tree and bound him with torn grasses. They laid him carefully on a mound where he quietly turned inward like a shrimp and, after repeating a trio of names until he had drained them of all meaning, more or less disappeared from everyone’s view.

  It was only then that Epictetus, swinging open the slice of bark that had been cut to let out the corpse of Felicio, reached into the heart of the tree a
nd helped out his slave, Manes. The dark tree that had disguised him closed again behind, and the group turned to gather up the brother in a cloak that they carried back into the city as compassionately as if he were a newborn fawn.

  ‘Only think,’ the Stoic said as they set out for home, ‘how sad it must be for a man to lose his reason as a mere boy and become a beast. Or to watch himself becoming, through all the long years, nothing more than a single dead tree.’

  Epictetus never told his wife or his son anything about the new leg that he had a craftsman add to his study table. It was a sculpture in brown marble of a tree with gnarls and swirls of bark. Within the stone knots of the leg, a body seemed to be writhing, and through a pair of holes projected the white face and arm of a fair young man. His features were placid with unhappiness, while his hand hovered peacefully as a band of pale smoke across his captured chest. The colours were pure and deep, and the workmanship was as lifelike as the forest original. But the marble tree did not move.

  Neither did the philosopher tell his family of Aprulla’s doomed twins. Only to his class did he tell the story of the mother who gave birth to two boys and the father who would not be happy with anything less than triplets. It had been the mother’s idea to create an imaginary brother to be added to the twins, a Felicio who had at once become his father’s favourite. Little Kore had taken to the game, refining his skills even as a toddler in acting out a dual role for the family and all the neighbourhood. As both the beautiful and the good brother, he had enjoyed the liberties that only more than one life can give. On the same day, he could please his father with Felicio’s brilliant talk and satisfy his mother with Kore’s quiet poetry. He never had to be the same boy twice. While his brother, Kunos, had squandered his spirit in sports and hunting, Kore had doubled his in fantasies and playacting. Like an actor or a thief, he had put on both the robes that God had given him and the robes that God had withheld. And, before very long, he had begun to wonder if he could ever again be happy with being only and always Kore.

  But when their father had died, so did the need for a ghostly third brother. The second loss in the family seemed to have affected Kore strangely. He yearned for the freedom of being two at once, and he began to look upon his real brother, Kunos, with a secret envy. He hungered for the rambling life in the city streets that Kunos had made his own, while his own domestic talents with words and quail-keeping began to feel as hollow as an emptied bowl. Now Kore was an orphan in his own home, and his imaginings soon ran after the hunting and the shouting that only Kunos had been born to do. Eventually, his reason abandoned him, leaving him with only one road to follow. On a bright summer’s day, Kore lured his brother out to the tree, dared him to climb up inside the cleft, and crucified him with bands of leather. Then he became both and lived two long lives out in Nicopolis, savouring both the honours due to a good son and the admiration bestowed on the evil. Even his mother had not suspected. Only Kunos, planted and nurtured as a source of inspiration in the woods, knew that Kore was himself and he was not. But Kunos had no one to tell but the tree and the sky. And when a thunderstorm had finally starved him of even his last hope, the dual Kore must have decided to become permanently the Kunos he had always dreamt of being.

  Until, that is, Epictetus and his slave had frightened him into madness with a living mirror.

  Still, as often as the Master repeated the story under the colonnade, there were among his students many who could not understand how he had guessed the truth. To them, he always made the same reply, while always avoiding a direct look into anyone’s doubting eyes.

  ‘What?’ Epictetus would answer evenly. ‘Do you mean besides the father’s obsession with threes and the mother’s philosophical imagination? Besides her troubling equanimity, her belief in habit, and her strange remarks about quail lice that weren’t there? Or Kore’s reference to his twin brothers and himself as Eteocles and Polynices rather than as, perhaps, the three-headed monster of Sparta, Athens, and Thebes or as the Dorians with their three tribes? Weren’t all these enough for you? What more did you want? God’s own arithmetic to help you add one plus one and come up with two instead of three?

  ‘Remember,’ he would say uncertainly and hurry back to his topic. ‘All of us have a choice between good and evil, desire and aversion, life and death. God never gives us a third option. Life isn’t a syllogism, philosophers. It’s a question. It’s you who are supposed to be the answers.’

  And at the next Saturnalia, when he repaid his slave, Manes, with extra liberties, the Stoic sat at home alone with a cup of wine and his new table leg. He stared at it for hours, remembering a man who had lived out his only life as a tree and probably learned more about what was and what was not within his control than any Master could ever teach. From then on, Epictetus reserved his judgements of others until he got to know them better, until he learned how little he really knew of any other man’s daily burdens, of his marble horror and his ivory despair.

  THE ASS’S HEAD

  Phyllis Ann Karr

  Phyllis Ann Karr may be better known for her fantasy novels, which include an Arthurian murder mystery, The Idylls of the King (1982), but her first professional sales were historical mysteries to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1974. In the following story she tackles something quite different, and considers how the early Christian religion appeared to the superstitious Romans. Strange though this story may seem, it is based on firm facts cited in The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (1984) by Robert L. Wilken.

  THE ASS’S HEAD

  by Atramentacio

  translated & adapted by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Translator’s Foreword Very few of Atramentacio’s plays have survived, and most of those were discovered less than two decades ago, eighteen hundred years after being written and first produced. Little is known of the author’s life. Nevertheless, obscure though he – or, possibly, she – is today, Atramentacio’s plays seem to have enjoyed considerable popularity in their own time: the last quarter of the second century CE and some decades following. It has been plausibly argued, largely from internal evidence in the plays themselves, that the pseudonym conceals a woman’s hand. A few scholars have suggested some connection between Camolindium, the setting of at least three Atramentacian plays (the other two have reached us only in fragments), and King Arthur’s Camelot.

  Working against deadline to adapt this play for the modern reader, I confess to having followed the path of least resistance. Rather than choosing one or two viewpoint characters through whose eyes to look (there is no one character who appears in every single scene), refashioning blocks of dialogue into descriptive passages, and multiplying the variety of scenes by turning offstage action into narrative or vice versa, I have simply tried to imagine myself in a front-row seat watching a good production. In Crato and Chloe we see the remnants of the classical Chorus (and also, one might almost be tempted to guess, the seeds of the archetypal old couple of later ballads); their Prologue and Epilogue were probably delivered on the equivalent of bare stage in front of the closed curtain, but the lines themselves indicate that they are to be understood as taking place in Crato’s own garden. The one other scene change is indeed in the original play; this may have been an innovation for the times. I have shortened numerous speeches (believe it or not!) and occasionally imagined some tone of voice, bit of stage business, or piece of costuming; but more of such touches than one might expect were suggested by certain lines of dialogue, usually among the ones I omitted. For example, in one such line, Bodicca – surely the playwright had Boudicca (Boadicea) in mind as a model – says: ‘Is my left breast not bared for suckling my [own] child by Kynon, even while my right arm remains unencumbered to wield my spear?’ This reference could simply echo one ancient belief about the Amazons; but it could also suggest the actual stage costume, which is how I decided to interpret it. In such elements as the portrayal of native Britons, I have attempted to reconstruct, not historical reality as we now know it, but popular conte
mporary conception as it might have been represented on the theatrical stage in farflung parts of the Roman Empire. In some cases, e.g., the floor plan of Flavian’s house, Atramentacio seems more or less reliably informed; in other cases, he (or she) does not. I have tried to reproduce this play ‘warts and all.’

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Cassius Marcellus Flavian, legate of Camolindium in Britain

  Gnaius Metellus Lucian, his favorite centurion

  Marcus Gordius Octavio, a young decurion, newly transferred from Gaul

  Kynon (Roman name: Horatius Marcellus Kynus), a British chieftain, formerly Flavian’s son-in-law

  Crato, an old philosopher, adoptive uncle to the town

  Bucco, a young slave of Flavian’s

  Dossemus, a tinker

  Rufus Sinistris, a traveler

  Marcella, Flavian’s daughter, formerly married to Kynon

  Bodicca, a British warrior-woman, Kynon’s present wife

  Chloe, Crato’s wife, adoptive aunt to the town

  Marcellina (also called Kyna), daughter of Marcella and Kynon, formally adopted by her grandfather Flavian, between two and three years of age

  Myrtilia, a slave of Flavian, Bucco’s mother, formerly Marcella’s and presently Marcellina’s nurse.

  Flavian’s adjutant, slaves of Flavian’s household, legionaries, British shield-bearers and warriors, townspeople, etc.

  The old woman was pacing her courtyard, plucking worms and dropping them to the ground whenever she noticed them menacing her tender green buds. At last the old man rose from his seat in the peristyle and strolled over to join her, still absent-mindedly munching his honey cake. He wore the simple pallium of antique Greek philosophers but, in deference to the harsher climate of Britain, under it he had on a soft, well-patched woolen tunic with long sleeves.