Sword of Apollo (35 page)

Kolax yawned loudly and wandered to a pottery shop next door, perusing the plates, bowls, and vases displayed on the shelves. Most of them had naughty scenes that made Kolax laugh, especially one showing a satyr with an erection that was so huge, it took four slaves to help support the thing. He wished that Mula were here so that they could laugh about the picture together. He became sad, wondering if Mula had made it down the mountain that day they bolted from the cave. The boy was fast, and he had had a good head start.

He picked up a little olive oil container bearing a picture of an enormous griffin harnessed to a chariot and driver. The griffin was Kolax's family symbol, and his father had tattooed a snarling griffin on Kolax's upper back when he was a child. This container was an excellent piece of work, in the Skythian lad's opinion. The artist had drawn the griffin's eagle face with a fierce eye and muscular wings. And the charioteer was leaning forward over the top of the cart, his mouth open and his brow frowning as if he were shouting at the huge beast to hurry up.

He traced a finger over the letters written above the charioteer's head. “Dionysus,” he read aloud. Phile would be surprised at how fast he could read now. Andros's shipboard lessons had taught him much. He could even write fluently now. He would make her a poem telling her how much he enjoyed her shapely hips and generous breasts. Merely thinking about her body made him feel odd. He looked down and realized that his tunic had started to rise up like a tent from his growing hard-on. Stupid Greek clothes! Skythian pants of leather were so much better.

“Hey!” said an angry female voice. “Put that down, you filthy boy!” An old veiled woman hustled over to him and snatched the container from his hand. “These aren't for fondling,” she added, glancing at his puffed-up tunic with an offended look.

Kolax snatched the container back from her. “I've got coins in my purse, old harpy,” he said, and was pleased with her look of surprise when he pulled out a Syrakusan coin and held it before her rheumy eyes, pinched between his thumb and forefinger. “I'll take this one and this other one too,” he said, picking up the plate with the picture of the satyr with the giant prick. “I want them packed in a box, protected with straw,” he said. “Pack them well, for I'm going to be making a sea voyage off of this dog's bunghole of an island, and not soon enough for my liking,” he added under his breath.

To kill some time while the old woman packed up his purchase, Kolax ambled over to the big quarry near the new theatre, half a mile from the shops. The stones from the gigantic quarry pit had been used to construct the theatre and many other buildings in Syrakuse, or so a pesky guide had blathered to him the first time he wandered over this way. The guide also told him that there were more than three thousand men living in the pits right now—foreigners captured by the Syrakusans, pirates, criminals, and enemies of General Pantares.

When Kolax got to the path near the quarry, he spotted the guide—an oily little man with a haughty face—attempting to entice two Korinthian mariners on a guided tour of the area. They were rowers whom Kolax recognized from the
Bane of Attika
—Andros's trireme, a ship that was sitting in a boat shed on the isle of Ortygia. They'd been marooned in Syrakuse just like Kolax.

“Don't pay that goat-stuffing ape anything!” yelled Kolax to the mariners. “I'll show you all about the pit for free.”

The guide gave Kolax a dark look and the mariners told the Syrakusan to shove off. The seething guide slunk off to the shade of an olive tree as the mariners walked over to Kolax, who led them to the rim of the quarry, standing precariously close to the edge, for the Skythian lad had no fear of heights. He looked down upon the pit, scored with countless chasms and chutes so that the quarrymen could get at the best limestone deep below the surface. Here and there he saw the tiny bodies of the men walking about or cutting stone below. They looked like ants from up here.

“How far down is that?” asked one of the mariners in awe.

“Over a hundred feet,” said Kolax. “They have to lower the new prisoners down on that crane over there. The Syrakusan soldiers can't risk going into the pits. The men would kill them. They're led by somebody called the Quarry Lord, a Karthaginian pirate who kills men with a stone club and drinks their blood.”

“Gods, the place is enormous,” said the other mariner.

“I wish we could stick all of the Athenians down there and let them rot,” said the first mariner.

“See that huge crevice in the rock across the way?” asked Kolax. “The enormous thing in the wall of the quarry that looks like a woman's gash? That's the Ear of Dionysus, a great cave inside the quarry. They say that if you stand on the ground above the Ear in a special listening place, you can hear everything that's said in the cavern below—even the faintest whisper. Andros told me that General Pantares comes to the listening place every night and puts his ear to it so that he can hear if any of his enemies down in the quarry are talking about him.”

The Korinthian mariners looked at him dubiously. “Why would Pantares care what they're saying?” one of them asked. “They're in the pit. They'll never get out.”

“I don't know,” said Kolax, shrugging and turning slightly scarlet. “Hey, smell the corpses?” he asked, brightening, for the wind had just shifted in their direction and was whipping up the sheer side of the quarry. “The prisoners heap their dead below us here and let them rot. Some people say they eat the choicest parts of the corpses first,” he added with macabre glee.

The mariners paled and turned away from the quarry. They had no desire to linger near such a loathsome place and headed off to a brothel they had heard about. They asked Kolax if he wanted to join them, but Kolax had never been with a woman and told them he was saving his sacred seed for his future wife and thought to himself, “Hopefully, Nikias's lovely sister.”

He walked around the perimeter of the quarry to the west side where there was a walled-off area, hurling stones into the quarry as he went. He came to a ten-foot-high wall that surrounded a section of the ground next to the quarry's sheer edge. In the wall was a portal guarded by armed men who stood glowering on either side. Over this wall, Andros had told Kolax, was the listening place for the Ear of Dionysus. Kolax wanted more than anything to sneak over the wall and have a listen at the Ear. Andros would be impressed if he managed to pull that off.

The door in the wall suddenly opened and a pretty young woman dressed in sable exited, accompanied by two sinister-looking bodyguards. These men had dark skin, black curling hair, slanted eyes, and slightly upturned noses. Although they had long beards, their upper lips were shaved. And the strange bronze helms that they wore, thought Kolax, were the stupidest things that he had ever seen. They were small and round and poorly made, lacking any cheek or nose guards. It looked like they were wearing shit pots on their heads!

The woman stared at the ground as she walked, arms crossed on her chest. Her face was pensive and agitated. Kolax thought her very pretty and stepped aside from the little path to make way for her and her scowling bodyguards, who glared at Kolax as though they might slay him merely for looking at the woman. Obviously she was someone important—a wealthy man's wife or a rich man's concubine.

As she walked past Kolax she gave him the merest glance, but then she stopped all at once and turned back, looking directly into his eyes with her keen gaze—eyes like daggers.

“A Skythian dressed as a Greek,” she said in a cold voice. “Tell me who you are or my men will cut off your tongue and hurl you into the Prison Pits.”

 

TWO

Kolax tried not to show his surprise. He returned the gaze of the strange woman. He didn't like being threatened by anyone, but for some reason he wasn't afraid of this creature, even though she had somehow guessed that he was a Skythian. She fascinated him, like a beautiful grass viper: menacing and alluring. Her bodyguards were dangerous enough, that was true. But he knew he could bolt right now and leave them all in the dust. He was fast and her men were heavy and wearing leather armor. But he didn't feel like running. It would be undignified. And so he remained silent.

“Who are you?” she repeated, fingering a gold ring on her right hand, twisting it round and round with the fingers of her other hand.

“Nobody,” replied Kolax, meeting her gaze. “I'm just visiting this place.”

She took a step toward him and looked him up and down from head to toe—until Kolax started to grow uncomfortable.

“I was only joking,” she said all of a sudden, her face breaking into an impish smile. “About cutting off your tongue.”

Kolax laughed. “What about throwing me into the pit?”

She ignored his question. “Tell me your name,” she demanded.

“I am my master's servant,” he said.

“And who is your master?”

“Andros the Korinthian.”

“Oh,
him
,” she said with a disdainful sniff, and chewed on her lower lip.

But Kolax asked, “How did you know that I'm Skythian?”

“You speak with a Skythian accent,” she said. “But I knew where you came from before you had spoken to me. The shape of your face and nose. The color of your eyes. Your hair has been dyed. If I could see the hair under that tunic, I'm sure it would be a different color,” she added with a lewd smile. “And finally, you stand bow-legged, as one who has spent more time on a horse's back than on his own two feet.”

Kolax grinned. He was impressed. “You should become a soothsayer. You speak the truth. Can you see my father? Can you tell me where he is?”

She stared at him with an almost puzzled look, then reached out a hand and touched his cheek. He flinched at her touch, for her fingertips were cold, like those of a corpse.

“Who are you?” she repeated again, but this time her voice was low and urgent, as if she knew that Kolax was hiding something from her that was terribly important and it was imperative that he told her immediately.

Now that Kolax had stared at the woman for a while, her face started to change before his eyes. At first she had appeared wholly feminine, but now there seemed to be something masculine about her features that was showing through her skin, as though there were a man's bones underneath her flesh. He noticed the slight bulge at the top of her throat—

“A eunuch,” blurted a voice in his head. In Skythia only the prettiest slave boys were selected for this horrifying change: they were tied down and had their balls crushed between two ingots of iron. Kolax and his friends had watched this alteration once, sneaking into a tent where it was taking place. He was fascinated by the boy's screams, for a Skythian eunuch was created without first taking opium or hemp—the men who made the eunuchs believed that the excruciating pain of having their gonads crushed sent a beneficial juice flowing through their organs.

He suddenly remembered something that Leo had told him back in Plataea—a story about a mysterious eunuch who had come to the citadel during the time that Kolax went to Athens with Nikias. Leo said that the eunuch was a friend of Chusor—that he was beauteous and forbidding and that Leo did not trust him. This eunuch was famous in Syrakuse, where he had spent much of his life. Could this be the same man? Kolax wasn't foolish enough to tell this stranger that he was a friend of Chusor, however. He had learned from Andros over the last month never to trust anyone with a secret. Especially not in this treacherous place—a city that was swarming with Spartan and Korinthian spies and the agents of General Pantares.

“I told you before,” Kolax said, lowering his eyes submissively. “I am my master Andros's servant. And I must return to him now.” He bowed and walked quickly away, and was relieved when the eunuch did not call his men to seize him. He glanced over his shoulders and saw him standing there, watching Kolax with a dark look on his pretty face.

When Kolax got back to the path near the southern edge of the quarry, he spotted the oily-looking guide lurking underneath an olive tree. The man now held a stout stick in one hand, and when he caught sight of Kolax he loped over to him, his face screwed up with fury, brandishing the stick in a threatening manner that made Kolax snicker.

“You!” said the guide. “I'll teach you a lesson!”

Kolax dodged the man's wild blow with a quick and fluid dart to the side, then kicked his legs out from under him. An instant later Kolax was kneeling on the man's chest with his dagger to his scrawny throat.

“Tour guide or assassin?” asked Kolax with a laugh.

The man's eyes bulged with terror as he stared at the gleaming dagger. “Apologies,” he said meekly.

Kolax took out a silver drachma from his purse and said, “Open your mouth.”

The guide obeyed and Kolax stuck the drachma into his maw. “Now swallow.” The man did as he was told. “Consider that a payment. The first of many, perhaps. Now tell me all that you know about the eunuch who was visiting the listening place behind the wall.”

Walking back from the ceramic shop with his box under one arm, Kolax mused on the nature of fate. In Skythia, a chance meeting was called “a collision of arrows”—like two arrows, shot from different men's bows, meeting head-to-head in midair. The Syrakusan guide had told him that the eunuch was named Barka, and that was indeed the name of the eunuch that Leo had told him about in Plataea. Kolax wondered why the gods had brought him together with that sinister yet alluring man. The guide had also told him that Barka came to the listening place nearly every day, but he did not know why or under whose orders. Whatever the case, Kolax considered, this Barka was dangerous and should be avoided.

He returned to the house that he shared with Andros—an unremarkable little place on a narrow and twisting street near the harbor—and went directly into the kitchen, ordering the woman who cooked for them to make him something to eat. Andros returned while he was in the middle of his meal of bean soup and freshwater eels. The Korinthian was in a foul mood, the likes of which Kolax had rarely seen.