Sword of Apollo, page 27
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.
“What’s wrong, master?” he asked.
“Word has come to me from a messenger ship,” said Andros, sitting down and pouring himself some wine, “that one of our expeditions to root out some pirates on Serifos ended in disaster nearly a month ago.”
“What happened?”
“Six triremes and their crews were lost.”
“That’s over twelve hundred men,” said Kolax.
“Your multiplication has improved,” said Andros with a mirthless smile.
“Thank you,” replied Kolax.
“You don’t understand sarcasm, do you, Kolax?”
“Master?”
“Twelve hundred men, and I will take the blame for their ineptitude,” muttered Andros. He caught sight of the box on the floor at Kolax’s feet and asked suspiciously, “What’s this?”
“Nothing,” said Kolax.
“A box of nothing?” Andros snatched it up and pried off the top. His dark look faded as he took out the plate embellished with the satyr. “A souvenir of Syrakuse?”
“For a friend,” said Kolax.
Andros put the plate back in the box and interrogated him on what he had learned that day. Kolax told him about the conversation that he had overheard at the shield shop, and how he had taken the two mariners from the Bane of Attika on a tour of the rim of the quarry. But he said nothing about Barka the eunuch, nor did he say that he had recruited his own agent in the oily guide.
Andros had his secrets and Kolax had his own.
THREE
Another two dreary weeks went by, and every few days Kolax went to the quarry and met with the guide, learning from him the schedule that Barka the eunuch kept on his visits to the listening place above the Ear of Dionysus. But Kolax was careful never to run into Barka again.
One afternoon, when Kolax had just returned from roaming the city, his master burst through the front door calling out, “Kolax! Put on your best tunic! We’re going to a symposium!”
Andros was in a gay mood, for the symposium was at the palace of General Pantares. Kolax reluctantly put on a frilly tunic, a golden belt, and some fancy sandals, then walked alongside Andros through the winding streets to the best part of the citadel.
“You are my eyes and ears, young Kolax,” Andros said. “Make yourself one with the walls and find me some diamonds.”
“Diamonds” were what Andros called any bit of information that he believed to be valuable. So far Kolax had failed to deliver any of these illusionary gems.
“Yes, master,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll do my best.”
The house of General Pantares was an enormous place, built of imported marble. Standing out front was a troop of armed guards—serious-looking men of the same race as the eunuch’s bodyguards, with long chin beards and slightly upturned noses. They patted Kolax and Andros down, searching for hidden weapons.
When Kolax and Andros entered the front courtyard, they heard energetic harp music playing from within. Slaves came and led them to footbaths and removed their sandals, coating their feet in scented oils.
“Disgusting smell,” said Kolax.
“Rose water,” said Andros with a smile. “Would you prefer they bathed your feet in horse sweat?”
“That would be a joy,” said Kolax. “And from what tribe are those pig’s-arse-ugly guards out front?”
“Tyrsenians in the employ of Pantares,” said Andros. “He has his own little army of them in the citadel. They’re his police force, like the Athenians have your Skythian brethren. The Tyrsenians used to rule all of Italia, but they were defeated by the Syrakusans soon after the last Persian War. So they must earn their coins under Greek masters now.”
“We Skythians don’t have to serve anyone,” said Kolax testily. “The Athenians pay well. When they stop paying, we move on.”
“Would Skythian archers enlist with Korinthians like me?”
“We Skythians don’t care which city’s stamp a coin bears. The sweet jingling sound that they make in our pocket is exactly the same, be they Athenian owls or the winged horses of Korinth.”
Andros laughed. “You are quite the pragmatist, young Kolax.”
Kolax smiled. He was lying, of course. Neither he nor any of his Bindi kindred would serve the Korinthians. Maybe those Nuri dogs would lick the arses of the men of Korinth. But not Kolax and his tribe. Unless, of course, the pay was good. But Korinthians were notoriously tightfisted. And dishonest. At least, that’s what his kinsman Skunxa had always told him. But Kolax didn’t say what he was thinking. He had learned to honey his words and become a pragmatist under Andros’s tutelage … even though he wasn’t quite sure what being a pragmatist meant.
After scent had been applied to their hair, they were allowed to enter the big inner courtyard where the symposium was taking place. The harp music was louder here, but Kolax could not see where the musician was standing. There were fifty or so men and a few hetaerae milling about, along with some bejeweled lads with painted eyes. Everyone was drinking and talking so that the space was filled with the din of their voices and laughter. The walls around the courtyard, at first glance, were lined with the shapes of dark statues. But then Kolax realized that they were armed Tyrsenian warriors, watching the crowd with squinting eyes.
He looked up and saw that the harpist was sitting above them, suspended over the guests on a swing. Kolax scoffed. What a ridiculous profession. The only thing stupider and more useless than a musician, in his opinion, was an actor. Could not a man make his own music with voice or drum? Could not a man tell his own stories?
At the far wall was a large throne-like chair where a man sat dressed in a rich robe, his fingers adorned with rings that scintillated in the light. His bearded visage was stern and humorless. His dark eyes scanned the room from face to face, like a hawk deciding which mouse to swoop down on. There was a coiled menace in the big man who, to Kolax, looked like a pankrator who had given up his training and gone to seed, yet retained the killer instinct of one who has faced men down in the arena or in battle and beaten them soundly. He reminded Kolax of an evil and coldhearted version of the kindly Plataean Arkon Menesarkus—only with three double chins. In his hand this man held an object like a small head or a ball of gold.
“There sits Pantares,” said Andros out of the side of his mouth. “None of your pert Skythian ways with him, mind you. He’ll cut off your head and shove it up my arse. I’ve seen him slay men in here for sport. And ever since his beloved daughter died he’s been as cruel as a Persian satrap.”
“I’ll keep out of the way,” said Kolax.
When a slave approached with a tray filled with wine cups, Kolax grabbed one and slunk off toward the chamber where the slaves had washed their feet. He spotted some stairs leading to the balcony and ran up them, spilling his wine all over his tunic. He cursed and went to the balcony, leaning over it. This was a better place to watch what was going on than in the crowded courtyard below. After a while he saw Andros approach Pantares deferentially and the two spoke for a bit—rather, Andros spoke while Pantares listened and occasionally frowned or nodded ever so slightly, always fingering the golden object in his lap. After a time Pantares evidently grew frustrated with this interview and abruptly waved Andros away. Kolax could plainly see the look of dissatisfaction on his master’s face.
