When Makron is presuaded to take his sick freedwoman and mistress Gorgo to try an overnight sleeping cure at a popular shrine, Diokles smells a rat, collects his slaves Hylas and Kharis and joins them. His suspicions are proved correct.
EXCERPT:
There is a time of night, even in a city like Athens
Only those who lie awake outdoors feel its power: the
guards of the Spartan army out in the fields across Attika, on watch amongst
smoking crops and rubble; trusted slaves guarding warehouses in Peiraieus or cargo
in the holds of ships rocking and bobbing in the harbour; young almost-soldiers
patrolling the walls of Athens
Diokles looked up at the sky above the shrine of
Amynos, across at the sleeping Makron and the sleeping Gorgo, exchanged glances
by torchlight with Hylas at the door and Kharis draped over Gorgo, and yawned.
Nothing had happened. The young priest had left some while ago. No movement, no
sound. Nothing. Somewhere deep under the ground close beneath him Amynos
himself lay, long dead, his old tired soul working to heal the sleeping Gorgo.
The torches died and the darkness began to thin
slowly. The cool, deep grey-black of the first drift of morning came, scented
with dew. A mouse flickered across the courtyard, more sound than shape. The clap
of sandals on stone approached from The Street of the Tripods, passed and faded
away. Diokles leaned back against the wall and his eyes began to close.
There was a sharp scuffling in the dust beside him and
he jerked awake again. An arm clamped his throat and a powerful hand gripped
his jaw, holding his mouth closed. He struggled to stand up and fight but was
forced to the ground again, his spine jolting against the sanctuary wall. A
knife pricked Diokles’ side and he stiffened. His brain cleared and he thought
fast, counting facts in the dark, adding them up. There were two of them at
least, he decided, light enough on their feet not to wake him until they were
upon him. One was strong in the arms and the one with a knife still had a hand
free.
Faster than the stab of a heron into a pool, Diokles
saw shadows fanning out across the courtyard, one making towards Hylas, two
more towards Makron. Another and another came like wraiths, then Hylas was up,
club raised, swinging at the shadows.
‘Makron!’
Gorgo’s howl brought Makron to his feet in a movement,
from sleep to action in a second, but the two were upon him, clubbing and
kicking.
The knife came again, deeper this time. Diokles
stabbed backwards with an elbow aiming blind for the groin, and heard a cry.
The hand over his mouth shifted and he bit down on it like a dog. The knife
slipped into his flesh, a hand’s width, and he wrenched at the arm around his
throat, twisting and falling, rolling the man over on the ground. He jerked
free, lifted the man by his arm and flung him headfirst at the wall. As he
collapsed, the other fled limping across the courtyard and out into the street.
Now Gorgo and Kharis were screaming, a high wail that
pierced Diokles’ head like red-hot steel. He ran towards the sound and found
Makron struggling weakly against one attacker, who also had Kharis clinging to
his back. Hylas was laying vigorously into the other, who broke away and
disappeared into the street like a rat into a sewer. In a fraction of a second
Diokles put a headlock on Makron’s assailant and dragged him away, sending
Kharis flying.
‘Don’t break his neck,’ Makron muttered, face down.
‘This is a sacred place.’ Then he crawled slowly to his hands and knees. Diokles thumped the anonymous man several
times in the face with his clenched fist, threw him out onto the street and
watched him stumble cursing into the darkness.
Flicking his eyes over his shoulder, Diokles saw that the last man had
recovered from his encounter with the precinct wall and disappeared, too.
‘They’ve all gone, master,’ Hylas said.
Diokles patted his shoulder in a gesture of
incongruous tenderness. ‘Yes, Hylas,’ he said. ‘Gone.’ He suddenly began to
feel pain in his side, put his hand there and found blood on it. He found a
stone and sat down while Hylas tore his tunic and pressed cloth into the wound,
binding it round his master’s waist.
Dazed and sweating, Diokles just succeeded in not
wincing as the cloth tightened around the knife-wound. He began to talk, partly
to distract himself.
‘I know almost all I need to know,’ he said. ‘And they
know, too, the killers of Sosigenes and Skylax. They used clubs on everyone
else, but saved a knife for me. I’m alive for now, but now I must finish it.’
He waved an arm. ‘Leave it now, Hylas - I can make it home. Look after Makron.
And well done, Kharis, too. Brave for a little one.’
As he turned away he caught a glimpse of Kharis’ teeth
as she grinned in the darkness. Beside
her walked Gorgo, a black shadow against grey but upright and moving freely,
kindled for a while by danger.
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