Steven Saylor - Wrath of the Furies

“What should I do, fortune-teller? Should I go to Ephesus, or not? Will Antipater die if I don’t go? Will he-will he-” The words caught in my throat. Try as I might, I could not speak them aloud. Will he die anyway, whether I go to him or not?

I took a deep breath, and tried to speak again, but the words would not come out.

With a start, I realized that I had been rendered speechless. It was my plan, hatched in a reckless moment, to masquerade as mute-and suddenly I had become so. I felt as if the words themselves were stuffed down my throat. I could not spit them out. I experienced a thrill of panic. The pulse of my heartbeat was loud in my ears. Had the fortune-teller bewitched me? Had I been put under some spell by the contents of the two cups?

I clutched my throat, and squeezed it, striving somehow to loosen the words lodged inside. At last a strangled noise came forth, and all the words piled up behind it came rushing out. “Will Antipater die anyway? Will he die whether I go to him or not?”

Ameretat laughed. “Of course he’ll die! All men die. Did you not know that, Roman?”

“You mock me, fortune-teller! You serve me a strange brew, you take my money, you tell me nothing I don’t already know, and now you mock me!”

She sighed. “You have a tongue to speak, it seems, but you have no ears to hear. This is a waste of my time and yours.”

From the patch of darkness came a slithering sound, and my squinting eyes perceived a vague movement. I decided the fortune-teller had remained unseen for long enough. I rose to my feet and stepped toward her, intending to pull her into the light. I shielded my eyes from the glow of the window, thinking to see her more clearly, but when I reached for what I took to be the cowl of her cloak my hands encountered only a pile of empty cloth with no person inside.

“It’s only a pile of rags!” I said, tossing aside the various pieces until nothing remained and the corner was empty.

“How in Hades…?” I whispered, looking about the room. With my back to the window I could now see Bethesda quite clearly, and the rug on which she sat, and the empty cups on the rug-but nothing else. Except for the two of us, the room was empty. The only way into or out of the room was through the door by which we had entered, or else through the window, and the fortune-teller had exited by neither route, for we would have seen her do so. Unless the room had a trapdoor …

Before I could set about examining the wall and floor beneath the window, a voice called out from the doorway.

“Time to go!”

It was the little boy who had shown us in-or so I thought. But when I looked at the person in the doorway I saw not a boy but a very small woman, her wizened features starkly lit by the morning light from the window.

“Time to go!” she said again.

I frowned. “Who are you? You can’t be the person who greeted us at the door…”

Bethesda, rising from the rug, turned to look at the woman. “Of course it’s the same person, Master. She opened the door for us and showed us in, and brought the two cups.”

“You recognize her?”

“Of course, Master. Do you not?”

“The voice is the same, yes. But I thought…”

“Perhaps you were mistaken. Would it be the first time, Roman?” The dwarfish woman’s wrinkled features were drawn into a smile. I drew a sharp breath. Now she sounded like the fortune-teller!

“Time for you to go!” she said again, clapping her hands for emphasis. She ushered us down the narrow hallway, which was now light enough so that I could avoid banging my elbows. She opened the door and shooed us into the street.

I put my hand on the door before she could close it.

“Who are you?” I said. “What happened here?”

The little woman looked up at me. She sighed. “Alas, Roman, sometimes things are not what they seem.”

“So I’ve discovered. But I would see things as they are.”

“Would you, Roman? Is that truly your desire?”

“Always.”

“Always?” She laughed. “To always and everywhere see things as they truly are-that is not a blessing, Roman, but a curse, and only a handful of mortals must bear it. They are called fortune-tellers.”

“Or finders,” I said, thinking of my father, who strove always to see things as they were. It was from him that I had inherited the same curse, if a curse it was.…

The little woman took advantage of the lapse in my concentration to push the door shut. I heard a bolt fall, and knew she had locked the door.

So ended my visit to Ameretat the fortune-teller.

“Look, Master! Is that a dolphin, swimming alongside the ship? I’ve seen pictures of them in mosaics, and statues in fountains, but never a real dolphin. Look, there’s another! And listen-do you hear? They seem to be chattering to each other. Or laughing! Do dolphins speak? Do they laugh? I wonder, are those two a couple? Do dolphins pair, as mortals do?”

Bethesda looked at me with raised eyebrows, feigning innocence-for she knew how much her pestering questions had come to irritate me, since I could answer only with a nod, or a shrug, or a grunt. I tried to make a sour face, but probably failed, for I found myself thinking how beautiful she looked with her long black hair fluttering in the salty breeze.

* * *

Four days before that sighting of the dolphins, we had boarded the Phoenix as planned, despite Bethesda’s protests.

To her, the fortune-teller’s words had been a clear warning that we should not take the trip. I was more skeptical. What, after all, had Ameretat said that I did not know already, or could not have imagined on my own? She had said something about “the mightiest mortal on earth” causing destruction unlike anything the world had ever seen, unleashing the Furies themselves. Given his recent victories, the mightiest mortal might be King Mithridates, but it seemed to me more likely that the mightiest of mortals surely must be some Roman general or other, though perhaps that was only my bias as a Roman. As for unprecedented destruction, the world had seen a great deal of bloodshed and horror since Prometheus first created mankind, and it seemed to me unlikely that there could be anything new looming in that regard. As for the Furies being unleashed on earth … well, just as Bethesda had never before seen a real dolphin, I had lived twenty-two years on earth and traveled many hundreds of miles without encountering a Fury, except in statues and paintings and mosaics, and it seemed unlikely that I would meet one of those fierce, snake-haired, winged crones in Ephesus.

The one thing Ameretat had said that gnawed at my equanimity was that Antipater did not want me to come to his aid-indeed, that he wanted me to stay away from Ephesus. This contradicted the words of Antipater that I had read with my own eyes, so it seemed to me this utterance proved either that the fortune-teller was a fraud, or that she did in fact know something I did not-a disturbing notion. But I inclined toward the first conclusion, reasoning that Bethesda, intentionally or not, had revealed to the fortune-teller’s agent her own desire that we should not go, inspiring Ameretat to weave this invented detail into her narrative.

So, despite the fortune-teller’s words and Bethesda’s objections, we set sail from Alexandria aboard the Phoenix, bound for Ephesus by way of Rhodes with a cargo of papyrus, grain, perfumes, and spices in the hold, and a handful of passengers on deck, almost all of them men. Fortunately, there had been no one on the waterfront that day, or among those who boarded the ship, who recognized me as Gordianus of Rome, so I successfully managed to depart from Egypt under the guise of Agathon of Alexandria, recently stricken mute, bound for Ephesus and attended by a single slave.