Steven Saylor - Wrath of the Furies

“When we see him again-”

“Yes, tell him I came looking for him. As long as he’s alive and well, then I haven’t yet failed entirely in what I came to do.”

“How can he find you?”

I shook my head. “I can’t tell you where I’m staying. Nor can I explain the mess I’ve gotten myself into.” If I began to do so, the tale would lead inevitably to the revelation that I was to witness Freny’s death. The sobbing of the two women had finally subsided, and I had no wish to set it off again. “I’ve traveled here under another name, pretending to be someone and something I’m not. I can’t tell you more than that.”

“Very well, Gordianus.” Anthea’s voice was suddenly cold and distant. As I had vented my frustration on Samson, so, I think, she was venting her emotions on me. “If you must go, then go. Perhaps we’ll see you again, or perhaps not. Perhaps we’ll tell Antipater that you came, or perhaps we won’t.”

“Mistress, no!” whispered Amestris, her voice hoarse from weeping. “We can’t be angry with Gordianus. Not after all that he did for us.”

Now it was Anthea’s turn to look abashed. “You’re right, of course. Oh, my lovely Persian dove is always right!” She touched Amestris’s cheek and gazed at her in such a way that I felt a stab of something like jealousy.

Samson tugged at my tunic. I realized I was staring at them and lowered my eyes. “Anthea, Amestris, I’ll leave you now.”

If I expected a parting embrace from Amestris, I was to be disappointed. She remained where she was, seated next to her mistress-too exhausted and distraught even to give me a friendly farewell kiss, I thought. I desired that kiss from her more than ever. It was not to be.

Samson led me stealthily through the house and past the doorkeeper. The man studiously avoided seeing us, even when Samson pressed a coin into his hand-not part of the bribe, I thought, but guilt money for having betrayed the man’s indiscretion to his mistress.

More coins changed hands at the guarded door in the city gate. Samson paid, and I stepped through, but he didn’t come with me. I presumed he was headed back to the palace. Or was he headed off on yet another mission, with some purpose unknown to me?

I followed the Sacred Way. The paving stones seemed to glow very faintly, reflecting the pale starlight. In my yellow tunic, I, too, must have seemed to glow. The recumbent forms that dotted the landscape looked more like stones than people, but from either side I occasionally heard a sleepy whimper or a hushed voice asking if I had food or water.

“Don’t even ask him!” whispered one voice. “He’ll only spit at us, or hurt us.”

How I longed to take off the yellow tunic and find myself a toga to wear, and say to them, “I’m one of you. I’m a Roman, too!” But I had no toga, and I didn’t dare to speak. I hurried on.

At last I came to the temple steps, so crowded with restless sleepers they were almost impassable. The light of two burning braziers at the top of the steps helped me find my way.

Inside, the floor of the temple was likewise cluttered with sleepers. The flickering light of scattered lamps helped to guide me, but still I became disoriented within the vast interior. Weary and confused, I finally found my bearings and came to the hidden door. Slowly, with each footstep heavier than the last, I made my way up the stairs to the secret chamber in the pediment.

Zeuxidemus was where I had left him, snoring softly at the foot of the statue of Artemis.

I found a coverlet and some pillows and collapsed to the floor. Almost at once I fell into a deep sleep.

* * *

My slumber was filled with strange dreams.

I dreamed that I was not asleep at all, but lying awake amid the pillows at the feet of Artemis, with the young priest snoring nearby. Suddenly the goddess above me gave a sigh. She broke from her stiff pose, stretched her back, and shook out her arms. She looked down at me, and then leaned forward. The pendulous, fleshy orbs adorning the front of her body hung above me, swaying slightly, like heavy fruit from a tree.

“Gordianus,” she said, in a soft, pleasing voice. “They tell me you’ve come to ask a favor of me. They say you’ve gone mute and want your voice back. But you aren’t mute at all, are you?”

“No, goddess,” I said. It seemed a proper way to address her. “O great Artemis” would be too formal, while “Artemis” alone would be too familiar.

“But there is something you desire, is there not?”

I was suddenly heartsick and filled with dread. “Yes, goddess-that we all should be safe from harm.” I meant Antipater, but also Bethesda, and Amestris, and little Freny, and my father back in Rome.

I didn’t say their names aloud, but Artemis knew my thoughts. “That would be too much to ask. You must give up one of them, I think.”

“Then … if one of them dies, all the others will be well?”

“They must all die, sooner or later.” She shook her head. The motion caused the dangling orbs to sway, and now they were not fleshy at all, but more like dried gourds. They made a hollow, clacking noise that set my teeth on edge.

“Must Freny die, then?”

“Can you imagine any way that her death might be stopped? I can do nothing to interfere. She is not being sacrificed to me, but to them. ” She made a gesture with one hand, seeming to indicate others who were behind her, out of sight because she blocked the view. By some magic, space itself was bent for an instant, so that I caught a glimpse of the dark things that lurked beyond her-things unspeakably hideous, hungry, and hateful. I heard a slithering of batlike wings and a shrill cackling.

I opened my mouth to cry out, but Artemis put a finger to my lips. “We must not name them,” she whispered. “Even to speak their names is to invite their wrath. That is why the poets of olden days called them Eumenides, ‘the Kindly Ones’-the very opposite of what they are.”

The rasp of slithering wings diminished, and the cackling faded. Suddenly we were no longer in the temple, but in a wood beside a stream. The goddess was no longer the Artemis of Ephesus, but Diana as I had grown up knowing her, a beautiful young maiden dressed for the hunt in a flimsy, loose-fitting tunic, tanned and tawny, bare-limbed and holding a bow. A warm breeze sighed through the sun-dappled wood, carrying a sound that came from far away, not the cackling of the Kindly Ones but something nonetheless disquieting, but still so faint and far away I paid it no attention as I stepped away from the goddess, toward the brook, where a little waterfall emptied with a babbling noise into a small pool surrounded by mossy stones. There in the pool stood Amestris, her nakedness lit by beams of sunlight and by glittering flashes of light bouncing off the water-naked as I had never seen her, for when we made love she had come to me by night and departed by dawn. I felt a stab of heartsickness and a desperate longing, for she was more beautiful than anything could be in the waking world. She radiated a kind of beauty that can be seen only in a dream, a beauty that brings pure bliss.

The disquieting noise carried on the warm breeze grew closer, and louder, but with the splashing of the waterfall in my ears I couldn’t make it out, and paid it no heed.

I stepped into the water, and realized that I was naked, too. The water was cold around my feet, while the fragrant breeze from the forest was warm upon my arms and legs. Patches of sunlight were all around me, on the mossy stones and on the leaves of the trees, on the splashing water and on the wet, glistening flesh of Amestris. I imagined that we were creatures made of sunlight, Amestris and I, and I longed for us to merge together into a single, pure beam of light. But when I reached out to touch her, she was flesh, and I was flesh, and then I wanted our flesh to touch, everywhere and all at once.