Steven Saylor - Wrath of the Furies

When the chamberlain returned, he brought me a dark tunic that reached below my knees and covered most of my arms. He insisted on dressing me himself. I think this was so that he could check to see that I had been sufficiently cleaned. “Your slave did an excellent job. She seems to have bathed herself as well,” he noted, not realizing that it was I who bathed her. “She’ll be taken back to your room now, and you will follow me.”

Another chamberlain was waiting at the door. He nodded to Bethesda, then led her away. She gave me a last glance over her shoulder. How I longed to speak her name!

The chamberlain led me in another direction. It was the hour of dusk, when preparations are made to light the lamps. Servants were kindling fires, carrying torches, and pouring oil into vessels. The hours of daylight were done. The hours of darkness had begun.

I was led to a large courtyard where several litters were waiting, all shrouded with black curtains. The chamberlain indicated that I should step into one of these, and I found myself once more in the company of Gnossipus and Damianus. Like me, they wore dark tunics. They sat side by side, while I sat across from them.

The deaf man gave me a grunt of welcome. Gnossipus raised an eyebrow. “Is that you, Agathon?”

The interior was so plush with pillows and cushions that I had to search to find a hard wooden surface on which to rap my knuckles. I did so twice.

“Ah, so it is you, Agathon. Often I can recognize people by their smell, but we’ve all been scrubbed clean and perfumed with the same scented oil, so we all smell alike. Here we are, the three of us, off to do whatever it is the king requires. I find it rather exciting, don’t you?”

I rapped my knuckles twice. More exciting than you know, I thought. As the litter was lifted from the blocks, my heart began to race.

All night Antipater and I had practiced what we planned to do. But would I have the nerve? Would Antipater? We were to act on a signal from Kysanias. Would the priest carry through with our plans, or would his courage fail him?

The curtains remained closed as we set off. I could see nothing outside the litter. As the last light of day receded, the interior of the litter became so dark that I was almost as blind as Gnossipus.

“I wonder where we’re headed?” he said. “I mean to say, I know we’re off to the Grove of the … Kindly Ones … but I don’t where that is. Do you?”

I knocked once. With so much else to discuss and rehearse the night before, I hadn’t thought to ask Kysanias the location of the grove. With the curtains closed and darkness all around, I had no idea in what direction we were headed. At some point, from the sounds outside, I was certain we passed through a city gate, but Ephesus had several gates, all leading in different directions.

Gnossipus began to hum tunelessly. “They wouldn’t let me bring my flute,” he said morosely.

Damianus began to shift nervously in his seat. Unable to hear and with only darkness around him, it was no wonder he began to feel unsettled. I realized that I was shifting about uneasily, too, and grinding my teeth.

The journey seemed to last a long time.

At last we came to a halt. I felt the litter settle onto blocks. The curtains were drawn back. A figure holding aloft a torch silently beckoned for us to step out. The light of the flames revealed the face of Zeuxidemus, though he was dressed not in yellow but in a dark tunic not unlike the one I was wearing. So were all the men around him. Among them I recognized some of the Megabyzoi and Magi who had examined me naked, including the Grand Magus and Kysanias. Their clothing was so dark that it was hard to tell one from another, but that was intentional. A man does not approach the Furies dressed in such a way as to call attention to himself.

Leaving the litter-bearers behind, and led by a few among us bearing torches, we walked a short distance, stopping at a low wall made of rough-hewn stones. There was a break in this wall, beyond which a gravel path led to a circle of towering cypress trees. In the darkness, it was hard to judge the diameter of this circle. The tall, slender trees stood so close together that they formed a sort of wall. Whatever might be inside that circle of trees could not be seen.

The night was very still. There was no sound except that of footsteps and the crackling of torches. A company of spear-bearers approached; these were the king’s private bodyguards, clad in armor and helmets that gleamed in the torchlight. They escorted a small group dressed in the same dark tunics as the Magi and Megabyzoi. Among the approaching faces illuminated by the flickering light I saw those of Antipater and Rutilius.

At the head of this company was a man who would have stood out even if he had not been wearing a fillet of purple and white on his head. Mithridates stood taller than even the tallest of his bodyguards, and his black tunic did not conceal the breadth of his shoulders and the brawniness of his arms and legs. Though the night was warm, he wore a cloak as well, just as Kysanias had predicted, saying the king always wore it for important occasions-the purple cloak of Alexander the Great, taken from the Egyptian treasury at Cos. The gold embroidery on the cloak caught the light, further setting him apart from the rest of us.

The king’s face was clean-shaven, showing his powerful jaw. Torchlight picked out strands of silver amid the long hair combed back from his face. His strong features were those of a man who looks his best in middle age. His mouth was grim but his eyes glittered with confidence.

The only other monarch I had ever seen so close at hand was the recently deposed King Ptolemy, back in Egypt. Two men could not have been more dissimilar. If King Ptolemy was the fattest man I’d ever seen, Mithridates was one of the fittest, and certainly the most formidable. Seeing him in the flesh, I despaired for his enemies, including Rome.

I despaired for myself, as well, for this was the man we were conspiring to deceive. Even at a glance, I saw that Mithridates was no man’s fool. What had we been thinking? I remembered the scoffing noises Bethesda had made as I described our scheme. I felt light-headed. A trickle of sweat snaked its way down my spine.

Next to the king, so much smaller that she seemed almost a child, was the queen. Monime was swathed in black silk. Her body merged into the darkness, so that her red-gold hair and pale round face seemed almost to levitate, as if attached to nothing beneath.

I glanced at the others in the king’s company. Besides Antipater and Rutilius, I recognized the young Prince Ptolemy, who stood near Monime. The golden cobra of his uraeus crown, with its ruby eyes, glittered in the light. Why was he being included in the ritual? Did the king think of the kidnapped prince as part of his household? Or, since he wore a crown, was Ptolemy present as a royal representative of Egypt, despite his father’s fall from the throne?

There was also a man I took to be Metrodorus of Scepsis, the so-called Rome-Hater, one of the king’s closest advisors. Kysanias had described the man and told me a little about him the previous night, saying Metrodorus would be the observer around whom we must be most careful, because of his famous ability to remember every detail of everything he saw and heard. Metrodorus had perfected his memory with a method of his own invention, based somehow on the divisions of the zodiac. I wished I could have met him under other circumstances. My father had taught me some simple tricks of memorization, but what might Metrodorus be able to teach me?

Also near the front of the company was a man I assumed to be Monime’s father, Philopoemen. As Episcopus of Ephesus, he carried a staff with a gold knob at the top to show his authority as a royal overseer. I looked at him only for an instant, because I suddenly saw two men farther back in the group, hidden in the shadows until that moment.