Steven Saylor - Wrath of the Furies

We pressed on.

I knew we had gone beyond the boundary of the sacred precinct when I saw long trenches to either side of us. Several layers of bodies had been piled into the trenches, but I saw no diggers nearby. Freny had begun to weep. Then I heard something, and shushed her.

It was a muffled cry. “Help me!”

“Where is it coming from?” I whispered.

“From the trench over there,” said Samson. “Here, help me.”

I shuddered at the thought of digging through corpses. Then Antipater, standing next to me, fell to his knees. He was clutching his chest.

I dropped to my knees beside him. “Teacher, what’s wrong?”

His face was ashen. He grimaced.

I heard the muffled cry again, but louder now, as Samson, working alone, uncovered the man who was calling for help. As I continued to stare at Antipater, wondering what was wrong with him, the man stumbled out of the trench. I glanced at his filthy, bloodstained toga, then saw his face.

“Chaeremon of Nysa!” I whispered.

Antipater continued to grimace and clutch his chest. He gasped. “This is the end of me!”

“No, Teacher!” I whispered.

“Give this man my tunic.”

“What are you saying, Teacher?”

“He can’t be seen wearing that toga. Give him my clothing. Cover me with his toga … and leave me here.”

“No, Teacher, you’re coming with us!” I said, with a catch in my throat.

“Do you not see, Gordianus? The Fates have given me a last chance … to do something worthwhile. Give this man my clothing … so that he may go with you safely. And take for yourself … the pages I carry with me.”

“What pages?”

He struggled to reach inside his tunic. He pulled out a leather cylinder.

“But, Teacher, I can’t leave you here.”

He fell to his side and began to gasp for breath. I wept.

“What does it matter … where my body lies?” he said, his speech slurred as if he were drunk. I put my ear to his mouth and strained to hear him. “Let them bury me here … with the Romans. Do I not already have … a funeral monument … in Rome … from the first time I died?” He made a sound that might have been a laugh, then a long sigh issued from his throat, and then there was silence.

While I stood by, trembling and fighting back tears, Samson removed Antipater’s tunic and gave it to Chaeremon. The man appeared to be unscathed, despite the bloodstains I had seen on his toga, but he was badly shaken. He removed his toga and laid it over Antipater, like a shroud.

Chaeremon had just finished putting on Antipater’s tunic when we heard footsteps approaching. Out of the mist, the troop of soldiers reappeared.

Their captain looked at us for a moment, then laughed. “You lot, again! This fog is so thick, either you’re walking in circles or we are!” He scrutinized us more closely, and his eyes came to rest on Chaeremon. Did he remember Antipater’s face, and realize that someone new had been added to our party? Or did he simply see an old man in a tunic?

At last he took his eyes off Chaeremon and waved to his men to keep walking. “Be on your way,” he said to us. “May the goddess guide you safely though this infernal fog!”

Thus did the gift of his tunic, the final act of Antipater, save the life of Chaeremon of Nysa, a loyal friend of Rome, and the only known survivor of the Ephesian massacre.

We hurried on, leaving Antipater behind.

We crossed the misty landscape. We saw no more bodies, and encountered no more soldiers. At last we came to the river, where a boat was anchored alongside a short pier.

Samson conferred with the captain, then told us there would be a brief delay while the ship was made ready to sail.

Still stunned by the death of Antipater, I sat on the pier with my legs dangling over the side, my feet not quite touching the water. A blanket of swirling fog floated a few feet above the river. The sight was strangely beautiful.

I opened the capsa Antipater had given me. The first piece of parchment I pulled out happened to be the very last he had written. Seeing my name, my eyes fell on the sentence, I give these words to you, Gordianus .

I looked through the other pieces of parchment. Some pages appeared to be missing. From my tunic I pulled out the piece that had been sent to me. I found the place where it belonged.

Blinking back tears, I read the final entry of his diary. My mind was slow, so that I had to read some sentences more than once to make sense of them. But no matter how many times I read it, his idea that Monime had sent the stolen page to me-to lure me to Ephesus as part of some plot to bring down Antipater-made no sense. Surely the queen could have done away with Antipater more easily than that, given the power she wielded in the royal household.

As I pondered the mystery-who sent the page to me, and why?-another solution occurred to me. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Of course, I would never be able to prove it.…

And then, out of the mist-literally-came the embodiment of my conjecture. I thought I must be hallucinating, until Samson, standing nearby on the pier, gave a start.

“Who are those three?” he asked in a low voice. “And what in Hades are they doing here?”

“I know who they are,” I said, quickly rolling the pages and slipping them back into the capsa as I stood up. “The one in the middle, at least … because I was just thinking about him.”

Even without his cobra crown, I recognized young Prince Ptolemy. He was dressed in a common tunic, as were his two servants, but his shoes were exquisite. Each of the servants carried a heavy-looking sack slung over his shoulder. The prince smiled a bit uncertainly as he stepped onto the pier. Looking behind me, I saw that Bethesda and the others had drawn closer together, and that Samson stood before them, holding a knife in one hand.

“You may put aside that weapon,” said the prince quietly. When Samson didn’t respond, his voice became stern. “I have asked you nicely. Now, as a prince of Egypt, I order you to do so. Are you not an Alexandrian, subject to the House of Ptolemy?”

Samson hesitated for a moment, then put away his knife. “What are you doing here, Your Majesty?”

“I’ve come to sail away with you.”

Samson cocked his head. “But how…?”

“I think I know how the prince followed us here,” I said. “These two servants are the same two who were assigned by Monime to look after Antipater. Am I right?”

“They are!” said Freny. “I recognize them both.”

“You are indeed correct … Gordianus of Rome,” said Prince Ptolemy.

“But their true loyalty is to you.”

The prince nodded.

“And despite Antipater’s attempts to elude them,” I said, “one or the other of them never let Antipater out of his sight. Thus you knew where Antipater went, when he fled the house of Eutropius. And you knew that last night he was in the Temple of Artemis. And this morning, by some feat of stealth, you managed to follow Antipater and the rest of us through the mist.”

He nodded again. “And at a distance I witnessed his death. Alas! The world has lost a great poet. I had hoped your old tutor would be with us on this journey, so that he might amuse us with his verses.”

“But how is it that you’re free to go where you wish?” asked Samson. “The king never allows you to leave the palace.”

“The whole city, including the palace, has been in an uproar, day and night, ever since the massacre commenced. I took advantage of all the confusion to slip quietly away. I had help to do so; these two are not the only servants in Mithridates’s household who are secretly loyal to the House of Ptolemy. Still, even with my loyal minions covering for me, sooner or later the queen will realize that I’ve gone, so I suggest we cast off at once.”