Atlantis and Other Places (30 page)

Father George wouldn’t have sworn an oath of vengeance in the Virgin’s name, but he knew Anna wasn’t thinking so clearly as she might have been. Her older daughter, Margarita, said, “Why would anyone want to hurt Father? Why?” She sounded bewildered.

The question made people stir awkwardly. “Why?” Basil echoed. “Well, on account of he was rich, for starters, and—
ow!
” Father George didn’t see what had happened, but guessed somebody’d stepped on Basil’s foot.

“If we don’t send down to Amorion, how will we find out who killed Theodore?” the farmer named Kostas asked.

No one answered, not in words. No one said anything at all, in fact, though Margarita and Martina kept weeping quietly. But everyone, including Theodore’s daughters, looked straight at Father George.

“Kyrie, eleison!”
the priest said, making the sign of the cross yet again.
“Christe, eleison!”

 

 

“No one had mercy on my husband,” Anna said bitterly. “Not the Lord, not Christ, not whoever killed him. No one.”

She stood with George beside Theodore’s corpse in the parlor of the house that had been the farmer’s. She and her daughters had washed the body and wrapped it in white linen and bent Theodore’s arms into a cross on his chest. He held a small, rather crudely painted icon showing Christ and Peter. He lay facing east on a couch by the bricks of the north wall, so the caved-in ruin that was the right side of his head showed as little as possible. Candles and incense burned by him.

“You heard nothing when he went out yesterday morning?” Father George asked.

“Nothing,” Theodore’s widow replied. “I don’t know whether he went outside to ease himself or to see what he needed to do first in the morning, the way he sometimes did. Whatever the reason was, he hadn’t been gone long enough for me or the girls even to think about it. Then Basil pounded on the door, shouting that he was dead.”

“He must have come to me right afterwards,” the priest said. Anna nodded. Father George plucked at his thick black beard. “He didn’t tell you he saw anyone running away?”

“No.” Anna looked down at her husband’s body. “What will become of us? We were doing so well, but now, without a man in the house . . . Hard times.”

“I’ll pray for you.” Father George grimaced as soon as the words were out of his mouth. They were kindly meant, but felt flat and inadequate.

“Catch the man who did this to him—did it to all of us,” Anna said. “He must have thought he would profit by it. Don’t let him. Don’t let Theodore go unavenged.” Tears started streaming down her face again.

Gently, Father George quoted Romans: “‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’”

But Anna quoted Scripture, too, the older, harder law of Exodus: “‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.’ ”

And George found himself nodding. He said, “No one heard anything. Basil didn’t see anyone running off. No one else did, either, or no one’s come forward. Whoever slew your husband got out of sight in a hurry.”

“May he never show himself again, not till Judgment Day,” Anna said.

“Here is a question I know you will not want to answer, but I hope you will think on it,” Father George said. “Who might have wanted Theodore dead?”

“Half the village,” the dead man’s widow said at once, “and you know it as well as I do. When Theodore and I married, he was working a miserable little plot, and we almost starved a couple of times. But he worked hard—nobody ever worked harder—and he always had a good eye for land that would yield increase, so he made himself a man to be reckoned with in Abrostola—even a man people had heard of in Amorion. That was plenty to make lazy people jealous of him.”

The priest nodded again. Theodore had been a great ox in harness. But not everyone said such gracious things about the land deals he’d made, though Father George didn’t tax Anna with that now. He already knew some of those tales; he could learn more later. In the smithy close by, Demetrios’ hammer clanged on iron. George said, “I’ll leave you to your mourning.”

“Find the man who killed my husband,” Anna said. “If you don’t . . . If you don’t, I’ll have to go down to Amorion to see if the
strategos
and his henchmen can help me.”

“I understand.” Father George bit the inside of his lower lip. With any luck, his luxuriant beard kept Theodore’s widow from noticing. He couldn’t blame her. Of course she wanted the murderer caught and punished. But if men from the capital of the Anatolic theme, men loyal to Constantine the iconoclast, started poking through Abrostola, George would have a thin time of it. The whole village would have a thin time of it, for supporting an iconophile priest. “I’ll do everything I can.”

Anna just waved him to the door, imperious as if she were an empress, not a peasant’s widow. And George’s retreat, to his own embarrassment, was something close to a rout. After the gloom of candlelight inside Theodore’s house, he blinked in the strong sunshine outside.

He almost ran into Kostas, who was coming toward the house. “Excuse me,” he said, and got out of the farmer’s way.

Kostas dipped his head. He was a lean gray wolf of a man, with hard, dark eyes and with scars on his cheeks and forearms that showed he’d done plenty of fighting against Arab raiders. “You’re the man I came to see, Father George,” he said. “Your wife told me you were here.”

“Walk with me, then,” the priest said, and Kostas did. They went past Demetrios’ blacksmithery. The smith stopped hammering at whatever he was making. He raised his right hand from the tongs with which he held hot metal to the anvil to wave to the two men. Kostas nodded again. Father George waved back. As soon as Demetrios started clanking away with the hammer again, the priest gestured to Kostas. “Please, my friend—go on.”

“Thanks.” But Kostas didn’t say anything right away. He stared at the brickwork houses of the village, some whitewashed, some plain; at their red tile roofs; at the flocks and vineyards and pasturage that lay beyond, as if he’d never seen any of them before. At last, when George was wondering if he’d have to prompt the farmer again, Kostas said, “That business between Theodore and me last year, that wasn’t so much of a much, not really.”

“Has anyone said it was?” Father George asked.

Kostas ignored that. “I still don’t think the plot I got from Theodore was as good as the one I gave him in exchange for it, but I never even reckoned it was worth going to law about, you know. Farmers’ Law says I could have, and I think I would’ve won, too. But nobody wants those nosy buggers from Amorion mucking about here, and that’s the Lord’s truth.”

“Seeing how things are these days, I’m glad you feel that way,” George said.

Again, Kostas talked right through him: “If I wouldn’t go to law over it, I wouldn’t smash in Theodore’s head over it, either, now would I?”

“I hope not,” Father George answered. “But someone did.”

“Not me,” Kostas repeated, and walked, or rather loped, away.
A lone wolf, sure enough
, the priest thought. He let out a long sigh. How many more denials would he hear over the next few days? And which villager would be lying like Ananias?

Like anyone else in the village, Father George kept a couple of pigs and some chickens. He was scattering barley for the chickens when Basil sidled up to him. Not even the chickens gave the scrawny little peasant much respect; he had to step smartly to keep them from pecking at his toes, which stuck out between the straps of his sandals.

“Good day, Basil.” Father George tossed out another handful of grain.

“Same to you.” Basil seemed to like the sound of the words. “Yes, same to you.” He stood there watching the chickens for a minute or two, and kicked dirt at a bird that was eyeing his feet again. The hen squawked and fluttered back.

“You wanted something?” George asked.

Basil coughed and, to the priest’s surprise, blushed red as a pomegranate. “You recall that business year before last, don’t you? You know the business I mean.”

“When you were tending Theodore’s sheep?”

“That’s right.” Basil’s head bobbed up and down. “People said I milked ’em without telling Theodore, and sold the milk and even sold off a couple of the sheep.”

People said that because it was true. He’d got caught selling the milk and the sheep in the market square at Orkistos, more than ten miles northwest of Abrostola. Father George didn’t bother mentioning that. With a grave nod, he said, “I remember.”

“All right. All right, then,” Basil said. “And after that, they gave me a good thumping and Theodore took away my wages. That’s what the Farmers’ Law says to do, and that’s what they did. I got what they said was coming to me, and that’s the end. Fair enough, right?”

“So far as I know, no one has troubled you about it since,” the priest replied. No one had hired Basil as a shepherd since, either, one more thing George didn’t say.

“That’s true enough—so it is,” the skinny peasant agreed. “But do you know what’s going round the village now? Do you know?” He hopped in the air, not because a chicken was after his toes but from outrage. “They’re saying I smashed in Theodore’s head on account of that business, is what they’re saying.”

“You found him dead,” Father George observed.
Did you find him dead because you killed him?
he wondered. But he kept that to himself, too.

Basil dropped to his knees and clasped the priest’s hand. “Not you, too!” he cried. “I couldn’t’ve killed Theodore, not even with a club in my hand! He’d’ve grabbed it and thrashed me all over again. You know it, too.”

“Not if you struck from behind.” But George hesitated and shook his head. “No. The blow he got surely came from the front. I saw as much. I daresay he would have cried out against you, at any rate, if he saw you coming with a club in your hand.”

“That’s right! That’s just right!” Basil said fervently. He kissed George’s hand in an ecstasy of relief.

Is it?
George wasn’t so sure. Maybe Theodore wouldn’t have taken scrawny Basil seriously till too late. But he lifted the peasant from the dirt and dusted him off. “Go your way. And stay away from sheep.”

“Oh, I do,” Basil said. And the priest believed him. Nobody in Abrostola let Basil near his sheep. Had Father George had sheep, he wouldn’t have let Basil near them, either.

 

 

Theodore’s funeral felt strange, unnatural. The procession to the burial ground outside the village seemed normal enough at first. Father George and the dead man’s relatives led the way, all of them but the priest wailing and keening and beating their breasts. More villagers followed.

Some of them lamented, too. But others kept looking at one another. George knew what lay in their minds. It lay in his mind, too. They were wondering which of their number was a murderer. Was it someone they despised? Or was it a friend, a loved one, a brother? Only one man knew, and they were burying him.

No. Father George grimaced. Someone else knew, too: the killer himself. And he hoped to walk free, to escape human judgment. God would surely send him to hell for eternal torment, but he must have despised that, too.

George chanted psalms over Theodore’s body as it lay in the grave, to protect his soul from demons. “Let us pray that he goes from here to a better place, to paradise, to the marriage chamber of the spirit,” he said, and he and the mourners and the whole crowd of villagers made the sign of the cross together.

As the funeral ended, they straggled back toward Abrostola. Behind Father George, the gravediggers shoveled the earth down onto Theodore’s shrouded body. The priest sighed and shook his head. That was always such a final sound, and worse here today because some wicked man had cut short Theodore’s proper span of years.

Later that day, Father George went to the dead man’s house to console his widow and daughters. Anna met him at the door and gave him an earthenware cup of wine. She was dry-eyed now, dry-eyed and grim. “We are as well as we can be,” she said when he asked. “I’ll give you another few days to catch the killer. If you don’t, I’m going down to Amorion.” She sounded unbendably determined. In that, she’d been a good match for Theodore.

“I’m doing all I can, all I know how to do.” George knew he sounded harried. His training was to fight sin, not crime. “If you go to Amorion ...”

“The holy images are dear to me, too,” Anna said. “But justice and vengeance are dearer still.”

Father George bowed his head. He had no good answer for that, and no way to stop her if she chose to go. “I’ll do all I can,” he repeated. He finished the wine, gave her the cup, and turned to go.

Demetrios was already hammering away again. When George walked past his house and the smithy by it, Sophia came out and stopped him. “Have you heard?” the smith’s wife asked.

“I don’t know,” Father George said. “But I expect you’ll tell me.”

Sophia put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side as she studied George. Her dark eyes flashed. She remained one of the prettier, and one of the livelier, women in Abrostola. Fifteen years before, she’d been the prize catch in the village, as Zoe was now. George had eyed her back before she married Demetrios. So had a lot of the young men in Abrostola. She knew it, too, and used it now, making him pay more attention to her than he would have were she plainer. “Why, the lies John’s spreading, of course.” Her tone was intimate, too, as if she were the priest’s wife, not the smith’s.

“You’d better tell me more,” Father George said. “John hasn’t said anything to me.” That was true. It didn’t mean George hadn’t heard anything, though he hoped Sophia would think it did.

She tossed her head. “Oh, no. He wouldn’t tell you. That’s not his way. He’ll put poison in other people’s ears, and let them put it in yours.”

“I haven’t heard any poison I know of,” George said.

Sophia went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “The mill Demetrios built last year has been sitting idle ever since, because the water it took out of the Lalandos kept Theodore’s wheatfields from getting enough.”