Furies (33 page)

A reed barge punted along the foul-smelling brown canal adjoining the Tannery district, heavily laden with stacks of animal hides, the bargeman watching Aculeo walk along the street with vague curiosity. Few pornes were walking about this time of day, Aculeo noticed, mostly just hungover-looking residents of the surrounding mishmash of dingy little flats, merchant seamen making the most of their leave ashore, and the occasional tourist who’d taken a very wrong turn.

He knocked at the faded blue doorway of the brothel. No answer. He noticed the placard of the blue bird was missing from the lintel. He pushed open the door. “Tyche?” he called. No sound but the creaking of the door and the echo of his footsteps as he walked down the hallway towards the little courtyard. The looms were gone, the little tables and chairs as well. The plaster statue of the nymph looked back at him with empty, silent eyes.

Aculeo cursed and kicked it over, feeling little satisfaction as the statue smashed to pieces on the stone floor.

Through the shimmering heat lines over the water’s surface, a stark pink line stretched like a deep wound on the horizon.

“Hoi,” the bargeman cried, the clap of sound breaking the silence, echoing across the still dark waters. The line trembled, shuddered, then rose, spreading out, a great flock of flamingos, their pink bodies filling the morning sky. Aculeo watched uneasily, unsure if it was an omen, not wanting to speak of it in case it was.

Tell him your story, Sekhet had urged the porne Tisris after they’d shown up at his door first thing that morning. Go ahead and tell him. And like a fool I listened, he thought, eyeing the young woman huddled in the corner of the dusty barge. Tisris glanced back at Aculeo. She was shivering, though the mid-day heat off the water was enough to make him sweat. She was pretty enough, dusky-skinned, with sharp cheekbones and fine black hair that fell midway down her slender back. She had closed her dark-lidded eyes, as though she was trying to sleep. More likely trying hard not to think where they were going.

“You need to tell him what happened,” Sekhet had said, gently urging the girl along.

“Sekhet, please, can we do this another time,” Aculeo had grumbled. He’d been out drinking most of the night, unwilling to return to an empty bed, and had little patience for any more puzzles.

“It was party,” Tisris whispered in a dense Iberian accent. “He said we’d make lot silver. We thought would be okay, I don’t know, don’t know.” She licked her lips, her fingers combing back through her long, dirty hair. “She dead now I think.”

“What’s she talking about?” he asked. “Who’s dead?”

The porne had taken a deep, trembling breath and started again. “Heraïs and me, three days ago we meet man. He invite us to big party, said he pay us three silver each, even show the money.”

“Alright.”

“I don’t trust him, strange eyes, I say no, don’t want to go, but Heraïs say it okay … she need silver.” Tisris had stumbled on her final words, her shoulders shaking. “So we go with him,” she continued at last. “Say we have to take boat there, not far, down to harbour, take his boat, smell like animals. He give us wine, long trip, too long, even for three silver. I say I want go back, but he not nice anymore, tell me shut up. When we get there, he put us in cage. We wait there for long time until dark. Then party start, we still in cage. Others come, men, women too, they have faces.”

“Faces?” Aculeo asked, confused.

“Yes, faces, like …” the young woman made a motion as if to slip off her own face.

“You mean masks?” Sekhet said.

“Yes, masks, masks of animals,” Tisris said, trembling at the memory. “Cats. Birds. Wolves. Man come back then, bring us wine, tell us to drink. I not drink it. Heraïs not listen to me, she drink. She get sick, sleeping. There are sounds, strange animal sounds, they getting closer, I try and try but cannot wake her up. I have to escape, leave her, leave her there.” She was crying, tears rolling down her drawn, pretty face. “She dead, I know she dead.”

“You don’t know that for certain,” Sekhet soothed.

“What did you do then?” Aculeo asked. “Did you see them kill her?”

“No, no, I get away, take boat across water in dark, find farm. I ask them help me, help Heraïs but …” She wept, her head held low, unable to face them.

“I was told of stories like that, of girls not returning,” Aculeo said to Sekhet.

“Some stories turn out to be true,” she said.

He threw up his hands in frustration. “Enough of this.”

“Where are you going?”

“What would you have me do, old woman? I’m trying to recover what was stolen from me, not waste my time hunting for missing pornes. Besides, the recluse Apollonios is already awaiting trial, remember?”

“What if Neaera was taken to this place?”

“So I should run off chasing every wild tale?”

“She’s telling the truth, you know it,” the healer snapped.

“Did you see any other women held captive there?” he asked the porne, who bit her lip and shook her head. “Shit. What do you want of me, Sekhet?”

Sekhet glared at him. “Only a fool ignores a viper at his breast for the sake of a scorpion at his heel.”

And so Aculeo had reluctantly hired a flat-bottomed barge later that morning – the marshlands being virtually impossible to reach by land – and set out along the shoreline of the inland sea to take himself and the Iberian porne to find a farm on the far edge of the city. A place where apparently people ran about in animal masks and forced bitter wine on captive pornes.

According to Tisris’ jumbled recollection, the place they sought lay below the marshlands near the salt pans on the shores of Lake Mareotis. The waters were dotted with barges large and small, all heading in the opposite direction to market, some piled high with great sacks of grain and beans, others stacked with amphorae of oil, wine, beer, rough cages filled with livestock. A pair of ivory-white cattle in one barge lowed mournfully as they passed by, looking quite displeased with being caged, much less out on the open water. Aculeo felt much the same. The shore curved inland, out of sight of the city, and led into the marshlands. The air here was muggy and heavy with the ancient, oppressive stench of rot. A haze of mosquitoes pocked the water surface, filling the air with their high-pitched drone. The bargeman punted through the shallows with a long pole, weaving through the maze-like channels cut through the verdant reed-beds. Fellahin fishermen looked up at them as they passed, living the same lives as their ancestors had done for thousands of years, no doubt, whatever went on in the rest of the world, dropping their fishing nets and dragging them through the shallows amidst the pale green seaweed fronds and white and pink lotus flowers.

Something splashed at the river’s edge, and a flock of geese and ducks flapped up from their nests in the reeds, disturbing the water with their frantic wingbeats. The bargeman tossed a bent throwing stick, just missing one of the ducks, rattling into the reeds instead. The birds all protested noisily as they lifted higher in the warm winds, turning on the wing to climb over the tops of the trees until they disappeared.

Past the marshlands on the western shores, the lake’s bottom was scalloped out into broad, shallow bowls, the waters here coloured pinkish-brown from the salt pans, the air laced with the sharp taste of wet iron. Tisris sat up then, her eyes wide, face pale, hugging her knees to her chest, watching. The shore opened up again into a broad channel dotted with islands containing small settlements and individual farms. Most of the farms in the area were owned by cleruchs, ex-soldiers whose services had been paid for by Caesar in plots of farmland upon their retirement. The cleruchs in turn typically leased the land back to the fellahin to run as tenant farmers.

“There,” Tisris said, pointing towards the shore. A desolate looking property stood at the mouth of the channel, marked by a barren bay tree standing at the edge of the wild shore. Next to the tree stood a crude wooden altar, to Neptune most likely. A pair of weathered looking barges lay across the yellow sands. One of the barges had a large hole in the bottom. Aculeo told the bargeman to bring them closer to shore.

“Stay here,” Aculeo told the girl. She shook her head, her eyes wide with fear. “It’s alright, I won’t be long.” He climbed out when the water was knee deep, wading the rest of the way. There was a splashing sound behind him – Tisris had jumped into the water as well and was sloshing towards him. She clung to his arm as if she was drowning. They moved a little more awkwardly now towards the property.

It was a shoddy little place with a half-finished canal leading to the fields, all of which appeared to have been left to fallow. The bugs were appalling, nipping any exposed bit of flesh they could find, swarming around the ears, nose and eyes. The bargeman sensibly covered himself with a cloth shroud and settled into the floor of the barge for a nap. Aculeo swatted the bloodthirsty demons trying to devour the nape of his neck. Why in Hades’ name would anyone live here, much less throw parties? And why would Neaera come to a place like this? It made little sense, even if …

He sensed someone watching them, turned and spotted a dirty-faced slave with crudely chopped hair standing in the brush. “Hey, fetch your master,” Aculeo said. “We want to speak with him.” The slave’s eyes widened and she turned and ran. Tisris clung to his arm even tighter. “Seen the wolf, I suppose. Let’s go.”

They followed the slave up a rough path to a small mud-brick hovel with a thatched roof. The air was rank with the stench of manure and rot. A pen of animals stood off to the side of the house. A pair of glum-looking, raw-boned cows, flicking their tails at the dark clouds of flies that swarmed over their open sores. An adjoining pen was stocked with a dozen or so pigs squealing, grunting and thrusting themselves up against the pen gates, rattling them. An enormous slave carried a bucket of slop out to their trough.

“Hoi – where’s your master?” Aculeo called out. The slave stopped in his tracks, blinking down at the ground, a trickle of drool dripping down his great whiskered chin, making incomprehensible grunting noises that sounded eerily like his charges.

“Hey,” a voice called. They turned and saw a fat, balding man in a filthy tunic standing at the doorway of the shack, rusted gladius in his hand.

Tisris gasped as she dug her nails painfully into Aculeo’s arm. “That’s him?” he asked softly. She nodded, trembling, her breathing rapid as she stared down at her feet. “Greetings,” Aculeo said to the man, offering a wary smile. “You’re owner of this place?”

“Ay,” the man said guardedly, wiping the sleep from his eyes with the back of his hand.

“What’s your name?”

“Callixenes.”

“You’re a cleruch then?”

“A freedman, if it’s any of your business.”

A freedman? Aculeo thought. And this festering dungheap is what he aspired to in his dreams of freedom?

“What the fuck d’you want here?” the man growled. A slave had appeared behind him, just barely managing to restrain a very large and fierce looking dark brown Molossian dog that was practically strangling itself on the rope tied around its neck as it tried to get at the trespassers.

“I’ve some questions for you.”

The man’s dark, furtive eyes glanced back and forth between Aculeo and Tisris as he scratched his huge, hairy belly. The pigs were still making their maddening, high-pitched squeals and the dog gave its strangled barks as it strained to get at them. Aculeo noticed the dirty-faced slave girl now huddling near the side of the house, her eyes wide with terror. What’s the matter with her, he wondered, watching her from the corner of his eye.

“What sort of questions?” Callixenes asked.

“You hired some pornes to come here a few days ago?”