“Then why couldn’t she just say so?” I said, exasperated. I turned back to Gaïs. “Are you by any chance related to the Pythoness?” I asked, because the Pythoness at Delphi is the priestess who speaks for Apollo, and she always speaks in riddles. I’d never been to Delphi, but I imagined dealing with her must be as irritating as having to talk to this woman.
Gaïs shook her head. “I’m a child of the temple.”
“So I heard. Have you no idea who your mother and father might be?”
“The temple is my mother.” Gaïs looked over my shoulder at the marble building behind me. “It’s beautiful.”
Indeed it was. With the crickets chirping and the still night under the stars, and even just enough disruption from the noisy girls to give the place some life, the Temple of Artemis Brauronia was a good place to be, if you liked a quiet life.
I said, “With all this running you do, if there were a bear, do you think you might have seen it?”
Gaïs shrugged.
“Have you seen anything unusual out in the woods?” I asked.
“No,” Gaïs said. “Not unless you count that strange man.”
“What strange man?” Diotima and I said simultaneously.
“He follows me.” Gaïs seemed utterly unconcerned. “When he sees me in the woods, he runs after me. I get away every time.” Gaïs shrugged. “I think he might be crazy.”
Well, she’d be in a position to know.
“Every time we interview a suspect, they give us someone else to suspect,” I moaned as we walked away, leaving Gaïs to rejoin the dance. “This can’t go on.”
“If only because we’ll run out of people,” Diotima said coolly. “The problem is that we’re so removed from everything that’s happened. We haven’t been anywhere near a fresh crime, we haven’t even seen a body! All we have to work with is what people tell us. It’s frustrating!”
A gaggle of girls sat on the lawn, playing games and talking nonstop. We remained silent while they were in earshot. “What do you think of this bear everyone keeps talking about?” Diotima asked me in a quiet voice when we’d passed.
“It’s obviously rubbish,” I said. “There haven’t been bears in Attica for decades, maybe even a century or more.”
“What happened to them?”
“People hunted them to extinction.”
“And by people, you mean men.”
“Well, yes.”
“What about the fathers?”
“No, they haven’t been hunted to extinction.”
“I mean, why aren’t the fathers of those two girls down here with us, looking for their children?”
“Polonikos seems to be shifty. He has some reason for staying in Athens but wouldn’t say what it was. The father of Allike I don’t know about. But I’m not sure talking to him will help. Why would he have anything to do with this?”
We stopped outside the dorm rooms for the girls, where Diotima would sleep for the night. I had another hundred paces to the wooden shack out the back where the slaves slept on pallets on the dirt floor.
I said, “We’ll have to talk to this stranger in the woods.”
“We’ll have to find him first.”
I dreamed of Allike screaming as she was torn apart. The nightmare wouldn’t let me rest. I rolled over into the man beside me. He snored and blew hot air straight into my face.
That woke me up.
But the screaming didn’t stop.
I scrambled up, tripped over the man beside me, got up again, and banged my head into the door. My hand fumbled in the dark for the handle, and I finally got out. The stars were bright and the moon brighter. The noise was coming from the girls’ dorm, where Diotima was. I reached for my knife, realized I’d left it on the ground in the dark shack, and decided to go without it.
I ran to the stoa, down the corridor, and into the girls’ room, ready to grapple.
Diotima stood in the middle of the room, a knife in her right hand, the point red with blood. But for the knife she was naked. The girls in the room were backed up in their beds. They were the ones screaming.
Diotima pointed with her left hand. “He went that way.”
Exactly the way I’d come from. No, that was impossible. I ran out, looked around quickly, and realized the intruder, whoever he was, must have turned left and headed toward the river. I instantly knew what he’d done. He’d entered the sanctuary by walking down the riverbed, where the banks hid him from view, then climbed up when he was closest to the stoa.
I padded softly along the top bank, in the hope of catching him. Well ahead I saw a silhouette scramble up the gentle slope that rose behind the sanctuary. I picked up to a run. He saw me and ran too, over the top of the hill that separated the sanctuary from the bay before I did, and then he was out of sight.
I stopped. Diotima caught up. She said, “He’s hiding behind the bushes on the hill. I saw him bend over, and he’s moving right to left.”
If this was the man who’d shot at us the other day, then we were terribly exposed where we were, in this moonlight. I said, “Does he have a bow?”
“If he does, I didn’t see it,” Diotima said. “But then, I wasn’t exactly looking. He crept into the room and leaned over me. I don’t know what made me wake up, but I did. I opened my eyes, and I was staring straight into his.”
“So it was your scream that woke me.”
“No, it was his. Good thing I keep a knife beside my head. I think I only sliced him, though. If that’s our bowman, he can still shoot.”
“Diotima, go back to the sanctuary. I can stalk him.”
“Not with this much moonlight. I’ve got a better plan. I’ll divert his attention while you rush him.”
“I said to run back to the sanctuary.”
“No.” Diotima turned away to run up the slope, not toward the target but well to his right. She made no attempt to hide herself. If the intruder was watching, he couldn’t miss her.
This wasn’t the time to argue, but I could see I’d have to deal with her lack of obedience later. I moved as quickly as I could to the left. This put me behind the creeper. When I felt I was far enough behind, I turned and ran up the slope. For the first time, I looked for my target.
I couldn’t see him, but I could see a clump of bushes that swayed against the breeze.
Our creepy character had his eyes fixed on Diotima. I was relieved to see he held no bow. But that was my future wife he’d crept up to in her bed, and for that reason alone I was going to kill him.
He was crouched behind a bush, almost kneeling and with his hands on the shrubbery to create a gap to peer through. I knew now why he’d slowed down. The soil here was extremely soft and my feet sank in, the one advantage being that it made me silent. I bent low and walked rapidly. Now I was above and behind him, and I crouched to watch. He was a man I guessed to be thirty-certainly older than me. He had short hair and wore an exomis. He didn’t have the look of a highwayman. He might be an artisan, or he might be the son of a wealthy man. Or he might be a well-paid assassin.
Diotima stood on the crest. How she had the nerve I don’t know, knowing a stranger was watching-maybe the one who’d shot at us the day before. She was exposed as a silhouette. A silhouette with wide hips and perfect breasts.
That got our attention, both mine and the intruder’s.
I had to tear my gaze away from my fiancée-swearing as I did that I’d do something about that beautiful woman that night, no matter what Sabina had to say about it-and turned back to the stranger. He was still staring at her. There was no bow, but hanging at his side was a short sword. That was an expensive piece of equipment.
From my crouch I began running, then straightened up as I got faster.
He heard me coming. He turned, saw me, and gave a startled cry. Then he drew the sword.
I dove into him. Hard. My shoulder went into his chest, and he grunted as I wrapped my arms around him and we both went flying downhill in an untidy ball. Somewhere on the way down, he lost the sword. I knocked my head on something and saw stars. We struggled to strike at each other as we rolled down the slope and onto the hard dirt.