But there was one more thing to do. I took the length of rope that Zeke brought at my request and tied it about my waist. I handed the other end to Zeke’s assistants.
“Pull me up if I tug on the line, or if I’m down there too long,” I said to them. They nodded in a vague way and showed no signs of even paying attention, but I knew Diotima would see me safe.
I picked up my rock, waded back to where the ground fell away, and stepped over the edge.
The water that was so cold before now seemed strangely warm. My friend the rock carried me to the bottom. I was upside down, and I could feel that even my feet were thoroughly underwater. I let go of the rock, immediately began to float up, grabbed the weight again, and felt around with my right hand.
Slimy mud slipped between my fingers. I ignored it and kept sweeping in the dark. My fingers touched something hard. Not a rock-it felt man-made. Perhaps a weapon. I was beginning to feel the need to breathe. I got the fingers of my right hand around it, gathered up my rock-weight in the crook of my left arm, because I knew I’d be coming back, and tugged on the rope.
The first thing I did when my head broke the surface was suck in a lungful of air. The second was to toss my discovery onto the grass along the edge, where it rolled once or twice before coming to a halt on solid ground.
“Found that at the bottom! I think it’s metal!”
I waded to the shallows while Diotima picked it up, whatever it was. She turned it over, and over again. I saw at once that it wasn’t a dagger or a sword, which had been my first thoughts. It looked more like a plate.
“It’s covered in slime,” Diotima said. She used the hem of her chiton to wipe away the worst of the muck and algae. When she had finished, she said in wonder, “It’s a statuette. It’s a bronze statuette of a woman.”
Diotima held the statuette at arm’s length and considered. “It doesn’t seem all that old,” Diotima said. “If I saw this cleaned and polished and for sale in the agora, I wouldn’t look twice.”
I said, “So the priestess and the women supplicants threw all these things into the Sacred Spring as sacrifices to the Goddess?”
“Yes,” said Diotima. “Mostly silver and gold. Some finely-wrought bronze.”
Terrific. I would have to bring up every single item, because in the muddy depths I couldn’t tell a murder weapon from a piss-pot. I took a deep breath and dived.
The ghastly business continued all afternoon. Piece by piece, two or three at a time when I could manage it, the Sacred Spring of Brauron gave up its secrets. It reached the point where I no longer cared what it was that I carried. I tossed them to the bank, and Diotima took each one and inspected it closely. If it was thoroughly covered in algae and mud, then it almost certainly wasn’t of any interest, because it must have lain there for a long time. But she was careful.
At the very bottom, underneath all the other pieces, I came across something long and hard. At first I thought it was an oddly shaped rock, but when my fingers traced the outline of a hilt, I knew what I had. I hauled it up, and this one I handed over, so as not to accidentally hit Diotima.
“A sword?” Diotima said, puzzled. “That’s an odd thing to find in a spring.”
“Maybe it’s something to do with us,” I said.
“No, Nico,” Diotima said, as she held it up in some disgust. “It’s absolutely covered in slime. This thing’s been down there since forever.”
“Is it iron?”
“Yes.” Diotima wiped at it with the edge of her chiton.
I dived again and swept the deepest part of the spring with eyes closed and arms outstretched.
My hand encountered flesh.
Even purely by feel I knew it for what it was, soft and resistant to my touch, cold but not at all slimy. My hand slid over the discovery and I clenched automatically; my palm felt a projection beneath it that my imagination said at once was the shape of a nose.
I resisted the urge to panic, in this dark, ice-cold place, in the presence of a corpse.
But was it? If I rose to the surface and raised the alarm and then was proven wrong, I’d look like an idiot. I opened my eyes; they were desperately sore from all the diving, but this was no time to worry about that. I could see nothing but a blur. I slid my hand down to feel what might be a mouth. I had to be sure. I pushed my fingers against whatever this was. They slid right in and I felt teeth and what could only be a tongue lodged between my fingers.
I gagged and choked on my own vomit. Underwater, I was in the greatest danger. I dropped my rock and swam to the surface, barely able to hold onto my heaving stomach. The moment my head breached the surface, I spewed my stomach contents across the Sacred Spring. I trod water, desperately trying to breathe and release the mess in my throat at the same time. I still could have choked to death.
“Nico!” Diotima screamed in alarm; she would have dived in had Zeke not grabbed hold of her. He motioned to two of the slaves, who splashed in, grabbed hold of me, and hauled me to land, where I pushed myself up on all fours and sucked in lungfuls of clean, precious air.
Diotima knelt beside me and said, “Nico, are you all right?”
“What happened?” Thea asked.
Calm at last, I said, “There’s a body down there.”
My pronouncement set off wailing among the girls for their departed sister, as was right and proper. The girls and the priestesses tugged at their hair and tore at their chitons. They would continue like this for days.
I ignored the noise as best I could. Feeling recovered enough now, I asked Zeke for a long rope, only to discover he’d already brought one. He was obviously a good man in a crisis, and I thanked the gods he was there.
I looped one end about me and tied it loosely with a simple knot. Zeke put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you sure you’re all right to do this? You’ve been up and down a lot this day.”
I nodded. “I can do it one last time. Have your men pull when I tug the line. I’ll guide her body up so it doesn’t snag.”
I walked into the water-it felt like home-prepared myself for what I was about to touch, eased myself under, and kicked down. After so much practice, I no longer needed the rock.
For a moment or two, I thought I’d lost the body, but then I connected with a chest and then an arm. I pulled the end of the rope, and it came free to drift beside me. Luckily for me Poseidon had decreed that things in the water should be lighter than on land. It was easy to raise the body with one hand-there was a slight sucking resistance from the mud, easily overcome. I looped the floating rope around and under, across the chest, under the armpits, did it twice more to be sure, then tied two tight knots. As I tightened I thought to myself it might be too tight for her to breathe, then realized at once how stupid that was: this body wasn’t breathing.
Though I’d worked as quickly I could, everything had been done by touch alone, and I was running short of breath. It didn’t matter, I was done. I pulled on the rope going up until it was taut, then tugged three times, sharply.
At once the rope slipped through my hand and the body rose. I waited for it to pass by, then followed with both hands on the back, gently guiding it past the rocks and, when we neared the point where Ophelia would be dragged across the bottom, added my own force to save her corpse the indignity of being dragged through mud before her friends.
She broke surface the instant before me, and I heard the screams even through the thin layer of water above my ears that rose to a crescendo as I came up for air. Two men had been waiting, ready to grab the body and carry it to land.