“Nico!” Diotima shouted at me in alarm over the din. “You’re not going to hit people with that, are you?”
“No.”
I swung hard. Right into the wall. Nothing happened, but I could feel the mud brick yield, ever so slightly. Everyone around us ignored me; they were all intent on getting out the door, so I swung again. And again. Every time on the same spot. I didn’t tire. Years of assisting my father with the heavy stonework of his sculpting paid off now. It needed only a handful of blows to make a sizable dent.
Diotima, I noticed, watched me with some appreciation. My chiton was all but torn away. She could see the muscles of my upper arms and chest work. Diotima had always liked a strong male chest. The thought made me swing harder.
The first mud brick fell out. Immediately I attacked the one above it. It came out more easily. Then two to each side, a single blow for each. Soon I had a hole large enough to crawl through.
“Go!”
Diotima handed me her chicken and dived through. The cocks instantly attacked each other in my arms, and I got a face full of feathers. I threw both squabbling fowls out the hole, not caring if they ran off. I was about to follow them when a hand grabbed me by the shoulder and turned me round. I was too startled to resist.
“Not so fast.” It was my two pursuers. I cursed myself for an idiot. When I’d led Diotima to the wall opposite the door, I’d taken us back to them.
I hit one of them with the mallet.
It wasn’t much of a swing-there’d been no time to pull back-but the blow sent him tumbling into his friend. They both went down.
I jumped through the hole in the wall, to where Diotima waited for me, and together we ran into the dark night.
It would have been nice if the night hadn’t been so dark. I ran straight into Pythax, standing in the middle of the road. My prospective father-in-law was more than twice my age, but he was built like a rock, and he wore the full armor of the Scythian Guard. I bounced off him and fell on my behind.
That was when I recalled that Pythax, whose permission I needed to marry Diotima, was chief of the Scythian Guard of Athens, the people we were trying to avoid.
“What are you doing here?” he growled. Then he saw the rooster under my arm. “Have you taken to stealing chickens?”
“It’s a cock.”
Then Pythax noticed my companion, also with a struggling fowl. He pointed at his own daughter and said, “Who’s he?”
Diotima pushed back the hood of her traveling cloak. “Hello, Father!” she said. “Fancy meeting you here!”
Pythax strode back and forth while I stood at attention like a small boy before his schoolmaster. Diotima he had sent home, with a guard on either side to make sure she went, and with firm instructions to stay there until he calmed down, or possibly for the rest of her life, whichever came first. He had not even attempted to believe our explanation: that we happened to be walking down the street when we came across the fighting cocks, which had somehow escaped from the brawl in which we had had no involvement.
“What in Hades were you thinking!” Pythax stormed at me. “You took my daughter into a gambling den?”
“I swear I didn’t, sir! Diotima got herself in there.”
“You didn’t stop her.”
“I told her to leave, sir, but she refused.”
“And you reckon you’re fit to marry her, do you? Shit, boy. What sort of a man can’t control his own wife?”
“Er …” I began, thinking of Pythax’s inability to control his own wife’s spending.
“If you answer that, I’ll kill you,” he said. He stopped his march, stared me in the face, and said, “What were you doing in there? You ain’t the sort to go slumming with the lowlives.”
“I was looking for a witness, Pythax. A man named Egesis.” I explained about the bear sightings, and how they were due to a real bear.
“A bear wandering about Attica,” he muttered. “And a murderous one at that. Gods, is there anything else that can go wrong?”
“Well …”
“Don’t answer that. And don’t make it happen, either, or my daughter’ll be a widow before she’s a wife.”
“Yes sir.”
“I suppose I’ll have to send men to hunt down this bear. I can’t have some bloody animal eating the citizens.”
“No sir.”
“You say there are men following you?”
“Yes sir. They’re hired thugs. Their leader will have a large lump on his head, about the width of a mallet.”
“I think we might have him. He was still unconscious when we picked over the bodies. Are you telling me you left an enemy alive? On purpose?”
“Yes sir.”
“You’re an idiot, Nico.”
“Yes sir.”
“Next time you got an enemy in your power, just kill the bastard. All right?”
“Yes sir.”
“Dear Gods, boy, didn’t I teach you anything?”
“No sir. Er … that is, yes sir.”
“Do you want this thug?”
“It would be nice …”
“He’s not a citizen; he’s a metic,” Pythax growled. “Just get him out of my sight, and out of Athens for that matter-I got no room for troublemakers in my city-and make sure he never comes back.”
“Yes, Pythax. I can arrange that.”
When he came to, he was bound with rope, wrapped around him so many times he looked like a fish. The winding finished at his ankles, whence the rope went up and over two tree branches. He hung upside down.
“Where am I?” was the first groggy thing he said.
I said, “Welcome to my farm. We thought this would be the best place to take you. Fewer people to hear you scream.”
In the background, two roosters clucked and scratched about in search of seed. Diotima’s first considered action on being released from her father’s house had been to remove the spurs from the animals and tend to their wounds. We had to keep them separated-they had a tendency to want to kill each other-but they seemed happy enough. The slave Pericles had assigned had begun building a pen for each. We’d have to get a few chickens too. With two cocks and a few chickens we’d soon be chicken breeders. I’d always loved fresh eggs.
I said to our captive, hanging upside down, “We’re all professionals here, right?”
“Right!” he said. “And as a professional courtesy, if you could get me down from here … the blood’s rushing to my head, and I got a bad headache-”
“Tell me, how does one professional extract information from another?”
“Well, normally he beats the crap out of him, but in this case-”
“You see that woman over there?” I pointed to a figure fifty paces away. “That’s my wife-fiancée rather-”
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you. Diotima’s quite a good shot with a bow. But I’m afraid she’s a bit out of practice.”
I grabbed hold of my victim, took two steps back, pulling him with me, then let go. He swung back and forth. The rope creaked slightly, and the olive branch bent under his weight, but he went with a more or less regular rhythm.
I said, “I’d like to know who you work for.”
“You know I can’t tell you that. It would be unprofessional.”
I waved to Diotima.
She raised her bow, took careful aim, and fired.
The arrow whistled past and embedded itself with a solid thud, point-deep into the trunk of the olive tree. It had missed him by a whisker.
He twisted in a vain attempt to escape. “Hey!”
“I told you she was out of practice. Who do you work for?”
“You know a professional wouldn’t tell-”
I waved to Diotima again.
This time the arrow grazed his head and went into the ground at the tree roots. The shot had drawn a scratch across his ear that quickly turned bright red and began to drip.
“Aaargh!”
“Sorry about that. I guess it’s hard for a woman to get the pull right, them not being as strong as we men. It’s a good thing you’re a professional who doesn’t talk. She’ll have plenty more time to get her arm in.”