“Yes. To explain why, I must delve into an entirely different mystery. It’s the key to removing all the irrelevant clues. The moment I met him, I was intrigued by the question of who Zeke was.”
Every eye turned to Zeke. He stood beside Thea with a face like stone.
“No one knows where Zeke came from,” I said. “He won’t say. Thea won’t say. Have you wondered about his accent? I have. Then there’s the sword that I dredged up from the bottom of the Sacred Spring. It’s Persian. How did it get there?
“This put me in mind of an interesting idea: that Zeke might be from Persia. I remarked to Diotima, very early on, that the way Zeke had set guards around the sanctuary was up to the standard of a top-notch camp commander. How did a man whose last thirty years had been spent as a jack-of-all-trades at a temple acquire such expertise?
“Fortunately there was an event that explained everything. It’s called the Battle of Marathon. You’ll recall I asked you, Aeschylus and Callias, whether Zeke had been at Marathon. You told me he wasn’t on the memorial list. But Zeke did fight at Marathon. He fought on the Persian side. And given his expertise, I suggest he was an officer. Notice, too, that Zeke appeared at Brauron some time after the battle, but well before the second invasion ten years later. The timing fits.”
Gasps from about the temple. Zeke stared at me, expressionless, as one might an enemy.
“Are you indeed a Persian?” Callias asked Zeke.
Zeke turned to Thea.
“We may as well tell them, dear,” Thea said, and she held his hand. “We’ve nothing to be ashamed of.” She paused, then added, “And even if we did, we’re too old to regret it now.”
“Then I admit it. It’s true,” Zeke said, with obvious reluctance. “I was once an officer of the Great King. After Marathon I decided to settle here, to be with Thea. For obvious reasons, I couldn’t do so openly. For thirty years I’ve been Zeke the maintenance man, and that’s how I intend to remain. I’ve committed no crime.”
“No crime? You fought against Athens!” Aeschylus almost exploded. He advanced on Zeke and Thea. Zeke, seeing the threat, stepped in front of Thea to protect her and prepared to strike Aeschylus. I quickly put myself between them and pushed them apart. Callias grabbed Aeschylus by the arm.
Aeschylus spat. “My brother died in the rush to take their ships. This Persian might have killed him.”
“As a soldier of his own country,” I said. “Zeke’s right, Aeschylus. That’s no crime.”
“If it’s any compensation, I couldn’t have killed your brother,” Zeke said. “After our line broke, I was cut off and had to retreat south. I took no part in the ship action. As it turned out, I was lucky. It meant when I saw Thea’s signal, I could go to her.”
“It was I who flashed that signal,” Thea said. “To tell Zeke that I loved him. To ask him to come to me, if he would.”
“How did you meet?” said Callias, intrigued. “How could a woman who spent her whole life in this sanctuary manage to meet a Persian officer?”
“I should imagine a scouting party?” I said. “This is, after all, the hometown of Hippias, the safest place to land advance scouts.”
Zeke nodded. “When the Great King decided to attack Athens, he sent an advance force to scout the path.”
“No doubt,” said Callias.
“I led that force. We landed at Brauron, because it was the home of Hippias, as Nicolaos says. He told us of places where a team might land quietly. One of these was the bay close by the temple. I landed with eight men in the dead of night. There, as the gods would have it, my force of Persians ran straight into a priestess, a woman of the greatest beauty. It was Thea, walking by the seaside in the moonlight, and I loved her the moment I saw her,” Zeke said quietly. “My men hid while I spoke with her.”
“You had to learn Greek,” Aeschylus pointed out.
“I already spoke it. That was why I was chosen to lead the advance. My father, who was a senior officer of the Great King, married a Hellene woman of Ionia.” Zeke smiled. “It seems the men of my family have a fondness for Hellene women.
“She saw in me what I saw in her. I know this only happens in the songs of peasants, but the truth is, we fell in love that night. Thea never gave us away.”
Thea held Zeke’s arm and said, “I couldn’t support the Persians. I could never do that. But nor could I give Zeke away.”
Zeke said, “In the days that followed, my men and I hid during the day and moved about in the dark, scouting paths for the coming invasion.”
“Where did you hide? Surely not at the temple.”
“No. In a nearby cave that we discovered.”
“Not-”
“Yes, in the same cave in which the remains of Hippias were found.”
Thea said, “I went to visit him there, often. We sat and spoke of our different lives, and what we’d do after the war. Zeke said he would have to return to Persia. He asked me to go with him. I refused.”
“We argued about it,” Zeke said. “The only time we have argued in thirty years.” The old soldier and the old priestess smiled at each other.
Thea said, “Nothing could cause me to join the Persians. Not while they supported Hippias. But Zeke was honor-bound to return to his own army. It seemed fate would separate us.”
“I told her that I must return,” Zeke said. “But I thought long and hard, and I confess my heart was not in it. I told Thea that if she still wanted me after I had fought against her own people, then she should signal from the mountain.”
“Which I did,” Thea said simply.
Callias and Aeschylus both gasped. Aeschylus said, “It was you I saw?”
Zeke ignored them, intent on his story, now that it was revealed. “I expected our side to win at Marathon,” he said. “But if I disappeared at once, straight after the fighting, men would assume I had perished in the fight, and there would be no stain on the honor of my family. As it happened, our heavy defeat made it that much easier to desert my country. When Thea flashed the light, I could see where she was, and I joined her. We made our way back here.”
“Zeke couldn’t join us at Brauron immediately,” Thea added. “It would have been too obvious. We waited months while he camped out.”
I said, “You see, Aeschylus, the signal at Marathon had nothing to do with political conspiracy. It was a love letter.”
Aeschylus rubbed his chin and thought, and then said, “I must believe you. But don’t think this means Athens trusts you, Persian.”
I said, “This leads us to the next question, the one for which Pericles and the archons commissioned me. Who killed Hippias, and why?”
“You’re about to tell us that Hippias recognized Zeke in Brauron,” Aeschylus said, “and to protect his identity, Zeke killed Hippias.”
“That certainly could have happened,” I said. “But I don’t think it did, because of the evidence of the knife and the scrolls. The fifth scroll is missing. That must be because it incriminates someone still with us. But whoever took the fifth scroll left the first four. In the fourth, Diotima found these words. She read them to me before ever we came to Brauron. I’ll read a part to you now.” I opened the fourth scroll and read.
Have discovered via local source that the girl was hidden near my own estates. She will go on the next execution list. The last thing I require is another Elektra.
I closed the scroll. “There’s an execution list that follows shortly after. In it, there’s a line that reads merely ‘the girl.’ Hippias didn’t know her name, despite which he wanted her dead. Who is this girl, to threaten a tyrant? In the legends, Elektra, the daughter of Agamemnon, grew up to avenge her father. Elektra could only be a reference to the sister of Harmodius. Hippias feared that the sister of Harmodius would grow up and return to avenge her brother.”
“So the sister of Harmodius was indeed killed,” Callias said sadly. “I always thought it.”
“This note comes at the very end of scroll four,” I said. “Shortly before the second rebellion-organized in part by you, Callias-had succeeded in overthrowing Hippias. It’s possible that last list of victims was never executed. Maybe “the girl” survived. Let me speculate for a moment on who she might be. Where were the estates of Hippias?”