The idea in my head was mad—or was it? I could have told Posidonius what I was thinking, but his study door was closed, and what if he refuted me? I thought of telling Antipater, but he was likely already asleep, and the old poet would only slow me down—for I suddenly realized that if I wished to act, I must do so at once. I might be too late already.
Without even fetching my cloak, I rushed to the vestibule and into the street, walking quickly at first, then running all the way to the harbor with the cold wind in my face.
After I pressed a few coins in his hand, the tavernkeeper had no trouble remembering the Gauls who had been getting drunk in his establishment all afternoon. “In fact, they left only a short while ago. The young giant was so drunk he could hardly stand. The older one practically had to carry him out.”
“Did you see which way they went?”
The tavernkeeper made a face. “I can’t see through walls, young fellow.”
“Never mind, I think I know,” I whispered.
The little hut beside the roped-off entrance to the mole was empty. On such a day, with the sky threatening to open at any moment and black waves lashing the boulder-strewn shoreline of the mole, no tourists were hiking out to have a look at the Colossus. I jumped the rope and ran toward the ruins.
On the way, I saw a thing I never anticipated—the body of Zenas. Whipped by the wind, the roiling water in the harbor must have separated his corpse from whatever had been used to weigh it down, and the waves had thrown it upon the shore. I stopped for just a moment to stare down at his lifeless, bulging eyes and the rope tied around his neck, which had surely been used to strangle him.
Gasping for breath, I ran on.
Why did I think Gatamandix had chosen this place to complete his purpose? It was close, for one thing; and here was the cause of all his grief, the Colossus itself. It was only a hunch on my part, but it proved correct. Deep within the ruins I rounded a corner, and in an open spot amid the huge fragments of bronze, hidden from the waterfront and the harbor but open to the stormy sky, I came upon the two Gauls.
Surrounding us, like the standing stones of the Druids, were strange, gigantic pieces of anatomy—a finger pointing skyward, a bit of a shoulder, the crook of an elbow, and a long, hollow section of thigh to complete the magic circle. In the center, lying across one of Helios’s broken sunbeams as if it were a sacrificial altar, was Vindovix, his glassy eyes barely open, insensible from consuming great quantities of wine. Over him stood Gatamandix, holding his ritual knife with both hands raised high above his head, muttering an incantation in his barbarous tongue.
A sudden flash of lightning lit the scene, making it seem garish and unreal. An instant later, a thunderclap shook the ground beneath my feet.
I gave a cry. The Druid saw me and froze. I rushed toward him. He brought down the knife.
I hurtled through the air. The descending blade caught against my tunic and ripped the cloth. It must have grazed my side, for I felt a sudden, searing pain across my ribs. I collided with Gatamandix, and together we tumbled across the uneven ground. I braced myself for a tremendous struggle—but then I heard a loud clanging sound, together with a sickening crack.
Gatamandix went limp. With some difficulty, I extricated myself from the dead weight of his arms, and stood over him. He stared up at me with lifeless eyes. He had struck his head on the giant finger of the Colossus and broken his neck. With his features distorted by a fierce grimace, the Druid’s enormous moustache looked more ridiculous than ever.
Spots swam before my eyes. I struggled to fill my lungs, and realized I had not caught a proper breath since I left Posidonius’s house. In my dizzy state, surrounded by flashes of lightning, the anatomical ruins around me looked weirder than ever. It seemed to me that I surely must be in a dream.
“Gordianus—you saved my life!”
Vindovix had roused himself enough to sit upright on the sunbeam. For a long moment he looked utterly stunned, then he flashed a lascivious grin. “Gordianus, what a man you are! For this, you deserve a reward—the kind of reward only a true man, a man with a moustache, can give you.”
He staggered to his feet and took a few steps toward me, leering at me with half-shut eyes.
“But Vindovix,” I said, still gasping for breath, “you no longer have your moustache.”
“What?” Perplexed, he reached up to touch his clean-shaven upper lip. Then his eyes rolled up, his knees gave way, and Vindovix the Gaul fell flat on his face.
* * *
That night I met with Posidonius in his library. Antipater and Cleobulus were there, as was Vindovix, who sat in a corner, still a bit befuddled by wine and nursing the cuts on his brow and the swollen lip he had suffered when he fell.
I explained what had happened, relying partly on reason and partly on conjecture.
“Gatamandix hated the idea that a Gaul had posed for the Colossus even more than Cleobulus did. According to the story, the ancestor of Vindovix had been a slave—and if a Gallic slave had been used by a Rhodian sculptor to create a monument to a Greek god, that was not a cause for pride, but for shame. To Gatamandix, then, what was the Colossus but a monument to the failure of the Gauls to conquer Greece, and a bitter reminder that a man of the Segurovi had been enslaved by the Greeks? No doubt he had long been irked by the family of Vindovix and their fantastic story, stubbornly repeated down the generations. It was Vindovix who really wanted to come to Rhodes, not Gatamandix. But if Vindovix returned home, not only having seen the Colossus with his own eyes but bearing some proof that his ancestor was the model, there would never be an end to the story. Gatamandix—as Druid, judge, and executioner—decided to take action. That was the real reason he accompanied you back to Rhodes—not to explore the world of the Greeks, but to thwart Vindovix’s quest to prove the historical reality of his family’s legend. Toward that end, he first destroyed the evidence of the plaster statue; to do that, he didn’t hesitate to murder Zenas and throw his body overboard. Then he set out to eliminate Vindovix, getting him too drunk to resist and preparing to murder him as a ritual sacrifice. Only he, Gatamandix, would return to the Segurovi, with a story that would refute and forever put an end to the tale of a Gallic slave who posed for the Colossus of Rhodes.”
Posidonius shook his head. “The tale as you reconstruct it makes perfect sense, Gordianus. How could I have
