“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, thank your mother. Personally, I thought a little hunger might remind you not to play political games when there’s proper work to be done. Phaenarete is distraught, by the way. She’s refused all food since we heard the news and shut herself up in her quarters, says she won’t eat until you’re free. I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you again. I’ll be preparing the way for your exile.”
“I thought you said Conon wouldn’t allow it.”
Sophroniscus looked left and right and lowered his voice. “We might be able to bribe the guards. I’m trying to raise some money, we don’t have many relatives to help, and there’s the debt to Callias, but perhaps I can borrow.”
“Avoid the Antisthenes and Archestratus Savings and Loan Company,” I advised him.
“As to where you go, I know a man in Corinth who might be able to take you in. He’s a decent sculptor who should be able to start you in the trade I failed to teach you.
“Goodbye, son,” he said gruffly. He reached through the door and gripped my hand.
“Thank you, Father. I…”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been a disappointment.”
“That would be putting it mildly. Oh, by the way, that girl you were chasing came to see us.”
“I wasn’t chasing her.”
“She apologized and said the whole thing was her fault. I told her not to worry, you were an idiot long before she met you.”
“Oh Nico, it’s all my fault!” Diotima sobbed. She was the next to come to see me. She had dressed in priestess regalia and I heard her tell the guards she had come to deliver an oracle. They stepped aside, and as she passed, one said he wouldn’t mind if she could do him a service too. She walked on with her nose in the air while they laughed.
“It’s all my fault!” she repeated.
“Yes, I know.” I tried not to be too obviously upset about being imprisoned for a capital crime because of her blunder. “You went ahead and tried to blackmail the Eponymous Archon and Pole-march, and their instant response was to arrest not you, but me.”
“The Archon says he’ll drop the charges if I hand over all the incriminating evidence against him and swear by my Goddess never to breathe a word.”
“Which means you would have to marry Rizon, and your mother loses her house.”
Diotima nodded silently.
“So it’s a choice between my life or your future.”
“I’m afraid so. I told Mother. She said you were a bad influence on me, and extolled the virtues of a married life.” Diotima paused. “You know I couldn’t let them kill you, Nico!”
“So you’ll hand over the parchments?”
She chewed at her thumbnail. “I can’t let Mother lose her house. There has to be a way to get both. I don’t know what it is, but don’t worry, Nico, I’ll find it.”
“Why would I worry?” I asked sarcastically.
“Take this.” She passed through a parcel. More food.
She left me to my thoughts, which consisted mostly of worrying about what she was up to now. With Diotima, there was no telling.
I unwrapped the food and placed it alongside the parcel sent by Mother. I wasn’t hungry but I picked at it anyway. I would have to keep up my strength if I was to defend myself in court.
No one had told me when the trial was to be. I assumed it wouldn’t be the next day, but Athenian justice is speedy, and I needed to be prepared. The prosecution would be given the morning to make their case. I would have the afternoon to defend myself. The jurors would make their decision on the spot and I would be a free man or a condemned one as the sun set.
What defense should I use? Should I defend myself by declaring the real murderer? Or should I stick to the much simpler plan of proving it couldn’t have been me? I considered the difficulty of taking 501 jurors through the labyrinthine logic of the case. It didn’t seem possible to persuade normal men with that, not when they hadn’t been living with the case for days as I had. There were too many details to absorb. I wondered if a straightforward, “It wasn’t me,” would be enough to get me off. I thought back glumly over the case for the prosecution as Pythax had put it in the street, considered Sophroniscus’ words about the Archon leading the prosecution, and concluded I was probably doomed. I decided then and there that if I had to die, then at least it would be telling the truth. I would tell the jurors of Athens what really happened to Ephialtes.
Oddly enough, accepting that there was nothing I could do to avert my fate gave me a feeling of calm. I was able to lie down and sleep.
“Move over, little boy.”
I was awoken rudely by Pythax, shaking the rickety cot. He held a wineskin in his hand. He gave the cot another shake, and it was sit up or be rolled off.
“What time is it?” I moaned.
“How should I know? It’s the middle of the night. Move over.”
Pythax plumped down his heavy behind and for a moment I thought the pinewood was going to shatter. It held. I put my bare feet on the cold stone floor and sat beside him.
“Gah!” I choked in horror. A swarm of rats covered the food parcels. And I’d been sleeping right beside them. I kicked out and the rats ran away to the dark recesses. I could see their eyes staring in the dark. The food was a rotten, half-eaten mess.
Pythax barely seemed to notice. He had always been tough and menacing. Now he was maudlin and menacing. He held the wineskin out to me. A certain aroma drifted across.
“Are you drunk?” I asked in amazement.
“Not yet,” he grunted. “Drink.”
I took a swig, a small one, in case this was some form of exotic trap, and handed back the skin. Pythax showed no such reticence. He upended the skin and gulped.
“To what do I owe the honor? Come to gloat over the condemned prisoner?” This wasn’t perhaps the most diplomatic thing I could have said, but I’m always grumpy when I’m awoken in the middle of the night by a drunk barbarian.
“Don’t be more of an asshole than you have to be, boy. You’ve already got more enemies than most men twice your age.” He shook his head in wonder. “Shit in Hades, you did it all in a month. I admire that, boy, I really do.”
“So you’re a friend, are you? You have a strange way of showing it then. You’re the one who put me in here.”
“Orders, boy, orders. A soldier’s got to follow orders.”
“You don’t think I killed them then?”
“Hades, boy, I know you didn’t kill one of them.” He hesitated. “It was me popped Aristodicus. I dunno if you did the others. I doubt it.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Whoever did for Ephialtes was a professional. Professionals aren’t usually smartasses.”
“Gee, thanks, Pythax.”
I held out my hand and he gave me the wine. This time I took a decent swig before handing it back.
“Tell me something, Pythax. Why are you here?”
“I don’t like to drink alone.”
“No, I mean, why are you here in Athens?”
“I’m a slave, or hadn’t you noticed?”
“You are a slave in the same sense I am the King of Persia. If you decided to walk through the Dipylon Gates tomorrow morning who’s going to stop you?”
Pythax took another drink and contemplated his feet for so long I began to feel embarrassed. I was on the verge of telling him to forget the question when he suddenly said, “I did that once, walked through the gates, then I walked back again.
