‘One of them was a girl,’ Satyrus said, the words coming from deep within him. ‘I shot her to end her pain. She had an arrow in her guts and she begged-’ He sobbed. He could see her sweat-filled hair.
The priestess nodded. ‘Life-taking is a nasty business,’ she said. ‘Horrible for children.’ She turned to her attendants. ‘Bathe the boy for the ritual. Then bathe the girl.’ To Satyrus, she said, ‘When you are clean, you may sacrifice a black kid – each – and I will say the prayer lest some uncleanness cling to you.’ She looked unseeing out over the bay. ‘Where is your friend?’ she asked.
‘Friend?’ asked Satyrus, who was still thinking of the girl he’d killed. He wondered if her face would ever leave him.
‘You have a friend who is sick, yes?’ the priestess asked. Her voice rasped like the sound of a woman scraping cheese with a grater. ‘This temple also serves Artemis and Apollo. Did you not know?’
‘We did not,’ Melitta said. She saw now the statue of her patron goddess among the Greeks, a young woman with a bow. She bowed deeply to the priestess. ‘We have a sick friend in town.’
The priestess nodded. ‘The men in the trireme are searching for you. You will be safe here, and nothing is more important than that we make you clean. I will send a slave to your friends. They must come here.’
Satyrus turned and for the first time saw the trireme coming into the harbour under sail.
Coenus came up the bluff in a litter while the trireme was performing the laborious task of turning around under oars and backing her stern on to the beach. She was full of men – Satyrus could see the warm wink of sun on bronze on her deck. Philokles put the horses in a stand of oaks behind the temple.
‘You bet your life on an old priestess,’ he said.
Satyrus stared at the marble under his feet. ‘You didn’t lie to the people in the wine shop.’
Philokles nodded. ‘I didn’t tell them the truth, either. They assumed that we were small merchants from up the coast, and I let them think it.’ He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. The navarch on that fucking trireme will be on to us in twenty questions.’
Theron dumped a heavy wool bag inside the precincts of the temple. ‘Are we asking sanctuary? Or running?’
The old priestess emerged, supported by the larger of her two slaves. ‘The children are bathing to be clean in the eye of the gods,’ she said, ‘a process that would benefit you too, oath-breaker.’ Then she pointed at Coenus with a talon-like finger. ‘Take him to the sanctuary. We will not give him up, nor will those dogs from Pantecapaeum have him. The rest of you should ride as soon as you are clean. He’ll only slow you.’
Philokles bowed. ‘As you will, holy one. Why do you help us?’
She shook her head in annoyance. ‘I can tell the difference between good and evil. Can’t you?’
‘Then you know why I broke my oath,’ Philokles said.
‘I?’ she asked. ‘The gods know. I am a foolish old woman who loves to see brave men do worthy deeds. Why did you break your oath?’
‘To save these children,’ Philokles said.
‘Is that the only oath you’ve broken?’ she asked, and Philokles winced.
She turned. ‘The girl is bathed and clean,’ she said. ‘Come, boy.’
He followed the old woman into the sanctuary, which was sumptuous beyond anything in Tanais, with walls picked out in coloured scenes showing the triumph of Herakles, the birth, the trials of Leto and more than he could easily take in. There was a statue of Apollo as a young archer, in bright orange bronze, his eyes and hair gold, and his bow of bronze shooting a golden arrow. In the centre of the sanctuary was a pool. The water moved and bubbled. Above the pool stood a great statue of Herakles, nude except for a lion skin, standing in the first guard position of the pankration. The sight of the statue made the hair stand up on the back of Satyrus’s neck, and he smelled wet fur, a heady, bitter smell like a cat. Or a lion skin.
‘This is the pool of the god,’ she said. ‘It was here before there was a temple. We do not let just any traveller enter this pool. Remember as you go in that Herakles was a man, but by his deeds he became a god.’
An attendant took his chiton, unpinned the pins and threw the garment into the fire that burned on the altar. He dropped the brooches – not his best pair, but solid silver – into a bowl on the altar, and the fire on the altar flared and smoked.
‘The god accepts your offering and your state,’ the priestess said. ‘Into the water with you.’
Satyrus thought that his sister had just done this. He wondered why he hadn’t seen her.
Strong hands grasped him and he hit the water and was under it in a moment. The water was warmer than blood and bubbled fiercely, fizzing around his limbs and with bubbles rising between his legs and up his chest. He rose to the surface and took a breath, eyes tightly closed, and somebody placed a hand on his head. ‘Pray,’ he was commanded, and the hand pressed him down into the pool.
He could hear the voice counting above him. The bubbles continued to rise around him and he was on the edge of panic, his hair rising in the water and his skin scoured and his breath stopped so that coloured flashes came before his eyes, and still the hand pressed on his head. The pool was too small for him to stretch his arms. He was trapped.
‘Pray!’ the voice said.
Lord of the sun, golden archer, he began. What was he praying for? He wanted to live! Not drown!
Coenus.
Golden archer, take your shaft from the side of my friend Coenus, he prayed. And forgive me for killing that girl. I only did it because – she begged – I couldn’t stand her pain!
But what if she, too, could have been healed?
Lion killer, hero, make me brave! He prayed fervently, and an image of the golden statue of the god at pankration filled his mind.
The hand on his head released him and he shot up from the pool, then the temple slaves pulled him on to the marble and a towel began to rub him vigorously.
‘Did you hear the god?’ the old woman asked.
‘No,’ Satyrus said. Or perhaps I did.
The woman nodded. ‘That’s as well. Your sister did.’ She held something under his nose, something with a strong scent. Like hot metal. ‘You are clean. Do you know how to sacrifice an animal?’
Satyrus, who had sacrificed for his family since he was six, was tempted to make a childish retort, but he bit it back. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Good,’ she said. The slave led him out of the back of the sanctuary, to an altar at the top of wooden steps that led down to the oak woods. His sister was drying her hair.
An attendant – a young priest, he thought – handed him a blade – a narrow blade of stone with a gold-wire handle. ‘It is very sharp,’ he whispered. ‘And as old as the stars.’
Satyrus took it. The kid was tethered to the altar. Satyrus put a hand on the young beast’s head and asked its forgiveness. He raised his eyes to the sky and cut its throat in one pull, stepping clear of the fountain of blood.
The attendants caught the animal and slaughtered it with the precision of long practice.
‘Well done,’ the priestess said. ‘Now go. I will look to your friend.’
Satyrus went down the steps, wiping the blood from his left hand on the grass at the bottom.
Melitta mounted first and tossed her wet hair over her shoulders. Her eyes were sparkling. ‘There are gods!’ she said.
Satyrus got up on the horse he had named Platon for its broad haunches. ‘I know,’ he said.
Philokles had the train of spare horses in motion.
‘Where are we going?’ Satyrus asked Theron.
The athlete shook his head. ‘Philokles got a tip in town,’ he said.
‘We’re going to Bata,’ Philokles said. ‘We’ll be there tonight if we ride hard. There’s a Heraklean merchant in the harbour, if he hasn’t left yet. If he has, we ride for the mountains. We can’t come back here.’
‘What if the marines follow us?’ Satyrus asked as they jogged along, already moving at a trot and screened from the beach by the trees.
‘They’d need horses,’ Philokles said. He smiled grimly. Then he shook his head. ‘Don’t ask,’ he said to Theron.
There was a ship waiting off the beach in Bata, stone anchor deep in the mud and waiting for twenty more jars of Bata’s salmon roe in oil before unfolding his wings for Heraklea. The ship had seemed like a gift from the gods; the more so when they sailed down the coast to Sinope without the sight of a trireme. Satyrus and his sister
