brilliant sailors. Every pack has a cur.
I sat alone in the bow, sang the hymn to Apollo as we sing it in Plataea — I have Apollo’s raven on my shield — and prepared myself to meet the god of the lyre and the plague. I tried not to think of how easily I could take this ship. Those days were gone. Or so I thought.
The last night at sea, I had a dream — such a dream that I can remember wisps of it even today. Ravens came to me and carried my good knife away, and one of them set a lyre in my hand as a replacement. I didn’t need a priest to tell me what that meant.
The most dangerous of the Iberians — you could see it in his eyes — had a raven tattooed on his hand and another on his sword arm. When the slaver’s stern was set in the deep sand of a Delian beach and his people were moving cargo, I dropped my heavy knife into the blackness under the Iberian’s bench, while he lay watching me, exhausted from rowing.
Our eyes met. I nodded. His face was completely blank. I wasn’t even sure he’d seen the knife, and I went ashore, poorer by a good blade.
Priests are priests the world around — I’ve noted a certain similarity from Olympia to Memphis in Aegypt. Many of them are good men and women; a few are remarkable, genuinely blessed. The rest are a sorry lot — people who probably, in my opinion, couldn’t make a living any other way, except as beggars or farm labour.
The man who met me as I kissed the rock by the stern of the slave ship was one of the latter. His hands were soft and his hand-clasp was limp and unpleasant, and his soft voice wished me a speedy encounter with the god in a voice that seemed all too ready to wheedle and plead.
‘You are Arimnestos of Plataea,’ he said.
Well, that took me aback. I was naive then, and didn’t know the effort to which the great priesthoods went to be informed. Nor did I suspect how carefully engineered this might be.
‘Yes,’ I allowed.
‘Brought here by the god to hear your penance for murder,’ he said in the same voice that a man might tease a girl into his blanket roll. I didn’t like him. But he had me, I can tell you.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘The god has spoken to us of you,’ he said. He leaned his chin on the head of his staff. ‘What have you brought as offering?’
Just like that. My feet were still in the sand of the beach and the priests of Apollo wanted their fees.
I sighed. ‘I have served Apollo and Hephaestus all my life,’ I said. ‘I revere all the gods, and I serve at the shrine of the hero Leitos of Plataea.’ This by way of my religious credentials, so to speak.
He said nothing. His eyes flickered to the purse in my hand.
‘I have twenty drachmas, less the one I owe as passage to that slave trader.’ Need I mention that the priests of Apollo played an active role in the trade?
‘Nineteen silver owls? That is all the duty you pay to the god, you who are called the Spear of the Greeks?’ He shook his head. ‘I think not. Go back and return when you intend to give the god his due.’
Now, lest you young people miss the accounting, nineteen silver owls was the value of a farm’s produce for a year. But of course, it was as nothing next to the profits a man might make trading — or as a pirate.
I didn’t know what to say. I had more respect for priests in those days — even venal creatures like this one. ‘These nineteen drachmas are all I have,’ I protested.
He laughed. ‘Then Lord Apollo will give you nineteen drachmas’ worth of prophecy — I can feel his words in my heart. Go — and come back when you have learned enough wisdom to pay your tithe.’
Perhaps at eighteen, I’d have obeyed.
But I was older. ‘Out of my way,’ I said. ‘I need to find a priest.’
He oozed insult. ‘I am the priest the god has assigned.’
I shrugged and pushed past him. ‘I suspect the god can do better.’
He followed me up the rock and his voice became increasingly shrill as he demanded that I speak to him, but I continued up the steps to the temple complex. At the gate, he was still shouting at me as I asked the porter to find me a priest.
The porter grunted and I gave him a drachma, and he sent a boy.
‘Arimnestos of Plataea!’ the priest from the beach persisted. ‘This is not the way a gentleman behaves!’
‘Only eighteen drachmas left,’ I said. ‘And by the time I get a new guide to the altar, there will be
‘Your arrogance will be your death,’ he said. ‘You seek to cheat the god!’
‘I do not,’ I said. ‘I am a farmer in Boeotia, not a pirate in the Chersonese. These coins are a fair share of my fortune in the last year.’
I said so — but I began to be afraid. Those coins were, as you know, taken from the corpses of men who tried to kill me. Perhaps the coins were polluted. But essentially my words were true ones. The eighteen coins in my purse were more than a tenth of all the coins I had in the world.
‘Why have you requested a second guide?’ a hard voice asked. This priest was older, dressed in a simple wool garment that had seen better days. ‘Thrasybulus? Why have I been summoned?’
‘You may go back to your cell,’ the oily man behind me answered. ‘This arrogant Boeotian is attempting to bargain with god.’
‘I wish to be washed by the god for a murder committed in Athens,’ I said. ‘If the god has words for me to hear, I would laugh with delight to hear them. But this man asks me for money I do not have.’ I pointed at the younger priest.
The older man rubbed his beard. ‘What price have you offered?’ he asked.
‘He is-’
‘Silence, Thrasybulus.’ The older priest seemed a different kind of man.
‘I have offered eighteen drachmas,’ I said. ‘It is all I have.’
‘The cost of three new bulls?’ He looked at me.
‘He can do better. Much better.’ Thrasybulus pointed at the metalwork on my empty scabbard.
The older man sighed. ‘This is unseemly. The priesthood of Apollo does not bargain like fishwives on the beach.’
The porter’s laugh suggested that this statement was not entirely true.
‘I am Dion of Delos,’ the older man said. ‘I am principally a scholar, and I seldom lead men to the gates — but Thrasybulus has, I fear, earned your displeasure.’ The older man glared at the younger. ‘You will need silver for food — and passage home, as well. Will you not?’
I nodded.
‘Give me twelve drachmas for your sacrifices, and I will lead you to the god,’ he said.
Thrasybulus spat. ‘You are a liar before the god,’ he said, pointing at me.
Not an auspicious start to my time on the island of Apollo.
That evening, I made the first of my three sacrifices — this one on the so-called altar of ash. I sacrificed a black lamb, a symbol of my crime, and I told the god and all the other men waiting to sacrifice how I had come to kill the thug in Athens and what my sin was — the sin of hubris, in feeling that I was as fit to decide his fate as the gods.
Other men sacrificed for other crimes. One, from Crete, had killed his son with a javelin — an error, a grievous miscast while hunting. Another had slept with a foreign woman during her courses and felt unclean. I almost laughed, but everyone else seemed to feel this was a serious thing. Several men were soldiers — mercenaries — who had come to atone for killing other Greeks — over dice, or in battle. Two men were guilty of gross impiety.
My sacrifice was refused. I took the animal to the altar and killed it, but the fire would not accept the beast. I saw it myself.
The same happened to one of the men guilty of impiety, and the man who had killed his son.
My priest — Dion — led the three of us from the altar. He took us to a hut made of brush on the cliff high above the beach. ‘You will remain here for a week, eating clean food and drinking only water. Consider how you became unclean. Consider your life. I will return for you.’
That was a long week.
The Cretan was called Heracles. He was tall and strong, noble in his carriage, and so broken by grief that it
