The stranger’s precious brocade tunic had been soaked with his blood. I remembered the leafy pattern on his chest obscured by that dark stain. His homespun cloak had soaked up a fair amount as well. But a dead man’s blood doesn’t flow as readily as it does when someone’s still busy dying, frantically gasping as his heart beats its last.
I gestured to Kadous. ‘Go and look up and down the lane for any sign of where he was murdered.’ I suppose there was always the chance he’d dragged himself to our gate.
‘Murder?’ Epikrates whimpered.
‘No one we know,’ I reassured him.
We watched Kadous walk down the lane as far as the bend beyond Sosistratos’s house. He returned and went in the other direction up to the Hermes pillar where the lane meets the road, studying the beaten earth all the while. He walked back to join us, shaking his head.
‘No sign of blood. No signs of a fight.’
‘So who brought his body here?’ I wondered aloud. Why would the dead man’s killer do such a thing? Or rather, the killer and his accomplices. Carrying corpses and wounded men during my military service had taught me the true meaning of ‘dead weight’. No lone man had done this. So these killers had run the risk of being caught carrying a murdered man, even if they’d wrapped him up in his cloak to hide their crime. Though I had no idea how far the poor bastard had been carried from wherever he’d been killed. Each new discovery about this death brought me more questions I didn’t have time for. Not with today’s rehearsal to get to. Not with the problem of Epikrates’ missing leather to tackle.
‘Shall I go and tell the Scythians?’ Kadous asked. ‘In case they hear about some unexplained pool of blood?’
I shook my head. ‘They’ll find a hundred false scents down back alleys.’
Athenian citizens would soon be feasting on gifts of meat from the Dionysia’s public sacrifices, but resident foreigners and visitors have to throw their coins into a common pot and buy a sheep or a goat to slit its throat behind someone’s house and celebrate their own rites.
‘Master?’ Epikrates quavered.
‘Come on,’ I said, trying to curb my exasperation. ‘Let’s see what Nymenios and Chairephanes make of Dexios’s games.’
The walk would give me time to think of ways to persuade the Scythians to tell me the dead man’s name when the Polemarch found out who he was. No one would come all the way from Ionia to the Dionysia alone, so someone would surely go looking for him when he didn’t turn up for breakfast. The magistrate’s office was the first place they’d go for help. Unless his travelling companions were the ones who’d cut his throat over some quarrel. Though that didn’t explain why they’d dumped their carrion at my door.
We left our quiet side street, turning on to the broader road running northwards to the city. Birds tweeted and fluttered along the scrubby verges or hopped across the hard-packed gravel, pecking at seeds or insects.
As Epikrates and I went on our way, I guessed that most of the men I could see out this early were slaves. Their masters would want them reaching the agora as soon as the market’s traders set up their stalls, ready to buy the freshest and finest provisions for their household’s celebrations. Other slaves would be buying up bundles of firewood and sacks of charcoal, brought in from Attica by the cartload to feed the city’s hearths and cooking braziers.
After reaching the city walls, we waited our turn to go through the gate, guarded by this year’s contingent of young warriors called up for training. These lads would soon be kicking their heels on garrison duty somewhere on Attica’s borders. I envied them. Better to be bored by days of drills than be thrown into battle barely used to the weight of your shield.
Things had been very different for me and my phalanx mates. There’s scant chance of perfecting such skills when your shield wall’s braced against roaring Boeotians all intent on ramming a spear point into your eye and out through the back of your skull.
‘Good morning.’ I greeted the youth approaching us and gestured at Epikrates cowering a few steps behind me. ‘This is my slave.’
‘Good day to you.’ Hearing my Athenian accent, he waved us through the gate with a smile.
We still had a fair walk ahead of us. My family’s home is overlooked by the Hill of the Nymphs, some way to the south-west of the agora and to the north of the Hill of the Pnyx, where the People’s Assembly meets. We’re registered outside the walls in the Alopeke district because that’s where my great-grandfather lived, back when Cleisthenes established the voting tribes to secure popular rule. That’s merely one of the ways our Athenian democracy ensures this city won’t ever succumb to aristocratic tyrants again.
Anyway, as Grandfather’s leather-working business prospered, he moved inside the city to be closer to his customers. Father always reminded us to give thanks for that decision every Epitaphia festival when we commemorate Athens’ honoured dead. Father remembered the fates of those people he’d known as a child, who’d still been living outside the walls when his family moved within the city. Those unfortunates had lost everything when the Persians invaded and devastated Attica with fire and sword.
When I knocked on that familiar gate, my eldest brother, Nymenios, opened up.
‘Oh.’ He looked at me, blank-faced with surprise.
‘Who were you expecting?’ I was equally startled. A slave usually manned the entrance.
He glanced over my shoulder at Epikrates. ‘I should have guessed he’d go running to you.’
‘What’s going on?’ We went into the courtyard. Broad, sloping roofs on either side sheltered piles of leather, baskets of offcuts and racks of tools, as well as
