‘Did,’ Satyrus managed. His voice was rough, the word incomprehensible. ‘Did he live?’
Curly Hair laughed. ‘No. Starved to death. I kept him alive a long time, though. He didn’t really want to live. His boy left him for another man.’
‘You — are — doctor?’ Satyrus managed.
‘Hmm. Yes. Although I don’t know if Hippocrates would have me if he saw my practice. You have a name, lad? The whores who brought you in want to be paid. You said gold.’ The man winked. ‘Beat as bad as you were beat, I’d have claimed to have gold, too. My advice? Don’t be too eager to pay.’
Satyrus coughed. ‘Why?’ he asked weakly.
‘Because you’re bleeding internally, son. Pissing blood right and left. Pay if you live, that’s my advice. You have family in Athens?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Satyrus said.
‘Don’t be telling me you’re a slave. You had two rings on until some cocksucker — and I use the term precisely — took them.’ He began to unwind Satyrus’s bandage. ‘This is going to hurt. Anything you want to say, first?’
‘Kineas,’ Satyrus said, on the spur of the moment. He was clear headed enough to know that his own name probably wasn’t the wisest idea. ‘Alexandria.’
‘Ah,’ said the doctor. ‘So you do have a few darics, eh? I can tell the girls and boys?’
Satyrus nodded.
‘In that case,’ said the doctor, ‘I’ll give you some poppy for the pain.’
The god lay by his stream, as he ever did, a magnificent figure — bigger than Theron, bigger than any man Satyrus had ever seen, his skin smooth and unmarked, heavily muscled. He wore a lion skin like a kilt.
Satyrus was healed. He walked to the edge of the stream and sat easily, all of his muscles responding perfectly.
‘You will have to make decisions,’ the god said. ‘You will have a friend — a weak friend.’
Satyrus wanted to bathe his head in the cool stream, not listen to the god. He rolled on his stomach. The ground underneath him was moss — damp and cool and slightly springy. The stream was narrow but swift, and he could see the gravel bottom. He put his hands in the stream, and it was cold as ice. He dipped his head-
‘Are you awake, sir? Sir? Awake, sir?’ said an insistent voice.
Satyrus rose out of a deep well of sleep and poppy towards the voice.
‘Please wake up, sir. Please wake up, sir. Sir, please wake up.’ It was an unpleasant voice — a surprisingly unpleasant woman’s voice, squeaky, grating, the sound of a sword on rock.
Satyrus tried to respond. A meaningless mumble emerged, and his eyes opened.
‘There’s a good gentleman, sir. How nice. Lovely morning — very cool. And can you tell me sir, what is your name? Where can we find your … people?’ she asked.
There was a man standing behind her. ‘Bankers. Ask if he has bankers.’
Harpy Voice sounded impatient. ‘Don’t be stupid. He can barely talk. We’ll be lucky if he’s a ship owner.’
Satyrus wasn’t thinking very clearly. He was afraid, not a common feeling for him. Afraid that this coarse-voiced woman would sell him to Phiale. Afraid that Phiale would find him — he was in a brothel, he assumed. With his left eye open, he could see that Harpy Voice was a plain-faced girl of sixteen or seventeen with short legs and magnificent, prominent breasts and hips worn under a chitoniskos so short as to be indecent. But of course it was indecent. She was a whore. A porne. Her eyes, though, were fierce, independent — interested.
The boy behind her was younger — wide shoulders, narrow waist. Fit, but his face was misshapen, as if he’d been hit hard as a small child, or had his jaw broken and badly set. He looked stupider than an ox. An ox with a broken jaw.
‘Maybe a ship’s name, then?’ Ox Face asked. ‘Maybe he’s off a ship and they can pay us?’
‘Shut up,’ Harpy Voice said. She leaned over Satyrus — she had to, as there wasn’t room to stand next to the bed. ‘A name, sweetie. Just a name, so we can get you help. No offence, sir, but we’re not doing this for our arete.’
Her use of the upper-class word made him smile.
‘Ooh, sweetie, you know that word, do you?’ she said, and she sat by his feet, coiling neatly on her haunches. ‘The better for us, Alex.’
‘Why?’ he asked, in his ox voice.
‘’Cause idiotes and poor men have nothing to do with arete, that’s why. Not for the likes of us.’ She smiled at Satyrus — a totally false smile, and not a very effective one. ‘Give me a name, lover.’
Satyrus couldn’t think of a name that would help him without compromising him. Leon had factors in Athens — but surely Phiale would have them watched. Even in one of their houses, he’d be vulnerable to Phiale, or to her master.
Satyrus had to assume that Phiale was working for Demetrios.
The girl leaned down the bed, moving her feet along the bed’s edge, crawling over him like a spider — with the ease of long practice, he assumed. Her breasts hung before his eyes, and even through the poppy he was aware of her.
‘Oh-ho,’ she said. ‘So you are alive. Listen to me, sweetie. I need a name and some promise of reward, or I’m clearing this bed. I’m paying four obols a day for this bed, I’m paying for the doctor in blow-jobs, and to be honest, I have plenty of work just now. So … a name.’ She smiled. It was a better smile. ‘Come on. I don’t care what husband beat the crap out of you. You’ll live — you won’t be pretty, but you’ll live. Doctor says you ain’t pissing so much blood. So give over, lover. A name.’
He was dead, but he was a name, from one of the great families of Athens, and if Demetrios was behind this, the man’s family would help him anyway. He didn’t pause to check the mushiness of his logic. He could drive an elephant through the flaws, but he needed out of this brothel before Phiale, who’d come out of one of these and knew them like he knew the plains below Tanais, looked for him.
‘Polycrates of Lysander,’ he croaked.
‘Ooh, dearie,’ she said, and clapped her hands. ‘Ooh, sweetie. For that name, I’d keep you for a week.’ She leaned down and kissed his forehead — he had a flash of his mother, and she bounded off the bed.
‘Come on, Alex,’ she said. ‘We’re going to be rich.’
She was gone, and her ox-faced partner with her.
Once she was gone, Satyrus had a long time to examine what he’d done and doubt it. After all, the man was dead. It was possible that the news wasn’t out yet. Satyrus lay in his narrow bed and couldn’t decide how many days had passed. Two? At least two. Perhaps as many as … he really didn’t know.
It was possible that Polycrates’ body hadn’t been found. In which case, his family would still be loyal to Demetrios — Satyrus grunted. He could follow this line of thinking to one disaster after another.
The skin under the heavy linen wrap around his torso itched as if he had a dozen mosquito bites wrapped under there, but his arms were better. He tried to scratch, and found that he could move his shoulders and neck — real improvement.
He watched the shadows roll down the curtain. Somewhere over his head was a small, unglazed window — there was no breeze, but somehow the air in the room was alive.
When he lay still, he could listen to the sounds of the house. As the shadows lengthened on the curtain, customers began to arrive. Many of them tramped right past his curtain — feet both loud and soft, aggressive and secretive, hurried and measured. Some were talkative — enquiring after their partner’s health, as if a chance-met friend in the agora — others were silent, or pre-emptive, or demanding.
His first evening of lucidity. He wondered how many times his sheets had been changed. His mouth was dry, and he needed to urinate so badly that it made his back hurt, and he suspected from the smell that he’d relieved himself into the bed up until now.
Down the hall, a man was beating his whore. The boy’s sin was failing to give the man an erection — a hideous scene, played out through thin walls. Satyrus had little experience of brothels. Listening made him feel ill — right though his pain and his bladder.