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 were too tired to examine the gift, or question it, and the ship ran south with a fair wind and the gentle hand of Moira to guide it.
Five days out of Bata, Melitta had her first sight of Heraklea in the last full light of the sun, and the marble of the public buildings shone like coral in jewellery or well-burnished bronze, pale orange in the setting sun, and gold and bronze sparkled from statuary and adornments. Heraklea was as rich as Sinope or Pantecapaeum or Olbia. Richer than Athens. The tyrant, Dionysius, was not a friend of their mother’s, or their city. But nor was he a friend of Eumeles of Pantecapaeum. He was a friend of his own power, and Philokles said they had no other choices.
‘Tanais might have looked like that in twenty years,’ Melitta said.
‘Tanais is a blackened corpse,’ Satyrus said, his mood dark.
Melitta took his hands, and together they stood against the rail of the merchant ship as she heeled into the evening breeze and thrust her way across the waves to Heraklea. ‘You need to take life for what it is,’ she said. ‘Look!’ She waved her arm like an actor. ‘Beauty! Enjoy it!’
‘You need to stop pretending to be an all-wise priestess,’ he shot back. ‘Our mother is dead and our city is lost. Do you realize that we could be enslaved? That any man on those wharves with the strength to take us could kill us or sell us? We could be pleasuring customers in a brothel before another sun sets. Do you get that?’
She nodded. ‘I get it, brother.’ She looked at Theron and Philokles, who were rolling dice in the cover of an awning. ‘I think they will protect us, and I think the gods will see us right.’
‘The gods help those who help themselves,’ Satyrus said.
‘Then get off your arse and start helping,’ Melitta said. ‘Killing that girl is the best day’s work you ever did. Stop moping like a little boy. You are a king in exile. Start acting like one.’ She looked over the side. ‘You must follow my lead in this. I know what I’m doing.’
Satyrus watched the wharves. Melitta had assumed that the sea would cure him – the sea that he loved, where he went on his summers to sail on Uncle Leon’s ships and learn the ropes. This voyage, he hadn’t even watched the sailors rig the sail.
‘Fine,’ Satyrus said.
The angry silence that followed lasted them until the ship’s side scraped along a stone jetty, and then again until they were standing in the dust and ordure of the Heraklean waterfront.
Philokles had spent some time with the captain of the merchant ship throughout the voyage – keeping him sweet, or so Theron said. As they approached the wharves, Philokles took the man aside on the platform where the steersman conned the ship. When they were done talking, Philokles came down the gangplank with a worried look. Theron was trying to unload the horses with the help of the deck crew. They had kept the three best horses from the farmer, and Melitta’s Bion. The rest of the horses had been sold at Bata, where they had got a good price. Shipping the horses had cost more than shipping the people – but Philokles had told the twins that without horses, they were too vulnerable.
Bion hadn’t liked being swayed aboard in a sling, and now he didn’t like walking down the gangplank, resisting every step, showing his teeth and acting like a mule. Melitta had to coax him on to dry land with a hastily purchased honey and sesame confection.
‘Stupid horse,’ she said fondly.
Satyrus ignored her. He stood with his back against his own horse and his arms crossed.
Philokles tugged at his beard. ‘I have to take a risk,’ he said. He was not quite sober – in fact, he had drunk steadily once they were on board.
Theron shrugged. ‘It’s been all risk since I joined this crew,’ he said. ‘Why do you stay?’ Melitta asked. She was drawing looks from passers-by on the wharves, as a young woman of good family out in the public eye. In fact, she was a young woman of good family who was out in public wearing a short chiton with a scarlet chitoniskos over it and she was wrangling horses. She got a great deal of attention.
Theron smiled. ‘The company’s good,’ he said. ‘And I’m not bored.’ Philokles gave them all a crooked smile. ‘This is not the place to have this conversation,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
Satyrus got on to his horse with a wriggle and a push. Melitta did her usual acrobatic vault, and every head on the street turned.
‘You have to stop doing that in public,’ Theron said. ‘Girls don’t ride. They certainly don’t ride astride. They don’t vault on to horses, and they don’t do acrobatics.’
‘Of course they do,’ Melitta said with a toss of her head. ‘I see it on Athenian plates and vases all the time.’
Theron made a choking noise that Satyrus recognized through his sullenness as ill-concealed laughter. ‘Those are flute girls and hetairai!’ he said.
Melitta shrugged. Then she turned her Artemis smile on the people around them, and some of the men smiled back.
‘Where are we going?’ Melitta asked.
‘Leon the Numidian has a factor and warehouses here,’ Philokles said.