The old woman leaned back. The food was gone, and the sky was a deep black.

  “What became of him?” I asked, “Agias. Did you ever find out?”

  “You’re not usually so easily taken in, are you Pamhilos? You, who have travelled the Aegean, studied the oracles and the messias. Is a fanciful story accompanied by three cups of wine enough to convince you of my supernatural powers?”

  I could not gather my words together before she interjected.

  “Yes.” She smiled. “I know what became of Agias. I have my priestesses now. They will ask me what I tell them to ask me, and nothing more. I occasionally ask about Agias. He fulfilled his promise, and lived a quiet life in Miletus. He worked himself up to the respectable classes, and found himself an understanding wife. Before long I was a distant memory, something he didn’t need to think about at all, so long as he didn’t stray too far from the city walls.”

  She leaned back, and idly tied up the loose ends of her tale.

  “I left Sardis, and travelled north. I learned quickly to use my curse to survive. I found people I could pay to ask me questions. Beggars, prostitutes, sometimes small children if the risk was low. If I took people into my confidence, always two or three at a time. That way I could check the loyalty of one by having the other ask about them. Many people have tried to take advantage of me over the years. But it is easy for me to stay a few steps ahead at all times. Not everybody got off as lightly as old Agias, I’m afraid.”

  She looked at me.

  “I think the time has come, Pamphilos, for you to put me to the test. I’ll let you ask me some questions that will prove I’m speaking the truth. Or at least that I’m not lying about what I can do. What you ask is up to you, but if you’ll take my recommendation, may I suggest a simple secret from your childhood. Something you were once embarrassed about.”

  I thought for some time. Just as I was about to speak, she interjected.

  “Your question is what was your favorite childhood toy, and how did you come by it.”

  I was stunned.

  “My priestesses have asked me many questions about you, Pamphilos. About tonight and how this evening might proceed.”

  “The toy, for the sake of completeness, was a small wooden gladius”, she said, recounting my own memories to me. “A sword like the Romans carry. It belonged to a friend, the son of the man who tended to your olive grove. They were poor, so his father had carved the sword himself, as a present. It was a beautiful piece of work.

  Your father disapproved of the way the Roman army was idolized, and would never have bought such a toy for you, or have had one made. It was infuriating that the child of one of your servants could have something that you desired, something you could never have. So you stole it. You could not let your father see you with the sword, or the friend for that matter, so you hid it among the ancient trees in the rose garden, where the slaves weren’t allowed.

  While your friend was chastised for losing the precious toy that his father had spent so much time on, you would sneak off to the garden by yourself to play with it. But you could not ignore your shame enough to enjoy your conquest, so you snapped the sword in anger. You then buried it, and avoided the rose garden for a long time.”

  The memory was vague. It seemed clearer in her mind than mine. I was browbeaten, fully willing to go along with the woman’s story. With her plan for me, whatever it was.

  She placed a coin on the table.

  “I know you don’t feel like inquiring further. You feel sufficiently convinced. But I have some bitter truths for you, Pamphilos, and it will be easier if we fully remove the option of doubting my abilities.”

  We played the coin flipping game a few times. I asked, she answered, and I flipped. I was satisfied after five turns, but she insisted I keep going. Thirty times, she said, that’s what it would take to convince a skeptical philosopher with a head for numbers.

  She poured out the last of the wine. Half a cup each.

  “I think it’s time for the next act. I’ve talked too much already, it’s your turn, Pamphilos. It’s time you told me what brings you here. What’s the question you have for me?”

  “You know everything already? Where I’m from, about my son?” “Yes. I know all the details of your life. You are very important to me. I know about your son.”

  My son. How do I convey what he meant to me? How can any father? I guess you’ll have to indulge me, and let me start at the beginning. It will show, if nothing else, why I made such a suitable target.

  You’ve heard some small part of my childhood from the oracle. In truth, it tells you all you need to know. I was not a nice child, I think.

  My parents had six children altogether, but by my ninth birthday I was the only one left alive. Most of my siblings died in childbirth, one an early death in the crib. One, my younger sister, I actually remember playing with. She died from a fever at three.

  After that, my mother’s nerves were too frail to make any further attempts at extending the family. My father was expected to divorce her, and to try again with another woman, but he never did. When I was thirteen, she died. I don’t have many memories of her. I think she was deeply unwell for most of my life.

  He kept me at home and took charge of my education. He taught me about our great pirate ancestors, the scourges of the Adriatic. Of how his father fought the Gauls in the mountains, and of how he himself twice fought the invading Romans.

  During the day he drilled me in naval strategy, and the sneak tactics with small raiding parties that had served them so well in the war. “The Romans never change”, he would say, “They will be back one day and they will fight in exactly the same way with exactly the same tactics. So long as we are prepared, so long as we all remember how we beat them the last time, they will never cross Illyria. That’s us son, our class. Let the King play his games with the Senate. We are the memory of the Ardiae. So long as we remember, we can beat the Romans back when they come. And one day, we will be an independent people again.”

  But despite all his lessons, he could not bring himself to take me outside, to let me rig a ship and sail it by myself, to take me to the square where the young men from the village practiced their maneuvers and their hand to hand combat. He would not let me come face to face with the men I might have to lead one day.

  He knew what I needed to be prepared for, but he would only let me do it inside. The theories and exercises meant nothing to me without real experience, and I progressed little. The worse I did, the harder he drilled me, and the less it all made sense. He dreaded the day, he said, when he would have to give me control of the household.

  With no siblings, and no children of my own class to play with, I resorted to uneasy friendships with the children of our servants. I have few precise memories, but I assume that I acted insufferable, and superior. I was superior, by the law of the land. And yet, I so often saw in their lives the things I craved. A doting mother. The freedom to swim in the sea or to play in the woods on the mountain. Brothers and sisters to argue with.

  The day my father dreaded came sooner than he thought. He was summoned to the court of the new King, when he was struck by apoplexy. Even the physicians of the King could do little more than keep him alive. When he came home, his body was limp. When I looked at him, his eyes locked with mine in an intense stare, but he could no longer speak, or make his intentions known.

  A messenger travelled with him, and informed me that by order of the King, and by the grace of the Roman senate, I had inherited my father’s lands. I was hereby instated as ruler of the house, and of our village.

  While the slaves kept my father alive, with liquid meals, I stumbled into a life my father had utterly failed to prepare me for. I owe much to Midas, our principal slave, who had regularly carried out administrative tasks for my father. He arranged weekly meetings with representatives from the village, and cut in whenever a situation presented itself that I was unequipped to handle.

  If he had wanted to, he could easily have ruled through me. The house, and with it the region. He had the cunning, and I would have been very easy to manipulate in those days. But Midas, I believe, always had the interests of the family at heart. I don’t believe that old Midas ever wanted anything but for me to adjust to my role.

  And I did adjust. I made many mistakes; misspoken words to village elders, money misspent, calamities not foreseen. But we always adjusted and together, we could always adjust. I was not confident. I was not happy. But I managed. After a while, even some of the things my father had drilled into me began to make sense.

  What Midas couldn’t possibly help me with, it would have been unthinkable for a slave even to comment, was my life outside the administration of the household. A better son would have visited his father. Talked to him, told him of my struggles and my triumphs. I was not that son. I never visited him. I passed quietly by his door. I awoke alone, and dined alone. My only company were the slaves and the representatives from the villages. And all the time, there was the door to my father’s room. The door, I told myself, one day I would open. One day I would visit my father, and speak to him. Just not today.

  I never did, of course, and two years after the day the King’s men had carried my father into the house, Midas informed me that he had died. I told Midas to bury him with my mother, and to arrange for the necessary rites. I did not tell myself that I should be there. I let the burial pass me by, and at no time during the preparations did I imagine that I would be present. Some sense of virtue, of obligation had died in me.

  I withdrew from the village in the same manner. I fulfilled my duties. I received the representatives, and sent my reports to the palace. But I stopped officiating weddings. I no longer visited the harvest festivities or the festivals of the solstice. I disdained common life. The smells, sights and noises of the villagers became something disgusting to me. I no longer strived to be happy or to be virtuous, or to be good at some chosen endeavour. All I longed for was solace. Moments spent by myself in true quiet. Away from sounds and smells. The rest of my time I spent in anger. Anger at nothing in particular. Lashing out at the slaves, at the villagers.

  I was like a knot, too complex to untangle, and constantly pulled at from all sides. I saw no way out. My misery would increase, little by little, day by day, until death, like Alexander’s sword, would release me, and end our bloodline in shame.

  As it happened, the fates were not content for me to be a loose thread in their tapestry. My knot was eventually loosened, not by a sword, but by the nimble fingers of a young woman. She was a young Nubian. Bought by Midas as an addition to the household. He suggested Anaximene as a name, in line with the tradition we had of taking names from Phrygian royalty.

  She was a quiet girl, obedient. She could move around without making a sound, so I ordered that she take care of my morning routine. She would wake me, help me dress and bathe. Midas did this job before her, but could never do so quietly enough to avoid my ire. Even if I did lose my temper with her, where Midas would assume the correct response of downcast eyes, Anaximene would simply look back at me. Not defiant, but not apologetic either. Simply innocent, and still. Other citizens might have had the girl whipped for what they saw as a sign of disobedience. I could not bring myself to such violence, and was forced instead to control my anger. And so began a long, slow process of reflection on my anger and its origin.

  At times I resented this, I think. I would imagine how the other men I met at court would respond if they saw a slave in my household refuse to subdue. I would resolve to be firmer, to speak with Midas, and have him discipline the girl. She would learn not to look me in the eye and things would continue as normal. But I never did, and the softer I grew, the more liberties the girl began to carve out for herself.

  Ultimately, the opinions of other men never held much sway over me and before long I let go of all convention. I let the girl speak to me informally, I let her call me by my name, and initiate conversations. The other slaves, I’m sure, were bemused by this, and certainly Midas will have taken it upon himself occasionally, to reprimand her. But so long as I didn’t act, they could take little serious action, and the girl acquired a peculiar position in the household.

  All this didn’t mean that I had found peace, or that the knot had come undone. One day, I found myself angered by noise from festivities in the village. I sent Midas out to put a stop to it, and treated the rest of the household with little consideration for the rest of the day. At night, I dismissed Anaximene, not wanting those piercing eyes of her to break the spell of my anger.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  The next morning she woke me by lightly touching my shoulder, rather than opening the shutters that covered the window of the bedroom.

  “How did you sleep?”

  “Poorly” I answered bluntly.

  “Do you still feel angry?” She sat with one leg on the side of my bed. A position that would have earned her a beating in any other household.

  “I think I do, yes” Even by her standards, it was an impertinent question. I think that I answered truthfully, because I felt understood by it.

  “Would you like me to keep the shutters in place? Perhaps a few more hours of sleep would do you good.”

  “No, thank you Anaximene. I think I had better get up.”

  “Your anger must be strong that it still burns after a night of sleep.” she said as she let the light in. “I rarely feel something so strongly that it does not die in my sleep.”

  “I must have slept poorly.”

  “Or perhaps it was too great an anger to be resolved by sleep and time. Sometimes that is the case. A deep grief, or a profound anger over a great injustice cannot be cured in a day.”

  “There was no great injustice behind my anger. I’m not sure why I felt so bad yesterday. Everything was as it should be, and everybody was going about their business. Only the noise from the village disturbed me.”

  “But, if you’ll permit me, it seems to me you felt angry before the festivities started. As early as the morning, even though you hid it well.”

  I smiled, weakly.

  “I can rarely hide these things from you Anaximene. You’re right, the noise simply served to fan the flames.”

  “Your hearing really is most acute. I often barely notice noises from the village. It’s quite a distance from the villa.”

  I got out of bed, and proceeded to wash my face with the bowl of water she had set down for me.

  “Gordias told me it was a wedding yesterday, the party. They broke things off early after he told them to stop.”

  She said it carelessly, as a matter of fact, but her words stopped me dead. I imagined a husband and wife, a family, a day of happiness, a day that was meant to be a lifelong memory. Crudely interrupted by a single order from me.

  In the past I would surely have begrudged them their happiness. I would have found reasons to think of them as uncivilized, common. But now, I couldn’t see anything in my mind but a simple pair of young people in love. Celebrating love among their family. I sat down on my bed.

  Anaximene knelt down at my feet, at once impertinent and submissive, a strange trick of hers. “What is the matter? They are your citizens. It is within your right to regulate festivities. Many noblemen would have done the same.”

  “You’re very kind.” But her words did little to ease my mind.

  “You are not the first man to act in anger, you know. And this is not the worst action taken in anger. Not by a long way.”

  She began to tidy up the room.

  “I doubt the villagers resent you very much for it. Much worse is happening in villages around Illyria, without a chance of revolt. If anything, the fact that you care shows you have a gentle soul. From what I see, you suffer worse than anybody.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, as you tell it, all this started because you felt angry. Anger without any cause, and any injustice. Anger so great that a long night of sleep does nothing to quell it.” She stopped what she was doing when she noticed that she had my complete attention. That I was looking up at her wide eyed and unable to speak.

  “You’ve been angry for a long time, haven’t you?”

  And so I began to tell her, over many days, the way I’d lived. She listened, patiently and without judgement. And in recounting, I found that I could force a change in myself. In some way reliving the past, in minute detail, was like opening an old wound once poorly healed. The process was painful, but the fresh wound would be allowed to heal properly. I doubt she ever knew that in listening to my past, she was playing the physician.

  Memories began to come back to me. I knew there were many parts of my past I had avoided thinking about for a long time. What I didn’t know was how many of them were happy memories. My mother playing with me. My mother and father in a loving embrace.

  The most vivid memory was of a time during one of the festivals when we ate a meal together. It was the first time I ate a pepper, and it burned my throat. My father laughed, and my mother chastised him for it. She told me to eat bread instead of drinking. My father told me that I would get used to it, that I would learn to enjoy the taste. In demonstration he grabbed a red pepper and ate it whole. He was almost immediately overcome by it, and his attempts to keep composed only worsened matters. My mother laughed at him and then so did I. I’ll give you a taste of pepper, he declared, and tried to kiss her as she squealed and giggled.

  These were the memories I had pushed away, trained myself not to recall. The contrast, I suppose between the good and the bad was too great to bear, so I had eliminated only the good, and left myself twisted. Eventually I had convinced myself that all I had buried was misery and pain.

  As painful as they were, these conversations were addictive, and I found myself living for little more than my days spent with Anaximene. Anaximene became Ana, and before long, I shared my bed with her as well as my history.

  There is no shame in Illyria in taking a slave into your chambers. Taking one into your heart is less common. It may have raised some eyebrows around the household, around the village and even at court, but then I was never seen as a conventional man. And I did not want Ana treated as a commodity any longer. So she became my wife. The wedding was held privately, in the rose garden, the news unceremoniously announced, and Ana became the master to slaves that had previously given her orders. Midas, at least, was admirably stoic throughout, adjusting effortlessly to Ana’s new role as the head of the household. I believe that he could see the change in me, and was happy for it, whatever its source.

  Our first child was stillborn. The second, a son, was healthy. I named him Hyllus, after the first Illyrian king. A reminder of our glory days. If I could crawl out of so deep a hole, then perhaps Illyria too, could find its way back into the light. And our family would regain its place at court. Hyllus may have been born of a slave girl, but I recognized Ana as my wife, and Hyllus as my son.

  I spoke at length with Ana about how we would prepare him for his later duties. How I would avoid the mistakes of my father. As precious as he was to me, we would take the risk of letting him have adventures. He would meet the men of the village. He would grow up with them. Be trained by them and later train them. He would sail and see the world before he took charge of the household.

  He would know what he was defending, and who he was defending it from.

  She died when he was three. After surviving as a slave for most of her life and making it through two pregnancies in perfect health, she died in her sleep, suddenly, and with no clear cause.

  There was no physician living in the village. Midas sent for a physician from Skhodra, who examined her body, and told us it was likely an infection of the heart. Uncommon in one so young, but not unheard of. He suggested that if she had suffered a period of starvation, or serious illness, in her past as a slave, it may have weakened her heart considerably.

  From that point on, I felt like I was managing a forest fire in my chest. If she had been all I had had to live for, I would have gladly let it erupt, let it burn me down, one way or another. Often, I came close. Once, I nearly killed one of my slaves.

  Shortly after the funeral, I caught a young slave in her bedroom. I thought he was preparing to clear it out, and I was ready to admonish him for it. But he simply stood there. Frozen, wide eyed, making no excuses. I realized something was wrong, but I could not immediately tell what was going on.

  His right fist was clenched tight. I ordered him to open his hand, but he just stood there, motionless. I grabbed by his tunic, and pulled his hand up by the wrist. He relented, and opened it, revealing a small necklace. A gold chain threaded through a small beryl pendant, carved in the shape of two dolphins intertwined.

  This was the first thing she bought for herself when she became a free woman. It was the necklace she wore when she wanted to be at her most beautiful. She knew that her face was fair enough, the line of neck gracious enough that too much jewelry would only diminish it. All she needed was one small touch of bright green, offset against the deep umber of her skin, with the faint highlight of the thin gold chain. She wore it often, and in all my happiest memories of her.

  And here stood this fool, just days after we had performed the rites, after we had all mourned for her, as a household master and slave alike, sullying her belongings with his greedy fingers. And of all the things he could choose to steal, he picks the one item I would keep above all to remember her by.

  I beat him. I kept beating. I was not a skilled fighter. I broke as many bones in my own hands as I did in his face. But he did not resist or fight back. If Midas had not found us, I would surely have killed him. When my rage had subsided, Midas took him away. I later learned that the boy had been sold to a caravan bound for the east. We lost a fortune, selling him in that state, but it ensured that he would be taken far out of our lives, instead of lingering around the village.

  But for Hyllus, I would have let that fire burn me to ash. That little boy, asleep in his little bed, offered me a refuge from my rage. A different kind of sorrow.

  He was too young, we could not yet explain to him what had happened. He only knew that his mother was no longer there. He needed me. I did not know much about life, but I knew what it would be like for him to grow up without a mother. I knew how he would look to his father. When I looked at him, I felt frightened, unprepared, but filled with purpose. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew what not to do.

  A household full of slaves can easily raise a boy. It would have been simple. It would have been expected of me. I would see the boy once a day, perhaps for a lesson, or perhaps we would eat together occasionally, and that would be it. But that was how I was raised. I remembered how jealous I was of the gardener’s children. They ate together every morning, and evening. Their mother put them to bed and sang them a song, or told them a story. I knew that this was what he needed, so this is what I became for him. I must have made a strange sight, a high-born father doting over his son like a wet-nurse, but I had little company, and what little regard I once had for the opinions of others died with Ana.

  I lived like that for three good years. Repeating the same routine day after day. It was good for the boy and it was good for me. The simple act of caring for someone else, kept my mind off my own sorrows. It allowed me to mourn for Ana in piecemeal.

  And just as I was beginning to find a true peace. Hard fought, well-earned, by any man’s measure, the gods showed their true nature. They were not testing me to build me up, to make me a finer person. They were not teaching me hard lessons through experience. They were simply being cruel. It was cruelty for cruelty’s sake.

  Death had come to my door many times, and I was used to it. But Hyllus, he simply disappeared. In the morning, he would usually call for me, or for one of the slaves, since the door to his room was too heavy for him to open by himself. In the summer months we would leave it open, so he could come to my bed by himself and wake me at impossibly early hours of the morning, but in the colder months we closed the door to keep the room warm. This morning, I awoke by myself, with the sun already high in the sky. The slaves had long stopped waking me, since Hyllus performed the job so much more effectively.

  I was immediately filled with a vague sense of despair, despite the fact that I could only come up with innocent explanations. He had gone for a walk with one of the slaves. They had let me sleep because I had seemed tired recently. Maybe I dismissed them in my sleep and forgot about it. With every explanation I came up with, my unease mounted. I made my way to his room and found it empty. With rising panic I called from slave to slave. Each occupied with their own jobs, and none of them aware of where the child could be. Mercifully, Midas took charge. He took a roster of all slaves, to make sure that everybody was accounted for and that nobody knew where the boy could have got too. Then he assigned each a part of the grounds and sent them looking, not just for the boy but anything out of place.

  When nobody found anything, the men of the village were mobilized, and the woods and mountains were searched. They continued through the night, but nothing was found. No trace of burglary, no trace of an escape with a struggling boy.

  Had he died of some illness, I would have simply taken my own life as well. Had he been murdered, I could have occupied myself with fantasies of a cruel revenge. This was the problem in me. If I had known what had happened, I would have known how to grieve, or at least how to destroy myself. Without knowing, the only thing I could do was to trace out what small certainties I had, like Odysseus, seeding his fields with salt.

  I knew he had not wandered off by himself, because the door was too heavy for him to open. He could not reach the window. Only one other thing was missing, from among all his toys, a small cloth hippopotamus, stuffed with rags of linen. Made for him by his mother.

  There was nothing special about the toy. Hyllus didn’t particularly care for it. The only significance was that his mother had made it for him. It was the toy I would have taken, if I could have chosen only one. It was the toy she would have taken. In my darkest moments, I feared that she had come back, judged me to be unworthly of her son, and taken Hyllus with her to the underworld.

  More than once, I dreamt that I myself had taken him. That I had broken myself in two, one side filled with happiness and love, which had taken all that mattered: Hyllus and the memory of his mother, and one side left behind in my vast, empty house, filled with all the bitterness, loneliness and misery that I had collected over the years.

  In my more lucid moments, I suspected all the slaves. Questioned them. One or two I beat, in hopes of a confession. I was hoping that somebody would run away, so that I would know that they were guilty. Of course, I had some enemies. Some villagers whose lives I had upset. Some slaves and ex-slaves. Could the slave who stole Ana’s necklace, have made his way back from the slave market in Byzantion? He seemd utterly resigned even as I beat him. Perhaps even Midas bore some hidden grudge against his new master. Would any of them be so aggrieved as to hurt me by taking my son? Did anything I had done in my life warrant such cruel retribution?

  Finally, in my desperation, I turned to the oracles.

  I traveled to Dodona first, just over the border in Macedon. Only a few days travel. It was Midas’ idea. To ask for guidance, nothing more, for a way to cope with my grief. But by the time I disembarked at Gitanea, and made my way up the mountains, I knew just what I would ask.

  I paid a considerable sum and was given direct access to the main attraction; an ancient oak tree, guarded by a priest of the cult of Zeus. With a small knife, I carved my question in a slip of lead. Addressed to Zeus and to Dione. What happened to my son? I asked.

  The priest sat with me, by the oak tree, and we listened intently to the rustling of the leaves. Yes, he said finally, Zeus Naios knows what happened to your son. He is not beyond saving. He wants to be saved. There is a possibility for you and him to see eye to eye again. The Father judges you as unworthy to know more. If you devote yourself, you will be reunited with your son.

  I tried to ask more, but it was forbidden. No amount of money would convince them. I was still enthralled by the theatre. Only when I made my way back to the coast, did I slowly begin to realize what a hollow performance it had been. They had told me what I wanted to hear, and tried to rope me into their cult. They didn’t even know my son was gone. I could have been a father wondering why his son had grown distant, and all their answers would still have made perfect sense to me.

  But the idea that I might get a meaningful answer this way had taken root. Only days after I had come back home, I left again for the Pythia at Delphi. Afterwards I travelled straight to Epyra, to ask the oracle of the dead whether Hyllus was already in the underworld.

  Before long I rarely visited home at all, except briefly to refill my purse. The religious cults were to be found in the hills of Macedon and the islands of the Aegean. The brief moments when I was forced to return became a stone around my neck. I couldn’t bear to face Midas’ pitying eyes, and all the reminders of what I had lost. Eventually, I managed to locate an old friend of my father in Athens who would agree to occasionally lend me money, to be reimbursed periodically, with healthy interest, at the villa back home. The family fortune was more than enough to cover my meagre expenses, and to make it worth his efforts.

  And with that final arrangement, I left an empty villa, no doubt tended to loyally by my slaves. An enviable olive grove, an ancient rose garden, and a dozen luxuriously furnished rooms. All kept in perfect condition for over a decade, for nobody in particular.