Free Six for Gold by Mary Reed, Eric Mayer Page B

truth of the matter is, well, Achilles has been dragged down into the underworld. Yes, demons came and took him away!”
    The servant cast a frightened look over his shoulder as if he expected to see fiends lurking in the laurel or sunning themselves in a flower bed.
    Dropping his voice to a whisper, he continued. “It was about a week ago now, on the very night the master was murdered. My room is at the front of the house, so it overlooks the street. It was a few hours after sunset, and glancing out I noticed three or four men—or so I thought them—were just leaving the house. I couldn’t see who they were since they were moving away so briskly and by then of course it was quite dark. Nothing about them struck me as familiar, but Achilles was with them.”
    “You are certain of it?”
    “I cannot be mistaken, sir. I know him well and could identify him easily. He is bowlegged, you see, and quite bald. I was puzzled but not alarmed until just as the last man was about to go around the corner after the rest, he turned and seemed to look straight at me!”
    Again Diomedes made the Christian sign. “It was no man, sir. It was a demon from the pits of hell! And nobody has seen Achilles since!”

Chapter Thirteen
    The crocodile nosed its way along a channel that sliced through the towering reeds stretching stiff fingers up from Lake Mareotis.
    The boat for which the carved reptile served as a prow slid along behind. As the vessel glided through the water, it moved in and out of patches of shadow where smaller paths had been cleared for the benefit of those who lived on the lake’s islands.
    The maze of passages reminded John of the hallways of the palace’s administrative buildings.
    A startled heron flapped into the air.
    Down a narrow corridor where the sky was a blue sliver glimpsed above marching ranks of reeds growing so thickly a wider boat than theirs could not have passed between them, John glimpsed a fisherman emptying a net filled with wriggling silver into his small craft.
    Fortuna had smiled, John thought. He had found a captain willing to take Cornelia, Peter, and himself up river for the amount they had earned from a single, excruciating performance, and on a boat embarking within the hour.
    The captain carried a full cargo of wine amphorae as well as a quantity of timber lashed to the deck Anything extra by way of payment from the half dozen or so passengers he was transporting was a gift from the gods, the more so since it would not need to be reported to the boat owner.
    Soon the vessel left marshes and reeds behind and entered a network of canals that would eventually take them to the Nile. John and Cornelia sat on deck and watched men working the fields, laden donkeys plodding patiently along, and nut-brown children waving from muddy banks. Compared to the heat and noise of Alexandria, the boat was an oasis of calm.
    After a while Peter approached. He was beaming.
    “What an interesting country this is, master! It’s one thing to pour the wine, but quite another to see the grapes used to make it, being grown in such odd ways.”
    He waved a hand at the vineyard past which they were sailing. Workers watering the vines waved back. “That one has vines growing up poles, but the one we saw after we left the lake had vines on a sort of trellis.”
    “What a keen eye for detail you have, Peter,” Cornelia said.
    “Thorikos pointed it out to me, mistress. He’s the stout fellow in brown robes.”
    Cornelia nodded. “With the embroidered stripes down the sides.” She turned to John. “He has a rubicund face, or at least a rosy nose. His shape reminds me somewhat of a pear.”
    “He was a deacon in Cilicia,” Peter put in, “and he kept a wine-importing business on the side. He’s very comfortably off. We got into a conversation about his travels. Since he’s getting on in years and has no family, he decided to spend his savings to see the world. He says that although he misses the comforts of