Free The Marathon Conspiracy by Gary Corby

could so forget herself as to descend into debauchery. Did we teach you nothing about proper conduct, girl?” Sabina glared at Diotima, who blushed bright red.
    Sabina said, “Here, you will conform to the proprieties. We have standards to maintain before the girls.”
    Diotima said, “Please, Sabina, we
are
betrothed, and soon we’ll be—”
    “I’m not interested in your rationalizations either. That’s for your own conscience. Now where was I? Oh yes, accommodation … beds. You can sleep with the maintenance men,” she said to me. “There’s a wooden hut out back.”
    “Is there a bed there?” I asked.
    “I’m sure you’ll make do. I’ve never looked inside, myself. The smell of all those unwashed men drives me away.” Sabina turned to Diotima and frowned. “Normally a visiting priestess would be housed with the rest of us, in the east wing, but there are no spare beds at the moment. We could make up a pallet, of course, but you’d be sleeping on the stone floor. We do have two spare beds in the west wing, if you don’t mind sleeping with the girls in a dorm room.”
    “That might be better,” Diotima said at once, and I knew she was thinking the farther away she was from Sabina, the better.She probably didn’t realize when she said it, but the two spares must surely have belonged to Allike and Ophelia.
    Dinner that night was an interesting affair. Diotima ate with the women and girls, while I ate with the men. The conversation among the men was, predictably, about the women. Not that much of what they had to say was useful, nor repeatable if it came to that, though the speculation about what Sabina might do in her lonely bed was amusing and, based on what I knew of her, quite possibly correct.
    There were eleven men, some of them slaves, some of them free men so poor they had to work at the temple for the few coins it paid. The slaves were the better off; they at least had guaranteed food and a place to sleep at no cost.
    Zeke puzzled me. Normally you can tell which city a man is from by his accent, but Zeke I couldn’t place at all. He wasn’t from Attica, of that I was certain. I wasn’t even sure whether he was a slave or a free man. His job was menial; normally a foreign man with a menial job must be a slave, yet Zeke neither behaved nor was treated like one. He was clearly the leader, by age, by experience, by force of personality. Zeke kept apart, spoke little, except to tone down with his soft voice any argument that threatened to become a fight, treated slave and free man alike, and let the men have their way. He reminded me of Pythax, my future father-in-law: a man who lived outside the system, while supporting it to the core.
    Diotima and I met after dinner on the lush, green grass of the courtyard. A quarter of the girls had set about clearing up, while the others sang and danced in the moonlight. We sat and listened to the girls’ voices. The moon was beautiful in the sky, and a soft, warm breeze blew across the sanctuary.
    Lying back on the grass, I said, “It’s hard to believe such a lovely place could harbor evil.”
    “Clearly you’ve never been to a girls’ school before,” Diotima said.
    I looked over at her. “You didn’t like it here?”
    “I loved the place. I didn’t like the other girls.”
    “Did you really know Gaïs when you were children? Was she always crazy?”
    “Yes to the first. She was here before I arrived. She was still here when I left. But she’s changed a lot.”
    “You mean she wasn’t always crazy.”
    “I don’t remember her like this,” Diotima admitted. “She was always something of a loner. But then, so was I.”
    “You didn’t become two loners together?” I asked.
    Diotima snorted. “Not with her. I remember she was arrogant even back then. She always pushed people away.”
    “How come she’s still at Brauron? I thought everyone stayed for a year.”
    “The sanctuary takes in a few orphan girls, ones with nowhere else to