Free The Marathon Conspiracy by Gary Corby Page B

stood before us and said nothing.
    I said, “Gaïs, did you shoot an arrow at us this afternoon?”
    “No, was I supposed to?” She looked at us as if we were the mad ones.
    “They say Allike was torn apart,” I said to her. “I’m sorry to mention it, but I must. They say there’s a bear out there. Do you think a bear might have killed Allike?”
    Gaïs almost recoiled. “Never! The Goddess would never allow the greater servant to harm the lesser.”
    “Huh?”
    “She means a bear wouldn’t have hurt Allike,” Diotima translated for me. “When Artemis walks the earth, she’s attended by the wild bears of the wood, who are her sacred servants. That’s why the girls here are called the Little Bears, Nico, because they’re the little servants of Artemis. Gaïs is saying that the larger servant—the bear—wouldn’t harm the smaller, Allike.”
    “Then why couldn’t she just say so?” I said, exasperated. I turned back to Gaïs. “Are you by any chance related to thePythoness?” I asked, because the Pythoness at Delphi is the priestess who speaks for Apollo, and she always speaks in riddles. I’d never been to Delphi, but I imagined dealing with her must be as irritating as having to talk to this woman.
    Gaïs shook her head. “I’m a child of the temple.”
    “So I heard. Have you no idea who your mother and father might be?”
    “The temple is my mother.” Gaïs looked over my shoulder at the marble building behind me. “It’s beautiful.”
    Indeed it was. With the crickets chirping and the still night under the stars, and even just enough disruption from the noisy girls to give the place some life, the Temple of Artemis Brauronia was a good place to be, if you liked a quiet life.
    I said, “With all this running you do, if there were a bear, do you think you might have seen it?”
    Gaïs shrugged.
    “Have you seen anything unusual out in the woods?” I asked.
    “No,” Gaïs said. “Not unless you count that strange man.”
    “
What strange man?
” Diotima and I said simultaneously.
    “He follows me.” Gaïs seemed utterly unconcerned. “When he sees me in the woods, he runs after me. I get away every time.” Gaïs shrugged. “I think he might be crazy.”
    Well, she’d be in a position to know.
    “E VERY TIME WE interview a suspect, they give us someone else to suspect,” I moaned as we walked away, leaving Gaïs to rejoin the dance. “This can’t go on.”
    “If only because we’ll run out of people,” Diotima said coolly. “The problem is that we’re so removed from everything that’s happened. We haven’t been anywhere near a fresh crime, we haven’t even seen a body! All we have to work with is what people tell us. It’s frustrating!”
    A gaggle of girls sat on the lawn, playing games and talking nonstop. We remained silent while they were in earshot. “Whatdo you think of this bear everyone keeps talking about?” Diotima asked me in a quiet voice when we’d passed.
    “It’s obviously rubbish,” I said. “There haven’t been bears in Attica for decades, maybe even a century or more.”
    “What happened to them?”
    “People hunted them to extinction.”
    “And by people, you mean men.”
    “Well, yes.”
    “What about the fathers?”
    “No, they haven’t been hunted to extinction.”
    “I mean, why aren’t the fathers of those two girls down here with us, looking for their children?”
    “Polonikos seems to be shifty. He has some reason for staying in Athens but wouldn’t say what it was. The father of Allike I don’t know about. But I’m not sure talking to him will help. Why would he have anything to do with this?”
    We stopped outside the dorm rooms for the girls, where Diotima would sleep for the night. I had another hundred paces to the wooden shack out the back where the slaves slept on pallets on the dirt floor.
    I said, “We’ll have to talk to this stranger in the woods.”
    “We’ll have to find him first.”
    I DREAMED OF