Free Wrath of the Furies by Steven Saylor Page A

do?”
    Bethesda looked at me with raised eyebrows, feigning innocence—for she knew how much her pestering questions had come to irritate me, since I could answer only with a nod, or a shrug, or a grunt. I tried to make a sour face, but probably failed, for I found myself thinking how beautiful she looked with her long black hair fluttering in the salty breeze.
    *   *   *
    Four days before that sighting of the dolphins, we had boarded the Phoenix as planned, despite Bethesda’s protests.
    To her, the fortune-teller’s words had been a clear warning that we should not take the trip. I was more skeptical. What, after all, had Ameretat said that I did not know already, or could not have imagined on my own? She had said something about “the mightiest mortal on earth” causing destruction unlike anything the world had ever seen, unleashing the Furies themselves. Given his recent victories, the mightiest mortal might be King Mithridates, but it seemed to me more likely that the mightiest of mortals surely must be some Roman general or other, though perhaps that was only my bias as a Roman. As for unprecedented destruction, the world had seen a great deal of bloodshed and horror since Prometheus first created mankind, and it seemed to me unlikely that there could be anything new looming in that regard. As for the Furies being unleashed on earth … well, just as Bethesda had never before seen a real dolphin, I had lived twenty-two years on earth and traveled many hundreds of miles without encountering a Fury, except in statues and paintings and mosaics, and it seemed unlikely that I would meet one of those fierce, snake-haired, winged crones in Ephesus.
    The one thing Ameretat had said that gnawed at my equanimity was that Antipater did not want me to come to his aid—indeed, that he wanted me to stay away from Ephesus. This contradicted the words of Antipater that I had read with my own eyes, so it seemed to me this utterance proved either that the fortune-teller was a fraud, or that she did in fact know something I did not—a disturbing notion. But I inclined toward the first conclusion, reasoning that Bethesda, intentionally or not, had revealed to the fortune-teller’s agent her own desire that we should not go, inspiring Ameretat to weave this invented detail into her narrative.
    So, despite the fortune-teller’s words and Bethesda’s objections, we set sail from Alexandria aboard the Phoenix, bound for Ephesus by way of Rhodes with a cargo of papyrus, grain, perfumes, and spices in the hold, and a handful of passengers on deck, almost all of them men. Fortunately, there had been no one on the waterfront that day, or among those who boarded the ship, who recognized me as Gordianus of Rome, so I successfully managed to depart from Egypt under the guise of Agathon of Alexandria, recently stricken mute, bound for Ephesus and attended by a single slave.
    Bethesda had boarded the ship with trepidation. Her misgivings mounted when we set sail. She had been on board a ship only once in her life, and briefly, as a captive of the Nile bandits, but in that instance had been kept locked away; also, the bandits’ ship had hugged the coastline, never venturing out of sight of land. Standing on board the Phoenix, watching the skyline of Alexandria and the towering Pharos Lighthouse slowly dwindle and finally vanish from sight, she grew so agitated, pacing and biting her knuckles, that I feared she might burst into tears and say something to give me away.
    Then, before my eyes, a transformation took place. She looked at a seagull overhead—a rather intrepid creature, to be venturing so far from shore. She breathed in the fresh, salt-scented air. She gazed at the endless expanse of the sea, an undulating blanket of lapis-blue spangled with sparkling points of golden sunlight. Far to the east we could see the red-and-white-striped sail of another ship, and far to the