The Temple of the Muses(23)

“You’ve found congenial activity, I see.” It was Julia.

“Yes. Extraordinary luck, don’t you think? Where is Fausta?”

“She and Berenice went back to the Palace. A murder scene is not the proper place for royalty.”

“I hope they don’t start blabbing when they get there. I want to persuade Ptolemy to assign me to the investigation tomorrow.”

“Decius, must I remind you that this is Egypt, not Rome?”

“Everybody wants to tell me that. It’s not as if this were really an independent nation. Everybody knows that Rome calls all the tunes here.”

“And you’re with the diplomatic mission. You have no business interfering in an internal police matter.”

“But I feel I owe Iphicrates something. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d be listening to a discussion on acatalepsia right now.”

“You’re just bored,” she insisted.

“Utterly.” An inspiration seized me. “I’ll tell you what: How would you like to help me in this?”

She paused. “Help you?” she said suspiciously.

“Of course. I’ll need an assistant. A Roman assistant. And it wouldn’t hurt to have one who can talk to the highborn ladies of Alexandria and the court.”

“I’ll consider it,” she said coolly. I knew I had her. She was usually eager to take part in my disreputable snooping, but back in Rome it was not a respectable activity for a patrician lady. Here she could do as she liked, within reason.

“Good,” I said. “You might start by getting Berenice to persuade Papa to assign me to the case.”

“I knew you had some low motive. Where are we going?” We were in a wing of the Museum I hadn’t yet seen, a gallery of statues and paintings, fitfully illuminated by lamps.

“Asklepiodes has something to show us,” I said.

“The axe has been little used as a weapon in modern times,” he said. “Although in antiquity it was not considered to be an unfit weapon even for noblemen. In Book Thirteen of the Iliad, the Trojan hero Peisandros drew an axe from behind his shield to engage Menelaos, not that it did him much good.”

“I remember that part,” I said. “Menelaos stabbed him through the top of his nose and both his eyeballs fell bleeding to the dust beside his feet.”

“That would be the part you remember,” Julia said.

“I love those passages. Asklepiodes, why the art gallery?”

“In art, the axe is usually depicted as a characteristic weapon of the Amazons.”

“Surely,” I said, “you aren’t suggesting that Iphicrates was done in by an Amazon?”

“I rather think not. But look here.” He had stopped before a large, splendid black-figure vase standing on a pedestal that identified it as the work of the famous vase-painter Timon. It depicted a battle between Greeks and Amazons, and Asklepiodes pointed to one of those martial ladies, mounted, dressed in tunic and Phrygian bonnet, raising on high a long-handled axe to smite a Greek who was dressed solely in a large, crested helmet and armed with spear and shield.

Julia fetched a lamp from a wall sconce and brought it close so that we could study the weapon. Although the handle was long, the head was quite compact, rather narrow and widening slightly to a half-circular cutting edge. The opposite side of the head bore a sharp, stubby spike.

“It’s something like the sacrificial axe the flamine’s assistant uses to stun the larger sacrificial animals,” Julia noted.

“Ours aren’t quite that deeply curved on the edge,” I said.

“In parts of the Orient,” Asklepiodes said, “axes of this very form are still in use for religious purposes.”

“Have you seen any here in Alexandria?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “No. But there is certainly at least one such axe in the city.”

We took our leave of him and returned to our litter, where we found the bearers sound asleep, a defect I quickly remedied. We crawled into the litter and lay back on the cushions.

“Why would anyone murder a scholar like Iphicrates?” Julia wondered sleepily.

“That’s what I intend to find out,” I told her. “I hope it isn’t anything as common as a jealous husband.”

“Your superiors won’t like you taking a hand in this, you know. It could complicate their work.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I want to find out who did this and see that he’s punished.”

“Why?” she demanded. “Oh, I know that you’re bored, but you could cure that by escorting me on a boat trip down the Nile to the Elephantine Island, showing me the sights along the way. You have no real interest in Alexandria and you certainly didn’t like Iphicrates. What is it?”