Sacred Games Read Online Free PDF Page B

irreversible condition.
    Now she sat in a tent, waiting to learn her fate while our fathers squabbled.
    Diotima balanced a knife on one finger and said, “Would you believe Pythax—Father—took away my bow and quiver?”
    “I should hope so. The Sacred Truce forbids arms at the Games.”
    “I don’t even have my mother here to talk to and … oh Gods, how desperate do I have to be to have said that?” Diotima grimaced. She and her mother were not exactly close friends.
    “I think I can relieve the boredom for you.” I told Diotima how Timodemus had broken his oath, and the fallout from it, finishing, “No one knows what’s to happen. Timodemus may or may not be banned.”
    “Interesting.” Diotima had paid close attention to my story. I knew if I asked her, she could repeat everything I’d said almost verbatim. “Why did your friend attack the Spartan?”
    “He wouldn’t tell me.”
    “That’s worrying.”
    “It’s irrelevant, unless they let him back in.”
    “It’s certainly irrelevant to me while I’m stuck in this tent.”
    “What happened with Pythax?” I asked her. After we’d arrived, and my father had disowned the marriage, Pythax had taken control of Diotima and rented this tent to install her.
    Diotima shrugged unhappily. “Pythax says I’m not to leave the camp without a responsible adult. By which he meant himself. I’m not sure it means you.”
    “Oh. I thought about taking you to visit the agora.”
    She pushed herself off the travel chest. “Good, let’s go.”
    “You just said your stepfather wouldn’t allow it.”
    “Yes, he will. Pythax is desperate to win me over, and besides, he isn’t all that bad, you know. Beneath that callous, gruff exterior there’s a … a …” She was lost for words.
    “A callous, gruff interior?”
    “Well, all right, yes. But he’s besotted with my mother, and if he wants me to call him Daddy, he’d better not stop me.”
    I wondered if Pythax had met his match in his new stepdaughter, and what that might mean for me and whether there was something I should do about it, but I wasn’t about to stand inthe middle of any fight between Pythax and Diotima. There are easier ways to die.
    I led her across the ford, and we walked through the Sanctuary of Zeus and out the other side to see the famous festival agora of Olympia, which for forty-nine months out of fifty is an empty field of weeds and for the remaining one month is the most exciting place in Hellas.
    The festival agora lies to the north of the sports grounds, on the east side of Mount Kronos, where the market catches the sun in the morning. We heard the sound of the people before we saw the market itself, just around the bend.
    “Yaah!”
    A man in a lion’s skin jumped out in front of us. He swung a gnarled club at our heads. Diotima and I leaned back instinctively. The madman missed us by a wide margin.
    I stepped forward into the swing, hooked my leg behind our assailant’s, and pushed him to the ground. I snatched the club from his hands as he fell.
    “What do you think you’re doing!” I shouted at him.
    He picked himself up. I expected another attack and gripped the club in both hands to use on its owner. But when he only stood there, head hung low, I asked, “Who in Hades are you?”
    “I’m Heracles,” he said.
    “Wasn’t Heracles larger and”—I looked him up and down—“slightly better muscled?”
    The man before us was dark-haired, small and weedy. A faded and somewhat patchy lion skin draped over his left shoulder fitted him like a tent. Now that he no longer swung the club, I saw he had the muscle tone of a dead chicken.
    The weedy character said, “You’ve never heard of the Heracles imitators?”
    Diotima and I both shook our heads.
    “Milo of Croton did it first. Men at the Games have beendressed as Heracles ever since. We do it for fun. Playacting, you know? And to impress the crowd.”
    “Who’s Milo of Croton?” Diotima asked.
    “He was