Harvest - 02 - Harvest of Gold Read online

  Darius made a noncommittal sound in his throat. The five men did not strike him as ordinary robbers. They fought like professionals, not bandits. Their high-quality horses were well cared for. He could still picture the unusual moves of the slim man he had fought; if not for Sama’s help, he would have lost that clash. Those were not the moves of a common thief.

  He deliberated for a moment on whether to take the time and solve the puzzle of this mysterious attack, or bundle the culprits on their horses and deliver them to the magistrate in Susa and let him untangle this enigma. After all, the king, who had summoned him and Sarah for a special audience, expected their speedy presence.

  Yet, something about these men continued to nag at him. He felt uneasy at the thought of leaving the investigation to someone else. A baffling mystery was at work here, and he grew convinced that he needed to solve it, even if it meant a delay in meeting with the king.

  The sun had risen high by the time his men had made a small mound of their attackers’ belongings in the middle of the campground. Darius picked up the white staff and examined it. It was made of a kind of wood he had never seen. He flexed it in opposite directions several times. It gave with incredible ease, bending in ways that would have broken any other wooden stick. He wondered how the staff had been fashioned in order to have at once the solidity of wood and the flexibility of leather. He discarded it and began to go through the pile of sacks and parcels in front of him.

  At the top of the pile rested a flawless box, carved from ivory. Inside, Darius found a dagger decorated with exquisite jewels on one side of the handle and plain gold on the other. The delicate construction allowed the dagger to rest comfortably in one’s hand. He hefted it in his palm and tested the edge; although it had been designed as a ceremonial piece, it proved more than battle worthy. The blade was well balanced, honed, and sturdy.

  This was no ordinary dagger. The consummate craftsmanship and the rare jewels used in its creation marked it a worthy offering for a nobleman of high rank. Darius examined it a moment longer, looking for identifying marks or clues to its ownership. Finding none, he replaced it in the box and set it aside.

  Unlike the dagger, everything else in the pile appeared commonplace and well-used. Extra clothes, coins, a couple of jars of oil for the treatment of leather and metal, camping gear. Wine. Dried date cakes. Nothing incriminating. At the bottom of the pile, a sealed leather pouch caught his eye. He did not recognize the seal; the palm tree and stylized lion motif weren’t Persian. He showed it to Sarah. “Do you recognize this seal?”

  She studied it before responding. “It’s unfamiliar to me.”

  “Can you break the wax, but retain the integrity of the design? I need to figure out its source once we arrive in Susa.”

  “I think so. It depends on the quality of the wax.” She pulled out her knife and drew a careful line into the seal. With a delicate snap, she broke it into two undamaged sections.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” The voice was deep and calm. Darius turned and found the broad-shouldered man who had attacked him regarding him through intelligent brown eyes.

  “Ah. Awake at last. Did you have a pleasant nap?”

  “You better leave that package alone.”

  Darius crossed his arms. “You aren’t in a position to make demands, are you? Who is it for?”

  The man said nothing. Darius unrolled the leather and found a short letter inside. “Not very illuminating,” he said after he read it.

  “What does it say?” the man asked, shifting against his tight bonds.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I just carry them. I don’t read them.”

  “How noble.” He held out the letter to Sarah. “What do you think?”

  She studied it in silence for a time. “Interesting.”

  “Really? I found it disappointing. Carry out the instructions I send you. You now have everything you need for the New Year ceremonies. May you walk in safety. How is that of any help? What are the instructions? That’s what I need to find out.”

  “Your problem is that you don’t know your grammar. You see the way the author of the letter has used the verb send?”

  Darius gave a desultory kick against a round pebble, sending it spinning into the air. “Are you trying to put me to sleep?”

  Sarah tapped the rolled letter against her thigh. “Listen, your lordship, and you might learn something of benefit. The way the author has used this verb indicates that the instructions are not coming later. Nor have they been sent ahead. Whoever wrote this letter is saying that the instructions should be delivered at the same time as the missive, which strongly indicates that these gentlemen have them hidden somewhere. Possibly on their persons.”

  Darius whistled softly at that bit of news. He executed a showy, court-worthy bow before Sarah. She pushed against his shoulder with an exasperated hand. The hand, soft and mildly ink-stained from her furious work on the estate records before their departure, was speckled with dirt—no doubt a result of her dive behind the outcropping of rocks.

  “That is an excellent grammar lesson.” He turned to the intruder. “Impressive, isn’t she? Too bad for you. Would you like to tell me where these blessed instructions are?” He sighed as the man stared back, turning mute. “I didn’t think so.”

  He bade his men to search the intruders again while he went through the pile of their possessions once more. There were no other items of interest in the remaining pouches—nothing that pointed to the missing instructions. With sudden insight, Darius began to search through the piles again. This time, he wasn’t trying to find something, but to ensure that a certain crucial article was missing.

  “Where are your travel visas—your viyataka?” he asked.

  The man’s head snapped up. “What?”

  “Your permits. You can’t be travelling on the king’s roads without the required documents. Yours seem to be missing.”

  “Must have lost them.”

  Darius patted the pile in front of him. “I don’t think so. I think that’s what you were after when you attacked us. There happen to be five men in our party and five in yours. It must have proven too convenient a coincidence for you to overlook. You are travelling the back roads, so your chances of running into the king’s soldiers are diminished. But to enter a large city like Susa, where this road leads, you will need the official viyataka. Much easier to enter the city with the appropriate documents than to try to sneak in without them, which must have been your original plan.”

  “You forget—you also have a woman, which we don’t. So you see, your travel documents would be of no use to me.”

  Darius knelt in front of his captive and poked him in the chest with his index finger. “You underestimate yourself. It would be easy enough to pay a woman at the gates of Susa to pretend to be a member of your party.”

  The man turned his face away from Darius’s penetrating gaze. “So what?”

  “So, this proves that you aren’t simple thieves looking for money. You are on a mission of some kind—a mission secret enough to prevent you from applying for travel documents. Would you care to share what that mission is?”

  He snorted. “Would you care to share yours?”

  Darius sighed. “You insist on making this difficult.”

  By now, his men had searched the intruders and their horses down to the skin, but had found nothing. The whole troop had regained consciousness and sat brooding in their ropes, but made no move to resist the thorough examination.

  With a sudden move, Sarah sprang to her feet and walked over to the owner of the staff. “That’s an unusually short haircut,” she said.

  Darius frowned. It wasn’t like his wife to be fashion conscious, or to make public statements about someone’s lack of style. He edged closer to her, not liking her proximity to the exceptional fighter in spite of his being bound.

  “You must have cut it within the past month,” Sarah continued, refusing to budge from the subject. “Shaved
it even, I would guess, from the way it has grown back.”

  Darius gave his wife a sidelong glance before bending to examine the man’s scalp. The sun had risen while they were interrogating the thieves, its light winter bright. Under its luminous reflection the man’s skin shone white beneath the covering of hair. Then with bewilderment Darius noticed black marks on parts of the scalp. “Tattoos. You have tattoos on your scalp.”

  The man turned to Darius and gave him a pleasant smile. “First your woman, now you. Are you people obsessed with scalps?”

  Darius restrained the urge to give him a good kick and signaled Meres to shave the man’s head.

  “Leave my head alone!” the man yelled, but was helpless, trussed up as he was, to prevent Meres from completing his task.

  His head was shaved in a matter of moments. Meres wiped the blood that flowed from several shallow cuts, a consequence of the man’s futile struggles. A short message written in Aramaic became legible on the white scalp, tattooed in black ink.

  Sarah gasped as she read it in silence. “That’s about the king!”

  What?” The man whose skull was the focus of intense attention twisted his head to address Darius. “What’s it say?”

  “As if you don’t know.”

  “Can’t read my own head, can I? What does it say? Tell me.”

  Darius, who had grown rigid after perusing the strange missive, emptied his voice of inflection and began to read the tattoo aloud. “Poison the jeweled side of the dagger only. Present it with a roasted pigeon as our gift. Cut the bird in half. Make certain he consumes the poisoned side.”

  Darius’s men looked at one another, puzzled. Arta scratched his wounded head. “What does that mean, besides the fact that some poor sod is going to get murdered?”

  “The message is about the king,” Sarah explained.

  “What?” Several masculine voices, including their attackers, spoke at the same time.

  “How can you tell?” Arta asked.

  “His Majesty receives gifts from ambassadors around the empire on the first day of spring. You remember the mention of New Year in the letter we found among their gear? This is what the author meant.

  “Often the gifts presented to the king are symbolic: water from a river, to indicate that the whole river belongs to Artaxerxes; earth, to signify that the land itself is offered to the king. A bird would be a pretty way of claiming that the sky is also the dominion of the Persian monarch. A cooked bird would be tasted by the king as a sign of his approval, which, one assumes, is why they have included the knife.”

  “That’s why the knife is so exquisite,” Darius said. “It’s meant as a gift for His Majesty on the feast of the New Year.”

  Sarah nodded. “Although the king would eat of the proffered fowl, he would take the precaution of sharing it with the one who has brought it in order to ensure that it is not poisoned. However, the person behind this plot has concocted a clever ploy to bypass that difficulty. Both will eat from the same bird, but the king’s portion will be deadly, while the assassin’s remains free of venom. There would be no proving such a plot; you could not tie the death of the king to the killer, for many would have witnessed that both ate of the same food and only one sickened and died.”

  “The king!” Arta almost exploded as he pronounced the word. “Are you certain? I thought the New Year offerings were made in Persepolis.”

  Darius pressed his forefinger and thumb to the bridge of his nose. “Usually, they are. This year the king changed the venue to Susa as he did not wish to travel. The heads of state from around the empire—governors, satraps, and important officials—are at this moment descending on Susa to bring their offerings to His Majesty. Except that one of them has been planning to use this occasion as a means of assassinating the king. Only an official of high rank would have access to the king on New Year’s Day, so this plot has its origins in a person of consequence someplace in the empire.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence. Then everyone began to speak at once, the loudest voices belonging to the intruders, swearing ignorance of the plot.

  Aggravated by the noise and confusion, Darius bellowed, “Silence!”

  An uncomfortable quiet settled over the camp.

  Darius took a deep breath; the movement strained his bruised side, and he shifted to ease the pain. Facing the intruders he said, “How can you have the gall to profess innocence? The only thing we lack in evidence against you is the dead body of the king himself.”

  The man who had forbidden Darius from opening the sealed letter now addressed the gathering. Darius guessed that he was the leader of their party and set his attention on him.

  The man nodded his dark head. “My lords, my lady, my name is Nassir, from Babylon. These are my four brothers: Nur, Naram, Nutesh. And that one,” he said, pointing with his chin to the man with the tattoo, “is our youngest brother, Niqquulamuusu. Everyone calls him Niq.”

  “That’s a relief,” Darius said.

  “First, please accept our humble apologies for the manner of our introduction.”

  Darius noticed Sarah’s mouth twitching at the use of the word introduction. This fellow was entertaining for a cur and a murderer, he had to admit.

  Nassir continued. “We intended you no harm. You must have noticed that we went to great lengths to ensure no one was truly hurt. We don’t kill people.”

  “That tattoo bears witness against your claim.”

  “This is a terrible misunderstanding, my lord. Allow me to explain.”

  Darius, who now had the task of interrogating the Babylonian brothers, motioned for him to continue, curious as to the story he would concoct.

  “My brothers and I are couriers, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Couriers work for the empire. I doubt the royal administration hired you or”—Darius waved his hand vaguely toward the group of tied-up men—“your siblings.”

  “That is true, sire. Perhaps courier is stretching the word a little. We transport things. As you noted, travel in Persia is guarded by strict regulations. Even mail, if sent without royal approval, is read and destroyed upon discovery. But there are those who, for personal reasons, can neither apply for a travel permit nor entrust their mail to official couriers. Most people have secrets they would rather not share with the king’s bureaucrats, who could sell a juicy morsel for extra money on the side. In my experience, these secrets are often harmless to the empire. They concern matters of a personal nature—inheritance, love, family squabbles. Our rule is that we never look inside the packages and letters entrusted to us. People’s private sorrows and pain are not our concern.”

  “How convenient. And you don’t think that such rules attract murderers and villains of every kind?”

  “No, my lord. Folks who have murder in mind wouldn’t entrust a stranger with their secrets, generally speaking. We are honest men of business. We have no interest in murder. We merely transport documents and goods from one part of the empire to another for a reasonable fee.”

  “Honest men, you call it?” Arta gaped. “My head is still aching from your honesty.”

  “That was business, sir. It’s not as if we were going to rob you of your gold or silver. As his lordship so wisely deduced, we needed to borrow your travel documents.”

  At his side, Sarah tried to stifle a snort; she did not succeed. Darius decided to redirect the conversation. “Explain the tattoo.”

  “Ah, that. Believe me, my lord, I had no idea what the content of that vile message was or I would never have placed my brother’s scalp at the disposal of such roguery. Here is what happened. A man contacted me and offered a great deal of money for my brothers and me to carry that dagger and a couple of missives into Susa.”

  “What man?” Now they were getting somewhere, Darius thought.

  “There’s the rub, my lord. He met me at night, wearing a hooded cloak. I hardly saw his face. His only introduction was a bag of gold. He sounded like an aristocrat. But I never found out h
is name.”

  “Where was this?”

  “In Babylon. But the man was not Babylonian; I could tell from his accent. I don’t know where he came from. I found it hard to place him, as though he had distorted his speech. He paid extra because he wanted to tattoo his letter on the messenger’s scalp. He said it was the only way he could be certain that it would not be discovered by royal spies.”

  “But for my wife’s sharp eyes he might have proven right. How came he to tattoo your head without your knowing what the message said?” he asked Niq.

  Niq shrugged. “They kept me hidden in a room for a month. Except for the man who shaved and tattooed me, I saw no one, not even my brothers. My room had no window, so I couldn’t send or receive any messages. I had no idea what they had written on my head. They locked me in until my hair had grown out and covered the message beneath. At the time I thought it a mere inconvenience: the pay had been so enormous that I figured it was worth a month of my life. It never occurred to me that they had tattooed treason on my head. When I find the rascal who marred me with dishonor, I’ll flatten him.”

  “Why did you not ask your brother to try to decipher the message?”

  “By then my hair had grown in, and we could read nothing. I couldn’t shave my head. The purpose of waiting for a month was to have the hair grow in so that we could travel with the message hidden.”

  “Was the man who tattooed you the same person who spoke to Nassir, do you think?”

  Niq shook his head. “No. He had no lordly ways about him. He must be a simple servant, judging by his manner. His master must’ve held him in deep confidence, though, if he entrusted him with such a job.”

  Darius chewed on his lower lip. The origin of the plot was proving a dead end if the brothers were to be believed. Although he had foiled the plan by discovering it, he knew it was essential that he find the traitor. No doubt whoever intended to assassinate Artaxerxes would try again. “To whom were you supposed to deliver the dagger and the missives in Susa?”

  “I have no name,” Nassir said.