The Sweet Girl (20 page)

I understand only slowly that Thale is experiencing great pleasure.

I back away, then turn and—what? I don’t run, because I can’t feel my feet. I am soundless; there’s no effort involved. Let’s say I float. I float through the other rooms in the house, to find what I already know is there. Olympios, gnawing roast meat from a plate piled high with bones, grease running down his chin, while Pretty plays with my empty jewellery box.
Ambracis and Agapios’s slave are in my room, Ambracis on her knees before him; I have to spy over Philo’s shoulder to see them. Philo is fisting himself faster than he’s ever done anything in his life.

I’m in the courtyard dying when the house explodes with the sound of their voices, from all corners, all shouting at the same time. Singing? I don’t know what it’s called. They all arrive together. A cloud of startled birds poofs up from a tree; somewhere the dog, no longer a puppy, starts to howl. A crack runs up one wall from floor to roof; I watch the black line of it tracing like a raindrop running upwards. High, high up, a line of dry lightning silently continues the rent. I close my eyes.

Daughter
.

I open my eyes and see Tycho in the corner of the courtyard. He squats, wrapped in his great filthy horse-blanket, rocking and mumbling to himself. Has he been here all this time?

“Tycho.” I go to him, put my hand on his shoulder. “Tycho, your lady is here.”

He looks at me with unseeing eyes.

“Tycho.” I touch his forehead, his cheek. I try to get him to stand, but he won’t. “Tycho!”

He rocks, mumbles.

“Are you hungry?”

Nothing.

In the kitchen I pick through the scraps and sort out a plate of stale bread and salt fish, and a cup of water from an almost empty jar. No way to know if it’s fresh. I take it back outside and set it in front of him. “Are you cold?”

He shoves it all away, so abruptly that the cup spills and the fish flips into the dirt.

I understand the goddess is punishing the house. I understand it’s because of me. She is visiting her feelings upon my house: jealousy, hurt, abandonment, betrayal. All I had to do was love her.

I decide to go looking for mercy, for Tycho if for no one else. A reprieve, or a few days’ rest; any crumb. At the garrison, I’m shown straight to Thaulos’s quarters. He looks happy to see me.

“There!” he says. “I knew you’d solve it. Clever father, clever daughter. How was your service?”

I say, “My service?”

“At the temple.”

I tell him I’ve left the temple.

“Profitable, though, eh? You don’t have to pretend. My wife serves there. I know how it works.”

“Your wife,” I say.

“The army’s on the move, coming home, you’ll be happy to know.”

I nod.

“Soon you’ll be having babies. Little babies running all over, and all this unpleasantness will be forgotten. What a gift to your husband, the house all settled! You should feel proud.”

I close my eyes and see Thale. I open my eyes.

“It
is
all settled?”

I close my eyes and see Simon’s rhubarb. I open my eyes.

Exasperated: “But then why did you go to the temple?”

I shake my head.

“Why have you come here?”

I tell him my servants are possessed.

Thaulos laughs, incredulous. “You’ve brought me absolutely nothing?”

Nothing.

Tycho looks up when I enter the courtyard and says, “Lady,” as though he is lucid. I ignore him and go to my room. Tricks of the goddess. Fortunately Ambracis and Agapios’s slave are gone. Warm clothes, the bracelet I hid under a loose stone in the courtyard. In the kitchen I’m at a loss. Water? A knife? I turn around and Tycho is there, a bear in the doorway. “Lady.”

I push past him, back through the courtyard to the stables. But the horses are gone. Sold, I guess.

“Lady.”

I’ll sell the bracelet in the market, buy a day’s food, walk at night, hide during the day. If I make it to Athens, Theophrastos will have to take me in. He’ll have to.

“Lady.” Tycho plants himself between me and the gate. “You must do as your father would expect of you.”

“I’m going to Athens.”

I see the goddess return; I see the sudden flare in his eyes. He kneels abruptly, like he’s been struck on the back of the head. “No,” he says.

No
, she says.

“It hurts,” he says.

I ask him where.

He turns his wide, crazy eyes to mine.

“You have my leave to eat,” I tell him. “And drink, and light a fire. You have my leave.”

“Not Athens,” he says.

Not Athens
.

I ask her,
Where then?

“Think of your father,” the goddess says through Tycho. Tycho’s mouth and voice. “What has your father left you?”

Books. Knowledge
. What, indeed?

When I come back from the butterfly room—vaginal dilator in hand—he’s in the corner of the courtyard again, rocking and mumbling.

Well, what would
you
think if you saw me? Hurrying through the streets alone—morning still, the sky soft and white with cold—carrying nothing but my father’s implement. The men look bemused but the women know. They shrink back from it. They clench. My hair is long and loose behind me as I stride. They part for me. I feel a bit like the goddess herself, with my implement instead of a bow, then realize she’ll punish me for such thoughts. Too late. I walk faster.

The route to Glycera’s house is familiar now. The turn in the road, the particular quality of light in the air just by this building here. The smell of baking, then figs, always figs. Five narrow steps up and into a quieter street—posh, elegant. The widow’s house is set back from the others, right at the end.

There’s a man coming out of her gate: Euphranor. He stops when he sees me.

“Where’s your guard?” he asks. I don’t answer. He looks at the implement and his eyebrows go up and stay there. “Really?”

I tap on the gate.

“About your farm.” He’s got his head on the side, studying the implement. “I know I said I could make it profitable for you, but it’s winter. There will be no money coming from it before next summer at the earliest. Meanwhile—”

I tap louder.

“It’s winter,” he says. “Cold at night in a tent at the garrison. I need my home.”

“Take it.”

“No, but listen—”

I whang the gate with the implement. Now there’s a sound they can’t ignore.

“I’ve had word from Thaulos,” he says. “Terrible man. He told me what happened. I’m shocked, shocked at his assumptions. That you would even consider stealing from the goddess. Paying off your debt with votive offerings. Gods, it’s blasphemy. Foul blasphemy, eh, Pythias?”

Why does no one come?

“We might share the house, you know.” He touches my hand. “Pythias, stop. Listen. I like you.”

Thale and the rhubarb and the smell of Myrmex’s burning hair and Philo peeping and Ambracis slurping and Herpyllis looking at Pyrrhaios and Daddy looking at Herpyllis and I will never touch myself ever, ever again.

Euphranor’s looking down at my hand, which he’s holding, breathing like he’s been running, only he hasn’t.

I take my hand back and two-handedly whang the implement on the gate again. The big slave finally comes.

“You’re magnificent,” Euphranor says. “I’ve always wondered how those work.”

The slave closes the gate behind me.

“Think about it,” Euphranor says.

I have already thought.

Glycera receives me in a room I haven’t seen before, a lush cave hung with furs and hot with braziers. Her hot room, her winter room. The cushions are red and gold. She rises from her couch to embrace me. I am not thinking not thinking not thinking about how her hair is all mashed down at the back.

I don’t say hello. “Clea, the midwife. Where does she live? Where can I find her?”

The thing about Glycera is she’s sincere. I read empathy in the way the shoulders drop, the head goes to one side, the eyebrows furrow in concern. Her eyes slip to the implement, now dangling from my hand to the floor, and her eyes flare in horror. “Child, oh child,” she says.

But I am not in the mood for her perfumed bosom.

“There are alternatives,” she says. “I know women in my position usually think otherwise. But I love babies, I love them. I’d help you with it. Ask my girls! I’ve never put one out because of a baby. Look at Meda. Didn’t I do everything I could for Meda?”

I could nod.

“How far—?” She abandons the sentence to perform the calculation herself. She looks doubtful. “Before your father died?” she says. “Quite a while before?”

“What?”

“You’re at least two moons, if you know for sure. Who was it? A student of your father’s? Some boy in Athens? Well, it doesn’t matter. As I say, no one understands better than me the kind of troubles a young girl can face. You were right to come to me.”

“I haven’t come to you.”

“Shall we put that awful thing away?” She seems not to have heard me. She calls for a slave and points at the implement.

I hug it to my chest. “Clea,” I say. “I just want to find Clea.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m not pregnant.” She winces at the term, as Gaiane and her mother did so long ago. “I didn’t come here to stay. Please. If you won’t tell me, I’ll have to find her some other way.”

She stands. “Who, then?”

I don’t think you can get pregnant eating it, but who knows. The lie is easier. “Ambracis. One of my slaves.”

“You treat them well.”

“She has no worth if she dies.”

Glycera blinks, then tells me, “Clea lives in the old town, behind the market. I’ll send my slave with you. Really, you shouldn’t be walking out alone. Where’s your man?”

“Just at the bottom of the hill. I told him to wait there.”

“Why?”

I adjust my woollens around me and get a better grip on my implement. “He was getting on my nerves.”

Glycera leads me out through a different door than the one I came in, into a room that is a smaller version of her luxurious cave. Small, dark, warm, all furs and cushions. “Look who’s come to see us,” Glycera says.

This windowless room is darker than the first, and it takes my eyes a moment to make out Meda. It takes me a moment longer to make sense of what I’m seeing: she’s nursing an infant. She smiles at me, then the baby, then back at me. The baby’s eyes are closed, though it’s still sucking. She smiles at Glycera, who puts a finger to her lips and leads me out.

“The baby son of a local merchant.” Glycera pats my shoulder. “She’s working as a wet nurse while she recovers. Recovers in her body and in her mind. Usually she works at their house, but occasionally she brings him back here. It’s the best thing that could have happened, really. Did you see her face just now?”

Before I can stop myself, I say, “That’s horrible.”

Glycera’s smile sweetens further. “You’re very young, aren’t you? Running your own house, delivering babies, serving the goddess, knowing what’s best for everyone. Not needing anyone’s help. You’re really extraordinary.”

“No.”

“Milk should never be wasted.” She looks again at the implement. “You’ll mutilate her with that. Maybe you don’t care. Just a slave, eh? You’ve never had one of those up you, have you?”