The Sweet Girl (22 page)

“Really?” I say. I haven’t heard about him before.

They start; they thought I was drunk, or sleeping, or in the easy shadowland between drink and sleep.

“You pay someone?” I prompt, because they’re staring at me, silently.

One of the men touches the knife on his belt with one finger.

“Let’s sing,” I say. I hold my cup up high. “A hymn to the goddess. More wine to honour the goddess!”

“Stop it, Pythias.” Clea leans back against her latest companion. “You’re a bad actor. You’re not drunk. You heard something you shouldn’t, eh? Usually you know to keep your mouth shut.”

There’s a movement in the shadows behind me. Clea’s a bad actor, too, with her show of relaxation.

“I don’t know what I heard,” I say. “I don’t think I actually heard anything.”

“Actually,” Clea says.

The one behind me moves closer. I hear his breath. I say, “After, will Candaules kill a puppy to go below with me?”

Clea glances over my head; an understanding through glances; the one behind me withdraws, a little. After a moment of nothing, I hear the knife being sheathed.

“He came to us,” Clea says. “New in town, offering his services. We laughed him off, at first. We laughed him off for nine months, until the first jump in births—we had more work than we could handle. Then he came to us again and said he’d given us nine months for free, but if we didn’t start to pay him, he’d move on to another town.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Five years. It’s gotten so we can spot which are his. There’s always something not quite right. Not quite natural. It’s not just the baby not looking like the husband, though it’s that, too. Though the parents don’t seem to notice it; they’re in a kind of daze. Sometimes the babies are deformed, sometimes too perfect. And the women all seem—dulled down, sort of. Like they can’t properly remember their lives before.”

I think of Meda.

“You know the health of the baby is determined by the quality of the act of conception,” Clea says. “Vigorous act, vigorous baby. Unwilling act, colicky baby. I’ve often wondered about the ones that are his.”

“Achilleus the architect’s wife,” I say. “But then what about the deformed ones?”

Clea nods. “We told him at the outset, the women had to be willing. I wasn’t going to pay him to rape. We followed him for a few nights, too, just to be sure.”

“And you were sure?”

“Oh, yes.” Clea nods, shakes her head; smiles despite herself, remembering. “
Ai
. I think maybe it’s that he works too hard, sometimes, and the quality of his seed suffers. That’s why some of the children—well. It’s not the babies he cares about, though. They’re just the side effect, the by-product. It’s—I don’t know how to explain.”

“It’s the women,” I say.

“It’s the seduction, certainly. The hunt.” Clea shakes her head. “That’s not it either, though, entirely. There’s something very sad about him at times.”

The others nod, murmuring.

“It’s more like a hunger.” Clea taps her finger to her lips. “A sickness, maybe. He can’t stop. He couldn’t, anyway, and it suited us well enough when he couldn’t. And now, all of a sudden—”

“Maybe he just needs a rest.”

“That one? He’ll rest in his grave.”

“Does he want more money?”

Clea shakes her head. “We offered him everything we could think of.”

The fire flares up, spitting sparks onto the floor; the shape behind me steps forward to tamp them out. He looks at me apologetically, shrugs; it’s Candaules. He sits back in his place.

“We think he’s pining,” Clea says. “That he’s fallen in love with some little scrap of a flat-chested thing somewhere who won’t have him, and now he doesn’t know what to do with himself. We’d pay her, if we could find her.”

“What does he look like?”

They’ve relaxed now; they’re pouring more wine, feeding the fire, whispering to each other. They’re still keeping an eye on me, though. What do they think I’m going to do?

“We can’t seem to agree on that,” Clea says. “We think he’s a bit of a shape-shifter.”

“Handsome?”

“Some days.” Clea holds up the wine; I shake my head. She pours for herself. “Sometimes I think he makes himself dull so he can go unnoticed. To be able to slip in and out of places without anyone looking at him twice. And then sometimes of course he’s a right peacock.”

“Wait, though.” I sit up straight, trying to understand. “Once he’s gone, surely there’ll still be babies born. You seriously think this one man services the entire town? Won’t people like Achilleus the architect and his wife just go back to having uglier babies?”

“We thought so, too, at first,” Clea says. “At first. But haven’t you noticed? They’re all unhealthy now. We think he’s punishing … everyone, really. The mothers, the babies, the families, us.”

I shake my head. The room is quiet again.

“Since you came to town, come to think of it. What do you make of that?”

I shake my head. “I haven’t met a man like that. No one’s approached me that way. Well, except—”

“Except?” Clea says.

I shake my head.

“Except,” Clea says.

“There’s a cavalry officer.”

The room is dirty, rough, sour with wine and dogs and lust. Clea’s friends listen wide-eyed as children who know the story to come and need to hear it again anyway.

“That’s the one,” Clea says. “We think he might be a god.”

Tick, tick, tick
, the tiles fall into place like in that game Daddy used to play with Herpyllis in the courtyard, late into summer evenings.

“If you’re the one he wants, who are we to deny him?” Clea says. “He’ll reward us for bringing you to him.”

“Gods don’t behave that way,” I say. “My father taught me that. God is far, far away. Not a man or a woman. More like a force.”

They’re listening.

“A beautiful vase,” I say. “Think of a beautiful vase. Its beauty might prompt a man to buy it. That’s its force. But the vase itself is oblivious. That’s like god.”

“What are you talking about?” Clea says.

“My father,” I say. I’m trying to remember the exact words, and the sound of his voice. “My father said people lean back into the idea of benevolent gods to avoid standing on their own two feet. People lean back into each other in the same way. It’s not real.”

“That’s a small, cold world your father lived in.”

I say nothing.

“Do you live there, too?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

I don’t have many things here, not much to collect: a change of underclothes Clea gave me when I arrived, and the implement.

“You’ll bring him to us,” she says, watching my tiny packing. “Or we’ll find you, and we’ll give you to him.”

At the door, she presses her cheeks to mine and then pushes me out into the starry cold.

I wake in pain, cold and awfully cramped, in the hollow of a tree not far from the east side of the channel, in the shadow of the garrison on the hill just across the water. It was deep night when I left Clea’s, black and raw cold, and my instinct had been to curl up somewhere and die on my own terms. But a knife at my throat to make more babies for the midwives to save, or not—no. I started to walk, in case they should find me in a nearby alley at dawn and change their minds.

I heard sloppy singing as I walked, and shouting, and once the shriek of a woman’s laughter from an upstairs window.
Really?
I thought.
Really?
Was the world really as lewd and drunken and dangerous at night as in stories? Wasn’t that a bit ridiculous? Didn’t the rapists and murderers have to sleep, too? I kept moving, kept to the shadows. I kept a firm hold of the implement and walked away from any light or sound, any life. At the channel, I realized I was a prisoner in Euboia; at least until dawn, when the ferryman would come. I stood for as long as I could—Daddy had taught me the danger, the siren
call of warm sleep in cold—then squatted, and finally let myself doze sitting up as the first pink wine spilled low across the sky. Pretty, brainless dawn. I hugged the implement like a puppy inside my woollens, and rested my head against the tree trunk.

I hear the ferryman’s bird-like call and the
plash
of his pole. I stand and beat the pins and needles from my legs with my fists, then limp down the bank. He takes the coin I hold out. I clomp onto the raft, feet still prickling from my awkward spell beneath the tree, and sit down.

“What’s that?” He unties us casually, automatically, coiling the rope while looking curiously at the implement, which I’ve laid across my lap. Daddy taught me to see actions learned by the body, actions so habitual the body could work without the brain. To be good at anything physical, he taught me, you had to reach that point. That was a way to judge people, too, workmen and slaves, how easily they moved in their bodies. That told you of their experience, more than words could.

“It’s a dilator.” My tongue refuses
vaginal
. I am a lady, still, barely. “It’s for babies.”

“Eh—it’s not.” The current is quiet; I wonder if we’re almost at the change of the tide. He sets the paddle down and reaches for a pole. “I had five myself. I never saw one of those.”

“Maybe your wife did.”

“What wife?” His face cracks open in a delighted smile; I’ve fallen for whatever he wanted me to. “Five babies, five different girls.” He stops in the middle of the channel, pole planted in the depths. “I’ve seen you before.”

I’m too tired to lie. “Yes.”

“You shouldn’t be alone.”

I don’t answer.

“Tell you what.” He fishes my coin from inside his clothes and holds it out. “You keep this.”

I take the coin but don’t put it away. If he’s hoping to see where I keep my pouch, he’s out of luck. He starts poling again and we crunch against the opposite shore in a few heartbeats. With the same thoughtless ease, he loops the rope around the large rock he uses for his Western cleat.

“Thank you, Charon,” I say.

He shakes his head. “I’ve heard that joke before.” He takes an unsteady, lurching step towards me, as though thrown offbalance by the bobbing raft, and kisses my mouth. I jerk back. His taste is sour, rotten. Bad wine, bad teeth. His face cracks again.

“Thank you, Grandfather,” I say.

For a moment neither of us moves. Then I’m halfway up the slope and he’s calling after me,
Wait, wait. Your baby-thing
.

I don’t stop. There’s payment, if you like: a kiss, a handful of wool where he’d hoped a bigger breast would be, and a vaginal dilator.
For you; enjoy
.

The neighbourhood, around the backside of the hill topped by the garrison, is only a short walk away now. The streets are quiet; it’s early still. Lately it’s always early, or late. I’m aware of my own evil smell, lank hair, damp dirty clothes, throbbing head. Fatigue has scrubbed the inside of me raw, like a
handful of sand. I don’t recognize the house at first and am unsurprised; the gods have plucked and replanted the neighbourhood, perhaps, or I’m addled—punch-drunk from the effort of continuing, these past few weeks. Mere weeks, only, still. I walk to the end of the street where we used to live, then back again, ticking the houses off against the map in my mind. I recognize this one, with the painted lintel; and the next, with the chickens in the yard; and the next, with the pretty gardens and the sundial; and the next, the one next to ours, with the big cypress. Our house—mine, Euphranor’s, someone’s—is now overgrown with vine leaves, but after a moment of staring I recognize familiar details: gate, plant pots, trees, the diagonal crack in the stone walkway.

Vines don’t grow in winter.

I stand still, cautiously putting this thought together.

“Lady.”

Behind me. Sitting in the street in his filthy horse blanket, a greasy cloth wound around his stubbled head. He struggles to stand. I go to him and search his face. His eyes are clear. The joy of this stabs me unexpectedly deep. “Tycho.”

“Lady.”

I want to touch him. It’s the oddest thing.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he says.

“I know.”

He studies my chin. “Euphranor is master of the house now.”

I nod.

“He’s inside.”

“Yes.”