The Sweet Girl (27 page)

I get myself down while Pyrrhaios helps Herpyllis. I suppose I should have waited for my husband, or Theophrastos, who takes my reins with a reproving look. Ladies are unfamiliar with horses, I suppose, even getting themselves off them.

“Thank you,” I say to him.

Surprised, he softens. “You ride well.”

“My father permitted it.”

I see in his face a tiny recalibration: his future wife will be permitted to ride, too. A wedding gift I’ve thrown blind at
some anonymous woman; a gift I’ve hurled at the future, too, if he decides to write about it and influence other men that way. Perhaps, in the future, women will be taught to ride as part of their educations, all because of my lie just now, my four little words. Fun!

“Pythias.”

I actually trip over my feet in my hurry to answer Nicanor’s call. I see Herpyllis exchange a fond look with Pyrrhaios. They must think it happened last night.

“Will you show me around?”

I ask Herpyllis if she will supervise setting up the picnic, here in the yard. It’s cool, still, even in the sun; too cool and dew-edged for the pond.

“Take your time,” she says. “Blanket?” I glare at her, but she’s unembarrassed. “It has to be done at some point.”

She’s right, of course, that and the sacrifices before the first crops go in, but luckily Nicanor is already walking, and didn’t hear.

“Next time,” I say. “I think right now he just wants me to show him around.”

As we walk, I sketch the layout of the farm: fields, orchard, river, pond, woods. I collect specimens as we go: snail shells, flowers for pressing, a yellow and black striped millipede that I carry in my hand. It wriggles. I let it clamber from finger to finger while we walk.

“Insects, eh?” Nicanor says.

“It’s for Nico. I prefer birds. Fish, too, but mostly birds. I had to leave my collection in Athens.”

“Who cares for them?”

I don’t understand, and then I do. He thinks I mean they’re alive.

“Skeletons,” I say. “I collect skeletons.”

“We’re behind, if our neighbours already have their seed.”

His mind has moved on. “I’d like to spend a lot of time here. Maybe even make the house liveable again. For me, at least. The well’s still good?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to see the river.” We cut through the stalks and stubble until the babble is louder. “Excellent,” he says. “No crops without irrigation.” He stands, hands on his hips, and looks all around again.

“You’ve never farmed, have you?” I ask.

He rewards me with his rare smile. “Never.”

“Why are you so keen?”

He looks at his feet. “It’s quiet out here,” he says finally. “I can think clearly.”

As we walk back through the trees to the picnic, we pass a bird’s nest lying broken in the long grass. Still teasing the millipede from finger to finger, I go look. There are eggs in it still, one broken, and nearby a newly-hatched dead wren, unfletched, with a disproportionately large head and bulging eyes.

Nicanor comes to look, too. “Fell down.”

I shake my head. “Starlings, probably. They’re looters. Here.” Awkwardly, I transfer the millipede from my fingers to his so I can pick up the dead chick. The head lolls. It doesn’t fill the palm of my hand.

“What are you going to do with that?”

Back in the yard, Herpyllis has laid the picnic out on
blankets. Nico is delighted by the millipede, and everyone crowds around to see my prize.

“Filthy, disgusting children,” Herpyllis says. “And I brought cold chicken for lunch.”

After we’ve eaten, Pyrrhaios, Theophrastos, and Nicanor walk over to pick Demetrios’s brains. They come back full of purpose, and immediately set about making lists. Herpyllis says she wants a nap, so I offer to show Nico the nest.

“I might have done something bad,” Nico says as we walk. “I asked Nicanor to tell me about the siege of Tyre. Theophrastos said I should ask.”

“Why is that bad?”

“I’m not sure.”

We’ve reached the nest. Nico squats next to it and fingers through the broken egg shells.

At last he says, “He told me to mind my own business.”

Together we pick the shards from the nest. Gingerly, Nico lifts the nest from the grass. It stays together.

“Well, I got kind of mad. I mean, that was just rude for no reason. So I bugged him a little. I mean, I kept asking. It was for Theophrastos, really.”

“Theophrastos could have asked for himself.” I tear a strip from the hem of my dress to wrap the nest in, so he can carry it suspended by the knot and hopefully get it home in one piece.

“I think Theophrastos is scared of him. You know he stutters, Theophrastos, when he’s nervous? He’s afraid sometimes he won’t get the words out. I know you don’t like him much, Pytho, but sometimes I feel sorry for him. He’s very nervous, and he knows he’ll never be as smart as Daddy.”

My brother is no longer a child.

“So you pressed Nicanor. Then what?”

He shakes his head, remembering. Just when I think he isn’t going to answer, he says, “He told me he’d seen men die in ways I couldn’t imagine, and if I were his son he’d cripple me so I’d never have to serve in the army. I told him I wasn’t a coward and he laughed.” Nico flushes, remembering. “He said I didn’t know what I was, and hopefully I never would. What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Herpyllis worries he isn’t kind to you.”

Kind to me
. Is that what sex is?

“She worries he won’t take good care of you. She says he’s like Daddy used to be, always going off by himself to his room. But Daddy worked and Nicanor does nothing. She says he drinks too much.”

“So does Pyrrhaios.”

“Pyrrhaios is happy, though.”

At home, late that night, Herpyllis finds me in the kitchen.

“I just wanted a hug,” she says, putting her arms around me from behind while I tend my pot on the stove. “It doesn’t seem so long ’til summer, does it, when we’ll see you again?”

“Mm,” I say, stirring.

“What are you making? Smells like—” She looks over my shoulder and abruptly lets go of me. “Disgusting!” she says. When the meat has boiled from the bones, I drain the pot
and lay the bits out on a rag to cool. The skeleton has come completely apart; some of the bones are no bigger than my fingernail clippings. I’ll have a puzzle in the morning.

I go to Nicanor’s room. “Tell me about Tyre,” I say.

He shakes his head without opening his eyes. “Go to bed, Pythias.”

“Tell me about India.”

He opens his eyes.

“Tell me about Persia. Tell me about Babylon. Tell me about Kandahar. Talk to me.”

Harshly now: “Go to bed.”

I remove the pins at my shoulders and the front of my dress falls to my lap.

“No.” He actually writhes, rolling his head one way and then the other, trying not to see. “No.”

“Do you want a boy?”

“No.”

“Is it because of how I spent my time while you were away?”

He sits up and covers one of my meagre breasts with his palm. The nipple hardens. He’s actually considering laying me. Conversation is worse?

“No.” He takes his hand from my breast and touches my chin, lifts it slightly in an echo of the widow’s gesture, until I have to look at his face. “Not tonight. Tomorrow.”

“Really?”

He lifts my dress back to my shoulders.

The next morning, I lay the bones out on a cloth in the courtyard, for the good, early light. I start easy: the skull; the vertebrae, which are tiny but distinctive; the humeri and scapulae—shoulders and arms in people, wings in the bird. Daddy taught me that.

Nico wanders into the courtyard with his bread and honey, to watch and offer an occasional suggestion. Herpyllis next, with her tea. She’s enjoying the two of us together, rather than our reconstruction. Pyrrhaios appears to tell us he’s loaded the carts, and Pinch is ready for Nico. We bid goodbye in front of the house. No tears this time; we are a sticky spider-web now, connected from Athens to Chalcis and Stageira, and know we cannot be unclipped from each other. We will meet again in a few weeks’ time, for Theophrastos’s wedding, in Athens.

Nicanor and Theophrastos appear for the final parting; they’ve been in some deep conversation, and embrace briefly before Theophrastos turns to me to thank me, over-formally, for our hospitality.

“Advising him on the married life?” I ask my husband without looking at him, my hand still raised, suspending the thread between my palm and Herpyllis’s, as she looks back from the cart that’s just disappearing round the corner at the end of our street. Nicanor sniffs hard and quirks his mouth, holding onto a surprised laugh.

“I’m funny, just so you know,” I say.

I turn back to the courtyard, and my chick. At first I think he hasn’t followed me, and reconcile myself to a morning alone with my project. But then he’s back with a tray, and I see he’s detoured through the kitchen to bring bread and tea. “I want
to go back to the farm today,” he says. “As soon as you’re ready.”

I don’t answer immediately. I’m trying to fit the humerus and scapula together, those tiny bone flutes. Most of the very smallest bones I can’t begin to identify. I’ve laid the big ones together on the cloth: skull, pubis, keel. You can see the baby’s shape.

“How will you fix it together?”

I feel his breath on my ear, smell him: leather, sweat, the body, and something sweet.

“My father used fish glue.”

“Ah.”

He watches for another minute, then leaves again. When he comes back, he’s got my travelling cloak over his arm.

“I’m busy,” I say.

He sits down to wait.

I work for a few more minutes, then turn to the tray.

“Why do you suppose no one’s ever seen a centaur?” Nicanor asks.

“Centaurs live in Thrace.”

“I’ve been to Thrace,” Nicanor says.

I sip my tea.

“What I
have
seen,” Nicanor says, “are monkeys. In India. Do you know what a monkey is?”

“No.”

“They’re like little people, with hair all over them and long tails and overlong arms and legs. They chatter like they’re speaking a language.”

I take a bit of bread, but Nicanor puts his hand over mine to stop me.

“Pytho, listen,” he says. “I’ve killed so many people, I lost count. I tried to keep count but I got confused. And when you torch a village, it’s hard to tally. How many died, exactly? How many I was responsible for myself, and how many I would have to share?”

Figs, too.

“I saw the king. Many times. I always thought of your father. It was hard to imagine them in a room together. Alexander was so—”

I wait.

“He had the strangest eyes,” he said. “When he wasn’t fighting, he looked confused. Does that make any sense? And tired. He was always so tired. He seemed so old and tired and broken, but in your father’s stories he was this burning boy.”

“Daddy wrote him letters. He never wrote back, but he collected specimens and sent them by courier.”

Nicanor shrugs. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

“He says he wrote the king about you. Alerting him to your presence, and stressing your relationship. Suggesting he might—make use of your talents, or your intelligence, somehow. Befriend you.”

Nicanor raises his eyebrows.

“Daddy taught him to swim.”

Nicanor rubs his forehead, then says, “He couldn’t swim. We saw him try, in India. He wanted us to swim across the river at Nysa, to surprise the enemy from behind. He waded in and flailed around and wouldn’t let anyone touch him. He looked like a cat in a rain barrel. He even tried to float across on his own shield. When he couldn’t do it, he made us march
to a shallower place where we could ford it. Gods, that was a long day.”

“And did you surprise the enemy from behind?”

He makes a tired gesture that means yes. “Are you ready?”

I let him help me with my cloak, but I mount by myself. Tycho follows us on a donkey. I say, “I didn’t know we had a donkey.”

“I bought him yesterday.”

“What’s his name?”

Nicanor has to think about that. “Snit,” he says finally.

“What?”

“Snit.”

I look at him.

“I’m funny, too,” he says.

We turn the corner where we’d waved Herpyllis and the others out of sight. There’s the town spread out below us, the near side and the far, and the tender green farmland beyond. The sun shaves sparks off the blue water. We can see movement in the town, all the tiny people making things work, and even the ferryman with his barge and his pole, tiny, tiny.