The Sweet Girl (11 page)

Myrmex has to come over to us; has to. Hunting! He can’t be left out. He stands closer to me than usual, waiting for his assignment.

“Come, ladies.” Euphranor takes a few steps. Perhaps he senses Myrmex’s face hardening, because he looks back and slaps himself on the forehead. “Pinch, good man! Get that basket, would you?”

Myrmex nods at Pyrrhaios, who hefts the picnic basket and follows us at a distance. Daddy and the old man are already deep in conversation, and Daddy doesn’t even notice us leave. He has that cock-headed, flare-nostrilled attention that says everyone around him is to be silent so he can learn.

We picnic in a pine grove on a horse blanket thrown over a carpet of sappy needles. Piny wine and thick, slow sunshine I can taste. “Eat your bread,” Herpyllis says, but I’m not hungry. Wine and sunlight, sunlight and shade and wine. I take my cup down the slope to look at the pond, all overhung with goldenrod and forsythia. The surface of the water is thick and still and spackled with golden pollen, Demetrios’s scum.

Something leaps behind me; I feel the air move.

My brother, naked; he lands in the pond with an almighty air-spangling splash, and comes up coated in gold. He floats on his back for a moment to give me a look at everything, then arches lazily and goes down smooth as a dolphin: throat, chest,
softness, thighs, knees, feet, toes. The pollen has fled from the centre of the pond to limn the banks yellow, leaving a cool black hole. He surfaces again, smiles; wants me to come in. A little less golden, now, after the second dip. I feel the honey letting down between my legs. I shake my head.

“You see,” Euphranor says behind me, softly. He hasn’t stepped from the shadows, knows Myrmex doesn’t know he’s there. “That’s all it needed. Cleared nicely now. Shall we go in?”

The three of us
. Doors and the windows all opening.
Oh!

“Next time.”

Euphranor smiles, catching my veil as I pass him on my way back up the hill, and trails its full white length through his fingertips before he lets it go.

Shouting from the distance. Nico and Herpyllis, on the blanket, look up from their perusal of the sweets. They look at me; I shrug. Then we can make it out: Demetrios calling his master. “He’s at the pond,” I tell Herpyllis. “I just left him there. I’ll get him.”

Back down the slope, the ghost of my veil reeling me back down and in. But there’s only Myrmex, supine in the goldenrod, who starts when he sees me and covers himself with his hands. The gold is gone, and instead he’s pink all over from the exertion of what he’s just been doing.

“You haven’t seen Euphranor?”

He shudders, sighs.

Back up the slope again, where I find Euphranor listening to a puffing Demetrios, while Nico struggles to ready the horses.

“Your father is injured,” Euphranor says curtly. “Where are the others?”

“Mummy went looking for mushrooms,” Nico stammers. “Pyrrhaios went with her. I don’t know where Myrmex is.”

“Injured how?” I look from Euphranor to Demetrios. Neither is smiling.

Demetrios glances at his master, who nods. “Twist of the ankle, Lady,” he says. “Already puffed up like a melon. He can’t walk on it, but I reckon he’ll live.”

I’m moving.

“Child, wait.” Euphranor hurries to catch up to me. “Do you ride? It might be faster if I were to lead you on your brother’s little—”

I start to jog.

Back at the house, Daddy is sitting on a cart as though we’ve kept him waiting a long time. I hear Demetrios telling his master he left him inside, on a couch.

“What happened?” I climb up beside him to look.

He grunts and lifts his hem. His left ankle is a purple ball. I smell the vomit, though his face and clothes are clean. A lot of pain, then.

“Why do you sit this way?” I whisper. “You’re the one who taught me—”

He lets me help him to lying, my hand supporting his heavy head. He lets me lift the good foot onto the bench, and then the bad. White with the pain, now. I scootch one of the silly purple silk cushions under the ankle to elevate it, and tell Nico to get a cold cloth. “Long enough for binding,” I tell him. He nods and disappears into the house, ignoring Euphranor. Now who’s the soldier?

Daddy is talking about which plant to use for the
compress. “At home,” I tell him. “Right now, let’s just get home.”

He retches once while Nico holds the foot up and I bind his ankle. Euphranor sends Demetrios to look for the others. Myrmex appears and himself wipes Daddy’s mouth with a clean damp cloth. Euphranor draws Myrmex aside and says something to him in an undertone I can’t hear. I hear Myrmex tell him Daddy needs to be kept warm. They’re both frowning, serious, co-operating. Euphranor touches Myrmex’s shoulder and points into the house. Myrmex goes inside and comes out a moment later with a fur he tucks around Daddy, against shock. He knows without being told, like Nico and me. More than Demetrios. More than Euphranor.

Herpyllis and Pyrrhaios appear, breathless, leading the horses.

“Where have you been?” Daddy asks, looking up at her, his love. She sits beside him the whole journey home, holding his hand, gazing into his face. There’s dirt on her dress and a twig in her hair. When I draw the twig out, she opens the pouch on her hip to show me her dozen creamy, dirty finds.

We will have eggs with mushrooms for supper.

“What about Daddy’s farm?” Nico asks in a small voice, and Euphranor promises he’ll take us another day, when Daddy’s better.

“Agrimony,” I tell Daddy. The plant he was trying to remember. “I’ll make you an agrimony poultice for the swelling. Try not to move so much.”

Daddy, pushing the fur down, says he’s hot.

“No, Myrmex is right,” I say. “Better hot than cold.”

The rest of the ride home we are silent, chastened. I try to remember what we might have left behind at the picnic site, the pond, the field. Food, wine, the blanket, my veil. A small spoonful of Myrmex’s pleasure. Herpyllis’s virtue.

My sandals, abandoned in the field so I could run.

Agrimony, what Herpyllis calls cocklebur, grows like a weed along the roadside. I wrap my hands in leather to pluck the leaves, and pile some burs in the courtyard for Nico, who uses them for darts. Cooked with bran and vinegar, the leaves makes a sticky, stinky mess that Daddy soon tires of.

“Lie still,” I order. He groans and squirms while I try to wrap a cloth around his pasted ankle, getting smears everywhere, until finally he demands the pot like a sulky child who suddenly can’t wait any longer. So now he must stand, and I mustn’t watch. I put my hands over my eyes and listen to his effortful dribble, and help him back to lying once he’s dropped his clothes back over himself, smearing the poultice even further. As the days go by he complains of headaches, too, and insomnia, and whines if we leave him alone for too long. He makes Myrmex read to him, and—when Myrmex is too slow—me. Herpyllis tries sitting with us, once or twice, but she bores quickly, and Daddy complains when she starts pottering around the room, dusting or straightening the sheets or picking over the flowers she cut for him the night we got home, pinching off the dead bits. She’s nervous lately, quick to tears, and when Daddy starts talking about the dead king, she bites her fist and leaves the room.

More and more he talks about the king. His grief now—clouded by the pain in his ankle, maybe—is tinctured by bitterness, until you’d think they never loved each other at all. He rants. Alexander wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t learn, not so bright after all, just a vicious little boy. Never a man, not really. In the body, but never in the mind.

I am not thinking of Myrmex.

Daddy wrote him letters, hundreds of letters. The army was under orders from no less than Antipater himself to have them included in dispatches, but never once a reply. That’s not love, Daddy says. All that he gave him, and never once a word back.

“But he sent all those specimens,” I remind him. “Fish skeletons, fossilized birds, dried flowers. To you, no one else. So something reached him.”

“I don’t doubt my letters reached him,” Daddy says stiffly. “As I have just said.”

“Not your letters.” I hold a cup to his lips for him to sip. Utterly unnecessary, but he’s malingering now, a week later, and demands these little services. “Your—thoughts. Your love of him. Those things reached him, and he reached back to you.”

“You’re a sweet girl,” Daddy says.

The next day there’s a gleam in his eye I recognize, and fear. With much production, he has himself carried to his study and set up on cushions, with drink and nibbles and books and pen and paper ready to hand. He insists Ambracis sit beside him in case he should need her to fetch anything, leaving all the kitchen work to Thale, who slams the pots just enough to let us know how much she resents the younger woman’s easy day. Ambracis, in turn, may not move or rustle or swallow too
loudly in case she should throw off Daddy’s train of thought; nor may she respond when the baby calls for her. I pass by once or twice and see her sitting miserably while it screams from where Thale has tethered it to the table in the kitchen so she can keep an eye on it and do her chores, too. It quiets when Olympios stops by, but he has work to do. I try to play with it myself a bit, but it knows the difference, and is fretful all the day.

“What’s he doing?” I ask Herpyllis, but she doesn’t know.

By evening he’s ready to show us: drawings. Designs, actually, for statues of his dead: of his parents; his brother, Uncle Proxenus, and Proxenus’s wife; Daddy’s little sister, who died in childbirth when her son, my cousin Nicanor, was a tot. He’s with the army now, Nicanor, in the East. We assume he’s alive.

“I will have them erected in Stageira,” Daddy announces. “The village of my birth. And, in thanks for Nicanor’s return, I propose statues of Zeus and Athena also, life-size.”

Now I know he is mad.

“Is Nicanor returned?” I say carefully.

Daddy ignores me, carefully rolling his drawings.

“How big
are
Zeus and Athena?” I ask. “In life?”

“Go to your room,” Daddy says.

The drawings are tentative, in Daddy’s quavering old-man’s hand. He intends to commission a famous sculptor, an Athenian named Gryllion, to execute them. He’ll send Tycho to deliver the commission. For the next three days, he works and works on his awful drawings, and speaks of nothing else. On the fourth day, Ambracis whispers he is bedridden, and refuses to eat.

I nod, and she shakes her head. We know the pattern.

Two weeks after the injury, after three days in his room, he summons me to his bedside. He’s sitting up, supported by many pillows. His ankle is much less swollen, though he still affects to close his eyes and quiver when I touch it with gentlest fingertips.

“Daughter,” he says. “Leave that. I have brought you here today to discuss your future.”

Brought me here
—as though I haven’t been in and out of the room every hour, seeing to his needs while the blackness grips him. Spooning in the broth, steadying the bedpan, flapping the curtain to freshen the air. Combing his hair.

“Piffle,” I say.

“You shall marry cousin Nicanor,” Daddy says. “Just as soon as he returns from Persia.”