The Sweet Girl (17 page)

I’m marked, now; his ghostmark on my mouth. My lips go chapped from all my licking, trying to get it off. Another loss to grieve: the first kiss should have been my husband’s. Probably I’m spoiled now, and my husband will know it; he’ll smell it on me. But by the time I’m his to taste, the ceremony will be over, we’ll already be married, and I’ll be safe. He’ll be angry, though. Perhaps the way to do it will be to make sure he drinks a lot of wine, so that he won’t even notice. If we can get past the first moment, then he’ll have marked me with his own scent, and he’ll never have to know.

I look at my mouth in the little bronze Herpyllis gave me, this way and that. Morning bounces off it onto the walls.

“Lady.” Thale taps on my door frame. “The courier is here.”

I hand her the bronze and tell her to give it to him. She frowns. “He’ll understand,” I say.

After the clop of hooves has faded away, Thale returns.

“You may speak,” I say.

She suggests a visit to the temple. A thread of iron firms her jaw, and she’s piled her hair on the back of her head in the style called the melon, instead of her usual skinned-back pinning. She wears her best dress, a wheat-coloured wool I remember Herpyllis sewing her for a gift. I wonder if she misses Herpyllis. She whispers, “For guidance.”

I know she favours Aphrodite, but I don’t.

“Tell Tycho.” I get off my bed and look around for clothes. My room’s a mess, lately. Thale touches her hair, meaning mine, so I let her comb it quickly and whip it into a loose approximation of her own. “What shall we take?”

Thale shows me her own offering, a pair of sandals the baby has outgrown.

“Let’s take Pretty with us,” I say. “She’ll enjoy the walk.”

Thale takes a deep breath and doesn’t exhale. The next moment, she’s gone to fetch her from Olympios. She’ll never have a baby of her own; my father told me years ago she was too old. She’s shy around Olympios’s baby; awed, I think. The little girl never naturally reached for Thale, with her hard sharp angles and her nervousness and her onion smell. Thale will adore a morning of holding her chubby little hand and wiping her mouth.

In the courtyard, Olympios is lingering, making a show of sweeping the already clean ground. He looks grim. The baby is clean and neatly dressed; her hair is up. She looks serious. Olympios kneels to say a word in her ear, while Thale waits for the handover. She’s practically vibrating.

I hold my hand out to the baby. “Shall we go for a walk, Pretty?”

She takes my hand on one side and Thale’s on the other.

“Don’t let her run away,” Olympios says, so soft and terrified an order that I don’t reprimand him. Tycho catches his eye and nods, and Olympios nods back. They’re both such big men; I shouldn’t want to laugh at their concern over a tiny girl, but I do.

Pretty walks very nicely all the way to the temple of Artemis. My choice—huntress, virgin, patron of young girls. She watches Thale leave the sandals in the massive votive pile by the gate, and unclutches her little fist to reveal her own offering: a wooden bead Olympios must have given her. Gravely she lays
it next to the sandals. Both of them turn enquiringly to me.

“Take Pretty to see the lamps,” I tell Thale.

When they’re gone, I draw the last black hair from my pouch. I only burned two for the iunx; the third I kept, just to keep. I lay it next to Pretty’s bead, where the shadows swallow it; I blink and it’s gone.

“The goddess will understand, I suppose?”

A priestess. I jump, startled.

“May I make a suggestion?” Not just any priestess; the head priestess, she of the black brows, from Plios’s party. “Next time, you might tie it to something so it doesn’t get lost. Something shiny, to attract the goddess’s attention.”

“A coin, perhaps.”

The priestess gestures elegantly, as though to say that’s none of her business; she’s above such worldly concerns. I reach back into my pouch and add a coin to the pile.

She tells me she’s reading one of Daddy’s books, and is learning so much. She confesses she was unfamiliar with his work before we came to Chalcis, and regrets now she did not take advantage of his acquaintance while he was alive.

“Which book?”

“The
Prior Analytics
. Oh, it’s beautiful. Elegant.”

“Difficult,” I say, in case she finds it so.

Her face lights with interest. “You’ve read it?”

“I’ve read all my father’s work.”

Her hands float into the air, fingers fluttering, a mannerism I’ll get to know well. It means excitement, anticipation. “But that’s marvellous! And you write, too?”

“I do.”

A child’s voice, rising.
No, no, no!
The priestess of Artemis and I flinch simultaneously, then smile at the mirror image we make. “The goddess loves children,” the priestess says. “It’s a dreadful failing of mine that I so wish her supplicants would leave them at home.”

I bite back a laugh.

“Unusual young woman,” she says, not disapproving. “We’re not all cut out for the family life, you know.”

No, no, no! Bad Thale!

I catch Thale’s eye, where she’s struggling to keep Pretty from touching the lamps, and look sharply at the door.
Take her out
.

The priestess follows my glance, and looks back to me enquiringly.

“Members of my household,” I say. “The child has never been to the temple. I apologize, I apologize. She’s usually very well behaved.”

Thale stoops to pick up Pretty, who’s now lying on the floor, and gets a kick to the face. The priestess gestures to an attendant, who scoops up the now shrieking girl and takes her outside, trailing the weeping Thale. I touch the pain budding at my temple.

“As I was saying.” With her toe, the priestess nudges into alignment the sandals, the bead, the coin. “We were not all made for the family life. Some of us need more silence, more contemplation. Devotion can take many forms, yes?”

I’m distracted by a procession of girls in matching dresses carrying votive offerings from the pile to, presumably, a storeroom in the complex of sanctuary buildings behind the temple. Young priestesses.

“Will you come and visit me again? By yourself, next time, perhaps, so you can spend more time on your contemplations?” The priestess’s gaze follows mine. “I could introduce you to some of the young women who serve the goddess here. They could tell you about their lives. Might you like to know more about their lives?”

I nod, slowly. From outside rises a high, thin wail like the blade of a knife. The priestess stoops to pick up my coin. “I think someone needs a sweet.” She hands the coin back to me. “One’s first visit to the temple should be an occasion of joy. A honey-cake from the market to sweeten the memory.”

I take the coin slowly.

The priestess winks. “Go on. The goddess and I are old friends. I’ll explain it to her. Will you come again?”

“I will,” I say. Then, more warmly: “I will.”

She smiles.

At home there is meat for supper; Simon and Thale, who eat with me, won’t meet my eye. I don’t ask. Meat, and bread and wine. I don’t call it tonic anymore. It’s just wine, and I drink it, properly watered, like Herpyllis did every supper time. I’m a lady now.

The next morning, I give the courier my gold bracelet with the ram’s-head clasp, the one Daddy gave me. The next night there is meat again. Leftovers from the night before, must be.

“Beans tomorrow,” I tell Thale, just to be sure.

“I don’t like beans,” she says.

She’s clearing the table, just as always, and I watch her until I’m pretty sure I only imagined what she said. A bone slips from a plate onto the ground, and she doesn’t pick it up. The puppy—not so little anymore—comes nosing over and gnaws at it until it starts to cough. Nico wanted to take it to Athens with him, but we guessed he belonged with the house. I get the bone away and hold it out to Simon, who pretends he doesn’t see. He turns away to follow Thale to the kitchen. I put the bone on the table.

I’m cold.

In bed I pile on all my furs and lie curled tight, toes tucked behind a knee to keep them warm. Much later, deep in the night, a woman’s laugh wakes me. A lovely, low, warm, tickling laugh. I know what it means; but who?

The courier arrives again while I’m eating breakfast; Simon brings him to me. “No,” I say. “Yesterday was for two days. Two days at least. Probably three, probably more.”

The courier says nothing, doesn’t move.

“You go back and tell your master what I said.”

He doesn’t move.

“Go,” Simon says.

He goes.

When I open my mouth to thank Simon, he cuts me off by asking what I’ll give tomorrow.

I open my mouth, change my mind. “More jewellery.”

“Show it to me.”

An order? I raise my eyebrows.

“If you’re going to give it away, you might as well get the proper value of it. Give it to me and I’ll change it to cash in the market.”

“I should have thought of that.”

“They’d cheat you there, too. Let me see to it.”

I think about that.

“Bring it out,” he says. “Show me.”

Then I’m showing him my special box, and he’s stirring through it with one thick dirty finger. He picks out a few things.

“No,” I say softly. My baby necklace with the gold wire flowers, the one from my mother.

“We need to eat.”

I hold out my hand, shaking. He hesitates long enough to show me who’s making the decision.

“Just that one,” I say, and he gives me back the necklace. One of the flowers is already bent from its brief stay in his fist.

“Selfish little girl,” he whispers.

Yes
.

Over the days that follow, objects start to disappear: metals first, carvings, pots. Or have they been gone for a while and I’m only noticing now? I check the storeroom to find the winter stores alarmingly depleted; where is it all going? Then, one night, Thale brings me beans and serves herself meat. We’re sitting inside, in the room for guests; it’s too cold for the courtyard.

“We don’t eat meat every night in this house,” I say.

“You have what you wanted.”

I stand. “You wouldn’t have treated Herpyllis this way.”

“Herpyllis is gone.” She eats doggedly, without looking at me.

In the kitchen I find the slaves, also eating meat. Only Tycho stands when he sees me. I realize, with a kind of animal instinct, it would be wrong to show anger or distress of any kind. “Where’s Simon?” I say instead.

Tycho leads me to the stables, where Simon is plucking a goose.

“That money was for the house,” I say right away when I see him.

Simon shrugs.

“These aren’t your decisions.”

Simon says nothing. I feel Tycho, behind me, getting bigger.

“Was that Thale’s goose?” I squint at it. “The egg goose? Why would you do that?”

I’m not here, apparently; Simon continues as though I’m just a breeze passing through.

In the courtyard, Tycho clears his throat.

“You may speak,” I say.

“Your father believed too much meat to be unhealthy for the digestion.”

I blink. “Yes. I know.”

“You must stop them.”

I touch my temple. “Yes.”

He says no more, and I assume he’s done. I turn away, but he doesn’t follow.

“Yes,” I say.

“Ambracis has a visitor,” he says. “At night.”

It’s my turn to say nothing.

“From the house of Agapios.” Our near neighbours. “One of the servant boys there. I’ve caught Philo spying on them.”

My mind, unbidden, performs its trick of outracing his; I see Philo peeking through a curtain, rubbing himself; hear again Ambracis’s laugh.

“Is she happy?” I ask.

“During the day Philo is at her, now. At her all the time. We don’t know what to do.”

“Keep them apart.”

Tycho hesitates; nods. I go to my room with a massive pain behind my eyes, leaving the servants to their feast. Tomorrow, I will seize everything back.

The next morning, Ambracis’s eyes are red and her face is bloated from weeping. She slaps my plate in front of me—dry bread—and stares at me with sheer hatred.

“Philo,” I tell Tycho, when he answers my summons. “Keep
Philo
away from her, I meant. Not the other one. I don’t care what she does with the other one.”