The Sweet Girl (18 page)

Tycho frowns.

“Oh, what now?” I snap.

“Your father never permitted lewdness amongst the servants.”

Herpyllis was a servant
, I want to say. Instead I tell him I intend to spend the morning in my father’s study, reading, and am not to be disturbed.

“May I eat now, Lady?” he asks.

“What?”

“With your permission.”

“You don’t need my permission.”

“Bread and water, no more.”

I wonder if Tycho is losing his mind.

“With your permission,” he insists.

“Of course you have my permission.” I shoo him away with my hand, the way my father used to when he was irritable.

This becomes a new, supremely annoying habit of his: asking permission before every meal. I understand he means to set some kind of example—for the other servants, for me—but his displays of meagre eating grate on me even more than the others’ new-found passion for meat.

I spend the next day in my father’s study. I’m reading the
Odyssey
, of course, reading and rereading the part about the suitors eating Penelope out of house and home while her men are away.

Finally I take up pen and paper and write the letter I’ve been avoiding. Salutations to my father’s most esteemed colleague, gratitude for all his assistance, much affection to my little brother, and could Theophrastos offer news of the political situation? Was there the possibility of a visit? Me to him, him to me?

I send Simon on Spiffy. I intuit—correctly—a trip to Athens will appeal to him. And he likes Nico. Everyone likes Nico.

He’s back, not the next night, but the one after.

Salutations to the child of his esteemed and honoured teacher, the letter says, political situation too complex to explain, ongoing attacks on Macedonian citizens, at all costs the child of his esteemed and honoured teacher should remain where she is; unsafe for her to travel.

But
you
are not Macedonian, Theophrastos; and what of Nico?

He wants me to say it straight out, I think, that I can’t manage by myself. He’s read Simon, the spite and the insolence in the line of his spine and the curl of his lip. He knows, he knows, and he’ll let me suffer on a little more. He’s punishing me for all the times I teased him about his books.

I drop the letter in the brazier. So.

A hot dream of wetness and lust, hips in a rhythm, someone moaning, and then Tycho is by my bed, touching my shoulder.
Lady, Lady
.

“Ambracis?” I say.

I follow him to the receiving room, where a big male slave waits. “My lady Glycera requires you,” the new one says.

“Where’s Ambracis?”

Tycho shakes his head; doesn’t know.

“Thale?”

Tycho looks at the floor.

“I see,” I say weakly. Animals, all of them, their lusts shimmering in the air all through the house and invading my dreams. And poor Tycho having to look and look for a woman to wake me, having to spy them at it, and finally having to get me himself and risk a whipping. I tell him, “It’s all right.”

“My lady says quickly,” the new slave says.

Tycho looks straight at me and shakes his head, minimally.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Now.” The big slave’s face is bold. “She says you’re to come now.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“She’ll be dead by morning.”

I’m so tired.

“Not my lady. The young one.”

“I don’t understand.”

The big slave actually turns and leaves the house, running home, I suppose, now that his message is delivered. And I’d go back to bed, too, if Tycho doesn’t say, “It’s not safe,” so then of course I have to defy him and go.

We’re in the street, me a little bear beside him in my furs, my breath white in the moonlight. Ice crusts the ground. Tycho walks slower and slower until finally he says, “Not this house.”

We’ve arrived.

Tycho says, “It’s a whorehouse, Lady. Everyone knows.”

Someone screams inside.

“You could sell me,” Tycho says.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” I say. “Nobody would want you, anyway. Wait here.”

The big slave is waiting in the doorway. We leave Tycho behind and he leads me to a room pulsing with light and pain. Lamps lamps lamps and a girl on the bed. So many women crammed in the tiny room, so many scents all clashing in panic. The girl on the bed is naked and the baby is coming. My dream, so.

What would my father do.

“Out.” I point at one girl after another. “Out, out, out.”

As they flee, one steps forward. She’s not like the others: scrubbed face, homely clothes, smelling of herself. She tells me
she’s the midwife. I see in her face judgment of me withheld. “Let me stay,” she says.

I nod. There are just four of us in the room now: the girl, the midwife, me, and the woman who hasn’t left, the one I can’t order about. “How is she?”

“Thank you,” Glycera says.

The girl screams again as the pains surge. The midwife puts a hand between the legs, checking something.

“She didn’t look pregnant,” I say.

“She wore a corset,” Glycera says.

The midwife makes a face. “You could have hurt the baby,” I say. “You must never corset a pregnant woman. My father taught me that.”

“Your father is here to help us now,” Glycera says to me. “I feel it. All right, now, Meda. All right. Look who we’ve brought to help us. It’ll all be over soon.”

I look at the midwife, who makes a wry face.

“I’m Pythias,” I say to her. “What’s your name?”

“Clea.”

The girl screams at a new pitch. Something inside her is changing.

“She started early this morning,” Clea the midwife says. “Want a look?”

She’s twice my age, and tolerating me with a patience that tells me there’s no real danger; I can’t understand why Glycera summoned me. I ask Glycera for clean towels and she hurries out.

“Her daughter,” I say.

“Her something.” Clea shows me the dark hot mess between
the girl’s legs, the pee smell and the blood and the drenched black curls. Expertly she inserts her fingers. “She’s doing fine.”

The girl throws up just as Glycera returns with the towels. “Water,” I tell her, and she goes back out. I clean up the vomit and wipe the girl’s face.

The midwife has stationed herself at the end of the bed, between the girl’s legs. “We’re going to push soon,” she tells me.

“Meda,” I say loudly. “We’re going to push, Meda.”

“Like using the pot,” Clea says.

“Like using the pot,” I tell Meda. “You’re going to push like you’re using the pot. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” the girl says.

“When the next pain comes.” Clea touches her belly, looks down below. “Ready?”

The girl screams and pushes. I feel Glycera’s shadow in the doorway, but she doesn’t come in. “Good, Meda, good!” I say.

“Two or three more like that,” Clea says.

She pushes again as the next pains come: two, three, four times. Clea dips her fingers in a dish on the floor and massages where the baby’s coming. When she sees me looking, she explains. “Olive oil.”

The girl screams again and Clea’s face changes; I can tell she’s got the head. Joy, briefly, then not. “Once more,” she tells the girl.

And the baby slides out wet and blue and cheesy. “Take it,” Clea barks. I hold out a towel to receive the baby while Clea cuts the cord. It’s turning pink already. It’s big and has a mat of black hair. Wide blue eyes. An innocent pink snarl: a harelip.

“Pretty boy,” I say, “pretty boy,” for Meda to hear, and Clea for the first time shoots me a poisonous look. I hold the baby while she finishes with the girl, the cord and the afterbirth, and then she takes the baby back from me. “Clean her up, will you?” she says. To Glycera: “Lady, your daughter is thirsty.”

Glycera disappears a third time.

I change the sheets and swab the blood from Meda. I wrap her in clean things and wipe her face again, and kiss her cheek, and tell her she’s done very, very well. The baby goes quiet. When I turn back to Clea, she’s got the baby swathed head to toe so you can’t see any part of him. Even his face.

Glycera drops the cup in the doorway.

“Stillborn,” Clea says. “I’m so sorry.”

Glycera starts to cry. She sits on the bed next to Meda and takes her in her arms and they cry together, racking sobs.

“No,” I say. I feel logic in me, cold and strong, pushing down everything else. “No.”

Clea uncovers the baby’s face to show me. I touch the cheek. Clea has cleaned him; no more mucus, no more cheese. She holds the little body out and I take it. I press my cheek to the little dead one, still warm.

Clea says, “Cry. Let it out.” But nothing comes out of me.

We leave Glycera and Meda in the room. Clea carries the baby clutched to her chest like it’s still alive. Tycho stands when he sees us.

“Where will you take it?” I ask.

The midwife shakes her head.

“Why?”

“He couldn’t have latched on to the breast. He would have starved. This was quicker. Kinder.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, Pythias.” She tries to smile and I see that, like me, she is crying all over the inside of her face. “I’ve seen it many, many times. You were a great help to me tonight. I thought my lady had lost her reason, calling you, but she’s always proved herself an astute judge of character. Always, and she wasn’t wrong about you, either. Your grandfather was a doctor, she told me.”

I say, “You’ve helped Glycera’s daughters—many times, then?”

“Many times.”

“Where will you take him?”

She looks at me for a long moment.

“I’ll bury him,” she says simply. “With a friend. He won’t be alone.”

A
T THE GATES TO
Artemis’s sanctuary, I tell Tycho to go back to the house. “Mule!” I say, when he doesn’t move.

“Yes, Lady.”

“Go!”

“Yes, Lady.”

He stands lumpishly until a light approaches from deep in the complex. The head priestess holds a lamp up, her face an enquiry. I can tell she was sleeping.

“Make him go.” I wipe my wet face with the back of my hand. “Make him go.”

She does something to the inside of the gate and it opens enough to admit me to the outer sanctuary. She closes it quickly again behind me, though Tycho doesn’t move.

“Go!” I order one more time, harsh as I can, and that is the last I see of him for many days.

“You’re bleeding.” The priestess leads me to an alcove, where she lights more lamps from the one she’s holding. My clothes are bloody from the birth and I smell of Meda’s vomit. “Who did this to you?”

“No one.”

More priestesses appear, silently. They want to bathe me before I go inside; then they want me to sit on the steps by the goddess and recover myself that way. I tell them what
I
want.

“Indeed.” The priestess who admitted me takes my hands in hers, looks at them. Filthy. “One of your slaves?”

I shake my head.

“The baby died?”

I don’t answer.

“Yes.” She smoothes my hair back from my face, like Herpyllis used to. “It hurts everywhere, doesn’t it?”

I spend the night on a cot in the alcove, attended by the head priestess herself. She sits by me, sometimes humming a little. She has a husband and three children at home, she tells me; she had to send a slave to tell her household she’d be away for the night. She inherited the priesthood from her mother and her grandmother before her. I try to imagine her down on the rug in front of her hearth, playing horsey, giggling with her sons. She has a kind, tired face. “I thought you disliked children,” I say. “That day I first came to the temple—”

“I thought that was what you needed to hear. Sleep, now.”

The next morning, she takes me into the room where they bathe and tells me to take off my clothes. She walks a circle around, tapping her lips with her fingers, while two other priestesses stand ready to assist her.

“What’s this?” she asks of the scar Myrmex gave me on my thumb.

“My brother and I were fighting. It was an accident.”

She runs her finger along it. “That must have hurt.”

“No.”

Around and around she goes. “Any pains anywhere? Ever been sick as a child, really sick? Ever had an injury?” No, no, no. “Are you a virgin?” Yes. “Will you let me see?” Yes. I lie down on a blanket the attendants spread for me, and spread my legs. She kneels down and peers.

“I didn’t know you could tell that by looking,” I say.

“The hole goes slack when it’s used.” She stands and signals I may do the same. The attendants give me back my clothes.

“It doesn’t matter so much, really, virginity,” the priestess says while she waits for me to dress. “We’re obliged to check, but it doesn’t really affect what you can do here. I think perhaps in the old days it mattered more. One of those old traditions we cling to, yes? But perhaps without meaning, in the modern world.”

“I love the old traditions,” I say, because I guess she does, too.

“You were honest with me, anyway,” she replies. “That matters more.”

We return to the big room, where a committee has assembled. The head priestess announces I am whole. “No significant blemishes, no scars. All fingers and toes.”