The Sweet Girl (23 page)

We both look at the house.

“Vines don’t grow in winter,” I say. Like a test.

“We can’t cut them down,” Tycho says. “Blades can’t cut them.”

“It’s Dionysus, isn’t it. Euphranor is Dionysus.”

Tycho’s eyes skip over me, hair clothes feet, not settling anywhere for long. Taking my measure. He looks back at the house. “He’s been looking for my lady.”

“Is he—”

Tycho lets his eyes touch mine, so briefly. “No,” he says. “He’s brought order back to the house. It’s clean and tidy and we obey him. He treats us well. He’s kind. He’s been building up the storeroom, as well as he can this time of year. He only insists on order, cleanliness and tidiness. That and looking for you. He sends one or other of us out every day into the city, searching.”

Here, in the cold street with Tycho, these feel like my last moments of—what? The end of one life and the beginning of another. Lesser; another lesser life. That’s what I fear. That’s what keeps me out here, in the cold. Yet less than what? Did I have so much without knowing it? What did I have before that I don’t have now, that I could possibly recover in this world? Charon, indeed.

“There’s something else.” Tycho runs a hand over his stubble in that familiar gesture. “Someone else, another one. He comes every day. He comes to the gate and asks for you.”

A sound from inside the courtyard: horse’s hooves, a whinny, the clinking of tack. Someone is coming.

“Here.” Tycho leads me a little way down the street, out of sight of the gate. We step back into some trees and watch until the gate has opened and closed and Euphranor has ridden past
on his big black animal, not seeing us. Heading for the garrison. Handsome, today.

“A strange young man,” Tycho continues. “Every day for a week now he’s been coming, asking for you. He runs, though, if he gets the least smell of the master.”

“Strange how?”

“Familiar.” Tycho touches his stubble, his temples, covers his eyes, uncovers them, looks at me. “Lady?”

The glaze has returned.

“You should go in now,” I say, though it hurts me.

“I have to wait for my lady.”

“Yes.” I take from his hands the greasy cloth he used to cover his head against the cold. It’s big enough to cover me. “You should wait just inside the courtyard, there. Then they can bring your breakfast.”

He looks confused.

“Just inside the gate.” I give him a little push. “Then you can see the street and inside the house, too. It’s the best spot. Your lady wants you to wait there.”

He goes in. I go, too, not far; back to the spot in the trees where we watched Euphranor pass. I wrap the greasy cloth all around me, covering my body and my hair and most of my face, and squat like a beggar in case anyone should notice me.

I spend the day in sleep’s shallows, waking with a start at any sound or movement: the neighbours’ comings and goings, birdsong, peddlers with their rattling carts, calling out new milk and bread and fish and trinkets and remedies and firewood and water. I buy a drink and a cake from a man who, when
I touch my throat to fake muteness, takes me for a boy.
Here, lad
, he says, and gives me my right change. Each time I think I can’t sleep anymore, I’m off again, drifting, until the day’s gone and it’s dusk.

The street is busier now than it’s been all day: people returning home, the night vendors making their supper rounds, soldiers coming down off the hill for an evening in town. I watch a beggar approach our gate, a dirty, bearded boy with a bad limp. He doesn’t knock, but peers in like he’s trying to stick his head through the bars. After a few moments he steps back. The gate opens minimally, then shuts with a clang. Now the beggar has a heel of bread.

He turns in my direction and I see it’s Myrmex.

He passes me, close enough for me to see the limp is real, and I follow him down the hill and towards the ferry. But he turns left, along the shoreline to the beach where I took Daddy to swim in his last weeks. Down, down, down the long dunes tipped with shadows, and back into the trees, into a deep tangle where he must sleep. He could have looked back anytime and seen me; he didn’t. Coming closer, I see him bending over something on the ground, working at something: a fire. I don’t hesitate. When he hears the first stick crack under my foot, he jumps up and back, awkwardly, and I walk straight up to his astonished self and push him so hard he falls backwards. Down on his back and I keep coming, beating at his head and shoulders with fists, hurting him. He tries to bat my hands away from his nose and eyes, but doesn’t otherwise fight back. When I stop, he’s bleeding from his nose and lip, and crying a little, too.

I sit on a log and watch while he builds the fire into something usable. The light’s going fast now. By the time he’s done, I can’t see the tears or the blood.

“Pytho,” he says. Of course his voice plucks me like a lyre string.

He has a number of little packets of things, it turns out: kindling, dry clothes, dried fish, a leather roll of tiny knives I recognize as Daddy’s. He worries through all these packets, looking for something with an anxious fussiness I hadn’t known in him before. I accept some nuts and dried fruit without letting his hand touch mine. We sit across the fire from each other, warily eating.

“You’re dirty,” he says, after a while.

“You smell like pee and onions. What happened to your foot?”

He shakes his head.

“Fine,” I say, and then we’re not talking, again.

We finish eating and stare into the fire. After a while, he gets up and rummages around and throws a blanket at me. It hits me in the head. I wrap it around my shoulders. He sits shivering and I don’t care. I’m glad.

“How’s Nico?” he says finally.

“He went to Athens, to Theophrastos.”

“That’s good,” Myrmex says. “He’ll be safe there.”

“Herpyllis went to Stageira,” I say, when he doesn’t ask. He grunts. “What happened to your foot?”

“A man put it on a chopping block. I thought he was going to cut it off with his axe, but instead he used the butt end on my ankle. I don’t think it’s going to heal.”

The stars are out. The fire seethes, sounding like Herpyllis sucking her teeth in annoyance.

“I’m sorry, Pytho,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

Let it come.

“I thought I could help, if it means anything,” he says. “I took it to gamble, the money. I thought I could make more than enough for—”

Our wedding
, I think. I can’t stop myself. Of course that wasn’t what he was going to say, but my mind makes it anyway.

“They were going to send me home,” he says. “I wasn’t going back there. I was going to make enough so we could choose for ourselves, both of us.”

“Choose what?” I say softly.

He looks at me across the fire, utterly clear, utterly bleak. “Not that, little Pytho,” he says. Again: “I’m sorry.”

“You could have asked me. I would have given it to you. I would have given you everything. You didn’t have to leave. You could have just asked.”

He shrugs; such disinterest, now that suddenly I’m enraged. He doesn’t get to choose when
my
life is over.

“Here.” I hike my dress up to my thigh, rip off the pouch I have strapped there, and throw it at him across the fire. He catches it reflexively. “That’s my last. That’s everything I have. It’s yours now. You understand?”

He’s interested now. I can see he wants to look inside, to see how much is there. Instead he says, “I’m surprised Euphranor lets you carry money.”

“Euphranor?”

He looks confused; caught.

“You think I’m living in that house with Euphranor?”

“Where else?”

I stand up. The dress falls back down over my legs; the blanket falls from my back. “Look at me.
Look
at me. Do I look to you like I’ve been living in a house with a man?”

He looks. I think he looks at me properly for the first time in his life.

“Come here,” he says.

“Fuck you.”

“Come here. I don’t want this.” He holds out my pouch.

When I reach for it, he grabs my wrist, and we go where we’ve been heading since the day he arrived: hello and goodbye in the same breath. After, he wraps us both in the blanket and holds me until I fall asleep.

When I wake, he’s gone for good, with the money I carried in the pouch on my thigh, my last.

Kick, Pytho, kick.

I can’t.

You can. Daddy won’t let go. Kick, Pytho.

Pytho kicks. Pytho can see the bottom, the hot fine dry sand she plays in on shore now swirling, liberated by the water. Water isn’t blue when you splash it or pour it from your hands, but it looks blue when you look at the whole big sea. That’s interesting
.

Kick, sweet.

Pytho kicks, straining to keep her chin up. Daddy holds her hands, pulling her forward while he walks backwards. He’s letting his grip go softer and softer and Pytho knows he’s getting ready to let go and make her do it by her own self. She crab-claws his hands with hers so he can’t
.

Now put your face down.

That Pytho can do. She puts her face into the water, eyes wide open, and holds Daddy’s hands and kicks. She makes big splashes and wriggles her body and does silly-swimming
.

Good,
Daddy says when she stands up to catch her breath
. My little fishy. You’re a good swimmer.

I know,
Pytho says
.

Pytho is naked. Mummy’s Herpyllis is up on the beach with the picnic and the baby. Herpyllis doesn’t see why Pytho needs to learn to swim, but she isn’t Pytho’s mummy and she doesn’t decide. Daddy and Pytho decide. Mummy is down below, but Pytho will be down below one day too, so that’s all right for now. Meanwhile she’s nice to Herpyllis, because Herpyllis belonged to Mummy when she was alive and Mummy was nice to her. Pytho waves and Herpyllis waves back with the hand not holding the baby. Pytho decides she will give Herpyllis a present
.

Look at me!
she calls, and puts her arms over her head and dives into the water and kicks kicks kicks, all by her own self, until she comes up coughing. Daddy is right there and scoops her out of the water and holds her up to the sun, his pet fishy, and she can hear Herpyllis clapping and others on the beach too, people they don’t even know, and Daddy is hugging her and telling her she’s brave and strong and she did it all by herself
.

Again,
Pytho says
.

Again and again, all that afternoon, until she can swim even where her feet don’t reach the sand, and Daddy never gets bored and leaves her, not even for a minute
.

“Hold still,” Glycera says. “This is going to hurt.”

She rips the wax from my eyebrow and I say a word.

“Don’t be coarse,” Glycera says. “Other one.”

This time I’m silent, though my eye cries from the pain. Just the one eye. That’s interesting.

“Much more effective than tweezing. The redness will fade in a few hours.” She picks up my hand, looks at my fingernails, and makes a face. “They’ll grow back, I suppose. Still. How did you let things go that far? I’ve never understood girls who don’t care for their bodies. Men either, for that matter. My husband always let me take care of him that way. It’s who I am, I suppose. You express your inside through your outside, no? Clean and tidy?”