The Sweet Girl (28 page)

“Snitty,” I say, and he agrees that’s even better.

“What
did
Daddy teach him, do you suppose?” I ask. “I mean, that stuck.”

He thinks for a moment, then says we should get going.

At the farm, he tells me to wait at the edge of a muddy field. When he wades out into the middle of it with a blanket, he
disappears to the ankles. Tycho and I watch him lay the blanket flat and tromp back.

“Tycho will hold your sandals,” Nicanor says.

He takes my hand and leads me through the sucking mud to the blanket, while Tycho waits with his back to us at the edge of the field with our horses and Snitty and my sandals and the picnic. I lie down on my back. My husband lowers himself onto me, eyes closed. It takes a while, but finally his seed comes. He lets his full weight rest on me while his breathing recovers. When he gets off me, I reach down and wipe some of the seed onto my fingers. It’s like mucus. I fling what I can into the field, and he offers me the hem of his clothes to wipe the rest on. I think of the women drugged by the god. This is nothing like that. This is bright sun, cold, mud, and my husband unsmiling. This is outdoors, daytime, bright pain, and cold. He pats my shoulder and walks away.

We return to Tycho, who’s laid out the picnic. I take my sandals and a towel and tell them I’m going to the river to wash off. When I come back, they’re sitting together, eating, talking. When Tycho sees me, he starts to get up, but I tell him, “Stay.”

Our lunch is bread and cheese. Nicanor has rigged up a bar over a cook fire so he can hang a pot from it to heat something for us to sip. Hot water. They’re talking about crops.

“My father belonged to a farmer,” Tycho says. “I lived with him until my beard came in. I can tell you what I know.”

Teach
, he can’t bring himself to say.

“I would be grateful,” Nicanor says.

“I didn’t know that about you,” I say to Tycho.

“Lady,” he says, ducking his head in acknowledgement. He hesitates, then says to Nicanor, “It’s good here.”

Nicanor looks up at him.

“Good air, good water, good soil.” He’s holding Nicanor’s gaze, unusually. “Quiet.”

“It
is
quiet,” Nicanor says.

“A good place to come,” Tycho says.

Nicanor nods.

Tycho leaves us then, ostensibly to look at what needs doing first to the farmhouse.

“A bit forward, that one,” Nicanor says.

“Daddy was the one who bought him when his beard came in,” I say. “For heavy work. I’ve known him all my life. He’s loyal, but he does always find a way of saying what’s on his mind.”

“He wants me to farm,” Nicanor says.

“Apparently.”

We pack up the lunch things, and Nicanor kicks dirt over the fire.

“Well.” I flutter my fingers towards the fields. “Same time next year?”

I win another smile. He slings an arm across my shoulders and squeezes, briefly. “Sure,” he whispers into my hair.

Back at home, there’s a commotion in front of our house. An enormous cart is tethered out front, and Olympios is supervising the unloading of a massive marble sculpture. “The other one’s already inside,” he says, when we come close.

They lean the two pieces up side by side in the courtyard. “Do you know about this?” Nicanor asks, while the driver waits, narrow-eyed, for his pay.

I’m blank, and it’s Tycho who answers. I remember as he’s saying it: Daddy sent Simon to Athens to commission statues to Zeus and Athena to commemorate Nicanor’s safe return. They’re to be erected in Stageira, but the cost of transport being what it was, Daddy only wanted to pay to have them sent as far as Chalcis; we’d have to take them the rest of the way ourselves. They’ll watch us from now on: Zeus, big-chested and big-bearded, with the piercing eyes; Athena of the clear brow and crested helmet. Here they will remain for many months, eerie at first and later familiar, finally just furniture.

Nicanor pays the driver and says he’s going to his room. He asks Tycho to send his tray there. I feel the ghostly throb of him still in my vagina, but realize we have had no easy breakthrough, and there will be no cosy cuddling in the marital bed tonight. We have done what we can to ensure agricultural good luck, and who knows what soup is cooking inside me now, but in his mind my husband is still in Egypt, Persia, Bactria, Kandahar, India, Babylon—torching villages, raping peasant girls, starving, night-marching, eternally suffering under the obsession of an eternally suffering king. Wren bones and fish glue, indeed.

I could end it here. But there is one more thing to mention: a gift I asked of my husband, a wedding gift. At first he was reluctant.

“Oh, pink cloth,” I said. “Poof. Pink cloth. What am I supposed to do with that, sew myself a dress?” The chick was done by then, as done as he was going to be, and hanging from the ceiling in the big bedroom by a piece of thread. He flew in the slightest breeze. I don’t see what’s gruesome.

“Fine,” my husband said. “But don’t come crying to me when you have regrets.” We weren’t sharing the room—probably never would—but we used it for private conversations, particularly concerning the servants. It was high spring by then, and he was mostly living at the farm, camping out there with the men he employed. He came home every now and then for a bath and a meal, and some evenings when he’d seemed less distant than usual I’d visit him in his room, then return to my own for sleep. He’d got the good Euboia dirt grained into his hands by then, under the nails, and maybe he drank a little less. I never asked him, nor Thale neither, who kept the stores and would know.

“You’ll have to come with us, to the magistrate.”

“Have you considered terms?”

“As few as possible,” I said. “It’s what my father would have wanted.”

So today we return to the home of Plios the magistrate. My husband is resentful that I’ve kept him from the fields; he was late getting the seed in, and his inexperience makes him anxious. But then he is proud, too, shyly proud of the pale green nubs he’s already coaxed from the mud. I’ve begun a vegetable patch by the house so we’ll have something to talk about in the evenings. The first harvest from that patch, an early lettuce, I’ve brought as a gift for the magistrate’s wife. Tycho follows us
at his usual distance, leading Frost. Nicanor plans to ride straight from the magistrate back to the farm.

“I’ve been thinking I might do some teaching,” I say as we walk. “Girls from wealthy families. Do you remember Thaulos? He asked if I’d teach his daughter to read. Maybe a bit of math, a bit of biology. There’s a fashion for it.” I finger the stone and the snail-shell from Daddy’s school that I’ve taken to carrying in my pocket, lately, as talismans. I’ve already started with Pretty; she can say her alphabet very nicely, and she likes it when I draw numbers on her tickly back with my finger and she has to guess what they are. Slow Philo likes to watch us, squatting on his heels, clapping his hands when Pretty laughs. Once he held up three fingers to show her and said in his thick voice, “Three.”

Pretty looked at me. I told her she had two teachers now. Philo beamed.

“Not for money,” Nicanor says now.

“Of course not.”

“I wouldn’t set them on skeletons, either,” he says. “Not right away, anyway.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you to bring me a fox, if you find one. I’ve never done a fox. I know farmers kill them if they can.”

“Chicken farmers,” Nicanor says dismissively. Then: “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll ask Demetrios. He has traps.”

He’s made friends with Demetrios, and Euphranor, too, who is beyond deferential. Star-struck, almost, by my husband’s experiences in Alexander’s army, by his hard edge and remote silences. Star-struck, lovestruck. He looks a little silly, these days, Euphranor. But he’s helping enormously with the farm,
and says he’ll put my husband in touch with an honest dealer when it comes time to sell the harvest to Athens, in the fall.

“Come, Tycho,” Nicanor says. Tycho follows us through Plios’s gate. A slave leads us into an inner room, Plios’s office, where the magistrate rises from his desk to greet us. I’m heavily veiled; he ignores me.

“This is the fellow?” he asks, and Nicanor says yes.

“A great day for you,” Plios says to Tycho.

I pay the token coin to Plios—a privilege I had particularly asked of my husband. I wanted to do it myself. I put the coin on his desk, like a lady, so our hands won’t touch.

“You are no longer a slave,” Nicanor tells Tycho. “But your obligation to the family will remain until your death. You will come to us three times each month for instruction. These are the formal terms. Additionally, you will owe a freedman’s tax to the city. Any children you might have will be exempt from this tax. Plios the magistrate represents the city as our witness.”

“Children
I
might have?” Tycho says.

“Done!” Plios says, most jolly. “Now. Do we have time for a cup?”

A slave brings a tray with a jug and three cups for the men. Tycho looks like he’s going to throw up.

“Drink, man!” Plios says. “Look at him. He’s terrified. Where are the others, anyway? I thought we were doing four today.”

Of course, as magistrate, he’s read Daddy’s will:
And Tycho, Philo, Olympios, and his child shall have their freedom when my daughter is married
.

“Their terms are different,” Nicanor says. “No rush there.”

Outside, Nicanor mounts Frost. My hand has strayed to my belly again; I see him look, look away. “Walk her home, will you?” my husband says to Tycho. “I’ll be a week at least. Your lady will explain everything to you. So.” He spurs the horse and is gone, my unmoved mover: gone without a backward look.

He’ll probably remember my fox, though.

“Lady,” Tycho says. “I don’t have money for the tax.”

We walk; not home, but to the beach where my father swam and then washed up, where Euphranor saw my birthmark, where Myrmex and I fucked each other all ways. We sit on the flat rock where Daddy used to leave his clothes. “You can have the shed behind the stables,” I tell Tycho. The biggest of the outbuildings. “I’ve been fixing it up. It’s clean and dry, weather-tight. I put in a new bedroll, and a chair and a lamp, and a chest for your things. You’ll keep working for us, only we’ll pay you now. And you’ll have free time, to do what you want.”

We sit for a long time, quietly, as morning turns hot noon.

“Children,” he says.

I put my head on his shoulder, and after a while he puts his arm around me.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Huge thanks to Professor Susan Downie and Professor Shane Hawkins, of Carleton University; Professor Pauline Ripat and Professor Mark Golden, of the University of Winnipeg; and Professor Maria Liston, of the University of Waterloo, for sharing their vast knowledge.

Thanks to Anna Avdeeva for her generous gift of
Medicinal Plants of Greece
and Conni Bagnall for Robert Graves’s
The Greek Myths
.

Thanks to Anna Avdeeva, Amanda Holmes, Ariel Levine, and Christine Lorimer of Carleton University and the University of Winnipeg, who came to Aristotle’s Lyceum with me.

The poem Pythias reads on the road to Chalcis is from
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
, translated by Anne Carson.