The Sweet Girl (3 page)

“You
have
encouraged her to flourish,” Krios says to Daddy.

“It’s getting to be a problem,” Daddy says.

When their laughter dies down, Krios says, “The question, then, is whether little Athena is unique, or whether she is an example of what many girls could be, if they were encouraged by such fathers.”

“Is that the question?” Daddy says. “You’ve hijacked the evening, pet.”

“I’m Daddy’s shadow,” I say, because I want to tell him I love him.

“A freak.” A new voice: Akakios. “Oh, I don’t mean that unkindly. But how could such a great man produce an ordinary child? The tallest mountains have the tallest shadows. She’s not representative of her sex. She’s the exception that proves the rule.”

Daddy bows, acknowledging the compliment.

“If he’s right, child, you’re destined for loneliness,” Krios says.

“Only in the company of women,” Daddy says. “She’ll be all right so long as she has books.”

“You’ll have to find a husband willing to supply her,” Akakios says.

“
If
he’s right,” Krios repeats.

He looks at me, and I see him thinking,
Go on, little Athena
.

“How many of you have daughters?” I ask.

Again that silence as they absorb the sound of my voice.

“Many of us,” Akakios says, when it becomes clear they’re not going to offer a show of hands.

“Can they read books?” I ask. “Not just household accounts. I mean real books.”

No reaction.

“Could they?” I ask. “If you tried to teach them? If an ass could read, would it be wrong to teach it?”

“Would it be wrong not to?” Krios says.

“Would the ass be worse off?” Akakios asks. “Would it be unhappy?”

“Ah,” Daddy says. “
That’s
the question.”

“Did you like that, pet?” Daddy asks when the last guest is gone.

“Very much.”

“Shall our subject be animals next time?”

“Yes, please.”

“They liked you,” Daddy says. “You made them think.”

We pause at the door to my room. He kisses the top of my head.

“Will I be lonely?” I ask.

He smiles. “Of course,” he says. “Does that frighten you?”

“Are you lonely?”

“Of course.”

“But you have us.”

“I do,” he says. “I have Herpyllis for when I’m cold, and Nico for when I want to laugh. And I have you, Pytho.”

I wait while he thinks.

“For when you want to remember Mummy,” I supply, finally, to spare us both.

He looks surprised. “That, too,” he says. “But I was going to say: I have you, my Pytho, for when I want to think about the future.”

I go up on my tiptoes and kiss his cheek. He clears his throat and stalks off to his bed.

Daddy is as good as his word, and soon Herpyllis is saying he’s completely lost his reason. He arranges displays of skeletons in the big room and has Tycho stack crates of live specimens in the courtyard. It’s Herpyllis’s job to feed them, which means it’s really Nico’s and mine. Birds, lizards, frogs, rabbits, turtles, and a weasel Nico names Nipper.

“Well, don’t keep sticking your fingers in.” I squeeze his hand with a rag until the bleeding stops. “I wonder what he’s going to do with them all.”

“Dissect them, of course,” Nico says.

“After he’s finished, I mean.”

Nico trickles some grain through the roof of the birdcage, startling the pigeons. “You’re going to be soup, yes you are,” he coos.

I squeeze a sponge over the frogs. Daddy says we have to keep them moist. “I wonder what Herpyllis will do with these?”

“Feed them to the dogs?”

“Feed them to Daddy’s students.” We giggle. “Roast frog with walnuts.”

“Figs,” Nico says. “I don’t like walnuts. Hey, you’re bleeding.”

I wipe my hands on my dress. “That’s yours.”

“No, not there. At the back.”

I twist my skirts around and see the red-brown stain.

“Mummy!” Nico hollers. “Pytho sat on something sharp.”

“You great lump,” I say. “It means I can have a baby now.”

Nico giggles.

“Shut up,” I say.

“You shut up. You need a man to have a baby. He has to stick his penis in your hole.”

“Thank you, Nico,” Herpyllis says, coming into the courtyard. She takes one look at me and sweeps me away to her room. “Almost thirteen summers,” she says. “About time.”

“I’m not getting married.”

“Yes, you are.” Herpyllis strips me and calls for a basin of water and clean rags. “It’s straight from here to the temple. We’ve had a man waiting there all this past year. He’s very ugly and he has very bad breath.”

“Stop it.”

“Well, of course you’re not getting married yet.” She shows me how to wind the rag around and tie it in place. “You know Daddy’s views. Eighteen summers, at least. That’s years and years away.”

“That’s ancient. Gaiane’s the same age as me, and she’s getting married this summer.”

Herpyllis stops wringing out my bloody dress and puts her hands on her hips. “So now you
do
want to be married?”

“I didn’t say that!”

“You want to argue with me, is what you want. Like every other girl your age wants to argue with her mother.” I don’t correct her.

The next morning Herpyllis hustles me off to the temple, with gold coins and a bottle of perfume and the good wine she was saving for Daddy’s name day. Daddy frowns, but says nothing. Tycho follows a little way behind us, carrying a bag of my old toys. I wrote the dedication out myself:

At the time of her menarche, Pythias consecrates to Artemis the ball that she loved, the net that held her hair; and her dolls, as is fitting; Pythias the virgin, to the virgin goddess. In return, spread your hand over the daughter of Aristotle and watch piously over this pious girl
.

I had a little fight with Herpyllis this morning when I tried to keep back Pretty-Head. I don’t play with her or sleep with her anymore, but my mother sewed her for me, embroidered tiny pink roses on the hem of her dress. I like to stare at the
tiny complication of those roses and imagine my mother straining her eyes over the stitches. I don’t really remember her, and what I do recall—a gruff woman with heavy brows and a harsh voice who carried me on her hip while she barked at everyone but me—I’ve been told is wrong. I don’t care: I know what I know. Sometimes when I’m fierce with Nico I feel her in me, surging up, and I feel safe and strong.

Herpyllis won that fight, though. “I don’t care,” Herpyllis says now as we walk. “You don’t skint the goddess. I knew a girl when I was young, her mother gave second-best oil, and she never had a child. Walk straight, Pytho. Everyone doesn’t need to know.”

“It feels like it’s slipping.”

“It’s fine. You’ll get used to it. Don’t sit down, that’s all, until we get home, and then it won’t soak through your clothes. You have to rinse it right away and hang it to dry in your room so Daddy doesn’t have to see it.”

“I know.”

“Listen, though.” She stops in the road, puts her hands on my shoulders. “You have to thank the goddess properly. No mistakes. She’ll know if you don’t get it right.”

I think of Daddy, his dry scepticism. “How will she?”

“She sees. Like Daddy, but without all the cutting.”

I take the stopper from the perfume and sniff. “Oh, Herpyllis, no. This is your best.”

“Yes, it is.”

In the temple we make our offerings and pray. I do everything in the right order, and I can see Herpyllis is happy. But the ritual is one thing; my feelings are another. I find I can’t be
thankful for the mess coming out of me and the prospect of some pimply boy breathing his halitosis into my mouth, but I can think of Herpyllis giving up her nicest perfume on my account and find loving tears in myself that way. I kiss Pretty-Head and stroke the little stitches on her dress one last time, then lay her with the other offerings. Herpyllis kisses me when we’re done, wipes her eyes and mine, and says nothing all the way home, but holds my hand in hers. Her joy spills into me. Borrowed joy, but genuine enough to please the goddess, I hope.

At home, a strange boy is rapping his knuckles on our gate. My age, roughly. He wears a pack. His feet are filthy and raw, but his clothes are decent enough.

“You have to knock harder than that,” Herpyllis says. “How will we possibly hear you?”

He turns his startled face to hers. Black eyes, black hair, hurt mouth; the bruise is almost gone, but not the swelling. He looks at me.

“Fetch Daddy,” Herpyllis says. Her voice has hardened almost imperceptibly; the boy won’t have heard the difference. “Are you hungry?” she says.

“Yes.”

Deep voice. Older than I thought, by a year or two; he’s small for his age.

“Go,” Herpyllis says, sharply now, because I haven’t moved.

I come back with Daddy and an apple. Herpyllis is holding a letter. The boy takes the apple and looks at me again, nods. Daddy takes the letter and reads.

“And here I thought I knew all my cousins,” he says after a while. “Well. Shall we go in?”

“No,” Herpyllis says later that afternoon, for the twentieth or thirtieth time. “We don’t have room. He’d have to sleep in the stables.”

“He could share with Nico.”

“Absolutely not. We know nothing about him.”

“There’s that empty room in the servants’ wing.”

“Which you use for specimens. Where would you like us to move those to?”

“Just think of him as a bigger specimen,” I say.

“Now, now.” Daddy stands up. “A little charity, please, both of you. Imagine yourselves in his situation, sent away from his family because they can’t afford to keep him. Thrown on our mercy. He’s probably terrified. Where is he now, in the kitchen? Send him to me when he wakes up.”

“I’ve never seen anyone eat the core of an apple,” I say to Herpyllis when Daddy’s gone back to his room. The new boy’s sleeping on a mat by the hearth; Nico’s running wild somewhere with his friends, and doesn’t know yet about his new brother. “Where did he come from, again?”

“Amphissa, he says.”

“You don’t like him.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“Why not?”

She looks at me. “I have no idea.”

“I like him,” I say.

“I know, sweetheart.” She stands and kisses the top of my head. “You hold on to that. I think he has a hard path ahead of him.”

“Why?”

She ruffles my hair, and goes to start cleaning out the specimen room.

I go to the kitchen. He’s awake on his mat, and his eyes flare when he sees me. He sits up. I ask him what happened to his mouth. He doesn’t answer.

“What’s your name?” he says. That unexpectedly deep voice again, music I’m still getting used to.

“Pythias.”

“Your mother doesn’t like me.”

“She’s not my mother. Are you hungry?”

“Starving.”

I get bread and cheese from the shelf. “Does it hurt to chew?”

“A little. But the tooth is tightening up.”

“Did it happen before you left, or on the way?”

He rips the crust off and leaves it on the plate. “Before,” he says through a soft mouthful.

“What did you do?”

“Kissed a girl,” he says. I laugh. He shakes his head without looking up from his plate.