The Sweet Girl (21 page)

“No.”

“It’s not for us to pick and choose the blessings of the gods. Milk is a gift. To the baby, to Meda, and to my household, which benefits from the money she brings in. I really don’t care
what you think of us. Follow this road straight to the market, then go up the weavers’ alley. She’s the seventh door on the right.”

I thank her.

“Good luck,” she says. “For your girl’s sake. I’m sure
you’ll
be just fine.”

Just at the bottom of the hill is Tycho: my lie to the widow made manifest. The goddess put him on her palm and blew him here, like chaff. How else?

“Lady,” he says, “Lady.” He’s wringing his hands, shifting from foot to foot like he has to pee. “There’s a man at the house. He says he lives there.”

“Yes.” I start walking the straight road to the market, as the widow directed. Tycho follows. “His name is Euphranor. The house belongs to him.”

“Lady,” he says. Surely it’s the goddess sparking in him, her spirit inhabiting his body, moving him along like a puppet. I left him past sight and speech; how else is he so quickly recovered? “Lady, he walked right in the front gate, calling for you. Laughing.”

“That’s not possible. I just talked to him. He was just here. How can he be in two places at once?”

We walk together for a while, not talking. I feel ragged with confusion.

“I’m sorry,” I say finally. “I’m sorry I left you.”

“Lady,” the goddess says.

“You were kind to me. You took care of me. You deserved better from me.” The goddess looks confused. “Release me from your service.” Now the goddess looks afraid. “I know I still owe you a debt, and I’ll find a way to pay. I will. But you have to release me.”

“Lady, you’re ill,” the goddess says.

Odd how she can so completely resemble Tycho, with his mud-brown eyes and soldier’s stubbled head, the great bulk of him, even his leathery smell. My father, in me, begins to wonder about the mechanics of divine possession. Perhaps Tycho acts as a kind of filter or shell, and something of him remains even as the goddess shines through the cracks and pinholes. Perhaps Tycho’s still here, somehow—confused, terrified, but here. Perhaps I need to speak
to
Tycho rather than around him; perhaps the goddess is not as free as I thought.

I set the implement down at my feet and take both his hands in both of mine. “I free you, Tycho,” I say. This is as public a declaration as any; market-goers flow around us like water, looking openly, crooked-smiling. “I free you, Tycho, from service to my father’s house, as a reward for your loyalty to him and to me.”

Release me, Lady
.

“Lady, no.” Tycho shakes his head, like I’m three again. “Your father required me to serve you until your marriage. I obey your father.”

I let his hands go. “I free you!” I say loudly. Around me, people are laughing.

“Lady.” Tycho picks up the implement for me. “You can’t free me. A girl can’t.”

I snatch the implement back and run. I lose him quickly enough in the crowd, and then there’s the seventh door, which opens for me just as I’m raising my fist.

Clea sets me to memorizing aphrodisiacs. Not the hocus-pocus of Herpyllis’s world—the iunx spells and burnt offerings and midnight mutterings—so much as the kind of science that would have pleased Daddy. Mostly, Clea explains, we prescribe seediness: quince, sesame, pomegranate. Olive oil for lubricant, honey for sweetness. I must look stupid because she says, “Not off a spoon.”

I’m sent into the back room when she meets with clients, mostly well-to-do women trying to conceive, or woo back wayward husbands; sometimes young bridegrooms who can’t persuade their wives to—

I listen at the door. Clea is patient, serious, respectful, never lewd.
Perhaps
, Clea says, and
Have you considered?
The clients tell her everything, quicker than I would ever have guessed.
She only likes it this way, he wants me to put my finger up there, she says it hurts, he always cries after
. They pay nicely for Clea’s advice, and we sell oils and creams and other things. After, sometimes, she’ll raise her eyebrows at me, knowing I’ve had my ear to the door. She says there’s nothing she hasn’t heard at least two or three times a week for most of her adult life.

She explains the business to me the night I arrive. Not sex, but the before and after: aphrodisiacs and midwifery, contraception and abortion. She is as two-faced as her work. Quiet
and modest with her clients; frank and easy with her friends, the others with whom she shares her house. In the evening, they drift in: three more midwives, plus a couple of men who have no clear occupations—assistants, security, companions—it’s all fluid. They sit around the big room late into every night, eating and drinking and laughing and singing and telling stories. I understand they have no family but each other. They are dregs who have drifted to the bottom and settled together.

“Who’s this?” one of the men asks the first night. His name is Candaules. A pair of hunting dogs nip at his heels and he carries a new-born puppy, whose head he knuckles while it blinks blissfully.

“This is Pythias,” Clea says. “She’s with me.”

“I thought I was with you,” Candaules says.

Clea takes the puppy from his arms and kisses its face and hands it back to him with a smile. “There’s lots of Clea to go around.”

That first night I keep to the corners, cooking and tidying and playing with the dogs and puppies. There are always puppies underfoot, play-fighting or looking for a cuddle, reminding me of Nico. The big room is high-ceilinged and dark, smoky from the brazier in the middle of the floor, around which they lay their sleeping mats. They drink themselves to sleep. They smoke, too, from a pipe that makes them happy. One of the men whittles phalluses, life-size and a little bigger; Clea explains we sell those, too. We sleep all about on the floor around the brazier, much like puppies ourselves, under mounds of blankets in the warm puppy-smelling dark. Their voices continue even after the fire is down to embers.
I learn the language of sex, a language hidden in plain sight:
tumbling chariots, visiting the sausage-seller, the double scull, the smelter, the trireme, the lioness on a cheese grater
. They laugh and laugh. They kiss and sigh and cry out. I sleep between Clea and the wall, facing the wall while she services Candaules, who favours the
wicker basket on horseback
, and later another midwife, who shares with Clea
a sparrow’s breakfast
.

“No one will touch you,” she whispers over her shoulder, sensing my sleeplessness, deep in the night. “I told them you were mutilated, and in great pain.”

“Thank you,” I whisper.

I can’t have another
, I hear, more than once a day.
It’ll kill me. It’s too soon. It’s too late. I’m exhausted. Give me something. There must be something
.

There’s always something. Cheesecloth, if he doesn’t mind. A douche, after. Counting the days. Clea teaches them the safe days and they nod, doubtfully. They’re desperate; nothing feels safe. If it’s already begun, there are teas for sale. Sometimes they’ll lie down on the table and Clea will have a look, feel around, and ask me to fetch a tool she has that’s smaller than my implement. There’s crying then, pain and blood, and afterwards a good deep sleep while we change the laundry and prepare a child’s meal of warm milk and sweet bread for the woman. Clea instructs them how to explain it to the husband: a miscarriage brought on by exertion. She is to tell him she needs rest, much rest, and no relations for—”

“How old is your youngest?” Clea will ask, and the woman will say, and Clea will tell her a number of moons, and say, “How does that sound?”

They will nod, weakly.

When the women are gone, Clea cleans her equipment.

I go into private homes with her, to assist at births. I am calm and quiet and play up my Athenian accent; the grandmothers take to me. There are no live births. Each time, she sends me back to the house to tell one of the men she needs a puppy.

“Why?” I ask the first time.

“To be kind,” Clea says. “We strangle the puppy and bury them together. That way, the baby won’t be alone.”

I join them now in the evenings around the brazier with my cup of wine.

“I had a good one today,” one of the women will begin.

They tell work stories, sad stories, bawdy stories, sex stories. The brazier crackles, the puppies sigh in their sleep, the wind rages outside. While they talk, I drift into myself. I hear and don’t hear their tales of the prostitute who served an entire unit in one night and walked away after; the girl who pushed out four babies, one after another, like a cat’s litter; the man who tallied his lays by notching his lintel every morning upon his return, until the morning it collapsed and killed him. I hear
and don’t hear their tales of the newest priestess of Aphrodite, the one who has to wear a veil in the temple so the goddess won’t get jealous (good advertising, the midwives agree; no one has yet seen her face, though people flock to the temple now to catch a glimpse of her; probably quite plain, though with a graceful walk; the midwives have been to see for themselves); the preternaturally beautiful baby born to Achilleus the architect’s wife, who tells anyone who will listen that the pleasure of his conception was so extreme that she suspects divine interference (Achilleus the architect will nod, apparently pacifically, during these confessions, as though modestly conceding that yes, yes, it’s possible he was possessed by a divine sexual fire, after all look at the infant, that hair, that skin, those eyes!, and what if he himself is a short stout bald worrying man whose wife is taller and louder than he is, what if?); the man the midwives themselves pay to cock around town, putting it wherever he can to keep them all in business.