The Sweet Girl (5 page)

T
HE KING IS DYING; THE KING DIES; THE KING IS DEAD
. I walk down to the shore to watch the gulls squabble over this morsel. At sixteen summers, I shouldn’t be going about alone. The trick is not to ask. Myrmex used to be my chaperone, but lately he fancies himself a strongman: hanging around the garrison, drinking with the soldiers, missing his classes with Daddy. He resents every minute he spends with the family. He carries a knife of extravagant length and detailing, paid for the gods know how. He still isn’t much taller than me. He’s always hefting things, trying to build up his arms. Daddy says this is a temporary infatuation, and will pass when he realizes fighting is intellectually unsatisfying.

I miss him, badly. I miss my friend, my brother. Lately, too, I miss the smell of him, and his snub nose and honey mouth and voice, the man who isn’t my brother. I think it’s his absence; if he were around more, things would go back to the way they were. Temporary infatuation, indeed.

I’ve brought the lentil pot just to have a reason to detour through the market and hear the gossip. Milk, cheese, olives, bread, nuts, herbs, fish, fruit, meat. High summer, the fat season. I wear a new muslin dress and veil and drift, listening. I feel pretty.
Babylon
, I hear. I know Babylon from Daddy’s maps.
A headache, a massive headache
. Can you die of that? I don’t ask it aloud, don’t have to.
No, it was the guts. He was in agony for a day and a night and then he died. They buried him there. No, they’re bringing him home. No, they were all wrong. He was alive. It was the double who’d died. They had a double who looked like him and appeared in public in his place. Assassins wouldn’t know the difference. Poison, it was poison, but it was the double who’d died. Not the king. Not yet
.

“Now, beauty,” the lentil seller says. “Red or green?”

I’m not a beauty, but I go to him in particular to hear the lie. I put the heavy pot on his table. “Green, please.”

“Lucky lentils,” he calls as he pours. “Favourite of the king.”

Laughter all around us, not kind. Why? But of course I know why. Athenians can remember the time before Macedon, the time when they were independent and powerful and glorious in their own right. It’s living memory; Daddy himself saw the battle where the king cut Athens down. They grumble and chafe and snigger and sneer, and fail to notice the Macedonian girl with the Athenian accent who understands more about democracy and empire than they ever will.

The pot’s heavy; I balance it on my hip like the servant women do. I want to buy a bird, too, feeling momentousness in the air, but Herpyllis is possessive of the marketing and will find something wrong with it. I can do the heavy pots, but the party pieces she likes to save for herself.

The walk to the beach is long with the pot denting my hip. Tycho wants to carry it, but he already has the towels and lunch and waterskins and my books. We scramble over the hot rocks, away from the popular swimming spots, until we find a deserted scythe of sand at the bottom of a steep rock-dislodging scramble, sheltered by cliffs, with a little sea cave for privacy. I undress and dive into the water while Tycho sinks sticks in the sand and arranges a little oilskin tent for me. When I come out the lentil pot has disappeared, probably into his pack. He’s put my food on plates, poured me a cup of water, and arranged my
books in the tent, then gone to sit some distance away on the rocks, staring out to sea.

I eat and drink and pick at the blister from the lentil pot puffing on my palm. I build an obstacle course for the thumbnail–sized crab I’ve brought up from the water’s edge and watch him negotiate sand hummocks and rivulets of my drinking water. Once I look for Tycho and see him down at the water-line, picking shells from the kelp and sucking them out. Every now and then he splashes water on his bristly skull, cooling off.

Late in the afternoon, we pack for home. My palm’s seeping a little and I don’t ask for the pot. We stop by Gaiane’s house for a visit, but the slave who goes to her room to announce me returns saying she’s indisposed. She’s never turned me away before. But two babies in the four years since her marriage, one stillbirth, and pregnant again;
indisposed
. I don’t think anything of it.

Sure enough, Herpyllis has felt the turbulence as I have, in the cooking part of her brain, and has bought a pheasant on her own trip to the market. Nico, twelve summers now, is in the courtyard playing Greeks and Persians with the tail feathers. Herpyllis and I make a walnut sauce.

“Do you think it’s true?” she asks me, pausing the pestle.

Tycho appears at that moment to set the lentil pot just inside the kitchen doorway. I lift it to its place on the shelf.

“Yes,” I say. “I think it’s true.”

Herpyllis shakes her head, blinking hard.

At supper, when Daddy asks me how I spent my day, I tell him some of what I heard. Some, not all. I don’t tell him about the laughter.

“Never mind, pet,” he says. “He’s died at least a dozen times in the last year. He’ll die a few more before we need to start paying attention.”

Still, his long fingers fidget with a napkin. He’s a bad liar but a good worrier. If he really thought the rumour were true, there’d be tears. All the same, he doesn’t like to think of it; it upsets him. He was once like a father to the king, long ago, or so he likes to claim. Herpyllis is glaring at me for upsetting him.

“There was a nice breeze by the sea,” I say. “Cooler than in town. We should take a picnic sometime.” Her glare softens. “Just the four of us.” She smiles. “We could take the cart. Spend the day.”

My little brother groans.

“Absolutely not,” Daddy says. “Rattle my bones loose. I ache enough as it is. Do you want to finish me?”

Herpyllis immediately does a switchback. “You could have thought of that yourself,” she says to me. “You know your father hates the seaside.”

“Since when?” I say.

“Why don’t we eat cat?” Nico asks. Sweet, worried clown. I love his furrowed face. He holds something up on a knife. “Is this cat? It tastes like cat.”

“Daddy loves the seaside,” I say. “We all do.”

“I have gills,” Daddy confirms. He frowns at Nico’s knife. “It looks stringy enough for cat.” Nico giggles, but Daddy’s
eyes wander away and grow troubled. “Likely I’ll never see the sea again,” he says to none of us. He’s been saying things like this more and more lately, since he passed his sixtieth summer. The number bothers him.

“What does cat taste like?” I ask Nico.

He chews chews chews gulps, dead pleased. “Sweet and salty at the same time.”

“Disgusting child.” Herpyllis reaches over to wipe gravy from his cheek. “You know perfectly well it’s pheasant.” They have the same dark hair and green eyes, the same too-wide smile. I take after my own dead mother: lighter curls, deeper voice. I have our father’s eyes, though, that clear unlovely grey. Thinking is unlovely on a girl, Herpyllis has told me, though she likes to fix my hair and kiss my cheek when I’ll let her. She says kissing is good for the skin.

“Never again,” Daddy says again, a little sharper this time.

I reach across the table to squeeze his freckled, paper-skinned hand. “One day the sea will get tired of waiting and come to you. It’ll suck itself up into one big wave and come rolling across Athens until it reaches you. It’ll say,
Where have you been?
”

“Will it bring specimens?” Daddy says. “I haven’t looked at new marine specimens in so long. I used to take the king looking for specimens, when he was just a boy. Did I ever tell you how I taught him to swim? He was afraid until I taught him.”

“The king was never afraid,” Nico says.

Daddy leans forward. “He tried not to show it, but I knew. Have I never told you that story?”

Herpyllis and I look at each other. Her lips quirk ever so slightly. I have to look away so I won’t smile.

Daddy tells Nico for the fortieth or fiftieth time how he taught the king to open his eyes underwater, a skill my brother and I have had since babyhood. “It is impossible for sea water to hurt the eyes,” Daddy says. “Your eyes already contain salt water. You’ve tasted your tears, haven’t you?”

Nico nods. Daddy often encouraged us to poke and taste and smell our various excretions, to learn about the workings of our bodies. “Why does the sea sting, then?”

“Algae, perhaps,” Daddy says. “Tiny bits of it. Pythias?”

“Daddy?”

“You’ll stay home tomorrow, please, and help me with my books.”

A job I like, the periodic tidying of his library, and the glimpse of books I’m not normally allowed to see. Plus he likes to talk about his work at such times, and show me his collections and drawings.

“Well, I’m going hunting,” my brother says. He’s recently made himself a lot of equipment: bow and arrows, a fishing rod, and a stick lashed to a flint blade for a spear. He and his friends set out every morning insisting it’ll be rabbit for supper.

“No,” Daddy says. “You’ll help, too. We’re all staying home tomorrow.”

Nico looks at Herpyllis with do-something eyes. She opens her mouth to speak when we hear loud laughter from outside the front gate. Male, more than one. A moment’s quiet, the sound of a flute, then more laughter. We hear them move off down the street, singing.
Calliope’s daughter, Calliope’s daughter
 …

“Drunks,” Daddy says. “No, sit down. You don’t need to go look.”

My brother sits back down and starts hacking at the remains on his plate. He’s sulking. Suddenly he yelps. He’s cut himself, drawing a bead of blood above one knuckle, black in the lamplight.

“Let me see.” I make a tourniquet with my napkin and hold it tight until the bleeding is staunched. Daddy’s taught me everything he knows about doctoring. I can splint a sprain, lance an abscess, bring down a fever, probably even deliver a baby. He’s shown me his tools and described the process. I kiss the tip of Nico’s finger and wipe pain-tears from his cheeks with my thumbs. “Stupid boy.”

“Stop it,” he says. “Stop treating me like a baby.”

Daddy pushes his plate away. “The Athenians don’t know what’s good for them. I’ll speak to the king when he comes home, explain the situation. If he spent more time here, if they got to know him—”

Daddy and the king haven’t spoken since Nico was born, when the army left Pella and we came to Athens.

“I’ll write him tomorrow,” Daddy says. “The army will take it in dispatches. They know who I am.”

Nico yawns. Herpyllis starts clearing the table, sorting what she can save for soup, scraping our plates onto hers.

“May I go to the garrison with you when you deliver it?” I ask. “I haven’t seen Myrmex in days.”

“No,” Daddy says.

The next morning there’s a pile of excrement in front of our gate and more daubed on our outside walls. Tycho and another of our slaves, Pyrrhaios, set grimly to work cleaning it off.

“Dog
and
cow,” Nico says. “Man, too.” He went to see; I wasn’t allowed. The stench in our yard is everything the drunks intended. Daddy has been in his library since before dawn, Herpyllis says; he’s slept poorly for years. He’s told her he’s working—probably on his letter to the king—and will call us when he’s ready for our help. We don’t know if he’s smelled the insult.

Herpyllis sits in the inner courtyard, fiercely carding wool. Nico and I fence for a while with the pheasant feathers and then Herpyllis calls me over to do my hair. She has pins and combs and jewels and all kinds of whatnot. A long session then, to soothe her. I sit at her feet while she complains about the crunchy effect of salt water on my hair. She says she’s going to speak to Tycho. “You shouldn’t be traipsing around the beaches all by yourself, anyway. He should know better.”

“How’s he going to stop me?” I pick up a clip set with sea-shells, lovely tiny blue-brown speckled dove shells.

She snatches it from my hand. “I’ll stop you,” she says.

I smile to infuriate her. I’m my father’s child. I do what I want.

“I’ll speak to your father.” She yanks and yanks again harder when I don’t show hurt. “He doesn’t always remember you’re a girl, that’s his problem. Well, who can blame him? Look at you. Have you once used that kohl I got you?”