The Sweet Girl (8 page)

Apollo of the Twilight stands just inside the gates of Daddy’s school. He rests one forearm on the top of his head, like Daddy when he’s frazzled and trying to think, as he leans on a tree trunk. His marble hair is braided like a child’s, though he’s taller than Theophrastos.

We’re in our heavy travelling clothes, the clothes we’ll be sleeping in tonight, and I’ve borrowed Herpyllis’s finest muslin veil. Daddy walks ahead, saying many serious things
to Theophrastos, who listens attentively, and to Nico, who does not. I trail behind. Dragonflies, poppies, tiny dandelions, light purple iris, snail shells bleached white in death. Curious looks my way.

I worked it out last night in bed. It’s been four years since I was last here, ten minutes’ walk from our house.

I pick up a snail shell and a small white stone to put in my pouch, later, when I can get under my dress.

Men are coming up to Daddy, touching him, hugging him, wiping away tears. Daddy looks tired. I know it’s the effort of not crying himself. I slip up quietly so he can feel me near. “Pythias?” he says, starting.

I blush under my veil as the men look politely away from me, from this gross breach of my modesty: the public utterance of my name.

“So like your mother, for a moment.” He touches my cheek through the cloth. “I mistook you.”

I go up on my toes to whisper in his ear that I need to sit down. He looks relieved. We go into one of the lecture halls, where Theophrastos has had a table laid with food and drink. Daddy settles onto his couch with a pained groan while his students assemble around him. I whisper to Theophrastos that we might send word to Herpyllis to have the carts brought here so he won’t have to walk home again. He nods. Libations, blessings, valedictory speeches.

“I’m bored,” Nico murmurs to me. We’re at the back of the room, out of the way, supervised by Theophrastos.

“I wonder if they do this every time he goes on holiday,” I say.

“Shh.” Theophrastos frowns: sternly at me, cross-eyed at Nico.

“I’ve been enjoying the book you gave Daddy,” I whisper. “On botany.”

“Ah,” he says.

“The part on medicinal herbs especially,” I whisper. “I was wondering—”

“It’s hard to hear you in here,” Theophrastos says. “Perhaps it’s better if you don’t try to talk.”

I bow my head obediently. I’ve had my fun with him, anyway.

When it’s time to leave, I touch Daddy’s arm.

“All right, pet,” he says. “It’s all right. Don’t be frightened. Don’t be sad.”

I whisper in his ear to speed us along, to spare him.

“My daughter is unwell.” His voice is loud, hoarse. The men part for us.

The carts are indeed waiting in the street, loaded with our goods and our people. Simon holding the horses; Herpyllis in the first cart; Thale dandling the child; Pyrrhaios, Olympios, Philo, and Ambracis holding Philo’s hand so he won’t wander away; Tycho; and—leaning against the last cart—Apollo of the Twilight himself, but loose-curled, chewing on half a smile.

“Too much sun and standing,” Daddy diagnoses, as many hands reach to catch me and my weak knees.

He makes me wait. He walks at the end of our caravan with Pyrrhaios. Guarding us, oh yes. Knowing he’s with us, I can ignore him for the moment. The streets are busy, busier than usual, with a lot of doorway loitering and dart-eyed muttering and finger pointing. Daddy is famous. But then someone calls
“Macedonians,” and “fucking Macedonians” again from another part of the street, and then a chorus of voices call other words—Herpyllis claps her hands over my ears. The cart speeds up, the horses rump-smacked by Simon, and I’m thinking of Gaiane, and I’m understanding why she wouldn’t see me, or was told not to. Daddy’s face is white. He takes Nico’s hand in one of his and mine in the other, and sits as tall as he can.

The stone hits him in the side of the head and bounces back onto the road. A small stone. Daddy drops my hand to swat at the place, as though at a bug, and then touches his temple with his fingertips, feeling the blood there.

Myrmex is beside us now, knife drawn. Oh, he’s fierce! He’s shouting all kinds of things, but Herpyllis, behind me, is wiggling her fingers so hard in my ears, I can’t make out a thing. Pyrrhaios is on the other side of our cart too, suddenly, saying something to Herpyllis. She pops her fingers out of my ears and wipes them reflexively on her lap. “Stand up,” she tells me and Nico.

Another stone rebounds off Daddy’s shoulder.

“Stand up, babies,” she says. “Let them see who they’re hurting.”

We stand. I have to set my legs wide to balance on the bumping cart. I feel a tug at my back and air on my face and understand: Herpyllis has pulled my veil off. I take Nico’s hand and close my eyes, waiting for the bite of a stone on my face or breasts, but nothing happens. We ride like that, standing, me with my eyes closed, until we leave the shouting behind.

“Sit, now,” Herpyllis says.

We’re in a quieter street, closer to the outskirts of the city. Daddy is lying in the bottom of the cart on a pile of skins. His entire face is an apology. I shake my head:
It’s not your fault
.

“You see,” he says. “I wasn’t wrong.”

Myrmex climbs up beside me.

“That was magnificent,” he says, and then I want it to happen all over again.

We sit for a long time shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. He pulls my veil back on himself and spends a couple of moments arranging the muslin with his fine fingers. I want to rest my head on his shoulder, as Nico rests on Herpyllis, but that might be less than magnificent, so I hold myself nobly upright instead. He keeps a hand on his knife and scans the landscape like an eagle. Gods, we are a pair!

The journey to Chalcis takes two days. We pass the first night in a field, sleeping in the carts. Herpyllis and I have a cart to ourselves, and Tycho rigs up an oilskin tent over us as he did for me at the beach. We eat Herpyllis’s picnic—bread and cheese and fruit and nuts—and we each get another tonic. I read by lamplight while she tidies the camp, but I put the book away when she returns.

“What is it?” she asks.

“Poetry.”

She nods, lies back, and stares at the roof of our tent. “Read me some?”

“How’s Nico?”

“He’s being brave. Daddy’s with him. He’ll sleep, I think.”

“You won’t?”

“Probably not.” She smiles tiredly; more warmly when I meet her eyes. “It’ll be good to get to Chalcis. You were brave yourself, today.”

“I wasn’t.”

“I don’t think any of us expected it to be like this.”

“Daddy did, I guess.”

She shrugs. “We’re so used to thinking we’re smarter than the smartest man in the world. Because he can never find his bath oils, or remember your friends’ names. Maybe we should give him a little more credit.”

I lean over to kiss her cheek.

“Read me some,” she says. “There’s still oil in the lamp, and I’m wide awake.”

I pull the book back out and find one of my favourites, the one about the temple by the clear water where sleep comes dropping through the apple branches.

“Louder,” Daddy’s voice calls from the next cart, and Nico calls, “Louder, Pytho.”

I hesitate.

“Pytho?” Myrmex calls sleepily.

“ ‘Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind,’ ” I begin.

The next morning dawns pink and hot. We take turns peeing in the barley, and Herpyllis hands out apricots and sticky sesame cake to eat as we ride. The land is flat, rich, ringed by
mountains; we’re riding across the bottom of a vast green-gold cup. By noon, my head is throbbing and I throw up over the side of the cart. Tycho puts the tent back up. Even though it’s stifling under the oilskin, Daddy says I’m sun-sick and need the shade. He makes everyone else wear hats, except Myrmex, who refuses. He’s distant again today, maybe because he saw my sick-up. I’m so disgusting. I ruin everything.

We arrive in Chalcis by late afternoon. We pass gravestones along the road leading into the west side of town, and convoys of Macedonian soldiers moving to and from the garrison. They ignore us, which isn’t bad. I’m sitting up by now, taking sips from the cup Herpyllis holds for me, trying to get something back inside me and keep it down.

The town straddles an isthmus that splits it neatly into two halves, like an apple. On the west side, the mainland side, the garrison dominates, set on a rocky rise. The slopes are treed with olive and cypress, and there are some nice houses set in a collar at the bottom of the hill. Officers’ residences, probably. East, across the strait—forty paces or so at its narrowest—is the town proper, bustling with shops and workshops and temples and the market and smaller houses. Outside the town on the east side is Euboia, the very best farmland in the world. That’s where Daddy’s property is.

An hour ago, Daddy sent Pyrrhaios ahead on our best horse, Frost, named for her white socks. Now, as we arrive at the gate at the base of the road that leads up to the garrison, we’re met by an officer maybe half Daddy’s age. Clearly a Macedonian: he styles himself like Alexander, short hair and clean-shaven. Daddy looks pleased. “Thaulos is the leader of
the garrison,” he murmurs to Herpyllis. “He knows who I am.”

Thaulos looks harassed and exhausted, and greets Daddy by saying, “Is it true?”

Daddy hesitates.

“They celebrate his death?”

Daddy puts his hands on the man’s shoulders and shakes his head, meaning
yes
.

Thaulos squeezes his eyes shut and starts to sob. “They should be celebrating his return.”

“We’ve come for sanctuary,” Daddy says. “I wrote to you. Did you not get my letter? Is the house not prepared?”

“The house,” Thaulos repeats. He looks at the rest of us, briefly, and back to my father. “The house?”

“You will see to it,” Daddy says. He’s gone pale again.

Thaulos hesitates, gives a curt nod. Then we’re jerking slowly, painfully up the hill. The gates clang closed behind us. At the top of the hill, through another gate, he leads us to a corner of a busy courtyard just inside the walls.

“You can bivouac here tonight,” Thaulos says. “Cook fires over there. Tomorrow you’ll have to be out. We’ve got reinforcements coming. We’ll need every available space.”

“The house,” Daddy says.

“Later,” Thaulos says. He seems angry now, perhaps because we saw him cry. Slowly we all dismount, stretching our jarred, aching bodies. I whisper to Herpyllis. “I’ll find us a pot,” she whispers back. “We can do it in the tent.”

Daddy announces he’s going for a walk, as though he needs to stretch his legs after a morning’s work, and simply walks away.

“Go after him,” Herpyllis whispers to Pyrrhaios.

Pyrrhaios follows him at a discreet distance, leaving the rest of us to set up a makeshift camp in as small a space as possible. The shadows are already lengthening and it’s too late to market. Herpyllis’s picnic has run out, and she looks like she’s going to cry.

Tycho whips the tent up for us and we take our turns with the pot.

“How much money have we got?” I whisper to Herpyllis when she emerges, with that grim but collected look that means success, hard-earned, in the nethers.

“A fair bit,” she murmurs. “Daddy gave me all the coin in the house. It’s in the bag with the salt fish.”

We approach Myrmex together and explain our plan. Herpyllis gives him the leather pouch and tells him how much more to promise once the deal is made. Surprisingly he offers no argument—Myrmex always wants to put his own spin on things, add his own flair—and leaves in the direction of the officers’ quarters.

He returns long after Daddy is back, long after midnight, and Daddy and Nico and the servants are all asleep and Herpyllis and I have snuffed our lamp so no one will realize we’re still awake. We hear him trip over something and giggle.

“So?” She sticks her head out through the tent door, clearly startling him; he lurches heavily against the side of the cart and giggles again. The horses, tethered nearby, shuffle, disturbed.

“All taken care of.” He waves at her like he’s leaving on a long journey, lies down in the dust beside the embers of our cook-fire, and is snoring before she has had time to refasten the flap.