The Sweet Girl (13 page)

I’m woken by the tap of his fingers on my door jamb, while the sky is still black and the cock is still sleeping. I tie my hair back uncombed into a pony tail, and put on my warmest clothes. It’s really cold; hoarfrost on the grass.

Once we’re away from the houses and our voices won’t disturb anyone, I exhale hard, like Nico trying to offend me with his garlic breath, to make a white plume in the air. “There must be fire in us,” I say to Daddy. “Or something like embers. In the heart, maybe? To make smoke like this?”

Daddy says nothing.

At the narrowest part of the channel, we pick our way down the rocky slopes to the water. Daddy starts to undress.

“Ho!” calls a man passing on the near bank with a horse and cart.

“Good morning!” Daddy calls back, undressing.

“Is he sick?” the man calls to me.

I shake my head.

“Look, he’s got milk,” Daddy says. “Take some coins from my bag, there, and my cup, and get some for after my swim. It’s early enough; it’s probably still warm.”

“I’ll do it,” I tell Tycho.
Stay with him
.

I pick my way up the slope, holding my skirts up, while the man waits, staring at Daddy. When I hold out the coin, he asks me again if Daddy is sick. I shake my head.

“Then he’s an idiot.” The man fills Daddy’s cup with milk, which steams in the cold. I realize how stupid my idea was. Embers in the heart, seriously. That’s why Daddy didn’t reply. “The current’s about to change. You’re not from here, are you?”

“He knows about the current.”

“He doesn’t know anything.” There’s a splash and the man cries out. Daddy’s in. The man says an evil word. He reaches under his seat for a length of rope and jumps down awkwardly from his cart. He hands me the horse’s reins and tells me not to let go. He scrabbles down the bank, tripping once, but doesn’t stop to inspect the scrape to his knee which, even from here, I can see is bleeding. Daddy is mid-channel now, treading water in what seems to be a lull. The man coils the rope, then tosses the end to Daddy. Confused, Daddy reaches for the end, but it drifts out of his reach. Now Daddy is moving, but not swimming. He dives.

The man asks Tycho what the evil word Daddy thinks he’s
doing, and did Tycho and I come down here to help him kill himself, and if so we’re evil words ourselves. I feel his anger on me like spit. Beside me, the horse shifts and snuffles nervously. It pulls its head against the reins, testing me, smelling inexperience. Smelling girl.

People on both banks have stopped to watch now, adults and children with early-morning business. The sky has indeed gone tender, pink and frail and fine. A shout goes up from the onlookers: Daddy has surfaced, considerably north of where he went in. He’s trying to swim back to us, but the current is holding him prisoner, and he’s swimming hard just to stay still. People are shouting and waving their arms,
That way, that way
, wanting him to swim with the current rather than against it. He dives again.

The crowd makes a soft, hurt sound, fist to the gut.

I scan the crowd for someone I recognize: one of the men from Plios’s party, a soldier, Euphranor himself? But it’s too early in the morning for the quality, and all I see are slaves, market-women, vagrants. Each face shows horror.

The milkman is beside me. “Come on,” he says. “He’ll wash up on the beach there.” He points towards our swimming beach. “If he washes up.”

I climb up onto the cart beside him and he
tchas
the horse into a trot. At the head of the beach path, he ties the reins to a stump. Tycho and I run on ahead.

The beach is empty.

“No,” the man says, puffing up behind me. “No, no, no,” like he’s forbidding me something. My arm shoots out to point to something far out in the bay: a head. The man strips angrily
to pudge-buttocked bareness and wades in, then dives. Tycho is ahead of him. Tycho swims out to Daddy and brings him back, expertly, in a kind of swimming headlock. When they’re fifty paces out, I wade in myself, waist-deep, to help bring him the rest of the way. Daddy’s face is white and his eyes are closed.

On the sand, Tycho wraps his own clothes around Daddy and rubs him hard all over his body. The onlookers have caught up with us now, and someone has a blanket for the milkman. I rub Daddy the way Tycho does, sitting beside him on the sand, propping him up against my body. Tycho is blue-lipped and shivering convulsively now.

Someone dumps a blanket over Tycho’s shoulders, and another over my legs. Perhaps I’m crying.

“Pythias,” Daddy says quietly, without opening his eyes.

The crowd exhales. The air goes white from the ember in every chest.

At home, Herpyllis proves she could have made a soldier. She has Daddy put to bed wrapped in sheets warmed with stones heated in the fire; gives the milkman a set of new clothes, a hot meal, and a bag of coins; thanks Tycho; and slaps me across the face.

She spends the rest of the day at Daddy’s bedside, spooning hot broth into his mouth and singing to him like she does to Nico when he gets a tummy ache. I can hear her soft voice from my bedroom, which she’s ordered me not to leave.

Daddy soon gets a cold. He snots and sneezes and aches all
over, he says, and where is Pythias? Herpyllis relents, and lets me in to see him.

“Hello, pet,” he says.

I ask him how he’s feeling. Herpyllis snorts.

“Fine, fine,” he says, and then he coughs until his face goes purple. He waves angrily at Herpyllis to leave the room.

“It’s nothing,” he says, when the coughing stops. “She’s hysterical.”

“She’s not.”

He pats the bedside and I sit. “She loves us both,” he says. “She knows you were trying to help.”

I hold his hand for a while, his baby-soft hand.

“A child is a line cast blind to the future,” he says. “Like an idea, or a book. Who knows where it will land, or what it will draw out?”

I ask him if he’d like me to write that down.

“No, pet,” he says. “That’s just for you.”

I think we’re both joking.

The cough stays with him. He begins to cough up a yellowish thickness that Herpyllis says is a good sign; it’s the sickness coming out. He runs a low fever and has shivering fits. He eats little and drenches the sheets with night sweats. Still, he gets up sometimes, to use the pot or sit for short periods in the garden in the thin autumn sun. He asks for books, not to read, but just to hold on his lap. Sometimes I read to him. When he coughs, now, he holds a hand to his chest against the pain. His lips are
permanently blue. Moving from bed to chair is enough to make him gasp like a runner at the end of a race. He takes to coughing into a cloth. Herpyllis does his laundry, angrily forbidding me or the servants to help. She thinks she can carry this secret by herself.

After a week of coughing blood, he lies down to die. It takes four more days. He complains of stabbing pains in his side, and his skin takes on a blue tinge all over.

“What did you see?” I ask him, late one night. I’m sitting with him so Herpyllis can sleep a bit. “What did you see down there, Daddy?”

His shallow breaths rasp like a saw.

When the cock crows, I go to wake Herpyllis. She takes one look at Daddy and sends me to get Nico, and Myrmex and everyone. The slaves, everyone.
Now, now, quickly, quickly
.

He’s still breathing when we get back.

Herpyllis herself lays the coin on his tongue, and together we bathe him and dew him with sweet oil. We dress him warmly in white for his journey, and when Thale returns from the meadow with a basket of fall flowers we weave a tiny wild-flower garland for his lovely head: creamy fall anemones, purple crocuses, white winter violets, pink cyclamen. Herpyllis puts the honey cake for the dog in his hand and holds his fingers closed over it until they stiffen. We wear our darkest clothes to contrast Daddy, to show we are still with the living, and the pain of that.

The next day is the laying-out. Pyrrhaios and Tycho carry the bed to the front hall and point his feet to the door. Herpyllis, Nico, Myrmex, and I sit around him, fanning away the flies. To Thale falls the coming and going: fetching white jars from the market for perfumes to keep the body bearable, sweeping up the dried marjoram and strewing fresh on the floor, trying to get the four of us to drink and Nico to take a bit of bread. Herpyllis rips her hair from its pins and lets it hang; I pull mine out, slowly, strand by strand, until Herpyllis takes my hands in hers and says enough.
Enough
; though she comes back from a visit to the pot with bloody claw-marks on both cheeks and on the tops of her breasts. When she forbids me to do the same, I know she’s worried about scarring before my marriage. I touch my fingertips to her blood, instead, and swipe it onto my face, where it mixes with the tears and eventually dries. We are quiet, against tradition—no keening—but we know it’s what Daddy would want.

On the third day is the procession. Herpyllis has left the body only to use the pot and put Nico to bed. Herpyllis and Myrmex and I dozed sitting up with him and are weak with hunger and exhaustion now. We set out before sunrise. Pyrrhaios, Simon, Tycho, and Myrmex carry the bed. Behind them walk the singers Thale found, sisters from Caria who know the old mourning songs. Professionals: their voices are thin and bird-like, their eyes blank. Nico and I come last, holding hands; Herpyllis—no marriage, no tie of blood—stands in the doorway, watching us go.

We walk away from the sunrise, to the road into town, to the markers we passed when we first arrived. The gravesman is
waiting by a hole in the ground. Nico steps forward to help lift Daddy into the clay coffin. “On his side,” the gravesman says. The only thing he says. They lay Daddy on his side like a sleeping child so that when he’s lowered into the ground he’ll face west. We take turns approaching him. Myrmex places the three white perfume jars at Daddy’s head and hands and feet. I put a book of seashell sketches inside his clothes, against his breast, because his arms and hands are too stiff now to manoeuvre into an embrace, and at any rate he’s still holding the dried-up cake. Nico is last. He has the lamp Herpyllis gave him, and a tablet and stylus of his own. I notice he glances up at Pyrrhaios as he’s placing them by Daddy’s hands and Pyrrhaios nods,
That’s right
.

The gravesman closes the coffin and the men lower it, suspended on ropes, into the hole. They shovel the dirt over and erect the marble stone. Thale hands me the basket of olives, honey and wildflowers, which I place on the grave. Myrmex pours a cup of milk over the raw earth, and it’s done.

When we get home—all but Myrmex, who peeled away from us into town—Herpyllis is holding a letter that came by courier while we were at the grave. Theophrastos will host the funeral feast for Daddy’s colleagues and students—
those who were closest to him
, he writes—in Athens.

Daddy is travelling. The coin will be gone by now, and the cake. He’s on his way.