The Sweet Girl (24 page)

“Yes, Mother.” It’s what I must call her now.

“You always were a ratty little thing,” she says, but not meanly. “Never mind. Shall we talk about your hair?”

We talk about my hair, about how often I’ll be expected to wash and comb it—more than I’m used to—and the styles that are appropriate for my age and station. Nothing too complicated, Glycera says; she wants me looking young. “Nothing perverse. Just your age, that’s all. You don’t need to try to look older than you are. I have older girls.”

Meda enters the blue-sky room with a tray of jewels, and smiles her smile.

“How is the baby?” I ask.

Glycera nods, and Meda fetches him in his rush cradle. I ask if I might hold him. Glycera smiles at me like she’s going to cry,
and nods again at Meda, who lifts him gently and puts him in my arms. He doesn’t wake. I kiss his hair and breathe his smell.

“One day,” Glycera says, and smiles again at Meda, at me. The baby sighs in his sleep.

They spend a long time over the jewels, holding them up to my cheek to check the colours. Glycera calls for the other girls to solicit their opinions. She explains that each girl has a signature colour, to show her to best advantage.

“And to stop us fighting over clothes,” Meda says. The other girls giggle. This is the longest sentence I’ve ever heard her say.

Meda is pale green. Obole is lilac; Aphrodisia is blue. Glycera herself is orange. Yellow, they agree, makes me look sallow. Shell pink appeals to them, but I reject shell pink. Dark green? Red is coarse. Grey is dull. Brown?

The girls sniff. They don’t like brown. I touch a ring, gold, set with a piece of earthy agate.

“Brown could make her skin look lighter.” Glycera holds the ring to my cheek. She fingers through the tray and finds another, darker. “What do you think, Pythias?”

It reminds me of cumin, and the colour when I close my eyes, just before sleep.

“Brown.” Glycera turns the word over in her mouth, tasting it. “Unusual. Well. Unusual suits you, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, Mother.”

I take my lessons in the big dining room, which Glycera says they use for parties. At this time of year, it’s cold. Glycera says the cold will force me to concentrate; something Daddy believed also. I have dance lessons and singing lessons and lessons in the art of conversation. These are with Glycera herself,
who begins by offering some opinions about Alexander’s military campaigns. She can talk about tactics, formations, terrain. I tell her Daddy once accompanied the king on campaign and saw him in all his glory. Daddy had gone along to serve with the medics, I explained, and because the king himself had asked him to.

“Good,” Glycera says. “That’s good. Very interesting. You can use that.”

We talk about battlefield injuries and their treatment. We talk about medicine more generally. She quizzes me about my cycles, and finds out what I know about contraceptives: much, thanks to Clea. She wants to tell me about the act, but I tell her I’ve seen animals, and Daddy has explained most everything.

“All right,” Glycera says. “Only you can’t keep talking about your father. Once, at the beginning of a conversation, to remind the client of your bloodline. Then you must forget. The client wants to talk to
you
.”

She asks me if I have particular interests, and says I’ll speak most fluently about what I care about.

Do I have particular interests? Can I speak without Daddy speaking through me?

Skeletons
, I think. “Poetry,” I say finally.

“Yes, dear.” She pats my hand. “Recitation is a lovely skill. In my experience, though, they don’t want to listen. They want to talk.” I must look disappointed because she adds, “Never mind. A dreamy young girl in love with poetry. That’s very pretty. A very appealing type.”

Now I am a type.

“Of course you’re a type,” she says. “We’re each a type. And after a while you’ll come to see that the clients are, too, and you’ll learn to respond appropriately.”

“What type are you?”

“Old.” She’s crisp, unoffended. “I’m Mother.”

“And Meda?”

“No,” Glycera says. “I’m not playing this game with you. You have to learn it for yourself. Now we’re going to have an argument. Are you ready? They like a spirited argument, even a bit of cheek. Always with a smile.”

We argue about the relative merits of empire and democracy; the Macedonian treatment of Athens; the virtues of friendship versus erotic love. I’m guessing there’s a right side to this argument, but Glycera says not. We are
hetairai
, she says, worthy companions, not common prostitutes; we are not coarse. I remember not to mention Daddy, and at the end of the lesson she says I’m very good at conversation, a natural.

“Thanks,” I say.

She shoots me a look. I wonder if I’ll be reprimanded for my tone, but she says nothing.

She says she needs a lie-down, and tells Aphrodisia to show me cosmetics. We powder my face white and paint my eyes. “More, more,” Glycera keeps saying from her couch across the room, waving a languid hand and not opening her eyes. “She’s brown as a little nut.” Aphrodisia’s hands are tiny and she smells of roses. The powder makes me sneeze. She rubs a fingertip of oil on my lips, to soften the chap, and says I must do so every morning and night until they’ve healed. In the bronze, I look like I’m wearing a mask.

My coming-out party will be in ten days. Obole and Meda work on my dress, a tan gauze with darker brown embroidery. They want ties at the shoulder, but Glycera favours the more old-fashioned gold pins. Spikes. From these kinds of details, I’m putting together a picture of the type she thinks I am: brainy, fierce, Macedonian rather than Southern. A wild young Northern thing with a chest like a boy and a brain like a man. The embroidery pattern on my dress is all geometrics.

“No flowers?” I ask, and Glycera says no, no flowers. Aphrodisia is flowers; Obole is birds; Meda is herbs and green plants and seed pods; Glycera herself is fruits. Aphrodisia is sweet and simple and pretty; Obole is graceful and athletic; Meda is lovely and sad. My party is meant to introduce my type, and a bit of myself, too: Glycera says we’ll serve my favourite foods. What are my favourite foods?

“That’s a lot of salt,” she says, when I rattle off a list. “No sweets at all? Usually young girls like sweets.”

I’m standing on a low table while they pin up my hem. “Sandals,” Glycera says, considering. “Definitely sandals to the knee.”

“Next you’ll have me carrying a spear.”

“Lippy.” Glycera raises my chin with a finger, the way she does. “Have you ever been with a man?”

A question I’ve been waiting for. I was surprised she didn’t ask within minutes of my creeping through her door and asking for sanctuary. “Three.”

“All right, fine.” Glycera shrugs. “I’m just trying to help. I’ll give you some books to read, shall I?”

My salty, brown, spiky party is like the wedding party
I attended in Chalcis with Daddy: the same lulling golden warmth, the same rich ribboning scents of meat and wine, the same fine citizens in their finery, smiling fit to break their faces. At the last minute, Glycera decides not to powder me, and plucks all but a few pins from my hair, so it mostly hangs long and loose down my back. She almost sends me out barefoot, but decides that would be a touch too much. Her pet names for me have been evolving: now I am
orphan, waif, ragamuffin, scrap
. “Sweet little scrap,” she says with her lip-biting, I’m-not-really-crying smile. “You remember the magistrate?”

I smile.

“Now, you see,” Plios the magistrate says. “You’ve fallen on your feet, after all.”

He’s not the one I’m waiting for.

“Pythias.” The priestess of Artemis puts her hand on my shoulder. “You have found a way.”

She’s not the one I’m waiting for.

He arrives late, after Glycera’s speech, after the meal, after Aphrodisia has sung for me, and Obole has danced, and Meda has juggled two pears and a heavy earring, to much delighted applause. I haven’t had to perform beyond a few words of thanks to the room. Glycera, in a final evolution, has turned to praising my wit. Soften them with pity and then quicken their interest; I see the scheme. We’ve moved to couches in the cave room. A slave announces him. Glycera leads him to the couch next to mine, and while she begins a general conversation on economics—a pre-set topic offering me opportunities to shine—he leans over and says quietly, “You’re so angry, you’re practically throwing sparks.”

“I have a message for you. From Clea, the midwife. She wants to talk to you.”

He waves a dismissive hand. “Boring.”

“Mm.”

He looks around the room. “What an awful party. Aren’t you dying?”

“I’m dead. How’s Tycho?”

“They’re all fine. No fear, little Pythias. You know you can come see them any time.”

I say nothing.

“You really think this is better than what I’m offering?” He means the room, the party, the guests, Glycera, my dress, all of it. “I’d take you swimming. Riding and swimming and hunting. I’d buy you books. What else?”

“My own spear?”

“Knives, spears, bows and arrows, a catapult.”

I must smile because he does, too.

“Tell you what,” he says. “I know how to get out of here. Together, single file, no looking back until we’ve reached the other side of the water.”

“But who will lead and who will follow?”

He gets up and walks away. So that’s how it would be.

Had he looked back, he’d have seen me moving to the magistrate’s couch to challenge him—wittily—on a point of taxation.

Plios the magistrate is not a bad man. He doesn’t tell me I’m throwing sparks. He comes every afternoon as the sun is going
down, between his work and his home. He greets Aphrodisia with a kiss when he sees her; I’m her replacement. He takes a warm drink in one of the big rooms with Glycera and me, chatting about his day. He likes to talk about his cases and solicit our opinions. I ask the kind of questions Daddy would have, about the practical day-to-day workings of the courts. Theory is one thing, Daddy always said, but practice another. If all you know is theory, you don’t know anything.

“Well, take today, for example,” Plios says on his third visit. “On paper, it was an open and shut case. The woman was accused of killing her husband with an iunx. There was plenty of evidence. They found the tablet with the curse, and the bird nailed to the wheel, and the ashes, and her maids confessed to helping her.”

“Confessed,” Glycera says lightly.

Plios stretches mightily, groaning with pleasure. “Glycera and I have this argument,” he says to me. I’m sitting next to him on the couch, holding his hand. “She doesn’t believe you can get an effective confession through torture.”

“An eccentricity of mine,” Glycera says. “What do you think, Pythias?”

“I agree.” I turn his hand over in mine and massage the meat of his palm with my thumb, the way Glycera taught me. He sighs happily. “I’ve seen women in childbirth who would say anything, any lie, to make the pain stop. Why is she supposed to have wanted him dead?”

“The man’s brothers say she had a lover. She wanted to marry this other man. He confessed, too.” I switch to his other hand. “Open and shut when I read the brief. But in court—well.”
Glycera signals to a slave, who steps forward with a tray of wine. She pours Plios a cup. He takes a sip and makes a face. “You’ve got mice,” he tells Glycera.

I take the cup and smell it. Sour, faintly fecal. I signal to the slave, who steps forward again to remove the wine. Glycera looks mortified.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter.” Plios stands, pulling me up with him. “I don’t need wine. My good Elene is expecting me for supper, anyway. She’s told me, one more late night at work and she’ll let the slaves prepare my meals from now on. I can’t risk it. She’s got a lovely light touch in the kitchen, my Elene. Lovely clear soups. After you, my dear.”

I lead him to my brown room. He wants it sitting, with me kneeling between his legs, facing him. I still gag, but he doesn’t mind. I’ve learned a bit of pain, a pinch or a scratch just before the peak, finishes him faster.

“Why was it different in court, though?”

We’re wiping ourselves and dressing again. Three times, only, and already we have habits—I hold my hair up so he can repin the shoulders of my dress.

“Well, she was black and blue. She couldn’t see out of one eye, it was so swollen, and she couldn’t talk clearly because of her jaw.”

“The brothers?” I straighten his clothes for him, his hair, rake smooth his beard with my fingers.

He shakes his head. “Everyone agreed they hadn’t seen her since the death. She was taken in almost right away. That was the one thing everyone agreed on.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

He looks at me with his clear, kind eyes. “It has to have been the husband.”

“The one she killed?”

He nods.

“Did that change your decision?”

He looks at me a little longer, without answering.

I walk him to the gate. “I can’t come tomorrow,” he says. “But the day after, I can stay longer. Quite a bit longer.”

I say, “All right.”

It starts to rain. Big, reproachful drops.