Chapter 5 Echo
Echo
Echo’s dream merges with the waking world, the dreamscape’s whispering current blending with the rattle of Nabu’s bedroom door.
Jolting awake, Echo re-grips the giant femur she found for protecting and pushes herself against the wall, as the latch clacks and the doorframe shakes.
She clutches the bone so hard its ridges dig into her fingers.
‘Curses, Echo, it’s me, open up!’
Still hazy from sleep, she mumbles. ‘Nabu?’
‘Yes, it’s me. Open the door!’
Her hands slacken but she keeps hold of the bone as she unlocks the door. Nabu launches in, all long arms and billowing robes, and dives into the crates lining the room.
‘We’ll need sandalwood, that handful of poppyheads hanging on the beam—and the leeches,’ he instructs, throwing aside a mummified vole, a net of crystals, and a bronze bowl, which jangles on the stone floor.
Echo stares at the rammed box of incense and smudging sticks by the bed, beams of sunrise falling over them from the air vent near the ceiling. Has she overslept? The huge glass jar of leeches squirms in a corner, and she hugs the thigh bone.
Nabu grabs a dagger and a liver preserved in a phial of oil, stuffing them into his bag as he finally turns to her. He frowns at the femur. ‘What’s that for?’
‘Protection. The door is disturbed in the night.’ Echo scowls, answering in unsteady Hellenic. ‘I have no sleep.’
‘But the lock will stop anyone getting in.’
‘I not trust the lock.’ Simple phrases are starting to come more easily, if not always correctly, after her long night of politics with Nabu and Kosmos.
Nabu nods at the bone. ‘And you think that’ll keep them off? You hurt one of the Peisistratids and you’ll be sorry you’re alive.’
‘No. It is self-defence.’
He looks at her oddly, and she realises this probably isn’t an argument that’s available to someone of her status. She throws the bone on the bed. She’d crack the latch-rattler with it anyway, screwed-up Athenian laws be damned.
‘Where’s it from?’ Nabu asks, nodding to the bone.
Echo points. ‘This box. It belongs to you.’
‘Does it?’ Nabu looks genuinely surprised. ‘Funny the stuff that turns up in here.’
‘The others call this room the den of the magos.’ Echo overheard Khemut cackling about it with some of the girls on her way to bed last night. Nabu, naturally, stayed with Kosmos.
‘Mmm, I know. It’s annoying. Being Lydian doesn’t make me a magos—I’ve never even met one.’
‘But you not correct them?’
‘No. I think it probably boosts my healing credentials.’ Nabu rearranges his shoulder-bag. ‘Come. We’ve work to do.’
‘What work?’
‘We have to go and mend someone.’ An odd word to use—??σθαι—implying something’s been broken, rather than someone needs curing. As if the patient is an object.
Poppy heads strung from her elbow and jar of wriggling leeches in her arms, Echo follows Nabu past the other storerooms that double up as the enslaved people’s quarters, and into the kitchen. Khemut grimaces at the leeches as Echo navigates breakfasting kitchen hands and stableboys.
In the internal courtyard, Echo whispers to Nabu, ‘Where are we go?’ but he only pulls back a wool curtain, revealing a staircase, and gestures her through.
She mounts the stairs with sandy eyes, wishing she’d managed to get more sleep.
She’s still jumpy from the door rattling off and on all night, and the walls weeping with noises that left her in no doubt Kosmos’s father, uncle, and perhaps even brothers were harassing the household.
The kind of sounds that made her tremble in the dark with fury and fear, knowing there was nothing she could do.
If she’d left her room, they’d just have got her too.
Nabu being an artisan employee offers him, and therefore Echo, crucial advantages over the enslaved people—freedom, a wage and, most importantly, that lock on the door.
But she doesn’t believe Nabu when he says it’s enough.
A woman on her own is never enough, nor is a boy.
If only Nabu would stay with her, rather than sneaking into Kosmos’s room via that old hatch in the kitchen, but she can’t expect that from him.
At least this way she has the bed rather than the floor, all she has to do is figure out how to sleep in it.
Her pulse rises envisioning another night confined in the pitch-black, caught by terror, inhaling spices and decay, dozing fitfully to other people’s whimpers and her own dreams of a silent companion in a womblike sea.
As she nears the landing, the sounds of the house fade, replaced with the dawn chorus, women’s whispers, and the scent of honey and rose-water.
She emerges into a long oblong room, decorated with finery that makes Kosmos’s Elpis tapestry seem shabby.
About twenty women and girls from five to fifty, long dresses as many shades as their hair and skin, drape over looms, spindles, and carding baskets, so Echo can’t immediately tell the difference between enslaved people and aristokrats.
A couple of them hum in harmony with a pair of golden oriole birds in a wicker cage.
At a table, three girls take a mathematics lesson from a teenager, while a handful of toddling boys play knucklebones at their feet, still young enough not to be exiled downstairs to the men.
The sun’s first rays slant through high windows, catching dust motes on the air and the bronze threads in the wall hangings.
Even so, salted oil lamps light the looms, allowing the women to better see their illustrations. They’re all at work far too early.
When Echo enters, every woman stops, running calculating glances over her—a youth in their midst!
When Nabu follows, their hackles lower and they return to their work, shuttles clattering over looms, but an underlying tension remains, as if they’re a flock of birds watching a cat on their periphery.
At the room’s far end, a set of drawn red curtains splits, allowing a statuesque woman to pass through.
She rearranges her dress over Amazonian clavicles, looking to Nabu with charcoaled eyes that glitter alongside the bangles coating her wrists.
As she walks to them, the bracelets dislodge, revealing snatches of purple bruising. ‘Good morning, Amel-Nabu.’
‘Myrrhine.’ He inclines his head.
This must be the mistress of the house—Kosmos’s mother, or, judging by her plump curves and clay-smooth skin, his stepmother. She gestures, elbow tight to her body and wrist like a hinge. ‘He’s through there.’
‘Are his humours still disrupted?’
Myrrhine wrinkles her nose. ‘He’s stilled somewhat…’ Her mouth is too moist and red around the edges, as if she has recently either been kissing or crying. She seals her lips like she’s only spoken half the words on her mind.
‘It’s an improvement. I’ll tend him.’ Nabu passes Myrrhine with another half-bow, and Echo tiptoes after, weighed down by the jar of leeches.
Behind the curtain beds line up like sleeping hoplites.
The day is stagnant and the room smells of urine, sweat, and something stickier and sicklier Echo doesn’t want to think about.
On one bed sits a man, his back to them, purple robes cascading over his shoulders, hemmed with gold threads and sard beads. The tyrannos.
He turns as Nabu approaches, baring his teeth and hissing. ‘They’re going to kill me.’
Echo’s pulse sprints. Surely their plot can’t have been discovered so quickly?
But Nabu remains placid, kneeling beside Hippias. ‘Who is trying to kill you, tyrannos?’
Insides squiggling like the leeches, Echo keeps her breathing even as she just catches Hippias whisper, ‘The women.’
Echo marvels at Nabu’s resolve as he meets the tyrannos’s gaze. ‘Tyrannos, the women are not trying to kill you. There are no women in here.’
‘Mother is here.’ Hippias points to a corner of the room where what Echo had thought was linen piled on an unmade bed moves, becoming a crone watching them with blackbird eyes.
Her dress falls asunder as she shifts, revealing a wrinkled depression the size and shape of an orange in her left breast. Echo looks away, trying to preserve the woman’s dignity.
Holding out a hand, Nabu murmurs, ‘Let’s take you to your bedroom, tyrannos. There are no women in there. It’s nice and quiet. You’ll be safe.’
Liar. There’ll be one woman in there. The Not Here scrapes Echo’s throat, daring her to out herself—but she holds it in.
Hippias examines Nabu’s hand as if it might grow claws.
‘Remember last time, tyrannos, how I brewed you a special infusion and made the fire blaze, and you felt better for it?’
‘Did you?’ Hippias’s eyes skitter over Nabu. ‘Yes, that’s right. You did.’
‘Come now, tyrannos. Come with me. I’ll keep you safe.’ Nabu’s voice is smooth as petals, and the tyrannos puts his bloodless hand into the healer’s. Nabu wraps an arm around him, steering him between the curtains.
Hippias moans when he sees the women, burying his face in Nabu’s shoulder and clinging to his robes. ‘You promised, no women—’
‘It’s alright,’ Nabu coaxes him. ‘We’re almost there, just keep putting one foot in front of the other.’ But Echo catches the glance he shares with Myrrhine; the unspoken promise that he’ll be back later to look at the bruises still blooming up her arms.
As Nabu and Hippias descend the stairs, Myrrhine inserts a mint leaf into her mouth, rubs rose-water on her wrists, and settles at her loom. She catches Echo watching and snarls. ‘Keep staring and I’ll have you whipped, boy.’
Echo pins her eyes to the floor, adjusts the leech jar in her arms, and darts downstairs, the dried poppies batting her leg.
She catches up to Nabu and Hippias in the andron, where a group of boys are clearing the litter of wine-sticky kylixes and wilted flower crowns from last night’s modest symposium.