Chapter 5 Echo #2
‘Out,’ Nabu instructs them. ‘And send for Hipparchos.’ In just half a day in the household, Echo has learned that the tyrannos’s slaves don’t always listen to Nabu, particularly if a member of the family or their manager has given them other instructions, but these boys take one look at Hippias and bolt. Clearly, this has happened before.
Nabu bundles Hippias into a spacious back bedroom lined with furs, thick blankets, and tapestries of Odysseus outsmarting the Sirens.
Echo’s barely placed the leeches and poppies on a side table when Nabu grabs her shoulder.
‘Go to the kitchen. Find me sage—as much as you can carry—a jar of honey, and three sprigs of marjoram. And make a lavender infusion.’
Echo turns to leave but he grabs her wrist, looking to where Hippias has slumped, scowling and muttering, into a chair. ‘Make the infusion strong.’
She cocks her head, as the Not Here rustles and moves her mouth without her consent. ‘Valerian root.’
‘What?’ Nabu starts shredding the poppyheads distractedly.
She tries to cover her loss of control. ‘Would you like valerian root also?’
Nabu lifts his brow, as if surprised she knows about herblore. She’s surprised herself. ‘Why not. Can’t be too careful.’
In the kitchen, the sun peeks through the shutters as the enslaved workers tidy away their own breakfast and ready the Peisistratids’.
Echo creeps between their morning bustle to find what she needs.
The valerian root is tucked behind a bottle of mandrake wine—useful for sleepy sleep—so she grabs that as well.
As she brews the infusion with water from a large cauldron bubbling on a hearth, the Not Here keeps trilling—another pinch, you’ll not kill him with lavender—but it doesn’t try to make her speak again.
Overnight, the mysteries of her amnesia and the Not Here hardened into a stone of dread.
Her concept of ‘normal’ has come unstuck, but she’s pretty certain what’s happening in her head has dropped right off the spectrum of normality.
Yet every time she tries examining the Not Here, it dances away, and exhaustion muffles her worry. She yawns, chopping marjoram.
‘No yawning in my kitchen!’ Khemut appears like steam, shouting in Echo’s ear, making her jump and scatter her cuttings. ‘See? Tired workers are useful as goats!’
‘Good day, Khemut.’
Khemut’s face crumples like an unironed sheet. ‘Is it?’ The old woman runs an arthritic claw through Echo’s hair. ‘Such an unusual colour, so much copper and gold. Here’s hoping Apollo’s made you tough as bronze on the inside too.’
Her eyes are like daggers, but Echo can’t look away.
‘You’re lucky Nabu’s taken you under his wing, he’s a kind man, but you can’t count on staying his favourite forever. I used to be a favourite too. Half the lads and lasses in this kitchen are mine by some Peisistratid. Wouldn’t know it to look at me now though, would you?’
She grins, bearing a ridge of ulcered gums and making wrinkles around her scarred, sewn-shut eye.
‘I apologise. I am forced to return to work.’ Echo steps away as her fear of nighttime latch-rattling wells up, and hastens back to Nabu.
Surely, the real ‘luck’ would be to go unseen, not be a favourite?
She shivers. No, someone will always see a woman in this world, and better it’s a tyrannos than a brothel owner.
In this house, horrendously, it seems the same might go for a boy.
In Echo’s absence, Nabu’s been tending the fire, and when he unfolds to his full height in the dancing light, incense clouding his sinuous robes, she understands why the others think he’s a magos. She could believe magic of him. Then again, that’s probably what he wants her to think.
He nods when he sees the mandrake wine. ‘Pour a knuckle’s worth into the infusion—no more—then unpack my bag onto that table.’
Echo complies, the leeches squiggling with interest when she takes out the jar containing the preserved liver.
Nabu leans over Hippias, examining each eye closely, then undresses him to the waist. The tyrannos protests, but Nabu uses that calming voice again. ‘Hush now, we’re just leeching you to take away the troubling humours. There’s a darkness in you, we have to draw it out.’
He gestures for Echo to bring the leeches, and extracts one deftly. ‘Thirteen, on his chest, understand? When they’re good and fat, bring them to me at the table.’
‘I never have used leeches before.’ Echo wants to stay quiet, be good, go unseen, but the thought of plunging her hand into a jar of leeches—she just can’t.
Nabu pauses, looking at her as if he can see through her skin. Perhaps her voice is too quiet, too high-pitched, too fearful. Maybe a boy wouldn’t squirm at a leech, or the previous Traveller had been braver. Whichever, she clearly doesn’t have a choice.
Glaring, Nabu dips his thumb and forefinger into the jar, pulling out another squirming leech.
‘Just two fingers, like that. Doesn’t have to be the whole hand.
Don’t be frightened of them, they’re quite harmless.
Find the thin end and present it to the skin—like this.
They’ll grab on by themselves.’ He holds the leech’s sucker to Hippias’s chest. It stretches, sensing his blood, and latches on.
‘They’ll fall off when they’re full—and that’s when you bring them to me. One at a time is fine.’
Echo screws up her face, but nods.
‘They’ll leave a small wound that’ll bleed like anything. There are cloths in my bag to staunch the flow, but it won’t stop for hours. That’s alright, I’m expecting that. Got it?’
He pats her shoulder before sweeping back to the table.
Echo sinks her thumb and forefinger into the jar, but the leeches are slithery and in the end she has to use three fingers to trap one against the jar wall.
She pulls it out and drops it, mouth-first, onto Hippias’s chest. He glares at her, hissing wordlessly.
There’s something mean wrong with him, and she doubts the leeches will do any good, but she keeps going until all thirteen are gorging on his blood.
She squats on the floor, watching them grow fat.
Hippias’s scowls diminish, but his eyes stay red.
There’s a knock on the door and Nabu opens it enough to allow the oxlike man beyond a view of Hippias.
Though heavier built than the tyrannos, he has the same wineskin complexion and scowl-prone features which must make him the brother, Hipparchos.
His eyes rake Echo and she finds herself looking at the leeches rather than him.
Here’s hoping Apollo’s made you tough as bronze.
Whispering, Nabu asks Hipparchos to wait in the andron and closes the door.
The fire burns down and Nabu builds it up again, using sandalwood twigs whose pungent smoke mixes with the incense and makes Echo light-headed.
One by one, the leeches detach from Hippias’s chest, and Echo covers the wounds before delivering the parasites to Nabu, their rubbery skin so stretched they threaten to pop in her hand.
Slicing the creatures open, Nabu prays in a language even the Not Here doesn’t understand, creating a mess of dissected liver and slaughtered leeches.
He sweeps the gristle into a bowl, chucks in the marjoram, and throws the sage on the fire, where it billows and spits.
Plunging his hand into the bowl, he flicks the bloody mixture widdershins around Hippias’s chair, chanting all the while.
When the bowl is empty and the tiles ruined, he dabs the leech wounds with honey. ‘Feed him the tea.’
She expects the tyrannos to protest, but he wolfs it like a toddler.
Nabu wipes his hands and nurses Hippias into bed. ‘We’ll let him sleep now,’ he mutters to Echo.
In the andron, Hipparchos waits, brushed with anaemic midday sunlight. Have they really been in there all morning? One of the herbs must have twisted Echo’s mind.
‘How bad this time?’ Hipparchos asks.
Nabu shakes his head. ‘Hard to say. The dark humours are strong in him. I read the liver, but its message was unclear, so I won’t know more until I’ve talked to Myrrhine—I wasn’t there when the episode began, but I suspect he beat her.’
‘No matter about the women, who else saw?’
‘The usual: Slaves. Me. You.’
‘And this one?’ Hipparchos points a thick finger at Echo.
‘My new assistant. A trustworthy boy.’
‘If you say so.’ But Hipparchos’s face doesn’t match his words.
His gaze is hungry, as if he’s holding back saliva calculating how much meat is on her.
She shrinks around the leech jar. She hopes he thinks she’s a boy until she realises no one should look at boys like that.
Perhaps he’s the latch-rattler, and he doesn’t have the wrong door at all.
It’s some time before Nabu and Echo are free to go about their own business.
First, they return to the gynaikeion, applying poultices to Myrrhine’s bruises and checking on the karkinoma of the tyrannos’s mother.
Back at Nabu’s room, a queue of artisans and enslaved workers from the house and the Peisistratid farms demand attention.
With Echo’s amateur assistance, Nabu resets a labourer’s broken arm to curdling shrieks, advises the old paidogogos to bathe his arthritic ankles in cold water, and tells a serving girl her son has gangrene and won’t survive the night …
Echo goes into the stable yard and splashes her face with well-water to get the girl’s sobs out of her head.
The Not Here murmurs that it doesn’t have slavery—not legally, not where she was—but it’s so enmeshed in Athenian culture she can’t open her eyes without seeing it.
1834 Abolition of Slaver— The date is so impossibly far off, she can’t wrap her head around it.
It’s no use, this is how it went, how it goes, how it is; she can’t stop it, only live amongst it, sick as it makes her.