Chapter 8 Echo #2
Echo holds her breath as Leaina’s eyes fix on where her cleavage should be. She’s spotted the binding strips—she must have, because when she meets Echo’s eyes, her look is narrow and calculating. ‘Has he indeed?’
Wanting to excuse herself, Echo opens her mouth, but there’s nothing to say and the plea sits silently on her lip.
Leaina keeps toying with her neckline. ‘Well, I’m very pleased to meet you, Echo.’
Releasing her breath, Echo replies, ‘I am also pleased to meet you.’
Leaina tidies Echo’s tunic, tucking away the binding.
‘Shall we go to this symposium then? Are you ready to meet our great guest of honour, the mighty Xenophanes?’ Echo doesn’t have time to reply as Leaina locks arms with her and drags her along, joking with Kosmos and Nabu as the Not Here whispers: Leaina the hetaira; educated slut; favoured of the tyrannicides; and her tongue is her tongue is her tong—
They approach a sprawling villa, torchlight and raised voices spilling from its windows.
Harmodios greets them at the door, smoking a small clay pipe.
A refreshing wind catches his knee-length chiton, and his still-growing-out hair gusts around his face.
‘Welcome to the select few, my friends! You’re just in time, looks like rain. ’
‘We should challenge the sky to a contest,’ Leaina says, detaching from Echo and alighting on their host. ‘Can the clouds shed more water on the ground or we more wine on our bodies?’
Laughing, Harmodios cups her cheek. ‘And Dionysos himself shall be the judge!’ He ushers them all inside, where the open doors and courtyard do little to clear the foetid air.
The symposium makes the centauromachy look as dry as a lawyer’s office.
There are hetairai everywhere, old-style dresses laced under their breasts, and youths serving drinks wearing short tunics, their mouths plumped with cochineal and glistening with olive oil, faces tinted lead white.
And hands, hands, hands, roaming nauseatingly rogue amongst them all.
Garlands cascade from the ceiling, petals falling on the wrecked drinkers, who wear skewed celery crowns and enough gold to sink a trireme—all of them smudged by clouds of hul gil.
It has this burnt thyme, cat piss, week-old trout stench that’s stomach turning.
Echo’s eyes water and her focus swims, the real feast blending with the perfect bacchanalia muralled on the walls.
Echo looks for Hanno and Absalon, but they’ve already disappeared, seamlessly blending with the other guards and attendants around the room’s edge.
‘This is a “select few”?’ Echo asks Nabu as he hands her a kylix of wine.
‘I think Harmodios might have a different definition of “few.”’ He sips, examining the crowd. ‘Kleisthenes doesn’t seem to be here. Shame, he’s good for an intelligent conversation.’
Echo drinks deep. The wine is well-watered, weak and fruity, and can’t do any more damage than the passive hul gil smoke already is.
The vinegary, sickly-sweet taste polarises her tongue in a way that’s familiar.
Down in one Fresher; penny fizzing in the bottom of a pint; the crack of Pimm’s on ice—
Rain starts pattering the roof and new guests arrive pink-cheeked and soaked to the skin.
Thunder grumbles as they wait for Xenophanes, the guest of honour, to emerge from his quarters.
Meanwhile, in the atrium, his retinue have already arrived, eschewing wine but enjoying the hul gil pipes in rotation.
Most of the Athenians haven’t encountered smoking pipes before, and Xenophanes’s followers have to instruct them how to breathe in deep, then giggle at the resulting coughs and splutters.
Three young men play worn instruments, matching drum, lyre, and pipes to the thunder while hetairai dance to their melodies.
Two older men in sky-blue robes dabble their feet in the central pool, passing a pipe between them in rapid breaths.
Echo tries edging to the sidelines, but someone’s always blocking her path, rebounding her again and again into conversations she doesn’t know how to navigate and can’t fully follow. Presently, she’s dropped into a circle containing Nabu, Harmodios, and Leaina.
‘Aristogeiton’s right, your boy really is a skinny thing,’ Harmodios says to Nabu, as if Echo isn’t there.
He exhales a cloud of smoke from the corner of his mouth, flaunting his smoking experience, then flips the pipe around to her.
‘Try some. Go on, I want to see what happens when a slip of a thing like you smokes.’
‘Come now, that’s not a good idea,’ Nabu says, wine cup barely touched since Echo last saw him. ‘What if the tyrannos takes ill? You’ll notice I’m not smoking.’
‘Just a puff won’t do any harm. It’s what men do.’
Leaina smiles slyly. ‘Well, it’s what real men do.’
‘Exactly,’ Harmodios continues. ‘No Persian bowing to a king here, even our dear tyrannos knows better than to emasculate us Athenian men in such a way.’
It’s a cruel, ignorant thing to say—especially since the greatest act of respect in Persia isn’t just to prostrate yourself before someone, it’s to kiss their feet—but Nabu just scowls silently.
Perhaps he doesn’t wish to draw further attention to any perceived want of real manliness in his refusal to smoke or lack of citizenship.
Shaking his head, he turns his attention to watching Kosmos dance.
Harmodios looks at Echo expectantly. Damn Leaina and her magic, complicated words.
Real man. Echo’s true, womanly, adult self laughs at it all, but in this world, the boy Echo’s pretending to be would care.
He’d take the hul gil, so she must, even though smoking it increases the danger of revealing her true identity.
Leaina winks at Echo over her kylix. And her tongue is—
Echo sighs, taking the pipe from Harmodios and inhaling steadily.
The hul gil doesn’t taste as bad as it smells, it’s earthy and grounding after so many evenings of bittersweet wine with Nabu and Kosmos, and her lungs are almost relieved to be filled with fresh smoke rather than stale second-hand fog.
Echo exhales in a billowing blue-grey cloud and Harmodios applauds her.
‘Good lad, like you’ve been smoking for years. ’
Maybe she has. The taste is unfamiliar but the act itself feels like an old homey tradition. Perhaps she just wasn’t smoking this.
Harmodios and Leaina watch her, as if waiting. Echo frowns. ‘What?’
‘Any minute now. Just wait. You should count yourself lucky, Echo. Hul gil’s expensive and extremely rare. It comes from the same place Nabu does. Happy plant, that’s what it means.’
‘That’s a crude translation and it comes from much farther northeast than I do.’ Nabu scowls. With Echo and Kosmos, he’s open about how much he hates the arrogance that makes Harmodios so compelling to everyone else, but collaborating with him is the only way to get rid of Hippias.
Dregs of smoke roll in Echo’s lungs. It breaks over her like an early summer wave, cool and perfect against the heat of her tipsiness.
The party sharpens in focus but softens in impact.
Candlelight gilds the guests’ skin and robes, glinting on their gold cuffs and bronze torques.
The statues hugging the corners of the room unveil previously unappreciated details.
Even Harmodios shines with youthful vigour rather than limpid debauchery.
It’s as if someone has wiped fingerprints directly off Echo’s eyeballs.
Harmodios smirks. ‘There. Like I said: Happy.’
She grins—or rather, the cloud in her lungs grins for her, but as it spreads through her humours, she wonders what really is the difference between the cloud and her? Surely they are one, and this is her grin. She nods like a sage. ‘Yes. Happy.’
Harmodios holds his sides from laughing.
Apparently something about her face post–hul gil is amusing.
She laughs along with him—it’s good to be happy, everyone should be happy—but, his entertainment complete, Harmodios doesn’t offer her the pipe again.
Nabu glares at her, steering her to the edge of the room as soon as Harmodios is distracted.
‘What were you thinking?’ he hisses.
Echo’s heart races but she can’t stop grinning, and the juxtaposition makes her feel slightly sick. ‘I think—’ Her Hellenic slips as she forces her fuzzy tongue around the words. ‘I think of being the boy. Real boy.’
Nabu curses in Lydian. It’s a long curse, during which Echo sways. Shaking his head, Nabu sits her on a bench in a corner. ‘Stay there. Honestly, whoever recruited you did a bad job. The last Traveller would never have indulged in such stupidity.’
A hul gil fog rolls in, until her entire world is the bench.
Humans emerge from the mist, most of whom pass by without a glance at that low artisan Nabu’s scrawny assistant.
She’s just the butt of Harmodios’s joke.
Her brain keeps trying to communicate her vulnerability, but her body can’t bring itself to safety.
Her feet are too numb to walk home on, even if she could figure out the way; her tongue’s too heavy to talk to Nabu with, even if she could find him in this human jungle.
A series of images flick by—Aristogeiton ruffling her hair; Kosmos sighing when she can’t say which direction Nabu went; Leaina’s perfume, heavy with musk and beeswax, and her whispering, ‘It’s OK, you can tell me.
’ But had Echo told her? She has no idea, for between each image is only the sheep-hide softness of the hul gil high.
Smell like an ashtray; should really quit; rocket fuel in those— Who said that?
Someone she hates and loves and can’t do without and isn’t here.
The Not Here stirs and stretches, but it doesn’t answer.
‘Do you understand?’ Nabu, very close, annunciating slowly.
‘What?’
‘Everyone’s gathering by the pool to hear Xenophanes. Move.’