Chapter 10 Echo
Echo
As dawn seeps through the gaps between the shutters and under the doors, Echo shuffles out of the kitchen, across the yard, and into the orchard.
Cool breezes ease her headache as she slouches between the trunks, plucking a low-hanging apple and disturbing insects in the long grass.
After Harmodios’s symposium, she threw up once more, halfway home, and Nabu made her sleep on the floor so she wouldn’t accidentally be sick in his bed.
‘You’re an idiot,’ he repeated, leaving a handful of mint leaves beside her.
And she is. She regrets everything, she’s never drinking again—and gods, she’s never ever smoking hul gil again.
Her head reels. The only benefit was that it let her talk to Hazel in the dreamscape, and confirm that her instincts are right: Her purpose here isn’t to usurp Hippias, but to build a philosophical school.
Yet her reprieve from murdering the tyrannos has been replaced by the equal weight of preventing the bleak, lonely future Hazel began to describe.
The orchard’s edge drops steeply, giving way to terraced aristokratic villas and a half-circle theatre before sprawling into Athens’s terracotta rooftops.
Beyond the city walls rise the foothills and mountains, through which Spartans and Corinthians raid, and where Kosmos will be sent next summer to join the defence.
Nabu, of course, will never be sent: he lacks a horse and, worse, citizenship.
Echo has often overheard them talk of the danger Kosmos will face, and she imagines his woolly fingers must struggle to grip a sword.
She slumps onto a log hidden behind an unruly fig, watching the sunrise.
The apple gurgles as it settles in her recently emptied stomach.
Poppies stretch their petals towards the lightening sky as wild garlic releases its savoury perfume.
The sun clips the mountain peaks and the world yawns.
For a few minutes, Athens belongs just to Echo and the symphony of birds, then whispers and the swish of quick, angry strides through the grass betray the presence of others—probably stableboys causing trouble, or household guards on patrol.
She sinks down, hoping to avoid awkward good-mornings. She has no patience for people today.
It turns out, it’s Kosmos and Nabu. A rhythmic thwuck indicates Nabu passing something—maybe a piece of fruit—between his hands. ‘Xenophanes dismissed me, Kosmos, you can’t deny it.’
Echo pricks up her ears. It’s not exactly eavesdropping if they’re talking anyway, though their words keep getting lost in the handover between crickets and cicadas.
‘Yes, but he dismisses everyone he doesn’t agree with.’
‘It was different with me. A different kind of dismissal—it wasn’t because of what I was saying but because I was the one saying it.’
‘Darling, I mean this in the kindest way, but you are not that interesting to Xenophanes.’
Nabu’s heavy tread ceases and the fruit falls still in his hands. ‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it.’
Kosmos stops too. ‘What do you mean then? Because you’re Lydian? A freeman? You’re too sensitive. No one cares about citizenship in those circles.’
‘This from the man who won’t even hold my hand in public.’ Nabu throws the fruit into the fig bush and Echo ducks. It lands a couple of feet away; a pear, skin bruised and split where it impacted the ground.
‘Only because it would endanger your livelihood—let alone your life—if my father were to discover we actually care about each other,’ Kosmos retorts.
‘It’s one thing for him to think I’m just taking you to my bed arbitrarily, he and Hipparchos do that all the time with anyone who takes their fancy.
So long as I keep it in the house and don’t expose us to public ridicule, I can do what I want.
It’d be another thing entirely for you and me to have a relationship. ’
Nabu snorts. ‘Public ridicule? Is that what I would bring on you?’
‘They’re the words my father would use! I may be well-off and from a good family, but I’m not free to do whatever I like.
’ Kosmos blows out a frustrated breath and Echo can picture him with a hand in his hair.
‘I’m supposed to marry a woman who will bear me sons, and if I take a male lover he should be …
Yes, frankly, another aristokrat. Any indication I’m not going to do that endangers us both! ’
Nabu snarls. ‘Grow a spine, Kosmos. It’s not for you to decide when and how I should be kept safe. So what, you’ll piss off your father? He wants you to be a man, show him the man you are!’
‘And what of your circles, hmm?’ Kosmos retorts. ‘What would Harmodios and Aristogeiton say if they knew you visited my bed every night? The tyrannos’s son, the most likely traitor—you couldn’t take a worse lover in their eyes.’
‘It’s not the same thing at all, they’d think I’d got lucky. You’re respected by them—you’re of them. I’m useful to them, but that’s different from respect. Even to them, I’m that non-Athenian freeman who works for the tyrannos.’
‘But Nabu, you aren’t Athenian, and you are a freeman! You can’t expect to be afforded the same rights as a citizen, you’re not entitled to them.’
The birds try drowning the silence. Echo holds her breath.
‘Nabu, I didn’t mean—’ Kosmos starts, but Nabu cuts him off, and Echo’s impressed by how steady his voice is.
‘I may be a foreign freeman. But before that, I am a man. Simply, a man. By the gods, if you don’t understand that by now then maybe Harmodios is right, and you really are nothing more than the spoilt son of a tyrannos.’
‘Come on, that’s not fair—’
‘Open your eyes, Kosmos, the world is rotten, and your damn family’s the worm at the core. Aristogeiton and Harmodios might have their eye on dethroning your father for the citizenry, but I intend to make an Athens for everyone. Even foreign freemen like me.’
The grass swishes as he strides back to the house.
‘Nabu!’ Kosmos hisses. ‘Hey!’
Nabu doesn’t falter.
Kosmos mutters under his breath and kicks poppyheads as he stalks around the fig bush. Echo freezes as he spots her, half-eaten apple in hand and groggy with a hangover.
He pulls back, standing straight for once in his life. ‘I suppose you heard all that.’
She nods, but dares not say anything. He’s already flown off the handle once this morning and if Nabu’s nothing but a foreign freeman, Echo must be lower still.
Kosmos grimaces, shaking his head. He hasn’t washed yet, and flops onto the log beside her in a cloud of stale wine. ‘Hades, I’m stupid as a ram, aren’t I?’
Echo nods, still frozen. ‘Maybe two rams.’
He gives her the special glare he reserves for hysterical women.
‘It’s not a question of affection, it’s just politics.
Nabu’s na?ve if he thinks we can walk around like Harmodios and Aristogeiton, it’s just not possible.
’ Kosmos scrunches his face and kicks the pear Nabu threw earlier, sending it over the orchard’s tiered edge.
Echo takes a bite of apple to stop herself passing comment. It won’t do any good to get involved, but she might not get another opportunity to talk to Kosmos alone about the real Deed, so she stays put.
He watches her eating and takes it as judgement. ‘You think it doesn’t devastate me that Nabu and I can’t be together openly? Of course it does. But we can’t delude ourselves. Even if the rebellion succeeds things won’t change that much.’
Echo bites back the comment that this is only true if Kosmos continues being a spineless elitist git. Instead, she says, ‘What if Nabu is incorrect about why I am here? Not for the rebellion, but for something else?’
Kosmos smirks. ‘I doubt Nabu would’ve misunderstood the last Traveller. It must be four years ago now, but they were thick as thieves, and he remembers it like it was yesterday.’
‘He misunderstands only by accident,’ she says. ‘An interpretation problem.’
Kosmos chews a fingernail. ‘Go on.’
Echo lowers her voice. ‘Nabu said I am brought here to “transform our gods to mud and our mud to gods.” What if that is not political, but philosophical?’
‘Philosophical?’ Kosmos squints at the sunrise. ‘I suppose gods to mud and mud to gods sounds a bit like what Nabu was saying to Xenophanes.’
‘Exactly. In times to come, this will be named the “divine-mundane duality paradigm.” But it will be lost, and so terrible things will happen.’
‘Terrible how?’ Kosmos asks, eyes sparking with interest.
The Not Here whispers, still enjoying the extra reins the hul gil gave it.
For once, Echo lets it through, translating into Hellenic as she goes: ‘The seas will rise; the trees will fall; the sun will bake the ground. More people than are alive at this moment will starve to death every day. Creatures will disappear, and the rivers will run dark with poisons. Human beings will be driven to the edge of existence, and there will be no gods to save them. None will escape it, for it will be too late and they will have—will have forgotten how to be kind. So, we must found a school of philosophy that preserves this concept of divine-mundane duality, to resuscitate—revive—the world.’ The Not Here starts bullying its way into her vision and hearing, and she beats it into submission with the Traveller’s Cipher. Are we not drawn onward …
Kosmos looks at her, genuinely frightened. ‘How are you doing that with your voice? It’s like the thing you did with the salt prayer last night.’
That’s interesting. It must be the Not Here altering her voice, but Kosmos wouldn’t necessarily understand that. Best for him to draw his own conclusions. She lets the silence dangle, attempting an air of mystery through her hangover.
‘It’s like the gods are speaking through you,’ he whispers, as if Echo is dangerous.
She balls her fists so Kosmos won’t be able to see her fingers shaking. ‘If they were, would they permit me to tell?’