Chapter 10 Echo #4
In the crowd, Aristogeiton spots this. He exchanges quick words with Harmodios, then both men start towards the tyrannos, leaving Leaina and their families behind.
‘Echo, stop dallying.’ Nabu pulls her arm, trying to draw her to the other household members.
‘No, something is not right,’ she says.
Nabu follows her gaze to Harmodios and Aristogeiton’s advance. ‘They can’t be moving already,’ he murmurs. ‘Not in all these crowds. They’re not meant to until after the sacrifice.’
The Not Here pushes against Echo’s gritted teeth: her tongue is her tongue is tyrannicides—
Harmodios and Aristogeiton emerge from the crowd, striding towards the Peisistratids. Knowledge crashes into Echo from the Not Here vortex: They’re going to screw it up. Seeing Kosmos laughing with Hippias, they’ve assumed he’s switched sides, and they’re moving too early.
They draw daggers from the folds of their robes, raindrops beating the iron blades.
Plink. Plinkplink. Echo only hears it because she’s looking for the sound.
Kosmos doesn’t. He’s not smart enough to keep an ear out.
He’s too near his father, he’ll get caught in the fray—but Kosmos doesn’t die now.
This isn’t his time. Hippias only has five sons in the history books.
No sixth. No youngest brat who loved philosophy.
The Not Here laughs at her attempts to remember what happened to the sixth son.
If he died here, at the Acropolis, someone would’ve written about it, but they didn’t, which means he can’t die.
But the tyrannicides are getting closer, and Kosmos still hasn’t seen them, too busy looking up at the gods-damn rain and laughing.
Any second now he will though, he has to, because this isn’t when he dies—but they’re so close, their blades rising. He’s not going to notice.
Echo catches her reflection in a forming puddle.
It is her, but as a child, pink with sunburn and startled.
A quirk of time travel. That child version of herself is unreachable; her home, family, school all a blank slate.
Echo gave up all those memories to be here.
She knows why, intellectually, but she can’t feel the reasons.
She’s an unlit hearth, laid and ready to perform the Deed, but with no spark of motivation.
What drives that girl in the puddle? Echo needs to act for her, and whatever sets her aflame.
She looks up, everything moving slowly, glistening with rain. The Deed needs Kosmos; needs that farm he talked about turning into the philosophical school; needs his connections; needs him alive.
She lunges, grabbing Kosmos and yanking him sideways.
He stumbles as the tyrannicides’ knives descend, missing him by a thread.
Hipparchos’s bodyguards leap to action; guards, attackers, and tyrannos’s brother fall in a tangle of arms, legs, blades, and linen, slipping on the wet marble. The crowd pulls back, roaring in fear and shock.
Kosmos struggles against Echo’s grip, squealing, but she drags him away from the fray, fingers clawing his perfumed hair and oiled skin.
‘No!’ She grabs his cheeks as the Traveller’s voice waterfalls out of her. ‘You do not die now. Stop struggling!’
Then Hanno’s pulling her off Kosmos as if she weighs nothing, spinning her round, scowling in her face with a blade at her throat.
She throws her hands up. ‘Stop, Hanno! I did not hurt him!’
Only a couple of steps behind her, Nabu inserts himself between them, pushing Hanno back until his blade rests against Nabu’s chest instead. ‘The boy was getting him out of the way, Hanno!’
Echo holds her breath as Hanno’s blade quivers. He looks between them, while behind him Absalon defends Kosmos from other attackers like a hen guarding a chick.
‘Stop, Hanno!’ Kosmos shouts. ‘Echo really wasn’t trying to hurt me.’
Hanno’s blade wavers, but something he spots over Echo’s shoulder makes him pull the sword back and shout, ‘Get down!’
She ducks, pulling Nabu with her, as a conspirator’s sword sweeps through the air where her head was just a moment ago.
Hanno must have concluded that if they’re being attacked by the conspirators, they’re not in league with them, because he leaps to their defence in the fray. Kosmos grabs Echo and Nabu, hauling them closer as Hanno and Absalon’s swords enclose them in a nest of flashing blades.
The entire thing takes no more than a hundred heartbeats, but beyond them the Sacred Way is already a morass of blood, bodies, and weapons.
Echo hadn’t realised how many plotters there were, their blades numerous as fish scales.
Hipparchos, the first victim, lies gasping and retching, his white robes blotted with blood.
There’s nothing to be done for him. Echo’s seen enough wounded farmers by now to tell that even from this distance.
The furious, vengeful part of her says good riddance; the objective, lawful citizen says she could have pushed him out of the way at the same time as she did Kosmos. She just didn’t want to.
‘They tried to attack us!’ Nabu says over the commotion.
‘They think Kosmos betrays them,’ Echo replies. ‘Then they saw me keep him safe and you defend me, and so they think we have all turned.’
‘Idiots. They moved far too early.’ Nabu watches the skirmish.
He murmurs a diatribe in Lydian, but she gets the picture: Despite Hipparchos’s assassination, the fight’s tide is turning against the conspirators.
Harmodios has collapsed against a statue base, guts spilling through his hands.
Because he and Aristogeiton started prematurely, the crowds were too dense for them to get a clear hit at the tyrannos, and now Hippias stands at the Acropolis gate, protected by guards three deep.
Shaking with fury and shock, Nabu is transfixed by the rivulets of Harmodios’s blood threading the pavement, so Echo looks to Kosmos. He gazes at her, eyes of a boy embossed in a man’s face, and says, ‘We have to protect ourselves.’
It’s a dirty decision, but Kosmos is right. The tyrannicide was always going to go this way; her Deed is not this, and she needs to keep that in sight. Hating herself, she grasps Nabu’s shoulder. ‘Nabu. Look at me. It is over. We are defeated.’
He shakes his head. ‘No. We can still pull it back.’
She grips his shoulder harder, disgusted at encouraging their defection, but he’s her Caretaker, and the Deed needs him. She needs him. ‘We are useless if we are dead. Now, we must preserve ourselves. We are healers. We are going to heal.’
Nabu exhales like his spirit’s leaving his body. ‘Just this battle.’ He looks to Kosmos, and for a moment their weird situation unites them again. ‘Who must we heal?’
‘My uncle?’ Kosmos asks, with a look like he might gag.
Echo looks at Hipparchos’s wriggling, blood-soaked body.
‘Nothing to be done for him,’ Nabu replies.
‘Exactly,’ Echo says, not meeting either of their gazes. Technically, they won’t contribute anything to either side, but they’ll perform an act that will hold them out of Hippias’s suspicion, at least for now.
Kosmos stands, indicating to Hanno and Absalon that they need to make their way to his uncle.
Darting between blades and over fallen bodies, they reach Hipparchos’s side, and Nabu guides Echo and Kosmos’s hands over the injuries.
‘Push here, harder, we want to stop the bleeding.’ The healer in him takes over: A patient is a patient.
Echo’s fingers slide over the wound in Hipparchos’s tree-trunk thigh—a smooth, deep incision, dug into a major artery and pouring hot blood.
It doesn’t matter that she’s trying to save this hateful man rather than idealistic Harmodios, either would be a hopeless exercise.
Hipparchos jitters from blood loss, gulping like a lamprey out of water.
She performs the act of healing convincingly enough to save her skin but, remembering the rattling latch and Kosmos’s scarred lip, she relaxes the pressure on the wound, letting blood seep through her fingers.
It soaks the rain-drenched pavement like cochineal around a lady’s wash bowl.
She’s not killing him. He’s already dead.
She’s just making sure she doesn’t accidentally save him.
Around them, the fight increases, but Hanno and Absalon cover them, and most combatants are too concerned with the living’s attacks to notice the dying at their feet.
Echo hunches over Hipparchos, trying to disappear as raindrops drum her back.
Nabu tears strips off his cloak to use as sutures, but ties them just a little too loose to work.
Slowly, the fight’s thumps and slashes become less regular.
Aristogeiton bellows like a minotaur as Hipparchos’s one remaining bodyguard restrains him.
Harmodios clutches his stomach, choking on blood, his whimpers inaudible under the rainfall.
Echo watches his lips moving. He’s calling his sister.
Rain drips into Echo’s eyes and down her cheeks, so she can’t tell if she’s also crying with fear.
Under her hands, Hipparchos stills, rain falling on his staring eyes.
Hippias approaches, footsteps heavy from a wound in his calf, gaze like lightning.
It’s all over—and yet, it has only just begun.