Chapter 12 Echo
Echo
Withdrawing his dagger from the last assassin, Hippias signals for a trumpet blast. His leather-clad guards regroup before the Acropolis gate, their spears seeming to almost scrape the clouds.
Hanno and Absalon draw closer to Kosmos, panting from the fight.
The crowd of citizens tried to flee when the fighting erupted, but they were too densely packed and bottlenecked, and now they cling to each other in knots, pressing as far from the violence as possible.
Hippias surveys them, raising his hands and silencing their whimpers.
‘The games cannot open under bloodshed. Citizens of Athens, return to your homes.’ His voice is steady, tempered by battlefields, and the crowd edges down the hill with whispers and backward glances.
Alone with the captured rebels, Nabu, Kosmos, and the tyrannos and his men, it’s quiet enough that even with the diminishing rain Echo can hear the sea crashing on the shore a league away.
Hipparchos’s blood has oozed from red to brown to viscous black.
How long did the fight last? Ten minutes? Fifteen?
Hippias approaches his brother’s corpse, placing a hand on Kosmos’s shoulders. ‘Get up. There’s nothing left to do.’
Kosmos starts, eyes wide like he’s smoked bad hul gil. His hands remain stuck to his uncle’s wounds.
‘I said, let go,’ Hippias repeats, moving on.
Face wooden, Kosmos pulls back. Clearly death—the realm of women, healers, and soldiers—doesn’t look as he imagined.
Echo follows his lead, her hands sucking away from the clots.
The adrenaline that’s kept her going drains, and her legs only just hold her.
In the brawl, the sacrificial bull broke free, and it clomps among the dead shedding garland petals, while the rain muddles scattered flowers and tangled corpses.
Echo sways, breathing copper and nectar.
So many enslaved people dead for a fight between aristokrats.
Behind her, Aristogeiton whimpers, separated from the other captives and kneeling between two guards as Hippias inspects his split lip and bruised eye. The tyrannos smiles. ‘It would be you. Always such pretentions. And yet, here I am still.’
A new shot of adrenaline jolts Echo: Where’s Leaina? Fearful of drawing attention to herself, she scans the corpses, but only spots two household guards and a serving boy with a knife through his eye. The boy wasn’t even armed.
Feeling lightheaded, she turns to the captives behind Aristogeiton. Please, please, don’t let Leaina be there. And her tongue her tongue her tongue is—
Echo’s breath evaporates: There’s Leaina, sandwiched between two would-be usurpers.
Her bright yellow dress has been torn and her hair is coming loose from its needles.
In the line of aristokratic, politically-scheming men, she’s the only woman and worker; the only one who perhaps didn’t even know about the plot.
She’s only there because Aristogeiton adored her so publicly.
Leaina’s eyes lock on Echo’s, and Echo forces herself to hold her gaze, trying to silently communicate that it’s not how it looks, she’s not with the tyrannos, not a traitor.
But she’s still drenched in Hipparchos’s blood, and Kosmos and Nabu are laying out the horrible man’s limbs, readying the tyrannos’s brother for his last journey home.
Leaina’s eyes brim and she looks away, a tiny movement of her delicate neck.
Nabu, Kosmos, and the Deed are safe for now, but Echo’s insides turn as she realises Leaina will never be safe again.
Hippias’s guards drag the captives to the Peisistratid house, led by the vengeful tyrannos.
He entrusts Nabu, Kosmos, and Echo with Hipparchos’s body, leaving them behind to await the bier.
Hanno, Absalon, and Nabu pace the battle site, identifying the bodies of household members and laying them out for collection.
Echo tries helping, but she’s too in shock to think straight, and too weak to lift the dead, so Nabu sends her to sit beside Kosmos.
Alone by his uncle’s cooling corpse, Kosmos sighs shakily. ‘We’re not suspects, it seems.’
‘They have not started to interrogate yet,’ Echo replies. Kosmos stares at Hipparchos’s body like he’s waiting for it to come back to life. ‘Are you alright?’
When he doesn’t respond, she puts a hand on his knee. Surprisingly, he doesn’t shrug it off. ‘Kosmos?’
He looks at her with distant eyes. Someone else once looked at Echo like that. Shock; PTSD; it’s OK, you’re safe; in to four out to; would you like me to read to you—
‘I’m not na?ve,’ Kosmos whispers, quiet as the rain.
‘I’ve seen corpses before. My mother, of course, but I was too little to remember, and it was different because she was sick, it wasn’t—’ He breaks off, examining the grooves of dried blood on his palms. ‘I was so frightened of him when he was alive. Echo, when I had my hands on his wounds, I was praying he wouldn’t survive.
I—I didn’t push as hard as I could have. ’
‘He would have bled out anyway. He was wounded many places.’ For once, Echo doesn’t have to lie.
‘I still don’t feel right about it.’ Kosmos breathes shallowly, like a little rabbit, the shock making him delicate and open.
‘Thing is, I thought … I’ve always imagined that if he died, I’d be less afraid of him.
But here he is, look at him, and I’m still terrified.
’ He clutches Echo’s hand. ‘I keep waiting for him to breathe. It’s impossible he’s not breathing. ’
‘He will not breathe. You are safe.’
A tear draws a line in the dirt on Kosmos’s cheek. ‘Am I? I’ve never felt less safe.’
Echo’s glad, then, that she didn’t knock Hipparchos out of the tyrannicides’ way, and a latch rattles in her memory. Thank the gods Nabu installed that lock. She leans in. ‘Can I tell you a secret?’
Kosmos laughs and another tear drops. ‘You contain even more?’
‘I also did not push hard enough.’
Kosmos nods silently, retracting his hand. His next breath is steadier. ‘You promise he won’t breathe?’
‘I promise,’ she says.
‘You knew they were coming for me, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You pushed me out of the way?’ He phrases the question as if he’d rather say, ‘Why did you push me out of the way?’ looking at her like a lost boy again.
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Thank you.’
‘That is alright,’ she says, as the Not Here mutters. He’s not in the history books; no lacuna in the records; Hippias didn’t have a sixth son—
Hanno and Absalon have wandered out of earshot, but across the Sacred Way, Nabu reaches Harmodios’s body. He hides the young man’s spilled guts in the folds of his himation. ‘We should send for someone to collect him.’
‘Should we?’ Kosmos says. ‘No, don’t look at me like that, think about it. He’s a conspirator and Aristogeiton’s lover. It won’t be long before my father identifies them as the ringleaders. If we show him any mercy, it will implicate us.’
Nabu scowls. ‘What should I do then, just leave his body here?’
Kosmos shrugs.
Nabu gapes. ‘He was your friend, Kosmos, and you’d abandon him to wander as a ghost.’
‘As if you know so much about friendship,’ Kosmos retorts. ‘You knew I’d become one of their targets, didn’t you?’
‘I had no idea. All I knew was they were worried you’d betray us, but I told them no, Kosmos would never do that. Then you went and did it anyway!’
‘No, I didn’t!’ Kosmos shouts, voice breaking like he’s going to cry again. He breathes heavily, making an ameliorating gesture to Hanno and Absalon, who straightened in alarm when they heard the shout. Much quieter, Kosmos repeats, ‘I did not betray you.’
‘And I didn’t know they would come for you.’
Yet Echo senses that whatever brought them back together in the skirmish has broken again. Even if neither of them actually betrayed the other, they still assumed each other capable of betrayal, and that’s a bad sign.
Nabu stalks away from Harmodios’s body. Echo avoids his gaze, unwilling to admit they’re putting their own safety before a friend; but Kosmos is right, if they show even the slightest sympathy for the conspirators, they’ll become suspects as well.
Two sodden priestesses skulk up the hill to retrieve the bull, and the guards with the bier aren’t far behind. Nabu takes a last glance at Harmodios as they leave.
‘Somebody will come,’ Echo says, touching his arm.
He shakes her off, snarling. ‘Go to the crows, Echo. You know the dogs will get to him before his self-preserving aristokratic family does.’
She closes her mouth. Of all of them, he must be feeling the charade of their switching sides the worst. If her stomach’s turning, his must be doing somersaults, but it was necessary to preserve any chance of completing the Deed.
Kosmos and Nabu are alive and uncaptured, able to set up a philosophical school that no errand boy like Echo could alone.
The challenge now is keeping them unharmed, because Hippias is about to become far more terrible.
Hipparchos’s body jolts as one of the bier carriers trips in a pothole and rights himself.
Echo needs to talk to the Forward Traveller, and communicate with her enough to figure out their next steps, but she can’t imagine ever sleeping again.
The streets are deserted and the windows shuttered, but doors slam and footsteps slap in parallel alleyways, as if everywhere they pass through has only just been cleared.
Rumour precedes them—and no wonder, for they hear the tyrannos’s house long before they reach it.
Animal howls snake through the streets, shaking the branches of the fruit trees.
The cry comes again and, with a gag, Echo realises it’s not animal, but human.
What can they be doing to that man to make his voice tear out of him like that?
Nabu’s eyes widen and he glances at Echo: Any minute now, it could be their turn.