Chapter 2 Echo
Echo
Cut your hair. Underwater, she has a moment to think about it.
She empties her lungs in a flurry, removing her buoyancy, and settles on the stony floor.
She waits, heart thumping, feeling the bubbles caught in her hair crawling around her scalp until the curve releases them—up and away—to join the rest of the air at the surface.
When her pulse starts thudding in her ears, she pushes her palms against the pebbles, kicking slowly upwards.
She emerges, gasping, farther out than anticipated, and kicks on the spot until she catches sight of the man on the shore again.
A breeze disturbs the grove of bitter almonds surrounding the lake, and a swell of pink blossoms drifts over the man, settling in his curls and the grooves of his tunic.
He waits for her to swim back, running a hand over the rewards of his hunt—a hare and a duck—as the afternoon sun gilds their fur and feathers.
The lake is steep sided, so by the time she’s at standing depth, she’s uncomfortably close, within arm’s reach of him.
He holds out his knife, handle first, the blade still mottled by the animals’ blood.
‘τ?με τ?ν σ?ν κ?μην.’ Teme tên sên komên, cut your hair.
She translates in her head, racing to catch the meaning as the peculiar words dance in her ears like pollen.
Easier, because it’s the second time he’s said it.
She takes the knife, wetting the worn leather grip. Dipping it under the water, she rubs the seam of blood at the blade’s edge. Her long hair weaves around her arms and waist, copper where the sun peeks through the canopy.
‘Stop ?κνει, someone might find us.’ Oknéi, to hesitate, but in a specific way; a womanly, fearful, shirking hesitation.
She glances at the man, stroking a lock of her hair.
She can’t remember the patience of growing it or attach fond memories to it, but her hair is part of her body, the only familiar thing in this otherwise alien land.
If she cuts it, she’ll lose one of the few essential parts of herself she has left.
‘Come on,’ the man says.
She passes the knife between her hands. Fish dart around her knees and reeds stroke her shins.
‘Say again.’ She’s frustrated by how clumsy her speech is.
She understands most of what she hears, but can’t conjure the words herself—not yet.
‘Say again the words.’ She needs to hear them, to confirm once more that she is where she’s supposed to be.
He cocks his head. Then, in an altogether different language—her language, her mother tongue, her English—as if he’s learned the words by rote and understands only their importance, not their meaning: ‘Are we not drawn onward ere divided?’
As when she first heard them, she relaxes, as if she’s stepped from a cave into summer sunshine. But this time the flood of relief that she’s in the right place is tempered by fear that the right place doesn’t necessarily mean a safe place. She lets the water take her weight.
‘We few live on mirror rims…’ She mutters back, but perhaps he misses it because he doesn’t respond, just glances over his shoulder at the wheat field beyond the grove.
Still, the words they should exchange reverberate in her head: Emit no evil bronze doors and horses, torn from Constantinople and dragged across the sea to Venice; the city that sinks as the land becomes a tinderbox—
The flood of memories is sudden and uncontrollable, a vast wave threatening to engulf her.
The concepts, images, and contexts flow out of the void in her head—the same place as the Hellenic she barely speaks and the English in which she thinks.
Wherever that place is, it’s not here and she cannot be pulled into it.
She has to remain in the present, with this strange man, it’s where she’s supposed to be.
We few live on mirror rims. She anchors herself on his gaze and repeats his name, ‘Amel-Nabu.’
‘Nabu’s probably better. If we’re to pull this off people should think we’re familiar.’
‘Nabu.’ God of scribes and writing and wisdom and—
He runs his eyes over her body like she’s a ewe at market. ‘Those’ll need binding before you put your tunic on.’ He rustles in his travelling bag and pulls out two strips of cloth, bloodstained like the knife. ‘One for above, one for below.’
She pulls herself from the water, more naked without it, as if the waves and reeds and fish had clothed her.
The rough linen grates on her skin as she rushes tying the loincloth.
Sunlight evaporates water droplets off her in shivers, as she fiddles about binding her breasts.
Nabu tuts, ‘No, tighter,’ until she’s bound so hard she can barely breathe and he pins the cloth under her arm with a bronze brooch and a satisfied nod.
At last, he hands her a plain green tunic and a leather belt.
The tunic, which is clean but built for someone Nabu’s size, falls flat over her crushed breasts.
Like an ironing board, a coffee table strewn with half-read books and fermenting mugs, the kitchen sideboard in the old London flat— The back of her neck prickles.
She fumbles the belt on, clinging to the leather, tying herself to the here and now.
The void falls silent again, the sunshine relaxes the hairs on the back of her neck, and she focuses on the lake, the darting insects, the burning shore.
Whatever resides in that internal void, it’s not here. And the Not Here cannot keep her safe.
She straightens, breath pressing against her binding, hands on hips. ‘So? I am a boy?’
Nabu tilts his head and allows himself a close-lipped smile. ‘Not bad. There’s nothing else to do anyway, they’ll either take you for a boy or they won’t.’
Indeed. Whoever ‘they’ are.
‘I haven’t got any sandals for you.’
‘Did you not say I had—uh—have been expected?’
‘Yes, I expected you, but not today. I didn’t know when. You can’t imagine I’d carry an extra pair of shoes with me everywhere.’
‘You have the extra tunic.’
He yanks the hare and duck up by the strings tied around their feet and throws them over a shoulder. He gestures at his own bloodied clothes. ‘It wasn’t for you.’
She bites her lip, stroking her tunic’s too-big, frayed neckline. ‘Thank you.’
‘Come.’ He holds his fingers to the horizon, measuring the sun’s distance from it. ‘We have a long walk and it’s later than I’d like.’
They emerge from the grove onto a baked mountainside.
Wind snakes Echo’s bare legs, fresh with salt.
The horizon glares, low sun glancing off a faraway sea, and a breeze scratches the mountain’s ochre dust over her feet.
Her nose fills with savoury-sweet dittany, sage, oregano, and thyme, their oils brought to the surface by the heat.
She scans the parched land. In the haze, she can just make out a distant cluster of red squares, the roof tiles of a city, swathed in grey hearth-smoke.
In its centre is a large hill, flattened on top, and occupied by gleaming limestone buildings.
The Acropolis. Athens. The words dart from the Not Here, piercing her other thoughts. The flat-topped hill is the Acropolis, the city is Athens. That’s all she gets. How she knows this is beyond her, but she knows it in the same way she knows the sun will rise tomorrow. Unarguable facts.