Chapter 2 Echo #2
They set off down the mountain, Nabu navigating via a thin stream of water.
The cicadas riot, so loud she loses her breath and footsteps to their susurrations.
The insects dart into her chest like flying stones as she and Nabu pass bathers and laundresses, who arrive at the riverbank grimy and worn from the stepped farmland.
Presently, the stream joins with others, like twigs feeding into a branch.
Or railway tracks converging at a station, or country lanes linking into major roads, or— No, here those things don’t exist. If she listens, the disconnect of the Not Here will split her in two.
She tamps the Not Here down. When she’s ascertained that Nabu really won’t hurt her, when she’s been fed and watered and has tended to the blisters swelling on her feet, then she can worry about the mess in her mind.
The streams become a river—the Ilisos, according to Nabu—and it curves across the valley floor.
Her knees thank the ground for flattening out as the mountain tracks too converge into a road, and Echo and Nabu join a current of travellers.
At first, she flinches and hesitates whenever someone overtakes her, but no one gives her a second glance: to them she really is just a boy heading back to town from an errand with his boss or master.
As they round a hill, the city comes into full view, walls drenched in sunset. ?θ?ναι, Athens. This time it comes in the context of print on paper. Books, ink, font, printing press, Gutenb— Quiet.
By the city gates a couple of guards with throwing spears taller than Nabu lounge on the roadside playing a board game. Not backgammon, the board’s cinched in the middle. The game of Ur. She rubs her forehead as she passes and one of the guards glances up.
‘Gotta make sure you drink in this heat.’
She tenses. ‘Excuse?’
The guard shrugs. ‘The headache, lad. Make sure you drink enough water.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she replies, as Nabu turns her back to the road.
She hunches and locks her eyes on the ground, but he squeezes her shoulder, muttering, ‘Boyish enough, then.’
She nods. Of course, she’s relieved that the guards accept her as a boy so unthinkingly, but it hurts too. She had hoped there was more to her womanhood than that.
Within the walls, the sun seems to sink faster, dyeing the sky fuchsia pink.
Even at this hour, Athens remains a cacophony of stonecutters’ hammers, yelping dogs, yelling children, and tradespeople crying their wares.
Echo weaves around a girl who can’t be more than sixteen carrying a basket of sea urchins towards the agora, two small children tumbling in her wake.
Men in sweeping himatia stalk the streets, followed by contingents of enslaved people, and occasionally one of the household women.
Burning hearths lace the air with wood smoke, baking bread, frying olive oil, and roasting meat.
Her stomach growls, but she doesn’t dare ask when they’ll eat.
They dip off the main road, Nabu leading them through backstreets stuffed with seamstresses, butchers, jewellers, cloth merchants, and rat catchers.
The land slopes again as they climb one of the circuitous routes up the Acropolis and turn into an alley lined by villas with small windows but ornate entrances, which give away the fact these are aristokrats’ homes.
Echo and Nabu pass a pair of oak doors carved with heroic escapades. Theseus and the Minotaur; Ariadne breaking up the royal family; the thread guiding them into the Labyrinth and out again— Echo sees everything, first as it is, then embroidered by the whispers of the Not Here.
The guard posted to the door leans on a marble herm and nods to Nabu, who returns the gesture, then guides Echo down a side passage to the servants’ entrance.
A set of wooden gates have been left ajar in the back wall, giving on to a chaos of hay, horses, dogs, laundry, and enslaved maids, farmhands, stableboys, and children.
Echo hops over animal droppings, but her feet still pick up another layer of filth as they cross to the kitchen, which bursts over her in a hive of activity and heat.
Two long tables are laid across the room, clusters of women gathered around them chopping vegetables and singing.
More children dart underfoot, wrestling sleek puppies for fallen scraps under the tables.
A huge hearth takes up an entire wall, kitchen hands feeding its three fires with logs and kindling.
In the corner beside the open back door, a tidy old woman barks orders, so thin she ought to slip between her slatted chair-back.
She spots Echo and Nabu immediately, fixing them with one eye and rubbing the stitch-scars where the other used to be as if she still believes she can make it see. ‘What’s the cat dragged in this time?’
‘The boy’s my new assistant, Khemut. He arrived today from out of town.’ Nabu places a hand on Echo’s shoulder, and she senses his height and warmth behind her, a shield in the chaos. Are we not drawn onward ere divided?
‘Such airs and graces you artisans give yourselves.’ Khemut slots a thumbnail between her gaping front teeth, dislodging a scrap of old food and examining it before flicking it to the dogs. ‘I assume you’ve asked Myrrhine’s permission to bring another mouth into the house?’
Nabu sweeps his hair from his eyes and grins, cheeks dimpling. ‘So suspicious, even after all these years, and when I’ve brought you gifts too!’ He slings the hare and duck onto a nearby table, and Khemut raises an eyebrow.
‘Off with you, your charms do no good on me. It’s your business if you get yourself thrown out.
You’ve got a good job here, you remember that!
’ She jabs her thumb towards a door at the far end of the room, then raises her cane with the other hand and shouts, ‘Hey! Put that apple back where you found it, it ain’t yours. ’
Echo jumps. ‘I do no thing!’ Her instinctive reply fights with the sizzle of crayfish frying in a pan and the clatter of fresh bread being scooped from the ovens, but it’s heard by enough kitchen hands to cause a wave of laughter.
Khemut cackles, saying ‘Not you, her!’ and a girl drops her apple mid-steal.
Echo follows Nabu across the kitchen, stepping over a pair of stableboys prodding a half-dead gecko, and squeezing past a worker fanning his face with a wide-brimmed hat.
She ducks under the heavy wool curtain hanging in the doorway and emerges into a square courtyard, edged by a colonnade hung with thick vines of grape and ivy.
Terracotta pots filled with sunny fennels, dusky aconites, and blood-red anemones line the patio, interspersed with statues of mythic figures.
Larger than life, their painted faces glower at Echo as she passes.
From the colonnade roof, a pet peacock squawks, making Echo nearly lose her skin in fright.
‘Nabu!’ The stage whisper comes from an atrium beyond the courtyard.
Silhouetted against the sunbeams allowed by the closing front door, a lanky young man flanked by two mountainous bodyguards nods a greeting.
Nabu circles the colonnade, Echo skulking behind, inhaling sharply as her feet step from hot tiles to cool marble mosaics.
The main house is so grand she barely dares to breathe, conscious of her grubby, bloody feet.
She checks behind her and, sure enough, she’s left flecks of dirt.
In the atrium, north-facing light slants through high windows, criss-crossing murals and the miniature gods on the household altar, while a broad skylight illuminates a central pool.
The two guards hang back, silent but watchful, as the young man sits on a low wall beside the pool and removes his sandals.
He chucks them, trailing dust, towards a passing maid, who scoops them up and makes for the villa’s deeper recesses, passing Echo with a sigh at her dirty paws.
Echo realises the work she’s created with her muddy footprints and apologises softly, but it only seems to make the maid hurry out of sight faster.
Perhaps Echo is somewhere between Nabu and the maid in the pecking order?
It’s all so weird, and she’s so tired—but even the luxury of that thought makes her realise she isn’t Nabu’s slave.
Reaching the young man, Nabu murmurs a greeting too low for hearing and sits beside him, facing away from the pool.
Just as Echo isn’t Nabu’s slave, clearly he isn’t the young man’s.
Whatever’s between the two men, it’s something else.
Still, Nabu isn’t entirely at ease. The room is a temple of stillness, calm, and cool after the bustle and heat of the city and kitchen, but Echo fears breaking the quiet, and hovers in the shadows.
The young man jerks his head at her as he dabbles his feet. ‘Who’s that then?’
‘The new assistant I told you about, Kosmos.’
The young man—Kosmos—narrows his gaze. ‘From out of town?’
Nabu grunts in assent, dipping a couple of fingers in the pool, watching wave-patterns form and collide.
Kosmos sizes Echo up, and she wonders how much Nabu’s told him about her real origins.
He’s slender as a silver birch, in that way of youths who’ve reached adulthood but haven’t filled into themselves yet, his limbs all angles and lethargy.
He’s perhaps almost twenty, his hair still flyaway and not fully grown to his shoulders.
If he were more comfortable in his skin, his haphazard features might coalesce into liquidity and grace, but as it is he’s clumsy and awkward.
‘You’re a mess, boy. Come here, and wash your feet.’ Kosmos’s voice is flat and unreadable, his upper lip staying still when he speaks, as if he too is afraid of what lies in this villa. ‘Come. The water won’t bite.’