Chapter 12 Echo #2
The guards look to Kosmos, who gazes up the street, a child again, as if all the monsters he feared have climbed out from under his bed.
For a moment, Echo’s comforted by the fact he’s clearly never heard a man make that noise either, until it dawns on her that Hippias has become more furious and unpredictable than ever.
Nabu hugs himself. ‘We should go elsewhere. Surely.’
Kosmos locks eyes with him, and there’s another split second in which they’re both frightened boys, ready to fall into each other’s arms and hide under a blanket. Then Kosmos says, ‘I don’t think we have a choice,’ and the plot-gone-awry and mutual suspicion divide them.
Echo steels herself, knowing Kosmos is being sensible.
If they don’t return it could be read as guilt, but they walk up the hill slowly, fussing with Hipparchos’s sundered robes.
The human howls take on new tones, each one more sickening than the last. At the threshold, Kosmos waits as the bier-carriers navigate Hipparchos inside, stroking his scar.
As they enter, an eerie quiet descends over the house.
In silence, they watch the women lay the body out on a table in the atrium, allowed from their quarters for the ritual.
The old mother with her karkinoma-scarred chest washes Hipparchos’s face as gently as if he were a newborn, but Myrrhine stands at the corpse’s feet, wringing the washcloth in her hands without using it.
The last of the rain drips into the pool while Khemut lights extra incense and candles on the household altar.
‘Nabu!’ One of Kosmos’s brothers calls from the andron door.
Nabu nods, halfway through taking off his shoes. ‘One moment.’
‘Should I come?’ Echo asks.
He studies her. ‘No. I don’t think both of us need to see what’s in there.’
As he passes, Khemut makes the sign of the horns, pointing down at the chthonic gods. ‘Echo, get out of here,’ she says, jerking her head towards the kitchen. Echo doesn’t need telling twice, exchanging only a brief glance with Kosmos before bolting.
Instantly, the household workers are all over her, asking a hundred questions at once with tight mouths and knitted brows.
‘What happened at the Acropolis?’
‘Rebels.’
‘Is it true Hipparchos is dead?’
‘Yes, he is in the atrium.’
‘Did Kosmos really kill someone?’
‘I do not think so.’
‘Where are Hanno and Absalon?’
‘With Kosmos.’
‘Where’s my son?’ This last from a baker nearly as old as Khemut.
Echo hesitates. Bad news is better heard from longtime friends. ‘Hanno and Absalon know what happened to everyone else.’
There’s a heartbeat of silence, as the room absorbs the number of friends and family missing. Then a little girl asks, ‘Do we still have to serve lunch?’
‘Is it lunchtime?’ Echo gazes at the faces surrounding her.
‘Stop pestering the boy.’ Khemut enters, stick whacking any available shins and backsides. ‘Work doesn’t stop because of life or death.’
Exchanging glances, the others shuffle back to their tasks, the usual bustle muffled by the sudden silence from the andron.
Knowing that inhuman shrieking has ceased is worse than the sound itself because it fills the gap between heartbeats with the questions ‘Why?’ and ‘Who’s next?
’ Khemut leans back in her chair, chewing the inside of her cheek and tapping her cane on the floor.
Just as it occurs to Echo she should help somehow, Nabu sweeps through the kitchen, one hand over his mouth, and heads straight out the stable door. Following, she finds him vomiting in a bucket.
‘What happened?’
He can’t reply for bile, so she fetches a drink from the well. He takes it from her, hands trembling so much they wrinkle the water.
‘What happened, Nabu?’
‘I’m not trained for this.’
‘For what?’
Nabu frowns, swills his mouth out, and spits in the bucket. ‘I cannot—cannot—do this.’ He throws the cup across the yard. ‘I will not serve this tyrannos, he has no honour.’
A clutch of stable hands listen in as they fork a nearby pile of straw, and curious heads poke out of the kitchen doorway. ‘Careful, Nabu, we are not alone.’
‘I don’t care, I won’t do it, Echo!’ He stands, straightening to his full height, eyes blazing.
Darting looks at the other members of the household, Echo grabs Nabu’s arm and drags him into the orchard. When they reach its far edge, she lets him go.
‘Now. With calm. Tell me what Hippias did.’
But Nabu can’t answer straight. He paces, hands in and out of his hair, voice louder than it should be.
‘Since I was seven years old, I’ve been taught that there is a boundary between the body and the world.
We are sacks of meat and humour, held together by this—this thin veil of being!
’ He holds his hand in front of Echo’s face, pulling up the skin.
‘Any perforation of the veil must be undertaken with gravity and intent and necessity, because once you have extracted a humour, you cannot put it back. Once you have undertaken a katharsis the unearthed matter is in the world, along with any Furies or curses attached to it. It is a sacred thing, this veil! You do not puncture it without reason, you do not—do not—’ Nabu’s mouth works emptily.
He flops onto a log, gazing at the mountains as sunshine lances the low-hanging clouds.
Echo’s never seen him this upset, not even when he argued with Kosmos. ‘Nabu?’
He mutters, ‘I forget, sometimes…’ Then his eyes focus and he turns to her. ‘Why didn’t we try fighting? I could have ended him. He was right there and so was I.’
Echo slumps onto the log. ‘You were not near him, Nabu. His guards surrounded him. We had already lost.’
‘You can’t know that.’
‘I can. I am a Traveller. I know.’
‘But you’re here to change things. To change this. You promised me.’
‘No, the last Traveller promised. His promise is open to interpretation. He did not mean what you think.’
‘He wouldn’t have done that to me.’
‘Are you certain?’
Nabu looks away without answering. ‘You won’t overcome this system without force.’
‘There are many ways to be forceful, not all are violent. We must found a school—’
‘Stop that. Not now.’ Nabu puts his head in his hands. ‘Aristogeiton is dead. Hippias killed him.’
The revelation stretches between them, filling with the silent accusation that it’s her fault. Maybe it is. ‘I am sorry,’ she says, but the words are inadequate before they’re even spoken.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it. That any man could treat a body like that…’ Nabu curls up, diminishing behind his long hair and broad shoulders. ‘I can’t do what he wants, Echo. I just can’t.’
She’s petrified that Hippias will call for her interrogation, and she’ll discover she can wail as terribly as Aristogeiton.
No part of her wants to walk into the wolf’s mouth, except the small strong voice that wishes to regain Nabu’s respect.
After the rain, it’s humid and she wipes her sweaty palms on her tunic.
‘When next Hippias calls, I will assist him.’
‘Why?’
Echo shrugs. ‘It is necessary. You are my Caretaker. We need each other and I want to help you. So, I am here.’
Nabu nods and stares at the mountains. ‘You know Aristogeiton didn’t betray a soul?
Even though he once threatened to give Hippias my name if everything went wrong, when it came down to it, he didn’t.
That’s how much he cared about the rebellion.
He wouldn’t even rat us out, in case it damaged the revolution’s honour or purity.
He still believed it would live on.’ Nabu grips his chiton. ‘We can’t let their lives be in vain.’
From the house, a new howl begins, long and high like a gull cry, too piercing for a man. Echo’s heart sinks: There was only one woman amongst the captives, and now it’s the veil of her body being perforated.
For the first few minutes, Echo can’t believe she’ll ever get used to the sound. She’s never truly known what blood-curdling means before, but Leaina’s unnatural cries burrow into her ears, unspooling in her skull until she can’t conceive of ever being alone in that bone cavity again.
Yet, when the sun has only moved a finger’s width, Khemut fetches Echo from the orchard because one of the kitchen girls accidentally cut herself, and by the time Echo’s finished binding the wound, Leaina’s cries have blended into the background like cicada song.
It’s only when Echo returns the honey disinfectant to the pantry and runs out of tasks that the cries refresh their grip.
So, she busies herself. First, she washes and changes back into her everyday tunic, scrubbing the blood from under her nails.
Then Myrrhine sends for Nabu, and Echo goes to the gynaikeion instead as he’s still hiding in the orchard waiting for much-needed thunder and the cessation of the household storm.
Myrrhine requires poppy milk, apparently for menstruation pains, though Echo can’t blame her for wanting an opiate sedative after laying out Hipparchos’s body.
As Echo’s upstairs, Hippias’s mother draws her to one side, stony-faced and unreadable, as if she loses sons to revolutionaries every day.
She’s found a new lump in her other breast and needs examining.
It doesn’t wriggle around like a cyst and, with a painted smile, Echo tells her to wait for a proper diagnosis from Nabu.
She recommends a lavender infusion in the meantime, only because making it gives her something else to do, but all the while Leaina’s howls stain the air.
Beloved of the tyrannicides and her tongue is—
Khemut sends as many of the household out on errands as she can, and when the kitchen’s almost empty, Nabu returns from the orchard and slinks to his room.