Chapter 12 Echo #3
The day passes in this cycle of forgetful resignation and jolting remembrance.
The sun wheels down the sky, winking between clouds that promise more rain but deliver none.
Evening spills blood on the firmament, the blister of stars and slice of aged moon obscured by a thickening overcast. The children hide under the kitchen table, clinging to the dogs, and the serving girls make complicated pastries while the stable hands drink unmixed wine and play dice.
Echo finds ways to keep busy too listening for the pulse of a pregnant fruit-picker’s fetus, pressing her ear against the stretched firm skin.
She taps it out—buhbuh buhbuh—on the mother’s hand.
As Echo straightens, an absolute quiet falls, and as one the kitchen’s inhabitants look to the door. For the second time that day, the silence is worse than the sound.
Khemut clears her throat. ‘Hippias hasn’t had his infusion.’
‘We are beyond calming infusions,’ Echo replies.
Footsteps approach and Kosmos appears. ‘Where’s Nabu?’ His voice is hoarse and his eyes glisten.
‘Not available,’ Echo says, standing.
‘What do you mean not available? He’s paid to be available.’
Echo glares at him. ‘I am here. Nabu is not. I will come.’
Kosmos hesitates, then slumps. ‘Fine. Come on then.’
‘What should I bring?’
‘Gods below, how should I know?’ He pinches unshed moisture from his eyes. ‘Nothing. You don’t need to bring anything.’
Echo reminds herself to breathe. Only those who have passed on need nothing.
In the inner courtyard, Kosmos wheels around and grabs Echo’s wrist, imploring her. ‘Before we go in, you must know, I didn’t touch her. I didn’t do any of it. I swear. He just made me watch, that’s all. You understand?’
‘Observation is not action?’ She sneers, though her hearing it all and doing nothing isn’t exactly moral high ground. Her tongue, her tongue—
Kosmos’s eyes well up again and he repeats, quieter, ‘I didn’t touch her.’
Bloody sandal-prints lead beyond the andron’s threshold and as Kosmos pushes the doors open they drag dark thick substances over the floor.
He gestures. ‘After you.’ The room reeks of latrines and metallic blood, but Echo keeps her stomach in check.
A single oil lamp shakes shadows over the pushed-aside dining tables and couches, light glinting on the puddled floor.
In the centre of the room is a body. If it weren’t for the yellow dress tossed to one side, Echo wouldn’t be able to identify it as Leaina.
‘Revive her. We are not finished.’ Echo starts and squints into the corner where Hippias, barely visible, reclines on a couch. Gold bands glimmer at his wrists as he turns sparkling eyes on Kosmos. ‘Where’s Nabu?’
Kosmos looks at his spattered sandals and shuffles his feet.
‘Nabu is occupied with another patient,’ Echo lies. ‘He sent me instead. I can attend any situation.’
Hippias waves his arm in a broad arc: Here’s the situation.
Trying not to breathe the foetid air, Echo approaches Leaina, substances she doesn’t want to name oozing between her toes.
Leaina’s hair has been shorn and her limbs are disjointed.
If she’s recognisable at all, it’s by what’s left of her curves, hinting that her body was so recently bountiful.
Echo squats, tucking her tunic between her legs to avoid dragging it in the mess. Her tongue, her tongue—
Inside Leaina’s gaping mouth is a stump where her tongue should be. Lioness who bit—
Her eyes are frozen open. Echo takes a pulse for the sake of form but there’s no doubt. Her mind falters, ringing with shock.
‘Well?’ Hippias sounds like he might be chewing something.
‘I cannot revive her. She is dead.’
‘You are certain?’
‘Yes.’ The only reason Echo contains herself is because she’s terrified she’ll be next.
With a grunt and clicking knees, Hippias stands and emerges from the shadows, wiping his hands on a fresh cloth, his fingernails black sickles against the white linen.
‘Women always go quicker than men. They’re more porous, like a sponge.
They absorb what’s around them too much, it’s what makes them so overemotional and short-tempered.
So quick to squeal. Aristogeiton didn’t make such noises.
He bellowed like an ox, as men should. She was a piglet. ’
Echo’s fists bunch. She was a lioness, a hero, a foremother of the democratic turn—
Hippias moves behind Echo, his breath brushing the back of her neck. Bit her tongue— No, don’t think about where Leaina’s tongue is and why it’s not in her mouth. Don’t think at all.
Echo stands and turns, shorter than Hippias and skinny where he’s wired with muscle.
‘I wonder, boy, are you old enough to behave like a man yet? Has the fabric of your spirit hardened?’ His eyes bore into her, pulling at threads of truth: her gender, the Not Here, her Deed, Kosmos and Nabu’s involvement in the tyrannicides’ plot …
But if he knew any of it, she’d already be in trouble. She swallows her fear, tightening her fists. ‘Do you need another diagnosis?’
Hippias tilts his head. ‘Perhaps. You should stay, at any rate.’ He draws a knife from his sheath and holds it out to Kosmos. ‘Cut off its feet.’
Kosmos stammers. ‘What?’
‘The corpse. Its spirit must not be allowed to rise. Cut off its feet.’
There is a long silence. Echo can see the pulse in Kosmos’s neck, his chest rising and falling fast, like ripples in water. He looks from his father to Leaina to Echo. She holds his gaze until he has to look away.
He takes a step back, shaking his head. ‘No.’
Hippias jerks the knife at him. ‘Do it.’
‘No. I will not.’ Kosmos’s voice is a kitten-mewl, but it doesn’t make the words less brave.
Hippias squares up to him. ‘Useless boy. You want to be haunted, do you? Want to be cursed?’
Kosmos trembles visibly. Late as it’s arrived, in this moment, Echo’s got to admire his courage. His lip quivers. ‘If she rises then perhaps it’s because we deserve to be risen against.’
Every muscle in Hippias’s face contorts with disgust. He re-grips the knife handle and Kosmos winces preemptively.
The Not Here mutters that once upon a time, Echo wouldn’t have thought twice about standing up to Hippias.
She wouldn’t have sat listening to Leaina scream; she would’ve burst in here and done something about it.
Since she travelled, she’s been so absorbed in what’s ‘good’ and ‘safe’ it’s paralysed her actions.
She’s done nothing in the face of terrible crimes and violence.
In the Not Here, she had agency and rights and she used them.
That Not-Here-self hammers through her now like violets through marble paving, not acting in aid of the Deed or the future, just in defence of Kosmos who, like her, is finally trying to do something.
‘He said: If she rises it is because you deserve to be risen against.’
Hippias rounds on her. His punch is so sudden Echo doesn’t register the fist until she’s on the floor blinking away stars. Floodgates open in her nose, blood gushing down her face. She’s still spinning when a second blow, a thunderclap in one ear, leaves her floored.
Drawing her into a kneeling position, Hippias takes her face in his claws. He turns it this way and that, as if verifying her nose is genuinely bleeding, her ear and forehead really bruised. He pushes his face so close spittle lands on her cheeks and mouth with every consonant.
‘Little boy. Always there in the shadows. Bringing me my infusions so dutifully. But how much do we really know about you. Are you one of them? Are you with the traitors?’
Echo wriggles, trapped. ‘N—No.’
His nails dig into her cheeks, reeking of rot and iron. ‘You’re hiding something.’
‘No. I swear.’
Hippias pulls back a fist like an archer stringing his bow and releases it into her stomach. For one tiny moment she forgets herself and crumples, spluttering and squealing. Squealing like a girl.
She clamps her mouth shut, but it’s too late, Hippias noticed the womanly noise. The Furies catch him, and she remembers that first day when she and Nabu nursed him out of the gynaikeion: There is only one thing he fears and despises more than traitors. ‘I see you. I see you now, woman.’
She shakes her head, trembling, not daring to speak.
‘No, you say? We’ll see about that, won’t we? Let’s see what we can do to get the truth out of you.’
His fist grips her hair, pulling her head up as he takes his knife and slices above her brow. Pain slashes through her head as blood trickles into her eye. She screams.
‘Hey!’ Kosmos thumps into his father, twisting the knife from Hippias’s hand, and it’s only the tyrannos’s surprise that makes the attack successful.
Hippias lurches back and the knife clatters across the floor.
Letting her brow bleed, Echo darts behind Kosmos.
‘Stop.’ Kosmos’s voice squeaks, but his feet are firm.
Hippias scowls. ‘You too? Yes, it makes sense. Always hiding behind the women’s skirts as a child, going to watch them weave until you were far too old for it. They’ve poisoned you.’
Kosmos holds his arms out, still protecting Echo. ‘We’re not with the women or the traitors, Father, but I will not trap Leaina’s soul. Either you’ve acted with honour today and she won’t rise up, or you’ve done a dishonourable thing and she has every right to vengeance.’
‘A snivelling, womanly weakling.’ Hippias draws himself up like an asp. ‘Get out of my sight.’
‘We are not traitors,’ Kosmos repeats, voice on the edge of breaking.
‘Out.’ Hippias shouts so loud the rafters rain dust.
Echo flees, dashing through the moonlit courtyard with Kosmos on her heels, until they burst into the kitchen, scattering eavesdroppers. Khemut takes in Echo’s cut up face and gestures to Nabu’s room. ‘Don’t tell me anything, just get seen to.’
Blood drips into Echo’s eye as Kosmos guides her down the storeroom corridor. Nabu is curled in bed, eyes red and hair unbraided, but he rises when he sees Echo and dresses her wound without being asked.
‘What happened?’