Chapter 14 Echo
Echo
‘Is the rumour true?’ Echo asks Nabu, as she settles beside him under the olive tree, placing her basket between them.
‘That the body of the missing conspirator’s been found?’ he replies. ‘I believe so. Who did you hear that from?’
‘Attendants at the gymnasion this morning. Kosmos was there convincing the other young philosophers to come to his symposium tonight.’ Echo removes the basket’s linen cover, revealing a stoppered jug of honey-milk and a selection of small cakes.
They’re traditionally offerings for the dead, but for the past half-moon, Nabu and Echo have been using them as a front for meeting in the graveyard, where they’re unlikely to bump into anyone or be overheard.
It’s a risk for Nabu to be associated with the tyrannos’s fickle philosopher son, just as it is for Echo to be seen with the artisan healer who was perhaps too close to the tyrannicides.
Echo gives Nabu a cake. ‘Apparently the body was a horrible mess, the worst yet.’
‘I doubt that,’ Nabu says, glancing at Aristogeiton’s tomb and making the sign of the horns.
The wound Hippias inflicted on Echo’s brow twinges. ‘Hanno says at night you can hear Aristogeiton crying in this graveyard. He says the summer is dry and the harvest bad because the gods have abandoned Athens.’
‘Hanno’s superstitious,’ Nabu replies. ‘I didn’t know you’d stayed in touch.’
‘You are not my only friend.’ Echo picks up a cake for herself and stares at it.
Every day, she misses Hanno’s easy gossip and Absalon’s friendly silences.
She wishes they could’ve joined Echo and Kosmos in the escape to the farm, but alas the bodyguards are owned by Hippias and had to stay behind.
‘Kosmos also heard Kleisthenes might send to Sparta for support, and Hippias has sent envoys to Persia. It seems there will be a war.’
‘Kosmos is dramatic,’ Nabu says around a mouthful of cake.
‘But Nabu, you must admit you are not safe in the tyrannos’s house.’ Echo picks sesame seeds off her cake. ‘This is maybe the fifth disappearance in the half-moon since the tyrannicide. Not everyone is as brave as Leaina, you will be named at some time.’
Nabu swoops, clamping a hand over her mouth. ‘Are you trying to get me disappeared?’ He springs back as a grieving family passes, children darting around the adults’ legs. One of their attendants recognises Nabu and throws glances at him until they round a corner.
Nabu relaxes, swallowing the last of his cake.
‘The rumours are getting out of hand. I’ve heard people say Hippias has started ingesting human flesh, that he drinks traitors’ tears and has become a hatchling of Hades.
Even that he’s promised the chthonic gods citizens’ lives in return for prolonging his power. It’s all nonsense.’
Echo puts her uneaten cake back in the basket.
‘These bodies are not nonsense.’ Every time she runs errands in the agora or accompanies Kosmos to the gymnasion and stoa she can sense the citizenry rising against the tyrannos like waves on a beach, threatening him with little stones but unable to wash him away.
Nabu is just a shell on the sand, at risk of being swept up or buried any moment.
Every day it’s more of a miracle he hasn’t been questioned, given how close he was to the tyrannicides.
Hippias’s five loyal sons must have stuffed their ears with wax, knowing that only Nabu can get close to Hippias in his worst rages.
‘What is your plan, Nabu? Stay in his house until the next rebellion?’ Urged by her worry, the Not Here hiccoughs out. ‘You will be waiting a long time, and the Peisistratids will be exiled before then. Do you want to return to Persia, for that is where they are bound?’
Nabu raises an eyebrow. ‘I see your control of the Traveller’s voice is still worsening.’
Echo waves a hand. Ever since she told Nabu that Leaina bit out her own tongue, the Not Here has been more troublesome.
She knew what would happen to Leaina, but it turned out that wasn’t what the Not Here wanted to say.
Her tongue is; her tongue is; her tongue is fine, it’s her larynx that’s damaged; smoothing a hospital sheet— Stop it.
Echo focuses on Nabu and the conversation at hand.
‘I am serious. You are my Caretaker, we must keep each other safe, and you are not safe where you are.’
Nabu gets up, pacing to a grave stele. ‘I don’t really have a plan, I just think I might be useful one day where I am.’
‘You sound doubtful.’
‘Honestly, you have got into my head a bit, all that talk of violence creating more violence.’ He picks lichen off the stele.
‘I witnessed all this as a child in Lydia: the tyrannicide was a portent of rebellions to come, and I couldn’t bear for all the bloodshed to happen here.
Athens is my home; I’d know the streets blindfolded.
I know how the wind blows off the sea in autumn, how the low sun catches the stoa murals in winter, which flowers open in summer …
This place is part of me. I care about it.
In Lydia, the revolution failed, and if I brought that much bloodshed here in aid of nothing, I couldn’t forgive myself.
You’re right, we didn’t have enough of a plan, we were just shouting into the wind.
Who would’ve replaced Hippias? Another aristokrat? Useless.’
‘You do not want to be part of another rebellion?’
‘No, I do. Just the right one.’
Echo nods. ‘Meanwhile, why not join us at the farm? You will be safe, and you might find answers.’
‘Oh yes, I’ll find all the answers with you and Kosmos. You haven’t even set up a real school, it’s just a tumbledown old farm and the only followers Kosmos can drum up are bitter aristokratic youngest sons and wine-swilling imitators who go straight from the stoa to the brothel!’
Echo looks at her feet. ‘It will take time.’
‘You said yourself it’s broken the hereafter. Have you made any progress on figuring out why? Or is that another thing we’ll avoid talking about?’
Larynx is damaged; want me to read to you— The back of Echo’s neck prickles and she kneads the pain.
Nabu watches her, head on one side. ‘How long’s the scruff of your neck been hurting?’
‘It is nothing,’ Echo lies. ‘And I have no answers for why the hereafter is broken. If you come to the symposium tonight, maybe you can help me discover it.’
‘I’d rather not have to be in a room with Kosmos.’
Echo folds her arms. ‘So do not talk to him. It will be exciting, Pythagoras is the guest of honour. He has predicted a lunar eclipse, and you love the Wanderers still, even if you do not love Kosmos. Come because I cannot understand what is wrong with the school and I know you will.’
‘I’ll tell you the problem right now: You don’t see a man with a broken leg and shout, “Heal!” You don’t start a school and shout “philosophise.” You’ve got no idea what you’re doing, that’s the problem.’
The silence oozes. Echo doesn’t feel like admitting he’s right.
Hesitantly, Nabu sits beside her. ‘Echo. Thinking about Lydia the last few days, I’ve got this thought I can’t shake. Where you’re from, you know things. Does my language survive?’
‘I know only the Hellenic for your language. What do you call it, Nabu, in your own words?’
He huffs. ‘You haven’t recognised it in all these weeks. Not a good sign.’
‘I do not know every language. Give me your name for it.’
‘To us it’s Sfard?ti?.’
The Not Here tolls, and Echo draws the word in the dirt, copying a page in her mind’s eyes, whiter and smoother than any papyrus:
‘This is how to write it?’
He sucks in a breath, transfixed as a breeze already eats the word’s edges. ‘Yes, that’s it. So?’
With genuine regret she shakes her head. ‘We have the words, we know some of the grammar, but the meanings and sounds are lost.’
He nods, clenching his hands, turning from her. ‘But where you’re from, you know everything.’
‘No, we do not. We know a dangerous amount about only some things. Many things are lost, I am sorry.’
A fly settles in the centre of the word, assisting the breeze in breaking it up.
Holding her fingers to the sky, Echo sighs.
The sun’s already low. ‘I apologise. I must return and help prepare for tonight. Can you take the cakes and milk to Khemut, Hanno, and Absalon?’ Nabu nods, still shaken by the impermanence of his language, and she puts a hand on his arm.
‘Think about coming tonight. It might help. Also, I would like to see you.’
He shakes his head, but mutters, ‘I’ll think about it.’
She passes the bereaved family on the way out, the children gobbling sacred cakes in the shade of the gravestone.
Sticky-fingered, they’re oblivious to the political turmoil stewing around them, cushioned by their aristokratic parents.
Winji, the youngest daughter of the enslaved family that runs Kosmos’s farm and who Echo bumps into on the road home, couldn’t be more different.
She looks as much of a child as any of them, but her expressions and movements belong to a much older body as she struggles under the weight of the household groceries.
‘Here, I will help,’ Echo says, taking one of the baskets.
‘I could carry it all when it was just us.’ Winji pants, hands on knees, before she takes up her basket again.
For too long Kosmos’s farm ran on not enough, so Winji and her four siblings are twig thin.
Though Kosmos’s residency has brought more food into the house, there are many drawbacks: His chaotic symposia and expectations from a much larger and grander abode have tripled their workload.
Echo’s sweating within a few steps, and readjusts the basket, which is full of bags of spices and grains. ‘It is not always so heavy, this is because of the symposium tonight, yes?’