Chapter 14 Echo #2
Winji nods, tight-lipped. ‘Let’s just get home, please.
I don’t want to stay in town too long.’ She checks over her shoulder, as if one of Hippias’s guards is about to run them down.
No child should be so terrified. Running off to found the school with Kosmos was a start at resistance, but Nabu’s right: If Echo wants to mend Athens’ broken bones, she has to do more than shout, ‘Heal!’
They scuff up dust in the last of the summer heat, wending down a dirt track between parched fields and orchards, watched by the mountains.
Tucked in the countryside, Kosmos’s farm is distanced from the epicentre of rebellion, but being beyond the city walls instead risks attack by Spartan soldiers.
Winji’s family are armed, but they’re mostly whittled by overwork or too young to be competent with a sword.
The neighbours wouldn’t help either: Even if their houses were closer, they’re foreign artisans, freemen, and trusted enslaved farmers who tend the surrounding land for distant masters, and Kosmos’s presence threatens their autonomy.
They’d gladly see the back of him, leaving Echo caught between longing for the skirmish-free embrace of winter and dreading the intensification of political upheaval it might bring.
‘You’re worrying about the Spartans again,’ Winji says, shifting her basket.
Echo glances at her. ‘You think I am silly.’
Winji shrugs. ‘No. There’re just other things I worry about more.’
‘The tyrannos.’
Winji nods, checking over her shoulder again and flattening her mouth. Even that might have been too much to say.
‘It will be alright,’ Echo says.
‘You don’t know that.’ Sometimes Echo forgets Winji’s only eight, she’s nothing like the doll-playing, squealing child Echo patchily recalls being.
It’s silly to try placating her when her fears are sound.
Hippias has let them be for now, but Kosmos has crumpled and burned numerous letters from his brothers demanding he return and unite the family.
As with Nabu, it’s only a matter of time before Hippias comes for him, either because Kosmos’s role in the plot’s been revealed, or to fetch his wayward son home.
For now, thank the gods Hippias believes Kosmos ran away due to weakness of spirit.
As they approach the villa, Winji’s father Dagos leaves tending the goats to help carry the food to the kitchen. He’s a cheerful worker despite his early-onset cataracts and missing left arm, which he claims he lost fighting a boar. His wife Unatti says it was a ploughing accident.
‘There you are!’ Unatti says to Winji when they unload the groceries onto the kitchen table. ‘I sent you to town hours ago, you have to be more efficient!’
Winji shuffles her bare toes. ‘Sorry, Mama. It was very heavy.’
Unatti sighs and says something in Kushite to Winji that makes the girl nod at her feet and slope outside to wash in the stream that runs round the orchard.
Unatti unpacks, adding ingredients to pots and pans that are already on the hearths, then returns to kneading bread with her powerful arms. ‘She just can’t seem to get her head around the fact that things have to change now Kosmos is here! ’
‘Yes, my love,’ Dagos says mildly. ‘Though perhaps you might go easier on her? She’s only young.’
‘You think I like clipping the wings of my own children? We have to show them where the boundaries are before he teaches them, Dagos. We have to protect them from his wrath.’ Echo feels for the family.
The five children—aged eight to sixteen—have run uninhibited all over the farm their whole lives.
Unatti and Dagos belonged to other households before this, so they knew what it would be like when that illusion of freedom inevitably ended, but the children have no such bitter experience, and are slow to adapt.
While Echo finds their kittenish ways endearing, Unatti fears them getting berated; in her eyes, the Spartans are nothing compared to an angry Kosmos.
‘How’s town today?’ Dagos asks, changing the subject and turning to Echo.
Echo tells him about the conspirator’s body being found. ‘Anyone could be next. Everyone is walking on eggshells.’
‘As they should.’ He shakes his head. Athens is small enough that Dagos must know some of the exiled and disappeared.
Unatti sprinkles spices into a simmering pot. ‘No one’s safe when there’s trouble amongst the aristokrats.’
‘Speaking of aristokrats, I must talk to Kosmos,’ Echo says. ‘Excuse me.’
It’s always a wrench leaving Unatti’s kitchen.
It’s where everyone can be themselves: children squealing, half-feral dogs yipping, Dagos playing Kushite and Celtic songs on his pipes as his family sing along …
When it’s not a symposium night, Echo usually eats with them, leaving Kosmos to his own devices.
It reminds her of a home she can’t quite remember.
Identified the bodies while you were getting here; visiting hours are over; not leaving—
She slaps the back of her itching neck as she passes the andron, where Unatti and Dagos’s boys are decorating the ceiling with thyme, mint, and oregano, minute purple and white flowers sparkling amongst the foliage.
‘Need help?’ Echo asks.
The boys giggle behind their hands. ‘You’ll only be in the way. No healer’s needed here!’
By the front door, Echo kicks her sandals into a pile and washes her feet in the frog-inhabited atrium pool.
She nods to the many non-Hellenic pantheons on the household altar, winding her fingers through recently lit incense smoke, before striding across the courtyard of pebbled mosaic to Kosmos’s room.
He’s only recently returned from the gymnasion, his hair still wet and long enough now that it constantly escapes the stubby braid he insists on making. He flicks stray strands out of his face when he looks up. ‘Preparations coming along for tonight?’
‘Unatti has things in hand.’ Echo runs her fingers over the pears in Kosmos’s fruit bowl but he doesn’t offer her one.
He puts down the scroll of Works and Days he’s been poring over. ‘How was town?’
‘They found the missing man.’
Swinging his feet over the couch and leaning on his knees, Kosmos grunts. ‘Father’s lunacy’s still rabid then. At least he hasn’t come for us.’
Their eyes meet with the unspoken yet.
Kosmos’s gaze skims away like fat on a hot pan. ‘You saw Nabu?’
‘Yes. I think he will not come tonight.’
‘How stubborn. Can’t you do something?’
‘I have done what I can.’ Echo keeps her face neutral. Early on, Kosmos made it clear that running away together hadn’t done anything to shift the power dynamics between them, but perhaps it’s time to start pushing them. ‘Maybe you could do something?’
‘Oh yes?’ Kosmos glares. ‘I suppose you’d have me apologise.’
She selects her words carefully. ‘I think an apology is not enough. It is about attitude.’
‘Are you implying I have a bad attitude?’
‘No, you have a perfectly normal attitude. That is the trouble. It is at odds with your aims.’
‘This from someone whose aims are so changeable they make the zephyrs look steady. First we have to rebel, then we have to found a school, now the school isn’t being run right but you don’t know what “right” would look like.
’ Kosmos stands and starts pacing. ‘You don’t know anything about Nabu and me. ’
Pacing is usually a bad sign about Kosmos’s temper, but she needs him to understand. ‘I know he feels you do not see him.’
He points to his eyes, voice rising. ‘I see him perfectly well.’
‘What a ridiculous answer,’ she says without thinking. ‘There are many ways to see someone. Most do not involve the eyes.’
‘And what would you know about love? You’re a woman!’
Not leaving her side, she’s my—
‘I know about love!’ Echo retorts. ‘You wish to be a philosopher? Loving knowledge is to challenge the way that you think, so challenge yourself, see me as more than a woman and Nabu as more than a non-Athenian freeman!’
‘I do see him as more than that!’ Kosmos is so furious he raises his hand to hit Echo, and she flinches, the half-healed cut over her brow pulsing as she waits for the blow.
A small gasp and a loud clatter makes them both pause.
Winji stands in the doorway, eyes wide as staters, the tray of mountain herb infusion Unatti asked her to bring Kosmos spilt at her feet.
She looks at the upended drinks, then at Kosmos.
Perhaps he recognises a younger version of himself or Nabu in her frightened face, because his hand falls to his side and his jaw slackens, as if he’s looked into a mirror and seen his father’s worst convulsions in the reflection.
‘Sorry, sorry.’ Winji repeats the apology like a prayer as she scoops the broken pottery back onto the tray and runs away with it.
Kosmos slumps to the couch, head in his hands. ‘Why didn’t she knock?’
Echo sinks to the floor by the table. ‘You were going to hit me. You never hit anyone.’ She’s numb.
She trusts him. He’s a sulky git sometimes, but she never imagined he might hurt her.
Hippias and Hipparchos’s depravity has been drilled into Kosmos since childhood, but she’s never seen him regurgitate it before. This isn’t like him.
Kosmos rocks back and forth, shaking his head.
‘I wasn’t going to. I wouldn’t hit you.’ He looks up at her, eyes pink with held back tears, but she didn’t lean over Leaina’s body, touch her marble neck, inhale her clotting blood, just to let Kosmos become like his father.
The obedient line inside her that’s been fraying since they left Hippias’s house snaps.