Chapter 14 Echo #3
She points at the scar on his upper lip, calling up the Traveller’s voice that’s always so close to the surface now.
‘It is time to make a decision about who you want to be. You have never treated the slaves well, because truly that would mean freeing them, but unlike your family your worst offences have always been carelessness and indifference, not cruelty. Continue developing on the path to kindness and you might be well-remembered, as a man marginally ahead of his times. Or you can go down as the cowardly son of a tyrannos, who ran away then became his father’s copy.
Is that how you want to be remembered, Kosmos? Like Hippias, always raging?’
‘I’m not like him.’
His eyes keep welling, but Echo’s too furious to stop.
‘If you are not like your father, why do you sound like him? I am a woman, but that does not give you rights over me; you believe Nabu is a freeman, but that does not make him beneath you. How would you feel seeing someone treat Nabu like that?’
‘I did see it!’ Kosmos looks stunned at the volume of his own voice, but this shout is different from the last, the kind of cry someone gives when you reset a broken bone.
‘I saw it every day! You think I didn’t feel acutely that we could have grown up together as equals under different circumstances?
You think I didn’t notice who he was from the moment he arrived in our house?
You cannot be in a house with Nabu and not notice him.
He is extraordinary. If I had singled him out, and made him my friend, what would my family have done?
My brothers, my father, my cursed uncle?
My inattention kept him safe from the worst of it, and continues to keep him safe now.
If we stick our necks out, the polis will noose and strangle us.
That’s how things are!’ He’s been shouting loud enough they must hear him in Sparta, but his tears finally escape, the lightning of his anger finding the ground.
‘There’s nothing I can do, Echo, there’s never anything I can do.
Nabu thinks I have all this power, but I’m just as stuck in it all as the rest of you! ’
Whatever came over him has passed; he’s half boy again, the same creature who sat next to Echo at the Acropolis convinced his dead uncle could still get at him.
Echo sits beside him, exhaling the worst of her fury too.
People can’t always see when they’re unfairly disgorging the things that have hurt them.
It’s painful work, not letting your past determine your future, and everyone needs help with it.
Echo has no idea what forgotten mechanisms from her own past might be shaping her present even now.
‘Have you told Nabu all this?’
‘Of course not.’
That makes sense: If everything Kosmos has ever openly loved has been sundered by his family, why would he make himself vulnerable like that? She sighs deeply. This man’s got a long road ahead if he can’t see that it’s precisely through vulnerability that strength emerges.
Kosmos leans back, eyes on the ceiling. ‘Gods, I’m sick of aristokrats.’
Echo lets herself smile. ‘You are all bloody awful.’
He laughs despite himself. ‘Let’s just hope Pythagoras brings in a different crowd tonight—and that my father doesn’t come down on us for inviting such oddities into the house.’
Outside in the goat field, the children run about screaming, Winji’s voice joining them, her fear no doubt only suppressed, not forgotten.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kosmos says.
‘It is not alright,’ Echo replies, running a finger over the scab on her brow. ‘Unless in defence of your life, you must never threaten to hit woman, man, or child again.’
Kosmos pulls back, likely confused about why their old dynamics aren’t falling back into place. ‘Of course. I won’t.’
Echo leans forward. ‘However it feels, Kosmos, you have more power in your little finger than most Athenians have in their whole bodies. You have more potential to make change than anyone else in this house. What you have is not a failure of capacity, but a failure of action. Start using your imagination.’
She stands and leaves, taking a pear, and letting the door slam shut behind her.
Pythagoras arrives with sunset over one shoulder and moonrise over the other.
They hear him coming a league away, his followers bashing hammers on metal sheets.
The ruckus only stops at the farm’s threshold because a shaggy brown bear, who’s part of the retinue, raises onto its hind paws with a roar that silences even the crickets.
Echo jumps seeing the beast in the doorway, and across the atrium, Kosmos looks like he might pass out.
Into the quiet comes a little chuckle, and after jovial murmuring and shuffling, Pythagoras squeezes past the beast.
‘Don’t mind friend bear!’ he cries to Kosmos, shooing the bear from the house. ‘She’s used to waiting outside, some of my retinue will stay with her so she doesn’t get lonely.’
Kosmos stammers, his manners apparently lost. ‘Yes, of course, we couldn’t let her get lonely.’
Though the same age as Xenophanes, Pythagoras has the fitness and energy of a much younger man.
He folds a surprised Kosmos into a warm embrace, eyes glittering, before doing the same to Echo.
His waist-length beard, streaked pale from time and sunshine, tickles her cheek, smelling of bergamot and sandalwood.
He holds her at arms’ length as they break apart, narrowing his eyes.
Her blood runs cold—his hands were on her back, he could have felt her binding under her thin tunic—but he just smiles and winks.
That’s when she notices a number of women in the retinue, and wonders if they’re hetairai or wives.
She turns to ask him, but Pythagoras has moved on, playing with the dogs as if they too are worthy of greeting.
Hammers and metal sheets temporarily abandoned in a heap, his retinue are all soft words and giggles.
They add their shoes to the pile by the door and mingle with the guests who’ve already arrived.
There’s no gold on the Pythagoreans, save for the philosopher’s gold-plated wooden leg, and they all wear white, flitting amongst those in brightly coloured Athenian garb like doves.
The guests watch them with wary curiosity, but are too polite not to make small talk.
Kosmos was forced to adopt an ‘invite everyone’ approach to tonight, as fewer and fewer are foolish or brave enough to enter the house of the tyrannos’s disgraced son.
The guests are therefore mainly hard-up younger sons, artisans, and freemen—the attendees of the stoa whose minds life has already pried open.
Until two minutes ago, Echo suspects, each of these men probably thought themselves terribly eccentric, but they’re fast getting a lesson in what true eccentricity looks like.
Pythagoras washes his feet, marvelling at the frogs which Winji and her sister failed to chase out. ‘You ought to plant lilies in the pool and make them a home.’
Kosmos laughs before he realises Pythagoras isn’t joking.
‘Naturally, you must make them a home. You never know which of these could be your grandfather,’ the philosopher says, and everyone laughs at the idea of a froggy Peisistratos. Pythagoras retwists his curls into his headwrap and claps his hands. ‘Shall we eat before the eclipse?’
‘Certainly, this way,’ Kosmos replies with his practiced hosting smile, guiding Pythagoras to the andron.
Pythagoras inhales deeply. ‘Ah, you’ve decorated so beautifully, it smells like the mountain itself.’ He addresses these compliments and more directly to Unatti and Dagos when they serve him.
Overhearing, Kosmos avoids Echo’s gaze and keeps that winning smile pinned to his face.
They haven’t spoken since their argument earlier, and he seems as wary of her as she still is of him.
A chaos of plates and kylixes migrate from the kitchen to the andron, Dagos and his eldest son handling the vast wine krater, filled tonight with grape juice at Pythagoras’s request. Dagos stumbles as they’re setting it down and Pythagoras’s cloak gets splattered.
Dagos holds his breath, glancing between the philosopher and stormy-browed Kosmos, but Pythagoras just laughs.
‘I’ve always looked better in red anyhow. ’
Hunger overrides Echo’s stab of guilt thinking about Unatti and the others toiling in the kitchen, and she helps herself to food.
She takes a little of everything from the trays of marinated cabbage, steaming bowls of lentil stew with feta, and ladles of figs in goat’s yoghurt dusted with cinnamon, crushed almonds, and drizzled honey.
Unatti has outdone herself, accounting for all the Pythagoreans’ dietary oddities: She cooked no meat or fava beans, and the feast’s centrepiece is a sculptural arrangement of fennel, leeks, and cardoons, coated in her special stash of Kushite spices.
Pythagoras twinkles, sharing a couch with one of his grown daughters and showing Winji a magic trick with an obol when she passes by to collect dirty cups.