Chapter 14 Echo #4
Guests arrive piecemeal from town, until they don’t have enough couches, and Echo ends up sharing with a woman called Nedjem.
Only when they talk does Echo realise that none of the Pythagorean women seem to be enslaved, employed, or married.
They’re just—women. Echo almost laughs. Pythagoras might have noticed her binding when they hugged, it just doesn’t matter to him, and the tenterhooks that she’s been hanging on release.
For the first time since arriving in Athens, she isn’t squeezed with fear about her hidden identity.
It’s been with her so long she’d forgotten it was there, and only its absence makes it noticeable.
Without terror, flavours return, along with the presence of mind to appreciate them: melting roasted garlic, olives bursting with salt, creamy feta, and the sweet crunch of sesame biscuits.
She feasts, as Nedjem embarks on an enjoyably baffling address about triangles, drawing diagrams in the sauce left on her plate and narrating them with a heavy Egyptian accent.
‘Ah, but I shouldn’t say too much, or I’ll be divulging secrets you mustn’t know—and then we’d have to throw you in the sea! ’
Yet, despite the growing crowd, the easy laughter, and Kosmos’s tentative smile at the symposium’s burgeoning success, Nabu is nowhere to be seen.
Echo droops. She misses him, and if Pythagoras won’t get him to come here, it’s possible nothing will.
She senses the timeline cracking in her grip because, despite the delicious food and the beautiful decorations, the Pythagoreans are carrying a disproportionate weight of the conversation.
Between female philosophers, the lack of wine, and occasional growls through the window from the bear, Kosmos and the other Athenians are not at ease.
The night isn’t coming together, even though it should, and Echo’s sure Nabu would know how to fix it.
When they’re all just beyond comfortably satiated, they sprawl, digesting, over the floor and couches, picking at the leftovers and learning singing games from the Pythagoreans until the philosopher stands up, spreads his arms, and declares it’s time for the eclipse.
He leads them outside, shaking a pine cone–topped thyrsus, and his followers take up their hammers and metal sheets again, making a cacophony that parades them into the moonlight.
As Echo’s eyes grow used to the dark, Pythagoras leads the crowd in tuneful meditation, and they settle on the ground like piles of early-fallen leaves, Pythagoreans and Athenians in different drifts.
The full moon hangs low in the sky, fat and yellow with harvest. It reddens as they watch, the singers lowering their voices to awestruck whispers, then, finally, silence.
The world makes noise for them: Owls hoot and bats chirrup, crickets rattle and moths mutter around the sputtering lamps.
Used to Pythagoras’s nighttime excursions, Nedjem lets Echo huddle under her cloak as they watch the dusty path of stars turning through the sky.
Autumn beckons, though Echo’s not just grateful for Nedjem’s warmth because it’s cold, but because there’s a growing frost in her bones whispering that she can’t save the timeline.
So much blood in the sky cannot be a good sign.
The bear comes around the house, sniffing toes and faces, until it settles by Pythagoras, and he leans back on the beast like a living throne, his false gold-plated leg stretched in front of him.
‘There, there, friend bear,’ he murmurs.
Then, addressing his audience: ‘A good omen, the wanderer Dias is present for the eclipse.’
Mention of the wanderers opens a window in the conversation that surely they must all follow.
Who is it a good omen for? The aristokrats or the people?
In a balanced world, could it be both? And how might balance be achieved?
But Pythagoras rattles his thyrsus and, despite the prohibition on wine, hands around a vial of snake venom.
Each of his followers takes a gulp, then in turn the Athenians, led by Kosmos, no doubt not wishing to offend his guests.
Wary after the incident with the hul gil, Echo wants to decline, but she can’t be the only one to offend the philosopher and takes a miniscule sip.
Barely enough to do anything, she hopes, but within minutes her pupils are harvesting the scant light like its midday; spring flowers bloom in the fresh-tilled autumn fields, and the stars sparkle bright as sunshine on a lake.
‘Music, music!’ Pythagoras calls, and his followers resume their hideous metal-sheet-and-hammer cacophony.
Yet this time, Pythagoras conducts, making calculations about the size of hammer against the thickness and type of metal sheet, forcing his followers to swap instruments until the fracas coalesces into a harmony that’s almost delightful.
‘Softer!’ he demands, waving his arms from his living bear throne.
‘Feel the music, let it flow through you. Though we are making calculations about it, it is still a mystical and artful act.’ There’s another conversational window: Can music really be both mathematical and mystical?
Calculated and artful? Mundane and divine?
If so, how can the tensions of these elements be gathered into a harmony?
The Pythagoreans create a new kind of song, more complex versions of the post-dinner singing games, making a figure-of-eight melody that loops in repeated syncopations.
Presently, Pythagoras brings in the Athenians as chorus, creating a hybrid between mantra and music.
Gods, it makes so much sense, it sounds so glorious, as if the snake venom is painting colours with sound.
Yes, this is sacred and secular, if only they could stop and take it apart, analyse how it’s working so they can repeat the phenomenon in other constellations.
What if politics could be this song? Or philosophy?
Or cooking, farming, healing, birthing, dying… ?
But again, nobody takes up the conversational reins. The thing that kept Echo on edge over dinner is still missing. They begin dancing, jerking and disconnected, each lost in their own snake-venom world. The symposium is a ship without ballast. Not leaving—
At the party’s edge, she tumbles to the grass.
She’s so tired of carrying the weight of the Deed and the timeline.
The amnesiac void in her head pulses, blinding her with the molten light that wraps a baby in the womb, creeps through the eyelids of the dying, inhabits planet cores, and radiates from the verge of expanding suns.
The world’s forests sigh, blowing away the Pythagorean music in a breeze scented with leaf mulch and spring rain.
The back of Echo’s neck itches as she drowns deliciously in the Not Here sea.
‘Pull up if I pull up.’ Hazel’s voice emerges from beyond the blinding light, but Echo isn’t asleep, so how can she be in the dreamscape?
‘Where are we?’ Speaking to Hazel is easy, like it was when she took the hul gil. Her neck pinches. Leave leaving—
‘The wrong place at the wrong time.’ Hazel’s voice is urgent. ‘Just repeat after me.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Are you high again?’
‘Little bit, but that’s not why I want to leave.’
‘You’re not allowed to give up. Come on, repeat—’
‘No. I don’t want to do what you say, or what Kosmos says, or Nabu.
I shouldn’t have to feel grateful to have my own room, or money, or privacy.
I’m exhausted. I want to go home, Hazel.
Back to—to—’ But whatever and wherever home is escapes her.
The pain in her neck is spreading to her throat, head, and shoulders. She’s my— ‘It hurts.’
‘You do not get to give up. Salt an atlas. Say it.’
‘S—Salt an atlas.’ The pain ebbs.
‘That’s it. Pull up if I pull up.’
‘Pull up if I pull up.’ The sights and sounds of the dreamscape fade, leaving Echo on her back in the grass, one of the dogs licking her hand. She should be relieved she can share the load with Hazel, but all she feels is the senseless, endless distance between them.
She sits up, watching the dancers and musicians.
The eclipse is fading already, the windows for conversation closed.
If Nabu were here, there’d be none of this delirious capering.
He’d have thrown the cat amongst the crows, unafraid of anything except injustice and untruth.
Kosmos might have the resources to facilitate symposia, but that’s not enough.
They need Nabu’s gravity and provocation.
Echo gasps. That’s it! That’s what’s wrong with the timeline: The school needs Nabu as much as it needs Kosmos.
If they work together, they can preserve the concept of divine-mundane duality and pass it on through philosophy to the religions that replace them; their followers will be stewards rather than reapers, the far-off scientists of her own time observers rather than discoverers.
But that’s not going to be easy to achieve.
Echo’s eyes weigh closed—and there’s the molten light again, the sound of all the world’s forests, the smell of mulch. That tingle in the back of her neck …
No, Hazel’s right, just because something feels overwhelming doesn’t mean she gets to give up on it being possible. She grips the grass, tying herself to the cooling, heating, helpless, indomitable Earth, and it catches her—though perhaps only in her snake-venom daydreams.