Chapter 17 Echo
Echo
Pythagoras inhales a breakfast large enough for three men, Kosmos beside him drinking honey water and wearing his leatherleaf hangover necklace.
Echo snoozes off her come-down on a bench in the atrium, until at last the philosopher’s followers have all risen.
Then Pythagoras bids farewell to Unnati and her family, and the other remaining guests, and the bees in the courtyard, and the frogs in the atrium pool—and last but not least to Kosmos.
Outside, Pythagoras reunites with ‘friend bear’ and leads his white-clad followers away with as much noise and chaos as they arrived.
Echo watches them all the way down the road, their walking songs trilling across the fields to tease her headache long after they disappear amongst the hedgerows and olive groves.
A shield bug lands on her tunic as she walks back inside, green on green.
She coaxes it into her hand and leaves it in the courtyard with a heavy sigh.
There’s nothing for it, they need Nabu, so she must once again front Kosmos about apologising to him.
She knocks on his bedroom door, entering at the muffled response. Kosmos is lying in bed, one arm over his eyes and leatherleaf necklace left over a bedpost. ‘What?’
Echo draws up a stool and sits beside him. ‘We need to talk.’
Kosmos frowns, squinting at her. ‘Gods below, again?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve been developing a nasty blunt streak the past couple of days, Echo. You should be careful, a less hungover man might bother to take offence.’
‘And a more sagacious man might not treat me like a silly boy when he knows I am not one.’
‘Indeed. You’re a woman. Significantly less helpful.’
Echo balls her fists until her nails dig into her palms, but she quashes the urge to escalate.
‘Pretend I am not a woman. Or a boy. Or a noncitizen. Pretend instead I am an Athenian, an aristokrat, and a man—someone you admire. Pretend I came to you as a Traveller with such status and gender. Would you treat me then the way that you do now?’
He sighs. ‘Of course not.’
‘Then treat me with such respect. In my land, we try to make it not matter where you come from, what body you are born into, how much money you have, or who your family is. We do not always succeed, but we try. When I was selected as a Traveller, it was as an equal, not a subordinate, and for my Deed to be completed, you must honour that.’
‘Where you come from sounds like a very backward place.’ Kosmos grumbles, but he sits up.
Echo puts a hand on his knee. ‘We need Nabu. You cannot do this on your own, you will break things that must remain whole.’
Kosmos swats her hand as if she were a fly, eyes bulging.
For a heartbeat Echo thinks he’s going to go for her again, but he catches his reflection in the bronze mirror over her shoulder and deflates.
‘I brought you with me because I believe in your Deed, and I keep you here because you wouldn’t be safe in Athens alone, but you mustn’t mistake that for equality.
I don’t want to be like my father—you were right about that much—but that doesn’t mean I won’t send you away if you test my patience.
I won’t apologise to Nabu, I did nothing wrong.
I was trying to protect him, it’s not my fault if he doesn’t like it. ’
Echo frowns. ‘What exactly do you think you said to him?’
‘The truth: that it’s unsafe for us to be together publicly because our ranks don’t align,’ Kosmos says.
‘But Kosmos, what do you think that implied?’
He slumps, making an exasperated sound in the back of his throat. ‘Nothing, I said what I said, it didn’t mean anything more than that.’
Echo screws up her courage. ‘It might have to Nabu. He is not stupid, he knows he does not have the same political rights as you or wield the same respect from the aristokrats that you do.’
‘Yes, and that gets to him.’
‘Of course, as it would get to you. It is senseless! But he cares more about his rights to your respect and affections. He wants to be seen as your equal by the world, but he needs you to see him as an equal.’
Kosmos raises an eyebrow. ‘You’re on his side, aren’t you?’
‘Very much.’ Echo nods. ‘You should apologise because, Kosmos, he is not just your equal, he is your superior in almost every way that matters. Which is what I always thought you loved about him.’
Kosmos flushes, opening his mouth to retaliate, but the wind knocks from him. Thank the gods for hangovers. ‘I’ll give it some thought.’
‘Thank you,’ Echo says.
‘I should have gone with the Pythagoreans. Much simpler.’
Echo shakes her head, the Not Here murmuring more uncomfortable truths. ‘That would have been unwise, they will not last long.’
Kosmos looks at her like a snake. ‘The gods speak that clearly to you?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘And what do they tell you of my future?’
‘That is harder, because you are bound with me now, and we are changing our futures. The act of telling you what I know is in store for you might alter it.’ She meets his eyes. ‘But I think you will need cunning and perseverance to survive, and more friends in low places than high.’
‘Friends in low places? I suppose oracles have always spoken in riddles. Your predecessor wasn’t any different according to Nabu.’
‘There is something else.’ Echo hesitates, not certain she should tell him, but perhaps it would do him good to know.
He waits while she decides how to say it.
‘In the history books, you do not exist. There is no record of a sixth Peisistratid son. Whatever it is you do, at some point you disappear. I recommend making that disappearance on your own terms.’
He licks his lips, blinking. ‘Well, as you said, we might change things.’
Certainly, things are changing. Within a couple of days, rumour of Pythagoras’s stay lends an eccentric and alluring aura to the school, attracting wild thinkers, rowdy debates, and a groundswell of curious visitors.
Magi descend from the mountains to grace their doorstep, telling stories of far-off places and teasing Kosmos for his obsession with family honour.
One of them, who the others insist is not a magos, just a hanger-on, drinks the sacred wine of Persia in immoderation, believing it will bring him closer to the gods.
His stupor lasts for three days, during which he cannot speak or hear, but sits in a corner bulge-eyed with a purple tongue and blueish teeth.
When he wakes, he claims to be channelling Dionysos, dresses himself in mauve, and, with many gourds of grape wine, moves north alone.
The magi follow at a distance, curious what he will do next.
Only the next day, the school welcomes a group of travelling Etruscans, who try to teach the guests how to reach the divine through dance and orgasm.
It’s too much for Echo, who goes to sleep in the quiet, musty goat shed with Unatti and her family, but Kosmos claims they have a good time.
Indeed, a kind of ecstasy appears to be reached, but it is not what he or any of the school’s regular visitors would consider philosophy.
A trio of white-haired mystics from the far north oust the Etruscans.
Dismayed by their predecessors’ bodily desires, they convince the school’s philosophers to starve themselves and meditate for long nights in the freshly ploughed fields.
They attempt to run over hot coals, from which Echo gains only numerous blisters and the wisdom not to try it again.
Their hunger drives them into transparent delirium within a week and, on the verge of empty-stomached retching, Kosmos hallucinates a Medean dragon, says it’s all quite enough, and throws the Northern mystics out.
As soon as they’re gone, Unatti cooks them a lunch large enough to sink the Argo, and Kosmos, Echo, and the ten other guests in attendance devour every last crumb.
‘They’re benign lunacies,’ Echo explains to Hazel in the dreamscape. ‘They’re not technically doing anyone any damage.’
‘But they’re not helping either,’ replies Hazel, out of sight as always, standing back to back with Echo.
She often wonders why the Forward Traveller hides herself, even though she’s clearly able to move in the dreamscape, which Echo still can’t.
After Pythagoras’s visit, when Echo’s memories nearly took over, Hazel explained about anamnesis, and ever since Echo’s lived in fear of it: When she’s not high on snake venom, she recognises the importance of mending the timeline.
Her memories haven’t triggered badly enough to send her directly into the dreamscape again, but each day more return and she has a growing suspicion that Hazel hiding her face might be because, once-upon-a-future, they knew each other.
‘Perhaps these little lunacies are what’s breaking the timeline?’ Hazel says.
‘No doubt they’re making it worse. We need Nabu to ground it all in some kind of substance.’
‘You’re sure Nabu will fix it?’
‘Not entirely, but it’s the only idea I’ve got,’ Echo replies. ‘There’s something about those two when they’re together…’
The waking world becomes hardly less strange than the dreamscape.
Kosmos and his fellow philosophers study like bees in a freshly queened hive, fractious and wandering, venturing ever-further from their starting point.
They embrace travellers and mystics from lands where the skies stay light all night long; where the mountains are swathed in blood-red flowers; where rivers are so fat only a ship can traverse them; where seas are so salty the body floats; or sand is so endless the travelling sages have gone half blind, their feet softened like kidskin.
They dance in the dawn and chant out the sunset, birds flocking above them in dark clouds, crying against rosy daybreak and lavender dusk alike.