Chapter 20 Echo #2
Kosmos takes off his gold torque—his only gesture towards aristokratic dress—and pushes it into Hanno’s hand.
‘For you and Absalon,’ he says. ‘I know you’ve been saving to buy yourselves back.
Go to Myrrhine, she’ll bury it all in the household expenditures, and my father won’t notice until you’re gone. ’
Hanno stares.
‘Take it. I’m only sorry it took so long.’
With a shake of his head, Hanno accepts the torque. ‘You really should’ve run.’
As they enter the house, a lone blackbird trills from the roof, guiding them through the neat atrium and well-tended courtyard.
Hanno opens the andron door and gestures them within.
Inside, it’s close and dark, more like an animal’s den than ever.
Kosmos’s brothers gather around his father’s couch, and the tyrannos looks up as they enter, tossing paperwork onto a low table.
‘So. You have finally graced us with your presence.’
The thing that’s been shifting in Kosmos over the weeks has stuck fast with Nabu’s support, so that even facing his father’s rage, he’s steady as a rock. ‘Good afternoon, Father.’
‘First, I hear rumours you’ve welcomed all manner of barbarian into your house—a home which I gave you upon becoming a man—and allowed them to poison your mind with rebellious claptrap. And now it seems you’ve taken a freeman as your lover, disgracing our family name with your womanly ways.’
In the shadows, Echo tenses, exchanging a look with Nabu, both ready to spring to Kosmos’s defence.
‘Those rumours are false,’ Kosmos replies. ‘I’ve welcomed sages and magi from many lands to teach me wisdom, and my lover is a proud Lydian, who has done many great things for this polis and our family.’
‘My family!’ Hippias bares his teeth, and his other sons shrink from the couch. The tyrannos stands, stalking towards Kosmos. ‘You are my son, I created you.’
‘You might’ve dug me from the ground, but you didn’t forge me,’ Kosmos replies. ‘I’m not your creature anymore and never will be again.’
Kosmos glances at Echo, as if maybe she’s had a hand in forging him, but the back of her neck itches and the Not Here won’t stop whispering. In the history books, you do not exist, Kosmos; at some point you disappear—
Hippias laughs, a chuckle at first, then from deep in his belly. It’s far, far worse than if he was shouting. He picks up a knife from the table.
Echo and Nabu dart forward, but the brothers intercept them, all older, stronger, better fed.
Echo crumples like a leaf in their grip, falling to her knees as they twist her wrists.
One of them hits her with a jug to make sure she stays down and the pottery shatters, breaking the skin on her back.
She whimpers and looks up, only to see Nabu pressed against a far wall, three blades at his throat.
‘Stop!’ Kosmos shouts at his father. ‘Don’t hurt them. Hurt me, you only asked for me, and I’m here.’
‘I should have guessed you’d drag dirt in off the street with you,’ Hippias replies, eyes bulging.
Arms pulled back and knees pressed into the floor by the brothers, Echo hardly dares breathe as Hippias thumbs his knife blade. Nabu struggles, but the three brothers guarding him flex their daggers against his windpipe and he stills, breathing quick and hard.
‘Kneel.’ Hippias snarls to Kosmos.
Glancing at his trapped friends, Kosmos does as he’s told, flaxen tunic pooling around his shins. Blood trickles from the wound on Echo’s shoulder and seeps into her binding strips. At some point, you disappear—
Sneering, Hippias pulls Kosmos’s face up, exposing his neck, and places his knife against the skin.
Kosmos trembles visibly. His father leans in close, but speaks loud enough for the whole room to hear.
‘You’ve disgraced my family name, shown weakness unbecoming of a man, and rumour has it you’ve consorted with rebels, even if none will give you up.
You’ve forced me to invent a whole new punishment for you, boy. ’
Echo gasps, thinking this is the end, but rather than slicing flesh, Hippias pulls the blade across the skin, shaving the beard Kosmos has been growing so proudly. Kosmos’s brothers exchange looks, their palms sweating as they pin Echo down. Apparently, they don’t know where this is going either.
Hippias cradles his son’s face as he shaves it, as if Kosmos were a boy again, incapable of looking after himself. Kosmos is still, stunned like a trapped animal.
‘If I disowned you,’ Hippias says, ‘there would be paperwork, records of your existence and your disgrace. If I were to kill you, though I have every right to, you would become an emblem for inappropriate lovers and rebellious sons to use in their war against me, like those damn tyrannicides. I cannot have that. Far better that you simply disappear. So I am going make it as if you were never born, never my son.’
Echo exchanges a look with Nabu, one eyebrow raised: Is this normal? He shakes his head minutely. Absolutely not. In the past, Hippias has been more violent and furious, but Echo’s never seen him so at odds with reality. How can he think he will un-birth his son?
The tyrannos hisses and mutters, wreathed in incense, slicing away the dark curls of Kosmos’s beard until his knife drags at bare skin.
‘Let them say that nineteen years ago, a child was born to me, but the Furies visited me and told me he would disgrace me. So, as the sun went down on the day of his birth, I carried him beyond the city walls, leaving him in the ploughed fields for the wolves and cold to decide his fate.’
Beard shorn, Hippias moves to Kosmos’s thick hair, slicing his braid and throwing it to the floor.
Kosmos gives the barest wince, but as his father sets to work shearing his hair as close as his beard, his head droops and his shoulders shake.
‘Exposed thus, the child died, as feeble children do, the fruit of a weak-willed woman now dead from plague. Never welcomed into my household, that child was never mine. I have only ever had five sons.’
Hippias slips the knife under the neckline of Kosmos’s tunic and cuts the fabric, making his clothes fall to the floor.
‘I have shorn you of adulthood, made you as bare as the day you came into this world. Now, expose yourself on the mountainside, naked and unarmed as a newborn.’ The tyrannos draws Kosmos’s face back up, revealing his tears in the lamplight.
‘Should you survive, you may stay on your damnable farm, but you will never again set foot inside the walls of Athens. You are exiled from my household and my city. Henceforth you will be known—if known at all—as No One of no family and no polis.’ He releases Kosmos, who curls up, holding his bald head as if waiting for a blow.
But it doesn’t come.
Hippias clicks for his sons to release Echo and Nabu.
Echo sinks to the ground and catches her breath, but Nabu darts straight for Kosmos.
Touching a hand to his back, Nabu whispers to him, but Kosmos doesn’t move.
Nabu looks to Echo, brow creased in fear.
She slips forward, watching Hippias with wary eyes, one of which is still scarred from his previous attack.
When Echo leans into Kosmos’s ear, she uses the Traveller’s voice, the only thing she can think of that might make a difference: ‘Disappear on your own terms.’ Her shoulder twinges and the back of her neck itches.
Kosmos flexes his jaw, hugs himself tighter, then unfurls like a fern leaf.
He waves Nabu and Echo’s support away, standing on his own feet in nothing but a loincloth.
He looks so thin, the debaucheries and denials of the last few weeks at the school visible in his twiggy limbs and greyed skin.
He lifts his gaze, meeting his brothers’ eyes, making sure each knows that tomorrow this could be them.
They look away as he steps from the circle of his severed hair and clothes, leading Echo and Nabu back into the daylight.
In the courtyard, Hanno directs Kosmos out through the kitchen, and he draws the household’s stares until they’re back on the streets, where instead he draws the stares of passers-by.
In the agora, the friends who ran to him before hang back, whispering and frowning.
Even Kleisthenes only leans against a pillar with folded arms, though his letter this morning had encouraged Kosmos to disown the Peisistratids.
Echo’s hope wilts. With Kosmos ruined, the school might be as well.
By the time they return to the empty school, the sun is setting. In the kitchen, Nabu lights lamps and Echo puts out bread and olives for dinner. Kosmos stands by the back door, still naked except for his loincloth, staring at the dusky mountains.
‘It is too cold to be standing like that,’ Echo tells him. ‘Come in and close the door.’
He turns to her, eyes elsewhere. ‘I have to go out.’
Echo and Nabu frown at each other.
‘I have to expose myself on the mountainside, like Hippias instructed,’ Kosmos says. ‘If I don’t, it only gives him another excuse to make trouble. Besides, it feels right, somehow.’ He runs a hand over his smooth head.
‘You won’t find anything except a chill out there,’ Nabu says.
‘I might.’
‘Yes, wolves,’ Echo says. ‘You should take a sword and blanket.’
Kosmos laughs. ‘You don’t practise exposure in your polis, do you Echo?’
‘My polis is not called a polis,’ Echo replies. ‘But no, we do not.’
‘I can’t take anything, except the loincloth I’m wearing.’
‘Kosmos, this is ridiculous, you’re finishing the invented punishment of a madman for him,’ Nabu says. ‘Which in itself is an act of madness.’
Kosmos looks back out the door to the mountain. ‘Then mad I’ll be.’
Recognising the set of his jaw, Echo throws her hands out and gives up. There’s no stopping him in this mood, it was the same when the Etruscans visited—the school’s already empty, the timeline can hardly break more—but Nabu follows him out, trying to stop him, returning alone after moonrise.