“Take it.”

  “No, but listen—”

  I whang the gate with the implement. Now there’s a sound they can’t ignore.

  “I’ve had word from Thaulos,” he says. “Terrible man. He told me what happened. I’m shocked, shocked at his assumptions. That you would even consider stealing from the goddess. Paying off your debt with votive offerings. Gods, it’s blasphemy. Foul blasphemy, eh, Pythias?”

  Why does no one come?

  “We might share the house, you know.” He touches my hand. “Pythias, stop. Listen. I like you.”

  Thale and the rhubarb and the smell of Myrmex’s burning hair and Philo peeping and Ambracis slurping and Herpyllis looking at Pyrrhaios and Daddy looking at Herpyllis and I will never touch myself ever, ever again.

  Euphranor’s looking down at my hand, which he’s holding, breathing like he’s been running, only he hasn’t.

  I take my hand back and two-handedly whang the implement on the gate again. The big slave finally comes.

  “You’re magnificent,” Euphranor says. “I’ve always wondered how those work.”

  The slave closes the gate behind me.

  “Think about it,” Euphranor says.

  I have already thought.

  Glycera receives me in a room I haven’t seen before, a lush cave hung with furs and hot with braziers. Her hot room, her winter room. The cushions are red and gold. She rises from her couch to embrace me. I am not thinking not thinking not thinking about how her hair is all mashed down at the back.

  I don’t say hello. “Clea, the midwife. Where does she live? Where can I find her?”

  The thing about Glycera is she’s sincere. I read empathy in the way the shoulders drop, the head goes to one side, the eyebrows furrow in concern. Her eyes slip to the implement, now dangling from my hand to the floor, and her eyes flare in horror. “Child, oh child,” she says.

  But I am not in the mood for her perfumed bosom.

  “There are alternatives,” she says. “I know women in my position usually think otherwise. But I love babies, I love them. I’d help you with it. Ask my girls! I’ve never put one out because of a baby. Look at Meda. Didn’t I do everything I could for Meda?”

  I could nod.

  “How far—?” She abandons the sentence to perform the calculation herself. She looks doubtful. “Before your father died?” she says. “Quite a while before?”

  “What?”

  “You’re at least two moons, if you know for sure. Who was it? A student of your father’s? Some boy in Athens? Well, it doesn’t matter. As I say, no one understands better than me the kind of troubles a young girl can face. You were right to come to me.”

  “I haven’t come to you.”

  “Shall we put that awful thing away?” She seems not to have heard me. She calls for a slave and points at the implement.

  I hug it to my chest. “Clea,” I say. “I just want to find Clea.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not pregnant.” She winces at the term, as Gaiane and her mother did so long ago. “I didn’t come here to stay. Please. If you won’t tell me, I’ll have to find her some other way.”

  She stands. “Who, then?”

  I don’t think you can get pregnant eating it, but who knows. The lie is easier. “Ambracis. One of my slaves.”

  “You treat them well.”

  “She has no worth if she dies.”

  Glycera blinks, then tells me, “Clea lives in the old town, behind the market. I’ll send my slave with you. Really, you shouldn’t be walking out alone. Where’s your man?”

  “Just at the bottom of the hill. I told him to wait there.”

  “Why?”

  I adjust my woollens around me and get a better grip on my implement. “He was getting on my nerves.”

  Glycera leads me out through a different door than the one I came in, into a room that is a smaller version of her luxurious cave. Small, dark, warm, all furs and cushions. “Look who’s come to see us,” Glycera says.

  This windowless room is darker than the first, and it takes my eyes a moment to make out Meda. It takes me a moment longer to make sense of what I’m seeing: she’s nursing an infant. She smiles at me, then the baby, then back at me. The baby’s eyes are closed, though it’s still sucking. She smiles at Glycera, who puts a finger to her lips and leads me out.

  “The baby son of a local merchant.” Glycera pats my shoulder. “She’s working as a wet nurse while she recovers. Recovers in her body and in her mind. Usually she works at their house, but occasionally she brings him back here. It’s the best thing that could have happened, really. Did you see her face just now?”

  Before I can stop myself, I say, “That’s horrible.”

  Glycera’s smile sweetens further. “You’re very young, aren’t you? Running your own house, delivering babies, serving the goddess, knowing what’s best for everyone. Not needing anyone’s help. You’re really extraordinary.”

  “No.”

  “Milk should never be wasted.” She looks again at the implement. “You’ll mutilate her with that. Maybe you don’t care. Just a slave, eh? You’ve never had one of those up you, have you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not for us to pick and choose the blessings of the gods. Milk is a gift. To the baby, to Meda, and to my household, which benefits from the money she brings in. I really don’t care what you think of us. Follow this road straight to the market, then go up the weavers’ alley. She’s the seventh door on the right.”

  I thank her.

  “Good luck,” she says. “For your girl’s sake. I’m sure you’ll be just fine.”

  Just at the bottom of the hill is Tycho: my lie to the widow made manifest. The goddess put him on her palm and blew him here, like chaff. How else?

  “Lady,” he says, “Lady.” He’s wringing his hands, shifting from foot to foot like he has to pee. “There’s a man at the house. He says he lives there.”

  “Yes.” I start walking the straight road to the market, as the widow directed. Tycho follows. “His name is Euphranor. The house belongs to him.”

  “Lady,” he says. Surely it’s the goddess sparking in him, her spirit inhabiting his body, moving him along like a puppet. I left him past sight and speech; how else is he so quickly recovered? “Lady, he walked right in the front gate, calling for you. Laughing.”

  “That’s not possible. I just talked to him. He was just here. How can he be in two places at once?”

  We walk together for a while, not talking. I feel ragged with confusion.

  “I’m sorry,” I say finally. “I’m sorry I left you.”

  “Lady,” the goddess says.

  “You were kind to me. You took care of me. You deserved better from me.” The goddess looks confused. “Release me from your service.” Now the goddess looks afraid. “I know I still owe you a debt, and I’ll find a way to pay. I will. But you have to release me.”

  “Lady, you’re ill,” the goddess says.

  Odd how she can so completely resemble Tycho, with his mud-brown eyes and soldier’s stubbled head, the great bulk of him, even his leathery smell. My father, in me, begins to wonder about the mechanics of divine possession. Perhaps Tycho acts as a kind of filter or shell, and something of him remains even as the goddess shines through the cracks and pinholes. Perhaps Tycho’s still here, somehow—confused, terrified, but here. Perhaps I need to speak to Tycho rather than around him; perhaps the goddess is not as free as I thought.

  I set the implement down at my feet and take both his hands in both of mine. “I free you, Tycho,” I say. This is as public a declaration as any; market-goers flow around us like water, looking openly, crooked-smiling. “I free you, Tycho, from service to my father’s house, as a reward for your loyalty to him and to me.”

  Release me, Lady.

  “Lady, no.” Tycho shakes his head, like I’m three again. “Your father required me to serve you until your marriage. I obey your father.”

  I let his hands go. “I free you!” I say loudly. Around me, people are laughing.

  “Lady.” Tycho picks up the implement for me. “You can’t free me. A girl can’t.”

  I snatch the implement back and run. I lose him quickly enough in the crowd, and then there’s the seventh door, which opens for me just as I’m raising my fist.

  Clea sets me to memorizing aphrodisiacs. Not the hocus-pocus of Herpyllis’s world—the iunx spells and burnt offerings and midnight mutterings—so much as the kind of science that would have pleased Daddy. Mostly, Clea explains, we prescribe seediness: quince, sesame, pomegranate. Olive oil for lubricant, honey for sweetness. I must look stupid because she says, “Not off a spoon.”

  I’m sent into the back room when she meets with clients, mostly well-to-do women trying to conceive, or woo back wayward husbands; sometimes young bridegrooms who can’t persuade their wives to—

  I listen at the door. Clea is patient, serious, respectful, never lewd. Perhaps, Clea says, and Have you considered? The clients tell her everything, quicker than I would ever have guessed. She only likes it this way, he wants me to put my finger up there, she says it hurts, he always cries after. They pay nicely for Clea’s advice, and we sell oils and creams and other things. After, sometimes, she’ll raise her eyebrows at me, knowing I’ve had my ear to the door. She says there’s nothing she hasn’t heard at least two or three times a week for most of her adult life.

  She explains the business to me the night I arrive. Not sex, but the before and after: aphrodisiacs and midwifery, contraception and abortion. She is as two-faced as her work. Quiet and modest with her clients; frank and easy with her friends, the others with whom she shares her house. In the evening, they drift in: three more midwives, plus a couple of men who have no clear occupations—assistants, security, companions—it’s all fluid. They sit around the big room late into every night, eating and drinking and laughing and singing and telling stories. I understand they have no family but each other. They are dregs who have drifted to the bottom and settled together.

  “Who’s this?” one of the men asks the first night. His name is Candaules. A pair of hunting dogs nip at his heels and he carries a new-born puppy, whose head he knuckles while it blinks blissfully.

  “This is Pythias,” Clea says. “She’s with me.”

  “I thought I was with you,” Candaules says.

  Clea takes the puppy from his arms and kisses its face and hands it back to him with a smile. “There’s lots of Clea to go around.”

  That first night I keep to the corners, cooking and tidying and playing with the dogs and puppies. There are always puppies underfoot, play-fighting or looking for a cuddle, reminding me of Nico. The big room is high-ceilinged and dark, smoky from the brazier in the middle of the floor, around which they lay their sleeping mats. They drink themselves to sleep. They smoke, too, from a pipe that makes them happy. One of the men whittles phalluses, life-size and a little bigger; Clea explains we sell those, too. We sleep all about on the floor around the brazier, much like puppies ourselves, under mounds of blankets in the warm puppy-smelling dark. Their voices continue even after the fire is down to embers. I learn the language of sex, a language hidden in plain sight: tumbling chariots, visiting the sausage-seller, the double scull, the smelter, the trireme, the lioness on a cheese grater. They laugh and laugh. They kiss and sigh and cry out. I sleep between Clea and the wall, facing the wall while she services Candaules, who favours the wicker basket on horseback, and later another midwife, who shares with Clea a sparrow’s breakfast.

  “No one will touch you,” she whispers over her shoulder, sensing my sleeplessness, deep in the night. “I told them you were mutilated, and in great pain.”

  “Thank you,” I whisper.

  I can’t have another, I hear, more than once a day. It’ll kill me. It’s too soon. It’s too late. I’m exhausted. Give me something. There must be something.

  There’s always something. Cheesecloth, if he doesn’t mind. A douche, after. Counting the days. Clea teaches them the safe days and they nod, doubtfully. They’re desperate; nothing feels safe. If it’s already begun, there are teas for sale. Sometimes they’ll lie down on the table and Clea will have a look, feel around, and ask me to fetch a tool she has that’s smaller than my implement. There’s crying then, pain and blood, and afterwards a good deep sleep while we change the laundry and prepare a child’s meal of warm milk and sweet bread for the woman. Clea instructs them how to explain it to the husband: a miscarriage brought on by exertion. She is to tell him she needs rest, much rest, and no relations for—”

  “How old is your youngest?” Clea will ask, and the woman will say, and Clea will tell her a number of moons, and say, “How does that sound?”

  They will nod, weakly.

  When the women are gone, Clea cleans her equipment.

  I go into private homes with her, to assist at births. I am calm and quiet and play up my Athenian accent; the grandmothers take to me. There are no live births. Each time, she sends me back to the house to tell one of the men she needs a puppy.

  “Why?” I ask the first time.

  “To be kind,” Clea says. “We strangle the puppy and bury them together. That way, the baby won’t be alone.”

  I join them now in the evenings around the brazier with my cup of wine.

  “I had a good one today,” one of the women will begin.

  They tell work stories, sad stories, bawdy stories, sex stories. The brazier crackles, the puppies sigh in their sleep, the wind rages outside. While they talk, I drift into myself. I hear and don’t hear their tales of the prostitute who served an entire unit in one night and walked away after; the girl who pushed out four babies, one after another, like a cat’s litter; the man who tallied his lays by notching his lintel every morning upon his return, until the morning it collapsed and killed him. I hear and don’t hear their tales of the newest priestess of Aphrodite, the one who has to wear a veil in the temple so the goddess won’t get jealous (good advertising, the midwives agree; no one has yet seen her face, though people flock to the temple now to catch a glimpse of her; probably quite plain, though with a graceful walk; the midwives have been to see for themselves); the preternaturally beautiful baby born to Achilleus the architect’s wife, who tells anyone who will listen that the pleasure of his conception was so extreme that she suspects divine interference (Achilleus the architect will nod, apparently pacifically, during these confessions, as though modestly conceding that yes, yes, it’s possible he was possessed by a divine sexual fire, after all look at the infant, that hair, that skin, those eyes!, and what if he himself is a short stout bald worrying man whose wife is taller and louder than he is, what if?); the man the midwives themselves pay to cock around town, putting it wherever he can to keep them all in business.

  “Really?” I say. I haven’t heard about him before.

  They start; they thought I was drunk, or sleeping, or in the easy shadowland between drink and sleep.

  “You pay someone?” I prompt, because they’re staring at me, silently.

  One of the men touches the knife on his belt with one finger.

  “Let’s sing,” I say. I hold my cup up high. “A hymn to the goddess. More wine to honour the goddess!”

  “Stop it, Pythias.” Clea leans back against her latest companion. “You’re a bad actor. You’re not drunk. You heard something you shouldn’t, eh? Usually you know to keep your mouth shut.”

  There’s a movement in the shadows behind me. Clea’s a bad actor, too, with her show of relaxation.

  “I don’t know what I heard,” I say. “I don’t think I actually heard anything.”

  “Actually,” Clea says.

  The one behind me moves closer. I hear his breath. I say, “After, will Candaules kill a puppy to go below with me?”

  Clea glances over my head; an understanding through glances; the one behind me withdraws, a little. After a moment of nothing, I hear the knife being sheathed.

  “He came to us,” Clea says. “New in town, offering his services. We laughed him off, at first. We laughed him off for nine months, until the first jump in births—we had more work than we could handle. Then he came to us again and said he’d given us nine months for free, but if we didn’t start to pay him, he’d move on to another town.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Five years. It’s gotten so we can spot which are his. There’s always something not quite right. Not quite natural. It’s not just the baby not looking like the husband, though it’s that, too. Though the parents don’t seem to notice it; they’re in a kind of daze. Sometimes the babies are deformed, sometimes too perfect. And the women all seem—dulled down, sort of. Like they can’t properly remember their lives before.”

  I think of Meda.

  “You know the health of the baby is determined by the quality of the act of conception,” Clea says. “Vigorous act, vigorous baby. Unwilling act, colicky baby. I’ve often wondered about the ones that are his.”

  “Achilleus the architect’s wife,” I say. “But then what about the deformed ones?”

  Clea nods. “We told him at the outset, the women had to be willing. I wasn’t going to pay him to rape. We followed him for a few nights, too, just to be sure.”

  “And you were sure?”

  “Oh, yes.” Clea nods, shakes her head; smiles despite herself, remembering. “Ai. I think maybe it’s that he works too hard, sometimes, and the quality of his seed suffers. That’s why some of the children—well. It’s not the babies he cares about, though. They’re just the side effect, the by-product. It’s—I don’t know how to explain.”

  “It’s the women,” I say.

  “It’s the seduction, certainly. The hunt.” Clea shakes her head. “That’s not it either, though, entirely. There’s something very sad about him at times.”

  The others nod, murmuring.

  “It’s more like a hunger.” Clea taps her finger to her lips. “A sickness, maybe. He can’t stop. He couldn’t, anyway, and it suited us well enough when he couldn’t. And now, all of a sudden—”