“Maybe he just needs a rest.”

  “That one? He’ll rest in his grave.”

  “Does he want more money?”

  Clea shakes her head. “We offered him everything we could think of.”

  The fire flares up, spitting sparks onto the floor; the shape behind me steps forward to tamp them out. He looks at me apologetically, shrugs; it’s Candaules. He sits back in his place.

  “We think he’s pining,” Clea says. “That he’s fallen in love with some little scrap of a flat-chested thing somewhere who won’t have him, and now he doesn’t know what to do with himself. We’d pay her, if we could find her.”

  “What does he look like?”

  They’ve relaxed now; they’re pouring more wine, feeding the fire, whispering to each other. They’re still keeping an eye on me, though. What do they think I’m going to do?

  “We can’t seem to agree on that,” Clea says. “We think he’s a bit of a shape-shifter.”

  “Handsome?”

  “Some days.” Clea holds up the wine; I shake my head. She pours for herself. “Sometimes I think he makes himself dull so he can go unnoticed. To be able to slip in and out of places without anyone looking at him twice. And then sometimes of course he’s a right peacock.”

  “Wait, though.” I sit up straight, trying to understand. “Once he’s gone, surely there’ll still be babies born. You seriously think this one man services the entire town? Won’t people like Achilleus the architect and his wife just go back to having uglier babies?”

  “We thought so, too, at first,” Clea says. “At first. But haven’t you noticed? They’re all unhealthy now. We think he’s punishing … everyone, really. The mothers, the babies, the families, us.”

  I shake my head. The room is quiet again.

  “Since you came to town, come to think of it. What do you make of that?”

  I shake my head. “I haven’t met a man like that. No one’s approached me that way. Well, except—”

  “Except?” Clea says.

  I shake my head.

  “Except,” Clea says.

  “There’s a cavalry officer.”

  The room is dirty, rough, sour with wine and dogs and lust. Clea’s friends listen wide-eyed as children who know the story to come and need to hear it again anyway.

  “That’s the one,” Clea says. “We think he might be a god.”

  Tick, tick, tick, the tiles fall into place like in that game Daddy used to play with Herpyllis in the courtyard, late into summer evenings.

  “If you’re the one he wants, who are we to deny him?” Clea says. “He’ll reward us for bringing you to him.”

  “Gods don’t behave that way,” I say. “My father taught me that. God is far, far away. Not a man or a woman. More like a force.”

  They’re listening.

  “A beautiful vase,” I say. “Think of a beautiful vase. Its beauty might prompt a man to buy it. That’s its force. But the vase itself is oblivious. That’s like god.”

  “What are you talking about?” Clea says.

  “My father,” I say. I’m trying to remember the exact words, and the sound of his voice. “My father said people lean back into the idea of benevolent gods to avoid standing on their own two feet. People lean back into each other in the same way. It’s not real.”

  “That’s a small, cold world your father lived in.”

  I say nothing.

  “Do you live there, too?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  I don’t have many things here, not much to collect: a change of underclothes Clea gave me when I arrived, and the implement.

  “You’ll bring him to us,” she says, watching my tiny packing. “Or we’ll find you, and we’ll give you to him.”

  At the door, she presses her cheeks to mine and then pushes me out into the starry cold.

  I wake in pain, cold and awfully cramped, in the hollow of a tree not far from the east side of the channel, in the shadow of the garrison on the hill just across the water. It was deep night when I left Clea’s, black and raw cold, and my instinct had been to curl up somewhere and die on my own terms. But a knife at my throat to make more babies for the midwives to save, or not—no. I started to walk, in case they should find me in a nearby alley at dawn and change their minds.

  I heard sloppy singing as I walked, and shouting, and once the shriek of a woman’s laughter from an upstairs window. Really? I thought. Really? Was the world really as lewd and drunken and dangerous at night as in stories? Wasn’t that a bit ridiculous? Didn’t the rapists and murderers have to sleep, too? I kept moving, kept to the shadows. I kept a firm hold of the implement and walked away from any light or sound, any life. At the channel, I realized I was a prisoner in Euboia; at least until dawn, when the ferryman would come. I stood for as long as I could—Daddy had taught me the danger, the siren call of warm sleep in cold—then squatted, and finally let myself doze sitting up as the first pink wine spilled low across the sky. Pretty, brainless dawn. I hugged the implement like a puppy inside my woollens, and rested my head against the tree trunk.

  I hear the ferryman’s bird-like call and the plash of his pole. I stand and beat the pins and needles from my legs with my fists, then limp down the bank. He takes the coin I hold out. I clomp onto the raft, feet still prickling from my awkward spell beneath the tree, and sit down.

  “What’s that?” He unties us casually, automatically, coiling the rope while looking curiously at the implement, which I’ve laid across my lap. Daddy taught me to see actions learned by the body, actions so habitual the body could work without the brain. To be good at anything physical, he taught me, you had to reach that point. That was a way to judge people, too, workmen and slaves, how easily they moved in their bodies. That told you of their experience, more than words could.

  “It’s a dilator.” My tongue refuses vaginal. I am a lady, still, barely. “It’s for babies.”

  “Eh—it’s not.” The current is quiet; I wonder if we’re almost at the change of the tide. He sets the paddle down and reaches for a pole. “I had five myself. I never saw one of those.”

  “Maybe your wife did.”

  “What wife?” His face cracks open in a delighted smile; I’ve fallen for whatever he wanted me to. “Five babies, five different girls.” He stops in the middle of the channel, pole planted in the depths. “I’ve seen you before.”

  I’m too tired to lie. “Yes.”

  “You shouldn’t be alone.”

  I don’t answer.

  “Tell you what.” He fishes my coin from inside his clothes and holds it out. “You keep this.”

  I take the coin but don’t put it away. If he’s hoping to see where I keep my pouch, he’s out of luck. He starts poling again and we crunch against the opposite shore in a few heartbeats. With the same thoughtless ease, he loops the rope around the large rock he uses for his Western cleat.

  “Thank you, Charon,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “I’ve heard that joke before.” He takes an unsteady, lurching step towards me, as though thrown offbalance by the bobbing raft, and kisses my mouth. I jerk back. His taste is sour, rotten. Bad wine, bad teeth. His face cracks again.

  “Thank you, Grandfather,” I say.

  For a moment neither of us moves. Then I’m halfway up the slope and he’s calling after me, Wait, wait. Your baby-thing.

  I don’t stop. There’s payment, if you like: a kiss, a handful of wool where he’d hoped a bigger breast would be, and a vaginal dilator. For you; enjoy.

  The neighbourhood, around the backside of the hill topped by the garrison, is only a short walk away now. The streets are quiet; it’s early still. Lately it’s always early, or late. I’m aware of my own evil smell, lank hair, damp dirty clothes, throbbing head. Fatigue has scrubbed the inside of me raw, like a handful of sand. I don’t recognize the house at first and am unsurprised; the gods have plucked and replanted the neighbourhood, perhaps, or I’m addled—punch-drunk from the effort of continuing, these past few weeks. Mere weeks, only, still. I walk to the end of the street where we used to live, then back again, ticking the houses off against the map in my mind. I recognize this one, with the painted lintel; and the next, with the chickens in the yard; and the next, with the pretty gardens and the sundial; and the next, the one next to ours, with the big cypress. Our house—mine, Euphranor’s, someone’s—is now overgrown with vine leaves, but after a moment of staring I recognize familiar details: gate, plant pots, trees, the diagonal crack in the stone walkway.

  Vines don’t grow in winter.

  I stand still, cautiously putting this thought together.

  “Lady.”

  Behind me. Sitting in the street in his filthy horse blanket, a greasy cloth wound around his stubbled head. He struggles to stand. I go to him and search his face. His eyes are clear. The joy of this stabs me unexpectedly deep. “Tycho.”

  “Lady.”

  I want to touch him. It’s the oddest thing.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” he says.

  “I know.”

  He studies my chin. “Euphranor is master of the house now.”

  I nod.

  “He’s inside.”

  “Yes.”

  We both look at the house.

  “Vines don’t grow in winter,” I say. Like a test.

  “We can’t cut them down,” Tycho says. “Blades can’t cut them.”

  “It’s Dionysus, isn’t it. Euphranor is Dionysus.”

  Tycho’s eyes skip over me, hair clothes feet, not settling anywhere for long. Taking my measure. He looks back at the house. “He’s been looking for my lady.”

  “Is he—”

  Tycho lets his eyes touch mine, so briefly. “No,” he says. “He’s brought order back to the house. It’s clean and tidy and we obey him. He treats us well. He’s kind. He’s been building up the storeroom, as well as he can this time of year. He only insists on order, cleanliness and tidiness. That and looking for you. He sends one or other of us out every day into the city, searching.”

  Here, in the cold street with Tycho, these feel like my last moments of—what? The end of one life and the beginning of another. Lesser; another lesser life. That’s what I fear. That’s what keeps me out here, in the cold. Yet less than what? Did I have so much without knowing it? What did I have before that I don’t have now, that I could possibly recover in this world? Charon, indeed.

  “There’s something else.” Tycho runs a hand over his stubble in that familiar gesture. “Someone else, another one. He comes every day. He comes to the gate and asks for you.”

  A sound from inside the courtyard: horse’s hooves, a whinny, the clinking of tack. Someone is coming.

  “Here.” Tycho leads me a little way down the street, out of sight of the gate. We step back into some trees and watch until the gate has opened and closed and Euphranor has ridden past on his big black animal, not seeing us. Heading for the garrison. Handsome, today.

  “A strange young man,” Tycho continues. “Every day for a week now he’s been coming, asking for you. He runs, though, if he gets the least smell of the master.”

  “Strange how?”

  “Familiar.” Tycho touches his stubble, his temples, covers his eyes, uncovers them, looks at me. “Lady?”

  The glaze has returned.

  “You should go in now,” I say, though it hurts me.

  “I have to wait for my lady.”

  “Yes.” I take from his hands the greasy cloth he used to cover his head against the cold. It’s big enough to cover me. “You should wait just inside the courtyard, there. Then they can bring your breakfast.”

  He looks confused.

  “Just inside the gate.” I give him a little push. “Then you can see the street and inside the house, too. It’s the best spot. Your lady wants you to wait there.”

  He goes in. I go, too, not far; back to the spot in the trees where we watched Euphranor pass. I wrap the greasy cloth all around me, covering my body and my hair and most of my face, and squat like a beggar in case anyone should notice me.

  I spend the day in sleep’s shallows, waking with a start at any sound or movement: the neighbours’ comings and goings, birdsong, peddlers with their rattling carts, calling out new milk and bread and fish and trinkets and remedies and firewood and water. I buy a drink and a cake from a man who, when I touch my throat to fake muteness, takes me for a boy. Here, lad, he says, and gives me my right change. Each time I think I can’t sleep anymore, I’m off again, drifting, until the day’s gone and it’s dusk.

  The street is busier now than it’s been all day: people returning home, the night vendors making their supper rounds, soldiers coming down off the hill for an evening in town. I watch a beggar approach our gate, a dirty, bearded boy with a bad limp. He doesn’t knock, but peers in like he’s trying to stick his head through the bars. After a few moments he steps back. The gate opens minimally, then shuts with a clang. Now the beggar has a heel of bread.

  He turns in my direction and I see it’s Myrmex.

  He passes me, close enough for me to see the limp is real, and I follow him down the hill and towards the ferry. But he turns left, along the shoreline to the beach where I took Daddy to swim in his last weeks. Down, down, down the long dunes tipped with shadows, and back into the trees, into a deep tangle where he must sleep. He could have looked back anytime and seen me; he didn’t. Coming closer, I see him bending over something on the ground, working at something: a fire. I don’t hesitate. When he hears the first stick crack under my foot, he jumps up and back, awkwardly, and I walk straight up to his astonished self and push him so hard he falls backwards. Down on his back and I keep coming, beating at his head and shoulders with fists, hurting him. He tries to bat my hands away from his nose and eyes, but doesn’t otherwise fight back. When I stop, he’s bleeding from his nose and lip, and crying a little, too.

  I sit on a log and watch while he builds the fire into something usable. The light’s going fast now. By the time he’s done, I can’t see the tears or the blood.

  “Pytho,” he says. Of course his voice plucks me like a lyre string.

  He has a number of little packets of things, it turns out: kindling, dry clothes, dried fish, a leather roll of tiny knives I recognize as Daddy’s. He worries through all these packets, looking for something with an anxious fussiness I hadn’t known in him before. I accept some nuts and dried fruit without letting his hand touch mine. We sit across the fire from each other, warily eating.

  “You’re dirty,” he says, after a while.

  “You smell like pee and onions. What happened to your foot?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Fine,” I say, and then we’re not talking, again.

  We finish eating and stare into the fire. After a while, he gets up and rummages around and throws a blanket at me. It hits me in the head. I wrap it around my shoulders. He sits shivering and I don’t care. I’m glad.

  “How’s Nico?” he says finally.

  “He went to Athens, to Theophrastos.”

  “That’s good,” Myrmex says. “He’ll be safe there.”

  “Herpyllis went to Stageira,” I say, when he doesn’t ask. He grunts. “What happened to your foot?”

  “A man put it on a chopping block. I thought he was going to cut it off with his axe, but instead he used the butt end on my ankle. I don’t think it’s going to heal.”

  The stars are out. The fire seethes, sounding like Herpyllis sucking her teeth in annoyance.

  “I’m sorry, Pytho,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

  Let it come.

  “I thought I could help, if it means anything,” he says. “I took it to gamble, the money. I thought I could make more than enough for—”

  Our wedding, I think. I can’t stop myself. Of course that wasn’t what he was going to say, but my mind makes it anyway.

  “They were going to send me home,” he says. “I wasn’t going back there. I was going to make enough so we could choose for ourselves, both of us.”

  “Choose what?” I say softly.

  He looks at me across the fire, utterly clear, utterly bleak. “Not that, little Pytho,” he says. Again: “I’m sorry.”

  “You could have asked me. I would have given it to you. I would have given you everything. You didn’t have to leave. You could have just asked.”

  He shrugs; such disinterest, now that suddenly I’m enraged. He doesn’t get to choose when my life is over.

  “Here.” I hike my dress up to my thigh, rip off the pouch I have strapped there, and throw it at him across the fire. He catches it reflexively. “That’s my last. That’s everything I have. It’s yours now. You understand?”

  He’s interested now. I can see he wants to look inside, to see how much is there. Instead he says, “I’m surprised Euphranor lets you carry money.”

  “Euphranor?”

  He looks confused; caught.

  “You think I’m living in that house with Euphranor?”

  “Where else?”

  I stand up. The dress falls back down over my legs; the blanket falls from my back. “Look at me. Look at me. Do I look to you like I’ve been living in a house with a man?”

  He looks. I think he looks at me properly for the first time in his life.

  “Come here,” he says.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Come here. I don’t want this.” He holds out my pouch.

  When I reach for it, he grabs my wrist, and we go where we’ve been heading since the day he arrived: hello and goodbye in the same breath. After, he wraps us both in the blanket and holds me until I fall asleep.

  When I wake, he’s gone for good, with the money I carried in the pouch on my thigh, my last.

  Kick, Pytho, kick.

  I can’t.

  You can. Daddy won’t let go. Kick, Pytho.

  Pytho kicks. Pytho can see the bottom, the hot fine dry sand she plays in on shore now swirling, liberated by the water. Water isn’t blue when you splash it or pour it from your hands, but it looks blue when you look at the whole big sea. That’s interesting.