“Indeed,” Daddy says. “He’s become quite the geographer.”

  “But maybe not such a cartographer,” Akakios says. “He seems to have lost his way home.”

  Herpyllis returns, mock-grim, shaking her head. “We’ll have to have a tile marathon tonight,” she tells me. “But only after Nico practises his reading. I told him you’d help him.”

  I don’t stamp my foot, groan, roll my eyes or spit, but all three adults laugh anyway. “She shoots sparks, doesn’t she?” Akakios says.

  “She gets bored,” Daddy says. “It’s the female aspect of the mind, I think. I was never bored.”

  “No, no.” Akakios taps his temple with his finger. “She’s got a flame in there, but it needs fuel. I get bored all the time. With lazy students, especially. That’s why I so look forward to these evenings. They feed me for days.”

  Daddy bows; he bows back. Herpyllis manages not to snort; I hear it distinctly. These evenings are the biggest expense the household has. “The brain needs food just like the tummy.” Akakios addresses me. “Your father feeds us, body and soul.”

  “Pompous prick,” Herpyllis says after we’re in Nico’s room. “He brings a bag so he can squirrel food away to take home with him.”

  “That’s a compliment to your cooking.” I’m pressing my ear to the wall.

  “I’m bored,” Nico says, pushing his tablet away. “I’m hungry.”

  “You could have eaten with the men.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You shut up,” I say. Mimicking him, drawing out the whine: “I’m hungry.”

  “Well, I am!”

  “You’re defective,” I say. “Why can’t you read yet?”

  “Reading’s hard,” Herpyllis says immediately. “Please, no more fighting. Shall we go to the kitchen and see what’s there?”

  We follow her into the courtyard. The men’s voices are clearer here, and I hang back. Daddy’s speaking. I look pleadingly at Herpyllis.

  “We’ll be in the kitchen,” she whispers.

  In the past, I’d stand in the courtyard, quietly listening; perhaps creep to the doorway of the big room and listen from behind the curtains; then run fleet as a little doe back to the kitchen at the first quiver of that curtain. But something about tonight, about Nico giving up his place, about Daddy saying I should have been a boy, about Akakios’s kindness, and I find myself tripping with quite a clatter over a little table just outside the big room. A moment later the curtain wings aside and Daddy helps me up off the floor. Beyond, I can see all the men on their couches craning to see who it is.

  “Please, Daddy,” I whisper.

  Then I’m sitting in the corner that should have been Nico’s, near Daddy, feet tucked up under me. The men are bemused.

  “Getting eccentric in your dotage,” one of them calls to Daddy. “You want to watch that.”

  “The lad is prettier,” one of them says.

  “But the girl’s brighter,” Akakios says.

  I keep my mouth shut, and am relieved when they return to their argument.

  “You cannot possibly believe all that modern nonsense you spout,” an old man says to Daddy. I recognize him: Krios, a senior administrator for the city, one of Daddy’s most regular guests. “The virtues of oak trees and donkeys and the gods know what else. It’s all nonsense and you know it. The gods give us virtue.”

  “They lead by their example?” Daddy says.

  “Don’t blaspheme,” the old man says mildly, and I see that he is used to Daddy, and too smart to be goaded. That must be why Daddy likes him, despite his antiquated opinions. “They set a better example than you’d like to admit. They would understand the presence of little Athena over there better than most of our colleagues here tonight.”

  He means me.

  “The gods value women. They understand the power of women.” Krios nods, agreeing with himself. “In their world, the greatest women are a match for the greatest men. Thinkers, warriors, healers.”

  “In their world,” someone says.

  “Plato, my master, taught that this world is an echo or a shadow of the ideal,” Daddy says. “I’m afraid, in this world, our specimens are of a different quality.”

  I give Daddy a look that makes the men laugh.

  “Not you, pet,” Daddy says. “I wasn’t talking about you.”

  “You were, though, surely,” Krios says. “No offence to you, little Athena. But if we follow your argument to its conclusion, where do we get? The greatest virtue consists in flourishing to the greatest of our capacities. If we’re an oak seed, we are virtuous in our vegetable growth. If we’re an ass, we are virtuous in the most flourishing performance of our asinine tasks.”

  “Carrying saddlebags, and braying, and so on,” I say.

  I’ve thrown a pebble in their pond. There’s a ripple of meaningful silence, and then Krios bows slightly, acknowledging me. “And if we are human, we are most virtuous when we are flourishing to the fullest of our capacities, the greatest of these being the intellect. That’s correct, isn’t it, little Athena? That’s what your father teaches?”

  “It is.”

  “You’ve read your father’s books, haven’t you?”

  “I have.”

  “Some of them,” Daddy says.

  “Do you have a favourite?”

  I let my mind run ahead through the conversation to come. I can see it laid out like tiles, this game of conversation the men play. I could play this tile, or that one. Daddy clears his throat, and I know he’s playing the same game. I glance at him and he winks. Quickly, Pytho.

  “The Metaphysics,” I say. “I like the books about animals, too, and the dissection drawings, but I can read the Metaphysics again and again and learn something every time.” I could have named any number of his books, and sent the game in a different direction with each choice, but I know few of the men here tonight have made it to the end of the Metaphysics, because I’ve heard Daddy tell Theophrastos so.

  “What sort of things do you learn from it?” Krios asks.

  “I’ve learned about change,” I say. “Change in space, and time, and substance. I’ve learned about motion. I’ve learned about the perfect and eternal being, what Daddy calls the unmoved mover.”

  “About god,” Krios says.

  “About god as a metaphysical necessity,” I say. “Remote and oblivious and lost in contemplation.”

  “You have encouraged her to flourish,” Krios says to Daddy.

  “It’s getting to be a problem,” Daddy says.

  When their laughter dies down, Krios says, “The question, then, is whether little Athena is unique, or whether she is an example of what many girls could be, if they were encouraged by such fathers.”

  “Is that the question?” Daddy says. “You’ve hijacked the evening, pet.”

  “I’m Daddy’s shadow,” I say, because I want to tell him I love him.

  “A freak.” A new voice: Akakios. “Oh, I don’t mean that unkindly. But how could such a great man produce an ordinary child? The tallest mountains have the tallest shadows. She’s not representative of her sex. She’s the exception that proves the rule.”

  Daddy bows, acknowledging the compliment.

  “If he’s right, child, you’re destined for loneliness,” Krios says.

  “Only in the company of women,” Daddy says. “She’ll be all right so long as she has books.”

  “You’ll have to find a husband willing to supply her,” Akakios says.

  “If he’s right,” Krios repeats.

  He looks at me, and I see him thinking, Go on, little Athena.

  “How many of you have daughters?” I ask.

  Again that silence as they absorb the sound of my voice.

  “Many of us,” Akakios says, when it becomes clear they’re not going to offer a show of hands.

  “Can they read books?” I ask. “Not just household accounts. I mean real books.”

  No reaction.

  “Could they?” I ask. “If you tried to teach them? If an ass could read, would it be wrong to teach it?”

  “Would it be wrong not to?” Krios says.

  “Would the ass be worse off?” Akakios asks. “Would it be unhappy?”

  “Ah,” Daddy says. “That’s the question.”

  “Did you like that, pet?” Daddy asks when the last guest is gone.

  “Very much.”

  “Shall our subject be animals next time?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “They liked you,” Daddy says. “You made them think.”

  We pause at the door to my room. He kisses the top of my head.

  “Will I be lonely?” I ask.

  He smiles. “Of course,” he says. “Does that frighten you?”

  “Are you lonely?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you have us.”

  “I do,” he says. “I have Herpyllis for when I’m cold, and Nico for when I want to laugh. And I have you, Pytho.”

  I wait while he thinks.

  “For when you want to remember Mummy,” I supply, finally, to spare us both.

  He looks surprised. “That, too,” he says. “But I was going to say: I have you, my Pytho, for when I want to think about the future.”

  I go up on my tiptoes and kiss his cheek. He clears his throat and stalks off to his bed.

  Daddy is as good as his word, and soon Herpyllis is saying he’s completely lost his reason. He arranges displays of skeletons in the big room and has Tycho stack crates of live specimens in the courtyard. It’s Herpyllis’s job to feed them, which means it’s really Nico’s and mine. Birds, lizards, frogs, rabbits, turtles, and a weasel Nico names Nipper.

  “Well, don’t keep sticking your fingers in.” I squeeze his hand with a rag until the bleeding stops. “I wonder what he’s going to do with them all.”

  “Dissect them, of course,” Nico says.

  “After he’s finished, I mean.”

  Nico trickles some grain through the roof of the birdcage, startling the pigeons. “You’re going to be soup, yes you are,” he coos.

  I squeeze a sponge over the frogs. Daddy says we have to keep them moist. “I wonder what Herpyllis will do with these?”

  “Feed them to the dogs?”

  “Feed them to Daddy’s students.” We giggle. “Roast frog with walnuts.”

  “Figs,” Nico says. “I don’t like walnuts. Hey, you’re bleeding.”

  I wipe my hands on my dress. “That’s yours.”

  “No, not there. At the back.”

  I twist my skirts around and see the red-brown stain.

  “Mummy!” Nico hollers. “Pytho sat on something sharp.”

  “You great lump,” I say. “It means I can have a baby now.”

  Nico giggles.

  “Shut up,” I say.

  “You shut up. You need a man to have a baby. He has to stick his penis in your hole.”

  “Thank you, Nico,” Herpyllis says, coming into the courtyard. She takes one look at me and sweeps me away to her room. “Almost thirteen summers,” she says. “About time.”

  “I’m not getting married.”

  “Yes, you are.” Herpyllis strips me and calls for a basin of water and clean rags. “It’s straight from here to the temple. We’ve had a man waiting there all this past year. He’s very ugly and he has very bad breath.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Well, of course you’re not getting married yet.” She shows me how to wind the rag around and tie it in place. “You know Daddy’s views. Eighteen summers, at least. That’s years and years away.”

  “That’s ancient. Gaiane’s the same age as me, and she’s getting married this summer.”

  Herpyllis stops wringing out my bloody dress and puts her hands on her hips. “So now you do want to be married?”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “You want to argue with me, is what you want. Like every other girl your age wants to argue with her mother.” I don’t correct her.

  The next morning Herpyllis hustles me off to the temple, with gold coins and a bottle of perfume and the good wine she was saving for Daddy’s name day. Daddy frowns, but says nothing. Tycho follows a little way behind us, carrying a bag of my old toys. I wrote the dedication out myself:

  At the time of her menarche, Pythias consecrates to Artemis the ball that she loved, the net that held her hair; and her dolls, as is fitting; Pythias the virgin, to the virgin goddess. In return, spread your hand over the daughter of Aristotle and watch piously over this pious girl.

  I had a little fight with Herpyllis this morning when I tried to keep back Pretty-Head. I don’t play with her or sleep with her anymore, but my mother sewed her for me, embroidered tiny pink roses on the hem of her dress. I like to stare at the tiny complication of those roses and imagine my mother straining her eyes over the stitches. I don’t really remember her, and what I do recall—a gruff woman with heavy brows and a harsh voice who carried me on her hip while she barked at everyone but me—I’ve been told is wrong. I don’t care: I know what I know. Sometimes when I’m fierce with Nico I feel her in me, surging up, and I feel safe and strong.

  Herpyllis won that fight, though. “I don’t care,” Herpyllis says now as we walk. “You don’t skint the goddess. I knew a girl when I was young, her mother gave second-best oil, and she never had a child. Walk straight, Pytho. Everyone doesn’t need to know.”

  “It feels like it’s slipping.”

  “It’s fine. You’ll get used to it. Don’t sit down, that’s all, until we get home, and then it won’t soak through your clothes. You have to rinse it right away and hang it to dry in your room so Daddy doesn’t have to see it.”

  “I know.”

  “Listen, though.” She stops in the road, puts her hands on my shoulders. “You have to thank the goddess properly. No mistakes. She’ll know if you don’t get it right.”

  I think of Daddy, his dry scepticism. “How will she?”

  “She sees. Like Daddy, but without all the cutting.”

  I take the stopper from the perfume and sniff. “Oh, Herpyllis, no. This is your best.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  In the temple we make our offerings and pray. I do everything in the right order, and I can see Herpyllis is happy. But the ritual is one thing; my feelings are another. I find I can’t be thankful for the mess coming out of me and the prospect of some pimply boy breathing his halitosis into my mouth, but I can think of Herpyllis giving up her nicest perfume on my account and find loving tears in myself that way. I kiss Pretty-Head and stroke the little stitches on her dress one last time, then lay her with the other offerings. Herpyllis kisses me when we’re done, wipes her eyes and mine, and says nothing all the way home, but holds my hand in hers. Her joy spills into me. Borrowed joy, but genuine enough to please the goddess, I hope.

  At home, a strange boy is rapping his knuckles on our gate. My age, roughly. He wears a pack. His feet are filthy and raw, but his clothes are decent enough.

  “You have to knock harder than that,” Herpyllis says. “How will we possibly hear you?”

  He turns his startled face to hers. Black eyes, black hair, hurt mouth; the bruise is almost gone, but not the swelling. He looks at me.

  “Fetch Daddy,” Herpyllis says. Her voice has hardened almost imperceptibly; the boy won’t have heard the difference. “Are you hungry?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  Deep voice. Older than I thought, by a year or two; he’s small for his age.

  “Go,” Herpyllis says, sharply now, because I haven’t moved.

  I come back with Daddy and an apple. Herpyllis is holding a letter. The boy takes the apple and looks at me again, nods. Daddy takes the letter and reads.

  “And here I thought I knew all my cousins,” he says after a while. “Well. Shall we go in?”

  “No,” Herpyllis says later that afternoon, for the twentieth or thirtieth time. “We don’t have room. He’d have to sleep in the stables.”

  “He could share with Nico.”

  “Absolutely not. We know nothing about him.”

  “There’s that empty room in the servants’ wing.”

  “Which you use for specimens. Where would you like us to move those to?”

  “Just think of him as a bigger specimen,” I say.

  “Now, now.” Daddy stands up. “A little charity, please, both of you. Imagine yourselves in his situation, sent away from his family because they can’t afford to keep him. Thrown on our mercy. He’s probably terrified. Where is he now, in the kitchen? Send him to me when he wakes up.”

  “I’ve never seen anyone eat the core of an apple,” I say to Herpyllis when Daddy’s gone back to his room. The new boy’s sleeping on a mat by the hearth; Nico’s running wild somewhere with his friends, and doesn’t know yet about his new brother. “Where did he come from, again?”

  “Amphissa, he says.”

  “You don’t like him.”

  “I don’t trust him.”

  “Why not?”

  She looks at me. “I have no idea.”

  “I like him,” I say.

  “I know, sweetheart.” She stands and kisses the top of my head. “You hold on to that. I think he has a hard path ahead of him.”

  “Why?”

  She ruffles my hair, and goes to start cleaning out the specimen room.

  I go to the kitchen. He’s awake on his mat, and his eyes flare when he sees me. He sits up. I ask him what happened to his mouth. He doesn’t answer.

  “What’s your name?” he says. That unexpectedly deep voice again, music I’m still getting used to.

  “Pythias.”

  “Your mother doesn’t like me.”

  “She’s not my mother. Are you hungry?”

  “Starving.”

  I get bread and cheese from the shelf. “Does it hurt to chew?”

  “A little. But the tooth is tightening up.”