I say, “Ah.”

  “You remind me,” Daddy says. “I’ll do it after my swim. Let’s go check the charts for the tide.”

  It turns out the optimal time is dawn. “Seriously?” I say, thinking of my warm bed. “Couldn’t we just wait twelve hours?”

  “It’ll be dark by then,” Daddy says.

  “Dawn’s pretty dark, too.”

  “Lazy pet. You’ll survive one early morning. Have you ever seen the colour of the sky that early in the day? The sun comes up like fine wine.”

  I pretend to shudder and he smiles that rare, sweet smile.

  I’m woken by the tap of his fingers on my door jamb, while the sky is still black and the cock is still sleeping. I tie my hair back uncombed into a pony tail, and put on my warmest clothes. It’s really cold; hoarfrost on the grass.

  Once we’re away from the houses and our voices won’t disturb anyone, I exhale hard, like Nico trying to offend me with his garlic breath, to make a white plume in the air. “There must be fire in us,” I say to Daddy. “Or something like embers. In the heart, maybe? To make smoke like this?”

  Daddy says nothing.

  At the narrowest part of the channel, we pick our way down the rocky slopes to the water. Daddy starts to undress.

  “Ho!” calls a man passing on the near bank with a horse and cart.

  “Good morning!” Daddy calls back, undressing.

  “Is he sick?” the man calls to me.

  I shake my head.

  “Look, he’s got milk,” Daddy says. “Take some coins from my bag, there, and my cup, and get some for after my swim. It’s early enough; it’s probably still warm.”

  “I’ll do it,” I tell Tycho. Stay with him.

  I pick my way up the slope, holding my skirts up, while the man waits, staring at Daddy. When I hold out the coin, he asks me again if Daddy is sick. I shake my head.

  “Then he’s an idiot.” The man fills Daddy’s cup with milk, which steams in the cold. I realize how stupid my idea was. Embers in the heart, seriously. That’s why Daddy didn’t reply. “The current’s about to change. You’re not from here, are you?”

  “He knows about the current.”

  “He doesn’t know anything.” There’s a splash and the man cries out. Daddy’s in. The man says an evil word. He reaches under his seat for a length of rope and jumps down awkwardly from his cart. He hands me the horse’s reins and tells me not to let go. He scrabbles down the bank, tripping once, but doesn’t stop to inspect the scrape to his knee which, even from here, I can see is bleeding. Daddy is mid-channel now, treading water in what seems to be a lull. The man coils the rope, then tosses the end to Daddy. Confused, Daddy reaches for the end, but it drifts out of his reach. Now Daddy is moving, but not swimming. He dives.

  The man asks Tycho what the evil word Daddy thinks he’s doing, and did Tycho and I come down here to help him kill himself, and if so we’re evil words ourselves. I feel his anger on me like spit. Beside me, the horse shifts and snuffles nervously. It pulls its head against the reins, testing me, smelling inexperience. Smelling girl.

  People on both banks have stopped to watch now, adults and children with early-morning business. The sky has indeed gone tender, pink and frail and fine. A shout goes up from the onlookers: Daddy has surfaced, considerably north of where he went in. He’s trying to swim back to us, but the current is holding him prisoner, and he’s swimming hard just to stay still. People are shouting and waving their arms, That way, that way, wanting him to swim with the current rather than against it. He dives again.

  The crowd makes a soft, hurt sound, fist to the gut.

  I scan the crowd for someone I recognize: one of the men from Plios’s party, a soldier, Euphranor himself? But it’s too early in the morning for the quality, and all I see are slaves, market-women, vagrants. Each face shows horror.

  The milkman is beside me. “Come on,” he says. “He’ll wash up on the beach there.” He points towards our swimming beach. “If he washes up.”

  I climb up onto the cart beside him and he tchas the horse into a trot. At the head of the beach path, he ties the reins to a stump. Tycho and I run on ahead.

  The beach is empty.

  “No,” the man says, puffing up behind me. “No, no, no,” like he’s forbidding me something. My arm shoots out to point to something far out in the bay: a head. The man strips angrily to pudge-buttocked bareness and wades in, then dives. Tycho is ahead of him. Tycho swims out to Daddy and brings him back, expertly, in a kind of swimming headlock. When they’re fifty paces out, I wade in myself, waist-deep, to help bring him the rest of the way. Daddy’s face is white and his eyes are closed.

  On the sand, Tycho wraps his own clothes around Daddy and rubs him hard all over his body. The onlookers have caught up with us now, and someone has a blanket for the milkman. I rub Daddy the way Tycho does, sitting beside him on the sand, propping him up against my body. Tycho is blue-lipped and shivering convulsively now.

  Someone dumps a blanket over Tycho’s shoulders, and another over my legs. Perhaps I’m crying.

  “Pythias,” Daddy says quietly, without opening his eyes.

  The crowd exhales. The air goes white from the ember in every chest.

  At home, Herpyllis proves she could have made a soldier. She has Daddy put to bed wrapped in sheets warmed with stones heated in the fire; gives the milkman a set of new clothes, a hot meal, and a bag of coins; thanks Tycho; and slaps me across the face.

  She spends the rest of the day at Daddy’s bedside, spooning hot broth into his mouth and singing to him like she does to Nico when he gets a tummy ache. I can hear her soft voice from my bedroom, which she’s ordered me not to leave.

  Daddy soon gets a cold. He snots and sneezes and aches all over, he says, and where is Pythias? Herpyllis relents, and lets me in to see him.

  “Hello, pet,” he says.

  I ask him how he’s feeling. Herpyllis snorts.

  “Fine, fine,” he says, and then he coughs until his face goes purple. He waves angrily at Herpyllis to leave the room.

  “It’s nothing,” he says, when the coughing stops. “She’s hysterical.”

  “She’s not.”

  He pats the bedside and I sit. “She loves us both,” he says. “She knows you were trying to help.”

  I hold his hand for a while, his baby-soft hand.

  “A child is a line cast blind to the future,” he says. “Like an idea, or a book. Who knows where it will land, or what it will draw out?”

  I ask him if he’d like me to write that down.

  “No, pet,” he says. “That’s just for you.”

  I think we’re both joking.

  The cough stays with him. He begins to cough up a yellowish thickness that Herpyllis says is a good sign; it’s the sickness coming out. He runs a low fever and has shivering fits. He eats little and drenches the sheets with night sweats. Still, he gets up sometimes, to use the pot or sit for short periods in the garden in the thin autumn sun. He asks for books, not to read, but just to hold on his lap. Sometimes I read to him. When he coughs, now, he holds a hand to his chest against the pain. His lips are permanently blue. Moving from bed to chair is enough to make him gasp like a runner at the end of a race. He takes to coughing into a cloth. Herpyllis does his laundry, angrily forbidding me or the servants to help. She thinks she can carry this secret by herself.

  After a week of coughing blood, he lies down to die. It takes four more days. He complains of stabbing pains in his side, and his skin takes on a blue tinge all over.

  “What did you see?” I ask him, late one night. I’m sitting with him so Herpyllis can sleep a bit. “What did you see down there, Daddy?”

  His shallow breaths rasp like a saw.

  When the cock crows, I go to wake Herpyllis. She takes one look at Daddy and sends me to get Nico, and Myrmex and everyone. The slaves, everyone. Now, now, quickly, quickly.

  He’s still breathing when we get back.

  Herpyllis herself lays the coin on his tongue, and together we bathe him and dew him with sweet oil. We dress him warmly in white for his journey, and when Thale returns from the meadow with a basket of fall flowers we weave a tiny wild-flower garland for his lovely head: creamy fall anemones, purple crocuses, white winter violets, pink cyclamen. Herpyllis puts the honey cake for the dog in his hand and holds his fingers closed over it until they stiffen. We wear our darkest clothes to contrast Daddy, to show we are still with the living, and the pain of that.

  The next day is the laying-out. Pyrrhaios and Tycho carry the bed to the front hall and point his feet to the door. Herpyllis, Nico, Myrmex, and I sit around him, fanning away the flies. To Thale falls the coming and going: fetching white jars from the market for perfumes to keep the body bearable, sweeping up the dried marjoram and strewing fresh on the floor, trying to get the four of us to drink and Nico to take a bit of bread. Herpyllis rips her hair from its pins and lets it hang; I pull mine out, slowly, strand by strand, until Herpyllis takes my hands in hers and says enough. Enough; though she comes back from a visit to the pot with bloody claw-marks on both cheeks and on the tops of her breasts. When she forbids me to do the same, I know she’s worried about scarring before my marriage. I touch my fingertips to her blood, instead, and swipe it onto my face, where it mixes with the tears and eventually dries. We are quiet, against tradition—no keening—but we know it’s what Daddy would want.

  On the third day is the procession. Herpyllis has left the body only to use the pot and put Nico to bed. Herpyllis and Myrmex and I dozed sitting up with him and are weak with hunger and exhaustion now. We set out before sunrise. Pyrrhaios, Simon, Tycho, and Myrmex carry the bed. Behind them walk the singers Thale found, sisters from Caria who know the old mourning songs. Professionals: their voices are thin and bird-like, their eyes blank. Nico and I come last, holding hands; Herpyllis—no marriage, no tie of blood—stands in the doorway, watching us go.

  We walk away from the sunrise, to the road into town, to the markers we passed when we first arrived. The gravesman is waiting by a hole in the ground. Nico steps forward to help lift Daddy into the clay coffin. “On his side,” the gravesman says. The only thing he says. They lay Daddy on his side like a sleeping child so that when he’s lowered into the ground he’ll face west. We take turns approaching him. Myrmex places the three white perfume jars at Daddy’s head and hands and feet. I put a book of seashell sketches inside his clothes, against his breast, because his arms and hands are too stiff now to manoeuvre into an embrace, and at any rate he’s still holding the dried-up cake. Nico is last. He has the lamp Herpyllis gave him, and a tablet and stylus of his own. I notice he glances up at Pyrrhaios as he’s placing them by Daddy’s hands and Pyrrhaios nods, That’s right.

  The gravesman closes the coffin and the men lower it, suspended on ropes, into the hole. They shovel the dirt over and erect the marble stone. Thale hands me the basket of olives, honey and wildflowers, which I place on the grave. Myrmex pours a cup of milk over the raw earth, and it’s done.

  When we get home—all but Myrmex, who peeled away from us into town—Herpyllis is holding a letter that came by courier while we were at the grave. Theophrastos will host the funeral feast for Daddy’s colleagues and students—those who were closest to him, he writes—in Athens.

  Daddy is travelling. The coin will be gone by now, and the cake. He’s on his way.

  We sit in the public room in the home of Thaulos, a high-ceilinged reception room with severe furniture and only a single small brazier in one corner. Herpyllis is in the middle of a couch with Nico on one side and me on the other, a wing around each of us. My hair is cropped short, like a boy’s; Nico’s will be allowed to grow shaggy.

  “The children have been ill,” she says, when neither of us answers his greeting.

  She still wears her darkest dress, sweat-smelling after so many days without washing, and no make-up; her eyes are a mess. Nico drones softly to himself, a wordless keening. He’s been doing this for days. I find it important not to speak. Each word feels precious, suddenly, and so many words are so utterly unnecessary.

  “Your father named Antipater as executor of his will,” Thaulos begins. Antipater, regent of Macedon, my father’s old friend. “I stand here today as his proxy.”

  “I thank you,” Herpyllis says.

  Thaulos takes a breath to speak, then changes his mind. He rubs his forehead, reading over the paper in front of him. Finally he looks up. “It’s a pickle, isn’t it?” he says kindly.

  We can only breathe.

  “I’ve sent word to your father’s school in Athens, to”—he squints at the paper—“Theophrastos, and to the nephew, in dispatches. His unit is still in Babylon. Nicanor, yes? Your intended?” He’s looking at me.

  “He’s dead,” I say.

  “Shh.” Herpyllis kisses my hair.

  “Nicanor is dead.”

  Thaulos looks surprised.

  “He’s dead,” I say again.

  “Then you have better intelligence than I do.” He smiles gently at his own joke. “I’ve received no such report. The army prides itself on accuracy in such matters. I wish I’d known you had such worries. I could have eased your mind.”

  “Is he coming home?” Herpyllis asks.

  Now Thaulos frowns.

  “They’ve been coming home ever since they left,” I say. “Years ago. That’s what Daddy always said. All we can do is wait.”

  “Your father had a unique insight into the mind of our king,” Thaulos says. “I think his great wisdom guides us even now.”

  “She has the spark of him in her,” Herpyllis says. “She always did.”

  I go blank for a few seconds, and when I come back they’re discussing Herpyllis’s future.

  “Of course,” she’s saying, bowing her head obediently. “Of course.”

  “You have people there still?”

  “A sister,” Herpyllis says. “Cousins.”

  “And the boy will go to Theophrastos.”

  “Myrmex, you mean.” Herpyllis nods.

  Thaulos looks at the papers again.

  “Mummy?” Nico says.

  “Nicanor shall take charge of the boy Myrmex, that he be taken to his own friends in a manner worthy of me with the property of his which we received,” Thaulos reads. “Orphan, is he? No, I mean the other boy. This fine fellow here. Would you like to go to school? Nicomachos, is it? I’m sure it’s what your father would have wanted for you.”

  Nico screams, a high thin sound like a hawk. Herpyllis lets go of me to put both her arms around him. Her shoulders are shaking.

  Thaulos, obviously startled, stands. I stand, too, while Herpyllis and Nico hold each other, weeping. With a look, he bids me follow him over to the window, where they won’t hear us. We look out on a drill team going through manoeuvres. “And you?” he says.

  I wait.

  “You can go to Athens with your brother.” Watching his soldiers, Thaulos stands taller with unconscious pride. “I’m familiar with your father’s concerns, but I can reassure you that they were—overstated, shall we say. Macedon controls Athens. You will be safe there.”

  I thank him.

  “I suppose you could go with the woman, alternatively,” he muses. “Like a mother to you, is she? A girl needs a mother. You could wait with her in Stageira for your intended. Confidentially, I suspect the army will move quickly now to return home. Now that the king’s ambitions are no longer—”

  “Now that there is no longer a god to lead them,” I say.

  Thaulos looks at his feet.

  “How long?” I ask.

  “Months. A year at most, I’d guess, for all of them to return. Think about it. I have a daughter myself, though younger than you. I understand there are preparations for a marriage? Certain information to be passed on? Household management and so on? And then learning how to care for all the little ones to come?”

  I think he is a kind daddy.

  “I’ll leave your decision to the wisdom you’ve inherited from your father.” He gives me the paper and holds a hand towards the door, conducting us out. Nico is quiet now, and he and Herpyllis have both risen. Our interview is done. “He will guide you.”

  “Always,” I say.

  Outside, Pyrrhaios leans down to murmur something in Nico’s ear. Nico stands a little straighter, wiping his face, and Pyrrhaios briefly puts a hand on his shoulder. He must have heard everything. Herpyllis walks slowly, already trying to delay the inevitable.

  At home, I find Myrmex and give him the paper. He reads it slowly, then once more, even more slowly. I realize he’s drunk.

  “ ‘Taken to his own friends in a manner worthy of me with the property of his which we received.’ ” Myrmex spits at my feet. “What property? What friends?”

  “I don’t know,” I whisper.

  He reads a third time. “There was a bag,” he says slowly. “They gave me a bag to give to your father, when I left home, when I came to Athens. It was sewn closed. I bet it was money. My money.”

  I want to kiss him.

  “Your brother’ll give it to me, if you won’t.”

  “I’ve been in the storeroom,” I say, stupidly. “I’ve never seen such a bag.” I stand up so he can press himself against me if he wants to.

  “Tight as your father,” he sneers. And off he goes to rant at poor terrified Nico, until Herpyllis flaps him away like she flaps the chickens with her skirts.

  “I’ll get what’s mine,” Myrmex says. “I’ll find a way.”

  He clangs out of the front gate, leaving it bouncing behind him.

  Herpyllis begins packing. Nico sits in a corner, his gaze following her everywhere. Sometimes he rocks a little. Herpyllis’s eyes are now so raw and swollen I fear infection. She lets me examine her. I make her cold compresses with bruised mint, but, privately, I fear whatever prettiness she might once have had is gone forever.

  The next morning, Myrmex still isn’t back.

  “He needs to grieve,” Herpyllis says. “Not everyone can share grief.” She puts aside what she’s been doing, some last mending for Nico, and pats the couch beside her. “I’ve been wanting to speak to you, Pytho.”