The Golden Mean (15 page)

“I keep the girls back here.” He leads us to a tent behind the pens. “Less trouble that way. Give me a minute and I’ll bring them out.”

“We could just go in. Spare you the trouble.”

“I’ll bring them out.”

“Something in there,” Callisthenes says once the slaver’s inside.

He brings out five. “Go ahead,” he says to me, and to the women, “Show the man your teeth.”

They all smile tooth-baringly, and Callisthenes and I obediently examine them. One coughs when I ask to see her tongue. The front of her tunic is blood-speckled. I send her back in. The slaver watches without comment. I have them kneel, jump, touch toes, stretch their arms high. I send a wincer back inside.

“Likes them young,” the slaver says to Callisthenes.

I do indeed like the youngest, who is also the tiniest, skinny-shanked, flat-chested, with unnaturally light, curly coppery hair, light green eyes, and milky skin speckled with brown across the nose. She’s not an agate, though, and I’m not sure this kind of tiny prettiness would please my wife.

“What is your name?” I ask her in Macedonian, then Greek.

She says nothing.

“Celts,” the slaver says. “I got them from a man who traded them for salt. He got them from a man who got them from their own people. Some squabble with the next village over, and theirs lost. Over who had the better goatskins to dress their wives in, no doubt. They’re from the far north, the islands. Have you heard about those places? Animals, of course, but proud in their own way. The men are warriors and I’ve heard the women are too. Don’t wash, don’t shave, eat dog, healthy as horses and almost as tall. That’s just the women. This one’s not full-grown yet. Another year or two and she’ll be a monster like the others. I had some men, too, but they went fast. Like oxen, wonderful for field work. Hair down to here.” The slaver slaps his own ass. “The men, I mean. All reds, like that.” He points at my tiny girl. “You know that’s real, by the way? Pull it out and check it from the root if you don’t believe me. A conversation piece for your neighbours, just for starters. Twelve, thirteen years, I put her at. Hard to say exactly with these people. You’d be her first owner. You can train her up just the way you want her.”

Callisthenes nods at her foot, which is heavily bandaged.

“May I see?” I bend down. She glances at the slaver, but I don’t need to unwrap it: the smell is of gangrene. How she jumped up and down on it is amazing. I send her back.

“Can’t say I mind,” the slaver says. “I might keep her myself. Doesn’t speak a word other than gibberish. Bites. I adore her.”

“You want that foot seen to. It might have to come off.” My father would have offered to do the job himself. I still have his saws somewhere. Me, I don’t even ask what happened. Am I the more worldly or was he? Two left: a tall one from the same village as the tiny girl, I’d guess, with the same rusty colouring and a more general, less attractive speckling of the skin—a rash, on closer inspection, peeling and bloody by the hairline—and an older one with a sullen face who looks me in the eye like that’s her way of spitting.

“Can you cook?” I ask her.

“Hey fuck you.” Her Greek is heavily accented but clear enough. She’s dark, not red, but I noticed her earlier muttering to one of the others. Either they share a language or she’s out of her mind.

“What can you cook?”

“I cook poison for you. Your wife, your children. All dead by morning.”

Her teeth are good; I sniff her breath while she’s talking and there’s no rot there. She’s solid, solidly hipped, with a good colour in her skin. She stands with her feet braced, hands in loose fists. She looks me in the eye. I like her.

“You like everyone,” Callisthenes says.

Her hair is shot through with grey and she’s deeply tanned; I see the paler lines in the crinkles around her eyes. Happier days, once, maybe. “What’s the story with this one?”

“I don’t know why you bother asking,” Callisthenes says afterwards, as we’re walking home. “They only ever tell you what they think you want to hear. Did you see how happy he was to get rid of her?”

“You think I fell for it?”

The woman walks a few paces behind us. The slaver offered to rope her wrists for me to lead her like a horse, but I declined. If she runs, Callisthenes will catch her and then we’ll all know where we stand.

“Maybe just a little bit,” Callisthenes says.

“Hey fuck you,” the woman says. “He got deal. I’m cook like how you say.”

“She’s cook like how you say.” Callisthenes turns to the woman. “What was in the tent?”

She shrugs, makes a loose fist with one hand, and plugs a finger in and out of the hole with the other. “Customer.”

“And where are you from?”

She says a name, a guttural I can’t get my mouth around. She laughs when I try.

“Forest country?”

“Sea. Real sea. Cold, not like here.”

“Somewhere up north,” Callisthenes says helpfully.

“Far.” She ignores him, looks at me, seeing I want to know. “You no go farther. You fall off edge.”

“Of the land, or the sea?”

“Sea pour off edge to hell,” she clarifies.

It’s fun to watch Athea—that’s her name—and Pythias take each other’s measure.

“Thank you.” Pythias’s face lights with surprise.

“Hey fuck you,” Athea says.

Sometimes I mistake Pythias for being frailer than she is.

“Don’t speak to me so rudely,” Pythias says. “We are kind to each other in this house. If you speak to me unkindly, your new master here will have to take you back to the market and I promise wherever you end up next won’t be as congenial. Shall I show you the house and the kitchen, and where you will sleep? Are those your belongings?” She means a clinking lump of things Athea brought with her from the slaver’s tent, tied up in a cloth that she dangles by the ears.

“Ah, ah, ah,” Athea says. “Everyone so nice. All right. Maybe we are best friends by tonight, yes? Maybe everyone wake up tomorrow after all?” She winks at me.

“It will be better here,” I say awkwardly, meaning better than wherever she was before, but she just waves a hand at me, dismissing me and my reassurances, and follows Pythias from the room.

Callisthenes makes his fingers into horns and pretends to clash them together.

“She’s awful,” Pythias says that evening, after supper.

We’re sitting in the courtyard while the slaves tidy up around us and dusk falls. One of our last out-of-doors meals; it’s fall now, cooling fast, the sunlight a thinner gold. Paler colours everywhere, paler pink at sunrise, green slowly leaching from the trees, in this last serving of hospitable days. The rains are on their way. The smell of smoke and burning everywhere now. We’re alone now, but can hear them in the kitchen, the clatter of their work and their voices, talking and occasionally laughing. Pythias seems content. Her cheeks are rosy, perhaps from the wine.

“She made one of the girls cry just by staring at her. She told me my house was filthy and Macedonians are animals. I told her we weren’t Macedonian.”

“And she said?”

Pythias has drunk more than usual, actually, or she would never say what she says next: “She said she could cure our problem.”

She’s blushing, and I assume none of this is very serious. “What problem is that?”

“She showed me what she had in that bag. Some stones, some bones, some dried herbs. She’s a kind of witch, or thinks she is. She says she’s helped people like us before.”

“That’s what we got her for.” I’m assuming she’ll come out with it eventually, our problem as diagnosed by Athea the snarly witch.

“Tomorrow I’m going to have her start on the big room. You’ll have the dinner there, I’m assuming. We still have barrels and crates and things in there from when we moved. We’ll have to find somewhere else for all that. The floor will need scouring, and the walls, and the ceiling. Have you ever really looked at the ceilings in here? Black, all black from the lamps. I don’t think they’ve been cleaned ever.”

“Stones and bones and herbs?”

“You bought a witch,” she says, and giggles.

“The slaver told me she was a Scythian healer. He said her village exiled her when a child she had been caring for died. She was walking to the next village, hoping to go to some family there, when she was picked up by an army. She didn’t know which, didn’t speak their language. When they were defeated, she was sold off with the other prisoners of war. He said she was next employed in the house of a wealthy man in Byzantium as a cook, but she tried to run away and so he sold her to the slaver. He said he’d refused a couple of times already to sell her because the buyers wanted her to work in the fields, and he knew she had more skills than that.”

A failed healer: Callisthenes saw it right away. Pythias may or may not, I can’t tell. Sometimes I think she knows all of my weak spots, sometimes none.

“That starts out right,” Pythias says. “The child was brought to her too late, she says. There was nothing she could do, but they blamed her anyway. They made her leave her family behind, her own children. She doesn’t know who got them. She scavenged for the army until they were wiped out, and spent a month in the slave market before she was bought. The wealthy man was a miser who bought old meat for the household because it was cheap, and when they all got sick after she cooked a meal for them she got a reputation as a poisoner. They took her back to the market and sold her to the man you bought her from. She said he made his living travelling, selling cheap goods cheap. He never refused anyone. He’d be gone before the buyer could realize they’d bought dregs. I doubt he kept her for soft work. She said he told her if he didn’t sell her in Pella, he’d kill her rather than have to feed her another day. She said she was getting ready to die when you showed up.”

“The family got sick, or died?” I ask.

“She says her training was as a midwife. They never should have brought the child to her in the first place, it needed a doctor, but there was no doctor. She had no idea what to do for it. She says she told the rich man’s wife the meat was no good and the woman beat her. She says I should eat more fruit, and you shouldn’t take any hot baths, and we should pay attention to the cycles of the moon.”

“She told you a lot for the first day. Do you want to eat more fruit?”

Night now, and I waved the lamps away some time ago. We’re sitting in darkness while the slaves wait for us to finish so they can clean up after us and get to bed themselves.

“I like fruit,” she says.

I can’t see her face.

I send her to bed and sit a while longer on my own. It’s Athea herself who comes over to clear our last dishes and wine cups. I wonder if she’s been listening, though we’ve kept our voices low. A witch, so.

“All right?” I ask.

“Go to bed.”

I tell her to take a lamp to my library. I want to sit up and work for a while.

“Go to bed, you.”

I tell her to take a lamp to my library.

“What you work on?”

“Tragedy,” I say.

“Hey fuck you. You don’t want tell me, I’m nothing, don’t tell me. Your wife tell me other day, maybe. She like to talk.”

My wife likes to talk? “Goodness. The good life. What it means to live a good life, and the ways in which that goodness can be lost.”

I wait for her to laugh, or say something sarcastic, or tell me to fuck myself again, but she is only silent. Then she says, “I give garlic your wife, okay?”

“I don’t know. Is it okay? What does she need garlic for?”

“You are not doctor?” She looks proud of herself, like she’s trumped me with this piece of information she thinks she’s ferreted out from somewhere. “You know what for. I am surprise you not try this yourself. Shy, maybe. Is okay. I explain to her.”

“Explain it to me.”

She studies me, assessing whether I’m being disingenuous or genuinely don’t know what she’s talking about. Apparently I pass. “Some doctor,” she says, not displeased. “Your wife she stick the garlic up. In the morning, smell her breath.”

This is what I thought. “Up where?”

“Up.” She shoves a hand at her crotch. “Where you fuck. Put the garlic there. One clove only, is enough. If her breath smell, passages are open. If not, no baby for you.”

“I’ve heard of this. With onion, though.”

She waves this away. “No, no, no. Garlic. Stronger. Fit better also.”

“And if the passages are closed?” I feel like my father. “I suppose you have a charm to open them?”

“I don’t know charm. We try this first, then we see.”

“Athea,” I say. “Listen to me. My wife is right: we are kind to one another in this house. But you have only been here one day. There is no ‘we.’ We have not retained your services. We do not have any kind of problem that concerns you. You will not mention this or anything like this to my wife. No garlic. No charms. If you speak of this again, I will take you back to the market. My wife was right about that also.”

“Is stupid.” She shrugs.

“Probably. Now go and do what you’re told.”

She does indeed cook like how you say. Supper this night was a bean soup, bread, cheese, olives, fish, a spread of colourful little saucers we emptied and stacked in a teetering pile, licking our fingers as we went.

“These are ours?” I asked Pythias, of the saucers.

“Athea found them in one of the crates. She asked if she could use them.”

The soup was thick with greenery, herbs and some kind of tender, deep green leaf that withered in the liquid but kept its jewelled colour. She’d found a marrow bone for it too. The bread was gritless and still warm, the round white cheese pressed with walnuts in a flower pattern, the sardines intact but magically boneless. The witch has knife skills worthy of my surgeon father.

“I
’VE READ THIS ALREADY
,” Alexander says.

We’re in Mieza, in the kitchen, seated beside each other in front of the hearth. Not where I’d prefer to be sharing books, but he’s lately pulled something in his leg in games and has been told to sweat the muscle until he can run on it again. He sits with his heel propped on the bar where the pots hang, my Homer in his lap. I’m anxious for the book—embers, smuts—but so far he’s shielding it nicely, taking care. It’s sweet to see.