now, her brother was probably master of Pantecapaeum.
She found that she was perfectly happy to be a mother with a healthy baby, and two days later, when Sappho, pale as death from blood loss, allowed her eyes to flutter open and was pronounced likely to live, Melitta was happier still.
It took her several days – feeding her son all the time, watching the slave girls change him and being visited at regular intervals by an absurdly uncomfortable Coenus – before she got the whole story: the mad doctor who drew a knife and was stopped only by Sappho's reckless courage in putting her hand under the knife and then her body across Melitta's; the Jewish doctor who tackled the assassin, dying for his efforts but getting the man clear.
'Sophokles,' she said, shaking her head.
Coenus, sitting stiffly at the foot of her bed, nodded. 'So I assume. Which means he's still in Alexandria.'
'And we let him in!' Melitta said. 'As a doctor?'
Coenus shook his head. 'None of the other doctors knew him. He might have come in with slaves, with servants – we weren't taking any precautions.'
'Well,' Melitta said, with all of her returning strength. 'Well, it'll be all right. You'll see.'
Coenus shifted uncomfortably. 'Have you thought of a name, my dear?'
Melitta shrugged. 'No,' she said. 'Among the Sakje, we name a child on the thirtieth day after its birth. When we know it will live.'
Coenus nodded. 'This boy – he'll be my heir. He means a great deal to me, Melitta. When Xeno died-' Coenus didn't choke a tear, he was too strong and too much the aristocrat for that, but his pause was eloquent. 'This child – I mean to stand by him. Despite the fact that you were not formally wed, I – I hope that-'
'Foolish uncle!' Melitta shook her head. 'You will be his father in many ways, Uncle Coenus. And of course I see your interest. Men! Heirs! A daughter would be your heir with twice the surety!' She gave him an impish grin and he returned a frown.
'A daughter would not have carried my name,' he said.
Melitta laughed. 'Oh, Uncle Coenus, Greeks are all fools. What would you like me to call this lovely boy?'
Coenus leaned close, inhaling the fragrance of his grandson. 'Kineas,' he said.
*
The summer sailing season drew on, the wind from the north freshening every room in Leon's great oceanside house. In the courtyard, figs began to ripen. The yearly convoy from Massalia in far-off Gaul came in on time and heavily laden, and Leon's fortunes soared.
Sappho healed slowly, rebuilding her blood with sweets and the small beer that the Aegyptians drank. She sat on a kline in the private courtyard – a colonnaded space between Leon's house and Diodorus's, where the women gathered unless it rained. Slaves brought wine and dates and other sweets while she held court, dispensing wisdom and even justice to her household.
Nihmu, a Sakje woman from the sea of grass, had four quivers of arrows and she stood at one end of the courtyard shooting bronze-barbed shafts into a target hidden in the shadow of the colonnade. Unlike Sappho, who ran her husband's affairs, Nihmu had virtually no interest in the trade that drove her husband. But she never spoke of what she missed.
Melitta sat in the grass, envying Nihmu her archery and yet fully engaged in talking nonsense to her son as she walked him around the grass, hands under his tiny armpits so that his feet just barely brushed the ground.
'Who's going to be a great athlete, eh? With long, long legs?' she asked as he managed a grab at her breasts. 'And grabby, grabby arms?'
He spat a little, and reached out for her. He was just a few days short of two months old, and she named him Kineas – in the Temple of Hathor and in the Temple of Poseidon. And now she spent her days playing with him in the garden.
'You could let Kallista play with him,' Sappho said, raising her eyes from a scroll. 'He's not a toy, or a chore. Shoot your bow!'
Melitta sighed. Motherhood – fatherless motherhood – had not changed her status in the household. She was the veteran of battle, a grown woman, a mother – and Sappho still spoke to her as if she needed a lesson in every aspect of life.
'Kallista is not his mother,' Melitta said.
Sappho shrugged, her eyes never leaving her scroll. 'She'll be a mother in a matter of days,' she said. 'But – as you wish, dear.'
'What are you reading, Auntie?' Melitta asked.
'Aristotle. This is Philokles' copy – I'm going to see that it goes to the library. I'm cataloguing all his scrolls. He had hundreds.' Sappho looked up.
'What's it about?' Melitta asked.
'Well,' Sappho said. She sat back on her couch. 'It says that it is a study of nature, but so far, it seems more like a survey of other men's ideas.'
'Philokles didn't think much of Aristotle,' Melitta said.
Sappho raised a beautifully manicured eyebrow. 'You have read Aristotle?'
Melitta shrugged. 'Some. His work on gods – on religion. Philokles copied it all out for me to read.'
Sappho leaned forward as if noticing her niece for the first time. 'Really?' she asked.
Melitta was stung by her surprise. 'I studied every day with Philokles from the time I was six!' she said. 'I've read Aristotle, Plato, all the speeches of Isocrates, all the sayings of Heraklitus, all the books of Pythagoras. All! Even that useless twit Pericles.'
Sappho smiled. 'I know, dear.'
'You act as if I'm too stupid for conversation!' Melitta said.
'You act as if you never plan to read a scroll again,' Sappho said.
'I have a baby!' Melitta shot back.
'Often the result of ill-considered sex.' Sappho smiled. 'Needn't determine the rest of your life.'
'Ill-considered?' Melitta stood up, gathering Kineas in her arms. She took a breath for a tirade.
'The hetaira Phiale,' announced Kallias, the steward. He bowed, and Phiale – not, strictly speaking, a beauty, and yet the most attrac tive woman in Alexandria – entered, flinging off a dust-coloured shawl into the arms of her attendant slave, a hard-faced woman named Alcaea.
'Oh, despoina!' Phiale said. She came and knelt by Sappho.
Sappho's face closed up. Her eyebrows seemed to harden in place, and her mouth became a hard line. 'Oh, Phiale! Is it so bad? Or are you just being dramatic?'
Phiale shook her head. The tears in her eyes suggested that her abject posture was unfeigned. 'No, despoina. No drama. There is a report in the palace – a report from Rhodos.'
Sappho took both of the hetaira's hands between her own. 'Tell me quickly. Is it Diodorus?'
Phiale shook her head. 'No – no. Diodorus is well. It is the expedition to the Euxine.'
Melitta felt as if her blood had stopped flowing. 'What?' she asked, her anger forgotten.
Nihmu's arrow flew through the air with a sound like a bird – thwit!
'It was a trap,' Phiale said. 'That's what they are saying at the palace. A trap.'
'You are not the person I would choose to deliver bad news,' Sappho said through her mask of a face. 'Say it, Phiale!'
Phiale buried her head in Sappho's lap, and Sappho began to stroke her hair. 'Satyrus?' she asked.
Phiale bobbed her head up and down. 'They say his ship sank – from damage. That no one – could save him. He – had Theron and Abraham aboard.'
Melitta sobbed. She almost fell. Suddenly, Nihmu's calloused hands were under her elbows, and Kallista appeared, heavily pregnant, and took Kineas, who burst into tears and squalls.
'And my husband?' Nihmu asked.
'Eumeles has captured him,' Phiale said. 'But he lives, and will be ransomed.'
'Only when he is humiliated and broken,' Nihmu said.
The sound of weeping filled the garden. Phiale was weeping, and Kallista, and Melitta – Kallias wept, and both of their slave women. Alcaea watched with her usual indifference to the sufferings of others. Her demeanour suggested that suffering was the norm and the rest of them had best get used to it, as she had.
