should have embraced, but we were too young to forgive and forget.
I was still standing there when I heard a scream from the courtyard. I ran. I thought we were being attacked. Remember that apart from my life as a house slave and companion, I was already a man of violence, and that Diomedes seemed to have a bottomless purse when it came to sending men after me.
When I reached the courtyard, Hipponax was standing stony-faced, staring at a man dressed in the same green chlamys I'd worn a few days previously. Briseis was screaming, her face contorted, all her beauty gone. Penelope was trying to drag her away.
The herald backed out of the gate.
Penelope looked terrified. Briseis's face was the face of a fury, deep lines carved across her smooth brows as she wailed with screams of pain. Her father glanced at her and turned away. Poor man. He had nothing to offer her. Gods send that I never be in his place.
Archi tried to hold her and she began to fight him, and she landed a blow – a foul blow. She was a good fighter, that girl. Down he went, and then she spat like a wild cat and raked her nails across Penelope's chest – I thought they were her nails – and blood flowed.
She screamed again.
I thought she was having a fit. I took her down. I wasn't her brother, and much as I thought I was in love with her, she was a danger to everyone in the yard. I swept her feet and held her arms and put her down on the ground hard enough to drive all the breath from her. She had the strength of a goddess but no palaestra skills, and on her way to the ground I rolled her in the end of her own peplos to pin her arms. She ripped her left arm free and her nails drew blood from my cheek and neck.
But when she wrenched her head back with superhuman strength, a hand shot out and smacked her across the face – once and then again.
'Silence, girl!' her mother said.
I had not seen Euthalia in days. She was neatly dressed in sombre colours, and she did not look as if her life had ended.
Briseis sat back on her haunches and the daimon left her. I saw it leave her eyes. It takes one to know one. But then the bitterness exploded.
'It's your fault, you faithless bitch!' she said to her mother. 'He called me a whore! Diomedes called me a whore! In public! Now I'll die barren. He's broken the marriage contract.' She didn't cry. Crying would have been better than her imperious self-pity. 'If you hadn't been so busy riding the Persian's cock-bird, I might be a matron.'
Euthalia's hand shot out and snapped her daughter's head back again. 'Be civil or take the consequences,' she said.
'I can't even blame him!' Briseis cried, and for the first time her voice cracked and she began to sob instead of scream. 'My mother's a whore! I'll be a whore too! I should kill myself!'
Penelope was cowering. She had a bad scratch across her breast and her Doric chiton was filling with blood. She was sitting on a step crying. I saw now that Briseis had a pin in her hand. She had ripped Penelope with it, and me too, I realized.
Euthalia reached into her bosom and her right hand came out with a knife in it. 'Here,' she said. 'Get on with it.'
This was the family that I had so envied when I joined them.
Briseis picked up the knife and ran her thumb across it like a man getting ready for sacrifice. Then she stepped towards her mother, and I felt that her intentions were plain.
I stepped in on her and raised my left hand as Cyrus had taught me. She tracked the hand with the knife and not the body, and I caught her wrist and disarmed her. She got the pin into my chest, but the gold bent and I only took a finger's breadth. It was cold in my chest, and the pain made me want to kill her.
Just for a moment, the pain and the urge to kill balanced against the knowledge that this was Briseis. She saw the daimon come into my eyes and her own widened. As I have said, it takes one to know one. But those eyes saved her, and I took control of my body with my left hand closed around her throat.
Her mother was shaken. Close up, I could see that her hair was not dressed and she was not herself. But she would not relent. 'Take the knife and finish it,' she mocked. 'You think your life is ruined, little princess? Perhaps it is time a dose of reality came into your life. You despised Diomedes when you had him. You are acting. There is a world bigger than that inside your head. Wake up.'
Archi stepped in between them. I still had Briseis, and she had dropped her gold pin of her own volition.
'Take her to her room,' he said. He nodded to me. Suddenly, we were allies. I obeyed, lifting Briseis and carrying her. Penelope came after us. She was holding her side. She got ahead of me and led the way, which was as well, as I had no idea where Briseis's room was.
Briseis put her arms around my neck and let me carry her without struggle. She smelled of jasmine and mint. It was hard to imagine, while carrying her, that she had just intended to kill her mother with a knife.
We pushed though a curtain of glass beads into a room painted in scenes of gods and goddesses – fine work. Archi's room was plain white, with a border of Hera's eyes painted around the cornice. Briseis's room had all the gods done as vignettes. Hera stood with mighty Zeus – a loving couple, painted as her mother and father. Her brother was Apollo with a lyre, and she was Artemis with a bow. Penelope was Aphrodite, and Darkar was a mighty Pluton. Diomedes was painted as a young and rather ambiguous Ares, and then I saw that I, too, was in the pantheon, as Heracles, a club on my shoulder and a lion skin draped over me. I didn't know the rest of the figures, but it was good work. Excellent work. The figure of Aphrodite-Penelope was unfinished, and the paints were there along one wall. The room smelled of marble dust and ox-blood.
Despite everything – adultery, betrayal, drama – I stopped and looked at the paintings on the wall. I took in the paint pots and the smell.
'Your work?' I asked Penelope, amazed.
'Hers,' Penelope said. 'I need a bandage,' she said, and fled.
I laid Briseis on her bed. She was crying. I knew that sound. That was despair. The sound new slaves make when they are taken. The sound you make when your life is taken away from you.
I actually pitied her. So I put a hand on her back.
'It will get better,' I said.
She rolled over, and her eyes held anger, not sorrow. 'Kill him for me!' she said. 'Kill Diomedes!'
You have no idea what it is like to be alone with Briseis. I didn't slap her or run from the room.
But neither did I agree. 'I cannot kill him for you, despoina,' I said. I remember smiling. 'But I could hurt him for you.'
She brightened immediately. 'You could?' she asked. 'Really hurt him?'
She reached out and took my hand, and a flame licked me from my palm to my groin and up to my head.
'If I hurt him, will you stop this foolishness of hating your mother?' I asked. 'Diomedes is a piece or horse shit. You lost nothing in losing him. Your mother did you a favour.'
Her eyes widened. 'I had never thought of that,' she said. Her hand was still stroking mine. 'I know Archi hates him. And he tried to hurt you, didn't he? He bragged of it to me. And Penelope said you were too tough to be hurt by a thug.' She smiled at me.
Oh, the flattery of a beautiful woman. Let's look at this as adults, thugater. She never wanted Diomedes, but she was dutiful enough – she certainly wanted to be an adult, and she liked the attention. But being jilted was turning out to be better. More drama.
Who wants to play the dutiful wife when you can be Medea? And I played into her hands – all reasonable, knowing and male. Zeus Soter, honey, she played me like a kithara.
I pulled my hand out of hers and left the room. Then I went to find Archi.
He was making love to Penelope.
I found Darkar instead. 'See to Briseis,' I said. And then I understood. 'You knew Archi was doing Penelope!' I said.
He nodded. And shrugged.
I shrugged back. 'Thanks for trying to keep it from me, anyway,' I said. 'I suppose. But I know.'
Darkar looked at me for a moment. 'Come into my office,' he said. And when I was in, he closed the door. His office was a tiny room under the cellar stairs where he did the household accounts.
