Cook was leaning on the counter, talking to Darkar.
Darkar understood everything as soon as he saw me. 'Burn it,' he said, pointing at my chlamys. I dropped it in the kitchen fire and Cook piled wood on top, squandering shavings and bark prepared for fire-starting to make the blood-sodden thing burn. All my extra work and helpfulness and popularity had come to this – Darkar and Cook conspiring to keep me alive.
'I need a bath, and then Archi needs one,' I said.
Darkar squinted at my use of the young master's name.
'He says it's death if I'm caught, but mere annoyance for him. So I bathe first.' I pulled my chiton over my head – a work chiton of raw wool, and no loss to anyone. Kylix was in the kitchen by then, and I handed it to him. 'Go and give this to the ragman,' I said. 'Better yet, just throw it on his pile.'
Darkar nodded.
'Bath is hot,' Cook put in. 'You got the bastard?' This is the ultimate sign of a good house – the slaves are loyal to the master's revenge. Like the Odyssey.
I told them where he was. 'They won't find him until morning,' I said. 'Maybe some Spartan visitor will come and bugger him!' That got a nervous laugh.
The kitchen was filling up with slaves. I hadn't told Kylix not to spill to his friends – he was already spreading the whole tale. He told it to the slaves at the fountain when he took the cloak to the ragman's pile, too. That's the world of slaves. Word gets around.
We hadn't considered that.
Darkar shut them up and pushed me out of the door. 'You what?' he asked as he pushed me towards the bathhouse. 'You what?'
'I told you,' I said.
Darkar was alone with me in total darkness. The bath was like that – no windows. He smacked me, hard, in the head. 'I thought you'd have the master beat him. Not you, boy.'
'Ouch!' Lo, the mighty warrior. The steward hurt me more than the Thracians had.
'You will be killed. Do I have to remind you that you are a slave? You scout for him, you take a blow for him, but you do not strike a free man!' Darkar slapped me again, this time at random, because he couldn't see any better than I could. Then, after a pause in the dark, 'I think you'll have to run or die.'
With that, he left me to the bath.
It was a big oak tub, the kind where men crush the grapes at harvest time when they don't have stone basins. It leaked slowly, but it held enough water for two to bathe together. Archi and I had shared it many times but, covered in blood, a man doesn't really want to touch anything much. Different from a feast-day bath.
There was pumice and oil, and I worked hard. I knew I had blood under my nails and in my hair. Even then – even as a slave – I had long hair.
I was washing my hair when the door opened. The bath was in a low shed and that door let a little light in from the kitchen windows, so I saw Penelope's robe fall to the floor. Then she was in the bath with me and water sloshed over the sides and on to the floor.
If you imagine that I was going to take this moment to protest about her faithlessness while her naked skin was under my hand, you don't know what it is to be young. I put my mouth on hers before she could speak, and she laughed into my mouth – not something she had done before. Perhaps I should have cared that she was unfaithful to my master – and now, I think, my friend – Archi.
Instead, I half stood and half sat with her astride me, and we kissed and kissed, her breasts against my chest and the hot water up to our hair. Her kisses were clumsy at first, and then warmer and deeper. My hands roved her and then she planted herself on me – her choice, and perhaps I had a qualm, or a suspicion that this was wrong, because I remember that I hadn't pushed into her.
It makes me smile, though. Hah! The gods are often kind, and Aphrodite chose to send me to Tartarus with a glimpse of heaven. When we were finished, we kissed, and kissed, and kissed.
Darkar called my name from the back door. Penelope slipped out of the tub, picked up her robe and vanished – not a difficult trick in the dark. I was sore and happy and suddenly clear-headed, and I had the taste of cloves in my mouth. I got over the side of the tub and thought that on a normal night there'd be trouble from Cook for making such a mess of the bathhouse. Then I grabbed the olive oil, doused myself and strigiled as fast as I could.
I went through the kitchen as clean as a newborn. Darkar tried to slow me down, but I passed him and went into the hall.
Penelope was crying in Archi's arms. Archi was still covered in blood and crap, and so was Penelope.
And her hair wasn't wet.
A chill went through me like a rainy wind in winter blowing across my soul. In my nose, I discovered the scent of mint and jasmine. The hair began to stand up on the back of my neck.
Archi let go of Penelope. 'You look worse, not better.'
Penelope looked at me. 'You'll both be killed,' she said.
Oh, Aphrodite. Oh, Mistress of Animals. Who had I just been with in the bath?
'I am afraid,' I admitted to Archi. I just didn't tell him why. 'You must go and bathe.'
'Stay where you are,' Hipponax said from behind me. I assume that Darkar told him. We were young and stupid. We had not thought through the consequences. And the game of revenge has no rules.
Hipponax looked at his son. Archilogos met his eyes. They were the same height, by then. 'What have you done?' he asked.
Archi shrugged – I've mentioned what I think of this as a gesture from child to parent, eh?
'What have you done?' he shouted.
Archi smiled. 'What needed doing,' he said. 'Diomedes called my sister a whore and we made him one.'
Well, not precisely, but it made a good line.
And then Hipponax surprised me. I should have known – he was always a good man and a poet. He understood rage and lust and the human and the divine. He stood back from the doorway, so that Darkar could enter.
'You must go away,' he said. 'Tonight. Now. I will have a ship manned.'
Then there was a flurry of packing and crying. Archi took his panoply and his sea bag, and I took mine. He went for a bath, and Hipponax took me aside.
'Heraclitus tells me you swore an oath to protect my son,' he said.
I nodded. I raised my eyes to his.
'Here is your freedom. I expect you to keep that oath. As does Heraclitus. Until the end of the war. You stand by him. But as a free man, Diomedes will have to try you, at least. I wrote out your manumission for yesterday. A friend will witness it in the morning – as if it had been done yesterday.' He shook his head. 'I should have freed you for what you did with the Persian,' he said. 'Is all my family cursed?'
I stood silent, awed by his generosity, and conscious of what I had just done in the bath. The furies were laughing. And sharpening their nails.
But I was free. It was worse when Archi went to say goodbye to his sister. Worse because she wept, real tears without anger. She loved her brother better than the rest of us, I think.
And worse because her hair was wet.
She looked at me several times, and her look was one of calm triumph. She was beautiful.
Thugater, I have never doubted the presence of the gods. In that moment – in that look from that damp- haired girl – the long, dark shaft and the barbed point of the arrow that comes from Aphrodite's bow went through me, and the pain was never sweeter. Even when Hipponax announced to the whole oikia that I had been freed – even when all the slaves crowded around me, and Penelope took my hand and gave it a tentative squeeze, all I could see were her eyes, that glance. I see it still.
I'm an old fool. Forget me. Imagine what it was like for poor Penelope, honey. Her free lover was leaving her. Her chance of freedom was walking away. And Archi said nothing. I think Hipponax might have freed her, had Archi asked. But he didn't. He wasn't bad, my master. Just a self-centred ephebe who thought he'd just made himself a hero.
The Pole Star was high, and the oarsmen, grumpy and drunken, had been roused from their brothels to their oars, but by luck, the trade trireme Thetis was supposed to leave the north beach with the sun anyway, bound for Lesbos with a cargo of Cyprian copper and some finished armour for the gentlemen of Methymna. We walked down
