It was only when Menkaure shared his own grief at the loss of his beloved wife that I realised his daughter was one of the girls painting pots in the back of the workshop. I don’t think he had been seeking a protector for her, in case some ill fate befell him, but when Zosime and I exchanged our first shy smiles, he’d made no objection.
‘That’s a fine piece.’ I nodded at the wine-mixing bowl he was shaping.
‘It will be, as long as Disculos doesn’t screw up when he decorates it.’ Menkaure raised his voice to make sure his fellow craftsman heard.
The painter replied with a cheerfully obscene gesture without looking up from the olive garland he was drawing around a long-necked jug.
‘She told me what happened.’ Menkaure’s dark eyes fixed on me, unblinking, as he cleaned his fingers with an ochre-stained rag. ‘She said you were as restless as a pistachio on a griddle all last night.’
‘Are you surprised?’ I said with feeling.
‘Hardly,’ he assured me, ‘but if you don’t know who the dead man was, can you be so sure you have seen the end of this, just because the Scythians took the body away?’
‘It seems our dead man was a Carian looking for a speech writer. He just happened to hear my name. I met one of his travelling companions in the agora and I told him to claim the body from the Polemarch.’ I shrugged.
‘Good to know.’ Menkaure tossed the rag into an old chipped pot by his feet. ‘I’m glad you called by. Thallos says he wants to lock up early today. I was planning to leave at noon anyway. Some old friends are here from Memphis for the Festival, but Zosime isn’t interested in coming with me. Can you get word to Kadous to collect her earlier than we arranged?’
I could see the sense in that. Official festivities might not start till tomorrow but this part of the city was already heaving with visitors looking for fun, trouble or both. ‘I’ll make sure she gets home safely.’
Menkaure set his wheel spinning again as I walked to the back of the workshop. ‘I’m looking forward to finally seeing your chorus all dressed up,’ he called after me.
‘Just remember that masks and costumes aren’t everything,’ I said over my shoulder.
‘Shouldn’t you be supervising your rehearsal?’ Zosime looked up from the white oil flask she was decorating. ‘And what took you into the city so early?’
I pulled up a stool and explained about Dexios and the leather deliveries. Then I shared what I’d just learned about our Carian corpse. ‘So his friends can claim his body from the Polemarch and if they come knocking on our gate, we ignore them. We’ve no idea who killed the poor bastard and I won’t risk getting dragged into some stranger’s quarrels. Now, your dad just told me everyone is leaving here early today.’
She nodded. ‘Thallos has a horde of relatives coming in from the country. If he doesn’t get back to help his wife, she swears she’ll shut him out of her bedroom till midwinter.’
She’d do it, too. She was a formidable woman, like so many I knew. People hear such exaggerated tales of women’s lives in Athens: how we shut our citizen-born wives and daughters away so that the only females ever seen on our streets will be slaves and whores. A few household tyrants might live like that, but I’ve never known a woman who would put up with it.
That meant today’s work was as good as done. Thallos made these decisions as the most senior artisan in this workshop. It wasn’t a family business like the one bequeathed to me and my brothers. Resident foreigners share these premises with citizens from the lowest class; the men who row Athens’ triremes. They all work alongside each other, splitting the costs and profits.
‘If you’re nearly finished with that, you could come to the rehearsal with me?’ I suggested. ‘There’ll be someone there who can walk you home.’
‘Or I can wait until you’ve finished rehearsing and we can walk back together. I’m sure someone can take a message, to save Kadous a wasted trip into the city.’
She laid down her brush and I admired the portrait she was painting. A youth reclined at the feet of a muse as she sat in a chair playing a lyre. ‘That’s beautiful.’
‘He loved music, so his father says.’ Zosime’s smile faded as she recalled the man’s sorrow.
These slender white, black-footed flasks are only ever used for pouring gifts of oil or wine onto graves, to honour the gods below. They are Zosime’s speciality, so she’s always crafting some remembrance of a family’s loss. But she still prefers painting these personal, intimate pictures, instead of time-worn mythological scenes in black and red with their endlessly familiar cast of characters.
She put the flask carefully at the back of her workbench. ‘Let me tidy up and I’ll come with you.’
I looked idly around the workshop while she rinsed her brushes and gathered up the shards of broken vases she uses to practise a likeness, until the family paying for her skills are satisfied with the depiction of their loved one.
Most of the other artisans were finishing up, too. They all had families eager for the festivities. The only man here for the next few days would be the aged Thessalian with hands too twisted with arthritis to do anything more than feed the kiln’s stoke hole and threaten would-be burglars with his hefty olive-wood club. He had no one to go home to, so Zosime told me. The Persians had killed all his family in the wars.
‘Let me wash my hands.’ She went over to the ewers, which the Thessalian filled every morning, and poured a little into a basin. She’d spent enough of her childhood carrying water not to waste a drop.
Satisfied she was free of paint,
