She pulled away and sat up. Opening the small chest beside the bed, she anointed a scrap of sponge and tucked it deep inside herself. Olive oil. Blessed Athena’s gift to our ancestors, which secures our eternal devotion. It’s the foundation of every meal, it heals and cleans our bodies and lights our homes after sunset. It’s the highest prize at the games held in our goddess’s honour and a man can be put to death for felling an olive tree. Finally, when the dregs of an amphora sour, Athena offers women one last boon. That oil can stop a man’s seed taking root in a fertile womb.
Neither of us wants a baby. We discovered we had that in common when I came back to the pottery to buy a white flask for funeral rites. Her first and longed-for pregnancy had been the death of my younger sister. While Zosime sketched a likeness of Ianthine with her brush, she told me her mother had died in childbirth, labouring after a string of miscarriages in her determination to give Menkaure a son. I’ll leave raising the next generation of Athenian citizens to my brothers. Besides, any sons or daughters Zosime gave me would be bastards by Athenian law, with precious few rights or privileges. I won’t burden a child with that, any more than I’ll give up the woman I love.
Zosime straddled me. A few strokes of her oil-slick hand and she guided me inside her. As she leaned forward, I cupped and kissed her breasts and we lost ourselves in that bliss which the finest poets can’t hope to describe. A comedy scribbler like me shouldn’t even try.
No wonder I dozed off again. I only stirred when Zosime got out of bed and poured water into a washbasin.
‘So what did Aristarchos have to say about the dead man, Xandyberis, last night?’
I recognised that tone. This wasn’t just some passing remark. I opened my eyes. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Did you tell him what the boy in the agora said? Surely you want to know why these Carians are so convinced that the Delian League’s levy will be reassessed?’ she challenged me.
I gazed at the ceiling. I did. I also wanted to know who’d killed Xandyberis, because I’d been thinking some more about why his corpse had been dumped at my gate. If his killers thought we’d already met, and that I’d accepted his commission, it would have been an emphatic warning for me to mind my own business.
I hoped that satisfied whoever was lurking in the shadows. Unless someone decided the benefits of shutting my mouth outweighed the risks of killing an Athenian citizen. I had better take care not to walk back from the city on my own after dark.
That wasn’t the only thing darkening my mood. ‘Our allies offer a tribute to Athena,’ I said curtly. ‘They’re not paying a levy.’
‘It might have been a tribute to Apollo when the League’s treasury was still in Delos,’ Zosime retorted as she washed herself briskly, ‘but that’s not how people outside Athens see it these days.’
I rolled onto my side, raised myself up on one elbow, and stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’
She emptied the basin into the slop pail. ‘Ten years ago, Pericles moved the League treasury to Athens. Then the city started building all these new temples even though that money’s supposed to be for ships.’
‘The people debated all the new building plans and voted to approve them,’ I protested.
‘The Athenian Assembly voted for Pericles’s plans,’ she countered, opening her clothes chest. ‘What about anyone in Naxos, or Thasos? When did the Samians agree?’
‘It was agreed when Callias made peace with Emperor Artaxerxes,’ I insisted.
‘Not according to everyone.’ Zosime shook out a length of pale blue wool. ‘Besides, how is that free and clear agreement? A man in the Miletus marketplace would have agreed to anything to end the war with Persia.’
‘It’s in everyone’s interests to honour Athena,’ I asserted. ‘Without her aid, the Persians would have conquered us all.’
‘Who can doubt it? But isn’t it still better to ask than just to take?’ Zosime changed her mind about the blue and pulled out a vivid red that my sisters would envy. With only herself and her father to spin and weave for, she can buy the costly dyed wools that my mother calls unnecessary extravagance. ‘Besides, it’s not only these new temples and the theatre and the Council Chamber, and whatever else Pericles has planned.’ She shook out the cloth. ‘People come here for the festivals and hear how ordinary Athenians are paid to serve in the Assembly and to sit on a jury. Where does all that money come from?’
‘From Attica’s silver mines in Laurium. Everybody knows that.’
‘Are you sure everyone believes it?’ Zosime cocked her head. ‘You don’t think that man in the Miletus marketplace wonders if the Archons are helping themselves to the Delian League’s money?’
You know that expression ‘lying like a Cretan’? Ever since meeting Zosime I’ve wondered who coined it and why, because she never spares me the most brutal truths.
‘All sorts of unfounded nonsense must slosh up and down the Ionian coast,’ I said crossly. ‘Who knows what garbled rumours get passed from ship to ship and from island to island?’
‘What’s that got to do with the price of fish?’ She folded over the top quarter of the red rectangle with a deft twist of her wrists. ‘This Xandyberis risked coming all the way here at the very start of the sailing season. He
