by Annabel Lyon
EXCERPT
THE RAIN FALLS IN BLACK cords, lashing my animals, my men, and my wife, Pythias, who last night lay with her legs spread while I took notes on the mouth of her sex, who weeps silent tears of exhaustion now, on this tenth day of our journey. On the ship she seemed comfortable enough, but this last overland stage is beyond all her experience and it shows. Her mare stumbles; she's let the reins go loose again, allowing the animal to sleepwalk. She rides awkwardly, weighed down by her sodden finery. Earlier I suggested she remain on one of the carts but she resisted, such a rare occurrence that I smiled and she, embarrassed, looked away. Callisthenes, my nephew, offered to walk the last distance, and with some difficulty we helped her onto his big bay. She clutched at the reins the first time the animal shifted beneath her.
"Are you steady?" I asked, as around us the caravan began to move.
“Of course.”
Touching. Men are good with horses where I come from, where we're returning now, and she knows it. I spent yesterday on the carts myself so I could write, though now I ride bareback, in the manner of my countrymen, a ball-busting proposition for someone who's been sedentary as long as I have. You can't stay on a cart while a woman rides, though; and it occurs to me now that this was her intention.
I hardly noticed her at first, a pretty, vacant-eyed girl on the fringes of Hermias' menagerie. Daughter, niece, ward, concubine – the truth slid like silk.
"You like her," old Hermias said. "I see the way you look at her." Fat, sly, rumoured a money-changer in his youth, later a butcher and a mercenary; a eunuch now supposedly, and a rich man. A politician, too, holding a stubborn satrapy against the barbarians: Hermias of Atarneus. "Bring me my thinkers!" he used to shout. "Great men surround themselves with thinkers! I wish to be surrounded." And he would laugh and slap at himself while the girl Pythias watched without seeming to blink quite often enough, She became another gift, one of many, for I was a favourite. On our wedding night she arrayed herself in veils, assumed a pose on the bed, and whisked away the sheets before I could see if she had bled. I was thirty-seven then – five years ago, now – she fifteen, and god forgive me but I went at her like a stag in a rut. Stag, hog.
“Eh? Eh?” Hermias said the next morning, and laughed.
Night after night after night. I tried to make it up to her with kindness. I treated her with great courtliness, gave her money, addressed her softly, spoke to her of my work. She wasn't stupid; thoughts flickered in her eyes like fish in deep pools.
Three years we spent in Atarnaeus, until the Persians breathed too close, too hot. Two years in the pretty town of Mytilene, on the island of Lesvos, where they cobbled the floor of the port so enemy ships couldn't anchor. Now this journey. Through it all she has an untouchable dignity, even when she lies with her keens apart while I gently probe her for my work on generation. Fish, too. I'm studying, field animals and birds when I can get them. There's a seed like a pomegranate seed in the centre of the folds, and the hole frilled like an oyster. Sometimes moisture, sometimes dryness. I've noted it all.
