Antiquities: Five Stories Set in Ancient Worlds Read online

  Shouts of laughter rang out in the courtyard. Eudokia eased the door open to let in light and air and sound again, and the women quieted. The jests were louder and cruder as the men dipped more deeply into the wine.

  Nysa took up her spindle. With every wool ball she spun into thread, she prayed to Hermes, god of merchants, thieves, and travelers. Help me, she prayed. Oh, swift-footed Hermes, guide and guardian, who leads the souls of the dead to their final home, lead me out of the life I have now. Help me steal myself.

  In the house where Nysa was born, before her first mistress sold her away from her mother, she had a sister, Kore, who was ten years older than Nysa. Kore danced at men's gatherings in the evenings. When Nysa watched Kore practice dancing, her heart rose up, and a taste crossed her tongue that was sweet and sour at once: Kore was too close to perfect. She was more than a slave. She was beauty walking.

  One of the guests of the house saw Kore and wanted her.

  Nysa was only five or six. She didn't know what negotiations took place. She only knew that later, her sister was too sick to dance, and then she grew big with child, and that child killed her. Mother didn't want her to see, but Nysa had to say farewell to her sister; she would not be kept out of the room where her sister's body lay. She saw all the blood.

  The baby was alive, but the master didn't want it. He had no wet nurses in the house at the time and didn't want the bother of hiring one, so he took the baby out to the hillside where people left unwanted children to die.

  That night Nysa couldn't sleep. She heard her sister's screams every time she closed her eyes. Finally she got up and crept to the altar in the courtyard. She nicked her finger with a paring knife and let the blood fall among the ashes of the daily fire. She prayed to Artemis that she would remain a childless virgin the rest of her life.

  She prayed, but she didn't believe the goddess listened. No one listened to the prayers of slaves.

  Before the sun was driven up over the eastern hills the next morning, Eudokia and Nysa took water jugs to the public fountain. Nysa liked the lion spout, but Eudokia favored the donkey spout. The lion spout ran slower, which gave Nysa more time to visit with other slaves and resident foreigners who were out on the same errand.

  Lyris was a friend Nysa had made in her first household, the oldest slave Nysa had ever met, and still going out after water, though she had lost height and hair and teeth, and her hands were gnarled and twisted with age. She was there that morning, ahead of Nysa in line for the lion spout. When Lyris saw Nysa, she stepped out of line and joined Nysa at the end.

  "Nysa, how are you?" Lyris asked, as the women ahead of them gossiped about a man who had bought more sheep than he could pay for, and another whose wife paid her slave to sneak a man into her house when the husband was at the market, how the sounds of her lovemaking with the stranger were wilder than those she made with her husband.

  "She cries aloud like a seagull," said one woman to the other.

  "I am well," Nysa told Lyris. "My mistress is kind. The food is good and there's enough of it."

  "This is always your answer, but today your eyes say something else," Lyris said. They moved forward. The night-chilled earth was cold against the soles of Nysa's feet. Smoke rose from hidden courtyards in the centers of pale, red-tile-roofed houses all around them into the lightening sky as households started their days with fire at the altars. The gods would be rich in smoke.

  "I always hoped to have a skill," Nysa murmured.

  Lyris nodded, her veiled head only shoulder height to Nysa.

  "I play the flute. Not as well as Kalonike the Hetaera, but I know I can learn. I could entertain; I could play for festivals."

  "Yes," said Lyris, and nudged her forward.

  Nysa glanced toward the other line, where Eudokia stood, her empty jug sideways on her head as she spoke to her friend from next door.

  "The mistress lets me sit with her and spin while she teaches Panthea to read and write, so I have learned that as well. I could be a scribe or a messenger."

  "We are running out of time for your point," Lyris said. There were only two women ahead of them in line now.

  "I have never wanted to be a prostitute, but I fear the master will make me into one," Nysa whispered quickly.

  "There are worse things," said Lyris.

  Nysa stared into Lyris's eyes.

  "A beating is worse. Being beaten for no reason is worse still. Being owned by someone who enjoys giving pain is a bad thing. Being a prostitute is not pleasant, especially at first, but the work is often over quickly, and sometimes you are given coin or favors in addition to whatever the man will pay your master."

  Nysa's mouth opened, but no words came out. At Nysa's old household, Lyris was the best spinner and the best weaver. She could put patterns into the hems of cloth without having to consult a diagram. Nysa had imagined Lyris had always spun and wove.

  Lyris gave her a merry smile. "Though you might not credit it, I was young once, and pretty."

  "I am afraid," Nysa said. "I can't forget my sister."

  Lyris set her jug on the ledge below the lion fountain; the spout sent water into it. "As to that, if you miss your courses, tell me, and I'll help you get rid of the child before it can harm you. I know all the herbs and doses."

  "I don't want this fate."

  "If it's fate, there's no escape." They stood silent while water gurgled into Lyris's pitcher, and then Lyris reached into a small purse hanging from her belt and took something out. "Perhaps it isn't fate yet," she said, holding out her hand.

  Nysa reached out, and Lyris dropped something in her palm. Nysa closed her hand around it and hid her hand under her cloak, hoping no one had noticed.

  She filled her pitcher and said farewell to Lyris.

  As Nysa and Eudokia walked back to the house, Eudokia asked what Lyris had given Nysa, but she had hidden it already. "I don't know," she said. "I dropped it." Into her wallet.

  "Why do you like that old woman, anyway?" Eudokia said. "She's like a crow, full of bad tidings."

  "She's from my former household."

  "Ah," said Eudokia.

  Eudokia headed into the household to pour her water into one of the big hydria, water jugs they would draw from all day. Nysa stopped before the Herm, guardian at the gate into the household's courtyard. In this form, the guardian had only a bearded face, which wore a benign smile, and his genitals; the rest of the god was a squared pillar. Nysa laid a corner of honeycake at the base of the Herm, bowed her head, and passed inside.

  Before she joined Eudokia in the kitchen, Nysa stopped against the wall, below the balcony where the mistress couldn't see her from the women's quarters upstairs, and took the thing Lyris had given her out of her wallet. It was a small, dark pressed brick of something about the size of her thumb. Nysa sniffed it; it didn't smell like anything to eat, but it had a strong fragrance that made her dizzy. Incense, she decided: a tribute to which god or goddess? Perhaps it was her choice. She tucked the incense in her wallet and took her pitcher into the kitchen to empty it, then went back to the public fountain for more.

  "Mistress, do the gods ever answer your prayers?" Nysa asked later that afternoon, when it was so hot all the women rested in the women's quarters, and some slept. Nysa had a pallet on the floor near the mistress's couch. The other slaves were actually asleep, she thought; no one had said anything for a while. They had let down the shade to cover the window so hot sunlight would not come in, and no lamps or candles burned.

  Nysa would have to get up soon and go down to the kitchen to grind grain for tomorrow's bread, but just now she rested.

  "I have a fine son," the mistress said. Diomed, her boy, ten years old, was off at school all day, and spent his evenings with his father. One of the slaves in the household, a tall, bearded man named Telestes, was Diomed's paidogogus, his attendant; Telestes followed the boy to school and made sure he paid attention to his teachers. Telestes was an educated man, a captive of war who had been crippled in
the fighting and sold rather than slaughtered. Sometimes Telestes tutored Diomed.

  "I have a fine son, so that was one prayer answered," the mistress said. "I prayed for a second son, and that prayer was answered with a dead child."

  Someone in the afternoon darkness groaned — whether from a dream or a memory, Nysa did not know.

  The mistress had been recovering from the loss of her second child when Nysa came to the house. The mistress was a wild woman in those days, once she stopped being so sick she could not rise from her bed. Even after the fever left her, madness haunted her. She named the child, though it had not lived an hour, let alone the ten days a child should live before it received a name. She cut her hair in mourning, made herself a slave to her sorrow. It was all the four female slaves could do to keep her in her rooms, and Eudokia feared her wailing would be heard on the street, so she sealed all the windows up with sheepskin with the fur still on. They could scarcely breathe. Finally Eudokia, with the master's permission, fed the mistress poppy syrup to make her sleep.

  The slaves found rest then, and after a course of given sleep and many dreams, the mistress found sanity. Eudokia had reminded the mistress about Diomed, the son she already had, too young to understand anything, distressed while his mother was mad, sheltered in a different room by the second senior female slave. The mistress regained her senses a little at a time. After a season she could embrace Diomed again; and then the master planted his seed in her, and she grew big with child a third time.

  After three seasons of nightmares and nights full of apprehensive whispers and cries, the mistress gave birth to Panthea, who was a healthy child. Care for her daughter brought the mistress back from the precipice. Nysa felt as though she met her mistress for the first time.

  Now in the afternoon darkness, Nysa had awakened the woman of nightmares and screams with her foolish question.

  The mistress's tone turned meditative. "I was your age, fourteen, when I was to be wed, and then I prayed many times to Hera for a handsome husband. I never saw Drakon before we wed. The night of our wedding procession, he looked fine in the torchlight, an athlete with the face of Adonis. The next morning when I saw him by daylight, I still found his appearance pleasing, though what we had done in the marriage bed in darkness frightened and hurt me. Still, my prayers were answered. Who the man was under that beautiful surface, well.… Drakon is not so bad as others. My sister's husband, for instance."

  Nysa had gone with the mistress to her sister's household. Of all the women the mistress visited, her sister was the one whose company she sought least. The household was small, with only two slaves. There was a stink of slops about the house that made it unpleasant, and flies lived there. The women's quarters were cramped and dark. The mistress's sister never burned more than one lamp. She sat far from it, huddling in the shadows, letting her guests enjoy the gleam of light.

  While the mistress and her sister spoke, Nysa heard winces in the sister's whispering voice, small gasps as if movement pained her. These were the sounds of someone who had been beaten. The slaves of the household also bore marks of beating and mistreatment. The cook's arm had been broken and healed badly. The guest cakes served the mistress were thin and without honey, and all the stories the sisters told each other were sad.

  After one visit as they walked away from the house, the mistress said, "She used to be my favorite sister, the one who danced, the one who laughed."

  "All in all," the mistress said now, "I feel the gods have listened to me and treated me well. Not all my prayers have been answered, but the important ones were. Thanks to all gods and goddesses listening."

  "Thanks for your answers, Mistress," Nysa murmured.

  Aristides came the next night for supper; he brought a younger man with him, Pelagios, a companion he often brought. The boy had been beardless before, but now dark hair grew along his jaw and below his nose.

  Watching from the balcony above, Nysa saw Pelagios lay a hand on Aristides's shoulder, saw the way Aristides flinched it off.

  The three men ate with only the slave Kyprios attending, and Pelagios left early. The conversation was too soft for Nysa to catch, though, with the mistress's permission, she spent the evening on the balcony above the men's room. Aristides stayed until the half moon set, and staggered as he left.

  Nysa ground grain on a flat stone the next morning in the kitchen. Kyprios stopped beside her and spoke in a low voice: "They've negotiated your price. Aristides will have you tomorrow night."

  Nysa clutched the grinding stone as though it were the only solid thing she knew. "Thank you," she whispered. Kyprios almost never spoke to the other slaves. As the master's favorite, he had a greater degree of freedom, and sometimes went off on errands that kept him out overnight. He had his own money, too. She wondered why he spoke to her. "Did he purchase me outright, or is it just the use of me he bought?"

  "One night," said Kyprios. He wandered over to where the cook was taking fresh hot flatbreads from the pottery oven. Cook slapped his hand away from one, but he snatched another before she could stop him, and then he was out the door, laughing, juggling the bread from hand to hand.

  Nysa poured the ground grain into a sieve and sifted the flour through the cloth into a pot, straining out the bran. She made all her motions without thought, she had done the job so many times before. Her mind fluttered.

  Tomorrow he would take her, that toad, with his pinching fingers and damp hands. If it were fate, there was nothing she could do about it but submit. Every day things like this happened, and the world went on just the same.

  She set aside the pot of flour, put the husks into a basket, and poured new grain onto the flat stone. If it were fate — but what if it wasn't? The little lump of incense Lyris had given her lay inside her wallet, against her hip. Tonight she would burn it after the household went to sleep.

  The master went to someone else's symposion that night, leaving the mistress more freedom for music and play. Nysa played the double flute, trying to recapture the tunes Kalonike had played for the men. She had lost some of the phrases, and when the others tired of her stumbling attempts and asked for hymns and story songs, she played the ones they all knew. The mistress, feeling daring, asked Megakles to bring the game board upstairs. She had him set it on the balcony and invited him to teach the women how the pieces moved. He was scandalized, but finally gave in to her teasing and chiding. Though he had seen the game played many times, he had never before played it himself, so everyone learned together how the pieces moved; the mistress proved quite clever in capturing her opponent's men.

  Nysa watched and laughed with everyone else in the relaxed atmosphere that night. It took a long time for the mistress to tire and send everyone to their sleep, but the time finally came. Nysa lay down between the others and waited until she heard the slowed breath of sleepers all around her before she rose, put on her clothes, and stole outside and down the stairs.

  The cook slept in the kitchen; her snores made Nysa feel safe in her silence. Nysa took a small pot from the pottery shelf and fished a still-glowing ember out of the oven into it, borrowed one of the small knives, dipped up a cup of watered wine, and ventured outside the household.

  So late at night, all the households along the street were shut up and most of the torches snuffed; no sounds of singing or laughing came, even from the neighbors across the way, who usually had torches flickering in the courtyard later than anyone else, and whose slaves slept later in the morning, too. A few streets away some men called to each other in the slurred voices of those who had drunk too much, and farther away a night patrolman accosted someone for something, his tone strident.

  Nysa knelt before the household Herm. He was a dark pillar against the whitewashed wall beside the entrance, his face shadowed in the night. A small dog barked somewhere in the city.

  "Lord Hermes, guardian and guide, slayer of the many-eyed Argos who was set to guard a girl in a cow's form, you who rescue those who are trapped, you who lead the dea
d into another life, patron of thieves and merchants, you who guard the roads and boundaries, I make offering to you." She held the cup of wine aloft, then poured its contents at the base of the Herm. "I offer you incense." She took the block Lyris had given her out of her wallet and set it beside the ember in the small pot, then blew on it to encourage the fire. The scent that rose was strong and strange, an attack of flowers and dark woods and the musks of some animals. She hoped Hermes would like it; she wasn't sure she did. The smoke was dense; Nysa felt dizzy. She cut across her palm with the knife, and leaned through the smoke to hold her hand at the base of the Herm. "I have no unblemished animal to offer you; all I can give you is part of myself. I offer you my blood," she whispered, shaking drops from her palm into the soil.

  As she hunched before the Herm, she felt ridiculous. The night was cool, the moon gone, stars shimmering in a rippling sky, and here she was, bare feet on the ground not far from where someone had dumped slops that morning, squatting before a statue when she should be asleep. She sneezed from the smoke, but it tickled inside her head. If the gods listened to the prayers of slaves, wouldn't all slaves be free? She swayed. The smoke was making her sick.

  "What is it you want, little one?" asked a light male voice, salt as sea breeze.

  Had she been discovered? Was it someone who would recognize her, report her disobedient actions to the master? Nysa tried to rise, but tottered instead and fell back on her rump. She glanced everywhere, but there was no movement in the street.

  "Little one?"

  A shadow above her, someone leaning forward, a dark silhouette against the dancing stars.

  "Master?" she whispered.

  "Thank you for the gifts," he said. "What do you pray for?"

  Was this the god? She leaned forward onto her knees and pressed her forehead to the ground between his feet, afraid to speak.