Owls to Athens

by Harry Turtledove

  A sparrow fluttered down into the courtyard. Sostratos tossed it a scrap of bread. The little bird hopped over, cocked its head to one side as it examined the morsel, and then pecked at it. Satisfied, it snapped it up and flew away.

  “You should have put some wine out for it, too,” Lysistratos said, amusement in his voice.

  “Put some wine out for what?” Sostratos’ mother asked as she came out into the courtyard.

  “Oh, good day, Timokrate,” Lysistratos said. “Sostratos gave a sparrow some crumbs for breakfast, and I was saying it should have had wine, too.”

  “It probably wouldn’t have been able to fly straight if it had,” Timokrate said. She was in her early forties, gray beginning to streak her brown hair. Smiling at Sostratos, she said, “You always did like to feed the birds.”

  “Well, why not, Mother?”

  “No reason at all,” she said, walking toward the kitchen. “It’s just funny how you haven’t changed much through the years.”

  “Oh.” That made Sostratos scratch his head. Here he’d been thinking he was a different man from the one who’d left Athens, and his mother still saw him as the same little boy who’d played in this courtyard back when Alexander the Great was alive. Which of them was right?

  Timokrate came out with bread and wine, too. Smiling at her son and her husband, she took her breakfast back upstairs to eat in the women’s quarters. Erinna, Sostratos’ younger sister, had always chafed under the restrictions Hellenic custom placed on respectable women. She wanted to be out and doing things, not shut away inside a house. His mother seemed perfectly content to stay indoors most of the time. People are different, Sostratos thought with profound unoriginality.

  Erinna had lived with her second husband, Damonax, for the past year (her first had died after they’d been married only three years). She wouldn’t be going out of his house for a while, anyhow; their little boy, Polydoros, was just over a month old. Sostratos said, “I’m glad Erinna had a boy.”

  “So am I.” Lysistratos dipped his head. “Both because it’s better to have a boy and because ...” His voice trailed away.

  Sostratos finished the thought: “Because Damonax might have exposed it if it were a girl.”

  “Yes.” His father dipped his head again. “Whether or not to rear a baby is a husband’s privilege.”

  “I know. But Erinna would have been very unhappy if Damonax had decided not to raise it,” Sostratos said. When his sister came back to live at the family home after losing her first husband, she’d fretted that she would never remarry and never have the chance to bear children. To have a child and then lose it at a husband’s whim . . . That would have been cruelly hard.

  “On the whole, your brother-in-law seems a pretty reasonable fellow,” Lysistratos said.

  “On the whole, yes,” Sostratos said. “When it comes to olive oil, no. How many times do we have to tell him we’re not going to fill the to the gunwales with the stuff and haul it to Athens? I thought you and Uncle had made him understand why we can’t do it.”

  “Oh, we did,” his father answered. “But he can’t be reasonable—or what we think of as reasonable—about that. He’s got his own family’s interests to worry about, too, you know. They still aren’t all the way out of debt, and olive oil is what they’ve got to sell. And so ...” He sighed and shrugged.

  “It’s good oil. I’ve never said it’s not good oil. But it’s not the right cargo for a merchant galley, not with the overhead costs we’ve got because of all the rowers we need.” Sostratos sighed, too. “I almost wish we hadn’t done so well with it last sailing season. Then Damonax could really see why we don’t want anything more to do with it.”

  “Especially not going to Athens,” Lysistratos said.

  “Especially not going to Athens,” Sostratos agreed. “I can’t imagine a worse place in the world to try to bring in olive oil. They stopped growing grain there a couple of hundred years ago, by the gods, so they could plant more olive trees. They export oil; they don’t import it. on Olympos, Father, at the Panathenaic Games they give the winners amphorai of olive oil—their own olive oil.”

  “We both know that. ...” his father began.

  “Damonax knows it, too,” Sostratos said. “He studied at the Lykeion in Athens before I got there. How can he help knowing it?”

  Lysistratos let out a sad little chuckle. “Well, son, when someone marries into the family, you don’t just get the good. You get all the problems he brings with him, too. And Damonax and his family probably think of us as a bunch of stingy whoresons.”

  Sostratos dipped his head. “That’s true. But there’s a difference— we’re right.” He knew he was being silly. So did his father. They both laughed. But it wasn’t as if he didn’t mean it, too.

  Two days of bright sunshine in a row made Menedemos want to rush down to the Great Harbor to make sure the was fully laden and ready to put to sea. His father said, “You don’t want to go out too early, you know. Better to wait a few extra days than to get caught by the last big blow of winter.”

  “But others will be setting sail now,” Menedemos protested. “I don’t want them to get the jump on me.”

  “Some skippers always set sail sooner than they should,” Philodemos said. “A lot of the time, they end up paying for it.” Menedemos fumed. Watching him fume, his father smiled a thin smile and added, “I’m going down to the agora, to find out what the news is. I expect you to be here when I get back.”

  “Why don’t you just hire a pedagogue to take me here and there, the way you did when I was seven years old?” Menedemos said bitterly. His father took no notice of that. He hadn’t really expected that Philodemos would. But the look of smug satisfaction on his father’s face when he left for the market square stung like sweat dripping onto a raw sore.

  Fuming still, Menedemos went into the kitchen. Sikon the cook would listen to him grumble, or give him something tasty to make him forget about grumbling. But Sikon wasn’t there. He’d probably gone to the agora, too, or to the harborside fish markets to see what he could bring home for the evening’s supper. Barley porridge still simmered above a low fire. Menedemos had eaten some for breakfast. He’d hoped for something better now: tunny or octopus, perhaps. Those failing, he dipped out another bowl of porridge. His father would have complained about his eating at midmorning, too. But Father’s not here, he thought, and ate. The porridge, bland stuff, tasted better for being illicit.

  Splashes that had nothing to do with rain greeted his ears when he went back out into the courtyard. At the direction of Philodemos’ second wife, a slave poured water from a hydria onto the flowers and herbs in the garden there. “Careful, now,” Baukis told him. “Don’t miss the marjoram.”

  “I won’t, mistress.” The slave turned the stream from the big, heavy water jug where she pointed.

  “That’s better,” she said, and dipped her head. When she looked up again, she saw Menedemos. She smiled. “Hail.”

  “Hail,” he answered gravely. “How are you?”

  “Well enough. Glad of this sunshine,” Baukis said.

  “It is nice, isn’t it?” Menedemos agreed. Nothings, commonplaces . . . but he could look at her while they talked. Here inside her own household, she went unveiled, of course. She was no great beauty, but, except for front teeth that stuck out, pretty enough—and, at seventeen, any woman seemed fresh and glowing and ripe. Her figure had certainly ripened, these past few years. When she’d wed Philodemos, she’d been hardly more than a girl, with hardly more than a girl’s shape. No more.

  “Will you be sailing soon?” she asked.

  “Before long, anyhow,” Menedemos said. “Sostratos wants to get to Athens as fast as he can, and I don’t blame him. We’ll put to sea as soon as Father decides the weather’s likely to hold.”

  “I hope you have good fortune.” Baukis watched his face, as he watched hers—as was only polite when two people talked. If her gaze traveled the length of him, as his now and
then paused at her rounded bosom or at the sweet flare of her hips ... If her gaze swung so, it was only in the most casual way, a way on which, for instance, the patient slave with the hydria could not remark.

  “Thanks,” Menedemos replied. His glances were every bit as circumspect. Philodemos raved because he made adultery a game. But he knew adultery with his father’s young wife would be, could be, no game. He’d realized he might want her not long after his father wed her. Only since the autumn before had he known she might want him, too.

  They’d kissed only once. They’d never done more than kiss. Whatever else Baukis wanted, she also wanted to make Menedemos’ father a good wife. Lying with Menedemos might not merely cause scandal. It might cause murder.

  Since she couldn’t speak of love, she spoke of travel: “Athens must be a wonderful place.”

  “Sostratos knows it better than I do. It’s his second home,” Menedemos said.

  The hydria gurgled dry. The slave sent Baukis a look of appeal. She tossed her head and tapped her sandaled foot on the ground. “Go fill it again, Lydos,” she said. “You can see some of the plants here still need more water. With the rains lately, the cistern’s nice and full.”

  “With the rains lately, the plants shouldn’t need all that much water,” Lydos said.

  “They’ll dry up if you don’t keep them moist,” Baukis said sharply. “And if you don’t dry up, I’ll find something for you to do that you’ll like a lot less than watering the garden.”

  Muttering to himself in a language that wasn’t Greek, the slave shouldered the hydria and carried it back toward the cistern. Had it been late summer, with the cistern dry, Baukis would have sent a slave woman to the well a few blocks away. Menedemos laughed to himself. Who could guess when the woman would have come back from the well? Men talked in the market square. Women gossiped around the wellhead.

  For that matter, who could guess when Lydos would come back from the cistern—and it was only at the rear of the house? By the way he dragged his feet going there, he was in no hurry to get on with his work. But then, what slave ever was in a hurry, except maybe to go out and get drunk on a festival day?

  Menedemos wasn’t about to rush him, either. Now he could gaze his fill at Baukis . . . provided he didn’t do it too openly. They still weren’t alone. As if to prove that, Sikon the cook came into the house, his face a thundercloud—shopping for fish must not have gone well. He stormed into the kitchen and made a racket as he started on the day’s baking. Maybe he was working out his anger. Maybe he thought that the noisier he was, the busier everybody would think he was. That was another slave trick old as time. The doorman was puttering around, too, and the slave women upstairs. In a household full of slaves, you could never count on being alone for very long.

  Baukis took not quite half a step toward Menedemos. Then she stopped, a rueful—and more than a little frightened—smile on her face. She knew the risks of living in a house full of slaves as well as he did. They were lucky they hadn’t been found out the one time their lips did touch.

  We can’t, she mouthed silently. They’d been saying that to each other ever since discovering they both wanted to.

  I know, Menedemos mouthed back. They’d been saying that, too, each trying to convince the other, both trying to convince themselves.

  The past two springs, when Menedemos had known he longed for Baukis but hadn’t known they shared a longing, he’d wanted to flee as soon as he could. Now . . . Now at least part of him wished he could stay and wait for a chance that might never come, a chance he might not take even if it did come. Hellenes agreed love was a mad, dangerous passion. What to do if one fell into it anyhow? On that, there was no agreement.

  He started to mouth, I love you, but he couldn’t even do that. Here came Lydos back with the water jug. He was still grumbling. Baukis had had her problems with the house slaves, and especially with the cook, but she was wise enough to affect not to notice this. All she said was, “Oh, good—that didn’t take too long,” and showed him the plants that still needed watering. As he bent to moisten the dirt around them, Baukis shot Menedemos another glance full of harried amusement.

  And Menedemos could only dip his head. Had he fallen in love with any other wife in all of . . . For a long time, he’d tried to make himself believe this hadn’t happened. Life would have been much easier—much safer, too—if it hadn’t. But the world was what it was, not what he wished it would be.

  Lydos’ second jar of water ran dry. He looked up at Baukis in mute appeal; the garden was almost done. She knew exactly what he was thinking. “Go get enough water to finish the job,” she said.

  “Oh, by the gods!” Lydos turned to Menedemos in appeal. “Young master—”

  Menedemos tossed his head. “I can see the corner that’s still dry,” he said before Lydos could go any further. “My father’s wife is right. If you’re going to do something, do it properly. That’s a lesson you learn at sea—or, if you don’t, you pay for it.”

  Lydos let out a theatrical groan, as if Menedemos had just ordered him sold to the mines. When that failed to soften either Menedemos’ heart or Baukis’, he carried the hydria away again, moving like an old, old man whose joints pained him.

  Baukis snorted. “It must be terrible for a man to be made into a slave.”

  “Yes, it is.” Menedemos looked right at her, as if to say she had made him into hers.

  She spent a lot of time indoors, which kept her skin fair. He watched, enchanted, the flush that rose from her neck to her cheeks to her forehead. Stop that, she mouthed.

  She was right, of course. The more such foolish things he did, the likelier someone would notice: his father, which would be the worst disaster of all; or a slave, who might tell his father or extort who could guess what by threatening to tell; or even Sostratos, who’d puzzled over why Menedemos had been so eager to get away from Rhodes the past couple of sailing seasons.

  As Baukis had, Menedemos snorted. His cousin, sometimes, thought too much for his own good. A more perceptive man, one who felt more and perhaps thought a little less, might well have realized what was wrong with Menedemos. Or maybe Sostratos needed to fall in love himself before he could recognize the symptoms in others. They weren’t—or Menedemos hoped they weren’t—something that could be known by reason alone.

  He stole another glance at Baukis . . . and caught her stealing a glance at him. Their eyes met for a heartbeat, then jerked away. Hers went to the stairway leading up to the second story, his to the stone bench in the courtyard. He pointed. “Look—there’s a wall lizard, soaking up the sun. He thinks spring is here.”

  The motion of his arm made the grayish-brown lizard dash to the edge of the bench, leap off, and disappear amongst the plants in the garden. Baukis said, “I’m glad to see it. They eat insects. Have you ever seen one with a grasshopper in its mouth?”

  “Oh, yes.” Menedemos dipped his head.

  Talk of lizards was safe enough. When Lydos returned with the hydria, he couldn’t have noticed anything the least improper. A sour expression on his face, the slave emptied the jar not far from where the little animal had taken shelter. It fled again, this time across the courtyard. It vanished into a crack in the mud-brick inner wall of the house.

  Menedemos laughed. “Poor thing must have thought Deukalion’s flood was sweeping down on it.”

  “Yes.” Baukis gave Lydos a severe look. “You don’t need to drown the plants, you know.”

  “Sorry.” He sounded anything but.

  “Be more careful next time,” Baukis told him. His nod was so impatient, so perfunctory, that Menedemos would have called him on it if Baukis hadn’t. But she did: “Be more careful, Lydos, or you will be sorry.”

  That got through. “Yes, mistress. I’ll remember,” the slave said, and this time Menedemos believed him.

  “See that you do, because I’ll remember, too,” Baukis said. “Now go on.” Lydos hurried away, carrying the hydria.

  “You hand
led that very well,” Menedemos said.

  “Oh, slaves aren’t so hard. I was dealing with slaves before I was married, too, you know,” Baukis said. But then she checked herself. “Most slaves aren’t so hard. On the other hand, there’s Sikon.”

  “Yes.” For a moment, Menedemos left it at that. Baukis and Sikon had feuded ever since she came to Philodemos’ house. She wanted to be a good household manager, and was convinced he was trying to bankrupt the place with the fancy fish he bought. He wanted to turn out the best suppers he could, and was convinced she wanted everyone in the house to live on barley porridge, beans, and salt fish. The truth, as usual, lay somewhere in between—or so Menedemos thought, anyhow. He said, “Cooks are a law unto themselves, you know.”

  “Really? I never would have noticed,” Baukis said tartly. But then she relented: “I suppose it is better not to be quarreling with him all the time.”

  They’d come to a tentative truce the autumn before. It had already held longer than Menedemos had expected. He said, “I’m glad you’re not squabbling anymore.” That gave him another excuse to smile at Baukis. It gave her another excuse to smile back. And no one who saw them or listened to them could have noted anything out of the ordinary.

  Sostratos held his nephew with exaggerated care, as if afraid Polydoros were about to leap from his arms and precipitate himself headfirst onto the dirt of the courtyard at Damonax’s house. For all his care, both Erinna and a wet nurse hovered close by, ready to snatch the baby out of his inexperienced hands.

  Trying to reassure them that he had some idea what he was doing, he said, “He sure looks a lot better than he did right after he was born.”

  His sister scowled. “What was wrong with him right after he was born?” she demanded in irate tones.

  “He looked just fine, I’ll have you know,” the wet nurse added.

  “All right. All right. Fine. I didn’t mean anything by it,” Sostratos said hastily. The women relaxed. Sostratos looked down at Polydoros. The baby was a healthy pink now, not the reddish-purple color he’d been. His head had been almost cone-shaped. It was much rounder now, and getting more so each time Sostratos saw him. Even his expression seemed more alert, less confused, than it had when he first came into the world.