Halo

by Zizou Corder

  And now, war.

  All human men killed people, it seemed. Pericles had killed men. That’s how it is among the humans.

  When war comes, she thought, everyone will be a killer.

  Aspasia was talking. ‘I don’t know,’ she was saying. ‘We will see… but war or no war, Pericles wants you to be educated. You’ll start school tomorrow. Arko too.’

  School? But – ‘Aspasia, we can’t. We have to go to – to visit the Centaurs…’

  ‘You can’t go now,’ she said, ‘Halo, not possibly. It’s far too dangerous. There’ll be no travelling without permits – even if it were OK for a child to wander around the country.’

  Halo was silent.

  ‘And Halo, you’re not just any child any more,’ she continued. ‘You’re a son of Pericles. His enemies will know that… You have to take care. You’ll go to school. Aides will take you.’

  So the next morning they set off with Aides, their own pedagogue, a grumpy old slave whose job it was to look after them.

  ‘It’s quite funny,’ murmured Arko, ‘given what we’ve been through before on our own.’

  Actually they both rather liked being looked after for a change, and being told to watch out not to be knocked down by wagons. But soon it grew annoying.

  And school had its own risks for Halo. With any luck, she thought, everyone at school will be so busy staring at Arko they won’t see anything odd about me.

  But she had no such luck. After that first morning of reading and writing and learning poetry with a bunch of boys who did indeed stare at Arko and ignore Halo, they were sent out to the gymnasium, to exercise.

  The boys all stripped cheerfully, leaving their chitons in a pile, and ran off to stretch and warm up. Arko cantered up and down, beating them at races. Halo stood like a fool.

  She couldn’t take her chiton off.

  ‘Come on,’ said the teacher, Martes. ‘Chiton off.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, fiddling with Leonidas’s leather cuff, which she still wore on her wrist.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said.

  ‘Medical reasons,’ she said. It was the first thing that came into her head.

  He frowned. She refused. She was not going to reveal herself as a girl.

  ‘Do as you’re told, child.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want to be beaten?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then get ready for gym.’

  ‘No.’

  Martes didn’t want to beat Pericles’s adopted son on the first day. In the end he called for Aides, and sent her home.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Aspasia.

  ‘He wouldn’t strip for gym,’ said Aides. ‘Point blank refused. Won’t say why.’ He stomped off.

  Aspasia looked at her. ‘Why?’ she said.

  Halo stared at the ground.

  ‘Halo,’ said Aspasia firmly.

  Halo was going hot and cold under her skin. She knew the lie would catch up with her, but not yet. And she had never meant it to be a lie to them. And if she admitted it now, she’d be in trouble for lying, she wouldn’t be able to go to school, she’d be kept in the house, and made to marry and do housework for the rest of her life… no more swimming in caves, or running with Arko, no more adventures, no hope of ever going to Thessaly to find Chariklo and Kyllarus, and find out what Manticlas was really up to…

  Halo had lost so much already. She wasn’t going to lose being a boy. She couldn’t… she couldn’t… but she couldn’t think of any way out…

  She wrapped her arms tight around her torso, as if she were holding herself close.

  Aspasia sighed.

  ‘Halo,’ she said. ‘Is there something you want to tell me?’

  Halo shook her head angrily.

  ‘Really?’ said Aspasia, looking down at her.

  Halo blinked. She wasn’t going to cry. She didn’t know what to do.

  Aspasia made a little shape with her mouth, as if to say, Well, I think there is something.

  ‘Halo,’ she said, and her voice was not unkind, ‘I think you’re a girl.’

  Halo jumped. Across the room. ‘Oh!’ gasped Aspasia. ‘You are! Aren’t you?’

  Halo nodded, dumbstruck. There goes all my freedom, all my hope…‘Are you going to reveal me?’ she asked in a very small voice.

  ‘No,’ said Aspasia. ‘I mean – I don’t think so… Except…’

  ‘You can’t lie to Pericles,’ Halo said. ‘You know you can’t.’

  Aspasia was silent for a moment. She was thinking about how life would be for Halo, as a girl, not a citizen, even in the family… How she would have to be washed and tamed and set to weaving and laundry, instead of running about the country with Spartans and Centaurs. She would have to be married off – but who would want her, with that tattoo, and her wild history? She was thinking about how Pericles, for all his virtues, still thought that the best thing a woman could achieve in life was never to come up in conversation among men.

  Yet he loved her, Aspasia, and people talked about her all the time…

  ‘You’re right, I can’t,’ she said. ‘I have to think about this…’

  ‘Please don’t tell him,’ Halo blurted, but then she stopped herself – she couldn’t ask that.

  Aspasia gazed at her, sympathy and impatience mixed in her expression. ‘You can’t possibly…’ she said. ‘Halo – the family – listen. I understand. Often, often I have wanted a man’s freedoms. But – how long could you get away with it? You’re fine for now, but soon you will start looking like a girl. You’re pretty; the men will look at you. It’s too late to make you respectable, but in a few years… What are you going to do, grow a beard? And you’ll start to bleed…’

  ‘Why would I start to bleed?’ said Halo, confused.

  ‘Why…? Your periods,’ said Aspasia. ‘Ah. Yes, I suppose it’s different for Centaurs.’

  Halo did not like this talk. It sounded womanly. She did not want to be womanly. Nor did she want to be manly. Pictures sprang up in her mind. Leonidas’s strong, scarred back. The Skythians with their long moustaches and wiry muscles. The Spartan phalanx, those giant men, with spears and swords and massive shields… deep harsh voices, and the smell of sweat.

  But she was only twelve, or thirteen… there was plenty of time…

  ‘We can think about all that later,’ said Halo. ‘Can’t we? Can’t I just go to school… and…?’

  ‘No,’ said Aspasia. ‘Here in Athens girls marry at fifteen.’

  ‘That’s two years,’ said Halo pleadingly. ‘Plenty of time.’

  ‘So, what, in two years we turn to Pericles and say, “Oh, your adopted son is a girl, by the way”?’ Aspasia said. ‘No. No. I’ll tell – no, you tell him. For your honour. Tonight.’

  Halo lowered her head. ‘I’ll tell him,’ she said. ‘But I won’t tell anyone else.’

  ‘Well, that will be up to him,’Aspasia said.

  Halo smiled bitterly. Of course it would.

  As Halo was about to leave to find Arko, Aspasia said, ‘By the way. Your father – you know he recorded your birth, wrote to his family about you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Halo.

  ‘You know, normally they only do that for a boy.’

  Halo didn’t think that was very nice.

  ‘So he must have loved you,’Aspasia said, and looked at her.

  Halo took that thought away with her, and in moments of darkness for the rest of her life she would take it out and stroke it.

  That afternoon Arko and she talked it over, tussling the question to and fro and still coming up with no answer, as they took the road out to Kerameikos, the cemetery beyond the city walls. Gyges the Skythian was manning the gate. He checked their permits – ‘cemetery only’ – and waved them through. The big dogs stared and drooled in the shade.

  ‘Don’t think about it now,’Arko said. After all, they had something else on their minds.

  The guardian at the cemetery pointed out the per
iboloi of the Alcmaeonids: an area of soft green grass surrounded by a fine stone wall. Plaques gave the names of the people buried within. She found several with the name Megacles. Her father’s was easy to identify. It was the newest. It said, simply:

  MEΓAKΛHΣ, XAIPE

  MEGACLES, FAREWELL

  She stared at it for a long time. She couldn’t help thinking of bodies at sea, floating, lifting and falling, in the waves, in the foam, so cold. She thought of her own little baby body washed up on the beach in Zakynthos in its turtle shell. She thought of her older body, diving from the Zakynthine ship, hanging from the stern of the ship, swimming and swimming and washing up on the shore of the Mani. She thought of her body floating unconscious in the Lacedaemonian pool, and of Leonidas dragging it out. She thought of when she was lost in the icy waters of the underground cavern. All the times she didn’t drown.

  Her mother was of course not mentioned on the plaque. Halo traced the shapes of the letters of her name with her finger, under her father’s name:

  AIEΛΛA

  There was enough room. She would ask Pericles if a mason could come and carve it in.

  But how would she be able to ask Pericles anything, now she had to tell him she had lied to him?

  She laid a bunch of wild celery at the base of the wall, and propped a flask of oil with it: traditional mourning offerings. She sat quietly there for the rest of the afternoon, crying for her dear parents, and for herself, remembering nothing about them. Arko sat with her, and wouldn’t let anyone disturb her.

  Afterwards, feeling purified, she went back to face Pericles. But he didn’t come home that night till after she was asleep, and he was gone early in the morning.

  ‘I told him you have something important to say to him, in private,’ said Aspasia. ‘He said could you tell him tomorrow.’

  But that day too he was in meetings and discussions and negotiations till after midnight, and Halo didn’t see him.

  The morning of the third day, Pericles swept out of the courtyard at dawn. Halo gathered all her courage together and ran after him.

  ‘Dear boy,’ he said. ‘Not now.’

  He was away from the house for days on end, preparing for war. He was always surrounded by advisers and colleagues. Halo remained ready at all times to tell him.

  The moment didn’t arrive.

  Aspasia told Martes that Halo could not go to the gym as she had other studies in the afternoons – which she did. She had music. She and Arko sat in a glade below the hill of the Areopagus with a nice old man called Philoctetes, who taught them song after song, and they taught him Centaur songs in exchange, which he was very interested in. They got into the habit of bringing fruit with them, and Philoctetes’s slave Bokes would prepare it, and his grandson Alexis would drop by, so it often turned into more of a musical picnic than a class. Arko started to learn the lyre, which he felt was appropriate for a Centaur of Apollo.

  ‘You can’t do music every day,’ said Aspasia.

  ‘Medicine then,’ Halo said, surprising herself.

  Pericles had told Aspasia that as Halo would be in the army in a few years, she should concentrate on military training. Aspasia decided to understand that Pericles meant medical training would be useful for the army, and sent Halo two afternoons a week to see a young man called Hippias, who had studied at the new medical school in Cos, under the famous Hippocrates.

  The first time Halo went to Hippias’s little house, it was full of people who had come to consult him. A boy with tufty brown hair and a mouth like a straight line, his apprentice, Halo thought, let her in, and told her to sit quietly in the corner. She did so, eyes and ears wide open as Hippias, a sleek brown-eyed person rather like an otter, dealt with a woman with a vastly distended tummy. She had a high squeaky voice, in which she complained a lot about feeling exhausted and having no bleeding.

  ‘Has it occurred to you, madam, that you might be having a child?’ Hippias asked patiently, after taking her pulse and prodding her gently.

  ‘Oh no, I can’t be,’ she said. ‘My husband’s away.’

  ‘Well, when was he here?’

  ‘He’s been gone seven moons, at least,’ she squeaked.

  ‘Then after two moons, expect a baby,’ said Hippias. ‘They take nine moons to grow, you know.’

  ‘Do they?’ squeaked the woman.

  ‘Have you not had one before?’ he asked, and she agreed that no, she hadn’t.

  ‘Go and talk to your mother,’ he said very kindly, and not laughing at all. ‘You’re not ill. Send for the midwife when your time comes.’

  ‘How will I know?’ she said, alarmed.

  ‘You’ll know,’ he said ominously, and, clucking with excitement, she went on her way.

  Hippias looked up. ‘Next!’ he called, and when Halo went over first he asked her what seemed to be the matter.

  ‘Oh no, I’m all right,’ she said. ‘I’m Halo. I’m here to learn.’

  He stared at her for a moment as if he had no idea what she was doing there, but then remembered, and smiled, and said, ‘Well good. Have some cake.’ He handed her a piece of syrupy baklava from a dish on the table. ‘Good, now, so – what do you want to learn? How to set broken limbs and sew wounds? Or what herbs to use to lift a fever, how to clean a pustule, or rebalance the humours of the constitution? Magic spells to move on a dropsy? Or do you want to know if it is true to say that goats breathe through their ears? Or do you want to know whether a disease comes from the air or from the individual? Or do you want to know the nature of the human soul?’

  His expression was completely serious.

  Halo looked at him, and she couldn’t help laughing through her cake. ‘Yes please,’ she said.

  His eyes brightened. ‘Well good,’ he said again, amiably. ‘And do you know anything yet?’

  Halo swallowed and licked her lips.

  ‘I can set an arm. Well, I’ve never done it, but I know how, and I can clean a pustule, I could probably sew a wound… I know that if many people get the same disease then the disease is in the air, or maybe the food, if they ate bad meat – but if only one gets it then the disease is in the person – or in the person’s reaction to the air, or the food, like those people who if they eat a nut come out in a rash…’

  He was grinning at her. ‘And what don’t you know?’

  ‘I don’t know… I don’t know so many things! How to pull the bones of the leg apart to reposition them for setting. How babies get inside the mother. How to bring an unconscious person back to the world… How to cure people…’

  He raised his hand to hush her. ‘And what will you do with your knowledge?’ he asked.

  ‘Help people,’ she said. ‘And animals.’

  ‘Then I’ll take you on,’ Hippias said. ‘Follow what I do with my patients, watch and listen. Soak up everything I do and say, like a dry sponge. Keep an open mind. And read – start with Alcmaeon. Though I can’t agree with him about the goats. Now – extending the leg for setting, you said. Come with me…’

  Ten minutes later, she was cranking a heavy winch, which was attached to thick leather straps, which were attached to the ankle and knee of a poor builder who had fallen from scaffolding and snapped his thigh bone. He in turn was strapped to a chair, which was nailed in place to the floor. Even before she started the stretching and pulling and racking of the leg, he was howling pathetically in pain. Like Chiron when he had set her arm all those years before, Hippias explained what he was doing.

  ‘Pull it hard!’ he cried. ‘Hard as you like! We don’t want to leave him lame with a shortened thigh. You can’t pull it too hard. A little bit of pain now, but the bone-ends will meet cleanly, and his leg will be good as new. Don’t be scared…’

  Like all those years ago, Halo gritted her teeth and refused to allow pain to prevent the doing of what had to be done.

  Hippias pressed the snapped bone back into position.

  The man shrieked in agony.

  It was a lot easier now th
at the pain was not hers.

  That night, Arko said, ‘We can’t do what can’t be done. We can’t go to Thessaly yet. You’re doing your best to confess to Pericles. We can’t do more.’

  ‘I could write to him,’ Halo said.

  Arko thought for a moment, and said, ‘But Halo – you don’t want him to know. Do you?’

  ‘No…’

  ‘So don’t write to him. Let things be.’

  It was a very appealing idea.

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  Arko admitted easily that he had no talent for medicine, and no interest in it, so he didn’t go along – also, the patients might think they were having hallucinations if they saw him. After a few attempts at training with the boys at the gymnasium he had to give that up too: he won all the races and got in trouble for kicking during the wrestling, even though he wasn’t trying to kick.

  Their other class was archery.

  Halo and Arko turned up at the field where the archers practised. There were no Athenian boys there – just a few foreigners and public slaves. The instructor was a bored-looking Cretan. An even more bored-looking Skythian with thin clean scars down each cheek sat on his horse beside him, casting his bored look over the trainees, and not thinking much of them.

  Halo glanced at him. Did they never get off their horses? Wherever she went, there seemed to be a Skythian, astride horse, chewing and watching and looking dangerous, daggers hanging off him, hound at his heel. Whatever Aspasia said, they made Halo nervous. This one was no different.

  The bows were the Cretan type, which neither Halo nor Arko had used before – sleek and well made. She liked the look of them. The targets, though, were so big that she thought someone must have drawn the line in the wrong place, and went to take her first shot from another line, twenty metres further back.

  ‘Get back here,’ shouted the Cretan. ‘That’s the border of the discus course.’

  So Halo went back to where he indicated, even though clearly even a five-year-old could hit the target from that distance.