by Suzanne Weyn
“Do you desire a husband?” he asked.
“No,” she replied. “If I could choose my destiny, I would go serve Athena in her temple as a priestess. A priestess of Athena is taught to read the sacred stories of the gods and goddesses. She serves a higher purpose than catering to her husband, as I will be forced to do if I marry.”
“Then I would never want to compete for your hand in marriage,” he said.
“But my father will not hear of me becoming a priestess,” she clarified quickly. “And since I must marry, I would rather it be to someone with whom I am companionable. Marriage could be an agreeable thing, perhaps, if one found a soul mate.”
“A what?”
“I, too, heard the philosopher Socrates speak in the square once. He believes we are part physical and mortal, and part soul, the part which lives on after death. I started thinking: If one could find a mate with whom one might travel companionably through all time in love and understanding, then …”
She cut herself off, feeling foolish.
“Then what?” he prompted.
“Then a person might really find happiness.”
“And you think this can happen through marriage?” he asked.
“With the right mate. If one is lucky.”
Once again, their eyes met and something passed between them that she could not name. It was attraction, yes, but also recognition. There was something in him that made her want to stay beside him, to curl her head onto his chest with never the thought of leaving.
She stepped toward him but he broke the connection, tossing it away with a harsh laugh. “I am a homeless scrounger,” he reminded her.
“I have a large dowry. My father is a wealthy importer and exporter of goods.”
She could hardly believe these words were coming from her. How shameful to be begging a complete stranger to vie for her hand in marriage! But all the young men who would come to compete for her would be strangers as well, and some much older and not nearly as good-looking. If she would be wed to a stranger, then let it be Artem — Artem, whom she barely knew but who did not feel like a stranger to her. She knew she’d be happy married to this person she had felt she knew on that very first day when she’d spied him in the fish market. Of course, it made no sense — but there it was, just the same.
He stood and waved her away. “No, I could never wed a siren.”
“A what?”
He turned toward her. There was mischief in his eyes though his face was serious. “I have heard you down by the ocean rocks, singing into the crashing surf.”
“You have?”
“Yes,” he replied. “And I believe you must be a siren, one of the magical half-fish women who drive sailors mad with their song. Surely you’ve read of it in the work of the poet Homer?”
She had heard the tale told. She lifted her long, tan, linen skirt to reveal two sturdy legs. “No fish tail here,” she said.
“I see. Those are most assuredly legs,” he said as he smiled and his eyes ran appreciatively up and down the length of her body. “Then, tell me, how do you come to sing so enchantingly?”
Hyacinth was proud of her voice and it pleased her that she’d been overheard. Singing was the only thing she had ever been allowed to study despite the fact that her two older brothers were schooled in many subjects.
“I have a teacher,” she told him. “He assigns me to sing over the crashing of the waves in order to strengthen my voice.”
Artem pulled a scroll from under his roll of blankets beside the ashen remains of a fire. Then he took out a flute. “Sing this,” he suggested. “It’s a poem I wrote. I want to put music to accompany it. I have a plan that perhaps I can earn my keep playing and reciting my work in the homes of the wealthy.”
“I can’t read it,” she reminded him.
“I’ll recite it to you. Maybe you can remember it.” He began to recite from memory. It was a poem telling of a trip up the Nile River taken by a slave being transported to Thebes, the city that had once been called Luxor before the Greeks renamed it.
Hyacinth was awestruck by the beauty of the language. It described the majesty of the pyramids and the slave’s amazement in passing the great Sphinx for the first time. He told of the slave wishing he could lift into the sky like a graceful crane and return to his homeland.
The pain and loneliness in the verses caused tears to well in Hyacinth’s eyes. “How do you know such ancient things?” she asked when he was finished. “You are not singing of the Egypt that we Greeks rule. It is a much older Egypt that you sing of. Your words are so clear that I see it in my mind’s eye. Why would you write of the life of a slave, you who are not tethered to anything?”
“I do not know why these images come to me. Sometimes the muses send pictures to me by day and other times Morpheus appears in my dreams and leads me to wondrous visions I cannot explain.”
“Perhaps I have traveled there with you,” she suggested.
He smiled, a bit bemused but not scornful. “Perhaps it is a thing akin to the Myth of Er that Plato refers to in his work The Republic.”
Hyacinth had heard Plato’s name discussed in the evenings when her father, brothers, and friends sat drinking their wine and debating issues she did not fully understand. But she had no idea about The Republic or the Myth of Er. Still, she could not bear for him to think her a fool. “Perhaps it is like the Myth of Er,” she agreed.
“You’ll read it for yourself someday,” he said. “Can you remember the words to the poem?”
“Tell it to me again and this time I will listen closely with a mind to recall it,” she suggested, closing her eyes to concentrate.
Macar glanced around the gymnasium, checking that he was clear to throw, and then drew back his arm, hurling the javelin with all the force at his command.
Under his breath, he hissed a curse. The javelin had landed a full yard short of the farthest javelin thrown by Elpinor.
He rubbed his jaw. It was aching, as it often did when something worried him. Perhaps he’d been grinding his teeth in his sleep again, fretting about the upcoming tournament for Hyacinth’s hand in marriage.
Elpinor slapped him on the back. “Have no worries. I’m not about to vie for my sister’s hand in marriage, so you’ll get no competition from me,” he said, laughing. “Though why you would want her at all confounds me.”
“I can’t resist a contest,” Macar joked glibly. “Besides, I hear she comes with an impressive dowry.”
“That she does,” Elpinor confirmed. “But is it worth putting up with such a sour disposition? Somehow she has no concept of the rightful place of a woman. She is forever listening in on the dialogues among the men, forever having to be shooed away like an intrusive hen.”
Macar laughed even more loudly as he and Elpinor retrieved their javelins. “Perhaps it’s simply that she’s so disinterested in me,” he pondered. “I relish the challenge. Other girls are forever flirting with me. I’m considered quite a good catch. But your sister simply turns away when she sees me, almost as though I’ve done something to her.”
“Your sin is being male,” Elpinor told him. “If she had her way she’d join the priestesses in the temple and devote her life to Athena.”
“That would be a waste of beauty,” Macar commented, thinking of Hyacinth’s attractive curves.
“My father forbids it, so there will be no waste of her beauty,” Elpinor said. “But, I tell you, she will try your patience.”
“I can subdue her,” Macar insisted confidently. “After all, she is but a female.”
Artem sat beside his campfire. It snapped as the flames danced, devouring the brittle branch he’d thrown onto it. It brought to mind the wild women at a bacchanalian feast.
He had taken his bow from his sack and removed an arrow from its quiver. Lying with the back of his head resting on a flat rock, he fit the arrow into the notch in the bow, aimed toward the fat, full moon, and waited.
A bat soared across its silvery path.
The arrow hissed through the darkness, taking down the creature.
Rising lazily, he strolled to where it had fallen and retrieved it. Not much meat on this, but he’d been so involved in working on his Egyptian poem this evening that he’d forgotten to hunt for his dinner.
He still had some figs he’d swiped from a nearby grove of trees. It would be enough.
He gutted the bat, pouring its blood into an earthenware cup. He had heard that drinking bat’s blood could make a man invisible — a good quality to have when hunting. Then he set the bat on a spit over the fire.
Lost in thought, mesmerized once again by the fire, he absently plucked the taut string of his bow.
He could win her.
That he had the ability was never in question.
He wanted her. He had seen her from afar for years and thought her lovely, but when she approached him two days ago and he spoke to her, he felt the uncanny connection between them. It was surely something deeper than physical attraction.
She could not return to see him until tomorrow because she was committed to stand on a stool in the sewing chamber and be fitted for her wedding gown. He could picture her in it, the sun shining through crisp white lines; somehow he pictured her wearing a simple golden band around her forehead instead of the traditional wreath of hyacinths and violets. It would suit her better, in his opinion.
How much he longed to be the groom standing beside her. It was true that they had known each other but a day. Yet it was a day with such a timeless quality: He felt as if he’d known her always.
But wanting things led to disaster. He had always been of this mind, although he was not sure why or wherefore he had come to this conclusion. Perhaps it was simply that as a person of no standing in the community he knew that nothing was coming to him. So why try?
Artem took a flask of wine from his sack, drawing in a long gulp. He was not meant to accomplish anything, to have anything. He had eluded the fates by avoiding slavery. That he was yet a free man should be enough for him. Why long for a life that was not his destiny to possess?
Once again he drank from the flask.
He did not intend to get yoked into the captivity of marriage. Lovely as she was, she would soon turn demanding, reminding him constantly that all they owned in the world had come from her dowry. He couldn’t really imagine her being like this, but generally it seemed to be the way things went.
Then again … he had thought about competing in the upcoming Olympic Games even before she’d brought it up. Perhaps with the winnings and status from an Olympic victory their positions would be more equal….
No. It was too improbable an idea.
He had not eluded one kind of slavery simply to be tricked into another.
When she came to see him tomorrow as they’d arranged, he would not be there.
Closing his eyes, he tilted his head back and emptied the flask.
Perhaps I drink too much, he considered.
Hyacinth vowed to find out what he’d meant about the Myth of Er. She had asked her mother first, while she stood on a stool modeling her half-finished wedding garment. “I know not and neither do you need to know of such things,” her mother chided as she pinned the white skirt into careful pleats. “You should be sewing this yourself. I hope your new husband won’t notice that you can’t embroider or weave, either, if you sing to him all the while.”
“Perhaps if I knew how to create a clay vessel on the wheel he would be impressed,” Hyacinth said. She had always wanted to learn the art of making pottery. The grace of its forms appealed to her. It would be lovely to create such beauty from wet clay, she thought.
“Pottery is not suitable as women’s work, and you know that,” her mother scoffed. “Now stand still!”
Later in the day, she tried to ask her father, but he was too busy to discuss anything with her. “I have ships coming into port in two days, the day of your wedding competition,” he said absently as he pored over a wide ledger of accounts. “On them will be enough goods to restore your dowry.”
“Restore?” she inquired.
He sputtered and his embarrassment showed. Apparently he had not intended to tell her this. “I had to borrow against it to pay a debt, but it’s a temporary measure. The goods that are on those incoming ships will return full value to the fund.”
When she asked her eldest brother Agapenor, he told her that girls shouldn’t bother themselves about such things. So now, as a last resort, she would ask her other brother Elpinor who was two years older than she but, in her opinion, acted like a ten-year-old.
“What’s the Myth of Er?” Hyacinth asked Elpinor at lunch the next day.
Elpinor stared at her quizzically, as though he hadn’t understood the question. “Where did you hear of such things?” he asked. It wasn’t the question that he didn’t understand but the fact that it was she who had asked it that had stunned him.
He still hadn’t answered when Macar came in to join them for lunch. “She wants to know what the Myth of Er is,” Elpinor told his friend.
Macar didn’t understand. “What use does she have for Plato?” he asked.
“Perhaps he can give her wedding advice!” Elpinor shouted, laughing.
“Toad,” Hyacinth insulted her brother disgustedly.
Macar shrugged as he sat cross-legged against another bolster at the table. At least he wasn’t a total fool like Elpinor. Still, Macar’s smug confidence made her dislike him immensely. She wished she didn’t dislike him so much because he was the most likely suitor to win her father’s contest.
“I remember learning about the Myth of Er,” Macar suddenly recalled. “It’s a nonsense story.”
“What is it?” Hyacinth dared ask.
“Oh, it’s crazy. It’s about a fellow named Er who comes back from the dead. He’s the only one who returns. He says the rest of the people who died went on to live in other bodies. Instead of living forever happily in the underworld ruled by Hades, God of the Dead — as all sane people know happens after they die — Plato thinks you go to some field and take a number like you might in the marketplace. Then when your number is called, you get to come back to this world in another body.”
“Another body!” Elpinor shrieked with laughter. “Imagine! I’m drowned at sea and the next time I open my eyes someone is wiping my bare behind and feeding me baby slop!” Gales of laughter shook him.
“I don’t think it sounds so funny,” Hyacinth commented. It struck her as infinitely more interesting than endless days spent lolling around in some dull underworld.
“You’re right!” Elpinor roared. “It’s not funny, it’s hilarious!”
Macar bit down on a smile as he reached toward a plate of dried apricots and nuts on the table. “Leave her alone. Women are prone to such flights of fancy and childlike fantasy,” he remarked. “It’s perfectly normal.”
Hot anger began to rise within Hyacinth, coloring her cheeks. “Plato was not a woman.”
Macar chortled. “No, but he must have been dead drunk when he came up with that one.”
Elpinor turned nearly purple with laughter at Macar’s remark.
Hyacinth stared at Macar, narrowing her eyes angrily. Surely she could not be expected to marry this smug, condescending fool.
She had to convince Artem to compete for her. It was her only chance.
Casting a disdainful glance at Macar and her still-cackling brother, she hurried from the room and out to the balcony where she descended the side steps. Hurrying to the woods, she found Artem packing up his campsite. “You’re not leaving?” she cried, alarmed by what she was seeing.
“Is it so important?” he asked lightly.
“Yes!” she insisted urgently. “You must compete for me.”
“We hardly know each other,” he protested.
“I know you better than any of the others. I know you better than Macar, who is my brother’s friend. He comes to the house but I barely speak to him, and when I do, I am repulsed
. You like me. I can tell you do. You promised to teach me to read!”
“I know Macar,” he said. “He has often taunted me, calling me ‘orphan of a slave.’”
“You don’t like him any more than I do.”
“No. Not much,” he agreed.
“Then fight for me,” she urged. “Don’t let him win me.”
Macar had trailed Hyacinth from the house. He could see she was angry with her brother and annoyed at him for mocking that fool Myth of Er. If he could calm her down, talk sense to her, she’d see what a strong voice of reason he would be as a mate.
It didn’t matter if she loved him or even liked him. But their lives would go more smoothly if she at least respected him. And they would have a life together. Of that, he was certain.
He was a good deal behind her when he saw her dart into the woods. Hurrying his pace so he wouldn’t lose her, he caught up and spied the light color of her dress moving through the trees.
Creeping silently, he hid behind a tree to observe the other figure that had appeared. She was speaking to someone.
Who?
Artem? The dirty vagrant?
Before Macar’s disbelieving eyes, Hyacinth threw her arms around Artem and they kissed.
From her balcony, Hyacinth looked out on the playing field as thunder blasted the sky. It was an ill omen. At the horizon, the Aegean was blanketed by black clouds. The storm was still out at sea but the sky above them was gray, and the foul weather appeared to be rolling ever closer to land.
Her eyes were not on the competitors who were lined up for the javelin competition. Instead, she scanned the crowd that had come to watch, searching for Artem. Like Odysseus who had returned from the Long War to save Penelope from the greedy suitors who only loved her wealth, perhaps Artem would show up, shedding a disguise at the last moment. Just as Odysseus had used his expertise with a bow to best the others, Artem might step forward and win her.
This could yet happen. At the moment, though, Artem was nowhere to be seen.