by Rachel Caine
While they tended their stalls, she strolled at her seeming leisure among the columns, fountains and mosaics. While they did their household shopping, she sipped sweetened juice in the shade and smiled at handsome men. Beckoning them. Tempting them.
Follow me.
To enjoy such freedom? To answer to no husband, to live under the roof and auspices of no father or brother? To lounge in her bed as late as she pleased, rise when she wanted, go wherever she wished?
Her figure was firm and shapely, unspoiled by years of motherhood and marriage. Her hands were smooth. She wore fine linen, hair ornaments, and jewelry.
Oh, yes, they envied her, and with good reason.
Sometimes, to her amusement, she even saw dour-faced wives tramping along prostitute-trodden paths, scuffing, kicking dirt, and obliterating the marks.
“They are coming!” shrieked the old madman from his mat. “Beware the gods’ wrath! Beware the fiends of Tartarus! They are coming, the sun will bleed, the skies will blacken! Babies dead in their cradles! Grandmothers in their beds! The strixoi—”
A boy threw a stone, striking the old man in the ribs. He squawked and sat down hard. Those nearby laughed.
The day warmed. The sun, unbleeding, climbed higher in the unblackened skies.
Euterpe earned a quick drachma from a lawyer’s clerk on an errand, then wended her way past more arrays of goods for sale—olive oil, vegetables, perfume, grain, pottery, fish, spices, slaves, figs, beads, tools, honey. She bantered and flirted with merchants she knew, did some more business, bought a wedge of flatbread smeared with a paste of crushed fruit, and lingered to examine a display of brass lamps.
When she saw other prostitutes, they exchanged acknowledging nods or a word or two of greeting, or paused to chat if they were on friendlier terms.
Theirs was a strange sisterhood, one of competition and community. They held themselves far above the pornai, who lived wretched lives in brothels under the control of a procurer, but knew their own status to be well below that of the elite hetaerae, whose elegant and educated company was much sought-after by the wealthiest and most influential of men.
Some, Euterpe among them, more pitied than despised the pornai. After all, age, misfortune, disfigurement, or hard times could reduce any of them to that level at any time. Others of their sisterhood had already come from such a history, having managed to save up enough of their meager earnings to buy their liberty.
An Athenian youth, healthy-looking and more than presentable, paused in his labors. Noticing her tracks and their message, he followed them with his eyes, then favored Euterpe with a long, admiring grin. She tipped her head and raised her plucked, painted eyebrows in a beckoning gesture.
Temptation twisted his features. He was with an older man—his father or uncle, she judged—who stood nearby, arguing with one of the city’s tax collectors. As of yet, this stern figure had not noticed the youth’s distraction.
Euterpe shifted from one foot to the other with an undulating roll of her hips, trailing a hand down the front of her chiton and inhaling.
The youth looked stricken. He indicated crates of goods yet to be unloaded, and spread his hands in a helpless shrug. She exaggerated a sigh of disappointment, then shrugged herself and tapped the toe of her sandal at her tracks. Follow me… Lotus Street.
She moved on. She did more business.
“They slice their own breasts and nurse their young upon blood!” howled the madman, and a basket-weaver drove him away from her shop, swearing, striking at him with a bundle of reeds.
Later that afternoon, another prostitute fell in beside her in the colonnade. Melanthia was dark-haired and pretty, short of stature but rounded of curve, and she brimmed with the latest bits of gossip from their circle of acquaintances.
Phylia was pregnant again, Melanthia reported, and thinking that she might keep this one this time, marry a potter, settle down. Iolanthe continued to drink too much; getting on in years, and not as popular as she’d once been, she was desperately afraid of becoming one of the pornai yet hastened her way toward it with each jug of cheap wine. Niobe had seen her orphaned nephew in the company of a brothel owner known for providing pretty boys to men with a taste for cruelty. Glyke’s husband, long since believed lost at sea, had returned and been furious to learn how she’d been supporting herself in his absence.
“He dragged her into the street by the hair,” Melanthia said, “and was hitting her with a strap when Althea came by. Remember how we always suspected those two shared more than affection? Althea snatched that strap out of his hand and beat him bloody with it.”
“What happened to her?” asked Euterpe, both shocked and impressed by Althea’s audacity. Free or not, for a woman to raise her hand to any man was a serious offense. No matter how vile the man or his actions were. Then again, Althea was a big woman, strong-jawed and claiming descent from the line of Hippolyta and Antiope.
“She and Glyke ran off together. They haven’t been found yet. I hope that they aren’t.” The wistful pursing of Melanthia’s mulberry-stained mouth said that she knew better than to put much faith in that hope. She shook her head briskly, causing black ringlets to bounce, and changed the subject. “How are your sandals holding up?”
“Quite well.” Euterpe looked at her friend’s tracks in the dust, and saw that her stamped letters were faint, almost illegible.
ollow m… lanthi read one footprint; olphin Str… lanthia read the other.
“Yours look faded,” Euterpe added. “The soles are wearing thin.”
“I know,” groaned Melanthia. “I’ve been trying to save up for those silver bracelets set with blue stones Didos has at his stall, they’d go so well with my peplos of dyed-indigo wool… but, if my customers cannot find me, I’m not earning, and if I’m not earning, I’m not saving, am I?”
“So it is,” Euterpe agreed. Seeing that the old madman had relocated his mat to this side of the agora, and was about to begin another insane oration of how the dark strixoi would pierce their hearts and kill them in their beds, she said, “We’re not far from Gaius’ shop. I might like new laces for mine. Did you see the ones Nereia has?”
“With the braided strips of kidskin to the ankles, and the little bronze bells over the toes? Aphrodite herself would want those!”
They went on at a brisker pace, discussing fashion, until they reached a side street that took them to a much smaller courtyard dominated by a fountain depicting the nine Muses with their instruments and implements of their various arts.
Euterpe, as she always did, stopped to honor them, particularly her namesake, with an offering of a coin and murmured praises.
Melanthia, less deferential, smothered a giggle. “And how many flutes have you played of late, oh giver of delights?”
“Hush,” chided Euterpe. “Follow me.”
The shop of Gaius, the sandal-maker, was tucked away in a corner, almost hidden from view. He lived there as well, sleeping on a cot in the back room, and did not go out much.
Some likened him to Daedalus for clever invention, or cunning Odysseus for craftiness and wit. Skilled though he was, the respectable women of Piraeus and the good Athenian wives snubbed his business. But, as he’d told Euterpe, he wasn’t bothered by it.
“Oh, yes, I lose their drab custom,” he’d said, “because I have beauties like you coming into my shop… letting me hold, touch, wash, caress, anoint with oil and adorn with my humble sandals their most lovely, delicate, nymph-like feet… and then you pay me? Tfah!”
Gaius was a former slave, or that at least had been the intention of the raiders who’d seized him from his village when he was just a boy. He’d been, he cheerfully explained, a terrible slave, willful and disobedient, more trouble than he was worth.
It showed. The marks of a dozen different masters were inked upon his body, black and crimson and blue, from all the times he’d been sold or traded. Brands and the scars of so many beatings meant he hardly had an unblemished patch of skin left.
His nose and both ears had been docked as punishments. After repeated attempts to escape, both his feet had been severed, the stumps cauterized.
This, the prostitutes who frequented his shop speculated, was why he had such a lavishing fondness for theirs. They all agreed that no one took more care and evident joy in fitting a sandal to a shapely foot than did Gaius. He’d rub them with his skilled hands, massage them with his thumbs. Sometimes, he’d use a horsehair brush to apply a thin layer of colorful dye to each toenail.
If he enjoyed this practice as much or more than their other customers enjoyed fondling other parts of their bodies, the prostitutes hardly objected. Besides, it went no further than that; Gaius was, among his other maimings and misfortunes, a eunuch.
He got around his shop well enough on his knees, or made use of crutches and a wheeled plank when he needed to go out into the streets. Most of the time, he simply hired a neighbor lad to run errands for him.
Melanthia giggled some more as she perched on a stool and extended her legs to let Gaius slip off each of her sandals in turn. He tutted as he saw the worn-down soles, then tutted again when he found the beginnings of a callus. Taking up a rounded piece of grey ash-stone, he began gently scouring at it.
“Is it true,” he said as he worked, “that Zetis is leaving us?”
“It’s that young man she’s sweet on,” said Euterpe, bending over a tray of lacings that ranged from coarse twine to lengths of golden wire. “The soldier, the one with the curls. She thinks that if she leaves the profession, he’ll marry her.”
“That was it, yes,” Melanthia said. “But he’s already promised to someone else. Now she’s planning to become a—eeh! that tickles!—soothsayer.”
Gaius exhaled a sorrowful gust of breath. “Those exquisite toes, what a shame.”
“Slopping around in a goat’s liver, looking for omens?” Euterpe grimaced. “How does she expect to make a living doing that? She’ll change her mind.”
“We can hope,” said Gaius, wrapping Melanthia’s feet in a cloth that had been soaked in scented oils.
“Maybe not,” she said, and propped her heels on a cushioned footrest. “I dined with her last night. She wants to travel to Delphi and consult the Oracle there about dreams she’s been having. She says that a darkness descends over Piraeus.”
Euterpe, holding up a ribbon-lace dyed Tyrian purple, scoffed. “There’s a madman in the marketplace who’ll tell you the same for nothing, whether you want to hear it or not.”
“The old stick-thin one with the beard?” Gaius asked. He knelt on a low bench by his worktable, cutting leather to measure for Melanthia’s new sandals. Nearby rested the set of brass stamps, block, and mallet with which he’d impress the lettering into the soles. They had to be made backward, inverted, that was the trick, so that the messages would be legible once pressed into the dirt. “The one who’s been going on about how the strixoi are coming?”
“That would be him, yes.”
“Tfah! He’s been out there for ages. Last month, it was that we were all being poisoned by our own wells and fountains. Now it’s the strixoi on their flapping black wings.”
“I thought strixoi were spirits,” Melanthia said. “Seductive women who lure and prey upon men.”
“Then there are two in my shop even now,” Gaius said, and they all laughed.
“Those are sirens, and lamiae,” Euterpe said when they finished. “In the stories I know, the strixoi are birds. Not the bronze-taloned flesh-eaters that Heracles fought, but small birds with red eyes and long needle-sharp beaks.”
Melanthia shrugged. “Well, you would know.”
“Ah, yes,” said Gaius. “Your father.”
Her father. The scholar, the philosopher, the fool. Not a madman like the one at the agora, but an eccentric. And, most damaging of all, a bad speaker. It didn’t matter how well-read, well-learned, well-educated or well-meaning a man was; if he couldn’t hold his own in the arguments and debates, he was lost.
They’d been poor, poorer still after her mother had died, but she didn’t begrudge him. He’d tried his best. He’d even taught a girl-child to read, taught her about history, and architecture. He’d taken her exploring in the catacombs beneath the city, and the secret tunnels that ran the lengths of the Long Walls.
“One day, my little Muse,” he’d often told her, “perhaps you’ll even follow in my footsteps.”
Instead, as he grew older, as the palsy and forgetfulness set in, she’d had to become what she was just to keep bread and salt on the table.
Now, men followed in her footsteps.
Gaius turned the leather sole of Melanthia’s new sandal upside down over the block. He positioned the larger of the brass embossing tools against it, and struck the blunt chisel-end with the mallet. He held it up for their inspection, the lettering backward but clear. Then he pushed it into a shallow pan of sand so they could see it as it would appear on the street.
Follow me, read the message.
The craftsman continued with the more difficult work of stamping the rest of it—Dolphin Street on the other, for that was where Melanthia had her rooms, and her name on both sandal-soles.
The neighbor lad who ran errands for Gaius came in when the sandals were close to being finished. Gaius scolded him good-naturedly for tardiness; it was well past the time he usually arrived. The lad said it was because his mother had been called away to sit with a grief-stricken friend.
“Her baby died,” he told them, blinking with youthful enthusiasm at Euterpe’s breasts. “They’re saying she killed it, stabbed it with a brooch pin.”
“If she didn’t want the baby,” Melanthia said, swiveling her ankles to inspect the fit, “why didn’t she leave it up on the hillside, like everyone else?”
“She’s out of her head.” The lad’s gaze shifted to Melanthia’s legs, for she’d needlessly drawn the hem of her chiton up past her dimpled knees. “Says a bird did it in the night, flew in by a window and poked the baby to death with its beak.”
At that, Euterpe and Gaius shared a disconcerted look.
“Weren’t you just saying… ?” asked the sandal-maker.
“The mother must have heard some of that madman’s ravings, that’s all.”
“A lot of babies have died lately, haven’t they?” said Melanthia, still admiring her sandals. “Do you think there’s a new sickness in town? Someone said nineteen beggars and slaves have been found dead too, these past few days, down by Mud Street.”
“There’s always sickness of some kind or another down by Mud Street,” Gaius said. He gave the boy a handful of small coins. “Sardines and some bread, today. A quail egg or two, if you can find them. Perhaps a pomegranate. And wine.”
“What kind?”
“An amphora of whatever’s cheapest; I’m not feeling choosy. There’s a good lad. Off you go.”
And, off he went, after a final long look and a grin.
“You’ll have a new customer in a year or so.” Gaius also grinned as the boy left. He turned to Euterpe, who’d lifted her feet from immersion in a basin of water sprinkled with hyacinth petals. “Chosen which laces you’d like?”
“These,” she said. “The red wool cords, with the glass beads.”
“Ooh!” Melanthia peered at them. “See how intricately they’re knotted! What a pity so few of the men will notice, but then, they don’t often look at your shoes.”
“I’ve never understood that about Athenian men,” said Gaius. He deftly removed the old laces from Euterpe’s sandals, laced in the red ones, and slipped them onto her dried and oiled feet. “Too snug?”
“Perfect,” she said.
“Tighten them as needed; they’ll loosen as you walk.” He traced the crossing lace-pattern with a fingertip. “And how well the color complements your skin. If you like, I’ll tint your toenails to match.”
“Next time,” she said. “I should do some more business before the day’s through.”
“So should I, if I hope to
ever get those bracelets,” said Melanthia with a sigh. “Didos just would have to be devoted to his wife.”
They paid Gaius—as always, he joked that he should pay them for the privilege of fondling their lovely feet—and left his shop. A fine haze of high clouds had begun to drift in from the west, turning the sunlight to diffuse gold. The scent of boiling lentils, onions, and garlic hung in the air.
Their search for business did not take long; customers approached them before they’d returned from the side street to the main colonnade. Melanthia went off with a hearty, round-faced man in a stonemason’s smock, while Euterpe negotiated with a pair of students who seemed more interested in each other than her, but had appearances to uphold.
“Follow me,” she bade them once they’d agreed on a price, and led them toward Lotus Street.
On the way back to the marketplace, cosmetics refreshed, she saw the old madman again. He was no longer on his mat uttering his prophecies and proclamations. He huddled on it instead, rocking on his haunches with his eyes tightly shut and his arms wrapped around his bony shins. By the presence of fresh bumps, scrapes and bruises, he must’ve been pelted with more stones, and maybe with rotting vegetables as well.
“…coming,” he mumbled into his stringy grey beard. “They’re coming… the strixoi… they’re coming… you’ll see… too late, too late… the sky look to the sky look to the sky they’re coming…”
Despite herself, Euterpe looked to the sky. She saw it still hazed, bronzed now rather than gold, but that hardly seemed unusual at this time of day.
Struck with a sudden pity for the madman, Euterpe fished a few coins from her purse and tossed them onto the mat. They landed with a faint clinking. His eyes popped open at the sound, the wild intensity in them so startling that she took a step back.
“There were only a few, at first,” he said, staring at her. “Like bees, like ants. Scouts! Sent from the hives, the hives in dark Tartarus. Sent to find weakness and filth, pride, the arrogance of man!”
She took another step back, already regretting having pitied him.
“And they found it!” His bunched, twiglike fingers rose, splayed and shaking, beside his head. “Great Athens, the learned city, city of art and law, philosophy, science! Statesmen! Lawyers! Painted pandering whores! We sneer at the gods in our folly and they will smite us down! Smite us for our greed and decadence!”