The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [51]
“I was thinking the day after tomorrow.” I’m due back in Mieza.
She shakes her head. “A month. We have to clean. We haven’t cleaned properly since we got here. Three weeks, maybe, if I had an extra girl.”
“So that’s what you’re after.”
“I’m not after anything. You suit yourself. A month, then, and not a day sooner.”
I make a list: Callisthenes, of course; Carolus, the old actor; Antipater; Artabazus, because I owe him a courtesy for his condolence letter, and because my last conversation with Alexander is bothering me; Leonidas; Lysimachus; and—after some thought, as an experiment—Arrhidaeus’s morose nurse, Philes.
The next day I take Callisthenes down to the market with me. We wander through the stalls, inspecting fruit and fish hooks and leather goods and knives. I’ve already begun mapping out the conversation, a little—a symposium on theatre appeals to me, so Carolus won’t feel in over his head, and Lysimachus can show off, harmlessly, and Artabazus will see we’re cultured, and Antipater can have a night off from the wars, and young Philes can just sit gobsmacked and listen. And Leonidas; who knows what old Leonidas will do. Eat, maybe. At a gem stall, watched by a bulge-bodied mercenary hired to guard the place, I buy Pythias an agate the size and coral colour of her baby fingernail, engraved with a Heracles the size of an ant. She likes tiny things, rings and perfume bottles and trinkets she can keep in a carved sandalwood box I can hold in the palm of my hand, a gift from Hermias. A reaction against Macedonian ostentation, I suspect: lately, the tinier, the better. The slave trade is new to Pella, a small business still, catering to foreigners like me, and usually there isn’t much on offer. Today, though, we’re in luck: a new shipment is just in from Euboea. The slaver is genial, chatty, smelling profit and taking his ease in anticipation of it. He tells us about the journey, by ship, a rough one with much sickness but no lives lost. He’s got some soldiers, Thracians, prisoners of war, good for farm work but with a look in their eye that says they’d take watching. He’s got three young children, brothers and sister, he says, and what hard heart would separate them? They’re each eating a piece of bread (a pretty show on the slaver’s part), dirty but bright-eyed, the girl maybe three, the older boy eight or nine. What hard heart, indeed, though what a soft heart would do with them is a question I’m not interested in answering today. He asks us what we’re looking for. A girl for my wife, I tell him. Housework, kitchen help, nothing too rough.
“I keep the girls back here.” He leads us to a tent behind the pens. “Less trouble that way. Give me a minute and I’ll bring them out.”
“We could just go in. Spare you the trouble.”
“I’ll bring them out.”
“Something in there,” Callisthenes says once the slaver’s inside.
He brings out five. “Go ahead,” he says to me, and to the women, “Show the man your teeth.”
They all smile tooth-baringly, and Callisthenes and I obediently examine them. One coughs when I ask to see her tongue. The front of her tunic is blood-speckled. I send her back in. The slaver watches without comment. I have them kneel, jump, touch toes, stretch their arms high. I send a wincer back inside.
“Likes them young,” the slaver says to Callisthenes.
I do indeed like the youngest, who is also the tiniest, skinny-shanked, flat-chested, with unnaturally light, curly coppery hair, light green eyes, and milky skin speckled with brown across the nose. She’s not an agate, though, and I’m not sure this kind of tiny prettiness would please my wife.
“What is your name?” I ask her in Macedonian, then Greek.
She says nothing.
“Celts,” the slaver says. “I got them from a man who traded them for salt. He got them from a man who got them from their own people. Some squabble with the next