The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [53]
“Ah, ah, ah,” Athea says. “Everyone so nice. All right. Maybe we are best friends by tonight, yes? Maybe everyone wake up tomorrow after all?” She winks at me.
“It will be better here,” I say awkwardly, meaning better than wherever she was before, but she just waves a hand at me, dismissing me and my reassurances, and follows Pythias from the room.
Callisthenes makes his fingers into horns and pretends to clash them together.
“She’s awful,” Pythias says that evening, after supper.
We’re sitting in the courtyard while the slaves tidy up around us and dusk falls. One of our last out-of-doors meals; it’s fall now, cooling fast, the sunlight a thinner gold. Paler colours everywhere, paler pink at sunrise, green slowly leaching from the trees, in this last serving of hospitable days. The rains are on their way. The smell of smoke and burning everywhere now. We’re alone now, but can hear them in the kitchen, the clatter of their work and their voices, talking and occasionally laughing. Pythias seems content. Her cheeks are rosy, perhaps from the wine.
“She made one of the girls cry just by staring at her. She told me my house was filthy and Macedonians are animals. I told her we weren’t Macedonian.”
“And she said?”
Pythias has drunk more than usual, actually, or she would never say what she says next: “She said she could cure our problem.”
She’s blushing, and I assume none of this is very serious. “What problem is that?”
“She showed me what she had in that bag. Some stones, some bones, some dried herbs. She’s a kind of witch, or thinks she is. She says she’s helped people like us before.”
“That’s what we got her for.” I’m assuming she’ll come out with it eventually, our problem as diagnosed by Athea the snarly witch.
“Tomorrow I’m going to have her start on the big room. You’ll have the dinner there, I’m assuming. We still have barrels and crates and things in there from when we moved. We’ll have to find somewhere else for all that. The floor will need scouring, and the walls, and the ceiling. Have you ever really looked at the ceilings in here? Black, all black from the lamps. I don’t think they’ve been cleaned ever.”
“Stones and bones and herbs?”
“You bought a witch,” she says, and giggles.
“The slaver told me she was a Scythian healer. He said her village exiled her when a child she had been caring for died. She was walking to the next village, hoping to go to some family there, when she was picked up by an army. She didn’t know which, didn’t speak their language. When they were defeated, she was sold off with the other prisoners of war. He said she was next employed in the house of a wealthy man in Byzantium as a cook, but she tried to run away and so he sold her to the slaver. He said he’d refused a couple of times already to sell her because the buyers wanted her to work in the fields, and he knew she had more skills than that.”
A failed healer: Callisthenes saw it right away. Pythias may or may not, I can’t tell. Sometimes I think she knows all of my weak spots, sometimes none.
“That starts out right,” Pythias says. “The child was brought to her too late, she says. There was nothing she could do, but they blamed her anyway. They made her leave her family behind, her own children. She doesn’t know who got them. She scavenged for the army until they were wiped out, and spent a month in the slave market before she was bought. The wealthy man was a miser who bought old meat for the household because it was cheap, and when they all got sick after she cooked a meal for them she got a reputation as a poisoner. They took her back to the market and sold her to the man you bought her from. She said he made his living travelling, selling