Dionysia
The year following my hosioster was the best of my life. It might not have looked like it from a distance: I killed at least two people; I was beaten badly a dozen times, twice so badly I was in bed for a week; I was told to my face on multiple occasions that I was worthless and deserved to die. But none of it mattered. I finally had a place to belong, and I had Phemonoe.
My first problem, of course, was Tyche. For two months after my hosioster, our captain did her level best to convince me to disappear from Delphi. She left me off of assignments and out of briefings. She beat me bloody under the guise of training me. She cornered me when no one was around and whispered that I didn’t belong in the Hosioi: why couldn’t I just get the message and leave?
It didn’t get to me until she used Phemonoe against me. One night in the spring after everyone had headed to bed, she caught me in the atrium going to get a drink from the fountain. “You know,” she said, materializing from the shadows like some kind of revenant, “none of the Hosioi thinks you’re one of us, not really.” I checked my reach to my dagger in its thigh holster beneath my chiton and said nothing. I was at this point at least on friendly terms with most of the rest of the Hosioi, having used my usual tactics. Selene loved to hear me sing the sailor shanties I had learned in Antikyra; Boetia just liked to be flattered; Iris and Rhea loved the honey cakes that I humped over from the bakery in Arachova; Melissa just wanted someone to listen to her bang on about her unrequited crushes on couriers and temple guards. I had given up trying to charm Tyche, naturally, and Nyx, I couldn’t draw a bead on, but so far as I could tell, she didn’t like anyone or anything outside the twin daggers she wore at her back and polished obsessively, no matter how appropriate the occasion.
Tyche snorted a laugh. “You think it doesn’t matter as long as you have Noe. But you’re doing her the most harm of all.” I should have just turned around and walked away, but she had nicked me with that one, so I squared off as she came closer to the fountain. “She’s Alcmaeonid. Do you know what that means?” I didn’t nod, but of course I knew what that meant. How could I not? Pericles, Alcibiades, any Greek anyone had ever heard of came from the Alcmaeonidae line. “Her family is looking at matches for her. Oh, you didn’t know that?” Whether she had seen me stiffen or not, I didn’t know, but she went on. “She’s due to marry in a year’s time, like Erbe did, and leave us. But now there are rumors flying around that she’s a follower of Sappho, thanks to you hanging all over her. If her family can’t make a match because of those rumors, fair or not, they’ll disown her. Do you think you have the right to do that to an Alcmaeonid scion, you?” Even though it was dark, I swore I could see the scorn twisting her lip up. “A wharf rat from Antikyra?”
I wanted to laugh. It was the smart thing to do–laugh in her face and ask her if that was the best she had. But it stuck in my throat. It wasn’t the sapphic bit: those kinds of affairs happened within the sanctuary, certainly, even among the Hosioi (or so Melissa had told me), but no one outside the Polygonal Wall knew or cared. It was the wharf rat thing. Imagining, even for a fleeting second, Phemonoe seeing me the way Tyche did, as a pesky rodent under her foot, somehow uncorked some old fear I had bottled up. I couldn’t even say what it was at that moment, but it flooded out, blacker than the shadows, and drowned my voice in my throat.
“I’m going to say this once, Captain,” someone else’s voice said behind me. I spun to find Phemonoe’s silhouette. “If you ever speak of the Alcmaeonidae again in such an unworthy way, or blaspheme one of the god’s consecrated Hosioi in my hearing, I am honor-bound to meet you on the field of combat.”
Tyche’s posture said she didn’t fear the challenge, but she was considering: was running me off worth a rift, or even a duel, with the strongest member of her guard? In the end, she simply shrugged and walked away.
I dashed away humiliated tears as Phemonoe came to me and shook my shoulders gently, as if I were a child just awakened from a nightmare. “Don’t listen to her,” she said. “And don’t worry about her. She’ll come around.”
I don’t know that Tyche ever came around. But after that night her aggressions toward me were mostly limited to the arena, and there at least I had some recourse. We were training in earnest for the Pythian games, set for summertime. Women were allowed to compete in archery, running, and chariot races, as well as some of the music and poetry competitions, and Delphi traditionally fielded a strong team. I could already out-shoot Tyche and keep up with her running. Phemonoe was a better wrestler than either of us, so training with her got me to the point where I could block the sneaky elbows aimed at my nose, the kicks to the backs of my knees. Once, I even managed to pin Tyche, though the hatred she glared at me afterward made me decide not to repeat the maneuver.
About this time came my first extramural mission–one I wouldn’t ordinarily have been assigned to, but it needed a full complement–four of five active Hosioi, with one always staying behind to guard the Pythia–and Rhea had recently been injured in a chariot accident. There was a group of bandits operating in one of the Parnassian passes that led north toward Olympus. They had waylaid a caravan of tribute from Zeus’s sanctuary meant for the Pythian games, taking the treasure and holding two priests hostage; one managed to escape and come to us. The situation needed to be handled quickly and discreetly, as it wouldn’t do for word to get round that a gift exchange between Greece’s two most powerful gods had been undone by a handful of fleabitten bandits. So, we set out in time to arrive early in the morning at the caves where they were reputed to be laying low, when they would be sleeping off their wine.
“Apollo is with us,” Tyche gloated softly from our hiding spot behind a cluster of boulders. In the waxing light, it was coming clear that the bandits’ main force was off elsewhere marauding, and they’d left only a few guards for the priests and treasure. Phemonoe and Nyx slid out from cover and dispatched these noiselessly. We found the stashed tribute and loaded it onto the stolen horses; it was my job to keep the animals plied and quiet with honey cakes during this process. So far, so good. But when Tyche found the cell-cave holding the priests and killed the guard sleeping in front of it, one of the captives started screaming and gibbering in terror. Tyche knocked him senseless, and she and the other priest carried him to the horses. But while they were heaving his flopping body aboard like an awkward, gangly saddlebag, a guard we hadn’t accounted for slid out of the shadows behind Tyche, dagger out.
Phemonoe was dealing with the treasure; Nyx was on the other side of the horses. I was the only one in range. There wasn’t even time to shout. I drew my dagger and threw. Thank the god, it flew true, sinking into the man’s right cheek. He stumbled, gargled out a scream around his impaled tongue, and our captain turned in time to deflect his flailing dagger and finish him off with her own. As he crumpled to her feet, Phemenoe and Nyx came around, weapons out, and all of the Hosioi looked first at the dagger that Tyche pulled from the man’s face, and then at me. I was shaking with battle blood, strangely elated. Tyche wiped the blade of my dagger on the man’s tunic and held it out to me, hilt first. She didn’t say anything, but for the first time her eyes looked as if she were looking at a person and not an animal. I took the dagger with a nod, and she nodded back.
We certainly weren’t bosom friends after that, but my captain did start cutting me a bit more slack. She was, after and above all, relentlessly logical. And if I proved myself useful to her operations, it couldn’t but change her calculations about me. I started being invited on more missions after that–none as dangerous or distant as that first one. A merchant in Cirrha had failed to offer his annual tribute of salt fish to the god and needed to be reminded; another, his tribute of grain. Some upstart followers of this new god Iesous Christos were maligning the Pythia in Thebes and needed to be encouraged to take their nonsense elsewhere. I could tell these missions chafed with Phemonoe, even though she said no word against them. Still, I was coming to know her very well, and every turn of her head and tensing of her shoulders spoke as clearly to me as the Pythia spoke to her petitioners. Phemonoe didn’t like being Apollo’s glorified collection agent. She preferred to use her powers to protect women and punish the men who abused them: those were the missions she really came alive on.
I, on the other hand, loved every minute of every mission–from smearing our bodies with the black cream the acolytes compounded from altar ash, tallow and laurel, to throw off any dogs, to washing it off in the Castalian spring on our return. Being out with the other Hosioi, checking perimeters, sending signals, sliding through dark gardens, standing guard at the door–all of it was more intoxicating than wine for me. And then afterward, when the mission was done, the wine and laughter flowed. We would have a meal together in the common room of our wing, or out in the atrium if the weather were fine, and talk and play games and music until the sky began to pale above the Castalian cliffs and the stars winked out one at a time. There was nothing I liked better in the whole world than to flop down in Phemonoe’s lap with a full belly and wine cup and let her braid my hair while we listened to Rhea play her harp and Melissa sing her favorite love songs in her sweet, low voice.
“It really is remarkable how well the two of you work together,” Iris raised her cup one night to Phemonoe and me after we’d stopped an assassination attempt against a political prisoner who had sought asylum at our sanctuary: anyone could do so by throwing themselves on the feet of the old statue of Apollo inside the temple and begging the god. But this particular prisoner had apparently made off with some secrets that the Ithakan council didn’t want getting out, and so a team of assassins had been dispatched to finish him off in his cell. Phemonoe and I had caught them in the Athenian stoa, killed two, and sent the last running into the night. The prophetae burned the corpses on Apollo’s altar and sent their ashes back to Ithaka in a jar. “It’s like you’re one person, or twins,” Iris went on. “It’s incredible for how short a time Dia’s been with us. The god is certainly with you.”
“We’re counting on you in the relay,” Rhea added. The Pythian games were only a week off. I rolled onto my back and looked up at Phemonoe.
“Who else is running again?” She smiled and gave my head an indulgent pat.
“You and Tyche are taking the last two legs because you’re our fastest runners. The acolyte Gemma is starting because she’s our quickest off the rope. I’ll take the second lap.”
I grinned. What Phemonoe was good at was making sure no one got ahead of her. With her wrestler’s strength and coordination, she could apply a hip or elbow at precisely the moment her competitor’s feet were both off the ground, sending them flying in a way that made it look as if they’d tripped. Rhea must have been thinking the same thing because she chuckled.
“Ah, yes, Apollo’s honorable Hosioi.”
The usually silent Nyx suddenly spoke up on my left. “If the Hosioi aren’t proof that the god has his dirty tricks, I don’t know what is.” Laughter and cheers to that all around.
“Yet another wreath for the Alcmaeonidae,” added Tyche as she raised her cup. “At this point there must be a treasury at your father’s house dedicated purely to your laurels and trophies, Noe. He always applauds the loudest at the games.”
I looked up at Phemonoe’s face to see the smile fading from it. I sat up. “Your family is coming?”
“They do every year,” Tyche answered for her. “They have an estate right here in Delphi. And this year is a special year, of course.”
“Why?” asked Melissa. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing is happening,” said Phemonoe. She took a drink of her wine, and I swear the gaze she fixed Tyche with over the rim made the captain pale a shade, but it might have just been the firelight. A sick feeling puddled in the pit of my stomach like bad wine. I stood and went in to our sleeping chambers, leaving the rest of the Hosioi by the fire.
The Rookery 