Amicae Usque ad Aras, Part Three

Dionysia

And then everything fell apart.

Not in the way I thought it might, not at all. And at first everything seemed to be going exactly as I wanted–no, as I would have wanted if I had had a gods-eye view of my life. Someone did leave the Hosioi, but it wasn’t Noe. The injury to Tyche’s leg turned out to be worse than any of us had thought and would not heal–not with daily baths in the Castalian spring, not with the Dionysian priests’ prayers, not with the doctor her father brought from Thebes to attend her. He told her she would never run again–not an option for a Hosios. After a long meeting behind closed doors with the Pythia, Tyche’s father emerged and announced that he had made a marriage arrangement for his daughter and was taking her home with him.

Tyche’s retirement ceremony at the shrine to Dionysus was beautiful and solemn, and I did my level best not to grin through the whole thing. Although our captain had stopped actively trying to maim me, or harass me off her team, she had never learned to love me. Any time she found an excuse to punish me for something trivial–like being out a minute past curfew, nodding off on vigil, or letting a wayward child slip through into the sanctuary–she did so as severely as she could get away with, and with obvious delight. Her favorite punishment was making me kneel on the paving stones in our atrium, holding my sword out at arm’s length, for an hour. Of course I couldn’t make it that long, so once my arms started to sear and shake and droop, she passed every five minutes until the hour was up hissing in my ear, “Suck it up, Hosios.” If Noe wasn’t there—she would sit in the atrium with Melissa or Iris if she wasn’t on duty and tell stories to distract me and keep an eye on Tyche—each of these reminders came with a knee between my shoulderblades. So, I gleefully imagined putting a knee between hers as she rode out our gates for the last time with her father. I was even happier when the priests announced that Noe, as the most senior Hosios after Tyche, would take over as captain.

But if I have learned two things from the old myths, it is to be careful of what you ask the gods for and even warier if they give it to you. Once she was made captain, Noe started to spend less time with me, and when she did, she seemed distant: she talked less; she didn’t seem to want to cuddle or game or sing. For the first time in my two years on the guard, I started feeling alone again. Because when Tywas after me, at least I still had Noe. Now, it felt like I was losing her, too, and I couldn’t bear it.

“Are you angry with me?” I finally blurted out as we were washing up after training at the gymnasium, two months after Tyche had left. Noe stopped mid-scrape with her strigil and blinked at me.

“What? Of course not.”

“Have I done anything wrong? If I have, Noe, just tell me: I swear by the god I’ll fix it.”

She flicked the oily sand off her strigil into the waste jar and set the scraper on the rim, turning to face me. “Dia, what’s going on?”

“That’s what I’m asking you. You don’t hang out with us in the atrium at night anymore. You don’t smile at me or call me mikré anymore. What did I do?”

“Dia….” She rubbed an oily hand over her face. “First of all, you’re not a girl anymore. I don’t want to make you small in the eyes of the rest of the Hosioi by calling you pet names. As to the rest of it, it’s nothing to do with you. I have more responsibility as captain, that’s all. The priests and Pythia ask to meet with me more often, and what they tell me doesn’t always bring a smile to my face.” She picked up her strigil and started scraping again, jaw corded. I felt tears sting the corners of my eyes like sand.

“Noe, I’m sorry. Please don’t be mad at me.”

She looked up, startled, and then came and wrapped her arms around me–they felt warm and scratchy at the same time from the grit still stuck to them. “No, mikré, I’m sorry. This is all new to me, and I’m trying too hard to be perfect at it. It’s very like me. For both our sakes, I’ll try harder to be the old Noe instead. I promise. Okay?” She pulled back and wiped a tear from my cheek, smiled. But her smile didn’t look happy; it looked weary. She’s tired of me, I thought. It’s always like this. Everybody likes me at first, but then they get tired of me and want to get rid of me.

I know it wasn’t rational. Even Noe told me so when I tried to bring it up with her a few weeks later while we were on patrol. “Dia! How could anyone get tired of you?” she asked and tugged my braid with that same wan smile I was coming to hate. “What we do is just…hard. And it gets to me sometime. I get tired of it, yes. Never of you.”

“You’re tired of being a Hosios?” I demanded. “You’re going to limp away like Tyche?” I regretted saying it the moment it came out of my mouth, but I also was powerless to stop myself, as if some daemon was speaking through my mouth. For the first time in our friendship, I saw anger flash through Noe’s eyes, like lightning east to west. I braced myself for her to shout at me, hit me, even. But after a moment, the hard line of her shoulders sagged, and she sighed.

“I don’t know how many more times or in how many different ways I can say it, Dia. I’m not leaving–not the Hosioi, and not you. What will it take for you to believe me?” She searched my face with her eyes, earnest, pleading. For the first time in weeks, I felt like I was seeing the real Noe. But I had the strangest reaction. I suddenly felt cold all over. I looked at Noe and felt disgust at her beseeching eyes. The plain, strong features I had always loved so much seemed rough to me, pathetic. I turned away from her and stalked off down our patrol route.

“Nothing,” I tossed over my shoulder as I went. “Forget it.”

Like I said, I knew it wasn’t rational. I think I knew, even at the time, that what I was doing was dangerous, that I should stop. But I couldn’t. I still don’t know why. Looking back, all I can dredge up from the silt of my memory is fear. There had been no one in my life I could trust before Noe. She had told me she would never give up on me, never leave me, and for a while, I could to believe her. But something had changed. Perhaps the idea that she might get married and leave, that she might get tired of me: these were like tiny seeds of fear that had sprouted in me, and no matter how I tried to pluck out this shoot or that, they kept growing back from the roots, spreading faster than I could contain, winding around me, binding me tight and keeping me from saying any of this to Noe, finding the words to say what I was really feeling instead of harsh and hurtful things.

Noe tried hard to make up to me after that night on patrol, bringing me honey cakes, trying to draw me into talk about how I was feeling. All I could be was cold in return. I started avoiding her. We had added Gemma to our number to replace Tyche, and though she was a simple girl who couldn’t make me feel half as secure and loved as Noe did, she at least catered to me–laughing at my jokes and asking me for advice on how to improve her speed, her skill with the bow. I started sitting by Gemma nights in the atrium, letting her braid my hair. Sometimes, I caught Noe looking at us, and the sadness in her eyes gave me a rush so intense it felt like battle blood. But later lying alone on my pallet, the exhilaration drained away, and I felt empty. Still, I couldn’t stop myself or make myself do anything differently. My fear was wrapped around me like the tentacles of a great octopus now, and it was dragging me down into the dark.

When the snows broke up over Parnassus the following April, Zeus’s oracle at Dodona sent its traditional delegation over the passes to our spring festival. It was an important meeting of the two greatest Greek cults, and the days of preparation were a welcome distraction from my problems with Noe. Melissa told me that Zeus’s three prophetesses at Dodona were old women with feet caked with mud because they were never allowed to wash them or leave the sacred oak grove where they divined the god’s will by listening to the fall of acorns into bronze basins. So, they sent to us members of their private guard, the Pelioi.

Given the word meant “pigeons,” or “old men,” depending on the dialect, I wasn’t expecting the three Pelioi who showed up to sacrifice at Apollo’s altar with their contingent of scribes and attendants to be men our age. “Maybe they’re eunuchs,” Melissa whispered in my ear, horrified at the prospect. I squinted: they didn’t look like it. They were muscular, tan, dressed as soldiers in chitons, long cloaks and sandals, carrying short swords at the hip. One of them, beardless, carried a crossbow across his back as well. He was tall and lean with gray eyes and long, black ringlets curling away from the braids on his head. He was scanning the area much as I would have, looking for anything interesting, anything out of place. When his eyes landed on me, and he found me watching him, he smiled and inclined his head in a slight bow.

His name was Lycas. I learned this as we entertained the Pelioi in the atrium of the Pythia’s house while their captain conferred inside with the oracle and the captain of her guard. We brought the men apples and bread and cooked lamb skewers over the fire. Melissa immediately stuck herself to Lycas’s comrade, Aeron, like a burr to a sheep. He was a hulking blond lad with a fearsome beard. Lycas shivered slightly under his cloak on the bench across from me and drank deeply from his cup of hot wine.

“It’s blasted cold up here,” he said. “How do you live with it?”

I shrugged. “You get used to it. Is Dodona by the sea?”

“You’ve never been?”

I felt my cheeks flush. I wasn’t sure what I should tell this man and what I shouldn’t. It was clear that Delphi and Dodona shared some things with each other but kept others close to the chest. Truthfully the closest I had ever gotten to Dodona was the pass with the robbers, so I thought it was safe to shake my head at least. He nodded. “We’re on a ridge above the ocean, but not so high as this one.”

I leaned forward and flipped the skewers so they wouldn’t burn. “What do you think they’re talking about in there?” 

Aeron called out pompously, “State secrets. Above our pay grade.” Melissa giggled as if it were the funniest thing she ever heard and squeezed Aeron’s enormous bicep. I rolled my eyes behind my wine cup. When I lowered it, I found Lycas watching me with a smile playing at the corner of his mouth.

“How much does your captain tell you?”

“Nothing,” I snapped, making Iris pop her head up from her lyre and give me a warning glare. I put down my wine cup and grabbed the skewers off the fire using the hem of my tablos. “Let’s eat.”

Some number of empty wineskins later, Iris was asleep over her lyre, Melissa and Aeron had disappeared somewhere, and Lycas and I were left to tend the fire and wait for our captains. We were talking for some reason about the famous triremes we had seen–Lycas had grown up in a port city as I had. He yawned, stretched his back. 

“How much longer you think they’re going to be in there?” As the furs he had wrapped over his shoulders fell away, I tried not to stare at his collar bones, the lithe muscle in his neck. He had the build of a race horse or a hunting dog. Bred for speed. I wondered a few things, suddenly. One of them was if I could beat this man in a footrace. 

“Come on,” I said, throwing the stick I had been poking the fire with into the blaze and sending up a little explosion of sparks. “I want to show you something.”

We climbed up to the stadium. “By the gods,” panted Lycas as we reached the top step and the seats of the stadium glowed white in front of us under the moonlight. “That gets the blood pumping.”

“Not so much as this will,” I said, dropped my tablos, and took off running around the stadium. I heard him laugh, and then after a moment, I heard his feet behind me, pounding the turf. I dug in and pushed forward, using the wine and my anger with Noe for leaving me out in the cold as fuel. The dark shadows at the far curve of the stadium swallowed us. As we bolted back out into the silver light, I heard Lycas’s breath now, not just his feet. I tried to turn on another burst of speed, but my heart wasn’t in it. He caught me In a half dozen strides. His hand closed warm around my wrist, and then he was dragging me to a stop.

I turned, stumbled, fell laughing against him. He smelled like sweat, sheepskin, and cedar incense.

“Got you,” he murmured, and I felt it thrum in his chest. I reached up and tangled my hands in his ringlets, pulled his head down to mine, and kissed him.