Aristophanes clapped a firm hand on Euripides’s shoulder. “Good men lead quiet lives, as old Euripides likes to say, don’t you, Euripides?”
Euripides opened his mouth but said nothing, nodding shyly instead.
Aristophanes blared on exuberantly with a glowing review of his own dramatic works, while Sophocles shifted and shuffled behind him, trying to make eye contact with his lover. But Aristophanes was set on having Euripides for himself, it seemed.
“All three love each other really,” said a light voice behind Kassandra.
Kassandra swung around. Nothing.
“Down here,” the voice continued.
Kassandra dropped her gaze to waist height. A doe-eyed girl stared up at her, biting her lip, face wrinkled with guilt and a dash of defiance.
“Phoibe?”
Phoibe threw her arms around Kassandra’s waist. “I missed you terribly,” she wailed into Kassandra’s stola. “After you left, Markos looked after me well enough, but then he found out about the eye. He convinced me to lend it to him so he could invest it, and promised to double its value.” She sighed.
“Phoibe, you didn’t…”
“He lost it all.”
Kassandra’s teeth ground. “Of course he did.”
“He was distraught for days on end. It was only new and more dreadful business ideas that brought him back to his usual self. He wanted to steal a herd of cattle from the estate north of Mount Ainos. It was a ludicrous plan that involved me wearing a cow suit.” She shook her head. “Anyway, it has been a year since you left, and I knew I had to come in search of you. I sneaked aboard one of the supply ships bringing timber to the Piraeus harbor. I now work for Aspasia, wife of Perikles. I am a servant, yes, but at least I don’t have to wear a cow suit. I knew you would come here eventually. Everyone does, they say. Tonight, when I saw you, I…” She fell silent, her eyes brimming over with tears. Kassandra held her tight, kissing the top of her head, enjoying the familiar scent of her hair, stamping down on the deeper wells of emotion that tried to rise from her heart.
“Tell me why—why did you not return to Kephallonia,” said Phoibe, “even just to let me know you were well?”
“Because the quest I set out upon has grown horns, tentacles and talons.” Kassandra sighed. “My mother lives, Phoibe.”
Phoibe’s eyes grew moonlike. “She lives? But you told me—”
Kassandra placed a finger over her lips. Phoibe was one of the few who knew everything. “I told you what I thought was true. I was wrong. She lives. Where, I don’t know. That is why I am here. Someone here tonight might know.”
“Aspasia will help you,” she said confidently, straightening up. “Everyone here knows something, but she knows nearly everything. She is as bright and shrewd as Perikles himself. Brighter, even, say some.”
“Where is she?” Kassandra asked, seeing no women present.
“Oh, she is here.” Phoibe smiled knowingly.
Thucydides and his military men called Phoibe over, waving their empty wine cups. Phoibe rolled her eyes then hurried over to tend to them.
Kassandra moved to the edge of the room, rested a shoulder on the edge of a doorway and tried to work out who to approach next. From behind the door—locked—muffled voices spoke. Her ears pricked up and every half-formed word she heard was like a shiny coin landing in her purse. Anything, she willed herself to hear, even the smallest clue.
“Wider, wider. Yes… yes!” A squeal of delight. A sucking noise and then a popping sound, quickly followed by a gasp of pleasure and a joint cry of delight from a group of voices. Instinctively, she jolted upright, as if the wall itself were part of this debauched tryst. The door rattled from the force of her movement.
Footsteps, then the door swung open. A golden-haired vision stood within, chiseled and young, standing proud. He was pale-skinned and blue-eyed, wearing just a leather cord around his neck and a diaphanous silk scarf around his waist. Standing proud in all senses, Kassandra realized, cocking her head to one side then looking up again. Behind him, the room glowed with the light of a few oil lamps and weltered with sweet incense smoke, steam from a sunken bath and the heat of naked bodies. Men and women writhed on the beds and couches, all across the floor, under the table. Glistening buttocks and bouncing breasts—all of varying standards, moans of pleasure and tangles of limbs.
“Ah, another participant?” the golden-haired man grinned.
“Possibly,” she said, seeing an opening.
“Alkibiades. Perikles’s nephew.” He bowed, taking and kissing her hand, his eyes drinking in her body’s every contour.
“I’m looking for a woman,” Kassandra said.
Alkibiades’s grin widened and he extended a hand, gesturing toward a voluptuous older lady who was sitting on her own by the side of a sunken bath. The woman shot Kassandra a lustful glower, running her tongue across her perfect teeth, her raven hair spilling in coils across her shoulders as she slid her legs apart.
Kassandra arched an eyebrow. “No, that’s not what I meant.”
“A man then?” he suggested, his waist scarf twitching.
“It depends on what that man can tell me.”
“I can tell you anything you’d like to hear. Come, come.” He beckoned her in.
Kassandra set down her wine and water kraters and stepped inside. “I seek a woman called—”
Alkibiades shot a hand across her front, like a barrier, halting her and swinging the door closed with a click. With his other hand, still across her front, he traced her breasts. She balled a fist, feeling a strong urge to break his jaw as she had done with the opportunistic Spartan in Stentor’s camp… but then she saw the glint of opportunity.
She relaxed her fist, stepped toward him and pressed her lips to his. He chuckled softly as they kissed, his lips hot and wet, his tongue venturing into her mouth. He wrapped his muscle-bound arms around her and she felt him guiding her toward a rare free couch, but she halted him with a hand on his broad chest, pulling back, knowing she had the fish on the hook. “I’m looking for a woman who fled Sparta a long, long time ago,” she said.
Alkibiades whimpered, face still contorted for more kissing, eyes still half-closed. When he realized the tryst was on hold until he answered, he shook his head as if to clear away the haze of desire. “Fled Sparta? No one flees Sparta. And alone?” He blew air through his lips. “But, let’s pretend she did. Come to Athens without a male chaperone and she’d be arrested. Thebes, Boeotia, all the rest it would be the same. If she was smart, she’d go to the one place where women can be free and independent.”
Kassandra stared at him, her hard eyes demanding the rest.
“Korinthia,” he said. “The Hetaerae of the temples are the heart of that city. Aye, they lie with men for money and gifts, but only because it is the will of the Gods. They are strong, free…” His eyes grew distant, his lips quirking with some debauched memory. “Imaginative.”
She clicked her fingers a few times in front of his eyes, breaking the spell.
He shook his head. “Anthousa is the one you should speak to. Korinthia is in her care as much as Athens is in Perikles’s…” He sighed, glancing over her shoulder at the door. “For now, anyway.”
Outside, she heard a muffled voice. Someone speaking in strained, panicked tones. Herodotos?
She stepped away from Alkibiades, deliberately brushing his groin scarf. “Thank you, Alkibiades. Perhaps when next we meet I can show you a thing or two.”