She dropped off her balcony on to the beach and froze as she heard movement to her left. Barefoot in the sand, she moved slowly and carefully back into the shadow of the house, at the same time drawing her Sakje akinakes.
She saw her brother drop to the sand from his own balcony and she almost laughed aloud – but she couldn’t be sure that they were on the same side when it came to her running away. She wondered where he was going, and then she caught a glint of gold. He was well dressed. Amastris.
She gave the superior smile of the sister, crouched down on her haunches and waited for him to vanish up the beach. When he was gone, his footsteps lost in the noise of drunken sailors, she picked up her armour and the leather wallet that held the rest of her boy’s clothes, and ran off along the strand, past the beached squadrons of Ptolemy’s fleet until she reached some lower and thus less opulent houses, where she cut inland. She leaned against a stable to clean her feet before pushing them into Thracian boots. Other expeditions in boy’s clothes had taught her that her hands and feet gave her away more than her breasts – carefully bound and now almost flat under her Sakje jacket.
Just short of the northern agora, she stopped, straightened her clothes and began to walk purposefully, like a man in a hurry. Not like a girl running away.
The agora was busy, despite the darkness, and she wanted to linger. There were torches everywhere and the heady odour of burning pitch filled the air along with the reek of patchouli and the smell of burning garlic and unwashed people. She wanted to be part of everything.
The night market was a strange world where the thieves and the pornai and the beggars ruled, where soldiers were customers and slaves paid to be entertained. In some ways, it was the daytime world stood on its head, as Menander had so rightly observed. Menander was sometimes a denizen of the night market himself, and his plays were full of night-market expressions.
She bought a skewer of meat – probably rats or mice – from a girl no older than five, who took the money with the concentration a young child gives to an adult task, while her mother serviced a noisy soldier in the booth behind her.
‘I couldn’t – I had to come,’ Xeno said beside her, and she looked up into his eyes.
‘You found me in the night market? You must be part dog!’ she said. She ought to have been angry, but instead she squeezed his hand.
They wandered from stall to stall, paid a blind singer with a kithara for his songs and watched a troupe of slave acrobats perform for free what their master charged heavily for them to perform at a symposium or a private house.
‘The archer-captain is sitting over there with his mates, drinking wine and telling lies,’ Xeno said with a smile. ‘I told him a bit about you – not about you being a girl, of course. About how you were small and you can shoot.’
She kissed him on the nose, as she had seen boys do with their men, even in public. ‘I take back all those things I say about you behind your back,’ she said.
Xeno winced. There was some fear in him, some hesitation, and it annoyed her.
‘Let’s go and meet this captain,’ she said.
They wandered across the agora, avoiding a deadly brawl so sudden and explosive that Xeno was splattered in blood and Melitta found that she had her akinakes in her fist before she thought to draw it.
‘This your little archer, Master Xenophon?’ asked a deep voice, while Xeno was still wiping the blood off his face. He was looking at the body as if he’d recognize the victim any moment, but he turned.
‘Captain Idomeneus!’ he said. ‘My friend-’
‘Bion,’ Melitta said, offering her hand to clasp the archer’s. He was a Cretan by his accent, and he looked like a caricature of Hephaestos – his face was handsome enough, but he was short and wide, with powerful arms and short legs. Indeed, he only topped her by a couple of fingers.
She must have looked at him too long, because he gave a fierce grin. ‘Like what you see, boy? My dick is short and broad, too. Hah!’ He had a mastos cup in his hand, and he drank wine from it. ‘No offence, boy. You can shoot?’
‘Anything,’ Melitta said. ‘I’ve been shooting since I was four years old. I can hit a target seven times out of ten at half a stade. I can-’
‘You can string a bow? Avoid bragging, boy, it’s too fucking easy for me to test you tomorrow. What kind of bow do you have? Let me see it.’ He didn’t seem drunk, but a whole life spent with Philokles had taught her that some men could operate efficiently through a haze of wine.
She took her bow from its gorytos and handed it over.
He whistled. ‘Sakje? Maybe you ain’t so full of shit, boy. It’s your size. Made for you?’
She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘You Sakje, boy?’ he asked. ‘People going to come looking for you?’ There was something in his tone that she liked – a firmness that showed his command skills. So she told him the truth.
‘I have family here,’ she said. ‘They might look for me. Even if they find me, I doubt they’ll make a fuss.’
‘Rich kid?’ Idomeneus asked.
Melitta shrugged. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, trying to roughen her voice and sound tough.
The Cretan grabbed her by the ear and pulled her face close to a torch. She flinched, grabbed his hand in a pankration hold and rotated his arm, using the hand as purchase.
‘Whoa!’ the Cretan called. ‘Hold!’
She let him go. He rubbed his shoulder. ‘I think you speak like a boy who had a tutor,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to waste my time visiting magistrates and archons. And,’ he shrugged, his eyes flashing in the torchlight, ‘if I didn’t know better, I might wonder if you were a girl. Not that I particularly give a shit, you understand. Just that if an outraged father or brother kills me, I’ll haunt you. You as good as that bow says you are?’
‘Yes,’ Melitta said.
The Cretan shrugged. ‘Okay. I’m desperate, which this young animal has no doubt told you. We need archers the way a man in the desert needs water. You’re on. If your father comes for you, though, I’ll hand you over in a heartbeat. Understand me, boy?’
Melitta stood straighter. ‘Yes, sir!’
‘Pluton, none of my boys call me “sir”.’ Idomeneus grinned, his teeth glinting in the torchlight. ‘Can I buy you two a cup of wine to seal the bargain?’
Melitta wanted to accept, but Xeno shook his head. ‘I thought I’d go to the slave auction,’ he said.
Melitta flinched. ‘You know how Uncle-’ She reconsidered her sentence. ‘What do you want with a slave?’ she asked.
Idomeneus gave her a steady look. Xeno glanced around nervously. ‘I want a shield-bearer,’ he said. ‘I have all my share from the ship. All the rich boys have a shield-bearer.’
‘A fool and his money,’ the Cretan muttered. ‘Listen, boys – never buy anything at the night auction. Half those poor bastards were just kidnapped off the street, and the other half are shills who follow you home just to help their allies rob your house.’
‘I can’t afford anything at the day market,’ Xeno said. He was avoiding Melitta’s glares.
‘Go without,’ the archer-captain said, with all the firmness of age and experience. ‘Oh, fine. I’ll go with you – otherwise you’ll both end up on the block. Argon?’ he called, and another Cretan stepped away from a big fire, downed the wine in a cheap clay cup and handed it to another man.
‘With you, humpback. Who’s this boy?’ Argon was taller and handsomer and didn’t look very bright.
‘Bion – just joined. We’re going to the night auction. Come and cover my arse.’ Idomeneus grinned and the two men slapped each other’s backs.
The four of them made their way to the auction, where a deep throng of onlookers – many of them slaves themselves – gathered to bid on the dregs of the dregs of the city of Alexandria. Melitta was disgusted by the whole process – she shared her uncle’s views on every aspect of the trade. Most of the people on auction were hopeless – the kind you saw on the fringe of the agora in the daytime, begging and stealing, many scarcely capable of speech. They were scrawny, ill fed, most had few teeth and all flinched whenever a free man came too close. The only healthy, normal-looking specimens were children, and their version of normality was abject terror at being sold. One boy sobbed incessantly.