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jaw, governed Aegolus like a king. All townspeople deferred to him.
    My home had no slaves. I lived in a mud-straw house with my father, mother, sisters and Aunt Cloethe, whose husband had been killed in the war with the Thessalonians. The women cooked outside our rear doorway and laundered clothing in the creek at the back of our courtyard. They couldn't leave our enclosure unescorted, but we village boys roamed everywhere, swimming in creek pools, catching salamanders, hurling rocks with homemade slings, and exploring where we liked.
    On some evenings my father took me to the open-air shrine with its painted wooden statues of the two gods under a decorated roof. The priest, who was also the village's chief plowman, sacrificed goats, sheep, pigs and occasionally dogs on altars beside the shrine, while all the men prayed to Zeus or Apollo for a good harvest, and some prayed for cures for ailments. During the sacrifices, the priest wore an ornate vestment and headdress. Helpers held the bleating animals on the altar. As I watched him ceremoniously plunge a decorated knife into a helpless creature, I cringed. It upset me, even though all the village men nodded and chanted in approval. Sometimes the sacrifices were burned and the men ate parts of the cooked meat.
    Our green valley had little contact with the outside world, except when Octavola relatives arrived on horseback to visit the Overseer or when our chief harvester hauled wagonloads of vegetables, wine, cheese, wheat and other produce to Kavopolis for sale. After one trip, the harvester returned with news that the mighty ruler Alexander, who conquered the Persians and all other kingdoms, had died at only thirty-three years of age. But such affairs of state were remote from us, except for the conscription of some village youths as Greek warriors, most of whom never returned.
    I was small in stature, but I began working in the fields alongside my father at age six and by ten was considered a full laborer. Occasionally we hoed and raked with my grandfather or my two uncles, also Aegolus field hands. The men often visited our home or met Father and me during sacrifices at the shrine. But their women remained invisible within their homes, in keeping with custom. I listened to the men discuss many things. They said some other Greek farms used slaves for labor, but the Octavolas preferred to hire freemen, thus avoiding the cost of armed guards and the risk of a slave uprising.
    "Besides," Uncle Kartos said sourly, "they pay us so little that we are barely above slaves."
    In spare hours I helped Grandfather with chores such as repairing the leaky thatch of his roof. He was a wise old man who taught me wonders of nature. We discussed the perfect patterns of spiderwebs, and the delicious smell of sassafras roots, and rainbows that appear only on rainy days when the sun emerges behind you, and the playful habits of otters raising their babies in creekbank burrows. He pointed out the faithfulness of male and female duck pairs swimming side by side. In the dark, on the creekbank, he showed me foxfire, the mysterious glow in rotting logs.
    To record the seasons, Grandfather and I watched the shadow of the porch roof on the outer wall of his home. When the shadow reached its lowest point on the wall—at midsummer, the longest day, when the sun was highest—we marked the shadow's location by scratching a notch in the wall. When the shadow reached its high point—at midwinter, the shortest day, when the sun was lowest—we did likewise. Thereafter, we observed the progression of the year by watching the roof shadow migrate upward and downward between the notches.
    Grandfather explained the cycle of the moon: The new moon begins as a sliver in the western sky after sunset, then grows thicker and more easterly each successive night, until it becomes a full disk in the east, then fades again. Each cycle requires nearly thirty days, and recurs more than a dozen times a year. The moon's