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“Five! One would have saved us!”
    We recovered Diomache’s mother’s body, and my mother’s and father’s, on the eve of the third day. A squad of Argive infantry had set up camp around the gutted ruins of our farmhouse. Already surveyors and claims markers had arrived from the conquering cities. We watched, hidden, from the woods as the officials marked off the parcels with their measuring rods and scrawled upon the white wall of my mother’s kitchen garden and sign of the clan of Argos whose lands ours would now become.
    An Argive taking a piss spotted us. We took to flight but he called after us. Something in his voice convinced us that he and the others intended no harm. They had had enough of blood for now. They waved us in, gave us the bodies. I sponged the mud and blood off my mother’s corpse, using the singlet she had made for me, for my promised passage to Ithaka. Her flesh was like cold wax. I did not weep, neither shrouding her form in the burial robe she had woven with her own hands and which in its cupboard chest remained miraculously unstolen, nor interring her bones and my father’s beneath the stone that bore our ancestors’ blazon and signia.
    It was my place to know the rites, but I had not been taught them, awaiting my initiation to the tribe when I turned twelve. Diomache lit the flame, and the Argives sang the
paean,
the only sacred song any of them knew.

    Zeus Savior, spare us
    Who march into your fire

    Grant us courage to stand
    Shield-to-shield with our brothers

    Beneath your mighty aegis
    We advance

    Lord of the Thunder
    Our Hope and our Protector

    When the hymn was over, the men raped her.
    I didn’t understand at first what they intended. I thought she had violated some portion of the rite and they were going to beat her for it. A soldier snatched me by the scalp, one hairy forearm around my neck to snap it. Bruxieus found a spear at his throat and the point of a sword pricking the flesh of his back. No one said a word. There were six of them, armorless, in sweat-dark corselets with their rank dirty beards and the rain-sodden hair on their chests and calves coarse and matted and filthy. They had been watching Diomache, her smooth girl’s legs and the start of breasts beneath her tunic.
    â€œDon’t harm them,” Diomache said simply, meaning Bruxieus and me.
    Two men took her away behind the garden wall. They finished, then two more followed, and the last pair after that. When it was over, the sword was lowered from Bruxieus’ back, and he crossed to carry Diomache away in his arms. She wouldn’t let him. She stood to her feet on her own, though she had to brace herself against the wall to do it, both her thighs dark with blood. The Argives gave us a quarter-skin of wine and we took it.
    It was clear now that Diomache could not walk. Bruxieus took her up in his arms. Another of the Argives pressed a hard bread into my hands. “Two more regiments will be coming from the south tomorrow. Get into the mountains and go north, don’t come down till you’re out of Akarnania.” He spoke kindly, as if to his own son. “If you find a town, don’t bring the girl in or this will happen again.”
    I turned and spat on his dark stinking tunic, a gesture of powerlessness and despair. He caught my arm as I turned away. “And get rid of that old man. He’s worthless. He’ll only wind up getting you and the girl killed.”

FIVE
    T hey say that ghosts sometimes, those that cannot let go their bond to the living, linger and haunt the scenes of their days under the sun, hovering like substanceless birds of carrion, refusing Hades’ command to retire beneath the earth. That is how we lived, Bruxieus, Diomache and I, in the weeks following the sack of our city. For a month and more, for most of that summer we could not quit our vacated
polis.
We roamed the wild country above the
agrotera,
the marginal