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eagle.”
    I RETURNED TO the gymnasium to find Timodemus still there with his uncle and trainer. He was safe enough, which left me free to visit the person I wanted most in the world to see.
    The women’s camp serves two purposes: it’s where the men who’ve brought their families can leave them so they don’t getin the way, and it’s also where the prostitutes—the cheap
pornoi
and the expensive hetaerae—set up for business. The women’s camp is on the west side of the river. On the east side are the men’s camps, the sports grounds, and the temples.
    Two soldiers of Elis guarded the ford across the river. They were dressed in formal armor of polished bronze to befit the occasion, their helmets tilted back on their heads for a quick pull-down if required, but they leaned on their spears while they argued over which team would win the chariot race the next morning. They ignored me completely as I passed by. There was considerable traffic back and forth, which they also ignored; I guessed the guards were more to ensure drunks didn’t trip and drown on the way across than for any pretense of security.
    The women’s camp was smaller than the men’s and tidier and smelled better. Unlike the men’s, it wasn’t divided into city camps, I suppose because there were fewer tents or because the women were less likely to riot. I had no trouble finding Diotima’s tent, because I had helped set it up.
    A knife flew past me as I entered. It almost went into my eye but missed to embed itself in the tent pole beside me.
    “Dear Gods! Do you want to kill me?”
    “Oh! I’m sorry, Nicolaos! I didn’t hear you coming.”
    She sat on a travel chest, dressed in a bland and well-worn chiton, and looking very, very beautiful. My wife. At least as far as I was concerned. Opinion was divided on our relationship. Diotima and I believed we were married. The rest of the world was sure we weren’t. We had carried out an ersatz version of the Athenian marriage rites in the midst of a bad situation, one in which neither of us had expected to survive. But we had, and now it looked like a quick trip to Hades might have been the better alternative.
    “Do you usually practice knife throwing in a tent?”
    Diotima grimaced. “Only when I’m bored out of my mind. Have you any idea how deadly it is in here?”
    I put out a finger to stop the knife’s quivering in the wooden pole. “I think I have some idea.”
    “No, you don’t. You’re not a woman.”
    “But I’m glad you are.”
    It had come as a shock to both our families when I arrived with Diotima on my arm. We’d come to Olympia direct from Asia Minor, because I knew Pericles would be here, and I needed to report on the outcome of our last mission, a delicate matter that had required a certain amount of discretion. I hadn’t expected to find my father, and we certainly hadn’t expected to find Diotima’s stepfather.
    My father was furious with me. He had twice before refused to negotiate for Diotima. By Athenian law he had every right to refuse, and as long as he did, by Athenian law the marriage had never happened.
    My girl had always been known as Diotima of Mantinea—the town of her mother’s birth—rather than by the name of her father, because she was the illegitimate child of a prostitute by a prominent citizen. Diotima had risen to become a priestess of Artemis, but the miasma of illegitimacy still clung to her. That had changed when Diotima’s mother finally married—not Diotima’s father, who had died, but a newly made citizen: the barbarian Pythax.
    Pythax was, if possible, even more angry with me for marrying Diotima than my own father was. He’d become responsible for Diotima the moment he married her mother. Now he faced the prospect of a daughter for whom he could never hope to find a good husband, because I had, in his words, “soiled” the love of my life. No Athenian father would accept Diotima as wife for his son in her new and entirely