The Sweet Girl Read Online Free PDF

their own right. It’s living memory; Daddy himself saw the battle where the king cut Athens down. They grumble and chafe and snigger and sneer, and fail to notice the Macedonian girl with the Athenian accent who understands more about democracy and empire than they ever will.
    The pot’s heavy; I balance it on my hip like the servant women do. I want to buy a bird, too, feeling momentousness in the air, but Herpyllis is possessive of the marketing and will find something wrong with it. I can do the heavy pots, but the party pieces she likes to save for herself.
    The walk to the beach is long with the pot denting my hip. Tycho wants to carry it, but he already has the towels and lunch and waterskins and my books. We scramble over the hot rocks, away from the popular swimming spots, until we find a deserted scythe of sand at the bottom of a steep rock-dislodging scramble, sheltered by cliffs, with a little sea cave for privacy. I undress and dive into the water while Tycho sinks sticks in the sand and arranges a little oilskin tent for me. When I come out the lentil pot has disappeared, probably into his pack. He’s put my food on plates, poured me a cup of water, and arranged mybooks in the tent, then gone to sit some distance away on the rocks, staring out to sea.
    I eat and drink and pick at the blister from the lentil pot puffing on my palm. I build an obstacle course for the thumbnail–sized crab I’ve brought up from the water’s edge and watch him negotiate sand hummocks and rivulets of my drinking water. Once I look for Tycho and see him down at the water-line, picking shells from the kelp and sucking them out. Every now and then he splashes water on his bristly skull, cooling off.
    Late in the afternoon, we pack for home. My palm’s seeping a little and I don’t ask for the pot. We stop by Gaiane’s house for a visit, but the slave who goes to her room to announce me returns saying she’s indisposed. She’s never turned me away before. But two babies in the four years since her marriage, one stillbirth, and pregnant again; indisposed . I don’t think anything of it.
    Sure enough, Herpyllis has felt the turbulence as I have, in the cooking part of her brain, and has bought a pheasant on her own trip to the market. Nico, twelve summers now, is in the courtyard playing Greeks and Persians with the tail feathers. Herpyllis and I make a walnut sauce.
    “Do you think it’s true?” she asks me, pausing the pestle.
    Tycho appears at that moment to set the lentil pot just inside the kitchen doorway. I lift it to its place on the shelf.
    “Yes,” I say. “I think it’s true.”
    Herpyllis shakes her head, blinking hard.

    At supper, when Daddy asks me how I spent my day, I tell him some of what I heard. Some, not all. I don’t tell him about the laughter.
    “Never mind, pet,” he says. “He’s died at least a dozen times in the last year. He’ll die a few more before we need to start paying attention.”
    Still, his long fingers fidget with a napkin. He’s a bad liar but a good worrier. If he really thought the rumour were true, there’d be tears. All the same, he doesn’t like to think of it; it upsets him. He was once like a father to the king, long ago, or so he likes to claim. Herpyllis is glaring at me for upsetting him.
    “There was a nice breeze by the sea,” I say. “Cooler than in town. We should take a picnic sometime.” Her glare softens. “Just the four of us.” She smiles. “We could take the cart. Spend the day.”
    My little brother groans.
    “Absolutely not,” Daddy says. “Rattle my bones loose. I ache enough as it is. Do you want to finish me?”
    Herpyllis immediately does a switchback. “You could have thought of that yourself,” she says to me. “You know your father hates the seaside.”
    “Since when?” I say.
    “Why don’t we eat cat?” Nico asks. Sweet, worried clown. I love his furrowed face. He holds something up on a knife. “Is this cat? It tastes like