The cart jolts along the frozen track from the city, rattling her teeth with every bounce. Selene shivers and hugs her cloak tighter to her chest. The little pony cart gives no protection from this wind, an icy gale that blows down from the Golden Horn and whirls snowflakes around her so thick she can hardly see. Her eyes stream with tears. From the wind? From humiliation? Anger? All.
Her mare lowers its head to the wind and struggles on, as cold as she is, poor beast. When at last they reach her father’s house, it turns in at the path and heads for the shed, needing no word from her. It whinnies and there is an answering whinny. Alypius’s pair. He is here again. Now she sees his big covered carriage with its gilded doors and velvet curtains pulled up beside the house. The liveried coachman emerges from the shed and runs toward her.
“Let me help you down, Miss. You must be half frozen.” Miss. As though she were a mere girl without a husband. “I’ll see your animal is rubbed down and fed. We’ve brought a bushel of good fodder with us this time.”
“Thank you, Paulus.” She doesn’t like accepting these favors. There have been too many of them.
Alypius meets her at the door and draws her inside, putting his big hands around hers and rubbing them. A handsome man of middle age, his hair blond with gray starting in it, a comfortable paunch, florid face, expensive clothes. “Horrid weather to be out in. What were you thinking, Selene? Why didn’t you ask to use my coach and driver? Melampus tells me you went to see some petty bureaucrat? I hope you found him, at least.”
The room is stifling, braziers smoking in every corner of it. The charcoal another gift from Alypius. Well, they need it, don’t they? In spite of the heat, her father lies in his bed, wrapped in blankets up to his chin. He lifts an eyebrow at her. Was Psellus there? What did he say you?
“No,” she answers both of them. “It seems the man has moved house lately. I went to the palace but no one there would tell me anything.”
“Shocking,” says Alypius in his loud baritone. “Can’t say I’m surprised. These high and mighty officials. But why didn’t you ask me to go with you? I’m not without influence, you know.” She knows. He says so often enough. “Anyway, sit and have something warm to drink. Your father and I have had a jolly time, talking about demons and spirits and such. I always enjoy our conversations.” Does he, really? Alypius claps his hands. “Martha, bring your mistress a warm posset.” He orders their servant around as though he were in his own house. “Come, take that off, it’s wet.” He removes her cloak for her, leaving his hands on her shoulders a moment too long. “Still no news of your husband, then?” Have they no secrets at all from this man? She has little to say to Alypius, but her father … the old man, so trusting, so guileless.
She goes to the bed and kisses his forehead, the skin dry and yellow as parchment. He never leaves his bed anymore, the tremors are too violent for him to stand, and he has no more breath in him. The vapors of mercury—the precious stuff of Hermes, the key that he hoped would let him perfect nature, turn base metal into gold, maybe even bestow immortality—they are killing him instead. He smiles at her wanly, “When spring comes, my dear, the sailing season. I’m sure …” He pats her hand.
When spring comes. They always say this. But Odd has been gone for two springs now. It has been a year-and-a-half since his one letter arrived from Messina. It has been eight months since the money stopped arriving from the Logothete’s office, money they depended on to survive—or would, if it weren’t for Alypius. “When spring comes,” she and her father tell each other, each pretending, for the other’s sake, to believe it. And meanwhile not a word from Psellus. He has abandoned them, or maybe is just embarrassed to have nothing for them. And she has been too proud to ask, until finally Melampus pleaded with her to go and speak to him, and she couldn’t refuse any more because her father will soon be dead. They both know it. So she went, carrying a bundle of the letters they have written to Odd over these months, written and saved with no way to send them—and failed to find Psellus. And now what?
Myrinna, Alypius’s eight-year-old daughter, has been playing in the corner with little Gunnar and the monkey. She runs up to Selene and takes her hands. “Didn’t you bring me anything from the city, Auntie?” When did she become this girl’s ‘auntie’?
“I’m sorry, no, dear. How are you feeling today?” Myrinna is thin, with mouse-colored hair and skin you can almost see through.
One always has to ask how Myrinna is feeling. She has a variety of complaints. Her father brought her to their door back in the summer of’thirty-eight, not long after Odd had sailed away. A widower with a sick child, needing to consult a doctor. He was, he told them, an architect and builder, of good family, doing very well for himself. He had a house in the city that was much too big for him, he said, and an olive orchard he had recently bought in their neighborhood. Melampus had been recommended by a mutual acquaintance—both as physician and as delver into the mysteries of the cosmos. Since then, his daughter seems never to get much better or much worse, but Alypius continues to bring her, once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. Once there was an unexplained hiatus of several months and then he reappeared. He always pays Melampus’s fee as if this were a real consultation, although it is obvious that the old man is past curing anyone. And he always brings food and charcoal. Unobtrusively, not with any great display. But there it is. And there are more intimate gifts for her—an amethyst bracelet, a topaz ring. These she has tried to refuse, but he won’t allow it. You don’t argue with Alypius. And what, Selene asks herself, will he demand in return? He has done nothing so far but look at her. But she feels herself go rigid when she knows his eyes are on her.
Now Gunnar runs up to her, clutching Ramesses in his little yellow coat. The children have been feeding him chestnuts. She lifts boy and beast in the air and spins them around. Odd once laughed that if they had a baby it would resemble the monkey. She smiles to think of it. What a handsome boy he is now! Sturdy legs and strong arms, straight black brows and long lashes, and his head a mass of unruly black curls. ‘Tangle-Hair’, she calls him sometimes.
Tangle-Hair. Is he alive or dead? Happy or sad? Alone or with a woman? Has he forgotten them entirely? At night, when Gunnar crawls up beside her in the bed, she lies awake for hours, stroking his hair and thinking. What would she do if Odd were to walk in the door at that moment? Throw herself in his arms, or spit in his eye? Sometimes she feels one way and sometimes the other. It wearies her to think of it.
And when Alypius, as he too often does, delivers his thoughts on the subject of barbarians, his face pulled into a sympathetic frown, his voice insinuating—“Can’t trust those fellows, all of’em the same, irresponsible, care about nothing but their bellies and their balls, pardon my bluntness”—then she excuses herself and goes into the bedroom and fights back her tears.
She has tried again to see Psellus, and this time has gone into the palace and wandered the corridors until someone shows her to the Logothete’s suite of offices. But Psellus isn’t there. She waits in an anteroom for hours, watching men come and go, catching at scraps of whispered conversation. An elderly usher takes pity on her, gives her a cup of water and a sympathetic smile. Should she have brought money for a bribe? That’s how things are done here. But she has none.
She is about to go when suddenly Psellus bustles through the door, dictating a letter to a secretary who trails behind him. She catches at his sleeve as he passes by. He is startled. At first, he seems not to recognize her. Then he looks embarrassed, apologetic. “Selene, what a long time it’s been! News of Odd? Alas, no. The siege drags on. Frustrating for all of us. Our communications with Sicily, well, they’ve rather broken down. But we haven’t heard that he’s dead. Always room to hope. Send someone to find him? I’m afraid that’s not possible. The subsidy? I’m terribly sorry, these days we must all make sacrifices. I’d like to help, truly.” He reaches into the purse at his belt and pulls out a few silver coins. “Afraid I haven’t much on me, but, you know, whatever I—”
She hesitates an instant, then snatches them from his hand and flees.
“I’ll send a man with …” Psellus starts to say, but she has already vanished down the crowded corridor.
At home again, she sits by her father’s bed. Mercifully, Alypius isn’t here and they can speak freely, father and daughter.
“If he offered you marriage, my dear?” She has to strain to make out his words, his voice is like a whisper of wind in tall grass.
“I am married, Father.”
“But we must be practical, about money, you know. I never was. Forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive.” She kisses his hand, dropping a tear on it.
He goes on. “Alypius likes you … more than likes. I notice things, you know. Needs a woman in his house, Myrinna needs a mother, Gunnar a father. I loved Odd, too, but we must be realistic. I won’t be here—”
“Stop now, please.”
“A carriage ride’s just the thing,” Alypius says. “Lovely weather out, everything blooming, we’ll bundle him up, do the old fellow good, fresh air, take the young’uns along too, where are they, outside?”
They thought Melampus was asleep. He’d had a very bad night, coughing, struggling to breathe, but finally dropped off around sunrise. Suddenly, he sits bolt upright in the bed. “Odd! It’s Odd!”
She rushes to his side, puts her arm around his thin shoulders to hold him up. “What about Odd? What do you see?”
Because as the soul parts from the body it sees more clearly. Everyone, knows that.
“Darkness … pain, such pain … no hope …”
“Father, don’t say so.”
The old man’s heart is fluttering like a bird’s, his eyes fixed in a distant stare. What does he see?
“Selene, you … you …”
“Hush, dear.” Then the eyes go blank. A thread of saliva runs from the corner of his mouth. His soul flies up to the stars, where Thrice-Great Hermes reigns and everything is gold.
She lays her head on his breast and lets her tears flow.
Alypius comes up behind her, touches her on the back. “Well,” he says and clears his throat. “Very sad, very sad. I know he had his own notions about religion but I’ll see he gets a proper Christian burial nonetheless. Can’t be too careful in these matters. You leave everything to me.”