King of the Bosphorus

2

Of all the places in the world for a woman to give birth, there weren't many that could better Alexandria.

Melitta lay on the special kline that the doctors had brought her and chewed idly on the leather strap she had for labour pains. She was covered in sweat, and her bloated body was fighting with all of its not-inconsiderable strength to push the baby out, and she still had the capacity to think about her brother, out on the wine-dark sea, conquering their kingdom while she lay on a bed conquering her pregnancy. That's how she had come to think of it – a conquest. Nothing in her life – not war, not abduction, not the threat of assassination – had prepared her for the discomfort, the enforced idleness and the boredom of pregnancy.

'Here they come again,' she muttered. Her room was full of doctors and midwives – too many people, she thought. Sappho had ignored Nihmu's advice – that Nihmu and Sappho should deliver the baby themselves.

Wave of pain. She bit down on the leather strap, convulsed with the thing – palpable, like lying in water, except that this was inside and outside her.

'Not long now,' the man nearest the bed said. Nearchus – Leon's personal physician.

Nihmu had one of her hands. 'Breathe!' she said in her Sakje-accented Greek. 'He is right,' she said with a smile that Melitta could just see through the tangle of her hair. 'You are almost done.'

'Very lucky, for such a young girl,' another voice said.

Wave.

As she surfaced from the latest wave, she realized that they were right, and everything that the priestesses of Hathor and the priestesses of Hera said was true – the waves came closer and faster and lasted longer. She could no longer hold an image of her brother's expedition in her head. There was no reality beyond the-

Wave.

This time, she became aware that something around her was wrong. Nihmu's hand was gone and there were men shouting – and blood – blood like red water flowing over her. She reached out – shouted. She could feel the next wave building already, could feel her whole groin convulsing, could feel that lovely alien presence coming – it was happening now.

If that's my blood, I'm in trouble! she thought. Something or someone landed right on her legs, and she gave a choked scream and the next wave came-

She fought to escape it, to see… brushed the sweaty hair out of her eyes and screamed. Shouting… the ring of bronze and iron… the scent of blood. She tried to focus… something… fighting?

'Get him!' roared a voice by the door, and then another… clang of bronze… 'Guards!'… 'See to my lady!'-

Wave!

'Still there, love?' Nihmu said by her ear. People were pressed against her so tightly she couldn't breathe, and there was weight on her legs that she didn't like, and shouting – men's voices.

'Breathe, honey bee.' Nihmu was there. 'Get her off her legs,' she said.

The weight came off her legs even as she felt herself opening, opening-

Wave! This one didn't stop. She rode it like a ship on the sea, and suddenly-

'I see the head!' Nihmu shouted. 'Clear the room!'

'Yes, lady!' Hama answered. Even in waves of pain and the confusion of whatever had just happened, Melitta knew Hama's Celtic Greek. What on earth was he doing in her birth room?

'Push!' Nihmu and Nearchus spoke together, sounding eerily like a god.

She didn't really need to push any more than she already was. Her hips rose a fraction and suddenly it all came together. She tasted blood in her mouth and the muscles in her stomach and pelvis found a different purchase, almost like the first time she had mounted a horse under her own power – the triumph of the heartbeat in which all her weight shifted and she knew she would make it up Bion's back – a flood of release, a wet triumph.

And a cry. 'Now see to Sappho!' Nihmu said.

'A boy!' Sappho said, and her voice sounded weak.

Melitta seemed to surface, as if she'd been swimming in murky water. The room looked as if someone had tossed buckets of blood at it – the smooth plastered walls were strangely splashed, and the floor was wet.

'Hathor!' Melitta said. She saw her son – the blood – her son. 'Artemis!' she said. 'Ah, my beauty,' she said and reached her arms for him.

There was blood everywhere. Sappho was lying on the floor, her head on Nearchus's lap. Nihmu stood between her legs with the baby in her arms. Even as Melitta watched, Nihmu caught the cord in her teeth and cut it with a silver knife – a Sakje tradition. The baby wailed.

The child's grandfather – Coenus, a Megaran gentleman and now a mercenary, whose son, the newborn's father, was eight months in his grave – appeared at Nihmu's shoulder. He had a sword in his hand that dripped blood on his hand.

'Gods!' he said, his eyes wide. 'He's splendid! Well done, little mother!' And to Nihmu, 'I have two files of men hunting him – them. What in Hades happened?'

Melitta sank back on the kline. 'May I hold my son?' she asked.

Nihmu placed the baby on her breast but her eyes were still on Coenus, because he looked grey. 'What happened?' he asked again. He was looking at the floor.

'One of the doctors tried to kill Melitta,' Nihmu said. 'Sappho stopped him.'

'That's insane!' Coenus said. 'The blood!'

'Mine,' Sappho murmured. 'And his!' She pointed at the Jewish physician who their friend Ben Zion had provided. He was lying on top of his own guts, already dead. 'He tackled the man – gods, he died for us, and he didn't even know us!' Sappho was bleeding slowly from her upper thigh – a wound that Nearchus held together with one hand while he scrambled to make a tourniquet with the other.

'Help me!' he shot at Coenus.

Coenus knelt by Sappho and vanished from Melitta's view.

'Put your hand here and grab – harder! Don't be afraid of a woman's thigh – she's going to die if I don't get this closed.' Nearchus was suddenly a battlefield commander, his voice hard.

'The curtain ties,' Nihmu said. 'Or her girdle.'

Nearchus had the ties off the seaward window in three heartbeats, and in two more he had the rope around her thigh.

'Hold that there. No, like this. Now I have to find it and sew it. Hippocrates, stand with me. Hermes, by my shoulder.' Murmuring prayers, Nearchus snatched a set of tools from his bag between Melitta's feet.

Melitta couldn't watch – she had her infant on her breast and she couldn't muster the strength to rise.

Nihmu crouched by her head and took her hand. 'Let me see him, honey bee. See? Perfect. Not a flaw. Take my hand. He's just stitching her thigh – oh, Lord of Horses, that's a big cut. I'm sorry, honey bee, I'm… she's-'

Melitta raised her head to see Sappho's foot stomp the floor weakly.

'Hold on, lady! I've got the vessel!' Nearchus sounded triumphant. 'Hippocrates, this stuff is hard to sew.'

'Do it, man!' Coenus grunted.

'One more turn! One more. Got it – let off that rope – slowly – one turn. Another turn. Aphrodite stand by this woman. Artemis, stand away – you need not take my mistress yet…' Nearchus's voice trailed on – endearments, comments.

'Now what?' Coenus asked.

'Now we wait,' Nearchus muttered. A day later, and Sappho was alive. Melitta was alive – in fact, she felt better already. She sat up, nursed her son and watched slaves and house servants clean the birth room with religious intensity. The servant women came and looked at her baby and complimented her, cooing at it and suggesting names.

Melitta had expected to be bitter – she was missing the great adventure, the reconquest of the Tanais. Even now, her brother was probably master of Pantecapaeum.

She found that she was perfectly happy to be a mother with a healthy baby, and two days later, when Sappho, pale as death from blood loss, allowed her eyes to flutter open and was pronounced likely to live, Melitta was happier still.

It took her several days – feeding her son all the time, watching the slave girls change him and being visited at regular intervals by an absurdly uncomfortable Coenus – before she got the whole story: the mad doctor who drew a knife and was stopped only by Sappho's reckless courage in putting her hand under the knife and then her body across Melitta's; the Jewish doctor who tackled the assassin, dying for his efforts but getting the man clear.

'Sophokles,' she said, shaking her head.

Coenus, sitting stiffly at the foot of her bed, nodded. 'So I assume. Which means he's still in Alexandria.'

'And we let him in!' Melitta said. 'As a doctor?'

Coenus shook his head. 'None of the other doctors knew him. He might have come in with slaves, with servants – we weren't taking any precautions.'

'Well,' Melitta said, with all of her returning strength. 'Well, it'll be all right. You'll see.'

Coenus shifted uncomfortably. 'Have you thought of a name, my dear?'

Melitta shrugged. 'No,' she said. 'Among the Sakje, we name a child on the thirtieth day after its birth. When we know it will live.'

Coenus nodded. 'This boy – he'll be my heir. He means a great deal to me, Melitta. When Xeno died-' Coenus didn't choke a tear, he was too strong and too much the aristocrat for that, but his pause was eloquent. 'This child – I mean to stand by him. Despite the fact that you were not formally wed, I – I hope that-'

'Foolish uncle!' Melitta shook her head. 'You will be his father in many ways, Uncle Coenus. And of course I see your interest. Men! Heirs! A daughter would be your heir with twice the surety!' She gave him an impish grin and he returned a frown.

'A daughter would not have carried my name,' he said.

Melitta laughed. 'Oh, Uncle Coenus, Greeks are all fools. What would you like me to call this lovely boy?'

Coenus leaned close, inhaling the fragrance of his grandson. 'Kineas,' he said.

*

The summer sailing season drew on, the wind from the north freshening every room in Leon's great oceanside house. In the courtyard, figs began to ripen. The yearly convoy from Massalia in far-off Gaul came in on time and heavily laden, and Leon's fortunes soared.

Sappho healed slowly, rebuilding her blood with sweets and the small beer that the Aegyptians drank. She sat on a kline in the private courtyard – a colonnaded space between Leon's house and Diodorus's, where the women gathered unless it rained. Slaves brought wine and dates and other sweets while she held court, dispensing wisdom and even justice to her household.

Nihmu, a Sakje woman from the sea of grass, had four quivers of arrows and she stood at one end of the courtyard shooting bronze-barbed shafts into a target hidden in the shadow of the colonnade. Unlike Sappho, who ran her husband's affairs, Nihmu had virtually no interest in the trade that drove her husband. But she never spoke of what she missed.

Melitta sat in the grass, envying Nihmu her archery and yet fully engaged in talking nonsense to her son as she walked him around the grass, hands under his tiny armpits so that his feet just barely brushed the ground.

'Who's going to be a great athlete, eh? With long, long legs?' she asked as he managed a grab at her breasts. 'And grabby, grabby arms?'

He spat a little, and reached out for her. He was just a few days short of two months old, and she named him Kineas – in the Temple of Hathor and in the Temple of Poseidon. And now she spent her days playing with him in the garden.

'You could let Kallista play with him,' Sappho said, raising her eyes from a scroll. 'He's not a toy, or a chore. Shoot your bow!'

Melitta sighed. Motherhood – fatherless motherhood – had not changed her status in the household. She was the veteran of battle, a grown woman, a mother – and Sappho still spoke to her as if she needed a lesson in every aspect of life.

'Kallista is not his mother,' Melitta said.

Sappho shrugged, her eyes never leaving her scroll. 'She'll be a mother in a matter of days,' she said. 'But – as you wish, dear.'

'What are you reading, Auntie?' Melitta asked.

'Aristotle. This is Philokles' copy – I'm going to see that it goes to the library. I'm cataloguing all his scrolls. He had hundreds.' Sappho looked up.

'What's it about?' Melitta asked.

'Well,' Sappho said. She sat back on her couch. 'It says that it is a study of nature, but so far, it seems more like a survey of other men's ideas.'

'Philokles didn't think much of Aristotle,' Melitta said.

Sappho raised a beautifully manicured eyebrow. 'You have read Aristotle?'

Melitta shrugged. 'Some. His work on gods – on religion. Philokles copied it all out for me to read.'

Sappho leaned forward as if noticing her niece for the first time. 'Really?' she asked.

Melitta was stung by her surprise. 'I studied every day with Philokles from the time I was six!' she said. 'I've read Aristotle, Plato, all the speeches of Isocrates, all the sayings of Heraklitus, all the books of Pythagoras. All! Even that useless twit Pericles.'

Sappho smiled. 'I know, dear.'

'You act as if I'm too stupid for conversation!' Melitta said.

'You act as if you never plan to read a scroll again,' Sappho said.

'I have a baby!' Melitta shot back.

'Often the result of ill-considered sex.' Sappho smiled. 'Needn't determine the rest of your life.'

'Ill-considered?' Melitta stood up, gathering Kineas in her arms. She took a breath for a tirade.

'The hetaira Phiale,' announced Kallias, the steward. He bowed, and Phiale – not, strictly speaking, a beauty, and yet the most attrac tive woman in Alexandria – entered, flinging off a dust-coloured shawl into the arms of her attendant slave, a hard-faced woman named Alcaea.

'Oh, despoina!' Phiale said. She came and knelt by Sappho.

Sappho's face closed up. Her eyebrows seemed to harden in place, and her mouth became a hard line. 'Oh, Phiale! Is it so bad? Or are you just being dramatic?'

Phiale shook her head. The tears in her eyes suggested that her abject posture was unfeigned. 'No, despoina. No drama. There is a report in the palace – a report from Rhodos.'

Sappho took both of the hetaira's hands between her own. 'Tell me quickly. Is it Diodorus?'

Phiale shook her head. 'No – no. Diodorus is well. It is the expedition to the Euxine.'

Melitta felt as if her blood had stopped flowing. 'What?' she asked, her anger forgotten.

Nihmu's arrow flew through the air with a sound like a bird – thwit!

'It was a trap,' Phiale said. 'That's what they are saying at the palace. A trap.'

'You are not the person I would choose to deliver bad news,' Sappho said through her mask of a face. 'Say it, Phiale!'

Phiale buried her head in Sappho's lap, and Sappho began to stroke her hair. 'Satyrus?' she asked.

Phiale bobbed her head up and down. 'They say his ship sank – from damage. That no one – could save him. He – had Theron and Abraham aboard.'

Melitta sobbed. She almost fell. Suddenly, Nihmu's calloused hands were under her elbows, and Kallista appeared, heavily pregnant, and took Kineas, who burst into tears and squalls.

'And my husband?' Nihmu asked.

'Eumeles has captured him,' Phiale said. 'But he lives, and will be ransomed.'

'Only when he is humiliated and broken,' Nihmu said.

The sound of weeping filled the garden. Phiale was weeping, and Kallista, and Melitta – Kallias wept, and both of their slave women. Alcaea watched with her usual indifference to the sufferings of others. Her demeanour suggested that suffering was the norm and the rest of them had best get used to it, as she had.

Nihmu was also dry-eyed, and Sappho pinched her lips and shook her head. 'We are not beaten yet,' Sappho said.

Melitta watched as Sappho and Nihmu locked eyes. Something passed between them, and both of them turned, as if they were one being, to look, not at her, but at her child.