As they continued down the footpath the homestead came slowly into view beneath the overhanging moon. When they were two stades from the structure it became obvious that this was not a farmstead, but a rural craft-house with a single out-building, with an intervening space shaded by a lone cypress tree between which flickered the candlelight. When they were a stade away one could clearly discern two separate candles, one lighting the work of a naked boy laboring at a potter’s wheel.
The nearer candle illuminated the efforts of a naked old painter who worked from a palette that had but three colors: red, black and white. This grizzled old man applied his paint to a double-eared vase of the type being formed by the boy. He worked with a brush and a stylus, and patted his dirty feet on the ground all the while.
A third figure, a woman of middle years, was the only one of the trio dressed, being draped in a faded gray linen robe. She worked the hardest, taking the vases formed by the naked little boy, and then firing them in a low smoldering kiln, the embers of which were just now visible as she reached into the little inferno with long wooden tongs and extracted a vase, set it on a pallet to cool, and then returned to the boy for another vase of moist clay. She also mixed the clay for the boy in a wide trough, stacked the painted pots on a pallet behind the kiln, fed wood chips into the coals, and worked the bellows.
These three hardworking souls have yet to look up from their work, and have not even taken notice of our approach.
The woman knows, but she ignores us.
As they approached to a mere twenty paces, Arlene stopped and signaled Sebastian and Selene to stand to either side of her. This they did, but just a step back to emphasize her status. These types of considerations, if ignored, could eventually mean trouble for their party in this status-obsessed society. They stood patiently and the work proceeded, as if they did not exist.
Are we truly in ghostly form? Did the time-travel not work completely?
After they had stood long enough for Arlene’s candle to burn down to the socket, and had witnessed the complete process of amphora making from clay trough to pallet, the narrow door to the house creaked open, and a small girl emerged into the moonlight. Her task it appeared was to replace the candles in their sockets, as she bore three of these and a brand. As the girl replaced the burned down candles the woman brought wine for the man and boy in a carafe and poured some into the mouth of each while they continued to toil under the moon.
Yes indeed, we are but ghosts in this time. Our quest shall come to naught.
Then the girl, about twelve years of age, and dressed in a threadbare night robe, approached them, smiled up at Arlene, and replaced her candle, even lighting it, before smiling again and batting her large brown eyes. She then spoke the first words in ancient Greek any of them had heard, though it was a rough version of Attic, “Good day Lady-of-the-world. Apologize for Father’s rudeness I do. It is how he is when pressed for a work—some Cow-lander with an olive press I think. His slaves dare not stray from the toil. Polymara I am. Welcome. Come Lady—your slaves as well.”
A slave to a pagan prostitute! What would pious Frère Torres think?
Why it makes you as unredeemable as Governor Soto himself!
To think, that that evil man shall not be born for nineteen hundred years!
The hardworking master and his slaves did not even spare a glance as the trio followed little Polymara into the house, into a small receiving room, through what seemed a workshop, past a kitchen complete with bed, and finally, through a linen hung doorway into the little lady of the house’s private quarter. The small chamber was tolerably appointed, with a bronze barred window facing the road to Athens, lit with three candles for keeping out nocturnal insects. A linen and parchment blind was suspended above the window, no doubt intended to shield the occupant from sun and flies by day, and perhaps rain by night.
I would have been so very glad to have had a home like this in Navarre, a home at all. The girl is indeed blessed, with a hard-working father and all of her needs attended to.
The furnishings included a couch-like bed, a water basin, and a small folding table and chairs with stretched linen seat. On the small table was a pente board with colored stones, a game apparently being in progress.
Polymara threw herself on the cushion of her couch, looked up at Arlene and smiled. “Please Lady, have a seat.”
At that moment Sebastian stepped forward and extended his open palm with the three silver coins. “Polymara, some coin for your generosity to My Lady Arlene.”
The girl waved him off with one hand even as she grasped Arlene’s fingers with her other hand. “No good here is your coin. Have a seat please. You seem frail and need to be fresh to attend Your Lady on the road today.”
As Sebastian took his seat the girl’s eyes flashed at Selene. “You have an Amazon for a bodyguard; and with both of her breasts! You must have purchased her when young, yet you are not much older. Has she been your slave since childhood?”
Arlene smiled and answered in her quirky yet smooth Ionian. “Selene is a friend. She is not an Amazon but an order keeper in my homeland, where women are as free as men.”
The girl’s eyes bugged out. “What is this place?”
“It is called Virginia Tech, a school I graduated from, in a land called America, beyond the lands of the Gauls and the Painted People of the west.”
The girl was rapt, and wiggled her butt on her seat in an attempt to become as tall as the woman whose hand she held. “You come to Attica as a companion for the leading men?”
“Yes Polymara, I am a companion, and I come seeking the wisest man in the world, in hopes of making a gift of myself to him.”
The girl seemed puzzled. “Why not make him pay more than most? You are beautiful and certainly more skilled with a penis than are local women.”
“I hope to receive the gift of his vast knowledge. I am not just a companion Polymara. I am a philosopher, as is my friend Sebastian here, who is likewise not a slave, but a learned man.”
“This America must be a wondrous place. I hope Alexander does not burn it down! I have many questions for you Lady Arlene. I have no mother or sisters and the vicious bitch that Father owns has nothing but snarls for me. Father is working hard to make enough coin to provide for my dowry so he can give me to a monger of some sort. If I am to marry some beastly fish- or leather-monger I need to know how to please him. You would know these things—the proper method of pinching a man’s testicles for instance.’
They are not to be pinched you little pagan beastie!
“Please stay through the dark hours and teach me?”
Oh, I so dearly wish to hear My Lady describe the methods of pleasuring a man. But I am afraid that I shall be asked to leave.
Arlene patted Polymara on the back. “Dear, I must speak to my friends in a whisper, not meaning to be rude, but because our purpose is secretive.”
Arlene put her arms around both of their shoulders as she bent over the pente board and whispered, “We will have to egress twice to take Aristotle. That would permit us to take one more. She could help until then. Mister Shuei wants us to bring back young ‘incidentals’ when possible. What do you say?”
Sebastian nodded affirmatively even as Selene hissed, “Any plan that liberates one more woman from pre-modern bondage gets my vote.”
Sebastian, thinking of Polymara as a child rather than as a female, had been somewhat jealous of her lot in life compared to his own as a penniless medieval orphan. But to the women of the future ‘America’, blessed with their endless wealth and opportunity, the girl did seem to be destined to a life of misery.
Arlene went back to the couch and caressed the skinny girl’s cheek with the back of her hand. “Polymara, join us, and we will take you to America after I have traded for knowledge with the philosopher.”
Polymara was ecstatic. “And Vargin Teche, I go to your school?”
Arlene smiled. “I will take you there and we shall see about educating you so that you can qualify for admittance when you come of age.”
Polymara beamed. “Oh, it shall be soon; I will bleed any moon now, I know it!”
After a brief meeting while Polymara gathered her things, all the while assuring them that her father would be glad to be rid of the burden of an unwed daughter, it was decided that Sebastian should make the necessary arrangements with the old vase painter, whose name was Xyston.
Serve Your Lady well. Her purpose is just, to rescue an intelligent child destined to remain uneducated and the slave to some uncaring man.
But such is the lot of nearly all of humanity for nearly all of Time. Who are we to decide?
We are the Angels of Time.
Blasphemer!
Yes!!
Sebastian approached the grizzled old man as he painted in the nude under the now sinking moon. “Painter called Xyston, I understand you to be the father of Polymara.”
Without even looking up from his work the man snarled in Attic, “Isn’t it obvious you rich fucking barbarian flute-player.”
The man is rudeness incarnate!
Sebastian kept to his liturgical tone, speaking in the high Ionian of the learned men of this world, “My companion wishes to be attended by Polymara, who wishes it also, as I go to study at the Lyceum—you are sounding too Latin. You must purge the Cs and stress your kappas.
“This arrangement shall save you from paying a dowry and benefit the girl as she shall receive the best education and care. I, Sebastian de Canete of the Iberians, offer you these thirty pure silver coins and two gold ones—blank so that they might be worked with your stylus—as compensation for the services your daughter shall no longer be present to provide.
Do you agree to this arrangement Xyston?”
The rude little man still failed to look up from his work as he painted the red portion of the amphora he was working on. His voice was no longer a snarl. “Put the coin on the palette. She’s yours now. Fuck her in the ear for all I care you prissy outlander.”
The painter then re-immersed himself in his drudgery, which seemed to have little of art in it. Sebastian haughtily ignored the slaves as he turned from their master and returned to the house, feeling now, that His Lady’s sympathy for Polymara was well-placed, and must have come from some feminine form of intuition. Sebastian had at first thought the child content and the home life comfortable if not idyllic.
I hope that the girl provides advantages in dealing with these people. They are stranger than I would have thought possible.
Keep to the course fool. We are falling into the lives around us.
When Sebastian returned to the chamber of the departing daughter of the rude vase painter, he softened his tone, “Polymara, My Lady, the painter Xyston has agreed to the adoption of his daughter into our family of knowledge-seekers.”
The girl and the woman smiled to each other and then to him. Selene, who seemed to care little for Sebastian as a man, patted him admiringly on the back.
Do not bask fool, ask the question.
“Polymara, what moon is it that rises above, Hekatombion [June] or Skirophorion [May]?”
The quick-witted girl was flippant, “Why you aren’t much of a sky-watcher are you? It is Hekatombion; the longest day passed just a dekad-and-a-half ago.”
Sebastian spoke in Spanish to Arlene and Selene. “Ladies, as the girl said, I am not much of an astronomer, but I reckon this day to be the Fifteenth of June at the earliest, and the Fifth day of July at the latest. In either case, Alexander is already dead. We must make haste.”
Selene, who spoke very little Greek, and koine at that, was for the first time in this past the full participant in a conversation. “Oh shit Ar! Your old boy might already be headed for Chalcis. Let’s roll.”
Arlene seemed to grow calm, and for the first time instilled her team members with full confidence as she spoke in English, “Let’s split the difference and say the Boy Wonder has been dead twelve days. That would give us two. That’s just a mid-point guess, and all of our estimates concerning the time it would take word to get from Babylon back here could be wildly inaccurate; not to mention the problems with rectifying the various calendars in use now, by the ancient historians, and by us. It’s a crap shoot in any case. We did our best to insert ourselves in advance. We just don’t know guys, so there’s no sense in panicking. Let’s play it cool and get this girl off on her Yellow Brick Road.”
What a cryptic reference.
She must refer to a fairy tale of some sort, beloved by girls.
Those words focused Sebastian’s attention once again on the beaming joyful face of the young Polymara while Selene stepped out into the night to begin securing their route.
We will tread the wise course quietly and without haste and should be rewarded by God with safe passage.
