The Boy on the Other Side

I #

The first time Melantho saw her son die, he charged her two figs.

He had erected a little stage between the charcoal bins and was dying backward across it with one hand on his belly. The injury appeared to wander. When he fell upon his elbow it moved to his chest; when the elbow hurt him, it returned to his belly. He had borrowed her best red wool for the blood.

“That comes out of your wages,” she said.

“Mother. I am dying.”

“You are doing it on an order for a wedding mirror.”

He raised his head, shifted the wrapped disc out from under him, and resumed. His heels struck the bins. A black shower fell about his beautiful face.

From the doorway, someone applauded.

The woman there wore a traveling cloak with a mended purple border. She had broad shoulders and a scar through one eyebrow, which gave her the appearance of being perpetually halfway through a difficult question. Behind her, the noon street of Aigale lay white and empty. Everyone sensible had gone indoors.

“The first death was better,” she told him. “Before you discovered your audience.”

Ias sat up so quickly that Melantho knew this was the visitor he had been waiting for.

“Doro,” he said. “This is my mother.”

“I can see that.”

They looked nothing alike. Melantho was short, heavy in the hips, with grey already at her temples. Her son had the long legs of someone always standing on a place from which he might depart. Nevertheless the woman’s answer pleased her, and for that reason she immediately distrusted it.

Doro led six players who had arrived by sea for the festival. They had been given the disused oil press for their lodging and the steps above the harbor for their stage. Ias had spent the last eight evenings helping them carry benches. Or so he had said. His mother had imagined benches being carried in the dark, endless benches, an extraordinary quantity of seating for a town where most people preferred to stand.

“I have offered him a place,” Doro said.

Melantho took the polishing leather from her knee. Beneath it the wedding mirror held a patch of ceiling, a reversed hammer, no faces.

“He has a place.”

“He says he has work here. That is different.”

“Does he.”

Ias wiped the charcoal from his cheek, making it worse. At eighteen, he could reproduce her smallest sounds: the breath she took before lifting a hot vessel, the little click with which she condemned a customer’s taste. He could become her so completely that the neighbors laughed before he spoke. Now he seemed unable to arrange his own face.

“We leave after the third performance,” Doro said. “He would mend our fittings, learn the chorus, carry quite a lot of things, and eat badly. I told him the last part twice.”

“You might tell him about the pay.”

“A share after expenses.”

“Then he will eat very badly.”

Doro smiled. Melantho did not want to like this woman.

Across the room, under the stair, stood the tall wooden chest in which she kept scrap too troublesome to melt and tools that had belonged to her mother. Ias glanced at it. He was thinking of the money he had saved beneath its loose lid. Melantho was thinking of something else inside.

“I will finish the wedding order,” he said. “And the handles for Simo. I haven’t forgotten.”

“You have forgotten the winter.”

“We’ll winter in a larger town.”

“You have forgotten that larger towns also have winter.”

Doro leaned against the doorpost. She had evidently witnessed departures before and knew the value of allowing everyone a moment to become unreasonable.

Melantho rose. Her knee gave its small familiar crack, and all three heard it.

“You see?” she said, hating herself before the words were finished.

Ias looked down.

Outside, someone drove a mule past the workshop. Its panniers held live hens, and one indignant head traveled backward through the sunlight. Melantho would remember this absurdity later: that on the morning the gods found her, she had believed a cracked knee might be enough to keep her son.

“I haven’t agreed,” he said.

“But you want to.”

“Yes.”

There it was. No illness, no cruelty, nothing against which she could properly defend herself. He wanted to go.

She returned to the mirror. “Finish Simo’s handles first.”

Doro touched two fingers to the doorpost in farewell. Ias followed her out, and their voices moved down the street, low and excited. Melantho rubbed the bronze harder than she needed to. The ceiling brightened beneath her hand.

It was an ordinary mirror. She had made hundreds. A good surface gave back what stood before it; only the cheapest work made a virtue of distortion. Women complained that she did not make them young. Men complained that she made them resemble their fathers. She offered to sell them bowls instead.

She had never let her son polish a mirror after sunset.

Until that morning he had accepted the rule as one of her peculiar economies, like refusing a new roof while buying the finest charcoal. She had called it bad for the eyes. He had inherited none of her face, but eighteen years of her explanations had given him a recognizable squint of disbelief.

The street grew quiet. A fly worked at the lip of the oil jar. Melantho listened for her son’s returning steps and heard instead the sound of a spinning top.

It came from inside the chest.

For a while she did nothing. Then she put the wedding mirror face down upon the bench.

The top continued, a small dry hum, although the toy had lain motionless beneath three layers of cloth since before Ias had a name.

II #

Her sister arrived with a man carrying a covered basket.

Myrrine had dressed for a solemn occasion, which meant she had found a clean version of the same dark garment she wore to the baths, to funerals, and to borrow money. She was the younger sister by four years and had cultivated an air of ancient disappointment. The man behind her was thin, sunburned, and barefoot. An ivy wreath sat crookedly on his cropped head. One of his feet was bleeding.

Melantho remained between them and the chest.

“Where is the boy?” Myrrine asked.

“Working.”

“Where?”

“At his work.”

The man lowered the basket. “I am called Oion.”

Nobody invited him to sit. After a moment he sat anyway, carefully keeping his bad foot off the floor.

“You have walked a long way,” Melantho said.

“Most of it unnecessarily. I was told the mirror was in a tomb.”

“Then you should try the tombs.”

Myrrine shut the street door.

The workshop changed. With its square of sunlight gone, the tools became darker versions of themselves. From the chest, the top hummed. Oion turned his head toward it, and his face relaxed with such naked relief that Melantho felt suddenly vicious.

“How much has my sister promised you?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “She has been trying to make me leave since dawn.”

Myrrine lifted the basket’s cover.

Inside lay six pieces of bronze on undyed linen. Their broken edges were black, but their faces had the clean brightness of water under a rock. One piece reflected a branch heavy with pale grapes. Another held the leg of a small chair. In a third, a white hand rested palm upward, fingers slightly crooked. Nothing in the workshop accounted for these images.

Melantho looked away from the hand.

“We have found everything except the middle,” Oion said.

“There is no middle here.”

“Melantho,” said her sister.

For eighteen years Myrrine had kept her secret. She had washed the child, fetched milk, taught him the ridiculous song about the crab who borrowed shoes. She had sat with him through his fever while Melantho ran between shrine and physician with money she could not spare. Whatever business brought her here now was not simple betrayal. Melantho knew this, and found it impossible to forgive her for looking sad.

“He has been dreaming,” Myrrine said. “He came to me.”

“What dreams?”

“A white face. Men offering him things. He thought it meant he ought to be initiated before traveling.”

“He ought to have told me.”

“He thought you would stop him traveling.”

Oion examined the sole of his foot. His silence was more tactful than anything he might have said.

Melantho lifted the chest lid. The hum strengthened. She took out a coil of wire, her mother’s punches, a cracked mold for a handle shaped like a bird. At the bottom was a bundle wrapped in sailcloth. She brought it to the bench and opened it.

The disc was roughly the size of a man’s spread hand, broken on every edge. Beside it, a wooden top spun upon the cloth. Its point had worn a tiny circle into the weave.

The bronze was empty.

It did not reflect the rafters or the faces leaning over it. It held the color of a room after a lamp has been extinguished, when the eye continues to expect furniture.

Oion began to weep.

“Don’t,” Melantho said.

He covered his mouth with the back of his hand. She had been ready for threats, for demands in the names of gods, and this was much worse.

Myrrine asked quietly, “Did you know whose it was?”

“Not at first.”

“Later?”

Melantho folded the sailcloth over the top. It kept turning beneath the fold.

The sea had delivered the bundle during a winter storm. Her husband had been dead two years. There had been no children. She had gone down to the wreckage with the others to look for timber, and found a cedar box wedged beneath a broken steering oar. She remembered resenting its weight. That was the last ordinary thing about it.

Inside were the toys and the broken disc. The mirror showed a child watching someone behind her.

She had turned. Nobody was there.

When she looked again, he had lifted his arms.

She told this much. She did not tell them about the nights that followed, how she warmed the disc with her body because the child inside it shook, or how she began addressing the image in the foolish, tender voice she had believed she would never use. Nor about the morning she woke with a weight across her throat and found a living child asleep there, his fist tangled in her hair.

“The sea takes things out of their time,” Myrrine said to Oion. “You know that.”

“I know.”

Whatever age had passed outside the box, the frightened child had stayed inside his single moment until Melantho found him.

“He grew,” she said. “He ate. He was ill. There was nothing of bronze in him.”

Oion nodded, wiping his face. “The god has grown also.”

At last someone had said it.

Beyond the closed door, Ias laughed at something in the street. The sound came toward them. Melantho reached for the cloth, but her sister caught her wrist.

“You cannot make him unknow it now.”

“I can give him one more morning.”

The latch lifted before either woman could move.

Ias stood in the doorway holding a folded leaf packet of sweet cakes. He had bought them to soften her. He looked from her face to the basket, then down at the white hand resting in the bronze.

The packet slipped. Honey and sesame scattered over the threshold.

“Those men,” he said.

III #

The boy would not go upstairs. He would not sit beside his mother. He took the low stool opposite Oion, put both feet flat on the floor, and folded his hands. Melantho recognized the posture. It was how he played a king preparing to hear bad news.

Oion told him about the child of Persephone, the throne Zeus had set him upon, and the white-faced Titans who came with toys. He spoke plainly. The god had been torn apart. Athena had preserved his heart. Other hands had gathered what could be gathered. Dionysus lived, and would live when their town was a reef beneath the sea.

“But the face he saw before the men took him,” Oion said, “was gone.”

Ias looked at the empty fragment.

“There are many faces in a mirror.”

“Not this one.”

“Then I am him.”

Melantho said, “You are Ias.”

Her son did not look at her. “I am asking him.”

Oion hesitated. The ivy on his head had begun to dry at the edges.

“You are what he saw. Before he understood what they were going to do.”

“An image.”

“Yes.”

“Is that less?”

“I don’t know.”

This answer seemed to steady Ias. He had always preferred an honest uncertainty to the elaborate ways adults disguised their ignorance.

The god, Oion explained, had sent him in search of the mirror’s pieces. The restored Dionysus could change shape, enter dances, loosen grief, make the sober forget the narrow rooms of their lives. But whenever he called back his earliest face, there came instead the hands that had seized it. He wanted to look once more at the child who had not yet been hurt.

“Does he want me dead?” Ias asked.

“No.”

“Does he want me alive?”

Oion lowered his eyes.

Melantho stood. “You have your metal. Take it.”

“The metal is empty.”

“Then tell him it was empty when you found it.”

Ias laughed once, without amusement. “That is your answer?”

“It is a good answer.”

“Another thing not to say.”

For years she had known that a quarrel was accumulating somewhere inside their life. She had imagined it would be about his father’s name. She had invented a dead sailor, then refused to speak of him, a convenient combination until Ias grew old enough to know convenience when he saw it.

“Was any of it true?” he asked.

“The storm.”

“The sailor?”

“No.”

He nodded. No anger could have hurt her as much as the care with which he received the information, setting it somewhere private for later use.

Myrrine began collecting the cakes. She picked the grit from one and put it on the bench. Her hands shook slightly.

“Your mother believed she was protecting you.”

“I was asking my mother.”

Myrrine set down the cake.

After a while Ias said to Oion, “If I go to him, what happens?”

“He has asked that the mirror be brought whole to the place where Night receives him. At the next dark moon. That is tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow?” Melantho said.

“I have been searching three years.”

“So that leaves us a day.”

“It leaves everyone a day.”

Ias ran a finger along the stool’s edge. He had carved a little fish there when he was eight. Melantho had pretended not to notice, although she noticed every new mark he made. The fish had become smooth beneath eleven thousand idle touches.

“Can he make me whole?” he asked.

The words entered her so cleanly that for a moment she felt no pain.

“You are whole.”

“Then why did you hide what I am?”

Oion did not interrupt. Myrrine stood beside the ruined cakes. Outside, the town had begun preparing for the evening performance. Hammer blows came up from the harbor, followed by the complaint of someone whose thumb had been struck. Ias had promised to be there. Until an hour ago, this had seemed to Melantho a danger worth resisting.

She heard herself ask whether he wanted to abandon eighteen years for a stranger.

He rose so violently the stool fell.

“That is what you think they are? Years I owe you?”

“No.”

“You keep counting them.”

“I am frightened.”

He stopped.

For a moment they regarded each other without the shelter of their usual quarrel. His eyes were bright. She wanted to touch the charcoal still clinging beside his ear. She wanted him to be five years old, or thirty, or elsewhere altogether, anywhere outside this terrible age at which he had the body to leave and she still remembered lifting it.

“I want to know,” he said.

She nodded. It was not consent. It was the motion her head made when she could not bear to remain entirely still.

Myrrine said she knew the road to Night. Her shrine kept an old path through the limestone hills, used by petitioners for whom the nearer gods had no answer. They would leave before dawn, carrying the pieces together. Perhaps Night would distinguish what belonged to the god from what had become the boy.

“And perhaps she won’t,” Melantho said.

“No,” her sister answered. “Perhaps she won’t.”

Ias bent to pick up the stool. He put it exactly where it had stood, which was a kindness he could still manage.

Then he went to tell Doro that he would miss the performance.

Melantho watched him cross the street. At the fountain he paused to wash his face. She could not see the water from the workshop, but she saw his shoulders stiffen when he looked into it.

He turned his back on the basin and scrubbed himself with his eyes shut.

IV #

They packed as though for an ordinary journey. Myrrine brought bread, dried pears, a little salt, and a blanket that smelled of the shrine’s damp wall. Oion changed the dressing on his foot. Ias rolled his clothes into a spare cloak and tied them so badly that Melantho reached to correct the knot, then stopped.

She packed her smallest hammer, a polishing stone, leather, a drill, and two strips of soft metal. The mirror’s seven pieces traveled separately. Until she could examine the breaks properly, she would not risk fitting them together.

There was one more thing she needed.

After the others had settled, she went down to the harbor. Torches stood along the players’ improvised stage. A woman in a wooden mask was scolding a painted door. The audience shrieked whenever the door answered. Melantho waited behind the oil press until Doro came off carrying the door beneath one arm.

“He told you?” Melantho asked.

“Some of it.”

“Did you believe him?”

Doro set the prop against the wall. “I once shared a boat with a man who turned into a seal whenever his wife mentioned money. Believing is not the difficult part.”

“What is?”

“Knowing what to do afterward.”

Melantho looked at the masks hanging from a rope. Kings, old women, a beautiful girl with a very large mouth. At the end hung an unfinished face, pale linen stiffened into shape.

“Could you make one of him?”

Doro followed her gaze.

“I could. Why?”

“For the journey. In case we need to give the god something to look at.”

It was not quite a lie. Melantho had begun to see the outline of an arrangement. A face cast from her son’s features, polished metal behind its eyes, the empty disc laid within it. If a mirror had once held a child, perhaps it could be persuaded to do so again. She knew things about surfaces that priests did not know. With sufficient time, a clever artisan could make distance appear where there was only depth, motion where there was only a change of angle.

Doro studied her.

“Does he know?”

“He is asleep.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

Melantho put her purse on an overturned jar. Doro did not touch it.

“He has already sat for one,” she said at last. “We needed a young prince. He was proud of how long he could stay still.”

She took a wrapped object from a shelf and opened it. The face inside was unmistakably Ias, but calmer, stripped of the quick living changes that always made Melantho feel she had missed something. Doro had caught the mouth beautifully. Melantho disliked her afresh.

“Borrow it,” Doro said. “It belongs to the company.”

Melantho reached for it.

Doro held on. “Don’t make him ashamed of wanting us.”

“You will have other boys.”

“Yes.” The woman released the mask. “And you will have this one, if you let him.”

On the way home Melantho passed Myrrine’s shrine. It was a low building between a baker and a man who repaired sandals. No columns distinguished it. Above the door, a serpent had been cut into the stone, turning its head toward its own tail without quite reaching it.

Their mother had taught there before Myrrine. Melantho could still hear her directing the women to sit with their hands open, asking each to remember an anger and then notice the person remembering it. The teaching passed between mouths in the dark. A girl would carry it into a marriage across the water, a washerwoman would repeat it to a woman working beside her, and the words changed while the small inward turn survived.

Melantho had used it with Ias long before he could have understood a hymn. At first he copied whoever was nearest. If she laughed, he laughed; if she struck her shin and swore, he wept as though injured. He woke from dreams unable to tell whether he had been the child in the dream or the woman holding him.

She made a game of speaking about tomorrow.

“When you wake, where will Ias put his feet?”

“On the floor.”

“And who knows that now?”

“Ias.”

Eventually he had laughed at her and said, “I do, stupid Mother.”

She had been so happy she allowed the insult to become a household privilege.

The first time he lied to her deliberately, about a broken oil jar, she had shut herself upstairs to cry with relief. He had made a little place inside himself from which he could watch her believing something he knew was false. Later, when the oil had to be paid for, she had been less philosophical.

She passed beneath the serpent and continued home.

Ias was awake. He sat on the stair with his traveling bundle between his feet.

“What is that?”

“A mask.”

“Mine?”

“For the god.”

He held out his hand. She gave it to him, slowly.

He examined the empty eyeholes, then slipped the face over his own. For an instant her son vanished into the beautiful stranger Doro had made. He tilted his head. The smile remained unchanged.

“Better?” he asked through the mouth.

“Take it off.”

He did.

“What were you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He looked at her tools, already bundled for the morning, then at the mask. He was not a foolish boy. She had spent eighteen years making certain of that.

“You were going to trick him.”

“If I could.”

“With a pretty thing to look at.”

Melantho had no answer.

“That is how they caught him,” Ias said.

She sat on the stair below him. The house smelled of quenched metal and the supper none of them had finished. She had thought herself capable of anything to keep him. She had not understood how small and ugly anything might be.

“I don’t want to go back inside,” he said.

It was the first time he had admitted fear.

She reached up, slowly enough that he could refuse, and laid her hand against his shin.

“Then we will find another way.”

He rested the mask on his knees. After a little while, he put his hand over hers.

V #

At dawn Aigale belonged to bakers, dogs, and people leaving it.

Doro waited beside the fountain with a skin of water. She wore no purple now, only a sleeveless tunic, and had the exhausted eyes of someone who had packed an entire theater after midnight. She gave the skin to Ias.

“We sail tomorrow, after the last performance.”

“I know.”

“If you miss us, ask at the harbor in Nysa. We owe a rope-maker there money. He will know where we have gone.”

Melantho expected an embrace and prepared to resent it. Instead Doro inspected the knot on the boy’s bundle.

“Hopeless,” she said, and retied it.

They walked east while the town was still shadowed by its hill. Oion limped but refused the stick Myrrine offered. By the first ridge he accepted it without comment. Below them the harbor reduced itself to a curve of pale water, a few hulls, the distant antlike movement of people setting out benches for a play they would not see.

Ias walked ahead with his aunt. Melantho followed with Oion. The basket of fragments hung from his shoulder, and now and then something inside struck a soft musical note.

“Does he speak to you?” she asked.

“Sometimes.”

“What does he sound like?”

Oion considered. “Like someone you have been waiting to hear.”

“That is convenient.”

“Not always.”

At a stream they stopped. Myrrine washed Oion’s foot while he endured the pain with a politeness that made it unpleasant to watch. Ias carried water up from a place where the current broke over stones. He avoided the still pool.

“What did you do before this?” Melantho asked the man.

“Kept my brother’s accounts.”

“Before serving the god.”

“So did I.”

She looked at him.

“My brother was kind. That made it worse. I could not bear the sound of the stylus on the tablet. Every day there were measures of barley, measures of oil, things that had happened written down as if that were the end of them.”

He watched Myrrine wind the clean cloth.

“I went to a dance. I had not intended to dance. There was a woman beating a drum, and at some point I realized I had not been thinking about myself for a very long time.”

“How long?”

“Perhaps the length of a song.”

Melantho almost smiled.

“It was enough,” he said. “I had become very tired of the man who followed me around inside my head, telling me how poorly I was doing. I did not know he could be quiet.”

She glanced toward her son. She had labored to give him such a companion. Here was a man who had crossed the world in gratitude for losing his.

“And now you do what the god asks.”

“Usually.”

“Even this.”

Oion looked at the basket. “I thought I was looking for a piece of metal.”

Myrrine tied the bandage. “There.”

They ate bread with their feet in the sun. Ias produced the least damaged of the sweet cakes from his bundle. He broke it into four pieces, distributing the grit without favoritism. Oion laughed when his tooth met a pebble, and for a short while the journey became bearable.

Beyond the stream the road entered pale hills. Olive trees gave way to low thorn. The cicadas continued although the heat diminished. Toward afternoon their sound began to arrive before their bodies: a shrilling from bare stone, followed a moment later by the insect settling upon it.

Myrrine told them to stay on the path.

“Why?” Ias asked.

“Because the path knows which way things happen.”

Above a cleft in the hill, an eagle hung motionless. It was not riding the air. Even its smallest feathers were still. They passed beneath it, and when Melantho turned to look back, it beat its wings once, enormously slowly, and was gone.

Night’s country began without a boundary stone.

The sky remained bright behind them, but ahead the road passed into a darkness that did not conceal it. Every pebble was visible. The shadows of the travelers lengthened toward their bodies instead of away from them, as if somewhere in front lay the place from which their darkness had been borrowed.

Oion stopped.

The ivy on his head had become fresh again.

He lifted the basket down and pulled back the linen. In one fragment the white hand had closed. In another, grapes swelled and burst without falling. A thin red line traveled across the polished surface, reached the broken edge, and stopped.

“He knows,” Oion said.

Ias stood beside him. Melantho moved to take her son’s arm, but her sister caught her sleeve.

“Let him look.”

In the smallest piece, where the chair leg had been, there was now an eye.

It did not look at Ias. It looked at Melantho.

She had seen anger in men who could strike her and fear in people she could not save. This eye held both, immense and helplessly joined. She understood that the god had not spent the last eighteen years waiting politely for a debt to be paid. Somewhere beyond the comfortable limits of her household, a child had been searching for the last thing he remembered before the knives.

She hated him for making her understand.

Then the image vanished. Oion covered the basket.

Far ahead, from somewhere inside the hill, came a sound like a great wing dragging across the ground.

VI #

Night’s house was a cave with a doorstep.

The doorstep was what unsettled Melantho. A cave could belong to anything. A worn stone with a chipped corner suggested people had come here carrying jars, had put down burdens to find a key, had scrubbed away spilled milk. She had prepared herself for a majesty unlike her own life. Instead she found the frightening possibility that majesty had a household too.

Inside, an old woman sat beside a basin.

Her hair was dark. Her face was old. Between these simple facts lay a contradiction Melantho could feel but could not see. The woman wore a garment without ornament, and across her knees rested a long staff. Behind her the cave continued far beyond the hill that contained it.

Myrrine knelt. Oion lowered the basket and prostrated himself. Ias stood very straight, not from insolence but because he had forgotten what knees were for.

Melantho set down her tools.

“Lady,” she said. “I brought my son.”

Night looked at Ias.

“Yes.”

It was only one word. Melantho would have paid everything she owned to know exactly what it affirmed.

A thin stream entered the basin from the rock. Night had been washing something in it: a curved, pale object no larger than a broken plate. She lifted it into the light, although there was no light to lift it into.

It was shell.

Melantho knew without being told. Every eggshell she had ever broken had been rehearsing this curve. Its inner surface held a color that existed before white and had not entirely agreed to become white.

“From the first egg?” Ias asked.

“From its edge.”

“Why do you wash it?”

“Things settle.”

He took this in. Melantho loved him for his effort to understand the answer literally.

In the shell’s hollow she saw a wing folded against a body, then a pair of eyes that seemed to face both ways. Neither male nor female exhausted the shape. It was beautiful with the terrible generosity of something that had not yet chosen what it would be. She felt desire, and the desire to make something, and hunger, and the first breath of a child, all troubling the same small place beneath her ribs.

She looked away.

“Phanes,” Myrrine whispered.

Night placed the shell beside her. “What has happened can be seen from here. Do not mistake it for something you can take home.”

They laid the mirror fragments on a flat stone. Melantho arranged them by the shape of their breaks. She had done this work with damaged ornaments, with a basin crushed beneath a cart, once with a bronze hand brought from a burned shrine. Seven pieces made an imperfect circle. The center remained dark while the outer pieces held the same room from different angles.

A child’s room. A chair. A hanging cloth. The white hand.

“Who made it?” she asked.

“Hephaestus,” said Night.

Melantho took her hands away. Then, ashamed of the gesture, she put them back.

“The metal has lost nothing at the breaks.”

“No.”

“Then it can be joined.”

“Yes.”

“And the boy?”

Night watched the pieces.

“That is why you came.”

Myrrine rose from her knees. She had served Night for twenty years. It had never improved her patience with an unhelpful answer.

“Lady, a child left that surface. We fed him. He learned us, then himself. Does that count for nothing here?”

“It counts for eighteen years.”

Melantho nearly laughed. The goddess and the bronze worker had reached the same poor arithmetic.

Night turned the staff upon her knees. For an instant it was a scepter so bright that Melantho could see the bones in her sister’s hands. Beyond it rose the outline of a sky not yet separated from the earth. Somewhere in the depth of the cave, the coils of Time tightened against Necessity.

“Before kings counted their fathers, the First-Born put this in my hands,” Night said. “He had come out of what could not hold him. Sky took rule after me. Kronos after Sky. Zeus gathered what came before him into his own body and brought the many forth again.”

The brightness receded. The staff was dark wood.

“You ask whether something can leave its beginning and become another thing. You are standing in the answer.”

Ias breathed out.

Melantho said, “Then he needn’t go back.”

“I did not say that the one who has lost him will find it easy.”

A cold draft passed through the cave. Oion turned toward it like a dog hearing a familiar step.

The goddess laid the shell upside down.

“He will come when the moon is entirely dark. Make the mirror sound. You may work here.”

“Will you protect him?” Melantho asked.

“In my house no one is taken by force.”

“Outside it?”

Night looked toward the entrance, where the four travelers’ shadows stood as if waiting to be admitted.

“Outside it are the lives you must lead.”

They were given water, a little fire, and a place on the stone for their blankets. No servant brought these things. They became apparent as soon as they were needed, which Melantho found less reassuring than a servant.

She knelt beside the pieces. Ias knelt across from her.

“Tell me what to hold,” he said.

And for the first time since the basket entered her workshop, she had something useful to tell him.

VII #

The maker of the mirror had been extravagant with tin.

Melantho discovered this by testing the back of the smallest fragment with her finest point. The surface resisted, then yielded a bright shaving. Divine workmanship, it appeared, did not exempt a thing from being made of something. She found this comforting.

The front required no polishing. Wherever her leather passed, images rose: a ball rolling beneath the little chair, the hem of a robe, a child’s fingers reaching upward. None lasted long. The room belonged to a moment that had been broken with the mirror, and each fragment remembered an angle of it.

She could join the pieces mechanically, using a backing plate and clips turned over the rim. Heat was unnecessary and might change the face. The joints would remain visible, but the disc would hold.

Ias heated the soft strips at the little fire while she drilled the backing. Oion slept with his mouth open. Myrrine watched the cave’s entrance. Night had disappeared, leaving the eggshell beside the basin as another woman might leave a cup.

“Did I always look like him?” Ias asked.

“You looked like you.”

“Mother.”

She put down the drill.

“I hadn’t seen him.”

“The child in the bronze.”

“Yes. At first.”

“And afterward?”

“You lost a tooth. You grew. You broke your nose falling off Simo’s wall.”

“He pushed me.”

“You told me you fell.”

“I was on his side of it.”

She looked up, and he gave her the brief, unwilling smile of someone discovering that a confession had survived beyond its usefulness.

“What else?” he asked.

She could have told him everything. That was her temptation: to bury the strange origin beneath so many household particulars that he could never dig it out. Instead she chose the part that troubled her.

“When you first came out, you copied me. Even asleep, if I moved, you moved. I thought perhaps I had made you badly.”

“Made me?”

“I know.”

He held the strip in the tongs. Its end reddened.

“What changed?”

“You began wanting things when I wanted something else.”

“An inconvenient sign of health.”

“Yes.”

She told him about the oil jar. He laughed, then grew quiet.

“Was I only doing what you taught me?”

“Sometimes. Not with the jar.”

“I mean all of it. Wanting to go. Wanting you to be sorry. I can hear you inside my head even when you aren’t speaking.”

“So can I hear my mother.”

“Does she ever stop?”

“She has become less useful about the price of charcoal.”

He laughed again. She fitted one strip across the backing and marked the holes.

“My mother said the women who first learned to speak inwardly thought someone had entered them. An ancestor, perhaps, or the serpent that leaves its old shape behind. They taught one another to answer without opening their mouths. After a while they could tell whose voice they were using.”

“Is that a true story?”

“It is the story she told me. The teaching works. I don’t know the first woman’s name.”

Ias watched the strip cool.

“When I act, I can hear the next words before the people watching can. Sometimes I think about the person saying them while I’m saying them. Then I forget, and it goes well.”

Melantho had never asked what it felt like. She had asked whether he was paid, whether he was cold, whether the others drank too much. Now she listened.

“Doro says I show people what I want them to feel. I should let them feel it. She says I don’t have to keep proving I’m there.”

“Doro says a great deal.”

“She does.”

He set the cooled strip beside her and began shaping another.

Near the entrance Myrrine made a startled sound.

They turned. A woman stood just inside the cave, holding a sleeping infant. Her clothes were wet. Water dripped from her hem, yet none reached the floor.

“Don’t speak to her,” Myrrine whispered.

The woman crossed the chamber without looking at them and vanished into its deeper darkness. After a moment came a man leading an old horse, then two girls with linked hands. The girls were quarreling inaudibly. One turned to stick out her tongue at the other, and Melantho saw the dark hole in her throat.

Ias reached for his mother’s wrist.

“Dead?”

Myrrine nodded.

“Where are they going?”

“To ask. Or to rest. Not everyone knows.”

The cave admitted them with the same lack of ceremony it had offered the living. No one counted the visitors. No one asked what words had been laid in their mouths before burial. Melantho thought of the thin gold leaves Myrrine sometimes helped families prepare, the careful directions for a journey the traveler could not rehearse. Her sister’s work suddenly seemed both necessary and unbearably small.

“Would I go somewhere?” Ias asked.

No one answered quickly enough.

“If I die,” he said.

Melantho kept her hand still beneath his.

“I want you to have a very long time to find out.”

He looked at the infant receding in the woman’s arms, although there was no longer anything there to see.

The mirror rang softly. One of the pieces had shifted on the stone, drawn toward its neighbor.

They returned to work. She drilled, he held, and gradually the broken room took on a continuous shape around its empty center. When the final clip was closed, the disc became unexpectedly heavy.

Ias took it from her.

His face appeared.

Not the face above the surface. A child’s face, rounder, uninjured, waiting with complete trust for whatever would be offered next.

The grown boy opened his mouth. The child smiled.

Then Ias began to scream.

VIII #

He had seen the hand turn.

Later, when he could speak, that was what he told them. Nothing about knives. Nothing about blood. Only the white hand turning palm downward, ceasing to offer and beginning to grasp.

Melantho had taken the mirror from him, but the scream continued. It had no space in it for breath. Oion woke and stumbled toward them. Myrrine caught the boy as he fell. For a terrible moment he seemed to come apart without breaking: his limbs struggled in different directions, his face turned toward a person who was not there, and the hand gripping Melantho’s sleeve belonged to a very small child.

She could not get him to hear his name.

Oion knelt beside him and began a low rhythm against the stone with the heel of his hand. Myrrine matched it. Melantho knew the rhythm. Their mother had used it to bring frightened women back from the inward dark, and before that someone else had carried it across a stretch of sea nobody in Aigale could name.

“Breathe where my hand falls,” Oion said.

Ias shook his head. Or the child did. The body between them no longer seemed certain of its age.

Melantho struck the stone with the others. She had once believed this rhythm too simple to count as knowledge. Her mother’s hands had been so unceremonious when they taught it.

Gradually Ias found a breath between the blows. Then another. He gagged and vomited onto the floor. The sight of the ordinary bread he had eaten was so reassuring that Melantho nearly laughed.

Night stood over them.

“The mirror remembers from both sides,” she said.

“You might have told us,” Melantho answered.

“I told you to make it sound. You put him in front of it.”

Her voice held no rebuke, which made the words worse.

Ias lay with his head on Myrrine’s lap. His eyes were open. Sweat darkened his hair.

“I was smiling at him,” he said.

Melantho knelt close.

“In the mirror. He thought I was another child. I smiled, and he came closer. I could see them behind him.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“I saw them.”

“You were an image.”

He looked at her with a hatred so sudden and tired that she flinched.

“When it suits you.”

She sat back on her heels.

Ias shut his eyes. “I couldn’t turn away. He was looking at me. I had to do what he did.”

At last she understood the child’s raised arms in the salvaged bronze. He had not been asking her to lift him. He had been repeating the last movement of someone reaching toward a beautiful thing while men approached from behind.

For eighteen years she had told herself she had answered a request.

She touched the hem of her garment, where the seam was coming loose. Her fingers looked old and clumsy. She could no longer tell which of her memories were acts of love and which were descriptions she had made afterward so she could live with them.

“Why did he come out?” she asked Night.

The goddess looked at the boy.

“Ask him.”

“I don’t remember,” Ias said.

“Then let it remain something you don’t remember.”

Myrrine wiped his face. Oion carried away the soiled cloth. Night returned to the basin and poured water over her hands.

Melantho took the mask from her bundle. She held it beside the repaired mirror. The resemblance between mask and boy was good, but the resemblance between boy and the child now visible in the bronze was weakening. The child had no broken nose, no small scar under the jaw from a careless shave, no knowledge of the oil press or Doro’s company. The likeness stopped at the point where life began making its own marks.

She turned the mirror face down.

“What will you do with that?” Ias asked.

“Nothing.”

“The mask.”

“Whatever you want.”

He took it. His hands were steadier now.

“I want to see him before he sees me.”

Oion returned with clean water. “He is already coming.”

“Then tell him to wait.”

The initiate looked toward Night. She did not move.

Oion stood, adjusted the wreath on his head with the absurd care of a man preparing to meet someone whose good opinion still mattered, and went out.

Ias sat up. Myrrine let him, though she kept a hand behind his shoulder.

“He has my childhood,” he said.

Melantho looked at the mirror.

“No. I have his.” He rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know how to say it.”

“Tell it badly,” Myrrine said. “We have time for that.”

He tried. There had been the room, the chair, the white faces. There had been the terrible interval inside the broken disc. Then warmth against the metal, a woman’s voice, darkness with a pulse in it. He could not remember deciding to leave. But he could remember the woman’s hair in his fist, and wanting to pull it because she made an interesting sound.

Melantho laughed. Tears entered her mouth.

“Very interesting,” she said.

“Those aren’t his memories.”

“No.”

Ias fitted the mask over his face, then removed it. He did this twice, testing the difference in the air against his skin.

“I think he is going to be angry.”

“Yes.”

“I might want what he offers.”

Melantho looked at her son. She had promised to find another way, but until this moment she had imagined it as a way to get exactly what she wanted.

“If you do,” she said, “you must tell me yourself. I won’t have a priest tell me what happened to you.”

He nodded.

Behind them, Night’s basin overflowed. The water ran across the stone, entered the narrow joints beneath their feet, and vanished. From the depths of the cave came a pressure like the air before a storm. The little fire bowed flat.

Ias stood.

Melantho stood with him, although her knee protested. He reached automatically to help her. This time she accepted without making use of it.

IX #

Dionysus came without a procession.

Oion entered first and moved aside. The god behind him was young, dark-haired, and barefoot. He wore a plain tunic with a damp place at the shoulder, as though he had leaned against a tree after rain. No one could have mistaken him for a man. It was not his beauty. It was the sensation that the cave had become a place in his body and they were standing inside a breath he had yet to release.

He looked at Night, and the pressure eased.

“Grandmother.”

“Come in.”

He obeyed. His gaze went immediately to the covered mirror.

Then to Ias.

For the space of a heartbeat their faces were identical. Melantho saw the likeness happen, rather than simply exist. The god was looking for something, and her son’s features moved toward it, like filings stirred by an invisible force.

Ias pressed the mask against his chest.

Dionysus stopped.

“You have grown,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know you could.”

Melantho wanted to say that neither had she, that there had been years when every new inch seemed stolen and miraculous. She kept quiet.

The god walked around the stone where the mirror lay. At one angle he had small horns beneath his hair. At another he was a girl a little older than Ias. Then he was the young man again, with something hurt and watchful at the corners of his mouth.

“Show me.”

Melantho lifted the cloth.

The room in the bronze brightened. The child at its center turned his head toward the god, but the movement was incomplete. It faltered where one fragment joined another. The clips held; the picture did not.

Dionysus reached for it.

Ias said, “Wait.”

The god’s hand stopped above the disc.

Melantho had not known she could be so frightened of a hand doing nothing.

“What did you say?” Dionysus asked.

“I want to tell you what happened afterward.”

“I know what happened.”

“To me.”

The silence lengthened. Oion stared at the floor. Myrrine stood close enough that her sleeve touched Melantho’s.

“Speak,” Night said.

Ias put on the mask.

His mother understood why at once. The face gave him somewhere to put his fear. He had not become another person. He had acquired a surface behind which he could choose what to do next.

At first he said nothing. He crouched, turned his head, and lifted a hand as though he were looking out through a window too small for him. The movement was simple. Melantho saw the cedar box again, the child in the fragment. He pressed his palm against the air.

Dionysus leaned forward.

Ias drew back. He was inside the mirror, waiting. A sound came from him, hardly speech, the little questioning breath of a child who has called often enough to stop expecting an answer.

Melantho began to cry silently.

He made her voice. Not the sharp voice he used to amuse the neighbors. The other one, the foolish voice she had used when nobody could hear.

“Well, then. What have we caught?”

She remembered saying it. She had been sitting on the bed with the disc in her lap, still smelling the sea in its wrapping. The child had watched her mouth.

Ias answered with the small breath. Then he became her again, rubbing warmth into his own arms, grumbling at the expense of milk, singing half a song and losing the rest. He was not flattering her. He imitated the exhaustion, the impatience, the way she sometimes held him too tightly when he tried to get down.

She wanted him to stop. She wanted the god to see every moment.

The cave grew warmer. Somewhere beyond its entrance grapes began to ripen; the scent reached them, heavy and almost rotten.

Ias took off the mask.

“I don’t remember the step between,” he told Dionysus. “I remember being held after it.”

“That was mine,” the god said.

Melantho stiffened.

Dionysus looked at her. His eyes were wet.

“Being held.”

Nobody spoke.

“I had that,” he said. “Before.”

His voice had become very young. Melantho saw no tyrant demanding a possession. She saw the boy from the bronze, who had been offered delight and given butchery, facing a stranger who had somehow continued into the life he should have had.

“I didn’t take it from you,” Ias said.

“No.”

The answer came easily. Too easily, perhaps. Dionysus stepped closer.

“Come here.”

Ias did not move.

“I can give you everything you cannot have as this.” The god gestured toward the boy’s mortal body. “No shrinking in age. No breath growing thin. You won’t have to lose her.”

He looked at Melantho, and she felt the offer pass through her with a sweetness so complete that she nearly reached for it. Her hands young again. The workshop undimmed. The boy returning, always returning. Enough time to stop being afraid.

Ias glanced at her.

She could not speak. Refusal would have been a lie about how much she wanted it.

“Will I still know what I wanted before you asked?” he said.

Dionysus’s face changed.

“You will know much more.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

The fire went out.

In the darkness the god’s eyes remained visible. A bull’s breath filled the chamber. The stone beneath Melantho’s feet trembled, and at the entrance a vine drove its root through the rock with a noise like a joint breaking.

Oion dropped to his knees. Myrrine seized Melantho’s hand.

Ias stood within reach of the god.

Night struck the floor once with her staff.

The vine stopped growing. Its youngest leaf, half uncurled, shook in the still air.

Dionysus closed his eyes.

When he opened them, he was a young man again. He looked down at his hands as if someone had put them there without asking him.

“I am not those men,” he said.

Ias swallowed.

“I know.”

But neither of them moved closer.

X #

Melantho let go of her sister’s hand.

She went to the mirror, lifted it, and turned it over. The backing was her own work: dull bronze, six drilled holes, a strip set slightly crooked because Ias had been speaking while she marked it. At the rim one clip bore the small crescent her hammer left when she struck at an awkward angle.

“This is what I can do,” she said.

Dionysus looked at the back.

“I can make it hold together. The joins will always show.”

She had nothing more useful to offer him. No child, no explanation that would make the crime part of a benevolent design. Only sound work upon a damaged thing.

He took the mirror. His thumb passed over the crooked strip.

“I have been gathered together before.”

“Yes.”

“Everyone was very pleased.”

The bitterness was so ordinary that she could bear to look at him.

He turned the face upward. The child flickered at the center, his arms raised. Dionysus tilted the disc, searching for the angle at which the picture would become continuous. The motion grew quick, frustrated. Ias stepped beside him.

“Let me hold it.”

The god tightened his grip.

“I won’t run,” the boy said.

Melantho heard the promise with a chill. She had asked him for smaller versions of it all his life.

Dionysus allowed him to take the other side of the rim. They held the mirror between them, neither directly before it. The child’s face dissolved. In its place the room opened, empty for a moment, the hanging cloth stirring in an air long gone.

Ias breathed in sharply.

Melantho moved toward him.

He shook his head. “I can stand here.”

The picture changed. The child entered carrying a ball. Melantho could see him whole now, not as the image in the toy but as the boy who approached it. He knelt. Beyond him came the white faces.

Dionysus made a sound in his throat.

“Stop them,” he said.

Ias’s fingers whitened on the rim.

“Stop them.”

The boy did not answer. His lips moved. Melantho recognized the little spaces between his breaths, the rhythm of hands against stone. She began it softly against her thigh. Myrrine joined her. After a moment, Oion did too.

The white hand turned.

Dionysus flinched. Ias nearly dropped the disc, then caught it. The god’s free hand closed on his forearm, hard enough to leave marks.

Melantho stopped breathing.

“I’m here,” Ias said.

The room in the mirror became crowded. Melantho lowered her eyes, but the sounds remained: the ball striking the floor, a chair overturned, a cry cut into separate cries. She had heard men tell the story over wine. Their voices had made the horror distant, arranged it into something a listener could endure. Here there was no distance. A child was being killed. No meaning redeemed it.

“I couldn’t turn,” Ias said. “I could see them, but I couldn’t turn you.”

Dionysus held his arm.

“I thought if I could turn you—”

The boy’s voice failed.

In the mirror the image broke with the bronze. Darkness entered along six remembered fractures. Then the room was gone.

For a long time no one moved.

Dionysus released Ias’s arm. The marks of his fingers stood white, then red.

“You saw,” he said.

“Yes.”

“All of it.”

“Yes.”

The god bowed his head until it nearly touched the boy’s. They were no longer identical. One had the unmarked beauty of a power that could discard a shape. The other was pale, sick, sweating, with an old crookedness in his nose. He looked painfully young.

“I thought I had left you there,” Dionysus said.

“I thought I had left you.”

Melantho sat down on the stone. Her legs had stopped holding her. She had imagined a struggle over ownership. She had not imagined these two children on opposite sides of the same terror, each believing himself the one who escaped.

The mirror cleared.

There was a child in it again, but he was not waiting. He crouched over his ball, absorbed, turning it in his hands to inspect a worn patch. He looked up briefly at some sound beyond the edge and went back to his game.

Dionysus touched the surface.

The child continued playing.

“Before,” the god whispered.

Ias nodded.

The image had become a memory. It did not need the grown boy to move its hands. Melantho could not have said whether the mirror had changed or whether its owner had at last learned where to look. She knew only that her son stood beside it, breathing for himself.

Dionysus held it close.

“Stay with me,” he said to Ias.

There was no pressure in the cave now. Only the request, terrible because it was a request.

Ias looked at his mother. She understood that if she pleaded, he might stay with her instead, and spend his life calling that choice his own. She pressed her palms against the cold stone.

“I have work,” he said at last.

The god’s mouth moved, almost a smile.

“Playing other people.”

“Learning to.”

“You have been doing it longer than you know.”

“I want to do it badly first.”

Dionysus laughed. The sound was small and startling. Oion covered his face again, but this time Melantho did not begrudge him the tears.

The god picked up the mask. He held it before his own face, and for a moment Doro’s prince looked out at them, calm and empty-eyed.

“May I?”

“It belongs to the company,” Ias said.

Melantho laughed helplessly. Even Night’s dark face seemed to alter.

“Then I will borrow it.” Dionysus placed it beside the mirror. “Tell them who has it.”

“They’ll want it back.”

“Of course.”

He touched Ias once on the forehead. Nothing visible happened. The boy did not shine. His bruised arm remained bruised.

When the god left, Oion followed him to the doorstep and stood there until the scent of grapes had thinned. Then he came back for his basket.

Night lifted the eggshell from beside the basin. She held it for a moment, looking into its curve, and set it carefully on a high ledge.

“Sleep,” she told them.

Melantho lay beside her son on the stone. She did not reach for him. Near morning he shifted in his sleep and put one cold foot against her ankle, exactly as he had done when he was small.

XI #

They returned by the same road, which took less time and was considerably steeper.

Oion had decided to travel with them as far as the coast. His god had gone another way. He said this without resentment, though he kept looking into the trees as if he might hear his name.

Myrrine asked whether he would visit his brother.

“Perhaps.”

“You could write first.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“That you are alive is usually a satisfactory beginning.”

Ias laughed. He had been quiet through the morning, and everyone tried not to show how glad they were to hear it. His arm hurt. He was hungry. The ordinary inconveniences of being a person returned one by one, and he met them with no particular grace.

At the stream he knelt beside the still pool.

Melantho stayed on the path. She could see his face in the water, darkened by the sky, breaking whenever an insect touched the surface. He looked for a long time. Then he drank, ruining the picture with both hands.

They reached Aigale while the festival benches were being dismantled.

Doro’s company was loading a boat. A painted door leaned against a coil of rope. Someone had misplaced the head of an old king, and the owner of the oil press was insisting that it be found before he returned their deposit. Doro stood on the quay with a tablet, directing three arguments at once.

Ias stopped at the top of the harbor steps.

His mother stopped beside him.

“You’ll have to run,” she said.

He looked at her.

“I haven’t finished Simo’s handles.”

“I know how to make a handle.”

“What about the wedding mirror?”

“She isn’t marrying until the next full moon. If she sees her face sooner, it won’t improve the marriage.”

He laughed, but his eyes were wet.

Melantho took a small purse from her belt. She had counted the coins before leaving Night’s cave. Enough for food if the shares proved imaginary, not enough to make him careless. She put it in his hand.

“Don’t lend it to a man who calls you brother before he knows your name.”

“I won’t.”

“And don’t write that you’re well if you need something.”

“I won’t.”

“And if a fever—”

She stopped. There was no end to the instructions. She could bind him in them more thoroughly than in any mirror.

He embraced her.

She held him hard. For once she did not care whether it was wise. His shoulder smelled of travel and the smoke of Night’s little fire. Her child had been a god’s image, a stranger from the sea, a boy who broke jars, this young man who was about to go. She could feel none of those distinctions through his tunic. She could feel his ribs and the movement of his breath.

Then he stepped back.

“I might be no good,” he said.

“At first, probably.”

He gave a shocked laugh.

“You might be very good later,” she added. “I haven’t seen enough to know.”

The answer pleased him more than praise would have. She watched him discover that his mother could be interested in something she did not control.

He went down the steps.

Halfway he turned. “The mask!”

“Tell her.”

“She’ll never believe me.”

“Try.”

Melantho remained at the top while he reached the quay. Doro looked up, said something sharp, and pushed a rolled sail into his arms. He began talking. She listened while counting the bundles. Then she stopped counting and stared at him.

Melantho could not hear her reply. From the expression on Ias’s face, it was worth the journey.

Myrrine came to stand beside her. Oion had gone to buy sandals.

“You can cry,” her sister said.

“I know.”

“You look as though you don’t.”

“I am waiting until he can’t see.”

Below them the boat loosened from the quay. Men pushed with poles. The painted door swayed dangerously, was caught, and disappeared beneath the awning. Ias stood among the bundles. He lifted a hand. Melantho lifted hers.

The distance increased in the ordinary way.

At home the workshop was hot and smelled of stale oil. A customer had left a cracked pan outside the door, trusting her return more than she had. Beneath the stair, the chest stood open. Melantho took out the sailcloth, shook it, and folded it for use as a polishing rag. A little sand fell from the seam.

She put the wooden top on the bench. It had stopped spinning sometime in Night’s house. She had not noticed when.

That evening she finished the wedding mirror.

The bride came with her sister to collect it and complained, as brides sometimes did, that the surface was too truthful. Melantho held it closer to the light. The young woman leaned forward, then laughed at something her sister whispered. Their faces moved together in the bronze and apart again.

“There,” Melantho said. “That is better.”

After they had gone, she ate outside with Myrrine. Her sister talked about the shrine’s leaking roof and the sandal-maker’s determination to marry her, which he had expressed by offering to repair only one sandal for free. Melantho said he was a businessman. Myrrine said so was a rat.

The town darkened. Lamps appeared behind shutters. From the harbor came a sailor’s song, interrupted by a quarrel about a rope. Melantho found herself listening for her son’s voice and would do so for a long time.

Before bed she tried the top.

It wobbled, struck a knot in the wood, and fell. She tried again. This time it found its balance and made a small dry music upon the bench.

She watched until it began to slow. Then she left it there and went upstairs, carrying the lamp.