I put my shoes back on. I didn’t think I would ever tire of feeling the grass under my feet again, but I was mistaken. Delightful as it was to feel each individual strand forcing its way between my toes, the pain of treading on the stones which hid themselves beneath the grasses more than balanced it out. Besides, it was easier to wear shoes than carry them, although the leather was so tough at first that it blistered my feet. It has softened now, or my feet have hardened, as we have crossed the stades from the city. This is my first time outside Thebes, up on the mountain roads. We have a donkey to carry our packs. He’s young and only occasionally bad-tempered. He limits the distance we can travel each day. After so many stades (the number varies, depending on the hilliness of the terrain), he stops for the night, and no persuasion from me or Sophon has any effect.
I look back to see the lower stretches of the mountains beneath me, and catch sight of Sophon’s bald head through the waving grasses, like a large egg in a nest. I am still angry with him, though I feel the rage ebbing away with each step we take. I don’t know whether it is the movement which cures my anger, or the distance I have put between myself and Thebes. Once we round the peak of the mountain – later this afternoon sometime – I will be out of sight of my city for the first time in my life. I could not stay there when my sister became queen, and used her first day as ruler to order that Creon be executed in the main square. I understood her reasons – he had turned against her and against our family, he had plotted against our brothers – but she could have banished him instead. Haem may never recover from it, I told her. She said he would learn to, or he would leave. I am not sure she cares which of these things happens. She wants people to know she is unafraid of her power. I’m sure they understand that now.
I plan to return to Thebes one day, but the roads are treacherous, and my plans may count for nothing. We will sleep outside for one or perhaps two more nights. I don’t mind waking up covered in dew, my muscles stiffened from the hard ground. But I am decades younger than Sophon, and he struggles to raise himself in the mornings when we have slept on the ground, even if I have wrapped him in all the blankets we have with us. Still, he never complains.
He’s coming up behind me, climbing towards me without noticing that I’ve perched on this boulder to wait for him. He’s concentrating hard on the uneven ground; he doesn’t want to lose his balance. He has a stick to help him negotiate his way over the rocks, and so do I. I found a branch by a dead pine tree, and I used a small knife to slice off the twigs which covered it. Because the tree is long dead, there is no sap bleeding out of it, gumming up my hands. It’s more brittle, but I have been careful with it and it holds my weight when the path is uncertain.
I wave down to him, but he isn’t looking up at me. I want him to know there’s a stream right by my feet, which means we can refill our bottles. He worries about water. He says it’s from years of living in Thebes, where water was once in short supply. But he doesn’t ever tell me I wouldn’t understand because it wasn’t like that when I was born. He just worries in silence. So I try to reassure him: we won’t run out. Travellers used to take this path between the two cities all the time. If dying of thirst was a frequent occurrence, we would have seen the consequences somewhere by now: bodies by the side of the road. But still he worries. So now I just try to go ahead and find water, then wave back to him so he knows. But that only works if he remembers to look up.
He is filled with guilt and I am filled with blame. I don’t know if the space between us can be crossed. Why had he never told me that my mother had not killed herself from shame, but that she had been infected with the plague? He says Creon forbade any mention of her, and told him – on the day she died – that if he ever raised the subject with any of her children, he would be banished from the palace immediately. Anyway, we never asked about it because we thought we knew everything already. She hanged herself, and everyone said it was from shame. They spoke about her so quietly and cruelly that we knew it must be so. And yet it was not. I grew up believing that my mother did not love us enough to stay alive. But the opposite was true. She loved us so much, she died to protect us. Sophon used to tell me in lessons that it is possible to change the past. When I expressed disbelief he gave the example of a wound, which might only be revealed as fatal many days after it has been sustained. I never understood it until now.
His head has disappeared from view, as the path curves away beneath me. I cannot hear him yet, but he must be closing in on my vantage point. I lift myself from the boulder, and sit on a smaller rock a little further up the path. He will need the high flat surface of the boulder, to rest his weary bones. The donkey trudges ahead of him, having decided that he keeps a more appropriate pace than I do. There are shoots of new green grass by the side of the stream, which the donkey will appreciate, as much as Sophon enjoys the cool mountain-water.
I have no idea what Corinth will be like. Thebes never did reopen her gates, after the two summers of the Reckoning. Ani has finally opened the city up again and most people are glad of it. But that wasn’t so long ago, and word has not yet spread far enough afield for us to see anyone coming towards Thebes. The habit must have been broken years ago: there would have been no point crossing these mountains when you couldn’t get into the city.
Or perhaps, as Sophon fears, the plague killed more people outside the city than inside. That happened before, with the first Reckoning, back when he was a boy. The whole world changed, he said, because so many people died. Things which had seemed permanent became temporary. So perhaps we will reach the city and find it inhabited only by bandits or skeletons or wild dogs or nothing at all. Perhaps we’ll reach the outskirts and see that it is too late, and that there is nothing there for us, not even information. But I prefer to imagine that it will have survived, just as my city survived, in its own way. I think that people will be carving out their lives, in whatever circumstances remain for them. And I believe that one of them will be able to help me.
One of them will remember a time ten years ago when a blinded man wandered into their city, the place where he grew up. His eyes were gone, but you could see he had been handsome before that. He would have had a beard, I think, and he would have been accompanied by travellers he met near Thebes, who were heading to the city because they didn’t yet know the gates had been closed. He would have told them that he had survived a brush with the Reckoning and that he could tell them how to protect themselves. My father was clever, and resourceful. They would have turned on their heels, weary and disappointed that their journey had been in vain. And he would have accompanied them back to his home. He might still be there now. He would be about forty years old.
He won’t be able to see me, but that won’t matter, because I was a child when he left Thebes. If anything, being able to see me would just confuse matters. It is the sound and the smell of people that doesn’t change, even as they grow up or grow old. I know I will recognize him though, and Sophon will, of course. Sophon has survived so much, and for so long, he says appearances are all like masks for him. He can see through them to the true person within.
I know it would be better for him if we spent just one more night sleeping out in the open, but I hope it’s two. Because that gives me two more days of imagining what it will be like to find my father again.
And even though he hasn’t heard my voice in all these years, when I say his name, he will know me straightaway.
