Page 6 of The House of the Red Balconies

“I see.” So the aqueduct was going to help, but only if other repairs were made to the water delivery system of the town. Hylas wondered whether that was part of Governor Loukianos’s plan too.

A woman came in lugging a jar of oil and struggling to suppress laughter.

“Guess who I just saw leaving?” she said, elbowing the cook.

“Captain Themistokles,” the cook’s assistant guessed.

“What? No, Captain Themistokles—I’ve stopped even noticing him, he’s like a part of the furniture. No, it was Gordios. The spice merchant?”

“No! Who was he with?” the cook demanded.

“He was by himself when I saw him, and he didn’t look happy to be alive. I think he got drunk in a corner and slept here, and nobody noticed.”

“Gods, I wonder if he did! How comical!”

“It won’t be if it gets talked about,” the cook’s assistant put in drearily from where she was working at the stove. “You think the girls here want this to be the kind of house where drunks fall asleep in corners? You go to the cheap wine shops and the brothels down by the harbour for that.”

“True enough,” said the cook with a sigh.

“Oh, hello,” said the oil-carrier, finally noticing Hylas. “Who are you?”

“He’s the new tenant, the aqueduct man.”

“Oh, the aqueduct man! Don’t pay any attention to what I was just saying, sir.”

“He’s just had to come to the kitchen to get his own tea,” the cook’s assistant intoned. “I think he knows we’re a house fallen on hard times.”

“Oh, not at all, I mean I—that’s—it’s no trouble.”

Mercifully, the tea was ready by this time. The cook’s assistant brought over a small clay pot, its handle wrapped in a cloth, with steam rising from the spout, and the cook placed it on a tray with a basket of fresh buns and two little glazed bowls, then handed the whole thing to Hylas. He didn’t know whether the two bowls were because she expected him to share the tea with someone or because there was some other, mysterious use for the second bowl. Did tea have pits that you had to spit out? He thanked her, nodded politely to all three women, and left the kitchen.

He took the tray back to his apartment and set it on the floor, since there was no table. He thought fleetingly of going out into the private yard, but the prospect of running into his neighbour again frightened him, so he settled down inside.

He plumped down a cushion, in imitation of the people he had seen sitting in the courtyard, and lifted the lid of the pot with the cloth to peer inside. Something crumbled and dark was floating in the water, which had turned a clear amber. Were you supposed to fish that out? Was that what the second bowl was for? But surely a spoon or something would have been more useful.

He replaced the lid and poured some tea into one of the bowls. The pot had a strainer built into the spout, his discovered, so few of the solids came out. Hylas blew on the surface of the tea and sipped gingerly. It was very hot, with an earthy, slightly bitter flavour that was completely different than he had expected. He liked it.

CHAPTER 3

The morning pot of tea and basket of buns became a daily thing. Hylas learned the name of the cook—Elpis—and some of her assistants—Gio, Tuma, and Dria—and their opinion of the landlord (very low) and the mistress of the Red Balconies (not much higher).

“She’s a harpy,” was Gio’s judgement.

“She likes things to look just so,” in Dria’s more nuanced view, “and she takes it to extremes. That’s why she quarrelled with young Zo last winter.”

They always gave Hylas two bowls with his tea and more buns than he could eat in one sitting, and he never protested or explained that he had no one to share them with.

He took his breakfast in the back garden now, under the looming cliff face in the shade of the olive tree. He had realized that all the inhabitants of the Red Balconies slept late, so there was no likelihood of encountering his neighbour at this hour. He would drink as much of the tea as he comfortably could, eat half of the buns—they were delicious, stuffed with different fillings, some sweet and some savoury—and wrap the rest up in a cloth to take with him to work.

Not that he was doing much work. He was trying: he had hired the mule and gone out, a couple of days in a row, to survey the site on the little island as best he could by himself, but much of it was impassable scrubland, and you needed a team to do it properly. The site on the big island was apparently even worse. He’d asked around at the government office and learned the name of the navy’s chief surveyor, but everyone seemed to agree that they’d need to wait until the quartermaster’s mistress returned from Gylphos before actually requesting his help. He hadn’t gone down to the fort.

The three hundred nummoi had duly materialized on the second morning, and the staff of the government office had been helpful in suggesting how much of it he might want to keep at home and explaining how to deposit the greater portion with the treasurers at the Temple of Amphiaraos in the town’s small agora. He’d got through that procedure with a minimum amount of embarrassment, and to celebrate had gone out to the market and treated himself to a few luxuries.

Eventually, to keep himself busy and avoid spending another afternoon trying to appreciate Governor Loukianos’s gardens, he had set himself a project of checking the map of water sources in the town and its environs. The people in the governor’s office clearly thought he was wasting his time doing this, as the existing map, which was painted on the wall of the government office, was wonderfully detailed, with artistic renderings of the various fountains and wells in their locations. Hylas mumbled something apologetic about needing to see things with his own eyes and agreed that the map was indeed a thing of beauty. On his first day comparing the map to the streets of the town, he found that the map was inaccurate, had been inaccurate when it was first painted, and was now out of date, showing fountains that were no longer in use and omitting at least one major well. So he was discreetly drafting a new one, much less distinguished artistically, but much more accurate.

His evenings were spent with Governor Loukianos and his friends at the tea houses. His afternoons could have been spent there too, and sometimes were, if he made the mistake of being somewhere where the governor could find him at around the time the tea houses opened, and not appearing adequately busy.

Afternoons were the times when the tea houses actually served tea, and the atmosphere was relaxed and, in some ways, more intimate, because there were fewer guests. It might have suited Hylas better, but in fact it put him intolerably on edge; there were no crowds or shadows to hide in, no one was lit up with drink or distracted by dancers, and everyone looked you in the eye. People really did expect you to recite poetry in the afternoons. Evenings, when you could pretend to be a sleepy drunk, or enraptured by a performance, or just very busy eating, were easier.