Page 8 of The House of the Red Balconies

“I guess you could say the house has fallen on hard times. We’re certainly not as happy here as we used to be.”

“Oh,” said the person she was talking to, lamely. Yes, it was certainly Zo’s neighbour.

“I’d say it’s been about a year,” Taris went on unprompted. “Since around the time Theano had her baby, or maybe before that, when Hippolytos died. And the roof had to be redone. Not that those things had anything to do with each other, but they were both blows, coming almost one on top of the other, and it left us struggling. The winter’s always a harder time anyway, with fewer guests. And Theano had a difficult pregnancy and a worse birth.”

“Oh dear. That … that must have frightened everyone.”

Zo eased himself carefully down to sit on the steps. He wasn’t particularly surprised to hear Taris talking to the new tenant like this; she was a chatty person who liked talking to men more than she liked actively flirting with them. But he wanted to hear how she would tell this story. Likely he wanted to hear it more than the aqueduct man himself did; he’d sounded uncomfortable, to Zo’s mind.

“It did. And honestly, Mistress has been in a funk for a long time. Pani and Menthe say it’s because she didn’t want Theano to keep the baby, but I don’t think that’s true. She did quarrel with Zo, though—that’s true, we all heard that.”

Ah, there it was. Eavesdrop long and well enough and you’d always hear someone talking about you; that had been true in Rataxa, and apparently it was true here too.

“Oh,” said Hylas again, and could Taris not tell that he wanted none of this information?

She couldn’t, or she didn’t care; she went on: “I think it was a misunderstanding—she wasn’t trying to be mean, but she has a harsh way of saying things sometimes. And between you and me, I don’t think she knows how to deal with male companions. They’re kind of betwixt and between, you know?”

“I—I—Are they?”

He doesn’t know, Zo thought; he doesn’t pay any attention to us. He barely paid attention to the women, from what Zo could see.

“Anyway,” Taris was saying, “Zo used to be much more sociable before that—I mean, he’s sociable with the guests still, he comes out of his room and is quite dazzling all night, then he goes back and shuts himself up in his corner of the house and hardly comes out during the day. It’s a shame. He used to help us with our wool-work during the day, you know? He got Pani and Menthe to teach him to spin, and he was getting quite decent at it. I thought it was sweet of him. You’d never catch Chrestos doing that!”

All right, that was enough. Zo got to his feet and was about to begin noisily descending the stairs.

“He … he must really want to be one of you,” the aqueduct man said, and Zo froze again. He hadn’t said that in the way Zo would have expected; it hadn’t been a scoff or even a cringing “Oh, how … nice.” It had sounded earnest.

“Well, perhaps he did, at the time,” Taris allowed.

“What was the quarrel about?”

“Oh, it was … ” She’d succeeded in getting him interested in the subject, and now she didn’t want to talk about it anymore, clearly. “I probably shouldn’t be gossiping like this. Let’s get these into your room, and then I should go finish my chores.”

“I—I can take that, you needn’t⁠—”

Taris laughed brightly. “Of course you can, it’s not as if you need me carrying things for you, is it? Sorry for talking your ear off. It’s just nice to have a new face around here who’s not a guest, you know?”

The aqueduct man mumbled something polite, and Taris handed over whatever it was they had been bringing to his room—linens or something, maybe, to replace the things Pantaleon had taken with him when he left—and after a moment Zo heard a door shutting and silence. He went quietly down the stairs himself and into his own room.

He often woke with the sun and lay in bed trying pointlessly to get back to sleep, so he’d heard the new tenant out in the garden, and knew he’d developed a habit of taking his breakfast under the olive tree. That was certainly better than what Pantaleon had used the garden for. One more point in the aqueduct man’s favour.

“I think I’ll stay in tonight,” Hylas told Governor Loukianos, two weeks after beginning his job. “I’m afraid I need a rest.”

“Of course, of course!” Loukianos agreed indulgently. “I’ve been running you ragged, keeping you out until all hours of the night. And you’re a man of sober habits, I should have known it by looking at you. Timon said as much.”

Hylas felt a perverse need to argue that Timon hadn’t judged him correctly, even though he clearly had, and probably “sober habits” was much more flattering than what he had actually said. Whatever it was, no doubt it was deserved.

“It is true,” Hylas said, instead of arguing. “I have not got the stamina that all of you have.”

He returned home feeling rather pleased with himself, as if an evening alone was a prize he had won. He fetched water from the cistern and took a cold, brisk bath, a habit retained from his early life. As it turned out, he had not been bothering with the public bath. Dressed in a clean tunic, he made his way back to his room.

A young man he’d never seen before stood on the dark landing, thumping a fist on the door next to Hylas’s.

“Zo, come on!” he groaned. “Why are you taking so long?”

Hylas hesitated, not wanting to call attention to himself by slipping past to his own door, but also not wishing to be caught standing there awkwardly, with damp hair and a bundle of dirty clothes, when Zo opened the door. If Zo was going to open the door.

It was too late, anyway, as the young man at the door had noticed him and turned to stare, then look him up and down, wide-eyed.