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alleys, the great houses and the small ones, the beer houses, houses of pleasure and the hostels for travelling men. Every day I spent hours in the bookroom. Sometimes strange men came and consulted with Perseus or eyed poor Chloe where she was yawning, her face carelessly bared. No one bothered to look at me, a muffled figure poring over an unrolled scroll. It was for me an enchantment. After a while, whenever I met Ionides – and he came to the palace of the Pythias almost every day – he would address me with an hexameter and wait, his head on one side, ready to assess the answer. I was very shy at first and could hardly stammer out a phrase as he wanted. But he would say, ‘Oh, come along, a half-line, even just an umtiddy um-tum!’ Then one day I tried to explain that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to or didn’t know what he wanted, I was shy, that was all – and found myself falling into the measure as easily as slipping into something loose, and he gave a great shout which echoed in the bookroom and brought Perseus running from his cell. Ionides gave me the victor’s salute.
    ‘A great step forward!’
    After that we sometimes carried on quite long conversations in the measure and I began to think in it as well as speak it. I don’t know whether I have recorded anywhere that the Pythia used to give the answer in hexameters. Ionides thought that if only the questions could be made great enough the speech would follow. I was eager to please him as I suppose any girl would be. I planned to get rid of Chloe. She was too pretty. When I told Ionides he agreed. So we sold her to her great relief. I myself was so relieved that I gave her the smaller of the two Egyptian necklaces which had come down from my mother’s mother. There was no possibility of my wearing them myself. But I shocked Ionides by this.
    ‘Why, in the name of god?’
    ‘Whenever I used to look at her neck I would think first of the necklace lying round it and second of strangling her.’
    ‘Have you any conception of what that necklace is worth? She could buy her freedom with it! But that old fool who has bought her could make his fortune if he had the wit.’
    ‘She is gone and I want to forget her.’
    Ionides showed me another place too. I do not know what to call it. I think the columbarium would be as near as anything. It was a small building and this is because there was a cave behind it, so that you never knew when you were in the open but in a building, or when you were under the earth and in a cave. The cave had been so altered. He instructed me in vivid terms that I was not to speak of anything I saw, ever. Indeed, I don’t think he showed me the columbarium because the knowledge of it would be useful to me but because he wanted to impress me with his cleverness and importance. Oh yes, I had seen round Ionides already and liked him all the more for it. Any woman feels all the more secure with a man – with her man, and if Ionides was anyone’s man it was mine – when she sees a little further round him and into him than he thinks. Quite a number of men, slaves of course, worked in the columbarium. It was a building with many ladders, or stairs as I learn I must call them. We climbed them all and they were so built that a woman, or for that matter a man, could use them without indecent exposure to below. At the top there were many cages for pigeons and the first time we reached them, a bird fluttered in, rang its bell as it did so, then flopped in the bottom of the cage. Ionides reached in and took a tiny roll of paper from its leg.
    ‘Smyrna. All the way across the Aegean Sea and Attica. Here you are, Ariston, take it.’
    ‘That bird carried a message all the way from Asia?’
    ‘Yes. You see there are places, you’ve probably heard of them. They like to keep in touch with Delphi, still the centre of the world. And one day –’
    ‘What messages?’
    ‘That’s a secret, Young Lady. But you’ve heard of other oracles