Page 23 of Odette's Vow

“Don’t you want to read them … in private?”

“When you and I are alone, Odette, we are in private.”

“Oh.” He was right, though I was loath to admit it.

Learning more Greek would come in useful. The longer I was here in this camp, the more frustrated I felt by the lack of things I could say. The girls all knew our common tongue, but the soldiers hated hearing us speak it. They assumed we were talking about them, and the crueller ones would slap the women they heard talking in a foreign language. ‘Speak Greek!’ they’d yell at us, as if it were that easy. As if we weren’t having to translate everything they were saying into our own common tongue in our heads, understand it, form a response, convert that into what little Greek we knew, and then try and pronounce it. Most of the time they jeered and laughed and called us ‘slow’.

So, Odysseus’ offer was tempting, I could not deny that.

“Why?” I eventually asked him.

He looked at me. “Why would I teach you? I have just explained that to you. You have to be smarter. I can’t have you getting on the wrong side of these men.”

“No, not that. Why do you care?” I asked slowly.

“You’re my property, Odette.”

I shook my head. “I have seen how other men treat their property. You are not the same. You once told me you picked me for something. I want to know why, what, you picked me for.”

He blinked slowly, as if surprised by the question, before looking at me as though he’d never seen me before. Then he leaned back from the crates we sat on and crossed his arms. His forearms, dusted in dark brown hairs, bulged even larger, and I saw the fabric of his chiton ripple and stretch taut over the power of his quads, solid and unyielding, like carved stone. That amount of muscle on display made me uncomfortable. Almost as uncomfortable as the assessing look he roamed over my face.

“Because you’re intelligent. That much is clear, and it’s a rare commodity in war.”

“In-tell-ig-ent?”

“Smart. Clever.”

“Ah.”

“And clever slaves,” (to his credit, he did scowl at that word) “are rarer than pretty, fuckable ones. It is wise to own rare things.”

Nothos.?3

He might have spat the word ‘slaves’ with distaste, but he still refused to see me as anything more than a tool to be used, playing on my emotions with a clear understanding of how human I was. My first impression of him had been right: while others admired his cleverness, his stirring speeches, and strategic brilliance, I saw through it. He was cunning, manipulative, and used people for his own gain with a callousdisregard for anything else. I wondered if he was even aware of his own cruelty – and if his wife saw it, too.

“Let us begin.”

Scowling, I took a seat at the pallet and gently snatched the first letter he held out to me.

When Alcander first taught me all the Greek he knew, I saw it as a vast, sprawling language similar to our own. With that similarity, I had picked it up easily enough. But after I became a mother, relearning had proved challenging. Perhaps it was the stress of the situation, having to learn polite phrases: pleases, thank yous, how can I help, what would you like. Knowing they were all phrases designed to keep me alive; if you could call slavery a life.

Penelope, instead, wrote and spoke as eloquently as her husband. She mused over old memories of her and Odysseus enjoying a sweet moment together before he’d left for the war. They ate akratos?4 and half a fig each; the juice of a particularly succulent one she had bitten into dripped down her chin and he had wiped it off with his tongue. Then she recounted quite vividly other things he’d done with his tongue, which I read until I’d blushed and refused to read any more, citing I could not possibly understand all the words.

Still, our lessons continued every night after I had finished my duties, and I got to know Odysseus’ wife through her letters. She was clever, sharp, and witty, just as he’d described me. Not all of the letters were so immodest as that first one. My favourites were those in which she’d spun tales of how she’d imagined their son getting older in those first few years, so Odysseus could feel closer to him as he grew up. They warmed my heart, for it was like getting to relive all of Lykas’ moments of growth; being absorbed in the letter and able to deny the reality of him being gone. As if he was simply off in a faraway land, like Odysseus’ son.

Until, one day, the lessons stopped.

Instead, I found Odysseus in our tent as tired and weary as the rest of the men. He barely offered me a glance before going out to wash away the day, again barely a grunt when I pressed a glass of wine into his hands upon his return. I went about preparing something to eat with what we had as he slumped into a seat on the floor, his back against the centre wooden pole that held up the tent. One leg was long and straight in front of him, the other bent at the knee with his foot on the floor, as he held the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb.

“Headache, my lord?”

“This whole war is giving me a headache.” I mulled over what to say, when he beat me to it. “What have the women noticed about the men of late?”

I stilled, then wiped the knife I’d been using against my tunic, placed it down and turned to him. “How did you know the women have been discussing the men?”

“Your shoulder blades sit much tighter together when you have something to tell me, and you don’t know how to broach the subject.”

I hadn’t realised he’d come to know me so well. I thought I’d been all but a closed book, but apparently any amount of time in close quarters proved that even I could not hide my very nature from others. I wondered how long it would be before my other secrets unknowingly slipped out from beneath my skin. I made a mental resolve to push those thoughts downfurther, deeper, and then cocked my head so I looked inquisitive.

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