I ran about the edge of the agora, jumping constantly to see over the heads of the people, in search of our main opponent.
There he was.
Antobius stood on the steps of the Stoa Basileus, waiting for his wife to appear. He’d picked the one spot to wait that Aposila couldn’t avoid.
The great arc I’d run around the market had taken me to the same steps, but from the side. His back was to me, his full attention on his wife. He could easily nab her as she came up the stairs.
There wasn’t a thing I could do. If I attacked him there, in full view of the agora crowd, I’d be up for assault. Nor would it help Aposila if I did, because it would show a man had intervened in her divorce.
At that moment Aposila saw Antobius upon the steps, waiting for her. Her steps faltered.
Unable to be seen to help, but desperate to save her, I mouthed a single word, straight at Aposila: “RUN.”
She saw me, nodded imperceptibly, picked up her skirts, and ran.
The spectacle of a middle-aged matron sprinting across the agora grabbed everyone’s attention. Everyone, that is, except the invariable board-game players outside the Basileus’s office-the same ones as before, whom I’d last seen fighting over a trivial point.
While everyone watched Aposila, I edged up behind Antobius and gave him a good shove.
He’d been balanced on the top step. He fell forward, down the steps, straight into the board game. The pieces scattered; the game was ruined. The two players were enraged. Both struck out at Antobius. He struck back by sheer reflex. At that, the gamers began to pummel him furiously.
Meanwhile, Aposila was almost flying across the agora. I’d never seen a middle-aged woman run so fast. The crowd had seen Antobius on the steps, standing like an enraged bull; they’d guessed what was happening and they cheered her on.
Antobius had an even better idea of what had happened. He knew I’d pushed him. He disposed of the game players with two massive, double-handed blows that sent both players spinning through the air.
Aposila had reached the bottom step. But Antobius could easily catch her before she reached the door.
I jumped between them. Antobius ran into me.
“Get out of my way!”
“No.”
I couldn’t hit him, but I could stand between them.
The last thing I saw was Antobius’s fist going into my face.
When I came to, there were three Diotimas floating above me.
“Did she make it?” I asked all three of them, groggily.
“She made it. Aposila is divorced.”
Diotima raised my head to give me water, but it hurt so much she quickly lowered me. The whole world spun, and I had to shut my eyes.
“Antobius was so busy pounding you that he let Aposila slip past. Well done, Nico.”
“Yes, very clever of me.” My head throbbed.
“Antobius tried to force his way into the stoa offices. The Basileus had him thrown out. When he tried again, they called the Scythians. They escorted Aposila to a friend’s house; a friend whose husband doesn’t like Antobius.”
“Lucky the Scythians were close by.”
“No luck whatsoever. I suggested to Father he might like to keep this area well patrolled today.”
That was the advantage of marrying a clever woman. I told myself I would never, ever give Diotima cause to make that walk to the archon’s office.
I lay in the dirt of the agora. The excitement over, everyone had gone back to their business and completely ignored me.
Diotima had sent a Scythian for help. He returned with a couple of slaves and a board. They put me on the board and carried me home.
THERE SHOULD BE a rule that when a man is married, or about to be, his mother isn’t allowed to scold him anymore.
Unfortunately there isn’t, so Phaenarete shared her views on my stupidity as she washed and bandaged my cuts and bruises.
She finished with, “Dear Gods, Nico, look at the state of you. It’s a good thing Diotima is joining us. It’s going to take the two of us to keep you alive. You obviously can’t do it on your own.”
I refrained from pointing out it was Diotima who’d gotten me into this state, when she talked me into taking on a divorce case.
I wondered about this as I toiled away on an urgent domestic task that couldn’t be put off any longer. I was in the women’s quarters of our house, a place in which I had not spent any significant time since I was a boy. Every house has its women’s quarters, always on the second floor, usually on the side of the house that gets the most sun. The women’s quarters of our house was one open rectangular space. Since I didn’t have any sisters, the only inhabitant was my mother. But that was about to change.
When Diotima moved in, she would share this space with my mother. But no two women can share the same room every moment of their lives without any privacy, particularly not when one is a new wife and the other her mother-in-law. Tradition and domestic harmony both required me to partition this room: a space for my mother, one for Diotima, and a sitting room to share.
Scattered about me were a mallet, two drills, two saws-one for rough cutting and the other for finishing work-and chisels of varying widths, all borrowed from my father’s workshop. The advantage of belonging to an artisan family was that you never lacked for the right tool. When I borrowed the tools, I’d asked Father if he’d care to help me, expecting him to say yes. Instead he’d given me a look I couldn’t interpret and told me that he already had.
The house slaves had carried Mother’s precious possessions-her bed and dresser and cupboard and her fine chairs-down to the courtyard, dropping them fewer times than I would have, so that I was left with a totally empty space in which to work. Phaenarete sat in the courtyard, on furniture that was set out in imitation of the women’s quarters, while I tore apart the room she’d lived in all her married life.
I began by pulling down the panels of the inner walls of her room. They were attached firmly with holding pegs and had to be pried off with a crowbar. Most of the pegs snapped with age when they came away, but I was prepared for that. I had a whole basket of new pegs that I’d bought from the local carpenter’s workshop. Apprentices turned them out by the bucket load.
When the walls had been stripped, I saw, to my surprise, that cut into the support beams were insets for joists. I stood back to judge the position of the joist insets. They were perfectly positioned to create three rooms from one. It was as if some psychic builder had put everything where I would want it placed decades later.
It was impossible.
Then the answer hit me: I wasn’t the first man to remodel this room. Forty years ago, my father had performed the same service for his bride, my mother Phaenarete. When he’d said he’d already helped me, he wasn’t joking. He’d left me to do this on my own, so I could discover an interesting lesson about the cycle of life.
When my grandmother had died, Father must have converted the room back into one large space, removing the internal walls and replacing the paneling, but leaving everything necessary in place for his own son to do it over again. I wondered if my father might be smarter than I’d thought.
Father had partitioned the room much as I planned to do, with a small bedroom at each end and the common room in the middle. That was when I realized that all the windows overlooking the courtyard had been placed so that there’d be one for each bedroom and two for the common room.
I decided I’d be a fool to change Father’s original layout. I set to work. What I’d thought would take four or five days now would be done in one. I had the walls up before sundown.
The women’s quarters had seemed quite large when it was empty. Now that it was partitioned, the rooms all seemed cramped. Diotima’s room was adequate, no better than that. But it was the best that a middle-class artisan family could do. I wondered again if we should have moved into her father’s old home, but it would have been so against custom that it would have caused more trouble than it was worth. Besides, we could rent the place for extra income.