Through twelve evocative tales of longing and loss, Exiles Incorporated depicts a volatile world of hostile landscapes, where humans strive to belong amid the cruelty of conquest, the madness of desire and the transience of love. In the second story Athena, set in an Athens devastated by plague in 430 BC, orphan Christos searches for wisdom, only to experience nightmarish revelations about the sickness of the adult world.
Christos bounded through the door of his aunt’s home onto the twilight street. Swishing an olive branch into the frigid air, the man of the house decapitated one, two, three Medusas with his sword of fire. Tonight, his quest for wisdom would begin. Athens would conceive a new hero from its infected slums, while nobility shrank indoors bolting the locks in their minds.
The boy twirled through the darkening labyrinth, skirting round snoring and spluttering vagrants. The late afternoon sun no longer sparkled on the luscious crop of blond hair curling around Christos’s shoulders. The most handsome eight-year-old in Athens, his mother said before she fell ill. Definitely the tallest. Blessed by Apollo himself. Destined to shine like the sun over our city.
These days Christos preferred the night-time. Sunlight exposed Athens at its worst. A mazy mess of wood and marble, smeared by neglect, war and disease. The corpses piled high in the squares and alleys; swollen faces twisted to the sky. Our city is a beacon of civilisation, said his father, before the plague laid waste to mind and flesh. When both he and Pericles were alive.
Scorching mythical creatures as he skipped, Christos weaved past the dying and the drunk to his new tutor’s home on the city’s outskirts. Chilly wind nipped his ears. He pulled the hood of his brown cloak over his head, imagining he was an incognito prince rescuing a beautiful maiden. Or Thanatos himself, stalking the neighbourhood to drag the plague’s victims to the Styx. Both these fantasies he’d exchange for a decent meal. Aunt Cassie never cooked.
“Nestor’s house is at the very south of the city, at a forking point between two tracks leading to the city walls,” she had shouted through the curtain, her sickly perfumed stench wafting through the one-storey house.
He hadn’t seen Cassie’s face for four days. She’d retreated to her private room behind a curtain of purple and gold, tied to a wooden post from the inside and embroidered with spindly spiderweb patterns. In the evening, while Christos played Perseus in the street, he would hear a bubbling sound and see smoke rise through the hole in the room’s ceiling.
“Look for a small house set off from the others,” she barked. “There is an olive tree growing around it. The branches curl into the windows, like they’re about to lift the roof away. Be careful Christy. Stay away from anyone who looks like they don’t know any better. When you meet Nestor, show him this.”
Cassie’s bony hand crept underneath the curtain hem and slid a silver tetradrachm coin across the stone floor. Her flesh was unmarked by sores; she wasn’t coughing either. Christos had no idea why neither of them were sick. She wasn’t that special. Maybe he was though.
Exiles Incorporated is available to buy on Apple Books, Amazon and Google Play as an e-book, plus on Amazon and Barnes & Noble as a paperback.
PHILIP PARRISH 