The weaver came out of her house carrying a fresh pile of cloths. These were better work, solidly woven. They were all still the color of the dusty streets, but that was what I was after. She tossed them over Milo’s shoulders one after the other, to demonstrate the different lengths.
“What would the noble lord prefer?” she cooed at Milo, embarrassing him terribly. “If you’re most concerned about keeping out the cold, this one’s long enough to cover you from neck to heels and provide enough material to pull up over your head. But if you’d rather have something shorter…”
“That one will do,” I declared. It was perfect, but I knew better than to let her know that. “It’s not very well made, and there are snarls in the wool the size of locusts, but I have better things to do with my time than look at every scrap of cloth in Delphi.” So the bargaining began.
Milo’s cloak cost me the taller soldier’s small bronze knife. I promised him I’d give him a new spearhead in exchange, once we returned to Sparta.
“It’s an honor to serve you, Lady Helen,” he said as we continued to walk through Delphi. “I don’t require anything in exchange.”
We both know you don’t mean that, I thought. Aloud, I said, “Then honor me by accepting it as a gift. I only wish there were something I could do for you now to show my thanks.” I coughed as if my throat had gone dry suddenly. “Ugh, what a hard time I had, getting that woman to agree to a decent bargain! I’m ready to die of thirst. Let’s find a wineshop.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard,” the taller soldier said, sniffing the air. He was right. We came across one before we’d gone thirty steps. It was very small, little more than a storeroom with a serving table full of cups inside and a bench out on the street. I rejected it.
“I don’t want to drink out in the sun,” I said. “I’ll only get thirsty again. Keep looking.”
The next wineshop we found had a shady arbor covered with grapevines next to it, a very comfortable place for customers to take refuge from the sun. I peeked into the shop itself and then rejected this one too.
“Too few amphoras,” I said. “They haven’t got enough wine to sell. I want to drink wine thinned with water, not water flavored with wine!” I caught my guards exchanging a look and demanded, “What?”
“Oh, nothing, Lady Helen, nothing,” the shorter man said, rubbing his chin. “It’s just that we never expected you to be so…knowledgeable about wineshops.”
“I want us all to share a cup of wine together,” I told him. “It’s to thank you for looking after me so well. I could settle for just any wineshop, but you deserve better than that.”
“I thought you didn’t want us to—” the taller man began. He was the one I’d barked at earlier.
“I was being foolish,” I said sweetly. “Now that I’ve seen what Delphi’s like, I know that I’d have been lost if I’d left the temple grounds without you. I want to apologize.”
What could they say after that? They let me have my way, and soon I did find exactly the sort of wineshop I’d been seeking: dark, cavernous, crowded, and noisy. As soon as we were seated at a table, I snapped a little silver ornament off my belt and held it out to Milo.
“Bring us wine, boy,” I said grandly, but instead of placing the silver into his hand, I deliberately missed and let it drop to the floor.
“I’ll get it, Lady Helen!” he exclaimed, falling to his hands and knees.
I uttered a short, exasperated sound. “You’ll never find it by yourself.” With that, I ducked beneath the table as well, while my guards laughed.
Safely out of my sheepdogs’ sight and hearing, I grabbed Milo’s hand just as it closed over the silver ornament. “Milo, do you want to help me?” I whispered urgently.
“Yes, always,” he whispered back. “Anything.”
I told him my plan as quickly and quietly as I could, then said, “I just need you to drop the cloak where I can get it and create a distraction so I can slip out. Do you think you can do it? Find some way to distract them?”
Milo smiled more happily than I’d ever seen him do before. “You’ll see,” he said.
I pulled myself back onto my bench while Milo scurried off to fetch the wine. The silver ornament bought more than enough for what I had in mind. Even though he drank with us, as my servant it was Milo’s job to add water to each helping of wine. I drank only one cupful, which was mostly water, but he made sure that the guards drank almost pure wine.
After a while, the tall one exclaimed, “Hey, look at that! Isn’t that his fourth cup?” He pointed unsteadily at Milo.
“So what?” his comrade said. “It’s our fourth too.”
“But he’s—he’s just a boy. He can’t drink like that,” the first man objected.
“Who says I can’t?” Milo thumped his cup down loudly on the table. He sounded ferociously drunk, though he wasn’t. He had emptied four cups, but the soldiers couldn’t know that there wasn’t enough wine in all of them together to equal the wine in one of theirs. “I’m from Calydon, an’ in Calydon we know how to drink. Dionysus, god o’ wine himself, taught us how to make the bes’ wine. Song about it. Listen.” He climbed onto the bench, flung his new cloak to the floor, then leaped onto the table and began a frantic dance while singing a loud, vulgar, hilarious song that soon had my guards and every other customer in the wineshop roaring the chorus and pounding out the rhythm on the tables.
While Milo kept them all distracted, I grabbed his discarded cloak, threw it over my head so that my face was well hidden, and slipped out into the streets of Delphi.