With a cry of horror, Xanthippus leapt back from the bed. The darkness that had seemed to pool around her was blood. Suddenly, he could smell it in the room, over the burning oil and his wife’s perfume.

‘What is this? What have you done?’ he cried.

When she only gaped at him, he reached out and took hold of the sheet, then wrenched it away with all his strength. She tried to cling on to it, but the cloth slipped through her fingers, leaving her naked and bloody, curling into herself. A huge red pool shone wet on the mattress beneath. Her thighs were slimed with it, already dry in places, like red salt-rime.

‘What?’ he said, opening and closing his mouth. ‘Are you hurt? Is it … your monthly blood? Tell me, Agariste! What is going on here?’

She was weeping, he saw. In moments, her beauty crumpled and became a sticky mass, tinged in red as she rubbed hard at her nose and eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Xan,’ she said between sobs. ‘I’m so sorry. I just couldn’t …’

Coldness touched him then, a chill that ran down his legs and made the hairs stand up. He knew women bled every month from an excess, that menstrual blood could make fields more fertile. Somehow, it was the source of life, stopping only when a woman was pregnant or too old to bear a child. He looked at his red-smeared hand and shuddered. He had seen blood before. More, he had seen menstrual rags before, as they were taken out to be buried. They had been spotted, like red coins. This was more like a battle wound, worse than anything he had imagined.

‘Why are you sorry?’ he snapped.

By the gods, should he comfort her? Was she dying? Thoughts of a lover fled from him, leaving him feeling useless in the face of a woman’s mysteries.

‘Why is there so much blood, Agariste? Is it … is it always this way?’

She shook her head and curled into a ball. Xanthippus stood over her for a moment, then began to roar for the midwife to be summoned.

A slave went pelting down the road to call the woman out from her own bed. Before she arrived, house slaves had wrapped Agariste in a clean sheet, while removing the others to be burned. Silence and calm greeted the midwife as she bustled in with a huge bag under one arm, clear-eyed and neat as if she had already been awake. Perhaps she had, Xanthippus thought, or perhaps she was used to being summoned by women who bled in the night.

Xanthippus found himself standing in the corridor, sent away while the midwife examined Agariste. He heard his wife answering questions sleepily, like a child. He began to pace up and down. He could not lose her. She was the master column of his life, the one that held up all the rest. He began to pray to Athena, mother to Athens and all foolish men.