The Lydian Baker

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Purple laver…

I blinked and set the letter down on the table beside my wine cup. Some things — what Perilla's philosopher pals would call the Eternal Verities — never changed. They included death, pestilence and Mother's whacky recipes. In the four months we'd been away we'd piled up enough ways of cooking lentils to open an Egyptian cookshop, and some of the other stuff she recommended for a full and healthy life you couldn't put a name to even in hieroglyphs.

'Hey, Perilla,' I said. 'You any idea what purple laver is?'

The lady looked up from the book she was reading. Chrysippus's Studies in Grammar. That's one advantage of living in Athens, if you can call it an advantage: there're more libraries than even Perilla can shake a stick at. Serious ones, with not an Alexandrian bodice-ripper in sight. Listen hard and you can hear manuscripts crumbling all over town. Readers, too.

'It's a kind of edible seaweed, dear,' she said. 'Imported from Gaul, I believe.'

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