Chapter Ten: The Ledger
The fortieth one was a boil.
It was on the back of a carter’s neck and it had been there eleven days and it was nothing, and Lysandros opened it and cleaned it and packed it in about four minutes, and then went and sat down outside and wrote it on a piece of a broken jar with a nail.
Forty.
Name, age as near as the man knew it, what he came with, what was done, what happened afterwards.
He had started the list in the spring without deciding to, and by autumn there were forty of them stacked in a basket in the corner of the hut in the order they happened.
It was the potsherds that made it possible.
There was no papyrus in Arcadia and there was never going to be any.
But every household up there broke a jar or a bowl every few weeks, and the pieces went on a heap by the wall, and nobody in the world cared what happened to them.
He could have written on ten thousand of them and nobody would have asked.
He tried wax once.
A man in the lower village had a tablet and traded it for a winter’s worth of willow bark, and Lysandros used it for four days and then gave it to Klytie to draw on.
“You said you needed one.”
“I did.
I was wrong.” He put another sherd on the pile.
“Wax is for people who intend to change their minds.”
What he was building had a shape and there was nobody up there he could explain it to.
Any healer can treat a patient.
Marpessa had treated four hundred people and she carried all of it inside her head, in stories, in the order she happened to remember them, with the ones that went well nearest the front.
When she died it would all go with her, and the woman after her would start again from nothing, with only what she had been told.
Every physician who had ever lived had worked like that, in this century and for a great many centuries afterwards.
Individual excellence, held in one skull, lost on one day.
He had spent two years rebuilding a department out of that exact problem.
So he wrote it down.
All of it, and in the same order every time, whether or not it seemed worth it.
Especially when it did not seem worth it, because a record you only keep on the interesting days is not a record, it is a story about yourself.
And he kept the ones that went wrong.
A Greek physician would have stared at him for that.
There were books in the world.
He knew that, he had heard of the Hippocratic writings and had asked about them and had learned that no copy of anything had come up this valley in living memory.
But the books that existed were full of cures.
Nobody wrote down the sixteen things they tried on a man who died anyway, because there is no glory in it and no fee, and because a physician who writes those down has handed his enemies a weapon.
Lysandros used a mark in the corner of the sherd rather than a word, because it was going to happen often enough that he did not want to write the word four hundred times.
Pyrrhos arrived in his life without either of them agreeing to it.
He was fourteen and a head and a half taller than Lysandros and he had been in the yard the night his own name was said out loud, and neither of them had ever mentioned it.
He started by carrying things.
Then by fetching water.
By midwinter he was standing at the shoulder of every patient Lysandros saw, and by spring he was doing the parts that needed hands and no thinking, which was most of it.
He was slow.
He had always been slow and it did not trouble him.
He asked no questions for a whole season.
And he did not flinch.
That was the most important thing about him.
Lysandros had spent years in his first life working with people who had been selected and trained and paid, and even there, out of any ten of them, perhaps three could hold a man still while he screamed and not let go and not go pale and not start apologising to him.
It has nothing to do with courage and nothing to do with kindness.
Some people can put their hands on a person who is in agony and keep them there, and most cannot, and you cannot teach it and you cannot tell who has it until the day you find out.
Pyrrhos had it at fourteen.
“You are going to be better at this than I was at your age,” Lysandros said, one afternoon, with a man’s forearm between them.
“You are nine.”
“Hold him.”
The other one who came was the widow.
She stood in the doorway one evening in the first cold of the winter and put a cheese down on the floor and did not come in.
“That is what there is,” she said.
Lysandros looked at the cheese.
He had a very good idea of what her household had in it, because he had a very good idea of what everybody’s household had in it now, and she had no man and one son and four terraces on the wrong side of the slope.
“I do not want it.”
“I know you do not want it.”
“Then take it back.”
“No,” the widow said, and stood there, and would not move, and after a moment he understood.
He had never treated anybody in her family.
She was paying him for a night in a yard in the summer, and if he did not take the cheese then what happened in that yard sat on her for the rest of her life and she had no way to put it down.
He picked it up and thanked her for it.
She went home.
Some part of that transaction had been necessary and none of it had been good, and he sat in the door for a while afterwards thinking about how many things in this place worked the same.
The word went down the mountain that winter, and it went down through the barley, because everything up there did.
Eleven measures had come up from a man in the lower village in payment.
Inside a month there were people coming up the track who had never been up it in their lives.
An old woman with a hip.
A boy with an ear.
Then a man with a leg badly set nine years earlier by somebody who had done their best, which Lysandros looked at and put down and could not do anything about and said so.
Damon watched all of it from the door of the hut and finally said what he had been holding.
“How many people know your name now.”
“I have not counted.”
“You have counted.”
“Sixty one,” Lysandros said.
“Perhaps seventy, if the ones who have only heard it count.”
“And how many of those live in a place where a Roman goes.”
Lysandros stopped what he was doing.
“You are going to tell me that a reputation travels.”
“I am going to tell you that a reputation is a road,” Damon said.
“It goes both ways and you do not get to decide who walks up it.
Up here you are a strange boy who is good with a knife.
In Stymphalos you are a story.
Two valleys over you are something else again, and by the time a story has been through six mouths it has grown a hat and a horse, and the version of you that arrives at the far end is not one I can defend.”
“So I should treat nobody.”
“I did not say that.”
“Then what.”
“I am saying I do not know,” Damon said.
“I have been trying to work it out for a year and I cannot, and I want you to know that I am not comfortable and that I have stopped being able to see the shape of it.
That is all.
Go and see the old woman’s hip.”
Damon had set the count at a hundred when Lysandros was seven, and he had said it as a joke.
Lysandros hit it in the spring he turned ten, on a cold clear morning above the spring, and he did it on purpose in front of the old man with the whole thing planned out, and when he came down off the stick his arm was dead from the shoulder to the fingers and he could not feel three of them.
“A hundred and two,” he said.
“I counted.”
“You said a hundred.”
“I did.”
Lysandros waited.
Damon rubbed his beard and looked out over the basin.
“With the light stick,” he said.
“What?”
“You did a hundred and two with the light stick.
A blade is not the light stick.
Get to a hundred with the heavy one and we will talk about it.”
There was a silence on that flat piece of ground that went on for some time.
“That is not what you said.”
“No.”
“You said a hundred.”
“I know what I said, boy.”
“Then say something honest to me,” Lysandros said, “because you have never once in five years moved a thing after you set it, and you have just done it standing there without even bothering to make it sound good, and I would rather you told me to go away than watched you do that.”
Damon picked up the light stick off the ground and put it under his arm and walked back down towards the village, and did not answer, and did not speak to him for four days.
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