Chapter Eleven: The Mark in the Corner
Damon had carried wood up from the lower stand every eight days for four years.
In the spring he had started carrying it on the other side.
In the summer he had started making two journeys with a smaller load and had made a joke about being an old woman.
And that morning Lysandros had watched him lift a full skin over the lip of the trough with his right arm doing all of it and his left elbow tucked in against his ribs, dead, doing nothing, held there.
He had been watching it for eight months and had not been looking at it.
Those are two different things, and he should have known better.
“Take your tunic off.”
“No.”
“Take it off or I will tell Antheia you have been sleeping badly and she will make you drink the thing with the bark in it.”
Damon swore at him in Latin, which he had started doing about a year earlier and which Lysandros had come to enjoy, and took his tunic off, and sat on the wall in the cold with his hands on his knees.
Lysandros examined him properly for the first time in five years.
He did it exactly as he had been taught, in the order he had been taught, out loud, because the order is what stops you missing things.
Look.
Then feel.
Then move it.
Then move it against resistance.
The wasting was obvious once you allowed yourself to see it.
Above the spine of the shoulder blade and below it, both, hollowed out, and the whole shoulder sitting lower on that side.
When he asked the arm to come out sideways it came to about here and stopped, and Damon’s whole body came up off the wall to help it, which is a thing people do without knowing they are doing it.
Then he put his hand flat on the shoulder and made him move it again, and felt what happened underneath.
He stood behind the old man for a while so that he did not have to arrange his face.
“How long has it hurt at night,” he said.
“It does not.”
“How long.”
Damon looked at the ground between his feet.
“Two years,” he said.
“It wakes me if I roll on it.
I sleep sitting up against the wall now.
That is why the wall.”
“And the arm has been going for eight months.”
“Nine.”
He knew exactly what it was.
He could have written the note in his sleep.
Long standing tear across the top of the shoulder, almost certainly complete by now, in a man who had been hauling and fighting and carrying on it since he was a boy, and who had then taken a child over a mountain range on that side in the winter with nothing in his stomach.
Wear underneath it in the joint itself.
Loss of the ability to lift the arm away from the body, most of the way gone already.
Pain at night, which is the part that breaks people, because you can work around a shoulder in the day and you cannot work around not sleeping.
Xavier would have had a picture of it inside a week.
Then a conversation about whether it was worth repairing, and at that size and that age it might not have been, and then the other operation, the one where they take the joint out and put a different joint in the wrong way round, which sounds like something out of a nightmare and gives a man back the use of his arm.
Here he had willow bark.
He had willow bark, and a set of movements he could teach the old man to keep what was left of the other muscles working, and the ability to say the word rest to a man in a village where nobody rests.
That was the whole of it.
“Say it,” Damon said.
“It is torn across the top.
It has probably been torn for years and it has finished tearing.
There is nothing holding the arm up any more except the parts underneath, and they are doing work they were not built for, and that is why it hurts at night.”
“Will it mend.”
“No.”
Damon nodded, slowly, at the ground.
“Say the rest of it.”
And here it was again.
He was ten years old, sitting on a wall in Arcadia in the cold, doing the thing he had done in a corridor at eleven o’clock at night for fourteen years, which was to carry a number into a room where somebody was still living in a world where the number was not true yet.
He had told the truth every time in that other life.
He had been proud of it, and it had cost him ninety seconds and a headache, and it had cost them everything.
Nobody believes the number the first time.
He had learned that in another century and filed it as a small sad fact about people.
Damon was going to believe it immediately.
“It will get worse,” Lysandros said.
“Not quickly.
It will go the way it has been going.
In a year you will not be able to get that hand above your shoulder.
In three or four you will have trouble getting it to your mouth on a bad morning.
The pain will be worst at night for a long time and then it will get less, and that will not be good news, because it will mean the joint has stopped complaining.”
“And the sword.”
“You can hold a sword.
You will be able to hold a sword for years.” Lysandros made himself say the second half.
“You will not be able to fight anybody with it.
Not properly.
You cannot hold a guard on that side and you cannot take a blow on it and you cannot recover if somebody moves you, because there is nothing to recover with.”
The wind came up off the basin.
“How long have you known,” Damon said.
“Since this morning.”
“How long have you been able to see it and not looked at it.”
“Eight months,” Lysandros said.
Damon laughed.
Lysandros had not braced for laughter.
They sat there for a while.
“I have been carrying it up the other side since March,” Damon said.
“I thought if I did not use it, it would come back.”
“Everybody thinks that.
It is the single most reasonable wrong idea there is.”
“And I have been telling myself it is the weather.”
“Everybody does that as well.”
“Do not.” Damon put his tunic back on, awkwardly, and Lysandros watched him do it with the elbow tucked in and did not offer.
“Do not do the thing where you make me feel ordinary.
It is worse.”
Lysandros shut up.
“Right,” Damon said eventually.
“Then let us do this properly, because I have been thinking about it for a year and you have been thinking about it since breakfast.” He looked at the boy.
“I cannot teach you much longer.”
“You can teach me for years.”
“I can talk at you for years.
That is not the same and you know it is not the same, because you can already put me on the ground and we both know that too, and we have both been careful about it for about eight months now.” He said it flatly.
“That is why the stick.
That is why a hundred with the heavy one.
It was not about the stick.”
“I know.”
“You knew four days ago.”
“I worked it out on the second day and I was too angry to admit it,” Lysandros said.
“I have been feeling like a swine since Tuesday.”
“Good.”
That evening he sat down with a piece of a jar and a nail and took it apart.
The shoulder was fixed, in the sense that a thing you cannot change is fixed.
What he had to solve was underneath it.
He was ten years old and he had one teacher and the teacher had somewhere between two and four usable years in him, and after that Lysandros would be fourteen and there would be nobody on this mountain who could teach him anything about what a real fight felt like.
So he wrote it down as a list.
What Damon could still give him.
Everything that did not need the left arm.
Footwork, which was most of it anyway.
Ground.
Distance.
What men do when they are frightened.
The Roman drill, which Damon had watched from the inside for seventeen years and could describe down to the hour.
What he needed and could not get here.
Somebody to hit him.
Somebody good enough to make him bad again, because he had noticed that he had stopped getting worse at things, and a man who never gets worse at anything has stopped learning.
Then he wrote, on a piece of a broken storage jar: Klytie.
Sling.
Ask.
He looked at it for a while.
There was a fourteen year old girl on this mountain who could put a stone into a moving thing at forty paces, and there was nobody else in the world who could teach that, and in about four years she was going to be married into another valley and it would be gone out of his reach for good.
He had been coming up here to watch her do it for three years and had thought of it as a friendship.
It had been a friendship.
It had also been the only real training available to him, and he had not once written it down as such, and looking at the sherd in his hand he did not entirely like what it said about him that he had written it down now.
He put it in the basket with the other forty and went to bed.
They brought the man up on a door, four of his sons carrying him, from two valleys over.
Lysandros knew what it was from the noise he was making before they got him through the gate.
Gut blocked.
Days of it.
Belly hard and swollen and quiet where it should have been noisy, and the vomiting had gone where the vomiting goes at the end, and that smell settles the question for anybody who has met it once.
There was an operation for it.
There had always been an operation for it.
It was not even a difficult one, and Xavier Reid had done it in under an hour more times than he could count.
He told them the truth in the yard, with the four sons standing round him.
“I cannot mend this.”
“You mended the headman’s boy.”
“That was a different thing and it was a thing I could reach.
This is inside him and it is shut, and the only way to open it is to open him, and if I open him he dies today instead of Friday, and he dies worse.”
The eldest son wanted to argue.
The youngest one, who was about twelve, had already understood and had turned round to look at the wall.
“Then what is he to do?”
“He is to be given something for the pain,” Lysandros said, “and he is not to be given anything to eat or drink beyond wetting his mouth, because it will not go anywhere and it will make him worse.
And somebody is to sit with him, and it is not to be the same person the whole time, because it takes longer than people think.”
He went and got the poppy from Marpessa.
She gave it to him without a word and without asking who it was for, and she came down herself on the second evening and sat for four hours in the middle of the night so that the sons could sleep, and she and Lysandros did not speak to each other once.
It took two days.
When it was over the eldest son stood in the yard and could not decide what to do with his hands, and eventually he gave Lysandros a knife, which was the only thing on him worth anything.
“He knew you were not going to save him,” he said.
“He said so on the first night.
He said, that one has told me the truth and I will not have anybody arguing with him.”
Lysandros went out afterwards and sat above the spring for a long time.
He had been braced for the other thing.
Every hour of those two days he had been waiting for somebody to say the word, because the last time a man died in this valley on a schedule he had named out loud, the whole place decided he was the reason.
He had gone into that yard with it in his mouth.
He had let Damon stand behind him for two days without saying why.
Nobody said it.
They brought him a cheese and a knife and one of them cried on him.
He sat up there and worked out why, and the answer was not comfortable.
He had been right, and being right had nothing to do with it.
He had sat down.
He had stayed in the room.
He had gone in on both nights and put his hand on the man and been there when it happened, and forty three people had watched him do it, and to all of them that was the whole of medicine and the diagnosis was decoration.
He wrote the man up that night the same as all the others.
Name.
Age.
What he came with.
What was done, which was almost nothing.
What happened.
Then the mark in the corner.
It was the fifty first sherd and it was the fourth mark, and he sat and looked at the basket for a while and thought about how many more of them there were going to be before he was finished.
One of the big storage jars in Praxias’ house had cracked at the lip years back and somebody had mended it in the old way, cutting a channel and running melted lead into it, and now the jar had finally gone properly and the lead was being pulled out to be used again, because nobody up there threw away metal.
Lysandros picked a piece up off the floor while he was waiting for the woman with the ear to be brought out.
It was a strip about the length of his hand.
Soft.
He could bend it between his fingers, and when he set his thumbnail into it, it took the mark and kept it.
He stood there in a doorway in an Arcadian village turning it over.
Potsherds broke.
He had lost three already, dropped or trodden on, and there were things written on them he could not get back.
Wax got smoothed.
Papyrus was a hundred miles away and rotted in a wet winter.
This did not break, did not rot, did not burn, and took a scratch off a nail without any effort at all.
You could write on it and roll it up and put it in a pot and open it in fifty years and it would say exactly what it said today.
“Are you keeping that,” said the woman with the ear.
“May I?”
She looked at him.
Everybody in that village had started looking at him differently in the last year and he had not got used to it.
“It is a bit of old lead,” she said.
“You may have all of it if it makes you happy.”