Chapter Twelve: The Wrong Order
He laid them out on the floor of the hut in rows, all fifty seven of them, and it took most of a morning because the light was bad and he kept having to carry them to the door to read his own handwriting.
Damon came in at about the fourth hour and stopped.
“What is this.”
“Do not tread on any of them.”
“I can see that.
What is it.”
“I am sorting them,” Lysandros said, without looking up.
“Not by name.
By when.”
He had never written a date on a single one of them, because there were no dates.
The calendar in this country was a local argument that changed every time you went over a ridge, and half the people up here could not have told you the month with a knife at their throat.
So he had written down what the village had been doing instead.
Before the barley.
During the barley.
After the vintage.
First snow.
When the flocks came down.
He had thought of it as a poor substitute.
He got the rows finished a little before noon, and then he stood up and looked at them from the door, and stood there a long time without saying anything.
Four marks in the corner in the summer half of the year.
All four adults, and one of them a man from two valleys over with a blocked gut who had come to him already dying.
Fourteen marks in the winter half.
Eleven of the fourteen were children under six.
And on nine of those eleven, in his own scratched Greek, in the corner where he put the season, it said the same thing.
After the flocks came down.
He had been in that village three years and had never once looked at the water.
He worked that out standing in the doorway.
Three years.
He had treated ninety odd people and buried eighteen and built a record system out of broken pots, and he had spent every hour of it looking at the patient in front of him, because that is what he was trained to do and that is what he was good at and that is the thing that gets a man a reputation.
Nobody had ever paid a physician to walk up a hill and look at a spring.
He had known all this in another life.
He had known it in the abstract, as a fact about history, that the great killers were beaten by engineers and not by surgeons, and he had said so at a dinner once and been agreeable about it, and then he had gone back to work on Monday and never thought about it again.
He went and got Pyrrhos and Klytie and told them to bring nothing and come with him.
The spring came out of a crack in the rock about two hundred paces above the top house.
It made a pool the size of a table in a hollow of stones that somebody’s great grandfather had lined, and it went out of the hollow along a shallow scrape in the ground that ran between the top house and the next one down, and the women drew from a wide place in the scrape about halfway along, because that was where you could get a jar in without kneeling in the mud.
Below the drawing place the scrape widened again and filled a trough, and that was where the animals went.
“That is the wrong order,” Klytie said.
Both of them looked at her.
“I have been telling you this for nine years,” she said to Pyrrhos, and then, to Lysandros, “not you, I have not been telling you, you have been busy.
It is the wrong order.
In the summer it is fine because everything is up on the high pasture and the only things down here are the two milkers and the sick ones.
But when they come down in October there are two hundred head between all the houses standing in that trough all winter, and they are standing in it, they get in it, and the ground round it goes to a soup, and where does the soup go?”
She pointed uphill.
“There is your answer.
It does not go anywhere.
It sits.
And then it rains, and the water off that whole slope comes down through the fold, because we put the fold there because it is sheltered, and it goes across the scrape above the drawing place.
Not below it.
Above it.”
Lysandros walked the line of it twice.
Then he went up and looked at the fold, which was four walls of dry stone put up on the sheltered side of the slope where the wind came round, and which was uphill of every single thing in the village including the spring.
“Who chose that,” he said.
“It has always been there,” said Pyrrhos.
“That is not an answer, it is a date.”
“My grandmother’s grandmother,” Klytie said.
“That is the answer.
It is the best sheltered ground on this side and it has been the fold since before anybody.
They will not move it.”
He went up to Marpessa’s that evening and asked her one question.
“Have you ever had the winter sickness up here.”
She thought about it while she went on doing what she was doing.
“No,” she said.
“Twenty two years.
I have had a bad chest twice and I broke a finger and I have never once had that.
I have sat with a dozen of them.
I have sat with children who had it and gone home and eaten my supper.”
“Where do you draw.”
She stopped.
She was not a stupid woman and she had spent her life watching people and working out what they meant before they said it, and Lysandros saw her get to the end of the thought about four seconds after he did.
“From the crack,” she said slowly.
“I never go down to the scrape.
I have not gone down to the scrape in twenty years, because I do not like walking past that house and they do not like me walking past it, and I have a pot and I go up in the morning and put it under the rock.”
“Anybody else?”
“Old Ino did.
Before she died, and hers is the same wall as mine, so she came with me.” Marpessa put down what she was holding.
“Say it.”
“Ino buried nobody.
In eleven years neither did the house next to hers.” He had checked that on the way up and he had felt sick doing it.
“Everybody else on this hill has buried at least one, and the two households at the bottom of the scrape have buried five between them.”
Marpessa sat down on the step.
“It is the water,” she said.
“It is the water.”
“For how long.”
“For as long as the fold has been where it is,” Lysandros said.
“So since before anybody.”
She sat there and did not say anything for a while, and he had the sense to leave her alone, because she had drunk from the crack for twenty two years out of spite, and it had kept her alive, and she was working out what to do with that.
He named his apprentices four days later, and he did it badly, because he had not thought about it as a thing that required any tact.
They were sitting on the wall above the spring in the last of the light, the three of them, with the whole plan drawn out in the dust between them, and he said it the way he would have said it in a corridor.
“Right.
From now the two of you are my apprentices.
I will teach you both everything I know, in order, and you will do what I say when I say it, because there is going to be a month where nothing works unless somebody does exactly what they are told without arguing about it in the middle.”
Pyrrhos said, “Yes.”
That was all.
He did not even move.
He had been waiting for somebody to say something like that to him since he was seven years old and had a name said out loud in a yard, and he said yes and then went back to looking at the drawing in the dust.
Klytie did not say anything.
“Klytie.”
“No.”
Lysandros turned round.
“No?”
“I said no.” She was not angry.
She was picking at the wall.
“I will help you.
I will do the fold and I will do the walking and I will tell you where the goats go, and I will do it every day for a month and I will not complain about it once.
I am not going to be your apprentice.”
“Why not.”
“Because you would be over me.”
“Yes.
That is what the word means.”
“Then no,” said Klytie.
Pyrrhos looked from one to the other and very sensibly said nothing.
“Give me the reason,” Lysandros said.
“Not the feeling, the reason.
You have one, you always have one.”
Klytie thought about how to put it and then put it plainly, which was the only way she ever put anything.
“Up here the one who is over the others is the one who can make them.
That is what it means.
My father was over our house because he could put my uncle through a door, and when he died my mother was over it because she is worse than my uncle in a different way and everyone knows it.
Praxias is over the village because he has the grain and the plough, and if he stops having them he stops being over anybody by the spring.
“It is not a thing you get given.
It is a thing that is true or it is not true.
And I can put you on the ground, and I have done it about two hundred times, and I did it last week.” She shrugged.
“So you cannot be over me.
It is not an insult.
It is the same as saying you are ten.”
“That is a terrible system.”
“It is not a system.
It is just what happens.”
Lysandros sat on the wall with his hands on his knees and thought about it for a while, and the annoying part was that she had described about four thousand years of human government in a hundred words and had been broadly correct.
“Sticks,” he said.
Klytie’s face changed.
“Now?”
“Now.”
Damon came out and stood at the edge of the flat ground with his left elbow tucked in and did not offer to referee, and did not tell them to stop, and did not say a single word the whole time.
She was fourteen and a half and she had four inches of height on him and about three of reach and she had been carrying, climbing and running that mountain since she could walk.
He was ten years old and had a hundred and two in one arm and five years of Damon.
The first exchange he did correctly.
He knew he had done it correctly.
He came in off the line she expected, kept it small, went for the inside of the wrist because the inside of the wrist ends fights, and she did not do anything clever about it at all.
She simply came forward through it, because she weighed what she weighed and he weighed what he weighed, and put him into the wall.
“Again,” he said.
Second time he got her.
He got the stick onto the back of her hand hard enough that she dropped hers and said something he had not heard a girl here say before, and for about a second and a half there was a completely different look on her face.
“That hurt.”
“It was supposed to.”
“Where did you learn that?”
“There is a bone at the back of the hand that runs to the middle finger,” Lysandros said, “and there is nothing on top of it.
Nothing.
No meat, no muscle, one layer of skin.
A person cannot hold anything for ten minutes after you hit it properly and there is no way to train it to be harder because there is nothing there to train.”
Klytie picked her stick up.
“Show me that later,” she said.
And then she stopped playing.
It took about eight seconds.
She came at him fast and did not stop coming, and everything he did was right and none of it mattered, because she took two hits to get one and she could afford to and he could not.
He got put down, got up, got put down again with his own stick under him, and lay on the flat ground above the spring looking at the sky with his ribs going in and out.
Damon walked back into the hut without a word.
“You want to know what is wrong,” Klytie said, sitting down next to his head.
“Not really.”
“I am going to tell you.”
“I assumed you were.”
“You fight like somebody who has been told.” She put her stick across her knees.
“Everything you do is right.
It is annoying how right it is.
But you do the right thing at the time when you decided to do it, and I do a worse thing at the time when it works, and I have been hit a lot and you have never been hit by anyone except Damon, and Damon has not really hit you in about two years because he cannot.”
Lysandros lay there.
That was the entire content of the piece of pottery he had written in the winter and put in the basket, and she had just said it to him for free, lying on a hillside, at fourteen.
“So hit me,” he said.
“What?”
“Every day.
Not for teaching, and I do not want you to go easy.
I want to be beaten by somebody who is better than me every single day until I stop being worse.” He sat up.
“And the day I beat you, properly, no accidents, you are my apprentice and you do what I say.”
Klytie looked at him for a long moment.
“And if you never beat me?”
“Then you were right and it would have been a stupid arrangement anyway.”
She put her hand out, which is not a thing they did up there, and he had to work out what she meant by it before he took it.
“Every day,” she said.
“And I am not going to be kind about it.”
“I would want my money back if you were.”