Chapter Thirteen: A Thing That Did Not Happen
The meeting took two evenings.
Nine households.
The heads of them in Praxias’ yard, and everybody else standing at the wall listening, because there is no such thing as a private argument up there either.
Lysandros could not speak in it.
He was ten.
There was no version of that place in which a ten year old boy stood up in a yard and told nine men what to do with the fold their great grandmothers had built.
So Damon spoke, and Damon was terrible at it.
He was a good man and a hard one and he had spent seventeen years learning to say nothing in a foreign town, and he stood up in that yard and laid out the whole thing in about nine sentences, correctly, in order, with no pleading in it anywhere, and sat down.
Nobody moved.
It was the worst four minutes Lysandros had ever spent listening to somebody be right.
Then the arguments came.
It was a month of work in the worst month for it.
It was moving the fold, and the fold was where it was because of the wind, and if they moved it they would lose animals in the first bad week and everybody had a story about somebody who had lost animals.
It meant new wall, and new wall meant new lines on the ground, and there were two households up there that had not spoken properly since a wall went up in the wrong place forty years ago.
And underneath all of it there was a different objection, and nobody would say it.
It sat there for an hour and a half.
Then a man named Eualos drank enough to say it.
“The boy says the water is bad.” Eualos put his cup down.
“My father drank that water.
My father’s father drank it.
I have drunk it my whole life and I am standing here.
And now the unlucky one says it is bad, and we are all to dig for a month because he says so, and I want somebody in this yard to tell me the difference between that and being told there is a curse on our spring.”
Nobody answered him.
Because there was no difference.
That was the honest position and Lysandros knew it and had known it for four days.
He had no mechanism.
He could not tell them what was in the water, because the word did not exist and would not exist for two thousand years and could not be shown to them in any way they would accept.
He could not point at anything.
All he had was a pattern in a basket of broken pots, in his own handwriting, in a script most of them could not read.
He stood up anyway.
“May I speak,” he said.
“No,” said two men at once.
“Let him,” said Praxias.
He had thought about it for four days and he threw all of it away in the yard, because the speech he had prepared was an argument and an argument was going to lose.
“I am not going to tell you the water is cursed,” he said.
“I am not going to tell you it is bad.
I do not want you to believe anything.
“I want you to look at where your children are buried and tell me what month it was.”
Silence.
“Every one of you knows.
You do not need me and you do not need anything I have written down.
You know the month.
So think of it, and do not tell me, and then think about where the flocks are in that month.”
Somebody at the wall said something to somebody else.
“That is all it is,” Lysandros said.
“I am not asking you to believe me about the water.
I am asking you to notice a thing you already know and have never put next to another thing you already know.
And if I am wrong we will have moved a wall and dug a ditch and the whole of it will have been a month wasted in a bad year, and I will have paid for it, and you can call me whatever you like for the rest of my life.
And if I am right, then next winter is different, and the winter after that.”
He sat down.
Praxias let it run for another quarter of an hour and then stood up, and everybody shut up, because that is what a village is.
“I have two sons,” he said.
“I had two sons on a Thursday in the summer and I was going to have one by the Friday, and the reason I have both is sitting on that wall.
So I am going to pay for half of the food for the month out of my own store, and I am going to move my fold whether the rest of you move yours or not, because mine is the highest.
“And I will say the other thing, since Eualos has already said the first one and nobody hit him for it.” He looked round the yard.
“I do not know what that boy is.
Nobody up here knows what he is and I am past pretending we do.
But he has been up here three years and in three years he has never once asked us for anything for himself, and this is the first time, and it is not for himself either.
So I am going to give it to him.
And if any of you want to argue with me about it you may come and do it at my door in the morning.”
Nobody came to his door in the morning.
The month was hard and none of it was interesting.
They cut a stone box into the hollow at the crack and roofed it with two slabs and packed the joints, so that nothing could fall in and nothing could run in off the slope.
They cut a channel from the box, lined it, and ran it eighty paces along the contour to a new drawing place on hard ground where you did not have to kneel.
Below that, and only below it, they let the overflow drop into the old trough for the animals.
Then they dug a cut across the top of the slope, above the spring, to take the winter runoff round the shoulder and down the far gully instead of through the middle of the village, and that was the part that broke people, because it was a hundred and forty paces of rock in November.
And they moved the fold.
Pyrrhos did most of the actual moving of people, which Lysandros did not plan and should have.
Nobody up there wanted to be told where to put a stone by the unlucky boy.
They would take it from Pyrrhos, because Pyrrhos was fifteen and enormous and slow and everybody’s friend, and because his mother was a widow with four terraces and there was nothing in him to resent.
So Lysandros told Pyrrhos, and Pyrrhos told everybody else, and it worked, and he watched it work and made a note of it.
“You are angry about something,” Pyrrhos said, on about the ninth day, over a stone.
“I am not angry.”
“You have been quiet since Tuesday.”
“I have worked out that things go better when I do not say them,” Lysandros said.
“I am adjusting to it.”
Pyrrhos considered this for a while.
“You could teach me the reading,” he said.
“Then you could write it down and I could say it and you would not have to be there.”
Lysandros put the stone down.
He had known that boy for a year and a half.
He had taught him to pack a wound and hold a limb and mix the salt water and read a face, and he had never once asked him what he wanted, because he had needed hands and Pyrrhos had hands.
“How long have you wanted that?”
“Since the summer,” said Pyrrhos.
“I did not want to ask while you were busy.”
Klytie hit him every evening through the whole of it.
She kept her word and she was not kind about it.
He finished most days with something that did not work properly the following morning, and he went back up every evening, and by the end of the month she had stopped being able to beat him in eight seconds and had to work for about twenty.
She noticed that before he did and did not mention it.
The winter came in and the flocks came down, and the fold was on the far shoulder now with new wall round it, and they lost two goats in the first bad week exactly as everybody had said they would, and Eualos said so in front of eleven people.
Then nothing happened.
That is the whole of it.
That is what he got.
There were three cases of the winter sickness in that village that year and not one more.
All three were in the same household, and all three of them lived, and when Lysandros went and looked he found that the household in question had been going down to the old trough because it was forty paces closer and they had a woman with a bad hip.
In the ten years before the work, that hill had buried eleven children under six.
In the winter after it, none.
There was a baby in the spring who did not live three days, and he could have told them why, and it had nothing to do with the water, and nobody asked him.
Nobody said anything to him about the rest of it either.
Not one person.
Not once.
There was no evening where somebody came to the door with a cheese and said that their daughter was alive because of a ditch.
There could not have been, because their daughter was alive and had never been ill and there was nothing to attach it to.
In February a woman he had never treated stopped him on the path and thanked him with tears in her eyes for the boil he had opened on her husband’s neck two years earlier.
He got more out of that boil than he got out of the whole of it.
He took it to Marpessa in the spring, because there was nobody else.
“You want to be thanked,” she said.
“No.
I have thought about that and it is not that, and I am not going to pretend I am above wanting it, but it is not that.” He was sitting on her step.
“I want to understand.
I have done one thing up here that mattered more than everything else I have done put together, and there is no story in it anywhere.
Not one.
Nobody will ever tell it.
In forty years there will be an old woman on this hill who tells her grandchildren about the boy who cut Bion’s arm open, and there will be nothing at all about the ditch, and she will be alive to tell it because of the ditch.”
Marpessa nodded slowly.
She had been expecting this conversation, or one like it.
“Nobody has ever paid me for a thing that did not happen,” she said.
“No.”
“Not once in twenty two years.
They pay me when the child is screaming and they pay me when the man cannot pass water and they pay me at the end when there is nothing to be done and they want somebody in the room.
They have never in my life paid me for a quiet week.” She looked out over the basin.
“You cannot make a story out of a thing that did not happen.
There is nowhere to put it.
It has no shape and no name and nobody was there for it.”
“Say the rest of it,” Lysandros said.
“You have been thinking about this longer than I have.”
Marpessa was quiet for a moment.
“You asked me last summer why the gods are thin,” she said.
“I told you the offerings are small now and the shrines are empty and everybody says it is the wars, and that is true and it is not the answer.
“The answer is that they only ever got fed when somebody had a story.
A man is pulled out of the sea and there is a story and he goes up the hill with a goat.
A woman has a bad birth and lives, and there is a story, and the story goes into a song and the song lasts four hundred years and the god eats for four hundred years off one night.
“And the ones who did not drown, and the ones who never had a bad birth, they have no story, so nothing gets fed.
Nothing has ever been fed by a thing that did not happen.” She turned her head and looked at him properly.
“So your ditch feeds nobody.
Not me, not you, not Pan, not any of them.
It is the largest thing anybody has done on this hill in a hundred years and it goes nowhere, and it will go on going nowhere every winter for as long as the stone holds.”
Lysandros sat on her step for a long time after she had stopped talking.
He was working out the corollary, and he did not much like where it went.
If a story is the only thing that ever gets paid for, then the whole system is built to reward the wrong work.
It pays the man who arrives at the last minute and does something visible in front of witnesses.
It pays the cutting and the shouting and the standing up on a wall in a yard.
It has never once, in the entire history of anybody, paid the man who moved a fold four hundred paces uphill in November.
Which meant that anybody who wanted to be fed by it, anybody at all, had exactly one way to go about it.
You have to do it where they can see you.