Chapter Fourteen: What Answers
He tried to draw his father in the January of the year he turned twelve, and got it wrong eleven times.
It should not have been difficult.
He could draw a liver from memory, front and back, with the vessels going into it in the right order.
He could draw the branching in a forearm well enough that a man who had never seen inside one would know where not to put a knife.
He had been drawing anatomy on broken pots for four years because it was the only way to hand any of it to Pyrrhos.
He sat on the floor of the hut with a nail and a stack of sherds and could not produce his own father.
The beard came out fine.
He had the beard, cut in the old fashioned style Nikias had been so deliberate about, and he had the shape of the head, and after that he was making it up and he knew he was making it up.
The nose came out different every time.
On the fourth attempt he got something that satisfied him for about half a minute and then he looked at it properly.
He had drawn Praxias.
He put the nail down and sat with his back against the wall and did not move for a while.
He knew what was happening to him, and knowing made it worse rather than better.
Memory is not a jar with things in it.
There is no shelf.
Every time you take a thing out and look at it you are building it again out of whatever is lying about, and then you put the new one back where the old one was, and the old one has gone.
He had explained that to families in another century, carefully, when they got upset that they could no longer hear a voice.
And he had taken his father out and looked at him more than anything else he owned.
There was nothing to check it against.
No portrait.
No coin with a head on it.
Nothing painted on any wall that was still standing.
Theano was somewhere in Italy and Kleio was somewhere in Italy and everything either of them had ever owned had gone off a cart at Lechaion.
In the whole world there was one copy of that face and it was inside his own skull, and his own skull had started quietly getting rid of it.
He got to Damon’s end of the hut twice and did not say it.
Damon had known Nikias for four years and had worked for him for most of them.
Damon could have given him that face in four sentences, flat, without making anything of it, and would have gone straight back to what he was doing.
He could not do it and it took him two days to work out why.
It was not pride.
It was that the moment he said it out loud, it would be a fact.
While nobody knew, there was a chance he was being dramatic and it would come back on its own in the spring.
If he asked Damon to describe his father to him, then he had lost the man twice.
The flat ground above the spring was where he and Klytie fought.
They had been at it every evening for two years by then and she still won, though it had got slower and she had stopped enjoying it as much.
She was sixteen and she had stopped growing and he had not, and he had started to be able to reach things that had been out of reach a year ago.
Neither of them talked about it.
He had a private count going and she almost certainly had one as well.
So when he went out at night that January it was not a decision about where to go.
It was where his legs took him.
It was cold enough that the ground rang under him.
There was no moon to speak of.
He went to the far side of the flat, above the old boundary wall, where the wind came off the shoulder and stopped, and he sat down against the stone with his knees up and got the nail and a strip of lead out of his shirt.
There is nothing beyond that wall except the ground where they put their dead.
It is not a graveyard as anybody would build one.
It is a stony piece of hillside with a lot of small heaps on it and one big rock at the top end, and there is no reason at all for a boy of twelve to be thinking about it while he sits with his back to the wall on the other side.
He had been using lead for a year.
Anything he could not afford to lose went on lead and into a pot.
The salt water in the right amounts.
The order of an examination.
The eleven things about setting a bone that nobody up here did properly.
He scratched the name.
Nikias, son of Alexis, of Corinth.
That was the whole of the plan.
He wanted the name on something that would not break and would not rot and could not be smoothed over, so that on some evening in forty years when everything else had gone, there would be a strip of metal in a pot in the corner with the name still on it.
He cut it slowly and got the letters even, which took him three goes at the first one, and then he sat there with his thumb across the scratches.
And then he said the oath out loud.
There was no decision in that either.
The name and the oath had arrived in his head in the same second in an alley five years earlier and they had been welded together ever since.
He wrote the one and the other came up out of him after it, the second half of a line coming when somebody starts the first.
“I will make them pay,” he said, to nobody.
“Those animals.
I will tear them apart limb from limb.
I will burn their pathetic city to the ground and salt what is underneath it, and there will be nothing left of them but the word, and one day there will be nobody alive who remembers what the word used to mean.”
He sat there feeling foolish, and cold, and after a while he put his hand on the wall and started to get up.
I will make them pay.
It came from four feet to his left and a little behind him.
He did not move.
Everything in him that had been trained came up at once and started working, and for a few seconds he was perfectly calm, because a frightened physician is no use to anybody and he had spent fourteen years getting that out of himself.
Sound in the ear with no source outside it.
Extremely common.
Cold, and he was cold.
A few nights of bad sleep.
That state on the edge of sleep where the mind produces voices and faces, which is ordinary and harmless and accounts for a good half of the ghosts in human history.
He was twelve, underfed by any standard he would once have accepted, and four weeks into losing something.
All of that was true.
All of it was the correct answer.
None of it covered the second thing.
Because it came again, and it was his father’s voice.
Not a voice like his father’s.
The exact one.
The flat vowel at the end of the first word, and the small catch in the middle where a man who has spent fifty one years in the smoke of a fire takes a breath, and it was the voice off the courtyard step and the harbour road and the alley, and he had it whole and immediately and without any effort at all.
He turned his head.
There was the wall, and the dark, and the hill going away.
“Father.”
Nothing.
“Do you know where my mother and my sister are.”
Nothing, and no sound of anything moving.
He sat with a strip of lead in his fist and asked the dark a question he had been carrying for five years, and got no answer, and after a while he understood that whatever had been there had spent what it had and gone.
He had come up here for the face.
That was the thing he could not get past, sitting on frozen ground at midnight with his own breath going away from him.
He had gone out into the dark to try to hold on to a face, and something had heard him, and what it gave him back was the voice.
He had never lost the voice.
He would have handed the voice over without arguing for a nose.
He got about eleven paces down the slope before he ran.
He was nearly at the hut when he stopped, and stood with his hands on his knees in the cold, and then turned round and went all the way back up.
Two hundred paces.
Because he had left a strip of lead lying in the dirt with his father’s name cut into it, and there was no version of himself that was going to lie down and sleep having done that.
He picked it up.
Nothing happened.
He carried it down and put it in the pot with the rest and stayed awake until it got light.
He did not tell Damon.
He wrote it up instead.
He did it on a fresh strip at first light, in the format he used for a patient, because that was the only format he had.
What was done.
What happened.
He put down the four words he had cut and the words he had said and the two questions he had asked and the fact that neither was answered.
He put down how cold it had been and how long he had been awake and what he had eaten.
Then he sat and looked at it for most of the morning, waiting to feel frightened.
What he felt was appetite.
He went up to Marpessa’s after the noon meal.
“No,” she said.
“You have not heard it.”
“I have not and I am not going to.” She was on the step with a bowl in her lap and she did not look up.
“You have got a face on you.
I have seen that face twice in my life and it cost me both times.
You want a thing out of me that I have never given anybody, and the answer is no.”
“I will pay.”
“With what.”
“Barley.
Eleven measures, and I can get twice that by summer.”
“I have barley.”
“Wool.
Two fleeces and a half, good ones.”
“My hands do not spin any more, so it is straw to me.”
“Then your hands,” said Lysandros.
“I have watched you carry that bowl on your thumbs for a year.
I know what is wrong with them, I know why it is worse in the cold, and there are four things I could do and two of them would work.”
Her chin came up at that, and for a moment he thought he had her.
“No,” she said.
“A knife.
Iron, good, given to me by a man from two valleys over.”
“I have three knives.”
“Your roof.”
“My roof is better than yours.”
“Letters,” said Lysandros.
She stopped.
“An hour a day for a year and you would have them,” he said.
“Every word your grandmother ever told you.
All of it, on lead, in a pot, still there when the woman after you is dead and the woman after her.
Nothing of yours goes into the ground.”
He watched her want it.
He watched her hold it up and look at it and want it badly, and then he watched her put it down, and he had no idea what he was seeing until she told him.
“That is the best offer anybody has made me since I came over that hill,” Marpessa said.
“And I am not taking it.
I will tell you why, or you will keep going until dark.
“Twenty three years I have been up here.
In twenty three years there has been one person on this hill who said a sentence to me that was not about a body.
Not a fever, not a birth, not somebody’s leg.
One.
It was you, on this step, last spring, about the ditch and the gods.”
She put the bowl down on the stone beside her.
“So I do not want your barley.
A question for a question.
You ask, I answer.
Then I ask, and you answer properly, and not the way you answer Damon.”
Lysandros sat down on the step.
“That is a far worse bargain for me than the barley.”
“Yes,” said Marpessa.
“You go first.”
He gave her all of it.
The name, the lead, the oath, the voice, the two questions and the silence.
She listened with her hands still, which he had never seen her do, and when he stopped she asked one thing.
“Where were you sitting.”
“The flat above the spring.
Far side, out of the wind, with my back to the old boundary wall.”
“Which side of it.”
“The near side.”
“And what is on the other side of that wall,” said Marpessa.
He was quiet for a moment.
“Eighty feet,” he said.
“A hundred at the outside.”
“A hundred at the outside.” She let a breath out through her nose.
“So.
You had the name and the father’s name with it.
You had it cut into lead.
You were a stone’s throw from a burying ground, at night, in the cold, and you said a thing out loud that you meant with the whole of yourself.
“There is a word for what you did.
It is not a secret and it is not clever and people have been doing it since long before this village was here.
They do it in Athens.
They did it in Corinth.
In the town I came from there was a man who would write one for you for four obols and he was not the only one.” She flexed her fingers.
“A sheet of lead, thin as you like.
The name of the one you want, cut into it, with his father’s name, because half a name goes nowhere.
Then what you want done to him, said plain.
Then you roll it, and you put a nail through the roll, and you give it to the dead.
A grave.
A well.
A shaft.
Anywhere they are.”
“Why lead.”
“Because it is cold, and it is heavy, and it does not change.
That is what I was told and nobody has ever given me a better answer and I have never used anything else.”
“Why the dead.”
“Because there is nobody else still listening,” said Marpessa.
She got up and went inside and came back with a cup and did not offer him any.
“Now the part you are going to hate,” she said.
“Six times in twenty three years.
That is all.
Every one of them prepared four days.
Two of them I fasted.
I got the name right, the whole name, and I cut it properly and I took it out at the hour I had chosen a month before, to a place I had walked to twice in daylight to be sure of it.
“Two of the six did anything at all.”
Lysandros sat very still.
“Two out of six.”
“And I am counted good,” Marpessa said.
“My grandmother was better and she would have told you three in a good year and she would have been boasting.
It does not work.
It is a thing that sometimes works, and every single person who does it knows that, and none of us says it out loud, because then who is going to pay us.”
“And I did it by accident.”
“You did it wrong.
In the dark, first time, with a full belly, in the wrong month, no nail, no preparation, and you never even put it anywhere.
And it answered inside a minute.” She drank.
“I have been sitting here since you started talking, trying to find a way to make that ordinary, and there is not one.”
“You are frightened of me.”
“I have been frightened of you since the yard.
That is old news and it is not the part that interests me.” She looked at him over the cup.
“The part that interests me is that you did nothing clever.
There is no skill in what you did.
I have watched you for five years and there is nothing in you that looks like a talent for this, and I would know, because I have got one and it is not much.”
“Then what.”
Marpessa looked at him over the cup for a long moment, and then looked away, out at the reeds.
“I have a thought about it,” she said.
“It came to me while you were talking and I do not care for it, and I am not going to say it out loud in the middle of the afternoon on somebody else’s step.”
“Marpessa.”
“No,” she said.