Chapter Sixteen: Choosing the Ground
Marpessa told him in the morning and it took her about nine words.
He had gone up early, as she had known he would, and she was already sitting on the step with her hands round a cup, and she did not make him ask.
“It answered you because you are one of them,” she said.
He stood on the path.
“You have been dead,” said Marpessa.
“You told me that yourself.
You died in a ditch in the rain in another country and then you were somewhere else, and whatever it is that stands between us and them, you have already gone through it once.
So when you knocked, you were not knocking from out here.
You were knocking from in there.”
He thought about that for a long time and could not find anything wrong with it.
“That is not a comfortable thing to hear.”
“No,” she said.
“It has not been a comfortable thing to carry about since yesterday afternoon either.
Now go away, I am busy.”
He did not go back up to the wall that spring.
He did not go back for four months.
Part of that was Marpessa and part of it was cowardice and most of it was that the weather turned, and when the weather turns in Arcadia the whole of life moves outdoors, and there is no time at all to be haunted.
The flocks went up.
The barley came in.
There were nine weeks in the middle of it when Lysandros was awake from before light until after dark and treated eleven people and did not once think about anything that was not immediately in front of him.
And in the evenings, when the work was done and the light was still going, there were the three of them on the flat ground above the spring.
It started with the fence post and it got out of hand within a week.
The post was the one Klytie had been hitting since she was six.
It stood at the far end of the flat where somebody had put up a length of wall and then given up, and it had a scar on it about the size of a hand, worn white, from ten years of stones.
“Forty paces,” she said.
“Five each.
You go first because you are the worst.”
Lysandros got one out of five, and the one that hit was low.
Pyrrhos got none out of five, and one of his went so far over the post and down the slope that they heard it land in the gully.
Klytie got five out of five and made a small satisfied noise after each one, which was the most irritating sound either of them had ever heard.
“Again,” said Lysandros.
“You will not get better in an hour.”
“I am aware of that.
Again.”
He worked on it for a month and it did not help, and he knew exactly why it did not help, which was the joke.
He understood the thing completely.
He could have told anybody on that hillside what a sling was doing.
It is a lever.
You are lengthening your arm by two feet of cord, so the pouch is travelling far faster than your hand is, and everything depends on releasing at the one instant in the circle where the stone is pointed at where you want it.
He could work out the angle.
He knew that the best release is somewhere near forty five degrees for distance and much flatter for a target, and that the stone goes in a curve and not in a line, and that a rounder stone flies straighter than a lumpy one.
Every word of that was true and none of it went into his hands.
“Stop thinking,” said Klytie, about eleven times.
“I am not thinking.”
“You are doing something with your face.”
“That is my face.
It stays there.”
“You are counting.”
He was counting.
He had worked out that his release was late and had started counting the whirls, and it had made him worse rather than better, and it took him three weeks to accept that a girl of sixteen who had never counted anything in her life was right about it.
Pyrrhos was hopeless with the sling and they found out why by accident.
“Throw it,” said Klytie, out of temper with him.
“Just throw the thing, you great lump.
Throw it at the post with your hand.”
Pyrrhos threw it at the post with his hand.
He hit it dead centre from forty paces, hard enough to knock chips off it, and then stood there looking mildly apologetic.
There was a silence.
“Do that again,” said Lysandros.
He did it again.
Then he did it four more times, and he hit the post four more times, and by the fifth one Klytie was sitting on the wall with both hands on her head.
“I have been trying to teach you to sling for a month.”
“You said the sling was better.”
“The sling is better!”
“He is seventeen and he lifts stone walls for a living,” said Lysandros.
“His arm is a siege engine.
Klytie, how far can you throw one by hand?”
“That is not the point.”
“How far.”
“Not as far as that,” she admitted.
“Nowhere near as far as that.”
So they made a new competition, and Pyrrhos won it, and he was so pleased about it that he could not stop smiling for two days and everybody in the village asked him what had happened.
Then it got worse, because Lysandros started making rules.
He could not beat either of them at anything, so he did the only thing available to a man in that position, which was to keep inventing new games until he found one he was good at.
Five stones at a post, which he lost.
Five stones at a post while running, which he lost by more.
Five stones at a rolling gourd, which Klytie won so comprehensively that the gourd was in pieces before Pyrrhos had loaded.
Then he proposed one where each of them had to call out where they were going to hit before they threw, and only a hit in the called place counted.
He won that.
He won it because Klytie could hit anything but had never once in her life decided in advance which part of it, and by the time she had thought about it her whole rhythm was gone, and she missed four out of five and threw her sling on the ground.
“That is not slinging.”
“It is exactly slinging.
There is a post and there are stones.”
“You have made a game you can win at.”
“Yes,” said Lysandros.
“That is what people do.”
“It is cheating.”
“It is not cheating, it is choosing the ground.” He was extremely pleased with himself and doing nothing to hide it.
“You will notice that I have never once asked you to a competition about who can carry the most water.”
Pyrrhos, who could carry the most water by a distance, laughed so hard he had to sit down, and Klytie hit Lysandros with the sling.
They were sitting up there afterwards with the light going orange over the reeds when she told him about the lead.
“You know they used to make them out of metal.”
“Make what.”
“Bullets.
For the sling.
Not stones.” She had her arms round her knees.
“My grandfather saw them when he was young.
Lead ones, cast in a mould, the shape of an almond, both ends pointed.
He said they go further than a stone and they do not turn in the air and you cannot see them coming.
Soldiers had them.
Proper armies.”
Lysandros sat up.
“Lead.”
“That is what he said.
He said his father had one and lost it.”
“How much further.”
“I do not know.
Further.
Ask a soldier.” She grinned.
“And here is the good part.
He said they used to write on them.”
“Write what.”
“Insults,” said Klytie.
“That is the whole of it.
You cast a lump of metal to fire at a man half a mile away, and before you fire it you scratch a rude word into it.
My grandfather said he saw one that said catch.
Just that.
Catch.”
Pyrrhos thought this was the funniest thing he had ever heard in his life.
Lysandros did not say anything for a while, because he was sitting on a wall in Arcadia with about eleven strips of lead in a pot forty paces below him, and something had just gone over in his head with a very quiet click.
“What,” said Klytie.
“Nothing.”
“You have got the face on.”
“I have got a face.
It stays there.”
The sparring was different, because Pyrrhos would not hit anybody.
They had tried to get him into it for two summers and he had always found something to carry instead, and that August Lysandros finally cornered him about it and made him take a stick.
He was seventeen.
He was a head taller than Klytie and half again as wide, and he had been shifting stone since he was nine, and he stood on that flat ground with a length of ash in his hand and looked ill.
“Come at me,” said Lysandros.
Pyrrhos came at him at about half the speed a man of that size can move, and stopped the stick four inches short, and apologised.
“Again.”
He did it again.
He did it eleven times, and on every one of them something in him let go about a foot before the end, and after the eleventh he put the stick down on the ground and stood there looking at it.
“I cannot,” he said.
“You can.
You are the strongest person on this hill.”
“That is not it.” He was going red.
“I know it is not real.
I know it is a stick and I know you would not mind.
I get to about here and everything stops.”
Klytie was watching from the wall with her chin on her hand and no expression on her face at all.
Lysandros sat down on the ground and thought about it.
He had known Pyrrhos for four years.
He had watched him hold a man’s arm down through a drainage that made two other people leave the room, without shifting, without going pale, and without saying one word of apology afterwards.
He had watched him hold a woman’s shoulders while she screamed for a quarter of an hour and then go outside and eat his supper.
It was the same thing.
It was exactly the same thing coming out the other way.
Some people can stand inside somebody else’s pain without being moved out of position by it.
That is why he was the best pair of hands on the mountain.
And the identical piece of him that let him stay still in the middle of it would not let him be the cause of it, and there was no separating the two, and Lysandros understood in that moment that he was never going to get one without losing the other.
“All right,” he said.
“I will try again.”
“No.
Put it down.” He got up.
“You are going to learn where to stand and how to get somebody out of a place, and you are not going to hit anybody, and I am not going to ask you again.
Klytie.”
“What.”
“Come and hit me.
He can watch and learn how not to do it.”
The best evening of that whole summer was the two on one, and none of them realised what it was at the time.
It began as an insult.
Klytie had put him down five times running and had started giving him advice between each one, which he could not bear, and eventually he said the two of them together could take her.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Pyrrhos does not hit people.”
“He does not have to.”
So they tried it, and she beat both of them in about fifteen seconds, twice, and the second time she did it she was laughing so much she could barely stand up.
“You got in each other’s way,” she said.
“You were both in front of me.
You might as well have been one person and he is a bigger target than you are.”
Lysandros lay on the ground and looked at the sky and worked.
The problem was not skill and it was not strength.
Two people are worse than one person because two people are two decisions, and two decisions made at the same time in the same place produce a collision.
Klytie was one decision.
That was her entire advantage and it was enormous.
Unless you fix it.
And there is a way to fix it, and it is the oldest way there is, and he had spent fourteen years of another life doing it in a room with eleven people in it and a man’s aorta open on a table.
He sat up.
“Again,” he said.
“New rules.
Pyrrhos, you do not attack, you only move.
You go where I say and you stand there and you do not let her past you.
You are a wall that walks.
And you say what you are doing out loud when you do it.”
“Out loud?”
“Every time.
Say it.
And I will call, and when I call you do it immediately and you do not think about whether it is a good idea, because you thinking about it is what kills us.”
“That is not fighting,” said Klytie.
“No,” Lysandros agreed.
“Ready.”
It took four attempts and then they had her.
Not with a clever move.
Pyrrhos stood where he was told and stopped being able to be got round, and Lysandros went where Pyrrhos was not, and every single time Klytie changed her mind, one of them said so out loud, and the other one already knew.
She got the stick across the back of the knee, sat down hard, and said a word.
Then she sat there in the dust for a moment.
“Do that again,” she said.
They did it again and it worked again, and then a third time, and on the third one she saw it coming and still could not stop it, and she got up and dusted herself off and looked at the two of them with an expression Lysandros had not seen on her before.
“That is horrible,” she said.
“It is very effective.”
“It is horrible.
It is like fighting one person with four arms who knows what he is going to do before he does it.” She was rubbing the back of her leg.
“How did you know that would work.”
“I did not know.
I worked it out on the ground while you were laughing at me.”
Which was true, and it was also not the whole truth, and he did not give her the rest of it, because the rest of it was that he had done exactly this at least four hundred times in another world in a room with white light and machines, and that the entire reason a trauma bay works is that one person speaks and everybody else says out loud what they are doing, and that he had spent two years rebuilding a department on that principle and had never once thought of it as a way to beat somebody with a stick.
He was twelve years old and lying on a hillside with two people he liked, and it had just occurred to him, quietly, that the thing which saves people and the thing which kills them is the same thing.
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