Chapter Seventeen: Thirty One
They walked down together in the dark and Pyrrhos was still saying things out loud out of habit and Klytie kept telling him to stop, and Lysandros was in the middle of them and did not join in.
He had noticed something on the path and it had thrown him completely.
He was happy.
Not distracted.
Not busy.
Not usefully occupied in a way that kept the other thing at a distance.
He had spent five years running a stick out at arm’s length in the dark so that there would be no room in his head for four minutes of his sister saying no, and he had spent six weeks in his first life working eighteen hour days for exactly the same reason, and he understood that machinery in himself extremely well.
This was not that.
He had spent an evening being beaten with a stick by a girl who then laughed at him about it, and he had eaten badly, and his arm hurt, and he was walking down a hill in Arcadia in the dark between two people, and he was happy, and it had happened without his permission.
He did not know what to do with it.
He turned it over the whole way down and could not find anywhere to put it, and it sat in his chest all evening being unfamiliar.
Two nights later he went back up to the wall.
He did not plan it.
He told himself he did not plan it, which is a different thing and he knew that too.
It was September and the nights had turned.
He took the strip out of the pot and went up the two hundred paces in the dark, and sat down in the same place with his back against the stone, and put the lead flat on his knee.
He did not have to say the whole oath this time.
He got four words into it.
I will make them pay.
It was closer than before.
In January it had been four feet to his left.
Now it was at his shoulder, at the height his father’s mouth would have been if his father had been sitting next to him on the ground, and the cold in that one place was not the cold of the rest of the hillside.
“Father,” he said.
I will make them pay.
“Father, listen to me.
I have one question and I have had it for six years.”
Those animals.
“Is Kleio alive.”
Nothing.
He waited.
He counted to sixty and the cold stayed where it was and there was nothing in it and nothing came out of it.
“Your daughter,” he said.
“Kleio.
Your daughter Kleio.
Where is your daughter.”
I will tear them apart limb from limb.
“Stop.” He had his hands flat on the ground.
“I am not asking about Rome.
I do not want to talk about Rome.
Just tell me if she is alive.
That is all.
You do not have to say anything else ever again, just say whether my sister is alive.”
I will burn their pathetic city to the ground.
He changed his approach.
He stopped asking the ghost to know things and started asking it to remember things, which are not the same operation, and he built the questions the way he would have built them for a man with a head injury.
Nothing abstract.
Nothing requiring judgement.
Only what was in front of the eyes.
“The front of the house,” he said.
“You went to the front of the house.
You gave an order.
I heard you.
What did you see.”
I will make them pay.
“Which road.
When they took them out of the courtyard, which way did they turn.
Left is the harbour.
Right is the square.
Which way did they go.”
Those animals.
“Were they roped or were they carried.
Was there a cart.
How many men were there.
Were there women with them already or were they the first.”
I will tear them apart limb from limb.
“Was she alive when they took her out of the house.”
I will burn their pathetic city to the ground and salt what is underneath it.
“Father, please.”
And there was a pause.
It was longer than the others.
It was long enough that Lysandros stopped breathing, because something in it had changed, and there was a quality in that gap that he had no word for and that felt exactly like a man reaching for something on a high shelf.
And there will be nothing left of them but the word.
He stayed up there and let it say the sentence thirty one times.
He counted.
Of course he counted.
He sat on the frozen ground with his arms round his knees and let his dead father say the same twelve words over and over into the side of his head, and he counted them, because it was the only thing he had left that was his own.
It never varied.
Not the order, not the pace, not the small catch in the middle where the breath went.
It was not a man saying a thing thirty one times.
A man saying a thing thirty one times gets tired of it, or angry, or bored, and the eleventh one is different from the first.
This was the same one, thirty one times, and by the twentieth he had stopped being frightened and had started to feel something much worse.
He had worked it out.
It was not a difficult problem and he had been avoiding it for eight months, and once he let himself look at it there was nothing to it.
That was not his father.
His father would have asked about Theano.
His father would have asked the first thing, before anything else, and it would have been about his wife, and he would have got angry when there was no answer.
His father would have told him to stand up straight.
Five years in the ground would not have touched that.
If Nikias son of Alexis had been in any way present on that hillside, the first thing out of him would have been an instruction about the boy’s posture and the second would have been about the cold.
His father had never in his life said one sentence twice without changing it, because he was a man who talked for a living and could not leave a thing alone.
There was none of that.
There was no temper, no impatience, no curiosity, nothing about the weather, nothing about the boy, no question of any kind.
Whatever was on that hillside had no interest in him whatsoever and had never asked him one thing.
What was there was a sound, and a piece of a night, and a sentence.
And here was the part he had been walking round for eight months, and it went into him properly for the first time sitting on that ground at the count of thirty something.
If what is left of a man is the last thing that mattered to him, then this is what mattered.
Not Theano.
His wife of nineteen years, taken out of the front of his own house forty minutes earlier while he was bleeding into a gutter.
Not Kleio.
Not the son sitting in a cupboard four streets away with his hands over his ears.
An oath.
A promise extracted from a child in an alley in the last four minutes of a man’s life, and it had been the largest thing in him, and it had beaten everybody in that house.
He had known that already.
He had known it since he was seven years old and stood in that alley and watched his father look up at him and not ask.
Now he had it confirmed by the dead.
He still went back.
That is the part he could not explain to himself afterwards and never wrote down anywhere, on lead or on anything else.
He worked out that it was not his father, and he understood the argument completely, and he could have stood up in a yard and defended it against anybody.
And then he went back up to that wall eleven days later, and again before the first snow, and again in the spring, and he sat down in the same place and said four words and let a sound that was not his father say a sentence into the side of his head until his feet went numb.
Because it was the voice.
Because there was nothing else anywhere in the world that made that noise, and there was never going to be, and if he stopped going up there then the last thing left of the man would be a drawing of Praxias on a broken pot.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
Prolonged grief disorder.
He had written that phrase in other people’s notes and never once thought of it as a thing a man might choose on purpose.
The treatment is to stop going to the place.
He went up anyway.
The clinician came back in the spring, and it came back in the middle of the night in the hut with the fire out.
He was lying there doing what he had done every night since September, which was going over the pause.
The one that was longer than the others.
The one after Father, please.
And he heard himself think: that was a longer pause.
He sat up in the dark.
Longer than what.
Longer than the others.
Which meant there had been others, and he had noticed a difference between them, and a difference is not a mystery.
A difference is a variable, and a variable can be changed on purpose, and a thing that can be changed on purpose can be tested.
He got up and lit the lamp and Damon swore at him from the other side of the hut and rolled over.
He sat down with a nail and a fresh strip and looked at it for a long time.
Everything he knew about this was a story.
All of it.
The lead is cold and heavy and does not change, because that is what a woman was told by her grandmother, who was told it by hers.
Half a name goes nowhere, because somebody said so.
Two out of six, prepared four days, fasted twice, at the hour chosen a month before, and nobody in the whole history of the world had ever once written down which four days, or which hour, or what was different about the two that worked.
Nobody had ever kept a record.
There were people doing this in Athens and in Corinth and in a town in Thessaly where a man charged four obols for it, and there had been people doing it for four hundred years before that, and every single one of them had learned it from one other person and passed it to one other person and taken everything they knew into the ground.
It was Marpessa’s four hundred patients all over again.
It was every physician who had ever lived.
Excellence held in one skull and lost on one day, and nobody comparing anything with anything, and nobody writing down the ones that failed.
He put the point of the nail on the metal.
He was twelve years old and his father was dead and there was a sound on the hillside that knew one sentence, and there was no comfort in any of it and there was not going to be, and he had spent eight months looking for a reason and finding nothing.
But something had happened up there.
Something had happened, twice, and things that happen have causes, and causes can be found, and there is exactly one method in the world that finds them and he was the only person alive who knew it.
He scratched the first line.
What is different about the ones that work.