Chapter Eighteen: Variables
It took him nine days to write it out and most of that was arguing with himself about the order.
He did it on lead, and he used four strips and had to melt down two of the old ones to get the metal.
He wrote it the same way he would have written a protocol for a department, and by the end of the nine days he had something he was not ashamed of.
One curse.
The same words each time, cut the same way, on the same metal.
One thing changed on each attempt and one thing only.
The hour.
The distance from the dead.
The presence of the nail.
Whether the name carried the father’s name.
Whether the thing asked for was small or large, near or far, specific or vague.
Every attempt written down before it happened, so that nobody could decide afterwards what they had been expecting.
Every attempt written down after it happened, including the ones where nothing occurred, with the day and the weather and what had been eaten and how long anybody had slept.
And a rule at the bottom in larger letters, which was the only line on all four strips that mattered.
The ones that fail are the ones that teach.
Write them first.
He went to Damon before he went to Marpessa, because that had been the agreement since he was seven years old on a hillside with a sword six feet from his throat.
The old man was forty six now and looked ten years past it.
The arm had gone the way Lysandros had said it would, on the schedule he had given, which was one of the more unpleasant things about being right.
It hung.
He could get the hand to his belt and no further, and the shoulder had stopped hurting at night eighteen months ago, and that had been the bad news it was always going to be.
He listened all the way through without interrupting once, which took a while.
“Say the last part again,” he said.
“I want to find out how it works, and the only way anybody has ever found out how anything works is to do it many times and change one thing and write down what happened.”
“And the many times.”
“Yes.”
“On people.”
“Eventually.
Not at first.”
Damon sat with that.
“How many people are going to know.”
“Two.
Me and her.”
“Wrong answer.
How many people are going to be able to work it out.” He put his good hand on his knee.
“The boy who is good with a knife has been a story in three valleys for four years.
Now there is going to be a boy who is good with a knife and a woman from Thessaly, and they are going to be seen going up a hill together at odd hours for a year.
That is not two people knowing.
That is forty three people watching and one of them talking to a cousin.”
“Then we do it carefully.”
“There is no careful,” said Damon.
“There is only lucky.”
Lysandros waited.
He had come up here to be told yes or no, and he had come up here expecting to be told no, and he had already worked out what he was going to do about it and was not proud of any of that either.
Damon looked at the wall for a long time.
“You did not have to tell me,” he said.
“That was the agreement.”
“The agreement was made by a man who could have stopped you.” He said it flatly, with nothing in it.
“I could have put you on the ground at eleven.
Klytie has been knocking you down every evening for three years and she is having to work at it now, and I know what that means and so does she.”
“Damon.”
“Let me finish.
It is not a complaint.” He shifted the arm with his other hand, which he did now without thinking about it.
“The terms were that you tell me and I decide.
And you have come up here and told me, and you have done it when there is nothing at all in this hut that can make you, and I want you to know I noticed that.
“But I am not going to decide.”
Lysandros looked up.
“I am not going to be the reason you did this,” said Damon, “and I am not going to be the reason you did not.
If I say no you will do it anyway inside a year and we will both know I am a man whose word does not carry, and I would rather keep the last of it.
And if I say yes then this is mine as well, and it is not mine.
I do not understand one word of it and I am too old and too tired to start.
“So it is yours.
All of it.
You tell me what you are doing and I will listen and I will tell you when I think you are being a fool, and that is what I have got left.”
He got up, which took him two attempts.
“For what it is worth,” he said at the door, “I think you are going to do something up there that you cannot put down afterwards.
I have thought that since you were nine.
I am not going to be able to stop it and I would rather be told about it than find out.”
Marpessa laughed for twenty minutes.
He had not been expecting that.
He had been expecting a fight and he had prepared for a fight, and he stood on her step in the spring sunshine with four strips of lead in his hands and she started before he was halfway through and did not stop for a third of an hour.
She laughed at the fact that he had written it down.
She laughed harder when he said it was a protocol, because she made him explain what the word meant and then laughed at the explanation.
She laughed at the idea of doing the same curse twice.
She laughed at the phrase the ones that fail are the ones that teach, which he had been rather pleased with.
At one point she had to put a hand on the doorpost.
He waited it out.
He had learned that much from her.
“Are you finished.”
“No.” She wiped her face.
“Sit down, you ridiculous boy, and let me tell you why it is nonsense, because you have gone to trouble over it and you deserve better than being laughed at.”
“It is not a craft with parts in it,” she said.
“Everything has parts.”
“No.
Listen.
That is exactly where you are wrong and you are wrong at the beginning, so everything after it is wrong too.” She held up her hand.
“It is one thing.
It is one whole thing that you do one way, the way it was given to you, and you do all of it or you do not do any of it.
It is not a wall you can take stones out of to see which one is holding it up.
“Change a piece and you are not doing a different version of the thing.
You are doing a different thing.
And a different thing does not work, and then you will write down on your metal that the hour does not matter, and you will be wrong, and you will have proved nothing except that you did it wrong.”
“How do you know that.”
“Because that is what I was taught.”
“By your grandmother.”
“By my grandmother,” said Marpessa, “who had it from hers, and if you are about to be clever about that I would rather you did it quickly.”
“Which hand do you hold the nail in?”
She stopped.
“What?”
“When you put the nail through.
Which hand.
Is it always the same one.”
“The right.”
“Does it matter.”
“No.”
“Are you certain.”
“Yes, because I broke a thumb the summer before last and did the whole of one in my left and it went perfectly well.” She was starting to see it.
“Do not.”
“You have just told me it is one whole thing,” said Lysandros, “and then you have told me there is a piece of it that does not matter.
That is not one thing.
That is a thing with parts.
Some of them are load bearing and some of them are decoration, and you already know that, and you know it because you have accidentally tested one of them and remembered the result.”
“That is not the same.”
“It is precisely the same and it is the only difference between us.
You have been running this experiment your whole life.
So did your grandmother and so did hers.
Every one of you has changed things by accident, because people are tired and it rains and thumbs get broken, and every one of you noticed some of it and forgot most of it and told nobody.
“I am proposing to do it on purpose and write it down.”
She got up and went inside and did not come out for a while, and when she came back she had the cup and again she did not offer him any.
“Then let us do the real objection,” she said.
“How many.”
“How many what.”
“How many times, boy.
You want to change one thing on each go.
There are what, six things on that list of yours?”
“Nine.”
“Nine.
So nine goes, at the very least, and you will not believe the first one so you will want it twice, and there is an eighteen.
And two out of six is what I get on a good year, so most of your eighteen will be nothing, and you will not know whether the nothing is because the hour was wrong or because it was one of the four in six that does nothing anyway.
“So it is not eighteen.
It is sixty.
It is a hundred.”
He did not say anything.
“Go on,” she said.
“You have done that sum.
You did it before you cut the metal.”
“Around eighty,” said Lysandros.
“If the rate is as bad as you say and I want to be able to tell one cause from another, then about eighty for the first six variables and more after that.”
“Eighty curses.” Marpessa put the cup down.
“On who.”
Here it was.
He had known this was coming for eleven days and he had worked on the answer and it was not good enough, and he heard it come out of his mouth and heard exactly how thin it was.
“Small things,” he said.
“Nothing that harms anybody.
A man’s sleep for a night.
Whether somebody drops a cup.
Losing a thing and finding it again.
There is no reason a curse has to be a large one, and if the small ones work the same as the large ones then the small ones are the right tool for finding out how it works.”
“On who.”
“On people who will never know it happened and will not be hurt by it.”
“Say a name.
Say one name,” she said.
“You have got eighty of them to find.
Start with one.
Say it out loud to me now, on my step, and see how it sounds.”
He looked at the ground.
“That is what I thought,” said Marpessa.
“You have written four strips of metal and you have not written one name, because the moment you write a name it stops being a protocol and starts being a thing you did to Eualos.
And you know that.
You have known it the whole time and you have been walking round it for eleven days and you came up here hoping I would be the one who said it.”
“Yes,” said Lysandros.
“At least you are honest about it.”
“Not really.
I would have gone and done it anyway.”
“I know,” she said.
“That is the only part of this I am not frightened of.
It is the part I understand.”