Chapter Nineteen: The Wanting
They sat on her step for a while.
“Then let me ask you something,” he said, “and it is not a trick.
Was your grandmother better at this than you are?”
Marpessa did not answer straight away.
“Yes.”
“By much.”
“By a great deal.”
“And was her mother better than her.”
“So she said.
She said it often.”
“And what did that one say about the ones before her.”
Marpessa’s face changed and he watched it happen and did not enjoy it.
“She said the old ones could do things nobody living can do,” she said slowly.
“She said that in her grandmother’s day there was a woman near Larissa who could bring a storm down onto one field and leave the next one dry, and that there was nothing left of that now, and that we were the tail end of it.”
“And her grandmother said the same about hers.”
“Yes.”
“And so on back.”
“Yes.”
“Marpessa,” said Lysandros.
“Nothing that is getting better says that about itself.
“Think about it for a moment before you tell me I am wrong.
You have got a whole tradition of people, over three hundred years, and every single one of them says the same sentence.
The old ones were stronger.
What we have is the remains of it.
It was better before.
“Now.
That is either true, in which case it has been going downhill for three hundred years without a single generation halting it, which is a very strange thing for a craft to do all by itself.
Or it is not true, and every one of those women thought it anyway, which means the whole line of them has spent three hundred years grieving for something that was never there and never once looking to see whether it was.
“Either way.
Either way, name me one thing you can do that your grandmother could not.
Name me one thing your grandmother could do that hers could not do.
One thing.
Anywhere in three hundred years.”
Marpessa sat on her step and looked out at the reeds and did not say anything for a long time.
“No,” she said.
“No what.”
“No, I cannot name one.” Her voice had gone flat.
“There is nothing.
It is the same six things done the same six ways and I have not added a single piece to it in twenty three years and neither did she, and if you had asked me last week I would have told you that was the point of it.”
“It is not the point of it.
It is what happens to anything that is only ever handed from one mouth to one ear.
There is nobody comparing anything.
There is no woman anywhere writing down that she tried it at the second hour and again at the fourth.
There is nobody who has ever put six of these next to each other and looked for what the two that worked had in common.
Every one of you learns it from one person and gives it to one person and takes the whole of what you found out into the ground with you, and the next one starts where you started.
“Nobody has ever written down the ones that did not work.
So nobody has ever learned anything.
And that is why your craft is exactly as good today as it was three hundred years ago and not one thing better.”
“Get off my step,” said Marpessa.
He got off her step.
“No,” she said, when he was six paces down the path.
“The answer is no.
Not because you are wrong.
I would rather you were wrong and I have been sitting here for an hour trying to make you wrong, and I cannot do it, and I am going to be a long time forgiving you for that.”
“Marpessa.”
“I said no.
Go away.”
He gave her a month, because there was nothing else he could do, and he spent it doing the only part of the work that harmed nobody.
He tested the ghost.
That was the one place in the whole thing where there was no name to say out loud and no person to walk past afterwards, because the man was already dead and had been for six years, and whatever was on that hillside had no interest in him and could not be made worse.
So he went up in the dark with a strip and a nail and a discipline, and he changed one thing at a time.
He wrote the name on a potsherd instead of on lead.
Nothing.
He wrote it on a scrap of bronze off a broken buckle.
Nothing.
He went down to the flat by the drawing place, two hundred paces from the wall, and did all of it correctly.
Nothing.
He did it at the wall in the middle of the afternoon in bright sun with the goats forty feet away, which took more out of him than any of the rest of it, and it worked.
It worked exactly as well as it did at midnight, and he sat down afterwards on the warm stone with his hands shaking, because three hundred years of women had been going out at chosen hours in the cold for no reason at all.
He wrote the name and did not say the oath.
Nothing.
He said the oath and did not write the name.
Nothing.
The last one took him three attempts, because it turned out to be hard in a way he had not predicted.
He wrote the name.
He said the oath.
And he tried to say it without meaning it.
He failed twice.
He got the words out flat, in the voice he used for reciting a list, and got about six words in before something came up through him and he heard his own voice go and knew he had ruined the test.
Both times.
The third time he did it by counting.
He kept a separate count running in his head, the whirls of a sling, one two three, all the way through.
He said all twelve words in a flat voice with a number in his head and meant not one of them.
Nothing came.
He said it again immediately, properly, and it was there before he had finished.
He sat on that ground for a long while afterwards with his back to the wall and the cold coming up out of it, and he did not write anything down for two days, which had not happened since he was nine.
Because he understood what he had found and he did not want it.
It only works if you mean it.
That is the whole of it, and every woman in Thessaly could probably have told him, and it is the one thing his four strips of lead had no way of handling.
He had written a protocol for a thing that requires sincerity.
He had drawn up nine variables and eighty attempts on the assumption that he was the instrument, and he was not the instrument.
The wanting was the instrument.
Which meant there was no such thing as a small test.
There was no version where he cursed a man’s sleep for a night as an exercise, because the curse would not go unless he actually wanted that man not to sleep, and he could not want it as a demonstration.
He could not perform it.
He had just proved that on himself in the dark with a number in his head.
Eighty attempts meant eighty times of standing on a hillside and genuinely wishing something bad on a person who had done nothing to him, and meaning it all the way down, or it was worthless.
He wrote it down on the third day because he wrote everything down.
Klytie put him down that evening in about forty seconds, which was the longest it had ever taken her, and she was breathing hard at the end of it and pretended not to be.
“You are somewhere else,” she said.
“I am here.”
“You are not.
You have been somewhere else for a month and it is making you slow and it is going to make you slower.” She threw his stick back at him.
“Whatever it is, do it or stop thinking about it.
This is the worst part.
The bit before.”
He looked at her for a moment.
“That is the most useful thing anybody has said to me all year,” he said.
“Do not make it strange.”
Marpessa came down the path on a morning in June and was sitting outside the hut when he came out.
She had a bundle with her.
She had never once come down to that hut in six years.
“Four things,” she said, before he could speak.
“You will not like the first one and you will hate the second.”
“Go on.”
“I write nothing.
Not one mark.
You cut every strip and you keep every strip and if any part of this ever ends up in a yard in front of the village, I was not there, I was never there, and I will stand up and say so.” She looked at him steadily.
“I have been the woman up the hill for over twenty years and it is the only thing keeping me fed.
I am not putting my hand on a piece of metal for you.”
“Agreed.”
“Second.
Nobody from this village.
Not Eualos, not anybody, not for the small ones, not for the ones you think are harmless.
Not one person who drinks out of that spring.
I do not care how much slower it makes it.”
“Agreed.”
“Third.
When I say stop, we stop.
Not argue.
Stop.
I will not use it often and I am not going to explain myself when I do.”
He thought about that one properly before he answered it, and she watched him think about it, and she was not offended by the pause.
“Agreed,” he said.
“And the fourth.”
Marpessa put the bundle down on the ground between them and did not open it.
“The letters,” she said.
“You offered me them in the winter and I would not take them.
I am taking them now.
An hour a day, as you said, and we start before we do anything else, and the first thing we write down is not one of your nine variables.
“The first thing we write down is my grandmother.
All of it.
Everything she gave me, every word, in her order, the six things and how she did them and what she said about them and the bits I have always thought were rubbish, and I want that in a pot in the ground before you and I curse one single person.
“Because you were right on my step and I have had a month of it and I cannot get out from underneath it.
There is nothing behind me but women who were better than me, and I have added nothing, and if I go into that hillside the way she did then three hundred years walks in with me and nobody will ever know it was there.”
She looked up.
“So I am going to be the first one who put something in,” she said, “or I am going to be the one who finished it off.
And I have decided I do not much care which, so long as it is written down.”