Chapter Twenty: Goats First
He bought the goats with four years of cheese.
That was what it came to.
Four years of wool and barley and cheese, traded down and traded down again until it was eleven animals standing in the abandoned fold on the near shoulder, and the village thought it was the most sensible thing he had ever done.
Praxias said so at the well.
Two women who had never properly spoken to him came and told him which animals to walk away from at the summer sale, and one of them stayed a quarter of an hour.
A young man putting his payment into livestock is a young man thinking about a household.
He bought them thin and old and cheap, which everybody read as a boy driving a hard bargain.
The plan was not clever and he never pretended it was.
Curse a goat.
Wait.
Write down what happened.
Change one thing.
Do it again.
He had wanted something better than that.
He had written four strips of protocol the year before and most of it turned out to be for a world with more than one of him in it, and what he had was a fold, a nail, some lead, and the summer.
So: one goat at a time.
One change at a time.
And a column for the ones where nothing happened.
Names stopped him in the first fortnight.
He had assumed a name was a label you put on.
He cut the one with the nicked ear into a strip of lead and got nothing.
He invented a name and used it out loud for three days, walking up and down the fold calling the animal by it until he felt ridiculous, and got nothing.
Then he did one on a goat the seller had called something at the sale, in front of him.
It went on the fourth day.
So a name has to be a name somebody uses.
Out of their own mouth, without thinking about it.
Which left him with a fold of animals and one name between them, and there was one person on that mountain who could tell forty goats apart at three hundred paces.
“Why,” said Klytie.
“I want to know what they get called.”
“You have never cared about a goat in your life.” She swung round on the wall.
“Fine.
All of them or just yours?”
“Yours as well, if you will.”
He had come up there with a story ready and did not need it.
Nobody had ever asked her about the thing she was best at, not once, and she went through his eleven and then started on her own without being asked.
Which ones had two names.
That the brown one was called one thing by her and another by her uncle, and that her uncle was wrong and had been wrong since before she was born.
She was pleased the whole time.
He wrote it all down and thanked her and went up the hill.
Pyrrhos did the watching, and never knew he was doing it.
“Every morning,” Lysandros told him.
“Every animal, same order.
Is it up.
Is it eating.
Is it lame.
Is the coat right.
Has it got the flux.
You say it and I write it.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody has ever written down how a goat goes wrong.”
Pyrrhos thought that was a reasonable thing to want to know, for Lysandros anyway, and did it for five months without missing a morning.
He did not know which ones had been worked on.
He never asked why the answers went on metal instead of pots.
He stood at that wall in whatever weather there was, eighteen years old and half a head taller than any man in the village, and gave an honest account of eleven animals to somebody who already had half the answer.
What five months got him was four things, and three of them were about what does not matter.
Lead works.
Bronze does nothing, twice.
Clay nothing.
Wood nothing.
A strip of iron nothing.
Why lead and not bronze, he could not say and did not pretend to.
He cut what he had cut a hundred times in the other world, on things that worked reliably and had no explanation behind them: mechanism unknown, effect consistent.
Graves work.
A well works less well and takes longer.
Ground with no dead in it does nothing at all, which he proved by walking two miles to a place Marpessa swore had never held a body, doing the whole thing perfectly, and walking back in the rain.
The nail makes no difference.
Four with, four without, and the ones without came out marginally better.
Three hundred years of women driving a nail through a roll of lead in the cold.
And goats die anyway.
That was the fourth thing and it was the one that mattered.
Of the four he never touched, one went in September of something ordinary.
So a dead goat proves nothing on its own, and he wrote five of seven against one of four at the bottom and then wrote not enough underneath it, because it was not.
He needed more goats.
He got them out of the lower village, and he got them by working.
Word had been going down that hill for four years and he had never once chased it.
Now he chased it.
He went down twice a week through the autumn and he took anything that came, and he told them what he wanted paid in, and by the end of the year there were nine more animals in that fold and a woman two valleys over who had promised him two in the spring for a thing he had done for her husband.
He was good at it.
That was the uncomfortable part.
He set a shoulder in a yard in front of six people and they talked about it for a month, and three of them brought him goats.
He stopped going up to the flat ground to spar in the evenings that autumn, and he told himself it was the walking.
Some of it was.
He was down in the valley three days out of seven and coming back after dark.
The rest of it was that he had got taller in the spring and had gone on getting taller.
Klytie had stopped.
She came to about here on him now, which he put at five foot six and she would have put at nothing at all, because nobody on that mountain measured anything.
He was around five foot eight and still going.
Two summers ago she had put him on the ground in eight seconds.
Last winter it had been taking her a minute.
He had done the arithmetic on reach and weight and the four inches he had gained, and had understood that he could probably beat her now.
He did not want to find out.
That was the whole of it and he knew exactly how pathetic it was.
He had made a bargain at ten years old, on that flat ground, that the day he beat her she was his apprentice and did what he said.
And he had wanted it for three years and now he did not want to spend it, because the arrangement was better than the prize.
The moment he won, the evenings stopped being two friends hitting each other and started being something with a rank in it.
So he was busy.
He was extremely busy that autumn.
Anybody could see it.
He looked at himself properly in November and it was the first time in seven years.
There was standing water in the old trough by the abandoned fold, flat and dark, and he was waiting for Pyrrhos and there was nothing else to do.
Clinical inventory, then.
Height good.
Better than good, in this century.
Every grown man in that village was shorter than he was going to be by fifteen.
Colouring wrong for the country and he had known that since he was small, because people mentioned it, and because it was one of the several reasons they had settled on him being unlucky.
Hair so pale it was nearly white, thick, falling either side of a parting because it fell that way and he had never once done anything about it.
Eyes a blue that got remarked on by strangers in the lower village.
Xavier Reid had been six foot at thirteen.
He stood over a trough in Arcadia and made an honest comparison, and the honest answer was that this one was better looking, and that it was not close, and that most of the advantage came from where he was standing.
In another century he would have been a tall blond man in a corridor full of tall people.
Here he was something the lower village turned round to look at.
He noted it, then he thought about what a face like that was for, in a country where nobody trusts a stranger.
Marpessa stopped coming down that winter, and before the end of it she had stopped coming out.
She had always been up early.
Now she was up before light, every day, and there was a fire going outside her door at dawn, small and carefully built.
Then it was what went on the fire.
Barley at first, a pinch of it.
Then oil, which she could not spare.
Then a bird, which she could not spare either, and which she would not discuss.
Then she started getting things right.
That was the part he could not put anywhere.
She read four people in the lower village before midwinter and got two of them near enough that they came back.
Then six more before the winter broke, and four of those were talked about.
A woman was told her brother was lying to her about a debt and he was.
A man was told not to take the road that week and took it and lost a mule.
“It is a bowl of ash,” Lysandros said.
“It is not.”
“Two out of six is what you told me about the lead.
Half of everything anybody predicts comes true because half of everything happens.”
“I know that,” said Marpessa.
“You taught me to think like that and it took a year and I am grateful.
And I am telling you that it is not that.”
She was sitting on her step with her hands round a cup and her hands were not steady and had not been for a fortnight.
“I can read now,” she said.
“That is all.
There has been a roll in my house for many years, and my grandmother had it before me, and her mother before her, and not one of the three of us could get a word out of it.
It was on the shelf the entire time.
“It is a man explaining his trade.
How a fire takes.
Which way the smoke goes and what that means with the wind off the sea and what it means with no wind at all.
What it means when a flame splits and does not come back together.
Forty one signs, and beside every one of them, what is coming to the person you built it for.
“And it is not the fire that knows.
The fire is only where you look.”
“Then what knows.”
“Apollo,” said Marpessa.
He did not say anything.
“There is no shrine to him in this basin and there has not been one in my lifetime.
Nobody up here has burned anything properly for him in thirty years, because there is nothing to spare and nobody with the time.” She put the cup down.
“I have been burning for him since October.
Every morning, before it is light.
And he is small and he is a long way off and he is thin, and he is closer than he was in the autumn, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to make you comfortable.”
He went down the hill that evening and worked out what was happening to her, and he got it wrong.
A woman of fifty five, on her own for twenty three years, who had had the floor taken out from under her two years ago by a boy with a piece of metal.
He had sat on that step and told her there was nothing behind any of it.
He had recited a dead man’s words at her about the gods being gone and the cold coming on, and she had said it was the worst thing anybody had ever told her.
And now she was up before dawn burning food she did not have.
He had a name for that as well and it was not a kind one.
Grief goes somewhere.
Take a person’s faith apart in front of them at fifty three and stand back and see what grows in the hole.
He wrote it down, in the ledger, under her name, in the same hand as everything else.
What he did not write down, because he did not think of it, was that he had spent two years proving that the dead answer when you knock properly, and that he had no grounds whatsoever for telling anybody what was not out there.