Chapter Twenty One: The Gods Favour You
By March she had stopped eating and he could see it from the path.
He went up with bread and made her take it in front of him.
Her hands were bad.
The shaking had come and gone since the autumn and now it did not go, and she put the cup down with both hands and pretended she had meant to.
“Let me look at them.”
“No.”
“Marpessa.”
“Go home.”
He sat on the step instead and looked at the fire pit.
It was a proper pit now.
Dug out, stone lined, the ash cleared and banked, the kindling stacked under the eave where the rain could not reach it.
A woman who could not hold a cup had built that over the winter.
“How many have you read.”
“Fourteen.”
“And you burn every morning.”
“Every morning.”
He thought about it for a fortnight and then gave in, and it was not about himself.
She was fifty five and she was giving away food she needed.
She was doing it because he had sat on that step and taken her floor out from under her, and every time he told her it was ash she went further in.
So he would let her do it.
He would sit through the whole thing and take it seriously in front of her.
She would say something.
He would nod and thank her and go home, and the fight would be over, and perhaps then she would eat.
He went up before light at the end of March feeling like a man doing somebody a kindness.
“You have to give me something.”
“Such as?”
“Something you have carried.
Not something you own.” She had her back to him, laying the sticks.
“It has to have been in your hand a great deal.
Otherwise I am building a fire for nobody and I will get nothing and you will say I told you so.”
He went through what was on him and it took about four seconds, because there was only one thing on him that he had carried every day for five years.
He put the nail in her hand.
Marpessa looked at it.
It was four inches of iron off a broken door strap and it had gone blunt at the point twice and been ground back twice, and she had watched him cut every strip of lead he had ever cut with it.
She put it in the fire.
The fire took cleanly and went up.
Then the smoke leaned over to the west and came back.
Marpessa knelt at the pit with her forearms on her knees and watched it, and every so often she said a number under her breath.
He understood after a while that the numbers were the signs.
Forty one of them in a roll on a shelf, and she had them all by heart.
A stick cracked.
Something in the middle of the pit split into two flames and burned like that for a while.
She said a number.
Then the two came back together and she stopped saying anything at all.
The silence went on much too long.
He gave it a count of two hundred and then stopped counting, and after that he watched her instead of the fire, because more was happening in her face.
She was sweating.
It was the end of March before dawn on an Arcadian hillside and the ground had frost on it, and there was sweat on her forehead and in the hair at her temples and running down in front of her ear.
Her hands had gone still.
Both of them.
Completely still, for the first time in five months.
She put her palms flat against her own cheeks and held her face and did not blink.
“Marpessa.”
Nothing.
“Marpessa.
Look at me.”
She turned her head and he got a clear look at her eyes in the firelight.
The pupils were enormous.
Wide open, both of them, holding, with almost no colour left round the edge.
He had seen that.
He had seen it in another century on people who had taken drugs, and he sat on that step and went through what it could be and came up with nothing, because there was nothing in this valley that did that and she had eaten a piece of bread in front of him three days ago and nothing since.
“What does it say,” he said.
She got her hands off her face.
“The gods favour you.”
“What?”
“The gods favour you.” She said it again straight away, faster.
“I looked for one and I could not find which and it does not matter, it is all of them, they all favour you.”
“You have been burning for Apollo since October.”
Her voice went up.
“That was not him.”
“Marpessa, sit down.”
“Wealth.” She was not sitting down.
She was up on her knees with one hand out at the fire.
“More than you can count.
More than a man can spend in a life.
Power over men, and you will not have to go and get it, it comes to you, they come to you and they hand it over.
“Conquest.
Everything you want.
Every single thing.
For as long as you want it.”
She got hold of his arm.
“The world is yours,” said Marpessa.
“You have only to take it.”
Here is the part he did not expect and could not have prepared for.
He wanted it.
It went through him before he had any say in the matter.
A hot clean thing, up through the middle of his chest and out along both arms, and for about two seconds he was not a physician sitting on a step managing a sick woman.
He was a boy of thirteen who had just been told by a god.
He felt it arrive and he felt how much he liked it.
And that was what frightened him.
Not her eyes and not the sweat.
His own body, doing that, on the word conquest.
So he started talking, because talking was the only thing he could do to keep himself grounded.
“Listen to me,” he said.
“I am going to say something and I need you to hear it, and I am saying it to myself as much as to you.
“There is no fate handed down to anybody.
There is no list with my name on it.
A man is not given a life, he makes one, out of what he does.
“There is a Greek who said it and he said it better than I can.
He said a man’s character is his daimon.
Not a thing sitting outside you handing you your portion.
What you are.
That is all a fate has ever been.
It is the sum of what a man does, told backwards, after he has done it.”
“Boy.”
“Let me finish.” He was holding his own knees.
“What you saw is a possibility.
That is all it can be.
Every person alive has a hundred of them and most of them never come to anything, and the reason they never come to anything is not that a god decided, it is that people get tired and get ill and change their minds.
“The world does not belong to me.
The world does not belong to anybody.
It is standing there and it is the same distance from every single person in it, and the only thing that ever decides anything is what somebody actually gets up and does.”
Marpessa was shaking her head the whole time he was speaking.
“You are saying words,” she said.
“I am saying true things.”
“You are saying words at me because you are frightened and it is what you do.” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist and there was more sweat under it.
“I have watched you do it for seven years.
Somebody dies and you say a true thing about it.
The child in the yard.
The old man on the door.
You stand there and you explain and you think that is the same as it not having happened.”
“That is not fair.”
“No.
It is not.” She was still on her knees.
“I am not being fair.
I have not slept and I am telling you what I saw and you are giving me a schoolroom.”
He should have stopped there.
He did not stop.
“There was a man,” he said.
“He is not born yet.
He will be born a very long time after you and me and everybody in this valley, in a country you have never heard of, and he wrote one sentence that answers the whole of this.
“He said a man is nothing except what he makes of himself.
Nothing.
There is no shape waiting for you that you have to grow into.
There is no plan and nothing is written anywhere.
You come into it with nothing decided and you are what you do and there is no other thing you can be, and every person who has ever told you otherwise was selling you something or comforting themselves.”
Marpessa screamed at him.
There was no warning and he had never heard the noise out of her before.
She came up off her knees and got hold of the bowl by the pit and threw it, not at him, past him and into the wall, and it went into pieces.
“No.”
“Marpessa.”
“No.
No.” She had both hands in her hair.
“You do not understand.
You did not see it.
You were sitting three feet away and you did not see it.
“I have read fourteen people.
Fourteen.
Every one of them got a mixture, every single one, because that is what the thing is, it is this and also that, you get the good year and here is the thing that pays for it.
Every fire I have built since October has had a price in it somewhere.
“There are eleven signs in that roll that mean paying.
Eleven.
I know all of them.
I sat there and I went through all forty one twice and I waited for one of the eleven and it never came.
“Nothing held back.
Nothing at the end.
Nothing.
“Just yes.”
She was crying and did not seem to know it.
“And you can sit on my step and tell me about a man who is not born yet, and I will still have been the one kneeling in front of it, and I saw it, and it was pleased.
Do you understand me?
Something looked at you for a long time this morning and it was pleased with you.
“Get off my step.
Get off my step and go home and say your true things to somebody else.”
He went.
He was two hundred paces down the path before he realised he had left the nail in the ash, and he did not go back for it.
Everything he had said to her was correct.
He went over it walking down and every piece of it held.
There is no portion written out for anybody.
A fate is a story people tell about a life after it has been lived.
What she had seen was one possible shape out of a hundred, in a fire, before dawn, by a woman who had not slept or eaten properly in a month and whose eyes had told him she was not in a state to read anything.
All true.
He could have stood up in front of three hundred people and defended the whole of it.
It made no difference whatsoever.
Because somebody had sat in front of a fire and looked into it and then told him, in a voice with nothing in it, that the world was his and he had only to take it.
You can know that a thing is nonsense.
You cannot make yourself not have heard it.
He was at the bottom of the path when he noticed what he was doing.
He was not arguing any more.
He had stopped somewhere near the spring and had gone on to something else, and the something else was arithmetic.
Wealth is barley and wool and a man in Sikyon who owes him.
Power over men is forty three people on a hill who used to call him unlucky and now bring him cheese, and about a hundred more in the lower village who ask for him by name.
Conquest does not attach to anything up here at all.
He stopped walking.
He knew now he should not have sat in front of that fire, because he would test it against everything that happened to him for the rest of his life, and what she said would be in the room with him every single time he had to decide anything.