Chapter Twenty Two: The Men Who Count
They came up the valley in June and there were nine of them, and the whole basin knew about it two days before they arrived.
Two Romans.
A Greek clerk with a satchel.
Six soldiers who were not there to fight anybody and who spent most of the first afternoon sitting in the shade against the wall of the threshing floor at Stymphalos, taking their boots off.
The older Roman was about fifty and had done this before in three provinces and made no attempt to hide that he would rather be anywhere else.
The younger one was perhaps twenty two.
He had a wax tablet and he was careful with it.
They asked for somebody who spoke Latin.
Damon had said nothing all morning.
He had known they were coming since the Tuesday and he had gone about his work and gone to bed at his usual hour, and when Praxias came to the hut at dawn on the Thursday with a face on him, Damon put his cloak over the bad arm and went down the hill without one word about any of it.
Lysandros went with him because he wanted to see it and because he was not going to let the old man do it on his own.
It took four days and it was the dullest thing he had ever watched.
That was what nobody could have told him and what he could not have believed in advance.
There was no shouting.
Nobody was struck.
Nobody was threatened, and nothing was demanded that had not been written down beforehand somewhere else.
They counted.
Heads first.
Every person in every household, by name, with an age as near as anybody could get it, and whether they were free.
Then the land.
Every terrace, walked, paced out, and the clerk on his knees in the dirt with a knotted cord.
Then the animals, which took a day and a half, because goats do not stand still and because half the basin had moved theirs up the mountain in the previous fortnight and everybody knew it and nobody said so.
Then the trees.
That was the part that made a woman cry, and she was not a woman who cried.
They counted olives.
Every tree, every household, and they wrote down which were bearing and which were young, and the young ones were written in a different column because a young olive is worth a number in fifteen years rather than now.
“He is writing my daughter’s trees,” she said to Damon.
“Those are hers.
Her grandmother put them in for her.”
Damon translated the question and the older Roman answered it without looking up.
“He says yes,” Damon said.
“He says they will be counted again.”
Lysandros stood at the edge of the threshing floor for four days and did not speak, and somewhere in the middle of the second afternoon he understood the whole of it at once.
Nobody in that yard was doing anything to anybody.
The clerk was a Greek from Sikyon who was paid by the day and who was polite to everybody and who had a bad back and kept standing up to stretch it.
The soldiers had not moved from the wall except to eat.
The older Roman was bored in the specific way of a man who has done a task so many times that he has stopped seeing the people in it, and the younger one was doing his best and checking his own figures twice.
Not one of them wanted anything.
Not one of them had a grievance against a single soul in that basin.
If you had asked any of the nine whether they wished harm on the woman with the olive trees, every one of them would have said no, and every one of them would have been telling the truth.
And at the end of the four days there would be a number.
The number would go to Sikyon, and from Sikyon north to the governor in Macedonia, and next year another nine men would come up this valley and do the identical thing in the identical order, and the year after that another nine, and none of them would need to care either.
Damon had told him about the camp on a track above Nemea when he was seven years old.
Six thousand men who had marched all day and who dug a ditch anyway, in a country with no enemy in it, because a thing done only when it is needed will not be done properly on the night it is needed.
He had understood that as a fact about soldiers.
It was not about soldiers.
He was watching the same animal with a stylus in its hand, and the thing that made it work was exactly the thing that made it unbearable, which is that it did not require anybody in it to mean it.
He had spent two years of another life building a small one.
Six questions asked out loud in the same order every time, by everybody, at four in the morning, whether or not it seemed necessary.
He had been proud of it.
It had saved people, and it had saved them precisely because it did not depend on anybody caring at four in the morning.
He stood on a threshing floor in Arcadia and watched what the same idea looks like when it is pointed at a valley.
On the third day they were waiting for a household to bring their beasts down and there was nothing to do, and the young one, Publius, had run out of things to check.
He was leaning on the wall next to Damon, and he made conversation, because he was twenty two and it was hot and the man beside him spoke his language.
“Your Latin is very good.”
“Thank you.”
“No, I mean it.
Better than the clerk’s and he is paid for it.
Where did you get it?”
Damon looked out at the reeds.
“I lived in Italy,” he said.
“Did you?
Where?”
“Cortona.”
The young man’s whole face opened up.
“I know Cortona.
My mother’s people are from Perusia, it is no distance at all, I have been through it twice.” He was delighted.
He was genuinely, uncomplicatedly delighted, and there was not one thing in his voice that was anything else.
“It is up a hill, is it not?
There is a lake down below.
Did you ever go down to the lake?”
“Yes.”
“How long were you there?”
“Seventeen years,” said Damon.
“Seventeen.” Publius whistled.
“Then you know it better than I do.
Did you like it?”
Damon did not answer for a while.
Lysandros stood four feet away and watched him not answer, and did the only sum available to him.
Seventeen years in that town.
A woman whose name Damon had never once said out loud.
And a son born there, who would be twenty two now, and who had never seen this country, and who would be standing about in a yard somewhere in Etruria this afternoon with a tablet in his hand and his boots off.
“Yes,” Damon said.
“I liked it.”
“There, you see.
Everybody does.” The young man pushed himself off the wall, because the goats were coming down.
“You should go back sometime.”
That evening Damon ate nothing and went outside and sat on the wall above the spring by himself for three hours.
Lysandros left him there for two and then went and sat down next to him, on the good side, and did not say anything.
The light went off the top of the reeds.
Somewhere down the slope a dog started and gave it up.
“He is the same age,” Damon said.
Lysandros did not answer him.
There was nothing to say that the old man had not already got to on his own, hours before, standing in a yard being asked about a lake.
The two of them sat on the wall until it was too dark to see the water.