Chapter Twenty Three: Alexon
The number came back in September and it was a tenth higher than the year before.
Nobody in the basin could get an explanation for the tenth.
There was no bad news attached to it, no war anybody had heard of, no failure that anybody could be blamed for.
A number had been a number and now it was a different number, and the men who set it were four days away and had never seen the valley.
And it did not come with soldiers.
It came with Alexon, who was a Greek from the town below, out of a family that had held property there for six generations, and who had taken the contract to gather the district’s tribute because somebody was going to and he thought it had better be a man who knew the households.
Lysandros first saw him properly at a collection in the lower village in October.
A table in a yard.
A tablet.
A man with ink on his fingers, working down the list household by household, patiently, for four hours, without once raising his voice.
“You are eleven short.”
“I know what I am.”
“Then we will do it the way we did last year.
Six now, and five against the spring, and I will write the five down here in front of you so that there is no argument in April about what was agreed.” Alexon turned the tablet round.
“Look at it.
Put your mark on it if you want one.”
The man looked at it and did not put a mark on it and took the terms.
It went like that all afternoon.
He never once pretended the thing was fair.
When a woman told him it was not fair he agreed with her, out loud, in front of eleven people, and then wrote down what she owed.
Two households in the lower village went that autumn.
They did not die and nobody killed them.
They sold what they had and went down to the coast, and were not seen after that.
What finished them was the seed.
A household can be squeezed for most of what it has and come back the following year.
Take the eating grain and there is a hungry winter and a thin spring and everybody lives, badly.
Take the seed and there is nothing to put in the ground, so there is nothing in the summer, so there is nothing next winter either, and the house is finished eighteen months before anybody in it says so out loud.
Alexon took seed.
He took it because the number on his tablet said what it said and there was nothing else left in the house to make it with.
He told them what it meant while he was doing it.
That was the part that would not leave Lysandros alone.
He stood in a yard and explained to a woman precisely what would happen to her household in the spring after next, accurately, in order, and then had the sacks carried out.
In November, Thaleia’s name came off the bottom of the list and onto the middle of it.
Pyrrhos told him.
He told him the way he told him about the goats, plainly, in order, with nothing in his face at all, standing at the wall of the fold at first light with the count in his hand.
“Four terraces on the wrong side,” Lysandros said.
“Yes.”
“And she has never been on the middle of that list in her life.”
“No.”
Pyrrhos looked at the goats.
“She has not told me to do anything,” he said.
“She would not.
I am telling you because you asked me to tell you things.”
He went down to see the man in the week after that, and he went with the intention of hating him properly.
He had thought about it on the walk down.
There is a particular kind of work that a person’s face does when they are taking something from somebody who cannot stop them, and he had seen it in another century in men who ran companies and in one memorable administrator who had closed a ward, and he expected to see it and to be able to use it.
Alexon was in the same yard at the same table.
There was a cup at his elbow with nothing in it and he had been there since before light.
“You are the physician,” he said, when Lysandros had finished.
“From up the hill.
My sister’s husband went to you about his shoulder and could not stop talking about it.”
“I have come about a household on your list.”
“Yes, you have said.
Four terraces, a widow, one son who works, no other man.” Alexon did not look at the tablet, which meant he knew it without looking.
“You are asking me to take her off the middle of it and put her back at the bottom.”
“Yes.”
“Right,” said Alexon, and turned the tablet round, and pushed it across the table.
“Read it.”
“I can read.”
“I know you can read.
Everybody in this valley knows you can read, it is one of the four things they say about you.” He put his finger halfway down.
“That is the number for the district.
I did not make it.
I cannot move it by one measure in either direction and I have tried twice in two years and been told twice what happens to a man who sends back less than the figure.
“Now look at the column.
That is every household in this district in the order of what they can bear.
If I take her off the middle and put her at the bottom, the number does not change, so somebody on the row above her goes onto the middle instead.
“So I would like you to put your finger on the row and tell me which one.”
Lysandros looked at the tablet.
He looked at it for a long time, and he was reading it properly, and that was the mistake, because he was good at lists and he could see inside four lines that the man had built it honestly.
“There is nobody above her who can take it.”
“No,” said Alexon.
“There is not.
Now you have got as far as I got, and it took me about a year, and I have been sitting in that chair ever since.”
He put the cup down and rubbed his eyes with his finger and thumb.
“May I say a thing to you that I do not say to most people,” he said.
“Go on.”
“I did not want this.
I want that understood by somebody in this valley before I die, and it will not be understood by anybody in the lower village, so you can have it.
“The contract was going to a man from Sikyon.
I have met him.
He would have farmed it out to people he never speaks to, and he would have taken his tenth off the top and then another tenth, and he would not have come up here once.
He would have sent men.
“So I took it.
And I have kept the figure honest for two years and taken nothing beyond what is owed, and I know every household in this district by name and I know which of them are lying to me and I let most of them lie, because the ones who lie are the ones who need to.”
“And the seed.”
“And the seed,” Alexon agreed.
“Yes.
I take the seed because the alternative is that I send Sikyon a short number, and Sikyon does not write me a letter about it.
A short number in two years running and men come up from the coast and they are not interested in anybody’s terraces.
“I have done that sum as well.
I have done it more often than you would believe.
Four households ruined by me, slowly, over three years, against what happens to the whole basin if the figure goes short twice.”
He looked up.
“I would very much like somebody to tell me I have got that sum wrong.”
Lysandros walked back up the hill in the dark and could not get anywhere with it.
He had wanted a man who was enjoying himself.
He had wanted somebody who had taken the work because it paid, or because it put him above people who had once been above him, or because there is a certain sort of man who likes carrying a list.
What he had was a tired Greek of forty five with ink on his hands who had made the least bad choice available to him and was right about it, and who had told him so without once asking for sympathy.
That would have been survivable.
What he could not put down was the other thing, and it arrived somewhere around the spring, and it was this.
Every single person in the whole apparatus was reasonable.
The young Roman with the tablet who liked Cortona.
The clerk with the bad back.
The men who set the figure four days away and had never seen the valley.
Alexon at his table, being honest, keeping the number clean, taking the seed.
Not one of them was a monster and the machine worked perfectly, and a widow with four terraces was going to be finished in eighteen months.