Chapter Twenty Four: Twelve Days
He got the hair off a comb in Alexon’s own house, and he got in because Alexon sent for him.
That is the part he has never been able to arrange in his head in a way that sits properly.
The message came up in the first week of December.
The man’s hands were giving him trouble, had been for a year, and were worse in the cold, and there was a physician up the hill that his sister’s husband would not stop talking about.
Lysandros went down.
The room had a brazier in it and a table and more tablets than he had ever seen in one place, stacked in a rack against the wall in order, and a girl of about ten who was sent out and went as far as the doorway and stopped there.
“Chrysis.
Out.”
“I want to watch.”
“Out,” said Alexon, without any force in it, and she went as far as the other side of the door and sat down where they could both see her feet.
Lysandros took the hands and turned them over.
He knew what it was before he had finished looking.
Thirty years of holding a stylus, in the cold, for eight hours a day.
The joints at the base of the thumb on both sides gone thick and grating under the pad of his own thumb when he moved them.
The first two fingers of the right hand not straightening properly any more.
It was a clerk’s hands and it was the commonest complaint in the world, and there was almost nothing he could do about it, and he said so.
“Nothing at all?”
“Heat.
Not the brazier, hot water, as hot as you can stand, first thing, both hands, every morning.
It will buy you an hour.
Stop for a hundred count every hour and open and close them.
Do not grip harder to compensate, which you are doing, because it makes it worse and you will not notice you are doing it.”
“That is it?”
“That is it,” said Lysandros.
“I am not going to sell you something.
In twenty years you will not be able to write.
You have perhaps ten years of it left if you are careful and about four if you are not.”
Alexon sat with his hands palm up on his own table.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Two men have taken money off me for that and both of them promised to mend it.”
The comb was on the shelf by the window with a dish and a strap.
There was a moment while the man was getting up and his daughter was coming back in and the room had three people moving in it, and Lysandros took what he needed off the teeth of it with two fingers and had it in his fist before either of them turned round.
He did the arithmetic that night and it finished a sum he had left open on a path in March.
Wealth was barley and wool and nine more goats and a man in Sikyon who owed him.
Power over men was a hill full of people who used to call him unlucky.
Those two had answers.
Conquest had not attached to anything at all.
Now it did.
There was a Greek with a contract and a tablet, four days from anybody who might care, with no soldiers and no guard and no household beyond a housekeeper and a daughter, and he was a single point that the whole of Rome in this valley ran through.
He wrote that on a strip before he did anything else, because he wanted it recorded that he had thought of it in exactly those words, and because he already suspected he would want to lie to himself about it later.
He did it correctly, because he had written the rules himself and there was nobody alive who knew them better.
Name and father’s name, both, cut clean.
Hair off the comb, folded in.
The lead thin and the words plain and specific, because vague ones do nothing and he had two years of metal in a pot that said so.
The nail through the roll, which makes no difference and which he did anyway.
He asked for the hands.
Not death.
He wrote that down beforehand so that there would be no argument with himself afterwards, and the argument came anyway.
A man who cannot hold a stylus cannot keep a list.
A district without a list argues for a year.
A year is a harvest, and a harvest is the difference between a widow with four terraces finishing and not finishing.
He took it up to the wall above the spring and said it, and there was nothing in him that had to be manufactured, and there was no market to walk down to first.
He meant every word.
It was in the ground before midnight.
Day two.
The right hand stiff in the morning past anything it had been.
Alexon shook it out and made a joke about the cold and wrote for the rest of the day.
Day four.
Short of breath on the stairs of his own house.
He sat down halfway up and Chrysis fetched water and he was irritable with her about it.
Day six.
He could not hold the stylus.
Lysandros heard about it standing in the market at Stymphalos on a cold bright morning, from a woman who had come to ask him about her mother’s chest.
She was pleased about it.
Half the town was pleased about it and did not bother hiding it, because a man with a list is a man with a list no matter what he is like when you talk to him.
And for about four seconds it went through him clean and hot and it was the best thing he had felt in a year.
He was still carrying it when he got to the edge of the town.
He stopped on the road and put his hand flat on a wall and was sick into the grass.
Day eight.
They sent to Sikyon.
The physician came and stayed a night and went away the following afternoon, and what came back up the valley was this.
A wasting of the sinews.
An imbalance of the humours, long standing, brought on by the cold and by sedentary work.
Possibly a punishment for something, which the man had not said in the house but had said at the inn, where it was repeated.
Lysandros sat in the hut and went through the correct differential in his own head, in order, the way he had done four hundred times in another century, and he could have written it up properly and he could not write it at all, because he had done it.
Day nine.
They sent for Marpessa.
She had to go.
The whole town knew who she was and a refusal from a woman like that is an answer in itself.
She went down in the morning and was in the house four hours and came back up the mountain after dark.
She did not stop at his hut.
She did not speak to him for a week, and when she did speak to him it was about a goat, and she did not mention any part of it then or afterwards, ever, which he had not expected and found much harder than shouting.
Day eleven.
He could not lift his head from the pillow.
Day twelve.
The thing nobody can tell you about twelve days is that you have to spend them.
He had expected the horror to be in the watching.
It was not.
He watched about six minutes of it in total over a fortnight, in a market, at a distance.
The rest of it was breakfast.
He got up.
He ate.
On the Tuesday he went down the valley and set a wrist and took payment in cheese and walked home in the rain.
He argued with Praxias about a wall for most of an afternoon and won.
He wrote up four patients in the evening in the same hand he wrote everything in.
He slept.
He got up and did it again, eleven more times, while a man he had sat in a room with came apart on a schedule he had set himself.
On the ninth day Pyrrhos said something about a goat that was genuinely funny and Lysandros laughed at it.
He caught himself doing it and could not get it out of his head for a month.
A knife is a second.
You do a thing and it is done and then you are a man who has done it.
This is a fortnight of ordinary life with something going on underneath it that nobody else can see, and you carry it into every room you walk into, and it does not stop because you have got tired of carrying it.
It did not save Thaleia.
He had that inside a month.
The list did not go away because the man holding it did.
It went to a cousin in Sikyon who had none of Alexon’s patience and none of his shame, who put the figure up another tenth to cover his own trouble, and who never came up the valley at all and did the whole of it through men he sent.
Rome did not notice.
Rome did not know Alexon’s name.
Somewhere in a room in Sikyon a Greek clerk crossed out a line and wrote in another one.
He went up to the wall at the end of the month.
I will make them pay.
It came from further back than it had ever come from, and it was thin, and it got four words out and stopped.
Those animals.
He waited a count of two hundred and said it again, and nothing came at all.
He said it a third time and stood there until his feet went numb.
He came down and got the pot out and put every count he had into one column, which he should have done a year ago and had not, because he had not wanted to see it.
Twelve words, at the start.
All twelve, every time, for the first two years.
Eleven goats over five months, and it was still getting ten of them out.
One man in December.
Now it stops at four.
He sat on the floor of the hut with the lamp going and looked at the column, and the arithmetic did itself.
Two years of goats and small work had cost him two words.
Alexon had cost him six.
Twelve days of one Greek clerk with ink on his fingers had taken three times what the whole of the rest of it had taken put together, and it had taken it in a fortnight.
He wrote it up properly, because that is what he does.
Twelve days to a result.
Cannot be recalled once it is in the ground.
Cannot be used without cost.
Will not stop an army.
Will not stop one man being replaced by a worse man inside a month.
Then he did the other sum, which took about a minute and which he had been avoiding for two weeks.
Four men gave the order at Corinth and perhaps nine carried it out at a level that mattered.
Thirteen.
He had four words left on that hillside.
The whole of what was left of his father would buy him one.
He sat with that for a long time.
Curses are not the answer.
He had thought for two years that he was building a weapon and what he had built was a method for killing one careful man a season at a price he could not afford, and it did not stop anything, because there is always another man and the list survives.
Something else has to be the answer.
He did not know what.
Damon found out in January and not from him.
Lysandros never asked how.
It was a small valley, and a man had died of his hands in twelve days a fortnight after a boy who was known for hands had been in his house, and Damon had been alive for forty six years.
He said one thing about it, at the door of the hut, in the morning, with his cloak over the bad arm.
“I have not asked you a question,” he said.
“Do not answer one.”
Then he went out and got the wood in.