Chapter Twenty Five: Nobody Asked You
Klytie found the pot in late January and she found it because of a goat.
One of the last of the old eleven had gone lame and she had come up to the fold to look at it, since she was still better with them than he would ever be, and she had come back down to the hut to tell him and he was not there.
So she waited.
And the pot was in the corner with the lid off, because he had been at it the night before and had not put it back, and there were strips on the floor.
She could read a little.
He had taught her some of it over the years when she asked, and she had stopped because she did not need it.
But he drew.
He had been drawing on lead and on pottery for five years so that Pyrrhos could learn without words, and he was good at it, and there is no version of a drawing that a person cannot read.
He came in and she was sitting on the floor with four strips laid out in front of her.
She did not look up.
“What is this.”
“Klytie.”
“What is this.” She put a finger on the second one.
“That is a goat.
That is the brown one with the cut ear, you have drawn her ear.
And that is a mark and then a mark and then a mark, and then this, and I do not know what this is but it is on eight of them.”
“That one is a name.”
“Whose name.”
“Hers.”
Klytie looked at it.
“I gave you those names,” she said.
He did not lie to her.
He has thought about it since a great many times and he does not think he decided anything.
He came in and she was on the floor and she asked him a question, and the truth came out of him in order, and by the time he heard himself doing it he was four sentences in and there was no way back.
So he told her all of it.
The goats and why.
The names and what they were for and that he had come up to her with a story ready and not needed it.
Pyrrhos at the fold every morning for five months, saying which animals were up and which were eating, and not knowing which four had been worked on and never asking.
The wall above the spring and what was there and what it said.
He did not tell her about Alexon.
That is the one thing he held and he has never pretended to himself it was for her sake.
She did not say anything for a long time and she did not look frightened.
That was the part he had braced for and did not get.
Since she was eleven years old she had known there was something in him and had said so out loud on a hillside with the goats behind her, and had never once been frightened of it, and had told him that most of them only want something small.
It was the strips she could not look away from.
“You wrote it down,” she said.
“Yes.”
“All of it.
Every one.
You sat in here afterwards with the lamp going and you wrote down what you did and how long it took.”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
“Because a thing that is not written down never happened,” Lysandros said.
“And because if I only wrote the ones that worked I would be lying to myself inside a year, and everybody who has ever done anything like this has been lying to themselves for three hundred years, and that is the whole of why they never learn anything.”
Klytie put the strip down.
“That is not what frightens me about it,” she said.
“A man who loses his temper and does a wicked thing, I know what that is.
My uncle did a wicked thing to a dog when I was six and I have never forgotten it and I know what he is.
“You did not lose your temper.
You sat down afterwards and you made it neat.”
He had no answer to that and he did not try to build one.
She stayed on the floor of that hut for about an hour and they said perhaps nine things to each other in the whole of it, and then she got up and went to the door and stopped there.
“Do not do it to anybody I know,” she said.
“No.”
“Say it properly.”
“I will not do it to anybody in this village or anybody you know.”
“All right,” said Klytie, and went home, and came up the next evening with a stick as though nothing had happened, and put him on the ground twice, and he let her, and she knew he was letting her and said nothing about that either.
The other thing had been going on since the autumn and he had been ignoring it, and she told him about it herself about a fortnight later, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely.
“My mother has been talking to the family at the far end of the basin.”
“Which family.”
“The one with the mill.” She was looking down the slope.
“The second son.
He is twenty six and he is not unkind and he has all his teeth and I have spoken to him four times in my life, three of which were about a goat.”
“And what do you think of it.”
“Nobody has asked me what I think of it,” said Klytie.
He worked on it for nine days and he worked on it in exactly the way he worked on everything, which is the part that ruins him.
She was eighteen.
That is late here, two years late, and everybody in the basin knew it.
Her mother had held off longer than most and had held off for reasons that were about Klytie and not about money, and had run out of room.
In a year the offers get worse and in two there are none.
If she went to the mill family she went four hours away.
She would have a household and a man who was not unkind and a great deal of work, and she would be in it for the rest of her life, and the evenings on the flat ground above the spring would stop.
He wrote out the whole thing on a strip because that is what he did, and he was honest on it, which did not help him at all.
What she is to him.
The only person who has ever been able to hit him.
The only person in this basin who can put a stone into a moving thing at forty paces, four times in five, and who has been doing it since she was four, and who cannot be replaced or trained or bought.
And under that, in the same hand: If she goes to the mill there is nobody.
He read it back and did not like the shape of it and did not change one word.
He went to Antheia first and then to Praxias, because that is the order, and he did both of them in the same week in March.
Antheia heard him out standing up, in her own doorway, with her hands in front of her.
“You are fourteen.”
“Yes.”
“She is eighteen.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what they will say about that in the lower village.”
“Yes,” said Lysandros.
“They will say it for about a year and then they will stop, because I will be the only physician between here and Sikyon and there will be nobody in this basin who has not needed me twice by then.”
Antheia looked at him for a long time.
“Say the rest of it,” she said.
“You have not said the part I am waiting for.”
“I have nine goats in the upper fold and eleven more coming in the spring, and I am owed by four households in the lower village and by a man in Sikyon.
In three years I will have more than the mill family and I will have it here, in this basin, four hundred paces from your door.
“She does not leave.
That is the offer.
She does not go four hours away and she does not go into a house full of somebody else’s mother, and you do not lose her.”
Praxias took a day and a half and asked two questions, and the second one was the one that mattered.
“Do you want her?”
“I want her here.”
“That is not the question I asked,” said Praxias.
“I know it is not.”
The old man leaned back against his own doorpost and thought about that, and Lysandros stood in the yard and let him, and did not fill the gap, because he had learned at least that much in seven years.
“There will not be children for a while,” Praxias said eventually.
“Given the ages of it.”
“No.”
“And your name is your own and there is nobody behind you, which means there is nobody for me to go to if you turn out badly.”
“There is Damon.”
“There is Damon for about three years,” said Praxias, “and we both know it.”
He looked out at the basin.
“Antheia says yes,” he said.
“She said yes in about four minutes and she has been arguing with herself about it ever since and she is going to go on arguing about it for a year.
You are the strangest thing that has ever come up that path and the whole village knows it and I have stood in a yard and said so out loud.
“But I have got one son because of you and my brother’s boy has got a leg because of you, and there is not one household on this hill that does not owe you something.
So yes.
“Go and tell her.”
He went up to the high pasture on the Thursday and told her, and he had it prepared, and he got about four sentences in.
He explained the arrangement.
He explained that she would not have to go to the mill family.
He explained that nothing was expected of her that she did not want and that he was fourteen and that this was not what it looked like from the outside.
And then he said the part he had rehearsed most and was proudest of.
“I want to be clear about the other thing,” he said.
“There is nothing in this of the kind you are thinking of.
There cannot be.
I am not a boy of fourteen, whatever I look like.
I have been a grown man and I died at thirty seven and I have been here for fourteen years on top of that, and in whatever way you want to count it I am past fifty.
“So you should not think of me like that and I do not think of you like that, and I wanted that said out loud and settled at the start, so that it is never a thing sitting in the room with us.”
Klytie had been quiet for the whole of it.
“Who did you ask,” she said.
“What?”
“Who did you ask.
For the arrangement.
Whose door did you go to.”
“Your mother.
And then Praxias.”
“And when did you ask me?”
He opened his mouth and there was nothing in it.
“I am asking you now.”
“No, you are not,” said Klytie.
“You are telling me now.
There is a difference and you know there is a difference, because you spent four years explaining to me about the difference between a thing that is written down and a thing that somebody remembered.
“You went to my mother.
Then you went to Praxias.
Then you came up the hill on a Thursday to tell me what had been agreed, and you brought a speech.”
She got up.
“Do you know what I gave you the goat names for?”
He did not say anything.
“Because you asked me,” she said.
“Nobody had ever asked me about them in my whole life.
Not my mother, not my uncle, not one person in this village in eighteen years, and then you came up here and asked, and I would have given you anything that day.
“And you knew that.
You have written it down somewhere, I know you have, because you write everything down.
“And you still went to my mother first.”
She walked off down the slope and he stood on the high pasture with the goats and did not follow her.
He had got everything else right.
The arrangement was good.
It was better than the mill family by a distance and everybody involved knew it, and her mother had said yes in four minutes, and he had solved a real problem that was going to take her away.
He had also done the one thing she had never once had done for her, which was to be the man who did not ask.
He stood up there until it got dark and then went down, and he did not write any of it on a strip, and that was the second time.