Chapter Three: Roman Wolves
The house was rich.
It took him a while to work that out, because he had nothing to compare it to.
Then he was carried out into the city for the first time, and he saw what the rest of it looked like, and he understood that the cool rooms and the painted walls and the water that arrived without anybody fetching it were not normal.
His father was called Nikias.
He was a big man going heavy in the middle, with a beard cut in a style that Lysandros later learned was old fashioned and deliberate, and he had money in ships and in the crossing where the two seas nearly touched.
He was not cruel.
That would have been easier.
He was stern, and he had opinions, solid and permanent and arranged before you got there.
His mother was called Theano.
She was fifteen years younger than her husband and she ran the entire household and every coin in it, and she did it quietly enough that Nikias believed he did.
She had a habit of stopping in doorways to think, and Lysandros would watch her do it and see the arithmetic going on behind her face, and he liked her more than he had expected to like anybody here.
She was also the woman from the corridor.
He worked that out at about eighteen months and it sat oddly in him for years.
And there was Kleio.
His sister was four years older and she was the only person in the world who was not frightening, because she was the only one who did not want anything from him.
She hung over his cot and told him enormous lies about the household in a whisper.
She named the cats.
She dragged him around by one arm when he learned to walk and was told off for it every day but never once stopped.
When he did something strange, and he did strange things constantly, she did not go quiet and look at her mother.
She laughed and asked him to do it again.
He had not planned on loving anybody in this life.
He had come out of the last one with a wife who wanted somebody else and a girl he had killed, and he had decided, privately, in the dark, that he would keep his distance this time and do the work and get out clean.
Kleio put a beetle in his ear when he was two and a half and laughed until she was sick, and that was the end of that plan.
The thing that taught him to hide happened in his third winter.
One of the kitchen women had a baby, four months old, and it got sick, and the house did what the house did.
They tied things to it.
They took it up to a shrine on the hill and brought it back and it was worse.
Lysandros heard it breathing from two rooms away.
He knew that sound.
He had known that sound since he was a student.
It is a very specific noise, and if you have heard it once with a doctor standing next to you telling you what it means, you never stop hearing it.
He was in the doorway before he had decided to be.
The mother was holding the baby wrong, folded up against her chest, and the flaring at its nose was going and the little pull under the ribs was going, and Theano was standing over them both with her hands empty.
“Sit her up,” he said.
“Off her chest.
Off.
She cannot get it in like that.
And she needs water, she is dry, look at her mouth, and somebody hold her up over the steam from the pot.”
The room stopped.
He was two years and eight months old.
He had strung nine clauses together with the grammar in the right order and half a dozen words he had no business owning, in a house where his best effort that morning had been asking for bread.
Theano put herself between him and the woman on the floor.
She did not shout at him.
That was the part that stayed with him.
She crouched down and looked into his face for a long moment with an expression he had never seen on her and would see twice more in his life, and then she said a word he did not know, and said it again, and spat into the front of her own dress.
The baby lived.
They sat her up and gave her water and held her over the steam, because whatever else was going on, Theano was not a woman who ignored a thing that might work.
But that night he had a cord tied round his wrist with a lump of something on it, and there was a woman in the house he had never seen before who burned something in a dish in his room and talked over him for an hour, and for a month afterwards his mother watched him the way you watch a dog that has bitten once.
He was three before he pieced together what she had been frightened of.
Not illness.
There is a thing that gets into children.
It looks out of their eyes and it uses their mouths, and the family that keeps one is a family everyone stops visiting, and there are ways to be rid of it, and some of them do not involve a shrine.
They were rich and she loved him and none of that was worth anything.
He had watched his own mother work out whether her son was still in there.
So he made rules.
He was a man who had run a department on protocols, and he sat in the dark with a lump of stone tied to his wrist and wrote himself a protocol.
One.
Never know a thing before somebody has said it in front of you.
Two.
Ask questions instead of giving answers.
Ask stupid ones.
Three.
Be wrong on purpose, in public, about once a week.
Four.
Nothing goes in your mouth in front of your mother.
Five.
If you break one to four, you have to be a child about it for a fortnight afterwards, and you have to mean it.
He read it back to himself in the dark until he had it.
Then he started on rule three, because rule three was going to be the difficult one.
“Say it,” his father said.
He was three.
He was sitting on the step in the courtyard with his father’s hand flat on the back of his neck, and it was late and the light had gone off the top of the wall.
“Lykoi,” Lysandros said.
“Roman what.”
“Roman wolves.”
“Again.”
“Roman wolves.”
“And what do wolves do.”
He knew this one.
He had known it since before he could pronounce it.
His father had started on him the week he took his first step and had not let a month go by since.
“They take.”
“They take.
They make nothing.” Nikias’ hand did not move.
It sat there, warm and heavy, and it was the most affection his father had in him.
“There is no Roman thing in the world, boy.
Not one.
Every good thing in that city was carried there off a Greek ship or dragged out of a Greek house.
They have no philosophy.
They have no medicine.
They have no theatre worth the name.
They have farmers with swords, and they have an appetite, and they came here and took Macedon, and they took a thousand of our men away to Italy without a charge and without a trial and kept them seventeen years.”
“I know.”
“You do not know.
You are three.” Nikias took his hand off his neck.
“Three hundred came home.
Of the thousand.
Damon came home.
You will meet him.”
Lysandros looked at the wall.
Here was the trouble, and it had been the trouble since the first time his father started on this, and he had never once been able to say it.
He did not disagree about the facts.
The facts were the facts and he had no way to check them anyway.
Somebody had taken a thousand men and kept them seventeen years and handed seven hundred of them back as nothing at all, and that was a real thing that had happened to real people, and his father had every right to hate it.
It was the wolves he could not get past.
There had been a night in the other life, in the other world, when they brought in a man who had shot two people in a car park and been shot himself by the police, and Xavier Reid had opened him up and worked on him for five hours and given him back his liver and his life.
Nobody in that room had asked whether he deserved it.
It was not a question anyone thought to ask, because once you start asking it there is no floor, you go down and down and you never hit anything.
You do not get to pick.
You take the patient in front of you and you treat the injury in front of you and that is the whole of the job, and the moment you start treating the category instead of the person you are not a doctor any more.
You are something else holding a knife.
Rome was a category.
A quarter of a million people, and children, and old women, and men who had never held a spear, and his father wanted him to hate all of it, in one lump, for what a general did to a thousand men before either of them was born.
It was lazy.
That was what got him.
Lazy thinking from a man who was not lazy about anything else, who could hold four cargoes and nine debts in his head at once and never write a thing down.
“Father,” he said.
“What.”
He thought about the words he had.
He had a lot of words for three.
He did not have enough for this and he knew it.
“The men who took them.
Are they alive?”
Nikias looked down at him.
“Some.
What of it.”
“Then they should pay it.
Them.
Their children did nothing.”
There was a silence in the courtyard that went on slightly too long, and Lysandros felt his own heart go, and understood he had made a mistake, and did not yet know how big a one.
“Who told you that,” his father said.
“Nobody.”
“Nobody.” Nikias crouched down, which he never did, and put his face level.
Up close he smelled of wine and of the oil they used on the good chests.
“Listen to me.
There is a thing that happens to a house when the wolf comes to it.
The clever son says, this wolf has done nothing to us yet, this one may be a good wolf, let us wait and see.
And the house is opened, and everyone in it dies, and the clever son dies last, still being clever.”
“I only meant that they are people.”
“So are we,” Nikias said.
“That is the entire argument, and we are losing it.”
He stood up and went inside.
Lysandros sat on the step in the dark for a long time.
He had lost, and he knew he had lost, and the losing was not the part that bothered him.
It was that he was not certain his father was wrong.
He had been in the room with that man’s liver in his hands.
But he had never been in a house when the wolf came to it, and his father had, twice, and there is a kind of knowing that does not come out of books, and Xavier Reid had never had any of it.
Damon came the summer he turned five.
He was a thin old man with a bad shoulder and two fingers gone off his left hand, he was nineteen when the Romans took him to Italy as a hostage and thirty six when they let him come home.
He came back to a city where his mother was dead and his brothers were dead and a man he did not know was living in his father’s house, and he took work teaching rich men’s sons to hold a sword, and he did it without one word of enthusiasm and never once let a boy off a single repetition.
He did not care that Lysandros was clever.
Everyone else in that house had spent five years being unnerved and delighted by how clever the boy was.
Damon looked at him for about four seconds and said, “Stand up straight.
No.
Straight.”
“I am straight.”
“You are a bag of sticks.” Damon pushed the small of his back with one finger and Lysandros fell over.
“Again.”
It was the most humiliating year of either of his lives.
He knew where every muscle in his own body was.
He could have drawn the origin and insertion of all of them from memory.
He knew in exact detail what he was asking his shoulder and his forearm to do, and he could feel the moment they failed, and knowing all of it turned out to be worth precisely nothing.
He was five.
A five year old body does what a five year old body can do, and no amount of anatomy makes a child’s arm hold a wooden sword out straight for a count of fifty.
He got to thirty one on the count one afternoon and he was so pleased with himself that he broke his own protocol and said so out loud.
“A boy in Argos got to a hundred and four,” Damon said.
“He is dead now.
Again.”
But the old man talked on the walk back, and that was worth every count of fifty.
He had lived seventeen years among them.
His opinions about Romans were nothing like Nikias’.
He did not call them wolves.
He called them farmers, and he said it with something in his voice that Lysandros could not place for a long time and eventually worked out was respect, and eventually worked out was fear.
“Your father hates them for what they take,” Damon said.
“Your father has never watched them build a camp.”
“Is a camp frightening?”
Damon walked on for a while.
“Six thousand men come off a march at the end of a day,” he said.
“Tired, same as anyone.
And they do not sit down.
They dig a ditch and they throw up a bank and they set a palisade, and they do it in the same shape they did it the night before, and the night before that, and in Spain, and in Africa, and they will do it again tomorrow.
Every man knows where he sleeps before they stop walking.
Nobody gives an order about it that I ever heard.”
“That is only tidiness.”
“That is what I said.” Damon shifted the bundle on his shoulder.
“I was nineteen and I said, it is only ditches.
It took me eleven years to understand what I had been looking at.”
“So what were you looking at?”
“Get to a hundred on the count,” Damon said, “and I will tell you.”
He had started on the animals by then.
It began because he was bored and had a small knife and there was a dead bird.
He wanted to see whether the heart was where he expected.
It was.
It was exactly where he expected and shaped exactly as he expected, only small, and he sat in the dust behind the storeroom with it in his hand and felt something come back into him that had been gone for five years.
After the bird there were mice, and a dog that died of old age, and a goat his mother assumed the kitchen had taken.
Kleio found him at it.
She was nine, he was five, and she stood over him with her hands on her hips.
He had a whole lie ready.
He had been building it for weeks.
“Is that the heart?” she said.
He looked up at her.
“Yes.”
“Show me the bit that makes the noise.”
So he showed her, and she was not frightened at all, and after that she brought him things.
She brought him a hare that had been caught in the vineyard and she brought him a bat, and she crouched in the dirt with her chin on her knees and asked questions he could actually answer.
“Have we all got one of those.”
“Everybody.
Same place.
Yours is going now.”
“Where.”
He put two fingers under her collarbone and moved them and stopped.
She sat very still and her eyes went round.
“That is horrible,” she said, delighted.
“Do it again.”
For about a year, in the yard behind the storeroom with a dead animal between them, Lysandros was not lonely.
That was the animals.
The animals were fine.
The people were not fine, and he knew it at the time, which is the part he never got to put down.
There were eleven in the household who could not leave.
He had grown up alongside them for five years, he had learned all their names, he liked most of them, and he had noticed slowly that when he asked one of them for anything the answer was yes.
Not out of kindness.
There was no other answer available to them.
Bion was thirteen and he worked the yard, and Lysandros watched the arm for nineteen days before he did anything about it.
That is the number.
He counted it at the time and he never lost it.
Nineteen days of walking past a boy with a swelling on his forearm that was hot and tight and shining, going through it every night in the dark, doing the arithmetic.
If he opened that arm in front of witnesses, a five year old who has never been taught anything would be doing a thing that grown men in this city charged money for.
His mother had already crouched in front of him once and looked into his face to see who was in there.
He had a cord on his wrist.
Set against that, a yard boy nobody would write down.
He was honest with himself about the sum, which is worse.
He worked out on about day six that he was probably going to let the arm go, and he spent the next thirteen days looking for a reason that was not the real one, and he found several, and none of them were any good, and the swelling got bigger.
On the nineteenth day Bion was hot to the touch and slow to answer and there were red lines running up towards his elbow, and Lysandros stopped doing arithmetic.
He got the small knife and he heated it in the brazier, because he could not explain boiling and he could explain fire.
He got clean linen out of his mother’s press, which meant a beating later and he took the beating.
He took Bion into the corner behind the storeroom where he had cut up the goat.
“Sit down,” he said.
“Put the arm on the block.”
“Young master, it is nothing, it is only a knock.”
“Put the arm on the block.”
And Bion, who was thirteen and eight years older and a head and a half taller, sat down on the ground and put the arm on the block.
That was the moment.
Lysandros heard himself give the order and heard how it had come out, flat and quick, in the voice he used to use across a table with a bleeder somewhere and eleven people waiting, and he watched a boy who had every reason to refuse do exactly as he was told.
“Bite on this,” he said.
He opened it along the long axis and let it out and cleaned it and packed it.
It took a long time.
Bion screamed into the strap twice and then went quiet and sweated and held still, and held still, and kept holding still, because a master’s son had told him to.
It was correct.
That is the thing.
In any sense a court or a college would recognise it was the correct treatment, done at the correct site, at very nearly the right time, and the arm came good.
Bion was back in the yard in eleven days with a scar and a story.
And Lysandros had known, standing there with the blade going in, that some part of him had been waiting five years for exactly this.
For the smell of it.
For the give under the edge.
The boy had been incidental.
That was the truth of it and he did not manage to hide it from himself even for an hour.
There was a word for the thing he had just skipped.
Consent.
In the other world he could not have taken a photograph of a patient without it, and the reason was a list of doctors who had done precisely what he had just done, to people who were in no position to refuse, and written it up afterwards as a success.
Every form he had ever signed existed because of one of those men.
He had complained about the forms.
He had stood in a corridor with a coffee in his hand and called them a waste of his morning.
He was five years old and he had built himself a hospital where nobody could say no.
The worst of it came four days later, when Bion caught him by the well and thanked him.
Went on thanking him.
Told him the young master had luck in his hands and said it in front of two other people, and one of them repeated it, and inside a year there was a thing that people in that house believed about him.
He had not planned that.
He got a great deal of use out of it later.
Damon was standing at the corner of the yard.
Lysandros did not know how long he had been there.
The old man looked at the boy, and he did not say a word about it then or ever.
But he doubled the counts the next morning, and from that day he spoke to Lysandros differently from the way he spoke to the other boys, and he never once said why.
He was six years old when the Roman envoys came to Corinth.
He did not understand what it was about.
Nobody explained it to him and he was still assembling the politics out of overheard scraps.
There was a quarrel with Sparta.
There had been a quarrel with Sparta his entire life.
Rome had sent men to settle it, and the men stood up in front of the assembly and read out what Rome had decided, which was that the League was to be broken up and cities taken out of it, and Corinth was on the list.
What Lysandros knew, sitting on his father’s shoulders at the edge of an enormous crowd, was that the noise was the loudest he had heard in this life.
They screamed at the envoys.
They threw things.
Somebody near the front got hold of one of the Romans by the arm and there was a surge, and the envoys went out of the square in a knot of their own people with things still coming after them, and a man beside Lysandros was laughing so hard he had to hold on to his neighbour.
Then the city came apart into a party that ran two days.
His father lifted him down.
His father was crying and laughing at once, and Lysandros had never seen either from him.
“Do you see?” Nikias was shouting over the noise.
“Do you see what they are?
They came in here to read us our terms, in our own square, and we put them out into the street.
Say it.”
“Roman wolves,” Lysandros said.
“Louder.”
“Roman wolves!”
His father roared and picked him up again, and all around them Corinth was singing.
And Lysandros, six years old, up above the crowd where he could see the whole of it, looked out at a square full of happy people and felt the floor of his stomach go.
He did not know the year.
He did not know the general’s name.
He did not know one single fact about what was coming.
He knew what it looks like when somebody makes a mistake in a confident voice, and everyone in the room hears it, and nobody stops them.