Chapter Four: Preparation for War
The news came in the wrong order all year.
First there was a war and everyone was pleased about it.
Then there was a tax for it and everyone was less pleased.
Then in the spring a ship came into Lechaion with a story out of the west, and the story went round the city in a day, and after that nobody in Corinth was pleased about anything again.
Carthage was gone.
It wasn’t beaten and fined and told to behave.
Gone.
Six days of fighting in the streets, house to house and roof to roof, and then the rest of them sold, and then the walls pulled down, and the man off that ship said the Romans had gone over the ground afterwards with poles to be sure of what was underneath it.
Lysandros sat on the storeroom step and listened to two of his father’s men repeat it to each other four times, twice more than they needed to, because it would not fit inside their heads.
He could not have named one date from the ancient world.
He knew what an extinction event sounds like when it is described by somebody who does not have the term.
“They will not do that here,” one of the men said.
“That was Africa.”
He got up and went inside, because he had a rule about staying out of rooms where he might say something.
The rest of the year arrived in pieces.
Critolaus took the army north and met the Romans near the pass at Thermopylae, and there was no battle at all, or there was one that lasted the length of a bad afternoon.
Nobody could agree on what had happened.
Everyone agreed that Critolaus was not coming back and neither were most of the men, and that some of them had drowned in a marsh trying to get away from a road.
Diaeus took over.
Diaeus was a man Lysandros had heard his father praise all his life and heard him swear at by midsummer.
He asked the city for money and the city gave it.
He asked for more and the city gave that too, with less singing.
He called up men who had never held anything sharper than a net, and then he ran out of men, and then he did something that everybody in that house talked about in the same low voice for a month.
He freed twelve thousand slaves and put weapons in their hands, because there was nobody left to put weapons into.
Bion went at the end of that week.
He came to the gate to say goodbye to the household and he had a spear, and he was holding it wrong, and he looked over at Lysandros and grinned and lifted the arm with the scar on it.
“Luck in your hands, young master.”
Lysandros stood in the gateway and said nothing and let a boy of thirteen walk off to a war holding a spear like a broom.
Here is the thing he could not get anyone to understand, and he had a whole year to try.
He had spent his first life reading scans.
That was most of the job, whatever the hospital magazine had said about hands.
You stood in a dark room and looked at a picture, and the picture gave you a number, and the number was true whether or not anybody in the building wanted it to be.
Then you walked down a corridor into a room where a family was sitting, and every one of them was still living in a world where the number was not true yet, and you carried it in and put it on the table between you.
He always told them.
He never broke that rule once, and he had been proud of it in a way he now understood was cheap, because telling them cost him almost nothing.
Ninety seconds and a headache.
It cost them everything they had.
And they never believed him.
Not the first time.
Not once in fourteen years had anybody heard a number like that and taken it on the first pass.
They asked whether the machine could be wrong.
They asked him to look again.
They told him about a cousin who had been given six months and was still alive at ninety, and he had learned to let them do it, because a mind will not take a thing like that at speed.
Now he was standing on the other side of it.
Corinth was the family in the room, and there was no doctor.
Or there was, and he was seven years old, and there was no way to say the sentence out loud that did not end with a woman burning something in a dish beside his bed.
He tried anyway.
Twice.
Both times he built it out of things a child could plausibly have overheard, and both times his father listened with half his face and talked about the walls, and about Acrocorinth, and about how no army in three hundred years had gone up that rock.
The thing is nobody believes the number.
He had known that and had filed it as a small sad fact about people.
It turns out to be the mechanism by which a city dies.
They went out to the Isthmus in the autumn.
He watched them go.
The whole city watched them go.
There were men in that column wearing armour their grandfathers had worn and men wearing nothing at all, and there were slaves who had been free for eleven weeks, and there was singing.
The singing was the worst of it.
It was the same singing as the night they put the envoys out of the square.
Nikias did not go.
He was fifty one and heavy and he had put in money instead, a great deal of money, and he stood at the edge of the road with his hand flat on the back of his son’s neck.
“There,” he said.
“Now say it.”
“Roman wolves,” Lysandros said.
His father did not correct his pronunciation, which he always did.
It took one afternoon.
The first of them were coming back before dark, which was not possible, because the Isthmus is a morning’s walk.
They came in ones and twos with no shields, and then in larger groups with no shields, and the story came in with them in fragments that agreed about nothing except the shape of it, which was that the horse had gone first and then everything else had gone at once.
By the second morning the road was full and the gates were open and Corinth was emptying.
He had not known a city could do that.
He had assumed there would be a defence.
There were walls, there was the rock, there was a spring up in the citadel that had never once failed, and there were eleven thousand people down here, and any one of them could have picked up a stone.
Instead the whole thing came apart in about eleven hours.
Everybody who could walk went out through the gates towards the hills and the ports, and nobody organised any part of it, and the ones who could not walk stayed in their houses.
Theano was packing before Nikias had agreed to go anywhere.
She had the strongbox open and the good bronze in sacking and Kleio beside her holding a list, and she was doing it out in the courtyard where the whole household could see, and Nikias stood in the doorway telling her it was a rout and not a fall, that Diaeus would reform at Argos, that Mummius could not take Acrocorinth with three armies.
“Then we will come back,” Theano said, without looking up, “and it will all still be here.”
“You are frightening the children.”
“I am frightening you.
The children were frightened a week ago.
They have more sense than either of us.”
They lost a day to that argument.
One day.
Lysandros stood in the corner of the courtyard and watched them lose it and did the arithmetic on the road and the harbour and the number of people already on both, and he understood that his father was going to be right about nearly everything except the timing, and that the timing was the only part that counted.
By the time Nikias gave in, the harbour road at Lechaion was one solid body of people and there were no boats left that had not already gone.
A man his father had known for thirty years told him to his face that there was no room for four and a strongbox.
Nikias started to talk about paying, and the man laughed at him.
A man laughed at his father on the harbour road.
Standing there in the crowd, Lysandros understood that the city had already fallen and that the battle had very little to do with it.
They went back to the house because there was nowhere else to go, and they barred the door, and they waited for the Romans to come in.
The Romans did not come in.
Nobody believes this part afterwards.
It is true anyway.
The gates of Corinth stood open.
The walls were empty.
There was nobody in the towers and nobody at the gatehouse and half the streets were bare, and the Roman army sat out on the plain and did not move.
One day.
Then two.
Then three.
Mummius did not believe it.
Nobody opens a city like that.
Nobody walks away from walls like those and leaves the gate standing wide with the ropes still hanging on it, so the man made a camp and waited for the ambush he was certain was inside.
Three days.
There is a bit in Epicurus that Xavier Reid had liked since he was a student, and it had been the last thought he ever had.
Death is nothing to us.
When we exist, death is not present.
When death is present, we do not exist.
So it never touches us.
There is no moment where you and your own death are together in one room.
Corinth sat in a room with hers for three days.
They ate.
Three times a day, because there was food and no reason to stop.
Theano kept the household running because the alternative was to sit down.
Kleio played knucklebones on the storeroom floor with a girl from the next house whose family had also left it too late.
On the second evening somebody two streets over was playing a pipe, badly, and kept going for an hour, and nobody went out and told him to stop.
Lysandros sat with his back against the courtyard wall and thought about a woman he had told, in a side room on a Thursday in his first life, that she had eleven months.
She went home and cleaned her kitchen.
Her daughter told him about it afterwards, furious, as though he had done it to her personally.
She cleaned the whole kitchen, top to bottom, and then she sat down in it.
On the third night his father came and sat down beside him on the step, and put his hand flat on the back of his neck, and for a long while neither of them said anything.
“They may only want the money,” Nikias said.
“Yes,” Lysandros said.