Chapter Five: The Sack of Corinth
They came in at first light on the fourth day.
The sound arrived before anything else, and it was not the sound he had expected.
He had expected shouting.
What came over the roofs was a low grinding of thousands of feet on stone, unhurried, and underneath it the sound of doors.
That was the sack.
Doors.
Hundreds of them going in one after another all over the city, a slow uneven knocking that spread from the north end and did not stop for two days.
His father moved faster than Lysandros had ever seen him move.
He put the household in the back rooms.
He put Theano and Kleio in the room off the loom room with a chest across the door, which was pointless, and which everybody standing there knew was pointless.
Then he came and got Lysandros by the wrist and took him through the storeroom to the corner where the grain jars stood.
There was a cupboard set into the wall for the dry goods.
He opened it and swept the shelf out with his forearm.
“In.”
“Father, the shelf.
If they see a shelf on the floor they will look at the wall.”
Nikias stopped.
He picked the shelf up and put it back and stood the jars on it and made a space underneath, low down, and Lysandros went in on his belly.
His father crouched.
Up close he smelled of wine, and his face was doing something Lysandros had never seen it do.
“You do not come out,” Nikias said.
“Whatever you hear.
Do you understand me.
Not for me.
Not for your mother.
If you hear your sister, you stay where you are.”
“Father.”
“Say it back to me.”
“I stay where I am.”
“Good.” He put his hand on the back of his son’s neck, in the dark, in a cupboard.
“Now listen, because there is one more thing and it is the only thing I have ever asked you for.
Do not forget this day.
Whatever else goes out of your head, you keep this one.
You keep it exactly as it is.
Do you hear me.”
“I hear you.”
“Say that back as well.”
“I will not forget this day.”
His father looked at him a second longer.
Then the door shut and the light went, and Lysandros heard him drag something across the storeroom floor and walk away towards the front of the house.
The dark in there was total and it smelled of barley.
He lay on his side with his knees up and his cheek on the boards and he listened, and this is what he had.
The front door opened, and then a great many feet on the tile, and voices in a language he had never heard spoken by more than one person at a time, casual, one of them laughing at something somebody else had said.
Then furniture.
The particular noise a chest makes when it is turned over.
More furniture.
The sound of a household being taken apart by men who are good at it, have done it before, and are in no hurry at all.
His father’s voice once, loud, at the front of the house.
Giving an order in the tone he used on the dock.
Then a sound, quite short.
Then his mother.
Then the two of them together, his mother and Kleio, and a door, and Kleio saying no over and over with her voice going up at the end of it, and men’s voices sounding bored, and then all of it moving out through the courtyard and away down the street until he could not hear any of it any more.
He stayed where he was.
He lay in a cupboard in the dark with his hands over his ears and he stayed where he was, because a man had told him to and because he was seven years old and because there was nothing else a seven year old could have done, and not one part of that made the smallest difference to it.
He had been in charge of a trauma department.
He had stood in a room with eleven people looking at him and said out loud which of two patients was going to be worked on and which was going to be moved aside, and he had done it in four seconds with his voice flat, and he had thought of himself for years as a man who could do the necessary thing.
He found out in that cupboard that he had never once done a necessary thing in his life.
He had done efficient things.
There is a difference between the two, and the difference is that nobody had ever asked him to lie still.
He did not cry.
He noted that he was not crying and could not make himself, and he filed it, and he hated himself with a completeness that was almost restful.
He did not know how long it was.
Long enough that the light under the door changed twice.
The house went quiet.
Much later there was noise again, different men, going back through the same rooms for whatever the first ones had left.
Then quiet again.
Then somebody knocked on the cupboard.
Three taps, low down, near the floor.
“Boy.”
He did not answer.
“Lysandros.
It is Damon.
Come out of there.”
He pushed and the door stuck and then gave, and he came out on his hands and knees into a light that was orange, and Damon was standing over him with a sword in his left hand, covered in blood from the hairline down.
None of it was his.
Lysandros checked that before he checked anything else and he did it without deciding to.
No arterial pattern anywhere on him, no soaking through at the belly or the groin, weight square on both feet.
Somebody else’s blood, a great deal of it, most of it dry.
“We are going,” Damon said.
“Now.
The city is lost.”
“Where is my family.”
Damon lowered his head.
“It is only you,” he said.
“We do not have much time.”
He got a hand round the boy’s upper arm and started for the yard door, and Lysandros locked his heels into the floor and did not move.
“No.
My father would never allow this.
He would never let you take me and leave them behind, never, you do not know him, go back and find them, he would never allow it.”
Damon turned round and threw him.
It was not a shove.
He took the boy off his feet with one arm and put him down on the storeroom floor hard enough to empty his chest, and stood over him with the sword still in his hand.
“Who do you think gave me this order,” he said.
“Who do you think did.
I promised him, while he was bleeding out into a gutter with his hand in my collar, that I would get his family out of this city.
His family.
I have been through this house twice.
I have been down four streets.
I could not find your mother.
I could not find your sister.
I found you.” He got his breath.
“So stop being difficult.”
The city was burning in three places and none of them were close, and the smoke came along the streets at ankle height before it lifted.
Damon took him out through the yard into the alleys and never once went anywhere in a straight line.
The blood was not the problem.
There was blood in the gutters and up the walls, and in one doorway a quantity of it that had come out of more than one person, and Lysandros looked at all of it and felt nothing at all, because he had spent most of his life up to his wrists in it and it is only a fluid.
It was the noise.
The screaming was two streets away in every direction at once and it never resolved into words.
It was the smoke, which got into him and stayed there, and which smelled of things he could identify and things he could not, and which turned the whole city into a room with a low ceiling.
And it was how ordinary the men were.
They were walking, not running.
They had sacks.
Two of them crossed the end of an alley carrying a table between them, and one was walking backwards and telling the other to mind the step.
Somewhere around the fifth street he got his voice back.
“Damon.”
“Quiet.”
“Where is my father.”
“Quiet.”
“Is he dead.”
Damon stopped at a corner and looked round it and did not answer.
“He is not dead,” Lysandros said.
“You said bleeding.
You said he had his hand in your collar.
A man who can hold a collar is alive.
Where is he.”
“Boy.”
“Take me to him.” He got hold of the old man’s belt with both hands.
“Listen to me.
Listen.
I can treat him.
I can.
You saw Bion’s arm, you saw it, that arm was coming off and he is walking about with it.
I did that.
I am lucky.
Everyone in the house says it, they say I have luck in my hands, you have heard them say it a hundred times.
Take me to him and let me try.”
He was crying by then.
He noticed that he was, and he noticed that he had broken every rule he had written for himself at three years old, and he did not care about any of it, because he had run the numbers in about two seconds and they were not complicated.
He was seven.
He was alone.
He would probably be dead by morning.
The protocol had been built to keep him alive inside a house that no longer existed.
And his father was rich.
That was the rest of it, and he was not proud of the order the thoughts came in.
His father was rich, and there were still ships out of Kenchreai on the far side of the Isthmus, and if he could get that man onto his feet then there was money, and somewhere on the other side of all this there was a place to go.
Damon looked down at him for a long moment.
“He will be dead,” he said.
“Then I will see that.”
“You will see it.
That is exactly what you will see.”
“Then take me.”
Damon shut his eyes for a second and muttered something into his beard.
Lysandros caught about half of it, and the half he caught was that there were no Greek gods, there were only Roman ones.
Then he turned round and went back the way they had come.
His father was propped against a wall in an alley off the street of the bronzeworkers, sitting up, legs straight out in front of him, hands in his lap.
It was almost tidy.
Somebody had put him there or he had put himself there, and his chiton was pulled down over his knees, and both his sandals were still on.
There was a wide smear on the wall behind him where he had come down it.
Lysandros took the whole picture in about four seconds and it was the fastest work he had ever done in either life.
Abdominal wound, low, left of the midline.
Entry only.
Pooling underneath him, dark and slow, so no great vessel, or the man would have been dead in the street four hours ago.
Belly hard.
The smell over the top of the blood, the specific one, which meant the bowel was open and its contents were somewhere they are not supposed to be.
Skin grey and wet.
Pulse in the neck fast and thin and going faster while he watched it.
He knew exactly what it was.
He could have written it up in six lines and been right about every one of them.
He knew exactly how to fix it, and it was not even difficult.
In his first life this man goes to theatre and gets his belly washed out and the perforation cut away and the ends joined, and four bags of blood and a course of antibiotics, and then he complains about the food for nine days and goes home and is a nuisance for another twenty years.
It is a Tuesday.
It is a case you hand to a registrar so they can practise.
He needed light.
He needed clean water and a lot of it.
He needed a needle and thread that had been boiled, and a blade, and somebody to hold, and six clear hours, and a room with a door that shut.
He needed hands.
He looked down at the two things on the ends of his own arms in the light coming off the fires.
They were a seven year old’s hands, small and soft, with the nails bitten down, and they could not have held a needle steady through six hours of anything.
There is a great deal of philosophy about the body and Xavier Reid had read most of it in a comfortable chair.
The body is a prison.
The body is a machine.
The body is a ship with every plank replaced.
He had been extremely clever about all of it in corridors for years, at eleven o’clock at night, with a coffee going cold in his hand.
The truth is simpler and it is this.
The body is a set of tools.
The tools are the only reason anybody ever calls you a genius.
Take them off a man and the genius is somebody kneeling in an alley knowing eleven things he cannot do.
He had said the planks never mattered.
Nikias saw him and smiled.
He looked up out of a grey face and saw his son standing in the alley, and he did not ask about Theano.
He did not ask about Kleio.
He did not ask whether they were alive, or where they had been taken, or whether anybody had gone after them.
He smiled, and lifted one hand out of his lap, and got it onto his son’s back, and left it there.
Something in Lysandros gave way and he could not get any air in.
“There,” his father said.
“There you are.”
“Father, I need you flat on your back with your knees up, and I need Damon to find water, any water at all, and clean cloth, and a lamp.”
“Listen to me.”
“There is a hole in your gut and it is emptying into your belly and that is the thing that will kill you, not the bleeding.
I can stop it.
I know how to stop it.
I have done it a hundred times.
I need water and light and I need you to be quiet and let me work.”
“Boy.” The hand pressed.
“Look up.
Look at that.”
Above the roofline the sky over the whole north end of the city had gone brown and then orange, and there was ash coming down through it, and the noise had not stopped anywhere for hours.
“You see that,” Nikias said.
“Roman wolves.
You will hate them, boy.
With every fibre in you, every day that you live.
They have taken everything from us.
Our family.
Our city.
Our pride.
There is nothing left of us anywhere except what you carry out of here tonight.” His hand was shaking on his son’s back.
“Swear it to me.
To all the gods.
Swear that you will make them pay for this.”
Lysandros knelt there.
He had an argument.
He had been carrying it since he was three years old and he had built it out of a man on a table in a country that did not exist yet, and it went like this.
You do not treat the category.
You treat the person in front of you.
The moment you start asking who deserves it there is no floor and you go down and down and never hit anything.
There were a quarter of a million people in Rome who had never heard of Corinth.
There was a boy somewhere in this army tonight who was seventeen and frightened.
The men who decided this were not in this alley and would never be in this alley as long as they lived.
It was a good argument.
It was the best thing he owned.
As far as he could tell it was the only part of Xavier Reid that had come across at all.
He stood up.
He took his father’s hand off his back, and held it a moment, and put it down in the man’s lap.
“I will make them pay,” he said.
“Those animals.
I will tear them apart limb from limb.
I will burn their pathetic city to the ground and salt what is underneath it, and there will be nothing left of them but the word, and one day there will be nobody alive who remembers what the word used to mean.”
It came out in perfect Greek.
Every case in its place, every ending clean, the verbs sitting where they were supposed to sit, the whole thing built and balanced and delivered in the voice of a grown man out of the mouth of a seven year old kneeling in an alley in the dark.
Behind him he heard Damon’s breath go.
His father did not notice, which is either the mercy in it or the joke.
Nikias was four minutes from the end of his life and long past hearing grammar.
What he heard was his son saying yes.
“Good,” he said.
“Good boy.
Good boy.”
So Lysandros knelt back down and took hold of him and said, quietly, come on now, lie back, let me look at you, and his father let him, and there was nothing to see that he had not already seen from six feet away, and there was nothing in that alley to do any of it with.
He held the wound closed with both hands, because that was the last thing left that his hands could do.
It took eleven minutes.
He knew because he counted, and he could not have stopped counting if he had wanted to.
The breathing went first, shallow and quick and then not regular.
The hands went cold from the fingers backwards.
There was a long gap, and then one more breath, and then a longer gap, and Lysandros knelt in the dark with his palms full and did the only thing still available to him, which was to be accurate about it.
Time of death, he thought.
There was no clock anywhere in the world to finish the sentence with.
The Roman came into the alley about a minute after that.
He was young.
Nineteen, twenty at the most, with a sack over one shoulder and a lamp in his left hand, and he was not looking for anybody.
He had already been down this alley once and he was walking it again without much interest, and he saw the old man and the boy and the body, and he stopped, and mostly what he was, was surprised.
He put the sack down carefully.
He kept hold of the lamp.
Damon said something to him.
It was Latin.
Lysandros did not have one word of it.
Three or four sentences, and the old man’s voice was flat and level and very nearly friendly, and he said all of it while he moved sideways to put himself between the boy and the mouth of the alley.
Whatever it was, the young man’s face changed while he was listening to it.
He answered.
Two words.
Damon nodded, and said one more thing, and then went for him.
There was no ringing of blades.
Damon came in low and fast and off the wrong foot, and the Roman got his shield up in time, and for about two seconds it was going to be over and Damon was going to be dead, because the man was twenty and armoured and Damon was forty with a bad shoulder and two fingers gone and looked sixty from the front.
Then the Roman stepped back to set himself and put his heel down in the gutter, which had things in it, and went onto one knee.
Damon did nothing clever at all.
He caught the top edge of the shield with his ruined left hand and hauled it down and across, and put the sword into the side of the man’s neck above the mail and below the helmet, and then he leaned his weight on it.
Lysandros watched from four feet away and could not look at anything else.
He knew that vessel.
He knew its name in two languages.
He knew which branch it came off and which muscle it ran under and how deep it sits in centimetres, and he had put his own gloved fingers on it more times than he could count, and he had spent an entire career keeping sharp things away from it.
Nine seconds, near enough.
The lamp went over on the stones and did not go out.
Damon stood up and stepped back and wiped his hand down his thigh, and looked at the boy.
The boy was looking at the young man on the ground with an interest that had nothing childish in it anywhere, and something went over the old man’s face.
Then he had Lysandros round the middle and up off the ground.
“No,” Lysandros said.
“No, wait, we cannot leave him there, we cannot leave him lying in the street, nobody will even know his name, put me down, put me down, put me down.”
“I know,” Damon said.
“Put me down.”
“I know, boy.”
He carried him out of the alley and did not put him down for a long time.
Over the old man’s shoulder, going away, Lysandros could see the wall and the smear on it, and his father’s sandals with both straps still done up, and the lamp burning by itself on the stones, and above all of it the whole north of the city going up into a sky with no stars in it anywhere.
One thing.
He had been asked for one thing, and it was the only one he had left to give.
So he kept his eyes open and he looked at all of it, the whole way out.
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