Chapter Six: The Second Sword
Damon put him down two streets from the alley and told him to run.
The next hour came in pieces and never joined up properly.
They went north first, which was wrong, and Lysandros knew it was wrong and did not have the breath to say so.
Then they went west.
Then they stopped in a doorway while something with torches went past, and Damon’s hand was over his mouth and Damon’s other hand had the sword in it and did not move.
“Listen,” Damon said, when the torches had gone.
“You do exactly what I say and you do it the first time.
If I put my hand down, you sit.
If I go, you go.
If I go down, you do not stop for me.
Say it.”
“If you go down I do not stop.”
“Good.”
“Damon.”
“What.”
“Go back for the sword.”
Damon turned his head.
They were crouched in a doorway with a burning city on three sides of them, and a boy of seven had just asked him to walk four hundred paces back towards the men who were killing everybody, for a piece of iron.
“The Roman’s,” Lysandros said.
“It is lying in the alley beside him.
Nobody has been down there since.
It is a good blade and it has not been used enough to notch.
I looked at it while he was dying.”
“You cannot lift that.”
“Not today.”
The silence in the doorway went on longer than the one with the torches.
Then Damon said something under his breath and got up and went.
He was gone eleven minutes.
Lysandros counted them, because he could not stop counting things, and because if he stopped he would have to think about the fact that the man who had told him not to stop for anybody was doing exactly that for a sword.
He came back with it wrapped in somebody’s cloak and he did not look at the boy.
They got out through the burning quarter.
Damon chose it on purpose and Lysandros did not understand why until they were in the middle of it.
Everybody else in the city was running away from the fire.
So the fire was where the Romans were not.
The smoke sat thick at head height, thick enough that a man carrying a child could go up the centre of a street and be a shape, and there were no soldiers in that quarter because there was nothing left in it to take.
It was the worst twenty minutes of either of his lives.
He could not breathe.
He had his face in Damon’s shoulder and his eyes shut and it made no difference, the heat came through his eyelids in waves.
There were things down at street level that he made himself not look at and looked at anyway.
There was a doorway with a woman sitting in it who had not run.
Damon went past her without slowing.
The wall on the west side had a place where the old work met the new work.
The joint had gone at some point in the last two hundred years and been patched with rubble and never touched since, because nobody maintains a wall on the side of a city that faces its own vineyards.
Damon knew where it was.
He had known where it was for twenty years, because he was the kind of man who finds the exits on his first day somewhere and never stops knowing them.
He put Lysandros up first.
Eleven feet of loose stone, then a drop on the far side that Damon took at a crouch and made a noise about.
Then they were out, and there was cold air, and it was the sweetest thing Lysandros had ever put into his lungs in either body.
They ran until the boy could not run, which was not far, and then they went into a vineyard and lay down between the rows.
He turned onto his back and looked at the sky and it was orange from one end to the other.
Then he sat up and looked north, and there it was, the whole of it, from the outside.
Corinth was burning from the Lechaion road to the foot of the rock.
The temple of Apollo stood up black in the middle with the columns showing.
Above all of it Acrocorinth had the light on its western face and the top in cloud, and there was no fire up there, which meant nobody had gone up, which meant that if they had gone up they might have lived.
He looked at it for a long time.
He had spent his first life being told that he did not have normal reactions to things.
His registrars had said it admiringly and his wife had said it in a different tone.
Now he sat in a vineyard outside a burning city and waited for a normal reaction to arrive, and it did not come.
Instead he found himself counting the fires and estimating the wind and working out, with a part of him that would not switch off, how many hours it would burn and which quarters would go and whether the grain in the storerooms would take.
Then he thought about Kleio’s voice going up at the end of the word no, and the whole thing came down on him at once, and he was sick into the vine roots until there was nothing left.
Damon watched from four feet away and let him do it, and then gave him water, and said nothing about it then or later.
They walked for six days.
Damon had a plan and the plan was Arcadia.
He explained it once, on the first morning, sitting under a wall before the sun came up.
“South and west.
Kleonai, then Nemea, then we get off the road and we go up.
Six days if you can walk.
Nine if I have to carry you.
There is nothing in Arcadia, and that is the point of Arcadia.
No harbour, no crossing, no grain, nothing on the roads worth the ink to write it down.
A man does not march an army into those mountains, because at the other end of it there are stones and goats and more stones.”
“Why not the coast?”
“Because the coast is where the ships are, and where the ships are, the buyers are.” He looked at the boy.
“You are seven.
You are well fed and you have all your teeth.
Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“Say it back.”
“I am worth money.”
“You are worth a great deal of money,” Damon said.
“So is any woman under forty and any man under fifty.
There will be men on those roads inside two days who are not soldiers and are not looting.
They are shopping.”
They kept off the road except at night.
They went round Kleonai instead of through it.
Twice on the second day they lay in a ditch and let people go past.
The second time it was three men on mules with about twenty on foot roped together behind them, and Lysandros lay on his face in a dry ditch four feet from the road and heard the whole of it go by, and did not look, and could not have said afterwards whether any of them were women.
On the third day they passed a woman sitting at the side of the track with a child in her lap.
She was not old.
She had come from Corinth and the child was about two, and it was breathing in a manner Lysandros could hear from fifteen feet away, and it had been going on long enough that the mother had stopped rocking it and was just sitting.
He stopped walking.
He got about four steps off the track and Damon had him by the collar.
“No.”
“She is thirty feet from a stream.
All she has to do is get water into it.
If it is what I think it is I can tell her in four sentences and she walks out of here with it alive.”
“No.”
“Four sentences.”
“And then she looks at you,” Damon said.
“And then she talks to whoever she meets tomorrow about the child on the road who knows things.
And then somebody comes looking for the child on the road who knows things, because a boy who can cure is worth a good deal more than a boy who can dig.
Do you understand what I am telling you?”
Lysandros stood there with the old man’s fist in his collar.
He had an argument.
He had been carrying it for years and he had said it out loud to his father at three and lost, and it was that you treat the person in front of you, and that the moment you start doing sums about who gets treated you are something else holding a knife.
He looked at the woman.
She had not even looked up at them.
She had stopped expecting anybody to stop.
“All right,” he said.
He said all right, and he turned round, and he walked.
The argument he had about treating the person in front of you did not die in the alley with his father.
It died on a track outside Nemea on a bright morning, quietly, with nobody watching, because a man he trusted gave him a good reason and he took it.
They walked two hours before he spoke again.
“How many is it.
Just so I know the number.
How many of those do I walk past before we get there.”
“All of them,” Damon said.
The training started on the fourth morning, and it started because Lysandros asked for it.
“No,” Damon said.
“Why not.”
“Because you have walked nineteen miles in three days and eaten twice and you will fall over.”
“Then I will fall over.”
So Damon gave him the stick he had been testing the ground with, and stood him on a slope, and told him to hold it out and count.
He got to forty four.
A fortnight ago, in his father’s yard, on a full belly and a night’s sleep, he had been getting to seventy.
Now he stood on a hillside outside Nemea, seven years old, four days after watching his father die, and his arm came down at forty four.
Damon looked at him.
“Again,” he said.
They did it every morning and every evening after that.
Stance and grip and how to fall over properly.
How to carry a blade so it does not announce you.
How to walk on scree without putting a foot through it.
He did not let the boy hold the Roman sword, and he did not let him hold his own, and all of it was done with a stick.
“When do I get a blade.”
“When you can hold a stick for a hundred.”
“That is illogical.”
“Yes,” Damon said.
Damon did not know what the boy was doing once he had gone to sleep.
Lysandros waited.
He lay with his eyes shut until the old man’s breathing changed, and then got up and went twenty paces off and stood in the dark and did the forms again.
Getting better had nothing to do with it.
He was seven and he had no illusions about how long the getting better would take.
He did it because when his arm was out and his whole shoulder was on fire, there was no room left in him for anything else.
He knew exactly what he was doing, because he had done it before.
He had done it for six weeks in a hospital in his first life.
He had told the board it was for the department and told himself it was for the patients, and it was for neither.
A room with nothing happening in it was a room where he had to see Claire’s face.
So he had filled every room.
He had filled every hour with something that had to be done immediately, and it had worked, and the only cost had been a sixteen year old girl on a table with a clamp coming off too early.
Now he stood in the dark on a hill in Arcadia and did the same thing with a stick.
Because there was a sound.
It was not his father.
He had watched his father die with his hands inside him and it was heavy and it was cold and it stayed in one place, and he could pick it up and put it down again.
It was Kleio.
He had not seen it.
That was the problem.
He had been in a cupboard with his hands over his ears and he had heard four minutes and no more, and his mind, which was a good mind, which had been trained for twenty years to complete a picture out of partial information, had spent every hour since finishing the job.
She was eleven.
Just eleven.
So he counted to sixty with his arm out until his eyes watered, and then he counted to seventy, and after a while it was too late in the night for anything to be in his head.
He asked about the camp on the fourth day, going up.
They were off the low ground by then and the track was climbing into the shoulder of the hills.
There were pines.
It was colder than it had any business being, and Damon was slower on the climbs than he wanted the boy to notice.
“You said you would tell me when I got to a hundred.”
“You are at forty four.”
“You may not be here to see me get a hundred.”
Damon laughed.
It was a horrible noise, and it was the first one Lysandros had heard out of him since the city.
“All right,” he said, and walked a while before he started.
“I was nineteen.
We had been three days on a road with them, going down towards the coast, and they were not treating us badly.
That was the first thing that was wrong.
I had been told my whole life what Romans were, and these ones were bored.
There was one who kept trying to sell me a knife.
“On the third evening they stopped at about the ninth hour, in the middle of nowhere, on a slope with nothing on it.
And they did not sit down.
“They put a man in a field with a stick, and he stood there, and men came past him and dug.
A ditch and a bank, and the bank got a palisade on it, and the whole of it was square, and inside the square the tents went up in streets, and the streets had the same names as the streets in the camp the night before, and the night before that.
“Two hours.
Maybe less.
Six thousand men who had marched all day.
Nobody shouted at them.
There was no man standing over them with a whip, boy, there was no music, nobody was made to do it.
Every one of them knew where he slept before he stopped walking.”
“And that frightened you.”
“No.
That is what I am telling you.
It did not frighten me at all.
I was nineteen and I stood there and I thought, this is tidiness.
This is what people do when they have no poets.
I said it out loud.
I said it to a man from Dyme who is dead now.”
They went up a switchback and he stopped to breathe, and did not pretend he was stopping for any other reason, which he had done for the first three days.
“It took me eleven years.
One night in Etruria I woke up and I understood it, and I was sick, and I could not have explained why to anybody who had not been there.
“They build it when there is no enemy.
There was nobody within four hundred miles of that hill who could have hurt them.
Nobody.
They dug the ditch anyway.
They dug it going out and they dug it coming home and they dug it in a country they had owned for a hundred years, because a thing that is only done when it is needed will not be done properly on the night it is needed.
You cannot frighten that.
You cannot outlast it.
It does not get tired of you and it does not get bored and it does not go home for the harvest, because the harvest is somebody else’s job now.
A Greek army is a lot of men who have agreed to be there.
It is a different sort of thing altogether, and I have been in both, and I know which one I would put money on.”
Lysandros walked beside him and said nothing, because a shape was forming in his head and he did not want to lose it.
He had run a department once.
He had inherited it from a man cleverer than he was and much loved, and the department had been a disaster, because the man had run it on his own excellence.
Every good outcome in that place had gone through his hands.
When he retired the whole thing fell over inside a month.
Xavier Reid had spent two years rebuilding it, and what he built was not brilliant.
It was checklists.
It was the same six questions asked out loud in the same order every single time, by everybody, including him, including at four in the morning, including when it was obviously unnecessary.
Especially then.
That was the point of it.
A thing you only do when it is needed will not be done properly on the night it is needed.
He had built a small Roman camp on the third floor of a hospital and never once known what he was looking at.
“Damon.”
“What.”
“How do you beat it.”
“You do not.”
“That is not an answer, that is a mood.
There is always a way.
Everything that gets built has one thing it stands on.
Find that and you do not have to beat the rest of it.”
Damon stopped on the path and looked down at the boy for a moment, and then went on climbing and did not answer.
That night he told him about Cortona, in pieces, because the boy asked one question and then shut up, which is the only reliable way to get anything out of a man like that.
“They split us up.
A thousand of us, and they did not keep us together.
They put us out in the Etruscan towns, twenty here and thirty there, so that we could not be a thing.
I was at Cortona.
It is up a hill.
You can see the whole valley from the top, and there is a lake at the bottom of it that goes silver in the evening.
They did not chain me.
Nobody ever chained me.
I want you to understand that, because everybody at home wanted the chains and I never had any, and they were disappointed in me about it.
They gave me a room and a small amount of money and they told me I could not leave the town.
That was all.
That was the whole of the punishment.
Seventeen years.”
“You were never tried.”
“We asked.
Every year.
Every single year there was a request to Rome that the Achaean hostages be given a hearing, and every year the Senate found that it was not the right moment, and after a while it became a joke there.
An old man made one in front of the whole Senate.
He wondered aloud whether it mattered much to anybody which country’s undertakers put a few Greek pensioners in the ground.” Damon was quiet for a second.
“They laughed at that.
It was the laughing that did it.
They voted the next day.”
“What did you do for seventeen years?”
“I worked.
I mended things.
I got good at Latin.
There was a woman.”
He stopped there, and Lysandros said nothing.
“Her name is not for you,” Damon said eventually.
“She had a son.
He is a Roman, before you ask me.
He was born there and he speaks like them and he is about twenty two now and he has never once seen this country.” The fire cracked and settled.
“Three hundred of us were still alive by then.
Out of the thousand.
And they opened the door and told us we could go home, and I stood in a room and I had to decide, and I decided, and there is no version of it where I am not the worst man in the story.”
“That is why you do not call them wolves,” Lysandros said.
“I have never in my life been able to say that word about them.
I could not say it to your father either, and now he is dead in an alley killed by the so-called wolves and I still cannot say it.
Go to sleep.”