Chapter Seven: Daimon
On the fifth night they had come up over the last of the low ridges and found a shelf of flat ground under an overhang, and they had a fire because it had got too cold not to.
Lysandros had eaten and was sitting with his back to the rock, working through the next few days out loud, because the protocol was gone.
He had stopped bothering four days ago.
He had not decided to stop.
He had come out of that cupboard and found that the child had not come out with him.
He was saying something about water.
That they needed to know where the village took its water from before they went near it, because a settlement that has survived a bad year watches its water before it watches anything else.
That Damon’s shoulder was worse than he was admitting and would need strapping before the pass and not after.
That they had two days of food and four days of walking and this needed deciding tonight rather than in the morning when they were both stupid.
He looked up.
Damon was standing.
He had the sword out and low and the fire was behind him and he was not moving.
“Sit still,” he said.
Lysandros sat still.
“Put your hands where I can see both of them.
Both.
Good.”
“Damon.”
“Do not talk.”
The old man came round the fire, not fast, and stopped about six feet away, which is the distance a man stands at when he has thought about the distance.
“In your father’s yard,” Damon said, “you cut a boy’s arm open.
You were five.
You knew where to put the knife and you knew how deep and you were not frightened, and I stood at that corner and told myself, he has watched somebody do it.
Children copy.
I told myself that for two years.
“But in the alley you told your father what was killing him.
Not the blood, you said.
What is in the gut, going into the belly.
There is not a physician in Corinth who would have put it in those words, and there is not a man alive who would have put it that way at seven.
“And then you swore an oath in better Greek than the man you swore it to.”
He shifted his grip.
“So I will ask once, and you will answer me, and I will know if you lie, because I have been listening to you lie for two years and I know what it sounds like.” His voice did not change.
“Are you a daimon?
Is there a thing sitting inside that boy?”
The honest answer was not no.
Lysandros sat with his back against a rock in Arcadia with a sword six feet from his throat, and he had been working on that question for seven years without getting anywhere.
He knew the arguments.
He had been the sort of student who read philosophy for pleasure and then went into a profession where nobody ever asked him about any of it, and he had carried the whole lot around unused for twenty years.
Start with memory.
There is a tradition that says you are your memories, that the thread of remembering is the thread of the self, and that if the memories cross over then the person has crossed over.
By that test he was Xavier Reid, and this was possession, and Damon should put the sword in.
Except that he grieved for Kleio.
Xavier Reid had never met Kleio.
Xavier Reid had never had a sister, had never lain in a courtyard at four years old while a nine year old girl explained the entirely invented history of the neighbours’ dog.
Those were not his memories.
They were Lysandros’, and Lysandros was the only person in the world who had them, and the grief taking him apart every night at the bottom of that count was not borrowed.
It had been made here.
It had grown in this body out of this life.
So something had been added.
Whatever crossed the gap had not stayed the same shape.
Then the worse question, the one he had been walking round for years.
Was there ever a Lysandros?
If there was, if a soul had been on its way into that body and had been shouldered out of the doorway by a dying surgeon in a ditch two thousand years away, then he was exactly the thing the old man was asking about.
Then Theano had been right to spit into her dress.
Then he had eaten a child before the child had a name and had been wearing him ever since and taking his mother’s kisses.
And if there was not, if the body had been empty and he had simply arrived in it, then what he was could not be said in any language spoken on this hillside.
Nobody had been born in this body.
Something had been installed in it.
Neither answer let him say no.
And there was a joke in it that he could not enjoy.
He had settled this question years ago, in another country, with his hands inside people, and he had been so certain that he had been rude about it in corridors.
Now here was a man with a sword asking him whether he was one, and he could not say no.
“Answer me,” Damon said.
“I do not know.”
“Do not do that.”
“I am not doing anything.” His own voice came out flat and level, and it was not a seven year old’s voice, and there was no point pretending about that any more.
“You have asked me the only question I have ever been frightened of, and I have been working on it since before I could speak.
I do not know the answer.
If I said no to you I would be guessing.”
“Then what do you know.”
“I remember another life.” He kept his hands where they were.
“I was a man.
I was a physician, in a country that does not exist, a very long way from here in a direction that is not on any map you have seen.
I had a name.
I was thirty seven when I died on a road in the rain, and then there was noise, and then I was lying on my back in your city and I could not lift my own head.
“I did not ask for it.
I did nothing to get it.
I have never found one thing I did that would explain it.
I have gone through it every night for seven years and there is no reason for any of it, and if you want the truth, I would rather have stayed dead, because I killed a girl the day I died and I was looking forward to stopping.”
Damon did not move.
“And the boy,” he said.
“Nikias’ son.
Where is he.”
And there it was.
“I have never heard him.
Not once.
There has never been another voice in here and there has never been a door I could not open.
If he was in here before me then he was gone before I could speak, and I would not have known how to look for him.” He swallowed.
“I loved Kleio.
He would have loved Kleio.
I cannot tell you which of us was doing it, and I have stopped being able to find the join, and I am telling you that because it is true and not because it helps me.”
The fire went down a little.
“That is a demon’s answer,” Damon said.
“It is an honest one.
Those overlap more than people think.”
“Do you mean me harm.”
“No.”
“Did you mean your father harm.”
“I had my hands in him,” Lysandros said, “trying to hold shut a hole I could not have closed with a hospital behind me, and I would give every hour left in this body to have had one clean room and six hours and a pair of my own hands.
If you want to put that sword in me for what I am, I cannot argue with you, because I do not know what I am.
But do not do it for that.”
Damon stood there for a long time.
Then he turned the blade over and put the point in the dirt and leaned on it, which is not what a man does when he intends to use a sword, and it was the most tired Lysandros had ever seen anybody look.
“I have killed four men this week,” he said.
“I am forty years old, and until Wednesday I had killed two men in my life, and both of those were a long time ago and I learned their names afterwards, which is worse.
Do you understand what I am saying to you.”
Lysandros shook his head.
“No.”
“I am saying I have nothing left to be frightened with.” He sat down heavily on the rock and put the sword across his knees and did not put it away.
“Do you know what I have been since we came out of that wall?
I have been a promise.
There is nothing else in me.
I told a bleeding man I would take his family out, and I got one of them, and now I do not even know whether it is his.”
“It is his.
That is the part I am sure of.
Whatever I am, I am also his, and I was the one in the cupboard, and I heard all of it, and I stayed where I was because he told me to.
Nobody but his son would have done that.”
Damon looked into the fire.
“Terms,” he said.
“Go on.”
“You do not do that in front of anybody.
Not in the village, not in a market, not in front of a priest, and not in front of me if you can help it, because I have got used to you and I do not want to get used to it.
When you are going to do a thing that people will have no explanation for, you tell me first, and I decide whether it happens.”
“That is not terms.
That is you deciding everything.”
“Yes.”
Lysandros thought about it.
“One change,” he said.
“If somebody is dying and I can stop it and there is time to ask you, I ask.
If there is no time, I do it, and you shout at me afterwards.”
“No.”
“Then we have no agreement, because I will do it anyway and you will find out, and it is better for both of us if you were told first.”
Damon shut his eyes.
“Gods,” he said.
“You are exactly like him.
That is the worst of it.
He negotiated like that.
He would give you nine tenths of a thing and take the whole of it back in one sentence at the end and smile at you.”
“Do we have an agreement?”
“We have an agreement.”
They did not talk about it again.
But something changed that night, and it went in a direction Lysandros had not expected, because the old man stopped explaining things to him.
He started asking him things instead.
On the sixth day, going up through the pines below the shoulder of Kyllene, with the air thin and the food gone, he stopped on the path and said, “There are two ways round this and I do not like either of them.
You have the head for it.
Which one.”
Lysandros stood in the cold and did the arithmetic out loud, and Damon listened all the way through and then took the second one, and neither of them said anything about how strange it was.
The mountain above them was where the god was supposed to have been born.
Damon mentioned it in passing, without much interest.
There had been a cave up there and people had gone to it once.
Nobody had gone in a long while.
The last two days were bad.
The food was gone after the fifth night and they came over the top with nothing in them, and at the height of it the cold got into Lysandros’ hands until he could not feel them, which frightened him more than the sword had.
Damon carried him down the last of the descent on a shoulder that should not have been carrying anything.
Then the ground opened out.
There was a basin below them, high and flat and closed all round by mountains, with a lake in the bottom that was more marsh than lake, and a stand of reeds a mile long, and birds going up off it in a sheet.
There were fields.
There was smoke, three or four threads of it, in different places.
“Stymphalos,” Damon said.
“The town is at the far end, and it is a town, so we do not go there.
There are four or five places up on this side with no name worth putting on anything.
That is where we are going.”
“How do you know they will take us.”
“I do not.”
They came down onto a goat track in the late afternoon and had gone about half a mile when Lysandros stopped walking.
“There is somebody on the slope,” he said quietly.
“Above us and to the left, in the rocks by the split pine.
They have been there since we came round the last spur.”
Damon did not turn his head.
“How long have you known.”
“About ten minutes.
They moved when we moved and stopped when we stopped, and just now they got it wrong by about a second.”
“Well,” Damon said.
“Then let us find out.” He put his hands out where they could be seen, away from the sword, and raised his voice at the hillside.
“We are Achaean.
We are two.
There is a child.
We have nothing worth taking off us and we would be grateful for water.”
Nothing happened for a while.
Then a rock came down the slope.
It landed in front of them rather than at them, and those are two different messages.
And then she stood up.
She was a girl of about ten with a filthy face and a shepherd’s staff too long for her, and she came down the scree at a speed that made Damon put a hand out to steady a boulder that was not moving.
She stopped about fifteen feet away and looked at them with her head on one side.
“You are very slow,” she said.
“I have been watching you for an hour.
You are slow and you are loud and he is limping, and you have been up on the ridge in the open twice where anyone at the far end could see you.”
“That is fair,” Damon said.
“Are there Romans behind you?”
“No.”
“How far behind you are they?”
“That is a better question,” Damon said, and something in his face moved.
“Two days ago there were none south of Nemea.
I cannot tell you about today.”
The girl thought about it with a seriousness that was not a child’s seriousness.
Then she planted the staff.
“I am supposed to count them,” she said.
“If they are coming I go up on the rock and I stay there and I do not shout, because shouting tells them there is something to find.
I am not supposed to talk to anyone.
But you have got a child with you, and my mother says a man running with a child is running from something.
So.”
She looked at Lysandros.
He looked back at her.
“What is wrong with your face?” she said.
“Nothing is wrong with my face.”
“Something is wrong with it.” There was no malice in it.
“You look how our grandfather looked.
Are you coming or not?
It is another hour and my mother will be angry with me, and she will be angrier if I leave you out here.”
She turned round and started up the track without waiting.
Damon stood where he was for a second, then let his breath out, and put a hand on the back of the boy’s neck, and moved him forward.
“Do not,” he said quietly, “say anything clever.”
“I never say anything clever.”
“Boy.”
“I heard you,” Lysandros said, and went up the track after her.