Chapter Eight: The Unlucky Child
The girl talked the whole way up.
She talked about the goats first, there were forty one of them and she could tell them apart at three hundred paces and she wanted this understood.
Then about her brother, who was fourteen and useless.
Then about a man in the lower village who owed her mother eleven measures of barley and had been about to pay it for two years.
“Why are you both so quiet,” she said.
“Are you always this quiet or is it because of the city?”
“The city,” Damon said.
“Which one?”
“Corinth.”
She stopped on the path.
Then she went on walking, slower.
“Everyone said it would not happen,” she said.
“My uncle said it.
He said Corinth has walls like nowhere else and the Romans have no ships worth anything and it would be a fine and short war.”
“Your uncle was wrong.”
“He is always wrong.
That is why he is in the lower village.” She swung the staff.
“Are you going to tell my mother about it or shall I?
Because I would rather it was me.
I am better at it and she will not shout at me if I am the one holding it.”
The country up there was poorer than anything Lysandros had seen in either life.
Terraces going up the slope, six feet wide, hacked out and walled with rubble by somebody’s great grandfather.
Barley on them, thin.
Beans.
A vine or two on the sheltered side of a wall, kept alive out of stubbornness.
Chestnut and oak higher up, and Klytie explained without embarrassment that in a bad year they ate the acorns, which you had to boil three times or they were not worth the trouble.
There were forty three people living up there in nine households, and eleven of them were children, and one of the eleven was a boy nobody would name because he had not lived a full year yet.
They came past a shrine on the last bend.
It was a slab of rock with a face carved into it, not well, and a heap of stones in front of it.
There was one offering lying on the heap.
It had been a bunch of something once and it had gone brown and dry and lost most of itself to the weather, and nothing had been put on top of it since.
“Pan,” Klytie said, catching him looking.
“You have to say something when you pass.
Anything.
He does not listen but you have to.”
“How do you know he does not listen?”
“Because nobody has got anything for a long time,” she said, and went on up the path.
She ran ahead to warn her mother, which left the two of them alone on the track for ten minutes, and Lysandros used them.
“Damon.”
“What.”
“I am going to ask you something and it is going to sound like nothing.
Answer it anyway.”
Damon breathed out through his nose.
“Go on.”
“Is there a country called Judaea?”
“Ioudaia.” The old man frowned.
“There is a district of that name in Syria.
Why?”
“What do you know about it.”
“Very little.
They threw out one of the Greek kings a few years back, or they think they did, and the kings have been too busy killing each other to go and check.
They have one god and no image of him anywhere, which everyone thinks is a joke until they meet one of them.” He glanced sideways.
“Boy, of all the things you could ask me.”
“One more.
Have you ever heard of a teacher from there.
A man.
He would have been put to death by Romans, and afterwards people said he came back from it.”
Damon actually laughed.
“No,” he said.
“And I will tell you why not.
Rome does not hold Syria.
Rome does not hold anything east of Macedon.
There is no Roman within a thousand miles of that country who could put a man to death, unless he did it in a tavern over a woman.”
Lysandros stopped walking.
“Boy.”
He did not answer for a while, because there was a great deal of calculation happening and none of it was going the way he wanted.
He had been trying to date himself for seven years and he had one fixed point.
One.
He was not a religious man but he knew that every number he had ever written on a chart or a form or a death certificate had been counted forward from the birth of a baby in that country, and that the man that baby became had been killed by Romans, which meant Rome was there, which meant that if Rome was not there yet then the baby was not born yet.
He was standing in a negative number.
Every date he had ever known ran backwards from here.
All of it.
The whole of the calendar he had lived inside for thirty seven years was measured from a thing that had not happened yet, to a person who did not exist, in a country Rome had not reached.
And under that, worse, the part that took his legs out.
He had knelt in an alley eleven days ago and sworn to burn Rome to the ground.
Rome had not even truly started yet.
Whatever he half remembered from a schoolroom he could no longer picture, the emperors and the roads and the whole enormous weight of it, none of that had happened.
What had happened was Carthage and Corinth in one year, and the thing that had done that was still on its way up.
“Boy.”
“I am all right.”
“You have gone the colour of a fish.”
“I have been trying to find out what time period it is since the day I was born,” Lysandros said.
“And you have just told me.”
Damon waited.
“Well?”
“It is a long time before a thing that has not happened yet,” Lysandros said.
“That is the best I can do.”
Antheia had them in because it was going to snow inside the fortnight and because there was a child, and she made it very clear that those were the two reasons and that neither of them was hospitality.
Praxias came down that evening.
He held the most land up there and the most goats, and he had a way of standing in a doorway that Lysandros recognised from consultants and from his own father, and he said no three separate times in four different ways.
Damon let him finish.
“I was seventeen years in Italy,” he said.
“I speak their language.
I have watched them take a town that surrendered and I have watched them take one that did not, and the difference is not what you think it is.
When they come up here, and they will, somebody in this village is going to have to stand in front of them and answer questions.
You can do it with me standing next to you or you can do it on your own.”
Praxias thought about that for a long time.
“The boy works,” he said.
“He is seven.”
“So was my brother,” Praxias said, and went out.
There was an old woman called Ino who lived in the last house and who had been coughing since before they arrived.
Lysandros watched her come across the yard one morning with a bucket, and he watched how she stopped, and how long it took her, and the colour of her hands.
“Three days,” he said quietly to Damon.
“Four if the weather turns warm.”
He was not showing off.
He was doing what he had done every working morning of his first life, which was to look at a person and produce a number, and he had said it in a low voice to the only man on earth he could say it to.
Klytie’s aunt was on the other side of the wall.
Ino died on the third day.
After that the word went round, and the word was dysdaimon, and Lysandros knew enough Greek by then to take it apart and see exactly what was inside it.
It did not mean cursed and it did not mean wicked.
It meant a person with a bad spirit on him.
It meant, quite literally and with no metaphor anywhere in it, the thing Damon had put a sword to his throat about on a hillside eleven days earlier.
Damon flinched the first time he heard somebody use it.
Lysandros did not.
He had a professional interest, at this point, in how it worked.
He had told them the number and the number had come true, and to every person in that village those were one event and not two.
You do not get to be the man who reads the sky and is not also the man who brings the weather.
He had spent fourteen years walking into rooms and putting a number on a table and had never once considered that he was doing something that might get him killed in most of human history.
The practical results came in fast.
No child was allowed near him.
Mothers did not shout about it and they did not explain it, they simply arrived and removed their children, and after a few weeks the children did it themselves without being told.
Straton, who had fought at the Isthmus and got home with a hole through his forearm, refused to teach him.
He did it politely.
He said his arm was not what it was, and that a boy that age should be minding goats.
Two of the others did the same.
One did not bother being polite.
Damon came back from the last of those conversations and stood in the door of the hut for a while without saying anything.
“They are frightened,” Lysandros said.
“It is not unreasonable.
If I believed what they believe I would do the same.”
“That is not why I am angry.”
“Then why.”
“Because Straton is a bad swordsman,” Damon said, “and I still had to ask him.”
So it was Damon, and only Damon, every morning and every evening, on a flat place above the spring where nobody had to watch.
The count went up.
Sixty by midwinter, and he could feel the difference in the arm rather than just measure it.
Eighty by the spring.
Damon added the first real drills, which were mostly footwork.
And it was Klytie the rest of the time.
She came the second week, sat down on the wall, and watched him swing a stick at nothing for about a quarter of an hour.
“You are doing it wrong,” she said.
“I am doing exactly what he told me to do.”
“Yes, and you are doing it wrong.” She hopped down.
“Put your hands up.”
She was eleven.
He was seven.
She had spent every day of her life on a mountain and he had spent his lying in a courtyard learning to talk, and she put him on his back four times in about a minute and a half and did not even get warm.
The fifth time he did not get up straight away.
“Are you crying?”
“No.”
“You can, I do not care.”
“I am not crying,” Lysandros said, into the dirt.
“I am thinking about the mechanics of what you just did to me and I am extremely annoyed.”
Klytie thought this was the funniest thing she had ever heard and had to sit down.
She beat him at everything for two years.
Wrestling, always.
Running, always, and worse uphill.
Climbing, which she did without appearing to make a decision about where her hands went.
Throwing, which he had assumed he would be all right at and was not.
And the sling.
She kept it wound round her wrist and she used it on the wolves and on anything that came at the goats, and she could put a stone into a fence post at forty paces four times out of five.
Lysandros could not hit it at fifteen.
He worked on it for eight months before he could hit it at twenty five, and by then she had got bored and moved on to hitting things that were moving.
“How,” he said once, sitting on the wall with his arm hanging, “how does anyone learn that.”
“You start when you are four and you do it every day for six years while you are looking at goats,” Klytie said.
“There is nothing else to do.
It is not clever.”
“It is the most useful thing I have seen since I got here.”
“That is because you are strange.”
She said it without heat.
That was the thing about her.
In two years she never once said the other word, and she never once pretended she did not think it either.
“You are a daimon, though,” she said one afternoon.
“Aren’t you.”
They were up on the high pasture.
It was hot.
The goats were doing nothing and the two of them had been throwing stones into a gully for an hour.
Lysandros considered several answers and used none of them.
“Why do you say that.”
“Because you look at people like my grandmother looked at a cracked pot.” She threw.
“And because you never ask anyone anything.
Everybody asks things.
You already know.”
“That is not much to go on.”
“It is enough.” She sat back on her heels.
“It does not bother me.”
“It bothers everybody else in this village.”
“They are stupid about it.” Klytie said this cheerfully.
“My grandmother said there is one in the spring and one in the old oak by the top wall, and there was one that followed my great uncle about for years.
She left milk out for it.
Forty years, every night, a little bowl, and she was not frightened of it and it never did anything to anybody.
Most of them just want something small.
They want to be noticed.
They are not all Furies.”
Lysandros sat with that.
He had been braced for the sword or the amulet or the woman burning something in a dish.
He had not been braced for a shrug.
Nowhere in nine years had he considered that the people of this country had been living comfortably alongside the idea of things inside things for a thousand years, and that a village woman leaving a bowl of milk out for four decades might be the most theologically relaxed person he had ever met.
“What do you think I want,” he said.
“I do not know.
That is why I keep coming up here.” She was watching him with her head on one side.
“Are you old?”
“Yes.”
“How old.”
“Older than your mother.
Older than Damon.”
“Huh.” She turned that over.
“What is it like being old?”
Nobody had asked him a question that good since he arrived on this continent.
“Everything hurts and you stop being surprised by people,” he said.
“And you get quicker at deciding things and worse at changing your mind about them.”
“Do you get to go back?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“No.
It is finished.
There is no door.”
Klytie nodded slowly, and then she said something that did more for him than the sword and the terms and every hour of that winter put together.
“Then you are just here,” she said.
“Same as the rest of us.”
She got up and went to move the goats.