"Well," said Tyndareus. "You've proved yourself. Beyond doubt. Now tell us what you mean to do with it."
It was the small council room again, a month after the hills, with the single window and the benches. Only four of them, this time. The king. Helen, on her stool. Menelaus, on the bench by the door, with his arms folded. And John.
The breastplate from Agenor's yard stood on a stand in the corner, six bright scratches across its chest and an iron rim round the shield propped against it. John had carried both up from the ford the morning after Paris left. Tyndareus had walked round them twice and run his thumb along the scratches and not asked.
"Training first," said John. "What we've started on the river. Not only the king's men. Every child in the valley, boys and girls, from seven. Running, swimming, carrying, the three movements. Reading a hillside. Standing in a line." He'd thought about it for a month. "Your phalanx is strong, my lord, but it only knows how to go forward. I'd teach it to turn. To open and close. To fight on broken ground, like the hundred did in the hills."
Menelaus said nothing. His jaw moved. He'd sworn.
"Then a school," said John. "In the king's house, or near it. Not for fighting. For everything else. Bring men here from everywhere, from Crete and Egypt and the islands and the cities in the east, whoever knows anything, and pay them to teach it. Numbers. Building. The stars. Medicine. Writing." He looked at Helen. "And let anyone come who wants to learn. Girls too."
"Athens has nothing like that," said Tyndareus slowly. "Mycenae has nothing like that."
"No, my lord."
"And the fields?"
"The fields are easy," said John. "Don't plant the same thing in the same field every year. Wheat, then beans, then let it rest under sheep. The beans feed the soil, and the sheep. Your grandsons will be cutting wheat from fields that are tired now." He shrugged. "Twice the harvest, in a few years. Maybe more."
Tyndareus sat back. He looked at John for a long time with his hawk's face.
"And that," he said, nodding at the corner. "The armour."
John looked at it.
"Every man of the hundred by spring," he said. "Then the whole phalanx. Agenor is taking on four boys, and I'll teach them the tin and the hammering myself. After that, blades." He met the king's eyes. "Weapons that outmatch anything in Greece, my lord. But that's the least of it. The school matters more."
* * *
The next weeks went by like the Eurotas in spate.
He was everywhere. He knew he was doing it. He'd done it in Egypt, the first year, and knew exactly what it looked like from outside: the foreigner on the river bank at dawn with a thousand children, the foreigner in the fields at noon with the old farmers and their sticks, arguing about beans, the foreigner at Gytheion in the afternoons crouched in the wet sand with Odysseus and the shipwrights over the first of the new hulls. The foreigner in a room in the king's house at night with a lamp, teaching a dozen men from three countries how to write numbers by their place, with a mark for nothing.
The school had nine masters by the end of the month. A Cretan who knew the stars. A builder from Mycenae who'd quarrelled with his king. An old Egyptian scribe who'd washed up at Gytheion on a Phoenician ship and was so astonished to be addressed by John in his own language, in the old Theban accent Amenhotep had taught him, that he'd wept.
And Helen was always there.
In the school at night, at the back with the girls from the river, writing numbers in a tray of sand. In the fields. At Gytheion, once, in a man's cloak, with Aithra in despair. She learned the way Cleopatra had learned, all at once, and then asked the question nobody else had thought of, and John found himself telling her things, in the evenings, walking in the terraced garden, that he hadn't told anyone since Alexandria. About Florence, and a painter with a red notebook. About a beach in Japan, and a man who'd never had a student. About the gallery of eighty-one portraits.
Not the wall in the wind. He hadn't told her that.
"Sometimes," she said, one night by the spring, "I think you're shaping Sparta the way the Mycenaean builder shapes stone. As if you can see what's inside the block before he cuts it."
"In a way, I can."
"How?"
"I've seen what Sparta might be," said John. "Some of it good. Some of it very bad." He looked at the dark valley. "I'm trying to steer it towards the good. And not to push too hard. I pushed too hard, once, somewhere else."
"Egypt."
"Yes."
"And did you make it good?"
He thought about it for a long time. A city of glass. A riot over the price of bread. A nine-year war on a border he didn't know the name of. Children in school uniforms, fat-cheeked. A plaque on a wall. Here the people of the Delta quarter saved the books.
"Some of it," he said.
* * *
The messenger came at the end of the second month, at night.
John was in his room in the east wing, with the lamp, drawing a hull for Odysseus. A young man of the king's guard knocked and came in without waiting and bowed very low, still out of breath from the stairs.
"My lord," he said. "The king says you're to know at once. A delegation's come up the road from Gytheion. From Troy. Eight ships, the fishermen say, and gifts on the carts, more than anyone's ever seen. Gold and horses and purple." He swallowed. "Prince Paris leads them. With his father's seal. They ask to be heard by the king." He hesitated. "And by the lady Helen."
John sat with the stylus in his hand after the young man had gone.
Tell the old man I'll be back. With my father's word on it.
Two months. In the stories it had been years, and a marriage, and a different king on the throne of Sparta. Here it was two months, and the girl wasn't married to anyone, and the prince was back with his father's seal.
I did that, he thought. I sent him home. And he went to his father and told him about the man in the black armour and the box that knows the way home and the ships with doors on their backs, and his father sent him back with eight ships.
He'd pulled the whole story forward. The way you'd pull a tablecloth.
* * *
Paris came back to the king's hall the next day in purple, with his father's seal on a cord round his neck, and he'd learned something on the voyage. He didn't swagger. He knelt to Tyndareus on the painted floor in front of the whole court, and laid his father's gifts at the king's feet one by one: a gold cup as big as a helmet, a team of white horses from the plains of Troy, bolts of purple cloth worth a city. He spoke beautifully, and briefly, and well. He spoke of friendship between Troy and Sparta, and of trade, and of the great road of the sea.
He didn't once look at John.
He looked at Helen. Only at the end, and only for a breath. It was enough.
* * *
In the days after that, John watched him court her.
It was done very well. Nothing that could be complained of. No drunkenness, no swords. Gifts sent up to the women's rooms: a necklace of gold and blue stones, a little ivory box of scent, a singing bird in a cage of silver wire. Songs, by his own bard, at the feasts. Paris himself, at the high table, on his stool, talking. About Troy. About the walls and towers and the great city on its hill over the plain by the sea, where the ships came in from everywhere. About what a queen of Troy would see. Egypt. Babylon. The lands at the edge of the world.
Helen listened. Politely. Mostly.
On the sixth day she came to the school at noon, when it was empty, and found John alone there with the Egyptian scribe's papyrus, and shut the door behind her.
"I need your counsel," she said.
He put the papyrus down.
She didn't sit. She stood in front of the window, with her back to him, and talked in a rush, the way people talk when they've rehearsed something and then forgotten all of it.
"He's been making... offers. You've seen. Gifts. Songs. Promises. A life in Troy. A palace with fifty rooms of polished stone. The sea." She stopped. "I know I should refuse him outright. My father would refuse him outright if I asked. Menelaus would kill him if I asked. But..."
"But part of you's tempted," said John gently.
She turned round. Her face was red.
"Is that so terrible?" she said.
He thought about the wall in the wind. The black ships on the beach. Ten years. Every king in Greece.
He thought about Lisa saying I was born in the wrong century, and you've done something about it, and I can't.
"No," he said. "It isn't terrible to be tempted by someone who offers you the whole world, Helen. Especially when you've wanted to see it all your life." He chose the next words carefully. "But be careful of what's underneath the offer. He doesn't only want you. He wants what you'd bring him. He told me so, on the wall below the house, the first week. Through her, Troy will be the greatest city that ever stood." He held her eyes. "More than one city could burn, depending on what you choose."
She looked at him for a long time.
"You've seen it," she said slowly. "Haven't you? Something. What happens."
He opened his mouth.
A shout from the courtyard outside. Then another. Men's voices, very loud. Running feet.
* * *
Paris and Menelaus were in the middle of the great court, three yards apart, with half the king's household round them in a ring.
"...overstep, Trojan," Menelaus was saying. He wasn't shouting. His voice was low and thick and it carried to the colonnades. "She's promised to me. And your diplomacy is a thief's trick in a purple cloak. You've come to steal her."
Paris's hand was on his sword. He was white. He'd been drinking, John saw, but not much. Just enough.
"Perhaps, Spartan," Paris said, "if you were more worthy of her, you wouldn't be so afraid of losing her to me."
Menelaus's face went dark red. His hand went to his own hilt.
He swore, John thought. Not to me. He never swore anything about Paris.
He went across the court.
He didn't run. He walked, quickly, the way you walk in a trench when you don't want anyone to panic, and stepped into the space between them, and stood there, with his back to Menelaus and his face to Paris, close enough to touch.
"Gentlemen," he said, loud, for the courtyard, in his best voice, the one he'd learned from a sergeant at Étaples. "This is no way to conduct an embassy. Prince Paris, the king's asked me to show you the new ships at Gytheion. I'd be honoured if you'd ride down with me now." He didn't turn round. "And Prince Menelaus, I think the king's been looking for you all morning. Something about the council."
Behind him, he felt Menelaus breathing. Very hard.
For a long moment neither of them moved.
Then, slowly, the big man's hand came off the hilt. John heard him turn. Heard his feet go away across the stones.
Paris looked at John with his beautiful face and his eyes full of hatred.
Then he took his hand off his sword.
* * *
They rode to Gytheion side by side, with Paris's companions and two of the king's men behind them, and for most of the way neither of them spoke.
At the top of the last hill, where the road came over and you could see the bay and the town and the ships, Paris said, low, without turning his head:
"You play a dangerous game, advisor."
"I'm not playing anything, my lord."
"No? I haven't forgotten our talk below the wall. Nor your little sword at my throat. Nor the smith's yard." Paris looked down at the bay. At his own eight black ships, drawn up on the shingle at the eastern end. At the king's twelve at the western end, and among them, half built on the stocks, the first of the new hulls, with its keel and its long clean shape and, at the stern, the hinge for a rudder. "Helen belongs to Troy. Whatever tricks you've taught Sparta. My father's said it, and the gods have said it, and I've said it."
"The future isn't cut in stone, prince," said John. "It's made. By what people choose. Choose carefully. The price could be more than you can imagine."
Paris laughed. Short, without any pleasure in it.
"You talk as if you'd seen it," he said, and put his heels to his horse, and rode on down the hill.
* * *
It was dusk when they reached the shingle.
The Trojans had lit lamps along the eastern end of the beach, by their ships, where their crews were cooking. The light lay yellow on the wet stones. John walked down along the waterline with Paris a little ahead, and the king's shipwrights coming out from the stocks to meet them, and Odysseus among them, wiping his hands.
He was looking at the new hull. That was why he didn't see her at first.
Then something made him turn his head.
She was standing by the bow of the nearest Trojan ship, in the lamplight, among the crew. Tall. In a long plain robe of undyed Trojan wool, like a servant of the embassy, with a cloth over her hair. A woman of about forty. A narrow, tired face. Standing very still, with her arms folded, the way she'd stood on the ridge above the village under the three pines, in the Branch, watching it burn.
She'd been watching him. She didn't look away when he saw her.
Doctor Moira Vance pushed the cloth back off her short grey hair, and smiled at him across the shingle. A small, tired smile.
"Hello again, Mr Ashford," she said, in English, quite softly, under the noise of the sea. "Did you like my octopus?"