He'd meant to train two hundred gunners. On the first morning four thousand people came.
They filled the great courtyard of the Gymnasium, the long colonnaded square in the middle of the city where Alexandrian boys of good family had been taught to wrestle and throw the discus for three hundred years, and they spilled out into the street beyond. Dockers. Bakers. Scribes. Women, a great many women, in their work dresses with their sleeves tied up, who had heard that the Bronze Face was going to teach the city to fight the Romans and had decided that they were the city too. Old men. Children who'd been told to stay at home.
John stood on the steps of the Gymnasium with the mask in his hand and looked at them.
"Send them home," said Achillas, beside him. "I need men for the guns. Not fishwives."
"The fishwives can carry powder."
"They'll blow themselves up."
"So will your soldiers. At least the fishwives will listen." John looked out at the square. Four thousand faces, turned up to him. Montu. Bronze Face. "Besides. If the Romans land, they won't be fighting your soldiers. They'll be fighting them."
He put on the mask.
He felt the courtyard see it. It went through four thousand people like wind through barley. A sound, low, everywhere.
And from the balcony of the Gymnasium above him, where she'd come up without telling him, Cleopatra's voice came down clear over all of it, in Egyptian and then Greek.
"Behold the face of your protector!"
He nearly turned round. He didn't. He stood on the steps in the bronze with his hands at his sides, while four thousand people went down on their knees in front of him, and listened to her tell them that the gods had sent him to make Egypt strong, and that he would teach them to be strong, and that the Romans would come in a month and break on them like a wave on the Pharos.
She's doing it on purpose, he thought. Of course she is. If they think a god's training them, they'll come back tomorrow.
He found he hated it. And he found she was right.
* * *
They came back tomorrow. And every day for a month.
He did it the way Musashi had done it to him, because it was the only way he knew. Not words. Movements. Simple ones, repeated until the body did them without being asked. He couldn't turn four thousand Alexandrians into soldiers in a month, and he didn't try. He taught them things.
How to carry a bag of powder: low, in both arms, away from flame. How to pass it down a line from hand to hand, the way the women already passed buckets at a fire. How to load the guns, ten to a gun, each with one task and only one, drilled until a crew of dockers and bakers could load and fire a nine-foot bronze tube in the time it took to say the morning prayer. How to dig a ditch. How to hold a spear in a line, so that a man running at it ran onto it. How to fall down when the guns fired, flat, mouth open, so that the noise didn't burst your ears. How to carry a wounded man, two to a stretcher, one at each end, at a walk.
And how to eat.
That had been the surprise. He'd stood on the steps on the third day and watched them do the morning drill, and seen how many of them were grey and thin and stopped after an hour with their hands on their knees, and he'd thought about the Somme, and about the nine-stone boys from the back streets of Manchester who'd come out to France in 1915 and been made into soldiers in six months on army rations, and put on two stone each.
He went to the palace kitchens that afternoon.
"Every person who comes to the Gymnasium in the morning," he told the queen's steward, "gets a meal at noon. Bread. Lentils. Fish, or meat if there's meat. Onions. Dates. Oil. A cup of beer. Every day."
The steward looked as if he'd been asked to set fire to the treasury. "Four thousand people, lord? Every day?"
"Six thousand, by next week."
"The cost..."
"Ask the queen," said John, and the steward did, and Cleopatra laughed at him and signed it.
They set up the kitchens in the colonnades of the Gymnasium, in great copper pots on fires, and fed six thousand people a day for a month. Within two weeks the people in the drill lines had stopped stopping. Within three they were running the length of the courtyard with sacks of sand on their backs and arguing about whose gun crew was fastest. The women of Rhakotis made up a song about lentils that was so rude Charmion refused to translate it.
On the twentieth day, a scholar from the Library came to the steps with a wax tablet and asked, very respectfully, if the Bronze Face would explain why lentils made a man stronger than barley porridge, because his colleagues in the medical school were arguing about it.
John spent an evening with eleven doctors in the Library telling them about the parts of food. What he knew, which wasn't much. What made muscle and what made fat and what burned. A doctor from Pergamon called Asklepiades took it all down and said at the end, politely, that he'd test it, and that if it turned out to be wrong he'd say so in print.
"Good," said John, and meant it. It was the only time in Egypt anyone had told him they'd check.
* * *
At night, he trained without the mask.
He didn't tell anyone. He went down to the empty Gymnasium after midnight, when the fires in the colonnades had gone to ash and the courtyard was white with moonlight, and did the nine movements of the kata alone, under the stars. And then he stood in the middle of the courtyard with nothing on his face, and found a single falling thing, a leaf off one of the plane trees, a moth round the last lamp, and pushed.
The first night he got nothing. The second night, nothing. The third, one count, with blood.
He kept going. He did it every night for the whole of the month. He didn't know if it was doing any good. He did it the way Musashi had made him do the kata in the yard in Kokura, ten thousand times, waiting for a groove to wear.
On the twenty-sixth night, a moth stopped in front of his face in the moonlight, and hung there with its wings blurred, and he counted one, two, three, and it went on.
Three counts. In Florence he'd had four.
He sat down on the cold flagstones with blood on his lip and laughed until he had to put his head on his knees.
* * *
On the last night of the month he took her to the top of the Pharos.
It was three hundred and eighty steps, and then a ramp, and then more steps, round and round inside the great white tower, and they did it in the dark with a lamp, and by the top Cleopatra was swearing in four languages. At the top was the lantern room. A fire of tamarisk logs as big as a house burned in an iron grate in the middle of it, roaring, and behind the fire, filling the whole north side of the room, the mirror.
It was bronze. Polished, curved, taller than three men, older than anything else in the city except the Library. For two hundred years the keepers had turned it on its great pivot by hand, so that the fire's light went out across the sea in a beam, and ships twenty miles out could steer by it.
John had spent four nights up here, the last week, with the keepers and a team of shipwrights, and they'd fitted a new pivot, iron, greased, on rollers. Now four men could swing it, not twelve. And they'd fitted, in a cradle in front of the fire, on a long iron arm, a second smaller mirror, which could be swung in front of the beam to block it, and swung away again.
"What's it for?" said Cleopatra, getting her breath back.
"Watch."
He nodded to the keepers. The small mirror swung across. The beam went out. The sea went black.
Then it swung away. The beam came back. On, off. On, off. Long, short, short.
"You're talking," said Cleopatra slowly. "To someone."
"To the guns." He pointed down, in the dark, along the line of the coast to the west, where there was nothing to see. "There are twelve of them out there, now. Along the shore and on the end of the moles. Each one's got a crew of dockers and fishwives who know three signals. One long: load. Two long: aim at the light. Long-short-short: fire." He turned to the keepers. "Swing it west."
They put their shoulders to the mirror. It turned on its new rollers, smoothly, heavily, and the beam went with it, sweeping across the black sea like a broom, and came to rest on the water two miles out to the west, a great pale oval of light on the waves.
"Whatever's in that light," said John, "the guns can see. At night. In the dark. From a mile away." He looked at her. "We light the sea."
Cleopatra looked at the oval of light on the water for a long time, with the fire roaring behind her and the wind pulling at her hair.
"You've done it again," she said at last. Not admiring. Quiet. "You haven't only made an army. You've made a city that believes it can't lose." She turned to him. "And they believe it because of you. Because of that." She touched the mask on his belt. "What happens to them if you're wrong?"
He didn't have an answer.
He was still trying to find one when the keeper on the western gallery, outside, in the wind, began to shout.
They went out. The keeper was an old man who'd been watching the sea from this gallery for forty years, and he was pointing west, along the beam, past the end of it, to where the dark sea met the dark sky.
At first John couldn't see anything. Then he could. Low on the horizon. Not stars. Too many, too low, in a long uneven line. Pinpricks of yellow, moving, very slowly.
Stern lanterns.
"Three days early," said Cleopatra.
John counted them. He got to sixty and stopped.