He'd never liked horses. Horses had known it about him since the donkey at Lucca.
The one that came down the street by the potter's yard that morning didn't care whether he liked it or not. It was a big bay stallion, a chariot horse from the king's stables by the size of it, with no harness on but a rope halter, and a boy of about fourteen on its bare back, flat along its neck, with his fists knotted in its mane and his face white. It came down the street between the stone houses at a flat gallop, scattering chickens and children and a woman with a water jar, and at the bottom of the street was the market ground, full of people, and beyond the market ground was the river, in spate from the snow, brown and fast and full of rocks.
The boy was going to come off. John could see it. Not the Branches; the boy's hands. One of them had already lost the mane.
He was in the street before he'd decided to be.
He ran. He'd been made to run, in Kokura, up and down the beach in the sand every dawn for two years until his legs stopped complaining, and he was fast, for a man with a farmer's body. Not as fast as a horse. He went across the corner of the street at an angle, to meet it where the street narrowed by the well, and the horse came at him huge and brown with its eyes rolling, and he pushed.
Three counts. No mask. The world went thick.
The horse hung above him in the air at the top of its stride, all four hooves off the ground, mane standing out like a flag. The boy's left hand open, the fingers stretched, the mane slipping through them. John took two steps inside the slow and got his hand in the mane by the withers, and his foot on the edge of the well, and pushed off.
The Hold went on three.
The world came back with a slam, and the horse came down, and he was on it. Sideways, mostly. One leg over, one arm round the boy, his face in the mane, his teeth knocked together so hard he tasted blood that wasn't from his nose. The horse felt the new weight and went mad.
He didn't know how long it lasted. A long time. He remembered the market ground going past, people flinging themselves out of the way, a stall going over. He remembered the river getting louder. He remembered doing the only thing he'd ever been told about horses, by a farrier in the Royal Engineers who'd been sick of watching sappers fall off mules: Don't fight the head. Turn it. Turn it round and round till it gets dizzy and bored. He got the halter rope. He hauled the horse's head round to its own shoulder, with all the strength in his arms, and held it.
The horse went round in a circle on the market ground. Then another. Then smaller ones. Then it stopped, blowing, sweating, shaking its head, twenty yards from the river bank.
John slid off. His legs folded. He sat on the ground with the boy in his arms.
The boy was crying. John was bleeding from the mouth and his fingers had gone white and he could feel, quite clearly, that he'd torn something in his shoulder.
A crowd was coming. He got up before they got there and gave the boy to the first woman who reached him and the halter rope to the second, and walked back up the street to the potter's yard, quite slowly, so as not to fall over.
* * *
On the far side of the market, by the stall that had gone over, a tall man in a fine red cloak with a sword on his hip stood with two of his companions, and watched him go.
He was about twenty-five, broad, heavy in the shoulders, with a short red-brown beard and a face that would have been handsome if it hadn't been so used to being obeyed. He'd seen the whole thing. He'd seen the stranger run, and seen him reach the well, and then he'd seen something he couldn't explain: the stranger's hand on the horse's mane before the horse was even there. As if he'd known.
"Who's that?" he said.
"The craftsman," said one of his companions. "The one at the potter's. Makes locks. They say he's from somewhere past Egypt."
Menelaus, son of Atreus, brother of the High King of Mycenae, watched the stranger walk away up the street, a little stiffly, with his hand pressed to his shoulder.
"Find out where," he said.
* * *
That night there was a feast in the king's hall on the hill. There was a feast most nights, now. The suitors were coming.
Helen sat at her father's right hand, where she always sat, and ate figs, and watched them.
There were eleven at the moment. She'd counted. Menelaus was the one who mattered, everyone said so: the High King's brother, rich, strong, of good blood, with Mycenae behind him. There was a prince from Crete with a laugh like a donkey's. There was a short clever one from the islands in the west, from Ithaca, whom she liked more than any of the others because he never looked at her for more than a breath at a time and talked to her father about goats. There were others. They gave her gifts. Bronze, and gold, and dyed cloth, and once, from a king in the north, a live bear, which her mother had had sent back.
She was seventeen and she had been told what she was worth since she was nine.
"...like no man I've ever seen," Menelaus was saying, across the hearth. He was telling her father about the horse. He told it well. He was a good teller of stories, Menelaus. It was one of the things that made her uneasy about him. "He was at the well before the horse was. Before. As if he'd been told where it would be." He drank. "Some of the women in the market are saying he must be favoured by the gods."
Helen leaned forward. "And what do you say, Menelaus?"
He looked at her. He had a way of looking at her that she didn't like, as if adding her up. "I say we should keep a close eye on him," said Menelaus. "Such a man could be a great gift to Sparta." He put his cup down. "Or a great danger to it."
Her father grunted and said something about the price of tin, and the talk went elsewhere.
Helen sat back and ate a fig and didn't listen to it.
A kite, she thought. A bronze knife that bends. A horse made of olive wood in a minute, for a goatherd's child. A man who climbs a tree like a lizard and wipes his mouth after as if it's bleeding.
And now a horse.
She'd watched him from the balcony above the market, and from her litter by the ford, and from the edge of the olive grove, where he'd looked at her. Not the way men looked at her. As if he'd seen her before somewhere, and was sorry about it.
She decided she would find out why.
* * *
She came to the potter's yard the next morning with one maid, Aithra, and the excuse of a commission.
He was at his bench in the shade of the yard wall with his left arm strapped to his chest in a sling of linen and a tiny hammer in his right hand, tapping at a strip of bronze on a little anvil. He was doing it very fast. So fast the hammer was a blur and the sound was like a cicada. She stopped in the gateway and watched it for a while before he saw her.
When he did, he stopped. He put the hammer down and stood up and bowed, slightly, the way he had in the grove, the craftsman's bow.
"My lady," he said. His Greek was strange. Old-fashioned in some places and new in others, as if he'd learned it from two different people. "How can I serve you?"
"I've heard a great deal about your skill," said Helen. "I wondered if you'd make something for me."
"What sort of thing?"
She'd thought about it on the way down from the hill. "Something unique," she said. "Something nobody else in the world has. Not gold. I have a room full of gold. Not a bear."
He looked at her for a moment. Then, for the first time, he smiled. It changed his face a great deal.
"Something that tells you a thing you don't know," he said.
"Yes." She was surprised. "Yes, exactly that."
He thought about it. He sat back down on his stool and she came across the yard and sat on the potter's upturned basket opposite him, with Aithra hovering in the gateway making little noises, and they talked about it. He asked her questions. What did she like. What did she do in the day. Did she ever go on the sea. She found herself telling him things she'd never told anyone, about the shrine of Artemis in the hills where she went to be alone, about the sea at Gytheion, which she'd seen twice, about how she wanted, more than anything in the world, to know what was on the other side of it.
He listened with his head on one side and his hands still. It was the stillness of him that she noticed. Everything about the men in her father's hall was always moving, laughing, boasting, reaching. He sat as if he had all the time in the world.
"I'll make you a pendant," he said at last. "Gold, if you like, since you've a room full of it. And inside it, a thing that always knows where north is. "Wherever you are. On land, on the sea, in the dark, in a strange country. A thing that will always tell you which way is home."
She stared at him. "There is no such thing."
"There will be," he said. "Give me a month."
* * *
She'd stayed too long. She knew it. Aithra was making the noise she made when Helen's mother would be told.
And then the gateway darkened, and a man came into the yard.
Not Menelaus. Someone she'd never seen. A young man, very young, twenty perhaps, slender, in a long robe of a deep blue dye she didn't know, with gold at his wrists and his throat and in his ears, and black hair oiled into ringlets, and a face so beautiful it was almost silly, like a face on a painted cup. He stopped in the gateway and looked at the yard, and then he saw her, and his eyes went wide.
"Forgive me," he said. His Greek had an accent, soft, from the east, from across the sea. "I was told I might find the finest craftsman in Sparta here. I didn't know I'd find..." He smiled at her. It was a very good smile. He'd clearly used it before. "Forgive me. Paris, son of Priam. Of Troy. My father has sent me to your father's house with gifts, my lady. We came up from the coast last night."
The air in the yard changed.
She felt it. She saw the craftsman feel it too: his hands, on his knees, went very still, and something in his face shut, like a door. He was looking at Paris the way you'd look at a cart you'd just seen coming round a corner too fast.
Helen stood up.
"I should go," she said, to no one in particular. "My mother will be wondering." She looked at the craftsman. "A month."
"A month, my lady."
She went to the gate. Paris stood aside for her with a bow, the gold at his wrists clinking, and she went past him without looking at him, out into the street with Aithra trotting after.
At the corner, she looked back.
Not at Paris. At the man in the sling, sitting on his stool in the shade of the wall, watching the prince of Troy.
* * *
When she'd gone, Paris turned back to John. He looked at him for a while, at the sling, at the tiny hammer, at the strip of bronze on the anvil. His smile didn't go away. It just stopped being for anyone.
"You seem to have quite an effect on the people here," he said. "Especially the ladies of the court."
"I'm just a craftsman, my lord."
"Of course." Paris looked round the yard. At the bench, the tools, the kite hanging on the wall where the potter's children had left it. "And what does the craftsman make? For princesses?"
"Whatever they ask."
"And what did she ask?"
"That's between me and the lady."
Paris laughed, lightly. He went back to the gateway, and stopped there, with the sun behind him, so that John couldn't see his face.
"We'll see about that," he said. Almost to himself. And went.
John sat for a long time in the yard with the hammer in his hand.
He hadn't touched either of them. He'd been careful. He'd kept his hands on his knees the whole time she was there, and he'd made sure Paris was never close enough to brush against.
He didn't need the Branches. He'd read the book.
A prince from Troy. Guest-gifts. A king's daughter.
He put the hammer down and looked at it. His good hand was shaking.
He'd come to Sparta by accident, on a bronze disc with an octopus on it, and he'd meant to keep his head down, make locks, and find a way out. He'd meant to watch.
He wasn't watching any more. He was in the middle of the story. And he was the only person in it who knew how it ended.