The shoulder was still strapped when Menelaus called him out, nine days later, and Menelaus knew it.
It was the wrestling ground by the river, a flat circle of sand raked smooth below the plane trees where the young men of the valley oiled themselves in the mornings and threw each other about. Half of Sparta seemed to be there. The suitors and their companions, under the trees. The king's men. Women on the steps of the shrine at the edge of the ground, and on the roof of the house behind it, in the shade of an awning.
John had only come to deliver a lock to the shrine's priest.
"You there," said Menelaus, across the sand. "Craftsman."
He was oiled, stripped to a loincloth, a big man made bigger by it, with the muscles of someone who'd driven a chariot and thrown a spear every day of his life since he could walk. He'd just put a Cretan on his back in the sand, and the Cretan was still lying there.
"Surely a man of your..." Menelaus paused, and smiled, and let the word hang. "Abilities. Would welcome the chance to test himself against Sparta's best."
The crowd went quiet.
John looked at the sand. He looked at his shoulder. He'd taken the sling off three days ago. He could lift a hammer and not a great deal more.
He thought about refusing. A craftsman could refuse a prince. And then he thought about what the valley would say by nightfall, which would be that the stranger who climbed trees like a lizard and caught horses like a god was a coward when it came to men; and that wasn't the problem. The problem was what Menelaus would think. Menelaus would think he was hiding something. Menelaus would be right.
"I'd be honoured, my lord," he said. "Though I'm afraid I'll disappoint you. My skill's in craft, not fighting."
He took off his tunic and walked onto the sand.
* * *
He had no mask. He had three counts of Hold, if he was lucky, and each one would cost him blood he'd have to hide. He had a shoulder that would tear again if Menelaus got a proper grip on it.
And he had two years in a yard in Kokura, being thrown into the dirt by the best fighter in Japan, ten thousand times, until his body learned not to be where the throw was going.
Menelaus came at him like a bull.
John wasn't there. He'd seen the hip turn. His feet were moving before he'd thought about it, the groove, a step to the left and a half turn, and Menelaus went past him into empty air and had to catch himself with one hand on the sand.
The crowd made a noise.
Menelaus came round and came again, lower this time, arms wide, to catch him round the middle. John let him get close. Then he dropped his weight and turned his hip into the big man's thigh the way Musashi had turned his into John's, every morning, and Menelaus's own speed took him over John's hip and down onto his back in the sand.
Not hard. John made sure of that. He let go before Menelaus landed, so it looked like a slip.
Menelaus was up at once. He was red now under the oil.
After that it went on for a long time.
John never really knew afterwards how long. It felt like an hour. The sun moved on the sand. Menelaus came at him again and again, and John was never quite where Menelaus went, and once in a while he'd let himself be caught, deliberately, and slip out of it, and once in a while Menelaus would catch him without his permission and he'd have to push, the Hold, two counts or three, to see where the hands were going and get his shoulder out of them before they closed. Each time the cold came in behind his eyes. Each time he wiped his lip on the back of his wrist as he turned away, and nobody saw, he thought. Or nearly nobody.
At one point Menelaus got him. Properly. Both arms round him from behind, his chest against John's back, his chin on John's bad shoulder, his hands locked under John's ribs, and began to squeeze and lift, and the crowd roared, because that hold ended fights.
John felt the shoulder start to go.
He pushed. Three counts, all he had. In the slow world he could feel exactly where Menelaus's fingers were locked, the right over the left, and exactly where the big man's weight was, a little too far forward. He did the only thing Musashi had ever taught him for this, which was not to fight it at all. He went limp. All of him, at once, a sack of grain. And dropped straight down through the circle of Menelaus's arms like water out of a bucket with no bottom.
The Hold went. The world came back. Menelaus was standing on the sand holding nothing, with his arms round air, and John was on one knee at his feet, with blood running out of his nose into his mouth.
He swallowed it. He stood up.
The crowd was silent.
He could see it in their faces, all round the circle. They weren't fools. They'd been watching men wrestle all their lives. They'd seen the stranger make Sparta's best look like a child for as long as it takes to drive a herd from the hills, and never once put him down hard, and never once really try. They didn't know why. They knew he could have.
Menelaus knew it too. He stood in the sand with his chest heaving, oil and sweat running off him, and looked at John, and John saw the exact moment the big man understood what had been done to him in front of the whole valley. And that it had been done kindly.
That was the worst part. John could see that it was the worst part.
"Enough," called someone from under the plane trees. An old man's voice, dry. "It's hot, and you've both proved what you came to prove. Call it a draw, son of Atreus, and come and have a drink."
Menelaus didn't move for a moment. Then he turned and walked off the sand without a word.
* * *
John put his tunic on with his back to the crowd so they couldn't see him wipe his face.
When he turned round there was a hand on his arm.
She was standing very close. Closer than she should have been, in front of the whole valley, with Aithra behind her looking like a woman watching her own funeral. She wasn't smiling.
"That was quite a display," said Helen. She said it low. Only for him. "Though I think we saw a very small part of what you can do."
"You flatter me, my lady. It was a hard fight. He's very strong."
"He's very strong," Helen agreed. "And you could have put him on his back any time you liked, from the first moment to the last. I watched your feet." She tilted her head. "And your mouth. You keep wiping it. Like you did after the tree."
He didn't say anything.
"Will you not tell me your secrets?" she said. She said it as if it were a joke, and it wasn't.
"My lady Helen."
Paris. He came across the sand from the shrine steps in his long blue robe, with his gold clinking and his smile set like plaster, and he didn't look at John at all. He put his hand on Helen's arm, above the elbow, where John's hand had been a moment before.
"I've been looking for you everywhere," Paris said. "Your father's asked for you. In the hall. He was very particular."
Helen looked down at his hand on her arm. Then up at John. Then, without any expression at all, she let Paris turn her.
"Until next time, craftsman," she said over her shoulder.
He watched them go across the wrestling ground towards the road up to the king's house. Paris's hand stayed on her arm all the way. Halfway there, Paris looked back, once, and the look was meant for John and had nothing in it at all but dislike.
* * *
He worked late that night. He couldn't sleep, and the shoulder was bad, and there was the pendant.
He'd found a lodestone in the third week, at the back of a smith's yard by the ford, a lump of black iron ore the smith used to pick up dropped rivets with and called the Magnesian stone. He'd bought it for a mended axe. Now he sat at his bench in the light of a single lamp with a fine needle of iron he'd drawn out himself, stroking it on the stone, always the same way, from eye to point, a hundred times, two hundred. He'd done it in the Boy Scouts in Camden Town in 1908 with a sewing needle and a cork in a saucer of water, and had been inordinately proud of himself.
The case was gold. Helen's gold, a bracelet she'd sent down with Aithra. He'd beaten it into a little round box the size of a big coin with a lid of rock crystal, polished over four nights with the Turn and emery until it was as clear as water. A tiny bronze pin in the middle for the needle to turn on.
He was setting the pin when the door of the yard opened.
He looked up. A man stood in the gateway with the moon behind him. An old man, tall, a little stooped, in a plain dark cloak with no gold on it, and no guards that John could see. A long grey beard. Eyes like a hawk's, deep in a face like a cliff.
John stood up.
"My lord king," he said.
"Sit," said Tyndareus. "You'll hurt your shoulder." He came into the yard and looked round it the way Caesar had looked round the granaries: not at the things, at what the things meant. The bench. The tools. The kite on the wall. The little gold box on the bench with its crystal lid. He picked it up and looked at it and put it down again.
"I've heard a great deal about you, stranger," he said. "My daughter seems quite taken with your... talents."
"I'm a simple craftsman, my lord. I'm only trying to make a living in your city."
"Yes. That's what Menelaus says you say. And my daughter. And the priest at the shrine, and the cloth merchant, and the potter, and the potter's children." Tyndareus looked at him. "You say it very well. You say it like a man who's said it in a great many places."
John didn't answer.
The old king sat down on the potter's upturned basket, where his daughter had sat, and put his hands on his knees.
"I'm old," he said. "I've had two wives and buried one, and I've had four children, and two of them are daughters of whom the whole world is talking. My elder girl is married to the High King at Mycenae. My younger has eleven kings in my hall eating my cattle and waiting for me to choose." He looked at John. "These are dangerous times, craftsman. Helen's hand is wanted by many powerful men, and every one of them has an army. When I choose, ten of them will go home angry. If I choose badly, they'll come back with their armies. All of them." He paused. "It would be very unwise for anyone to come between them and what they want. Very unwise. For him. And for my daughter. And for Sparta."
"I understand, my lord."
"Do you?" Tyndareus stood up. He was a tall man, still. "I wonder. You move like a man who understands a great deal, and you look at my daughter like a man who's read the end of a story and doesn't like it."
John felt the cold go down his back.
The old king went to the gate. He stopped there, with his hand on the post.
"She's been going up to the shrine of Artemis," he said, without turning round. "Every morning, this last month. Alone. She doesn't go to pray. She goes to ask the old priestess questions." He was quiet for a moment. "Yesterday she asked whether there were men who could see what was going to happen. And whether, if they could, they were allowed to stop it."
He went out into the moonlight and shut the gate.
John sat at the bench for a long time with the needle in his fingers. Then he set it on its pin, and put the crystal lid on, and the needle swung, and wavered, and settled, pointing north, up the valley, at the mountains, and at the dark house on the hill where the lamps were still lit.