After the wrestling the valley stopped leaving him alone.
People came to the potter's yard who didn't want anything mended. They stood in the gateway and looked at him, and when he looked back they asked for something, a pin, a buckle, a blessing, and went away with it and told their neighbours. Old women brought him sick goats. A man brought him a son with a club foot and asked him to make it straight, and John had to tell him he couldn't, and watched the man's face, and spent the rest of the day making the boy a boot with a wedge in it that let him walk without falling, and the man wept and kissed his hands and told everyone in the valley that the stranger had healed his son's foot.
Montu, he thought. Again. Already.
He hadn't changed anything yet. Not really. A kite, a lock, a boot, a horse. And still the people were starting to touch the walls.
* * *
Helen came on the fourth day after the wrestling, with Aithra, and said she'd come to see how her commission was getting on.
They both knew that wasn't why. He showed it to her anyway.
He'd finished it the night Tyndareus came. The little round gold box, the size of a big coin, with its lid of rock crystal, and inside it, on its bronze pin, the needle. It needed a chain. He'd been putting that off, because when it had a chain he'd have to give it to her.
He put it on the bench between them. "Don't touch it yet. Watch the needle."
She bent over it. The needle was pointing up the valley, at the mountains.
"Now turn round," he said. "Walk round the bench. Slowly."
She did. She walked all the way round the bench and back, watching the box over her shoulder, and the needle didn't follow her. It stayed where it was, pointing up the valley, quivering very slightly, while she went round it.
She came back and stood and stared at it.
"Pick it up," said John. "Turn it."
She picked it up in both hands. She turned it, slowly, in a full circle. Inside the crystal the gold box went round, and the needle stayed still, pointing north, as if it were nailed to the mountains.
"It's alive," she said.
"No. It's iron. Rubbed on a lodestone, the way you'd rub a cat's fur the wrong way. The world's a great lodestone. The iron wants to point along it." He'd tried to explain that to Cleopatra once, with cups. "Take it anywhere. On a ship at night, in a fog, in a country where you don't know the stars. It'll always point there." He nodded at the mountains. "North. And if you know where north is, you know where home is."
She held it in her two hands and looked at it for a long time without saying anything.
"You've been on ships," she said. "At night. In a fog. In countries where you don't know the stars."
"Yes."
"Where?"
He should have said something vague. He'd said something vague to everyone in the valley for two months. He looked at her face, bent over the box, and found that he didn't want to.
"Egypt," he said. "Further south than the cataracts. A country in the east, very far, at the end of the world, where they have wooden houses and paper walls and fight with curved swords. A city in Italy, by a river." He paused. "And a city in the north that you wouldn't believe in if I told you."
"Try me."
"It has carriages that move without horses. And a railway under the ground."
"What's a railway?"
He laughed. "A road made of iron, with a carriage on it that runs by fire. Under the ground, in tunnels. Full of people going to work at dawn, reading."
She was looking at him now, not the needle. "You're not lying," she said slowly. "I can always tell when men lie to me. Their faces go smooth, like oil on water. Yours doesn't. You're telling the truth, and it's mad."
"Yes."
"How do you learn all that? Where do you learn to move like you did in the sand? Where..."
The gateway banged open.
* * *
Menelaus came across the yard in three strides with two of his companions behind him and his face dark red, and Aithra squeaked and backed into the potter's kiln.
"So," he said. "This is where you come, Helen. Every time I ask where you are, they tell me the shrine. And I go to the shrine, and you're not there."
Helen put the gold box in her lap and closed her hand over it. "I came about a commission."
"You came about a commission four times." He didn't look at her. He was looking at John. "And you. Craftsman." He spat the word. "I challenge you. To a rematch. On the same ground, at dawn tomorrow. And this time you'll fight me. No dancing. No slipping out of holds like a greased pig. You'll fight me like a man, and the whole valley will see which of us is the better."
John raised his hands. "My lord, I meant no offence at the wrestling. If you thought I was mocking you..."
"Silence." Menelaus's voice filled the yard. "You made a fool of me. In front of Sparta. In front of her." He jerked his head at Helen without looking at her. "Don't tell me you didn't. I'm not stupid, whatever else I am. I felt it. You were holding back the whole time. You were being kind." He took a breath. "Meet me at dawn. Or be called a coward in every house in this valley before the sun goes down. And I'll see to it you never work in Sparta again."
He turned and went out. His companions went after him.
* * *
The yard was very quiet.
Helen let out a breath. She was white, he saw. Her knuckles were white round the gold box.
"You mustn't accept," she said.
"I don't think I have much choice."
"You do. You have every choice. Leave. Tonight. Take the road to the coast and get on a ship to anywhere." She stood up. "You don't understand Menelaus. He's not a bad man. He's a proud one. When his pride's hurt he stops being able to think. My father had to pull him off a man once at Mycenae, at a feast, because the man had laughed at the way he drove a chariot. He'd nearly killed him with his hands." She looked at John. "And you made him look like a child in front of the whole valley. Kindly. That's what he can't bear. If you'd thrown him on his back he'd have hated you and respected you. You pitied him."
"If I don't go, he'll hate me."
"If you do go he'll kill you."
He didn't answer. She stood looking at him, and then down at the box in her hand, and then back at him.
"If I leave," he said quietly, "what does the valley say? That the stranger ran. That Menelaus was right. That the man who could see things coming saw a beating coming and went." He shook his head. "And then he's the prince who frightened off the god. And he'll stand in your father's hall with that and be twice the size."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"You don't care about the valley," she said.
"No."
"Then who do you care about?"
He didn't answer that either. She looked at his face, and he had the feeling, as he had with Lisa on the first day, that she was seeing a great deal.
She put the gold box down on the bench, very carefully.
"Finish the chain," she said. "I'll come back for it." And she went.
* * *
He couldn't stay in the yard. He walked.
Out of the town, along the river in the dark, up the slope below the king's house, where the hill had been cut into terraces and a wall of huge rough stones ran round the top of it, holding up the great house and its courtyards. He walked along the foot of the wall with his hand on the stones. It was a habit, from Egypt. Touching walls. Letting the Branches come.
They came. Clear, bright, in that place he hadn't touched. The wall standing. The wall fallen. The house burning, once, very far off. And closer, much closer, the wrestling ground at dawn.
He didn't look at that one. He took his hand off the wall.
"A beautiful night for a walk."
Paris was sitting on a block of stone in the shadow of the wall above him, wrapped in a dark cloak, with the gold at his wrists covered. He'd been there for some time, John thought. He'd been waiting.
"One might almost forget," said Paris, "the storm that's coming over our nice little city."
"I fear I've walked into the middle of it, my lord."
"Walked into." Paris laughed. It was a pleasant laugh with nothing in it. He stood up and came down off the stone, lightly, a dancer's step. "Come now. A man of your talents. You knew exactly what you were doing. A kite. A horse. A box that knows the way home. The whole valley talking about you and the most beautiful woman in the world sitting on a basket in your yard four mornings out of seven." He stopped in front of John. He was shorter, John saw, close to. Younger than he'd seemed in the gateway. "So. Tell me. What are you really here for?"
"I'm a craftsman..."
"Don't." The word cracked. Then Paris smiled again, and it was back to plaster. "A craftsman who moves like a god and catches the eye of every woman in Greece. What's your game, stranger? Whose man are you? Agamemnon's? The Egyptians'? Some king in the east I don't know?" He leaned closer. "Because whatever it is, you should know this. Helen is meant for something greater than this valley. Greater than Menelaus and his brother's cattle. She'll be mine. My father has sent me with gifts for the king, but those are the gifts you give in daylight. I came for her. And through her, Troy will be greater than any city that's ever stood. Greater than Mycenae. Greater than Egypt." His breath smelled of wine. "Whatever you are. Stay out of my way."
He stepped back into the shadow of the wall, and was gone up the path towards the house.
John stood in the dark at the foot of the wall for a long time.
Troy will be greater than any city that's ever stood.
He knew how that story ended. A wooden horse and a burning city and a woman led home through the smoke by the man she'd left. Ten years of war. Every king in Greece. And all of it starting with a soft-voiced boy in a blue robe sitting on a stone at night saying I came for her.
He put his hand back on the wall.
No, he told himself. You came here by accident. You don't know if any of it's true. You're not going to look.
He looked.
He saw ships. A great many ships, black, drawn up on a beach under a city of high walls, and smoke going up from the city. He saw her, on a wall, in the wind, looking down at men in bronze over a plain gone gold with dry grass. The picture he'd seen in Florence when he first took Lisa's hand.
It was in there. It was one of the Branches. Not the only one. Not even the strongest, yet.
He took his hand away.
* * *
Aithra was waiting in the potter's yard when he got back, sitting on the upturned basket with her shawl round her, shivering.
"My lady sent me," she said. She'd clearly been told exactly what to say, and was saying it word for word, with her eyes shut. "She says: If you go to the ground in the morning, don't lose on purpose. Don't draw on purpose. I'll know."
She opened her eyes.
"And she says she's coming to watch."