It wasn't Rome.
He knew that before the fever, before he'd even finished falling. He came out of the dark into an alley so narrow his armoured shoulders scraped both walls, and the walls were rough grey stone laid without mortar, and the air was hot and dry and smelled of goats and olive smoke and dung, and above the end of the alley, against a sky so blue it hurt, there were mountains. Big ones. Bare and grey and folded, with snow still on the tops in what felt like early summer.
There were no mountains like that at Rome.
He opened his hand.
The bronze disc lay on his palm, rough, green at the edges, with the octopus on it. Eight arms curling out from a round body, done with a few quick strokes in the mould by someone who'd liked octopuses. Not a denarius. Not Roman. Not anything he'd asked for.
He turned it over.
On the back, scratched into the old bronze very recently, with the point of something hard, in small neat capitals:
BRAKES.
He sat down in the alley in the dung, and the fever came up over him like the sea.
* * *
He was eleven days learning where he was.
The fever took four of them. He spent them in a cattle shed at the edge of a village of stone houses with flat roofs, where an old woman with no teeth fed him goat's milk and barley without asking anything, because he'd given her a hank of the spare blue silk cord Kaneshige had packed with the armour for repairs, which she thought were the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. He kept the rest of the armour wrapped in Moira's coat under the straw, and the sword, and the mask, and slept on them.
The other seven he spent listening.
The language was Greek. He'd known that from the first word. But it was a Greek he'd never heard, older than Xenophon by centuries, older than Homer: the endings wrong, the vowels long, words he knew from St Olave's sitting in the middle of sentences with sounds round them he'd never seen written. It was like hearing Chaucer read aloud by a Yorkshireman. On the first day he caught almost nothing. On the seventh he caught a name.
Tyndareus.
The king. In the big house on the hill above the river, a mile off, inside its walls of huge rough stones. The old woman said it the way people in Kokura had said Hosokawa: a fact of nature, like weather.
And the king had a daughter. Everybody in the valley talked about the daughter. She was seventeen, and she was the most beautiful girl in all the lands of the Achaeans, and every king and prince from Ithaca to Crete had sent gifts and was coming, or had come, to ask for her. The old woman said her name as if it were a charm.
Helen.
He sat in the cattle shed with the octopus disc in his hand and laughed until he coughed.
Sparta, he thought. Not even classical Sparta. Bronze Age. Menelaus. Agamemnon. Troy. He looked at the scratched word on the back of the disc. Brakes. "You've sent me back a thousand years before Rome was a village," he said aloud, in English, to the cows. "To a place that never happened. Well done."
He'd read the books. He knew how much of it the scholars thought was true, which wasn't much. He knew how it ended, in the stories. A ship, a prince, a war of ten years, a city burned.
And he could see.
That was the thing that made him stop laughing. He'd put his hand on the old woman's shoulder on the fifth day, to thank her, and the Branches had come. Clear. Bright. Like a window someone had washed. Her son coming back from the hills with a lamb. Her son not coming back. The village under snow. The valley full of chariots.
He'd forgotten what it was like. Five years in Egypt with the fog thickening every month until it was like putting his hand into wet wool, and here, in a place he hadn't touched, the future was as clear as water.
He sat in the straw and looked at his hand for a long time.
So this is what it does, he thought. Moira. She doesn't need to stop me. She just needs to put me somewhere clean, and wait.
* * *
He went down to the town on the twelfth day, in a brown wool tunic and a cloak the old woman's son had traded him for the little lacquered medicine box from the armour's kit, with the mask in a leather bag on his belt and the sword left behind in the straw.
Sparta wasn't a city. Not yet. It was a scatter of villages along the river under the mountains, with the king's house on its hill, and between the villages, by the ford, an open space of beaten earth where people met to trade. A market. He found a room behind a potter's yard near it, and a workbench in the yard, for a promise of a year's mended tools.
He made things.
He'd always been good with his hands. Hartley had kept him for it, in the end, more than for his physics. And he'd spent two years in a forge at Kokura watching Kaneshige, and five in Egypt with Ezra and the shipwrights and the bronze-founders. He could make a hinge that didn't stick. He could make a bow-drill that went through bronze. He could make a lock with a key, which nobody in the valley had ever seen, and a pair of tongs that held without slipping, and a spindle-whorl that spun true.
And he had the Turn. A little of it, in his fingers. Enough to take the brittleness out of a cast bronze blade so that it bent instead of snapping. Enough to season a green ash shaft in an afternoon, the way a year in a dry barn would season it. He did it quietly, with his back to the yard. It cost him cold fingers and his supper. Nobody in Sparta had ever seen a bronze knife that bent and came back straight.
In a month he had more work than he could do.
* * *
He made the kite for the potter's children because they'd been kind to him.
It was nothing. Two sticks of split cane, a diamond of linen, a tail of rag, a long string of flax. He'd made them for Tom when they were boys, on Parliament Hill, out of brown paper and garden canes. He made this one in an evening and gave it to the potter's three in the morning and showed them how to run with it into the wind off the mountains.
The whole valley came out to watch it go up.
They'd never seen anything like it. A thing that flew, on a string, like a bird on a leash. The children ran with it across the market ground screaming, and the kite went up and up in the wind over the river, the rag tail streaming. Old men stopped with their hands on their sticks. A woman dropped a jar.
At the third day's flying the wind dropped suddenly and the kite came down into the top of a plane tree by the ford, fifty feet up, and stuck.
The youngest of the potter's children began to cry.
John looked at the tree.
He'd learned to climb from Musashi, who climbed everything, walls, cliffs, the roof of the borrowed house, because he said a man who couldn't go up was a man who'd die at the bottom of something. The bark was smooth and grey. The first branch was twenty feet up.
He went up it the way Musashi went up walls. Hands and feet on knots and ridges you couldn't see from the ground, his weight always moving, never stopping long enough to fall. Halfway, his foot slipped on a smooth patch and he pushed, the Hold, without the mask, and it gave him two counts of slow and a stab of cold behind the eyes and a wet lip, and in those two counts he found the next handhold.
He brought the kite down in his teeth.
When he dropped the last ten feet to the ground, the children were staring at him with their mouths open, and so was half the market.
He wiped his lip on his sleeve before anyone could see the blood.
* * *
He didn't see the litter. He only heard later that it had passed. Four bearers and a covered chair with curtains of dyed wool, going along the road by the ford from the king's house to the shrine of Artemis, and a hand that had drawn back the curtain, and stayed there, holding it back, until the litter was out of sight.
* * *
The merchant's stall was in the second week of the summer.
A cloth merchant, from the coast, with his goods piled on a stall of planks on trestles, too much on it, bolts of dyed wool stacked six high and jars of oil underneath, and one of the trestles had a split in it John could see from across the market ground. He watched it widen. He could see, with his eyes, without the Branches, exactly what was going to happen: the trestle going, the planks tipping, the oil jars smashing, the wool in the oil and the dust, a season's stock.
He walked over and took the weight off the bad trestle with his shoulder and began unloading the top of the stall onto the ground, fast, two bolts at a time, the way he'd unloaded ammunition boxes off lorries at Albert. It took perhaps a minute. By the time the merchant had stopped shouting at him and understood what he was doing, the stall was half empty and the trestle had cracked right through and was lying on the ground, and nothing else was.
"By the gods," said the merchant. He looked at John, and at the broken trestle, and at his goods, safe. "I've never seen a man move so quick."
"You'd split the leg," said John. In his new, bad, old Greek. "Get a better one. Ash."
He walked away before the man could ask him his name.
On the balcony of a house above the market, where the wives of the king's men sat in the shade in the afternoons, a girl in a white dress with her hair bound up in a band of gold leaned on the rail and watched him go.
* * *
It was the wooden horse that she saw properly.
He'd gone up into the hills above the river to a grove of old olive trees, one afternoon, because the potter's yard was hot and full of people and he wanted to be somewhere quiet. He sat with his back to a tree and a knife and a block of olive wood, and whittled, the way he'd whittled in dugouts, to keep his hands busy while his head was somewhere else.
His head was in Alexandria. In a gallery of eighty-one portraits with the white streak. In a palace bedroom two thousand years after that, and a woman with her hand on her stomach.
His hands made a horse. He didn't decide to. They did it the way his feet did the kata. A small rearing horse, the size of his palm, mouth open, the way Leonardo had made his clay one for the Anghiari battle, all those years ago.
When he looked up there was a little girl of about five standing in front of him, barefoot, with a goat on a string, staring at it.
He held it out.
She took it in both hands, very carefully, as if it might bite, and looked at it, and looked at him. Then she ran off down the hill with the horse in one hand and the goat towing behind on its string, shrieking to someone below.
He laughed. He hadn't laughed since the cattle shed.
When he stood up and brushed the shavings off his tunic, there was someone at the edge of the grove.
A girl. Young, seventeen, in a dress of white wool with a girdle of gold, with a single maid behind her and no guards, as if she'd slipped them. She was tall, nearly his height. Fair-haired, the colour of wheat straw, bound up in a gold band. And her face.
He'd seen it before. On a wall, in the wind, looking down at men in bronze over a plain gone gold with dry grass. In Florence, when he first took Lisa's hand.
She'd been watching him for some time, he thought. She didn't look away when he saw her. She looked at him with her chin up, steady, curious, the way you'd look at a hawk that had landed in your garden. Not shy. Not anything like shy. As if she'd decided to see what he would do.
He bowed, slightly. The way a craftsman bows to a lady of the king's house.
Then he turned and walked down out of the grove by the other path, and didn't look back, because he could feel the Branches waiting in the air between them like heat over a road, clear and bright as water, and he didn't want to see a single one.