He didn't sleep. He did the kata instead.
He did it in the potter's yard in the dark, with nothing in his hands, all nine movements, slowly, then at speed, then slowly again, the way he'd done it under the cherry tree in Kokura the morning he left. His shoulder screamed on the third movement every time. He did it anyway. Around the fiftieth time, the screaming went somewhere he couldn't hear it. Around the hundredth the sky went grey over the mountains.
He washed in the potter's trough and put on a clean tunic and went down to the river.
* * *
The whole valley was there.
They'd been there since before light. They stood under the plane trees round the wrestling ground and on the shrine steps and the roofs, and along the river bank, and in the branches of the trees, children mostly, like birds. On a platform of planks at the edge of the ground, raised on trestles so he could see over the heads, old Tyndareus sat in a carved chair with his hands on his knees and his hawk's face showing nothing.
Helen was below the platform, in front of the crowd, standing. Not on a roof. Not on a balcony. On the sand at the edge of the ring, where everyone could see her. She was very pale.
Paris was a little behind her, in his blue robe. He was watching John the way a man watches a dog he thinks might bite.
And Menelaus was in the middle of the ring, oiled, waiting.
He'd changed. John saw it as he walked out onto the sand. The red had gone out of the big man's face. He wasn't angry any more, or not in the way he'd been in the yard. He was calm and set and quiet, a soldier before a battle.
"So the craftsman comes," said Menelaus. Not loud. "Are you ready to fight like a man today, stranger? Or will you dance?"
"I'm here because you asked me, my lord," said John. "Let's settle it honestly."
Menelaus looked at him for a moment. Then he nodded, once, as if that were an answer he could respect.
* * *
He didn't dance.
He'd thought about it all night, doing the kata. Helen's message. Don't lose on purpose. Don't draw on purpose. I'll know. Menelaus in the yard, saying you pitied me. He'd decided somewhere around the seventieth time through the nine movements that there was only one thing he could do this morning that wouldn't make everything worse, and it was to fight.
So when Menelaus came, he didn't step aside. He met him.
It was like being hit by a door. Menelaus was three stone heavier and a lifetime stronger, and he came in low and hard and got his arms round John's waist and drove, and John went back three paces across the sand with his heels ploughing furrows. The crowd roared. John got his weight down, his good arm over the big man's back, and stopped him. Just. They stood locked in the middle of the ring, chest to chest, straining, the oil on Menelaus's shoulders slick under John's cheek, and neither of them moved.
Then John turned his hip.
Not the slip from the first match. A throw. A real one, one Musashi had used on him a thousand times, hip into thigh and his good arm pulling across, and Menelaus's own drive taking him up and over. Menelaus went over John's hip in a great arc and came down on his back in the sand with a sound like a sack of grain dropped off a cart.
He was up before John could follow. Of course he was. He'd been thrown before, by better men than any in Sparta, at Mycenae, at the games. He came back in, and this time he was ready for the hip, and he blocked it, and caught John's bad arm, and twisted.
John felt the shoulder go.
Not all at once. A long hot tear, deep, the thing he'd felt starting on the horse finishing now under Menelaus's hands. The pain went white across his eyes. He heard himself make a sound.
The crowd heard it too.
Push, said everything in him. Three counts. Just enough to get it free.
He didn't. If he Held now, he'd win with it, and Helen would know, and Menelaus would feel it, the impossible thing, the hand that was somewhere before it got there. And it would be the first match over again, only worse.
He let the arm go dead instead, the way he had out of the lock from behind. Went with the twist, not against it. Rolled under it, over his own bad shoulder, the pain like a hot iron in the joint, and came up on one knee on the far side with his arm hanging and Menelaus still holding the wrist, surprised, off balance, leaning.
John hooked the big man's ankle with his own foot and pulled.
* * *
After that it went on.
He never remembered all of it. Afterwards, people in the valley told it to him, and none of them told it the same way. Some of them said it was as long as a morning. Some said it was quick. They said that the stranger fought one-handed for most of it, with his left arm hanging, and that you could see on his face what it cost him every time Menelaus touched it. They said the stranger fought in a way no one in Greece had ever seen, with his hips and his feet more than his arms, and that every time Menelaus caught him he seemed to melt out of the hold and turn up somewhere else, and that it wasn't like the first time. This time you could see him doing it. This time it was a man.
They said that Menelaus was magnificent. That was the part they agreed about. He was strong as a bull and he never stopped coming, and twice he had the stranger on his back in the sand with all his weight on him, and twice the stranger got out, once by heaving his hips up so hard that Menelaus went over his head, and once, nobody quite saw how.
Helen didn't move the whole time. She stood at the edge of the sand with her hands knotted together in front of her and watched, and the people standing near her said afterwards that she never once looked away, and never once made a sound, and that her lips were moving.
Paris watched her watch. Nobody noticed that. He did it from just behind her shoulder, with his face very still, for the whole of the match.
* * *
It ended when the sun cleared the plane trees.
They were both finished. Menelaus's chest was heaving and his legs were shaking. John couldn't see properly out of his left eye, where an elbow had caught it, and his shoulder had gone past pain into something worse, a cold, numb heaviness, as if his arm belonged to someone else. They came together in the middle of the ring for what they both knew would be the last time.
Menelaus reached for the bad arm. Of course he did. He'd learned.
John let him have it.
He let the big man take the dead arm in both hands and pull, and he went with the pull, all the way, faster than Menelaus expected, into him, past him. And as he went past, he put his good hand flat on the back of Menelaus's neck and swept the big man's feet out from under him with the side of his own foot, the eighth movement of the kata, the one Musashi had done to him every morning for a year before he learned to stop it.
Menelaus went down on his face in the sand.
John went down on top of him, his knee in the small of the big man's back and his good hand on the back of his neck, and held him there.
Menelaus heaved. Once. Twice. John held him. He didn't know how. He had nothing left at all.
Then the big man went still under him. His face was in the sand. John felt him breathe out, long, and go limp.
The valley was absolutely silent.
John let go at once. He got up. It took two tries. He stood over Menelaus, swaying, with his left arm hanging and blood running down his face from his eyebrow, and held his good hand out.
Menelaus rolled over and looked up at it.
For a long moment, nobody breathed.
Then the son of Atreus reached up and took John's forearm in his own, the way warriors take each other's arms in Greece, and John pulled, and Menelaus came up off the sand.
They stood holding each other's arms in the middle of the ring.
"You fought well, my lord," said John. His voice was a croak. "It was an honour."
"You," said Menelaus, breathing hard, "are no craftsman." He didn't let go of the arm. He was looking at John's face, the eyebrow, the hanging shoulder. "No craftsman fights like that. No man in Greece fights like that. You took that arm off yourself rather than..." He stopped. "Rather than what? What was it you weren't doing? I could feel it. The whole time. Like a man with his hand on a sword he won't draw." He leaned closer. "Who are you really, stranger?"
John didn't have an answer he could give him.
He didn't have to give one.
* * *
Tyndareus had come down from his platform. The crowd parted for him like water round a rock. He walked out across the sand, a tall stooped old man in a plain cloak, and stopped in front of the two of them, and looked from one to the other.
"Yes," said the old king. "I think it's time we all found out who our guest is." His eyes went to John's face and stayed there. "You'll come to my hall, craftsman. Tonight, when your arm's been seen to. My own physician will set it. And then you'll stand in front of my house and the kings of Greece and tell us." He paused. "And don't come as a craftsman. I've had enough of the craftsman. Come as whatever it is you really are."
He turned and went back across the sand. Menelaus went after him, slowly, without looking back, rubbing the back of his neck.
John stood alone in the middle of the ring.
The crowd had begun to move and talk, all at once, a great rising noise like a flock of birds getting up. Across it, through it, at the edge of the sand, he could see Helen.
She hadn't moved. She was looking at him. Not with relief, and not with admiration, though there was some of both in it. With something hungrier than that. The look of a person who has been shown a door in a wall she'd thought was solid, and is already wondering what's on the other side, and how to get it open.
Paris, behind her, was looking at John too.
John turned away from both of them and walked off the sand, holding his arm. The king's physician met him at the edge of the ring, an old man with a bag. John let him lead him away.
Come as whatever it is you really are.
He thought about the bundle wrapped in Moira's coat in the straw of a cattle shed in the hills. Black lacquer and blue cord. A sword in a plain black scabbard. And the leather bag on his belt, with a bronze mask beaten out of a bell inside it.
He hadn't worn any of it in two months. He'd thought he might never wear it again.
Well, he thought. He asked.