The hundred were the worst men in Sparta, and Menelaus had picked them himself.
John understood that on the first morning, at the ford, when they mustered. Old men and boys. Two shepherds who'd never held a spear. A smith's apprentice with one eye. Men with debts, and men the king's captains had been glad to be rid of, and a handful of Menelaus's own companions, the good ones, standing a little apart with their arms folded and their faces saying we'll see.
"You asked for a hundred," said Menelaus. He was mounted, in his bronze, with his spear across his saddle. "Here's a hundred."
John looked at them for a long time.
Then he said, "Thank you, my lord," and meant it, a little, because if he'd been given the king's best and won, nobody would have learned anything.
* * *
He made Menelaus swear before they left.
Not in private. At the ford, in front of the hundred, with the river running brown behind them and half the valley watching from the bank. He'd thought about it all night. A force with two commanders is a force with none; he'd seen it at the Somme, in a wood called Mametz, where a brigadier and a colonel had argued over a map for an hour while their men lay in the open.
"In the hills," he said, loud, so the hundred could hear, "there's one voice. Mine. You're my second, my lord. You say so, now, here, so every man here hears it. Or we don't go."
Menelaus's face went dark.
For a long moment John thought he'd lost him. Then the big man swung down off his horse, and drew his sword, and held it up by the blade with the hilt towards the sky, the way Greeks swore oaths, and said in a loud flat voice to the river and the hundred and the valley:
"By Zeus and by the river, I'll obey the stranger in the hills until we come home. Every order. If I break it, let the river take me." He put the sword back in its scabbard and looked at John. "Satisfied?"
"Yes, my lord."
"Good. Because when we come home," said Menelaus, quite quietly, "I'll be your second in nothing."
* * *
It took them four days to find the raiders.
The hills to the north of the valley went up and up in long folds of grey rock and scrub and oak, with gorges between them full of the sound of water, and the villages were small and far apart and frightened. The fourth burned village they came to, on the second day, was still smoking. There were dead in the lanes. A woman sitting in a doorway with her hands in her lap who wouldn't speak.
John put his hand on the doorpost beside her.
He'd been wearing the mask since the first night, under his hood. It was the only way he could see far enough. Without it the Branches came clear but wide, everything at once, like light through a broken window; with it they came narrow and one at a time, and far. He hated that he needed it. He'd stopped pretending he didn't.
Men in wolfskins. Twenty, thirty, fifty. A long valley with a stream in it and a stand of black pines. A cave. Children. Thin children, crying.
And a giant with an axe.
He took his hand away.
"They're not raiders," he said.
Menelaus looked at him.
"They're starving." John looked up at the hills. "Up there, over the next ridge, there's no rain. Hasn't been for two years. Their flocks are dead. They've got their women and children in a cave in a valley full of pines, and they come down here to take grain, and they burn what they can't carry, because they want the villages too frightened to fight." He shook his head. "I don't think they're going to stop, my lord. I think they're going to do it until they're all dead, or we are."
"Then they'll be dead," said Menelaus.
John didn't answer that.
* * *
On the fourth afternoon he found the camp.
He did it on foot, alone, leaving the hundred in a gully below the ridge with Menelaus. He went up the last slope through the scrub on his belly the way he'd gone across no man's land on wiring parties, with the mask on, slowly, and lay among the rocks at the top and looked down.
The long valley. The stream. The black pines. Smoke from cooking fires, thin. Fifty men, perhaps more, in wolfskins and sheepskins, with spears and clubs and a few bronze swords, around a fire, arguing. Further up, by the mouth of a cave in the hillside, women and children.
And at the fire, standing, the giant.
He was bigger than any man John had ever seen. Bigger than Brennus and the Gaul together. Seven feet, perhaps, with a beard to his belt and a head of matted black hair, and an axe on his shoulder with a bronze head the size of a shield. He was talking, and the others were listening. Pointing down the valley, south. At a village John had passed that morning, on the other side of the ridge, with a shrine and a spring and nine houses.
Tonight, said the Branch, when John touched the rock under his hand. Tonight. When the moon goes down.
He went back down to the gully.
* * *
He divided them into three.
It was the only thing he knew. He'd seen it on a blackboard in a dugout at Albert, in chalk, drawn by a captain of the Royal Engineers who'd been a schoolmaster in Leeds and who'd been killed two days later. One to hold. One to close. One to strike.
Thirty to the village, under Menelaus's best companion, to get the people into the shrine and hold its wall. Thirty to the head of the long valley, behind the camp, to block the path the raiders would run by. Forty with him, for the camp.
"And me?" said Menelaus.
"With me."
Menelaus's jaw set. "You want me where you can watch me."
"I want you where I can see you," said John. "Because if the giant comes at you, I want to be there."
Menelaus looked at him a long time in the dusk.
"You think I can't take him."
"I think nobody can take him, my lord," said John. "Including me."
* * *
They went in when the moon went down.
The raiders were ready to go. That was the luck of it. They were on their feet, armed, round a fire built up high for courage, with the giant in the middle, and their backs to the dark slope where John and his forty came down out of the scrub without a sound.
He pushed.
With the mask, after two months without using it properly, the Hold came down like a door shutting on a quiet room. Easy. Too easy. He walked out of the dark into the firelight and the fire stood up stiff and orange and still, the sparks hanging over it like stars, and fifty men in wolfskins stood round it frozen in the middle of shouting.
He took the spear out of the hands of the first man he reached. Then a club. Then a sword. He put three men on their backs in the dust with the kata, the fourth movement and the sixth, one-handed, his left arm still bound across his chest under the cuirass. He had thirty counts. He used twenty. He came back to the edge of the dark, and let go.
Three men fell down at once round the fire. The weapons were in a heap at John's feet.
Then the forty came out of the dark behind him, shouting, and it was a fight.
* * *
It was ugly and short and very confused. That was what John told the king afterwards. It was a night fight in a valley full of black pines against men who had nothing to lose, and he didn't see most of it.
He saw Menelaus.
The big man went into the raiders like a boulder down a hillside. He was magnificent. He was exactly what the stories about him would be, in the other world, the one with the black ships: he killed two men in the first breath, and put a third into the fire, and roared, and the raiders in front of him broke and ran.
And he didn't see the man behind him with the spear.
John did. Through the mask, through the slits, through the Branch that came bright and hard, one voice down a wire: the spear in Menelaus's back, under the shoulder blade, where the cuirass ended.
He pushed. Ten counts. All he had left after the first. He ran across the firelight through the slow sparks and got his good hand on the spear shaft a hand's breadth from Menelaus's back, and turned it, and the spearhead went past the big man's ribs and into the dirt. He put the spearman down with his knee.
The Hold went.
Menelaus turned round and saw him there, with the spear in his hand and the spearman at his feet.
Neither of them said anything.
* * *
The giant came at him out of the dark.
He'd been at the cave, with the women. He came down the slope at a run, roaring, with the axe up over his head, and the raiders who'd been running stopped running and turned round, because he was their king.
John was out of Hold. Out of everything. His lip was wet, his good hand was cold to the wrist, his left arm was bound across his chest. He stood in the firelight and watched the giant come.
Don't move away, Musashi had said, on the beach, the first spring. A man with a big weapon wants room. Take the room away from him.
He moved towards him.
The axe came down. John wasn't there. He was inside it, under it, inside the giant's arms where the axe couldn't reach, so close he could smell him, wood smoke and sheep and old sweat. He had one hand. He used it the way the RAMC orderly at Corbie had once shown him, laughing, on a sergeant who was drunk, the place where the nerves ran under the collarbone and out into the arm. He drove two stiff fingers into it with all the weight of his body behind them. Then up, under the angle of the jaw, the place Musashi had used on drunks in inns. Then the side of his foot, hard, into the nerve inside the knee.
The giant's arms went dead. The axe fell out of his hands. His knees went.
He fell like a tree. Full length, on his face, in the dust by the fire, and lay there. He was awake. John could see his eyes, open, rolling, furious. He couldn't move his arms. He couldn't get his legs under him. He lay in the dirt making a sound in his throat like a bull.
The valley went very quiet.
* * *
"It's over," said John.
He said it in the old Greek, loud, so that the men in wolfskins at the edges of the firelight could hear. His voice came out of the mask strange and flat.
"Put down your spears. Nobody else needs to die tonight. I know why you came down out of the hills. I know about the rain. I know about the cave." He looked up the slope, where the women were, and the children. "Put down your spears and you'll be treated fairly, and your children will eat. Go on fighting, and you'll lie down like him." He nodded at the giant. "Or worse."
For a long time no one moved.
Then a man at the edge of the light, an old man with a white beard and a spear, looked at the giant in the dust, and at the bronze mask, and dropped the spear, and knelt.
The others went down one at a time after him, like trees in a wind.
* * *
They camped in the valley of the black pines that night, with the raiders' weapons in a heap under guard and the raiders' women and children brought down from the cave and fed out of the hundred's own sacks, because John told them to, and Menelaus didn't argue, because he'd sworn.
John sat at the edge of the camp, away from the fires, with the mask off at last, his good hand in a pot of warm water.
The hundred were singing. He could hear them. Old men and boys and shepherds and the smith's one-eyed apprentice, round the fire, drunk on the raiders' own wine and on being alive. They'd started a chant an hour ago, and it kept coming back round, louder every time.
Hail John! The stranger nobody beats! Hail John!
He didn't look up when Menelaus came and stood beside him.
The big man stood there for a long time without saying anything. Then he sat down on the rock beside John, heavily, and looked at the fires.
"You've won them," he said. "I can see why." He was quiet for a moment. "You were behind me. When the spear came. I didn't see it. I'd be in the dust with a hole in my back."
"You'd have done the same."
"No," said Menelaus. "I wouldn't. Not for you. Not this morning." He turned his head and looked at John. "So tell me truly, John of the Far Seas. What do you want with Sparta?" He paused. "With Helen?"
John thought about it. About the wall in the wind, and the ships on the beach, and a city burning.
"I want Sparta to be what it could be," he said. "As for Helen..." He looked at the fires. "She has to choose her own road. So do we all."
Menelaus didn't like that. John could see him not liking it. But he couldn't find anything wrong with it either.
He stood up. Then, slowly, he drew his sword again. He held it up by the blade, hilt to the sky, the way he had at the ford, and said, low, not to the hundred this time, just to John and the dark:
"I swore by the river to obey you in the hills. I'll swear this as well, by the same river. I'll never raise my hand against you. Or my voice, in the king's council, against what you counsel for Sparta. Not while I live." He sheathed the sword. "That's for the spear."
"My lord..."
"Don't thank me. I don't like you any better." Menelaus turned to go, then stopped. "You've earned something tonight, stranger. But don't mistake it. Sparta's loyalty is hard to win. And easy to lose."
"I'd expect nothing less, my lord," said John.
Menelaus walked away to the fires.
Behind him, by the heap of weapons, the giant had begun to be able to move his hands.