The king's physician set the shoulder in the potter's yard with his knee in John's ribs and a twist that made the world go white, and then bound the arm across his chest with linen, and gave him a cup of something brown and bitter, and told him that if he lifted anything heavier than a cup for a month he'd never lift anything again.
"And tonight?" said John.
"Tonight," said the physician, "you go to the king's hall, because the king said so." He was a small brown man with a bag of herbs and no illusions. "And you don't lift anything."
John went up into the hills to the cattle shed in the afternoon, and dug the bundle out of the straw, and unwrapped it.
He hadn't looked at it in two months. The black lacquer had gone dull with dust. One of the blue silk cords at the shoulder had frayed, and he'd given the spare ones to the old woman. He sat in the straw and looked at the armour for a long time. Then he took the old woman's hank of blue cord back from her, with her permission and a bronze knife that bent, and sat outside in the sun with it and re-laced the shoulder, one-handed, with his teeth.
He couldn't get the armour on by himself. The old woman's son helped. He was a goatherd of about twenty who had never in his life seen anything like it, and he did it in absolute silence, very carefully, plate by plate, cord by cord, as if dressing a god for a festival. When it was done he stood back and looked at John and didn't say anything at all, and then went and sat with his goats.
John hung the sword on his hip. He left his left arm bound under the armour, across his chest.
He took the mask out of its bag and held it.
Then he put it back.
* * *
The great hall of Tyndareus was a long room with a painted floor and a round hearth in the middle, four wooden columns round the hearth holding up the roof, and a hole in the roof for the smoke. Benches along the walls. At the far end, on a raised step, a throne of carved wood with a footstool, and on it the king.
It was full. John could hear it from the courtyard. The suitors, all eleven of them, with their companions. The king's men. Their wives. The priests from the shrines. Merchants. A man from Crete in a kilt with a wasp waist. People standing on the benches and along the walls and crowded in the doorway behind him, and the smoke from the hearth and the torches hanging under the roof in a blue haze.
The doors were open. He walked in.
The noise stopped.
It didn't fade. It stopped, all at once, as if someone had cut it with a knife. He walked down the painted floor between the benches with the hearth fire on his left, and the black lacquer of the armour took the firelight and threw it back, and the blue cords moved at his shoulders, and the plates of the skirt clicked together at every step. Musashi's armour. Musashi had worn it at sixteen at Sekigahara, in a battle with a hundred and sixty thousand men in it, and lived. John could feel it on him like a hand on his back.
People moved out of his way. Not because he asked them. Because they couldn't help it.
On the step, Tyndareus didn't move. On his right, Helen sat on a stool, in white, with gold in her hair, and her mouth had come slightly open. On his left stood Menelaus, in a clean tunic, with his face bruised, rubbing the back of his neck. Paris was further back, by one of the columns, half in the shadow, in his blue robe.
And on the bench nearest the throne, a short broad red-haired man with a clever face was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, watching, the way John had seen engineers watch a new machine. The one from the islands in the west. Ithaca.
John stopped at the foot of the step.
He knelt. Not the way Greeks knelt, on one knee, like a man asking for something. The way he'd knelt in Musashi's house every morning for two years: both knees, sitting back on his heels, his back straight, his good hand flat on his thigh. Seiza. Then he bowed, low, from the waist, until his forehead was nearly on the painted floor.
He stayed there for the length of a breath. Then he sat up.
"I am John," he said. "From a land beyond the farthest seas, where the sun comes up. I'm a warrior there, and other things. I didn't come to Sparta to conquer anyone, or to ask for anything. I came as a traveller. I've been in a great many places, and I've learned some things, and I'm willing to share them. That's all."
The hall was silent.
* * *
Tyndareus leaned forward. His hawk's face was quite still.
"You say you come from a land beyond the end of the world," he said. "And yet you speak our tongue. Not like a Phoenician, who sells us dye. Not like a Cretan." A murmur, from the man in the kilt. "Like a man of this valley. A little oddly. But like one of us. Two months ago the potter says you had ten words. How?"
"I learn quickly, my lord," said John. "I've had to. In my travels. It's one of the skills I've had the most use for."
That was true, at least. Lucca. Xenophon. Kiku's Italian and Musashi's silences. Cleopatra's seven languages, tried on him like keys in a lock on the first day.
"These clothes," said Helen.
Every head in the hall turned. She hadn't been asked to speak. She didn't seem to care.
"This weapon," she said. "I've never seen anything like them. No one in this hall has. Tell us about your homeland, John of the Far Seas."
He looked up at her. She was looking back at him without any expression at all, with her hands folded in her lap, as if she'd asked about the weather. Her eyes weren't asking about the weather.
"My homeland, lady," he said, "is a place of discipline. Where a warrior learns to fight the way a smith learns to forge, for years, every day, until his body knows what to do without being told. Where a man is judged by his skill and how he uses it, not by his strength. Where they say the best sword is the one that stays in its scabbard." He paused. "And where they make houses of paper, and bury their swords with their dead, and drink their tea very slowly."
Someone laughed, at the back. Then stopped.
Menelaus stepped forward.
"Fine words," he said. His voice was rough. He didn't sound angry, though. He sounded like a man who'd been thrown in the sand that morning and had decided to say exactly what he thought from now on. "But words are cheap, stranger. In Sparta a man is what he does."
"Yes, my lord," said John. "And I'm ready to show what I can do. Whatever trial you think fit."
Menelaus looked at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, almost against his will, he nodded.
* * *
It was Paris who broke it.
He came out from behind the column in a rush, as if he'd been holding himself there and couldn't any longer, pushing past the men on the bench, into the firelight. His face was flushed. His gold clinked.
"Enough," he said. "Enough of this. Can't you see? This man's a trickster. A charlatan from some market in Egypt, with a suit of painted armour and a fairground sword and a lot of tall stories about paper houses. And you're all sitting there with your mouths open like children at a puppet show." He turned to Tyndareus. "My lord king. He's beguiled your city. He's beguiled your daughter." He swung back to John. "Show us, then. If you're a warrior. Show us what that thing at your hip can do. Or admit you're a liar."
The hall went very quiet.
John stood up.
He did it slowly, the way you rise from seiza, without using his hands, one foot and then the other. He had one good arm. He had a shoulder that would tear again if he moved it wrong. He had no mask on. He had three counts, perhaps, if his body would give him three counts after the morning it had had.
He didn't need them.
He'd been taught the draw by Musashi on the beach at Kokura in the first spring, before the kata, before anything. A single movement. Right hand to the hilt, thumb on the guard, the sword coming out of the scabbard and round in one line, without stopping, without a breath between drawing and cutting. Musashi had made him do it ten thousand times with an oak sword before he was allowed to touch steel. Your body is a farmer's, he'd said. But a farmer can learn one thing very well.
His hand moved.
There was a sound like silk tearing. The blade came out of the black scabbard and round in a flat arc through the firelight, faster than anyone in that hall had ever seen a blade move. People said afterwards that they'd seen nothing at all, only a line of light. And it stopped.
It stopped a finger's breadth from Paris's throat. Absolutely still. The point just under the soft angle of his jaw, below the gold earring, where the great vein ran.
Paris froze. His eyes went very wide. He didn't move, didn't swallow, didn't breathe.
John held it there for the length of a heartbeat. He could feel the hall holding its breath with him. Then he turned his wrist and brought the sword back and slid it into the scabbard in one movement, without looking, and the guard clicked against the mouth of the scabbard, and the sound was very loud.
"There's nothing false in my skill, prince of Troy," he said quietly. "Or in why I've come."
Paris put his hand to his throat. There was nothing there. The blade hadn't touched him.
On the bench by the throne, the red-haired man from Ithaca let out a long low whistle through his teeth.
* * *
Tyndareus stood up.
"You've given us a great deal to think about, John of the Far Seas," he said, and his voice carried to the doorway without seeming to be raised. "For now you'll be my guest. In my house, not in a potter's yard. Tomorrow we'll talk about what you want, and what you can do for Sparta." He looked at Paris, who was still standing with his hand at his throat. "Sit down, son of Priam. You asked a question. You've had your answer."
Paris sat. He didn't look at anyone.
After that the hall broke like a dam. They came at John from all sides. The suitors, the king's men, the merchants, the priests, the man from Crete in his kilt, all talking at once, wanting to see the sword, to touch the armour, to know where the land of paper houses was and how far and how many ships it had. He answered as little as he could. He told them about the sea. He didn't tell them about anything else.
The man from Ithaca didn't come. He stayed on his bench by the throne, watching, with his elbows on his knees. When John caught his eye across the crowd, the man smiled, very slightly, and raised his cup an inch, as one engineer to another.
* * *
Helen got to him at last, near the doorway, when the crowd had thinned. She did it by walking straight through the middle of it, and men got out of her way without noticing they had.
"You must tell me everything," she said, very low. "Everything. I have so many questions I can't sleep."
"In time, my lady."
"Don't do that." Her eyes flashed. "Don't my lady me. You looked at me in the grove the first day as if you'd seen me before, and you've looked at me like that every day since. You've seen me somewhere. You know something about me. I want to know what."
He looked at her in the torchlight. At the gold in her hair, and the face from the wall in the wind.
"Not tonight," he said. "But I'll tell you. I promise."
She looked at him for a long time. Then she nodded, once, as Menelaus had.
"I'll hold you to that, John of the Far Seas," she said, and went.
* * *
They gave him a room in the king's house, on the east side of the great court, with a bed of carved wood and a window on the valley.
He took off the armour himself, slowly, with his teeth and one hand, because he didn't want anyone else to see what his shoulder looked like. Then he sat on the floor in seiza in the dark, the way Musashi sat, and tried to make his mind quiet.
It wouldn't go quiet.
He'd done it again. He'd come to a place he hadn't touched, where the Branches were clear as water, where he could see again. And in two months he'd made a kite and a lock and a boot and a box that knew the way home, and fought a prince, and drawn a sword in a king's hall at the throat of the man who would start the Trojan War.
And the Branches were already starting to blur.
He could feel it. Not much. Just at the edges. Like the first breath on a clean pane of glass.