On the first morning three hundred came to the great court. On the fifth, eleven hundred, and they had to move it down to the wrestling ground by the river.
He'd thought Tyndareus would send the girls home. Tyndareus came down on the third morning, stood under the plane trees with his hands behind his back, watched a hundred and forty girls between ten and twenty run the length of the river bank and back with sacks of sand on their shoulders, and went away again without a word. The next morning there were two hundred.
"He says Spartan girls have always run," Helen told John, at the river, out of breath, with her braid coming down and sand on her knees. "At the festivals. For Artemis. He says it's an old custom and he doesn't see why it shouldn't be a new one." She wiped her face. "He also says that if you make a girl run every morning, she's too tired to make trouble in the afternoon. He's wrong about that."
John had learned something in Egypt, at the Gymnasium. He didn't do it the same way twice.
There were no guns here, and there wouldn't be. He'd decided that in the valley of the black pines, with the rag doll from the third cataract in his head. No powder. No balloons. No bronze tubes. He'd teach them to run, and to carry, and to fall, and to stand in a line. He'd teach them the first three movements of the kata, the simple ones, until a thousand people on a river bank could do them together without being told. He'd teach the boys and the girls to swim the Eurotas in spate. He'd teach them to read a hillside the way he'd read it on his belly in no man's land: where the dead ground was, where a man could hide, where water would be.
And he'd feed them.
The king's steward had looked at him the way the queen's steward had looked at him in Alexandria. John had been ready for it. He'd had the answer worked out by the first night. Ask the king. The king had sighed, and said yes.
* * *
Helen watched it all from the edge of the river on the first day, and from the middle of it by the second.
He'd stopped trying to make her stand on a balcony. She came at dawn with the other girls in a short tunic, barefoot, and ran with them, and carried sand with them, and fell down, and got up. She did the first three movements of the kata better than anyone on the river bank except the smith's one-eyed apprentice, who'd turned out to have a gift for it. She did them with her jaw set and her face red.
Menelaus watched too. From the bank, every morning, with his arms folded and his face like a closed door. He'd sworn. He didn't say a word against any of it, in the council or out of it. He just watched.
On the fourth morning, when the girls were swimming the river, he came down to the water's edge where John stood and said, without looking at him, "My brother at Mycenae would have you killed for this."
"I know, my lord."
"Not for the girls. For the rest of it. He'll hear. He hears everything." Menelaus watched Helen go under in the brown water and come up again, laughing, gasping, her hair plastered to her face. "A Sparta where every boy and girl can fight. Where every man's worth ten. My brother's the High King. He'll ask himself why."
"What will you tell him?"
Menelaus was quiet for a long time.
"That I swore an oath," he said. And went back up the bank.
* * *
The old men came on the sixth day. Four of them, the elders of the king's council, in their good cloaks, very grave.
"Your ways are... unusual," said the eldest. He chose the word with care, like a man choosing a stone to step on in a stream. "Some of the people are afraid. They say you mean to change everything Sparta is. The way we fight. The way we farm. The way our daughters behave." He looked at the girls on the river bank. "The way we think."
"Things change, sir," said John. "Whether you want them to or not. The only question is whether you change them yourselves or let them change you." He looked at the old man. "I'm only trying to give Sparta a better chance at the first."
The old man looked at him for a long time. "You speak like a man who's seen the second," he said.
John didn't answer that.
* * *
Odysseus took him to Gytheion on the ninth day.
It was the port of the valley, a day's ride south, a little town on a bay under a headland with fishing boats drawn up on the shingle and the king's twelve warships in a row in the shallows. Odysseus walked along the row of ships the way a farmer walks along a row of cattle, slapping their sides.
"They're good ships," he said. "Best in the Peloponnese, after Mycenae's. They'll carry fifty men to Crete in two days if the wind's right. They won't carry them back if it isn't." He looked at John. "I watched you drawing in the dust by the river. Hulls. With a bit at the back like a door on a hinge. I'm from an island, John of the Far Seas. I know what that is."
"A rudder."
"A rudder." Odysseus tasted the word. "Show me."
So John drew it in the wet sand at the water's edge with a stick, the way he'd drawn it for the shipwrights of Alexandria. The long hull, a little deeper, a keel. The hinged stern rudder. A better sail. Odysseus crouched beside him and watched and asked short sharp questions that went straight to the joints of it, like Lisa, like Cleopatra, and by the end of the afternoon the king's shipwrights were crouched there too, arguing.
"You know," said Odysseus, on the ride back, in the dark, "what a ship like that does? It doesn't only go to Crete and back. It goes anywhere. Against the wind. In a storm." He was quiet for a while. "It goes to Troy."
John looked at him.
"I'm not a fool," said Odysseus mildly. "Neither are you. I can see you thinking about Troy every time that boy in the blue robe opens his mouth." He grinned in the dark. "Don't worry. I'm not going to tell anyone. I'd rather know what you know than have anyone else know it."
* * *
The forge was the last thing, and the one he'd argued himself into.
No guns, no powder. He'd kept to that. But armour wasn't a gun. Armour kept a boy of seventeen alive in a line. There was a smith by the ford, the one with the lodestone, called Agenor, and Agenor made bronze the way his father had, by eye: copper and whatever tin the traders brought, poured when it looked right. Some of his cuirasses were good. Some split like a pot the first time an axe found them. And in the back of his yard there was a lump of something he'd been given by a trader from the north. Black and heavy and pitted. Iron. Bloomery iron, very bad, full of slag. Nobody in the Peloponnese knew what to do with it. It was a curiosity.
John knew what to do with both.
For three weeks he'd been in Agenor's yard every night after the school closed. Weighing the tin on a balance he'd made himself, one part in ten, not one in six or one in fifteen. Hammering the cooled plates cold, so the bronze hardened under the hammer instead of staying soft as a cooking pan. And the iron, a little at a time: Turned clean of its slag between his palms, which cost him heat he felt in his teeth, then folded and hammered the way Kaneshige folded steel for Musashi's swords, into rivets and a rim for the edge of a shield that a bronze blade would notch itself on. By the twelfth night there was a breastplate on the anvil that had taken six blows from Agenor's best axe and shown six bright scratches. Sparta would have armour like nothing in Greece. Then blades. Five hundred years before anyone else.
Stones in the water. He knew. He kept hammering.
He was still at it when Helen came into the yard.
* * *
She came alone, at night, with a lamp, the way Lisa had come to the Sala del Papa in the snow. She stopped in the gateway and looked at him, at the forge, at the bright plate on the anvil and the hammer in his hand.
"You never stop," she said softly. "Do you? Sometimes I wonder if there's anything you can't do."
"A great many things." He put the hammer down on the anvil. "Most of the things worth doing."
She came in. She sat down on Agenor's bench by the forge with the lamp on her knee, and looked at him in the red light.
"Teach me," she said. "You keep saying you will. You teach me to run, and to fall, and the three movements. You teach the whole valley that. I don't want what you teach the valley." She leaned forward. "I want to know what you know."
The forge ticked. Outside, a dog barked, far off.
He didn't answer. He didn't know how. The air in the yard was very close and very warm, and she was looking at him in the red light from the forge with her chin up, and he could feel the Branches waiting between them like heat over a road.
The gate banged open.
* * *
Paris was drunk. Not very drunk. Enough. He stood in the gateway with his blue robe crooked and his oiled ringlets coming loose and a cup still in his hand, and his face was white and blotched red, and he looked at the two of them by the forge.
"So this is where you go," he said. His voice was too loud. "Helen. Daughter of Tyndareus. In a smith's yard. At night. With this... foreigner."
John stood up and put himself between them.
"You forget yourself, prince," he said quietly. "That isn't how you speak to a lady of Sparta."
"And you forget your place." Paris threw the cup away. It broke on the stones. "You've charmed your way into the old man's house and onto his council and into his daughter's... into his daughter's head, but you're nothing. A nobody. A juggler with a fancy sword." He came into the yard. "She's meant for something greater than anything you could give her. She's meant for Troy."
His hand went to his sword.
John didn't Hold. He didn't need to. Paris was drunk and slow, and John had been taught by the best fighter in Japan, and he closed the distance in two steps and put his good hand on Paris's wrist, on the hilt, before the sword had cleared the scabbard by an inch.
He held it there.
Paris pulled. He wrenched. He was young and quite strong and very angry. The hand on his wrist didn't move. It held his sword in its scabbard as if it had been nailed there.
"I think you should go to bed, my lord," said John, softly. "Before you do something that can't be undone."
For a long moment Paris strained against him, his face very close, his breath sour with wine. Then he made a sound in his throat and tore his hand away, and stumbled back, and stood in the middle of the yard with his chest heaving.
He looked at Helen. Not at John. At her.
Then he turned and went out of the gate into the dark.
* * *
Helen let out a long breath. She hadn't moved from the bench.
"Thank you," she said. "But I'm afraid that's only the start. Paris won't give up. Nor will Menelaus. He'll keep his oath. He'll keep it until it breaks him."
"I know."
"And what about you?"
He looked at her in the red light.
"You're not a prize, Helen," he said. "Not Paris's. Not Menelaus's. Not mine. Whatever happens, it's yours. You choose it."
She looked at him for a long time. Then she stood up, and as she passed him on her way to the gate her fingers touched his arm, very lightly, just for a moment, and were gone.
* * *
Tyndareus heard by morning. Everyone in the valley heard by morning.
A guest of the house, drunk, drawing a sword on another guest of the house, under the king's roof, with the king's daughter in the room. The old men of the council came to the king before breakfast. By noon it was done.
Paris left for Gytheion in the afternoon, with his companions and his gifts, and an escort of the king's men to see him onto his ship. He went with honour, because he was a king's son and a guest, and Tyndareus was careful. He went at once.
John watched him go from the terrace below the king's house. The little column of horses going down the valley road towards the sea, with the blue robe at the front.
At the ford, Paris turned in his saddle and looked back. Up the hill. At the house, and the terraces, and the figure on the terrace.
He was too far away for John to see his face.
That evening a fisherman from Gytheion came up the valley with news for the king. The Trojan prince had sailed at sunset, he said. He'd stood in the stern of his ship as it went out past the headland and shouted something back at the shore, at the king's men on the shingle, that the fisherman had heard quite clearly over the water.
Tell the old man I'll be back. With my father's word on it. And more gold than Sparta's ever seen.