They came down out of the hills on the seventh day, and the valley came out to meet them.
It had heard. Of course it had. A shepherd had run ahead from the village with the shrine and the spring, and by the time the hundred came down the last slope to the river there were people all along the road, and on the walls of the terraces, and on the roofs of the houses by the ford. They threw flowers. Wild ones, poppies and thyme and the yellow broom off the hillsides, whatever they could pick. Children ran beside the column screaming. Women held up babies to see.
The hundred marched in the middle of it with their heads up. Old men and boys and shepherds and debtors and the smith's one-eyed apprentice, who'd killed a man with a hammer in the valley of the black pines and been sick afterwards and then sung louder than anyone. They'd lost four. They'd brought them home on litters of spears.
Behind them came the raiders. Sixty men, unarmed, with their hands untied, because John had untied them on the second day. Their women and children walking with them. And Orsilochos, the giant, who could walk now, but slowly, and looked at nothing.
The crowd didn't know what to make of that. It went quiet as the raiders passed, and then loud again.
John rode at the front, with Menelaus. He'd taken the mask off at the ford. He wore the bronze cuirass the king's smith had made him, over his tunic, with Musashi's sword at his hip and his arm still bound under it, and he sat the horse badly, like a sack of flour, and the horse knew it.
The flowers landed on him anyway.
* * *
Tyndareus was waiting on the steps of the great hall, with Helen at his side, and the court behind them.
John dismounted. It took him two tries. He went up the steps.
"Hail, John of the Far Seas," said the old king, loud, for the courtyard. "Sparta owes you a debt. You've cleared our northern border and brought our men home, and proved what you are beyond any man's doubt." He held out his arm, warrior to warrior, and John took it.
"The honour was mine, my lord. Your men fought bravely. All I did was point."
"You're too modest," said Helen.
She said it clearly, so the courtyard could hear. She was in white again, with gold, and she was looking at him the way she'd looked at him on the wrestling ground: a person looking at a door in a wall. "The soldiers are saying you fought like Heracles come back. With one arm."
"Stories grow in the telling, lady," said John. "I'm a man."
"A man like no other," said Helen.
The courtyard heard that too. John saw Paris, on the edge of the court in his blue robe, stiffen. He saw Menelaus, coming up the steps behind him, hear it, and stop, and his face do something complicated and then go still. Menelaus had sworn by the river. He was keeping it. John could see what it was costing him.
"Come," said Tyndareus. He'd seen all of it too. He saw everything. "Inside. There's a feast. And there's a great deal to talk about."
* * *
It was the biggest feast the hall had seen since the suitors started coming. Three oxen, roasted whole on spits over the round hearth. Wine from the king's own vineyards in jars as tall as a child. The suitors and their companions on the benches, all eleven of them, and the king's men, and the hundred, every one, at the king's own orders, even the debtors, even the smith's apprentice, at benches of their own along the walls, very clean and very uncomfortable.
John sat at the high table at the king's right hand. Helen sat on his other side.
He knew what that meant. Everyone in the hall knew what it meant. He saw the suitors look at it and then look at each other.
"I was afraid for you," Helen said, low, when the bard had started singing and no one could hear. She didn't look at him. She was watching the bard. "When the shepherd came running with the news, I thought he'd come to say you were dead. The raiders in those hills are known for being cruel."
"They weren't cruel," said John. "They were hungry."
She turned her head and looked at him.
"Tell me," she said. "Not the fight. I've heard the fight eleven times today. Tell me about the hungry ones."
So he told her. The valley of the black pines, the cave, the women, the thin children. The rain that hadn't come for two years up in the hills. Orsilochos, who'd been their chief because he was the biggest, and who'd burned four villages because he couldn't think of anything else to do.
"What will my father do with them?" said Helen.
"I'm going to ask him to give them the land of the four villages they burned," said John. "The people there are dead or gone. The land's good. There's water. If they've got fields, they won't need to raid." He looked at the king, who was talking to one of his captains. "I don't know if he'll do it."
"He'll do it," said Helen, "if I ask him as well." She considered. "And I'll ask him."
* * *
Later, when the oxen were bones and the wine had gone round four times and the bard had sung the Battle of the Hundred twice, each time with more men in it, one of the king's captains stood up at the end of a bench, a grey veteran with a scar through his beard, and raised his cup.
"Tell us, stranger," he said, loud, over the noise. "How would you make Sparta's defences stronger? Since you know so much."
The hall quieted.
John thought about it.
He thought about Egypt. About the guns on the beach, and the boy king's barge on its side in the Nile because the water lifts had sucked the canals dry. About the rag doll on the ridge. About eleven thousand water lifts and a city of glass two thousand years later, with a riot in it over the price of bread. Stones in the water.
He thought about the Branches here, clear as a washed window, and how in two months they'd already begun to blur at the edges.
He could tell them about the phalanx. About iron. About the stirrup and the crossbow and the Roman legion's way of fighting in maniples. About gunpowder, God help him. They'd listen. They'd do it.
"Sparta's strength isn't in its spears," he said. "It's in its people." He looked along the benches at the hundred. "I'd train them. Not just the king's men. Everyone. Every boy, every girl. Run them. Make them strong. Teach them to think on their feet, and to read a country, and to talk to strangers. Make every one of them worth ten of anyone else's." He paused. "And I'd make sure they eat."
The hall began to argue at once. Some of the old men were nodding. Others weren't. Training girls? A man from Crete laughed, and was told to shut up.
Helen was looking at him. She said, under the noise, "You didn't say what you were thinking."
"No."
"What were you thinking?"
"About a place I made strong once," said John. "And what it cost."
* * *
He watched Paris for the rest of the evening without seeming to.
The prince of Troy had come to the high table after the bard, uninvited, with a cup in his hand and his best smile, and sat down on Helen's far side on a stool a servant brought him, and talked to her. He was charming. He was very good at it. He told her about Troy: the walls, the towers, the horses, the great city on its hill above the plain by the sea where the ships came in from every corner of the world. He told her about the palace of his father Priam, with fifty rooms of polished stone. He told her about the gold of the east.
Helen listened politely. Now and then she laughed.
Her eyes kept coming back across the table to John.
* * *
Near midnight, as the fires burned down and the benches emptied and the hundred went off in a singing crowd to sleep in the stables, Tyndareus put a hand on John's good arm and drew him into the shadow of one of the four columns.
"You've made quite an impression, my friend," said the old king. "On my men. On my people." He looked at the high table, where Helen was standing now, saying goodnight to her mother. "On my house."
"My lord."
"With great favour comes great envy. You know that. You're not a fool." Tyndareus's voice was very low. "Be on your guard. Not everyone in Sparta is glad to see a foreigner rise so fast. And not everyone at my table tonight was Spartan."
"I understand, my lord. I'm always ready for... difficulties."
"Yes," said Tyndareus. "That's what frightens me." He let go of John's arm. "I'll give your hungry ones the four villages. My daughter's already asked me, the shameless girl, before you could. Go to bed."
* * *
He didn't get to bed.
Helen was waiting in a doorway off the colonnade, where the steps went down to the garden. She'd sent Aithra away. She stood in the dark with a lamp in her hand.
"Walk with me in the garden," she said. It wasn't a question.
The garden of the king's house was terraced into the hillside below the walls, olive trees and fig trees and vines, and beds of herbs, and a spring coming out of the rock into a stone basin. There was a moon. The air smelled of thyme and night-flowering jasmine and, faintly, roast ox.
She walked to the basin and stopped.
"You've changed everything," she said. She didn't turn round. "Do you know that? You've been here two months. Sparta. My father. Menelaus, who swore an oath to a foreigner on his sword. And me." She was quiet for a moment. "My future. Nothing seems certain any more."
"Nothing's ever certain," said John. "We make it. By what we choose."
She turned round.
She had the pendant on. He hadn't known. He'd finished the chain the night before they marched and given it to Aithra, because he couldn't trust himself to give it to her. It hung at her throat on its fine gold links, the little round box with the crystal lid, catching the moon.
She held it up between them on her palm. The needle swung, and settled, and pointed past his shoulder, up the dark valley.
"North," she said. "Arcadia. The hills. Where you went." She looked at it. "I've watched it every night. It doesn't move. Wherever I stand." She looked up at him. "It doesn't point to Troy. I checked. Troy's east."
He didn't know what to say to that.
She came closer. She put her free hand on his good arm, the way she had in the corridor.
"Then let's make it," she said softly. "What happens. Together. Teach me. Not only the movements. Everything you know. The lodestone and the railway under the ground. The country where they drink tea slowly. I want to see the world through your eyes." Her voice didn't shake. "I want to see what's on the other side of the sea."
The Branches came. He'd known they would.
He stood very still in the moonlight by the spring with her hand on his arm and her face turned up to his, and he wanted, more than he'd wanted anything since the morning on the balcony in Alexandria, to pull her close. And he saw, clear as water, what would come of it, in more Branches than he could count. Menelaus's oath, broken. The suitors. Eleven armies. A different war, but a war.
And Cleopatra's face, with the single tear through the kohl. And a gallery of eighty-one portraits with the white streak.
He held still.
"The road of knowing things isn't an easy one," he said, carefully. "Are you ready for where it goes?"
Helen looked at him for a long time. Her hand stayed on his arm.
"I'm ready for anything," she said. "As long as you're there."
She took her hand away, and went back up the steps with her lamp, and left him by the spring.
* * *
He stood there for a long time.
When he finally turned to go back up, there was a man sitting on the wall of the terrace above him, in the dark, with his legs dangling. Short, broad, red-haired. He'd been there the whole time, John thought. He'd heard everything.
"Don't mind me," said the man from Ithaca. "I come down here to think. Nobody else ever does. They're all too busy thinking about her." He swung his legs. "Odysseus. Son of Laertes. Of nowhere very important." He looked down at John with his clever face. "I'd like a word with you, John of the Far Seas. Tomorrow. Not about her. About ships."