I gave him my wrist.
There was nothing else to be done. Refusing would have been worse: in that room, at that moment, refusing Herophilus my wrist would have been as strange as refusing to give my own name, and the man had been watching me work for three months and was nobody's fool.
So I put out my left arm and laid my wrist in his hand, palm up, and in the second and a half it took him to place his fingers I made the fastest calculation of my existence.
A pulse is a wave.
It is not blood running. It is a wave of pressure that travels up the wall of the artery each time the heart expels. The blood itself moves slowly; what you feel at the wrist is the knock, the jolt travelling along the pipe. Anything that pushes that liquid rhythmically produces a wave.
And my blood organised itself inside me whenever I chose. I had proved that with the spear, in the workshop yard, two months earlier: I thought, and it arranged itself.
I had never done it small. I had never done it without taking it out of the body.
Herophilus set three fingers down.
And I pushed.
I did it from the shoulder, mentally, sending the liquid downward in a short tight pulse and then releasing, and pushing again. The way you squeeze a wineskin. The way you work a bellows. I had no idea whether it would show at the surface or whether it would remotely resemble a human beat.
It showed.
I watched Herophilus's face change — not to suspicion, but to interest — and with his free hand he reached for the clepsydra and pulled the stopper.
The water began to fall into the bowl beneath.
And there began the worst two minutes of my first ten years.
Because a pulse has to be sustained.
I had to push and release, push and release, at a constant rate, without being distracted, without speeding up, without stopping, while the water fell; and I had to do it with one part of my attention while with the other I held the face of a man sitting quietly in a chair with nothing at all the matter with him.
I picked a rate and clung to it like a rope. Seventy. It struck me as reasonable for an adult male seated and at rest, neither suspiciously slow nor nervous.
The water fell.
Halfway through I realised I was consuming. I felt it the way I always feel it: a tug in the gums, a small notice. This was costing me blood. Not much, but it was costing, and I had gone two days without feeding.
I kept going.
When the clepsydra finished, Herophilus let go of my wrist and turned to the tablets.
And then he said, with no intention whatsoever, the sentence that kept me awake for three days:
"Seventy exactly."
He wrote.
"Strange," he added. "Very strange."
"Why strange?"
He looked up with the face he made when somebody asked him something elementary, which was a mixture of irritation and pleasure.
"Because a healthy pulse is not regular, Ianthos. It is the first thing one learns. It rises a little on the breath in and falls on the breath out. It alters if the subject thinks, if he is startled, if he hears a noise. Yours did not vary once in the whole measurement." He tapped the wax twice with the stylus. "Completely regular pulses I have found in three sorts of people: the very well trained, those about to suffer a crisis of the heart, and the dying."
He looked at me for a moment.
"And you do not appear to be any of the three."
And then, to my eternal relief, he shrugged and wrote anomalous subject in the margin and went back to work, because men like him are not frightened by anomalies: they collect them.
I left the Museum that night with an ache inside my wrist and a very clear understanding of two things.
First: I could manufacture a pulse.
Second: I had manufactured it badly, and been caught inside two minutes, and the only thing that had saved me was that the true explanation was unthinkable.
I spent the next three months learning to be a human being.
It sounds absurd written down like that. It is not. It is the hardest discipline I have ever submitted myself to — harder than magic, harder than the language, harder than anything that came afterwards — and it is the reason I am still here.
I made the list one night in the workshop, with the nail. Everything a living body does that mine did not:
Breathes. Beats. Is warm. Blinks. Swallows. Sweats. Tires. Gets distracted. Scratches. Moves when it is still.
And I set about them one at a time, with the same stupid patience I had brought to correcting my vowels.
Breathing was the easiest and the most important. I have lungs and they work; I simply do not use them. So I forced myself to use them. I imposed a rule: breathe always, at all times, in the presence of any person, even though it serves no purpose. At first I would forget within twenty seconds and have to remind myself. It took about six weeks to become automatic, and I have now spent twenty-three centuries breathing out of habit, without needing to, like a man jiggling his leg under a table.
Warmth I solved with tricks. Cold hands are what frighten a sick man most, and I put mine on ten of them a night. I started carrying two river stones the size of my fist in my cloak, heated on a brazier before going out. I squeezed them on the way, and they lasted me for the first two houses. Later I learned that freshly drunk blood keeps me warm for nearly an hour, and I organised my nights around it: feed first, visit afterwards.
Blinking took three weeks and was the most unnatural of all, because it has to be done without thinking and I had to think about it. I sat in front of the trough on the corner for many nights, watching myself, counting. A human being blinks about fifteen times a minute, more when speaking, fewer when concentrating. I learned to vary it. Above all I learned to blink more when lying, because I discovered from watching people that those telling the truth blink less, and that I, unchecked, had the fixed stare of a man who is lying all the time.
And restlessness, which was the last and the hardest.
The living move. They are never entirely still. They shift their weight, touch their faces, scratch the back of the neck, glance at the door when someone passes. I could stay absolutely motionless for an hour with no effort at all, and that — though nobody can name it — is noticed. People become uneasy around a thing that does not move.
So I invented tics. Literally. I chose three small gestures and made myself perform them every few minutes, and I have had to change them every twenty or thirty years, because since I never forget them they begin to repeat with an exactness that is worse than stillness.
I tell all this without drama because that is how I lived it: as an engineering problem.
And only much later, centuries later, did I understand what I had done in those three months of practice in front of a water trough.
I was not learning to seem human.
I was learning that one can seem human without being it, and that it is not difficult, and that almost nobody looks hard enough to tell the difference. And from the moment a man knows that, he can never look at anyone the same way again. I have spent twenty-three centuries wondering, every time I meet someone, whether they are breathing out of habit.
I turned the sense of smell into an instrument that same winter.
I already knew I could smell disease. What I did was catalogue it, which is an entirely different thing.
I had the cheat's advantage of knowing in advance what I was smelling, so the work was not discovery but calibration: associating each specific smell with the word I already carried in my head, and learning to tell intensities apart.
A man who passed enormous quantities of water and wasted away smelled, on the breath, of overripe fruit. Fallen apples. It is an almost pleasant smell, and it means that man is dying from the inside and that in that century there was absolutely nothing to be done.
The one with the swollen belly and yellow eyes smelled sweet and rotten at once, the smell of a liver giving up.
The one whose kidneys were failing smelled of ammonia, of an old latrine, even clean and freshly washed.
Gangrene has a smell that does not need to be learned: it teaches itself, the first time, and is not forgotten.
And there was another, consumption, which was the hardest and the one that interested me most, because it was a thing that passed from person to person within the same house and I was the only man on Earth who knew that it passed.
I made a list of some twenty-odd smells on the workshop wall and went on correcting it for years.
And somewhere in that winter I found the one I did not want.
There is a smell that appears a few days beforehand.
I cannot put it better. It is not the smell of the particular disease; it lies over all of them, it is the same in the liver and the lung and the infected wound, and it is faint, and it arrives before the patient visibly worsens. I noticed it for the first time in a woman who was improving, who had sat up in bed and asked for food and had her family happy around her, and it reached me and I went cold in the middle of the room.
She died three days later.
I checked it all that winter, telling nobody, with the cold discipline of a man verifying an unpleasant hypothesis.
Eleven times. Eleven out of eleven.
And there I had to sit down and think about something that was not medical.
Because I went into houses and did what I could, and then took my leave at the door, and the family would look at me with that particular face families have, and ask me what they all ask: will he come through this?
And from that winter on, I knew.
I have tried both answers over two thousand three hundred years and I have none. I have told the truth and seen what the truth does in a house where there was still hope. I have kept silent and seen people lose their last three days arguing about an inheritance because nobody warned them.
That winter, in Alexandria, I decided to keep silent.
And I do not know whether I was right. I only know that I decided to keep silent and that afterwards I rested just the same, and it is the second part that worries me.
They found Zenon in April, at the bottom of an open cistern two streets north of the fountain.
I heard at nightfall, when I came out. They were telling it in the street: the water-carrier, the one with the shoulder, had fallen in. Drunk, no doubt. It happens every year, with a cistern lacking a coping and a moonless night.
I stood in the middle of the street with the precise sensation of something having been removed from my inventory.
That man had given me a language.
He never knew it. We were never friends, or anything close. In the nine months I had known him I had spoken to him, all told, perhaps fifteen times, always briefly, always about his shoulder or the price of water or whether it was going to rain, which in Alexandria is a joke. I had treated his shoulder three more times since that night at the fountain and he called me the Massalian and laughed every time he said it, because he thought it was a made-up place.
And yet I had inside my head twenty days of his voice, eleven transactions an afternoon, the way his tone rose at the end of a question, his three favourite oaths, the word he used to agree without committing himself. I spoke Greek with the syntax of a water-carrier from the western district and I was going to go on speaking it that way for centuries.
I went to see him.
They had brought him up and had him in a shed beside the cistern, waiting for some relative to appear. There was a guard on duty who knew me and let me in without asking, because I was the foreign physician and because nobody cared about anything.
It took me less than five minutes.
The first thing was the mouth and the nose. In a drowned man there is froth. It is a fine white froth, very characteristic, formed by air mixing with water and mucus in the airways, and it comes out of the mouth and the nose, and sometimes goes on coming for hours if the chest is pressed.
There was nothing. I pressed his chest and nothing came.
That man had gone into the water without breathing.
The second thing was the head. I ran my fingers over the skull, slowly, under the wet hair, and at the level of the occiput, a little to the left, I found what I was looking for: the bone moved. A depressed fracture the size of a palm, with irregular edges.
A blow. Not a stone edge in a fall: a blow.
And the third thing, which confirmed everything, was in the hands.
The nails of the right hand were broken backwards, three of them, with dirt and a strand of esparto fibre underneath. There was a scratch running upward on the left forearm. The knuckles were skinned.
He had fought back.
I came out of the shed, sat on the coping of the cistern they had thrown him into, and stayed there a good while.
Because the matter was not a medical one and I knew it perfectly well.
In that city there was nobody who cared. There was no police in any sense I could recognise. There were the king's guards for what concerned the king, and there were magistrates for lawsuits between people with money, and for everything else there were families, who dealt with their dead if they could and if they had the means.
Zenon had no family in Alexandria. He had a brother in Naucratis who would arrive in two weeks if he arrived at all.
A water-carrier with a bad shoulder falls into a cistern that has been missing its coping for six years. End of the matter.
I tried the proper way first. That has to be told too, because at that point I still believed things worked.
The following day, as soon as it was dark, I went to the district guard post. It was a room with a table, two lamps and a man with a tablet, who at that hour was already thinking about going home.
I explained what I had found. I explained it well, in order, beginning with the water in the lungs and ending with the nails. I made an effort with my Greek. I remember even preparing the sentence before I went in.
He listened to me politely. That must be said: he was not rude, he did not laugh, he did not throw me out. He heard me through.
Then he asked me three questions.
The first was whether I was a relative of the dead man.
The second was whether anyone had seen what I was saying had happened.
And the third, after a silence, was who was bringing the complaint.
I said I was.
And he laid the stylus on the table with great patience and explained to me, the way one explains to a foreigner something everyone else has known since childhood, that it does not work like that. That the complaint is brought by the family. That if there is no family, it is brought by the employer. That if there is no employer, one must be a citizen of the city with someone to answer for you, and that a foreign physician with no registration, however well known in his own district, was nobody as far as a table with a tablet was concerned.
And he added one last thing, without any cruelty, which is the sentence that has stayed with me longest from that conversation:
"And even if I wrote it down — who is going to go and find the man who did it? Me? There are four of us for this district."
And he was right. Entirely right.
I had spent my previous life in a world with telephones, with records, with forensic examiners, with people whose job consisted specifically in seeing that this sort of thing did not simply stand, and I had spent nine months in this other one without realising what it actually meant that none of that existed.
It was not that there was injustice. It was that there was no machinery. There was nobody to give the work to. Justice, in that city and that century, was something families with money did when it was their turn, and for everyone else it simply did not exist, in the same way that hot water did not exist.
I came out of that guard post and stood in the street for a while.
And there I made the decision, and I did not make it for Zenon, or not only. I made it because I had just understood something about the place I had fallen into.
If I want something done in this world, there is nobody to ask.
And I was sitting on that coping with three facts in my head — no froth, no fall, no accident — and with the certainty that I was the only being on the face of the earth who had them.
I began that same night and it did not take me long, and that is the part that has to be told slowly.
Because the method I used I had had from the first day and had never used in that way.
The first thing was to reconstruct the ground. That was honest work: I walked his whole route, the one I knew by heart, and established what time he finished, which way he came back and how far the cistern was from his path. It was not on his way. You had to turn aside seventy paces and go into a dead-end alley to reach it.
A drunk man does not turn aside seventy paces to fall into a hole.
The second thing was to ask, the way people ask, in the market and at doorways. And there I ran into the usual: nobody knew anything, everybody had an opinion, and three different people told me the same rumour in three incompatible versions.
And then I did the other thing.
There was a boy of about fourteen, apprenticed to a dyer, who slept in the yard of his master's workshop thirty paces from the mouth of the alley. And in the round of questions he had told me one thing that did not fit with the rest: that on that night he had heard "a drunks' argument" and had gone back to sleep.
Nobody else had heard anything. He had heard something. And he remembered nothing more, because he was fourteen, half asleep, and in that district there are drunks' arguments every night.
I went back at three in the morning.
He was in the yard, on his mat, face down, with the thick sleep of a lad who works twelve hours. I did the usual. Left forearm, one point, a little, pressure afterwards.
And I drank from a boy of fourteen who had done nothing to me, without asking his permission, in order to steal a memory from him.
What reached me was all of him, because it cannot be filtered.
The smell of purple dye reached me, which is a foul smell of rotten shellfish that he no longer noticed. The constant fear of his master, who hit him about the ears, reached me. A girl from the next stall. His mother, in a village in the delta, and a small sister, and the vague adolescent certainty that he was going to get out of there one day.
And that night reached me.
The interrupted sleep. The irritation of being awake. Two men's voices in the alley, neither of them shouting, both of them tight. One of them higher, speaking very fast, repeating the same word three times. A dull flat blow, which he, half asleep, filed as a sack falling. Silence. Then something scraping on stone for a good while, a continuous rubbing, like something heavy being dragged.
And then nothing, and he turned over and went back to sleep.
And one more thing, the last, so faint it nearly escaped me: the high voice, moving away, saying something. Four syllables. A complaint. The intonation of a man talking to himself when he is very upset.
I let the boy go, pressed his arm, tied the strip of cloth, and knelt beside him for a while in that yard with two things in my head at once.
One: I now had the drag, the approximate hour and a voice.
The other: I had just discovered what I am actually for.
And I did not get up for a long time, because both arrived together, and the second weighed a great deal more than the first.
The motive I found on my own, by thinking, and I wish I had not found it.
In the western district the water came from two places. There was canal water, which arrived cloudy and had to be left to settle for two days in a tank before it was any use, and there was water from the big cisterns, which came already settled and clean and cost nearly twice as much.
And there was a man, Kritias, who held the concession on one of the cisterns and sold the water wholesale to four or five carriers in the district, Zenon among them.
And that winter, on the sixth street and the seventh, there had been fevers.
A great many. Seven houses. Two children dead. I had been in five of those houses and had been able to do practically nothing, because there is nothing to be done about that once it has started, and I had spent six weeks in a filthy mood.
And in February, one night, at the fountain, I said so to Zenon.
I remember it perfectly. I remember being tired and frustrated and talking too much. I told him those fevers came neither from the air nor from a god nor from an ill wind. I told him they came from the water, and that if there was fever on the sixth and the seventh and none on the ninth it was because the water was not the same, and that he should look at where the water he was distributing came from.
I said it the way a man unburdens himself to an acquaintance.
And Zenon, who was an honest man after his fashion and also a man with a ruined shoulder and no savings, went and looked.
He found that Kritias's cistern had been filling directly from the canal for months.
No settling, no filtering, nothing. The same cheap water sold at twice the price to four carriers who distributed it in good faith across half the district.
I do not know — and I have never known, and in twenty-three centuries I have decided I would rather not — whether Zenon went to Kritias to denounce him or to ask for a share.
I know that he went.
And I know that he turned aside seventy paces from his route, at night, to go into a dead-end alley and argue with a man who had a great deal to lose.
I confirmed it with a second man, and the second time the decision cost me nothing at all, and that is precisely what has to be written down.
Sostratos was another carrier from the same cistern, a fellow of fifty with a chronic cough and a wife who was afraid of him. I waited for him, found him asleep, and did the same.
And from him I got the rest: that Zenon had been odd for a fortnight, that he had half told him about it, that he had said "the water is bad and the man selling it knows", that Sostratos had told him to keep quiet and not meddle, and that on the last afternoon Zenon had told him he was going to speak to Kritias that very night.
And I also got something Sostratos did not know he had: the voice.
The moment the memory brought me Kritias speaking — some ordinary argument about a payment, months earlier — I recognised the tone. High, quick, with that cadence people have who talk as though they were always about to be interrupted.
It was the voice from the alley.
And Sostratos afterwards remembered nothing, and in the morning would wake tired with a scratch on his forearm which he would put down to a nail in the storehouse.
I left that house with the case solved and with a feeling that was not triumph.
Two people. A boy of fourteen and a man with a cough. Neither had done anything to me. Neither had given me permission. Both had handed me, along with a fact, everything else: I still know the name of the girl at the next stall, and I know things about Sostratos's marriage that I have told nobody and would rather not know.
And I had done it for a reason that seemed to me a good one.
That is the whole trap. I write this twenty-three centuries later and it is still the whole trap: the first time you break your own rule it is never for a bad reason. If it were for a bad reason you would not break it.
And then I came up against the real problem, which was the only one that mattered.
I knew who had done it. I could prove it to nobody.
I could not say how I knew. There were no witnesses, because the only witness was a boy who had heard a noise and gone back to sleep. There was no possibility of matching a strand of esparto to a rope before any tribunal, because the idea of doing that did not exist and there was no tribunal willing to hear it, least of all for a dead water-carrier with no family.
In the year three hundred before Christ a man could kill another in an alley and the only thing that condemned him was somebody having seen it.
And I considered killing him.
I am going to set it down because I want it set down. It was not a passing thought or a second's temptation. I spent two entire nights with the idea on the table, turning it over with the same coldness with which I had planned the trepanation in the warehouse, and I even went and looked at his house and decided which way in.
What stopped me was not goodness. It was a conversation I had with nobody but myself, and it went more or less like this:
If I kill him, the problem is solved tonight and nobody ever knows.
And the next time I know something I cannot prove, I will already know how it is solved.
And I am going to know things I cannot prove every week for the next two thousand years.
That was all. It was not moral. It was arithmetic.
A man who can kill every time he is right ends up killing every time he believes he is, and I was going to have a great deal of time in which to believe things.
So I looked for another way. And the one I found is, frankly, not much better.
I went to his house on the third night.
He lived alone, in a two-room house with a small yard, at the edge of the district. He had a real wooden door, with a bar, which was a way of telling the neighbourhood that he was doing well.
And I could not go in. Obviously.
I stayed outside, against the wall, a metre from the door, and waited for the lamp to go out and for the breathing inside to slow.
And then I spoke.
I did not shout. I spoke in a normal voice, calmly, close against the wood, in the cleanest Greek I could manage.
"Seventy paces," I said. "You turned aside seventy paces down the dyer's alley."
Inside, the breathing stopped.
"You argued for a while. He spoke low. You did not — you speak high and fast, and you repeated the same word three times."
Absolute silence.
"You struck him from behind, on the left, with something that was not a loose stone. He fought you with his right hand. He broke three nails."
I heard the mat creak. He had sat up.
"And then you dragged him. Seventy paces back, alone, and it took you a while because a wet man is heavy. The rope was esparto."
And there I paused a moment, because what came next was the important part and I wanted it to arrive on its own.
"And on your way home," I said, "you were talking to yourself. Four syllables. You said them twice."
And I said them to him.
And inside that house a man in his forties began to make a noise I had never heard before and have heard a few times since: the noise a person makes when the floor goes entirely out from under him.
I said nothing more that night. Not who I was, not what I wanted, not what was going to happen.
That was the whole trick, and it is not a noble one: I never told him I was a spirit, or a god, or an avenger, or anything. There was no need. A man who hears his own night recited from the other side of his door fills in the rest himself, and he fills it in far worse than I would have.
I went back on the fourth night and did not speak. I simply stood there, still, for two hours, leaning against his door. He knew it. I could hear his heart from the street and it did not drop below a hundred and ten all night.
On the fifth night I left on his step, under a flat stone, a length of esparto rope two spans long.
It was not his. It was an ordinary rope I bought at the harbour for nothing.
He had no way of knowing that.
He gave himself up on the sixth day, in the morning, before a district magistrate, without anybody asking him to and without anybody investigating anything whatsoever.
He told all of it, including the business with the water, which was what genuinely scandalised people, because a dead water-carrier mattered to very few and seven houses with fever mattered to the whole district.
They confiscated the cistern. They exiled him, with a fine that left him with nothing. In that period and for a free man of that standing, that was what there was, and it struck me as ridiculously little and I said nothing because I had no voice with which to say it.
He left Alexandria the following month. I do not know what became of him and I never troubled to find out.
And they repaired the cistern. That, at least. The district got good water, and that winter there were no fevers on the sixth or the seventh, and that was the only outcome of the whole business that was of any use.
Two children had had to die first, and a water-carrier with a ruined shoulder, and I had had to drink from a fourteen-year-old dyer's apprentice.
That is how a cistern got repaired in Alexandria in the year two hundred and ninety-nine before Christ.
Kleio asked me.
It was a few days later, at the door of a house where we had just spent half the night on a birth that went well. We were both sitting on the step, she with the cloth in her hands, I looking at the street.
"It was you," she said.
It was not a question and I did not answer it.
"The water man. Somebody frightened him until he gave himself up. Everyone says it was a god and I have gone thirty years without seeing a god frighten anybody."
I told her half. I told her about the body: that there was no froth, that the bone was driven in at the back, that the nails were broken backwards. I told her about the seventy paces. I told her a boy had heard something being dragged.
All of it true. Everything that mattered left out.
She heard me through, nodding slowly, and when I finished she sat quiet for a while looking at her hands.
"Nobody does that," she said at last.
"Does what?"
"Nobody takes that trouble over a water-carrier." She shrugged. "Over a woman from a good house, yes. Over somebody's son, yes. Over a man who carries water and has nobody, no. That one falls in a well and within a month nobody knows what he was called."
And she looked at me.
"You are not from here, Ianthos, and there are things about you I do not understand and have decided not to ask about. But you did that well."
And she patted my knee twice and got up and went home to sleep.
I stayed on that step until nearly dawn.
Because what she had just said to me, in perfectly good faith, was exactly the opposite of what had happened.
I had not taken that trouble out of goodness. I had taken it because that man had given me a language and I bear debts badly. And along the way I had drunk from two people who had done nothing to me, and had seriously considered killing a third, and had tortured a man for five nights from the other side of a door until he broke, and all of it had worked so well and so fast that it frightened me.
That woman had just congratulated me on being good.
And the only thing that is true is that I had been effective.
I went back to the workshop before sunrise and wrote on the wall, under everything else, under the watch this that had been sitting there for months without explanation.
I wrote two lines.
The first:
Do not drink to know. Drink to live.
The second:
What comes with the blood is not mine. It is not used. It is not repeated. It is not remembered aloud.
And I stood looking at them for a while with the nail in my hand, and then I added a third, smaller, because if I write lies on my own wall then I have nothing left:
I write this knowing that today I did not keep it and that I would do it again.
That is why it has to be written.
That was the first real rule I set myself. The first of the code I would write out in full many years later, with children to teach it to and a house to govern.
I have broken it eleven times in two thousand three hundred years.
Eleven. I have all of them counted, with names, and I could recite them now in order.
They buried Zenon at the district's expense, in a common grave in the western cemetery, three days after he drowned with no water in his lungs.
I paid the part that was short and asked that they not say where it came from, and the gravedigger gave me an odd look and took the money and said nothing, because a gravedigger does not care.
The brother arrived from Naucratis two weeks later and found it all done. He asked who had paid for it. Nobody could tell him.
I did not go to the burial. It was daytime.
The only thing of his that I have I am wearing, and it does not show.
When I say good night in Greek, the long vowel comes out with the rhythm his had at the end of the afternoon, when he was tired and the pole was heavy. When I want to agree without committing myself, I use his word. When I lose my temper, his three oaths escape me, which were those of a man from the western district who thought himself finer than he was.
I have spoken that way in thirteen cities and in front of two emperors, for twenty-three centuries, and in all that time nobody has ever asked me where I got that way of speaking.
It is the only grave I have been able to give him.