I spent fourteen hours shut in with that thing and I did not sleep any of them, obviously.
The workshop had two rooms. In the back one, where I spent my days, I left it tied in the netting and the two tackle ropes, in the corner, with the tarpaulin over it. I sat against the opposite wall, three metres away, and there I stayed while the sun climbed and fell on the other side of a mud-brick wall.
For the first three hours it struggled.
And there I learned something I did not know, and it was the first useful thing it gave me: it could not break those ropes.
I could. I had lifted a two-hundred-and-fifty-kilo block to my chest, and a tackle rope of esparto, however good, would not have lasted me three seconds. That thing had been pulling for three hours and had not given a single strand.
It was weak. Not weak for a human being: weak for what it was.
And I understood it the moment I said it aloud, to myself, in that dark room:
It is skin and bone because it does not feed. Strength is paid for. Mine is paid for in blood, and so is its, and that thing has spent months with nothing to pay with.
A predator that has never fed well is weaker than one that has. It is so obvious it is embarrassing to write, and at that moment it was the most practical revelation I had had in two years, because it meant one very specific thing:
The strength of my kind is not a property. It is a balance.
Any one of us is as strong as he has recently fed, and therefore any one of us — including the ones who quite rightly frightened me at the time — can be emptied. Can be besieged. Can be starved.
I noted that down that afternoon, mentally, because I could not get up for the nail, and I have never forgotten it. I have used it three times in two thousand three hundred years. All three worked.
At the fourth hour it stopped struggling.
And from then on what it did was far harder to bear: it lay still under the tarpaulin and spent ten hours making a low continuous sound, with no rise or fall, that was not a moan or a weeping or a threat.
Ten hours. The same noise.
It is the noise trapped animals make when they no longer expect anything. I have heard it since in a horse with a broken leg and in a man in a pillory, and both times I thought of that afternoon in the workshop.
My face was open from the cheekbone to the jaw and it was not healing well, because I had spent nearly everything on the mist and the fight. I spent fourteen hours sitting against a wall, with half an ear gone, listening to that noise and thinking about the three people from the harbour.
And somewhere in those fourteen hours I stopped thinking of it as a thing.
Not out of goodness. Because of the noise.
As soon as the sun went down, I went out to feed.
It was quick and efficient and I have nothing to say about that part: a sleeping man, the forearm, four minutes. I came back with my face nearly closed and my hands warm, and sat down again three metres from the tarpaulin, and set about the real problem.
The real problem was this: I wanted that thing to talk.
And that thing could not talk because it had been emptying itself for months, and a creature like us, when empty, is not a person who is hungry. It is hunger in the shape of a person. I had been that for twenty minutes on a beach and I knew perfectly well that in that state there is nobody to converse with.
For it to talk, it had to feed.
And I had no way of feeding it.
I went through the options that night, sitting on the floor, and I want it on record that I went through all of them, including the ones that disgusted me, because being fastidious about the options one did not choose is the cheapest way of lying.
I could bring it somebody. Discarded, not on moral grounds but because I did not know whether I could stop it, and because if I let it loose with a person in front of it we were back at the harbour.
I could bring it an animal. I had already tried goat's blood: it does not feed. As empty as that thing was, a goat would have done nothing for it.
I could bring it blood in a jar. I had tried that too. Four hours and it goes out. And even if it had arrived fresh — in what quantity? Half a dozen people to fill somebody who has not fed in months?
And there was the last one.
I looked at my left wrist for a long while.
I knew that the blood of my kind feeds my kind. I had not read it anywhere and nobody had told me: I knew it the way I knew how to use the veil, with that sourceless knowledge that came with the body and which I had already got into the habit of distrusting.
And I had not the remotest idea what happened afterwards.
I did it anyway.
And that is one of the three or four most reckless decisions of my whole existence, and I took it for a reason that was neither generosity nor compassion, although there was something of both.
I took it because I wanted it to talk.
I pulled off the tarpaulin.
It was on its side, curled up inside the netting, its face turned to the wall. At the lamplight it curled tighter and the noise rose slightly, and it did not look at me.
I lifted its head by the hair, carefully, and put my opened wrist against its mouth.
It reacted on the second swallow.
And I have to tell what happened because I did not expect it in the least.
It was like watching a drowned man start breathing again. It seized my arm with both hands through the netting and drank with a desperation that had nothing of the animal about it and a great deal of the child, and as it drank it made a sound that was almost relief, and its whole body changed in front of me. The muscles of its arms filled out. Its skin changed colour. Its face, which had been a skull with skin on it, stopped being a skull.
And its memory reached me, because in this it works in both directions, and it reached me the opposite of how it always reaches me: not in an ordered stream but in broken pieces.
A loom. Small hands on a loom, many hours.
A very large, very brown river.
A woman with a shaved head laughing at something.
Hunger. Months of it. The whole hunger, bottomless, with no memory of before and no idea of after — exactly the same edgeless thing that had reached me from the goat.
And a man. A tall man, from behind, in a pale cloak, walking away up a sloping street without once turning his head.
I pulled my arm away after fifteen or twenty seconds, when I began to feel faint, and it cost me enormously, and it tried to follow and could not, because I had ten times its strength.
Then I sat back against the wall, dizzy, gripping my wrist, and waited.
It took about ten minutes.
And then, from the corner, in a broken voice and in appalling Greek — far worse than mine — it said the first thing I ever heard it say:
"Why did you do that?"
His name was Pashed.
Nineteen years old. From Rakotis, the Egyptian quarter, which had been there long before the Greek city and which the Greek city had been built on top of. Son and grandson of weavers. He had worked since he was seven and spoke just enough Greek to buy and sell, which is how half of Alexandria spoke it.
And he had been dead a year and four months.
He told me over that night and the three following, in pieces, jumping backwards and forwards, with that way of telling things that people have who have never told anything because nobody has ever asked them anything.
A man approached him in the street. At night, coming back from the workshop. A well-dressed man, with a northern accent, who spoke to him very politely and asked him for a direction, and then asked him whether he wanted to earn some money carrying a message.
And up to there it is exactly the story of any nineteen-year-old to whom something bad happens in any city in the world in any century.
What came next he never told properly. I think he did not remember all of it, and today I know there is a part he did remember and did not tell me, and I do not hold it against him.
What he did tell me, and told me three separate times in the same words, is what happened at the end.
The man stood up, wiped his hands, said to him that's done, and walked off up the street.
And that was all.
Not an explanation. Not an instruction. Not a warning about the sun. Nothing.
Pashed woke the next day under a portico, burning, and it took him three days to understand that he had to be under a roof, and he learned it the way one learns these things when there is nobody to tell you: by burning.
I asked him whether he had gone back home.
And here came the part that cost me most of all.
He said yes. That the first night he ran there. That he reached his street and called for his mother from outside, and that his mother came out and saw him, and that he tried to go in.
And could not.
His mother, who had been looking for him for two days, was watching him from the other side of an open door, and he could not enter the house where he had been born.
He told me she was speaking to him and telling him to come in. And that he tried and could not. And that after a few minutes his mother stopped telling him to come in and began doing something else with her hands, a gesture he made for me in that workshop with his hands tied in front of him, which I did not know and which was, obviously, a gesture for turning away evil.
He left there and never went back.
I looked at the floor for a good while.
Because I had known about the threshold since the second night. I had tested it, catalogued it and written it on a wall, and to me it had seemed, above all, a logistical problem.
And to that boy it had torn away his mother.
The three dead men of the harbour came up on the third night, and they came up badly.
I had deliberately spent two nights not raising it. I named them one by one. Menon, the watchman, forty-one. The woman from the portico, whose name nobody knew. Anthemios, fifteen, four sisters.
And I asked him about them.
What I expected was one of two things. I expected him to deny it, or I expected it not to matter to him: for him to look at me with the indifference of an animal asked about a mouse.
It was neither.
Pashed remembered all three.
He remembered all three perfectly, in detail, and not the way one remembers a meal: the way one remembers something that happened to him. He gave me the watchman's name before I did. He told me the woman from the portico was called Tabube and that she had a daughter in Memphis and had been a good seamstress before her eyesight went.
He carried them inside him. All of them. The way I carry mine.
He had drunk them whole and therefore had taken them whole, with their lives and their names and their daughters, and that had been happening to him every ten days for more than a year, and he had nobody to tell it to, and he did not know that any other way of doing it existed.
And at some point in that conversation he said to me, with no dramatic intent whatsoever, the sentence that forced me to get up and leave the room:
"I don't want to kill them. It's that I don't know how to stop. When it starts I'm not there."
And then:
"Do you know how to stop?"
I taught him the next day.
And to this day, with everything I have built and everything I have written and everyone who has come after, I still think that night in the workshop was the moment when everything else truly began.
I taught him on my own arm first, dry, without blood, the way one teaches a movement.
I told him: not the neck. Never the neck. I explained why, in the simplest words I could find in my bad Greek and his worse: that in the neck there is a pipe that pushes, and when you open it you are not drinking, it is pushing, and there is no way of stopping it, and that is why they always die.
I taught him the forearm. I made him look at his own, in the lamplight, palm up, and showed him the vein that can be seen, and made him touch it, and explained that there the liquid moves slowly and can be stopped with one finger.
I taught him the point. Not a bite: a single point, oblique, shallow. I did it to him on his own arm so he could see the difference, and he complained, and I told him to put up with it.
I taught him to count.
That was the important part and the hardest to explain. I told him not to drink until he felt full, because the feeling of being full never arrives in time. I told him to count. To choose a number before starting, and on reaching that number to take his mouth away, even if he did not want to, even if it seemed to him he would die if he did.
I said: do not let the hunger decide it. Let the number decide it.
He looked at me as though I were describing a country that does not exist.
"And if I can't?" he said.
"You will," I said. "I can."
And that, which was a fairly cheap piece of encouragement, turned out to be the only thing I said to him that night that had any effect.
Because he did not know that it was possible.
He had spent a year and four months convinced that this was what it was, that he was a thing that killed every ten days and that there was no other possibility, and so he had never tried. Nobody had told him another way existed. Nobody had told him anything at all.
It was enough that someone existed who did it.
And I have seen this a thousand times since, with men and with women and with creatures far worse than that boy, and it remains true: people do not change because you give them reasons. They change when they see somebody doing it.
We went out on the fourth night.
I chose the place, I chose the man, and I stayed a pace away the whole time with my hand on the back of his neck, ready to tear him off.
He chose the number twelve.
He reached twelve and took his mouth away.
And then he knelt on the ground shaking in a way I understood perfectly, and began to weep without tears, and I stood beside him looking at a sleeping man to whom nothing had happened.
And I felt something I had never felt until that night and have spent twenty-three centuries chasing like an addict.
Pride.
Not pride in him. I wish.
Pride in myself.
Meanwhile I still had to go on being Ianthos of Massalia, and that turned out to be far harder than domesticating a monster.
The problem was the ear.
My face closed in four nights, and even that was too fast, but a face can be covered with an angle and a hood. The left ear could not. A piece of the upper rim was missing, the size of a thumbnail, and it never grew back. Never. It is still like that.
There I learned something about myself that I did not know and that is written nowhere: what is entirely lost does not come back. Flesh repairs itself. A piece that has gone does not.
And I turned up at the Museum with my face marked and half an ear missing.
I told Herophilus I had been attacked at the harbour. It was the logical thing, with what was going on, and that week it was the most credible lie in Alexandria.
He believed it. And six days later he looked at my face while we were talking about something else and said, with no intent whatever:
"You close well."
Nothing more. Two words, without raising his voice, his eyes on my cheek.
I had spent six days with a cut running from the cheekbone to the jaw that was closed, pink and without a scab.
"I close well," I said.
And he nodded and went on talking about whatever we were talking about and never mentioned it again, and I spent the rest of that winter wondering what was written on his tablets underneath anomalous subject.
With Kleio it was worse and it was faster.
She saw the ear on the first day and asked me nothing. She made me sit down, turned my face towards the lamp with two fingers, looked at it the way one looks at a wound and not the way one looks at a friend, and let go of my chin.
"That was done by a hand," she said. "A knife does not tear like that."
I repeated the story about the attack.
Kleio wiped her hands on her cloth and looked at me a moment with that calculating face of hers, and then said:
"Ianthos, don't tell me anything. It's easier."
And went back to her work.
That woman knew, from considerably before that night, that there was something large and strange underneath me. I am certain of it. And she took, very early and without telling me, the decision not to look, which is the decision practical people take when somebody is useful to them and they like him.
I have had that conversation, in those same words, fourteen or fifteen times in twenty-three centuries. Don't tell me anything. I have heard it in five languages. It is always the best ones who say it.
And the nights, besides, went on being full.
Because there is one thing the stories about people like me never mention, which is that while I had a monster shut in a workshop in the western quarter and an unknown hunter watching me from the rooftops, I still had three births expected, an old man with an ulcer on his leg that had to be cleaned every other day, an apprentice with a splinted hand who needed checking, and two nights a week committed at the Museum.
I went back and forth. From the workshop to the ninth, from the ninth to the Museum, from the Museum to the workshop. I fed on the way there. I manufactured a pulse on arrival. I breathed out of habit. And at four in the morning I came back to a dark room where a nineteen-year-old Egyptian boy was waiting to ask me whether our nails grew.
Those eleven days were the first of a life I have since lived for twenty-three centuries without a break.
And I did not yet know it was going to be like that always. I was still living it as an emergency.
I kept him eleven days in the workshop, and somewhere in those eleven days he stopped being a prisoner without either of us saying so out loud.
I took the netting off on the fifth. The ropes I left another day and then took those off too, and it was not a decision or an act of trust: it was that I got tired of tying them on every morning before sleeping.
I brought him things. I brought him a mat, because he had been sleeping — or whatever it is we do — on the floor. I brought him a tunic from the ones drying in the district's yards, because he had spent a year in the same rag. I brought him a bowl of water to wash with, and discovered, with an odd pang, that it had not occurred to him in fourteen months that he could still wash.
And we talked.
We talked whole nights, in the worst Greek ever spoken in Alexandria, two foreigners using the language of a city that belonged to neither of us.
He asked me practical things. All of them. Whether our hair grew — yes, very slowly. Whether we could get drunk — no, and I had tried. Whether we could drown — no either, and I explained that we did not breathe and he was quiet for three minutes because he had not noticed.
I asked him mine, and mine was always the same: who else is there, where are they, who is in charge, what rules are there.
And he knew almost nothing, because nobody had explained it to him. But almost nothing is not nothing, and I had spent two years with nothing.
And in return I asked him for the only thing he had that I wanted, apart from the information.
I asked him for his language.
He was baffled. I had to insist for two nights. To him, Egyptian was not something one taught: it was what was spoken at home, and the serious language, the one that was good for something, was the bad Greek he mangled in order to sell cloth.
I had spent two years in a city where half the people were Egyptian, in an entire country that was Egyptian, with temples that had been running for two thousand years and archives of which I had read one translation that had changed my life.
And I did not understand a word.
We began that same night and went on for the ten that followed, and it was the fairest bargain I have made in twenty-three centuries: I taught him to eat without killing and he taught me to count to twenty.
He was a bad teacher, as everyone is with their own tongue. He laughed at my accent, which after my own business with Greek struck me as an unbearable injustice. He got bored. He would forget that I knew nothing and talk at length and then remember and go back.
And one night, explaining a word that had no equivalent and that he could not translate, he made a gesture with both hands, a gesture of holding something round, and suddenly stopped mid-sentence.
I asked him what was wrong.
He told me his mother made that gesture.
And we did not study again that night.
From those eleven days I took away some two hundred words and the whole pronunciation, which is what actually matters and what is not learned from any book. It was not much use to me that year. It was of use twelve years later, going up the Nile, when a sorceress from Napata spoke to me for the first time and I was able to answer her something, and it is of use still.
Everything I know of the language of Egypt comes, at bottom, from a nineteen-year-old weaver from Rakotis who died on a sloping street and whom nobody ever explained anything to.
I taught him not to kill. He taught me to speak with the living of his country.
We both came out of it ahead, and he came out of it less ahead.
And one night, in those eleven days, I heard myself teaching him how to make a pulse.
I explained the wave. I made him put his fingers on his own wrist and push from the shoulder, and it took him three nights, and when it came out he laughed.
He laughed. That thing which had spent ten hours under a tarpaulin making the noise of a trapped animal laughed in my workshop because it had produced a false heartbeat.
And I felt good. And I have spent twenty-three centuries distrusting the fact that I felt good that night, because in that same workshop, ten paces from where the two of us stood laughing, the names of three people he had drunk were still written on the wall.
It broke on the eleventh day, and it broke over Rakotis.
He told me he wanted to go and see his mother. Not to go in: to see her. From the street. That it had been fourteen months and he only wanted to look at her for a while.
And I said no.
I gave him all the reasons, and all of them were true. That in that quarter people knew him. That he had been dead to them for fourteen months, and that the whole city was talking about a lamia in the harbour, and that if anyone recognised him in the street there would be a mob in Rakotis that same night and he would not be the only one to pay for it. That his mother had been given a son for dead and that seeing him appear without having aged, at night, was not a gift.
All true. And there was besides a reason I did not give him, which was that I had not finished extracting the information.
We argued. His voice rose. I said no again.
And then he did it.
He straightened up. That is the first thing I noticed: that hunched boy went upright all at once, and his face changed, and for an instant he did not look like himself but like an imitation of somebody else.
And he spoke to me.
I cannot properly say what it was. The words were two, in Egyptian, and I did not understand them. What did arrive, and arrived clearly, was the other thing: the voice came into me through somewhere that was not my ears. It was like when somebody calls your name in a crowded street and you turn before deciding to turn. There was, for half a second, something inside me that stood up and prepared to obey.
And then, nothing.
It cut off. It fell down, and I say fell because I can find no other way: the thing came at me, struck something that was not a wall and was not a defence, and came apart.
And I stayed where I was, arms folded, looking at him.
And I did not even become angry, because I was too busy taking notes.
Pashed backed away two paces.
And this is the important part of the whole chapter, the reason I have spent forty pages on an Egyptian weaver boy from Rakotis:
the one who was terrified was him.
Not me. Him. He looked at me the way he had not looked at me even when I had his face in the mud and my knee in his back. He backed into the corner, hands open, and began speaking very fast in Egyptian, and I had to tell him three times to speak slowly and in Greek.
"That always works," he said. "That works every time."
"Not on me."
"No. You don't understand." His hands were shaking. "That works every time."
It took him two hours to explain it and he explained it four times, because he did not have the words and because to him it was like explaining to somebody that water is wet.
Among our kind there is an order and the order is not disputed.
Those who have been here longer command those who have been here less. And they do not command because they are stronger, or because they have more people, or because they have won any war. They command because when one of them speaks to you in that way, you obey. It is not a threat and it is not an order: it is that your body does it before you have an opinion.
I asked him whether it could be resisted.
He told me he had tried once, with the man in the pale cloak, the night he took him. That he resisted with all his soul. And that while he was resisting with all his soul he was getting up and walking after him.
I asked how one knows who stands above whom.
And here he told me the thing that interested me and that he considered utterly trivial, in the same way one considers it trivial to know whether the person in front of you is tall or short.
You can feel it.
You feel it on walking into a room. You feel it at twenty paces in the street. There is a sort of weight, he said, and he could not explain it better: a thing one of us carries and the others perceive, and which says without any ambiguity whether the one before you is above or below, and by how much.
I asked what weight I carried.
And Pashed went quiet.
"None," he said.
"What do you mean, none?"
"That you don't carry any." His face was one of pure discomfort. "When you were on top of me in the alley I didn't know what you were. I thought you were a man. A very strong man. Until I saw your face closing."
And then he said it, looking at the floor:
"I don't feel you at all. It's like being alone in the room."
And then he remembered the blood.
I saw it arrive. I saw him lift his head suddenly, and go pale — as far as somebody like us can go pale — and look at his arm, and then look at me.
"You gave me your blood," he said.
"I gave you my blood."
"How much?"
"Twenty seconds. Maybe more."
And that boy stood up and began pacing the room with his hands on his head, saying things in Egyptian, and it took me a while to get him to sit down and tell me.
What he told me is this, and he told me it with the certainty of somebody repeating what everybody knows.
That the blood of one of us, drunk by another of us, binds.
That it is not a manner of speaking. That the first time it is already felt, and that by the third there is no going back. That the one who drinks begins to love the one who gave, and it is not a feigned affection or an obligation: it is real love, with the whole soul, and that is why it works so well and why it is so foul.
That the one who is bound cannot harm the other. That he seeks his company. That he forgives him anything. That he lies to the others for him without being asked.
And that this is how they own one another, and how the armies and the courts and the houses are made, and that it is the coin with which everything is bought among our kind since before there were cities.
"You gave me twenty seconds," he said. "I ought to be—"
And he stopped.
And he stood there in the middle of the workshop, looking at his hands, searching himself inside with an expression I have not seen on any other face in twenty-three centuries.
He was like that for nearly a minute.
"There's nothing," he said.
"Nothing?"
"Nothing." He looked up. "I'm the same as before. You're the same as before. I feel absolutely nothing."
And then, very quietly:
"That's impossible."
The two of us sat in silence for a good while in that room.
I was doing arithmetic, and it was not pleasant arithmetic, and I did all of it sitting there on the workshop floor with the bronze nail in my hand without remembering that I was holding it.
One: they cannot command me with the voice. None of them. Not the oldest.
Two: they cannot bind me with blood. And therefore neither can I bind anyone, and that, which at first sight looked like a loss, took me a hundred years to understand was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Three: they do not feel me. They do not know what I am until I show them.
And four, which was the one giving me a chill:
Everything they use to organise themselves — the order, the obedience, the ownership, the courts, the whole way in which they possess one another — is built on two mechanisms.
And neither of them works on me.
I was not outside their system through rebellion, or cleverness, or luck.
I was outside because the system simply did not reach me. Like a bolt that does not fit a door that is not its own.
And I remembered, sitting on that floor, the night on the waste ground in front of a tent I could not cross, when I wrote on that same wall that this was not biology, that it was written, and that what is written somebody wrote.
If this is written, I thought, then somebody wrote an entire system to keep all of them in order.
And I am not inside it.
And there are two ways of not being inside a text: either they left you out on purpose, or you arrived before it was written.
Both frightened me. The second still does.
Pashed said it to me at the end of that same night, when dawn was coming on and we had gone two hours without speaking.
He said it from his corner, without looking at me, in the tone of somebody who has spent a while deciding whether to say something.
"They're going to find you."
I asked him who.
And he answered something I did not expect, and with that the conversation ended and everything else began.
"They already found you," he said. "There's one that watches you."
I went very still.
"From the rooftops," I said.
"From the rooftops."
"Have you seen it?"
And Pashed laughed. It was a short laugh with nothing inside it, the first ugly thing I heard from him in eleven days.
"All year," he said. "It watched me. When I was under the portico, burning. When I spent two months under a wharf unable to get up. The night of the watchman it was there, on the roof of the warehouse opposite, standing."
He hugged his knees.
"It never did anything. Not once."
And then, with no drama at all, in the flat voice of somebody who has finished having feelings about a subject:
"I think it only watches. I think that's the only thing it does."