Chương 119: 109. Eleos

Democedes of Croton was the finest physician in the Greek world, and that was the lock on his own door. When Polycrates fell, the Persians carried him east, and the Great King housed him and seated him at the royal table because he had eased a foot the Egyptian doctors had wrenched out of joint. Herodotus says they gave him gold and a fine house and the run of the court and never the road home.

— The Ether Atlas: Field Notes of Steven Parr, Piraeus Arthur stood in the kitchen doorway with a string bag in each hand and a third hooked over his shoulder, and listened to Eleni.

"The flour you get from Stamatis, the old one with the bad eye, never the son." She folded a square of paper and held it flat against his chest until his fingers came up to take it.

"The son waters the sack and swears on his mother it is the same flour. It is not the same flour. You tell him Eleni Vassilou sent you, and he will find the good one from the back."

"Stamatis. The father." Arthur turned the list over. It was written with two languages together, half the words Greek and half a shorthand only the writer could understand.

"And the oil from Thekla, by the blue door past the cisterns. She owes me from the winter, so you do not pay, you only carry. If she tries to give you the small tin, you stand there until she is ashamed and brings the proper one." Eleni looked up, considering his frame filling the doorway.

"You. You she will not argue with." Sarah was at the table with her coffee. Her sling was gone now, and she was enjoying her mother far too much to help.

"Did you get all that?" Sarah asked, taking another slow sip from her cup.

"Carry what, pay whom, and stand where until who is ashamed?"

"You are not being a lot of help," Arthur grumbled.

"On the contrary." Sarah set the cup down and got up, careful of the arm.

"I will go with you and point, you will carry things and look large. It is the only part of this errand you are qualified for."

"She has been planning this run for two days," Sarah said.

"You are not carrying shopping, Arthur. You are carrying the Vassilou foreign policy."

"I could come," Donna said from her spot by the window, her voice utterly flat with boredom. She paused, staring out at the sunlit lane, then added, "Actually, no. I have absolutely zero interest in grocery shopping."

"You're going to walk the harbour and count the Council's men again, aren't you?" Sarah asked.

"I am," Donna agreed, and finished her coffee. Steve had already gone up to Kostas's terrace and his French volumes, having left before the bread was cut, with the energy of an academician looking forward to a long debate. Petros was under the sink, again, at a fitting that had beaten him the day before and meant to beat him again. He came up for the wrench and stayed up.

"You hear them in the night?" He said it to Arthur, wiping his hands on the towel over his shoulder.

"Up towards the hills. Wolves. Two nights now."

"We heard," Arthur said.

"Me, I do not like it." Petros tipped his head at the window, at the city going down to the water.

"Before, they kept to the empty places. The farms, the old quarries. Now they come down to smell the bins like cats." He folded back under the sink.

"Siga siga they get braver. That is all I am saying." Eleni stuffed a paper twist of something sweet into the top of the nearest bag while Arthur was not looking, and was straightening Sarah's collar before Sarah could argue either point.

"It is shopping, Mamá. We will be gone for a couple of hours at most," Sarah protested.

"You eat on the way," Eleni said matter-of-factly. Yiayia watched from her chair by the window. She said nothing, but she let her eyes rest on Arthur, a woman pricing a thing she had already decided to keep. Then she went back to her cup. • • The container yard market smelled of rust warming in the sun and of fish kept a day too long. Bruised fruit, vegetables, tools and crude weapons, everything found a nook and a home in one of the shops. Humanity doing what it did best. Adapt and survive.

Stamatis the elder found the good flour at the back of his box the moment Sarah said her mother's name, and shamed his son with a look.

"Good flour," he said with a smile.

"Good psomi." Thekla behind the blue door produced the small tin, saw Arthur standing over it saying nothing, and went and fetched the proper one without being asked.

"You see," Sarah said, when they were back in the lane with the oil.

"You are very good at this. You stand there like a building and people simply give me things."

"It is my one marketable skill."

"It is not your only one." She steered him by the elbow round a crate of somebody's salvaged plumbing.

"Last time you apologised to a man for not having trousers your size."

"He looked offended."

"He was bored. You apologised to a bored man for three minutes. Kýrios Fotis still asks after you."

"Well, I am British," Arthur said, as if that explained the entire situation. Sarah was quiet for a few paces as they navigated the crowded market path.

"You are also a wall for the people you care about," she said softly.

"I think that's your most marketable skill." Her hand had slid onto his forearm somewhere along the walk, her fingers resting lightly against his skin. Arthur shifted the weight of the heavy string bags in his grip and decided that he didn't mind grocery runs so much after all. They were three rows from the fruit when the market changed. The noise came up the lane towards them in a wave, first voices and then bodies, people pushing the wrong way.

"Stay-" Arthur said, and looked back only to find Sarah beside him, moving into the crowd. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. They found the reason for it past the row, under the shadows of the dead cranes. A dead wolf the size of a pony lay on its side on the concrete.

Two Council guards stood over it with their spears still in it, breathing hard, and a third sat against a container with his hand clamped to his thigh and his face the colour of the concrete behind him. The bigger problem was a man on his back ten feet off. Three women were around him, doing the only thing people without training know to do, which is to hold cloth to a wound and call on the name of God. The cloth was already soaked through. Arthur had seen enough bodies to read this and wish that he could not.

The wolf had slashed the man across the belly and along the inside of the arm, and the blood was not pooling so much as leaving him. The next thing Arthur saw was Sarah kneeling in the blood. She did not announce herself or give any instructions to the other three women. She put both hands into the spilling wound and went to work, a warm glow spreading over the wound.

The crowd was seeing a woman with her hands inside a dying man, finding the torn ends of the arteries by touch and pinching them closed, her lips moving as she counted, and under her hands the bright flow of blood slowed and then stopped. Arthur knew this story would spread, and as is the nature of stories, it would grow with each retelling. The femoral and the brachial are both opened, Archie said in their heads, flat and unhurried.

He has lost a great deal, though at your current level, you have far more Ether than this man requires.

"I know," Sarah said, to no one the crowd could see, and the woman beside her flinched and then decided not to have heard it. What happened then would be remembered differently by each of the forty or so people who saw it. The long tear across the belly drew its edges in. The skin did not knit cleanly, as a full week of healing would have left it; it went from a wound that would have killed to a wound that has been survived, raw and shut and ugly and alive. The man's breath steadied, and found a rhythm.

It took Sarah perhaps eight minutes. She knelt for the whole of it and Arthur stood over her with his back to the press of the crowd and his arms held a little out from his sides, making of himself the wall he was qualified to be. He had taken this woman out of a compound built because of this. A man with a fortified yard had heard there was a doctor who could do the impossible, and had built her a cage and called it a partnership.

He stood now in a market square and watched her on her knees in a stranger's blood in front of the whole street, putting herself onto every tongue in Piraeus by sundown. He understood that there was nothing he could do about it that would not also be the wrong thing. So he did the only right thing left to him. He stood there and became the wall that would keep the greed away. By the time the man's colour came back the square had filled even more. An old woman was on her knees with her forehead nearly to the stone.

Several were making the sign of the cross and murmuring something, and a thin man in a black cassock and a black hat stood with a string of beads stopped between his fingers, watching Sarah work. Sarah sat back on her heels at last and lifted her hands from the man. Arthur put a hand under her good arm and brought her up.

"He lives," she told the women who had held the cloth, in Greek.

"He must not be moved tonight. Keep him warm, keep him still. Water when he wakes and nothing else. Tomorrow he will hurt everywhere, which is how you will know he is going to be alright."

"Yiorgos," one of the women said, holding the unconscious man's face in both hands.

"His name is Yiorgos. He sells the eggs."

"Then Yiorgos will sell eggs again," Sarah said.

"Siga siga." • • They left before the thanks could start organising, and they went back up the lanes. She was quiet for two streets and her hands were not quite steady.

"You are shaking," he said.

"A little," she said with a small smile.

"It is not the healing. I have done worse work with mundane tools. It is the watching. It is doing it where they can all see." He stopped, set the bags down, and took her shaking hand in both of his, and held it until it was still.

"We got you out of one of these," Arthur said.

"I am not going to pretend I liked watching you make a target of yourself again."

"I know." She did not take the hand back.

"And I am not going to pretend I had a choice. He was bleeding out on the stones, Arthur. I am a doctor before anything else."

"I know that too," he said.

"It is the part of you I would never change. It is also the part of you that frightens me." There was a moment then, in the lane, with her hand in his, where one of them might have said the rest of it. Neither did. But when they started back down the street, he carried the bags in one hand and her hand in his other. • • The whole house ate together that night. Eleni put a tray of psari plaki down the middle and dared anyone to leave any of it unfinished.

The market story had got home too, carried up the hill on a dozen mouths, and it had grown on the journey.

"They are saying," Petros announced, pointing his fork around the table for order, "that our doctor put her hands into a dead man and walked him up out of the ground like Lazarus."

"He was not dead," Sarah said.

"And I did not walk him anywhere. He is lying very still in a box-shop being given water by his neighbours, which is exactly where a man who has lost that much blood should be."

"Lazarus," Petros repeated, because it was the better version and he was keeping it. He turned the fork on Arthur.

"And this one. They are saying he stood over her the whole time, so close, so serious, the wall, and would not let one soul near his wife."

"Wife?" Arthur said, looking up. Petros shrugged.

"People say what they see, ne?"

"You two seem to be taking the cover story very seriously," Donna said with a smirk as Sarah reddened and Arthur focused on the fish on his plate. It was later, when the plates were cleared and Petros had a small glass in front of him, that he came back round to the wolves.

"A wolf," he said.

"In the market. In the day." He turned the little glass on the table.

"I told you this morning. They are coming down. First the hills, then the quarries, now a box-shop full of people while the sun is up." He drank.

"Me, I keep my head down and my door shut. But a man cannot sell his eggs from behind a shut door, and now Yiorgos has learned that the hard way." Donna had stopped eating.

"How many nights of howling, before today?"

"Two," Petros said.

"Three, with tonight."

"Then it is not one lost animal," she said to the table.

"Something has moved them, or made more of them."

"It is Kastella, isn't it?" Steve said.

"The dungeon we saw." Nobody at the table had an answer for that. • • The lamps in the Metropolitan's house were lit early, and Nikephoros sat at the table after his evening prayers. He had a simple meal of bread and oil and a dish of olives laid in front of him when the young priest came in still breathing hard, the one who had been sent down to the market.

The young man had excitement on his face as he told the story to Nikephoros, the glowing hands, the blood, a man called back from death and a doctor who had come from somewhere with the four foreigners and put a stranger back together on the stones. Nikephoros listened, and ate, and when the young priest ran out of words he let the silence hang.

"Whose daughter is she," he asked finally.

"Vassilou. Eleni's girl, from the café by the marina. She has been away. The army, they say, or the doctors. In Africa."

"Eleni's girl." Nikephoros nodded, and pushed the dish of olives across the table to the young man, who had not eaten.

"Eat. You ran the whole hill." He tore another piece of bread for himself.

"Did she ask the people for anything, after."

"Nothing, Despota. She told them to keep him warm and give him water."

"Nothing." Nikephoros considered the bread in his hand.

"Kalá," he said, and ate it. Nikephoros sat with his thoughts late into that night. First the violet skies, then the monster, and now a girl who had brought a man back from death's door. What could it all mean? What was God's plan?