I died on a Tuesday night and it took me almost a full minute to notice.
There was no pain, or none of the kind you expect. There was a click behind my left eye, dry and small, like the stay of an umbrella snapping. Then the smell. Old coins, plumbing water, rising up my throat from the inside, and I—with my compulsion to explain everything—managed to classify it before I understood what it meant: blood. Blood somewhere blood had no business being.
It was a quarter past three in the morning. I know because the clock in the corner of the screen was there, white on black, and because I had been sitting in the same chair for eleven hours.
On the desk was a glass of water with a film of dust on it, left from the day before. An open notebook, graph paper, with a table I had ruled by hand: four columns, forty-odd rows, a name in every row. They were not real people. They were the citizens of a video game. I had recorded their ailments, their schedules, their relationships, who lied and who didn't, what each one was worth if I ate them. I had done this for three playthroughs running. By the third I wasn't doing it for the game anymore. I was doing it because I liked the feeling of having somebody else's entire world laid out in order on a sheet of graph paper.
My mother told me once, with no intention of insulting me, that I treated people as though they were exam questions. I answered that exam questions have solutions and people don't, and she went quiet for a long while and then said that was exactly her point.
I was twenty-four. I am not going to tell you my name. I have carried it for two thousand three hundred years and I have not given it to anyone, not to the three people I have loved most in all that time, and I am not going to start now.
On the screen was Jonathan Emmet Reid.
Surgeon, veteran of the Great War, haematologist by accident and by curse. I had taken him to the end three times, and that night I had him finished in the most bureaucratic sense of the word: the skill tree complete, every branch open, every level at the ceiling. There was nothing left to unlock. I had spent the last fortnight farming blood in the alleys of a London of 1918 made of polygons, and that night I had arrived at the point where the game had nothing further to teach me.
I remember thinking, with a strange and disproportionate sadness: that's it. There's no more.
Then the click. Then the smell of coins.
I tried to stand and discovered that the right side of my body had not received the order. That did frighten me. Not the pain, which wasn't there; the administrative silence of an arm that doesn't answer. I managed to look at my hand on the desk, still, beside the notebook, and it seemed to me to be somebody else's hand, something a person had left behind.
An aneurysm, I assume. An artery that had spent twenty-four years waiting, with a wall a little thinner than it should have been, and that night got tired. Nobody was at fault. Nobody killed me. There was no villain, no ritual, no lightning, no bored god moving a piece. A pipe burst inside me. That is the whole of what happened.
I have spent two millennia looking for a meaning in that and I have not found one. Some days I think that is the meaning.
The last thing I saw was the ceiling fan. The last thing I heard was the neighbour's dog, which barked twice and then went quiet.
And then nothing, for a length of time I cannot measure, because there was nobody there to measure it.
I came back in the dark with my mouth full of earth.
That is not an image. It was earth, real earth, dry and loose, coarse sand with lime in it, packed between my teeth and against my palate and pushed down my throat to a depth where there should have been a gag reflex and there was none.
The first thing I did was try to scream.
I couldn't. Not because my mouth was blocked, though it was, but for a much worse reason, one that took me several seconds to understand and that even now, after everything that has happened, is the part of that night I least like to remember.
To scream you need air. You need a diaphragm to push, lungs to empty, a column of air rising to vibrate two folds of tissue in the throat. I had all of those parts. They were there, intact, in their places.
They were not moving.
And they were not moving because nothing was compelling them to. There was no hunger for air. None of that burn in the chest, that old mammal alarm that is the first thing to arrive when you stay underwater a second too long. I was buried, my mouth was full of sand, and my body had no opinion on the matter.
I lay still. For a long time. I don't know how long.
Think, I told myself. It's the only thing you know how to do. Think.
And I thought something I have since spent years failing to forgive myself for, not because it was cruel but because it was stupid, and I believed then that the worst thing a man could be was stupid:
It's the game.
That is what I thought. That I had died and had somehow ended up inside it, and that this was the opening scene, the one I had watched three times, the mass grave in Whitechapel where Reid wakes among corpses without knowing what has been done to him. That I had the character maxed. That the forty-odd rows of the notebook were somewhere out there waiting for me.
I felt relief. That is the detail that damns me. Buried, dead, with sand in my teeth, what I felt was relief, because I believed I knew the rules.
I pushed.
Both arms answered, the right one too, and they came up with a strength that was not mine. I was a young man of twenty-four who got winded on three flights of stairs. What moved that earth did not get winded. I shifted a weight that must have been a grown man sitting on my chest and I shifted it the way you push off a bedsheet, and the sand collapsed to either side, and something scraped my face on the way past, and I felt my right hand snag on a root and the root give with a snap of fibre.
I found out later it was not a root.
I got my head to the surface and, out of habit, out of blind twenty-four-year-old habit, I breathed in.
The air came in and did nothing at all.
It was like filling a glass with no bottom. My lungs opened, closed, completed the whole procedure, and at the far end of all that movement there was no reward: none of that small sweetness you never notice until it is missing, the one that arrives at the end of a yawn or after running. Nothing. Air in, air out, and a body that did not thank me for it because it did not need it.
That was when I was frightened. Not when I understood that I had died: when I understood that I no longer breathed.
I dragged myself the rest of the way out and knelt on the turned earth, shaking in a curious way, with no racing pulse, no sweat, none of the things that accompany fear when fear has a living body underneath it. My heart was not beating fast. It was not beating. I put my hand to my neck and searched for the carotid with two fingers, the way I had been taught on a first-aid course I took at seventeen because it was compulsory and had never thought about since, and I found nothing, and I spent almost a full minute searching, switching sides, pressing harder, convinced the problem was my technique.
The problem was not my technique.
I looked at my hands in what little light there was. They were dirty with earth and with something else, something dark under the nails, and the nails were mine but thicker and harder, with an edge that did not belong to a nail. When I thought about them, when I actually gave them my attention, the sensation ran down my forearm like a cramp in reverse and the nails extended.
They did not transform. There was no effect, no sound. They were simply already there: four centimetres of something that was neither bone nor keratin, matte black, curved, so sharp that when I closed my hand I opened my own palm without feeling it.
And the palm closed itself while I watched. The lips of the wound drew together as though someone were pulling a thread underneath, and in five seconds there was nothing left, no scar, no blood, not even the sting.
I laughed. It was an ugly sound, short, with no humour anywhere in it. Then I was quiet for a long while.
I was in a trench.
I understood that when I stood up and could see over the edge. It was not a grave: it was a long, straight trench, more than a metre deep, its walls cut with a pick into a whitish soil that crumbled to powder at a touch. There was rope lying on the ground, an overturned basket, a stack of squared stone waiting beside a ramp of planks.
Building works. I had woken in the foundations of something that did not yet exist.
And above me, past the trench, past a slope of rubble, was the city.
I will never be able to explain properly what I felt at that moment, because two things happened at once and neither left room for the other.
The first was the smell.
I did not know that smell and yet I understood all of it at once, the way you understand a sentence in your own language. It smelled of freshly cut stone, which is a smell of wet dust and something mineral and clean. Of hot pitch. Of fish—a great deal of fish, in three separate stages of decay, and I was able to tell the three apart. Of old human urine and fresh human urine and the difference between them. Of olive oil burning in a linen wick. Of goat. Of a body with a fever, somewhere, two hundred metres off, the fever high, and beneath it something sweet and rotten that I recognised without ever having smelled it in my life and that years later I would learn to call by its name: an infected wound, with gangrene starting at the edge.
I was standing at the bottom of a hole and I could draw the map of an entire city with my nose.
The second thing was the hunger.
And here I have to stop, because in two thousand three hundred years I have never found anyone who understands it who has not felt it, and I have tried with all of them.
The hunger was not in the stomach. That is the mistake everyone makes. The stomach had nothing to do with it; the stomach was a dead bag I carried around for historical reasons. The hunger was in the gums first, the way it is when the back teeth are coming through and it is the bone that hurts and not the flesh. Then it climbed into the jaw, into the joints in front of the ears, and drew them tight. Then it settled behind the eyes with a steady, round pressure, the same pressure a high fever makes.
And then the world changed shape.
Everything that was not a person began to switch off. The stone, the rope, the ramp, the sea I could hear to my left—all of it became furniture, scenery, things of no interest. And instead, out in the dark, the heartbeats began to come on.
I could hear them. That is not a metaphor: I could hear them, one by one, through walls of mud brick and through planking. And I did not hear them as background noise but the way you hear a conversation in your own tongue, with meaning, with grammar. To my right, above, there was a man asleep with the slow regular pulse of the healthy. Beyond him, two people together with their hearts running fast for a reason that was not fear. In the house at the end there was an old man with an arrhythmia, a stumble every six or seven beats, so clear I could have drawn it. And somewhere toward the water there was someone alone, awake, with the steady pulse of a man working with his hands.
I could have counted every one of their beats. And I was not doing it out of medical curiosity. I was doing it the way a man reads a menu.
That was the moment I realised I had not woken up as myself.
I climbed out of the trench. I remember noticing halfway up that I was going up a slope of loose rubble without using my hands and without slipping, and that I was doing it silently.
And I remember what I was wearing, because it was the first thing that forced me to admit that something did not fit.
Leather boots with laces, high to mid-calf, the soles stitched. Heavy wool trousers. A buttoned waistcoat. Over it, a long dark coat with the collar turned up, of a heavy wool that smelled of damp and coal ash. In the inside pocket, nothing. On the little finger of my left hand, a plain gold ring that was not mine and that I did not take off for eighteen hundred years.
I had died in gym shorts and a T-shirt from a five-kilometre race I never ran.
Those clothes were not mine. They were his. They were 1918.
And here is the part that shames me, and I am going to tell it in full, because if I begin this story lying there is no point in telling it.
I stood at the edge of the trench, in the dark, dead, not breathing, hungry for a thing I did not yet dare to name, and instead of kneeling or praying or weeping for my mother, I took inventory.
I thought, in those words: my abilities are maxed.
I thought, in those words: the reserve is empty.
I went through the whole tree in my head, branch by branch, the way I had done so many times with the menu open and one hand on the mouse. The claws, yes, I had seen those already. The spring. The spear. The barrier. The veil. The mist. The three big ones at the bottom of the tree, the ones that cost so much that in the game you almost never used them. All of it was there, all of it available in the way that you know, without looking, that you have two hands.
And all of it was at zero.
I had no way of knowing it then, but I had just made the first true mistake of my existence, and it was not killing anyone. It was that. It was looking at a world I did not know and seeing an interface. It was spending ten minutes calculating the optimal route for resource recovery instead of asking myself, even once, where the hell I was.
If I had asked, I would have noticed that there was not a single gas lamp. That there was no chimney coal in the air, a smell you could not escape in London in 1918 even on the worst day of fog. That there was no machine anywhere—no distant train, no siren, none of the thousand low vibrations that no human being of my century had ever heard fall silent all at once.
I would have noticed that the silence had the wrong texture.
I noticed none of it. I straightened the collar of my coat, my hands dirty with earth and with something that was not earth, and set off toward the water, toward the one calm heartbeat that was alone and awake.
I told myself I was going to control it.
I told myself that I was a person who planned, who had filled three notebooks with the routines of people who did not even exist, who was capable of solving this with a little method. I told myself I was only going to get close enough to look, that I would do nothing, that it was important to gather information before acting.
I walked slowly for the first hundred paces.
To keep from thinking about the smell I began to recite. It is a habit I have had since I was a child, whenever something is too much for me: I start listing things in order. That night the first thing that came into my mouth was the bones of the wrist, both rows, outside in, and it surprised me to find them there, because I had never studied medicine in my life. Scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform. Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate.
They were not my words. They were in that mouth before I was, the way the boots and the ring were, and the first time I said them aloud something crawled at the back of my neck, because I said them in an accent that was not mine.
It worked for about thirty paces. Then I passed the house of the sick man.
It was the fourth in a row, wider than the others, the doorway covered with a woollen curtain. And from inside, through the curtain and the mud brick and everything else, came that smell I had recognised without knowing it: high fever, and beneath the fever something sweet and rotten that was flesh dying while still attached to a living man.
I cannot explain why that drew me more than the other. There is no logic to it. A sick man is poorer food; years later I would be able to prove it. But that night the smell of that infection called to me in a private and horrible way, as though a man could be called at once by hunger and by pity, and I found myself with my hand on the curtain without remembering having decided to raise it.
And I could not go in.
There was no one stopping me. There was no door, no bolt, no armed man. There was a curtain of cheap wool moving in the air.
I put my hand inside and my hand went in. I put my shoulder in and my shoulder passed. And when I went to put my foot down I found, at the exact height of the threshold, at the place where the packed earth of the street became the packed earth of the house, a refusal.
It is not a wall. That is the mistake everyone makes when I tell them. A wall can be pushed. That was not a surface: it was a no. It was the same impossibility you meet when you try to remember a name you do not know, or when you try to want something you do not want. I pushed with everything I had, which that night was a great deal, and nothing moved, because there was nothing there to move.
On the other side, three metres away, a man was snoring with the short broken breath of the feverish. I was standing half inside his house and I could not take a step.
I let go of the curtain. I stood in the street, shaking again in that false way, with no heart to race, and for the first time since I had come out of the ground a thought crossed my mind that did not come from the game, or the inventory, or the skill tree.
Someone had given me rules. And had not explained them to me.
I looked down the row of houses, every one with its curtain, every one with its people inside and its heartbeat, every one closed to me in a way no lock in the world could have managed.
And I turned my head toward the water, toward the single calm pulse that was alone, awake, and out in the open.
Then I stopped walking slowly.
His name was Timarchos. I learned it afterwards, and I learned it in the worst way there is.
He was on the shore, on a tongue of sand between two jetties of new timber, crouched beside an upturned boat. He had an oil lamp hanging from a stake, and by the light of that lamp he was caulking the hull: pressing pitched oakum between the planks with a flat blade and then tamping it down with the edge, with the repetitive patience of trades that are learned in childhood. He worked at night because by day it was too hot for the pitch. I learned that afterwards too.
He was a man of about forty, broad across the shoulders, with short curly hair and a beard that began high on his cheeks. He was stripped to the waist. He had an old scar on his right shoulder, white and thick, badly closed at the time. His knuckles were swollen. Early arthritis, I thought, and I hated myself in the same instant for having thought it, and I went on thinking it all the same: early arthritis, deformity of the first two interphalangeal joints, probably from the cold and the salt water.
I was twelve metres from him and I could see the pulse in his neck.
Sixty-four a minute. A calm man, in good condition, in no hurry at all. The blood climbed his carotid and my mouth filled with saliva, and that was the moment I discovered that I still had saliva, and what it was for.
He lifted his head. He had heard me, or felt me, or simply reached the moment to look somewhere else.
He saw me.
He was not frightened. That is the thing that stayed lodged in me for a thousand years. He was not frightened in the slightest. He saw a tall pale man covered in earth, wearing a coat absurd for the climate, standing on the sand in the middle of the night, and what he did was straighten up, rest the blade on the edge of the boat, and say something to me.
I did not understand the words. I understood the tone, which is a different thing and is sometimes worse.
It was the tone you use with someone who has got lost. A little mockery, a little irritation, and beneath all of it, without any doubt, the offer of help. He spoke again and pointed inland, toward the houses, and then made a gesture with his hand, two fingers together toward his mouth, and that I understood perfectly.
He was asking me whether I was hungry.
I opened my mouth to answer. I was going to tell him I needed help. I was going to tell him, I think, that I did not know where I was, that something had happened to me, that he should please not come any closer. In my head the sentence was whole and it was in my own language and it was a reasonable sentence, and to this day I know exactly what the words were.
What came out of my mouth was a sound.
I cannot describe it better than that. It was not a scream and it was not a growl. It was something low and continuous that began in the chest, that I did not order and could not stop, and that took the smile off that man's face in less than a second.
Then he was frightened.
He stepped back half a pace, groped blindly and caught up the blade, which was the only tool near him, a sheet of iron with no edge and a wooden handle. He raised it to his chest. His pulse went off: sixty-four, a hundred and ten, a hundred and thirty, and the sound of his heart filled my whole head and wiped out everything else.
I want to be exact about this part.
There is a story it would have suited me to tell, and it is that I blacked out. That the beast took me, that the lights went out, that I woke afterwards with red hands and no memory of what had happened. It is a clean story. I have heard dozens of my own kind tell it across the centuries and some of them I believe. Most of them, no.
I did not black out.
I was there the whole time. I watched every single thing I did while I was doing it. I crossed the twelve metres in less time than it takes a man to decide which way to run, and while I was crossing them I was thinking, with a part of me that was still working with absolute clarity, that the movement was not mine, that my legs were doing something I did not know how to do, that I was going to arrive too fast.
And at the same time, in another part of me, there was something that wanted to arrive.
That is the sentence. That is the only honest sentence I have about that night, and it has taken me twenty-three centuries to get it into order: it is not that I could not stop. It is that I will never know whether I could not or would not, and everything I have built since—every rule I wrote, every city, every child, every war—has been a way of not having to answer that question.
He hit me with the blade. On the temple. He put his whole shoulder behind it and it rang like iron on stone, and I felt the impact the way you feel someone touching your arm when your mind is elsewhere.
Then I took the blade off him. There was no struggle. I took it out of his hand the way you take a knife off a child.
I put him on his back on the sand. He kicked and drove his fingers into my face and got his thumb into my eye, and a man has to be very brave or very desperate to do that, and he was both. I pinned his wrist to the ground, and I pinned his shoulder, and I put my mouth to his neck.
It was not elegant. It was not a clean bite. I opened his throat with my teeth in a clumsy, brutal way, searching by instinct and finding by luck, and when the blood came it came under pressure, in spurts that kept the rhythm of his heart, and it filled my mouth and my face and the collar of the coat.
And it was warm.
That is the thing nobody tells you. I expected it to be revolting. I expected to have to overcome something. What there was instead was the largest and most complete relief I have ever felt, in two thousand three hundred years, and it has never repeated itself at that intensity, and I have spent a good part of my existence making sure I am never again in a position to feel it.
The ache went out of my gums. The pressure went out from behind my eyes. The world filled up again with things that were not heartbeats: the sea came back, the smell of the pitch came back, the trembling light of the lamp on its stake came back. I felt the cold leave my hands and my feet, a cold I had not even noticed until it stopped.
I felt, with perfect clarity, that I was healing.
And while I felt all of that, underneath me, a man who worked at night because by day it was too hot for the pitch was dying.
And then came the other thing.
Nobody had warned me. In the game that part was a screen: everything went red and three or four loose sentences appeared about the victim, a paragraph of context, a useful fact. I had read hundreds of those paragraphs with my thumb already on the button to skip them.
It was not a paragraph.
It was his entire life, coming in through my mouth along with the blood, and it arrived in the order memory arrives in, which is not the order things happen in.
Bread. The first thing was the smell of his mother's bread, and not bread in general but that bread, with too much ash on the crust because the oven drew badly, and the absolute wordless certainty that this smell meant being safe.
A yellow dog with a torn ear. Its name was something I could not pronounce then and cannot pronounce now.
Water. A great deal of water. The feel of the wet gunwale under the forearm, repeated ten thousand times until it was part of the body. The exact shape the coastline takes when you come in at night and recognise it by its outline and not by its lights.
An older man, his father, cuffing him hard on the back of the neck for leaving a rope badly tied, and then, that same night, giving him half his own food without saying anything.
A woman. Her name was Aristea. She used to sit across from him and hold his swollen hands in hers and press each knuckle one at a time, and it hurt him and he said nothing because he did not want her to stop. She died of a fever in four days. He was with her all four. On the last night she asked him for water and he went out to fetch it, and by the time he came back it was no longer needed, and he had spent eleven years unable to remember her without remembering the jug in his hand.
A daughter. Nine years old. Her name was Melita. She counted the stars aloud and always came out with a different number, and every night he followed her count with absolute seriousness and never once corrected her. She was asleep at that moment two hundred paces away, in the third house in the row, with a cloth over the window.
A debt. Four drachmas. He owed four drachmas to a man in the eastern market for some planks, and it weighed on him, and that was why he worked at night.
And at the end, on top of everything else, the newest thing, the strongest, the last thing he had thought with a whole head: a tall dirty man standing on the sand, and the idea, perfectly clear and unadorned, that the poor wretch had got himself lost, and that there was yesterday's bread at his house, and that his daughter would not wake if they came in quietly.
Timarchos. His name was Timarchos.
I learned a man's name at the exact moment I was taking it from him.
I let go. I threw myself back and landed sitting in the sand and pushed myself away with my heels until I hit the upturned boat.
He was still alive. He lasted a little longer. His eyes were moving and one of them found me, and there was nothing in it, no hatred, no question, no fear—only the enormous labour of staying there a while longer.
Then he stopped being there.
I looked at him from the ground. I stayed like that until the lamp burned itself out and went dark with a small sputter, and when it went out I discovered that I could still see him perfectly in the dark, in full detail, better in fact, and that struck me as the cruellest punishment they could have devised.
I was sick. That is, I tried to be. My body, which did not breathe and did not beat, turned out to have a very clear opinion about not giving back a single drop of that, and all I managed was to kneel and retch dryly over the sand for a long and humiliating while.
Then I went back to him and knelt at his side, and without thinking, with the idiot automatism of a first-aid course from seven years earlier, I felt for the pulse in his neck, in a neck that no longer had much left to feel it in.
And then I began to catalogue.
I could not help it. It is what I am. Pupils, fixed, dilated, equal on both sides. The temperature of the skin of the chest, still warm; the forearm no longer. The blood pooling in the back and in the backs of the thighs where the body met the ground, drawing that slow purple stain I had seen in a plate in a book and never on a person. The jaw, still soft; rigor had not begun. I calculated the time. I calculated the volume. I estimated, with a precision I found myself capable of without the slightest difficulty, how much blood I had drunk and how much had spilled into the sand and was already drying.
I had been doing that for half a minute when I heard myself.
I was taking clinical notes on a man I had just killed, with the same part of my brain that had filled three sheets of graph paper with people who did not exist.
And that was the first time, the first of many, that I felt true terror of myself. Not of what had been done to me. Of what I was going to do with what had been done to me.
I closed his eyes. I did not know any prayer. I was raised in a house where nobody prayed and at twenty-four that had seemed to me something to be proud of, and that night, kneeling on a beach in a country I could not name, with my hands soaked, I had absolutely nothing to say, and it struck me as a terrible poverty.
In the end I crossed his hands on his chest, those swollen-knuckled hands, and I said aloud, in a language that at that moment was spoken by no one on the face of the earth:
"Timarchos."
And then:
"Melita. Third house. Four drachmas."
I said it three times, the way you repeat a telephone number you cannot write down. I did not know why I was doing it. I know now. It was the first act of my entire existence as the thing I am, and it was a promise made to a dead man, and of all the promises I have made since—including the ones I made to kings and to gods and to things a great deal worse—it is the only one I have never broken.
I knew the dawn was coming before there was anything to see.
It was not the light. The sky in the east was still black, perhaps with that dirty grey of the first minutes, and it would have told a living man nothing. What I felt was something under the skin of my face and the backs of my hands, a minute, very fine itch, the kind that announces sunburn six hours before it appears.
And with the itch, a fear that was not mine.
That is the important part and it is the part that took me longest to admit. The fear of the sun did not come from my head. It was not a deduction. It came from the marrow, from the same place that pulls a hand back from fire, and it was enormous, and it was animal, and it was older than I was. My body knew perfectly well what was going to happen to it and had no interest whatsoever in discussing it with me.
I got up and ran.
I ran with no plan, inland, between low mud-brick houses with curtains over the doorways, and within a few paces I already knew I was not going to manage it that way, that I had no idea where I was or where there might be a door that would open for me. I doubled back. The itch was getting worse and now it was clearly heat, a heat coming from a sun that had not yet risen.
The trench. The building works.
I went back to the trench where I had woken, slipping on the rubble, and got into it and started digging with both hands and the claws out, in the same earth I had come out of a few hours earlier, and by then the irony was beyond caring about. I dug down nearly two metres in less time than it would have taken ten men with shovels. I shifted the stone, made a hollow, got in on my back and began pulling the earth over myself, over my legs, over my chest, over my face.
And in those last seconds, with my head still out, the harbour woke up.
First a small bell, two strokes. Then a wooden door. Then a woman calling to someone and a man answering her from further off, and another man laughing, and the unmistakable sound of a rope running through a pulley.
And the words.
I went still. I went absolutely still with the earth up to my chin, listening, because there was something in those voices that my head half recognised and that fit nowhere at all.
It was not English.
I had expected English. A hard, quick dockside English, an English of 1918 that would be difficult but would be English. And what I was hearing had another music: long vowels, words ending in hard syllables, a rhythm that lifted at the end of a sentence. And I knew that sound. I knew it from an elective I had taken at university to fill out my credits, from a whole semester of boredom and a lecturer who made us read aloud.
Greek. They were speaking Greek.
And not museum Greek. Living Greek, from people haggling over the price of fish.
I lifted my head a little more, just enough, against everything my body was screaming at me, because I had to see.
The eastern sky was truly paling now and the sea had gone the colour of lead. The bay opened away to the left, enormous, calm. And out from the shore ran a long causeway of stone, straight as a ruler, joining the city to a low flat island in the distance.
At the tip of that island there was a tower.
It was half built. You could see the wooden scaffolding climbing its outside, and the spiral ramp, and counterweighted cranes, and even at that hour there were men going up it like ants, minute, starting the day before the heat. The tower must have stood at a third of what it was going to be. Around its base was stacked stone in quantities that made no sense, mountains of stone, a whole city of stone waiting to go up.
I knew what that was. Anyone does. It is in children's books.
And I knew, because that is exactly the sort of useless fact I always memorised, that the tower had been finished somewhere around the year 280 before Christ.
And it was not finished.
The game I had played began in London, in 1918, with a man waking in a mass grave.
I covered my face with earth before the sun came up, and I stayed under it, in the absolute airless silence of a foundation trench, with my mouth still full of the taste of a man named Timarchos, understanding at last—at twenty-four years old, with two thousand three hundred more ahead of me and no way on earth to scream—that I was not playing.