Chương 100: 91. Anamnesis

"Nothing a mind refuses is ever truly discarded. It is set down within reach, and waits, patient, for the day its owner is desperate enough to take it up again." — Codex of the Long Watch, Watcher's Commentary Arthur had been running towards the next thing ever since the system upended the planet, and now he didn't know what to do when there was nothing to do. That was the trouble with the damn apocalypse: you couldn't just take a walk in the woods or watch some football when you wanted to take it easy.

Football reminded him that there would be no World Cup this year, which in turn reminded him that club football was over as well. The apocalypse was a right pain in the arse. Arthur was wondering how long it might take for competitive sports to be a thing again when Donna spoke up.

"You have looked at that triangle forty times this morning," Donna said.

"It has not moved." She was looking at Steve, his ledger open against his forearm, the page showing the phi triangle.

"That is rather the problem." Steve did not look up from it.

"The proportion is exact and the points are nowhere. We have a puzzle on paper that we can't plot on the ground." He shut the ledger on his thumb.

"Which is why I am hoping the professor has a better map of Greece than I do."

"You are hoping he does your homework," Donna said.

"I am hoping he leaves it lying where I can copy it without being seen." They reached a calm side street in Piraeus with houses on both sides. The bougainvillea were in full bloom, falling down in pink curtains over the boundary walls.

"It is the green door." Sarah went up the two worn steps ahead of them.

"Mind your manners. He taught half of Piraeus and corrected the other half, and my mother was one of the corrected. She hasn't forgotten that."

"Corrected about what?" Steve said.

"Her chickpeas. He told her the recipe was Anatolian and she was making it wrong, right after her marriage. She has fed him the same recipe every Sunday for thirty years since and never once granted that he was right."

"So an older version of Steve. Got it," Donna said. The door opened before Steve had a chance to respond.

"You wrote to me about the stone balls," the man in the doorway said to Steve, as if they were ten minutes into a conversation and not five years out of one.

"The ones they dug up at Tarxien. You asked me what they were for, and back then I did not have an answer I could stand behind. Since then, I believe I do." He stepped back and swept an arm into the dim behind him.

"Come in, all of you. Mind the books. They have begun taking territory."

"Thank you, Professor," Steve said as they walked in. The old professor was in his late sixties, with thinning hair tied in a ponytail. The beard had started to drift into the unkempt category, but his eyes remained bright and sharp. The house smelled of coffee and old paper. Books were stacked waist-high down both walls of the hall, course on course like a drystone wall. Sarah greeted him warmly, and the old man took her hand in both of his and said something in Greek that put colour and a smile into her face.

"Dr Kostas Markopoulos," he said to the rest of them, letting her go.

"For you, just Kostas. I've known the Vassilou family for a long time." He looked them over with frank, undisguised interest, an old man counting a sudden crowd in a house that did not often hold one.

"I'm sure you have interesting stories and questions. Sit, sit. I will make coffee. Do not move the books. I have my own cataloguing system." He made the coffee himself, on a wood-fired stove, in a long-handled briki that had gone black with use. It became plain very quickly that he had not had anyone worth talking to in some time. He remembered the year of Steve's conference, and the hotel, and a paper given on the second afternoon that he had disagreed with and disagreed with still.

"Your third question," he said, with his back to them, watching the pot.

"You wrote, 'There are stone balls all over Tarxien, too round and too many to be the work of weather, so what were they for? They make no sense since they are not part of the temple architecture.' I believe that was what you wrote." He turned with the briki in one hand.

"They are bearings. The builders had no wheel and no metal, so they laid the balls down like a road and rolled the giants over them, a ball-bearing five thousand years before anyone thought to set one in a machine. You can still find the grooves worn into the floor where the balls turned under fifty tonnes of stone." Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

"I wrote that in two thousand and twenty," Steve said.

"You wrote it in March 2020, yes." Markopoulos poured.

"I lose keys. I lose spectacles, the names of my own nephews. Questions, I do not lose." Donna had taken the chair nearest the door and sat with her back to the wall and her eyes on the lane through the window, as she did in every room that had a window. Your machines are dead. What your species still knows lives in its books and in the few who hold it in their heads, which makes those few valuable, and worth taking, or worth silencing, Archie said.

I would note only that your kind displays a remarkable inclination for burning books and libraries. None of them could answer with the professor in the room, not without the whole tomato shenanigans, which Archie knew, and which Arthur was beginning to suspect he enjoyed. Steve let him run, and laughed in the right places, and waited until the coffee was poured into four small cups before he began to fish.

"I have been thinking about placement," he said, turning his cup.

"Why were the old sanctuaries placed where they were placed? Whether there was a method in it, or whether we read a method into it afterwards because we like our maps tidy." Something came into Markopoulos's face, a greedy pleasure.

"Ah. You want a fight before the coffee is even cool." He set his own cup down untouched.

"Good. Yes, there was a method, if you believe the old texts. Aristotle says so, more or less. Strabo says so plainly, that the placing of the temples followed a discipline the priests kept but neither wrote down nor shared.

"Doxiadis tried to put numbers to it in the thirties, numbers off real surveys, angles from a sanctuary's gate, et cetera. That much is sober work and I will defend it at any table in Greece."

"Doxiadis, I understand. You can pace his angles on the ground," Steve said.

"It is the leap after the angles that loses me."

"The leap is where the money is." Markopoulos was enjoying himself now.

"A man pacing angles cannot sell a book. A man with a secret geometry of the gods sells a great many." He set his hands flat on the table.

"Strabo will tell you the priests built sanctuaries to be seen, from the sea, from the road, from the next sanctuary along, so a man walking between them was never out of the god's eye. You can draw those sightlines yourself."

"And after Doxiadis come the lovers of lines." The pleasure in his face soured into contempt.

"You draw enough lines between enough old stones and the lines begin to cross, and a certain sort of man decides the crossings are holy and the whole earth is wired.

"Richer, in the sixties, with his zodiac laid over the map of Greece. Worse were the ley-line people after him, worse." He flicked his fingers, as if shoving the literature off the table.

"Numerology in fancy dress. I have failed students for less and slept soundly." He filled his cup again.

"But do not let the cranks turn you off the sober half. The placement was real. These people set their temples by measure and by sightline and by ratios. They did it well enough that we are still arguing about it three thousand years on." Steve went quiet at the last statement. Arthur knew the look well. He had seen it a hundred, a thousand times since they were children. Patterns and references clicking into place.

"You disagree?" Markopoulos said, watching Steve.

"Oh no, never. I marked a student down for that zodiac map once, and I would do it again." Steve set the cup down.

"Although, for argument's sake, if a man did have a figure he could not pin to any map, how would he go about resolving it?"

"For argument's sake," Markopoulos replied.

"You do not pin these things to a map. You walk them. You walk the ground until it agrees with you or makes a fool of you. No substitute for fieldwork." They did not stay long after that. Steve promised to come back and argue the stone balls properly, and Markopoulos threatened to be ready for him. Sarah took the old man's hand again at the door and let him press something into it.

"For your mother," he said. A woman was coming up the lane as they came down the steps, a string bag of lemons in one hand and a card folder under the other arm. She stopped when she saw the crowd in the doorway, and her face brightened.

"Kosta, you have people," she said. Then she looked at all of them and said, in remarkably good English, "Forgive me. I am in and out of this house like a cat. He is the only one left in the city who reads what I read." Her glance went over them and came to rest on Steve, or rather on the ledger still under his arm.

"And you are not from here."

"Just visiting," Steve said.

"He is too modest." Markopoulos came to the threshold to enjoy the showing-off.

"Steven Parr. An archaeologist from England. Megalithic. We have corresponded for years, he and I. And the young doctor is Eleni Vassilou's girl, home at last from MSF. She came back on holiday with her friends a few days before the change," he said, motioning at Sarah. He finished by mentioning Arthur and Donna.

"And her partner and friend."

"An archaeologist." Her pleasure doubled on itself.

"Parr, was it? What is your field, Dr Parr? Tell me you do the Bronze Age, tell me I am not the only one left in Attica who still cares." She did not wait for Steve to answer and turned the same easy warmth on Sarah.

"Fortuitous, to be with family when all this began."

"Mostly I came home for my mother's cooking," Sarah said, and the woman laughed as though it were the wisest thing said all month.

"Papadakis," she said, giving them her name and taking each of their hands in turn with an unhurried grace.

"I hope to see you all again." She gave a last smile and went through the green door.

"I think she's on the Council," Sarah said as they walked down the lane.

"I'm fairly sure I've heard my brother say her name." Donna looked back, her mouth set.

"Then I hope the professor keeps his guests to himself. The last thing we need is the Council taking an interest."