Chương 101: 92. Schema

Information asymmetry is the oldest weapon your species owns. Before you shaped the first blade, you kept the first secret. The one who knew where the water lay could move the many who did not. — The Ether Atlas: Marginal Notes of Archimedes (Guidance System, Earth Assignment) Donna had her axe in her belt before the bread was off the pan. She ate standing, one shoulder against the doorframe and her eyes scanning the lane through the window every third mouthful.

Eleni had given up sitting her down on the second morning. Now she only set the plate where Donna could reach it and let her be.

"I am going to walk the city today," Donna said, once the table had filled in around her.

"The port, the markets, wherever the Council keeps its people. I would like to know the shape of this place while we are still under the radar."

"You are going to do reconnaissance on Piraeus," Steve said, "while the rest of us have breakfast."

"You can come if you want to learn how the docks rate four foreigners who killed six wolves," she said, tearing another piece off the loaf.

"Though I'm hoping that particular bit of news is still under wraps."

"I have my own homework, as it happens." Steve had the ledger open beside his plate.

"Kostas gave me a great deal to chew on yesterday and very little to swallow. But he keeps the kind of library you cannot buy any more. If he will let me back through the door, I want to sit with his Saronic surveys and a couple of his old French volumes and think the riddle through properly."

"He threatened to be ready for you," Sarah said.

"He meant it. Bring an opinion he can argue with or he will be disappointed."

"I intend to bring three." Petros had been under the sink since before they sat down, swearing softly at a fitting that would not seat. Wiping his hands on a towel, he emerged from the kitchen and took a seat opposite Arthur.

"And you two?" he said, his chin going between Arthur and Sarah.

"The doctor and her engineer. What does the happy couple do with a free day?" Arthur found he had no answer ready. He glanced at Sarah, who sat equally blindsided, before she spoke up as if inventing the plan on the spot.

"I can help Mamá," she said.

"And Maria. The house, the cooking."

"The house is done," Eleni said, from the stove.

"You will not scrub a floor I have already scrubbed so you can feel useful. Sit, eat. You are too thin again."

"I am working on the coat all morning," Maria offered from the end of the table, the younger child asleep against her shoulder. She had a length of heavy canvas folded across her knee and a tin of chalk beside her plate.

"Pockets all across the front and back and down the sides, for the plates. I do not need four extra hands in it." She glanced at Arthur.

"I will measure you again before you go anywhere, though. You have a strange shape."

"I have been told," Arthur said. Petros sat back and let a slow grin arrive.

"So." Petros looked from one of them to the other.

"Nothing for either of you. Re, this is a tragedy." He pointed his fork at them in turn.

"I have an idea. You go out. Together. Down to the water, where there are people. You let half of Piraeus see Eleni's girl walking with her man."

"I'm not her man," Arthur protested. Petros's grin widened.

"For the cover. Purely the cover, you understand. A great sacrifice."

"That is not a bad idea," Donna said, and meant it, which took the joke out of it.

"We have told this table the truth. We have told no one else anything. A doctor home from abroad, walking out with her partner on a quiet morning, is the most boring thing the street could see. Boring is what we want. Let them see it once and stop wondering." Arthur watched Sarah find something interesting in her coffee.

"You could show him Akrotiri," Steve said, brightening all at once, the riddle abandoned mid-thought.

"If you are going to walk somewhere worth walking. There is nothing like it. A whole Bronze Age town under the ash, streets and staircases with paint still on the walls. A Pompeii fifteen hundred years before Pompeii. You stand in a room four thousand years old and the colours are—""Absolutely not," Sarah said.

"you have to see it at least once in your—""Steve." She set the coffee down.

"It is a ruin. On my one free day, you want to send me to a ruin. I was dragged round Akrotiri as a child until I could have given the tour myself. And it is on Santorini, which is across a sea, and there are no ferries any more, which you also know."

"Details," Steve said, wounded.

"It is the least relaxing day out a person has ever proposed," Sarah said.

"You have proposed a day off, in a dead town, on an island we cannot reach."

"When you put it that way it does lose something." That got a proper laugh out of the table, Sarah included. Petros was still grinning into his cup when he spoke.

"Re, vlaka. Go to the beach. That is what a beach is for." He looked at Arthur as though letting him in on a secret known only to sensible men.

"Water. A rock to sit on. Sarah will show you Freattyda. We swam off those rocks every summer until the city council put up signs about it, and then we swam anyway."

"The beach," Arthur said. He had meant it as a question, but it came out as agreement, mostly because everyone was already treating it as decided.

"The beach," Donna confirmed with a slight smirk. She drained her cup and pushed off the doorframe.

"I will be back by dark. If I am not, do not come looking in a group, you will only make it worse." She was walking towards the courtyard gate before the group could process the last sentence. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. Maria measured Arthur with a length of string and a chalk line, turned him by the shoulder twice, declared for a second time that he had a strange shape, and let him go.

While he was being measured, Arthur saw Eleni stuff a paper twist of koulourakia and what looked like cheese into Sarah's bag for the walk, before adding with a grin, "For the picnic."

"It is not a picnic, Mamá," Sarah protested. Eleni ignored Sarah and instead went about straightening her daughter's hair. Yiayia watched them leave from her chair by the window. She said nothing, but she let her eyes rest on Arthur for a long time before she went back to her cup. * The Mediterranean sun pressed against a sky of hazy violet. The morning was neither bright nor altogether gloomy, but suspended in a warm, muted violet haze.

They drifted through the lanes with Sarah half a step ahead, naming things to fill the silence. The kafeneío where her father had his coffee and lost at tavli every Sunday of his life. The corner where a man had sold roasted corn from a brazier for forty years; the brazier still stood, nobody having had the heart to move it. She talked faster now, eager to give Arthur a glimpse of her home, the talk warmer for the little Greek words folded into the gaps between the English ones.

Arthur understood perhaps one in five and realised that he did not care. He knew they were performing; they were out to be seen, and Petros had given them the excuse. So he held to Sarah's pace, letting her take his arm when the pavement narrowed. He tried to walk like a man who had walked out with this woman a hundred times before, and found, within a street or two, that he had simply stopped trying.

"You are doing the face," Sarah said.

"What face?"

"The one where you are checking the lintels." She tipped her head at a doorway he had, in fact, been checking.

"Relax your jaw. People who are courting do not survey the masonry."

"This one has a crack running off the corner of the door that should be looked at before the next bad shake." He heard himself give the explanation and smiled.

"You are right. I will stop."

"You will not," she said, her sleeve brushing his as they kept the pace, "but it is sweet that you said it." The city around them wore its damage unevenly. Some streets had been swept and had washing out again; others stood exactly as the first day had left them, a shutter hanging, a car nose-down in a basement stairwell, the quiet of a place that had lost the people who used to make its noise. They were most of the way down to the front when a voice came out of a doorway, cracked with age and pure delight.

"Eleni's girl. Sarah! Koukla, you are home." An old man came down two steps with both hands already reaching, a string bag with three wrinkled oranges swinging from one of them. Sarah went to him and let herself be held and kissed on both cheeks. For a minute, the English left her entirely. She drifted into the low, rapid rhythm of the town while the old man told her things and patted her cheek.

"This is Kýrios Lambros," she said, looking back at Arthur.

"He had the chandlery by the marina. He sold my father his first fishing reel and never let him forget when he was tying the knots wrong."

"Andreas Vassilou could open a man's chest and put his heart back in working order," Lambros said, switching to a slow, careful English for Arthur's benefit, "and he could not tie a clinch knot to save his own life. A surgeon." He shook his head as if a surgeon ought to do better. Then his eyes went over Arthur, top to bottom.

"And this," Lambros said, the orange bag settling against his thigh.

"This is yours?"

"This is Arthur," Sarah said.

"Levéntis." Lambros nodded his approval at her, as though Arthur had been entered in a show and placed well.

"Big. Good shoulders. He will carry the shopping." He turned the full weight of the approval on Arthur.

"You are good to her? You had better be good to her. This family has had enough. The father gone, the girl away in the wars all these years, the mother holding the café open on her own out of pure stubbornness. They have earned an easy thing." The blunt finger pointed, fixing Arthur in place.

"You be the easy thing."

"I will try," Arthur said, surprised to find it was not the cover talking.

"He will try, he says. Po po po." But Lambros looked immensely pleased. He pressed two of the wrinkled oranges out of his string bag into Sarah's hands before she could stop him, told her three times to give her mother his love, and stood on his step, watching them go the whole way down to the corner.

"Half the street will know about it by noon," Sarah said once they turned the bend, "that I came home with a man, and that Lambros approves of his shoulders." She did not sound as if she minded.

"There is your cover, doing the work for us, and all we had to do was take a stroll."

"I wouldn't call joining up with us an 'easy thing,'" Arthur said, smiling.

"I might have already broken my word to Mr Lambros."

"No, it has not been easy," Sarah replied.

"But it is the happiest I have been in a very long time, so I think your word to him is safe." * They reached a café on the front itself, where the marina gave way to the open water. A board with Thursday's specials stood at the entrance, the chalked cursive fading because there had been no Friday worth wiping it clean for. Sarah stopped, her eyes drifting towards the quiet facade. Arthur stopped with her.

"My mother's," she said. The awning had a tear in it that the wind had started. Through the window Arthur could see a counter, a coffee machine the size of a small organ, a wall of photographs. A lintel over the side window would need fixing. The roof held well enough. It would stand. He caught himself and forced his eyes away from the stone. Sarah was not looking at the masonry. She had a hand flat against the glass, and she was looking at a corner table by the window. Arthur stayed quiet.

He didn't know the words for this, but he knew the kindest thing he could do was keep his mouth shut and let his shadow fall beside hers on the glass. After a long moment, she took her hand off the pane, leaving a print in the dust.

"She kept it open after my father died," Sarah said.

"Everyone told her to sell. She wouldn't hear of it. She poured coffee for the same twelve old men for eleven years instead, and called it keeping busy." Sarah wiped her palm dry against her trousers.

"She will open it again. The second there are enough people to fill three tables, she will be down here unchaining the chairs and arguing with Aikaterini about the price of sugar."

"Yes," Arthur said. He looked back at the frayed awning, then forced himself to look at her instead.

"It is a good building. It will hold until she is ready for it." The words felt clumsy and he knew it the moment they were out, a man offering a structural survey to a grieving daughter, and he braced for her to turn away. She did not. She looked at him for a long moment, and then her face eased.

"Thank you," she said.

"I think that is the nicest thing anyone has said about it." There was a moment where he might have said the other thing, the un-structural thing, or where she might have instead, but neither of them did. The unsaid sat between them in the clean morning light, louder than any confession. A long way off and entirely silent, Archie, who heard everything, had said nothing at all. It was the most tactful the construct had ever been, and Arthur suspected, not for the first time, that it knew exactly what it was doing.

"Come on," Sarah said, and took his arm again, though this time the street was not narrow enough to need it.

"Petros is right about one thing in his life. There is a rock down there with my name on it. I am going to sit on it and look at the sea for an hour, and you are going to sit beside me and do nothing at all."

"That is a great deal to ask of a man," Arthur said, teasing. Sarah smiled, the sea wind catching her hair.

"I know. Do it anyway." They sat on the rock while the light shifted on the water, talking about the smallest, least important things or talking not at all, stealing a moment before the reality of the shattered world and a ticking countdown caught up with them again. But for an hour, the sea was just the sea, and the silence was enough.