Chương 116: 107. Paradosi

What is hoarded dies with the one who hoards it. What is given finds a second pair of hands, and a third, and outlives the giver by centuries. Iron rusts in a locked chest and tempers in a working forge. — Codex of the Long Watch, Founding Tenet They reached the outskirts of Athens on the sixth day. The last two camps had been uneventful, quiet stretches of dirt and low fires. For four days, Sarah had set a slow pace, protecting her collarbone.

Now, as the coastal road bent past the first salt-bleached boatsheds and the cracked hulls of dry-docked vessels, she quickened her stride without seeming to notice it. Her left arm was still bound, but the canvas sling was loose now, worn more to guard against sudden jerks than to support the actual weight of the bone. Her voice carried a faster, warmer rhythm than it had on the long road from the cape.

She tumbled over her words, folding small Greek terms into the gaps without bothering to translate them, naming the man who had owned a collapsing shed, the cousin who had crewed a specific caïque before the sky changed. She wasn't talking to the three of them walking a step behind her. She was reading the street back to herself, checking to make sure it was all still there. Arthur watched the slight hitch in her gait, then looked ahead to the house rising at the end of the lane.

The blue paint on the door and the dark green leaves of the lemon tree showing over the stone wall. He had taken a doctor out of this house in one piece. He was bringing her back with a shattered shoulder and a half-knit collarbone, even if it was mostly mended now.

"Your mum's going to kill me," he said.

"Probably," Sarah agreed, her pace never faltering.

"But she will feed you first. So there is that."

"Small mercies," Donna said from the rear. The seven-foot length of barnacled black iron trident rode easily across her shoulder. An old man mending a net by his doorway looked up, his eyes tracking the massive, encrusted weapon, opened his mouth to say something, then quietly looked back down at his work without a word. The blue door stood wide open to the lane. Inside, the small courtyard was full of unfamiliar people and absolute silence.

There were five of them, sitting on wooden kitchen chairs that had been carried out into the shade of the lemon tree, and not one of them was speaking. An old man with thick, scarred fisherman's hands sat with his eyes shut, his palms held open and flat on his knees. Two women, one near Maria's age and the other a great deal older, sat with the same rigid stillness. A boy of maybe sixteen kept opening one eye, shifting uncomfortably, checking to see if anyone else was finding the silence as strange as he did.

Yiayia moved slowly among them, her long black dress rustling against the flagstones, anchoring the crowded yard with her customary gravitas. Yiayia looked up, offering the party a faint smile before returning her focus to the small circle under the tree. She stepped behind the seated fisherman and laid two fingers lightly against the pulse point on the inside of his weathered wrist.

"There," she said in Greek, her voice low and steady. Sarah translated it a beat later in a hushed whisper.

"You feel it. The river. You have always had it. You only stopped listening to it."

"She is teaching them to feel the Nadi-Matrix," Sarah murmured, watching her grandmother.

"Just like she taught me." The sixteen-year-old boy cracked his eyes open, a sudden grin breaking across his face when he spotted Sarah standing at the entrance. The success rate is anomalous, Archie said in their heads. An untrained adult population should show a perceptual threshold response in roughly one in nine. She is at four of five. Her method is inefficient. It includes a great deal of unnecessary instruction she would have to repeat.

"She can't hear you," Sarah whispered back.

"And if she could, she wouldn't care." Without breaking eye contact with the old fisherman, Yiayia snapped a sharp command to the boy in Greek. He immediately closed his eyes again, pulling his shoulders back and sitting up straight. The screen door rattled. Eleni stepped out of the kitchen doorway with a damp dishcloth gripped in her hands. She caught sight of her daughter standing at the gate, and the cloth slipped from her fingers, dropping to the flagstones.

"Panagía mou." She hurried across the courtyard, her hands coming up automatically before freezing an inch short of the canvas sling. Her palms hovered over Sarah's shoulder, trembling slightly.

"What is this? What happened to you? What is this?"

"It's just a clavicle, Mama," Sarah said gently, meeting her mother's frantic eyes.

"It's already mostly done knitting. It's fine."

"It is not fine, it is in a sling." Eleni's gaze snapped past her daughter's shoulder, locking onto Arthur with total, unblinking intensity.

"You. I gave her to you in one piece." Arthur shifted his weight under that glare. The level-twenty guardian felt entirely defenceless.

"She was very brave," was all he could manage.

"He actually did offer to carry her all the way back," Donna piped up from the rear, a smirk on her face.

"But Sarah refused."

"Ten days," Eleni said, turning her full attention back to Arthur, her voice rising in dramatic reproach.

"I waited here for ten days. Why you do this to a poor old woman?"

"Mama, you are only a poor old woman when you want to emotionally blackmail us," Sarah said, a smile breaking through her exhaustion. Eleni stared at Arthur for a long, silent moment, assessing the shattered shield. Finally, she stepped back, letting her hands drop to her sides as she took in the full, filthy sight of the four of them at once.

"Inside," she commanded, gesturing sharply toward the house.

"All of you. You smell like the road and you look like the road. Inside, baths first, and then we eat." Steve let out a long breath, his shoulders dropping as he smiled.

"It is so bloody good to be home." • • The bath took a month of mileage off all of them. Petros had rigged a copper cistern on the roof directly to the sun, and the water ran warm, carrying away four days of coastal road grime, the chalky dust of the collapsed temple and the stiff salt spray from the cape in one long, dark sluice. Arthur stood under the stream far longer than he needed to, only stepping out when he started feeling guilty about wasting the household's water supply.

By the time he walked downstairs, his hair wet and his beard finally cleared of decorative marble flakes, Donna and Steve were sitting around the table. Sarah came down last. Washing one-handed with a strapped shoulder was its own complex engineering problem, and Yiayia had refused to let her try it alone, accompanying her up the stairs to manage the bandages. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Then came the food, and the food was a campaign.

"Eat," Eleni said, and it was more of a command than a suggestion. She dropped a heavy dish of gigantes in front of Steve, great white beans in a rich, savoury red sauce. She stood over him, watching intently until he scooped a portion onto his plate, only to drop another ladleful the second a clear patch of white china reappeared.

"You are too thin. All of you. Look at you. A month of my cooking and ten days on the road and you come back thinner than you left."

"We've been on rations," Steve managed around a mouthful, speaking with the distinct helplessness of a man whose stomach had shrunk to the size of a fist and was currently struggling to remember its original capacity.

"Olives. And that hard bread that takes a tooth out with it."

"And whose fault is that? Did I ask you to go out? Rations." Eleni spat the word as if it were an insult to her kitchen, turning on her heel to fetch the horta from the stove. Petros arrived halfway through the meal. He slid into the chair beside Steve and pinched a bean straight off his plate with the ease of long practice.

"Petros! Wash your hands before you sit on my table," Eleni barked from the kitchen, her timing flawless. Petros grumbled under his breath but went nonetheless. When he returned to the room, his eyes bounced from Arthur to Sarah and back again, a slow, knowing grin spreading across his face.

"So," he said, leaning over his elbows.

"Mama says he carried you?"

"Mama, that is not what I said," Sarah said, looking at the kitchen, and got no response.

"He offered. I declined," she said to Petros, her tone perfectly level.

"He is making the duck," Petros told the table, pointing his fork directly at Arthur, thoroughly delighted.

"Look at him. The whole road, the duck."

"He means you're playing innocent," Sarah translated for Arthur.

"Pretending you have absolutely no idea what he's getting at."

"I actually don't," Arthur murmured.

"The duck," Petros agreed, entirely satisfied, before eating the bean. Donna's mouth moved at one corner. Steve let out a sharp laugh and then immediately tried to chase the linguistic lineage of the idiom back to its root.

"Is that the same word as—" He was cut off as Eleni dropped a heavy forkful of wild greens onto his plate.

"Eat," she said.

"You can dig up my language tomorrow." It was only after the plates were cleared, when the room had settled into the low murmur of people who had eaten far too much and stopped pretending they would help with the washing, that Petros leaned back. The humour had left his eyes, replaced by excitement.

"Before you go to your beds," he said, looking across the table at the four of them.

"There is a thing at the yard I want you to see. You especially." He tipped his chin toward Arthur.

"You told me to think long. I have been thinking long." • • The boatyard at dusk was a clutter of hauled hulls and coiled rope, thick with the sharp smell of pitch. Petros guided them through the shadows to a long, low shed at the back. It had once stored a slipway's worth of raw timber, but it held something entirely different now. Petros had cleared out half the floor space and laid down a flat deck of pallets, and along one wall ran a workbench Arthur could have built himself.

Sturdy, square and braced at the corners. Dark, oddly toned hides hung from a crossbeam, their surface rough but showing a faint hint of blue shimmer through the grain. In the far corner stood an old treadle sewing machine, an old black iron Singer with the gold lettering worn off the arm. It was the kind of machine that had never cared whether the world had electricity or not. Maria sat in the low light with a child fast asleep in a basket at her feet, steadily feeding a strip of the dark leather under the needle.

"That should not work," Steve said before he could stop himself.

"No," Maria agreed with a smile, never looking up. The mechanical treadle clattered rhythmically against the floorboards. The needle rose and fell, pulling the dark hide through in a perfectly clean, tight seam.

"It should not." Arthur walked over to the hanging beam. He took the thick corner of a hide between his finger and thumb, bending the leather back to watch the deep colour shift in the grain.

"These are from creatures," Arthur said.

"From the patrol." Petros stood with his thumbs hooked in his belt, wearing the broad smile of a man thoroughly enjoying himself.

"The army, they clear the roads, ne? They kill the things on the roads. And then they leave them there, because what is a soldier going to do with a dead thing the size of a calf? I made a small arrangement. They tell me where they fight, I send a cart. The meat is not always good, but the skin..." He waved a hand at the beam.

"The skin is good. The skin is very good."

"It's infused," Steve murmured, turning one of the hanging pelts toward the failing light of the doorway.

"The Ether sat in these animals long enough to soak the hide, the same way it soaked the iron. This isn't ordinary leather anymore. You shouldn't even be able to punch a hole in this with an awl."

"No," Maria said again. The treadle clattered, and the iron needle punched clean through the tough grain. Steve stared at the antique machine.

"Core bound. That's how she's doing it."

"Stavros," Petros explained, nodding.

"He put a core in his forge, ne, so it does not go cold and it shapes the iron quick. So I think to myself, this is just a tool. A tool is a tool, and Maria's machine is a tool." He gave the shrug of a man for whom the leap was obvious in hindsight.

"So we ask him how to do it. And Maria does it herself. One small stone. Now the needle goes through and it does not break, and it does not blunt."

"You've built a forge for cloth," Donna said, leaning her weight against a wall.

"Anyone who can stitch can now make armour out of dead monsters."

"Anyone in this family," Petros corrected.

"For now. Others will find out soon, I think." Arthur let the heavy hide fall back against the wooden beam. He stood in the centre of the low room, looking at the entire setup. The square bench, the salvaged hides and the small black iron machine punching through impossible leather. He had handed a pragmatic local a discarded pile of old gear and told him to think long-term, and the man had turned it into a place that made more gear.

"This solves Sarah's glove," Arthur said eventually.

"It might." Steve picked up a thin, flexible offcut of the dark leather from the bench, turning it over in his fingers.

"Ether-touched leather, worked fine enough. A glove or a wrap that channels straight at the skin, light enough to wear all day. We will definitely have to come back to this. Maria, can you work the hide any thinner than this piece?"

"I can work it however it is needed," Maria said, and for the first time looked up from the needle. There was a steadiness in her face that hadn't been there a month ago. She had been a terrified mother stranded in a world that had stopped making sense; now, she was the only person on the coast who could stitch the new leather. Sarah crossed the pallet floor and gave Maria a quick, one-handed hug. The two women held each other for a brief second and smiled.

"I'm still not wearing a full leather glove all day in this heat," Sarah said, letting go of her and stepping back.

"It's a good structural solution," Arthur argued, crossing his arms.

"Besides, what if the portal takes us to Canada next?"

"What if we end up in India?" Sarah shot back.

"Also, I like the idea of a baciamano." Steve looked up from his offcut, thoroughly puzzled.

"Why? A full glove gives significantly more physical protection, especially with infused leather."

"I heal better when my hands are free," Sarah said simply. The physical coverage of the digits has no demonstrable effect on the biological efficacy of your healing techniques, Archie's voice chimed in their minds, flat and prompt.

"What would you know?" Sarah countered tightly.

"You've never actually healed anyone." I have monitored menders across fourteen integrated worlds. I understand the baseline mechanics of tissue restoration in far greater structural detail than you do. Arthur's eyes narrowed slightly as he watched her.

"Sarah... this wouldn't happen to be a fashion choice, would it?"

"I've spent the last five years living out of muddy holes across the world," Sarah said, pulling her loose sling back into place.

"Also, I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about." She turned on her heel and walked out of the dark shed, leaving Maria laughing quietly behind her.

"She always liked her dresses and shoes, that one," Petros said with a warm smile, watching the empty doorway.

"When Papa was still with us, and before she went away to MSF."

"Not looking for a dress, but we all bloody well need new trousers," Arthur said, glancing down at his stiff, salt-crusted gear before looking over at Maria.

"Do you give a friends and family discount?" Maria waved her hands at him in mock dismissal, turning back toward the iron Singer.

"I will take measurements tomorrow."

"Tomorrow, then," Arthur nodded. He looked back toward the yard where Donna was waiting.

"We also need to find out if that trident is actually any good."