SALT AND IRON : The Tale Of Alexios

Part One : There is a particular kind of light that falls over the town of Myrrhos in the hour before dawn, when the sea is still black and the sky has only just begun to bruise itself purple at the edges. It is a light that belongs to fishermen and bakers and the very old, who cannot sleep, and to small boys who have decided, for reasons known only to small boys, that this is the day they will finally learn to be brave. Alexios was seven years old the first time he woke before the light to watch his father leave. He had crept down the narrow stairs of the house on Anchor Row, his bare feet finding the worn grooves in the wood without needing to see them, and he had settled himself into the shadow beside the hearth where the banked coals still glowed like sleeping eyes. From there he watched his father, Theron, standing at the window with a cup of something hot between his hands, looking out at a sea that gave away nothing. Theron was not a large man, not in the way the old stories made warriors large, all shoulders and beard and thunder. He was lean, weathered the way rope is weathered by salt and years, with hands that had calluses in places Alexios did not yet have names for. His hair had gone the color of wet sand, and there was a scar above his left eyebrow that he never explained the same way twice. Once he said a shark had done it. Once he said a jealous husband had done it. Once, when he had drunk more wine than usual at the winter festival, he said nothing at all, and looked instead like a man remembering something he wished he could not. "You should be asleep," Theron said, without turning around. "I heard you moving." "You hear everything. Your mother says you'll make a terrible thief, because you can never be quiet enough to steal anything." Theron did turn then, and there was a smile in it, small and real. "Come here." Alexios went to him and was lifted, though he was really getting too old to be lifted, and set upon the windowsill so the two of them could look out at the water together. The harbor was a forest of black masts against a bruised sky, and here and there a lantern moved along a deck like a firefly deciding where to land. "Where are you going this time?" Alexios asked. "South, past the Salt Islands, to trade wool and iron nails for cinnamon and pepper and a length of silk your mother has been hinting about for a month without ever once mentioning it directly." Theron said this with the particular fondness of a man who has been married a long time and finds his wife's small deceptions more charming than any honesty. "Six weeks, perhaps eight, if the winds are unkind." "Take me with you." "Someday." "You always say someday." "That is because someday is always true, until the day it isn't." Theron ruffled his son's hair, which Alexios hated and secretly loved in equal measure. "A ship is no place for a boy who has not yet learned to tie his own boots properly." "I can tie my boots." "You can tie them so they fall apart by midday. I have seen it happen. Twice." Alexios scowled, which made his father laugh, a low sound that seemed to come from somewhere deep and settled in his chest, a sound that Alexios would spend years afterward trying to remember exactly, and never quite managing to. It was not that Theron was an unusual father in the ordinary sense. He rose before dawn, as fathers who worked the sea did. He came home smelling of brine and tar and, sometimes, of foreign spices that clung to his coat for days. He argued gently with his wife about money, and less gently about whether their daughter was too young to be allowed to climb onto the roof of the boathouse, a debate his wife always won by the simple tactic of being right. He was, in every visible way, a trader — a man who bought low in one port and sold high in another, who knew the moods of the wind better than he knew his letters, who could haggle a Salt Island merchant down to half price and still leave the man smiling. What Alexios did not know — what almost no one in Myrrhos knew, save for a very few people scattered across very distant shores — was that his father had once been something else entirely. That the scar above his eyebrow had not come from a shark or a jealous husband, but from a blade wielded by a man who was trying very sincerely to kill him, and had very nearly succeeded. That there was a version of Theron who had worn armor instead of a trader's coat, who had killed men in the dark and buried the memory of it somewhere so deep that even his own dreams rarely found it. Alexios knew none of this. To him, his father was simply his father: a man who left before dawn and returned, weeks later, with gifts and stories and a particular way of setting down his sea-chest that meant he was home to stay for a while, and the whole house seemed to exhale. Their mother, Ismene, ran the house the way a captain runs a ship, which is to say with a great deal of shouting that meant nothing and a great deal of quiet competence that meant everything. She had grown up in Myrrhos, the daughter of a net-maker, and she had married Theron when she was nineteen and he was twenty-three, back when he still had the restless look of a man who had not yet decided what kind of life he wanted, and she had decided, with the clear-eyed practicality that would define the rest of her life, that she would simply help him decide. "Your father was impossible when I met him," she told Alexios once, working flour into dough with the heels of her hands while he sat on the counter's edge, f*******n from touching anything. "Impossible. He would disappear for months and come back thin as a fish-bone and say nothing about where he had been. I told him: Theron, a man who will not tell his wife where he has been is a man who does not deserve a wife at all. And do you know what he said?" "What did he say?" "He said, 'You are not my wife yet.' As though that settled the matter." She laughed, shaking her head at the dough as though it, too, should find this as absurd as she did. "So I made him a bargain. I said, tell me nothing of where you have been, if you must keep your secrets, but promise me that whatever you were, you are done being it. Be a trader. Be dull. Be home for supper more often than not. And he agreed, and mostly, he has kept it." "Mostly?" Ismene's hands stilled on the dough for just a moment, so brief that Alexios, at seven, did not notice it, though he would remember it years later and understand it entirely differently. "Mostly," she said again, and returned to her kneading, and the moment passed like a cloud crossing the sun, there and then gone. His sister, Elara, was four years younger than Alexios and, in the manner of younger sisters everywhere, considered it her sacred duty to be present for absolutely everything her brother did, whether or not she had been invited. When Alexios practiced throwing stones at the fence posts behind the boathouse, imagining himself a great warrior felling enemies with every throw, Elara sat cross-legged in the dirt nearby, keeping score with a seriousness that bordered on the religious. "You missed," she would announce, at deafening volume, whenever a stone went wide. "I did not miss. I was aiming to the left." "You were not aiming to the left. You missed." She would nod firmly, as though this closed the matter, and then, a moment later, without any sense of contradiction: "Teach me." He taught her, of course. He taught her to throw stones, and later to identify the different sails on the ships in the harbor, and later still — much to their mother's disapproval — to climb the boathouse roof, a skill she took to with a fearlessness that made Alexios's stomach drop every single time. "You're going to break your neck," he told her once, standing below the roof's edge with his arms out as if he could somehow catch her from ten feet away if she fell. "You're going to break your neck," Elara mimicked back at him, in a voice pitched to sound as much like their mother as she could manage, before flashing him a gap-toothed grin and scrambling higher. She adored him in the uncomplicated, total way that small children adore an older sibling who has not yet given them any reason not to, and he, in turn, indulged her with a patience he did not know he possessed until she required it of him. When she had nightmares, she came to his room instead of their parents', on the theory — never stated, only understood — that their mother would simply tell her nightmares were not real, while Alexios would ask her to describe the monster in detail and then help her plan, with great tactical seriousness, exactly how she would defeat it if it ever dared to appear again. "It had six legs," she told him once, at perhaps five years old, her small face very solemn in the dark. "And its mouth opened sideways." "Sideways," Alexios repeated, matching her gravity. "That is a problem. Most monsters have mouths that open the ordinary way, so you know where to hit them. A sideways mouth is trickier." "What do I do?" "You go for the legs first. Six legs sounds frightening, but it is really just six weak points instead of two. Knock out enough of them, and the monster falls over, sideways mouth or not." Elara considered this with the intensity of a general reviewing a battle plan, and nodded, satisfied, and went back to sleep curled against his side, and Alexios lay awake a while longer, strangely proud of himself, not yet understanding that this — protecting something smaller and more frightened than himself, even if only from an imaginary six-legged monster — was the first true taste he would ever have of what he would later spend his whole life chasing. The town of Myrrhos was not large. It sat in the crook of a bay on the northern coast, where the water stayed cold even in summer and the wind carried the smell of pine down from the hills behind the houses. Life there moved with the tides, literally and otherwise: the fishing boats went out and came back, the trading ships arrived heavy and left light, or arrived light and left heavy, and the seasons turned with a reliability that made the town feel, to a child, like the safest and most permanent place in the world. Alexios grew up believing this completely. He grew up on stories, as most children do, though the stories he loved best were not the ones his mother told about clever foxes and vain kings, but the ones the old sailors told at the harbor tavern, which he was technically too young to enter and which he entered anyway, with the ease of a boy who has learned that adults rarely look twice at a child sitting quietly in a corner. He heard, from men whose faces had been carved into leather by forty years of salt wind, stories of pirates and sea monsters, of the Iron Coast to the south where the water ran warm and the storms could tear a ship in half, of a legendary order of warriors who had once guarded the trading lanes before the order fractured and scattered and became, in the tellings of drunk old sailors, half myth and half memory. "There was a knight," one old man told him once, a man named Dorcas who had lost three fingers to a fishing line and told a different story about it every time, "who could take down six men without drawing his blade. Bare hands. That was the old order, boy. The Sworn. Not like the mercenaries you see now, selling their swords to whoever pays best. The Sworn had a code. Protect the weak. Never draw first. Never break your word, even to an enemy." "What happened to them?" Dorcas's face did something complicated, somewhere between a smile and a wince. "Same thing that happens to anything with a code, in a world with none. It got used by men who didn't share it, until there was nothing left of the code but the name, and even that stopped meaning much." He took a long pull from his cup. "Ask your father. He might know more than an old fisherman." Alexios did ask his father, that very night, bursting into the house with the question already halfway out of his mouth. Theron, seated at the table mending a net with the same careful hands he used for everything, went very still for a moment — so briefly that a less attentive son might have missed it, but Alexios, who had spent his whole life watching his father the way sailors watch the sky, did not miss it. "The Sworn," Theron said slowly, "were a very long time ago. Old men telling old stories, mostly. Half of what Dorcas tells you never happened at all." "But some of it happened." "Some of everything happened, if you go back far enough." Theron did not look up from the net. "Eat your supper. Your mother made fish stew, and if you let it go cold she will make you a speech about the many starving children of the world who would be glad of it, and it is a very long speech." Alexios let the matter go, that night, the way children let things go — not because the question was answered, but because supper was ready and the stew smelled good and there would, surely, be other nights to ask again. He did not yet know how few of those other nights remained. He did not know that a boy only gets so many ordinary evenings with his father before the world decides, with the casual cruelty it reserves for the people who love each other most, that the ledger has come due. There were good years. He would tell himself that, later, in the worst of the years that followed — there were good years, and I had them, and no one can take that away from me even if they took everything else. He had a father who lifted him onto windowsills to watch the dawn. He had a mother whose bread was the best in Myrrhos and who was never, not once, too tired to answer a question, even a foolish one, even the fortieth foolish question of a very long day. He had a sister who believed he could defeat six-legged monsters with strategy and patience, and who followed him everywhere with a devotion that occasionally made him want to scream and, far more often, made the whole world feel steadier just for having her nearby. He had, for the first twelve years of his life, everything a boy could reasonably ask for, and he did not know it, because that is the particular tragedy of childhood — you cannot know you are happy until you have something to measure the happiness against, and by the time you have that measure, the happiness itself is usually long gone. There was one afternoon in particular that Alexios would return to more than any other, in the years afterward, turning it over in his memory the way a man turns over a smooth stone in his pocket, worn soft from handling. He was ten. His father had been home for three weeks, the longest stretch in recent memory, because a broken mast had delayed his ship's next departure, and Theron had spent the unexpected holiday the way he spent most of his holidays: fixing things around the house that did not strictly need fixing, teaching Elara the names of constellations she promptly forgot, and, on this particular afternoon, taking Alexios down to the flat stretch of beach beyond the boathouse with two lengths of driftwood, each about the length of a short sword. "Your mother will be angry," Alexios said, though he was already reaching for the driftwood with undisguised delight. "Your mother is always a little bit angry. It is her natural state, like the sea being a little bit wet. We will manage." Theron tossed him one of the sticks and kept the other for himself, and settled into a stance that Alexios had never seen him use before — feet apart, knees soft, weight balanced in a way that looked, for the first time in Alexios's memory, less like a trader and more like something else entirely. "Hold it like this. Not so tight. A tight grip is a tired grip, and a tired grip is a dead man's grip." "How do you know that?" "I know a great many things, Alexios. It is the burden of being old." Theron's tone was light, but something in his eyes was not, something careful and a little sad, though Alexios, ten years old and thrilled beyond words at the prospect of learning anything that resembled swordplay, did not notice it at the time. "Now. Come at me." Alexios came at him, driftwood raised, with all the ferocious enthusiasm of a boy who has spent years imagining exactly this moment, and Theron parried the blow so easily, so economically, that Alexios found himself sitting in the sand before he had entirely registered being struck. "Again," Theron said, and helped him up, and this time watched more closely as Alexios adjusted his grip, his stance, the angle of his shoulders, correcting him with small, precise touches — a hand on the elbow here, two fingers against the small of the back there — until an hour had passed and Alexios's arms ached in a way that felt, to him, like the best kind of ache in the world. "Was I good?" he asked, breathless, as they walked back up the beach in the fading light. "You were terrible," Theron said, and then, seeing his son's face fall: "Everyone is terrible, the first time. The question is never whether you are terrible today. The question is whether you are less terrible tomorrow." He put a hand on Alexios's shoulder, and his voice changed, dropped into something lower and more serious than his usual easy warmth. "Listen to me. If you ever do learn to fight — truly fight, not driftwood on a beach — you must understand something that most men who carry swords never bother to understand. A blade is not for glory. It is not for anger, and it is not for revenge, though revenge will tempt you more than anything else ever will, because revenge feels like justice while you are wanting it, and only shows its true face once it is already done, and by then it is too late to want anything else instead. A blade is for protecting what cannot protect itself. That is the only reason worth picking one up. Every other reason rots a man from the inside, even if it takes him thirty years to notice the rot." Alexios, ten years old, nodded solemnly, understanding perhaps a third of what he had just been told, and treasuring all of it regardless, the way children do with the serious pronouncements of the parents they idolize — not for the meaning, which comes later if it comes at all, but for the weight of being told something that mattered. "Did someone teach you that?" he asked. Theron was quiet for a long moment, long enough that Alexios thought perhaps he would not answer. "Someone did," he said finally. "A long time ago. Better than I ever became." "What happened to him?" "He died believing it. Which is more than most men manage." And that was all Theron would say, and they walked the rest of the way home in a silence that was not uncomfortable, exactly, but that Alexios would remember afterward as the closest his father ever came to telling him the truth outright, and the closest Alexios ever came, as a child, to understanding that there was a whole ocean of his father's life that he had never been shown, glimmering just beneath the surface of the man he thought he knew completely. Elara, upon hearing about the driftwood lesson — because Elara heard about everything, eventually, through some network of observation and interrogation that Alexios never fully mapped — demanded lessons of her own, and was told, with uncharacteristic firmness, that she was too young, a verdict she accepted with far more grace than Alexios expected, though she extracted a promise that when she turned ten, she too would learn. "You won't forget," she said. It was not a question. "I won't forget." "Promise properly. Spit in your hand." "I am not spitting in my hand, Elara." "Then it isn't a real promise." He did not spit in his hand, in the end, on the grounds that he was twelve and had some dignity remaining, but he did make the promise in every other way a promise could be made, and Elara, satisfied, went back to whatever she had been doing before, which on that particular day involved trying to teach the neighbor's cat to fetch, an effort that met with a success rate of precisely zero but that she pursued with undimmed optimism for the better part of a month. It was, looking back, an ordinary childhood, full of ordinary things — a father who came and went with the tides, a mother whose love expressed itself mostly through labor and worry and bread, a sister whose whole world orbited her older brother without either of them quite realizing it. There was no sign, in any of it, of what was coming. There rarely is. The world does not announce its cruelties in advance. It simply arrives, one ordinary morning, wearing the face of a stranger at the door, and everything that came before becomes, in an instant, a single word: before. There was a season, too, that belonged entirely to Ismene, though it took Alexios many years to understand its worth. His mother did not fight with driftwood, and she did not tell him stories of ancient orders of knights, but she taught him things that mattered in their own quiet way. She taught him to read, sitting beside him at the kitchen table with a patience that never once cracked no matter how many times he confused one letter for another. She taught him to keep accounts, insisting that a man who did not understand money would spend his whole life being cheated by men who did. She taught him, without ever quite saying so directly, how to notice things — the way a customer's eyes moved when they were about to lie about a price, the way a storm announced itself hours before it arrived if you knew to watch the color of the light on the water, the way a person's voice changed, just slightly, when they were frightened and trying not to show it. "Your father teaches you to fight," she told him once, not unkindly, catching him practicing his stances alone in the yard when he thought no one was watching. "I will teach you to think. A man who can only fight is a weapon. A man who can fight and think is dangerous in a way that lasts." "Are you dangerous?" Alexios asked, grinning, expecting her to laugh. She did not laugh, not immediately. She looked at him for a long moment, and something passed behind her eyes that he did not understand at the time — something old and tired and, perhaps, a little proud. "More than you know," she said finally, and turned back to her work, and would say nothing further on the subject no matter how he pressed her, which he did, for the better part of a week, to absolutely no effect. It was Ismene, too, who first taught him to grieve, in a manner of speaking, though she did not know she was doing it and neither did he. When Alexios was nine, the family dog, an old grey mutt named Barrel who had been in the household since before Alexios was born, died quietly in his sleep one autumn night, and Alexios found him in the morning, cold and still on his blanket by the hearth, and did not know what to do with the enormous, wordless thing that opened up in his chest. His mother found him there, kneeling beside the dog, not crying, just staring, too shocked to know what shape his grief was supposed to take. "It is all right to cry," she told him, kneeling beside him, her hand warm on his back. "I don't know how." "No one knows how, the first time. You simply do it, and it turns out you knew all along." She held him while he cried, the first great uncontrolled grief of his young life, and afterward she helped him bury Barrel beneath the old fig tree behind the house, and she told him something he would not fully understand for years: "The size of the grief tells you the size of the love. Never be ashamed of a grief that is large. It only means you loved well, and there is no shame anywhere in that." He would think of those words again, years later, under circumstances so much larger and crueler than the death of an old dog that the comparison would feel almost obscene — and yet the words held. They held exactly as well for the largest grief of his life as they had for the first, and in some strange way, that first small grief had prepared him, just slightly, for the mountain that was coming, the way a single stone prepares a riverbed for the flood that will eventually reshape it entirely. He was seventeen — no longer a child by any measure the town of Myrrhos recognized, tall now, broad through the shoulders in the way that suggested he would eventually match his father's build if not quite his father's leanness, still practicing with driftwood on the beach some evenings out of habit more than instruction, since Theron's lessons had grown sparser as trading routes grew longer and stays at home grew shorter — when his father left for the last time. It was, in every visible respect, an ordinary departure. Theron kissed his wife at the door, the same unhurried kiss he always gave her, as though they had all the time in the world and this parting was no different from the hundred partings before it. He ruffled Elara's hair, though she was fourteen now and objected loudly to being treated like a child, an objection Theron ignored with the serene confidence of a man who intended to keep ruffling his daughter's hair until one of them died. And he clasped Alexios's forearm in the manner of two men taking leave of each other, a gesture that had only recently replaced the embraces of childhood, and that Alexios still secretly treasured more than he would ever have admitted. "South again," Theron said. "Further than usual, this time. There's a new trading concession opening past the Salt Islands, down toward the Iron Coast, and if I don't establish myself early, some other fool will, and then I'll spend the next ten years undercutting him instead of simply being first." He smiled, and it was his ordinary smile, easy and a little tired, nothing in it to suggest that this journey differed in any meaningful way from the dozens that had come before. "Three months, this time. Perhaps four." "That's longer than usual," Alexios said. "The Iron Coast is further than usual." Theron's grip on his forearm tightened, just slightly, just for a moment, and something moved behind his eyes that Alexios noticed but did not know how to read — not fear, exactly, but something adjacent to it, something like a man checking, one final time, that a door was properly locked. "Look after your mother and your sister while I'm gone. You're old enough now that I don't need to say it, but I'm saying it anyway, because I'm your father, and saying unnecessary things to my children is one of the few privileges of the job." "I always look after them." "I know you do." Theron held his gaze a moment longer than the conversation strictly required. "You've grown into a good man, Alexios. I don't say that enough. I should say it more."