1In the days when the Medes held the high plateau and the kings of Lydia held the gold rivers of the west, there was war between them. It had gone on five summers, and neither could finish it.
2On the shore of the western sea stood Miletus, a city of ships and wool and argument. From there, in the sixth summer of the war, a boy named Damon marched east with the hired spears. He was sixteen. He did not carry a spear. He led two mules loaded with water skins, and he walked behind his brother Nikias, who did.
3Their father was dead and the farm was in debt. The king of Lydia paid in silver. That was all the reason there was.
4Now before they marched, Damon had been sent down to the harbour with a jar of oil for a man named Thales. Everyone in Miletus knew Thales, and half of them laughed at him. It was told that he had once walked into a ditch while looking up at the stars, and that a servant girl had asked him how he hoped to know the sky when he could not see his own feet.
5Damon found him on the harbour wall with a tablet of wax, scratching rows of small marks. "What are you counting?" said Damon, for he was a boy who asked.
6"Darknesses," said Thales. "The star-watchers of Babylon have written down every time the sun went dark in the day, for longer than this city has stood. I have some of their counts. They did not write them to understand. They wrote them to know when to be afraid. But look." He turned the tablet toward the boy. "They come round. Not like a blow. Like a tide."
7"The sun goes dark when a god is angry," said Damon. "Everyone knows that."
8"Then the god is angry by the calendar," said Thales, "and that is a strange kind of anger." He looked at the boy's marching sandals, which were new. "You are going east with the spears. Then listen. By my count it comes this year. I cannot tell you the day. I do not know the day. But if the sun goes out over your head, do not run, and do not kill anyone. Count slowly. It comes back."
9They walked forty days. The land rose and dried. The hired spears joined the army of the Lydian king, and together they came to a wide brown river with the Medes on the other side of it.
10At night the fires of the Medes lay along the far bank like a second river, and one of them burned higher than the rest and never went down. An old soldier said that was the fire of their priests. They carried it from their own country, and it had never once gone out.
11The battle came on a hot bright morning at the shallow place in the river. Damon's work was simple. He filled the skins upstream, loaded the mules, and led them down to the line where the men stood in their bronze, and they drank, and he went back.
12By the middle of the day he had made the walk nine times. Men were lying in the reeds who would not get up. The noise was like being inside a bell. He had not seen Nikias since the third walk.
13On the tenth walk the light went wrong.
14At first he thought it was dust. The colour drained out of the hills. The shadows of the reeds grew sharp and thin, like shadows drawn with a knife. The mules stopped and would not be pulled. Then a cold wind ran along the water, and the birds dropped out of the sky into the reeds as they do at evening, and Damon looked up.
15Something had bitten the sun.
16It went quickly after that. The bite widened. The day turned the colour of iron, then the colour of a bruise. Stars came out in the middle of the afternoon. And where the sun had been there hung a black hole in the sky with a thin white fire around it, like the eye of something looking down.
17The noise of the battle stopped as if a door had shut on it.
18Then it began again, and it was worse, for now it was the noise of fear. Thousands of men were crying out to thousands of gods. The Lydian horse broke first. Damon heard them before he saw them: a drumming in the ground, coming back toward the river, toward the shallows, where the wounded lay in the reeds and the mud.
19Every part of him said run. His legs had already turned. And in that moment, because he was sixteen and frightened out of his wits, a foolish thing came into his head: a wax tablet, and a row of small marks, and a man with oil on his fingers saying, like a tide.
20He knew the year, thought Damon. He said this year. He said it comes back.
21He did not believe it. But he found that a thing told beforehand sits differently in the chest than a thing that falls from nowhere. Fear with a reason in it was a smaller fear. It left him one hand's width of room to think. And in that room he thought: the horses will come through the shallows, and my brother is in the shallows.
22He let the mules go. He ran down into the reeds, into the dark, shouting his brother's name.
23He found Nikias by his voice. He was lying half in the water with a dead horse across his legs, and he was not calling for help. He was praying, fast and high, like a child. Around him other men lay or knelt, Lydians and men of the coast, and some had thrown away their shields to hold up their hands to the black sun.
24"Get up," said Damon. "The horses are coming back."
25"It is the end," said Nikias. "Look at it. We have killed too many and the gods have shut the sky."
26"It is not the end. A man in Miletus counted it. Thales. It comes round like the tide and it goes away again. Help me push."
27He had said it loudly, and others had heard. And Damon, who had never spoken to more than three people at once in his life, stood up in the reeds and shouted at the top of his voice: "It was counted! It was known! It is not for us! Get the hurt men out of the shallows! Count to a thousand, and it comes back!"
28Not all of them moved. But six or seven did, because a boy who shouts a clear thing in the dark is easier to follow than a silence. They heaved the horse from Nikias. They dragged the wounded up the bank by their arms and their belts, counting aloud like men pulling a rope: forty, forty-one, forty-two.
29At three hundred the horses came. They went through the shallows like a flood through a gate, riderless, most of them, with their eyes white. Where the wounded had lain there was nothing afterward but churned water.
30Damon lay on the bank with his arm across his brother, and kept counting, because he did not know what else to do. And lying there he saw a thing he would remember all his life.
31A man was standing over him. He wore the tall cap of the Medes and he had a short sword in his hand. He had come across the river in the dark, running from the same terror in the other direction, and he had stopped because there was a boy at his feet saying numbers.
32They looked at one another under the black sun. The Mede was not much older than Nikias. His sword hand was shaking. Damon understood that the man was going to kill him, not from hate, but because he was afraid, and a frightened man with a sword will use it on whatever is nearest.
33Damon had no weapon. He had only the one thing he had been given. So he pointed up, at the hole in the sky, and then he held up his open hand and slowly closed the fingers, one, two, three, four, five, and opened them again, and nodded. Wait. It is counted. Wait.
34He did not know if the man understood. But the man did not strike. He stood there, breathing hard, and he looked up.
35At the eastern edge of the black disc a bead of light appeared, as bright as a spark struck from flint. It grew. The stars went out one by one. The colour came back into the hills from the west, the way colour comes into a face. A bird began, and then all the birds.
36Damon had reached seven hundred and twelve.
37The Mede lowered his sword. He looked at the boy for a long moment with an expression Damon could not name. Then he turned and waded back across the river to his own people, and no one on either bank lifted a hand against him.
38There was no more fighting that day. The two armies stood in the returning light and looked at each other across the water. They had been ready to die for their kings an hour before. Now they wanted only to be home.
39The kings were no braver than their men. Within the month they had sworn a peace, and made the brown river the border, and sealed it with a marriage between their houses. Six years of war ended in an afternoon. All this is written, and you may read it.
40On the night the peace was sworn, the two camps mixed for the first time. Damon carried water among the wounded of both sides. So he came to the high fire that never went down.
41An old man tended it, with a cloth tied over his mouth so that his breath would not touch the flame. Beside him sat the young Mede from the riverbank. He saw Damon and stood up quickly and spoke to the old man. The old man beckoned.
42Through a trader who had both tongues the old priest asked: "My sister's son says a boy of the west was not afraid of the dark sun. He says the boy knew its length, as a man knows the length of his own field. Who taught you?"
43"I was afraid," said Damon. "Only a little less than the others. A man in my city said it would come this year. No god told him. He counted. He had the old counts from Babylon, and he saw that they made a pattern."
44The old priest was quiet a long time. Then he said: "We are taught that there is the Truth and there is the Lie, and that each man must choose between them with his own mind. I have kept this fire fifty years. I have told the people what the sky means. I did not think to ask the sky. Your man asked."
45Then he took a coal from the edge of the fire with bronze tongs, and laid it in a small clay pot with ash over it, and gave it to the boy. "For your road," he said. "It is cold in the passes."
46Damon carried it home. He would not have said why. He fed it bark and dry dung through the passes, and Nikias, limping beside the mule, called him a fool and shared the warmth of it every night.
47He came into Miletus in the autumn and went down to the harbour before he went to his mother. Thales was on the wall. He was looking at the water this time.
48"It came," said Damon. "The sun went out at the river, in the middle of the battle. You knew."
49"I knew the year," said Thales. "I have told you, I did not know the day. I was as surprised as anyone. I was eating." But he had gone still, and Damon saw that he was more moved than he would show. "And did you run?"
50"No. I counted. Seven hundred and twelve." And he told it all: the horses, the shallows, the Mede with the sword, the peace.
51Thales listened to the end. Then he said, "They will say I stopped a war. I did not. I only looked at what was there, and asked what it was, in place of asking who was angry. Any man could have done it. That is the part they will not want to hear."
52He pointed at the sea. "Here is what I am asking now. The sky and the stone and the olive and your mule: are they many things, or one thing in many shapes? I think one. I think it is water. Water is hard in winter and soft in summer and goes up as mist, and nothing lives without it."
53Damon looked at the sea, and at the stone wall, and thought about it honestly. "Stone is not wet," he said.
54Thales laughed aloud. "No. A young man named Anaximander tells me the same, at much greater length, and I have not yet found my answer to him. Perhaps I am wrong about the water. Then let someone show me where, and we will both know more. Being shown wrong is no wound."
55Then he saw the clay pot, and Damon told him where it came from, and what the old priest had said. That evening Thales lit his own lamp from the coal of the Medes, the lamp he counted by. "An old man who kept one fire for fifty years, and wished he had asked the sky," he said. "I will count for him too."
56Damon went home to the farm. The king's silver paid the debt. But he came down to the harbour wall on many evenings after that. And when he was an old man, and his grandchildren asked about the battle of the dark sun, he did not tell them about the kings.
57He told them about a hand's width of room. "The whole army had eyes," he would say. "One man had looked at the sky and asked. Because he asked, I had a little room inside my fear, and in that room I could think, and so your great-uncle walked home on his own legs." He would hold up his hand and close the fingers one by one. "That is all it was. That is everything it was."
58That was in the west. But the asking did not belong to one city or one people. In those same years it was waking beside other rivers, in men who had never heard the name of Miletus. Now hear what came after.