1Now turn west again, to the shore of the sea where this book began. Ninety years had passed since the day of the dark sun. The Lydian kings were gone. The Persians, the people of Cyrus, ruled from the plateau to the water's edge, and the cities of the coast paid them tribute.
2In those years the coast cities rose against the Great King, and Miletus led them. For six years they held out. Then the Persian fleet broke theirs within sight of the walls, and Miletus fell. The men were killed. The women and children were chained and marched east, a journey of three months, to be settled beside the river Tigris. The city of Thales was emptied of its people and burned.
3One who was not taken was a girl of thirteen named Myrto. On the last night her father had put her into a fisherman's boat, under the nets, and gone back up to the wall. From the water she saw the fire take the roofs, street by street, up to the hill where her house was. Her mother and her two small brothers were in that house. She learned later that they had been seen alive, in the long line going east. She never saw them again.
4The fisherman set her ashore a day's sail to the north, near the city of Ephesus, and gave her a loaf, and left. He had his own children.
5Ephesus had kept out of the fighting, and it still stood. It did not want the children of Miletus, for a Persian garrison sat in the harbour fort. So the strays went where strays have always gone. Outside the city stood the great temple of Artemis, and its ground was sanctuary. Forty or fifty children from the burned city lived on its steps that winter, and begged from the pilgrims, and stole from one another.
6Myrto did not cry. She had her great-grandfather's story, of the day he stood in a river and counted while the sun was dark. Now she found a new edge on it. He had not run. Neither would she. She would count, and wait, and then she would give the Persians back what they had given Miletus.
7There was a man who came to the temple steps most days. He was about forty, lean, with a face like a shut door. The other children said he was of the old royal house of the city, and had handed its priesthood to his brother because he could not bear the company. He spoke to almost no grown person. But he would sit on the steps and play knucklebones with the temple strays for hours, and he played to win.
8His name was Heraclitus. The Ephesians said he was the proudest man alive.
9Myrto won from him the first day, twice running. He looked at her sharply. "You are counting the falls," he said.
10"Everything comes round if you count it," said Myrto. "My great-grandfather was taught that by Thales."
11"Thales," said Heraclitus. "The first of them who asked what a thing is. Since then they have all grown very learned. They know a great many things and understand none." But after that he played with her more than with the others, and brought bread, and did not call it charity.
12In the spring the Persians began to rebuild their fleet. Ship timber came down the river on rafts and was stacked in the harbour yard, with jars of pitch beside it. Myrto went and looked at it every day. It was enough timber for forty warships. It was as dry as a bone.
13She made her plan with care. The temple kept a fire always burning on the altar before the doors. On a night with no moon and a wind from the land, she filled a clay pot with coals from the altar's edge while the watchman dozed, and covered them with ash, and went down the long road to the harbour with the pot against her chest. It burned her hands through her cloak. She was glad of it.
14At the bridge over the river, a man was sitting on the rail.
15"It is a long way to carry a fire," said Heraclitus, "for a child with no hearth."
16She stood still. She thought of running. But he had not moved, and he did not look like a man who meant to seize her.
17"You watched the timber for a month," he said. "I watched you. I am not as blind as my neighbours hope. Sit down. If I meant to hand you over I would have brought the guard and not come alone."
18She did not sit. "They burned my city," she said. "My father was on the wall. My mother is walking to the end of the earth with a rope on her neck. Fire for fire. You will not talk me out of it."
19"I shall not try. I do not hold with talking people out of things. They only go and do them more quietly." He looked at the pot. "I will ask you one question about what is in your hands, since you are a girl who counts. What is it?"
20"Fire."
21"What is fire?"
22She had no answer ready. It made her angry. "It is what burned Miletus."
23"So it is. And it baked the loaf I gave you this morning. And it is the lamp your Thales counted by, and the sun he counted. One thing." He held his hand over the pot, feeling the heat. "I have thought about this more than about anything else, girl. Look at how it lives. It lives by turning what it is given into itself. Feed it by measure and it stays on the hearth for a hundred years and feeds a household. Give it more than its measure and it does not grow kinder. It eats the house, and then the street, and when there is nothing left it dies in its own ash. It was the same fire the whole time. Only the measure was different."
24Then he said a thing in another voice, slowly, as a man says what he has laboured over. Long afterward she found the same words in his book, and they are there still:
25"This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out."
26"I do not understand that," said Myrto.
27"Few do. Understand this much, then. There is a fire in your hands and a fire in your chest. The one in your chest was kindled the night your city burned. I do not blame you for it. It is the same stuff as the other. I ask you only what I would ask of any fire: has it a measure? Do you hold it, or does it hold you?"
28"It keeps me alive," she said. "It is all I have."
29"I believe you. Now count, as your Thales taught. You burn the timber. It will burn well; you chose your wind like a general. What comes round after that?"
30She had not counted that far. She had counted to the flames and stopped, because the flames were what she wanted. Now, with his eyes on her, she made herself go on.
31The garrison would want someone to pay. They would not look long. Everyone in Ephesus knew who hated them most: the brats of Miletus on the temple steps. Sanctuary was a Greek law, not a Persian one. Forty children. Little Phanes, who was five and slept against her back for warmth.
32And the ships would be built anyway. There were more forests.
33Her hands had begun to shake. The pot was burning her badly now, and she set it down on the bridge and went down the bank and put her hands into the river. The water was very cold. She knelt there with the current pulling at her wrists.
34He came and stood above her. "You cannot step twice into the same river," he said.
35"It is the same river," she said, through her teeth. "It is the Cayster. It has been here always."
36"Is it the same water that is on your hands now as when you began to speak? That water is halfway to the sea. The river is only a river because it does not stay." He was silent a moment. "And you. Are you the same girl who got into the boat?"
37That was when she wept. She wept kneeling in the water, for her mother and the boys and the house on the hill, and for the girl who had got into the boat, who was gone as surely as they were. He did not touch her or tell her to stop. He stood there on the bank and let it run.
38They were still there when the patrol came along the harbour road: six spearmen and an officer, with a torch.
39The officer was a Persian, a grey-bearded man. He saw a child and a nobleman by the river in the dead of night, and on the bridge between them a pot of live coals, three hundred paces from the timber yard. He was not a fool. His hand went to his sword.
40Myrto got to her feet. She knew she was dead, and all the temple children with her.
41Heraclitus did not bow. He bowed to no one. "You know me," he said. "I am the brother of the priest-king of this city. The girl is a suppliant of the goddess. That fire is from the altar of Artemis."
42"And where was she taking it, in the dark?"
43"Ask her. I do not answer for other people's minds. I have trouble enough with my own."
44The officer looked down at her. The torch was in her eyes. She understood that the old man had told no lie, and would tell none, and had left her standing exactly where she had been at the bridge: with the fire in her hands, and the choosing of it hers.
45She looked at the pot. A coal glowed red through the ash, quiet, a hearth's worth.
46"I have no hearth," she said to the Persian. Her voice shook, but it was true as she said it, and it became more true with each word. "I am from Miletus. I have slept on stone for five months. I took the fire to have one."
47The officer was silent. He looked at the pot of coals for a long moment, and something in his face changed. His people held fire to be the cleanest thing in the world. They kept it in their houses and would not let it die. A child carrying a coal through the night to begin a hearth was a thing he knew from his own village on the plateau.
48"In my country," he said slowly, in rough Greek, "we do not put fire to dirty use." And she saw that he knew quite well what she had first meant to do with it, and that he had heard what she had now said, and was choosing which to believe. "Keep it, then. Feed it clean wood. Do not let me see it near the yard." He turned his men and went on up the road.
49Heraclitus picked up the pot by its rim, in a fold of his cloak. "There is a room behind my kitchen," he said, in his sour way. "The cook is old and wants hands. I do not offer it from kindness. I am tired of losing at knucklebones in front of pilgrims."
50So Myrto came to live in the house of the proudest man in Ephesus, and the coal from the altar went into his oven, and she kept it.
51She learned that he was not a calm man. He taught measure, and he raged. When the Ephesians banished his friend Hermodorus, for no crime but being abler than the rest, he said that every grown man in the city ought to hang himself and leave it to the boys. She was fifteen by then, and not afraid of him. "Do you hold it," she asked him, "or does it hold you?"
52He stared at her. Then he gave his cough of a laugh and sat down. "It holds me," he said. "I know the measure. I did not say I always keep it. A man may see a true thing and still be a fool three days in seven. Write that on my tomb."
53She learned his kindness too, which he hid like a theft. Once, some travellers came from across the sea to see the famous thinker. They found him in the kitchen, of all places, warming himself by the oven beside a servant girl with flour to her elbows. They stopped in the doorway, ashamed for him. He called to them to come in and not hang back; there were gods there too, he said.
54He wrote his book in those years. It was short, and hard, and he would not make it easier. When it was finished he did not read it out in the marketplace. He rolled it and carried it out to the temple of Artemis, and Myrto walked beside him with the lamp, for it was evening.
55"Why here?" she asked. "The men of the assembly will never climb these steps to read."
56"No," he said. "They have ears and do not hear. But anyone may come up these steps. A slave may. A Persian may. A girl from a burned city may. I do not know who will understand it. I know only that it is not for me to say beforehand who cannot." He gave the roll into the hands of the temple keepers. Then, when it was done, he took it back for a moment and held it out to her. "You first. Before the priests."
57She read it that night on the steps where she had once slept, by her own lamp. She did not understand one line in three. She told him so.
58"Then you are ahead of the Ephesians," he said. "They have had longer."
59Myrto lived out her life in Ephesus. She kept a hearth of her own in time, lit from his oven, and children at it. She never ceased to grieve for the house on the hill. But the fire in her chest she kept by measure, and it warmed her, and it burned no one.
60The book lay in the temple, and people came from far cities to read it, and went home shaking their heads, and remembered it. And in that same season, at the other end of the earth, a teacher and his students were sitting hungry in an empty field. Now hear what came after.