1A little more than a hundred years after the teacher of Alexandria died, the western half of the empire was gone. The eastern half lived on, and its emperor ruled from a great city on the straits where two seas meet. His name was Justinian.
2Justinian was a builder and a lawgiver, and he wished his empire to be one thing: one law, one faith, one mind.
3In Athens there was still a school. It was the last of its kind. It claimed a line of teachers that ran back nine hundred years to Plato, who had been the pupil of Socrates. It had seven teachers and few students. They did not hold the emperor's faith.
4In the house of that school there was a custom about the lamp. The reading lamp in the long room was never allowed to go out. Each evening, before it burned low, a fresh lamp was lit from it. They said it had been so since the founder's day, flame from flame, with never a gap.
5The one who kept it, in those last years, was a servant girl named Eirene. She was thirteen. She had been left at the door as a baby, and the old head of the school, a Syrian named Damascius, had told the cook to feed her. She was a Christian. She said her prayers every night, and then she got up and trimmed the philosophers' lamp, and she did not find this strange.
6In the third year of Justinian's reign, an order came from the city on the straits. It was one sentence long. No one who did not hold the emperor's faith might teach, anywhere in the empire.
7The officers who brought it were not cruel. They read the order aloud in the courtyard. They set a wax seal on the door of the long room. One of them, seeing a girl standing there with a lit lamp in her hands and nowhere to put it, said, "You can keep that, child. It is not on my list."
8So nine hundred years ended on a weekday, before the noon meal. One sentence had done it.
9Two years later news came from the east. Beyond the great desert lay Persia, the old rival of Rome, the land of Cyrus and of the fire temples. Its old king had died. The new king was a young man named Khosrow. Travellers said he read the Greek thinkers and gave honour to the wise of every nation. They said that in Persia a philosopher was king.
10The seven talked it over for a month. But Simplicius, the ablest of them, a broad quiet man from Cilicia, said, "We can die here with a sealed door, or we can go and see." They sold what they had and bought mules. They loaded the best of the books.
11No one thought to say what would become of the girl. She settled it herself. On the morning they left she was standing by the book mule with a bundle on her back and the lamp in a horn lantern, alight.
12"You cannot carry a flame to Persia," said Simplicius.
13"I can try," said Eirene.
14She carried it over the sea, and for nineteen days on the road down through the mountains. The seven old men walked ahead, arguing about the nature of time. She walked behind with the mule and the nine hundred years, and she did not take her eyes off the lantern.
15On the twentieth night they camped in open country, and a wind came up out of nowhere. It tore the lantern shutter open. She threw herself over the lamp, and when she lifted her hands there was a thread of smoke and a red dot on the wick. She breathed on the dot. It went black.
16She sat back on her heels. She did not make a sound. Then she began to shake.
17Simplicius found her like that. He lowered himself to the ground beside her.
18"From Plato," she said. "Nine hundred years. And I am the one who let it go out."
19"Did you sleep? Did you forget it?"
20"No!"
21"Then you did not let it. The wind did it. You are not the keeper of the wind." He took the lamp from her and turned it in his big hands. "In my own time in that house, that lamp went out twice. Once in an earthquake. Once a cat knocked it over. Old Damascius lit it again from the kitchen fire and said nothing, and neither did I."
22She stared at him. "Then it was a lie. The whole nine hundred years."
23"No. It was a custom. The flame was never the thing, Eirene. A flame is new every moment. It is not even the same from one breath to the next." He took flint and iron from his belt and held them out. "The thing is that somebody lights it. Tonight that is you. Go on."
24She struck. It took her six tries, for her hands were not steady. The wick caught. It was a small yellow flame, the same as any other, and it lit the pages of the book in the old man's lap exactly as the other one had.
25"Since you are sitting up with it," Simplicius said, "you may as well learn what it is for." He turned the book toward her. "That mark is alpha." That night she began to read.
26They came down through Syria toward the frontier, and there they met the war.
27For Rome and Persia had been fighting again, as they had fought on and off for six hundred years, over a strip of dry land that neither could hold. The old Persian king's death had brought a pause. The land between the armies was empty of law, and full of riders who served whichever side paid.
28The seven joined a caravan of merchants for safety. On the fourth day beyond the last Roman fort, the raiders came. They came out of the sun, forty men on fast horses. But in the shouting and the dust the mules panicked, and the book mule tore its rope out of Eirene's hands and bolted, straight out into the desert, with everything on its back.
29She ran after it. No one saw her go.
30She ran until she could not hear the shouting. The mule was a shape ahead of her, then a sound, then nothing. She stopped. She turned around. There was no caravan, and no road, and no light anywhere on the earth. There was flat stony ground under her feet, and above her the whole sky.
31She was thirteen and she had never been alone at night. She knew that people died in this desert a mile from the road. She stood there with her heart going like a bird's, and she made herself be still.
32What did she have? She did not have the road. She did not have the mule. She had her own two feet, and what was in her head.
33And in her head was something the old men had taught her on the road, on the nights she sat up with the lamp. All the stars wheel through the night, but they wheel around one still place in the north, as a door turns on its pin. The small Bear keeps closest of all to that still place, and they had shown her how to find it from the Wagon. The road ran from west to east. She had run off it to the right hand, to the south. So the road was north.
34She found the Wagon. She found the small Bear, and the still place it circled. She put it straight before her face and walked.
35After a time she heard a snort in the dark, and there was the mule, standing with its rope caught under a stone and its sides heaving. The packs were still on it. She took the rope and went on walking toward the star. She did not look down, for if she lost the Bear she had nothing. In the grey before dawn she came out on the road. The seven old men were standing in a row at the edge of it, peering into the desert like a line of herons.
36Damascius counted the book packs before he said a word. Then he looked at her. "Who taught her the pole?" he said.
37"I did," said Simplicius.
38"Teach her the rest," said the old man. And that was all the thanks she got.
39They crossed the frontier and went down the great river Tigris to the Persian capital.
40The king received them well. Khosrow was young, and he truly did love learning. He sat them down and asked them questions for days. What is the soul, and where is it when a man sleeps? Why do the tides rise and fall? One of the seven, Priscian, wrote down their answers for him in a book, and that book still exists.
41But the seven had come looking for a kingdom ruled by wisdom, and they did not find it. They found a court. There were flatterers in it, and spies. The king who loved Plato in the morning had his own brothers put to death in the afternoon, to make his throne safe. A crown was a crown, whatever books lay beside it.
42They were bitterly cast down, and they asked the king's leave to go home.
43He gave it, and more. He was at that time making peace with Justinian, and he had one line written into the treaty. It said that these seven should return to their own land and live out their lives there unharmed, in their own beliefs, and that no one should force them. The lord of Persia wrote that, for seven old Greeks, and the lord of Rome set his seal to it. Each of them ruled millions. Neither had been able to change what seven old men thought.
44On the night before they left, Eirene sat by the lamp in the guest house with a book. She read slowly, with her finger, but she read.
45A man came to the door. He was a physician of the court, a Syrian Christian in a black robe.
46"The king has asked your masters to leave him copies of their books," he said. "They have agreed. But he wants them turned into Persian, and into Syriac for our schools. We have almost no one who reads Greek and has lived among those who understand these writings." He looked at the book under her finger. "I am told there is a servant who reads."
47"I am only learning," said Eirene.
48"So are we all. There is a town in the south of this country where physicians gather, and where Greeks and Syrians and Persians work at one table. We need hands. I will not lie to you. You would be a stranger here all your life. But you would not be a servant."
49She went to Simplicius. He was packing, slowly, like a man who has nothing to hurry toward.
50"If I go back with you," she said, "what is there for me in Athens?"
51He did not soften it. "A sealed room. Seven old men who are permitted to breathe. I mean to set down everything I know of the old thinkers before it is lost. One of them will be the lame teacher of Nicopolis, who was a slave. But I shall have no pupils. The law still stands. When we die, it ends there."
52"And if I stay?"
53"I do not know. That is the honest answer. I cannot see how it ends here. Nor can you. We do not get to choose the end, Eirene. We get to choose where to set the lamp down."
54She thought about it through the night. She thought of the emperor on the straits, who had closed nine hundred years with a sentence, and of the wind that had put out the flame. All her short life, great things had happened to her that she had no hand in. Not one of them had been hers to decide.
55But she had struck the flint. She had found the still place in the sky and walked toward it. Those two things had been hers. And now there was a third.
56In the morning the seven old men rode out of the west gate on their mules, toward home. Damascius did not look back. Simplicius did, once, and raised his hand. He went back into the Roman lands and wrote for twenty years, as he had said, great careful books that hold inside them the only words we still have of thinkers a thousand years dead. The line in the treaty held.
57Eirene stood at the gate until they were out of sight. She cried, for she was thirteen. Then she went back to the guest house and took up the lamp. She did not try to carry the flame this time. She let it burn out, and packed the lamp in straw, with flint and iron beside it.
58She went south with the physician. She lived a long life in that town among the palms. She learned Syriac, and then Persian, and she sat at the long table between a monk from Edessa and a fire-priest's son from Fars, turning Greek into their tongues a line at a time. In later years a Persian doctor came back from India with a load of books, and she saw those turned into Persian too. On that table Euclid lay beside the star tables of Alexandria, and beside them lay books from the Ganges. No one there thought to ask whose learning it was.
59Each evening she lit the lamp from flint, and thought nothing of it.
60She did not live to see what came of it. A hundred years after her time, riders came up out of the southern desert with a new faith and a new tongue, and the old Persian crown fell to them in a few seasons, and it looked as though everything would be swept away again.
61It was not. The books were still there, and so were the grandchildren of those who had learned to read them. And a little way up the river from the palace where a young king had once questioned seven old Greeks, in a village among date palms, they marked out the ground for a new city, in the shape of a ring.
62In that city they would build a house for books, and send to the ends of the earth to fill it. But that is the next telling.
63The ember passed out of the hands of crowns. An emperor had put it out with a sentence, and a servant girl had lit it again with a flint, in a room far to the east. One fire, many hands.