It took me seven months to reach the Museum, and I did not get in through the door.
I spent those seven months working.
Eirene recovered completely. She ran a fever on the third day and they sent for me that same afternoon, exactly as I had asked, and it turned out to be an infection of the chest and not of the other thing, and it passed on its own. The girl was named Kale. Within a month she had a nickname on the ninth street: the neighbours called her "the foreigner's one", which amused Demetrios and which froze me every time I heard it.
They began to send for me.
At first it was through Kleio. She had thirty years of births behind her and a network of women across four districts, and one night was enough for her to decide I was of use. She started sending me what she could not solve, and what she could not solve was almost always the same three things: bleeding, fevers after childbirth, and babies that turned blue.
Then came the others.
A man with an abscess in his jaw who had not slept for three weeks. I drained it from the inside, with a boiled blade, and he paid me with a lamb I obviously could not eat and which I gave to Kleio, who laughed at me about it for a solid year.
An old woman with a leg that was dying from the foot upward. That one I could not save and I did not lie to her, and when I told her she thanked me, which was worse.
An apprentice from the works with a crushed hand. I cleaned the wound and splinted what was left and told him twenty times that it had to be washed and boiled, and he did it, because he was nineteen and terrified, and he kept three fingers.
And somewhere in those seven months, without my deciding it, I stopped being a stranger with an odd accent and became a thing that existed in that district: the foreign physician, the one who only comes at night.
Because that had to be explained, of course.
I solved it with an illness, which is the most efficient lie there is, because nobody asks you to prove it and everybody pities you. I said I had a disease of the skin, inherited from my mother, and that sunlight opened it into sores. I said it once, in front of three people, with the face of a man who would rather not discuss it.
Within two weeks the whole district knew. Within two months, half the city. And that lie worked so well that I went on using it, with variations, for fifteen hundred years.
What none of them knew is that I was not curing people out of kindness.
That is: yes, that as well. I do not want to come out of this worse than I was. But the reason I accepted every case, including the ones that did not interest me, including the ones that put me in a room with fresh blood for three hours, was another.
Every body I touched was information.
I had a corpse that walked and did impossible things, and absolutely nothing to compare it with. I needed to know what a human body is like inside when it works and when it fails. I needed to handle diseased livers and hear waterlogged lungs and watch up close how a leg dies, because only with that would I ever be able to understand what in God's name had happened to me.
I was studying humanity as an experimental control.
And when I finally put it to myself in those terms, one night, walking back from the harbour district with my hands still smelling of pus, I stopped in the middle of the street and stood still for a while.
It was not a bad thought. That was the problem. It was a perfectly reasonable, perfectly useful thought, and I had had it about Kleio, about Demetrios, about the boy with the crushed hand.
That night I wrote on the workshop wall, underneath everything else:
Watch this.
And I did not write what.
The case that opened the door happened in the ninth month, and it was an accident at a harbour warehouse.
A badly propped stack of dressed stone came down on a group of workers. Two died on the spot. There were five injured, and one of them took an edge to the right temple.
His name was Phanias. He was twenty-two. And he was not a porter: he was an assistant of the Museum who had gone down to supervise a consignment of scrolls arriving on the same ship, and was in the wrong place through sheer administrative bad luck.
He lost consciousness for a minute and then got up.
That is the important part. He got up, felt his head, said he was fine, apologised for the fright and helped move another injured man. His scalp was bleeding a little and that was all.
When I arrived, two hours after dark, there were two Museum physicians in the warehouse dealing with the serious cases, and Phanias was sitting in a corner drinking water and talking perfectly normally to a friend.
I looked at him from the doorway and went cold all over.
I want to explain exactly what I saw, because it was not magic and because the reader has to understand that anyone with my training would have seen the same thing and that no man of that century could have seen it.
I saw a boy who was conscious, oriented, speaking well, two hours after a blow to the temple. I saw that he kept holding his head. I saw that he had vomited once, according to his friend, and had put it down to the shock. And above all I saw the location: the temple bone, just above the ear, which is the thinnest part of the entire skull and beneath which an artery runs pressed against the bone.
The lucid interval.
It is one of the most treacherous things in medicine. The blow tears the artery, blood begins to collect between the bone and the covering of the brain, and because at first there is room, the patient wakes up and feels well and everyone relaxes and goes home. And meanwhile the pool grows, and when there is no more room, it presses. And when it presses, the patient falls asleep, and does not wake again.
From a blow on the temple to a corpse is usually six to twelve hours.
I asked the friend for the lamp and lifted one of Phanias's eyelids without asking his permission.
Both pupils equal. Still.
"His skull has to be opened," I said. "Tonight. Now."
They laughed at me.
Not cruelly. Worse: patiently.
The Museum physician who spoke for them was a man of about fifty, competent, calm, with clean hands, and he answered me in the tone one uses with a neighbourhood quack who has said something outrageous in front of people. He explained to me, very slowly, that the young man was conscious. That he was talking. That he was on his feet. That the scalp wound was superficial. That you open a skull when the bone is driven in and can be seen to be driven in, and that this bone was not driven in.
Everything he said was correct, according to what he knew.
And I stood there in a warehouse in the harbour of Alexandria with the absolute certainty that this twenty-two-year-old would be dead before dawn, and without a single way to prove it.
That is the sensation that defines my first two hundred years and I have never been able to describe it properly. It is not loneliness. It is the specific impotence of knowing something true and having nothing to demonstrate it with.
I could have told the truth: in seven hours one of his pupils will start to grow, he will vomit in a jet, his left side will go limp and then he will fall asleep for good. And they would have asked me, with every right in the world, how I knew. And there was no answer. In the year three hundred before Christ there existed no answer to that question that did not turn me into a sorcerer or a madman.
So I did the only thing that could be done, which was to stay.
"Very well," I said. "Then I stay with him until dawn."
The physician shrugged and went back to his serious cases, which is exactly what I would have done in his place.
Four of us stayed: Phanias, his friend, me and a lamp.
I made use of the hours. I asked him about his work, about the Museum, about what was done there, and he told me everything with that generosity the young have when someone older asks them seriously about what they do.
That is how I learned, sitting in a warehouse, waiting for a boy's brain to start swelling, that two hundred metres away there was an institution where the king paid men to think. That it had a common dining hall and a salary and lodging. That there was a garden, and animals brought from Africa, and a room full of tables where scrolls were copied all day. That every ship entering the harbour was searched and any books aboard requisitioned to be copied, and that sometimes the copy was returned and the original kept.
And that there were physicians.
And that one of those physicians, Phanias told me, lowering his voice without noticing that he was lowering it, opened the dead.
"What do you mean, opens the dead?"
"He opens them," he said. "With the king's permission. He looks at them inside and writes down what he sees."
I sat in silence long enough for the boy to get worried.
I had spent nine months treating the sick by touch, palpating abdomens and guessing at what lay underneath, knowing perfectly well what was down there and never being able to see it, in a city where touching a corpse was a defilement.
And it turned out that ten minutes' walk away there was a man with a royal licence to open them.
"What is he called?" I asked.
And Phanias said the name, and it meant nothing to me at all. That is the detail that still shames me. I, who had come from the future, who knew the list of the Ptolemaic kings and the date of the Pharos, had not the faintest idea who Herophilus of Chalcedon was.
The names that survive are not the ones that mattered. They are the ones that were lucky with the copies.
At the sixth hour it began.
Phanias said his head hurt a great deal. Then he said he was sleepy. Then he vomited, and not the way people normally vomit: in a jet, with no retching first, almost without warning.
I lifted his right eyelid.
The pupil was enormous and did not move in the light.
"Go and fetch him," I told the friend. "Run. Tell him he has vomited and that one eye is large. Those two things. Run."
The boy went.
And I was left alone with Phanias, who was no longer answering me properly, and I took the only important decision of that night, and it was not a medical one.
I could wait.
If I waited and they arrived in time and did it themselves, I would be nobody. If I waited and they did not arrive in time, the boy died and I was right, and being right about a corpse is no use to anyone.
If I did not wait — if I opened him myself with what I had in a harbour warehouse — then either I saved him or I killed him with my own hands in front of witnesses.
I opened him.
I did it on a plank, with his head wedged between two sacks of grain, by the light of two lamps held by a porter whose hands were shaking.
I shaved the area with a knife. I washed it with wine and then with boiled water. I washed myself, twice, counting to a hundred and twenty, while the porter watched me the way you watch a lunatic.
I had no trepan. Nobody has a trepan in a warehouse. I had a carpenter's brace, the kind used to bore holes in ships' timbers, with a bronze bit.
We boiled it. It was the only thing I could do and I did it.
I cut the skin in three arms from a single point, turned back the flaps, reached the bone, and there it was, exactly what had to be there: a fine line, almost invisible, crossing the bone of the temple.
I bored slowly, turning, stopping every few revolutions to check the depth with a finger.
And when I went through the last layer, it came.
It came under pressure, a dark thick jet of clotted and fresh blood, and it soaked his hair and the plank and both my hands, and Phanias, who had not spoken for half an hour, groaned and moved.
I widened the hole. I took the clot out with my fingers, in pieces, with the greatest possible care. I found the torn vessel, which was exactly the one I knew it would be, and pressed it against the bone with a small roll of boiled linen, which is what you do when you have nothing better, and is still what is done today.
And at that moment Herophilus came in.
The first thing he did was stay silent.
He walked into that warehouse with two assistants and Phanias's friend, stopped three paces from the plank and took in the whole scene: the carpenter's brace, the hole in the skull, the clot in a bowl, the linen compression, and a foreigner on his knees with both arms red to the elbow.
And he did not say a word for nearly a minute.
When he spoke, he did not ask who I was, or by what authority, or what I had done.
He asked:
"How long between the blow and the vomiting?"
I lifted my head and looked at him for the first time.
He was a man of about forty, lean, with a long face and eyes set close together, his nails cut to the quick and his hands stained with something that was not ink. He did not look like a scholar. He looked like an intelligent butcher.
"Six hours," I said. "A little more."
"And he woke before that? He spoke?"
"He spoke for two hours. He was perfectly well. He helped carry another injured man."
Herophilus came closer, bent over the boy and lifted both eyelids, one after the other, without touching anything else.
"The right pupil responds again," he said. "Barely. But it responds."
And then he asked the question.
"How did you know?"
That question has been put to me in many ways across twenty-three centuries, and most times I have dodged it with the same dull lie.
That night, kneeling in a puddle with my hands inside a young man's head, I took the decision that has organised everything I have done since. I took it in under two seconds and I have never revised it.
I could tell him the truth, and be a sorcerer.
I could invent a teacher in Massalia, and be a liar who would be caught sooner or later.
Or I could give him something else.
"Because I have seen two others exactly like it," I said. "A blow to the temple, they get up, they talk, and a few hours later they fall asleep and do not wake. Always the temple. Never the back of the head, never the forehead. Always the temple."
Which was false in its details and true in its structure.
And I added the part that mattered:
"If you open the skulls of the ones who die that way, you will find blood between the bone and the covering of the brain. Always in the same place. Open them and check."
Herophilus went very still.
And then he did something that disarmed me, because I had been expecting argument, or contempt, or awkward questions.
He took a small set of wax tablets and a stylus from his belt, and wrote.
He wrote standing up, right there, in that warehouse that smelled of grain and vomit, with the ease of a man who has spent twenty years noting down what he sees. And as he wrote he repeated under his breath, to himself:
"Always the temple."
Then he looked up and said the sentence with which everything else began:
"Come tomorrow. Bring clean hands."
I went the next day, after sunset, and I did not have to explain myself.
That was the first gift of that place, and it was unintentional: Herophilus also worked at night.
Not by preference. By necessity and because of the climate. In Alexandria, in summer, a body begins to come apart within a few hours, and the flies arrive before the heat does. Working at night was the only way to have any time before the thing became useless. So when I turned up at the hour I turned up, with my excuse about the skin disease ready in my mouth, nobody asked for it.
In twenty years nobody there ever asked me for it.
The Museum looked nothing like what I had expected, because I had expected marble and I had expected silence.
It was a large complex attached to the palace, with a long portico, a common dining hall, rooms for the residents and a garden which did in fact contain animals: I saw a cage of monkeys and a pond with birds I could not identify. It smelled of food, of animal urine, of papyrus and of oil lamps. At night there were people awake in three or four different places, and from the courtyard you could hear somebody arguing at the top of his voice about astronomy in a corridor.
It was, precisely, a university.
And in a low building at the northern end, set apart from the rest and with its own entrance, was the other thing.
The room had two stone tables with a channel and a drain, a mass of lamps hung from a frame that could be raised and lowered, and a smell that has not left my nose in twenty-three centuries.
And on one of the tables was a dead man, opened from the breastbone to the pubis.
I stopped in the doorway.
I am going to tell this precisely, because it was the first time it happened to me and it has happened many times since, and because it is, I think, the hardest thing to explain to anyone who is not like me.
I felt two things at once, with equal intensity, neither one covering the other.
The first was an enormous joy.
There it was. Everything I had spent nine months guessing at through the skin of living people, there it was, visible, ordered, real. The liver, with a colour and a size no description prepares you for. The mass of the intestine. The diaphragm, which everyone talks about and almost nobody has seen. The kidneys tucked away behind in their fat. At a glance I saw three things I had spent months wanting to check in a real body and not in a drawing from a book that did not yet exist.
And the second thing was hunger.
That man had been dead only a few hours. The blood was cold and still and no longer any use — I had learned that with the jars — and even so the smell came in and found the exact place it always finds, and my gums gave me notice.
And there I stood in that doorway, being both things at once: a dazzled physician and an animal with a wet mouth.
They have never separated. That is the part that took me fifty years to accept. It is not that I am sometimes one and sometimes the other. It is that both of them look at the same body at the same time, and the only difference between a monster and a man is which of the two is running the hands.
That night the good one ran them.
I went in, greeted him, and asked permission to come closer.
Herophilus was, beyond any doubt, the finest anatomist who existed before the sixteenth century, and he worked blind for forty years.
I say blind because he had nothing to look with. There were no lenses. No microscope. No way to inject a vessel to see it, or to fix a tissue, or to preserve a specimen for more than a day. He had a knife, a very good pair of hands, an enormous memory and the permission of a king.
And with that he did things that left me speechless.
That first night he showed me the difference between a nerve and a tendon, which in that period nobody could tell apart because to the naked eye they are the same white cord. He told them apart by following them. He followed them one by one, with an embroiderer's patience, until he saw where they ended, and the ones that ended in the brain were one thing and the ones that ended in a bone were another.
He showed me, at the base of another body's skull, the place where the great channels of the brain's blood come together. He had already named it. He called it the wine-press, because it reminded him of the trough where grapes are trodden.
That name outlived him. Two thousand three hundred years later, in the anatomy books I studied in a previous life, that structure is still called the torcular of Herophilus, and I had read it in a manual without the faintest idea that it was the affectionate nickname a man gave it one night in Alexandria because it reminded him of wine.
I told him so. I could not help it. I told him that name would last.
And he answered, without looking up from the body:
"Names last. What a man understands does not. It is lost in the first bad copy."
And went on cutting.
On the fifth night I asked him why he did it, and he answered me in a way I had not expected.
I had assumed a man in his position would have a prepared speech. That he would talk about the advancement of knowledge, or the good of the sick, or one of those phrases men use when they do something the world detests and they need to justify it.
He had no speech. He had rage.
He told me, without stopping work, that he had lost his first wife at twenty-five and had never known of what. That her belly hurt. That he, who was already considered a good physician, had laid hands on her eighty times in four months and had felt a lump and had not the remotest idea what that lump was, or where it came from, or what organ he was touching, because nobody in the world knew.
"I opened her," he said.
And went on cutting for a while before finishing the sentence.
"Afterwards. Alone, at night, before handing her over. And I found nothing I could name, because I did not know what I was looking at. I had my hands inside my wife and it was like reading a language I do not know."
He has never spoken to me of it again, in twenty years.
And then he told me the other thing, which was what I had actually asked.
That in that city and in that century, touching a corpse defiled a man. That a body must be burned or buried whole and in peace, and that doing to one what he did was, for practically everybody, a desecration. That he could only do it because the king protected him and because the king was a Macedonian who did not give a damn for anyone's priestly scruples.
And that they called him a butcher.
"They will say worse when I am dead," he said. "They say it already. They say I open condemned men alive."
I asked him whether it was true.
Herophilus looked up for the first time in the whole conversation and held my eyes for a while, and in that while I understood that others had asked him that question and that he was measuring me, not the question.
"No," he said. "But mark what I have just told you, foreigner, because it is the only important thing about this trade: I have not done it, they will attribute it to me anyway, and in three hundred years' time that will be the only thing known about me."
He went back to the body.
"People do not forgive you for looking at what they do not want to look at. They never forgive it. And there is no point wasting time being angry about it: the thing to do is record it in such detail that it cannot be lost, and put up with what they say in the meantime."
I thought about that for a long while, and not for the reason he supposed.
Because there, a metre away from me, was a man the whole city called a monster who was not one. A man who spent his nights with his hands inside a corpse for a clean reason, and who would drag a butcher's reputation behind him for two thousand years without having earned it.
And a metre away from him was me. With my Massalian accent, my invented skin disease and my courteous manners. Whom nobody called anything. Whom the women of the district let into their houses at night with their newborns in their arms.
And of the two of us, the one who had killed a man on a beach was me.
That night I understood that reputation has absolutely nothing to do with what a man is, and that this is the greatest of all advantages, and that I was going to be able to make use of it for a very long time.
I did not like how easily it occurred to me.
The business of the arteries came up on the third night and nearly ruined everything.
There was a young man working with him, a fellow from Ceos not yet thirty, extremely quick, insufferable and brilliant, who had spent weeks defending a thesis: that the arteries do not carry blood.
And he had his reasons, and they were good ones.
His main reason was experimental. When you open a corpse, the arteries are empty. You can see them, you can feel them, they have thick walls, and there is nothing inside. They are full of air. That is an observable fact, confirmed every time, and from it came his conclusion: that the veins carry the blood and the arteries carry the vital breath, the air that gives life, and that if blood comes out when you cut an artery in a living man it is because the blood seeps across from the veins through very fine channels when the system is broken.
It is impeccable reasoning from a correct observation.
Because the arteries of a corpse are empty. It is true. They empty at death because they go on contracting a little after the heart stops, and push what is left in them across into the veins. I knew that. I knew it the way you know the name of a country's capital.
And there, standing in that room, I had the hardest moment of my first ten years.
I could have ended the argument with one sentence. One. The arteries carry blood; they empty after death. It would have been correct. It would have saved them both, and everyone who came after them, some four hundred years of error.
And I did not, and I have thought a great deal about whether I did right.
I did not do it out of fear, though there was fear as well. I did not do it because that night, watching those two men argue over a table with a dead man on it, I understood something that had escaped me until then.
If I gave them the answer, they would have nothing. They would have a sentence spoken by a foreigner from Massalia, with nothing behind it, which they could believe or not believe, and which the next generation would copy or not copy, and which the first scholar with more standing than me would knock out of the book.
An answer without a method is a rumour.
What they needed was not my sentence. It was the way to arrive at my sentence themselves, because the only thing that outlives the man who said it is what can be demonstrated.
So I did what I have done ever since for twenty-three centuries, and which is the nearest thing I have to a trade.
I did not give the answer. I gave the experiment.
"Take a living animal," I said. "A goat. Expose a large artery without cutting it, put two ligatures on it well apart, and tighten them both. Then cut between the two ligatures, with the animal alive, and look at what is inside that closed length."
They both looked at me.
"If what is inside is air," I said, "you are right. If what is inside is blood, and it was shut in there before you cut, then it seeped in from nowhere."
There was a fairly long silence.
The young man from Ceos said that this proved nothing, and gave three reasons, two of which were bad and one of which was good. Herophilus said nothing. He took out the tablets and wrote.
It took them eleven years to do the experiment and they did not do it because of me; they did it because it had stuck in Herophilus. And when they did it, blood came out, and the young man from Ceos did not change his mind, because brilliant men almost never change their minds, and the error stayed alive for another four hundred years regardless.
It does not always work. That is the other half of the trade, and it took me three centuries to accept it.
Phanias got me into the Library.
He recovered, by the way. He was left with a soft hollow at the temple that he covered with his hair, partial deafness in that ear, and a tendency to headaches that stayed with him always. And I was left with something I had not foreseen: that young man decided, without consulting me, that he owed me his life, and organised the rest of it around that idea.
He got me access to the halls. Not as a member, obviously. As an external physician with consultation rights, a category he invented and which nobody disputed because nobody cared enough.
And so I walked into the Library of Alexandria thirty years after its founding, on a forged permit obtained by a boy with a hole in his head, and I looked for exactly one thing.
I looked for myself.
I spent four months at it.
I went at night, with my own lamp because theirs were rationed, and the librarian on duty hated me for four months and then got used to me.
I searched in Greek, which was the only thing I could read fluently. I searched the catalogues of Callimachus, which were not yet finished. I searched the poets, the travellers, the compilations of barbarian customs, the medical treatises, the histories.
And what I found was rubbish.
I found the Lamia, who was a queen whose children were killed and who went mad and took to stealing other women's, and who in the oldest versions drank their blood. I found the Empusa, who had one leg of bronze and one of a donkey, and who seduced young men and ate them. I found the Mormo, who was essentially the bogeyman.
Stories to frighten children. All of them contradicting one another. Not one with a single usable detail.
Nothing about the sun. Nothing about the threshold. Nothing about blood that will not keep. Nothing, in four months, that resembled what was actually happening to me.
And there, on the floor of a hall in the Library of Alexandria, surrounded by scrolls, I understood something that left me hollow for weeks.
I was looking in the wrong place, and not because the Library was a poor one.
What was happening to me had never got into the books. And it had not got in because the people it happens to do not write treatises, and the people who come across it either do not tell anyone or do not understand it, and because everything that had reached a scroll had passed first through four frightened mouths.
Myths are not degraded information. They are something else. They are what is left when someone who understood nothing tries to warn the ones coming after.
And after four months I found the line.
It was not among the Greeks. It was in a heap of material nobody ever consulted: Greek translations of Egyptian temple documents, made on royal commission, of an unbearable dryness. Inventories. Priests' rations. Protocols.
I was reading them by elimination and out of stubbornness.
It was a text about the closing of a tomb. A list of instructions for the staff, point by point, of the kind written to be followed by people who are not expected to think: how many lamps, in what order the sealing is done, who speaks and who keeps silent, what is done with the tools afterwards.
And in the middle of that list, between an instruction about sealing the plaster and another about taking down the scaffolding, there was a sentence.
It said, more or less — and I say more or less because I have tried to reconstruct it exactly for twenty-three centuries and have never found the scroll again:
And the word that gives passage shall not be spoken before the door, neither by day nor by night, for there are those who wait outside for it to be said.
That is all. One line. In the middle of a manual of sacred bricklaying.
I sat on the floor with that scroll open on my knees until the librarian came to tell me the shift was ending.
Because that was not a myth.
Myths are long and have adjectives. That was a work instruction. It was a procedure, written by an official for other officials, about a real and known hazard, with the same matter-of-factness with which one writes do not leave the tools inside.
Somebody, centuries before I was born, in a river valley a thousand kilometres away, knew about the threshold.
They knew it so well that it no longer needed explaining. It had become a rule of occupational safety.
I left the Library before dawn with cold hands, and for the first time since I had woken in that trench I had a feeling that was neither fear nor curiosity but something in between and a great deal worse:
I was not the first.
And whoever had been there before me, enough of them to end up in a temple's regulations, was in all likelihood still out there.
That same week Herophilus came within an inch of finding me out, and he did it for the most characteristic reason in the world.
He was obsessed with the pulse.
It was his great project and he gave his whole life to it. He held that the pulse is not one thing but four — size, force, speed and rhythm — and that each varies independently, and that in that variation the state of the patient is written. He was trying to measure it, which is what separated that man from everyone else in his century: describing it was not enough for him, he wanted a number.
And to measure it he had had a clepsydra brought in.
A water clock, one of the palace ones, calibrated. He kept it on a shelf in the northern room and used it on the patients brought to him and on the students and on anyone who came within reach: he filled the vessel, counted how many beats fitted inside it and noted it on the tablets with the subject's name, age and constitution.
He was building, without the faintest idea of what he was doing, the first clinical database in history.
That night he had finished with a student and was writing it up. I remember the sound of the water falling into the bowl beneath, a steady dripping, and the stylus in the wax.
And without lifting his head, with the absolute ease of a man who has made that gesture ten thousand times, he put out his left hand towards me and said:
"Give me your wrist, Ianthos. I am short of foreigners."