Philadelphia

Kallias has been travelling the wrong way along that road for eleven days, and there has been nobody on it to tell him so. A wool merchant of the Phrygian interior, he is carrying fleeces he could have sold better anywhere, and one thing that is not stock at all: a story off the Lycus valley roads about a man teaching in a public hall in Ephesus, and what the people there did with their own books.

The city was planted to be a gateway — the youngest in Asia, laid in fresh courses over old fault-lines, its eastern gate the biggest thing it has. Its people build anyway. At dusk they light their doorways one by one.

He means to leave in the morning. At a cloth-worker's stall, bargaining for a night's lodging, he is asked about the one thing he has told nobody.

The lamp wants oil: that is the first thing Sophia knows of the morning, before her eyes are properly open. She has filled it ten thousand evenings and tended it ten thousand mornings, and somewhere in the ten thousand it stopped being something she did and became something she was.

She sets it on the bracket by her door before dawn, facing up the street toward the eastern gate, where anyone coming down out of the dark country will see it first. A small terracotta thing, nothing a wealthy house would look at twice. It says the door is open and somebody is keeping it.

She has a cloth trade, a crack in the plaster she has decided not to mend, and a husband in the back room whose breath she listens for before she does anything else.

Then the city asks for a record she cannot produce.