THE WORLD IN TWO HANDS

1

That morning, in an olive grove above the sea, a tall woman in grey had been waiting for him. The grove was still.

The light came through the leaves in pieces and the air smelled of the sea below the cliff and the dry warm earth underfoot, and she had been standing at the centre of it without moving, the way a stone stands in moving water — as if she had always been there.

She had not given her name.

She had not asked his.

She had simply looked at him the way people look at something they have been expecting for a long time.

She pressed the shield into his hands.

The bronze was cold and heavier than it looked. He had thought, briefly, that it was the wrong shape for fighting — too round, too flat, the rim too polished.

But he had been given a thing and so he held it and said nothing.

Then she had looked him in the eye for the first time.

She pointed at her own eye. She said one word.

"Reflection."

Then she was gone, before the wind had even moved.