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you not learning enough here?”
    Not that the argument was flawless. But what impressed me was that she had bothered to reason with me at all. And she didn’t just sail off either, as if to say she had more important things to do than remonstrate with someone my size. She stood planted there, and under those long arching brows her black eyes beheld me evenly. This was important enough to settle here and now. What unnerved me was that I knew I had not yet understood
why
. She never went into the library. And as she stood facing me down, whatever her reason, it felt bigger than I was.
    I flinched. Retreated. Gave way to her—
yet again
.
    But there were other arrangements to try and titles to sample, laid out on Grandfather’s book trays. Lycophron and Pythagoras; commentaries on the Cabbalists and their codes, on Galileo and other such ‘moonstarers.’ And, especially now,
novels:
tempting
picarescas
of young children running away from cruel mothers, of spurned knights throwing rings into reflecting wells, of wrongly accused brides vindicating their honour before the pitiful, shamed accusers, whom it took little effort to picture wearing nuns’ habits….
    Sometimes I would close my eyes and choose at random from Grandfather’s book tray. Once my hand fell upon a manual on the making of suits of armour, which, when ornamented with jewels andpearls and precious metals, Grandfather said were among the most beautiful things ever fashioned by man’s ingenuity or in his image. Among the great European armourers were the Colmans and the legendary Jacobi Topf. So icily beautiful were his designs, I had soon devoured the manual front to back.
    How darkly fastidious, these black arts—all the intricacies in the fluting, the roped and scalloped edges, the treatment of the surfaces—acid-etched and russeted, blued and blacked. For the warhorse, the buff armour of ox hide, and the chanfrons and crinnets without which its lovely head might be severed at a single blow of an obsidian axe. So impressed were the Conquistadors with the quilted Mexican armour, they adopted it themselves. Though they did still cling to the kite-shaped bucklers as if to the thread on which swung their lives.
    Yet nothing prepared me for the annihilation of Melos.
    Did Grandfather not see me reading Thucydides? How could anyone forget
this
, Abuelo least of all. Yet he had forgotten, as he was beginning to do, as I should have seen if I had been attentive enough to notice. Then he did remember. He sat with me for over an hour, at first patting me awkwardly on the shoulder, then pressing his forehead to mine.
    These are old stories of course, but who among us may claim never to have been wounded by one such as this, and a little changed inside? It is that chapter in
The Peloponnesian War
when the mighty Athenian navy stops at the small island of Melos to dictate terms. Terms the Melians so gracefully contest in their final hours.
    Each fine point, they turn this way and that, pleasantly—on both sides, for the Athenian envoy too is a man of high reason. They are all men like Thucydides, who stood by and watched, and was once an admiral himself. The fine, precise minds, the superb learning, these precious things they shared.
    â€œAnd all
for what?”
I asked Abuelo angrily. But I felt confusion too, that a book by a historian two thousand years dead could loose such a flood of feelings in me—wonder, fury and grief; the channels scored then have never quite silted in. I know that chapter as though I’d written it, as the one who watched them fall.
    ATHENS: You know and we know, as practical men, that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength, and that the strong do what they can, and the weak submit.
    MELOS: As you ignore justice and have made self-interest the basis of discussion, we must take the same ground, and we say that in our opinion it is in your interest to maintain a