‘Really?’ I was young, remember. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘All right, I’ll prove it to you.’ He jumped up and started to walk away. I had
to run to keep up with him.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘You’ll see.’
As we walked, he kept on about the extraordinary powers of this talisman of his.
Not only could it make people obey you, so that they could refuse you nothing;
it could even make them like you. Love you, even. In spite of myself, I was
getting interested; but Diogenes was walking so quickly that I didn’t have
enough breath to ask questions with. With his special magical artefact, he
continued, he could move mountains — literally, he could cause a mountain to be
taken from one place and put down in another. He could create cities, destroy
them; he could feed and clothe all the starving poor, or he could enslave a
whole nation; the virtue of its magic was such that it could carry him across
the sea, take him to the most remote corners of the world, from the Isles of Tin
in the far west to the furthest reaches of Sogdiana...
We’d stopped in front of a baker’s shop.
‘But to start with,’ he said, ‘let’s do something easy. Watch carefully. I’m
going to make the baker give me a loaf of bread.’
‘All right,’ I replied.
He nodded resolutely, walked over to the baker’s window and tapped on the sill.
‘Good morning,’ he said, ‘I’d like a quarter-measure loaf. Wheat, not barley.’
‘There you go,’ the baker replied. ‘One obol.’
Diogenes opened his mouth, fished out a coin (we used to carry our small change
in our mouths back then) and put it down on the sill. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and
walked back to where I was standing.
‘Satisfied?’ he said.
‘But you didn’t do any magic,’ I protested. ‘You bought the loaf.’
‘That’s right,’ Diogenes replied. ‘With my magic talisman.’
I didn’t say anything; didn’t seem to be much point. After all, that was just
silly.
‘You’d be amazed,’ he went on, talking with his mouth full as we walked back to
where he’d left the jar, ‘at how much magic we’re all capable of.’
‘Really,’ I said, sulking.
‘Oh, yes. For instance, I can make water go uphill.’
I frowned. ‘Really? No fooling?’
‘No fooling. Of course, I need my magic talisman.’
I could feel a headache coming on. ‘Oh, no,’ I replied. ‘You can’t pay water to
flow uphill.’
‘No, but you can buy a jar to carry it in.’
That was so silly that I was about to say something rude. But I didn’t. In fact,
I didn’t say anything.
‘Magic,’ Diogenes went on, ‘is easy. Just like most things in life. The trick
lies in persuading people that they’re difficult.’
I stopped where I was. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I think I can see what you’re
getting at. You’re saying that...’ I paused, trying to find the right words.
‘What a thing is depends first of all on how we define it. You defined magic as
being able to make people do things, but you didn’t exclude paying them money
from the definition. That’s how you were able to trick me.’
He shook his head. ‘No trick,’ he said. ‘You made it difficult for yourself,
that’s all.’
‘But,’ I insisted, ‘some things really are difficult, because — well, they just
are.’
He smiled. ‘Really? Name one.’
‘All right.’ I thought for a moment. ‘Flying through the air.’
He shook his head. ‘No. I can do that.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Honestly. I give you my word. Put me on a mountain or on the top of the old
tower in the Potters’ Quarter, and I promise you I can fly through the air.’
He said it so convincingly that for a moment I believed him. ‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes.’ He grinned. ‘Just not for very long, that’s all.’
My brother Eudaemon loved playing soldiers. I can picture him now, with his
wooden sword and the shield my father made for him out of a torn cloak stretched
over a vine-sapling frame, charging up and down the rows in the small vineyard
on the slopes of Parnes, chasing invisible Spartans. Well, I say they were
invisible, and for sure I can’t see them any more, but in those days they were
as plain as day (I was five at the time, and Eudaemon was seven). The difference
between us was that while Eudaemon sallied forth to meet them, one small boy
against a thousand fire-breathing hoplites, I tended to hide behind the old
fig-tree until they’d gone.
My father’s attitude towards my brother’s martial aspirations tended to vary
from day to day, depending on circumstances. For instance, when Eudaemon soundly
defeated a phalanx of newly planted olive saplings (they outnumbered him
thirty-five to one but eventually he overcame and beheaded them all), Father
chased him three times round the terrace and broke his stick over Eudaemon’s
shoulders when he finally caught up with him. On the other hand, when one of our
neighbours asked Eudaemon what he wanted to be when he grew up and Eudaemon
immediately answered ‘a soldier’, Father nodded sagely and said there were far
worse careers for an ambitious young man of good family. Later, I found out the
reason for that reaction, and it’s a salutory lesson for anybody who tends to
read books.
It was many years later, after Father’s death, and we were going through the box
he kept his books in (he had well over twenty of the wretched things) with a
view to sharing them out between us and maybe selling any that were worth money.
While the rest of us browsed happily, snatching the rolls out of each other’s
hands and reading bits aloud in silly voices, Eudaemon grimly worked his way
through all of them till he found the one he was looking for, then stuffed it
inside his tunic and hurried away. Well, naturally we couldn’t let that pass
without finding out what it was that meant so much to our dear brother (we
assumed it must be something with naughty bits in) and we left off fighting over
the other books and persecuted Eudaemon until we’d managed to get the book from
him. But it wasn’t dirty poetry or anything like that; it was a scruffy and
well-used copy of Xenophon’s Persian Campaign, a most dangerous and pernicious
thing as I’ll explain in a moment. Anyway, we tried teasing Eudaemon about this,
but he got so angry and so violent that we had to give it back to him before he
hurt somebody.
You, my ignorant young friend, don’t know the celebrated Xenophon from a stick
of rhubarb, so I’d better tell you a little bit about him; because if anybody
was to blame for all the things that eventually happened, it may well have been
him. Xenophon was a mercenary soldier, one of those sad, nasty people who were
unaccountably still alive at the end of the War — sorry; the Great Peloponnesian
War — and lacked the patience to wait around at home till the next war began.
Instead they went toddling off to Persia to fight for young Prince Cyrus against
his brother, the rightful king. Of course, it was a complete and utter fiasco,
Cy
rus’ army was beaten; his Greek mercenaries, about ten thousand of them who
survived the war, found themselves stranded deep in the heart of the Persian
Empire, which at that time stretched from the Greek border as far as the edge of
the known world; as if that wasn’t enough, all the Greek army’s senior officers
were lured to a banquet by the local Persian representatives and murdered.
Awkward, to say the least. At this point, our hero Xenophon (an Athenian,
needless to say) was elected commander-in-chief by his fellow desperadoes and
proceeded to march them home, from Cunaxa, where the Tigris meets the Euphrates,
across deserts and mountains and all manner of other romantic and godforsaken
terrain, through Media, Armenia, Pontus, Paphiagonia (it goes without saying
that we had only the vaguest notion where the blazes any of these places were,
but that didn’t matter; they sounded fantastic) until finally reaching the
Bosporus, which was effectively home. Every step of the way, according to
Xenophon’s insidious little book, they fought and made mincemeat out of hordes
of Persian warriors, shrugging off their vastly superior numbers like an ox
dispersing a cloud of flies with a shake of his head and a contemptuous flick of
his tongue.
All this happened about fifteen years before I was born, and if it hadn’t been
for Xenophon’s unfortunately compelling way with words, it’d have gone the way
of all the other battles and wars in which foreigners have beaten Greeks and
been forgotten about and buried. No such luck. To my father’s generation, who’d
grown up at the lowest point of the War and lived through our defeat and the
fall of the democracy, Xenophon’s escapade was incredibly significant and
inspirational. If Greeks stopped killing Greeks, they said, and started killing
Persians instead, there was no limit to what we could do. All the wealth and
power of the Great King’s empire could be ours. The Persians were weak, effete,
apples ripe and hanging heavy on the branch waiting to be picked or fall of
their own accord. And so forth. It didn’t help matters that Xenophon’s pirate
band was made up of men from all over Greece, Athenians and Spartans and
Boeotians, deadliest of enemies during the War but now comrades-in-arms taking
on the whole world and winning...
If it made sensible grown-ups go a bit crazy, think of the effect this tripe had
on my poor brother, with his vine-prop spear and his home-made scrap-leather
helmet with a single tatty crow’s feather for a plume. Apparently my father had
been polluting his brain with it for years, reading it to him as a special treat
in return for extra chores and double shifts breaking up clods of earth on the
terraces. It’s easy enough to imagine the scene; there’s Eudaemon with his
mattock, too big and heavy for a boy his age but that’s all part of the
challenge; every recalcitrant chunk of dirt and tree-root is the head of a
Persian soldier, a Mossynoician peltast or a Bactrian-camel-rider or even an
Immortal of the King’s own guard. And every blow would send a shudder of pain
down through his elbows, jarring his spine and making his head ring, until his
eyes glazed over with berserk fury and he slashed wildly at the ground, striking
great showers of sparks off stones and never ceasing from smiting and smiting
until at last he missed his aim completely and knocked the head off the mattock
against the trunk of a tree.
You’re reading this, Phryzeutzis, and wondering why on earth I’m making such a
big deal out of this. Among your people, you’re about to remind me, a boy
practises every day with his bow as soon as he’s old enough to string it on his
own. By the time he’s twelve years old he rides with the fighting men when they
go cattle-rustling; by fourteen he’ll either have killed some other miserable
little kid or been killed himself. Yes. Well.
I suppose it’s different for you — I mean us — here at the end of the world. You
don’t recognise childhood as a sovereign nation among the ages of Man. Children
are just adults who haven’t finished growing yet; the fact that they can’t do as
much work is offset by the fact that they need less food, and so they’re
tolerated until they’re fit to be deployed, so to speak. It’s a different
attitude from ours, theirs, the Athenian way of looking at things, and I’m too
old now to care whether it’s better or worse. Let’s just say that since Eudaemon
was a little Athenian boy, and little Athenians don’t have to bring home the
severed head of an enemy warrior in order to prove they’ve graduated to
adulthood (we have a little ceremony with music and cakes and an embroidered
tunic instead), then I hold by my assertion that encouraging his obsession was
the wrong thing to do.
Where was I? Oh, yes. Eudaemon wanted to be a soldier; so Father set about
trying to find a soldier to apprentice him to. Now, we Athenians didn’t have
anything like a standing army (the navy was different, as I think I explained
earlier) and we were getting into the pernicious habit of hiring mercenaries
whenever we needed people killing in bulk, rather than putting on bronze
underwear and doing the job ourselves. I think that was what my father had in
mind when he talked about soldiering being a worthwhile career for a young man
of good family; true enough, some mercenaries were making good money, and
somehow or other professional soldiering managed to escape the
working-for-someone-else stigma (probably because the average mercenary worked
for himself first and whoever was paying him a poor second).
Anyway, there was one mercenary living near us, an extraordinary fellow by the
name of Bias — an appropriate name, it means ‘violence’. He was a sight to see,
Bias was, on a fine spring morning. In retrospect, I suppose he was a walking
advertisement for his own prowess.
He used to go down to the market every morning in his fanciest armour —
mirror-polished Boeotian helmet, corselet of gleaming gilded scales,
silver-plated greaves clipped round the calves of his legs, and a whacking great
Thracian cavalry sabre bouncing up and down on his hip, regardless of whether or
not carrying arms in public happened to be illegal that week. People used to
stop and stare at him as he bought his pint of sprats (he tended to carry them
home in his helmet) and if anybody was so ill-advised as to stop him and admire
a particular item of his outfit, he’d gladly spend an hour or so telling them
the whole gory history of where he’d acquired the piece, who it had formerly
belonged to and how, in graphic detail, he’d killed the previous owner. All
Bias’ clobber was taken from the bodies of his slain foes, of course, prizes of
war (or, if you prefer, second-hand); the idea being, I suppose, to advertise
his excellence in his chosen profession and designed to create opportunities for
sales pitches. I remember when I was a kid skipping along behind him trying to
spot the hole in the backplate whose previous incumbent he’d reportedly kebabbed
with a javelin at no fewer than forty paces; there was no trace of a
puncture-mark or a brazed-on patch, so
I guess he must have had it invisibly
mended.
In due course my father apprenticed Eudaemon to this remarkable person. Money
changed hands, and Eudaemon went to live at Bias’ house. Now, it occurred to me
that, for someone who made his living fighting in wars, Bias spent an
unconscionable percentage of his time at home in Athens , where there weren’t
any. For all his splendid outfits and stirring tales of valour, Bias never
actually seemed to do any fighting, and therefore didn’t seem to me to be a
suitable person to teach our kid the warrior’s trade. I mentioned this to Father
and got a thick ear for my pains, appropriately enough. But time went on, and
whenever Eudaemon was allowed home for a visit (he lived about two hundred yards
away) I got the impression from what he told us that he was receiving a
first-class education in the noble arts of armour-polishing, sword-burnishing,
cloak-darning and cleaning mildew off leather, but that was about as far as it
went. Eudaemon, of course, was fiercely loyal, as you’d expect a soldier to be.
According to him, a man’s got to look after his kit if he expects his kit to
look after him, and no soldier’s worth a damn who doesn’t spend a substantial
number of his waking hours bulling up metal and waxing leather. As it happened,
this was confirmed by my father’s recollections of his brief period of military
service, many years earlier, which he spent either polishing his gear or getting
it covered in mud while digging miles of trenches across a flat, uninhabited
plain many miles from where the fighting was taking place; so he accepted the
Bias/ Eudaemon version of the military curriculum without question, and got
annoyed with anybody who suggested that he was being taken for a sucker.
Nevertheless, rumours of the scepticism that was rife in the lesser members of
our household seemed to have reached Bias, because he started giving Eudaemon
lessons in military theory. All of these came out of a remarkable book (I wish I
still had my copy, but it went the way of all flesh last year, when I needed
some thin rawhide to mend a broken hoe) by a man called Aeneas the Tactican,
whose qualifications for pontificating about the art of war seemed to consist
solely of having written this same book. What Aeneas lacked in hands-on
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 4