in front of witnesses. We had all this; and we had me.
And, at the last minute, looking extremely unhappy as her father and two
brothers shooed her up the gangplank with my son in her arms, we had Theano;
expensive, ungrateful, hard-done-by Theano, who didn’t want to go and who’d far
rather have worked herself to death washing clothes by the river.
Two and a half thousand idiots and one angry girl, and a fair wind for Olbia.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘Excuse me,’ you’re saying, ‘but where’s Olbia?’ You sound sheepish, perhaps
slightly ashamed that you don’t know where
Olbia is; but it’s a good question, and one I really ought to have asked rather
earlier than I did.
The sad truth is, I thought I knew. I thought Olbia was a natural harbour at the
bottom edge of the almost-island of Chersonesus*, the roughly rectangular chunk
that dangles like a spider from the roof of the Black Sea coast at the mouth of
the Gulf of Maeotis, with a mountain range on one side and the sea on the other;
an area colonised by Greeks for many years, with a pleasant climate and friendly
relations with both the neighbouring Greek colonies and the local savages.
There is indeed such a place; it’s called Heracleia, and we weren’t going there.
Olbia, by contrast, is lodged in the mouth of the Hypanis river like a strand of
meat wedged awkwardly between your teeth. It’s got a wonderful natural harbour;
to the east, there’s a promontory very like a folded thumb and pointing
forefinger, or a wolf’s head with a very long snout. We weren’t going there,
either; someone had beaten us to it, a mere three hundred years earlier.
The place we were actually headed for ** was a little triangular bay nibbled
into the coastline between Olbia and Tyras, roughly level with the fingernail of
the pointing forefinger of land I mentioned a
* The Crimea .
** Between Odessa and Mykolayiv in the Ukraine .
moment ago, which the sub-committee on Names and Public Holidays had, in the
comfortable shade of a fig-tree in Mieza, resolved to call Philippopolis en
Beltiste (‘The city of Philip in the best place anywhere’). In practice, we
didn’t often refer to it as that. To be honest, if you were to ask me what the
most commonly used name for it was, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell you. Some
of my fellow Founders actually did insist on calling it
Philippopolis-and-the-rest, which made them a joy to listen to after they’d had
a drop to drink. (Try it and you’ll see what I mean.) The Illyrians called it
something unpronounceable in Illyrian. My friend Tyrsenius (I’ll tell you about
him later) took to calling it Oudama (‘nowhere’) and the name stuck, at least
with some of us. This confused the hell out of the Illyrians and the
Gallippidae, the local natives; in Greek, you see, the part of the word that
means ‘no’ can be either ou- or me- depending on whether it’s in a principal or
a subordinate clause and whether the verb is infinitive or subjunctive, which
meant that we’d find ourselves referring to it as Oudama and Medama in the same
sentence. The Illyrians firmly believed that there were two colonies being
founded simultaneously, and needless to say they’d been sent to the crummy one,
which made them very sad. The Callippidae drew roughly the same conclusion, and
spent countless thousands of man-hours searching for Medama in the hope of
striking a better deal with the Medamites for the sale of their wheat and
barley. In fact there was one bright spark who set himself up as the official
Medamite commercial attaché in Oudama and got a lot of good business that way,
until we caught him at it and asked him to stop.
‘In the best place anywhere’ was an exaggeration, to be sure. But there were
worse places to be, among them Attica and, for that matter, Macedonia . Don’t
believe what they tell you about the Black Sea climate, all those horror stories
about freezing cold winters and roasting summers; it’s a little cooler than
Greece, but not offensively so. The main difference is in the terrain. It’s
flat. For an Athenian, used to being surrounded on all sides by rocky mountains,
it’s a rather dizzy feeling to see land that level or a sky that big. In Attica
, and nearly all of Greece for that matter, we grow our food in the thin layer
of dust and dirt that covers the lower slopes of the mountains. Olbia is one
enormous level, deep-soiled plain, perfectly suited for growing wheat; drop
crumbs from your breakfast and they’ll take root and grow. Of course, we
Athenians have known this for years. For every coarse barley loaf eaten in
Athens , we import six medimni of Black Sea wheat, and in return we palm them
off with Athenian oil, honey, wine and figs, which we’ve carefully educated them
to prefer to their own.
And who are they, I can hear you asking. The simple and unhelpful answer is, the
Gallippidae. The name is Greek and means ‘sons of fine horses’ (and what that’s
supposed to mean is another matter entirely). The proper answer is that they’re
Scythians who’ve packed in the nomadic life, settled down and earned the arts of
agriculture and getting cheated by Greeks.
(‘Ah,’ you say, with a smile on your face. ‘Like us.’
Yes, Phryzeutzis, very much like you. I mean us. like our people here, they’re
renegade descendants of the horsemen of the steppes, who saw the obvious merit
in trading a life of mobility, self-reliance, freedom and yoghurt for the
security of the same little square of dirt and the uncertain charity of Mother
Demeter— ‘Maybe they got sick of yoghurt,’ you suggest.
Maybe they did. Maybe they just grew tired of moving on. Quite possibly the urge
to roam from one set of mountains to the next is the childhood all races and
nations go through and grow out of, as soon as they come to know better...
I suggest, here in Sogdiana on the Iaxartes river, a place I never knew existed
until I wandered here, as far from Attica as it’s possible to get.
‘Ah,’ you reply indulgently, ‘but once you got here, you decided to stay.’
Absolutely. This is clearly the place I’ve been looking for all my life.
‘Wherever the hell it is.)
Very like us, Phryzeutzis; industrious, slow, suspicious, hospitable, ferocious,
incomprehensible — we Greeks have one word for all of that, barbaros, barbarian,
a foreigner, someone who when he speaks makes ba ba noises with his mouth
instead of speaking proper Greek. The Callippidae had become a little bit
Greekified, in that they lived in houses rather than wagons and dug in the dirt
rather than milking mares and ewes. They’d even acquired a taste for Greek
delicatessen and some of our showier consumer goods. But barboroi beyond
question, now and forever.
‘Could be worse,’ my friend Tyrsenius said, as we leaned over the rail and
stared at it. ‘Definitely, could be worse.’
Wonderful stuff, optimism. It’s like honey; take the lid off the jar and somehow
it gets everywhere, clinging to your fingers, smearing on everything you touch.
Also, too much of it makes you want to be sick.
‘Flat,’ I commented.
‘And green,’ Tyrsenius added. ‘Except for the yellow bits. That’s corn,
presumably.’
‘Wheat,’ I confirmed.
We looked at each other.
‘This could be a nice place to live,’ he said.
I nodded. ‘I expect the people who live here’d agree with you.’
He shrugged. ‘I know these people,’ he said. ‘They aren’t fighters. Warriors
yes, but not fighters. We’ll get no bother from them.’
My friendTyrsenius —Tyrsenius the Flamboyantly Wrong, as someone once dubbed
him — was the nearest thing we had to a native guide. For years his father had
made the long trading run from Elba, off the west coast of Italy, to Olbia;
hugging the coast all the way, starting off with a cargo of Italian pig-iron
that mutated at every stop he made until it turned into the dried fish he traded
for wheat on the shores of the Black Sea, ready to be converted into honey in
Athens, honey to crockery in Corinth, crockery to sheepskins in Illyria,
sheep-skins to timber in Istria, timber to wine in Apulia, wine to cheese in
Sicily, cheese to pig-iron on Elba.. . Wizards, they say, can turn one thing
into another, can even turn base metal into gold if they’re clever enough. My
friend Tyrsenius, like his father before him, was a true wizard, though. He
could turn iron into wheat.
And he knew these people, or people a hundred miles or so further down the coast
who looked and sounded quite like them; ‘close enough for a public contract’, as
he used to say. Warriors, not fighters; I liked the sound of that, though I
wasn’t quite sure I understood what it meant. Maybe they’d just kill us once and
go away.
‘You see,’ he went on, ‘they won’t be expecting us to stick around. They know
about Greeks here, you see. Greeks arrive on ships, they buy stuff, they sell
stuff, they go. Sometimes they hang about waiting for the winds to change,
sometimes they’ll even build a city as a base for future operations, but sooner
or later they push off, they don’t go out into the fields and get their hands
dirty. They’ll be delighted we’ve come, just you wait and see.’
I shrugged. I had grave misgivings. I also had a thousand Illyrian mercenary
soldiers, whose spears laid all low before them and (further or in the
alternative) whose deaths in glorious battle wouldn’t draw too many tears from
King Philip’s one good eye if the worst came to the worst. I clearly had nothing
to worry about. Maybe they’d all want Agenor to carve their portraits.
‘How long before landfall?’ I asked.
Tyrsenius grinned. ‘You’re learning the technical seafaring terms, I see. Not
long.’
‘Not long,’ I repeated. ‘That’s another technical seafaring term, is
He nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘It means I don’t know exactly, but not
long.’
In fact, a contrary wind kept us hanging about for what seemed like for ever;
during which time someone spotted our sail and scampered back to the village to
raise the alarm. The reception committee we found assembled on the beach when we
finally came ashore didn’t look nearly as delighted at our coming as I’d hoped
or Tyrsenius had promised.
‘They’re just shy, that’s all,’ my friend Tyrsenius whispered to me, as the
golden Olbian sun flashed off a scimitar-blade. ‘Once they’ve gone through the
motions, a little show of hostility just for form’s sake, we’ll all get on like
a house on fire.’
Not the most comforting of images. Marsamleptes, the Captain-General of the
Illyrians, was making grumbling noises as our keel hit the sand. He was probably
trying to tell me something or ask me a question, but apparently he still hadn’t
quite grasped the fact that I couldn’t speak Illyrian. He was probably telling
me that his boys would eat them alive; that or we didn’t stand a chance. One of
the two was always a fair bet with Marsamleptes, a straightforward man who
tended to chew the ends of his moustache at moments of great stress.
Such as this.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘here we go. No sudden movements, anyone.’
It feels strange, describing to an Eastern Scythian (that’s you, Phryzeutzis)
what it felt like for the Athenian leader of a largely Illyrian expedition to
come face to face for the first time with a Western Scythian. I’m not sure which
of us is the funny foreigner, and which of us is Us. The situation at the time
was further confused by the fact that, as an Athenian, I was quite used to
seeing Western Scythians , but in a less than helpful context.
The City of Athens , you see, has for quite some time now used Scythian slaves
as policemen. Sorry, you don’t know what that word means; it means men paid by
the state to keep order and catch and punish people who break the laws (or at
least, that’s the theory). We had to use foreign slaves for the job because no
self-respecting Greek, let alone Athenian, would dream of doing a job that
involved exercising practically unlimited power over his fellow citizens. Quite
right, too. Ask yourself; what kind of man would you get volunteering for a job
like that? Men who want that kind of power are by definition the last people
you’d allow to have it.
So; we imported barbarian slaves, choosing Scythians because they’re quick at
learning our language, skilled with the bow and arrow— which is why in Athens we
just called them ‘archers’ — and (because of their entirely alien views on what
constitutes wealth and happiness) almost impossible to bribe. They did the job
well, by and large, but in spite of that — maybe because of it — you’d be hard
put to find a Greek with a good word to say about them, or about Scythians in
general. Now, I pride myself on being the sort of man who as a general rule
isn’t particularly bothered about the colour of people’s skins or hair or eyes,
as witness the fact that I took an almost immediate liking to the
not-quite-Greek Macedonians. But a Scythian, with those distinctive cheek-bones
and dark intense eyes — I can’t help getting the shivers sometimes when I look
at them, and a sixty-year-old memory yells at me from the back room of my mind,
‘Run for it, here come the archers!’
As if that wasn’t enough to contend with, I also had my friend Tyrsenius’
last-minute confession about the role I’d assigned him as chief interpreter.
‘Of course I speak the language,’ he told me when I asked. ‘Not absolutely
fluently, of course,’ he added. ‘I mean, from listening tome you wouldn’t
necessarily assume I was Scythian by birth or whatever, but I can make myself
understood, most of the time.’
Of the dialect of this particular region, it turned out, he knew about five
phrases; things like ‘Where are we?’ and ‘Which way is the sea?’ These were, it
goes without saying, useless questions to ask, because he had no chance
whatsoever of understanding a single word of the reply.
In the event, it wasn’t relevant. The chief spokesman spoke excellent Attic
Greek —‘— As a result,’ he assured me, ‘of spending twenty years in Athens as an
archer, before I saved up e
nough to buy myself out and come home.’ He looked at
me for a long time without speaking, and behind him his escort of tall,
solemn-faced warriors allowed their fingers to creep forward and touch the
strings of their bows. It was a shall-I-eat-him-now-or-save-him-for-later look,
and even thinking about it all this time later still bothers me some.
‘I know you,’ he said. ‘It’s a gift I have, I never forget a face.’
That startled me, for sure. ‘How can you know me?’ I replied. ‘We only just
met.’
He shook his head. ‘Every face I’ve ever encountered,’ he went on, tapping his
forehead, ‘stored away somewhere, in here. And besides,’ he added unpleasantly,
‘even if I had a rotten memory I’d still remember you.’
I looked at him again; and, though the face was still entirely unfamiliar, I
noticed that he did have a significantly crooked nose and a gap in his front
teeth. A memory dropped into place.
‘Oh,’ I said.
(It was a long time ago. I was young, not used to drinking undiluted wine on an
empty stomach. And it wasn’t just me; in fact, I didn’t really participate, I
was just tagging along with the rest of them and happened to be the one that got
caught— You want to hear the story, don’t you? Oh, all right. Like I said, I was
little more than a kid at the time, and we’d been at a fairly boozy party. When
it finally wound up, we roamed around the streets for a while, singing
abominably and breaking up minor works of civic art, the way one does at that
age, until we found ourselves outside the house of some girl that one of us
fancied. So we started singing serenades, according to the time-honoured
tradition; and when the archers showed up to shoo us off, we made a bit of a
fight of it, just to prove we were free-born Athenians who don’t take kindly to
being pushed around by foreign slaves. . . And one of us, can’t remember a thing
about him, got a little bit carried away and clubbed one of the archers across
the face with the arm off a statue that had got in our way earlier. There was a
loud crunch and ever so much blood, and the man went face down; we were sure
we’d killed him. At that point, my fellow revellers did the sensible thing and
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 28