watch them. You learn to do that instinctively when you’re a merchant, but of
course you’ve never done anything like this before. Now, if I was in your shoes,
I’d send a couple of hundred Illyrians down to the village in full armour, just
to make a tactful show of force.’
‘If you were in my shoes,’ I muttered, ‘you’d have blisters. Your feet are much
bigger than mine.’
He gave me a puzzled look for a moment, then smiled. ‘Good to see you’ve still
got your sense of humour,’ he said.
A day or so later, as soon as the expedition could be trusted to be left on its
own, I led a party to the Scythian village to open a dialogue.
There was me, and my friend Tyrsenius, and Agenor the itinerant sculptor (who’d
kindly made the time to come with us) and Captain-General Marsamleptes, and the
little man with a squint who was probably the only person in the expedition who
could understand what both Marsamleptes and I were saying, and a bunch of
Founders, and some particularly villainous-looking Illyrian soldiers in their
best armour to add a suitable nuance of menace to the proceedings. And also,
for some reason, there was Theano, who’d tagged along on the pretext that she
was bored and had nothing to do.
The news that we were on our way to the village was relayed by the inevitable
squadron of small boys who were permanently on duty in the patch between the
village and the city site, so when we toiled up the hill and got our first sight
of our new neighbours, nearly all of them were there to meet us, bearing with
them their strung bows and unsheathed scimitars, and other traditional Scythian
tokens of welcome. My old friend Anabruzas came out and stood in front of them,
flanked by hostile-looking men with helmets and wicker shields.
‘You’ve come, then,’ he said.
Well, it was perfectly obvious that we had, but I didn’t say anything clever. I
just nodded. Taciturn strength, I thought; that’s what these people respect.
‘All right,’ Anabruzas said. ‘What do you want?’
‘We need to talk,’ I replied. ‘About land for the colony.’
Anabruzas scowled at me. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘none to spare. You’ll have to go
somewhere else.’
I’d been hoping we weren’t going to have to do all that. ‘I don’t think so,’ I
replied. ‘We just need to rearrange things a little, that’s all.’
Anabruzas’ scowl tightened up a little. ‘You don’t seem to get it,’ he said.
‘There’s only so much land, and we need it.You can’t grow it on a tree or dig it
up out of the ground. Either it’s there or it isn’t.’
I shook my head. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘don’t agree. There’s only six hundred or so
of you, and all this plain; only about a fifth of it’s under the plough, and
even that’s far more than it takes to feed a hundred-odd people. There’s more
than enough for all of us, provided you’re prepared to be reasonable.’
‘No,’ Anabruzas said.
A fat lot of good being taciturn had done me. ‘That’s just silly,’ I said.
‘Look, you’re welcome to keep everything you’ve already got ploughed and
planted. The stuff that’s just lying idle will do us.’
Anabruzas laughed. ‘That’s not the way we do things,’ he said. ‘You ever heard
of rotation of crops? One year plough, two years fallow; that’s how we get such
good yields. We need all this land, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but that’s lazy, wasteful farming. Come on, Anabruzas,
you’ve lived in Athens , you know how we do things there. One year under corn,
one year under beans, plough five times before planting and use plenty of dung.
It works for us.’
‘That’s as may be,’ he said. ‘But it’s not how we do things. If you want the
land, you’ll have to fight for it.’
By this time, Marsamleptes had learned to recognise the Greek words for
fighting, battles and so on, and now he woke up out of his daydream and started
glowering horribly at the Scythians like a dog who can see birds. The Scythians,
though plainly alarmed, scowled back.
‘If we fight,’ I pointed out, ‘you’ll lose. No question about it.
Anabruzas nodded. ‘Quite likely,’ he said. ‘But I promise you this. By the time
you’ve killed every last one of us — and that’s what it’ll take — we’ll have
taken so many of you with us there won’t be enough of you left to found any damn
city.’
‘It’d be ten to one,’ I pointed out.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Anabruzas replied. ‘Better dead than Delos , any day.’
(There I go again, making assumptions. You don’t know what or where Delos is;
well, it’s a small island in the Aegean , famous for two
things. One’s being the birthplace of Apollo himself, and the other’s the slave
market; biggest in Greece , they say.)
Well, I suppose it could have been worse. We might have started fighting there
and then; if my fellow Founders had had their way, I expect we’d have done just
that, and Marsamleptes (who hadn’t killed anyone for weeks and was starting to
look pale and thin as a result) would undoubtedly have made a thoroughly
professional job of it. All I could think of to do was turn away and walk back
down the hill, hoping very much that I’d get clear without being hedgehogged
with arrows. I kept on going, and nobody shot at us; didn’t somebody say
somewhere that any peace conference where you escape with your life can be
considered a success?
‘You made a right hash of that,’ Theano said.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘Obviously, tact isn’t your strong point.’
‘No,’ I agreed.
‘Of course,’ she went on, ‘I knew that already. You’ve got an amazing ability to
say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.’
‘Apparently,’ I said.
She walked on in silence for a moment, then continued, ‘The worst thing was when
you told him he was welcome to keep the land they’d already ploughed and sown —
have you any idea how insulting that sounded? Or when you told him how much land
they needed—’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I think you’ve made your point.’
She smiled. ‘Just so long as you know,’ she said. ‘After all, I know from bitter
experience, you’re so damn ignorant, maybe you hadn’t actually realised—’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Because,’ she went on, ‘I can’t see how somebody could know they were doing
something like that and keep on doing it. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense—’
‘Thank you for your input,’ I said. ‘I’ll try and bear it in mind.’
You didn’t have to be anybody clever — Aristotle, say — to work out what the
likely sequence of events would be. Messengers would go out from the village to
other settlements all over the Olbian hinterland; men with bows and scimitars
would assemble like ghosts in the grey dawn, and we’d be jerked out of our sleep
by the screaming of women and the hissing of fire on the thatch. We wouldn’t
stand a chance. It’d all be over before we had a chance to put our shoes on.
So Marsamleptes organise
d the defences, and none of us got much sleep for the
next week or so. We scrabbled together huge piles of brushwood and lit them at
sunset; we posted sentries; we all took our turn to peer anxiously at the border
of the light and the darkness, imagining stealthy shapes where the shadows were
longest; we worked in armour until every scrap of clothing we possessed was
dripping with sweat and snagged to ribbons, and the swords dangling from our
shoulders got in the way of everything we did, digging trenches and hauling
masonry blocks and putting up scaffolding. We were exhausted and uncomfortable
and very, very short-tempered with each other, but we were ready for them.
Of course, nothing happened.
Our scouts, creeping up to the skyline to spy on the activity in the village,
reported back that they appeared to be going about their business as if nothing
had happened. They weren’t clanking about the place like refugees from the
Iliad, or sitting up all night screaming, ‘Who goes there?’ at quietly scuttling
foxes. ‘Lulling us into a false sense of security,’ my friend Tyrsenius called
it; of course, he’d clambered into his armour the moment he got back from the
peace conference and set about ringing his tent with a wonderfully intricate
system of tripwires linked to five enormous cow-bells (where he got them from,
gods only know; but Tyrsenius always had everything), the incessant clanging of
which really started to get on our nerves after the first couple of hours. After
a week of not being killed, though, he was strolling around the place (still
head to toe in shining bronze, of course) announcing that we were over-reacting
quite dreadfully and he’d said from the very beginning that there was absolutely
nothing to worry about from that quarter.
The work, meanwhile, slowly began to take shape.
It’s remarkable how small a large copse can be, when you cut it down, trim its
branches off and hammer its component trunks into the ground to make a stockade.
By my system of reckoning, any stand of trees large enough to get lost in is a
wood, probably even a forest; but the small forest we located on the first day
was all used up by the time we’d built the first gatehouse, let alone any wall
for itto be a gate in. Given our nervous state, we didn’t dare send any logging
parties out of eyeshot of the camp without an equivalent number of armed
escorts, and of course we also had to make sure the camp itself was never
without an adequate garrison. This didn’t leave too many bodies over to do any
productive work, and the few who actually did some soon began to harbour
uncharitable thoughts about their fellows who spent all day lounging about
leaning on their spears, watching and occasionally making helpful suggestions.
Nevertheless; up the stockade went, our first priority, and after that we felt
just a little bit more secure, enough to allow ourselves the luxury of taking
off our breastplates while we worked.
Originally, the idea had been that instead of wasting money buying stone (I
mean, who’d be stupid enough to buy the stuff when all you need do is chip it
off the sides of cliffs?), we’d quarry it ourselves from the nearest exploitable
seam of granite or sarsen.
It was an understandable mistake, bearing in mind that we were Greeks, brought
up on the tiny patches of flat ground squeezed in between enormous bare
mountains. We never imagined for a moment that stone might be hard to come by,
just as a fish probably can’t understand the concept of a desert. After we’d
wasted a lot of valuable time and manpower in prospecting for suitable material,
we gave up and asked Tyrsenius if he knew where we could get building stone
from; and in due course, purpose-built barges trundled along the coast from
Odessus, riding low in the water under their burden of neatly trimmed modular
sandstone blocks. The cost was staggering, so we sent a ship back to Macedon for
more money, one thing we could be sure we wouldn’t run short of so long as
Philip was alive.
‘If we’d only done this in the first place,’ announced Tyrsenius, formerly our
self-appointed Director of Quarrying Operations, as he checked the manifest of
the latest stone barge, ‘we’d be a fortnight further on by now. I do wish people
would listen to me now and again; it’d save you all a lot of time and effort.’
Agenor, now firmly established as Director of Works, suddenly remembered that
not long ago he’d been a professional sculptor and demanded marble instead of
sandstone for the façade of the gate-house, which we were building directly
behind the gate in the stockade. I told him to go to the crows with that idea,
whereupon he appealed to the Founders and explained that if at some point he was
going to decorate the gatehouse with a commemorative frieze depicting the
founding of the city, he would need not just marble but good marble, a point
which the Founders held to be entirely valid. I told them to go to the crows
too. We held a number of quite passionate Works committee meetings, noted the
objections formally on the record and told Agenor to shut his face and get on
with his work, which he did once I’d promised him all the marble he could use
once the city was built and priorities could be reassessed.
There was a moment — I can’t remember when, exactly, but it quite suddenly,
while none of us were watching — at which point it stopped looking like a huge,
random mess and started looking like a baby city. Not Athens , that’s for sure,
or even Pella ; but a city. There were streets, or narrow strips where you could
believe streets would one day be; we stopped walking all over the place and kept
to them. We even gave them names; Main Street and Gate Street and South Street
and West Street, none of which appeared in the list previously agreed by the
relevant sub-committee, but if you said ‘the plot two thirds of the way down
West Street on the left as you face the sea’, people would know where you meant.
It was a bizarre feeling, once we allowed ourselves to acknowledge that it had
happened. And time went on, the Scythians didn’t attack, the money didn’t arrive
from Macedon but the barges kept coming from Odessus, we arranged further credit
with Olbia City for more food, tools, canvas and rope, we found more timber a
day’s walk away, we stopped wearing armour and sending armed escorts, we
finished the first well, we completed the preliminary land survey and began
drawing lots for who was to get which parcel of land, still the money didn’t
come, we broke up the palisade because it was getting in the way and we needed
the timber for other things, we finished the first house, we started the first
temple, we held countless endless meetings, we made our first plough, we laid
the foundations of the granary, the money arrived but there wasn’t nearly
enough, the fourth house fell down in the night and we started it again from
scratch, we looked up and found we’d been there a year— Theano and I got
married; something of an afterthought, fitted in on a spare afternoon while we
were waiting for the plaster to dry before making a start on the roof. The
Scythians had
n’t attacked yet. We were still here. And the next day. And the day
after that.
I began to record the history of the city, on a piece of parchment that had come
wrapped round a large cheese. I recorded our first harvest, the first couple of
deaths and births, the first major theft, the first rape, the first sale of
land— It wasn’t anything special, in fact it was mostly downright primitive. But
it was alive.
Extraordinary...
CHAPTER TWELVE
W hen my son was a year old, I chose a name for him. I’d left it rather late,
putting off the chore for a variety of insubstantial reasons — perhaps at the
back of my mind I believed that if I ignored his existence he’d go away. Why I
should want to think like that I have no idea; I wasn’t conscious of not wanting
the child, or not feeling the usual degree of paternal affection. Maybe it had
something to do with the fact that Theano and I weren’t getting along
particularly well, though there’s no logical connection there that I can see. On
the other hand, logic doesn’t usually have much to do with anything in such
circumstances, as far as I can tell.
I named him Eupolis; nominally after his great-grandfather, the Comic poet, but
really because Eupolis means (or can be made to mean) ‘from the best of cities’;
it was a propitiatory sacrifice, an act of dedication for the colony itself, as
well as a pun on the highfaluting ‘official’ name the Founders had chosen. As
such, it was well received and taken by my honest neighbours as a vote of
confidence, or an act of faith. Something like that, anyway.
Fair play to us; we built that city quickly and well. I believe that a large
measure of our success was due to the fact that the Founders, having settled
every last theoretical detail from the names of the streets to the colours the
statues were to be painted before the expedition left Macedon, left us alone
once we actually got there, and we were therefore able to ignore everything
they’d decided, which was a great help. As for all that wonderful theorising
about the ideal form of government for the ideal colony, all the model
constitutions and draft law-codes we drew up and then tore to bits over someone
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 30