reconstruct what he was actually trying to say, his argument was that he
couldn’t be charged with Blocking A Watercourse Recklessly Or With Intent (which
was what he was accused of in the statement of claim) because there had never
been enough rain in previous years to cause a sufficient overflow, and so water
had never actually coursed down the said conduit, which meant it had never been
a watercourse within the meaning of the statute; further or in the alternative,
he’d been more or less forced to build his wall by the ferocious onslaughts of
his neighbour’s goats, which had frequently done more damage in an afternoon
than the water had wrought in the space of a month; ‘furthermore,’ he’d added,
‘what was I supposed to do with all that water anyhow? Drink it?’ This wasn’t
really what you’d call a convincing legal argument, but at least I could see the
point he was trying to make without having to twist my imagination at
right-angles to my brain.
Clearly the fair and equitable thing for me to do as a juror was to ignore the
evidence of both sides and go with the version of events as set out in the
pleadings, which reduced the whole thing to a straightforward question of law.
Now, it’s a sad but universal fact that when people are sitting under a tree on
a pleasantly warm afternoon dreaming up laws for their city, they tend to devote
most of their time and ingenuity to the exciting stuff, such as murder, rape and
assault. By the time they get around to considering civil suits, particularly
those likely to have a rural setting, it’s late and the wine ran out an hour or
so ago and the fun is wearing a bit thin; they tend to skimp and rush through,
and when these laws come to be put into practice, this weakness shows up with a
vengeance. We’d gone a stage further down the road to chaos and confusion by
basing our farm law on the models set out by Plato in one of his perfect-society
pamphlets, a decision we came to regret quite quickly. Stickler for annoying
detail though he was, Plato never went so far as actually to define a
watercourse; was it a ditch or trench through which water actually passed, or a
ditch or trench intended to be used for the transmission of water, whether or
not water actually ever came in contact with it? I agonised over this point
without reaching any decision until it was time for the jury to start voting, at
which point I asked myself the simple question, Which of these two imbeciles
would you least lihe to live next to? I went with my instincts, and gave
judgement for the defendant.
In fact the plaintiff won, though there were only four votes in it. There was a
much closer consensus on the amount of damages; we awarded him the value of his
ruined onions, less the value of the damage done by his goats, resulting in a
net award of the price of a medium-sized jar of dried figs. Personally I’d have
gone further and included an additional award against both of them for wasting a
specified proportion of my life in a manner likely to cause aggravated pain and
suffering; but I don’t suppose either of them could have afforded to pay such an
enormous sum.
Well now, Phryzeutzis, I’m sure that by now you’ve tumbled to the fact that I’ve
been trying, in my heavy-handed way, to give you some idea of what real life in
this perfect society of ours was like, twelve years into its history. You’ll
have noticed that it was by no means perfect, and it didn’t have much in common
with those high-minded and carefully crafted model constitutions we used to play
around with after dinner back in Athens . I don’t know if that was a good thing
or a bad thing; we had no real government to speak of, just the Founders (whom
everybody ignored as a matter of course) and me, who tried his level best to
avoid doing any governing unless compelled to do so by force. We had no foreign
policy, because it never occurred to us that we were grown-up enough to need
one. As far as economic policy went, we had my friend Tyrsenius, the man who
sold overpriced ornamental armour and unserviceable weapons to our potential
enemies, and urged us to borrow money from our neighbours that we never had a
hope in hell of ever paying back. We had just enough law and order to discourage
us from cutting each other’s throats. As for politics; well, we had better
things to do with our time. And yes, we made a hash of quite a lot of things, we
drifted far enough away from our original intentions that not only the Illyrians
but some of the Budini were able to fit in and make themselves at home. We
produced no literature, art, science or philosophy. We had no time to spare for
the finer things in life. What’s more, we didn’t care. It wasn’t Athens (but in
Athens you could be put on trial for blasphemy, or slandering the City in front
of foreigners, or failing to farm your own land to an acceptable standard of
husbandry; you could be put to death for proposing a law to repeal another law,
if you went about it the wrong way; you could be executed for refusing to take
either side in a civil war; and every year we had a ballot to exile a certain
number of people, not because they’d done anything wrong but just because nobody
liked them very much); and it wasn’t Macedon either. By a process of
elimination, we were forced to the conclusion that it was Antolbia; nothing
more, nothing less.
That, then, was the opinion most of us had of ourselves while we were planning
our monumental civic thrash in honour of a dozen years of nationhood; and by and
large, we liked what we saw in the mirror. There’s a part of me that wishes I
could have taken that young Prince Alexander I once helped to capture a hive of
bees on a leisurely tour round Antolbia instead of trying to teach him the art
of war and the knack of scanning elegaic couplets. There were things he’d have
seen there that might just have answered some of the questions he tried to
resolve by leading the Macedonian army to the very edge of the world, and
possibly the answers he’d have come across with me would have been a hair’s
breadth closer to the truth. By the same token, if I was made of pottery and had
smaller ears, I’d be a jar. It’s hard enough writing history without trying to
rewrite it as well.
The Founders wanted to kick off with a procession — lots of smiling children
with their faces washed and their hair combed — carrying baskets of freshly
baked bread and seasonal fruits from the place where the first ship landed to
the temple. This would be followed by communal singing of the Homeric Hymn to
Apollo and selections from Pindar, after which we could relax with a recital of
flute and harp music and an athletics contest.
The rest of us felt that if that was the Founders’ idea of a big time, then good
luck to them. What we wanted to do was drink excessively and make a lot of
noise, and possibly even round the celebration off by smashing up a few
redundant statues (such as the one of me that had been plonked down, much
against my will, in an alcove round the side of the market hall. On many a dark
night I’d tried to nerve myself to go and do mischief to it with a big hammer; I
&n
bsp; just couldn’t bear the thought of the look on the Founders’ faces if one of them
had caught me at it).
In the end, we compromised; procession, edited highlights of the Homeric Hymn,
and a big vat of booze in the middle of the square for everybody to dip a cup
in. My contribution to the success of this consensus was persuading Founder
Perdiccas to donate three sheep and three goats for sacrifice and subsequent
barbecue, a result I achieved by thanking him in public for his exceptionally
generous offer without asking him first. A highly effective ploy, that, and one
I recommend to you.
Early reports on the wine suggested it was going to turn out drinkable, though
of course there’d be no way of knowing until we actually racked it off. There
was a degree of apprehension among the gloomier of the self-professed experts;
they held that the richer, deeper soil and milder temperature of Olbia might
tend to produce a more watery, fruity wine without the subtle malice of Greek
vintages. Up to a point, their concern proved to be justified when the first
jars were opened; the stuff tasted sweet and bland, prompting them to reduce the
water in the mix from a half to a third. The consequences of this experiment
were dramatic; you drank a pint or so of the stuff to no apparent effect, and a
quarter of an hour later you fell over. On balance, we decided that this was a
good thing, the stuff that truly heroic binges are made of.
‘Wake up,’ Theano said to me, just before dawn on the day of the festival.
I grunted. ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Is it that time already?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘But I want to get the house straight before we go, and
you’re making the room look untidy.’
My son Eupolis was one of the basket-bearers in the procession. In essence, his
job was to walk from A to B without tripping over or dropping the basket, and
both Theano and I had grave reservations about whether he’d manage it. However,
he seemed quite relaxed about it all when we finally managed to prise him out of
his bed and chivvy him into his clothes (specially made for the occasion and
almost a good fit) so we worried about me instead. As oecist I was not only
reciting some of the magic words during the formal part of the ceremony but also
reputedly making a keynote speech, after the Hymn but before the drinking
started. As you can imagine I’d given this speech a great deal of thought. The
first draft was about twenty minutes long and packed with references to the
wisdom of the Founders, the unreliable protection of the gods and other lofty
themes. The final version was a loose paraphrase of ‘Drinks on the house!’,
which at least had the merit of giving the people what they wanted to hear.
‘You’re not proposing to go out looking like that, are you?’Theano said.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Why not?’
‘For one thing,’ she said, ‘it’s too small. For another, there’s a dirty great
patch just above the left shoulder, and it isn’t even the same colour.’
I frowned. ‘I wore this same tunic on the day we made landfall,’ I said. ‘I
thought it’d be a nice touch if I wore it today, just to demonstrate—’
‘What a scruffy slob you’ve become. No thank you. People always blame the wife,
and it’s not fair. Go and change.’
She also insisted that I take the jar — you remember, the jar, the one that
didn’t have a snake in it. Actually, I didn’t object; it was Olympias’ belief
that there was a snake in it that had led to all of us being here, so it seemed
appropriate, in a twisted kind of way.
Against all expectations, I enjoyed the procession. Meaningless civic rituals
have never done very much for me, but just for once I was able to kid myself
that this one wasn’t meaningless. And yes, dammit, I felt ever so slightly proud
when I saw my son toddling along at the front of the line, grimly clinging to
his basket, eyes determinedly forward, like the spearman at the apex of a wedge
formation going into battle. Sure, it was cheesy and sentimental; but the bread
in the basket and the basket itself had been made in Antolbia, and it was high
time we showed our gratitude to Apollo, on the off chance that he really did
exist. You’ll gather that I’m not a particularly religious man, but there are
certain times when the act of religion is far more important than whether or not
there really is an Apollo or a Zeus. Maybe it’s moments like that which create
gods. Who knows?
We shuffled up into line to sing the Hymn.
We left the gate open.
Well, it didn’t seem important.
There’s a certain comic irony in the fact that the line we were singing at the
moment when it started was, I will remember and not be unmindful of Him who
shoots from afar, because we hadn’t, of course. We’d clean forgotten. Like most
of the survivors I’ve talked to, I can clearly remember what I was thinking the
instant before the first arrow struck; I was thinking that since the grapes we
grew in Olbia were fatter and pulpier than the average Greek grape, it stood to
reason that with a little care we ought to be able to make a genuinely sweet
white wine, like the stuff you occasionally get from Phoenicia. The image in my
mind was of a big, plump grape, its skin just starting to split under the
pressure of a man’s knee in the pressing-box. I could see the first big teardrop
of juice oozing out of the split and running down the side of the grape, cutting
a channel in the dusting of yeast.
Then somebody screamed. We all looked up, wondering what was going on.
I was at a picnic once, out in the fields at Phyle. We’d gone out on the pretext
of making an offering at the shrine there — I can’t have been more than seven
years old — and we children were playing running-about games when some fool
threw a stone and hit a hollow tree that happened to house a swarm of wild bees.
Out they came, like cavalry appearing unexpectedly on your unprotected flank;
and at once the picnic party broke up in wild, grotesque panic — people running
backwards and forwards, their hands over their faces, crashing into each other,
knocking over the jugs and jars, breaking crockery, swearing, squealing. I’d
never actually encountered wild bees before and I just stood there like an
idiot, trying not to get trodden on. Because I stayed put and didn’t identify
myself as a target the bees left me alone, but the rest of the party got
thoroughly stung. At the time I thought the whole thing was rather amusing and
wonderful.
It took a while for us to realise that there were people behind us, shooting
arrows. We couldn’t imagine who’d be doing such a thing until we actually saw
them; genuine wild Scythians, tall men on rather undersized horses, performing
the hardest of all martial manoeuvres, shooting from the saddle. Amazing, the
skill of these people; they drop the reins completely and guide the horse with
nothing more than gentle pressure from their knees, while using both hands to
draw and aim their bows. I don’t suppose I’d ever have been able to learn the
trick; it must be something you’re born to. I’ve even seen them string the bow
/> at full gallop, one-handed.
I saw Melanthius, one of the Founders, stagger and drop to his knees. I never
liked Melanthius much. I saw Eurygye, the wife of a man whose name I’ve
forgotten but who helped me build my first barn, trying to haul herself along
the ground on her elbows because an arrow had lodged in her spine. She was sixty
if she was a day, and so badly troubled with arthritis that she found it hard to
get about freely at the best of times. I saw Azus, my Budini bodyguard,
struggling to string his bow without even trying to pull out the arrow that was
lodged between his collar-bone and neck tendon. I saw Agenor, the stonemason,
pushing people down and shouting. I saw Perdiccas the Founder running at a
Scythian horseman with a meat-cleaver in his hand; but the Scythian saw him
first and sliced off the top of his bald head with his scimitar, like a fussy
man tackling a boiled egg. I saw Theano, sensible girl, ducked down behind an
overturned table, holding up a bronze meat-dish like a shield. I saw Bollus, an
Illyrian who once returned a stray goat of mine, shoot a Scythian from his
saddle at seventy-five yards. I was just standing there, quite still, clutching
my jar that didn’t contain a snake, and nobody seemed very interested in me.
I’ve said this before; whenever something happens, I’m always on the sidelines,
though just for once I wasn’t looking the other way. I saw Jason, the Illyrian
wheelwright who was such an expert on the diseases of sheep, pinned by an arrow
to a door, while his wife threw plates at the Scythian who’d shot him; he was
coming back for her with his scimitar, but she hit him in the face with a plate,
it broke and drew ever such a lot of blood; he wiped it away and so was able to
see, and then she hit him again — but he killed her before she could throw
again. I saw my friend Tyrsenius, with one arm hanging limp and useless at his
side while he hacked a fallen horseman to death with the captured scimitar he
held in his good hand. I saw my son Eupolis running towards our house, and I
watched the arrow that killed him all the way from the bow.
I didn’t see Marsamleptes and Charicles the Founder lead the counter-attack that
finally drove them off; apparently they went for them with sticks and pots and
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 40