He took no notice of that remark. ‘Once,’ he said, ‘the Persians attacked some
of my people and captured a village. A Persian officer saw a woman he liked the
look of. Since she wanted nothing to do with him, he rounded up her whole family
and told her he was going to kill them all, unless she did what he wanted her
to. If she cooperated,’ he went on, stressing the word, ‘he promised he’d spare
one of her family. Just one; it’d be up to her to choose.’
‘Interesting story,’ I said. ‘Go on.’
‘She accepted the offer,’ Anabruzas continued, ‘and told the Persian that she
wanted him to spare her. brother. The Persian was as good as his word; later,
though, he told her that he was curious to know how she’d arrived at her
decision.
“‘It was a matter of logic,” she told him. “I didn’t choose my husband, because
one day I might find myself another husband. I didn’t choose my children,
because if I marry again I might bear more children. But my mother and father
are dead, so I can never have another brother, and that’s why I chose him.”’ He
sighed, and looked at me. ‘I used to wonder,’ he went on, ‘whether anybody could
ever reach the point where they’d be able to make a choice like that. I honestly
didn’t think it’d be possible; you simply couldn’t bring yourself to figure
something like that out in such a cold, rational way. That, however,’ he went
on, ‘was before you Greeks came.’
I frowned. ‘Are you going to do it, or aren’t you?’ I said. ‘I really don’t care
enough either way to be kept hanging about.’
‘Oh, I’ll do it,’ he replied. ‘I can’t see that I’ve got any choice, logically.
Tell me; the people you capture. Don’t you Greeks sell your prisoners as
slaves?’
‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘But we don’t believe in slavery in Antolbia. I’d have
thought you’d have noticed that.’
He acknowledged what I’d said with a slight bow. ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘You
don’t. We don’t either. Other Scythian nations do; the
Budini and the Massagetae and the others whose names I don’t know, who live at
the other end of the world. We never have, for some reason. It’s not an idea
we’re comfortable with.’
I shrugged. ‘Owning slaves makes a society weak and decadent,’ I said. ‘Where
you have rich men with armies of slaves, the ordinary farmers and craftsmen
can’t make a living. Also, you’ve always got the problem of keeping them in
order; that’s the sort of thing that can ultimately wreck a society, the way it
did for the Spartans. All through their history, everything they did was
motivated by the fear that their slaves might get loose some day and kill them
all, You can’t live with something like that hanging over you.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Different reasons. Do you promise that if I open the gates, you
won t put my people in chains and ship them off to —remind me, where is it you
have your big slave market?’
‘On the island of Delos ,’ I replied.
He nodded. ‘Isn’t that where you have the big temple?’ he asked.
‘That’s right. We believe Delos is where the god Apollo was born.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘You take a holy place and turn it into a slave market.
Clearly you Greeks are more complicated than I thought.’
‘You have my word,’ I said. ‘Once the village has been levelled, you’ll be free
to go.’
He stood up, slowly and painfully, like a man with a bad back. ‘I’ll open the
gates,’ he said. ‘And when you’ve done what you have to do, I’ll never see you
again. Do you promise that as well?’
‘I can’t see any reason why we should ever meet again,’ I replied.
He smiled. ‘That’s all right, then,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I had this
horrible premonition. I thought I’d died, and travelled to the place in the far
north where we go when we die; and the first face I set eyes on when I got there
was yours.’ He walked towards the doorway, then stopped and turned back. ‘One
last thing I wanted to ask you,’ he said. ‘Is it true what they say, that you
keep a magic snake in a jar that brings you victory and tells you what people
are thinking?’
‘No,’ I replied.
‘Oh. Oh, well,’ he said. ‘I should have known it wouldn’t be something that
simple.’
I’m not claiming to be some sort of mystic or visionary here, but there’s one
point on which I feel confident that I’m able to interpret the wishes of the
gods. As I see it, the setting of the sun and the shrouding of the world in
unspeakable darkness is intended as a hint to mortal men to stay home until
morning.
If you must insist on going out after dark, the one thing you should avoid doing
at all costs is taking part in any sort of military operation. The plain fact
is, at night, you can’t see where the hell you’re going. Now, that’s bad enough
when the worst thing that can befall you is an unsuspected tree-root and a
skinned knee. When you’re shuffling along in a packed wedge of bodies, with the
spear-points of the men behind and the butt-spikes of the men in front
threatening you at all times, it ceases to be a foolhardy adventure and becomes
sheer insanity.
I remember my father telling me the story his father told him about the
notorious night attack the Athenians made on the Syracusans during the Great
War. My grandfather took part in that debacle, and if it hadn’t been for either
fool’s luck or the direct intervention of the god Dionysus, our family history
would have ended right there, Phryzeutzis, and you and I would never have met.
Perhaps because of this, antipathy for fighting battles at night runs in our
family. Unfortunately, on this occasion blind stupidity, which also runs in our
family, must have run a whole lot faster and got there first, because this
attack, my first and only experience of the technique, had been my own damn
stupid idea.
The men gathered in the market square at nightfall; apart from a very few with
legitimate excuses, the entire male citizen body of Antolbia, together with the
surviving Budini and a small band of Triballian javelin-and-buckler artists, the
only additional mercenaries we could get at such short notice — not nearly as
useless as they looked, as it turned out. There was a curious feeling about the
assembly; extreme nervousness bordering on terror, which was quite right and
proper under the circumstances, mixed with an involuntary thrill of excitement
and, for want of a better word, fun. I guess it was something to do with
everybody being in the adventure together, with the additional spice of it being
at night — after all, you can’t help associating nocturnal gatherings with booze
and exuberance and socially acceptable acts of boorishness and vandalism.
The closest thing I can remember to that feeling was the big organised
boar-drive that I went on while I was at Mieza; a massive social occasion, with
the whole court there, all kitted out in big boots to ward off the thorns and
undergrowth as we plunged about in the forest trying to flush out
the wild boar.
As it turned out, the whole thing was a complete waste of time; we found
nothing, got tired and scratched and bad-tempered, and trudged home again
feeling very sorry for ourselves. But the atmosphere as we set out was
extraordinary; we were off for a grand day’s sport, a wonderful chance for
relaxation and camaraderie, enormous fun, with a small but significant chance
of being ripped open from the groin to the chin by the most dangerous wild
animal in the whole of Greece.
Marsamleptes had divided our people into three groups. The first to leave was
the encircling party, whose job was to throw a cordon round the village, with
special reference to the two side gates. I went with the main party; we were the
ones who were going to walk in through the open gate. The remaining section,
made up mostly of the Budini, the Triballians and the best of the Illyrians,
were a mobile reserve, who’d follow on closely behind the main body and stand
ready to reinforce the other two groups as and when necessary.
We were late setting off. Marsamleptes had sent two Budini to creep up on the
village and make sure everything was quiet; they didn’t come back when they were
supposed to, and we immediately began to worry. If they’d been caught, there was
a fair chance the enemy would be ready for us, and there’s nothing on earth
quite as vulnerable as an ambush party walking into an ambush, with the possible
exception of a baby hedgehog on its back. When at last they finally showed up,
the news they brought wasn’t encouraging. Apparently they’d been pinned down by
groups of Scythians wandering about in the darkness, calling out to each other
and seemingly carrying out an organised search.
(What had actually happened was that a little girl had had a blazing row with
her parents and run off. There was no sign of her inside the village, so her
family turned out and started searching outside, afraid that she might meet up
with a bear or a wolf or — ha! —a band of marauding Greeks. Then she turned up
in somebody’s hayloft, and they called off the search and went home. But we, of
course, didn’t know that.)
In the end, Marsamleptes decided to send more scouts; and, by the time they came
back and reported that as far as they could see everything was quiet and there
were no signs of additional sentries, it was well past midnight; we’d have to
get a move on if we weren’t to get caught out by the dawn.
The encircling party set off. They were doing their best to be as quiet as
possible, and they’d muffled their boots with hanks of felt and wrapped wool
round their sword-hilts so they wouldn’t clank against their armour; but as they
marched into the darkness, I was convinced they were making enough noise to be
audible in Byzantium .
Once they’d gone, the jovial adventure atmosphere dissipated a bit, and the rest
of us stood about, leaning on our shields and trying not to fidget as we waited
for it to be time for us to follow on. It was while I was standing about that it
suddenly occurred to me — you can tell I wasn’t thinking straight, I should have
seen this hours before —that because we were so far behind schedule, there was a
good chance that Anabruzas had either given up waiting and gone home, or he’d
opened the gates anyway, the treachery had been discovered, and the enemy would
be waiting for us with arrows nocked on their bowstrings.
I pointed this out to Marsamleptes and demanded that we scrub the whole show. He
got angry and said that he already had a third of his army in position; was I
suggesting that we just leave them there till dawn, or were we going to try to
pull them out, which would inevitably lead to the alarm being raised? If the
gate wasn’t open when we got there, he said, we’d just have to bash it in with a
log or a big stone; compared with the difficulties involved in trying to abort
the operation at this late stage, the gate being shut was no big deal. If the
worst came to the worst, we’d use an assault on the main gate as a diversion
while he put the mobile reserve in through the side gates and carried the
village that way.
There was no point in trying to argue with him; now that the operation was under
way, he was the man in charge and nobody was going to listen to me, even if I
had a witnessed deposition from the gods telling us we were all going to die.
Now that was a long march, Phryzeutzis, that night-march from the city to the
village. I kept going by fixing my eyes on the back of the head of the man in
front of me; I could just about differentiate between the shades of black,
though as far as seeing where I was going was concerned, I might as well have
had my eyes shut. As luck would have it, there was cloud over the moon and
stars, which meant that even after I’d been walking for a long time I still
wasn’t seeing any better than when we set off. How Marsamleptes found the way I
just don’t know, and because I’d lost all track of time I thought we must have
come too far and walked straight past the village. In fact, I was just screwing
up the courage to break ranks, find him and point out this obvious error when
the man in front of me stopped abruptly and I only just managed to avoid walking
my knee into the butt-spike of his spear.
I was in the third rank, so although I didn’t see a thing, I heard the hinges of
the gate creak. Good old Anabruzas, I caught myself thinking, I knew he wouldn’t
let us down; then I just had time to castigate myself for being a sick bastard
before we moved off again.
There was light inside the gate; only a couple of lamps, but after our journey
in the dark it was like noon . I took a very deep breath as
I walked into the light — I felt stretched and squashed up, both at the same
time, and I couldn’t keep my mouth from lolling open. We were in. I made a
solemn oath to take as small a part in the proceedings as
I possibly could.
‘What the hell kept you?’ a voice hissed to my left. I looked round; it was
Anabruzas, his eyes glowering at me from under the brim of an absurdly wide
Greek hat.
‘Sorry,’ I whispered back.
I thought he’d go away, but instead he skipped along at my side; it reminded me
of something I’d seen back in Athens one time, when a division of men were being
marched off to some war. One of the men apparently owed money to his neighbour,
because I watched the creditor scurrying along beside the column, trying to keep
up while he ranted and yelled at this poor man, calling him all the names under
the sun, while the soldier stayed rigidly eyes-front and in step, all the way
down the road where the Long Walls used to be and halfway to Piraeus.
‘Go away,’ I whispered.
‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘I’m coming with you.’
Once the whole unit was inside the gates, Marsamleptes gave the order and we
split up into platoons. We’d practised this bit several times so as to be sure
to get it right, but of course we’d practised it on an open, uncluttered
drill-square, rather than a village street. Now, as we tried to carry out the
operations we’d learned so carefull
y, we found to our horror that there were
houses and carts and a well in the way. We blundered about, knocking over jars
and making a hell of a racket.
‘Forget it,’ Marsamleptes shouted. ‘Push down through, and try and keep in
line.’
(Did I mention that habit of his? Marsamleptes was hopeless at giving
directions. He knew exactly what he meant, of course; but what he’d say would be
something like, ‘I’ll go on down over, and you follow me up through and we’ll
meet up on the other side.’ Gibberish; and totally misleading, if you made an
attempt to understand it.)
I could feel Anabruzas’ hand gripping my arm. ‘What are you doing?’ he said.
‘Let go,’ I replied.
‘Tell me what you’re doing, I want to know.’
‘Not now,’ I said; honestly, we sounded like an old married couple. ‘Get out of
my way.’
They’d lit torches off the lamps in the gateway, and thatch was beginning to
flare up, splashing wavering yellow light over everything. ‘What are they
doing?’ Anabruzas said. ‘Tell me, what’s going to happen?’
I lost my temper and shoved him away; he staggered back a step or two, then
slipped and fell over. I hoped he’d stay out of the way, but he didn’t; he
rushed up and tried to grab hold of the torch in a man’s hand; he was just about
to set light to the eaves of a roof. The man didn’t know who Anabruzas was; he
had his spear in his other hand, and stabbed him underhand, driving the blade in
under the ribs on the left-hand side. There was that sucking noise as the blade
came out again, and the whistling noise of a man breathing through a punctured
lung. That was the last I ever saw of him.
(I think of him, Phryzeutzis, even now. I find it disturbing to think that here
was a man, a good and very unlucky man, whose life was marked by disaster and
sorrow at every turn, and each and every one of those disasters and sorrows was
directly caused by me. I was the author of all his misfortunes, right from that
night in Athens when I bashed his face in and left him sprawling in his own
blood. I led my people into his homeland, I made him send one son to be
butchered, ordered the battle in which his other son died; I forced him to
betray his village in the name of saving it, and made him become the traitor on
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 46