by Tom Holt
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, Cyrus’ 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, w
hich 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 experience, however, he more than made up for in imagination. His book (and, therefore, Bias’ lessons) positively teemed with cunning schemes and devilish contraptions for winning wars at a stroke and bringing the boys home before harvest. There were ox-powered troopships and mechanical gadgets that hurled rocks, there were dastardly ploys for deceiving the enemy (unless, of course, they’d also read Aeneas’ book), there were stratagems and counter-stratagems and counter-counter-stratagems for the really advanced student. And, best of all, there were the bees.
Oh, gods, the bees.
Imagine you’re trapped in a city under siege, with seventy thousand men camping out under your battlements, vowing to slaughter every living thing inside the walls. They have archers and battering-rams and siege-towers, not to mention plenty of food and drink.You, on the other hand, have a first-generation copy of Aeneas the Tactician, so there isn’t anything to worry about really. Every day the enemy shoot and bombard and hammer away; you repel every attempt, sword in one hand and book of instructions in the other. Eventually, the enemy get depressed. Some of them start talking loudly about going home. Their general is getting worried, and consults his chief engineer.
No problem, the engineer replies. We can’t climb over the walls or bash them down, so what we’ll do is we’ll dig a tunnel under the walls and then collapse it, bringing the walls tumbling down. The general smiles broadly and off the engineer goes, requisitioning buckets and organising shift rosters; and the next thing you know, your sleep is troubled by a sort of underground scratching noise, which is too loud to be cockroaches and too quiet for an earthquake.
Just in time, you figure out what’s going on, and immediately consult The Book.
Sure enough, there’s the answer. It’s wonderful. It goes like this.
First, find out as best you can where the enemy tunnel is.Then, dig a tunnel of your own to intercept it. When you’re nearly through into the enemy’s main shaft, you stop and go round the city collecting up all the hives of bees you can possibly find, stunning the vicious little creatures by puffing smoke at them with a portable brazier and a pair of bellows. Then you take the hives of drowsy but evil-tempered bees down your tunnel, break through into next door, sling in the beehives and seal the hole up quick. In due course the bees wake up with a foul hangover and set about finding someone to blame for their injuries.
Since ten standard beehives contain something of the order of five million bees, life in the enemy’s mines is likely to be unbearably exciting for quite some time. Once you’ve given your black-andyellow-arsed allies a chance to do their stuff, you open the hole up again and flood the mines with smoke, enabling your men to get into the enemy’s diggings and cave in the tunnels, leaving them the whole lousy job to do again.
I remember that the first time Eudaemon told us about this, I laughed so much I had to go outside and take deep breaths of cold night air to regain my composure, much to my brother’s irritation. What, he wanted to know, was so damn funny about a thoroughly ingenious, utterly foolproof military manoeuvre? I replied that if he couldn’t see the joke, I wasn’t going to be able to explain it to him, and we left it at that. I may even have apologised, under duress, for my lack of proper respect. Of course, the next time I came across Aeneas’ book —
well, that’ll keep.
So there we were, the sons of Eutychides, all apprenticed to our various vocations, all quietly chugging along with them to humour our father and not really giving much thought to the future. I knew, of course, that what I was learning from the illustrious Diogenes wasn’t, in purely commercial terms, worth spit. I assume Eudaemon realised the same thing, deep down in his liver, and the same for the others as they played at surveying or banking or trading in exotic spices. It didn’t matter really, because Father was fit and healthy and in due course we’d each marry a girl with enough of a dowry to make up the difference between our inheritances and what we’d need to bring in a decent living.
Time passed, though, and one by one all the gullible heiresses in our part of Attica married other people. This was annoying; it meant that our brides would be from more distant regions, which would mean a lot of traipsing about the countryside going from holding to holding — five acres in Pallene, seven more out as far as Marathon maybe, two more over Phyle way; grandfather Eupolis’
inheritance had been scattered enough as it was without the further headache of subdividing it and then matching up the bits with more far-flung snippets.
Before you ask, there was no question of selling inconveniently situated land and buying other land to take its place. In those days, that simply wasn’t done;
it’d be like selling the members of your family you didn’t happen to get on with and buying someone else’s sweet-natured aunt. Land, after all, was for ever; it was people who came and went. It was thinking like this that made the relatively straightforward task of making a living in Attica such a complex and difficult matter, and led the Athenians as a nation to turn their back on self-sufficient agriculture and dabble in world domination instead.
Came the time, however, when even the girls of our age in Acharnae and the back end of the Mesogaia were all married, but not to any of us. Naturally enough, we started to ask why. Generally speaking, Athenian fathers are only too delighted to get their daughters off their hands as quickly as possible, only just stopping short of giving them away, one free with every five jars of olives. It turned out, however, that my father, and our family in general, had acquired such an unhealthy reputation for eccentricity (because of my father’s knack of apprenticing his sons to world-famous deadheads) that nobody wanted to know us, let alone marry into our obviously jinxed house. Perhaps it would have been different if my mother had been alive (she died when I was three). She’d been the daughter of a very prestigious and respectable family — you could tell how grand they were from the fact that most of them were in political exile at any given moment — and I’m sure her people’s solid reputation would have gone a long way towards undoing the damage. But once she died her family didn’t want to know us, so that was no help. And of course the more obvious it became that we weren’t going to be able to marry our way out of trouble, the more feverishly my father schemed and contrived to make sure we’d all be provided for. I tell you, he reminded me of a boy trying to untangle a ball of wool; the more he tugged and yanked at it, the tighter the tangles became, and the harder he pulled. It’s something of a miracle, in fact, that we managed to keep things together as long as we did.
In the event, my father died as stolidly and disastrously as he’d lived. He was stung by a wasp during the olive harvest, and fell out of a tree. It was a singularly fatuous way for him to die; there wasn’t any call for him to go shinning up trees at his age, but the slave whose job it was had bruised his knee and gone limping home, and Father was worried in case the wind blew the olives down (we were late with the olives that year, for some reason), leaving them on the ground, spoiling. So, being Father, he clambered up into the branches with his long stick for knocking the olives down, and he’d already cleared all the ones worth having; all that were left were a few small, hard specimens up in the high, thin branches, but (being Father
) he was determined to show up the malingering slave by doing a thorough job. The wasp stung the back of his left hand, the one he was holding onto the branch with; I suppose he automatically let go, and went crashing down in a tangle of twigs and foliage, landing awkwardly and breaking his leg.
Now, that wasn’t enough to kill him, Heaven knows; but he was alone out there, unable to move, with the sun setting, which meant that all our sensible neighbours had left the terraces and started home. And of course it would have to be the one night in the year when we had a freak rainstorm.
Normally, of course, we’d have realised something was wrong when he failed to come home, and gone out to see what the matter was. But of course we had a house at Phyle (house is an overstatement; it had been a house back in Grandfather Eupolis’ day, but by that point it was four walls and a vague recollection of the shape of a roof, which we patched up with trimmings and branches whenever we had occasion to use it, for example during the olive harvest) and we naturally assumed that Father had decided to sleep there rather than trudge all the way back to Pallene.
He was still very much alive the next morning, when our loathsome neighbour Demonax found him and (grudgingly, we assume) helped him down the hill to our roofless, tumbledown house. That, however, was the limit of neighbourly charity as far as Demonax as concerned; he had olives to get in, and if Eutychides was fool enough to go falling out of trees and breaking legs, he should be grateful for a shoulder to lean on as far as the house, where undoubtedly the slave or one of the maids would show up before noon. So he left him there, wrapped in his sopping wet cloak, either failing to notice or failing to care that Father was developing a rare old fever.