by Tom Holt
but watching Philocrates hurling second-hand food with tremendous force into the Aegean, the Straits of Euboea, the Gulf of Pasagae and the Thracian Sea, I found myself reconsidering my position on the issue. It was fairly obvious that Phiocrates had already chucked up every morsel of food he’d ever eaten in his life before we were even clear of Cape Sunium , so everything he vomited after that must have been stuff he’d eaten in previous incarnations.
Of my other co-ambassadors, Demosthenes and Aeschines disagreed so completely and so violently that I couldn’t face asking either of them for fear of starting off a war that’d have made the Olynthus campaign seem like a polite difference of opinion by comparison; and none of the others seemed all that better-informed than I was. So much, then, for the series of introductory lectures on the present crisis, Macedonian culture and heritage and King Philip’s bargaining style. However, as one of my colleagues pointed out, it doesn’t require a significant amount of preparation or background knowledge to squeal for mercy, so it didn’t really make much odds.
Obviously, Phryzeutzis, you’ve never seen a ship in your life, and I expect you’re pulling all sorts of muscles in your imagination just trying to picture in your mind what one of these extraordinary contraptions looks like. Try this.
Imagine a fairly deep, round clay bowl that’s still wet from the wheel; but you don’t know that, so you pick it up and your fingers cave in two of the sides, leaving you with something that looks a bit like a pear split longwise. Sticking up out of the middle is the trunk of a tall tree, stripped of its branches. Tied to the top of this tree and at right-angles to it is another, smaller beam of wood, from which hangs the linen bag used to catch the wind — that’s the sail.
Front and back there’s two posts sticking up, like the head and tail of a goat;
on either side of the goat’s tail, there are two broad wooden planks on the end of poles, which trail in the water. The helmsman — the man who tries to make the boat go where it’s supposed to be going — drags on these planks to make the boat change direction (try holding your hand out flat, thumb upwards; then plunge it into water and push sideways. You’ll feel your hand shoving water out of the way, but not immediately. Pushing against the water is how you steer the ship).
That’s it, basically. The whole thing is made out of wooden planks, fitted together closely enough to be watertight; it’s horribly fragile, and when the wind blows on the sea and stirs it up, the boat is tossed up and down, it can turn over or get swamped, or it can be blown against a rock, which’ll smash it to pieces. Imagine trying to float down the river inside an upturned parasol, and you’ll get the basic idea.
No wonder, then, that sailors — people who make their living crossing the world in these things — are a nervous bunch, prone to irrational fears and superstitions. All Greeks are superstitious to some extent, but sailors are quite obsessive about it, and in particular they pay great attention to dreams, bad language and sneezing. Sneeze when you’re walking up the gangplank and there’s a good chance they’ll refuse to get on board — unless, of course, your head happens to be facing to the right at the time, in which case they take it as a good omen. Sailors are as foul-mouthed as the next man when they’re on land, but once the ship is under way they’ll throw you over the side if you say ‘Damn!’ or ‘To the crows with you’. (A crow in the rigging, by the way, is recognised as the worst omen of all, so if someone sees a black shape drifting through the air towards the ship, everybody stops what they’re doing and crowds on to the deck, stamping and whistling and throwing nuts and handfuls of olives and anything else that happens to come to hand.) But it’s dreams above all that they’re interested in. There you are, sleeping peacefully on the deck just as the sun’s about to come up, and some clown of a sailor comes and digs you in the ribs with his toe and demands to know what you’ve been dreaming about. I asked one of the sailors on that voyage to explain to me what all the various dreams meant; it took him a full hour. I can only remember snippets of it — a goat means big waves, especially a black goat; a pig means a storm so violent that your chances of survival are minimal. Owls mean pirates. A dream about seagulls, on the other hand, also foreshadows a disaster, but of a non-lethal variety —
the ship will probably sink, but nobody will drown. Dreaming about flying on your back or crossing the sea on foot mean good luck — try to remember how many times you’ve dreamed of flying on your back, and you’ll begin to appreciate the fundamental pessimism of your average sailor. Oh, yes, and dancing on board ship is right out; they’ll chuck you overboard so hard you’ll probably bounce.
I’m only telling you all this because it explains how I came to hear about Aeschines’ dream. Now, I think I’ve already mentioned that Aeschines was a professional actor before he found he could make a better living out of politics; he was a good actor, too, specialising in winsome young girls, long-winded old crones and messengers reporting bloody murder. I don’t know;
maybe all those years of cramming his mind with all that poetry, all that vivid and striking imagery, had done something to him. Perhaps he was like that anyway, which was what prompted him to take up acting in the first place.
Anyway, on the third morning, when we were within sight of the town of Pasagae (or where Pasagae had until recently been, before Philip played rough games with it) I overheard him talking to one of the sailors, an incorrigible dream monitor.
‘Never set eyes on the place in my life,’ he was saying, ‘but I knew it was Pasagae as if I’d lived there since I was a boy. Strange feeling, actually.’
The sailor nodded. ‘And when you saw it just now, was it like what you ‘d seen in your dream?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Aeschines replied. ‘That is, no, it didn’t look anything like what we’re looking at now. But that’s because what we’re looking at now is a heap of fallen walls and ashes.’
I don’t think the sailor liked the way this story was going. ‘Well?’ he said.
‘What happened?’
Aeschines frowned. ‘I’m not sure, really,’ he said. ‘Oh, I can remember the dream quite clearly, and it seemed to be making perfect sense while I was having it. Now, though—’
Just then the sailor looked up and caught sight of me; I saw him seeing me, but by then it was too late to make an unobtrusive exit, which is something that needs a good deal of notice and forward planning on something as small and confined as a ship. I should explain that somehow or other, the crew had got wind of the way I made my living — and, being extremely superstitious, they believed it wholesale, all the stuff about the little demon who lived in a jar.
‘Euxenus,’ the sailor called out. ‘Come over here. I need you to explain a dream.’
Obviously he’d forgotten that he’d spent all that time the previous day telling me how to interpret dreams. Anyway, there was no point in arguing. I fetched the jar out of my luggage and went over to join them.
‘I was standing in the market square at Pasagae,’ Aeschines said, ‘talking to some people I apparently knew, when a dog suddenly appeared out of nowhere and started running in and out of the stalls, pulling them down and killing people.
I could hear the screams. It was awful.’
The sailor had turned a revolting green colour. ‘Go on,’ I said to Aeschines, in a nice calm voice. ‘This is quite interesting.’
‘Well,’ Aeschines went on, ‘pretty soon the dog had smashed up the whole town and rounded up all the sheep and it was herding them into a pen — by this point we were in Pella, except it was also Athens; you’ll just have to take my word on that, I knew — when a lion jumped out and swatted it over the head, and it fell over. Then the lion led the sheep across the Hellespont into Asia — only they weren’t sheep any more, they were bees, and the lion — he’d stopped being a lion but it was still him — was marching up and down the rows inspecting wings and stings, like they were soldiers on parade, then packing them up into hives and loading them on a man’s back until he could hard
ly stagger. After that they both flew away east; and I knew they went a very long way, but I was there waiting for them at the other end. When they got there, the number of hives was enormous; and I was standing in the gateway of a city, desperately trying to get the gate shut to stop them getting in; but it was one of those dreams, you know, the sort where the gate won’t budge even though there’s nothing obstructing it, and every time you look up the people who’re after you are closer and closer.
Anyway, they lined up all the hives in front of my gate and pulled off the doors; and all these hundreds of thousands of dead bees came tumbling out. There weren’t any live ones left at all. Then the lion was dead too, and I was standing in Assembly back home, and I could smell the lion’s dead body, all the way from Asia . I looked round for somebody to ask what was going on, but everybody was running on the spot and wouldn’t talk to me. I tried to make them listen but they pushed me over and started kicking me as I lay there. And that’s when you’ — the sailor — ‘woke me up. Well?’ he concluded, looking at me. ‘Have you the faintest idea what that means?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘You want to lay off eating that strong cheese last thing at night. It’s indigestion, that’s all.’
Neither of them thought that was funny, but at least I wasn’t asked to interpret any more dreams. When we made landfall the next day without shipwreck, pirates, mutiny or manifestations of divine anger, I’ll swear the superstitious man was disappointed.There’s no pleasing some people.
It’s a long but not too arduous journey from the mouth of the river Axius to Pella , where Philip’s palace was. He’d sent a troop of cavalry to escort us, with spare horses for us to ride; Macedonians don’t walk anywhere if they can help it. At this point in my life I’d had mercifully little to do with horses;
my father owned one because he was obliged to do so, by law, being in theory a member of the Athenian Cavalry by virtue of his wealth and political status. Its name was Chestnut, and it ate a king’s ransom in barley and lived in a stable in Pallene, and if I was naughty as a boy, he threatened to feed me to it. I regarded this as a pretty terrifying threat. A man sitting on a horse is a long way off the ground, and I couldn’t see the point in taking that sort of risk.
Now you, Phryzeutzis, and all your bone-idle countrymen are perfectly at home aboard the horrible things, which I regard as proof that in spite of appearances to the contrary, at heart you’re all still ignorant savages.
Nevertheless; we were supposed to be diplomats, and refusing to go anywhere near the dreadful creatures would probably have caused grave offence, so we rode from the coast up to Pella . I did a wonderful impersonation of a sack of oats slung over the back of a donkey.
Macedonia is divided into two parts, highlands and lowlands. The mountains form a double horseshoe, hemming in the rich, pleasant farmlands above the Gulf of Thermai . Pella was in the plains, and it wasn’t in the least what I’d been expecting. We Athenians reckoned we knew about the Macedonians; they were brutal, drunken hooligans who lived in mountain passes and dressed in goatskins. That was true enough of the highlanders; but Philip’s family were lowlanders, and although they dutifully maintained old national customs like blood-feuds and succession by right of assassination, they’d been doing their best to improve themselves for several generations. Philip’s grandfather, for instance, had hired the great and perpetually unpopular Athenian dramatist Euripides to be his court poet, and he did it only partly to annoy the hell out of the highland tribal chiefs (who had to sit still and listen when they’d far rather have been out in the fresh air killing something; having read the collected works of Euripides, I can’t blame them. So would I).
Be that as it may; we’d been expecting some kind of long-house built out of tree-trunks, and what we found was a fantasy in white and painted marble, although the mosaic-pattern cobbles were a bit on the garish side for my taste.
Actually, I had a head start on my fellow ambassadors. I happen to like dogs, even big, enthusiastic ones, and they like me. As we made our way through King Philip’s courtyard, there were dogs everywhere, the pride and joy of the highland barons. When they saw an Athenian who didn’t immediately cringe away and try to climb the nearest wall when something the size of a horse, with a lolling pink tongue and teeth like shipwright’s nails, planted two enormous forepaws on his shoulders, they were intrigued. I was, as far as they were concerned, in; and I hadn’t said a word yet.
It wasn’t long before I found out where they’d got their ideas from about what Athenians are like; but I’ll come to that in a minute.
Gods forgive me for saying this, but I found I quite liked the Macedonians.
Partly, I’m sure, it was relief at finding they weren’t grunting savages who wore the neck-bones of their enemies as hair decorations. To a certain extent, besides that, I was ashamed of the attitude of my fellow diplomats, who acted from the start as if they expected to be stuck on spits like thrushes and roasted whole for dinner — Demosthenes was the worst offender, as you’d expect, given that his whole life was devoted to convincing the City that Philip was evil incarnate and the Macedonians were his attendant demons, but all of them except me were appallingly rude from start to finish. I could also try to rationalise by saying that the rather free-and-easy informality of Philip’s court appealed to me in my Yapping Dog persona.
Excuses, excuses. I couldn’t help liking them. They were just like those enormous dogs of theirs; all it took was a little friendliness and a little fortitude, just enough to show that you weren’t afraid of them, and they went from growling mastiffs to big soft puppies in no time at all. The difference was, they were prepared to like us if we liked them, particularly if we showed even the slightest inclination to treat them as ‘proper’ Greeks — which they weren’t, let’s face it, but I’m not so sure that’s necessarily a bad thing. That was almost the first thing I picked up on, that grudging awe of us just because we were Athenians. They regarded us, I think, the way we regard the gods; we acknowledge that they’re probably wiser than us, undoubtedly a hell of a lot stronger, and we most certainly don’t like them. We disapprove of them, and we console ourselves for being inferior in every other respect with the satisfying knowledge that morally, we’re far superior to the whole lot of them. I could feel that same moral superiority, as of straightforward, simple folk confronted with sophisticated decadence, being held up against me like a shield. I felt they had a point, at that. So I went along with it.
Excuse me for a moment, but that reminds me of Diogenes... We were walking through the Potters’ Quarter one day when I was still quite young, and he pointed out a rather dashing young man in the latest fashions, hair curled and scented, beard neatly trimmed right back.
‘What do you reckon?’ he said, loudly enough that people could hear.
‘I think he looks very smart,’ I said.
Diogenes shook his head. ‘Affectation,’ he replied.
A little later, we passed the Academy, and Diogenes stopped and pointed out a fairly well-known foreign philosopher who happened to be visiting the City from one of the islands. He was an impressive spectacle; very plainly dressed in coarse homespun wool, with bare feet and a long grey beard, clean but uncombed and untrimmed.
‘What do you reckon?’ he said.
‘Affectation?’
‘You’re learning.’
I nodded, and we walked on a bit further until we came to a well. I stopped, dipped the bucket, drew it up and pointed at it. ‘What do you reckon?’ I said.
He looked down and caught sight of his reflection. ‘Point taken,’ he said, and we walked on.
So yes, the Macedonians’ pose of primitive manly virtues was just as much an affectation as our culture and sophistication; but so what?
Show me a man with no affectations whatsoever, and I’ll show you a dead body.
I don’t remember much about the room where we first met Philip, except that it seemed to be full of Philip, with not much space for anything else.
Actually, he was a short man, neither slight nor stocky; you’ll see a hundred men like him if you walk from the City to the hill when the farmers are out pruning or bashing up the clods with mattocks. But Philip was like a beautiful woman, his face was his fortune; and if you cast your mind back to that conversation we had about good luck and bad luck, King Philip’s face is an excellent illustration of my point. It was his appearance that made him undoubtedly the most skilful negotiator and manipulator of men’s hearts and minds that I’ve ever met in my life.
King Philip was incredibly ugly. Actually, you could see quite clearly that once he’d been quite strikingly good-looking; but he’d lost his right eye in some baffle, and the scarring was quite revolting. The eye itself was still partly visible, just the white bit of it, turned upwards as if he was trying to look at something perched on his left shoulder, and the seams of the scar that ran down from the forehead, across the eyesocket and down the cheek almost to the corner of his mouth looked like a child’s first attempts at moulding in clay, where he’s pressed two edges together and tried unsuccessfully to smooth them over into a join.
Now, you can imagine the effect of that on an Athenian (beauty equals good, remember, and ugliness equals evil); ruggedly handsome in left profile, hideously ugly in right. Now, as if that bizarre dichotomy wasn’t bad enough, there was the fact that you couldn’t help staring, no matter how hard you tried.
It wasn’t something you could ignore or get used to; you had to stare. And it was obvious — he made it obvious — that he knew you were staring, and that it wounded him deeply, the horror and the pity, all the pathos of a handsome man suddenly reduced to a monster. He never said anything; he just met your eyes and looked at you with his one good eye.