by Tom Holt
He shook his head. ‘Euxenus, plucked to safety at the last moment from a tempestuous sea, complains that I infringe upon his right to swim.’
I smiled. ‘Aristotle, who can’t swim, imagines that everybody who’s in the water will drown if he doesn’t save them. And now, with the very greatest respect, I want to go to bed. That way, come morning, I’ll be wrong but happy and you can be right and dead on your feet.’
For some time now, Phryzeutzis, I’ve been hearing your voice at the back of my mind. You’re not complaining, exactly; you’re just asking in a bemused tone of voice why someone who’s led such a quiet and pedestrian life as I obviously have should feel any kind of obligation to make a record of it for future generations. It’s not, you point out, as if anything interesting ever happened to me. Oh, sure enough, you add, at various times I met a whole bunch of other people who led interesting lives, but that’s not the same thing. Maybe, you suggest, I should forget about telling my life story and tell theirs instead.
I can quite understand. After all, who the hell would want to read the history of just one ordinary man, the annals of how he earned his living, where he lived, who his friends were, who he slept with, whether he ever got ill, what was his favourite sauce to go on pan-fried whitebait. This isn’t, I grant you, the sort of thing anybody outside his immediate family would ever conceivably want to know, unless he was someone really important and famous (in which case it might have some bearing on our understanding of the way things happened; he burned such-and-such a city to the ground because its gates were painted blue and he never could be doing with blue; his wife snored, which was why he sat up all night plotting how to overthrow the republic; a little bit of human interest makes history palatable, like a spoonful of honey and grated cheese on top of rough wine).
I understand your puzzlement, and I forgive you for it. You see, my problem is that all the interesting stuff happened in the second half of my life (assuming I don’t live to be as old as Nestor, in which case we’d have to make that the second third), but much as I’d like to I can’t really skip the tedious early stuff, because you need to have waded through it to understand why things turned out the way they did. When I started this story, I did consider jumping in at the stage I’ve just reached and then stopping and going back to do the explanations (‘And the reason for this was that when I was only a kid.. .‘); but that’d just be confusing. The fact is, people don’t live their lives like that, starting off in their late thirties, nipping back to catch up on their childhood, then carrying on where they left off —which is a pity, in my opinion.
I’m sure I’d make a far better job of my childhood if I could do it now, with the benefit of everything I’ve learned over the years, instead of having to try to cope with one of the most influential and formative parts of my life equipped only with the shallow and imperfect understanding of a young boy. It’s always struck me that asking a kid to cope with being young is like telling a farmer that if he makes a good job of ploughing the field with his bare hands, you’ll reward him by giving him a plough.
The truth is, my life never went according to plan, or a plan, or anything resembling a plan. It just sort of sprawled. Some lucky people have lives like a new colony, where the public buildings and houses and streets and markets and town walls are all laid out and completed before the first settler moves in. The rest of us are like old villages which grew up haphazard, strung out along a road or squashed in between two mountains. Consider; I was born to be a gentleman farmer, a man who does just enough work to maintain his self-esteem and spends the rest of his time in aimless and harmless enjoyments. Instead, I became a professional liar, a fraudster, a parasite; and my reward for that was to be entrusted with the education of the Prince of Macedon and the next generation of the nation’s rulers and noblemen. Now, when I first embarked on a career in lies, the last thing I’d have expected was to find myself in a position of such responsibility, so of course I didn’t plan or prepare for anything like that. Instead, I just drifted down the river. My few attempts at living a regular, honest life, such as my marriage, failed quickly and totally, so I stopped bothering. To all intents and purposes, I was living in my sleep, in the same way as other people walk in theirs. By and large, an inoffensive and undemanding way to use up your days, but hardly the stuff of gripping and life-enhancing history.
Then, quite suddenly —(Here comes the sort of thing you’ve been waiting for.)
— my life changed and I found myself involved with and initiating momentous and significant events, doing things that will affect the lives of countless people yet unborn, finding myself a place in history. A remarkable, unforeseen change, and all because of an olive.
The olive in question was a small, wrinkled, rather elderly example that nobody had wanted; so it was left in the bottom of the bowl while its younger, plumper brethren were dragged away and eaten like the seven boys and seven girls supposedly sent every year to the Minotaur. Eventually, our sad olive was the only one left; at which point it was scooped up by a greedy individual by the name of Myronides and swallowed whole.
Myronides had the bad habit of talking with his mouth full, and he tried to swallow the sad olive while in the middle of a lively, really quite heated discussion with Leonidas, Euxenus son of Eutychides (me) and General Parmenio, Philip’s most trusted advisor. As a result, the olive went down the wrong way, wedged itself sideways in his throat and blocked off his windpipe in the manner of the 300 Spartans who held off the Persian army atThermopylae. Rather more successfully, in fact; Myronides choked, went an alarming shade of purple, and died.
I’d never seen a man choke to death, and I didn’t see it happen this time — I was looking the other way, as usual, chatting to the man on my right because I was bored to tears by Myronides and the rather fatuous argument he’d been waging for the past quarter of an hour. The first I knew of it was when someone said ‘Myronides?’ in an alarmed voice, and someone else said ‘Gods, he’s dead!’ and people started jumping up and crowding round and yelling for doctors.
If I sound a trifle callous, it’s probably because I didn’t like Myronides much.
He was loud and rude and stupid, but stupid in a crafty way so that he was always able to kid people into going along with his stupid notions. He was, I’m ashamed to say, an Athenian and a philosopher.
The reason he was there, having dinner with King Philip, his chief minister and his tame intellectuals, was that he was pitching an idea; and the real reason why I took an instant dislike to him was that the idea he was pitching was one that I should have thought of myself. In brief, he was there to ask the King to sponsor him in establishing a new colony on the Black Sea coast, where the wheat comes from.
Before Alexander, the Black Sea region was where all ambitious colonists went if they could. A disturbingly large proportion of the bread eaten in Attica was grown there, and reached us by way of the Greek cities of the Crimea; there was plenty of money to be made in those parts, the natives were either friendly or negligible, and the Greek presence had been there long enough to make it something of a home from home.
The other sweet thing about the Black Sea region was that it didn’t belong to anybody (apart from the people who lived there originally, who obviously didn’t matter). The whole stretch of coastline from Byzantium to Colchis was there for the taking. It was far enough away from Greece proper that you didn’t have to get involved in the endless round of dreary little wars between Athens and Sparta if you didn’t want to, and the Persian Empire stopped at the Caucasus , with the mountains and the violent, unruly Sarmatians between the Great King and the bit the Greeks lived in.
In consequence, the region appealed to both sections of society from whom colonists are usually drawn; poor, practical-minded people who want an easier living, and woolly minded idealists who want to found a brave new world. It’s plain enough that these two types go together like oil and water, having very little in common beyond the vague belief that geography holds
the key to human happiness. Unfortunately, most every colony ever founded has been made up of a mixture of the two, and since the idealists are mostly reject or inadequate sons of the ruling class, they tend to be the ones who get put in charge of the venture. Typically, they set out with noble aspirations of founding the world’s first true democracy, which generally lasts until halfway through the sea voyage out, by which time the fifty per cent of the colonists who underestimated how much food they’d need on the journey have traded their notional five-hundred-acre allotments with their more practical co-settlers for a couple of jars of cattle-feed-quality barley. Again typically, it’s the scions of the great and good families who forget to bring a packed lunch; so when they get to journey’s end, they tend to adjust the constitution of the Great Experiment a little, usually the parts dealing with land ownership, taxation and representation of the people. Sooner or later there’s a civil war of sorts, and since the scions of noble houses are the only ones who could afford to bring along such expensive items as armour and weapons, things generally end up following the pattern everybody left home to get away from, but with the erstwhile younger sons finally having a bit of land to call their own. It’s a wonderful system, highly successful and very, very Greek.
That, as I say, is the usual way it’s done; but Myronides had something better to suggest.
For some time, Philip had been hiring mercenaries to augment his own troops in his itty-bitty wars. From a purely military point of view, this was good business. Mercenaries generally make better soldiers than civilians, because they fight for money and they only get paid when they’re winning. The problem Philip was facing lay in the fact that he now had rather more mercenaries on the payroll than he could afford, and the point at which you thank your paid helpers for their excellent work and suggest that they leave your prosperous, fertile country and go back to their rocky hillsides is notoriously ticklish. Sometimes they don’t want to go.
Atypically for an employer of mercenaries, Philip did have enough quality citizen-soldiers to sling them out and make sure they stayed out, if he had to.
But why incur such an expense of manpower and resources, both of which he’d need for his next round of itty-bitty wars, if he didn’t have to? Myronides’ idea was to pack them all off to a colony in idyllic Taurus, where the old Borysthenes river winds lazily to the sea; it’d cost next to nothing, he’d be rid of a nuisance, the mercenaries would be as happy as a pig under an oak tree and King Philip would have a strategically placed outpost on the land route from Greece to Persia, for as and when he had time to extend his interests in that direction.
And Myronides, fat, loud, obnoxious and plausible, would be the outpost’s first governor.
And would have been, but for that one sad olive.
Like I said, I was looking the other way when it happened. But before that, before I lost interest in it, I’d been taking a lively part in the debate we’d been having about the Ideal Colony. Perhaps you’ll recall that I’ve mentioned before how popular this tiresome and faintly ridiculous subject was back then, as a topic for philosophical debate. If so, you’ll remember that it was a favourite subject of mine —not because I was desperately interested in it, quite the reverse, but because it happened to be one I was very good at (and there was also the unmissable opportunity to dance dialectic rings round Aristotle, who took it so desperately seriously, with his mammoth collection of constitutions of city-states and all).
That evening, I’d been on pretty brilliant form until my head started to hurt.
Mainly to aggravate Aristotle and get my revenge on Myronides for thinking of my idea before I did, I’d taken it upon myself to rubbish both democracy and direct military rule as ways of running the sort of colony that was being envisaged here. Rubbishing Aristotle was easy enough — after all, it’s perfectly true that democracy isn’t the way to go in these cases, for the reasons I mentioned just now. I was on rather less solid ground with Myronides’ proposal, but Myronides didn’t have the verbal skills to win a debate with me if he was trying to argue that fire is hot. Offhand I can’t remember what I said, but by the time I lost interest, Myronides had fewer legs to stand on than a flatfish, and was getting rather desperate — hence, I suppose, his carelessness in eating olives. Damn. I hadn’t thought of it that way before. It seems as if I was responsible for his death, if you care to look at it from that angle.
Well, for some reason Myronides’ demise stole my thunder, and even after they’d towed away the body and mopped up the spilt wine nobody seemed very interested in resuming the debate where it had left off. I made an excuse and cleared off as soon as it was polite to do so. Ironically, it was one of the six nights each month when Theano’s husband was away with the horses (didn’t I mention Theano?
Not much to tell, really. She was the daughter of one of the local tenant farmers, and had married one of Philip’s chief grooms in the hope of getting out of Mieza for good; but her husband had fallen in love with one of the boys who worked in our kitchens and had got himself assigned to the royal steading across the valley from us so as to be near him. She found me interesting because I was Athenian and exotic, and spoke with what she maintained was an attractively sophisticated Attic accent. Well, it takes all sorts), but what with death at the dinner table and my bad head I really wasn’t in the mood. She shrugged and said she’d hang about for a bit even so; it was a positive pleasure to get out of the house for a few hours, she said, even if only to go and sit in someone else’s. I said I didn’t have a problem with that, but I wasn’t likely to be terribly good company. ‘So what’s new?’ she replied sweetly, and mixed herself a drink.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she added, as an afterthought.
I made a vague gesture intended to convey warm-hearted hospitality. ‘You go ahead,’ I said. ‘Finish the jar, if the risk of having all your teeth dissolved doesn’t bother you. And to think, I used to reckon Attic wine was rough.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘But I wasn’t talking about the wine. What I meant was, you don’t mind me hanging around here?’
‘Be my guest. Well, strictly speaking you’re my guest already, so really what I’m saying is, carry on being my—’
‘I’m going to have a baby,’ she said.
I thought for a moment before replying. ‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘When’s it due?’
She glared at me. ‘No,’ she said, ‘think. I’m going to have a baby.’
‘That’s what I thought you said,’ I answered. ‘Surely that’s a good thing.’
‘I don’t think my husband’s going to see it like that.’
I’m not usually that obtuse, really; but I’d had a long day and a fretful evening, and you know how difficult it can be to think clearly when your head’s splitting. ‘I see,’ I replied.
‘You see,’ she repeated, and I couldn’t help noticing that she used that same flat, expressionless tone of voice that Alexander favoured when he was angry.
Probably a Macedonian thing, I told myself. ‘Well, that’s fine.’
I swung my legs off the couch and sat up. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m open to suggestions. What did you have in mind?’
She looked at the wall a foot or so above my head. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Hanging myself is probably favourite. They say hemlock’s the most comfortable way, but I wouldn’t want to try that without some sort of recipe. Maybe you could ask your friend Aristotle if he knows what the recommended dose is. He’s heavily into botany, isn’t he?’
I didn’t like the sound of that; Theano wasn’t much given to melodrama as a rule. ‘I could ask, I suppose,’ I said, ‘but hemlock’s something of a sore subject with us Athenians, and philosophers in particular. Don’t you think you’re over-reacting somewhat?’
The Alexander look was replaced with a generous eyeful of pure poison.
‘Over-reacting,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Over-reacting. You may find this difficult t
o believe, but where I come from, pregnancy isn’t usually regarded as some kind of death sentence. In fact, there’s quite a few people who wouldn’t be here today if someone hadn’t got pregnant at some stage. Tell me, has the concept of divorce filtered its way into this delightful country of yours? Or am I looking at a duel to the death, or something equally quaint?’
Her scowl deepened; then she giggled. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘that’s rather sweet of you. But I don’t think it’ll improve matters if Pisander kills you too. But yes, we do have divorce, and it’s only legal to kill an adulterer if you catch him in the act.’
I nodded. ‘Same as in Athens ,’ I said, ‘more or less.’
She sighed. ‘Oh, you’re all right,’ she said. ‘The worst that can happen to you is an order for damages.’
‘What about you?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘He won’t kill me,’ she replied. ‘Dead, I’m not worth anything. No, he’ll divorce me and sue you, and that’ll be the end of it. It’ll probably cost you the price of a couple of good horses but you can afford that, I’m sure. Still, I’m sorry. I didn’t do it on purpose.’
I frowned. ‘Don’t be horrible,’ I said. ‘Everything’s going to be fine, you’ll see. I mean, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened, and I don’t suppose it’ll be the last. Just so long as we both take it as it comes and don’t panic—’
That made her really angry.
I know, I know. But really, I was completely out of my depth here. After all, I hardly knew the girl. And in Athens , we have a rather more pragmatic attitude to these things. Well, for a start it’d all have been sorted out by men; her father or her brother would have talked to me about it, and we’d have put together some sort of deal for the husband, and then we’d have made arrangements for her and the baby. A nation that’s produced some of the finest minds the world has ever known is more than capable of dealing with such minor domestic crises in an organised and efficient manner. Up in the wild and woolly north, however, it seems to be the case that situations of this kind aren’t held to be properly concluded without substantial displays of emotion.