by Tom Holt
I’d made up my mind to wander off and hide somewhere till nightfall when something truly unexpected happened. Agenor the sculptor — remember him? Well, at various times when he hadn’t been able to make a living from pure and unsullied art, he’d filled in as a stonemason, on one project rising to the rank and dignity of assistant foreman. The wise Founders of Gamma Section had assigned him to Subsection Green (utterly useless people, in charge of keeping out of the way) and he’d been standing around for several hours watching things degenerate into a state of primeval chaos, and thinking what a negative turn of events this was. Finally, unable to bear any more, he’d jumped down from the rock he’d been sitting on, rounded up his fellow spectators, led them up the beach and set them quietly and efficiently to work digging trenches, with spades he effortlessly charmed out of Delta Section (who wouldn’t have given them to me if I’d gone to them on my knees and promised them each their weight in silver money).
One of the sulking Zeta Section Founders, noticing this, strolled across and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. Digging foundations, Agenor replied. The Founder asked, foundations for what? The city wall, of course. The Founder, managing to keep a straight face, asked him what on earth made him think the wall should go there, when his Section hadn’t even found North yet.
Agenor looked at him oddly and said that of course the wall went here, because if he cared to look at the map (which Agenor had glanced at a day or so earlier for the first time) he’d see that that over there was the promontory marked on the map as Promontory, and that pointy-topped hill was Hill, so all you had to do was draw an imaginary line between the two points and start digging.
It took about ten minutes for word to spread that someone had turned up who Knew What He Was Doing; whereupon Agenor found himself surrounded by nearly everybody in the expedition, all demanding at the tops of their voices to be told what to do. It’d have fazed me, and probably Agamemnon and Zeus as well, but you can’t fluster an ex-foreman of masons that easily. Bless his heart, he had the courtesy to send someone over to fetch me, and made a show of consulting me while issuing his orders; as far as I was concerned, I was delighted to approve anything he said, on the grounds that he seemed to Know What He Was Doing, and I patently didn’t.
From then on, things went rather more smoothly.
Zeta Section announced that we’d come to the right place after all, and set to work with measuring rods, squares and little wooden pegs. Beta found a substantial copse of nice tall pines they’d somehow managed to overlook, and started chopping them down. Alpha unloaded the rest of the cargo and put it at the disposal of Epsilon, who laid the equipment out in neat stacks, nicely convenient for Gamma to collect and take with them to perform the various tasks to which Agenor had assigned them. It was all wonderfully efficient and civilised, and even the Illyrians joined in and worked hard for several hours without killing or maiming anyone.
‘There you are,’ observed my friend Tyrsenius, sipping a cup of wine he’d managed to find somewhere (drop my friend Tyrsenius out of the sky onto his head in the middle of the Libyan desert and five minutes later he’ll have found a chair to sit on, a jug of drinkable wine and a cute girl to pour it for him). ‘I told you it’d all go smoothly once everybody knows what they’re supposed to be doing.’
‘And there was me worrying,’ I replied. ‘I should have known it’d all be all right.’
Tyrsenius shrugged. ‘You need to learn how not to worry,’ he yawned. ‘It’s a basic survival skill for anybody in a position of authority. I tell you, you don’t get far running a merchant ship if you spend all your time with your head in your hands, fretting.’
‘True,’ I conceded, in the hope that it’d shut him up. It didn’t.
‘Now, if you really want something to worry about,’ he went on, ‘you could do worse than worry about the Scythians. I don’t trust ‘em.’
I blinked. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Not five minutes ago you were saying how well it had all turned out, and at least we weren’t going to have to play dominance games with the natives because they’re all so damn friendly.’
He smiled indulgently. ‘You know your trouble?’ he said. ‘You take people at face value too much. You want to watch that, you know.’
I was about to protest that I’d had serious misgivings the moment I first set eyes on them, but I didn’t get the chance.
‘In Olbia,’ he continued, ‘the nicer they are to you, the more you’ve got to watch them. You learn to do that instinctively when you’re a merchant, but of course you’ve never done anything like this before. Now, if I was in your shoes, I’d send a couple of hundred Illyrians down to the village in full armour, just to make a tactful show of force.’
‘If you were in my shoes,’ I muttered, ‘you’d have blisters. Your feet are much bigger than mine.’
He gave me a puzzled look for a moment, then smiled. ‘Good to see you’ve still got your sense of humour,’ he said.
A day or so later, as soon as the expedition could be trusted to be left on its own, I led a party to the Scythian village to open a dialogue.
There was me, and my friend Tyrsenius, and Agenor the itinerant sculptor (who’d kindly made the time to come with us) and Captain-General Marsamleptes, and the little man with a squint who was probably the only person in the expedition who could understand what both Marsamleptes and I were saying, and a bunch of Founders, and some particularly villainous-looking Illyrian soldiers in their best armour to add a suitable nuance of menace to the proceedings. And also, for some reason, there was Theano, who’d tagged along on the pretext that she was bored and had nothing to do.
The news that we were on our way to the village was relayed by the inevitable squadron of small boys who were permanently on duty in the patch between the village and the city site, so when we toiled up the hill and got our first sight of our new neighbours, nearly all of them were there to meet us, bearing with them their strung bows and unsheathed scimitars, and other traditional Scythian tokens of welcome. My old friend Anabruzas came out and stood in front of them, flanked by hostile-looking men with helmets and wicker shields.
‘You’ve come, then,’ he said.
Well, it was perfectly obvious that we had, but I didn’t say anything clever. I just nodded. Taciturn strength, I thought; that’s what these people respect.
‘All right,’ Anabruzas said. ‘What do you want?’
‘We need to talk,’ I replied. ‘About land for the colony.’
Anabruzas scowled at me. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘none to spare. You’ll have to go somewhere else.’
I’d been hoping we weren’t going to have to do all that. ‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘We just need to rearrange things a little, that’s all.’
Anabruzas’ scowl tightened up a little. ‘You don’t seem to get it,’ he said.
‘There’s only so much land, and we need it.You can’t grow it on a tree or dig it up out of the ground. Either it’s there or it isn’t.’
I shook my head. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘don’t agree. There’s only six hundred or so of you, and all this plain; only about a fifth of it’s under the plough, and even that’s far more than it takes to feed a hundred-odd people. There’s more than enough for all of us, provided you’re prepared to be reasonable.’
‘No,’ Anabruzas said.
A fat lot of good being taciturn had done me. ‘That’s just silly,’ I said.
‘Look, you’re welcome to keep everything you’ve already got ploughed and planted. The stuff that’s just lying idle will do us.’
Anabruzas laughed. ‘That’s not the way we do things,’ he said. ‘You ever heard of rotation of crops? One year plough, two years fallow; that’s how we get such good yields. We need all this land, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but that’s lazy, wasteful farming. Come on, Anabruzas, you’ve lived in Athens , you know how we do things there. One year under corn, one year under be
ans, plough five times before planting and use plenty of dung.
It works for us.’
‘That’s as may be,’ he said. ‘But it’s not how we do things. If you want the land, you’ll have to fight for it.’
By this time, Marsamleptes had learned to recognise the Greek words for fighting, battles and so on, and now he woke up out of his daydream and started glowering horribly at the Scythians like a dog who can see birds. The Scythians, though plainly alarmed, scowled back.
‘If we fight,’ I pointed out, ‘you’ll lose. No question about it.
Anabruzas nodded. ‘Quite likely,’ he said. ‘But I promise you this. By the time you’ve killed every last one of us — and that’s what it’ll take — we’ll have taken so many of you with us there won’t be enough of you left to found any damn city.’
‘It’d be ten to one,’ I pointed out.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Anabruzas replied. ‘Better dead than Delos , any day.’
(There I go again, making assumptions. You don’t know what or where Delos is;
well, it’s a small island in the Aegean , famous for two things. One’s being the birthplace of Apollo himself, and the other’s the slave market; biggest in Greece , they say.)
Well, I suppose it could have been worse. We might have started fighting there and then; if my fellow Founders had had their way, I expect we’d have done just that, and Marsamleptes (who hadn’t killed anyone for weeks and was starting to look pale and thin as a result) would undoubtedly have made a thoroughly professional job of it. All I could think of to do was turn away and walk back down the hill, hoping very much that I’d get clear without being hedgehogged with arrows. I kept on going, and nobody shot at us; didn’t somebody say somewhere that any peace conference where you escape with your life can be considered a success?
‘You made a right hash of that,’ Theano said.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘Obviously, tact isn’t your strong point.’
‘No,’ I agreed.
‘Of course,’ she went on, ‘I knew that already. You’ve got an amazing ability to say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.’
‘Apparently,’ I said.
She walked on in silence for a moment, then continued, ‘The worst thing was when you told him he was welcome to keep the land they’d already ploughed and sown —
have you any idea how insulting that sounded? Or when you told him how much land they needed—’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I think you’ve made your point.’
She smiled. ‘Just so long as you know,’ she said. ‘After all, I know from bitter experience, you’re so damn ignorant, maybe you hadn’t actually realised—’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Because,’ she went on, ‘I can’t see how somebody could know they were doing something like that and keep on doing it. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense—’
‘Thank you for your input,’ I said. ‘I’ll try and bear it in mind.’
You didn’t have to be anybody clever — Aristotle, say — to work out what the likely sequence of events would be. Messengers would go out from the village to other settlements all over the Olbian hinterland; men with bows and scimitars would assemble like ghosts in the grey dawn, and we’d be jerked out of our sleep by the screaming of women and the hissing of fire on the thatch. We wouldn’t stand a chance. It’d all be over before we had a chance to put our shoes on.
So Marsamleptes organised the defences, and none of us got much sleep for the next week or so. We scrabbled together huge piles of brushwood and lit them at sunset; we posted sentries; we all took our turn to peer anxiously at the border of the light and the darkness, imagining stealthy shapes where the shadows were longest; we worked in armour until every scrap of clothing we possessed was dripping with sweat and snagged to ribbons, and the swords dangling from our shoulders got in the way of everything we did, digging trenches and hauling masonry blocks and putting up scaffolding. We were exhausted and uncomfortable and very, very short-tempered with each other, but we were ready for them.
Of course, nothing happened.
Our scouts, creeping up to the skyline to spy on the activity in the village, reported back that they appeared to be going about their business as if nothing had happened. They weren’t clanking about the place like refugees from the Iliad, or sitting up all night screaming, ‘Who goes there?’ at quietly scuttling foxes. ‘Lulling us into a false sense of security,’ my friend Tyrsenius called it; of course, he’d clambered into his armour the moment he got back from the peace conference and set about ringing his tent with a wonderfully intricate system of tripwires linked to five enormous cow-bells (where he got them from, gods only know; but Tyrsenius always had everything), the incessant clanging of which really started to get on our nerves after the first couple of hours. After a week of not being killed, though, he was strolling around the place (still head to toe in shining bronze, of course) announcing that we were over-reacting quite dreadfully and he’d said from the very beginning that there was absolutely nothing to worry about from that quarter.
The work, meanwhile, slowly began to take shape.
It’s remarkable how small a large copse can be, when you cut it down, trim its branches off and hammer its component trunks into the ground to make a stockade.
By my system of reckoning, any stand of trees large enough to get lost in is a wood, probably even a forest; but the small forest we located on the first day was all used up by the time we’d built the first gatehouse, let alone any wall for itto be a gate in. Given our nervous state, we didn’t dare send any logging parties out of eyeshot of the camp without an equivalent number of armed escorts, and of course we also had to make sure the camp itself was never without an adequate garrison. This didn’t leave too many bodies over to do any productive work, and the few who actually did some soon began to harbour uncharitable thoughts about their fellows who spent all day lounging about leaning on their spears, watching and occasionally making helpful suggestions.
Nevertheless; up the stockade went, our first priority, and after that we felt just a little bit more secure, enough to allow ourselves the luxury of taking off our breastplates while we worked.
Originally, the idea had been that instead of wasting money buying stone (I mean, who’d be stupid enough to buy the stuff when all you need do is chip it off the sides of cliffs?), we’d quarry it ourselves from the nearest exploitable seam of granite or sarsen.
It was an understandable mistake, bearing in mind that we were Greeks, brought up on the tiny patches of flat ground squeezed in between enormous bare mountains. We never imagined for a moment that stone might be hard to come by, just as a fish probably can’t understand the concept of a desert. After we’d wasted a lot of valuable time and manpower in prospecting for suitable material, we gave up and asked Tyrsenius if he knew where we could get building stone from; and in due course, purpose-built barges trundled along the coast from Odessus, riding low in the water under their burden of neatly trimmed modular sandstone blocks. The cost was staggering, so we sent a ship back to Macedon for more money, one thing we could be sure we wouldn’t run short of so long as Philip was alive.
‘If we’d only done this in the first place,’ announced Tyrsenius, formerly our self-appointed Director of Quarrying Operations, as he checked the manifest of the latest stone barge, ‘we’d be a fortnight further on by now. I do wish people would listen to me now and again; it’d save you all a lot of time and effort.’
Agenor, now firmly established as Director of Works, suddenly remembered that not long ago he’d been a professional sculptor and demanded marble instead of sandstone for the façade of the gate-house, which we were building directly behind the gate in the stockade. I told him to go to the crows with that idea, whereupon he appealed to the Founders and explained that if at some point he was going to decorate the gatehouse with a commemorative frieze depicting the founding of the city, he would need not just marble
but good marble, a point which the Founders held to be entirely valid. I told them to go to the crows too. We held a number of quite passionate Works committee meetings, noted the objections formally on the record and told Agenor to shut his face and get on with his work, which he did once I’d promised him all the marble he could use once the city was built and priorities could be reassessed.
There was a moment — I can’t remember when, exactly, but it quite suddenly, while none of us were watching — at which point it stopped looking like a huge, random mess and started looking like a baby city. Not Athens , that’s for sure, or even Pella ; but a city. There were streets, or narrow strips where you could believe streets would one day be; we stopped walking all over the place and kept to them. We even gave them names; Main Street and Gate Street and South Street and West Street, none of which appeared in the list previously agreed by the relevant sub-committee, but if you said ‘the plot two thirds of the way down West Street on the left as you face the sea’, people would know where you meant.
It was a bizarre feeling, once we allowed ourselves to acknowledge that it had happened. And time went on, the Scythians didn’t attack, the money didn’t arrive from Macedon but the barges kept coming from Odessus, we arranged further credit with Olbia City for more food, tools, canvas and rope, we found more timber a day’s walk away, we stopped wearing armour and sending armed escorts, we finished the first well, we completed the preliminary land survey and began drawing lots for who was to get which parcel of land, still the money didn’t come, we broke up the palisade because it was getting in the way and we needed the timber for other things, we finished the first house, we started the first temple, we held countless endless meetings, we made our first plough, we laid the foundations of the granary, the money arrived but there wasn’t nearly enough, the fourth house fell down in the night and we started it again from scratch, we looked up and found we’d been there a year— Theano and I got married; something of an afterthought, fitted in on a spare afternoon while we were waiting for the plaster to dry before making a start on the roof. The Scythians hadn’t attacked yet. We were still here. And the next day. And the day after that.