by Tom Holt
quite the reverse, in fact.That only left love. I groaned audibly, but he didn’t seem to notice.
‘Tyrsenius,’ I said, grabbing onto a doorpost to stop him swirling me away, ‘what’s going on? You’re in love again, aren’t you?’
He scowled at me. ‘Rubbish,’ he said.
‘Don’t mess with me,’ I sighed. ‘I was there the last time, remember? And the time before that. And the time before that. And...’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘You make it sound like I fall in love every other day.’
I didn’t say anything. The plain fact was that Eros had shot my friend Tyrsenius so many times with his pernicious little arrows that it was a miracle he didn’t leak when he drank a cup of water. Over the last six months, for example, there had been the niece of one of the deadlier Founders, Marsamleptes’ daughter, Marsamleptes’ son, the night-soil boy, the Olbian dried-fish merchant’s wife, the cute little Illyrian girl who cleaned the guts for her father the sausage-maker, the girl with the gammy leg who was betrothed to one of Tyrsenius’ business partners in Odessus, Agenor the stonemason’s apprentice and (I suspected, though I didn’t have any proof) my wife Theano. It said a great deal forTyrsenius’ invincible amiability that people didn’t try to cut his throat as he walked across the square, let alone continued to trade with him and regard him as a friend. But that was Tyrsenius all over; ill-will simply dripped off him, the way water refuses to adhere to the waxy belly-feathers of ducks.
‘Not every other day,’ I conceded. ‘Every other week.’
He didn’t dignify that cheap shot with a reply. Instead, he yanked me free of the doorpost (he was deceptively strong for a man of his build) and carried on marching me across the square.
‘There,’ he said magnificently, as if introducing me to Zeus.
Scythians, I thought; what joy.
A second look confirmed that the four wretched, grumpy-looking people huddled together on the steps of the market hall were indeed Scythians of some kind, though not any kind we’d encountered before. For one thing, they were seriously overdressed; it was a warm day, and they were swaddled up in the traditional Scythian cold-weather gear; tall, conical felt hats with drooping earfiaps that reached to the collar-bone, tight-fitting jackets and trousers of heavy patterned cloth, deeply lined with felt. I could see the sweat glistening on their foreheads. And it took only one glance at their nervous, hawklike faces to tell that this was the first time they’d ever been inside a Greek city, possibly even a permanent settlement of any kind.
‘Who are these people?’ I asked.
‘They’re the Budini,’ Tyrsenius replied in a low whisper.
Remarkably, the name was familiar. ‘I’ve heard of them,’ I said. ‘Or at least, I think I read about them somewhere. Aren’t they the ones who’re supposed to eat fir-cones?’
Tyrsenius looked blank. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘you’d have to ask them that. The point is, they’re here to trade and — get this — to make an alliance with us against the village people.’
I stood still for a moment and thought about that. ‘Where did you say they came from?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t,’ Tyrsenius said. ‘You didn’t ask. But as far as I can tell, they live way up north in the frozen country, just under the lee of a big range of mountains.
I nodded. ‘And they’ve come all the way from the frozen country on purpose to pick a fight with the inhabitants of a small Olbian village. Yes, that makes a lot of sense, I can see that quite clearly now you’ve explained it to me.’
‘Not this particular village,’ Tyrsenius said wearily. ‘That’d be silly. What I meant was, they’ll help us if we help them. It’s got to be the most wonderful opportunity.’
‘You mean for selling them things?’ I asked. ‘I reckon they live so far north that they won’t have heard the warnings about you yet.’
He looked worried for a moment until he realised I was joking. ‘Very witty,’ he said. ‘Now come on, Euxenus. Even you should be able to appreciate—’
Then I happened to catch sight of one of them and everything fell into place.
The youngest member of the party was a girl; a pretty one at that, if you like that slim, boyish, ambiguous look (whichTyrsenius notoriously did; Theano always reckoned that what he liked was the uncertainty of not knowing for sure whether it was a boy or a girl until he’d actually got them home and unwrapped them, as it were). I looked at her, then back at Tyrsenius. The poor fool definitely had it bad this time.
‘It’s a girl,’ I said. ‘Trust me on this and save yourself a lot of time and hassle.’
For a moment I was afraid I’d really upset him, but I needn’t have worried. Just as it was impossible to be angry withTyrsenius for more than a minute or so, he never really seemed to take offence no matter what you said to him. ‘I can see that,’ he said. ‘What I don’t see is the relevance. Here we are on the brink of what could be a turning-point in our history, and all you can do is babble about girls.’
I sighed and gave up. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘What do you want me to do?’
At his insistence I invited these peculiar people into my home (Theano took one startled look at them, grabbed our son and shot out of the house; can’t say I blame her) and spent the best part of the morning trying to communicate with their leader, a granite-faced character called Bossus or something like that, while Tyrsenius twittered round the girl like a wren trying to scare off an elephant. I’ll say this for the man; he never ever seemed to worry about the language barrier — I imagine that’s a necessary trait for a trader. It was patently obvious the girl didn’t understand a word he said to her, but then again, you didn’t need to be Aristotle to work out what he was after. Whether or not he was getting anywhere I neither knew nor cared. Bossus, on the other hand, could just about make himself understood in Greek, something I should have found suspicious if I’d had my wits about me.
He said that his people lived Far Away (he pointed; apparently they came from somewhere just left of the sun) and they’d been driven from home by Bad Cold and they wanted to come and live down here, where it was warmer. The fact that the region was already heavily settled didn’t seem to bother him (we are Fighting People; Fighting is Much Honour) and he seemed to regard our neighbours as decadent and depraved because they’d abandoned the nomadic habits of their ancestors and taken to staying in one place. Obviously this blanket condemnation of the settled life didn’t apply to us, because he seemed only too happy to commit his entire nation to a war of aggression against all the non-nomadic Scythians in Olbia, but declared that with us he only wanted to live in peace.
Fair enough, I thought, assuming this clown is for real. That, however, didn’t seem all that likely. For all his vagueness about where Far Away actually was, I could see no obvious reason why he should have set his heart on this particular piece of territory to the exclusion of other alternatives that might prove easier to acquire. The clincher, as far as I was concerned, was that he was prepared to sit still and natter away at me while not two yards away, a degenerate Greek was doing his level best to debauch his daughter, and do nothing about it. Even I knew that this wasn’t the Scythian way, and as soon as our honoured guests had been induced to shove off back to the guest quarters Tyrsenius had requisitioned for them (in my name, which I thought was a bit much), I raised this point.
‘Not the Budini,’ he replied. ‘They’re completely relaxed about that kind of thing. They believe in open, non-exclusive communal relationships; you know, like in Plato’s Republic.’
Now, I knew for a fact that the only copy of Plato’s Republic that Tyrsenius was likely ever to have looked at carefully would have been one wrapped round a bundle of fish; however, I really couldn’t be bothered to labour the point.
Indeed, the prospect of Tyrsenius being chased round the square by a party of enraged Scythians with long, sharp knives was, at that moment, rather attractive. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Well, there you go. When y
ou’ve finished with these people, please make sure they leave. I don’t mind them, but there’s a lot of people in town who get very nervous at the sight of Scythians these days.’
He made a sad noise and proceeded to lecture me for several minutes about openness, trust and the desirability of setting his new friends on the people of the village like a pack of wild dogs. Eventually, when he’d gone, I put my hat back on, picked up my mattock and went out to do some work.
After the raid and the events that immediately followed it, there was an understandable wave of paranoia. People took to going out to the fields in full armour again, or at the very least with helmet, spear and shield; and although that didn’t last more than a few days before the sheer impracticality of trying to fresh out ditches clad head to toe in shining bronze made people revise their security arrangements, the attitude persisted.
Nearly all the Illyrians had bows and knew how to use them. Greeks, however, don’t really hold with bows and arrows, preferring to trust in heavy metal and physical strength. Back home, where you’re never out of sight of your neighbours, it wouldn’t have been nearly so bad. Here, where we all had so much land, a man working in the fields was pretty much on his own, and that feeling of isolation was bad enough at the best of times. With the constant threat of attack present in everybody’s minds, it began to have a serious effect on our lives.
It was Agenor the stonemason who first suggested hiring the Budini to guard us, and I must say I’d have expected better from him. Once he made the suggestion, it caught on like a brush-fire, and Tyrsenius (who had, incidentally, succeeded with the girl in the face of all the odds) at once opened negotiations for setting up a rent-a-guard agency, to be organised by himself, on an almost-but-not-quite-non-profit basis. I tried to talk them all out of it, but I’d left it too late. Not long afterwards, bands of boiled-looking men in heavy wool and felt started drifting into the city, to be marshalled by Tyrsenius and allocated to a particular household. When not guarding, they lived in a huge sprawl of tents outside the wall (we had stone walls now in place of the stockade, and very proud of them we were). Nobody knew how many of them there were, except presumably my friend Tyrsenius. Nobody cared much, either. It had all the appearance of a logical and satisfactory arrangement that could carry on indefinitely.
And after a while, I stopped worrying about it. I’d been expecting to wake up one night to the sound of rampaging Budini sacking the city and massacring Greeks in their beds, but so far this hadn’t happened, or if it had they’d been very quiet and discreet about it. Even I, with my unique talent for looking in the wrong direction whenever anything worthy of note happens right under my nose, would have noticed something like that.
My personal guard (the Founders insisted that I had one, though I objected like hell) was called Azus, though I didn’t find this out until he’d been following me around for the best part of a year. The most striking thing about him was the smell — not unpleasant, just very, very noticeable; he smelt of a combination of smoke, hemp and violets. I’m no dwarf myself, but Azus towered over me like a mountain looming over a valley, and until the novelty wore off Theano and I amused ourselves no end exchanging tall-bastard jokes. He didn’t speak Greek and I didn’t know more than a dozen words of the Budini dialect of Scythian — which I doubt whether you’d be able to understand, Phryzeutzis; it’s full of bizarre archaisms and peculiar dialect words, and the syntax is so complicated it’s a miracle that young Budini manage to learn to talk before they’re forty. He used to stand there all day while we were out in the fields, just watching me work;
big broad-bladed spear in one hand, heavily recurved horn-and-sinew composite bow in the other, with an expression of total detachment on his face, as if it was all a strange, incomprehensible dream. Finally one day, when I’d been wrestling with a huge log for half an hour without making any progress beyond wrenching my back, I lost patience with him; I grabbed him by the arm, led him across to the log and made frantic gestures, until he carefully laid down his bow and spear and grabbed the other end of the log. Together we had no trouble at all shifting it, and when we’d done I smiled and nodded thank you. To my amazement he smiled back.
The next day I borrowed the young son of one of my neighbours; he’d been learning Budini for some reason and could interpret for me. Thanks to him I found out Azus’ name, and learned that he’d been only too delighted to help; it was horribly boring, he said, standing about all day with nothing to do, and he’d never been able to understand why these crazy Greeks never allowed them to lend a hand, even when it was patently necessary.
We got on much better after that; the boy taught me how to say, ‘Help, please,’
and I did the rest in sign language. Gradually — very gradually — I picked up a little of his language and he learned rather more Greek, until we were able to hold a sort of conversation, though it was a major effort for both of us, and we frequently talked for a long time without realising we were completely at cross purposes. He told me that the reason Bossus had given for leaving the tribe’s ancestral pastures wasn’t quite the truth; the fact was that he and his small contingent of followers had been thrown out after a blood-feud had got badly out of hand, even by Budini standards, and that they’d ended up here not because of any grand plan of carving out lebensraum for themselves among the effete plains-dwellers, but because they’d had to come this far to get beyond the reach of their enemies, who had friends and relations all over the place. Contrary to what we’d been told, there weren’t any more of them waiting for the call to come sweeping down from the high pastures; it had taken all Bossus’ skill and tenacity as a leader of men to keep them together this far.
Above all, Azus said, he wanted to make the point that compared with the traditional life of the nomad, the life they had here was little short of the earthly paradise, and in order to have this good a time back home, you had to be virtuous and honourable all your life and then die. About the only thing we’d been told that was true, in fact, was what Tyrsenius had told me about the Budini attitude to personal relationships; and that was because there were so few adult male Budini (because of the blood-feuds) that more conventional arrangements would have been pointless and led to the rapid extinction of the race.
If you’re thinking back to what I told you about the rich Scythian’s plot, and wondering when the Budini are going to stop pretending to be our friends and start butchering us in our sleep, I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. The truth is (though of course we didn’t know this) was that the plan had gone badly wrong. Sure, he’d arranged for the displaced nomads to ingratiate themselves with us, specifically using the girl as bait with Tyrsenius; but he hadn’t anticipated that they’d find their new life with us so entirely agreeable that they’d forget all about the deal they’d made with him and come over to us.
Maybe I should have suspected something from the way Azus and some of the others kept harping on about how treacherous and deceitful our settled-Scythian neighbours were, and how we ought to be constantly on our guard in case of further sneak attacks; but we all assumed that they were just playing up the hazards so as to keep their jobs, and paid no great attention.
Meanwhile, to everybody’s amazement, Tyrsenius married the Budini girl, shortly after the birth of their second daughter. Once they were married he gave up trying to pronounce her real name (they’d been together two years and he’d never managed to get it right) and announced that henceforth she’d be answering to Callixena (which means ‘beautiful foreigner’; for a man so entirely given to flights of fancy, Tyrsenius had the imagination of a small rock). She didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she seemed genuinely fond of him in a mildly contemptuous sort of way, while he calmed down to a remarkable extent and appeared to have given up falling in love almost entirely; perhaps as a result of the Budini custom whereby married women wore a razor-sharp two-edged dagger as part of their everyday dress. Anyway; since I can’t remember what she was really called, I shall refe
r to her as Callixena, not that it really matters a damn after all these years.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Oh, I almost forgot; a year or so after Chaeronea , Philip of Macedon was murdered.
After the battle, it didn’t take Philip long to break up what little resistance remained. He awarded himself the title ‘Captain of the Greeks’, a delightfully nebulous term which suggested that he was merely the temporary head of a coalition of great and equal partners joined together to accomplish some mighty purpose. Imagine everyone’s surprise, therefore, when it turned out that he really did have a mighty purpose in mind.
And purposes don’t come much mightier than the one Philip had selected. For reasons that better men than I have speculated endlessly about, he’d decided that the vast and invincible Persian Empire, which extended eastwards from the Hellespont to the very ends of the earth (to here, in fact), was decadent and ripe for conquest; furthermore, that he was the man who could do the job.
And, as usual, he was right. By virtue of its very size and the diversity of the nations that it comprised, the Empire was the next best thing to ungovernable at the best of times. As soon as one rebellion was put down in one province, another broke out — the old joke has the Great King starting each day by asking his chamberlain which provinces he still ruled — and ever since the civil war in which the celebrated Xenophon took part (you may remember I told you about it a while back) the King had come to rely more and more on Greek mercenaries rather than his own levies to do the day-to-day work of a standing army. The logic behind this was impeccable; he couldn’t trust his own people further than he could sneeze them out of a blocked nose, but Greek mercenaries were legendary for their loyalty so long as they got paid, and since they got paid as long as they were winning, they tended to do a good, professional job.
The key word, of course, is professional. By rights, a Greek heavy infantry army shouldn’t stand a chance on Asian soil against Asian cavalry and archers. But it’s a fact of life that a trained and determined army of professionals will defeat unwilling amateurs every time, even if they’re outnumbered ten to one and armed with sticks of celery, because there’s always that moment when the two sides face each other, and one side weighs the advantages of victory against the perils of defeat, and realises that war, even if you win, is a mug’s game and no occupation for a sensible man.