by Tom Holt
‘Back to the city,’ I ordered, ‘quick as you like. You —‘ (referring to the hundred-odd Budini horse-archers) ‘— split up; fifty towards the city, fifty towards the village. Find out what’s going on, send me a message, and do whatever you can to help if you’re the ones who find the enemy. Got that?’
The Budini captain nodded, and gave his orders while I sat down again and rubbed my left calf in an attempt to disperse a savage attack of pins and needles. Not long after that we set off for the city at the double.
We’d gone about half the distance when a rider from the Budini contingent I’d sent to the city came galloping up with the news that the city was safe and the survivors of the attack had been coming in about the time he got there. I didn’t like the sound of that word ‘survivors’ one little bit; but although the man’s Greek was first rate for a Budini nomad, I couldn’t make any sense of his attempts to clarify. In any event, whatever had happened appeared to have happened; there was no need to break our necks scrambling over rocks in a desperate rush to get home, We marched the rest of the way at normal speed.
‘Where the hell were you?’ they shouted at me as I led my men through the gate.
It wasn’t so bad. I’d been anticipating worse.
It was all the Thracians’ fault. They’d dawdled, basically; they’d pottered along with the livestock so slowly that the war-party had caught up with them far earlier than expected, and came on them by surprise, taking them in flank and rear. This sort of thing could only be construed as proper grown-up fighting, which our expensive professional cavalry hadn’t been expecting. They promptly panicked and broke away; but instead of carrying on down the road they swung north, in effect leading the war-party back towards the village. They managed to outrun their pursuers (when it came to serious, no-holds-barred running away, I have to concede that the Thracians did a spectacular job); but so fast and far did they run before shaking the Scythians off that the war-party arrived home at almost exactly the moment when our army appeared in front of the main gate of the village, anticipating a jolly time among the weak and helpless rather than a battle with an over-excited and extremely confident Scythian cavalry detachment.
In the event, Marsamleptes and his men gave a good account of themselves. They’d been practising anti-cavalry drill ever since the first raid, and once they’d recovered from the initial shock they did their drill-masters proud.
Furthermore, instead of holding off and shooting at them, the Scythians tried to press home a charge with lance and scimitar, and they emerged from the resulting scrimmage quite definitely in second place. I forget how many of them we claim we killed; rather more to the point, we came out of it with none killed, four seriously injured (one man lost his left hand, another lost an eye; the other two recovered. The man who lost his hand was a young Greek by the name of Chrysippus; he’d recently been taken on as an apprentice by Agenor the stonemason. Agenor himself was slashed across the face with a scimitar after his helmet had fallen off; the cut healed, but the scar was spectacular and his beard always grew funny afterwards).
This wasn’t nearly the same sort of thing as chasing terrified Thracians, and the war-party pulled back, regrouped and rode in a wide loop until they were able to take up a position directly between our men and the village.
Marsamleptes, commanding our forces, decided that he’d done enough for one day and ordered a withdrawal in good order, which the Scythians let go without any further bother. Finally, when the fifty Budini showed up some time later, the war-party (who were still milling about in front of the gates at that point) saw them off with a volley of arrows and a charge, but our men had the good sense to get out of there quickly and in several directions at once, and so sustained no casualties.
In short, it was a banjax, but a non-lethal one. It made me think of military history lessons in Mieza; most battles are lost by the loser rather than won by the victor, and this was no exception. In fact, we claimed it as a victory and did the usual Greek thing of piling up a trophy of captured weapons (only we hadn’t captured any weapons, so we hunted around for souvenir bows and scimitars and borrowed a few from the Budini; they sneaked out after dark and retrieved them, and nobody commented, so I don’t suppose they noticed). After all, we’d engaged the enemy and killed a substantial number of them (‘substantial’: military jargon meaning ‘at least one’) without loss to ourselves. In practice we’d proved that we were incompetent strategists but formidable fighting men, and trying to charge our heavy infantry formation was a mug’s game, so I suppose we did more good than harm, at least in the short term.
Well, once the debriefing and the gripe session were over, we’d posted a guard on the wall and built that damn trophy, there was nothing left to do but go home. In my case, this would have meant going back to my house, with Theano sitting staring at the wall or pacing up and down or bolting herself in the inner room and dissolving into floods of tears; not the most attractive prospect for a man who’s spent a long hot day crouching behind a rock. So when a couple of the Illyrians came sidling up and asked me rather diffidently if I’d like to join their thanksgiving celebration, I thought, ‘Why not?’ and agreed.
I was expecting something rather raucous and Illyrian, with lots of booze and banging of fists on tables and throwing of bones. In fact, it was an eerie and rather beautiful ceremony, most of it conducted in dead silence except for the pattering of dancers’ feet on the baked earth of the dancing floor. It’s an odd phenomenon, the Illyrian tendency to dance without music, but quite effective (and to be honest with you, the absence of what the Illyrians think of as music is a blessing at all times), and the oddest part of all was watching these rather stolid ex-mercenaries, quite a few of whom I now knew to talk to and some of whom I thought of as actual friends, dancing their silent, intricate courses in the pale moonlight. Merely by virtue of the light, the silence and the tradition they followed, they stepped out of context and into a state of almost instant grace, until the dance came to an end and they trooped back to their places laughing and complaining about how sore their feet were.
The last dance, they told me, was something special; if I possibly could, I should stay and see it. Well, I had nothing better to do, so I stayed.
It was, of course, a snake-dance; I might have guessed when they were at such pains to invite me. A young Illyrian called Boizas danced the snake, while ten or so of the older men danced the evil spirits the snake drives away. There was music to go with this one, which spoilt it rather, but in spite of that I must admit I was entranced.
First the snake came out of his lair and did a solo, a very still, quiet piece that would have been plain dull if it wasn’t for the exceptional degree of intensity that young Boizas brought to it. When he moved, it was as if he was laden down with some particularly heavy load, so that the slightest movement of an arm or a foot was an achievement to be applauded. At the height of this part of the dance, the evil spirits appeared and bore down on him, ringing him round with their arms raised as if to strike, so that he was completely hidden behind them. The spirits’ dance was fast and lively, they seemed to flicker and dart like flames; then, when they’d completed the circle and were so closely packed together that I thought they must be standing on poor Boizas, he jumped up, somersaulted and landed with a foot on one shoulder of each of the two tallest spirits. He then proceeded to perform a quite remarkable dance, hopping from shoulder to shoulder, leaping, somersaulting in a manner I’d never have thought possible, until he jumped high in the air, landed neatly between the circle and the spectators, and set about chasing the other dancers away in a rearing, swooping set of movements that was just like every snake you ever saw in every respect apart from actual motion, if you see what I mean; he managed to convey everything there is to notice about a snake without once doing anything that imitated how a real snake acts. It was bizarre and no end impressive; and he concluded it by cartwheeling across the dancing-floor, vaulting to his feet right in front of me, reaching down
and pulling a large and bad-tempered looking snake of indeterminate species apparently out of the fold of my gown. He held this thing up for a moment in both hands — you could see it was a real live one by the way its tongue kept flicking in and out — then let it curl round his arm and slither up into his sleeve, at which point he pulled off his tunic and threw it in the air, and no snake fell out. Indeed, when he brought the tunic to me there was no sign of any snake, either inside the tunic or wrapped round Boizas (and since he was wearing nothing but a very short kilt there was nowhere he could have hidden it). Then he bowed and danced away, and as I raised my hands to join in the applause, I found that same snake sitting in my lap, where Boizas had found it in the first place.
Oh hell, I thought; then, extremely slowly and carefully, I grabbed the snake firmly below the head, the way I’d seen it done, lowered it into a large pottery jug and slapped the lid on as fast as I could. I found out afterwards that it was — well, I can’t remember what the Illyrians said its name was, but it’s so deadly poisonous that even a tiny smear of the stuff on an open scratch or cut would kill you before you can count to ten.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Talking of remarkable people, Phryzeutzis; I once knew a man who had this amazing, astounding, reality-distorting ability to lose hats. He was bald as an egg, which didn’t help matters; he had to wear a hat, because otherwise there’d have been nothing between the fury of the Attic sun at noon and his poor, squidgy brains except a thin layer of bone. But hats simply left him; they’d blow away in sudden gusts of wind, or snag in the low branches of trees, or slip noiselessly past his eyebrows when he was bending over to peer down a well. If all else failed they subtly attached themselves to whoever he happened to be with; you’d be sitting chatting to him under a tree, and then you’d look up at the sun and see how late it was getting, scramble to your feet (reaching instinctively for your hat as you did so) and hurry back to work before your goats had a chance to stray into someone else’s pasture. Later on, when it was time to go home, you’d notice something was strange; you’d reach up to pat the top of your head, and there a hat would be, though you knew for a certainty you left the house that morning without one. I’m not saying that hats hated this unfortunate man, or feared him, or anything like that. In the short space of time his hats spent with him, I seem to recall he treated them kindly. But after a day or so, they all seem to have come to the conclusion that it was time to move on, and they left him.
With him, hats; with me, women. Not, perhaps, to quite the same extent; I don’t drop them down wells or carelessly leave them behind when I visit other people’s houses. But sooner or later there comes a time when I look round to say something to them and there they aren’t. No doubt they have their reasons; and if I could understand what those reasons were, I would understand women far better than I do, and maybe they wouldn’t leave.
What I’m trying to say is that Theano left me. As a historian, I have a duty to record all the facts; she became very friendly with a Syracusan cheese merchant, a month or so after the failed attack on the Scythian village, and when he left, so did she. It’s a logical assumption that they left together, although I can’t put that down as a fact since I didn’t witness it myself. He was tall and very fat, this merchant; older than me, bald (like the hat-man) and with an unusually curly beard. I get the impression, though, that what really attracted her to him was the fact that he wasn’t me.
Well, it wasn’t quite the elopement of Helen of Troy, and I’d be lying to you if I pretended that I was terribly upset about it. But I was still feeling no pain after the death of my son Eupolis; and besides, our marriage had been a mistake from the very beginning. One aspect of the matter that does puzzle me even now is the timing of it all; I mean, one moment she was sobbing herself to sleep over the death of her only child, and the next she was swept up by an overwhelming passion for a tubby, bald-headed cheese vendor with skin as pale and flaky as the plaster rind of his wares. Tyrsenius reckoned that the role of the cheese man in all this was simply as a provider of transport; since she couldn’t very well ask me for the price of a passage out of Olbia, she had to make what arrangements she could and pay her fare with what she had at her disposal. Maybe; I don’t know, and I’m not much bothered. All my life I’ve found it too much of an effort to take an interest in things I know I don’t understand.
The Thracians, very sensibly, never came back; but the Budini we’d hired for the attack stayed on, first as soldiers, then as settlers. They didn’t ask for land, of course; which was just as well, since the Founders would never have let them have any. They didn’t even admit that they intended to stay permanently. They just stayed, and made their living as hired labourers, a commodity much in demand. For all our noble professions that we had come to Olbia to work with our own hands, we were getting a little bit jaded after twelve years of high-minded nobility. It was nice to be able to watch someone else being uplifted by manual labour for a change, especially from under a shady tree with a cup of wine in one’s hand.
I suppose about six months must have passed; six or seven, since the abortive raid. I remember that we heard the news of the great battle between Alexander and the Persian King at the river Granicus, where the Macedonian heavy infantry with their absurdly long pikes and Alexander’s heavy cavalry between them humiliated the Persian army, and where Alexander, fighting always in the front rank, twice breaking his spear, his horse shot dead under him, somehow failed to get himself killed in spite of everything. He was Achilles that day for sure, except for the happy ending; and when he raised his trophy of captured armour and weapons, I doubt whether he had to borrow swords and lances from his own men to get it to a respectable height.
Maybe it was hearing about the battle, I don’t know; but there was a general feeling among us all that we should finish what we’d started with our neighbours, before the first anniversary of our first vintage came round with our dead still not yet made comfortable. The Illyrians in particular were all for taking some strong action; so too, unaccountably, were the Budini, though it may just have been a way of dealing with the fact that they’d been stuck in one place for so long. Most curiously, our fire-breathing Founders weren’t nearly so enthusiastic as they had been. Prodromus actually tried to talk me out of organising an attack; he said that it would be much better to wait until we’d got the harvest in, because otherwise we’d be vulnerable to reprisals when we were out working in the fields. I told him he’d missed the point; that if we did a proper job this time, there wouldn’t be anybody to make any such reprisals, and so the consideration wasn’t valid. He didn’t like the sound of that very much, and accused me of being bloodthirsty and blinded by my personal tragedies to the moral implications of what I was proposing. I told him to go stuff his head up something dark and wet, and on that note we parted.
Well, the cattle-raid stunt wouldn’t work again, so we had to think of something else. Marsamleptes pointed out that we’d done best when the enemy had tried to press home a charge against our heavy infantry; if we could provoke them into making the same mistake twice, there was no reason why we shouldn’t take them on in the open field, rather than resorting to some over-elaborate stratagem.
My first inclination was to tell Marsamleptes to take a cold bath and think again; but then I thought of Alexander and the Granicus battle. Once you pared away all the Homeric stuff, what you were left with was a disputed river-crossing. The Persian infantry took no part in the battle; it was their cavalry who lined up on the other side of the river and tried to stop Alexander from struggling through the ford. In other words, Alexander had kidded the Persians into using their cavalry as infantry; and when it comes to infantry fighting, a man sitting on a horse is at a significant disadvantage.
So, I thought; the greatest threat to us was the speed and manoeuvrability of the war-band and their ability to shoot their bows from the saddle. Trick them into standing still, and you deprived them of their advantage, while tilting the balance in favo
ur of our well-drilled, disciplined heavy infantry. All that was needed, I realised, was a suitable river-crossing; and as luck would have it, I knew the very place.
It was a hot day. You know what it’s like when you’ve had to wake up earlier than you’d have liked, and as soon as you open your eyes the brightness of the sun makes you wince. I overslept, like a fool, and by the time I came to it was well past dawn. Of course, nobody had thought to come and wake me up.
By the time I’d struggled into my armour and stumbled out into the bright sunshine, I had a blinding headache, which didn’t go well with the upset stomach I’d failed to shake off by not eating anything the day before. Anything less than a battle or harvest and I’d have stayed in bed, but an oecist-cum-commander-in-chief doesn’t have that option, no matter how dodgy his tummy might be.
By the look of it, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t really feel in the mood for mortal combat that day. We marched slowly, coughing and grumbling as we breathed in the dust we were kicking up into a towering cloud. In my capacity as general, however, I didn’t mind the dust-cloud. In fact, I was counting on it to attract their attention and get them to come trotting out to meet us. Timing, of course, was important. If we wanted to fight them in the place we’d chosen, it was fairly crucial that we got to the river first. If the enemy crossed over before we arrived, we’d be facing another kind of battle entirely, and one I didn’t really want to be involved in.
But somehow we reached the ford, and in reasonable order too.We didn’t have to wait very long before the enemy cavalry put in their appearance; and, just as I’d wanted them to, they spread out along their side of the river and waited to see what we had in mind.