by Tom Holt
I looked doubtful. ‘Isn’t that over-elaborate?’ I asked. ‘Judging by how things went the last two times, we’d better assume that anything that can go wrong, will.’
He looked at me with a very faint smile. ‘I’m a soldier,’ he said. ‘I always assume that. Unfortunately, it doesn’t solve much. Just because you know a thing’s the weak link in the chain doesn’t mean you can do anything at all about it. No, we’ll just have to make sure that we make as few mistakes as possible.’
He looked at me steadily. ‘Do you really think you can find someone who’ll be willing to open the gates?’ he said.
I nodded. ‘I think so,’ I said.
He looked older than he had the last time I saw him. His broad shoulders were starting to get bony, the muscles of his forearms were shrinking, so that he wore the bones like an old man wears a tunic that fitted him like a glove twenty years ago. His hands looked bigger, and they shook a little. But he still had the scar I’d given him all those years before, and the look in his eyes was exactly the same as always.
‘Peace,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t think you people know the meaning of the word.’
‘We don’t,’ I replied. ‘That’s why it’s got to be done this way. Look, Anabruzas, I’m being absolutely straight with you. If you don’t open the gates and let us occupy the village, calmly and peacefully while everyone’s asleep, then we’ll come along with catapults and battering-rams and break in during the day; and I promise you, you won’t like that.’
‘I’m sure,’ he said. ‘And if I felt I could trust you, it’d be a different matter. But I don’t. How can I, after what you did the last time?’
I shrugged. ‘If you don’t co-operate,’ I said, ‘we’ll definitely storm the stockade and kill you all. If you do what I’m telling you, there’s a chance I might keep my word. Even half a chance is better than none at all.’
Anabruzas gave me a look of pure contempt. I wondered what I’d done to deserve it.
‘If I do open the gates,’ he said, ‘what will you do? Just how will you go about it?’
I smiled. ‘Do I look like I’m stupid?’ I said. ‘I’m not going to tell you that.
Listen, will you? I’m talking about a chance to save lives; your people’s lives, mine as well. I’m trying to be practical, for all our sakes. I’d have thought that you, of all people...’
He turned away, as if he couldn’t bear the sight of me any more. ‘For your information,’ he said, ‘my son — my other son — was killed in the battle. I’m too old and too tired to raise any more. Do you know the story of the woman who was captured by the Persians?’
I blinked. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘At least, I don’t think so. Is this a time to be telling stories?’
He took no notice of that remark. ‘Once,’ he said, ‘the Persians attacked some of my people and captured a village. A Persian officer saw a woman he liked the look of. Since she wanted nothing to do with him, he rounded up her whole family and told her he was going to kill them all, unless she did what he wanted her to. If she cooperated,’ he went on, stressing the word, ‘he promised he’d spare one of her family. Just one; it’d be up to her to choose.’
‘Interesting story,’ I said. ‘Go on.’
‘She accepted the offer,’ Anabruzas continued, ‘and told the Persian that she wanted him to spare her. brother. The Persian was as good as his word; later, though, he told her that he was curious to know how she’d arrived at her decision.
“‘It was a matter of logic,” she told him. “I didn’t choose my husband, because one day I might find myself another husband. I didn’t choose my children, because if I marry again I might bear more children. But my mother and father are dead, so I can never have another brother, and that’s why I chose him.”’ He sighed, and looked at me. ‘I used to wonder,’ he went on, ‘whether anybody could ever reach the point where they’d be able to make a choice like that. I honestly didn’t think it’d be possible; you simply couldn’t bring yourself to figure something like that out in such a cold, rational way. That, however,’ he went on, ‘was before you Greeks came.’
I frowned. ‘Are you going to do it, or aren’t you?’ I said. ‘I really don’t care enough either way to be kept hanging about.’
‘Oh, I’ll do it,’ he replied. ‘I can’t see that I’ve got any choice, logically.
Tell me; the people you capture. Don’t you Greeks sell your prisoners as slaves?’
‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘But we don’t believe in slavery in Antolbia. I’d have thought you’d have noticed that.’
He acknowledged what I’d said with a slight bow. ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘You don’t. We don’t either. Other Scythian nations do; the Budini and the Massagetae and the others whose names I don’t know, who live at the other end of the world. We never have, for some reason. It’s not an idea we’re comfortable with.’
I shrugged. ‘Owning slaves makes a society weak and decadent,’ I said. ‘Where you have rich men with armies of slaves, the ordinary farmers and craftsmen can’t make a living. Also, you’ve always got the problem of keeping them in order; that’s the sort of thing that can ultimately wreck a society, the way it did for the Spartans. All through their history, everything they did was motivated by the fear that their slaves might get loose some day and kill them all, You can’t live with something like that hanging over you.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Different reasons. Do you promise that if I open the gates, you won t put my people in chains and ship them off to —remind me, where is it you have your big slave market?’
‘On the island of Delos ,’ I replied.
He nodded. ‘Isn’t that where you have the big temple?’ he asked.
‘That’s right. We believe Delos is where the god Apollo was born.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘You take a holy place and turn it into a slave market.
Clearly you Greeks are more complicated than I thought.’
‘You have my word,’ I said. ‘Once the village has been levelled, you’ll be free to go.’
He stood up, slowly and painfully, like a man with a bad back. ‘I’ll open the gates,’ he said. ‘And when you’ve done what you have to do, I’ll never see you again. Do you promise that as well?’
‘I can’t see any reason why we should ever meet again,’ I replied.
He smiled. ‘That’s all right, then,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I had this horrible premonition. I thought I’d died, and travelled to the place in the far north where we go when we die; and the first face I set eyes on when I got there was yours.’ He walked towards the doorway, then stopped and turned back. ‘One last thing I wanted to ask you,’ he said. ‘Is it true what they say, that you keep a magic snake in a jar that brings you victory and tells you what people are thinking?’
‘No,’ I replied.
‘Oh. Oh, well,’ he said. ‘I should have known it wouldn’t be something that simple.’
I’m not claiming to be some sort of mystic or visionary here, but there’s one point on which I feel confident that I’m able to interpret the wishes of the gods. As I see it, the setting of the sun and the shrouding of the world in unspeakable darkness is intended as a hint to mortal men to stay home until morning.
If you must insist on going out after dark, the one thing you should avoid doing at all costs is taking part in any sort of military operation. The plain fact is, at night, you can’t see where the hell you’re going. Now, that’s bad enough when the worst thing that can befall you is an unsuspected tree-root and a skinned knee. When you’re shuffling along in a packed wedge of bodies, with the spear-points of the men behind and the butt-spikes of the men in front threatening you at all times, it ceases to be a foolhardy adventure and becomes sheer insanity.
I remember my father telling me the story his father told him about the notorious night attack the Athenians made on the Syracusans during the Great War. My grandfather took part in that debacle, and if it hadn’t been for either fool’s luck
or the direct intervention of the god Dionysus, our family history would have ended right there, Phryzeutzis, and you and I would never have met.
Perhaps because of this, antipathy for fighting battles at night runs in our family. Unfortunately, on this occasion blind stupidity, which also runs in our family, must have run a whole lot faster and got there first, because this attack, my first and only experience of the technique, had been my own damn stupid idea.
The men gathered in the market square at nightfall; apart from a very few with legitimate excuses, the entire male citizen body of Antolbia, together with the surviving Budini and a small band of Triballian javelin-and-buckler artists, the only additional mercenaries we could get at such short notice — not nearly as useless as they looked, as it turned out. There was a curious feeling about the assembly; extreme nervousness bordering on terror, which was quite right and proper under the circumstances, mixed with an involuntary thrill of excitement and, for want of a better word, fun. I guess it was something to do with everybody being in the adventure together, with the additional spice of it being at night — after all, you can’t help associating nocturnal gatherings with booze and exuberance and socially acceptable acts of boorishness and vandalism.
The closest thing I can remember to that feeling was the big organised boar-drive that I went on while I was at Mieza; a massive social occasion, with the whole court there, all kitted out in big boots to ward off the thorns and undergrowth as we plunged about in the forest trying to flush out the wild boar.
As it turned out, the whole thing was a complete waste of time; we found nothing, got tired and scratched and bad-tempered, and trudged home again feeling very sorry for ourselves. But the atmosphere as we set out was extraordinary; we were off for a grand day’s sport, a wonderful chance for relaxation and camaraderie, enormous fun, with a small but significant chance of being ripped open from the groin to the chin by the most dangerous wild animal in the whole of Greece.
Marsamleptes had divided our people into three groups. The first to leave was the encircling party, whose job was to throw a cordon round the village, with special reference to the two side gates. I went with the main party; we were the ones who were going to walk in through the open gate. The remaining section, made up mostly of the Budini, the Triballians and the best of the Illyrians, were a mobile reserve, who’d follow on closely behind the main body and stand ready to reinforce the other two groups as and when necessary.
We were late setting off. Marsamleptes had sent two Budini to creep up on the village and make sure everything was quiet; they didn’t come back when they were supposed to, and we immediately began to worry. If they’d been caught, there was a fair chance the enemy would be ready for us, and there’s nothing on earth quite as vulnerable as an ambush party walking into an ambush, with the possible exception of a baby hedgehog on its back. When at last they finally showed up, the news they brought wasn’t encouraging. Apparently they’d been pinned down by groups of Scythians wandering about in the darkness, calling out to each other and seemingly carrying out an organised search.
(What had actually happened was that a little girl had had a blazing row with her parents and run off. There was no sign of her inside the village, so her family turned out and started searching outside, afraid that she might meet up with a bear or a wolf or — ha! —a band of marauding Greeks. Then she turned up in somebody’s hayloft, and they called off the search and went home. But we, of course, didn’t know that.)
In the end, Marsamleptes decided to send more scouts; and, by the time they came back and reported that as far as they could see everything was quiet and there were no signs of additional sentries, it was well past midnight; we’d have to get a move on if we weren’t to get caught out by the dawn.
The encircling party set off. They were doing their best to be as quiet as possible, and they’d muffled their boots with hanks of felt and wrapped wool round their sword-hilts so they wouldn’t clank against their armour; but as they marched into the darkness, I was convinced they were making enough noise to be audible in Byzantium .
Once they’d gone, the jovial adventure atmosphere dissipated a bit, and the rest of us stood about, leaning on our shields and trying not to fidget as we waited for it to be time for us to follow on. It was while I was standing about that it suddenly occurred to me — you can tell I wasn’t thinking straight, I should have seen this hours before —that because we were so far behind schedule, there was a good chance that Anabruzas had either given up waiting and gone home, or he’d opened the gates anyway, the treachery had been discovered, and the enemy would be waiting for us with arrows nocked on their bowstrings.
I pointed this out to Marsamleptes and demanded that we scrub the whole show. He got angry and said that he already had a third of his army in position; was I suggesting that we just leave them there till dawn, or were we going to try to pull them out, which would inevitably lead to the alarm being raised? If the gate wasn’t open when we got there, he said, we’d just have to bash it in with a log or a big stone; compared with the difficulties involved in trying to abort the operation at this late stage, the gate being shut was no big deal. If the worst came to the worst, we’d use an assault on the main gate as a diversion while he put the mobile reserve in through the side gates and carried the village that way.
There was no point in trying to argue with him; now that the operation was under way, he was the man in charge and nobody was going to listen to me, even if I had a witnessed deposition from the gods telling us we were all going to die.
Now that was a long march, Phryzeutzis, that night-march from the city to the village. I kept going by fixing my eyes on the back of the head of the man in front of me; I could just about differentiate between the shades of black, though as far as seeing where I was going was concerned, I might as well have had my eyes shut. As luck would have it, there was cloud over the moon and stars, which meant that even after I’d been walking for a long time I still wasn’t seeing any better than when we set off. How Marsamleptes found the way I just don’t know, and because I’d lost all track of time I thought we must have come too far and walked straight past the village. In fact, I was just screwing up the courage to break ranks, find him and point out this obvious error when the man in front of me stopped abruptly and I only just managed to avoid walking my knee into the butt-spike of his spear.
I was in the third rank, so although I didn’t see a thing, I heard the hinges of the gate creak. Good old Anabruzas, I caught myself thinking, I knew he wouldn’t let us down; then I just had time to castigate myself for being a sick bastard before we moved off again.
There was light inside the gate; only a couple of lamps, but after our journey in the dark it was like noon . I took a very deep breath as I walked into the light — I felt stretched and squashed up, both at the same time, and I couldn’t keep my mouth from lolling open. We were in. I made a solemn oath to take as small a part in the proceedings as I possibly could.
‘What the hell kept you?’ a voice hissed to my left. I looked round; it was Anabruzas, his eyes glowering at me from under the brim of an absurdly wide Greek hat.
‘Sorry,’ I whispered back.
I thought he’d go away, but instead he skipped along at my side; it reminded me of something I’d seen back in Athens one time, when a division of men were being marched off to some war. One of the men apparently owed money to his neighbour, because I watched the creditor scurrying along beside the column, trying to keep up while he ranted and yelled at this poor man, calling him all the names under the sun, while the soldier stayed rigidly eyes-front and in step, all the way down the road where the Long Walls used to be and halfway to Piraeus.
‘Go away,’ I whispered.
‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘I’m coming with you.’
Once the whole unit was inside the gates, Marsamleptes gave the order and we split up into platoons. We’d practised this bit several times so as to be sure to get it right, but of course we’d pract
ised it on an open, uncluttered drill-square, rather than a village street. Now, as we tried to carry out the operations we’d learned so carefully, we found to our horror that there were houses and carts and a well in the way. We blundered about, knocking over jars and making a hell of a racket.
‘Forget it,’ Marsamleptes shouted. ‘Push down through, and try and keep in line.’
(Did I mention that habit of his? Marsamleptes was hopeless at giving directions. He knew exactly what he meant, of course; but what he’d say would be something like, ‘I’ll go on down over, and you follow me up through and we’ll meet up on the other side.’ Gibberish; and totally misleading, if you made an attempt to understand it.)
I could feel Anabruzas’ hand gripping my arm. ‘What are you doing?’ he said.
‘Let go,’ I replied.
‘Tell me what you’re doing, I want to know.’
‘Not now,’ I said; honestly, we sounded like an old married couple. ‘Get out of my way.’
They’d lit torches off the lamps in the gateway, and thatch was beginning to flare up, splashing wavering yellow light over everything. ‘What are they doing?’ Anabruzas said. ‘Tell me, what’s going to happen?’
I lost my temper and shoved him away; he staggered back a step or two, then slipped and fell over. I hoped he’d stay out of the way, but he didn’t; he rushed up and tried to grab hold of the torch in a man’s hand; he was just about to set light to the eaves of a roof. The man didn’t know who Anabruzas was; he had his spear in his other hand, and stabbed him underhand, driving the blade in under the ribs on the left-hand side. There was that sucking noise as the blade came out again, and the whistling noise of a man breathing through a punctured lung. That was the last I ever saw of him.
(I think of him, Phryzeutzis, even now. I find it disturbing to think that here was a man, a good and very unlucky man, whose life was marked by disaster and sorrow at every turn, and each and every one of those disasters and sorrows was directly caused by me. I was the author of all his misfortunes, right from that night in Athens when I bashed his face in and left him sprawling in his own blood. I led my people into his homeland, I made him send one son to be butchered, ordered the battle in which his other son died; I forced him to betray his village in the name of saving it, and made him become the traitor on whose hands the blood of all of them would lie. And yet I’m not a bad man, Phryzeutzis, I’ve never been more than careless or insensitive, never evil or malicious; and everything I did in Olbia I did for the best.)