by Tom Holt
‘Self-pity, Euxenus,’ you’re muttering at me, Phryzeutzis, as you smile the patronising smile of the tolerant young. ‘You’re exaggerating for effect again.
That’s not the way to write history.’
I won’t argue with you; thirty years ago, now, and you’d have had a real dialectic fight on your hands, but these days the sound of my own voice raised in debate simply makes me feel tired. So I’ll concede the point, if it makes you feel any better. Anyway, I don’t need to use any philosopher’s tricks to make my point. Picture me and Syrus, sitting opposite each other in the empty house in Pallene; that’ll be far more eloquent than I ever was, even when I was young and fiery.
So we won’t overplay the melodrama. During the day I didn’t crouch in the ashes like a heroine out of Euripides; I went out into the fields — my fields — and I worked, bloody hard. For a while I was an inspiration to my neighbours. ‘Up before dawn,’ their wives would tell them, ‘and off with the team or the mattock, never comes home till dark, and he’s got that place looking as good as it was in his father’s day, all on his own. Why can’t you be more like Euxenus?’
And yet, in spite of that, they were still prepared to talk to me. They wanted to hear all my fabulous tales of far away, about King Philip’s court and the boyhood of Alexander (‘Is it true that when he was just a baby, he strangled two snakes in his cot?’), about desperate battles against the cannibal Scythians, and of course my opinion about the latest news from the East. ‘We heard Alexander’s reached Pasargadae ,’ they’d say to me, ‘where’s that?’ Whereupon I’d smile knowingly and reply that they didn’t want to go believing everything they heard (which is good advice at all times, though as a matter of fact Alexander had indeed reached Pasargadae, wherever the hell that is, and had turned northeast towards Ecbatana). That would impress them no end, though I don’t imagine they had a clue why they found it impressive, and maybe they’d even buy me another drink.
In short, I became a prosperous and well-respected citizen; you might almost say a model citizen, the sort of person you’d want living in your perfect society. I got the vineyards back into shape, put some heart into the soil by ploughing five times a year and growing beans in the off year; I repaired my walls and trellises, pruned back my trees, shored up my terraces, interplanted barley between my rows of olive trees so that not a square yard of good soil went idle.
I saved up and bought a couple of slaves, good, strong middle-aged men who worked long hours silently and never gave me any bother. I was as near as you’ll ever get, in fact, to the Good Farmer, that enigmatic character you read about in the books on good husbandry that people like Aristotle are so fond of writing; ‘the good farmer,’ they say, ‘takes the trouble to sow vetch and lupins on the fallow, both to put heart into the soil and provide winter fodder for his livestock.’ When I was young I used to picture this paragon of virtue, trying to imagine the expression on his face as he carefully lifts a crumb of soil to his tongue on the tip of his little finger, to ascertain whether it’s too sour for growing wheat, or his quiet smile of satisfaction as he inspects the flourishing shoots he’s grafted onto his vines to boost their productivity. But I never quite managed to get a fix on him until one day I was looking something up in one of those damned manuals, and realised, with rather mixed feelings, that he was me.
Now, they’re all well and good, those books, but they never tell you enough.
They don’t tell you what this good farmer does the rest of the time; at night, when he’s finished repairing broken tool-handles by wrapping them with saturated rawhide or plaiting himself a useful rope out of the loose hairs he’s saved off the curry-comb; when it’s late and the house is empty, and he sits alone in the dark instead of going to bed. On reflection, though, that situation wouldn’t arise for the good farmer, because he married a good wife in chapter three (industrious, good at spinning and weaving, capable of helping with field work in the busy season, not inclined to drink or gossiping with other women) and their union was blessed in chapter five by the birth of three strong, healthy sons (four is too many, placing too much strain on the farm’s resources; two isn’t enough, because one of them may die young and leave the farm short of manpower), who will presumably inherit come chapter twenty-nine, when the good farmer dies, surrounded by family and friends, with a finger stuck in the book to mark the place in case he needs to refer to it for instructions before the end finally comes. Maybe I wasn’t the good farmer after all; or maybe he never actually existed. You know, the more I read, the more sceptical I get. I never met the man who farms like the good farmer, or the soldier who fights like Achilles or the heroes in Homer, or the citizen who participates in the ideal society, or even the great historical personage who bore any resemblance to the description in a book of history; even, I hasten to add, this book of history, as written by me.
We finally made a start on patching up that old barn. The incentive was a freak rainstorm — we get them every ten years or so — which washed the last of the thatch off the roof and nearly drowned old Syrus and my two slaves. Now, the Good Farmer naturally takes care of his slaves; they are, after all, his most valuable perishable asset, and if they die of pneumonia or even if they miss work for a week or so because they’re ill, it’s a dead loss. Accordingly, he makes sure that their quarters are dry and warm, and that they’re adequately fed and clothed. You’ll find specifications for the ideal slave rations in those excellent books, the perfect balance of nutrition and economy; an ideal to which, I confess, I never aspired. They knew where the grain-store was, and they helped themselves. I suspect that if I’d taken the trouble to follow the ideal, I’d have spent more on fancy padlocks and Molossian watchdogs to keep them from pilfering than I’d ever have saved on barley, cheese and figs.
The stones were mostly still where they’d fallen; we’d used a few over the years to patch up walls, but not many. All we had to do was figure out how they fitted together and put them back. Simple.
In theory. It’s a basic rule of nature that putting something back together is always a hundred times harder than taking it apart; as witness that barn. It was so easy to bring it down that the wind and weather managed it without human assistance. If I’d thought of it, I could have hired a Thessalian witch to catch the wind in a bag and ask it if it remembered how the stones fitted. But I didn’t; I tried to figure it out for myself, and as a result arrived at Euxenus’
Law of applied geometry, which states that just because things fitted together once, it doesn’t follow that they’ll fit that way again. It’s a good law, that, and I think you’ll agree if you’ve been paying attention to this story that it doesn’t just apply to dry-stone walling.
After two frustrating days of skinned knuckles, wrenched backs and foul tempers, we decided to adopt a more radical approach, involving cold chisels and big hammers. I borrowed the necessary tools from my neighbours and we set to work, trimming and shaping the stones to make them fit. Although I hadn’t actually done any masonry work myself, I’d stood and watched Agenor a score of times over the years, and he always made it look easy. Without scribing a line or taking measurements he’d simply tap-tap a couple of times with the chisel, then give one sharp, hard tap and split off the irregular chunk of stone, leaving a smooth, flat face that would lie nicely flush against its neighbour. The waste material came away like rust flaking off an iron ploughshare; the desired shape was already in the stone, and all he had to do was strike off the encumbrances.
He never swung the hammer in great double-handed sweeps; just those little woodpecker taps up and down a convenient fault-line. Definitely the way to go;
nothing to it.
For some reason it didn’t work that way when we tried it. Either we got nowhere, scarcely even marking the stone, or else it exploded under the hammer into a shower of razor-sharp fragments, like the results of the technique they use in the quarries when they heat the rock with bellows and a brazier, then throw vinegar on it to make it shatter.
Unfortunately for all of us, this total lack of progress annoyed me so much that I resolved to persevere and succeed at all costs. Match the intransigence of stone, I said to myself, against the infinite flexibility of the human mind, and eventually you’ll get a row of neatly dressed masonry blocks, together with the immeasurable satisfaction of knowing you’ve won. True, my philosopher’s brain had proved itself not to be entirely up to the task of building the ideal city, but a simple thing like chipping out a few blocks of stone, something that an unlettered and uneducated man like Agenor could do so easily, ought to be well within my capabilities.
‘Keep at it,’ I commanded. ‘And keep your mind on what you’re doing.’
They looked at me, wiped sweat ostentatiously from their foreheads, and renewed their assault on the stone. They may possibly even have lost their tempers just a little, or perhaps they were playing the game we all play when we’ve got a tedious job to do that involves hitting or slashing, and imagined that the rock was me; in any event, the chips started flying in all directions, and I, being a prudent man as well as a philosopher, muttered something about measuring up and retired to a safe distance.
I was fooling about with a measuring rod when I heard one of the slaves —
Sclerus, his name was, or at least that was the name I’d given him; he was a Celt, from Galatia, and what they call themselves is nobody’s business but their own — yelp loudly enough to make me drop my rod, and then started swearing in Galatian.
‘Now what?’ I said.
‘Got something in my eye,’ he replied.
I looked round, and saw that he was crouched on the ground with his hands over his face. He’d stopped swearing and started making a sort of whimpering noise, which was most unlike him.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘A bit of that damned stone,’ replied his colleague, a Sicilian I called Aeschrus. ‘It flew up and hit him in the eye.’
‘Let me see,’ I said; but Sclerus didn’t want to take his hands away from his face. I could see blood trickling down his cheek. ‘Aeschrus, hold his hands,’ I said. ‘This is no time for melodrama.’
Aeschrus was a big strong lad; Sclerus was tall but thin and bony. So Aeschrus twisted his arms behind his back and I held his head still. I could see the splinter easily enough; he’d had his eye shut, but the splinter had gone right through it, pinning it to the eyeball. ‘That looks bad,’ I said. ‘Get him into the house.’
I broke a thin piece of bronze off the rim of a wooden bowl and bent it double to make a pair of tweezers, with which I was able, eventually, to pull the splinter out. It wasn’t easy; the splinter was an awkward shape and I couldn’t get a grip, and every time I tried Sclerus would roar with pain and thrash about like a deer that’s run into the nets during a forest drive. When eventually it did come out, a lot of blood came with it, and the poor man fainted. While he was out I washed the wound with hot water on a clean bit of rag until the bleeding stopped; then I gave Aeschrus some money and told him to run to the City and see if he could find a doctor.
He came back that evening with the money but no doctor. He’d tried four, he said, but they were all either busy or not at home. I don’t think a doctor could have done any good, in any event. The wound stayed fresh, which was something;
gods only know what would have happened if it had turned septic. I tried to treat it with a poultice, but whenever I went near him with the stuff Sclerus would start to bellow and cower, so I gave up and left him to it. Aeschrus made him an eyepatch out of very fine goatskin, because even though he couldn’t see through it, strong sunlight made it hurt terribly.
We gave up on the barn after that.
It occurs to me, looking back, that I should have known better. The project contained all the elements of my previous disasters; trying to make life better for other people, trying to restore a bit of the life I’d left behind when my father died, trying to build something, trying to make something that wanted to be one shape into another. When I was a boy I heard the story of an enthusiastic but entirely talentless boxer; when he died, they said, his family and neighbours had a gravestone carved showing this man standing in the ring, his hands bound up for fighting, his arms raised to strike; and underneath, the inscription ‘In memory of Polydamas, of whom it can truly be said, he never harmed his fellow men’. You know, I feel a bit like that Polydamas, only the other way round. He tried to hurt people but never managed it. I’ve tried to do good, on and off, my whole life, and I’ve left a trail of dead and mutilated bodies behind me wherever I’ve gone.
Now, in that excellent book, I expect it says that if one of the good farmer’s slaves gets damaged in a way that affects his performance of his duties, the only sensible course of action is to cut one’s losses, sell him for what he’ll fetch and buy a replacement, rather than compound the loss by feeding and providing for a slave who does less work but eats the same amount. I didn’t do that, however, which meant that Syrus, Sclerus, Aeschrus and I had five good eyes between the four of us, and people started calling us the Graeae, after the three witches in the old stories who have one eye between them, which they pass from hand to hand. (That, by the way, is the sort of thing that passes for wit in rural Attica , along with tying burning twigs to the tails of dogs and shoving drunks down wells.) So, with Syrus unable to do anything much and Sclerus restricted to light duties only (when we finally managed to get hold of a doctor, he warned that too much exertion could mean he’d lose the other eye as well), I ended up having to work longer and harder to put bread on the table for my slaves than I’d ever done before I bought them.
In the end I hired a couple of lads from a neighbouring farm to knock down what was left of the old barn and build a new one. It took them three days. They made it look easy.
‘You could have done that,’ they said to me as I paid them their money.
‘Probably,’ I replied. ‘But you know how it is.’
They looked at me. ‘Come again?’ they said.
I grinned, thinking of Diogenes and the magic talisman that made people do things for you, the silver coin. ‘Why do a job yourself when you can get someone to do it for you?’
‘Right,’ they said. ‘Like, you keep three men and do all your own ploughing. No wonder you packed in being a philosopher.’
I nodded. ‘Get off my land,’ I said, ‘before I set the snake on you.’
Time passes at a different rate, depending on where you are. A week in some strange place seems to last for ever, while you can lose a year at home as easily as a forgetful man misplaces his hat. I can’t say I was really aware of time passing; someone would mention something that happened a while ago, and I’d say, ‘Yes, that was the year the crows got in the laid patches in the barley.’
And then I’d think, when was that? Not last year, because the barley stood up well right up till harvest. Not the year before, because I got Aristodemus’ boy to stand guard with his sling and a bag of pebbles, and after a week he told me he’d killed thirty-seven of them. So it was either the year before that or the year before that — and suddenly I’d taken note of the passing of four years, which had sneaked by me like an adulterer creeping out of the window while his girlfriend keeps the husband talking in the front room.
While I was drifting aimlessly between harvests at home, Alexander of Macedon was marching from victory to victory, as unstoppable as a cart running down a hill. I could give you a battle-by-battle account of the campaign, I suppose, but it’d only be a rehash of what I’ve read in books; I wasn’t there, remember, I was in Antolbia, then Attica, where the glorious achievements of the son of Philip were as remote and as irrelevant as the Trojan War. As far as we were concerned in Athens , Alexander had marched off the edge of the world, and the further he went away from us, the better we liked it. Sure, he wasn’t hated and feared the way his father was. Truth to tell, he left us pretty much alone, and there were days you could go from dawn to dusk without anything reminding you of the Macedonian presence
in Greece, or the effects of the battle of Chaeronea. If any of my neighbours knew I’d been to Macedon, been the boy’s tutor, they were too tactful to mention it. Just occasionally, though, something reminded us of his existence; news of another glorious victory, rumours that he was dead (‘Alexander dead?’ someone said on one such occasion. ‘Don’t you believe it. If Alexander was dead, the stench would fill the earth’) or had been captured by the enemy, or had ascended bodily into the heavens to rejoin his real father Zeus; there were rumours that he’d listened to bad advice and marched his army into a vast, waterless desert, where most of them had died of thirst. There were rumours that he’d finally gone mad, and was demanding that everybody worship him as a god. He’d married the daughter of the King of Persia, there was to be peace and Alexander was to succeed to the Great King’s throne; he’d been shot in the chest while storming a fortress, and was hanging onto life by a thread; he’d murdered his best friend in a fit of drunken rage and burned down the capital city of the Empire in an excess of guilt-ridden insanity; he’d decided to merge the Greek and Persian races, and soon we’d all be shipped off and forcibly resettled in Asia, each of us being required to take at least one Persian wife, and wear trousers, on pain of death. Oh, there were always rumours; and of course we ignored them, or half-accepted them, not caring whether they were true or not — it’s like when you read books about faraway lands, and you’re told that beyond the great deserts of Africa there live people whose faces are in their bellies, whose ears are so long that they trail on the ground as they walk. You read, and you neither believe nor disbelieve, because even if you live to be a thousand years old, there’s no possible set of circumstances whereby things like that could ever be relevant to you. If it’s all lies, then so what? It’s a pretty story. If it’s true, then your belief or your scepticism aren’t going to alter anything; it doesn’t matter. Whichever way it does, the fact that there may or may not be people in Africa who have one enormous foot instead of two normal-sized ones isn’t going to make it easier or more difficult for you to cut your late barley before the crows flatten it, so you dismiss such things from your mind with a shake of your head and get on with your work. Similarly, the fact that at least three-quarters of the rumours we heard about Alexander turned out in the end to be true was neither here nor there. So what? Nothing, the gods be praised, to do with us.