by Tom Holt
Half the people who die, he now firmly believed, die of diseases caused or aggravated by dirt. Incredible numbers of people troop down to the Styx ferry and stump up their two obols to the ferryman simply because they don’t, as the old man he met on Chios put it, live clean. According to Pherecrates, from the people who wouldn’t die if you cleaned up the water in Greece , you could raise an army large enough to conquer the world, found colonies in every province, and still have enough left over to have hunger riots. If only half of the wise men, philosophers, scientists, poets, statesmen who die of infections, blood poisoning and other dirty deaths were to be spared, mankind would soon be so wise and so powerful that the gods wouldn’t stand a chance. We could exile them to the Arabian desert or the frozen wastes out back of Scythia and run the world ourselves. All it would take to make the difference would be a few aqueducts, drains and cesspits and a weekly wash-and-brush-up around the home, and we’d have stolen a prize so valuable as to make Prometheus stealing fire from Heaven seem trivial. According to Pherecrates.
Now, he was sceptical at first, just as I was and you are. For instance; how can bodily waste be so dangerous and poisonous when it comes out of our own bodies?
It didn’t kill us while it was still inside us, so why should it be so desperately lethal after it’s left us and seeped into the village well? And dirt, honest dust and mud; dirt and mud are what we grow our food in, and once we’ve grown it, we eat it. If dirt and mud are so deadly that a little getting into a cut or a scratch can kill you, how come food isn’t deadlier than my brother’s poison honey? Isn’t it far more logical to assume that diseases and deaths are what we’ve always believed they are, supernatural entities that roam and buzz unseen among us, looking for unlucky or doomed people to pick on, rather than perverted products of the good earth and our own bodies?
Pherecrates couldn’t answer that; all he could do was set out his evidence and suggest that the conclusions he drew from them were worthy of serious consideration. At which point the book ended, and Pherecrates stepped out of my life back into the darkness he’d so miraculously appeared from.
Yes, I know. It sounds like the demented ravings of a man with an obsession, like those people you try to avoid in the market square who do their best to convince you that the King of India’s sent assassins to murder them, or that the stars are eating their brains. But what if he’s right? What if there’s even a tiny scrap of truth in his notion? The only way to know for certain, I suggest, is to try it and see; build a city with all his fussy ideas put into practice and count how many people drop down dead and how many don’t. As great experiments go, it’s no daffier than Alexander’s pet project of forcing a thousand selected flowers of Macedonian manhood to marry a thousand hand-picked Persian girls, with a view to breeding a master-race he could use to repopulate Asia . Of the two great leaps of faith, why not choose the one that causes least inconvenience to the subjects of the experiment and has the most potential for good, in the unlikely event that it’s successful?
So here I am, Phryzeutzis; in my old age, an old fool who should know better, once again trying to play god and create an ideal city. Maybe it’s a disease of the elderly and underoccupied; certainly it’s the sort of thing I could imagine the Founders at Antolbia coming up with (and I’d have told them, politely, but firmly, to go and stick the idea where the sun never shines, because people with work to do in the real world simply don’t have time to get involved in wild idealistic schemes — or if they do it turns out an utter disaster, like Plato’s bad experiences in Sicily when he went out there to found the philosopher kingdom). So what? In theory, under the charter Alexander gave this place when he set it up, as proxy oecist I have absolute power here, so I probably ought to use it once in a while, if only to show the people here how lucky they are to have me, rather than someone who rushes about doing things all the time.
This city won’t last, of course. How can it? Greek city, founded on a whim by a great king who was briefly a god but who’s now dead, populated by savages and ruled by a crazy old man. I remember a city so very much like it that these days I have trouble telling them apart. There are times, Phryzeutzis, when I think you’re really my friend Tyresenius, or my Budini bodyguard, and that this is Antolbia, and that any moment now Theano’ll come out of the house with a big jug of wine with honey and cinnamon; or that any minute, the other savages will come bursting through the gate with arrows on their bowstrings and kill us all. I sit here sometimes, Tyrsenius, and I seem to be remembering some specific small incident that happened at the old city, rather than watching it happen again here in the new one. History, of course, is the setting down in writing of the deeds of great men and the happening of great events, so that they shall never be forgotten, and so that the manifold and grievous errors of the past can be recognised and avoided by those that come after us; so, by writing history, I’m pinning this time down, so that we’ll know it’s not the time before or the time after. It’s a trick to stop myself going crazy, I guess. If I can look it up in a book, I can know for certain that this is something that’s happening, not something I’m remembering.
And, like most tricks, it doesn’t work.
Lately I’ve been getting this pain in my right hand, where the joints are chalking up; and that very nice woman from the vegetable market who thinks that if she mothers me and looks after me I’ll leave her money when I die, that very nice woman gave me something to take away the pain. What she gave me was a little box of dried leaves; you sprinkle them on a fire and breathe in, and next thing you know the pain doesn’t hurt any more. Well, she’s absolutely right, I feel no pain now; but whenever I sit by the fire with a cloth over my head, breathing deeply, I seem to see someone sitting next to me, also breathing in and enjoying the smoke. I have no idea who he is; I can’t see his face clearly through the smoke, and his voice is fuzzy and indistinct, like the hum of distant insects. Sometimes I think it’s my father, or Diogenes; at other times it’s Alexander or Aristotle, or Tyrsenius or Agenor the stonemason, or Theano, or one of my brothers, or my grandfather Eupolis, or Pherecrates the drainage enthusiast, or Eudaemon’s friend Peitho (who of course I never met). Sometimes, when I’m drowsy and not thinking straight, I think it’s you, and that you’re reading my book, and I’m the book sitting there being read.
I suppose I ought to be worried. But it’s too late for that. These days, I’d gladly trade a blurred edge to my sanity for something that’ll take away the pain. Sanity’s a wonderful thing, but it isn’t a patch on a good night’s sleep, or being able to take a piss without feeling like someone’s hammering a tent-peg into your kidneys. All my life I’ve felt no pain, as I’ve bounced happily along with death and destruction at my heels like happy dogs being taken for a walk, eating up everybody around me and, in general, leaving me alone. It’s a small price to pay, the company of some indistinct figure who vaguely resembles the way I think some long-dead person I can barely remember ought to have looked, in order that he fits the character I’ve drawn for him in my book of history. As the man said after he’d been in solitary confinement for fifty years, it’s a pain having to share this cell with the devil, but it’s better than being alone.
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[i] Iskander, about 50 miles north-east of Tashkent.
[ii] The Crimea.
[iii] Between Odessa and Mykolayiv in the Ukraine.
[iv] August-September