When they did, a riot broke out.
Well, not so much a riot, as a gang fight. A tavern brawl. A knock-down, knife-slashing, club-thumping, fist-striking, neck-choking, pretty much every man for himself donnybrook. This did, as the queen promised, occur at the height of Alexander's attack, but none of the combatants got farther than the agora, and most remained in battle with each other at the rally point – the Mausoleum itself.
The fight was so localized, and so far from the fighting at the walls, as to be of little consequence to the defense of the city. A handful of the city watch and some armed sailors from the fleet sufficed to cordon off and to contain the battle royale, which petered out on its own accord long before the sun set. Even as a distraction, the vaunted fifth column proved a failure. And no one felt that failure more deeply than the woman who had been responsible for it.
When night fell, and not one gate had been forced open, not one section of wall still in their hands, nor one of their men alive, save as a captive, in the city, the Macedonian generals on their own authority called off the attack. Alexander was furious, but no amount of shouts, threats, pleas or promises could make Ptolemy, Perdiccas, or Parmenion send their men back into the fight.
“It is done for today,” said Parmenion quite solemnly to the king. “The men have no more to give...nor do I,” sighed the old general. “Not if your father himself came back from the grave would I send my men against that wall again...”
“But they are not 'your' men, Parmenion,” simmered Alexander. “They are 'my' men. And I say, no, I command you, to renew the assault. The city is ripe for the picking, I can feel it, I can smell it!”
“What you smell, my King,” said Parmenion as he took off his helmet and wiped the sweat and dirt from his face, “is the dead. The Persians are burning their dead – and they are burning the bodies of the thousand of Macedonians who died on and inside those walls today. As for the other thousand dead outside the walls,” he added as he waved his hand in the direction of the field made bloody with corpses, “those are ours to burn. Or they will be, as soon as the heralds arrange a truce so that we may collect and do honor to the dead and, the gods be merciful, aid any of the fallen who can yet be saved.”
75
Bogdan
Garmabeh and Paraidaeza
Despite their mooning over the distracting Halime, Oxy and Ari in effect canceled each other out, thus allowing the Persian girl to direct the party as promised to Bogdan. It was little more than a sheep and horse trading station. It had few buildings save those absolutely necessary for the farriers, tanners, butchers, and others who made their living from the animal trade. As such, it was a bleak, dusty, odoriferous little nowhere on the road to everywhere. What passed for an “inn” was nothing more than a few ragged awnings covering some crude wooden tables, and some flat rooftops with canopies where those passing through could, for a small price, find some shade and a relatively safe place to rest.
“Bit of a let down, isn't it?” said Dimitrios as the group limped down the main street – the only street or, more accurately, the Royal Road.
“I don't know, brother,” replied Klemes wearily but in good humor. “After days and days of stadia after stadia, or parasang after parasang, or whatever, on my feet, even this place seems a bit like a paraideaza.”
“A what?”
“A paraideaza, like that lovely garden back at the estate where we met Halime,” he replied.
“You could have just said 'garden,' you know,” grumbled Dimitrios. “You don't have to always use a five-drachma word when a one-obol word will do.”
“Yes, I know, dear brother,” smirked the physician as he tied up the reins of his horse to a post by the “inn,” and then began dusting himself off. “But it does so rile you when I do. And, besides, how will you every better yourself if you don't expand your vocabulary. You do know what that word...”
“Yes, Klemes,” mumbled Dimitrios, equally dusty and in desperate need of a bath, “I do know what that word means. I may not have had the luxury of lying about in the shade listening to pompous old men drone on about such things for hours on end as you did...”
“It's called an education, my over-muscled brother. You should try it sometime. After all, someday you may have the opportunity to go back into the wine business. You don't want to just end up as some worn out old soldier scrambling about the streets begging for drink money, do you?”
Dimitrios shot him an angry glare, but did not respond. He could best his brother in the physical and financial arts, but when it came to bandying words, Klemes was far quicker and far better at that than anyone he ever met. No sense fighting a battle on ground of the enemy's choosing, he thought to himself. Better to retreat, save up strength, and wait for a situation where his talents were of more value than those of his elder, learned and, frankly, often insufferable brother. There are more ways to bully someone than with fists, he grumbled inwardly, and as much as he loved his brother, there were old scores – and a few new ones – that would still have to be settled. Today, however, was not that day. Today, Dimitrios sighed in his mind, today there are much more important matters to attend to – like a bath.
That was something that both brothers – and the others in the party, not just Halime, did share a desire for. If cleanliness is an obsession with Greeks, it is practically a religion with Persians. While Bogdan would not have anything like a real bath house or public baths, there would be somewhere to bathe.
“We call it a garmabeh,” said Halime when Klemes asked where he might find a place to clean up. “It is nothing grand, like you find in the bigger towns and cities, but it more than serves the purpose. Here it is likely to be nothing more than a tent with good drainage; a place where you can wash yourself from a tub of water heated on a fire, and then cool yourself from a bowl of rose water. I will ask Oxy to inquire at what passes for an inn where we may cleanse ourselves.”
“Why don't you just go inside and ask?”
“That would not be proper, Klemes,” she said with both a bit of a blush and a haughty manner, as if she had been offended and needed to set things straight. “After all, I am not some serving girl, or a woman of low status seeking to sell her charms, which is the best and worst way any man in there would think of me for even entering that place, let alone asking such a delicate question. No, it is for a man to ask...or, in this case, a boy,” she almost giggled.
As rude a place as they found Bogdan to be, it did have the three things the party desired most: a place to bathe, a place to eat and, most important of all for Dimitrios, a place to find horses. Oxy, of course, could take his pick of mounts, and at no charge. All he needed to do was flash his medallion, and any subject of the king of kings had to provide food, shelter, aid, and horses to the courier. Refusal was not an option: not unless they wished to kill the courier, dispose of the body and concoct some story that would satisfy the inevitable inquiry that would follow a courier's disappearance. Such inquiries were undertaken by servants of the Eyes of the King – a shadowy figure whose meticulous and frequently lethal methods always unveiled the truth.
Dimitrios, however, could make no such demand. The owner of the local stables was determined to make up for the expense of outfitting Oxy – who of course chose his finest mount – by fleecing the Greek barbarians as best he could. Halime, a better judge of horseflesh than even Oxy, could only help so much.
“Your brother says that before being a soldier you were a wine merchant?” she asked of Dimitrios rhetorically, for she already knew the answer. “Well, that will be of little help here.”
“Why?” he asked, quite perplexed. “A deal is a deal. The rules are the same no matter what you wish to buy or sell.”
Halime stifled a little laugh, but her smile gave away her amusement.
“Horses are not amphorae of wine,” she replied, still trying not to make Dimitrios think she was making fun of him. “There are procedures that must be followed and customs that must be attended
to in the minutest detail. One wrong move and the deal will be off – and blood may flow if you are not careful.”
“I understand the art of the deal,” replied Dimitrios, taken aback at being lectured to by a mere slip of a girl. “I have been making deals since you were a baby and Zeus was a corporal,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height and thumping his chest.
“Well, oh great and powerful Theban wine merchant,” she shot back, taking umbrage at his response to her advice. “Unless you want to keep walking all the way to Diospolis or wherever it is you think you are going, or are itching for a knife in the back, please put aside that 'Greek's know best' misplaced manly pride of yours. Let me tell you how we do things here. Remember, my people were born on the back of a horse, and it was on horseback that we built an empire from the shores of the Ganges to the beaches of the wine dark sea. We are very set in our ways, in this perhaps more than anything. So I ask you...no, I beg you,” she added coyly, changing her tune from that of instructor to supplicant, “to sit back down and let me explain to you how horse trading works in the Persian empire.”
“I hope the horses for sale are better than the food here,” grumbled Dimitrios as he grudgingly sat back down.
“Oh, they are, my captain,” she replied, “they most certainly are – if you know how to go about it properly.”
As a Greek, a Theban, a captain, a merchant, and a hoplites, Dimitrios could not be expected to take the advice of a woman. That went double or even triple when the woman was not only a foreigner, but a Persian, and still, in his eyes, a girl – and a mere slip of a one at that. After all, Dimitrios was a man of the world, schooled in the classrooms of experience in the agora and on the battlefield. In other words, he was too proud to take Halime's advice.
The consequences of which were predictable – or at least what she predicted they would be.
The negotiations went badly from the beginning. Dimitrios had made many a business deal in his career, as had his father and his grandfather before him. The wine business was both literally and figuratively in his blood. Unfortunately, he was not dealing with another wine merchant. Hassan, the horse trader, did not only not play by the same rules as Dimitrios, he did not even play the same game. Worse, Dimitrios had to rely on Halime to translate for him. He had no other choice, for no one else in Bogdan spoke any Greek, and his Persian seemed incomprehensible to a man who spoke this a particular dialect.
Just bringing a woman along to a business transaction made Hassan not only as uneasy as it did Dimitrios; it also made him downright hostile. Already spoiling to find a way to make this foreigner make up Hassan's losses at having given Oxy a mount, he bridled at the presence, let alone involvement, of the girl. Horse trading, after all, was man's work. That this girl seemed to know far too much about horses, and corrected and even contradicted Hassan as to the health and suitability of the horses he was offering to sell the Greek made a bad situation worse.
To recite the litany of offers, counter-offers, claims, corrections, pleas, arguments, heated exchanges, insults, and threats would serve little purpose. Suffice it to say that within half an hour the deciding factors in the making of the deal were not words, handshakes or coins, but knives, cudgels and fists. It was fortunate for Dimitrios that Hassan had few friends in Bogdan, having cheated or at least taken advantage of too many of its citizens, and too often. Otherwise the Thebans would have been overborne by numbers; instead of allies, however, all Hassan had from the people of Bogdan was an audience.
Hassan held back as two of his toughs jumped Dimitrios, pummeling and pounding him with their bare firsts. Ari quickly came to his friend's aid, wielding a heavy stick to bat away the thugs. Hassan signaled for the rest of his men to join in the fray. Two more came forward – the third, and youngest, electing to stay with the horses. When he heard the tumult, Klemes came out from under the tavern's awning. Halime, too, entered the fray to help even the odds. As small and as light as she was, Halime was the only girl in a family of boys, and thus knew from practice how to hold her own in a scuffle.
Had Oxy not already have ridden off to the next courier station, he would most likely have come to their aid but, alas, by now he was hours away. After all, the courier could not be delayed from his appointed rounds, or so demanded his oath.
The unseemly scuffle was finally decided by the inn-keeper. His customers were watching and taking bets on the outcome of the fight, and as such were taking up space under his awnings without ordering food or drink. A bucket of dirty water from the kitchens in hand, he strode forth and splashed the combatants with its contents. Those who kept fighting, he simply clocked on the head with the bucket. Standing like the Colossus of Rhodes, the burly innkeeper put himself firmly between each camp, daring any one from either side to make a move to renew the brawl.
“Hassan!” he bellowed to the horse trader, who had managed to stay behind while his minions did his fighting for him. “Give these Greeks and their girl four of your best horses – not that many of yours are all that valuable. You know the going rate,” he spat, scornfully. “Add a tenth to that, and let that be that.”
“And as for you, you...Greeks,” he said, nodding to Halime to translate. “You will give Hassan your old horses and then pay the price Hassan and I have set, and you will pay it without further discussion. And then you will leave, understand?”
Dimitrios made to respond, but the innkeeper cut him off with a hard look and a stance that made it very clear he was ready to wield the bucket to enforce his demand. Soldier enough to know when time had come to retreat, Dimitrios nodded his head, rose slowly to his feet and held out his bloody, bruised and dirty hand. The innkeeper spat into his free hand, took Dimitrios' outstretched hand, and shook it.
“Now,” he said, through a forced smile which did little to hide the threat behind it, “pay the man. Gather your gear – and leave. And take that girl with you. Oh,” he added, as Dimitrios started to back away. “Next time listen to her. She might just be able to keep you alive...at least for a little while longer.”
76
Diospolis
The Postman Always Rides Twice
After the dusty scuffle in the dirt in Bogdan, Dimitrios was more eager than ever before to continue his mission. Oxy had suggested that his fellow courier, Aleph, might be able to aid them in their quest to find Barsine. It was Aleph, after all, who had handed off to Oxy the message meant for Memnon in Halicarnassos. Aleph, by Oxy's reasoning, would either have received the letter directly from an agent of the princess, or at least could tell Dimitrios which courier had given it to him. Dimitrios sincerely hoped he would not have to keep backtracking from one courier to the next, but it might be the only way to find Memnon's wife.
“Why couldn't she have just sat still in some nice, comfy palace, keeping cool and cozy in one of those paraidaezas of theirs?” grumbled Klemes, whose patience had grown thinner with each passing day on the road.
“This Barsine is not some gentle Athenian woman, who must keep to her house and garden and be seen and not heard,” said Halime, who had ridden back to the captain's side after a brief scout ahead. “This is Persia – or at least the Persian Empire. Our women have much more freedom than yours, or so I have been told. We can own property, run a farm, conduct the business affairs of our families...”
“How?” said Dimitrios in surprise. “For all of that you would need an education. You would need to know numbers. You would need to know how to read, and how to write, and...”
“I can read, and write, and calculate numbers – and in three languages,” said Halime quite calmly. “My father had tutors for me and my brothers. That is how I know about how you basically imprison your women, keeping them caged up in their homes. Such is not the custom in Persia. Here women are allowed to make their own choices, in at least some matters, that is.”
“No wonder the Macedonians think your men weak and easy to conquer,” remarked Dimitrios with a laugh. “My family is rare, in that women and g
irls of the House of Pindar are allowed an education, but that does not mean they have a say in running things, at least not outside of the home. After all, what kind of a man lets a women make her own decisions, let alone for a family?”
“A wise one, Captain,” said Halime with a smile, as she gave her horse a little kick and trotted ahead.
“Curious people,” mumbled Dimitrios. “Curious people. I hope the king of kings doesn't let his women guide him in his war plans,” he grumbled to his brother. “If so, we may find ourselves on the losing end of this war.”
“It may surprise you, brother,” replied Klemes, “but Darius does listen to his women – or at least to the wisest of them. The queen mother, Sisygambus, is said to have her own network of spies and assassins,” added Klemes. “I have heard her described as the spider who sits at the center of a web. A web through which agents from all over the world, and not just the empire, bring her news. She even spies on the imperial spymasters, the men known as the Eyes of the King and as the Ears of the King.”
Dimitrios turned and looked directly into his brother's face and asked, quite incredulously, “and just where did you 'hear' such rumors, brother?”
“Back in Ephesos – and again in Miletos,” he replied. “While you are busy hacking, and slashing, and strutting about playing the important soldier, some of us take a little time to listen to what other people are saying. Or, perish the thought, to even ask questions. You know, that method they taught us that Socrates used.”
“I know about the Socratic method and all of that,” sighed Dimitrios. “You've lectured me on it countless times.”
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