experience, however, he more than made up for in imagination. His book (and,
therefore, Bias’ lessons) positively teemed with cunning schemes and devilish
contraptions for winning wars at a stroke and bringing the boys home before
harvest. There were ox-powered troopships and mechanical gadgets that hurled
rocks, there were dastardly ploys for deceiving the enemy (unless, of course,
they’d also read Aeneas’ book), there were stratagems and counter-stratagems and
counter-counter-stratagems for the really advanced student. And, best of all,
there were the bees.
Oh, gods, the bees.
Imagine you’re trapped in a city under siege, with seventy thousand men camping
out under your battlements, vowing to slaughter every living thing inside the
walls. They have archers and battering-rams and siege-towers, not to mention
plenty of food and drink.You, on the other hand, have a first-generation copy of
Aeneas the Tactician, so there isn’t anything to worry about really. Every day
the enemy shoot and bombard and hammer away; you repel every attempt, sword in
one hand and book of instructions in the other. Eventually, the enemy get
depressed. Some of them start talking loudly about going home. Their general is
getting worried, and consults his chief engineer.
No problem, the engineer replies. We can’t climb over the walls or bash them
down, so what we’ll do is we’ll dig a tunnel under the walls and then collapse
it, bringing the walls tumbling down. The general smiles broadly and off the
engineer goes, requisitioning buckets and organising shift rosters; and the next
thing you know, your sleep is troubled by a sort of underground scratching
noise, which is too loud to be cockroaches and too quiet for an earthquake.
Just in time, you figure out what’s going on, and immediately consult The Book.
Sure enough, there’s the answer. It’s wonderful. It goes like this.
First, find out as best you can where the enemy tunnel is.Then, dig a tunnel of
your own to intercept it. When you’re nearly through into the enemy’s main
shaft, you stop and go round the city collecting up all the hives of bees you
can possibly find, stunning the vicious little creatures by puffing smoke at
them with a portable brazier and a pair of bellows. Then you take the hives of
drowsy but evil-tempered bees down your tunnel, break through into next door,
sling in the beehives and seal the hole up quick. In due course the bees wake up
with a foul hangover and set about finding someone to blame for their injuries.
Since ten standard beehives contain something of the order of five million bees,
life in the enemy’s mines is likely to be unbearably exciting for quite some
time. Once you’ve given your black-andyellow-arsed allies a chance to do their
stuff, you open the hole up again and flood the mines with smoke, enabling your
men to get into the enemy’s diggings and cave in the tunnels, leaving them the
whole lousy job to do again.
I remember that the first time Eudaemon told us about this, I laughed so much I
had to go outside and take deep breaths of cold night air to regain my
composure, much to my brother’s irritation. What, he wanted to know, was so damn
funny about a thoroughly ingenious, utterly foolproof military manoeuvre? I
replied that if he couldn’t see the joke, I wasn’t going to be able to explain
it to him, and we left it at that. I may even have apologised, under duress, for
my lack of proper respect. Of course, the next time I came across Aeneas’ book —
well, that’ll keep.
So there we were, the sons of Eutychides, all apprenticed to our various
vocations, all quietly chugging along with them to humour our father and not
really giving much thought to the future. I knew, of course, that what I was
learning from the illustrious Diogenes wasn’t, in purely commercial terms, worth
spit. I assume Eudaemon realised the same thing, deep down in his liver, and the
same for the others as they played at surveying or banking or trading in exotic
spices. It didn’t matter really, because Father was fit and healthy and in due
course we’d each marry a girl with enough of a dowry to make up the difference
between our inheritances and what we’d need to bring in a decent living.
Time passed, though, and one by one all the gullible heiresses in our part of
Attica married other people. This was annoying; it meant that our brides would
be from more distant regions, which would mean a lot of traipsing about the
countryside going from holding to holding — five acres in Pallene, seven more
out as far as Marathon maybe, two more over Phyle way; grandfather Eupolis’
inheritance had been scattered enough as it was without the further headache of
subdividing it and then matching up the bits with more far-flung snippets.
Before you ask, there was no question of selling inconveniently situated land
and buying other land to take its place. In those days, that simply wasn’t done;
it’d be like selling the members of your family you didn’t happen to get on with
and buying someone else’s sweet-natured aunt. Land, after all, was for ever; it
was people who came and went. It was thinking like this that made the relatively
straightforward task of making a living in Attica such a complex and difficult
matter, and led the Athenians as a nation to turn their back on self-sufficient
agriculture and dabble in world domination instead.
Came the time, however, when even the girls of our age in Acharnae and the back
end of the Mesogaia were all married, but not to any of us. Naturally enough, we
started to ask why. Generally speaking, Athenian fathers are only too delighted
to get their daughters off their hands as quickly as possible, only just
stopping short of giving them away, one free with every five jars of olives. It
turned out, however, that my father, and our family in general, had acquired
such an unhealthy reputation for eccentricity (because of my father’s knack of
apprenticing his sons to world-famous deadheads) that nobody wanted to know us,
let alone marry into our obviously jinxed house. Perhaps it would have been
different if my mother had been alive (she died when I was three). She’d been
the daughter of a very prestigious and respectable family — you could tell how
grand they were from the fact that most of them were in political exile at any
given moment — and I’m sure her people’s solid reputation would have gone a long
way towards undoing the damage. But once she died her family didn’t want to know
us, so that was no help. And of course the more obvious it became that we
weren’t going to be able to marry our way out of trouble, the more feverishly my
father schemed and contrived to make sure we’d all be provided for. I tell you,
he reminded me of a boy trying to untangle a ball of wool; the more he tugged
and yanked at it, the tighter the tangles became, and the harder he pulled. It’s
something of a miracle, in fact, that we managed to keep things together as long
as we did.
In the event, my father died as stolidly and disastrously as he’d lived. He was
stung by a wasp during the olive harvest, and fell out of a tree. It was a
singularly fatuous way for him to die; there wasn’t any call for him to go
shinning up trees at his age, but the slave whose job it was had bruised his
knee and gone limping home, and Father was worried in case the wind blew the
olives down (we were late with the olives that year, for some reason), leaving
them on the ground, spoiling. So, being Father, he clambered up into the
branches with his long stick for knocking the olives down, and he’d already
cleared all the ones worth having; all that were left were a few small, hard
specimens up in the high, thin branches, but (being Father) he was determined to
show up the malingering slave by doing a thorough job. The wasp stung the back
of his left hand, the one he was holding onto the branch with; I suppose he
automatically let go, and went crashing down in a tangle of twigs and foliage,
landing awkwardly and breaking his leg.
Now, that wasn’t enough to kill him, Heaven knows; but he was alone out there,
unable to move, with the sun setting, which meant that all our sensible
neighbours had left the terraces and started home. And of course it would have
to be the one night in the year when we had a freak rainstorm.
Normally, of course, we’d have realised something was wrong when he failed to
come home, and gone out to see what the matter was. But of course we had a house
at Phyle (house is an overstatement; it had been a house back in Grandfather
Eupolis’ day, but by that point it was four walls and a vague recollection of
the shape of a roof, which we patched up with trimmings and branches whenever we
had occasion to use it, for example during the olive harvest) and we naturally
assumed that Father had decided to sleep there rather than trudge all the way
back to Pallene.
He was still very much alive the next morning, when our loathsome neighbour
Demonax found him and (grudgingly, we assume) helped him down the hill to our
roofless, tumbledown house. That, however, was the limit of neighbourly charity
as far as Demonax as concerned; he had olives to get in, and if Eutychides was
fool enough to go falling out of trees and breaking legs, he should be grateful
for a shoulder to lean on as far as the house, where undoubtedly the slave or
one of the maids would show up before noon. So he left him there, wrapped in his
sopping wet cloak, either failing to notice or failing to care that Father was
developing a rare old fever.
Well, the slave with the bad knee tottered back up to the olive grove, saw that
Father wasn’t there, assumed he’d gone home and set about getting in the rest of
the olives. He knew he was in trouble for sloping off the previous day, and was
anxious to regain a bit of lost favour by putting in a full day’s work. It was
only by chance that he stayed so late at his work that he decided to stop over
at the house himself; where he found my father, half off his head with fever,
apparently having a heated argument with Grandfather Eupolis about the merits of
Euripides’ play The Trojan Women.
By this time, of course, it was too late in the day to think about trying to get
him home, or even finding help. So Father had to spend the night there, with
nothing to eat (the slave had only taken his own lunch with him, and of course
he’d eaten that) and precious little in the way of warmth or comfort. As soon as
it was light, the slave set off to find help. He made the mistake of hammering
on Demonax’s door. Our neighbour replied that he’d already wasted enough
valuable time larking about with the old fool, and he had better things to do,
etc. By the time the slave gave up and left, encouraged on his way by Demonax’s
two unspeakably ferocious dogs, it was already midmorning, and by the time the
slave had gone back home, found someone who’d listen to him (my feckless
brother Euthyphron; hardly the person you’d choose to turn to in a crisis),
organised a makeshift litter and some bearers, and slogged back out to Phyle, it
was dark again.
By now Father was in terrible shape, so Euthyphron decided to take him home in
the dark. I suppose it wasn’t his fault that it rained again; it rains so rarely
in Attica that the risk was practically negligible. But he’d been going back and
forth to Phyle since he was a little kid, he shouldn’t have got lost and spent
the whole night wandering up and down, round and round in circles, until he
finally blundered into the house at Pallene, soaked to the skin, about an hour
before dawn.
Even after all that, you’d have expected Father to pull through. True, he had
dreadful congestion in his lungs by this stage, as well as the fever, but this
was Attica , where as a rule people generally don’t die of a broken leg. We
called for a doctor, and he came; a short, fat, busy little man from
Halicarnassus who drained off an alarming amount of Father’s blood in a series
of little bronze dishes while mumbling prayers to Asclepius in a sing-song voice
that nearly drove me round the bend. His considered opinion was that the real
cause of the illness was the wasp-sting. Some people, he said, react very badly
to being stung, and that’s just how it goes. We pointed out that we kept bees,
and Father had been stung more times than he’d eaten salted fish, but the doctor
shook his head and said that bee-stings and wasp-stings had quite different
effects and attacked different humours in the body. Then he siphoned off another
jugful of Father’s blood just to be on the safe side, charged us a drachma, and
went home.
But we didn’t imagine for a moment that he was going to die; we knew he was very
ill, but the worst we anticipated was the inconvenience of having to hang around
the house listening to him argue (with incredible bitterness, most of the time)
with the ghost of his dead father when we all had work to do. I suppose the
apprehension set in when we realised that none of us knew how the estate, the
family business, actually worked. Oh, we knew about its component parts, but
Father had always kept a firm and exclusive grip on the overall management of it
all, and we didn’t have a clue what needed to be done. Slaves and day-labourers
kept turning up at the door wanting to be told what they should be doing, and we
didn’t know. It was utterly thoughtless of Father, we told each other, to be
lying there raving like a loon when there was so much work to be done that only
he could do.We knew whose fault it would be when he recovered and found that
everything was in a total mess; there’d be no point trying to explain...
And then one of us raised the possibility — I don’t think anybody said it in so
many words — of what would happen if he didn’t recover; what if he died, and
left us all alone? At first that didn’t bear thinking about, and besides, he
wasn’t going to die, so stop being so damn morbid. But time went on, and
although his slanging match with our late grandfather grew steadily more
vitriolic (we could only hear one side of it, of course, but we remembered
Eupolis and were sure that at the very least he was giving as good as he got),
his voice was getting steadily weaker. He didn’t recognise any of us, o
r even
seem to be aware that there was anybody there except his own father. When he
started telling the old man that it was his neglect and mental cruelty that
killed our grandmother Phaedra, we were all so embarrassed we got up and left
the room.
He died on the seventh day of the fever, in the middle of a stream of abuse. It
was the first time we’d ever heard him use that sort of language, or express
himself so passionately about anything. In fact, after Grandfather died, I can’t
remember Father ever mentioning him (aside, of course, from this occasion) in
anything except a vaguely respectful tone such as you’d use about some minor god
you believed in but didn’t actually know very much about.
Well, soon enough I expect to see him again — both of them, in fact
— on the other side of the blind river, that drab and featureless place where we
Greeks go when we die. I’ll be able to ask them both what it was that passed
between them that was important enough to blot out everything else from Father’s
mind in the last hours of his life. I’ve often speculated idly about what on
earth it might have been. The prospect of satisfying my curiosity on this point
is, in fact, about the only thing that reconciles me to the thought of death,
which in all other respects has nothing to recommend it whatsoever.
CHAPTER THREE
A thenian children, my illiterate young friend, are plagued from their earliest
years by the poet Homer. For reasons which I have never and will never
understand, we’re required to learn vast acreages of his dreary masterpieces by
heart, and anybody who can’t or won’t is immediately dismissed out of hand as
perverse or just plain stupid. ‘Ignorant little ratbag, doesn’t even know his
Homer,’ they say, and reinforce their reproof with the backs of their hands.
Bizarre. After all, there’s nothing in the iliad and next to nothing in the
Odyssey that’s of any practical value to anybody; quite the reverse, in fact.
Four-fifths of the Iliad is endlessly repetitive battle scenes, describing a
style of fighting that would get you killed in less time than it takes to blow
your nose if you tried it on a modern battlefield, and the rest of it’s an
extremely dubious, if not downright blasphemous, take on the lifestyle and
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 5
