exhausting it can be, deliberately walking slowly). Yet here he was, racing down
the hill like a stag with the hounds at his heels. I let go of the handlebar,
took my foot off the footplate and watched, dumbfounded.
‘Chaereas?’ I called out.
‘Can’t stop.’ He’d seen the plough directly in front of him, but he was going
too fast to slow down; instead he soared over it with a mighty leap, like a
prize-winning hurdler at the Games. A man twenty years younger would have been
proud of that jump.
‘Chaereas!’ I yelled down the hill after him. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
‘The Macedonians,’ he called back. ‘They’re coming! Run!’
By that point he was too far away to hear me, but I couldn’t leave it at that. I
left the plough and team standing — the great thing about nine-year-old oxen is
that they stay put — and followed after him as quickly as I dared go, which
wasn’t nearly fast enough. I didn’t catch up with him, in fact, until I reached
the village, where I saw him huddled in a crowd around a couple of other
neighbours of ours, who were saying something about Philip of Macedon...
It shouldn’t have come as such a shock, really. Philip had been playing war in
Chalcidice for some time, threatening and harassing our colonies and allies up
there into leaving us and joining him; but for some reason we still hadn’t been
able to work up enough enthusiasm to send an army and sort him out. I think it
was because of what happened at Thermopylae , where, if you recall, the sight of
an Athenian army holding the pass had sent him scuttling away like a fox who’s
seen the sheepdog. Sooner or later we’d make a proper show of force, instead of
sending a few cut-price mercenaries, and he’d bolt off back to his mountains and
his mead-hall and his week-long drinking matches with the tribal
warrior-chieftains. He was, after all, just a Macedonian; they may look a bit
like proper Greeks, but that didn’t mean a thing. A savage is a savage is a
savage; and when you stand up to them, they run. Everybody knew that.
The news that broke that summer day in my twenty-sixth year was that Philip of
Macedon had stormed Olynthus, the principal city of Chalcidice and a loyal
friend of Athens; once inside, he’d ordered a general massacre, after which he’d
rounded up the ten thousand or so survivors and marched them off in slave-irons
to be sold abroad.
A lot of speeches were made around that time; very good speeches, most of them,
packed with memorable phrases. But what immediately comes to mind when I think
of that day is old Chaereas hurdling my father’s beat-up second-best plough,
with a look of terror on his face as if the Great King and ninety thousand of
his archers were treading down the backs of his heels. ‘They’re coming!’ he’d
said, but he was a bit behind the times. They’d already arrived, and we hadn’t
even noticed.
Extraordinary times bring to the fore extraordinary men; and the fall of
Olynthus was no exception. In her hour of need, Athens turned to me, Euxenus son
of Eutychides of the deme of Pallene, a man extraordinarily ill-suited to the
task assigned to me.
We were quite a party, the Athenian embassy to Philip; there was Aeschines,
who’d been an actor before he turned to politics; there was Demosthenes, a
lawyer; there was Philocrates, an earnest and utterly terrified little man who
understood Philip so well that he should never have been allowed to join the
party, let alone lead it — whenever he was in the man’s presence, he watched
Philip with the motionless resignation of a fledgeling bird on the ground
watching a polecat, because he knew, beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt, that
it was only a matter of time...
There were ten ambassadors. Correction; there were nine ambassadors and me. When
I canvassed my family and friends for possible explanations of why I’d been
chosen, I got a wide selection of plausible replies, but no overall consensus.
My sister-in-law Praxagora reckoned they’d chosen me because Philip had a habit
of killing messengers, and who else was so uniquely expendable? My brother
Eudorus, who was also a professional actor, opined that I’d been included as
official scapegoat, a complete nobody on whom Aeschines and Demosthenes could
dump the blame when the whole mission came to nothing. Diogenes grinned and said
they must have chosen me to lull Philip into a true sense of security. Anyway, I
went.
Before I tell you about this momentous event in my life, I’ll just pause for a
moment or two and indulge in a little narcissistic mirror-gazing. In my
twenty-sixth year I was one of the tallest men in Athens . Between the ages of
thirteen and seventeen I’d sprouted at an unbelievable rate — people told me
they used to stand there and watch me getting taller, until it made them feel
all dizzy and faint. It was my excessive height, according to some, that made me
go bald at a relatively early age. That high up, they said, you can’t expect
anything to grow except a little moss and the most tenacious species of
rock-flower. Now, most of the other freaks of altitude I’ve met have made up for
it by being thin and stringy, as if they’d been made out of wax and stretched
when they were three parts set. Not me. In spite of the fact that I’d given up
farm work at a relatively early age and never took any exercise that I could
possibly avoid, I had broad shoulders and forearms as thick as some men’s
calves. I could pick up great big oil-jars that took two ordinary men to shift —
I didn’t, as a rule, but I could have if I’d wanted to — and from the age of
thirteen onwards, fights and aggravation were things that happened to other
people, not to me. Looking back, of course, this was a handicap.
That said, I was a pretty feeble specimen when it came to anything involving
stamina. My diminutive brother Eumenes, for instance, could walk under my
outstretched arm without ducking and if we walked together he had to trot to
keep up with my great shambling strides. But if we happened to be walking
uphill, it wouldn’t be long before he’d be tapping his foot impatiently, waiting
for me to catch up. Eumenes, of course, was a farmer.
When an Athenian asks you, ‘What does so-and-so look like?’ what he means is,
‘Is he good-looking?’ That’s essential information for an Athenian, because of
this beautiful-good/ugly-bad thing I’ve touched on before. We reckon that beauty
is like a seal, pressed into the soft wax of our faces when we’re born, so that
for ever afterwards people will be able to tell at a glance whether we’re good
or bad. By that criterion, I was sort of middling-nothingish, which I suppose is
fair enough (but I still don’t believe in the general rule). Baldness is
regarded as a sort of amusing eccentricity-cum-folly in Athens , like
absent-mindedness, wearing outlandish or inappropriate clothes or mild
kleptomania; people made it plain that though they didn’t condone it, they
didn’t really hold it against me either.
(I can see you smiling, Phryzeutzis; you think that because I can’t see you
doing it, I won’t know. But it’s true; when I was younger, I was a very tall
man, and if I could only get this pathetic excuse for a back of mine to
straighten out, I could prove it to you. All right, don’t believe me if you
don’t want to; but the only man I ever met who was noticeably taller than me was
Hephaestion the Macedonian, Alexander’s friend; the one the Persian queen
assumed must be Alexander, because he was the tallest man in the room. And no, I
don’t know why I’m making such an issue of it. I suppose it’s because it’s
really the only respect in which I’ve excelled my fellow men and so in spite of
myself I’m really rather proud of it, deep down, even though it was none of my
doing.)
Philocrates was supposed to brief us on the ship, so that we’d arrive in Macedon
fully informed and up to date, ready for anything that the man already widely
acknowledged as the world’s greatest living negotiator might have lined up for
us. But Philocrates was seasick. Desperately seasick. In fact, he was so
wholeheartedly and continuously seasick that he set me thinking seriously about
the theory of reincarnation, as proposed by the great Pythagoras and endorsed
fairly recently by the celebrated Plato. I’d never had much time for it myself;
but watching Philocrates hurling second-hand food with tremendous force into the
Aegean, the Straits of Euboea, the Gulf of Pasagae and the Thracian Sea, I found
myself reconsidering my position on the issue. It was fairly obvious that
Phiocrates had already chucked up every morsel of food he’d ever eaten in his
life before we were even clear of Cape Sunium , so everything he vomited after
that must have been stuff he’d eaten in previous incarnations.
Of my other co-ambassadors, Demosthenes and Aeschines disagreed so completely
and so violently that I couldn’t face asking either of them for fear of starting
off a war that’d have made the Olynthus campaign seem like a polite difference
of opinion by comparison; and none of the others seemed all that better-informed
than I was. So much, then, for the series of introductory lectures on the
present crisis, Macedonian culture and heritage and King Philip’s bargaining
style. However, as one of my colleagues pointed out, it doesn’t require a
significant amount of preparation or background knowledge to squeal for mercy,
so it didn’t really make much odds.
Obviously, Phryzeutzis, you’ve never seen a ship in your life, and I expect
you’re pulling all sorts of muscles in your imagination just trying to picture
in your mind what one of these extraordinary contraptions looks like. Try this.
Imagine a fairly deep, round clay bowl that’s still wet from the wheel; but you
don’t know that, so you pick it up and your fingers cave in two of the sides,
leaving you with something that looks a bit like a pear split longwise. Sticking
up out of the middle is the trunk of a tall tree, stripped of its branches. Tied
to the top of this tree and at right-angles to it is another, smaller beam of
wood, from which hangs the linen bag used to catch the wind — that’s the sail.
Front and back there’s two posts sticking up, like the head and tail of a goat;
on either side of the goat’s tail, there are two broad wooden planks on the end
of poles, which trail in the water. The helmsman — the man who tries to make the
boat go where it’s supposed to be going — drags on these planks to make the boat
change direction (try holding your hand out flat, thumb upwards; then plunge it
into water and push sideways. You’ll feel your hand shoving water out of the
way, but not immediately. Pushing against the water is how you steer the ship).
That’s it, basically. The whole thing is made out of wooden planks, fitted
together closely enough to be watertight; it’s horribly fragile, and when the
wind blows on the sea and stirs it up, the boat is tossed up and down, it can
turn over or get swamped, or it can be blown against a rock, which’ll smash it
to pieces. Imagine trying to float down the river inside an upturned parasol,
and you’ll get the basic idea.
No wonder, then, that sailors — people who make their living crossing the world
in these things — are a nervous bunch, prone to irrational fears and
superstitions. All Greeks are superstitious to some extent, but sailors are
quite obsessive about it, and in particular they pay great attention to dreams,
bad language and sneezing. Sneeze when you’re walking up the gangplank and
there’s a good chance they’ll refuse to get on board — unless, of course, your
head happens to be facing to the right at the time, in which case they take it
as a good omen. Sailors are as foul-mouthed as the next man when they’re on
land, but once the ship is under way they’ll throw you over the side if you say
‘Damn!’ or ‘To the crows with you’. (A crow in the rigging, by the way, is
recognised as the worst omen of all, so if someone sees a black shape drifting
through the air towards the ship, everybody stops what they’re doing and crowds
on to the deck, stamping and whistling and throwing nuts and handfuls of olives
and anything else that happens to come to hand.) But it’s dreams above all that
they’re interested in. There you are, sleeping peacefully on the deck just as
the sun’s about to come up, and some clown of a sailor comes and digs you in the
ribs with his toe and demands to know what you’ve been dreaming about. I asked
one of the sailors on that voyage to explain to me what all the various dreams
meant; it took him a full hour. I can only remember snippets of it — a goat
means big waves, especially a black goat; a pig means a storm so violent that
your chances of survival are minimal. Owls mean pirates. A dream about seagulls,
on the other hand, also foreshadows a disaster, but of a non-lethal variety —
the ship will probably sink, but nobody will drown. Dreaming about flying on
your back or crossing the sea on foot mean good luck — try to remember how many
times you’ve dreamed of flying on your back, and you’ll begin to appreciate the
fundamental pessimism of your average sailor. Oh, yes, and dancing on board ship
is right out; they’ll chuck you overboard so hard you’ll probably bounce.
I’m only telling you all this because it explains how I came to hear about
Aeschines’ dream. Now, I think I’ve already mentioned that Aeschines was a
professional actor before he found he could make a better living out of
politics; he was a good actor, too, specialising in winsome young girls,
long-winded old crones and messengers reporting bloody murder. I don’t know;
maybe all those years of cramming his mind with all that poetry, all that vivid
and striking imagery, had done something to him. Perhaps he was like that
anyway, which was what prompted him to take up acting in the first place.
Anyway, on the third morning, when we were within sight of the town of Pasagae
(or where Pasagae had until recently been, before Philip played rough games with
it) I overheard him talking to one of the sailors, an incorrigible dream
monitor.
‘Never set eyes on the place in my life,’ he was saying, ‘but I knew it was
/> Pasagae as if I’d lived there since I was a boy. Strange feeling, actually.’
The sailor nodded. ‘And when you saw it just now, was it like what you ‘d seen
in your dream?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Aeschines replied. ‘That is, no, it didn’t look anything like
what we’re looking at now. But that’s because what we’re looking at now is a
heap of fallen walls and ashes.’
I don’t think the sailor liked the way this story was going. ‘Well?’ he said.
‘What happened?’
Aeschines frowned. ‘I’m not sure, really,’ he said. ‘Oh, I can remember the
dream quite clearly, and it seemed to be making perfect sense while I was
having it. Now, though—’
Just then the sailor looked up and caught sight of me; I saw him seeing me, but
by then it was too late to make an unobtrusive exit, which is something that
needs a good deal of notice and forward planning on something as small and
confined as a ship. I should explain that somehow or other, the crew had got
wind of the way I made my living — and, being extremely superstitious, they
believed it wholesale, all the stuff about the little demon who lived in a jar.
‘Euxenus,’ the sailor called out. ‘Come over here. I need you to explain a
dream.’
Obviously he’d forgotten that he’d spent all that time the previous day telling
me how to interpret dreams. Anyway, there was no point in arguing. I fetched the
jar out of my luggage and went over to join them.
‘I was standing in the market square at Pasagae,’ Aeschines said, ‘talking to
some people I apparently knew, when a dog suddenly appeared out of nowhere and
started running in and out of the stalls, pulling them down and killing people.
I could hear the screams. It was awful.’
The sailor had turned a revolting green colour. ‘Go on,’ I said to Aeschines, in
a nice calm voice. ‘This is quite interesting.’
‘Well,’ Aeschines went on, ‘pretty soon the dog had smashed up the whole town
and rounded up all the sheep and it was herding them into a pen — by this point
we were in Pella, except it was also Athens; you’ll just have to take my word on
that, I knew — when a lion jumped out and swatted it over the head, and it fell
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 12
