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Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt

Page 28

by Alexander at the World's End (lit)


  in front of witnesses. We had all this; and we had me.

  And, at the last minute, looking extremely unhappy as her father and two

  brothers shooed her up the gangplank with my son in her arms, we had Theano;

  expensive, ungrateful, hard-done-by Theano, who didn’t want to go and who’d far

  rather have worked herself to death washing clothes by the river.

  Two and a half thousand idiots and one angry girl, and a fair wind for Olbia.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘Excuse me,’ you’re saying, ‘but where’s Olbia?’ You sound sheepish, perhaps

  slightly ashamed that you don’t know where

  Olbia is; but it’s a good question, and one I really ought to have asked rather

  earlier than I did.

  The sad truth is, I thought I knew. I thought Olbia was a natural harbour at the

  bottom edge of the almost-island of Chersonesus*, the roughly rectangular chunk

  that dangles like a spider from the roof of the Black Sea coast at the mouth of

  the Gulf of Maeotis, with a mountain range on one side and the sea on the other;

  an area colonised by Greeks for many years, with a pleasant climate and friendly

  relations with both the neighbouring Greek colonies and the local savages.

  There is indeed such a place; it’s called Heracleia, and we weren’t going there.

  Olbia, by contrast, is lodged in the mouth of the Hypanis river like a strand of

  meat wedged awkwardly between your teeth. It’s got a wonderful natural harbour;

  to the east, there’s a promontory very like a folded thumb and pointing

  forefinger, or a wolf’s head with a very long snout. We weren’t going there,

  either; someone had beaten us to it, a mere three hundred years earlier.

  The place we were actually headed for ** was a little triangular bay nibbled

  into the coastline between Olbia and Tyras, roughly level with the fingernail of

  the pointing forefinger of land I mentioned a

  * The Crimea .

  ** Between Odessa and Mykolayiv in the Ukraine .

  moment ago, which the sub-committee on Names and Public Holidays had, in the

  comfortable shade of a fig-tree in Mieza, resolved to call Philippopolis en

  Beltiste (‘The city of Philip in the best place anywhere’). In practice, we

  didn’t often refer to it as that. To be honest, if you were to ask me what the

  most commonly used name for it was, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell you. Some

  of my fellow Founders actually did insist on calling it

  Philippopolis-and-the-rest, which made them a joy to listen to after they’d had

  a drop to drink. (Try it and you’ll see what I mean.) The Illyrians called it

  something unpronounceable in Illyrian. My friend Tyrsenius (I’ll tell you about

  him later) took to calling it Oudama (‘nowhere’) and the name stuck, at least

  with some of us. This confused the hell out of the Illyrians and the

  Gallippidae, the local natives; in Greek, you see, the part of the word that

  means ‘no’ can be either ou- or me- depending on whether it’s in a principal or

  a subordinate clause and whether the verb is infinitive or subjunctive, which

  meant that we’d find ourselves referring to it as Oudama and Medama in the same

  sentence. The Illyrians firmly believed that there were two colonies being

  founded simultaneously, and needless to say they’d been sent to the crummy one,

  which made them very sad. The Callippidae drew roughly the same conclusion, and

  spent countless thousands of man-hours searching for Medama in the hope of

  striking a better deal with the Medamites for the sale of their wheat and

  barley. In fact there was one bright spark who set himself up as the official

  Medamite com­mercial attaché in Oudama and got a lot of good business that way,

  until we caught him at it and asked him to stop.

  ‘In the best place anywhere’ was an exaggeration, to be sure. But there were

  worse places to be, among them Attica and, for that matter, Macedonia . Don’t

  believe what they tell you about the Black Sea climate, all those horror stories

  about freezing cold winters and roasting summers; it’s a little cooler than

  Greece, but not offensively so. The main difference is in the terrain. It’s

  flat. For an Athenian, used to being surrounded on all sides by rocky mountains,

  it’s a rather dizzy feeling to see land that level or a sky that big. In Attica

  , and nearly all of Greece for that matter, we grow our food in the thin layer

  of dust and dirt that covers the lower slopes of the mountains. Olbia is one

  enormous level, deep-soiled plain, perfectly suited for growing wheat; drop

  crumbs from your breakfast and they’ll take root and grow. Of course, we

  Athenians have known this for years. For every coarse barley loaf eaten in

  Athens , we import six medimni of Black Sea wheat, and in return we palm them

  off with Athenian oil, honey, wine and figs, which we’ve carefully educated them

  to prefer to their own.

  And who are they, I can hear you asking. The simple and unhelpful answer is, the

  Gallippidae. The name is Greek and means ‘sons of fine horses’ (and what that’s

  supposed to mean is another matter entirely). The proper answer is that they’re

  Scythians who’ve packed in the nomadic life, settled down and earned the arts of

  agriculture and getting cheated by Greeks.

  (‘Ah,’ you say, with a smile on your face. ‘Like us.’

  Yes, Phryzeutzis, very much like you. I mean us. like our people here, they’re

  renegade descendants of the horsemen of the steppes, who saw the obvious merit

  in trading a life of mobility, self-reliance, freedom and yoghurt for the

  security of the same little square of dirt and the uncertain charity of Mother

  Demeter— ‘Maybe they got sick of yoghurt,’ you suggest.

  Maybe they did. Maybe they just grew tired of moving on. Quite possibly the urge

  to roam from one set of mountains to the next is the childhood all races and

  nations go through and grow out of, as soon as they come to know better...

  I suggest, here in Sogdiana on the Iaxartes river, a place I never knew existed

  until I wandered here, as far from Attica as it’s possible to get.

  ‘Ah,’ you reply indulgently, ‘but once you got here, you decided to stay.’

  Absolutely. This is clearly the place I’ve been looking for all my life.

  ‘Wherever the hell it is.)

  Very like us, Phryzeutzis; industrious, slow, suspicious, hospitable, ferocious,

  incomprehensible — we Greeks have one word for all of that, barbaros, barbarian,

  a foreigner, someone who when he speaks makes ba ba noises with his mouth

  instead of speaking proper Greek. The Callippidae had become a little bit

  Greekified, in that they lived in houses rather than wagons and dug in the dirt

  rather than milking mares and ewes. They’d even acquired a taste for Greek

  delicatessen and some of our showier consumer goods. But barboroi beyond

  question, now and forever.

  ‘Could be worse,’ my friend Tyrsenius said, as we leaned over the rail and

  stared at it. ‘Definitely, could be worse.’

  Wonderful stuff, optimism. It’s like honey; take the lid off the jar and somehow

  it gets everywhere, clinging to your fingers, smearing on everything you touch.

  Also, too much of it makes you want to be sick.

  ‘Flat,’ I commented.


  ‘And green,’ Tyrsenius added. ‘Except for the yellow bits. That’s corn,

  presumably.’

  ‘Wheat,’ I confirmed.

  We looked at each other.

  ‘This could be a nice place to live,’ he said.

  I nodded. ‘I expect the people who live here’d agree with you.’

  He shrugged. ‘I know these people,’ he said. ‘They aren’t fighters. Warriors

  yes, but not fighters. We’ll get no bother from them.’

  My friendTyrsenius —Tyrsenius the Flamboyantly Wrong, as some­one once dubbed

  him — was the nearest thing we had to a native guide. For years his father had

  made the long trading run from Elba, off the west coast of Italy, to Olbia;

  hugging the coast all the way, starting off with a cargo of Italian pig-iron

  that mutated at every stop he made until it turned into the dried fish he traded

  for wheat on the shores of the Black Sea, ready to be converted into honey in

  Athens, honey to crockery in Corinth, crockery to sheepskins in Illyria,

  sheep-skins to timber in Istria, timber to wine in Apulia, wine to cheese in

  Sicily, cheese to pig-iron on Elba.. . Wizards, they say, can turn one thing

  into another, can even turn base metal into gold if they’re clever enough. My

  friend Tyrsenius, like his father before him, was a true wizard, though. He

  could turn iron into wheat.

  And he knew these people, or people a hundred miles or so further down the coast

  who looked and sounded quite like them; ‘close enough for a public contract’, as

  he used to say. Warriors, not fighters; I liked the sound of that, though I

  wasn’t quite sure I understood what it meant. Maybe they’d just kill us once and

  go away.

  ‘You see,’ he went on, ‘they won’t be expecting us to stick around. They know

  about Greeks here, you see. Greeks arrive on ships, they buy stuff, they sell

  stuff, they go. Sometimes they hang about waiting for the winds to change,

  sometimes they’ll even build a city as a base for future operations, but sooner

  or later they push off, they don’t go out into the fields and get their hands

  dirty. They’ll be delighted we’ve come, just you wait and see.’

  I shrugged. I had grave misgivings. I also had a thousand Illyrian mercenary

  soldiers, whose spears laid all low before them and (further or in the

  alternative) whose deaths in glorious battle wouldn’t draw too many tears from

  King Philip’s one good eye if the worst came to the worst. I clearly had nothing

  to worry about. Maybe they’d all want Agenor to carve their portraits.

  ‘How long before landfall?’ I asked.

  Tyrsenius grinned. ‘You’re learning the technical seafaring terms, I see. Not

  long.’

  ‘Not long,’ I repeated. ‘That’s another technical seafaring term, is

  He nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘It means I don’t know exactly, but not

  long.’

  In fact, a contrary wind kept us hanging about for what seemed like for ever;

  during which time someone spotted our sail and scamp­ered back to the village to

  raise the alarm. The reception committee we found assembled on the beach when we

  finally came ashore didn’t look nearly as delighted at our coming as I’d hoped

  or Tyrsenius had promised.

  ‘They’re just shy, that’s all,’ my friend Tyrsenius whispered to me, as the

  golden Olbian sun flashed off a scimitar-blade. ‘Once they’ve gone through the

  motions, a little show of hostility just for form’s sake, we’ll all get on like

  a house on fire.’

  Not the most comforting of images. Marsamleptes, the Captain-General of the

  Illyrians, was making grumbling noises as our keel hit the sand. He was probably

  trying to tell me something or ask me a question, but apparently he still hadn’t

  quite grasped the fact that I couldn’t speak Illyrian. He was probably telling

  me that his boys would eat them alive; that or we didn’t stand a chance. One of

  the two was always a fair bet with Marsamleptes, a straightforward man who

  tended to chew the ends of his moustache at moments of great stress.

  Such as this.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘here we go. No sudden movements, anyone.’

  It feels strange, describing to an Eastern Scythian (that’s you, Phryzeutzis)

  what it felt like for the Athenian leader of a largely Illyrian expedition to

  come face to face for the first time with a Western Scythian. I’m not sure which

  of us is the funny foreigner, and which of us is Us. The situation at the time

  was further confused by the fact that, as an Athenian, I was quite used to

  seeing Western Scythians , but in a less than helpful context.

  The City of Athens , you see, has for quite some time now used Scythian slaves

  as policemen. Sorry, you don’t know what that word means; it means men paid by

  the state to keep order and catch and punish people who break the laws (or at

  least, that’s the theory). We had to use foreign slaves for the job because no

  self-respecting Greek, let alone Athenian, would dream of doing a job that

  involved exer­cising practically unlimited power over his fellow citizens. Quite

  right, too. Ask yourself; what kind of man would you get volunteering for a job

  like that? Men who want that kind of power are by definition the last people

  you’d allow to have it.

  So; we imported barbarian slaves, choosing Scythians because they’re quick at

  learning our language, skilled with the bow and arrow— which is why in Athens we

  just called them ‘archers’ — and (because of their entirely alien views on what

  constitutes wealth and happi­ness) almost impossible to bribe. They did the job

  well, by and large, but in spite of that — maybe because of it — you’d be hard

  put to find a Greek with a good word to say about them, or about Scythians in

  general. Now, I pride myself on being the sort of man who as a general rule

  isn’t particularly bothered about the colour of people’s skins or hair or eyes,

  as witness the fact that I took an almost im­mediate liking to the

  not-quite-Greek Macedonians. But a Scythian, with those distinctive cheek-bones

  and dark intense eyes — I can’t help getting the shivers sometimes when I look

  at them, and a sixty-year-old memory yells at me from the back room of my mind,

  ‘Run for it, here come the archers!’

  As if that wasn’t enough to contend with, I also had my friend Tyrsenius’

  last-minute confession about the role I’d assigned him as chief interpreter.

  ‘Of course I speak the language,’ he told me when I asked. ‘Not absolutely

  fluently, of course,’ he added. ‘I mean, from listening tome you wouldn’t

  necessarily assume I was Scythian by birth or whatever, but I can make myself

  understood, most of the time.’

  Of the dialect of this particular region, it turned out, he knew about five

  phrases; things like ‘Where are we?’ and ‘Which way is the sea?’ These were, it

  goes without saying, useless questions to ask, because he had no chance

  whatsoever of understanding a single word of the reply.

  In the event, it wasn’t relevant. The chief spokesman spoke excellent Attic

  Greek —‘— As a result,’ he assured me, ‘of spending twenty years in Athens as an

  archer, before I saved up e
nough to buy myself out and come home.’ He looked at

  me for a long time without speaking, and behind him his escort of tall,

  solemn-faced warriors allowed their fingers to creep forward and touch the

  strings of their bows. It was a shall-I-eat-him-now-or-save-him-for-later look,

  and even thinking about it all this time later still bothers me some.

  ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘It’s a gift I have, I never forget a face.’

  That startled me, for sure. ‘How can you know me?’ I replied. ‘We only just

  met.’

  He shook his head. ‘Every face I’ve ever encountered,’ he went on, tapping his

  forehead, ‘stored away somewhere, in here. And besides,’ he added unpleasantly,

  ‘even if I had a rotten memory I’d still remember you.’

  I looked at him again; and, though the face was still entirely unfamiliar, I

  noticed that he did have a significantly crooked nose and a gap in his front

  teeth. A memory dropped into place.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  (It was a long time ago. I was young, not used to drinking undiluted wine on an

  empty stomach. And it wasn’t just me; in fact, I didn’t really participate, I

  was just tagging along with the rest of them and happened to be the one that got

  caught— You want to hear the story, don’t you? Oh, all right. Like I said, I was

  little more than a kid at the time, and we’d been at a fairly boozy party. When

  it finally wound up, we roamed around the streets for a while, singing

  abominably and breaking up minor works of civic art, the way one does at that

  age, until we found ourselves outside the house of some girl that one of us

  fancied. So we started singing serenades, according to the time-honoured

  tradition; and when the archers showed up to shoo us off, we made a bit of a

  fight of it, just to prove we were free-born Athenians who don’t take kindly to

  being pushed around by foreign slaves. . . And one of us, can’t remember a thing

  about him, got a little bit carried away and clubbed one of the archers across

  the face with the arm off a statue that had got in our way earlier. There was a

  loud crunch and ever so much blood, and the man went face down; we were sure

  we’d killed him. At that point, my fellow revellers did the sensible thing and

 

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