as it was impossible to be angry withTyrsenius for more than a minute or so, he
never really seemed to take offence no matter what you said to him. ‘I can see
that,’ he said. ‘What I don’t see is the relevance. Here we are on the brink of
what could be a turning-point in our history, and all you can do is babble about
girls.’
I sighed and gave up. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘What do you want me to do?’
At his insistence I invited these peculiar people into my home (Theano took one
startled look at them, grabbed our son and shot out of the house; can’t say I
blame her) and spent the best part of the morning trying to communicate with
their leader, a granite-faced character called Bossus or something like that,
while Tyrsenius twittered round the girl like a wren trying to scare off an
elephant. I’ll say this for the man; he never ever seemed to worry about the
language barrier — I imagine that’s a necessary trait for a trader. It was
patently obvious the girl didn’t understand a word he said to her, but then
again, you didn’t need to be Aristotle to work out what he was after. Whether or
not he was getting anywhere I neither knew nor cared. Bossus, on the other hand,
could just about make himself understood in Greek, something I should have found
suspicious if I’d had my wits about me.
He said that his people lived Far Away (he pointed; apparently they came from
somewhere just left of the sun) and they’d been driven from home by Bad Cold and
they wanted to come and live down here, where it was warmer. The fact that the
region was already heavily settled didn’t seem to bother him (we are Fighting
People; Fighting is Much Honour) and he seemed to regard our neighbours as
decadent and depraved because they’d abandoned the nomadic habits of their
ancestors and taken to staying in one place. Obviously this blanket condemnation
of the settled life didn’t apply to us, because he seemed only too happy to
commit his entire nation to a war of aggression against all the non-nomadic
Scythians in Olbia, but declared that with us he only wanted to live in peace.
Fair enough, I thought, assuming this clown is for real. That, however, didn’t
seem all that likely. For all his vagueness about where Far Away actually was, I
could see no obvious reason why he should have set his heart on this particular
piece of territory to the exclusion of other alternatives that might prove
easier to acquire. The clincher, as far as I was concerned, was that he was
prepared to sit still and natter away at me while not two yards away, a
degenerate Greek was doing his level best to debauch his daughter, and do
nothing about it. Even I knew that this wasn’t the Scythian way, and as soon as
our honoured guests had been induced to shove off back to the guest quarters
Tyrsenius had requisitioned for them (in my name, which I thought was a bit
much), I raised this point.
‘Not the Budini,’ he replied. ‘They’re completely relaxed about that kind of
thing. They believe in open, non-exclusive communal relationships; you know,
like in Plato’s Republic.’
Now, I knew for a fact that the only copy of Plato’s Republic that Tyrsenius was
likely ever to have looked at carefully would have been one wrapped round a
bundle of fish; however, I really couldn’t be bothered to labour the point.
Indeed, the prospect of Tyrsenius being chased round the square by a party of
enraged Scythians with long, sharp knives was, at that moment, rather
attractive. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Well, there you go. When you’ve finished with
these people, please make sure they leave. I don’t mind them, but there’s a lot
of people in town who get very nervous at the sight of Scythians these days.’
He made a sad noise and proceeded to lecture me for several minutes about
openness, trust and the desirability of setting his new friends on the people of
the village like a pack of wild dogs. Eventually, when he’d gone, I put my hat
back on, picked up my mattock and went out to do some work.
After the raid and the events that immediately followed it, there was an
understandable wave of paranoia. People took to going out to the fields in full
armour again, or at the very least with helmet, spear and shield; and although
that didn’t last more than a few days before the sheer impracticality of trying
to fresh out ditches clad head to toe in shining bronze made people revise their
security arrangements, the attitude persisted.
Nearly all the Illyrians had bows and knew how to use them. Greeks, however,
don’t really hold with bows and arrows, preferring to trust in heavy metal and
physical strength. Back home, where you’re never out of sight of your
neighbours, it wouldn’t have been nearly so bad. Here, where we all had so much
land, a man working in the fields was pretty much on his own, and that feeling
of isolation was bad enough at the best of times. With the constant threat of
attack present in everybody’s minds, it began to have a serious effect on our
lives.
It was Agenor the stonemason who first suggested hiring the Budini to guard us,
and I must say I’d have expected better from him. Once he made the suggestion,
it caught on like a brush-fire, and Tyrsenius (who had, incidentally, succeeded
with the girl in the face of all the odds) at once opened negotiations for
setting up a rent-a-guard agency, to be organised by himself, on an
almost-but-not-quite-non-profit basis. I tried to talk them all out of it, but
I’d left it too late. Not long afterwards, bands of boiled-looking men in heavy
wool and felt started drifting into the city, to be marshalled by Tyrsenius and
allocated to a particular household. When not guarding, they lived in a huge
sprawl of tents outside the wall (we had stone walls now in place of the
stockade, and very proud of them we were). Nobody knew how many of them there
were, except presumably my friend Tyrsenius. Nobody cared much, either. It had
all the appearance of a logical and satisfactory arrangement that could carry
on indefinitely.
And after a while, I stopped worrying about it. I’d been expecting to wake up
one night to the sound of rampaging Budini sacking the city and massacring
Greeks in their beds, but so far this hadn’t happened, or if it had they’d been
very quiet and discreet about it. Even I, with my unique talent for looking in
the wrong direction whenever anything worthy of note happens right under my
nose, would have noticed something like that.
My personal guard (the Founders insisted that I had one, though I objected like
hell) was called Azus, though I didn’t find this out until he’d been following
me around for the best part of a year. The most striking thing about him was the
smell — not unpleasant, just very, very noticeable; he smelt of a combination of
smoke, hemp and violets. I’m no dwarf myself, but Azus towered over me like a
mountain looming over a valley, and until the novelty wore off Theano and I
amused ourselves no end exchanging tall-bastard jokes. He didn’t speak Greek and
I didn’t know more than a dozen words of the Budini dialect of Scythian — which
&n
bsp; I doubt whether you’d be able to understand, Phryzeutzis; it’s full of bizarre
archaisms and peculiar dialect words, and the syntax is so complicated it’s a
miracle that young Budini manage to learn to talk before they’re forty. He used
to stand there all day while we were out in the fields, just watching me work;
big broad-bladed spear in one hand, heavily recurved horn-and-sinew composite
bow in the other, with an expression of total detachment on his face, as if it
was all a strange, incomprehensible dream. Finally one day, when I’d been
wrestling with a huge log for half an hour without making any progress beyond
wrenching my back, I lost patience with him; I grabbed him by the arm, led him
across to the log and made frantic gestures, until he carefully laid down his
bow and spear and grabbed the other end of the log. Together we had no trouble
at all shifting it, and when we’d done I smiled and nodded thank you. To my
amazement he smiled back.
The next day I borrowed the young son of one of my neighbours; he’d been
learning Budini for some reason and could interpret for me. Thanks to him I
found out Azus’ name, and learned that he’d been only too delighted to help; it
was horribly boring, he said, standing about all day with nothing to do, and
he’d never been able to understand why these crazy Greeks never allowed them to
lend a hand, even when it was patently necessary.
We got on much better after that; the boy taught me how to say, ‘Help, please,’
and I did the rest in sign language. Gradually — very gradually — I picked up a
little of his language and he learned rather more Greek, until we were able to
hold a sort of conversation, though it was a major effort for both of us, and we
frequently talked for a long time without realising we were completely at cross
purposes. He told me that the reason Bossus had given for leaving the tribe’s
ancestral pastures wasn’t quite the truth; the fact was that he and his small
contingent of followers had been thrown out after a blood-feud had got badly out
of hand, even by Budini standards, and that they’d ended up here not because of
any grand plan of carving out lebensraum for themselves among the effete
plains-dwellers, but because they’d had to come this far to get beyond the reach
of their enemies, who had friends and relations all over the place. Contrary to
what we’d been told, there weren’t any more of them waiting for the call to come
sweeping down from the high pastures; it had taken all Bossus’ skill and
tenacity as a leader of men to keep them together this far.
Above all, Azus said, he wanted to make the point that compared with the
traditional life of the nomad, the life they had here was little short of the
earthly paradise, and in order to have this good a time back home, you had to be
virtuous and honourable all your life and then die. About the only thing we’d
been told that was true, in fact, was what Tyrsenius had told me about the
Budini attitude to personal relationships; and that was because there were so
few adult male Budini (because of the blood-feuds) that more conventional
arrangements would have been pointless and led to the rapid extinction of the
race.
If you’re thinking back to what I told you about the rich Scythian’s plot, and
wondering when the Budini are going to stop pretending to be our friends and
start butchering us in our sleep, I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong end of the
stick. The truth is (though of course we didn’t know this) was that the plan had
gone badly wrong. Sure, he’d arranged for the displaced nomads to ingratiate
themselves with us, specifically using the girl as bait with Tyrsenius; but he
hadn’t anticipated that they’d find their new life with us so entirely agreeable
that they’d forget all about the deal they’d made with him and come over to us.
Maybe I should have suspected something from the way Azus and some of the others
kept harping on about how treacherous and deceitful our settled-Scythian
neighbours were, and how we ought to be constantly on our guard in case of
further sneak attacks; but we all assumed that they were just playing up the
hazards so as to keep their jobs, and paid no great attention.
Meanwhile, to everybody’s amazement, Tyrsenius married the Budini girl, shortly
after the birth of their second daughter. Once they were married he gave up
trying to pronounce her real name (they’d been together two years and he’d never
managed to get it right) and announced that henceforth she’d be answering to
Callixena (which means ‘beautiful foreigner’; for a man so entirely given to
flights of fancy, Tyrsenius had the imagination of a small rock). She didn’t
seem to mind. In fact, she seemed genuinely fond of him in a mildly contemptuous
sort of way, while he calmed down to a remarkable extent and appeared to have
given up falling in love almost entirely; perhaps as a result of the Budini
custom whereby married women wore a razor-sharp two-edged dagger as part of
their everyday dress. Anyway; since I can’t remember what she was really called,
I shall refer to her as Callixena, not that it really matters a damn after all
these years.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Oh, I almost forgot; a year or so after Chaeronea , Philip of Macedon was
murdered.
After the battle, it didn’t take Philip long to break up what little resistance
remained. He awarded himself the title ‘Captain of the Greeks’, a delightfully
nebulous term which suggested that he was merely the temporary head of a
coalition of great and equal partners joined together to accomplish some mighty
purpose. Imagine everyone’s surprise, therefore, when it turned out that he
really did have a mighty purpose in mind.
And purposes don’t come much mightier than the one Philip had selected. For
reasons that better men than I have speculated endlessly about, he’d decided
that the vast and invincible Persian Empire, which extended eastwards from the
Hellespont to the very ends of the earth (to here, in fact), was decadent and
ripe for conquest; furthermore, that he was the man who could do the job.
And, as usual, he was right. By virtue of its very size and the diversity of the
nations that it comprised, the Empire was the next best thing to ungovernable at
the best of times. As soon as one rebellion was put down in one province,
another broke out — the old joke has the Great King starting each day by asking
his chamberlain which provinces he still ruled — and ever since the civil war in
which the celebrated Xenophon took part (you may remember I told you about it a
while back) the King had come to rely more and more on Greek mercenaries rather
than his own levies to do the day-to-day work of a standing army. The logic
behind this was impeccable; he couldn’t trust his own people further than he
could sneeze them out of a blocked nose, but Greek mercenaries were legendary
for their loyalty so long as they got paid, and since they got paid as long as
they were winning, they tended to do a good, professional job.
The key word, of course, is professional. By rights, a Greek heavy infantry army
shouldn
’t stand a chance on Asian soil against Asian cavalry and archers. But
it’s a fact of life that a trained and determined army of professionals will
defeat unwilling amateurs every time, even if they’re outnumbered ten to one and
armed with sticks of celery, because there’s always that moment when the two
sides face each other, and one side weighs the advantages of victory against the
perils of defeat, and realises that war, even if you win, is a mug’s game and no
occupation for a sensible man.
Philip of Macedon (who hired me to teach his son military history) knew all
about this, which was why he spent his life perfecting the Macedonian
professional army. If you want to, you can interpret everything Philip did from
the moment he became King as leading up to the invasion of Persia , and all the
facts will fit that view. He united Greece , he trained and developed a
magnificent army; in his dealings with the Greek cities he conquered he went out
of his way to be nice so as not to alienate them and lose them from the grand
design. And, if he’d lived, I believe he’d have achieved a substantial part of
his objective, maybe even ending up after twenty years or so of war as ruler of
a quarter of Asia.
He never got the chance. Shortly before the expedition was due to set off, he
staged a magnificent wedding for his daughter Cleopatra, who was marrying the
King of Epirus. It turned out to be a long, hard wedding, with days of good
old-fashioned drinking lightly seasoned with mandatory cultural events befitting
the taste and discrimination of the Captain of the Greeks, some of which Philip
even attended. It was at one of these, an athletic contest held in the theatre
at Aegae, that a young guardsman called Pausanias stuck him through the ribcage
with a Celtic-pattern broadsword, rendering him as comprehensively dead as it’s
possible for a man to be in just one lifetime, before running away, tripping
over a trailing vine and falling smack on his nose in front of gods know how
many thousand utterly stunned people.
Pausanias didn’t live very long after that. He certainly didn’t survive long
enough to answer any questions, but that was all right because, apparently, it
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 38
