swooping set of movements that was just like every snake you ever saw in every
respect apart from actual motion, if you see what I mean; he managed to convey
everything there is to notice about a snake without once doing anything that
imitated how a real snake acts. It was bizarre and no end impressive; and he
concluded it by cartwheeling across the dancing-floor, vaulting to his feet
right in front of me, reaching down and pulling a large and bad-tempered looking
snake of indeterminate species apparently out of the fold of my gown. He held
this thing up for a moment in both hands — you could see it was a real live one
by the way its tongue kept flicking in and out — then let it curl round his arm
and slither up into his sleeve, at which point he pulled off his tunic and threw
it in the air, and no snake fell out. Indeed, when he brought the tunic to me
there was no sign of any snake, either inside the tunic or wrapped round Boizas
(and since he was wearing nothing but a very short kilt there was nowhere he
could have hidden it). Then he bowed and danced away, and as I raised my hands
to join in the applause, I found that same snake sitting in my lap, where Boizas
had found it in the first place.
Oh hell, I thought; then, extremely slowly and carefully, I grabbed the snake
firmly below the head, the way I’d seen it done, lowered it into a large pottery
jug and slapped the lid on as fast as I could. I found out afterwards that it
was — well, I can’t remember what the Illyrians said its name was, but it’s so
deadly poisonous that even a tiny smear of the stuff on an open scratch or cut
would kill you before you can count to ten.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
T alking of remarkable people, Phryzeutzis; I once knew a man who had this
amazing, astounding, reality-distorting ability to lose hats. He was bald as an
egg, which didn’t help matters; he had to wear a hat, because otherwise there’d
have been nothing between the fury of the Attic sun at noon and his poor,
squidgy brains except a thin layer of bone. But hats simply left him; they’d
blow away in sudden gusts of wind, or snag in the low branches of trees, or slip
noiselessly past his eyebrows when he was bending over to peer down a well. If
all else failed they subtly attached themselves to whoever he happened to be
with; you’d be sitting chatting to him under a tree, and then you’d look up at
the sun and see how late it was getting, scramble to your feet (reaching
instinctively for your hat as you did so) and hurry back to work before your
goats had a chance to stray into someone else’s pasture. Later on, when it was
time to go home, you’d notice something was strange; you’d reach up to pat the
top of your head, and there a hat would be, though you knew for a certainty you
left the house that morning without one. I’m not saying that hats hated this
unfortunate man, or feared him, or anything like that. In the short space of
time his hats spent with him, I seem to recall he treated them kindly. But after
a day or so, they all seem to have come to the conclusion that it was time to
move on, and they left him.
With him, hats; with me, women. Not, perhaps, to quite the same extent; I don’t
drop them down wells or carelessly leave them behind when I visit other people’s
houses. But sooner or later there comes a time when I look round to say
something to them and there they aren’t. No doubt they have their reasons; and
if I could understand what those reasons were, I would understand women far
better than I do, and maybe they wouldn’t leave.
What I’m trying to say is that Theano left me. As a historian, I have a duty to
record all the facts; she became very friendly with a Syracusan cheese merchant,
a month or so after the failed attack on the Scythian village, and when he left,
so did she. It’s a logical assumption that they left together, although I can’t
put that down as a fact since I didn’t witness it myself. He was tall and very
fat, this merchant; older than me, bald (like the hat-man) and with an unusually
curly beard. I get the impression, though, that what really attracted her to him
was the fact that he wasn’t me.
Well, it wasn’t quite the elopement of Helen of Troy, and I’d be lying to you if
I pretended that I was terribly upset about it. But I was still feeling no pain
after the death of my son Eupolis; and besides, our marriage had been a mistake
from the very beginning. One aspect of the matter that does puzzle me even now
is the timing of it all; I mean, one moment she was sobbing herself to sleep
over the death of her only child, and the next she was swept up by an
overwhelming passion for a tubby, bald-headed cheese vendor with skin as pale
and flaky as the plaster rind of his wares. Tyrsenius reckoned that the role of
the cheese man in all this was simply as a provider of transport; since she
couldn’t very well ask me for the price of a passage out of Olbia, she had to
make what arrangements she could and pay her fare with what she had at her
disposal. Maybe; I don’t know, and I’m not much bothered. All my life I’ve found
it too much of an effort to take an interest in things I know I don’t
understand.
The Thracians, very sensibly, never came back; but the Budini we’d hired for the
attack stayed on, first as soldiers, then as settlers. They didn’t ask for land,
of course; which was just as well, since the Founders would never have let them
have any. They didn’t even admit that they intended to stay permanently. They
just stayed, and made their living as hired labourers, a commodity much in
demand. For all our noble professions that we had come to Olbia to work with our
own hands, we were getting a little bit jaded after twelve years of high-minded
nobility. It was nice to be able to watch someone else being uplifted by manual
labour for a change, especially from under a shady tree with a cup of wine in
one’s hand.
I suppose about six months must have passed; six or seven, since the abortive
raid. I remember that we heard the news of the great battle between Alexander
and the Persian King at the river Granicus, where the Macedonian heavy infantry
with their absurdly long pikes and Alexander’s heavy cavalry between them
humiliated the Persian army, and where Alexander, fighting always in the front
rank, twice breaking his spear, his horse shot dead under him, somehow failed to
get himself killed in spite of everything. He was Achilles that day for sure,
except for the happy ending; and when he raised his trophy of captured armour
and weapons, I doubt whether he had to borrow swords and lances from his own men
to get it to a respectable height.
Maybe it was hearing about the battle, I don’t know; but there was a general
feeling among us all that we should finish what we’d started with our
neighbours, before the first anniversary of our first vintage came round with
our dead still not yet made comfortable. The Illyrians in particular were all
for taking some strong action; so too, unaccountably, were the Budini, though it
may just have been a way of dealing with the fact that they’d been stuck in one
place for so long. Most curiously, our fire-breathing Founders weren’t nearly so
enthusiastic as they had been. Prodromus actually tried to talk me out of
organising an attack; he said that it would be much better to wait until we’d
got the harvest in, because otherwise we’d be vulnerable to reprisals when we
were out working in the fields. I told him he’d missed the point; that if we did
a proper job this time, there wouldn’t be anybody to make any such reprisals,
and so the consideration wasn’t valid. He didn’t like the sound of that very
much, and accused me of being bloodthirsty and blinded by my personal tragedies
to the moral implications of what I was proposing. I told him to go stuff his
head up something dark and wet, and on that note we parted.
Well, the cattle-raid stunt wouldn’t work again, so we had to think of something
else. Marsamleptes pointed out that we’d done best when the enemy had tried to
press home a charge against our heavy infantry; if we could provoke them into
making the same mistake twice, there was no reason why we shouldn’t take them on
in the open field, rather than resorting to some over-elaborate stratagem.
My first inclination was to tell Marsamleptes to take a cold bath and think
again; but then I thought of Alexander and the Granicus battle. Once you pared
away all the Homeric stuff, what you were left with was a disputed
river-crossing. The Persian infantry took no part in the battle; it was their
cavalry who lined up on the other side of the river and tried to stop Alexander
from struggling through the ford. In other words, Alexander had kidded the
Persians into using their cavalry as infantry; and when it comes to infantry
fighting, a man sitting on a horse is at a significant disadvantage.
So, I thought; the greatest threat to us was the speed and manoeuvrability of
the war-band and their ability to shoot their bows from the saddle. Trick them
into standing still, and you deprived them of their advantage, while tilting the
balance in favour of our well-drilled, disciplined heavy infantry. All that was
needed, I realised, was a suitable river-crossing; and as luck would have it, I
knew the very place.
It was a hot day. You know what it’s like when you’ve had to wake up earlier
than you’d have liked, and as soon as you open your eyes the brightness of the
sun makes you wince. I overslept, like a fool, and by the time I came to it was
well past dawn. Of course, nobody had thought to come and wake me up.
By the time I’d struggled into my armour and stumbled out into the bright
sunshine, I had a blinding headache, which didn’t go well with the upset stomach
I’d failed to shake off by not eating anything the day before. Anything less
than a battle or harvest and I’d have stayed in bed, but an
oecist-cum-commander-in-chief doesn’t have that option, no matter how dodgy his
tummy might be.
By the look of it, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t really feel in the mood for
mortal combat that day. We marched slowly, coughing and grumbling as we breathed
in the dust we were kicking up into a towering cloud. In my capacity as general,
however, I didn’t mind the dust-cloud. In fact, I was counting on it to attract
their attention and get them to come trotting out to meet us. Timing, of course,
was important. If we wanted to fight them in the place we’d chosen, it was
fairly crucial that we got to the river first. If the enemy crossed over before
we arrived, we’d be facing another kind of battle entirely, and one I didn’t
really want to be involved in.
But somehow we reached the ford, and in reasonable order too.We didn’t have to
wait very long before the enemy cavalry put in their appearance; and, just as
I’d wanted them to, they spread out along their side of the river and waited to
see what we had in mind.
This was the point during the battle of the Granicus at which Alexander launched
his cavalry charge, to hold off the enemy while his heavy infantry waddled
across the ford. Characteristically of Alexander’s military planning, it was a
bold, innovative and highly successful manoeuvre, and nobody could ever deny
that it worked like a charm —
— Which is why we were all at a loss to know why it didn’t work nearly so well
for us. The situation, after all, was more or less identical
— river, cavalry on one side, heavy infantry on the other; it was as if we’d
taken the ingredients for honey-cakes, mixed them together in the prescribed
manner, and ended up with cheesecake.
I remember the stone in my boot, which I hadn’t had a chance to get rid of all
the way from the city to the ford. I remember how the headache made it such an
effort to think at all, let alone try to revise my plan in mid-flow. I remember
thinking, right in the middle of the fighting, that unless I managed to control
my irregular bowel movements until the battle was over and I could snatch a few
moments behind a bush somewhere, it was all going to be terribly sordid and
embarrassing. I clearly recall the high curtain of water thrown up by the hooves
of the Budini’s horses as they clattered into the ford at a brisk, jarring trot.
I have a whole library of pictures in my mind from that battle, dozens of little
scenes and observations, all as self-contained as the black and red pictures on
the sides of fancy pottery. Quite a few of them I’d be delighted to get rid of,
such as the sight of the entire front rank of our cavalry charge sliding dead
off their horses into the water as the Scythians poured a volley of arrows into
our ranks from about fifteen yards away. Those horses; I can see them clearly,
trotting up the opposite bank of the river, as if they knew that without the
burden of men on their backs they were safe, they were welcome as being valuable
commodities, not just martial scrap to be heaped up on a trophy. Of course, I’m
proud to recall how our line of spear-points hardly wavered as the infantry line
crossed the river, though that image isn’t as sharp as the others. What I do
remember is how wet the water was when we knelt down in the river, taking
shelter behind our shields from the next volley of arrows. I can feel the claggy
wet cloth of my kilt against my skin, and the singularly disagreeable sensation
of water running down the inside of my legs as I stood up afterwards. I can
remember the colour of the water; briefly muddy with kicked-up silt and the
blood of the dead Budini.
These images are all so sharp and immediate, in fact, that it amazes me that
I’ve never come across them or others like them in the great battle-scenes in
Homer, which are supposedly about men fighting each other. It makes me wonder;
did Alexander get wet and shivery as he crossed the Granicus; or did the water
somehow fail to soak into whatever he was wearing that day? Perhaps kings and
heroes have a special dispensation that lets them off getting wet when they
fight battles in the beds of shallow rivers. I don’t know; and although over the
years I’ve had plenty of opportunities to ask people who were in a position to
analyse what happened and what went wrong, I’ve never quite been able to deal
/>
with it.
Most curious of all is that when I’ve talked about that battle to other people
who were there, they claim to have noticed an almost completely different set of
observations and impressions, as if they’d been at a different battle in the
same place on the same day. There can’t have been another battle, can there? I’m
sure I’d have noticed, and so, I assume, would they, unless it started half an
hour after I’d gone home. But they reckoned they saw me there, and most of them
were far too unimaginative to have made up something like that.
We were about halfway across the river when they fell back, pulling their
horses’ heads round and cantering off a hundred yards or so towards their
village. They were conceding the crossing to us. They weren’t meant to do that.
The whole idea was that they were meant to see that we’d made a tactical error —
trying to cross an awkward obstacle in the face of the enemy, it’s suicide, ask
any general — and that they should immediately press home their advantage before
we had a chance to recover, let alone get across the damn river. This would mean
riding down onto the riverbed to fight us, or at least holding their bank
against us, which from our point of view would mean they’d lose all their
advantages as cavalry and accordingly succumb to our superior infantry, just the
way it had happened at the Granicus.
But they didn’t. I can only assume they were too stupid to see the obvious
advantage, or too cowardly to dare to seize the moment. Instead, they waited
till we’d pulled ourselves out of the water and started shooting at us again.
The fools.
Fortunately, we were ready for them, thanks to all those hours of foot drill. We
dropped down on one knee, lifted our shields, same as before; they scratched and
dented a lot of expensive metalwork, but they didn’t kill anybody. After three
or so volleys they stopped, worried about running short of arrows. We got up and
started to advance. They let us come on seventy-five yards or so, then rode off
another hundred yards and started shooting again. We knelt, waited, got up,
advanced, a hundred or so yards at a time. It was slow and painful stuff, not to
mention embarrassing — by rights, we should have killed them all by now, whereas
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 44
