your father set me free.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘You were going to go into the rope-making business.’
‘I did,’ he said, nodding. ‘Worked for fifteen years in a ropewalk in Piraeus ,
till I saved up enough to start up on my own. I was doing all right, too.’
I waited for a moment, then said, ‘What happened?’
‘There was a fire,’ he said. ‘My wife, my boy, the two lads I had working with
me, the house, all the stock and materials — it’s tricky stuff, rope. Actually,
it’s the tar we put on it to keep it from rotting. One spark and the next thing
you know—’ He smiled; or at least his lips pressed together and widened, and his
body shook a little. ‘They fished me out, but they shouldn’t have bothered. It’s
nothing but a waste of good food keeping me alive now.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘So why are you here?’
He shrugged. ‘Well, nobody was going to keep me back in Piraeus , I’d have
starved. But I thought, the boys back at the farm, they might look after me for
old times’ sake. Of course, when I got here I heard, they’re all. . . Except
Master Eudemus, and he’s no better off than I am really. He lost an eye, you
know, in the battle.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘That reminds me; do you happen to know where he is?’
Syrus turned his head towards me. ‘Didn’t you know? He — I’m sorry, Euxenus,
he’s gone too. Some kind of illness, I never heard any more.’
I sighed. ‘That’s it, then,’ I said. ‘It looks like it’s just me. And you,’ I
added. ‘So you got here and you found they were all dead. What then?’
‘Your cousin, Philocarpus; he let me sleep in the barn and eat with the hired
help. That was kind of him, he didn’t need to do anything like that. But he only
laughed and said I went with the land, like some old tree-trunk it’s easier to
plough round than dig out.Then he came and told me he was having to move on back
to Priene, because you’d won your case. He didn’t make it sound like I could go
with him, so I stayed here.’
I thought for a moment. ‘Is there anything at all you can do?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘I’ll be straight with you, Euxenus, there isn’t much.’ He lifted
his hands; I could see the scar tissue from the burns even in that poor light.
‘I can grind, and turn the olive-press, if someone else fills the hopper. That’s
about it.’
‘I see. Fine inheritance you turned out to be.’ I opened the flap of my satchel
and pulled out a small, half-empty jar of rough wine that had been keeping me
company as I walked out from the City. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘help yourself.’ He found
the neck with his hands and drank deeply, spilling wine down his chin. ‘Just you
and me,’ I repeated. ‘And I’ve come ever such a long way to get here.’
He frowned. ‘I don’t follow,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I replied. ‘Look, you can carry on dossing down in the
barn, and I’ll see you don’t starve. What do you do all day?’
‘Not a lot I can do,’ he said. ‘I sit, mostly.’
‘Sounds pretty boring.’
‘It is,’ he said. ‘But there’s worse things than boring. Thank you, Euxenus.’
‘Forget it,’ I replied. ‘Doesn’t sound like I’m doing you any favours, at that.’
He smiled again. ‘Remains to be seen, doesn’t it?’ he said.
And that my young friend, is how, after a lifetime of wandering and striving
after achievement, I finally attained what had always been my heart’s desire,
the life and dignity of an Athenian gentleman. Curious; if I’d known that all I
had to do was manage to reach the age of forty-one without dying, I’d have
stayed at home and kept myself amused with pottering around the market square,
telling lies for money, rather than educating the sons of kings or founding
cities, and maybe an awful lot of people would still be alive today; Scythians,
Illyrians, Greeks... Not to mention a fair number of Persians, Medes, Bactrians,
Cappadocians, Armenians, Gedrosians, Drangianae, Fish-eating Ethiopians (so
called to distinguish them from the other Ethiopians, who live in Africa),
Arians, Massagetae, Egyptians and Indians whose deaths are probably partly my
fault as well. I remember hearing once about some savage king of somewhere or
other who had a road running the length of his empire paved with the skulls of
his enemies. I can go one better than that. I travelled from Pallene to Pallene
by way of Macedon and Olbia, walking a road paved with the dead bodies of my
family and friends.
‘Self-pity, Euxenus,’ you’re muttering at me, Phryzeutzis, as you smile the
patronising smile of the tolerant young. ‘You’re exaggerating for effect again.
That’s not the way to write history.’
I won’t argue with you; thirty years ago, now, and you’d have had a real
dialectic fight on your hands, but these days the sound of my own voice raised
in debate simply makes me feel tired. So I’ll concede the point, if it makes you
feel any better. Anyway, I don’t need to use any philosopher’s tricks to make my
point. Picture me and Syrus, sitting opposite each other in the empty house in
Pallene; that’ll be far more eloquent than I ever was, even when I was young and
fiery.
So we won’t overplay the melodrama. During the day I didn’t crouch in the ashes
like a heroine out of Euripides; I went out into the fields — my fields — and I
worked, bloody hard. For a while I was an inspiration to my neighbours. ‘Up
before dawn,’ their wives would tell them, ‘and off with the team or the
mattock, never comes home till dark, and he’s got that place looking as good as
it was in his father’s day, all on his own. Why can’t you be more like Euxenus?’
And yet, in spite of that, they were still prepared to talk to me. They wanted
to hear all my fabulous tales of far away, about King Philip’s court and the
boyhood of Alexander (‘Is it true that when he was just a baby, he strangled two
snakes in his cot?’), about desperate battles against the cannibal Scythians,
and of course my opinion about the latest news from the East. ‘We heard
Alexander’s reached Pasargadae ,’ they’d say to me, ‘where’s that?’ Whereupon
I’d smile knowingly and reply that they didn’t want to go believing everything
they heard (which is good advice at all times, though as a matter of fact
Alexander had indeed reached Pasargadae, wherever the hell that is, and had
turned northeast towards Ecbatana). That would impress them no end, though I
don’t imagine they had a clue why they found it impressive, and maybe they’d
even buy me another drink.
In short, I became a prosperous and well-respected citizen; you might almost say
a model citizen, the sort of person you’d want living in your perfect society. I
got the vineyards back into shape, put some heart into the soil by ploughing
five times a year and growing beans in the off year; I repaired my walls and
trellises, pruned back my trees, shored up my terraces, interplanted barley
between my rows of olive trees so that not a square yard of good soil went idle.
I saved up and bought a couple of slaves, good, strong mi
ddle-aged men who
worked long hours silently and never gave me any bother. I was as near as you’ll
ever get, in fact, to the Good Farmer, that enigmatic character you read about
in the books on good husbandry that people like Aristotle are so fond of
writing; ‘the good farmer,’ they say, ‘takes the trouble to sow vetch and lupins
on the fallow, both to put heart into the soil and provide winter fodder for his
livestock.’ When I was young I used to picture this paragon of virtue, trying to
imagine the expression on his face as he carefully lifts a crumb of soil to his
tongue on the tip of his little finger, to ascertain whether it’s too sour for
growing wheat, or his quiet smile of satisfaction as he inspects the flourishing
shoots he’s grafted onto his vines to boost their productivity. But I never
quite managed to get a fix on him until one day I was looking something up in
one of those damned manuals, and realised, with rather mixed feelings, that he
was me.
Now, they’re all well and good, those books, but they never tell you enough.
They don’t tell you what this good farmer does the rest of the time; at night,
when he’s finished repairing broken tool-handles by wrapping them with saturated
rawhide or plaiting himself a useful rope out of the loose hairs he’s saved off
the curry-comb; when it’s late and the house is empty, and he sits alone in the
dark instead of going to bed. On reflection, though, that situation wouldn’t
arise for the good farmer, because he married a good wife in chapter three
(industrious, good at spinning and weaving, capable of helping with field work
in the busy season, not inclined to drink or gossiping with other women) and
their union was blessed in chapter five by the birth
of three strong, healthy sons (four is too many, placing too much strain on the
farm’s resources; two isn’t enough, because one of them may die young and leave
the farm short of manpower), who will presumably inherit come chapter
twenty-nine, when the good farmer dies, surrounded by family and friends, with a
finger stuck in the book to mark the place in case he needs to refer to it for
instructions before the end finally comes. Maybe I wasn’t the good farmer after
all; or maybe he never actually existed. You know, the more I read, the more
sceptical I get. I never met the man who farms like the good farmer, or the
soldier who fights like Achilles or the heroes in Homer, or the citizen who
participates in the ideal society, or even the great historical personage who
bore any resemblance to the description in a book of history; even, I hasten to
add, this book of history, as written by me.
We finally made a start on patching up that old barn. The incentive was a freak
rainstorm — we get them every ten years or so — which washed the last of the
thatch off the roof and nearly drowned old Syrus and my two slaves. Now, the
Good Farmer naturally takes care of his slaves; they are, after all, his most
valuable perishable asset, and if they die of pneumonia or even if they miss
work for a week or so because they’re ill, it’s a dead loss. Accordingly, he
makes sure that their quarters are dry and warm, and that they’re adequately fed
and clothed. You’ll find specifications for the ideal slave rations in those
excellent books, the perfect balance of nutrition and economy; an ideal to
which, I confess, I never aspired. They knew where the grain-store was, and they
helped themselves. I suspect that if I’d taken the trouble to follow the ideal,
I’d have spent more on fancy padlocks and Molossian watchdogs to keep them from
pilfering than I’d ever have saved on barley, cheese and figs.
The stones were mostly still where they’d fallen; we’d used a few over the years
to patch up walls, but not many. All we had to do was figure out how they fitted
together and put them back. Simple.
In theory. It’s a basic rule of nature that putting something back together is
always a hundred times harder than taking it apart; as witness that barn. It was
so easy to bring it down that the wind and weather managed it without human
assistance. If I’d thought of it, I could have hired a Thessalian witch to catch
the wind in a bag and ask it if it remembered how the stones fitted. But I
didn’t; I tried to figure it out for myself, and as a result arrived at Euxenus’
Law of applied geometry, which states that just because things fitted together
once, it doesn’t follow that they’ll fit that way again. It’s a good law, that,
and I think you’ll agree if you’ve been paying attention to this story that it
doesn’t just apply to dry-stone walling.
After two frustrating days of skinned knuckles, wrenched backs and foul tempers,
we decided to adopt a more radical approach, involving cold chisels and big
hammers. I borrowed the necessary tools from my neighbours and we set to work,
trimming and shaping the stones to make them fit. Although I hadn’t actually
done any masonry work myself, I’d stood and watched Agenor a score of times over
the years, and he always made it look easy. Without scribing a line or taking
measurements he’d simply tap-tap a couple of times with the chisel, then give
one sharp, hard tap and split off the irregular chunk of stone, leaving a
smooth, flat face that would lie nicely flush against its neighbour. The waste
material came away like rust flaking off an iron ploughshare; the desired shape
was already in the stone, and all he had to do was strike off the encumbrances.
He never swung the hammer in great double-handed sweeps; just those little
woodpecker taps up and down a convenient fault-line. Definitely the way to go;
nothing to it.
For some reason it didn’t work that way when we tried it. Either we got nowhere,
scarcely even marking the stone, or else it exploded under the hammer into a
shower of razor-sharp fragments, like the results of the technique they use in
the quarries when they heat the rock with bellows and a brazier, then throw
vinegar on it to make it shatter. Unfortunately for all of us, this total lack
of progress annoyed me so much that I resolved to persevere and succeed at all
costs. Match the intransigence of stone, I said to myself, against the infinite
flexibility of the human mind, and eventually you’ll get a row of neatly dressed
masonry blocks, together with the immeasurable satisfaction of knowing you’ve
won. True, my philosopher’s brain had proved itself not to be entirely up to the
task of building the ideal city, but a simple thing like chipping out a few
blocks of stone, something that an unlettered and uneducated man like Agenor
could do so easily, ought to be well within my capabilities.
‘Keep at it,’ I commanded. ‘And keep your mind on what you’re doing.’
They looked at me, wiped sweat ostentatiously from their foreheads, and renewed
their assault on the stone. They may possibly even have lost their tempers just
a little, or perhaps they were playing the game we all play when we’ve got a
tedious job to do that involves hitting or slashing, and imagined that the rock
was me; in any event, the chips started flying in all directions, and I, being a
; prudent man as well as a philosopher, muttered something about measuring up and
retired to a safe distance.
I was fooling about with a measuring rod when I heard one of the slaves —
Sclerus, his name was, or at least that was the name I’d given him; he was a
Celt, from Galatia, and what they call themselves is nobody’s business but their
own — yelp loudly enough to make me drop my rod, and then started swearing in
Galatian.
‘Now what?’ I said.
‘Got something in my eye,’ he replied.
I looked round, and saw that he was crouched on the ground with his hands over
his face. He’d stopped swearing and started making a sort of whimpering noise,
which was most unlike him.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘A bit of that damned stone,’ replied his colleague, a Sicilian I called
Aeschrus. ‘It flew up and hit him in the eye.’
‘Let me see,’ I said; but Sclerus didn’t want to take his hands away from his
face. I could see blood trickling down his cheek. ‘Aeschrus, hold his hands,’ I
said. ‘This is no time for melodrama.’
Aeschrus was a big strong lad; Sclerus was tall but thin and bony. So Aeschrus
twisted his arms behind his back and I held his head still. I could see the
splinter easily enough; he’d had his eye shut, but the splinter had gone right
through it, pinning it to the eyeball. ‘That looks bad,’ I said. ‘Get him into
the house.’
I broke a thin piece of bronze off the rim of a wooden bowl and bent it double
to make a pair of tweezers, with which I was able, eventually, to pull the
splinter out. It wasn’t easy; the splinter was an awkward shape and I couldn’t
get a grip, and every time I tried Sclerus would roar with pain and thrash about
like a deer that’s run into the nets during a forest drive. When eventually it
did come out, a lot of blood came with it, and the poor man fainted. While he
was out I washed the wound with hot water on a clean bit of rag until the
bleeding stopped; then I gave Aeschrus some money and told him to run to the
City and see if he could find a doctor.
He came back that evening with the money but no doctor. He’d tried four, he
said, but they were all either busy or not at home. I don’t think a doctor could
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 49
