even remember. He did reasonable business there in the morning, trading figs for
cheese and cheap silver hairpins for cheap bone combs, but in the afternoon
nobody much was about, and he was thinking of packing up and heading back to the
ship when a man came up to him offering to sell him a pair of shoes.
They were, according to Pherecrates, very old shoes, shoes that could well have
walked to Spain and back, and Pherecrates said he didn’t want them. The man said
fair enough, but showed no signs of wanting to go away, and for lack of anything
better to do Pherecrates started chatting to him.
How the subject came up, Pherecrates couldn’t quite remember; it was something
to do with some historical figure, and the man happened to comment that he’d
seen this man once, years ago.
‘You can’t have,’ Pherecrates objected. ‘He died sixty years ago.’
‘Oh, I saw him all right,’ the man replied. ‘Why, are you calling me a liar or
something?’
Pherecrates shook his head. ‘No offence,’ he said, ‘but you simply couldn’t have
seen him. Like I said, he died sixty years ago, and you’re obviously not a day
over fifty-five.’
The man grinned at him, revealing a perfect set of teeth. ‘I’m eighty-seven,’ he
replied.
Well, that made Pherecrates very curious, not to mention sceptical. ‘And what’s
more,’ the man added, ‘I’ll prove it to you. Stay there.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Pherecrates said; and a little while later, the man
came back with two other men, who both looked like slightly younger copies of
him.
‘This is my son,’ the man said, ‘he’s sixty-six; and this is my grandson, who’s
just turned fifty. Isn’t that right, boys?’
They offered to go and fetch the rest of the family; great-grandson and
great-great-grandson, but Pherecrates assured them there was no need. He
believed them. ‘That’s remarkable,’ he said.
The son smiled patronisingly. ‘No it isn’t,’ he said. ‘Just sensible, clean
living.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Pherecrates said, expecting to be sold something if he wasn’t
careful.
‘That’s right,’ the old man said. ‘I’ve always lived clean, and my boys here
have always lived clean, and look at us. Never had a day’s illness in our
lives.’
Pherecrates frowned (or I imagine he did; he doesn’t say so in his book, but
it’d be human nature to frown at this point). ‘When you say “live clean”,’ he
said, ‘what exactly do you mean by it?’
Then the old man explained. Ever since he was a boy, he said, he’d had a phobia
about dirt; couldn’t abide it, he said, made him go all queasy. So, when he
built his own house, he went out of his way to make sure everything was always
clean. He moved the privy away from the house, downstream on the little brook
rather than upstream;
he made sure the house was swept clean once a day and that any food that had
gone off was thrown out or given to poor travellers, rather than left to moulder
in the store-room; he insisted that all the family’s clothes and bedding were
changed and washed regularly; he banished the animals from the house and built a
special stall for them instead, well away from the house and the water supply.
If anybody cut himself or got dirt in an existing cut, they had to wash it out
immediately and put on a clean bandage. In short, he was utterly obsessive about
it. And nobody in his house ever seemed to get ill.
Well, Pherecrates thought no more about it at the time. But, as the years went
by, what the old man had told him snagged in his mind, like a hook in a fish’s
throat, and he started to think, and use his eyes. When he went abroad, to the
towns and cities where he bought and sold, he looked about him and made
connections — an epidemic in Priene, where the nightsoil from one quarter soaks
away into another quarter’s water supply; a man in Ephesus who died of a
poisoned flea—bite; old men’s stones of their fathers’ experiences in the Great
Plague at Athens; deaths here, deaths there, deaths everywhere — until he came
to the conclusion that shocked him like nothing had ever done before.
Half the people who die, he now firmly believed, die of diseases caused or
aggravated by dirt. Incredible numbers of people troop down to the Styx ferry
and stump up their two obols to the ferryman simply because they don’t, as the
old man he met on Chios put it, live clean. According to Pherecrates, from the
people who wouldn’t die if you cleaned up the water in Greece , you could raise
an army large enough to conquer the world, found colonies in every province, and
still have enough left over to have hunger riots. If only half of the wise men,
philosophers, scientists, poets, statesmen who die of infections, blood
poisoning and other dirty deaths were to be spared, mankind would soon be so
wise and so powerful that the gods wouldn’t stand a chance. We could exile them
to the Arabian desert or the frozen wastes out back of Scythia and run the world
ourselves. All it would take to make the difference would be a few aqueducts,
drains and cesspits and a weekly wash-and-brush-up around the home, and we’d
have stolen a prize so valuable as to make Prometheus stealing fire from Heaven
seem trivial. According to Pherecrates.
Now, he was sceptical at first, just as I was and you are. For instance; how can
bodily waste be so dangerous and poisonous when it comes out of our own bodies?
It didn’t kill us while it was still inside us, so why should it be so
desperately lethal after it’s left us and seeped into the village well? And
dirt, honest dust and mud; dirt and mud are what we grow our food in, and once
we’ve grown it, we eat it. If dirt and mud are so deadly that a little getting
into a cut or a scratch can kill you, how come food isn’t deadlier than my
brother’s poison honey? Isn’t it far more logical to assume that diseases and
deaths are what we’ve always believed they are, supernatural entities that roam
and buzz unseen among us, looking for unlucky or doomed people to pick on,
rather than perverted products of the good earth and our own bodies?
Pherecrates couldn’t answer that; all he could do was set out his evidence and
suggest that the conclusions he drew from them were worthy of serious
consideration. At which point the book ended, and Pherecrates stepped out of my
life back into the darkness he’d so miraculously appeared from.
Yes, I know. It sounds like the demented ravings of a man with an obsession,
like those people you try to avoid in the market square who do their best to
convince you that the King of India’s sent assassins to murder them, or that the
stars are eating their brains. But what if he’s right? What if there’s even a
tiny scrap of truth in his notion? The only way to know for certain, I suggest,
is to try it and see; build a city with all his fussy ideas put into practice
and count how many people drop down dead and how many don’t. As great
experiments go, it’s no daffier than Alexander’s pet project of forcing a
thousand selected flowers of Macedonian man
hood to marry a thousand hand-picked
Persian girls, with a view to breeding a master-race he could use to repopulate
Asia . Of the two great leaps of faith, why not choose the one that causes least
inconvenience to the subjects of the experiment and has the most potential for
good, in the unlikely event that it’s successful?
So here I am, Phryzeutzis; in my old age, an old fool who should know better,
once again trying to play god and create an ideal city. Maybe it’s a disease of
the elderly and underoccupied; certainly it’s the sort of thing I could imagine
the Founders at Antolbia coming up with (and I’d have told them, politely, but
firmly, to go and stick the idea where the sun never shines, because people with
work to do in the real world simply don’t have time to get involved in wild
idealistic schemes — or if they do it turns out an utter disaster, like Plato’s
bad experiences in Sicily when he went out there to found the philosopher
kingdom). So what? In theory, under the charter Alexander gave this place when
he set it up, as proxy oecist I have absolute power here, so I probably ought to
use it once in a while, if
only to show the people here how lucky they are to have me, rather than someone
who rushes about doing things all the time.
This city won’t last, of course. How can it? Greek city, founded on a whim by a
great king who was briefly a god but who’s now dead, populated by savages and
ruled by a crazy old man. I remember a city so very much like it that these days
I have trouble telling them apart. There are times, Phryzeutzis, when I think
you’re really my friend Tyresenius, or my Budini bodyguard, and that this is
Antolbia, and that any moment now Theano’ll come out of the house with a big jug
of wine with honey and cinnamon; or that any minute, the other savages will come
bursting through the gate with arrows on their bowstrings and kill us all. I sit
here sometimes, Tyrsenius, and I seem to be remembering some specific small
incident that happened at the old city, rather than watching it happen again
here in the new one. History, of course, is the setting down in writing of the
deeds of great men and the happening of great events, so that they shall never
be forgotten, and so that the manifold and grievous errors of the past can be
recognised and avoided by those that come after us; so, by writing history, I’m
pinning this time down, so that we’ll know it’s not the time before or the time
after. It’s a trick to stop myself going crazy, I guess. If I can look it up in
a book, I can know for certain that this is something that’s happening, not
something I’m remembering.
And, like most tricks, it doesn’t work.
Lately I’ve been getting this pain in my right hand, where the joints are
chalking up; and that very nice woman from the vegetable market who thinks that
if she mothers me and looks after me I’ll leave her money when I die, that very
nice woman gave me something to take away the pain. What she gave me was a
little box of dried leaves; you sprinkle them on a fire and breathe in, and next
thing you know the pain doesn’t hurt any more. Well, she’s absolutely right, I
feel no pain now; but whenever I sit by the fire with a cloth over my head,
breathing deeply, I seem to see someone sitting next to me, also breathing in
and enjoying the smoke. I have no idea who he is; I can’t see his face clearly
through the smoke, and his voice is fuzzy and indistinct, like the hum of
distant insects. Sometimes I think it’s my father, or Diogenes; at other times
it’s Alexander or Aristotle, or Tyrsenius or Agenor the stonemason, or Theano,
or one of my brothers, or my grandfather Eupolis, or Pherecrates the drainage
enthusiast, or Eudaemon’s friend Peitho (who of course I never met). Sometimes,
when I’m drowsy and not thinking straight, I think it’s you, and that you’re
reading my book, and I’m the book sitting there being read.
I suppose I ought to be worried. But it’s too late for that. These days, I’d
gladly trade a blurred edge to my sanity for something that’ll take away the
pain. Sanity’s a wonderful thing, but it isn’t a patch on a good night’s sleep,
or being able to take a piss without feeling like someone’s hammering a tent-peg
into your kidneys. All my life I’ve felt no pain, as I’ve bounced happily along
with death and destruction at my heels like happy dogs being taken for a walk,
eating up everybody around me and, in general, leaving me alone. It’s a small
price to pay, the company of some indistinct figure who vaguely resembles the
way I think some long-dead person I can barely remember ought to have looked, in
order that he fits the character I’ve drawn for him in my book of history. As
the man said after he’d been in solitary confinement for fifty years, it’s a
pain having to share this cell with the devil, but it’s better than being alone.
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 65
