Damocles, though, has pretty much reached the top of his career arc. Once the Tyrant has taken you into the palace and deigned to feed you, there’s not a whole lot of room for further advancement. Everything else is pretty much determined by birth, or coup d’etat. Damocles doesn’t have the birth, and if a coup d’etat came Damocles would probably get snuffed first thing for being a loudmouth intellectual.
Damocles could enlist in the army and join one of the incessant minor wars of Dionysius, but he’d probably get nicked in battle and die of infection or tetanus. There’s a damn good chance he’d croak of dysentery without ever leaving the camp-tents. Homer’s war-brags don’t talk about sickness much, but it’s there all right. There’s even a killer plague of the period called “the sweats” which Thucydides talks about in his histories; it once killed off half of Athens. Nobody knows what kind of disease “the sweats” was or where it came from. We’d just better hope it never comes back.
So Damocles goes to the court, dressed in his second-best outfit, since the day doesn’t augur much. Damon and Pythias are there; Damocles has known them since they were kids; he knows pretty much everybody who counts in Syracuse, since it’s a small town. Ever since D&P won the favor of Dionysius, through this stunt they pulled by offering to die for each other, they’ve been big cheeses at the court. Damocles has had to make up a lot of flattering dithyrambs and iambics and anapests about them; he’s just about run out of rhymes for “Phyntias” and wishes the guy would change his goddamn name.
Today though he finds to his surprise that there’s a big celebration. Three of Dionysius’s war-galleys are back from raiding the coast of Egypt, where they sank a few reed-boats and got some slaves and loot. It’s a famous victory. There’s lots of millet-beer and grape-wine.
Damocles elbows his way through the revelers and helps himself. The wine quickly goes to his head. Nobody knows what “fermentation” is yet, so the quality of the wine varies a lot. Every once in a while it makes you puke on the spot, but sometimes it gets way up to four, five percent alcohol. This is prime stuff all the way from Greece, and it only tastes a little of the tar they use to seal the amphoras. Damocles gets totally plastered.
Dionysius is in one of his jolly moods. The kind where he thinks up ingenious psychological tortures for his hangers-on. He calls the drunken, tottering Damocles front-and-center to have him immortalize the glorious day in extemporaneous verse.
Damocles gives it his best shot. He picks up a goatskin tambourine and starts banging it against his hip so he can remember the proper meter. He spouts out a lot of the canned stuff from Homer, the clichéd “epithets” you use when you can’t think of anything original, like “So-and-so of the nodding plumed helmet,” and “his armor rang about him as he fell,” and even stuff that sounds vaguely comical nowadays, like “he bit the dust.”
But he can see it’s not working. He starts to get desperate. He starts babbling out whatever comes into his head. Free association, surrealism. We postmoderns are really into that kind of stuff since Max Ernst and Dada, but it doesn’t cut much ice with ancient Dionysius.
So Damocles plays his last ace, and starts laying on the flattery with a trowel. What a lucky guy Dionysius is; how the Gods smile on him; how supreme the Tyrant’s power is; how everybody wishes they were him.
“Oh really,” interrupts Dionysius, with that awful smile of his. He gives some orders to his lithe teenage male wine-bearer and then beckons Damocles forward. “So you want to be the Tyrant, eh?”
“Yeah, sure, who wouldn’t?” says Damocles.
“Fine,” says Dionysius loudly. “You sit right here on my throne”—actually, it’s a dining-couch—“and help yourself to this feast. You, the humble Damocles, can be Tyrant, just for today!” He takes the gold fillet from his head and places it on the sweating noggin of Damocles. “You can give the orders. See how much you enjoy it.”
“Gosh, thanks!” says Damocles. “Hot dog!” The cup-bearer has mysteriously disappeared, but Damocles, who’s somewhat partial to women, has one of the new Egyptian slave-girls do the honors for him. Soon he’s eating chunks of roast boar, knocking back goblets of honey-mead, and making satirical wisecracks that have the whole court in stitches. There’s a bit of nervousness in their laughter, but Damocles writes it off to the oddity of the situation.
Just to break the ice, he issues a few tentative Tyrannical orders. He forces some of the more elderly and dignified courtiers to imitate goats or donkeys. It’s good clean fun.
Then Damocles spots a disquieting reflection in the polished bronze of his mead-cup. He looks up. The wine-bearer of Dionysius has shinnied high up into the palace rafters. He’s got a sharp, heavy bronze sword, and he’s tied it to the rafter with a single woolen thread. The sword is dangling, point-first, directly over the reclining torso of Damocles.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Damocles says.
Dionysius, who has been watching and chuckling from the sidelines, steps forward. He crosses his arms, and strokes his royal beard. “This,” he says, “is the true nature of political power. This is the daily terror that we Tyrants must live under, which you thoughtless subjects somehow fail to appreciate.” He laughs deep in his kingly chest.
“I get it,” Damocles says. “It’s a metaphor. Kind of a koan.”
“That’s right,” says Dionysius. “Now go on, Damocles, enjoy yourself. You won’t be leaving that couch for some time.”
“Good thing, I was just getting comfortable,” says Damocles, and he pillows his head on an enormous bundle of two hundred pounds of primed TNT. He’s been carrying this massive weight of explosive with him all the time, wired to his body in a kind of backpack.
In fact, everybody in the palace has got a TNT-bundle of their own, too. They just haven’t really noticed it, until the situation was made metaphorically clear. Everybody in Syracuse has their own share of explosive. Every man, woman and child on the planet; even the innocent babes in their cradles. Everybody carries their share of the global megatonnage; they’re never without it, even when they somehow manage to forget about it. They just lug it around, day in day out, because they have to; because it’s the postmodern condition. The cost of it nearly bankrupts them, and the weight wears calluses on their souls, but nobody dwells on the horror of it much. It’s the only way to stay sane.
So, with a merry laugh, Damocles has two of the guards seize Dionysius. They demonstrate to him some of the unappreciated hazards of living like a peasant, instead of a king. They start by ripping out several of his teeth, without health insurance. Then they do some other things to him which are even funnier, and finally leave him penniless and ragged in the streets.
So much for the famous legend of “The Sword of Damocles.” I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Damocles went on to live it up happily ever after, in his merry, pranksterish way, until he got gout, or cirrhosis, or a bad cocaine habit, or AIDS.
As for Dionysius, he retired to California, where he now lives. He often appears on talk-shows, and makes lucrative speaking-tours before Chambers of Commerce and political action committees. He is writing a set of memoirs defending his public-service record. He’s looking for a movie-option, too. But it’s okay—I don’t think he’ll get one.
THE GULF WARS
Gouts of black smudge, thick as curds, billowed against the heat-washed blue of a Mesopotamian sky. Blistering sunlight wrapped the flatlands in glare. For the moment, the siege was broken. Even a fanatic couldn’t fight in heat like this. It was too hot to die with conviction.
In the attackers’ camp, two army engineers sat in the shade of their open tent, munching dates and ration-bread. The dates were gritty and the bread had molded, but the two men ate without complaining. They no longer expected much.
Halli and Bel-Heshti, the two engineers, were long campaigners with a certain hard-won wisdom. They had pitched their tent upwind of the latrines, on a little rise where they could oversee the camp and spot any caravans arriving with fresh food.
The rest of the camp sprawled around them: government-issue black woolen tents for an army of six hundred men.
Two companies of Assyrian regulars formed the army’s shock troops. First were the Mountain-Leaping Pioneers, an engineer and sapper unit. They were aided by the River Zab Chariotry, who were now an unhappy infantry, since most of their horses had died in an outbreak of glanders.
The remaining forces were lightly-armed Babylonian auxiliaries. The Babylonians had unwisely supported the Elamites in the early days of the war. The Babylonians were now atoning for their sins by leading each assault and taking most of the casualties.
Bel-Heshti munched another flat cake of rye-bread, staring squint-eyed across the plain at the mud-brick walls of the Elamite city. The town’s surrounding fields had been systematically ravaged, the grain trampled flat, the groves of palms razed and burned, and the irrigation canals deliberately filled in.
The Assyrian sappers had dug a network of siege-trenches surrounding the town. Counter-balanced catapults stood in rows, their long arms and leather slings idle now, but ready to fling flaming oil-bombs over the city wall. Four large siege-engines crouched at the walls amid a rubble of smashed and battered brick. Their armored roofs and sides were dented by stones and splattered with pitch, flung by the defenders.
Movement showed atop the city wall. An Elamite altar-boy mounted the fire-scarred battlements, carrying a curved wicker shield as large as himself. From within the trenches, in the patchy shade of stretched blankets, a few besiegers jeered, without much enthusiasm.
Behind the shield-bearer came an Elamite priest in a robe of Tyrian purple, heavily hung with seashells, linked medallions, and gold braid. The heretic prophet spoke a little dog-Akkadian, enough to get his insults across to the Assyrian audience. Each day since the siege had begun, he’d taken advantage of the stunned torpor of noon to bellow deep-voiced taunts and curses.
He raised his arms, shaking his gilded sleeves. “May boil-imps bite you! May the demoness Lamashtu close up your wives!” A lazily-slung stone bounced from the acolyte’s shield. The Assyrians had learned to stop firing arrows at the priest. The citizens were out of arrows. They carefully collected Assyrian arrows and fired them back when things were cooler.
Bel-Heshti squinted at the distant priest and spat a date-pit into the ocher dust. “I’m getting tired of him.”
His companion grunted. Halli was a lean, jug-eared ex-peasant with the clever hands of a born strangler. His humble family raised barley, west of the Tigris.
Bel-Heshti came from the wrong side of Nineveh. His family, a clan of half-shekel exorcists and nostrum peddlers, were always in trouble with the city law. Bel-Heshti stood half-a-cubit taller than most men in the troop. He had a squint and a large hairy nose and the general aspect of a man who enjoyed doing terrible things with a sledgehammer.
Like the rest of their troop, Halli and Bel-Heshti wore long indigo-blue army tunics with dangling vermillion fringes at the knee. Their waists were cinched in thick dagger-belts with broad, crossed shoulder-straps of oiled brown leather.
Halli had taken off his conical helmet to soak his black ringlets and long square beard with cooking lard. The lard smothered lice and nits, which Halli, like the rest of his army, had in plenty. With his hair slicked to the sides of his long, narrow head, he had the drowned look of a newborn calf.
Bel-Heshti sucked brackish water from a pottery canteen. He looked longingly at a large stoppered jug lying in the corner of the tent. Two weeks earlier he and Halli had poured water into the jug along with two days’ barley ration and a pinch of yeast.
Halli noticed his companion’s gaze. “Not ready yet,” Halli said. He picked a slender cane from a sheaf of marsh reeds at his elbow, and sighted down the shaft.
“It must have beered up fine by now,” Bel-Heshti said.
Halli was patient. “You can’t break the seal until Inanna Moon-Goddess is full. Otherwise you get the imps of souring. And once the sour-imps find a brewer, they hang on him stubborn as ticks. Then any beer he makes might as well be rotten oatmeal.” Halli made a quick luck-sign and spat twice.
“Listen to the big brewer,” Bel-Heshti scoffed.
Halli snipped the cane’s ends with his dagger and dipped one end in a bowl of pitch. “A brewer gets respect in life. Peasants have no Name. Gimme one of them arrowheads.”
Bel-Heshti passed him an arrowhead of crudely pounded pig iron. “Listen, Halli, even a brewer doesn’t get imp-shit until he’s out of the army. And when will that be?”
“The gods give luck,” Halli said piously. “Once I was a barefoot peasant. Now I fight for the King in Elam like a gentleman with a Name. What mortal knows what is to come?” Halli socketed the arrowhead and set it aside.
“There’s always more war for the likes of us,” Bel-Heshti said. “You don’t need a royal diviner to tell you that much.”
Halli shrugged and selected another cane. “If I could just get my hands on some real loot for once …”
“Sure,” Bel-Heshti yawned. He waved one hand before his meaty nose. “That pitch stinks to perdition. What a hellhole this place is. It gives pitch and asphalt like better places give milk and honey.”
The Elamite prophet’s screaming floated across the camp. “May you drown, and search the world forever for an earthen grave! May scorpions fill your armpits—”
Bel-Heshti glanced out the tent-flap and grunted in alarm. Their captain approached, on one of the troop’s last horses. The captain reined up. “Pioneers Bel-Heshti and Halli!”
The men touched their foreheads.
“On your feet, boys. General wants to see you.”
Bel-Heshti and Halli scrambled up in alarm. They tugged their sandal-straps, checked their daggers, and followed the captain’s horse. Dust as fine as flour puffed from the trampled paths around the tents.
“Ishtar’s dugs,” Bel-Heshti muttered. “You think he knows we’re home-brewing? He’ll wallop us for sure.”
Halli glared at him, amazed. “That’s it, idiot. Put a name to our bad luck. Don’t you know demons are listening?”
“Sorry,” Bel-Heshti said. They batted at bluebottle flies as they passed one of the latrines.
Halli scowled. “How’d you live this long, anyway, you big ox? Always blabbing bad omens and tempting fate.”
“My luck’s fine,” Bel-Heshti said. “But too bad your hair stinks of louse-lard. You look like a real half-wit.”
The captain dismounted near the closed flaps of the General’s broad, striped tent. He threw the horse’s reins to an orderly and vanished inside. The two veterans waited under the army’s standard, which hung limply in the murderous heat.
The General’s tent stood next to the supply dump. Halli and Bel-Heshti looked unhappily at the dwindling supplies: rock-hard blocks of dried fish, empty oil jars in toppled heaps, dusty sacks of millet and barley, the very last of the cheese. Guards leaned on their spears, stunned with heat and boredom. A war chariot rumbled by and covered everyone with grit.
The captain beckoned from within the tent. Bel-Heshti and Halli ducked and stepped into the incense-reeking shadows. They spotted the dim gleam of the General’s bronze armor and quickly prostrated themselves on the carpet. Puffs of dust rose from the thick dark wool.
“All right, boys,” the General rumbled. “At ease.”
“Thank you, Lord General!” they chorused. They each rose to one knee.
The General was huge, with thick, powerful arms and massive, hairy hands. Girded with armor, sword, and quiver, he seemed to weigh half a ton. Scars from a lion-hunt streaked the side of his face, vanishing into an oily thicket of beard.
The General bent over a table with a leathery creak of lacings, and examined a clay tablet. His lips moved as he studied the cuneiform. “Bel-Heshti and Halli … You boys have been with the Mountain-Leapers quite a while now.”
“Yes, Lord General!”
“You were with us at Nippur,” he said, straightening. “That was a nasty
little piece of business.”
“Yes, Lord General,” Bel-Heshti said. “I mean, no, Lord General! It was an honor to serve under your command!”
The General’s Babylonian camp-slut appeared from the back, with a long-handled palm-leaf fan. She began chasing flies with indolent strokes of the fan, looking bored.
The General’s eyes glittered under the gold-chased rim of his helmet. “Get much loot when we sacked Nippur?”
Bel-Heshti fingered the heavy silver ring at his earlobe. “A little, Lord General.”
“Gambled it all away by now, eh?” said the General, with an ugly laugh. “I hear you boys took your share of heads, too.”
“Well, yes, Lord,” said Bel-Heshti. “That was orders. ‘Gather male heads for central requisition and display.’ Right, Halli?”
“What he said, Lord,” Halli nodded.
“Remember one head in particular?” the General said. “An old man with a cast in one eye and a turned-up nose like a pig’s?”
Bel-Heshti smiled humbly. “We took many heads, Lord General. Fighters, too. Not just old men.”
“You did kill him, though?”
Bel-Heshti swallowed doubtfully. “We found the old geezer hiding in a rat-hole, Lord General! So we stuck him and took his head. That was orders!”
The General paused and knotted his hands behind him, savoring the moment. “Boys, that loathsome rebel was Governor Nairi. Our King cherished a special hatred for that arch-heretic.”
The General began to stride back and forth across the dusty carpet. “I wrote to the King in his Palace at Nineveh,” he said. Reluctantly the girl followed him, swinging her fan. “I informed the King that elements of my Mountain-Leaping Pioneers had confronted the traitor Nairi. They forced the wretch to tremble before the awesome power of His Majesty and slew him with the edge of the sword!”
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