Alternate Empires

by Gregory Benford

  “Looking through the notes I made before I left Babylon,” Mithredath said. “Here, I knew there was something that would tell me who ruled here when the first Khsrish came. An old tablet says he led Dēmos of Athens into captivity. Who is this Dēmos, if Kodros was the last king here?”

  “‘Dēmos’ isn’t a who, I’m afraid, excellent saris, but rather a what,” Polydoros said. “Whoever wrote your tablet wanted to celebrate the King of Kings, as you do, but did not know the Hellenic tongue well. Dēmos of Athens’ simply means ‘the people of Athens.’”

  “Oh.” Mithredath sighed. “If you knew the trouble I had finding that—” He shuffled scraps of papyrus, briefly looked happy, then grew cautious again. “I also found something about ‘Boulē of Athens.’ Someone told me -ē was the feminine ending in your language, so I took Boulē to be Dēmos’s wife. You’re going to tell me that’s wrong too, though, aren’t you?”

  Polydoros dipped his head. “I’m sorry, but I must, excellent saris. ‘Boulē’ means ‘council.’ ”

  “Oh.” The eunuch’s sigh was longer this time. “The people of Athens, the council of Athens—where is the king of Athens?” He glared at Polydoros as if the young banker were responsible for making that elusive monarch disappear. Then he sighed once more. “That’s what I came here to find out, I suppose. Where are we most likely to find whatever records or decrees this town kept before it came under the rule of the King of Kings?”

  “There are two likely places,” Polydoros said after a visible pause for thought that made Mithredath very much approve of him. “One is up here, in the citadel. The other would be down there”—he pointed north and west—“in the agora—the city’s marketplace. Anyone who came into the city from the countryside to do business would be able to read them there.”

  “Sensible,” Mithredath said. “We’ll cast about here for a while, then, and go down again later. The fewer trips up and down that ramp I take, the happier I shall be.” When Polydoros agreed, the eunuch turned to his servants. “Tishtrya, Raga, you will be able to help in this enterprise too. All you need do is look for anything with writing on it, and let me or Polydoros know if you actually find something.”

  The servants’ nods were gloomy; they had looked forward to relaxing while their master worked. Mithredath expected little from them, but did not feel like having them sit idle. He was surprised when, a few minutes later, one of them came trotting through the rubble and undergrowth, waving excitedly to show he had found something.

  “What is it, Raga?” the eunuch asked.

  “Words, master, carved on an old wall,” Raga replied. “Come see!”

  “I shall,” Mithredath said. He and Polydoros followed the servant back to where his companion was waiting. Tishtrya proudly pointed at the inscription. The eunuch’s hopes fell at once: it was too short to be the kind of thing he was seeking. He turned to Polydoros. “What does it say?”

  “Kalos Arkhias,” the Hellene replied: “‘Arkhias is beautiful.’ It’s praise of a pretty boy, excellent saris, nothing more; you could see the like chalked or scratched on half the walls in Peiraieus.”

  “Nasty buggers,” Tishtrya muttered under his breath in Persian. Polydoros’s eyes went hard for a moment, but he said nothing. Mithredath upbraided his servant; at the same time he made a mental note that the Hellene understood some Persian.

  The search resumed. The citadel of Athens was not a large place; a man could easily walk the length of it in a quarter of an hour. But how many such trips would he have to take across it, Mithredath wondered, to make sure he missed nothing? Assuming, of course, he added to himself a moment later, anything was there to be missed.

  Polydoros sat down in the narrow shade of an overthrown chunk of masonry, fanned himself with his straw hat. He might have been thinking with Mithredath’s mind, for he said, “This could take forever, you know, excellent saris.”

  “Yes,” was all Mithredath cared to reply to that obvious truth.

  “We need to plan what to do, then, rather than simply wandering about up here,” the Hellene went on. Mithredath nodded; Polydoros seemed to have a talent for straightforward thinking. After more consideration, Polydoros said, “Let’s make a circuit of the wall first. Decrees often go up on the side of a wall so people can see them. Is it not the same in Babylon?”

  “It is,” Mithredath agreed. He and Polydoros made their way back to the ramp up which they had come.

  They walked north and east along the wall. Mithredath’s heart beat faster when he saw letters scratched onto a stone, but it was only another graffito extolling a youth’s beauty. Then, when they were about halfway along the northern reach of the wall, opposite the ruins of some many-columned building, Polydoros suddenly pointed and exclaimed, “There, by Zeus, that’s what we’re after!”

  Mithredath’s eyes followed the Hellene’s finger. The slab Polydoros had spied was flatter and paler than the surrounding stones. As they hurried toward it, Mithredath saw the slab was covered with letters in the angular script the Hellenes used for their own language. If this was someone praising a pretty boy, he’d been very long-winded.

  “What does it say?” the eunuch asked. He fought against excitement; for all he knew, the inscription had been ancient when Khsrish took Athens.

  “Let me see.” Polydoros studied the letters. So, in his more ignorant way, did Mithredath. He could see that the stone-carving here was more regular than the scratchings his servants and he and Polydoros had come upon before. That in itself, he suspected, marked an official document.

  “Well?” he asked impatiently. He took out pen and ink and papyrus and got ready to transcribe the words Polydoros was presumably rendering into Aramaic.

  “This is part of what you seek, I think,” the Hellene said at last.

  “Tell me, then!” Had he been a whole man, Mithredath’s voice would have cracked; as he was what he was, it merely rose a little.

  “I’m about to. Here: ‘It seemed good to the council and to the people’ … boulē and dēmos again, you see?”

  “A plague on the council and people!” Mithredath broke in. “Who in Ahuramazda’s name was the king?”

  “I’m coming to that, I think. Let me go on: ‘—with the tribe of Antiokhis presiding, Leostratos serving as chairman, Hypsikhides as secretary—’”

  “The king!” Mithredath shouted. “Where is the name of the king?”

  “It is not on the stone,” Polydoros admitted. He sounded puzzled. Mithredath, for his part, was about ready to grind his teeth. Polydoros continued. “This may be it: ‘Aristeides proposed these things concerning the words of the prophetess of Delphi and the Persians:

  “‘Let the Athenians fortify the citadel with beams of wood as well as stone to meet the Persians, just as was bid by the prophetess. Let the council choose woodsmen and carpenters to do this, and let them be paid from the public treasury. Let all this be done as quickly as possible, Xerxes already having come to the Asian Sardis. Let there be good fortune to the people of Athens.’ ”

  “Read it over again,” Mithredath said. “Read it slowly, so that I can be sure I have your Yauna names correct.”

  “Not all Hellenes are Ionians,” Polydoros said. Mithredath shrugged—how these westerners chose to divide themselves was their business, and he did not care one way or the other. But Khsrish, back in Babylon, would think of them all as Yauna. And so, in his report, Yauna they would be.

  Polydoros finished reading. Mithredath’s pen stopped its scratching race across the sheet of papyrus. The eunuch read what he had written. He read it again. “Is, ah, Leostratos the ruler of Athens, then? And this Aristeides his minister? Or is Aristeides the king? The measure is his, I gather.”

  “So it would seem, excellent saris,” Polydoros said. “But our words for king are anax or, more usually, basileus. Neither of those is here.”

  “No,” Mithredath said morosely. He mentally damned all the ancient Athenians to Ahriman and the House of the Lie for confu
sing him so. Khsrish and his courtiers would not be pleased if Mithredath had traveled so far, had spent so much gold from the King of Kings’ treasury, without finding what he had set out to find. Nothing was more dreadful for a eunuch—for anyone, but for a eunuch especially—than losing the favor of the King of Kings.

  Mithredath read the translated inscription once more. “You have rendered this accurately into Aramaic?”

  “As best I could, excellent saris,” Polydoros said stiffly.

  “I pray your pardon, good Polydoros,” the eunuch said. “I meant no disrespect, I assure you. It’s only that there is much here I do not understand.”

  “Nor I,” Polydoros said, but some of the ice was gone from his voice.

  Mithredath bowed. “Thank you. Help me, then, if you will, to put together the pieces of this broken pot. What does this phrase mean: ‘it seemed good to the council and to the people’? Why does the stone-carver set that down? Why should anyone care what the people think? Theirs is only to obey, after all.”

  “True, excellent saris,” Polydoros said. “Your questions are all to the point. The only difficulty”—he spread his hands and smiled wryly—“is that I have no answers to them.”

  Mithredath sat down on a chunk of limestone that, from its fluted side, might once have been part of a column. Weeds scratched his ankles through the straps of his sandals. A spider ran across his instep and was gone before he could swat it. In the distance, he heard his servants crunching through brush. A hoopoe called its strange, trilling call. Otherwise, silence ruled the dead citadel.

  The eunuch rubbed his smooth chin. “How is Peiraieus ruled? Maybe that will tell me something of Athens’s ways before the Conqueror came.”

  “I beg leave to doubt it, excellent saris. The city is no different from any other in the Empire. The King of Kings, may Zeus and the other gods smile on him, appoints the town governor, who is responsible to the satrap. In the smaller towns, the satrap makes the appointment.”

  “You’re right. That doesn’t help.” Mithredath read the inscription again. By now he was getting sick of it, and put the papyrus back in his lap with a petulant grunt. “‘The people,’” he repeated. “It almost sounds as if they and the council are sovereign, and these men merely ministers, so to speak.”

  “I can imagine a council conducting affairs, I suppose,” Polydoros said slowly, “though I doubt one could decide matters as well or as fast as a single man. But how could anyone know about what all the people of a city thought on a question? And even if for some reason the people were asked about one matter, surely no one could expect to reckon up what they sought about each of the many concerns a city has every day.”

  “I was hoping you would give me a different slant on the question. Unfortunately, I think just as you do.” Mithredath sighed and heaved himself up off his makeshift seat. “I suppose all we can do now is search further and hope we find more words to help us pierce this mystery.”

  The eunuch, the Hellene, and the two servants prowled the citadel for the next two days. Tishtrya almost stepped on a viper, but killed it with his stick before it could strike. Mithredath came to admire the broken statuary he kept stumbling over. It was far more restrained than the ebullient, emotional sculpture he was used to, but had a spare elegance of its own.

  The searchers came across a good number of inscriptions, but none that helped unravel the riddle the first long one had posed. Most were broken or worn almost to illegibility. Twice Polydoros found the formula, “It seemed good to the council and to the people—” Each time Mithredath swore in frustration, because the rest of the stone was in one case buried beneath masonry it would have taken twenty men to move and in the other missing altogether.

  “Enough of this place,” Mithredath said on the evening of that second day. “I don’t care any longer if the answer is right under my feet—I think it would run away from me like a rabbit from a fox if I dug for it. Tomorrow we will search down below, in the marketplace. Maybe our luck will be better there.”

  No one argued with him, although they all knew they had not thoroughly explored the citadel—that would be a job for months or years, not days. They rolled themselves in their blankets—no matter how hot the days, nights stayed chilly—and slept.

  The marketplace had fewer ruins than the citadel. “How do I know this still is part of the marketplace?” Mithredath asked pointedly as he, Polydoros, and the servants picked their way along through grass, bushes, and brush. Before Polydoros could answer, the eunuch added, “Aii!” He had just kicked a large stone, with painful results.

  He pushed away the brush that hid it. It was a very large stone; he felt like an idiot for not having seen it. In his anger, he bent down to push the stone over. “Wait!” Polydoros said. “It has letters on it.” He read them and began to laugh.

  “What, if I may ask, strikes you funny?” Glacial dignity, Mithredath thought, was preferable to hopping up and down on one foot.

  “It says, ‘I am the boundary stone of the agora,’” Polydoros told him.

  “Oh,” the eunuch said, feeling foolish all over again.

  The most prominent wrecked building was a couple of minutes’ walk north of them; its wrecked facade had eight columns, two of them still standing at their full height and supporting fragments of an architrave. “Shall we examine that first?” Polydoros asked, pointing.

  Mithredath’s throbbing toes made him contrary. “No, let’s save it for last, and wander about for a while. After all, it isn’t going anywhere.”

  “As you wish,” Polydoros said politely. Behind them, Mithredath’s servants sighed. The eunuch pretended he had not heard.

  “What’s that?” Mithredath asked a minute or so later, seeing another piece of stone poking up from out of the weeds—seeing it, thankfully, before he had a closer encounter with it.

  “By the shape, it’s the base a statue once stood on,” Polydoros said. He walked over to it. “Two statues,” he amended: “I see insets carved for four feet. Ah, there’s writing on it here.” He pulled weeds aside, read, “‘Harmodios and Aristogeiton, those who slew the tyrant Hipparkhos.’”

  “What’s a tyrant?” Mithredath frowned at the unfamiliar word. “Some sort of legendary monster?”

  “No, merely a man who ruled a city but was not of any kingly line. Many towns among the Hellenes used to have them.”

  “Ah. Thank you.” Mithredath thought about that for a moment, then said incredulously, “There was in the marketplace of Athens a statue celebrating men who killed the city’s ruler?”

  “So it would seem, excellent saris,” Polydoros said. “Put that way, it is surprising, is it not?”

  “It’s madness,” the eunuch said, shuddering at the idea. “As well for all that Persia conquered you Yauna. Who knows what lunacy you might otherwise have loosed on the world?”

  “Hmm,” was all Polydoros said to that. The Hellene jerked his chin toward the ruined building, which was now quite close. “Shall we go over to it now?”

  But Mithredath reacted to the Hellenic perversity exemplified by the ruined statue base with perversity of his own. “No, we’ll go around it, see what else is here.” He knew he was being difficult, and reveled in it. What could Polydoros do about it?

  Nothing, obviously. “As you wish,” the Hellene repeated. He then proceeded to skirt the ruins by an even larger margin than Mithredath would have chosen. Take that, the eunuch thought. Smiling behind Polydoros’s back, he followed him north and west.

  Still, enough was enough. “I’m certain this isn’t the marketplace anymore,” Mithredath said when the Hellene had led him almost all the way to Athens’s overthrown gates.

  “No, I suppose not,” Polydoros admitted. “Are you ready to head back now?”

  “More than ready.” Mithredath caught Polydoros’s eye. They grinned at each other, both of them a little sheepish. Mithredath glanced at his servants. They did not seem amused, and knew better than to seem annoyed.

  Some
thing crunched under the eunuch’s foot. Curious, he bent down. Then, more curious, he showed Polydoros what he had found. “What’s this?”

  “An ostrakon—a potsherd,” Polydoros amended, remembering to put the Yauna word into Aramaic.

  “I knew that,” Mithredath said impatiently. “I’ve stepped on enough of them, these past few days. But what’s this written on it?”

  “Hmm?” Polydoros took a closer look. “A name—Themistokles son of Neokles.”

  “Why write on a potsherd?”

  “Cheaper than papyrus.” Polydoros shrugged. “People are always breaking pots, and always have sherds around.”

  “Why just a name, then? Why not some message to go with it?”

  “Excellent saris, I have no idea.”

  “Hrmp,” Mithredath said. He took another step, heard another crunch. He was not especially surprised to find another potsherd under his foot, as Polydoros had said, people were always breaking pots. He was surprised, though, to find he had stepped on two sherds in a row with writing on them. He handed the second piece of broken pottery to Polydoros, pointed at the letters.

  “Themistokles Neokles’ son again,” the Hellene said.

  “That’s all?” Mithredath asked. Polydoros dipped his head to show it was. The eunuch gave him a quizzical look. “Good Polydoros, why write just a man’s name—just his name, mind you, nothing else—on two different pieces of broken pottery? If one makes no sense, does twice somehow?”

  “Not to me, excellent saris.” Poly doros shifted his feet like a schoolboy caught in some mischief by his master. This time his sandal crunched on something. Mithredath felt a certain sense of inevitability as Polydoros looked at the sherd, found writing on it, and read, “Themistokles son of Neokles.”

  The eunuch put hands on hips. “Just how many of these things are there?” He turned to his servants. “Tear out some brush here. My curiosity has the better of me. Let’s see how many sherds we can turn up.”

  The look Raga and Tishtrya exchanged was eloquent. Like any master with good sense, Mithredath pretended not to see it. The servants bent and began uprooting shrubs and weeds. They moved at first with the resigned slowness servants always use on unwelcome tasks, but even they began to show some interest as sherd followed sherd in quick succession.