Olympiad Tom Holt

by Olympiad (lit)

  Trade, though - that was something else, a quaint but ultimately frustrating ritual that a businessman could get tired of in an awful hurry. It wasn't like some of the aggravating trade practices he'd come across in other countries, an artful way of weighting the proceedings in favour of the home side. That he could understand and, with practice, cope with. But Greeks - well, they insisted they couldn't understand the very idea of trade. All they could get their heads, or their beloved hearts, around was giving and receiving presents. So, when he called on a Greek, the drill was- 'I've brought you a present,' the guest said.

  'That's nice,' Palamedes replied. 'Let's see it, then.'

  'Here we are.' The guest reached into his bag and produced a small mirror, heavily burnished bronze, backed with ivory tastefully carved in the image of the Goddess. Really rather attractive, and he could get as many of them as he wanted for a few ingots of pure copper in the market at Tyre.

  'That's lovely,' Palamedes said, without excessive enthusiasm. 'Though it's a pity I've already got a mirror.

  The guest braced his smile slightly. 'Yes,' he said, 'but you could swap - you could give it to someone as a present. Someone who might give you a nice present too, something you haven't got and could use.'

  Palamedes shrugged. 'What I could really use right now would be five hand span bars of fairly clean yellow bronze,' he said. 'I need to make a new ploughshare, not to mention a couple of new scythe-blades.'

  'Oddly enough,' said the guest, 'I happen to have four hand span bars of absolutely pure yellow bronze. Would you rather have those instead of the mirror?'

  Palamedes nodded happily. 'That's extremely kind of you,' he said. 'Happiness-'

  'Bronze,' the guest went on, before Palamedes could tell him about Happiness lodging in his heart, 'is something I can always get hold of, no problem at all. If only I could get premium untanned ox hides as easily as I could get bronze-'

  'Ox hides?'

  The Phoenician lifted his head. 'Enough to make a comfortable load for five mules,' he said. 'That'd solve a lot of problems for me.'

  The old man looked thoughtful for a moment. 'How many hides, would you say, could a mule carry comfortably? Twenty?'

  'Pretty feeble mules you must have in these parts. Double that, where I come from.'

  'I think,' said Palamedes, 'that a good mule could carry thirty hides quite easily. What do you think?'

  'Thirty sounds reasonable to me,' said his guest.

  Palamedes smiled. 'That's good,' he said, 'because it'd give my heart great pleasure to give you five times thirty hides, as my present to you. You did say untanned, didn't you?'

  'For choice,' the Phoenician replied.

  The Greek grinned at him. 'My pleasure,' he said. 'And,' he went on, 'it really is a very nice mirror. Quite like the one I've already got, but better.'

  'Really? Then you hang on to it,' the Phoenician said, keeping his smile going. 'Another present.'

  Palamedes nodded. 'I'll say this for you Phoenicians,' he went on, picking up the mirror and putting it down again at the other end of the room, 'you're a very generous people. Generosity must lodge in your hearts all the time.'

  His guest sighed. 'Absolutely,' he said. 'In fact, she's got her own cup and plate and everything.'

  Inevitably, there was a great deal of eating and drinking to be done. Mercifully, he'd managed to time his arrival so that the first meal he was obliged to eat was nothing more than a slice of bread the size of his head and half a cold roast sheep. He had the feeling, however, that now the deal was done he wasn't going to get off so lightly.

  Sure enough, around late afternoon the preparations began. Two of Palamedes' sons burst into the hall, lugged out a huge trestle table and started putting it together noisily. Then someone else, another of the tall, slim young men that clustered round big houses like flies in these parts, lugged in an enormous block of wood, dragging it into the circle of firelight so that he'd be able to see what he was doing. Other young men, more or less identical, appeared carrying parts of animals (a sheep; the headless trunk of a goat; the front forequarter of a pig, white with fat), which they proceeded to chop up over the log with a great deal of enthusiasm and gratuitous flourish.

  (Meat for dinner, the Phoenician thought. What a surprise.)

  Then they impaled the slices on long spikes, while still more young men poked the fire awake. As the Phoenician stared at the rather stunning quantity of meat and tried to decide which he disliked more, the sizzle or the smell of burning, they hauled the spits down, scattered a few handfuls of salt at random and pulled out the spits as if yanking spears from the bodies of their foes. Finally, Palamedes' eldest son chose the choicest, least-burned chunk of flesh and threw it on the fire, for the gods.

  'Pitch in,' the old man said. 'There's plenty to go round.'

  In Phoenicia, he'd once tried to explain, what we mostly eat is bread with vegetables, herbs, spices; some meat, of course, but not a great deal ... At which Palamedes had shaken his head and replied that in that case he needed feeding up, because bread and plants - well, you could live on that stuff, but it wasn't proper food. After that, the Phoenician had resolved in future to eat what was put in front of him and never raise the subject again.

  The food he could probably have coped with, given time and the stomachs of two cows. But there was also wine - harsh, coarse stuff like the edge of a shoemaker's rasp, served without water and sprinkled with oatmeal, honey and grated cheese. Every time he got rid of it, some fool grabbed his cup and topped it up again, giving him the impression that he was trying to drink the sea- 'That cup,' mumbled the old man beside him, 'been in my family for generations. Belonged to Hercules once, they reckon.'

  The Phoenician squinted at the object in question, trying to make his eyes focus. 'Really?' he said. 'Doesn't look that old. How long ago would that be, then?'

  'What? Oh, hundreds of years. Hundreds and hundreds.'

  'That's odd,' the Phoenician began to say; then he thought better of it. He'd been about to remark that it looked very much like the sort of cup they made on Cyprus, and wasn't that writing on the side there? But then he read the writing (peculiar patterns of strokes and flicks, easy enough to mistake for random decoration), naming the prince of the city of Qartikhadast it had been made for, and who was still alive... 'So when did Hercules die, then, do you know?'

  The old man frowned. 'Now you're asking me something,' he said. 'Forgetfulness has emptied my mind. Here, Cleander, when did Hercules die? Was it before or after your great-great-great-grandfather was born?'

  The man Cleander, a complete stranger, shook his head. 'More recent than that,' he said. 'My heart tells me my grandfather met him once. At least, I think it was my grandfather.'

  'I thought he was still alive,' someone else put in.

  'No, he's dead for sure,' someone else replied. 'It was after the war with the Achaeans but before the battle where my father lost his foot. Closer than that...'

  Cleander frowned. 'Was that the second war with the Achaeans,' he asked, 'or the third?'

  'What third? There were only two, unless you're counting Iphicles' raid.'

  It wouldn't have made an awful lot of sense even without the wine; with the wine, it was like a horrible tangled ball of rope, where you tease open one knot only to find another, even worse. The cup, however, was fifty years old at most.

  The Phoenician was just starting to nod off to sleep when Palamedes nudged him. 'There) you see,' he said, 'proves that point I was making earlier. If a man's done great things, made a name for himself, he'll never be forgotten. So who needs those scratches of yours, eh?'

  'Absolutely,' the Phoenician said rather desperately. 'I can see that now.'

  'Of course,' Palamedes went on, 'Hercules was the greatest of all the heroes, no question about that. He'll never be forgotten, no matter what. Others - well, I suppose it's touch and go, depending on what they've done. The greater the achievement, the better your chances of living for ever.'
>
  Someone down the other end of the table sniggered. Palamedes looked up, annoyed. 'Did I say something funny?' he asked.

  'Sorry,' the other man replied. 'I was just thinking of Coroebus.'

  There was a moment of deep silence; then quite a few of the men round the table started to laugh, at roughly the same time. Palamedes was one of them.

  'Shame on you,' he said nevertheless, trying to look serious and thereby making things worse. 'No, dammit, credit where it's due, he did - Oh well, anyway. By and large, what I was saying is true, though there's exceptions. Doesn't mean to say-'

  'Who's Coroebus?' the Phoenician asked.

  Another pause, rather sooner interrupted. 'Of course,' the old man said, 'I don't suppose you know that story, you weren't around then. Funny story, in a way, though I've got to say it. Sadness pulls down my heart sometimes when I think of some of those people, because really, none of it was right. But it didn't do any harm, and Leon was a good king, so-'

  The Phoenician nodded appreciatively, hoping he could change the subject before anybody had a chance to launch into a narrative. He was about to ask how the olives were shaping up this year when- 'If you like,' Palamedes said, 'I'll tell you the story of Coroebus.

  Would your heart like that?'

  'Well,' the Phoenician said, 'is it a long story?' Palamedes shook his head. 'Not really,' he replied. 'By rights, though, it's Cleander here who should be telling it, not me. After all, Cleander was there at the time, weren't you?'

  The man called Cleander lifted his head. 'I certainly was,' he said.

  'All right,' said Palamedes, 'you tell it, then. Just don't spin it out like you usually do. Our friend here's only staying five days.'

  As the Phoenician blinked and offered up a silent prayer to his gods that that was what passed in Elis for a joke, the man called Cleander leaned back against the wall and felt for his cup (the Phoenician hadn't noticed he was blind), then coughed. 'It all started,' he said- It all started a long while ago (said Cleander), back in King Leon's time.

  Any of you remember King Leon? Well, you do, Palamedes, goes without saying, but any of the rest of you? Too young, of course. Suits me; it means I can say what I like and nobody'll know different.

  Well now, we're going back thirty-five, maybe even forty years, before most of you were born. Now you ask people, they'll tell you, Yes, they were great days, men were lions then. But it's not true, you know. They weren't. People like you and me, our hearts tend to see the way things go as an upside-down triangle; once, the world was wonderful, then it shrank down a bit into just good, and soon it'll dwindle away into really bad. I suppose it's because we all respect our fathers and reckon they were better than us, and we're better than our children - goes without saying, doesn't it? Except for your people, I believe, honoured Phoenician guest; don't your people say that the triangle's the other way up, and people just keep on getting better and better? Makes no difference either way. It's not true, whichever way up it is, and when you get to my age you'll know it's true and tell everybody the exact opposite. Well, isn't that what old people do?

  All right, yes; King Leon. He was a good king. He was one of those good kings who make you wish you had a bad king instead. Oh, come on, you know perfectly well what I mean. All right, what makes for a good king? Brave, just, true; agreed? Well, Leon was brave all right - stick him up on a chariot with a couple of spears in his fist, he'd be off like a dog after hares; and the rest of us, well, we had no choice but to follow after. That's good most of the time, but there's a few good men's ghosts on the wrong side of the River because King Leon always fought in the front of the battle, and they were the ones who had to go and get him out again when he'd gone just a bit too far forward.

  And just - oh, King Leon loved justice. Couldn't get enough of justice. That's a good thing, too. Many a time I've seen King Leon sitting in the market square, and there's been some small man, someone with not much land and not many cows, weeping tears of joy because King Leon found for him against his rich, greedy neighbour. And I've seen those same rich, greedy men hanging about the fountain-head later that very day with frowns like summer thunder on their faces, and you didn't need to be able to hear their hearts to know what was in them - which isn't a disaster when you've got a strong king, a man with the heart of a lion, who'll smack down the wolves and the bears when they come down to the treeline where the flock's settled. When you've got a king who's true) sticks to his furrow with his eyes on the far headland, you don't need to worry about men like that - let them make trouble; the sooner they act up, the sooner they can be smacked down. So that was all well and good. He was a good king.

  But he was a bad king too; because his son - his legitimate son, who'd be the king when Leon crossed the River - was... Well, no hard words about the lad, many times in many places he'd have been a good man, but he was shaping up to be a bad king. Not his fault. He tried so hard, didn't he ever - he tried to be brave, tried four times where anyone with a place for Wisdom in his heart would've given it best after one. Two good friends of mine died pulling him out of trying to be brave the third time, and he was so ashamed afterwards that he tried to be brave a fourth time, and thank the gods I was the other side of the battle that day. So he stopped trying to be brave and tried to be just instead. He tried many, many times, until Anger stole so many hearts among the better sort that they'd have cut off his head and thrown him in the sea if they'd had a clear chance; and Leon couldn't rightly blame them for it - though he had to, of course, and lost good men that way, just because the boy's heart couldn't seem to understand that the little man with not much isn't always, always right (two times in ten he's a thief and a liar and no good, and three more he's just plain wrong). But no, he'd always find for the sparrow against the hawk and the mouse against the bear, and where's Justice in that? And as for true - his heart was always telling him what he'd just done was wrong (even when it wasn't) so the next day he'd do the opposite, and nobody had a clue where they were with him. The more he tried to be a good prince, the less chance he stood of being anything but a truly awful king. It's like they say: push one way and the tree'll fall the other.

  Leon saw all this, of course; and his heart told him, one day this boy will be king and everything you've done well will turn out badly on him. All the enemies you've crushed and humbled will take it back from him, with an extra measure for the loan. All your justice is making him unjust. As for being true - well, a man must be true to his own son, but if you do that you'll be false to the whole of Elis.

  'There's no hope in this,' he told me one day - we were watching them get in the apples, it should have been a happy day, but Sorrow had him. 'Everything I do makes it worse. It's enough to make a man give up and go live in a cave.

  I tried to sound cheerful. 'He's a good lad,' I told him, 'and he's still young.'

  'He's seventeen,' Leon said. 'When I was his age-'

  'All right,' I said. 'But he's younger than you were at his age. Most people are. What he needs is to get something right.'

  King Leon smiled. 'That's no lie,' he said.

  'No, that's not what I mean,' I said. 'He needs to do one thing -one big, splendid thing - and get it right. It's like when you're liming birds. You set out your snares and you wait, and the first five or ten birds fly over. They see the snares and sheer off, and all the other birds in the trees see them and they fly away too, and you think you'll never catch a single one if you stay there all year. Then Folly takes one bird and it drops in, puts its feet in the lime, it's stuck. So it perches there on the branch, pulling to get its feet free and flapping its wings. The other birds see it pitch in and stay there, so they guess it must be safe and they drop in too. Each one that pitches and gets stuck draws in another one, until the branch is full.

  It's the same way with Success. Until you've done one big thing right, Success sees the snare and keeps flinching away. Once you've limed one Success, though, another'll drop in, until you find it hard to do a thing wrong if yo
u try - even the things you do badly seem to go well - until the branch is full of Successes flapping their wings at you. Trust me on this: find one thing he can do well, keep him away from everything else until he's done it, and your problems will be over.'

  He never poured half measures, King Leon. Either he was all happy or all sad - I've noticed, it's often the way with these big men. I suppose their hearts are big and they can fit more in. Anyhow, when I'd put this to him he went from all sad to all happy, quick as a fire catching. The problem, though, was finding a big thing the boy could do. We all tried to think, but either our hearts didn't know or they weren't telling. It had to be the right sort of thing, proper for a king's son to do - but the boy had tried all those and made a muck of them. Someone said, Let's try to find out what he is good at, everybody's good at something. But that wasn't any help. Sure, he was good at digging a ditch or minding goats, he could weave a basket tolerably well, he could jump over a chair with both feet together. None of that was going to help us much.