Olympiad Tom Holt

by Olympiad (lit)

I shouted - don't ask me what - and bounded forwards like a happy dog; then I felt the dead man's spear dragging down my shield, and I let go of the handgrip; and when I did that, my middle and fourth fingers fell off. The spearhead had severed them, neat as you like, and I'd been so terrified I hadn't even noticed.

  I didn't know what to do next; some god had taken away my wits, and I stood there like a big straw target, just asking to be thrown at. In a baffle, that's not a good thing to do, and someone (don't know who) must have seen me for the opportunity I was; a spear hit me on the side of the head and knocked me down, and I was out of it then, for a while.

  When I came to, all I could see was feet. It was like being in a forest. They were shuffling about all round me, and I could hear grunting and bashing noises, like a blacksmith's shop. At least I had the wit to keep absolutely still, even when somebody stubbed his toes in my face. It didn't help that I'd been lying in a badly folded heap, so both my right arm and my left leg had gone to sleep; if I'd somehow managed to get back on my feet I wouldn't have lasted more than a couple of heartbeats. So, for once in my life, I did the sensible thing and stayed put.

  As if to make up for my numb right arm, my left hand was hurting like you wouldn't believe, and the only thought in my heart was terror that someone might stand on it or kick against it; the damn thing felt so tender and sore that just thinking about it made me feel weak. In other words, I was stuck, useless and helpless. I won't say it was the most miserable moment of my whole life, because I'm not dead yet and some god may be listening. All I can say is, if there's something worse lined up for me in the future, someone kill me now.

  Just when I was beginning to despair of ever getting out of there, something happened; there was a kind of a surge overhead, something fell on me and the feet shuffled past. I lay there under the thing (all I could think was, Oh great joy, it didn't land on my bad arm) until it was quiet, then I sort of rolled awkwardly - can't describe it, really, but it was uncomfortable and not very dignified - pulled my head out and sat up.

  The thing was my uncle Thaumastes, and he was as dead as they come. I found that very hard to believe. Not that I'd ever liked him much; he was one of those grown-ups who can't pass by a small child without ruffling its hair, something that annoyed the hell out of me when I was small. But he'd always been there; he was the sort of inoffensive, amiable man you never really notice, you assume he's there because he always is. He was no fighter, that's for sure; not much of anything really, being the great Deistratus' kid brother, father of the promising young Callon, Mylon and Doryclytus, husband of Prince Agis' younger daughter - the sort of man you define in terms of other people, not himself. Anyway, he was dead; his helmet was off and someone had crushed his skull with a rock.

  Which reminded me: the battle. It was about fifteen yards away by now and moving fast in the wrong direction; Fear and Panic were driving us like sheep back the way we'd come, and I was getting left behind. Now, you've seen a new-born foal flolloping around on its bendy legs; that was me, pins and needles like death in my left leg, stumbling frantically to keep up with the battle - I was facing the backs of the enemy, who were driving us back; I suddenly realised that somehow or other I was going to have to get round them if I wanted to rejoin my family and get out of there. Awkward. I didn't know what to do, and I was standing still being a target again.

  And then something wonderful happened. I can't describe how wonderful it was. Imagine a god swooping down out of the sky and whisking you clear of all your troubles. It wasn't a god, in fact, it was Doryclytus with the chariot; he came bouncing up out of nowhere right behind me, yelled, 'Get in!' at the top of his voice, and was cracking the whip on the horses' backs before I'd had a chance to grab the rail. But I scrambled up somehow, and he took me away from the battle. I've never been so grateful for anything in my whole life.

  Well, Doryclytus put a lot of ground between us and the battle. Then he pulled up and leaned forward against the rail, looking like death.

  'You're all right, then,' he said.

  'Yes,' I replied, in the interests of keeping it simple. 'What happened?'

  'It was after you killed Strymoneus,' he said. I was about to say, 'Who?' but he went on, 'They pushed forward, you went down; we went up to get you and there was a ruck right over where you were lying. That's about it, really. I'm glad you're safe, after all that.'

  I felt like I'd fallen out of a tree. 'You mean all that was because of me?' I asked.

  He looked at me. 'Well, we weren't just going to leave you there, were we? Father and Uncle Deistratus'll be relieved; when they drove us back like that, I was sure we'd lost you.'

  He didn't know. Well, no reason why he should; he'd got more sense than to stand about sightseeing in the middle of a battle. 'That's all right, then,' I said. 'Thank you.'

  He shrugged. 'I didn't do anything,' he said. 'I was just driving the chariot, trying to keep out of the way. What happened to your hand?'

  'Nothing, really,' I said stupidly, really wishing he hadn't noticed. After all, his father and his uncle were lying dead out there, apparently because of me. The last thing I could face right then was his sympathy.

  'Your fingers,' he persisted. 'Are you all right? Sorry, what a dumb question.' He was gawping at me like I was a hero or something; and right then, quite apart from the shame and the embarrassment, I was ready to kneel down and worship him like a god for getting me out of the baffle. The whole thing was ridiculous.

  Anyway (Cratus continued), that was the baffle. As you've probably gathered by now, we lost; though it was a fairly close thing, because we won on other parts of the field, and the next day the Triphylians packed up and headed for home. I gather they'd more or less finished their raid anyway, and were only holding on for the battle.

  Probably the worst part of it all was that I was now a hero. It seems that the clown who managed to stick himself on my spear, Strymoneus, was the Triphylian king's nephew, second in line to the throne after a five-month-old kid, and the king himself was in his seventies and not a well man. Killing him was about the only notable deed we did in the battle, which had cost us our own hero Deistratus and a dozen or so other big names, so naturally we - I mean us, the Eleans - played up Strymoneus, which made me a big man. Of course, I didn't dare say anything, for fear of being strung up from a tree; denying our one major achievement in an otherwise wretched affair would have been the next best thing to treason under the circumstances, which were gloomy enough to be going on with. The battle was supposed to be the prince's first great deed, remember? I can't say any of the blame for what happened was his any more than anybody else's, but the fact remained that the whole deal had gone very badly wrong and made things a whole lot worse. Which, dear brother- 'Don't start,' said the blind man angrily. 'You've been going on and on about this for nigh on forty years. If we'd won-'

  'Yes, but we didn't.'

  'But if we had-'

  'Yes, but we didn't.'

  Palamedes held up his hand. 'You two,' he said, 'shut up, or take it outside. What will our guest think of you, yelling at each other like a couple of neighbours over a boundary stone? I'm sorry,' he went on, turning to the Phoenician. 'You know how it is with brothers sometimes.

  'That's all right,' the Phoenician said. 'Actually, I was thinking of turning in now, if that's...'

  'You're a very tolerant man, I can see that,' Palamedes said. 'Usually they aren't like this at all. Best of friends, really. It's just this one subject brings out the worst in them. What I always say is, anything that happened forty years ago can't possibly be worth shouting about now.'

  Cratus smiled. 'Really?' he said. 'My heart seems to remember you getting pretty worked up when you fell out with Mnesiochus over that ditch on your boundary. And that was fifty years ago, if it was a day.'

  'Different matter entirely,' Palamedes said irritably. 'I know for a fact my father dug that ditch, so legally it's mine. Mnesiochus had no right-'

  The Phoenician's head was begin
ning to hurt. 'Really,' he said, 'I would rather like to go to bed now, if it's all the same to you. It's a very interesting story, I can tell; but it's been ever such a long day, and I want to be up bright and early in the-'

  Palamedes frowned. 'Well,' he said, 'tell you what. We'll take the story up to the funeral, and then you can hear the rest tomorrow. How's that sound, Cleander?'

  'It's a good place to pause,' the blind man agreed. 'Shall I just finish it off? No disrespect to my brother here, but I was closer to what was going on than he was.'

  'Be my guest,' Cratus grumbled. 'Never let it be said I didn't give you a chance to tell your side of the story.'

  As Cratus just said (the blind man continued), the war had turned out pretty badly, for our family and for King Leon. But just curling up and licking our wounds wasn't going to help anything. Like my father always used to say, there's precious little in this life that can't be made worse and can't be made better, depending on how you set about it.

  The first thing we had to do, of course, was hold the funeral. Regardless of what impressions Cratus may have tried to give you, Uncle Deistratus was a great and famous man; he served his family and his city all his life, and he wouldn't have wanted to go out any other way. It was only right and proper we give him a decent send-off.

  Building the pyre was a major undertaking in itself. We worked it out; the least we could get away with was twelve wagonloads of reasonably dry timber - use freshly cut green pine and even if you can get it to burn, it'll spit resin at you and muck up a solemn occasion - but twelve loads was more than we could get our hands on in a hurry just then. We sent runners out to beg timber from everyone we could think of, but they all came back with the same story - nobody could spare us any timber because they were patching up their barns for the harvest. Fair enough, I could see their point, but it wasn't helping us build our bonfire, and all the while Uncle Deistratus wasn't getting any fresher. Then someone mentioned that there was a wrecked ship down on the coast. We were dubious about that; driftwood spits like the devil when it's burned, almost as bad as pine, and the flame's a funny colour because of the salt. But we didn't really have a choice, so off the wagons went, and sure enough they came back laden with timber. One look at it was enough to convince us we'd been right to have our doubts. Damn stuff was still pretty well sodden in the middle; we'd have to douse the whole thing down with oil and lard to get it to take, and that meant putting up with the smell.

  Come the day, though, we were lucky. Some god sent a stiff breeze, and although it was a noisy old fire, all hisses and crackles, that's actually not a bad thing for a funeral pyre; a bit of noise masks the fairly gruesome sounds a dead body tends to make when it's burned.

  Once we were certain it wasn't going to go out on us with the job half done, so to speak, we unstoppered a jar of cheap drinking wine and poured the libations (well, you don't give the good stuff to the gods, do you?), making sure we left enough to damp down the embers once the fire had burned itself out. Then we picked out the bones, folded them up in the fat from the ox we'd slaughtered for the funeral feast and stowed them in a big jar - gilded bronze it was; Deistratus got it from a Northerner, and it had scenes of harvest and vintage embossed round the sides.

  We dug the pit, closed up and piled a barrow (one thing we're never short of in these parts is stones, as anybody who's broken a newly shod plough will tell you), sprinkled the last of the wine and did the respectful standing-around bit, which I can never see the point of, personally. I mean, if someone's dead you're either beside yourself with grief or glad that he's gone to the Happy Islands, or delighted to be rid of an enemy; hanging about looking quietly miserable is almost never appropriate.

  Well, that concluded the solemn part of the occasion. Now we could get on with the fun.

  Let's face it, everybody enjoys funeral games. Some people, the types who are naturally good at running and jumping and all that stuff, spend hours and hours training. Then there are the people who've got first-class thoroughbred chariot horses, or red-hot keen archers, or crackerjack boxers and wrestlers; a funeral's the only real opportunity they get to show off, compete with like-minded folks, maybe even win a prize and some glory. And, by some unkind chance, nobody worth holding games for had died for a long, long while in our city, so all the frustrated games enthusiasts hadn't had a chance to play.

  Oh yes, everybody benefits from the games. It's not just the people who take part, either. The family gets a chance to clear out some of the accumulated junk the dead man's acquired over the years; you know the sort of thing - unwanted gifts from unwelcome guests, family heirlooms that everyone's sick at the sight of, loot from primitive and poverty-stricken villages, small and ugly items of gold and silver. They're no use to anybody; it'd be insulting to give them as presents, they just sit in boxes or up in the rafters, taking up space. Offered as prizes, however, they bestow honour on the giver and the man who wins them. A good deal all round, really.

  Deistratus had been a terror for piling up stuff eminently suitable for giving as prizes. He had a shed full of hideously ugly bronze tripods, silver-plated cauldrons with the silver peeling off, great big ugly two-handed cups that looked like the sort of thing the cutler's apprentice takes home for his mother after his first month in the shop, bent swords with moth-eaten baldrics, armour in excessively large or small sizes, two left greaves - you name it, he'd got it stashed away, as if for this very purpose. Obviously, unwanted metalwork wouldn't be enough for the two main prizes, chariot race and foot-race; but it so happened that a few months before his death he'd been given a couple of flute girls by some foreign friend of his. Gorgeous, they were, to look at, but you wouldn't want either one of them in the house, neither the filthy-tempered one nor the clumsy one. I think his family were at their wits' end trying to think of ways to get shot of them when the perfect opportunity presented itself.

  Well, the best men won, naturally. Thersiochus won the chariot race, Buprasius won the boxing and the javelin. Mecisteus won the wrestling - he cheated, of course, but there'd have been so much trouble if he hadn't won that nobody said anything, and we made up for it by giving him a mouldy old helmet for first prize, and giving Lyces, the runner-up, a really rather tidy mixing-bowl that had belonged to Deistratus' grandfather. Shame on me, I can't remember who won the archery or throwing the weight; what I can tell you is that I lost in the second round of the weight, because just as I was swinging and pushing with my back leg, like you're supposed to, I slipped on a patch of horseshit left behind after the chariot race and went down flat on my nose. That was the sum total of honour and glory I got out of those games, and I suppose in a way it wasn't a bad thing. What're honour and glory, after all, but reasons for people to remember you after you're dead? Now, I can't remember who actually won the prize, but you ask anybody who was there and you'll find that the one spectacle that lodged in everybody's mind was the sight of me sprawled in a little pyramid of horse dung, so I suppose I came out best after all.

  But the reason I'm telling you all this, apart from the fact that it's a good story and it's about famous people who should be remembered, is that the winner of the foot-race was none other than our beloved crown prince, the one who was the problem we'd made such a hash of fixing. Won it easily, too, and against better men. At the time there was a certain amount of muttering - only won because he's the king's son, and shouldn't be surprised he's good at running, not after what happened in the baffle - the usual stuff. But anybody who actually saw the race knew in his heart that it was a true win, fair and square. Quite unexpectedly, without any help from us, the kid had done something right. Well, that's life.

  Something big, too. People were talking (not the sore-heads, other people), saying what a good race it had been and how the prince had run it well. But, when all's said and done, winning a race in a local funeral games wasn't big enough, not to establish the kid as a good man in the hearts of the people. Which led my heart back to wondering: we need to find something properly
big to do, and fast. I wasn't deaf. They were starting to blame the boy for the defeat. Nothing specific, of course, because there wasn't anything specific to blame him for. But that's almost worse, in a way. A man gets a reputation for bad luck, there's nothing he can do about it because it's not up to him. He can't make up his mind and harden his heart to go out and deliberately have good luck, the way he can go fight a baffle or kill a bear or something.

  Worse still, the enemy were getting sure of themselves - particularly Prince Oeleus, Leon's brother's son, who'd be king if the crown prince didn't measure up. Did I mention Oeleus won first prize in the long jump? Also, he'd made a fairly good show in the baffle (better than the prince did, anyway) and he'd always been popular with the peers of the realm, the people Leon and the kid had antagonised over the years by the judgements they'd given at law. Don't get me wrong; Oeleus was a good man, in many ways better suited to be king than Leon or his son. He had the knack of carrying off his mistakes as though they were successes, which is pretty well essential if you want to rule a city, and he didn't make that many mistakes either. He was a good, brave fighter, he managed his land well, he had a lot of friends in other cities all over the country, and yes, he was a fair-minded man in matters that didn't concern him - he'd have made a good judge and handed down sound judgements in law. But he wasn't Leon's son, only his nephew; so even though he was a good man, he wasn't good enough, and never could be. Not unless he could force the issue and push the kid aside when Leon died. The difficulty was, that was looking more and more likely as time went on, and that in itself was unsettling for families that had always enjoyed Leon's favour, been his advisers, that sort of thing. Knowing that the rival heir to the throne doesn't like you does wonders for your loyalty, I can tell you.

  I was debating these things with my heart, the evening after the games, when we were drinking after the big dinner in the long hall. It was a fairly boisterous gathering, as you can imagine. The good wine was going the rounds, some of the men were singing, some of them had tied up some poor fool to a pillar at the side of the hall and were chucking the bones off their plates at him, first one to draw blood wins. In the background, our nonentity of a harper was playing some trash and mumbling the words of the big baffle-scene under his breath, as if he was burgling a house and was terrified anybody would hear him. The hail was unpleasantly smoky (we were burning up the last of that damned driftwood) and I'd had more than enough of the good wine. What I really wanted was to get home, sponge the vomit off my clothes (had the bad luck to get between one extremely thirsty reveller and the door) and go straight to bed.