Olympiad Tom Holt

by Olympiad (lit)

  Then he bashed me over the head with the butt of the spear - to keep me from following and strangling them all with my bare hands, I suppose - and I was out of it for a while. Next time I came round, Cleander was standing over me.

  'What the hell do you think you're playing at?' he asked me.

  My head hurt, and I felt a bit of a fool lying there with no clothes on. 'Go to the crows,' I replied.

  Cleander frowned; then he grinned. 'You got robbed,' he said.

  'Wisdom's your friend today, I can tell,' I replied. 'Here, give me your cloak before I frighten the horses.'

  He scowled and popped the brooch. 'What horses?' he replied. 'They seem to have taken them.'

  'I didn't mean my horses, rest their souls,' I said.

  'We've come on foot,' Cleander said. 'We assumed you'd bring the old chariot or a cart.'

  I closed my eyes. 'Wonderful,' I said. 'So either we go back for a cart or we walk all the way to the end of the world. What an auspicious start this is turning out to be.'

  'We'll walk,' said Uncle Sarpedon, leaning over Cleander's shoulder and prodding at the cut on my head. 'That's not serious,' he said. 'Can't have put up much of a fight if that's all they did to you.'

  'I didn't put up any sort of a fight,' I told him. 'There were six of them. Got more sense.'

  Uncle Sarpedon looked at me as if I was something he'd trodden in.

  We trudged back to Uncle Sarpedon's house - it was the nearest -in gloomy silence. Even Dusa was relatively quiet (Dusa, neglecting an opportunity to be unbearably amusing at her brother's expense: that ought to tell you just how depressed we all were).

  I hadn't been inside Uncle Sarpedon's place for the best part of ten years, back before his wife died and both his sons left to join a colony in Ionia. Of course, I hadn't realised it had been so long. I certainly wasn't prepared for what I saw.

  Uncle's house was full - jam-packed, crammed, piled up to the rafters - with junk. Everywhere you looked, there were things, so many of them that in places you just had to step over them, like a man crossing a river on stepping-stones. Now, if that makes it sound like Uncle Sarpedon was rich, forget it, please; when his father's land was divided up between him and his brothers, he got the rocky, sour-soiled end the rest of them didn't want, and (since there were four sons in the family) not very much even of that. He hadn't married well - typically, the dowry was mostly armour and weapons and a chariot - and the seven acres he'd inherited from his mother's side was the only good land on the whole patch, and that was on the other side of the valley from the rest of his holding. Also, Uncle had never taken much interest in what little he had got. Given the choice between getting his own hands dirty and hiring a couple of no-goods off the road come pruning or ditching time, he could be relied on to make the wrong decision. He could never be bothered, too busy practising sword-drill and spear-casts and shield exercises, bashing dust out of the ratty old quintain he'd set up in the courtyard or hauling his shepherd down from the sheiling during lambing and making the poor bugger throw spears at him (sharps, mind, not blunts) so he could practise his dodges and parries.

  So, if Uncle wasn't rich, how had he come by all the countless things that were packed into his house? Well; first, he'd always been a great traveller, a compulsive goer-on-visits, and over the years he'd called on a lot of rich and generous friends who took a pride in giving genuinely valuable presents. Without meaning to, he'd always had the knack of doing well out of giving and receiving, in terms of both quantity and value; accordingly, a lot of the stuff in his house was the proceeds of his various quests and expeditions.

  Even more of it was loot; his share of the plunder of several cities and the gods only know how many small towns and villages. He'd done well there, too; where most men of his rank would have wanted to take their share in women, Uncle had always gone for the more 'honourable' kind of plunder, stuff that'll still look good, and therefore preserve the memory of his glorious deeds, twenty years later. So he had any amount of tripods, cauldrons, bits of imported furniture, big cedar wood chests full of clothes that he'd never thought to open since the day he got them; and don't forget all the armour and weapons he'd stripped from the bodies of the men he'd killed. Put together, his collection of metalwork was worth a fortune just on metal value alone, but I'm not counting any of it as wealth, because nothing on earth would have induced him to part with any of it, and if that's your attitude, you might as well not have the stuff for all the practical good it'll do you.

  So; he'd acquired it, one way or another, and then, apparently, just stacked it against the wall or dumped it on the floor. You think I'm exaggerating; you tell them, Cleander. I'll swear, there was stuff there that looked as if it had been lying in the same place on the deck for ten years. I guess he only thought of it, when he considered it at all, as evidence, some kind of tangible proof of what he'd done over the years; it might just as well have been notches cut in a tally for all he cared about the things themselves. Bizarre, I call it-'

  'Excuse me butting in,' the Phoenician interrupted, 'but there's a case in point for you, Palamedes. About what we were discussing earlier. This man had to keep a house full of useless objects to remind him of his deeds - and all that wealth in metal and fabric and so forth, completely wasted - when if he'd known about writing, he could have written it all down, still had a record of the score, so to speak, and been able to walk across his floor in a straight line into the bargain.'

  Palamedes grinned. 'It's a fair point,' he said. 'But suppose he'd done what you seem to be suggesting - given away all his trophies and plunder and got things he wanted in return; and say he'd scratched down all about his deeds on a wax tablet instead. Where would the proof be?'

  The Phoenician frowned. 'Sorry, I don't follow,' he said.

  'How could he prove he'd done all the things he said he'd done, if he had nothing to show for it except a bit of wood with some scratches on? I mean, he could have made the scratches and never left his house or gone to the wars. A stranger from another city, or his own descendants after his death, they wouldn't know whether he was a truthful man or not. If they couldn't be shown actual things he'd brought away from a war, they'd have to take what he said on trust.'

  'True,' the Phoenician said. 'But I could go around collecting bits of old armour with holes punched in them, and I could hang them up on my wall and pretend I'd stripped them off the bodies of great heroes I'd killed in battle, and you wouldn't be any the wiser.'

  Palamedes frowned. 'I suppose you could, at that,' he said. 'But who'd do such a thing?'

  'The same sort of man who'd write out a false tablet, I guess,' the Phoenician replied.

  'All right,' someone else said. 'But your scratched bit of wood wouldn't mean a thing to me. I mean, if you'd died and I was going through your stuff and I found a bundle of bits of wood with wax on them, I'd assume they were firelighters. But if I went into your house and saw helmets and shields and spears all over the place-'

  'You'd assume I'd made a living repairing damaged armour,' the Phoenician said with a smile. 'The truth is, things on their own can't tell you very much, not unless there's words to go with them. The point about writing is, it preserves words, like flies caught in those amber beads you get from way up in the north-east. If you preserve a man's words, it's - well, it's as if he's still alive and talking to you, maybe a hundred years after his death. But stuff's just stuff.'

  There was a moment's awkward silence; then someone else down at the far end of the table spoke up. 'There's another alternative you haven't considered,' he said. 'And as far as I'm concerned it's the most important one of all. Glory isn't things you leave behind, or some sort of tally or message you scratch on bits of tree-bark. It's how other people remember you. It's having people telling stories about you - and repeating the words you said - when you've long since flaked away to ashes and the sheep have scattered the stones of your cairn. And that only comes if you've really done something worth remembering, so all this tal
k about proof isn't really relevant.'

  The Phoenician nodded. 'If they remember you right,' he said. 'But what if they don't? Suppose there was a great battle, everybody fighting bravely, great deeds of valour done on both sides; but one side's completely wiped out. Now, the survivors on the other side go away and tell their tale, and they're remembered all right, but what about the equally brave men on the losing side? They're forgotten; or maybe even worse, lies are told about them and repeated over and over again for generations. But if you write stuff down, you're talking directly to a man long after you're dead, without having to rely on other people to be truthful and have good memories.'

  There was a murmur around the table after that. 'I'll admit,' Palamedes said, 'the more I hear about this writing business, the more interesting it sounds. But it's no good me being interested; if nobody else can understand my scratches, it'd be like having a lock without a key to fit it.'

  A longer silence; which Cratus eventually broke.

  'If it's all the same to the rest of you,' he said, 'can I carry on with the story now, please?'

  Thank you (Cratus said). Now, where'd I got up to? That's right, Uncle Sarpedon and his junk.

  I don't think Uncle was in the habit of entertaining guests. We had to find our own places to sit down, wash our own hands and feet - had to fetch our own water, come to that, while the half-dozen or so oafish-looking men he had hanging around the place just stood there with their mouths open - and generally make shift for ourselves while Uncle hopped about like a bird on a thin branch, looking out suitable bits of kit to make good my losses.

  Well, I had my choice of armour - only I wasn't reckoning on taking any armour, so he had to put it all back again. He more or less forced me to accept a helmet and a huge old-fashioned sword with a pommel that dug into my wrist. They were both as green as moss, and I think something small and furry had been living in the helmet. To wear I got a very old purple cloak, with gold thread fraying wildly round the neck, and a couple of homespun tunics Out of a box whose lid was white with mildew. As for the one pair of boots I managed to prise out of him, you didn't have to be particularly observant to realise that the previous owner had died in them; there's nothing quite like caked-on blood for cracking leather.

  By then, of course, it was too late to set off, though we made several half-hearted attempts at suggesting it, on the basis that a night under the nice clean stars was greatly to be preferred to trying to sleep wedged in the cracks between Uncle's metalwork collection.

  Maybe it was the excitement of the day's adventures, or the weird surroundings, or the foul, stale bread we had for dinner; but I had a rather peculiar dream that night, as I lay on my side under my new-to-me cloak between a large, ugly tripod and a stack of spears.

  I was lying there (in my dream, I mean) when this dark figure appeared at the back of the hall. Now, in my dream there was an inner room m Uncle's house, and this figure walked through the door from the inner room into the main hall; it was dark in the hall, but there must have been a whole bunch of lamps burning in the inner room, because as the door opened a beam of light shot out, and because the figure was standing in front of the light, I couldn't see who or even what it was.

  'Hello?' I said. 'Who's there?'

  No reply from the figure, who just stood there; but I saw myself, and Cleander, and the rest of our party (including some other people I didn't know - oh yes, and the prince, Leon's boy) stand up and walk towards the light, past this figure and into the back.

  'Hello,' I repeated; I was wondering, if I'd just seen me going through the door, then who was dreaming this dream anyway? 'What's going on?'

  Well, the figure in the doorway didn't look like it was going to be any help, so I (whoever I was at this stage) got up and went to see for myself. I put my head round the door; but now the light was behind me, in the hall, and the inner room was as dark as a bag.

  I turned round and made a grab for the figure; I caught hold of a handful of long hair and realised it was a woman. Then I caught sight of her face, and I knew, the way you do in dreams, who she was; it was Athena, and I was pulling her hair like a naughty boy tormenting his sister.

  I tried to let go, but the stuff was sticking to my hands like cobweb. 'I'm really sorry about this,' I said, or words to that effect.

  'Don't worry about it,' the goddess replied. 'After all, who would you rather be, the man who wins the prize or the man who calls out the names of the winners?'

  Didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, either. While I was trying to figure it out, Athena grabbed me by the hair (I'd apparently managed to come unstuck from her by this point) and dragged me back into the hall; only it wasn't the hall, it was this big, enormous building, like a temple, only bigger; and I was looking at an absolutely huge statue of a man sitting in a chair. When I say huge, I had to crane my neck till the back of my head was squashed against my shoulders just to see its head; and it was made of ivory, gilded to show up the hair and the clothes. Strangest thing you ever saw. But that wasn't the really crazy part. It was who the statue was of-Yes, quite. Modesty forbids.

  'See?' said Athena. 'Cleander was right after all.'

  I hadn't got a clue what she meant by that, but I let it pass; after all, she was a goddess, and she still had me by the short hairs, literally. 'That's nice,' I mumbled.

  I could feel her smile at me; and then the statue started falling to bits, right in front of my eyes. The head went first. Great big chunks of gilt ivory as big as chickens came tumbling and bouncing down, like a rockslide on a cliff face. After that the shoulders split and fell apart, followed by the rest of the body, till there was nothing left but two big heaps of white rubble. Again, I didn't need to be told; my funeral cairn, and Cleander's.

  Well, that really put the wind up me, seeing my own grave like that. By now, the temple had fallen down as well, and we were in the open air; just me, Athena and those two piles of stones about a couple of hundred paces apart. There was a big crowd of people hanging about watching, and I figured out what it was - funeral games for Cleander and me. Anyway, there were runners getting set beside my cairn, and on the mark they started to run.

  Let me put it this way. I was there all right, but I also knew in my heart that it was just a dream, the way you do; and that part of me was just thinking really hostile thoughts about Uncle Sarpedon's ewe's-milk cheese when the goddess grabbed my shoulder and hauled me round so I was staring her right in the face. And it wasn't her any more, it was Dusa.

  At that point, I'm delighted to say, I woke up.

  I knew it would be pointless trying to go back to sleep after that. I just lay there, waiting for the dawn and trying to figure out in my heart what the dream could possibly have meant. I was still figuring when someone shook me hard by the shoulder, and I realised I'd fallen asleep after all, though not for long.

  'On your feet,' Uncle said. 'We've got a whole day to make up somewhere, thanks to you.'

  I had plenty of time to mull the dream over in my heart that day as we tramped along the road to Mantinea - Uncle insisted we should walk, probably because none of his horses were fit to draw a chariot - but the more I thought about it, the more confused I got. All I can say is, if the dream was a god telling me something, the god was mumbling.

  Someone else who wasn't too thrilled about walking was Tachys, our hardened traveller. About midday he mentioned his feet. A little later, he mentioned them again, along with a passing reference to his ankles and the dryness of his mouth. It was, he observed, a hot day. Inexperienced travellers, he pointed out, had been known to overdo it in heat like this, leading to exhaustions, strange visions and death. Experienced travellers like himself, he mentioned in passing, preferred to sit out the midday heat under a shady tree.

  Uncle Sarpedon decided to reason with him. 'Shut your face,' he said. Uncle Sarpedon could be very persuasive when he wanted to be. We didn't hear any more out of Tachys for the rest of the day.

  We slept very well indeed that
night, slumped on the ground like a drunk's clothes (we were supposed to have set a watch, in case of thieves, but somehow we didn't get round to it; and all our things were still there when we woke up), and, come dawn, we felt reasonably refreshed, if a trifle stiff around the calves and knees. We set off at a smart pace and covered a respectable amount of ground before it was time to stop for breakfast.

  'We aren't stopping for breakfast,' Uncle Sarpedon announced. 'No time for that, sorry. Thanks to Cratus we're a day and a half behind.'

  I wasn't the only one who didn't like the sound of that. 'Be reasonable,' Dusa said. 'If we don't eat we'll get worn out, and then we'll be even slower. And besides,' she added, 'who appointed you captain of the march?'

  Uncle looked offended. 'I'm only trying to help,' he said.

  'Please don't. You're being extremely annoying.'

  That was the first cross word between those two; up till then they'd been thick as curdled milk, hanging back a few yards behind the rest of us and nattering away, just softly enough that the rest of us couldn't hear what they were saying. Uncle Sarpedon was certainly taken by surprise.

  'But you're all so slow,' he said unhappily. 'You dawdle. Gods, we'll be old men by the time we reach Athens, at this rate.'

  Cleander looked up. 'Athens?' he said. 'Who mentioned anything about going to Athens?'

  'Well, aren't we?'

  'Why would we want to go there?' Cleander said. 'I thought we might just hang about for a boat at Rhion to carry us over the Gulf, and then head straight for Thessaly. At this rate, we could be there within ten days.'

  The rest of us exchanged looks. 'Cleander,' I said, jumping in because I was the most tactful, 'the Gulf and the ferry are due north of Elis.'

  'I know that. So?'

  'Well,' I pointed out, 'we're going south.'

  Cleander scowled at me. 'Nonsense,' he said. 'We're going north. You can tell by the position of the sun.'