Olympiad Tom Holt

by Olympiad (lit)

  So I stayed away from him. And I definitely wasn't talking to Dusa, not after the flour stunt; and Sarpedon was getting all bloodthirsty and peculiar as the prospect of a good fight got nearer. That only left my heart to talk to, or the princes; and they were busy most of the time, counting jars and shouting at bowyers and fletchers and armourers and spear-polishers and shield-furnishers and potters and harness-makers and grooms and rope weavers and charcoal-burners and carpenters and smiths and pretty well everybody who could do anything in Megara (none of whom were exactly thrilled about being dragged away from their farms at a busy time of year in order to make things for an unexpected war, on the vague understanding that there might be something in it for them in the middle to long term) - not to mention all the sitting around eating and drinking they had to do with all the mighty warriors who turned up at the palace door in answer to the heralds (that's one part of being a prince that'd never suit me, having to be polite to all those people, day after day...). In other words, they were busy, no time for idle chatter with someone who was at best peripheral to the success of the venture. So I kept out from under their feet, and resolved to go away and do something I've always been exceptionally good at: sulking.

  But even that didn't make me feel a whole lot better (unusually); the essence of good sulking is feeling hard done by, and although I was that all right, my heart would insist on telling me that I was guilty of giving as many hard deeds as I was getting. After all, over the last month or so I'd been party to disrupting the Argive games, harbouring and protecting a man of blood, highway robbery, stealing a ship and plotting an entirely gratuitous invasion for the benefit of a fraudulent blasphemer. Added to which - and this was, for some reason, the chief accusation my heart brought against me - I'd cheerfully abandoned the job my king had entrusted me with, forgotten all about the problems we faced at home, and given up on the pursuit of games-players. Why the god chose to put guilt into my heart at a time like that, when surely I had every reason to count myself an innocent victim and not to blame for anything, I have no idea; the gods walk in clouds and mists, and their ways are obscure to mortals. Also, their sense of humour is rather different from ours, and not particularly nice.

  The best way of dealing with guilt, of course, is to find something useful to do; and in the middle of the preparations for a war, there are so many things that need doing that anybody who wants to help can generally find an occupation. Now, when I was a boy, one of the things I used to love doing (though I didn't get many opportunities, since I wasn't supposed to do it) was hanging around the smithy helping the smith. Our smith was a small, cheerful man with a club foot; he wasn't much use on the land, partly because of his disfigurement but mostly because he just didn't like the work, so he spent as much time as he could in the smithy and left his brothers to get on with the farming. In consequence he wasn't very popular with them, and didn't have anybody to talk to, which in turn meant he was one of the few people around our place who had time to talk with a small, inquisitive boy.

  The princes' smith was young for a man in his trade - he'd just taken over from his father, who had died unexpectedly of a fever -quite competent and extremely talkative, so much so that people with things to do tended to keep out of the smithy for fear of getting pinned down in a conversation and losing a day's work. That suited me fine, however, so I offered my services as an unskilled hammer wielder, fetcher and carrier. Naturally, the order of the day was spear-blades, and arrowheads when we got bored and wanted a change. I would load the charcoal into the furnace and work the goatskin bellows, clean up the moulds, swing the hammer as directed, change the tempering bath when it got too filthy, scour and burnish the crap off the newly cast and forged pieces and generally do as I was told, while he did the clever stuff: gauging the alloy of the bronze, reading the heat by the colour, forming hard edges and folding sockets, quenching and tempering and grinding the contour of the cutting blade. He was an interesting man, and I wish now that I'd thought to ask his name.

  'So you're here for the war?' he asked me, as we worked over a spearhead, me bashing with the hammer, him turning it in the tongs so the blows fell exactly where they were needed.

  'Not me,' I replied. 'I'm one of the people who brought it here.'

  'Ah.' He nodded. 'So you must be either Cratus or Cleander. And, since you've got nothing better to do than bash hot metal, I guess you must be Cratus. Welcome to Megara.'

  'Thank you,' I said. 'I reckon I owe you an apology.'

  He lifted his head. 'Doesn't bother me,' he replied. 'After all, nobody's asking me to go to war, thank the gods, all I've got to do is my job - and I'd rather be doing this than dragging round after the plough or busting up clods with the mattock; that's what the gods made brothers for.'

  'Is that it?' I said. 'I've often wondered.'

  'Oh yes,' he replied, 'but first you've got to know how to handle 'em right. They have to be broken to it, like horses. 'Course, it's different for you of the better sort, there's enough to go round when the old man dies and each of you gets a place of his own. Us poor buggers, we can't afford to split everything up and go our separate ways; that's why I learned the trade, that and my old man being the palace smith. Usually it works well enough; they get the stuff they want made for them, and we get jars of stuff sent down from the palace by way of saying thank you, though not as often as we'd like, of course. These two, they've got better memories than their father, but it's not something you can rely on when you're counting out the stores for the winter.'

  I grinned. 'You get by, I reckon,' I said.

  'Oh, I never said we didn't. And there's perks of the trade - like there's always a few bits and pieces of material left over when the job's done, but they don't have to know that.'

  'I'll bear that in mind when I get home,' I said. 'Assuming I ever do get home, that is.'

  He pulled a sympathetic face. 'My heart tells me you will,' he said. 'And if you don't - well, I expect Prince Pentheus won't forget you when he's handing out land and bronze on Aegina. Especially,' he added with a nasty grin, 'if you're his brother-in-law.'

  I snarled at him and he laughed.

  'So what do you make of this war, then?' I said, anxious to change the subject.

  He shrugged. 'Nothing to do with me,' he replied. 'After all, whatever happens, the Aeginetans aren't likely to be coming over here or bothering me. If you noblemen want to bash each other around with dangerous weapons and you're prepared to do it somewhere else, the very best of luck to you.'

  'Count me out,' I said. 'I think war's a rotten game, personally. I suppose I've got to take part, because my brother and my uncle will be involved and it'd look awful if I didn't join in. I don't want to, though.'

  'Do me a favour,' he laughed. 'Think of all the immortal glory you're going to win. Isn't that all you noblemen think about, honour and prestige and living for ever?'

  'The others might,' I said. 'Me, I'm less concerned about living for ever and more worried about living past the age of at least thirty. Is that so very wrong of me?'

  He paused to get a better grip on the billet with the tongs. 'As a matter of fact,' he said, 'yes, it is. Means you aren't doing your job. It'd be the same as if the princes told me to make a dozen bronze axle-pins and I turned round and said, Sorry, I'm not in the mood. Now sure, they can't make me do it if I don't want to; but I do it, because I'm the son of a smith who's the son of a smith, and it's what I do. Same with any tradesman. I do it because I was born to do it; it's got its advantages and its disadvantages. Disadvantages are, I've got to stand here in the heat and work bloody hard, whether I like it or not. Advantages are, the princes make up to my family what they lose because I'm here and not ploughing or digging - which is also bloody hard work - and a bit more besides; and it makes me different, not just another man. I get respect. People listen to me.'

  'Honour and prestige,' I said. 'It's all you smiths think about.'

  'Ah,' he replied, 'but I don't figure on living for ever.'
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br />   'In a sense you do,' I told him. 'Like, for generations out of mind there's been a smith here, and it's been you, or your father, or his father, right back to the time when the Sons of the Achaeans first came here. When you're gone, it'll be your son, then your grandson, and so on for ever. Oh, the names might change, but the palace smith of Megara is immortal; far more so than any warrior, who'll only be remembered if he's lucky and it's convenient.'

  He thought about that for a moment, then lifted his head. 'I can see the point you're trying to make,' he said, 'and it's clever enough, I suppose. But I don't agree with you. It's a better-sort-versus-ordinary-sort thing, if you ask me. A man like you looks at a man like me, all he sees is the job, the anvil or the plough or the spoke-shave or whatever. You see me, you see the palace smith. You don't see me. When I'm dead and gone, you'll look at my son and you'll see - guess what, the palace smith. I'll be lost for ever.'

  'Maybe,' I said. 'But you're doing exactly the same thing. You say I should do my bit in the war because I'm of the better sort, it's my job and expected of me. You're looking at me and seeing my job, or my trade, or my position, just the same as I do when I look at you. And suppose by some miraculous chance I were to do some great deed or other, in war or playing games - I won't be remembered in song and story if I don't - well, it's the same thing, isn't it? People will hear about me and remember the deed, the little pip of heroism that stays behind after the apple's rotted away. I'll be cold ashes long since, but the deed may just live for ever. My deed, your trade; all the same, really.'

  He smiled. 'I'll say this for you,' he said, 'you've got a way with words. Maybe you'll be remembered for all time as a clever bastard who could make any crowstruck thing sound right if you put your mind to it.'

  'I'd settle for that,' I replied. 'Then at least they'd be remembering me, not what I said.'

  It was the speed of it all that bewildered me most. One moment, it seemed to me, we were sitting in the hall and Cleander was saying, Don't mind him, he's crazy; the next, we were watching them load bits of chariot on to the ships.

  There's definitely an art to taking chariots to bits and putting them back together again, and listening to our Phoenician friend here, with his scratches and marks that tell you things, puts me in mind of the worst problem of the lot: how to match up the right bits to the right chariot. It's all very well taking off the wheels and packing them carefully in straw, but what happens when you get to the other side and find you can't remember which wheels are supposed to go on which axles? A right fool you look sitting cross-legged in the sand trying to get a matched pair that'll run true while the enemy are thundering towards you on the skyline. Now, if you scratched or hammered some cute little mark on the wheels, and the same mark on the axles, you'd know which ones went with which, and it'd save an awful lot of fooling about.

  But that's by the by; the traditional way to do it is by layers, with the wheels for Agesilaus' chariot on the bottom of the stack, then Protesilaus' wheels, then the next pair, then the next, and some poor fool has to try to remember the order they went down m. Meanwhile there's someone else who's in charge of remembering shafts, and yokes, and rails, and axle-pins, and finally the boxes themselves. It's all very well, I guess; but what happens if the man who's remembering the yoke-collars, say, gets swept overboard during a squall and drowns? You get to where you're going, and nobody's got a clue which collar goes on which shaft. Result: chaos.

  Not, of course, that anything like that happened to us. No, we had as calm and smooth a ride as anybody could hope for. Even Dusa (who insisted on coming with us, 'to bind up wounds and be useful generally,' as if she'd ever been useful in all her sweet life) managed to keep her last meal down until we were well out of sight of the shore.

  We left just before dawn- 'Sorry to interrupt again,' the Phoenician said, 'and I've got a feeling I'm going to regret asking this; but why exactly did you two go along on this invasion? It wasn't your fight, surely. And I'd got the impression you didn't even like Pentheus very much.'

  Cratus nodded. 'That wasn't really anything to do with it,' he said. 'There were a number of reasons, really. First - what you might call the formal reason; we were the princes' guests, therefore temporarily part of their household, so it was just assumed we'd be going along with everybody else. To look at it another way, we'd have had every right to be frightfully upset if they hadn't invited us. Second - well, it's another conventional reason, but we Sons of the Achaeans of the better sort are supposed to like wars and fighting -it's what we're for, basically, it's what we train for, right from the day we're big enough to bash a tree-trunk with a little wooden sword. Now, conventional stuff like that explains why Cleander was ready to go; I had my own reasons as well. One, if Cleander and Sarpedon - and Dusa, of course - had all gone off to the wars, I'd have been left all on my own in Megara, which wouldn't have suited me at all. Two, I wanted to keep an eye on Dusa and Pentheus. And three - well, I suppose I had nothing better to do. The finding-games-players thing had more or less ground to a halt. My chances of getting home, realistically speaking, depended on the princes lending us a crew and supplies for our lovely stolen ship.' He paused, and let his face slide into a lopsided smile. 'And, gods help me, it was an adventure, a remarkable event, a chance to be remembered as part of a great deed of valour. I don't know,' he concluded, lifting his head. 'It never occurred to me not to go, is the simple answer. Will that do?'

  We left just before dawn (Cratus went on) and were well past the poxy little islands by the time we had to drop anchor for the night; there was a chance we'd been seen, of course, but things seemed to be going our way - we didn't notice any fishing-boats, so there was at least a chance that no fishing-boats noticed us. It was a cool, still night and everybody else but me seemed to have no trouble at all getting to sleep. I wasn't so fortunate. Oh, I wasn't lying there quivering with fear, like a hare tangled up in a briar; I just couldn't sleep, is all.

  But I must have dozed off eventually, because I had a dream. This dream came and stood over me, the way dreams do, and I saw it was a young woman, naked and white as milk from head to toe. To be precise, it was my sister.

  'Dusa?' I said. 'For pity's sake. I told you, it wasn't very clever the first time.'

  But the dream shook her head. 'I'm not your sister,' it said. 'I'm Victory; the real Victory. If you don't believe me, try to grab hold of my hand.'

  I didn't, so I did; and of course, my hand passed straight through it, because there was nothing there.

  'I'm sorry I doubted you,' I said, feeling rather silly. 'Only, you really do look just like my sister Dusa.'

  The dream smiled. 'Actually,' it said, 'you've got that the wrong way round; Dusa looks like me. Can't you see the difference? Figure it out later, then, I haven't got the time to go through it for you step by step. I'm just here to tell you that when the foot-race begins, I'll be with you and all of you, even though you may find it hard to believe at the time. Remember: I'm usually where you least expect to find me, and nobody ever really recognises me at the time.'

  It turned to go, but I called it back. 'Victory,' I said, 'can I ask you something?'

  'You can ask,' it said.

  'The other night,' I said, 'you didn't happen to visit the two princes, Oenophilus and whatsisname, Hipposomething?'

  'As a matter of fact,' said the dream, 'I did. And before you ask, yes, I promised myself to them if they attacked Aegina. Shall I tell you something else, while I'm at it?'

  'Please.'

  It smiled. 'I don't always tell the truth.'

  'Ah,' I said.

  'Or at least, not the truth you're expecting me to tell,' said the dream. 'Some people hold that it's because we gods speak not for the moment but for all time. Or you could say it's because we like making fools out of you. Up to you which one you believe.'

  Then it walked away, and as I was trying to call it back I woke up.

  'Excuse me,' the Phoenician interrupted, 'I'm confused. When she said she didn
't always tell the truth, who was she being?'

  Cratus frowned. 'Sorry, I don't follow,' he said.

  'I know, it's complicated. When the dream of Victory said she didn't always tell the truth, which one was she being? Victory, or a dream? Look, let me put it another way. Was she telling you that Victory sometimes tells lies, or that dreams sometimes tell lies, or what?'

  'Oh, I see.' Cratus rubbed his chin. 'You know,' he said, 'I hadn't thought of it like that before. I'd always assumed that it meant dreams don't always tell the truth; but that could just have been me jumping to conclusions.'

  The Phoenician nodded. 'That's the way I took it too,' he said, 'until I wondered if that was right after all. I mean, it's not my language, maybe I'd failed to grasp some fine nuance of word order or something.'

  Cratus shrugged. 'Well,' he said, 'actually it could just as well have been the one as the other. For what it's worth, I assumed it was talking about dreams; and as a fall-back position, I assumed that if it wasn't that, it was my sister Dusa all covered in flour.'

  'Thank you,' the Phoenician said. 'I understand now. I think.'

  The next day (Cratus went on), we reached Aegina.

  The first indication was the lookout up in the prow, yelling. Now, he'd been put there because he had amazingly keen eyesight, so it was a while before the rest of us could make out anything apart from waves and sky. But in due course we saw it too, a grey-brown hump sitting up out of the water. The shipmaster yelled to put on more speed, and the oarsmen quickened the pace - vitally important to waste no time, now that we were presumably visible to them. I stood by the mast and watched the hump get bigger and bigger; hilly place, Aegina, I thought, as we crawled through the water, but then again, most islands were. The closer we got, the hillier it looked, until a rather disturbing thought occurred to me. What if Aegina was all hills, with no flat plain worth a damn? What if it sat up out of the sea and kept on going? Here we were, with fifty chariots and the best damned charioteers in the world, rapidly approaching a place where (by the looks of it) chariots were going to be absolutely useless.