Olympiad Tom Holt

by Olympiad (lit)

  When I reckoned it was safe to look up, I looked up. Nothing to be seen except a landscape with dead soldiers; so I picked myself up and tottered a step or so forward, until I realised I was standing on friend Ischophilus' sword. Well, he wouldn't be needing it where he'd gone, so I took it off him, also his helmet - a better fit than the boars'-teeth number, not to mention a bit more solid - and stood there, alone like a solitary tree on a bleak hillside, wondering what in buggery I should do next.

  They were fighting like mad further down the slope. I watched them for a heartbeat or so; then the god put it into my heart that the really smart thing to do would be to walk away; not up the hill, because I wasn't really in the mood to try sacking Aegina on my lonesome; not down the hill, because there was a battle going on down there and I'm not that stupid; instead, walk away, parallel to the shore, and keep going until I'd got well past the end of the battle-lines, whereupon I could loop round and stroll back to the ships in relative comfort and peace.

  It felt strange, very strange indeed; it was as if I was out for a walk with the sling and the dogs, and I happened to wander into the middle of someone else's battle. In this imaginary baffle, there are two sides hammering the crap out of each other, but for some reason it's obvious that I'm not involved, so nobody takes any notice of me. I carry on with my stroll, walking round the baffle like you'd walk round a patch of briars, fallen tree or other natural obstacle. You know, I suppose that sort of thing must happen from time to time; there's a baffle, and some shepherd or drover walks round a bend in the road and finds himself unexpectedly in the middle of it. I wonder what they do, these accidental witnesses, who may not even know who the two opposing nations might be, let alone the names of the mighty men of valour.

  I started to walk, and I kept on going, and for a long time no one bothered me, till my heart was beginning to believe I might actually get away with this blatant act of cheating. As if. Good luck, they say, is just the gods' way of telling you that really bad luck is on its way. In my case, the bad luck consisted of about a dozen Aeginetans running up the slope towards me - running away, let me add, from the baffle, which was starting to go our way at last. Our good luck; my bad luck. I'd like to tell you that in spite of everything my heart rejoiced to see that our side was prevailing; but I can't, because I have a nasty habit of telling the truth.

  A dozen Aeginetans, and me. Again, no question of there being a choice, or any doubt in my heart as to what to do. I took one look at them, said something vulgar, and ran back the way I'd just come, quick as I could.

  Bad decision; because those dozen cowards weren't the only Aeginetans to turn tail and run like deer. Another group of about twenty were coming up the slope on the other side of me. Meanwhile, doubtless shamed into action by the worthlessness of their comrades, yet another wave of armed men was scurrying down the hill from the city to join in the fighting. In other words, there was a triangle of converging hostile forces, with me in the middle, and the only way out that wasn't full of enemy spears was straight up m the air.

  I'm not, unfortunately, a bird.

  There are men, mighty men of valour, who'd have shrugged their mountainous shoulders, picked the smallest group of opponents and charged. Not me. Don't get me wrong, I didn't have such a low opinion of myself that I wouldn't have held still and slugged it out with one Aeginetan warrior, or maybe even two very short ones. Best part of fifty, though, that was a different matter. No; there comes a time in a man s life when he can't dodge and run any more. He's got to anchor his feet firmly to the bosom of his mother Earth, stand firm, listen to his dauntless heart and, at the proper moment, fling himself on his face in the dirt and grovel for mercy.

  I was just about to do this when the dozen or so I'd run into first came up behind me. I was actually proposing to surrender to the twenty-odd in front of me, having underestimated the first party's speed, so they caught me by surprise and still standing. Oh well, I said to my heart, and turned round, hoping I'd get a chance to squeal 'No! Don't hurt me!' before it was too late.

  There was an ugly great brute of an Aeginetan standing there staring at me. 'Well?' he said.

  I was too bewildered to say anything. 'Well?' he repeated. 'What d'you want us to do?'

  Still couldn't make any sense of it; and then the god put the meaning into my heart. This clown, seeing a lone figure running backwards and forwards behind the lines, and wearing a rather splendid bronze helmet with a big horsehair plume sticking out of the top, had taken me for some kind of officer on his own side. Made sense, I guess; after all, what kind of fool would be strutting backwards and forwards like a peacock, entirely surrounded by the enemy.

  'Pull back,' I managed to say, somehow.

  The man looked at me. 'You sure?' he said.

  "Course I'm sure,' I snapped - you can sound terribly abrupt when you're just about to piss yourself with fear. 'You heard what I said. Jump to it. And you,' I added, because the other group was up with us now, 'you lot, go with them. Back to the city, quick as you like.'

  The man dipped his head towards the reinforcements coming down the hill. 'What about them?' he asked.

  'Tell 'em the same, from me,' I said. 'Get the hell out of here while you still can.'

  And off they went; while I did a pretty passable imitation of a worried commander rushing back to the baffle, even though well aware that he's unlikely to come back alive. I was so good, I nearly burst out crying at the tragedy and nobility of it all.

  Remember what I said about good and bad luck? Think about it. My good fortune in being taken for an Aeginetan by the Aeginetans suddenly threw off its disguise and revealed itself to be bad luck as soon as I came up close to our victorious advancing troops, and I was taken for an Aeginetan by the Megarans. By one in particular, who slung a spear at me and hit me right in the midriff.

  Now, that should have killed me very dead indeed; but I was back in a good luck phase by then. The spear hit me, to be precise, right on the belt-buckle; and whoever it was that made that particular belt for the princes' great-grandfather had obviously been given a big lump of bronze and instructions to use it all. To cut short, the spear hit me, went through about a thumb's width and lodged in the arms of the buckle. It also sent me staggering backwards, so that I fell over and bumped my head hard enough to put me to sleep for a while; so I guess I must have passed for dead, and managed to get ignored by whoever it was who had chucked the spear at me.

  When I came round, and realised with as much surprise as joy that I still wasn't dead yet, the situation had changed yet again. In spite of my intervention, it seems, the Aeginetan reinforcements had come down and joined in the fighting, pushing our boys back yet again. This time, in fact, they'd shunted us all the way back to the sand, leaving me stranded behind the lines again. That, I guess, was the bad luck to follow the good luck I'd had with the buckle.

  Oddly enough, though, I wasn't as panicked as I might have been, or ought to have been. I was, after all, an honorary Aeginetan - that is, it seemed as though they couldn't tell the difference between me and them. At that moment, the god put it into my mind that if I toddled slowly up the hill clutching my gut and looking sorry for myself (and I was; believe me, I was), maybe I could pass for an Aeginetan long enough to get away from the fighting and up into the hills for a day or so; after which time, assuming I hadn't bled to death, I might just be able to do what our friend Pentheus had evidently managed to do: steal a boat or hitch a ride, get off the island, maybe even - well, stranger things have happened - eventually get back home.

  One thing for sure: dumb as the scheme may sound to you (and to me at the time), it looked a much better prospect than trying to rejoin my comrades in arms in the battle, who just then were taking a terrible beating from the enemy.

  (Or at least, that's how it looked from where I was standing. Of course, I couldn't see more than one small area of the battlefield, and I wasn't entirely sure any more which of them were Us and which were Them. From a long way away, peo
ple on battlefields tend to look like people, which can be really confusing.)

  So up the hill I went; and after a fairly steep climb I reached the city. It was smaller than I'd expected - listening to Pentheus' account of his adventures, I'd imagined something larger and rather more grand; but then, people always tend to remember the places where they grew up as being bigger than they actually are; even so, there were a lot of people milling about - some men with shields and weapons, older men mostly who I suppose were left behind as a last line of defence. There were other men shifting jars and loading stuff on to carts, and women and children helping them, or looking out anxiously in the direction of the beach. One old dear grabbed me by the arm as I walked up to the gate and asked me if I'd seen her son Theoclymenus. I said yes, he was fine (well, I guessed it was the easiest way to get rid of her) and walked away as quickly as I could without running.

  My plan, if you could call it that, was to find somewhere dark and quiet where I could hide till just before dawn; then I'd set off up the hill along with all the shepherds and terrace-builders going off to work, get up into the mountains and keep out of sight there for a bit until things had calmed down a little and it was safer to sneak back down into the city in search of a ride home. First order of business, then, was something like a barn or a storage-tower; not a difficult thing to find, you'd have thought. But I was back in a bad-luck cloud; everywhere I looked, people were bundling their children and belongings up ladders into hay-lofts and hauling bundles and jars up the sides of the towers with ropes - wonderful thing, panic; if you could harness it somehow to do useful work, like oxen, you'd never have to bend your back again. The last place I could possibly hide, in other words, was in a barn.

  And then the god put the thought in my mind: well, if everybody's hiding up in the barns and the towers, their houses are probably empty. Why not go and hide there?

  The ideas the god puts in your mind are a bit like the water in lowland rivers - usually you can trust them, but not always. On this occasion, though, it seemed like he'd given me a good one. Now, I've always found that if you want to look inconspicuous, walk briskly as if you know where you're going; it's your furtive creepers who stand out like mud on a linen tunic. Trying to look like I owned the place, I walked up to the first house I came to and pushed the doors. They were open, and, sure enough, the house was empty. Wonderful, I said to my heart; now for somewhere to hide. I tried the inner room, but the door was locked. That left either the hall - far too open to hide in, even in a small house like this - or the upper room, which I didn't fancy either. Why not? Think about it. Yes, in the upper room you're reasonably well out of sight from people in the hall, but how are you going to get out again? To leave, you've either got to tiptoe through the hall, past the people sleeping on the benches, or else climb out of the top gallery window and shin down the front of the house, which is both conspicuous and dangerous. If you're in the inner room, though, provided you're quiet about it and you have appropriate tools (like a sword) it's generally no bother to dig your way out under the wall, like a burglar, and be gone without anybody knowing you were there until much later in the day.

  I decided to compromise; I went up the ladder to the upper room, pulled back the rug on the floor and used my sword to prise up the floorboards directly above the inner room. Needless to say I snapped off the tip of the sword - even the best of blades isn't meant to be used as a pry-bar - but I got through in the end and dropped down into the room below, which was as dark as the inside of a bag. That was all right, but of course I was now facing a problem I hadn't considered, namely how to put back the planks I'd levered up, so as not to make it painfully obvious what I'd done. I promise you, I'd been sitting there for a long time, as long as it takes to plough all round the headland of a five-acre patch, when I followed up on the thin beam of light that shone through the hole I'd just made in the ceiling (the only light in the place) and realised that I'd been staring at the back end of the key, in the lock, all that time.

  That solved that problem - all I had to do was unlock the door, nip up the ladder, put the boards back, job done - but of course it raised another one. If the key was inside the locked room.

  Well, my heart told me, if you've been in here with whoever it is for this long, and they haven't tried to stab you or strangle you, chances are they're more afraid of you than you are of them. Maybe with good reason. In any event, the smart thing to do would be to leave, now, while you've got the chance...

  But I didn't fancy that. As it was, I was sitting with my back to the curved rear wall of the house, where nobody could creep up behind me and bust me over the head. If I were to get up and cross the room to the door, I'd be losing that advantage.

  Which left only one option: hold still, see who sneezes first.

  That would probably have been all right if only I hadn't started to feel so damned sleepy. It's just the way it goes sometimes; you can't stay awake, even though you know you really must. You barricade the gates of your eyelids, but Sleep digs under the defences like a sapper undermining a city - she's a persistent enemy, Sleep, and very crafty. The more my heart told me, Stay awake, stay awake, the more I was aware of just how gritty and sore my eyes were. Come on, Sleep whispered, at least close your eyes; you can stay awake with your eyes closed, can't you, a big, strong man like you? And yes, I was very tired - it catches up with you, weariness, like the man you borrowed a hoe from the year before last, and it insists on getting its due - and it was pretty comfortable leaning up against that wall. I could feel my mind drifting away, like the boat you thought you'd tied up to the river-bank. Sleep sent me dreams disguised as wakefulness, the sort where you think you're just following some usual path of thought, but when you stop and look, it's pure nonsense, and, try as I might, I couldn't help but follow them...

  I hate Sleep. People die in her. She's a pest, and I don't care who knows it.

  What woke me up was the sound of the key in the lock; a scritchety graunching noise, the sort that tells you it's time to slap in some goose-grease if you don't want it to jam solid. Well, that told me all I needed to know - where this other person was and what he was doing; also a general area where his head might reasonably be expected to be. I'd already located a suitable weapon, something long and nicely balanced and made of wood; I took one step forward, raised it above my head and tripped over something.

  The wooden thing, when the door opened and light streamed in through the doorway, turned out to be a yard-broom; and the something I'd tripped over was a small footstool. As for my unseen enemy, it was a small girl, about seven or eight years old, which put me in a hell of a spot. You see, I'd assumed for some reason that whoever was lurking in there with me was a man, someone it would be legitimate enough to kill in order to stop him raising the alarm. Now, a small child can raise an alarm better than anybody - it's odd, the way we lose the ability to make a huge amount of noise as we get older - but even I, a desperate pirate turned housebreaker, wasn't really prepared to go slaughtering children, not even if my life depended on it. An example of a rule which I think applies more often than you'd imagine: the superiority of the weak. I'd have killed a man, but I couldn't kill a child. A man slaps you round the face, you break his nose, but if a woman hits you, you don't hit back. We reckon that in this unfair world, the strong prevail over the weak, but isn't it sometimes just as unfair when it's the other way round? At that moment, I certainly thought so.

  As I was scrambling up again, my heart thought of something else to worry me with: what if the kid got out and locked the door on me? If she then went and got help, they'd be on to me long before I could dig my way out under the wall. The essence, then, was to get out of there before the door closed. I jumped up, trod on that damned footstool again, and went down hard on my chin. I was still counting stars when I heard the lock graunch again. Wonderful, I told my heart, now look what you've made me do.

  No time to waste; I had to start digging if I was going to stand a chance. For that I need
ed my sword - and of course I'd dropped it somewhere, and couldn't find the crowstruck thing anywhere. You feel such a fool, on your knees in a cluttered storeroom, scrabbling about in the dark looking for a sword. Well, I did find it - crawl with bare knees on a floor where there's something sharp lying, you'll find it all right, it's only a matter of time - and I started digging at once; only to find, after a couple of scoops, that I'd hit stone.

  There comes a time when so many things have gone wrong, all you can do is sit back on your heels and grin. After all, if the gods have made it that patently obvious that they don't want you to escape, it seems not far short of blasphemy to keep trying.

  Then my old friend the god put something else into my mind; I'd clean forgotten about the hole in the ceiling, the way through which I'd found my way into that crowstruck room in the first place. If I could climb back up through that - well, I'd be back in the upper room, which wasn't a place I particularly wanted to be, but it couldn't help but be an improvement on where I was. What I needed, of course, was something to stand on. I tried the footstool, cause of so many of my afflictions, but that wasn't tall enough. Eventually I found a jar and clambered up on to that. I felt the neck go crack under my feet as I hauled myself up through the hole, but so what? Not my jar. Besides, given the way that room had treated me, the more of its owner's property I could damage or spoil, the better.

  Back up in the light and air, things didn't seem nearly so bad. Even the two choices that confronted me didn't seem like pathways to certain death, as they probably would've if I'd been thinking of them back down there in the dark. I could go down the ladder and out through the doors, or I could get out on to the platform above the doors and jump down. I was tempted by the relative ease of the first option, but my heart wouldn't hear of it. The way my heart saw it, as soon as I was down the ladder, the doors would fly open and the hall would be full of armed and angry Aeginetans who would chop me into little slices like a sausage; whereas if I followed the second option, even if they did burst in while I was still on the premises, all I had to do was wait till they were all inside, then drop down into the street and walk away, whistling a favourite tune.