I frowned. 'We'll see,' I said. 'After all, it's not like we've got a choice. Tell you what: we'll scrub round all the other events, just have the foot-race. Then we can make out we've got a really fantastic field - Cleonymus of Athens, Menippus of Sicyon, Lydus of Thebes, Philonetor of Rhodes-'
Cleander stared at me. 'Who are all those people?' he asked.
'I don't know, I just made them up. But they'll do, won't they? After all, what we need is foreign games-players; a foreigner's someone who comes from far away, a games-player is a man who plays a game.'
Cleander shook his head. 'Not quite. A games-player is a nobleman who plays a game. You're suggesting we try to pass off a bunch of sailors as noblemen.
I smiled. 'Relax,' I said. 'I'll say it again. Nobody will ever know. And besides,' I added, widening the grin a little, 'who knows, we might get lucky. Maybe all the sailors will turn out to be exiled noblemen - you know, the sort who are princes in their own country.'
There was indeed a ship at Peneus-mouth. And it did indeed contain a crew of foreigners. Extremely foreign foreigners. Not to put too fine a point on it, pirates.
Not particularly competent pirates, either. Apparently they'd set out from the south-eastern end of Sicily, so long ago they couldn't remember when, and managed to get so far off course that the first land they saw was the coast of Epirus (they'd been headed for Trapezus, a city in north-west Sicily, and had been wondering all the way across the open sea why it was taking them so long). Off Epirus they sighted what looked like a nice fat ship, so they attacked; thanks to some fairly impressive heroics by a couple of their best fighting-men they managed to get away with their lives, but their intended victim chased them all the way from Corcyra to Leucas before breaking off to go after a likelier-looking victim -('You mean,' I interrupted, 'you attacked another pirate ship?' 'Yes.'
'Ah. A real pirate ship.'
'Fuck off.'
'I see. Please, go on.')
- and all this excitement left them with a broken rudder, precious little in the way of food or water, and only the sketchiest notion of where they were. Fortunately, as they drifted down the coast they came across what looked like a small, defenceless fishing village.
It was a close thing in the end. At one point it looked as if they hadn't got a chance, but just when the fighting was at its fiercest they managed to grab a hostage or two and barricade themselves in a blacksmith's shop. After three days without food and only a jar of the foul, oily water the smith used for quenching hot metal in, the villagers let most of them go (they had to hand over their leader to be ceremonially hanged, drawn and quartered, but after what he'd put them through, they reckoned the villagers were just saving them a job) and they scuffled back to their ship as fast as they could go. A following wind got them out of there agreeably quickly, then scraped them against some submerged rocks and suddenly dropped, leaving them bailing frantically in order to stay afloat.
They were becalmed for two days and a night; then another freak gale picked them up and rammed them into Peneus-mouth, where they were (mostly) able to abandon ship before the storm piled it on to the rocks. Out of the fifty who left home, there were twelve survivors; and at the thought of doing something as safe and restful as impersonating foreign noblemen they nearly cried for joy. So that was all right.
We sat them round their fire and explained what they had to do, who they were meant to be, and so forth. At times it was hard going. Half of them weren't Sons of the Achaeans, or anything like us at all, though all of them could understand the language, just about; but there were two or three of them who simply couldn't pronounce the names we'd given them, so we had to think of different ones that were shorter and easier to say. There was one man -I think he may have been some kind of Phoenician, in fact - who couldn't even get his tongue round Melas son of Leucas of Argos; it came out something like Mewa son of Luha of Agwa, and we decided that he'd have to be Streuthes son of Chelidon, the famous deaf-and-dumb-from-birth games-player from Lemnos. But he was a big, tall, strong man, and when I asked some of his mates if he was any good at running, they replied that he'd made a pretty fair fist of it during the battle against the villagers, so probably yes.
So we had a dozen genuine foreigners, whom we'd transformed by the magic of a simple lie into Athenians, Argives, Spartans, Thebans, Corinthians, Cretans, islanders, even (a nice touch of my own) a Trojan prince in exile, directly descended from King Priam himself. The next step was to tell King Leon the good news, if possible without giving him cause to wonder how we'd suddenly managed to come up with the goods after so many months of failure.
'Easy,' Cleander said - he was getting the hang of this lying business by now. 'It's all our fault, naturally; we told them the third new moon after solstice, not the second; and then we forgot. Anyway, they're here now, so no harm done.'
As Cleander explained all this to the king, I'll admit I started to feel a bit worried about him. You see, it was almost as if he'd managed to convince himself that all the lies we'd made up were actually true. All that stuff about, Well, they're foreigners and they can run, so they're foreign runners - he'd taken it straight to heart, also the princes-in-their-own-country thing I'd said as a joke. Half the time, I think he actually believed it himself. Anyway, he made it sound so convincing that, for the first time since we got home, Leon actually seemed pleased with us. I only hoped we'd be able to keep it up long enough to see off these confounded games and send our piratical friends on their way. I wasn't bothered about us -Cleander and me. I'm a born liar, and Cleander had got himself fooled, so we were all right. No, what bothered me was our twelve prize specimens, who got over their pathetic gratitude at being rescued far too quickly for my liking and started throwing themselves into the parts we'd given them with just a scrape too much enthusiasm. Lithus the Corinthian, for example (can't remember his real name; couldn't say it if I could), soon got very boring indeed boasting about his games-playing exploits at this and that celebrated funeral, and as he got carried away, so he made more and more obvious mistakes. He'd won first prize at the funeral games of Pylades of Argos, he told us - but Pylades was the special friend of Orestes, Agamemnon's son, and must have died more than a hundred years ago. Luckily, he came across as a genuine Achaean games-player telling spurious tales of his own exploits, rather than a complete and utter fake - in a way, that made him all the more convincing. I didn't like it, though. It made me nervous. In fact, I was as jumpy as a hare at harvest time, whereas Cleander seemed to be completely relaxed and enjoying himself.
Sometimes I have this dream, where I'm a burglar and I wander into this completely deserted city; nobody in the streets, the houses all empty, everything so quiet it's enough to freeze your blood. The city is, of course, Elis, on the day of the games - but there weren't any break-ins in Elis that day. Even the burglars had gone off to watch the race.
They came on foot, in chariots, in carts, leading mules; they brought wine in little jars and bread and cheese in little baskets, sausages, cold meat wrapped in fat, figs, olives, garlic and honey; they came with their wives and their mothers and their children swaying astride their shoulders, faces I'd known all my life and faces I'd never seen before. They came with good humour and patience and hope, commodities that keep in the hot sun about as well as fresh milk. I haven't a clue how many of them there were; someone told me it was upwards of eight thousand, though I find that hard to believe. However many of them they were, it looked as if they were covering the plain like a rug thrown over a chair, or flies on a dead sheep - and the noise; well, imagine it, say five thousand people all chatting normally at the same time. It was a soft noise but deafening, like the hum of all the bees in the world, gathered together and dumped in one small place.
'This is very good,' King Leon murmured to me as we stared out over the crowd from our place on the platform. 'Or very bad, depending on how things go. One thing's for sure: if it fails, it won't be for apathy.'
I smiled wanly and didn't say anythi
ng. It's hard to talk when your tongue feels as if it's larger than your foot.
'It's just as well,' Leon continued, not looking at me, 'that all those foreigners showed up like they did. And isn't it odd, all of them turning out to be foot-racers.'
I nodded and made a respectful grunting noise.
'I'm just grateful,' Leon went on, 'that this show's been organised by people I can trust - do trust, implicitly. Otherwise I'd be sitting here thinking about how suddenly those games-players appeared from nowhere, and how wonderful it is that they're all taking part in the one event that absolutely had to happen. Not to mention,' he added, in exactly the same quiet, pleasant tone of voice, 'the really quite bizarre resemblance between the tall, thin Argive - what's his name? Alexicacus, that's it - and that cattle-thief we rounded up five or so years ago; you know, the one who managed to dig under the wall and escape, the night before we were due to string him up.'
'Really,' I squeaked. 'That's amazing.'
'I thought so,' Leon said. 'In fact, if I didn't know for certain that everything's straight and above board, because it's you two that's been organising everything, I'd be so worried I'd have to call the whole thing off, here and now, just in case it turned out that some bastard -' he spat the word in my ear '- some bastard was trying to make a fool out of me. Of course, all these people would be madder than hell when I got up to announce that the race'd been cancelled; but I'd tell them it was all right, I'd arrested the men responsible, and here they are.' He chuckled. 'You know,' he said, 'by the time this lot'd finished with them, you'd be lucky to find enough bits to fill a scent-bottle.'
I made a tiny tweeping noise at the back of my throat.
'But that's all beside the point,' Leon said. 'Thankfully. Call me squeamish if you like, but I never could stand the sight of a mob ripping someone to pieces with their bare hands. So depressing, don't you think, all that human nature in the raw? Phaedon,' he added.
'Sorry?' I managed to croak.
'The cattle-rustler who got away. I'm sure his name was Phaedon.'
For some odd reason, I found it hard to keep my attention from wandering during all the opening formalities - the sacrifice, the reading of the portents, the hymn, even Leon's speech to the crowd. Instead, my heart kept clogging up with rather horrible images of public disorder and violent death, even when I screwed my eyes so tightly shut I reckoned I'd pulled a cheek muscle.
I was sitting there brooding on such matters when Cleander poked me in the ribs with his elbow.
'Come on,' he hissed. 'We've got to go and start the race.'
I tell you, it seemed to take longer to walk from the platform to the middle than it had to cross the Peloponnese. I felt like every eye in the plain was watching me, waiting for me to betray my guilt by one false flick of an eyelid. In fact I don't suppose anybody noticed me at all. They were all gawping at the runners, who'd lined up and were standing with their toes in the groove, all shiny with fresh oil like a bunch of sardines. At least they seemed reasonably relaxed; and I was pleased to see that the prince, our boy, was at the end of the line-up where everybody could see him. That was, after all, the whole point of the exercise.
I was supposed to blow the trumpet for the start; but I couldn't, and I knew it, so I handed it to Cleander, who took it without saying a word. That meant my place was now at the finishing-line, where we'd piled up a little cairn of stones. It took even longer to walk the track than it had to get down there from the platform. I was an old man by the time I finally got there.
Typically, I was looking the other way when Cleander blew the horn. I turned round, and there in the distance - a hundred and ninety-two paces, or six hundred times the length of Hercules' foot, if you prefer - I saw the runners thundering up the track towards me.
You don't need me to tell you that we'd fixed the race. Fixed it? We'd rehearsed it five times, with Cleander playing the part of Prince Gormless; we'd trained those pirates like chariot horses, taught them exactly how they should run so as to lose without making it look obvious. We'd gone over it time and time again. It was the only foolproof part of the whole venture.
I'm telling you, though, we hadn't expected the prince to be quite such a classy runner. He tore away from the line like a hunting dog, kept his pace up, actually accelerated; but we'd planned it all on the basis that he was mediocre-competent at best. What I saw as I stood there gaping was the prince way out in front, the rest of the field panting along behind him trying to keep up. It looked awful, a clumsy fake, an obvious fix. If the rest of them had all fallen over at exactly the same moment, it could hardly have been any less convincing.
I guess even the prince felt embarrassed by the lead he'd built up by the halfway mark; I saw him glance back over his shoulder, notice the gap and slacken off the pace a little, as if he was giving them a chance to catch up. I groaned and looked away, oblivious to the noise of the crowd or the thumping of the runners' feet bouncing up through the ground at me -
- And then I heard the most terrific roar, and I looked round; there was one of our pirates, a Sicilian we'd decided to call Anax of Athens, tearing up the track at the prince's heels as if Cerberus himself was snapping at his heels. You never saw a man run like that; you wouldn't believe a man's body could put out so much effort, or endure such strain without tearing itself apart. It wasn't his arms and legs that were pushing him forward, it was purely an effort of will, of the mind refusing to accept the limitations of the body. And, as a result, he was gaining; the prince was aware of him and was piling the speed back on, but the gap was getting shorter and shorter - the question was, could he make up the ground in time to overtake and win, or had he left it too late to make his dash?
Well, of course he had, my heart told me; he's supposed to lose the damn race, he knows that if he wins, we'll cut him into slices and feed him to the tuna-fish. But looking at him, seeing that extraordinary effort, I couldn't accept what my heart was telling me. All the while, of course, the crowd were yelling themselves hoarse, cheering him on - our fake Athenian, you realise; they were howling and baying for the foreigner to win, this feckless fraud who couldn't even rob a ship right - and to my shame and disgust I realised that I was, too. But the prince was doing it now, running from the heart; and as the two of them closed in on me, with less than the length of a spear-shaft between them, it was the prince who looked to be pulling ahead, by no more than the breadth of a finger; whereupon my pirate suddenly found the god inside him, the one who held that last handful of strength and will, and surged up shoulder to shoulder with his man, so that if you'd been watching from the side you'd only have seen one runner, the nobleman and the scum of the earth combined, fused into a single figure in the moment of greatest pressure- And then they were past me, down in the dirt and sprawling, gasping for breath like fish dying in the net. And - damn it - they'd gone by me so fast I hadn't seen them, I hadn't a clue which one of them had won the race.
It was so quiet, that moment, you could have heard a twig snap or a bird sing right on the other side of the plain.
Do something, you idiot, my heart screamed at me; so I did the only thing I could, in the circumstances. I took as deep a breath as I could hold without splitting open like a bullfrog, and yelled out the prince's name at the top of my voice.
Well, I don't know, do I? For all I know, he did win the race. And (for all I know) my friend the pirate was of royal blood, and a prince in his own country. But the race was a fix, our Prince Gormless had to win, that was why we were all there; it was why we'd crossed the Peloponnese, shed blood, fought a war. Tachys had died and Dusa had found and lost the man she loved, the Corinthian dynasty had been cleared out of Aegina and Uncle Sarpedon had become a king, all so that Leon's no-good son could win this race (the prince who was no good, the no-good who ran like a prince; merged together like molten copper in a crucible, at the crucial moment).
And besides, if I made the wrong decision, Leon was going to flay me alive.
It was, let's say, a po
pular decision; that is, the crowd screamed and yelled, the prince and the pirate helped each other up and grinned foolishly at each other on their way to the platform where
Leon was waiting to hand over the prizes. I assume somebody came third, but I can't remember anything about that.
And then it was over. People stood up, got their things together and went home. The pirates trooped off with Leon and Cleander for a celebration dinner at the palace, where Leon loaded them down with presents (over and above what they'd got from us) before saying fond farewells and getting the hell out of Elis, as they'd faithfully promised to do. (And they did; from start to finish, you couldn't fault them. Heroes, every one.)
I wandered over to the platform and nodded the pirate over to one side, where nobody could hear us over the racket.
'That was a good race,' I said.
He grinned feebly. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'Don't know what came over me. I mean, I saw he was too far in front and it was looking silly, so I speeded up; and then the next thing I remember-'
I lifted my head. 'Did you win?' I asked him.
'Sorry?'
'Did you win?' I repeated. 'The race. Did you cross the line first, or did he?'
He thought for a moment, then lifted his head. 'Sorry,' he said, 'wasn't looking at the line. If you don't know, I guess nobody does.'
I smiled. 'Doesn't matter,' I replied.
So they all went away; except me. I stood there as the sun went down, gazing at where the race had been, and the crowd, and all. But what I saw was an empty stretch of flat ground, with nothing outside human memory to prove there'd been any excitement in that place beyond a few scratches in the dirt.
'Coroebus,' the Phoenician said.
'I beg your pardon?' Cratus replied.
'At the beginning,' said the Phoenician. 'You said, "This is the story of Coroebus." Which one was he?'
Olympiad Tom Holt Page 41
