Текст книги "God of War -The Story of Alexander the Great"
Автор книги: Christian Cameron
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Amyntas, who was expert at currying favour, had brought some sample plunder out of the town. It was a rich town, and my troops were going through it with ruthless efficiency even as we accepted Batis’s surrender. But Amyntas found the prize – a royal chariot, possibly even one kept for Darius, sheathed in gold. He found a team to draw it, too. He led it down on to the plain, rather than driving it. And he presented it to Alexander when the king emerged from his tent.
Alexander embraced him carefully – his shoulder must have hurt like fire – and mounted the chariot. With a strange team, in front of twenty thousand men, he drove the chariot effortlessly across the sand to where Batis waited.
Batis stood as straight as an old tree. Other Persians fell on their faces. Batis looked at his conqueror with neither fear nor fawning.
Alexander stopped the chariot. Two files of hypaspitoi joined him.
He looked at me. ‘What terms, my friend?’ he asked.
That didn’t sound good. ‘No terms,’ I said. ‘But I would ask for their lives.’
Alexander nodded curtly. Now he turned and looked at Batis. ‘Say something,’ he said.
Batis locked his eyes with the king’s. He was a head taller.
He crossed his arms and stood negligently.
Alexander walked up to him. ‘I can order your garrison massacred – or sold into slavery. You are not a soldier of Darius, Batis – you are a rebel against me. You understand that? Darius is no longer King of Asia.’
Alexander was angry. His spit flew into the Persian’s face.
Batis didn’t even seem to blink.
‘I have summoned this town to surrender five times,’ Alexander said in a loud, clear voice. ‘And I was mocked each time.’
No one moved. Batis allowed himself the smallest smile of contempt.
Alexander made a motion with his hand, and the hypaspitoi seized Batis and threw him to the ground.
‘Strip him,’ Alexander said. He took a spear from another hypaspist – a dory, twice the height of a man – and snapped it in two in the middle.
Batis remained silent. Two hypaspists pinned him while a third cut his clothing off with a sharp sword. He bled. He began to struggle and Alectus slammed his fist into the Persian’s temple. Batis thrashed and Alectus hit him again.
‘When you resist, you waste my time,’ Alexander said. He took half the broken spear – the half with the head attached – and walked over to Batis. He thrust the spear into Batis’s leg, near the foot – I thought he was just prodding him, but then he leaned his weight on it, and Batis grunted, the cords in his neck showing like ropes as he struggled not to scream. He was a brave man.
Alexander punched the spearhead out through the other side of the leg at the ankle, and thrust again, against the whole weight of Batis’s thrashing leg, with superhuman strength, and his blow was sure. He penetrated the other ankle, at the back near the heel.
Batis moaned and gave a strangled cry.
Alexander looked up from his task. ‘You read about Achilles doing this,’ he said, conversationally. ‘But you have to wonder what it’s like to do it – and now I know.’ He kicked Batis’s near ankle and pulled the spear shaft through so that the spear penetrated bothankles, with several feet of haft emerging on either side.
A slave held a towel while the king wiped his hands. Hypaspitoi tied the spear shaft to the back of the chariot.
The king looked at what they’d done and shook his head. ‘You need knots outsidethe ankles,’ he said, conversationally. ‘Otherwise, he’ll slip off, and we’ll have to do all this again.’
He smiled at Amyntas. ‘My thanks for the chariot. A godsent opportunity.’
Batis coughed and choked – a very brave man struggling not to scream, knowing that when the first one came out, he’d never stop until he died.
In every life there are things for which we do not forgive ourselves. I cannot forgive myself for not stepping forward and putting my spear into Batis. He deserved a hero’s death.
Alexander smiled at Batis. ‘You wanted to be Hector. And now, you are!’
He cracked a whip and the horses moved, and Batis screamed.
And screamed.
And screamed.
Alexander drove up and down until the Persian was dead. Then he stopped the chariot in front of us, stepped down and nodded to Hephaestion and Parmenio, who stood as stunned as I was. The army was cheering him.
He didn’t look at me. He beckoned to Parmenio.
I knew what he was going to do. I watched, unable to make myself act, with revulsion and a certain weariness, the way I used to watch when he would go out of his way to make Philip his father unhappy, or to embarrass Aristotle.
‘Kill them all,’ Alexander said, waving his hand at the town. ‘It’s time they learned not to waste my time.’
Parmenio glanced at the garrison. ‘All?’ he asked.
Alexander made a face. ‘No, keep all the eunuchs with two left feet alive. Yes. All! Everyone!’
And then he turned and walked across the sand, surrounded by hypaspitoi. Back to his tents. And left us to the blood, and the killing.
TWENTY-SEVEN
In the aftermath of the capture of Tyre, I heard a great deal of ugly grumbling from the friends – the inner circle – about the last year. The murder of Batis shocked us all. The manner of it – the bloody-handed tyranny of it – shocked the aristocrats and the army’s leaders.
For the first time, I heard it suggested openly that the king was insane.
I didn’t think he was insane – if he had ever been sane by the standards of normal men, he still was. But the enormous wound he’d taken and the drugs Philip must have put into him to keep him on his feet – by Apollo’s bow, I still look for any excuse to cover him. He ordered almost fifty thousand men and women killed between Tyre and Gaza, and for nothing. Everyone else had already submitted. There was no exampleto be made. And the killing of Batis went clean against his code – except that more and more frequently, he seemed to be set on the annihilation of all resistance, rather than the honourable combat and complex warrior friendships of the Iliad.
It was a paradox – the kind on which Aristotle thrived – that Alexander seemed to want to create the world of the Iliad– a world of near-eternal war and heroism – and yet seemed to want to destroy all of his opponents so that they could not continue the struggle.
The public killing of Batis galvanised aristocratic Persian opinion, and any Persian who was not a snivelling lickspittle determined to resist Alexander to the last arrow. I hesitate to give voice to this theory – but it is possible that the king wanted the war to go on, and feared that the Persians would simply murder Darius and cave in. It is difficult for me, even as one of his closest confidants, advisers and perhaps even his closest friend – to say what went on inside his head.
The priests here in Aegypt are quite expert on matters relating to what happens inside a man’s head. They claim to be able to discern hundreds of illnesses that afflict a man and yet are invisible. Some are obvious – one man can drink wine all his life, get drunk when it pleases him and otherwise live a normal existence, while another man craves the drink in unseemly ways and ruins his life.
Others are harder to sort out, and I’ve met a priestess of Hathor who claimed that the sort of paradox I mentioned can drive a man to madness. Perhaps.
I think there are other factors. In all the years I knew Alexander, I never heard him once say the words ‘my fingers hurt’. Hurt fingers are the ultimate commonplace among soldiers. Every soldier hurts his fingers – the wooden sword catches them sparring, the fingers hurt from the jarring of constant use, they’re the first things injured in a fall. Soldiers bitch about them all the time.
Mine hurt every morning by the time I was twenty-one. And every morning, I pissed and moaned about them to my peers, who did the same in return. Add in shoulders, backs, hips, thighs when riding, old wounds, new wounds . . .
Aside from sex and money, pain is probably the third most common topic among veterans, rivalling the availability of wine and easily beating anything to do with warrior skills or tactics.
I never heard the king mention any of his wounds, or any other pain. Not true – on two occasions, I heard him mention his wounds. Both times he was virtually unable to speak from the pain. When he stood in his chariot, rolling across the plain below Gaza with Batis being dragged to death behind him, every bump of the bronze-clad wheels must have sent a lance of fire through his left shoulder. When he pushed the spear through the enemy’s ankles, the action must have torn at his wound, nearly blinding him with pain.
I say this not to excuse him – you will see my views more and more – but to explain why we did not rise as a body and murder him as unfit to be king. I, for one, was still absolutely loyal, and when men questioned his sanity and his fitness, I shouted them down and questioned their loyalties and their love of Macedon. What else could I do? If I had joined those questioning, where would I have gone from there?
I had a greater worry than the king’s sanity, and Hephaestion shared it, as did Parmenio. All three of us had begun to wonder what would happen if the king died.
The king’s sickness at Tarsus and his wound at Gaza revealed that the army would – with grave reservations – take orders from Parmenio. It would not take orders from Hephaestion. Or rather, everyone would obey orders from Parmenio up to a point, and the point was commitment to battle.
If Alexander died, we were going to melt away like snow on Mount Olympus in high summer, and all our conquests were going to be like smoke from a sacrificial fire – beautiful to smell, and gone on the first wind.
The pezhetaeroi cared nothing about it. Neither did the mercenaries. But from the time of the wound at Gaza, a few of us began very quietly to discuss the future of Macedon when the king died.
When, not if.
A last word on the subject.
Mazces surrendered Aegypt without a fight. Mazces was a worm where Batis had been an eagle, but as I have said before, it was never possible to look far into the labyrinthine corridors of the king’s godlike mind. Alexander killed fifty thousand at Tyre and Gaza. But Aegypt surrendered without a fight – Aegypt, the most populated place I’d ever been. While I grant that their soldiers – excepting only their superb marines – were not very good, had their populace chosen to resist, we’d still be fighting there.
But they did not. It is possible that the wholesale murders helped break their will to resist. I doubt it. The king might have thought so, but Thaïs’s letters suggested a country that was going to fall into our laps like a ripe grape. And so it proved.
We marched south from Gaza after a four-day rest. If any man in our army was sleeping well, I didn’t know him. I know that the night before we marched, Marsyas and I sat and got very drunk.
The fleet was waiting for us at Pelussium seven days later, and Mazces was waiting a few parasanges farther on to offer submission. We marched to Memphis – some of the army went downriver by ship and boat, and Alexander marched cross-country. He was starting to recover from his wound, and as the drugs wore off, he was surly and difficult.
Three weeks after the fall of Gaza, I happened to have the vanguard. We were two days out from Memphis, according to our scouts, and the country had submitted – but we’d learned from experts, and we took no chances. I had a double screen of light cavalry – I already had fast-moving parties in every village on the river for two or three parasanges in either direction, and behind these patrols and the thick screen came my pezhetaeroi in a three-sided box covering the archers and Agrianians ready to pounce on an ambush.
All routine, of course.
Alexander was driving his chariot. The roads in Aegypt were excellent – some of the best I’d ever seen – and the chariot was ideal for a man who wanted to be active but still suffered a lot of pain.
I trotted Medea over to the king. We were making a long march – a hundred stades – and the men were starting to flag. The same men, let me add, who had been in continuous combat for seventeen months.
‘Lord,’ I said, with a salute. There had been a time when the king’s friends didn’t need to salute, but I found that, since Gaza, I needed to show respect. Lest some draw the wrong conclusion.
Alexander looked up through the dust and nodded. ‘Ptolemy,’ he said.
We rode along for a stade or two – I offered him wine, he drank it. I got the impression that he was clamping down very hard to control himself. I suspected that the wound from Gaza still hurt a great deal more than he let on.
‘When are we celebrating some feasts?’ I finally asked. I had worked on a dozen methods of manipulating the king into this conversation, but although he virtually refused to speak, I wasn’t going to let go.
He looked at me, his brows furrowed and the lines around his eyes as stark as writing on paper. ‘Feasts?’ he asked.
I leaned down. ‘The army is exhausted,’ I said. ‘They need a rest.’
Alexander looked at me. I’m not one for reading into expressions – I like men to speak their minds, and women, too – but Alexander’s face was haggard.
‘You are driving yourself rather than give in to pain,’ I hazarded.
‘I am above pain,’ he said. The lines around his eyes contradicted him, although his voice was perfectlycontrolled.
‘Save it for the troops,’ I said. ‘The appearance of effortless control costs you. But they don’t know that. If you will play at being a god, they will take your sacrifices for granted. And curse your name.’
He looked away.
‘It is openly said that you are insane,’ I said.
His head shot around with the speed of a falcon’s.
‘I am notinsane,’ he said. ‘All I do must be done.’
Well, well, thought I.
‘The army needs a rest,’ I insisted. ‘Don’t take my word for it. Ask Black Cleitus. Ask Hephaestion. Ask Parmenio.’
I watched his face close down.
‘You are dismissed,’ he said.
I’m sure we’d both like me better if, at this point, I offered him some more home truths, but sadly, I didn’t. I went off to make a show of tending to my advance guard.
Two days later, we arrived at Memphis. The king announced that he would take the elites upriver, and the rest of us could sit at Memphis for a month-long rest and sacrifice to Amon and Apis. He purchased every sacrificial animal in the city and gave them to the army, as well as a ‘donation’ that amounted to a little less than three months’ pay per man.
His status with the army changed overnight. Every wine shop and brothel in Memphis was packed to the rafters. The women of Aegypt were short, with short legs and heavy breasts and tawny skin, and they did not age well at all – peasant girls were young at twelve and old at twenty-four. But they were plentiful and warm and very alive – they could dance and sing, and a third of the men in the army acquired a wife, many through actual services conducted by the priests of Hathor. For we had seldom been welcomed as heroes before, but in Aegypt, among the common people, we were their liberators. Greeks had a fearsome, but in the main wholesome and heroic, reputation here as preservers of the people’s liberties, and we benefited from years of Athenian meddling.
That’s a convoluted way of saying that the women welcomed us with open legs. It is possible that some men were pleased, as well, but none of my soldiers was paying any attention whatsoever.
Thaïs and I wandered around the palaces. Alexander went to sacrifice to Apis as king, and we were invited to attend – women have greater participation in Aegypt than elsewhere, and Thaïs could attend as herself and without prejudice.
I’m a pious man, as soldiers go. I worship the gods, and I have learned to respect the gods other men worship, as well. As an Indian once told me, there is more than just one truth.
But at Memphis, I experienced the divine.
Oh, Aegypt, the land of gods.
We entered the temple of Osiris, which was old when Heraklitus taught, and old when Homer wrote, old when Troy fell, old when Herakles walked the earth. It chilled me – chilled us all, even in the blinding heat of Aegyptian summer – to feel the sheer age of the temple, and see the stains on the warm red-brown stone where thousands upon thousands of feet had trod the surface to perfect smoothness – a rippled effect that said more about worship than all the images of men and gods with the heads of animals around me.
The gods of Aegypt have the heads of animals – I expect you know that by now. Seen safely from a distance, this can be ugly or merely disconcerting – alien. But seen in rows, hundreds upon hundreds, or seen in colossal repetition, as in the great temple complex at Memphis – it forces you to ask the obvious question.
Why not the faces of men?
Or rather, are men any the less animals, when compared to the gods?
Apis is different. Apis has many statues, but all of them are men. Or many are men, and some are bulls. Some are bulls that walk on all fours, and some are bulls that walk erect like the Minotaur, and some are bull-headed men. And some are men. Those are the kings of Aegypt, who, through the mystical powers of Ptah and Osiris, rise again as gods – in Memphis they say Osiris-Apis, or Oserapis, as we say in Alexandria.
Thaïs was walking from statue to statue, touching every one in reverence, and the priests gathered around her – she was an acknowledged priestess of Aphrodite, which can be a joke among Greeks but gave her a very serious status in Memphis.
A senior priest walked beside Alexander, answering his questions.
His questions were concerned with exactly how reincarnation and rebirth worked.
‘Why only kings?’ he asked.
The priest shrugged. ‘Kings are part god from the first,’ he said.
I was leaning on the plinth of a statue, and when Alexander passed me to lean over an incised decoration on a tomb, I stumbled – sheer farm-boy clumsiness – and put my hand on the gold-encrusted hide of a mummified Apis bull.
Without warning I stood on an infinite plain. My first impression was desert, but there was no desert – simply blinding white light and an infinity of it, and no horizon.
A voice spoke in my head, a strong voice. ‘You will be king, here. Do what is right.’
I awoke with my head on Thaïs’s lap, and Alexander massaging my wrists. I was embarrassed, as any man is who shows weakness, and perhaps most remarkable, it was some time before I remembered what I had seen and heard, so that at first I imagined I’d just passed out.
Looking back, I have a difficult time recalling the dream, but no trouble at all recalling the deep confusion it engendered in me. Although I worship the gods, no god had ever spoken to me so directly. Indeed, when I saw Alexander sacrifice his chariot on the morning before Issus, I thought of thatas the supreme moment of my religious life.
And now, an alien, foreign god had reached out and touched me.
I stumbled along through the rest of the tour.
The Apis bull is chosen from a herd of very ordinary black and white cattle. They’d look odd in Macedon, but not so odd that they wouldn’t fetch a decent price at market. However, it is different in Aegypt, where from the whole herd, one bull is chosen and taken to the temple, where he becomes kingor, as they say here, pharaoh. That bull is king for twenty-eight years, and at the end of his reign, he is sacrificed – usually by the pharaoh and in the presence of the priests. Sometimes an older pharaoh orders a champion to do the deed for him, but then all of the priests and the king eat the flesh of the slaughtered bull and this ceremony, very secret and sacred, is symbolic of the renewal of life that Apis offers. The slaughtered bull is called ‘Apis-seker-Osiris’ and the Aegyptians call him ‘Living dead one’.
Pardon me for this Platonic lesson in cosmology, but what happened cannot be understood unless you know what Apis is.
When we had toured, and sacrificed, a Greek priest of Zeus was introduced to us – a pilgrim, come from the shrine of Zeus at Lampsacus to visit the shrines of Aegypt.
He bowed deeply. ‘Great King of Asia, I am Anaximenes of Lampsacus!’ he said with a flourish.
It is not often a man can combine the pomposity of a horse’s arse with the false humility of a false priest, but Anaximenes did both at the same time, to which he added a brilliant mind, a wit razor-sharp in the service of flattery and an actor’s ability to be all things to all men.
Hush, let me tell you how I really felt about him, the shite.
Alexander loved him.
And well he might. Anaximenes it was who knew that the Apis bull was due to be slaughtered – that, in fact, it was but two weeks until the ceremony was due. Anaximenes knew that Darius had forbidden the ceremony.
In hours, we were preparing to take part, and Alexander spent money like water to have his vestments and crown as the Great King of Aegypt prepared. The priests leaped to serve him, eager, I think, to have a king who might be their ally instead of their enemy, as the kings of Persia had been. He invited me to participate, and I was drawn to it, and I noticed that one of the priests – not the Greek, but one of the smooth-headed Aegyptian priests – seemed to follow me with his eyes.
While the details of the ceremony were discussed, a priest came to Thaïs, and after a brief conversation, she squeezed my hand and vanished. What followed was a secret – I will not tell you, even now, although if you, in your turn, should by the will of gods be a king, I cannot recommend to you too highly the worship of Apis – and we spent a long evening learning our roles.
Later, unfed, I fretted alone in the palace. I had sumptuous rooms, and they had the most remarkable furnishings – Aegypt was, and remains, the richest country I had ever seen, and even the palace guest rooms to house a foreign, barbarian general were superb. I summoned slaves and ate in solitary splendour, missing anyone – Marsyas, Cleitus – who might share the tolerable beer.
Unsummoned, a pair of attendants came and took me to a bath – a remarkably ugly bath, but enormous. It was as if someone had heard of a Greek bath but knew none of the details, and used sandstone rather than marble for the fittings. On the positive side, I emerged clean and fresh, and the towels were superb. On the negative side, I was not oiled, and so left the bath chamber feeling dry and scratchy.
I walked back along the corridors of the palace to my rooms, flanked by four bath attendants, and it was curious that there were no other men or women in the corridors. It gave the experience a slightly dreamlike air.
And Aegyptian architecture is heavy – to the point of ugliness – and I had a moment when I experienced something almost like vertigo, when I wanted to see something familiar – a Greek shape, a Greek column . . .
And then I was in my rooms.
Thaïs was sitting on a rather formal chair. It took me three heartbeats to know her, as she wore the disc of Hathor on her head and Aegyptian garments, with kohl-painted brows and lashes and henna on her hands and feet. Her eyes seemed huge, the whites white, the pupils enormous.
She stood and smiled at me. ‘I have had the most glorious experience,’ she said, and for some reason I bowed to her.
I must digress, because you are so young. When you fall in love, your lover is the most beautiful thing in all of creation. You cannot get enough of her. Her feet, her hands, the inside of a thigh, the perfume of her, the scent of her breath . . .
When you have been partnered for some years, neither of your bodies has any secrets left, no surprises, no wonder. This is not the death of love – far from it – but it is possible and human to long for that sense of wonder, that desire so strong it can bend steel.
My partner was reckoned, even after two pregnancies, one of the world’s most beautiful women. She added to that – her natural beauty – training in music, dance, singing, rhetoric – and sex. She was a superb horsewoman, and a fine archer.
And yet, I would lie if I say that either one of us excited the other then as we had in the first months we were together. We pleased one another. No woman I’ve ever lain with had pleased me as she could, or as easily, and I dare say I knew her as none of her other partners ever had.
And yet . . .
I bowed because, in her Aegyptian priestess’s costume, she was herself, and yet she was someone else. Her dignity – always asserted – was even more evident, and elegant.
And in that moment, I remembered clearly what the voice had said. It hit me – again – like a bucket of seawater on a hot day.
I think I stumbled.
She tilted her head a little to one side. ‘You, too, I think,’ she said.
I sat in the chair she had been in. It was still warm from her. ‘I . . . touched . . . the gods,’ I said. Indeed, as I said the words, I thought them. I had not allowed myself to think about it, simply walled it away.
She pursed her lips. She had some sort of wax, almost crimson, on her lips. I wanted to lick them.
‘A voice,’ I said. My voice was deepening, hoarse with emotion. ‘Told me I would be king here. And that I should rule well.’
And even as I spoke, and my voice grew hoarse with emotion – thickened – I felt a pressure on my body like the very personification of lust, and I pulled her lips against mine.
My hand found that she had nothing under her gown, and with a shrug, she lost it – but not her crown, not her regalia, not her paint.
I have never experienced anything like that night, and I will tell you no more. Except to say that it was not sex, but the sacred. Or perhaps all sex is merely another contact with the sacred.
Two priests instructed me the next day in every aspect of my function, because, owing to Alexander’s wounded shoulder, I was going to be his ‘champion’ and sacrifice the bull.
Hephaestion, it turned out, would not do it. He saw it as sacrilege. He wanted nothing to do with foreign gods.
Cleitus refused on other grounds. He was a man who feared failure more than he wished for success, and the notion of killing the sacred bull in front of an audience of a thousand, with the king’s success riding on his stroke – Cleitus passed.
I knew I was the king’s third choice. And the thought of performing it gave me the same shakes that it gave to Cleitus. But I was driven, a mere tool of the god. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before.
Those were two happy weeks. Something entered into my love of Thaïs – or returned to it – that had been lost with our second child. She once again looked at me with her secret smile lingering almost invisible in the corner of her mouth. She sang. I croaked back at her.
She teased me, and parodied my bad Aegyptian accent when I practised my lines, and when I reached to tickle her, she did not run shrieking like a young fool, but took my hands in her grip of iron and put me over her hip like an old and wily pankrationist, so that I had to roll on the floor. And dug her thumbs into my armpits until I bleated like a lamb, and we lay together . . .
Good times.
And other times, I left her to her new friends – and she had quite a few, the priestesses of Hathor – and I went into the lower town and drank expensive wine and cheap beer with Marsyas and Cleomenes and Alectus and Cleitus.
I remember one night, I had a slave from Marsyas inviting me for wine – Greek wine – at a tavern by the river. I dressed simply and left all my expensive jewellery and my good cloak, left a note on the cheap and available papyrus for Thaïs and ran down the palace steps like a schoolboy going on an adventure.
The slave led me to the rendezvous, and it was well lit, with oil lamps hanging in rows so that the walls seemed to have their own star fields. It was hot, and most of the patrons sat outside in the night air. The river smelled of silt and ordure – but it was a smell you got used to quickly, like manure in springtime. Men sat on benches and drank, played dice or knucklebones – a few barrack-room intellectuals played Polis or backgammon.
I was early, or the others were late, and I found myself sitting at a small table reserved, I expect, for those who looked likely to pay more, but wedged between an enormous potted plant in an urn carved from stone, and probably three thousand years old – and a trio of pezhetaeroi. Not mine – men of Craterus’s taxeis.
There was an old one, a middle-aged one and a young pup straight from the fields around Pella. I tried not to listen too hard, or look too hard, as they would recognise me and grow stiff and formal, and the last thing a good officer wants to do is to rain on the fun his men are having.
I had a scroll – Xenophon’s ‘On Hunting’. It fitted nicely in my bag, so I left it there, and sitting alone in a tavern in Aegypt with a bowl of wine that had cost me a day’s pay for a soldier, I leaned my stool back, tucked my shoulder into the enormous stone urn and read about boar spears.
If, in spite of javelins and stones, he refuses to pull the rope tight, but draws back, wheels round and marks his assailant, in that case the man must approach him spear in hand, and grasp it with the left in front and the right behind, since the left steadies while the right drives it. The left foot must follow the left hand forward, and the right foot the other hand. As he advances let him hold the spear before him, with his legs not much further apart than in wrestling, turning the left side towards the left hand, and then watching the beast’s eye and noting the movement of the fellow’s head. Let him present the spear, taking care that the boar doesn’t knock it out of his hand with a jerk of his head, since he follows up the impetus of the sudden knock.
‘’Scuse me?’ the oldest man was asking. He was polite – nodding at me, and pulling at his chiton. Drunk as a lord. ‘’Scuse me? Damme, you look familiar.’
I laughed, perhaps a little bit self-conscious.
‘Except it’s like this, see? Dion says that this chit, here,’ and the grizzled veteran of Philip’s wars caught the wrist of a serving girl, ‘has the best tits of any girl in this fine establishment.’ He nodded sagely. ‘Which she may, or may not.’
