Free The Walled Orchard by Tom Holt Page B

this, but as soon as his mind had managed to choke the concept down he believed it implicitly. After all, in the legends Zeus is always slipping in between some human’s sheets, with such results as Sarpedon, Perseus and the glorious Heracles. To a naïve and trusting man like Euergetes it must have seemed far more probable that his lifetime of piety was being rewarded by a visit from the Great Adulterer than that his wife could possibly think so little of him as to have taken a lover. He hesitated for about a seventy-fifth of a second and fell on his knees in a stupor of religious awe.
    Now Myrrhine was a sensible girl and she knew that this fortunate state couldn’t last. After all, if the God was a God he would now perform some miracle, such as filling the room with flowers or making a spring rise from the floor, and he certainly wouldn’t put on his tunic and cloak and just walk out into the street. Then she happened to notice the little jar of perfume. While her husband was busily praying to the Scythian, she crept up behind him and hit him on the head with the jar as hard as she could. Of course Euergetes went out like a lamp in a gale, and the Scythian flung his clothes on and fled. A few minutes later, Euergetes came round and sat up, holding his head and moaning. There was blood, mixed with expensive Syrian perfume, all over his face and he was distinctly disorientated.
    ‘What happened?’ he asked.
    ‘You idiot,’ said his wife, ‘you got struck by lightning.’
    ‘Did I?’ asked Euergetes. Then he remembered. ‘Was the God really here, then?’
    ‘He was,’ said Myrrhine. ‘And you insulted him, so he hit you with a thunderbolt. I was terrified.’
    Euergetes drew in a deep breath and of course he smelt the perfume. ‘What’s that funny smell?’ he said.
    ‘A God has been in our house and you ask me that,’ replied Myrrhine.
    At once Euergetes staggered off to make preparations for a sacrifice, and to his dying day he swore that he had seen the God. And when, nine months later, his wife bore a son; there was no prouder man in the whole of Athens. He named the boy Diogenes (which means ‘Son of Zeus’) and had a mural of Leda and the Swan painted on the wall of the inner room, with Leda looking just like Myrrhine. Unfortunately the blow on his head did some sort of lasting damage and he died not long afterwards, but that was probably no bad thing; for his son turned out most unZeuslike, and the family fortunes declined from that moment on, so that Diogenes’ children had been reduced to rowing in the fleet and sitting on juries by the time that I made the acquaintance of one of them. Nevertheless, parts of the commemorative shrine that Euergetes built on his land just outside Pallene can still be seen to this day; indeed, it was quite a well-known landmark when I was a boy. But the roof blew off in a storm a few years ago and then people started taking the stones to build walls and barns with, and all that’s left now is the sacred enclosure and the altar itself.

CHAPTER FOUR

    There are some people, I know, who can’t enjoy a poem or a story unless they’re told what the hero looks like. I suppose this is due to some deficiency in their imaginative powers that I ought really not to encourage; but I can sympathise, since I was exactly the same when I was a boy and attending that miserable little establishment, the School of Stratocles.
    The professed purpose of this organisation was to teach the sons of gentlemen to recite Homer — in my day, it was universally believed that the only skill a young man needed to acquire before he was launched into the world was the ability to recite the Iliad and Odyssey off by heart, like one of those rather sad-looking old men who make their living that way on the edges of fairs — and for all my aspirations to being a literary man and an aesthete I couldn’t be doing with it. For a start I don’t like Homer (I know this is like saying that I don’t