{"Extracts":[{"author":"Melanie Backe-Hansen","authorBiography":"Melanie Backe-Hansen <\/b>is a historian, writer, and speaker, who specializes in researching the social history of houses throughout the United Kingdom. She is the author of two books, House Histories: The Secrets Behind Your Front Door<\/i> (2011) and Historic Streets and Squares: The Secrets on Your Doorstep <\/i>(2013), and she was a consultant on the television series of A House Through Time<\/i>. She is a member of the Royal Historical Society and an honorary teaching fellow at the University of Dundee.","bicCodeList":"HBJD1,HIS015000,HBTG,WQY,AMX,AMKD,HBTK","bisacCodeList":"ARC005000,ARC003000","estimatedReadingTimeMinutes":11,"extractHtml":"

INTRODUCTION<\/span><\/h2>

The Changing Idea of the Home<\/i><\/b><\/h2>

W<\/span>hen we move into a new house we instantly set about stamping our tastes and our identities on to it. We redecorate, we arrange our furniture and our books, the collected volumes that we hope say something about us and our lives. This, and the frenzy of cleaning and scrubbing that precedes it, is about much more than domestic hygiene and personal taste. It is also an attempt to exorcize the lingering presence of past residents from our new private space.<\/p>

In our frantic urge to turn an old house into a new home we attempt to conceal an unavoidable fact – that until recently it was the home of other people, and before them yet more people; a line of strangers stretching back decades and often centuries. But the truth is that no matter how many layers of paint we slap on or alterations we make, we can never succeed in wiping away the traces of the lives that have been lived there before us. If walls could talk it would be ordinary homes, not grand public buildings or the mansions of the rich, that would have all the best stories. This is because it is at home, behind closed doors and drawn curtains, that we live out our inner lives and family lives. Only there, in the domestic space, in living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms, either alone or in the company of our partners, parents and children, are we genuinely ourselves.<\/p>

There is a simple but harsh truth about houses – they live longer than we do. Their ages are counted in centuries rather than decades and some have multiple lives. Houses are malleable in ways that we are not. They can change function and status, they can be restored and brought back from the dead. Houses can adapt to changing times, they can survive economic downturns by slipping into states of almost suspended animation, living on long enough to be rediscovered and restored. Millions of British homes bear the marks and scars of such restorations and transformations: patches of new stonework or brickwork amidst the old and the ghostly outlines of doorways and windows that were long ago filled in. Our fleeting lives become single chapters in their longer stories. We might leave our marks, but they are overlain by those of later generations who will undo what we have done and make our spaces their own. For millions of people these stark realities are invigorating rather than disheartening. Rather than lament their ephemeral place in the stories of our homes they are enthralled by the possibilities these realities open up. They accept that our homes, the most intimate spaces in our lives, and the most expensive purchases we ever make, come to us second-hand, with a history of their own already written. Instead of being unsettled by these realities they are drawn to the twin prospects of becoming a small part of a bigger history and of uncovering the previous hidden chapters.<\/p>

Our homes are acutely familiar and yet their histories are concealed from us. The urge to know more, to discover something of lives lived in the same space in earlier times, is seemingly innate. Most people who are given a map of their home town from a previous century instinctively look for their own house and street. If we are lucky enough to discover a picture of our home from the past most of us find the experience both profound and unsettling. The effect is more profound if the faces of past occupants stare back out at us. To see them standing in our doorways, tending our gardens, smiling out into the street from our front windows is mesmerizing and at the same time disconcerting. In recent years thousands of people have surrendered to the urge to know more about the past lives of their homes. House histories have become the new frontier of popular, participatory history. Many of those who set out to discover the secrets contained within their own four walls are those who have already uncovered their ancestors in the archives. Enthralled by those discoveries they set out to become the curators of another history within which they are the inheritors.<\/p>

Many books about the history of the British home focus largely on one thing – architecture. The history of domestic architecture, along with the history of design and home organization, will be part of this book. How could it not be? However, the true significance of the material histories of our homes is that the lifeless things that estate agents love to call ‘original features’ enable us to commune with past residents, members of the generations for whom our homes were originally built. The features and decoration that they so valued offer us a glimpse into their lives and a better understanding of the societies they knew and the times they lived in. Innately we care about flesh and blood more than bricks and mortar, and material history only matters because it mattered to them.<\/p>

What inspires twenty-first-century homeowners to head off to the archives and wade through trade directories, deeds, land-registry documents, electoral registers, wills, birth and death certificates, parish registers, maps, census returns, local newspapers and other sources is not the thought of discovering lost plans or architectural drawings, but the hope of linking those original features or later modifications to the people who lived in our personal spaces. People to whom we are connected by shared space and separated only by the single dimension of time.<\/p>

At its most fundamental and visceral, history is about people. No new discovery, no original theory or ground-breaking revelation from the archives, really matters unless it can tell us something about the lives of human creatures, just like ourselves, who lived and died before our birth. This is the essence of what the historian G. M. Trevelyan called the ‘poetry of history . . . the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.’ No ‘spot of ground’ is more familiar and important to us than our own homes, and therefore perhaps no connection with those vanished generations – other than the genealogical bonds of kinship and blood – is stronger than the connection to shared private space.<\/p>

Those who set out to discover the histories of their homes report experiencing profound feelings of empathy for the people who came before them. But their encounters in the archives with people who long ago left this world are enormously amplified upon returning home with the thought that their hands gripped the same wooden banisters and pushed open the same doors, that they sat by the same fireplaces and looked out of the same windows – although to see radically different views. Such close encounters are thrilling and ghostly and also – it would seem – addictive.<\/p>

To learn of the lives of the people who once walked through the rooms and corridors of our homes, to read their letters, to come across their signatures on yellowed documents, to hold in our hands copies of papers that shaped their fortunes; all of that is powerful enough. But to do so and then return home to the rooms from which those letters were written and in which those documents were first read is almost to commune with the dead. It is to have intimate encounters with people we could never have known and could never have met but with whom we have a powerful connection. Those connections are stronger still if we come across an old photograph that brings us face-to-face with them. What are the questions we would ask them? What did our home mean to them? Did it make them happy and what role did it play in the story of their lives? Who came and who departed in the years when our homes belonged to them? What were the key scenes played out in the rooms we now occupy?<\/p>

Amateur house historians are often deeply moved to discover that many of the people they meet on the pages of documents suffered terrible tragedies within the shared domestic space. Perhaps we should not be surprised; after all, we don’t have to go very far back into the past to arrive at an age in which births and deaths took place at home, rather than in hospitals. How many lives began in the rooms in which we now sleep? How many lives drew to an end within the walls of our homes? History, at its most visceral, is about these sorts of shiver-down-the-spine moments.<\/p>

It is not just the oldest of homes that have such stories to tell: even relatively modern houses harbour such dark secrets. We need only journey backwards seventy years to encounter an age in which Britain’s homes were more than dwelling places. During the Blitz a quarter of a million homes were destroyed. Another two million – an incredible figure – were damaged, and today thousands still bear the scars of bomb damage. Within what are today our personal spaces recent generations cowered inside Morrison shelters, steel survival spaces disguised as dining-room tables. In what are now our gardens they nightly lived a troglodyte existence, half-buried in Anderson shelters. Shrapnel marks, black scars from fires, and patches of repaired brickwork – all have stories to tell. This most tantalizing of questions, who lived in my house during the war, can be one of the easiest to answer as in 1939 the government carried out a national register of every home in England and Wales. It preceded the issuing of identity cards and ration books, but seven decades later this special, one-off census provides us with a snapshot of Britain at the start of the war. As such it carries names of most of the forty-six thousand people who were killed in the Blitz, and it lists most of the quarter of a million addresses that would not appear on the first post-war census. The comparatively easy online exercise of looking up who was living in our homes in 1939 can be the gateway drug that leads people to deeper research and a deeper sense of connection.<\/p>

Just as the history of any house is more than its architectural history, the story of any single dwelling is something that spills out into the surrounding streets. The history of every home and the lives and the circumstances of the people who lived within its walls is intimately wrapped up in the history of the neighbourhood in which it stands. Then, as now, it is ‘location, location, location’ that matters. The story of Britain’s towns and cities is one characterized by great shifts in the fortunes of each district and neighbourhood. Their rises and falls are critical to understanding the histories of the individual homes within them. This is where the little histories contained within our homes intersect with bigger histories, both national and international.<\/p>

The many stories uncovered from within the walls of the three houses explored in the three series of A House Through Time<\/i>, 62 Falkner Street in Liverpool, 5 Ravensworth Terrace in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and 10 Guinea Street in Bristol, reveal how the big themes of the past can be reduced to granular detail by focusing on a single address. The ups and downs of the economic cycle, the coming of the railways, the arrival of new industries and the decline of old ones, slavery and its abolition, endemic and epidemic disease, the two world wars, the loss of empire, and feminism all influenced the lives of the residents who lived in those three homes over the decades. To an extent those forces determined who those residents were and from where in society they were drawn.<\/p>

The history of a house can be shaped by what happens elsewhere within its city. The fortunes of each of our houses in A House Through Time<\/i> were undermined by the emergence of fashionable new suburbs whose creation condemned the once desirable inner-city districts in which all three of our houses stand to precipitous decline. Today they find themselves in districts that are once again regarded as desirable. They are the beneficiaries of waves of regeneration and, more latterly and controversially, gentrification. Yet for decades each of those streets and the other streets surrounding them sank down the social spectrum and became urban twilight zones. Falkner Street sank the furthest and by the 1950s was regarded as a slum. Each of our three houses – all of them large, designed for wealthy families – was at various points in its story subdivided, turned into a lodging house or tenement.<\/p>

What was true for those three homes was also the case for many hundreds of thousands of others. The pattern of decline, subdivision and eventual decay was so common that foreign visitors to Victorian and Edwardian Britain noted with surprise that the poor lived, packed sardine-like, in elegant homes originally designed for the rich. And it didn’t take much for a once desirable residence in a formerly fashionable area to become a cheap lodging house. A new railway line cutting across a Victorian city, for example, could condemn the streets on one side to decay and decline. Literally on the wrong side of the tracks, such areas cascaded ever downwards, and this was just one of the mechanisms by which houses built for the rich became the homes of the poor. In the case of 10 Guinea Street, the rise of Bristol’s glamorous district of Clifton was key to its decline, as the rich who might have once lived in its wood-panelled rooms preferred the Georgian elegance and panoramic views from the new homes and apartments built on the cliffs. Many of Britain’s grand Georgian town houses, more modest terraces and beautiful Victorian villas have humbler chapters in their pasts. For the house historian, this means the range of occupations, life experiences and social status of past residents is often remarkably broad. A home built for the wealthy and perhaps today once again valuable and highly desirable may, in earlier ages, have been the resting places of the semi-destitute and the desperate, home to those on the fringes of society who sought out single rooms or shared rooms in what were then decaying houses in downbeat districts.<\/p>

This book is the work of two authors, David Olusoga and Melanie Backe-Hansen. Melanie is a highly respected house historian who has worked as a consultant on A House Through Time<\/i>. Her previous books have uncovered the hidden pasts of individual houses and set their stories within the wider historical context. Drawing on her experience, eye for the practical details, and extensive knowledge of the archives, this book aims to offer tips and advice to budding house historians and to provide a modest work of social history. In her chapters, and in her notes on resources, Melanie will help readers learn how to read the clues contained in the physical fabric of their homes and direct them towards the documents and resources they will need in order to uncover the unique stories of their homes (chapters one, two, eight and nine). Both Melanie’s and my own chapters are peppered with stories of homes and their past residents that have emerged from previous explorations as well as the three houses featured in A House Through Time<\/i>. We have both benefited from the knowledge and advice of social historian Gavin Weightman, whose help has been invaluable as we completed this book.<\/p>

Together our chapters plot developments in the history of the British home and explore the changing social idea of the home – something which has never remained static or settled. As the history of every urban home is shaped by the history of the city in which it was built, there will also be chapters on the development of the British city. These passages reveal how the urbanization of the country changed how homes were built and lived in, and their patterns of ownership. Elsewhere we explore the ever-changing functions that past generations allotted to the rooms of the homes we have inherited.<\/p>

Always, however, we are drawn to the people who lived before us, and it is their stories that echo through the corridors of our homes. If you live in an old house then you share it with the ghosts of the people who lived there before you, because your space was once their space.<\/p>

David Olusoga, 2020<\/p> <\/section> <\/body>","format":"DG","formatDescription":"EPUB","formatDetail":"E200","illustrator":"","imprintDisplayName":"Picador","isFeatured":true,"isbn":"9781529037258","isbn10":"1529037255","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/extracts.panmacmillan.com\/site\/extr\/static\/jacketimages\/9781529037258.jpg","keynote":"","nextPageLink":null,"publicationDate":"2021-08-19T00:00:00Z","reader":"","relatedWorks":[{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529046649","isbn10":"1529046645","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1068430&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=89701","publicationDate":"2019-11-19T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529046656","isbn10":"1529046653","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1068444&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=89702","publicationDate":"2019-11-19T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529046663","isbn10":"1529046661","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1068458&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=89703","publicationDate":"2019-11-19T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529046670","isbn10":"152904667X","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1068472&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=89704","publicationDate":"2019-11-19T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"BB","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529037241","isbn10":"1529037247","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1134849&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=87338","publicationDate":"2020-04-09T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AJ","formatDescription":"Lossless Format Audio, WAV","formatDetail":"A104","isbn":"9781529037265","isbn10":"1529037263","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1070169&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=87342","publicationDate":"2019-11-21T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"BC","formatDescription":"B-format paperback","formatDetail":"B105","isbn":"9781529037272","isbn10":"1529037271","jacketUrl":"","publicationDate":"2021-06-10T00:00:00Z"}],"title":"A House Through Time"},{"author":"Paul Cartledge","authorBiography":"Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture in the Faculty of Classics, where he taught from 1979 to 2014. His undergraduate and doctoral qualifications were obtained at Oxford, where he completed a dissertation on the archaeology and history of early Sparta under the supervision of Professor Sir John Boardman. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of well over a score of books, including The Cambridge <\/i>Illustrated History of Ancient Greece<\/i>; The Spartans: An Epic History<\/i>; Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past<\/i>; Thermopylae: The Battle that <\/i>Changed the World<\/i>; and Democracy: A Life<\/i>. He co-edits a monograph series, sits on the editorial boards of three learned journals, and serves as consultant in ancient history to publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and an Honorary Citizen of Sparta, Greece, and holds the Gold Cross of the Order of Honour awarded by the President of the Hellenic Republic.","bicCodeList":"HBLA,HIS002010,HRKP3,HBTB","bisacCodeList":"HIS039000,HIS054000","estimatedReadingTimeMinutes":23,"extractHtml":"

CHAPTER 1<\/h2>

Introduction: From Myth to History<\/h2>

T<\/span>he chief purpose of this first part of the book is to set the scene, to establish the backdrop against which any history of historical Thebes may and must be essayed and assayed. It aims above all to make clear both the differences and the interconnections between the Thebes of Myth and the Thebes of History, the twin cities that are our inspiration and objective.<\/p>

‘Historical’ Thebes may be taken to begin at around 700 BCE<\/span>. But as noted at the beginning of Part II, all periodization is at least somewhat arbitrary and rough. My ‘Pre-History’, for example, includes what I have called ‘protohistory’ as well as what I and others call the ‘Dark Age’ or ‘Early Iron Age’. ‘Prehistory’, strictly, should be text-free, but historians of prehistoric Thebes have both the ‘Linear B’ tablets and the poetry of Homer to factor in, so the term has to be interpreted and applied rather liberally. To set the scene, a brief review of nomenclature and geography is followed by a survey of the available ancient sources of evidence, both written (including epigraphy) and unwritten (archaeology, including art history and numismatics).<\/p>

The origins of the name ‘Thebai’, a plural form – hence the English transcription ‘Thebes’ or the German ‘Theben’ – are lost in the mists of time. But no self-respecting historical – and indeed historic – Greek city could be without a foundation story or myth (the Greek word muthos<\/em> meant simply a traditional tale), or more than one if need be. The ancient Greeks (who called themselves ‘Hellenes’ – ‘Greeks’ is a legacy of the Romans, and not an entirely benign one) were myth-makers par excellence. Thebans, exceptional Greeks in many other ways, were no exception in this regard, and invented traditions with the best of them. In some ways, far better than most, as we will discover in , when we explore the stories of the city’s foundation.<\/p>

There was, however, no ancient Greek ‘country’ nor a ‘state’ of ‘Greece’. Hellas, the Greeks’ own term, meant the ancient Greek world, a cultural as well as geographical space that embraced all areas of permanent Hellenic occupation where Hellenic mentality and social practices predominated (see ). The heartland – Old Greece – was the southern Balkan peninsula and adjacent islands, which is sometimes referred to as Aegean Greece. From there many Greeks emigrated permanently, beginning by settling in Cyprus in the Late Bronze Age, and moving thereafter ever further afield: to Asia Minor (western Turkey today) from the eleventh century BCE<\/span> on; to the northern Aegean, the Black Sea approaches, southern Italy and Sicily from the eighth century; to all round the Black Sea itself and to North Africa (Cyrenaica, in today’s Libya) from the seventh; and to southern France and eastern Spain from the very beginning of the sixth. New Greek settlements were still being founded in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE<\/span>, when Plato amusingly wrote that the Greeks lived like ants or frogs around a pond (actually two ‘ponds’: the Mediterranean and Black Seas), and that was before the massive further expansion eastwards in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great (reigned 336–323).<\/p>

Thebes lay firmly in the centre of Old Greece, in the region known as Boeotia (see ), but Boeotian Thebes was not the only mainland Greek Thebes. Not far to the north, in the region of Thessaly called Phthiotis, lay another; this was an altogether lesser affair. To complicate things further, there was also an ancient, non-Greek Thebes, a Nilotic town, lying within the Egyptian region of Waset. It was mentioned in Homer’s Iliad<\/em> and visited by Alexander the Great in the late 330s BCE<\/span>, after his conquest of Egypt from the Achaemenid Persian Empire – that Egyptian Thebes sits within today’s Luxor.<\/p>

Our Thebes lies in the fertile ‘Teneric’ plain in central mainland Greece, north of the Isthmus of Corinth, midway along a chain of hills running in a natural ridge from Mount Helicon (home of the divine Muses, although Homer also locates them on Mount Olympus) to Boeotian Tanagra (site of more than one major battle). Its prominent acropolis, known since antiquity as the Cadmea (Kadmeia), is a vast plateau measuring 700 metres in length by 400 in width. On all sides except the south it is blessed or cursed with steep slopes, making it difficult to access; moreover, it is flanked on the west and the east by two deep gullies. The ancient city where most inhabitants lived spread out to the north and east of this acropolis site. Another point of topography is hugely relevant: Thebes lies west-north-west of Athens, about 90 kilometres by today’s roads. A fast walker can get from one to the other in some twelve hours. Thebes and Athens, so often enemies, were far too close to each other for comfort.<\/p>

Boeotia (see ) was mainly flat, relatively fertile and strategically crucial. It occupied around 3,000 km2<\/sup> of central mainland Greece, with East (Opuntian) Locris to its north, Attica to its east and south, and Phocis and the Megarid (territory of Megara) to its south. Just as the history of Athens can be properly understood only within its overall regional context of Attica (Attikê in Greek), and ancient Sparta within its regional context of ‘Lacedaemon’, that is Laconia and Messenia combined in the southern Peloponnese, so the city and settlement of Thebes can be properly understood only in the wider context of Boeotia.<\/p>

That context must, however, be both political and geographical, since, although Boeotia was bounded to the east by the sea, to the north, south and west there are no ‘natural’ fault lines determining its limits. The Boeotia visited by the Asiatic Greek traveller-pilgrim Pausanias in the third quarter of the second century CE<\/span> was not the Boeotia of the geographer Strabo (also Asiatic Greek) in the late first century BCE<\/span>\/early first century CE<\/span>, nor was Strabo’s Boeotia the same as that of Theban Epaminondas in the fourth century BCE<\/span>, and Epaminondas’s again was not that of Boeotian poet Hesiod (from Ascra near Thespiae) in the late eighth\/early seventh <\/sup>century BCE<\/span>.<\/p>

The eastern border district around Oropus often changed hands: in the years c<\/em>. 500–411, c<\/em>. 375–366, and 338–322 it was under Athenian domination. The town of Eleutherae was originally Boeotian, but became Athenian. And so on. Moreover, one major feature of the physical geography of ancient Boeotia that did play a determining – in the sense of decisively influential – role in the region’s ancient political history has simply disappeared: Lake Copais has been drained, even more drastically than the Fens of East Anglia. Finally, ethnic status, always to some extent a matter of self-ascription and self-identification, was liable to fluctuate: Orchomenus, for example, at its earliest mention in extant literature was described as ‘Minyan’, whatever exactly that meant, but in all historical periods was firmly Boeotian.<\/p>

‘The Boeotians’ therefore are a bit of a moving target. But one way to begin to get a handle on those ancient Thebans and other Boeotians is to consider the work of a fourth-century BCE<\/span> Athenian historian, formally anonymous to us, who owes his name (or names: the Oxyrhynchus Historian, or the Papyrus Historian, or simply plain P) to the fact that chunks of his work have been recovered not on parchment (vellum) but on papyrus – from rubbish dumps in an Egyptian town known in antiquity as Oxyrhynchus or (roughly) Sharp-Nosed Fishville. In a chapter of his Hellenic History<\/em>, modelled quite closely on the masterpiece of his immediate predecessor Thucydides, our – to us – anonymous author most helpfully sets out in detail the political components, the member polities, of the Boeotian federal state (koinon<\/em>) as that was constituted in, precisely, 395 BCE<\/span>:<\/p>

As regards the governance of Boeotia, all the inhabitants had been divided [since 447] into eleven districts, each of which provided one Boeotarch. Of those eleven Boeotarchs the Thebans by themselves accounted for and controlled four: two Thebans, and two representing [collectively] the citizens of Plataea, Scolus, Erythrae and Scaphae. Two Boeotarchs were provided by the citizens of Orchomenus and of Hysiae. Two [collectively] by the citizens of Thespiae, Eutresis and Thisbae. One by the citizens of Tanagra. One by [collectively] the citizens of Haliartus, Lebadea and Coronea. One by [collectively] Acraephiae, Copae and Chaeronea.<\/em><\/p>

Seventeen places mentioned in all, sixteen of them dependent poleis<\/em>: that is to say, more or less dependent on the one superordinate polis<\/em> of Thebes (see ). They show both the fact that for a town or habitation in ancient Greece to have polis<\/em> status it did not have to have full autonomy or political independence (see for more on this), and the fact that geography by itself was not a sufficient condition of a settlement’s achieving polis<\/em> status. Some of the 1,000 or so ancient Hellenic poleis<\/em> did indeed owe their origin and existence as such to geography: the island-poleis<\/em> of Chios and Samos are obvious examples. But the island of Lesbos boasted five, originally six, separate poleis<\/em>, and on the broad, unencumbered Boeotian plains there was no intrinsic geographical reason why as many as seventeen (and at other times more) poleis<\/em> should have emerged.<\/p>

However, it was Boeotia’s principal geographical feature, Lake Copais, that led directly to the principal geopolitical division of the territory in historical – and possibly even prehistoric – times between its two largest towns or cities; Orchomenus to the north-west and Thebes to the south-east. The political distribution of federal power in 395 BCE<\/span> represented therefore the triumph of Thebes over Orchomenus, a triumph the Thebans were to translate thirty-one years later into something far more literally destructive and total. Likewise their treatment of Plataea even sooner.<\/p>

In Classical and post-Classical times there were local Boeotian historians – Daemachus of Plataea, for example – but they were not judged worthy of preservation and presumably could not stand comparison with the likes of Thucydides or even Xenophon of Athens. However, Xenophon, despite a personal connection to a Theban comrade in arms, was an out-and-out Thebophobe, and cultural Athenocentrism yielded the soubriquet ‘Boeotian swine’ referred to by Pindar, a Boeotian and Theban by adoption, as early as 500 BCE<\/span>. And although the ancient adage ‘an Attic [Athenian] neighbour’, meaning a seriously unpleasant neighbour, was not coined by Thebans, it could well have been; it nicely brings out the longstanding rivalry, if not hostility, between the two adjacent cities.<\/p>

Apart from Homer’s Iliad<\/em> and Hesiod’s didactic epic Works and Days<\/em>, in terms of written\/literary evidence we have to make do, paradoxically, with generally very much later writers, mythographers such as (Pseudo-)Apollodorus (first century CE<\/span>) and travel writers such as Pausanias (second century CE<\/span>). The so-called Archaic period, which means formatively and temporally pre- or proto-Classical rather than backward or old-fashioned, is best if sketchily covered in the Histories<\/em> of Herodotus – Greece’s and indeed the West’s first proper historian – who was writing in the mid-fifth century BCE<\/span>. ‘History’ for him meant enquiry or research, and what he enquired into principally were the oral traditions handed down officially or unofficially in families or through public remembrancers and priests and still vibrant in his own day.<\/p>

Herodotus’s main subject was the Graeco-Persian Wars, the series of military encounters between 499 and 479 which occupied the last four of the nine books into which later scholars and librarians divided his huge prose work. But on top of and around those narratives he wove a vast and enormously rich and varied tapestry extending back as far as the eighth and seventh centuries, and ranging as far east from his native Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum) in south-west Asia Minor as Babylon in what is now southern Iraq, and as far north and north-east as the northern shore of the Black Sea and beyond into the Eurasian, Caspian Sea hinterland; as far west as southern France, southern Italy, and Sicily; and as far south into Africa (‘Libya’ to him) as the Nile delta and Cyrenaica in eastern Libya (to us).<\/p>

Thebes and Thebans do not feature as prominently in Herodotus as we might ideally wish, probably in large part because he found in Athens a culturally and politically far more congenial mainland Greek base. But nor does Herodotus disguise the fact that in the epochal conflict between (pitifully few) Hellene resisters and vast hordes of Persian invaders, as played out in the immortal land battles of Thermopylae and Plataea (the latter actually on Boeotian soil), Thebans fought, mostly, on the wrong side – that is, for the Persians.<\/p>

Thucydides took up the stylus where Herodotus laid it down, beginning his narrative in 478 BCE<\/span>, but really focusing on the events of what is often referred to largely in his honour as ‘the’ Peloponnesian War (431–404). Actually it was not just one war, but two, and those two bouts of continuous fighting between Sparta and Athens and their respective alliances (431–421, 413–404) were repeats of earlier flare-ups that would soon enough flare up again. By 431, moderately oligarchic Thebes had sided enthusiastically with Sparta, not least because in the interim between the Persian and Atheno-Peloponnesian Wars democratic Athens had insulted as well as injured the city by somehow occupying and controlling it and most of Boeotia for a whole decade (457–447), and Thucydides correspondingly opens his narrative with a typically Theban demarche – an attack on Boeotian Plataea, hated by Thebes for being a steadfast ally of Athens for some nine decades – rather than with the first systematic invasion of Attica by the Peloponnesian alliance, led in summer 431 by Sparta.<\/p>

Unfortunately, Thucydides’s brilliant account breaks off in mid-sentence in the summer of 411 BCE<\/span>, leaving a further seven years of his war undescribed and unanalysed – seven whole years in which Thebes seems to have spectacularly profited, literally as well as figuratively, from the occupation of northern Attica since 413 by a permanent Spartan garrison. It would have been good, too, to have had Thucydides’s account of how Thebes responded to Sparta’s eventual victory. As it is, Thucydides has left us valuable accounts of major fighting within Boeotian territory, and tantalizing hints of how the Boeotian federal state was constituted and managed by Thebes.<\/p>

Those hints are happily fleshed out for us by the so-called Oxyrhynchus Historian, whose systematic description of the federation’s structure in 395 BCE<\/span> was quoted above. This very good Athenian historian, who may well have been Cratippus, was one of the four writers known to us who resumed Thucydides’s narrative where he had perforce abandoned it, and the probability is that he continued his account from 411 down to the conclusion of a watershed peace sworn between Greeks and the Great King of Persia in 386: the Peace of the King (Great King Artaxerxes II) or Peace of Antalcidas (the Spartan chief negotiator), as it was alternatively known in antiquity; being also the first of a series of such ‘common’ peace treaties that came to a close first in 362 before being resumed by Philip of Macedon some twenty-five years later.<\/p>

362 BCE<\/span> was the end point chosen by Xenophon of Athens, one of several authors to continue the history of Thucydides. Xenophon, an upper-class adherent of Socrates, was by no means only or merely a historian: he covered the waterfront of the available literary and intellectual genres, writing philosophy, biography, economics and technical military manuals as well as his misnamed Hellenica<\/em> or Greek History. Actually, it was more of a ‘Peloponnesian’ than a Greek History, as seen though the eyes of Xenophon and his pro-Spartan friends.<\/p>

It was something of a comment on that work’s quality and range that the much later Sicilian Greek historian Diodorus, writing in the first century BCE<\/span>, preferred to follow not Xenophon but the Oxyrhynchus Historian and his fourth-century successor Ephorus when it came to writing up the course of Sparta’s post-Peloponnesian War supremacy between 404 and 371. For that was precisely the problem: Sparta, led by one of its two kings, Agesilaus II, did exercise a very controversial hegemony during those three-plus decades, and Xenophon was not only heavily pro-Spartan but also very anti-Theban.<\/p>

The battle fought at Leuctra in Boeotia in 371 and won hands-down by Thebes and its allies over a fading Sparta and its labile alliance was as decisive as almost any other battle ever waged on mainland Greek soil. Yet Xenophon somehow both failed to mention two of its principal Theban architects (Pelopidas and Epaminondas) until after <\/em>the battle and – more heinous still – omitted to describe possibly its single most important consequence: Sparta’s loss of control of half its domestic polis<\/em> territory (Messenia) and with it more than half its subjected Greek workforce (the Messenian Helots). It would be wonderful if we could say that Diodorus’s surviving Library of History<\/em> (so called because it was cobbled together into a chronologically ordered, annalistic account from other authors’ books) did full justice by way of compensation for those gross Xenophontic flaws – but it does not. It is selective, inaccurate – and dull.<\/p>

Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and the Oxyrhynchus Historian were ‘Hellenic’ as opposed to local historians. Local Greek history – horography – seems to have sprung up as an intellectual exercise and pursuit during the last quarter of the fifth century. Hellanicus, a native of Lesbos noticed and criticized by Thucydides, included among his output a Boeotian Histories<\/em>. He was followed by local Boeotian writers: an Armenidas, and an Aristophanes, of no specified town, and by Daemachus of Plataea. It’s been strenuously argued that these all wrote in and about the last quarter of the fifth century and\/or the first half of the fourth, but their extant ‘fragments’ are both few and uninformative.<\/p>

After 362 BCE<\/span> we are largely reliant on a very different kind of literary source – the speeches either delivered and written up by the Athenian orator-politician Demosthenes (384–322) or attributed to him in the collection put together by later grammarians and literary critics in Athens and Egyptian Alexandria (founded in 332 by Alexander of Macedon). These speeches are represented as more or less faithful renditions of what Demosthenes had once actually said either in the Assembly on Pnyx hill below the Acropolis of Athens or in the law courts down in the Agora, the Athenian civic centre.<\/p>

Demosthenes did not come from an established political family, but he was seriously rich and went to great lengths to equip himself to serve as a rhetor<\/em> (orator-politician). He began to come to public notice and make an impact in the mid-350s, in a quite conservative way; but around 352 he seems to have experienced a Damascene conversion – to a radical brand of democracy and, connectedly, an unremitting hostility to Philip of Macedon. Hence his four ‘Philippic’ orations – and our English noun ‘philippic’. He stirred up controversy throughout his exceptionally long career.<\/p>

The year 362, as we shall see, marked the apogee of Theban power and influence way beyond the borders of Boeotia. The nadir was still a fair way off, but, with the rise of Macedon to pre-eminence under King Philip II (reigned 359–336) and his hegemony ever spreading southward into and through Thessaly and then, by 346, over all Phocis, Thebes found itself confronted again, in 340 as in 480, with a decision on whether to resist or to give in to the encroaching superpower. Thanks in significant part to Demosthenes’s persuasiveness – which was owed not only to his silver tongue but also to the fact that he served as the Thebans’ official diplomatic representative in Athens – the Thebans opted this time for resistance, united with resolutely anti-Philip Athens. It did not, however, go well.<\/p>

In 338, the first of several major battles fought over the centuries at Boeotian Chaeronea resulted in total victory for Macedon and Philip – and his late-teenage son Alexander. Two years later, Philip was assassinated, and one way in which Alexander attempted to shore up his controversial accession at home and controversial rule over mainland Greece was to take on and take out rebel Thebes in 335. More of that anon. So far as our narrative historiographical evidence for Alexander goes, it is generally conceded that the best of a not particularly distinguished and very much non-contemporary and split source tradition is the account by the Graeco-Roman soldier-politician of the second century CE<\/span>, Arrian of Nicomedia (another Asiatic Greek), who rightly highlights the 335 Thebes episode, which will mark for us a major hiatus.<\/p>

For the historian of ancient Thebes, Chaeronea has another very particular resonance. It was the birthplace of one of the ancient world’s most distinguished intellectuals and littérateurs, known to us as Plutarch. In Greek he was Ploutarchos, in Latin L. Mestrius Plutarchus, for he was both a citizen of Chaeronea and a civis Romanus<\/em>, a citizen of Rome and the Roman Empire – and a priest at Delphi into the bargain. At two vital moments of Theban history he becomes a major source of our evidence.<\/p>

Born in about 46 AD<\/span>\/CE<\/span> and living until about 120, he became one of the greatest ornaments of the movement known as the ‘Second Sophistic’ – second, after the ‘first’ Sophistic half a millennium earlier, exemplified by such sophistai<\/em> (wise men) of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE<\/span> as Herodotus and Aristotle. Those two had both engaged in what has been called ‘second-order reflection’, that is, an intense concentration on the nature and status of their own arguments and discourse. Plutarch did likewise.<\/p>

His voluminous and well preserved oeuvre is divisible into two broad halves: on the one hand, his essays on diverse subjects – philosophical, scientific, mathematical and other, often lumped together as ‘moral’ essays; and, on the other hand, his biographies. We shall be drawing from works on both sides of the ledger.<\/p>

Plutarch himself made it absolutely clear that he was not writing ‘history’ as that term might be applied to the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, even Xenophon, or even Diodorus. Of course he drew heavily on such works, but his own interest was rather in the characters, especially the moral characters (and quirks and foibles), of the illustrious Greeks and Romans whose lives he chose to write up. Conversely, when he did turn to ‘straight’ historiography, or historical criticism, as in his juvenile essay ‘On the Meanspiritedness of Herodotus’, he frankly did not make a very good fist of it. One of his key modes of critical appraisal was comparison, hence his composition of twenty-three sets of what in English are referred to as parallel – or paired – lives. One of those lives is that of Pelopidas of Thebes, a key actor in Theban and Greek politics during the first half of the fourth century BCE<\/span>. It is one of the enduring sadnesses of the extant tradition that his biography of Pelopidas’s great Theban contemporary and coadjutant Epaminondas has not<\/em> survived.<\/p>

For Aristotle, according to his brief treatise Poetics<\/em>, ‘history’ is intrinsically inferior to ‘poetry’, on the ground that the latter was more ‘serious’ and dealt in universals, the sorts of things that ‘could’ or ‘might’ happen, whereas history – merely – told ‘what Alcibiades did and what happened to him’. We shall, for once, ignore Aristotle here. For there is another, very different kind of ‘literary’ evidence available to us, and that is poetry. Though it lacks any overt historiographical intent or ambition, poetry is nevertheless a source of crucial information for reconstructing a cultural history of Thebes and Boeotia. Not all Boeotians were mere ‘pigs’. Hesiod of Ascra and Pindar of Thebes conspicuously and rather magnificently were not. They operated in very different genres – and metres.<\/p>

Hesiod achieved the universal Hellenic acclaim of being coupled with Homer (whoever he was, or how many), both of them composing in the same dactylic hexameter epic form and being jointly credited by Herodotus with inventing, or at any rate giving definitive form to, nothing less than ancient Hellenic polytheism, for they together<\/p>

were the first to compose for the Greeks an account of the gods’ and goddesses’ genealogy, to award them their cult-titles, to allot them their honours and particular talents and to signify their – anthropomorphic – forms. (Herodotus: <\/em>The Histories, 2.53, trans. T. Holland, slightly modified)<\/em><\/p>

Herodotus was thinking particularly of Hesiod’s Theogony<\/em>, or ‘Birth of the Gods and Goddesses’, which is a sort of Greek equivalent to the biblical Book of Genesis. But Hesiod also composed – or was credited with composing – several other verse works, of which at least the Works and Days<\/em> is without a doubt authentically Hesiodic. The latter poem, composed around 700 BCE<\/span>, is ostensibly a didactic treatise on good farming practice, but it also includes matter of a precisely political nature, dealing as it does with the distribution and exercise of political power in the early Greek city. (We shall return to Hesiod in Chapters and , to Homer in .)<\/p>

Pindar too was a highly politicized and political poet, but – rather in contrast to sour and surly seeming old Hesiod – he was above all in the business of praise, encomium, of both individuals and cities alike. And I do mean – as he too meant in another sense – business: he got into trouble – from people he had not praised – for being altogether too sordidly mercenary, for prostituting his very considerable verbal facility to the highest bidders, regardless of their moral or political worth. Pindar’s greatest claim to fame – huge fame – was the four sets of his ‘epinician odes’: four because they were written about and for victors in the four major panhellenic (all- and only-Greek) religious festivals; ‘odes’ from the Greek for ‘song’ (odê<\/em>); and ‘epinician’ from the Greek meaning ‘as applied to’ (epi<\/em>) a ‘victory’ (nikê<\/em>). It was a fame from which his descendants were rather unexpectedly, if also rather tragically, to benefit five or so generations later.<\/p>

We shall return to Hesiod and Pindar in their appropriate chronological and cultural contexts below. Nor must we forget that ancient Athenian drama, both tragic and comic, was also poetry, poiesis<\/em>. Both in its contemporary context () and in terms of its modern reception () we shall attempt to bring out how far, in what ways, and why Athenian dramas such as the Antigone<\/em> of Sophocles or the Bacchae<\/em> of Euripides can be used to illuminate a cultural history of Thebes.<\/p>

Another, albeit rather more mundane source available to us can be found in the modern scholarly study of texts inscribed on non-perishable materials (usually stone, bronze or fired clay). Epigraphy is a highly developed and highly prized subdiscipline within the field of ancient Greek historical studies. One monograph on the ‘local scripts’, or regional dialectal variations of Archaic (c<\/em>. 750–500\/479 BCE<\/span>) and early Classical (479–400) Greece, lists some fifty such ‘Boeotian’ texts of very varied kinds. More recent finds include a seventh-century graffito on a pot from Kommos, Crete, mentioning Boeotian individuals, and a Thasian-made wine amphora found in the Athenian Agora of the later sixth century BCE<\/span> with a Boeotian owner’s mark scratched underneath.<\/p>

Other recent discoveries and renewed scholarly attention to inscriptions found in Thebes and elsewhere in Boeotia have illuminated the history of ancient Thebes in ways that go well beyond the ancient literary sources’ preoccupation with great battles. The examples that follow illustrate this beautifully, but they are only three of many.<\/p>

In the suburb of Thebes called Pyri, something over a decade ago a kioniskos<\/em>, that is a mini-column, made of whitish poros (limestone) was found in a well-built, tomb-like cist. It bore an inscription relating to the near-immediate aftermath of Sparta’s failed invasion of Attica in 506. Happily, this confirmed in a general way the account we already had in Herodotus, and from a Boeotian point of view.<\/p>

A fifth-century example was discovered in 1965 through regular excavation by the German Archaeological Institute at Olympia (where its members have been digging since 1875): a bronze tablet bearing the inscribed text of a judgement passed in the years 476–473 by the Eleian judges (who presided over the management of the Olympic Games) regarding a dispute between Athens and the Boeotian federal state. An interesting pointer to the bad blood then running especially hot between those two states, which was to give rise to further negative encounters throughout the ensuing century (Chapters and ).<\/p>

Finally, a fourth-century text that comes from Thebes itself; it is inscribed on a stone stele bearing a decree of proxenia<\/em> (honorary consulship) conferred by the revamped, post-378 Boeotian federal state (koinon<\/em>) in the early 360s (see ). The honorand was one Timeas, son of Cheiricrates, a ‘Lakon’. ‘Lakon’ could mean either a Spartiate (full Spartan citizen) or a Perioecus (perioikos<\/em>), that is, a citizen of one of the fifty or so dependent poleis<\/em> of Laconia and Messenia that went to make up the polis<\/em> (state) of Lacedaemon ruled by Sparta. But, if he had been a Spartiate, he would more likely have been described either as ‘Spartiates’ or ‘Lakedaimonios’. The scholarly consensus is that he was a Perioecus – not the first Perioecus to be so honoured by a foreign power, but an excellent example of the way that Epaminondas in particular deployed diplomacy to divide and weaken the Spartan state.<\/p>

We are often being told that new archaeological discoveries, whether on an Aegean island or in a cave in the Mani peninsula of the Peloponnese, are ‘rewriting ancient Greek history’. But what’s new, really, under the sun? It was apparently Plato who coined the term arkhaiologia<\/em>, from which is derived the English word ‘archaeology’, but Plato of course did not mean and could not possibly have meant by the former what we understand by the latter. Arkhaiologia<\/em> was logos<\/em> (talk, discourse) about arkhaia<\/em> (ancient things), so tales of olden times – allegedly something that the Spartans were particularly fond of, as they liked to hear about the deeds of the great heroes of the past. Not necessarily all that distant a past, of course – the heroes of Thermopylae and Plataea (see ) would do nicely for the Spartans of Plato’s day (c<\/em>. 427–347).<\/p>

For us, however, in its sense first developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, archaeology concerns the recovery, classification, analysis and interpretation of mute material remains of the more or less distant past, often brought to light through excavation, but, since excavation is also inevitably destructive, by various non-destructive methods too. Historical as opposed to text-free prehistoric archaeology is both more and less difficult: less difficult, because the availability of texts in the form of good, reliable, ideally documentary contemporary evidence can sometimes settle questions that the absence of such texts leaves necessarily open; more difficult, because archaeology and history do not always tell the same sorts of stories; or rather archaeology may be better at telling some sorts, e.g., of long-term historical and especially economic development, than others.<\/p>

One very current example might be the recent findings by members of the British School at Athens on the islet of Dhaskalio, located in the Aegean Sea some 125 miles north-east of Athens. The finds are many and complex – marble statues broken and unbroken, copper daggers, spearheads, axes and other tools manufactured on the islet. The trouble is – from the point of view of their interpretation – that these finds date to the Aegean’s Early Bronze Age, the beginning of the third millennium BCE<\/span>, long before the invention of any form of Aegean script. The spade may never lie, but of course it cannot speak; it has to be made to speak since it is mute. Moreover, archaeology can deal only with surviving<\/em>, non-perishable remains: how wonderful it would be, for instance, to be able to view still the cedarwood statue of Apollo said to have been carved in Thebes by the Sicyonian sculptor Canachus (Kanachos) in the latter part of the sixth century BCE<\/span>.<\/p>

The archaeological record for the history – and prehistory – of Thebes has been assembled in a number of ways. At the outset, it is important to remember two things: first, that overall archaeology has probably done rather more for the prehistory than for the history of Thebes; and second, that the archaeological evidence should never be used solely or mainly for illustrative purposes, merely to add colour as it were to the picture to be gleaned from the written sources.<\/p>

Before 1900, only sporadic excavations took place in Thebes and its surrounds. But between 1906 and 1929, with enforced interruptions, A. D. Keramopoullos excavated remains of the Mycenaean palace and fortifications on the Cadmea as well as several Mycenaean-period chamber tombs. He also investigated the Temple of Apollo Ismenius. A small museum was opened in Thebes to house these finds, together with those made elsewhere in Boeotia, and a catalogue of its collection was published in 1934. In the early 1960s, the Cadmeum and the Cabeirion were excavated. Excavations have continued in the decades since, and the findings are now housed – and fully catalogued – in a brand-new museum.<\/p>

Excavation is not the only way to increase the archaeological record, and especially not the only way to diversify it. Intensive field-survey – repeated walking over specially designated transects (tracts) of land surface, and minutely detailed recording and re-recording of visible surface objects and features – began vigorous life as an archaeological technique in the New World, but has since been widely practised in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. Boeotia occupies an honoured place in this new tradition of research, with successive teams of both professional archaeologists and undergraduates exploring the Boeotian Valley of the Muses, focusing on Thespiae, the ancient polis<\/em> within which lay Hesiod’s hamlet of Ascra.<\/p>

There have been excavations of Haliartus and Tanagra, too, as well as intensive surface surveys of Eleon in eastern Boeotia, and of the Oropus borderland. What such surveys mainly contribute is a better, more fine-grained understanding of rural habitation and agricultural land use over the long, sometimes very long, term. In other words, they tell you more about the daily lives of the vast majority of an ancient population than they do about individual, potentially unrepresentative elites whose families could afford to have them buried in durable and lavish form, or whose deeds were more likely to be reported in a literary source.<\/p>

Numismatics – the study of currency and coinage in their many forms – is another important aspect of the archaeological evidence. Image and superscription tell a lot at a glance. Composition and weight (including weight standard) require further, scientific testing. Barclay V. Head, who published in 1911 what is still a quite standard reference work on all ancient Greek coinages (Historia Numorum<\/em>), first sought to establish a chronological sequence for Boeotian coins in the 1880s. What’s really important about them, historically, is that they are precisely Boeotian – and not exclusively Theban or Orchomenian or otherwise. Ancient Greek coins – mainly silver in this case, though small bronze denominations followed for use as small change – were worth what they weighed; when stamped with a representative image and superscription, they asserted that they were authentic, and that there was a recognized, legitimate political authority both issuing and guaranteeing them. To some extent, therefore, they were both political and economic phenomena.<\/p>

Scholarly controversy has arisen and to some extent persists over which kind of motivation – the political or the economic – was the more significant for the very origin of coining money in Greek cities. (Many states never did; some – e.g. Sparta – did so, but only much later than the pioneers.) It is at any rate clear that the non-Greek kingdom of Lydia got there first of all, so the question of origins is, in part, a question of why Greeks decided to follow suit. Since the earliest denominations were all rather large, small change for everyday economic use by ordinary individuals – most of whom were peasant farmers – was not the original motivation. Rather, coined money was first used by states, for example to receive payments of taxes or to make payments to mercenary soldiers. Coinage also served to advertise a state’s status as a proudly independent and sovereign political entity.<\/p>

The first Lydian coins were of electrum, a naturally occurring local alloy of gold and silver. Few if any Greek cities possessed natural deposits of either gold or silver, let alone electrum, so the raw materials had to be imported in exchange for other goods or services. The earliest Greek electrum coins were fashioned around 600 BCE<\/span>, not surprisingly on the Asiatic mainland – near Lydia and its capital at Sardis on the gold-bearing River Pactolus. But quite soon the preferred Hellenic medium was more or less refined silver, as struck by the island-city of Aegina. Aegina is not far from the (Attic\/Athenian) mainland, and via<\/em> Athens and Corinth the idea of a silver coinage seized hold quite quickly. Hence the origins of the Boeotian coinage in the latter half of the sixth century.<\/p>

Coins, in order to serve their ‘nationalist’ political function, required a distinctive stamp – an image and\/or superscription that would unambiguously individuate their source and guaranteeing authority. What is interesting about the earliest Theban coins is that they were also Boeotian: the issuing authorities chose a symbol common to all Boeotians, namely a particular form of the heavy-infantryman’s shield. We shall return below to this and other federal political developments of the Archaic era.<\/p> <\/section> <\/body>","format":"DG","formatDescription":"EPUB","formatDetail":"E200","illustrator":"","imprintDisplayName":"Picador","isFeatured":true,"isbn":"9781509873173","isbn10":"1509873171","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/extracts.panmacmillan.com\/site\/extr\/static\/jacketimages\/9781509873173.jpg","keynote":"","nextPageLink":null,"publicationDate":"2021-05-13T00:00:00Z","reader":"","relatedWorks":[{"format":"BC","formatDescription":"B-format paperback","formatDetail":"B105","isbn":"9781509873180","isbn10":"150987318X","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1260945&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=78610","publicationDate":"2021-01-18T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529049176","isbn10":"1529049172","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1142164&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=90148","publicationDate":"2020-04-29T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529049183","isbn10":"1529049180","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1142183&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=90149","publicationDate":"2020-04-29T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529049190","isbn10":"1529049199","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1142197&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=90150","publicationDate":"2020-04-29T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529049206","isbn10":"1529049202","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1142211&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=90151","publicationDate":"2020-04-29T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"BB","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781509873166","isbn10":"1509873163","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1142119&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=78609","publicationDate":"2020-04-29T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AJ","formatDescription":"Lossless Format Audio, WAV","formatDetail":"A104","isbn":"9781509873197","isbn10":"1509873198","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1108093&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=78612","publicationDate":"2020-02-12T00:00:00Z"}],"title":"Thebes"},{"author":"Adrian Tchaikovsky","authorBiography":"

Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, and headed off to university in Reading to study psychology and zoology. For reasons unclear even to himself, he subsequently ended up in law. Adrian has since worked as a legal executive in both Reading and Leeds and now writes full-time. He also lives in Leeds, with his wife and son. Adrian is a keen live role-player and occasional amateur actor. He has also trained in stage-fighting and keeps no exotic or dangerous pets of any kind – possibly excepting his son.

Adrian is the author of the critically acclaimed Shadows of the Apt series, the Echoes of the Fall series and other novels, novellas and short stories. The Tiger and the Wolf<\/i> won the British Fantasy Award for Best Fantasy Novel – and Children of Time<\/i> won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. This was in the award’s 30th anniversary year.<\/p>","bicCodeList":"FM,FIC009020,FJ,FA","bisacCodeList":"FIC009010,FIC009100","estimatedReadingTimeMinutes":22,"extractHtml":"

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\"chap1\"<\/p>

After Stenwold picked up the telescope for the ninth time, Marius said, ‘You will know first from the sound.’<\/p>

The burly man stopped and peered down at him, telescope still half-poised. From their third-storey retreat the city walls were a mass of black and red, the defenders hurrying into place atop the ramparts and about the gates.<\/p>

‘How do you mean, the sound?’<\/p>

Marius, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, looked up at him. ‘What you hear now is men braving themselves for a fight. When it starts, they will be quiet, just for a moment. They will brace themselves. Then it will be a different kind of noise.’ It was a long speech for him.<\/p>

Even from here Stenwold could hear a constant murmur from the gates. He lowered the telescope reluctantly. ‘There’ll be a great almighty noise when they come in, if all goes according to plan.’<\/p>

Marius shrugged. ‘Then listen for that.’<\/p>

Below there was a quick patter of feet as someone ascended the stairs. Stenwold twitched but Marius remarked simply, ‘Tisamon,’ and went back to staring at nothing. In the room beneath them there were nine men and women dressed in the same chain hauberk and helm that Marius wore, and looking enough like him to be family. Stenwold knew their minds were meshed together, touching each other’s and touching Marius too, thoughts passing freely back and forth between them. He could not imagine how it must be, for them.<\/p>

Tisamon burst in, tall and pale, with thunder in his expression. Even as Stenwold opened his mouth he snapped out, ‘No sign. She’s not come.’<\/p>

‘Well there are always—’ Stenwold started, but the tall man cut him off.<\/p>

‘I cannot think of any reason why she wouldn’t come, except one,’ Tisamon spat. Seldom, so very seldom, had Stenwold seen this man angry and, whenever he had been, there was always blood. Tisamon was Mantis-kinden, whose people had, when time was young, been the most deadly killers of the Lowlands. Even though their time of greatness had passed, they were still not to be toyed with. They were matchless, whether in single duel or a skirmish of swords, and Tisamon was a master, the deadliest fighter Stenwold had ever known.<\/p>

‘She has betrayed us,’ Tisamon stated simply. Abruptly all expression was gone from his angular features but that was only because it had fled inwards.<\/p>

‘There are . . . reasons,’ Stenwold said, wishing to defend his absent friend and yet not turn the duellist’s anger against himself. The man’s cold, hating eyes locked on to him even so. Tisamon had taken up no weapon, but his hands alone, and the spurs of naked bone that lanced outward from his forearms, were quite enough to take Stenwold apart, and with time to spare. ‘Tisamon,’ Stenwold said. ‘You don’t know . . .’<\/p>

‘Listen,’ said Marius suddenly. And when Stenwold listened, in that very instant there was no more murmur audible from the gates.<\/p>

And then it came, reaching them across the rooftops of Myna: the cry of a thousand throats. The assault had begun.<\/p>

It was enough to shout down even Tisamon’s wrath. Stenwold fumbled with the telescope, then stumbled to the window, nearly losing the instrument over the sill. When he had the glass back to his eye his hands were shaking so much that he could not keep it steady. The lens’s view danced across the gatehouse and the wall, then finally settled. He saw the black and red armour of the army of Myna: men aiming crossbows or winching artillery around. He saw ballista and grapeshot-throwers wheel crazily through the arc of the telescope’s eye, discharging their burdens. There was black and gold now amongst the black and red. The first wave of the Wasp divisions came upon them in a glittering mob: troops in light armour bearing the Empire’s colours skimming over the tops of the walls, the air about their shoulders ashimmer with the dancing of nebulous wings. For a second Stenwold saw them as the insects they aped, but in reality they were armoured men, aloft in the air, with wings flickering from their backs and blades in their hands. They swooped on the earthbound defenders with lances and swords, loosing arrows and crossbow bolts and hurling spears. As the defenders turned their crossbows upwards towards them, Stenwold saw the bright crackle as golden fire flashed from the palms of the attackers’ hands, the killing Art of the Wasp-kinden.<\/p>

‘Any moment now,’ Stenwold whispered, as though the enemy, hundreds of yards away, might overhear him. From along the wall he heard a steady thump-thump-thump as Myna’s huge rock-launchers hurled missile after missile into the ground troops advancing beyond the wall.<\/p>

‘They’re at the gate.’ Marius was still staring into space, but Stenwold knew that one of his men was positioned on a rooftop closer to the action, watching on his behalf.<\/p>

‘Then it must be now,’ Stenwold said. ‘Now.<\/em>’ He tried to focus the jittery telescope on the gates, saw them flex inwards momentarily and heard the boom of the battering ram. ‘Now,’ he said again uselessly, for still nothing happened. All that time he had spent with the artificers of Myna, charging the earth in front of the gates with powder, and nothing<\/em>.<\/p>

‘Perhaps they got it wrong,’ Marius suggested. Again the ram boomed against the metal-shod gates, and they groaned like a creature in pain before it.<\/p>

‘I was practically looking over their shoulders,’ Stenwold said. ‘It was ready to go. How could they have . . . Someone must have . . .’<\/p>

‘We are betrayed,’ said Tisamon softly. ‘By Atryssa, clearly. Who else knew the plan? Or do you think the people of Myna have sold their own to the slaver’s block?’<\/p>

‘You . . . don’t know . . .’ But Stenwold felt conviction draining from him. Atryssa, so expected but so absent, and now this . . .<\/p>

‘Spider-kind,’ Tisamon spat, and then repeated, ‘Spider-kind,’ with even keener loathing. On the walls the vanguard of the Wasp army was already engaged in a hundred little skirmishes against the shields of the defenders. Tisamon bared his teeth in utter fury. ‘I knew! I knew you could never trust the Spider-kinden. Why did we ever let her in? Why did— Why did we trust her?’ He was white knuckled, shaking, eyes staring like a madman’s. The spines flexed alarmingly in his forearms, seeking blood. Stenwold stared into his face but barely heard the words. Instead he heard what Tisamon had left unsaid, and knew not fear but a terrible pity. Spider-kinden, as Tisamon said. Spider-kinden, as subtle and devious as all that implied, and still Tisamon, with a thousand years of race-hatred between them, had let her into his life and opened the gates of his soul to her. It was not just that Atryssa had betrayed her friends and betrayed the people of Myna; it was that she had betrayed Tisamon, and he could not bear the hurt.<\/p>

‘It has been a long time,’ Marius said quietly. ‘A lot can happen that even a Spider cannot predict.’<\/p>

Tisamon rounded on him, livid with anger, but just then with a great scream of tortured metal, a thundercrack of splintering wood, the gates gave way.<\/p>

The ramming engine was first through, no telescope needed to see its great brass and steel bulk as it blundered over the wreckage it had created, belching smoke from its funnels. A ballista atop its hood hung half off its mountings, mangled by the defenders’ artillery, but there were eyelets in its metal sides from which spat crossbow bolts and the crackling energy of the Wasps’ Art. Swarming either side of it were their line infantry, spear-armed but shieldless. Clad in armour too heavy to fly in, they pushed the men stationed at the gate back through sheer force, whilst their airborne divisions were beginning to pass over the city. The guardians of Myna were a disciplined lot, shield locked with shield as they tried to keep the enemy out. There were too many of them, though; the assault came from before and above, and from either side. Eventually the defenders’ line buckled and fell back.<\/p>

‘We have to leave now,’ Stenwold said, ‘or we’ll never get out. Someone has to know what’s happened here. The Lowlands have to be warned.’<\/p>

‘The Lowlands won’t care,’ said Marius, but he was up and poised, and Stenwold knew that, below them, his soldiers would be ready with shield and sword and crossbow. They went down the stairs in quick succession, knowing that, now their single trick had failed, nothing would keep the Wasps out of Myna. Their army had five men for every defender the city could muster.<\/p>

What a band we are.<\/em> The thought passed through Stenwold’s mind as he took the stairs, bringing up the rear as always. First went Marius, tan-skinned and dark, with the universally compact build of his race: he had abandoned his people to come here, gone renegade so that he could fight against the enemy his city would not believe in. After him came Tisamon, still consumed with rage and yet still the most graceful man Stenwold had ever known. His leather arming jacket bore the green and gold colours, even the ceremonial pin, of a Mantis Weaponsmaster. Stenwold had never seen him without it and knew he was clinging to his grudges and his honour like a drowning man.<\/p>

And then myself: dark of skin and receding of hair; stout and bulky, loud of tread. Not my fault my folk are so heavy boned! Hardwearing leathers and a scorched apron, a workman’s heavy gloves thrust through my belt, and goggles dangling about my neck. Not at first sight a man ever intended for war. And yet here I am with a crossbow banging against my legs.<\/em><\/p>

Down in the room below, Marius’s soldiers were already alert and on their feet, Some had their heavy square shields out, swords at the ready, others had slung them and taken up crossbows. Two carried the baggage: a heavy leather bag containing Stenwold’s tools, and a long wooden case. Even as Stenwold got sight of the room they were unbarring the door, throwing it open. Immediately two of them pushed out, shields first. Stenwold realized that he had paused halfway down, dreading the moment when there would no longer be a roof above him to keep off enemy shot. Tisamon and most of the soldiers were gone. Marius, however, was waiting for him, an unspoken urgency hanging in his gaze.<\/p>

‘I’m coming,’ Stenwold said, and hated the shaking of his voice. He clumped on down the stairs, fumbling for his crossbow.<\/p>

‘Leave it, and just move,’ Marius ordered, and was out of the door. Following behind Stenwold, the final pair of soldiers moved in to guard the rear.<\/p>

And then they were out into the open air. The sounds of the fighting at the gate were very close, closer than he could have thought, but this street had seen no blood – not yet. There were citizens of Myna out and about, though, waiting in a scatter of anxious faces. Men and women, and boys and girls still too young to be here at all, they were clutching knives and swords and staves, and waiting.<\/p>

At his unheard direction, Marius’s soldiers formed up: shields before and shields behind, with Stenwold, the baggage and the crossbows in the middle. Marius was at point, already setting a rapid pace down the narrow street. His troop’s dark armour, its single purpose, moved people quickly out of the way without need for words or action.<\/p>

‘I can’t run as fast as your lot,’ Stenwold complained. He already felt out of step and was just waiting for the men behind to jostle or stumble over him. ‘Where’s Tisamon, anyway?’<\/p>

‘Around.’ Marius did not look back or gesture, but then Stenwold caught a glimpse of the Mantis warrior passing through the crowd like an outrider, constantly pausing to look back towards the gate and then move on. He wore his armoured glove, with the blade jutting from between the fingers, flexing out like a sword blade one moment, folded back along his arm the next. It was an ancient tool of his kind and a laughable anachronism, save that Stenwold had witnessed what he could do with it.<\/p>

‘What about your man, at the gates?’ Stenwold called, trying desperately to fall into step with those around him.<\/p>

‘Dead,’ was the officer’s curt reply.<\/p>

‘I’m sorry.’<\/p>

‘Be sorry when you know the full tally,’ said Marius. ‘We’re not out of it yet.’<\/p>

There was a ripple among the people of Myna, and not from the passage through them of this little squad of foreigners heading for the airfield. Stenwold realized what it must mean. All around now, they were brandishing their swords or workman’s hammers or simple wooden clubs. It would not be quick or easy to capture this city, but the Wasps would have it in the end. Their dream of a black-and-gold world would accept no less.<\/p>

Stenwold was Beetle-kinden and in the Lowlands his people were known for their industry, their artifice, even, as he liked to think, for their charity and kindly philosophy. The people of Myna were his distant cousins, being some offshoot of Beetle stock. He could spare them no charity now, however. He could spare no thought or time for anything but his own escape.<\/p>

A brief shadow passed across him as the first of the Wasp vanguard soared overhead in a dart of black and gold, a shimmer of wings. Three more followed, and a dozen after that. They were heading in the same direction that Stenwold was moving.<\/p>

‘They’re going to the airfield. They’ll destroy the fliers!’ he shouted in warning.<\/p>

Instantly Marius and his men stepped up the pace and Stenwold wished he had not spoken. Now they were jogging along, effortlessly despite their armour, and he was running full tilt within a cage formed by their shields, feeling his gut lurch and his heart hammer. Behind him there were screams, and he made the mistake of looking back. Some of the Wasps, it seemed, were not heading for the airfield, but had stopped to rake across the assembled citizens with golden fire and javelins and crossbow bolts, circling and darting, and coming back to loose their missiles once again. This was no ordered attack, they were a frenzied mass of hatred, out solely for slaughter. Stenwold tripped even as he gaped, but the woman closest behind caught him by the arm and wrenched his bulk upright again, without breaking stride.<\/p>

A moment later his rescuer herself was hit. There was a snap and crackle, and the stink of burned flesh and hot metal, and she sagged to one knee. Stenwold turned to help but nearly fell over the man reaching to drag her upright. The Wasp light airborne troops were all around them now, passing overhead, or diving at the citizens to drive them off the streets. A crossbow bolt bounded past Stenwold like a living thing.<\/p>

The injured woman was on her feet once more. She and the man beside her turned to face the new assault. Marius and the rest kept moving.<\/p>

‘Come on, Stenwold! Hurry!’ the officer shouted.<\/p>

‘But—’<\/p>

‘Go,’ said the injured woman, no pain or reproach in her voice. She and the man with her locked shields, waiting. Stenwold stumbled away from them, then turned and fled after Marius and the others.<\/p>

Tisamon was beside him in an instant. He had a look on his face that Stenwold had never seen before, but he could read it as though the Mantis’s thoughts were carved there. Tisamon wanted a fight. He had been betrayed. He had been broken. Now he wanted a fight that he could not win.<\/p>

‘Get a move on, fat-Beetle,’ he hissed, grabbing one strap of Stenwold’s apron and hauling him forward. ‘You’re getting out of here.’<\/p>

‘We are,’ corrected Stenwold, too out of breath by now to say any more. He watched Tisamon snatch a Wasp spear from the air in his offhand and then the Mantis spun on his heel, launched it away into the sky behind them, and was immediately in step once again. Stenwold did not pause to look, but he had no doubt that behind them some Wasp soldier would now be dropping from the sky, pierced through by his own missile.<\/p>

Myna was a tiered city and they hit a set of steps then, a steep, narrow twenty-foot ascent. Stenwold tried to slow down for it but Tisamon would not let him, grabbing his arm again and pulling him upwards, exerting every muscle in his lean frame.<\/p>

‘Keep moving,’ the Mantis snapped at him through gritted teeth. ‘Move your great big fat feet, you Beetle bastard!’<\/p>

The sting of that insult got Stenwold to the top of the steps before he realized. There were more citizens up there, all trying to head in the wrong direction, directly towards the gates. Something in Tisamon’s face or body language pushed them easily aside. Ahead, Stenwold could see Marius’s squad taking the next set of steps at a run.<\/p>

And Stenwold ran, too, as he had never run before. His toolstrip, and his sword and crossbow, all clattered and conspired to trip him up. His breath rasped as he dragged ever more of it into his lungs, yet he ran, because up beyond those steps lay the airfield. Then he would know if he could stop running or if it was already too late.<\/p>

There were Wasp soldiers scattered across the airfield. At the far end, the great bloated bulk of an airship balloon was slowly settling into itself, gashed in a dozen places and deflating. Some half a dozen dead men and women were strewn like old toys between the flying machines, but a dozen more were putting up a final desperate defence, letting off their crossbow bolts at the circling Wasp soldiers from whatever shelter they could find. If the Wasps had been arrayed in military order they could have swept the place clean in a minute, but they were mad for blood, each one on his own.<\/p>

Stenwold noticed one old man frantically stoking the boiler of a sleek orthopter that stood there like a tall ship, its slender wings folded together and pointing up towards the sky. A Wasp soldier passed close and caught him by the collar, hauling him ten feet away from the machine before touching down again and putting his sword through the old man once, twice, three times. A moment later a bolt caught the same soldier between the shoulder blades. He pitched forward, trying even as he fell to reach behind him and pull it out.<\/p>

‘That one!’ wheezed Stenwold, stumbling towards the now deserted orthopter. It was stoked. It was ready to go. ‘Come on!’ he gasped.<\/p>

In a moment Marius’s men were around him, and then they were past him, deliberately moving away from the machine and making a brief wall of their shields with crossbows poised behind it, guarding the retreat as effectively as they could.<\/p>

‘Can you fly this?’ Marius demanded. Stenwold merely nodded, because he had no more breath to speak, and no room left for doubt. The officer clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Get it moving. We’ll join you.’ And then, as Stenwold hurried past him, ‘Watch out for Tisamon. He does not want to leave this place.’<\/p>

I know why.<\/em> But Stenwold did not have the breath for it.<\/p>

Tisamon was already at the orthopter, hand reaching for the hatch, then stopping. He looked back at Stenwold with an agonized expression. ‘I— how . . .’<\/p>

‘The handle. Turn the handle.’<\/p>

Hand on the lever, the Mantis shook his head, baring his teeth. One of Marius’s men arrived just then, ducked neatly under his arm and hauled the hatch open, hurling Stenwold’s toolbag inside. Stenwold reached the orthopter so fast that he bounced back off the scuffed wood of its hull. The soldier had already unslung his crossbow and was running to join his colleagues. Tisamon turned and went with him.<\/p>

‘Wait—’ Stenwold got out, but the Mantis was already sprinting across the airfield with his blade drawn back ready for action. Even as Stenwold hauled himself up into the machine, the Mantis leapt and caught a passing Wasp by his black-and-gold boot, dragging the flailing man out of the sky and lashing the two-foot edge of his metal claw across the invader’s throat. It would be a poor day for any Wasp who met with the Mantis just then.<\/p>

Stenwold shouldered his way through the cramped interior of the flier towards the cockpit, there finding a single seat too small for him and unfamiliar controls. He was an artificer, though, and had lived with machines all his life. A moment’s observation told him which glass bar indicated the boiler pressure, which lever unleashed the wings. A Wasp soldier darted across the large and wide-open ports that were mainly what Stenwold had between him and the fighting outside. Then the wings clapped down and outwards with a roar of wood and canvas and the soldier was sent spinning by the concussion of air. Stenwold’s feet found pedals in the narrow confines of the footwell. The boiler pressure was now closing on the optimal. He put his head back, peering through the open hatch for any sign of his comrades.<\/p>

Half of Marius’s men were already dead, he saw, and this jolted his heart. They fought beautifully: even he, though no warrior, could see that. Each man knew by heart the thoughts of his fellows, so they moved as one. They were so few, though, and the Wasps swarmed all over the field. Shield and crossbow were no defence against their numbers.<\/p>

‘Come on!’ Stenwold bellowed. ‘Let’s go now!’ He could not believe that they would hear him over the din of combat but one of them must have, and so they all did. They began to fall back, shields held high. Even as he watched, another was lanced in the side by a crossbow bolt, falling awkwardly before rising to one knee. The others continued to retreat, and Stenwold might have thought it heartless of them had he not been so sure that the fallen man would be exhorting them to go, to leave him there. Stenwold realized that he knew none of their names, had not even heard many of them speak.<\/p>

Ant-kinden, he would never understand them or their communal world. Or how Marius had managed to leave that world and not look back.<\/p>

The hatch went suddenly dark. A Wasp soldier forced his way in, the dance of his wings dying behind him. One open hand still crackled with the fire of his sting but he was now leading with his sword. Stenwold was lurching backwards even as the man’s shoulders cleared the entrance, hurling the first thing that came to hand, which happened to be a mechanic’s hammer. It thumped into the Wasp soldier’s shoulder and knocked him half out of the hatch. Then Stenwold was upon him, grabbing for his sword arm with one hand, lunging with the other. He never got hold of the man’s sword, but his right hand somehow managed to draw his own, and he rammed it up to its narrow guard in his adversary’s armpit.<\/p>

The Wasp spat at him and he recoiled in shock, then recoiled again as he saw the blood stringing across the man’s lips. Then the dying soldier was falling out of the flier, the weight of him taking Stenwold’s sword from his suddenly nerveless fingers.<\/p>

He had just killed another human being. There’s a first time for everything.<\/em><\/p>

One of Marius’s soldiers now reached the hatch and cast the wooden case inside. Marius himself and three of his men were still inching their way back, painfully slow.<\/p>

‘Tisamon!’ Stenwold called out. ‘Tisamon!’<\/p>

He saw him then, the Weaponsmaster, moving in and out of the Wasps as they tried to corner him. But he stepped through the golden energy of their stings, their crossbow bolts that fractured on the hard earth of the airfield. He caught their spears easily and hurled them back. His blade, twisting and darting too swift to see, was never still for a second. It moved as naturally as his wrist and hand and arm could, and there were always the spines of his arms to cut and tear at anything the metal missed. Tisamon was going to die, but he would have more company on his journey than he knew what to do with.<\/p>

‘Tisamon!’ Stenwold shouted and the Mantis-kinden broke off from the fight, danced across to him, casually cutting down a Wasp that tried to put a spear in him.<\/p>

‘Get Marius inside and go!’ Tisamon commanded. ‘Go! Just go!’<\/p>

Stenwold’s face twisted up in anger and fear. ‘You bloody-handed bastard! If you stay here then you’re taking me with you! I’m not going without you!’<\/p>

Even as he moved to meet the next attacker Tisamon’s face showed how utterly unfair he felt that threat was. Even so, he was returning to the orthopter in the very next instant.<\/p>

‘Marius, now!’ Stenwold shrieked, and at last Marius and his two survivors broke into a run, shields temporarily slung on their backs. Stenwold ducked away from the hatch and even as he did so a lance of energy blasted a smoking hole in the rim. Hands shaking, he squeezed himself back into the pilot’s seat, and began to pedal fast. He felt the entire frame of the flier creak as the wings moved, first up and then down, powered by the steam-boiler but guided by his feet.<\/p>

Someone vaulted into the flier, and Stenwold flinched in fear, but it was only Tisamon, face grim. He set on the wooden case immediately and tugged at the buckles, his bladed glove now removed. A moment later a woman belonging to Marius’s squad climbed in too and turned to help her commander aboard. By now Stenwold had the wings working smoothly and felt the orthopter lurch as though eager to be gone from here.<\/p>

Marius was halfway in when he arched backwards without warning and began to fall away. The female soldier caught his belt and dragged him to safety, but Stenwold caught a glimpse of the leather vanes of the crossbow bolt buried deep in the commander’s lower back beside the rim of his shield.<\/p>

‘Any more?’ He could barely keep the machine on the ground.<\/p>

‘No!’ the woman yelled to him, and he doubled his pace and the orthopter sprang into the sky, spinning a couple of Wasps out of their way with the displaced air.<\/p>

Stenwold risked a single glance behind him to see what was happening. Marius was lying on his side, his skin turned from tan to ashen-grey, his sole remaining soldier investigating the wound. Tisamon had opened his case and was stringing his greatbow. Another relic of the Bad Old Days, Stenwold knew, but he would not have swapped such a bow in Tisamon’s hands for the latest repeating crossbow. The Mantis crouched at the still-open hatch and nocked an arrow. A moment later he loosed it and Stenwold saw, as he circled the airfield, another Wasp go whirling downwards, sword spinning off separately, out-reaching him as he fell.<\/p>

‘Away would be good!’ Tisamon snapped, reaching into the case for another arrow.<\/p>

‘I have to gain height first,’ Stenwold told him, knowing that the Mantis would not understand. He was pulling the orthopter into a ponderously slow upwards circle of the airfield as the steam-driven wings worked up and down. None of the other Mynan flying machines had got off the ground. He did not want to think about what might be happening in the city below them. He just pedalled and steered, watching a rising circle of Wasps below them, flying men with swords and spears milling in a furious swarm. Tisamon leant far out, securing his position with one knee and one elbow, and drew back the string.<\/p>

High enough.<\/em> Stenwold decided, and wrestled the orthopter out of its curve. But he had misjudged the angle and ended up sending it straight out over the teeming city. Below him a dozen Wasp soldiers passed by, oblivious, but Stenwold’s attention was by now somewhere else.<\/p>

‘Hammer and tongs!’ he swore. ‘Will you look at that!’<\/p>

It was ugly as sin and it hung in the air as elegantly as a hanged man, but nevertheless it stayed up and there had to be some craft in that feat. A heliopter in Wasp colours, a monstrous, uneven metal box with three spinning blades straining to keep it from crashing to the ground. There must have been hatches in its underbelly, he realized, because there was a stream of missiles falling constantly from it onto Myna. He thought they were rocks at first but, on seeing the explosions, decided they must be fire-pots or firepowder grenades.<\/p>

Why am I still flying at it?<\/em> He wrenched quickly at the simple wooden stick and the orthopter veered away, the Wasp heliopter sliding out of his frame of vision as he cast his newly acquired vehicle across the city and out over the walls. The orthopter was a simple piece of machinery, and the artificers back at his native city of Collegium, hundreds of miles away, would have called it ‘prentice stuff’. It was all Stenwold needed, though, for it could outpace the Wasp light airborne, and in only minutes their pursuers were dropping back, turning for the city again, and Tisamon could lower his bow.<\/p>

The Wasp heliopter, however – that was a crude and primitive piece. Any self-respecting artificer would have been rightly ashamed of it. And yet it flew, and only five years ago the Wasps had possessed nothing like it.<\/p>

‘Marius . . .’ he began. He could crane over his shoulder, but even while letting the machine glide on its canvas wings he dared not take his attention from the controls. ‘Marius, talk to me.’<\/p>

‘He is sorry,’ said the woman, and after a moment’s blank surprise Stenwold realized that Marius must now be too weak to speak, but strong enough to send his thoughts into her mind.<\/p>

‘We have to tell them what has happened here,’ Stenwold continued. ‘Marius, we have to tell Sarn. We must warn your city.’<\/p>

‘He says we are considered renegades there,’ the woman replied impassively. ‘He says we can never go back.’<\/p>

Beneath them the fields and small villages that were Myna’s tributary settlements swept past. ‘But Marius only left because he thought this was for your people’s good,’ Stenwold said stubbornly. ‘He saw the threat even when they did not. You know this, and you have to tell them.’<\/p>

‘We can never go back there,’ the woman said, and he realized she was speaking for herself this time. ‘Once the bonds of loyalty are broken, we can never go back.’<\/p>

‘But Marius – Sarn isn’t like the other Ant cities any more. There have been changes. There are even some of my own kin on the council there,’ Stenwold insisted.<\/p>

There was a lengthy silence from behind him, and he assumed that Marius must have died. He choked on a sob, but then the woman put a hand on his shoulder in a strong soldier’s grip.<\/p>

‘He says you must do what you can,’ she told him softly, and even her intonation resembled Marius’s own. ‘He says he regrets that things have ended this way, and he also regrets that the others, Atryssa and Nero, were not with us, but he does not regret following you from his city, and he does not regret dying in this company.’<\/p>

Stenwold wiped a hand across his eyes and felt the first shaking of his shoulders. ‘Tell him . . .’ he managed, but then the woman’s hand twitched on his shoulder, just once, just for a moment, and he knew that Marius was dead.<\/p>

He let out a long, racked breath.<\/p>

‘We can tell nobody about this, because nobody will listen,’ Tisamon said. ‘We tried to warn your people at Helleron that the Wasps were coming, and what did they say? That nobody would invade Helleron. They claimed that the city was too useful. That Wasps needed to trade and deal in arms like everyone else. They look upon the Empire as just another Ant city-state.’<\/p>

‘And if we told your people?’ asked Stenwold bitterly.<\/p>

‘Then they would simply not care. They have quarrels a thousand years old that they have yet to settle. They have no time for new ones.’ And Stenwold heard, to his surprise, an equal bitterness in Tisamon’s voice. The Mantis was hinging his metal claw forward and back, rolling his fingers about the crosspiece to lay the blade flat against his arm, then bringing it out to jut forward from his knuckles. It was not a threat, but just the man seeking reassurance in his old rituals.<\/p>

‘We saw their map,’ Stenwold whispered. That one glimpse he had caught, of the Wasps’ great map, had been a harsh education. A map of lands he had never seen, extending down to lands he knew all too well, the Lowlands of his home, and all sketched out with lines of advance and supply. A map of a projected conquest that stopped only with the Wasps’ knowledge of their world.<\/p>

‘Nobody will care,’ Tisamon repeated, and there was a rare wisdom in his voice. ‘What is the Lowlands, anyway? A half-dozen feuding city-states, some hold-overs from the Days of Lore, when things were different, and perhaps a few men like yourself, trying to make sense of it all. The Wasps are a unity, we are a motley.’ The gloom about him deepened, and Stenwold knew that his thoughts were turning inexorably towards Atryssa, towards the betrayal. Stenwold wished he could find some other way to explain her absence and their failure at the gates.<\/p>

‘What will you do,’ he asked the Ant-kinden woman, ‘if you cannot go home?’<\/p>

‘I will not be the first Ant renegade to go mercenary. If you now take us to Helleron I will sell my sword there,’ she said. ‘The market for us is good, and like to get better.’<\/p>

‘The same for me,’ Tisamon confirmed.<\/p>

‘Tisamon—’<\/p>

‘No.’ There was more finality in the Mantis’s voice than Stenwold had ever heard from him. ‘No return to Collegium for me, Stenwold. No debate and diplomacy. No society. No kind words, ever again. I followed you down that path once, and see where I am now.’<\/p>

‘But—’<\/p>

‘I will stay at Helleron and I will oppose the Wasps the only way I can.’ With careful movements Tisamon replaced his greatbow in its case. ‘You yourself have other means, Sten. You must go back to your college and your clever, machine-fingered people, and have them make ready. Of all of us, you were always the real hope of the future.’<\/p>

Stenwold said nothing as, below them, the last of the straggling fields gave out, and a scrubby, dry landscape passed beneath them without so much as a whisper.<\/p> <\/body>","format":"DG","formatDescription":"EPUB","formatDetail":"E200","illustrator":"","imprintDisplayName":"Tor","isFeatured":true,"isbn":"9780230736450","isbn10":"0230736459","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/extracts.panmacmillan.com\/site\/extr\/static\/jacketimages\/9780230736450.jpg","keynote":"","nextPageLink":null,"publicationDate":"2021-02-04T00:00:00Z","reader":"","relatedWorks":[{"format":"BC","formatDescription":"B-format paperback","formatDetail":"B105","isbn":"9781529050264","isbn10":"152905026X","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1163365&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=88503","publicationDate":"2020-06-22T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AJ","formatDescription":"Lossless Format Audio, WAV","formatDetail":"A104","isbn":"9781529050271","isbn10":"1529050278","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1173201&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=89280","publicationDate":"2020-07-15T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"BC","formatDescription":"B-format paperback","formatDetail":"B105","isbn":"9781509898435","isbn10":"1509898433","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=767913&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=82460","publicationDate":"2018-01-19T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"BC","formatDescription":"B-format paperback","formatDetail":"B105","isbn":"9781447292227","isbn10":"1447292227","jacketUrl":"","publicationDate":"2021-03-30T12:01:27Z"},{"format":"BC","formatDescription":"B-format paperback","formatDetail":"B105","isbn":"9781447208600","isbn10":"1447208609","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=49519&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=27540","publicationDate":"2013-11-22T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"DG","formatDescription":"Mobipocket unencrypted","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9780230736474","isbn10":"0230736475","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1262422&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=17975","publicationDate":"2021-01-20T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"BC","formatDescription":"A-format paperback","formatDetail":"B104","isbn":"9780230704138","isbn10":"0230704131","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=167687&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=15227","publicationDate":"2013-11-22T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529070194","isbn10":"1529070198","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1209781&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=93254","publicationDate":"2020-10-06T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529070200","isbn10":"1529070201","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1209795&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=93255","publicationDate":"2020-10-06T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529070217","isbn10":"152907021X","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1209814&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=93256","publicationDate":"2020-10-06T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529070224","isbn10":"1529070228","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1209829&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=93257","publicationDate":"2020-10-06T00:00:00Z"}],"title":"Empire in Black and Gold"},{"author":"Scott Turow","authorBiography":"Scott Turow is the world-famous author of several bestselling novels about the law, from Presumed Innocent<\/i> to Reversible Errors<\/i> , as well as the wartime thriller Ordinary Heroes<\/i>. He has also written an examination of the death penalty, Ultimate Punishment<\/i>. He lives with his family outside Chicago, where he is a partner in the international law firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal.","bicCodeList":"FHP,FIC031030","bisacCodeList":"FIC030000,FIC031010,FIC022080,FIC034000,FIC050000","estimatedReadingTimeMinutes":8,"extractHtml":"

1. THE END<\/h2>

L<\/span>adies and Gentlemen of the jury,” says Mr. Alejandro Stern. For nearly sixty years, he has offered this greeting to start his defense of the accused, and with the words today, a vapor of melancholy scuttles across his heart. But he is here. We live in the everlasting present. And he knows this much with iron certainty: He has had his turn.<\/p>

“This is the end,” he says. “For me.” Without lowering his eyes from the jury, he blindly probes his midsection to fasten the center button on his suit coat, as he always has done after his first few words. “No doubt, you have been thinking, ‘The defense lawyer is so very old.’ And you are correct, of course. Standing up to the government when the freedom of a good person, like Dr. Kiril Pafko, hangs in the balance is not a task for someone of my age. This will be my final time.”<\/p>

Behind him on the bench, Chief Judge Sonya Klonsky utters an unformed sound, as if clearing her throat. Yet having known Sonny well for thirty years, he understands as clearly as if she had spoken. Were he to say more about his personal situation, the judge will politely cut him off.<\/p>

“Yet I could not refuse this case,” he adds.<\/p>

“Mr. Stern,” Judge Klonsky says, “perhaps you should turn to the proof.”<\/p>

Looking up to her on the carved walnut bench, Stern lets his head droop in a small bow. It is a gesture retained from his boyhood in Argentina, which also left the whisper of an accent that embarrasses him, even now, whenever he hears recordings of his voice.<\/p>

“Just so, Your Honor,” he answers, then turns again to the jury. “Marta and I are proud to stand beside Dr. Pafko at this crucial moment in what has been a long and honored life. Marta, if you would.”<\/p>

Marta Stern rises slowly at the defense table, greeting the jurors with a pleasant smile. As her father sees her, Marta is that unusual person who looks far better in her middle years than she did as a young woman—fit, well coiffed, and at ease. Stern, by contrast, has been withered by age and disease. But even now, he does not need to say she is his daughter. Both are short and thickly built, both show the same awkward combination of wide features. Nodding, Marta resumes her seat at the defense table beside their paralegal, Pinky, Stern’s granddaughter.<\/p>

Stern lifts his hand next to his client.<\/p>

“Kiril, please.” Dr. Pafko, too, comes to his feet, stiffened by age but still tall and attentive to his appearance. A white silk pocket square bubbles above one line of the golden buttons on his double-breasted blazer. His silver hair, streaked by yellow and almost entirely thinned away on top, is swept back debonairly, while his teeth are uneven and small as he attempts a charming smile. “How old a man are you, Kiril?”<\/p>

“Seventy-eight,” Pafko answers at once. Stern’s question to his client at a time when only the lawyers are supposed to speak is clearly improper, but Stern knows from long experience that the government’s lead counsel, the United States Attorney, Moses Appleton, will bypass minor objections rather than have the jury think he is eager to hide things. Stern wants Kiril’s voice to be among the jurors’ first impressions, so they will be less disappointed if, as Stern hopes, Kiril never takes the stand in his own defense.<\/p>

“Seventy-eight,” Stern repeats, and tosses his head in mock amazement. “A young man,” he adds, and the fourteen jurors, including the two alternates, all smile. “Let me tell you a bit about what the evidence will show concerning Kiril Pafko. He came to the US from Argentina to complete his medical education roughly half a century ago, accompanied by his wife, Donatella, who is there behind him in the first row.” Donatella Pafko, a year or two older than Stern, eighty-six or eighty-seven now, sits with a regal air, utterly composed, her white hair gathered into a smooth bun, her face heavily made up and lifted bravely. “He has two children. His daughter, Dara, is seated beside her mother. You will meet his son, Dr. Leopoldo Pafko, called Lep, later as a witness in the case. Lep and Dara have given Donatella and Kiril five grandchildren. Surprisingly, Kiril’s grandchildren, too, will figure in the evidence you are going to hear.<\/p>

“Of course, most of the proof will concern Kiril’s professional life. You will learn that Kiril Pafko is both a medical doctor, an MD, and a PhD in biochemistry. For four decades plus, he has been an esteemed professor at Easton University’s medical college, here in Kindle County, where he has directed one the world’s foremost cancer research labs. Along the way, he also founded a company, Pafko Therapeutics, which puts his research into practice, producing lifesaving cancer medications.<\/p>

“I apologize now, because in this case you will hear a good deal about cancer. As we learned during voir dire,” Stern says, using the term for the judge’s questioning of prospective jurors, “many of us have our own sad experience with cancer, through the suffering of a loved one, or even”—Stern meaningfully touches the lapel on his suit jacket—“ourselves. If the fight against cancer may be likened to a worldwide war, then Kiril Pafko has been one of the human race’s leading generals and, as the evidence will show you, one of that war’s most decorated heroes.”<\/p>

Using his ivory-knobbed walking stick, Stern steps closer to the jurors.<\/p>

“Despite a light remark or two from me,” Stern says, “I am sure you understand that for Dr. Pafko, this case is not a laughing matter. You have heard an excellent opening statement from my friend, Moses Appleton.” Stern gestures to the crowded prosecution table beside him, where Moses, a square man in a store-bought suit, screws up his lips and his narrow, faint moustache in suspicion. He clearly regards Stern’s compliment as tactical, as it is—but also sincere. After trying half a dozen cases against Moses over the years, Stern knows that the US Attorney’s stolid, plainspoken way strikes all but the most blatantly racist jurors as reliable.<\/p>

“Mr. Appleton has summarized the evidence, as the government would have you see it. For nearly a decade, he says, Pafko Therapeutics, sometimes called PT, worked on a cancer wonder drug called g-Livia. That much is true. What is untrue is Mr. Appleton’s claim that the medication received rapid approval from the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, only because Dr. Pafko falsified the clinical trial data for g-Livia to conceal a series of unexpected deaths. You will learn that Kiril Pafko did nothing like that. But Mr. Appleton maintains that this imagined ‘fraud’ caused Dr. Pafko’s stock in PT to gain several hundred million dollars in value, even while seven cancer patients named in the indictment had their lives cut short.<\/p>

“In consequence, the prosecutors have charged this seventy-eight-year-old scientist, revered around the globe, as if he were a Mafia don. In Count 1 of the indictment, the government has alleged a strange crime called ‘racketeering’ that combines a grab bag of state and federal offenses. Kiril Pafko is now accused of fraud, by several different names, of insider stock trading, and if all that were not enough, of murder. Murder<\/em>,” Stern repeats and goes completely still for a second. “Not a laughing matter at all.”<\/p>

Pausing for effect, Stern glances to Marta to gauge how he is doing. If the Sterns had followed their long custom, Marta would be addressing the jury in opening. But she has gallantly given way to her father, saying he is entitled to maximum time at center stage for his final bow. The truth, Stern suspects, is that she does not care much for their client, and regards the case as her father’s last folly, a misjudgment of age or vanity or both, and, besides all that, a test Stern may no longer be up to.<\/p>

Marta would say this case has nearly killed Stern once already. Eight months ago, in March, he was sideswiped at high speed on the interstate, as he was driving back from witness interviews at PT. Stern’s Cadillac was slammed into a ditch, while Stern himself was unconscious when the ambulance arrived at the hospital, where a subdural hematoma—blood on the brain—required immediate neurosurgery. He was confused for days, but by now the neurologist says his scans are normal—“for a person of eighty-five.” The qualification troubles Marta, but Kiril, who after all has a medical education, continues to insist his old friend represent him. In the courtroom, Stern has always been his best self. Yet he also knows that here, the truth emerges through a fierce struggle between the sides that will push him to his very limits.<\/p>

But for fifty-nine years, Stern has approached every case almost as if he, as much as his client, were on trial. Each day consumes his entire spirit; he will sleep fitfully, as the witnesses take over his dreams. The worst moment, as always, came this morning, the first day of the actual trial, always like a play’s opening night. Anxiety was a rodent gnawing on his heart, and the office was in bedlam. Pinky, his granddaughter, was ranting about misfires with the computer slides for Stern’s opening. Marta was dashing to and from the conference room issuing last-minute directions for legal research to four young lawyers on loan to Stern & Stern. Vondra, Stern’s assistant, kept invading his office to check his trial bag, while in the hallways it looked as if the entire support staff was building the pyramids, loading a long handcart with the huge transfer cases of documents and office equipment that would be needed in the courtroom. In his few instants alone, Stern focused on his opening, trying to etch it into memory, an effort cut short when Kiril and Donatella arrived for a final briefing, during which Stern was required to project an air of utter calm.<\/p>

And yet this is the life he has been reluctant to forsake. It is not ego or money, the tabloid version of his motives, that have kept him working. The reasons are more personal and complex, for whatever the frequent frustrations of practicing law, the plain truth is that Mr. Alejandro Stern has adored it: The rushing about, the telephone calls, the small breaks of light in the tangle of egos and rules. His clients, his clients! For him, no siren song could be more enticing than an anguished call from someone in dire straits—in his early years, a hooligan in the precinct lockup, or as happens more typically these days, a businessperson with a federal agent at the door. He has always answered with the majestic calm of a superhero: ‘Speak to no one. I shall be there momentarily.’ What was it? What was this mad devotion to people who were often scoundrels, hoping to avoid a punishment that even Stern knew they deserved, who balked at paying fees, who lied to him routinely, and who scorned him the moment a case was lost? They needed him. Needed him! These weak, injured, even buffoonish characters required the assistance of Mr. Alejandro Stern to make their way. Their lives teetered on the cliff edge of destruction. They wept in his office and swore to murder their turncoat comrades. When sanity returned, they dried their eyes and waited, pathetically, for Stern to tell them what to do. ‘Now,’ he would say quietly. The work of six decades reduced to a few words.<\/p>

If some of the central figures in his life—his first wife, Clara, the mother of his children, who died a suicide in 1989; or Peter, his eldest child; or, in rare moods, Helen, who left Stern a widower again two years ago—if they were present to hear Stern sing lyrics about his clients, his family would ask pointedly, ‘And what about us?’ To their implicit accusation, Stern, ironically, has no defense. The brute fact is that his energies and attention have often been entirely consumed by the courtroom, leaving less than he would have liked for the people he claims to love. All he can offer in response is candor: This is the life I needed to live. At eighty-five, he is certain that without it, he never would have known himself.<\/p> <\/section> <\/body>","format":"DG","formatDescription":"EPUB","formatDetail":"E200","illustrator":"","imprintDisplayName":"Mantle","isFeatured":true,"isbn":"9781529039115","isbn10":"1529039118","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/extracts.panmacmillan.com\/site\/extr\/static\/jacketimages\/9781529039115.jpg","keynote":"","nextPageLink":null,"publicationDate":"2021-01-07T00:00:00Z","reader":"","relatedWorks":[{"format":"BC","formatDescription":"B-format paperback","formatDetail":"B105","isbn":"9781529039108","isbn10":"152903910X","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1144922&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=88133","publicationDate":"2020-05-05T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529049138","isbn10":"152904913X","jacketUrl":"","publicationDate":"2020-06-01T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529049145","isbn10":"1529049148","jacketUrl":"","publicationDate":"2020-06-01T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529049152","isbn10":"1529049156","jacketUrl":"","publicationDate":"2020-06-01T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529049169","isbn10":"1529049164","jacketUrl":"","publicationDate":"2020-06-01T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"BB","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529039085","isbn10":"1529039088","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1141094&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=88131","publicationDate":"2020-04-28T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"BC","formatDescription":"Trade Paperback","formatDetail":"B106","isbn":"9781529039092","isbn10":"1529039096","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1141108&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=88132","publicationDate":"2020-04-28T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AJ","formatDescription":"Lossless Format Audio, WAV","formatDetail":"A104","isbn":"9781529039122","isbn10":"1529039126","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1114922&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=88135","publicationDate":"2020-02-26T00:00:00Z"}],"title":"The Last Trial"},{"author":"Arkady Martine","authorBiography":"Arkady Martine is a speculative fiction writer and, as Dr AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and an apprentice city planner. Under both names she writes about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda and the edges of the world. Arkady grew up in New York City and, after some time in Turkey, Canada and Sweden, lives in Baltimore with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw. A Memory Called Empire <\/i>is her debut novel, which is followed by A Desolation Called Peace.<\/i>","bicCodeList":"FLS,FIC028030","bisacCodeList":"FIC028050,FIC028000","estimatedReadingTimeMinutes":23,"extractHtml":"

CHAPTER<\/h2>

ONE<\/h3>

\"image\"<\/p>

And from behind the curve of the large gaseous planet at coordinate B5682.76R1, the Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare arose on the bow of her ship, and she was a radiant blaze flooding all of the void. The rays of her light, reaching outward like the spear-spokes of her throne, struck the metal shells which were the dwelling-places of human beings in Sector B5682, and illuminated them brightly. The sensors of Twelve Solar-Flare’s ship recorded ten of them, each alike to the other, and this number has not increased since. Within the shells the men and women knew not seasons nor growth nor decay, but lived endlessly in orbit without benefit of a planetary home. The largest of these shells called itself Lsel Station, which in the language of its people meant a station that both listened and heard. But the people there had grown strange, and cleaved to themselves, though they were capable of learning language, and immediately began to do so . . .<\/p>

—The Expansion History, Book V,<\/em> lines 72–87, anonymous but attributed to the historian-poet Pseudo-Thirteen River, writing in the reign of the Emperor of All Teixcalaan Three Perigee<\/p>

* * * <\/p>

In order to expedite your travel into the Imperium, Teixcalaan requests the following as proofs of identity: a) a genetic record stating your sole possession of your own genotype, unshared with clonesibs OR a notarized document stating that your genotype is at least 90 percent unique and that no other individual holds LEGAL claim to it; b) an itemized list of goods, chattels, currencies, and objects of idea commerce which you intend to bring with you; c) a work permit from a registered employer in a Teixcalaanli system, signed and notarized, with salary and maintenance information, OR a record of superlative performance on the Teixcalaanli Imperial Examinations OR an invitation by a person, governmental entity, bureau, ministry, or other authorized individual specifying your entrance and exit dates from Imperium space OR evidence of sufficient self-supporting currency . . .<\/p>

—Form 721Q, Visa Application Made from Foreign Sectors ALPHABETIC LANGUAGE VARIANT<\/span>, page 6<\/p> <\/div>

MAHIT<\/span> <\/span>came down to the City, heart-planet and capital of the Teixcalaanli Empire, in a seed-skiff, a bubble of a ship hardly big enough for her body and her luggage both. She squirted from the side of the imperial cruiser Ascension’s Red Harvest<\/em> and burned atmosphere on her planetward trajectory, which distorted the view. Thus the first time she saw the City with her own flesh eyes, not in infofiche or holograph or imago-memory, it was haloed in white fire and shone like an endless glittering sea: an entire planet rendered into an ecumenopolis, palatially urban. Even its dark spots—older metropolises not yet clad in metal, decaying urban blight, the harnessed remains of lakes—looked populated. <\/em>Only the oceans remained untouched, and they gleamed too, a brilliantine blue-turquoise.<\/p>

The City was very beautiful and very big. Mahit had been on a fair number of planets, the ones closest to Lsel Station that weren’t completely inimical to human life, and she was nevertheless overcome by awe. Her heart beat faster; her palms went clammy where they gripped her harness. The City appeared exactly as it was always described in Teixcalaanli documents and songs: the jewel at the heart of the Empire. Complete with atmospheric glow.<\/p>

<That’s what looking at it is meant to make you think,> said her imago. He was a faint staticky taste on the back of her tongue, a flash of grey eyes and sun-dark skin in her peripheral vision. The voice in the back of her head, but not quite her voice: someone around her age, but male, and quicksilver-smug, and as excited <\/em>to be here as she was. She felt her mouth curve in his smile, a heavier and wider thing than the muscles in her face preferred. They were new to each other. His expressions were very strong.<\/p>

Get out of my nervous system, Yskandr,<\/em> she thought at him, gently chiding. An imago—the implanted, integrated memory of one’s predecessor, housed half in her neurology and half in a small ceramic-and-metal machine clasped to her brainstem—wasn’t supposed to take over the host’s nervous system unless the host consented. At the beginning of the partnership, though, consent<\/em> was complicated. The version of Yskandr inside her mind remembered having a body, and sometimes he used Mahit’s as if it were his own. She worried about it. There was still so much space<\/em> between them, when they were supposed to be becoming one person.<\/p>

This time, though, he withdrew easily: sparking prickles, electric laughter. <As you will. Show me, Mahit? I want to see it again.><\/p>

When she gazed down at the City again—closer now, the skyport rising to meet her skiff like a flower made of scooping nets—she let the imago look through her eyes and felt his rush of exhilaration as if it were her own.<\/p>

What’s down there, <\/em>she thought. For you<\/em>.<\/p>

<The world,> said her imago, who had been Ambassador from Lsel in the City when he was still a living person and not part of a long chain of live memory. He said it in the Teixcalaanli language, which made it a tautology: the word for “world” and the word for “the City” were the same, as was the word for “empire.” It was impossible to specify, especially in the high imperial dialect. One had to note the context.<\/p>

Yskandr’s context was obfuscating, which Mahit had come to expect of him. She coped. Despite all her years of studying Teixcalaanli language and literature, his fluency had a different quality than hers, the sort that only came from immersive practice.<\/p>

<The world,> he said again, <but also the edges of the world.> The Empire, but also where the Empire stops.<\/em><\/p>

Mahit matched his language and spoke out loud in Teixcalaanli, since there was no one but her in the seed-skiff. “You’ve said something meaningless.”<\/p>

<Yes,> Yskandr agreed. <When I was ambassador it was my habit to say all sorts of meaningless things. You should try it. It’s quite enjoyable.><\/p>

In the privacy of her body, Yskandr used the most intimate forms of address, as if he and Mahit were clonesibs or lovers. Mahit had never spoken them out loud. She had a natural younger brother back on Lsel Station, the closest she would ever get to a clonesib, but her brother only spoke the Stationers’ language, and calling him “you,” intimate-otherself in Teixcalaanli, would have been both pointless and unkind. She could have said “you” to a few people who had been in those language and literature courses with her—her old friend and classmate Shrja Torel would have taken the compliment correctly, for instance, but Mahit and Shrja hadn’t spoken since Mahit had been picked to be the new Ambassador to Teixcalaan and carry the imago of the previous one. The why <\/em>of that little breakage between them was obvious, and petty, and Mahit regretted it—and it wasn’t something she was going to get a chance to repair, except by apologetic letter from the center of the Empire both she and Shrja had wanted to see. Which almost certainly wouldn’t help.<\/p>

The City had come closer: it filled up the horizon, a vast curve she was falling into. To Yskandr, she thought, I am the Ambassador now. I might speak meaningfully. If I wanted.<\/em><\/p>

<You speak correctly,> Yskandr said, which was the sort of compliment the Teixcalaanlitzlim gave to a still-crèched child.<\/p>

Gravity caught at the seed-skiff and sank into the bones in Mahit’s thighs and forearms, giving her the sensation of spin. It was dizzying. Below her the skyport’s nets flared open. For a moment she thought she was falling, that she would fall all the way to the planet’s surface and smear to paste on the ground.<\/p>

<It was the same for me,> Yskandr said quickly, in that Stationers’ language that was Mahit’s native tongue. <Don’t be afraid, Mahit. You are not falling. It is the planet.><\/p>

The skyport caught her with hardly a bump.<\/p>

She had time to gather herself together. There was some business with the seed-skiff being shunted into a long line of other such vessels, moving along a great conveyor until each one could be identified and come to its assigned gate. Mahit found herself rehearsing what she would say to the imperial citizens on the other side as if she was a first-year student preparing for an oral examination. In the back of her mind, the imago was a watchful, thrumming presence. Every so often he moved her left hand, the fingers tapping along her harness, someone else’s nervous gesture. Mahit wished they’d had longer to get used to each other.<\/p>

But she hadn’t undergone the normal process of having an imago implanted, complete with a year or more of integration therapy under the precise care of one of Lsel’s psychotherapists: she and Yskandr had had a scant three months together, and now they were approaching the place where they’d need to work<\/em> together—work as one person, compiled out of a memory-chain and a new host.<\/p>

When Ascension’s Red Harvest<\/em> had arrived, hanging in parallel orbit around Lsel Station’s sun, and had demanded a new ambassador to take back to Teixcalaan, they had refused to explain what had happened to the previous one. Mahit was sure there had been a great deal of politics on the Lsel Council as to what—and who—to send back, and with what demands for information. But this she knew was true: she herself had been one of the few Stationers both old enough for the job and young enough not to have already been brought into an imago-line—and one of the fewer still within that group who had any of the appropriate aptitudes or training for diplomacy. Of those, Mahit had been the best. Her scores on the Imperial Examinations in Teixcalaanli language and literature had approached those of an imperial citizen, and she’d been proud of that—spent the half year since the exams imagining that she would come to the City, sometime in her middle age, once she was established, and collect experiences—attending whatever salons were open to noncitizens that season—gathering up information for whoever she’d share her memory with after she died.<\/p>

Now she’d get to the City, all right: more important than any Teixcalaanli examination, her scores on the imago-aptitudes had come up green, green, green for this match. Her imago would be Yskandr Aghavn, the previous Ambassador to Teixcalaan. Who was now somehow unsuitable to that empire—dead, or disgraced, or held captive if still alive. Mahit’s instructions from her government included determining precisely what had gone so wrong with him—but she still had his imago. He—or, at least, the last version of him available to give her, fifteen years out of date—was the closest thing Lsel could provide to a native guide to the Teixcalaanli court. Not for the first time, Mahit wondered whether or not there would be a Yskandr waiting for her in the flesh when she stepped outside. She was not sure which would be easier, having one—a disgraced ambassador? A competitor for her, but perhaps salvageable?—or not having one, which meant he had died without ever giving to any younger person what he had learned in his lifetime.<\/p>

The imago-Yskandr in her head was hardly older than she was, which was both helpful in finding commonality and uncomfortable—most imagos were elders or victims of early-death accidents—but the last record of Yskandr’s knowledge and memory had been taken when he’d last returned to Lsel on leave from his post in Teixcalaan, only five years after he had first gone down to the City. It had been another decade and a half since then.<\/p>

So he was young, and so was she, and whatever advantage to integration that might have granted the two of them was belied by how short a time they’d been together. Two weeks between the courier’s arrival and when Mahit learned that she’d be the next ambassador. Three more weeks for her and Yskandr to learn how to live together in the body that used to belong to her alone, under the supervision of the Station’s psychotherapists. A long, slow time on Ascension’s Red Harvest,<\/em> traversing the sublight distances between the jumpgates that were scattered like jewels throughout Teixcalaanli space.<\/p>

The seed-skiff peeled open like a ripe fruit. Mahit’s harness retracted. Taking hold of her luggage in both hands, she stepped onto the gate, and thus into Teixcalaan itself.<\/p>

The skyport gate had an airy utilitarianism constructed of wear-resistant carpet and clearly marked signage between glass-and-steel-paneled walls. Standing in the center of the gate’s connecting tunnel, a precise halfway between the seed-skiff and the skyport proper, was a single Teixcalaanli imperial official in a perfectly cut cream suit. She was small: narrow at the shoulder and hip, much shorter than Mahit, and she wore her hair in a fishtail-braid queue of black that spilled over her left lapel. Her sleeves, wide like bells, shaded through flame-orange at the upper arm—<Information Ministry coloring,> Yskandr told Mahit—down to the deep red cuffs that were the privilege of the titled members of the court. Over her left eye she wore a cloudhook, a glass eyepiece full of the ceaseless obscuring flow of the imperial information network. Hers was sleekly decorative, much like the rest of her. Her large, dark eyes and thin cheekbones and mouth were more delicate than was fashionable on Teixcalaan, but by Mahit’s Stationer standards she was interesting,<\/em> if not quite pretty. She touched her fingers together politely in front of her chest and inclined her head to Mahit.<\/p>

Yskandr lifted Mahit’s own hands to make the same gesture—and Mahit dropped the two bags she’d been carrying on the floor with an embarrassing clatter. She was horrified. They hadn’t slipped like that since the first week they’d been together.<\/p>

Fuck,<\/em> she thought, and heard at the same moment Yskandr say <Fuck.> The doubling wasn’t reassuring.<\/p>

The official’s carefully neutral expression did not change. She said, “Ambassador, I am Three Seagrass, asekreta<\/em> and patrician second-class. It is my honor to welcome you into the Jewel of the World. I will be serving as your cultural liaison at the command of His Imperial Majesty Six Direction.” There was a long pause, and then the official gave a small sigh and went on: “Do you require some sort of assistance with your belongings?”<\/p>

“Three Seagrass” was an old-fashioned Teixcalaanli name: the numeral half was low value, and the noun half was the name of a plant, even if it was a plant Mahit hadn’t seen used in a name before. All of the noun parts of Teixcalaanli names were plants or tools or inanimate objects, but most of the plant ones were flowers. <\/em>“Seagrass” was memorable. Asekreta <\/em>meant she was not only Information Ministry, as her suit suggested, but a trained agent of rank, as well as holding the court title of patrician second-class: an aristocrat, but not a very important or rich one.<\/p>

Mahit left her hands where Yskandr had put them, which was where they belonged no matter how angry she was at how they’d gotten there, and bowed over them. “Ambassador Mahit Dzmare of Lsel Station. At your service and that of His Majesty, may his reign be a radiant blaze upon the void.” Since this was her first official contact with a member of the Teixcalaanli court, she used the imperial honorific she’d picked carefully in consultation with Yskandr and the Council government on Lsel: “radiant blaze” was the epithet for the Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare in The Expansion History as Attributed to Pseudo-Thirteen River,<\/em> the oldest account of imperial presence in Stationer space. Using it now was thus a sign of both Mahit’s erudition and her respect for Six Direction and his office; but “the void” carefully avoided any intimation of Teixcalaanli claim on parts of Stationer space which were not, <\/em>in fact, space.<\/p>

Whether Three Seagrass was aware of the implications of reference was somewhat difficult to tell. She waited patiently while Mahit scooped up her luggage again, and then said, “Keep a tight grip on those. You are urgently awaited in the Judiciary concerning the previous ambassador, and you may need to greet all sorts of people along the way.”<\/p>

Fine. Mahit wouldn’t underestimate Three Seagrass’s capability to be snide, nor<\/em> her capability to be clever. She nodded, and when the other woman turned smartly and walked up the tunnel, she followed.<\/p>

<Don’t underestimate any of them,> Yskandr said. <A cultural liaison has been at court for half as long as you’ve been alive. She earned the post.><\/p>

Don’t lecture me when you’ve just made me look like a flustered barbarian.<\/em><\/p>

<Do you want me to apologize?><\/p>

Are you sorry?<\/em><\/p>

Mahit could imagine his facial expression all too easily: arch, as calm as a Teixcalaanlitzlim, the lusher mouth she remembered from holographs of him dragging her own lips up and askew. <I wouldn’t want you to feel like a barbarian. You’ll get enough of that from them.><\/p>

He wasn’t sorry. It was marginally possible that he was embarrassed, but if he was, he wasn’t feeling it with her endocrine system.<\/p>

_________<\/p>

Yskandr got her through the next half hour. Mahit couldn’t even resent him for it. He behaved exactly like an imago ought to behave: a repository of instinctive and automatic skill that Mahit hadn’t had time to acquire for herself. He knew when to duck through doorways built for Teixcalaanlitzlim instead of Stationers; when to avert her eyes from the rising glare of the City reflected in the glass of the elevator that crawled down the outside of the skyport; how high to step to climb into Three Seagrass’s groundcar. He performed courtesy ritual like a native. After the incident with the luggage he was careful about actually moving Mahit’s hands, but she let him have charge of how long she maintained eye contact and with whom, the degree to which her head was inclined in greeting, all the little ways of signaling that she was less of an alien, less of a barbarian, something that might belong in the City. Protective coloration. Going native without ever having to be a native. She could feel curious eyes slide off of her and fixate on the far more interesting court dress of Three Seagrass, and wondered how much Yskandr had loved the City, to be this good at being in it.<\/p>

In the groundcar, Three Seagrass asked, “Have you been within the world long?”<\/p>

Mahit needed to stop thinking in any language but Teixcalaanli. What Three Seagrass meant was a standard bit of politesse small talk, a have you ever been to my country before,<\/em> and Mahit had heard it like an existential question.<\/p>

“No,” she said, “but I have read the classics since I was a very small child, and I have thought often of the City.”<\/p>

Three Seagrass seemed to approve of this answer. “I wouldn’t want to bore you, Ambassador,” she said, “but if you’d like a brief and verbal tour of what we’re passing by, I’d be pleased to recite an appropriate poem.” She flicked a control button on her side of the car, and the windows faded to transparency.<\/p>

“I couldn’t be bored,” Mahit said honestly. Outside, the city was a blur of steel and pale stone, neon lights crawling up and down the glass walls of its skyscrapers. They were on one of the central ring roads, spiraling inward through municipal buildings toward the palace itself. Properly, it was more of a city-within-a-city than a palace. By statistics, it had several hundred thousand inhabitants, all of whom were responsible in some minute fashion for the functioning of the Empire, from the gardeners on up to Six Direction himself: each of them plugged into the information network that was guaranteed to imperial citizens, and every last one bathed in a constant flow of data that told them where to be, what to do, how the story of their day and week and epoch would go.<\/p>

Three Seagrass had an excellent voice. She was reciting The Buildings<\/em>—a seventeen-thousand-line poem which described the City’s architecture. Mahit didn’t know the precise version she’d picked to declaim, but that might have been Mahit’s own fault. She had her own favorite narrative poems from the Teixcalaanli canon, and she’d memorized as many of them as she could in imitation of Teixcalaanli literati (and to pass the oral portions of the examinations), but The Buildings <\/em>had always seemed too dull to bother with. It was different now, hearing Three Seagrass recite it as they passed the structures being described. She was a fluent orator, and she had enough command of the metrical scheme to add amusing and relevant original detail where improvisation was appropriate. Mahit folded her hands across her lap and watched the poetry going by through the glass windows of the groundcar.<\/p>

This was the City, then, the Jewel of the World, the heart of the Empire: a collapse between narrative and perception, Three Seagrass making adjustments on the fly to the canonical Buildings<\/em> when some building had changed. After some time she realized that Yskandr was reciting along with Three Seagrass, a dim whisper in the back of her mind, and also that she found the whisper reassuring. He<\/em> knew this poem, and thus she knew it too, if she needed to know it. That was what imago-lines were for, after all: making sure useful memory was preserved, generation to generation.<\/p>

They traveled through forty-five minutes and two traffic snarls before Three Seagrass concluded her stanza and stopped the groundcar at the base of a needlelike pillar of a building, quite near the center of the palace grounds. <Judiciary complex,> Yskandr said.<\/p>

Good sign or bad sign? <\/em>Mahit asked him.<\/p>

<It depends. I wonder what I did.><\/p>

Something illegal. Come on, Yskandr, give me a general sense of the possibilities here. What would you do to get yourself thrown in jail?<\/em><\/p>

Mahit got the impression of Yskandr sighing at her, but also the queasy sensation of someone else’s nervousness setting off her adrenal glands. <Mm. Sedition, mostly.><\/p>

She wished she could be sure he was joking.<\/p>

Surrounding the pillar of the Judiciary was a perimeter of grey-uniformed guards, clustered more closely at the door: a security checkpoint. The guards carried long, slim dark grey sticks rather than the energy weapons that the Teixcalaanli legions favored. Mahit had seen a lot of the latter on Ascension’s Red Harvest,<\/em> but not these.<\/p>

<Shocksticks,> Yskandr said. <Electricity-based crowd control—these were not <\/em>here when I was last here. They’re anti-riot gear, or at least they are in tabloid entertainments.><\/p>

You’re fifteen years out of date, <\/em>Mahit thought. A lot might have changed<\/em>—<\/p>

<This is the center of the palace. If they’re worried about riots at the Judiciary, something hasn’t changed, <\/em>something is wrong. <\/em>Now go find out what I did.><\/p>

Mahit wondered what had gone sufficiently wrong to create security theater at the door of the Judiciary, and if Yskandr had helped <\/em>it go that wrong—felt prickles go up the back of her spine and down through her arms, the ulnar nerves crawling unpleasantly—and then had no time for more distressing reflection, as Three Seagrass was escorting her through. She offered up her thumbprints as well as Mahit’s, and stood with her eyes politely averted as a Teixcalaanli security guard patted chastely at the pockets of Mahit’s traveling jacket and her trousers. Her luggage was decorously placed in their custody, and she was promised that she could have it back on her way out.<\/p>

Once the guard was done breaking all of Mahit’s personal space taboos, she advised Mahit to avoid wandering off without escort, as her identity was neither recorded on cloudhook nor otherwise authorized to be present within the Judiciary. Mahit raised an inquiring eyebrow at Three Seagrass.<\/p>

“There were questions of speed,” Three Seagrass said, proceeding briskly through a multiplicity of irising doors into a cool, slate-floored interior, toward the elevator bank. “Your registration and permission to move about the palace complex will of course be taken care of as soon as is possible.”<\/p>

Mahit said, “I’ve been in transit more than a month, and there are questions of speed?”<\/p>

“We <\/em>have been waiting for three<\/em> months, Ambassador, since we sent for a new representative from the Station.”<\/p>

<I must have done something quite spectacular,> Yskandr said. <Down below are secret courts and interrogation chambers, or so the palace rumors always went.><\/p>

The elevator chimed in fourths. “And one more hour matters, after three months?”<\/p>

Three Seagrass gestured for Mahit to precede her into the elevator, which was a sort of answer, if not an informative one.<\/p>

They descended.<\/p>

Waiting for them below was a chamber that could have been a courtroom or an operating theater: blue-metal floor, and amphitheater-style benches arrayed around a high table on which lay some large object covered in a sheet. Floodlights. Three Teixcalaanli strangers, all broad-cheekboned and broad-shouldered, one in a red cassock, one dressed identically to Three Seagrass in the orange-and-cream of the Information Ministry, and one in a dark grey suit that reminded Mahit of nothing so much as the metal sheen of the shocksticks. They stood around the table, arguing in low, rapid voices, and blocked Mahit’s view of whatever was lying on it.<\/p>

“I still would like to make my own examination, for my Ministry, before he’s returned,” said the Information Ministry courtier, annoyed.<\/p>

“There’s not a single good reason to just turn him back over to them,” the Teixcalaanlitzlim in red said, with some finality. “It won’t do us any good<\/em> and might spark an incident—”<\/p>

Dark Grey Suit disagreed. “Contrary to the opinions of your Ministry, ixplanatl,<\/em> I am entirely certain that any incident they could induce wouldn’t be more trouble than an insect bite, and as easily soothed.”<\/p>

“Oh for fuck’s sake, argue later,<\/em>” said the one from Information, “they’re here.”<\/p>

The man in red turned toward them as they entered, as if he had been anticipating their arrival. The ceiling was a low dome. Mahit thought of a bubble of gas, trapped under the earth. Then she understood the shape on the table as a corpse.<\/p>

It lay under a thin sheet drawn midway up its bare torso, hands resting on its chest, fingertips touching as if it was preparing to greet some afterlife. Its cheeks were sunken and its open eyes were filmed over with a hazy blue. The same color had infiltrated its lips and nailbeds. It looked like it had been dead a long time. Perhaps . . . three months.<\/p>

As clearly as if he had been standing next to her, Mahit heard Yskandr say <I got old,> with wondering horror. She was shaking. Her heart raced, drowning out the sound of Three Seagrass introducing her. A dizzying rush, worse than falling toward the planet, panic out of nowhere. Not her panic: Yskandr’s, her imago flooding her with her own stress hormones, enough adrenaline to taste metallic. The mouth of the corpse was slack, but she could see the smile lines at its corners, feel on her own mouth how Yskandr’s muscles would have formed them over time.<\/p>

“As you see, Ambassador Dzmare,” said the man in red, whose name Mahit had completely failed to catch during the introductions, “a new ambassador was necessary. I apologize for preserving him in this fashion, but we did not want to disrespect any funereal processes which your people might prefer.”<\/p>

She came closer. The corpse stayed dead, stayed still and limp and empty. <Fuck,> Yskandr said, a fizz of nauseating static. Mahit was horribly, helplessly sure she was going to throw up. <Oh, fuck, I can’t do this.><\/p>

Mahit thought (or Yskandr thought—she was having trouble keeping them apart, and this wasn’t how the integration was supposed to go, she was never supposed to be lost inside his biochemical panic response hijacking her own endocrine system) about how the only place that Yskandr existed now was inside her head. <\/em>She’d considered that he was dead, when Teixcalaan had demanded a new ambassador, thought about it intellectually, planned for it, and yet—here he was—a corpse, <\/em>a hollow rotting shell, and she was panicking because her imago was panicking and an emotion-spike was the easiest way to fuck up an integration that wasn’t finished, an emotion-spike would burn out all the tiny microcircuits in the machine in her mind and oh fuck he was dead <\/em>and oh fuck I am dead<\/em> and the blur, <\/em>the nauseating blur of everything.<\/p>

Yskandr, <\/em>she tried, aiming for comfort and missing by a long distance.<\/p>

<Get closer,> he told her, <I need to see. I’m not sure—><\/p>

He moved them before she could decide to do what he asked. It was like she’d blacked out for the space of time it took to approach the corpse, blinked and was there, <\/em>and this was going so very, very awry, and she couldn’t stop it—<\/p>

“We burn our dead,” she said, and didn’t know who to thank for the fact that she’d said it in the right language.<\/p>

“How interesting a custom,” said the courtier in dark grey. Mahit thought he was from the Judiciary itself; this was likely to be his morgue, even if it was the man in red who was the mortician.<\/p>

Mahit smiled at him, too wide for her face and too uncontrolled for Yskandr’s, an expression that’d horrify any serene Teixcalaanlitzlim. “Afterward,” she said, searching for the correct vocabulary, a spar to cling to through the roiling waves of adrenaline, “we eat the ashes as a sacred thing. His children and successors first. If he had any.”<\/p>

The courtier had the grace to blanch and the stubbornness to repeat himself. “How interesting a custom.”<\/p>

“What do you do with yours?” Mahit asked. She came nearer Yskandr’s corpse, drifting. Her mouth seemed to be under her control for the moment, but her feet belonged to Yskandr. “Excuse my inquiry. I am, after all, not a citizen.”<\/p>

The man in red said, “Burial is common,” as if it was a question he answered every day. “Do you wish to examine the body, Ambassador?”<\/p>

“Is there some reason I should do so?” Mahit said, but she was already pulling down the sheet. Her fingers were sweating, slick on the fabric. Underneath, the corpse was naked, a fortyish man with all of his skin tinged that same blue at its most translucent points. An injectable preservative, all through him. The injection points were strikingly visible, holes surrounded by a halo of pale, swollen flesh—at the carotid, and in the ulnar veins of both arms. There was an extra injection site at the base of the corpse’s right thumb, distorting the shape of the hand. She found herself staring at it, in another one of those blanked-out moments—she’d been looking at his face, and now she was looking at his wrist, as if the imago needed to see every place his former body had been altered. Even if Mahit had wanted to claim her rights as his successor to the dust of his flesh—and she wasn’t sure she wanted to—she thought that it might be a very stupid idea to ingest whatever the man in red had filled him up with. Three months without rotting. She could taste bile in her throat, under the metallic endocrine cascade. Bodies should decompose,<\/em> and be recycled.<\/p>

But the Empire preserved everything, told the same stories over and over again; why not also preserve flesh instead of rendering it up for decent use?<\/p>

She was touching the wrist, the imago tracing her fingertip over the injection site, and then further, into the palm, following the line of some scar. The flesh was rubbery, plasticky, too much give and not enough all at once—her<\/em> Yskandr hadn’t gotten that scar yet; her Yskandr wasn’t dead<\/em> yet—there was another one of those dizzying nauseous waves, the edges of her vision irising to fizz and sparks, and she thought again We are going to blow out all the circuitry, stop it<\/span><\/em>—<\/em><\/p>

<I can’t,> Yskandr said again, an enormous negation inside her mind, an avulsion that felt like a spark gone to ground—and then he was gone.<\/em><\/p>

Dead quiet. Not even the feeling of him watching through Mahit’s eyes. She felt gravityless, full of endorphins she hadn’t produced on purpose, and horribly alone. Her tongue was heavy. It tasted like aluminum.<\/p>

Nothing like this had ever happened to her before.<\/p>

“How did he die?” she asked, and was amazed that she sounded entirely normal, entirely unfazed; asked for the sake of continuing to talk. <\/em>None of the Teixcalaanli knew about imagos, none of them would even be able to understand what had just happened to her.<\/p>

“He choked on the air,” the man in red said, touching the corpse’s neck with a practiced span of two fingers. “His throat closed. It was very unfortunate; but the physiologies of noncitizens are often so different from ours.”<\/p>

“He ate something he was allergic<\/em> to?” Mahit asked. This seemed absurd. She was shock-numb, and apparently Yskandr had died of anaphylaxis, and if she wasn’t careful she was going to have a hysterical laughing fit.<\/p>

“At dinner with the Minister for Science Ten Pearl, no less,” said the last courtier, the one from Information. This one looked like he’d climbed out of a classical Teixcalaanli painting: his features were unbelievably symmetrical: lush mouth, low forehead, perfectly hooked nose; eyes like deep brown pools. “You should have seen the newsfeeds afterward, Ambassador; it was quite the tabloid story.”<\/p>

“Twelve Azalea means no disrespect,” said Three Seagrass from where she stood by the door. “The news went no farther than the palace complex. It would be inappropriate for the general population.”<\/p>

Mahit pulled the sheet back up to the corpse’s chin. It didn’t help. He was still there. <\/em>“Was the story also inappropriate for the stations?” she asked. “The courier who asked for my service within the City was unnecessarily vague.”<\/p>

Three Seagrass shrugged, a minute shift of one shoulder. “Ambassador, while I am asekreta,<\/em> not every asekreta<\/em> is privy to the decisions of the Information Ministry as a whole.”<\/p>

“What would you like done with his body?” inquired the man in red. Mahit looked up at him; he was tall for a Teixcalaanlitzlim. His eyes, an unnervingly friendly green, were almost even with hers. She had no idea what to do with a corpse. She had never burnt anyone herself; she was too young.<\/em> Her parents were both still living. And besides, what you did was you called the funeral manager and they<\/em> handled it, preferably while someone you loved held your hand and cried with you over the mutual loss.<\/p>

She had less idea what to do with this corpse. No one was going to cry over Yskandr, even her, and there weren’t any funeral managers in Teixcalaanli space who would know where to begin.<\/p>

She managed, “Nothing yet,” and swallowed hard against the remains of the nausea. Her fingers felt electric, all prickle-shimmer where they had touched the dead man’s skin. “I will of course make arrangements once I am better acquainted with the facilities available. Until then, well, he’s not going to rot, is he?”<\/p>

“Only very slowly,” the man in red said.<\/p>

“Sir—” Mahit looked to Three Seagrass for help; she was a cultural liaison so she could damn well liaise<\/em>—<\/p>

“Ixplanatl<\/em> Four Lever,” Three Seagrass said obligingly. “Of the Science Ministry.”<\/p>

“Four Lever,” Mahit went on, dropping the man’s title—it meant “scientist,” in a very general sense, scientist-with-credentials—entirely on purpose, “when will the rot be noticeable? Another two months, perhaps?”<\/p>

Four Lever smiled enough to show off a sliver of teeth. “Two years, Ambassador.”<\/p>

“Excellent,” Mahit said. “That will be plenty of time.”<\/p>

Four Lever bowed over the triangular press of his fingertips, as if she’d given him an order. Mahit suspected she was being indulged. She’d take it. She had to. She needed space enough to think and she wasn’t going to get it here, in the bowels of the Judiciary with three courtiers and a ixplanatl <\/em>morgue attendant all waiting for her to make some irrevocable error and end up like Yskandr had.<\/p>

Betrayed by his own physiology. After twenty years of living in the City, eating what the Teixcalaanlitzlim ate. Did she believe it?<\/p>

Yskandr, <\/em>she thought at the blank place where the imago ought to be, what did you get us into before you died?<\/em><\/p>

He didn’t answer. Reaching for the blank spot made her feel like she was falling even though she knew her feet were steady on the floor.<\/p>

“I would like,” said Mahit to Three Seagrass, slow and even and in the correct language, trying to hide the vertigo and the fear, “to be registered as the legal Ambassador from the stations to Teixcalaan, and also to see to my luggage.” She wanted to get out <\/em>of here. As fast as possible.<\/p>

“Naturally, Ambassador,” said Three Seagrass. “Ixplanatl<\/em>. Twelve Azalea. Twenty-Nine Infograph. As ever, your company is a pleasure.”<\/p>

“As is yours, Three Seagrass,” said Twelve Azalea. “Enjoy the Ambassador.”<\/p>

Three Seagrass did that one-shoulder shrug again, as if nothing anyone had said could affect an asekreta<\/em> of the court in a fashion that mattered. Mahit liked her, abruptly, and was aware that the liking was more of a desperate grasp at an ally than anything else. She was so alone, <\/em>without the imago talking to her. Surely he’d come back in a moment. Once the shock was over. Once the emotion-spike had faded. It was fine. She was fine. She wasn’t even dizzy anymore.<\/p>

“Shall we, then?” she said.<\/p> <\/body>","format":"DG","formatDescription":"EPUB","formatDetail":"E200","illustrator":"","imprintDisplayName":"Tor","isFeatured":true,"isbn":"9781529001600","isbn10":"1529001609","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/extracts.panmacmillan.com\/site\/extr\/static\/jacketimages\/9781529001600.jpg","keynote":"","nextPageLink":null,"publicationDate":"2020-07-06T00:00:00Z","reader":"","relatedWorks":[{"format":"BC","formatDescription":"B-format paperback","formatDetail":"B105","isbn":"9781529001594","isbn10":"1529001595","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1069862&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=80729","publicationDate":"2019-11-20T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"BB","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529001570","isbn10":"1529001579","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=932759&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=80727","publicationDate":"2019-01-31T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"BC","formatDescription":"Trade Paperback","formatDetail":"B106","isbn":"9781529001587","isbn10":"1529001587","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=903617&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=80728","publicationDate":"2018-11-21T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AJ","formatDescription":"Lossless Format Audio, WAV","formatDetail":"A104","isbn":"9781529001617","isbn10":"1529001617","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=1168971&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=80731","publicationDate":"2020-07-06T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529019698","isbn10":"1529019699","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=932787&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=85386","publicationDate":"2019-01-31T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529019704","isbn10":"1529019702","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=932801&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=85387","publicationDate":"2019-01-31T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529019711","isbn10":"1529019710","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=932815&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=85388","publicationDate":"2019-01-31T00:00:00Z"},{"format":"AC","formatDescription":"","formatDetail":"","isbn":"9781529019728","isbn10":"1529019729","jacketUrl":"https:\/\/www.biblioimages.com\/macmillanuk-dam\/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=932829&cat=default&size=origjpg&id=85389","publicationDate":"2019-01-31T00:00:00Z"}],"title":"A Memory Called Empire"},{"author":"Claire Balkind","authorBiography":"","bicCodeList":"WDM,GAM020000,VFX,WF,YNV,JNW","bisacCodeList":"FAM034000,CRA043000","estimatedReadingTimeMinutes":8,"extractHtml":"

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN<\/h2>

Imagine the news is packed with reports of a global pandemic, the government tells you that you’ve got to stay at home to stop it spreading and you quickly run out of activities to do with your kids. This was one of my biggest fears, and being the sort of person who makes lists and plans ahead, I set up Family Lockdown Tips & Ideas on Facebook as a way to manage. Parenting is hard at the best of times and I tend to keep my kids busy by being out and about. The group was born out of necessity and a genuine anxiety that somehow, despite being a teacher and having five years of parenting under my belt, I wouldn’t be able to cope.<\/p>

Fast-forward exactly four weeks later and that little group has become a community of over 1 million incredible members, has witnessed over 12 million posts, likes and comments and represents families in over 100 different countries. That moment of panic where I really worried about my sanity and the well-being of my kids has created a global virtual village of families supporting each other, and it is deeply humbling that I have the privilege of helping steer the ship.<\/p>

The main reason this book exists is to celebrate what has and can be achieved by this community of resourceful, resilient and innovative families who have, for better or worse, had to embrace what lockdown has thrown at them. From bear hunts to rainbow chalk paths to crafting bird boxes, the group has generated creativity that – even in my wildest dreams – I could never have imagined and has demonstrated what can be achieved, despite the odds.<\/p>

This book is ultimately a testament to the power of community, and the good it can bring. Lockdown has forced us to live differently – to physically disconnect from what is familiar and embrace isolation. And while we may be distanced from those we hold dear, we have proven that we can be there for each other virtually – high-fiving brilliant ideas, giggling when things don’t quite go to plan and metaphorically holding hands when the going gets tough. It is when we work together that we really can achieve great things. In the words of my five-year-old daughter, ‘Mummy, never forget: teamwork makes the dream work.’<\/p>

This book also exists as a historical record of how families – ordinary people – dealt with the conditions placed on them by Covid-19. We didn’t ask for this, yet we have shown we can rise to the challenge. As a history teacher, I know and appreciate the power of documents in telling a story about days gone by. And I hope that this book will be just that in the future – a document not only to reflect ideas to pass the time but for people to engage with their families and build memories together.<\/p>

Read on, and what you will find is a curated list of popular tried and tested ideas inspired by the creativity and innovation found in the Facebook group. They are easy to do, require very few if any resources and can be done in as little or as much space as you have. There are also suggestions on where an activity could go next and how they can be adapted for different ages and interests. And if an activity just doesn’t float your boat, that’s fine. Move on to the next one. After all, it is just as important to enjoy something for ourselves, as it is for our children.<\/p>

And before you do virtually flick the page, I wanted to thank you. By supporting this ebook, you have helped to raise vital funds for Barnardo’s, a charity very close to my heart, which works tirelessly to protect children and offer practical and emotional support to families and young people. There really has never been a more important time for Barnardo’s to be able to carry out the incredibly important work that they do. As a community that was born out of a desire to create opportunities for children at home, it seems very fitting that we collectively pay it forward and do the same for other children and families who are in need of that help.<\/p> <\/body>

1. SCAVENGER HUNT LOCKDOWN-STYLE<\/h2>

In a nutshell<\/span><\/h3>

If you fancy sending your kids off to hunt for random objects while you sip your coffee, this is the activity for you! A scavenger hunt is very simply a game where there is a list of items at the start and whoever finds them all first is the winner. Alternatively, it doesn’t need to be a competition and can simply be a list of items that you check off as you find them. What is great about scavenger hunts is how versatile they are and how they encourage kids to explore something new or see their environment in a different way. There are a variety of ways you can enjoy doing a scavenger hunt but below are three top ideas that are easy to do and reliably work.<\/p>

What you’ll need<\/span><\/h3>