The Last Four Things

15

There is a children’s rhyme about the Laconics to which the guttersnipes of Memphis used to skip and sing.

The Ephors of Laconia

Like skeletons but bonier

Their soup is black and so’s their wit

They throw their babies in a pit

ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!

They kill their slaves and just for fun

They go and kill another one

They carry coffins on their heads

And sleep in them instead of beds

FIVE! SIX! SEVEN! EIGHT!

They whip their children with a stick

They beat them black and blue with it

And if they wince or make a sound

They treat them to another round

NINE! TEN! ELEVEN! TWELVE!

There is a forbidden final verse not to be sung in the presence of adults or snitches.

Their children aren’t for fighting just

They use them for their wicked lust

It’s dreadful what they do to them

They stick it up their B! U! M!

While most of this verse is whispered, the final three letters are to be shouted as loud as possible.

Cale lay down to read the brief Bosco had sent him full of the cocky disdain common to the excellent when it came to those who were rumoured to be better. This soon became simple fascination at the peculiar details of what he was reading.

Admirers of the Laconic spirit and way of life (or Laconiaphiloidiods in the ancient Attic tongue) would regard the doggerel above as nothing more than street-urchin slander. But with the exception of the lines about coffins – which seems to be an entirely childish invention – the accusations in the song have strong backing from those less smitten than the Laconiaphiloidiods with this most strange of all societies. The Laconics, whose country resembled a barracks more than a nation, regarded themselves ‘the most free of all the peoples of the earth’ because they were dominated by no one and produced nothing of any kind whatsoever. They were a state where there was only one skill with which they were solely preoccupied: warfare. Healthy boys born into the Laconic peoples belonged to the state and at the age of five were taken away from their families – if such a thing could be really said to exist – and trained to do one thing, ‘kill or die’, until they reached the age of sixty something; it must be said, they rarely did. If they were not born healthy they were, as the gutter song rightly claimed, thrown into a chasm know as the Deposits. If the Laconics had written poetry, which they didn’t, little of it would have been about the pleasures or pains of old age. They paid for this single-minded pursuit of violence in two ways. At any one time up to a third of their number, which never exceeded more than thirteen thousand, were engaged in mercenary activities for which they were famously well paid. The bulk of the Laconic state was financed by the existence of the Helots. The term ‘slave’ is insufficient to describe the subjugation and bondage of these miserable peoples, which is what they were. Unlike the slaves in the Materazzi Empire and elsewhere, the Helots were not a mix of races captured here and there and sold on from owner to owner. They were conquered nations, subordinated in their entirety and who now farmed what had once been their own land and made goods for trade that were owned entirely by the Laconic state. The Laconics brought their children up in barracks to fear nothing but one thing and that was their Helots. Vastly outnumbered by these state serfs who surrounded them in huge numbers, their continued subjugation of the slaves slowly became as one thing with their obsession with war. The Helots made the Laconics’ single aim in life possible but were also the greatest threat to that life. Suppression of the Helots who had once been the means to wage war endlessly had now become the reason why it was now indispensable they do so. The vicious dog with razor teeth became obsessed with biting its own tail.

The Laconics were ruled by five Ephors elected from the small number who survived past their sixtieth birthday. The song’s reference to their alleged boniness is not borne out by any known historical fact. It is often said by those who detested the Laconics, and there were many, that the famous Laconic humour was humour at the expense of others, especially the physically disabled, whom they despised. This was not always true if the famous story about the Ephor Aristades is true. Once every five years all Laconic males were permitted to vote for the execution of any Ephor who had generally displeased them by his foolishness or pride, or indeed for whatever reason, the sentence only to be carried out if the votes against exceeded one thousand. Knowing that the number of votes for his death was rapidly approaching that number, the Ephor Aristades was asked by an illiterate citizen from the sticks, who had never clapped eyes on him, to write the name, if he would be so kind, of ‘that bastard Aristades’ on a clay tablet used for voting. It was considered greatly to his credit as a wit that he cheerfully obliged. He is said to have survived by only two votes. There was little else to laugh about for a child born into the Laconian state. The joke in Memphis was that the children thrown into the Deposits were the lucky ones. Once assigned to a barracks the food was as bad as that given to Redeemer acolytes but there was much less of it. This meanness was intended to make them ingenious in having to steal in order to stay alive. If caught they were severely punished, not for immorality but for showing a lack of skill in the execution of their larceny. There is a story that a ten-year-old having stolen a pet fox belonging to the Ephor Chalon with the intention of eating it found himself called into a parade before he could wring its neck and hide it. It is claimed that rather than reveal its presence and demonstrate his failure amongst his fellows, he allowed the fox to eat his entrails and dropped down dead without uttering a sound. Those who found this tale completely implausible before they encountered the Laconics were never quite as sure once they had done so.

The infamous black soup mentioned in the song was made of pig’s blood and vinegar. A Duena diplomat, a hired negotiator in the way that mercenaries are hired soldiers, having once tasted this concoction said to the Laconics who had given it to him that it was so revolting it explained why they were so willing to die. As such wits are prone to do, he repeated much the same joke about the Materazzi and their infamously difficult-to-please wives. The difference between the Materazzi and the Laconians was that the latter thought the joke extremely funny. Another oddity about this black soup, and a revealing one, is that while its taste can hardly have been better than the rancid fat and nuts of dead men’s feet – Cale, Kleist and Vague Henri never thought of this revolting slab with anything other than a shudder – it was well known that the Laconics regarded black soup as wonderfully toothsome and that even exiles pined for it in their absence as for nothing else.

If their sense of humour softens your opinion of the Laconics and you find it preferable to the fanaticism and cruelty of the Redeemers, or the arrogance and snobbery of the Materrazi, we now come to the darkest and most revolting of all the practices conceived by perhaps the strangest people in the history of all the world. Whereas all right-thinking people regard sexual intercourse between adult males and young boys as a crime calling out to the heavens for vengeance and punish those who commit such actions by death (the more horrible the better), in Laconia this perversion was not only tolerated but legally enforced. The older man who did not choose a twelve-year-old to use in this way would be heavily fined for failing to set a good example in manly virtue.

How such a disgusting, peculiar hurdy-gurdy came about I cannot say. They are also reported to have had an unusually high valuation of mothers, allowing these to express insulting opinions to every rank of man and even permitting them to inherit property – a custom, which it is said, gives much offence to their neighbours and for which they are much more often criticized than for the disgusting practice of compulsory pederasty.

All of this information had been given to Cale by Bosco in an embargoed testament which he had been told to keep strictly to himself. But one section of the document clearly included long before most of the other information in the testament particularly caught Cale’s attention, and was one he wanted to discuss with Vague Henri. It concerned the claim made by an exiled Laconian soldier who was reliably questioned in the document itself about the existence of the Krypteia – a small and particularly secret service made up of what he called ‘anti-soldiers’. Selected from the most ruthless and cruel young Laconians, they were encouraged to develop qualities of originality and independence of thought and actions otherwise discouraged in those who were expected to fight in massed ranks without thought of personal survival.

‘I wonder,’ said Cale to Vague Henri, ‘if that’s where Bosco got the idea for me?’

‘And I wonder,’ said Vague Henri to Cale, ‘if your head gets any bigger whether or not you’ll be able to fit through the door. Besides even if you’re right – just be grateful it was the only idea he took from them.’

Cale’s face wrinkled with pruny disgust. ‘Good God,’ he said.