Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt

by Alexander at the World's End (lit)

  exhausting it can be, deliberately walking slowly). Yet here he was, racing down

  the hill like a stag with the hounds at his heels. I let go of the handlebar,

  took my foot off the footplate and watched, dumbfounded.

  ‘Chaereas?’ I called out.

  ‘Can’t stop.’ He’d seen the plough directly in front of him, but he was going

  too fast to slow down; instead he soared over it with a mighty leap, like a

  prize-winning hurdler at the Games. A man twenty years younger would have been

  proud of that jump.

  ‘Chaereas!’ I yelled down the hill after him. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘The Macedonians,’ he called back. ‘They’re coming! Run!’

  By that point he was too far away to hear me, but I couldn’t leave it at that. I

  left the plough and team standing — the great thing about nine-year-old oxen is

  that they stay put — and followed after him as quickly as I dared go, which

  wasn’t nearly fast enough. I didn’t catch up with him, in fact, until I reached

  the village, where I saw him huddled in a crowd around a couple of other

  neighbours of ours, who were saying something about Philip of Macedon...

  It shouldn’t have come as such a shock, really. Philip had been playing war in

  Chalcidice for some time, threatening and harassing our colonies and allies up

  there into leaving us and joining him; but for some reason we still hadn’t been

  able to work up enough enthusiasm to send an army and sort him out. I think it

  was because of what happened at Thermopylae , where, if you recall, the sight of

  an Athenian army holding the pass had sent him scuttling away like a fox who’s

  seen the sheepdog. Sooner or later we’d make a proper show of force, instead of

  sending a few cut-price mercenaries, and he’d bolt off back to his mountains and

  his mead-hall and his week-long drinking matches with the tribal

  warrior-chieftains. He was, after all, just a Macedonian; they may look a bit

  like proper Greeks, but that didn’t mean a thing. A savage is a savage is a

  savage; and when you stand up to them, they run. Everybody knew that.

  The news that broke that summer day in my twenty-sixth year was that Philip of

  Macedon had stormed Olynthus, the principal city of Chalcidice and a loyal

  friend of Athens; once inside, he’d ordered a general massacre, after which he’d

  rounded up the ten thousand or so survivors and marched them off in slave-irons

  to be sold abroad.

  A lot of speeches were made around that time; very good speeches, most of them,

  packed with memorable phrases. But what immedi­ately comes to mind when I think

  of that day is old Chaereas hurdling my father’s beat-up second-best plough,

  with a look of terror on his face as if the Great King and ninety thousand of

  his archers were treading down the backs of his heels. ‘They’re coming!’ he’d

  said, but he was a bit behind the times. They’d already arrived, and we hadn’t

  even noticed.

  Extraordinary times bring to the fore extraordinary men; and the fall of

  Olynthus was no exception. In her hour of need, Athens turned to me, Euxenus son

  of Eutychides of the deme of Pallene, a man extraordinarily ill-suited to the

  task assigned to me.

  We were quite a party, the Athenian embassy to Philip; there was Aeschines,

  who’d been an actor before he turned to politics; there was Demosthenes, a

  lawyer; there was Philocrates, an earnest and utterly terrified little man who

  understood Philip so well that he should never have been allowed to join the

  party, let alone lead it — whenever he was in the man’s presence, he watched

  Philip with the motionless resignation of a fledgeling bird on the ground

  watching a polecat, because he knew, beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt, that

  it was only a matter of time...

  There were ten ambassadors. Correction; there were nine ambassadors and me. When

  I canvassed my family and friends for possible explanations of why I’d been

  chosen, I got a wide selection of plausible replies, but no overall consensus.

  My sister-in-law Praxagora reckoned they’d chosen me because Philip had a habit

  of killing messengers, and who else was so uniquely expendable? My brother

  Eudorus, who was also a professional actor, opined that I’d been included as

  official scapegoat, a complete nobody on whom Aeschines and Demosthenes could

  dump the blame when the whole mission came to nothing. Diogenes grinned and said

  they must have chosen me to lull Philip into a true sense of security. Anyway, I

  went.

  Before I tell you about this momentous event in my life, I’ll just pause for a

  moment or two and indulge in a little narcissistic mirror-gazing. In my

  twenty-sixth year I was one of the tallest men in Athens . Between the ages of

  thirteen and seventeen I’d sprouted at an unbelievable rate — people told me

  they used to stand there and watch me getting taller, until it made them feel

  all dizzy and faint. It was my excessive height, according to some, that made me

  go bald at a relatively early age. That high up, they said, you can’t expect

  anything to grow except a little moss and the most tenacious species of

  rock-flower. Now, most of the other freaks of altitude I’ve met have made up for

  it by being thin and stringy, as if they’d been made out of wax and stretched

  when they were three parts set. Not me. In spite of the fact that I’d given up

  farm work at a relatively early age and never took any exercise that I could

  possibly avoid, I had broad shoulders and forearms as thick as some men’s

  calves. I could pick up great big oil-jars that took two ordinary men to shift —

  I didn’t, as a rule, but I could have if I’d wanted to — and from the age of

  thirteen onwards, fights and aggravation were things that happened to other

  people, not to me. Looking back, of course, this was a handicap.

  That said, I was a pretty feeble specimen when it came to anything involving

  stamina. My diminutive brother Eumenes, for instance, could walk under my

  outstretched arm without ducking and if we walked together he had to trot to

  keep up with my great shambling strides. But if we happened to be walking

  uphill, it wouldn’t be long before he’d be tapping his foot impatiently, waiting

  for me to catch up. Eumenes, of course, was a farmer.

  When an Athenian asks you, ‘What does so-and-so look like?’ what he means is,

  ‘Is he good-looking?’ That’s essential information for an Athenian, because of

  this beautiful-good/ugly-bad thing I’ve touched on before. We reckon that beauty

  is like a seal, pressed into the soft wax of our faces when we’re born, so that

  for ever afterwards people will be able to tell at a glance whether we’re good

  or bad. By that criterion, I was sort of middling-nothingish, which I suppose is

  fair enough (but I still don’t believe in the general rule). Baldness is

  regarded as a sort of amusing eccentricity-cum-folly in Athens , like

  absent-mindedness, wearing outlandish or inappropriate clothes or mild

  kleptomania; people made it plain that though they didn’t con­done it, they

  didn’t really hold it against me either.

  (I can see you smiling, Phryzeutzis; you think that because I can’t see you

 
doing it, I won’t know. But it’s true; when I was younger, I was a very tall

  man, and if I could only get this pathetic excuse for a back of mine to

  straighten out, I could prove it to you. All right, don’t believe me if you

  don’t want to; but the only man I ever met who was noticeably taller than me was

  Hephaestion the Macedonian, Alexander’s friend; the one the Persian queen

  assumed must be Alexander, because he was the tallest man in the room. And no, I

  don’t know why I’m making such an issue of it. I suppose it’s because it’s

  really the only respect in which I’ve excelled my fellow men and so in spite of

  myself I’m really rather proud of it, deep down, even though it was none of my

  doing.)

  Philocrates was supposed to brief us on the ship, so that we’d arrive in Macedon

  fully informed and up to date, ready for anything that the man already widely

  acknowledged as the world’s greatest living negotiator might have lined up for

  us. But Philocrates was seasick. Desperately seasick. In fact, he was so

  wholeheartedly and con­tinuously seasick that he set me thinking seriously about

  the theory of reincarnation, as proposed by the great Pythagoras and endorsed

  fairly recently by the celebrated Plato. I’d never had much time for it myself;

  but watching Philocrates hurling second-hand food with tremendous force into the

  Aegean, the Straits of Euboea, the Gulf of Pasagae and the Thracian Sea, I found

  myself reconsidering my position on the issue. It was fairly obvious that

  Phiocrates had already chucked up every morsel of food he’d ever eaten in his

  life before we were even clear of Cape Sunium , so everything he vomited after

  that must have been stuff he’d eaten in previous incarnations.

  Of my other co-ambassadors, Demosthenes and Aeschines disagreed so completely

  and so violently that I couldn’t face asking either of them for fear of starting

  off a war that’d have made the Olynthus campaign seem like a polite difference

  of opinion by comparison; and none of the others seemed all that better-informed

  than I was. So much, then, for the series of introductory lectures on the

  present crisis, Macedonian culture and heritage and King Philip’s bargaining

  style. However, as one of my colleagues pointed out, it doesn’t require a

  significant amount of preparation or background knowledge to squeal for mercy,

  so it didn’t really make much odds.

  Obviously, Phryzeutzis, you’ve never seen a ship in your life, and I expect

  you’re pulling all sorts of muscles in your imagination just trying to picture

  in your mind what one of these extraordinary contraptions looks like. Try this.

  Imagine a fairly deep, round clay bowl that’s still wet from the wheel; but you

  don’t know that, so you pick it up and your fingers cave in two of the sides,

  leaving you with something that looks a bit like a pear split longwise. Sticking

  up out of the middle is the trunk of a tall tree, stripped of its branches. Tied

  to the top of this tree and at right-angles to it is another, smaller beam of

  wood, from which hangs the linen bag used to catch the wind — that’s the sail.

  Front and back there’s two posts sticking up, like the head and tail of a goat;

  on either side of the goat’s tail, there are two broad wooden planks on the end

  of poles, which trail in the water. The helmsman — the man who tries to make the

  boat go where it’s supposed to be going — drags on these planks to make the boat

  change direction (try holding your hand out flat, thumb upwards; then plunge it

  into water and push sideways. You’ll feel your hand shoving water out of the

  way, but not immediately. Pushing against the water is how you steer the ship).

  That’s it, basically. The whole thing is made out of wooden planks, fitted

  together closely enough to be watertight; it’s horribly fragile, and when the

  wind blows on the sea and stirs it up, the boat is tossed up and down, it can

  turn over or get swamped, or it can be blown against a rock, which’ll smash it

  to pieces. Imagine trying to float down the river inside an upturned parasol,

  and you’ll get the basic idea.

  No wonder, then, that sailors — people who make their living crossing the world

  in these things — are a nervous bunch, prone to irrational fears and

  superstitions. All Greeks are superstitious to some extent, but sailors are

  quite obsessive about it, and in particular they pay great attention to dreams,

  bad language and sneezing. Sneeze when you’re walking up the gangplank and

  there’s a good chance they’ll refuse to get on board — unless, of course, your

  head happens to be facing to the right at the time, in which case they take it

  as a good omen. Sailors are as foul-mouthed as the next man when they’re on

  land, but once the ship is under way they’ll throw you over the side if you say

  ‘Damn!’ or ‘To the crows with you’. (A crow in the rigging, by the way, is

  recognised as the worst omen of all, so if someone sees a black shape drifting

  through the air towards the ship, everybody stops what they’re doing and crowds

  on to the deck, stamping and whistling and throwing nuts and handfuls of olives

  and anything else that happens to come to hand.) But it’s dreams above all that

  they’re interested in. There you are, sleeping peacefully on the deck just as

  the sun’s about to come up, and some clown of a sailor comes and digs you in the

  ribs with his toe and demands to know what you’ve been dreaming about. I asked

  one of the sailors on that voyage to explain to me what all the various dreams

  meant; it took him a full hour. I can only remember snippets of it — a goat

  means big waves, especially a black goat; a pig means a storm so violent that

  your chances of survival are minimal. Owls mean pirates. A dream about seagulls,

  on the other hand, also foreshadows a disaster, but of a non-lethal variety —

  the ship will probably sink, but nobody will drown. Dreaming about flying on

  your back or crossing the sea on foot mean good luck — try to remember how many

  times you’ve dreamed of flying on your back, and you’ll begin to appreciate the

  fundamental pessimism of your average sailor. Oh, yes, and dancing on board ship

  is right out; they’ll chuck you overboard so hard you’ll probably bounce.

  I’m only telling you all this because it explains how I came to hear about

  Aeschines’ dream. Now, I think I’ve already mentioned that Aeschines was a

  professional actor before he found he could make a better living out of

  politics; he was a good actor, too, specialising in winsome young girls,

  long-winded old crones and messengers reporting bloody murder. I don’t know;

  maybe all those years of cramming his mind with all that poetry, all that vivid

  and striking imagery, had done something to him. Perhaps he was like that

  anyway, which was what prompted him to take up acting in the first place.

  Anyway, on the third morning, when we were within sight of the town of Pasagae

  (or where Pasagae had until recently been, before Philip played rough games with

  it) I overheard him talking to one of the sailors, an incorrigible dream

  monitor.

  ‘Never set eyes on the place in my life,’ he was saying, ‘but I knew it was

/>   Pasagae as if I’d lived there since I was a boy. Strange feeling, actually.’

  The sailor nodded. ‘And when you saw it just now, was it like what you ‘d seen

  in your dream?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Aeschines replied. ‘That is, no, it didn’t look any­thing like

  what we’re looking at now. But that’s because what we’re looking at now is a

  heap of fallen walls and ashes.’

  I don’t think the sailor liked the way this story was going. ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘What happened?’

  Aeschines frowned. ‘I’m not sure, really,’ he said. ‘Oh, I can remember the

  dream quite clearly, and it seemed to be making per­fect sense while I was

  having it. Now, though—’

  Just then the sailor looked up and caught sight of me; I saw him seeing me, but

  by then it was too late to make an unobtrusive exit, which is something that

  needs a good deal of notice and forward planning on something as small and

  confined as a ship. I should explain that somehow or other, the crew had got

  wind of the way I made my living — and, being extremely superstitious, they

  believed it wholesale, all the stuff about the little demon who lived in a jar.

  ‘Euxenus,’ the sailor called out. ‘Come over here. I need you to explain a

  dream.’

  Obviously he’d forgotten that he’d spent all that time the previous day telling

  me how to interpret dreams. Anyway, there was no point in arguing. I fetched the

  jar out of my luggage and went over to join them.

  ‘I was standing in the market square at Pasagae,’ Aeschines said, ‘talking to

  some people I apparently knew, when a dog suddenly appeared out of nowhere and

  started running in and out of the stalls, pulling them down and killing people.

  I could hear the screams. It was awful.’

  The sailor had turned a revolting green colour. ‘Go on,’ I said to Aeschines, in

  a nice calm voice. ‘This is quite interesting.’

  ‘Well,’ Aeschines went on, ‘pretty soon the dog had smashed up the whole town

  and rounded up all the sheep and it was herding them into a pen — by this point

  we were in Pella, except it was also Athens; you’ll just have to take my word on

  that, I knew — when a lion jumped out and swatted it over the head, and it fell