and for his mistake he was punished, dying too soon before the empire could be
established, wounded by an arrow shot by some common soldier, dying of a fever
resulting directly from that wound.
(And consider me, poor and half-blind among the enemies of my people — no
offence, Phryzeutzis, but this city was built by Macedonians in Sogdiana and I’m
a long way from home — trying in my old age to make a record of what I’ve seen,
a book that only you will ever read.)
Well, after that the atmosphere was rather strained for a day or so, and I
decided I’d better do something to redeem myself, or at least help put that
unfortunate incident out of everybody’s mind. Fortunately, I’d anticipated that
sooner or later there’d be some sort of crisis in the student/teacher
relationship, so I’d kept back a choice nugget of comic relief, the sort of
thing that dissolves tension in a wave of shared merriment. It was a pity that I
was going to have to use it up so soon; but the situation seemed to require it.
I read them the bit in Aeneas the Tactician about the bees.
CHAPTER NINE
I remember once standing in the Potters’ Quarter in Athens , chatting aimlessly
to someone about something, when quite suddenly I heard the most almighty crash.
I turned round and saw that a wall had collapsed. There was a cloud of dust, and
someone was screaming, and people were starting to run. In the end, as I
recall, they pulled four bodies out of the rubble, all dead. I didn’t see a
thing, of course. I was looking the other way.
Story of my life, I guess. I was certainly looking the other way while Philip
was waging his not-quite-a-war against the Athenian people; I was in Mieza,
teaching the next generation of Macedon’s best and brightest about the war
before the war before last. I was teaching them about the theoretical weaknesses
of the traditional Greek heavy infantry formation (I’d figured it all out for
myself from first principles; I was ever so pleased with myself) while Philip
was training these same kids’ fathers and uncles and elder brothers to command
the new model Macedonian phalanx, which was designed to exploit those same
weaknesses and turn the citizen-soldiers’ shield-wall (bulwark of Greek freedom
for two hundred and fifty blood-spattered internecine years) into an easy joke.
But we didn’t get much in the way of news in Mieza.We were living in an awful
kind of cheesy literary epic, pastiche Homer of the worst possible kind, where
Aristotle and Leonidas and Lysimachus and I were Cheiron and Peleus and Phoenix
and whoever the hell I was meant to be (I objected so strenuously to being
Ulysses that eventually I was relieved of duty) tutored the young Achilles and
his comrades, the flower of Grecian youth. In that regard it was all very
tasteless and tacky and, to be honest, quintessentially Macedonian. I was
constantly reminded of the way the Macedonians periodically tried to put on a
play, something famous by Sophocles or Euripides. They made up costumes that
were nineteen parts out of twenty accurate and authentic recreations of what the
Athenian chorus and actors would have worn, but that remaining one-twentieth was
enough to spoil the whole effect. The heels of the boots would be too high or
too low, the expressions of the masks too menacingly comic or too ridiculously
sad, or one of the colours would be wrong, or (worst of all) some wealthy patron
of the arts wouldn’t be able to resist fitting out the chorus with genuine
purple scarves when the Athenian producer would’ve found a way to get roughly
the same effect with henna. Likewise, they’d speak the lines with passion and
feeling, but not quite understand what they were actually saying, while archaic
or poetic turns of phrase that they weren’t familiar with could cause absolute
and hilarious chaos.
I particularly remember one well-meaning, conscientious soul who’d been
dragooned into being an actor — in real life he spent his days smearing pitch
round the necks of wine-jars — who turned out to have genuine talent and an
uncanny insight into what he was saying. He was doing ever such a good job and I
was sitting there enjoying the play no end when he came to a bit that he
obviously hadn’t been able to puzzle out. The line should have been ‘After the
storm, I see the blessed calm’; but he put the wrong emphasis on the word galen,
and managed to turn it into ‘After the storm, I see the goddamn ferret’. Which
was bad enough; but what reduced me to uncontrollable giggling was the way he
said it, with a tremendous soaring rush and a both-arms-wide gesture of sheer
joy, as the poor fool tried to gloss over the apparently meaningless gibberish
with a spectacular piece of histrionics.
Tsk. Macedonians. The fact that they were smart enough to overrun Greece while
the majority of us didn’t even realise what they were doing pales into
insignificance compared with their inability to get a line of poetry right. The
point is, they had no business fooling about with poetry in the first place. A
lion would look ridiculous pulling a farm-cart.
By the same token, Macedonian princelings had no place sitting under the shade
of carefully trimmed beech trees discussing the finer points of Alcaic prosody
or the authenticity of the Dolon episode in the Iliad. At their age they should
have been with their elders on the battlefield or in the camp, polishing armour
and carving thick slabs of meat off the whole sheep roasting on the spit. But,
being young noblemen, they laboured and strained and excelled themselves, to the
point where they could just about have passed for my social equals at an
Athenian dinner party.
Case in point; Philip made one of his unaccounted impromptu visits, and made it
known that he’d like to hear how Alexander was getting on with his music. So we
all trooped into the little theatre (did I tell you we’d dug a little theatre
out of the side of a hill? It was small and the seats were just banked-up turf
and from time to time a stray goat would wander across during the course of a
performance to nibble at the grass growing between the paving-slabs on the stage
floor, but by the time we’d finished it was a theatre; or at least, it was
useless for anything else) and made ourselves as comfortable as we could. Then,
when we were all perching comfortably, Alexander strode onto the stage and
started to play the harp.
Needless to say he played it competently; competent verging on well, in fact,
because he’d chosen quite an awkward piece with tricky fingering, but he was
making it seem much easier than it was.
‘Well done,’ Philip grunted. ‘That’s very good.’
Alexander looked up, grinned and started to play something else. This time he
played something downright difficult, and what’s more he played it not only
flawlessly but also with feeling, a genuine interpretation of the music rather
than just making a noise that sounded like it. While this was going on, Philip
was getting steadily more and more annoyed, until finally he stood up with a
scowl on his face.
‘That’s too good,’ he said. ‘Aren’
t you ashamed to be able to play the harp that
well?’
At which, as you can imagine, Alexander dropped the harp as if it had just come
still cherry-red hot from the blacksmith’s forge and stomped back to join the
other kids, with not the slightest trace of expression on his face and (to the
best of my knowledge) never touched a musical instrument again as long as he
lived.
That was, of course, a slap in the face for Aristotle, because music was one of
his subjects — oh, he didn’t actually teach the harp himself, there was a little
man who came in to do that. But Aristotle taught the theory of music, and
musical appreciation, and the mathematical foundations on which music is based;
and there was Philip accusing him, by implication, of training his son and heir
for the life of a four-obols-a-day professional musician, the kind you buy in
the slave sales for two-thirds the price of a good quality field hand.
Like Athens and Thebes around that time, Aristotle and I had formed an uneasy
defensive alliance against Philip, not because he’d given us cause but just in
case he ever did (a bit excessive, you think, Phryzeutzis? You never met Philip)
and I remember him coming to see me that evening, after we’d managed to get away
from the obligatory Macedonian family feast. If it’d been anybody else my heart
would’ve bled for him.
‘What am I supposed to do,’ he complained sorrowfully, ‘teach mediocrity? Fair
enough, if that’s what he wants, he has plenty of Macedonians far better
qualified than I am. But I just can’t do that, Euxenus, I don’t know how to
teach a boy so much and no more. I wouldn’t have the first idea how to go about
it.’
I nodded sympathetically. ‘Of course not,’ I replied. ‘It’s because you aren’t
really a teacher. You’re a philosopher, a scientist; you have to teach the whole
truth because it’s all you understand. A teacher doesn’t always understand;
often as not he doesn’t. But he knows how to get across as much of the subject
as is good for the pupil. It’s a different skill.’
Aristotle sighed. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘I don’t really understand what
you’ve just said. I know what the words mean, but when you examine them
carefully they don’t make sense. With respect, I feel that you’re much closer to
your own definition of a teacher.’
I yawned; it was late and I’d had a lot to drink, and I had to be up early in
the morning. ‘That’s me,’ I said. ‘I’m just a porter who carries knowledge. I
pick it up out of the book, lug it across and dump it in the boys’ minds, so
many basketfuls per shift until I’ve filled my quota. What’s in the basket, I
neither know nor care.That’s why I’m a good teacher, gods forgive me.’
He smiled. ‘You have the knack of putting things in a striking way, with imagery
and other pleasing rhetorical touches,’ he said. ‘I believe you would do well in
politics if you ever found anything you believed in. But you don’t really
believe in anything, I think; that’s your Yapping Dog philosophy.’
I stretched out on a couch and rubbed my forehead. ‘That’s not quite true,’ I
said. ‘I believe quite passionately in the imperfection of all known political
theories. I believe that once you’ve brought them out of Plato’s Republic and
tried to make them work in the cesspit of Athens , you’ll find that none of them
can survive prolonged contact with the lowest common denominator, human nature.’
I yawned again. ‘I don’t know, you have this fine slogan, Man is a political
animal, and I suppose I agree. You can’t put three human beings together for
more than a week without politics of some description breaking out, like mildew
on damp apples. It’s definitely part of our nature, I’d never try and argue
otherwise. All I’m saying is, it’s part of human nature in the same way that
greed and violence and vanity are all parts of the mix. It’s there and it can’t
be got rid of, but it’s wrong to encourage it. And it’s doubly wrong to make
people believe that if we all sat down and put our thinking caps on and studied
enough data and made a big effort, sooner or later we’d be able to come up with
the perfect political system. It’s like saying that if only we tried really hard
we could make ourselves grow wings.’
Aristotle shook his head. ‘That’s just the Yapping Dog credo again,’ he said.
‘We are all imperfect, we are all doomed to stay that way, nothing can be done
for us. I can’t accept that, I’m afraid. Humanity is capable of perfecting
itself; if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be human.’
I put my hands behind my head and closed my eyes. ‘Now we’re just swapping
slogans,’ I said. ‘You’re welcome to yours and I’ll keep mine, and that way we
needn’t start a fight. Meanwhile, I really am feeling rather tired, so if it’s
all the same to you—’
I don’t think he heard any of that. All the time I knew him he suffered from
this terrible intermittent deafness. ‘Consider the gods,’ he went on, sitting
upright and looking at me as if to suggest I really ought to be taking notes.
‘Because they’re immortal and invulnerable, they can survive and flourish
without needing to perfect themselves. Indeed, perfection would be torment for
them, since they live forever; they’d be in a permanent state of having reached
the end of a journey. Now consider animals, and the lesser forms of humanity
that are little better than animals. They lack the resources and abilities that
would make it possible for them to perfect themselves; they lack reason and
self-awareness and the ability to differentiate between right and wrong, good
and bad. Now, between the two extremes, consider Man. He has the ability to rise
above the animal, and he has the need to do so, because he is mortal and finite,
and because as a mere animal he would be entirely unsuccessful, having no fur to
warm him or claws or sharp teeth or thick hide to defend him against the more
powerful predators. Consider the means by which he is to achieve that
perfection; surely by co-operation, by virtue of the fact that a combination of
many men together is far more than the sum of its parts. This is Man in his
political mode—’
‘Oh, I know,’ I said. ‘A pile of unlaid bricks is a pile of bricks, but the same
bricks put together is a wall. Comes a time, though, when all walls fall down.
You show me a wall that’s still standing and I’ll show you a wall that hasn’t
fallen down yet. Trust me,’ I added, with a quite ostentatious yawn, ‘I know
about walls falling down.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Aristotle said, puzzled. ‘I don’t think I quite—’
‘You wouldn’t,’ I interrupted. ‘You weren’t there. Sorry, private joke.’ He’d
annoyed me now, and I wasn’t feeling quite so sleepy. ‘All right,’ I went on,
‘now it comes down to ways of looking at things. I could say, why build a wall
if it’s designed to fall down sooner or later? Where’s the point? Or I could
say, just because it’ll fall down in a hundred years’ time, or a thousand,
doesn’t mean to say we shouldn’t build it now and kee
p the sheep out of the
newly-planted beans. Attitude, that’s all. I’m prepared to concede that you’ve
got a good attitude and I’ve got a bad one, but that begs the question of what’s
good and what’s bad. Your wall may keep the sheep out for a thousand years, or
it may fall down tomorrow and kill a bunch of people. Your politics is
dangerous, Aristotle, and if it tends to cause more harm than good, maybe you
shouldn’t play around with it.’
Credit where it’s due, he’d been listening attentively and not taken offence. ‘I
see you sitting on a hillside,’ he replied, ‘surrounded by stones. You’re wet
and cold, and sooner or later you’ll get fever in your lungs and die. Now, you
have the wit and the skill to build a house out of the stones, and to light a
fire inside it that’ll keep you warm. But you say, no, if I build the house it
may fall on me and crush me, and if I light the fire it may throw sparks into
the thatch and burn me while I sleep. So you stay out on the hill and die.’
‘Maybe,’ I conceded. ‘Maybe I last twenty years, whereas if I’d built the house
and it had fallen on me — Attitudes, you see. Or opinions, if you prefer. The
different ways you and I trade off risks and benefits. Maybe the real difference
is that you’re trying to make me think the way you do, while I’m quite happy to
let you do what the hell you like, provided you do the same for me.’
He shook his head. ‘Euxenus, plucked to safety at the last moment from a
tempestuous sea, complains that I infringe upon his right to swim.’
I smiled. ‘Aristotle, who can’t swim, imagines that everybody who’s in the water
will drown if he doesn’t save them. And now, with the very greatest respect, I
want to go to bed. That way, come morning, I’ll be wrong but happy and you can
be right and dead on your feet.’
For some time now, Phryzeutzis, I’ve been hearing your voice at the back of my
mind. You’re not complaining, exactly; you’re just asking in a bemused tone of
voice why someone who’s led such a quiet and pedestrian life as I obviously have
should feel any kind of obligation to make a record of it for future
generations. It’s not, you point out, as if anything interesting ever happened
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 23