Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt

by Alexander at the World's End (lit)

  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