Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt

by Alexander at the World's End (lit)

  to me. Oh, sure enough, you add, at various times I met a whole bunch of other

  people who led interesting lives, but that’s not the same thing. Maybe, you

  suggest, I should forget about telling my life story and tell theirs instead.

  I can quite understand. After all, who the hell would want to read the history

  of just one ordinary man, the annals of how he earned his living, where he

  lived, who his friends were, who he slept with, whether he ever got ill, what

  was his favourite sauce to go on pan-fried whitebait. This isn’t, I grant you,

  the sort of thing anybody outside his immediate family would ever conceivably

  want to know, unless he was someone really important and famous (in which case

  it might have some bearing on our understanding of the way things happened; he

  burned such-and-such a city to the ground because its gates were painted blue

  and he never could be doing with blue; his wife snored, which was why he sat up

  all night plotting how to overthrow the republic; a little bit of human interest

  makes history palatable, like a spoonful of honey and grated cheese on top of

  rough wine).

  I understand your puzzlement, and I forgive you for it. You see, my problem is

  that all the interesting stuff happened in the second half of my life (assuming

  I don’t live to be as old as Nestor, in which case we’d have to make that the

  second third), but much as I’d like to I can’t really skip the tedious early

  stuff, because you need to have waded through it to understand why things turned

  out the way they did. When I started this story, I did consider jumping in at

  the stage I’ve just reached and then stopping and going back to do the

  explanations (‘And the reason for this was that when I was only a kid.. .‘); but

  that’d just be confusing. The fact is, people don’t live their lives like that,

  starting off in their late thirties, nipping back to catch up on their

  childhood, then carrying on where they left off —which is a pity, in my opinion.

  I’m sure I’d make a far better job of my childhood if I could do it now, with

  the benefit of everything I’ve learned over the years, instead of having to try

  to cope with one of the most influential and formative parts of my life equipped

  only with the shallow and imperfect understanding of a young boy. It’s always

  struck me that asking a kid to cope with being young is like telling a farmer

  that if he makes a good job of ploughing the field with his bare hands, you’ll

  reward him by giving him a plough.

  The truth is, my life never went according to plan, or a plan, or anything

  resembling a plan. It just sort of sprawled. Some lucky people have lives like a

  new colony, where the public buildings and houses and streets and markets and

  town walls are all laid out and completed before the first settler moves in. The

  rest of us are like old villages which grew up haphazard, strung out along a

  road or squashed in between two mountains. Consider; I was born to be a

  gentleman farmer, a man who does just enough work to maintain his self-esteem

  and spends the rest of his time in aimless and harmless enjoyments. Instead, I

  became a professional liar, a fraudster, a parasite; and my reward for that was

  to be entrusted with the education of the Prince of Macedon and the next

  generation of the nation’s rulers and noblemen. Now, when I first embarked on a

  career in lies, the last thing I’d have expected was to find myself in a

  position of such responsibility, so of course I didn’t plan or prepare for

  anything like that. Instead, I just drifted down the river. My few attempts at

  living a regular, honest life, such as my marriage, failed quickly and totally,

  so I stopped bothering. To all intents and pur­poses, I was living in my sleep,

  in the same way as other people walk in theirs. By and large, an inoffensive and

  undemanding way to use up your days, but hardly the stuff of gripping and

  life-enhancing history.

  Then, quite suddenly —(Here comes the sort of thing you’ve been waiting for.)

  — my life changed and I found myself involved with and initiating momentous and

  significant events, doing things that will affect the lives of countless people

  yet unborn, finding myself a place in history. A remarkable, unforeseen change,

  and all because of an olive.

  The olive in question was a small, wrinkled, rather elderly example that nobody

  had wanted; so it was left in the bottom of the bowl while its younger, plumper

  brethren were dragged away and eaten like the seven boys and seven girls

  supposedly sent every year to the Minotaur. Eventually, our sad olive was the

  only one left; at which point it was scooped up by a greedy individual by the

  name of Myronides and swallowed whole.

  Myronides had the bad habit of talking with his mouth full, and he tried to

  swallow the sad olive while in the middle of a lively, really quite heated

  discussion with Leonidas, Euxenus son of Eutychides (me) and General Parmenio,

  Philip’s most trusted advisor. As a result, the olive went down the wrong way,

  wedged itself sideways in his throat and blocked off his windpipe in the manner

  of the 300

  Spartans who held off the Persian army atThermopylae. Rather more successfully,

  in fact; Myronides choked, went an alarming shade of purple, and died.

  I’d never seen a man choke to death, and I didn’t see it happen this time — I

  was looking the other way, as usual, chatting to the man on my right because I

  was bored to tears by Myronides and the rather fatuous argument he’d been waging

  for the past quarter of an hour. The first I knew of it was when someone said

  ‘Myronides?’ in an alarmed voice, and someone else said ‘Gods, he’s dead!’ and

  people started jumping up and crowding round and yelling for doctors.

  If I sound a trifle callous, it’s probably because I didn’t like Myronides much.

  He was loud and rude and stupid, but stupid in a crafty way so that he was

  always able to kid people into going along with his stupid notions. He was, I’m

  ashamed to say, an Athenian and a philosopher.

  The reason he was there, having dinner with King Philip, his chief minister and

  his tame intellectuals, was that he was pitching an idea; and the real reason

  why I took an instant dislike to him was that the idea he was pitching was one

  that I should have thought of myself. In brief, he was there to ask the King to

  sponsor him in establishing a new colony on the Black Sea coast, where the wheat

  comes from.

  Before Alexander, the Black Sea region was where all ambitious colonists went if

  they could. A disturbingly large proportion of the bread eaten in Attica was

  grown there, and reached us by way of the Greek cities of the Crimea; there was

  plenty of money to be made in those parts, the natives were either friendly or

  negligible, and the Greek presence had been there long enough to make it

  something of a home from home.

  The other sweet thing about the Black Sea region was that it didn’t belong to

  anybody (apart from the people who lived there originally, who obviously didn’t

  matter). The whole stretch of coastline from Byzantium to Colchis was there for

  the taking. It was far enough away from
Greece proper that you didn’t have to

  get involved in the endless round of dreary little wars between Athens and

  Sparta if you didn’t want to, and the Persian Empire stopped at the Caucasus ,

  with the mountains and the violent, unruly Sarmatians between the Great King and

  the bit the Greeks lived in.

  In consequence, the region appealed to both sections of society from whom

  colonists are usually drawn; poor, practical-minded people who want an easier

  living, and woolly minded idealists who want to found a brave new world. It’s

  plain enough that these two types go together like oil and water, having very

  little in common beyond the vague belief that geography holds the key to human

  happi­ness. Unfortunately, most every colony ever founded has been made up of a

  mixture of the two, and since the idealists are mostly reject or inadequate sons

  of the ruling class, they tend to be the ones who get put in charge of the

  venture. Typically, they set out with noble aspirations of founding the world’s

  first true democracy, which generally lasts until halfway through the sea voyage

  out, by which time the fifty per cent of the colonists who underestimated how

  much food they’d need on the journey have traded their notional

  five-hundred-acre allotments with their more practical co-settlers for a couple

  of jars of cattle-feed-quality barley. Again typically, it’s the scions of the

  great and good families who forget to bring a packed lunch; so when they get to

  journey’s end, they tend to adjust the constitution of the Great Experiment a

  little, usually the parts dealing with land ownership, taxation and

  representation of the people. Sooner or later there’s a civil war of sorts, and

  since the scions of noble houses are the only ones who could afford to bring

  along such expensive items as armour and weapons, things generally end up

  following the pattern everybody left home to get away from, but with the

  erstwhile younger sons finally having a bit of land to call their own. It’s a

  wonderful system, highly successful and very, very Greek.

  That, as I say, is the usual way it’s done; but Myronides had something better

  to suggest.

  For some time, Philip had been hiring mercenaries to augment his own troops in

  his itty-bitty wars. From a purely military point of view, this was good

  business. Mercenaries generally make better soldiers than civilians, because

  they fight for money and they only get paid when they’re winning. The problem

  Philip was facing lay in the fact that he now had rather more mercenaries on the

  payroll than he could afford, and the point at which you thank your paid helpers

  for their excellent work and suggest that they leave your prosperous, fertile

  country and go back to their rocky hillsides is notoriously ticklish. Sometimes

  they don’t want to go.

  Atypically for an employer of mercenaries, Philip did have enough quality

  citizen-soldiers to sling them out and make sure they stayed out, if he had to.

  But why incur such an expense of manpower and resources, both of which he’d need

  for his next round of itty-bitty wars, if he didn’t have to? Myronides’ idea was

  to pack them all off to a colony in idyllic Taurus, where the old Borysthenes

  river winds lazily to the sea; it’d cost next to nothing, he’d be rid of a

  nuisance,

  the mercenaries would be as happy as a pig under an oak tree and King Philip

  would have a strategically placed outpost on the land route from Greece to

  Persia, for as and when he had time to extend his interests in that direction.

  And Myronides, fat, loud, obnoxious and plausible, would be the outpost’s first

  governor.

  And would have been, but for that one sad olive.

  Like I said, I was looking the other way when it happened. But before that,

  before I lost interest in it, I’d been taking a lively part in the debate we’d

  been having about the Ideal Colony. Perhaps you’ll recall that I’ve mentioned

  before how popular this tiresome and faintly ridiculous subject was back then,

  as a topic for philosophical debate. If so, you’ll remember that it was a

  favourite subject of mine —not because I was desperately interested in it, quite

  the reverse, but because it happened to be one I was very good at (and there was

  also the unmissable opportunity to dance dialectic rings round Aristotle, who

  took it so desperately seriously, with his mammoth collection of constitutions

  of city-states and all).

  That evening, I’d been on pretty brilliant form until my head started to hurt.

  Mainly to aggravate Aristotle and get my revenge on Myronides for thinking of my

  idea before I did, I’d taken it upon myself to rubbish both democracy and direct

  military rule as ways of running the sort of colony that was being envisaged

  here. Rubbishing Aristotle was easy enough — after all, it’s perfectly true that

  democ­racy isn’t the way to go in these cases, for the reasons I mentioned just

  now. I was on rather less solid ground with Myronides’ proposal, but Myronides

  didn’t have the verbal skills to win a debate with me if he was trying to argue

  that fire is hot. Offhand I can’t remember what I said, but by the time I lost

  interest, Myronides had fewer legs to stand on than a flatfish, and was getting

  rather desperate — hence, I suppose, his carelessness in eating olives. Damn. I

  hadn’t thought of it that way before. It seems as if I was responsible for his

  death, if you care to look at it from that angle.

  Well, for some reason Myronides’ demise stole my thunder, and even after they’d

  towed away the body and mopped up the spilt wine nobody seemed very interested

  in resuming the debate where it had left off. I made an excuse and cleared off

  as soon as it was polite to do so. Ironically, it was one of the six nights each

  month when Theano’s husband was away with the horses (didn’t I mention Theano?

  Not much to tell, really. She was the daughter of one of the local tenant

  farmers, and had married one of Philip’s chief grooms in the hope of getting out

  of Mieza for good; but her husband had fallen in love with one of the boys who

  worked in our kitchens and had got himself assigned to the royal steading across

  the valley from us so as to be near him. She found me interesting because I was

  Athenian and exotic, and spoke with what she maintained was an attractively

  sophisticated Attic accent. Well, it takes all sorts), but what with death at

  the dinner table and my bad head I really wasn’t in the mood. She shrugged and

  said she’d hang about for a bit even so; it was a positive pleasure to get out

  of the house for a few hours, she said, even if only to go and sit in someone

  else’s. I said I didn’t have a problem with that, but I wasn’t likely to be

  terribly good company. ‘So what’s new?’ she replied sweetly, and mixed herself a

  drink.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she added, as an afterthought.

  I made a vague gesture intended to convey warm-hearted hospitality. ‘You go

  ahead,’ I said. ‘Finish the jar, if the risk of having all your teeth dissolved

  doesn’t bother you. And to think, I used to reckon Attic wine was rough.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘But I
wasn’t talking about the wine. What I meant was, you

  don’t mind me hanging around here?’

  ‘Be my guest. Well, strictly speaking you’re my guest already, so really what

  I’m saying is, carry on being my—’

  ‘I’m going to have a baby,’ she said.

  I thought for a moment before replying. ‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘When’s it due?’

  She glared at me. ‘No,’ she said, ‘think. I’m going to have a baby.’

  ‘That’s what I thought you said,’ I answered. ‘Surely that’s a good thing.’

  ‘I don’t think my husband’s going to see it like that.’

  I’m not usually that obtuse, really; but I’d had a long day and a fretful

  evening, and you know how difficult it can be to think clearly when your head’s

  splitting. ‘I see,’ I replied.

  ‘You see,’ she repeated, and I couldn’t help noticing that she used that same

  flat, expressionless tone of voice that Alexander favoured when he was angry.

  Probably a Macedonian thing, I told myself. ‘Well, that’s fine.’

  I swung my legs off the couch and sat up. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m open to

  suggestions. What did you have in mind?’

  She looked at the wall a foot or so above my head. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Hanging myself is probably favourite. They say hemlock’s the most comfortable

  way, but I wouldn’t want to try that without some sort of recipe. Maybe you

  could ask your friend Aristotle if he knows what the recommended dose is. He’s

  heavily into botany, isn’t he?’

  I didn’t like the sound of that; Theano wasn’t much given to melo­drama as a

  rule. ‘I could ask, I suppose,’ I said, ‘but hemlock’s some­thing of a sore

  subject with us Athenians, and philosophers in particular. Don’t you think

  you’re over-reacting somewhat?’

  The Alexander look was replaced with a generous eyeful of pure poison.

  ‘Over-reacting,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Over-reacting. You may find this difficult to believe, but

  where I come from, pregnancy isn’t usually regarded as some kind of death

  sentence. In fact, there’s quite a few people who wouldn’t be here today if

  someone hadn’t got pregnant at some stage. Tell me, has the concept of divorce

  filtered its way into this delightful country of yours? Or am I looking at a