hired hands, tenant farmers’ sons, city trash, small boys, without a decent
helmet or breastplate between them. But what they did have were throwing-spears
and bows and arrows and an infinite quantity of good, hand-fitting stones, the
size and weight your father told you never to throw at people in case you did
someone an injury.
‘It wasn’t an army; it didn’t have the gear or the social standing to be an
army. And since it wasn’t an army, it couldn’t fight a battle, so it didn’t.
What it could do, though, was buzz round our resplendent and immaculately
polished army like a swarm of angry bees, stinging and buzzing away before they
could be swatted. Trying to catch them was a waste of time; you’d feel the
chunk! of a slab of rock on the back of your bronze-encased head, and down you’d
go; by the time you were on your feet again, they’d be nowhere to be seen. The
few men who did go scampering off among the rocks in full armour and hot pursuit
never came back, of course; twenty or so adolescent thugs were waiting just
over the skyline to pull the breathless hero down and tear him apart with their
fingernails.
‘Nothing for it, then, but to keep marching; in full armour, because of the
unceasing shower of stones; in the heat of the day, because they daren’t stop;
wandering about, herded like goats bewildered by the yapping of small, fierce
dogs — they tried to shake them off by marching at night, but they didn’t know
the way, and the enemy did. The further they went, the further they were driven
from the road they should have been following, the one that had wells and
streams along it; no water, no food, but lots of dust and heat and the constant
nagging persecution of the enemy that wasn’t even an army...
‘In the end, they broke into two sections, one straggling behind the other. The
first party staggered down to a river; tortured with thirst, they plunged into
the water and the Sicilians killed them as they drank — I gather they didn’t
make any attempt to fight, they just lay in the water and guzzled it, all filthy
with silt and blood, till an arrow or a stone stopped them, or until the
Sicilians rounded up the survivors and marched them back the way they’d just
come towards Syracuse.
‘On the way, they passed the place where the other half of the army had been
killed, in a walled orchard on some wealthy Syracusan’s country estate. My
grandfather was one of a handful who got out of there before the archers and
slingers finished off the job. The rest stayed, kneeling behind their shields
until hunger, thirst or the unofficial weapons of the Sicilians did for them.
‘Only a fraction of the army lived to be taken prisoner; but there were
thousands of them nevertheless, and they died of starvation and neglect squashed
together in the stone-quarries of Syracuse, the only secure place big enough to
hold such a multitude. They died simply because there wasn’t enough food or
water to spare for such a huge number of men, and nowhere big enough to shelter
them.’
I stopped there and looked at my audience. They looked uncomfortable, like
children who’ve just become aware that their father isn’t the biggest, strongest
man in the world, and that there isn’t really a Good Fairy who watches over them
while they sleep. In retrospect, maybe it was an unkind thing to do to them, at
such an early and impressionable age, to strip them of the comfortable belief
that high breeding, solid plate armour and obeying orders without question will
always see you right, no matter how dismal the situation. After all, these boys
had been raised to be soldiers, and a soldier must have something to believe in,
else he’d turn tail and run at the first sight of the sun flashing off the
enemy’s helmets.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘that’s the facts of the case. You don’t need me to tell you
that it flatly contradicts everything I’ve taught you so far about military
theory. In case some of you weren’t listening, I’ll just repeat that one basic
lesson: in war, the side that doesn’t screw up, wins. But in this case, apart
from a few logistical problems which they were by no means the first to
encounter, I don’t think the Athenians made a mistake. They saw they’d bitten
off more than they could swallow, so they resolved to withdraw in good order.
There was no field army to oppose them. More to the point, there was no reason
to oppose them, because they were going away, with no suggestion that they were
likely to come back. According to basic military theory, there was nothing to be
gained by fighting an enemy who’s pissing off of his own accord. After all, what
did the Syracusans actually gain by the exercise, apart from a lot of healthy
exercise burying the dead? They killed thousands and thousands of men; so what?
‘And that’s the point, surely. The Syracusans changed the rules. Up to that
moment, everybody in the world knew why people fought wars; it was to decide a
simple question, such as who owns this attractively situated plain, or who’s
going to rule this city. When other means of deciding the issue fail, the
question is put to the gods, who hold up a set of golden scales with the fates
of each side in the pans — you remember the scene from Homer, no doubt, and very
memorable it is, too. We Greeks designed heavy infantry warfare to be efficient
and suited to our needs; first, it always gave a clear result; second, it was
decided by courage and physical strength rather than the cleverness of
individual generals; third, it was relatively safe, even for the losing side;
fourth, only the ruling class, the men who can afford armour, are allowed to
take part. We’ve fought this way for hundreds of years without a significant
change in the way we go about matters because it works, it does what we want it
to do. As a result, war in Greece has never been about killing as many people as
possible, which would be infamous and an affront to the gods. So; what went
wrong?
‘There are many possible answers. You can say that the Sicilians aren’t proper
Greeks (though, by the same token, neither are you; and you’re just as shocked
as I was when I first heard the story). You can say that the attack on Syracuse
was simply state piracy and utterly unprovoked; and that’s true, too, but hardly
unprecedented. Maybe you could claim that, after enslaving their fellow Greeks
for fifty years, the Athenians were so bitterly hated that something like this
was inevitable, sooner or later. You can argue that this all happened at the end
of the longest and nastiest war in our history, at a point where one side
finally lost its temper and played spitefully, like a violent child. All sorts
of reasons; maybe you can put them all together and end up with enough reasons
to make sense of what happened. But that’s not good enough for us, because we’re
trying to learn history here, and the whole point of history is to find out how
certain things happened with a view to making sure they never happen again. One
day, you’ll be at the head of an army in hostile territory, and you’ll see far
away in the distance a big mob of en
emy skirmishers keeping pace with you, and
you’ll think of me then and ask yourself, “What do I do now?”
‘All right, here’s the answer. Not necessarily a definitively correct one, but
something you can write down on your tablets and learn by heart; the side that
doesn’t screw up, wins; making assumptions is an easy way to screw up. Never
assume that the rules will stay the same, that the difficult job is too
difficult or the easy job is too easy. My grandfather and his comrades-in-arms
assumed that walking to Catana was easy, and destroying a vast army with sticks
and stones was difficult; they made assumptions. Now, if I were you, I’d lie
awake at nights worrying about what I’ve just told you. In fact, the night when
you can put it out of your mind and go back to sleep should be the night before
the day you hand over command to someone else. Any questions?’
I hadn’t expected any (I’d made an assumption, see?) so I was a little bit put
out when Alexander solemnly raised his hand and looked me in the eye.
‘Well?’ I said.
Alexander swatted away a fly. ‘I think it’s obvious where the Athenians went
wrong. Their army was too big. They had more men than they could feed, and then
they sent more men instead of food. And all their soldiers were heavy infantry,
with no light troops or cavalry; if they’d had cavalry and archers, they
wouldn’t have got into such a mess. And they didn’t know the way, they can’t
have or they wouldn’t have ended up wandering aimlessly about. That’s three
mistakes. If they’d have got one of those three right instead of wrong, they’d
have made it to Catana without any trouble. So I don’t see what the fuss is
about.’
I nodded slowly. ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘as far as the details go. But you tell
me, why did the Syracusans attack them when they were going home anyway? Why
didn’t they just let them go and be glad to be rid of them?’
Alexander frowned. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘If they’d reached Catana alive, they could
have come back later; fewer of them, with food and cavalry support and guides
who knew the way. They couldn’t do that if they were dead. It made sense to kill
them all.’
I studied his face for a moment. ‘You reckon,’ I said.
‘Why not?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What was the name of their general, by
the way?’
‘Gylippus,’ I replied. ‘He was a Spartan.’
‘Well,’ said Alexander, ‘if I’d been Gylippus, I’d have done the same thing.’
I smiled. ‘And so would I, if I’d been Alexander.’
After class, I went to a meeting of the Town Planning and Statues sub-committee.
It was the seventh meeting we’d had so far, and we’d covered the town plan in
the first half hour. That left the statues.
‘I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss,’ one of them said to me, his face
bright red. ‘After all, you know you’ll have yours, and slap bang in the middle
of the market-place too. So I can’t see why you begrudge the rest of us a little
recognition. After all, we’re the ones founding this city, we’re entitled. .
There’s a kind of exasperated noise best described as the sound patience makes
when it’s been heated to steam and escapes through a gap in one’s teeth. I made
it. ‘I don’t want a damn statue,’ I said. ‘If I have a right to one, I hereby
waive it. Now, statues of the gods, yes, we need a few of those; but forty-seven
others — have you any idea how much valuable cargo space they’re going to take
up? Not to mention the expense.’
‘Depends where your priorities lie,’ someone else said disdainfully. ‘You’re an
Athenian. Wouldn’t you just love it if you had genuine authentic statues of
Cecrops and Theseus and Aegeus and Alcmaeon, taken from life? Think how proud
you’d be, with that kind of tangible proof of your nation’s heritage.’
I drummed my fingers on the ground. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I really want to be
remembered as the oecist whose people starved over their first winter because
all they had in the holds of the ships were statues of themselves. Tell you
what; let’s have the statues carved out of hard cheese. That way, when we’re
done admiring them, we can eat them.’
There was a gloomy silence.
‘All right.’ My heart sank; Theagenes was speaking, and I’d come to dread his
intervention. Whenever there was deadlock, up would pop Theagenes the voice of
reason, with a compromise pitched with geometrical precision exactly halfway
between the opposing viewpoints. Unfortunately, halfway between sensible and
utterly fatuous is still utterly fatuous. ‘All right,’ Theagenes said, ‘how
about this? Instead of lots of separate statues, what about one big statue? A
frieze or something like that, with all of us on?’
I shook my head. ‘A frieze that big wouldn’t even fit on the ship,’ I said.
‘We’d have to build a ship specially, or buy one of those great big barges they
use for shipping marble from Paros .’
Theagenes nodded. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘What about this; we hire a sculptor,
take him with us, and he can do all the statues once we get there? That way
we’ll save all that space on the ship, and we can have as many statues as we
like instead of having to decide in advance.’
It took me about three heartbeats to make up my mind to support this proposal
with every last scrap of enthusiasm I could fake. After all, no sculptor skilful
enough to know which end of the chisel to hit was going to want to leave Greece
and go and settle in Olbia; we’d search for one, in vain, until it was time to
go, and by then it’d be too late to have our portraits carved — result, no
statues. Ideal.
Of course, at that time I hadn’t yet formulated Euxenus’ Law; namely, never
underestimate the perversity of human nature. We found our sculptor all right.
His name was Agenor, and he was born on a little chip of rock off the south
coast whose name escapes me for the moment. His love for and skill at carving
stone led him in time to Corinth, and after a year or so there he started
wandering from city to city, staying in one place just long enough to establish
a reputation as a highly competent marble-basher and then get himself chased out
of town by whoever was running the place, be it a democracy, monarchy or
oligarchy. Agenor, you see, was a dreamer, an idealist, a thinker of such deep
thoughts that it always amazed me that he didn’t bash his own thumb with the
hammer more often than he did. Everywhere he went, he found fault with the way
the city was governed, and being Agenor he felt it his duty to explain these
shortcomings, loudly and in public, whenever he found somebody willing to
listen. In Athens , they formally exiled him. In Sparta , they flayed the skin
off his back and threw him out of a window; the only reason they didn’t hurl him
from the city wall is that Sparta hasn’t got any city walls. In Megara they
dumped him in a cesspit. In Sicyon they tied him backwards on a three-legged
mule and let the children chase him out with sticks. In Orchomenus they
sentenced him to death and left him in a cell
under the citadel with the tools
of his trade (an ancient tradition of the city), and he escaped by chiselling
out a hole in the rock and slithering through it. In Ambracia they listened to
him, and had a brief but highly unpleasant civil war as a result, from which he
escaped with great difficulty and the loss of the top third of his left ear. In
Pella they found him a job cutting paving-slabs for road-making, and when he
said it wasn’t quite the sort of work he was looking for they said, tough, make
yourself useful or we’ll cut out your tongue. Oh, Agenor was delighted to have
the opportunity to join us, and after a brief show of reluctance I agreed to
take him. After all, I reasoned, he could hardly be more of a pest than most of
my fellow Founders, and if I had my way, we’d be laying a lot of paving-stones,
so he might come in useful after all.
So we had deadheads, we had enthusiasts, we had idealists, we had the antisocial
and the mentally inadequate; we also had some genuine farmers, men whose fathers
had had one too many sons, and some craftsmen with useful skills that they were
willing to exercise in return for a fair day’s pay, and some ex-slaves who knew
all there was to know about hard work for little reward; and we had a thousand
Illyrian mercenaries, who’d been led to believe that the life they were
embarking on was going to be better than the one they were leaving behind. In
other words we had Greeks, two and a half thousand of them including women and
children. It was a better start in life than many cities get, because we also
had food and animals and materials and tools, provided for us by the King of
Macedon; we had five ships of our own and the loan of twenty-five others there
and back; we had the services of a hundred professional stonemasons for a year,
to be paid by Philip in arrears on their return; we had a splendid and extremely
long written constitution, composed by a committee chaired by Aristotle himself,
of which seven copies housed in shiny bronze canisters were ceremoniously placed
in a cedarwood chest in the hold of the expedition’s flagship on the day before
we sailed — how the mice managed to get at and chew up all seven copies to such
an extent that nothing legible remained I simply have no idea, or at least not
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 27