Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt

by Alexander at the World's End (lit)

  suits of armour pro­vided at public expense; everyone dies eventually, but at

  least they’ve bought something with their death, obtained an advantage that they

  haven’t necessarily deserved. But I couldn’t see where Anabruzas was taking his

  profit in this deal; he was paying out and there didn’t seem to be anything in

  it for him. A strange man, and one I couldn’t help admiring, insofar as it’s

  possible to admire a fool.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ I said. ‘I’ll talk to my people. I’ll try to make

  them understand. I’m making no promises; that way, I won’t be made a liar

  either. But please, bear this in mind. We don’t want to have to fight you, or

  anybody. We don’t like fighting, we don’t have the same notions of honour and

  glory as you do; basically, we just want to know we’re going to be left alone.

  If we have to defend ourselves, we’ll do so as thoroughly and effectively as we

  possibly can, but we look at this sort of thing as if we were keeping accounts.

  Every dead Greek is a net loss, and we get no profit from killing any number of

  your people.’

  He looked at me as if he expected me to say something else, as if what I’d been

  saying was obviously incomplete. ‘That’s all,’ I said. ‘Now you go away and do

  your best, and I’ll do what I can.You never know, we might get out of this mess

  yet.’

  An hour or so after he’d gone, Prodromus the Founder came bustling in with a

  face like thunder.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘After everything we’d agreed.You gave your

  word.’

  I had my hands full with a broken greave; I was trying to solder a new clip, but

  the fire wasn’t hot enough to make the solder run. ‘What are you babbling about

  now, Prodromus?’ I asked.

  ‘You made a deal with the Scythian,’ he said. ‘One of the guards who was here

  with you came and told me. You’re betraying the trust of the whole city, I hope

  you know that.’

  I sighed. ‘Balls,’ I said. ‘I’m doing no such thing.’

  He was speechless for a moment. ‘Euxenus, you can’t lie to me, I’ve heard

  everything that was said in this room. You told that man you’d do everything you

  could to promote a peaceful settlement.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I was lying.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I was lying,’ I repeated. ‘I have absolutely no intention of trying to talk you

  and the rest of them out of attacking the village; partly because I know it

  wouldn’t work, but mostly because I want to see that village burned to the

  ground and the heads of the men who killed my son stuck on poles among the

  ashes.’

  Prodromus looked at me as if I was talking Persian. ‘I don’t understand,’ he

  said. ‘You told that man...

  ‘That’s right. And he’s gone back to his village, and right now I expect he’s

  telling all the people how the Greeks are willing to talk, and this is their

  last, best hope for peace. With any luck, he may even convince them. Which’ll

  make our job that much easier the day after tomorrow.’

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody look as shocked in all my life. ‘Euxenus,

  for the love of the gods,’ he said. ‘You can’t do that, it’s...’

  ‘Clever,’ I said. ‘Is that the word you were looking for?’

  ‘It’s inhuman,’ he shouted. ‘It’s disgusting. I refuse to have anything to do

  with it.’

  I smiled. ‘I can’t remember asking you,’ I replied, ‘so that’s all right. Oh,

  for pity’s sake, Prodromus, we’ve all solemnly agreed that the day after

  tomorrow we’re going to attack their village and kill the lot of them. Compared

  with that, a little white lie is neither here nor there.’

  He stared at me as if I’d grown an extra head. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing

  this,’ he said. ‘Not from an Athenian.’

  ‘Ex-Athenian,’ I reminded him. ‘Now please, unless you’re any good at soldering,

  shove off and stick your conscience where it won t get in the way. And if I were

  you, I’d keep my face well and truly shut or the next couple of days; that’s

  unless you want the Scythians to learn what we’ve got planned for them. I have a

  feeling that our security isn’t everything it should be, or how did they know

  the gate was going to be left open?’

  He opened his mouth, then closed it again and went away without another word.

  And, in case you were wondering, I got the solder to run perfectly well after

  that. I suspect that before I hadn’t been using enough flux.

  The average Thracian, when you get to know him, is probably a decent enough

  fellow. I expect they herd their sheep and goats the same way we do, plant their

  barley and their beans, argue with their wives, spoil their children, fall out

  with their relatives, grumble about the weather, grow old and die exactly the

  same way as everybody else. By the same token, the average Thracian, like the

  average Greek, is born, lives and dies in his native village and never goes more

  than twenty miles from it in his whole life. It follows that the Thracians we

  hired weren’t average Thracians, just as we weren’t average Greeks.

  So I can’t justify a statement along the lines of ‘All Thracians are worthless,

  treacherous bastards’; I must reserve my hatred and abuse for the particular

  bunch of Thracians I had dealings with, and that’s all to the good; the fewer of

  them, the more hatred there is to go around.

  Worthless, treacherous, cowardly bastards; they took our money, we gave them a

  relatively safe and perfectly simple job to do, and they cocked it up. I don’t

  subscribe to the theory, popular around the city of Antolbia shortly after the

  events I’m about to describe, that their actions were deliberate, if only

  because they were far too stupid to have done what they did on purpose. If

  they’d been trying to screw up the operation they’d have got it wrong, and

  things wouldn’t have turned out nearly so badly for us.

  You’ll remember the plan, Phryzeutzis; my plain, simple, logical plan whereby

  the Thracians were to drive off the Scythians’ livestock, drawing the main

  war-party out of the village and leaving it open to our main army; meanwhile,

  once they’d realised they’d been tricked, the war-party would hurry back towards

  home and run straight into the ambush we’d set for them.

  Well now. What could possibly go wrong?

  On the day, I’d chosen to go with the reserve, who had the job of ambushing the

  war-party. Partly this was because that engagement was the only one that could

  possibly go wrong (the attack on the undefended village would just be a

  massacre, and you don’t need to be an Alexander or a Brasidas to organise the

  slaughter of women and children), mainly because I didn’t really want to be

  there when the non-combatants got killed. I know; hypocritical and pointlessly

  squeamish, but what the hell.

  The Thracians set off just before dawn, and we followed almost immediately,

  since we had to get to the ambush site on foot. We arrived and were in position

  when the war-party set out. We watched them galloping furiously up the nicely

  conspicuous trail the Thr
acians had left, made a rough estimate of their

  numbers, which tallied nicely with what we knew of the fighting strength of our

  enemies, and did our best to keep calm and stay quiet while we waited for them

  to come back.

  We waited.

  A long time.

  Noon came and went. Noon is a very hot time when you’re crouched behind a rock

  in full armour, and as we hadn’t anticipated being there for nearly that long,

  we hadn’t burdened ourselves with much drinking water. If we stayed put, not

  only were we going to fry to death, we were also missing out on what was

  happening elsewhere — for all we knew, the Scythians had caught and obliterated

  the Thracians and, flushed with success, were sweeping down on unguarded

  Antolbia; if we moved, we ran the risk of being caught out in the open by the

  war-party and severely handled.

  It was at this point in my reasoning that I gave up. Either way, I could picture

  myself facing an angry mob of Founders, all saying, ‘How could you have been so

  stupid—?’ It was bad, but not nearly as bad as finding out you’ve been sitting

  behind a rock all day while your friends and neighbours were being cut down

  where they stood by barbarian horsemen.

  ‘Back to the city,’ I ordered, ‘quick as you like. You —‘ (referring to the

  hundred-odd Budini horse-archers) ‘— split up; fifty towards the city, fifty

  towards the village. Find out what’s going on, send me a message, and do

  whatever you can to help if you’re the ones who find the enemy. Got that?’

  The Budini captain nodded, and gave his orders while I sat down again and rubbed

  my left calf in an attempt to disperse a savage attack of pins and needles. Not

  long after that we set off for the city at the double.

  We’d gone about half the distance when a rider from the Budini contingent I’d

  sent to the city came galloping up with the news that the city was safe and the

  survivors of the attack had been coming in about the time he got there. I didn’t

  like the sound of that word ‘survivors’ one little bit; but although the man’s

  Greek was first rate for a Budini nomad, I couldn’t make any sense of his

  attempts to clarify. In any event, whatever had happened appeared to have

  happened; there was no need to break our necks scrambling over rocks in a

  desperate rush to get home, We marched the rest of the way at normal speed.

  ‘Where the hell were you?’ they shouted at me as I led my men through the gate.

  It wasn’t so bad. I’d been anticipating worse.

  It was all the Thracians’ fault. They’d dawdled, basically; they’d pottered

  along with the livestock so slowly that the war-party had caught up with them

  far earlier than expected, and came on them by surprise, taking them in flank

  and rear. This sort of thing could only be construed as proper grown-up

  fighting, which our expensive professional cavalry hadn’t been expecting. They

  promptly panicked and broke away; but instead of carrying on down the road they

  swung north, in effect leading the war-party back towards the village. They

  managed to outrun their pursuers (when it came to serious, no-holds-barred

  running away, I have to concede that the Thracians did a spectacular job); but

  so fast and far did they run before shaking the Scythians off that the war-party

  arrived home at almost exactly the moment when our army appeared in front of the

  main gate of the village, anticipating a jolly time among the weak and helpless

  rather than a battle with an over-excited and extremely confident Scythian

  cavalry detachment.

  In the event, Marsamleptes and his men gave a good account of themselves. They’d

  been practising anti-cavalry drill ever since the first raid, and once they’d

  recovered from the initial shock they did their drill-masters proud.

  Furthermore, instead of holding off and shooting at them, the Scythians tried to

  press home a charge with lance and scimitar, and they emerged from the resulting

  scrimmage quite definitely in second place. I forget how many of them we claim

  we killed; rather more to the point, we came out of it with none killed, four

  seriously injured (one man lost his left hand, another lost an eye; the other

  two recovered. The man who lost his hand was a young Greek by the name of

  Chrysippus; he’d recently been taken on as an apprentice by Agenor the

  stonemason. Agenor himself was slashed across the face with a scimitar after his

  helmet had fallen off; the cut healed, but the scar was spectacular and his

  beard always grew funny afterwards).

  This wasn’t nearly the same sort of thing as chasing terrified Thracians, and

  the war-party pulled back, regrouped and rode in a wide loop until they were

  able to take up a position directly between our men and the village.

  Marsamleptes, commanding our forces, decided that he’d done enough for one day

  and ordered a withdrawal in good order, which the Scythians let go without any

  further bother. Finally, when the fifty Budini showed up some time later, the

  war-party (who were still milling about in front of the gates at that point) saw

  them off with a volley of arrows and a charge, but our men had the good sense to

  get out of there quickly and in several directions at once, and so sustained no

  casualties.

  In short, it was a banjax, but a non-lethal one. It made me think of military

  history lessons in Mieza; most battles are lost by the loser rather than won by

  the victor, and this was no exception. In fact, we claimed it as a victory and

  did the usual Greek thing of piling up a trophy of captured weapons (only we

  hadn’t captured any weapons, so we hunted around for souvenir bows and scimitars

  and borrowed a few from the Budini; they sneaked out after dark and retrieved

  them, and nobody commented, so I don’t suppose they noticed). After all, we’d

  engaged the enemy and killed a substantial number of them (‘substantial’:

  military jargon meaning ‘at least one’) without loss to ourselves. In practice

  we’d proved that we were incompetent strategists but formidable fighting men,

  and trying to charge our heavy infantry formation was a mug’s game, so I suppose

  we did more good than harm, at least in the short term.

  Well, once the debriefing and the gripe session were over, we’d posted a guard

  on the wall and built that damn trophy, there was nothing left to do but go

  home. In my case, this would have meant going back to my house, with Theano

  sitting staring at the wall or pacing up and down or bolting herself in the

  inner room and dissolving into floods of tears; not the most attractive prospect

  for a man who’s spent a long hot day crouching behind a rock. So when a couple

  of the Illyrians came sidling up and asked me rather diffidently if I’d like to

  join their thanksgiving celebration, I thought, ‘Why not?’ and agreed.

  I was expecting something rather raucous and Illyrian, with lots of booze and

  banging of fists on tables and throwing of bones. In fact, it was an eerie and

  rather beautiful ceremony, most of it conducted in dead silence except for the

  pattering of dancers’ feet on the baked earth of the dancing floor. It’s an odd

  phenomenon, the Illyrian tendency to dance without music
, but quite effective

  (and to be honest with you, the absence of what the Illyrians think of as music

  is a blessing at all times), and the oddest part of all was watching these

  rather stolid ex-mercenaries, quite a few of whom I now knew to talk to and some

  of whom I thought of as actual friends, dancing their silent, intricate courses

  in the pale moonlight. Merely by virtue of the light, the silence and the

  tradition they followed, they stepped out of context and into a state of almost

  instant grace, until the dance came to an end and they trooped back to their

  places laughing and com­plaining about how sore their feet were.

  The last dance, they told me, was something special; if I possibly could, I

  should stay and see it. Well, I had nothing better to do, so I stayed.

  It was, of course, a snake-dance; I might have guessed when they were at such

  pains to invite me. A young Illyrian called Boizas danced the snake, while ten

  or so of the older men danced the evil spirits the snake drives away. There was

  music to go with this one, which spoilt it rather, but in spite of that I must

  admit I was entranced.

  First the snake came out of his lair and did a solo, a very still, quiet piece

  that would have been plain dull if it wasn’t for the exceptional degree of

  intensity that young Boizas brought to it. When he moved, it was as if he was

  laden down with some particularly heavy load, so that the slightest movement of

  an arm or a foot was an achievement to be applauded. At the height of this part

  of the dance, the evil spirits appeared and bore down on him, ringing him round

  with their arms raised as if to strike, so that he was completely hidden behind

  them. The spirits’ dance was fast and lively, they seemed to flicker and dart

  like flames; then, when they’d completed the circle and were so closely packed

  together that I thought they must be standing on poor Boizas, he jumped up,

  somersaulted and landed with a foot on one shoulder of each of the two tallest

  spirits. He then proceeded to perform a quite remarkable dance, hopping from

  shoulder to shoulder, leaping, somersaulting in a manner I’d never have thought

  possible, until he jumped high in the air, landed neatly between the circle and

  the spectators, and set about chasing the other dancers away in a rearing,