Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt

by Alexander at the World's End (lit)

  more aware you become of this, as each new aspect you address turns out to be

  yet another ‘grey area’, which is lawyer’s talk for ‘We haven’t a clue, and if

  we did we wouldn’t tell you’. I ended up with the conclusion that about

  sixty-four per cent of Athenian law is known by nobody at all; which is odd when

  you consider that if you happen to break it, ignorance isn’t an excuse.

  While I was fighting the case, I earned my living the way all poor Athenians do,

  by hanging round the law-courts and Assembly. Three obols a day for sitting on a

  jury, the same for attending Assembly; it’s a living, but by the gods you meet

  some unsalubrious people when you’re a professional citizen. Traditionally,

  juries are manned by deadbeat old men without families to care for them who’re

  too old or too crippled to go to work. Half of them are stone deaf, half of the

  remainder are crazy or senile, so that they can’t remember their own names, let

  alone the points made in the previous speaker’s deposition. But if you’re on

  trial for your life, they’re the ones who’ll be sitting in judgement over you,

  and you can tell what sort of justice you’re likely to get by looking at their

  fingernails; you can always tell a professional juror by the thick clots of wax.

  When the accused is found guilty, you see, the jury votes on the severity of his

  punishment by scratching a line on a wax tablet — the longer the line, the

  harsher the penalty.

  It’s the same crew of dead and desiccated corpses who sit in Assembly when they

  can’t get on a jury (jury work’s better, because the hours are shorter; kinder

  to an old man’s bladder, though the experienced juror takes his chamber-pot with

  him. It’s disconcerting, to say the least, when you’re winding up into your

  closing speech and all you can hear is the steady trickle of piss on pottery)

  and it’s a great comfort to think that these are the men who wield the sovereign

  power in the Athenian democracy, the fairest and most perfect de­mocracy the

  world has ever seen.

  I particularly remember one day in the law-courts; I was on the jury for a

  complicated fraud trial, and the evidence was about as boring as it’s possible

  to get. I must have been the youngest man on the jury by about twenty years.

  Sitting behind me were a couple of regulars — we called them the Living Skulls

  because they were so old and shrivelled that you could clearly see the bone

  under the skin of their faces — who’d been having the same conversation for the

  last ten years. As soon as the proceedings started, they began to talk. When

  court was dismissed for the day, they broke off in mid-sentence and went home.

  The next day they picked up exactly where they’d left off. Nobody could figure

  what it was this marathon conversation was actually about. It was something to

  do with a quarrel between their sisters, long since dead, but since they kept

  drifting off on side-issues, it was impossible to follow. The man next to me was

  fast asleep; not the only one, by any means. On my other side was an old boy who

  hummed softly under his breath all day; asking him to stop had no effect, and

  neither did jabbing him sharply in the ribs with your elbow. Directly in front

  of me was another old man who talked to himself, and beside him was yet another

  celebrated jury personality, nicknamed Ocean because he never seemed to run dry

  (but it was his habit of emptying his chamber-pot at random over the benches

  below him that made him really famous).

  It was early in my legal career and I was actually trying to make sense of what

  was going on; but what with the snores and the tinkling and the humming and the

  muttering and the earnest voices of the Skulls, not to mention the heat of the

  sun and the hardness of the bench, I got hopelessly lost after the first

  half-hour. When the time came for the vote, the usher went round prodding awake

  the sleepers and chivvying us all off the benches towards the voting urns. A

  white pebble for not guilty, black for guilty; except that we had to provide our

  own pebbles, and white pebbles are harder to find; anyway, we voted and the

  verdict was Guilty, so we were sent back to decide on the punishment. My

  neighbours didn’t take long about it; they dug their nails in hard and ripped,

  like a cat laying open a dead mouse; straight lines across the tablet, the death

  penalty. When this was announced, the lawyer who’d been acting for the accused

  got up and tried to explain that the death penalty didn’t apply for this

  particular offence; it was a fine, or at the worst, exile. No sooner had he sat

  down than his opposite number bobbed up and asked us to convict his learned

  friend for contempt of court, in that he’d challenged the decision of a duly

  constituted jury. So off we went to vote once again; and since it was the last

  case of the day, we’d all used up our last remaining pebbles on the previous

  vote. But the usher saved the day; he found a man selling beans and confiscated

  his stock, then issued them to us to use instead of pebbles. Now these beans

  were a sort of dark brown colour, as near black as made no odds; so the lawyer

  was found guilty, and the usher passed round the wax tablets. A few minutes

  later, he announced that the jury had decided on the death penalty, which was a

  valid punishment for contempt; what had happened was that there were no more

  unmarked tablets, so they simply reissued the ones used for the last vote,

  without explaining that what we were meant to do was turn them on their sides...

  After the case was over, just out of interest, I stopped one old boy and asked

  him innocently what scratching a full line across the tablet meant.

  ‘Means he’s guilty, of course,’ the old man said.

  ‘Really? I thought we used the pebbles for that.’

  ‘Oh.’ The old man thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re wrong. Least, I

  been coming to this court forty years and I always done it that way, and nobody

  ever told me different.’

  Gradually, I found out what had happened at Antolbia.

  There had been one survivor — one. He was an Illyrian who’d hidden in a

  grain-pit. When they set fire to the barn, the roof fell down in such a way as

  to create a pocket of air that lasted until the fire burned itself out, so he

  was saved from the smoke; but he was down there for two weeks, pinned down by a

  fallen beam and unable to move, until quite by chance some Odessans who’d come

  to see if they could salvage any grain happened to open up the barn and found

  him. He’d survived by eating the raw grain and catching drips of water from a

  mill-stream that had been diverted when a house fell into its course, sending it

  down across the barn floor. Because the floor had been stamped hard, the water

  ran off it instead of sinking in, and enough drips fell over the side of the pit

  and into his mouth to keep him from dying of thirst. He was so firmly wedged in

  by the beam that they had to cut off both his feet before they could get him out

  of there.

  When he was able to talk again, he told them what he could remember, which

  wasn’t much. He’d been out drinking the night before, and hadn’t made it all the


  way home; the furthest he’d been able to stagger was a friend’s barn, so he

  crawled in and collapsed on a pile of straw. When the attack began, he’d been

  woken up by the shouting and screaming; he guessed at once what was happening,

  and all he could think of to do was to dive into the pit and hope for the best.

  As it was he fell in head first and nearly drowned in the grain; it was like

  swimming through mud, he said, and that far down he could scarcely breathe

  through a mouth and nose filled with grain.

  All in all, he said, he wasn’t surprised at what had happened, bear­ing in mind

  that the General had just been killed and the oecist had vanished a day or so

  later, taking the city’s lucky snakes with him. Obviously, he said, the snakes

  had warned the oecist about what was going to happen and told him to get out

  while he still could.

  It took longer to find out the Scythian background. In fact, a year went by and

  I’d pretty well given up hope of ever knowing when quite by chance I met a

  Scythian policeman (he arrested me for sleeping off one of my regular drinking

  bouts in the market square). When he found out I could speak quite a lot of his

  own language he was mightily impressed and let me go; then he asked me where I’d

  learned Scythian. I told him and he looked rather thoughtful.

  The attackers, it turned out, were his people, the Sauromatae; to be precise, a

  rogue war-party that was escaping after a defeat in some civil war or other and

  had turned south, through the land of the Alizones and down into the settled

  region. He hadn’t been with that particular party, but a cousin of his had, and

  he’d heard the story from him.

  It was then I found out about the rich man whose son stole the horse, and all

  the rest of the story. When we burned the village, the rich man went around the

  other villages stirring up trouble, promising that they’d be next. Everyone was

  very worried, as you can imagine, but none of them wanted to be the ones to take

  us on, since we were so very warlike and ruthless. Then, quite by chance, these

  outlaw Sauromatae turned up, and were immediately approached to undertake the

  task of attacking the colony. They replied that they’d fought their own people,

  the Royal Scythians, the Alizones and the Persians; they certainly weren’t

  afraid of a few Greeks. There were about seven thousand of them, I believe, all

  with their own horses.

  Before attacking, they sent infiltrators down into the city, pre­tending to be

  mercenaries looking for someone to hire them. They were told to go away, since

  with the General dead and the oecist gone, there wasn’t anybody dealing with

  security or defence right then; it was supposed to be the elders’ job (the

  Founders, I suppose he meant) but they hadn’t been able to decide between them

  who was going to do it, and meanwhile there weren’t even any sentries on the

  wall, because there wasn’t anybody to organise a rota.

  The attack, my policeman friend told me, was pretty much an anti­climax, much to

  the disgust of these warlike Sauromatae. They’d taken the job as much for the

  pleasure of matching themselves against the invincible Greeks as for the pay

  (which wasn’t much, since the villages were at little better than subsistence

  level at the best of times), but when they made the assault, at midday, they

  found the gate left open and met with no resistance whatsoever. After they’d

  killed and burned everything inside the city, they combed the surrounding

  fields, rounded up the livestock and burned off the crops before reporting back.

  After they’d gone, the villagers who’d formed the alliance against Antolbia held

  a meeting and decided that they couldn’t stay where they were; there were bound

  to be reprisals from other Greeks, and the Sauromatae had moved on and wouldn’t

  protect them. So they did what the Scythians have always done in the face of

  concerted invasion; they destroyed all their permanent structures, burned their

  crops, poisoned their wells, packed every­thing they owned into wagons, and set

  off north, into nomad country.

  A little after that, I learned that Olbia and Odessus had decided to take no

  action; after all, the Scythians had gone, and the whole region was now empty.

  But, since Antolbia had nominally been a Mace­donian colony, they sent a

  petition to Alexander asking him to avenge the massacre by sending a punitive

  expedition. Alexander got the message and acknowledged it, but nothing was ever

  done; Alexander was a long way away and had other things on his mind.

  Well, I hope the rich man was able to get his son back in the end. It’d be truly

  sad if he went to all that trouble and expense for nothing. I never did find out

  his name, and as a historian I regret that. The duty of a historian is to ensure

  that the momentous deeds of men whose actions shape the world are never

  forgotten, and I guess that if anybody qualifies under those criteria, he did.

  A month or so after the end of my lawsuit, when I was sure that my

  ninth-cousin-fifty-times-removed had finally packed up and slung his hook, I

  went back home to Pallene.

  It’s an old house; my father was always talking about pulling it down and

  building something better, but he never got round to it, and while I was growing

  up there it was still basically as it had been when my great—great—grandfather

  built it. In the middle there’s a courtyard, closed in on the southern and

  western sides by plain mud-brick walls and on the other two sides by the two

  flat-roofed blocks of the house which meet at right-angles at the north-eastern

  corner, comprising the main room (facing north) and the inner room (facing

  east). The gate’s in the east wall, with a verandah on the outside. The northern

  half of the courtyard is shaded by the roof of the portico. That’s it,

  basically.

  As I walked down the bill, the first I saw of it was the flat roof of the inner

  room; that was where we all used to sleep during the hottest part of the year,

  when it was impossible to sleep indoors. A little further down the trail, and I

  caught sight of the tower, a separate building a few yards behind the house

  itself, masked from the path by a little curtain of apple trees. These trees had

  grown a lot since I’d been away — nobody could be bothered to prune them, I

  guess — so it was only when I left the path and wound my way past the two big

  rocks we called the Gateposts that I was able to see the house itself. Apart

  from the overgrown trees it was exactly the same as I remembered it. Even the

  half-dead old fig-tree we’d pegged to the outside of the south wall when I was

  just a kid was still there, still lolling off the pegs like a drunken man

  leaning on the shoulder of a long-suffering friend. The fallen-down barn we’d

  kept promising ourselves we’d restore was still standing, no more and no less

  dilapidated than when I’d last seen it. The old cartwheel my father had hung

  from a branch for us to play on was still propped against the pear-tree, still

  missing the same two spokes. Even the two beehives were exactly where they’d

  been the last time I conjured the place up in my mind’s eye.

  I was
home. Fact.

  I walked into the verandah, lifted the latch and gently pushed the door. It

  opened a hand’s span or so, then stuck. I put my shoulder against it, forced it

  open enough for me to squeeze through, and went into the main room.

  There was nothing there, of course. My defeated rival had taken all the

  furniture and movables with him when he left, and for the first time in my life

  I could see all four corners of the room at once. It was much smaller than I’d

  remembered, the doorways were lower, the hearth narrower. It was darker, too.

  I was about to turn round and go outside when I heard a faint scuffling noise

  from the inner room. I tiptoed across and jerked the door open.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I asked.

  The inner room had been stripped bare too, of course, and it was even darker.

  Under the shadow of the far wall I could see something that looked like a bundle

  of old cloth.

  ‘You,’ I said. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Euxenus?’

  I took a step closer. The voice wasn’t familiar exactly, but I had an idea I’d

  heard it before. ‘Who are you?’ I repeated.

  ‘It’s me,’ the voice said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  It was an old man’s voice, quite quiet, with an accent of some sort. ‘On your

  feet,’ I said. ‘This is my house now, and you’re trespassing.’

  ‘Euxenus? It’s me, Syrus.’

  For a moment my mind was as blank as a fresh wax tablet; then I remembered.

  ‘Syrus?’ I said. ‘I thought you were dead.’

  You remember the slave who hurt himself during the olive harvest, and thereby

  indirectly caused the death of my father? That was Syrus. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘not

  so’s you’d notice.’

  I moved closer, and he lifted his head. It was Syrus all right. He’d gone bald

  and his beard was white and scraggy, he was painfully thin

  — he’d been a stout, round-faced man when I last saw him — and the folds of

  empty skin around the sides of his eyes and chin made me think of sacks dumped

  on the floor. He’d gone blind, I realised.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I asked.

  He looked at me — well, about a yard to my right, actually; it was rather

  disconcerting. ‘Nowhere else to go,’ he replied. ‘You re­member, in his will