his own hands, after a long, hard night with the local wine, but the part of
town I was billeted in was so far away that I didn’t even see the glow in the
sky. I was around when General Parmenio ‘s son Philotas was accused of treason,
and father and son were put to death as blithely as we’d wring the neck of a
goose for the table, but I only heard about it a day or so afterwards. I marched
to India all right, but mostly what I had to look at was the ruts in the road
left by our carts and the arse of the horse in front. I wasn’t important enough
(thank gods) to be one of the officers at the staff meeting where Alexander
announced out of the blue that from now on, the Macedonians as well as the
Persians and the other conquered peoples were expected to fall on their faces
and worship him as a god. All this stuff, this history, passed me by. Which is
probably just as well.
The plain truth is, by this stage I wasn’t feeling quite myself, if you see what
I mean. It was something to do with the medicine I’d been taking. I’d assumed,
no more bees, no more medicine, but it didn’t quite work like that in practice.
I found that not taking the medicine left me feeling much worse than the
bee-stings ever did; I was dizzy, muddle-headed, irritable, nervous, shaky and
sometimes quite horribly depressed, and I couldn’t begin to imagine why, since
there wasn’t anything wrong with me. So I asked around until I found some
Scythian auxiliaries — they were full-time horse-breakers, attached to Livestock
— and asked them if they knew how I could get some more medicine. But they just
looked sad and said they knew exactly how I felt; the bush or tree the leaves
came from simply didn’t grow in Persia , and that was all there was to it.
However, they went on, they’d been making their own enquiries and they’d found
out about a local Persian medicine that was probably almost as good, and as soon
as they got hold of some they’d let me know so I could give it a try.
They were as good as their word. It was completely different stuff; for a start
it was some kind of root rather than leaves, and you chewed it rather than
burning it, and if anything it was a good deal stronger than the leaves had
been. Anyway, it certainly did the job as far as getting rid of the dizziness
and the shakes and all, so I got them to make me up a big, big batch of the
stuff.
At first I was as happy as a lamb; happier, in fact, since lambs don’t go around
smiling all the time or occasionally bursting out laughing for no apparent
reason (which I’m told I did, frequently). But then I started getting the
weirdest dreams; first when I was asleep and then, annoyingly, when I wasn’t.
The dreams were always different, but they generally started off with me asleep;
but I wasn’t at the war, sleeping in a tent, I was back home in Attica, and the
bed was an old one that had been in our family for generations, and I was the
head of the family, which wasn’t even our family, if you see what I mean.
Anyway, I’d wake up and remember that I was a prosperous Athenian farmer with a
beautiful young wife and three fine sons; and then I’d roll over and see on the
pillow next to me a dead body, shrivelled away into a skull, with the dried skin
shrunk tight to the bone and a fine, full head of snow-white hair. This always
scared the shit out of me, even though I knew it was coming. Anyway, I’d get up
and go into the next room, and there on the floor under a blanket would be three
more skin-and-bone corpses of very old men. By this time I’d have worked out
that the one in my bed was my wife and the other three were my sons, and that
I’d somehow been turned into a god during the night. Well, a good night’s sleep
for a god is longer than a mortal lifespan; while I’d been asleep my wife and
sons had slept with me, and in that long sleep they’d grown very old and died.
In fact, so had everybody, except me. As the dream went on, so I’d remembered
more and more; before I was a god I was a soldier, part of the army that
conquered the world with Alexander. So I’d go and see if there was anybody I
knew there; but when I found them they were all dead too, all shrivelled up in
their beds and cots and hammocks. Then I’d remember that Alexander had been a
god, just like me, so I’d go to look for him; and I’d find him, dead in his
sleep and dried up like strips of fish in the sun, until his skin was as hard
and brittle as the bark of a dead tree and his hair snapped off if you touched
it. I’d search the whole world, in fact, but they’d all be the same. I’d
outlived them all, in one night, every living thing in the world. The only other
person I ever found in these dreams was Peitho, who was every bit as dead as
they were, but not dried up or shrivelled, so somehow he could talk to me and
move about.
‘Hello, Peitho,’ I’d say.
‘Hello,’ he’d reply, and salute; or sometimes he’d do the full Persian obeisance
routine that Alexander had such trouble getting the Macedonians to do. And I’d
know as soon as I looked into his eyes that he was plotting to kill me, because
I’d become a god; and that wouldn’t do, since it’s bad for morale if junior
officers start murdering gods all over the shop. So every time he tried to
poison me, I’d have him executed, and the next day there he’d be again, until
eventually he’d be there all the time, just like he is now. Of course, he was
younger then; now he’s grown old and shrivelled just like the rest of them. The
only one who hasn’t changed is me.
Of course, I know he isn’t there really, he’s some kind of nasty side-effect of
the medicine, just like that damn buzzing sound, like a swarm of bees, that I
hear nearly all the time now. Interesting, the bees. You see, I don’t know if
you know this but bees are immortal, too; not individually, of course, but as a
group, a bit like a city. It’s that old thing about the component and the whole;
the small parts die and perish but the thing they make up endures for ever; like
some city founded by a mighty hero to perpetuate his name, for instance, or even
an empire such as the empire of the Kings of Persia orAlexander of Macedon.
Components die; components don’t matter, they aren’t worth spit. Only the whole,
the unity, the thing made up out of the parts, really exists. Not the man, only
the god he becomes. The Egyptians told Alexander that everybody is part of the
god; then that he was the god that they made up. Now, I can’t say I quite follow
that line of reasoning, though it does sort of tie in with what I’ve noticed
over the years, about the difference between who people are and who they become
through the eyes of other people; like you became this great wise philosopher
who’d taught Alexander the meaning of everything. Well, quite. I rest my case.
Sometimes, in fact, Peitho is the bees and the bees are Peitho; I look at him
closely and he sort of melts down into the swarm, so closely packed together
(dead but not really dead, because the swarm can’t die) that from a distance
they look like a single man. Oh, it’s all right, he isn’t like that now, he’s
; just ordinary, dead old Peitho. Best friend I ever had, till he started trying
to kill me.
And, of course, all this is imaginary, the side-effects of the medicine, which
the Scythians told me I’ll have to keep taking for the
rest of my life if I ever want to be really cured. I’ve got a big jar of it.
They gave me exactly enough, they said; when I come to the end of it, that’ll be
the time for me to die. I find it reassuring to know I’ll never run out of the
stuff; by now, I guess, without it I’d be seriously ill. But it gets to you
after a while, knowing deep down that however they appear on the surface,
everybody you meet or talk to is actually dead, that all I’m seeing right now is
my memory of you, and that we’re not having this conversation, I’m simply
remembering history, a conversation we had years and years ago, before you
died.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
N ext morning, we went our separate ways; Eudaemon back to Attica , to the
family farm I’d been keeping warm for him, with his jar of medicine and his
invisible companion; me on into Asia , heading East towards Sogdiana, with my
empty jar and my invisible snake. The last I saw of him was the back of his head
as he slept; with his broken leg he couldn’t come down to the post halt, and to
be honest with you I wasn’t too sorry. It would have been awkward saying
goodbye to him now that I knew he’d gone completely crazy. I’m afraid I get
terribly embarrassed around people with disturbed or damaged minds.
The Persian system of post roads is, sorry, was little short of miraculous. In
King Darius’ time, before the Greeks let it go to rack and ruin, the royal
messenger service maintained a straight, well-surfaced road all the way across
the Empire, with inns at regular intervals, fresh horses standing by, cavalry
escorts to get you across dangerous or debatable territory, everything a
traveller in a hurry could possibly want. For all I know, I could have been one
of the last people to use it to go right across the Empire and so get the full
benefit of it. Now, of course, with what was the Empire split up into several
rival kingdoms and parts of it effectively outside anybody’s control, the
messenger service has gone and the road’s in a sorry state. A pity, but there it
is.
Since it was fairly obvious from pretty early on that my horsemanship simply
wasn’t up to the standard needed to make proper use of the road, the couriers
who went with me organised a carriage —well, more of a cart, really, except that
it was drawn by horses rather than oxen or mules, and it had a sort of vestigial
leather hood to keep
off the worst of the sun and the weather. Nevertheless, the feeling of being a
consignment of olives on their way to market was depressingly strong. The
motion of the cart made me very drowsy, and I slept on and off for most of the
journey; even when I was awake during the day, I kept well in the shade of the
canopy and out of the blinding sun. As a result, I missed the scenery and the
points of interest and the remarkable sights, as usual.
Instead of sightseeing and taking an intelligent interest in my surroundings,
as a good historian should (think of Herodotus, with his magpie mind and his
tape measure and his incessant questions), I spent a lot of time thinking with
my eyes shut; a proceeding which greatly puzzled the couriers, until the
Macedonian courier explained to the two Persians that in the small, plain jar in
my luggage was a magic, fortune-telling serpent, and I was communing with it.
After that, they left me well alone, except for a few tentative enquiries about
romantic encounters and gambling strategies.
I thought a lot about jars, as it happens, and the contents thereof; jars of
bees hurled into mineshafts to flush out the enemy; jars of wine and grain being
meticulously counted by the keepers of the Athenian census, to ascertain which
property class a man belonged to; jars of various sorts of produce stacked up in
the hold of my friend Tyrsenius’ ship; jars of arrows bumping along in a supply
train on their way to the war; empty wine-jars littering the floor of the house
of a man who’s given up bothering; jars of poison for the body and the mind;
jars of wisdom and prophecy. Most everything that moves about from one place to
another in this world travels in a jar — it’s the handiest, most convenient
container of all, waterproof, of a fixed and easily regulated volume, easy to
stack, easy to keep track of if you simply scratch a few letters on its neck.
According to legend, the greatest of all the heroes, Hercules, escaped from the
murderous Cercopes by hiding in a jar. Seal the neck with wax or pitch and the
contents will stay fresh indefinitely, like the words of a historian in a book.
If you’re so minded, you can hire a painter to embellish the outside of your jar
with unreal images of legendary and long-dead people, drawing out of his
imagination the way they ought to have looked (which is not necessarily what
they were actually like; but who’s to say which is the more valid image, the way
a man was or the way he ought to have been, or the way he seemed to be to those
around him, those influenced by him?). Oh, your humble jar has a fair claim to
being Man’s best friend, if you discount the first ever jar, the one the gods
gave to Pandora, with all the troubles and evils of the world packed inside; but
she didn’t know that and clawed away the wax that stopped the neck, releasing
all the evils and the troubles into the air, like a swarm of buzzing bees, and
leaving behind only one, the most pernicious of all — blind Hope, the queen bee,
who has lived at the bottom of jars ever since.
And so, after a long and uneventful journey (I got sunstroke once and dysentery
twice; a wheel came off the cart at the Gaspian Gates, fortunately before we
struck out across the desert; between Bactra and Nautaca one of the post inns
had burned down, so we had to sleep in the cart and eat field rations; otherwise
nothing to speak of), I arrived here, where the Scythian mountains run down to
the Iaxartes river, wherever the hell that is in relation to anywhere else. As I
perceived it, a day came when the cart stopped early, a courier woke me up and
said, ‘We’re here,’ and, having no reason not to believe him, I got out and
unloaded my luggage. I suppose it’s possible that he played some kind of
practical joke on me and this is in fact Italy , or southern Libya , or the
country north of the Danube . Of course that’d mean you were in on the joke too,
Phryzeutzis; but you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?
Don’t answer that.
Assuming that this is Sogdiana, it’s the furthest north-easterly point where the
wilderness of the Scythian nomads (that’s you, my young friend) impinges upon
the settled, mundane world of farmers and city-dwellers. Is it just me, or do
you Scythians lie at the edges of everything, as the Ocean is reckoned to
encompass all the dry land? Go north off the edge of the map (Aristagoras’
engraved bronze map, that bamboozled the Athenians into the First Persian War..
. Maps have a lot to answ
er for) and it seems to me that wherever you go, from
northern Greece to India, you’ll find yourself among Scythians; an unlikely race
to have had such a significant effect on the lives of my brother and myself, but
a pretty pervasive influence all the same. Maybe you Scythians (sorry, we
Scythians, I keep forgetting) surround the other nations of the earth the way
darkness surrounds the light of a flickering lamp; or maybe Scythia is the rule
and the bit in the middle is the exception; the small exception, maybe — does
anybody know how big Scythia actually is? For all I know it could be so huge
that all the countries of Darius’ and Alexander’s Empire put together are tiny
in comparison, like a single fallen leaf in the market square of a busy town.
*
The walls were already up when I arrived here; the streets were laid out, the
public buildings more or less complete, the water supply connected up.
Apparently, because of Alexander’s habit of founding cities like a dog pissing
against trees, the engineers had made it a rule always to have the basic
components of a city to hand, all neatly stored in jars, numbered, ready to slot
together at a moment’s notice — modular unit Ideal Societies, where the temple
roof from Alexandria-in-Arachosia would fit the temple in
Alexandria-on-the-Caucasus should they ever happen to need a spare. They’d got
putting the bits together down to a fine art, they could put up a city almost as
quickly as their colleagues in the siege and assault department could tear one
down. My old friend Agenor the stonemason would have hated that.
So there was precious little for me to do, apart from ‘stand by’, as my brother
would say (but all my life I’ve been a bystander, though never, gods know, an
innocent one). I had to dedicate the temple, where the statue of the god (god,
unspecified, marble, service issue, one) bore an uncanny resemblance to
Alexander of Macedon, until a thrice-blessed workman contrived to chip off half
of its nose while installing the head on the shoulders. Now our god stands there
in an inspiringly martial pose, one head outstretched to aid and succour, the
other upraised to strike, looking like one of those professional boxers we used
to get at country fairs who’s lost one too many fights for the good of his
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 63