The Pillars of Hercules

by David Constantine

  And there was only one king now. He sat in his palace and no one saw him. Earlier in the year all the talk around the campfires was whether he had one son or two, but now he had none. He had lost one in Sicily, the other (so it was rumored) in the far west, at the world’s edge. He had no flesh to call his own anymore. Save his own…

  He still had a kingdom, though. Not just Macedonia either: the East was still his; Persia showed no signs of shaking off his yoke, and he showed no signs of coming to terms with Athens. That city had held onto at least some of its empire—had kept at some portion of its navy, had regained Carthage and struck a deal with Syracuse. Now the world waited to see what would happen next.

  Nor was it simply about kings and empires anymore. It was something more. First the hairy star; then the storms; then the burning bird. And now the tremors in the Earth. The autumn had been bad. The winter promised to be worse. It seemed the ground shook every few days now. Strange portents had been seen. Oracles said the gods were displeased. Priests kept to themselves. Peasants kept to their villages at night. They were said to fear monsters that had crawled up from the underworld and that roamed the woods around them. No one of any repute had seen one. Still, it made people nervous. It made it easier for the man to skulk through Pella. He was no monster. He may have been missing a finger, but no one would notice that. No one would care. He was just one of the crowd.

  Now he was one of the king’s guards. He knew a brothel where some of them cavorted. He knew a back door. He never even used the front—just went straight into one of the rooms and relieved the client within of his uniform and his life. The girl too. By the time they found the bodies none of this would matter. Ten minutes later he was riding with a score of other guards across the promontory that led to the palace, escorting a train of wagons carrying supplies. Five minutes after that he was moving through the darkened, draft-filled halls. He didn’t need any credentials now. He was at one with the shadows of the flickering braziers. He blended right in—walked past sentry-posts and guards and he was just darkness flitting on the wall.

  Getting into the throne room was a little more difficult. There were no guards inside, but there were plenty of traps. Fortunately he knew most of them. And those that didn’t, he was able to deduce. He knew too much of the mind of the man who had set them. In short order he was climbing across the vaulted ceiling that overlooked the throne room—and then sliding down one of the lion-emblazoned banners that hung from the arches. From the bottom of the banner it was twenty feet to the floor. The man dropped to it as lithely as a cat.

  Then he approached the throne. It was the only thing in that huge chamber that wasn’t entirely in darkness. Torches surrounded the giant chair, their light making the tree from which it had been carved look all the more misshapen.

  Same with the man who sat in it. If anything, Philip had gotten even fatter. It would have been impossible for him to get uglier. He stared at the figure closing on his throne and didn’t seem in the least surprised.

  “You took your time getting here,” he said—and raised a wine goblet in mock-toast.

  The figure stopped, threw back his hood. “It wasn’t easy,” he replied.

  “Neither was being defeated, I’m sure.”

  Alexander nodded. He’d seen it in the mirror: his face looked five years older. He felt at least ten. “Hephaestion is dead,” he said dully.

  “Dead?” asked Philip. “Or just keeping a low profile?”

  “He was burnt across half his body. I held him as he died.”

  “That must have been touching.”

  “I never”—Alexander stopped for a moment. Then: “I never imagined defeat would be so hard.”

  “You mean you thought you’d never be defeated.”

  “It wasn’t a fair fight.”

  Philip laughed. “Fair? That word means nothing. You knew the stakes. You failed to master them.”

  “So did you.”

  “Ptolemy—”

  “—met the same fate as Eumenes.”

  “You should have gone yourself,” said Philip.

  “I would have lost my army.”

  “You did lose your army.”

  Alexander nodded. Almost like a chastised child. Then—“How many soldiers do we have left?”

  “I have thirty thousand,” said Philip. “And twice as many allied units.”

  “Enough to hold onto Persia.”

  “Enough to continue to fight Athens.”

  “Which you don’t intend to do.”

  “Who knows?” The king slurped wine. “But they’re no longer the real enemy. The folks you stirred up downstairs are.”

  “They won’t be up here for a while.”

  “We don’t know that, do we?” Philip’s voice dripped sarcasm. “They could be here in a hundred years. They could be here next Tuesday. My guess: we don’t have much time. Tell me, do you still hear the voices?”

  “No. They’ve gone silent.”

  Laughter: “Because they got what they needed from you. Someone dumb enough and powerful enough to switch the lights back on.”

  “If we had been able to secure the chariot—”

  “They never intended for mortals to have it.”

  “What they intend and what they’ve gotten may be two different things. There was a lot of fighting downstairs. A lot of damage. I think whatever… apparatus was communicating with me wasn’t unscathed. Look at the weather. It’s now out of control. And it used to be under my control.”

  “Only partially,” said Philip. “Only to the extent their machinery allowed it. So you could stir up some waves and conjure up some clouds? So what?”

  “So I still retain some powers over the elements. Some residue.”

  Philip’s eyes narrowed. “Did you acquire one of the amulets?”

  “I can only wish.”

  “You’re not the one with the powers. It’s them. That’s the way they intended it.”

  “I disagree. I still have the—”

  “Fuck your bloodline.”

  Alexander shrugged. “It’s yours too.”

  “It’s also your son’s. Who you let slip from your control.”

  “I’ll get him back.”

  Philip practically dropped his wine-glass. “He’s still alive?”

  “I know it for a fact.”

  “So in other words: you’ve fucked up totally.”

  “I admit there have been setbacks.”

  Philip threw back his head and laughed. “Name one thing that’s gone right.”

  “I know who my father really is now.”

  The laughter stopped as quickly as it had started. A welter of emotions crossed the cragged face. “So you’re… you understand that what happened at Siwah was a sham?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that Zeus was a lie.”

  Alexander shook his head. “The voice that claimed to be Zeus… maybe. The real Zeus… never.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Zeus is Olympian. Not Plutonian. He rules in the heavens above.”

  “And you’ve spoken with him how many times?”

  “I don’t need to speak with him to know I’m his son.”

  “So you really are still crazy.”

  Alexander shrugged. “A strange word to use after everything that’s happened.”

  “Nonetheless: an accurate one.”

  “How so?”

  “You need to put aside this childish obsession with sucking the dicks of superbeings.”

  “And suck yours instead?”

  “I said don’t be childish,” snapped Philip. “You truly think those above will bear you any more love than those below?”

  “It’s not love I’m interested in. It’s finding a way to kick the Plutonians back down to Hell when they show up.” A long pause, then: “I accept what I couldn’t before. I truly do. Your seed was put into my mother without interference—without acceleration of the bloodline. But that just means that ultimately Zeus
is father of us both—the one who set all this in motion.”

  “Too simplistic a theory,” said Philip. “There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen, and they weren’t all on the same side either.”

  “Nonetheless. The only way for me to salvage this situation is to get upstairs—get to the All-Father’s side—”

  “And take his place,” said Philip. “No? You step inside his machinery, you take charge of his magicks—if you could do that, you wouldn’t just be the one who ruled the world. You’d rule the universe.”

  “Is there any other ambition worth having now?” asked Alexander. “There are god only knows how many other gods downstairs waking up, plotting—among themselves, against each other, against all of us. There are at least seven other bloodline-houses that might have bred players capable of climbing into the gears of the celestial sphere. So what the hell else are we supposed to do but get moving?”

  “Work together,” said Philip. “That’s what.” Alexander said nothing. “You know I’m right. You may have come back here thinking you were going to try to kill me, but I’m sitting in this throne and you know what it’s capable of. Same way you know that the reason we failed was that we didn’t work together. Our men worked at cross-purposes. That can’t happen again.”

  “It won’t,” said Alexander.

  His multi-hued eyes shone; suddenly Philip was illuminated as though from within—every bone in his body glowing with white-heat, his whole skeleton incandescent for a single instant. He screamed and writhed—and gripped the arm-rests of the chair, which sent a hail of missiles flying at Alexander: arrows and spears and iron-balls, all of them flying in from every corner of the room, every single one of them somehow missing as Alexander just stood there, as Philip’s screaming ceased and his fat melted and his body set fire to his throne.

  The doors to the throne room flew open. Guards poured into the room—only to stop as they saw who stood beside the flaming pyre.

  “I’m king now,” said Alexander.

  There was a stunned pause.

  “The only one,” he added.

  No one was arguing. More soldiers entered the great chamber—and still more. The word spread quickly; they filled that throne room up. In Persia, Alexander’s subjects had bowed before him with proskynesis. But Macedonians crawled before no man. So now they proclaimed him king by acclamation, in the tradition of their army. He had been king for months by his own proclamation, but he wasn’t about to refuse the direct ratification of his father’s forces. After all, now they were his.

  Then that army parted as an old man entered the room. He stooped and used a stick to steady his walking. But he walked steadily enough as he went right up to Alexander and kissed him on both cheeks. His eyes were wet with tears.

  “My king,” he said.

  Alexander embraced him. “Thank you for rendering that throne useless.”

  “It was straightforward enough.”

  “Getting inside his head was not.”

  The old man shrugged, lowered his voice so that only Alexander could hear. “He thought I had returned to his side in both body and spirit. The prodigal philosopher. He used the threat of his assassins to convince me that I’d be safer in Pella. But this city is still the same cage it always was.”

  “Now that he is dead, that will change.”

  “It had better. You need me, Alexander.”

  “It took me too long to realize that. Do you still have qualms about my deeds?”

  “Not when I’ve seen the decadence to which Athens has sunk with my own eyes. They are nothing but mob now.”

  “They were never anything else,” said Alexander. “There is not a man among them whom money does not move. It blinds them—even as it makes them see what we want them to see. A poisoned sorceror, for instance.”

  “There are many types of poisons,” said Aristotle. “And the kind that merely seems to kill can be more useful than one that actually does the job.”

  Alexander looked at him almost ruefully: “Yet you could have been of so much more help. You watched the game, but did not play it.”

  “I needed to understand its nature.”

  “Your daughter showed no such caution.”

  The old man nodded. “I taught her too much. She tampered with my work rooms. Read a few too many of my scrolls. Refused to confine herself to the tasks I’d appointed her. And now she is almost certainly dead on account of it.”

  “If she is still alive, you will bring her to heel.”

  “We’ll bring all creation to heel,” said Aristotle. Alexander took his hand and turned back to the troops who filled the hall. Beside him, the body of the old king kept burning, smoke pouring from the blackened throne and past the lion-banners, rising through the atrium skylights far overhead, out toward the starry orb above. Alexander held up Aristotle’s hand.

  “I’d like you to meet my new chancellor,” he said.

  Appendix:

  Building A World That Wasn’t

  Alternate history—“counterfactual history,” as historians like to call it—is a tricky business. The world you envision is a combination of stuff that happened and stuff that, well, didn’t, with the latter category encompassing a spectrum that runs from the it-really-could-have-been-that-way, to the kinda-unlikely, to the downright impossible. Nonetheless, one starts with an understanding of the past as it occurred, and a few notes on that might be in order to help readers unravel the world of Pillars.

  On Alexander the Great:

  The more he recedes in history, the more he towers over it. After the death of his father, few expected the untried boy who became king of Macedonia to survive, yet in just over a decade he conquered an empire the size of which still boggles the imagination more than two millennia later. Alexander has lost none of his ability to captivate and charm during that time—but that’s all the more reason for us to be careful.

  What I found particularly interesting in penning this manuscript is just how far the view of Alexander in fiction has diverged from the scholarly consensus of him. Much of the literature—SF or otherwise—has followed in the footsteps of W.W. Tarn’s vision of Alexander, a Victorian scholar who saw in the king echoes of the British Empire’s self-styled “civilizing” mission, and who thus painted a picture of an Alexander who was not just a near-perfect ruler, but also the very best of men. Tarn’s most notable influence was of course upon the peerless Mary Renault1, but his shadow has fallen upon many other writers, all of them quick to explain away every single act of the king’s that might give his admirers the slightest pause2.

  Yet from a scholarly point of view, Tarn’s view of Alexander has long been a dead letter. Ernst Badian of Harvard University saw to that when he demolished Tarn in a series of revolutionary articles, portraying Alexander as a ruthless manipulator who excelled at realpolitik, a king whose ability to wreak slaughter on the battlefield was equalled only by his skill at orchestrating intrigue behind it. To quote Badian himself:

  No aspect of the career of Alexander the Great should be more important and constructive to the historian than the series of executions and assassinations by which he partly crushed and partly anticipated the opposition of Macedonian nobles to his person and policy. Yet no aspect has, on the whole, been less studied in modern times….This procedure is part of an attitude towards Alexander the Great of which Tarn was the most distinguished (though by no means the only) exponent, an attitude which has made the serious study of Alexander’s reign from the point of view of political history not only impossible, but (to many students) almost inconceivable. Yet there is no plausible reason why the autocracy of Alexander the Great should not be as susceptible of political analysis as that of Augustus or Napoleon, for the grim and bloody struggle for power that went on almost unremittingly at his court is amply documented even in our inadequate sources.3

  Badian also wrote at length on the trajectory of Alexander’s megalomania, the other part of the key to understanding the king, though I’ll be t
he first to admit that Pillars takes more than a few liberties in articulating a metaphysic that frames that megalomania in a rather different light. Indeed, it’s only in recent years that Tarn’s grip on the world-view of Alexander novelists seems to have loosened, and a more balanced view of Alexander has begun to come to the fore4.

  On the Geopolitical Gameboard:

  The question of what would have happened had Alexander turned West might just be the oldest alternate history of all, since the Roman historian Livy devoted a portion of his ninth volume to how Rome would have fared had the Macedonian Empire invaded Italy. Writing at the height of Rome’s power, Livy was anxious to reassure his audience that Alexander would have met his match against their forefathers; his attempt to do this by naming a long list of unknown Roman generals who he believed could have taken on the champ rings less than totally convincing. Nonetheless, Livy was onto something when he observed that “Alexander died young….before he had time to experience any change of fortune.” We can only say what might have been.

  More recently, Arnold Toynbee’s Some Problems of Greek History concludes with three fascinating essays that explore various permutations of Alexander and/or Philip living and potentially turning west. In some ways, Philip II remains one of those unfortunate characters of history, a man who might have been hailed as great in his own right, had it not been for the son who came after him. Yet it was Philip who built Macedonia into a superpower capable of taking on the world—and imagining the ongoing struggle between him and his son carrying over into a post-Persian mileau made for some intriguing speculation.