Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  King Philip of Macedon started off his reign with a series of hard, difficult wars against the seemingly inexhaustible supply of savage and barbarous races who filled up the mountainous wastes to the north and west of his kingdom —

  Illyrians, Thracians, Thessalians, Triballians, Paeonians and Getae. Much to everyone’s surprise he beat them all and, more surprising still, instead of burning their villages, killing the men and selling the women and children as slaves, he turned as many of these apparently sub-human creatures as he possibly could into good Macedonians, or at least the nearest imitation he could get.

  Mildly interesting to an Athenian observer; we relish strange tales from the hills, and of course at that time we made it our business to stay au fait with the latest reports from the region because we had valuable colonies up there, inhabited by real Athenians who’d left Athens for reason of business or health.

  We started to take a little more notice when Philip, having run out of hairy tribesmen to slaughter and tame, turned south. It’s a long story and rather a sad one if you’re an Athenian. The short version is that he began by appointing himself the guardian of Apollo — we’d always assumed that Apollo, being a god, was big enough and ugly enough to look after himself, but apparently not; it came to Philip’s attention that some impious wretches from the city of Phocis had annexed the sacred shrine and oracle of Delphi, helped themselves to the huge reserves of money deposited there (Apollo is honorary banker to the cities of Greece, something I’ve always found most odd. After all, he’s a god; not the sort of person you’d trust to look after your cloak in the baths, let alone your life’s savings) and were behaving in a generally disrespectful manner. By the time he managed to wangle an excuse for intervening, the man who’d masterminded the coup was dead and his henchmen scattered, but nevertheless Philip ploughed steadfastly on, beat the Phocians to a pulp, scooped up a couple of valuable cities that had been carelessly left lying about, and somehow wandered sixty or so miles further south until he came up against the Athenian army at the celebrated narrow pass of Thermopylae. We’d rushed our forces up there to protect our colonies, mines and other valuables, just in case Philip absent-mindedly slipped them up his sleeve, as guests sometimes palm spoons at dinner-parties; on this occasion he took the hint and proceeded no further.

  Nevertheless, anybody who hadn’t heard of Philip before was well aware of him now, and we were in the uncomfortable position of people who’ve acquired an antisocial and boisterous new neighbour, whose children steal apples from the home orchard and whose dog chases the sheep.

  No matter, we thought; all except a man by the name of Demosthenes, a professional lawyer with a speech impediment who started saying worrying things in Assembly not long after Philip’s picnic in Thessaly . Demosthenes had a fine turn of phrase and it was a treat to listen to him on a warm, lazy morning when there wasn’t much else to do. There was always a splendid turnout when we knew he was planning to speak; but we didn’t really take any notice. After all, the idea of the wild and woolly Philip being a serious threat to Athens was a fantasy, as imaginative and amusing as that old comedy by Aristophanes where women take over the government of Athens and start voting in Assembly. We Athenians love comic fantasy.

  Not long ago I met a man who told me a story he’d heard about young Alexander, Philip’s son; according to this man, the incident referred to must have taken place about this time. I’m convinced it’s either wholly or partly false — you’ll see why in due course — but there may be a grain of truth in it, so I’ll pass it on, and you can make up your own mind.

  Background, Phryzeutzis: you probably know by now that we Greeks tell stories about a mighty hero called Hercules, the son of Zeus Himself. In the stories, the first sign that Hercules was going to be a mighty hero was when a couple of snakes crawled into his cot a few days after he was born and tried to sting him, whereupon he strangled them with his bare hands. Now, according to what this man told me, Philip’s wife Olympias felt that her son deserved a proper start in life just as much as Hercules, and arranged for a couple of fangless, elderly snakes to be turned loose in the bed where Alexander was sleeping; the idea was that the young prince (who was old enough to throttle snakes, and undoubtedly knew the story) would take the point, recognise a good public-relations opportunity when he saw one, scrag the unfortunate snakes and let the goddess Rumour do the rest. The plan worked just fine, up to a point. The snakes did their part, following a carefully laid trail of live ants trapped in runny honey up the side of the bed and on to the prince’s pillow; Alexander noticed them and, quick as lighming, snatched a dagger from under his pillow (which nobody knew was there) and slashed the heads off the snakes before you could say ‘garlic’. So far, so good.

  Unfortunately, Alexander’s next step was to storm into the great hall of the palace, fling the headless remains down at his mother’s feet, and in a very loud voice demand to know why she’d seen fit to try to murder him. This put Olympias in a rather awkward position —she couldn’t tell the truth for fear of looking extremely silly, but the evidence of the dead snakes and the trail of ants and honey did seem to point towards an assassination attempt. Accordingly, Olympias was forced to frame a minor Macedonian nobleman and his wife and have them put to death on the spot, which annoyed Philip when he heard about it and caused a coolness between them that lasted for some time.

  As I said a moment ago, you’ll soon see why I don’t accept this story as the whole truth. But that picture of the young Alexander, stalking past the astonished nobles with a pair of dead snakes dragging behind him where most kids his age would be trailing a wooden horse on a string or some other favourite toy — that I can believe in; and if it isn’t true, it should be. So, by including it in this book of mine, I’ve given it a certain degree of truth and thereby, I guess, improved history.

  Athenians of my generation play a memory-game, a sort of reminiscence competition. ‘Where were you and what were you doing when you first heard about Olynthus ?’ they ask each other. ‘Pruning my vines,’ says one. ‘In the market square.’ ‘In Assembly, of course.’ ‘You remember that brothel in Tripod Street ?

  Well, I was just coming out of there when I met my cousin, and he told me.. .‘

  But it’s true enough; everybody remembers hearing the news. It was one of those moments — rare enough, thank the gods — when you feel the outside world bursting through the walls we all build to keep it out of our personal lives, like a flood battering down a sea-wall; a moment when you realise you’re suddenly ankle-deep in history, and the level is all set to rise faster than you can run.

  I was in Pallene, of all places, helping my brother Euthyphron. Gods alone know what I was doing there; but Euthyphron had sounded so pathetic when I bumped into him in the street, moaning about how impossible it was for a man on his own to cope with all the work that had to be done in the height of summer on a miserably rocky, strung-out holding like his. I offered to change places with him there and then; he pretended he hadn’t heard me.

  ‘You remember the mountain terraces,’ he sighed, leaning on his walking-stock like an old man of seventy (he’s a year younger than me). ‘Three ploughings in summer, minimum; really, three’s the absolute minimum, you need to go four if you expect to do any good. Fewer than three and come autumn you’re just wasting good seed-corn.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ I replied. ‘Which begs the question, why are you here in the City rather than back home working?’

  Now, I didn’t remember Euthyphron as being particularly hard of hearing, but something must have happened to him since I left home, because he had great difficulty hearing a lot of what I said to him.

  ‘As if that’s not bad enough,’ he went on, ‘the damn plough’s virtually clapped out — the share-iron’s thin as a leaf at the point and you remember where Father mended the break in the drawbar by wrapping it round with rawhide? Well, that’s starting to peel off, but where am I going to get rawhide from this time of year? Jus
t my luck, of course, to get the old knackered spare and not the—’

  ‘My heart bleeds,’ I interrupted. ‘Of course, it simply hasn’t occurred to you to get a new one made.’

  He must have heard that all right, because he turned his head like a crow looking up from a carcass and gave me that special look of scorn that’s reserved for a working farmer talking to a landless townsman.

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ he said. ‘Oh, yes, you’ve done very nicely for yourself, you’ve forgotten what it’s like actually working for a living. Well, I’m here to tell you, I just haven’t got that much coined money, that’s all; not with a wife and four daughters to provide for, and the roof on the old barn needing fixing — but I just didn’t have the time to do it, so I had to hire a carpenter; do you have any idea..

  I’d been about to offer to buy him a new plough anyway, as a peace offering; but the way he put it, I realised that it wouldn’t be a gift so much as blood-money to appease the wrath of twenty generations of sturdy Attic yeomen whom I’d foully betrayed by turning my back on the land in favour of a life of Persian luxury. Bless him, though, he didn’t hold it against me. As a reward (though really I was just doing my belated duty) he allowed me to help with the ploughing and so re-establish contact with the better part of myself that I’d walled up in some dark recess of my mind; while Euthyphron played with the new plough down on the home enclosures, he let me take the old, rickety heirloom up onto the high terraces, where the stones are the size of a man’s head and have always seemed to me to grow faster than the grapes.

  ‘Please be careful with it,’ he said, almost pleadingly, as I yoked in the oxen.

  ‘If that split in the sole opens out any further, the whole thing’ll only be fit for firewood.’

  So there I was, right up high like an eagle, nursing that decrepit heap of a plough through the dust-thin topsoil of a terrace no wider than the width of my own shoulders, when our neighbour came running past down the hill.

  I’d known Chaereas all my life — twenty-six years, in case you’re interested —

  and in all that time I’d never seen him run. It’d never have occurred to me that he was capable of it. As far as I was concerned, Chaereas slouched — quick slouch in the mornings, agonisingly slow slouch come evening, when he dragged his weary bones home again (and politeness demanded that if I met him on the track I had to walk the rest of the way with him, at his pace; and you know how exhausting it can be, deliberately walking slowly). Yet here he was, racing down the hill like a stag with the hounds at his heels. I let go of the handlebar, took my foot off the footplate and watched, dumbfounded.

  ‘Chaereas?’ I called out.

  ‘Can’t stop.’ He’d seen the plough directly in front of him, but he was going too fast to slow down; instead he soared over it with a mighty leap, like a prize-winning hurdler at the Games. A man twenty years younger would have been proud of that jump.

  ‘Chaereas!’ I yelled down the hill after him. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘The Macedonians,’ he called back. ‘They’re coming! Run!’

  By that point he was too far away to hear me, but I couldn’t leave it at that. I left the plough and team standing — the great thing about nine-year-old oxen is that they stay put — and followed after him as quickly as I dared go, which wasn’t nearly fast enough. I didn’t catch up with him, in fact, until I reached the village, where I saw him huddled in a crowd around a couple of other neighbours of ours, who were saying something about Philip of Macedon...

  It shouldn’t have come as such a shock, really. Philip had been playing war in Chalcidice for some time, threatening and harassing our colonies and allies up there into leaving us and joining him; but for some reason we still hadn’t been able to work up enough enthusiasm to send an army and sort him out. I think it was because of what happened at Thermopylae , where, if you recall, the sight of an Athenian army holding the pass had sent him scuttling away like a fox who’s seen the sheepdog. Sooner or later we’d make a proper show of force, instead of sending a few cut-price mercenaries, and he’d bolt off back to his mountains and his mead-hall and his week-long drinking matches with the tribal warrior-chieftains. He was, after all, just a Macedonian; they may look a bit like proper Greeks, but that didn’t mean a thing. A savage is a savage is a savage; and when you stand up to them, they run. Everybody knew that.

  The news that broke that summer day in my twenty-sixth year was that Philip of Macedon had stormed Olynthus, the principal city of Chalcidice and a loyal friend of Athens; once inside, he’d ordered a general massacre, after which he’d rounded up the ten thousand or so survivors and marched them off in slave-irons to be sold abroad.

  A lot of speeches were made around that time; very good speeches, most of them, packed with memorable phrases. But what immediately comes to mind when I think of that day is old Chaereas hurdling my father’s beat-up second-best plough, with a look of terror on his face as if the Great King and ninety thousand of his archers were treading down the backs of his heels. ‘They’re coming!’ he’d said, but he was a bit behind the times. They’d already arrived, and we hadn’t even noticed.

  Extraordinary times bring to the fore extraordinary men; and the fall of Olynthus was no exception. In her hour of need, Athens turned to me, Euxenus son of Eutychides of the deme of Pallene, a man extraordinarily ill-suited to the task assigned to me.

  We were quite a party, the Athenian embassy to Philip; there was Aeschines, who’d been an actor before he turned to politics; there was Demosthenes, a lawyer; there was Philocrates, an earnest and utterly terrified little man who understood Philip so well that he should never have been allowed to join the party, let alone lead it — whenever he was in the man’s presence, he watched Philip with the motionless resignation of a fledgeling bird on the ground watching a polecat, because he knew, beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt, that it was only a matter of time...

  There were ten ambassadors. Correction; there were nine ambassadors and me. When I canvassed my family and friends for possible explanations of why I’d been chosen, I got a wide selection of plausible replies, but no overall consensus.

  My sister-in-law Praxagora reckoned they’d chosen me because Philip had a habit of killing messengers, and who else was so uniquely expendable? My brother Eudorus, who was also a professional actor, opined that I’d been included as official scapegoat, a complete nobody on whom Aeschines and Demosthenes could dump the blame when the whole mission came to nothing. Diogenes grinned and said they must have chosen me to lull Philip into a true sense of security. Anyway, I went.

  Before I tell you about this momentous event in my life, I’ll just pause for a moment or two and indulge in a little narcissistic mirror-gazing. In my twenty-sixth year I was one of the tallest men in Athens . Between the ages of thirteen and seventeen I’d sprouted at an unbelievable rate — people told me they used to stand there and watch me getting taller, until it made them feel all dizzy and faint. It was my excessive height, according to some, that made me go bald at a relatively early age. That high up, they said, you can’t expect anything to grow except a little moss and the most tenacious species of rock-flower. Now, most of the other freaks of altitude I’ve met have made up for it by being thin and stringy, as if they’d been made out of wax and stretched when they were three parts set. Not me. In spite of the fact that I’d given up farm work at a relatively early age and never took any exercise that I could possibly avoid, I had broad shoulders and forearms as thick as some men’s calves. I could pick up great big oil-jars that took two ordinary men to shift —

  I didn’t, as a rule, but I could have if I’d wanted to — and from the age of thirteen onwards, fights and aggravation were things that happened to other people, not to me. Looking back, of course, this was a handicap.

  That said, I was a pretty feeble specimen when it came to anything involving stamina. My diminutive brother Eumenes, for instance, could walk under my outstretched arm without duckin
g and if we walked together he had to trot to keep up with my great shambling strides. But if we happened to be walking uphill, it wouldn’t be long before he’d be tapping his foot impatiently, waiting for me to catch up. Eumenes, of course, was a farmer.

  When an Athenian asks you, ‘What does so-and-so look like?’ what he means is, ‘Is he good-looking?’ That’s essential information for an Athenian, because of this beautiful-good/ugly-bad thing I’ve touched on before. We reckon that beauty is like a seal, pressed into the soft wax of our faces when we’re born, so that for ever afterwards people will be able to tell at a glance whether we’re good or bad. By that criterion, I was sort of middling-nothingish, which I suppose is fair enough (but I still don’t believe in the general rule). Baldness is regarded as a sort of amusing eccentricity-cum-folly in Athens , like absent-mindedness, wearing outlandish or inappropriate clothes or mild kleptomania; people made it plain that though they didn’t condone it, they didn’t really hold it against me either.

  (I can see you smiling, Phryzeutzis; you think that because I can’t see you doing it, I won’t know. But it’s true; when I was younger, I was a very tall man, and if I could only get this pathetic excuse for a back of mine to straighten out, I could prove it to you. All right, don’t believe me if you don’t want to; but the only man I ever met who was noticeably taller than me was Hephaestion the Macedonian, Alexander’s friend; the one the Persian queen assumed must be Alexander, because he was the tallest man in the room. And no, I don’t know why I’m making such an issue of it. I suppose it’s because it’s really the only respect in which I’ve excelled my fellow men and so in spite of myself I’m really rather proud of it, deep down, even though it was none of my doing.)

  Philocrates was supposed to brief us on the ship, so that we’d arrive in Macedon fully informed and up to date, ready for anything that the man already widely acknowledged as the world’s greatest living negotiator might have lined up for us. But Philocrates was seasick. Desperately seasick. In fact, he was so wholeheartedly and continuously seasick that he set me thinking seriously about the theory of reincarnation, as proposed by the great Pythagoras and endorsed fairly recently by the celebrated Plato. I’d never had much time for it myself;