Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  ‘It’s a well-known syndrome,’ Lysicles replied, lying back on his couch and dropping a grape into his mouth. ‘Great men’s sons never amount to anything. All through their early years they’re completely overshadowed by their fathers, like weedy little plants growing under big trees. Everybody tries so hard to turn them into exact copies of the Old Man that they never learn the ability to think for themselves. I expect you’ll find this young Alexander’s a little tiny Philip, like the wee clay figures the Egyptians put in tombs; an exact copy, but much smaller in every respect. It’s a well-known fact; the more illustrious the father, the feebler the son. That’s why great empires ebb and flow like rivers,’

  he added, stifling a belch. ‘Up one generation, down the next. Take the Persians,’ he went on. ‘First there’s Cyrus. Cyrus the Great. Carves out a mighty empire, conquers half the world. And who does he have for a son?

  Hydaspes, of whom virtually nothing is known. His son? Darius the wet-slap.

  Darius, who we beat the shit out of. And who does he have for a son? Xerxes. The moral: a great conqueror, an empire-builder like Cyrus, has a weak son and a pathetic grandson and great—grandson.’

  I thought for a moment before answering. ‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘Though I’m not quite so sure. I mean, it’s true that our great-great-grandfathers beat King Darius’ army—’

  ‘You bet your life,’ Lysicles yawned.

  ‘But,’ I went on, ‘not before he’d burned Chalcis and Eretria and trampled over most of Greece without anybody daring to oppose him. And as I recall, the first thing he had to do when he became king was put down major rebellions in pretty well every province of the empire, which he succeeded in doing in just over a year—’

  ‘If he’d been anything they’d never have rebelled in the first place. And remember, the Scythians beat him too. And they’re just savages.’

  ‘True,’ I admitted. ‘But in their country it snows half the year, and the rest of the time it’s so hot you die of thirst in a day if you don’t know where the wells are. I sort of got the impression he realised Scythia just wasn’t worth the effort and came home again.’

  ‘He was weak,’ Lysicles replied firmly. ‘A strong king’d never have risked his prestige starting a war he knew he couldn’t win. Nothing buggers up a king’s prestige like losing a war. Look at Xerxes.’

  I was only arguing for devilment’s sake. ‘Xerxes burned Athens to the ground,’ I pointed out, the voice of sweet reason and pure truth. ‘Not to mention a whole bunch of other cities. And he got back home again with most of his army intact.

  Sure, we won a few battles, but maybe it was the same as Darius and Scythia .

  Maybe he realised Greece just wasn’t worth the effort.’

  Lysicles smiled. ‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d be a bit careful talking about Xerxes’ war around these parts. Might be a sore topic.’

  That was a good point. Back in those days, when King Xerxes invaded Greece with his huge army, the King of Macedon voluntarily joined the Persian Empire rather than try to fight — a perfectly sensible decision on his part under the circumstances, since he’d have stood no chance at all, but one which had been a source of endless embarrassment to the Macedonians ever since. Sure enough, as soon as it became apparent that, against all the odds, the Greek allies were winning the war and Xerxes was going home, the Macedonian King did his best to set matters straight by betraying the Persian order of battle to the Greek general staff on the night before the decisive battle of Plataea; a helpful act, but not desperately honourable. (Who was that famous general who once said, ‘I’ve nothing against treachery; it s traitors I don’t like’?)

  Come to think of it, the King of Macedon in those days was also called Alexander. A family name, presumably.

  I left Lysicles to catch up on his sleep (I never knew anybody who needed as much sleep as he did) and wandered out into the fresh air. It happened to be one of the few afternoons on that mission that we actually had to ourselves; Philip had been called away, and Parmenio, who was supposed to keep us entertained and busy when Himself wasn’t about, loathed pointless socialising almost as much as he loathed Athenians. The respite came just in time for me; I’ve never liked being indoors terribly much at the best of times. I strolled round a courtyard, found a side door that opened onto an alley and walked up it until I came to another courtyard, where someone was halfway through building a house. There were piles of stone blocks, all neatly cut, shaped and stacked, scaffolding, ropes, orphan tools and all the other junk you find heaped up on building sites, but there was nobody about. I sat down on a heap of blocks, yawned and stretched my arms, taking sincere delight in the absence of human voices.Then I noticed movement behind a pile of timber. I sat still and waited.

  It turned out that there was a boy behind the pile. He was so engrossed in what he was doing that he didn’t realise I was there. I stood and watched him.

  He didn’t look very much like either his father or his mother; even so, I had no trouble recognising him. He may have been a thumb-joint taller than most boys his age, certainly no more than that. He had a long, straight nose, full lips like a girl’s, and big eyes. His hair was naturally curly. Both his knees and elbows were scabbed with recent grazes, and he had a big purple bruise on his right forearm.

  He’d found a nest of wild bees among the stones, and was studying it carefully.

  From time to time he poked at it with a long stick, until a scouting party of bees came buzzing out to see what the matter was. As they emerged from between the stones and started to fly, he flicked them out of the air with the split end of his stick, snapping them down with a short, brisk jerk of the wrist. The speed of his reactions and his eye/hand co-ordination were little short of phenomenal.

  ‘Been stung yet?’ I asked.

  He didn’t jump or even look round, just went on concentrating on the job in hand as he replied. ‘Seven times,’ he said. ‘Twice on the arm, three times on the leg, once on the neck and once on the face.’

  ‘Does it hurt much?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I smiled, but he wasn’t paying me any attention. ‘Then why do it?’ I asked.

  ‘Because they stung my dog yesterday.’

  ‘Good reason,’ I said. ‘It’s the mark of a good man to avenge his friends and dependants. But why do it that way? Why not smoke them out?’

  He narrowed his eyebrows without taking his eye off the bee he was tracking. ‘I hadn’t thought of it,’ he admitted.

  ‘Did you try and think of a better way?’ I asked. ‘Or does the exercise of skill and speed please you so much that you don’t want to find one?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘No reason to suppose you would,’ I conceded. ‘After all, you’re what, ten?’

  ‘Nine,’ he replied. ‘And seven months.’

  I got up and walked round to where he could see me, provided he could be bothered to look.

  ‘You’re an Athenian,’ he said. ‘One of the ambassadors.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I replied. ‘But I used to be a farmer, and when I was your age we had a swarm of wild bees nest in a cavity between the doorframe and the front door. Nearly drove us out of the house for a couple of days, until my father smoked them out.’

  ‘How did he do it?’ Alexander asked.

  ‘With a brazier,’ I replied, ‘one of those little portable ones on a tripod, like they make in Corinth . He cooked up some damp kindling until it was smoking well, then he stood the tripod in the doorway and puffed the smoke up into the nest with a pair of bellows he’d borrowed from our neighbour the smith. That made them all drowsy and sleepy, and we were able to bundle them into an empty hive we’d got handy — we’d lost a swarm the year before, and this way we were able to replace it for free.’

  Alexander thought about that, and let a bee go by unswatted. ‘Didn’t you all get stung while you were doing it?’ he said.

  ‘Once or twice,’ I answered him. ‘Not nearly as
much as seven times. Of course, we knew to muffle ourselves up in cloaks and blankets.’

  I could see him digesting the information, the way a cormorant digests a whole fish; you can see the shape of it in his long neck as it goes down. ‘So you took bad luck and made it into good luck,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘That’s clever.’

  ‘That’s wisdom,’ I said, ‘which comes from knowledge and experience. Instead of fighting our enemies and destroying them, at the cost to ourselves of many painful stings, we overwhelmed them with our superior wisdom and added them to our household. We got a good load of honey from that swarm for many years.’

  He dropped the stick. ‘You’re saying that killing the bees is the wrong thing to do. I could be capturing them and making them work for me.’

  I nodded. ‘You’ve got it,’ I said. ‘And you won’t get stung so much, either.

  It’s brave to fight in the forefront of the battle, but you shouldn’t do it unless it achieves a useful end. As it is, every bee you kill is one less to bring you honey. You’re wasting resources.’

  He frowned. ‘But they stung my dog,’ he said. ‘Oughtn’t they to be punished for it?’

  ‘By captivity,’ I said, ‘not death. And anyway, the bee that did the actual stinging is dead already; you can’t punish him where he’s gone.’

  Alexander smiled. ‘You make it sound like bees go to the Elysian Fields when they die,’ he said.

  ‘Well, why not? They have flowers there, don’t they? In which case, it stands to reason they have bees.’

  ‘Now you’re making fun of me,’ Alexander said, in a tone of voice that suggested that that wasn’t a prudent course of action.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Bees aren’t a laughing matter. We have the best bees of all, back where I live, in Attica . Of course. I expect you’ve heard of the Hyblaean strain.’

  ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘But Aristotle’s going to teach me all about the different varieties and breeds of animals and birds. He knows all about that sort of thing.’

  ‘I bet.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. So,’ I continued, ‘what are you going to do? Are you going to continue the war, or make peace on favourable terms?’

  Alexander thought for a moment. ‘Oh, make peace,’ he said. ‘Trouble is, I haven’t got a hive to put them in.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ I said, ‘that’s no excuse. We farmers, when we haven’t got something we need, we go away and make it.’

  ‘How do you make a beehive?’ he asked.

  ‘Out of strips of bark,’ I told him, ‘which you sew together with bits of trailing ivy. Or if you prefer, you can use osiers, like you’d use for weaving baskets. Anyway, once you’ve got the shell, so to speak, the next step is to line it with clay. Then finally you add a loop to hang it from, and there you are. Keeps the frost and the birds out, but you can still get in when it’s time to rob them of their honey.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alexander said. ‘Which is better, the bark or the osiers? I know where there’s a big old apple tree we could strip some bark off, but osiers might be a problem.’

  ‘There,’ I said, ‘you’ve answered your own question.’

  He smiled. ‘So I have,’ he said. ‘All right, I’ll get the bark, and you—’

  I held up my hands. ‘Whoa!’ I interrupted. ‘So I’ve been conscripted, have I?’

  ‘You’ve got to help me make it,’ Alexander said, with an odd note of urgency in his voice. ‘Where’s the point in knowing how to do something if you don’t go and do it?’

  I shrugged. ‘What’s wrong with knowledge for its own sake?’ I said. ‘No, don’t bother with that, it’ll be quicker to make the beehive. All right, you want me to look for some ivy, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alexander said.

  ‘And a needle,’ I added. ‘Got to have a needle for the sewing. Before you ask, I can make one out of wood, that’s no problem.’

  Alexander was a remarkably quick study. If he had a fault, it was impatience; he wanted very much to be able to do a thing without having to go through the humiliation — I’m sure he saw it as that — of having to learn, of being subservient to another who happened to have a piece of knowledge he hadn’t acquired yet; he wanted to gulp down knowledge like a sick man gulps down medicine, to be able to take it and immediately be in a perfect state of being able to do whatever the task was, without any intermediate stage of halfknowledge or apprenticeship. I’d say, ‘This is how you do such-andsuch,’

  and he’d interrupt and say, ‘Yes, I know,’ when fairly obviously he didn’t. But he was amazingly sharp and quick, and his level of concentration was astounding for a human being that age.

  ‘There,’ he said, regarding the finished article with a satisfied look on his face, ‘that’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’ll do,’ I said. ‘It’d have been even better if we’d waited for the clay to dry properly like I told you, but it’ll get the job done. Now I suppose you want to smoke out the bees.

  He looked at me. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Otherwise there wouldn’t be any point making the hive. Come on, we’ll ask the priest in the small temple if we can borrow his portable brazier. He’ll say yes, he knows me well enough. We can ask for some of that thick smelly incense; that’ll make good smoke.’

  I laughed. ‘That’s an interesting thought,’ I replied, ‘using expensive imported incense to smoke out bees. You can ask if you like, but I wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you. I think you’ll have to wait until you’re a great warrior and you’ve conquered the Spice Islands beyond the Great Ocean before you can go using the stuff that freely.’

  Of course, that made him all the more determined to get the incense, and so of course he did. Best quality stuff, too; it smelt disgusting, all sweet and cloying.

  ‘That’ll do fine,’ I said. ‘If it has this effect on us, think what it’ll do to the bees.’

  We also requisitioned a small shovel and a slab of potsherd, for scooping the dazed bees up with. As we put these items with the rest of the kit, I saw that Alexander was looking at them nervously. I asked him why.

  ‘I was thinking of that story,’ he replied.

  ‘Which one?’ I asked him. ‘There’s several, you know.’

  He looked at me oddly, and I suddenly realised: no sense of humour. Oh, well, nobody’s perfect. ‘The one about the Lydians,’ he said. ‘You know, where they went to fight the Persians, and they were so sure they were going to win that they took along a whole bunch of chains and collars and stuff to chain the prisoners up in, and after the battle they ended up wearing them themselves. I think a lot about that story,’ he added.

  ‘You do? Well, fair enough. I don’t think the bees are going to chain us up and make us go round collecting honey from flowers.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it literally,’ he said patiently. ‘It just feels a bit like —what’s that expression?’

  ‘Tempting Providence ?’

  He nodded. ‘That’s the one. But I suppose we need to scoop them up quickly while they’re still groggy from the smoke, so we’d better take this stuff with us.’

  Gods; it had been years since I’d last smoked out bees, and I wasn’t quite sure I’d remember how to do it. There’s quite a knack to it, mostly getting the smoke to go in the nest. In the event, Alexander appropriated the bellows and clung onto them so tightly that I didn’t even bother suggesting that I should handle that part of the operation. Interesting sidelight here; a few years later, I asked him if he remembered this episode and he said yes, of course. During the conversation, this issue of him having to be the one who did the difficult bit came up, and he said he’d insisted because he’d worked out that the bellows-operator was far more likely to get stung if things went wrong than the man holding the tripod; if there was a risk of danger, a front rank to be fought in, then it was up to him to take the position of most danger, because he was the leader. He quoted me those famous lines of Homer, the ones people who don’t know
any Homer tend to spout at you out of context —

  Tell me, Glaucus, why are we honoured among the Lycians With thrones and banquets and the respect due to gods?

  Because we always tahe our stand in the front ranh of the fighting...

  — Except that he’d got it wrong, or else whoever taught it to him knew a different version; he’d somehow managed to incorporate into it that other famous bit about Glaucus the Lycian, so that his third line went —Because we are always the best, excelling all other men .

  —Which isn’t the same at all. But when I tried to tell him this, he wouldn’t believe me; he said that obviously the Homer we had in Athens wasn’t the real Homer, and if one of us was wrong, it was me; it stood to reason that the Macedonians would know the real Homer, because he was descended on his mother’s side from Achilles himself. He clearly took this all so seriously that I resisted the urge to point out that, following his system of logic, if I was ever in a lawsuit I’d know more about the law than anybody else because an ancestor of mine successfully proposed a measure in Assembly— (Which is true, believe it or not; a decree abolishing certain trade tariffs imposed on citizens of Locris Opuntia trading in Athenian markets, passed shortly after King Xerxes’

  war. A futile piece of legislation, since the tariffs were on commodities the Locrians didn’t deal in; but never let it be said that our family hasn’t scratched its name in a corner of the wall of history.)

  Anyway; the bees didn’t stand a chance. One whiff of that nauseating incense and they fell out of the nest into our shovel like dung from a cow’s backside, everything going exactly according to plan and no unforeseen contingencies arising. I mention this in my role as historian, because I think it’s the first recorded instance of Alexander’s unbelievable luck, the same elemental force that made it possible for him to walk into Babylon , the world’s most fortified city, without striking a blow, or conquer unconquerable Egypt without having to fight a single battle. Alexander was always lucky; a quality he shared, in pretty well exactly the same way, with my father.