by Tom Holt
‘Right,’ I said, as we ladled the last squirming dollop of bees into the hive.
‘We’ve captured them. Now what do we do with them?’
He looked at me as if I’d just asked him why he breathed. ‘Take them to my father, of course,’ he said.
‘Fine.’ I nodded slowly. ‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘You take them to him. You don’t have to mention my name, tell him you caught them all by yourself. I’m not sure I want to be in the picture when you plonk down a hundred thousand hungover bees on your father’s dining-table.’
‘I can’t do that,’ Alexander replied, shocked. ‘I can’t take the credit for something I haven’t done. Where’d be the point in that?’
I sighed. The concept of diplomatic immunity was known in Macedon, but only in the category of quaint and impractical foreign customs, along with the Hyperborean savages who worship the souls of fish, or the Hyrcanian ascetics who believe that painting themselves with the urine of pregnant sheep makes them invulnerable to arrows. ‘You did all the hard work,’ I pointed out. ‘Not to mention all the difficult tactical planning. I just advised on the technical aspects. If you storm a city who gets the praise, you or the man who built the battering-ram?’
‘Both of us,’ Alexander replied firmly. ‘I led, and you helped. Glory,’ he added, reciting carefully, ‘is the only commodity that seems to increase the more you spread it around.’
I’d heard a similar version of that saying; it started Glory and dogshit are the two commodities.. . ‘Think,’ I urged him. ‘By the time your father gets back, those bees will have woken up, and they aren’t going to be pleased about how they’ve been treated. Besides, unless you give them a chance to settle down in their new home, there’s a good chance they’ll just up sticks and move on, and there’s no knowing where they’ll go after that.’
Alexander thought about it. ‘That makes sense, I suppose,’ he conceded. ‘Perhaps you’d better give the hive to me. I’ll find a place for it and then take my father to see it once he gets back.’
My excuse for going along with the proposal — well, there were three of them.
First, young Alexander seemed like a serious, thoughtful young fellow, not inclined to mischief. Second, it reduced the risk of my being blamed for a swarm of bees being turned loose in a packed dining-hall. Third, by this point what I really wanted to do was put space between me and the soon-to-revive bees. ‘Up to you,’ I said. ‘He’s your father, and they’re now your bees. But if it all goes horribly wrong, I’ve never set eyes on you before. Understood?’
‘You mean you’d want me to lie to my father?’
‘Yes.’
He was profoundly unimpressed by the idea, but eventually we agreed that he’d limit the assignation of blame to ‘one of the Athenians’, whose name he didn’t quite catch. To make it true, I had to mumble my name two or three times under my breath so he’d be able to say with a clean conscience that he hadn’t been able to make my name out when I told it to him.
I left Alexander and walked away. As soon as I was out of sight, Alexander took his trophy and scuttled off into the town, where lived an old man and his wife who’d once been Philip’s chief steward and housekeeper respectively. In this capacity they’d somehow earned the young prince’s extreme displeasure.
Now here’s the difference between Alexander as a young boy and countless tens of thousands of other bright, imaginative lads of his age. Any boy worth the name could have scrambled up onto the old couple’s roof and dropped the hive down the smokehole. It took the future hero of the Granicus to bar all the doors and windows from the outside first (silently and unassisted), so the poor fools were trapped in there, facing an angry phalanx of bee-stings with nowhere to run.
Didn’t quite work out that way, however. The hive got stuck, about a forearm’s length down the hole, and wouldn’t go any further; nor could it be fished back out again. For all I know it’s still there; assuming that whoever’s got that cottage now doesn’t mind a roomful of smoke every time he tries lighting a fire.
So when Philip got home, there was no magnificent trophy of the bee-hunt to delight his warrior heart.What he did get, however, was a glowing account of the merits of one of the Athenian ambassadors, with special reference to his skill both as a teacher and as a miliary engineer.
I didn’t know about that, of course. The first I heard was when two officers of the household (translate: two hulking great Macedonians in armour) turned up at the door of my quarters telling me that I had to go with them at once, and not answering my pleas for further information.
I knew it had to be something to do with Alexander, since I hadn’t done anything else on my own since I’d been there. The picture of Philip smashing Queen Olympias in the face stuck in my mind as firmly as that damned beehive in the chimney, and by the time I reached Philip’s audience chamber I was fine-honing my philosopher’s deathbed speech — a tradition started by the illustrious Socrates (‘Don’t forget. Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean; hence the customary obscurity of these utterances).
When I got there, I found Philip (filling the room as usual), the Queen, Alexander, an old man with a shiny bald head, and Aristotle. Of course, as soon as I saw Aristotle I more or less gave up hope — the most I could expect is that my deathbed words would make it back to Athens , probably in heavily garbled form, unless they turned out to be good enough for him to plagiarise.
‘Thank you for joining us,’ Philip said politely. ‘Now, to come straight to the point—’
‘Do you keep a snake in a bottle?’ Queen Olympias interrupted.
For a brief moment I shut my eyes, since I didn’t particularly want to see a repeat performance of the Queen of Macedon trying to learn how to fly; but there was no chunky, solid sound of bone against bone, and I opened them again.
Olympias was glaring at me.
‘Do you keep a snake in a bottle?’ she repeated.
Olympias wasn’t quite the formidable presence that her husband was;
nevertheless, she could have stapled a seven-ply shield to an oak door just by scowling at it. This was, I judged, no time for finely honed Athenian evasiveness. ‘No,’ I said.
‘Oh.’ She didn’t look happy. ‘I’d heard you did.’
I contemplated trying to explain, but decided not to. For all I knew, conjuring the spirits of the dead into small non-returnable wine jars was grounds for crucifixion in those parts; or perhaps it was fraudulently pretending to conjure ghosts into jars that was the capital offence. I had no idea; and it’s a good general rule of thumb that if you haven’t got the faintest idea what’s going on, the truth’s as good as anything else. At that, the bald-headed type looked up at me (up to that point he’d been studying the straps of his sandals).
‘Don’t you claim to speak to the immortal part of the soul of Socrates, which you keep sealed in a jar?’ he said, in a loud, high, clear voice. ‘I gather that’s how you earn your living.’
Gods in Heaven, I thought, are there any of these damned Macedonians who aren’t expert interrogators? Who was going to cross-examine me next, I wondered? The cook’s dog?
‘That’s true,’ I said.
‘Thought so,’ crowed Olympias, bashing the arm of her chair with her balled fist. ‘I told you he keeps a snake in a bottle.’
I suppose I should have seen that one creeping up on me. Olympias’ people believe that snakes are the spirits of the dead; they’re immortal and they go from body to body, shedding the old one when it’s worn out just as a regular snake sheds its skin. I reckoned it’d be best if I kept my face shut, and that’s what I did.
‘I see,’ Philip said, after a moment. ‘Well, that seems to cover it. Right?’ he added, looking back over his shoulder at Olympias. She nodded. The old man grinned. Aristotle looked as if he’d woken up out of a nightmare about being marooned on an island inhabited by cannibals to find it was all horribly true.
‘That’s all right, then,
’ Philip said. ‘In that case, I’d like to offer you a job as my son’s tutor.’
I felt — well, imagine how you’d feel after you’d been wandering in the desert for two days, slowly dying of thirst, and then someone sneaked up behind you, knocked you down and started drowning you in a shallow pool of fresh spring water. My fears about being tortured to death flocked out of my mind like an audience leaving the theatre, only to find themselves sharing a narrow gateway with a whole lot of new fears about offending Philip by refusing his offer, which were all trying to crowd in.
‘I’m honoured,’ I stalled. ‘This is truly a great distinction—’
‘He means no,’ Olympias grunted, chewing on a stray curl of hair that had crept out from behind her ear. ‘Offer him money. If he won’t take the job, see if he’ll sell the snake.’
‘Olympias,’ Philip purred (and it wasn’t a domestic cat kind of purr).
‘Euxenus,’ he went on, ‘please don’t be afraid to speak your mind. As I’m sure you know, my son already has two highly qualified tutors; my cousin Leonidas,’
(the bald man nodded very slightly), ‘and your celebrated compatriot Aristotle, both of whom enjoy my fullest confidence. The Queen, however,’ he went on, his voice hardening a little, ‘feels that another perspective, perhaps one that encompasses more of the spiritual, mystic side—’
‘Tell him we want the snake,’ Olympias rumbled, in that remarkably deep voice of hers. ‘I don’t care a damn about the Athenian, but I want that snake for my son.’
You know, it was almost worth all the terror and embarrassment just to watch Aristotle squirm. He was hating this, I could see. I formed a hasty assessment of my position. I could refuse altogether, and risk having to be persuaded to change my mind — Philip had a staff of full-time persuaders; he recruited them from among his cavalry farmers, on the grounds of physical strength and familiarity with the use and properties of red-hot metal — or I could sell them the empty jar and risk assassination on the grounds of having swindled the royal house of Macedon. Or I could take the job. The last choice had the fringe benefit of a number of chances to dump on the celebrated Aristotle, not to mention the prospect of a chance of getting a closer look at that damned map, which had become something of an obsession with me...
The map that invariably lay across Philip’s knees whenever we’d had meetings with him looked to be (and was, as I was able to confirm later on) very old, with a long and remarkable history; turns out it was one of the maps made by Aristagoras of Miletus, who governed the city in the old days when it was part of the Persian empire. He sent out maps, among the first ever seen in Greece, with his requests for aid from the mainland in the great rebellion against Persian rule; they impressed the hell out of everyone except the Spartans, who actually took the trouble to read them and work out how far away Miletus was.
Other cities, including Athens, sent token contingents or other forms of aid and comfort to the rebellion; after it had been utterly crushed, the Persian King, Darius, sent a punitive expedition to deal with the mainland states who’d taken part, and destroyed two great ‘cities, Chalcis and Eretria. The Athenians managed to defeat the expedition at the celebrated battle of Marathon, and it was the need to avenge this defeat that led King Xerxes to invade Greece with his vast, unwieldy army of a million men, after which it became an established principle in the Greek mind that Greece would never be safe until the Persian Empire was overthrown. So, as you can see, Phryzeutzis, Aristagoras’ pretty sheets of engraved bronze had a lot to answer for, one way or another; and here one of them was, in the possession of the King of Macedon, another mighty conqueror. The fact that he used it more as a dinner-tray cum writing-desk than as a whetstone for his aspirations was neither here nor there.
‘I shall be honoured to accept,’ I said.
‘Oh, good,’ Philip replied, with a very slight trace of a yawn. ‘Have a word with Leonidas here later on today; he’ll make the arrangements and sort you out, tell you how everything’s set up. It’s, um, a pleasure to welcome you to our household.’ He sighed, and gave Olympias a mildly poisonous look. ‘You and your potted snake,’ he added.
At this point, I suppose I ought to say a few words...
Don’t sigh like that, Phryzeutzis; quite probably this is the bit you actually want to hear. After all, most people who learn that I knew Alexander when I was younger can’t wait for me to tell them: what was he like, what was he really like?
And, over the years, I’ve learned a little speech which I can recite mindlessly, the way the herald recites the formal part of the law without knowing or caring much what he’s saying. Probably you’ve heard it yourself, I can’t remember.
Anyway, I recite the speech and they go away again, feeling that they’ve somehow folded the fabric of history back on itself, so that their present has in some way touched the past. It makes them happy, and stops them bothering me.
You, I feel, deserve something better. Now, let’s analyse the question; when you ask me, ‘What was he really like?’, what you’re asking (whether you realise it or not) is, ‘What did you think about him?’ — because that’s the only way that question can ever be answered when one mortal man talks to another. What did I think of him? That way, Alexander is filtered through me, like whey strained through fine cloth.
You want a straight answer, Phryzeutzis? I’ll give you one. I know, I’ve been putting this off since I started telling you this story, because it’s quite difficult for me to say this. But without this rather essential piece of information, you won’t be able to make an awful lot of sense of what I have to say about the man later, or indeed what I say about myself. So; here goes.
I have no opinion about Alexander one way or the other; and that’s a deliberate decision on my part, one that’s cost me a lot of peace over the years. Let me give you an analogy — it’s what we Athenians do best, they say, the subtle art of talking about something else instead of what we’ve been asked about.
Suppose you lived in the valley on the river-bank, and one year the rains were so heavy that the whole plain flooded, washing out your house and crops and leaving you destitute. Now suppose you lived near the desert, and one year it didn’t rain at all, parching your land, killing your stock and driving you out to make your living begging in the streets of some city. In one case, you curse the rain because it keeps falling; in the other, you curse it for not falling at all.
But cursing the rain is pointless, Phryzeutzis; it can’t hear you, it’s a force of nature, something beyond benevolence or malice. Blame someone if you must —
the king, for not building a dam or an embankment; your father, for settling on the edge of the desert; your neighbour, for blocking the drains or bleeding off water from the spring that feeds your well. Blame human beings, whose actions and decisions you can at least understand; blame the rain and you just look ridiculous.
Alexander was a force of nature; he was a force of history. Think about him dispassionately for a moment. Think of the hole you’d make in history if you cut him out of it, like a carpenter fret-sawing a pattern out of a brass sheet to inlay into a piece of wood; see if anybody or anything else would fit in that hole, so as not to destroy the integrity of history. I think you’ll be surprised.
First, Alexander would’ve been nobody if he hadn’t been Philip’s son. Philip took the old Macedon and changed it out of all recognition, made it the greatest power in Greece . By the same token, Philip couldn’t have done this if the great cities of Greece — Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth — hadn’t bled themselves weak and silly with their own incessant wars, hadn’t grown weak and lazy and fat, and most of all tired, so that they couldn’t be bothered any more. The same goes for Persia; if the Persian empire hadn’t been on its last legs anyway, if the Persian king had been anything like as good a soldier as his predecessors— Look at it another way. All round this Alexander-shaped hole we’ve sawed out of history are these factors that made him possible, and the more you look at them,
the more important they become, the smaller Alexander gets. It’s quite possible that if Alexander had died when he was a week old, Macedonians or Greeks or both would still have overthrown the Great King and taken his empire. It may have taken them longer; then again, they may have made a more thorough job.
Now we’ve reduced Alexander, let’s grind him flat. As a man, Alexander had his faults. Lots of them. He had no depth or breadth of feeling or understanding —
insofar as he had a sense of humour I’ll swear he learned it by rote, as he learned many skills that he reckoned a great man ought to have. He had no sense of pleasure beyond the gratifications of succeeding in his task; he was hardly interested in sex, in beauty of any kind, in anything that wasn’t needed for the work in hand; he selected the qualities that made him up like a man packing for a long journey, taking with him only the things he knew he’d need. In a sense, Alexander was painfully flat; look at him face on, he was so broad he blocked out the light; look at him sideways, you’d hardly know he was there.
That’s Alexander, then; a flat shape in history, like a country sawn out of one of Aristagoras’ sheet-bronze maps; an image representing a substantive thing, not the thing itself. Now, this flattening effect is something I reckon happens to all Great Men to a certain extent. What they do starts to replace what they are, until there’s nothing left except the shape of their achievements in history. But Alexander, being Philip’s son, was born that way; he was brought up and trained to be the conqueror of the world, to finish what Philip had started.
More than that; Philip was an enormous man, both in his place in history and in himself — I’ve said, I think, how he seemed to fill any room he was in, making anybody else seem incidental and irrelevant. Alexander was both bigger and smaller than his father. Alexander —well, it’s possible to convince oneself that he was a god; rather harder to believe that he was ever a human being. You’d have to crush a dozen Alexanders in an olive-press before you could extract enough humanity to make up an ordinary person. As a human being, he was tiny.