Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  Well, the days went by; no speech. We reached Pella ; no speech. Day followed day, negotiating session merged into negotiating session; we conceded everything that Philip wanted and got nothing in return; no speech. It was like the hot, thundery weather of late summer, when you look up at the sky every morning and you know it’ll rain today, but it doesn’t; it’s hot and tense and even the goats in the pen and the mules in the stable get restless and quarrelsome, but still no rain and no thunder. No speech.

  Then we worked it out; he was waiting for the final day of the talks, to ensure that he got maximum effect. There Philip’d be, nicely relaxed and off guard after his diplomatic triumphs, imagining that it was all over and he could tick Athens off his list of Things To Do Today; then, at the last minute, Demosthenes would pop up like the god at the end of a tragic play and blow Philip into wind-strewn chaff, right when he imagined he was safe. We couldn’t help admiring the audacity of the plan, to say nothing of the firm grasp of tactics and the insights into Philip’s personality — after all, it was broadly based on Philip’s celebrated battlefield manoeuvre of letting his enemy breach his line and pass through the middle of his forces, the better to cut them off and surround them at the very last moment. Fitting, we thought. Brilliant, even. Not to mention inspirational and a tremendous morale-booster.

  And the moment came. It was after we’d officially concluded the embassy’s business and made our last concession — we’d been quite open-handed about it, giving away big raw cutlets of our national endowment, since we knew for certain that once Demosthenes had made his speech, we’d get ‘em all back again — and we were just about to plunge into yet another drab, long-winded Macedonian court ceremonial when Demosthenes reared up on his hind legs, cleared his throat and began to speak.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he began. ‘Were it not for the fact that—’

  —And he froze. Either he’d forgotten the words or he’d been seized with a near-fatal dose of stage fright. Whichever it was, he couldn’t move, not even enough to open his mouth. He was like one of the many statues of Demosthenes about to make a speech, the ones that at one time were put up all over the place as a symbol of anti-Macedonian feeling, except that a lot of those statues were pretty lifelike and at that precise moment Demosthenes, frankly, wasn’t. I couldn’t help but be reminded of that old story about Perseus and the head of Medusa the Gorgon, which was so incredibly ugly that it turned whoever looked at it to stone — interesting parallel, that, given the way Philip looked.

  For a long while, nobody moved, and there’s a fair chance we’d all be there still, all turned to stone, if it hadn’t been for Philip. As soon as he’d got over his initial bewilderment and he’d worked Out what had happened, he leaned forward a little in his chair and tapped Demosthenes on the arm, just above the elbow.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It happens to all of us now and again. Now, try taking a deep breath, and start again.

  Demosthenes looked at him, breathed in and began to shake.

  ‘Try just telling us your name,’ Philip said. ‘Just say something, to break the ice. Come on, you can do it.’

  ‘D-d,’ Demosthenes mumbled. ‘D-d-d.’

  ‘All right,’ Philip said. ‘Now try looking straight past me at the back of the room. Pick a point, something you can fix your eyes on; lamp-sconce, ornament, a particular pattern in a tapestry, doesn’t matter what. Just look straight at it, and tell it your name. Out loud. Go on.’

  Demosthenes’ eyes locked onto something, and he gasped for a moment like a stranded fish.

  ‘D-d-d-demos,’ he said. ‘D-d-d-d-mosthnes.’

  Philip clapped his hands together. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘All right, this is good, we’re making progress. Again — and this time, a bit more slowly and fluently.’

  Demosthenes, of course, never made his speech. Philip coaxed and coached him to the point where he could say his name, his father’s name and his city and deme, then let him off the hook.

  ‘I’m disappointed, though,’ Philip said, as Demosthenes sat down, staring at the ground between his feet. ‘I’ve been looking forward to hearing a Demosthenes speech ever since the conference began. You’ll have to come back another time, when you’re feeling a bit better.’

  The embassy left for home. I stayed.

  I hadn’t planned it, gods know. I’d never before shown any inclination to want to leave Attica — quite the opposite, in fact. It wasn’t as if I was unhappy there, or that the job at Macedon was anything wonderful. On the other hand, I didn’t have any cause not to stay; no family worth speaking of (at least, none who’d talk to me), no debts, no obligations. It was like dying, and being reborn, though as what remained to be seen.

  Later the same day I found myself in a cart headed for the village of Mieza . It was a big, heavy farm-cart, and the rear offside wheel squeaked. In the cart with me were Leonidas and Alexander, who I’d already met; Parmenio’s sons Philotas and Nicanor; another boy called Menippus, about whom I remember nothing at all; and the principal of the school, Lysimachus. We went for the rest of that day in stony silence, nobody daring to say a thing in front of the stranger (me), and put up for the night in a small, comfortable inn about halfway between Pella and Mieza. When the innkeeper saw us, and the two Thracian cavalrymen we had as outriders, he went white as a sheet and dashed back inside; a few seconds later, his wife and son emerged, looking equally panic-stricken, and started unloading our kit without a word.

  It was unnerving, that silence. I was beginning to wonder what on earth I’d walked into. Was it some really ancient, bizarre custom, that the young hope of Macedon went everywhere in complete silence, broken only during lessons? As an Athenian, I wasn’t sure I could stand that. Athenians talk. All the time. The surest way to drive an Athenian mad is to shut him up in a confined space on his own and deprive him of conversation; and even then he’ll talk to himself, disagree, shout, lose patience, start a fight... But that theory, mercifully, proved false; I could hear them whispering to each other when they thought I couldn’t hear, though I couldn’t make out anything of what they were saying. I wanted to break the silence myself by talking to one of them, asking a simple question and defying them to break all the rules of polite conduct by not answering; but I had an attack of Demosthenes’ fever and couldn’t bring myself to say a word. Dinner, consisting of bread, cheese, cold sausage and a pleasantly sweet, strong, neat wine, went down in silence except for wordless demolition noises, and we were shown our sleeping quarters in dumb show and left alone for the night.

  I tried to put it all out of my mind; instead, I asked myself why Aristotle wasn’t with the party. That thought, however, wasn’t conducive to sweet dreams.

  I kept remembering episodes from mythology where the victim is sent on a mission by the wicked king to a distant town or province bearing a sealed letter which contains instructions for his own execution. The big mystery, why I’d been offered the job in the first place, didn’t seem such a mystery after all.

  Aristotle had been here — what, two years? Five? I couldn’t remember offhand, but long enough, surely, to have wormed his way into the King’s confidence and affection. I could picture the scene; the throne-room, dark except for the ambivalent light of one smoking lamp. Aristotle approaches the royal presence and whispers for a moment in Philip’s ear. The Athenian herald, Euxenus. What of it, my friend? Do you know him? Know him! Why, your majesty, I hate him above all mortals, as would you if only you knew.. . Tell me more, Aristotle, tell me more . . . Philip nods; his one eye burns fiercely in the gloom. I see, he says quietly, I see. Well, we’ll have to do something about that, won’t we? Leave it to me, my friend. Aristotle bows deeply; thank you, your majesty, you can’t know how long I’ve dreamt of vengeance... Think nothing of it, my good and faithful servant. The man’s as good as dead.

  Well, you know how it is when you’re lying awake in the middle of the night, fretting. You can imagine anything, any kind of horror, and convince yourself that
it’s true. And guilty conscience had something to do with it, of course—

  What, I never told you, Phryzeutzis? Well, I’d better tell you now, otherwise this whole business of Aristotle and me isn’t going to make a whole lot of sense. Yes, the wretched man had every reason to hold a grudge against me, after what I’d done to him. It’s not a story I like telling, mainly because it puts me in a bad light; but what the hell, this is History.

  Actually, it was all Diogenes’ fault; at least, he put me up to it. Aristotle collected cities; that is, he was compiling a huge database of the constitutions of Greek city-states, with the aim of reducing all this data down and using it to compile the authoritative, all-time Number One best model constitution for a Greek city. He was quite serious about the project; he’d been to all manner of out-of-the-way places, asking questions and getting under the feet of the city fathers, and whenever a stranger from a city he hadn’t distilled and bottled yet arrived in Athens he’d scamper off with his tablets and stylus and be asking detailed questions about procedures for the co-option of council members to replace a deceased Superintendent of Drains before the unfortunate traveller had had a chance to shake the dust out of his cloak.

  For some reason Diogenes and I found this noble project unbearably amusing; so we decided to sabotage it. Aristotle had never met me or heard of me; so Diogenes saw to it that a rumour went round concerning the arrival in Athens of a citizen of Escoracaschia (meaning, loosely translated, ‘Pissoffsville’;

  there’s advanced Athenian wit for you), the furthest-flung Greek colony in the world.

  That citizen, of course, was me. We hired a room in a cheap inn, bought some raggedy old travelling clothes in the market, and waited. Sure enough, along came Aristotle, tablets in hand, imploring me to spare him just an hour or so of my time...

  ‘Sho’ nuff,’ I replied, in the corniest stage-Doric accent I could muster.

  ‘Mighty civil of you to take an interest in us plain folks from Hyperborea, you bein’ a book-learned gennelmun an’ all.’

  Then I told him all about my native city; how it lies on the southern tip of an island that lies opposite the north-eastern coast of Europe, an island so distant and remote that for half the year it rains nearly every day, and great banks of fog sweep down from the hills and cover everything, so that between the driving rain and the impenetrable mist day was as obscure as night, and instead of using our eyes to find our way about we used our noses, planting aromatic herbs at strategic points as beacons to guide us to our fields and villages; how the said rain and fog makes it impossible for us to tell each other apart except at very close quarters, with the result that we long ago ceased trying, and now no longer differentiate between other men’s families and wives and our own; how, in consequence, we don’t recognise such concepts as ownership and property but hold everything in common, so that a man who blunders in out of the rain sits down in front of the hearth and makes that house his home, until such time as the wind and the rain stave in the roof and send him on his travels again; how there is no crime or wickedness in our city because, when you’re soaked to the skin and coughing your lungs up all the time, you simply don’t have the energy to start fights or plot against your neighbour (and since you haven’t the faintest idea who your neighbour’s going to be from one day to the next, there really isn’t much point); how, in short, thanks to the unremitting violence of nature and the utter savagery of our environment, we live in a sort of earthly paradise with neither poverty nor excessive wealth, without crime or discord, freed from the snares and delusions of the flesh and the petty aspirations and ambitions of the natives of happier climes. In fact (I added, picking up a jug of water), being this far south, in this unwholesome and decadent land of sunshine and warm earth, my heart ached for the feel of cold rain dripping down between my neck and collar, the comforting dampness of a leaky boot, the spiritual solace of a lungful of phlegm — at which point I solemnly upended the jug of water over my head, closed my eyes and relaxed my face into a beatific vision of contentment.

  And Aristotle believed it. He fell for it, this dedicated man of science, this pre-eminent logician, like a stranger off an Egyptian grain-freighter who meets a man in the market square offering to sell him the Acropolis for five hundred drachmas. He took the whole thing so seriously that it frightened me; but I didn’t dare tell him, the joke had gone too far. So he thanked me profusely, folded his tablets carefully away, and scuttled off like a startled crab to write up his notes and incorporate them into his work in progress.

  So taken was he by the world-view of the good people of Escoracaschia Ap’

  Eschatois (‘Pissoffsville At The End Of The World’, to give it its official designation) that he wrote up a monograph on the subject and announced that he would deliver it as a public lecture, admission one obol. Then he sent to discover whether by any lucky chance Oumeleresas son of Oudemiapolis (‘Comeoff-it, son of No-such-city’; subtlety our speciality) was still in Athens and might possibly be prepared to attend the lecture and answer questions from the audience.

  At this point I told Diogenes that the joke had gone far enough and I wanted nothing more to do with it. No power on earth, I told him, would induce me to get up on a platform in front of people who probably knew me and make a public exhibition of myself. Absolutely not. No point even considering the idea.

  So there I was, on the platform, doing my best to shade my face under the brim of an impossibly broad, floppy hat that Diogenes had dug up somewhere for me;

  and there was Aristotle, declaiming his monograph to a painfully large audience with all the passion of one who has long sought and finally found.

  It was a long time before somebody laughed, and even then it was just one snigger; a soft, muffled snort, the sound made by a man who’s got a gathered handful of cloak stuffed in his mouth and still can’t stop himself from laughing. But once that noise had broken the silence, others followed in a torrent, like water coming through a compromised dam, until the whole crowd were roaring their heads off — and there was Aristotle, his nose buried in his manuscript, not looking up, still carefully reading. When the noise was so loud he could no longer hear his own voice he looked up, with an expression of bewilderment and sorrow on his face that would have melted a heart of stone.

  ‘What’s the in-matter?’ he said. ‘Why are you laughing?’

  Not the best thing to say, under the circumstances. I tell you, if my celebrated grandfather Eupolis the comic poet had ever managed to get a laugh like that, he’d have prayed to Apollo to shoot him dead on the spot, since life could hold nothing better for him if he lived to be a thousand. Aristotle, meanwhile, was on his feet, waving his hands in my direction and yelling that if they didn’t believe him, here was a citizen of the city, in person, who’d confirm that every word he’d said was absolutely true.

  Whereupon I stood up and took off my hat, and the whole crowd went quiet. I looked at them, and then at Aristotle; and some evil god put words into my mouth that I’ve repented ever since.

  ‘All right, boss,’ I said. ‘Now can I have my three drachmas?’

  That was when they started throwing things — fruit, mostly, some chunks of sausage, a few stones and shards of pottery. About the only life-threatening thing that got thrown was the leg off a small bronze tripod, and I entirely agree that it was right and proper that it hit me a glancing blow on the side of the head and sent me down like a sacrificial bull when the priest whacks its neck with a big axe. The next thing I knew, therefore, was opening my eyes to Diogenes’ malevolent grin and the worse headache, bar two, I’ve ever had in a long and headache-prone life.

  And that, Phryzeutzis, is why I was afraid Aristotle might have arranged an obscure and bloody death for me, out in the wilds of the Macedonian countryside, where it could be blamed on renegade Illyrians or bears. It was, you’ll agree, a singularly obnoxious thing to do (quite apart from the humiliation and shame, he’d spent a sizeable portion of his ready cash on having a hundred c
opies of the monograph made for immediate sale, all of which ended up as fish-wrap and shield-grip padding), and if I’d been Aristotle I wouldn’t have rested until the man responsible for such an outrage was paying his three obols to Charon the Ferryman for his one-way ride across the River of Death.

  Anyway; dawn broke, and there I was, still awake, still largely unmurdered, and wishing very hard that I was safely back in Attica, where if someone wants to kill you they falsely accuse you of treason in the Law-Courts and the whole thing is done in a calm, civilised manner. I sneaked out into the courtyard, hid in a doorway until I saw the landlord’s son going by with a bucket of oats for the mules, jumped out on him and grabbed him by both arms.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘What’s going on? Why won’t anybody talk to me?’

  But the poor lad just stared at me and made a soft whimpering noise, so I let him go and sat down on the mounting block, feeling very confused; at which point, someone behind me cleared his throat.

  ‘Morning,’ said Leonidas. ‘You’re up early. Trouble sleeping?’

  I nodded. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘what is it with you people, or with me? Why won’t anybody talk to me?’

  Leonidas grinned. ‘They’re scared,’ he said. I blinked. ‘Scared?’

  ‘Terrified.’

  ‘Of me?’

  ‘Of the snake.’

  I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.

  ‘By now,’ Leonidas went on, ‘word’s reached all four corners of Macedon; beware of the Athenian wizard and his familiar spirit. Superstitious people. Almost as bad as theThessalians. Mind you,’ he added darkly, ‘Thessalians have good reason to be superstitious, every third one of ‘em’s a witch.’