Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  For all I knew that was meant to be a joke, but I didn’t feel like laughing (and besides; from what I gather, it’s true). ‘That’s crazy,’ I said. ‘Look, how many times do I have to tell you people this, there is no snake, repeat, no snake, in my goddamned jar. Understood?’

  Leonidas shook his head slowly. ‘You say there isn’t,’ he replied. ‘Queen Olympias says there is. Who do people believe? Need you ask?’

  ‘Oh, for...’ I’d had enough. ‘Wait there,’ I said, ‘and don’t move. I’ll be back.’ I stomped off, fetched the jar and stomped back. ‘Now then,’ I said, ‘you’re to be my witness. I’m releasing the neck of the jar, I’m lifting off the lid. There now, as you can plainly see, there is no...

  And that was when I dropped the jar (fortunately it landed in a big pile of horseshit and didn’t break); about a tenth of a second after, this dinky little black and green snake popped its head out of the jar and stuck its tongue out at me.

  Excuse me. I have this thing about snakes. Never could be doing with the horrible creatures.

  ‘You were saying?’ Leonidas said, without batting an eyelid.

  The snake wound itself out of the jar and slithered away among the straw. I didn’t move a muscle.

  ‘You’re a brave man,’ Leonidas went on. ‘One tiny nip from that and you’d be dead before you could blink an eye.’

  Just what I wanted to hear. After about a minute I managed to get a grip on myself, and I was just about to explain that it was either a practical joke, an attempt on my life by Aristotle, part of some political chicanery involving Queen Olympias, a really bizarre comcidence or a trick of the light, when I noticed that Prince Alexander was standing in the doorway looking at me.

  Marvellous. The perfect way to start the day.

  ‘My ancestor Hercules strangled two snakes while he was still in his cot,’

  Alexander said.

  Leonidas smiled at him. ‘Hercules,’ he said. ‘Fancy. I’d heard that was you.’

  Alexander gave him a look that’d have made a Scythian feel homesick. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘it was Hercules.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Leonidas replied. ‘I expect if you’d had snakes in your cot, you’d have strangled them right enough.’

  I managed to get my legs moving and used them, having first picked my jar out of the horse dung. It was a bad enough day already without eavesdropping on whatever private feud there was between Leonidas and Alexander. Another time I’d have lapped it up like a dog slurping up spilt wine — inside information’s always useful, as my father told me often enough — but right then I wasn’t in the mood. I stomped back inside, wiped off the jar with a handful of loose straw and got my kit ready for the next stage of the journey.

  And yet, I thought. There are worse fates that can befall a man than unexpected miracles that prove conclusively that he’s not a charlatan and a rogue, especially when he is a charlatan and a rogue and he’s just about to start a new job. The best odds said that Olympias arranged for the snake to be there;

  except, since she presumably wanted me there to counterbalance Philip’s basically non-snake-oriented tutorial corps at the Mieza school, why would she have given orders for a deadly poisonous snake to be hidden in my jar, just where it was most likely to give me a nip as I carelessly opened it? I’d be no good to her dead; so, unless it was some kind of primitive ritual thing — ordeal by serpent, to judge whether I was worthy of the task, etc. — that effectively knocked that theory on the head, leaving me with the Aristotle’s Revenge version. It made sense, after all. By arranging for Euxenus the purported snake-charmer to die at the fangs of his own stooge, he’d be able to spice his revenge with ridicule and contempt on a par with what I’d exposed him to all those years ago.

  And Aristotle wasn’t on the cart with the rest of us.

  I gave it up as a bad job, picked up my luggage and took my place on the cart.

  As before, conversation stopped dead as soon as I appeared — I remember thinking, you poor fools, what a boring day you’ve got ahead of you and it’s all your own fault. Then, as the cart started to roll, Alexander got up and came and sat beside me.

  ‘Is it true?’ he said. ‘That you’ve got one of the sacred serpents in a jar?’

  I sighed. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe not.’

  Alexander didn’t like that answer. ‘I asked you a civil question,’ he said. ‘Is it true?’

  ‘All right,’ I replied. ‘If you’d asked me that question an hour ago, I’d have said no. But just now I happened to open the jar and yes, there was a dirty great snake in it. Terrified the life out of me. I can only imagine someone put it there for a joke.’

  Alexander nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘only it wasn’t a joke. I put it there.’

  At that moment I came perilously close to changing the course of history. ‘You put it there,’ I repeated.

  ‘I just said so, didn’t I?’

  ‘Fine.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Would you mind telling me why?’

  ‘To see how you’d react when you found it, of course. I wanted to see if you’re a fake or a real wizard.’

  ‘I see. And what conclusion did you reach?’

  Alexander smiled. ‘If you’d been a fake, the snake would’ve bitten you. So obviously you’re a wizard.’

  ‘You think I’m a wizard?’

  ‘Isn’t that what I just said?’

  ‘Right. That’s settled, then, I’m a wizard. Get out of my face before I turn you into a rat.’

  Alexander didn’t like that either. ‘How dare you talk to me like that?’ he said angrily.

  ‘Ah, but I can talk how I like to whoever I like. I’m a wizard, remember.

  Officially.’

  ‘Yes, but even wizards only have one neck.’

  What a marvellous way, I thought, to begin our relationship of teacher and pupil. ‘If, on the other hand,’ I replied, ‘I’m not a wizard, then of course I wouldn’t dare to speak to your majesty in such a disrespectful manner. Well? Am I still a wizard?’

  At that moment I happened to catch sight of old Leonidas. He was smirking. I didn’t like that much, either. Athenian, go home, seemed to be the message, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was stuck in the middle of a group of very stupid, primitive people, all of whom were cleverer than me.

  ‘If you aren’t a wizard,’ Alexander said, ‘the snake would have bitten you.’

  I nodded. ‘Maybe it did,’ I answered. ‘Maybe it bit me and I didn’t die, because I’m a wizard.’

  Just then the boy Hephaestion leaned forward and smiled. He had one of those good-natured I-know-I’m-thick-so-forgive-me smiles that can solve all sorts of problems, up to and including treason and murder. ‘Maybe he’s a different sort of wizard,’ he said. ‘Not the sort of wizard the snake’s used to, but still a wizard. By the way, what is a wizard, exactly?’

  I felt as if I’d just been arrested and the arresting officer took another look at me and said, ‘Sorry, mistaken identity,’ and let me go. I could also feel a dirty great big cue sitting up and begging me to follow it up.

  ‘Now there’s a sensible question,’ I said. ‘Anybody? What’s a wizard?’

  Nicanor, Parmenio’s younger son, held up his hand. ‘Someone who can do magic,’

  he said.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s start from there. So what’s magic?’

  His brother Philotas, a stocky, broad-faced kid sitting with his back to the driver, held up his hand. ‘Magic is what gives you power over people,’ he said.

  ‘Good answer,’ I said, ‘but enlarge on it a bit. Otherwise King Philip’s a magician. Not,’ I added, ‘that I’m saying he isn’t. But carry on, please.’

  Philotas thought for a moment. ‘You use magic to make people do what you want,’

  he said. ‘If you aren’t a king or something. Kings and people like that have authority.’

  ‘I see,’ I replied. ‘In that case, let me show you some magic. Here, hold ou
t your hand.’

  Philotas looked at me with grave suspicion but did as I said.

  ‘Here you are,’ I said, reaching in my mouth for a single obol and putting it in his hand. ‘A magic charm for you. Go into a baker’s shop, tell him to give you a loaf of bread and hand him the magic charm. He’ll do exactly what you tell him to.’

  There was a moment of puzzled silence; then somebody laughed. From memory I think it was Hephaestion. Everybody laughed then; not so much because it was a funny joke but because the tension was released. Everybody, that is, except Alexander. He just looked at me.

  ‘So you are a wizard,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘And I learned wizardry from a very great and powerful wizard in Athens , by the name of Diogenes. He taught me to cast spells on people so that they’d believe anything I told them was true; and if people believe something’s true, then pretty soon it is true.’

  Alexander shook his head. ‘That’s nonsense,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘All right. Suppose you believed I was the King of Macedon. Suppose everybody in Macedon believed it. Wouldn’t that make it true?’

  He shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘It’d make it a lie that everybody believed.’

  ‘That’s a first-rate definition of the truth,’ I said.

  ‘No it isn’t,’ he replied.

  I nodded approvingly. ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘Correct answer. You’ve successfully mastered the first thing I needed to teach you before you can become a wizard too.’

  ‘But I don’t want to become a wizard,’ Alexander said. ‘Wizardry’s all about lies and deception.’

  ‘Fine. So what do you want to be when you grow up?’

  Alexander shrugged. ‘I want to be a god,’ he said, as if stating the blindingly obvious. ‘Gods do magic, but the magic they do is real.’

  It wasn’t a bad place to be. In fact, it was a wonderful place, in a self-conscious sort of way. Rolling hills neatly dressed in vineyards and orchards, like a well-muscled man in well-cut clothes; a well-behaved lowlands climate, with the mountains behind like a painted backdrop in the theatre; it felt as if it had been modelled in clay as the perfect setting for the happiest days of your life, and then handed over to a work-gang of giants, who set about bashing rocks and diverting rivers according to the architect’s plans.

  Well, it was better than Attica ; most places are. Attica is a hard country, all rock and dust, everything there is an effort. Mieza was no effort at all.

  Nothing could start until Aristotle arrived, so Alexander led his schoolmates off into the hills to hunt things, while I settled into the quarters that Principal Lysimachus had assigned to me. At first, I thought I was being shown round the schoolhouse itself, or some royal hunting lodge; it was a huge house by Attic standards, with a front room as big as any in Athens and a back room almost as big. The furniture was amazing; I learned later that it was all stuff that had accumulated at the palace in Pella over the years — diplomatic gifts, spur-of-the-moment purchases that had seemed like a good idea at the time, that sort of thing; there was a gold-plated tripod stand and an Egyptian painted couch and an ivory folding chair and a huge, huge silvered bronze mixing-bowl that must have held five gallons, embossed with scenes of heroic carnage on one side and amorous centaurs persecuting scantily clad women on the other. There was a cedarwood footstool upholstered with genuine Tyrian purple, worth a fortune in spite of the large scorch-mark on one side where someone had left it too close to the fire. The overall effect was so overwhelming that I shoved most of it over to one side of the room and set up a sort of camp on the other with a plain wooden stool and a low plank table I found in the outhouse.

  In the same outhouse I found a box; a heavy olivewood chest with a smashed lock, which I dragged out into the light and opened up. It was full of books; twenty genuine books, all rather sticky and tacky after spending so long in contact with the olivewood, but all perfectly legible providing you were careful about unrolling them. Gods only know how they got there; my best guess is that they were another diplomatic gift, of the how-lovely-what-is-it? variety, which had been put away out of sight, rediscovered some time later and jemmied open in the vain hope that such a robust locked box must contain something worth having.

  Then the connection books-school formed in someone’s mind and they were shipped up here, out of the way of the men and horses.

  My excitement at this discovery waned just a little when I discovered that eleven of them were Homer; four Iliads, three Odysseys, two Homeric Hymns and two Cyprias. Even so, that left eight proper books, of which only one (the collected plays of my grandfather Eupolis) had been nibbled by mice into a state of total uselessness. The other seven were: the poems of Archilochus; a long-forgotten epic poem about Hercules by Panyasis; selections from Aristotle;

  Thucydides’ History of the War, mercifully abridged; a seventy-year-old pamphlet by someone called Chrysippus suggesting improvements to the franchising system for exploiting Athenian mining interests at Laurium; an anonymous commentary on military tactics in Homer, seeking to prove their relevance to modern-day warfare; and my ill-fated brother Eudaemon’s preferred bedside reading, Aeneas theTactician’s monograph on the art of war. I flicked through this chance accumulation of dross, took the Archilochus and Chrysippus pamphlet for myself, earmarked the selections from Aristotle for mending leaky boots, and dumped the rest in the front room for the use of my young and impressionable charges.

  Practicalities were all taken care of with typical Macedonian robust efficiency.

  Meals happened four times a day, monolithic affairs involving huge slabs of roast meat, cheeses the size of cartwheels and enormous baskets of coarse barley bread, washed down with raw red wine mixed half-and-half. On special days, I gathered, there were olives, maybe the occasional fig. Laundry was in the hands of three gigantic troll-women, who reminded me alarmingly of the Three Wise Witches — the ones who live at the end of the world and share one eye, one ear and one tongue between them. There was an issue of clothing once a month; one cloak, one tunic, one pair of sandals, ditto boots, one hat, all of them fairly recent cast-offs from the nobs in Pella. For some reason I kept getting Philip’s hats and Parmenio’s tunics; the royal hats all had a thick band of grease just inside the brim, and Parmenio apparently spilt more wine down his front than he ever managed to get into his face. Once I got a stunningly beautiful silk shawl embroidered with countless blue and red snakes, heavily scented with saffron and violets and heavily stained in one corner with a dark brown stuff that was, beyond any shadow of doubt, human blood, which raised all sorts of interesting speculations in my mind as to what Queen Olympias’ duties as high priestess of the snake cult actually involved. The boots were standard army issue, but the sandals were soft and comfortable, if several sizes too big. In fact, everything in Macedon was several sizes too big, from the crockery to the lifestyle to the country itself — too big for me, and I’m no dwarf, remember; extremely curious, that, because I met very few Macedonians who were taller or broader than me, but all their clothes seemed to have been made for the elder brothers of the Titans.

  Aristotle arrived, eventually; at which point Lysimachus came to see me.

  I don’t know to this day whether Lysimachus was a Macedonian with a speech impediment or an offcomer who’d been in Macedon too long. As a general rule I had no trouble at all understanding the Macedonians, but whatever dialect or accent Lysimachus spoke in gave me endless problems, which was awkward when he was notifying me of timetable changes or amendments to the curriculum. He was a long, thin, harassed-looking man with a tiny little nose and enormous eyes, and loud noises made him jump even when he knew they were coming well in advance.

  When the school first started up and the young Alexander, banished here against his will from the royal court in Pella, manifested his displeasure by refusing to have anything to do with the proceedings, Lysimachus finally managed to coax him into co-operatin
g by setting up a vast and intricate role-playing game, in which Alexander was the young Achilles, and Lysimachus took the role of Achilles’ aged and decrepit old tutor, Phoenix. At first, the whole school had to be run in accordance with the rules of the Homer game; everybody was assigned a role to play and had to stay in character every minute of every day. By the time I arrived this requirement had been relaxed considerably, so that we only had to be our Homeric counterparts at morning assembly and after the plates had been cleared away following the evening meal. Even those two occasions were too much for me; because I’d arrived late on the scene, the only role still open for me was that of the wily Ulysses, a character I’ve loathed and despised ever since I was a small child. Besides which, I’m hopeless at acting. I feel like an idiot, pretending to be someone I’m not. But Lysimachus, by necessity, had taken real pains to be Phoenix , which argues a latent genius for histrionics on his part. After all, Phoenix as written by Homer has all the character and individuality of a small root; in order to be such a shallow and ill-defined personality so intensively and for so long, Lysimachus must have had an imagination capable of bending thick iron bars.

  When not being Phoenix , Lysimachus was a pedantic, worried man with a small gift for administration and a disturbing habit of bursting into tears whenever things started to go wrong. In later years Alexander demonstrated a genuine fondness for the poor old fool, which was in keeping with his habit of being very kind to simple, humble folks who agreed fervently with every word he said.

  I can picture you looking at me, Phryzeutzis, and grinning lopsidedly; here’s this little man, you’re thinking, taking every opportunity he can to snipe at the great Alexander now that he’s dead and gone. Maybe, maybe. I never claimed that I liked the boy, even at the height of my period of hero-worship. But the main reason I assume my mask of Yapping Dog, first class, when I start talking about him is that — well, in part I’m responsible. And if I was writing this in Greek you’d understand better, because we use the same word for ‘responsible’