by Tom Holt
‘Sorry,’ I said, but he wasn’t paying attention; he’d gathered the torn part of his gown in one hand and was staring at a little parchment scrap that was stuck to it. Plainly legible were the words ‘In many respects, the Corinthian assembly resembles that of the Athenians’; not, perhaps, the most memorable line he’d ever penned, but distinctive enough, it seemed.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said, and left.
So, inevitably, there I was, sitting on the rail with my hat on against the sun, as the first horse was led into the ring.
I have nothing against horses. I know how to ride one, more or less; you sit on the middle facing the end with the ears, it’s not exactly difficult. But I’ve always found it hard to be interested in horses, the way some people are.
Alexander, on the other hand, was obviously a connoisseur, and an expert. Hardly surprising; in Macedon they have both the money and the room for serious horse-rearing, and horses have always been part of the aristocratic lifestyle, so I imagine he’d been riding since shortly after he was old enough to walk.
Philip, I knew for a fact, was most definitely a horsey sort of man, and in a way it was significant that a new batch of horses brought him out to Mieza, something the education of his son never managed to do.
And a pretty tedious spectacle I found it, I have to admit. A horse was brought in, the various trainers and horse people persecuted it until it did what they wanted it to, and then they brought in another one. The sight of ten or so men bumping and wobbling their way round a ring on the backs of unwilling animals didn’t strike me as either inspiring or amusing, and since I didn’t understand the process I didn’t feel there was much I could learn from the experience.
Still, it would have been the height of bad manners to slope off before the King left, so I was stuck there. I wedged my heels onto the rail below me and let my mind wander.
I was startled out of my reverie by the sound of someone screaming. I looked up and saw one of the trainers, or whatever it is you call them, being dragged along the ground behind a ferocious-looking brute of a tall black horse with a white splodge on its forehead. Somehow the man’s foot had got tangled in the reins; as he bumped along the ground, leaving a dark-brown trail of blood in the dust as he went, so with each step he dragged on the left-hand rein, making the horse run in a wide circle. The more they tried to catch hold of him, the faster the horrible creature ran, and I joined the spectacle just before the wretched man’s head hit a stone or something with a very definite cracking noise, and he stopped struggling and flopped, like a wooden doll being dragged along behind a small child.
After that there wasn’t quite the same degree of urgency about stopping the runaway horse; they stopped trying, and without anybody chasing after it and flapping their hands in its face, the animal soon slowed down and came to a halt long enough for them to dart out and cut the dead man free from the reins.
‘Get the damned thing out of here,’ I heard Philip shouting; charitably, I assumed he was talking about the horse. But Alexander, who’d been sitting next to him, stood up and raised his hand in a hold-it sort of gesture.
‘It’s not the horse’s fault,’ he said.
‘Like hell it isn’t,’ Philip replied irritably. ‘Whose is it, anyway?’
I heard someone say that it belonged to a Thessalian called Philonicus.
‘Strange,’ Philip said. ‘I’d have thought he’d have had more sense. It’s obviously way past training.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Alexander said, in an embarrassingly clear, distinct voice.
‘I say they’re just going about it the wrong way, that’s all.’
I can only assume he was doing it on purpose. If so, he got the result he was looking for. ‘Oh, really?’ Philip said. ‘And you know everything there is to know about handling horses, and we don’t.’
‘I know enough to be able to handle this one,’ Alexander replied, as cool as you like. That was a habit of his, or a mannerism or whatever; the more heated and excitable the other man got in an argument, the colder and more detached he became. ‘Oughtn’t to be too difficult,’ he said. ‘Why, would you like me to show you?’
Philip didn’t know whether to shout or roar with laughter; either would have made things worse. It was pretty clear to me as an outside observer that the relationship between these two had reached the crisis stage where one of them was going to have to do something melodramatic and probably regrettable in order to resolve it. It was just a pity that it should have to involve something as horribly dangerous as a rogue horse that had just killed a professional horse-tamer. But from what I know of Alexander, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was how he wanted it; the bigger the risk, the bigger the victory, after all. If this crisis had been on the cards for any length of time (and I’m sure it had)
it’d be just like Alexander to engineer the breaking-point to be something like that, a very dangerous situation that he felt confident he could handle.
Alexander was always a gambler, and he only ever bet on certainties and he never wagered less than his life.
‘You’re going to break this horse, aren’t you?’ Philip said, lowering his voice ominously.
‘I think I’d like to try,’ Alexander replied.
‘All right,’ Philip said. ‘Suppose you fail, and suppose by some miracle you manage not to break your damn neck in the process; what’s the bet?’
Alexander thought for a moment. ‘I’ll buy the horse,’ he said.
That took Philip entirely by surprise. ‘You will, will you? Hey, you,’ he snapped at the man next to him, ‘how much does Philonicus want for that horse?’
The man whispered in Philip’s ear. ‘Louder,’ Philip said, ‘so we can all hear.’
‘Thirteen talents,’ the man announced.
(Yes, sorry, I’m losing you again, Phryzeutzis. You don’t know whether thirteen talents is the annual revenue of Babylon or the price of a bushel of garlic.
Well, let’s put it this way. It’d take your average working man, a stonemason, say, or a carpenter, over two hundred years to earn thirteen talents.)
‘Still going to buy the horse?’ Philip said.
‘Yes,’ Alexander replied.
‘Really. What with?’
Alexander looked at his father without any visible expression on his face. ‘Oh, I expect Mother’d lend me the money,’ he replied.
Now don’t ask me what all that was about; but the way Philip’s face tightened showed that Alexander had just said something unforgivable, bad enough that Philip would let him try to tame the horse because he was so angry he wouldn’t care if his son did get himself killed. Good tactics on Alexander’s part—
(And I thought of what I’d taught him: make the other guy make a mistake.
Precisely what Alexander had just done. Whatever the outcome now, Philip would be in the wrong. If Alexander tamed the horse, he’d be quite the young Hercules or Theseus, subduing monsters before he was through potty-training. If, on the other hand, he was killed or badly hurt, then whose fault would it be for letting him do such a crazy thing? The mistake he’d forced Philip into making was losing his temper to the extent that he allowed himself to be put in this no-win position...
Did I do that? I wondered.)
‘Bet,’ Philip said softly, and you can be sure it was quiet enough for everybody to hear. I’ve never heard so much venom packed into one little word, before or since.
So Alexander hopped down from the rail — it was the lissom movement of a child, the sort of thing you can’t do when you’re a grown-up, no matter how fit you are — and walked calmly to the centre of the ring, where the monster horse was standing, radiating hatred and viciousness in all directions. I didn’t really want to look; on the other hand, how many chances do you get in a lifetime to see a prince of the blood get horribly mutilated? In Athens there’d have been someone going round with a tray, selling apples.
First he just stood there, looking the horse in the eye; then he wa
lked round it, patted it on the side of the neck, slipped off his cloak and took hold of the reins, turning the animal’s head towards the sun. Then he got on its back and rode it round the ring a few times.
You’re probably way ahead of me. As soon as I told you that he made the horse face the sun, you reached the same conclusion that Alexander had; the stupid creature was afraid of shadows, and whenever it saw its own shadow, or the shadow of its rider’s cloak or anything like that, it bolted. That was all there was to it.
After he’d shown off his horsemanship for a minute or two Alexander pulled up in front of his father, jumped down, looped what was left of the reins over a rail and resumed his seat. For a long time, nobody said anything, or moved; then Philip nodded his head, ever so slightly.
‘You noticed that too,’ he said. ‘Very good.’
‘I think I’ll call him Oxhead,’ Alexander replied, looking straight ahead.
‘I see.You think I’m going to buy you this horse, do you?’
‘Yes.’
Philip shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘With luck I should be able to get him for twelve.’
Alexander shook his head. ‘He’s worth thirteen.’
‘All right.’
Now then; assuming one of them set up the other, which was it? At the time I was sure it was Alexander who’d taken Philip; now I’m not so sure. I wouldn’t put it past Philip to have arranged something like that, a test so close to the edge that nobody would ever believe it was a set-up. And that, of course, was why it would be such a triumph, the foundation for a legend; nobody in their right mind would ever believe a father would risk his son’s life in order that his son could triumph over him in public. Nobody, that is, except Philip, who was afraid of nothing. If he did plan it, it was one of his best ever pieces of strategy;
because that was when Alexander first knew what hitherto he’d only believed.
As for my lesson, Aristotle was quite right, bless his heart. In order to train this boy, you had to turn his head towards the sun and keep him from seeing his own shadow. Understand that simple fact and you could make him do anything you wanted.
By the time I got home that evening, I still liked the Macedonians. But in a slightly different way.
After that, I knew what I was supposed to do. It helps.
Thanks to the books I found in the outhouse, I was able to learn enough to be able to teach. I did a swap with Aristotle, my astronomy and medicine for his lyric poetry and prosodic theory, and learned how to write poetry from Archilochus and how not to from Panyasis; I traded literature for economic theory with Leonidas, and managed to distil enough economics out of the silver-mines franchising pamphlet to bluff my way (actually, any damn fool can work out economics from first principles; you start with ‘A has a loaf of bread but no money, B has a silver coin but no food’ and carry on from there). As for military history, I had Thucydides’ account of the War, the commentary on tactics in Homer and that old favourite, Aeneas’ military handbook, so I was spoilt for choice.
Teaching poetry was a piece of cake. None of the Macedonians had any interest in the subject whatsoever, so by mutual consent we whittled the curriculum down to being able to compose lines that scanned in pentameters and hexameters, iambics, dactyls and anapaests, to recognise the dumb-beast basic lyric forms (alcaics, anacreontics, hendecasyllables, sapphics); basic caesura rules, elisions, epic license and archaic forms — yes, I know this means nothing to you, Phryzeutzis;
what passes for poetry in this barbarous land works on an entirely different system of lines ending in words that sound vaguely similar, so I won’t even try explaining how real poetry works. Let’s say that if I’d been teaching them carpentry instead of poetry, they’d have learned the names (but not the uses) of the saw, the rasp and the bow-drill, and which end of the hammer you use to hit the nail with.
I’ve mentioned economics already. Young Harpalus, the fat kid, was talented and enthusiastic in this field, which was a nuisance, but the rest of the class were happy just to mark time. I based everything on the one bit of economic theory I remembered from my own schooldays, namely Socrates’ theory of growth. Actually, like so many of Socrates’ theories, it’s so full of holes you could use it for straining curds — it’s a misbegotten fusion of science, politics and mysticism, which equates the tendency of things in nature to grow (trees and grass and stuff like that) with the practice of lending money on interest, on the basis that money somehow reproduces, like mice in the thatch, and so it’s all right to borrow because each silver owl you borrow will hatch out a clutch of little baby owls, which’ll pay the interest on the loan and still leave you change for things like food and rent. Piffle; but I made it sound totally convincing, and in due course you’ll see what hatched out of it when Alexander and Harpalus eventually came into serious money.
But what they really wanted to learn — and I wanted to teach, because I had three books to teach it from — was military history; so we fiddled about with the curriculum until it ended up like the proportion of wine to water in the mixing bowl during the closing stages of a really evil party. I taught them the battles of the Persian Wars (from memory), the major engagements of the Peloponnesian War (from Thucydides’ book), the theory of chivalry and clean warfare (from Homer) and the future of military science (from Aeneas the Tactician; thirty years out of date and still every bit as impractical as the day it was written). I tell you, Phryzeutzis; if I’d been a slightly better teacher, or if they’d had slightly less inherent ability, I could have guaranteed the safety not only of Greece but the whole of the Persian empire .
Leonidas, of course, objected to my teaching Homeric warfare, because Leonidas taught Homer. It was his subject, the only one he knew anything about, the only one that really mattered in the eyes of Philip and the other boys’ fathers. I felt it was bitterly unfair that he should be getting at me over this; after all, I loathe and despise Homer, and wanted nothing at all to do with the matter, but the fact remains — teaching war without Homer is like teaching a lad to be a smith while omitting any reference to metal. Can’t be done.
The net effect of this was to make me even more rabidly anti-Homer than before;
which in turn brought me into conflict with Aristotle, who worshipped the stuff, and by association Alexander, who liked Homer in the same way a fish likes water. All that blood and honour, that simple equation between prowess, exertion and reward — it was the sort of world he most wanted to live in, regardless of whether or not it bore any relation whatsoever to real life.
We fell out over it, in fact. What brought it to a head was a discussion on the role of the archer in various philosophies of war. I’d pointed out that whereas the Greeks had never reckoned much to the bow and arrow, the Persians had won their empire with them. I was just explaining why this was— ‘Ibex horn,’ I said.
‘The only decent bows in Greece are made of ibex horn, and they’re difficult and expensive to build, so very few people have them. The majority of the bows we use are just plain wood, and Greek trees make lousy bows. The Persians, on the other hand, make vastly superior bows out of slivers of horn, wood and sinew laminated together; the materials are plentiful and they’re good enough at it to be able to make the bows affordable, so everyone who wants one has a chance to own one. So the Persians fight with the bow, whereas we Greeks prefer to fight with spears, in armour; and we prefer to fight that way because we have a different notion of what winning means. For the Persians, winning means killing the enemy. For us, it means making the enemy run away and leave us in possession of the disputed territory. That’s what we call honourable warfare, and it’s purely fortuitous that armoured spearmen can bash the crap out of archers nineteen times out of twenty, because otherwise I’d be telling you this in Persian—’
‘Excuse me,’ Alexander said. Please note: whatever else I may have failed to do, I’d at least taught him the rudiments of civility. ‘But that’s not the reason.’
I suppose I should have
been used to remarks like that by then; but we were running late and I wasn’t in the mood. ‘Really,’ I said. ‘Then maybe you’d care to tell us what the real reason is.
‘Simple,’ Alexander said. ‘The bow’s a coward’s weapon. It says so in Homer.’
I took a deep breath. ‘It does indeed,’ I replied. ‘Repeatedly; though that doesn’t stop Ulysses from single-handedly exterminating the sons-of-bitches who’ve taken over his house at the end of the Odyssey with a bow, something he’d have had no chance of doing with a sword or a spear. In fact, you’ll remember that he proves he’s the king because he’s the only one who’s man enough to be able to string the mighty bow, which implies they weren’t quite so snooty about bows on Ithaca , at least. Point of interest, by the way; any bow that’s been laid up in the rafters for twenty years and never strung, like Ulysses’ bow was supposed to have been, would have snapped like a dry twig long before you could get a string on it, but nevertheless—’
‘Ulysses wasn’t a man of honour,’ Alexander interrupted. ‘He was as devious as a fox.’
‘Or as we say in Athens , an intellectual,’ I snapped back. ‘Yes, I’ll grant you that. It’s not really relevant to the subject at hand, but it’s true enough.’
Alexander looked at me, and when he spoke again he’d lowered his voice. Really, I should have known better. ‘You don’t like Homer,’ he said.
‘True,’ I admitted.
‘Well, that’s not right,’ Alexander replied. ‘Even you must see that—’
‘You do, don’t you?’ I broke in. ‘You really enjoy the stuff, I can tell.’
‘Of course.’
I nodded. I’d been fattening him up for this. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘who would you rather be, Achilles or Homer?’
Alexander smiled. ‘That’s easy,’ he said. ‘Homer.’
‘Really?’
‘Of course. By the time Achilles was your age, he was dead.’
I nodded again. ‘Absolutely true,’ I replied. ‘Eternally famous, yes. The greatest hero of all time, yes. Destined to live forever—’