Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  ‘You bastard,’ she said; and she was clearly about to expand on the subject when someone started banging on the door.

  Hell, I thought. ‘You told me he was away at the steading,’ I hissed.

  ‘He is,’ she replied nervously. ‘He rode up there this morning with a string of yearlings.’

  More banging on the door. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Go in the back room till I can get rid of them.’

  The good news was, it wasn’t her loathsome husband Pisander. The bad news was, it was three soldiers.

  ‘Are you Euxenus?’ said one of them. ‘The Athenian?’

  I nodded.

  ‘He wants to see you.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  You didn’t need to be Solon or Pythagoras to work out who he was; and it didn’t require much imagination to guess what He wanted to see me about. I should have been expecting it, of course. A man drops dead at the King’s table, and a fellow guest hurriedly makes his excuses and darts away. Furthermore, said fellow guest had previously been arguing with the dead man; said fellow guest and said dead man were both Athenians. Hell, if I’d been in Philip’s place I’d have arrested me before they’d finished sweeping up the spilt chickpeas.

  ‘Can I just get my cloak?’ I said, heading for the back room.

  ‘No need for that,’ the soldier replied. ‘We’re only going to the other side of the yard.’

  Not that it’d have done you any good, his expression added. Military history and tactics seminar number three: always post a man outside the back-room window.

  Why they thought I could teach them anything about the subject, I haven’t a clue.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Any idea what this is about?’

  The soldier shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he added; and the hint of genuine compassion in his voice as he said it was probably the most chilling thing I’d ever heard in my life. When the arresting officer’s sorry for you, you know it’s not going to be fun.

  As a fountain of justice, Philip had a certain reputation for flair —when he was sober, at any rate. For example, when sentencing two undesirables to permanent exile, his judgement had been: (to the first undesirable) ‘Leave Macedon immediately’; (to the other one)

  ‘Catch him up’. Then there was the old man who was convinced for some reason that Philip had decided the case against him on account of his age; so he dyed his hair and appealed. ‘Go away,’ Philip said. ‘I’ve already said no to your father.’ A laugh a minute, in other words, provided you were sitting in the right part of the room.

  As I was led back into the hall, therefore, I wasn’t feeling particularly chirpy; and any residual traces of confidence I may have had left melted away when I saw that, as well as King Philip, I was in the presence of General Parmenio, Prince Alexander and a bunch of other high-ranking Macedonians who hadn’t been at the dinner. The whole assemblage had too much of an air of justice being seen to be done for my liking, and I was wondering whether there was any point at all in trying to argue that strictly speaking I was still an accredited Athenian diplomat (having never reported to Assembly, filed my accounts and been officially discharged from my duties) when Philip looked up and nodded to the soldiers. They took a few steps backwards, and Philip gestured for me to join the party.

  ‘Not disturbing you, I hope,’ he said.

  ‘No, no, not at all,’ I replied.

  Philip nodded. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘I was afraid you might have gone to bed.’

  I shook my head vigorously, as if denying charges of having murdered my mother.

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ I said. ‘Wide awake, in fact.’

  ‘That’s all right, then,’ Philip said, looking as if he was slightly taken aback at the force of my assertions. ‘It’s been an eventful evening,’ he went on.

  ‘And I know you’re not one for staying up late.’

  That, clearly, was a dig at my habit of sloping off from the communal feasting, which I knew was bad form by Macedonian standards. I couldn’t think of anything to say, though, so I just stood there. Philip helped himself to a drink, then went on.

  ‘If you’d cast your mind back to what we were talking about earlier,’ he said.

  ‘Before Myronides had his — accident. You remember?’

  Here we go, I thought. ‘More or less,’ I said, trying not to sound too cautious;

  bewildered innocence was going to be my line, I’d decided (and, come to think of it, I was innocent, though in the circumstances I didn’t feel innocent in the least. And neither would you, with all those grim-faced people staring at you).

  ‘The proposed colony. And colonies in general.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Philip said. ‘It’s a rather interesting subject. And what you had to say seemed to make a lot of sense.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ Philip went on, ‘we’ve been discussing the subject, and the consensus seems to be that there’s a lot to be said for Myronides’ idea, but the points you raised against it were also pretty valid. Good points on both sides, in fact.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  ‘Talking of which,’ Philip went on, ‘I’d forgotten till you reminded me that Archilochus led a colony to the Black Sea . Interesting.’

  I blinked. For the moment I hadn’t a clue who he was talking about. ‘Excuse me?’

  I said.

  ‘Archilochus,’ Philip repeated. ‘Archilochus the famous poet. The famous poet you’ve been teaching to Alexander and his friends.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Archilochus. Yes. I found this book of his poetry, you see, it was in an outhouse, and...’

  With uncharacteristic forbearance, Philip ignored me. ‘Very interesting,’ he went on. ‘I can’t help wondering, in fact, with all the work involved in setting up a whole new city , how he ever found time to sit down and write all that poetry.’

  ‘Well, quite,’ I said, nodding like a buffoon. ‘Still, you know what they say, if you want something done, ask a busy man.’

  Philip smiled. ‘Are you a busy man, Euxenus?’ he asked.

  ‘Me?’ My mind went blank. ‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘Well, not all that busy, I suppose. But fairly busy.’

  ‘Good. Because there’s something I want you to do for me.’

  Somewhere at the back of my mind I heard a little voice timidly suggesting that possibly I wasn’t going to die quite yet after all. ‘Anything,’ I said. ‘You name it. I’d be honoured, of course.’

  Philip clicked his tongue. ‘You don’t know what it is yet,’ he said.

  ‘No. No, I don’t, that’s perfectly true. What can I do for you?’

  Philip swigged down the rest of his wine and snapped his fingers for another jug. ‘This idea for a colony,’ he said. ‘As I said, I like the idea but I don’t like the problems you pointed out. Tell me, do you think those problems could be sorted out, or is the whole idea not worth bothering with?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I’d have to think about it some more.’

  ‘You do that,’ Philip said. ‘And when you’ve got an answer, come and tell me.

  And if it’ll help concentrate your mind, if the project’s viable and if you want the job, I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be in charge of it. After all,’ he went on, ‘Alexander here speaks very highly of you; very highly indeed,’ he added, with a slight edge to his voice. ‘And Aristotle reckons you’ve got the necessary grounding in economics and politics and all that stuff, as well as a healthy dose of common sense, which is what I’d say is the most important qualification. And Olympias —‘ he smiled; no, grinned. Definitely a grin ‘— I know you can count on her support. She’ll agree, you’re uniquely qualified. So, why not go and get a good night’s sleep, and start thinking it over in the morning?’

  I felt like a fish who finds a hole in the net just when he’s about to drown in air. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Right away. That’s . . . Well, thank you.Yes. Right away.’ And, still babbling, I backed away and
got out of there as quickly as I could.

  Theano was still there when I got home.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘You’re not dead, then. What was all that about?’

  I flopped down in a chair and started to shake. ‘It’s all right,’ I said.

  ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

  I made myself sit up, and looked her in the eyes.

  ‘Go home and pack,’ I said. ‘We’re going to Olbia.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Of course, that was just more melodrama; sure, we were going to Olbia, but not for some time.

  Even if you’re the king of Macedon, you can’t organise something as complicated as the foundation of a new city overnight. Usually, when the Athenians or the Corinthians found a colony, it takes a year or so of debate, deliberations, acrimony and name-calling before the project is even approved by Assembly (and I’ve never heard of a case where they didn’t get approval; but if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly and with an appropriate level of public spectacle). Then there’s another year to eighteen months of arguing over who the oecist is going to be — sorry, I keep forgetting. The oecist is the city’s official Founder, the man who lays the first stone or ploughs the first furrow, the man whose name gets repeated by smiling children at every Founder’s Day festival, whose head goes on the coins, whose soul receives prayers and sacrifices appropriate to a minor deity for as long as the city continues to exist. Doesn’t matter a toss if, having laid the first perfectly square stone or clung grimly to the bespoke ivory plough-handle, he immediately hops onto a fast, comfortable ship, goes back home and never sets eyes on the place again;

  he’s now as close to being an immortal god as it’s possible for a human being to get, short of shinning up a drainpipe into the castle of Olympus when they’ve all gone to bed and swigging ambrosia from one of the dirty cups. In this case, of course, we already had an oecist (me), but that wasn’t the end of it, by any means.

  Oh, there’s all sorts of things that have to be decided before the expedition sets sail, some of which may even be important; and you can bet your life that every single decision will be hammered out in furious debate between two bitterly opposed factions, while the third, fourth and fifth factions sneak around behind their backs forming alliances and plotting to overthrow them the day after tomorrow. Somehow I’d imagined it’d be different in Macedon, with a strong and autocratic king making all the really significant decisions. True enough, he did; but those weren’t the decisions that took time. Rather, it was the trivia he delegated to the proto-colony’s provisional ruling council that caused all the fuss, and really, a man like Philip should have known better. For of course these were exactly the sorts of things that I and my fellow babblers had been brought up from infancy to argue over in an appropriately fascinating manner until somebody paid us to stop, and even though we knew that this time we weren’t getting paid by the hour, force of habit’s a terrible thing and so’s professional pride.

  Well, at least it gave me ample opportunity to get to know my fellow councillors, although on balance I think it’d have been better for all concerned if the first time we’d met had been at the dockside. These men were the idealist part of the standard colonial mix, the ones who were sailing in the hope of a brave new world and a brighter tomorrow. It’s a general rule that cities, like prudent men making gifts to a worthy cause, never give away anything for which they might conceivably find a use one day, and the upper crust of any bunch of would-be settlers tends to be made up in roughly equal proportions of the useless and the malignant. Accordingly, among my Founding Fathers I had two noblemen’s sons of such unutterable depravity that I couldn’t for the life of me work out how they’d managed to pack so much activity into such short lives without completely ruining their health; a big-time political loser who’d been given the choice between a brighter tomorrow in Olbia and no tomorrow at all in Macedon; five or six extremely earnest, extremely young noblemen who’d read Plato and Aristotle and Xenophon and gods know what else, and who knew for a fact that humankind are basically a decent enough bunch of chaps provided you dredge deep enough, and there’s no problem so great that it can’t be solved if only men of goodwill are prepared to sit down together and talk through their differences in a rational manner; and one deaf-mute, one kleptomaniac and a congenital idiot.

  And so it went on. My colleagues argued and bitched; Philip sent the occasional brisk note asking how much longer he was going to have to keep paying these tiresome mercenary soldiers I’d undertaken to get off his hands; I floundered, banged tables, wheedled, horse-traded and sent replies to the royal court in Pella that weren’t exactly lies provided you interpreted them just right; all in my spare time, of course, when I wasn’t teachingYoung Macedon the correct use of the caesura in Archilochean iambics and the Spartans’ blockade of Attica during the Great Peloponnesian War. Just in case this wasn’t enough excitement, I also had the joyful prospect of Theano’s divorce and Pisander’s lawsuit against me to look forward to.

  By his own lights, Pisander had been unexpectedly decent about the whole thing.

  Apart from slapping her about a bit and drawing pretty patterns on her left forearm with a hot iron, he’d accepted the position without anger or bitterness and had come to see me in a thoroughly polite and businesslike manner, as seller to buyer, to open negotiations. Unfortunately, I wasn’t nearly as civilised and pragmatically minded as he was. I hadn’t actually met him before; as soon as he told me who he was and I realised that he was a head shorter than me and quite slightly built, my rage at his vicious treatment of his wife knew no bounds, and I bounced him off a wall or two before asking him to repeat his opening offer.

  After that, we negotiated through an intermediary.

  Theano herself didn’t seem to be inclined to make things any easier for me. She stayed away, didn’t answer the notes I sent urging her to leave her husband’s house and move in with me; she hadn’t even said whether or not she was coming to Olbia with me.When the stage in the divorce proceedings came where she had to leave, she moved back to her father’s house, much to his dismay, since he’d recently remarried himself, so there wasn’t a vacancy for another female in what was anyway a pretty small, hand-to-mouth household. I went to see him and put it to him that her attitude wasn’t doing anybody any good; everything was a mess, and the baby hadn’t even been born yet. After huffing and puffing for long enough to make sure money changed hands, he agreed with me and said he’d see what he could do to talk her round — an ambitious undertaking in which he was entirely successful, achieving with two short words (‘Get out!’) what I’d failed to do with several long and extremely well-phrased letters. In my own defence, I should add that she hadn’t actually read my letters, mainly because she didn’t know how to read. As an Athenian, of course, I’d just assumed... Well, I learned one valuable lesson from the experience though, as you’ll see in due course, a whole bunch of others were entirely wasted on me.

  So Theano moved in, and things got very awkward. Now you, my worldly wise young friend, will tell me that anybody with the sensitivity of a stale bun would have realised long before this stage in the game that it wasn’t entirely realistic of me to expect her to throw herself into my arms, in a passionate but respectful manner (as befitting someone of her inferior social standing) and thank me with shining eyes for rescuing her from a life of wretched drudgery and lovelessness. And really, I wasn’t expecting that, exactly. Neither, however, was I expecting a sharp blow on the side of my head from a hard-thrown pottery cup.

  ‘What was that for?’ I asked, dabbing at the point of impact with my forefinger to see if it was bleeding. ‘It was just a suggestion, that’s all.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ she replied.

  I frowned. What we had here, I perceived, was a communications problem.

  And no wonder. Bear in mind, please, that I was brought up in a traditional Athenian family, and t
hat my mother died when I was quite young. Consequently, I’d never had much occasion to talk to women when I was growing up, and then my wife died young too so I didn’t learn the language at that stage in my life, which is when most men find themselves assimilating this uniquely challenging skill. Also worth bearing in mind is the fact that I’d spent a very significant part of my adult life talking to men (and on a competitive basis, at that). I was, by any standards, a good debater, skilled in the logic-based, fundamentally adversarial form which discussion or argument among men generally takes. I imagined that you discussed things with women in basically the same way.

  Wrong.

  I suppose it’s a matter of upbringing as much as anything else; if we taught little girls how to conduct a structured, logical argument in the same way we teach little boys, maybe we wouldn’t run into these ghastly problems we tend to come across on those occasions when we find ourselves with no choice but to try to have sensible discussions with women. In practice in normal everyday life, such a need arises so rarely that it wouldn’t begin to justify the amount of effort involved, so we don’t bother. Upper-crust trophy wives need to be able to talk intelligently, as do the really high-class prostitutes; otherwise it is indeed a prodigious waste of time and resources.

  (I’m aware, Phryzeutzis, that things are rather different here, and that men and women share their lives, rather than living parallel lives under the same roof, as we tend to do in Athens . I’m sorry to say, it’s an indication of how primitive your culture really is. You see, the same symbiotic relationship does indeed occur in certain sections of society in Greece ; but only among the very poor and backward, where it’s necessary for the women to labour in the fields alongside the men, doing the same sorts of work, which means that husband and wife are in each other’s company pretty much all the time. Once you get away from this basic subsistence level of society, though, you find the regular pattern emerging; men go out to work in the morning and come home at dusk, having spent the day alone or with other men; women stay in the house and do women’s work, visit each other, and so on. That’s why, incidentally, if you look at the paintings on Greek pottery and woodwork and the like, the men are painted reddish-brown and the women are all white, or a very pale pinkywhite; men spend all day in the sun, women scarcely ever leave the house. I wouldn’t worry about it, though. As your society develops and matures, so you’ll gradually come to adopt more enlightened attitudes, patterns of behaviour and, finally, patterns of speech.)