Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I can see we need to talk about this. So why don’t you calm down and get a grip and then we might be able to work out just what it is that’s bugging you so much.’

  She made a curious sort of angry squealing noise. ‘I don’t want to calm down, thank you,’ she replied. ‘And I know perfectly well what’s “bugging me” without any help from you, Mister So-Damned-Clever Athenian.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘You are.’

  I sighed. A less patient man would have given up long since, but I’m not like that. ‘You’ll have to try to be a little more specific if we’re going to make any progress here,’ I said. ‘See if you can’t narrow it down a bit. Just what is it about me that makes you lose control and start throwing things? My face? The way I eat soup? The sound of my voice?’

  She glared at me. ‘All of them,’ she said.

  I scratched my ear thoughtfully. ‘Odd,’ I said. ‘I’ve been looking and acting and sounding the same all my life, and yet that’s the first time anybody’s ever slung the crockery at me. Can you account for that?’

  She shook her head. ‘They do have crockery where you come from?’ she asked.

  ‘My dear girl, we’re the biggest producers of fine-grade tableware in Greece .’

  ‘Then I can’t understand it,’ she replied. ‘I’d have thought an arrogant, interfering, manipulative, self-centred bastard like you’d have been dodging flying plates since you were old enough to crawl.’

  I was amazed. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘Oh, go to hell,’ she said.

  ‘That’s not an answer,’ I pointed out. ‘You’ll have to do better than that if you want me to accept—’

  She banged the wall with her fist. ‘I don’t want you to do anything,’ she said, ‘except get out of my life and stay out, before you do any more damage. Can’t you understand that? I don’t like you, and you’re a menace. Because of you, I’ve been thrown out of my own house and my father’s house, I’ve lost my husband and I’m pregnant. If you can suggest a way that things could possibly be worse, short of having me lose an arm or go blind, it’ll be one hell of a tribute to the power of your imagination.’ She scowled at me, then added, ‘Oh, yes, I forgot. Just to round it all off to perfection, you propose to make it up to me by whisking me miles away from home and stranding me in the middle of nowhere, in a log cabin surrounded by savages, to spend my days as your combination whore, brood-mare and skivvy. That’s surely an offer no girl in her right mind would ever dream of refusing.’

  She put her hand down on the table not far from the little oil-jug, and I instinctively jerked my head away. It’s a well-known fact: once they get a taste for throwing things, they find it quite difficult to stop. She noticed and gave me a look so full of scorn it’d have wilted cress. ‘It’s all right,’ she sighed.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  ‘Oh, but you have,’ I replied immediately (even I can spot an obvious cue when I see one). ‘Hurt me, I mean.’ I shook my head sadly, the very model of injured benevolence. ‘Just try looking at the situation rationally for a change, instead of letting all those rampant female emotions take you for a ride. We start off with a convenient, amicable business arrangement — one which you first suggested yourself, if you’re capable of remembering back that far. All right, so things got a bit out of hand and you found yourself in an awkward position — not something you couldn’t have anticipated, unless you had a really weird upbringing, but I suppose you decided to ignore the risk, figuring it’d never happen to you; some people have the ability to do that, and up to a point I almost envy them. I can’t, but I’m a born worrier. Anyway, along comes a problem, quite properly you come to me for help—’

  ‘I never—’ she interrupted. I ignored her and raised my voice a little.

  ‘You come to me for help,’ I repeated firmly. ‘I consider the position and come up with an eminently practical way of dealing with it, and what do I get in return? Obstructiveness and hostility, that’s what, in addition to all the expense and embarrassment I’m already being put to on your behalf. But that’s all right,’ I went on. ‘I do understand, it’s a really difficult and unsettling time for you, you’re frightened and upset and so you lash out — at me, naturally, the way a child in that sort of situation would take it out on its parents, the people who’re responsible for it and take care of it. It’s a perfectly natural reaction, I’ve observed it many times with frightened kids, and since I’ve more or less taken over that role in your life—’

  At this point she made a loud, unpleasant noise, somewhere between a scream and the squeal of a pig with a burned nose. ‘Shut up, will you?’ she yelped. ‘I don’t care how bad a state my life’s in, I don’t have to listen to this. And to think, I found you attractive because I liked the sound of your horrible whining Athenian voice!’

  ‘Theano,’ I said; she jumped to her feet, but I was a little quicker and caught her by the arm. Unfortunately, it was the arm her loathsome husband had chosen to practise his pyrography on, and she screamed with genuine, unpremeditated pain. I let go at once, of course, but the harm had been done; the association had already been formed in her mind.

  ‘Theano,’ I repeated. ‘Look, I’m sorry—’

  Waste of breath, of course. She was out of there like a thrush that’s managed to wriggle out from under the paw of an inexperienced fox.

  I sat down, feeling unaccountably upset. Not by the rudeness and ingratitude —

  I’m proud of the fact that I’m the easy-going sort, the kind who doesn’t take offence unless it’s really unavoidable, and besides, there were all manner of extenuating circumstances in this instance, as I’d been trying to explain to her. No, what was bothering me was the fact that she was clearly still distressed, even after everything I’d said to prove to her that I understood exactly what was going on in her mind; which in turn suggested that something else was bothering her, something I just couldn’t begin to grasp —

  — And me a philosopher. Me, a scientist, a man who hunts the truth to its lair and brings it struggling to the surface, a man who’d been studying his fellow men — that, after all, was what my apprenticeship with Diogenes had been all about — effectively since childhood. And here’s me, one of the brightest and the best, unable to get inside something as simple as the mind of a Macedonian peasant’s daughter.

  I freely admit, it was an uncomfortable moment; like trying to pick up a rock you’ve been able to lift since you were sixteen years old, and suddenly finding one fine day that it’s too heavy for you. I didn’t like the feeling one bit, and for a while I was tempted to let her go to the crows and take the problem with her, so that I wouldn’t have to try to deal with it again. For two pins...

  But there wasn’t anybody on hand to give me two pins, and my professional conscience wasn’t going to let me turn my back on a problem just because it was disagreeably awkward.

  Instead, I went to bed. As it so happened, the book I was reading at that moment was the collected works of Semonides, one of my all-time favourite lyric poets;

  and the line which jumped up off the paper at me like a friendly dog as I pulled down the scroll was:

  ‘God made women’s minds entirely separate from

  True, I thought, and fell asleep.

  She was back again by the time I woke up, of course; fast asleep on a couch in the main room, with her hair still up and her shoes still on. I left her there, dressed quickly and hurried out without any breakfast; I’d overslept, and a quick glance up at the sky told me that if I didn’t look sharp, I’d be late for school.

  ‘Today,’ I announced, ‘we’ll consider what I believe to be one of the most significant military actions ever to take place between two Greek armies; and it so happens that I’m extremely highly qualified to pontificate about this particular slice of military hi
story, because my own grandfather, the great comic poet Eupolis of Pallene, took part in it. In fact, he was so deeply involved in it that it’s a miracle I’m here at all.

  ‘I’m referring, of course, to the destruction of the mighty Athenian army sent under the command of General Nicias to conquer Sicily in Syracuse towards the end of the Great War between the Athenians and the Spartans. My unfortunate grandfather was a soldier in the second expeditionary force that was sent out to break the stalemate that resulted from the Syracusans’ entirely understandable reluctance to meet an army as huge and ferocious as the first expeditionary force — on its own it was one of the largest armies ever to leave Athens, and once Grandad’s mob joined it, it was staggeringly big.

  Too big, in fact; they didn’t bother to bring any food with them, and when they joined their chums under the beleaguered walls of Syracuse , they found them half dead from starvation. The only food to be had, in fact, was the occasional pumice-hard crust or shard of plaster cheese-rind slung over the ramparts by the chubby and prudent Syracusans, either from basic compassion or a savage sense of humour.

  ‘Well, after a couple of disastrously botched attempts to progress matters — a night-attack on the enemy and a sea-battle, in both of which the Athenians contrived to turn victory into heartbreaking defeat with that extreme deftness and sureness of touch that we manage so well — the generals realised that they had no choice but to raise the siege, fall back to friendly territory and get something to eat. Now this clearly was no big deal; in spite of their losses, the army was still enormous, and apart from the garrison of Syracuse itself, the enemy had no field army of any description, let alone one big enough to last five minutes against a force comprising half the male citizens of the largest city in Greece who were of military age and owned enough property to serve as heavy infantry. In other words, the march from Syracuse to Catana was going to be nothing more arduous than a walk in the country followed by a slap-up dinner at a friend’s house; what better way, in fact, to spend a day or so?’

  I paused there for a moment and looked round. In spite of the family connection, it was entirely possible that these born warriors already knew more about the affair than I did (actually, most of what I was telling them was reheated Thucydides; Grandfather Eupolis scarcely ever talked about the war, so I’m told, except very occasionally in his sleep); in which case they’d be looking bored or smug, and I could skip the rest of the narrative and get straight on to the nice chewy conclusions to be drawn at the end. But no, they all looked revoltingly fascinated and attentive, so I carried on with the story.

  ‘So off they marched,’ I said, ‘and to begin with they were cheerful and their morale was high. But after a while they began to get a rather creepy feeling, as if someone was following. So they stopped and the generals sent a few men to take a look; and sure enough, trailing along behind them like the village dogs following a sausage-maker on his way home from market was a rabble — I’m being polite calling them that, even — a rabble of Sicilian scruffs and no-goods, hired hands, tenant farmers’ sons, city trash, small boys, without a decent helmet or breastplate between them. But what they did have were throwing-spears and bows and arrows and an infinite quantity of good, hand-fitting stones, the size and weight your father told you never to throw at people in case you did someone an injury.

  ‘It wasn’t an army; it didn’t have the gear or the social standing to be an army. And since it wasn’t an army, it couldn’t fight a battle, so it didn’t.

  What it could do, though, was buzz round our resplendent and immaculately polished army like a swarm of angry bees, stinging and buzzing away before they could be swatted. Trying to catch them was a waste of time; you’d feel the chunk! of a slab of rock on the back of your bronze-encased head, and down you’d go; by the time you were on your feet again, they’d be nowhere to be seen. The few men who did go scampering off among the rocks in full armour and hot pursuit never came back, of course; twenty or so adolescent thugs were waiting just over the skyline to pull the breathless hero down and tear him apart with their fingernails.

  ‘Nothing for it, then, but to keep marching; in full armour, because of the unceasing shower of stones; in the heat of the day, because they daren’t stop;

  wandering about, herded like goats bewildered by the yapping of small, fierce dogs — they tried to shake them off by marching at night, but they didn’t know the way, and the enemy did. The further they went, the further they were driven from the road they should have been following, the one that had wells and streams along it; no water, no food, but lots of dust and heat and the constant nagging persecution of the enemy that wasn’t even an army...

  ‘In the end, they broke into two sections, one straggling behind the other. The first party staggered down to a river; tortured with thirst, they plunged into the water and the Sicilians killed them as they drank — I gather they didn’t make any attempt to fight, they just lay in the water and guzzled it, all filthy with silt and blood, till an arrow or a stone stopped them, or until the Sicilians rounded up the survivors and marched them back the way they’d just come towards Syracuse.

  ‘On the way, they passed the place where the other half of the army had been killed, in a walled orchard on some wealthy Syracusan’s country estate. My grandfather was one of a handful who got out of there before the archers and slingers finished off the job. The rest stayed, kneeling behind their shields until hunger, thirst or the unofficial weapons of the Sicilians did for them.

  ‘Only a fraction of the army lived to be taken prisoner; but there were thousands of them nevertheless, and they died of starvation and neglect squashed together in the stone-quarries of Syracuse, the only secure place big enough to hold such a multitude. They died simply because there wasn’t enough food or water to spare for such a huge number of men, and nowhere big enough to shelter them.’

  I stopped there and looked at my audience. They looked uncomfortable, like children who’ve just become aware that their father isn’t the biggest, strongest man in the world, and that there isn’t really a Good Fairy who watches over them while they sleep. In retrospect, maybe it was an unkind thing to do to them, at such an early and impressionable age, to strip them of the comfortable belief that high breeding, solid plate armour and obeying orders without question will always see you right, no matter how dismal the situation. After all, these boys had been raised to be soldiers, and a soldier must have something to believe in, else he’d turn tail and run at the first sight of the sun flashing off the enemy’s helmets.

  ‘Right,’ I said, ‘that’s the facts of the case. You don’t need me to tell you that it flatly contradicts everything I’ve taught you so far about military theory. In case some of you weren’t listening, I’ll just repeat that one basic lesson: in war, the side that doesn’t screw up, wins. But in this case, apart from a few logistical problems which they were by no means the first to encounter, I don’t think the Athenians made a mistake. They saw they’d bitten off more than they could swallow, so they resolved to withdraw in good order.

  There was no field army to oppose them. More to the point, there was no reason to oppose them, because they were going away, with no suggestion that they were likely to come back. According to basic military theory, there was nothing to be gained by fighting an enemy who’s pissing off of his own accord. After all, what did the Syracusans actually gain by the exercise, apart from a lot of healthy exercise burying the dead? They killed thousands and thousands of men; so what?

  ‘And that’s the point, surely. The Syracusans changed the rules. Up to that moment, everybody in the world knew why people fought wars; it was to decide a simple question, such as who owns this attractively situated plain, or who’s going to rule this city. When other means of deciding the issue fail, the question is put to the gods, who hold up a set of golden scales with the fates of each side in the pans — you remember the scene from Homer, no doubt, and very memorable it is, too. We Greeks designed heavy infantry warfare to be effici
ent and suited to our needs; first, it always gave a clear result; second, it was decided by courage and physical strength rather than the cleverness of individual generals; third, it was relatively safe, even for the losing side;

  fourth, only the ruling class, the men who can afford armour, are allowed to take part. We’ve fought this way for hundreds of years without a significant change in the way we go about matters because it works, it does what we want it to do. As a result, war in Greece has never been about killing as many people as possible, which would be infamous and an affront to the gods. So; what went wrong?

  ‘There are many possible answers. You can say that the Sicilians aren’t proper Greeks (though, by the same token, neither are you; and you’re just as shocked as I was when I first heard the story). You can say that the attack on Syracuse was simply state piracy and utterly unprovoked; and that’s true, too, but hardly unprecedented. Maybe you could claim that, after enslaving their fellow Greeks for fifty years, the Athenians were so bitterly hated that something like this was inevitable, sooner or later. You can argue that this all happened at the end of the longest and nastiest war in our history, at a point where one side finally lost its temper and played spitefully, like a violent child. All sorts of reasons; maybe you can put them all together and end up with enough reasons to make sense of what happened. But that’s not good enough for us, because we’re trying to learn history here, and the whole point of history is to find out how certain things happened with a view to making sure they never happen again. One day, you’ll be at the head of an army in hostile territory, and you’ll see far away in the distance a big mob of enemy skirmishers keeping pace with you, and you’ll think of me then and ask yourself, “What do I do now?”