Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  ‘All right, here’s the answer. Not necessarily a definitively correct one, but something you can write down on your tablets and learn by heart; the side that doesn’t screw up, wins; making assumptions is an easy way to screw up. Never assume that the rules will stay the same, that the difficult job is too difficult or the easy job is too easy. My grandfather and his comrades-in-arms assumed that walking to Catana was easy, and destroying a vast army with sticks and stones was difficult; they made assumptions. Now, if I were you, I’d lie awake at nights worrying about what I’ve just told you. In fact, the night when you can put it out of your mind and go back to sleep should be the night before the day you hand over command to someone else. Any questions?’

  I hadn’t expected any (I’d made an assumption, see?) so I was a little bit put out when Alexander solemnly raised his hand and looked me in the eye.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  Alexander swatted away a fly. ‘I think it’s obvious where the Athenians went wrong. Their army was too big. They had more men than they could feed, and then they sent more men instead of food. And all their soldiers were heavy infantry, with no light troops or cavalry; if they’d had cavalry and archers, they wouldn’t have got into such a mess. And they didn’t know the way, they can’t have or they wouldn’t have ended up wandering aimlessly about. That’s three mistakes. If they’d have got one of those three right instead of wrong, they’d have made it to Catana without any trouble. So I don’t see what the fuss is about.’

  I nodded slowly. ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘as far as the details go. But you tell me, why did the Syracusans attack them when they were going home anyway? Why didn’t they just let them go and be glad to be rid of them?’

  Alexander frowned. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘If they’d reached Catana alive, they could have come back later; fewer of them, with food and cavalry support and guides who knew the way. They couldn’t do that if they were dead. It made sense to kill them all.’

  I studied his face for a moment. ‘You reckon,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What was the name of their general, by the way?’

  ‘Gylippus,’ I replied. ‘He was a Spartan.’

  ‘Well,’ said Alexander, ‘if I’d been Gylippus, I’d have done the same thing.’

  I smiled. ‘And so would I, if I’d been Alexander.’

  After class, I went to a meeting of the Town Planning and Statues sub-committee.

  It was the seventh meeting we’d had so far, and we’d covered the town plan in the first half hour. That left the statues.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss,’ one of them said to me, his face bright red. ‘After all, you know you’ll have yours, and slap bang in the middle of the market-place too. So I can’t see why you begrudge the rest of us a little recognition. After all, we’re the ones founding this city, we’re entitled. .

  There’s a kind of exasperated noise best described as the sound patience makes when it’s been heated to steam and escapes through a gap in one’s teeth. I made it. ‘I don’t want a damn statue,’ I said. ‘If I have a right to one, I hereby waive it. Now, statues of the gods, yes, we need a few of those; but forty-seven others — have you any idea how much valuable cargo space they’re going to take up? Not to mention the expense.’

  ‘Depends where your priorities lie,’ someone else said disdainfully. ‘You’re an Athenian. Wouldn’t you just love it if you had genuine authentic statues of Cecrops and Theseus and Aegeus and Alcmaeon, taken from life? Think how proud you’d be, with that kind of tangible proof of your nation’s heritage.’

  I drummed my fingers on the ground. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I really want to be remembered as the oecist whose people starved over their first winter because all they had in the holds of the ships were statues of themselves. Tell you what; let’s have the statues carved out of hard cheese. That way, when we’re done admiring them, we can eat them.’

  There was a gloomy silence.

  ‘All right.’ My heart sank; Theagenes was speaking, and I’d come to dread his intervention. Whenever there was deadlock, up would pop Theagenes the voice of reason, with a compromise pitched with geometrical precision exactly halfway between the opposing viewpoints. Unfortunately, halfway between sensible and utterly fatuous is still utterly fatuous. ‘All right,’ Theagenes said, ‘how about this? Instead of lots of separate statues, what about one big statue? A frieze or something like that, with all of us on?’

  I shook my head. ‘A frieze that big wouldn’t even fit on the ship,’ I said.

  ‘We’d have to build a ship specially, or buy one of those great big barges they use for shipping marble from Paros .’

  Theagenes nodded. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘What about this; we hire a sculptor, take him with us, and he can do all the statues once we get there? That way we’ll save all that space on the ship, and we can have as many statues as we like instead of having to decide in advance.’

  It took me about three heartbeats to make up my mind to support this proposal with every last scrap of enthusiasm I could fake. After all, no sculptor skilful enough to know which end of the chisel to hit was going to want to leave Greece and go and settle in Olbia; we’d search for one, in vain, until it was time to go, and by then it’d be too late to have our portraits carved — result, no statues. Ideal.

  Of course, at that time I hadn’t yet formulated Euxenus’ Law; namely, never underestimate the perversity of human nature. We found our sculptor all right.

  His name was Agenor, and he was born on a little chip of rock off the south coast whose name escapes me for the moment. His love for and skill at carving stone led him in time to Corinth, and after a year or so there he started wandering from city to city, staying in one place just long enough to establish a reputation as a highly competent marble-basher and then get himself chased out of town by whoever was running the place, be it a democracy, monarchy or oligarchy. Agenor, you see, was a dreamer, an idealist, a thinker of such deep thoughts that it always amazed me that he didn’t bash his own thumb with the hammer more often than he did. Everywhere he went, he found fault with the way the city was governed, and being Agenor he felt it his duty to explain these shortcomings, loudly and in public, whenever he found somebody willing to listen. In Athens , they formally exiled him. In Sparta , they flayed the skin off his back and threw him out of a window; the only reason they didn’t hurl him from the city wall is that Sparta hasn’t got any city walls. In Megara they dumped him in a cesspit. In Sicyon they tied him backwards on a three-legged mule and let the children chase him out with sticks. In Orchomenus they sentenced him to death and left him in a cell under the citadel with the tools of his trade (an ancient tradition of the city), and he escaped by chiselling out a hole in the rock and slithering through it. In Ambracia they listened to him, and had a brief but highly unpleasant civil war as a result, from which he escaped with great difficulty and the loss of the top third of his left ear. In Pella they found him a job cutting paving-slabs for road-making, and when he said it wasn’t quite the sort of work he was looking for they said, tough, make yourself useful or we’ll cut out your tongue. Oh, Agenor was delighted to have the opportunity to join us, and after a brief show of reluctance I agreed to take him. After all, I reasoned, he could hardly be more of a pest than most of my fellow Founders, and if I had my way, we’d be laying a lot of paving-stones, so he might come in useful after all.

  So we had deadheads, we had enthusiasts, we had idealists, we had the antisocial and the mentally inadequate; we also had some genuine farmers, men whose fathers had had one too many sons, and some craftsmen with useful skills that they were willing to exercise in return for a fair day’s pay, and some ex-slaves who knew all there was to know about hard work for little reward; and we had a thousand Illyrian mercenaries, who’d been led to believe that the life they were embarking on was going to be better than the one they were leaving behind. In other words we had Greeks, two and a half thousand of the
m including women and children. It was a better start in life than many cities get, because we also had food and animals and materials and tools, provided for us by the King of Macedon; we had five ships of our own and the loan of twenty-five others there and back; we had the services of a hundred professional stonemasons for a year, to be paid by Philip in arrears on their return; we had a splendid and extremely long written constitution, composed by a committee chaired by Aristotle himself, of which seven copies housed in shiny bronze canisters were ceremoniously placed in a cedarwood chest in the hold of the expedition’s flagship on the day before we sailed — how the mice managed to get at and chew up all seven copies to such an extent that nothing legible remained I simply have no idea, or at least not in front of witnesses. We had all this; and we had me.

  And, at the last minute, looking extremely unhappy as her father and two brothers shooed her up the gangplank with my son in her arms, we had Theano;

  expensive, ungrateful, hard-done-by Theano, who didn’t want to go and who’d far rather have worked herself to death washing clothes by the river.

  Two and a half thousand idiots and one angry girl, and a fair wind for Olbia.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘Excuse me,’ you’re saying, ‘but where’s Olbia?’ You sound sheepish, perhaps slightly ashamed that you don’t know where Olbia is; but it’s a good question, and one I really ought to have asked rather earlier than I did.

  The sad truth is, I thought I knew. I thought Olbia was a natural harbour at the bottom edge of the almost-island of Chersonesus[ii], the roughly rectangular chunk that dangles like a spider from the roof of the Black Sea coast at the mouth of the Gulf of Maeotis, with a mountain range on one side and the sea on the other;

  an area colonised by Greeks for many years, with a pleasant climate and friendly relations with both the neighbouring Greek colonies and the local savages.

  There is indeed such a place; it’s called Heracleia, and we weren’t going there.

  Olbia, by contrast, is lodged in the mouth of the Hypanis river like a strand of meat wedged awkwardly between your teeth. It’s got a wonderful natural harbour;

  to the east, there’s a promontory very like a folded thumb and pointing forefinger, or a wolf’s head with a very long snout. We weren’t going there, either; someone had beaten us to it, a mere three hundred years earlier.

  The place we were actually headed for[iii] was a little triangular bay nibbled into the coastline between Olbia and Tyras, roughly level with the fingernail of the pointing forefinger of land I mentioned a moment ago, which the sub-committee on Names and Public Holidays had, in the comfortable shade of a fig-tree in Mieza, resolved to call Philippopolis en Beltiste (‘The city of Philip in the best place anywhere’). In practice, we didn’t often refer to it as that. To be honest, if you were to ask me what the most commonly used name for it was, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell you. Some of my fellow Founders actually did insist on calling it Philippopolis-and-the-rest, which made them a joy to listen to after they’d had a drop to drink. (Try it and you’ll see what I mean.) The Illyrians called it something unpronounceable in Illyrian. My friend Tyrsenius (I’ll tell you about him later) took to calling it Oudama (‘nowhere’) and the name stuck, at least with some of us. This confused the hell out of the Illyrians and the Gallippidae, the local natives; in Greek, you see, the part of the word that means ‘no’ can be either ou- or me- depending on whether it’s in a principal or a subordinate clause and whether the verb is infinitive or subjunctive, which meant that we’d find ourselves referring to it as Oudama and Medama in the same sentence. The Illyrians firmly believed that there were two colonies being founded simultaneously, and needless to say they’d been sent to the crummy one, which made them very sad. The Callippidae drew roughly the same conclusion, and spent countless thousands of man-hours searching for Medama in the hope of striking a better deal with the Medamites for the sale of their wheat and barley. In fact there was one bright spark who set himself up as the official Medamite commercial attaché in Oudama and got a lot of good business that way, until we caught him at it and asked him to stop.

  ‘In the best place anywhere’ was an exaggeration, to be sure. But there were worse places to be, among them Attica and, for that matter, Macedonia . Don’t believe what they tell you about the Black Sea climate, all those horror stories about freezing cold winters and roasting summers; it’s a little cooler than Greece, but not offensively so. The main difference is in the terrain. It’s flat. For an Athenian, used to being surrounded on all sides by rocky mountains, it’s a rather dizzy feeling to see land that level or a sky that big. In Attica , and nearly all of Greece for that matter, we grow our food in the thin layer of dust and dirt that covers the lower slopes of the mountains. Olbia is one enormous level, deep-soiled plain, perfectly suited for growing wheat; drop crumbs from your breakfast and they’ll take root and grow. Of course, we Athenians have known this for years. For every coarse barley loaf eaten in Athens , we import six medimni of Black Sea wheat, and in return we palm them off with Athenian oil, honey, wine and figs, which we’ve carefully educated them to prefer to their own.

  And who are they, I can hear you asking. The simple and unhelpful answer is, the Gallippidae. The name is Greek and means ‘sons of fine horses’ (and what that’s supposed to mean is another matter entirely). The proper answer is that they’re Scythians who’ve packed in the nomadic life, settled down and earned the arts of agriculture and getting cheated by Greeks.

  (‘Ah,’ you say, with a smile on your face. ‘Like us.’

  Yes, Phryzeutzis, very much like you. I mean us. like our people here, they’re renegade descendants of the horsemen of the steppes, who saw the obvious merit in trading a life of mobility, self-reliance, freedom and yoghurt for the security of the same little square of dirt and the uncertain charity of Mother Demeter— ‘Maybe they got sick of yoghurt,’ you suggest.

  Maybe they did. Maybe they just grew tired of moving on. Quite possibly the urge to roam from one set of mountains to the next is the childhood all races and nations go through and grow out of, as soon as they come to know better...

  I suggest, here in Sogdiana on the Iaxartes river, a place I never knew existed until I wandered here, as far from Attica as it’s possible to get.

  ‘Ah,’ you reply indulgently, ‘but once you got here, you decided to stay.’

  Absolutely. This is clearly the place I’ve been looking for all my life.

  ‘Wherever the hell it is.)

  Very like us, Phryzeutzis; industrious, slow, suspicious, hospitable, ferocious, incomprehensible — we Greeks have one word for all of that, barbaros, barbarian, a foreigner, someone who when he speaks makes ba ba noises with his mouth instead of speaking proper Greek. The Callippidae had become a little bit Greekified, in that they lived in houses rather than wagons and dug in the dirt rather than milking mares and ewes. They’d even acquired a taste for Greek delicatessen and some of our showier consumer goods. But barboroi beyond question, now and forever.

  ‘Could be worse,’ my friend Tyrsenius said, as we leaned over the rail and stared at it. ‘Definitely, could be worse.’

  Wonderful stuff, optimism. It’s like honey; take the lid off the jar and somehow it gets everywhere, clinging to your fingers, smearing on everything you touch.

  Also, too much of it makes you want to be sick.

  ‘Flat,’ I commented.

  ‘And green,’ Tyrsenius added. ‘Except for the yellow bits. That’s corn, presumably.’

  ‘Wheat,’ I confirmed.

  We looked at each other.

  ‘This could be a nice place to live,’ he said.

  I nodded. ‘I expect the people who live here’d agree with you.’

  He shrugged. ‘I know these people,’ he said. ‘They aren’t fighters. Warriors yes, but not fighters. We’ll get no bother from them.’

  My friendTyrsenius —Tyrsenius the Flamboyantly Wrong, as someone once dubbed him — was the nearest thin
g we had to a native guide. For years his father had made the long trading run from Elba, off the west coast of Italy, to Olbia;

  hugging the coast all the way, starting off with a cargo of Italian pig-iron that mutated at every stop he made until it turned into the dried fish he traded for wheat on the shores of the Black Sea, ready to be converted into honey in Athens, honey to crockery in Corinth, crockery to sheepskins in Illyria, sheep-skins to timber in Istria, timber to wine in Apulia, wine to cheese in Sicily, cheese to pig-iron on Elba.. . Wizards, they say, can turn one thing into another, can even turn base metal into gold if they’re clever enough. My friend Tyrsenius, like his father before him, was a true wizard, though. He could turn iron into wheat.

  And he knew these people, or people a hundred miles or so further down the coast who looked and sounded quite like them; ‘close enough for a public contract’, as he used to say. Warriors, not fighters; I liked the sound of that, though I wasn’t quite sure I understood what it meant. Maybe they’d just kill us once and go away.

  ‘You see,’ he went on, ‘they won’t be expecting us to stick around. They know about Greeks here, you see. Greeks arrive on ships, they buy stuff, they sell stuff, they go. Sometimes they hang about waiting for the winds to change, sometimes they’ll even build a city as a base for future operations, but sooner or later they push off, they don’t go out into the fields and get their hands dirty. They’ll be delighted we’ve come, just you wait and see.’