Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  But I was out of practice; it had been years since I hung off the handles of a plough from dawn to dusk or spent a week bashing clods with a mattock or digging trenches. Embarrassingly, there were some things I’d just plain forgotten how to do; rather than ask, though (an oecist has his pride, after all) I guessed, and usually got it wrong. I sowed my beans too thick and my borage too sparse. I cut timber when Sirius was rising — it should be overhead — and got plagued with woodworm. I built myself a cart, but made the felloe too narrow (two spans instead of three). I began ploughing when I saw the first cranes in the sky, which would have been right in Attica but not here; I ploughed at the winter solstice, after the Pleiades had set, but luckily it rained just enough to fill in the hoofprints of my oxen shortly afterwards, and so I got away with it. I pruned my vines when Arcturus first appeared at dusk, which was fine, but I cut them back too fiercely and did them no good at all. In fact, there wasn’t an awful lot that I did get right, and I suppose that if I’d been back home I’d have come to grief. But a poor harvest in Olbia was better than a good year in Attica , when all was said and done, and at least I made a point of learning from my mistakes.

  What with buggering up the ploughing and making a hash of the pruning, I didn’t see much of my wife and son, which in retrospect was a good thing. The less she saw of me, the less I could get on her nerves, while the normality of everyday life did a lot to smooth over her sense of having been badly used. After all, spinning and carding and grinding flour and keeping house are pretty much the same wherever you do them, and in most ways she was no worse off than she’d been before she met me. When our paths did cross we treated each other more like good neighbours than anything else; a few friendly words of greeting and encouragement in the morning, polite enquiries about each other’s day in the evening, and so forth. When I wanted my tunic darned or she wanted me to rehang a sticking door, we each helped out cheerfully, the way you or I would do if the man next door came and asked for the loan of a pruning-hook or a hand with driving in a row of posts. Mind you, that was pretty much the prevailing attitude throughout the colony; we were all neighbours and we did our best to get on with each other on the grounds that sooner or later we’d need a favour.

  The fourth harvest was pretty good; good enough that we’d be able to put away a year’s supply of grain, which is the minimum an Athenian farmer wants to have squirrelled away before he can start sleeping at night, and still have a surplus we could sell for cash. I’d finished my cart by then, new full-width felloe and all, and I started picking up when Orion first put in an appearance, exactly as I was supposed to. In fact, there wasn’t much left that could go wrong; except that, while I was loading the cart, I lifted a heavy stook awkwardly and felt my back give way. There was nothing for it but to slide agonisingly to the ground and wait for someone to walk by.

  Now in Attica , where we all work little tunic-sized scraps of land, it’s very rare to be out of sight of at least one other person. Here, in the abundant vastness of Olbia, you could go for hours at a time without having anybody intrude on your privacy; particularly at a busy time like that, when everybody was bustling back and forth from their fields to the barns, with too much to do and not enough time to do it in. I tried crawling, but I didn’t get further than about twenty yards before I gave it up, on the grounds that I was in enough trouble already.

  Needless to say, in my misery I couldn’t help thinking of my father (you’ll recall that he died under not dissimilar circumstances); and from there I started to worry, the way you do. If I died, what would happen to my son? Who’d work the place till he was old enough to inherit? In Attica my wife would have bought a slave, but thanks to our damned principles we’d resolved that we wouldn’t bring any slaves to Olbia, it was going to be a true republic of free men, purged of decadence by the ennobling effects of self-reliant labour; and besides, there wasn’t enough room on the boats for both slaves and oxen, and if things get really tough you can eat an ox. So if there was nobody to work the land, presumably Theano’d have to give it up and make a living by prostitution or doing laundry, in which case my son’s only way of claiming his inheritance would be to wait until he came of age and then file a lawsuit; maybe Tyrsenius would take him on as an apprentice (an image of my father, looking serious and saying, ‘Teach a boy a trade and he’ll never starve’ filled my mind like a wild bees’ nest in the crack between your lintel and the wall); but when I thought about that for a while it didn’t cheer me up too much. Sure, I’d trust Tyrsenius with my life, but that’s not quite the same as trusting him with my money, let alone my son’s birthright; in addition to which, the man was an idiot, and likewise I really didn’t like the idea of my son fooling about on ships, which can sink, particularly if they’re owned by idiots who probably haven’t got the sense to tar them in the off season...

  ‘Why are you lying on the ground?’ someone asked.

  It was Theano. She was the last person I’d expected to see (all right, hear; I was lying on my face, and all I could see were her toes); she never came out to the fields, because women don’t, in the same way that dogs rarely if ever fight in the front rank of the phalanx.

  ‘Hurt my back,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hurt my back,’ I repeated.

  ‘Oh. How’d you manage that?’

  ‘Lifting,’ I said. ‘Look, can you help me up?’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What do I do?’

  At first, she did more harm than good; but eventually I was able to explain (between the screams) the correct technique for helping a man with a bad back, and somehow we got me up and lying in the back of the cart, on top of all that nice soft straw.

  ‘Now what?’ she said.

  ‘Drive the cart home,’ I told her.

  ‘All right. How do you do that?’

  Nothing’s ever wasted, they say; my experience teaching the young nobility of Macedon how to scan an iambic pentameter had taught me the rudiments of communicating information, enough to explain to Theano the approved method of driving a cart.

  ‘Grab that stick thing,’ I said. ‘Now get on the cart and give the ox a smack round the bum.’

  ‘Done that,’ she replied, as the cart suddenly lurched forward.

  ‘Only,’ I added, ‘not quite so hard. Now, you see those leather straps?’

  She sighed. ‘I do know what reins are,’ she said. ‘There’s no need to be—’

  ‘Grab them,’ I said. ‘Pull the left one to make him go left, and the right one—

  ‘Yes, I know all that. What about stop?’

  We got home, somehow; and as luck would have it, the Founder Archestratus (who hadn’t been near me for eighteen months) had chosen that evening to come round and bitch about the colour the walls of the temple were being painted. With hindsight, a three-legged dog would have been more use, but there’s never a three-legged dog around when you want one; so he helped Theano get me indoors, then delivered his harangue and went away.

  ‘This isn’t good,’ Theano said, looking at me critically as I sprawled in the chair. I had the feeling that I was making the room look untidy, but I couldn’t help that.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ I replied. ‘By the way, where’s the boy?’

  ‘Next door,’ she replied. ‘You don’t think I just put him away in the clothes-press when I go out, do you?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I replied. ‘No, it’s a disaster,’ I went on. ‘Next year’s food’s lying out there feeding the rooks, and there’s bugger-all I’ll be able to do about it before it all goes mouldy and rots.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘What do you expect me to do about it?’

  I shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ I replied. ‘Picking it up and carting itto the barn’d be a good place to start, though.’

  She frowned. ‘What, on my own? You must be joking. I’ll go round your friends a bit later on, I’m sure they’ll lend a hand once they know—’

  I shook my head, though that wasn’t a god idea.
‘Think,’ I said. ‘They’ve all got their own stuff to get in, it’s one of the busiest times of the year. You may get a few promises of help, but I don’t suppose any of ‘em will actually turn up. Which is understandable,’ I added.

  She didn’t seem to believe me, and went out. An hour or so later she came back, looking angry.

  ‘Fine friends they turned out to be,’ she said.

  I sighed. ‘You weren’t rude to them, were you?’

  ‘I told them what I thought of people who’d let a man’s harvest rot because they’re too selfish and bone idle—’

  ‘You mean, yes, you were?

  She shrugged. ‘Friends like that you can do without,’ she said. ‘So now what?’

  I was lying on something (turned out to be a little wooden horse I’d made for the boy). When I shifted to get comfortable, I felt as if I were a fish, being gutted while it was still alive.

  ‘lie still, for gods’ sakes,’ Theano snapped. ‘It’ll never get better if you keep wriggling about like a maggot on a fishing-line.’

  I gave up and lay still, the horse’s nose sticking into my backside. ‘If they won’t help and I can’t move, who does that leave?’ I asked sweetly.

  ‘You want me to do it,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  And she did.

  To be fair, Tyrsenius rolled up on the first day and watched her for an hour, making helpful comments; and a few others showed up too and helped for as long as they could in the intervals between getting in their own cut grain. Mostly, interestingly enough, they were Illyrians, men whose names I didn’t know and couldn’t have pronounced if I did. Later on I found out that they, like Queen Olympias, were devout snake-worshippers, and once the word got out that I had this sacred snake in a jar. . . Never mind; they helped, and eventually the job got done, which was just as well; I was laid up unable to move for ten days, and it was another three days after that before I could do any useful work and make a start on the winnowing.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘That’s all right,’ she replied.

  We’d been married for four years at this point, and those were the nicest things either of us had ever said to the other. After that, however, things started to get a little easier between us. On her side, I think it was mostly time and acceptance — the further away she got from the things she perceived as grievances, the less they seemed to matter. For my part, I couldn’t help but respect the way she’d handled the crisis, which could have been far more serious than it turned out to be if she hadn’t put herself out to the degree she did. We started talking about things more; she took much more of an interest in the work of the farm, and I found it was worth listening to what she had to say. Often she’d surprise me by knowing the answer to a problem that had me foxed, or remind me of some elementary thing I’d completely forgotten, such as cross-ploughing (plough twice; once up and down, the second time side to side).

  When the plough we’d brought with us finally shook to pieces at the end of the season and proved to be beyond repair, she helped me build a new one. First we searched the woods till we found an elm sapling of the right height and thickness, which we bent down with ropes, trussed up to a former to take the shape of the stock, and left it there for a month. When it was ready, we fitted the eight-foot ash pole to the stem of the stock, with mould boards and double-backed share-beam. Then we cut a linden sapling for the yoke, and she whittled down a billet of beech for the handle and put it up in the rafters to smoke until it was time to put the bits together. Finally we salvaged the iron ploughshare from the broken plough, heated it up enough to make the metal expand, then cooled it to shrink the iron onto the wooden beam. It was a lovely job when it was finished, though I say so myself.

  There have been parts of my life when it’s felt like I’ve been asleep.

  Sleep’s a curious thing, if you stop to think about it. You lie down and close your eyes, your brain still reverberating with the various issues and projects of the day — must remember to fix that broken floorboard tomorrow before it does someone an injury, wonder if the sinew from the old plough-ox is cured yet, I’d have time to card it tomorrow, why are the Scythians so damned quiet, and just what is Tyrsenius up to with those seventy jars of quicklime? — and before you know it, the whole tedious and unproductive night’s over and there’s suddenly enough light to carry on where you left off the day before. Sleep cuts out the boring bits of life, so we don’t go mad sitting still in the dark.

  With my life, though, it’s generally been the other way around. I’ve tended to sleep through the good, quiet bits and only woken up when something’s going wrong, or there’s a fresh tranche of shit to be waded through. For example; I was ten years in Olbia. When I arrived I was twenty-eight years old, supposedly at the height of my strength and abilities, old enough to have got past the awkward, ignorant part of youth, but not so experienced and work-hardened that I couldn’t do a full day with the mattock and still be fresh the next morning.

  When I next opened my eyes I was thirty-six; almost completely bald on the top of my head, grey flashes in my beard on either side of my chin, rather less flexible in the back and legs, the joints of my left hand just starting to feel cramped. I had a ten-year-old son, old enough to be useful at last, who’d recently started working with me during the day. I was getting to know him, though that was something of a disappointment; on the rare occasions when I’d thought about what my son would be like, I’d always assumed that he’d be something like I was, reasonably bright with an enquiring mind and a taste for words. While I’d been asleep, however, he’d grown up into my brother Euthyphron, a perfect little farmer, whose interest was wholly confined to thirty specific acres out of the whole world.

  As we worked together I tried to teach him things — poetry, history, philosophy, science, even (gods forgive me) Homer. He was a polite lad and he humoured me by pretending to listen, but I could see he wasn’t interested in the slightest degree by anything that wasn’t obviously useful or relevant. When I told him all I could remember of what I’d read about foreign lands in Xenophon or Herodotus, he looked away, his mind on what he was doing or just at rest, that trance-like state that only farmers at work can achieve. Only if I happened to mention, say, the fabulous oxen of the Egyptians or the incredible fertility of the mud of the Nile delta would he look up and actually take note of what I was telling him;

  and even then I could see him thinking: So what? That’d be worth knowing if we were in Egypt , but we aren’t, so who cares?

  I tried telling him the history of our family, their experiences in the wars;

  but of course, he’d never seen Athens or lived in Attica . I told him stories of the gods and heroes, but he quickly reached the conclusion that the gods and heroes were a load of rich bastards who never did a day’s real work in their lives, and so were beneath contempt. I explained to him Socrates’ theory of the origin of rain, how the sun is supposed to suck water up off the sea and drop it on the mountains, whence it flows back down the rivers and returns to its source; that caught his attention for a little while, but he soon realised it wasn’t important enough to bother with. After all, who cared why rain fell so long as it kept falling? Now, if I knew how to make it rain or how to stop it raining, that’d be great, but I didn’t; forget it. As for Homer — well, there were a few bits he managed to learn, mostly the parts where he describes men working in the fields. They stuck in my son’s mind because (in his expert opinion) they were pretty silly ways to go about things, and we knew a whole lot better, so why did we bother to learn by heart stuff that was just plain wrong?

  Didn’t make sense. The only poems he learned were the Works and Days, which he thoroughly approved of— dates for ploughing and planting and pruning and pricking out, helpfully condensed into easily remembered hexameters, though the old-fashioned diction bothered him a lot. He’d go into a study and then re-emerge to say that he’d thought of a way to change s
uch and such a line so that it wasn’t old-fashioned any more but still scanned, maybe even included some additional snippet of information that the old fool had left out; when I tried to explain that, actually, he was missing the point, he’d cast his mind adrift once again and let me babble to myself without further interruption.

  ‘Maybe I should find him a trade,’ I suggested to Theano one evening. ‘Learning a trade broadens the mind, as well as giving you something to fall back on.’

  She made a little dry laughing noise. ‘Like you learned a trade, you mean?’

  I frowned. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘so that didn’t work out the way it was planned.

  But in the event it achieved the desired result. If I hadn’t learned my trade with Diogenes, I’d be earning my living voting in Assembly and eating nothing but dried fish and barley-husks. It was my trade that got me here, doesn’t matter how it got me here.’

  She thought about that for a moment as she threaded a needle. ‘You remember that game you tried to teach me, the one with the bone counters and the chequered board?’

  ‘Draughts,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the one.’ She narrowed her eyes and licked the end of the thread. ‘All I remember is that instead of going up and down the board, the little counters move sort of sideways, across the corners of their squares—’

  ‘Diagonally,’ I said.

  ‘Whatever. Well, it seems to me you’ve lived your life like those counters move — making progress, but never straight ahead the way you planned to go, always —

  what was that word again?’

  ‘Diagonally.’

  ‘Which means,’ she went on, ‘that you’ve come a hell of a long way, but not the way you’d ever intended to come. Am I right?’

  I thought for a moment and nodded. ‘You could say that,’ I replied. ‘Though maybe you’re bending the facts a bit to make them fit the comparison. So what do you think?’ I went on. ‘Should we find someone to apprentice him to?’