Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  ‘Tough.’ He gave me a smile that had nothing to do with friendliness. I told you, I can’t give orders to my people, I’m not a king or a magistrate or anything like that. The only people who can give orders are the heads of households.’

  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘So what’s he doing here?’

  Anabruzas looked at me for a moment. ‘I can order him,’ he said. ‘He’s my son.’

  There was a long and awkward silence, filled with all the unfortunate history we’d somehow contrived to share over the years.

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Well, do I get my wife and daughter back now?’

  I frowned. ‘That’s the deal, is it? You trade me your son for your wife and daughter. What charming people you are.’

  Once again, I could see him visibly not getting angry. ‘It’s common sense,’ he said. ‘His life is ruined anyway, they’re both reasonably healthy, fit for work.

  All right, the girl’s a liability, but she can still card wool.’

  I nodded slowly. ‘That’s how you see people, is it? Strictly

  ‘Sorry, I don’t understand long words,’ Anabruzas said. ‘I’m trying to prevent a war, and this is the best I can do. I can’t think of anything else I can offer.

  If you’ve got any suggestions, I’m listening.’

  Suddenly I felt tired and not terribly nice to know. ‘Take your wife and daughter and go to the crows,’ I sighed. ‘I’ll do the best I can. No promises.

  He smiled again. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t trust them if you made any.’

  Once the story got about, the sheer melodrama appealed to my people so much that they almost forgot about our own dead, they were so entranced by it all. This was tragedy come to life, and Anabruzas made a wonderful tragic hero. What with that and the freak show as well, they seemed to feel, the Scythians had paid their debt in pure entertainment. Even the families of the men who’d been murdered admitted that they couldn’t ask a great deal more, especially once we’d concocted a false confession in which the poor lame bastard supposedly admitted that he’d been the driving force behind the whole raid, and the others had just been following his orders (we made him out to be some kind of high-ranking commander of the Scythian armed forces; a sort of Alexander to Anabruzas’

  Philip).

  On the day we put him to death, everybody turned out at first light and hung around the market square for hours so as not to miss a thing. Some of them brought garlands and offerings of flowers, bread and fruit. Quite a few of the women were in tears, which goes to show what a soft-hearted lot we Greeks can be. There was a moment of pure farce just before the actual business —

  Marsamleptes’ men dropped the poor kid as they lifted him off the stretcher to carry him to the chopping-block, and the stunned look on his face was highly comical, in a sense. There was a muted cheer as the axe went down, but nobody seemed particularly cheerful as the head was ceremoniously carried to the steps of the market hall and hung up in the temple porch; it all seemed fairly pointless somehow, and afterwards people drifted quietly away, much to the disappointment of those who’d brought along wine and sausages to sell.

  After three days we took down the head and sent it back with the body to the village in a cart. They didn’t seem particularly interested —they don’t go in for funerals to nearly the same extent as we do — and the carter told me it was almost as if they were doing us a favour taking the bits off our hands.

  We heard about what had happened at Chaeronea some ten days after this, from the captain of an Athenian grain-freighter. Obviously, he didn’t tell me about what had happened to my brothers; I only found that out when my friend Tyrsenius got a letter from one of his business associates back in Athens . He turned up on my doorstep late one evening, put the letter in my hands and walked away without saying anything.

  I was pretty much out of things for a day or so after that, and so I missed the next development in our relationship with the Scythians. As far as I was able to piece it together afterwards, however, it went something like this.

  There was an old man in the Scythian village who had a very fine horse. The son of an important man in the next village along saw this horse one day, found out that its owner was too old and sick to ride it more than once or twice a month, and asked if it was for sale. The old man said no; sure, he didn’t ride it, but he just liked owning such a beautiful animal. That didn’t suit the young man, who reckoned it was a waste and a crying shame. He kept increasing his offers until he was offering a ridiculous amount for the creature, but the old man wouldn’t have any of it. He was too old, he said, to be interested in money, he just wanted to own a really exceptional horse, and would the young pain in the bum please stop bothering him? The young man was starting to get obsessive about the horse. He felt it was a personal affront, and he was going to have the horse if it was the last thing he did. One of his father’s hangers-on smelt money, so he crept out one night, stole the horse and brought it to the village.

  When the young man’s father found out what had happened, he quite understandably went berserk. Stealing horses is a very serious crime for all Scythians — I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you this, Phryzeutzis; you undoubtedly know more about the nuances and implications of all this than I ever will — and the thought that he’d been party to horse-theft, even without knowing it, was enough to stop him sleeping at night. He immediately had the horse killed, chopped up into small bits and burned; then he did the same with the poor fool who’d stolen it, and sent his worthless son off to live with some cousins a couple of villages away. He felt a bit better after that, but he still couldn’t sleep; the theft of such a fine horse was big news, and he knew it’d only be a matter of time before people linked the theft with his son’s excessive offers and general bad behaviour. So he put about the story that the Greeks from the colony had stolen the horse, as a way of getting back at the villagers for the killings.

  Now, one of the men who’d taken part in the original escapade (who was still, of course, very much at large, though extremely nervous at all times) heard of this and decided to try to make something of it. He hated us anyway, which was why he’d joined the raid in the first place, and after what had happened to Anabruzas’ son he was convinced that unless he did something quickly it’d only be a matter of time before he met with a pretty unpleasant end. He’d been trying to nerve himself to leave the village; but that would have meant being parted from his wife and children, because his father-in-law had made it perfectly clear that if he left the village he’d leave it alone, and he didn’t want that.

  The business with the horse (which was, for all he knew, perfectly true) seemed to him to be a first-class opportunity for stirring up the villagers against the Greeks and launching a proper attack that’d make us go away once and for all.

  That may sound like extremely wishful thinking; but the villagers had some pretty odd notions about us at the best of times.Try as they might, they could never understand how anybody could willingly leave his home, the place where he’d been born and brought up, to go hundreds of miles away and make a new home somewhere else. That wasn’t something they could ever imagine doing; for better or worse, they reckoned, a man belongs where he’s born, and that’s where he stays if he possibly can; which is why exile is a far more cruel punishment than death among these people. Accordingly, they figured that we were either mad or else had been banished for some awful crime; in either case, it wasn’t going to take much to shift us, since we’d already abandoned one home and were therefore capable of abandoning another, if only we were given the incentive.

  The fact that the original raid had happened at all proves how high feelings ran in the village. We hadn’t known a thing about it, but the only reason we’d had ten years of peace was because of an old witch (every village has a witch; she gets drunk, breathes in the smoke of strange poisonous herbs, and rides on an eight-le
gged horse into the spirit kingdom to ask the advice of the ghosts there. They take it all very seriously, and the village witch is as near as they get to a community leader) who refused to let them do anything to us. The ghosts, or her own good judgement, had warned her that tangling with the Greeks could only end in disaster; even if they managed to dislodge us, it’d cost so many lives and so much property that the village would cease to be functional.

  Accordingly, whenever she was consulted about us (fairly regularly, it seemed)

  she made it unequivocally clear that as long as she was alive, anybody who picked a fight with us would get no help from the ghosts in this world or the next.

  But she died, about a month before the raid, and when the villagers met to choose their new witch it was pretty clear that the successful candidate would be someone who talked to a different bunch of ghosts or could get them to give a different answer on this subject. Predictably, the new witch came back from the spirit world with the news that the ghosts had revised their views about the Greeks, to the effect that they were now extremely unhappy with anyone who didn’t help drive the offcomers into the sea with all due dispatch.

  That there wasn’t an immediate all-out attack was, it appears, largely due to my old acquaintance Anabruzas. Every time the subject was raised, he’d stand up and say that he didn’t give a toss about what the ghosts said, he wasn’t going to have anything to do with a war with us, for the simple reason that he knew Greeks the way none of the rest of them did, and a war could have only one outcome; namely, that the ghosts would suddenly have so much new company out there in the spirit world that they’d be hard put to itto find a patch of grass to graze their horses on. The villagers believed in the ghosts, but they also knew and respected Anabruzas; he’d gone away and come back a rich (by their standards) and wise man, he’d learned all manner of strange and incredible skills in the city of the Greeks, he knew how to cure diseases and make things, he’d picked up a wonderful way with words. He now argued that it didn’t make any sense that the ghosts should have changed their tune to such a drastic extent just because one witch had died and another had taken her place. They all knew, he said, that the new witch was telling them what they wanted to hear, which wasn’t necessarily the same thing as the truth. He knew all about that sort of thing, he told them, after living in the city of Athens , where the people met every day in Assembly to do democracy, which is the art of telling each other what they want to hear and then taking a vote to turn it into the truth. The Athenians, he said, were perfectly capable of passing a law stating that the sea is pink, if that’s what they wanted it to be; but the sea wouldn’t be noticeably pinker as a result, if they voted till they were blue in the face. The Athenians didn’t usually go that far, of course; but they did vote that everybody should be happy and well fed and rich and that there wouldn’t be any more stealing or fighting in the streets and that Philip of Macedon would crawl down a hole and die; and if the villagers believed that the ghosts were telling them that it was now all right to attack the Greeks, they’d be demonstrating that they had no more of a grip on reality than the people of Athens — and if that was the case, then the ghosts have mercy on them all.

  But Anabruzas had a son; a foolish, rather crazy kid who didn’t get on with his father and was at that age where he’d do anything provided it was what his father didn’t want him to do... It occurred to one of the leading anti-Greeks that if Anabruzas’ son got involved in an attack on the colony, it’d force his father to stop opposing the war and that’d be the main obstacle out of the way.

  So they talked the kid into coming with them and set off to do just enough damage to start a war.

  It was supposed to be a quick, safe job, but of course it didn’t turn out like that. Two of the raiders were killed, another badly injured, in an attack on a small group of supposedly unarmed farmers walking out to the fields. The Greeks, in other words, appeared to be every bit as dangerous a proposition as Anabruzas and the old witch had said they’d be, and it was a matter of cold fact that we outnumbered them at least four to one. Enthusiasm for the war melted away like a candle on a bonfire, particularly when Anabruzas tore into the raiders in the meeting that followed and set an awful example by handing over his son to us to be killed.

  So that was the situation the anti-Greek faction faced when the horse-stealing affair came about, and the man I told you about who’d been on the raid was trying to rally support. Obviously, he needed to find something to change the odds significantly in the villagers’ favour; and, because of the business with the horse, he found it.

  The difference was, of course, the rich man in the next village who’d started the horse-theft rumour. What he wanted most of all was to be able to fetch his son home again. If the Scythians went to war with the colony, then his version of what had happened would be accepted as the truth essentially by default, and he wouldn’t have to worry about accusations of horse-stealing. Since he was as influential in his village as Anabruzas was in what I’m going to call our village, he didn’t have much trouble in whipping up a nice anti-Greek froth on the surface. But he knew that when it actually came time to do something about it, it might well be a different story. His people had heard about how very formidable these Greeks were — by this time the facts were starting to grow ears and whiskers, the way they always do; the number of raiders had grown, the number of Greeks had diminished, the Greeks tore the dead raiders apart with their bare hands, it was more like twenty dead rather than two, and so on;

  furthermore, the King of the Greeks was under the direct protection of a ghost-snake who accompanied him wherever he went in the form of a beautiful but ferocious yellow-eyed woman (you know, except for the fact that Theano’s eyes were dark brown rather than yellow, I’d say there was more than a germ of truth in that part of it) and any attack on them was doomed to ignominious failure.

  The rich man — I wish I knew his name, but I don’t; I’m sorry —didn’t give up.

  Instead, he thought it all through quite carefully and came to the conclusion that what he needed was proof that these Greeks weren’t nearly as tough as people now thought they were. He’d taken pains to find out what had actually happened by talking to the man who’d been on the raid, and when he analysed it carefully he saw that the only reason there’d been any casualties at all was that the raid had been poorly planned and carelessly executed, as you’d expect from a spur-of-the moment escapade by a bunch of young hooligans.

  Fortuitously, about that time, a party of Scythians from much further north arrived in the area. Unlike our Scythians, they were true nomads who’d had to leave their tribe on account of one of the messy, complicated blood-feuds that break out up there every now and again. These men were to all intents and purposes professional soldiers; what with cattle-raids and counter-raids and ambushes and hot pursuits, they’d gained an impressive amount of experience in small-scale warfare, and were now at a loose end, badly in need of a job. The rich man took them into his household and spent a long time with them, asking their advice and listening to what they had to say.

  But he still wasn’t going to rush into anything. He knew that if something went wrong, or if the exhibition turned out not to be sufficiently impressive, he’d only make things worse for himself and his ally in ‘our’ village. What he really needed, he decided (and his nomad friends were very much in agreement) was some good, solid military intelligence. For example, some of the Greeks had their bows with them wherever they went, others didn’t. Some of them were trained soldiers, others were apparently as soft as butter. What he needed was someone who could give him reliable information, — sufficient to make intelligent plans. This was going to be awkward to achieve now that there was active hostility between them and us; but there was still one man in the colony who kept up apparently friendly relations with the Scythians, namely my very good friend Tyrsenius. The rich man decided that he was the likeliest prospect, and set out to find a way of establishing contact without being too o
bvious about it.

  When I finally climbed out of the dark hole the news from Athens had dropped me into, almost the first thing I saw was an enormous soppy grin on the face of my friend Tyrsenius. It made me wonder whether I hadn’t been better off down the dark hole.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he barked at me, grabbing me by the elbow and marching me from my front door towards the market square. ‘Really, you ought to have more consideration than to go wandering off when there’s work to be done.

  Still, here you are at last, so that’s all right.’

  I should point out that the big soppy grin was quite unlike Tyrsenius’ usual predatory, slightly leering grin, which was such a fixture on his face that it always reminded me of the old story of Medusa’s head, which turned people into stone. My favourite theory was that Tyrsenius had been unlucky enough to encounter the Gorgon’s petrifying visage as a young boy while on the point of eating a particularly lush, sticky honey-cake he’d just stolen from a smaller, less quick-witted child. Theano, on the other hand, held to the view that he’d had a nasty shock while relieving himself after a long and uncomfortable bout of constipation. Her version was more arresting but I prefer my own, if only because it’s more literary and cultured.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  ‘You may well ask,’ Tyrsenius replied helpfully. ‘Come on, you can see for yourself.’

  I was intrigued, I must admit. It wasn’t the level of animation that caught my imagination; Tyrsenius was always hopping about, like a sparrow on ashes, until you got dizzy and sick watching him. It was more the irresistible cheerfulness that wafted from him, like the reek of a tanner’s yard. Only two things could have had this effect on him; money and love. If it was money, it meant he’d struck some particularly juicy deal, and for some reason he rarely required my official presence as oecist when he was cooking up his famous juicy deals —