Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  Clearly the fair and equitable thing for me to do as a juror was to ignore the evidence of both sides and go with the version of events as set out in the pleadings, which reduced the whole thing to a straightforward question of law.

  Now, it’s a sad but universal fact that when people are sitting under a tree on a pleasantly warm afternoon dreaming up laws for their city, they tend to devote most of their time and ingenuity to the exciting stuff, such as murder, rape and assault. By the time they get around to considering civil suits, particularly those likely to have a rural setting, it’s late and the wine ran out an hour or so ago and the fun is wearing a bit thin; they tend to skimp and rush through, and when these laws come to be put into practice, this weakness shows up with a vengeance. We’d gone a stage further down the road to chaos and confusion by basing our farm law on the models set out by Plato in one of his perfect-society pamphlets, a decision we came to regret quite quickly. Stickler for annoying detail though he was, Plato never went so far as actually to define a watercourse; was it a ditch or trench through which water actually passed, or a ditch or trench intended to be used for the transmission of water, whether or not water actually ever came in contact with it? I agonised over this point without reaching any decision until it was time for the jury to start voting, at which point I asked myself the simple question, Which of these two imbeciles would you least lihe to live next to? I went with my instincts, and gave judgement for the defendant.

  In fact the plaintiff won, though there were only four votes in it. There was a much closer consensus on the amount of damages; we awarded him the value of his ruined onions, less the value of the damage done by his goats, resulting in a net award of the price of a medium-sized jar of dried figs. Personally I’d have gone further and included an additional award against both of them for wasting a specified proportion of my life in a manner likely to cause aggravated pain and suffering; but I don’t suppose either of them could have afforded to pay such an enormous sum.

  Well now, Phryzeutzis, I’m sure that by now you’ve tumbled to the fact that I’ve been trying, in my heavy-handed way, to give you some idea of what real life in this perfect society of ours was like, twelve years into its history. You’ll have noticed that it was by no means perfect, and it didn’t have much in common with those high-minded and carefully crafted model constitutions we used to play around with after dinner back in Athens . I don’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing; we had no real government to speak of, just the Founders (whom everybody ignored as a matter of course) and me, who tried his level best to avoid doing any governing unless compelled to do so by force. We had no foreign policy, because it never occurred to us that we were grown-up enough to need one. As far as economic policy went, we had my friend Tyrsenius, the man who sold overpriced ornamental armour and unserviceable weapons to our potential enemies, and urged us to borrow money from our neighbours that we never had a hope in hell of ever paying back. We had just enough law and order to discourage us from cutting each other’s throats. As for politics; well, we had better things to do with our time. And yes, we made a hash of quite a lot of things, we drifted far enough away from our original intentions that not only the Illyrians but some of the Budini were able to fit in and make themselves at home. We produced no literature, art, science or philosophy. We had no time to spare for the finer things in life. What’s more, we didn’t care. It wasn’t Athens (but in Athens you could be put on trial for blasphemy, or slandering the City in front of foreigners, or failing to farm your own land to an acceptable standard of husbandry; you could be put to death for proposing a law to repeal another law, if you went about it the wrong way; you could be executed for refusing to take either side in a civil war; and every year we had a ballot to exile a certain number of people, not because they’d done anything wrong but just because nobody liked them very much); and it wasn’t Macedon either. By a process of elimination, we were forced to the conclusion that it was Antolbia; nothing more, nothing less.

  That, then, was the opinion most of us had of ourselves while we were planning our monumental civic thrash in honour of a dozen years of nationhood; and by and large, we liked what we saw in the mirror. There’s a part of me that wishes I could have taken that young Prince Alexander I once helped to capture a hive of bees on a leisurely tour round Antolbia instead of trying to teach him the art of war and the knack of scanning elegaic couplets. There were things he’d have seen there that might just have answered some of the questions he tried to resolve by leading the Macedonian army to the very edge of the world, and possibly the answers he’d have come across with me would have been a hair’s breadth closer to the truth. By the same token, if I was made of pottery and had smaller ears, I’d be a jar. It’s hard enough writing history without trying to rewrite it as well.

  The Founders wanted to kick off with a procession — lots of smiling children with their faces washed and their hair combed — carrying baskets of freshly baked bread and seasonal fruits from the place where the first ship landed to the temple. This would be followed by communal singing of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and selections from Pindar, after which we could relax with a recital of flute and harp music and an athletics contest.

  The rest of us felt that if that was the Founders’ idea of a big time, then good luck to them. What we wanted to do was drink excessively and make a lot of noise, and possibly even round the celebration off by smashing up a few redundant statues (such as the one of me that had been plonked down, much against my will, in an alcove round the side of the market hall. On many a dark night I’d tried to nerve myself to go and do mischief to it with a big hammer; I just couldn’t bear the thought of the look on the Founders’ faces if one of them had caught me at it).

  In the end, we compromised; procession, edited highlights of the Homeric Hymn, and a big vat of booze in the middle of the square for everybody to dip a cup in. My contribution to the success of this consensus was persuading Founder Perdiccas to donate three sheep and three goats for sacrifice and subsequent barbecue, a result I achieved by thanking him in public for his exceptionally generous offer without asking him first. A highly effective ploy, that, and one I recommend to you.

  Early reports on the wine suggested it was going to turn out drinkable, though of course there’d be no way of knowing until we actually racked it off. There was a degree of apprehension among the gloomier of the self-professed experts;

  they held that the richer, deeper soil and milder temperature of Olbia might tend to produce a more watery, fruity wine without the subtle malice of Greek vintages. Up to a point, their concern proved to be justified when the first jars were opened; the stuff tasted sweet and bland, prompting them to reduce the water in the mix from a half to a third. The consequences of this experiment were dramatic; you drank a pint or so of the stuff to no apparent effect, and a quarter of an hour later you fell over. On balance, we decided that this was a good thing, the stuff that truly heroic binges are made of.

  ‘Wake up,’ Theano said to me, just before dawn on the day of the festival.

  I grunted. ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Is it that time already?’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘But I want to get the house straight before we go, and you’re making the room look untidy.’

  My son Eupolis was one of the basket-bearers in the procession. In essence, his job was to walk from A to B without tripping over or dropping the basket, and both Theano and I had grave reservations about whether he’d manage it. However, he seemed quite relaxed about it all when we finally managed to prise him out of his bed and chivvy him into his clothes (specially made for the occasion and almost a good fit) so we worried about me instead. As oecist I was not only reciting some of the magic words during the formal part of the ceremony but also reputedly making a keynote speech, after the Hymn but before the drinking started. As you can imagine I’d given this speech a great deal of thought. The first draft was about twenty minutes long and packed with references to the wisdom of the Founders, the
unreliable protection of the gods and other lofty themes. The final version was a loose paraphrase of ‘Drinks on the house!’, which at least had the merit of giving the people what they wanted to hear.

  ‘You’re not proposing to go out looking like that, are you?’Theano said.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Why not?’

  ‘For one thing,’ she said, ‘it’s too small. For another, there’s a dirty great patch just above the left shoulder, and it isn’t even the same colour.’

  I frowned. ‘I wore this same tunic on the day we made landfall,’ I said. ‘I thought it’d be a nice touch if I wore it today, just to demonstrate—’

  ‘What a scruffy slob you’ve become. No thank you. People always blame the wife, and it’s not fair. Go and change.’

  She also insisted that I take the jar — you remember, the jar, the one that didn’t have a snake in it. Actually, I didn’t object; it was Olympias’ belief that there was a snake in it that had led to all of us being here, so it seemed appropriate, in a twisted kind of way.

  Against all expectations, I enjoyed the procession. Meaningless civic rituals have never done very much for me, but just for once I was able to kid myself that this one wasn’t meaningless. And yes, dammit, I felt ever so slightly proud when I saw my son toddling along at the front of the line, grimly clinging to his basket, eyes determinedly forward, like the spearman at the apex of a wedge formation going into battle. Sure, it was cheesy and sentimental; but the bread in the basket and the basket itself had been made in Antolbia, and it was high time we showed our gratitude to Apollo, on the off chance that he really did exist. You’ll gather that I’m not a particularly religious man, but there are certain times when the act of religion is far more important than whether or not there really is an Apollo or a Zeus. Maybe it’s moments like that which create gods. Who knows?

  We shuffled up into line to sing the Hymn.

  We left the gate open.

  Well, it didn’t seem important.

  There’s a certain comic irony in the fact that the line we were singing at the moment when it started was, I will remember and not be unmindful of Him who shoots from afar, because we hadn’t, of course. We’d clean forgotten. Like most of the survivors I’ve talked to, I can clearly remember what I was thinking the instant before the first arrow struck; I was thinking that since the grapes we grew in Olbia were fatter and pulpier than the average Greek grape, it stood to reason that with a little care we ought to be able to make a genuinely sweet white wine, like the stuff you occasionally get from Phoenicia. The image in my mind was of a big, plump grape, its skin just starting to split under the pressure of a man’s knee in the pressing-box. I could see the first big teardrop of juice oozing out of the split and running down the side of the grape, cutting a channel in the dusting of yeast.

  Then somebody screamed. We all looked up, wondering what was going on.

  I was at a picnic once, out in the fields at Phyle. We’d gone out on the pretext of making an offering at the shrine there — I can’t have been more than seven years old — and we children were playing running-about games when some fool threw a stone and hit a hollow tree that happened to house a swarm of wild bees.

  Out they came, like cavalry appearing unexpectedly on your unprotected flank;

  and at once the picnic party broke up in wild, grotesque panic — people running backwards and forwards, their hands over their faces, crashing into each other, knocking over the jugs and jars, breaking crockery, swearing, squealing. I’d never actually encountered wild bees before and I just stood there like an idiot, trying not to get trodden on. Because I stayed put and didn’t identify myself as a target the bees left me alone, but the rest of the party got thoroughly stung. At the time I thought the whole thing was rather amusing and wonderful.

  It took a while for us to realise that there were people behind us, shooting arrows. We couldn’t imagine who’d be doing such a thing until we actually saw them; genuine wild Scythians, tall men on rather undersized horses, performing the hardest of all martial manoeuvres, shooting from the saddle. Amazing, the skill of these people; they drop the reins completely and guide the horse with nothing more than gentle pressure from their knees, while using both hands to draw and aim their bows. I don’t suppose I’d ever have been able to learn the trick; it must be something you’re born to. I’ve even seen them string the bow at full gallop, one-handed.

  I saw Melanthius, one of the Founders, stagger and drop to his knees. I never liked Melanthius much. I saw Eurygye, the wife of a man whose name I’ve forgotten but who helped me build my first barn, trying to haul herself along the ground on her elbows because an arrow had lodged in her spine. She was sixty if she was a day, and so badly troubled with arthritis that she found it hard to get about freely at the best of times. I saw Azus, my Budini bodyguard, struggling to string his bow without even trying to pull out the arrow that was lodged between his collar-bone and neck tendon. I saw Agenor, the stonemason, pushing people down and shouting. I saw Perdiccas the Founder running at a Scythian horseman with a meat-cleaver in his hand; but the Scythian saw him first and sliced off the top of his bald head with his scimitar, like a fussy man tackling a boiled egg. I saw Theano, sensible girl, ducked down behind an overturned table, holding up a bronze meat-dish like a shield. I saw Bollus, an Illyrian who once returned a stray goat of mine, shoot a Scythian from his saddle at seventy-five yards. I was just standing there, quite still, clutching my jar that didn’t contain a snake, and nobody seemed very interested in me.

  I’ve said this before; whenever something happens, I’m always on the sidelines, though just for once I wasn’t looking the other way. I saw Jason, the Illyrian wheelwright who was such an expert on the diseases of sheep, pinned by an arrow to a door, while his wife threw plates at the Scythian who’d shot him; he was coming back for her with his scimitar, but she hit him in the face with a plate, it broke and drew ever such a lot of blood; he wiped it away and so was able to see, and then she hit him again — but he killed her before she could throw again. I saw my friend Tyrsenius, with one arm hanging limp and useless at his side while he hacked a fallen horseman to death with the captured scimitar he held in his good hand. I saw my son Eupolis running towards our house, and I watched the arrow that killed him all the way from the bow.

  I didn’t see Marsamleptes and Charicles the Founder lead the counter-attack that finally drove them off; apparently they went for them with sticks and pots and their bare hands (I saw a bee-keeper once capture a wild swarm with nothing but an empty honey-jar; he judged the moment just right and swiped the whole swarm out of the air and into the jar, and he didn’t get stung). Nothing bad happened to me while all this was going on. Afterwards, people said the snake protected me, same as bloody always.

  I suppose the attack lasted about the time it takes to bring a basin of water to the boil; it seemed longer, while at the same time it was all over in a moment.

  Someone shut and bolted the gate, while others manned the wall. People were running or walking, calling out names, screaming, sobbing. Agenor, who didn’t know much about medicine but who’d seen his fair share of nasty accidents while he was working as a stonemason, was organising people to see to the wounded, sorting out the dying from the merely damaged. The basic principles of looking after badly injured people are calm and patience; I once watched Agenor piecing together a shattered vase that I’d simply have given up on and thrown away. Of course, it’s that bit harder to throw away people, but the temptation’s there all the same.

  I went over and looked at the body of my son, who was every bit as dead as Philip of Macedon (why did I think of that, I wonder, at such a moment? Sure, I wasn’t thinking straight; it was like the time I stood up sharply under a low beam and gave my head the most almighty crack. For a long time, everything seemed to be very slow and far away, and I remember wondering whether I was still alive, and being pleasantly surprised to discover that I was).

  They were using the wine to clean
out scimitar-wounds. I saw two children standing very still, looking down at a dead body. They were just as still as I was; then one of them kicked the body, which was almost but not quite dead, presumably because it was Scythian — only it wasn’t, it was Budini, and he’d died with his axe in his hand, trying to fight the enemies of his people. Made no difference really, of course, a kick in the head from a child was neither here nor there in his condition, but it was the total lack of expression on the boy’s face that lodged in my mind, like the barbed sting of a bee.

  I’d never known Theano go all to pieces before. Hardly surprising, of course;

  but like I said I wasn’t thinking straight. I expected her to be cold and hard, to lock her feelings out or shove past them, like a bad-mannered man in the fish queue. But she didn’t; she broke up into tears and rages, and I’m ashamed to say I left her to get on with it.

  As for myself I was — we have this expression for someone who’s blind drunk, ‘feeling no pain’; that was me. It was very much like being drunk, that aimless, drifting, out-of-it feeling when you’re using everything you’ve got just to keep your balance and not fall over, nothing to spare for anything less immediate. In a sense, you’re never more intimately aware of being alive, because all the things you usually do without thinking take so much conscious effort. Yes, that was me. Feeling no pain. I was completely out of it. I guess the snakes protected me.

  Whenever you get really huge disasters, there’s always so much work to be done afterwards, so much clearing up and mending, digging graves and covering for the people who’ve been injured and can’t milk their own goats; so many strategy meetings and heads-of-department meetings — just when we could have used the Founders, we had five dead and seven seriously wounded — and who knows what else. As an excuse for staying out of the house, they were just what the doctor ordered. I really pulled my weight over the next few days.