Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  Azus, my bodyguard, died on the fourth day after the attack, of blood poisoning.

  I was with him when he died, and all he could talk about was how he’d let me down, how he hadn’t done his job, how he should have saved my son’s life. I told him not to worry about it, but he didn’t want to listen. He died with tears running down his face, trying to think of the Greek word for honour. Oddly enough, I couldn’t remember it either.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘Kill the bastards,’ they told me. ‘Kill all of them. Every one.’

  ‘Believe me, I’d like to,’ I replied. ‘Nothing would please me more. Now, if someone would just suggest a way of going about it that won’t get all the rest of us killed—’

  ‘Wrong answer.’ My friend Tyrsenius shook his head. ‘If you say that, some hothead’s bound to stand up and say he’s got a plan that’ll bring ‘em to their knees by the end of the month, and everybody’ll start cheering and waving their arms; and either you’ll have to hand over command to him or take it yourself.

  Either way, it spells disaster.’

  ‘And what if it was one of the Illyrians,’ Prodromus the Founder added, ‘and he actually took command and he won? We might as well turn over the government of the city to them now and be done with it. That’s exactly how Cleon grabbed power in Athens during the Great War, when the Spartans were on Sphacteria.’

  That sounded like typical Founder talk to me, but I wasn’t in the mood to play political games. ‘All right, then,’ I sighed. ‘So what do you suggest I tell them? Anybody?’

  ‘Easy,’ said Tyrsenius, getting in ahead of the others by a comfortable margin;

  years of practice in business negotiations. ‘They say, Kill the bastards. You say, We will. We’re going to. We’re working on it right now. Obviously it’s going to be a while before we’re in a position to make our move, but you can rest assured that as soon as the moment’s right we’re going to make them pay.

  Something like that,’ he added. ‘There’s absolutely nothing anybody can object to there, and you haven’t committed yourself to anything.’

  I shook my head. ‘Sounds to me like I’ve just committed myself to military action against the Scythians,’ I said. ‘They’re not fools, you know; that line might get them off our backs for a week or so, but they aren’t going to forget all about it as soon as there’s something new to talk about. And the longer I hang about, the weaker my position’s going to get.’

  Tyrsenius thought for a moment. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s try this. It’s an old trick, but I’ve never known it fail. You say, Yes, of course we’re going to attack, we’re going to attack straight away, just as soon as the rest of the alliance are ready, which’ll be any day now. And whoever’s asking the question’ll look bewildered and say, Alliance , what alliance? Ah, well, you’ll reply, I wasn’t planning on making an announcement on this until it was all agreed a hundred per cent, but I’ve been talking with our neighbours in Olbia and Odessus; basically the only thing we’ve still got to agree on is the precise number of ships they’re going to send. That way, you see,’ Tyrsenius added, ‘when time goes on and nothing happens, it’ll be their fault in Olbia and Odessus, not ours. And then finally, when you’ve played it along as far as it’ll go, you make an announcement that the alliance isn’t actually going to happen, because the other guys have pulled out at the very last moment; and by then, of course, they’ll be so used to the idea of the alliance that they won’t want to take the risk of just us going in alone. And the whole thing’ll blow over, which is what we want.’

  Prodromus looked up sharply. ‘No, it isn’t,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Tyrsenius snapped. ‘We aren’t getting tangled up in any war with the Scythians. Why the hell would we want to do a stupid thing like that?’

  I closed my eyes for a moment. ‘Tyrsenius,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ he replied incredulously. ‘Don’t say you’ve actually been taking this nonsense seriously.’

  The very same Tyrsenius who’d demanded, a mere four days earlier, that when we took the village (when, mark you, not if), we should burn down all the houses and plough up the site, and distribute the land between our citizens. I knew where he was coming from then; he was already looking ahead to buying up all this extra land cheap, once everyone had realised it’d be completely impractical to try to farm a large additional holding a day’s ride from Antolbia, with a view to selling it dear to the next wave of settlers he was already planning to bring in once the Scythians had been dealt with. It was gold to bronze he had an equally sound commercial reason for this latest change of heart, but I really wasn’t interested in hearing about it.

  (The very same Tyrsenius who killed four Scythians during the raid, pulling them down from their horses and hacking them to death with one of their own scimitars; all this in spite of having been shot through the left bicep in the first volley of arrows, losing so much blood that when it was all over he passed out and nearly died in the night. I, of course, just stood there and did nothing, while the sacred snake shielded me in its coils and flicked flying arrows away from my head with its tongue.)

  ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this,’ Prodromus was saying meanwhile. ‘Euxenus, for gods’ sakes, the whole future of the colony’s at stake here. How the hell can we be expected to get on with our lives with the threat of something like this hanging over us every day till we die? You’ve got to do something and it’d better be soon. Two more families are talking about getting on the next ship out. Soon there’ll be nobody left here but the Illyrians.’

  He was making me lose my temper. ‘That’s what’s really bugging you, isn’t it?’ I said angrily. ‘You’re afraid that unless we true-born Greeks take control of the situation, the Illyrians are going to lose patience and go off on their own to do something about it; and then you won’t be a Founder any more, just some Greek who’s got to work for a living.’

  ‘I resent that,’ Prodromus replied, predictably enough. ‘I think you’d better take that back, before—’

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘That’ll do. As it happens, I agree with you, not Tyrsenius. I want to kill the bastards, every last one. It’s them or us; there’s no way we can live peacefully together after what’s happened, and I wouldn’t want to if there was. All I’m saying is, unless we do it right they’re going to massacre us.’

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ Prodromus said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  The last part of his remark had been directed at Marsamleptes, who’d been sitting there still and quiet as a log, through all Prodromus’ comments about the shifty and treacherous Illyrians, without once taking his eyes off the sconce on the opposite wall. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Euxenus is right. If we attack, we must do it properly.’

  ‘If?’ Prodromus repeated. ‘Don’t you start. It’s bad enough Tyrsenius here wants to pretend nothing’s happened. For pity’s sake, Euxenus, just for once take your responsibilities seriously and tell him—’

  I held up my hand for silence and, much to my surprise, I got it.

  ‘When we attack — shut up, both of you, or you might miss something important —

  when we attack, we’re going to do it properly. Now, so far I haven’t heard any suggestions as to how we should go about this that make any kind of sense at all. Until I see a plan of action that’s got a better than seventy-five per cent chance of success, we aren’t going anywhere, because if you think things are bad now, you wait and see what they’ll be like if we attack and get well and truly beaten. That really would be the end, and I’ve come too far to take chances like that just because you Founders want to be the first in line in the fish queue.’

  The homely image was intended to annoy him, and it did; nothing put Prodromus’

  back up more than the thought that he wasn’t being taken seriously. That said, he was one of the brighter Founders, and I much preferred dealing with him than, say, Perdiccas— (Whose brains I’d seen on the steps of the market hall
; four days later, there was still a brown stain. When we buried him we tried to fit the top of his skull back on, but the scalp had shrunk. We had to bind it on with a strip of cloth in the end; he went into the ground looking like an old woman with her shawl pulled up over her ears.)

  ‘All right,’ Prodromus said. ‘I’ll take that as a definite commitment to action, and I’ll tell the rest of them that I’ve heard your proposals for action and I’m prepared to go along with them. But I warn you, if I find you’re playing for time and you don’t really have any intention of carrying the war to the enemy, I promise you there’ll be trouble.’

  I rubbed my eyes; four days with very little sleep. ‘I’ll take that as agreement,’ I said. ‘Not that I’m all that fussed whether you agree or not. Now then, Marsamleptes; how about some basic facts? What sort of army can we put together?’

  He thought for a long time before answering. ‘We are strong in heavy infantry,’

  he replied, speaking slowly as ever, ‘very weak in everything else. My people can mostly shoot well with the bow, but they will want to fight with the spear.

  The Budini are fine archers, but there are so few of them. We have no cavalry.

  If we mean to fight, we must lead to their strength and find a way of overcoming it.’

  ‘I see,’ I replied. ‘And their strengths are?’

  ‘Cavalry,’ he replied. ‘Cavalry and archers. I cannot tell how a battle between horse-archers and heavy infantry would be, because I have never seen one, but I think the horse-archers would win if they were well led.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Tyrsenius interrupted. ‘Look at Leonidas at Thermopylae . Or the Greeks at Plataea . Or Xenophon—’

  I frowned. Of course, none of the examples he’d quoted had involved horse-archers fighting against heavy infantry. ‘Marsamleptes,’ I said. ‘If you had to fight such a battle, how would you go about it?’

  Once again, long pause for thought. ‘Tyrsenius talks about the battle at Plataea ,’ he said. ‘When the Persians shot at the Greeks, the Greeks knelt down behind their shields and made themselves small, and the Persians grew impatient and attacked them with the spear. That was a mistake on their part.’ He looked up at the roof. ‘Maybe the Scythians would make a mistake too. I doubt it, having seen them. It would be hard to attack them in this way, of course.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,, Tyrsenius chimed in. ‘Think of the Carthaginians at Himera.’

  That reference was so obscure I didn’t even bother considering it. ‘You want to make them attack us, I take it,’ I said.

  ‘Which they will not do,’ Marsamleptes went on, ‘unless they make another mistake. There are more of us. Why would they choose to attack a larger army?’

  ‘I can see your point,’ I conceded. ‘You’d better go away and think about it some more. Prodromus, I want you to calm your people down as much as you can.

  Tyrsenius’ idea about sending for help to Olbia’s a good one. Tyrsenius, I want you to write to your friends in Olbia, just in case they might be prepared to help us. I know, they haven’t got any quarrel with their neighbours, but you might play up the idea that once they’ve got rid of one Greek colony, they might like the idea of getting rid of them all. And you might make enquiries about mercenaries; light infantry, archers, maybe even some experienced Thracian cavalry if there’s any at a loose end.’

  Tyrsenius shook his head. ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘Anybody who’s any good will have gone with Alexander. You should see what he’s paying.’

  That’s right, I’d forgotten; Alexander had set out with his army to conquer the world.

  You know all about it, of course, Phryzeutzis, you were brought up on it. When you were little, your daddy told you stories about the great warrior who founded this city. Later on, you listened to the recital of the official history on Founder’s Day, the day when all the children get given an apple and a honey-cake, to bribe them to be good citizens when they grow up. I’ll bet you can name the great battles, in places you’ve never been to, in countries you can’t imagine; when you were a child, I expect you recreated them in places you knew, so that the stream that runs down off the mountain became the Granicus, and the brook through the town meadow became the Issus . You staged the siege of Tyre here in the city; it must have been a tight fit, all those hundreds of thousands of men crammed into our dusty little market square, with Alexander’s vast siege ramps and assault towers poking their noses over our low, burned-brick wall. Where did you see Gaugamela , I wonder? Don’t tell me; either the temple lot, before we started the building work, or the patch of scrubby orchard behind the water-tanks. Of course your Alexander will have been dark-haired and black-eyed, with a tall felt cap on his head as he rode his short-legged, round-nosed pony in the cavalry charge at Arbela —was Arbela the battle with the cavalry charge, or am I thinking of the Granicus? My Alexander, you see, is getting fainter as the years go by, while our civic Alexander gets bigger and bolder and more godlike as each year passes, as each year of children meet him for the first time on Founder’s Day, with the cake sweating honey through their hot little fingers. The day will come when I won’t recognise our Alexander at all, the way a senile father forgets his own children.

  But we’re not there quite yet; so indulge me and put aside your personal Alexander for a moment, or try to think of the man I’m going to talk about as someone else who coincidentally had the same name.

  Before setting out on his great adventure, Alexander of Macedon cleared up all his father’s outstanding business in Greece . He had four of his relatives murdered; they were too close to the throne to be left behind, and they weren’t wanted on the journey. They were the two brothers of the King of Lyncestis, a bastard son of King Philip’s and the son of Philip’s elder brother, as whose regent Philip had been crowned in the first place.

  Alexander went to Corinth with an army to be officially installed as Captain of the Greeks in his father’s place. While he was there, so they tell me, he paid a visit to one Diogenes, known as the Yapping Dog, who’d moved to Corinth from Athens a few years earlier for the good of his health. Now, it may be that he remembered some of the things his old tutor had told him about Diogenes, or maybe the great philosopher (who I thought had been dead for years at this point) was included on every sightseeing tour; in any case, Alexander summoned Diogenes for an audience. Diogenes didn’t turn up. So Alexander went to see Diogenes.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘My name is Alexander.’

  Diogenes (or at any rate, my Diogenes) grunted and said nothing. He was sitting, naked as the day he was born, on a flat stone half a mile outside the city, staring up at the hills. As I picture him, he must have looked pretty much like a thin brown lizard. Alexander studied him for a few minutes, as if getting ready to write an essay for his next tutorial, while behind him the soldiers of his bodyguard shuffled their feet and the Corinthian civic dignitaries cringed with embarrassment and wondered how in hell they were going to get out of this in one piece.

  ‘Are you all right, sitting there?’ Alexander asked eventually.

  ‘Mphm.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

  Silence.

  ‘Is there anything at all I can do for you? Anything you want? Just name it.’

  Then this long brown lizard of mine turned his head and opened one lidless reptilian eye. ‘Since you ask,’ he said, ‘there is.’

  Alexander’s lips curled in a small smile, an I-thought-there-might-be expression. He might have remembered being taught when he was a boy that power, like money, works rather like magic, because it can make people do things they normally wouldn’t, and can make possible things that normally aren’t. ‘Name it,’

  he said, ‘and you’ll get it. You have my word.’

  The lizard nodded. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘move a bit to the left. You’re getting in my light.’

  At which, so they tell me, this Alexander was bitterly offended, and it was only his respect for the gran
d old man of Yapping Dog philosophy that kept him from losing his temper and having the old fool punished. ‘That’s no favour for a king to grant,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ Diogenes replied. ‘If it makes you any happier, give me a thousand talents in gold.’

  Alexander smiled; a very thin smile, probably. ‘That’s no gift for a Yapping Dog to receive,’ he said.

  Diogenes nodded. ‘Good answer,’ he replied. ‘I can see the time I spent on you hasn’t been entirely wasted.’

  Alexander raised one perfect godlike eyebrow. ‘I don’t follow you,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Diogenes sat up, resting on one elbow. ‘Oh, sorry, for a moment there I thought you were someone I used to know.’

  It was probably at this point that the Corinthian civic dignitaries suggested that now would be a good time to go and look at the new aqueduct.

  After that, Alexander took an army into Thrace and Illyria and beat hell out of the natives there, for reasons that doubtless made a lot of sense at the time.

  He pushed up as far as the Danube — we heard about him from the Scythians (it was before the trouble started), who seemed to blame us for all the disturbance and bother their south-eastern cousins were having, though we assured them that Alexander was no fault of ours. He very nearly died up there, as a result of carelessness and overconfidence, but he pulled himself out again with some brilliantly imaginative improvisation that wouldn’t have been needed if he’d been paying attention when we did Brasidas’ northern campaigns...

  But news of his supposed death reached the ancient and powerful city of Thebes , which for a while, in my father’s time, had been the most important power in Greece . Immediately, the Theban government resolved to throw off the Macedonian yoke and restore their city to its former glory — a bit like the mice declaring war on the gram-bin once they’ve heard the cat is dead. At least one of their politicians urged a degree of caution; wait a week or so, he suggested, just in case. ‘After all,’ he told them, ‘if Alexander’s dead today, then he’ll still be dead tomorrow. Who knows, he may even still be dead the day after tomorrow; and then we can declare war on Macedon.’