Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  This was the point during the battle of the Granicus at which Alexander launched his cavalry charge, to hold off the enemy while his heavy infantry waddled across the ford. Characteristically of Alexander’s military planning, it was a bold, innovative and highly successful manoeuvre, and nobody could ever deny that it worked like a charm —

  — Which is why we were all at a loss to know why it didn’t work nearly so well for us. The situation, after all, was more or less identical — river, cavalry on one side, heavy infantry on the other; it was as if we’d taken the ingredients for honey-cakes, mixed them together in the prescribed manner, and ended up with cheesecake.

  I remember the stone in my boot, which I hadn’t had a chance to get rid of all the way from the city to the ford. I remember how the headache made it such an effort to think at all, let alone try to revise my plan in mid-flow. I remember thinking, right in the middle of the fighting, that unless I managed to control my irregular bowel movements until the battle was over and I could snatch a few moments behind a bush somewhere, it was all going to be terribly sordid and embarrassing. I clearly recall the high curtain of water thrown up by the hooves of the Budini’s horses as they clattered into the ford at a brisk, jarring trot.

  I have a whole library of pictures in my mind from that battle, dozens of little scenes and observations, all as self-contained as the black and red pictures on the sides of fancy pottery. Quite a few of them I’d be delighted to get rid of, such as the sight of the entire front rank of our cavalry charge sliding dead off their horses into the water as the Scythians poured a volley of arrows into our ranks from about fifteen yards away. Those horses; I can see them clearly, trotting up the opposite bank of the river, as if they knew that without the burden of men on their backs they were safe, they were welcome as being valuable commodities, not just martial scrap to be heaped up on a trophy. Of course, I’m proud to recall how our line of spear-points hardly wavered as the infantry line crossed the river, though that image isn’t as sharp as the others. What I do remember is how wet the water was when we knelt down in the river, taking shelter behind our shields from the next volley of arrows. I can feel the claggy wet cloth of my kilt against my skin, and the singularly disagreeable sensation of water running down the inside of my legs as I stood up afterwards. I can remember the colour of the water; briefly muddy with kicked-up silt and the blood of the dead Budini.

  These images are all so sharp and immediate, in fact, that it amazes me that I’ve never come across them or others like them in the great battle-scenes in Homer, which are supposedly about men fighting each other. It makes me wonder;

  did Alexander get wet and shivery as he crossed the Granicus; or did the water somehow fail to soak into whatever he was wearing that day? Perhaps kings and heroes have a special dispensation that lets them off getting wet when they fight battles in the beds of shallow rivers. I don’t know; and although over the years I’ve had plenty of opportunities to ask people who were in a position to analyse what happened and what went wrong, I’ve never quite been able to deal with it.

  Most curious of all is that when I’ve talked about that battle to other people who were there, they claim to have noticed an almost completely different set of observations and impressions, as if they’d been at a different battle in the same place on the same day. There can’t have been another battle, can there? I’m sure I’d have noticed, and so, I assume, would they, unless it started half an hour after I’d gone home. But they reckoned they saw me there, and most of them were far too unimaginative to have made up something like that.

  We were about halfway across the river when they fell back, pulling their horses’ heads round and cantering off a hundred yards or so towards their village. They were conceding the crossing to us. They weren’t meant to do that.

  The whole idea was that they were meant to see that we’d made a tactical error —

  trying to cross an awkward obstacle in the face of the enemy, it’s suicide, ask any general — and that they should immediately press home their advantage before we had a chance to recover, let alone get across the damn river. This would mean riding down onto the riverbed to fight us, or at least holding their bank against us, which from our point of view would mean they’d lose all their advantages as cavalry and accordingly succumb to our superior infantry, just the way it had happened at the Granicus.

  But they didn’t. I can only assume they were too stupid to see the obvious advantage, or too cowardly to dare to seize the moment. Instead, they waited till we’d pulled ourselves out of the water and started shooting at us again.

  The fools.

  Fortunately, we were ready for them, thanks to all those hours of foot drill. We dropped down on one knee, lifted our shields, same as before; they scratched and dented a lot of expensive metalwork, but they didn’t kill anybody. After three or so volleys they stopped, worried about running short of arrows. We got up and started to advance. They let us come on seventy-five yards or so, then rode off another hundred yards and started shooting again. We knelt, waited, got up, advanced, a hundred or so yards at a time. It was slow and painful stuff, not to mention embarrassing — by rights, we should have killed them all by now, whereas we hadn’t got close enough to make out the colour of their eyes, let alone hit anybody. At this rate, it’d be a long, dangerous crawl to the village, provided that their arrow supply held out.

  It was at this point that someone quite unexpectedly did something intelligent.

  Corus, the captain of the remaining Budini (he wasn’t their regular leader; he hadn’t made it), suddenly led a frantic charge, apparently at right-angles to everything that was going on. It was as if he’d caught sight of that other battle I was speculating about just now, the one that everybody else but I could see, and had gone racing off to join it.The enemy lowered their bows and stared, unable to fathom what the hell was going on; we were staring too, come to that.

  If it hadn’t been for the drawn scimitars and levelled lances, I’d have sworn they were running away. But they weren’t. After they’d galloped about a quarter of a mile, they abruptly veered off to the right and swung back; they’d gone just far enough to be behind the enemy’s line, provided they could reach it before the enemy had a chance to get out of the way.

  It was close; the war-party had to back and shuffle before they could turn round to face the incoming attack, which was closing at a hell of a rate, and that was when I saw it, the complicated manoeuvre in the face of the enemy — the mistake.

  I scrambled to my feet and yelled for an immediate attack; Marsamleptes was way ahead of me, and he had the wit to give the order to the trumpeters, who blew the charge. In the event, I did well to keep up and not get trampled on.

  When they saw us coming, the enemy tried to turn back again, thereby getting themselves hopelessly tangled up. It was more by luck than judgement, but both charges, cavalry and infantry, went home at more or less the same time. We were holding them like a piece of hot metal in a pair of tongs. They couldn’t shoot or run. It was just like the Granicus, only better.

  Being rather slow off the mark, I ended up in the fourth row of the infantry formation, where I couldn’t see anything past the helmet of the man in front of me, and couldn’t contribute anything beyond my body-weight. As to what actually happened, therefore, I have no idea; I didn’t get to see any of the cut and thrust of hand-to-hand combat, the lunging and feinting and parrying, the footwork and shieldplay. My experience of the battle was something like being caught in a big, over-excited queue, like when you’re lining up to get into the theatre or Assembly, and they open the doors and everybody surges forwards at once, sweeping you along with them. I was scared, no question, but not of the enemy; the immediate threat to me (and a very real one too) was from the butt-spikes on the ends of other people’s spears, the terrifying risk of slipping and getting trodden into the dirt, or being crushed like a bug between two ranks of armour-clad bodies. In fact, I only have other people’s word for it that we
engaged the enemy at all. I didn’t see any of them, certainly, unless you count one or two dead bodies I trod on when something suddenly gave way and for a few short, scary moments we were all stumbling forward out of control.

  They must have been the enemy, those dead men, because they weren’t wearing armour; but that was all I had time to notice about them.

  It’s not as if I gave a damn, anyway. Fighting and killing were the last things on my mind just then.

  From what other people told me, I gather that we sort of squeezed them into nothing, as if you took on overripe pear in your hand and crushed it, till the pulp squirted out between your fingers and you were left holding the core and the pips. It was something like a hundred and seventy-odd killed, as many again captured, while our losses were in single figures, apart from the Budini shot down in the river (seventeen killed, twenty or so wounded). Anyway, people who knew about this sort of thing reckoned that it was a good closing score and we’d done well, and there was plenty of stuff for a proper trophy this time. But the rest of them got back inside the village and shut the gates, and after we’d caught our breath and sorted ourselves out, there was nothing else to do but go home again. Complete waste of time, if you ask me.

  ‘We did well,’ Tyrsenius said, ‘considering. Of course,’ he went on, ‘we’ll have to be very careful from now on. Very careful indeed.’

  I yawned; it was late and I was very tired after all that frantic pushing and shoving. ‘What you’re saying is,’ I replied, ‘we’ve attacked them, provoked them, killed nearly two hundred people, and sooner or later they’re going to attack us again.’

  ‘That’s a rather negative way of looking at it, don’t you think?’ Tyrsenius said. ‘After all, we’ve just won a rather splendid victory.’

  ‘Which achieved nothing,’ I said. ‘If anything, we’ve made things worse. You know what I’d do if I were in charge in that village? I’d send messages to every Scythian community in reach, saying, Dire warning, unprovoked attack, we must all band together now and get rid of these Greeks once and for all, or else we don’t stand a chance. After all,’ I added, ‘isn’t that what we did?’

  Prodromus the Founder looked at me. ‘I thought you were the one who wanted this war,’ he said.

  I leaned back and let my head rest against the wall. ‘I wanted to wipe out the village,’ I said. ‘No village, no more problem. It serves me right, I suppose, for thinking you can do that sort of thing.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Tyrsenius said. I ignored him.

  ‘All right,’ Prodromus said. ‘So now what are you saying? We should give up the war? Try to negotiate peace?’

  I nodded. ‘We’ve made our point, at least,’ I said. ‘And sure enough, we’ve thinned out the war-party, got rid of a lot of the young braves who were spoiling for a fight. We’ve got the anger out of our system too, I hope. What I’d like to do is go back to the terms Anabruzas proposed that time, and see if we can make anything out of those.’

  Marsamleptes stroked his beard with the ball of his thumb. ‘That’s if those terms are still open,’ he said. ‘Maybe now it’s their turn to be angry.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’d have hoped we’ve killed too many of them to let them afford the luxury of being angry,’ I replied. ‘Even though we lost control of the battle right at the outset, they still weren’t able to do us any real harm. We’ve proved they’re no match for us in a pitched battle.’

  Marsamleptes dipped his head a little. ‘Maybe they aren’t figuring on having any more pitched battles,’ he replied. ‘It’s not the way they do things, left to themselves.’

  I saw his point. If we were going to thump them every time we met in the open field, the sensible thing from their perspective would be not to go to the open field any more. But they could still launch surprise attacks, ride down our people as they walked home from work, and then dart back behind their gates before we could do anything about it. Then we’d have to follow suit, they’d step up their attacks; and when, in the middle of all this, would any of us find the time to do any farming? ‘So what’s your idea?’ I asked him.

  ‘Gather more men,’ he said. ‘Hire more soldiers. Then we lay a siege and destroy the village.’

  I sighed. ‘Back where we started, only harder,’ I said. ‘In fact, we’ve achieved nothing.’

  Marsamleptes shook his head. ‘Things have changed since we started,’ he said.

  ‘Back then, we could have come to an agreement. Now, we have to see it through.’

  Nobody said anything after that, and the meeting broke up. Marsamleptes went off to organise guard duty; his work wouldn’t be over much before dawn. We weren’t supposed to be doing all this; it was summer now, but soon it would be autumn;

  vintage, harvest, ploughing, sowing. In Greece , the campaigning season has always been very rigidly defined, wars don’t drag on into vintage and get in the way of people’s work. But in Greece , everybody knows what wars mean, they understand the meaning of a victory or a defeat. It’s like judgement in a lawsuit, and if the judgement goes against you, you don’t complain or try to wriggle out of it, you pay up and get on with your life. How would it be if every dispute over who owned which side of a ditch or who was responsible for breakages in a consignment of jars of honey had to be carried through until one or other of the parties was dead? That was the lesson of military history: only fight battles if you’re prepared to abide by the result.

  That didn’t seem to work here, which made the point. We weren’t in Greece any more. We’d left all that, moved on.

  Pity.

  I crawled out of my clothes, which had dried on me twice that day — once from the river-water, once from the sweat — and slumped onto my bed. I was used to being alone in the house now, it was remarkable how quickly I’d adapted to it. Everything had gone wrong, one way or another, and I’d accepted it without really noticing.

  I woke up in the middle of the night and realised that I’d decided to leave Antolbia.

  In a sense, there was nothing left to leave. My Antolbia was firmly based around the notion of home, family, farm, the life I should have had if only my father hadn’t screwed everything up by having so many sons. Now my own son was dead, my wife had fled to Sicily with a cheese magnate, I didn’t dare go to my farm for fear of getting shot; that didn’t leave much. The ideal society had gone the way of all such experiments — it had lasted longer than some, and I had the consolation of knowing that the forces tearing it apart were mostly external, but it was still a fundamentally impossible project, as close to real life as Homer’s version of battle. The truth was quite simple; we’d tried to found a Greek city that wasn’t in Greece , in a place that was already somewhere else by the time we got there. When Greeks founded Miletus and Syracuse and Cyrene and Croton and Odessus, the world was still soft and plastic, like a ball of wet clay that could be moulded and shaped. By the time we went to Olbia, it was already too hard to work.

  The only question was, when would I be free to go? Perversely, if everything had been going well I could have walked away without a second thought (but if everything had been going well, I wouldn’t have wanted to). True, I had no material ties worth bothering with, and thanks to Philip of Macedon and the battle of Chaeronea, I was the rightful heir to substantial property in Attica —

  following the deaths of Eudorus and Euthyphron, half my father’s original estate; I’d have to fight hard in the courts to get it, of course, and on that score the sooner I left Antolbia and started my campaign, the better. But leaving at that particular moment, either the beginning or the middle of the war, but most certainly not the end, was something I couldn’t bring myself to do. Don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t anything to do with obligation or responsibility or honour. It was more a matter of wanting to be looking in the right direction when the main event happened, just for once in my life —My fellow Antolbians, it is with a heavy heart...

  — And partly, of course, cowardice, because I didn’t have the nerve to s
tand up in front of them and make that speech. No, if I wanted to leave now, I’d have to sneak out of town on some pretext, like the man who tells his wife he’s just going up to the market to buy a quarter of whitebait, and is next heard of ten years later, as a captain of mercenaries in libya.

  After a sleepless night (more to do with rough wine and anchovies than mental turmoil, I suspect) I decided on a compromise. When we’d erased all traces of the Scythian village, I’d be free to go. Even while I was formulating the proposal, I couldn’t help wondering what had happened to me over the last dozen years, to bring me to a state where I predicated my personal redemption on the wholesale slaughter of innocents. But I explained that by saying that I was merely reverting to type. What we’d have called genocide in Olbia would have been considered in Athens a sensible business precaution.

  I went to see Marsamleptes.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he replied, in answer to my question. ‘If we had the resources, I’d want catapults and battering-rams, plus at least three hundred specialist archers.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t afford the money, or the time. What can we do with what we’ve already got?’

  He thought for a while longer. ‘Attack by night,’ he said eventually. ‘In the dark, they can’t see to shoot. If we can force the gate before they realise what we’re doing—’

  I shook my head. ‘Is that likely?’

  ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Not really.’

  I chewed my lower lip for a moment. ‘What if someone opened the gates for us?’ I said. ‘Would that be enough, do you think?’

  As always, he considered his answer carefully before replying. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think it would. Basically, we’d have to use the village stockade like a net, as if we were lamping for hares. Surround the stockade but leave the two side-gates unblocked. Put in an assault party through the main gate, with torches, setting fire to everything in reach and making it look like there’s more of them than there really are. Once they realise what’s going on, they’ll try to bolt through the side gates. That’s where we catch them and kill them.’