Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  I particularly remember one day in the law-courts; I was on the jury for a complicated fraud trial, and the evidence was about as boring as it’s possible to get. I must have been the youngest man on the jury by about twenty years.

  Sitting behind me were a couple of regulars — we called them the Living Skulls because they were so old and shrivelled that you could clearly see the bone under the skin of their faces — who’d been having the same conversation for the last ten years. As soon as the proceedings started, they began to talk. When court was dismissed for the day, they broke off in mid-sentence and went home.

  The next day they picked up exactly where they’d left off. Nobody could figure what it was this marathon conversation was actually about. It was something to do with a quarrel between their sisters, long since dead, but since they kept drifting off on side-issues, it was impossible to follow. The man next to me was fast asleep; not the only one, by any means. On my other side was an old boy who hummed softly under his breath all day; asking him to stop had no effect, and neither did jabbing him sharply in the ribs with your elbow. Directly in front of me was another old man who talked to himself, and beside him was yet another celebrated jury personality, nicknamed Ocean because he never seemed to run dry (but it was his habit of emptying his chamber-pot at random over the benches below him that made him really famous).

  It was early in my legal career and I was actually trying to make sense of what was going on; but what with the snores and the tinkling and the humming and the muttering and the earnest voices of the Skulls, not to mention the heat of the sun and the hardness of the bench, I got hopelessly lost after the first half-hour. When the time came for the vote, the usher went round prodding awake the sleepers and chivvying us all off the benches towards the voting urns. A white pebble for not guilty, black for guilty; except that we had to provide our own pebbles, and white pebbles are harder to find; anyway, we voted and the verdict was Guilty, so we were sent back to decide on the punishment. My neighbours didn’t take long about it; they dug their nails in hard and ripped, like a cat laying open a dead mouse; straight lines across the tablet, the death penalty. When this was announced, the lawyer who’d been acting for the accused got up and tried to explain that the death penalty didn’t apply for this particular offence; it was a fine, or at the worst, exile. No sooner had he sat down than his opposite number bobbed up and asked us to convict his learned friend for contempt of court, in that he’d challenged the decision of a duly constituted jury. So off we went to vote once again; and since it was the last case of the day, we’d all used up our last remaining pebbles on the previous vote. But the usher saved the day; he found a man selling beans and confiscated his stock, then issued them to us to use instead of pebbles. Now these beans were a sort of dark brown colour, as near black as made no odds; so the lawyer was found guilty, and the usher passed round the wax tablets. A few minutes later, he announced that the jury had decided on the death penalty, which was a valid punishment for contempt; what had happened was that there were no more unmarked tablets, so they simply reissued the ones used for the last vote, without explaining that what we were meant to do was turn them on their sides...

  After the case was over, just out of interest, I stopped one old boy and asked him innocently what scratching a full line across the tablet meant.

  ‘Means he’s guilty, of course,’ the old man said.

  ‘Really? I thought we used the pebbles for that.’

  ‘Oh.’ The old man thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re wrong. Least, I been coming to this court forty years and I always done it that way, and nobody ever told me different.’

  Gradually, I found out what had happened at Antolbia.

  There had been one survivor — one. He was an Illyrian who’d hidden in a grain-pit. When they set fire to the barn, the roof fell down in such a way as to create a pocket of air that lasted until the fire burned itself out, so he was saved from the smoke; but he was down there for two weeks, pinned down by a fallen beam and unable to move, until quite by chance some Odessans who’d come to see if they could salvage any grain happened to open up the barn and found him. He’d survived by eating the raw grain and catching drips of water from a mill-stream that had been diverted when a house fell into its course, sending it down across the barn floor. Because the floor had been stamped hard, the water ran off it instead of sinking in, and enough drips fell over the side of the pit and into his mouth to keep him from dying of thirst. He was so firmly wedged in by the beam that they had to cut off both his feet before they could get him out of there.

  When he was able to talk again, he told them what he could remember, which wasn’t much. He’d been out drinking the night before, and hadn’t made it all the way home; the furthest he’d been able to stagger was a friend’s barn, so he crawled in and collapsed on a pile of straw. When the attack began, he’d been woken up by the shouting and screaming; he guessed at once what was happening, and all he could think of to do was to dive into the pit and hope for the best.

  As it was he fell in head first and nearly drowned in the grain; it was like swimming through mud, he said, and that far down he could scarcely breathe through a mouth and nose filled with grain.

  All in all, he said, he wasn’t surprised at what had happened, bearing in mind that the General had just been killed and the oecist had vanished a day or so later, taking the city’s lucky snakes with him. Obviously, he said, the snakes had warned the oecist about what was going to happen and told him to get out while he still could.

  It took longer to find out the Scythian background. In fact, a year went by and I’d pretty well given up hope of ever knowing when quite by chance I met a Scythian policeman (he arrested me for sleeping off one of my regular drinking bouts in the market square). When he found out I could speak quite a lot of his own language he was mightily impressed and let me go; then he asked me where I’d learned Scythian. I told him and he looked rather thoughtful.

  The attackers, it turned out, were his people, the Sauromatae; to be precise, a rogue war-party that was escaping after a defeat in some civil war or other and had turned south, through the land of the Alizones and down into the settled region. He hadn’t been with that particular party, but a cousin of his had, and he’d heard the story from him.

  It was then I found out about the rich man whose son stole the horse, and all the rest of the story. When we burned the village, the rich man went around the other villages stirring up trouble, promising that they’d be next. Everyone was very worried, as you can imagine, but none of them wanted to be the ones to take us on, since we were so very warlike and ruthless. Then, quite by chance, these outlaw Sauromatae turned up, and were immediately approached to undertake the task of attacking the colony. They replied that they’d fought their own people, the Royal Scythians, the Alizones and the Persians; they certainly weren’t afraid of a few Greeks. There were about seven thousand of them, I believe, all with their own horses.

  Before attacking, they sent infiltrators down into the city, pretending to be mercenaries looking for someone to hire them. They were told to go away, since with the General dead and the oecist gone, there wasn’t anybody dealing with security or defence right then; it was supposed to be the elders’ job (the Founders, I suppose he meant) but they hadn’t been able to decide between them who was going to do it, and meanwhile there weren’t even any sentries on the wall, because there wasn’t anybody to organise a rota.

  The attack, my policeman friend told me, was pretty much an anticlimax, much to the disgust of these warlike Sauromatae. They’d taken the job as much for the pleasure of matching themselves against the invincible Greeks as for the pay (which wasn’t much, since the villages were at little better than subsistence level at the best of times), but when they made the assault, at midday, they found the gate left open and met with no resistance whatsoever. After they’d killed and burned everything inside the city, they combed the surrounding fields, rounded up the livestock and b
urned off the crops before reporting back.

  After they’d gone, the villagers who’d formed the alliance against Antolbia held a meeting and decided that they couldn’t stay where they were; there were bound to be reprisals from other Greeks, and the Sauromatae had moved on and wouldn’t protect them. So they did what the Scythians have always done in the face of concerted invasion; they destroyed all their permanent structures, burned their crops, poisoned their wells, packed everything they owned into wagons, and set off north, into nomad country.

  A little after that, I learned that Olbia and Odessus had decided to take no action; after all, the Scythians had gone, and the whole region was now empty.

  But, since Antolbia had nominally been a Macedonian colony, they sent a petition to Alexander asking him to avenge the massacre by sending a punitive expedition. Alexander got the message and acknowledged it, but nothing was ever done; Alexander was a long way away and had other things on his mind.

  Well, I hope the rich man was able to get his son back in the end. It’d be truly sad if he went to all that trouble and expense for nothing. I never did find out his name, and as a historian I regret that. The duty of a historian is to ensure that the momentous deeds of men whose actions shape the world are never forgotten, and I guess that if anybody qualifies under those criteria, he did.

  A month or so after the end of my lawsuit, when I was sure that my ninth-cousin-fifty-times-removed had finally packed up and slung his hook, I went back home to Pallene.

  It’s an old house; my father was always talking about pulling it down and building something better, but he never got round to it, and while I was growing up there it was still basically as it had been when my great—great—grandfather built it. In the middle there’s a courtyard, closed in on the southern and western sides by plain mud-brick walls and on the other two sides by the two flat-roofed blocks of the house which meet at right-angles at the north-eastern corner, comprising the main room (facing north) and the inner room (facing east). The gate’s in the east wall, with a verandah on the outside. The northern half of the courtyard is shaded by the roof of the portico. That’s it, basically.

  As I walked down the bill, the first I saw of it was the flat roof of the inner room; that was where we all used to sleep during the hottest part of the year, when it was impossible to sleep indoors. A little further down the trail, and I caught sight of the tower, a separate building a few yards behind the house itself, masked from the path by a little curtain of apple trees. These trees had grown a lot since I’d been away — nobody could be bothered to prune them, I guess — so it was only when I left the path and wound my way past the two big rocks we called the Gateposts that I was able to see the house itself. Apart from the overgrown trees it was exactly the same as I remembered it. Even the half-dead old fig-tree we’d pegged to the outside of the south wall when I was just a kid was still there, still lolling off the pegs like a drunken man leaning on the shoulder of a long-suffering friend. The fallen-down barn we’d kept promising ourselves we’d restore was still standing, no more and no less dilapidated than when I’d last seen it. The old cartwheel my father had hung from a branch for us to play on was still propped against the pear-tree, still missing the same two spokes. Even the two beehives were exactly where they’d been the last time I conjured the place up in my mind’s eye.

  I was home. Fact.

  I walked into the verandah, lifted the latch and gently pushed the door. It opened a hand’s span or so, then stuck. I put my shoulder against it, forced it open enough for me to squeeze through, and went into the main room.

  There was nothing there, of course. My defeated rival had taken all the furniture and movables with him when he left, and for the first time in my life I could see all four corners of the room at once. It was much smaller than I’d remembered, the doorways were lower, the hearth narrower. It was darker, too.

  I was about to turn round and go outside when I heard a faint scuffling noise from the inner room. I tiptoed across and jerked the door open.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I asked.

  The inner room had been stripped bare too, of course, and it was even darker.

  Under the shadow of the far wall I could see something that looked like a bundle of old cloth.

  ‘You,’ I said. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Euxenus?’

  I took a step closer. The voice wasn’t familiar exactly, but I had an idea I’d heard it before. ‘Who are you?’ I repeated.

  ‘It’s me,’ the voice said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  It was an old man’s voice, quite quiet, with an accent of some sort. ‘On your feet,’ I said. ‘This is my house now, and you’re trespassing.’

  ‘Euxenus? It’s me, Syrus.’

  For a moment my mind was as blank as a fresh wax tablet; then I remembered.

  ‘Syrus?’ I said. ‘I thought you were dead.’

  You remember the slave who hurt himself during the olive harvest, and thereby indirectly caused the death of my father? That was Syrus. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘not so’s you’d notice.’

  I moved closer, and he lifted his head. It was Syrus all right. He’d gone bald and his beard was white and scraggy, he was painfully thin — he’d been a stout, round-faced man when I last saw him — and the folds of empty skin around the sides of his eyes and chin made me think of sacks dumped on the floor. He’d gone blind, I realised.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I asked.

  He looked at me — well, about a yard to my right, actually; it was rather disconcerting. ‘Nowhere else to go,’ he replied. ‘You remember, in his will your father set me free.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘You were going to go into the rope-making business.’

  ‘I did,’ he said, nodding. ‘Worked for fifteen years in a ropewalk in Piraeus , till I saved up enough to start up on my own. I was doing all right, too.’

  I waited for a moment, then said, ‘What happened?’

  ‘There was a fire,’ he said. ‘My wife, my boy, the two lads I had working with me, the house, all the stock and materials — it’s tricky stuff, rope. Actually, it’s the tar we put on it to keep it from rotting. One spark and the next thing you know—’ He smiled; or at least his lips pressed together and widened, and his body shook a little. ‘They fished me out, but they shouldn’t have bothered. It’s nothing but a waste of good food keeping me alive now.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘So why are you here?’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, nobody was going to keep me back in Piraeus , I’d have starved. But I thought, the boys back at the farm, they might look after me for old times’ sake. Of course, when I got here I heard, they’re all. . . Except Master Eudemus, and he’s no better off than I am really. He lost an eye, you know, in the battle.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘That reminds me; do you happen to know where he is?’

  Syrus turned his head towards me. ‘Didn’t you know? He — I’m sorry, Euxenus, he’s gone too. Some kind of illness, I never heard any more.’

  I sighed. ‘That’s it, then,’ I said. ‘It looks like it’s just me. And you,’ I added. ‘So you got here and you found they were all dead. What then?’

  ‘Your cousin, Philocarpus; he let me sleep in the barn and eat with the hired help. That was kind of him, he didn’t need to do anything like that. But he only laughed and said I went with the land, like some old tree-trunk it’s easier to plough round than dig out.Then he came and told me he was having to move on back to Priene, because you’d won your case. He didn’t make it sound like I could go with him, so I stayed here.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘Is there anything at all you can do?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I’ll be straight with you, Euxenus, there isn’t much.’ He lifted his hands; I could see the scar tissue from the burns even in that poor light.

  ‘I can grind, and turn the olive-press, if someone else fills the hopper. That’s about it.’

  ‘I see. Fine inheritance
you turned out to be.’ I opened the flap of my satchel and pulled out a small, half-empty jar of rough wine that had been keeping me company as I walked out from the City. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘help yourself.’ He found the neck with his hands and drank deeply, spilling wine down his chin. ‘Just you and me,’ I repeated. ‘And I’ve come ever such a long way to get here.’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t follow,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I replied. ‘Look, you can carry on dossing down in the barn, and I’ll see you don’t starve. What do you do all day?’

  ‘Not a lot I can do,’ he said. ‘I sit, mostly.’

  ‘Sounds pretty boring.’

  ‘It is,’ he said. ‘But there’s worse things than boring. Thank you, Euxenus.’

  ‘Forget it,’ I replied. ‘Doesn’t sound like I’m doing you any favours, at that.’

  He smiled again. ‘Remains to be seen, doesn’t it?’ he said.

  And that my young friend, is how, after a lifetime of wandering and striving after achievement, I finally attained what had always been my heart’s desire, the life and dignity of an Athenian gentleman. Curious; if I’d known that all I had to do was manage to reach the age of forty-one without dying, I’d have stayed at home and kept myself amused with pottering around the market square, telling lies for money, rather than educating the sons of kings or founding cities, and maybe an awful lot of people would still be alive today; Scythians, Illyrians, Greeks... Not to mention a fair number of Persians, Medes, Bactrians, Cappadocians, Armenians, Gedrosians, Drangianae, Fish-eating Ethiopians (so called to distinguish them from the other Ethiopians, who live in Africa), Arians, Massagetae, Egyptians and Indians whose deaths are probably partly my fault as well. I remember hearing once about some savage king of somewhere or other who had a road running the length of his empire paved with the skulls of his enemies. I can go one better than that. I travelled from Pallene to Pallene by way of Macedon and Olbia, walking a road paved with the dead bodies of my family and friends.