by Tom Holt
My first day as Colonel of Bees, a sergeant took me over to an enclosure on the far side of the camp, where nobody ever seemed to go, and introduced me to my new command. There were something like ten million of them, divided into twenty-five hives, each under the command of a queen who, presumably, reported directly to me. The first thing they did was chase me three times round the enclosure and sting me on the legs. It was then I discovered, rather to my disgust, that I’m allergic to bee-stings.
I should have known, of course. You may remember, when we were kids — I think I was about eight or nine at the time — one summer I got stung by a bee just under my chin, and the whole of my neck swelled up like a wineskin and for about a week everybody was certain I was going to die. Seems I’m one of those people who can get really seriously ill from bee-venom, because by the start of my second day as Colonel of Bees I was so badly crippled up I could only just crawl out of bed far enough to fall on the floor and lie there on my face.
Well, for two pins I’d have packed it in then and there, and so what if it meant the end of my career with the Macedonian army? But before I was well enough to crawl to His Majesty’s pavilion and turn in my command, my sergeant showed up with a couple of Scythians in tow. Really evil-looking types they were — well, you’d know all about them — and I was just about to ask the sergeant what the hell he thought he was doing filling my quarters with bloodthirsty cannibals when he said that these Scythians were experts in everything to do with bees, including how to deal with a bad reaction to getting stung.
To cut a long story short, these Scythians gave me a big jar of stuff to put on the stings which drew the poison out before it could do me any real harm, and another jar of a different kind of stuff to stop them coming anywhere near me in the first place, and both of these worked fine, believe it or not, though the smell was something else. It’d have been just fine if they’d left it at that, but they didn’t.
Oh, did I mention that apart from making me swell up like that, the bee-stings were also quite amazingly painful? Well, they were. Every bit of me seemed to hurt like I had bits of sharp gravel trapped inside my joints, and next day I mentioned this to those two wise Scythians, who looked at each other and nodded.
‘We can help you there,’ they said.
I was so impressed with the other stuff they’d given me that I’d have tried anything they chose to recommend without a second thought. But I’ll say this for them, they did try to warn me.
‘These leaves,’ they said, ‘are a great medicine among our people. When we’re sad or unhappy, we throw a few handfuls of them onto the campfire, and a few minutes later we’re all dancing and singing and laughing, as if we hadn’t got a care in the world. It’s a bit like being very drunk,’ they went on, ‘except that we’ve noticed before now that from time to time a man will get so happy because of the smoke that he’ll trip over as he dances round the fire and fall into it, and unless his friends pull him out he’ll just stay there, lying quite happily burning to death. The magic smoke, you see, makes you feel no pain; and that’s why we’re a bit wary of giving it to foreigners who aren’t used to it. You’d be amazed,’ they went on, ‘how effective it is. A man can lose his wife and see his children die before his eyes, and still he’ll feel no pain, just sit there grinning and muttering happily to himself. So be careful with it, that’s all we’re saying. A man who doesn’t feel any pain at all can be a real danger to himself and other people.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Point taken. Just so long as it takes away the pain of the bee-stings, it’ll do me just fine.’ So they gave me a big jar of these leaves, and as soon as they’d gone I pitched a handful on the fire and waited to see what would happen.
Brother, it was amazing. After a few minutes, all the pain in my joints was gone; in fact, I didn’t seem to have a body at all. In fact it reminded me a lot of Plato —(‘You read Plato?’ I asked.
Eudaemon frowned. ‘Yeah, well,’ he said. ‘A bloke I served with had a copy once.
Sometimes it gets so boring on campaign you’ll read any bloody thing. And it made a welcome change from “Produce of Attica” on the necks of wine-jars.’)
—That bit in Plato where he talks about the perfect or ideal state of being, where we’ve purged ourselves of the body and all its worldly concerns and we exist as creatures of pure thought, which I guess is what you philosophers reckon is a good time. A load of crap, obviously, when you stop and think about it; but after I’d been breathing in that smoke for a bit, that’s just how I felt, and in a strange way I could see the attraction. Anyway, it sorted out the bee-stings, and an hour or so later the effects wore off and I gradually came back to normal. Of course the stings started hurting again after that, but not so much, because the other stuff was doing its job; at least I could get about, and I could walk from my quarters to the mess hall without bursting into tears.
Now that I had a way of at least surviving, I knuckled down and started learning about bees. And believe me, there’s a lot to learn. Luckily, I had those two Scythians to teach me; I had a word with their commanding officer and got them seconded to my command. They were happy enough; it got them out of serious soldiering, and I upped their pay a bit, too; anything to keep them sweet and take the load off me.
Anyway, they taught me how to make and repair beehives, either by sewing together tree-bark or weaving osiers, and smearing clay in the cracks to keep the little buggers nice and warm. You’ve got to be particular about what kind of bark you use, mind; some kinds of tree don’t agree with them at all, like yew or crab-apple. They taught me which kinds of leaves and plants you need to gather and dump about the place to keep them sweet and make sure they keep coming back;
balsam, saffron and honeywort really draw them in, which only shows there’s no accounting for tastes. Even more important, they taught me how to sort them out when they get all stroppy and start swarming — all you do is, you scoop up a big handful of dust and throw it over the swarm, and they calm down just like that.
Amazing, the first time you see it. And they showed me how you recognise the queen by her size, and how you pull her wings off to stop her flying away and leaving the hive; a dirty trick, if you ask me, but that’s war for you.
They made me this smock thing, with a big hat and a veil to go with it, and that helped keep the bastards from stinging me to death; but I still got stung in spite of all the fancy dress, whereas they never got stung at all. So I asked them about it and they said, No, the bees left them alone because they understood each other. After a while, they said, you learn how to communicate with bees, on a very basic level, of course. It’s all to do with the way you move, they said; if you’re relaxed and calm and don’t make sudden movements or anything like that, they stop seeing you as a threat and quit stinging you. Of course, I reckoned that was all a load of cock; but bugger me if it wasn’t true, and gradually it became second nature to me. They stopped bothering me, took no notice of me at all, even when I was up to my wrists in them. I promise you, it’d make you swear off drink for life to watch me groping about inside a seething mass of bees, with them crawling right up my arms and all over my face, and never getting stung once.
So; thanks to extreme dedication and diligence on my part, I’d gone from being more or less completely ignorant about bees to the point where I could probably keep a household in honey and beeswax. Pretty impressive, don’t you think?
Except that that wasn’t the point. King Alexander didn’t want honey and beeswax;
he wanted a secret weapon that’d cut a swathe through the great walled cities of Asia . On that score, my two Scythian friends weren’t any use to me. Nobody was.
Even if Aeneas the Tactician were still alive (he may be, for all I know, though I hope for his sake that he isn’t, just in case he runs into me some dark night)
he wouldn’t have been able to help me, for the simple reason that neither he nor anybody else had ever done anything of the sort before. If Alexander was to have h
is secret weapon, I was the one who was going to have to figure out how to make it work.
‘You’re mad,’ said Anacharsis, the elder and gabbier of the two Scythians, when I broke the news to him. ‘It can’t be done.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Why not?’
He rolled his eyes. They’re good at that, Scythians. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘for a start, the King wants you to move the bees, yes?’
‘More than just move them,’ I replied. ‘Wherever the army goes, they go too.’
‘Out of the question,’ Anacharsis said. ‘If you load the hives onto a cart, you’ll lose the bees. They’ll fly out, and when they return the hive won’t be there any more. They won’t be able to find it.’
I thought for a moment. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘How’d it be if we sealed the hives up with wax or mud while they’re in transit?’
He shook his head. ‘They’ll die,’ he replied. ‘Either they’ll fight among themselves and kill each other, or they’ll just curl up and go to sleep. Forget it.’
I rubbed my cheeks with the palms of my hands. Helps me concentrate. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I take your point. But we’ve got to find a way round it, somehow or other. Put that on one side for now; any other problems?’
He nodded. ‘Feeding them,’ he said. ‘If you let them out to gather pollen, they’ll fly away. Now suppose you find some way of keeping them in the hive without killing them; they’ll just starve to death instead.’
My head was beginning to hurt. ‘Honey,’ I said. ‘We buy up all the honey we can lay our hands on and feed them on that. Money’s not a problem, remember.’
He sighed. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Bees are meant to make honey, not consume it. The whole idea’s unnatural.’
‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘But we’re lumbered with it, so stop being so damned negative and help me find a solution, unless you want to find yourself reassigned to a suicide squad come the first battle.’
Then his mate Bobas, who usually never said a word from one new moon to the next, lifted his head off his chest and looked at us both. ‘Siege towers,’ he said.
We waited for him to enlarge on this oracular statement, but he didn’t oblige. I shook my head. ‘How about—’ I’d started, when Anacharsis grabbed my arm.
‘He’s right,’ he said joyfully. ‘Do you know, that’s brilliant. Exactly what we need.’
I scratched the back of my head. ‘Could one of you explain it to me?’ I said.
‘I’m lost.’
Anacharsis looked at me as if I were feeble-minded. ‘Siege towers,’ he repeated.
‘You know, the portable scaffoldings with wheels they use to attack walls and towers.
‘I know what a siege tower is, thank you very—’ I broke off. I’d seen the light.
Just like the man said, it was brilliant.
Now you, dear brother, have spent your life skulking about in well-fortified cities or following a plough, so I don’t imagine you’re all that familiar with siege towers and how they’re made. Basically it’s a platform perched right up high on a scaffolding tower, all resting on a wagon-bed with two pairs of small, very solid wheels sticking out of the corners. The idea is, the top of the platform’s level with the top of the battlements of the city you happen to be picking a fight with at that particular moment. The assault party stands on the platform and a whole bunch of other guys push this contraption tight up against the wall.
Now then; obviously the thing’s got to be made on site since no two city walls are the same height and if you’re too high or too low —well, forget it. But some of the components are interchangeable, one-size-fits-all sort of thing; for example, the big wicker shields they hang on the front and sides to keep the enemy arrows off the assault party. Actually, they aren’t worth a light when you come down to it, but there’s one very special thing about them I might not have mentioned yet. They’re made of either hard bark or thick osiers woven together with a very fine weave, which makes them strong enough without being too heavy.
In practice, they make the weave so fine that nothing gets past or through, except an arrow at point-blank range. They’re certainly bee-proof. And they’re big. Just what the doctor ordered. Cut ‘em up and build what’s effectively an enormous hive, one with enough space for the little bastards to fly about inside and keep from going nuts or dying of boredom. We made them the same length as the bed of a great big long wagon, with a trapdoor in the side so we could get in and out.
Simple idea. The bees stay in this hutch contrivance, which bounces along on a wagon with the rest of the siege train. A couple of times a day, someone climbs in to keep the feeders topped up with honey and change the leaves and foliage, make sure they’re all right. And there you have it. Mobile beehives that’ll go wherever you can take a long wagon and a dirty great long train of mules.
Simple, yes?
Simple idea, hideously complicated to build in real life. We ended up tying the parts together with fine-filament rope, the way they make the hulls of ships in Egypt . It worked, is all I can say. It stayed in one piece and it kept the bees happy, or at least not as mad as they’d have been cooped up in a closed hive. We loaded it onto a wagon bed and took it for a twelve-mile hike just to test it, and it survived and so did we, and so did the bees.
‘Crazy,’ Anacharsis said, as we brought it back into the camp.
‘Maybe,’ I replied. ‘But it works.’
‘So far,’ he answered gloomily. ‘We’re going to look real idiots if these things fall apart somewhere in the mountains of Ecbatana and all the bees fly away.’
‘True,’ I conceded. ‘But at least we’ll have lived that long. And besides, remember what it is the King’s got in mind for us to do. Chances are we’ll all have been cut into rashers by the Persians long before we get to Ecbatana , so nobody’ll ever know.’
Does that sound unduly pessimistic to you, brother? Well, you’ve got the wonderful advantage of hindsight. You know that in spite of the odds and some truly shameful acts of bad soldiering, King Alexander pretty well strolled through Asia , with the Persians either running away or impaling themselves on our spear-points like moths buzzing burning lamp-wicks. Now that’s not how it was either, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever convince you of that, because all you know of the story is the outcome. You know we won, and we won easily, so as far as you’re concerned there can’t have been anything to it.
But I tell you, brother, those weeks when we were getting ready to set off, the only way we kept from going crazy with fear was by singlemindedly thinking about something else. We knew that what we were about to try to do was utterly impossible. We knew we were probably all going to be dead inside three months.
Believe me, if I’d thought I’d still be lugging around those idiotic bee-hutches ten years later, I’d never have dreamed of trying something so dumb; I’d have applied my mmd and thought of a better system. As it was, I didn’t care all that much. The hutch idea was, as they say, good enough for government work, so that’s what we did. And if ever I started worrying about it, I had those excellent Scythian leaves to take the pain away. Wonderful medicine, that; cured you of life, which at times is even more painful than bee-stings.
Now, according to King Alexander, dear brother, you’re the world’s greatest living authority on military history, so obviously you don’t have to be told about the Persian war by a mere eyewitness.You know it all already. In fact, you ought to be telling me.
Actually, to be straight with you, I wouldn’t recommend that you put a lot of faith in my testimony even if you weren’t a mighty historian. Truth to tell, I was out of it a lot of the time, in more senses than one. While the King and the fighting army were off tanning the hides of the Persians, we were plodding along with the siege train or standing about waiting while the engineers slowly and painfully dismantled the wagons to get them through some narrow mountain pass or other, then put them slowly and painfully back together again. We spent hours like that, watching other peo
ple work, with the convoy of mules and wagons stretched out behind us, nothing to do but listen to the soft chink of distant hammers driving out axle pins. It was boring, and boredom is a very acute form of pain, let me assure you. Fortunately, I had plenty of medicine; so it won’t come as too much of a surprise when I tell you that I haven’t a clue about a lot of the places we went to, what they looked like, whether the houses were flat-roofed or thatched, whether they kept sheep or goats, the names of the rivers and the location of the fords, where the snow-line was, how many days it took to get from one particular poxy little village to another. You can read all about it in one of the books, you don’t need me to tell you. So I won’t. Now I could tell you some pretty damn fascinating stories about some of the things I did see and some of the people I spoke to, often for hours at a time, but you see, they weren’t real, and therefore of only incidental interest to a dedicated historian like yourself. In a way, of course, I’m sorry I missed the show; but that’s me all over. I was always the kid who was so excited at the prospect of going to the theatre that he lay awake all through the night before and then fell asleep immediately the play started.
Yes, brother, that’s soldiering for you; well, partly. Actually there’s more to it than that. There’s also the long days in the murderous heat, when you’re manhandling the baggage over trails where the wagons can’t go, in your breastplate and helmet (because there’s a one-in-ten-thousand chance that there might be renegade Hyrcanian infantry units hiding out in the hills, and you know that the one time you don’t wear your armour is the time they’ll attack), with the sweat trickling off your forehead into your eyes, no skin on your palms because of hauling on dry papyrus cables with sweaty hands, your head pounding from the cruel brightness of the sun — and then, just when you reckon you’re about done, the load gets wedged fast between two rocks, or an axle pin shears or a mule refuses to budge or some fool gets his leg trapped under a fallen boulder or an A-frame pops its dowels or some other bloody thing goes wrong;