Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  Enough to make you spit, really. Everything we’d worked at so hard for all that time ended up at the bottom of the straits along with gods know how many dead workers and the charred scrap of our two beautiful siege towers. It was one of those moments of total and abject failure that takes it all out of you, all the stuff inside your head and your heart that makes you keep going. For my part, I cooked up a big hot fire of my own and started sprinkling my beautiful medicinal leaves in big handfuls.

  It was only the day after, though, that the full implications became obvious enough that even I, with my head full of smoke and painlessness, could get the drift of it. While we’d been farting about trying to fill in the sea, the King of Persia had been putting his army back together again in Armenia , and he was coming to get us. The Tyrians had been deliberately playing us along, letting us fritter away our time with our buckets and spades so as to give the Great King a chance to get his act together. When word reached them that the Great King was ready, they cleared up the mess we’d made, like grown-ups putting away the toys.

  We’d fallen for it, complete in every part. At last, finally, Alexander had made a big mistake; a super-jumbo-sized, war-losing mistake that was going to get us all killed.

  And that, brother, is why if I wasn’t stuck on this damned bed unable to move, I’d be up on my feet throttling you right now; because when the general staff urged him to give it up and get out while there was still a slim chance of getting away, he stared at them with those ice-cold blue eyes and said no, certainly not, because that wasn’t the way he’d been taught the art of war, and anybody who even suggested pulling out would pretty soon be reckoning that the Great King was the least of his problems. So what if the enemy had pulled down the causeway? We’d build another one; only bigger, and wider, with room for lots more siege towers. True, thousands of our conscript workers were now dead and at the bottom of the straits, leaving us with something of a labour shortage, but that wasn’t really a problem; plenty more where they came from, plus all the specialist masons and carpenters and engineers he’d had rounded up in Cyprus and Phoenicia . History, he informed his open-mouthed heads of staff, would remember Tyre as a shining example of Macedonian siegecraft (that is, he implied, if History knew what was good for it).

  At this point, a nervous young man called Hegelochus, who held a command in the Horse Guards, cleared his throat pointedly and asked what, if anything, led Alexander to believe that he’d have any more luck the second time round than he had the first. Now, I wasn’t there, so this is all hearsay; but a man I used to play knucklebones with had a cousin who was in the same cockflghting syndicate as the younger brother of Callas, the commander of the Thracian heavy cavalry, who was there; so what I’m telling you now is as close to absolute Platonic truth as you’re likely to get in this sadly imperfect world, and Callas said that Alexander didn’t like the implications of that question, not one bit.

  ‘Something’s bothering you about this, Hegelochus,’ he said, in that level, calm voice of his that sent people who knew him scurrying off in search of abandoned well-shafts to hide down. ‘I’d like to know what it is.’

  That young fool Hegelochus cleared his throat again. ‘With respect, the whole thing bothers me,’ he said, ‘because I’ve got the strangest feeling I’ve been here before.’

  Alexander smiled. ‘Is that so? Now that’s strange, my friend, because we’ve known each other since we were both six years old, and I don’t ever remember you going abroad even, let alone to Phoenicia. When was this?’

  ‘When we studied together in the school at Mieza,’ Hegelochus replied. ‘That time when Professor Euxenus was telling us about that battle — sorry, can’t remember the name of it now — where the besieging army sat under the walls of this impregnable city grinding themselves down to no effect until the relief force came and scrunched them up.

  ‘ Syracuse ,’ Alexander said. ‘You’re thinking of when the Athenians tried to take Syracuse in the Great War. Euxenus told us his grandfather was in that army.’

  Hegelochus nodded. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘He was one of the very few survivors, wasn’t he?’

  Alexander scowled at that; he’d been made to play the straight man, something he hated unless he’d deliberately set it up himself. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘And I’m sure you remember the moral of the story. Euxenus said that if he’d been the Athenian commander there, he’d have kept pegging away till he found a way to take Syracuse , because that was the only way the army was going to get out of there in one piece. And then one of us — wasn’t that you, Cleitus? — one of us asked how he’d have proposed going about that, since everything they’d tried had failed. And Euxenus just smiled, that way he did, and said, “Simple. I’d have waited for them to make a mistake.They always do, you know. All wars are lost by the loser, not won by the victor.”’ He paused for a moment and looked at Cleitus, his head slightly on one side. ‘You haven’t forgotten that, have you?’

  he went on. ‘Or are you saying Euxenus was wrong?’

  (‘I don’t remember saying that,’ I interrupted.

  Eudaemon gave me a long, cold stare. ‘Don’t you indeed,’ he said. I thought for a moment. ‘Well, bits of it,’ I replied. ‘That tag about wars being lost by the loser — that was a favourite line of mine, I admit. I thought it was pretty neat, and it seemed to impress the kids, so I used it a lot to save myself the trouble of thinking. But that actual conversation, about what I’d have done at Syracuse ; I don’t remember that at all. Sorry.’

  Eudaemon shrugged. ‘Maybe you don’t,’ he said. ‘After all, who’d expect you to be able to remember every damn thing you said to a bunch of kids when you were teaching them? Maybe you never actually said it at all, in so many words, and Alexander remembered it wrong. Doesn’t matter. Alexander’s Euxenus said it, and it very nearly got us all killed. And Alexander’s Euxenus was more real to him —and, as a result, to me — than you’ll ever bloody be. In fact,’ he added, glowering at me, ‘of all the Euxenuses there are or were, I’ll bet you’re about the most insignificant of the lot.’)

  So that was that. Hegelochus and Cleitus were in disgrace, we were staying, the siege continued, with us trapped up against Tyre like a billet of red-hot bronze between the hammer and the anvil. The Tyrians started building up their walls with wooden towers so they could shoot fire-arrows directly down into the working parties. We stumbled on — there were people getting shot down or squashed flat by rocks from the catapults every minute of every day, and we were just supposed to ignore it — and in the meantime Alexander got bored and wandered off, with his boyhood chums and his pet light-infantry brigade, to go hunting tribesmen in the hills. Of course, the bloody clown nearly got himself killed; there was this old fool called Lysimachus, who’d been a teacher at your school —(‘I know Lysimachus,’ I interrupted.

  ‘No doubt.’)

  — And he’d insisted on tagging along on this adventure. Seems they were playing at being people in Homer, they were always doing it; Alexander was Achilles, Lysimachus was the old tutor, Phoenix . Anyhow, Lysimachus strayed off and got left behind. The tribesmen were all around, dogging the column’s footsteps, never coming to grips, just making sneak attacks, shooting arrows and throwing javelins and then melting away; a lot of our people got killed, and there was bugger all our Achilles and his Homeric knights could do about it; I guess the tribesmen hadn’t been to your classes, didn’t know to conduct themselves in a fitting manner. Well, everybody was terrified out of their minds; all except Alexander, who was absolutely furious. They were spoiling his game, you see, there wasn’t anything in all of this for him.

  Anyhow, when Phoenix went missing, Alexander freaked out and said they had to go back and find him. None of the others wanted anything to do with that, understandably enough; they were in enough shit as it was. But no, Alexander insisted, he’d caught a whiff of honour in the breeze and went off after it like a bad dog after a hare. So there they were, completely lost, surrounded by
these tribesmen who were knocking them off like ducks on a pond; and night falls, and everybody knows they aren’t going to see tomorrow, because the tribesmen have started up their spirit dance, which means they’re going to attack and finish the job, and there’s thousands and thousands of them out there, according to a friend of mine who was on this jolly. Our boys know they’ve got no chance, because they haven’t been able to get a fire going — sudden downpour of rain, all the kindling soaked through — so they can’t see spit, they’re completely at the mercy of the enemy. At this point, when it really couldn’t get any worse if it tried, Alexander gets up without a word, takes his cloak with the hood and a long dagger and walks away. Twenty minutes later, he’s back; he’s only snuck up on the nearest enemy camp, scragged a couple of sentries, lit a torch in their fire and come bouncing back with an absolutely enormous grin on his face, like a boy who’s just killed something. Think about it, brother; the king of the known world, prancing about stalking sentries; everybody else was scared out of their wits and he was off playing.

  But he’d got a torch, and they were able to light a fire and see to keep a lookout, and what with one thing and another the enemy didn’t attack; and the next day, by the purest fluke, they stumbled across old Lysimachus, curled up in a bush and whimpering with fear. Alexander didn’t like that, completely out of character for his role in the make-believe game, but he’d got what he came for and they headed back. Made it, too, though they left a lot of their own behind, littered all over the trail like bits of crust and apple-cores a bunch of untidy kids leave behind them as they go. And of course, Alexander’s the great hero who single-handedly saved everybody’s life, and the fact that the whole trip was a disastrous failure — well, History knows better than to record that. But old Lysimachus, who’s desperate to get back in the lad’s good books after disgracing himself, he stands up at the next council of war and starts going on about how Alexander’s really braver and better than Achilles ever was, and how even Homer himself wouldn’t have been able to find words to tell the story like it should be told; and Alexander’s face melts into this huge self-satisfied smirk.

  Well, now he’s back Alexander calls a council and says there’s been a change of plan. Forget the causeway, he says, it’s obviously not going to work, any fool could have told you that. Nobody says a word; and Alexander goes on and says that the only way to take Tyre is to fit out special warships with battering-rams mounted on them and go smash in the seaward walls. So we do that, and it’s an absolute disaster. The ships just can’t get in close enough, the water’s too shallow, except in one place and the enemy’ve realised this and dumped huge great rocks there to obstruct the shallows and keep ships from coming in.

  But Alexander won’t be beaten. He’s really away with the wood-nymphs now;

  sometimes, when he isn’t thinking, he’s calling the place Troy instead of Tyre, every day he’s sending heralds demanding single combat with the enemy’s champion — they’re just standing there in their watchtowers looking embarrassed — and when they tell him about the rocks he just frowns and says, ‘Well, if they’re in the way, you’d better fish them out again.’ Bugger me, Euxenus, he was serious;

  so we had to build ship-mounted cranes for hauling up these rocks — under fire all the time, remember, and the rawhide screens we’d used on the first causeway to keep the arrows off were useless, because these new towers the enemy had built meant they could shoot right over the top. Also, the enemy sent out ships and boats of their own, and soon they were fighting ship to ship; they’d sent in these little ships that were all planked in to protect their men from our archers, and they’d nip out, cut the anchor cables of the dredgers and scoot off again before we could do anything about them, though eventually we swapped the cables for chains, and that put a stop to it.

  So Alexander called a council of war and said the ships weren’t working, time to finish off the causeway, which was clearly their only hope of taking the city.

  So we finished the causeway — we were using the rocks the dredgers were pulling up out of the shallows, and if that wasn’t the dumbest thing; pulling trash out of the sea at point A and slinging it back at point B — and we set up battering rams on it, but they don’t do any bloody good, the wall’s made of huge blocks of stone cemented together.

  So Alexander called a council of war and said stuff the causeway, concentrate on the ships. Finally, after we’d nearly filled up the hole the dredgers had excavated with the bodies of our dead, we managed to bash a hole in the seaward side. Before we could get the ships with the portable drawbridges in, they’d sealed it again — a whole ship full of workers and engineers got caught out then, and the lot of them were killed when the enemy set their ship alight. So we tried again next day, the whole army (except me; I was standing by); and somehow those crazy Macedonian infantry managed to get across the jerry-rigged drawbridges and into Tyre . The whole of the first wave got themselves killed in the breach; and Alexander saw this and went charging in there himself, waving his sword and yelling like a lunatic. Should’ve been killed just like all the others. Wasn’t.

  So we stormed Tyre . Killed eight thousand civilians, sold thirty thousand more to the slave dealers, along with some of our surplus labour — we needed the money, we were hopelessly over budget after all this fooling about, the cost of materials alone was enough to have bankrupted a city. But we won. I guess.

  Oh, and that Persian army I was telling you about? They got held up. Pure fluke;

  bad roads, rivers in spate, that sort of thing. Instead of sweeping down on us when we were at our most vulnerable and butchering us where we stood, they were backing up in narrow mountain passes that had got blocked by freak rockslides, or frantically repairing bridges that had been swept away by flash floods. When they realised they weren’t going to make it in time, the Great King sent Alexander a message with a peace offer — 10,000 talents cash and half the empire, everything west of the Euphrates , provided he’d piss off and leave Persia alone. They had a council of war to discuss the offer. ‘I’d take it, if I were you,’ said old general Parmenio. ‘Sure, so would I,’ said Alexander, ‘if I were Parmenio.’ Then he told the embassy what they could do with their offer, and told us we were going to conquer Egypt .

  In all the excitement, of course, he’d completely forgotten the reason he’d wanted to sack Tyre in the first place; the Persian fleet, which was all poised and set to sweep down on Greece while our backs were turned. But that turned out all right; the Byblians and the Sidonians fell out with the Persian admirals over something or other and buggered off in a huff, the Cypriots joined them, and a whole bunch of ships changed sides and came over to us, asking for a job.

  And that was the end of the Persian fleet, our part in its downfall being exactly nothing.

  ‘Oh, well,’ my mate Peitho said to me, when we heard about this. ‘We needn’t have bothered with Tyre after all, then.’

  ‘Apparently not,’ I agreed, and I chucked some more leaves in the fire.

  ‘How come you stayed out of the fighting?’ Peitho asked me. He’d been hit twice, once during the dredging operation, once during the assault, and the second arrow had put out his left eye.

  ‘I was standing by,’ I replied.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Peitho said, breathing in deeply through his nose. ‘Grows on you, this stuff, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Very good for bad backs and sprained ankles,’ I said.

  ‘Quite likely. Hey, I wonder if Alexander realises all that business with Tyre was for nothing?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘You tell him,’ I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ‘That’s a really amazing story,’ I said, stifling a yawn. ‘And now, if it’s all the same to you, I really must go and get some—’

  ‘Shut up,’ my brother said.

  It was after the siege of Tyre , and because of the siege of Tyre , that my friend Peitho and I realised that there was something we could do to make the world a
better place, yank the human race back from the brink of an abyss, and win ourselves an honoured place in history at the same time.

  We could kill Alexander.

  Now then, brother, before you turn white and start screaming for the guards, I ought to point out that when we reached this conclusion, Peitho and I had been kippering ourselves in that wonderful Scythian smoke more or less non-stop for a couple of weeks (Peitho had really bad toothache, the sort that gets to you so completely that you can’t think of anything else, and I felt it was my duty as a fellow human being to do what I could to alleviate his misery), so we were both as crazy as a jarful of polecats or we’d never even have considered the idea for a moment. After all, enough innocent, harmless men had their throats Cut because of entirely mythical and nonexistent plots against Alexander to make a sane man think very seriously indeed about embarking on a real one. But we, medicated as we were from the soles of our feet to the tips of our ears, were above such mundane considerations as fear or common sense. Really, brother, I wish I had some of that stuff left, it’d do you a world of good. Maybe even loosen you up a little, if that’s humanly possible.

  Now, it’s all very well to say, ‘I know, let’s kill Alexander and then everything’ll be sweet’; but getting close enough to him to stick a knife in his back wasn’t going to be easy. First off, he was surrounded day and night by his lifelong companions, the young Macedonian nobles you prattled away to in dear old Mieza; animals, the lot of them, who’d cleave your skull without a moment’s hesitation if they didn’t like the way you wiped your nose. I put this point to my fellow conspirator one evening, when we’d pitched camp for the night and were sharing a sociable lungful or two of medicine. He thought about it for a while, while I shovelled another double handful of leaves on the fire.