Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Fair play to you, Eudaemon, you’ve got a point there. No way we can get to him while the Companions are about. They’d slice us up like bacon.

  ‘You bet,’ I agreed, nodding. ‘Our head’s be rolling on the deck before we got close enough to smell his sweat.’

  Peitho frowned. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘there’s no need to get all negative about it. Like the philosopher said, a problem is just a challenge in disguise.’

  ‘Oh.’ I thought for a moment. ‘Which philosopher was that, then?’

  ‘My cousin Gelo,’ Peitho replied. ‘He wasn’t a professional philosopher, mind, it was more like a hobby with him.’

  ‘I see.’ I paused, filled my lungs with smoke, held my breath for a count of five and breathed out again slowly. ‘What about poison?’ I suggested. ‘Don’t have to be anywhere near for that.’

  Peitho scratched his head. ‘Doesn’t he have all his food tasted before he eats it?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ I replied, ‘but that’s no problem. Use a slow poison. Something that doesn’t start working till the next day. Then, by the time the taster goes bright purple and keels over, it’ll be too late to do anything about it.’

  Peitho yawned. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘So you know all about poisons, then, do you?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘Haven’t a clue.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Peitho said. ‘Know anybody we could ask?’

  ‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘Besides, you go around asking people about poisons, they’ll want to know why. Maybe there’s a book about it we could read.’

  ‘Probably,’ Peitho said. ‘There’s books about heaps of stuff. Who do we know who’s got a lot of books?’

  I sat back on my chair — one of those three-legged folding efforts, as I recall — and tried to think. Wonderful insight those leaves give you, though your mind does tend to go racing off on side-issues. ‘How about Anaxarchus?’ I suggested.

  ‘He’s got a whole box of the things.’

  Anaxarchus was one of Alexander’s tame philosophers; he had two of them with him on the trip, Anaxander and Callisthenes (who was the nephew of Aristotle, who was — oh, of course, you’ve met him, haven’t you? All right, you know about Aristotle). I’d only met Anaxarchus a couple of times, barely spoken a dozen words to him, but if ever there was a man who was likely to own a book about different types of poison, it’d be Anaxarchus. Not that he’d have had any use for it, in the same way that a dagger’d be wasted on a shark.

  ‘All right, then,’ I said. ‘First thing in the morning, you go round there and ask him.’

  He looked up at me, eyes narrowed. ‘Why me?’ he said.

  ‘You’re a Macedonian,’ I replied. ‘He’ll trust you.’

  ‘Why? He’s isn’t Macedonian.’

  I sighed and poured myself another drink. Actually, my Scythian friends had advised me not to drink booze while using the medicine; the combination, they claimed, could sometimes have the effect of making a man somewhat light-headed.

  Never had that effect on me, though, or not that I was ever aware of.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘He’ll trust you because you belong to the ruling class. The elite.’

  ‘No I don’t,’ he objected. ‘My dad works seventeen acres on the Paeonian border.

  My mum isn’t even a citizen.

  I shook my head. ‘Missing the point,’ I said. ‘The Macedonians are the chosen people, the beloved of the gods. They shall inherit the flicking earth. While a poor bloody Athenian like me goes in some philosopher’s tent asking to borrow his copy of Poisoning for Pleasure and Profit, next thing I know, my body’ll be waving at my head and telling it not to be a stranger. Besides,’ I added, ‘I don’t think he likes me.’

  ‘Really? Why not?’

  ‘Because my brother was Alexander ‘s tutor.’

  ‘Really?’

  I nodded. ‘When he was a kid.’

  ‘Your brother?’

  ‘Alexander. When Alexander was a kid. Anaxarchus is jealous because he’s only come on the scene recently, he’s got to sit there listening to how Euxenus said this and Euxenus said that. Cramps his style. Wouldn’t lend me the wax out of his ears, let alone enough poison to wipe out half of bloody Asia .’

  Peitho tipped his head up and down, like a man leaning to and fro in a chair.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Suppose I’d better do it. What if he says no?’

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘Why’d he do that?’

  ‘Maybe he hasn’t got a book about poisons,’ Peitho pointed out. ‘No reason to think he has, when you get right down to it.’

  I sighed. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Only one way to find out. Ask the bastard. Just go in there, look the bastard straight in the fucking eye, and ask him. He’ll tell you, I promise you.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘How’s your tooth?’

  ‘Much better, thanks.’

  Now, as a rule, going to bed and sleeping for a bit tended to dissipate the effects of the medicine; but we were both of us so utterly fumigated with it that it no longer seemed to wear off the way it had at first. Accordingly, Peitho did go to see Anaxarchus, and afterwards he came to see me.

  ‘He hasn’t got one,’ he told me.

  ‘Buggery,’ I replied. ‘So that’s that, then.’

  Peitho shook his head. ‘Not necessarily,’ he said. ‘He thinks he knows who might have one.’

  ‘Ali. Right. Who?’

  ‘Callisthenes.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Because,’ Peitho went on, ‘Gallisthenes has got copies of all his precious uncle’s books, and it so happens, or at least so Anaxarchus reckons, that Aristotle’s done a poisons book.’

  ‘Really?’

  Peitho nodded. ‘Apparently. Well, it’s more your general book about plants, but in it he seems to remember there’s a lot of stuff about which plants are poisonous and what the poisons do to you. It’d be a start, anyhow.’

  ‘Better than a kick in the head,’ I agreed. ‘All right, then, you’d better go and see Gallisthenes.’

  He didn’t seem too happy about that. ‘Why me?’ he asked. ‘Why not you?’

  I had an answer ready for him. ‘Because,’ I said, ‘my brother Euxenus—’

  ‘The tutor.’

  ‘That’s him. My brother Euxenus is Aristotle’s deadly enemy.They hate each other’s guts. I’d have no chance.’

  ‘I see.’ Peitho thought for a moment. ‘Is there anybody in this man’s army your brother Euxenus hasn’t pissed off in some way?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ I replied. ‘It’s a big army, mind.’

  Callisthenes did have a copy of The Natural History of Plants, and when Peitho spun him some yarn about wanting to look up some wildflowers he’d recently gathered beside the road, he lent it to him gladly. That evening, after we’d pitched camp and I’d fed the bees, he brought it round to my tent and we went through it together.

  ‘You sure there’s stuff about poisons in here?’ I asked, after we’d been at it an hour. ‘Mostly it’s garbage. Can’t make head nor tail of it. Here, what do you make of this?’ I screwed up my eyes —it was a badly written copy, all abbreviations and poncified lettering, with notes scrawled in all the margins and over the tops of the lines. “‘And it would be thought that a man is acting more under compulsion and involuntarily when his object is to avoid violent pain than when it is to avoid mild pain, and in general more when his object is the avoidance of pain than when it is to gain enjoyment. For what rests with himself means what his nature is able to bear; what his nature is not able to bear and what is not a matter of his own natural appetition or calculation does not rest with himself.”’ I looked up and shrugged. ‘What the hell’s that got to do with the price of fish?’

  Peitho scowled thoughtfully, then leaned forward and craned his neck over so as to look at the page. ‘You clown,’ he said, ‘you’re reading the wrong book. The plants book’s further on in th
e scroll. This is something about ethics.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, fuck ethics.’ I rolled the scroll down a whole lot and tried again. ‘How about this?’ I said. ‘Here’s a bit all about lupins.’

  ‘Lupins aren’t poisonous, are they?’

  ‘No, but at least they’re plants, so we’re in the right book. Now then, let’s see what we can — Ali, now that’s more like it. The roots of the white hellebore, it says here, produce a poison so deadly that death is practically instantaneous—’

  ‘I thought we wanted a slow poison.’

  ‘Oh bugger, so we do. Hey, this is turning out to be harder than I thought.’

  Peitho was starting to look thoughtful, like a duck trying to hatch out a stone.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.’

  ‘It’ll be in here somewhere, I’m sure. Just a case of reading it through carefully—’

  He shook his head. ‘No, I mean this whole killing Alexander thing. Come on, it’s a bit drastic, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Look, he’s got to go, we both agreed. He’s a bloody menace.’

  Peitho bit his lip. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘to judge by that performance when he rescued old Lysimachus, chances are he’ll go on some dumb adventure and get himself killed while we’re still trying to make sense of this goddamn book.

  Shouldn’t we just leave well alone and let the gods do it for us?’

  I looked him squarely in the eye. ‘The gods,’ I said, ‘help those who help themselves. So if it’s all the same to you—’

  ‘Actually,’ he interrupted, ‘you’re wrong there. They don’t. In fact, they come down on them like a ton of bloody bricks. Look at Daedalus.’

  ‘Fuck it, Peitho, it’s just an expression, doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Then if it doesn’t mean anything, why the hell say it?’

  I closed my eyes for a moment. ‘The point I’m trying to make is, we can’t just sit tight and wait for things to happen, we’ve got to get up off our bums and—’

  ‘Or what about Prometheus? Or Theseus? Or Hercules, even? Or Paris ; he surely helped himself, and look what happened to him.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ I put the book down. ‘I say we cut his throat while he’s asleep. What do you think?’

  ‘You know what I think.’

  To cut a long story short, we didn’t kill Alexander that day; nor the day after.

  And then we found ourselves at a place called Gaza, where there was another fortress — nowhere near as big or as grand as Tyre, but the governor, a man called Batis, was the Persian King’s good and faithful servant, and all the time we’d been fooling about atTyre, he’d been getting ready for us. He’d reinforced the mud-brick walls, hired a mob of Arab mercenaries, built up a stash of food and supplies that would last for well over a year; and when our engineers surveyed the position, they reported back that the hill on which the fortress stood was so steep, it was physically impossible for battering-rams to reach the walls.

  Alexander didn’t want to hear that. ‘The more impossible it is, the more I’ll do it,’ he snarled, as he gave us the pre-mission briefing. ‘I always do the impossible, remember; that’s why they fear me.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Peitho whispered to me as we stood in the ranks, listening. ‘Got to go.’

  ‘Knew you’d see it my way in the end,’ I replied.

  And so, there we went again, building bloody great causeways to bring the siege engines up to the walls; or, in my case, standing by. Mind you, for a week or so I really thought I might actually be needed, when Alexander suddenly woke up in the middle of the night convinced that the Gazans were digging mines under the causeway to collapse it, and sent a team of our sappers to counter-mine them.

  But there weren’t any enemy sappers, and all that happened was that our countermine came up right under the weakest part of the causeway, which promptly subsided down the hole, killing the miners and a few dozen workers on the surface and wasting a week’s effort. But eventually it was completed; the engines rolled into place and started pounding shit out of the walls. Batis and his Arabs refused to surrender; although it was now pretty well a foregone conclusion, they counter-attacked, set fire to some of the engines and actually forced a company of Macedonian regular infantry to give ground down the hill.

  Cue, needless to say, heroics; Achilles to the rescue. Alexander led the charge in person, his sword flashing in the sun, his head bare so that everybody could see it was him — and then wham!, a bloody great big catapult-bolt from an engine on the walls smashed through his shield and breastplate and knocked him clean off his feet onto his bum. Just for once I was actually watching, I actually saw it happen; it was like the hand of a god swatting a wasp. Fuch me, I thought, he’s dead, no bugger could’ve survived that.

  There was a moment when everything was still; everybody, even the men who were hacking at each other with swords, stopped what they were doing and stared, as if a herald had just announced the end of the world. I remember thinking, So now what? But then Colonel Hephaestion and the bodyguards rushed forward and picked him up; someone yelled out, ‘It’s all right, he’s alive!’ Fuch, I thought; then the battle started again, with the Arabs hurling themselves at us like madmen, trying to cut off Hephaestion’s party and get to Alexander before we did. I promise you, brother, I never saw human beings fight so savagely; they were slashing at each other, not bothering to protect themselves with their shields, so that they were trading slash for slash, the last one to die being the winner.

  I saw a Macedonian and an Arab whittling each other to bits, they just didn’t give a damn; it was as if Alexander’s life being in the balance had removed every last Arab outside the walls, for what little good that did. There were only a few of them, and once we’d done that we were back where we were. Nothing had changed. Some smartarse bastard of a doctor patched Alexander up somehow;

  the day after next he was hobbling up and down the lines while everybody cheered and shouted and whistled to show how clever they thought he was for still managing to be alive. I was still alive too, but nobody seemed terribly impressed by that.

  So up came the big siege-engines we’d used at Tyre , and down came the walls. We had to make four sorties, mind, and even then those stupid bastard Arabs wouldn’t give up. We killed them all, except for some of the women and children.

  Oh, Himself was back in action in time for the last assault, and once again he got clobbered by a catapult shot; but this one only whacked him across the shins, not even hard enough to break them, and by now it was painfully obvious that nothing as mundane as artillery was going to be enough to kill Alexander.

  In fact, it was a moot point whether anything could, which depressed Peitho and me no end.

  Poor Batis, the good and faithful servant, was taken alive — alive on balance, let’s say; he didn’t give up easily — and frogmarched in front of Alexander, who was just coming round after being hit by the engine. As a result he wasn’t in a good mood.

  Anaxarchus was duty philosopher that day, and they were playing the Iliad game.

  I can’t remember who Anaxarchus was supposed to be — Nestor or Phoenix, someone like that; Alexander was being Achilles, of course, and little Batis — he turned out to be this short, fat, bald guy, this man who’d held us up for two whole months, made us look like clowns, nearly killed Alexander; I got a good look at him and he reminded me of what’s-his-name, Craterus, the funny little chap who used to come round with a handcart mending broken crockery — Batis was immediately cast as Hector; type-casting, you might say. Now, if you recall your Homer, you’ll remember that when Achilles killed Hector in front of the Scaean Gate of Troy , he had his body dragged behind his chariot seven times round the city walls.

  ‘Do it,’ Alexander commanded.

  ‘Just one thing,’ someone pointed out. ‘He isn’t dead.’

  Alexander looked at him. ‘So?’ he said.

  Well,
if he wasn’t dead at the start, he was at the finish. They cut slots through his feet with a carpenter’s chisel for the ropes to go through, and Alexander drove the chariot himself; since he couldn’t stand, they had to sort of tie him into it, to make sure he didn’t fall out when cornering sharply. In the event he did eight laps, one more than Achilles (well, naturally; anything you can do, and so forth); and when they untied him, they found the restraints they’d tied him in with had ripped all the skin off his knees and thighs. He didn’t seem to notice; enjoying himself too much, I expect. He stayed in character right through. He was brilliant like that. If he hadn’t been a soldier, he’d have made a wonderful actor.

  After we’d finished smashing up Gaza , he went through the spoils looking for nice presents for his mum and his kid sister back home; really considerate, I call that. He sent his mother a lovely ivory dressing-table set, all matching (used to belong to Batis’ wife) and he chose some really pretty silk fabric for his sister to make tapestries for the family dining-room at Pella . He even sent old Leonidas five hundred talents’ weight of frankincense and a hundred talents of myrrh, on the grounds that when he was a kid, Leonidas told him off for being wasteful with expensive spices and teased him, saying he’d have to wait until he’d conquered the Kingdom of Spices before he could afford to chuck the stuff around like that.

  (‘Hang on,’ I interrupted. ‘Did you say Leonidas?’

  ‘Yes. Are you deaf as well as clumsy?’

  ‘That wasn’t Leonidas,’ I said. ‘That was me. I made that joke, the first time I met him.’

  Eudaemon smiled. ‘Be fair,’ he said, ‘it was an exceptionally forgettable joke.’

  ‘Agreed,’ I replied. ‘And absolutely typical of him that he remembered it.’

  — And typical, Phryzeutzis, that he remembered it well enough to send his extremely thoughtful and staggeringly generous gift to the wrong bloody tutor.