Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  But that was Alexander for you: every bad thing he did came out right, and every good thing he did was ever so slightly wrong.)

  When we met up that evening (Eudaemon continued) Peitho was in an unusually assertive mood. ‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘Got to go. No question.

  I think we were the only two sober people in the whole camp; ironic, because we’d been as prodigal with the leaves as the boy Alexander had apparently been with the frankincense. I shook my head doubtfully.

  ‘Not sure it can be done,’ I replied. ‘How can you kill a bloke who survives direct hits from heavy artillery?’

  Peitho scratched his head. ‘I wasn’t suggesting we bombard the bugger to death,’

  he said. ‘I still think poison’s the way to go, personally.’

  I made a rude noise. Aristotle’s book had proved to be a complete and utter wash-out; not one slow poison from beginning to end. Yards and yards and miles and miles of meaningless philosophical drivel (‘We could bore him to death, easy,’ Peitho said gloomily, ‘only we’d never get him to sit still long enough’); but actual recipes a bloke could use? Bugger all.

  ‘Slit his throat,’ I said, ‘it’s the only way. Unless the bastard’s some kind of god, that’ll kill him, you mark my words.The only question is, how?’

  Peitho frowned. ‘I never heard it was difficult,’ he said. ‘You just sort of get a knife and—’

  ‘How do we get close enough to do it,’ I said, ‘without some bugger catching us?

  I mean, selfless heroism’s one thing, but I’m fucked if I’m going to get myself killed just to free the world of a pest.’

  ‘Well,’ Peitho said, and poured himself another drink.

  He had a point there, of course. The trouble was, Alexander was never alone. Not ever. Apart from his faithful bodyguard-buddies, there were always people trooping in to see him, make reports, get orders, explain themselves, pitch ideas, beg favours; not to mention all the philosophers and poets and local celebrities and general hangers-on that buzzed round him every hour of every day in a sort of shimmering cloud, like those tiny midges that you get by the thousand on cow-pats. Even when he was asleep there were ten or so blokes in the tent with him, lying at his feet like big soppy dogs.

  ‘Got to be poison, then,’ I said after a while. ‘No other way.’

  ‘There’s fire,’ Peitho said. ‘We could set fire to the tent.’

  ‘Nah.’ I shook my head. ‘They’d rescue him quick as spit through a trumpet.

  Poison. Put something in the pea soup. Kill the lot of ‘em.’

  Peitho frowned. ‘I’m not sure we should do that,’ he said. ‘Alexander, yes, but poison the whole retinue—’

  ‘So what?’ I said. ‘They’re all Macedonians.’

  ‘I’m Macedonian,’ Peitho pointed out.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘But not a real one, you said so yourself.’

  ‘True.’ He stopped, then looked up with a big grin on his face. ‘The honey,’ he said. ‘We could poison the honey.’

  I looked at him. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to let you share my fire any more. The smoke’s doing things to your brain.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Eudaemon. No, listen. It’s perfect. You know how when they sit around in his tent after dinner with a big bowl of booze, and they always have a jar of honey to sweeten it with? Poison the honey. What with the honey and the booze, they’ll never notice the taste; and everybody’ll think it was the wine that was poisoned, not the honey, or at least they’ll never be able to prove anything, since it all gets mixed up together anyhow. It’ll work, I promise you.’

  I leaned back and rubbed my chin thoughtfully. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘But that still doesn’t answer the question; what do we poison the buggers with? We still haven’t got a clue.’

  Peitho shook his head. ‘No, no, you’re wrong. They taste the food but they never taste the wine; no point, they all drink the wine and Alexander always assumes that anybody who’d want to kill him would be an upper-class Macedonian. Anybody who poisoned the wine would have to drink it himself.’

  He had something there. ‘So we wouldn’t have to use a slow poison,’ I replied.

  ‘Not at all. Quicker the better, really; the first drink’s always a toast to the gods, they all drink simultaneously, so — what’s so damn funny?

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, as soon as I’d managed to get a grip on myself and stop laughing. ‘It’s just the picture that came into my mind just then, all those fucking great long-haired Macedonians swilling down a toast and then hitting the deck at precisely the same moment—’

  Peitho sighed. ‘You’re a sad bastard, Eudaemon,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s think.

  What was that poison you found in the book the other day?’

  ‘White hellebore roots,’ I said. ‘One dewdrop’ll kill an elephant. Good stuff.’

  He nodded. ‘Sounds just the ticket. Where do we get some from?’

  ‘Search me,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders.

  ‘All right, we can dig some up. What does it look like? Where does it grow? Come on, you read the book.’

  ‘It didn’t say,’ I said. ‘It’s a crummy book.’

  ‘Obviously.’ Peitho slumped forward, his cheeks cupped in his palms. ‘Why is nothing ever bloody straightforward?’ he said.

  We made no further progress that night, mainly because I fell asleep; next thing I knew it was morning, and we were moving out. We talked a little more about it over the next few days, but what with one thing and another — we were getting ready to invade Egypt, and everybody was suddenly busy, except me, of course —

  there wasn’t really much time for sitting about.

  Alexander’s conquest of Egypt was the biggest non-event ever. The Persian governor, a man called Mazaces, surrendered before we even asked him to; poor bugger, he had no army, and the thought of what had happened to Batis obviously troubled him. We crossed the desert between Syria and Egypt in a week and headed straight for Memphis , the capital, where Alexander was officially crowned.

  It’s an odd thing with the Egyptians; they believe their kings are the eldest sons of their chief god, or maybe the same eldest son born over and over again, I’m not sure — no, that doesn’t make sense, because then how could the reigning king and his son and heir both be alive at the same time? Actually, I don’t think they worry about things like that. They don’t think about these things in the same way we do. In fact, I’d go further and say they’re all as crazy as fruit-bats, the lot of ‘em. Anyway, it didn’t bother them at all that one moment Darius of Persia had been the only begotten son of god and Alexander the next. I think the argument went something like, everything and everybody is god to some degree or other, but some people and things are a bit more god than the rest, which explains why some people have to work for a living and others don’t.

  Anyway, they were pretty confident that Alexander was a whole heap of god and therefore not only qualified but eternally predestined to be King of Egypt;

  which was convenient, bearing in mind that he had a large and ruthless army standing by to kill anybody who said otherwise.

  ‘How do I look?’ he’s supposed to have whispered to his buddy Hephaestion, immediately after the coronation. ‘I’ve never been a god before.’

  ‘Your nose is maybe a bit longer,’ Hephaestion replied. ‘Apart from that, pretty much the same.’

  So there we were in Egypt , the richest, oldest and weirdest country in the entire world. Everything in Egypt is weird, brother, everything. We were in the Kingdom of the Weird. It was, I think, where we all deserved to be.

  I ask you; it’s a country that’s mostly burned desert, but every year the river floods and drowns out all the farms and villages, leaving them covered in thick slimy mud — and that’s great, because if you spit a grape-pip into Egyptian mud, ten minutes later you’ve got a mature vine. In Egypt , dead people live in huge triangular palaces without windows, while the living don’t even bot
her to build proper houses, because where’s the point if they’re going to get buried in mud anyhow? In Egypt , it’s compulsory to drink wine but illegal to make it; that’s why we Athenians have been selling them our rot-gut stuff for a thousand years.

  In Egypt the King never dies, and god is every stray cat and white cow you see as you walk down the street.

  People just don’t care, in Egypt ; they don’t care about anything, because life is just an illusion and you don’t really start living till you’re dead. They don’t grow wheat because it’s their living, they do it because it’s a religious act, and it’s got to be done the right way, with priests supervising everything, or it doesn’t count. In Egypt they write everything down, but once it’s written down nobody reads it because it doesn’t matter (nothing matters). In Egypt , they don’t run away when a crocodile slides up out of the water, because a crocodile is god and has every right to eat anybody He chooses. In Egypt , they’ll fight you to the last drop of blood one minute and let you walk all over them the next. As far as I could tell, they didn’t really seem to notice we were there, like we were invisible or something. They did everything we told them to do; but when we were talking to them they appeared to be listening to somebody else we couldn’t even see.

  Personally, I liked Egypt . I could fancy living there.

  Alexander decided to found a city. The pretext was that a replacement was needed for Tyre ; it had been the commercial centre of the whole Near East and now that it was nothing but a pile of rubble, people hadn’t got anywhere to buy and sell things. This wasn’t actually true; the market was in the new town, which we hadn’t really touched. I think Alexander (who absolutely adored Egypt , for some reason) just wanted to found a city there. There was something distinctly fishy about Alexander and founding cities. He founded cities every bloody place he went, he left them behind him like a trail of broken wine-jars.

  As is tolerably well known by now, Alexander had no sex-life whatsoever, and my theory is that he got his fun doing to countries what normal people do to women, cities being the tangible outcome. At least, that’s part of it; the other part, brother dear, is that you left him to found the perfect city, so obviously founding perfect cities is what really great men do. And to think; I could have strangled you when we were both kids, and I never knew it was going to be important.

  The name of this city was to be Alexandria ; hardly surprising, since all the cities he founded were called Alexandria . Anyway, for a long time he was utterly obsessed with the project and wouldn’t tolerate anybody even mentioning anything else (such as the war or the King of Persia; but that was all right, because every time the Great King tried to rally his enormous army and come after us, something went wrong; a general died or a province rebelled or plague broke out or a river flooded or a supply-train was robbed by suddenly materialising nomads or the omens were bad, so nothing ever got done.

  Incompetence and rotten luck every step of the way; a one-legged dwarf could probably have conquered Persia at that time).

  The Egyptian priests advised Alexander to visit the holy shrine of Ammon.

  Actually, not true; they told him he’d already visited the holy shrine of Ammon, in a sense, and unless he hurried up and actually went there in person, with his physical body, it was going to upset a lot of things and throw the whole balance of cosmic forces out of kilter. So off he went, with a packed lunch and an entourage of hundreds of soldiers and thousands of Egyptian priests (who claimed they knew exactly what had happened when he went there, but politely changed the subject when he asked them to tell him).

  The shrine of Ammon is at a place called the Oasis of Siva, in the middle of the unspeakably awful Libyan desert . Needless to say, they got lost; the Egyptian priests knew the way all right, but when Alexander set off in the wrong direction they didn’t say anything, assuming that since he’d been there before he knew the way too. When they were all about ready to drop dead of heat and thirst, apparently they happened to bump into two enormous serpents blessed with the power of human speech, who told them to turn left at the next big sand dune and follow their noses; whereupon the heavens opened, it poured with rain for two whole days and they all got soaking wet. It was either talking serpents or a couple of camel-drovers; accounts differ. You’re the historian, you choose.

  Well, they found the place eventually, and in he went, and out he came again.

  ‘How’d it go?’ they asked.

  ‘I heard what I wanted,’ he said, and that was all they got out of him on the long trudge back to Alexandria . As a justification for a long and hazardous journey, it doesn’t amount to much; he could have done that just as easily if he’d stayed home, where a substantial number of the officers on his general staff devoted their lives to making sure he only heard things he’d be likely to want to hear, What’s not in doubt, however, is that whatever it was he heard out there in the desert had a significant effect on him. One school of thought regards it as some kind of spiritual rebirth, while others hold that even if you do have a magnificent head of long golden hair, if you insist on going several days in the desert sun without a hat, you get what’s coming to you.

  At first, the changes were subtle, and could easily have been due to something else; he was worried about something, or preoccupied with profound matters of state and strategy, or just pissed off and in a foul mood. He didn’t talk all the time like he used to, there was less of the obvious delight he’d always taken in being leader of the pack. Most of all, he started wanting to be alone occasionally, which he’d never shown any sign of wanting before. People who’d been close to him, or reckoned they were, went around muttering about the bad effect Egypt was having on morale generally, and how it was time to move on and find someone new to kill, rather than moping about boozing and enjoying ourselves.

  But for once, Alexander wasn’t the sole focus of attention, every hour of every day. It was announced that a concert party was on its way from Athens to entertain the troops, and for a day or so nobody could talk about anything else.

  In retrospect there’s nothing surprising about that; we’re Athenians, grandsons of Eupolis, we grew up with it, but for provincials (I’m being nice here, calling them that) the thought of seeing genuine Athenian theatre was rather more exciting than pyramids and crocodiles and the singing statue of Memnon, Son of the Dawn. Indeed, people even started taking notice of me, what with the family connection and all, and it was no use my saying I was completely out of touch and I’d never been all that keen to start with, they automatically assumed I was a theatre buff, drama critic and boyhood chum of every Athenian actor they’d ever heard of. They made me recite everything I could remember, from Grandfather’s stuff right back to the slabs of Aeschylus that Father made us learn when we were kids, and when I’d run out and told them I couldn’t remember any more they just got snotty and accused me of being stand-offish.

  When the concert party finally arrived, I expected there’d be a riot. Instead of the flower of the Attic stage, we’d been sent the trash, the dross, the understudies’ understudies. You remember Telecritus, that doddering old ham we saw a few times when we were kids? I’d assumed he’d died years ago, and the performances he gave while he was there didn’t do much to convince me otherwise;

  but the Macedonians loved him. They thought he was marvellous, even when he forgot his lines and started making them up, or patching in bits from other plays. Honestly, I thought it was a rather clever skit and was laughing quietly to myself, when some big hairy joker sitting next to me told me to shut my face or he’d push it out my neck for me.

  I’ll tell you who was in that company, though. I don’t suppose you’ll remember him, but I knew him quite well at one stage —Sostratus, our neighbour Achias’

  eldest boy.

  ‘Hello, Sostratus,’ I said, having walked up quietly behind him. ‘What’re you doing here?’

  He jumped about twice his own height into the air, then spun round. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Do I know yo
u?’

  ‘Eudaemon,’ I replied. ‘Eutychides’ son. Our fathers shared a boundary in Pallene, remember?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, and his face fell like a bucket down a well-shaft. ‘You.’

  I grinned. ‘Nice to see you too, Sostratus. How’s the nose these days?’

  He scowled. ‘Still not right,’ he said.

  ‘After all these years,’ I replied, ‘fancy. That’s a shame. How’s things at home?’

  ‘Awful,’ he replied. ‘That’s why I’m here. Anything to get out of the City for a month or so.’

  ‘In what way awful?’ I asked.

  He made a vague, all-encompassing gesture; far better than anything he’d done on stage, where he acted with all the style and fluency of a ploughshare. ‘Every way you can possibly think of,’ he said. ‘Harvests have been pathetic, prices through the roof, goddamned Macedonians chucking their weight around, nothing in the shops, everybody at each other’s throats in Assembly—’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Good to see some things never change. So you’re an actor now, are you? Since when?’

  He sighed. ‘Since I gave Orestes my share of the farm. No point both of us starving to death, after all.’

  ‘I see,’ I replied. ‘And how is your brother? Did he ever marry that tart from over the Mesogaia he was so crazy about? What was her name, now? Callipyge, something like that.’

  Sostratus looked at me. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I did.’

  ‘Oh. And how’s she keeping?’

  ‘She died last year.’

  ‘Ah. That’s too bad.’

  ‘Not really,’ Sostratus said, with another sigh. ‘She was an evil bitch.’ He studied me for a moment down the full length of his nose. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what’s it like, working for the Macedonians?’

  ‘Not so bad,’ I replied. ‘It’s a living.’

  ‘You were probably wise to clear out when you did,’ Sostratus said. ‘Things have been getting steadily worse all the time. Oh, by the way.’

  ‘Yes?’