by Tom Holt
So please, don’t ask me what it was like in the front line at Gaugamela, or the charge of the wedge at Arbela, or the day Alexander rode into Babylon, or the tight corner in the defile among the Uxians, or the bypassing of the Persian Gates; I wasn’t there, or I can’t remember. Don’t look for me in the wall-paintings and marble bas-reliefs; I won’t be there, unless the patron of the arts who’s commissioned them is so thorough that he’s even had his store-room and outside privy done, to depict the long, straggling baggage-train limping along a day or so behind the interesting bits of the army. I was at Persepolis when Alexander set fire to the royal palace of the Persian Kings with his own hands, after a long, hard night with the local wine, but the part of town I was billeted in was so far away that I didn’t even see the glow in the sky. I was around when General Parmenio ‘s son Philotas was accused of treason, and father and son were put to death as blithely as we’d wring the neck of a goose for the table, but I only heard about it a day or so afterwards. I marched to India all right, but mostly what I had to look at was the ruts in the road left by our carts and the arse of the horse in front. I wasn’t important enough (thank gods) to be one of the officers at the staff meeting where Alexander announced out of the blue that from now on, the Macedonians as well as the Persians and the other conquered peoples were expected to fall on their faces and worship him as a god. All this stuff, this history, passed me by. Which is probably just as well.
The plain truth is, by this stage I wasn’t feeling quite myself, if you see what I mean. It was something to do with the medicine I’d been taking. I’d assumed, no more bees, no more medicine, but it didn’t quite work like that in practice.
I found that not taking the medicine left me feeling much worse than the bee-stings ever did; I was dizzy, muddle-headed, irritable, nervous, shaky and sometimes quite horribly depressed, and I couldn’t begin to imagine why, since there wasn’t anything wrong with me. So I asked around until I found some Scythian auxiliaries — they were full-time horse-breakers, attached to Livestock — and asked them if they knew how I could get some more medicine. But they just looked sad and said they knew exactly how I felt; the bush or tree the leaves came from simply didn’t grow in Persia , and that was all there was to it.
However, they went on, they’d been making their own enquiries and they’d found out about a local Persian medicine that was probably almost as good, and as soon as they got hold of some they’d let me know so I could give it a try.
They were as good as their word. It was completely different stuff; for a start it was some kind of root rather than leaves, and you chewed it rather than burning it, and if anything it was a good deal stronger than the leaves had been. Anyway, it certainly did the job as far as getting rid of the dizziness and the shakes and all, so I got them to make me up a big, big batch of the stuff.
At first I was as happy as a lamb; happier, in fact, since lambs don’t go around smiling all the time or occasionally bursting out laughing for no apparent reason (which I’m told I did, frequently). But then I started getting the weirdest dreams; first when I was asleep and then, annoyingly, when I wasn’t.
The dreams were always different, but they generally started off with me asleep;
but I wasn’t at the war, sleeping in a tent, I was back home in Attica, and the bed was an old one that had been in our family for generations, and I was the head of the family, which wasn’t even our family, if you see what I mean.
Anyway, I’d wake up and remember that I was a prosperous Athenian farmer with a beautiful young wife and three fine sons; and then I’d roll over and see on the pillow next to me a dead body, shrivelled away into a skull, with the dried skin shrunk tight to the bone and a fine, full head of snow-white hair. This always scared the shit out of me, even though I knew it was coming. Anyway, I’d get up and go into the next room, and there on the floor under a blanket would be three more skin-and-bone corpses of very old men. By this time I’d have worked out that the one in my bed was my wife and the other three were my sons, and that I’d somehow been turned into a god during the night. Well, a good night’s sleep for a god is longer than a mortal lifespan; while I’d been asleep my wife and sons had slept with me, and in that long sleep they’d grown very old and died.
In fact, so had everybody, except me. As the dream went on, so I’d remembered more and more; before I was a god I was a soldier, part of the army that conquered the world with Alexander. So I’d go and see if there was anybody I knew there; but when I found them they were all dead too, all shrivelled up in their beds and cots and hammocks. Then I’d remember that Alexander had been a god, just like me, so I’d go to look for him; and I’d find him, dead in his sleep and dried up like strips of fish in the sun, until his skin was as hard and brittle as the bark of a dead tree and his hair snapped off if you touched it. I’d search the whole world, in fact, but they’d all be the same. I’d outlived them all, in one night, every living thing in the world. The only other person I ever found in these dreams was Peitho, who was every bit as dead as they were, but not dried up or shrivelled, so somehow he could talk to me and move about.
‘Hello, Peitho,’ I’d say.
‘Hello,’ he’d reply, and salute; or sometimes he’d do the full Persian obeisance routine that Alexander had such trouble getting the Macedonians to do. And I’d know as soon as I looked into his eyes that he was plotting to kill me, because I’d become a god; and that wouldn’t do, since it’s bad for morale if junior officers start murdering gods all over the shop. So every time he tried to poison me, I’d have him executed, and the next day there he’d be again, until eventually he’d be there all the time, just like he is now. Of course, he was younger then; now he’s grown old and shrivelled just like the rest of them. The only one who hasn’t changed is me.
Of course, I know he isn’t there really, he’s some kind of nasty side-effect of the medicine, just like that damn buzzing sound, like a swarm of bees, that I hear nearly all the time now. Interesting, the bees. You see, I don’t know if you know this but bees are immortal, too; not individually, of course, but as a group, a bit like a city. It’s that old thing about the component and the whole;
the small parts die and perish but the thing they make up endures for ever; like some city founded by a mighty hero to perpetuate his name, for instance, or even an empire such as the empire of the Kings of Persia orAlexander of Macedon.
Components die; components don’t matter, they aren’t worth spit. Only the whole, the unity, the thing made up out of the parts, really exists. Not the man, only the god he becomes. The Egyptians told Alexander that everybody is part of the god; then that he was the god that they made up. Now, I can’t say I quite follow that line of reasoning, though it does sort of tie in with what I’ve noticed over the years, about the difference between who people are and who they become through the eyes of other people; like you became this great wise philosopher who’d taught Alexander the meaning of everything. Well, quite. I rest my case.
Sometimes, in fact, Peitho is the bees and the bees are Peitho; I look at him closely and he sort of melts down into the swarm, so closely packed together (dead but not really dead, because the swarm can’t die) that from a distance they look like a single man. Oh, it’s all right, he isn’t like that now, he’s just ordinary, dead old Peitho. Best friend I ever had, till he started trying to kill me.
And, of course, all this is imaginary, the side-effects of the medicine, which the Scythians told me I’ll have to keep taking for the rest of my life if I ever want to be really cured. I’ve got a big jar of it.
They gave me exactly enough, they said; when I come to the end of it, that’ll be the time for me to die. I find it reassuring to know I’ll never run out of the stuff; by now, I guess, without it I’d be seriously ill. But it gets to you after a while, knowing deep down that however they appear on the surface, everybody you meet or talk to is actually dead, that all I’m seeing right now is my memory of you, and that we’re not having this c
onversation, I’m simply remembering history, a conversation we had years and years ago, before you died.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Next morning, we went our separate ways; Eudaemon back to Attica , to the family farm I’d been keeping warm for him, with his jar of medicine and his invisible companion; me on into Asia , heading East towards Sogdiana, with my empty jar and my invisible snake. The last I saw of him was the back of his head as he slept; with his broken leg he couldn’t come down to the post halt, and to be honest with you I wasn’t too sorry. It would have been awkward saying goodbye to him now that I knew he’d gone completely crazy. I’m afraid I get terribly embarrassed around people with disturbed or damaged minds.
The Persian system of post roads is, sorry, was little short of miraculous. In King Darius’ time, before the Greeks let it go to rack and ruin, the royal messenger service maintained a straight, well-surfaced road all the way across the Empire, with inns at regular intervals, fresh horses standing by, cavalry escorts to get you across dangerous or debatable territory, everything a traveller in a hurry could possibly want. For all I know, I could have been one of the last people to use it to go right across the Empire and so get the full benefit of it. Now, of course, with what was the Empire split up into several rival kingdoms and parts of it effectively outside anybody’s control, the messenger service has gone and the road’s in a sorry state. A pity, but there it is.
Since it was fairly obvious from pretty early on that my horsemanship simply wasn’t up to the standard needed to make proper use of the road, the couriers who went with me organised a carriage —well, more of a cart, really, except that it was drawn by horses rather than oxen or mules, and it had a sort of vestigial leather hood to keep off the worst of the sun and the weather. Nevertheless, the feeling of being a consignment of olives on their way to market was depressingly strong. The motion of the cart made me very drowsy, and I slept on and off for most of the journey; even when I was awake during the day, I kept well in the shade of the canopy and out of the blinding sun. As a result, I missed the scenery and the points of interest and the remarkable sights, as usual.
Instead of sightseeing and taking an intelligent interest in my surroundings, as a good historian should (think of Herodotus, with his magpie mind and his tape measure and his incessant questions), I spent a lot of time thinking with my eyes shut; a proceeding which greatly puzzled the couriers, until the Macedonian courier explained to the two Persians that in the small, plain jar in my luggage was a magic, fortune-telling serpent, and I was communing with it.
After that, they left me well alone, except for a few tentative enquiries about romantic encounters and gambling strategies.
I thought a lot about jars, as it happens, and the contents thereof; jars of bees hurled into mineshafts to flush out the enemy; jars of wine and grain being meticulously counted by the keepers of the Athenian census, to ascertain which property class a man belonged to; jars of various sorts of produce stacked up in the hold of my friend Tyrsenius’ ship; jars of arrows bumping along in a supply train on their way to the war; empty wine-jars littering the floor of the house of a man who’s given up bothering; jars of poison for the body and the mind;
jars of wisdom and prophecy. Most everything that moves about from one place to another in this world travels in a jar — it’s the handiest, most convenient container of all, waterproof, of a fixed and easily regulated volume, easy to stack, easy to keep track of if you simply scratch a few letters on its neck.
According to legend, the greatest of all the heroes, Hercules, escaped from the murderous Cercopes by hiding in a jar. Seal the neck with wax or pitch and the contents will stay fresh indefinitely, like the words of a historian in a book.
If you’re so minded, you can hire a painter to embellish the outside of your jar with unreal images of legendary and long-dead people, drawing out of his imagination the way they ought to have looked (which is not necessarily what they were actually like; but who’s to say which is the more valid image, the way a man was or the way he ought to have been, or the way he seemed to be to those around him, those influenced by him?). Oh, your humble jar has a fair claim to being Man’s best friend, if you discount the first ever jar, the one the gods gave to Pandora, with all the troubles and evils of the world packed inside; but she didn’t know that and clawed away the wax that stopped the neck, releasing all the evils and the troubles into the air, like a swarm of buzzing bees, and leaving behind only one, the most pernicious of all — blind Hope, the queen bee, who has lived at the bottom of jars ever since.
And so, after a long and uneventful journey (I got sunstroke once and dysentery twice; a wheel came off the cart at the Gaspian Gates, fortunately before we struck out across the desert; between Bactra and Nautaca one of the post inns had burned down, so we had to sleep in the cart and eat field rations; otherwise nothing to speak of), I arrived here, where the Scythian mountains run down to the Iaxartes river, wherever the hell that is in relation to anywhere else. As I perceived it, a day came when the cart stopped early, a courier woke me up and said, ‘We’re here,’ and, having no reason not to believe him, I got out and unloaded my luggage. I suppose it’s possible that he played some kind of practical joke on me and this is in fact Italy , or southern Libya , or the country north of the Danube . Of course that’d mean you were in on the joke too, Phryzeutzis; but you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?
Don’t answer that.
Assuming that this is Sogdiana, it’s the furthest north-easterly point where the wilderness of the Scythian nomads (that’s you, my young friend) impinges upon the settled, mundane world of farmers and city-dwellers. Is it just me, or do you Scythians lie at the edges of everything, as the Ocean is reckoned to encompass all the dry land? Go north off the edge of the map (Aristagoras’
engraved bronze map, that bamboozled the Athenians into the First Persian War..
. Maps have a lot to answer for) and it seems to me that wherever you go, from northern Greece to India, you’ll find yourself among Scythians; an unlikely race to have had such a significant effect on the lives of my brother and myself, but a pretty pervasive influence all the same. Maybe you Scythians (sorry, we Scythians, I keep forgetting) surround the other nations of the earth the way darkness surrounds the light of a flickering lamp; or maybe Scythia is the rule and the bit in the middle is the exception; the small exception, maybe — does anybody know how big Scythia actually is? For all I know it could be so huge that all the countries of Darius’ and Alexander’s Empire put together are tiny in comparison, like a single fallen leaf in the market square of a busy town.
*
The walls were already up when I arrived here; the streets were laid out, the public buildings more or less complete, the water supply connected up.
Apparently, because of Alexander’s habit of founding cities like a dog pissing against trees, the engineers had made it a rule always to have the basic components of a city to hand, all neatly stored in jars, numbered, ready to slot together at a moment’s notice — modular unit Ideal Societies, where the temple roof from Alexandria-in-Arachosia would fit the temple in Alexandria-on-the-Caucasus should they ever happen to need a spare. They’d got putting the bits together down to a fine art, they could put up a city almost as quickly as their colleagues in the siege and assault department could tear one down. My old friend Agenor the stonemason would have hated that.
So there was precious little for me to do, apart from ‘stand by’, as my brother would say (but all my life I’ve been a bystander, though never, gods know, an innocent one). I had to dedicate the temple, where the statue of the god (god, unspecified, marble, service issue, one) bore an uncanny resemblance to Alexander of Macedon, until a thrice-blessed workman contrived to chip off half of its nose while installing the head on the shoulders. Now our god stands there in an inspiringly martial pose, one head outstretched to aid and succour, the other upraised to strike, looking like one of those professional boxers we used to get at country
fairs who’s lost one too many fights for the good of his health. They were supposed to send us a new head, all the way from the main factory at Abydos in Egypt, but it got sent to the wrong Alexandria, and since they had a perfectly good head already, they spirited it away and stuck it in the nearest lime-kiln; so now it’s helping the crops grow, just like a good god should. The factory’s closed down now, of course. King Ptolemy (General Ptolemy, as was) had it turned into a plant for making catapult-balls. I gather they’re very good, too.
A day or so after I’d dedicated the temple, I was standing by in a hammock in the courtyard of the really rather fine house I’d been allocated as governor when the major-domo waddled in and announced that there was a deputation waiting to see me. I wasn’t expecting visitors, let alone any deputations, but there was always the off-chance that it was something important, so I told the man to bring them in.
‘We’d like you to dedicate the shrine,’ their spokesman said.
‘Already done that,’ I replied.
The man shook his head. ‘Not the temple,’ he said, ‘the shrine.
We built it specially as soon as we knew you were coming.’