Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

I frowned. I didn’t like the sound of that. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘this is the first I’ve heard about any shrine. Whose shrine is it, specifically?’

  The man looked confused. ‘For the sacred serpent,’ he said. ‘You know, the one you carry about with you in the jar. We’ve built a permanent home for it, just past the corn exchange as you go up the hill. It’s very nice.’

  I was silent for a very long time. ‘Let me just make sure I’ve got this right,’

  I said. ‘You want me to give you my snake.’

  He looked worried. ‘It may seem like that at first sight,’ he said nervously, ‘but it isn’t, really. We just thought the serpent might be happier if it had some kind of permanent home.’

  I shook my head. ‘He’s a nomad, my snake,’ I said. ‘Just like your cousins to the north. Just like me, I guess,’ I added; it hadn’t occurred to me before but yes, in my time I’ve been every bit as nomadic as your average full-blooded Scythian. ‘He doesn’t want a permanent home. He likes the freedom, you see.’

  ‘The freedom,’ the spokesman replied. ‘In a jar.’

  ‘A jar that’s been all over the world,’ I pointed out. ‘Just because he’s stayed inside the jar doesn’t mean he hasn’t been to all those exotic places. I’m sure he’d have paid proper attention to them if he’d ever stuck his head up above the rim.’

  But it obviously meant a lot to them. So, in spite of my serious reservations about the whole idea, I said I’d do it. This left me with a problem, of course;

  inside the jar — no snake. Well, I couldn’t very well buy one, in case people put two and two together and got upset. Nor could I find one, however hard I looked (and usually the trick is not finding one, as you walk the fields in your bare feet). So; no buy, no find; all that was left was to try making one. That may sound daft to you, but when I was a kid we used to find cast-off snakeskins in the fields, stuff them with wool and use them to frighten the life out of people by leaving them lying about (in the clothes-press, for instance, or buried in someone’s clothes while he was swimming in the sea). With a little practice, we were able to get them looking ever so lifelike, and they had the tremendous advantage over the real thing of not being able to bite and kill you.

  Well, of course, I didn’t have a snakeskin either; but I had an idea where there might be one. You may remember that when I was in Macedon, Alexander put a snake in my jar; it popped out at an embarrassing moment, if you recall. I’d noticed recently when I’d been moving the jar around that there was something small and light rattling around in there; my guess was that Alexander’s snake had taken advantage of the quiet and privacy of my jar to slough its skin. Anyhow, it wouldn’t cost me anything to turn the jar out and have a look.

  So I stood on a stool and reached up to lift it down from the hook in the rafters where I’d hung it; but it was a very old, tired stool. I heard a sharp crack, just as I’d lifted the ear of the jar off the hook, and the next thing I knew was that I was sitting uncomfortably on the floor, one leg folded underneath me at a very unusual angle, feeling extremely sorry for myself.

  Strangely enough, it was my right leg I broke, whereas my brother broke his left.

  I was too preoccupied with screaming and sobbing with pain to pay too much attention at first to what had become of the jar; but after I’d yelled myself hoarse and nobody came (major-domo and cook down at the market, shopping;

  housemaid and gardener off together somewhere), I calmed down a bit and saw that the jar had smashed, That shook me, I’ll admit. The jar had been with me a long time, it had been my living and a tremendous influence on the lives of myself and others — think; if I hadn’t had the jar, Queen Olympias would never have wanted me to tutor her son; if I hadn’t tutored Alexander ... Well. And now it was broken; and there among the small, sharp potsherds I saw the dried-up remains of a dead snake, curled up tightly like a coil of coarse rope, as perfectly preserved as an Egyptian king.

  Well, they do say that snakes are immortal too; instead of dying as we do, they simply slough off their old bodies and slither away. I wonder; as they break out of death like a chick out of an egg, do they remember the life ahead of them, or do they have to wait for it to come back piecemeal, like us ordinary gods? I have no idea; I never knew the answer to that one, or else it’s slipped my mind.

  I’m getting terribly forgetful these days, Phryzeutzis; I can’t remember anything unless I write it down somewhere.

  The broken leg was a perfect excuse for not dedicating the shrine; and one day while I was laid up waiting for it to mend, the gardener came rushing by with a basket in one hand and a long stick in the other. I asked him what the fuss was about.

  ‘There’s a snake got into the storeroom,’ he said. ‘Thrassa’s doing her block, so I’m going to get rid of it.’

  I propped myself up on one elbow. ‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘When you’ve caught it, don’t kill it; sling it in a jar and stuff the neck with straw. I’ve got a use for a live snake.’

  He looked at me as if I was crazy; then again, he always looked at me as if I was crazy. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Where do you want it put?’

  ‘Oh, anywhere,’ I said. ‘Just see that nobody disturbs it.’

  So the shrine got its snake, a little wriggly green bugger that slid away out of sight as soon as I pulled the straw out. The assembled local worthies were no end impressed, and took care to stand back as I passed so my shadow wouldn’t fall on them. For two pins, I think, they’d have started worshipping me as a god.

  The Macedonians have a law, or at any rate a tradition, that you don’t start a war during the month Daisios (that’s roughly the Athenian Thargelion; gods know what you people call it. At any rate, it’s between the rise of the Pleiades and solstice, about threshing time, and if you haven’t finished digging over the vineyards, you’re way behind). In the middle of Daisios in the thirteenth year of his reign, when he was thirty-two years old, Alexander was in Babylon , all ready to set off and conquer Arabia , a huge and worthless desert away to the south. On previous occasions, he’d taken the trouble to sidestep the tradition by having his astronomers repeat the previous month, Artemisios; this time, however, he couldn’t be bothered. Besides, he argued winningly, the intercalated second Artemisios had clearly been spurious, which meant that in the eyes of his fellow gods he’d gone to war in Daisios before and got away with it, so there was no reason why he shouldn’t do the same thing again.

  A day or so before the scheduled departure date, Alexander went to a party given by a man called Medius. It must have been a good party, because he woke up feeling awful, so he ordered the domestic staff to shift his quarters from the palace to a house in a park on the posh side of the river, where it was quiet and peaceful and a man could recover after a long night with a jar. There was a swimming pool at this house, and he decided to sleep beside it, under the stars;

  apparently Babylon ’s like an oven at that time of year, and it’s nice and cool by the water.

  Next day he was a little feverish, so he had a bath and spent the rest of the day at home with Medius, some other friends and a hair or two of the dog, since he wanted to be sure to be fighting fit when the army moved out in a couple of days’ time. He didn’t sleep well that night, and the next day the fever was a little worse. The general staff started making plans for postponing the expedition, but he wouldn’t hear of if, even though the next day, which was when the fleet should have sailed, he was no better. But the day after that he was almost fully recovered, and put in a full day’s work catching up on what he’d missed while he’d been ill. Maybe he overdid it; he was so bad the next day that he had to be taken back to the palace.

  He lived for another four days. Most of the time he was too weak to say anything, and when he wasn’t he was wandering in his mind, calling out all sorts of strange, delusional gibberish, the way people do when they’re out of their heads with fever. He did have a lucid spell near the end, but when his chief officers and ministers of state tried t
o talk to him about the succession he didn’t appear to remember who they were. When he was dying, he kept shouting that there were snakes on his pillow, but it was all right; he’d strangled them, because he was the infant Hercules and just about to be born. Then he said that Aristotle had had him poisoned, because Aristotle didn’t believe in gods and thought there shouldn’t be any; he’d got the recipe for the poison out of his nephew Gallisthenes’ book, the one Eudaemon had told him about, and the poison had been served to him in a cup made out of the hoof of a mule, because half-breed gods can’t have children. He gave orders for Babylon to be burned to the ground, followed by the whole of the earth, because he remembered that last time he’d wiped out the human race with a great flood and it didn’t do to repeat one’s effects. Then he sat upright and asked for someone to read to him out of Euxenus’ book about the war, since he wanted to know what had happened in the end. They told him Euxenus hadn’t written any books, and asked him which of the generals he wanted to have the empire after he was gone. ‘How should I know?’ he answered angrily, ‘I haven’t got to that bit yet,’ whereupon the generals had the room cleared.

  Some people say he died screaming, or in tears; that he went to bed just before he died; that in the last moment of his life a mighty eagle swooped in through the window and carried his soul away to Olympus . Other people will tell you that he didn’t die at all, that the embalmed, imperishable corpse that lies buried in Alexandria in Egypt (perfectly preserved, like a dried snake in a jar)

  is somebody quite other, a body he sloughed off when it started to fray, and Alexander is still alive somewhere, waiting for some unspecified event which means it’s time for him to return and continue where he left off. Some people would have you believe that he will never die, that he lives on in the group mind of the swarm of Macedonians and Greeks that are buzzing all through Europe and Asia these days, gathering nectar and nesting in every crack and corner of the world, even as far out as the eastern border of Scythia.

  Personally, I think he’s dead, and bloody good riddance.

  If history were to end there, with the death of Alexander and the collapse of his empire, it’d be a poor show; a great deal of work would have been wasted with nothing to show for it, and generations yet unborn would make pilgrimages to piss on our graves. I don’t intend it to be that way. I may be old, but I’m not so old that I can’t still dream about the ideal society, or at any rate the perfect city.

  It started a year or so ago, when that Lydian merchant showed up with his little cart full of plunder from some battle or other. Odd creatures, your Lydians;

  they’re about as Greek as the river Ganges, but they’ve had Greeks living next to them for so long that the colours have run, so to speak, and to listen to some of them talk, you’d almost believe they were as Greek as I am. This Lydian was like that; he called himself Theocles or some such Greek name, and if you believed his sales pitch everything in his cart that wasn’t made in Athens was made in Corinth or Megara orThebes. Anyway, in among the bloodstained boots and the slightly war-damaged armour (one careful but unfortunate owner) there was, he told me, something he knew I’d want to buy. In fact, he said, once I knew what it was I’d be so desperate to buy it I’d undoubtedly offer him far more money than I could possibly afford, so as a favour to me and a token of respect for the memory of the divine Alexander he’d offer it to me for a mere ten staters, sight unseen.

  Needless to say, I told him to go forth and multiply, whereupon he gave me a very sad look, the sort of look Lydian faces were expressly designed for, and said that the price was now twelve staters. This intrigued me; so I said that if he told me what this thing was, I’d give him half a stater, local coin. His face lengthened a little more, his hand turned palm upwards, and he told me it was a book.

  ‘A book?’ I said.

  ‘A book. A Greek book,’ he added.

  He was right; I was interested. ‘What sort of book?’ I asked.

  ‘About so long,’ he replied, ‘so much round, in its own brass tube. Tube’s extra,’ he added quickly, but not quickly enough.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But what’s it about? Who’s it by?’

  He shrugged; a complicated, multi-dimensional folding of the shoulders, as if he was about to take his arms off and put them neatly away. ‘Does it matter?’ he said. ‘It’s a book. In Greek.’

  I thought about it for a moment. ‘I might be interested,’ I said. ‘For three staters.’

  Honestly, I thought he was about to burst into tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said; then he fished about under his tunic and produced this book-tube, with the very dog-eared edges of a book poking out. He pulled it from the tube, unwound about a hand’s span, tore it off and ate it. ‘Fifteen staters,’ he said.

  I wanted to see how this was going to turn out. ‘Seven,’ I said.

  He unrolled and ate another span. ‘Seventeen,’ he said.

  ‘Done.’

  ‘You won’t be sorry,’ he said, spitting out a wadge of half-chewed Egyptian paper. ‘And three for the tube.’

  ‘You know what you can do with the tube,’ I told him.

  As I’d feared, the book turned out to be the goddamned bloody Iliad, messily copied by an illiterate scribe somewhere in Egypt , at a guess. Still, a book’s a book, so that afternoon, when it was too hot to do anything else, I sat down under a tree and started idly scrolling through, more interested in the footnotes and the little comments scrawled by previous owners in the margins than Homer’s actual immortal words. When I reached the end, I saw there was something else after it; the scribe, having cramped his writing up really small, had been left with blank space at the end and had to fill it up with something else. The text he’d chosen was new to me; it was On Death, by someone called Pherecrates of Cnidus. Quite by chance I’d stumbled across a treasure richer than gold: a book I’d never read by a man I’d never heard of. My lucky day.

  That afternoon, I got to know Pherecrates of Gnidus pretty well. He wasn’t a difficult man to understand; a gentleman farmer like myself, who made use of the idle parts of the year by renting space on his rich neighbour’s ship, loading up his surplus produce and a few bits and pieces he’d bought in specially, and cruising up and down the coast between Rhodes and the Hellespont. Men like Pherecrates don’t usually tend to trouble history, and Pherecrates himself would never have been an exception to this rule if he hadn’t come ashore one day at a something-and-nothing little town on the island of Chios, whose name he couldn’t even remember. He did reasonable business there in the morning, trading figs for cheese and cheap silver hairpins for cheap bone combs, but in the afternoon nobody much was about, and he was thinking of packing up and heading back to the ship when a man came up to him offering to sell him a pair of shoes.

  They were, according to Pherecrates, very old shoes, shoes that could well have walked to Spain and back, and Pherecrates said he didn’t want them. The man said fair enough, but showed no signs of wanting to go away, and for lack of anything better to do Pherecrates started chatting to him.

  How the subject came up, Pherecrates couldn’t quite remember; it was something to do with some historical figure, and the man happened to comment that he’d seen this man once, years ago.

  ‘You can’t have,’ Pherecrates objected. ‘He died sixty years ago.’

  ‘Oh, I saw him all right,’ the man replied. ‘Why, are you calling me a liar or something?’

  Pherecrates shook his head. ‘No offence,’ he said, ‘but you simply couldn’t have seen him. Like I said, he died sixty years ago, and you’re obviously not a day over fifty-five.’

  The man grinned at him, revealing a perfect set of teeth. ‘I’m eighty-seven,’ he replied.

  Well, that made Pherecrates very curious, not to mention sceptical. ‘And what’s more,’ the man added, ‘I’ll prove it to you. Stay there.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Pherecrates said; and a little while later, the man came back with two other men, who both looked l
ike slightly younger copies of him.

  ‘This is my son,’ the man said, ‘he’s sixty-six; and this is my grandson, who’s just turned fifty. Isn’t that right, boys?’

  They offered to go and fetch the rest of the family; great-grandson and great-great-grandson, but Pherecrates assured them there was no need. He believed them. ‘That’s remarkable,’ he said.

  The son smiled patronisingly. ‘No it isn’t,’ he said. ‘Just sensible, clean living.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Pherecrates said, expecting to be sold something if he wasn’t careful.

  ‘That’s right,’ the old man said. ‘I’ve always lived clean, and my boys here have always lived clean, and look at us. Never had a day’s illness in our lives.’

  Pherecrates frowned (or I imagine he did; he doesn’t say so in his book, but it’d be human nature to frown at this point). ‘When you say “live clean”,’ he said, ‘what exactly do you mean by it?’

  Then the old man explained. Ever since he was a boy, he said, he’d had a phobia about dirt; couldn’t abide it, he said, made him go all queasy. So, when he built his own house, he went out of his way to make sure everything was always clean. He moved the privy away from the house, downstream on the little brook rather than upstream;

  he made sure the house was swept clean once a day and that any food that had gone off was thrown out or given to poor travellers, rather than left to moulder in the store-room; he insisted that all the family’s clothes and bedding were changed and washed regularly; he banished the animals from the house and built a special stall for them instead, well away from the house and the water supply.

  If anybody cut himself or got dirt in an existing cut, they had to wash it out immediately and put on a clean bandage. In short, he was utterly obsessive about it. And nobody in his house ever seemed to get ill.

  Well, Pherecrates thought no more about it at the time. But, as the years went by, what the old man had told him snagged in his mind, like a hook in a fish’s throat, and he started to think, and use his eyes. When he went abroad, to the towns and cities where he bought and sold, he looked about him and made connections — an epidemic in Priene, where the nightsoil from one quarter soaks away into another quarter’s water supply; a man in Ephesus who died of a poisoned flea—bite; old men’s stones of their fathers’ experiences in the Great Plague at Athens; deaths here, deaths there, deaths everywhere — until he came to the conclusion that shocked him like nothing had ever done before.