Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt

by Alexander at the World's End (lit)

  morals of our gods. There’s some stuff about shipbuilding and carpentry in

  general in the Odyssey, I grant you; but as a guide-book it’s been proven

  useless time after time. The gods only know how many poor fools have set off to

  find all the wonderful places that Homer firmly asserts are out there,

  some­where between Troy and Ithaca ; according to those of them who’ve made it

  back in one piece, Homer got it wrong. As simple as that.

  But there was one bit in the Iliad that made one hell of an impression on me

  when I was a small boy; in fact, it scared me stiff, and still does. I’m not

  talking about those comically gory descriptions of spearpoints coming out

  through the backs of people’s skulls. They just make me giggle. The bit I’m

  talking about is the scene where Hector’s off to join the fighting and

  Andromache, his wife, is urging

  him not to go. What’ll become of me and the kids, she says, if you get yourself

  killed? There’s nothing worse in all the world than the fate of a woman whose

  husband’s killed in war. Suddenly, she’s left on her own, with nobody to protect

  her. At best, the people she thought were her friends ignore her, at worst they

  come sniffing round like wild dogs looking for easy prey. And if the city falls,

  what has she got to look forward to but slavery and degradation at the hands of

  the people who killed her husband?

  That sense of loneliness, of no longer being protected against the world by

  someone who you thought you could rely on to be there; I know how that feels.

  That’s how we felt, my brothers and I, when our father died. For all our

  splendid and expensive educations, we hadn’t got a clue what we were supposed to

  do. It was like looking down as you walk along and seeing that there isn’t any

  ground, that in fact you’re walking on thin air over a damn great chasm. All we

  knew was that with Father gone we were in deep trouble — we knew that because

  he’d been telling us so ever since we were children. Now, in spite of his best

  efforts, the very catastrophe he’d worked all his life to avoid had come about,

  and we were the ones who were going to have to deal with it.

  My brother Eudaemon dealt with the problem by running away. He left without

  telling anybody on the morning after the funeral, taking with him my father’s

  armour and sword (no great loss; after forty years of neglect they consisted of

  nine parts verdigris, one part force of habit) and all the badly hidden money,

  just enough to pay for a passage on a ship, if you didn’t mind sleeping on top

  of the cargo. We tried to find out where he’d gone, and a friend of the family

  reported hearing that the mighty Bias (who vanished from sight at the same time,

  to the great sorrow of various creditors) had joined an army being raised by

  Philomelus of Phocia against the Thebans. It seemed logical to assume that

  Eudaemon had gone with him, and when we heard a while later that Philomelus and

  a large part of his army had been wiped out, we shot out urgent messages begging

  for news and offering a cash reward for any information, but no replies were

  forthcoming, not even obvious lies.

  My brother Eugenes, easily summed up by the phrase ‘hatefully pragmatic’,

  pointed out that at least this meant one less brother to share the estate with.

  With Eudaemon gone, he explained as we sat under the old fig tree outside the

  back door at Pallene, we would now have just over seventeen acres each rather

  than barely fifteen.

  ‘For gods’ sakes,’ interrupted my brother Eudemus (the sensitive one;

  apprenticed to Lysias the banker, and the only one of us with any real prospect

  of being able to make a decent living), ‘that’s a disgusting thing to say.’

  ‘I’m just trying to be practical,’ Eugenes replied irritably. ‘Some­body’s got

  to be, after all. Dammit, if it’d bring him back I’d willingly hand over my

  entire share to the King of the Centaurs, but it won’t. He’s gone, we’re still

  here. And maybe, just maybe, that could make it possible to keep the family

  together, so that the rest of us won’t have to go out risking our lives halfway

  across the world—’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ interrupted my brother Euthyphron.You may remember, he

  was the one who coped so remarkably badly with the job of getting my father home

  from Phyle. There was no malice in him, but he was an idiot.

  ‘Well,’ Eugenes replied, ‘it’s conceivable. Let’s look at this scientifically,

  shall we?’ He fished a wax tablet and a stylus out of the fold of his tunic.

  ‘Now then, last year we got an average return of eleven medimni per acre on

  barley, twenty metretes per acre for the vines and two metretes for the olives.

  Very roughly, and not allowing for interplanting barley in the vineyards, we’ve

  got thirty acres suitable for barley, seventy acres of vineyards and twenty of

  olives and other general rubbish — Grandfather’s beans, the great lupin

  experi­ment, other junk like that. Split seven ways —‘ he paused for a moment,

  scowling and counting on his fingers ‘— split seven ways, we each get four and a

  quarter acres of the barley fields, ten each of vines and two and three quarters

  of the leftovers, making a total of seventeen acres. Everybody with me so far?’

  Eudemus was about to make another formal protest at the distastefulness of this

  conversation, but the rest of us shushed him. This was interesting.

  ‘All right then,’ Eugenes went on. ‘Here’s the good bit. Four and a quarter of

  barley at eleven medimni the acre is forty-seven medimni. Ten of vines at twenty

  metretes, that’s easy enough, two hundred metretes. Two and three quarters at

  two, wet or dry — probably over-optimistic, but it doesn’t make much odds anyhow

  — call it five and a half measures for ready money. Add those all up —‘ another

  pause while he did just that ‘— and the total for each one of us,’ he announced

  triumphantly, ‘is two hundred and fifty-two and a half measures each, wet and

  dry. Not enough for Cavalry class, sure, but we’ll easily qualify for Heavy

  Infantry, and there’s no shame in that, none at all.’

  We looked at each other like men rescued at the last minute from a shipwreck.

  ‘That’s amazing,’ said my brother Eumenes, more commonly known inside the family

  as The Human Weasel. ‘Even splitting the estate up like that, we’re all still

  rich. And that’s all because Eudaemon took it into his head to totter off and

  get himself killed?’

  ‘Hardly,’ broke in my brother Eudorus. ‘If Eudaemon was still here, we’d have

  fifteen each, not seventeen. By Eugenes ’ reckoning, we’d all still be producing

  enough to make Heavy Infantry. And there’s the point. Father wasn’t stupid, he

  could do sums just as well as Eugenes can, probably better. And he still thought

  we were done for. So what’s changed?’

  That was typical Eudorus; hence his nickname Apometeorus, that which descends

  upon one from a great height. He took a delight in exterminating optimism

  wherever he happened to find it, like a man clearing his barns of rats. The

  worst thing was, he was always right.

  ‘I don’t see that,’ Eugenes rep
lied. ‘It’s a matter of simple arithmetic.’

  Eudorus shook his head. ‘No, it’s not,’ he said. ‘You’re basing your argument on

  a false premise. Euxenus, you’re the tame philosopher. Explain to your brother

  what a false premise is.’

  Eudorus, I need hardly add, was also the eldest, which probably accounts for his

  pessimistic nature. He’d lived longer than any of us with Father’s obsessive

  conviction that we were all headed for ineluctable destitution and poverty, and

  so it was a fundamental article of faith with him.

  ‘I know what a false premise is, thank you very much,’ Eugenes said. ‘I just

  don’t think I’m guilty of one, that’s all.’

  Eudorus sighed. He had the knack of making a noise just like an icy winter wind

  sighing through the eaves. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘let me explain itto you so

  you’ll know better in future. You’re basing all these clever calculations of

  yours on these figures for average yield. Would you mind telling me how you

  arrived at those figures? I mean, is there any solid basis for them, or did the

  Muses tell them to you in a dream when you were herding goats on Parnes?’

  There was a slight crackle in the air, evidence of Eugenes painfully keeping his

  temper. ‘Simple,’ he said. ‘I looked up last year’s census in Father’s accounts,

  divided the yield figures by the acreages, and got the figure for the average

  that way.’

  Eudorus nodded. ‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘Obviously it didn’t occur to you that — to

  take an example at random — the long five-acre at Pallene regularly gives us

  sixteen measures of wheat to the acre, while Old Rocky at Phyle barely gives us

  six in a good year. Now you tell me, brother. Which of us gets the five-acre,

  and who gets stuck with Old Rocky?’

  Needless to say, there was a loud and confused chorus of replies to that

  question. Eudorus shut us all up with a ferocious scowl, and went on.

  ‘Another point,’ he said. ‘We get sixteen measures per acre off the five-acre

  because we manure it properly. We can do that because we’ve got nine mules. We

  can afford to keep nine mules because we’ve got a hundred and twenty acres. Now,

  if each of us has seventeen acres, it stands to reason — or at least, it does in

  the version of reality where I’m compelled to live — that we can’t each keep

  nine mules. In fact, we’ll be hard put to it to keep one. And what about labour?

  We get good yields because we plough three times and we harrow and we break up

  the clods and we make sure the terraces are kept up. When I say we”, of course,

  I’m referring to the slaves; the slaves which our father, with typical

  fat-headed generosity and respect for tradition, set free in his will. No

  slaves, no work-force, no triple ploughing. Result: reduced yields. Face it,

  brothers, the old man knew what he was talking about. This family’s finished in

  agriculture, and there’s no two ways about it.’

  There was a long, wretched silence; an invariable sign that Eudorus had been

  talking. ‘All right, then,’ Eumenes piped up. ‘If you’re so damned clever, you

  tell us what we should be doing.’

  Eudorus sighed again, and I instinctively pulled my cloak up to my ears to ward

  off the freezing cold wind. ‘It’s pretty obvious, actually,’ he said. ‘But

  you’re not going to like it.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ Eugenes muttered.

  (It’s just occurred to me, my Scythian friend; I’ll bet you’re completely and

  utterly bemused by the fact that all my brothers’ names begin Eu-. I’m afraid

  you’re just going to have to live with it; we did. Once an Athenian family gets

  it into its collective head to have a tradition like that, you’re stuck with it.

  Be grateful that at least all the names are different. In one of the oldest and

  grandest Athenian families, all the men were called either Callias or

  Hipponicus, and had been for a thousand carefully recorded years.)

  ‘What we’ve got to do,’ Eudorus went on, ignoring him, ‘is this. The land is

  split between four of us — four only, no more. The other three will have to make

  shift for themselves as best they can. I know it’s hard, but it’s the only thing

  we can do. It’s that, or sitting on juries for a living.’

  This time, the post-Eudorus silence was very long and quite deadly. Eventually,

  Euthyphron, of all people, cleared his throat nervously and said, ‘I agree with

  Eudorus.’

  ‘Of course you do,’ Eudorus said. ‘Because I’m right, and we all know it. Now,

  how are we going to do this? I propose we draw straws, but we can fish for

  pebbles in a hat if anybody’s got strong feelings on the matter.’

  (You’ll have noticed, I’m sure, that nobody once thought of suggesting that we

  do the really obvious thing, namely not split the estate up at all, just carry

  on living together as we’d always done with our nine mules and their abundant

  manure. Well, it’s probably really obvious to you, and it’s become really

  obvious to me now that I’m an old man who’s seen the whole world and devoted his

  life to philosophy. But back then we were young. More to the point, we were

  young Athenians. It would never have occurred to us in ten thousand years not to

  divide up the estate, because that was what happened when a father died. Even

  Eudorus’ suggestion was outrageously radical, the sort of desperate expedient

  people are forced into in the worst of extremes, like when starving men in a

  dungeon must either turn cannibal or die.)

  In the end, we fished for pebbles in a hat. There were four black pebbles and

  three white ones. I have my white pebble still. A clever man I met in Propontis

  some years later managed to drill a hole through it, using a tiny sliver of

  sapphire as a drill-bit, so I could wear it on a string round my neck. I’d hate

  to lose it; after all, it’s the only bit of my father’s land I ever got to keep

  for my own, so I’ve had to make the most of it. Does that sound bitter,

  Phryzeutzis or whatever your barbarian name is? Of course it does, because I am

  bitter. I’m as angry and wretched and full of hate now as I was all those years

  ago, when I opened my fingers and looked down and saw a white pebble in the palm

  of my hand. There are still some mornings when I wake up out of a dream about

  home and realise where I really am, and start crying and crying until my chest

  hurts and I can scarcely breathe. I’m afraid that’s what it means to be an

  Athenian, you see. We have this absurd devotion to our rocky, barren,

  evil-natured, dry, thin-soiled, infertile, poxy little armpit of a country, and

  that’s what makes us so terribly dangerous when we’re defending it and so

  utterly dangerous when we’re deprived of it. There’s an old story about the time

  when Xerxes the Great King of Persia invaded Greece with a million men, the hour

  of our greatest glory when we silly little Greeks killed his soldiers by the

  hundred thousand and threw him back across the Hellespont . After the great

  battle at Plataea , so the story goes, the Spartan king captured the Persian

  general’s luggage and broke it open. He’d never seen the like; gold and silver

  tableware, silk and furs an
d tapestries, precious stones and ivory and

  sandalwood and all the legendary wealth of Asia , heaped up in obscene confusion

  on the floor of the general’s tent. According to the story, King Pausanias stood

  staring at all this stuff for quite some time; then he scratched his head,

  turned to his second-in-command and said, ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘What doesn’t?’ the other man said.

  ‘These people have all this wealth,’ he said, ‘all this gold and stuff, all

  these things. Why in the gods’ names should they risk their lives to come all

  this way and try to take our miserable, poverty-stricken little country away

  from us?’

  (A good story, that; for all I know, it may even be true. Remember it, please;

  keep in your mind the expression on those thin Greek faces at the sight of all

  that luxury, that Oriental plunder. It might help you understand a bit of what

  comes after.)

  On the day my father died, Queen Olympias of Macedon gave birth to a son.

  In fact, it was a busy day all round. On that day, King Philip of Macedon won a

  battle; the Macedonian general Parmenio won another battle; King Philip’s prize

  racehorse won its event at the Olympic Games; and in Ephesus , the world-famous

  temple of Artemis burned to the ground.

  Philip and Olympias named their son Alexander. It wasn’t the best-omened name

  they could possibly have chosen. The first King Alexander had collaborated

  shamelessly with the invaders during the Great War against Persia , and the

  second Alexander had reigned for barely a year. Shortly before she gave birth,

  Olympias (who came from the barbarous tribes of Illyria and kept live snakes as

  pets) was struck by lightning during a freak thunderstorm. It was a miracle she

  wasn’t killed and didn’t lose the baby. For many years, King Philip suspected

  the boy wasn’t his son at all, and Olympias didn’t help matters much by dropping

  heavy hints that the father of her child was a god, either Zeus himself or one

  of those strange and faintly ridiculous Illyrian

  gods-of-drinking-a-lot-and-falling-over, in whose honour the secret order to

  which Olympias belonged staged jolly little orgies, at which they drank

  themselves silly, danced naked round a campfire and tore living things (human