source of endless embarrassment to the Macedonians ever since. Sure enough, as
soon as it became apparent that, against all the odds, the Greek allies were
winning the war and Xerxes was going home, the Macedonian King did his best to
set matters straight by betraying the Persian order of battle to the Greek
general staff on the night before the decisive battle of Plataea; a helpful act,
but not desperately honourable. (Who was that famous general who once said,
‘I’ve nothing against treachery; it s traitors I don’t like’?)
Come to think of it, the King of Macedon in those days was also called
Alexander. A family name, presumably.
I left Lysicles to catch up on his sleep (I never knew anybody who needed as
much sleep as he did) and wandered out into the fresh air. It happened to be one
of the few afternoons on that mission that we actually had to ourselves; Philip
had been called away, and Parmenio, who was supposed to keep us entertained and
busy when Himself wasn’t about, loathed pointless socialising almost as much as
he loathed Athenians. The respite came just in time for me; I’ve never liked
being indoors terribly much at the best of times. I strolled round a courtyard,
found a side door that opened onto an alley and walked up it until I came to
another courtyard, where someone was halfway through building a house. There
were piles of stone blocks, all neatly cut, shaped and stacked, scaffolding,
ropes, orphan tools and all the other junk you find heaped up on building sites,
but there was nobody about. I sat down on a heap of blocks, yawned and stretched
my arms, taking sincere delight in the absence of human voices.Then I noticed
movement behind a pile of timber. I sat still and waited.
It turned out that there was a boy behind the pile. He was so engrossed in what
he was doing that he didn’t realise I was there. I stood and watched him.
He didn’t look very much like either his father or his mother; even so, I had no
trouble recognising him. He may have been a thumb-joint taller than most boys
his age, certainly no more than that. He had a long, straight nose, full lips
like a girl’s, and big eyes. His hair was naturally curly. Both his knees and
elbows were scabbed with recent grazes, and he had a big purple bruise on his
right forearm.
He’d found a nest of wild bees among the stones, and was studying it carefully.
From time to time he poked at it with a long stick, until a scouting party of
bees came buzzing out to see what the matter was. As they emerged from between
the stones and started to fly, he flicked them out of the air with the split end
of his stick, snapping them down with a short, brisk jerk of the wrist. The
speed of his reactions and his eye/hand co-ordination were little short of
phenomenal.
‘Been stung yet?’ I asked.
He didn’t jump or even look round, just went on concentrating on the job in hand
as he replied. ‘Seven times,’ he said. ‘Twice on the arm, three times on the
leg, once on the neck and once on the face.’
‘Does it hurt much?’
‘Yes.’
I smiled, but he wasn’t paying me any attention. ‘Then why do it?’ I asked.
‘Because they stung my dog yesterday.’
‘Good reason,’ I said. ‘It’s the mark of a good man to avenge his friends and
dependants. But why do it that way? Why not smoke them out?’
He narrowed his eyebrows without taking his eye off the bee he was tracking. ‘I
hadn’t thought of it,’ he admitted.
‘Did you try and think of a better way?’ I asked. ‘Or does the exercise of skill
and speed please you so much that you don’t want to find one?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No reason to suppose you would,’ I conceded. ‘After all, you’re what, ten?’
‘Nine,’ he replied. ‘And seven months.’
I got up and walked round to where he could see me, provided he could be
bothered to look.
‘You’re an Athenian,’ he said. ‘One of the ambassadors.’
‘That’s right,’ I replied. ‘But I used to be a farmer, and when I was your age
we had a swarm of wild bees nest in a cavity between the doorframe and the front
door. Nearly drove us out of the house for a couple of days, until my father
smoked them out.’
‘How did he do it?’ Alexander asked.
‘With a brazier,’ I replied, ‘one of those little portable ones on a tripod,
like they make in Corinth . He cooked up some damp kindling until it was smoking
well, then he stood the tripod in the doorway and puffed the smoke up into the
nest with a pair of bellows he’d borrowed from our neighbour the smith. That
made them all drowsy and sleepy, and we were able to bundle them into an empty
hive we’d got handy — we’d lost a swarm the year before, and this way we were
able to replace it for free.’
Alexander thought about that, and let a bee go by unswatted. ‘Didn’t you all get
stung while you were doing it?’ he said.
‘Once or twice,’ I answered him. ‘Not nearly as much as seven times. Of course,
we knew to muffle ourselves up in cloaks and blankets.’
I could see him digesting the information, the way a cormorant digests a whole
fish; you can see the shape of it in his long neck as it goes down. ‘So you took
bad luck and made it into good luck,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘That’s clever.’
‘That’s wisdom,’ I said, ‘which comes from knowledge and experience. Instead of
fighting our enemies and destroying them, at the cost to ourselves of many
painful stings, we overwhelmed them with our superior wisdom and added them to
our household. We got a good load of honey from that swarm for many years.’
He dropped the stick. ‘You’re saying that killing the bees is the wrong thing to
do. I could be capturing them and making them work for me.’
I nodded. ‘You’ve got it,’ I said. ‘And you won’t get stung so much, either.
It’s brave to fight in the forefront of the battle, but you shouldn’t do it
unless it achieves a useful end. As it is, every bee you kill is one less to
bring you honey. You’re wasting resources.’
He frowned. ‘But they stung my dog,’ he said. ‘Oughtn’t they to be punished for
it?’
‘By captivity,’ I said, ‘not death. And anyway, the bee that did the actual
stinging is dead already; you can’t punish him where he’s gone.’
Alexander smiled. ‘You make it sound like bees go to the Elysian Fields when
they die,’ he said.
‘Well, why not? They have flowers there, don’t they? In which case, it stands to
reason they have bees.’
‘Now you’re making fun of me,’ Alexander said, in a tone of voice that suggested
that that wasn’t a prudent course of action.
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Bees aren’t a laughing matter. We have the best bees of
all, back where I live, in Attica . Of course. I expect you’ve heard of the
Hyblaean strain.’
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘But Aristotle’s going to teach me all about the different
varieties and breeds of animals and birds. He knows all about that sort of
thing.’
‘I bet.’
�
��Sorry?’
‘Doesn’t matter. So,’ I continued, ‘what are you going to do? Are you going to
continue the war, or make peace on favourable terms?’
Alexander thought for a moment. ‘Oh, make peace,’ he said. ‘Trouble is, I
haven’t got a hive to put them in.’
‘Ah, well,’ I said, ‘that’s no excuse. We farmers, when we haven’t got something
we need, we go away and make it.’
‘How do you make a beehive?’ he asked.
‘Out of strips of bark,’ I told him, ‘which you sew together with bits of
trailing ivy. Or if you prefer, you can use osiers, like you’d use for weaving
baskets. Anyway, once you’ve got the shell, so to speak, the next step is to
line it with clay. Then finally you add a loop to hang it from, and there you
are. Keeps the frost and the birds out, but you can still get in when it’s time
to rob them of their honey.’
‘Thank you,’ Alexander said. ‘Which is better, the bark or the osiers? I know
where there’s a big old apple tree we could strip some bark off, but osiers
might be a problem.’
‘There,’ I said, ‘you’ve answered your own question.’
He smiled. ‘So I have,’ he said. ‘All right, I’ll get the bark, and you—’
I held up my hands. ‘Whoa!’ I interrupted. ‘So I’ve been conscripted, have I?’
‘You’ve got to help me make it,’ Alexander said, with an odd note of urgency in
his voice. ‘Where’s the point in knowing how to do something if you don’t go and
do it?’
I shrugged. ‘What’s wrong with knowledge for its own sake?’ I said. ‘No, don’t
bother with that, it’ll be quicker to make the beehive. All right, you want me
to look for some ivy, I suppose.’
‘Yes,’ Alexander said.
‘And a needle,’ I added. ‘Got to have a needle for the sewing. Before you ask, I
can make one out of wood, that’s no problem.’
Alexander was a remarkably quick study. If he had a fault, it was impatience; he
wanted very much to be able to do a thing without having to go through the
humiliation — I’m sure he saw it as that — of having to learn, of being
subservient to another who happened to have a piece of knowledge he hadn’t
acquired yet; he wanted to gulp down knowledge like a sick man gulps down
medicine, to be able to take it and immediately be in a perfect state of being
able to do whatever the task was, without any intermediate stage of
halfknowledge or apprenticeship. I’d say, ‘This is how you do such-andsuch,’
and he’d interrupt and say, ‘Yes, I know,’ when fairly obviously he didn’t. But
he was amazingly sharp and quick, and his level of concentration was astounding
for a human being that age.
‘There,’ he said, regarding the finished article with a satisfied look on his
face, ‘that’s good, isn’t it?’
‘It’ll do,’ I said. ‘It’d have been even better if we’d waited for the clay to
dry properly like I told you, but it’ll get the job done. Now I suppose you want
to smoke out the bees.
He looked at me. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Otherwise there wouldn’t be any point
making the hive. Come on, we’ll ask the priest in the small temple if we can
borrow his portable brazier. He’ll say yes, he knows me well enough. We can ask
for some of that thick smelly incense; that’ll make good smoke.’
I laughed. ‘That’s an interesting thought,’ I replied, ‘using expensive
imported incense to smoke out bees. You can ask if you like, but I wouldn’t hold
your breath if I were you. I think you’ll have to wait until you’re a great
warrior and you’ve conquered the Spice Islands beyond the Great Ocean before you
can go using the stuff that freely.’
Of course, that made him all the more determined to get the incense, and so of
course he did. Best quality stuff, too; it smelt disgusting, all sweet and
cloying.
‘That’ll do fine,’ I said. ‘If it has this effect on us, think what it’ll do to
the bees.’
We also requisitioned a small shovel and a slab of potsherd, for scooping the
dazed bees up with. As we put these items with the rest of the kit, I saw that
Alexander was looking at them nervously. I asked him why.
‘I was thinking of that story,’ he replied.
‘Which one?’ I asked him. ‘There’s several, you know.’
He looked at me oddly, and I suddenly realised: no sense of humour. Oh, well,
nobody’s perfect. ‘The one about the Lydians,’ he said. ‘You know, where they
went to fight the Persians, and they were so sure they were going to win that
they took along a whole bunch of chains and collars and stuff to chain the
prisoners up in, and after the battle they ended up wearing them themselves. I
think a lot about that story,’ he added.
‘You do? Well, fair enough. I don’t think the bees are going to chain us up and
make us go round collecting honey from flowers.’
‘I didn’t mean it literally,’ he said patiently. ‘It just feels a bit like
—what’s that expression?’
‘Tempting Providence ?’
He nodded. ‘That’s the one. But I suppose we need to scoop them up quickly while
they’re still groggy from the smoke, so we’d better take this stuff with us.’
Gods; it had been years since I’d last smoked out bees, and I wasn’t quite sure
I’d remember how to do it. There’s quite a knack to it, mostly getting the smoke
to go in the nest. In the event, Alexander appropriated the bellows and clung
onto them so tightly that I didn’t even bother suggesting that I should handle
that part of the operation. Interesting sidelight here; a few years later, I
asked him if he remembered this episode and he said yes, of course. During the
conversation, this issue of him having to be the one who did the difficult bit
came up, and he said he’d insisted because he’d worked out that the
bellows-operator was far more likely to get stung if things went wrong than the
man holding the tripod; if there was a risk of danger, a front rank to be fought
in, then it was up to him to take the position of most danger, because he was
the leader. He quoted me those famous lines of Homer, the ones people who don’t
know any Homer tend to spout at you out of context —
Tell me, Glaucus, why are we honoured among the Lycians
With thrones and banquets and the respect due to gods?
Because we always tahe our stand in the front ranh of the fighting...
— Except that he’d got it wrong, or else whoever taught it to him knew a
different version; he’d somehow managed to incorporate into it that other famous
bit about Glaucus the Lycian, so that his third line went —Because we are always
the best, excelling all other men .
—Which isn’t the same at all. But when I tried to tell him this, he wouldn’t
believe me; he said that obviously the Homer we had in Athens wasn’t the real
Homer, and if one of us was wrong, it was me; it stood to reason that the
Macedonians would know the real Homer, because he was descended on his mother’s
side from Achilles himself. He clearly took this all so seriously that I
resisted the urge to point out that, following h
is system of logic, if I was
ever in a lawsuit I’d know more about the law than anybody else because an
ancestor of mine successfully proposed a measure in Assembly— (Which is true,
believe it or not; a decree abolishing certain trade tariffs imposed on citizens
of Locris Opuntia trading in Athenian markets, passed shortly after King Xerxes’
war. A futile piece of legislation, since the tariffs were on commodities the
Locrians didn’t deal in; but never let it be said that our family hasn’t
scratched its name in a corner of the wall of history.)
Anyway; the bees didn’t stand a chance. One whiff of that nauseating incense and
they fell out of the nest into our shovel like dung from a cow’s backside,
everything going exactly according to plan and no unforeseen contingencies
arising. I mention this in my role as historian, because I think it’s the first
recorded instance of Alexander’s unbelievable luck, the same elemental force
that made it possible for him to walk into Babylon , the world’s most fortified
city, without striking a blow, or conquer unconquerable Egypt without having to
fight a single battle. Alexander was always lucky; a quality he shared, in
pretty well exactly the same way, with my father.
‘Right,’ I said, as we ladled the last squirming dollop of bees into the hive.
‘We’ve captured them. Now what do we do with them?’
He looked at me as if I’d just asked him why he breathed. ‘Take them to my
father, of course,’ he said.
‘Fine.’ I nodded slowly. ‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘You take them to him. You
don’t have to mention my name, tell him you caught them all by yourself. I’m not
sure I want to be in the picture when you plonk down a hundred thousand hungover
bees on your father’s dining-table.’
‘I can’t do that,’ Alexander replied, shocked. ‘I can’t take the credit for
something I haven’t done. Where’d be the point in that?’
I sighed. The concept of diplomatic immunity was known in Macedon, but only in
the category of quaint and impractical foreign customs, along with the
Hyperborean savages who worship the souls of fish, or the Hyrcanian ascetics who
believe that painting themselves with the urine of pregnant sheep makes them
invulnerable to arrows. ‘You did all the hard work,’ I pointed out. ‘Not to
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 15
