Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt

by Alexander at the World's End (lit)

  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