Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt

by Alexander at the World's End (lit)

  else’s wine and chickpeas, in practice it all turned out to be about as much

  practical use as a tiny, pearl-encrusted gold pickaxe. We didn’t bother with any

  of that stuff; no need. The problem we had wasn’t deciding how best to impose

  the orders of the ruling class on our subordinates; quite the reverse. Where we

  ran into difficulties was in finding any­body who was prepared to give any

  orders at all.

  Odd? Well, it was an odd set-up, I suppose. What made the dif­ference was that,

  whether by random chance or disguised good fortune, we arrived on the Black Sea

  coast with a profound shortage of expertise. We had farmers, and a handful of

  people who knew a bit about building things, and that was about it; all the

  other technical knowledge pooled between us lay in the fields of killing and

  toss-arguing, and neither discipline (we quickly acknowledged, thank the gods)

  helps much when you’re trying to put a roof on a barn or mark out a wall in a

  straight line.

  Now, if we’d all been as useless as each other, I expect we’d have wiped each

  other out in bitter feuding within a week or so, as each faction of opinionated

  ignorance tried to bring its rivals round to its way of thinking by force of

  arms, like they do in real cities. But we did have experts, though not nearly as

  many as we’d have liked, and so pretty soon we had a workable system of

  government. Each expert was in charge of the project that needed his expertise

  and the rest of us kept our faces shut and did what we were told. As oecist I

  theoretically had the right to interfere, veto and command; but as they say,

  just because you’ve got ten fingers doesn’t necessarily mean you can play the

  harp. Like every farmer I knew a bit about everything, just enough to be able to

  see that there are some things you’ve got to entrust to the man who knows what

  he’s about.

  The system worked because none of our experts wanted to give orders — after all,

  who wants responsibility when he’s got to live with the consequences himself?

  Agenor the sculptor, for example, knew about dressing stone, and as much

  practical architecture as a site foreman needs to do his job. He wasn’t an

  architect; but we made him be one. The first thing he did, accordingly, whenever

  called upon to build anything, was to make it clear that he wasn’t an architect,

  and that he’d much prefer it if somebody else told him what to do

  Having reluctantly accepted the commission, he proceeded with extreme caution,

  like a cat walking along a branch of a thorn tree, happily listening to all

  relevant suggestions and actively canvassing opinions from anybody foolhardy

  enough to express them. In short, quite by chance, we’d hit upon that golden

  mean we philosophers had been babbling about for generations: a society where

  the people who didn’t want power were landed with it, and all decisions were

  reached cheerfully by consensus. Trust me; it works. Whether you could make a go

  of it in any context other than that of a completely new settlement, a bunch of

  people with tools standing on a grassy field with no food or shelter apart from

  what they contrived to make for themselves, I have no idea. That, by the way,

  was another beneficial side-effect of the settlement process; it cured me for

  ever of the pernicious urge to speculate about things I don’t know spit about.

  The Founders, meanwhile, kept pretty much to themselves, as I mentioned a moment

  ago. By some happy chance, they realised of their own accord that they were

  hopelessly out of their depth here, and that any prospect of getting fed,

  clothed and housed depended on the efforts of the rest of us, who’d do a far

  better job of providing for them if not interfered with.

  ‘We have a problem,’ my friend Tyrsenius informed me, as we shared a jug of wine

  under the shade of the east wall of our nearly completed temple.

  (Temple, singular; where the original Foundation plan had provided for no fewer

  than fourteen temples, we’d edited and modified a bit, coming to the conclusion

  that the gods were going to have to muck in like everybody else in this colony,

  share a house and learn to get along with each other without squabbling.)

  ‘Really?’ I said, with my hat over my eyes.

  ‘You bet,’ Tyrsenius replied. ‘If only you’d listened to me earlier, of course—’

  ‘Quite,’ I said. ‘Refresh my memory. What’s the matter?’

  Tyrsenius sighed. ‘We’re broke,’ he replied. ‘Worse than that, we’re up to our

  ears in debt. I was going over the accounts this morning, and—’

  I sat up and pushed my hat back. ‘We’ve got accounts?’ I said, startled.

  ‘Of course,’ Tyrsenius replied irritably. ‘I’m your treasurer. What do you think

  I do all day?’

  I shrugged. ‘That’s wonderful, Tyrsenius,’ I said. ‘And what’s in these accounts

  of yours?’

  ‘Our borrowing,’ he replied grimly. ‘What we owe to the other cities, Odessus

  and Olbia City . Think about it; we’ve been buying food and building materials

  and gods know what else from them since the day we arrived here, on the

  assumption that King Philip’d bail us out and send money.’

  I yawned. ‘Which he has done, bless him,’ I said. ‘Thanks, in no small part, to

  the incredibly persuasive letters I send him every month—’

  ‘Well, you haven’t been persuasive enough,’ Tyrsenius replied. ‘To be precise,

  you’ve failed to carry conviction to the tune of twelve talents, three minas.

  And that’s what I’d call a problem.’

  I poured a little more wine. ‘The cities don’t seem all that worried,’ I said.

  ‘They keep supplying the stuff, and I haven’t noticed them badgering us for

  money. Don’t worry about it.’

  He scowled at me. ‘Of course they aren’t badgering us,’ he said. ‘It’s all

  secured on land. Our land. And interest is running, let me remind you—’

  ‘So?’ I shrugged. ‘What do you think is going to happen? Are the Odessans going

  to show up one morning with spades and buckets and dig up all the land and cart

  it back to Odessus? Don’t see it myself. If they want more land, all they’ve got

  to do is go out and take it, right in their back yard. There’s more than enough

  for everybody. You’re thinking like we’re still in Greece , my friend.’

  He shook his head. ‘You’re telling me their security’s worthless, then.’

  I nodded. ‘For all practical purposes,’ I replied. ‘It comforts them to know

  there’s mortgage stones all over the fields here; I suppose it helps them

  balance their books and all. But in real life they know they’re going to have to

  wait till we’re on our feet and producing before they get their money. They

  trust us. Everything’s all right.’

  Tyrsenius blew out through his nose, like a horse. ‘You reckon,’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘One thing they won’t do is anything that’ll make life

  difficult for us — like trying to call in the debts. If we go under, they’ll

  never get paid. So they’ve got to keep supporting us. Good for us; in the long

  term, good for them. Plus, they’ve got King Philip as guarantor at the end of

  the day, and his credit’s good, I’m
sure.’

  ‘You think so?You think he’ll hold still and be sued if we default on a loan?’

  I smiled. ‘What an enticing mental image that is,’ I said fondly. ‘But no,

  that’s not what I mean at all. Be realistic. What they’re getting in return for

  goods and services delivered is the most valuable currency in the world —

  Philip’s awareness that they’re doing him a favour. Have you been listening to

  the news from Greece lately?’

  Tyrsenius looked puzzled. ‘Not sure I follow,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Suppose you lived in Sicily or somewhere like that, where

  they have those villages perched on the rim of a giant volcano. Now, suppose

  that the next time the volcano starts rumbling and burping fire and generally

  giving notice that it’s about to play war, you’re in a position to whisper in

  its ear, so to speak, that you’ve been going out of your way to be nice to the

  volcano’s pet nephew; the volcano recognises this, so when it erupts, the other

  villages get swallowed up in the lava flow, but you don’t. Worth a few bad

  debts, —’don’t you think?’

  Tyrsenius thought about it for a moment, then snuggled his back against the wall

  and put his hands behind his head.

  ‘My point exactly,’ he said.

  I’m not going to write the history of Philip’s piecemeal gobbling-up of the

  Greeks. It’s a long and tortuous story, and to be honest with you I’m not sure I

  can remember the details after all this time, par­ticularly since I wasn’t there

  when it was happening. What you need to know is that my royal patron had worked

  his way down through Greece , stirring up trouble and then stepping in to stop

  the resulting brawls; and once he was in somewhere, it proved rather difficult

  to get him out again. He was everywhere, the voice of sweet reason, agreeing

  with everybody at the same time. His operating system reminded me a lot, in

  fact, of those same Scythian archers who kept the peace back home. When a fight

  broke out, they didn’t rush in and intervene, thus uniting the warring factions

  in the common cause of beating the shit out of them. Instead they waited till

  the fight was over, and then stepped in and arrested anybody who was still

  stand­ing. That was Philip’s way, except that he’d also started the fight.

  It was, of course, that wonderful diplomatic skill of his that made it possible,

  and somehow everybody played along, though they must have seen for themselves

  what he was up to. In Athens , for instance, my old colleague Demosthenes

  harangued Assembly nearly every day with ferocious, entirely accurate accounts

  of Philip’s evil cunning. I gather that Demosthenes’ speeches were so popular

  that the City ground to a halt, with everybody who could manage to squeeze into

  the Pnyx hanging on his every word. When he’d done they’d applaud him till the

  ground shook — then proceed to vote down his proposals and do what Philip

  wanted, for the simple reason that if they didn’t, it might give him a pretext

  for declaring war, and that would be that.

  The only city that openly defied him was Sparta ; and he only tolerated them, I

  think, out of sentiment. You see, Sparta wasn’t the world-class power it had

  been in Grandfather’s time. It had, quite simply, grown old; it was a little,

  wizened shadow of what it had once been, and Philip made a point of treating it

  with the respect due to an honoured but rather senile ex-hero, tolerating its

  tantrums and threats with a broad smile that told the rest of Greece that he

  knew exactly what the realities of the situation were. At least the Spartan

  sense of humour was still alive and kicking; when Philip sent a long and

  beautifully reasoned letter to the Spartan high council, demanding various

  concessions and backed with a delicate infusion of blandishments and threats,

  the Spartans duly considered it and sent back a reply, which read In reply to

  yours: no.

  But plucky little Sparta was an exception. The rest of Greece knew what was

  going to happen, but there was nothing they could do. They were on the edge of

  the volcano, roasting chestnuts in the glowing ash while they could and waiting

  for the sky to turn red.

  The other day I came across one of the letters Alexander wrote me at about that

  time — I was patching my oldest and most highly prized pair of boots, not for

  the first time, and when I came to peel off one of the many layers of parchment

  I’ve pasted on the underside of the uppers over the years, there it was;

  three-quarters legible, and the rest easy enough to guess from the context.

  There was nothing special about that letter, beyond the fact that it had managed

  to survive so long and so much; just like me, I suppose. It’s absolutely typical

  of the letters he sent me while he was trailing round Greece acting as Philip’s

  adjutant; my theory is that he treated his letters to me as practice exercises,

  to make sure he didn’t forget how to conduct a formal correspondence with a

  respected elder of lesser rank, They read like the examples you get in those

  Complete Letter-Writer books, the sort that provide a model letter for every

  conceivable occasion — letters from fathers to sons; letters from ambassadors to

  kings; letters from creditors to debtors, class one (apologetic), class two

  (dismissive), class three (overbearing and arrogant); letters from husbands to

  wives; letters from recently appointed stewards to their masters informing them

  of increased annual yield or reports of dishonesty among the casual labour — but

  I knew for a fact that Alexander was far too proud to copy out forms and

  precedents written by somebody else, because when I told him to back in Mieza he

  flatly refused, and told me why in no uncertain terms; so I guess he was in

  effect writing his own and using me as a kind of quality control.

  His letters were always meticulously constructed:

  1) Formal greetings;

  2) Conventional enquiries about my health and brief report on his own;

  3) Admirably lucid and concise precis of the state of play in the cur­rent

  campaign — excellent practice for writing dispatches, and clearly showing that

  he’d taken to heart what I’d taught him when we did class exercises in military

  prose composition back in the old days;

  4) Interesting and informative observations on matters of geo­graphical,

  political, anthropological and botanical interest that had come to his attention

  since his previous letter; why he sent these to me rather than Aristotle (who

  liked that sort of thing) I don’t know, unless he wrote the same letter to both

  of us, changing only the name at the top and the address on the outside;

  5) One amusingly whimsical anecdote, human interest story or similar

  lighter note, also serving to reiterate some point or state­ment made earlier in

  the letter about some major current topic, thereby completing the structural

  loop;

  6) Exhortations to reply and best wishes.

  Of their kind, they were perfectly good letters — easily B, often rising to B+,

  and always a straight A for presentation and handwriting; I’d dutifully reply in

  the appropriate manner, singling out the good bits for elegantly
muted praise

  and tactfully drawing his attention to omissions or infelicities of style (‘I

  was fascinated by your account of the black sticky substance the olive-growers

  of Thessaly use to protect their trees against rats, but I think I may have

  missed the part where you say whether it actually works or not. Does it?’);

  throughout our corre­spondence, which lasted until Philip died, I can’t say I

  learned anything about Alexander that I didn’t know already, or ever read a word

  that couldn’t just as fittingly have been written to somebody else.

  We had one good harvest, followed by a bad one, followed by one that was just

  about good enough. The problem, we found, was the seed-corn; Greek seed wasn’t

  used to the rich and productive soil, and something went wrong with it in the

  second year. For the third year we bought about half our seed from Odessus; by a

  strange coincidence, about half the crop came up.

  In the third year we cut down all our olive trees and burned them. It was

  obvious they weren’t going to come to anything, and we needed the space. It was

  at this point that someone pointed out that the Greeks bought their Black Sea

  grain with olives, because olives didn’t grow here.

  That apart, there wasn’t much for me to record in the official history. We

  carried on building and borrowing, we gradually ploughed up more land without

  any protests from the Scythians, who stayed out of our way so completely that we

  wouldn’t have known they were there. The days were full, and at night we were

  too tired to do anything except go to bed.

  Like everybody else, I’d been allotted thirty acres, with the right to stake a

  claim on any unclaimed land I liked provided I ploughed and sowed it within a

  year. Like nearly everybody else, I had my work cut out coping with thirty

  acres. For one thing, it wasn’t like thirty acres in Attica , which would work

  out on average as seventeen acres of usable soil and thirteen acres of bare

  rock. I only wish my father could have seen it; so much flat, fertile,

  deep-soiled ground, enough to provide a good living for a whole damn dynasty.

  But I was out of practice; it had been years since I hung off the handles of a