Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt

by Alexander at the World's End (lit)

  country, where we could see and be seen for a long way. Nowhere much to hide.

  ‘Look,’ the boy called out, ‘there’s some people just coming up out of the dip.’

  ‘Scythians?’ I asked. ‘Or can’t you see?’

  ‘They’re on foot,’ the boy said. ‘I guess they’re our people.’

  I had a bad feeling, and I wasn’t the only one. ‘Could we signal them, do you

  think?’ someone asked.

  ‘No point,’ Illus replied. ‘If we can see the Scythians, so can they. More to

  the point, maybe the Scythians haven’t seen us yet. If that’s the case I’d like

  to keep it that way.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘Our best bet’d be to keep still,’ I said. ‘Put down

  your tools and anything that might catch the sun, then stand under the tree.’

  Everyone did just that. ‘They’ve seen the men on foot,’ the boy announced.

  ‘Definitely seen them, they’re changing course a bit and riding towards them.’

  ‘What are our men doing?’ asked Thrasyllus. ‘Can you tell?’

  ‘Just standing there, I think,’ the boy answered.

  ‘It’s not as if there’s anywhere they can go,’ someone said unnecessarily; the

  same was true of us. I was beginning to wish I was an Illyrian, who always

  carried his bow with him even when he went for a shit in the woods. I’d got my

  mattock, of course; wouldn’t want to be hit with one of those. But the Scythians

  fought with arrows mostly; arrows from a distance, then close with the lance and

  scimitar to deal with anyone left standing. I began to feel sick.

  ‘Any ideas?’ Amyntas asked nervously.

  Nobody replied.

  ‘They’re really close to our people now,’ the boy said a bit later. ‘They’re

  breaking into a gallop, charging at them. I can’t see — I think they’re going to

  ride round them in a circle.’

  ‘What, they’re going to leave them alone?’ said Thrasyllus.

  ‘No,’ the boy replied.

  By now, we could see fairly well for ourselves, though the boy continued to call

  out a commentary, like some people do when they’re watching the Games. At that

  moment, oddly enough, I thought of Alexander; Who’d you rather be, I asked him,

  the all-corners champion at the Olympic Games, or the little fat guy with a

  scroll who calls out the names of the winners?

  It went like this.The Scythians rode round our people — there were five or so of

  them — and shot arrows, killing a couple. Then they rode in. One man just stood

  there and was chopped down. The other two ran a little way. The Scythians left

  them where they fell and then carried on heading for us.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Thrasyllus demanded. ‘They just—’

  ‘All right.’ I pulled myself together, though it wasn’t easy. Never seen violent

  death before, you see. ‘That’s enough. Illus, you’re a soldier; is there

  anything we can do? Or do we just stand here and wait?’

  Illus shook his head. ‘Nowhere to hide and no cover worth spit. I don’t see how

  we’re going to get out of it this time.

  Marvellous, I thought; but what I said was, ‘We’ll see about that. Illus, I want

  you and your friends with the bows to shoot down as many as you can. You never

  know, if we sting them a bit they may go away.’

  Illus looked at me. For a moment there he’d thought I was actually going to come

  up with something clever, but I’d disappointed him. ‘If we shoot a couple it’ll

  probably only make things worse,’ he said. ‘We could try surrendering. If we

  tell them who you are, maybe they’ll spare us to keep as hostages.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Just do as I say.’

  I remember watching them get closer, changing from small shapes of horsemen into

  people, with discernible faces. They were young —sixteen to nineteen; I

  remembered reading somewhere that young Scythian warriors aren’t admitted to

  full manhood until they’ve killed someone, and I’d always assumed that was just

  sensationalist rubbish, like the stories about the crocodiles of Egypt or the

  island in the far north where at times the sun shines at midnight. But the faces

  of those men, or boys, or whatever they were, seemed to me to be filled with

  fear, every bit as much as ours; they were facing something they knew they had

  to do but which terrified them. They were new to this sort of thing, the same as

  I was, and they were well aware that they were about to play a game with us

  which had no rules, no guarantee of safety. They were afraid of getting killed,

  the same as we were.

  At seventy-five yards they broke into a gallop and shifted for­mation, flowing

  round us like a river bursting its banks. One of the Illyrians drew his bow and

  loosed an arrow; it missed. The Scythians were drawing their bows now; a couple

  of shots went wide, then Pericleidas the Corinthian staggered and sank down to

  his knees. He’d been hit, and there was an arrow sticking out of his stomach

  about a thumb’s length above the navel, a little to the right of centre. He

  wasn’t dead, but the pain and shock were so great he couldn’t speak or even make

  a noise, only mouth the words, as if he didn’t want the enemy to hear. I was

  staring at him, trying to think what to do, when Ptolemocrates suddenly swore

  loudly and keeled over, shot through the heart. A moment later I heard the sound

  of something heavy crashing through tree-branches and a heavy bump as it hit the

  ground; they’d shot the boy down out of the tree. One of the other boys, who was

  standing quite close to me, started to scream; he had an arrow through the

  middle of his left hand. On my other side, an Illyrian was bending his bow,

  taking aim, when an arrow hit his jaw about halfway along. The bow flew from his

  hands and the arrow cartwheeled sideways; I stared at the arrow sticking

  straight through his face, the broad barbed head standing a hand’s breadth clear

  of his cheek on the other side. He was still on his feet, looking groggy with

  shock; he tried to speak, and as he did so the arrow bobbed up and down.

  And that, I’m thoroughly ashamed to say, was enough for me. I’d never seen

  actual fighting before, though of course I’d speculated endlessly about what it

  must be like. Let’s say it wasn’t at all like I’d expected, and leave it at

  that.

  The wounded Illyrian’s bow had landed a foot or so from where I was standing. I

  grabbed it, then pulled a handful of arrows from his quiver. He saw what I was

  doing and tried to say something, making the feathers on the arrowshaft sticking

  out of his face waggle about in a ludicrously comic fashion. What he was

  actually trying to say, the gods only know.

  An arrow flew past dangerously close, a foot from my right shoulder, if that. I

  couldn’t help it; I ran. At least two of them called out my name, but I didn’t

  want to hear what they were saying. I ran.

  I went about eighty yards without looking round. Then I heard hooves drumming,

  not a terribly long way behind. I had no idea what to do.

  There was one Scythian horseman, a kid of seventeen, bearing down on me. He’d

  stowed away his bow and was holding his lance. I only saw him close for a very

  short time, six or so heartbeats, at which
point I realised that I wasn’t

  running. I was down on one knee, bending the bow I’d taken from the Illyrian,

  with one of his arrows on the string. I was never any good at shooting arrows,

  as a boy or later on in life; it’s always been one of those things that other

  people make seem easy, but which goes by me entirely. At the actual moment when

  I relaxed my fingers and let the string pull off my hand, I may even have had my

  eyes shut (I’ve been told that’s what I do when I loose the arrow, though I’ve

  never been aware of it). If I did, I opened them in time to see where my arrow

  had bone. By fluke, luck or providence, it had punched through the boy’s thigh,

  pinning him to his saddle. Needless to say, the horse was going mad, prancing

  and thrashing about, trying to shake loose whatever it was that was causing all

  that unexpected pain. Ordinarily the boy would have been thrown clear, but the

  arrow pinned him tight in his seat. His eyes were huge and round, and his mouth

  was nearly a perfect circle.

  I left him to get on with it, dropped the bow and carried on running. I was the

  only one who tried to escape, just as I was the only one who got away. You hear

  stories about men who’re the only ones to survive out of this or that mighty

  army; they’re supposed to be crippled with guilt and remorse for ever after, and

  I can understand that, in a way. But as I ran, I was praying to all the gods,

  Let them hill the others and forget about me, concentrate on the others, maybe

  they’ll exterminate each other so there aren’t any left to chase me. I’m not

  proud of it. The number of things I’ve done in my life that I’m proud of you

  could count on the fingers of one badly mutilated hand.

  I was never a great athlete, but I ran a good race that day, and I only stopped

  when I tripped over something and found I couldn’t get up. I’d twisted my ankle

  and I couldn’t move. Now that was a horrible feeling, that helplessness, that

  feeling of clumsy, lethal stupidity. I managed to drag myself round so I could

  look back towards where I’d come from; I couldn’t see any horsemen coming. There

  was a dip and a slope in the way, so I couldn’t see the fighting. For a moment,

  in fact, I wondered whether any of it had actually happened, until I caught

  sight of a thin red weal across the inside of my left forearm, where the

  bowstring had hit me. Apparently, so competent archers assure me, that’s a sign

  of a sloppy loose, holding the bow all wrong with your left hand.

  I tried crawling, but it hurt and I got only a few yards before I gave it up as

  a bad job; I was too far from home for that. The ridiculous thing was that I was

  home, I was in our fields, a piece of land owned by an Illyrian called Bardylis

  (he had the same name as one of their national heroes, who was killed fighting

  Philip at the age of ninety —imagine that, I thought as I lay there, ninety

  years old and he still couldn’t escape from this shit, you’d have thought a time

  would come when you didn’t have to do it any more, but apparently not) and any

  moment now, assuming the whole plain wasn’t crawling with marauding Scythian

  war-parties, Bardylis might appear over the brow of the hill, looking for

  somewhere out of the wind to eat his lunch, and find me. He’d stare and ask me,

  in atrociously bad Greek, what the hell had happened to me; and what was I going

  to say to him?

  In the event, it was a war-party of our own that found me. Apparently, someone

  else had seen the whole thing and scampered back to the city to raise the alarm.

  He went to my house, but of course I wasn’t there; Theano sent him to find

  Marsamleptes, who wasn’t there either, so he went home, got his horse (being a

  sensible sort; his name was Lytus, an Illyrian) and rode out to Marsamleptes’

  holding, which was only a short way out of town. Marsamleptes knew exactly what

  to do; he’d been quietly and hopefully planning, and so was able to mobilise an

  early response unit — I think that’s the right jargon — in under an hour. They

  rode to where the fighting had been, but all they found were dead bodies. It was

  sheer chance that they stumbled across me, following what they’d mistakenly

  thought was the trail of the retreating Scythians (in fact, it was a

  goat-track). A couple of them took me home on a spare horse, while Marsamleptes

  continued the search. He came home late that afternoon looking thoroughly

  miserable; he’d found neither hide nor hair of the Scythians, just the

  bodies of the men we’d seen being killed before the horsemen turned on us, and a

  courting couple who’d sneaked off into a small copse on the edge of our

  territory and been spitted with lances and left to die. He found two dead

  Scythians at the place where my group had been killed, both shot with arrows; no

  trace of a young lad with an arrow in his thigh, or a dead or wounded horse.

  It didn’t occur to anybody that I’d been with that group; they assumed that I’d

  been on my own and that the Scythians had tried to ride me down, and I’d somehow

  got away from them. Many of the Illyrians regarded my miraculous escape as proof

  that the sacred snake was watching over me; I gather that there was this story

  about how as I was lying there with Scythian lancers all round me poised to

  strike, a monstrous snake sprang up out of the earth and coiled itself about me,

  protecting me from the spear-thrusts with its impenetrable scales and driving

  the attackers away with spumes of poison (or, in some versions of the story,

  fire) sneezed out of its nose. In any event, my standing with the Illyrians went

  up considerably, and Marsamleptes, a superstitious man, took to averting his

  eyes when he spoke to me and treated me with great respect, in spite of several

  requests to pack it in. Needless to say, I never contradicted any of it, not

  even the snake stuff, and this is the first time, Phryzeutzis my friend, that

  I’ve ever told anybody the truth about what happened there. After all, where the

  hell is the point of lying to you? For all you know, I might be making the whole

  thing up, just to make my story a little bit more interesting.

  Now, you’re thinking that this unprovoked attack by the Scythians was what I was

  talking about when I said that that day, the seventh of Metageitnion in the

  tenth year of the colony, was a day that changed the world. Not a bit of it. The

  truly significant and memorable event of that day took place in Greece , at a

  place called Chaeronea , which is between Thebes and Delphi . There, King

  Philip, ably assisted by Prince Alexander and the other young Macedonian nobles

  who’d been brought up with him, fought a battle against the Greeks who still

  resisted him and utterly defeated them, thereby effectively making him the ruler

  of the whole of Greece. A thousand Athenians died that day and a further two

  thousand were taken prisoner; among the dead were my brothers Eudorus and

  Euthyphron. My brother Eudemus lost an eye, but escaped; Eumenes and Eugenes

  were both captured, but were later released unharmed along with the rest of the

  Athenians.

  According to the reliable accounts of the battle, it was Alexander who led the

  charge that broke the Theba
n Sacred Band, the best soldiers in all of Greece .

  As well as directing his troops with out­standing skill and flair, he forced his

  way into the thick of the fighting and turned the tide of the battle by the

  sheer ferocity of his onslaught; he was like an Achilles, they said, something

  out of Homer and the old stories, utterly regardless of his own safety, and he

  came back to his tent after the battle almost unrecognisable for blood,

  spattered on his face and hair, his own blood and that of the men he’d killed.

  They say that Philip didn’t know what to think; his heart was bursting with

  pride at the outstanding prowess of his son, but at the same time he was

  furiously angry that on the day of his crowning achievement Alexander had

  eclipsed him and taken all the glory for himself. Personally, I have a clear

  mental picture of the scene, as Philip looks at his tall, handsome young son all

  covered in dried blood, like something not human; he looks at him for a while

  with his one good eye and says nothing. After the battle, they say, Philip got

  more drunk than he’d ever been before; he danced up and down the battlefield,

  kicking the bodies of the dead and singing (loudly and off-key; Philip couldn’t

  sing):

  Demosthenes, Son of Demosthenes, Of the parish of Paeanea, proposes these—

  — Which is how the heralds at Assembly made the formal announcement each time

  Demosthenes had got up to urge the Athenian people to resist Philip, in those

  immortal speeches of his. Demosthenes, they say, ran like a hare almost as soon

  as the battle started. He’d bought a new shield especially for the occasion; it

  had the words GOOD FORTUNE painted on it in huge gold-leaf lettering. He threw

  it away when he bolted, and Philip used it as a chamber-pot for weeks until the

  leather rotted away.

  Interesting, I’ve often felt. I mentioned earlier that remark I made, about

  Homer and Achilles, Who’d you rather be, the all-corners champion at the Olympic

  Games, or the little fat guy with a scroll who calls out the names of the

  winners? Now, the Olympic Games, like the battle of Chaeronea, is a time when

  all the Greek states send their finest men to compete together for honour and

  glory and all the dearest values of free Greek citizens; and on the day when