Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt

by Alexander at the World's End (lit)

  was common knowledge that he had a per­sonal grudge against the King — lots of

  suitably squalid stuff about a clandestine love-affair that resulted in a

  gang-rape and all manner of prurient details; interestingly enough, the story

  struck me as remark­ably familiar the first time I heard it, and it didn’t take

  me long to work out why. It was basically the same as the hallowed tale of

  Harmodius and Aristogiton, the two young heroes who killed the tyrant Hipparchus

  and set Athens free a century or so back. For some reason, this made me think

  quite hard about Aristotle, a man who knew a good story when he heard one and

  had a very good idea of the sort of thing that catches the public imagination.

  If I’m right, the parallel between Philip and the lecherous monster Hipparchus

  was a singularly deft touch, which would compel me to raise my estimation of

  Aristotle by a significant factor.

  Once the show was over (I assume they must have carried on with the wedding,

  because Cleopatra did marry the King of Epirus) and everybody had finally

  accepted that what they’d seen was for real, the speculation began. Favourite

  for the role of First Murderer was Olympias the Queen, and there’s no denying

  that she had a pretty substantial motive, because not long before, Philip had

  married a young and beautiful girl (also confusingly called Cleopatra),

  appar­ently neglecting to divorce Olympias first but in all other respects

  indicating that he’d had enough of her and her bloody snakes and was proposing

  to start over with someone a bit less exhausting to live with. This Cleopatra

  lived longer than the man Pausanias but not by much, and there were all sorts of

  rumours flying about that Olympias, far from denying her involvement, was

  worried in case other people stole the credit for her great accomplishment.

  Entirely possible; but I don’t think so. The Olympias I knew could easily have

  smashed Philip’s skull with a chair-leg in the heat of an argument. She might

  even have poisoned his soup, if he’d done something that really upset her (and I

  don’t see going through a form of marriage with some girl as being enough to do

  that). But a public execution involving accomplices wasn’t her style at all; she

  was far too direct and self-reliant to bother with anything like that, and it

  seems pretty obvious that the whole purpose behind killing Philip at that

  particular time in that particular place was to stop Philip leading the army

  into Persia and starting the war with the Great King.

  Nor do I believe that the Persians had anything to do with it, though that too

  would have been entirely possible; or the Athenians, come to that, though they

  rather crassly voted that Pausanias should be awarded the posthumous rank of

  Hero of Athenian Freedom, and Demosthenes showed up at Assembly in a flamboyant

  new outfit designed to represent Great Joy, even though his daughter had died a

  few days previously. Both the Persians and the Athenians would have realised

  that killing Philip wouldn’t solve anything as far as they were concerned unless

  Alexander died with him; and Alexander didn’t die. Oh no. Not one bit.

  Alexander, in fact, became King; quite unexpectedly, while in the full flower of

  his youth and brilliance, which would otherwise have been wasted as he served

  his time as his father’s loyal lieutenant and second-in-command. If Philip had

  lived to a reasonable age, Alexander wouldn’t have succeeded to the throne much

  before his fiftieth birthday — by which time, quite possibly, all the best bits

  of the mighty purpose would already have been accomplished, and Alexander

  would’ve been stuck with the rotten job of consolidating and keeping in one

  piece the mighty empire Philip had carved himself out m the East. A

  fifty-year-old Achilles; I can’t see it, somehow. And I don’t believe that the

  Alexander I knew ever had the slightest intention of living to be fifty, if

  there was any way it could possibly be avoided.

  Yapping Dog history, take it or leave it; none of it matters much now, in any

  event. If you’re ill-mannered enough to insist that I offer some token scrap of

  evidence to back up my wild innuendoes, consider this. The man Pausanias was a

  guardsman, one of the Companions. I don’t remember him from my time at Mieza,

  but Pausanias was a fairly common Macedonian name at that time, so who knows,

  maybe the poor fool was a student of mine. One thing that’s certain is that the

  young Companions had been raised from birth to be unquestioningly loyal to

  Prince Alexander, to do whatever he ordered them to do regardless of the

  consequences to themselves. Of course, it’s possible that one of these carefully

  prepared young noblemen could have been so obsessed with sexual jealousy over a

  middle-aged one-eyed drunkard that he broke clear of everything he’d been

  brought up to revere to the extent of stabbing his lord’s father to death on his

  daughter’s wedding day; anything’s possible where human nature is concerned, as

  witness my friend Tyrsenius and Callixena, or Anabruzas and his son. But I was

  taught to yap like a dog when I was a boy, and I’ve come to the conclusion that

  it’s as good a way of looking at the world as any, and probably better than

  most. So sue me.

  In the twelfth year of the colony we finally got a decent growth of grapes, and

  I was pleased and proud to announce, in my official capacity as cecist, that

  henceforth, for the first time in its history, our city was going to be

  self-sufficient in booze.

  Naturally, we had to celebrate; but instead of letting us have a cheerful

  spur-of-the-moment party, our noble Founders decided that it would be more

  appropriate to combine our first vintage with a ceremony of thanksgiving to

  commemorate our tenth anniversary. This was an eminently reasonable thing to do

  in our twelfth year (by Founder logic, at any rate), and the highlight of the

  affair would be the official dedication of the city, something we’d

  unaccountably forgotten to do twelve years back, preferring to fritter away our

  time on building stockades and digging latrines.

  The slight difficulty was that, in order to dedicate a city, you really do need

  to have a name for it, and we still hadn’t got round to thinking of one.

  Instead, we’d thought of several. The Nowheresville joke had worn thin by now,

  and most of us simply referred to the place as Polis, ‘the city’. Our Greek

  neighbours called us Nea Polis (‘the new city ’) or Macedones (‘the

  Macedonians’), or just Houtoi (‘Oh, Them’). After Philip’s death, the Founders

  stopped calling it Philipsville-in-the­best-of-all-possible-worlds, for some

  reason, and found ways of phras­ing their remarks so as to avoid naming it at

  all. What the Scythians called us we didn’t know for sure, though we could

  guess.

  So, for a month or two before the planned vintage party, we talked about nothing

  else but what we were going to call the city. It was a game that everybody could

  play, and once the obligatory jokes were out of the way, we took it surprisingly

  seriously. I guess it was a sign that we’d finally stopped thinking of ourselves

  as Macedonians or Athenian
s or Corinthians, or even as Illyrians or, come to

  that, Budini; we no longer regarded stories of what was going on as news from

  home, but rather as strange and rather irrelevant happenings in places we used

  to know, in a part of our lives that was getting more and more distant and

  improbable-seeming with every successive har­vest and winter. We were, in other

  words, all starting to think of our­selves as citizens of something, so it’s

  logical, I suppose, that we should take an intelligent interest in what

  something was going to be called.

  Tyrsenius, in a fit of that nauseating sentimentality that was becoming an

  increasingly dominant facet of his personality, proposed that we call the place

  Callixene, after his wife. On another level, of course, it could be interpreted

  as meaning ‘beautiful foreign city’, but that didn’t do terribly much for the

  rest of us, because of course it wasn’t foreign any more, it was home. A Founder

  called Menippus suggested Apoecia, which means both ‘colony’ and ‘home from

  home’; neat, but too slick for us. We wanted something plain but substantial.

  Another Founder suggested Euxenopolis — a triple mean­ing; ‘city friendly to

  strangers’, ‘city on the Black Sea’ and ‘city founded by Euxenus’, but I

  persuaded him to withdraw the sug­gestion by offering to cut his throat for him

  if he didn’t. Nobody seemed to care much for my suggestion, Alexandria ap’Olbia.

  Obviously, this was blatant patronage-seeking, just the sort of minor toadying

  that Alexander would appreciate — our balance of payments position wasn’t

  getting any worse, but it wasn’t improving much, either, and rather too much of

  the silver money we earned from selling our surplus grain to our

  better-established neighbours (for resale to the old country) tended to stay

  with them as interest on their original loans to us from a decade ago. For the

  price of our self-respect, we might be able to coax Alexander into letting us

  have some of the money his father had promised us and never sent, which would

  make it possible to clear off some of the overhead and start building up a

  little working capital of our own. When I tried to explain this idea, however,

  the eyelids of my fellow citizens began to droop and the eyes beneath those lids

  began to glaze, and I gave it up before I made myself unpopular.

  In the end it came down to two contenders; Apollonia, because our temple was

  nominally dedicated to Apollo (and the reason for that was that Agenor the

  sculptor happened to have a statue of Apollo on his hands, as the result of a

  cancelled order, and offered it to the temple wardens at next best thing to

  cost); or Antolbia (‘Just across the way from Olbia’), a suggestion which, for

  all its manifold and obvious faults, at least had the virtue of being both

  accurate and useful for traders who wanted to visit us but didn’t know where to

  look for us.

  We settled on Antolbia — it turned out there was another Apollonia near enough

  to cause problems — and moved on to the next phase of the job in hand, namely

  getting ready for our vintage party.

  Well, the first thing you need for a successful vintage party is wine; so we

  made some of that, quite a lot of it, in fact. Needless to say we made our wine

  Greek style, and since (if the muck in the cup in front of me as I write is

  anything to go by) you people still have a lot to learn about this noble art, I

  think I’d better describe how we go about it. This isn’t a hint or anything; but

  the duty of a historian is to record things which may prove useful or inspiring

  to future generations, so pay close attention.

  Now then; it’s early autumn, Arcturus is rising and the grapes are the right

  size and shape. Having secured the services of everybody in your community who

  can walk but not move fast enough to get out of the way when you come round

  recruiting, you hasten to the vineyard, taking with you an ample supply of large

  wicker baskets, fine-meshed nets and the makings of your pressing-box. If

  possible, induce the others to do the hot, back-breaking work of filling the

  baskets with grapes. You’ll be far better off assembling the pressing-box, which

  consists of a block of timber about four feet square, with raised sides, four

  legs (the front pair shorter than the back pair) and a spout at the front for

  the grape-juice to drain through. Willing helpers then take the bunches of

  grapes from the baskets and load them into a dirty great bag made out of light,

  flexible wickerwork, which fits nicely inside the pressing-box. You then

  scramble up into the box and start crushing the grapes through the bag, starting

  off by using your knees, then standing up and squeezing out the remaining juice

  with firm, even pressure from the soles of your feet. The juice drains off down

  the spout into jars, which you later load onto your cart, take home and decant

  into your large fermentation vessels, where it stays for at least six months,

  until you’ve finished all your pruning and Arcturus starts rising at dusk; only

  then do you tap it off into small jars, seal them with resin and either drink it

  or sell it to the unwary. This method produces a light, sharp white wine that

  you can drink all night in a half-and-half mix without dying or having to be

  taken home in a wheelbarrow.

  The other method we sometimes used, which is vastly inferior but still better

  than yours, is to cart the grapes home and crush them in a huge baked-earth vat,

  big enough to hold your entire crop of grapes and at least three people, and

  fitted with a tap or spigot a foot or so above ground level. You leave the skins

  and pips in with the juice, cover the vat over with dressed hides and go away

  for six months or so, until it’s time to draw off the dark, murky result of your

  endeavours into jars. This method gets you a heavy red wine that tastes of decay

  and death, and which is best drunk neat, with plenty of honey and grated cheese,

  by people who lead unhappy lives in some distant town.

  Well, we made our wine by the first method, and settled down to wait for it to

  perform its small miracle. We had plenty of work to be getting on with in the

  meanwhile; ploughing and sowing, getting the beans in, followed by late

  ploughing at solstice and breaking up the fallow to let the frost in. As the

  summer faded, it became cool enough to sit out in the sun at midday , so we were

  able to catch up on the backlog of lawsuits we’d had to hold over during the hot

  season. That year, I recall, we had the Attack Rainwater case, which has stuck

  in my mind for no great reason other than the incredible ferocity with which it

  was waged by the two fools involved in it.

  The fundamental premise was reasonable enough. If your neigh­bour’s land lies

  above yours on the hillside and it’s been an unusually hot summer (as this one

  was) there’s always a risk that if it rains heavily, the run-off will come

  cascading down the slope in a flood and wash out anything you’ve planted that

  happens to get in its way. The defendant in this case had anticipated this

  contingency when he first moved in and took the place in hand twelve years

  previously; he’d dug a conduit to ru
n the water across the side of the hill and

  down to his barns, where it could be used for watering the animals and do some

  good. But there hadn’t been any flash floods for the next ten years, and in the

  meanwhile his neighbour (the plaintiff) had been rather careless about letting

  his goats wander, so the defendant built a stone wall on his downhill boundary

  to keep the four-legged pirates out. In building this wall he blocked the (by

  now forgotten) conduit; so when the rains came after our long, hot summer and

  the water was pouring down the hill in sheets, instead of being led safely away

  into docile captivity it dammed up at the foot of the wall, overflowed and

  rampaged through the plaintiff’s onion patch like a Spartan army.

  There followed a sharp and forthright exchange of opinions between the parties,

  followed in turn by a punch-up and litigation. It wouldn’t have been so bad if

  the defendant (an Illyrian) hadn’t convincingly won the punch-up, thereby

  changing the nature of the conflict from a dispute between neighbouring farmers

  into a rematch in the eternal battle between good and evil.

  If ever there’s a vacancy among the Judges of the Dead, and I’m co-opted to fill

  it, the first thing I’ll do is recommend that they punish people who’ve been

  very wicked indeed in this life by making them members of a jury hearing a

  dispute between two farmers. It’s a fine irony that, whoever wins or loses the

  case itself, the people who suffer most are the poor fools who have to sit still

  for the best part of a day and find some way of staying awake while, for

  example, a small, excitable Greek and a large, taciturn Illyrian share their

  feelings for each other in a public place. The plaintiff, a man who seemed to

  believe that the more often you say something the truer it gets, alienated me so

  badly while presenting his side of the argument that I’d have unhesitatingly

  found for the defendant if the court had risen immediately after they turned

  over the clock. Once the defendant started to speak, however, I quickly revised

  my judgement. Where the plaintiff had told a simple tale at insufferable length,

  the defendant tried to compress a bewilderingly complicated narrative into a few

  incomplete sentences and a succession of inarticulate grunts. As far as I could