thousands of men crammed into our dusty little market square, with Alexander’s
vast siege ramps and assault towers poking their noses over our low,
burned-brick wall. Where did you see Gaugamela , I wonder? Don’t tell me; either
the temple lot, before we started the building work, or the patch of scrubby
orchard behind the water-tanks. Of course your Alexander will have been
dark-haired and black-eyed, with a tall felt cap on his head as he rode his
short-legged, round-nosed pony in the cavalry charge at Arbela —was Arbela the
battle with the cavalry charge, or am I thinking of the Granicus? My Alexander,
you see, is getting fainter as the years go by, while our civic Alexander gets
bigger and bolder and more godlike as each year passes, as each year of children
meet him for the first time on Founder’s Day, with the cake sweating honey
through their hot little fingers. The day will come when I won’t recognise our
Alexander at all, the way a senile father forgets his own children.
But we’re not there quite yet; so indulge me and put aside your personal
Alexander for a moment, or try to think of the man I’m going to talk about as
someone else who coincidentally had the same name.
Before setting out on his great adventure, Alexander of Macedon cleared up all
his father’s outstanding business in Greece . He had four of his relatives
murdered; they were too close to the throne to be left behind, and they weren’t
wanted on the journey. They were the two brothers of the King of Lyncestis, a
bastard son of King Philip’s and the son of Philip’s elder brother, as whose
regent Philip had been crowned in the first place.
Alexander went to Corinth with an army to be officially installed as Captain of
the Greeks in his father’s place. While he was there, so they tell me, he paid a
visit to one Diogenes, known as the Yapping Dog, who’d moved to Corinth from
Athens a few years earlier for the good of his health. Now, it may be that he
remembered some of the things his old tutor had told him about Diogenes, or
maybe the great philosopher (who I thought had been dead for years at this
point) was included on every sightseeing tour; in any case, Alexander summoned
Diogenes for an audience. Diogenes didn’t turn up. So Alexander went to see
Diogenes.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘My name is Alexander.’
Diogenes (or at any rate, my Diogenes) grunted and said nothing. He was sitting,
naked as the day he was born, on a flat stone half a
mile outside the city, staring up at the hills. As I picture him, he must have
looked pretty much like a thin brown lizard. Alexander studied him for a few
minutes, as if getting ready to write an essay for his next tutorial, while
behind him the soldiers of his bodyguard shuffled their feet and the Corinthian
civic dignitaries cringed with embarrassment and wondered how in hell they were
going to get out of this in one piece.
‘Are you all right, sitting there?’ Alexander asked eventually.
‘Mphm.’
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’
Silence.
‘Is there anything at all I can do for you? Anything you want? Just name it.’
Then this long brown lizard of mine turned his head and opened one lidless
reptilian eye. ‘Since you ask,’ he said, ‘there is.’
Alexander’s lips curled in a small smile, an I-thought-there-might-be
expression. He might have remembered being taught when he was a boy that power,
like money, works rather like magic, because it can make people do things they
normally wouldn’t, and can make possible things that normally aren’t. ‘Name it,’
he said, ‘and you’ll get it. You have my word.’
The lizard nodded. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘move a bit to the left. You’re
getting in my light.’
At which, so they tell me, this Alexander was bitterly offended, and it was only
his respect for the grand old man of Yapping Dog philosophy that kept him from
losing his temper and having the old fool punished. ‘That’s no favour for a king
to grant,’ he said.
‘All right,’ Diogenes replied. ‘If it makes you any happier, give me a thousand
talents in gold.’
Alexander smiled; a very thin smile, probably. ‘That’s no gift for a Yapping Dog
to receive,’ he said.
Diogenes nodded. ‘Good answer,’ he replied. ‘I can see the time I spent on you
hasn’t been entirely wasted.’
Alexander raised one perfect godlike eyebrow. ‘I don’t follow you,’ he said.
‘What?’ Diogenes sat up, resting on one elbow. ‘Oh, sorry, for a moment there I
thought you were someone I used to know.’
It was probably at this point that the Corinthian civic dignitaries suggested
that now would be a good time to go and look at the new aqueduct.
After that, Alexander took an army into Thrace and Illyria and beat hell out of
the natives there, for reasons that doubtless made a lot of sense at the time.
He pushed up as far as the Danube — we heard about him from the Scythians (it
was before the trouble started), who seemed to blame us for all the disturbance
and bother their south-eastern cousins were having, though we assured them that
Alexander was no fault of ours. He very nearly died up there, as a result of
carelessness and overconfidence, but he pulled himself out again with some
brilliantly imaginative improvisation that wouldn’t have been needed if he’d
been paying attention when we did Brasidas’ northern campaigns...
But news of his supposed death reached the ancient and powerful city of Thebes ,
which for a while, in my father’s time, had been the most important power in
Greece . Immediately, the Theban government resolved to throw off the Macedonian
yoke and restore their city to its former glory — a bit like the mice declaring
war on the gram-bin once they’ve heard the cat is dead. At least one of their
politicians urged a degree of caution; wait a week or so, he suggested, just in
case. ‘After all,’ he told them, ‘if Alexander’s dead today, then he’ll still be
dead tomorrow. Who knows, he may even still be dead the day after tomorrow; and
then we can declare war on Macedon.’
But nobody listened; which was a pity, because when Alexander came back to life
again, he stormed Thebes, massacred the citizens and had the place levelled —
except for the house where Pindar, the celebrated poet, was supposed to have
lived a hundred years or so ago; it’s nice to see that all those hot, dull
afternoons scanning iambic pentameters under the fig-tree in Mieza turned him
into a man of culture and refinement.
After that he went back to Macedon, where his mother had just murdered his
father’s second wife by roasting her alive over a charcoal brazier, to discover
that he had inherited from his father a balance of payments deficit of three
million drachmas, which, as I understand it, is roughly how much it would cost
to build the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
To say he was annoyed would be an understatement. Imagine how Achilles would
have felt if, having killed Hector under the Scaean Gate and stripped him of his
armour, he’d had that same armour impounded
by the bailiffs on account of unpaid
forage bills. As far as Alexander was concerned, his Alexander wasn’t supposed
to have to bother with stuff like that, so he did the only honourable thing and
pretended he hadn’t heard. Instead, he borrowed a further five million drachmas
(I have no idea who from) and marched into Asia with forty thousand men. His
first stop, they tell me, was Troy, where he broke open the vault of the temple
and helped himself to a shield that was supposed to have belonged to Achilles—
‘Achilles was lucky,’ he told someone at the time. ‘He had Homer to praise him.’
What the other guy said is not, for some reason, recorded.
In spite of Tyrsenius’ dire warnings, we did manage to hire some mercenaries; a
hundred Budini horse-archers and fifty or so Thracian light cavalry. The Budini
were very much like the ones we’d already met, but the Thracians were a
miserable bunch, mostly men who’d been thrown out of their villages for
antisocial behaviour of one sort or another. Nobody liked them very much, but
they kept to themselves and only bothered those of us who hung around their camp
looking for trouble. Nevertheless; we were paying them by the day and they
weren’t cheap, which was a further incentive to us to make a move.
Even so, I persuaded my colleagues to restrain their enthusiasm for a little
longer, simply because the longer we left it, the better our chances would be of
taking them off-guard. We needed the element of surprise. With our deficiency in
cavalry, we couldn’t mount the sort of lightning raid they’d hit us with, and
besides, we had something rather more permanent in mind than killing a few
people at random and torching a handful of buildings.
After endless meetings, discussions, debates, councils of war and other
exercises in communal futility, I made a decision. I wasn’t the best person to
decide the matter, gods know, and I’m not entirely sure to this day whether I
actually had the authority to be quite so unilateral about it, but what mattered
was that nobody else knew I didn’t have the authority. If I hadn’t forced the
issue, I console myself, we’d probably still be arguing about it now; or at any
rate, our grandchildren would.
My idea was to send the Thracians on a make-believe cattle raid. If they were
sufficiently convincing (and I couldn’t see any reason why they wouldn’t be; in
their particular dialect ofThracian, the words for ‘soldier’, ‘hero’,
‘cattle-thief’ and ‘unmitigated bastard’ are all the same) this would have the
effect of turning out the able-bodied and warlike inhabitants of the village en
masse, leaving the way clear for us to walk in through the front gate. When the
village warriors realised they’d been had, of course, they’d turn back and ride
like hell for home, knowing perfectly well what the diversion was in aid of; at
which point they’d be ambushed by the Budini and the infantry reserve, with the
Thracians coming in at the end to murder and rob the walking wounded. Finally,
the ambush contingent would join the main body of the army to help with the
demolition work.
Two days before we were scheduled to go, I was sitting in the back room of my
house polishing my armour. If you could have seen me then, you’d have got a very
good idea of the priority that matters military had had in my general view of
things up to that point, because my helmet and breastplate were as green as the
lush grass of the Vale of Tempe, the clip in the left-hand greave had gone soft,
and the little patch that had been brazed over the hole in the backplate,
through which Death had come to visit the armour’s previous one careful owner,
had come away on two sides and was curling up like a dry leaf. That armour was
worth exactly what I paid for it, which is another way of saying it was junk.
‘Someone to see you,’ Theano said. She had an expression on her face that I just
couldn’t place, though I could deduce enough to know it wasn’t a happy one.
‘All right,’ I sighed, putting the breastplate down. ‘I’ll come through.’
As I walked into the main room, I nearly fell over.
‘Well, you’ve got a nerve,’ I said, as soon as I felt able to speak. ‘What the
hell are you doing here?’
Anabruzas, my old acquaintance, stood up. As he did so, the three men
Marsamleptes had set to watch his every move started forward and grabbed their
daggers. I frowned and shook my head, and they backed off, looking disappointed.
‘Thank you for the welcome,’ Anabruzas said. ‘Is there any point trying to talk
to you?’
I took a deep breath, nodded and told him to sit down. ‘I’d always rather talk
than fight,’ I said. ‘I suppose that’s the difference between us. Now, what’s on
your mind?’
He looked at Marsemleptes’ men, then at me, and sat down, rather as if he
expected the chair to come alive and bite him. ‘I told them not to do it,’ he
said. ‘You know by now that I can’t stop them doing something they’ve set their
hearts on doing, but I did hope I could talk sense into them. I couldn’t, so
there it is.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘So you’re telling me you have absolutely no authority to
negotiate any kind of settlement.’
He rubbed his eyes, like a very tired man. ‘What they’re saying,’ he replied,
‘is that there’s no point trying to talk to you now because after what happened,
you’re never going to listen. If I can go back to them and tell them otherwise,
I might be able to make them see sense.’
I looked at him, then said, ‘And if you do go back and tell them we’re ready to
talk, what makes you think they’ll trust either of us?’
He smiled sadly. ‘They know me,’ he said. ‘And they’ve dealt with Greeks long
enough to know that they take this sort of thing seriously
— you know, treaties and oaths and honour, the sort of thing you make laws and
write poems about. Oh, you’ll bend the law right back on itself if it gives you
an advantage, but you’ll stick to the letter of it. A wise man from one of the
other nations of my people once said that Greek laws are like our bows; they’re
designed to be bent almost indefinitely but never to be broken.’
‘That’s neat,’ I said. ‘I must use it myself some time. And if I try really
hard, I suppose I could interpret that as a compliment to our integrity. Now, do
you have anything specific to propose, or is this just an exercise in vague
hand-wringing?’
He shook his head. ‘I have a very specific proposal,’ he replied. ‘I propose
that we pay blood-money for your people who were killed, as if this was a family
feud between us; then we join together to build a wall between your land and
ours, which we both undertake never to cross without the other’s leave. And,
since you have no particular reason to trust us without some sort of security,
we’ll send you the second sons of each of our leading families as hostages;
hereafter, for every Greek who’s killed by one of us, you’ll be entitled to
execute five of our children.’
I nodded. ‘That’s a very favourable ratio,’ I said. ‘But personally I’d rather<
br />
you simply gave up killing Greeks.’
‘So would I,’ he replied angrily. ‘I still have one son left—’
‘Which is more than can be said of me,’ I broke in. I felt guilty for saying it,
though I’m not sure why. It was as if it was cheating to equate his son with
mine, because he’d loved his son... The thought made me frown.
He looked at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and I knew he meant it. ‘But you must try
to understand, we don’t think the way you do, and I’m trying to be realistic.
With the best will in the world I can’t guarantee there won’t be any more
killings. If I pretended otherwise, I’d end up being proved a liar, and then
there’d be no hope of peace after that. All I can do is try and arrange matters
so that, if there is any more violence, we know that we’ll come out of it far
worse off than you. If there’s anything else you think I can do, please tell
me.’
I didn’t say anything; I was thinking, what a remarkable man this was, a man
who’d sent his own son to be ritually slaughtered by us the first time he’d
tried to make peace; and here he was again, asking to be allowed to send us his
other son, fully expecting that there’d be a time when we slaughtered him, too.
This man was no philosopher, he didn’t profess to disregard the material world
as an unimportant illusion. There are philosophers and holy men who offer up
their lives and the lives of those they love for the good of others because they
put no value on life, and so they offer something they don’t care much about.
That’s cheating, of course. And I’ve heard that among some of the Scythian
tribes, when their king dies his wives and servants and companions are pleased
and honoured to have their legs and necks broken and be buried in the same mound
as their lord, because it means they’ll go to the pastures in the land of the
dead that are specifically reserved for kings and great lords, instead of the
cold steppes where commoners go. That’s cheating; it’s haggling with death for a
better deal, getting a higher price for what you’ve got to trade than it’s
actually worth. And those men who die in battle, whose names are read out before
the people and whose sons are honoured on Remembrance Day with laurel crowns and
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 42
