Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt

by Alexander at the World's End (lit)

  your father set me free.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘You were going to go into the rope-making business.’

  ‘I did,’ he said, nodding. ‘Worked for fifteen years in a ropewalk in Piraeus ,

  till I saved up enough to start up on my own. I was doing all right, too.’

  I waited for a moment, then said, ‘What happened?’

  ‘There was a fire,’ he said. ‘My wife, my boy, the two lads I had working with

  me, the house, all the stock and materials — it’s tricky stuff, rope. Actually,

  it’s the tar we put on it to keep it from rotting. One spark and the next thing

  you know—’ He smiled; or at least his lips pressed together and widened, and his

  body shook a little. ‘They fished me out, but they shouldn’t have bothered. It’s

  nothing but a waste of good food keeping me alive now.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘So why are you here?’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, nobody was going to keep me back in Piraeus , I’d have

  starved. But I thought, the boys back at the farm, they might look after me for

  old times’ sake. Of course, when I got here I heard, they’re all. . . Except

  Master Eudemus, and he’s no better off than I am really. He lost an eye, you

  know, in the battle.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘That reminds me; do you happen to know where he is?’

  Syrus turned his head towards me. ‘Didn’t you know? He — I’m sorry, Euxenus,

  he’s gone too. Some kind of illness, I never heard any more.’

  I sighed. ‘That’s it, then,’ I said. ‘It looks like it’s just me. And you,’ I

  added. ‘So you got here and you found they were all dead. What then?’

  ‘Your cousin, Philocarpus; he let me sleep in the barn and eat with the hired

  help. That was kind of him, he didn’t need to do anything like that. But he only

  laughed and said I went with the land, like some old tree-trunk it’s easier to

  plough round than dig out.Then he came and told me he was having to move on back

  to Priene, because you’d won your case. He didn’t make it sound like I could go

  with him, so I stayed here.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘Is there anything at all you can do?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I’ll be straight with you, Euxenus, there isn’t much.’ He lifted

  his hands; I could see the scar tissue from the burns even in that poor light.

  ‘I can grind, and turn the olive-press, if someone else fills the hopper. That’s

  about it.’

  ‘I see. Fine inheritance you turned out to be.’ I opened the flap of my satchel

  and pulled out a small, half-empty jar of rough wine that had been keeping me

  company as I walked out from the City. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘help yourself.’ He found

  the neck with his hands and drank deeply, spilling wine down his chin. ‘Just you

  and me,’ I repeated. ‘And I’ve come ever such a long way to get here.’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t follow,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I replied. ‘Look, you can carry on dossing down in the

  barn, and I’ll see you don’t starve. What do you do all day?’

  ‘Not a lot I can do,’ he said. ‘I sit, mostly.’

  ‘Sounds pretty boring.’

  ‘It is,’ he said. ‘But there’s worse things than boring. Thank you, Euxenus.’

  ‘Forget it,’ I replied. ‘Doesn’t sound like I’m doing you any favours, at that.’

  He smiled again. ‘Remains to be seen, doesn’t it?’ he said.

  And that my young friend, is how, after a lifetime of wandering and striving

  after achievement, I finally attained what had always been my heart’s desire,

  the life and dignity of an Athenian gentleman. Curious; if I’d known that all I

  had to do was manage to reach the age of forty-one without dying, I’d have

  stayed at home and kept myself amused with pottering around the market square,

  telling lies for money, rather than educating the sons of kings or founding

  cities, and maybe an awful lot of people would still be alive today; Scythians,

  Illyrians, Greeks... Not to mention a fair number of Persians, Medes, Bactrians,

  Cappadocians, Armenians, Gedrosians, Drangianae, Fish-eating Ethiopians (so

  called to distinguish them from the other Ethiopians, who live in Africa),

  Arians, Massagetae, Egyptians and Indians whose deaths are probably partly my

  fault as well. I remember hearing once about some savage king of somewhere or

  other who had a road running the length of his empire paved with the skulls of

  his enemies. I can go one better than that. I travelled from Pallene to Pallene

  by way of Macedon and Olbia, walking a road paved with the dead bodies of my

  family and friends.

  ‘Self-pity, Euxenus,’ you’re muttering at me, Phryzeutzis, as you smile the

  patronising smile of the tolerant young. ‘You’re exaggerating for effect again.

  That’s not the way to write history.’

  I won’t argue with you; thirty years ago, now, and you’d have had a real

  dialectic fight on your hands, but these days the sound of my own voice raised

  in debate simply makes me feel tired. So I’ll concede the point, if it makes you

  feel any better. Anyway, I don’t need to use any philosopher’s tricks to make my

  point. Picture me and Syrus, sitting opposite each other in the empty house in

  Pallene; that’ll be far more eloquent than I ever was, even when I was young and

  fiery.

  So we won’t overplay the melodrama. During the day I didn’t crouch in the ashes

  like a heroine out of Euripides; I went out into the fields — my fields — and I

  worked, bloody hard. For a while I was an inspiration to my neighbours. ‘Up

  before dawn,’ their wives would tell them, ‘and off with the team or the

  mattock, never comes home till dark, and he’s got that place looking as good as

  it was in his father’s day, all on his own. Why can’t you be more like Euxenus?’

  And yet, in spite of that, they were still prepared to talk to me. They wanted

  to hear all my fabulous tales of far away, about King Philip’s court and the

  boyhood of Alexander (‘Is it true that when he was just a baby, he strangled two

  snakes in his cot?’), about desperate battles against the cannibal Scythians,

  and of course my opinion about the latest news from the East. ‘We heard

  Alexander’s reached Pasargadae ,’ they’d say to me, ‘where’s that?’ Whereupon

  I’d smile knowingly and reply that they didn’t want to go believing everything

  they heard (which is good advice at all times, though as a matter of fact

  Alexander had indeed reached Pasargadae, wherever the hell that is, and had

  turned north­east towards Ecbatana). That would impress them no end, though I

  don’t imagine they had a clue why they found it impressive, and maybe they’d

  even buy me another drink.

  In short, I became a prosperous and well-respected citizen; you might almost say

  a model citizen, the sort of person you’d want living in your perfect society. I

  got the vineyards back into shape, put some heart into the soil by ploughing

  five times a year and growing beans in the off year; I repaired my walls and

  trellises, pruned back my trees, shored up my terraces, interplanted barley

  between my rows of olive trees so that not a square yard of good soil went idle.

  I saved up and bought a couple of slaves, good, strong mi
ddle-aged men who

  worked long hours silently and never gave me any bother. I was as near as you’ll

  ever get, in fact, to the Good Farmer, that enigmatic character you read about

  in the books on good husbandry that people like Aristotle are so fond of

  writing; ‘the good farmer,’ they say, ‘takes the trouble to sow vetch and lupins

  on the fallow, both to put heart into the soil and provide winter fodder for his

  livestock.’ When I was young I used to picture this paragon of virtue, trying to

  imagine the expression on his face as he carefully lifts a crumb of soil to his

  tongue on the tip of his little finger, to ascertain whether it’s too sour for

  growing wheat, or his quiet smile of satisfaction as he inspects the flourishing

  shoots he’s grafted onto his vines to boost their productivity. But I never

  quite managed to get a fix on him until one day I was looking something up in

  one of those damned manuals, and realised, with rather mixed feelings, that he

  was me.

  Now, they’re all well and good, those books, but they never tell you enough.

  They don’t tell you what this good farmer does the rest of the time; at night,

  when he’s finished repairing broken tool-handles by wrapping them with saturated

  rawhide or plaiting himself a useful rope out of the loose hairs he’s saved off

  the curry-comb; when it’s late and the house is empty, and he sits alone in the

  dark instead of going to bed. On reflection, though, that situation wouldn’t

  arise for the good farmer, because he married a good wife in chapter three

  (industrious, good at spinning and weaving, capable of helping with field work

  in the busy season, not inclined to drink or gossiping with other women) and

  their union was blessed in chapter five by the birth

  of three strong, healthy sons (four is too many, placing too much strain on the

  farm’s resources; two isn’t enough, because one of them may die young and leave

  the farm short of manpower), who will presumably inherit come chapter

  twenty-nine, when the good farmer dies, surrounded by family and friends, with a

  finger stuck in the book to mark the place in case he needs to refer to it for

  instructions before the end finally comes. Maybe I wasn’t the good farmer after

  all; or maybe he never actually existed. You know, the more I read, the more

  sceptical I get. I never met the man who farms like the good farmer, or the

  soldier who fights like Achilles or the heroes in Homer, or the citizen who

  participates in the ideal society, or even the great historical personage who

  bore any resemblance to the description in a book of history; even, I hasten to

  add, this book of history, as written by me.

  We finally made a start on patching up that old barn. The incentive was a freak

  rainstorm — we get them every ten years or so — which washed the last of the

  thatch off the roof and nearly drowned old Syrus and my two slaves. Now, the

  Good Farmer naturally takes care of his slaves; they are, after all, his most

  valuable perishable asset, and if they die of pneumonia or even if they miss

  work for a week or so because they’re ill, it’s a dead loss. Accordingly, he

  makes sure that their quarters are dry and warm, and that they’re adequately fed

  and clothed. You’ll find specifications for the ideal slave rations in those

  excellent books, the perfect balance of nutrition and economy; an ideal to

  which, I confess, I never aspired. They knew where the grain-store was, and they

  helped themselves. I suspect that if I’d taken the trouble to follow the ideal,

  I’d have spent more on fancy padlocks and Molossian watchdogs to keep them from

  pilfering than I’d ever have saved on barley, cheese and figs.

  The stones were mostly still where they’d fallen; we’d used a few over the years

  to patch up walls, but not many. All we had to do was figure out how they fitted

  together and put them back. Simple.

  In theory. It’s a basic rule of nature that putting something back together is

  always a hundred times harder than taking it apart; as witness that barn. It was

  so easy to bring it down that the wind and weather managed it without human

  assistance. If I’d thought of it, I could have hired a Thessalian witch to catch

  the wind in a bag and ask it if it remembered how the stones fitted. But I

  didn’t; I tried to figure it out for myself, and as a result arrived at Euxenus’

  Law of applied geometry, which states that just because things fitted together

  once, it doesn’t follow that they’ll fit that way again. It’s a good law, that,

  and I think you’ll agree if you’ve been paying attention to this story that it

  doesn’t just apply to dry-stone walling.

  After two frustrating days of skinned knuckles, wrenched backs and foul tempers,

  we decided to adopt a more radical approach, involving cold chisels and big

  hammers. I borrowed the necessary tools from my neighbours and we set to work,

  trimming and shaping the stones to make them fit. Although I hadn’t actually

  done any masonry work myself, I’d stood and watched Agenor a score of times over

  the years, and he always made it look easy. Without scribing a line or taking

  measurements he’d simply tap-tap a couple of times with the chisel, then give

  one sharp, hard tap and split off the irregular chunk of stone, leaving a

  smooth, flat face that would lie nicely flush against its neighbour. The waste

  material came away like rust flaking off an iron ploughshare; the desired shape

  was already in the stone, and all he had to do was strike off the encumbrances.

  He never swung the hammer in great double-handed sweeps; just those little

  woodpecker taps up and down a convenient fault-line. Definitely the way to go;

  nothing to it.

  For some reason it didn’t work that way when we tried it. Either we got nowhere,

  scarcely even marking the stone, or else it exploded under the hammer into a

  shower of razor-sharp fragments, like the results of the technique they use in

  the quarries when they heat the rock with bellows and a brazier, then throw

  vinegar on it to make it shatter. Unfortunately for all of us, this total lack

  of progress annoyed me so much that I resolved to persevere and succeed at all

  costs. Match the intransigence of stone, I said to myself, against the infinite

  flexibility of the human mind, and eventually you’ll get a row of neatly dressed

  masonry blocks, together with the immeasurable satis­faction of knowing you’ve

  won. True, my philosopher’s brain had proved itself not to be entirely up to the

  task of building the ideal city, but a simple thing like chipping out a few

  blocks of stone, something that an unlettered and uneducated man like Agenor

  could do so easily, ought to be well within my capabilities.

  ‘Keep at it,’ I commanded. ‘And keep your mind on what you’re doing.’

  They looked at me, wiped sweat ostentatiously from their fore­heads, and renewed

  their assault on the stone. They may possibly even have lost their tempers just

  a little, or perhaps they were playing the game we all play when we’ve got a

  tedious job to do that involves hitting or slashing, and imagined that the rock

  was me; in any event, the chips started flying in all directions, and I, being a

 
; prudent man as well as a philosopher, muttered something about measuring up and

  retired to a safe distance.

  I was fooling about with a measuring rod when I heard one of the slaves —

  Sclerus, his name was, or at least that was the name I’d given him; he was a

  Celt, from Galatia, and what they call themselves is nobody’s business but their

  own — yelp loudly enough to make me drop my rod, and then started swearing in

  Galatian.

  ‘Now what?’ I said.

  ‘Got something in my eye,’ he replied.

  I looked round, and saw that he was crouched on the ground with his hands over

  his face. He’d stopped swearing and started making a sort of whimpering noise,

  which was most unlike him.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘A bit of that damned stone,’ replied his colleague, a Sicilian I called

  Aeschrus. ‘It flew up and hit him in the eye.’

  ‘Let me see,’ I said; but Sclerus didn’t want to take his hands away from his

  face. I could see blood trickling down his cheek. ‘Aeschrus, hold his hands,’ I

  said. ‘This is no time for melodrama.’

  Aeschrus was a big strong lad; Sclerus was tall but thin and bony. So Aeschrus

  twisted his arms behind his back and I held his head still. I could see the

  splinter easily enough; he’d had his eye shut, but the splinter had gone right

  through it, pinning it to the eyeball. ‘That looks bad,’ I said. ‘Get him into

  the house.’

  I broke a thin piece of bronze off the rim of a wooden bowl and bent it double

  to make a pair of tweezers, with which I was able, eventually, to pull the

  splinter out. It wasn’t easy; the splinter was an awkward shape and I couldn’t

  get a grip, and every time I tried Sclerus would roar with pain and thrash about

  like a deer that’s run into the nets during a forest drive. When eventually it

  did come out, a lot of blood came with it, and the poor man fainted. While he

  was out I washed the wound with hot water on a clean bit of rag until the

  bleeding stopped; then I gave Aeschrus some money and told him to run to the

  City and see if he could find a doctor.

  He came back that evening with the money but no doctor. He’d tried four, he

  said, but they were all either busy or not at home. I don’t think a doctor could