side. Before we could get the ships with the portable drawbridges in, they’d
sealed it again — a whole ship full of workers and engineers got caught out
then, and the lot of them were killed when the enemy set their ship alight. So
we tried again next day, the whole army (except me; I was standing by); and
somehow those crazy Macedonian infantry managed to get across the jerry-rigged
drawbridges and into Tyre . The whole of the first wave got themselves killed in
the breach; and Alexander saw this and went charging in there himself, waving
his sword and yelling like a lunatic. Should’ve been killed just like all the
others. Wasn’t.
So we stormed Tyre . Killed eight thousand civilians, sold thirty thousand more
to the slave dealers, along with some of our surplus labour — we needed the
money, we were hopelessly over budget after all this fooling about, the cost of
materials alone was enough to have bankrupted a city. But we won. I guess.
Oh, and that Persian army I was telling you about? They got held up. Pure fluke;
bad roads, rivers in spate, that sort of thing. Instead of sweeping down on us
when we were at our most vulnerable and butchering us where we stood, they were
backing up in narrow mountain passes that had got blocked by freak rockslides,
or frantically repairing bridges that had been swept away by flash floods. When
they realised they weren’t going to make it in time, the Great King sent
Alexander a message with a peace offer — 10,000 talents cash and half the
empire, everything west of the Euphrates , provided he’d piss off and leave
Persia alone. They had a council of war to discuss the offer. ‘I’d take it, if I
were you,’ said old general Parmenio. ‘Sure, so would I,’ said Alexander, ‘if I
were Parmenio.’ Then he told the embassy what they could do with their offer,
and told us we were going to conquer Egypt .
In all the excitement, of course, he’d completely forgotten the reason he’d
wanted to sack Tyre in the first place; the Persian fleet, which was all poised
and set to sweep down on Greece while our backs were turned. But that turned out
all right; the Byblians and the Sidonians fell out with the Persian admirals
over something or other and buggered off in a huff, the Cypriots joined them,
and a whole bunch of ships changed sides and came over to us, asking for a job.
And that was the end of the Persian fleet, our part in its downfall being
exactly nothing.
‘Oh, well,’ my mate Peitho said to me, when we heard about this. ‘We needn’t
have bothered with Tyre after all, then.’
‘Apparently not,’ I agreed, and I chucked some more leaves in the fire.
‘How come you stayed out of the fighting?’ Peitho asked me. He’d been hit twice,
once during the dredging operation, once during the assault, and the second
arrow had put out his left eye.
‘I was standing by,’ I replied.
‘Fair enough,’ Peitho said, breathing in deeply through his nose. ‘Grows on you,
this stuff, doesn’t it?’
‘Very good for bad backs and sprained ankles,’ I said.
‘Quite likely. Hey, I wonder if Alexander realises all that business with Tyre
was for nothing?’
I thought for a moment. ‘You tell him,’ I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘T hat’s a really amazing story,’ I said, stifling a yawn. ‘And now, if it’s
all the same to you, I really must go and get some—’
‘Shut up,’ my brother said.
It was after the siege of Tyre , and because of the siege of Tyre , that my
friend Peitho and I realised that there was something we could do to make the
world a better place, yank the human race back from the brink of an abyss, and
win ourselves an honoured place in history at the same time.
We could kill Alexander.
Now then, brother, before you turn white and start screaming for the guards, I
ought to point out that when we reached this conclusion, Peitho and I had been
kippering ourselves in that wonderful Scythian smoke more or less non-stop for a
couple of weeks (Peitho had really bad toothache, the sort that gets to you so
completely that you can’t think of anything else, and I felt it was my duty as a
fellow human being to do what I could to alleviate his misery), so we were both
as crazy as a jarful of polecats or we’d never even have considered the idea
for a moment. After all, enough innocent, harmless men had their throats Cut
because of entirely mythical and nonexistent plots against Alexander to make a
sane man think very seriously indeed about embarking on a real one. But we,
medicated as we were from the soles of our feet to the tips of our ears, were
above such mundane considerations as fear or common sense. Really, brother, I
wish I had some of that stuff left, it’d do you a world of good. Maybe even
loosen you up a little, if that’s humanly possible.
Now, it’s all very well to say, ‘I know, let’s kill Alexander and then
everything’ll be sweet’; but getting close enough to him to stick a knife in his
back wasn’t going to be easy. First off, he was surrounded day and night by his
lifelong companions, the young Macedonian nobles you prattled away to in dear
old Mieza; animals, the lot of them, who’d cleave your skull without a moment’s
hesitation if they didn’t like the way you wiped your nose. I put this point to
my fellow conspirator one evening, when we’d pitched camp for the night and were
sharing a sociable lungful or two of medicine. He thought about it for a while,
while I shovelled another double handful of leaves on the fire.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Fair play to you, Eudaemon, you’ve got a point there. No
way we can get to him while the Companions are about. They’d slice us up like
bacon.
‘You bet,’ I agreed, nodding. ‘Our head’s be rolling on the deck before we got
close enough to smell his sweat.’
Peitho frowned. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘there’s no need to get all negative
about it. Like the philosopher said, a problem is just a challenge in disguise.’
‘Oh.’ I thought for a moment. ‘Which philosopher was that, then?’
‘My cousin Gelo,’ Peitho replied. ‘He wasn’t a professional philosopher, mind,
it was more like a hobby with him.’
‘I see.’ I paused, filled my lungs with smoke, held my breath for a count of
five and breathed out again slowly. ‘What about poison?’ I suggested. ‘Don’t
have to be anywhere near for that.’
Peitho scratched his head. ‘Doesn’t he have all his food tasted before he eats
it?’ he asked.
‘Sure,’ I replied, ‘but that’s no problem. Use a slow poison. Something that
doesn’t start working till the next day. Then, by the time the taster goes
bright purple and keels over, it’ll be too late to do anything about it.’
Peitho yawned. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘So you know all about poisons, then, do
you?’
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘Haven’t a clue.’
‘Me neither,’ Peitho said. ‘Know anybody we could ask?’
‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘Besides, you go around asking people about poisons,
they’ll want to know why. M
aybe there’s a book about it we could read.’
‘Probably,’ Peitho said. ‘There’s books about heaps of stuff. Who do we know
who’s got a lot of books?’
I sat back on my chair — one of those three-legged folding efforts, as I recall
— and tried to think. Wonderful insight those leaves give you, though your mind
does tend to go racing off on side-issues. ‘How about Anaxarchus?’ I suggested.
‘He’s got a whole box of the things.’
Anaxarchus was one of Alexander’s tame philosophers; he had two of them with him
on the trip, Anaxander and Callisthenes (who was the nephew of Aristotle, who
was — oh, of course, you’ve met him, haven’t you? All right, you know about
Aristotle). I’d only met Anaxarchus a couple of times, barely spoken a dozen
words to him, but if ever there was a man who was likely to own a book about
different types of poison, it’d be Anaxarchus. Not that he’d have had any use
for it, in the same way that a dagger’d be wasted on a shark.
‘All right, then,’ I said. ‘First thing in the morning, you go round there and
ask him.’
He looked up at me, eyes narrowed. ‘Why me?’ he said.
‘You’re a Macedonian,’ I replied. ‘He’ll trust you.’
‘Why? He’s isn’t Macedonian.’
I sighed and poured myself another drink. Actually, my Scythian friends had
advised me not to drink booze while using the medicine; the combination, they
claimed, could sometimes have the effect of making a man somewhat light-headed.
Never had that effect on me, though, or not that I was ever aware of.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘He’ll trust you because you belong to the ruling
class. The elite.’
‘No I don’t,’ he objected. ‘My dad works seventeen acres on the Paeonian border.
My mum isn’t even a citizen.
I shook my head. ‘Missing the point,’ I said. ‘The Macedonians are the chosen
people, the beloved of the gods. They shall inherit the flicking earth. While a
poor bloody Athenian like me goes in some philosopher’s tent asking to borrow
his copy of Poisoning for Pleasure and Profit, next thing I know, my body’ll be
waving at my head and telling it not to be a stranger. Besides,’ I added, ‘I
don’t think he likes me.’
‘Really? Why not?’
‘Because my brother was Alexander ‘s tutor.’
‘Really?’
I nodded. ‘When he was a kid.’
‘Your brother?’
‘Alexander. When Alexander was a kid. Anaxarchus is jealous because he’s only
come on the scene recently, he’s got to sit there listening
to how Euxenus said this and Euxenus said that. Cramps his style. Wouldn’t lend
me the wax out of his ears, let alone enough poison to wipe out half of bloody
Asia .’
Peitho tipped his head up and down, like a man leaning to and fro in a chair.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Suppose I’d better do it. What if he says no?’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘Why’d he do that?’
‘Maybe he hasn’t got a book about poisons,’ Peitho pointed out. ‘No reason to
think he has, when you get right down to it.’
I sighed. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Only one way to find out. Ask the bastard. Just go in
there, look the bastard straight in the fucking eye, and ask him. He’ll tell
you, I promise you.’
‘All right.’
‘How’s your tooth?’
‘Much better, thanks.’
Now, as a rule, going to bed and sleeping for a bit tended to dissipate the
effects of the medicine; but we were both of us so utterly fumigated with it
that it no longer seemed to wear off the way it had at first. Accordingly,
Peitho did go to see Anaxarchus, and afterwards he came to see me.
‘He hasn’t got one,’ he told me.
‘Buggery,’ I replied. ‘So that’s that, then.’
Peitho shook his head. ‘Not necessarily,’ he said. ‘He thinks he knows who might
have one.’
‘Ali. Right. Who?’
‘Callisthenes.’
‘Oh.’
‘Because,’ Peitho went on, ‘Gallisthenes has got copies of all his precious
uncle’s books, and it so happens, or at least so Anaxarchus reckons, that
Aristotle’s done a poisons book.’
‘Really?’
Peitho nodded. ‘Apparently. Well, it’s more your general book about plants, but
in it he seems to remember there’s a lot of stuff about which plants are
poisonous and what the poisons do to you. It’d be a start, anyhow.’
‘Better than a kick in the head,’ I agreed. ‘All right, then, you’d better go
and see Gallisthenes.’
He didn’t seem too happy about that. ‘Why me?’ he asked. ‘Why not you?’
I had an answer ready for him. ‘Because,’ I said, ‘my brother Euxenus—’
‘The tutor.’
‘That’s him. My brother Euxenus is Aristotle’s deadly enemy.They hate each
other’s guts. I’d have no chance.’
‘I see.’ Peitho thought for a moment. ‘Is there anybody in this man’s army your
brother Euxenus hasn’t pissed off in some way?’
‘Don’t know,’ I replied. ‘It’s a big army, mind.’
Callisthenes did have a copy of The Natural History of Plants, and when Peitho
spun him some yarn about wanting to look up some wildflowers he’d recently
gathered beside the road, he lent it to him gladly. That evening, after we’d
pitched camp and I’d fed the bees, he brought it round to my tent and we went
through it together.
‘You sure there’s stuff about poisons in here?’ I asked, after we’d been at it
an hour. ‘Mostly it’s garbage. Can’t make head nor tail of it. Here, what do you
make of this?’ I screwed up my eyes —it was a badly written copy, all
abbreviations and poncified lettering, with notes scrawled in all the margins
and over the tops of the lines. “‘And it would be thought that a man is acting
more under compulsion and involuntarily when his object is to avoid violent pain
than when it is to avoid mild pain, and in general more when his object is the
avoidance of pain than when it is to gain enjoyment. For what rests with himself
means what his nature is able to bear; what his nature is not able to bear and
what is not a matter of his own natural appetition or calculation does not rest
with himself.”’ I looked up and shrugged. ‘What the hell’s that got to do with
the price of fish?’
Peitho scowled thoughtfully, then leaned forward and craned his neck over so as
to look at the page. ‘You clown,’ he said, ‘you’re reading the wrong book. The
plants book’s further on in the scroll. This is something about ethics.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, fuck ethics.’ I rolled the scroll down a whole lot and
tried again. ‘How about this?’ I said. ‘Here’s a bit all about lupins.’
‘Lupins aren’t poisonous, are they?’
‘No, but at least they’re plants, so we’re in the right book. Now then, let’s
see what we can — Ali, now that’s more like it. The roots of the white
hellebore, it says here, produce a poison so deadly that death is practically
instantaneous—’
‘I thought we wanted a slow poison.’
‘Oh bugger, so
we do. Hey, this is turning out to be harder than I thought.’
Peitho was starting to look thoughtful, like a duck trying to hatch out a stone.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.’
‘It’ll be in here somewhere, I’m sure. Just a case of reading it through
carefully—’
He shook his head. ‘No, I mean this whole killing Alexander thing. Come on, it’s
a bit drastic, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Look, he’s got to go, we both agreed. He’s a bloody menace.’
Peitho bit his lip. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘to judge by that performance when he
rescued old Lysimachus, chances are he’ll go on some dumb adventure and get
himself killed while we’re still trying to make sense of this goddamn book.
Shouldn’t we just leave well alone and let the gods do it for us?’
I looked him squarely in the eye. ‘The gods,’ I said, ‘help those who help
themselves. So if it’s all the same to you—’
‘Actually,’ he interrupted, ‘you’re wrong there. They don’t. In fact, they come
down on them like a ton of bloody bricks. Look at Daedalus.’
‘Fuck it, Peitho, it’s just an expression, doesn’t mean anything.’
‘Then if it doesn’t mean anything, why the hell say it?’
I closed my eyes for a moment. ‘The point I’m trying to make is, we can’t just
sit tight and wait for things to happen, we’ve got to get up off our bums and—’
‘Or what about Prometheus? Or Theseus? Or Hercules, even? Or Paris ; he surely
helped himself, and look what happened to him.’
‘Yes. Thank you.’ I put the book down. ‘I say we cut his throat while he’s
asleep. What do you think?’
‘You know what I think.’
To cut a long story short, we didn’t kill Alexander that day; nor the day after.
And then we found ourselves at a place called Gaza, where there was another
fortress — nowhere near as big or as grand as Tyre, but the governor, a man
called Batis, was the Persian King’s good and faithful servant, and all the time
we’d been fooling about atTyre, he’d been getting ready for us. He’d reinforced
the mud-brick walls, hired a mob of Arab mercenaries, built up a stash of food
and supplies that would last for well over a year; and when our engineers
surveyed the position, they reported back that the hill on which the fortress
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 57
