Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt

by Alexander at the World's End (lit)

  his own hands, after a long, hard night with the local wine, but the part of

  town I was billeted in was so far away that I didn’t even see the glow in the

  sky. I was around when General Parmenio ‘s son Philotas was accused of treason,

  and father and son were put to death as blithely as we’d wring the neck of a

  goose for the table, but I only heard about it a day or so afterwards. I marched

  to India all right, but mostly what I had to look at was the ruts in the road

  left by our carts and the arse of the horse in front. I wasn’t important enough

  (thank gods) to be one of the officers at the staff meeting where Alexander

  announced out of the blue that from now on, the Macedonians as well as the

  Persians and the other conquered peoples were expected to fall on their faces

  and worship him as a god. All this stuff, this history, passed me by. Which is

  probably just as well.

  The plain truth is, by this stage I wasn’t feeling quite myself, if you see what

  I mean. It was something to do with the medicine I’d been taking. I’d assumed,

  no more bees, no more medicine, but it didn’t quite work like that in practice.

  I found that not taking the medicine left me feeling much worse than the

  bee-stings ever did; I was dizzy, muddle-headed, irritable, nervous, shaky and

  sometimes quite horribly depressed, and I couldn’t begin to imagine why, since

  there wasn’t anything wrong with me. So I asked around until I found some

  Scythian auxiliaries — they were full-time horse-breakers, attached to Livestock

  — and asked them if they knew how I could get some more medicine. But they just

  looked sad and said they knew exactly how I felt; the bush or tree the leaves

  came from simply didn’t grow in Persia , and that was all there was to it.

  However, they went on, they’d been making their own enquiries and they’d found

  out about a local Persian medicine that was probably almost as good, and as soon

  as they got hold of some they’d let me know so I could give it a try.

  They were as good as their word. It was completely different stuff; for a start

  it was some kind of root rather than leaves, and you chewed it rather than

  burning it, and if anything it was a good deal stronger than the leaves had

  been. Anyway, it certainly did the job as far as getting rid of the dizziness

  and the shakes and all, so I got them to make me up a big, big batch of the

  stuff.

  At first I was as happy as a lamb; happier, in fact, since lambs don’t go around

  smiling all the time or occasionally bursting out laughing for no apparent

  reason (which I’m told I did, frequently). But then I started getting the

  weirdest dreams; first when I was asleep and then, annoyingly, when I wasn’t.

  The dreams were always different, but they generally started off with me asleep;

  but I wasn’t at the war, sleeping in a tent, I was back home in Attica, and the

  bed was an old one that had been in our family for generations, and I was the

  head of the family, which wasn’t even our family, if you see what I mean.

  Anyway, I’d wake up and remember that I was a prosperous Athenian farmer with a

  beautiful young wife and three fine sons; and then I’d roll over and see on the

  pillow next to me a dead body, shrivelled away into a skull, with the dried skin

  shrunk tight to the bone and a fine, full head of snow-white hair. This always

  scared the shit out of me, even though I knew it was coming. Anyway, I’d get up

  and go into the next room, and there on the floor under a blanket would be three

  more skin-and-bone corpses of very old men. By this time I’d have worked out

  that the one in my bed was my wife and the other three were my sons, and that

  I’d somehow been turned into a god during the night. Well, a good night’s sleep

  for a god is longer than a mortal lifespan; while I’d been asleep my wife and

  sons had slept with me, and in that long sleep they’d grown very old and died.

  In fact, so had everybody, except me. As the dream went on, so I’d remembered

  more and more; before I was a god I was a soldier, part of the army that

  conquered the world with Alexander. So I’d go and see if there was anybody I

  knew there; but when I found them they were all dead too, all shrivelled up in

  their beds and cots and hammocks. Then I’d remember that Alexander had been a

  god, just like me, so I’d go to look for him; and I’d find him, dead in his

  sleep and dried up like strips of fish in the sun, until his skin was as hard

  and brittle as the bark of a dead tree and his hair snapped off if you touched

  it. I’d search the whole world, in fact, but they’d all be the same. I’d

  outlived them all, in one night, every living thing in the world. The only other

  person I ever found in these dreams was Peitho, who was every bit as dead as

  they were, but not dried up or shrivelled, so somehow he could talk to me and

  move about.

  ‘Hello, Peitho,’ I’d say.

  ‘Hello,’ he’d reply, and salute; or sometimes he’d do the full Persian obeisance

  routine that Alexander had such trouble getting the Macedonians to do. And I’d

  know as soon as I looked into his eyes that he was plotting to kill me, because

  I’d become a god; and that wouldn’t do, since it’s bad for morale if junior

  officers start murdering gods all over the shop. So every time he tried to

  poison me, I’d have him executed, and the next day there he’d be again, until

  eventually he’d be there all the time, just like he is now. Of course, he was

  younger then; now he’s grown old and shrivelled just like the rest of them. The

  only one who hasn’t changed is me.

  Of course, I know he isn’t there really, he’s some kind of nasty side-effect of

  the medicine, just like that damn buzzing sound, like a swarm of bees, that I

  hear nearly all the time now. Interesting, the bees. You see, I don’t know if

  you know this but bees are immortal, too; not individually, of course, but as a

  group, a bit like a city. It’s that old thing about the component and the whole;

  the small parts die and perish but the thing they make up endures for ever; like

  some city founded by a mighty hero to perpetuate his name, for instance, or even

  an empire such as the empire of the Kings of Persia orAlexander of Macedon.

  Components die; components don’t matter, they aren’t worth spit. Only the whole,

  the unity, the thing made up out of the parts, really exists. Not the man, only

  the god he becomes. The Egyptians told Alexander that everybody is part of the

  god; then that he was the god that they made up. Now, I can’t say I quite follow

  that line of reasoning, though it does sort of tie in with what I’ve noticed

  over the years, about the difference between who people are and who they become

  through the eyes of other people; like you became this great wise philosopher

  who’d taught Alexander the meaning of everything. Well, quite. I rest my case.

  Sometimes, in fact, Peitho is the bees and the bees are Peitho; I look at him

  closely and he sort of melts down into the swarm, so closely packed together

  (dead but not really dead, because the swarm can’t die) that from a distance

  they look like a single man. Oh, it’s all right, he isn’t like that now, he’s

 
; just ordinary, dead old Peitho. Best friend I ever had, till he started trying

  to kill me.

  And, of course, all this is imaginary, the side-effects of the medicine, which

  the Scythians told me I’ll have to keep taking for the

  rest of my life if I ever want to be really cured. I’ve got a big jar of it.

  They gave me exactly enough, they said; when I come to the end of it, that’ll be

  the time for me to die. I find it reassuring to know I’ll never run out of the

  stuff; by now, I guess, without it I’d be seriously ill. But it gets to you

  after a while, knowing deep down that however they appear on the surface,

  everybody you meet or talk to is actually dead, that all I’m seeing right now is

  my memory of you, and that we’re not having this conversation, I’m simply

  remembering history, a con­versation we had years and years ago, before you

  died.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  N ext morning, we went our separate ways; Eudaemon back to Attica , to the

  family farm I’d been keeping warm for him, with his jar of medicine and his

  invisible companion; me on into Asia , heading East towards Sogdiana, with my

  empty jar and my invisible snake. The last I saw of him was the back of his head

  as he slept; with his broken leg he couldn’t come down to the post halt, and to

  be honest with you I wasn’t too sorry. It would have been awkward say­ing

  goodbye to him now that I knew he’d gone completely crazy. I’m afraid I get

  terribly embarrassed around people with disturbed or damaged minds.

  The Persian system of post roads is, sorry, was little short of miraculous. In

  King Darius’ time, before the Greeks let it go to rack and ruin, the royal

  messenger service maintained a straight, well-surfaced road all the way across

  the Empire, with inns at regular intervals, fresh horses standing by, cavalry

  escorts to get you across dangerous or debatable territory, everything a

  traveller in a hurry could possibly want. For all I know, I could have been one

  of the last people to use it to go right across the Empire and so get the full

  benefit of it. Now, of course, with what was the Empire split up into several

  rival kingdoms and parts of it effectively outside anybody’s control, the

  messenger service has gone and the road’s in a sorry state. A pity, but there it

  is.

  Since it was fairly obvious from pretty early on that my horse­manship simply

  wasn’t up to the standard needed to make proper use of the road, the couriers

  who went with me organised a carriage —well, more of a cart, really, except that

  it was drawn by horses rather than oxen or mules, and it had a sort of vestigial

  leather hood to keep

  off the worst of the sun and the weather. Nevertheless, the feeling of being a

  consignment of olives on their way to market was depress­ingly strong. The

  motion of the cart made me very drowsy, and I slept on and off for most of the

  journey; even when I was awake during the day, I kept well in the shade of the

  canopy and out of the blinding sun. As a result, I missed the scenery and the

  points of interest and the remarkable sights, as usual.

  Instead of sightseeing and taking an intelligent interest in my sur­roundings,

  as a good historian should (think of Herodotus, with his magpie mind and his

  tape measure and his incessant questions), I spent a lot of time thinking with

  my eyes shut; a proceeding which greatly puzzled the couriers, until the

  Macedonian courier explained to the two Persians that in the small, plain jar in

  my luggage was a magic, fortune-telling serpent, and I was communing with it.

  After that, they left me well alone, except for a few tentative enquiries about

  romantic encounters and gambling strategies.

  I thought a lot about jars, as it happens, and the contents thereof; jars of

  bees hurled into mineshafts to flush out the enemy; jars of wine and grain being

  meticulously counted by the keepers of the Athenian census, to ascertain which

  property class a man belonged to; jars of various sorts of produce stacked up in

  the hold of my friend Tyrsenius’ ship; jars of arrows bumping along in a supply

  train on their way to the war; empty wine-jars littering the floor of the house

  of a man who’s given up bothering; jars of poison for the body and the mind;

  jars of wisdom and prophecy. Most everything that moves about from one place to

  another in this world travels in a jar — it’s the handiest, most convenient

  container of all, waterproof, of a fixed and easily regulated volume, easy to

  stack, easy to keep track of if you simply scratch a few letters on its neck.

  According to legend, the greatest of all the heroes, Hercules, escaped from the

  murderous Cercopes by hiding in a jar. Seal the neck with wax or pitch and the

  contents will stay fresh indefinitely, like the words of a historian in a book.

  If you’re so minded, you can hire a painter to embellish the outside of your jar

  with unreal images of legendary and long-dead people, drawing out of his

  imagination the way they ought to have looked (which is not necessarily what

  they were actually like; but who’s to say which is the more valid image, the way

  a man was or the way he ought to have been, or the way he seemed to be to those

  around him, those influenced by him?). Oh, your humble jar has a fair claim to

  being Man’s best friend, if you discount the first ever jar, the one the gods

  gave to Pandora, with all the troubles and evils of the world packed inside; but

  she didn’t know that and clawed away the wax that stopped the neck, releasing

  all the evils and the troubles into the air, like a swarm of buzzing bees, and

  leaving behind only one, the most pernicious of all — blind Hope, the queen bee,

  who has lived at the bottom of jars ever since.

  And so, after a long and uneventful journey (I got sunstroke once and dysentery

  twice; a wheel came off the cart at the Gaspian Gates, fortunately before we

  struck out across the desert; between Bactra and Nautaca one of the post inns

  had burned down, so we had to sleep in the cart and eat field rations; otherwise

  nothing to speak of), I arrived here, where the Scythian mountains run down to

  the Iaxartes river, wherever the hell that is in relation to anywhere else. As I

  perceived it, a day came when the cart stopped early, a courier woke me up and

  said, ‘We’re here,’ and, having no reason not to believe him, I got out and

  unloaded my luggage. I suppose it’s possible that he played some kind of

  practical joke on me and this is in fact Italy , or southern Libya , or the

  country north of the Danube . Of course that’d mean you were in on the joke too,

  Phryzeutzis; but you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?

  Don’t answer that.

  Assuming that this is Sogdiana, it’s the furthest north-easterly point where the

  wilderness of the Scythian nomads (that’s you, my young friend) impinges upon

  the settled, mundane world of farmers and city-dwellers. Is it just me, or do

  you Scythians lie at the edges of everything, as the Ocean is reckoned to

  encompass all the dry land? Go north off the edge of the map (Aristagoras’

  engraved bronze map, that bamboozled the Athenians into the First Persian War..

  . Maps have a lot to answ
er for) and it seems to me that wherever you go, from

  northern Greece to India, you’ll find yourself among Scythians; an unlikely race

  to have had such a significant effect on the lives of my brother and myself, but

  a pretty pervasive influence all the same. Maybe you Scythians (sorry, we

  Scythians, I keep forgetting) sur­round the other nations of the earth the way

  darkness surrounds the light of a flickering lamp; or maybe Scythia is the rule

  and the bit in the middle is the exception; the small exception, maybe — does

  anybody know how big Scythia actually is? For all I know it could be so huge

  that all the countries of Darius’ and Alexander’s Empire put together are tiny

  in comparison, like a single fallen leaf in the market square of a busy town.

  *

  The walls were already up when I arrived here; the streets were laid out, the

  public buildings more or less complete, the water supply connected up.

  Apparently, because of Alexander’s habit of founding cities like a dog pissing

  against trees, the engineers had made it a rule always to have the basic

  components of a city to hand, all neatly stored in jars, numbered, ready to slot

  together at a moment’s notice — modular unit Ideal Societies, where the temple

  roof from Alexandria-in-Arachosia would fit the temple in

  Alexandria-on-the-Caucasus should they ever happen to need a spare. They’d got

  putting the bits together down to a fine art, they could put up a city almost as

  quickly as their colleagues in the siege and assault department could tear one

  down. My old friend Agenor the stone­mason would have hated that.

  So there was precious little for me to do, apart from ‘stand by’, as my brother

  would say (but all my life I’ve been a bystander, though never, gods know, an

  innocent one). I had to dedicate the temple, where the statue of the god (god,

  unspecified, marble, service issue, one) bore an uncanny resemblance to

  Alexander of Macedon, until a thrice-blessed workman contrived to chip off half

  of its nose while installing the head on the shoulders. Now our god stands there

  in an inspiringly martial pose, one head outstretched to aid and succour, the

  other upraised to strike, looking like one of those professional boxers we used

  to get at country fairs who’s lost one too many fights for the good of his