health. They were supposed to send us a new head, all the way from the main
factory at Abydos in Egypt, but it got sent to the wrong Alexandria, and since
they had a perfectly good head already, they spirited it away and stuck it in
the nearest lime-kiln; so now it’s helping the crops grow, just like a good god
should. The factory’s closed down now, of course. King Ptolemy (General Ptolemy,
as was) had it turned into a plant for making catapult-balls. I gather they’re
very good, too.
A day or so after I’d dedicated the temple, I was standing by in a hammock in
the courtyard of the really rather fine house I’d been allocated as governor
when the major-domo waddled in and announced that there was a deputation waiting
to see me. I wasn’t expecting visitors, let alone any deputations, but there was
always the off-chance that it was something important, so I told the man to
bring them in.
‘We’d like you to dedicate the shrine,’ their spokesman said.
‘Already done that,’ I replied.
The man shook his head. ‘Not the temple,’ he said, ‘the shrine.
We built it specially as soon as we knew you were coming.’
I frowned. I didn’t like the sound of that. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘this is the first
I’ve heard about any shrine. Whose shrine is it, specifically?’
The man looked confused. ‘For the sacred serpent,’ he said. ‘You know, the one
you carry about with you in the jar. We’ve built a permanent home for it, just
past the corn exchange as you go up the hill. It’s very nice.’
I was silent for a very long time. ‘Let me just make sure I’ve got this right,’
I said. ‘You want me to give you my snake.’
He looked worried. ‘It may seem like that at first sight,’ he said nervously,
‘but it isn’t, really. We just thought the serpent might be happier if it had
some kind of permanent home.’
I shook my head. ‘He’s a nomad, my snake,’ I said. ‘Just like your cousins to
the north. Just like me, I guess,’ I added; it hadn’t occurred to me before but
yes, in my time I’ve been every bit as nomadic as your average full-blooded
Scythian. ‘He doesn’t want a permanent home. He likes the freedom, you see.’
‘The freedom,’ the spokesman replied. ‘In a jar.’
‘A jar that’s been all over the world,’ I pointed out. ‘Just because he’s stayed
inside the jar doesn’t mean he hasn’t been to all those exotic places. I’m sure
he’d have paid proper attention to them if he’d ever stuck his head up above the
rim.’
But it obviously meant a lot to them. So, in spite of my serious reservations
about the whole idea, I said I’d do it. This left me with a problem, of course;
inside the jar — no snake. Well, I couldn’t very well buy one, in case people
put two and two together and got upset. Nor could I find one, however hard I
looked (and usually the trick is not finding one, as you walk the fields in your
bare feet). So; no buy, no find; all that was left was to try making one. That
may sound daft to you, but when I was a kid we used to find cast-off snakeskins
in the fields, stuff them with wool and use them to frighten the life out of
people by leaving them lying about (in the clothes-press, for instance, or
buried in someone’s clothes while he was swimming in the sea). With a little
practice, we were able to get them looking ever so lifelike, and they had the
tremendous advantage over the real thing of not being able to bite and kill you.
Well, of course, I didn’t have a snakeskin either; but I had an idea where there
might be one. You may remember that when I was in Macedon, Alexander put a snake
in my jar; it popped out at an embarrassing moment, if you recall. I’d noticed
recently when I’d been moving the jar around that there was something small and
light rattling around in there; my guess was that Alexander’s snake had taken
advantage of the quiet and privacy of my jar to slough its skin. Anyhow, it
wouldn’t cost me anything to turn the jar out and have a look.
So I stood on a stool and reached up to lift it down from the hook in the
rafters where I’d hung it; but it was a very old, tired stool. I heard a sharp
crack, just as I’d lifted the ear of the jar off the hook, and the next thing I
knew was that I was sitting uncomfortably on the floor, one leg folded
underneath me at a very unusual angle, feeling extremely sorry for myself.
Strangely enough, it was my right leg I broke, whereas my brother broke his
left.
I was too preoccupied with screaming and sobbing with pain to pay too much
attention at first to what had become of the jar; but after I’d yelled myself
hoarse and nobody came (major-domo and cook down at the market, shopping;
housemaid and gardener off together somewhere), I calmed down a bit and saw that
the jar had smashed, That shook me, I’ll admit. The jar had been with me a long
time, it had been my living and a tremendous influence on the lives of myself
and others — think; if I hadn’t had the jar, Queen Olympias would never have
wanted me to tutor her son; if I hadn’t tutored Alexander ... Well. And now it
was broken; and there among the small, sharp potsherds I saw the dried-up
remains of a dead snake, curled up tightly like a coil of coarse rope, as
perfectly preserved as an Egyptian king.
Well, they do say that snakes are immortal too; instead of dying as we do, they
simply slough off their old bodies and slither away. I wonder; as they break out
of death like a chick out of an egg, do they remember the life ahead of them, or
do they have to wait for it to come back piecemeal, like us ordinary gods? I
have no idea; I never knew the answer to that one, or else it’s slipped my mind.
I’m getting terribly forgetful these days, Phryzeutzis; I can’t remember
anything unless I write it down somewhere.
The broken leg was a perfect excuse for not dedicating the shrine; and one day
while I was laid up waiting for it to mend, the gardener came rushing by with a
basket in one hand and a long stick in the other. I asked him what the fuss was
about.
‘There’s a snake got into the storeroom,’ he said. ‘Thrassa’s doing her block,
so I’m going to get rid of it.’
I propped myself up on one elbow. ‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘When you’ve caught
it, don’t kill it; sling it in a jar and stuff the neck with straw. I’ve got a
use for a live snake.’
He looked at me as if I was crazy; then again, he always looked at me as if I
was crazy. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Where do you want it put?’
‘Oh, anywhere,’ I said. ‘Just see that nobody disturbs it.’
So the shrine got its snake, a little wriggly green bugger that slid away out of
sight as soon as I pulled the straw out. The assembled local worthies were no
end impressed, and took care to stand back as I passed so my shadow wouldn’t
fall on them. For two pins, I think, they’d have started worshipping me as a
god.
The Macedonians have a law, or at any rate a tradition, that you don’t start a
war during the month Daisios (that’s roughly the Athenian Thargelion; gods know
wha
t you people call it. At any rate, it’s between the rise of the Pleiades and
solstice, about threshing time, and if you haven’t finished digging over the
vineyards, you’re way behind). In the middle of Daisios in the thirteenth year
of his reign, when he was thirty-two years old, Alexander was in Babylon , all
ready to set off and conquer Arabia , a huge and worthless desert away to the
south. On previous occasions, he’d taken the trouble to sidestep the tradition
by having his astronomers repeat the previous month, Artemisios; this time,
however, he couldn’t be bothered. Besides, he argued winningly, the intercalated
second Artemisios had clearly been spurious, which meant that in the eyes of his
fellow gods he’d gone to war in Daisios before and got away with it, so there
was no reason why he shouldn’t do the same thing again.
A day or so before the scheduled departure date, Alexander went to a party given
by a man called Medius. It must have been a good party, because he woke up
feeling awful, so he ordered the domestic staff to shift his quarters from the
palace to a house in a park on the posh side of the river, where it was quiet
and peaceful and a man could recover after a long night with a jar. There was a
swimming pool at this house, and he decided to sleep beside it, under the stars;
apparently Babylon ’s like an oven at that time of year, and it’s nice and cool
by the water.
Next day he was a little feverish, so he had a bath and spent the rest of the
day at home with Medius, some other friends and a hair or two of the dog, since
he wanted to be sure to be fighting fit when the army moved out in a couple of
days’ time. He didn’t sleep well that night, and the next day the fever was a
little worse. The general staff started making plans for postponing the
expedition, but he wouldn’t hear of if, even though the next day, which was when
the fleet should have sailed, he was no better. But the day after that he was
almost fully recovered, and put in a full day’s work catching up on what he’d
missed while he’d been ill. Maybe he overdid it; he was so bad the next day that
he had to be taken back to the palace.
He lived for another four days. Most of the time he was too weak to say
anything, and when he wasn’t he was wandering in his mind, calling out all sorts
of strange, delusional gibberish, the way people do when they’re out of their
heads with fever. He did have a lucid spell near the end, but when his chief
officers and ministers of state tried to talk to him about the succession he
didn’t appear to remember who they were. When he was dying, he kept shouting
that there were snakes on his pillow, but it was all right; he’d strangled them,
because he was the infant Hercules and just about to be born. Then he said that
Aristotle had had him poisoned, because Aristotle didn’t believe in gods and
thought there shouldn’t be any; he’d got the recipe for the poison out of his
nephew Gallisthenes’ book, the one Eudaemon had told him about, and the poison
had been served to him in a cup made out of the hoof of a mule, because
half-breed gods can’t have children. He gave orders for Babylon to be burned to
the ground, followed by the whole of the earth, because he remembered that last
time he’d wiped out the human race with a great flood and it didn’t do to repeat
one’s effects. Then he sat upright and asked for someone to read to him out of
Euxenus’ book about the war, since he wanted to know what had happened in the
end. They told him Euxenus hadn’t written any books, and asked him which of the
generals he wanted to have the empire after he was gone. ‘How should I know?’ he
answered angrily, ‘I haven’t got to that bit yet,’ whereupon the generals had
the room cleared.
Some people say he died screaming, or in tears; that he went to bed just before
he died; that in the last moment of his life a mighty eagle swooped in through
the window and carried his soul away to Olympus . Other people will tell you
that he didn’t die at all, that the embalmed, imperishable corpse that lies
buried in Alexandria in Egypt (perfectly preserved, like a dried snake in a jar)
is somebody quite other, a body he sloughed off when it started to fray, and
Alexander is still alive somewhere, waiting for some unspecified event which
means it’s time for him to return and continue where he left off. Some people
would have you believe that he will never die, that he lives on in the group
mind of the swarm of Macedonians and Greeks that are buzzing all through Europe
and Asia these days, gathering nectar and nesting in every crack and corner of
the world, even as far out as the eastern border of Scythia.
Personally, I think he’s dead, and bloody good riddance.
If history were to end there, with the death of Alexander and the collapse of
his empire, it’d be a poor show; a great deal of work would have been wasted
with nothing to show for it, and generations yet unborn would make pilgrimages
to piss on our graves. I don’t intend it to be that way. I may be old, but I’m
not so old that I can’t still dream about the ideal society, or at any rate the
perfect city.
It started a year or so ago, when that Lydian merchant showed up with his little
cart full of plunder from some battle or other. Odd creatures, your Lydians;
they’re about as Greek as the river Ganges, but they’ve had Greeks living next
to them for so long that the colours have run, so to speak, and to listen to
some of them talk, you’d almost believe they were as Greek as I am. This Lydian
was like that; he called himself Theocles or some such Greek name, and if you
believed his sales pitch everything in his cart that wasn’t made in Athens was
made in Corinth or Megara orThebes. Anyway, in among the bloodstained boots and
the slightly war-damaged armour (one careful but unfortunate owner) there was,
he told me, something he knew I’d want to buy. In fact, he said, once I knew
what it was I’d be so desperate to buy it I’d undoubtedly offer him far more
money than I could possibly afford, so as a favour to me and a token of respect
for the memory of the divine Alexander he’d offer it to me for a mere ten
staters, sight unseen.
Needless to say, I told him to go forth and multiply, whereupon he gave me a
very sad look, the sort of look Lydian faces were expressly designed for, and
said that the price was now twelve staters. This intrigued me; so I said that if
he told me what this thing was, I’d give him half a stater, local coin. His face
lengthened a little more, his hand turned palm upwards, and he told me it was a
book.
‘A book?’ I said.
‘A book. A Greek book,’ he added.
He was right; I was interested. ‘What sort of book?’ I asked.
‘About so long,’ he replied, ‘so much round, in its own brass tube. Tube’s
extra,’ he added quickly, but not quickly enough.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But what’s it about? Who’s it by?’
He shrugged; a complicated, multi-dimensional folding of the shoulders, as if he
was about to take his arms off and put them neatly away. ‘Does it matter?’ he
sa
id. ‘It’s a book. In Greek.’
I thought about it for a moment. ‘I might be interested,’ I said. ‘For three
staters.’
Honestly, I thought he was about to burst into tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said; then
he fished about under his tunic and produced this book-tube, with the very
dog-eared edges of a book poking out. He pulled it from the tube, unwound about
a hand’s span, tore it off and ate it. ‘Fifteen staters,’ he said.
I wanted to see how this was going to turn out. ‘Seven,’ I said.
He unrolled and ate another span. ‘Seventeen,’ he said.
‘Done.’
‘You won’t be sorry,’ he said, spitting out a wadge of half-chewed Egyptian
paper. ‘And three for the tube.’
‘You know what you can do with the tube,’ I told him.
As I’d feared, the book turned out to be the goddamned bloody Iliad, messily
copied by an illiterate scribe somewhere in Egypt , at a guess. Still, a book’s
a book, so that afternoon, when it was too hot to do anything else, I sat down
under a tree and started idly scrolling through, more interested in the
footnotes and the little comments scrawled by previous owners in the margins
than Homer’s actual immortal words. When I reached the end, I saw there was
something else after it; the scribe, having cramped his writing up really small,
had been left with blank space at the end and had to fill it up with something
else. The text he’d chosen was new to me; it was On Death, by someone called
Pherecrates of Cnidus. Quite by chance I’d stumbled across a treasure richer
than gold: a book I’d never read by a man I’d never heard of. My lucky day.
That afternoon, I got to know Pherecrates of Gnidus pretty well. He wasn’t a
difficult man to understand; a gentleman farmer like myself, who made use of the
idle parts of the year by renting space on his rich neighbour’s ship, loading up
his surplus produce and a few bits and pieces he’d bought in specially, and
cruising up and down the coast between Rhodes and the Hellespont. Men like
Pherecrates don’t usually tend to trouble history, and Pherecrates himself would
never have been an exception to this rule if he hadn’t come ashore one day at a
something-and-nothing little town on the island of Chios, whose name he couldn’t
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 64
