Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Read online

  ‘No,’ I answered slowly, so you’d be able to follow, ‘that was good luck. Well,

  his good luck, anyway. A large family is a sign of the gods’ blessing. No, we

  were the ones who had the bad luck, after he died. You see, back home, when a

  man dies all his property doesn’t just go to his eldest son, it’s divided

  equally between all his sons, because that’s much fairer, you see.’

  ‘Ah,’ you said. ‘Democracy.’

  I laughed. ‘You could call it that, I suppose. But the upshot of it was that

  Father’s property, divided seven ways, didn’t come to very much for each of us.

  In fact, it wasn’t enough to keep a pig alive. Now do you see the point I was

  making? Father had good luck, pretty well all his life; but as soon as he died,

  the bad luck started for us. None of us could make a living, so we had to give

  up farming and find something else to do. And that, basically, is how I ended up

  in Macedonia , with King Philip and Prince Alexander.’

  The plain truth of the matter is that my childhood was far too pleasant to be

  memorable. Not, of course, that I thought it was pleasant at the time. I seemed

  to spend most of my time hiding from people; my six elder brothers, all trying

  to palm their chores off on me, or my father, or the latest in a long succession

  of teachers and tutors. I got to be quite good at hiding, but not nearly good

  enough. I learned a lot of basic strategy that way — never hide in a tree,

  because once they spot you there’s nowhere else to run to; the last place

  they’ll think of looking is the place where they’ve just looked, and so on —and

  I got plenty of fresh air and exercise. But the lesson I never did learn was

  that it’s stupid to waste a whole day hiding rather than do a morning’s work.

  That’s simple commercial good sense, not spending a day to earn a morning; but

  in all the courses of tuition my father arranged for me (and he was fanatical

  about education, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment), simple good sense was

  never part of the curriculum. Like so many things in my life, I never got around

  to learning that until I was far too old for it to be of any use to me.

  Thinking about it, I may have made it sound as if the inevitable division of my

  father’s property into seven worthless shares came as a dreadful shock that

  dawned on us some time between the moment of his death and the morning after the

  funeral. Far from it; even when he was a relatively young man with only four

  sons, Father was obsessed by it, virtually to the exclusion of everything else.

  It coloured his whole life, and so hard did he try to find some workable

  solution to the problem that he neglected a great many other things, and so made

  the situation far worse.

  It’s worth mentioning at this point that we Greeks (or at least we Athenians,

  back in those days; I keep using this magic new word ‘Greeks’ as if it actually

  means something, but it doesn’t. And what I know about the rest of the Greeks,

  the ones who weren’t Athenians, could be written on the back of a potsherd with

  a rusty spearhead) had very strict views on how an honest man should make his

  living. Basically, he grew it, or for choice watched it grow, while other people

  did the actual hoeing and planting and pruning. The ideal was that a man

  inherited enough land from his father to grow enough food to qualify him for a

  respectable place in society — we divided people up into classes, according to

  how many measures of produce, wet and dry, their land produced in a year; so

  many measures and you could vote, so many more and you could fight for your

  country, and if your estate was big enough to produce five hundred measures a

  year, it stood to reason that there was no way you’d be able to eat all that

  stuff

  yourself without dying of chronic obesity, so you were obliged to use the

  surplus for the good of the community, by fitting out a warship for the fleet or

  financing the production of a play at one of the Festivals. That’s how come the

  Athenians of old had the best fleet in Greece , invented the Drama and never

  seemed to put on weight.

  Best of all, of course, was having enough money to be able to afford enough

  slaves to do all the fieldwork for you. Failing that, it was considered

  honourable, if tiresome, to work in the fields yourself, and some fairly rich

  men (Grandfather Eupolis, for example) quite enjoyed fooling about in the dust

  with a mattock or a pruning-knife. As far as earning a living went, though, that

  was it. Anybody who worked for someone else, even if he was a free man, felt

  that he was no better off than a slave. Nearly all the craftsmen and artisans,

  the smiths and carpenters and potters and wheelwrights and so forth, had their

  four or five scruffy acres of vines interplanted with barley and so could

  imagine they were really gentlemen farmers who happened to make door-hinges or

  sandals for a hobby. Merchants saw themselves as farmers who whiled away the

  parts of the year when nothing much was doing on the land by renting a space on

  a ship and taking a pleasure-cruise to Egypt or Italy , fetching along a few

  jars of wine or oil or honey just to help defray expenses. And the people who

  simply had no land at all, not even enough to lie down on without trespassing,

  had no choice but to admit that they were good-for-nothing outcasts from society

  and try to make a living out of politics.

  Actually, that wasn’t too hard at all. What with payment for attending Assembly

  and payment for sitting on juries (and we were such a savagely litigious nation

  that the demand for jurors usually outstripped the supply of layabouts by an

  alarming degree), a man could eat reasonably well and feed his family just by

  sitting on a stone bench all day, listening to the flower of Athenian oratory (a

  science in which we’re still unsurpassed in all the world; wonder why?) and

  doing his civic duty. If that wasn’t enough, however, there always used to be

  the third means by which Athens provided for her less fortunate children, namely

  the three obols a day she paid a man to sit in a warship and pull an oar. Since

  it was the moral effect of so many fine warships cruising up and down their

  coastlines that encouraged our loyal allies on the islands to part with the

  tribute money that paid for the juries and the Assemblies, the third option was

  necessary to provide for the other two; hence, I suppose, all those wars. At any

  rate, we Athenians proudly declare to all who’ll listen that Athens is the only

  place in the world where a man can make a living sitting on his bum being

  entertained by professional orators. It’s a proud boast, and one that nobody

  before or since has ever sought to emulate, for some reason.

  So it was understood that I and my brothers wouldn’t actually starve, whatever

  happened. But there’s more to life than just staying alive, the gods know; and

  so my poor father fretted himself half to death trying to dream up schemes

  whereby all eight of us would be able to live like gentlemen without having to

  listen to speeches. He was an ingenious man, my father, I’ll give him that. One

  way round the property qualifications was to own a workshop or a factory.
Some

  of the greatest Athenians of the past had done precisely that; Nicias the

  General, Cleon the Orator, Hyperbolus and so on. It was respectable, so long as

  you simply owned the building and the slaves and didn’t actually dirty your own

  hands.

  So Father snooped around looking for promising businesses to invest in, in the

  hope that in time they’d grow successful enough to do one of us boys as his

  share of the inheritance. Sadly, the only businesses my father could afford to

  buy into were either failing or doomed from the start. Offhand I can recall the

  franchise in the state-owned silver mines (he bought the concession on the only

  chunk of rock in Laurium that didn’t have any silver in it); the trumpet factory

  (how many trumpets a year do you think a city the size of Athens consumes, for

  pity’s sake?); the sandal-making shop that would have got the contract to supply

  sandals to a large con­tingent of the Athenian army, if that contingent hadn’t

  been the one decimated by the Thebans at Mantinea; the charcoal-burning yard on

  Lemnos, which he bought shortly before Lemnos was taken away from us by the

  Spartans, and which he sold for the price of a second-hand hat a month or so

  before we got it back again.. . If he’d only kept the money he poured into these

  disasters and laid it aside in a temple, there’d probably have been enough to

  buy three of us a merchant ship each. As it was, his prudence and foresight left

  us when he died with nothing but the land, the stock and the farm instruments;

  even some of the slaves had had to be sold to cover his liabilities from a

  joint-venture trading scheme involving a shipload of prime Euxine timber that

  hit a submerged rock somewhere near Byzantium.

  But at least he’d seen to it that I had an education, though I’m not sure a bit

  and brace and a set of chisels wouldn’t have been more useful. Father had got it

  into his head at an early stage in my development that I was going to be the

  clever one, and it’s perfectly true to say that Athens has always appreciated

  cleverness, more so than any city in Greece . Unfortunately, cleverness is a bit

  like sulphur or charcoal; producing the stuff is all very well, but the

  by-products can make the whole district uninhabitable. Athenian cleverness is

  nasty stuff to be around, like tar or nitre, and people who make their living in

  the cleverness industry — law, philosophy and politics, as if there was any

  difference between them — tend to die young. Accord­ingly I wasn’t too keen on

  the idea, in spite of Father’s insistence, which is why I kept running away and

  hiding.

  There were three ways you could earn a living by making speeches. First, there

  was good old-fashioned informing, though that was going out of fashion even

  then. Basically, an informer made it his business to bring actions at law

  against those who allegedly betrayed or injured the State. If they got a

  conviction, they were awarded a fat slice of the convicted man’s property, while

  the remainder went to the Treasury to pay for such things as jurors’ wages.

  Good, honest work; but for some reason a degree of stigma went with the job, and

  there was always a slight risk of having your throat cut on a dark night.

  Writing speeches was far more socially acceptable, though it didn’t pay quite as

  well. We Athenians are tolerant people; we understand that not everybody is

  blessed with an inspired turn of phrase, and sometimes it’s not very fair to

  pitch a honey-tongued professional informer against a doddery old farmer in a

  talking match to the death. It was, therefore, open to the defendant to pay

  someone to write his speech for him.

  Slightly more prestigious was teaching philosophy, with special reference to

  ethics, morality and how to turn these lofty concepts arse-about-face in the

  course of a public address. Since a fair number of the practitioners of this art

  were gentlemen who studied and taught the subject either as a hobby or for

  wickedness, rather than as a commercial proposition, my father decided that this

  was the least degrading of the three options and looked around for someone to

  apprentice me to.

  And that, to cut a long story short, is how I came to be involved with Diogenes,

  the Yapping Dog, quite possibly the most unpleasant and distasteful person I’ve

  ever known. He had no original ideas, nothing to say, no redeeming qualities of

  any kind except a certain flair for meretricious annoyance and

  self-advertisement, and a com­plete and total lack of fear. He’s dead now, of

  course; and if I were Hercules or Theseus or some other hero from the old

  stories and could go down to Hell and bring back just one soul with me, it’d be

  Diogenes.

  Dear gods, I remember with appalling vividness the day my father took me to meet

  him for the first time. Being my father, he’d formulated his cunning scheme and

  set his heart on it as being the definitive answer to the problem of what to do

  about Euxenus, before stopping to consider the one basic practicality on which

  the success of the project depended, namely money. A last-minute glance at the

  household accounts made him revise quite drastically his choice of who I was to

  be apprenticed to. Up to that point, my father’s criteria for selection had been

  reputation, valuable contacts, proven rates of success, et cetera. Came the day,

  however, and it all boiled down to who would be prepared to take me on for the

  money available, and the choice suddenly dwindled down to one.

  That was the time when Diogenes was running his celebrated (or notorious)

  living-in-a-barrel gimmick. The idea was to show up the mindless materialism of

  us regular folks by dispensing with any vestige of luxury and retaining only the

  barest of essentials; to wit, one upended oil-jar, with a sort of hole-cum-door

  smashed in the side for him to crawl in and out of. It was a marvellous

  attention-grabber, which he exploited shamelessly by rolling this confounded

  thing from pitch to pitch, wherever there was likely to be a large, good-natured

  crowd, and squatting in it looking all haggard and unworldly until he’d

  attracted a substantial enough audience to justify a per­formance. Of course, he

  didn’t actually sleep in the wretched thing. As soon as the show was over, he’d

  dump it somewhere and either sneak back to his own warm, cosy house or (more

  usually) spend the night with one of his devoted female disciples whose husband

  happened to be out of town. The remarkable thing was that nobody (except me, of

  course) ever seemed to notice that the whole thing was a racket. In retrospect,

  I think it was because everybody wanted him to be genuine, and so assumed he

  was, without question.

  Come to think of it, nearly everything about the Yapping Dog was a lie, and a

  strange kind of lie at that; he went out of his way to make himself seem far

  worse than he actually was. When he stood up straight and combed his hair and

  washed (I think he did all three simultaneously about five times in his entire

  life) he was a reasonably tall, well-proportioned man, quite good-looking in a

  bland sort of a way; but somehow or other he managed to make himself look like a

&
nbsp; scrawny, ugly little dwarf. I think he smeared soot under his eyes to make them

  look sunken and hollow, and his deformed crouch was a masterpiece of

  histrionics, though he undoubtedly suffered for his art. As his accredited

  pupil, I was allowed to watch when nobody else was looking, and he stood up and

  stretched his sorely abused spine with a quite heart-rending groan.

  Anyway. Diogenes was on duty in his jar when we found him (he was never hard to

  track down, at least during working hours). He was sitting in the shade, half in

  and half out of the jar, with his other celebrated prop, the lantern (which he

  lit and carried round in broad daylight, claiming to be looking for an honest

  man. Great line. If any­body can tell me what it means, I’d be ever so grateful)

  and nibbling at a crust of stale bread which he kept handy at all times.

  ‘Diogenes,’ my father said.

  ‘Get lost.’

  My father (stolid, respectable, robustly healthy, a great eater of garlic and

  onions) didn’t know what to make of that, so he pretended he hadn’t heard.

  ‘Diogenes,’ he repeated.

  ‘Didn’t you hear what I just said? Gods, it must be awful to be deaf as well as

  stupid. Go away, you’re ruining the view.’

  My father, a born straight man, turned round to see what he was talking about.

  ‘What view?’ he said. ‘There’s just a wall.’

  ‘So?’

  Now, being a boy of tender years, I’d instinctively guessed what Diogenes’ game

  was within a minute of first setting eyes on him —after all, his entire persona

  was little more than Bad Boy — and as far as I was concerned, the best of luck

  to him. But I also knew my father, who was as straightforward as they come;

  insult him to his face three times and he’d just look confused, but try it a

  fourth time and you’d be going home with your teeth in your hat. For some reason

  I decided it wouldn’t be good if Father broke the strange man’s neck, so I

  inter­vened.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’ve come to the wrong place. This isn’t Diogenes the

  philosopher, it’s only a chicken.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ said my father automatically; he always said ‘Be quiet’ when one of

  us spoke, right up till we were grown men. But Diogenes leaned forward a little

  and raised one grubby eyebrow.