Alexander the Mate - Chapter 7
In which we are swept away in a puff of smoke by our next author for a very different (but utterly divine) perspective on our not-quite hero's true origin story....
Got the hang of what what we are up to? If not, please see our attempt to explain it all at the end, and a link back to Chapter 5.
Chapter 7 brought to you by Imran Khan
Sikander sits back, lights a spliff and puffs away as he looks over the Birir valley in Chitral, modern day northern Pakistan. He loves coming back here.
You see, when he first came here, to an ‘India’ made up of various kingdoms, it was at the head of an army the likes the world had never seen. A young man at the height of his powers, he was set to take on the world. But it was here in the Birir Valley that he stumbled for the first time.
He smiles at the thought of arriving here in 327 BC. It was the women. Specifically, one woman of a small valley tribe that had caught his eye. For days he pursued her. His vast army stopped behind him for miles and miles wondering what the young general was doing, but grateful for the pause from endless slaughtering.
After a few days, the woman succumbed to his advances and struck a deal with him. She would marry him and give him a child but she would never leave the Indus valley, and her child would be raised with her. In return she would ask for protection. ‘Sikander,’ she whispered, ‘This will be your true empire. The one that will last forever.’
And last it did. In 2026 Sikander looks out over at the community of Kalash villages dotted across the Indus valley and recognises all of them as the direct descendants of the man the world knows as Alexander the Great, but here he is simply Sikander. Sikander protects and watches over this community, keeping them safe despite all the challenges they face, for they are his children.
Unfortunately, they weren’t his only children. Sikander puts out the spliff. His time watching over the Kalash in the Indus Valley has come to an end, for now at least.
Because fucking Xandy is in fucking trouble with a fucking guy called fucking Big Mac.
Honestly. Here I am. A ghost. Alexander the Fucking Great. Before I was 27 I created an empire the world still remembers. I have descendants in the Indus valley alive today. But I also have to look out for a spotty student in some rainy UK shithole. Ok, ok, he’s not just a student. He’s my son.
Ok, you probably need an explanation.
For that I’ll need another spliff.
So. Every so often I get bored of the valley and I head out to the new capitals of the world. Doha, Dubai, Mexico City, Tokyo, etc., to take a look around. On occasion I like to visit the old capitals: Tehran, Damascus, Bombay... When I get really bored I go to the mid cities that are past their glories, except that unlike the old capitals, they still think they are in power: London, New York.
Seventeen years ago I wound up in London. There, quite by accident, I met Hera, Zeus’s sister and wife (which is always complicated. Especially if, as my mother would have had me believe, I was a son of Zeus myself.) But Hera was in London for a little shopping, and game recognizes game (if not family) and we got drunk at the bar upstairs in Harrods and a few hours later, in one of the nicer rooms at the Ritz, a drunken idea was conceived that we should re-mix the excellence of our genes.
Fuck. That was a hangover for the ages. A few minutes after making love, little Xandy arrived. Hera decided that was quite enough of ruining her figure, especially given the new dresses she’d just bought. She fucked off back to Mount Olympus.
I left little Xandy in some quiet backwater with a nice but childless lady that loves llamas.
But now little Xandy is not so little anymore.
And Big Mac is plotting something.
The conundrum is… do I tell Hera?
(link back to Chapter 6 and from there to 5, etc.)
For more about Imran Khan, please see below the notes.
The next instalment will come to you from Mark Bowsher.
Tag Team Tales: Welcome to a special kind of serialised short (well, quite longish actually) story, in which 10 authors from The Breakthrough Book Collective have collaborated to compose a chapter of between 500 and 2000 words and then pass the narrative along.
Each author had a free hand — within certain guidelines — to let their imaginations run, in their voice and style, from any character’s point of view and introducing new characters and plot twists if so inspired. Each contributor had one week to add their chapter (circumstances permitting) and could also share input when it came to the final edit.
The story was kicked off by an initial prompt drawn from a non-fiction book, opened at random on a page which happened to mention Alexander The Great in the context of modern neuroscience and, bizarrely, jet fuel.
We will be posting a chapter a day over 11 days (one author who was holding the story thread topped and tailed).
Having kickstarted his career in the heady world of 1990s independent magazine publishing with work on Dazed and Confused, and launching seminal style title 2nd Generation, Imran Khan jumped into the mainstream with BBC London - hosting radio shows on popular culture, arts and news as the millennium approached. Despite having a face for radio, in 2001 he produced a series of short documentaries for BBC Newsnight, Britain s leading current affairs programme. His work was noticed in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks and Channel 4 commissioned the award-winning film The Hidden Jihad, which he wrote and presented.
Imran subsequently moved full-time into TV news, working as a BBC producer and correspondent reporting from Lebanon, London and Qatar, with freelance stints in Afghanistan and Iraq. He became a correspondent for Al Jazeera English in 2005 and is known for his extensive reporting from Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine and Libya, as well covering the Arab Spring and the conflict in Syria. He continues to work as a correspondent for Al Jazeera English, dividing his time between the Middle East, South Asia and London.
In Truth, Madness, the gripping magical realist tale about a war correspondent on the edge, and a kindle haunted by a Babylonian djinn, (Breakthrough Books) is his first novel.
This twist was absolutely inspired