When asked why he left Macedon, Alexander would laugh. “Bucephalous needed new pastures.” And so he campaigned eastwards. Thousands slaked the earth’s primordial thirst with their blood. New shoots burst through where they fell and the horse grazed and Alexander was content. Yet as he slashed through Asia Minor and entered the great flood plains of the Indus, he became uneasy. It was not conquest that disturbed him but rather its ease. Man’s destiny, he had taken to believing, was forged in struggle.
So he summoned Nestor, that storied advisor to Agamemnon to his tent. (Alexander had instructed his poets to raise Nestor from the myth. He had left Aristotle to his own devices in Athens, preferring the literal manifestation of Homeric epic to his nasally childhood tutor.) Also in the tent was Qinshihuang’s man, a Mercader under cover as a cultural attache, a tactic the Qin emperor had borrowed from the NKVD, the famed Soviet spy agency he had come to admire through his geomancer’s readings of cracked ox scapula. Nestor, platinum blond with a beak of a nose, ducked in through the heavy Persian curtains that framed the entranceway and asked why he had been summoned. Alexander asked, “What is my destiny?” The Qin Mercader sat quietly, the ink of his brush spilling silently across his scrolls, taking copious notes on the social customs of the Greeks.
Nestor started in.
As you well know I have advised the greatest of the great. I have stood atop the ramparts of Troy. I have stormed the beach at Normandy. I advised Heracles on the construction of his palace on Olympus Mons. I was Lew Alcindor’s teammate at UCLA. All of which is to say, I have come to this immutable truth.
At twenty-five, man diverges. There are but two destinies. Some follow one path and some another. The first path is paperwork. Bureaucracy. The prophesied power of Excel. They will whittle their distal phalanxs and ischiums down to the nub in the service of others’ dreams. The second path is power. Capital. The sword. These men will stand atop the heavens and their will be done on earth. If only the former will handle the paperwork for them.
Alexander exhaled, content in his understanding of Nestor’s speech. Power, capital, and the sword were his. Bucephalus was a sonic boom. Conquest was play in the fields of the lord. His destiny was secure.
The Qin Mercader was astonished. It came to him that Alexander had not understood—indeed could not understand—Nestor’s prophecy. So he abandoned his planned assassination, figuring that Alexander was hurtling towards doom of his own accord, and set off on the treacherous return to Qin. North through the snow-capped Pamirs, east through the sands of the Taklamakan basin, south through the pass at Jiayuguan alongside mendicants and Buddhists, until he arrived at Qinshihuang’s side.
The emperor, having already survived two assassination attempts, one by no less an adversary than Jet Li, ordered the Mercader imprisoned. This was another lesson Qinshihuang had learned from the NKVD. The Mercader was struggled against and criticized and self-criticized and tested on the tenets of Leninism and Legalism until his inquisitors were satisfied that he was, indeed, a loyal man of Qin, upon which he was released. He then went to Qinshihuang to relay Nestor’s message on the entangled destinies of pencil pushers and titans. Qinshihuang immediately realized the significance of the prophecy. Who is really king if a man who counts beans can cut the Fates’ strings? As was his custom, Qinshihuang adopted an elegant, if sanguinary, solution. He would burn all the scholars along with their books and so divert the confluent streams of destiny. And so he did.