God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great Read online

  I observed Alexander on dozens of hunts, but one sticks in my head. We’d been hard at it – lesson after lesson, swordsmanship and ethics, wrestling and spear-fighting and running and ethics, the lyre and ethics. The physical world – the bodies of men and women, with dissection; medicine, in detail – how to make drugs from herbs, how to grind powders, how to administer even the most complex concoctions. And political philosophy, too – we were, after all, the men who would rule Macedon, not a group of merchants’ sons, and we were being trained carefully.

  Like any group of boys, we had an established pecking order and it was ruthless and yet curiously malleable, and boys went up and down the ladder swiftly. Alexander headed it – he was to be king, and that was that. Indeed, he was not the strongest, the fastest or the best swordsman – but he was almost the best in every category, and he was, without a doubt, the most intelligent of us. Sometimes it seemed to us that he alone understood what Aristotle was talking about, and certainly, when it came to swordsmanship, or spear-fighting, what he lacked in reach and leg length he often made up for in subtlety and practice.

  Practice. I was busy sneaking over the wall of the boys’ compound every night to meet a girl – I loved her. I was fifteen, and her body was smooth and beautiful, and mine, as long as I was willing to risk heavy physical punishment and go for days without sleep, which most fifteen-year-old boys see as a small price to pay for the feel of two breasts under their hands. But I remember coming back from one of these expeditions, feeling like a king, and finding Alexander with a wooden sword in his hand, standing at the stake behind the barracks, practising the steps of a particular blow – hip rotation, right foot rotating around the left, then pushing forward, passing the left, and then another hip rotation that left you facing your opponent from a new angle. Our sword master – one of half a dozen men named Cleitus – had taught us the footwork the morning before, and here was the heir of Macedon in the first pale grey light of day, executing the move over and over. He’d placed white pebbles where he wanted his feet to go.

  ‘Join me,’ he said, without turning around.

  No one refused a direct order from the prince. Once or twice, Hephaestion, his best friend, had smacked him for us, but none of us, even Hephaestion, ever refused him. So I squared off, tried the steps, stumbled.

  ‘Use the white rocks,’ he said quietly. ‘They help.’ He stepped around the pell and left me to his rocks. They did help, but what helped me more was watching him. He was executing the steps faster and faster, and then he began to throw cuts with his wooden sword as he moved his feet – one, two, three. The master hadn’t taught us cuts yet – at least, not the cuts that went with the steps.

  It was always difficult to learn anything from Alexander – he learned things by observation, usually in one or two repetitions, and he never really understood that the rest of us needed to be shown things slowly and precisely.

  I had the steps in ten repetitions. Alexander grinned at me, and we started to do them together, like peasants dancing for the gods, and I picked up his sword cuts just for the joy of doing them in perfect unison. The sun rose, a red ball cutting through the high morning fog. I got it. What he had reasoned out in the darkness – well, I’m no fool. I got it.

  We dressed quickly and we were the first into the dining hall. Leonidas, the athlete, was already there, naked under a chlamys of coarse wool. He had a heavy staff in his hand. He rose and bowed his head to Alexander. He looked at me the way teachers look at boys – boys they know are guilty but haven’t caught yet.

  ‘Your pallet was empty, son of Lagus,’ he said formally.

  ‘He was with me, practising,’ Alexander said.

  Leonidas narrowed his eyes, stuck a hand down the front of my chiton and felt the slick sweat on my chest. He nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said. What he meant was, Another time, boy.

  That was the prince’s way, though. He didn’t say, ‘Ptolemy, Leonidas is on the hunt for you.’ He merely required me to attend him at practice and then dealt with the matter himself. So that if I made an excuse and avoided practising with him in the grey dawn, I would only punish myself.

  At any rate, that morning, after we did drills in pairs, the sword master handed out the padded wooden swords and we stripped off our chlamyses and sparred. We were tough boys – indeed, other than in Sparta, I doubt you’d have found tougher – and most fights ended with the loser knocked unconscious, because it was reckoned faint-hearted to raise a hand and accept defeat without showing blood or falling into the deep.

  By chance, I drew Amyntas – we were never friends. I hit him and he hit me, and welts were raised. He was cutting at my sword arm – perfectly legitimate, but my timing was off and he kept hitting the same place, and the lambskin wrapped on the oak sword was not enough to keep those blows from causing real pain.

  ‘Keep your sword down and behind your shield,’ Cleitus muttered. We weren’t using shields yet, but the chlamys was a standin for the shield. A good swordsman doesn’t show his opponent the sword until the cut is coming in. I was waving my sword about, sending Amyntas signals as clear as if I was shouting out when I meant to attack.

  I got back into my stance, got my sword hand down so that my weapon was hidden by my chlamys, and swore to myself that I’d let him strike first.

  I waited a long time. The little shit had learned his fancy arm cut and now he was determined to use it over and over.

  We circled and circled. The other boys hooted – Hephaestion began to deride us both. Alexander wasn’t even paying attention. He was somewhere else in his head – I knew that look.

  There were elements of swordsmanship that were exactly the same as elements of things at which I was very good – pankration, for instance, the all-in wrestling that the Greeks love. I’m big and my arms are longer than they ought to be, and I know my distances when I go for a throw. Amyntas was at a loss as to what to do, now that I wasn’t throwing attacks, and he was less willing to accept the taunts of the others than I was. I slid forward, closing the distance subtly while circling to the right.

  I didn’t plan it. It was gods-sent. I did stamp my foot to draw him, and he did fall for it. The movement of my front foot drew his counter-cut at my arm. But my arm wasn’t there, and I did the steps – one-two-three. My sword cut down from his open side, I was at an odd angle to him, and I hit him so hard in the head that I might have killed him – I swear I never meant to cut so hard. He fell like an avalanche falls – every part of him together.

  Cleitus narrowed his eyes. Shrugged. Gave me a curt nod. Like a tutor who thinks you’ve cheated on a test but can’t see how.

  ‘Next,’ he said. He looked back at me.

  Alexander came forward, with my friend Cleitus, the one we called ‘the black’. He was the son of Alexander’s nurse, and not exactly a nobleman, but he was as loyal as a good dog to Alexander and, as I say, he was my friend. Nearly always, or at least that’s how I remember it.

  I was covered in sweat, and while slaves dragged Amyntas off the palaestra and revived him, I put my cloak on – it was cold – and realized just how badly my arm was hurt.

  I stood there, rubbing it and trying to look unhurt and victorious. Manly and aristocratic.

  Alexander took Cleitus apart. It was quite an exhibition; Alexander had mastered the step and the associated cuts, and he proceeded to hit Cleitus over and over again. Cleitus scored occasionally – he wasn’t bad – but Alexander hit him again and again, smoothly moving through his cutting strokes as if on parade – right to left, bottom to top, as if this was a drill and having his opponent know which blow was coming was expected. But because Cleitus didn’t get the new rhythm or the fancy offset offered by the new footwork, the blows came in – one after another.

  And then Cleitus’s dark face filled with blood. Maybe he thought he was being mocked – maybe one of the blows hurt more than the others. He grunted – it caught my attention, because, to be honest, watching one man carve the crap out of anothe
r is dull, and I’d stopped watching, but that grunt had hate in it. He stepped in, took Alexander’s blow on his shoulder and caught the prince’s elbow – and threw him to the ground. Classic pankration.

  Alexander got to his feet, came on guard, measured the distance and knocked Cleitus unconscious. One-two-three. Black Cleitus crashed to the ground as if dead.

  The sword master looked at him, and then flicked his glance over to me.

  ‘Well done, my prince,’ he said. ‘A little harder than it needed to be.’

  Black Cleitus was not dead. He let out a great snort, and blood flowed from his nostrils, and then he snorted like a boar and got up on his knees and vomited.

  Alexander held his hair – we all wore ours long. Then he came over and stood by me – according to our traditions, the winning boys stood together.

  ‘Did you see me?’ he said. ‘I used the new step.’

  ‘Me, too,’ I said.

  He turned to me so fast I thought he had tripped. ‘You what?’

  ‘I put Amyntas down with the same blow you used on Black Cleitus,’ I said. I wasn’t paying attention to the signals – we were victors together, and I thought . . .

  His smile came off his face like water draining from a dropped pot. He stood quivering with anger. ‘It was mine,’ he said. ‘Not yours. I should have been first.’

  He had the same look in his eyes that Erigyus had when he punched his eating knife through the highlander’s throat-bole. I admit I stepped back.

  When the sun was high, Aristotle came out to find us and take us to the cold stone benches. As always, he asked Cleitus and Leonidas to tell him what we’d done.

  ‘Alexander downed his opponent with the Harmodius Blow,’ Cleitus the sword master said. He wasn’t a clever man, and his flattery rarely went well with the prince. He was a good swordsman, though.

  ‘Every idiot knows how to do it,’ Alexander spat. He stood by himself, arms across his chest, the very image of adolescent anger.

  Aristotle looked around. I fancied he caught my eye – perhaps it was just my imagination. ‘Victors should be gracious,’ Aristotle said.

  ‘I am gracious,’ Alexander retorted.

  ‘No,’ said Aristotle. ‘You are not.’

  Their eyes locked, and all the other boys shuffled away.

  ‘You desire to be Achilles? You strive always to be first and best?’ His old tutor, Lysimachus of Acarnia, who had complete control of the younger Alexander before Aristotle came, called himself Phoenix, called Hephaestion Patroclus and called Alexander Achilles. Aristotle was human enough to resent the old tutor and his lickspittle ways.

  Alexander looked away in angry silence.

  Aristotle stepped closer. ‘Which boy did you put down with this Harmodius Blow, Prince?’

  Alexander shrugged. ‘It does not matter.’

  ‘Ptolemy?’ Aristotle asked.

  ‘No,’ Alexander spat. ‘He . . .’ Then he lapsed into silence.

  ‘It was me, lord,’ Black Cleitus said. He was rueful. ‘Had it coming.’

  Aristotle looked at Cleitus. Then at me.

  Leonidas’s straight back and flared nostrils suggested that he was none too pleased by this intrusion of the academic into the athletic. ‘Held the boy’s hair. He was decent enough.’

  Aristotle looked around again, like a good hunting dog catching the scent of a distant and elusive prey.

  He looked at Amyntas, with a heavy bandage around his temples. The same bandage that Cleitus wore. ‘Who fought Amyntas?’ he asked.

  ‘I did,’ I allowed.

  ‘The same way?’ Aristotle asked, splaying two fingers on Amyntas’s head and measuring the blow.

  I shrugged.

  Alexander flushed.

  Aristotle laughed. ‘Alexander, excellence lies in being better than other men – not in other men being worse than you. I can read you like a book, boy.’

  Alexander looked as if he might cry.

  What is hard to explain in this schoolboy reminiscence is that I could understand. Alexander felt I had betrayed him. He’d rescued me from Leonidas only to have me go first and throw his blow – a blow he’d risen in the dawn to practise.

  So I stepped right up next to the prince and bowed my head. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  Alexander didn’t look at me. ‘No. I was not behaving well.’ His voice was choked, as if he’d just heard that a favourite was dead.

  ‘I’m sorry anyway,’ I said.

  My pater used to say that if you truly want to know a man, spend a week with him in the wilderness. No one can hide his true self from the companions of the hunt. Freezing rain, stinging nettles, a bad cut from a spear-point, an unwanted offer of sex from one of the oldsters – all the tests of young manhood are waiting in the hills and deep woods, and that’s before you meet the boar or the wolf with nothing between you but an ash staff and a few inches of cold iron.

  A few days after the sword incident, Erygius and Laodon came from Pella with some of the king’s companions – his Hetaeroi, friends and bodyguards and inner council of state all in one – to take us hunting. It was a test and a vacation all in one.

  Macedonian nobles do not hunt like Greek aristocrats, and despite the many ways we copy them, in hunting we have our own ways.

  We use dogs to locate the quarry, and other dogs to run it down, and we follow our dogs on horseback. Depending on terrain and the animal we’re after, we stay mounted with spears or dismount with spears. The height of courage is to take a boar on foot. Greeks do it the same way, but they don’t use horses, and that’s slower. And they don’t use a double-bladed axe to finish the boar, and that’s just foolishness. Trying to finish a boar with a spear is . . . well, it is a good way to reduce your supply of available noblemen.

  It was autumn, and we went north and west, into Lychnitis. Lychnitis is beautiful – low hills that rise gently into mountains, and old forests that men have never cut, not even in the age of heroes. There’re trees lying on the forest floor that are as thick as a horse, and others as wide as a man is tall, so that to clamber over them is like climbing a low hill – and they’re just the downed trees. Giants rise on every side, green temples to the immortal gods, and every animal thrives there – the great deer, the elk and the boar. And the wolves.

  And desperate men, of course.

  We made our hunting camp in a long clearing that kings of Macedon had used for their hunting camps since the gods walked the earth. It was a defensible hilltop, high enough to give warning of approaches, low enough that the boys and the slaves didn’t have to go too far for the water that flowed across the northern base of the hill from the spring. The land about was scrubby, but rose to the west and north – to the north the camp was dominated by the first low mountain of Paeonia, and to the west the trees grew and grew, so that the Illyrians said a squirrel could jump from tree to tree from the hunting camp all the way to Hyperborea, where Apollo went to sleep.

  The air was as clean and cold as a mother’s reproach. The animals were not afraid of men, and came right into camp to steal food. Our horses were skittish unless one of the boys was with them all the time. This was just a year after Alexander gained Bucephalus – a fine horse, though legend has improved him like it has polished his master. In fact, the prince had three big mounts for hunting and a palfrey for riding about. We all did – no one horse could keep going all day over that country, and we knocked them up badly. And that week, the rain fell as if Artemis disapproved of our slaughter – on and on, a light rain that never seemed to end, and in that kind of weather, horses get sick, go lame – die – as fast as children die in the same weather.

  I had a horse I loved – a dark yellow golden coat, with blond mane and tail, tall and handsome and fast, which one of Pater’s grooms had rather impiously called ‘Poseidon’. But Poseidon he remained, and he had the god’s own strength, and in my eyes he was a better horse than Bucephalus or any other horse who’d ever lived. He was certainly faster than the mighty
bay, but like the other boys, I was not foolish enough to show it.

  We spent the first few days deer-hunting – for the meat. Boar-hunting and wolf-hunting are very noble, but they don’t feed the troops or the slaves, so a boar hunt usually starts with the massed slaughter of a deer herd. It wasn’t like sport at all, or even like war – more like a harvest, as the trained slaves and a handful of the king’s cavalry troopers wove screens of brush and set up a long alley of these hurdles, shaped like a giant funnel, between two hills. All the mounted men made a great line before dawn, and we picked our way across the hills, eyes watering with the effort of finding the next huntsman to the right and left in the rain and the dim light – I was off my horse twice on the first morning, flat on my face once and off Poseidon’s rump the other, caught looking the wrong way when he trotted under a low branch.

  But we covered a lot of ground, driving the deer – and every other living thing – into the open end of the funnel. By full daylight, we closed the net tight. The first day was sloppy, and we pages were blamed for indiscipline. But on the second morning it was well done, and we drove fifty deer down the funnel into the older men, who killed them with swords and spears. Laodon was thrilling to watch, standing coolly with a short spear – a longche, just the height of a man, and heavy in the shaft. He killed a stag that charged him – stood his ground, shifted his weight and the animal was down, and then all the older men finished it. A few deer got past, of course, and soldiers with bows shot them down – shooting carefully, because hitting one of the king’s companions was a death sentence. Perhaps they were shooting too carefully, because one enormous stag, a monster as big as my horse, beloved of Artemis, burst through the archers and raced free up the hills and vanished into the deep trees.