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

  Hephaestion was a bitch queen, and Alexander loved him because he reminded him of his evil mother – that’s what I really think. And yet, to be fair, Hephaestion and I stood up for each other a number of times. He was loyal, and that alone was worth a lot.

  Hephaestion panicked. Granted, his form of panic was to gallop off downhill to the south and west, looking for Alexander, abandoning the two younger pages he was supposed to be riding herd on – Cleomenes and Pyrrhus, a pair of useless sprites. He galloped off, and there I was with two eleven-year-olds.

  Grinning like imps.

  ‘It’s an adventure, isn’t it, sir?’ said Cleomenes.

  ‘Shut up, you two.’ They had ponies. ‘Can you two find your way back to camp?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir!’ Pyrrhus said in the child’s tone that conveys the very opposite of what’s said.

  ‘Oh, no, sir!’ said Cleomenes, who’d felt my wrath before. ‘It’s . . . that way, I think.’ He pointed off towards Macedon, wrong by a quarter of the earth.

  ‘Stay with me, then,’ I barked.

  Want to rid yourself of fear? Taking care of others is the key. With Laodon I was the weaker – with Cleomenes and Pyrrhus I was the strongest. It might have been comic if it hadn’t been so forceful. I led them back over the first ridge and down to the treeline – and then I made them dismount while I looked at the camp.

  All I saw was armed pages looking nervous. So I gathered my charges and rode hard into camp.

  Philip was unable to keep still. ‘That’s all you found? Two brats?’

  Then he saw the blood on my arms.

  ‘I found Laodon. He’s looking for the prince.’ I was handed a cup and I took it, drank from it and spluttered – it was neat wine.

  ‘Thank the gods.’ Philip paused, met my eye. ‘Will you . . . go back out?’

  Command is hard. You have to make people do things that you could do better yourself – that might get them killed. Philip the Red, one of my many foes among the pages, was asking my permission to send me back out.

  I finished the wine. ‘I need to change horses,’ I said.

  Philip nodded. A slave ran for the horse lines.

  ‘Nice sword,’ Philip said.

  ‘Laodon did all the work,’ I managed. Suddenly we were men, talking about men’s things, and I was damned if I would boast like a boy.

  Philip nodded. ‘I’ve got archers in the woods,’ he said.

  ‘I got in the north way without being challenged,’ I said as my second-string horse, a big mare that I called Medea, was brought in.

  Philip gave me a hand up on to Medea’s broad back – as if I were his peer. ‘I’ll look at it,’ he said.

  I took a different angle this time, and the shadows were long. In half an hour or less the red orb would be lost behind the flank of the mountain. Already it was cold – and time for the prince and his hunting mentor to be back.

  I missed Poseidon immediately. I’d named the mare Medea for a reason – she was all love one minute and death on hooves the next, and she was in a mood. She made heavier work of climbing the ridges than Poseidon had done, and I had to spend more time dismounted, leading her. But before the sun was down a finger’s breadth, I was across the stream and marsh where I’d first left Polystratus, into new territory.

  Medea was a noisier horse, too, and she gave a sharp whinny as I crested the second ridge. I put a hand on her neck, but she raised her head and let go a trumpet call, and I heard a horse answer.

  I drew my new sword. There were several horses, all coming up the ridge at me. Running for camp was out of the question – we were drilled relentlessly about becoming the means by which an enemy might discover the camp, when we were scouting. In fact, we might have been training for this moment all our lives.

  I tucked Medea in behind a stunted, bushy spruce and threw my chlamys over her head to shut her up. I could hear my own panicked breathing, and I assumed that every Illyrian in the woods could hear me, too.

  I’d picked a poor hiding place, though. Always pick a place of ambush from which you can see. If you can’t see the enemy, chances are he can’t see you – but you can panic too, while you don’t know whether he’s outflanking you or wandering into your trap. I crouched there on Medea’s back, a hand well out over her head, keeping my cloak in place so she’d be quiet, and I had no idea where in Tartarus the Illyrians were.

  But to move now – they had to be a few horse-lengths away.

  The next few heartbeats were the longest of the day. And then the gods took a hand, and nothing was as I expected.

  I waited. I could hear them moving, and I could hear them talking. They were quiet and careful and they knew that they were being watched. And I became aware that they’d sent men around the other side of my spruce thicket – so I was a dead man.

  Best to charge, I decided. For the record, this is a form of fear that probably kills more men than running from an enemy. The need to get it over with is absurd.

  I pulled my cloak off Medea’s head and got her under me, and we were at them.

  Fighting on horseback is very different to fighting on foot, mostly because you are not on your own feet, but on someone else’s. It’s hard to wrong-foot a man in a fight – at least, in the open. But it’s not so hard to wrong-foot another man on horseback – if he’s got his spear on the wrong side of the horse, say. The first Illyrian had his spear in his right hand, held at mid-haft, slanted slightly down, and I burst from cover and he caught the spearhead in his pony’s neck strap.

  I missed my overhand stab, but my spearhead slammed sideways into his head and he toppled.

  Then Medea took a spear in the chest, and while I tried to slow her, another in the rump, and down we went. It was so fast I didn’t have time to hurt, but rolled free and got to my feet.

  Got my back against a big tree.

  The rest of the Illyrians were already relaxing – they’d thought it was a great ambush sprung on them, and now they were realising that they had one boy, not a Macedonian army.

  A pair of them kneed their horses around the spruce thicket, but the rest turned into me.

  I got my spear.

  A boy my own age laughed, pulled a bow from a long scabbard under his knee and strung it.

  So I threw the spear.

  It was something we practised every day – if I hadn’t been able to hit him at that distance, I’d have had marks on my back like a bad slave.

  That took the smiles off their faces. The boy with the bow died with a gurgle.

  I drew my sword.

  Let’s make this quick – they shot my horse, and then they beat me to the ground with spear staves. I don’t think I marked any of them. They were good. And thorough. They broke both my arms.

  They bound me to a sapling like a deer carcass, and I screamed. It hurt a great deal.

  Several of them spoke Greek, and the chieftain – at least, I assumed he was the chief, although he looked like a brigand with some gold pins – came and squatted by me.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘You killed Tarxes’ boy. He wants to skin you.’ The brigand chief grinned. He was missing a great many teeth, and others were broken, blackened stumps. I was somewhere in a haze of pain between consciousness and unconsciousness. ‘You look like a noble brat to me, boy. And you have one of my swords on you. Tell me. Who are you?’

  I’d like to say I was brave, but all I could do was mewl, spit and scream. The rawhide straps cut off all circulation to my legs but left plenty of feeling in my unset broken arms.

  Broken Teeth watched me for a while. Then he took my eating knife out of his belt and rammed it through my bicep. ‘Talk, boy,’ he said.

  I fainted. Thank the gods.

  They unstrapped me and threw me into the icy stream at the foot of the ridge. So much for fainting. I couldn’t swim. I couldn’t even float. It occurred to me that the best thing I could do was fill my lungs with water and go down, but they hauled me clear, and anyway, I’m not sure I had the nerve.
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  It is a funny thing, but when you are tortured, you are a different person. Weaker, with no pride and no self. And yet you want to live. That’s the hold they have over you. The desire to live.

  They knew quite a bit. They made the mistake of talking about it. They knew it was Alexander with the hunting party.

  As soon as I heard that, I knew that one of the lowland lords was playing at regicide. Alexander was the king’s only heir.

  That thought gave me power. Gave me back my self. Instead of being human garbage ready for sacrifice, I went back to being a royal page who had a master to protect.

  See this, lad? That’s where they cut my right nipple off my breast. Oh, yes. That’s all scar tissue.

  They enjoyed themselves. But they weren’t as good as, say, a Persian torturer.

  I screamed out my name. Several hundred times. It was the only thing I’d say, but I must have said it quite a bit, because I can actually remember when no sound came out at all – just the shrill sound of vocal cords wrecked by overuse.

  It would have been nice if I’d passed out again, but I didn’t and they tied me to a tree. Blood is sticky and cold. I was in shock, of course, and I shook so badly it hurt my arms. Shall I go on? Men came and beat me – quite casually. A fist in the face, a couple of kicks – they must have cracked every rib.

  I’m trying to shock you, boy, and that’s unkind. On the other hand, you have the satisfaction of knowing that since I’m here wearing the crown of Aegypt, I must have survived, eh?

  As darkness fell, half of them rode away west under Broken Teeth. The other half bedded down, with two alert and well-concealed sentries. Tarxes came and put his eating spike into my left hand and pulled it out a couple of times. See the scars?

  Then he went off to check the sentries. I was far too aware of everything around me. I wanted to faint or die, but instead I was hyper-aware.

  So I watched Laodon slit a sentry’s throat. I wasn’t sure it was real, because by then the night seemed to be full of ghosts and shadows. The moon was full. The Illyrian ponies began to fuss, and ghosts walked. When Laodon slit the man’s throat, taking him from behind with his hand as he’d grabbed me at the stream, I saw the ghosts lap at the fountain of black blood that flashed like a sword in the moonlight.

  From my position in the middle of the camp, I saw Erigyus take the big axe that was meant for boars and cut the other sentry in half, or close enough. The axe made a noise like a man splitting a melon for water on a summer’s day.

  Then the pages flooded the camp and began killing. There was no resistance – the Illyrians were taken by surprise and paid with their lives, and they died on their squalid pallets.

  Laodon cut my bonds. I managed a shriek when he reached for my arms, and he lowered me to the ground.

  ‘By Aphrodite,’ he swore. ‘What have they done to you?’

  And next I saw Alexander, his blond head outlined in fire. I can still see him – his profile sharply outlined. The pages must have thrown all the camp’s hastily gathered wood on to the fire, and the raging flames backlit him.

  ‘I will never forget this,’ he said, and kissed me on the forehead.

  It is a hard way to become a royal favourite – to win the absolute trust of the king. My left hand was never good for much afterwards, and I’ve known women lose the desire to fornicate when faced with the ruin of my left breast.

  But without those wounds, and those awful hours, I would not be King of Aegypt.

  I was a year recovering. To be honest, it was more than a year – it took me a year to recover my body enough to begin training, and another year to train hard enough to recover my place among the pages. And more than that to recover . . . something that Tarxes cut out. Ambition. Aggression. Will.

  I recovered for a while on my father’s estates, but as soon as I could walk and hold a stylus I was back with Aristotle, and it was then that I came to understand how much my station had changed. I was not Ptolemy, son of an aristocrat, royal page. Somehow I had become the Man Who Saved the Prince, and even my father treated me with respect.

  I had to go back to the Gardens of Midas to know why.

  Aristotle told me that Alexander saw me captured. That Polystratus – who lived to be free – found the prince and Erigyus, and was leading them to camp when they saw the whole fight – me against twenty Illyrians. Alexander ordered them to be silent. Later, Polystratus said he watched the whole incident like a craftsman watches his work – forging everything into his memory. Alexander and Polystratus didn’t depart until Broken Teeth took his men out of camp at nightfall, and they left Erigyus to watch – and came back with the pages and Laodon. As Aristotle explained it, the prince felt I’d sacrificed myself for him. Over the years many men would do the same, but he watched me do it. Sometimes the gods are kind.

  Aristotle liked to use it as an example of how proper behaviour could result in immediate reward.

  I was suspicious of that. It was my left hand that hurt as if it was newly injured every time it rained, not Aristotle’s. My smooth-skinned girl screamed when her hand found my scars and she woke her father.

  I had nightmares. Still have them. Nothing I ever found on the great wheel of the earth ever terrified me like that night in the woods when the ghosts walked, Death prowled and I was in the doorway between this world and the next, my soul stretched thin on the ground, when men wandered out of the dark to hurt me.

  But Alexander and the rest treated me like a hero. And that was, in fact, worth the cost.

  TWO

  Macedon and Greece, 341–338 BC

  My best memory of Aristotle is one of my most unhappy memories of myself.

  We were wrestling. Before my injury, I had been the best pankrationist – and the best boxer. The effective loss of my left hand, which was just strong enough to grasp the reins and not much more, left me a much worse wrestler and a bad pankrationist. I didn’t do much to change that.

  It must have been spring in the year that Alexander became regent. Greece was in ferment, Demosthenes was ranting against us every day in the Athenian Assembly, the Thebans were threatening war and nothing was as it had been in the outside world, or in the Gardens of Midas.

  The pecking order among the pages was no longer malleable. Hephaestion was at the top, with Alexander – he had no authority of his own, but Alexander would always back him, and the rest of us had learned to avoid open conflict. On the other hand, while I had been on my father’s estates, my ribs knitting back together, my arms healing, Hephaestion had changed for the worse – he no longer stood up for the other pages against Alexander. I suspect they’d been lovers since they knew how to do it, but they were thicker than thieves after the hunting camp. Inseparable.

  I was a distant third. I was not handsome, and that counted against me with Alexander. But like Black Cleitus, whose loyalty was beyond question, I had special rank, and no other page could touch me.

  After us came the best of the other boys – Perdiccus, Amyntas, Philip the Red – by now all leaders in their own right, with their own troops of cavalry. Cassander, Antipater’s son, was there – a useless twit then and now – and Marsysas, who even as a young man played the lyre and wrote better poetry than we did; nor was his sword hand light. Indeed, even Cassander – the best of the worst, if you like – was a fair fighter, the sort of man that troopers could follow in a pinch, with a rough sense of humour and a good way with hunting dogs.

  Then there was a pack of younger men and boys – the youngest was ten or eleven, and we treated them like slaves, for the most part, while trying to win their devotion at the same time, as older boys do to younger the world over. It was good practice for leadership – for war. Everything we did was practice for war.

  At any rate, we were fighting unarmed in the palaestra – a cool spring morning, all of us oiled, naked and trying to pretend we weren’t cold.

  I went up against Amyntas. I never tried – oh, Zeus, it hurts more to tell this than to tell of being tor
tured. I never even tried. I basically lay down and let him pin me.

  No one said a thing. Because by then, I’d done it fifty times. In fact, I remember Alexander smiling at me.

  But after we’d had a bite of bread moistened in wine, while Alexander and Hephaestion were fighting like desperate men – and by then we had seventeen-year-old bodies and a lot of muscle – Aristotle came and put a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘What I hate most about the Illyrians,’ he said, ‘was that they tortured your arete out of your body, and now you have no daimon at all.’

  Sometimes you know a thing is true. I burst into tears.

  Every man there turned and looked at me, and the pity in their eyes was like Tarxes’ eating spike driven into me again and again.

  Aristotle took me by the hand and led me out into the garden.

  ‘Ptolemy,’ he said, and he put a hand on the back of my neck as if I might bolt, ‘you were the best of the pages. And now you are not even a man. You have the honour of the prince’s esteem – you saved him. You alone saved him – with your head and with your sword. Is that to be the sum of your acts? Will you lie on that bed of laurels until it is withered, or will you rise from it?’ He turned me to face him. He was not a particularly handsome man, but I’ve always maintained that his looks made men think of him as the philosopher – bushy eyebrows, deep-set, wide, clear eyes, a thin mouth, a high forehead – the very image of manly wisdom.

  I’m ashamed to say that all I could manage was some sobs. It was all true. I’d lain down for every contest since I came back, and no one said me nay. I was an object of pity.

  ‘Let me tell you what I know of men,’ Aristotle said. ‘Most men are capable of greatness once. They rise above themselves, or they follow a greater man, or the gods lend a hand, or the fates – once, a man may make a fortune, may tell the truth despite pressure to lie, may have a worthy love who leads him to do good things. This taste of arete is all most men ever have – and they are better for it.’ He looked at me. ‘Stop blubbering, son of Lagus. I tell you – and I know – you are better than that. I expect better of you. Go and fight and lose. Lose fifty times to lesser men and you will be better for it. You have reached a point where there is no penalty for failure, and that is the worst thing that can happen to a young man. So here is your penalty – my contempt. And here is your reward – my admiration. Which will you have, son of Lagus?’