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

  And then there was Calixeinna, who was tall and willowy, with a waist so small that I could have put my hands around it, lips that were the colour of dawn, hair that was a particular blushing shade of red-blond, and heavy, full breasts as yet untouched by age. Her hips were wide and her legs long, and she was perfect.

  While her women shrieked and played, she swam in the small pool, really only about three times the length of her body, the water ice cold and black in the early sun under the great holm oak that shadowed the spring. When she emerged, it was like the rising of the sun, and when she reached her arms back to wring out her hair . . .

  Oh, youth.

  She played for a while with a turtle by the edge of the pool, and it occurred to me that she knew Alexander was there. I didn’t know much about women, but I knew they didn’t play naked by pools nearly as much as adolescent boys thought they did.

  When she was done with the turtle, she lay on a rock, naked. The other nymphs continued to laugh and scream, and the longer I watched, the more like a performance it seemed.

  Eventually, I had to wonder how often it had been repeated, and by what mechanism Alexander had been informed of it, and whether he’d been to the performance before.

  Eventually, she put on her chiton – so prettily that one breast was free while a lost pin was found in the grass – and she and the Persian girl skipped away down the hill, arm in arm, and the other two stayed for a few minutes, filling jars.

  I snuck back to my resting place, and went straight to sleep.

  A little later, Alexander wakened me, looking as if he’d had a religious revelation. Then, in broad daylight, we climbed into the walled compound and went to the slaves’ quarters, where we sat to breakfast with the slaves – bad wine and stale bread and a little cheese and some dry figs. They all looked at us, of course. Alexander just smiled.

  And we were in our usual places when Aristotle opened his class. The philosopher actually got several sentences into his lecture before he realised that we were supposed to be in hiding.

  He was pleased with us.

  We were pleased with ourselves.

  And I never told Alexander that I had watched Calixeinna bathe. I think he’d have killed me.

  My point is, he was very smitten, in his deeply self-controlled and selfish way.

  I missed most of the by-play, because the next weeks were the weeks I was off drilling in the late afternoons with Polystratus. But Genny told me everything – sometimes too much of everything. Genny could chatter gossip at me even when her breathing was coming in gasps and her hands were locked behind my back and her nails were cutting into my muscles – ‘and then – ah! – she said – ah! – that he . . .’

  It’s good to know that, even as king, I can raise a laugh.

  I don’t remember what occasioned it. We hardly ever boxed – it was considered too Greek and effeminate – but when we did we wrapped our hands. That helped me – my left hand was ugly, and I was young, and having it wrapped helped steady me.

  Old Leonidas stood wearing his chlamys and holding a heavy staff of cornel wood. I happened to be the first page out the barracks door with my hands wrapped. And Amyntas came out second.

  ‘Ptolemy, son of Lagus,’ Leonidas snapped. ‘Against Amyntas . . .’ His eyes wandered, and he shook his head. ‘No. A younger boy. Philip the Black.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be gentle with him,’ Amyntas said. ‘He’s ugly, but maybe if I roll him over . . .’ He guffawed, and many of the other oldsters laughed.

  Alexander looked hurt. And he gave me a look – the whole burden of his eyes. In effect, he said do it.

  I must give the prince this – he was horrified when the other pages began to turn against me.

  Hephaestion relished my discomfiture. ‘He’s the only oldster who competes against little boys,’ he said to Leonidas. ‘Make him fight Amyntas.’

  ‘Hephaestion!’ snapped Alexander.

  ‘I’d love to face Amyntas,’ I said. ‘But I’m no match for him.’

  Amyntas laughed. ‘Put a bag over your head, Ptolemy!’ he said, and his little set laughed, but the other pages – especially Philip the Red, long ago turned from my tormentor to my friend – looked embarrassed.

  Leonidas didn’t like it, but he put me in the ring of wands against Amyntas.

  Losing can become a habit.

  Amyntas put a fist in my gut and instead of twisting away – I had stomach muscles like bands of steel and it wasn’t that bad – I folded around his punch and lay down.

  But when I rolled over, he was pushing his hips, pretending to fuck me for his little audience.

  I did my very best to hide my rage. I’d had some practice, since the night with the Illyrians, at hiding my thoughts. I hung my head, rubbed my hip and squared off.

  Leonidas struck Amyntas with his staff. ‘Don’t be a gadfly, boy,’ he said.

  Amyntas turned on me, eager to have me on the ground again. But he stumbled as he took up his guard – the will of the gods and sheer hubris – and I had all the time in the world to strike him.

  I needed it. Losing is a habit. Covering up is a habit, too – fighting defensively, waiting for the blow that will allow you to lose with honour, or at least some excuse and a minimum of pain. That’s how low I’d fallen – even after weeks of practice with Polystratus, faced with a real competitor, I was ready to lie down, I think, until that stumble. Ares was good to me.

  He stumbled, and his chin came to my fist.

  Instead of defending himself, he lashed out with his left and caught me on the nose, and it hurt. He didn’t break it – but he hurt me, and I saw red. Those two things saved me from myself – his stumble and that haze of pain.

  Let’s make this brief. I beat him to a pulp. I broke his nose and blackened both of his eyes and made him beg me for mercy.

  None of the other boys said a thing. Leonidas stood back and let it happen, and Aristotle . . .

  . . . caught my eye and gave me the smallest nod of approbation.

  When he was begging, I let him go. I had him under my left arm, his head locked against my body, and I was beating him with my elbow and fist. My hand hurt.

  Leonidas waved for two boys to carry Amyntas off.

  ‘Since you are feeling better,’ he said, ‘you may face Prince Alexander.’

  If losing is a habit, so is winning. Alexander always won – both because none of us wanted to beat him, and because he was awfully fast. And practised like a mad thing.

  But that morning, in that place, I was bound to try. I was drinking water and I almost choked at the announcement. Cleitus the Black grinned – not an adversarial grin, but the grin of a man who has been there. So I grinned back, and just at that moment, the gods sent Calixeinna. She was not entering the palaestra – that would have been an appalling breach of etiquette – but she paused, going down the steps from the exedra, about thirty paces away. Owing to the way the columns and the buildings aligned, I’m pretty sure I was the only boy she could see.

  She smiled at me. It was a beautiful, radiant, confident smile, and it wasn’t a brief flash.

  Then she turned and went down the steps.

  I shrugged off my chlamys and went to meet the prince.

  My shoulders hurt and my left hand was a dead thing, and I was back to being embarrassed by the scar tissue on my left breast – competitors are supposed to be beautiful. But when the stick came up between us, I didn’t give ground but jabbed with my left – over and over, my left fist like an annoying horsefly.

  My fourth or fifth jab connected. Alexander’s head snapped back and his lip was split, blood already welling. He was stunned, and I stepped in and gave him my right to the gut, jabbed a few more times, making some contacts, and then my right to the exposed side of his head and down he went.

  The other pages were silent.

  Alexander got up slowly, putting the cloth wrapping of his fists against his split lip to slow the flow of blood. His eyes met mine – glanced away – came
back.

  He winked.

  And then his lightning-fast right jab slammed into my head, while I was still trying to understand the wink.

  When I came to, Alexander was sitting by my bedside in the infirmary. He loved everything about medicine, and always told us that if he wasn’t king, he’d want to be a doctor. He meant it, too – he was always trying medicines on himself and others, and for years he kept a little journal detailing what he’d tried and with what effect, under what conditions.

  He grinned at me when I was obviously aware of him.

  ‘Have I told you, Ptolemy, how much you are a man after my own heart?’ he asked.

  I smiled. Who wouldn’t? He was the most charming man who ever lived, and that smile was all for me. ‘Why so, lord?’ I asked.

  ‘How long since you decided to come back to us?’ Alexander asked me. ‘Two weeks? Perhaps three?’ He nodded. ‘And you hid your intentions carefully, like a wily Odysseus with the suitors all around him.’ He leaned forward. ‘You’d already started training when we were up the mountain, and you never said a word.’

  ‘My lord does me too much credit,’ I said. But I was grinning, too.

  ‘Welcome back, son of Lagus,’ Alexander said. ‘There is nothing I love better than a man in control of himself.’

  He gave me a hug, forced me to drink some foul tea that really did make me feel better – a tisane of willow bark, I think.

  Calixeinna came and read to me. I’d never really met her, and she had a beautiful voice and her reading was as good as an actor’s – at least, the kind of actors who came to Pella. She read to me from a play of Aeschylus and then she read me some of Simonides’ poem on Plataea. And then she recited a long section of the Iliad – the time from when Patroclus dies and Achilles is disconsolate.

  ‘You are one of his friends,’ she said, interrupting herself in the midst of the hero’s rage. ‘I just heard today – how you saved him.’ She looked at me – at my hand. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You are too kind,’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘No. I’m not. I’ve been used – I know what torture is.’ She squeezed my hand.

  My heart fluttered.

  ‘I need help with him,’ she said. ‘Would you help me?’

  I sat up. I really didn’t need to be in bed. And she gave off a perfume, and a feeling – some women exude sex, the way some men exude power. Perhaps it is the same. I wanted her, she knew it, it didn’t matter a damn to her, and she was prepared to use it against me.

  I wasn’t a fool, you know. Just young.

  She ran her hand casually up my left arm and on to the missing nipple, her nails unerringly just between pain and pleasure. ‘I could teach you things that would mean that no woman would ever care about your scars,’ she said. ‘I need to sleep with the prince. I need to see into his head. No one told me when I took this job that he was a Spartan.’

  My loyalty to my prince was absolute – nor had I ever had enough trouble with women, despite my looks, to worry overmuch in that regard.

  But to look at Calixeinna was to want her. ‘I’ll think on it,’ I said, and I meant it. I seized one of her hands and kissed it.

  Her free hand slapped my left ear, boxed it hard enough to drive my wits from my head for a moment. She was off the bed and across the corridor.

  Alexander was in the doorway.

  ‘He has a great deal of life left in him, I suspect,’ the prince said. He was smiling.

  Calixeinna sank gracefully to one knee and rose again, her back straight. Then she moved away.

  Alexander’s eyes never left her. I watched him watch her, when he thought that I was lust-raddled myself.

  In the same kind of flash that had come to me over the fighting skills, I understood him in that moment. Calixeinna didn’t have a chance.

  He wanted her.

  But to take her at his mother’s insistence would involve a loss of a battle.

  ‘I would not poach your deer,’ I said.

  ‘You may have her,’ he said. His eyes said otherwise.

  I shook my head. ‘Lord, if I were . . . in a moment of hubris, and even if she would part her legs for me – to take that woman, everyone would punish me for it.’ I shrugged. ‘Your father, your lady mother, Aristotle, the other pages – Aphrodite herself, no doubt.’

  Alexander sat on my bed. ‘How’s your head?’

  ‘The tisane helped,’ I said, which made him happy. I took out a stylus and scratched a note on his wax tablet.

  ‘You want her,’ I said. Boldest thing I’d ever said to him.

  He read the note. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. He sighed. ‘But I cannot. I think . . . do you understand, son of Lagus?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘A king must never surrender to his lusts. A man must never surrender to the views other men have of him. This would be both.’ Alexander nodded, having learned his lesson by heart.

  He was very serious. Only an eighteen-year-old can be that serious. You should know.

  ‘Have her in secret – win her to your side and have her deny that you were ever together,’ I suggested.

  ‘When did you become so wily?’ he asked.

  It occurred to me that in one blow I could become his confidant, undermine Hephaestion and help him with his mother and father. But that wasn’t my intention.

  On the other hand, once I’d thought these things, I realised that I had become wily – at some point between the bandit’s knife and pulping Amantys. Odysseus, not Achilles, was always my favourite.

  Alexander’s nails were pressed into his palms. He used pain quite a bit, to control himself – I’d seen it, and he was hardly alone in that regard.

  ‘Prince – you will be king. If you want the woman – let’s arrange it.’ I smiled.

  He didn’t smile. ‘It is a wrong action,’ he said.

  Aphrodite, the things Aristotle drilled into him. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Aristotle doesn’t want you to have any fun. And your father wants to make you behave like a beast. Surely there’s a middle road. Your own road.’

  Alexander’s self-control was such that he almost never touched his face. Try it – try to go fifteen minutes without touching your face. I mention this because I remember that at that moment he put his chin in his left hand and gave me a long look. ‘How?’ he asked me.

  It took me ten days. I felt a little like a pimp, to be sure.

  And of the two, the less willing conspirator was the prince. He did not like to conspire. He wanted to be Achilles. I was listening when Aristotle talked, by this time, and I’d finally figured out why we all love Achilles – who is, let us admit it, venal, selfish and somewhat given to boasting and drama.

  What we love is the freedom that comes with absolute mastery. Achilles can do whatever he wants – sulk for days in his tent, as we all wish to, or rage among his enemies, or mourn his dead friend, or take Briseis back from a great king. The limitations on his absolute freedom drive him almost to madness. And because the rest of us don’t live that way at all – because we submit to the will of others every day – we admire Achilles’ freedom.

  Alexander wanted to be Achilles, and sneaking about in the dark was not his way.

  As it turned out, my plan was over-complex and almost unnecessary.

  My plan involved Cleitus the Black taking a beating from Philip the Red – they could both be trusted. That evening, Hephaestion was to take wine to Aristotle – it was his turn. Every evening, one of the oldsters took him wine and sat and practised ‘good conversation’ for a few hours.

  Alexander would go to visit Cleitus – no unusual thing.

  But instead of Cleitus, he’d find Calixeinna, waiting on the bed in the infirmary. Not bad, eh?

  But on the day, Hephaestion had a virulent head cold and stayed in the barracks. And I was sent for by Aristotle.

  Alexander was nursing his best friend – a little too much nursing, and Hephaestion drove him away with his blanket snapping at his friend�
�s head and threw a vial of medicine after him for good measure. Sometimes Aphrodite takes a hand.

  I went to see Aristotle. I took a flask of good Chian – my father was rich, after all. This was the sweet Chian made from raisinated grapes. Sweet and strong. And instead of cutting it with water, I cut it with a mixture of wine and water I’d made in advance, and my tutor was as drunk as Dionysus by the time he’d finished his second bowl.

  He had a wife – a nice enough woman – whom he largely ignored. His tastes didn’t go that way, and she managed his household and not much more. I can imagine him telling others that a wife was cheaper than a slave butler – that’s what he’s supposed to have said to Alexander. On this evening, she came in, and she was on to me in a moment – saw me pouring my watered wine mixture into the Chian.

  She said nothing. Either Aphrodite was with us, or Aristotle’s wife was as happy to see him too drunk to move his legs as I was. Before he was done with me, though, he’d told me that I was the best of the pages again, and he tried to kiss me. He really was a moral man, but no man, no matter how controlled, can restrain himself with a jar of Chian under his belt. His wife took him to bed, singing a hymn to Ares of all things, and I cleaned up the wine-serving things – part of the training was learning what to mix and how to judge taste against quality of conversation.

  I was never good at the subtleties, but I had just figured out how to knock a middle-aged philosopher out cold.

  But I’m a worrier, and I cut across the compound, my slave laden with wine things, wondering if the prince had managed to make love to Helen of Troy, or whether some iron-clad principle had stood in the way.