God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great Page 8

  I thought that I’d just have a look. I had as much right to take a peek at Cleitus as anyone.

  I was sorry I looked. Not sorry, exactly. More . . . intrusive. Sensitive men do not last as household companions to princes – but at the same time, if you have no ability to read and feel other people, you’ll never be much of a battlefield commander, will you?

  My prince was lying with his head on her chest in the light of the vigil lamp. He was asleep. Her eyes were open. They met mine, and the very smallest smile – the sort that Pheidias put on Aphrodite – flickered around the edge of her mouth.

  I slipped away, mortified at his weakness – he looked like a boy sleeping on his mother.

  What had I expected?

  ‘Lord, there’s a rider at the gate.’ That was my forgotten slave, Hermonius, a big barbarian from the north. He was laden with the wine service, and despite that he was alert enough.

  ‘Go and drop the wine things in a chest and wake . . .’ Herakles – the prince was in the wrong bed. ‘I’ll deal with it,’ I said.

  I went to the gate, already wondering what could bring a messenger at this hour. Another way that the fight at the hunting camp had changed me – violence was real. Alone of the pages, or perhaps with Philip the Red, I realised that the Illyrians had intended to take or kill the prince and that meant he’d been betrayed. I’d only told two men – my father, and Aristotle. My father told Parmenio, or so he told me.

  The man at the gate was Laodon.

  ‘My lord?’ I said, swinging the gate open. And wondering, all of a sudden, if Laodon could have been the traitor.

  ‘Hello, Ptolemy. I need the prince – we’re fucked, and that’s no mistake.’ He was covered in mud, wearing beautiful scale armour and a fine red cloak both fouled from the road. He slid from his horse and embraced me – that surprised me, and pretty much let him off the hook of treason in my mind. ‘Glad you are here. Get me the prince.’

  ‘Life or death?’ I asked.

  Laodon paused just as Hermonius came out of the dark and started to untack his horse. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  I grabbed his rolled cloak and led him to the infirmary. It was still dark – all I needed was some luck. ‘Swear on the furies you won’t say a word, lord,’ I said. ‘I stood my ground with you.’

  Laodon shrugged. ‘He’s got that fool boy with him? Not my problem. This is the kingdom, boy – take me to the prince.’

  I took his hand. ‘Swear,’ I said.

  ‘By the furies, damn you!’ Laodon said.

  I took him into the infirmary. I got ahead of him, leaned over the bed – the oil lamp was still burning, and now they were both asleep.

  I woke Alexander with a brush of fingers across his mouth – works on most folks – and he came up with a knife in his hand. But I’d been the duty page before and I knew his little ways.

  ‘News from Pella,’ I said. ‘Life and death. Gather your wits, lord.’

  He looked past me and saw Laodon. Nodded to me. Rolled out of bed, naked but for a knife sheath on a string.

  She was awake already. I lifted her, bedclothes and all, off the bed, and carried her out the back of the infirmary. I put her down on the porch – on her feet – and threw the end of the blanket over her head, and she smiled at me and ran. Problem solved.

  As if we were in one of Menander’s comedies, Hephaestion came through the front door a heartbeat later. He was ready to be hysterical – he thought that he’d caught Alexander with Laodon.

  I’d have laughed if it hadn’t been so sad, and if the news hadn’t been so bad.

  Philip had lost a battle – and he was badly wounded. A combined force of Scythians and Thracians – not that the two are all that different – had caught him in the passes where he was carving out new territory, north and east of Illyria. He’d lost a lot of men – veterans – and part of his horse herd, and he’d taken a wound in the thigh.

  Laodon shrugged when he was done with the barest relation. ‘He’s your da,’ he said. ‘So please accept my regrets. But I think he’s done – and the Thracians aren’t going to sit on the other side of the mountains and let us rebuild.’

  ‘My father’s going to die?’ Alexander asked. His voice had a curious timbre to it – hard to guess what he thought.

  ‘Almost dead,’ Laodon said.

  Alexander didn’t raise his eyes from the rumpled bed – ‘Where’s Parmenio?’

  ‘Chasing Phokion in the south. Or being chased by him.’ Laodon shrugged.

  ‘Antipater?’ Alexander asked.

  ‘With your father, bringing the phalanx back as well as he can.’ Laodon was exhausted – I knew the signs. I poured him a cup of wine and water and he drank it off.

  Alexander stood up, and he wasn’t just awake, he was quivering with energy.

  ‘I was afraid he would leave me no worlds to conquer,’ he said softly. ‘Ptolemy – all the pages over fifteen, with armour and remounts, in the courtyard at dawn.’

  I thought that one through for fifty heartbeats. ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘Very good. See to it that the young person is suitably rewarded and silent, if you please.’ His eyes flicked back to the bed, but I knew who he meant. His voice was impersonal, military, like the better sort of Athenian orator. Like a king.

  I like to think that if Alexander had lain with the courtesan and then had a good night’s sleep, it might all have been different.

  By the time we cantered into Pella, our girths tight and our cloak rolls tighter, we looked like professional soldiers, the bodyguard of a king. We’d trained for it – and three days on the road moving at top speed tightened everything about us. Alexander had reached a new level of remoteness from us – he barely spoke, but when he did, his voice was light and he laughed with everyone.

  He was working on a new version, a new mask. From ‘serious boy’ he was now on to ‘golden boy’.

  When we reached Pella, the vanguard of the army was already coming in.

  Macedon in those days was an armed camp, a state girded for war night or day, winter or summer – indeed, it was one of Demosthenes’ chief complaints about us that we made war all year long. Even the Spartans took the winter off, seemed to be the burden of his message.

  But while Philip had certainly been beaten, and beaten badly – the Field of Crocuses comes to mind – Macedon was not used to defeat. Pella liked her victory celebrations, with rich, drunken pezhetaeroi swaggering through the streets and wild-eyed auxiliaries glutting themselves on wine and good bread and all the delights of civilisation.

  But when we rode into Pella, War was showing his other face.

  Philip’s companions brought him in. Every mouth was pinched, and every neck and shoulder bore the marks of ten days in armour and no rest. Men were missing helmets – helmets that had cost a year’s wages for a skilled man. Men were missing cloaks. Hardly a single knight had a spear, and some were missing their swords as well, and where there ought to have been four hundred noble cavalrymen, there were not many past two hundred.

  The horses looked worse, first because so many knights were riding nags and scrubs and hill ponies instead of our best Persian-given bloodstock, and second because where you did see a charger, he was as knackered as his master, and many of them had more wounds than the men on their backs. So many men and horses were wounded that the whole column buzzed with carrion flies and the companions were too tired to brush them away, so that a wounded man, just keeping his saddle, might have forty or fifty flies on the open wound of his face, in the corners of his eyes.

  Behind the companions came the pezhetaeroi, the ‘foot companions’. They had walked where the nobler companions had ridden, and they had lines like Keltoi work engraved on their faces, and their legs were mud to the thigh. Most of them wore quilted linen corselets, some leather, all splashed with mud and blood. Most of the infantry column had dysentery – not as uncommon as you might think, my lad – and some of them shat while they walked. Oh yes.

  And
behind the pezhetaeroi, the wounded. In baggage carts that had held officers’ tents and nobles’ spare horse tack – all abandoned to the foe. On blankets between two sarissas – our long spear, taller than two men. There’s a cruel Macedonian joke that every recruit wears the stretcher that will carry his corpse home – his infantryman’s cloak. There were quite a few wounded – later I learned that the pezhetaeroi had turned on the Thracians and stopped their last charge cold and then made sure of their wounded. Thracians torture any wounded they find – it is religious, for them, to test a man’s courage as he dies, but to us that is blasphemy.

  I was sitting in the front rank, a few horses from the prince. Hephaestion was next to him – calm and professional. He was only a drama queen when his own interests were affected. Black Cleitus gave me a grim smile and walked his horse to my side. But I watched Alexander, and he watched Antipater.

  ‘Ready?’ Cleitus asked. He had the face of a loyal dog, a big hound that you send in after the bear, but he was as smart as any of us. He hid it from most men, but not from me.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  Alexander heard him. He couldn’t stop the smile from reaching his face.

  But he was wrong. We all were.

  THREE

  Pella and Greece, 340–339 BC

  The problem was that Philip did not die.

  He was a great man. And there’s a saying in Greece that I heard when I was in Athens before the Great War – that great men have useless sons. Phokion, Isocrates, Alcebiades, Leonidas – none of them had great sons.

  But maybe the problem is that great men are too fucking hard on their sons, and most sons can’t stand the pain, and they fold – I’m just guessing, but sometimes it is easier to just knuckle under than to strive, endlessly, with the man of gold. I speak from some experience, youngster.

  But Alexander – no man ever born of woman – or of goddess – was ever so competitive. He had to compete – so deep, the inner need to prove himself to himself every day, all the time, over and over. When you are young, this appears as a great strength. As you grow older, it appears weaker and weaker. Trust me on this. The best men – the ones untouched by gods and happy in their own skins, the prosperous farmers and the good poets and the master craftsmen, the mothers of good children, the priestesses of well-run temples – have nothing to prove to gods or men. They merely are like the immortal gods.

  Then there’s the rest of us, of course. Hah!

  And Alexander had that need to prove prowess, like a disease. So that he ran, wrestled or studied Plato with the same look on his face that he wore in mortal combat. To him, it was all mortal combat. To the death. To prove himself as good as his father. Or better.

  Oh, it all sounds like crap – the sort of mumbo-jumbo that priests mutter. And he loved his father and his harpy of a mother, and they loved him. I’ve known many boys with worse parents. He did well enough. And he really loved them – he didn’t murder his mother, and that alone speaks volumes.

  Don’t look shocked, boy. We’re talking Macedon.

  But he was determined to be like a god – to be a god if ever he could be. To be a better man than his father, and his father was a colossus who bestrode the earth and made the mighty – Persia, Athens – tremble like small boys in a thunderstorm.

  Your father was a great man in a different mould – but you have to measure up to him, don’t you? Aye. And all around you are relatives, tutors, officers – men and women who knew him. You must see the judgement in their eyes.

  Good. Point made.

  Philip had a bad wound, but he was far from dead. In fact, he never gave up the reins of power. He was lying in a litter, dictating the restructuring of the magazines from Pella to the Thracian borderlands so that his counter-strike would land faster and better supplied.

  He looked up and caught my eye first. He was as white as a new-washed linen chiton, and his lips were pale, and his eyes had sunk into his head like those of a corpse – but he grinned.

  ‘Son of Lagus,’ he said. ‘You look ready for war.’

  ‘We heard you were dead, lord!’ I dismounted. The other pages dismounted behind me.

  ‘Not yet. Where is my son?’ Philip looked past me, and I saw him as he caught sight of Alexander, the only young man still mounted. He had his Boeotian helmet off, and the golden hair on either side of his forehead had made itself into ram’s horns, as it always did if he didn’t wash it for a few days. He looked like a god.

  Philip’s face lit up – blood came to his cheeks. His smile – I hoped that my father smiled like that, some day, when he saw me. ‘Ahh,’ Philip said.

  Alexander turned and saw his father’s litter and slid off his horse with his usual elegance. He bowed. ‘Pater,’ he said. Voice clipped, too controlled.

  ‘I’m not dead yet, boy,’ Philip said. Meant as humour. But delivered too deadpan.

  ‘My apologies, then,’ Alexander shot back. ‘I shall return to my studies.’

  ‘No – stay.’ The wounded man shifted. ‘They nearly cut my balls off, lad.’ Another try at humour.

  Alexander managed a half-smile. ‘That would hurt you worse than many another blow, Pater,’ he said.

  Philip laughed, slapped his leg and roared in pain.

  I left them to it, gathered the pages and joined them to the column.

  In fact, we never went back to the schoolroom. But it will take a long digression to explain how we ended up where we did, and you will have to be patient, because when you are young, life is an endless succession of elders forcing you to learn things, eh?

  Throughout my youth, Macedon was at war with Athens. This takes some explaining, because we sent them money and trees for their fleet and they sent us actors and rhetoricians and politicians and goldsmiths. But they had an empire and we wanted it. They were perfidious and evasive and dishonest – and Philip was their match.

  There was no principle involved at all. Just self-interest.

  Athens held most of the Chersonese and all of the best parts of the Bosporus. Athens’ prosperity depended on a free flow of grain from the Euxine – but of course you know all this, you scamp! And that was fine with Philip and Macedon, until Athens started to use all her naval bases in the Chersonese to brew trouble for Macedon. That’s a game that, once started, can’t be stopped. It’s like playing with a girl – you can hold her hand and be in paradise, but once that hand has been on her breast or between her thighs, you can’t go back to holding hands, can you? So it is with nation-states. First they slight each other, and then they foment war through third parties, and then they accidentally sink each other’s ships – brewing more hatred at every action – and they can never go back without a lot of treaties and some reason.

  Athens and Macedon were well matched. Athens was past her prime, but I didn’t need old Aristotle to tell me that Athens always bounces back – her prime is whenever she has a fleet. And Macedon was one generation from being a collection of mud huts in the wilderness, or like enough. In that one generation, Philip had pushed out borders in every direction, built an army as good as Sparta’s, built roads and supply centres, fortresses and alliances. But he didn’t have a fleet, and Athens could strip Macedon of her overseas possessions a few heartbeats after she acquired them. Macedon’s army was the better – but not really very much better, as the Athenians taught us in the Lamian War.

  Everything that happened while Alexander and I were growing to manhood was the petting and kissing part, on the way to real war between Athens and Macedon. I can’t even remember all the convolutions. The truth is, I didn’t pay that close a heed – I wasn’t a statesman, I was a boy.

  But even a very young man in Pella knew who Demosthenes was – knew that he rose every day in the assembly in Athens to denounce our king and our state and our way of life. Now – you’re an Athenian citizen, aren’t you, boy? I thought as much. So you probably know that we all admired Athens in every way – despite their prating against us, we all wanted to grow up to be At
henian gentlemen. We read their plays and their poetry and spoke their dialect and aped their manners and practised serving wine their way. But when it came to war, we were determined to beat them.

  And we knew who Phokion was – their best general, the one even Philip feared, and we knew that he admired us. Your father’s tutor, if I remember rightly. Yes.

  All by way of saying, in the spring when Philip came back from fighting Thracians, wounded – we were locked in a state of near war with Athens, and we were having the worst of it. Philip had seized a bunch of Athenian merchants – oh, he had provocation, but I remember old Aristotle saying it was the stupidest thing he’d ever done, and Aristotle was an admirer of wily Philip. At any rate, Athens declared war – a formal declaration, like going from kissing to intercourse. And Philip responded by marching an army into the Chersonese, laying siege to the major Athenian base at Perinthus – and failing.

  Then he descended on Byzantium, their most important base – a surprise attack after a fast march, his favourite ploy.

  And failed. Phokion outmarched him.

  So the defeat by the Thracians, even though it was against only a tithe of our armies, was a bad blow. The Illyrians, always willing to raid us, began to agitate on the borders, and the Athenian privateers preyed on our shipping, and Athens put a vicious bastard into the Chersonese, a pirate called Diopeithes. His son, Manes, is there yet. And he’s a vicious bastard, too.

  But the worst of it was that Athens had joined hands with Persia. That’s what Alexander and I were talking about, in the woods, over a trout dinner.

  It’s a funny thing – Persia was always the enemy of my youth. We didn’t play ‘Macedonians and Athenians’ in the corridors of Pella or the Gardens of Midas. We didn’t play Macedonians and Thracians, or Macedonians and Illyrians. We played Athenians and Persians, and it was always the day of Marathon, with us. Or we played Achaeans and Trojans. And the Trojans were just Persians.