God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (11 page)

‘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

T
he 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.