God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (2 page)
Read God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great Online
Authors: Christian Cameron
And ultimately, errors are my fault. If you find a historical error, please let me know!
One thing I have tried to avoid is altering history as we know it to suit a timetable or plotline. The history of the Wars of Alexander is difficult enough without my altering it. In addition, as you write about a period you love (and I have fallen pretty hard for this one) you learn more. Once I learn more, words may change or change their usage. As an example, in
Tyrant
, I used Xenophon’s
Cavalry Commander
as my guide to almost everything. Xenophon calls the ideal weapon a
machaira
. Subsequent study has revealed that Greeks were pretty lax about their sword nomenclature (actually, everyone is, except martial arts enthusiasts) and so Kineas’s Aegyptian
machaira
was probably called a
kopis
. So in the second book, I call it a
kopis
without apology. Other words may change – certainly my notion of the internal mechanics of the
hoplite phalanx
have changed. The more you learn…
A note about history. I’m always amused when a fan (or a non-fan) writes to tell me that I got a campaign or battle ‘wrong.’ Friends – and I hope we’re still friends when I say this – we know less about the wars of Alexander than we do about the surface of Mars or the historical life of Jesus. I read Greek, I look at the evidence, and then I make the call. I’ve been to most of these places, and I can read a map. While I’m deeply fallible, I am also a pretty good soldier and I’m prepared to make my own decisions in light of the evidence about everything from numbers to the course of a battle. I may well be “wrong,” but unless someone produces a time-machine, there’s no proving it. Our only real source on Alexander lived five hundred years later. That’s like calling me an eye-witness of Agincourt. Be wary of reading a campaign history or an Osprey book and assuming from the confident prose that we
know
. We don’t know. We stumble around in the dark and make guesses.
And that said, military historians are, by and large, the poorest historians out there, by virtue of studying the violent reactions of cultures without studying the cultures themselves. War and military matters are cultural artefacts, just like religion and philosophy and fashion, and to try to take them out of context is impossible. Hoplites didn’t carry the aspis because it was the ideal technology for the phalanx. I’ll bet they carried it because it was the ideal technology for the culture, from the breeding of oxen to the making of the bowl, to the way they stacked in wagons. Men only fight a few days a year if that, but they live and breathe and run and forage and gamble and get dysentery 365 days a year, and their kit has to be good on all those days too. The history of war is a dull litany of man’s inhumanity to man and woman, but history itself is the tale of the human race from birth until now. It’s a darn good story, and worth repeating. History matters.
Why does history matter? I should spare you this rant, after all if you’re reading this part of the book, chances are you’re a history buff at least, possibly a serious amateur historian, maybe a professional slumming in my novels. But just for the record, a week after I finished the final page proofs of this book, I happened to read a Facebook post by a Holocaust denier. I’m still mad. It’s not just the tom-fool anti-Semitism, it’s the anti-history. A person who denies the Holocaust happened is denying that history exists; that research and careful documentation, eye-witness accounts and government archives have any meaning. In this kind of relativism, there is no truth. Pontius Pilate wins. And historical fiction is just fantasy without magic.
Well, I happen to believe that the past
really happened
. And that the more we know about it, the more we are empowered to deal with the present.
Finally, yes, I kill a lot of characters. War kills. Violence and lives of violence have consequences, then as now. And despite the drama of war, childbirth probably killed women of warrior age about twice as fast as it killed active warriors, so when we get right down to who’s tough . . .
Enjoy!
Contents
PART II: The Path to the Throne
PART I
The Garden of Midas
PROLOGUE
S
atyrus had been in Alexandria only a few days when Leon took him to the Royal Palace to meet the King of Aegypt. After Antigonus and Eumenes and four months with a mercenary army, Satyrus should not have been nervous, but he was – Ptolemy was the greatest king in the circle of the earth, and his court kept great state, as befitted the ruler of a land that had recorded history going back five thousand years into the past, whose ancient gods still held sway over most of the Nile valley.
Ptolemy wore the crown of Lower Aegypt on his head, and a strange, un-Greek cowl that went with it, over a chiton of pure Tyrian purple. His sandals were white and gold. In his hand was the ankh – the sceptre of Aegypt. Leon’s hundreds of parental admonishments fled – Satyrus could scarcely remember how to bow.
The great king of all Aegypt leaned forward on his ivory throne. ‘Kineas’s son?’ he asked Leon.
‘Yes, great king,’ Leon answered.
‘Has the look. The nose. The chin. The arrogance.’ Ptolemy smiled at the boy. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, lad.’
Satyrus found his voice. ‘She’s not dead!’ he insisted. The loss of his mother had affected him more than even his sister. Rumour had her murdered on the banks of the Tanais river, but it was still possible that rumour was wrong.
Ptolemy smiled a sad smile. ‘Will you stay at my court, lad? Until you grow a little? And I’ll put a good sword in your hand and send you out to reclaim your own.’
Satyrus bowed. ‘I will serve you, lord, even as my uncles Diodorus and Leon serve you.’
Gabius, the king’s intelligencer, brought a stool and sent most of the courtiers out. And he and the king asked Satyrus questions – hundreds of questions – about Antigonus and about how Eumenes died, about the mountains south of Heraklea and about the coast of the Euxine – on and on, battles and deserts and everything Satyrus had seen in his busy young life.
But he was served rich cheese and pomegranate juice and crisp bread with honey. And neither the king nor the intelligencer was rude, or forceful. Merely thorough.
Sometimes Leon had to answer, or had to coax the answer from his ward, but Satyrus had lived with soldiers for two campaigns, and he knew what was expected of him. He explained as best he could the source of Antigonus’s elephants, the horse breeds of the steppe and a hundred other details, while a dozen Aegyptian priests and a pair of Greek scholars wrote his words down on papyrus.
When they were done, the king leaned forward again, and put a gold ring into the boy’s hand – a snake with his tail in his own mouth.
‘This is the sign of my people – my secret household,’ Ptolemy said. ‘Wear it in good health. And whenever you need me – well, your uncle knows how to find me. You are a remarkable young man – your father’s son. Is there anything I can do for you?’
Leon shook his head.
But Satyrus couldn’t restrain himself. ‘You knew . . . Alexander?’ he asked.
Ptolemy sat up as if a spark from the fire had struck bare skin. But he grinned. ‘Aye, lad. I knew Alexander.’
‘Would you . . . tell me what he was like?’ The boy stepped forward, and the guards by the throne rustled, but Ptolemy put out a hand.
The King of Aegypt rose, and every officer left in the great hall froze.
‘Come with me, boy,’ he said.
Together, the King of Aegypt and the adolescent boy walked out of the great hall of the palace. A dozen bodyguards fell in behind them. Leon and Gabias came with them, bringing up the rear of a fast-moving column that crossed the palace in deserted corridors or past scurrying slaves.
They entered a tunnel behind the royal residence. Ptolemy was silent, so Satyrus did his best not to ask questions. The one look he’d caught from Leon told him that his guardian was angry.
They climbed steps from the tunnel into a sombre hall, almost as big as the throne room. The walls were of red stone, lit by the last light of the sun through a round hole in the middle of the low dome above them.
The hole of the dome was covered in crystal or glass. Satyrus stared like a peasant.
In the midst of the hall was a dais as tall as a grown man’s knees, and on it was a bier – a closed sarcophagus in solid gold, with chiselled features and ram’s horns in ivory.
Satyrus fell on his knees. ‘Alexander,’ he said.
The King of Aegypt went to the bier and opened a cabinet set in the side of the dais. There were twenty-four holes – neat boxes made of cedar with silver nails. They held scrolls.
‘I kept a military journal, from our first campaign together to our last,’ Ptolemy said. He took one of the scrolls – the first – from its box, and handed it to Satyrus. Satyrus opened it, still on his knees. In the first hand’s-breadth of parchment, he saw water marks, mud, a grass stain, and a bloody handprint.
