God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (31 page)

I could read his mind. ‘You can’t defend it,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘I’ll need money,’ I said. ‘Other than that – feel free to betray me.’

‘Betray you?’ he asked.

‘Seize the lands in your own name,’ I said. ‘Tell Attalus to sod off, you are the boss here, now. I’ll wager you gold against iron he’ll make an accommodation rather than sending raids.’

Heron made a face. ‘Men will spit on my shadow,’ he said.

I shrugged. ‘Not for long,’ I said. ‘I have no heir, and if Alexander fails – well, it’s all yours anyway. But I’ll need money and horses. I’m going to take every horse you have, and all the coin, and all the men who can fight.’

Heron shook his head. ‘I need ten fighters and horses and armour for them.’

That was good sense. I couldn’t strip him bare – even for the week until he could get reinforcements from the outlying farms.

He scratched his jaw. ‘Going to take the prince to Epirus?’ he asked.

‘Zeus! Is it that obvious?’ I said.

Heron nodded. ‘Best place for him. His mother will protect him. Get him an army, if required.’ He scratched again. ‘Take twenty men and forty horses. Make up the difference at the northern farms – strip them, not me. And use them as stopping points. And while you’re at it, take the slaves and send all the farmers here for protection. Then I don’t have any hostages up there.’

‘And all the farmers know that you are secretly loyal to me.’ I saw right through him.

He shrugged. ‘Yes. No one in the family is going to believe I’m a traitor.’

‘Attalus will believe.’ I hoped it would at least slow him down. He was going to have other fish to bake over the next few months. I had to hope that, or I was going to return to find my people butchered and my estates burned or worse.

Loyalty is the most valuable thing in the world. You do not spit on it. When a loyal man says he wants something – especially when he wants his reputation protected – you had better listen.

Besides, I liked his idea of closing the northern farms – most of which were pretty marginal, spear-won properties still subsisting on frontier rations. And most of our best fighters were up there. And Heron was right – I could ride right through them.

We were the size of a small army when we rode out the next morning – fifty royal companions, more than a hundred retainers and grooms, ten baggage carts, grain, pork, jars of wine, casks of silver. But we were getting away clean, and any idea of pursuit was a day late. We slept in the open that night, and on one of my northern farms the next.

I think it was three days into our exile that we were all sleeping on the floor of the ‘hall’ of my poorest farm – a timber hall shorter in length than my great hall at home was wide. Our companions were packed in like salted anchovies from the coast. I sent twenty grooms ahead under Polystratus with all the slaves from the northern farms, to clear the road over the mountains, buy food and prepare the way.

It was pouring rain. Some of the slaves were weeping – their lives were hard already, and being driven out into the winter was pretty cruel. Of course, they didn’t know the half of it. If Attalus came here . . .

But the women wept. The rain fell. And Prince Alexander was sleeping on the floor of a frontier farm. He was between me and Hephaestion. I was lying there in my cloak, listening to the rain, and thinking – I remember this very well – of Thaïs. Not Nike. Such is the power of lust and time. I was imagining . . . well, never you mind.

Alexander was weeping.

I’d never heard him weep before.

So I tore myself from Taïs’s imagined embraces. ‘My lord?’

‘Go away,’ he whispered.

Hephaestion was sound asleep and no help.

‘Lord, we’re almost to the mountains and safety,’ I said.

‘Thanks,’ he said. Dismissively.

‘Lord—’

‘Fuck
off
,’ he hissed.

I rolled over, so that we were eye to eye. Once, I’d have let him go. But we had put too much behind us – together. ‘Talk to me,’ I whispered.

‘I’m going to die some fat old fuck at someone else’s court!’ he said. ‘I’ll wash up in Asia or Athens, and men will point at me and say – there’s the victor of Chaeronea. What happened to him?
Fuck
Philip! Maybe he isn’t my father. I should have killed him while he lay there. Then I’d be king. Now I will be
no one.
’

Well – what do you say to that? Eh?

‘You know what exiles are like? Hatching useless plots, to feel alive? Fondling slaves, because no free person will be with them? They become like family retainers, or old slaves – drones, feeding off the fat of the house and contributing nothing, with no excellence, no arete – nothing to offer.’ Alexander knew what he was talking about, because there were generations of exiles around the fringes of the Macedonian court – Persians, Athenians, even a Spartan. And we’d seen more of them in Athens. Thracians, Persians, even a Scythian prince from the far north.

His voice was thick with unshed tears.

I reached out, squeezed his shoulder hard – and said, ‘You don’t sound like Achilles, to me.’

Macedonians aren’t big on gentle.

He froze as if I’d stuck a dagger into him.

His breath shuddered in and out a few times. Then it steadied down.

I went to sleep.

In the morning, nothing more was said. Except that the man who vaulted into the saddle was the man who led the cavalry charge at Chaeronea.

EIGHT

W
e passed most of the winter in Epirus, at a court so barbarous that Pella seemed like Athens, and suddenly Olympias seemed a great deal less alien than before. She was a child of this world at the edge of chaos.

I tell this out of order, but I remember once when she came to visit us – she had her own court at Epirus, and as a princess of the blood she had the sort of loyalty there that she probably missed at home – men who would die for her. At any rate, Alexander had his own rooms, and we were having – that is, I was throwing – an Athenian-style symposium. We were lying on couches, and the subject of the debate was love, and I was thinking of Thaïs – not that I loved her, but that she was worthy of love.

Alexander smiled at Hephaestion. ‘I love Hephaestion, because he is me, and I am he,’ he said.

Truth to tell, we groaned aloud then threw things at him. Which was a good sign, because it meant we were starting to heal. Going into exile is like losing a battle, or taking a beating, or failing, or losing a loved one. It hurts, and the hurt can last a long time.

At any rate, we were lying on our couches philosophising, and she swept in without warning. So perfect was her intelligence net – it always was – that she got past our sentries with all her women – she knew when the guards changed, and when the sentries were lax, and when men went off for a quick fumble – perhaps
with
one of her maids.

The women entered first – a dozen of them, in beautiful wools, and their arrival froze our talk. Her arrival – her beauty, even her perfume – trapped us like bars of adamantine. No one moved.

She stood in the middle of the room – in fact, in my memory, she is
always
at the centre of the room – and she looked around slowly. When her eyes met mine, she smiled.

‘Son of Lagus,’ she said warmly. ‘You do my son good service.’

Lovely words, but they chilled me to the bone. And despite that, as I’ve said before, I desired her.

She went and sat on Alexander’s couch. ‘You are safe here,’ she said.

He grimaced.

She slapped his side. ‘Don’t play your foolish boys’ Athenian games with me,’ she said. ‘This is Epirus, not Athens, and I can go where I want. Don’t pretend that I cannot.’

Alexander was not happier for that.

She smiled at him, a little motherly superiority etched between her brows. ‘You so want to be men. But you are boys. It was well done, getting here, but now you need me. We will raise an army, and Philip will see reason. You will see. And everything will be as it was.’

Alexander looked at his mother, and for once he told her the truth. ‘I do not want it as it was.’

She laughed. But her laugh got no echo.

‘He will relent. As he gets older, it is harder and harder for him to see—’

‘I will kill him, if I must,’ Alexander said.

And she met his eye, and something passed between them. And she smiled. ‘If it comes to that,’ she said.

And he grinned, like a grateful son.

She ruled Epirus. Not exactly ruled, but she did as she liked there, and we saw clearly what she came from, and what had made her so sure of herself, so like a goddess come to earth – I mean one of the less human, more vengeful sorts of goddesses.

Beyond Epirus, men wore skins and tattoos, and no one knew the rule of law. At the ‘court’ of Epirus, most of the warriors had never heard of Aristotle. Or Plato. Or the
Iliad
. There were men like rhapsodes, and they sang songs – endless tales of the borders, where one man killed another in a litany of violence. I admit that the
Iliad
can sound that way, but it is the
Iliad
. These songs were long and dull and had no story beyond the blood, the infidelity of women, the perfidiousness of the cowardly, the greatness of the men of pure blood – come to think of it, this does sound like the
Iliad
, but the difference is that the
Iliad
is beautiful and powerful and these were dull. And monotonous.

There were Keltoi at Epirus – tribal barbarians from the north and west, with red hair, tattoos and superb swords and metalwork, and tall tales – better tales than the Epirote singers sang, about gods in chariots and beautiful women. One of the Keltoi mercenaries there made up a song that slighted Olympias, and she had him killed.

Remarkably, the other Keltoi took no offence.

It was there, at the ‘court’ of Epirus, that my lifelong love of writing really started. I had very little to do – for the first time in my life. We organised the companions and the grooms into a rotation of watches on the prince – but with fifty men at arms and a hundred grooms, we each only had a watch every ten days.

I took them out for drills every day. That gave the day structure. I had learned some very fancy riding tricks in Athens – team tricks, the way the Athenian Hippeis did them for the religious festivals – and I taught them to the royal companions. And I put all my fighters on to the grooms and trained them hard, too.

But you can only do so much drill. And I lacked the experience to know that I should have kept them all busy all the time. I had enough trouble keeping myself entertained.

I rode, wrestled – in a town so barbaric that they didn’t have a gymnasium or a palaestra, which is funny – when you think of what Pyrrhus has built there now! But at the time, it was hard to train, hard to keep weight off.

At any rate, I started to write. The first thing I wrote was about the Keltoi – what they wore, what they carried, and their marvellous stories. They had beautiful women with them – back-talking, witty, marvellous women with bright hair, slanted eyes and a boldness seldom seen in Macedon. They weren’t available – I tried – but they flirted as if they were.

Men who didn’t understand found themselves matching swords with the Keltoi men. I understood, because in this way the Keltoi were like Athenians. Subtler, but not weaker.

And I wrote about the mountains, which, despite the lack of culture, were breathtakingly beautiful and full of game.

One of my favourite memories came from that winter.

After a snow, the royal huntsman – who was himself of royal birth and carried the portentous name of the hero himself, Lord Achilles – took us on a bear hunt. I had never been out for bear. I’d seen the fur, seen the animal once or twice, but until then I’d never seen one stand on its back feet and rip dogs to pieces.

It was in a thicket at the edge of a clearing in a high oak forest, well up the mountainside, and that bear had a better eye for terrain than most Greek generals. His flanks were covered by ravines and he had an escape route out the back of the thicket and into the deep trees, and our dogs, loyal and well trained, made hopeless leaps at the monster and died, so that that roar of the baying pack became quieter and quieter. The dogs could reach the bear only two at a time.

Old Achilles leaned on his spear. ‘Well, boys?’ he said. I was there with Alexander and half of his court in exile, and for a moment it occurred to me that this was some deep Macedonian intrigue to kill the prince.

Alexander raised an eyebrow. And winked at me.

‘You and Hephaestion up the ravines,’ he said. ‘Horn-call when you are within a spear-cast of the bear. Philip and Nearchus and I will go right up the hill into him. All we need is a few seconds – thrown spears will do it if you hit him.’

That was our plan.

I spent half an hour climbing the ravine. You try climbing wet rocks in a scale thorax and smooth-soled boots. With a pair of spears and a sword.

I’d still be there if not for Polystratus, who followed me, or led me, barefoot – handing me up my spears, and pushing my arse when I couldn’t find a handhold.