God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (43 page)

The hypaspitoi began to cheer –
Alaialaialaialai
.

Suddenly Alexander laughed. ‘Fuck them if they’re late to parade!’ he shouted, and pumped his hand to indicate that we should prepare to march.

So we marched away from Thessaly to conquer the world. The hypaspitoi led, and all the rest of the army had to catch up.

Beat that story, lad. Those were great days, great men, doing great things.

We made forced marches across the Thessalian plain, one hundred stades a day and sometimes more. We didn’t drink wine in the stews of Larissa – we missed nothing, I can tell you – and we didn’t bother the shepherd boys on the slopes of Mount Othrys. We crossed Thessaly in five days, and the Thessalian nobles complained we were ruining their horses.

My men laughed. They were marching five parasanges a day, running a third of the distance, keeping up with the cavalry scouts and the king. They were young and strong, and after three weeks in the field, they had bodies as hard as rock. We rested at the height of the pass over the shoulders of Othrys – my men were tucked into rocks and fissures, and there was snow. Men curled up three to a cloak – or rather, three to three cloaks. The man in the middle got a little sleep.

Alexander rode into my ‘camp’, which means that he asked a few sleepy men and a sentry, and Polystratus woke me.

Alexander had only Hephaestion with him.

‘I need another dash from your myrmidons,’ the king said. ‘I need you to be at the Gates of Fire by tonight. I don’t
think
Thebes has the balls to contest my passage, but once I have the Gates, we’ve got all the time in the world. Tell your boys I promise at least a week’s rest at the Gates. But I need this done now – I went to sleep thinking about it, and I woke up just now with Herakles’ hand on my shoulder.’

Fuck him.
Let’s face it, I’m not at my best in freezing cold in the middle of the night after a hundred-stade march and very little sleep.

But there comes a moment – when you are building something special – when you just want to keep testing it, because you cannot really believe how good it is. I’ve seen a cutler put an edge on a razor and then test it until his thumb is bleeding – grinning like a fool because the edge is so good. That was me.

I got to my feet, smiled at the king and Polystratus bellowed, ‘Spears and armour! March in one hour!’

And they got up off their rocks and joked that marching would be warmer than lying in the snow.

We marched along the beach and through the Gates of Fire unopposed. In fact, we had time to stop and make sacrifice to the Spartans who fell there for Greece – though I knew we were better men than they ever were. After all, they were merely Greeks, without even the erudition of Athens.

But they were good, brave men, and all brave men should be brothers, even when they fight against each other. War’s bad enough without rules. I hear men say that war should be fought without rules, but I despise such weaklings. Rules in contests are the courtesies of the strong to the strong.

But I digress.

We bought sheep from the shepherds and sacrificed them, and we poured libations to the dead – Persians as well as Greeks. And while we did that, fifty picked men climbed the high pass on our right flank and another fifty prowled ahead twenty stades under Alectus, who neither knew nor cared who Leonidas had been, despite his gleanings of Greek learning.

We were ahead of the Prodromoi, so we laid out the camp – the first time that ever happened – and we got the pick of the sheep. The farmers were thin on the ground, and there wasn’t much food. I sent scouts north into Achaea looking for grain and wine and oil.

Towards evening, Alexander came with the army, looked approvingly at the small ash-altar our sacrifices had left, and dismounted immediately to add his own. His devotions were absolutely genuine – he was a very religious man, and the sacrifices of heroes – all heroes, regardless of cause or race – meant a great deal to him. Some he had to equal or exceed – he was locked in agonistic competition even with the very gods – but that didn’t mean he didn’t worship their achievements. By acknowledging them, he worshipped himself. Or that’s how I see it now.

The next morning, we slept in, and held impromptu games in honour of the Spartans. We had only four Spartans in the whole army, but they were made the judges, and we had a wonderful time, running and throwing javelins, riding horses, wrestling, fencing and reading poetry.

It was a first, but like many aspects of that campaign, it was a sign of the future. Alexander the innovator was also Alexander the conservative. He wanted the old ways restored, even at the risk of seeming a little silly to his men. The first games we held had a slightly forced atmosphere – I remember that when the first wreaths of ludicrously over-woven laurel were awarded to the distance runner, men laughed – but the laughter stopped soon enough.

Marsyas found some local girls and asked them to make us proper wreaths, and when I won the run in armour on the second afternoon – running with a spear wound in my left foot, let me add – I received a beautiful wreath, which I was proud to wear all the next day. And those of us who won wreaths ate together that night.

Astibus won the javelin throw for accuracy.

Little Cleomenes wasn’t so little now, and had long legs like a woman, and won the two-stade sprint – won it handily.

That one I remember, because Alexander watched that race with something very like lust. He wanted to compete.

I was lounging about, literally resting on my laurels. I was lying on a pallet of new straw watching men run and cheering, and I caught the king’s eye. I shrugged. ‘Go run!’ I said quietly.

He gave me a sad smile. ‘Prince Alexander might have run,’ he said. ‘King Alexander will never run again.’

It wasn’t all fun and games. As soon as he made camp, Alexander sent heralds to the members of the Amphictyonic League, demanding – in the most courteous way possible – that they meet him at the Gates of Fire.

In effect, he announced, ‘I’m at the gates of mainland Greece, and none of you have the strength of arms to stop me. Want to talk?’

And they all came.

Even before the League assembled, states around us were falling into line. Or rather, back into our allegiance. The cities of southern Epirus begged for forgiveness and insisted they hadn’t meant to revolt. Listening to their ambassadors was an education in bad rhetoric.

Alexander stunned them by giving a few of them their independence. It was a complex version of independence, wherein he kept absolute control of their foreign relations, but they had city charters and city magnates. I didn’t understand right away, and thought that he was making concessions to the realities – but in a matter of a few weeks his policy became audience. It was his father’s policy in Boeotia to liberate the smaller cities and use them as watchdogs on Thebes. Of course they were loyal Macedonian allies – they owed us everything. Plataea comes to mind.

Alexander did the same. And the outer provinces crawled all over themselves to return to the fold. Even the ones we’d left behind when we marched on Greece.

Athens and Thebes did not send representatives to the Gates of Fire.

It is remarkable, when you are a soldier, how quickly after exhaustion that rest gives way to boredom. The change seems to be immediate – you are exhausted, you have a rest, suddenly you are bored. Bored soldiers are the most dangerous animals in the human bestiary. They fight duels, they get drunk, they rape.

All bad.

By the third day at the Gates of Fire, I’d killed a man who’d fought at Mount Ossa with my own hand – he raped a child, and I gutted him in front of the parade. That gave the rest of them pause. And I learned my lesson – I hope that child’s life saved a few others – and I brought in instructors for sword work, for wrestling, for running. We threw javelins relentlessly, and we climbed the cliffs, and we began to master the close-order drill that Philip had insisted the pezhetaeroi learn. We had a lexicon of manoeuvres, and we spent four days marching through them – Spartan counter-march, Macedonian counter-march, files and form to the left, files and form to the right, wheeling motions, half-file manoeuvres and file-doubling manoeuvres. Anything to keep the bastards busy.

The League representatives met, and on the first day they voted Alexander to be head of the League, as his father had been. Alexander smiled and proposed an agenda for the next four days of meetings.

And then we marched away in the dark. All Alexander ever wanted was the League’s recognition. As soon as he had it, he was finished with them and their trappings of authority. The Prodromoi marched in pitch darkness, very early on a short summer night, and my hypaspitoi followed them. We had guides we’d recruited from the countryside and paid well, and we moved very fast.

We had to cross the mountains of Phokia, and Alexander, always religious, was determined to march past Delphi. The going was steep, but it was high summer and we’d had a week’s rest, and we flew. Three days to Delphi, and a day’s rest.

Alectus went to the temple, presented himself to the priests and was refused – as a barbarian.

So I accompanied him, both of us in armour.

Greeks like to claim that we Macedonians are barbarians when it suits them. As Alexander was the head of the Holy League and his soldiers were the guarantors of the temple treasury, I had a feeling they would accept me as a Hellene – nor was I disappointed.

We waited in the antechamber while a trio of Athenians asked detailed questions about business and about Alexander’s intentions for their city.

When they emerged, I sent Alectus in alone. And I walked out on to the portico with the Athenians. Two of them were unknown to me, but the third was Kineas’s friend Diodorus.

‘They say that meetings in the temple precincts are part of the will of the God,’ I said, putting my arm around his shoulder. Diodorus turned and we embraced.

‘Alexander wants to be recognised as hegemon of the League of Corinth. He’ll fight to get it, too.’ I held both his hands and looked him in the eye so that he’d see I was being utterly honest.

He nodded. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘And a great deal clearer than what the priestess muttered.’

His companions looked uneasy, and kept their distance.

He jerked a thumb at them, rudely. ‘I’m the token aristocrat. They’re my fellow democrats – friends of Demosthenes, or followers. More like acolytes – very dull companions. Give me dinner tonight and I’ll tell you how happy I am that Alexander is coming to rescue us!’ He laughed bitterly.

I sent him on his way and waited for Alectus, who emerged looking troubled.

‘She is a real prophetess,’ he said, and fingered his beard. ‘I could feel her power.’

I shrugged, because only a fool doubts the power of the god at Delphi.

Alectus walked with me back to camp, but I could tell he was not in a mood for talk.

That night, I gave a small dinner for Diodorus, and invited some of the Hetaeroi – Philip the Red, Cleomenes, Nearchus and Marsyas. He was good company, but his tale was a sad one – Athens was in a state of near stasis, civil war, because Demothenes kept the commons united against Alexander – who he caricatured as a fop, a poseur, an effeminate impostor.

Kineas was in the other faction, of course. And Diodorus had finally turned his back on the democrats.

‘If that fool has his way, we’ll fight you again,’ Diodorus said wearily. Then he brightened. ‘Say – you know that Thaïs speaks of you often?’

‘Does she?’ I asked. That gave me a little heart-burst of joy.

‘She gave me a party the night before I left – she prophesied that I would have days of dull company and would need to remember her wit.’ He smiled. ‘Some day, I long to afford a woman like her – to have her all to myself, every day. I’ll take her to dinner parties. Shock the matrons. Perhaps marry her!’

I laughed, although I was jealous.

He smiled at me as if reading my thoughts. ‘Thaïs said that she had been told by a seer she trusts that she is to leave Athens.’ He laughed. ‘Hardly news – the old men hate her so much they threaten to exile her constantly. Bad for public morals. Worse than old Socrates. Or so I hear.’ He laughed into his wine.

Marsyas leaned over. ‘Who is this paragon?’

‘Ah,’ I said, and took the opportunity every man loves, to discuss his paramour. Or perhaps she wasn’t my paramour. I won’t have you imagine that every time I lay with a slave girl or a willing free woman, I dreamed of Thaïs. That would have been, if nothing else, rude. The partner of the moment deserves your full attention. If you can’t remember the woman with whom you are lying – don’t bother!

But I thought of her often, more so as we came closer to Athens, and to discuss her openly with Diodorus was delightful.

At the same time, I sent Nearchus to Alexander when he went on duty with a note explaining the presence of the Athenian envoys and their mission.

Nearchus came back with two grooms and regretfully informed Diodorus that he and his fellow envoys would be guests of the temple for a few days. Diodorus accepted this with good grace. His fellows were obviously terrified.

We marched away in the dark.

We were at Lebedaea before noon, a hundred and ten stades of running and marching, with the Prodromoi just ahead of us and on either side, and the king with them, surrounded by his somatophylakes – the inner companions, the trusted bodyguards. I was one of them, in title.

I knew all morning we weren’t going to stop. Alexander was playing for the whole jar of oil, as the Athenians say, and we were going to make the dash. My men were in peak condition, and ready for anything. The Prodromoi changed horses at the meal break – and every one of them had at least two remounts.

The sun had scarcely begun to decline when we started for Thebes, another hundred and twenty stades across the plains of Boeotia, the dance floor of Ares. If the Thebans were going to fight, it was going to be today, tonight or tomorrow. My men had already come five parasanges on foot, in their armour, with their shields on their shoulders. Go and try it. Tell me how you do.