God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (49 page)

I looked into those remarkable blue eyes. ‘You mean, I can choose between sending you away, and having the best sex of my life?’ I sighed. ‘I don’t know. I need time to think,’ I said, while reaching my warm hands under her gown.

‘Humour,’ she said, through my kisses, ‘is your outstanding virtue.’

‘I thought it was my large penis,’ I said.

She laughed into my mouth. We were warm.

We spent the winter training north of Pella. This was new. As I’ve said, Philip always sent the army home for the winter. Alexander did not. He kept the entire force in the field – funded by the League of Corinth, at a drachma per soldier per day.

We climbed mountains in the snow.

We practised seizing ridges and passes. In the snow.

We charged lines of straw dummies with our lances. On horseback. In the snow.

We practised setting camp and setting fires, digging in, collecting forage – in the snow.

And we drilled.

Ares, it was endless.

Look, I’m good at drill. I love drill. I love the sort of ritual-team-dance aspect to drill – the stamp of a thousand perfectly timed feet sends a thrill down my spine. But that winter was absurd. We drilled and drilled and drilled, and I’m not sure that there’s any army in history that spent as much time practising the Spartan Counter-March as we did. Every day, five or six times a day – with wheeling, sprinting, breaking and reforming, marching to the left, right and rear by files, half-files and double files. On and on.

Every damn day.

The troopers cursed him. The aristocrats were good officers at first, but after two months – remember, we’d been at it all summer, too – people just wanted a cup of wine and a fuck.

I had to send Thaïs away, because men were starting to hate me for having her. Which was sad, because she loved it, and she kept people amused – she’d show up in the phalanx in armour and already know the drill, she’d ride a horse shooting a bow, she’d go off with the scouts until they caught her – she could easily pass for a man, but something often gave her away, too.

She had found a hobby. I didn’t know what it was and I knew I wasn’t allowed to ask, but she suddenly wrote a great many letters – on and on, really. Sometimes a dozen a day. And she bought a pair of Thracian slaves – and sent one home. Into the mountains. I didn’t understand that at all.

She smiled at me and dared me to ask.

At any rate, after a month I didn’t have to pay attention any more, because I had to send her to my estates. After that, the rest of the winter was a blur of marching and climbing and freezing cold – you climb a mountain in two feet of snow wearing open-toed boots. Go ahead. The pezhetaeroi were in sandals. I had a horse, most of the time – a sort of living leg-warmer.

I knew what we were doing. We were going to blow the Thracians right out of their northern kingdom and carve a road to the Danube – to buy Antipater a defensible border while we were away conquering Asia. It was a good plan, in a general, strategic way. But it was an obvious plan, and every man, woman and child on both sides of the nebulous border between Macedon and the wild Thracians knew we were coming as soon as the passes were free of snow.

Alexander did have one shaved knucklebone, though. He sent our fleet – twenty triremes and some supply ships – from Amphilopolis, around through the Dardanelles and into the Euxine Sea. In part it was exploration – the Macedonian fleet had never attempted to enter the Euxine. In part it was sheer daring – we knew nothing of the mouth of the Danube, although we found some Amphilopolans who had traded there. But it was a brilliant outflanking move. If it worked. The ships would leave well before the army marched. If the army marched.

One night, I lay in some straw between Cleitus and the king. We were passing a gourd full of wine. Outside, the wind howled. Alectus had just informed the king that we’d lost a little over a hundred men to exposure and the arrows of the Lord of Contagion that month.

I was keeping the Military Journal, by then – in effect, I coordinated everyone’s military reporting, and that had become my major job. Antipater did it for Philip, and he taught me – but I added to the job. I went around to all the regiments and appointed a record-keeping officer – sometimes with the help of the commander, and sometimes in spite of him. Perdiccas called my officers the ‘king’s spies’. The thing was, the king needed to know the truth. Bluster didn’t cut it when you needed a return of effective soldiers, or when we needed to know how many horses and how many riders were available for a particular mission, or which horses needed new tack before the army could march.

And at the same time, the king was paying – with League funds – for a gradual re-armouring of the whole Macedonian army. And that cost money, but it also required endless lists, inventories, record-keeping, tracking inventory . . .

It was all glory and arete, let me tell you.

At any rate, that’s why I was lying wrapped in my cloak in a pile of straw in a freezing-cold barn in northern Macedon, snuggled between the commander of the king’s bodyguard and the king himself, listening to Alectus tell us his figures on sick and injured, with every word sending plumes of mist rising from his mouth. It was
cold.

Alexander dismissed him with a cup of hot wine and rolled over. ‘As soon as the passes are clear,’ he said dreamily.

‘Why don’t we go now?’ I asked. ‘I mean, as soon as I can put together a logistics head of food and fodder.’

Alexander laughed. ‘Because that trick will only work once, and I want to save it for a tougher opponent.’

Sometimes, he was scary.

But later, when Alectus was obviously still awake, I turned towards him.

‘What did you learn at Delphi?’ I asked him.

He laughed. ‘I learned that I will live a few years yet, and the king is going to be a god.’ He laughed again.

The passes cleared. Before they cleared, I had all the grain in north-west Macedon gathered in fifty new-built stone granaries that cost a fortune to build and required men to keep roaring fires going all day and all night to keep the ground soft and let the mortar harden without freezing.

All in a day’s work.

We marched from Amphilopolis, headed north, and we moved fast. We had preset camps with supplies waiting at every halt. We flew.

At Neopolis we joined up with our baggage train, and I was reunited with Thaïs, who was fresh and pink-cheeked and looked like a maiden. Most of the army’s wives and sweethearts – and prostitutes and sex toys – came to Neopolis and marched with us. We crossed the Nestus and marched all the way to Philipopolis. The Thracians were conspicuous by their absence.

Thaïs shared my tent and my cloak. Her field household was now reduced to three – her steward, Anonius, from Italy, a Thracian, Strako and a Libyan woman, Bella, a big, attractive black woman who drew the stares of half the army wherever she went. However, she seemed capable of taking care of herself.

The Thracian came and went, foraging and visiting. I warned Thaïs that he would desert, and she laughed.

‘Give me a little credit,’ she said. ‘I have a chain on him.’

The worm of jealousy gnawed at me. It must have showed.

She laughed in my face. ‘I don’t fuck slaves,’ she said, and walked out of my tent.

I hope I don’t make her sound like a harridan. She was not. But we had a spat every day – that’s how we were. She wanted to know every aspect of my business, and I wanted her to respect my privacy, and I didn’t see any need for her to know the inner workings of the Military Journal or the Hetaeroi.

Plenty of things to fight about. Making up was good, too.

Strako kept with us. That impressed me. After two weeks in enemy country, I rolled over, pinned her with a leg and said, ‘OK, I have to know. Why’s he loyal?’

She wasn’t angry – I never knew, with her. She laughed. ‘Well – since you’re keeping me so
very
warm . . .’ She kissed my nose. ‘I have his wife, child and brother at home. At your home. If he runs, they all die.’

Um. So soft. So beautiful. So funny, so warm.

So hard.

She also received as many letters as the king. I know that to be true, because I sometimes functioned as the Military Secretary, in those days. I certainly saw most of the king’s correspondence, and I saw all the messengers that came in from Pella – one a day, and sometimes two. She had at least two a day. Some were slaves, some were free, and once, her messenger was a Priest of Apollo.

Two more days, and we were at the Shipka Pass. And the wild Thracians were there – in huge numbers. They had thousands of warriors and more armed slaves, and they had a wagon lager of four wheeled carts lining the top of the pass, where it was about two stades wide.

The Prodromoi brought us word.

We rode forward and looked.

‘Impregnable,’ Hephaestion said. From his years of military experience.

But he was right. It was impregnable. Several of Philip’s campaigns had ended right here.

We made camp.

Just as the light was failing – it was late spring, and the days were getting long – Strako came into my tent. I hadn’t seen him in a day. He frowned at me and motioned at Thaïs.

Thaïs was under some cloaks, trying to get warm. She got up, and Strako began to talk while she put on boots.

‘He says the wagons aren’t for defence,’ Thaïs said.

‘How do you know about the wagons?’ I asked.

‘Strako was just up there. In their camp. Listen, love. Tell the king they plan to roll the wagons on you when you attack. And then charge you. They are hoping you’ll bring up artillery to shell the wagons. It is a ruse within a ruse.’ Thaïs listened to the man.

‘You speak Thracian?’ I asked.

‘It was a long winter,’ Thaïs insisted.

I heard the report to the end. And looked at my lover.

‘I can’t expect to be taken to Asia for my good looks,’ she said. ‘I have friends in every city, and the Pythia made me more friends. But there are other tricks – that anyone in politics knows. That anyone who has read Thucydides knows.’

I had heard of Thucydides, but I hadn’t read him. I made a mental note to rectify this.

‘We can trust this report?’ I asked.

‘Or I’m a complete fool,’ she said.

I took it to the king.

Cleitus woke me in the dark. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We’re going to attack. Get up.’

I was up like a shot. I knew Alexander – I knew we were going to attack.

I went for Polystratus and found Bella curled in his cloak. He was mightily embarrassed to be awakened.

‘It’s not what you think, lord,’ he said. ‘We were cold.’

I nodded. What do you say?

We armed each other in the light of a single lamp. It was cold.

Alexander was waiting for us by a huge fire near his pavilion.

‘We’ve drilled all winter at opening gaps in the ranks,’ he said. ‘We’ll win this one on simple discipline. It will be a good lesson for the pezhetaeroi. Tell them to open ranks to let the wagons through – if they are too packed together, tell them to lie flat with their shields over them and let the wagons run over them.’ He shrugged. ‘Once they drop the wagons on us, it’s just an infantry fight.’

He turned to Philip Longsword. ‘Straight up the right-side ridge until you are well above the pass – then down into their flank.’ He turned to Cleitus. ‘Take the mercenary archers and march to the left of the hypaspitoi – get into the rocks – those white rocks there – and start shooting. You’ll have them at open shields. Then it’ll all be over but the marching.’

It wasn’t a complex plan. It was, in fact, an obvious plan.

The thing is, most armies couldn’t have done it. It required that the hypaspitoi climb a mountain in full armour, with spears, and then traverse a long ridge and then come down in the enemy rear, while archers climbed the same ridge, took cover and lofted arrows two hundred paces into the Thracians. While the rest of us went right up the path into the carts and didn’t just die.

But we knew each other. Alexander dismounted a hundred Hetaeroi, and I led them as the right anchor of the phalanx, which was going straight up the throat of the pass. When we assembled in the first light of dawn, the hypaspitoi were already gone, the last files of archers were just leaving camp and the Thracians were awake, alert and lining their rampart of wagons.

Alexander walked down the line of the front rank. We were only a thousand paces from the top of the pass.

He stopped and shook my hand. Then embraced me.

He went along the front rank and he hugged, embraced, shook hands – a hundred times or more.

While the Thracians jeered, and the hypaspitoi climbed.

And then, when he was satisfied that the army loved him, he waved and ran off to the right. He was going with the hypaspitoi. In person, this time. Not like on Mount Ossa.

I buckled my chinstrap and led my friends up the pass.

The thing about plans is that they are rarely like the eventuality. The idea that we could drop files and half-files to the rear – as a phalanx always did when faced with, say, a small stand of trees in the middle of a plain – was excellent. But the fact was that when the Thracians started rolling the carts on us, they came at us like a ball flung by a child – all angles, no predictable path.

I’d say we were at three hundred paces when they released the carts.

As I said, my Hetaeroi were on the right of the line. We were crammed into the last ‘open’ ground in the pass, and our end files were virtually crushed against the low cliff that gradually sloped in from our right, narrowing the pass and packing us tighter and tighter.

At five hundred paces, I had six files – almost half my strength – doubled in behind the left files to make space, and there was no place for us to climb above the pass, or I’d have gone.

My point is, we weren’t eight deep, we were sixteen deep, and all along the front, phylarchs and taxitoi doubled files to cut their frontage and keep room to manoeuvre.

And then the carts came.

There was no way we could drop files back, because the carts had no predictable path. They bounced, slammed into each other, stopped, exploded against rocks – or hurtled at us like fists from Olympus.