God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (61 page)

We had as many again – Thessalians. They served for pay, but under their own officers, as if Thessaly were a new set of Macedonian provinces, like Outer Macedonia. In effect, they were – they elected Alexander Archon for Life. So – eighteen hundred superb Thessalian cavalry.

Then the one really reliable contribution from the Greeks – six hundred splendid cavalry. Athens sent her best – the lead squadron of the Hippeis, all aristocrats, under my friend Kineas. But the other contingents weren’t bad, and they, unlike the hoplites, were friends of Alexander and willing to fight.

Parmenio had another thousand cavalry – mostly mercenaries – and then there were the Prodromoi, now augmented with Paeonians and with Thracians – a little short of a thousand light cavalry. All told, we had at least six thousand cavalry. The army totalled out just short of fifty thousand men, and we calculated rations and forage on fifty thousand, because it was easy, and because a surplus is a hedge against disaster. And besides, if you don’t already know it, that army had at least one slave for every soldier – probably more, and certainly many more after we started to gain Asia.

But I get ahead of myself.

Antipater and I went through all these figures, and then we started to draw things. Camps – laid out for one hundred thousand men. Forage – care to know what it takes to feed a hundred thousand men? It takes six hundred thousand pounds of food a day. Thirty thousand animals? Another three hundred thousand pounds of food. Call it a round million pounds of food a day.

Some of that can be found in grass. But that still leaves a lot to find.

And you can’t put a month’s worth of food in wagons. There just aren’t that many farm wagons in the world.

What you do is build magazines, and store food. Philip had started the process, and Alexander had, thank the gods, never stopped spending on his preparations so that the magazines were full at the two ports in Asia and all across Macedon and down the road to the Bosporus.

It was doubly good, because Antipater showed me the accounts. The magazines were full, and the troops were paid, and we had less than thirty talents in the treasury – cash for thirty days’ operations.

The men wouldn’t mutiny right away, of course – but it would only be a matter of time.

Memnon was reputed to be the best general of his generation, and a brilliant deceiver – and a careful strategist who never fought unless he had to. I began to sweat just thinking of what he could do to us by
not fighting
. Two months of avoiding us and we’d be broke.

Alexander flatly refused to marry. He’d accepted all of Parmenio’s appointments, and he’d accepted all of Antipater’s financial advice, but he was determined to march in the spring, unencumbered, and he referred to marriage in terms that left no one in any doubt of his views that marriage was profoundly unheroic. Achilles was mentioned a great deal.

Parmenio convinced me to talk to the king. On this topic, I agreed with the king’s mature councillors. An heir would make the kingdom more stable.

On the other hand, I saw through Antipater and I saw through Parmenio. Both had daughters – both seemed to feel that they would make fine fathers-in-law.

Ochrid was still alive, and no one had attempted to poison the king. My arrangements for his daily security were untouched.

Had I warned them off? Had the warning been a false alarm?

You never know, in this business.

I approached the king and asked if there was anyone he would marry.

He shrugged. ‘If Athens had a king, I’d marry that man’s daughter,’ he said. ‘If Darius offered me his sister, I’d consider it.’ He gave me his new, lopsided, man-of-the-people grin. ‘Otherwise, no.’

I nodded. ‘An heir would be good for the kingdom,’ I suggested.

‘I’d be dead the moment a son of mine put his head from between his mother’s thighs,’ he said.

I thought so, too.

So I went back to the old general and told him that Alexander would not marry.

He made a face, and dismissed me.

Kineas arrived with the Athenians. He kissed Thaïs, made much of Eurydike, and bought a house for himself and his friends. He was rich in a way that I’d never seen before – he refused all offers of help.

He still adored Alexander, but in private he told me that his father’s loyalty to the cause was costing him in the Assembly and in everyday business – that the anti-Macedon faction had unprecedented popularity.

That was sad. Athenians are fools, and democracy is an idiotic way to run a state.

Alectus came down from the hills and learned that we were to share the brigade of Psiloi. He came and had dinner with me, and we embraced and agreed to be good partners. In everything.

‘Which nights do I get Thaïs?’ he asked with a broad wink at her. In my home, she ate with my friends.

‘All the nights I don’t want her,’ I said.

Thaïs snorted. ‘All the nights I don’t want him,’ she said to Alectus with her dazzling smile.

But I got the better smile, and Alectus rolled his eyes.

‘It’s the tattoos, isn’t it?’ he said.

He was sixty if he was a day, and his abdominal muscles stood out like soldiers on parade. She ran a hand over his stomach.

‘Some people could learn a thing or two,’ she said wickedly.

I went back to training four hours each day.

Alectus laughed. But he always did.

Alexander recruited a small army of non-soldiers. Many were philosophers – men who studied plants and animals, who studied other men, who wrote about government. Their master was Aristotle’s nephew, Callisthenes, who had an even bigger mouth than I have and never hesitated to use it. I liked him fine. He made me look good.

Although it was never officially said, all those civilians came under my command – or rather, I was responsible for them. There were more than two hundred of them, with that many again in slaves, and not a fighting man among them, believe me. They had to be cosseted, protected and fed – marched about, saved from predators, kept warm – amid a constant stream of whiney abuse. Once, in the Trans-Oxiana, I wanted to kill them all myself, but that’s another story. Alexander was using them to make him famous. What they actually accomplished was, and is, so much more than any of us ever expected – well, that’ll come in time. But for the moment – in a way, they all helped me keep the Journal. Callisthenes began a
History
the moment he joined us, and he used to read it some nights. It was tougher than the Journal – sometimes more accurate, but nowhere near as detailed in military information. All the scrolls on the far side of the tomb are my copy of Callisthenes. He was a poor philosopher but a superb historian, and he did a better job than I. However, he was no soldier.

Later, let me add, the corps of scribes, as we called them, or the Philosophoi, filled up with two-obol hacks and con artists out to take Alexander, but at the start, the men who joined us were adventurers as much as we were, and the army had some respect for them. Later – well, later was later. Everything was different later, as you’ll see.

In early March, Alexander ordered me – and Perdiccas, Cleitus the Black and Marsyas – to organise a set of games to rival those of Nemea or Olympus. We were given thirty talents of gold to spend.

Perdiccas and I could take a hint – we each added ten more talents, and our games were as lavish as any ever given. We put them on down country at Aegae, and we rebuilt Philip’s stadium. We added a triumphal arch, we paid poets and actors from all over Greece – well, to be honest, mostly from Athens – acrobats, dancers – and athletes. The rest of the competitors came from inside the army.

Kineas, for instance, won a crown of gold laurel leaves boxing. He was superb. No one could touch him. He defeated two Olympic champions and all the Macedonian contenders.

We had horse races, foot races, races in armour, javelin throws ahorse and afoot, swordsmanship, spear-fighting and all the usual sports – pankration, boxing, wrestling, throwing the shield. And noble prizes for every one, crowns for the victors, handed out by Alexander himself.

The Homeric imagery was relentless. Alexander was Achilles, Hephaestion was Patroclus and every one of the somatophylakes had a Homeric name. We wore Homeric costumes, and the performers performed scenes from the
Iliad
.

Thaïs, to be honest, planned most of it. She was brilliant at this sort of thing, and it allowed her to bring in all of her friends from Athens and other cities – performers, some free, some slaves. Scene painters – fantastic chaps, men who could make a piece of flat hide look like a mountain.

Her seamstresses made the king his purple tent, large enough to allow a hundred guests to recline in comfort.

She planned the themes, and she watched the rehearsals. Alexander lost interest, sometimes – when the real war in Asia took over his head – but she stayed on target. She would come to meals with a stack of scrolls.

I remember one night, I went to dinner with Antipater. We were working together on the logistics for Asia, and for the games, and sometimes we shared a meal. We went to his house, where he ate in splendour, served by twenty slaves. His wife came through once, heavily veiled, to check on us.

I laughed. I was so used to my establishment, with a woman who had her own work and yet shared all of my life, that the glimpse of a ‘real’ Macedonian wife made me laugh.

I won’t say I hated the work, either. I’ll just mention that in many ways I was relieved when the opening ceremonies went off, and I’ll note that much of the conquest of Asia was easier. Destruction is much easier than creation. Eh?

And yet, we had fun. I remember a wild party at my house in Aegae, with Kineas and his friends and a crowd of Thaïs’s demi-monde friends – slaves and free, dancers, hetaerae, the scene painters, a sculptor and a crowd of actors. Altogether, there must have been fifty of us crowded into my andron.

The laughter went on and on, and Thaïs led them in an indecent retelling of the
Iliad
, which was hilarious – and which attacked Alexander in a hundred ways, and yet was hugely funny.

Kineas, always a man of immense personal dignity, laughed until wine and snot blew out of his nose.

Diodorus declaimed a long speech with an arm around one of Thaïs’s dancer friends. He was playing the part of Achilles, dying in his mother’s arms, but he managed to claim, in between stanzas, that as long as she would pillow his head on her breasts, he’d keep declaiming. This reached surprising heights of comedy – he was quite inventive – and every time he looked to expire, she rolled one breast or the other under his eyes, and he’d splutter and go on again, and we’d all laugh – oh, I remember that laughter as well as I remember anything in the whole crusade. I had thought Diodorus merely acerbic before that, but after that night, he and I were friends. We shared some love of laughter that transcended his dislike of Macedon and ‘my kind’. It went well for him – look at him now!

And when we had all laughed and laughed, Kineas threw a grape at Diodorus, who was running his tongue along the young lady’s flank, and yelled, ‘Get a room’ and she rose, took Diodorus by the hand and led him away. He looked back at us from the doorway.

‘Better a fiery death in glory than a long life and a dull end,’ he declaimed as she led him through the curtain.

Damn, that was the best exit line I’ve ever heard, and I still laugh to think of it.

And when most of the actors were gone, or asleep in the corners, and it was just Kineas and Thaïs and Diodorus and Niceas and, of all people, my Polystratus, sitting over a last cup of wine, Kineas got up (unsteadily) and raised his cup.

‘Let’s drink together – an oath to the gods, to remain friends always. We will conquer Asia together. Let’s drink on it.’

We all rose – no one mocked the notion – and we all drank, even Thaïs. Nearchus was there, and young Cleomenes, and Heron, and Laodon. The cup passed – we all drank.

‘I can feel the gods,’ Kineas said, in a strange voice – but no one laughed because, as Thaïs said afterwards, we could all feel them.

And indeed, I sometimes think that the gods are as drawn to laughter and happy drunkenness as they are to battlefields and childbirth – and if that is true, we must have had all Olympus by us that night.

The night before we were due to march, Olympias summoned Alexander to her. I was there when the summons came, and despite his love for her and his endless patience with her, he rolled his eyes like any teenage boy summoned by his mother. He was in a state of exaltation that was nearly dangerous – he was about to achieve the entire ambition of his life.

We shouted for him to go and come back, and he waved a hand, pressed Hephaestion to stay and keep the couch warm, and left us. I remember because I passed the time of the king’s absence by playing Polis with Cleitus, and I won, and Cleitus, who was drunk and in a mood, punched me, meaning only to give me a tap, but he hit me so hard that I had a bruise for a week, and only Nearchus kept me from hitting him back, or worse.

Alexander came back into the ruckus, and he was white, his lips were almost indistinct and he didn’t notice the tension – which dissipated instantly, because no little quarrel was as important as the king’s anger. He was angry – or worse.

In fact, he looked terrified.

Hephaestion took a look at him and ordered us all to bed. And we went – Alexander in one of his moods could be deadly.

Of course, nowadays, everyone knows what his mother told him – that he was not the son of Philip, but the son of Zeus Ammon, and that she had been made pregnant by the god.

It’s easy to be incredulous and cynical. But in Macedon, we take gods seriously. We’re not like fucking Athenians, who think the gods are so far away that they don’t exist. In Macedon, we credulous barbarians always believe that the gods are present in daily affairs. And every noble in Macedon is the direct descendant of one of the gods.

And Olympias was no madwoman. Say what you will of her – her only addiction was power, and she played the game better than almost anyone in her generation. She was brilliant, cunning and beautiful, and utterly without scruple, except when it came to defending her son. She used murder, the army and her body with equal facility. She could reason, cajole, threaten, seduce or eliminate. But she was not mad, and if she told Alexander that he was born of a god, it’s best not to dismiss the idea out of hand. Certainly Thaïs – a cynical Athenian hetaera – accepted the story at face value. Priests at Delphi accepted it. Aegyptian priests accepted it. It is fashionable now to say that Alexander was not half a god – merely a man. Very well. But I knew him, and I say that there was something beyond the human – something inestimably greater, and yet sometimes less than human, in him.