God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (84 page)

I kicked the back of his knee.

He fell and spilled his load. Then he got to his feet and came after me, face suffused with anger. Of course, working naked, we had no badges of rank.

Which was good, because the sunburned bastard trying to kick me in the nuts was Alexander. I ended up dropping my basket and holding him, and after I yelled my name a few times, he dissolved into laughter. And when the men around us realised what had happened, they stopped betting on the outcome and laughed with us.

Out on the end of the peninsula, meanwhile, Diades had built a framework of heavy timbers – superbly heavy timbers, the roof-trees of the largest houses in Old Tyre and some new-cut cedars. There was a low isthmus of sand and rock just under the sea – we were going to use it as the spine of our mole. And that day, two days after the feast of Olympian Zeus, we started to fill the frames with crushed stone and rubble.

And then the mole seemed to leap forward.

It took almost three weeks for us to use up all the rubble and stone we’d moved forward, but after the Thargellia, the feast of the children of Leo, we saw the mole grow every day – and we carried our baskets straight out to the end of it and dumped them in the frames. If we had doubted, we doubted less, now. The mole crept forward, and the sound of the taunts from the other side grew distinctly more strained.

Alexander grew distinctly more strained, as well. In the heady weeks after Issus, he’d sent Parmenio off to try and take Damascus. It was a gamble – Darius had sent his whole treasury to Damascus before the battle – but the gamble paid off and Parmenio had scooped the entire hoard. As well as all the families of Darius’s senior officers, and the Athenian ambassadors to Persia, the Spartan ambassadors – it was a good piece of theatre, I can tell you.

Parmenio also got Memnon’s wife, Barsines, and her sister, Banugul. They were identical twins, both beautiful, blond and sophisticated. I was there when they were brought from Damascus.

Their arrival set their tone. Barsines rode in an ox cart with screens against the dust, the whole cart painted elaborately with flowers and scenes of the life of Aphrodite. Barsines, as I have said, was Memnon’s wife. And she was said to be the most beautiful woman in the world, although some said her sister was her rival. They were both reputed to be descended from Aphrodite, but in fact their father was the satrap of Hyrkania.

Banugul rode a horse – a Nisean stallion of which she was the master. She rode beautifully – like a Scythian, with her legs well up and her knees bent.

Hephaestion had arranged to meet them as they entered camp. I think it was now part of the king’s policy to heroise his better opponents. Memnon was now praised regularly – now that he was safely dead. And Alexander loved to appear chivalrous.

But I don’t think he’d listened to the gossip, and I know he was unprepared for the sisters.

He stood, looking at Banugul as if he’d been struck by lightning. She was dressed from head to foot as a Persian nobleman, and all the male attire, the loose trousers, the burnoose, served only to accentuate the slimness of her limbs, her athletic build, her straight back and neck – and her breasts, which defied the masculine clothing.

She leaped from her horse, leaving the reins to Tyche, and threw herself down before the king in full proskynesis. We had seen it before, of course, but we’d never seen a woman throw herself in the sand before our king.

She did it with grace, and a complete lack of submission. Somehow, she did it seductively, and yet she didn’t waggle or wiggle. Nothing gross.

The king reached out and took her hand, raised her to her knees and looked into her eyes, and then he kissed her hand.

And the gate to the ox cart opened.

If Banugul was the Queen of the Steppes, Barsines was the Queen of the World. She stepped out of the ox cart as if, rather than travelling all day, she had been lounging in the Lyceum, listening to men recite the poets. She was dressed as a Greek woman, in a white chiton with a perfect Tyrian purple border itself edged in gold. The chiton was linen, and transparent, and the body beneath it was as perfect as the cloth of the chiton and as hard as any phalangites labouring under the walls of Tyre.

And she, too, lowered herself into the dust.

The king was transfixed. And it was as if he had taken two arrows – his eyes went back and forth between the two women.

Hephaestion cleared his throat a dozen times, and I began to wonder if the king might need rescuing.

But he raised her from the dust as elegantly as he had raised her sister, and kissed her hand. He said something, and she smiled – a perfectly genuine smile.

Her eyes were as big as a man’s hand, or so they seemed.

The king took each of the sisters by the hand and led them to his pavilions.

So many women – and men – had tried to set their hooks into the king that we, as his friends, had begun to look forward to watching them fail against his lack of interest. I have said it before – he did not look at women – or men – the way most men do. Beautiful women would come to camp, arrange an invitation to meet the king and end leaving with a small present, and he would shrug and wonder aloud why they wasted his time.

But the twins were different. Was it that he saw them as children of the goddess? As peers? They were witty, engaging, seductive, serious, well read, giggly – they were any woman he wanted them to be, with noble birth and descent from the gods thrown in. But I was there, and he was besotted instantly.

It is worth noting that, at the same time, we had Darius’s wife and her women in camp and she, too, was a great beauty. Alexander treated her with great gallantry – but it became obvious, as the siege went on, that gallantry alone was not holding their relationship together. She was a beautiful, powerful woman who had been deserted by her husband. What could you expect?

Thaïs lay with her head in the crook of my arm one night, and sighed. She sighed a great deal – it was as hot as the bowl of a helmet being forged, even at night – a horrible wet, sticky hot, that hurt a pregnant woman more than anyone. She had taken to swimming in the sea – scandalising older Macedonians – if only to have relief from the weight of the child and the heat for an hour every day.

So she lay with her head in the crook of my arm, and all the rest of her posed strategically as far from my body heat as she could arrange.

‘Alexander has discovered women,’ she said.

‘Alexander has discovered the siege of Troy,’ I said. ‘And that Helen has an identical twin sister.’

The army speculated endlessly that he was having both of them at the same time, an impractical fantasy that appealed to every Thracian, every Greek mercenary and every Macedonian – every man, and some of the women, too.

A week or so after they arrived, I entered my pavilion to find both of them sitting with Thaïs, drinking sherbet in the Persian manner. Thaïs looked beautiful, despite her pregnancy and even because of it – pregnancy enhances some things, and not just breasts – hair, and skin.

Barsines sat next to Thaïs, and Banugul closer to the door, and a pair of slaves fanned them while Bella, my love’s Libyan, brought food and wine.

I was wearing a soldier’s chiton over a naked body. I had been carrying rocks. I imagine that I smelled.

Both women rose to their feet and offered deep curtsies. I returned them – I’m a gentleman, despite being dressed as a slave.

Thaïs stayed seated. ‘My lover, the taxiarch Ptolemy,’ she said in a matter-of-fact manner.

Both women curtsied again.

Bella brought Eurydike into the tent, and Thaïs gave her a big hug and a kiss, while Eurydike looked out from the safety of her mother’s embrace at the two women. ‘Ooh!’ she said. ‘Real princesses!’ She had just begun to speak well. She was a little more than two, and she was never shy.

The two women laughed easily, and Barsines reached out for the child, who came to her quickly enough – an amazing thing, if you know children.

‘You are blessed,’ she said, touching our child.

Thaïs nodded.

Banugul turned to me. ‘You wanted a son?’ she asked.

I suppose that I frowned. I wanted Eurydike. I couldn’t remember a time when I had wanted anything else. ‘No,’ I said.

‘You
are
blessed,’ Banugul said, in her seductress’s voice. It wasn’t human, that voice. It was the sound of man’s desire for woman made flesh. But she was speaking to Thaïs.

And her sister kissed our daughter on the forehead. ‘I never had a child by Memnon,’ she said, with what sounded to me like genuine sadness. ‘You are very brave. Yes?’

Thaïs shrugged.

Women can be such cats to each other. But these two seemed to be above such stuff. Barsines leaned forward. ‘I was afraid to bear him,’ she said. And then looked confused, because she had said too much. ‘I loved him – too much.’ She looked at the rug on the floor of the tent.

‘Memnon?’ Thaïs said. And I realised that she had killed this woman’s husband – that Barsines, for all her seductive ways, had loved Memnon – it was graven on her face – and that Thaïs was just now understanding what every soldier learns – that every corpse you make had a sister and a brother and a wife and some children.

Eurydike had had enough of the strange princesses and came to me, and then raised her head. ‘You smell,’ she said. And giggled, aware that she was the centre of attention, and happy about it.

‘And you will have another child,’ Banugul said. She was openly curious. ‘You, who were reputed to be as beautiful as we?’

Thaïs laughed aloud. Whatever she had been thinking, the sheer hubris of Banugul’s comment didn’t gall her – it amused her. ‘I don’t think I was ever as honey-golden-beautiful as you,’ she said, coining a fine Greek word like any good poet. ‘But I do hate being pregnant. And yet . . .’ She took Eurydike back. The child glowed, put her arms around Thaïs, and said ‘Mummmmmy’, in her too-cute-to-live little-girl voice.

Thaïs rolled her eyes, and all three women laughed.

‘Beauty fades,’ Thaïs said.

Barsines nodded. ‘I try to make myself ready,’ she said. ‘Because I do love it.’

Banugul laughed. It was a laugh of bitterness.

Thaïs clutched her child. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said suddenly to Memnon’s wife.

Barsines had tears in her eyes. ‘Whatever for?’ she asked.

She’s sorry, now that you prove so human, that she killed your man
, I thought.

The next day I donned a good chiton and military sandals and went to attend the king. He’d received a formal letter from the Great King of Persia. He presented it to us – a plain letter on good papyrus, not a purple parchment with golden ink, as I’d been led to expect by Herodotus, but such things are often exaggerated.

Darius referred to Alexander, not as a fellow king, but in a slighting manner, and asked for the return of his wife and mother and his eldest son, and he offered to cede to Alexander about a third of the empire. It was a curious letter, full of false pomp and oddly arrogant for a man who ‘begged’ for the return of his wife.

We debated the letter after a fine dinner, the way Athenians debate the role of love after a symposium. As you might expect, it broke down into an argument – a nasty argument – between the two factions. The older men, Philip’s men, were for agreeing to its terms, and the younger men were for rejecting them out of hand. Despite the slowness of the siege, every one of us was sure we’d take the place. It would take time. But we were winning. The Persian Empire was beginning to shred itself – satraps were negotiating through Thaïs’s people, or directly with our king. Athens continued to sit on the fence.

Alexander stayed carefully silent.

When everyone had had too much wine, Parmenio rose to his feet and raised his cup. ‘If I were Alexander, great King of Macedon, I would accept this offer, and be done with war – victorious King of Asia.’ He raised the cup and drank.

Alexander took the cup next and smiled into Parmenio’s eyes. I thought for a moment that he meant the two of them to be reconciled.

He raised the cup. ‘If I were Parmenio,’ he said with careful malice, ‘I would accept.’ He drank the wine, and Parmenio’s face flamed with humiliation.

I helped draft the letter to Darius. A group of us did – Hephaestion, Amyntas, Nearchus, who was down in our camp for a visit.

But Alexander set the tone.

‘Your ancestors invaded Macedonia and the rest of Greece and did us harm although we had not done you any previous injury. I have been appointed commander-in-chief of the Greeks, and it is with the aim of punishing the Persians that I have crossed into Asia, since you are the aggressors. You gave support to the people of Perinthus, who had done my father harm, and Ochus sent a force to Thrace, which was under our rule. My father died at the hand of conspirators instigated by you, as you yourself boasted to everybody in your letters, you killed Arses with the help of Bagoas and gained your throne through unjust means, in defiance of Persian custom and doing wrong to the Persians. You sent unfriendly letters to the Greeks about me, to push them to war against me, and sent money to the Spartans and some other Greeks, which none of the other cities would accept apart from the Spartans. Your envoys corrupted my friends and sought to destroy the peace that I had established among the Greeks.

‘I therefore led an expedition against you, and you started the quarrel. But now I have defeated in battle first your generals and satraps, and now you in person and your army, and by the grace of the gods I control the country. All those who fought on your side and did not die in battle but came over to me, I hold myself responsible for them; they are not on my side under duress but are taking part in the expedition of their own free will. Approach me therefore as the lord of all Asia. If you are afraid of suffering harm at my hands by coming in person, send some of your friends to receive proper assurances. Come to me to ask and receive your mother, your wife, your children and anything else you wish. Whatever you can persuade me to give shall be yours.

‘In future whenever you communicate with me, send to me as King of Asia; do not write to me as an equal, but state your demands to the master of all your possessions. If not, I shall deal with you as a wrongdoer. If you wish to lay claim to the title of king, then stand your ground and fight for it; do not take to flight, as I shall pursue you wherever you may be.’