Three times, and then they came in silence, rushing up the dyke faster than I could imagine.
Gordias, on the other hand, kept his head.
‘Ready?’ he called. ‘Throw!’ he roared, and five hundred javelins swept like birds of prey on the huddled mass of unshielded, unarmed men.
And that’s as far as they got. So many men fell in the shower of spears that they turned to run, and Alexander was on them with the older pages and the professional cavalry – Alcus was there, and Drako, and all the younger pages from camp.
We were all around them, then, and with numbers, too. And weapons and armour.
Maybe a hundred of them lived. I doubt it, though. We offered no quarter, and Alexander meant to make an example in his first battle. The cavalry went in again and again, and they had nowhere to run – even our shield-bearers and camp slaves were out, with slings and rocks, lining the forest edge, so that if an armed man burst free of the melee, they shot him down.
Hephaestion said that Alexander killed the chieftain, and that’s possible, but when he went down, the rest as good as fell on their swords. All the fight went out of them, and we took fifty prisoners.
And then there was nothing but the vultures and the corpses and the stink of men’s excrement, and we went back to camp. We didn’t form and march back – nothing so organised. That level of efficiency came later. Instead, men simply couldn’t stand looking at the dead any longer – or men snatched up a gold ring or a torc and left, or wandered blank-eyed for a while and found themselves by a fire.
Gordias got some slaves organised and started collecting the rest of the loot. I found Philip the Red and got him to help me organise collection of the wounded – we had a few. We killed their wounded. I found that I was turning my head away.
It was horrible. But you know about that – I can see it in your eyes. And the animals – the dogs, the carrion birds.
Luckily it was daylight.
By noon, we had most of the army in camp. It was a young army, and most of the men simply sat, slack-jawed. Older men guzzled wine.
Alexander paced, like a caged lion.
‘We need to be at them,’ he said.
Laodon put an arm around his shoulders. ‘Sire, there is no “them” to be at. You have destroyed them.’
Alexander shrugged off his arm. ‘Do not be familiar, sir. And their villages are open – right now. Not for long – other tribes will protect them.’
Laodon shook his head. ‘Your army is exhausted.’
Gordias backed him up. ‘My men have been up all night, and fought two days in a row.’
Alexander flinched – a visible shudder. I knew him well, and knew that he was fighting off a temper tantrum.
Instead, he managed a smile. ‘Well, then,’ he said. He caught my eye. ‘Not bad for the baggage guard, eh?’ he said.
I grinned.
He grinned back.
‘I expected to find you besieged,’ Alexander said.
Laodon shrugged. ‘We were sent to fail,’ he said.
I stood in shock. ‘Antipater betrayed us?’
Alexander looked out at his battlefield and then back at me. ‘It makes no snese – but they were waiting for us. Laodon said they were, and they were. So we left you to fort up and went off to try and ambush their ambush.’
‘You might have said,’ I shot back. In Macedon, we’re not slaves.
Alexander rubbed the stubble on his chin. ‘I might have. But it was a hunch, and I might have been wrong. Or Laodon might have been the traitor.’ He shrugged, even as Laodon flinched. Smiled at me. ‘I knew it wasn’t you,’ he said to me. ‘That’s why you got the baggage.’
I didn’t really know what he was talking about. Thank the gods.
He slapped his knees. ‘Well, if the men need a rest, they need a rest. We march at dawn.’
And that was that.
The next day, Alexander took the oldsters and the Thracian auxiliaries and rode north-west, into Thracian territory, and proceeded to burn every village he came to. I moved along the valley floors, building small fortified camps or using the stock dykes the way the Thracians had, but with better sentries and sanitation. We covered fifty stades a day and Alexander covered three times that, and after three weeks he’d burned a swathe across Maetian Thrace as wide as the Chersonese and twice as long. Four weeks to a day after we’d broken their army, we stormed their log-walled city. Alexander put in a garrison of veterans from the infantry corps – two hundred men who got five times the land grants they might have expected. He called it Alexandropolis.
My last camp in Thracian territory had a stockade with three thousand slaves – mostly very saleable young women. The soldiers took their pick, and the rest went up for sale.
Horrible. But they did the same to us.
And then we marched home to Pella, with a fortune in gold and slaves, and Alexander gave an excellent speech, and handed out the whole of the loot to the infantry and the professional cavalry. The pages received nothing.
Antipater greeted us at the main gate, reviewed the army and embraced Alexander. The town cheered us.
It was very difficult to go back to being a page, after that. Three nights later, I was punished for being late to guard duty outside the prince’s door – publicly admonished by one of Philip’s somatophylakes, who didn’t seem to know or care that I had just won a night battle, killed my prince’s enemies, stormed a city and handed in my accounts for the logistics of the army and had them passed. Like an adult.
He hit me across the face with his hand, and ordered me to spend the night standing on my feet.
Which, of course, I did.
A month later Philip was back. Another failed siege in the Chersonese – another Athenian proxy victory, and now the Persian fleet was gathering, or so men said. It had been a summer of manoeuvre and near defeat for Macedon, and the rumour was that Thebes was ready to join Persia and Athens against us. And the western Thracians, unimpressed by Alexander’s near extermination of the Maeti, were threatening to close the passes of the north-east against us. Or perhaps hold them open for Thebes.
Amid all this, Philip came home. He embraced Alexander publicly and praised him to the skies – after all, as Philip was the first to admit, Alexander had won the year’s only victory, and turned a raw phalanx into a veteran one.
Then Philip took the new phalanx and marched it away, and changed Alexandropolis to Philipopolis, and we were left to wonder. And to raise fresh troops.
All winter, Philip marched and counter-marched – he lacked a fleet, and he had to keep the Athenians and their surrogates at arm’s length with his army. He sent letters – brilliant letters, full of advice for his son the regent. Some provoked a smile from the regent – and many a frown.
I read them to the prince, because I was one of the inner circle – my courage undoubted, my place secure, or so I thought. I would read him Philip’s letters while he wrote out his own correspondence – he had secretaries but preferred to write for himself. Philip’s advice, like that of most parents, could be internally contradictory – I recall one letter that admonished the regent for attempting to bribe the magnates of inner Macedon, and then in the next line recommended bribery as the tool to use with Thracians. And every time we managed to raise and equip a new corps of infantry, he’d summon them to his field army, leaving Alexander without the means to march against the renewed threat from the Thracians.
The second time this happened, when we’d stripped the countryside of farm boys to form a fourth taxeis of foot companions only to lose it, Alexander threw his ivory stylus at the wall, and it stuck in the plaster.
‘He wants everything for himself. He will leave nothing for me!’ he shouted.
Certainly Antipater was no longer allowed an army. Even Drako’s Thessalians were called away to the field army.
In the spring, Philip turned without warning and marched on the Thracians – a deeper raid than we had undertaken, and with no traitor to lure them o
ut to easy victory, this time the Thracians stayed in their hill forts and fought for time. Philip captured a few towns and lost some others, and began to move out of the hills in three columns – but the centre column made a mistake, or moved too fast, and was ambushed. Philip got another spear in the thigh – the same thigh – and the line infantry got badly chewed up.
Philip came straight back from defeat to Pella. He hadn’t won a major victory in two years, and the vultures were gathering. Defeat at the hands of the Thracians was unthinkable – it gave his enemies ideas.
But Philip had gone after the Thracians while leaving Parmenio and Attalus, the king’s left-hand man, with his best troops – now he concentrated his armies, and in effect abandoned the campaign in the Chersonese. In later years we never admitted to this, but Athens had beaten us, or rather, Athens backed by the threat of Persia.
On the other hand, although Philip didn’t admit it to us at court, he’d decided to risk his empire on one blow. To go for the jugular, like a hunting dog facing a boar.
The Greeks like to maintain that Macedon was an oppressor, a barbarian force from outside marching through sacred Greece with blood and tyranny, but in truth, they hounded Philip unmercifully and left him little choice. Demosthenes and his renewed Athenian empire insisted on facing Macedon, where in fact we might have been allies. We might have unified against Persia. And we did, in the end. Our way.
In the autumn, when we heard daily rumours of a Persian fleet in the Dardanelles and an Athenian fleet ready for sea, Philip marched – not south and east to the Chersonese, although that’s what he told all the ambassadors gathered like vultures in the capital. He left Alexander to deal with them – and Alexander did. For days, Alexander sat beside his father’s throne and insisted that the army was on manoeuvres in the flat country by Amphilopolis – that his father would hold winter court at Pella, that they intended to dedicate a new set of statues at Delphi together. The statues were shown, the ambassadors sent their dispatches.
It was about this time that the affair of Pausanias came to a head for the first time. Let me say that we were all dissatisfied, as are all young men are who are made to behave as children when they are blooded warriors. We continued to be pages, and the old men at court treated us like pages. In fact, Attalus wanted us all sent back to the Gardens of Midas, even though Aristotle was gone. He said that we were vain, bad for the prince’s morals – he said a great many things. We said that fat old Attalus hated us because his own useless cousin Diomedes had been refused entry – another complex story in the web of intrigue that dominated court. Diomedes was a pretty boy, and events proved him a good enough fighter, but somehow he had a reputation as . . . well, as an effeminate. And the pages refused to have him. Attalus vented his outrage on us every way he could – I took a great deal of it, because Antipater employed me as a staff officer even while I still had to do all my duties as a page.
Young Pausanias had been one of us, and then he joined the royal companions and went off to serve with the men. And he was Philip’s bed-warmer on campaign – this was not held to be dishonourable, although it led to some malicious humour. At any rate, Pausanias was wounded in the fight against the Thracians.
In the same fight, Diomedes supposedly stood his ground over the king after he took a spear and went down – held his ground, saved the king’s life. Mind you, I never heard any man but Attalus tell that story. But however it happened, after the Thracian campaign Diomedes was invited to join the companions, and he replaced Pausanias completely in the king’s affections.
Yes – yes, this really is how Macedon was run. Hard as this may be to believe. Philip had a new favourite every week, sometimes. Men, women – jokes were made about his horses. But he was king, he was in his prime and he had no intention of living anything less than the fullest possible life.
But Pausanias was sent back to the pages. It shouldn’t have been possible. One was promoted to a regular regiment from the schoolroom, but no one could remember a man being sent back to the boys.
And we had Attalus at court, and he was poisonous to me, and meaner to Pausanias – insisted he get all the worst duties, made him cut meat for the cooks. A rumour went round that he had been paid money to service grown men among the companions. Not hard to guess where that rumour started.
I didn’t like Pausanias much. He was, in most ways, the instrument of his own destruction. He was vain, horribly fragile, weak and easily used. But I was one of the captains of the pages by then, and I did my best when drawing up the duty to soften the blows from Attalus, who, despite being the king’s left-hand man, was still nowhere near as big a magnate as my father. I went home for the Festival of Demeter and laid it all before my father, and he must have done something because for the moment, Attalus backed off me and mine.
But the pages hated being treated like boys when we knew we were men, and as we thought, so Alexander thought. Every letter full of advice from his father reminded him that he was regent under Philip’s will – and being stripped of troops seemed to be an insult, although from the distance of years, I wonder if Philip simply needed the troops. Hard to know, now.
Pella seethed. They were plotting – I could feel it when I spoke to my father by the hearth. It was the last time I saw him. I could tell from the way he held his tongue that he knew something. Even now, I’m not sure what he knew – not sure what the plots were. It is essential to understand this, to understand Alexander. The old families and the generals were plotting every minute – when Philip appeared weak. When he was strong, they fawned. That was Macedon. Our foes were gathering, Philip had vanished and Alexander wouldn’t say where he was, and the men of power were looking for a plot to save themselves, their rich farms and their hoards of gold. Attalus was part of it. Parmenio was not, I’d swear to it.
I was learning about court. Certainly I had grown up there, and I knew most of the dirt – but I was suddenly old enough to see other things, listen to mutterings under the eaves, watch whose slave appeared at whose door. There was political intrigue, there were love affairs . . .
I remember an evening in autumn. I was standing on the Royal Terrace, because I was about to go on duty, and the prince came out, alone. I had not been alone with Alexander in a month. He hardly spoke to me.
But that day, he grinned his famous grin and came across to me. ‘You know where my pater is, Ptolemy?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘Guess,’ he said. ‘It will be public knowledge in an hour.’
I shrugged. ‘Thebes,’ I said.
Alexander threw his arms around me. ‘You are intelligent,’ he said.
Indeed, while I was smarter than the Athenian ambassadors, I’m not sure everyone was fooled. But they were fooled enough to keep their troops waiting for us in the Chersonese and in the autumn, Philip caught them flat-footed, and occupied the passes west of the Gates of Fire.
Demosthenes rose in the Athenian Assembly and demanded an army to meet Philip in the field. It was the best speech of his career. Athens answered with ten thousand hoplites and another ten thousand mercenaries, and by a matter of days’ marching, beat Philip into the southern passes and kept him out of Boeotia. My guess about Thebes had been premature.
But Philip sat at his end of the passes and watched the Persian–Athenian détente crumble. The Persians wanted nothing more than to see Athens and Macedon and Thebes rip into one another, and the Persian gold was cut off, the Persian fleet went home and Macedon was saved. Demosthenes spent the winter egging Athens on to greatness, or so he claimed. But as I had predicted at the trout dinner, the democracy did much of the work to destroy the Persian alliance themselves.
Philip sent orders home that we should raise two more taxeis of infantry and train the pages harder. But he also ordered that the pages be promoted to royal companions. We were going to be adults. And when we’d trained the new recruits, we were to bring them to Philip in the field. Father and son were going to war together.
; That winter, my father died, and I fell in love. I believe in love – many men don’t – and it had been my friend all my life. And my first love was linked to the death of my father.
Many men said then that I was Philip’s bastard son. That Philip put me on my mother – by rape, in an affair. And the gods know my pater was always fairly distant. On the other hand, he was closer than Philip ever was to me or to Alexander, for that matter. He didn’t have much time for me until I was eleven or twelve, but after that, when I was home from being a page, Pater listened to my tales of the hunt and the court, took me with him on business visits around our farms and we went hunting together ourselves. Some of my best memories are of sitting in the hall, on a stool by the hearth, surrounded by Pater’s great boar hounds. We talked about everything, solved many of the world’s problems, and Pater became quite a fan of Aristotle – actually bought two of his books and read them, which was quite a turn-up for a boar-hunting lord in the wilds of central Macedon.
Pater never discussed my birth directly. But once, when he was at court – a rare event in itself – Attalus made direct reference to it. And Pater smiled at him and rubbed his nose – his long hawk’s beak of a nose.
My nose, too.
My guess is that Mater and Philip were lovers – by his will, I suspect. But the child she bore her husband was theirs. He honoured her all her life, and there was a well-tended shrine to her after her death. Not that Philip ever visited it, either way. If he’d visited the graves of all his lovers, he’d have done nothing else.
Some time in late autumn, when there was snow in the passes and the snowline was creeping over the higher fields, when small farmers stayed in, weaving baskets and carving new handles for axes, and the great families had dangerous feasts where everyone drank too much, slept with the wrong people and killed each other with knives – word came to court that my pater was ill, and Alexander brought me the news himself. I was in Antipater’s rooms, copying documents like a scribal slave – lists of equipment issued to our new recruits. Dull stuff, but the very sinews of Ares, and Alexander insisted that it be done right.
God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great Page 12
