God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  I laughed. ‘When you are king, you’ll need to buy off all your enemies,’ I said. ‘I’m the Lord of Ichnai and Allante. I don’t need rewards. I’m your man.’

  So we rode down the passes into Macedon, and as we rode, we quietly plotted to murder the king.

  PART II

  The Path to the Throne

  NINE

  Looking back, I think that it might all have been talk, if not for Pausanias. He hadn’t made many friends since he was the royal favourite – he’d been demoted back to page when his accusations against Attalus and Diomedes outraged the king. But he’d served well – even brilliantly – at Chaeronea, and he was well born, if only a highlander. He wasn’t a favourite of Alexander’s, or mine, or Hephaestion’s, but he was one of us, and there were young men in our pages’ group who we liked a lot less and still tolerated.

  Pausanias had a remarkable way of saying the most dramatic thing instead of telling the truth, which made him untrustworthy as a scout or as a friend – a tendency to exaggerate, not just to make a story better, but because he craved excitement. This is not an uncommon failing in young men, but he had it to a degree I’ve seldom seen, and the saddest thing was that he had real accomplishments – he was a brilliant runner and a fine javelin-thrower. But he never bragged or exaggerated his real accomplishments.

  I only mention this by way of explanation, because what’s coming is hard enough to understand.

  We returned to Pella and had a public reconciliation with the king. He was entirely focused on the invasion of Asia, and he’d just appointed Attalus and Parmenion joint commanders of the advance guard – picked men, a whole picked army.

  It was only then, I think, that Alexander discovered how advanced his father’s plans were for Asia. And his anger was spectacular – almost worthy of Ares himself.

  I was there – dinner in the palace, with only men from our pages’ group at the couches, and Alexander was silent. Hephaestion tried to cheer him, called him Achilles, waited on him hand and foot and recited the Iliad.

  Alexander was having none of it. I suspected what was wrong, the way all of us do when a favourite or a wife is silent and careful. When we are left to guess for ourselves just why the subject of our scrutiny is so silent. I watched Alexander, and I guessed that it was the preparations for the war in Asia. They were all around us, from the horse farms teeming with new geldings ready for war to the piles – literally – of new-cut ash poles outside the foot companions’ barracks. We’d done our part, signing Athens to the fight, but Philip had not wasted a moment, and all Macedon – and all Greece – was girding for the war we’d all known from birth would happen some day. The great adventure. The crusade.

  And we were going to sit home in Pella and hear our elders tell of how it went.

  I remember Hephaestion starting into the recitation of Achilles at the head of the Myrmidons when Alexander let out something very like a screech and stood up. ‘Fuck that!’ he roared. He flung his wine cup across the room and it was squashed flat with the power of the throw – gold with tin in it.

  Alexander scarcely ever swore.

  Silence fell over the room.

  ‘He’s going to go east and leave me with nothing,’ Alexander said. ‘Nothing.’

  Hephaestion, who often misunderstood his hero, shook his head. ‘You’ll be regent—’

  ‘Regent?’ Alexander was almost crying. ‘Regent? I want to conquer the world! I will pull the Great King off his throne! It is my destiny. Mine! He is stealing my life, the old goat! The rutting monster!’

  I haven’t mentioned it, but we couldn’t miss the fact that Cleopatra, the new wife, was once again heavily pregnant, nor that many nobles acted as if Alexander were already supplanted. Nor that Attalus, who, in Macedonian parlance, had the king’s cock by both ends – by which they meant that he was Cleopatra’s uncle and Diomedes’ as well – was to be commander in Asia for the initial campaigns.

  At any rate, I remember Alexander standing there, eyes sparkling and nearly mad, his hair almost on end, his muscles standing out. He was possessed – if not by a god, then by something worse. But he was not human in that moment, and he meant business. Had his father entered the room just then, Alexander might have killed him himself.

  It was not Philip who entered, but Alexander’s mother, Olympias. Who was supposed to be in exile at Epirus, but was mysteriously back in Pella.

  She was hardly the monster that Kleithenes has proclaimed her, but she was capable of anything. Beautiful – Aphrodite gave her what men desire with both hands. Long, perfect legs, wide thighs and a waist so small that after birthing a child a big man could still get his hands around her tummy. Breasts not just beautiful to look at but curiously inviting – something about the texture of the skin between her breasts demanded that you touch it. It was smooth and yet never shiny. Her hair was as black as charcoal or a moonless night, and her eyes were seductive – deep, expressive, laughing – Alexander later claimed that she had lain with a god, and if anyone was god-touched, it was she.

  Men claimed to have lain with her – or to know someone who had – she had a reputation as utterly wanton. I wonder. I never knew anyone who made the claim and seemed believable. I do know several who made the claim and had accidents afterwards.

  But beyond her beauty, which was intimidating, was her brain, which was godlike. She never forgot a name. She never forgot an injury or a service. She knew every slave in royal service and every page who had ever served her son by name and family and value of service. She had a web of informers worthy of Delphi, and she usually knew who slept with whom and what the repercussions were, men and women both.

  She couldn’t read. But she could recite the entire Iliad. She could create lyric poetry extempore, alluding to Sappho or Alcaeus or Simonides, even borrowing a line here and there . . .

  She was brilliant. Alexander’s godlike genius probably came from her, and not from Philip.

  Of course, she was almost completely devoid of human emotions, except lust for revenge and a desire to see her son, as an extension of her own will, succeed. They say a child is two years old before he realises that his mother is not actually part of him. Perhaps true – but Olympias never, ever realised that Alexander was not part of her. An extension of her. Those men at court who saw women only as mysterious possessors of alien sex organs – such men are common everywhere, and mythologise women in terms of sex; you know whereof I speak, young man? Good. Those men at court liked to claim that Olympias slept with her son.

  Crap. She had no need to sleep with him. She lived through him, and consulted him from childhood on every aspect of her life. She was his priestess – he was her god. It was a deeply disturbing relationship, one that appalled even Alexander, and yet he was always helpless in her presence, unable to be a man or even a boy, usually just a toy to her will.

  I did not like her. I avoided her as much as I could, and even now, knowing that she is safely dead at that thug Cassander’s hands, I still fear her. Men at court feared her as a witch, a woman, a beauty. They were fools. She was one of them to her finger’s ends, and they should have dreaded her as one dreads a boar turned at bay, or a royal Macedonian bent on achieving power.

  Again, I tell this because without understanding her, nothing that follows makes much sense.

  At any rate, there we were, in virtual exile still, even at the heart of Macedonian power, and we were to all intents under siege. She had been exiled, and if the king had recalled her, we never heard. She hadn’t followed us to Illyria, but she had suggested the move, arranged the marriage, given Alexander money . . .

  Well, I for one assumed she was still in Epirus, and still in exile.

  Apparently not!

  She entered the room and Alexander turned pale. We were already silent, but the silence took on a new texture.

  ‘Whining about Philip?’ she said. She had a cup in her hand. She stopped near the door, bent with a dancer’s grace and plucked the ruins of Alexander’
s gold cup from the floor. ‘Achilles was a petulant arse, too, my dear. That’s an element of his heroism I desire that you avoid.’

  I remember thinking I would choke. That’s how she always struck me.

  She sat on Alexander’s kline and this time she lay down, as if experimenting with the feel of a couch. She lay back – scandalous in itself. She had golden sandals and her feet were painted. Her feet were as beautiful as the rest of her – and really, she was fifteen years older than me. My lord’s mother.

  She took a sip of wine. ‘Well?’ she asked the silence.

  Alexander was choking. ‘This is a man’s feast, Mother.’

  ‘No, it is not. If you were a man, Philip would be cold rotting clay in the ground, or bleeding himself out in a pool of his own vomit. He is not, so you, my dear, are not yet a man.’ She smiled lazily. ‘I predict that soon enough, one of you will come upon a method of killing the king. And then we will take power, and proceed to rule well. Philip must die.’ She smiled. ‘I shock you. You are still such . . . boys. How dare I – a matron? A mother? Suggest that my husband must die? Listen, boys – he’s had a boy or a girl on the end of his cock every day since I first spread my thighs for him, and I laugh, because none of them can give him what I can. But now he wants to be rid of my son – my godlike son, his true heir. And me. And this is not Philip, great-hearted Lion of Macedon. This is little Philip, the lover of Diomedes and the lickspittle of Attalus. Best that he die, before all his greatness is forgotten.’

  She got up. Smoothed the linen of her chiton, and handed Alexander her jewelled wine cup. ‘There, my dear. A new cup for your old one. Get it done, my dear. He means to rid himself of you and of me, too. Just this evening, one of my snakes died of something I was to have eaten.’ She smiled brilliantly at all of us. ‘I was tiring of Epirus. It was time to come back here and make Philip dine on his own vomit. Why are you shocked? I only say what you think.’ She rose on her toes to kiss her son, and I could see every inch of her body through the linen, silhouetted against the hearth fire, and I thought in that moment – what was Philip thinking? What man would want more than that?

  And truly, I think that if she had not been cursed with such a sharp mind, he’d have loved her for ever. But I imagine that she ferreted out the truth once too often. Who likes to feel inferior in a marriage? Especially when one is the king.

  On her way out, she paused by my couch and leaned far over. When my traitor eyes left her face to probe inside her linen to the very nipples of her breasts, she flicked her eyes over mine and her lips twitched with a familiar . . . contempt? Excitement?

  ‘Where is Pausanias, tonight?’ she asked.

  Who knows what I choked out.

  ‘You have the best brain in this room, besides his,’ she said. ‘Find Pausanias. He is now in a position to help us all.’ She laughed, a horrible laugh. Later, I knew she was making a pun on the word position.

  She straightened and cast her goddess-like smile around the room. ‘Be good, boys,’ she said, and glided out.

  I grabbed Cleon and, I think, Perdiccas – and told them to find Pausanias. He hadn’t gone into exile with us, and we’d only seen him once since we returned. Rumour was he had allied himself with Attalus – one way you can tell when a man is pre-eminent is that his enemies start to become his friends because they have nowhere else to go.

  Poor Pausanias.

  Alexander was quiet after his mother’s visit – quiet and thoughtful. Since he wasn’t up to any mischief, I let him go, and threw knucklebones with Hephaestion and young Neoptolymos, one of the other highlander lords attached to the pages.

  There was a disturbance down in the royal stables – loud shouting, someone screaming.

  Alexander stepped behind his couch and drew his sword. That’s how close to the edge we all were.

  Nearchus was on duty and sober. He took two pages in armour and raced off down the corridors towards the stables. We sent all the slaves away.

  More shouting, some drunken, some sober. A weapons clash. A scream.

  ‘We’re Attalus’s men!’ clear as day. And another scream. The unmistakable sound of a man with a sword in his groin or guts.

  Alexander was in his battlefield mode. His eyes met mine. ‘Go and find out,’ he said. He even managed a smile. ‘Don’t die.’

  I grinned back, hopped over my kline and ran, barefoot, through the curtains, aware that there were slaves just outside the door, cowering out of my way, and more slaves all down the corridor – it was, after all, the main corridor that connected the king’s apartments with the prince’s. I could see a pair of his royal companions outside the king’s door – not at attention, but straining towards me like hunting hounds waiting to be released.

  I waved my sword at them. They knew me. ‘If I find anything I’ll tell you!’ I called as I raced by. Hard to imagine they might actually be trying to kill me.

  I got down to the stables without seeing another freeman. The screams were done – so was the shouting.

  Perdiccas was just inside the stables, with two dead men-slaves – at his feet. Cleon the Black was holding another man – at first, I thought Cleon was ‘questioning’ him.

  Perdiccas looked as if he was going to cry.

  Cleon just looked angry and perhaps disgusted.

  ‘We found Pausanias,’ he spat.

  The man he was holding in his arms was Pausanias. He was naked. Blood was running out of his anus – thick, dark blood. All over Cleon’s wool chiton and his legs. Cleon didn’t flinch.

  ‘They raped him,’ Cleon said. ‘Attalus and Diomedes, and every guest at the party. And then he was given to the slaves, and they raped him, too. Fifty men?’ Cleon’s words were thick with rage.

  Pausanias was breathing. It sounded almost like snores – it took me a long time to realise he was sobbing without any voice left. He’d screamed his voice away.

  ‘He told you that?’ I asked.

  Cleon jutted his chin at the two corpses. ‘They did. Attalus’s stable boys.’

  Perdiccas had recovered his wits enough to clean his weapon. ‘If we’re found – fuck, it’s murder. We killed them.’

  I nodded. The bodies were a problem. So was Pausanias. He was alive. He would tell his story.

  Attalus meant him to live to tell his story.

  Olympias, damn her, knew already what had happened. She’d as much as told us. So the story wouldn’t be secret. I stared around, trying to see through the endless dark labyrinth of Macedonian court politics. Attalus was making a statement – that Alexander was too powerless to protect his friends.

  I thought of Diomedes a year before. Wondered if I had been intended for a similar fate.

  It was a fate any Macedonian would dread – now that he’d been used as a woman by fifty men, Pausanias’s life was over. No matter that it had been done by force. No matter. He would be marked. As weak.

  Even I felt a certain aversion. I didn’t want to touch him. I marvelled at Cleon’s toughness.

  But even while I thought through the emotions, a colder part of my brain went throught the ramifications.

  ‘Right. Cleon – can you carry him?’ I asked.

  As answer, Cleon rose to his feet and swung the older man on his broad shoulders. A drop of Pausanias’s blood hit my cheek and burned me as if it were acid – I felt his pollution. Or so I thought.

  ‘Take him to Alexander. Perdiccas and I will get rid of the bodies.’ I looked at Cleon. ‘Tell me the king is here, and was not at the party.’

  Cleon shrugged.

  Perdiccas and I carried the two thugs out of the royal stables. This may surprise you, but despite plots and foreign hatred, the palace itself was almost completely unguarded – two men on the king’s chamber, two on the queen’s, a couple of pages on Alexander and sometimes a nightwatchman on the main gate. We carried the dead men out one at a time, through the picket door used to clear manure out of the stables.

  We carried them through the streets – streets
devoid of life or light – and left them behind Attalus’s house. I put knives in their hands, as if they’d fought each other. I doubt that a child would have been fooled.

  After that, it was open war in the streets – our men against theirs. Pausanias was sometimes a tart and always a difficult friend – but he was one of us, and the outrage committed against him was a rape of every page. We were unmanned together. As we were supposed to have been.

  Diomedes led the attacks – sometimes from in front, and sometimes from a safe third rank. Cleon and Perdiccas were caught in the agora by a dozen of Attalus’s relatives, challenged and beaten so badly that Cleon’s left arm never healed quite right. They were baited with Pausanias’s fate. Anything might have happened, but a dozen royal companions intervened.

  The next day, I was on the way to my house – my rebuilt house – with Nearchus beside me when Diomedes appeared in front of me.

  ‘Anyone able to hear poor Pausanias fart?’ he said. ‘Ooh, he wasn’t as tight as Philip said he was!’

  There were men – Thracians – behind me.

  I ran.

  There’s a trick to the escalation of violence – most men, even Macedonians, take a moment to warm themselves up. Diomedes had to posture – both because he enjoyed it, and to get himself in the mood to murder me.

  I turned and ran, grabbing Nearchus’s hand as I went.

  I went right through the loose ring of Thracians behind me, and took a sword-slash across my shoulders and upper back – most of it caught in the bunches of fabric under my shoulder brooches, but some of the cut went home.

  But most of the Thracians were so surprised that they stumbled over each other.

  We ran along the street, back towards the palace.

  ‘Get them, you idiots!’ Diomedes shouted.

  But they were foreigners, didn’t know the city and had riding boots on. I was a former page wearing light sandals, and I flew. Nearchus was with me, stride for stride – street, right turn, alley, under an awning, along an alley so narrow that the householders had roofed it over, up and over a giant pile of manure – euch – into a wagon yard that I knew well and north, along the high wall of the palace, and we were clear.