God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  Alexander looked at me, and again, his eyes narrowed.

  I was challenging him.

  ‘You are above yourself, Ptolemy,’ Alexander said. ‘It is not your place to tell the king what he may and may not do.’

  Something – something that had been hanging over me since I stormed Mount Ossa – broke.

  ‘You’re wrong, Alexander,’ I said, and my use of his name was deliberate. ‘It is my place. I am your friend and your trusted man, one of your great nobles, the leader of your best troops. If you leave Attalus alive, you tell us, your pages, that our sacrifices meant nothing to you. And that makes you an ungrateful bastard, not a king. Everything is not a trade of this for that, a compromise towards better rulership. Sometimes, you just have to accept that you are a leader not by the will of the gods but by the consent of the men of worth. If you leave Attalus alive, you betray us.’

  He turned away. His posture hardened. With a good athlete, you can read anger in every muscle, not just in a few in the arms, shoulders and neck. He had rage in his hips and in his lower back.

  ‘Remove yourself,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck you,’ I said. Not what Aristotle would have wanted me to say. ‘Call your companions and have me dragged out.’

  Hephaestion came in in a hurry. I have no doubt he’d been listening. ‘You cannot address your king that way,’ he said. ‘Apologise!’

  ‘Alexander is going to pardon Attalus!’ I said.

  Hephaestion hadn’t been listening as closely as I had thought. He stopped dead. ‘What?’

  Alexander whirled. ‘Not you too! Listen. Attalus is a tool. I need him in Asia. I need all my father’s generals.’

  Hephaestion made a moue of distaste and glanced at me, clearly caught between annoyance at the king and dislike of me. ‘Attalus,’ he spat.

  I leaned forward. ‘My king, you do not need Attalus to conquer Asia. You do not need Parmenio and you do not need Amyntas. You just conquered Greece in forty days – with your own men and your own army. And your own head.’ I shrugged. ‘And I stand on my statement. If you pardon Attalus, I will take my grooms and retire to my estates.’

  Alexander paused and just looked at me.

  ‘My father did it,’ I reminded him. ‘I can live without all this.’

  Alexander was as white as a new-woven chiton. ‘Leave me.’ He waved his hand quickly, like a man dying of suffocation. ‘Don’t argue. Go.’

  I left the tent.

  That was a bad day. I ordered my kit packed. I called Philip Longsword and told him the whole story – much as I’m telling you now, because my story went back to the hunt with Laodon and the rape of Pausanias. He heard me out, and shook his head.

  ‘Bad,’ he said. ‘But you shouldn’t have defied the king.’

  I knew he was right. I knew that in a moment’s hot-headedness, I’d lost years of ground with Alexander, and maybe lost him altogether.

  So I handed command to Philip, and said some goodbyes, and then sat down on a camp stool – our kit caught up with us that morning when the rest of the army marched in – and waited for the summons.

  It didn’t come all day.

  Men watched me – men who had been my own a few hours before. But they kept their distance. Philip Longsword had told them – on parade – not to come within a spear’s length of me, by my own order.

  A long day.

  As the sun was setting and the evening sacrifices were being made, Nearchus came with a full file of Hetaeroi. Before he could ask, I gave him my sword.

  We walked back through a silent camp.

  The king was with Hephaestion in his tent. No one else. I took that as a good sign. If he meant to execute me, he’d have to order it done before my peers, and they’d have to agree.

  He kept his back to me.

  Hephaestion did the talking.

  ‘The king requests that you resign the command of his household guards. And requests – as one man to another – that you withdraw the term bastard.’ I had expected Hephaestion to be delighted by my fall from grace, but he looked stricken.

  ‘My king, I deeply regret my show of anger, this morning,’ I said. ‘I withdraw the term bastard, and offer my apologies.’

  Alexander turned around. ‘And trying to make me alter my policy?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, Alexander. But if you won’t give in on this, you will eventually die as your father did.’

  Yes, I said that.

  It was true. I loved him, and he was about to make a capital mistake at the very start. If he let Attalus live – do you see it, young man? If he let the bastard live, Cleomenes and Nearchus and Pyrrhus and Marsyas would begin to feel the germs of doubt. The kind of doubt that ends with a King of Macedon surrounded in bed by a ring of daggers held by men who were once his friends.

  That’s the way it is, in Macedon.

  Alexander had allowed himself to forget it. Not for the last time.

  But he shook his head. ‘If I kill Attalus,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘I have to give everything to Parmenio. I have no counterbalance to him. I hate Attalus – but that’s not important! I am king! I must do what is best!’

  I shrugged. ‘I am not king,’ I said. ‘I will be sorry not to command the hypaspitoi. And I will – without any disloyalty – do my best to kill Attalus myself. To spare you.’

  ‘Do not do this!’ Hephaestion spat. ‘Do not seek to bend him to your will.’

  Alexander nodded to himself. ‘Very well. I need a man I trust to go to Athens. You will go with the envoys we picked up at Delphi. I do not demand the head of Demosthenes, but I would very much like him to present himself to me as the ambassador of Athens.’

  Even through the tension, I had to smile at that image.

  ‘Go and be my ambassador to Athens. They know me there. And you weren’t to keep the hypaspitoi, anyway. They love you too well, and they are my spear.’ He nodded coolly. ‘And I’ll no doubt have to give them to one of Parmenio’s sons.’ He grimaced. ‘Go to Athens for me. Get their agreement that I am the hegemon. Tell them that I require five hundred of their best cavalry. Get your friend Kineas.’ He was speaking a little wildly, trying to stumble back from the brink I’d brought us to.

  That’s when I learned how much Alexander loved me. A little too late. And I burned some of that love, buying Attalus’s death.

  Worth it.

  Only a handful of men knew what had happened – the public story was that I was to return to command a squadron of Hetaeroi, and that while I held the ambassadorship to Athens, Philip Longsword would command the hypaspitoi. There was no punishment in public or private, except, in the days before I left for Athens, a certain distance with the king.

  I missed the hypaspitoi the way a father misses his daughter, and I wept the first night I was back with the Hetaeroi.

  Polystratus told me I was a fool.

  I took my grooms and three Hetaeroi. Diodorus rode with me as if he were my hyperetes, and the other two envoys cowered in the rear. Despite their presence, we made excellent time across Parnassus, and on the second morning we were at the gates of Athens. I requested permission to enter, made sacrifice as a foreign ambassador and was allowed entry. Demosthenes was still in shock – Athens had known for less than a week that the Macedonian army was just two hundred stades away. Suddenly, all the tough talk ended.

  I sought permission to lodge with your grandfather, Kineas’s father, and was accepted. I wish I had not. It was my fault that he was exiled later – my enthusiasm for his company, and his for mine, and Kineas’s open pleasure at having me in the city all conspired to seal his fate.

  I should have been in the throes of exile and anger myself. I had been ill used by the very king I was striving to serve – had I not?

  In truth, I was so sure that I had done the right thing – the good thing – that I was unconcerned by the result. Only young and naive people can act this way, but I was convinced that the king would see it my way in the end.

&
nbsp; So I set myself to enjoy Athens. And that began with a visit to Thaïs.

  I dressed plainly. It was late afternoon – her public receiving hour. I tipped the slave at her gate, and was escorted to her solar, a big, sunny room with a loom and a set of couches and chairs.

  At the sight of her, a thrill ran through me, better than the thrill of a cavalry charge or the racing rush of a galley. How well does Sappho say it? I had not seen her in more than a year, and her immanence was like a breath of incense to a man working in manure.

  Her smile was like sunrise. Or noon. Or something nice and poetic. It was beyond artifice, and that was the good part.

  She flirted effortlessly with half a dozen of us, and I noticed that most of the men present were quite young – twenty, just free of their ephebe duties – and long-haired boys at that, aristocrats who cared nothing for Athenian virtue.

  Diodorus had, indeed, suggested that Thaïs was past her most popular.

  I could find no visible flaw – nor, when she sang, could I hear an audible one. But fashions change, and Thaïs represented a freer, more self-confident Athens – not the narrow world Demosthenes wanted – a prude whose sole justification was his hatred of Philip. And now, of Alexander.

  But the boys were afraid of me. One made bad jokes at my expense, as if my Greek were so bad that I couldn’t be expected to understand. He was doing it from sheer bravado, and he bored me, and angered Thaïs, who asked him to stop.

  ‘Perhaps Demosthenes is right,’ the boy said, flipping his hair like a girl. ‘Macedon is a land of effeminate poseurs, and this Ptolemy with the barbarian name hides behind Thaïs.’

  I sipped some sweet wine. ‘Dear Thaïs, if I break the little one, will you forgive me?’

  She made a face. ‘Yes. But only if I can watch.’

  That stung the brat. He sat up. ‘Well – if that’s all the thanks I get for my wit, I’ll go.’

  I smiled. ‘Don’t hurry, laddy. We’re going to wrestle first.’

  Thaïs clapped her hands.

  The boy waved for his cloak. ‘I’ll decline to wrestle with a barbarian, however well connected.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, still smiling, ‘then I guess I’ll just break your neck.’ I caught him by the shoulders, locked an elbow, put him in a hold and threw him out of a window. The window was open, and it was less than the height of a man above the garden.

  The garden was a little thorny.

  ‘His father is quite important,’ Thaïs said.

  ‘My master is the King of Macedon,’ I said. The other boys hurried out. As soon as they were gone, I bent down over her kline and kissed her.

  And she let me.

  It was quite a long kiss, and without meaning to, I had a hand under her chiton, on one lovely breast and then the other.

  I could hear the boy in the garden arguing with his friends. But I didn’t care what he decided to do.

  My hand drifted over her belly, which was as taut as my own, and stroked her – down and down. My fingers parted her. And then I was inside her.

  It all took a deliciously long time. And her slaves must have been remarkably well trained.

  And at some point, she was astride me, and she pulled her chiton over her head without unpinning anything, shucking it off as a useless encumbrance. ‘Sex should be naked,’ she said. ‘Like athletics – the participants need to show their bodies.’

  I took the hint, although I remember giggling as I tried to wriggle out of my chiton while pinned to the couch.

  Am I shocking you?

  Let me put it this way. Before that afternoon, I’d never really had sex. She was playful, humorous, lust-filled, languorous, fast, slow, intelligent, as beautiful as Aphrodite, with more cleverness in one hand than all the slave girls I’d ever bedded had in their cunnies. And in between bouts – for sex with Thaïs bore some very real relationship to competitions – she’d talk of things – real things, like love and friendship and war.

  I’d like to say we made love six times, but that would be bragging.

  ‘I’m going to be sore tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sore right now,’ I said. I was looking at my penis, which was as red as a Spartan’s cloak. She laughed. I laughed.

  Put a value on that.

  ‘Come away with me,’ I said. ‘Live with me. Be my hetaera.’

  ‘On the basis of one afternoon on a couch? You don’t have my bill yet.’ She smiled and kissed my nose.

  Now, I hated my nose. People called me ‘Farm Boy’ because of that beak. No one had ever kissed it before.

  ‘On the basis of the fact that I think of you constantly.’ I licked her lips.

  ‘You’ve bedded me now – the feeling will pass.’ She smiled. ‘Men really only fancy what they haven’t had.’

  I bit her.

  She bit me.

  We were pretty far down the path when she grabbed my hand – she was strong – as strong as a warrior. ‘That hurts. I’m done, sweet.’

  I laughed and kissed her. ‘I suppose I owe you for the week you’ll be out of commission,’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘I’m not a porne,’ she said. ‘You’d be surprised how long it is since I had a man between my hips.’

  I licked her lips again. ‘I’m lucky.’

  She laughed. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘I mean it,’ I added. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘You don’t know me,’ she said. ‘And people will say the most unkind things.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ll kill them.’ That made her laugh.

  She wouldn’t give me an answer. We drank some wonderful red wine together, and I left to go to a dinner in Alexander’s honour.

  I didn’t see her for two days. She refused my invitations and was not at home to anyone.

  On the third day, Demosthenes himself agreed to lead the embassy to Alexander. Athens was racing to throw itself at the conqueror’s feet. Demosthenes could never meet my eye. Old Phokion was kind enough to shake my hand and tell me that the exploit of Mount Ossa was as worthy as any feat of arms he’d ever done.

  Kineas and I boxed, and he gave me a black eye. Your pater had the fastest hands I’ve ever failed to see, and that’s no lie.

  I was done. So I sent Thaïs a note, declaring that I was still sore and that I still wanted her to come with me. I thought a touch of humour might have an effect.

  She sent me a bill for ten talents of gold. A year’s income from all of my estates.

  I sent her all ten talents, and a bill for ridding her of a troublesome guest – one Athenian drachma, payable in kisses.

  The next day, I packed my gear. I had no intention of riding with Demosthenes. I detested him. He made my skin crawl.

  Mid-morning, while I said my goodbyes to Kineas, his father’s steward summoned the old man, who went out for a hundred heartbeats and came back.

  ‘Ptolemy, there is a person at my gate. She says she will wait for you. Do you wish me to admit her?’

  Kineas looked puzzled. I was puzzled.

  ‘Not . . . Thaïs?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Eumeles said. ‘A person of some . . . distinction.’ He spoke with evident distaste.

  ‘Ah!’ I ran down the stairs and out into the courtyard, across the yard and out through the gate.

  There were twenty mules in the alley, and a dozen slaves, and Thaïs, robed like a matron and wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat.

  ‘Last chance to change your mind,’ she said.

  I shrugged. ‘At ten talents an . . . encounter, I must confess that ours may be a chaste relationship.’

  She nodded. ‘Platonic, perhaps?’

  I laughed. Kineas laughed when I told it to him. He snorted wine over his chiton. She was that funny.

  When I left Athens, I had the one thing Athens had that I wanted.

  TWELVE

  When I rode out through the gates of Athens – the magnificent Panathenaic gates – I hadn’t given Alexander a thought in three days. And such was my delight in Th
aïs that I didn’t really think much about him during the idyll over Parnassus to his camp outside Thebes.

  But the camp was a buzzing hive, and the first drone to land near me was Hephaestion, who had the inner guards when I rode into camp. I saluted him, and he rode over.

  He looked at Thaïs, looked away, and back, and away.

  I smiled.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked. Not at his most subtle.

  ‘The hetaera Thaïs, the jewel of Athens.’ I smiled. ‘She has agreed, of her goodness, to spend a little time with me.’’

  ‘She is beautiful!’ Hephaestion’s admiration was quite genuine, and he bowed deeply in the saddle. ‘Despoina, that you condescend to grace our rude camp is like having Aphrodite herself—’

  ‘Hush,’ Thaïs said, with a smile, and raised a finger to Hephaestion’s lips. ‘No hubris, and no calls on the Cyprian that I challenge her beauty – for I do not.’

  Hephaestion was smitten on the spot. Who expects a courtesan to be well spoken and witty? Well, Macedonians don’t. Athenians do. There’s a lot to be said, there.

  ‘The king wants you,’ he said to me. ‘He’s waited for you for three days.’ Hephaestion made a face. ‘He wondered if you were coming back.’

  I sighed. ‘I wonder who put that thought in his ear?’

  Hephaestion frowned. ‘Not me. We need you, even if you are a fool. There’s only you, me and Cleitus who will stand up to him, now. But if I were you,’ and Hephaestion’s eyes flickered over Thaïs, ‘I’d take her. He needs to see something beautiful. He’s angry. And it’s not really about you – but it could become you in a heartbeat.’

  Well – for Hephaestion, this was almost like friendship.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. I still counted my fingers after I shook his hand. ‘I’ll change—’

  ‘Go straight away,’ Hephaestion said.

  Uh-oh.

  So I rode to the royal pavilion with Thaïs at my side, and helped her down from her horse. She didn’t make a fuss about her appearance or her fatigue – a miracle – but strode in behind me.

  Black Cleitus was at the tent door. He clasped my hand and beamed at Thaïs.