God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  Alexander shook his head. ‘Thebes has already been taught her lesson. They won’t rise again.’

  I felt like a conspirator. ‘They would if they thought that someone else was going to be King of Macedon,’ I said.

  ‘Amyntas?’ Alexander asked. ‘Or Caranus?’

  I shrugged. ‘If you like.’ Amyntas son of Perdiccas was the heir apparent by virtue of being the last legitimate claimant to the throne left alive. He had ties to Attalus and to Parmenio – marriage ties, family ties, office-holding ties and landownership ties.

  Caranus – I hope you are keeping track – was Cleopatra’s son by Philip, Alexander’s father. He was two years old and unlikely to make trouble for a would-be dynast, meaning that he was the perfect candidate to figurehead a rebellion.

  ‘Parmenio and Attalus and Amyntas were negotiating just four months ago,’ Alexander said.

  ‘Fuck me,’ I said. I hadn’t known, and I wasn’t cynical enough, yet. It’s amazing how cynical you have to be to keep up with human behaviour.

  Alexander nodded. ‘When we leave the circle of the mountains, it is at least possible that we march to face Parmenio at Pella.’ He looked at the entrance to the pass. ‘And it is at least possible that Nicanor is here to watch us and do what damage he can.’

  I had little love for the arrogant bastard, but – ‘That makes no sense, lord,’ I said. ‘Parmenio – whatever his faults – loves his sons like he loves himself. He wouldn’t sacrifice one.’

  Alexander gave me the look of a man to whom all other men were expendable. ‘I can’t trust to that,’ he said.

  ‘The lads need a rest soon,’ I pointed out.

  ‘So you always say,’ Alexander said.

  ‘We’ve marched seven thousand stades, according to the Military Journal. We’ve fought four major actions and two dozen skirmishes.’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘Lord, that’s four years’ worth of campaigning in one summer. They’re tired. I’m tired.’

  Alexander finished his wine. ‘I’m tired too,’ he said, very quietly. ‘But we’re not done. I can feel it.’

  Three hundred stades south of Pellium we found Langarus and his little army of Agrianians marching to our relief. They had won two actions and burned a swathe through the home country of the northern Illyrian tribes, and the Illyrian confederacy was smashed to pieces.

  But Langarus had opened the road to Macedon as he came up it behind us, and with him were a dozen couriers, elements of our camp, the siege train, and Thaïs.

  Thaïs wasn’t showing, and she was riding astride, dressed as a man, with a big straw hat, and only her maidservant, the black woman. I embarrassed my friends by kissing her in public – most of them had no idea who she was in her men’s clothes, and the image of me kissing a groom in public was indelibly printed on them. I took a great deal of ribbing.

  That was fine.

  Thaïs had intelligence – dozens of reports, most of them from Athens.

  I took her to the king, and left them together.

  She told me that he listened to her, read the letters she had and then wrote a long letter to his mother – it took him an hour to write, and he did it entirely himself, with no secretary.

  Alexander offered Thaïs anything she wanted – a rich marriage, an estate. She told him that when the time was right, she would ask her favour, and he kissed her and swore by Herakles.

  We lay together that night. The sex was emotional but not very athletic. She was distant.

  I prodded and pulled at her until she snapped.

  ‘It’s all coming apart,’ she said. ‘And friends of mine will pay. People I like are going to betray Alexander, and he will kill them, and I’ve chosen sides.’ She cried in my arms.

  In the morning, she rode back down the hills to Pella, and I sent Polystratus and all my grooms to guard her.

  Alexander was wrong. The Greeks had stabbed us in the back.

  Demosthenes, that paragon among Hellenes, had arranged for a cloak to be shown, covered in blood, in Thebes and Athens. The story was that Alexander had been killed in a rout in the Thracian hills.

  Thebes laid our garrison under siege and some Macedonians were murdered. Athens vacillated – Demosthenes was not universally trusted or popular, and men like Phokion and Kineas’s father were powerful enough to stop outright rebellion. But Athens was on the brink.

  Sparta was calling up her allies.

  But that was not the worst of it.

  In Asia, the new King of Kings had finally reacted to Parmenio’s presence. He had sent his best general – Memnon, the brilliant mercenary officer – with a largely Greek army to turn Parmenio out of the Troad, a region bounded by the Dardanelles to the north-west, by the Aegean Sea to the west and separated from the rest of Anatolia by the massif that forms Mount Ida, drained by two main rivers, the Scamander and the Simois, which join at the area containing the ruins of Troy.

  He crossed Mount Ida and almost caught Parmenio by surprise at Cyzicus, and then slipped past him and took one of his supply bases at Lampsacus. Calas, one of Parmenio’s brigadiers, lost an action and had to retire – in the messages, it sounded as if he’d been trounced. Parmenio had given up two years’ conquests in Ionia. And worst of all, Darius, this new and powerful King of Kings, had offered Athens and Demosthenes three hundred talents of gold to ally with him and Thebes against Macedon.

  Athens and Thebes held few fears for us. Right or wrong, we were sure we could take them. But Athens and Thebes backed by internal rebellion inside Macedon and the Great King – especially if Parmenio was complicit . . .

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ I said. I was drinking wine with the king, Hephaestion and Langarus. ‘Parmenio isn’t waiting for us on the plain in front of Pella. He’s trapped in the Troad, and he can’t even get his army across the straits. The Great King has done us a favour.’

  Alexander raised his cup in my direction, as if toasting to me. ‘Sometimes,’ the king said, ‘you and I share a thought. You are a deeper man than you appear, Farm Boy.’

  Well, take that as a compliment if you want. Alexander had a way of being at his most offensive when it was his intention to compliment.

  We marched next day, from deep in Illyria, almost due south. It was another brutal march, and there’s no great story to tell – but if you look at the Military Journal you can see that we averaged a hundred stades a day, in mountains.

  That’s the stark fact. A hundred stades on mountain tracks – tracks pounded to slush, mud and rock after a hundred men went over them, tracks where no wagon wheel could go and where, sometimes, the cavalry had to go by a completely different route from the infantry. Most nights, we slept without fires in early-autumn conditions, wrapped in blankets, sleeping on rocks.

  Sometimes the rocks held the heat of the day. There are some rocks that are quite comfortable. Ask any veteran.

  There was no wood.

  No grain for horses.

  No wine, no oil, too little food and no fire to cook it.

  And little things began to spiral into big things. Imagine the wear that our nailed sandals had taken. The thongs that bound them had probably all snapped and been replaced by the time we were south of Pellium, but in the mountains, the soles themselves began to give way. Men’s shoulder-bag straps broke. The porpakes on our aspides were bent, deformed, sometimes separating from the wood of the shields. Spear shafts all had a cast to them – every time a soldier leans his spear against a barn, it bends a little. Javelin heads rattled when you picked them up, because successive cold nights and warm days worked the rivets. The beautiful homespun wool of a good soldier’s chiton, made by his wife or his sisters, was threadbare and lacked warmth, or worn through to holes; his chlamys was filthy and brown and ragged like a beggar’s, and knife blades were dull – or snapped. There weren’t a thousand sharp razors left in the army, because men dumped their sharpening stones when they were tired. Swords were like iron clubs.

  All of us were as skinny as children in a hill town and
most of us had lice.

  And we had won all our battles.

  But we’d been living like this since before winter – and habituated as we were, men’s bodies were starting to break down. As an example – I began to pull muscles – in my sides – every day, just climbing and letting myself down the mountains. Just walking. I hadn’t had a massage in ten months.

  But Alexander was at his best when he was desperate. He communicated to his men that this was a gamble, and that the throne and empire were at stake – and that he took their trust for granted and that he needed them. He went from mess group to mess group every evening, which was unlike him – he wasn’t aloof, he listened when common men talked, and he made them promises – promises of rest when Greece was returned to obedience. And promises of loot I didn’t think we could fulfil.

  We rose in the dark and we didn’t get to sleep until darkness fell again. In between, we marched.

  Some days, I could look back from where I was near the lead of the column – mostly single file – and down a mountain valley I could see our army stretching back ten stades or more, filling every trail.

  Villages emptied ahead of us.

  That was just as well, because when we found a village, we looted it down to picked bones, and the bones were broken to get at the marrow.

  And that will give you an idea of what it cost to go a hundred stades a day across the mountains.

  We came out of the mountains in northern Thessaly. We raced across the Thessalian plain fast enough to shock every man we came across, but slowly enough to feed our horses to bursting on the good Thessalian grain – and grass – every day for four days. Our men ate beef and goat and lamb and bread – ate sausage even as they marched. Thessaly was friendly and had magazines and the king – who had no money at all – had credit there. We ate our way south.

  I led the cavalry patrol that seized the Gates of Fire. I knew the way, knew the passes, and I was there and in possession – with a powerful sense that I’d done all this before – and there was no opposition. The grumblers in every regiment began to suggest we were attacking nothing.

  We marched over the mountains to Onchestus and no one troubled us with so much as a sling stone.

  And then we marched down on to the plains of Boeotia, the dance floor of Ares, and the race was run. The Athenians had not marched to the aid of Thebes, and Thebes did not have a Persian army camped under its sheltering walls.

  That night, Alexander received letters from Pella, and a report that our siege train and most of our heavy baggage – including tents – was just five days behind us. Antipater had moved quickly, spending money Alexander didn’t have. In a few days, we were going to have twenty-six thousand soldiers.

  Alexander dispatched heralds to Thebes. He sent them excellent terms – already, his mind was full of Asia. Or perhaps it always had been, but the spectre of Persian gold at Athens and Thebes brought home to him that Asia was not just waiting for conquest – Persia might, indeed, strike back at him. At every campfire across the Thessalian plain, he’d explained to us that he would be easy on the Thebans if they would bend the knee quickly, because he wanted to get fresh troops across the Bosporus before winter.

  In his messages, he announced that he understood that they had been misled – and assuming him dead, had acted appropriately. He simply pointed out that he was not dead. He offered to meet a delegation and affirm the ancient liberties of the Polis.

  The next morning, we marched early. Once again, I had the Prodromoi and the Hetaeroi, with orders to choose a camp – carefully, and with due respect for Thebes.

  Well, I had little respect for Thebes, but I knew what Alexander wanted. Despite which, I fanned the Prodromoi out fifteen stades either side of our approach road, and I put strong parties of Agrianians in a chain behind them and kept the Hetaeroi together as a strike force.

  Just another routine day, marching through Greece.

  Before noon, the Prodromoi officers were reporting near-combat contacts, and parties of Theban aristocratic horsemen who they flushed from cover – olive groves, mostly – with flanking moves and who rode away. Since they had restrictive rules of engagement – in effect, we’d been told not to engage unless the Thebans started it – the Prodromoi just manoeuvred them out of their ill-set ambushes and continued forward. But that sort of thing is exhausting and annoying work, and by late morning, I was being begged for permission to ‘make an example’.

  I didn’t have to. The idiot Thebans did it for themselves. They came at us in mid-afternoon, four hundred cavalry emerging from behind the low hills north of the city to flush my Prodromoi back on the column.

  The Prodromoi retreated in good order, very quickly, and broke contact. The Agrianians went to ground and the Thebans never, I think, knew they were there.

  I had a long chain of reports, so that half an hour after the Theban attack started, I had all my Hetaeroi in two small wedges facing down a long field of barley, with a hundred Agrianians on each flank.

  The Theban cavalry rode into the other end of the field, as I had expected. After all, I was getting a new report on their movements every five minutes.

  ‘Don’t even twitch,’ I said to my men. ‘Let them do it, if they want.’

  They rode away.

  We rode up to Thebes and I picked a campsite – the same site we’d used the last time. I felt that sent the right message.

  Alexander must have agreed, because he gripped my hand at the end of the day. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘They won’t fight now – but you left them no bodies to mourn. Well done.’

  I loved his praise, when it was good praise.

  I went to bed a happy man, and awoke to the sound of screams.

  The Thebans had attacked our outposts in the dark – a huge attack, with twelve hundred hoplites. They came across the open ground in silence, and of course our army hadn’t fully entrenched, or anything like it. And Perdiccas hadn’t taken the precautions he should have. His outposts were surprised and overrun, and the Thebans killed at least two hundred pezhetaeroi and fifty hypaspists. And then they withdrew, untouched – we didn’t find a single body. Of course, they may have taken their dead with them – that’s certainly what I wrote in the Military Journal.

  Either way, they hurt us and we did nothing in response, and that emboldened the war party. No matter that I’d shown them how toothless their cavalry was – never mind that we had every advantage. When men are determined on violence, it’s like a plague, and you cannot stop it.

  Philip Longsword was among the dead. Alexander stood by his body in the new light of dawn, and he had white spots on either side of his nose and his lips looked pinched. His face was thinner than I’d ever seen it, and his ram’s horns were more pronounced. He looked like a satyr – a very angry satyr.

  But despite that, he ordered our troops to dig in, and avoid combat contact.

  So we did. The Hetaeroi, being aristocrats, didn’t dig – except in emergencies – but we were mounted in armour all day, moving from trouble spot to trouble spot.

  The Assembly of Thebes voted for war to defend their liberties.

  Our siege engines were three days’ march away. And our tents.

  It rained. We were wet. Luckily, Greece is dry all summer, but autumn was coming.

  The hypaspitoi marched out of camp and spread out, supported by the Agrianians, pillaging the countryside. This was an ancient tradition in Greek warfare. It was a public and somewhat formal statement – it showed the defenders that they could cower behind their walls, but they would lose everything outside them.

  We understood from men inside the walls – because many Thebans were supporters of Alexander – that the Assembly was now divided. So, after some hesitation, Alexander had his heralds proclaim at the edge of the walls that any Theban who wished to come out of the city would be allowed to go free – or that if Thebes surrendered the two men who had murdered Macedonians, it could still avoid war. His herald reminded them that Alexander was
the hegemon of the League and that Thebes was in violation of her sworn oaths.

  The Thebans apparently read this as weakness.

  The next day, their herald came out on the walls and called out in a voice of bronze, ‘Hellenes! Thebes stands with the King of Kings against the tyrant! Many times before, the King of Kings has aided Greece to throw off the yoke of tyranny and keep their cities free. Let us stand together, war down the tyrant, and be free together! But if the tyrant Alexander will give us Antipater and Philotas, as prisoners, men who are responsible for outrages against the Polis of Thebes, we will let him march away in peace.’

  Philotas was Nicanor’s brother, and he was thousands of stades away, fighting the Persians in Asia.

  I wasn’t anywhere near Alexander when the herald came out, but people tell me he went as white as parchment, and that when the man was done speaking, he spat.

  No one likes to be called a tyrant. Least of all a tyrant. That was the same day we discovered that Olympias had killed Amyntas and Cleopatra’s children and that poor Cleopatra had hanged herself with one of her own dresses.

  Macedon, eh? Olympias held the children face down in the coals of a brazier and literally burned their faces off. One at a time.

  I didn’t need Thaïs to tell me what was in the letters from Alexander to Olympias.

  But that didn’t make the cowardly Thebans right. Alexander had many failings. But we brought peace to the Greeks, and we made them ten times as rich and prosperous and lawful as ever before. We ended their petty squabbles, and how many women were raped, how many children burned in the endless cycle of wars? How many died when Athens and Sparta danced?

  Thebes never had an empire. Thebes never thought beyond the narrow confines of the plain of Boeotia. Of the great cities, only Thebes allied with Persia – over and over. When Thebes defeated Sparta, they did nothing to pick up the reins of Sparta’s overseas commitments – and the cities of Ionia, liberated by Athens and supported by Sparta, went right back to Persia. Thebes raped Plataea – the first city of Greece ever destroyed by other Greeks. Thebes had a calendar of sins going back to ancient times, and Thebans were the most selfish, grasping and mercenary of all the Greeks.