God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  But the pezhetaeroi were cheering their lungs out, and the Persian army was broken. Only the poor bloody Greek mercenaries stood their ground. They could see the king, and they sent us a herald – requesting that they be allowed to surrender.

  He picked a bad time.

  Alexander raised his eyes from his best friend lying in the bloody dust, and he pointed out the Greeks to his pezhetaeroi, who were close behind us, having to all intents and purposes rescued us from the Persian nobles.

  ‘Kill them all!’ he said, his voice harsh.

  The pezhetaeroi needed no further urging.

  We don’t really like Greeks, we Macedonians.

  As it turned out, of course, Hephaestion wasn’t as badly hurt as the king, who had a cut in his scalp that ran right into the bone. I’d say he missed grim death by the width of a sword blade. Hephaestion had been knocked unconscious.

  The Persians ran, leaving their Greek mercenaries to die. But they lost a lot of their finest men. They lost Mithridates, widely reckoned their finest fighter – he almost got Alexander.

  But I got him. Heh. And they lost Pharnakes, another of their best – Rhodakes, Spithridates, and two more satraps – great men, relatives of the king, trusted stewards of great provinces of the empire. If the king had lost Hephaestion, me, Parmenio and a dozen more like us, it would have been even.

  I’ll tell you two things about that fight, lad. One is, we voted the king the palm for the bravest in the army. It wasn’t some empty compliment. Watching him fight – both days – was inspirational. Ask any man who was there – ask any front-ranker in the pezhetaeroi what it’s like to watch your king work his way through a dozen enemies, a sparkling haze of metal and blood as he kills his way to victory. That’s what a King of Macedon is supposed to do. That’s why farmers from Pella will march to India. It’s not for his boyish good looks or his leopard-skin cloak.

  He did it with elan. He looked like a god.

  And when that fight was over, and he got remounted, helmet gone, blood flowing down his back, they cheered their lungs out and Parmenio could not understand why. All Parmenio saw was a reckless boy, foolish, arrogant, who had risked an easy victory for personal glory.

  The pezhetaeroi saw a god.

  The other is that, in many ways, that fight – those few minutes on the banks of the Granicus – were the fight for the Persian empire. The King of Kings lost most of his closest, most trusted warriors. He already had problems in the east, and he’d just lost all the men he could trust.

  One more thing.

  It was the closest they ever came to getting the king. I hated the bastards – they were the enemy, the barbarians, the Medes I’d waited my whole life to fight, but by all the gods, when they came for us they were heroes, and we were heroes, and it was the fight for ever after, around every campfire, in every cushioned hall where the somatophylakes lay with the king.

  Well – except for Halicarnassus. Halicarnassus was horrible. But mostly, we didn’t talk about those awful days. We talked about Granicus.

  Which only makes what happened later all the worse.

  SEVENTEEN

  The morning after the Battle of the Granicus, Alexander was already master of western Asia.

  We took their camp with our scouts after the battle. The Agrianians had superb discipline – remarkable, really, considering their origins – and were probably the only unit in the army that could be trusted not to loot the camp. We rode in the next morning, and discovered that we were masters of thousands of slaves (mostly very attractive women collected from all over the empire), tents, baggage animals (including camels) and a fair amount of gold. Enough gold to pay the troops, anyway.

  Polystratus did well for himself, because Alectus and he were friends. Don’t imagine that the Agrianians were stupid – just careful, and only their closest friends got first pick of the loot. My share was a beautiful ear-dagger from Aegypt, fine steel and gold and ivory – I have it still – and a new sword in the Persian manner with fine green stone grips. It was beautiful to look at. The dagger was superb and a fine fighting weapon – the sword was pretty and broke in my hand, as I’ll no doubt tell you later. There’s a lesson there, if you like. A parable of some sort.

  But the best prizes I received were horses, and a wreath of laurel. Polystratus – always my right arm, especially when it came to practical matters – got the horses of a number of Persian nobles. I was young enough to pretend they were the men I’d put down, but really, I think Polystratus simply rode around the battlefield before the last arrow flew and started collecting horses. I got two Nisean mares and a stallion, as well as a dozen lesser horses – lesser, but as good as Poseidon.

  Well, that’s a lie. As good as Poseidon to look at. Heh – Poseidon. Loved that horse. He was smart like a dog. Horses are dumb – you must know that. But one horse in a hundred thousand is some sort of horse genius.

  Its nothing to do with this story, but I put the stallion to the mares the next day and then sent them home with a pair of slaves – Keltoi men, expert with horses – and one of Polystratus’s grooms, and they made it all the way to Heron after a dozen adventures, and became the prize of my stud – both threw colts, and suddenly I had a Nisean stud. In many ways, those three horses made me more money than all the gold captured at Granicus. I still ride horses bred from Poseidon, the three Niseans and Ajax, the brute I took on Parnassus.

  The Nisean stallion had a mark on his forehead like a trident. And he and Poseidon got along – a great rarity among stallions.

  And Heron freed the two slaves for their honest service, and they wandered back to our army and joined the mercenary cavalry, and they ended up serving under your father for years. Andronicus and Antigonus!

  Small world, really.

  Alexander was beyond elation after Granicus.

  The night after the battle he insisted on refighting it, blow by blow. We had an enormous fire in front of what had been Arsites’s pavilion. We lay on Persian couches around the fire, and our new slaves served us fine Ionian wines. Philotas was uncomfortable, but Nicanor was already one of us in many ways, and he drank cup for cup with the king, unwatered wine.

  Alexander seized a harp from one of our minstrels and struck the opening bars of the Iliad, and men fell silent, and he began to sing. He was clever with words – and he was singing the Iliad, but it was the Rage of Alexander.

  To me, it was like hubris and blasphemy rolled together. But Cassander smiled, and Nearchus, and Black Cleitus could apparently stomach anything Alexander did.

  He had been the best fighter in the army. I doubt that any man had put so many Persians into the darkness, and he had a wound – almost a death wound – to prove his valour.

  But he would not shut up about it.

  When his focus was elsewhere, I rose and went off into the darkness to find Poseidon. Polystratus was there, and Ochrid, poulticing the great horse’s arrow wound and a dozen lesser wounds, and he withstood their ministrations with the same remarkable intelligence – only men who understand the deep stupidity of many horses can fully appreciate what it’s like to have a war horse with intelligence.

  I brushed him, where he wasn’t wounded, with a pair of marvellous Sakje brushes – woven horsehair – that Polystratus had picked up as part of the loot. Persians love their horses, and have the finest tack and equipment in the world, and next to them, we are mere barbarians.

  Polystratus waved away the smoke from the resinated torch we were using and grinned. ‘And ten more like it – nosebags of linen, some halters that I think are silk, and horse blankets – beautiful stuff.’ He shrugged. ‘Seemed better than gold.’

  Did I mention that Polystratus was a prince among servitors? And yet, he was no longer any kind of a servant, except where it came to my horses.

  I was enjoying the beautiful things – horse things, as I say – when we heard screams. I froze, and then I realised it was the wounded out on the battlefield.

  ‘Scavengers moving in
,’ Polystratus said.

  We’d lost good men at Granicus – almost no infantry, but a fair number of cavalrymen. Seleucus was badly wounded, and I had some nasty cuts – Marsyas was in a coma (although, of course, he recovered) and Perdiccas had a wound, as well. Philip, the commander of the allied cavalry, was killed. So was the commander of the Thracians, one of Philip’s old men.

  Alexander promoted men in all directions after Granicus. Parmenio’s brother got to be satrap of Phrygia, a powerful office that offered comfort and took him out of the command structure. The Thracians went to Alexander of Lyncestis, who’d proved himself relentlessly loyal since betraying his own brothers, and Alexander felt that he deserved it. And Alexander was loyal only to the king and not to Parmenio.

  Likewise, Parmenio’s brother had commanded the Thessalian cavalry, and now that he was out of the way, Alexander gave the command to Philip the Red – Philip son of Meneleus, my boyhood enemy/friend from the pages.

  Most of my friends didn’t see it happening, but Parmenio knew immediately what was going on, and so did I. Alexander was filling his staff with royalists, just as Parmenio had filled Alexander’s with his own people.

  It was not a bad policy – a system of checks and balances. Except that this was Macedon, not Athens.

  Phrygia fell easily, and we marched inland for Sardis after accepting the surrender of Cyzicus. Alexander led us quickly – the Aegema, which increasingly meant all the hypaspists, the Agrianians and all the Hetaeroi; he left the rest of the army to come more slowly under Parmenio with the baggage (including all the new baggage) and the siege train. Memnon fled the field at Granicus (doubtless muttering ‘I told you so’) and began gathering forces at Miletus. Alexander proclaimed his intention of following – but we didn’t take the coast road.

  We raced across the mountains to Sardis. It’s a good road, but a brutal trip with an army, and we had minimal baggage and six thousand men and three times as many animals. Any mountain valley was bled white just to feed us. And Alexander cared for nothing but speed, so our movements had the effect of a plague of locusts – and we had the main army behind us.

  But fifty stades north of Sardis, Mythrines, the satrap of Sardis, met us with two hundred noblemen at his tail and surrendered the city and the fortress – and the treasury. None of us could believe it – and the next morning, when we rode into our new capital of Asia, our incredulity was downright insulting. I could have held Sardis for six months. It was a richer city than Amphilopolis and Pella rolled into one – I could have fitted both of them into the Jewish quarter of Sardis. The treasury was full of gold, and the magazines were stuffed with grain and oil.

  But Sardis’s surrender is part and parcel of how Darius failed. Mythrines was no friend of his, and there was very little racial pride among the higher Persians. They were like Greeks in that respect – they were happy to play traitor if it served their own ends. Or put another way, Mythrines hated Darius more than he hated Alexander. And after Arsites killed himself – news of which came to us about this time – there was no commander in West Asia until Darius granted the title to Memnon.

  At any rate, Alexander was stunned by the craven surrender of Sardis. It had been his goal since the start of the expedition – he’d spoken of it often enough as the Troy of our crusade. But instead of an epic siege, it surrendered to his advance guard.

  The army rolled into Sardis, exhausted and hungry, but the plains around Sardis were fecund, the barns were full and Lydia was almost mythologically rich, and our army ate themselves sick. Probably improved the local breeding stock, as well.

  We were a month at Sardis. Spithridates, the actual satrap, died at Granicus, and Alexander didn’t trust Mythrines enough to give him the office, so he gave it to Parmenio’s brother Asander. Another promotion – another one of Parmenio’s old men moved out of the command structure.

  But at Sardis we received news that one of the original plotters against the king was at Ephesus – Amyntas, son of Antiochus. And once Thaïs had enough reports compiled, she sent to the king and guaranteed to seize the city in his name if he’d pay the bill – twenty talents of gold.

  Twenty talents of gold for the most famous Greek city in Asia.

  Parmenio had taken the city a couple of years earlier, but he’d failed to hold it, and Memnon had taken it back without much of a struggle. There was a large pro-Macedonian party in place, and Thaïs fed it with money and hope.

  Alexander sat in my house – my borrowed house, chosen and furnished by Thaïs and thus better than the king’s borrowed palace, a fine house with a courtyard and a rose garden – his chin in his hand. He was in my favourite of his moods – wry, human and intelligent. ‘I want a great siege!’ he said. He was mocking himself. Rare indeed. He had Hephaestion with him, and Callisthenes, Aristotle’s nephew, his new private secretary.

  Thaïs rolled her eyes. ‘Play Achilles in your spare time, lord. Achilles didn’t set out to conquer Asia. Ephesus—’

  ‘Gives us the port we need,’ Alexander said. ‘We need a port for the allied fleet. And I need to rebuild the Temple of Artemis.’

  Thaïs raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow. One of the most delightful aspects of living with (near, around) Thaïs is that she was many different women and one never had time to grow bored. In the mountains, she dressed in wool and sheepskin, her heart-shaped face and pointy nose peeping out from under a shepherd’s hat – the picture of an adventurous woman. But a week in Sardis and her hair had a glint of purple-red from some costly dye, her toenails were solid gold in her golden sandals and her eyes were rimmed with kohl. She smelled like . . . the danger of battle and the joy of love all rolled into one smell.

  I know I can wax boring on Thaïs, but love is like that. We’d been together a year or more, but Sardis was special. She had provided Alexander with information before, and taken Priapus, but Ephesus was the first time she prepared an action with her own people – and launched it – with his acknowledgement and support. She looked like a queen, and when Alexander smiled at her, she smiled back – peer to peer.

  ‘Give me twenty talents of gold and I’ll give you Ephesus,’ she said. ‘My understanding is that you’ll have your Troy at Miletus. You know Memnon has sent his wife to Darius as a hostage?’

  Alexander laughed. ‘Some men would see that as a double victory – to gain the king’s trust and be rid of a wife.’ He winked at Hephaestion. Callisthenes winced.

  Thaïs smiled, and her smile held a thousand secrets. ‘She is reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the world,’ she said. ‘She or her sister. Some say one and some the other.’

  Alexander shrugged. Thaïs was more interested in female beauty than Alexander. ‘Why would such a traitor have the veritable Helen?’ he asked.

  Thaïs crossed her legs and looked away. She glanced at me for help and back at the window.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Erygius and Laodon serve against their own cities, from time to time. Memnon is Ionian – and African.’

  Alexander nodded. ‘Oh – very well. Let us buy the damned city. But I assume you’ll use the demos faction to overthrow the oligarchy – yes?’

  Thaïs nodded.

  Alexander shook his head and made a face. ‘That’s contrary to my policy in Greece. I worry that I’ll seem fickle.’ He glanced at Callisthenes.

  Callisthenes frowned. ‘The better for us, if you liberate the cities of Asia for democracy,’ he said. ‘Excellent subject for a panegyric. And perhaps if you made the point that when the mainland cities can be trusted, they too will have democracies?’

  Thaïs looked as if she’d eaten bad seafood. She could stomach double-dealing spies, but there was something about the self-serving nature of Alexander’s policies that stuck in her throat – or perhaps she was simply enough of an Athenian to be repulsed.

  Callisthenes tried to kiss her hand when the king left. He also put a familiar hand on her bottom. ‘Are you available only to Ptolemy?’ he asked with a leer. ‘You must
have some spare time.’

  Thaïs drifted out of his hands. ‘None whatsoever, my lord,’ she purred. Her voice was so throaty and seductive that it took him precious seconds to realise he’d just been turned down flat. He flushed, but he was most of the way out of our door.

  He turned. ‘You whore,’ he said, and spat on our step.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘What you want is a whore. I can find you one, if that will please you.’

  What amazed me was that he said this in front of me, although my relationship with her was known throughout the army. But he was an arrogant pup – and he was as much a fool about men’s feelings as the king himself. And the two fed on each other. Aristotle has a lot to answer for.

  He made a rude gesture. ‘You open and shut like an oyster,’ he said. ‘And I’ll have you whether you like it or not.’

  His contempt for her – for all women – blazed like a torch.

  Ordinarily, I let Thaïs fight her own battles. After all – that’s what she wanted. And she was capable of punishing me for leaping to her defence in any way that seemed to her a slight on her capabilities.

  But this had become an attack on me.

  So I grabbed him and slammed his head into my doorpost.

  Sometimes, the only answer to an arsehole is a good beating. Heh.

  His slaves picked him up and carried him out the door, and I wiped my hands on a towel, and then I heard the sound of two small hands clapping. I turned to find Thaïs applauding me.

  ‘I didn’t love you for your strength or your temper,’ she said, ‘but it is sometimes lovely to see a man behave like a man.’

  I won’t go into details, but we had each other on the spot – court clothes and make-up pots discarded in all directions, until she was naked except for her golden sandals and I except for my Aegyptian dagger. On the carpets in the portico. If our slaves were scandalised, they were discreet. She smelled like danger and love, and she said I smelled like violence.