God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  Rule well.

  No one cheered, but many, many faces wore a broad smile. And men came to touch me. A priest – the one I had found staring at me, weeks before – came and took my sword from my hand. ‘It must be destroyed,’ he said, apologetically. ‘It has killed a god.’

  I guess I understood.

  That evening, Alexander gave a party. We drank too much and played stupid games, and Alexander treated the pages much as his father had treated us – which is to say, not very well, with some hard teasing and some innuendo that would not have made their mothers happy.

  Anaximenes rose and toasted the king as the son of Apis, the God of Aegypt, and men roared. Bull gods are always popular. Hephaestion looked away in distaste.

  ‘Lord, I have spent months here, looking into the origins of Apis – and Zeus, and Amon.’ He paused, and his false humility was like bad incense – it choked me.

  ‘It is said in Greece that your mother claimed you as her son – by Zeus!’ he said, and I thought, What a charlatan. Alexander will have him gutted. And the silence at the party was so thick you might have thought a beautiful woman was naked.

  But Alexander merely nodded.

  ‘Lord, the chief shrine of Amon is close – well guarded, and secret, but in Libya, across burning sands where no mere mortal man could survive the journey. But with you to lead us, we might go to the shrine of Amon. And there learn something of your parentage. With the benison of Apis upon you, and the most favourable sign he has vouchsafed to you . . .’ He threw his arms wide. ‘Your light be revealed to the world as the divine son of Zeus.’

  I choked on my wine. In truth, I had no trouble seeing my king as a god. In many ways, he was greater than human, and in others, like the gods, he was merely inhuman. And yet, paradoxically, I also knew that whatever troubles Philip and Olympias had had, and they were legion, the bedchamber had not been one of them, and they had romped like bull and cow for many and many an afternoon and evening, until the lady was pregnant. I wasn’t there – but my father was, and many other men I knew.

  Hephaestion turned his head away.

  Black Cleitus frowned.

  But Alexander nodded, his odd, eager smile coming to his face. Pothos again.

  ‘I have a gift to make to Aegypt,’ he said. ‘And then I will go and see my father, Amon.’

  Every man knows the story of the founding of this city of Alexandria. I won’t belabour it. Alexander laid it out himself, and he used sacks of barley. The site was superb, and still is – and his eye took it in in one go, just as he saw battlefields, with an Olympian precision of thought that was not like other men’s. He looked, and saw, and thought, and the thing was done – the map of the streets was in his head. I know, because he told me.

  He left the army at Memphis – to eat off the priests, he told us – and took only the elites north. But he asked me, because the ceremony of the sacrifice of the bull was important to him, and suddenly I was back in his inner circle. I wasn’t aware of having been excluded until I was put back. Running a regiment is a job that requires the same dedication as being a parent.

  And Thaïs came downriver with us and sailed from Naucratis to Athens. She told me that she had to go – she wanted to see our daughter and our adopted boy, and she needed to sell her house in Athens.

  I did not want her to go. I felt her loss keenly, and something told me I would never see her again. Despite which, I gave her ten talents of gold to spend on horses and equipment for me in Athens. New spears – new swords. Anything, really, to reawaken my interest in war, which, by the time the army reached Memphis, sickened me.

  We marched from Alexandria – what would be Alexandria – and along the coast over sixteen hundred stades, and our horses grew thin, and the Hetaeroi grumbled as loudly as the Agrianians. We ate like a swarms of locusts, leaving the inhabitants rich with gold and destitute of grain wherever we travelled. Eventually, we had to send for the fleet to bring us food.

  Having marched so far that some men expected to see the Pillars of Herakles, we turned south into the desert with native guides to lead us to the shrine of Amon.

  We marched for ten days, until all of our water was gone. And then we marched for two more days, and the guides admitted they were lost.

  Alexander rode bareheaded, the sun grilling him, his hair bleached almost white, while Hephaestion looked more and more like a statue of bronze, his skin and hair matching perfectly. Alexander roved the column on horseback until his horse died, and then he took my Medea. I offered her – he was the king. And he rode her to death, too.

  And then we ate the horses and drank their blood, and marched again.

  Sometimes, the blind faith that you are the son of a god is a good thing.

  ‘I am being tested,’ he said on the twelfth day. He smiled. ‘I won’t let you die,’ he added cheerfully, and rode away.

  On the fourteenth day, men started to die – good men, hypaspitoi who had survived a dozen campaigns. I was marching with Alectus, and I had Bubores and Astibus off to my right – we were four abreast in the sand, and even the hypaspitoi were losing their formation, stumbling along, and the hot sun burned even our feet as we trudged, and the gravel got into our sandals and hurt like spear-points. None of which mattered a damn compared to the lack of water.

  Men gave way to despair. There were suicides.

  I had no unit, so I had returned to the hypaspitoi of the Aegema, where I lived, ate and soldiered. But after that night, I wandered among the men, because the only way to prevent despair is through action.

  Alexander was everywhere.

  ‘Rest!’ he told the hypaspitoi. ‘Get sleep. We will find water, or it will come to us.’

  Men said he was insane.

  And the next day, it rained.

  In the desert, in summer.

  Two days of rain.

  And when the rain cleared, priests from the shrine, led by portents, found us and took us to the oasis and the shrine of Amon.

  Sometimes, I had to doubt whether it was Alexander who was insane.

  It is hard, in retrospect, to choose when Alexander changed. I used to argue the point with Cleitus, and with Kineas. Each had a different answer. For Kineas, Alexander’s change began after the pursuit of Darius, while for Cleitus, it began as soon as he won Granicus.

  Both are right, and both are wrong. To most of us, the change began some time before his sickness at Tarsus. Or perhaps at Tyre. But the change became set, like the hardening of concrete or mud bricks in the sun, during the visit to the shrine of Amon.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Alexander went to the oracle alone. The oracle of Amon was famous in the Greek world, as well as in Aegypt, and was ancient – as ancient as Delphi or older.

  Anaximenes says in his book that Alexander asked if all of the murderers of his father had been punished. If you consider that – if you look carefully at the question, and the man asking it – you have to face what a paradox Alexander lived. If Alexander didn’t wield the dagger himself – if Olympias arranged it without informing him – that was the very best he could claim, and I know better.

  To ask such a thing from a sacred shrine – what can I say? Is it gross impiety, or a reckless craving that the past might be changed to suit the present? Alexander sought not to be a patricide. Not to be Oedipus, but Achilles.

  Again according to that toad Anaximenes, Alexander was told that his question was impious. Because his father was Amon, Zeus Amon, and could never be killed. Was that what he was told? That’s what the lickspittle says.

  Or was that what Anaximenes and Aristander cooked up when Alexander was told that his question was impious?

  Or was the entire show managed from the first, so that Alexander could go on a quest to discover his parentage?

  I cannot see clearly into his mind. I often try – and did then. Sometimes on matters of procedure, or war, or building, as with Alexandria, he would explain to me how he thought. But on something like this, I was left to gu
ess.

  And the paradox of the patricide seeking to avenge his father was not something I could understand, despite years of trying.

  The only effect of the visit to the shrine of Amon was a hardening of Alexander’s resolve to be viewed and accepted as the son of a god and a god in his own right.

  And the introduction of Anaximenes as a favourite.

  We marched from the shrine of Amon with carts full of water skins and we made the coast and the fleet in good order, without any more deaths, as if, the drama done, Alexander needed to hurry. We reached the building site at Alexandria, and we had been gone only four weeks, but Alexander was angry that so little had been done. I think he had imagined that Zeus his father would build him a city in the desert while he visited Amon. I have no idea.

  I wanted Thaïs, and now that I was not going to die in the desert, I thought about her constantly. But we marched from Naucratis upriver to Memphis, moving fast, as if the King of Kings was behind us and this was a desperate race.

  In fact, I gathered from the grumblings of Callisthenes, who was considerably less happy with Anaximenes than the king was, that Darius had, in fact, used the year’s respite since Issus to rebuild his army. I had heard – through Thaïs and her endless network, and through military sources close to the king – that when we had entered Asia, the Great King had serious troubles on his own eastern frontier, far off in the lands we knew only by repute, such as India and Bactria.

  Now it appeared that by concession and temporising, he had brought his eastern barons to heel, and we were, finally, to face the whole might of Persia.

  Parmenio and his faction openly questioned the king’s strategy, and while they were loyal, their carping damaged morale. It is possible that, had Alexander plunged eastward after Issus, we might have taken Babylon and ended Darius, but as events were to prove, the empire remained the property of Darius for as long as he lived, and his bodyguard and his cousins were too realistic to leave him to die on a battlefield. And had we marched on Babylon from Issus – with the Persian fleet still alive behind us, with Aegypt as a base, with all the taxes and riches of Aegypt to support them – we might well have found ourselves cut off, alone and surrounded.

  Whereas now, as the king gathered his forces at Memphis, we held all the ground west of the Euphrates. There were hold-outs and rebels, as Antigonus and Nearchus could attest. But in the main, we held the field, and we had continuous supply lines all the way back to Pella.

  Which Antipater demonstrated by sending part of the fleet from Amphilopolis with fifteen hundred recruits for the various pezhetaeroi, a paltry six hundred more mercenaries and four hundred excellent Thracian cavalry, as well as more Thessalians. We divided the recruits among all seven taxeis, at about two hundred men each, which was excellent for me, and I took two hundred of the ‘mercenaries’ as well. They were a mixed bag of brigands, Peloponnesian defectors and other scum – all the good troops were fighting alongside Antipater – or fighting against him. Or we already had them with us. The truth was, every professional hoplite in the world of the Hellenes was in harness.

  I cared, but not much, because my taxeis was as close to full strength as I could get it.

  We marched by easy stages up to Pelusium, and then back to Gaza on the coast road, and then along the coast to Tyre. I dined with Alexander every night – with Craterus, Perdiccas and a dozen others from my boyhood. The king was more natural than I had seen him for a year. The only false notes were Anaximenes and Aristander, who were infinitely more obsequious than the most toady-like of the Macedonians – Nearchus, let us say.

  When we were alone – almost alone, that is – when it was Alexander and Hephaestion, or Alexander and Cleitus – we talked about a final shake-up of the command structure of the army. Parmenio was never included in these discussions, which troubled me.

  While we speak of paradox, let us remember that the whole army was in a state of paradox. Alexander commanded, and Parmenio was his second. When Alexander was sick, or wounded, Parmenio took command, and the reins slipped into his hands easily. And he never hesitated to hand the king back the reins when he rose form his sickbed.

  And yet, by this time, they cordially detested each other. And as far as I could see, each schemed carefully for the destruction of the other – while, at the same time, acknowledging that the army and the kingdom were better for the continued existence of the other.

  And if the Macedonian army seems to you a mighty thing, a monolith of military efficiency, let me tell you that inside the monolith, the edifice was plaster and wood, not stone; rats were gnawing at the thin ropes that held all the other stuff together. We had a lot of very mediocre mid-level officers, many of whom were Alexander’s friends and had been given commands owing to their loyalty to him.

  And Alexander had reached a point where friendship with the king was not enough to secure command. I approved, but of course, I didn’t get the sack, either.

  At Tyre, we had a long halt for the spring rains. Alexander had acted with foresight – we arrived to find a camp built by slaves and hired labour, vast magazines of food, and tents – new tents of heavy Syrian flax.

  Alexander had actually thought about his army.

  There were stockpiles of sarissas, well made by good smiths, and swords.

  But mostly, there were water skins, baggage carts and barley. I whistled as we examined the stocks, and the horde of rats that came with them, but Alexander was angry.

  It’s worth examining why, as an indication of how fast his mind was.

  The grain stocks were held in sixteen enormous stone granaries, each of which was so new that you could smell the mud brick and the mortar. I was looking at the nearest in something not unlike awe, and Alexander said, ‘He’s short by a thousand mythemnoi. Perhaps five times that.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Get me the satrap of Syria,’ he said, grimly.

  ‘He’ was Menon, and his successor in office, a local man. Satrap of Syria. The man responsible for bringing in the grain as taxes and building the granaries. It was nothing to Alexander that he had built this camp, arranged to receive the shipments of everything from linen to weapons, hired the workers to build the granaries – all a miracle of organisation, by Eastern standards. Inside Alexander’s clockwork brain, what mattered was that he was more than a thousand mythemnoi of grain short for his projected march to Babylon.

  He sacked the poor bastard on the spot, ignored his protests and appointed a new man.

  And with that, I must digress again. The farther into this story I get, the more often I see, with my finger on a line of the Military Journal, that I have left out an important subplot that will suddenly emerge to bite me.

  I have said almost nothing of Harpalus. He was a page with us, a young man with us, and he was fanatically loyal to the king. He was sent into exile when many of the rest of us were, and he was, for a long time, Erigyus of Mytilene’s lover. He was, like Marsyas, a fine fighter but a better brain, and had, quite early, taken to mathematics. He almost never accompanied us on campaign in the early years.

  But he was, almost from the first ascension of Alexander to the throne, his chief treasurer. He was good at maths, but more importantly, he was expert at talking men into making donations, and he seemed to be able to conjure gold out of the air, so that, in the early days, he stood as a barrier between the king and his very real poverty.

  In fact, I haven’t mentioned him because . . . how can I put this without seeming a cuckold? He never hid his admiration for Thaïs. And she liked him in a way she didn’t like me – as one brain to another, I think. They shared jokes – gossip – and secrets. Together. Without me.

  To say I hated him is to do all three of us an injustice. But I confess that most of the time I tried to pretend he didn’t exist.

  But he did.

  While Alexander was sick – at Tarsus – he defected. He took an enormous sum of money, and left us – for Athens and Sicily. To me, it was good riddance.

  Thaïs was pregna
nt, you recall, and delighted to be so. I was newly promoted to a taxeis, and all was well.

  But when I spoke of him as a traitor, Thaïs would look at me – a look that always meant, ‘You are better than that.’

  It made me think. After a while, I stopped referring to him as a traitor.

  At Amon, the king included Harpalus, by name, in his prayers and sacrifices.

  He was in Athens. And about the time the army arrived at Tyre, I realised that he was in Athens, and so was Thaïs.

  There were two ways for me to read it. I could see the love of my life as despicable – capable of running off with another man, without so much as telling me where her feelings lay.

  Or I could go back through all the conversations I’d ever had with either of them, and sort through for some facts.

  I was, and am, intelligent enough to see that Thaïs was not the woman to behave that way. If she had left me for Harpalus, she’d have said so. Or so I had to believe, despite the recurring notion that her spectacular appearance as a priestess of Hathor was a form of farewell.

  But the heart can be a dark place, and I could not conquer the image of Thaïs lying in his arms. In Athens.

  We’d been camped at Tyre for a week when three ships came from Athens – the Athenian state galley Paralus and an escort, as well as a private ship, with them – Stratokles of Athens in his first Black Falcon.

  I was drilling my taxeis on the wide plain when they came in, and an hour later, Polystratus rode up on a beautiful mare – a new one – and saluted.

  ‘The Lady Thaïs has arrived from Athens,’ he said. ‘She has a shipload of your goods, and requests your immediate presence.’

  Polystratus slipped from the horse’s back while he spoke. ‘And this divine filly, and a pair of geldings for you. You lucky bastard.’ He patted her back. ‘Don’t keep the lady waiting.’

  I could have kissed him. Instead, I vaulted on to the horse’s back – what a sweet horse – no war horse, but beautifully trained and responsive. A little small for me, but all heart.