God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  Again, we marched – or shuffled – all night, and kept going into the dawn.

  I had intended to say something to the king. But now that I was following this slim figure into the dawn – with the print of blood from his reopened wounds clear on his chiton – I realised that there was nothing to say. The time to speak, or to act, was so long past . . .

  Agrianians came out of the morning murk. There were half a dozen, without an officer, and they clustered around the king as I came up.

  They had a Thracian helmet full of water.

  It fixed our attention the way a beautiful woman can fix the attention of a hundred men in the agora. I noticed that it was not just water, but cool water, which formed condensation on the bronze of the helmet.

  The Agrianians knelt, and their leader gave the helmet to Alexander, handing it over with head bowed.

  Alexander looked into the bowl of the helmet for a moment. Then he looked around. By then, in the first light of day, there must have been a thousand men, perhaps three or four women, and Bubores’ son.

  He smiled.

  ‘Did you bring enough for everyone?’ he asked.

  The Agrianians shook their heads.

  Alexander poured the water out on to the sand. ‘I will drink when everyone has drunk. Now lead us to the spring.’

  Sometimes, he was easy to love.

  On the fifty-ninth day since we had left Patala, we marched into Poura.

  We did not march. We shuffled.

  Men died from drinking too much water, or too much wine.

  When we mustered, six days later, we had eleven thousand infantry, seven thousand cavalry and fewer than six hundred women. Eleven children. Thirty-one horses.

  One was Amphitrite.

  One of the children was Bubores’ son.

  And there was a letter from Thaïs waiting for me. It was lovely – I still have it. It was like water in the desert. And I know what the phrase means.

  As soon as we reached civilisation, the killing began again. It was Philotas and Callisthenes and Cleitus the Black, but at a new level of horror, and there were no attacks of remorse in the aftermath. Just a feast of crows.

  Cleander died. Sitalkes was killed. A row of Persian satraps, whose principal guilt lay in assuming that their barbarian conqueror would never return. Apollophanes was arrested and dismissed and then executed for failure to supply us. He hadn’t even tried. He never offered an excuse, even under torture.

  Astaspes was killed, and a host of men more junior found themselves arrested and murdered. Alexander informed us – and the army – that there had been a conspiracy against him – against all of us – and that the disaster in the Gedrosian was the result of their attempt to murder the army.

  Not the result of one man’s hubris.

  We marched into Persepolis. More satraps were executed.

  What did I do? Heroically, I kept my head down, went to the king’s tent as seldom as possible and commanded my Hetaeroi.

  I have not gone into detail about the king’s adoption of Asian ways – beyond asserting that, as always, he tried to please everyone and ended pleasing no one. But after the massacre of the satraps – with Cleitus dead, Nearchus terrified, Perdiccas and I in virtual in-army exile – after that, the king did whatever he liked. And what he liked was to become the King of Kings. He adopted the court costume. He hid himself in the midst of a vast horde of perfumed functionaries who had never held a piece of wood, much less a pike.

  At Susa, he held a review of his new army. He had raised a new army – I think I mentioned it – thirty thousand pikemen, all Persians and Medes, trained to a degree of perfection in drill that was both beautiful and a little scary to watch. He reviewed them at Susa, and called them ‘Successors’.

  The name meant just what it seemed to mean.

  His Macedonians had served their turn, and he was through with them – those he hadn’t killed in the desert, that is. And when the phalanx – that is, the old, at least partially Macedonian phalanx – grumbled, he referred to the Successors by another name. Because the assembly of the pezhetaeroi was often called the ‘Tagma’. And Alexander called his Persian phalanx the ‘Antitagma’.

  Another name that meant just what it seemed to mean.

  It took months for the king to lay his plans, but when he acted, he did so with the thorough planning that characterised him on the battlefield.

  He held the mass wedding – everyone knows the story – and thousands of his men took Persian wives. It was a magnificent ceremony.

  It was also one of the truly good, well-thought-out, well-devised acts of his reign.

  I was no longer needed for military planning, but at Susa, one afternoon, the king met Thaïs, recently come up from Babylon – or rather, he heard her unmistakable fingers on a kithara and invited her to help him plan the weddings. And she brought me.

  Once again, the king looked at me over a military desk and smiled. ‘Too long since I have seen you,’ he said, and embraced me.

  Again.

  It required the kind of planning that a fortress requires, or a campaign. Ten thousand men, ten thousand brides. Gifts, priests of every religion required, dowries, food.

  Twenty thousand people drink forty thousand amphorae of wine. Eat five thousand sheep and five thousand goats. Require twenty thousand slaves to wait on them, and the slaves have to be fed, too.

  Ten thousand brides require ten thousand bridal dresses. Even if you want them to sew their own, the cloth has to come from somewhere. So does the jewellery.

  Inside? What building can house this? Outside, what place is beautiful enough?

  And so on.

  The weddings were in the Persian manner, the men sitting in chairs, the women coming to stand by them. So we needed ten thousand chairs.

  It might have been chaos, but the king put ten thousand talents of silver at our disposal, and we did the thing well. The king offered me a Persian bride, and I grinned.

  ‘I want to marry Thaïs,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘I intend to marry Barsines,’ he said.

  ‘Barsines?’ I remember smiling. ‘Not Banugul? I thought you preferred her.’

  He looked very human, then. Looked out over the mountains, towards Hyrkania. ‘Perhaps it is the very fact that she prefers to rule her little kingdom among the wolves,’ he said. ‘I generally prefer what I cannot have.’

  I was still stunned by the self-knowledge evident in that statement when I reported it to Thaïs that night, as we lay, she half atop me, her head on my shoulder. She still smelled like herself, she still looked like herself . . .

  ‘He knows what he is,’ she said. ‘He merely ignores it, most of the time.’

  I shook my head in the darkness lit by a single lamp. Her skin glowed.

  As usual, I wanted her.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ I asked, when we had made love.

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t charge you, either way,’ she mocked me.

  ‘If I don’t marry you, the king means to give me a Persian girl of fourteen years,’ I shot back.

  ‘I could use someone to help around the tent,’ she said, running her hand across my penis. ‘To watch Eurydike. Perhaps teach her Persian, since it will be such an important language when she is grown.’ She was matching actions to the rhythm of her words.

  We giggled.

  We made love again, which, after all my body had suffered over the last years, was a sort of Aphrodite-sent miracle in itself. And I asked her again.

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  The lamp was out, and the tent was dark.

  ‘I really have to ask Bella,’ she said. ‘And what of all my other clients?’

  ‘Thaïs!’ I said.

  She laughed and laughed.

  And when I was slipping off into a sated sleep, she whispered, ‘Of course.’

  The weddings were superb. The food was good, and the priests – all six hundred of them – were on time. Our adoptive children were officiants – bo
th of them. Barsulas had sailed with Nearchus and had swum with whales in the eastern Ocean, and Olympias was a full priestess of Artemis and had come all the way from Ephesus with ten other priests of the goddess.

  People today speak of the weddings as if they all passed off in one meadow, or one great temple, but in fact the weddings took over every part of Susa, and our part was at the Temple of Astarte, to which I gave two talents in gold for offerings and a great gold amphora that I’d taken in India and my son had got home by ship – because, if you are wondering, not a single coin of plunder made it across the Gedrosian Desert. And I sat in my Persian chair, in Persian dress – oh, a nice long coat, baggy trousers, the whole costume – because the king’s actual intention was to begin the acculturation of his Macedonian staff to the world of ruling the Persian Empire.

  I sat in my chair, and Thaïs came, veiled in silk gauze, and after the Priestess of Aphrodite had said all the words, I rose, threw back her veil and kissed her lips, and her blue eyes stayed on mine for a long time.

  I think that would be a good place to end. Thaïs and I, on thrones, and Polystratus and his Persian bride Artacama, Laertes and Theodore with their brides, Barsulas with his bride, a magnificent girl and a rich heiress named Artonis, and all of our friends who we could gather – all the survivors of my group of pages. Philip the Red was there, and he wed another beauty, Amastrine, who seemed shocked to be offered a cup of wine by a man not her husband. You see – we carried through the weddings in the Persian manner, because the king had commanded it, and he was paying.

  But the feasts that followed were pure Greek. I’d say Macedonian, except that among the thousand men and women dining on the portico of the Temple of Astarte at Susa, no boy was raped and no man’s gullet slit – so it can’t have been a Macedonian feast.

  Thaïs played the kithara, and everyone was silent – the highest compliment that a crowd can pay a musician. We had performers – jugglers, and an old rhapsode, and then we danced – women with women and men with men, and Cyrus, my friend from Sogdiana, danced the Plataean Pyricche with Strakos and Amyntas and Polystratus and me. We were pretty drunk, but we did it well. And when the aulos pipes stopped and we were merely human again, we saw that the king had joined us.

  Thaïs led the women out – Persian as well as Macedonian, more than twenty women with whom, we saw immediately, she had practised in secret – and they danced one of the dances of Artemis that all Greek women know. Olympias danced next to Thaïs, and the Persian women danced – and Cyrus smiled. We all smiled. Wine flowed, and people were happy.

  It would be a good place to end this story.

  But I will not end here.

  A few weeks after the wedding, the king paid off the army’s debts. The men saw it as a favourable sign.

  They were wrong.

  He had himself declared a god. He assumed he had bought the army’s acceptance.

  He was wrong.

  He began to move the army – Aegema, Tagma and Antitagma all together – back to Babylon, and he paraded them at Opis.

  It was a clear, dry day. The army bore no resemblance to the ragged horde that had stumbled out of the Gedrosian Desert. We had the new phalanx, magnificent in bronze armour, crisp, white chitons and the new helmets with Persian-style tiaras atop them. The old Macedonian infantry – fewer than ten thousand men, even with a recent infusion of recruits from home and a thousand Greek mercenaries – stood looking second-best. The hypaspitoi had absorbed more men out of the pezhetaeroi – yet they, too, had received drafts of the very best of the new Persians. They gleamed with gold. And they stood separate, more like a tyrant’s bodyguard than the elite of the army. Seleucus commanded them, but he had multiple lieutenants who were clearly there to watch him – new men, fresh out of Greece, and one from Lydia.

  The Hetaeroi were more Persian than Greek. We had new horses and new armour and thousands of new men.

  Alexander came out and sat on a throne, surrounded by advisers and functionaries, under an awning. Then he stood, and in a loud, clear voice, informed them of his plans.

  ‘It is my wish that the men who conquered the world,’ he said with an easy smile, ‘should have the retirement they deserve – that men who should long ago have gone home to Pella to plant their farms should go, richly rewarded, and live lives of ease and splendour.’

  If he imagined that they would be pleased, he was wrong.

  The ranks began to move – the Tagma writhed as if it had to face elephants. The pikes wavered.

  The very air became still.

  Alexander still had that smile fixed on his face.

  Amyntas son of Philip stepped forward – he was the right file leader of the rightmost taxeis – the senior phalangites of the army. Every man knew him – every man knew he had declined to become the king’s shield-bearer, or the senior phylarch of the hypaspitoi. He stepped forward at parade-ground pace, until he was three paces in front of the taxeis.

  ‘Do you think you can just send us away?’ he roared. ‘We shat blood for you!’

  Alexander watched him, the way a man looks at a snake that has suddenly appeared near his foot.

  The phalanx began to shout abuse – at the king.

  Alexander’s face grew red.

  Amyntas raised his arm and pointed his spear at the Antitagma. ‘You plan to conquer the rest of the world with your war dancers?’ he shouted.

  The Tagma took up the cry – War Dancers! War Dancers!

  Men began to laugh.

  Now spears in the Antitagma began to shake – with rage.

  Alexander’s face was as red as the sun had turned it in the Gedrosian Desert. He raised his hand to speak.

  But the Tagma was not cowed.

  ‘With your pretty boys and your father Amon!’ called another front-ranker, and men laughed.

  They all laughed.

  Every Macedonian in the army began to laugh at the king.

  ‘God Alexander!’ men laughed. ‘Father Amon! War dancers!’

  Alexander walked rapidly up to Amyntas. He motioned to the hypaspitoi, and his personal guard detached themselves and ran to him. Not Bubores or Alectus, or Astibus – all dead. Men we didn’t know.

  Amyntas saluted. He said something. I was too far away to hear it.

  Alexander’s face became ugly – white and red, his mouth thin and set.

  A hypaspist drove his spear into Amyntas, under the arm with which he was saluting the king.

  He killed about fifty of them – veterans, every one. Later, in a fit of remorse, he held funerals, and a dinner to celebrate the friendship of Macedon and Persia.

  And then he ordered all the veterans home. Oh, they were well paid. But he sent them under Craterus, with orders to displace – and murder – old Antipater.

  And then Hephaestion died.

  Alexander was almost human for a month after Hephaestion died. He died of a hard life under brutal conditions – of a love of excess and hard drinking. I suppose it is possible that he was poisoned. I don’t think so.

  But his death revealed something to the king. Alexander looked around him like a man awakened from a dream – I think because Hephaestion, for all his failings, had helped to protect the king from the hardest truths, and without him, Alexander was like a man wearing armour without padding.

  But Hephaestion had also been our last conduit to the king – our last way of protesting, of demanding that he remain a Macedonian. And after a funeral that alternated between high drama and darkest comedy, heavy drinking and flights of royal fancy that made me want to vomit – he was lost.

  By the time we moved to Babylon, I had had enough. I sent Thaïs away, with the children, and all my men but Polystratus. They were discharged veterans now, anyway.

  I sent them west, to Aegypt. Thaïs had her orders, and Laertes had his.

  FORTY

  After Hephaestion’s death, all I could think of was Philip – Philip, the King of Macedon. The only excuse for his murder was hubris and tyranny
. He had made himself a god, and begun to act like a selfish tyrant.

  And Amyntas son of Philip – a ranker, a phalangite, a man who loved his king and marched to his wars, and died, spitted on a spear on the tyrant’s orders.

  Oh, yes.

  Bubores, dead in the desert. Astibus, at the foot of a wall that didn’t need to be stormed. Charmides, who shat himself to death in Bactria. Dion, who died at Guagamela.

  And another million men and women.

  It was me.

  After Hephaestion died, I was invited to the banquets again. It was odd – it was as if the gods gave him to me. At the funeral banquet, he put a hand on my shoulder and called me his ‘last friend’.

  Once I would have wept at those words.

  I had no more tears to shed.

  I sent Thaïs away, but I kept her things. I was a student of Aristotle, and a good one – I have a curious mind, and I like to read.

  It is not difficult, if your target drinks unwatered wine. And Alexander drank more and more – more every night, and longer, while he planned his next extravagant conquest.

  I am not ashamed to say that I tried twice. Twice, I went to his parties, lay on a couch near him, and I could not do it. I conjured the death of Cleitus – the death of Philotas, the death of Amyntas. The murder of Coenus. His attempt on my life. The march through the Gedrosian. The massacre of the Mallians.

  It is hard to kill even the shell of something you love.

  But some weeks after the funeral for Hephaestion, Cassander came. He was a nervous youth who was too used to having his own way too close to his school days. He came from Macedon – from Antipater – to negotiate. The old man knew Alexander wanted him dead, and with the same callous indifference to other men’s lives that he always showed, he stayed home and sent his young son.

  Cassander is and was no man’s friend. He was a boy on a dangerous mission. He was a fool then and he’s not much better now.

  But . . .

  He came into the dining hall with a clatter, because he’d tripped over his own feet at the entrance, and the men near the door laughed at him. I was lying three couches from the king – Bagoas was sharing his couch, painted like a woman.