Christian Cameron - God of War - The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

‘None? A steep price, but – Done. I’ll pay fifty talents for the estates. That’s thirty-five for them, and fifteen for you.’

Alexander’s tone lightened. ‘And I’ll have the use of the forest whenever I want it. Yes?’

‘For hunting? Done. Put it in the contract.’ I grinned, and we shook hands.

I took Thaïs home. Sent Heron with my grooms under Polystratus into Pella with fifty talents of gold – almost the whole of my father’s lifetime of savings, gone in an afternoon. On the other hand, Heron said it made him happy.

‘I’ve expected some bandit to come and kill us all for it – for years,’ he said.

Thaïs took another talent and poured money out into her spider’s web of contacts, and more news came back – more and more news.

Darius had ordered a fleet to combine at Miletus, in Asia.

He knew we were coming.

Memnon was raising a major army.

Darius himself was marching east with his household, to face a rebellion in Sogdiana, wherever that was.

Demosthenes was busy cooking trouble. Theban exiles were the new vector of rebellion throughout the league, and they spread like poison. Thaïs’s friends identified them in Corinth and Corcyra and Athens and Miletus.

Thaïs’s friends were electrified by recent events. The destruction of Thebes got rid of the mere hangers-on. It tested some loyalties, but others were either hardened as a stick is hardened in fire, or strengthened by fear.

But the other side – the anti-Macedonian faction, if you will – was also hardening. And since we were poor and Darius of Persia was rich, the mercenaries were all going his way.

I passed the reports on to Hephaestion. Thaïs stayed with me.

We spent months at the farms. I enjoyed putting my organisational skills to work on the royal farms I’d purchased. They’d been mismanaged for fifty years – no one ever manages a farm for the king as well as they’d manage it for themselves.

I appointed Heron’s oldest son to manage two of them, and left him to it, and took the other two for myself. I was determined to breed better horses, and make a killing on them. Or ride them myself. So Poseidon and my new Theban brute Ajax went to stud and passed a very happy winter.

Thaïs and I did too, for a while. She was due after the Winter Feast of Persephone, and she bore me a daughter virtually to the day she’d predicted – but then, she was a priestess of Aphrodite. We called her Eurydike, and she was pretty and plump and had cheeks you just wanted to kiss – or chew on. And thighs – and tiny fingers and toes.

I’ve forgotten to mention young Olympias, my Illyrian foundling. Thaïs took her into her household, and she grew up as a sort of older sister to Eurydike.

I should also mention that Thaïs and I kept separate establishments. Hers was run by old Chalke, a former smith and former slave, because she’d freed her Italiote, Anonius, and he’d returned to Italy. Chalke was old and tough and pretty much unafraid of anything or anyone – he had an eye gone, scars all over his chest – he was the kind of man everyone fears to meet in a dark alley.

Mine was run by Polystratus. Polystratus and Chalke were not friends – more rivals.

I mention this because Thaïs and I lived very separate lives, even after Eurydike was born, and we were too seldom together even when we wanted to be. She was, in many ways, a great lady – a person of as much importance as I was. Twice that winter she went into Pella without me, summoned by the king to deal with matters relating to her web. If I say she had no secrets from me, it’s because she had her private life and I mine. I don’t think that she had any other lovers – I know I didn’t – but I’d learned my lesson. I wasn’t going to ask.

After Eurydike’s birth, she informed me that the goddess required that she be celibate for two months, and that if I would join her in this sacrifice, Eurydike would be a healthier child.

Eurydike never had so much as a bad cold as a child, so I’m guessing that Aphrodite’s an honest goddess. So Thaïs was not in my bed for months after the birth of our daughter, and I saw less of her by day, as well. So I was shocked one day to walk into a barn on my home farm and find her and Bella lifting weights like men. Why was I shocked? And a month later, I found the two of them at the edge of one of my pastures, dancing to Chalke’s pipes, and I lay down and watched them, aching for her and amazed to see the rapidity of her movements, the near perfection of her speed and grace, the coordination of the two women, one black, one white, as they moved, naked, through a bewildering flurry of moves, covered in sweat.

It was truly like watching the gods. I snuck away through the trees. I know now that she was working very hard to get her body back – that this is another tribulation women bear, that they must lose months of conditioning in pregnancy and must train like athletes to return to shape. At the time, I simply missed her.

But two months after Eurydike’s birth, just after the early feast of Herakles, she and I shared a dinner, and after dinner, in the midst of a conversation about Menander’s latest play, she squeezed my hand. ‘I have a hankering,’ she said, ‘to sleep with a man with a big nose.’

Well, well.

Our whole relationship seemed to be restored in one night of love – not just sex, either. She came to me almost every night, for weeks. But it was rare for her to sleep with me – actually share my bed – never so often as to let it become familiar. She began to use different scents and wore different clothes and once shocked me by having a girdle of gold under her chiton, and another time she was painted – beautiful designs in red and black around her wrists and hips and running down into her loins.

No, I didn’t need to tup any slave girls. We’d started something different. We spent time together with our daughter. I remember one day dispensing justice for my tenants, with Eurydike curled on my lap. I was not planning to be my father.

After the Macedonian Feast of Zeus the King, Alexander summoned me to court. I had been gone three months, and I was softer, happier and less exercised than at any time in my life.

Happiness is so much harder to describe than war.

And you won’t find that in the Military Journal, either.

Antipater had either forgiven me, or never been offended. He and Alexander had summoned me back to court to help with the logistical planning for the march to Asia. That part is in the Journal, so I won’t bore you much, but I’ll use this opportunity to tell you what the king and Parmenio had chosen to take to Asia.

First, ten thousand pezhetaeroi in five regiments – Elimeotis, under Coenus; Orestae, under Perdiccas, and under Polyperchon the Tymphaeans – all collectively known as astHetaeroi , the men of Outer Macedon, as separate from the pezhetaeroi, who were in three regiments under Meleager, Craterus and Amyntas son of Andromenes, representing the men of Inner Macedonia. Old Macedonia. To further complicate this, we called all of them – all six regiments – pezhetaeroi . Got it?

Nicanor had fifteen hundred hypaspitoi. Alectus left the hypaspitoi for the Agrianians at this time, and took most of the Agrianians with him – not all, but most – and Nicanor drafted the very best men of the ‘Asian’ pezhetaeroi to replace them. It was a different set of hypaspitoi – but not worse, though it pains me to say so.

The Psiloi – the professional light armed troops, made up of men who could have fought in more equipment but were paid for specialist scout services (as opposed to the rabble of freed slaves and lesser men that Greeks used as Psiloi) consisted of six hundred Agrianians and four hundred archers – most of whom were recruited out of Attika and mainland Greece, although you’d never know it to look at them, as they dressed like Sakje or Thrake. But they were not mercenaries, but professional archers serving Macedon and looking to gain land grants and Macedonian citizenship. The archers (the Toxophiloi) and the Agrianians together were the Psiloi brigade, which was mine.