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

‘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.

Oh – Sardis. I remember Sardis through the curtain of her hair.

We marched as soon as Thaïs had a receipt for the twenty talents of gold, and the city opened its gates as we approached. Memnon’s garrison marched out through the Miletian Gate as we marched in through the Sardis gate, and Ephesus was Sardis all over again – another magnificent city, this one grander than Athens , surrendered without a fight, and even I felt a certain . . . sadness, if that’s the proper phrase.

Thaïs had no such heroic scruples, and though she entered the city with the baggage, on a mule, Alexander sent her a box – inside was a gold statue of Artemis holding a tiny key.

She kept it until she died. I wondered why Alexander found it so easy to admit publicly that she’d taken Ephesus, but couldn’t reward Cleitus for saving his life.

Ephesus was more dangerous to us than Sardis. Sardis was an alien, Persian city, and our troops knew they were in enemy territory. Ephesus was Greek through and through, and for all I claim that Macedonians hate Greeks – we love Greece, and we are Hellenes. Women in Ephesus looked like Greek women, and spoke Greek. The temples were to Greek gods. The stalls in the agora sold Greek goods and the shopkeepers spoke Greek.

And the artists and philosophers were Greek. Ephesus was the city of Heraklitus and of Thales – of Hipparchus the Comic Poet, and Archippos his son.

Apelles the Artist was living in Ephesus when we took it, and the purge instituted by Thaïs’s democrats had almost killed him. Alexander had the good fortune to rescue him personally from a crowd of democrats who didn’t, apparently, appreciate the new taste in art.

For a while, they were inseparable. Apelles was an agreeable man, I confess – and no sycophant, except out of pure sociability. He was an amiable man, gentle, brilliantly educated. Your father knew him.

Kineas had come down from Phrygia with a squadron of Athenian cavalry, because Alexander wanted to garrison the city with Greeks and Ephesus and Athens were old friends. It was the first time Alexander gave Kineas a direct command, as well – Kineas was the son of a great Athenian aristocrat, and as such was the right man to keep the democrats in line and guarantee to the (surviving) oligarchs that the rule of law would be preserved.

It was beautifully done, and typical of Alexander’s style. He let Thaïs’s partisans get carried away – and they killed almost everyone who might have resisted him. And then he ordered them to stop with a shudder of revulsion and appeared deeply contrite. And summoned his friend, an Athenian aristocrat, to put it all to rights, thus appearing even-handed and just – after ruthlessly exterminating opposition.

Thaïs was disgusted – she’d intended to institute a truly popular democracy. Did I mention my lover was a firebrand? But again, Alexander’s brilliance was ahead of her. She loathed aristocrats (myself excepted, I assume) but deeply respected Kineas. She didn’t do anything to undermine him – although if Perdiccas (for instance) had been commanding the military police, she might have had a different . . . approach.

And of course Kineas did an excellent job. But those few weeks made his career, with us – he dined every night with the king, and never abused the privilege. Only once did I see him anything but perfectly well behaved. One night Seleucus slapped him on the back. ‘You’re like one of our own officers, Kineas,’ he said. ‘I never even think of you as Athenian.’

Kineas winced, and his eyes narrowed. ‘I am, though,’ he said. ‘I am not a Macedonian, Seleucus.’

Apelles laughed aloud. ‘And thank the gods, Kineas!’ He raised a kylix of wine. ‘No Macedonian could have brought peace to the factions here.’

Apelles had excellent social skills. He did tend to go on a bit about politics, and I sometimes think the king kept him around to make his staff look more worldly.