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

Up and up, ridge after ridge, switchback trails on which the horses had to go two abreast – sometimes one abreast. And cold. A taste of winter.

Where in Hades are we going?

Up and up, and then down into a high valley – a magnificent valley that rolled away into an infinite distance – a hundred stades of high valley, with magnificent hills on either side, some already snow-capped, and beautiful farms laid out all along the valley floor.

The valley had a side door – a spur of the valley floor that ran off to the south, back towards the coast.

Locals called it the land of Herakles, in their own tongue. It looked remarkably like the best parts of Macedon, or southern Illyria.

We marched up the road, and came after two days of climbing to the mountain fortress of Alinda, reputed to be the strongest place in Caria, and perhaps in the world. The entire fortress was of stone – two outer walls, each the size of Pella, and separated by a bowshot, so that men on the high inner wall could support troopers on the outer wall, and then, towering over the inner wall, a great citadel like the stern of a ship rising over the so-called Carian Gate, itself protected by a pair of towers and with a magnificent carving over the lintel of an enormous lion snarling at visitors, very reminiscent of the stone over the lintel at Mycenae.

From the plain, we looked up and shuddered. I could see from the valley floor that the walls were too high above the plain for even our largest one-talent machines to reach them with enough force to dislodge stone.

‘What’s he thinking of?’ I asked Thaïs, who rode between me and Kineas.

Thaïs smiled. ‘He isn’t going to lay siege to it,’ she said. ‘He’s going to make love to it.’

She was at her most witty when she was enigmatic. So I smiled at her and kept my scouts moving.

I needn’t have bothered. Not a Carian mountaineer troubled us. The most excitement we had was when the Agrianians smoked a nest of bandits and we massacred them – good fun, but hardly a contest.

We camped below the citadel, and every Macedonian lord – certainly all the highlanders – looked up at it with something like lust. Alinda, the fortress, was a fine hold, and the man who had it would be comfortable, safe and powerful for ever.

It turned out that Thaïs and Alexander had been negotiating with the commander for weeks. Not quite the commander – rather, the semi-exiled queen of Caria, Ada. She had a few troops – all mercenaries – and she held the lower two circuits and had the Persian commander holed up in the citadel.

Thaïs took me with her when she and Alexander went to meet her. She was in her late thirties, and she had brown-grey hair, fine eyes – really startling, widely spaced and large – and was athletic rather than beautiful – slim-hipped and small-breasted.

How can I tell this?

Alexander fell in love with her. Right there, before my eyes.

She did have something of Atlante about her. She wasn’t shy, and she was not particularly feminine – she’d been in the field much of her life. She rode well, walked with purpose, and the word among her troops was that she was a fine sword-fighter and a good wrestler. She was twice the king’s age, or near enough.

I’ve done Alexander a disservice if I’ve made him sound like an effeminate. No Macedonian army would have tolerated such a man, and he was not, except in the propaganda of farts like Demosthenes.

Nor did he prefer boys to girls. The truth – a hard truth that men never wanted to believe – is that he was above such things. He didn’t particularly fancy anyone . Oh, a perfect beauty like Calixeinna moved him to possession and sexual satisfaction – but that was really a conquest, not a lust. He didn’t look .

I know. Despite being besotted with Thaïs for years – for most of my life – I look at every woman I see. If a woman bends over to pick up a basket, I’ll look at her breasts. If a woman walks away into the sun, I’ll look at the whole outline of her figure. Really – it is one of the joys of life. Women are always beautiful.

I’ve even seen beautiful men – a few. They don’t move me the same way, but there’s something truly admirable about a good body – hard and well trained and ready for war. Not as interesting, perhaps, as a woman’s body – but worth a look.

Alexander never looked. You could see it in him, if you took the time. You could parade hetaerae by him all day, and he’d only react to the beauty with a certain fascination – never with an obvious head-turn of the man . He was not a man.

He was more, and he was less.

But Ada, in her slim-hipped, hard-bodied, older and wiser way, pierced him.

There was an element of rich comedy to it from the first. She was a practical, unromantic woman, as hard as a sword blade, deeply suspicious of this foreign conqueror. Her face was more handsome than beautiful, aside from her eyes – her nose was too long, slightly curved in an Aramaic way, her skin was dusky and her lips were thin. She kept Alexander at a distance, distrusted the lot of us and tried to negotiate.

Alexander gave her anything she asked for.

Since she was neither romantic nor yet a tease, she had no idea of the effect she was having, and his besottedness confounded their negotiations.

Thaïs and I laughed ourselves to sleep, that first night.

Thaïs grabbed me and put a finger on a very sensitive place. ‘You have to help him,’ she said, stifling a giggle. ‘The goddess has him, and he can’t think.’

The things I’ve done for the king.

Next morning, I had the duty anyway. My little command had been broken up – we were clearly camping in this rich valley for a few days, and Philotas had the next turn on point. So I was back to bodyguard duty. I presented myself in armour.

Hephaestion was in a pout.

Alexander was having his hair brushed. ‘I want to look my best,’ he said to me as I came in. ‘Hephaestion’s being difficult, Ptolemy. And you could look better – when did you last polish that thorax?’

I made a face. ‘I think I was fourteen,’ I said. ‘Since then, I’ve had slaves to do it.’

That got me a smile.

‘Thaïs told me to have a talk with you,’ I said.

Alexander nodded. ‘She’s the most intelligent of women. Although Ada . . .’ He smiled again. ‘I keep saying her name.’

Hephaestion rolled his eyes.

I made a small motion with my thumb. Hephaestion read it and got to his feet. ‘I’m going to go and curry my horses,’ he said sulkily.

It’s funny. As I tell you this story, I keep insisting that Hephaestion and I were never friends, but I find that we cooperated awfully well – at least in the early days.

At any rate, he went out to the horse lines, and Nearchus – who was becoming the kind of yes-man who stands too close to the man in power, so close that the term ‘henchman’ comes to mind – Nearchus got the message and went out, looking back all the way, hoping to learn whatever deep secret was about to be related.

I took a cup of herbed wine and water from the duty slave. ‘Go and have a rest,’ I said. ‘Don’t come back for ten minutes.’

The slave beamed. And vanished.

Alexander looked around at his suddenly empty tent. ‘This is about Ada?’ he said, ready, I think, for a quarrel.

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Thaïs says I should tell you that this is falling in love, and you have no defence for it, and she’d like to take over the negotiations, please, before you make her Queen of Persia.’

Alexander spluttered.

Really, it was like talking to a stranger. He spluttered, he stammered, and he hadn’t a thing to say.

I put an arm around his shoulders. Alexander wasn’t much for human contact – but he submitted to my embrace. ‘She’s quite . . . handsome,’ I managed. ‘And I think she likes you.’