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

Sometimes, the gods send me this moment in my dreams, and I am stuck there, for a long time. In a dream, as in reality, you can tell yourself that it will end. But you don’t really know when it will end, and it seems to go on and on and on.

Then the hypaspitoi were coming up, and Bubores and Astibus came and dragged us off the king and got their shields over him, and we were all pulled clear of the killing zone. Alexander was alive, and virtually unhurt. I was covered in sand. The Tyrians mixed dog and pig shit into the sand to make it carry disease, and I missed the next month of the siege from the burns and the infection that came with them. Hephaestion was never quite so handsome again.

In fact, although I was screaming with the pain of my burns and didn’t know it at the time, they got their grapples deeply into the trees and dragged several of them from under our rebuilt mole, and caused almost half of our new work to collapse. They also managed to burn the machines we’d built on the mole, and a separate group of raiders burned the towers where they sat on the shore ready for deployment.

As I say, I missed all that. My recovery was slow, and our second child was born dead – just as I was starting to recover. The pregnancy had not been a good one; Thaïs had been depressed, anxious and sick, and her delivery was painful and hurt her in more ways than just the loss of blood and tissue . . .

And I was not really there to help. In fact, we were on two beds next to each other for a week. I was aware that she was hurt. But that was about all I could manage.

My fever broke eventually. I had lost a lot of muscle and a lot of weight, and my beloved was lying in a bed next to me, with a fever so hot you could feel her body from an arm’s length away. I fussed about uselessly, got in the way of Philip of Acarnia and a pair of midwives who were actually trying to help her, and eventually stumbled out of the tent into the brilliant sunshine of a late summer day in Syria.

Isokles found me immediately, and took me by the hand.

‘We were worried about you,’ he said. He gave me a wry smile, as if that was too much of a compliment and he thought I might bite him. ‘Hey – I’m an Athenian in a Macedonian army. No one likes me when you aren’t around. Except Kineas – and we try not to spend too much time together. It’s like committing adultery. You don’t want to give people ideas. Actually, it’s more like not committing adultery, but having your wife suspect you anyway.’

We walked from the officers’ lines across the camp. There was a heavy series of dust clouds running away north and east.

‘More trees?’ I asked. The dust made me cough, and the light made me blink and I was already tired. Everything seemed odd – off kilter. I’d been wounded before, but the hot sand – and the infection – was different. I felt weak.

Craterus was directing operations on the mole, and he embraced me carefully. ‘How are the burns?’ he said. ‘Lucky for you – you never had any looks to lose.’ He laughed.

People say the damnedest things.

He shrugged. ‘Hephaestion got sand all over his face,’ he said.

Then I understood.

I looked at the mole. There were four towers across the far end, and from where I stood in the heat shimmer, it seemed to be touching the walls of the city.

‘But we’re there!’ I said.

Craterus shook his head. ‘We haven’t made a yard in the last week. Rebuilding was hard enough. Alexander marched away, and both Hephaestion and Barsines taunted him for cowardice.’

I looked around. ‘I would like to have seen that,’ I said quietly.

Craterus shook his head. ‘No, you wouldn’t. Anyway, Diades kept us at it, and we rebuilt what we lost. But now there’s a deep channel – so deep our divers can’t find the bottom, and we’ve dumped . . . I have to think. Ten thousand talents of gravel? More? And trees, dirt, huge boulders—’

‘Where’s the king?’ I asked.

None of the officers on the mole would meet my eyes. ‘Hunting,’ Isokles said; because he was an Athenian, he didn’t have to care.

‘Hunting? As in, not here?’ I asked.

Men nodded.

‘Ares’ spear!’ I cursed. ‘With Barsines?’

‘Barsines is tending to Hephaestion,’ Craterus said, with a world-weary grin.

And then I fainted.

It was three more days before I left my tent again. I couldn’t take a great deal of sun, because of the burns on my head and arms. So I sat with Thaïs, whose fever had broken, fed her tea and learned a little about embroidery. I read to her – at first, the Iliad. But after a day, she looked at me, gave me a wonderful, sad smile and said, ‘No more war, love. Not the Iliad. I’m . . . living in the Iliad. And it isn’t so beautiful, from inside.’ She drank some iced water – provided by Philip.

So I began on the plays of Aristophanes, and we laughed ourselves silly over Lysistrata , the more so as Thaïs claimed descent from the lady herself – the high priestess of Athena in Socrates’ time. Laughter heals, too.

We were laughing – we’d just read:

Lysistrata:By the holy goddesses! You’ll have to make acquaintance with four companies of women, ready for the fray and well armed to boot.

Magistrate:Forward, Scythians, and bind them!

Lysistrata:Forward, my gallant companions; march forth, ye vendors of grain and eggs, garlic and vegetables, keepers of taverns and bakeries, wrench and strike and tear; come, a torrent of invective and insult! (They beat the officers.) Enough, enough! Now retire, never rob the vanquished!

Magistrate:Here’s a fine exploit for my officers!

Lysistrata:Ah, ha! So you thought you had only to do with a set of slave-women! You did not know the ardour that fills the bosom of free-born dames.

Magistrate:Ardour! Yes, by Apollo, ardour enough – especially for the wine-cup!

And for various reasons, the magistrate (that would be me) was laughing too hard to attend to the door of the tent, and the king came in.

Thaïs stopped laughing. Her look made me glance over my shoulder.

Alexander was angry.

‘In all my camp, there are only two voices laughing,’ he said. His voice was like ice, and his disdain was obvious. ‘And I find you reading that hateful play. Disgusting.’

I had to laugh.

His face flamed.

‘Is it hateful because it is against war ?’ I asked.

‘Perhaps,’ Thaïs said, ‘it is the notion of women seizing political power?’

Alexander ignored her. ‘If you are well enough to read to her,’ he said, ‘you can be with your troops.’

‘Oh, I’m a well-known malingerer,’ I shot back. ‘I just lie around avoiding my duty, eh?’

It occurred to me that if I was sick and Hephaestion was wounded and Nearchus was up north ruling Lycia, there was no one supporting the king. Or keeping him out of trouble.

Alexander was so angry that I knew he would say anything – anything – to make me hurt. That’s how he was, when the darkness came on him.

‘Since this bitch came into your life, you have more time for her than for your duty,’ he said.

‘Is that what Hephaestion said to you about Darius’s wife? Or was it about Memnon’s women? I can’t remember.’ I smiled. I was good at this – I’d known him since birth, and if he wanted to trade insults, I was happy to oblige. ‘And how is Barsines? Or is it Banugul this week?’

He hit me. It took me by surprise and I crumpled into Thaïs’s chair, and the chair broke under us.