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

The left side of my face, where his blow landed, was where I’d got a patch of sand – so it was pebbly, shiny and painful. His punch sloughed off some flesh and I began to bleed.

Alexander stood there, and all the life seemed to go out of his eyes. His shoulders slumped.

I stood up and got Thaïs on to the bed. He turned and strode out of the tent. As soon as I saw that Thaïs was well enough, I pushed my feet into boots and followed him, pushing past Ochrid where he stood with some cowering slaves, throwing a light chlamys over my shoulder. It was hot – Thaïs and I had been sitting naked.

He was moving fast, headed for his own tent. Once there, he would, I suspected, order the hypaspitoi not to admit anyone, and go into the dark.

So I ran. I called his name – once, and then again, and heads turned all over the camp.

He all but ran away from me. He pulled a corner of his cloak over his head and got in between his guards, and Alectus stopped him, clearly meaning to ask him something – the password of the day, no doubt.

I came up.

‘Alexander!’ I shouted at him from an arm’s length away.

‘Do not admit that man!’ Alexander yelled.

I pushed right past the spears. Alectus was utterly loyal – and used enough to the wonderful ways of Macedon that I’m sure he saw me as capable of regicide. So he drew his sword and put himself between me and Alexander.

‘By Olympian Zeus, lord over kings and men, Alexander, if you do not turn and speak to me, I will go home to Macedon and leave you here!’ I shouted at his back.

He paused.

‘I will apologise,’ I said. ‘You should too.’ I paused. ‘You will feel better if you do.’

He turned. ‘Why don’t you say that I must apologise?’ he asked, his voice crabbed with disjointed emotion. ‘Tell me!’ he insisted.

I shrugged, through Alectus’s sword. ‘You are the king. No one can make you apologise.’

Alexander let his cloak fall from his head. He stood up straighter. But he couldn’t meet my eye. ‘It was unworthy of me to . . . hit a wounded man.’

I laughed in his face, pushed past Alectus, who didn’t know what to make of us, and threw my arms around him. ‘That is the lamest apology I’ve ever heard,’ I said. ‘I am sorry that you are in such a piss-poor mood that you had to come to my tent and vent your spleen on a wounded man and his mistress – both of whom have served you loyally every day for many years.’

He struggled to be offended. I could see it on his face. But my embrace enfolded him, and it is very difficult to be really angry with someone who is holding you. Try it.

I was, however, waiting to feel Alectus’s steel grate against my spine. It may have looked as if I was rushing the king. Darius had put ten thousand talents of gold on his head.

Many loyalties were being tried at the same time.

But suddenly, his arms were pounding my back, and he was crying. We stumbled a little, as men will do when locked in an embrace, and he cried on my shoulder, and I . . . looked over his.

I was in his private tent, of course, not his receiving tent. And there was the table he used as his desk, and on it was a letter written in golden ink on purple paper. I didn’t have to be a genius to realise that this had to be the original of Darius’s letter. Nor did I have to be a scribe to be able to read the first three lines, in which Darius greeted Alexander as ‘My brother, the King of Asia’.

Alexander began to make tearful apologies to me – for claiming that I was malingering, for causing me to fall on Thaïs, for a host of things for which he suddenly felt the urge to apologise. But he didn’t mention that he had falsified the letter from Darius. As I read it over his shoulder, I realised that the forged letter – for surely this was the real one – left me not angry but curiously empty.

Alexander means to fight for ever. I had never formulated the thought before, but here, in his arms, in his tent, I realised that it was not a simple pothos – he was not fighting to be lord of Asia, or King of Kings. He was fighting because war made him something that peace could never make him. What he wanted was war.

Not conquest.

Merely . . . war.

I accepted his apologies and made some of my own, my daimon all but extinguished by the same realisation that many of my pezhetaeroi had made months before.

There would be no end.

TWENTY-FIVE

It took me two further weeks of training to get enough meat on my bones to consider leading men in combat. I wrestled with Meleager, fenced with Craterus and practised hoplomachia with Isokles, who had charged fees to train men in the armoured fighting when he was a young man in Athens, and was truly expert. Meleager was older than I and no great wrestler, and he took it ill when I threw him so that I needed a new companion, and I took to wrestling with Kineas’s friend Diodorus, who was a fine wrestler and a good weight for me – then and even now, though I’ve gained weight and he’s stayed slim, the bastard!

I noticed – perhaps because an illness is like a visit to another country – as I say, I noticed on my return to duty that there were changes throughout the army, and some of them were deep – some were changes in individuals and some were changes in the whole identity.

I think that Meleager was my key to the whole set of changes. He and I had never been friends, particularly, but we had got on well enough, and when I found that he had set up his pavilion near mine and liked to get his exercise at the rising of the sun, I thought it natural that we exercise together. But after a few mornings, he made excuses and began to exercise elsewhere. The man I had known ten years before – my superior, I would add – would have cared nothing for a little sand in his face – or would have offered to box with me, or fight with sticks or clubs and arms wrapped in our chalmyses until I was black and blue. But the older, more powerful Meleager didn’t want to take risks. Or if he did take risks, he wanted to take them under different circumstances. There was no ‘private exercise’ for Meleager. He was a public man. He cared deeply whether his subordinates saw him thrown to the earth.

My second lesson in this change was several days later, after my first bout with Diodorus. I was wiping the sand from my face – Diodorus threw me quite regularly, until I gained some muscle and some much-needed skill – and Craterus, who watched us, took me aside.

‘Do you think,’ he asked me cautiously, ‘that you are wise to let men see you be bested by an Athenian?’

I spat sand, and shook my head. ‘Herakles was a fucking Theban, and I’m pretty sure he’d put my head in the sand, too. And I’m pretty sure men would cheer.’ I gave him my best farm-boy grin. ‘No one minds if I get thrown. Who cares? It’s what I do when the bronze is shining that matters, isn’t it?’

Craterus smiled, and that smile was false. ‘Oh – of course. Absolutely.’ He withdrew, and I saw that we had changed as a group. We were keeping up appearances.

But the siege of Tyre was not about appearances, thank the gods, and by now we had machines on the end of the mole, throwing stones as big as my head – two a minute, all day, and a rank of spare machines ready for whenever the brilliant engineers on the other side managed to destroy one of ours.

Summer was becoming autumn, and the feel of the breeze had changed when I went back into the line. It was a late summer evening, and the heat of the day seemed to flow upward into the sky, and the breeze that came with the setting of the sun was like balm on wounds, and seemed to blow right through my leather-backed shirt of scales to cool my body.

I was right forward, in the line of engines, watching the teams load and loose them with a terrible precision, when there were cries – and screams – from the forward edge of the mole, and I assumed we were under attack. By this time, Alexander had forced virtually the entire servile population of Syria into our work crews, because so many slaves had died at the hands of the Tyrians – perhaps, by this time, as many as fifteen thousand or more. I had been told that armed soldiers were required now to whip the slaves forward with their loads, and to kill any who attempted to desert. And I was told that soldiers no longer worked on the mole – only slaves.