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

Mine hurt every morning by the time I was twenty-one. And every morning, I pissed and moaned about them to my peers, who did the same in return. Add in shoulders, backs, hips, thighs when riding, old wounds, new wounds . . .

Aside from sex and money, pain is probably the third most common topic among veterans, rivalling the availability of wine and easily beating anything to do with warrior skills or tactics.

I never heard the king mention any of his wounds, or any other pain. Not true – on two occasions, I heard him mention his wounds. Both times he was virtually unable to speak from the pain. When he stood in his chariot, rolling across the plain below Gaza with Batis being dragged to death behind him, every bump of the bronze-clad wheels must have sent a lance of fire through his left shoulder. When he pushed the spear through the enemy’s ankles, the action must have torn at his wound, nearly blinding him with pain.

I say this not to excuse him – you will see my views more and more – but to explain why we did not rise as a body and murder him as unfit to be king. I, for one, was still absolutely loyal, and when men questioned his sanity and his fitness, I shouted them down and questioned their loyalties and their love of Macedon. What else could I do? If I had joined those questioning, where would I have gone from there?

I had a greater worry than the king’s sanity, and Hephaestion shared it, as did Parmenio. All three of us had begun to wonder what would happen if the king died.

The king’s sickness at Tarsus and his wound at Gaza revealed that the army would – with grave reservations – take orders from Parmenio. It would not take orders from Hephaestion. Or rather, everyone would obey orders from Parmenio up to a point, and the point was commitment to battle.

If Alexander died, we were going to melt away like snow on Mount Olympus in high summer, and all our conquests were going to be like smoke from a sacrificial fire – beautiful to smell, and gone on the first wind.

The pezhetaeroi cared nothing about it. Neither did the mercenaries. But from the time of the wound at Gaza, a few of us began very quietly to discuss the future of Macedon when the king died.

When, not if.

A last word on the subject.

Mazces surrendered Aegypt without a fight. Mazces was a worm where Batis had been an eagle, but as I have said before, it was never possible to look far into the labyrinthine corridors of the king’s godlike mind. Alexander killed fifty thousand at Tyre and Gaza. But Aegypt surrendered without a fight – Aegypt, the most populated place I’d ever been. While I grant that their soldiers – excepting only their superb marines – were not very good, had their populace chosen to resist, we’d still be fighting there.

But they did not. It is possible that the wholesale murders helped break their will to resist. I doubt it. The king might have thought so, but Thaïs’s letters suggested a country that was going to fall into our laps like a ripe grape. And so it proved.

We marched south from Gaza after a four-day rest. If any man in our army was sleeping well, I didn’t know him. I know that the night before we marched, Marsyas and I sat and got very drunk.

The fleet was waiting for us at Pelussium seven days later, and Mazces was waiting a few parasanges farther on to offer submission. We marched to Memphis – some of the army went downriver by ship and boat, and Alexander marched cross-country. He was starting to recover from his wound, and as the drugs wore off, he was surly and difficult.

Three weeks after the fall of Gaza, I happened to have the vanguard. We were two days out from Memphis, according to our scouts, and the country had submitted – but we’d learned from experts, and we took no chances. I had a double screen of light cavalry – I already had fast-moving parties in every village on the river for two or three parasanges in either direction, and behind these patrols and the thick screen came my pezhetaeroi in a three-sided box covering the archers and Agrianians ready to pounce on an ambush.

All routine, of course.

Alexander was driving his chariot. The roads in Aegypt were excellent – some of the best I’d ever seen – and the chariot was ideal for a man who wanted to be active but still suffered a lot of pain.

I trotted Medea over to the king. We were making a long march – a hundred stades – and the men were starting to flag. The same men, let me add, who had been in continuous combat for seventeen months.

‘Lord,’ I said, with a salute. There had been a time when the king’s friends didn’t need to salute, but I found that, since Gaza, I needed to show respect. Lest some draw the wrong conclusion.

Alexander looked up through the dust and nodded. ‘Ptolemy,’ he said.

We rode along for a stade or two – I offered him wine, he drank it. I got the impression that he was clamping down very hard to control himself. I suspected that the wound from Gaza still hurt a great deal more than he let on.

‘When are we celebrating some feasts?’ I finally asked. I had worked on a dozen methods of manipulating the king into this conversation, but although he virtually refused to speak, I wasn’t going to let go.

He looked at me, his brows furrowed and the lines around his eyes as stark as writing on paper. ‘Feasts?’ he asked.

I leaned down. ‘The army is exhausted,’ I said. ‘They need a rest.’

Alexander looked at me. I’m not one for reading into expressions – I like men to speak their minds, and women, too – but Alexander’s face was haggard.

‘You are driving yourself rather than give in to pain,’ I hazarded.

‘I am above pain,’ he said. The lines around his eyes contradicted him, although his voice was perfectly controlled.

‘Save it for the troops,’ I said. ‘The appearance of effortless control costs you. But they don’t know that. If you will play at being a god, they will take your sacrifices for granted. And curse your name.’

He looked away.

‘It is openly said that you are insane,’ I said.

His head shot around with the speed of a falcon’s.

‘I am not insane,’ he said. ‘All I do must be done.’

Well, well, thought I.

‘The army needs a rest,’ I insisted. ‘Don’t take my word for it. Ask Black Cleitus. Ask Hephaestion. Ask Parmenio.’

I watched his face close down.

‘You are dismissed,’ he said.

I’m sure we’d both like me better if, at this point, I offered him some more home truths, but sadly, I didn’t. I went off to make a show of tending to my advance guard.

Two days later, we arrived at Memphis. The king announced that he would take the elites upriver, and the rest of us could sit at Memphis for a month-long rest and sacrifice to Amon and Apis. He purchased every sacrificial animal in the city and gave them to the army, as well as a ‘donation’ that amounted to a little less than three months’ pay per man.

His status with the army changed overnight. Every wine shop and brothel in Memphis was packed to the rafters. The women of Aegypt were short, with short legs and heavy breasts and tawny skin, and they did not age well at all – peasant girls were young at twelve and old at twenty-four. But they were plentiful and warm and very alive – they could dance and sing, and a third of the men in the army acquired a wife, many through actual services conducted by the priests of Hathor. For we had seldom been welcomed as heroes before, but in Aegypt, among the common people, we were their liberators. Greeks had a fearsome, but in the main wholesome and heroic, reputation here as preservers of the people’s liberties, and we benefited from years of Athenian meddling.

That’s a convoluted way of saying that the women welcomed us with open legs. It is possible that some men were pleased, as well, but none of my soldiers was paying any attention whatsoever.