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

TWENTY-EIGHT

Alexander went to the oracle alone. The oracle of Amon was famous in the Greek world, as well as in Aegypt, and was ancient – as ancient as Delphi or older.

Anaximenes says in his book that Alexander asked if all of the murderers of his father had been punished. If you consider that – if you look carefully at the question, and the man asking it – you have to face what a paradox Alexander lived. If Alexander didn’t wield the dagger himself – if Olympias arranged it without informing him – that was the very best he could claim, and I know better.

To ask such a thing from a sacred shrine – what can I say? Is it gross impiety, or a reckless craving that the past might be changed to suit the present? Alexander sought not to be a patricide. Not to be Oedipus, but Achilles.

Again according to that toad Anaximenes, Alexander was told that his question was impious. Because his father was Amon, Zeus Amon, and could never be killed. Was that what he was told? That’s what the lickspittle says.

Or was that what Anaximenes and Aristander cooked up when Alexander was told that his question was impious?

Or was the entire show managed from the first, so that Alexander could go on a quest to discover his parentage?

I cannot see clearly into his mind. I often try – and did then. Sometimes on matters of procedure, or war, or building, as with Alexandria, he would explain to me how he thought. But on something like this, I was left to guess.

And the paradox of the patricide seeking to avenge his father was not something I could understand, despite years of trying.

The only effect of the visit to the shrine of Amon was a hardening of Alexander’s resolve to be viewed and accepted as the son of a god and a god in his own right.

And the introduction of Anaximenes as a favourite.

We marched from the shrine of Amon with carts full of water skins and we made the coast and the fleet in good order, without any more deaths, as if, the drama done, Alexander needed to hurry. We reached the building site at Alexandria, and we had been gone only four weeks, but Alexander was angry that so little had been done. I think he had imagined that Zeus his father would build him a city in the desert while he visited Amon. I have no idea.

I wanted Thaïs, and now that I was not going to die in the desert, I thought about her constantly. But we marched from Naucratis upriver to Memphis, moving fast, as if the King of Kings was behind us and this was a desperate race.

In fact, I gathered from the grumblings of Callisthenes, who was considerably less happy with Anaximenes than the king was, that Darius had, in fact, used the year’s respite since Issus to rebuild his army. I had heard – through Thaïs and her endless network, and through military sources close to the king – that when we had entered Asia, the Great King had serious troubles on his own eastern frontier, far off in the lands we knew only by repute, such as India and Bactria.

Now it appeared that by concession and temporising, he had brought his eastern barons to heel, and we were, finally, to face the whole might of Persia.

Parmenio and his faction openly questioned the king’s strategy, and while they were loyal, their carping damaged morale. It is possible that, had Alexander plunged eastward after Issus, we might have taken Babylon and ended Darius, but as events were to prove, the empire remained the property of Darius for as long as he lived, and his bodyguard and his cousins were too realistic to leave him to die on a battlefield. And had we marched on Babylon from Issus – with the Persian fleet still alive behind us, with Aegypt as a base, with all the taxes and riches of Aegypt to support them – we might well have found ourselves cut off, alone and surrounded.

Whereas now, as the king gathered his forces at Memphis, we held all the ground west of the Euphrates. There were hold-outs and rebels, as Antigonus and Nearchus could attest. But in the main, we held the field, and we had continuous supply lines all the way back to Pella.

Which Antipater demonstrated by sending part of the fleet from Amphilopolis with fifteen hundred recruits for the various pezhetaeroi, a paltry six hundred more mercenaries and four hundred excellent Thracian cavalry, as well as more Thessalians. We divided the recruits among all seven taxeis, at about two hundred men each, which was excellent for me, and I took two hundred of the ‘mercenaries’ as well. They were a mixed bag of brigands, Peloponnesian defectors and other scum – all the good troops were fighting alongside Antipater – or fighting against him. Or we already had them with us. The truth was, every professional hoplite in the world of the Hellenes was in harness.

I cared, but not much, because my taxeis was as close to full strength as I could get it.

We marched by easy stages up to Pelusium, and then back to Gaza on the coast road, and then along the coast to Tyre. I dined with Alexander every night – with Craterus, Perdiccas and a dozen others from my boyhood. The king was more natural than I had seen him for a year. The only false notes were Anaximenes and Aristander, who were infinitely more obsequious than the most toady-like of the Macedonians – Nearchus, let us say.

When we were alone – almost alone, that is – when it was Alexander and Hephaestion, or Alexander and Cleitus – we talked about a final shake-up of the command structure of the army. Parmenio was never included in these discussions, which troubled me.

While we speak of paradox, let us remember that the whole army was in a state of paradox. Alexander commanded, and Parmenio was his second. When Alexander was sick, or wounded, Parmenio took command, and the reins slipped into his hands easily. And he never hesitated to hand the king back the reins when he rose form his sickbed.

And yet, by this time, they cordially detested each other. And as far as I could see, each schemed carefully for the destruction of the other – while, at the same time, acknowledging that the army and the kingdom were better for the continued existence of the other.

And if the Macedonian army seems to you a mighty thing, a monolith of military efficiency, let me tell you that inside the monolith, the edifice was plaster and wood, not stone; rats were gnawing at the thin ropes that held all the other stuff together. We had a lot of very mediocre mid-level officers, many of whom were Alexander’s friends and had been given commands owing to their loyalty to him.

And Alexander had reached a point where friendship with the king was not enough to secure command. I approved, but of course, I didn’t get the sack, either.

At Tyre, we had a long halt for the spring rains. Alexander had acted with foresight – we arrived to find a camp built by slaves and hired labour, vast magazines of food, and tents – new tents of heavy Syrian flax.

Alexander had actually thought about his army.

There were stockpiles of sarissas, well made by good smiths, and swords.

But mostly, there were water skins, baggage carts and barley. I whistled as we examined the stocks, and the horde of rats that came with them, but Alexander was angry.

It’s worth examining why, as an indication of how fast his mind was.

The grain stocks were held in sixteen enormous stone granaries, each of which was so new that you could smell the mud brick and the mortar. I was looking at the nearest in something not unlike awe, and Alexander said, ‘He’s short by a thousand mythemnoi. Perhaps five times that.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Get me the satrap of Syria,’ he said, grimly.

‘He’ was Menon, and his successor in office, a local man. Satrap of Syria. The man responsible for bringing in the grain as taxes and building the granaries. It was nothing to Alexander that he had built this camp, arranged to receive the shipments of everything from linen to weapons, hired the workers to build the granaries – all a miracle of organisation, by Eastern standards. Inside Alexander’s clockwork brain, what mattered was that he was more than a thousand mythemnoi of grain short for his projected march to Babylon.