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

Fast as thought, he leaped back. I wanted to close inside his spearhead, and he wanted to hit me in my rush. He didn’t want to fight me close in.

His feet crossed, and he fell. But even as he fell, he rolled on his shield shoulder and never let go of his spear, and he was as fast as a god. I closed the distance, but his roll changed the angle, and I had to brace, and he was on his feet. He thrust, and I caught his off-balance shot on the rim of my shield – Zeus, he was fast. I passed forward, sure I had won the fight, but he recovered his spearhead in the tongue-flick of a serpent, and he backed off two steps, as fast as a dancer at a symposium, avoiding the grabbing hands of clients – perhaps faster – and his spearhead licked out again, and just tagged my helmet.

I ducked my head and stepped in, spear across my body, and reached out to push him to the ground . . .

And stopped. It took a moment to realise he’d hit my helmet.

But I knew it.

I turned to the herald. ‘He hit me,’ I said.

The herald bowed.

The crowd began to roar.

Leosthenes bowed to me. ‘My back foot is out of the ring,’ he said. He spat the words, but by the gods, he was an honest man that day.

My rush had pushed him out of the limits.

The question we all had was – which happened first?

Alexander came down from his dais, and walked the sand with the heralds. He called the two of us together.

‘Leosthenes of Athens, you stepped out twice – two steps in a row.’ The king shrugged. ‘You are a brilliant fighter. Tyche was against you.’

I raised my hand. ‘Lord King, may I use this moment to crave a boon? May I ask that Leosthenes of Athens be considered a Macedonian, that I may have him as an officer in my taxeis?’

Alexander smiled one of his rare smiles of genuine amusement. ‘Is he at least as Macedonian as your Isokles?’ he asked.

Leosthenes stripped off his armour and went to stand with Kineas, whom he idolised, while I went on to win my next three fights. None of the other finalists was anything like as good as the Athenian.

Which the king acknowledged when he gave me my garland. Because he summoned Leosthenes and presented him with a garland as well, rather than the man who was, by points, the second.

Alexander could be fair, just and astute, when it suited him. As the judge of games, he was easy to love.

Alectus slapped me on the back when I received my garland. ‘He’d have killed you, if it was real,’ he said. ‘Don’t get cocky.’

There you have it.

But praise from peers is sweet. Bubores came, and Cleomenes, and Kineas, and a dozen other friends, and they poured wine over my head and slapped my back, and then a dozen of them picked me up and carried me to the beach and flung me into the sea – the sea that, a year before, we had dyed red with the blood of slaughtered Tyrians.

Alexander held a parade – one of the few I remember in any detail, although he held enough of them, in emulation of Xenophon’s Anabasis . My men looked forward to it eagerly, the last day of the games, because they knew they were going to dazzle the other pezhetaeroi, and even the hypaspitoi, with their new splendour.

Nor were we wrong. Leosthenes, Callisthenes, Marsyas and I worked overtime to arrange how to get ourselves and all our soldiers into our kit without the rest of the army seeing us. We put the kind of planning into it that we would have put into a military operation, and Leosthenes revealed what a cunning bastard he was in his brilliant misdirection plan.

In short, we were late for parade. All the taxeis competed to be first on parade, and we were deliberately last.

We had the front left file closer – Leosthenes now – carry a sarissa with every wreath and garland we had won as a body in the games tied to the spearhead with superb cloth-of-gold tape that Thaïs provided. We had a pair of slave aulos players, whom I freed for service.

We marched on, crossing the back of the parade to the tune of our flutes, marching in step.

We could hear the muttering in the ranks; ‘awkward sods’ was about the nicest thing we heard.

And then they saw us.

Heh. Another great moment.

There was no body of troops in that army of fifty thousand men who had matching helmet plumes, matching armour, matching spears, new chitons that shone like snow. We glittered.

And when I called ‘Ground your . . . spears!’ fifteen hundred saurouters crunched into the gravel with a single sound.

Alexander glanced at me. I had on my new panoply. I smelled like new leather and Thaïs’s perfume – I think she’d kept the armour awfully close during the sea voyage.

The king grinned.

Then he rode away to the head of the Royal Squadron, and we passed in review, marching past the king sixteen files wide, and in step, in a way that never really happened on the battlefield, and yet was a practical test of a regiment’s drill.

We marched up and down, and we marched past the king. And as the head of our regiment drew even with him – he was deep in conversation with Hephaestion – he touched his heels to Bucephalus and rode out to us.

‘Men of Outer Macedon!’ he shouted. Technically, that was our taxeis – the Taxeis of Outer Macedon.

He waited a moment or two.

‘YOU LOOK LIKE GODS!’ he roared.

They were still shouting his name when we went back to camp. They were willing to die for him, then.

Sometimes, he was easy to love.

Harpalus brought us detailed information on the war with Sparta and the threat to the League of Corinth in Greece. The night of the great review, when Craterus had pretended to punch me in the nose and Perdiccas had demanded that I tell him the source of my wonderful helmets (I told him), we discussed the war behind us – what Alexander later referred to as a war between mice.

They were dangerous mice. The Spartans were nothing like in their prime, but man for man they were still magnificent. And their king, Agis, understood strategy better, I think, than Darius. He struck immediately, and where we felt it most – he put a fleet to sea and took Crete, as I’ve mentioned above. Had we not won Tyre and Aegypt, Agis’s strategy would have crippled us, cut us off. So much for Parmenio’s views of the world.

But Tyre fell and the Cypriots came over to us, and the world changed faster than Darius and Agis were prepared for, and once again, Alexander was a step ahead.

As usual, everything depended on Athens. During the winter, while Alexander went to the shrine of Amon, our entire campaign teetered on the edge of extinction. Athens had three hundred ships. If Athens had joined Sparta, we would have faced a general uprising of all the states of Greece, and Antipater notwithstanding, the war would have been fought at sea, and in Macedon.

But Athens stayed loyal. Actually, Athens seethed with discontent, but stayed just the right side of betrayal. Or, as I have said before, the thetes couldn’t stomach siding with Sparta and Persia at the same time.

What role Harpalus played, I can only guess. His role was never vouchsafed to me. But Thaïs’s trip to Athens while Alexander went to the shrine of Amon . . . at the time, I never guessed it. She had apparently withdrawn from politics and spycraft, during her second pregnancy. Callisthenes took over her duties and ran her agents.

When I look back, now, I realise that she controlled Harpalus’s false defection, and ran him as a fisherman plays a fish. She was his lifeline and his paymaster, and the five thousand talents he ‘stole’ were used to bribe Athens. It was a brilliant move. I wish I could be certain whether Thaïs thought it through herself, or whether Harpalus designed it, or whether the king did – all three in concert, I think, but somehow, it has his stamp. Alexander’s mind . . .