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

I like to think that if Alexander had lain with the courtesan and then had a good night’s sleep, it might all have been different.

By the time we cantered into Pella, our girths tight and our cloak rolls tighter, we looked like professional soldiers, the bodyguard of a king. We’d trained for it – and three days on the road moving at top speed tightened everything about us. Alexander had reached a new level of remoteness from us – he barely spoke, but when he did, his voice was light and he laughed with everyone.

He was working on a new version, a new mask. From ‘serious boy’ he was now on to ‘golden boy’.

When we reached Pella, the vanguard of the army was already coming in.

Macedon in those days was an armed camp, a state girded for war night or day, winter or summer – indeed, it was one of Demosthenes’ chief complaints about us that we made war all year long. Even the Spartans took the winter off, seemed to be the burden of his message.

But while Philip had certainly been beaten, and beaten badly – the Field of Crocuses comes to mind – Macedon was not used to defeat. Pella liked her victory celebrations, with rich, drunken pezhetaeroi swaggering through the streets and wild-eyed auxiliaries glutting themselves on wine and good bread and all the delights of civilisation.

But when we rode into Pella, War was showing his other face.

Philip’s companions brought him in. Every mouth was pinched, and every neck and shoulder bore the marks of ten days in armour and no rest. Men were missing helmets – helmets that had cost a year’s wages for a skilled man. Men were missing cloaks. Hardly a single knight had a spear, and some were missing their swords as well, and where there ought to have been four hundred noble cavalrymen, there were not many past two hundred.

The horses looked worse, first because so many knights were riding nags and scrubs and hill ponies instead of our best Persian-given bloodstock, and second because where you did see a charger, he was as knackered as his master, and many of them had more wounds than the men on their backs. So many men and horses were wounded that the whole column buzzed with carrion flies and the companions were too tired to brush them away, so that a wounded man, just keeping his saddle, might have forty or fifty flies on the open wound of his face, in the corners of his eyes.

Behind the companions came the pezhetaeroi, the ‘foot companions’. They had walked where the nobler companions had ridden, and they had lines like Keltoi work engraved on their faces, and their legs were mud to the thigh. Most of them wore quilted linen corselets, some leather, all splashed with mud and blood. Most of the infantry column had dysentery – not as uncommon as you might think, my lad – and some of them shat while they walked. Oh yes.

And behind the pezhetaeroi, the wounded. In baggage carts that had held officers’ tents and nobles’ spare horse tack – all abandoned to the foe. On blankets between two sarissas – our long spear, taller than two men. There’s a cruel Macedonian joke that every recruit wears the stretcher that will carry his corpse home – his infantryman’s cloak. There were quite a few wounded – later I learned that the pezhetaeroi had turned on the Thracians and stopped their last charge cold and then made sure of their wounded. Thracians torture any wounded they find – it is religious, for them, to test a man’s courage as he dies, but to us that is blasphemy.

I was sitting in the front rank, a few horses from the prince. Hephaestion was next to him – calm and professional. He was only a drama queen when his own interests were affected. Black Cleitus gave me a grim smile and walked his horse to my side. But I watched Alexander, and he watched Antipater.

‘Ready?’ Cleitus asked. He had the face of a loyal dog, a big hound that you send in after the bear, but he was as smart as any of us. He hid it from most men, but not from me.

I raised an eyebrow.

Alexander heard him. He couldn’t stop the smile from reaching his face.

But he was wrong. We all were.

THREE

Pella and Greece, 340–339 BC

The problem was that Philip did not die.

He was a great man. And there’s a saying in Greece that I heard when I was in Athens before the Great War – that great men have useless sons. Phokion, Isocrates, Alcebiades, Leonidas – none of them had great sons.

But maybe the problem is that great men are too fucking hard on their sons, and most sons can’t stand the pain, and they fold – I’m just guessing, but sometimes it is easier to just knuckle under than to strive, endlessly, with the man of gold. I speak from some experience, youngster.

But Alexander – no man ever born of woman – or of goddess – was ever so competitive. He had to compete – so deep, the inner need to prove himself to himself every day, all the time, over and over. When you are young, this appears as a great strength. As you grow older, it appears weaker and weaker. Trust me on this. The best men – the ones untouched by gods and happy in their own skins, the prosperous farmers and the good poets and the master craftsmen, the mothers of good children, the priestesses of well-run temples – have nothing to prove to gods or men. They merely are like the immortal gods.

Then there’s the rest of us, of course. Hah!

And Alexander had that need to prove prowess, like a disease. So that he ran, wrestled or studied Plato with the same look on his face that he wore in mortal combat. To him, it was all mortal combat. To the death. To prove himself as good as his father. Or better.

Oh, it all sounds like crap – the sort of mumbo-jumbo that priests mutter. And he loved his father and his harpy of a mother, and they loved him. I’ve known many boys with worse parents. He did well enough. And he really loved them – he didn’t murder his mother, and that alone speaks volumes.

Don’t look shocked, boy. We’re talking Macedon.

But he was determined to be like a god – to be a god if ever he could be. To be a better man than his father, and his father was a colossus who bestrode the earth and made the mighty – Persia, Athens – tremble like small boys in a thunderstorm.

Your father was a great man in a different mould – but you have to measure up to him, don’t you? Aye. And all around you are relatives, tutors, officers – men and women who knew him. You must see the judgement in their eyes.

Good. Point made.

Philip had a bad wound, but he was far from dead. In fact, he never gave up the reins of power. He was lying in a litter, dictating the restructuring of the magazines from Pella to the Thracian borderlands so that his counter-strike would land faster and better supplied.

He looked up and caught my eye first. He was as white as a new-washed linen chiton, and his lips were pale, and his eyes had sunk into his head like those of a corpse – but he grinned.

‘Son of Lagus,’ he said. ‘You look ready for war.’

‘We heard you were dead, lord!’ I dismounted. The other pages dismounted behind me.

‘Not yet. Where is my son?’ Philip looked past me, and I saw him as he caught sight of Alexander, the only young man still mounted. He had his Boeotian helmet off, and the golden hair on either side of his forehead had made itself into ram’s horns, as it always did if he didn’t wash it for a few days. He looked like a god.

Philip’s face lit up – blood came to his cheeks. His smile – I hoped that my father smiled like that, some day, when he saw me. ‘Ahh,’ Philip said.

Alexander turned and saw his father’s litter and slid off his horse with his usual elegance. He bowed. ‘Pater,’ he said. Voice clipped, too controlled.