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

Alexander paced, like a caged lion.

‘We need to be at them,’ he said.

Laodon put an arm around his shoulders. ‘Sire, there is no “them” to be at. You have destroyed them.’

Alexander shrugged off his arm. ‘Do not be familiar, sir. And their villages are open – right now. Not for long – other tribes will protect them.’

Laodon shook his head. ‘Your army is exhausted.’

Gordias backed him up. ‘My men have been up all night, and fought two days in a row.’

Alexander flinched – a visible shudder. I knew him well, and knew that he was fighting off a temper tantrum.

Instead, he managed a smile. ‘Well, then,’ he said. He caught my eye. ‘Not bad for the baggage guard, eh?’ he said.

I grinned.

He grinned back.

‘I expected to find you besieged,’ Alexander said.

Laodon shrugged. ‘We were sent to fail,’ he said.

I stood in shock. ‘Antipater betrayed us?’

Alexander looked out at his battlefield and then back at me. ‘It makes no snese – but they were waiting for us. Laodon said they were, and they were. So we left you to fort up and went off to try and ambush their ambush.’

‘You might have said,’ I shot back. In Macedon, we’re not slaves.

Alexander rubbed the stubble on his chin. ‘I might have. But it was a hunch, and I might have been wrong. Or Laodon might have been the traitor.’ He shrugged, even as Laodon flinched. Smiled at me. ‘I knew it wasn’t you,’ he said to me. ‘That’s why you got the baggage.’

I didn’t really know what he was talking about. Thank the gods.

He slapped his knees. ‘Well, if the men need a rest, they need a rest. We march at dawn.’

And that was that.

The next day, Alexander took the oldsters and the Thracian auxiliaries and rode north-west, into Thracian territory, and proceeded to burn every village he came to. I moved along the valley floors, building small fortified camps or using the stock dykes the way the Thracians had, but with better sentries and sanitation. We covered fifty stades a day and Alexander covered three times that, and after three weeks he’d burned a swathe across Maetian Thrace as wide as the Chersonese and twice as long. Four weeks to a day after we’d broken their army, we stormed their log-walled city. Alexander put in a garrison of veterans from the infantry corps – two hundred men who got five times the land grants they might have expected. He called it Alexandropolis.

My last camp in Thracian territory had a stockade with three thousand slaves – mostly very saleable young women. The soldiers took their pick, and the rest went up for sale.

Horrible. But they did the same to us.

And then we marched home to Pella, with a fortune in gold and slaves, and Alexander gave an excellent speech, and handed out the whole of the loot to the infantry and the professional cavalry. The pages received nothing.

Antipater greeted us at the main gate, reviewed the army and embraced Alexander. The town cheered us.

It was very difficult to go back to being a page, after that. Three nights later, I was punished for being late to guard duty outside the prince’s door – publicly admonished by one of Philip’s somatophylakes, who didn’t seem to know or care that I had just won a night battle, killed my prince’s enemies, stormed a city and handed in my accounts for the logistics of the army and had them passed. Like an adult.

He hit me across the face with his hand, and ordered me to spend the night standing on my feet.

Which, of course, I did.

A month later Philip was back. Another failed siege in the Chersonese – another Athenian proxy victory, and now the Persian fleet was gathering, or so men said. It had been a summer of manoeuvre and near defeat for Macedon, and the rumour was that Thebes was ready to join Persia and Athens against us. And the western Thracians, unimpressed by Alexander’s near extermination of the Maeti, were threatening to close the passes of the north-east against us. Or perhaps hold them open for Thebes.

Amid all this, Philip came home. He embraced Alexander publicly and praised him to the skies – after all, as Philip was the first to admit, Alexander had won the year’s only victory, and turned a raw phalanx into a veteran one.

Then Philip took the new phalanx and marched it away, and changed Alexandropolis to Philipopolis, and we were left to wonder. And to raise fresh troops.

All winter, Philip marched and counter-marched – he lacked a fleet, and he had to keep the Athenians and their surrogates at arm’s length with his army. He sent letters – brilliant letters, full of advice for his son the regent. Some provoked a smile from the regent – and many a frown.

I read them to the prince, because I was one of the inner circle – my courage undoubted, my place secure, or so I thought. I would read him Philip’s letters while he wrote out his own correspondence – he had secretaries but preferred to write for himself. Philip’s advice, like that of most parents, could be internally contradictory – I recall one letter that admonished the regent for attempting to bribe the magnates of inner Macedon, and then in the next line recommended bribery as the tool to use with Thracians. And every time we managed to raise and equip a new corps of infantry, he’d summon them to his field army, leaving Alexander without the means to march against the renewed threat from the Thracians.

The second time this happened, when we’d stripped the countryside of farm boys to form a fourth taxeis of foot companions only to lose it, Alexander threw his ivory stylus at the wall, and it stuck in the plaster.

‘He wants everything for himself. He will leave nothing for me!’ he shouted.

Certainly Antipater was no longer allowed an army. Even Drako’s Thessalians were called away to the field army.

In the spring, Philip turned without warning and marched on the Thracians – a deeper raid than we had undertaken, and with no traitor to lure them out to easy victory, this time the Thracians stayed in their hill forts and fought for time. Philip captured a few towns and lost some others, and began to move out of the hills in three columns – but the centre column made a mistake, or moved too fast, and was ambushed. Philip got another spear in the thigh – the same thigh – and the line infantry got badly chewed up.

Philip came straight back from defeat to Pella. He hadn’t won a major victory in two years, and the vultures were gathering. Defeat at the hands of the Thracians was unthinkable – it gave his enemies ideas.

But Philip had gone after the Thracians while leaving Parmenio and Attalus, the king’s left-hand man, with his best troops – now he concentrated his armies, and in effect abandoned the campaign in the Chersonese. In later years we never admitted to this, but Athens had beaten us, or rather, Athens backed by the threat of Persia.

On the other hand, although Philip didn’t admit it to us at court, he’d decided to risk his empire on one blow. To go for the jugular, like a hunting dog facing a boar.

The Greeks like to maintain that Macedon was an oppressor, a barbarian force from outside marching through sacred Greece with blood and tyranny, but in truth, they hounded Philip unmercifully and left him little choice. Demosthenes and his renewed Athenian empire insisted on facing Macedon, where in fact we might have been allies. We might have unified against Persia. And we did, in the end. Our way.

In the autumn, when we heard daily rumours of a Persian fleet in the Dardanelles and an Athenian fleet ready for sea, Philip marched – not south and east to the Chersonese, although that’s what he told all the ambassadors gathered like vultures in the capital. He left Alexander to deal with them – and Alexander did. For days, Alexander sat beside his father’s throne and insisted that the army was on manoeuvres in the flat country by Amphilopolis – that his father would hold winter court at Pella, that they intended to dedicate a new set of statues at Delphi together. The statues were shown, the ambassadors sent their dispatches.