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

‘Come,’ I said into Alexander’s too-long embrace. ‘Bucephalus is trembling with fatigue, lord. We need to get these mounts rubbed down and fed – see to our men, too.’

He let go of my neck and his sword pommel slammed into my temple.

‘Oh!’ he said – almost a giggle.

‘Put that thing away!’ I snapped. ‘Better yet – give it to me!’

I took the blade closest to the hilt, tugged – and he kept hold of it.

‘It is stuck to my hand,’ he said, his voice a little wild.

It was, too. With blood.

‘Zeus Lord of Kings, and Ares of the Bronze Spear,’ I cursed. ‘Polystratus – water here.’

‘I just kept killing them,’ Alexander said. He was going to cry. I’d seen it with younger troopers. I’m a callous bastard myself – killing itself didn’t unman me like this.

Hephaestion got to us with a helmet full of water.

I poured it over his sword hand, and the sword came free, a little at a time. While Polystratus and Hephaestion got the sword out of his hand, I talked to him the way I would talk to a young trooper – to Nike when she cringed at thunder, the only thing that scared her – to Poseidon when he saw a snake.

‘There’s a good lad. Nothing to it – see the blood wash away? All gone. Let go, my prince. Well done – we won the day. You won the day.’ Voice pitched just so.

‘We did. I did.’ Alexander sighed. ‘They are so full of blood,’ he said.

‘May I invite you to dinner this evening, lord’?’ I asked.

He managed a wobbly smile – his mouth folded so that he seemed to smile and frown at once. But he was mastering himself – he had a will stronger than any man I’ve ever met.

‘I would be delighted, if it would not be too much trouble,’ he said, his face smoothing even as he spoke.

Hephaestion gave me a small nod. We seldom liked each other much – but when it came to Alexander, we could pull together. But when the sword came free from the prince’s fist, Hephaestion whispered in my ear –

‘Philip will have a victory dinner.’

I nodded. Alexander was sitting straight, eyes darting – the white rims gone.

‘One battle at a time,’ I muttered, and Hephaestion gave me a quick smile.

‘Let’s get cleaned up and see to our horses,’ he said to the prince.

I saluted, kneed Poseidon and cleared their path. Then I rode over to Philip. He was surrounded by sycophants – and officers. Older men, mostly.

They were telling him how brilliant his plan of luring the Athenians off the hill had been.

‘It was our counterstroke that broke them,’ Philip said to Laodon. ‘When we turned on them, they couldn’t stand.’

I remember thinking, Oho, so that’s how it’s to be, eh?

‘Your boy thinks he won the battle himself,’ Nearchus the elder said.

‘Let him,’ said Philip with a hollow laugh. ‘Boys always think they are important. And the troops love him.’ He shook his head. ‘Cavalry against hoplites – what was he thinking?’

Saving your sorry arse , I thought.

Attalus’s cousin Diomedes laughed a little too long. ‘He’s as mad as a dog in the heat, lord. We all know it.’

Philip turned and glowered at Diomedes. But he said no word, struck no blow. Something in this little scene told me that the words had been said before – that the catamite was playing a long game.

But Philip’s somewhat careless glare silenced Diomedes, although I noticed that he had a ‘cat’s got the cream’ smile on his over-thick lips. Then Philip noticed me.

‘Well fought, son of Lagus,’ he said, offering me his hand – a major favour, at court. He grinned – a genuine Philip grin. ‘Although you got off to a bit of a rocky start.’

I rubbed the goose egg on my head and smiled back.

‘Next time you represent Macedon in single combat, see that you win,’ he went on, and most of the older men laughed.

‘He was pretty good,’ commented Antipater. ‘Kineas son of Eumedes. I know him. His father’s my guest friend.’

Philip nodded. ‘One of Phokion’s boys – what do you expect?’ He clapped me on the back. ‘You look like a man with something to say.’

I couldn’t help but grin, despite my fatigue. ‘I have a gift for you, lord.’

Philip raised his eyebrows.

I motioned to Polystratus, and he led the wretched Demosthenes forward.

Philip smiled as a wolf smiles at a lamb.

I slipped away, duty done, and suddenly all I wanted was to sleep.

But the path to camp crossed the brow of the hill, and there I found Philip the Red and most of my own troop, still mounted.

They were picking up their wounded and dead, like good soldiers, and I joined them, like a good officer.

That took us an hour – killing the worst wounded and picking up the least wounded of both sides. Something turns over in you – you kill, you can’t kill any more, you help save one, and all you want to do is save them all. Men are complex beasts.

And I didn’t want to stop. If I stopped collecting the wounded, if I paused in getting water – well, I’d have to start thinking about it all. Besides, as long as Cleomenes and Philip were working, I was working.

Our grooms came out to help.

We got all of our own – there were only eight – and then we started collecting our own infantrymen, and enemy infantrymen. They lay in neat rows, or all muddled together – some men awoke as if from sleep when touched, to stumble to their feet, barely injured – others had screamed themselves to wheezing silence and lay as a deer lies when he has your arrow in his guts and he’s run as far as he can and the dogs have ripped his flesh and for some reason he’s not dead yet.

Every time I got another wounded man on to the litter made by my horse and Philip’s, I swore it would be the last.

But I kept going back. The younger companions were proving something, or saying something, or too young to know when to quit. I didn’t know which. But most of us were out there.

Philip’s victory dinner was starting – I could see the torches and the slaves – when I found your pater. He was lying almost alone in some high grass – I found out later that his friends had taken him out of the melee and laid him there, and then been caught up in the battle. He had three wounds – rather as I did, myself. Polystratus and I got him on the litter and took him back to the surgeons. He was deeply unconscious. And he’d lost his gorgeous lion’s-head helmet, which I rather fancied, I must confess.

I was done. Your pater was the last man I moved off the field. A young healer found me, ordered me to sit, and I went down like a sack of grain. He wrapped the wounds on my arms and my thigh, looked at my scalp and pronounced me fit enough.

‘Don’t drink wine tonight, lord,’ he said. He pointed at my scalp. ‘A blow to the head does not go with wine.’

So I stumbled back to my tent. To where Nike had stood waiting, as I heard it, for seven hours.

She embraced me, blood and guilt and all. I never loved her better – except when she washed me clean of the blood, wrapped me in a blanket and laid me on some straw she’d foraged like the miracle worker she was. I was out in a second. Show me a man interested in a tumble in the hay after a fight, and I’ll show you a madman. Men talk about it. Show me one who got laid after Chaeronea.

I slept.

For about an hour.

Nike woke me. ‘The king has asked for you. At his dinner. He means to honour you. So they say.’

I wasn’t stiff yet, and I was young enough that I was able to function, but I felt as if I’d been wrapped in felt and kicked a hundred times by giants. Everything seemed to come to me from afar – words, thoughts, gestures.