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

And then – one night Nike had a sore stomach, the next she was apologetic about being in bed, and the third – she was dead, and our baby with her.

That’s when Kineas and I became friends, young man. I sat with her corpse for a long time – holding one of her hands. I didn’t really believe she wouldn’t come back to me. I was numb and angry at the same time. And the mound of her pregnancy seemed the harshest mockery – pregnant women are supposed to be immune to disease. And I considered self-murder. She was that much to me that I didn’t really see what I had to live for.

I sat there for two days, in her folding chair by her corpse. Alexander came and clutched my shoulder and kissed her. That meant a great deal to me. But he left, and then Kineas came, and left. Cleitus and Philip and Nearchus and Cleomenes came, sat with me, and left.

After a couple of days, Kineas came again. This time he was dressed for riding.

‘Come,’ he ordered me, and I simply rose and followed him. Don’t know why.

We rode through a long afternoon, and camped under the eaves of Kithaeron. He killed a deer and we ate it. I swear that in the whole evening he said only ‘Salt?’ and ‘Have another helping’.

In the cold mist of dawn, we rode on, up the mountain. Up and up. Until we were on the flat of the crest, with the sea a golden blue in one direction and all Boeotia spread beneath us in the other.

‘Bury her here,’ he said. ‘With my people.’

Then I wept, and then I nodded, and then I discovered that her corpse was in a wagon at the base of the mountain.

We burned her in the high place, and her ashes went into a pot with a maiden and a child painted on it, and then we put her at the top of the mountain with all those Plataean heroes.

And the next few days are lost to me. There’s nothing there.

But your father and I were ever friends from that day forward.

SIX

Athens, autumn 338 BC–spring 337 BC

When I returned to the camp, it was to find that Alexander had been appointed ambassador to the Athenians, with Antipater and Alcimachus to support him. I was to go with him to Athens – in fact, I was the escort commander for the ashes of the dead Athenians. Kineas was appointed the commander of the Athenian escort – fifty troopers in armour as good as that of Philip’s inner circle.

One of the worst penalties of loving a commoner is that no one expects you to love her. When I returned from burying Nike, Alexander acted as if I should be done with her. She was dead, I had work to do as his escort commander – time to move on. Nearchus and Cleomenes avoided my eye when I showed signs of emotion. As when I discovered that no one had moved any of her things out of my tent – men can be the most thoughtless beasts. I packed her belongings – every chiton, every pin, every present I had given her.

Oh, the pain. Some men and women move in and out of love – it comes and goes. Yes? Not me, lad. I love for ever. I can still feel it – walking into the tent, thinking I was healed, and seeing her things strewn about. Zeus, I was nearly sick.

But royal pages are bred tough, for war. I survived it. I was enraged every time a man threw me a look that indicated that I should ‘get over it’, and I determined – in fact, I swore to Aphrodite – that the next time I knew love, I’d marry her, even if she was a common prostitute. If only so that I could have a year of mourning.

And the Cyprian was listening.

So as I relate the next few months, keep in mind that Nike was never far from my thoughts.

I’ll also note that two men never asked me to get over it . They were Kineas the Athenian and Cleitus the Black. Both of them seemed to understand at some unspoken level. One afternoon, I was helping Myndas make up a fire, and I found that he was using her firebox – a firebox I’d given her. Myndas got the fire started and I just crouched there on my haunches, holding the box in my hand.

Cleitus came to find me for Alexander – crouched by me. Took my hand, and held it for a second or two – pressed it, took the box away and said, ‘Alexander wants you,’ as calmly as if all had been well.

But perhaps it is the greatest tragedy of being a mere mortal – and greater men than I have written poems on the subject, I know – that all things pass. The pangs of love, the roaring fire of hate – even the pain of loss. Even a week after I burned her corpse, I was in Antipater’s tent, proposing to him that we buy a dozen Athenian armourers to have a better product in Pella, and he was agreeing that that was an excellent project. We were both impressed – and a little envious – of Kineas’s troop, in their ornate repoussé helmets like lion’s heads, men’s heads, with silver hair and gold cheeks, or with scenes from the Iliad on the cheekpieces – and still superb work that would turn a heavy blow. Not to say we didn’t have good armourers in Pella – but we didn’t have fifty cavalry troopers like that fifty.

Later, in the fullness of adulthood, I realised that they sent their very richest, best men – probably with the picked best armour of the whole city.

Worth noting here that soldiers are popinjays. Beautiful armour is good for morale. When you are shitting your guts out in a three-day freezing rain, waiting to be sabered by some Asiatic auxiliary, it raises your heart to know that you look like a hero, that your gold-figured spear is the best spear for parasanges. Men who look good are tougher and better. Only armchair generals think that you can coat a man in mud and get him to fight well.

At any rate, I started to use Polystratus as my hyperetes, just as Kineas had Niceas, and he was merciless on details of harness and dress. Men had got slack as royal companions – as veteran campaigners, with servants and grooms and leisure time. I wasn’t in a particularly good mood – in fact, I was unrelentingly savage, so much so that Nearchus and Cleomenes found somewhere else to eat for weeks.

But when we marched for Athens, my troop shone like the sun, and if their equipment wasn’t as spectacular as the Athenians’, the way they filed off from the right looked like a trick rider’s performance in the hippodrome, and every spear was held just so.

Polystratus got himself a trumpet. It wasn’t like any other trumpet in the Macedonian army – it must have been Keltoi or Thracian, with a hideous animal’s head and a long mouthpiece. Niceas, the Athenian, made a scabbard for it.

We went up over the passes, and came down the other side into Attika, the richest province in the Greek world. I couldn’t believe how thickly settled it was. There was a farm at every turn of the road, and it was a struggle every night after we came down the passes to find a campsite large enough for two hundred horse and their mounts and servants. We camped in farm fields, we camped on somebody’s recently cut oat stubble – gods, Attika is rich.

It was our third day. On the second, priests came out and blessed us, blessed the road, and welcomed the ashes of their dead home. But on the third, we met the families of the dead men.

Some of them were men I’d killed myself – panicked men who did me no harm, killed in the rout like cattle or sheep in a pen. It is one thing to kill them, and another to be blessed by their priests, and then to have to meet their wives, their sons and daughters – their parents.

They bore us no love, either. It was the mothers, I think, who got to me most. Their eyes would caress me with a kind of ecstatic hate – in my fine armour and on my mighty Poseidon, I was the Macedonian . Alexander looked young and innocent – and beautiful (unless you looked deep into his eyes). I looked young and hard and had a big, ugly nose.