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

But Pausanias did something incredibly brave. He did what Attalus never imagined he’d dare to – he swore a complaint. He admitted that he’d been raped. In effect, he admitted his weakness, but at high political cost to Attalus, who thought that the man would suffer in silence.

Attalus pretended that nothing had happened, but they watched – I heard this from Nearchus and from Black Cleitus too – as they watched, Philip turned his back on his senior adviser.

Later – an hour later – when Attalus demanded my head on a platter, the king again turned his back on Attalus. He didn’t even respond.

But still later – and very drunk – Philip also dismissed the charges against Attalus, with a weak joke about how everyone knew that Pausanias was prone to exaggerate. The ‘joke’ carried – intended or not – the suggestion that Pausanias had wanted what happened.

Pausanias turned very pale. Nearchus, who was closest to him, said for the rest of his life that Pausanias stumbled as if he’d been struck.

The next day Philip attended the newborn’s naming ceremony. He held the squawking infant high in front of a thousand Macedonians and named him Caranus – the name of the founder of the dynasty, and thus a strong suggestion that he would be King of Macedon. Alexander held his tongue. But he was as pale as Pausanias that night. That part I saw. And the king kept his back resolutely to Attalus, who was forced to accept that the birth of his grand-nephew wasn’t going to save him from the king’s anger.

And that day – almost convenient, the timing was – we received a dispatch from Parmenio, who was already in the field in Asia, saying that he had taken Ephesus, the mighty city of Artemis, without a fight – that they had opened their gates to him – and that he had set up an image of Philip beside the image of Artemis in the great temple.

All the court applauded. Even the ambassadors applauded. Alexander spilled his wine and then apologised for his clumsiness.

But after two more days of it, Attalus gathered his staff and his picked men – and Diomedes – and rode away to Asia with recruits and reinforcements for Parmenio. He was supposed to have had a major role in the ceremonies at Aegae, but he left. I still think that the king ordered him to go. I think it was something of a working exile.

Alexander knew all about the dispatch from Asia, and he knew all about the preparations for the ornate wedding of his sister. He watched those preparations with the same anger he showed over the preparations for war in Asia. He watched the priests gather, watched Olympias arrange for a new gown with new, heavy gold jewellery, watched the musicians practise.

‘The Athenians, at least, will view us with the contempt we deserve.’ Alexander shrugged. He indicated a new statue of Philip in marble with bronze eyes, being loaded on a cart.

‘My father, the god,’ he said.

In fact, Philip seemed to have included himself in the pantheon – a sort of unlucky thirteenth god, but he’d built a small temple at Olympias that could be interpreted as a temple to Philip, and now, in the procession of the gods, he’d included an image of himself. And Parmenio had put his image in the Temple of Artemis. Which seemed to me like hubris.

On the other hand, I was inclined to think that the Athenians would think whatever they were told, at least until they’d rebuilt their fortunes. I had begun to experience that cynicism that comes easily to young people. And to anyone who has anything to do with politics.

We travelled north from Pella to the old capital. Pausanias travelled with us. No one could make a joke near him, but he was alive and apparently unbroken, although pale and subdued. If he had been prone to exaggeration before, now he was merely silent. His hands shook all the time.

We rode up to the old capital in a band, like we were going to war. All the older pages wore armour, and the younger ones too, if they owned any. We didn’t dare go to the armoury, which Attalus virtually owned. I, for one, thought his ‘exile’ was a ruse and suspected he was out in the countryside with a band of his retainers, ready to attack us. There was an agora rumour that he meant to kill the king and seize power.

I was concerned to see that Olympias and her household travelled with us. She was as big a target as we were, and Attalus had apparently stated – in his rage the day after I taught Diomedes a lesson – that Olympias had arranged the whole thing and he’d have her killed. Apparently Attalus told the king – repeatedly, right up until the moment he left for Asia – that Olympias and Alexander were plotting his death.

The glories of Macedon, eh?

But Attalus didn’t come with us to Aegae. And Parmenio, the steadiest of his generation except for Antipater, was in Asia. And Antipater was nowhere to be found – in fact, he, too, was in self-imposed exile, on his farms.

We rode through a summer landscape of prosperity that thinly covered a state in which we were near to civil war – nearer than we had been in fifty years. Rumours were everywhere.

I remember that on the second day out of Pella, we were alerted by Polystratus that there was a column of foreigners coming the other way, and we took up our battle stations – Attalus employed a lot of Thracians, and we were ready for an attack.

These weren’t Thracians, but Athenian traders on their way to Pella, where they imagined the court to be. Nearchus turned them around, brusquely enough, but when we discovered that they had a cargo of swords and sword blades, we asked them to open their bales, and we probably put them in profit on the spot – fifty of the richest young men in Macedon. The Athenians had Keltoi swords from north of Illyria, beautiful swords with long, leaf-shaped blades and deep central fullers – much stiffer and heavier than our swords or Greek swords, but easy in the hand, and the longer blades promised a longer reach on horseback.

One of the traders showed me how the Keltoi held their swords, with a thumb pressed into the hollow of the blade. I bought the sword, and rode north playing with it. It was a foot longer than my xiphos.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell. What I wanted to tell is that Pausanias came alive at the sight of the blades. He was poor, and I loaned him money, and he purchased a beautiful weapon – the size of a xiphos, but with that heavy leaf blade, sharper than a bronze razor and with an African ivory hilt worked like a chariot and a running team. Superb work.

For as long as he was buying the sword, Pausanias was animated and alive. Even his hair seemed to regain its vibrancy.

And then it was gone. And he sank back into himself, and his face went slack, as if he’d taken a death blow.

We reached Aegae about the same time as the Athenian embassy. I looked for men I knew – I had rather hoped to see Kineas or Diodorus. But the Athenians had not sent any of their great men, except Phokion, and he was a guest friend of the king. He was kind enough to remember me. He clasped my arm – warrior to warrior, a nice compliment.

‘Why are you wearing armour, son of Lagus?’ he asked.

‘Difficult times,’ I said, looking elsewhere. Great as was my respect for the Athenian strategos, I was not going to tell him about our internal squabbles.

Indeed, upon arrival at Aegae, we all breathed a great sigh of relief. Aegae was sacred ground – no one would defile it with treason. Alexander and Olympias and Pausanias and I should all be safe, at least for the next fifteen days. Or so we reckoned.

That night, I played knucklebones with Nearchus and Black Cleitus, drank too much, lost at Polis to Alexander. He was withdrawn, even by his own standards.

I offered to go and check on Pausanias, and Alexander shook his head and held out his wine cup to have it refilled. ‘Pausanias is with my mother, now,’ he said. He said it in much the same voice as a man might have said that another man had died.