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

It was far worse than I thought. Olympias flushed and her eyes locked with mine – Alexander froze, and Antipater’s eyes flicked between Alexander and me.

‘Give it to me,’ Olympias said. ‘Have you read it?’

I looked her right in the eye – no mean feat, friend – and said, ‘No.’ But I smiled when I said it, to rob the denial of all meaning. I was playing very hard.

Alexander flicked a look at me – and then at his mother. ‘Mother?’ he asked quietly.

‘I know they are as guilty as if they held the knife themselves,’ I said. I carefully avoided mentioning that I now suspected that they weren’t alone in being guilty.

You may ask why I was working the situation so hard – eh? No? You understand, don’t you, boy? Palace revolution isn’t that alien to you, is it? All the rules were changing that night. I was determined to be a main player, and not a small one. Great things grow from small – that is how the interplay of power works. I had missed some important events – I already feared that I had been supplanted as Hetaeroi commander, and I was correct. Six hours’ absence – doing the king’s secret mission – and I was no longer commanding the Hetaeroi. You get it?

Good. I’ll move on.

Olympias came up to me. She was so small that, standing, her head came just above my shoulders. ‘Give me the scrolls,’ she said.

I sent Polystratus to the stables for them.

‘What do you think I should do with them, son of Lagus?’ she asked.

I smiled at her, an actor on a stage. ‘Why, Lady Queen, you should do whatever is best for Macedon,’ I said.

She actually smiled. ‘I like you, Ptolemy,’ she said.

Oh, I feared her. It was all I could do to look into her beautiful eyes and smile back, instead of shitting myself in fear. Because she was considering having me killed, right then and there.

It was almost too late when I realised that I was playing the wrong game. I was still playing the game of pages, whereby I could learn secrets to be the more trusted by the inner circle.

The game had changed. Alexander was king, and now he was playing for the preservation of power, and he observed no rules.

But I had not failed utterly, and Alexander embraced me again. ‘Ptolemy is one of my few friends, Mother,’ he said. ‘You want to hate him because he is as intelligent as we are. Do not. That is my express wish.’

I felt the arrow slicing down my cheek as it passed – death was that close.

Olympias met her son’s eyes, and then looked up at me. ‘If you read those letters, you are a fool. If you did not, you are a different type of fool. The correct action would have been to burn them with the house. Do you understand, young Ptolemy?’

I shrugged. I was young, foolish, vain and brave. ‘Perhaps the correct action was to make copies,’ I said.

Alexander turned and handed me a cup of wine. ‘Only if you plan to kill me and become king,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think you are in that game.’

‘Never,’ I said.

Alexander nodded. ‘Stop playing with fire, my friend. Mother, he never read the letters. He’s baiting you.’

Damn him, he was right.

Olympias sneered. ‘Such a dangerous game,’ she said quietly. ‘I do like you, young Ptolemy.’

I went to bed, still alive, and awoke, still alive. I learned a great deal in that exchange, and I never tried to match wits with Olympias head to head again. On the other hand, I was invited to council that morning, as soon as I was dressed.

Alexander presented himself to the ambassadors, and was acclaimed hegemon as his father had been.

And then Alexander ordered Pausanias’s corpse to be spiked to a tree. In public.

Philip’s corpse was stinking – which many saw as an omen. The ambassadors and the army were already present, so we rushed the burial – his tomb was ready, had been ready since he took the wound fighting the Thracians and began to think of mortality (and immortality).

So the next morning, just two days after the murder, we marched to his tomb, the parade in the same order as the parade into the theatre had been, except that my squadron of Hetaeroi – not Cleitus’s squadron – marched first.

We got to the tomb, and the priest of Apollo poured libations and prayed and we sacrificed a bull, four black rams and the two younger sons of Aeropus. My prisoners. They were drugged, and died as quietly as the bull.

This public revenge settled the matter of murder, at least among the commons.

But among the noble factions, men saw it as a clean-up operation, and many men looked at Antipater.

And Olympias.

After that, the factions were quiet. In fact, they were silent .

We had two immediate problems after settling the local population and killing the two possible immediate rivals. They were that the Greek states would almost certainly revolt, whatever their ambassadors said – and worst of all, Attalus, bloody Attalus, and Parmenio, whichever side he chose to be on, were in Asia with the cream of the army.

And Antipater predicted that every province would revolt except the home provinces.

Well, he was right. We were just starting to move the court back to Pella when the news came trickling in – two big Thracian raids and a string of insults from the Illyrians. The Boeotians expelled their garrison and abrogated the League of Corinth. Demosthenes made a tremendous show in the Athenian Assembly. His daughter had died less than a week before – but he threw off his mourning and went to the Assembly in white, wearing a garland of flowers and saying that Greece was saved.

Bad news travels fast.

There was nothing we could do immediately. Everything depended on timing, luck, the fortune of the gods – and the loyalty of the rump of the army.

Alexander took two steps immediately. We held a council the first night in Pella – Philip was seven days dead by then. Olympias was amusing herself by celebrating his death with more abandon than old Demosthenes. She had a sort of honesty to her, I’ll give her that. She decorated Pausanias’s body as if he were a hero, not a regicide.

Macedon, eh?

At any rate, we held an inner council the first night in Pella. Antipater was there, and Alexander the Highlander, who dealt pragmatically with the death of both his brothers. Olympias was excluded. Laodon was there – he’d been over the border in Thessaly, where Philip had sent him into exile, and he was already back. Erigyus was on his way and the actor, Thessalus, was recalled. So were some other favourites – mostly small men, but Philip had exiled quite a few of them when Alexander’s star began to wane at court.

Laodon had a trusted man – a Macedonian, a veteran, a man whom Philip had trusted as a herald and a messenger, but who had a special relationship with Laodon. Hecataeus was his name, and he’d been Alexander’s go-between with both Laodon and with Philip during his exile.

Hecataeus was a complex man – no simple image fits him. He was an excellent soldier, and because of it had made his way from the ranks to effective command of a taxeis under Amyntas. But he was both subtle and utterly honest – a rare and wonderful combination. Men – great men – trusted him. He was, in fact, the ideal herald – respected for his scars and war stories, trusted because he always kept faith, discreet with what he learned. I was not everywhere – I don’t know what the roots of his alliance with Alexander were.

But at the council, Alexander ordered him to go to Parmenio. ‘Bring him over to me, and order him to kill Attalus,’ Alexander said.

Antipater shook his head. ‘You may as well order the poor man to kill the Great King and conquer Asia,’ he said.

Alexander pursed his lips. ‘No, those things are for me to do,’ he answered, as if the comment were to be taken seriously.