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

Hecataeus smiled about one quarter of a smile. ‘My lord, what exactly can I offer Parmenio? He has the army.’

Again, there was something so . . . well, so reasonable about Hecataeus – it was not as if he was bargaining on behalf of a possible traitor. He was asking fair questions. He was a very able man.

‘Short of the kingdom, you may offer him anything,’ Alexander said.

Hecataeus shook his head. ‘I’m too small a man to make such an offer,’ he said. ‘I would go with concrete terms, if I must do this job.’

Alexander nodded. ‘Well said. Very good, then. Parmenio may have the first satrapy of the spear-won lands of Asia. The highest commands for his sons and himself – my right hand.’ He looked at Hecataeus.

The herald nodded. ‘That’s very helpful, lord. On those lines, I can negotiate.’

Alexander looked around. He was selling the commands of his kingdom to a man who’d either been a rival or held aloof. And we, his loyal inner circle, were clearly not going to get those commands.

Black Cleitus made a face. ‘I take it I shouldn’t get used to commanding the Hetaeroi,’ he said.

Alexander slapped his shoulder. ‘Parmenio owns the love of more of my subjects than I do,’ he said. ‘The man has most of the army, and most of the lowland barons. In time, Ptolemy can take over his faction, but for now, I need him. He’s sixty-five – he’ll be dead soon enough. In the meantime – yes. Make room, friends. The sons of Parmenio will be plucking the choicest fruits.’ He shrugged. Parmenio’s sons had not been pages. ‘I expect he’ll want Philotas as the commander of the Hetaeroi.’ He nodded to me and Cleitus. ‘But you two will command the squadrons.’

Then Alexander turned to me. ‘I have a mission for you, as well, son of Lagus, wily Odysseus.’

Well, who dislikes good flattery? ‘At your service, my king,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I’m sending you to the king of the Agrianians,’ he said. ‘Get me as many of his warriors as you can arrange. Psiloi and Peltastoi – light-armed men to replace all the light-armed men my pater has sent to Asia.’

That was our first intimation that the king intended an immediate campaign.

‘Are we going to war?’ I asked.

Antipater coughed. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘We are trying to negotiate from a position of relative strength, and a thousand light-armed men will make us look the readier to march.’

Alexander smiled. He looked around, caught every eye. ‘What he means is, yes, unless all my enemies miraculously knuckle under, I’ll be fighting all summer.’ His grin became wolfish. ‘I have cavalry, and enough heavy foot. Go and get Langarus to hand over some prime men. And hurry back.’

So I nodded. Even though I was again going to be absent while the big decisions were made.

In fact, I’d already seen the lay of the land. Alexander trusted us – his young inner circle – with the difficult missions. But it would be Antipater’s generation – Antipater and Parmenio and such men – who would lead the crusade into Asia. Not us.

I had a long ride into Illyria to ponder the ways of kings. I took my troop of grooms, and bandits fled at our approach. It was very gratifying. We swept the high passes clear. We practised climbing above the passes and closing both ends at once, so we could catch the bandits – and it worked twice (and not the other ten times!). Once, with Polystratus scouting, we took a whole band of them – scarecrows with armour – and executed all of them, leaving their corpses in trees as a warning to future generations.

So by the time we came down into mountainous Agriania, word of our exploits had run ahead of us.

Alexander’s young wife was pregnant. Her father quite happily called out a band of picked warriors – useless mouths, he called them. Many of them were his own bodyguard – the shield-bearers, he called them in his own tongue – in Greek, we called them hypaspists. He gave me almost six hundred men – well armoured, but light-footed. And he promised to come with his own army if Alexander summoned him.

That was a well-planned marriage. The girl beamed adoringly and waited to be summoned to Pella. For all I know, she’s still waiting.

We returned to Macedon by a different set of passes, and the Agrianians loved our game of climbing high above the passes and then closing both ends at once. In fact, they maintained – as a nation of mountaineers – that they’d invented it.

Their principal warrior was ‘Prince’ Alectus. He was no more a prince than I, but an old war hound. He was the hairiest man I’d ever seen – naked, he looked more like a dog, despite his heavy muscles. He had red-grey curly hair, even in his ears. To a Greek, he was impossibly ugly, with his wiry hair and his intricate tattoos.

He shocked me, the first night on the road home, by asking me if I was an educated man, and then debating with me about the gods. He was widely read, and yet he drew his own conclusions from what he read.

‘Ever think that all this killing might be wrong, lad?’ he asked me, that first night. He was drinking my wine in my tent. None of the Agrianians had a tent.

‘Of course I’ve thought it,’ I said. ‘All you have to do is look at a dead man’s widow.’

Alectus nodded. ‘Or his children, eh?’

‘Some men are evil,’ I said, drunkenly cutting across a whole lot of arguments. Aristotle would not have approved.

Alectus sneered. ‘And you only kill the evil ones, eh?’

That shut me up.

He was an old barbarian and he’d done a lot of killing, and he was beginning to doubt the whole game. ‘What if there’s nothing but this world?’ he asked, on the fourth bowl of wine.

‘Oh?’ I asked. ‘And who made it?’

Alectus shrugged. ‘If a god made it, what does he want? I mean, if I make a shield, it’s because one of the lads needs a shield. Eh?’

‘Where are we going with this?’ I asked.

‘Talk goes with wine,’ Alectus said. ‘I like both. I used to like a good fight. But now, I’m beginning to wonder.’

‘Are all you hill men philosophers?’ I asked.

Alectus spat. ‘As far as I can tell, your philosophers ain’t interested in what’s good for men. They’re interested in sounding good and pompous, eh? None of them seems to be willing to tell me what the gods think of killing.’

‘Go to Delphi!’ I said. I had meant to say it with a sneer, but I’m afraid – then and now – that I have a great respect for oracles.

Alectus drank off his wine. ‘You may actually have the makings of a wise man, Macedonian. Will Alexander take me to Delphi?’

I shrugged. ‘No idea. But . . . if we march on Greece, we’ll have to go right past the shrine.’

Alectus lifted the whole bowl and poured a libation. ‘To Delphic Apollo and his oracle,’ he said, and drank some. ‘That was god-given advice, young man. I’ll pay more heed to you in the morning.’

And then he picked up his sword and walked off into the night.

I liked Alectus.

We were two weeks getting back to Pella and my farms fed the Agrianians. I met up with Heron for the first time in two years and he embraced me – and I freely gave him almost a quarter of my farms. Loyalty is rare, young man. It needs rich reward.

And when we reached Pella, I swore out a warrant at the treasury for the value of the food my farms had provided to the barbarian auxiliaries. That got me a two-year remission of taxes.

Which meant that I made a profit – if a small one – on bringing the Agrianians to Pella.

I won’t belabour this point. But I mention it so that you know that managing a great estate is a matter of constant work and constant alertness to opportunity. It is much easier to fritter a great estate away than to protect and expand it.