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

‘Alexander downed his opponent with the Harmodius Blow,’ Cleitus the sword master said. He wasn’t a clever man, and his flattery rarely went well with the prince. He was a good swordsman, though.

‘Every idiot knows how to do it,’ Alexander spat. He stood by himself, arms across his chest, the very image of adolescent anger.

Aristotle looked around. I fancied he caught my eye – perhaps it was just my imagination. ‘Victors should be gracious,’ Aristotle said.

‘I am gracious,’ Alexander retorted.

‘No,’ said Aristotle. ‘You are not.’

Their eyes locked, and all the other boys shuffled away.

‘You desire to be Achilles? You strive always to be first and best?’ His old tutor, Lysimachus of Acarnia, who had complete control of the younger Alexander before Aristotle came, called himself Phoenix, called Hephaestion Patroclus and called Alexander Achilles. Aristotle was human enough to resent the old tutor and his lickspittle ways.

Alexander looked away in angry silence.

Aristotle stepped closer. ‘Which boy did you put down with this Harmodius Blow, Prince?’

Alexander shrugged. ‘It does not matter.’

‘Ptolemy?’ Aristotle asked.

‘No,’ Alexander spat. ‘He . . .’ Then he lapsed into silence.

‘It was me, lord,’ Black Cleitus said. He was rueful. ‘Had it coming.’

Aristotle looked at Cleitus. Then at me.

Leonidas’s straight back and flared nostrils suggested that he was none too pleased by this intrusion of the academic into the athletic. ‘Held the boy’s hair. He was decent enough.’

Aristotle looked around again, like a good hunting dog catching the scent of a distant and elusive prey.

He looked at Amyntas, with a heavy bandage around his temples. The same bandage that Cleitus wore. ‘Who fought Amyntas?’ he asked.

‘I did,’ I allowed.

‘The same way?’ Aristotle asked, splaying two fingers on Amyntas’s head and measuring the blow.

I shrugged.

Alexander flushed.

Aristotle laughed. ‘Alexander, excellence lies in being better than other men – not in other men being worse than you. I can read you like a book, boy.’

Alexander looked as if he might cry.

What is hard to explain in this schoolboy reminiscence is that I could understand. Alexander felt I had betrayed him. He’d rescued me from Leonidas only to have me go first and throw his blow – a blow he’d risen in the dawn to practise.

So I stepped right up next to the prince and bowed my head. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

Alexander didn’t look at me. ‘No. I was not behaving well.’ His voice was choked, as if he’d just heard that a favourite was dead.

‘I’m sorry anyway,’ I said.

My pater used to say that if you truly want to know a man, spend a week with him in the wilderness. No one can hide his true self from the companions of the hunt. Freezing rain, stinging nettles, a bad cut from a spear-point, an unwanted offer of sex from one of the oldsters – all the tests of young manhood are waiting in the hills and deep woods, and that’s before you meet the boar or the wolf with nothing between you but an ash staff and a few inches of cold iron.

A few days after the sword incident, Erygius and Laodon came from Pella with some of the king’s companions – his Hetaeroi, friends and bodyguards and inner council of state all in one – to take us hunting. It was a test and a vacation all in one.

Macedonian nobles do not hunt like Greek aristocrats, and despite the many ways we copy them, in hunting we have our own ways.

We use dogs to locate the quarry, and other dogs to run it down, and we follow our dogs on horseback. Depending on terrain and the animal we’re after, we stay mounted with spears or dismount with spears. The height of courage is to take a boar on foot. Greeks do it the same way, but they don’t use horses, and that’s slower. And they don’t use a double-bladed axe to finish the boar, and that’s just foolishness. Trying to finish a boar with a spear is . . . well, it is a good way to reduce your supply of available noblemen.

It was autumn, and we went north and west, into Lychnitis. Lychnitis is beautiful – low hills that rise gently into mountains, and old forests that men have never cut, not even in the age of heroes. There’re trees lying on the forest floor that are as thick as a horse, and others as wide as a man is tall, so that to clamber over them is like climbing a low hill – and they’re just the downed trees. Giants rise on every side, green temples to the immortal gods, and every animal thrives there – the great deer, the elk and the boar. And the wolves.

And desperate men, of course.

We made our hunting camp in a long clearing that kings of Macedon had used for their hunting camps since the gods walked the earth. It was a defensible hilltop, high enough to give warning of approaches, low enough that the boys and the slaves didn’t have to go too far for the water that flowed across the northern base of the hill from the spring. The land about was scrubby, but rose to the west and north – to the north the camp was dominated by the first low mountain of Paeonia, and to the west the trees grew and grew, so that the Illyrians said a squirrel could jump from tree to tree from the hunting camp all the way to Hyperborea, where Apollo went to sleep.

The air was as clean and cold as a mother’s reproach. The animals were not afraid of men, and came right into camp to steal food. Our horses were skittish unless one of the boys was with them all the time. This was just a year after Alexander gained Bucephalus – a fine horse, though legend has improved him like it has polished his master. In fact, the prince had three big mounts for hunting and a palfrey for riding about. We all did – no one horse could keep going all day over that country, and we knocked them up badly. And that week, the rain fell as if Artemis disapproved of our slaughter – on and on, a light rain that never seemed to end, and in that kind of weather, horses get sick, go lame – die – as fast as children die in the same weather.

I had a horse I loved – a dark yellow golden coat, with blond mane and tail, tall and handsome and fast, which one of Pater’s grooms had rather impiously called ‘Poseidon’. But Poseidon he remained, and he had the god’s own strength, and in my eyes he was a better horse than Bucephalus or any other horse who’d ever lived. He was certainly faster than the mighty bay, but like the other boys, I was not foolish enough to show it.

We spent the first few days deer-hunting – for the meat. Boar-hunting and wolf-hunting are very noble, but they don’t feed the troops or the slaves, so a boar hunt usually starts with the massed slaughter of a deer herd. It wasn’t like sport at all, or even like war – more like a harvest, as the trained slaves and a handful of the king’s cavalry troopers wove screens of brush and set up a long alley of these hurdles, shaped like a giant funnel, between two hills. All the mounted men made a great line before dawn, and we picked our way across the hills, eyes watering with the effort of finding the next huntsman to the right and left in the rain and the dim light – I was off my horse twice on the first morning, flat on my face once and off Poseidon’s rump the other, caught looking the wrong way when he trotted under a low branch.

But we covered a lot of ground, driving the deer – and every other living thing – into the open end of the funnel. By full daylight, we closed the net tight. The first day was sloppy, and we pages were blamed for indiscipline. But on the second morning it was well done, and we drove fifty deer down the funnel into the older men, who killed them with swords and spears. Laodon was thrilling to watch, standing coolly with a short spear – a longche, just the height of a man, and heavy in the shaft. He killed a stag that charged him – stood his ground, shifted his weight and the animal was down, and then all the older men finished it. A few deer got past, of course, and soldiers with bows shot them down – shooting carefully, because hitting one of the king’s companions was a death sentence. Perhaps they were shooting too carefully, because one enormous stag, a monster as big as my horse, beloved of Artemis, burst through the archers and raced free up the hills and vanished into the deep trees.