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

Marsyas listened, picked up a lyre and began to tune it. Lyres take a lot of tuning, I always find, but Marsyas could tune them as fast as I could kill a deer – I’ve known him take an instrument down from the wall of some strange hold and tune it while talking and go straight to playing. I suspect that being that fast to tune an instrument is a significant skill – if I’d ever learned to tune a lyre, I’d be a far sight better at playing one, I’ll wager.

At any rate, he tuned the lyre – and started to play. He played a song, shook his head, played another, made a face, played a line or a snatch of a line.

He nodded to Philip Longsword, who was watching with rapt admiration. Everyone loves music, and it’s rare in a marching camp. It was still dark, and the slaves were packing, and here’s this Macedonian nobleman playing the lyre on the next stool – of course Philip was attentive.

‘Show me your marching pace,’ Marsyas said.

So Philip walked up and down a few times.

Marsyas nodded and tried other things. The only one I knew was the beat of the rhapsodes singing the Iliad . Who knew you could march to the Iliad ?

Marsyas did.

Now you do, too.

That day, we were on parade with all the other taxeis, all our gear packed. There was some sarcastic applause from the veterans. And we were in all our kit, with spears and shields.

Twice that day, we ran a stade. Just one stade – it was enough. And then we marched, with those who knew the Iliad shouting the verses until our voices were shot. We concentrated on the first fifty lines. For some of the Agrianians, it was the first Greek they had ever learned.

That night, we made camp, lit fires, ate and threw javelins.

It was a pretty sad exhibition. The Agrianians made the Macedonians look really bad. No, that’s not fair. The Macedonians were really bad, and the Agrianians were better. The trouble was that in recruiting the biggest men, we’d taken more of the city boys who were rich and got meat every day, and fewer of the Pellan farm boys who could bring down a rabbit with a stone.

And the next day, we ran three times, a stade each time, and that night we threw javelins, and this time I offered a big silver four-drachma piece to each of the twenty best javelin men. We threw at marks.

I was the best javelin man. That made me happy. Still does. A thousand men, and I could throw farther, harder and more accurately.

The next day, we sang the first fifty lines of the Iliad again, as often as I had the wind to sing it, and we ran three times, a stade each time. And that night, the winners of the javelin throw each took twenty students and ran a javelin class. Alectus and Philip Longsword walked around preventing chaos and bad feeling. I taught a bunch of city boys.

I hit one with my fist when he was slow and stupid. He cried.

I hit him again. That’s what you did to pages who cried. You beat them until they didn’t cry any more.

That night – I think we’d been on the road a week – Polystratus lay next to me in the tent. I could feel that he had something to say, because he was lying on his back, not curling up at arm’s length.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘Say it.’

Polystratus shrugged in the darkness. Again, when you know a man – file partner or servant – or lover – you really don’t need to see them to feel their postures, do you?

‘That boy you smacked,’ Polystratus said. ‘He’s not the swiftest horse in the barn, is he?’

I sighed.

‘But lord, he’s not a royal page. And if I were you, I wouldn’t be using your precious pages as a standard of behaviour.’ He chuckled without mirth. ‘Beating children is foolish. You wouldn’t catch a Thracian beating a child, unless the child was very wicked or very foolish. Beating children breaks their spirits. Make their spirits strong – teach them to rule themselves.’

‘My, aren’t you the philosopher,’ I said.

‘You only know one way.’ He shrugged again. ‘It is a bad way.’

His tone was so final, and so judgemental, that I was angry. ‘What do you know?’ I asked. ‘You were a slave.’

He laughed. ‘So?’ he asked. ‘I know unhappy people when I see them. Your pages are all hate and sorrow. You were yourself, until . . .’ He chuckled again.

‘Until Pater bought you,’ he said.

‘And Iphegenia,’ he added. ‘Of course, I found her for you, too.’

‘Damn you, Thracian,’ I said. ‘I’m just toughening him up.’

Polystratus grunted. ‘Do all horses respond to the same training? All dogs?’

‘Of course not,’ I answered. ‘Every horse needs to be taught according to temperament – very well, you bastard, I understand what you are saying.’ In truth, I remember this so well because I remember lying there, shaking my head.

But you’ll note, young Satyrus, that while I have a corps of royal pages, I don’t let them beat their young ones or rape them either. Lesson learned. Maybe my pack won’t hunt quite as hard. But maybe they won’t all turn on each other as adults, either.

I’m leaving a great deal out. Many evenings I worked with my own regiment and then had to go to Alexander’s tent to be there for the councils. Alexander was behaving recklessly – he was taking almost all the troops he had and marching on Thessaly, which had refused to pay the tribute they had paid to Philip. Let’s put it this way – everyone refused to pay their tribute. The Macedonian Empire had ceased to be. Antipater felt that this was to be expected – and in Pella, he’d said as often as he could that all we had to do was work slowly, consolidate the gains at home – the so-called upper provinces – replenish the treasury and we’d be in fine shape in five years. He insisted that the immediate threat was from Attalus and Parmenio.

And Alexander marched away and left him regent, with Philip’s old cavalrymen and infantrymen and nothing else to stop the Thracians and the Illyrians. Antipater was a good loser – he accepted his fate well enough. The truth – at least, the truth as I see it – was that Antipater always played both sides. He helped murder Philip – for all I knew, he did all the dirty work himself – and he was right there to help Alexander take control. But we all knew he was personally and professionally close to Parmenio and to Attalus. He had a foot in both camps. If the foolish blond boy marched away and lost the army, why, Antipater would have maintained order, crowned Cleopatra’s son and called for Attalus to return from Asia. Or so I guess.

We all knew we were headed for Thessaly, which had the finest cavalry in the Greek world and the plains on which to deploy them.

But the Thessalians, as our scouts discovered, didn’t intend to fight a cavalry battle. Instead, they called up their feudal army and rolled it into the Vale of Tempe, twenty thousand men to our ten thousand, and waited for us. By the time my boys were throwing javelins in the evening, I knew we were going to have to fight the Thessalians, who, until a few weeks before, had been so closely wedded to us as to be cousins, if not brothers. And Parmenio, who was, remember, the head of the ‘lowland aristocrat’ faction, was himself half Thessalian.

You have to wonder what, exactly, was passing between Parmenio, Attalus and Antipater.

On our ninth day, we marched into the Vale of Tempe, with Mount Olympus on one side of us and Mount Ossa on the other side. Polystratus found me marching with my file, and informed me that the king wanted me.

I ordered Polystratus off his horse and gave him my aspis to carry, and laughed at his glare.

‘Just toughening you up,’ I said, and rode away on his horse.

Alexander was out front with the Prodromoi. He had Cassander, Philip the Red and a few of the other oldsters with him, and Laodon. I could see a dozen Thessalian nobles in brilliant tack, covered with gold, just riding away with a herald.