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

I nodded. ‘What if I ask you questions and I can stand the answers?’ I asked.

‘Then you will be unlike any man I’ve ever known,’ she said.

‘Did the Pythia please you?’ I asked.

‘Beautifully. She is a very skilled lover. Priestesses of Apollo always are.’ She shrugged. ‘And she is in a position to aid me. Delphi has powerful friends, and makes a powerful friend, too.’

I must have looked spectacularly dense. She made a motion with her hand – dimissal, annoyance. ‘Do you know that in every relationship, there comes a moment when I ask myself – Aphrodite, is he as dumb as he seems?’ Her eyes bored into mine.

Note that we were not having my conversation – the one where I tasked her with infidelity. I was on the defensive and losing ground more quickly than a badly ordered phalanx in a rout. ‘Well?’

‘She—’

‘I did not make love to her because she can help the crusade in Asia,’ Thaïs said. ‘But she can do us more service than ten thousand hoplites. Because Delphi is the clearing house of information for all of Hellas – and Asia, too. Do you understand?’

I’m sure I nodded. In truth, I didn’t understand. Not until much later.

But I was smart enough to know that I didn’t want to lose her, not for anything.

I nodded slowly. The spear-point was there, somewhere down in my belly, grating softly against my ribs, but I was going to learn to deal with it, because this was the woman I wanted.

‘She was better than me?’ my mouth asked before my brain could stop it.

Thaïs reached out a hand and caught my face in it. ‘I never, ever compare. Don’t ever ask me to again.’

I wanted to cry.

She shook her head. ‘I will teach you the rules, love. It will be worth it. Love, far from being scary, dangerous and horrid, is in fact a marvellous engine of energy and creation – but it needs a harness, and that harness is rules. Please?’ she asked, waiting for me to let her on to my lap.

I hesitated.

‘Ptolemy,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to play at this many times. If you cannot live with me as I am – let’s part now. Right now, this instant. Otherwise, let’s move on and make love. The talking is done.’ She smiled, and it wasn’t a hurt smile or a difficult smile – but it was a deeply knowledgeable one. ‘Choose.’

I looked into those remarkable blue eyes. ‘You mean, I can choose between sending you away, and having the best sex of my life?’ I sighed. ‘I don’t know. I need time to think,’ I said, while reaching my warm hands under her gown.

‘Humour,’ she said, through my kisses, ‘is your outstanding virtue.’

‘I thought it was my large penis,’ I said.

She laughed into my mouth. We were warm.

We spent the winter training north of Pella. This was new. As I’ve said, Philip always sent the army home for the winter. Alexander did not. He kept the entire force in the field – funded by the League of Corinth, at a drachma per soldier per day.

We climbed mountains in the snow.

We practised seizing ridges and passes. In the snow.

We charged lines of straw dummies with our lances. On horseback. In the snow.

We practised setting camp and setting fires, digging in, collecting forage – in the snow.

And we drilled.

Ares, it was endless.

Look, I’m good at drill. I love drill. I love the sort of ritual-team-dance aspect to drill – the stamp of a thousand perfectly timed feet sends a thrill down my spine. But that winter was absurd. We drilled and drilled and drilled, and I’m not sure that there’s any army in history that spent as much time practising the Spartan Counter-March as we did. Every day, five or six times a day – with wheeling, sprinting, breaking and reforming, marching to the left, right and rear by files, half-files and double files. On and on.

Every damn day.

The troopers cursed him. The aristocrats were good officers at first, but after two months – remember, we’d been at it all summer, too – people just wanted a cup of wine and a fuck.

I had to send Thaïs away, because men were starting to hate me for having her. Which was sad, because she loved it, and she kept people amused – she’d show up in the phalanx in armour and already know the drill, she’d ride a horse shooting a bow, she’d go off with the scouts until they caught her – she could easily pass for a man, but something often gave her away, too.

She had found a hobby. I didn’t know what it was and I knew I wasn’t allowed to ask, but she suddenly wrote a great many letters – on and on, really. Sometimes a dozen a day. And she bought a pair of Thracian slaves – and sent one home. Into the mountains. I didn’t understand that at all.

She smiled at me and dared me to ask.

At any rate, after a month I didn’t have to pay attention any more, because I had to send her to my estates. After that, the rest of the winter was a blur of marching and climbing and freezing cold – you climb a mountain in two feet of snow wearing open-toed boots. Go ahead. The pezhetaeroi were in sandals. I had a horse, most of the time – a sort of living leg-warmer.

I knew what we were doing. We were going to blow the Thracians right out of their northern kingdom and carve a road to the Danube – to buy Antipater a defensible border while we were away conquering Asia. It was a good plan, in a general, strategic way. But it was an obvious plan, and every man, woman and child on both sides of the nebulous border between Macedon and the wild Thracians knew we were coming as soon as the passes were free of snow.

Alexander did have one shaved knucklebone, though. He sent our fleet – twenty triremes and some supply ships – from Amphilopolis, around through the Dardanelles and into the Euxine Sea. In part it was exploration – the Macedonian fleet had never attempted to enter the Euxine. In part it was sheer daring – we knew nothing of the mouth of the Danube, although we found some Amphilopolans who had traded there. But it was a brilliant outflanking move. If it worked. The ships would leave well before the army marched. If the army marched.

One night, I lay in some straw between Cleitus and the king. We were passing a gourd full of wine. Outside, the wind howled. Alectus had just informed the king that we’d lost a little over a hundred men to exposure and the arrows of the Lord of Contagion that month.

I was keeping the Military Journal, by then – in effect, I coordinated everyone’s military reporting, and that had become my major job. Antipater did it for Philip, and he taught me – but I added to the job. I went around to all the regiments and appointed a record-keeping officer – sometimes with the help of the commander, and sometimes in spite of him. Perdiccas called my officers the ‘king’s spies’. The thing was, the king needed to know the truth. Bluster didn’t cut it when you needed a return of effective soldiers, or when we needed to know how many horses and how many riders were available for a particular mission, or which horses needed new tack before the army could march.

And at the same time, the king was paying – with League funds – for a gradual re-armouring of the whole Macedonian army. And that cost money, but it also required endless lists, inventories, record-keeping, tracking inventory . . .

It was all glory and arete, let me tell you.

At any rate, that’s why I was lying wrapped in my cloak in a pile of straw in a freezing-cold barn in northern Macedon, snuggled between the commander of the king’s bodyguard and the king himself, listening to Alectus tell us his figures on sick and injured, with every word sending plumes of mist rising from his mouth. It was cold.

Alexander dismissed him with a cup of hot wine and rolled over. ‘As soon as the passes are clear,’ he said dreamily.