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

‘Why don’t we go now?’ I asked. ‘I mean, as soon as I can put together a logistics head of food and fodder.’

Alexander laughed. ‘Because that trick will only work once, and I want to save it for a tougher opponent.’

Sometimes, he was scary.

But later, when Alectus was obviously still awake, I turned towards him.

‘What did you learn at Delphi?’ I asked him.

He laughed. ‘I learned that I will live a few years yet, and the king is going to be a god.’ He laughed again.

The passes cleared. Before they cleared, I had all the grain in north-west Macedon gathered in fifty new-built stone granaries that cost a fortune to build and required men to keep roaring fires going all day and all night to keep the ground soft and let the mortar harden without freezing.

All in a day’s work.

We marched from Amphilopolis, headed north, and we moved fast. We had preset camps with supplies waiting at every halt. We flew.

At Neopolis we joined up with our baggage train, and I was reunited with Thaïs, who was fresh and pink-cheeked and looked like a maiden. Most of the army’s wives and sweethearts – and prostitutes and sex toys – came to Neopolis and marched with us. We crossed the Nestus and marched all the way to Philipopolis. The Thracians were conspicuous by their absence.

Thaïs shared my tent and my cloak. Her field household was now reduced to three – her steward, Anonius, from Italy, a Thracian, Strako and a Libyan woman, Bella, a big, attractive black woman who drew the stares of half the army wherever she went. However, she seemed capable of taking care of herself.

The Thracian came and went, foraging and visiting. I warned Thaïs that he would desert, and she laughed.

‘Give me a little credit,’ she said. ‘I have a chain on him.’

The worm of jealousy gnawed at me. It must have showed.

She laughed in my face. ‘I don’t fuck slaves,’ she said, and walked out of my tent.

I hope I don’t make her sound like a harridan. She was not. But we had a spat every day – that’s how we were. She wanted to know every aspect of my business, and I wanted her to respect my privacy, and I didn’t see any need for her to know the inner workings of the Military Journal or the Hetaeroi.

Plenty of things to fight about. Making up was good, too.

Strako kept with us. That impressed me. After two weeks in enemy country, I rolled over, pinned her with a leg and said, ‘OK, I have to know. Why’s he loyal?’

She wasn’t angry – I never knew, with her. She laughed. ‘Well – since you’re keeping me so very warm . . .’ She kissed my nose. ‘I have his wife, child and brother at home. At your home. If he runs, they all die.’

Um. So soft. So beautiful. So funny, so warm.

So hard.

She also received as many letters as the king. I know that to be true, because I sometimes functioned as the Military Secretary, in those days. I certainly saw most of the king’s correspondence, and I saw all the messengers that came in from Pella – one a day, and sometimes two. She had at least two a day. Some were slaves, some were free, and once, her messenger was a Priest of Apollo.

Two more days, and we were at the Shipka Pass. And the wild Thracians were there – in huge numbers. They had thousands of warriors and more armed slaves, and they had a wagon lager of four wheeled carts lining the top of the pass, where it was about two stades wide.

The Prodromoi brought us word.

We rode forward and looked.

‘Impregnable,’ Hephaestion said. From his years of military experience.

But he was right. It was impregnable. Several of Philip’s campaigns had ended right here.

We made camp.

Just as the light was failing – it was late spring, and the days were getting long – Strako came into my tent. I hadn’t seen him in a day. He frowned at me and motioned at Thaïs.

Thaïs was under some cloaks, trying to get warm. She got up, and Strako began to talk while she put on boots.

‘He says the wagons aren’t for defence,’ Thaïs said.

‘How do you know about the wagons?’ I asked.

‘Strako was just up there. In their camp. Listen, love. Tell the king they plan to roll the wagons on you when you attack. And then charge you. They are hoping you’ll bring up artillery to shell the wagons. It is a ruse within a ruse.’ Thaïs listened to the man.

‘You speak Thracian?’ I asked.

‘It was a long winter,’ Thaïs insisted.

I heard the report to the end. And looked at my lover.

‘I can’t expect to be taken to Asia for my good looks,’ she said. ‘I have friends in every city, and the Pythia made me more friends. But there are other tricks – that anyone in politics knows. That anyone who has read Thucydides knows.’

I had heard of Thucydides, but I hadn’t read him. I made a mental note to rectify this.

‘We can trust this report?’ I asked.

‘Or I’m a complete fool,’ she said.

I took it to the king.

Cleitus woke me in the dark. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We’re going to attack. Get up.’

I was up like a shot. I knew Alexander – I knew we were going to attack.

I went for Polystratus and found Bella curled in his cloak. He was mightily embarrassed to be awakened.

‘It’s not what you think, lord,’ he said. ‘We were cold.’

I nodded. What do you say?

We armed each other in the light of a single lamp. It was cold.

Alexander was waiting for us by a huge fire near his pavilion.

‘We’ve drilled all winter at opening gaps in the ranks,’ he said. ‘We’ll win this one on simple discipline. It will be a good lesson for the pezhetaeroi. Tell them to open ranks to let the wagons through – if they are too packed together, tell them to lie flat with their shields over them and let the wagons run over them.’ He shrugged. ‘Once they drop the wagons on us, it’s just an infantry fight.’

He turned to Philip Longsword. ‘Straight up the right-side ridge until you are well above the pass – then down into their flank.’ He turned to Cleitus. ‘Take the mercenary archers and march to the left of the hypaspitoi – get into the rocks – those white rocks there – and start shooting. You’ll have them at open shields. Then it’ll all be over but the marching.’

It wasn’t a complex plan. It was, in fact, an obvious plan.

The thing is, most armies couldn’t have done it. It required that the hypaspitoi climb a mountain in full armour, with spears, and then traverse a long ridge and then come down in the enemy rear, while archers climbed the same ridge, took cover and lofted arrows two hundred paces into the Thracians. While the rest of us went right up the path into the carts and didn’t just die.

But we knew each other. Alexander dismounted a hundred Hetaeroi, and I led them as the right anchor of the phalanx, which was going straight up the throat of the pass. When we assembled in the first light of dawn, the hypaspitoi were already gone, the last files of archers were just leaving camp and the Thracians were awake, alert and lining their rampart of wagons.

Alexander walked down the line of the front rank. We were only a thousand paces from the top of the pass.

He stopped and shook my hand. Then embraced me.

He went along the front rank and he hugged, embraced, shook hands – a hundred times or more.

While the Thracians jeered, and the hypaspitoi climbed.

And then, when he was satisfied that the army loved him, he waved and ran off to the right. He was going with the hypaspitoi. In person, this time. Not like on Mount Ossa.

I buckled my chinstrap and led my friends up the pass.

The thing about plans is that they are rarely like the eventuality. The idea that we could drop files and half-files to the rear – as a phalanx always did when faced with, say, a small stand of trees in the middle of a plain – was excellent. But the fact was that when the Thracians started rolling the carts on us, they came at us like a ball flung by a child – all angles, no predictable path.