To the Macedonians, the Companion Cavalry, the Foot Companions, and the hypaspists, Alexander was a Macedonian and their king, angry at the betrayal, and blunt in his promise of vengeance and plunder for his loyal subjects. To the light cavalry, Thessalians and Thracians, the Greek mercenaries and the Scouts, he was very much their general, laying out the coming campaign; to the rest, the archers, the half-savage Agrianian javelin-men, the engineers and all the rest of the miscellaneous units, he was what each one wanted, compelling their consent. To the Sacred Band, Alexander spoke of honor and of pride and of his own sorrow; when he had done, the Thebans cheered him, swearing their eternal loyalty.
Under the cover of the shouting, Perdiccas said, “I swear they’d sack Thebes themselves and sell their sisters if they thought he’d like it.” Release from fear sharpened his tongue. There were no more than a dozen men in the king’s escort, even counting the Friends—and though no Macedonian was ever seen without his sword, the Friends were unarmored. Had the Sacred Band chosen to revenge Chaeronea, they could have done so.
Peucestas said, rather more sharply than he had intended, “It’s a good thing they love the king.”
Perdiccas sighed. “You know, that’s the difference between Philip and Alexander.”
Peucestas looked inquiringly at the other man. He himself was too young to have served under Philip, but Perdiccas had been made a battalion commander just before the old king’s murder. “What do you mean?”
“Philip was a good king and a fine general, and the men loved him—but not in the same way. Look: Philip could have ordered a man to jump off a cliff, and probably would’ve been obeyed, right? Alexander could get a hundred volunteers: that’s the difference.” He gave Peucestas a quick, malicious glance, and added, “And you’d be one of them.”
Peucestas, who had started to laugh, cursed instead, recognizing the kernel of truth in the other man’s words.
The first stage of the march, from Bactra to the summer palace at Ecbatana, was the worst. Alexander had chosen to accept short rations and the possibility of Scythian attack in exchange for reaching Ecbatana before summer. Careful planning and judicious bullying of the local populations made sure that the army did not starve, though none grew fat. The new chain of forts along the Scythian border served their purpose, too; they saw no raiding nomads.
The army rested at Ecbatana for two weeks, officers and men alike savoring the luxuries of the royal city. For the king and the Friends, however, there was little time to rest. The royal treasury had been left at Ecbatana for safekeeping; now the entire sum, talents of coin as well as jewels and plate, had to be transported to Babylon to finance the coming campaign, and to make up a regent’s treasury. Harpalus, the crippled treasurer, grumbled bitterly at the new demands, and Ptolemy began a discreet investigation of the royal finances. Harpalus had once been caught stealing from the treasury, but had been forgiven. This time, there were no missing funds, and Harpalus paraded his injured dignity for some days. Theocritus, still bitterly shamed by his son’s treason, was formally pardoned, and restored to command of the hypaspist battalion that would remain as part of the regent’s army. Peucestas, already informally accepted as Alexander’s Regent in Persia, complained at being left Theocritus, but even he had to admit that it was the safest solution.
It was at Ecbatana, too, that Alexander became aware for the first time of the number of children among the hordes that followed in the army’s wake. Some few were the products of legitimate marriages or long-term liaisons; most were the half-acknowledged offspring of the camp-followers. Something, plainly, needed to be done about them: he would not have them turned loose in Babylon to fend for themselves, nor could they be brought to Greece; half-Persian bastards would not find a life worth living in Macedon. After some thought, Alexander ordered the word spread that any son of a Macedonian could be enrolled in a new brigade: The boys would be fed and housed at royal expense and trained to take their fathers’ places in the phalanx. By the time the army left Ecbatana, some three hundred boys of varying ages had been enrolled in the new corps. In that modest beginning were the seeds of greatness.
There were far fewer girl-children to be provided for—a soldier with no sons at home might well feed a boy-child, but in most cases a bastard daughter had only the inadequate resources of its mother to see it through. But some had survived infancy, and to the ones not already being trained as prostitutes, Alexander offered a place in the queens’ household in Babylon plus a generous dowry. The neatness of the solution pleased him: not only did it fulfill the obligation he felt to his men and their offspring, but also, through the special status of the training corps, and the size of the girls’ dowries, emphasized his own wish for a union of his two peoples.
The march from Ecbatana to Babylon, down from the mountains into the heartland of the Persian empire, was an easy one, marred only by the death of the king’s ancient warhorse in the foothills of Susiania. Alexander wept bitterly over the animal’s death—Bucephalus had been a treasured companion of his youth—and his men, responsive as always to the king’s wishes, labored willingly through the three-day halt to build a memorial over the horse’s tomb. The men of the hill tribes, still half savage despite generations of Persian rule, came, wondering, to see the temple the foreign king erected for his horse. Still grieving, Alexander offered to remit their taxes if the tribes would use that money to maintain Bucephalus’s tomb. The tribesmen exchanged dubious glances at such incomprehensible behavior, but agreed readily enough. Craterus, who was himself the descendent of hill tribes and distrusted all such on principle, found the most prominent of their leaders and explained to him in detail what would happen to him if the tomb were not maintained. The tribesman swallowed hard, and swore on his father’s grave that he would keep his promise. Craterus was still somewhat doubtful, but comforted himself with the thought that he had done his best.
Alexander had planned to spend less than a month in Babylon, but it quickly became clear that, despite the messengers he had sent ahead from Ecbatana, he would need more time in the city. Nearchus, a Friend and the king’s chosen admiral, was dispatched at once for the coast with enough men and money to hire, buy or seize enough ships to carry the entire army to the Greek mainland. At the same time, Alexander sent his most skillful agent, Polydamus, to negotiate with the oligarchs of the little coastal town that Nearchus had chosen as the best landing place. Brauron had been friendly to Macedon before, if only out of hatred of the other cities: Polydamus carried enough coin to ensure her friendship once again.
Once those plans had been set in motion, the king turned his attention to securing the situation in Persia. In a ceremony that mingled Persian splendor and Macedonian ritual, Alexander conferred the regency on Peucestas; in an even more splendid ceremony two days later, the king married the elder of Darius’s daughters. She and Alexander’s second bride, a Sogdian—the first, Orestid, wife, mother of the heir Philip Alexander, had died in Macedon four years earlier—were installed in separate wings of the royal palace, ceremoniously bedded, and promptly forgotten. The ceremonies were followed by several days of feasting and celebration—payment in advance, said the cynics among the soldiers, for the coastal march ahead.
Just after midsummer, after a final day of sacrifices and prayers, the Macedonian army left Babylon. At the king’s order everyone travelled light, without the horde of camp followers and merchants, and with a drastically reduced baggage train. Even so, the weather was changing by the time they reached Miletos, the sailing season giving way to autumn storms.
With his usual efficiency, Nearchus had assembled a massive fleet, large enough to accommodate even the Macedonian army. He had gathered the necessary stores and fodder in advance, too, speeding the embarkation enormously. A dispatch was waiting from Polydamus as well: Brauron would, for a price, allow the Macedonians to land. Pleased, Alexander set aside the talent agreed upon, and the crossing began.
It was very crowded aboard the flagship, the d
isciplined crew tangling with the chaos of the royal household in the low midships pavilion. At the stern, Nearchus watched the confusion from the commander’s chair, while the pilot screamed himself hoarse trying to create some kind of order. Below decks, however, things were fully under control; the drum beat out a steady, conservative stroke, and the oars rose and fell easily, pulling the ship forward through the low swell of the harbor.
Hephaestion clung to the port rail, grateful that this was one of the cataphract ships with its full upper deck rather than an older trireme that had only a central catwalk running between the rows of oarsmen. He flattened himself against the racked shields to avoid a hurrying sailor, who promptly disappeared down the hatchway to the rowers’ deck, and for the first time he saw the full fleet spread out behind them. The four other quinquiremes—the flagship was the first and best, with a crack crew commanded by Nearchus himself—were spread out in a great lambda, the flagship at the point. Their oars beat the water in a stately rhythm, as though all five ships were listening to a single drummer. The newly painted eyes on the bows of the great ships rode up and down together, though in the comparative calm of the harbor the bronze sheathing of the ram barely showed above the waves. Banners snapped from the curved sterns, as new and as bright as the painting. Beyond them, trailing back in the same line and filling in the center, came the triremes, smaller and less well-armed—carrying only one catapult as against the three catapults of the quinquiremes—but as bravely decked out in new paint and banners.
Scattered among the last lines of warships, their sails almost hiding the buildings along the shoreline, came the round-bellied merchant ships, bearing provisions and more troops and the horses. Himself a poor sailor, Hephaestion was worried for the horses; in part, perhaps, because they shared this his only weakness. He would have to rest them well after landing, he decided, and pray that Alexander made no immediate plans that demanded peak performance from the Companion Cavalry. But the king understood that horses could not be pushed as far as men, and would do his best to spare them.
The motion of the ship changed subtly, checking almost imperceptibly, then riding up at a new angle as the ship left the protection of the harbor. Hephaestion swallowed hard, and, though he was not a particularly religious man, made a silent offer of a bull to Poseidon, if only the voyage were smooth. The chains of islands would provide some protection from bad storms, of course, but it was late in the season and there was a long stretch of open water between Icaros and Myconos. Already, the new motion, a sideways tossing that alternately lifted and buried the banked oars, unsettled him.
Outside the midships pavilion, under the eyes of the page guarding the king, Ptolemy and Coenus had begun a dice game, tossing the counters carefully on the heaving boards. Ptolemy looked up from a particularly good throw, eyed the cavalry commander’s pallor, and nudged Coenus. Coenus grunted sympathetically, and turned back to the game.
There was a flurry of action at the stern. Nearchus rose from his chair to reel off a string of orders while sailors ran forward to the sail and to the signal flags at the stern. The two helmsmen strained at their steering oars, and the ship heeled over slightly, turning north to avoid one of the outer islands. She straightened again almost instantly, but her motion was perceptibly rougher. Hephaestion swallowed again, tasting bile. He straightened cautiously, testing his balance, then lurched without dignity toward the pavilion. He caught himself on one of the guy ropes—Ptolemy grinned even more broadly, but, mercifully, said nothing—and ducked under the tent flap.
It was relatively quiet inside the pavilion, and much warmer. The pages had laid out beds for the Friends in the outer room. Hephaestion stretched out on a pile of familiar blankets, drawing his cloak around his shoulders, and closed his eyes. Alexander was asleep in the inner section of the tent, not seasick—Alexander was never seasick—but storing up sleep for the upcoming campaign. Despite his queasiness, Hephaestion twisted to reach the edge of the cloth that screened the inner room, lifted it a fraction of an inch off the decking. Through the opening, he could see the king sprawled on a pile of bedding, tunic disordered and sword belt discarded at his side. His eyes were closed, and his chest moved with the slow rhythm of sleep. Hephaestion let the curtain fall again, and settled himself on his own cushions.
After a while, the worst of the sickness passed, but he did not dare do much more than unfasten his sword belt and lay it on the deck beside his pile of bedding. After a while he loosened his cloak as well, and lay staring up at the sagging ceiling. Sick as he felt, he almost wished he had been the one left to rule Persia—the regency could have been his for the asking—but he knew he would change his mind as soon as they landed in Greece. In the meantime, there was nothing he could do but wait, and endure. With a sigh, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
In the stuffy inner room, Alexander lay with his eyes closed, halfway between sleep and waking. The plans that could be made in advance were already in motion. By now, the army should have been well into India, through the mountains as soon as the worst of the snow melted, then into the plains. Halfway to the Ocean. The League cities would pay dearly for their treason, in money, as Hephaestion had suggested, and in blood. Then he would return to the east, and the Ocean.
Interlude:
Trans-Indus Province, summer (Loios), 191 imperial (165 B.C., 588 A.U.C.)
“So,” the older man said, theatrically, “we stand in the heart of India. Alexander himself was never able to do as much.”
“Lucky Alexander,” his companion said.
The older man made a short, barking noise that might have been laughter, and turned back to the fretted window. Outside, the garrison town of Philippopolis—Philippopolis-trans-Indus—was slowly dissolving in the summer rains. A few native women moved laughing along the muddy street, heedless of the steamy downpour, their brilliant dresses plastered to their bodies. If he had been newly come to India, the older man might have watched with admiration; after nearly eight years’ duty with the Trans-Indus brigade, he barely noticed the women’s lithe curves, looking instead for any sign of his troops. He could not see the guardhouse from that window, but there should have been men on duty at the entrance to the stableyard. Frowning, he picked up the bell that stood on the nearest table and shook it sharply.
The runner, a stocky, shock-haired native, appeared almost at once. “General, sir?”
“My compliments to the watch commander,” the older man said, without turning away from the window, “and I would be grateful if he saw to the stable guard.”
“Sir!” The runner saluted sharply, and backed away.
“He’s probably just gone round the corner,” the younger man said, with Persian delicacy.
“The both of them, at once?” the older man snapped. He broke off instantly, regretting the loss of control. India was getting to him as well: Trans-Indus duty was a notorious breeder of mutiny and discontent. Perhaps it was time he asked to be reassigned. Then his eyes fell again on the scrolls lying on his desk, growing pulpy in the damp air. He could hardly do that, not with those messages still to be dealt with. And, once he had dealt with them, he would very likely not get the chance to ask for a new assignment before the native kings reassigned him permanently.
The other man saw the direction of his gaze, and sighed himself, rubbing at the scars on his chin. They were the sort of scars a rising young commander should have, turning nearly feminine beauty into masculine dash—except that they had been acquired in an Ephesian tavern brawl, when a prostitute swung a broken bottle across his face. “As bad as all that, sir?” he asked, tentatively.
The general grunted. “Read for yourself, if you want.”
The other man made no move to pick up the crumpled scrolls. “It is said,” he said carefully, the Asian notes suddenly prominent in his voice, “it is said, general, that the Scythians and some other, newer—even stronger—tribe are pushing at the Sogdian border. It is said Alexandr’Eschate’s been refortified, and the border f
orts need new blood. It is even said, general, that we’re the new blood.”
The general shook his head at the accuracy of the Philippopolis grapevine. “It is said—” he used the Persian phrase, mimicking the other’s diction “—correctly.”
“Then well abandon Philippopolis?” In spite of himself, the younger man was unable to keep the pleasure from his voice.
“We will not,” the general snapped. “Though I grant you we ought. No, Hippostratus in Bactra orders me to send the best of my legion, leaving me with barely a battalion to keep the peace—I beg your pardon, Mithrenes, but your Scouts are hardly the kind of troops I need to keep down trouble—and tells me at the same time that the king orders me to hold the Trans-Indus borders inviolate. If Cleopatra were still regent, there’d be none of that nonsense, I can tell you.”
Mithrenes nodded thoughtful agreement. The Queen Mother Cleopatra, daughter of the Sogdian branch of the royal family, had had her great ancestor’s instinctive grasp of strategic necessity, as her treatment of the Rhodian pirates had proved. Her son, only newly come to the throne, lacked both his mother’s genius and the experience that could in part substitute for it. But then, the Trans-Indus Province had never been a particularly wise venture, even if it had been an irresistible one. When the Maruyan Empire fell nearly seventy years before, Alexander VI had seen that as an invitation to go one better than the great Alexander, and extend the empire’s borders to the encircling Ocean. To no one’s surprise but his own, the feuding native kings had proved formidable opponents; the army had never been able to push more than a few hundred miles beyond the Indus, and had bought that steamy territory very dearly. It was not easily held, either: nearly every year, once the rains had ended, some local princeling raised an army and had to be put down.
“The great Alexander knew what he was doing, putting the borders in Bactria,” Mithrenes said aloud.
A Choice of Destinies Page 7