‘Bury her here,’ he said. ‘With my people.’
Then I wept, and then I nodded, and then I discovered that her corpse was in a wagon at the base of the mountain.
We burned her in the high place, and her ashes went into a pot with a maiden and a child painted on it, and then we put her at the top of the mountain with all those Plataean heroes.
And the next few days are lost to me. There’s nothing there.
But your father and I were ever friends from that day forward.
SIX
Athens, autumn 338 BC–spring 337 BC
When I returned to the camp, it was to find that Alexander had been appointed ambassador to the Athenians, with Antipater and Alcimachus to support him. I was to go with him to Athens – in fact, I was the escort commander for the ashes of the dead Athenians. Kineas was appointed the commander of the Athenian escort – fifty troopers in armour as good as that of Philip’s inner circle.
One of the worst penalties of loving a commoner is that no one expects you to love her. When I returned from burying Nike, Alexander acted as if I should be done with her. She was dead, I had work to do as his escort commander – time to move on. Nearchus and Cleomenes avoided my eye when I showed signs of emotion. As when I discovered that no one had moved any of her things out of my tent – men can be the most thoughtless beasts. I packed her belongings – every chiton, every pin, every present I had given her.
Oh, the pain. Some men and women move in and out of love – it comes and goes. Yes? Not me, lad. I love for ever. I can still feel it – walking into the tent, thinking I was healed, and seeing her things strewn about. Zeus, I was nearly sick.
But royal pages are bred tough, for war. I survived it. I was enraged every time a man threw me a look that indicated that I should ‘get over it’, and I determined – in fact, I swore to Aphrodite – that the next time I knew love, I’d marry her, even if she was a common prostitute. If only so that I could have a year of mourning.
And the Cyprian was listening.
So as I relate the next few months, keep in mind that Nike was never far from my thoughts.
I’ll also note that two men never asked me to get over it. They were Kineas the Athenian and Cleitus the Black. Both of them seemed to understand at some unspoken level. One afternoon, I was helping Myndas make up a fire, and I found that he was using her firebox – a firebox I’d given her. Myndas got the fire started and I just crouched there on my haunches, holding the box in my hand.
Cleitus came to find me for Alexander – crouched by me. Took my hand, and held it for a second or two – pressed it, took the box away and said, ‘Alexander wants you,’ as calmly as if all had been well.
But perhaps it is the greatest tragedy of being a mere mortal – and greater men than I have written poems on the subject, I know – that all things pass. The pangs of love, the roaring fire of hate – even the pain of loss. Even a week after I burned her corpse, I was in Antipater’s tent, proposing to him that we buy a dozen Athenian armourers to have a better product in Pella, and he was agreeing that that was an excellent project. We were both impressed – and a little envious – of Kineas’s troop, in their ornate repoussé helmets like lion’s heads, men’s heads, with silver hair and gold cheeks, or with scenes from the Iliad on the cheekpieces – and still superb work that would turn a heavy blow. Not to say we didn’t have good armourers in Pella – but we didn’t have fifty cavalry troopers like that fifty.
Later, in the fullness of adulthood, I realised that they sent their very richest, best men – probably with the picked best armour of the whole city.
Worth noting here that soldiers are popinjays. Beautiful armour is good for morale. When you are shitting your guts out in a three-day freezing rain, waiting to be sabered by some Asiatic auxiliary, it raises your heart to know that you look like a hero, that your gold-figured spear is the best spear for parasanges. Men who look good are tougher and better. Only armchair generals think that you can coat a man in mud and get him to fight well.
At any rate, I started to use Polystratus as my hyperetes, just as Kineas had Niceas, and he was merciless on details of harness and dress. Men had got slack as royal companions – as veteran campaigners, with servants and grooms and leisure time. I wasn’t in a particularly good mood – in fact, I was unrelentingly savage, so much so that Nearchus and Cleomenes found somewhere else to eat for weeks.
But when we marched for Athens, my troop shone like the sun, and if their equipment wasn’t as spectacular as the Athenians’, the way they filed off from the right looked like a trick rider’s performance in the hippodrome, and every spear was held just so.
Polystratus got himself a trumpet. It wasn’t like any other trumpet in the Macedonian army – it must have been Keltoi or Thracian, with a hideous animal’s head and a long mouthpiece. Niceas, the Athenian, made a scabbard for it.
We went up over the passes, and came down the other side into Attika, the richest province in the Greek world. I couldn’t believe how thickly settled it was. There was a farm at every turn of the road, and it was a struggle every night after we came down the passes to find a campsite large enough for two hundred horse and their mounts and servants. We camped in farm fields, we camped on somebody’s recently cut oat stubble – gods, Attika is rich.
It was our third day. On the second, priests came out and blessed us, blessed the road, and welcomed the ashes of their dead home. But on the third, we met the families of the dead men.
Some of them were men I’d killed myself – panicked men who did me no harm, killed in the rout like cattle or sheep in a pen. It is one thing to kill them, and another to be blessed by their priests, and then to have to meet their wives, their sons and daughters – their parents.
They bore us no love, either. It was the mothers, I think, who got to me most. Their eyes would caress me with a kind of ecstatic hate – in my fine armour and on my mighty Poseidon, I was the Macedonian. Alexander looked young and innocent – and beautiful (unless you looked deep into his eyes). I looked young and hard and had a big, ugly nose.
Most of the time, it is human to react to hate with hate. Or love with love. But there was something in the hate of those Athenian women that made me feel only pity, anger, shame. Pity for them. Anger at the fools who had led them to fight us. Shame at what I had done in the pursuit.
Perhaps I was insufficiently brutalised as a page. Maybe if I’d been raped by one of the older pages – it happened all the time, as a punishment – I’d have been the sort of murderous bastard who likes a good rout.
But I looked at all those mothers, and I saw my own mother, I saw Nike . . .
Well. I went on killing men, so it didn’t change me for ever.
Alexander saw none of this. I know, because our first night in Athens, at Kineas’s father’s house, Cleitus the Black and I had a halting conversation about the mothers, and Alexander looked at both of us as if we were giggling girls.
‘War kills,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Women weep. Men fight.’ He turned back to our host, Kineas’s father, Eumenes, and his admiration of Phokion.
The Athenians dedicated a statue to Philip. Demosthenes was exiled – not for ever, but for a while. We got to meet Isocrates, who somewhat sycophantically suggested that the whole Panhellenic crusade had been Philip’s notion and not his own – and his speeches in praise of Philip were deeply flattering. Alexander was made a citizen of Athens.
I spent evening after evening sitting with Eumenes. I missed my own father, and Eumenes was a good man – deeply conservative, well read, equally interested in Plato and in the breeding of dogs. He bore us no rancour – he was sure that fighting Macedon had been a mistake from the first.
Altogether, our reception in Athens was a masterpiece of diplomacy. There were people who hated and feared us – and no one tried to hide that from us. There were people who had always wanted our alliance. There were men like Kineas who wanted our alliance but had fought hard at Chaeronea to stop us.
Ev
ery day I learned more about democracy. Democracy isn’t a theory of government – it is a code of behaviour that allows a lower-class man to call me a murderer in the street, if he wants to. His neighbour may call me the saviour of Greece. They may share a cup of wine in a wine shop, still arguing.
Not like home. Interesting. It didn’t seem to work very well – but the dignity of the commons was amazing, vital and not like anything you’d see at home, where a twenty-year veteran of the king’s army would stand in the mud to let a thirteen-year-old aristocrat go by with his feet dry. That just didn’t happen in Athens.
Kineas and his friends were very much like us – we shared so many things that it was difficult, sometimes, to comprehend how deeply they were not like us. They had a respect for their commons – an acceptance of their power, their needs – that seemed at once weak and noble.
Athens had a great deal to offer, and I drank it in as I recovered from my loss. I had no duties, so I arranged to go to the theatre and to the assembly – sometimes with Eumenes, sometimes with Kineas, sometimes with Diodorus, who turned out to be the political member of Kineas’s band. He was an aristocrat – but politically he was a radical democrat and an enemy of Macedon.
‘You watch,’ he said one day over a cup of bad wine. ‘Your Philip is going to demand that Athens send soldiers to support his crusade in Persia. And they’ll send the Hippeis – we’re all oligarchs, to the mob. And I’ll spend my youth fighting for Philip.’ He laughed.
I laughed back. ‘And you’ll do it – because you respect the institution of voting.’
He shrugged. ‘I’d be a piss-poor democrat if I didn’t obey the will of the people. Even when it is wrong.’
Athens had other pleasures. I think I mentioned earlier that Aristotle tried to teach us to hold a symposium. Well, suddenly I was living in aristocratic Athens, and I was invited to a symposium virtually every night. For the first few weeks I passed. My heart was ashes, and somehow I couldn’t face the Athenians – as friends. So I sat at home with Eumenes.
But after my third visit to the theatre – the festival of Dionysus, the real thing, in Athens – Diodorus was going down to Piraeus to be with friends. It was like something from Socrates come to life. Too good to miss.
We walked down inside the long walls, and Diodorus pointed out how the walls were built in layers.
‘Athenians only spend money on defence when they are in a state of panic,’ he said with a nasty laugh. ‘Look at the base layer – see the column bases turned on their sides? Pure Parian marble – try to crack one of those with your catapults. That was from the year Plataea was fought, when Themistokles came back from Sparta and led us in building as fast as could be done. And atop it – mud brick, unbaked. That’s how it was finished.’ We walked along for a while. ‘Look here. Another course of marble laid down – and heavy stone atop it – the Thirty Years’ War. Niceas, or even Alcibiades. Look at the towers!’ He shrugged. ‘We do good work when we’re at our best. We’re at our best when we’re threatened, scared, angry.’
‘Like men,’ I said.
Diodorus glanced at me.
‘You aren’t what you seem at all, you know that?’ he said. ‘Kineas said you were . . . a thinker.’
‘Doesn’t exactly show on my face,’ I said. ‘It’s OK – I thought you were just an angry young man, all talk and no depth.’
And stuff like that. Making friends is the best way to pass time that there is – I had months in Athens, and I made friends that lasted me the rest of my life. Kineas, Diodorus, Demetrios of Phaleron . . .
But I get ahead of myself. We walked down the hill, talking about ethics and whether it was possible to have trust in a ruling class (my point) or acceptance of the stupid crap that the mob sometimes votes (his point) on faith. We agreed that either way, a lot of people were forced into acting on faith in other people’s choices.
We arrived at a beautiful house in Piraeus – Graccus’s house. He wasn’t as wealthy as Kineas’s father, and not as aristocratic – his father had built a fleet of merchantmen to trade with the Black Sea, and despite losses, they remained prosperous. But the house was a delight – pale stone and red tiles, a little above the street, and with a high central courtyard that had steps to a platform in the corner – so that on the platform, you could see the sea. We lay on couches watching the sun set. I had dined outside – what soldier has not? But I had seldom enjoyed it so much, a dinner of fresh-caught tuna and red snapper in parchment; deer meat in strips cooked on a brazier; bowls of spiced almonds in honey and little barley rolls. My mouth waters to recall it. And the wines – Nemeans and Chians, raisinated and clear and red, mixed with sparkling, bubbly water from some local shrine.
Graccus was a masterful host, with a good staff who loved him and worked to make us love him too.
I noted that Niceas, who was friends with my Polystratus and whom I treated as a sort of upper servant, shared Graccus’s couch. Later – after four or five bowls of wine – Niceas came and sat by me. He was a courteous man – he sat, but didn’t recline, until I indicated that he was welcome.
‘I’m not a servant, here,’ he said. He met my eye – we were only about a hand’s breadth apart. ‘I think you handle us well, Macedonian.’
‘Are you and Graccus lovers?’ I asked.
Niceas narrowed his eyes. ‘Not really your business, is it?’
I offer this by way of the thousands of things that showed me how free Athenians were – that this lower-class man could tell me to sod off, and then grin, slap my shoulder and go off to dance.
Dancing, it turned out, was the order of the evening. Graccus had musicians – famous ones, not that I knew who they were, but they were incredible, to me. I was used to a kithara and a couple of flutes. This was a group of seven players, and they played songs I knew – and songs of their own – with a sort of mad, elegant violence, fast, harsh and yet precise. As if I’d never heard the notes before. Later, Kineas explained to me that this was the fashion, created by this very group, and that a lyre player had to be extremely skilled just to get the staccato notes out so precisely.
They had a couple of dancers, who proved to be more like instructors – the whole thing was hopelessly complex, because it turned out that these musicians weren’t slaves, but freemen – famous freemen, who could demand high prices for their music and were playing for Graccus for free – because he had helped ‘discover’ them.
And the political discussion – that all government depends on the trust of one group in another, even in a tyranny – continued all around me. Men I’d never met – one of the kithara players, named Stephanos – sat on my couch, handed me the wine bowl and said, ‘Good topic.’
Another man – with curly blond hair like Alexander’s – sat down opposite me, on Kineas’s couch. ‘Are you really an oligarch?’ he asked. ‘I mean – you really believe in that horseshit, or are Macedonians so pig ignorant you’ve never thought about the rights of men?’
‘Well,’ I said, trying to not be offended while getting my point across. He was angry – so I smiled. That always helps throw oil on a fire, I find. ‘I studied with Aristotle.’
‘Pompous fuck!’ my debater said. ‘He thinks he’s better than other men.’
‘As do I,’ I said. ‘I think I’m better than other men. Debate me.’
There was a little hush – some men were still talking, but Kineas fell silent, as did Diodorus.
‘In what way?’ Blondy asked. ‘I mean, how exactly are you better?’
‘In every way. I am well born. Athletic. Intelligent. Rich. Educated.’ I shrugged. ‘I’m not handsome – which you are. So you are the better man in that respect, eh?’
‘You are certainly no prize for looks,’ he said, but he said it with a smile.
‘So you concede that some men may be better at one thing, and some at another,’ I said.
‘Look, I’ve been to the lyceum, I know where this goes.’ He shrugged. ‘But do my superior looks entitle m
e to superior political rights?’
I nodded. ‘If you combine them with superior oratory skills and a war record based on superior bravery and war skills, then they do – don’t they? Athenian?’ I asked.
Diodorus laughed. ‘Good shot, Macedonian. He’s got you there, Charmides.’
‘You democrats want to make everyone equal,’ I said. ‘And in time, you will, if we allow you. You will make war on excellence to raise up mediocrity. Cut the tall trees down and call the trees that remain tall.’ I looked around. Even the dancers had stopped. ‘What if all this equality costs us heroism? Ambition?’
‘Why?’ Diodorus asked. ‘I see a false assertion.’
‘Where?’ I asked. I was doing well, I thought.
‘Why can’t we all be equally great? Why not let every man be Achilles?’ Diodorus glowed when he spoke. He was a true believer.
I shook my head. ‘I’ve watched the circle around the king. The great men push other great men – but the petty men push only other petty men. Mediocrity breeds only mediocrity.’
I shut up then, realised I had spoken ill of my own among foreigners. Bad behaviour by any standard.
Diodorus snorted, dismissing my comment with a wave of his hand. ‘Just because a passel of Macedonians—’
But Kineas shook his head. ‘It is the same in the assembly,’ he said. ‘And you have said as much yourself, Diodorus.’
Blondy hopped off Kineas’s kline and slapped my shoulder. ‘All I care is that you believe in something,’ he said. ‘I’m Demetrios.’
Demetrios of Phaleron. The eventual Tyrant of Athens, and another of my lifelong friends. He was a rabid democrat in his youth.
So I count that argument as one for me and nought for the democrats, eh, lad?
The sixth bowl, and the seventh, and the eighth. I was dancing. Need I say more? The notes all made sense, and dancing a complex pattern with twenty near strangers was the most important thing in the world.
We danced the wine out of us – danced through moonrise. Lay back and drank water.
God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great Page 19