God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  And Antipater predicted that every province would revolt except the home provinces.

  Well, he was right. We were just starting to move the court back to Pella when the news came trickling in – two big Thracian raids and a string of insults from the Illyrians. The Boeotians expelled their garrison and abrogated the League of Corinth. Demosthenes made a tremendous show in the Athenian Assembly. His daughter had died less than a week before – but he threw off his mourning and went to the Assembly in white, wearing a garland of flowers and saying that Greece was saved.

  Bad news travels fast.

  There was nothing we could do immediately. Everything depended on timing, luck, the fortune of the gods – and the loyalty of the rump of the army.

  Alexander took two steps immediately. We held a council the first night in Pella – Philip was seven days dead by then. Olympias was amusing herself by celebrating his death with more abandon than old Demosthenes. She had a sort of honesty to her, I’ll give her that. She decorated Pausanias’s body as if he were a hero, not a regicide.

  Macedon, eh?

  At any rate, we held an inner council the first night in Pella. Antipater was there, and Alexander the Highlander, who dealt pragmatically with the death of both his brothers. Olympias was excluded. Laodon was there – he’d been over the border in Thessaly, where Philip had sent him into exile, and he was already back. Erigyus was on his way and the actor, Thessalus, was recalled. So were some other favourites – mostly small men, but Philip had exiled quite a few of them when Alexander’s star began to wane at court.

  Laodon had a trusted man – a Macedonian, a veteran, a man whom Philip had trusted as a herald and a messenger, but who had a special relationship with Laodon. Hecataeus was his name, and he’d been Alexander’s go-between with both Laodon and with Philip during his exile.

  Hecataeus was a complex man – no simple image fits him. He was an excellent soldier, and because of it had made his way from the ranks to effective command of a taxeis under Amyntas. But he was both subtle and utterly honest – a rare and wonderful combination. Men – great men – trusted him. He was, in fact, the ideal herald – respected for his scars and war stories, trusted because he always kept faith, discreet with what he learned. I was not everywhere – I don’t know what the roots of his alliance with Alexander were.

  But at the council, Alexander ordered him to go to Parmenio. ‘Bring him over to me, and order him to kill Attalus,’ Alexander said.

  Antipater shook his head. ‘You may as well order the poor man to kill the Great King and conquer Asia,’ he said.

  Alexander pursed his lips. ‘No, those things are for me to do,’ he answered, as if the comment were to be taken seriously.

  Hecataeus smiled about one quarter of a smile. ‘My lord, what exactly can I offer Parmenio? He has the army.’

  Again, there was something so . . . well, so reasonable about Hecataeus – it was not as if he was bargaining on behalf of a possible traitor. He was asking fair questions. He was a very able man.

  ‘Short of the kingdom, you may offer him anything,’ Alexander said.

  Hecataeus shook his head. ‘I’m too small a man to make such an offer,’ he said. ‘I would go with concrete terms, if I must do this job.’

  Alexander nodded. ‘Well said. Very good, then. Parmenio may have the first satrapy of the spear-won lands of Asia. The highest commands for his sons and himself – my right hand.’ He looked at Hecataeus.

  The herald nodded. ‘That’s very helpful, lord. On those lines, I can negotiate.’

  Alexander looked around. He was selling the commands of his kingdom to a man who’d either been a rival or held aloof. And we, his loyal inner circle, were clearly not going to get those commands.

  Black Cleitus made a face. ‘I take it I shouldn’t get used to commanding the Hetaeroi,’ he said.

  Alexander slapped his shoulder. ‘Parmenio owns the love of more of my subjects than I do,’ he said. ‘The man has most of the army, and most of the lowland barons. In time, Ptolemy can take over his faction, but for now, I need him. He’s sixty-five – he’ll be dead soon enough. In the meantime – yes. Make room, friends. The sons of Parmenio will be plucking the choicest fruits.’ He shrugged. Parmenio’s sons had not been pages. ‘I expect he’ll want Philotas as the commander of the Hetaeroi.’ He nodded to me and Cleitus. ‘But you two will command the squadrons.’

  Then Alexander turned to me. ‘I have a mission for you, as well, son of Lagus, wily Odysseus.’

  Well, who dislikes good flattery? ‘At your service, my king,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘I’m sending you to the king of the Agrianians,’ he said. ‘Get me as many of his warriors as you can arrange. Psiloi and Peltastoi – light-armed men to replace all the light-armed men my pater has sent to Asia.’

  That was our first intimation that the king intended an immediate campaign.

  ‘Are we going to war?’ I asked.

  Antipater coughed. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘We are trying to negotiate from a position of relative strength, and a thousand light-armed men will make us look the readier to march.’

  Alexander smiled. He looked around, caught every eye. ‘What he means is, yes, unless all my enemies miraculously knuckle under, I’ll be fighting all summer.’ His grin became wolfish. ‘I have cavalry, and enough heavy foot. Go and get Langarus to hand over some prime men. And hurry back.’

  So I nodded. Even though I was again going to be absent while the big decisions were made.

  In fact, I’d already seen the lay of the land. Alexander trusted us – his young inner circle – with the difficult missions. But it would be Antipater’s generation – Antipater and Parmenio and such men – who would lead the crusade into Asia. Not us.

  I had a long ride into Illyria to ponder the ways of kings. I took my troop of grooms, and bandits fled at our approach. It was very gratifying. We swept the high passes clear. We practised climbing above the passes and closing both ends at once, so we could catch the bandits – and it worked twice (and not the other ten times!). Once, with Polystratus scouting, we took a whole band of them – scarecrows with armour – and executed all of them, leaving their corpses in trees as a warning to future generations.

  So by the time we came down into mountainous Agriania, word of our exploits had run ahead of us.

  Alexander’s young wife was pregnant. Her father quite happily called out a band of picked warriors – useless mouths, he called them. Many of them were his own bodyguard – the shield-bearers, he called them in his own tongue – in Greek, we called them hypaspists. He gave me almost six hundred men – well armoured, but light-footed. And he promised to come with his own army if Alexander summoned him.

  That was a well-planned marriage. The girl beamed adoringly and waited to be summoned to Pella. For all I know, she’s still waiting.

  We returned to Macedon by a different set of passes, and the Agrianians loved our game of climbing high above the passes and then closing both ends at once. In fact, they maintained – as a nation of mountaineers – that they’d invented it.

  Their principal warrior was ‘Prince’ Alectus. He was no more a prince than I, but an old war hound. He was the hairiest man I’d ever seen – naked, he looked more like a dog, despite his heavy muscles. He had red-grey curly hair, even in his ears. To a Greek, he was impossibly ugly, with his wiry hair and his intricate tattoos.

  He shocked me, the first night on the road home, by asking me if I was an educated man, and then debating with me about the gods. He was widely read, and yet he drew his own conclusions from what he read.

  ‘Ever think that all this killing might be wrong, lad?’ he asked me, that first night. He was drinking my wine in my tent. None of the Agrianians had a tent.

  ‘Of course I’ve thought it,’ I said. ‘All you have to do is look at a dead man’s widow.’

  Alectus nodded. ‘Or his children, eh?’

  ‘Some men are evil,’ I said, drunkenly cutting across
a whole lot of arguments. Aristotle would not have approved.

  Alectus sneered. ‘And you only kill the evil ones, eh?’

  That shut me up.

  He was an old barbarian and he’d done a lot of killing, and he was beginning to doubt the whole game. ‘What if there’s nothing but this world?’ he asked, on the fourth bowl of wine.

  ‘Oh?’ I asked. ‘And who made it?’

  Alectus shrugged. ‘If a god made it, what does he want? I mean, if I make a shield, it’s because one of the lads needs a shield. Eh?’

  ‘Where are we going with this?’ I asked.

  ‘Talk goes with wine,’ Alectus said. ‘I like both. I used to like a good fight. But now, I’m beginning to wonder.’

  ‘Are all you hill men philosophers?’ I asked.

  Alectus spat. ‘As far as I can tell, your philosophers ain’t interested in what’s good for men. They’re interested in sounding good and pompous, eh? None of them seems to be willing to tell me what the gods think of killing.’

  ‘Go to Delphi!’ I said. I had meant to say it with a sneer, but I’m afraid – then and now – that I have a great respect for oracles.

  Alectus drank off his wine. ‘You may actually have the makings of a wise man, Macedonian. Will Alexander take me to Delphi?’

  I shrugged. ‘No idea. But . . . if we march on Greece, we’ll have to go right past the shrine.’

  Alectus lifted the whole bowl and poured a libation. ‘To Delphic Apollo and his oracle,’ he said, and drank some. ‘That was god-given advice, young man. I’ll pay more heed to you in the morning.’

  And then he picked up his sword and walked off into the night.

  I liked Alectus.

  We were two weeks getting back to Pella and my farms fed the Agrianians. I met up with Heron for the first time in two years and he embraced me – and I freely gave him almost a quarter of my farms. Loyalty is rare, young man. It needs rich reward.

  And when we reached Pella, I swore out a warrant at the treasury for the value of the food my farms had provided to the barbarian auxiliaries. That got me a two-year remission of taxes.

  Which meant that I made a profit – if a small one – on bringing the Agrianians to Pella.

  I won’t belabour this point. But I mention it so that you know that managing a great estate is a matter of constant work and constant alertness to opportunity. It is much easier to fritter a great estate away than to protect and expand it.

  Pella was an armed camp. There were three taxeis of pikes outside the town – all the men of upper Macedon, townsmen of Amphilopolis and hardy mountain men, all billeted on Attalus’s estates. Alexander had ordered every nobleman to call up his grooms, so that we had almost four thousand cavalry. He left his father’s royal companions at home, and almost a thousand of the foot companions he retired to new estates – a popular move, and one that left him with a reserve of veterans, if we had a disaster.

  Alexander picked the largest and best men from the foot companions (as had his father before him) and added them to the Agrianians, and created his own hypaspitoi. As I say, Philip had had his own – picked men of the phalanx, but they were the very veterans that Alexander had just settled on good estates. Did he distrust them? Or was the new broom sweeping clean?

  I wasn’t consulted. Later, we had three regiments of hypaspists – the ‘Aegema’ and two regiments of elite infantry to go with them. They were our only infantry that wore harness all year and never went back to their farms – well, in the early days. Heh. Soon enough, no one was going home at all. But I get ahead of myself.

  My grooms went with the cavalry, and my squadron of companions was commanded by Philip the Red, and no man was appointed to overall command of the Hetaeroi. But I found that I was the commander of the hypaspitoi – a job I held many times, and always enjoyed.

  Alexander loved to blend. It was an essential part of his success that he thought that men could be alloyed just as metals were – and the early hypaspitoi were his first experiment. It was his theory that big, tough, well-trained Macedonians would serve to reduce the Agrianians to discipline, and that the hardy, athletic and wilderness-trained Agrianians would teach his elite Macedonians a thing or two about moving over woods and rocks.

  Well, that’s what made him Alexander. I admit I thought he was mad. They’d only been joined an hour before we had our first murder.

  Alexander heard of it, sent for me and asked what I planned to do.

  ‘Catch the culprit and hang him,’ I said.

  Alexander nodded. ‘Good. Get it done by sunset.’ He looked at me. ‘We’re marching.’

  I was stunned. ‘But Antipater . . .’ I’d just seen Antipater, who had reassured me that the magazines were full and we weren’t going anywhere.

  Alexander frowned. ‘Antipater sometimes has trouble remembering who is king,’ he said.

  So I rode Poseidon into my lines. It was easy to find the killer. He was one of my men, a pezhetaeroi file leader. He was standing in the courtyard of his billet, bragging to his friends.

  Some of my best men. Six foot or taller, every man. Loyal as anything.

  I had Polystratus and my grooms. ‘Take him,’ I said.

  He didn’t even struggle until it was too late. All the way to the gallows tree he shrieked that he was a Macedonian, not a barbarian. His cries brought many men out of billets, and many Agrianians out of their fields. They watched him dragged to the tree, impassively.

  Alectus came and stood in front of them. He nodded to me.

  I did not nod back.

  I ordered Philip son of Cleon – that was my phylarch’s name – to have a noose put around his neck.

  I had almost a thousand men around me by then, and the Macedonians, as is our way, were vocal in their disapproval.

  A rock hit Poseidon.

  I had had other plans, but my hand was forced. The noose was tied to the tree, so I reached out and swatted the horse under my phylarch with my naked sword blade, and the horse reared and bolted, scattering the crowd, and before his fellow Macedonians could get organised, Philip son of Cleon’s neck snapped and he was dead.

  And that got me silence.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ I said. It was silent. ‘One law. For every man in the army. No crime against your fellow soldiers will be tolerated. You are one corps – one regiment. It is the will of the king. In a few hours, we will march to war. If you are angered, save it for the enemy.’

  Then I sent for the phylarchs and Prince Alectus.

  ‘When we march tomorrow,’ I said, ‘we will not march as separate companies. There will be four Macedonians and four Agrianians in every file, and they will alternate – Macedonian, Agrianian, Macedonian. And across the ranks – the same. See to it.’

  My senior phylarch, yet another man named Philip – Philip son of Agelaus, known to most of us as Philip Longsword – spat. ‘Can’t be done. Take me all night just to write it down.’

  ‘Best get to work, then,’ I said.

  There are some real advantages to being a rich aristocrat. He couldn’t stare me down. Social class rescued me, and eventually he knuckled under with a muttered ‘Yes, m’lord’.

  Alectus merely nodded.

  ‘Don’t be fools!’ I said. ‘You two don’t know the king and I do. He’ll kill every one of you – me too – rather than give up on this experiment. So find a way to work together, or we’ll all hang one by one.’

  If I expected that to have an immediate effect, I was disappointed. They both glared at each other and at me, and they left my tent without exchanging a word.

  All night, I wanted to go and see what they were doing. At one point, Polystratus had to grab me by the collar and order me into my camp-bed.

  The Hetaeroi marched first, in the morning, and we were just forming, and the whole army was waiting on us. And every man in the army knew what had happened.

  In retrospect, I gambled heavily on Alectus.

  He and Philip Longsword stood at the head of the parade,
and called men by name – one by one.

  It took an hour. More. We had just slightly fewer than eleven hundred men, and it took so much time to call their names that all the other taxeis were formed and ready to march.

  And when we’d formed our phalanx, what a hodge-podge we looked. No order, no uniformity of equipment or even uniformity of chaos – which is what the barbarians had. Instead, we looked like the dregs of the army, not the elite.

  But we were formed. I ordered them to march by files from the right, and off they went up the road.

  I found the king at my elbow. ‘My apologies . . .’ I began.

  Alexander gave me his golden smile. ‘Not bad,’ he said. He nodded and rode away.

  I remember that day particularly well, because I rode for a while and then dismounted and took an aspis from one of the hypaspists.

  You hardly see them any more, the big round shields of the older men. They were better men – better trained, the Greek way, in gymnasiums, and those perfect bodies you see in statues and on funerary urns had a purpose, which was to carry a greater weight of shield and armour than we lesser men today. It was Philip’s notion – Philip the king, I mean – to arm his bodyguard in the old way.

  You can’t just take farmers and tell them to carry the aspis. Well – you can if your farmers consciously train to carry it. But Macedonian farmers aren’t the heroes of Marathon, who were somewhere between aristocrats and our small farmers, with the muscles of working men allied to the leisure time of gentlemen. But by making the hypaspitoi full-time soldiers who served all year round and trained every day, Philip made it possible to maintain a body of professional hoplites like the men he’d trained with in Thebes when he was a hostage there.

  Alexander wanted the same – but he wanted to add the aggressive spirit and woodcraft of those Agrianians. On the first day, we had a lot of big men of two races who hated each other and were miserably undertrained in carrying the weight of the damned shield. And only the front-rankers had armour.

  Two hours into the march, my left shoulder was so badly bruised that I had my fancy red military chlamys tied in a ball to pad it, and I was sheathed in sweat and it was all I could do to put one foot in front of another. Men were falling out – both Agrianians and Macedonians.