God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  I hit one with my fist when he was slow and stupid. He cried.

  I hit him again. That’s what you did to pages who cried. You beat them until they didn’t cry any more.

  That night – I think we’d been on the road a week – Polystratus lay next to me in the tent. I could feel that he had something to say, because he was lying on his back, not curling up at arm’s length.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘Say it.’

  Polystratus shrugged in the darkness. Again, when you know a man – file partner or servant – or lover – you really don’t need to see them to feel their postures, do you?

  ‘That boy you smacked,’ Polystratus said. ‘He’s not the swiftest horse in the barn, is he?’

  I sighed.

  ‘But lord, he’s not a royal page. And if I were you, I wouldn’t be using your precious pages as a standard of behaviour.’ He chuckled without mirth. ‘Beating children is foolish. You wouldn’t catch a Thracian beating a child, unless the child was very wicked or very foolish. Beating children breaks their spirits. Make their spirits strong – teach them to rule themselves.’

  ‘My, aren’t you the philosopher,’ I said.

  ‘You only know one way.’ He shrugged again. ‘It is a bad way.’

  His tone was so final, and so judgemental, that I was angry. ‘What do you know?’ I asked. ‘You were a slave.’

  He laughed. ‘So?’ he asked. ‘I know unhappy people when I see them. Your pages are all hate and sorrow. You were yourself, until . . .’ He chuckled again.

  ‘Until Pater bought you,’ he said.

  ‘And Iphegenia,’ he added. ‘Of course, I found her for you, too.’

  ‘Damn you, Thracian,’ I said. ‘I’m just toughening him up.’

  Polystratus grunted. ‘Do all horses respond to the same training? All dogs?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I answered. ‘Every horse needs to be taught according to temperament – very well, you bastard, I understand what you are saying.’ In truth, I remember this so well because I remember lying there, shaking my head.

  But you’ll note, young Satyrus, that while I have a corps of royal pages, I don’t let them beat their young ones or rape them either. Lesson learned. Maybe my pack won’t hunt quite as hard. But maybe they won’t all turn on each other as adults, either.

  I’m leaving a great deal out. Many evenings I worked with my own regiment and then had to go to Alexander’s tent to be there for the councils. Alexander was behaving recklessly – he was taking almost all the troops he had and marching on Thessaly, which had refused to pay the tribute they had paid to Philip. Let’s put it this way – everyone refused to pay their tribute. The Macedonian Empire had ceased to be. Antipater felt that this was to be expected – and in Pella, he’d said as often as he could that all we had to do was work slowly, consolidate the gains at home – the so-called upper provinces – replenish the treasury and we’d be in fine shape in five years. He insisted that the immediate threat was from Attalus and Parmenio.

  And Alexander marched away and left him regent, with Philip’s old cavalrymen and infantrymen and nothing else to stop the Thracians and the Illyrians. Antipater was a good loser – he accepted his fate well enough. The truth – at least, the truth as I see it – was that Antipater always played both sides. He helped murder Philip – for all I knew, he did all the dirty work himself – and he was right there to help Alexander take control. But we all knew he was personally and professionally close to Parmenio and to Attalus. He had a foot in both camps. If the foolish blond boy marched away and lost the army, why, Antipater would have maintained order, crowned Cleopatra’s son and called for Attalus to return from Asia. Or so I guess.

  We all knew we were headed for Thessaly, which had the finest cavalry in the Greek world and the plains on which to deploy them.

  But the Thessalians, as our scouts discovered, didn’t intend to fight a cavalry battle. Instead, they called up their feudal army and rolled it into the Vale of Tempe, twenty thousand men to our ten thousand, and waited for us. By the time my boys were throwing javelins in the evening, I knew we were going to have to fight the Thessalians, who, until a few weeks before, had been so closely wedded to us as to be cousins, if not brothers. And Parmenio, who was, remember, the head of the ‘lowland aristocrat’ faction, was himself half Thessalian.

  You have to wonder what, exactly, was passing between Parmenio, Attalus and Antipater.

  On our ninth day, we marched into the Vale of Tempe, with Mount Olympus on one side of us and Mount Ossa on the other side. Polystratus found me marching with my file, and informed me that the king wanted me.

  I ordered Polystratus off his horse and gave him my aspis to carry, and laughed at his glare.

  ‘Just toughening you up,’ I said, and rode away on his horse.

  Alexander was out front with the Prodromoi. He had Cassander, Philip the Red and a few of the other oldsters with him, and Laodon. I could see a dozen Thessalian nobles in brilliant tack, covered with gold, just riding away with a herald.

  Laodon winked at me.

  Alexander nodded at the Thessalians. He pulled off his silvered Boeotian helmet and scratched his head. ‘They have ordered me to stop marching. They say that if we continue, they will be forced to fight.’

  Hephaestion laughed. ‘And the king agreed to stop marching!’ he said.

  I looked at Alexander.

  ‘See that mountain?’ he said. He had a short staff in his hand – like a walking staff of vine wood, but shorter. He used it to point. ‘See the high pass – see the ridge?’

  In fact, I could. ‘Yes, lord.’

  ‘I need your Agrianians to run up that ridge and seize the height.’ He nodded. ‘Can they?’

  ‘The hypaspitoi can do it,’ I said.

  Alexander caught the nuance. ‘Can they? All the better.’ He nodded. ‘Get it done. Cassander, get all the slaves and all the camp servants together, and get tools – shovels and picks.’

  ‘I get all the best jobs,’ Cassander whined.

  The Thessalians had ordered Alexander to stop marching. This was my king’s notion of high humour.

  I had my orders. I rode back, enjoying the clean breeze and the feel of a horse under me, and all too soon I was handing the reins to Polystratus and settling the aspis into the groove it had worn in my shoulder.

  I ran back along my column. The pass was quite wide at this point, and the ground level enough, so the army was marching ten files wide, with double the normal order between men, and the baggage and slaves in the intervals. We were in the face of the enemy, yet, for whatever reason, only my hypaspitoi were fully armed.

  ‘Leather bags! Make sure you have water in your canteen! Your chlamys, rolled tight.’ I looked at men in every file. By now, they were not so faceless – I knew that Amyntas of Amphilopolis was the useless gowp I’d hit with my fist, and I looked at him and he gave me a weak smile and held out his water bottle and his shoulder-bag straps to show me he was in full gear.

  Cleon of Aegae and Arcrax the Unready were two more useless mouths, and both of them had to find their mess slaves and recover their water bottles. No matter how elite a body of men is, somehow they always have a few of these men. Some have hidden talents, but most of them have none.

  The column continued to march, and my taxeis marched with them – those men who needed equipment had to run back and forth.

  And then we were ready.

  I ordered the slaves and baggage out of the ranks.

  I ordered the men to exchange their spears for javelins.

  Then I wheeled my taxeis out of the column and kept moving, so that my lead files were facing the ridge. It was two thousand feet above us, up a steep slope broken by olive groves, tiny farm plots and copses of ash and oak.

  ‘We are going straight up this ridge,’ I said. ‘We will reform at the top. First man gets a mina of silver. Last man gets to cook dinner.’

  Alectus looked at the slope. ‘Any defenders?’

&nbs
p; I shook my head. ‘No idea. But no one who can stand up to this lot.’

  Alectus grunted. ‘They’re not much good.’

  I nodded. ‘They’re freemen with good arms. Anyone waiting for us on this hillside is a bunch of slaves and lower-class men with bags of rocks.’

  Philip Longsword nodded. ‘Greeks, eh?’

  Greeks were notorious, among Macedonians and their allies, for having poor skirmishers.

  ‘Ready!’ I roared.

  The royal companions were coming up on our right flank.

  ‘The king is watching us!’ I roared.

  The high-pitched rattle of our cheer rose to the gods – Alaialaialai.

  Suddenly, I loved them. And we were off up the ridge.

  A two-thousand-foot ridge is a long climb, especially when it has a slope like a barn roof. We went up and up and up and up, and by the end of a tenth of the distance, my thighs were burning like a winter fire and my aspis weighed twice what it had weighed at the base of the ridge.

  But I was among the lead fifty men.

  So was Alectus, well ahead of me, and Philip Longsword, close by my side, although I suspected that was by choice, not by exertion.

  We came to an olive grove with a low stone retaining wall. Some men climbed the wall and I ran around and gained ground, and then I heard fighting off to my right. To be honest, what I heard was the sound of men being butchered, so I just kept running up the bastard hill.

  Rocks – big rocks, probably volcanic, were scattered across the hillside at this level, and there were weeds from the farm fields, including the bane of every infantryman’s existence, the sharp seed-pods that slip into your sandals and maim your feet.

  I hadn’t been a page for nothing. I ran on, despite the sharp pains in my feet and the stitch in my side and the trembling of my upper thighs, the feeling that my ankles were going to fail, the weight of my aspis.

  I was catching Alectus.

  A dozen men appeared behind a low stone wall and threw stones at us. One caught Alectus right on the brow of his Illyrian helmet, and down he went. And I was all alone.

  I went over the wall. Once people start throwing rocks and using spears, fatigue falls way – for a while.

  They ran. I never caught them – a dozen nearly naked slaves, and they left their little piles of rocks.

  Very frustrating. On the other hand, I was a little more than halfway up the hill, and I was in front. I looked back, panting over my pair of javelins, and the hypaspitoi were spread over a stade wide and half a stade deep, and the closest men were just ten paces back.

  ‘Come on!’ I called. ‘The king is still watching!’

  Because he was. I could see him – he had his helmet off, because he always knew how to watch a feat of arms. His blond mane showed over the distance and the faint heat shimmer.

  I waved my spear.

  He raised his helmet. I swear that I could see those blue eyes across the distance, and I swear some spark leaped from Alexander to me.

  I turned before the first men could catch me and I was off again, a different fire in my blood. And close at my heels, afire with emulation, came a mix of Agrianians and Macedonians – about fifty men, all together in a bunch.

  Men were laughing.

  We ran on.

  After another stade, we couldn’t really pretend to be running. We were just climbing. It was steeper, the rocks were bigger and the copses of stunted trees came thicker. I was panting every breath, and my mouth was so dry that my tongue stuck to its roof. I was no longer first, either – Philip passed me, and then several Agrianians all together, and then more men.

  We were all together when we caught the slaves, though. They were just slaves, and had no wind, and suddenly all our weapons were red.

  And as if their blood fed us, we all gained another wind from the gods, and we ran. And down in the valley, the pezhetaeroi were cheering – the same Alaialaialaialai we’d screamed as we started, and it carried like the very voice of the gods, and rebounded from the slopes of Olympus.

  The top of the ridge was only a few horse lengths above us now, and men had to pull themselves from scrubby tree to scrubby tree – and suddenly the ridge above us was full of Thessalians, hundreds of infantrymen. Not true hoplites, more like Peltastoi, with small crescent-shaped shields and leather hats and javelins.

  Their problems were twofold. First, it’s not that easy to throw a javelin accurately in thick brush, and we were climbing the last of the ridge through dense spruce and old ash – little trees, but probably ancient, starved of water and of food.

  Second, by luck or the will of Zeus, the portion of the ridge we’d come up at the last had an odd hump and twist, so that the men above us couldn’t actually see us until we reached the very last few feet.

  What was best – for us – is that they tried hurling javelins at the sounds we made climbing – because such was the fire in us that we never slackened our assault, even when it became clear that we were climbing into a force larger than our own.

  Philip Longsword shot out of the spruce first, and took a dozen javelins in his aspis.

  When I came out next to him, I was at the base of a rock taller than a man’s head. The enemy was atop the rock and behind it.

  Javelins were thudding into my shield like an ill hail.

  I looked left and saw a route to the top, and I ran up it, into a swarm of Peltastoi.

  It was like the bear hunt all over again, except that this time I had a lot of friends and armour. I took a javelin in my instep and another ripped a finger-deep gouge in my right calf, because I had no greaves. In fact, I’d never have made it to there with greaves. But my good thorax held some blows, and my helmet took its share of abuse, and my javelins were gone – who knows where – and then Philip’s long Keltoi sword was flashing in the sun by my side, and then Agrianians were shouting in their own barbarian tongue and one of their phylarchs – I didn’t know his name yet – was beside me, with a spear as big as the one Achilles carried.

  At first, the Thessalians poured into our position, trying to overwhelm us and push us back off the rock.

  We were bigger, stronger and better trained. So we held on, although at least one of my Agrianians fell to his death in that fight.

  But as they poured into the centre to repel my thrust, the rest of my hypaspitoi caught up, spread half a stade on either side, and some of them were suddenly atop the ridge with no opponents at all – and with no plan whatsoever, or at least no plan I made, they folded in from either flank like the horns of a great bull.

  I could see it from my rock. All I wanted to do was stop fighting – one minute and I was exhausted, and ten minutes and I was wrecked, and spears were coming past my guard routinely. Only my thorax saved me, as many as twenty times. Men – good men – fell there because they had nothing left after the climb, and didn’t have armour to keep them alive.

  But I could see the wings of my taxeis closing in, and it was glorious.

  I took a deep breath, and Athena stood at my shoulder and whispered honeyed words in my ear.

  ‘Hypaspists!’ I roared. Or perhaps I croaked it. But they heard. ‘The king is watching! And there is Olympus, and the gods themselves are watching!’

  And the battle cry came back – from the valley, from the heights above us, from every throat that could still draw breath, so that the very air around us thickened with the sound.

  Alaialaialaialaialai!

  The Peltastoi broke. I think they thought from the sound that we’d got behind them. But it doesn’t matter. They turned and ran.

  They all lived, because none of us followed them. We sank down on our ridge-top and bled.

  I drank water, and Polystratus appeared with twenty mounted grooms and bandaged my calves and my instep, and put me in riding boots.

  Cassander rode up the shallow end of the ridge, three stades away.

  At our feet, two thousand slaves were cutting steps in the hillside. They were fast. They’d been promised
cash payment and freedom for the best, and they worked with a will – so fast that we could watch the progress they were making.

  Cassander saluted. We were not friends – I’ve said that. But he grinned. ‘That was worthy of the heroes of the Iliad!’ he said. ‘Alexander all but pissed himself with pleasure. Now he wants you to clear the ridge heading south.’

  I nodded.

  Polystratus handed me a roll of sesame seeds in honey, and I sucked a mouthful out of the sausage skin. The sugar went into my blood like ambrosia. I drank a mouthful of wine, finished the seeds and stood up, a new man.

  Youth! How I miss it.

  ‘Hypaspists!’ I called. Very little came out.

  I looked at Philip, who was busy with two slaves, wrapping the mess he’d made of his sword arm. He shook his head and croaked something.

  ‘My voice is strong,’ Alectus rumbled. He had a bandage around his head. ‘I missed a good fight.’

  ‘I thought you had your doubts about fighting,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘You should listen more carefully,’ he said.

  I had to whisper loudly to get words out. ‘We need to sweep the ridge.’

  Alectus nodded. He walked out along the ridge and raised his big spear. ‘Hypaspitoi!’ he called in his barbaric accent. ‘Not finished yet, philoi! Take a deep breath, think of happy things and get your helmets back on.’

  Not exactly like my speeches, but it did the job.

  Alectus led, and we followed. Whatever fire had run through my veins was gone, and I was washed clean – and empty. I couldn’t think, and I couldn’t form words. Which was fine. Alectus spread us out in a skirmish line across the ridge, as if we were Peltastoi ourselves – perhaps the terrain, or perhaps it was just the Agrianian’s way. And we walked slowly, and the remaining Peltastoi and Psiloi simply popped up like hares in a hunt and fled, and we let them go. They wasted some stones on us, and we didn’t trouble them with our javelins.