He carried her to her tripod, which someone had set over the cleft.
But there were no priests. They were the required intermediary. I knew how it worked – the priestess breathed in the fumes from the cleft, and the god came to her, and she spoke, and the priests translated her words.
Alexander put her on the tripod and set her down. She gave a little squeak – the tripod had been set badly, and it wobbled and she shrieked as it began to topple – back, into the cleft.
Alexander’s right arm shot out and caught the tripod – a heavy bronze artifact that weighed as much as a strong man, and the Pythia was no small woman. He caught them both on the brink of the cleft – which was only a man’s shoulders wide but as deep as Tartarus – and pulled them back to safety, and the Pythia threw her arms around his neck.
‘You are invincible!’ she breathed.
But we all heard her.
Alexander beamed with joy like a boy on a feast day.
He set her on her feet and offered to carry her down the hill to her house.
She laughed. I don’t know how often the Pythia laughed in the temple, but I doubt it happened often. She looked around. ‘A most eventful day,’ she said. ‘If someone would lend me a cloak, I would return to my work.’
Thaïs handed her a long red cloak, which she held for a moment. ‘It has your smell,’ she said to Thaïs, and I felt a spear-prick.
Thaïs raised her two flawless eyebrows. ‘Keep it for my sake, then,’ she said.
Alexander turned aside to Thaïs. ‘I think you are the first woman to be allowed here, except for the priestess.’ He looked worried. I could read his mind – he knew that the ‘prophecy’ he’d just gained was irregular, and he was afraid that people would point at Thaïs as an aspect of pollution or sacrilege.
‘I?’ asked Thaïs. ‘I am not here,’ she said, and walked out of the precinct.
The next day, we rode together. I was still in turmoil. She had slept elsewhere that night, and that happened often enough, but I felt for her in the night. I was angry and hurt.
‘You do not own me,’ she said. Ares, she was angry.
This is the part I had not understood. I had made her angry.
I looked around, made a motion to Polystratus. ‘I do not own you. But I love you, and you slept with someone else. For nothing but the pleasure of it, I assume.’ Oh, I was being prim and proper and adult.
She shrugged. ‘Girls don’t make love. They just play. And she’s the Pythia. I am a priestess of Aphrodite. I cannot refuse the Pythia. And she was so lonely.’ She turned to me, and her eyes, despite some brimming tears, were hot with anger. ‘And you made me feel bad about it. Like a jealous boy. I don’t want to spend years with a jealous boy. I want to spend years with a noble man.’
‘Is that a clever, sophisticated, Athenian way of saying that you can spread your legs for whomever you please?’ I asked.
She spat. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Listen, Ptolemy. Let me tell you a harsh fact. I spread my legs for whomever I please. All freewomen do. Otherwise, we are slaves. If we can only open and close our cunts when you tell us, we are slaves. Period, end of story, no argument. If you want me, you must win me every day. Not just once, and then lock me away for future concubinage. If you cannot accept that,’ she sighed, ‘I have to face a long, cold journey back to Athens.’
I rode on, tight-lipped. Too hurt to speak.
She dropped back to her women.
Next day, I sent Polystratus to fetch her to my tent. It was colder than the blackest depths of Tartarus and I had a brazier going.
She came, which was a good sign, I felt.
‘I want you,’ I said.
‘Good,’ she said, and sat.
‘I need to negotiate a treaty with you,’ I said. ‘I cannot keep you – and win you every day. I cannot. I lack the time, and I have to live in a world of men.’
Thaïs laughed. ‘Do I get wine while we bargain?’
‘Hot wine, if Ochrid knows what’s good for him. First, I have considered your idea of freedom. Even if I accepted it in principle – and I’m not positive I do – I am a senior officer of the king, and a man in a world of warriors, and if you spread your legs for Nearchus I have to kill him.’
‘Nearchus?’ she asked. She shook her head. ‘He’s pretty, but he’s dumb.’
‘Perdiccas?’ I asked.
‘Spare me.’ She sighed. ‘You are saying that I cannot truly be free due to the constraints of your culture, in which I am choosing to live.’
I nodded. ‘Exactly!’
‘Did you consider that I might figure this out all on my own?’ she asked. ‘The Pythia . . . was lonely. And no one needed to know but us.’ She shrugged.
‘So I was being tested,’ I said.
She shrugged again. ‘If you like. You are not actually the centre of the universe, my love. Other people exist.’
‘Could you stop putting me in my place?’ I asked.
She laughed, drank some hot wine and quite suddenly got up, leaned over and kissed me. The scent of her – which I hadn’t smelled in two days – threatened to overwhelm me. My penis was instantly hard – I offer this vulgarity not to be salacious, young man, but to give you an idea of her power.
‘I will never offend you or yours,’ she said. ‘You are my friend, my heart. And you will not ever ask me questions. Because if you do, I will tell you the answers. My love, I am a hetaera, not a wife. If you want a kept virgin, go and get one, and leave me be.’
I nodded. ‘What if I ask you questions and I can stand the answers?’ I asked.
‘Then you will be unlike any man I’ve ever known,’ she said.
‘Did the Pythia please you?’ I asked.
‘Beautifully. She is a very skilled lover. Priestesses of Apollo always are.’ She shrugged. ‘And she is in a position to aid me. Delphi has powerful friends, and makes a powerful friend, too.’
I must have looked spectacularly dense. She made a motion with her hand – dimissal, annoyance. ‘Do you know that in every relationship, there comes a moment when I ask myself – Aphrodite, is he as dumb as he seems?’ Her eyes bored into mine.
Note that we were not having my conversation – the one where I tasked her with infidelity. I was on the defensive and losing ground more quickly than a badly ordered phalanx in a rout. ‘Well?’
‘She—’
‘I did not make love to her because she can help the crusade in Asia,’ Thaïs said. ‘But she can do us more service than ten thousand hoplites. Because Delphi is the clearing house of information for all of Hellas – and Asia, too. Do you understand?’
I’m sure I nodded. In truth, I didn’t understand. Not until much later.
But I was smart enough to know that I didn’t want to lose her, not for anything.
I nodded slowly. The spear-point was there, somewhere down in my belly, grating softly against my ribs, but I was going to learn to deal with it, because this was the woman I wanted.
‘She was better than me?’ my mouth asked before my brain could stop it.
Thaïs reached out a hand and caught my face in it. ‘I never, ever compare. Don’t ever ask me to again.’
I wanted to cry.
She shook her head. ‘I will teach you the rules, love. It will be worth it. Love, far from being scary, dangerous and horrid, is in fact a marvellous engine of energy and creation – but it needs a harness, and that harness is rules. Please?’ she asked, waiting for me to let her on to my lap.
I hesitated.
‘Ptolemy,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to play at this many times. If you cannot live with me as I am – let’s part now. Right now, this instant. Otherwise, let’s move on and make love. The talking is done.’ She smiled, and it wasn’t a hurt smile or a difficult smile – but it was a deeply knowledgeable one. ‘Choose.’
I looked into those remarkable blue eyes. ‘You mean, I can choose between sending you away, and having the best sex of my life?’ I sighed. ‘I don�
�t know. I need time to think,’ I said, while reaching my warm hands under her gown.
‘Humour,’ she said, through my kisses, ‘is your outstanding virtue.’
‘I thought it was my large penis,’ I said.
She laughed into my mouth. We were warm.
We spent the winter training north of Pella. This was new. As I’ve said, Philip always sent the army home for the winter. Alexander did not. He kept the entire force in the field – funded by the League of Corinth, at a drachma per soldier per day.
We climbed mountains in the snow.
We practised seizing ridges and passes. In the snow.
We charged lines of straw dummies with our lances. On horseback. In the snow.
We practised setting camp and setting fires, digging in, collecting forage – in the snow.
And we drilled.
Ares, it was endless.
Look, I’m good at drill. I love drill. I love the sort of ritual-team-dance aspect to drill – the stamp of a thousand perfectly timed feet sends a thrill down my spine. But that winter was absurd. We drilled and drilled and drilled, and I’m not sure that there’s any army in history that spent as much time practising the Spartan Counter-March as we did. Every day, five or six times a day – with wheeling, sprinting, breaking and reforming, marching to the left, right and rear by files, half-files and double files. On and on.
Every damn day.
The troopers cursed him. The aristocrats were good officers at first, but after two months – remember, we’d been at it all summer, too – people just wanted a cup of wine and a fuck.
I had to send Thaïs away, because men were starting to hate me for having her. Which was sad, because she loved it, and she kept people amused – she’d show up in the phalanx in armour and already know the drill, she’d ride a horse shooting a bow, she’d go off with the scouts until they caught her – she could easily pass for a man, but something often gave her away, too.
She had found a hobby. I didn’t know what it was and I knew I wasn’t allowed to ask, but she suddenly wrote a great many letters – on and on, really. Sometimes a dozen a day. And she bought a pair of Thracian slaves – and sent one home. Into the mountains. I didn’t understand that at all.
She smiled at me and dared me to ask.
At any rate, after a month I didn’t have to pay attention any more, because I had to send her to my estates. After that, the rest of the winter was a blur of marching and climbing and freezing cold – you climb a mountain in two feet of snow wearing open-toed boots. Go ahead. The pezhetaeroi were in sandals. I had a horse, most of the time – a sort of living leg-warmer.
I knew what we were doing. We were going to blow the Thracians right out of their northern kingdom and carve a road to the Danube – to buy Antipater a defensible border while we were away conquering Asia. It was a good plan, in a general, strategic way. But it was an obvious plan, and every man, woman and child on both sides of the nebulous border between Macedon and the wild Thracians knew we were coming as soon as the passes were free of snow.
Alexander did have one shaved knucklebone, though. He sent our fleet – twenty triremes and some supply ships – from Amphilopolis, around through the Dardanelles and into the Euxine Sea. In part it was exploration – the Macedonian fleet had never attempted to enter the Euxine. In part it was sheer daring – we knew nothing of the mouth of the Danube, although we found some Amphilopolans who had traded there. But it was a brilliant outflanking move. If it worked. The ships would leave well before the army marched. If the army marched.
One night, I lay in some straw between Cleitus and the king. We were passing a gourd full of wine. Outside, the wind howled. Alectus had just informed the king that we’d lost a little over a hundred men to exposure and the arrows of the Lord of Contagion that month.
I was keeping the Military Journal, by then – in effect, I coordinated everyone’s military reporting, and that had become my major job. Antipater did it for Philip, and he taught me – but I added to the job. I went around to all the regiments and appointed a record-keeping officer – sometimes with the help of the commander, and sometimes in spite of him. Perdiccas called my officers the ‘king’s spies’. The thing was, the king needed to know the truth. Bluster didn’t cut it when you needed a return of effective soldiers, or when we needed to know how many horses and how many riders were available for a particular mission, or which horses needed new tack before the army could march.
And at the same time, the king was paying – with League funds – for a gradual re-armouring of the whole Macedonian army. And that cost money, but it also required endless lists, inventories, record-keeping, tracking inventory . . .
It was all glory and arete, let me tell you.
At any rate, that’s why I was lying wrapped in my cloak in a pile of straw in a freezing-cold barn in northern Macedon, snuggled between the commander of the king’s bodyguard and the king himself, listening to Alectus tell us his figures on sick and injured, with every word sending plumes of mist rising from his mouth. It was cold.
Alexander dismissed him with a cup of hot wine and rolled over. ‘As soon as the passes are clear,’ he said dreamily.
‘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 a
lso 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.
God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great Page 37