God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  I never shed any tears for Thebes. Don’t you, either.

  After the herald’s answer, we opened siege lines. The Thebans were cocky, and to be fair, their hoplites were superb. Epaminondas wasn’t so long in his grave that their tradition of victory was dead. They raided our lines with panache, took prisoners, put three lines of palisades around the Cadmea to wall the Macedonian garrison off from any support – they were active, brave and professional.

  Our siege train arrived, and we set it up. We had engineers – military mathematicians whose work consisted of evaluating defences and planning – scientifically – to reduce them. Calixthenes was the best man – he was young, dark-haired, weedy and small, and he looked like a child in a breastplate, but he was brilliant both at sighting his engines and at predicting enemy counter-measures.

  The third day, they released a cavalry sortie, and I captured half of it. It was one of my best actions – one of those actions that make you feel like a god.

  When I came on duty, just after sunrise, I set a pair of ambushes well back from the two gates where they might sortie. My ambushes were both subtle – bah, I’m bragging. But I put men in hayricks near one, and in a dry watercourse by the other, with orders to let anyone who emerged go right past them.

  Both gates had a small cavalry force at hand, whose sole job was to fake an engagement and then get routed.

  The main body of Theban horse galloped out of the Plataean gate a little after dawn and raced for our foragers in their distant fields. My ‘small force’ of cavalry pretended to attempt to engage them, and then fled before contact, and the Thebans gave chase, pursuing my handful of desperate victims across farm fields, across a dry watercourse . . .

  Into the main body of the Hetaeroi. We charged them down a low hill and broke them in one charge, and then we hunted them all the way back to their gates, and the Agrianians who had been hiding in hayricks emerged and picked beaten men off tired horses as they fled.

  More than fifty of their cavalry broke the other way – towards Athens.

  Poseidon was fresh, and the power was on me. I gave chase with anyone who was following me.

  One by one, we caught them and captured them, or killed them – ten, twenty, thirty.

  Darkness fell, and we were still running them down. None of us had horses to change.

  Horses started to die. You can ride a horse to death, if you go long enough and you are sufficiently stupid – or desperate.

  They were.

  Poseidon ran on. He was magnificent – like a god himself. I overtook man after man, and these their vaunted best horsemen – and they would either beg for quarter, or make a cut at me with a sword or a spear, and I’d ride them down. One man, I remember well, I caught, and all I had to do was grab a fistful of his chiton and pull on Poseidon’s reins – Poseidon checked, and I pulled him right over his horse’s rump. I left him for slower men to take, and rode on.

  Most of their horses foundered all together – ten or twelve in a bunch, the poor animals blowing blood out of their noses where their hearts, shattered by too long a run, had forced it.

  They might have run into the woods on Parnassus and avoided me easily enough, but they stood like deer caught in torches and surrendered.

  But one man rode on, and I stayed with him. He had the best horse. He was only a blur ahead, and we were riding in moonlight, and Poseidon had been moving for twelve hours, and I became afraid for him. I was not galloping, or even cantering – in fact, I moved at a walk and then a trot, and I got down as frequently as I dared to give him a rest.

  I needn’t have worried. He was like a horse of the gods, and as we climbed Parnassus, he seemed to become more powerful, larger, faster . . .

  I caught my foe at the top of the pass. He turned his horse, raised his sword and charged me.

  I wanted his horse. Poseidon felt my weight shift, and he danced a little to the left, and the darkness betrayed us, and we were down – just like that – and a branch hit me on the head as I fell.

  I came to and had no idea how much time had passed.

  But I had a vast feeling of fear – of impending danger.

  Poseidon gave a scream – not a neigh, but a long, loud call.

  I got a foot under me, tripped over a root behind me and fell back so fast that the sword meant to cut me missed entirely. The will of the gods – no doing of mine. I fell backwards into the gully that caught the run-off from the narrow track, and hit my head again, and the earth trembled as in an earthquake.

  On the other hand, the pain helped steady me, and I could see my enemy against the moon. He cursed.

  I tried to get to my feet. The point of my hip felt as if I’d taken a spear or an arrow. It would support my weight, but I wasn’t going to execute any brilliant throws from pankration.

  I started to climb the gully. I could hear Poseidon, and I aimed my climb at him. He had both my spare javelins, and I assumed that with a javelin in hand I could stand off my attacker.

  He moved along the top of the gully and laughed grimly. I could hear his horse – breathing like an ironsmith’s bellows. He had his sword in his hand.

  ‘Come up, lackey of the tyrant, and I’ll gut you,’ he said.

  I didn’t bother talking.

  He came right to the top of the gully.

  I whistled.

  Poseidon kicked him, and he gave a cry and fell, clutching his thigh. I took his sword and cut his throat.

  Glorious, eh?

  He had a magnificent horse – a bay I called Ajax. Big as an elephant. His sons are still in my stable – mixed with Poseidon’s sons.

  But both my horses were done in, and I had to walk back to camp, limping all the way.

  As soon as I was back, Alexander sent for me, congratulated me and ordered me to Athens with a small escort of cavalry.

  ‘Take Thaïs,’ he said. ‘The city likes you, and loves her. I don’t care what you do – see to it that Demosthenes cannot raise an army to break my siege.’

  Alexander was never bloodthirsty. Far from it – in his mind of wheels and gears, everyone and everything had a purpose and he could never see why people wasted time on anything so inefficient as hate.

  And he said outright that if we had to lay siege to Athens, we’d never conquer Asia. ‘Athens could take us six months,’ he said. ‘Thebes I can surround. Athens – we’d need to go home and build a fleet, contest the seas with Lycurgus – at least a year wasted. Perhaps the whole war wasted.’ He shook his head and drank more wine. ‘I hate fighting Greeks. I’m beginning to hate Greeks.’ He looked into his wine cup.

  ‘Macedonians are better?’ I asked.

  ‘Amyntas is dead,’ he said. ‘There will be no more trouble in Macedon.’

  I shrugged. ‘Unless Parmenio or Antipater decides to take the throne himself.’

  Alexander smiled. ‘If I die. Not until. Or am defeated repeatedly in the field.’ His smile widened. ‘Which is never going to happen. I’m invincible.’

  I took my grooms under Polystratus. Thaïs and I had an abbreviated reunion. She did not want to go to Athens.

  ‘I do not want to be treated as a traitor,’ she said.

  ‘You have a unique opportunity to save lives in Athens,’ I said.

  She hit me. It was the only time she ever struck me, but she did it with venom. She meant to hurt me.

  She loved Athens.

  But she went.

  I went with a letter from Alexander demanding that ten leading men of Athens be surrendered to the judgement of the hegemon. I don’t think Alexander meant to execute them – well, to tell you the truth, I doubt that Demosthenes would have survived an hour, but there were so many of us out for his blood . . .

  Charmeides and Lycurgus were courageous, if wily, opponents. And they’d have made wonderful hostages. You need to remember the origin of the Hetaeroi – originally, the Hetaeroi and the pages were the sons of captured enemy chiefs and princes – hostages for their father’s good behaviour. It wa
s a Macedonian custom to take prisoners and integrate them into our service – and reward them so richly that they became part of us. Charmeides would have done better with us, but he took ship and fled to Darius. Lycurgus lay low. Demosthenes doubtless pissed on his chiton in terror and hid in a basement.

  Thaïs was cursed wherever she went. Her house had graffiti scrawled across the beautiful façade, and men yelled obscenities at her in the street.

  But Phokion and Eumeles, Diodorus and Kineas and a thousand men like them stood with us, and the Assembly refused to vote for Demosthenes’ resolution to send an army to support Thebes.

  I’m not sure I helped by being in Athens – in fact, I was hit with a stone on my first day and had little to say for a week – but Thaïs did. Despite her fears and her anger, she was unmoved by the catcalls and the vulgarity. She opened her house and held court – and men came.

  And she told them what would happen if Macedon stormed Athens. And she drew them pictures of our siege machines. Athens had a few on the walls. She told them what Alexander had at Thebes.

  But her most impressive speech was about Persia.

  ‘Just because Thebes – our ancient enemy – is choosing to waste herself against Macedon,’ she said, ‘must we? Thebes bragged – I heard them – that they were once again allies of the Mede. Is that who we are? Demosthenes has taken money from the Great King – would Miltiades approve? What about Pericles? Socrates? Plato? Did Athenians die at Marathon so that we could be slaves of Persia? Allies of Thebes?’ She shrugged. ‘Thebes is not in revolt against the tyrant of Macedon – Thebes has reverted to her truest self, and turned her back on Greece.’

  Nice speech. I give it here in full, because I feel she might have been another Pericles, had she been born with a penis and not a vagina.

  Her words, in Phokion’s mouth – and that was a matter for bitter mirth in itself, because Phokion and Eumeles hated her – and Demosthenes’ faction was wrecked.

  The Athenians voted to send a delegation of ten men to Alexander to crave forgiveness. They sent Phokion to lead it, and Kineas with a squadron of elite Hippeis as an escort.

  We arrived to find Thebes a burned-out husk, with her entire population raped and degraded, huddled in pens, awaiting sale. Later I heard Perdiccas, who led the assault, brag that no woman between ten and seventy remained unraped when the town was stormed. Children were butchered wholesale.

  The Theban hoplites fought brilliantly, but they were no match for us. I heard later that they were the best fighters, man for man, of any foe most of the hypaspists ever faced. But as a body, they made mistakes, and a major gate was left virtually unguarded, and Alexander led the hypaspitoi through it and the town was stormed. Most of the hoplites died in the streets.

  The Military Journal says that thirty thousand Thebans died. As many again were enslaved.

  There were exceptions – a widow of one of the Boeotarchs, an aristocrat, was raped by one of our officers – a taxiarch in the pezhetaeroi. She didn’t break or even bend – when he went to take a drink after getting off her, she pushed him into her well and dropped rocks on him until he died. Alexander gave her freedom and all her property.

  In fact, he was appalled. His troops had got away from him in the storming, and they were angry. Exhausted. They had marched across the world, in horrible conditions, because of these rebels (as we called them), and they wanted revenge for every boil and every sore, every pulled muscle, every broken bone, every day without food.

  I won’t say Alexander wept. Merely that, like his father, he would have preferred other means.

  But as I say, by the time the Athenian delegation arrived, there were no other means left. Alexander sat blank-faced on a stool and gave many Thebans their freedom – even their property. Many of the temples were spared. Several public buildings were spared. Slaves collected all the dead Theban hoplites and gave them a monument and a decent burial.

  But the rest were sold into slavery en masse, and the town was destroyed. Turned to rubble.

  Later – during the Lamian War – I heard Greeks claim that the true resistance to Macedon started there, and that Greek unity began in the ashes of Thebes.

  Bullshit, says I. Thebes got what was coming to it. A nation of traitors, served the dish they’d ordered. The women of Thebes have my pity. The men died in harness, as rebels, and stupid rebels at that, and they got precisely what they deserved. And no one in Greece gave an obol. Had we done the same to Athens, it would have been war to the end – even Sparta, or Argos or Megara. But Thebes?

  When we marched away, the ruins were still smoking, and Plataeans had come all the way across the plain, thirty stades, just to piss on the rubble. They waved at us and threw flowers.

  We waved back.

  And finally, we marched back to Pella.

  Most of us in that army had been on campaign for more than a year. No one had been home that summer, and from the noble Hetaeroi to the lowliest pezhetaeroi, we had fought in at least five actions per man, marched ten thousand stades, killed enemies without count – fought against odds over and over.

  We called it ‘The Year of Miracles’.

  We called Alexander . . . king. He was king. He was king from Thrace to Illyria, from Sparta to Athens and across Thessaly to Pella. Demosthenes and Darius of Persia had tried to unite with Amyntas and the Thebans to make a web of steel to surround and crush our king, and he had beaten every one of them, all at once.

  From the Shipka Pass to Pellium and down to Thebes, no enemy wanted to face Macedon in the field, ever again. And the smoke rising from the yawning basements of Thebes warned potential rebels of the consequences of foolishness.

  Tribute flowed from the ‘allies’. Everyone in the empire paid their taxes that winter.

  As the leaves reddened on the trees, we rode back to Pella. The last morning, Alexander was nearly giddy with excitement at returning victorious, and I suggested we put on our best armour and ride our best horses and make a fine show, and he laughed and agreed.

  We spent the morning preparing. Veterans among the pezhetaeroi mounted their horsehair plumes, or their ostrich feathers. I’d gone back to the same smith in Athens and got another helmet – this one covered in gold. He’d delivered it with ill grace – but he’d done a magnificent job, and my helmet had a distinctive shape, with a brim over the eyes and a forged iron crest over the bronze bowl, and a tall ruff of horsehair. It was the kind of helmet men called ‘Attic’. It had less face protection, but I could hear and see and, most importantly, it was magnificent, and every man who could see it would know where I was. And the iron crest meant I would never be killed by a blow to the head.

  Tirseas of Athens. Best armourer of his day. Hated Macedonians.

  We put all our best on – clean chitons, full armour, polished by the slaves with ash and tallow. Swords shining, spears sparkling. Shaved. We were wearing a fortune in armour – brilliant horsehair plumes, Aegyptian ostrich feathers, solid-gold eagles’ wings, panther skins, leopard skins, bronze armour polished like the disc of the sun and decorated in silver and gold, tin-plated bronze buckles and solid-silver buckles in our horse tack, crimson leather strapping on every mount, tall Persian bloodstock horses with pale coats and dark legs and faces. Alexander was the richest and the best-armoured – unlike his father, he looked like a god. No one could doubt that he was in command.

  At noon, the Hetaeroi entered Pella, and the crowds cheered us, I suppose, but what I remember is riding with the somatophylakes into the courtyard of the palace. Olympias was there, of course – best pass over her – and even the slaves were cheering us.

  When we reined up in the courtyard, there was a moment – no longer than the thickness of a hair, so to speak – when none of us moved. We sat on our horses and looked around.

  I looked up, to where I could see the marble rail of the exedra, and the double arch of the window of Alexander’s childhood nursery. I thought I saw a pair of small heads there, and I wondered if, despite Hera
clitus, I could put my toe back in the same part of the river. If I could reach across time to those boys – if they were right there.

  Those boys being us – me and Cleitus and Alexander. And tell them – some day, we will do it. We will be heroes. Fear nothing. We will win. We will do what Philip did.

  But better. And the best was yet to come.

  PART III

  Asia

  FIFTEEN

  Pella, 335 BC

  We had no money.

  Of course, that’s not true. The sale of all the Thebans, plus the loot from Thrace and Illyria, paid the crown of Macedon a little less than eight hundred talents of gold, which didn’t quite cover the arrears of pay to the army. Philip had died leaving the crown five hundred talents of gold in debt – in fact, like many an unlucky son, we had new creditors appearing every day, and Philip probably left Alexander more like a thousand talents in debt. A thousand talents. In gold. Remember that the King of Kings tried to buy Athens for three hundred talents . . .

  We’d been home from our year of miracles for three days when I saw Alexander throw one of the worst temper tantrums of his life. It was horrible. It started badly and grew steadily worse.

  I had the duty. There was a rumour – one of Thaïs’s sources – that Darius had put out money to arrange Alexander’ s murder, and the Hetaeroi were on high alert. In fact, I had Ochrid – now a freeman – tasting the king’s food because we’d been away from Pella a year and none of us trusted anyone in the palace.

  So I was in armour, and I had just walked the corridors of the palace with Seleucus and Nearchus as my lieutenants, checking every post. I had almost sixty men on duty, and two more shifts ready to take over in turn. Alexander had just promoted almost a hundred men to the Hetaeroi – some from the Prodromoi, some from the grooms and some from other units, or straight from civilian life. They were a mixed bag. Perdiccas and I had shared them out like boys choosing sides for a game of hockey.