God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  ‘If you are declaring war . . .’ Antipater said slowly – and I could see I’d shaken him.

  ‘I’m not!’ I said. And laughed. Oh, the power of it – I had just threatened Antipater and made him twitch.

  Court intrigue. Everyone says they are above such stuff, but no one is, and next to war, it is the greatest game.

  So I laughed and shook my head. ‘I am not declaring war,’ I said. ‘I just want everyone to note that if something happens to Alexander, there will be a general bloodbath – which I am seeking to prevent. But if that bloodbath happens – well, I wish to suggest that neither you nor Parmenio would emerge unscathed.’ I leaned forward. ‘Or even alive.’

  Antipater nodded. ‘I understood you the first time.’

  I stood back. ‘Good. I’m going to see the king, and then, as I said, go to my estates. Glad we could have this discussion.’

  Antipater leaned forward. ‘He’s insane, you know. You must know.’

  I shook my head. ‘No. He’s king. You old men should get that through your heads.’ At this point, Thaïs and I had had this discussion fifty times, and we had hammered out a point of view. I shot it at Antipater, a prepared missile. ‘You think he’s insane because he’s convinced he’s invincible, and because he can see right through you and acts accordingly, and because he says what he thinks. I agree it’s not normal – but he is the king.’

  Antipater raised a hand. ‘Listen: you think we are enemies – we are not. May I do you a favour?’

  I was instantly alert. ‘If you will,’ I quipped.

  He nodded. ‘The king is selling land. We need the money for Asia. I have four farms – all bordering yours. Between Europos and the Axios river – prime land, and twenty stades of royal forest on the river.’

  I nodded. I knew the land – farms which actually broke up our holdings along the Axios. They were meant to – to keep landowners like us from becoming regional warlords.

  As if.

  ‘For fifty talents of gold, I’ll see to it that you own them,’ Antipater said. ‘It’s for the war in Asia – none of it will stick to my fingers.’

  That’s twelve years of all the profits of all our land, I thought. My lands made me about four talents a year – that’s without lots of other profits, like sales of horses and slaves, fish from the river and other projects. In fact, I could depend on a little more than ten talents of gold a year.

  ‘You have last year’s accounts for the farms?’ I asked.

  Antipater shook his head. ‘Most aristocrats would just buy them – to have the land.’

  ‘For fifty talents?’ I asked. ‘Most aristocrats must be fools, then.’

  Antipater got up and went to the vast closet of scrolls that represented the tax documents of the empire. Scrolls sat in baskets. Two slaves sat at a nearby desk and sorted outgoing and incoming scrolls.

  He pulled down the central region basket, went through the scrolls and shook his head. ‘There’s no record.’ He shrugged. ‘Somebody forgot to note it. I imagine the farms and forest are worth . . . a talent a year. Perhaps more.’

  I nodded. ‘I’ll talk to the king, but I doubt I’ll offer more than thirty, and even that is more to help the war effort than because the land is worth it.’

  Antipater raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re going to bargain with the king?’ he asked.

  I smiled and left him. Again, I mention this because to understand us – me and Alexander and Parmenio and Antipater – you need to understand who Alexander was – and who I was. And how important it was, even when I was in power, to manage my estates well.

  The king had all the tax documents, of course. Antipater didn’t know the king – I did. If his precious war in Asia depended on finding money, I knew that Alexander would become an overnight expert at funding. And he did.

  ‘Antipater tells me you will buy the Axios estates,’ he said, as soon as I was admitted.

  Well, well.

  ‘For thirty-five talents,’ I said.

  Alexander sat back. ‘Perdiccas gave me ten talents yesterday.’

  I nodded – taken aback and trying not to show it. ‘What does he get for it?’ I asked.

  Alexander made a face. ‘My undying love? And command of a regiment of pezhetaeroi.’

  ‘What’re the Military Journal and the Agrianians worth?’ I asked.

  Alexander nodded. ‘You’d have to share with Alectus – who I just promoted to the Hetaeroi, as well. Pater always put the best foreigners into the guards – I’m doing the same. We’re going to have ten squadrons of two hundred, and a reserve – Philip’s old men – three more squadrons.’

  ‘No wonder you need money!’ I said.

  Alexander laughed. ‘Fifteen talents for the Agrianians and the Journal.’

  ‘Undying love?’ I asked.

  He looked at Hephaestion, who made a moue. ‘As long as you don’t make any more jokes about me,’ Hephaestion said.

  ‘None? A steep price, but – Done. I’ll pay fifty talents for the estates. That’s thirty-five for them, and fifteen for you.’

  Alexander’s tone lightened. ‘And I’ll have the use of the forest whenever I want it. Yes?’

  ‘For hunting? Done. Put it in the contract.’ I grinned, and we shook hands.

  I took Thaïs home. Sent Heron with my grooms under Polystratus into Pella with fifty talents of gold – almost the whole of my father’s lifetime of savings, gone in an afternoon. On the other hand, Heron said it made him happy.

  ‘I’ve expected some bandit to come and kill us all for it – for years,’ he said.

  Thaïs took another talent and poured money out into her spider’s web of contacts, and more news came back – more and more news.

  Darius had ordered a fleet to combine at Miletus, in Asia.

  He knew we were coming.

  Memnon was raising a major army.

  Darius himself was marching east with his household, to face a rebellion in Sogdiana, wherever that was.

  Demosthenes was busy cooking trouble. Theban exiles were the new vector of rebellion throughout the league, and they spread like poison. Thaïs’s friends identified them in Corinth and Corcyra and Athens and Miletus.

  Thaïs’s friends were electrified by recent events. The destruction of Thebes got rid of the mere hangers-on. It tested some loyalties, but others were either hardened as a stick is hardened in fire, or strengthened by fear.

  But the other side – the anti-Macedonian faction, if you will – was also hardening. And since we were poor and Darius of Persia was rich, the mercenaries were all going his way.

  I passed the reports on to Hephaestion. Thaïs stayed with me.

  We spent months at the farms. I enjoyed putting my organisational skills to work on the royal farms I’d purchased. They’d been mismanaged for fifty years – no one ever manages a farm for the king as well as they’d manage it for themselves.

  I appointed Heron’s oldest son to manage two of them, and left him to it, and took the other two for myself. I was determined to breed better horses, and make a killing on them. Or ride them myself. So Poseidon and my new Theban brute Ajax went to stud and passed a very happy winter.

  Thaïs and I did too, for a while. She was due after the Winter Feast of Persephone, and she bore me a daughter virtually to the day she’d predicted – but then, she was a priestess of Aphrodite. We called her Eurydike, and she was pretty and plump and had cheeks you just wanted to kiss – or chew on. And thighs – and tiny fingers and toes.

  I’ve forgotten to mention young Olympias, my Illyrian foundling. Thaïs took her into her household, and she grew up as a sort of older sister to Eurydike.

  I should also mention that Thaïs and I kept separate establishments. Hers was run by old Chalke, a former smith and former slave, because she’d freed her Italiote, Anonius, and he’d returned to Italy. Chalke was old and tough and pretty much unafraid of anything or anyone – he had an eye gone, scars all over his chest – he was the kind of man everyone fear
s to meet in a dark alley.

  Mine was run by Polystratus. Polystratus and Chalke were not friends – more rivals.

  I mention this because Thaïs and I lived very separate lives, even after Eurydike was born, and we were too seldom together even when we wanted to be. She was, in many ways, a great lady – a person of as much importance as I was. Twice that winter she went into Pella without me, summoned by the king to deal with matters relating to her web. If I say she had no secrets from me, it’s because she had her private life and I mine. I don’t think that she had any other lovers – I know I didn’t – but I’d learned my lesson. I wasn’t going to ask.

  After Eurydike’s birth, she informed me that the goddess required that she be celibate for two months, and that if I would join her in this sacrifice, Eurydike would be a healthier child.

  Eurydike never had so much as a bad cold as a child, so I’m guessing that Aphrodite’s an honest goddess. So Thaïs was not in my bed for months after the birth of our daughter, and I saw less of her by day, as well. So I was shocked one day to walk into a barn on my home farm and find her and Bella lifting weights like men. Why was I shocked? And a month later, I found the two of them at the edge of one of my pastures, dancing to Chalke’s pipes, and I lay down and watched them, aching for her and amazed to see the rapidity of her movements, the near perfection of her speed and grace, the coordination of the two women, one black, one white, as they moved, naked, through a bewildering flurry of moves, covered in sweat.

  It was truly like watching the gods. I snuck away through the trees. I know now that she was working very hard to get her body back – that this is another tribulation women bear, that they must lose months of conditioning in pregnancy and must train like athletes to return to shape. At the time, I simply missed her.

  But two months after Eurydike’s birth, just after the early feast of Herakles, she and I shared a dinner, and after dinner, in the midst of a conversation about Menander’s latest play, she squeezed my hand. ‘I have a hankering,’ she said, ‘to sleep with a man with a big nose.’

  Well, well.

  Our whole relationship seemed to be restored in one night of love – not just sex, either. She came to me almost every night, for weeks. But it was rare for her to sleep with me – actually share my bed – never so often as to let it become familiar. She began to use different scents and wore different clothes and once shocked me by having a girdle of gold under her chiton, and another time she was painted – beautiful designs in red and black around her wrists and hips and running down into her loins.

  No, I didn’t need to tup any slave girls. We’d started something different. We spent time together with our daughter. I remember one day dispensing justice for my tenants, with Eurydike curled on my lap. I was not planning to be my father.

  After the Macedonian Feast of Zeus the King, Alexander summoned me to court. I had been gone three months, and I was softer, happier and less exercised than at any time in my life.

  Happiness is so much harder to describe than war.

  And you won’t find that in the Military Journal, either.

  Antipater had either forgiven me, or never been offended. He and Alexander had summoned me back to court to help with the logistical planning for the march to Asia. That part is in the Journal, so I won’t bore you much, but I’ll use this opportunity to tell you what the king and Parmenio had chosen to take to Asia.

  First, ten thousand pezhetaeroi in five regiments – Elimeotis, under Coenus; Orestae, under Perdiccas, and under Polyperchon the Tymphaeans – all collectively known as astHetaeroi, the men of Outer Macedon, as separate from the pezhetaeroi, who were in three regiments under Meleager, Craterus and Amyntas son of Andromenes, representing the men of Inner Macedonia. Old Macedonia. To further complicate this, we called all of them – all six regiments – pezhetaeroi. Got it?

  Nicanor had fifteen hundred hypaspitoi. Alectus left the hypaspitoi for the Agrianians at this time, and took most of the Agrianians with him – not all, but most – and Nicanor drafted the very best men of the ‘Asian’ pezhetaeroi to replace them. It was a different set of hypaspitoi – but not worse, though it pains me to say so.

  The Psiloi – the professional light armed troops, made up of men who could have fought in more equipment but were paid for specialist scout services (as opposed to the rabble of freed slaves and lesser men that Greeks used as Psiloi) consisted of six hundred Agrianians and four hundred archers – most of whom were recruited out of Attika and mainland Greece, although you’d never know it to look at them, as they dressed like Sakje or Thrake. But they were not mercenaries, but professional archers serving Macedon and looking to gain land grants and Macedonian citizenship. The archers (the Toxophiloi) and the Agrianians together were the Psiloi brigade, which was mine.

  Then we had a little more than six thousand Thracians. The conquered chieftains each submitted a band in lieu of tribute – they were serving for plunder. They began to trickle in with the first melting of snow, and they were as excited as children before a feast, and you would never have known we’d beaten them like a drum the year before.

  We had about the same number of Greeks – mostly small contingents from the smaller states, three hundred men each from places like Argos and Corcyra. Worth noting here that the Greeks weren’t worthless, but they were outnumbered by the Thracians – this in the Panhellenic crusade to avenge the destruction of Athens!

  So that was the infantry, with five thousand mercenaries and Parmenio’s army in Asia (another ten thousand Macedonian foot in six more regiments). Altogether, we had about forty-two thousand infantry.

  For cavalry, Alexander and Parmenio spent the winter expanding the Hetaeroi to almost two thousand five hundred, and we took three-quarters of them to Asia – eighteen hundred men with three horses each and full armour.

  We had as many again – Thessalians. They served for pay, but under their own officers, as if Thessaly were a new set of Macedonian provinces, like Outer Macedonia. In effect, they were – they elected Alexander Archon for Life. So – eighteen hundred superb Thessalian cavalry.

  Then the one really reliable contribution from the Greeks – six hundred splendid cavalry. Athens sent her best – the lead squadron of the Hippeis, all aristocrats, under my friend Kineas. But the other contingents weren’t bad, and they, unlike the hoplites, were friends of Alexander and willing to fight.

  Parmenio had another thousand cavalry – mostly mercenaries – and then there were the Prodromoi, now augmented with Paeonians and with Thracians – a little short of a thousand light cavalry. All told, we had at least six thousand cavalry. The army totalled out just short of fifty thousand men, and we calculated rations and forage on fifty thousand, because it was easy, and because a surplus is a hedge against disaster. And besides, if you don’t already know it, that army had at least one slave for every soldier – probably more, and certainly many more after we started to gain Asia.

  But I get ahead of myself.

  Antipater and I went through all these figures, and then we started to draw things. Camps – laid out for one hundred thousand men. Forage – care to know what it takes to feed a hundred thousand men? It takes six hundred thousand pounds of food a day. Thirty thousand animals? Another three hundred thousand pounds of food. Call it a round million pounds of food a day.

  Some of that can be found in grass. But that still leaves a lot to find.

  And you can’t put a month’s worth of food in wagons. There just aren’t that many farm wagons in the world.

  What you do is build magazines, and store food. Philip had started the process, and Alexander had, thank the gods, never stopped spending on his preparations so that the magazines were full at the two ports in Asia and all across Macedon and down the road to the Bosporus.

  It was doubly good, because Antipater showed me the accounts. The magazines were full, and the troops were paid, and we had less than thirty talents in the treasury – cash for thirty days’ operations.

&
nbsp; The men wouldn’t mutiny right away, of course – but it would only be a matter of time.

  Memnon was reputed to be the best general of his generation, and a brilliant deceiver – and a careful strategist who never fought unless he had to. I began to sweat just thinking of what he could do to us by not fighting. Two months of avoiding us and we’d be broke.

  Alexander flatly refused to marry. He’d accepted all of Parmenio’s appointments, and he’d accepted all of Antipater’s financial advice, but he was determined to march in the spring, unencumbered, and he referred to marriage in terms that left no one in any doubt of his views that marriage was profoundly unheroic. Achilles was mentioned a great deal.

  Parmenio convinced me to talk to the king. On this topic, I agreed with the king’s mature councillors. An heir would make the kingdom more stable.

  On the other hand, I saw through Antipater and I saw through Parmenio. Both had daughters – both seemed to feel that they would make fine fathers-in-law.

  Ochrid was still alive, and no one had attempted to poison the king. My arrangements for his daily security were untouched.

  Had I warned them off? Had the warning been a false alarm?

  You never know, in this business.

  I approached the king and asked if there was anyone he would marry.

  He shrugged. ‘If Athens had a king, I’d marry that man’s daughter,’ he said. ‘If Darius offered me his sister, I’d consider it.’ He gave me his new, lopsided, man-of-the-people grin. ‘Otherwise, no.’

  I nodded. ‘An heir would be good for the kingdom,’ I suggested.

  ‘I’d be dead the moment a son of mine put his head from between his mother’s thighs,’ he said.

  I thought so, too.

  So I went back to the old general and told him that Alexander would not marry.

  He made a face, and dismissed me.

  Kineas arrived with the Athenians. He kissed Thaïs, made much of Eurydike, and bought a house for himself and his friends. He was rich in a way that I’d never seen before – he refused all offers of help.