God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the secret meeting, and I didn’t like the notion that Darius was a fool and would dance to our tune.

  I went to the king’s tent, and found the king’s own physician, Philip of Arcarnia.

  ‘I won’t,’ he insisted as I entered the tent.

  Alexander, remember, was in love with medicine. He’d studied it extensively under Aristotle, and if it had been one of us on that bed, he’d have been ordering concoctions by the cup.

  Philip was standing with his arms crossed. Cleitus looked as if he’d been weeping, and Hephaestion had his jaw set.

  I looked around.

  ‘I am your king. Do it.’ Alexander’s voice was so weak it barely registered.

  Cleitus looked at me. ‘He’s ordered Philip to make him a powerful emetic. Kill or cure, he says.’

  Alexander turned his head in my direction. I didn’t think he could see me. That’s how far gone he was.

  ‘Darius is five days away,’ he said, as clear as the sound of distant swordplay. ‘Parmenio will fail. I will not. This is my battle, and the Lord of Contagion will not keep me from it.’

  Philip shook his head. ‘This is powerful, dangerous medicine,’ he said. ‘You will probably die.’

  ‘But if there’s something evil caught in my bowel, this will move it. Yes?’ Alexander said.

  ‘If you survive the experience. Yes.’ Philip sounded wary.

  Alexander nodded. ‘This is my order. Do it.’

  Philip looked at Hephaestion.

  Hephaestion bit his lip and looked at me. But before I could say anything, he nodded. ‘It is what he wants,’ Hephaestion said.

  He could be a nuisance, and a drama queen, our Hephaestion, and he was at best an average cavalry commander, but he made the right call that night.

  Philip bowed. ‘You all heard him,’ he said.

  The physicians were terrified, you see, because Darius had offered a fantastic reward – ten thousand talents of gold – for Alexander’s death. This is the same Darius who had tried to bribe Athens for three hundred talents, not three years earlier. Our price had increased.

  Even old veterans in the pezhetaeroi openly joked about what they could do with ten thousand talents of gold.

  It was such a staggering sum that it made me look at every man as a potential regicide, and I watched every flask of water, every pitcher of wine, every loaf of bread. I took samples from every one, as well. Thaïs wrote the labels for me.

  I fed things to stray dogs.

  The evening passed, and Parmenio came to visit the king.

  ‘Tell him I do not wish to see him,’ Alexander whispered, and Parmenio went away, but Hephaestion returned with a note.

  ‘Open it!’ Alexander urged me.

  I still have it, right here, in my copy of the accurate journal. There’s the original, in the old man’s handwriting.

  ‘We understand you have urged Philip to make you a purge – it is poison. He has been bribed by the Great King. We beg you to throw out his medicine and order the false physician’s death.’

  Alexander blinked a few times.

  ‘Damn,’ Hephaestion said.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Cleitus said.

  ‘Take no action,’ I said, and fled the tent. I went straight to Thaïs, who was writing in her tent, and gave her the note.

  She took it, read it and then put it down with a sigh. She looked away from me.

  ‘Do not put this burden on me,’ she said.

  ‘So Parmenio is the traitor,’ I said.

  ‘You are far too intelligent for your face, Farm Boy,’ she said, and touched my hand. ‘That is why they always underestimate you. Yes. To me, this note merely proves that Parmenio poisoned him in the first place, and now fears that the king’s superhuman constitution, aided by some medicine, might yet triumph.’

  I kissed her, and ran back to Alexander’s tent.

  He was quite calm. I handed him the note, and he gave a slight smile. ‘What does your hetaera say?’ he asked.

  ‘She says that Parmenio is wrong,’ I answered.

  Alexander took a deep breath, and released it slowly. ‘You know what that means, I think.’

  I leaned over the king. ‘I think that right now, today, in the face of the enemy, it means nothing,’ I said.

  Alexander gave a slow nod.

  Philip came in with a horn cup.

  Alexander sat up with Hephaestion and Cleitus to help him. Both of them stood as far from Philip as they could manage.

  Philip didn’t like the atmosphere of the room. ‘I do not want to do this,’ he insisted.

  I, for one, believed him.

  He set the horn cup down on a side table.

  Before I could pick it up, the king had it.

  ‘Let me test it, lord,’ I said.

  Alexander smiled enigmatically and gave Philip the note from Parmenio to read.

  Philip’s eyes all but bulged out of his head. His hands shook. But he stood straight and his voice was steady, by the gods.

  ‘I swear I would never harm you or any other man or woman, in the pursuance of my art,’ he said. ‘If you take that cup, it may kill you, but not by my will. You and I both know the risks. That would be dangerous medicine for a man in the peak of fitness.’

  Alexander raised the cup in a mock toast, like the guest at a good Athenian symposium, and drank it off.

  Then he took a deep breath, and screamed.

  It was three days before the shit poured out of him with the sweat, and he fouled the bed three times in as many hours. Those were bad days, and I’ve no need to describe them. Our cavalry was in contact with the Persian cavalry all along the line of the passes, and we were going to fight, and the king lay in a sweat, unable to talk.

  I put Polystratus on Philip, to protect him.

  But mostly he stayed with the king, massaging his abdomen and groin and putting cloths on his head.

  And then the fever broke and the king rose, smelling slightly of his own excrement, and walked.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The king spent three more days in bed while the Great King of Persia sat on the far side of his mountains and held exercises for his army, and then Alexander marched north against hill tribes that threatened his communications – subjects of the Great King who were waging a very successful guerrilla war against our supplies.

  He was as weak as a new colt, and on the second day of that small campaign, I saw him fall off a horse for the one and only time in his life. But he laughed and got back in the saddle, and the tribesmen saw their villages burned, gathered their flocks and retreated north of the Taurus mountains – unbeaten, but less of a threat to us. The last two thousand of my troops marched along the coast road from the west, with Asander and Queen Ada at their head, and Alexander decreed three days of games at Tarsus. He sat with Ada throughout the games, and she smiled a great deal. On the last day, he distributed prizes, money and crowns. Ada presented him with a magnificent chariot, with four beautiful white horses and harness-work all solid gold, and he embraced her in public, something he had never done. He told me later it was the finest present of his life, and he loved driving it.

  I was astounded to find that I received a gold crown as reward for my victories in Caria. Asander received one, as well. I had the right to wear the crown on any public occasion. It was the highest award a Macedonian could receive. Parmenio had three, but Philotas, for example, had none.

  And – perhaps the joy of my life – he gave me a phalanx of my own, ostensibly Macedonian, although more than half of my two thousand men were Isokles and his Athenians whom I had captured. Craterus, who I thought disliked me, embraced me on the platform, and Perdiccas thumped my back.

  Local commands could come and go, but in Macedon a phalanx command was for ever. My phalanx would bear my name. I could only be displaced by death or treason.

  Old Parmenio took both my hands, the bastard, and embraced me. ‘You deserve it, boy. Now you are good enou
gh to have a command.’

  The temptation to put my fist in his eye almost spoiled the occasion. But it didn’t. I don’t have Alexander’s need for praise, but it is pleasant, and the unforced admiration of my peers – the men I’d marched and fought with for eight years already – was a heady wine, and I drank it Scythian-style.

  Thaïs lay next to me that night, stroking my crown of gilded oak leaves. ‘What does it mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Glory!’ I said.

  She shook her head.

  I laughed. ‘You, my love, killed Memnon. You stormed the Cilician Gates. It’s really your crown.’

  She smiled sadly. ‘Will you remember that when my belly is round and my breasts are flat and I have wrinkles?’ she asked.

  I sat back and appeared to consider. I took a long time about it, until she gave a little shriek and rammed her thumbs expertly into my armpits. Much later, she told me that she was pregnant again.

  It may not have been the greatest day of my life, but it has few rivals.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I should tell you about the manoeuvrings before Issus, but I’ll have to keep it to a few sentences, because suddenly I was a taxiarch and not a cavalry officer. I wasn’t scouting, or running a temporary battle group just behind the scouting line – I was in the cloud of dust, plodding along the road with my men and their baggage carts. It’s a different view of war, I can tell you.

  Of course, I had served on foot before, but the responsibility for two thousand pezhetaeroi was enormous and complicated, with everything from internal promotion to daily food, muster lists for the Military Journal (oh! how that boot was suddenly on the other foot!) and reports to Craterus on the progress of training.

  In a way, I was lucky in that I had no predecessor. I’ve found that when you inherit a unit, either the man before you was a god, and you are constantly compared to him, or he was a fool, and you are constantly compared to him. Often both at the same time. Men do not really like to be disciplined – men detest taking orders. It’s easiest to focus that discontent on the man in charge, unless he has enormous talent, great wealth, good looks, charisma or birth. Best to have all of them, like Alexander, or Kineas.

  Or me. I didn’t have the looks – but I had money, even by Asian standards, and a fair reputation, and I was getting a new taxeis, just raised from recruits and ‘mercenaries’ who were considered close enough to being Macedonians – Thessalians, Amphilopilans, men of the Chersonese. I was their first commander.

  I spent my first day in command wandering around the army, looking for officers. I had Isokles, and he was first-rate, although as an Athenian he was widely distrusted. I had Polystratus, although I left him mounted. Marsyas was bored as a file leader in the Hetaeroi and an apprentice on the Journal – I made him a wing commander in the taxeis. Pyrrhus followed me as a matter of course, and Cleomenes was back from his wounds and bored as a trooper, and I gave him the other wing.

  In fact, I ended up with more battalion officers than anyone else. I liked to subdivide, and I liked to have the ability to break my units up. So I had four companies – Isokles, Pyrrhus, Cleomenes and Marsyas – each a little shy of five hundred men. Every company commander had a tail of mounted men as messengers and a hyperetes with a trumpet.

  Isokles had some excellent notions of drill. One was that his men should drill every day, the way we had in the hypaspitoi. He became our drill master. He was a professional who had fought everywhere, and he knew tricks I’d never seen – like reversing your deployment in camp so that when your column of files reached the battlefield, they could deploy left to right instead of right to left. I admit it’s an esoteric trick, but it had never occurred to me that I could reverse the order of my deployment just by ‘about-facing’ my men in camp and leading with the back of the column. I never won any battles with it, but there’s a habit to thinking outside the accepted drills – and that applies even to something as apparently rigid as the close-order drill of the phalanx.

  By the fourth day after the games, we drilled well. Our recruits were above average in height and in strength, because the fringe districts where they’d been recruited were new ground to the recruiting officers. And our Athenian former mercenaries (every one of whom could now swear by Athena he’d been born in Amphilopolis, a former Athenian colony, and thus evade the prohibition on foreigners in the ranks) were excellent soldiers with as much experience as Philip’s veterans – some of it gained fighting them.

  The truth was that the king was running short on troops. Our Asian campaign was killing men at a great rate – as I’ve said before, dysentery killed more than enemy action, but not a day passed in my taxeis that someone didn’t break an arm, a leg, fall off a wall, fall into a well, get sick, desert, run mad, get trampled by a horse – Zeus, the list goes on for ever. And the original nine recruiting districts couldn’t keep up, even if Hermes had been willing to pick up every new recruit at the door of his farm and fly him to his new duty station in the phalanx. Even if transport had been available, even if our rear areas were safe, even if we had rear areas – we were using men faster than Macedon could supply them, and on top of that Antipater had his own troubles with Athens and now with Sparta.

  More and more non-Macedonians were put in the phalanx. Or rather, the definition of what made a man a ‘Macedonian’ became more and more flexible.

  But I digress. We drilled hard every day – marched fifty stades, made camp, cooked and drilled. The army was rolling east. Somewhere far ahead of us, Parmenio was watching the mountain passes. We could just see the mountains on the fourth day of march, and we knew that Darius and seventy thousand men – probably more, by now – were just over the mountains.

  It was interesting to go from Viceroy of Caria – ultimate power, with lip-service to Ada – to unemployed ‘friend of the king’, in which capacity I got to watch every decision made – to pezhetaeroi commander, with a view of the world limited to my baggage carts, my drill field and the cloud of dust in which I lived. That dust – the dust raised by marching feet – was the symbol of our lives in the infantry, because we couldn’t see out of it. Unless it rained, we ate dust, slept in dust, marched in dust . . .

  I think I’ve made my point. Horsemen eat dust too – but they can ride out of it.

  We marched east to the Amanus mountains and then south to Issus. Parmenio took a Persian cavalry patrol, and the officer knew all the details of Darius’s campaign plan – and confirmed the rumour we’d heard from the peasants that Darius would come across the southern pass, which was the kind of slow, conservative move that we expected from Darius, who always seemed, like all Persians, to act to best protect his own communications.

  Let me just pause here to note that when I gained high command, I always acted to preserve my communications. Some forms of conservative behaviour just make sense. A starving army is no army at all.

  At Epiphaneia, the coast of the sea turns sharply south and the terrain starts to change, from the austerity of Cilicia to the relative richness of Syria. Just a day’s march south of Epiphaneia, the king ordered all of us to leave our baggage and our sick at Issus, a very pleasant small town on its own river. That night, in Issus, there was a general officers’ meeting, and for the first time I attended as a general officer, as opposed to a king’s friend.

  Parmenio argued that we should camp on the green plains around Issus and wait for Darius to cross the passes.

  He talked for too long. I could see Alexander’s attention wandering, and I’ll just mention here that one of the things that stood between them was that neither of them could really speak to the other in his own language. Parmenio spoke to Alexander as a man speaks to a boy, which robbed even his best arguments of worth. Alexander, on the other hand, always spoke of glory, of religious duty, of omens – he phrased his strategies, which were often as brilliant as Parmenio’s, in the heroic terms of the Iliad. That’s how Alexander saw the world – through the Iliad. Parmenio had, I swear, never even read the Iliad. N
o, I mean it.

  The result should have been lethal to us. I can only suppose that the internal divisions and miscommunications of the Persians were worse.

  At any rate, Parmenio argued for putting the army between the passes, sitting and waiting for Darius to make his move. With our backs to the sea and our supplies intact, we had the rest of the fighting weather to wait – all autumn, if Darius hesitated. We had the wages to pay the troops, and we were holding his terrain. In effect, from a moral standpoint, Darius had to come to us.

  Like most of Parmenio’s suggestions, it was sound, unexceptional and virtually guaranteed success.

  Parmenio further argued, in a monotonous voice that put many officers to sleep, that on the narrow plains this side of the mountain, our flanks – both of them – would be secure, and the Persians’ numbers wouldn’t matter.

  But somehow, in his summing up, Parmenio managed to offend Alexander. I watched it happen. He said that our army could not hope to triumph against the Persians in the open field.

  Really, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

  Alexander reacted like a horse given too much bit.

  He leaped to his feet. ‘If we cross the mountains, Darius will be forced to fight, and his army will be at the disadvantage of knowing themselves the lesser men. Our boldness will disconcert them and make up for any disparity in numbers. We know from the prisoners that Darius was going by the southerly, Syrian Gates. Let us go to the Gates and force our way through before he seizes them, and the whole plain of the Euphrates is before us.’

  Like all of Alexander’s visions, it was bold to the point of madness. The young men were fired by it and the old men shook their heads. His voice rose with emotion, the more so as he was not yet fully recovered and his hands still shook when he got excited.

  Parmenio shook his head. ‘Lord, this is folly.’

  That was waving a red flag. Sometimes I thought that Parmenio did this on purpose, to drive Alexander to recklessness and defeat, but none of the old man’s other behaviours tended that way. Perhaps he couldn’t help himself. I’ve seen parents make the same error with a wayward child. In fact, I’ve made it myself.