God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  She raised her eyes. ‘Leave me,’ she said. And she meant it. Never make a jest about defeat or death.

  I wandered among my troops, watched a dice game, watched two men beat a slave, watched two more men butchering a lamb. The pezhetaeroi were sullen and didn’t want me in their camp. I went to sit and drink wine with Marsyas and Cleomenes, but they were screaming at each other like prostitutes fighting over a customer in the streets of Athens – and on the same subject.

  ‘She was mine,’ Cleomenes shrieked.

  ‘She’s not a slave. You cannot own a woman.’ Marsyas spoke in the sneering way that poets have when being superior, always the very best way to incite a riot.

  Two of my officers, standing in the street, fighting over a woman. With half a thousand of their own men watching.

  Cleomenes reached for the dagger he always wore. Really, we all wore them. I grabbed his hand from behind and then had to kick Marsyas in the crotch as he had drawn his and in his rage seemed to think I was pinning Cleomenes’ arms for him.

  Macedon. I tell you.

  As Marsyas the Poet fell forward, I slammed his forehead into Cleomenes’ forehead and the two fell together to the ground.

  I didn’t feel any better, but I’m sure that I helped to preserve discipline, which was going to Hades already, and we were on the day before the start of a year-long siege. Bubores, passing by, helped me take them to their tents.

  ‘We had a murder this morning,’ he said sullenly.

  As I left Cleomenes’ tent, I couldn’t help but note that the men going on guard were drunk.

  However, the finest anodyne to soldiers’ behaviour is work. And suddenly, the God of Work, with his high priest Diades, descended from the heavens. And none too soon.

  He had divided the areas around the landward end of his proposed mole into districts, and he’d assigned one each to all of the pezhetaeroi commanders. We were to employ our men as labour, and gather stone and wood.

  Craterus held a meeting and suggested that we refuse.

  ‘You have to be kidding,’ I said. I remember laughing at him. ‘It’s better than my lads deserve. I intend to work them like slaves. Until I trowel off the fat and the bad attitude.’

  Perdiccas nodded. Perdiccas and I had always been rivals – but having reached high command, we were, somehow, allies. He rubbed his chin and drank wine and then nodded. ‘If I enforced the king’s law about harming civilians,’ he said, ‘I’d have no phalangites. Last night, some of my men were sending children into the hills so they could hunt them. I need this work.’

  Craterus breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank Ares,’ he said. ‘I expected you all to be angry, and I was ready to back you. But in truth, there’s been too much loot and not enough discipline.’

  ‘Every man in camp has his girl,’ Perdiccas said. He looked at me. ‘I don’t mean you – yours does a job of work.’

  ‘Even Philotas has a beauty.’ Amyntas laughed. ‘And he affects to despise women.’

  ‘He despises all of her,’ Perdiccas laughed, ‘except when he’s on top of her.’

  The next day, we began working. I mustered my full strength – we’d had some levies, so I had a little more than fourteen hundred men. With Perdiccas, my men were assigned the old city of Tyre, which we were to dismantle, stone by stone, and move to the seaside.

  I stood on the bed of a four-wheel wagon and gave my orders, district by district. Isokles and I had already put out coloured tape – Tyrian red linen tape, used for marking, worth a fortune at home – to mark what streets were to be demolished and by what company.

  Marsyas and Cleomenes stood well apart from each other. They both looked a little green.

  I marched the taxeis over to the old city, had them strip and put them to work. One man in fifteen went into an army-wide pool to weave baskets. Every man who could handle a donkey went to the baggage train. Every man who could do fine carpentry or forge metal went to work directly for Diades.

  The siege of Tyre ran on manpower. We had four hundred oxen and a little over a thousand donkeys and perhaps two hundred mules at the height of the siege, but most of the digging and most of the rubble fill was ‘mined’ by men and carried by men in baskets woven by men who needed a new basket every couple of days.

  We had about twelve thousand pezhetaeroi and twice that again in slaves. Thirty-six thousand men, each needing a basket the size of a market basket every two days. To give you a notion of the scale of the siege of Tyre, let’s imagine the requirement for brush to weave baskets, at eighteen thousand baskets per day. Just for the sake of easy calculation, let us call that eighteen thousand mina of brush a day. Three thousand talents of brushwood, every day. Roughly the weight of a completed trireme with all its oars and all of its sails and equipment and fully laden with men – every day, just for baskets.

  Of course, I exaggerate. Of course not every man wore out his basket – nor did the basket-makers ever keep pace. Men were lost from the work to repair their own baskets – indeed, at one point, I had almost a hundred of my own men making baskets to keep the rest at work, and Diades came and took the whole draft – slaves and soldiers as well.

  Brush came from close by – for the first few days. After that, the local brush was gone, and the foragers had to go farther and farther afield, slowing the whole process. By the end of the siege, our brush was being brought from Kana and Sinde, east in the hills and down the coast in Galilee.

  And then there was food, water, forage for animals, heavy beams of wood, whole trees and stone. Wine, oil, water and food for fifty thousand men. Every day.

  And every man thus served could carry perhaps two hundred baskets of fill a day, if he was fast and devoted and fit. Care to guess how many men fell into that category? And men had to be detailed to destroy as well as to carry – to pull down the old houses and get at the stone in their foundation courses, or the base of the walls, the pillars of old temples. On and on.

  After just six days, it seemed normal. After ten days, I joined in, because that’s how you lead troops, and stripped naked and carried a basket on my head all day. I never made two hundred, either. And two days later, my whole body hurt, but I kept at it.

  We rested for major feasts, so on the nineteenth day of Mounikhion, by the Athenian festival calendar that dominated in my taxeis, we celebrated the feast of Olympian Zeus. I ordered five oxen to be sacrificed, and we feasted on them amid the rubble of Old Tyre. I gave games for my men, and pitted company against company. I couldn’t help but notice how well muscled everyone was.

  In Greece, women are forbidden the games, but in the field, all the camp followers watched, and Thaïs was no exception. Thaïs also had young Antigone, the girl who’d caused Cleomenes and Marsyas to come to blows, living in our cluster of tents. The two officers were perpetually trying to outwork each other – there was an endless amount of guilt they felt they had to expiate. I used it against them shamelessly.

  At any rate, she had chairs brought for the women of the taxeis – all the women, Syrian and Jew, Greek and Persian, slave and free. They all had stools on which to watch, and our phalangites, exhausted by the labour of the siege, ran, fought, wrestled and sang, naked, while the women giggled and roared their approval. They were very fit.

  When Marsyas wrestled Cleomenes, the two stripped in front of us, and Thaïs rubbed her thumb along my forearm. ‘My, my,’ she said.

  I determined to improve my own physique.

  We feasted for two days, and then went back to work. My body no longer hurt, and while I did not carry baskets of rock every hour, I made a point to get in several hours a day. Every day.

  One day, the slim man ahead of me took his own sweet time dumping his load on the towering rubble pile at the edge of the sea. The idiot had stopped to watch the construction work on the mole with his basket still on his shoulder.

  I kicked the back of his knee.

  He fell and spilled his load. Then he got to his feet and came after me, face suffused wit
h anger. Of course, working naked, we had no badges of rank.

  Which was good, because the sunburned bastard trying to kick me in the nuts was Alexander. I ended up dropping my basket and holding him, and after I yelled my name a few times, he dissolved into laughter. And when the men around us realised what had happened, they stopped betting on the outcome and laughed with us.

  Out on the end of the peninsula, meanwhile, Diades had built a framework of heavy timbers – superbly heavy timbers, the roof-trees of the largest houses in Old Tyre and some new-cut cedars. There was a low isthmus of sand and rock just under the sea – we were going to use it as the spine of our mole. And that day, two days after the feast of Olympian Zeus, we started to fill the frames with crushed stone and rubble.

  And then the mole seemed to leap forward.

  It took almost three weeks for us to use up all the rubble and stone we’d moved forward, but after the Thargellia, the feast of the children of Leo, we saw the mole grow every day – and we carried our baskets straight out to the end of it and dumped them in the frames. If we had doubted, we doubted less, now. The mole crept forward, and the sound of the taunts from the other side grew distinctly more strained.

  Alexander grew distinctly more strained, as well. In the heady weeks after Issus, he’d sent Parmenio off to try and take Damascus. It was a gamble – Darius had sent his whole treasury to Damascus before the battle – but the gamble paid off and Parmenio had scooped the entire hoard. As well as all the families of Darius’s senior officers, and the Athenian ambassadors to Persia, the Spartan ambassadors – it was a good piece of theatre, I can tell you.

  Parmenio also got Memnon’s wife, Barsines, and her sister, Banugul. They were identical twins, both beautiful, blond and sophisticated. I was there when they were brought from Damascus.

  Their arrival set their tone. Barsines rode in an ox cart with screens against the dust, the whole cart painted elaborately with flowers and scenes of the life of Aphrodite. Barsines, as I have said, was Memnon’s wife. And she was said to be the most beautiful woman in the world, although some said her sister was her rival. They were both reputed to be descended from Aphrodite, but in fact their father was the satrap of Hyrkania.

  Banugul rode a horse – a Nisean stallion of which she was the master. She rode beautifully – like a Scythian, with her legs well up and her knees bent.

  Hephaestion had arranged to meet them as they entered camp. I think it was now part of the king’s policy to heroise his better opponents. Memnon was now praised regularly – now that he was safely dead. And Alexander loved to appear chivalrous.

  But I don’t think he’d listened to the gossip, and I know he was unprepared for the sisters.

  He stood, looking at Banugul as if he’d been struck by lightning. She was dressed from head to foot as a Persian nobleman, and all the male attire, the loose trousers, the burnoose, served only to accentuate the slimness of her limbs, her athletic build, her straight back and neck – and her breasts, which defied the masculine clothing.

  She leaped from her horse, leaving the reins to Tyche, and threw herself down before the king in full proskynesis. We had seen it before, of course, but we’d never seen a woman throw herself in the sand before our king.

  She did it with grace, and a complete lack of submission. Somehow, she did it seductively, and yet she didn’t waggle or wiggle. Nothing gross.

  The king reached out and took her hand, raised her to her knees and looked into her eyes, and then he kissed her hand.

  And the gate to the ox cart opened.

  If Banugul was the Queen of the Steppes, Barsines was the Queen of the World. She stepped out of the ox cart as if, rather than travelling all day, she had been lounging in the Lyceum, listening to men recite the poets. She was dressed as a Greek woman, in a white chiton with a perfect Tyrian purple border itself edged in gold. The chiton was linen, and transparent, and the body beneath it was as perfect as the cloth of the chiton and as hard as any phalangites labouring under the walls of Tyre.

  And she, too, lowered herself into the dust.

  The king was transfixed. And it was as if he had taken two arrows – his eyes went back and forth between the two women.

  Hephaestion cleared his throat a dozen times, and I began to wonder if the king might need rescuing.

  But he raised her from the dust as elegantly as he had raised her sister, and kissed her hand. He said something, and she smiled – a perfectly genuine smile.

  Her eyes were as big as a man’s hand, or so they seemed.

  The king took each of the sisters by the hand and led them to his pavilions.

  So many women – and men – had tried to set their hooks into the king that we, as his friends, had begun to look forward to watching them fail against his lack of interest. I have said it before – he did not look at women – or men – the way most men do. Beautiful women would come to camp, arrange an invitation to meet the king and end leaving with a small present, and he would shrug and wonder aloud why they wasted his time.

  But the twins were different. Was it that he saw them as children of the goddess? As peers? They were witty, engaging, seductive, serious, well read, giggly – they were any woman he wanted them to be, with noble birth and descent from the gods thrown in. But I was there, and he was besotted instantly.

  It is worth noting that, at the same time, we had Darius’s wife and her women in camp and she, too, was a great beauty. Alexander treated her with great gallantry – but it became obvious, as the siege went on, that gallantry alone was not holding their relationship together. She was a beautiful, powerful woman who had been deserted by her husband. What could you expect?

  Thaïs lay with her head in the crook of my arm one night, and sighed. She sighed a great deal – it was as hot as the bowl of a helmet being forged, even at night – a horrible wet, sticky hot, that hurt a pregnant woman more than anyone. She had taken to swimming in the sea – scandalising older Macedonians – if only to have relief from the weight of the child and the heat for an hour every day.

  So she lay with her head in the crook of my arm, and all the rest of her posed strategically as far from my body heat as she could arrange.

  ‘Alexander has discovered women,’ she said.

  ‘Alexander has discovered the siege of Troy,’ I said. ‘And that Helen has an identical twin sister.’

  The army speculated endlessly that he was having both of them at the same time, an impractical fantasy that appealed to every Thracian, every Greek mercenary and every Macedonian – every man, and some of the women, too.

  A week or so after they arrived, I entered my pavilion to find both of them sitting with Thaïs, drinking sherbet in the Persian manner. Thaïs looked beautiful, despite her pregnancy and even because of it – pregnancy enhances some things, and not just breasts – hair, and skin.

  Barsines sat next to Thaïs, and Banugul closer to the door, and a pair of slaves fanned them while Bella, my love’s Libyan, brought food and wine.

  I was wearing a soldier’s chiton over a naked body. I had been carrying rocks. I imagine that I smelled.

  Both women rose to their feet and offered deep curtsies. I returned them – I’m a gentleman, despite being dressed as a slave.

  Thaïs stayed seated. ‘My lover, the taxiarch Ptolemy,’ she said in a matter-of-fact manner.

  Both women curtsied again.

  Bella brought Eurydike into the tent, and Thaïs gave her a big hug and a kiss, while Eurydike looked out from the safety of her mother’s embrace at the two women. ‘Ooh!’ she said. ‘Real princesses!’ She had just begun to speak well. She was a little more than two, and she was never shy.

  The two women laughed easily, and Barsines reached out for the child, who came to her quickly enough – an amazing thing, if you know children.

  ‘You are blessed,’ she said, touching our child.

  Thaïs nodded.

  Banugul turned to me. ‘You wanted a son?’ she asked.

  I suppose th
at I frowned. I wanted Eurydike. I couldn’t remember a time when I had wanted anything else. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You are blessed,’ Banugul said, in her seductress’s voice. It wasn’t human, that voice. It was the sound of man’s desire for woman made flesh. But she was speaking to Thaïs.

  And her sister kissed our daughter on the forehead. ‘I never had a child by Memnon,’ she said, with what sounded to me like genuine sadness. ‘You are very brave. Yes?’

  Thaïs shrugged.

  Women can be such cats to each other. But these two seemed to be above such stuff. Barsines leaned forward. ‘I was afraid to bear him,’ she said. And then looked confused, because she had said too much. ‘I loved him – too much.’ She looked at the rug on the floor of the tent.

  ‘Memnon?’ Thaïs said. And I realised that she had killed this woman’s husband – that Barsines, for all her seductive ways, had loved Memnon – it was graven on her face – and that Thaïs was just now understanding what every soldier learns – that every corpse you make had a sister and a brother and a wife and some children.

  Eurydike had had enough of the strange princesses and came to me, and then raised her head. ‘You smell,’ she said. And giggled, aware that she was the centre of attention, and happy about it.

  ‘And you will have another child,’ Banugul said. She was openly curious. ‘You, who were reputed to be as beautiful as we?’

  Thaïs laughed aloud. Whatever she had been thinking, the sheer hubris of Banugul’s comment didn’t gall her – it amused her. ‘I don’t think I was ever as honey-golden-beautiful as you,’ she said, coining a fine Greek word like any good poet. ‘But I do hate being pregnant. And yet . . .’ She took Eurydike back. The child glowed, put her arms around Thaïs, and said ‘Mummmmmy’, in her too-cute-to-live little-girl voice.

  Thaïs rolled her eyes, and all three women laughed.

  ‘Beauty fades,’ Thaïs said.

  Barsines nodded. ‘I try to make myself ready,’ she said. ‘Because I do love it.’