God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  A slave held a towel while the king wiped his hands. Hypaspitoi tied the spear shaft to the back of the chariot.

  The king looked at what they’d done and shook his head. ‘You need knots outside the ankles,’ he said, conversationally. ‘Otherwise, he’ll slip off, and we’ll have to do all this again.’

  He smiled at Amyntas. ‘My thanks for the chariot. A godsent opportunity.’

  Batis coughed and choked – a very brave man struggling not to scream, knowing that when the first one came out, he’d never stop until he died.

  In every life there are things for which we do not forgive ourselves. I cannot forgive myself for not stepping forward and putting my spear into Batis. He deserved a hero’s death.

  Alexander smiled at Batis. ‘You wanted to be Hector. And now, you are!’

  He cracked a whip and the horses moved, and Batis screamed.

  And screamed.

  And screamed.

  Alexander drove up and down until the Persian was dead. Then he stopped the chariot in front of us, stepped down and nodded to Hephaestion and Parmenio, who stood as stunned as I was. The army was cheering him.

  He didn’t look at me. He beckoned to Parmenio.

  I knew what he was going to do. I watched, unable to make myself act, with revulsion and a certain weariness, the way I used to watch when he would go out of his way to make Philip his father unhappy, or to embarrass Aristotle.

  ‘Kill them all,’ Alexander said, waving his hand at the town. ‘It’s time they learned not to waste my time.’

  Parmenio glanced at the garrison. ‘All?’ he asked.

  Alexander made a face. ‘No, keep all the eunuchs with two left feet alive. Yes. All! Everyone!’

  And then he turned and walked across the sand, surrounded by hypaspitoi. Back to his tents. And left us to the blood, and the killing.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  In the aftermath of the capture of Tyre, I heard a great deal of ugly grumbling from the friends – the inner circle – about the last year. The murder of Batis shocked us all. The manner of it – the bloody-handed tyranny of it – shocked the aristocrats and the army’s leaders.

  For the first time, I heard it suggested openly that the king was insane.

  I didn’t think he was insane – if he had ever been sane by the standards of normal men, he still was. But the enormous wound he’d taken and the drugs Philip must have put into him to keep him on his feet – by Apollo’s bow, I still look for any excuse to cover him. He ordered almost fifty thousand men and women killed between Tyre and Gaza, and for nothing. Everyone else had already submitted. There was no example to be made. And the killing of Batis went clean against his code – except that more and more frequently, he seemed to be set on the annihilation of all resistance, rather than the honourable combat and complex warrior friendships of the Iliad.

  It was a paradox – the kind on which Aristotle thrived – that Alexander seemed to want to create the world of the Iliad – a world of near-eternal war and heroism – and yet seemed to want to destroy all of his opponents so that they could not continue the struggle.

  The public killing of Batis galvanised aristocratic Persian opinion, and any Persian who was not a snivelling lickspittle determined to resist Alexander to the last arrow. I hesitate to give voice to this theory – but it is possible that the king wanted the war to go on, and feared that the Persians would simply murder Darius and cave in. It is difficult for me, even as one of his closest confidants, advisers and perhaps even his closest friend – to say what went on inside his head.

  The priests here in Aegypt are quite expert on matters relating to what happens inside a man’s head. They claim to be able to discern hundreds of illnesses that afflict a man and yet are invisible. Some are obvious – one man can drink wine all his life, get drunk when it pleases him and otherwise live a normal existence, while another man craves the drink in unseemly ways and ruins his life.

  Others are harder to sort out, and I’ve met a priestess of Hathor who claimed that the sort of paradox I mentioned can drive a man to madness. Perhaps.

  I think there are other factors. In all the years I knew Alexander, I never heard him once say the words ‘my fingers hurt’. Hurt fingers are the ultimate commonplace among soldiers. Every soldier hurts his fingers – the wooden sword catches them sparring, the fingers hurt from the jarring of constant use, they’re the first things injured in a fall. Soldiers bitch about them all the time.

  Mine hurt every morning by the time I was twenty-one. And every morning, I pissed and moaned about them to my peers, who did the same in return. Add in shoulders, backs, hips, thighs when riding, old wounds, new wounds . . .

  Aside from sex and money, pain is probably the third most common topic among veterans, rivalling the availability of wine and easily beating anything to do with warrior skills or tactics.

  I never heard the king mention any of his wounds, or any other pain. Not true – on two occasions, I heard him mention his wounds. Both times he was virtually unable to speak from the pain. When he stood in his chariot, rolling across the plain below Gaza with Batis being dragged to death behind him, every bump of the bronze-clad wheels must have sent a lance of fire through his left shoulder. When he pushed the spear through the enemy’s ankles, the action must have torn at his wound, nearly blinding him with pain.

  I say this not to excuse him – you will see my views more and more – but to explain why we did not rise as a body and murder him as unfit to be king. I, for one, was still absolutely loyal, and when men questioned his sanity and his fitness, I shouted them down and questioned their loyalties and their love of Macedon. What else could I do? If I had joined those questioning, where would I have gone from there?

  I had a greater worry than the king’s sanity, and Hephaestion shared it, as did Parmenio. All three of us had begun to wonder what would happen if the king died.

  The king’s sickness at Tarsus and his wound at Gaza revealed that the army would – with grave reservations – take orders from Parmenio. It would not take orders from Hephaestion. Or rather, everyone would obey orders from Parmenio up to a point, and the point was commitment to battle.

  If Alexander died, we were going to melt away like snow on Mount Olympus in high summer, and all our conquests were going to be like smoke from a sacrificial fire – beautiful to smell, and gone on the first wind.

  The pezhetaeroi cared nothing about it. Neither did the mercenaries. But from the time of the wound at Gaza, a few of us began very quietly to discuss the future of Macedon when the king died.

  When, not if.

  A last word on the subject.

  Mazces surrendered Aegypt without a fight. Mazces was a worm where Batis had been an eagle, but as I have said before, it was never possible to look far into the labyrinthine corridors of the king’s godlike mind. Alexander killed fifty thousand at Tyre and Gaza. But Aegypt surrendered without a fight – Aegypt, the most populated place I’d ever been. While I grant that their soldiers – excepting only their superb marines – were not very good, had their populace chosen to resist, we’d still be fighting there.

  But they did not. It is possible that the wholesale murders helped break their will to resist. I doubt it. The king might have thought so, but Thaïs’s letters suggested a country that was going to fall into our laps like a ripe grape. And so it proved.

  We marched south from Gaza after a four-day rest. If any man in our army was sleeping well, I didn’t know him. I know that the night before we marched, Marsyas and I sat and got very drunk.

  The fleet was waiting for us at Pelussium seven days later, and Mazces was waiting a few parasanges farther on to offer submission. We marched to Memphis – some of the army went downriver by ship and boat, and Alexander marched cross-country. He was starting to recover from his wound, and as the drugs wore off, he was surly and difficult.

  Three weeks after the fall of Gaza, I happened to have the vanguard. We were two days out from Memphis, according to ou
r scouts, and the country had submitted – but we’d learned from experts, and we took no chances. I had a double screen of light cavalry – I already had fast-moving parties in every village on the river for two or three parasanges in either direction, and behind these patrols and the thick screen came my pezhetaeroi in a three-sided box covering the archers and Agrianians ready to pounce on an ambush.

  All routine, of course.

  Alexander was driving his chariot. The roads in Aegypt were excellent – some of the best I’d ever seen – and the chariot was ideal for a man who wanted to be active but still suffered a lot of pain.

  I trotted Medea over to the king. We were making a long march – a hundred stades – and the men were starting to flag. The same men, let me add, who had been in continuous combat for seventeen months.

  ‘Lord,’ I said, with a salute. There had been a time when the king’s friends didn’t need to salute, but I found that, since Gaza, I needed to show respect. Lest some draw the wrong conclusion.

  Alexander looked up through the dust and nodded. ‘Ptolemy,’ he said.

  We rode along for a stade or two – I offered him wine, he drank it. I got the impression that he was clamping down very hard to control himself. I suspected that the wound from Gaza still hurt a great deal more than he let on.

  ‘When are we celebrating some feasts?’ I finally asked. I had worked on a dozen methods of manipulating the king into this conversation, but although he virtually refused to speak, I wasn’t going to let go.

  He looked at me, his brows furrowed and the lines around his eyes as stark as writing on paper. ‘Feasts?’ he asked.

  I leaned down. ‘The army is exhausted,’ I said. ‘They need a rest.’

  Alexander looked at me. I’m not one for reading into expressions – I like men to speak their minds, and women, too – but Alexander’s face was haggard.

  ‘You are driving yourself rather than give in to pain,’ I hazarded.

  ‘I am above pain,’ he said. The lines around his eyes contradicted him, although his voice was perfectly controlled.

  ‘Save it for the troops,’ I said. ‘The appearance of effortless control costs you. But they don’t know that. If you will play at being a god, they will take your sacrifices for granted. And curse your name.’

  He looked away.

  ‘It is openly said that you are insane,’ I said.

  His head shot around with the speed of a falcon’s.

  ‘I am not insane,’ he said. ‘All I do must be done.’

  Well, well, thought I.

  ‘The army needs a rest,’ I insisted. ‘Don’t take my word for it. Ask Black Cleitus. Ask Hephaestion. Ask Parmenio.’

  I watched his face close down.

  ‘You are dismissed,’ he said.

  I’m sure we’d both like me better if, at this point, I offered him some more home truths, but sadly, I didn’t. I went off to make a show of tending to my advance guard.

  Two days later, we arrived at Memphis. The king announced that he would take the elites upriver, and the rest of us could sit at Memphis for a month-long rest and sacrifice to Amon and Apis. He purchased every sacrificial animal in the city and gave them to the army, as well as a ‘donation’ that amounted to a little less than three months’ pay per man.

  His status with the army changed overnight. Every wine shop and brothel in Memphis was packed to the rafters. The women of Aegypt were short, with short legs and heavy breasts and tawny skin, and they did not age well at all – peasant girls were young at twelve and old at twenty-four. But they were plentiful and warm and very alive – they could dance and sing, and a third of the men in the army acquired a wife, many through actual services conducted by the priests of Hathor. For we had seldom been welcomed as heroes before, but in Aegypt, among the common people, we were their liberators. Greeks had a fearsome, but in the main wholesome and heroic, reputation here as preservers of the people’s liberties, and we benefited from years of Athenian meddling.

  That’s a convoluted way of saying that the women welcomed us with open legs. It is possible that some men were pleased, as well, but none of my soldiers was paying any attention whatsoever.

  Thaïs and I wandered around the palaces. Alexander went to sacrifice to Apis as king, and we were invited to attend – women have greater participation in Aegypt than elsewhere, and Thaïs could attend as herself and without prejudice.

  I’m a pious man, as soldiers go. I worship the gods, and I have learned to respect the gods other men worship, as well. As an Indian once told me, there is more than just one truth.

  But at Memphis, I experienced the divine.

  Oh, Aegypt, the land of gods.

  We entered the temple of Osiris, which was old when Heraklitus taught, and old when Homer wrote, old when Troy fell, old when Herakles walked the earth. It chilled me – chilled us all, even in the blinding heat of Aegyptian summer – to feel the sheer age of the temple, and see the stains on the warm red-brown stone where thousands upon thousands of feet had trod the surface to perfect smoothness – a rippled effect that said more about worship than all the images of men and gods with the heads of animals around me.

  The gods of Aegypt have the heads of animals – I expect you know that by now. Seen safely from a distance, this can be ugly or merely disconcerting – alien. But seen in rows, hundreds upon hundreds, or seen in colossal repetition, as in the great temple complex at Memphis – it forces you to ask the obvious question.

  Why not the faces of men?

  Or rather, are men any the less animals, when compared to the gods?

  Apis is different. Apis has many statues, but all of them are men. Or many are men, and some are bulls. Some are bulls that walk on all fours, and some are bulls that walk erect like the Minotaur, and some are bull-headed men. And some are men. Those are the kings of Aegypt, who, through the mystical powers of Ptah and Osiris, rise again as gods – in Memphis they say Osiris-Apis, or Oserapis, as we say in Alexandria.

  Thaïs was walking from statue to statue, touching every one in reverence, and the priests gathered around her – she was an acknowledged priestess of Aphrodite, which can be a joke among Greeks but gave her a very serious status in Memphis.

  A senior priest walked beside Alexander, answering his questions.

  His questions were concerned with exactly how reincarnation and rebirth worked.

  ‘Why only kings?’ he asked.

  The priest shrugged. ‘Kings are part god from the first,’ he said.

  I was leaning on the plinth of a statue, and when Alexander passed me to lean over an incised decoration on a tomb, I stumbled – sheer farm-boy clumsiness – and put my hand on the gold-encrusted hide of a mummified Apis bull.

  Without warning I stood on an infinite plain. My first impression was desert, but there was no desert – simply blinding white light and an infinity of it, and no horizon.

  A voice spoke in my head, a strong voice. ‘You will be king, here. Do what is right.’

  I awoke with my head on Thaïs’s lap, and Alexander massaging my wrists. I was embarrassed, as any man is who shows weakness, and perhaps most remarkable, it was some time before I remembered what I had seen and heard, so that at first I imagined I’d just passed out.

  Looking back, I have a difficult time recalling the dream, but no trouble at all recalling the deep confusion it engendered in me. Although I worship the gods, no god had ever spoken to me so directly. Indeed, when I saw Alexander sacrifice his chariot on the morning before Issus, I thought of that as the supreme moment of my religious life.

  And now, an alien, foreign god had reached out and touched me.

  I stumbled along through the rest of the tour.

  The Apis bull is chosen from a herd of very ordinary black and white cattle. They’d look odd in Macedon, but not so odd that they wouldn’t fetch a decent price at market. However, it is different in Aegypt, where from the whole herd, one bull is chosen and taken to the temple, where he becomes king or, as they
say here, pharaoh. That bull is king for twenty-eight years, and at the end of his reign, he is sacrificed – usually by the pharaoh and in the presence of the priests. Sometimes an older pharaoh orders a champion to do the deed for him, but then all of the priests and the king eat the flesh of the slaughtered bull and this ceremony, very secret and sacred, is symbolic of the renewal of life that Apis offers. The slaughtered bull is called ‘Apis-seker-Osiris’ and the Aegyptians call him ‘Living dead one’.

  Pardon me for this Platonic lesson in cosmology, but what happened cannot be understood unless you know what Apis is.

  When we had toured, and sacrificed, a Greek priest of Zeus was introduced to us – a pilgrim, come from the shrine of Zeus at Lampsacus to visit the shrines of Aegypt.

  He bowed deeply. ‘Great King of Asia, I am Anaximenes of Lampsacus!’ he said with a flourish.

  It is not often a man can combine the pomposity of a horse’s arse with the false humility of a false priest, but Anaximenes did both at the same time, to which he added a brilliant mind, a wit razor-sharp in the service of flattery and an actor’s ability to be all things to all men.

  Hush, let me tell you how I really felt about him, the shite.

  Alexander loved him.

  And well he might. Anaximenes it was who knew that the Apis bull was due to be slaughtered – that, in fact, it was but two weeks until the ceremony was due. Anaximenes knew that Darius had forbidden the ceremony.

  In hours, we were preparing to take part, and Alexander spent money like water to have his vestments and crown as the Great King of Aegypt prepared. The priests leaped to serve him, eager, I think, to have a king who might be their ally instead of their enemy, as the kings of Persia had been. He invited me to participate, and I was drawn to it, and I noticed that one of the priests – not the Greek, but one of the smooth-headed Aegyptian priests – seemed to follow me with his eyes.

  While the details of the ceremony were discussed, a priest came to Thaïs, and after a brief conversation, she squeezed my hand and vanished. What followed was a secret – I will not tell you, even now, although if you, in your turn, should by the will of gods be a king, I cannot recommend to you too highly the worship of Apis – and we spent a long evening learning our roles.