God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  I rode her down to the beach, enjoying every minute.

  There was Thaïs.

  With Harpalus.

  I almost choked, but I am not a fool. If any of my unworthy suspicions were true, then they would not be standing on a beach together laughing. Or rather, they might, but only if Thaïs was a different woman.

  So, not without effort, I dismounted, gave Harpalus a civil bow and opened my arms.

  Thaïs moulded herself to me. There is no other way of describing what a woman can do with the man she loves, so that as much of the body is in contact as can possibly be managed. She raised her face and I kissed her. I think it was the first time I kissed her in public.

  She laughed into my mouth.

  Harpalus looked at me with a certain bewildered jealousy. I thought him a traitorous, fickle, high-strung idiot, and he, I suspect, thought me a clod. Still thinks it, I suspect.

  There we go, then.

  ‘I have a few things for you,’ she said. She introduced me to Stratokles – father of the current politician – who looked at me with distaste. With him, and Harpalus, was a soldier – I knew him in a moment as one – well dressed, in the Athenian way.

  ‘I have all your armour,’ Thaïs said, delighted by her own success. What can be more wonderful for a man who has doubted his mistress than to watch her, in turn, be pleased at her ability to give pleasure? I didn’t need to hear the story to know that she had worked hard to get the armour shipment together.

  I sent a slave to get the taxeis down to the beach. I had arrangements of my own to make – I needed a man to replace Isokles. I had asked Kineas, but he – and Diodorus – refused to leave their precious aristocratic Athenian cavalry. I wanted an Ionian or an Athenian to help me with the prickly sods I had from Memnon, but no one was forthcoming.

  I digress, because of the association of ideas. The man with Harpalus and Stratokles the elder was Leosthenes, who had been elected an Athenian tribal general twice, and was as near a mercenary as you could be without carrying the name.

  I was introduced to him. He looked familiar.

  ‘You served with us at Issus?’ I asked, as soldiers do.

  He shrugged. ‘In the second line. Your king always puts men like me in the second line.’

  He had the kind of charisma that Alexander had. It burned from his eyes. And he had a nice Ionian accent.

  Thaïs laughed. ‘I brought him for you, dear. He goes with the horses.’

  Leosthenes blushed. ‘I don’t like to seem a supplicant,’ he said.

  Thaïs put a hand on his arm. ‘He has helped do the king a great service in Athens, and he needs a home for a few months.’

  I held out my hand. ‘I need a company commander, and an Ionian one is ideal. I don’t suppose you have any way of qualifying as one of us? A Macedonian?’

  Leosthenes laughed aloud. ‘My mother is Thessalian. The Athenian Assembly never tires of reminding me.’

  By that time, Polystratus and Marsyas had brought the taxeis down to the beach, stripped to chitons.

  I ambled the mare over to them and raised a hand for silence. ‘Listen, gents. I have spent a fair amount of gold to get you lot some new kit – so you can look like proper princesses when you go to the dance. Unload it from the ship, and we’ll have a feast tonight in the old way, and share it all out. This is my gift, lads – not an obol from your pay.’

  Unlike Alexander, I knew what appealed to soldiers.

  We unloaded that ship before the sun went down, and while we did, the regiment’s slaves built a dozen bonfires on the beach, and Leosthenes showed his skills by getting up fifty baskets of lobster. Just try to make fifty baskets of lobster appear. It takes skill and the will of the gods.

  The slaves built the fires high and burned them down to coals, and we buried the brutes in the coals and roasted them. There were anchovies so fresh that some tried to get back into the sea, and Thaïs had brought wine. I suppose – no, I know – she brought good wine for the campaign, but I handed it all over to the troops, save a few lonely amphorae for us, and she rolled her eyes, but held her peace.

  We had almost four hundred bales of goods, every bale wrapped in cowhide, with a layer of tallow, and then a couple of layers of linen canvas. When we had eaten, with all the mess groups in circles by their fires, and the officers all together – Marsyas and Cleomenes, the senior phylarchs, with the addition of Leosthenes, and Thaïs sitting with us as if the presence of a woman at a camp dinner was the most natural thing in the world – I took a sharp knife and started to open the bales.

  By luck, I got the helmets first. They were Attic in style, as I had requested – but with a brim over the eyes, a close-fit skull and hinged cheek-plates that adapted to the shape of the face. They were good bronze, and every helmet had a crest box and a horsehair crest.

  There might have been fifty men in the taxeis with better helmets than these, but I doubted it, and I started to give them out, starting with phylarchs, then demi-phylarchs, file closers, and on and on, so that senior men got them first – I had no idea how many there might be, and as this was the work of seventy or eighty armourers, I couldn’t make head or tail of all the bills of lading.

  The officers joined me, and soon we had men formed in files, and we had all the bales open – men took their new thoraces, their new sandals, their new chitons. The helmets were magnificent, but the sandal-boots came in for the most comment.

  It was a fine occasion, and we went to our tents late and full of good wine, and Thaïs and I cuddled and kissed and fell asleep. I imagine I told her that I had missed her a thousand times. She laughed.

  That was her way.

  Just before she fell asleep, she put a hand on mine. ‘You know that Darius’s wife is pregnant,’ she said, as if this was the sort of thing we discussed every day.

  I was half asleep. It took me a moment to realise that Darius’s wife was in a tent not far from me, not in Babylon with the King of Kings. And that only one man could have made her pregnant.

  But it didn’t really seem that important.

  Maybe Harpalus was right. Maybe I am a clod.

  Alexander arranged games. He put money and effort into them, and we had tracks and fields marked out in advance, and marvellous prizes – magnificent cloaks, gold cups, whole panoplies of fine armour.

  I ordered my men to store their new equipment. The new chitons were fitted, sewn to shape and put away. There was some grumbling, but I promised we’d have a promotion parade before we marched and wear it all. Games are hard on equipment, and I wanted them to go out in their old gear. I fought with spear and shield in my battered helmet, and Alexander, while commenting on my skill, managed to take note of the helmet.

  ‘You are, I think, one of the richest men in the army,’ he said. ‘Treat yourself to a new helmet.’

  Thaïs had brought it from Athens, and it sat on my camp bed – thickly plated in gold over iron and bronze, the same Attic design as my men’s helmets, but with blue and gilt over the whole outer face; the cheek-plates on springs, the brim a little more peaked and with a pair of bull’s horns flanking the rich crest.

  I wasn’t sure what I thought of the horns.

  Thaïs shook her head. ‘For the bull. See?’ She smiled. ‘I spent four days in the Chalcidean’s shop, making sure that the engraving was as I wanted it.’ Indeed, the entire cycle of the bull was on the helmet, and a depiction of Zeus enthroned on Olympus, but with bull’s horns.

  I loved it for her, as I thought that it was a little more gaudy than I needed. But the thorax matched, with white leather pturges.

  I like fine gear. What soldier does not?

  She’d brought me a dozen spears, each finer than the last, all fine steel work with long heads and long sockets, elegant saurouters, some with pierced work, some gilt, and all with fine silk tassels at the base of the socket – to keep the blood off your hands.

  As I say, I fought in the hoplitomachos. I was the only one of the taxiarchs to do so, altho
ugh they were all excellent fighters. Perdiccas was always my match. Craterus, ten years older than I, was faster than most men.

  It was odd, because despite the prizes, many of the contestants were mercenaries and professionals, and few of our hypaspitoi or our pezhetaeroi chose to match themselves. I suppose it was not so odd. We were the best fighters in the world, but few of our farm boys had the formal gymnasium training in wrestling and pankration that was the essential underpinning to being a truly formidable single fighter.

  In the second pool of fighters, I faced Draco of Pella. He was one of ours. In fact, he was a pezhetaeros of my own taxeis, and, despite his youth, a canny, thoughtful fighter with long arms and a heavy hand. When his spearhead struck my shield, he cut pieces from the cover, or took chips from the rim, or bent the bronze. But I got past his spearhead and threw him to the ground and rested my saurouter on his thigh and he grinned at me.

  And while I helped him up, I promoted him to phylarch.

  I faced Leosthenes, as well, and he bested me. I never saw the blow that clipped my old helmet and tore my crest away. I had never faced a man so fast.

  We put the judges in a quandary, because I had more wins than anyone in the competition except Leosthenes, but we were in the same pool. Or the judges were loath to disqualify a taxiarch and friend of the king. These things happen.

  Either way, we both went on to the last round on the third day. I was elated because one of my many Philips had won the garland for the stade sprint, bringing honour to the regiment, and another man, an Ionian, had placed second in the wrestling to Kineas’s friend Diodorus. Kineas won the boxing easily, as the sport was not well known in Macedon. I lost the pankration fairly early, as the competition was worthy of the Olympics or the Nemean Games. There were big, well-trained men, such as Demetrios of Halicarnassus, and he dropped me on my head about as fast as I could tell it, although, like a good comrade, he held my feet so I didn’t injure my neck.

  Alexander came and watched the final bouts of the hoplitomachos. Many men I knew were there, such as Kineas, wearing his garland, and Diodorus, wearing his.

  The herald assigned every one of us a little metal badge, each one of which had a sign of one of the gods on it. I drew Zeus.

  I prayed to Zeus-Apis. That’s how far my change had gone. Before, I would have prayed to Herakles before any contest, or perhaps Poseidon.

  Zeus-Apis denied my prayer, which was that I not face Leosthenes.

  We were matched immediately.

  Let me tell you how you fight a man who is better and faster than you are.

  You take your stance well out of reach of his spear, and you manipulate the measure – the distance – to mislead your opponent into making one of his lightning-fast attacks while still out of range.

  We circled for so long that men started to hoot and call suggestions.

  Leosthenes knew perfectly well what I was about, and he tried to push me, but I kept circling, using the angle of my movement to keep my distance while never getting backed against the wands that marked the edges of the competition area.

  Round and round.

  Had he been an impatient man, I’d have had him.

  Leosthenes the Athenian was never impatient.

  Let me add that we fought with bated spears, twice the height of a man. They hurt when they hit, but they didn’t punch through flesh.

  I grew impatient.

  Not the sign of an expert fighter, but I am a taxiarch, not a champion.

  I shortened my grip, sliding my hand to the centre of my weapon, and I stepped in.

  Leosthenes’ strike came like a levin-bolt, and I didn’t raise my shield. Instead, I caught it on my spear, near the tip, turned it into my shield and leaped forward.

  Fast as thought, he leaped back. I wanted to close inside his spearhead, and he wanted to hit me in my rush. He didn’t want to fight me close in.

  His feet crossed, and he fell. But even as he fell, he rolled on his shield shoulder and never let go of his spear, and he was as fast as a god. I closed the distance, but his roll changed the angle, and I had to brace, and he was on his feet. He thrust, and I caught his off-balance shot on the rim of my shield – Zeus, he was fast. I passed forward, sure I had won the fight, but he recovered his spearhead in the tongue-flick of a serpent, and he backed off two steps, as fast as a dancer at a symposium, avoiding the grabbing hands of clients – perhaps faster – and his spearhead licked out again, and just tagged my helmet.

  I ducked my head and stepped in, spear across my body, and reached out to push him to the ground . . .

  And stopped. It took a moment to realise he’d hit my helmet.

  But I knew it.

  I turned to the herald. ‘He hit me,’ I said.

  The herald bowed.

  The crowd began to roar.

  Leosthenes bowed to me. ‘My back foot is out of the ring,’ he said. He spat the words, but by the gods, he was an honest man that day.

  My rush had pushed him out of the limits.

  The question we all had was – which happened first?

  Alexander came down from his dais, and walked the sand with the heralds. He called the two of us together.

  ‘Leosthenes of Athens, you stepped out twice – two steps in a row.’ The king shrugged. ‘You are a brilliant fighter. Tyche was against you.’

  I raised my hand. ‘Lord King, may I use this moment to crave a boon? May I ask that Leosthenes of Athens be considered a Macedonian, that I may have him as an officer in my taxeis?’

  Alexander smiled one of his rare smiles of genuine amusement. ‘Is he at least as Macedonian as your Isokles?’ he asked.

  Leosthenes stripped off his armour and went to stand with Kineas, whom he idolised, while I went on to win my next three fights. None of the other finalists was anything like as good as the Athenian.

  Which the king acknowledged when he gave me my garland. Because he summoned Leosthenes and presented him with a garland as well, rather than the man who was, by points, the second.

  Alexander could be fair, just and astute, when it suited him. As the judge of games, he was easy to love.

  Alectus slapped me on the back when I received my garland. ‘He’d have killed you, if it was real,’ he said. ‘Don’t get cocky.’

  There you have it.

  But praise from peers is sweet. Bubores came, and Cleomenes, and Kineas, and a dozen other friends, and they poured wine over my head and slapped my back, and then a dozen of them picked me up and carried me to the beach and flung me into the sea – the sea that, a year before, we had dyed red with the blood of slaughtered Tyrians.

  Alexander held a parade – one of the few I remember in any detail, although he held enough of them, in emulation of Xenophon’s Anabasis. My men looked forward to it eagerly, the last day of the games, because they knew they were going to dazzle the other pezhetaeroi, and even the hypaspitoi, with their new splendour.

  Nor were we wrong. Leosthenes, Callisthenes, Marsyas and I worked overtime to arrange how to get ourselves and all our soldiers into our kit without the rest of the army seeing us. We put the kind of planning into it that we would have put into a military operation, and Leosthenes revealed what a cunning bastard he was in his brilliant misdirection plan.

  In short, we were late for parade. All the taxeis competed to be first on parade, and we were deliberately last.

  We had the front left file closer – Leosthenes now – carry a sarissa with every wreath and garland we had won as a body in the games tied to the spearhead with superb cloth-of-gold tape that Thaïs provided. We had a pair of slave aulos players, whom I freed for service.

  We marched on, crossing the back of the parade to the tune of our flutes, marching in step.

  We could hear the muttering in the ranks; ‘awkward sods’ was about the nicest thing we heard.

  And then they saw us.

  Heh. Another great moment.

  There was no body of troops in that army of fifty thousand men who had
matching helmet plumes, matching armour, matching spears, new chitons that shone like snow. We glittered.

  And when I called ‘Ground your . . . spears!’ fifteen hundred saurouters crunched into the gravel with a single sound.

  Alexander glanced at me. I had on my new panoply. I smelled like new leather and Thaïs’s perfume – I think she’d kept the armour awfully close during the sea voyage.

  The king grinned.

  Then he rode away to the head of the Royal Squadron, and we passed in review, marching past the king sixteen files wide, and in step, in a way that never really happened on the battlefield, and yet was a practical test of a regiment’s drill.

  We marched up and down, and we marched past the king. And as the head of our regiment drew even with him – he was deep in conversation with Hephaestion – he touched his heels to Bucephalus and rode out to us.

  ‘Men of Outer Macedon!’ he shouted. Technically, that was our taxeis – the Taxeis of Outer Macedon.

  He waited a moment or two.

  ‘YOU LOOK LIKE GODS!’ he roared.

  They were still shouting his name when we went back to camp. They were willing to die for him, then.

  Sometimes, he was easy to love.

  Harpalus brought us detailed information on the war with Sparta and the threat to the League of Corinth in Greece. The night of the great review, when Craterus had pretended to punch me in the nose and Perdiccas had demanded that I tell him the source of my wonderful helmets (I told him), we discussed the war behind us – what Alexander later referred to as a war between mice.

  They were dangerous mice. The Spartans were nothing like in their prime, but man for man they were still magnificent. And their king, Agis, understood strategy better, I think, than Darius. He struck immediately, and where we felt it most – he put a fleet to sea and took Crete, as I’ve mentioned above. Had we not won Tyre and Aegypt, Agis’s strategy would have crippled us, cut us off. So much for Parmenio’s views of the world.

  But Tyre fell and the Cypriots came over to us, and the world changed faster than Darius and Agis were prepared for, and once again, Alexander was a step ahead.