The hypaspitoi moved into guard positions around the treasury, the palace and the temples. The magi were carefully protected, as was our growing camp of collaborators.
Every other man in the city was butchered. Perhaps some escaped. I never met any.
It must have fallen like a bolt from Zeus. As I say, we’d lived among them for six weeks. And then, one night, with no warning, their town was sacked.
There was an orgy of destruction. I did not watch it.
But I’m sure you can imagine, if you put your mind to it.
And the next day, most of the lower town was burned flat. The temples and palaces remained untouched, somehow yet more noble for the ruins at their knees and feet. The wailing of women – the cry of absolute degradation and horror – could be heard everywhere in the temple complex. And in the palace. It was as if Persepolis itself wept.
Two days later, when Thaïs arrived with the mules returning from carrying the great treasure down to Susa, the town still smoked and the women were still weeping.
I embraced her, buried my face in her neck and kissed her, but when my hand sought the pins on her chiton, she pushed me away.
‘Raped women are an offence to Aphrodite,’ she said coldly. ‘I will not make love, even with you, while they weep for their dead and their virtue and the sanctity of their bodies outside my tent.’
What could I say? I nodded. Stepped back. ‘I took no part,’ I said.
‘Did you take action?’ she asked.
I turned away. ‘It is probably my fault,’ I said. ‘I wanted Alexander to see what the soldiers thought. Instead, he told them what to think – made them beasts, and rewarded them for it.’ I drank wine. I was drinking too much, in those days. ‘And all to pressure a handful of recalcitrant priests into holding some festival.’
‘The Festival of the New Year,’ she said. ‘I am sorry, Ptolemy. But my body cannot love while I listen to all that hate and despair.’ She crossed the tent to me and kissed me. ‘Why does he imagine that he will be allowed to celebrate the New Year festival?’
‘It’s about being the Great King,’ I said. ‘It is like Tyre. Only the Great King may accept the sanctity of Ahuru Mazda. If he’s allowed to celebrate the festival, that makes his rule legitimate.’ I shrugged. ‘Aegypt accepted him as Apis. Babylon accepted him as Serapis.’
She smiled. ‘Aegypt is older and wiser, and Babylon is the whore of cities.’ She motioned for me to pour her wine. ‘Persepolis has never been conquered before.’
‘We have a thousand Persian noblemen with us now,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘They will collaborate only until there is an alternative,’ she said. ‘Because Alexander thinks himself the ultimate power on earth, he cannot imagine the strength they can derive from their culture and their god. I have met with magi in Susa and in Babylon. They mean to resist.’
I shrugged. ‘He has done everything he can to appease them, and the Queen Mother.’
Thaïs shook her head, this time vehemently. ‘She hates him, now.’ She began to fiddle with her leg-wraps, and I knelt to help her get them off – we were having this conversation when she was no doubt cold and saddle-sore. She sat back. ‘I have missed you, son of Lagus. It’s harder and harder to get good help.’ She smiled at me. Then turned away. ‘He must be pushed away from the lure of Persia. If he makes himself Great King in fact, he will be a monster beyond the rich imagination of Plato or Socrates.’
A month in Babylon, and Thaïs had never been so direct.
Persepolis is where it all happened.
I was invited to ‘court’ more and more frequently. As if, having proved my usefulness again, I was welcome back once more. As if . . . nothing. That’s what had happened every time I left, and this time, my eyes were opened to the process. Out of sight, out of mind. In sight, rewarded.
It was chilling to talk to him. He had forgotten who I was. He spoke to me as if I were a stranger – with a false charm and a manicured sociability. In fact, he wooed me.
I didn’t want anything, and that made me dull.
Weeks passed, and I attended parties. Thaïs came and played her kithara. I tried not to be jealous that sometimes, when he’d had enough wine, the king treated her with the mixture of respect and mockery with which he’d once treated all his inner circle.
He no longer had an inner circle. Callisthenes was careful to flatter him, but increasingly, I think, disillusioned. Anaximenes was such a blowfish that he continued on his own path of subservience. But the former pages, such as Cleitus and Philip, and the older men, such as Craterus and especially Parmenio, found themselves alienated.
I had some excellent dinners with Kineas and his friends – Gracchus, Niceas, Diodorus, Coenus – gentlemen all, and we went hunting in the former royal parks. Alexander went hunting almost every day, but he took only his Persians and Hephaestion and some of the younger pages.
I found that I could not discuss the changes in the king with foreigners, even with Diodorus or Kineas.
And then the date of the Festival of the New Year approached.
Alexander stopped hunting in the hills.
A dozen talents’ worth of royal costume arrived by mule from Susa – rich vestments encrusted in gold, and a pair of towering headdresses, from the same priests who had made the costume for Darius.
I saw them on him. He modelled them for us, explaining with precision what each garment represented, how it symbolically linked the wearer to the sun god and to the ceremony.
He was still confident that the priests, the magi, had received the message of the destruction of the lower town.
They had.
On the morning of the festival, the complex was silent. Of course it was silent. The town was gone, and in its place was a population of soldiers.
When hypaspitoi went to the temples to fetch the magi, they were gone. Except the six chief magi, who had committed suicide.
For the first time in the history of mighty Persepolis, there was no feast of the new sun. The New Year was not praised. No King of Kings rode the sacred way, nor wore the high crown.
‘Bah!’ the king said. ‘Get me my friends. We’ll celebrate a feast of Dionysus, instead!’
But he fooled no one. His rage was as vast as his power, and unlike lesser men who succumb to rage, he had the power to act it out.
I saw that his hands shook, and his face was blotched, red and white.
He ordered couches brought to the high temple, where hours before the magi had stabbed themselves to death. And he assembled a hundred of his officers, and most of them were ordered to bring their partners – from great ladies of Macedon or Aegypt to prostitutes grabbed from the camp. Not a single of the new Persian officers – even the most trusted ones – was invited. In fact, I was present when Hephaestion ordered Nicanor to post men at their tents.
But every Greek in the army was invited – every Greek officer, Athenian, Ionian, Spartan and Megaran and Plataean, all the way down the ranks to phylarch. Kineas was invited. He brought a beautiful girl. I had seen her at parties – a girl who was somewhere between a prostitute and a courtesan, and Thaïs had invited her to our pavilion for wine, discussed her profession, admitted her to the lower priestess rank of Aphrodite. She was called Artemis, I remember, and she was slim and sharp and moved like a fighter.
But I digress, like an old man. Except I will tell you, lad, that the memories of beautiful women outlast all the foolish battles. Ashurbanipal had something, whatever Alexander said. Eat, drink and fuck. The rest is not worth a snap.
We ate venison and mutton with foreign spices, and we drank Greek wine. The Great King had vats of good Greek wine. There were stacks of barley rolls, as if we were in Athens.
Alexander knew what he intended from the very first. I suspected, but I don’t think anyone else did. But the theme of the dinner was revenge, and he ordered the entertainments to goad every officer attending.
The mutilated soldiers had couches, and they assembled at
the beginning of the dinner – a truly hideous regiment – to receive grants of land and taxes to ease the burden of their lives.
Then Artemis rose and danced the Athenian Pyricche in armour. Every man was on his feet cheering her. She was magnificent. When she was done, she read from Herodotus, of the destruction of the temples of Athens.
When she had finished, Thaïs rose with her kithara, and played. She played the song of Simonides, about Plataea, and she played the lament for Leonidas, and she played the opening lines of the Iliad, and suddenly the king was weeping.
She finished, and every man there roared his approval, and all the Greek women, as well.
I suspect that Alexander had coached her, and Artemis, on what to do. Because the purpose of the entertainment, there amid the barbarian splendour, was obvious. The women said, ‘This is who we are. We are not these foreigners. We are Greek and Macedonian, and our ancestors were Hellenes.’
Women are the guardians of culture. And often, only women can say these things.
When she was done playing, Thaïs rose and walked from the chair, but the king leaped to his feet, the garland on his head askew, and put out an arm to stop her. ‘Ask me for anything, and it is yours,’ he said.
She smiled into his eyes, and I felt a pang – more like a dagger-stab – of jealousy. But she was what she was. The greatest courtesan of her generation.
‘You have offered me anything before,’ she said.
He was not used to being mocked. ‘Well?’ he said, puzzled. ‘I offer it again.’
She nodded.
Silence fell. Silence fell whenever anyone showed a sign of winning the king’s favour – or losing it. No one knew which Thaïs was doing, and so the silence was absolute.
‘Burn it all,’ she spat. ‘All this barbarian splendour. For Athens. For Euboea.’ She nodded. ‘For me. And most of all, Lord King, for yourself. Burn Persepolis, and let the flames have her. And march home.’
Alexander laughed. I’m sure all this was planned – to me, it had the feeling of bad drama, but others I know – Kineas, for example – were sure it was extempore.
Thaïs and Alexander wanted the same thing. Nor had she watched him from the shadows for five years for nothing. She knew him. She knew that he could not resist a challenge, nor refuse a dare, nor take back a favour. He had to be like the immortal gods.
He strode to the central brazier, where slaves roasted the ritual meat and lit new torches. There were fifty tallow torches waiting in neat stacks on the ground. Alexander seized one, put it into the brazier and lit it.
‘Burn it all!’ he shouted.
And we did.
Persepolis wasn’t really a city. It was really a monument to Persia. A symbol of triumph, of ten generations of struggle and victory. The entire place was a monument in stone.
But the roof trees were cedar, and they were dry.
We were just two hundred people, but we danced through the great and silent palaces, and as we passed, we took turns setting the hangings alight. That was all it took. The magnificent tapestries were like the wicks of a great candle – sheets of fire rose up them to the rafters and caught, and the floors caught, and the great square and rectangular buildings were like chimneys roaring their throats out to the gods in the heavens, and the fires rose higher and brighter – the royal palace, the shrine of Ahuru Mazda, the Chamber of Records – on and on. Before the beams fell in on the royal palace, we set the last of the buildings afire, and Persepolis burned like the sun.
I still do not know if he acted from policy or impulse. I only know that while Thaïs won the round, and her revenge as a woman and an Athenian, Alexander did not march back to Pella.
We destroyed Persepolis, and the fires in the temples there were the funeral pyres of Alexander’s ambition to be recognised formally as Great King.
Darius was preparing to throw the dice again in battle, to the north, at Ecbatana.
We marched, leaving ash behind us.
Again.
I began to be part of the inner circle again. This time, I didn’t crave it. In fact, I began to crave another command – for the independence, and because I enjoyed the exercise of authority. I was good at it. I helped keep my men alive and happy.
Not one of Alexander’s concerns.
All the way to Ecbatana, he forecast that the army was about to undergo another reorganisation. He’d done it at Tyre, when we marched to finish Darius off, and now he was preparing to sack several satraps and replace them, as well as changing the command structure of the army.
Darius was north and east of us, with nine thousand cavalry and four thousand veteran Greek infantry. Ariston rode in with a dozen Prodromoi, having made a broad sweep towards Ecbatana, to report that Darius was still gathering troops from the east.
I noticed that the Queen Mother was no longer travelling with us.
Thaïs asked around, and could not discover where she and her ladies had gone.
Thaïs couldn’t find her. So we assumed that Alexander had had her strangled, and all her ladies. Certainly, we never saw or heard of her again. Later we understood that they’d had an argument, but Callisthenes insisted that she and her whole family were in secluded retirement, receiving instruction in Greek.
Sure.
At any rate, about the time that Sisygambis went missing, Ariston returned from his cavalry sweep. I was there, sitting at my ease in the king’s tent. Polystratus was at my elbow, using tow and olive oil and some fine pumice from Lesbos to take a stain out of my good kopis. I was sewing on the leather lining to my scale shirt. There were slaves aplenty – but one of the things that drove our new Persian comrades to drink was the Macedonian habit of doing things ourselves. Do you really want to trust a slave with your armour? Your weapons?
Ochrid was serving warmed wine with spices. Hephaestion was working on a papyrus scroll that he was keeping from me, and I was trying to seem uninterested, although I was pretty sure that it was the army reorganisation. Callisthenes came in and sat in the entrance – a cold place to sit, but Callisthenes could pretend to be humble, when required.
‘Ariston is here with his report,’ Callisthenes said. He was scooping Eumenes, and he wanted everyone to know it.
Alexander had been reading the Iliad. He glanced up – bounced to his feet.
‘Well! Bring him in!’ he proclaimed. He took wine from Ochrid and reached down to tap my shoulder. ‘Like old times, eh?’ he said.
I didn’t think, by then, that Alexander even remembered any ‘old times’. I had begun to suspect that in the corridors of his mind, all the time before the death of Philip had been erased. He never referred to his childhood, or to his time with the pages.
But I smiled. I was happy that he was happy.
Ariston came in, covered in snow, red-cheeked and with a fresh cut on his bridle arm. He had Kineas with him, and a Persian, bundled in wool. Kineas spent as much time scouting as he could – it was a form of warfare he loved, and at which he excelled. As we were to learn!
Alexander offered them wine, Achilles to his very speech patterns. He had, after all, been reading the Iliad.
Kineas gazed at him the way a boy watches his first love. He annoyed me – I admired Kineas, and I wanted to tell him just how hollow his hero was, but I didn’t want to be the parent telling the child that fairies don’t come to take teeth, so I held my peace.
‘Darius has taken seven thousand talents from the treasury in Ecbatana and marched away,’ Ariston reported. ‘This gentleman has had enough of Darius and hopes that you will make use of him. Kineas picked him up – he’s called Cyrus.’
Cyrus bowed. ‘I was looking for your Greek army. I am indeed called Cyrus, after the great Cyrus who is my ancestor. Darius has forfeited the diadem. He will not fight you again. He is a broken reed, a torn scroll. He is over.’ The Persian knelt and then bowed to the floor.
We’d all seen the Persian proskynesis before, but it was a bit of a shock, right there, in the mountains, and in
the midst of our attempt to reacquaint Alexander with Macedonian informality. He’d left Mazaeus behind as a satrap, and our other Persians were not causing trouble.
I smiled at the king. ‘I’ll bet that didn’t happen in the Iliad,’ I said.
But Alexander looked thoughtful. ‘You may rise,’ he said, holding out a hand to silence me.
Cyrus rose to his feet. He did it with dignity. This was a superb example of the way customs influence every aspect of culture. In Persian clothes, with trousers, the prostration can look elegant and refined. In Macedonian or Greek clothes, wearing only a chiton, a man usually looks as if he’s baring his buttocks – volunteering to take the woman’s part in sex. That’s the nicest way I can put it. The chiton rises up as a man lies down, and there he is – bare-arsed to the world.
Cyrus had none of those problems. He nodded. ‘Darius is fleeing east with Bessus. Bessus intends to betray him.’ Cyrus shrugged. ‘I will not be a part of it.’
Kineas nodded to the king. ‘I can attest that he came in of his own will, with fifty armoured horsemen and twenty more mounted archers. Diodorus met them and brought them to my camp under guard. They have not been any trouble.’
Alexander looked at Kineas. ‘You will vouch for him?’ he asked.
Kineas looked at Cyrus. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly.
Cyrus let out a breath.
Alexander turned to look at Hephaestion. ‘Aegema. And Kineas’s Athenians. Let’s grab Ecbatana and see what we get.’
He was elated.
He glanced at me. ‘I am the King of Kings,’ he said, and grinned. It was his old grin, but it had a new purpose, and one I could not like.
Alexander enjoyed seeing men bend their backs.
We rode like the wind. It’s a saying men use too often, but it was true of the race to Ecbatana. We had fifteen hundred cavalry on appalling roads. Every man – even the Athenians – had a pair of horses, and we moved two hundred stades a day despite the mountains and the treacherous rains.
We took Ecbatana by riding in. The treasury was looted, but the apples were in baskets along the road, waiting for the tithe-takers who never came. I remember stooping from the saddle and grabbing one, eating it as I rode under the marble lions.
God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great Page 83