God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  And that was that. Five minutes of straight talk, and we avoided a clash. After that, I got steady reports from Eumenes, and Thaïs shared all her information with him. And we became friends – real friends. His wife was not always with the army, but when she was, Athenais became Thaïs’s closest female friend.

  You have the look that all boys have when they find that war runs on gold and grain and rumour and intelligence, not blood and honour. Listen. In all of Aria there was just barely enough surplus grain to feed our army for three weeks. We could not linger. We needed to get out of the endless hills and down on to the fertile plains. That’s how war really works.

  So we marched into Bactria. We had a flood of defectors, many of whom were the last of Darius’s loyalists who would never go over to Bessus. But some had just waffled – because they had fresh reports from Bessus, who was across the Oxus river, raising troops. He was rumoured to have forty thousand cavalry.

  Alexander wasn’t just low on grain. He was genuinely worried that, having marched off the edge of the world, he was going to get stuck in a fight he couldn’t win. But he was elated – Bessus was proving to be a foe, and a foe meant challenge, opposition and conquest. We summoned the main army – Cleitus with the rest of the pezhetaeroi – and marched east.

  Nicanor died two days east of Aria – he’d never grown stronger after the illness, and when the king gave Parmenio the satrapy, Parmenio made his two sons swear to hold their positions with the army. Nicanor commanded the hypaspitoi and Philotas commanded the household cavalry, and that meant that Alexander was still, to some extent, in the power of Parmenio.

  Nicanor’s death was sudden. There was no reason to expect it – he was sick, but he was tougher than scrap bronze.

  Alexander didn’t even halt the march, and when Philotas broke down – Nicanor was his brother – Alexander shook his head.

  ‘Stay and arrange the funeral, if that’s what suits you,’ Alexander said. ‘Bessus isn’t going to wait for us to hold games. Ptolemy – get them moving!’ he called to me, and we marched off.

  I never had any time for Philotas, but Nicanor and I had long since made our peace and become friends. I left Polystratus to make my contribution.

  Alexander gave me command of the Hetaeroi. I thought it odd – Philotas couldn’t be more than a day behind us.

  But we were tired, hungry and I had all I could handle just getting the food arranged ahead of us. We were living day to day. Not the way the planning staff likes to live.

  But two days after we entered Bactria, it was obvious that Bessus had the troops to stop us, and we had other problems. Craterus was twelve hundred stades to the south, marching with Black Cleitus and the four taxeis of the reserve army, and Bessus had more men. And worst of all, bloody Satibarzanes revolted, and so did his cousin in the south, Barseantes, the satrap of Drangiana.

  Alexander took the Aegema and turned back. He sent me to lead the main army south, to the edge of Drangiana, to link up with Craterus’s column. Hephaestion went with him.

  We smashed the two attempts Barseantes made to stop our march. Behind us, the king drove Satibarzanes across the Oxus and caught most of his army on a wooded mountain. Alexander surrounded the base of the mountain and set the woods on fire. It was brutal, but I can’t disapprove. He was in a hurry, had no rearguard, no base of operations, and he needed a quick victory with no losses.

  I had troubles of my own, and I got a taste of what the coming years would hold, moving the main army over brutal terrain full of hostile – or sullenly apathetic – villagers, most of whom were hardy and dangerous. After just two weeks, I gave up on the notion that I could hold open a route to the logistics heads in Iran. I lost men trying to patrol the roads behind me, and leaving garrisons – well, if you have twenty thousand men, and you leave a hundred men each day in small towns in the mountains to watch your rear, how long until you have no army? You do the maths.

  In the third week, I halted, recalled all my garrisons and then pressed forward. The next morning I had a staff meeting.

  When I entered the Military Journal tent, Eumenes called ‘Attention!’ and most of the officers present snapped to their feet and stood as stiff as statues. It had never happened to me – although we’d all done it for Parmenio. And the king.

  Cyrus bowed deeply, and so did his son and a handful of other Persian noble officers.

  I decided to think about the implications later. ‘At ease,’ I called. ‘Listen up.’ I walked to the middle of the tent. Eumenes had an easel set up with a sheet of local slate. I had a piece of chalk, the kind tutors in Athens and Pella used to teach children in the agora.

  ‘First thing,’ I said. ‘We no longer have a road home behind us. All we have is the ground beneath our feet. All forward troops need to assume that every contact is a hostile contact. Rearguard, too. At the same time, foraging and logistics purchases will go better if we can form a market every night and get locals to come in of their own free will and sell us produce. Understand?’

  I wrote the words Firm But Fair on the slate.

  ‘I need the Prodromoi to operate a day ahead of the army and I need the Angeloi two days ahead. At least. I need the Prodromoi to scout a box . . .’ I drew a rectangle on the board. ‘And then we can move from box to box. The Agrianians will handle security inside the day’s box, the Prodromoi scout the next one. Any questions?’

  In fact, there were a hundred questions, but that became our doctrine for movement in hostile country. It changed a great many things – for one thing, Strako and the Angeloi began reporting directly to the Prodromoi, not to me – but it made our march routes far more secure, and it meant that even as we fought a battle, we already knew where our next camp would be, and it was already secure.

  We fought six actions that summer, and the scouting units were in action every day or two. This sort of warfare is terribly wearing on troops, and after just two weeks, the Angeloi were exhausted and the Prodromoi had taken losses of a third and were no longer an effective unit. Again, the mathematics of war are relentless – if your scouts lose one man a day, even from bad water or accident, and there’s only a hundred of them . . .

  So Eumenes began to rotate men, and later whole units, from the main body into the scouts. It was an excellent programme, and it allowed him to begin taking small commands himself. He was an honest man, but he was still a wily Greek.

  We pulled all three columns together in early autumn, on the shores of Lake Seistan. Craterus and Black Cleitus came up from the south, and brought us our daughter and our newly made priest of Poseidon, fresh from Sounnion.

  Olympias was fresh and lovely and just eleven years old, and she scarcely remembered us after two years in the Temple of Artemis. But that night she was curled in her foster-mother’s arms, and Thaïs was happier than I had seen her in a year.

  The truth is that the woman who had sent her away to be educated was a different woman in many ways from the mother who welcomed her back. And I was a different man and a different father. I wanted them to have stable lives, but I wanted them close.

  Barsulas was tall and handsome and very sure of his relationship with his god. Sounnion had sent him to us with a letter to the king.

  So I promised him an interview with the king when he caught up with the ‘main’ army, and that night we talked for hours about the gods. About Zeus-Apis in Aegypt – about Poseidon.

  Athenian notions of good conduct and the rational had not changed the inner boy. The boy who swam with dolphins. He was very easy to love.

  But Olympias, after just a week in camp, threw herself at my feet one evening.

  ‘Please, Pater!’ she begged. Young Eurydike, our daughter, followed Olympias the way an acolyte follows a priest, because the young priestess was on the very threshold of adulthood and thus the ultimate object of Eurydike’s ambition. At any rate, when Olympias threw herself at what had once been a beautiful pair of Boeotian boots rather than a cracked and tangled mare’s nest of leather re
pairs, my daughter Eurydike threw herself down next to the older girl.

  I tried to calm them both. Olympias’s tears seemed dramatic, and Eurydike’s were completely false – to me. Shows how little I knew about being a parent.

  ‘Please send me home!’ Olympias begged. ‘I hate it here! The Virgin Goddess will desert me here! There are no olive trees – no grass – men – all men . . .’ She wept.

  My younger daughter beat the floor of my tent – a local rug, as I remember – and wept, too.

  I thought this might pass, but Olympias was at it, day and night, and Thaïs was beside herself. Bella undertook most of Eurydike’s care, but Bella had no authority with this lovely young girl with the assurance of a well-bred Athenian aristocrat.

  Thaïs lay next to me – it must have been a week after the first outburst. ‘The obvious answer is to marry her to someone,’ she said. But she shook her head against my chest. ‘She does not want to marry. And my life started with a marriage I did not want.’

  I stared at the lamp burning above me in the roof of the tent, where it hung from a chain, suspended from the cross-beam. ‘She desires to be a priestess,’ I said.

  ‘And a virgin,’ Thaïs said. She said it with a sob that was half-laugh and half-cry. ‘She called me a porne – a prostitute.’

  Yes. Children. Even the adopted kind.

  The army had marched three thousand stades south from Sousia and Hyrkania, and Alexander gave them a rest while we poured scouts into the east and tried to find routes into Bactria that we could scout, hold open and supply.

  I was busy stockpiling food – the harvest was coming in, all over the empire – when I realised that Cleitus’s arrival meant that Parmenio’s command had been stripped of troops. That struck me as odd – he was the satrap of Persia, at the centre of the vast web of the old empire, and while the ‘Persian’ satraps all seemed to be in revolt, Parmenio held the centre.

  That night, I was again cuddling up to my intelligence chief, and I said – by way of small talk – that I wondered why Alexander had taken all the new Lydian and Thracian troops as well as all the taxeis under Parmenio’s command.

  Even as I said it – my hand reaching for one of Thaïs’s breasts – I realised why Alexander had done it.

  Thaïs frowned at me and moved my hand. ‘Parmenio’s days are numbered,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve said that before,’ I accused her.

  She shrugged, which was very attractive, given the circumstances. ‘Perhaps. But in the past, he was a threat. Since Aegypt, he has offered no threat. After Arabela, he couldn’t have toppled the king with Zeus by his side.’ She turned her head. ‘I have no love for him. But there is something . . . poisonous about Macedon. And Athens. Why cannot old men be allowed to retire? Why must we kill them?’

  Two day later, Philotas rejoined the army, having buried his brother.

  He was a difficult man – given to dressing like a king, flaunting his riches and his father’s political power, and far, far too addicted to telling us that he and his father had made the king who he was.

  He was also a brilliant officer, who could control a cavalry reconnaissance from the saddle, simultaneously riding, fighting and working out his campsites and his supply routes and his watch bill. He was foul-mouthed and he hated the Persians, whom he openly derided.

  Cyrus hated him, and he hated Cyrus, which made Eumenes’ job of running the scouts more difficult, as more and more Cyrus and his Persians served directly with the Hetaeroi.

  The day he returned to the army, I was coming in from the east with Cyrus, and Philotas had discovered that I commanded the Hetaeroi in his absence and came to find me.

  He waved. ‘Ptolemy,’ he said. ‘Tell your Persian butt-boy to fuck off, and we’ll talk.’

  I put my hand on Cyrus’s bridle. ‘Cyrus is my deputy,’ I said. ‘He serves the king.’

  Philotas grunted. ‘Any way he can, I bet. He understand Greek? Hey, Persian, sod off, understand me?’

  Cyrus’s face grew darker.

  ‘You are a fool, Philotas,’ I said. ‘Go and see the king.’

  ‘When I’m ready. I see you have my command.’ He spat.

  I raised a hand. ‘Let’s try this again,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry Nicanor died. Has his shade gone to Elysium? Did you bring me Polystratus?’

  Philotas looked away. Then he turned his horse and rode away without another word.

  I went to the king, but he was with Bagoas.

  I went to Hephaestion. ‘What’s happening with Philotas?’ I asked. ‘He wants his command back. I’m perfectly ready to give it up. I have all the grain to get in.’ I gave a bitter laugh. ‘The wily Odysseus, reduced to tracking grain shipments.’

  ‘The mighty Patroclus, reduced to writing orders for Achilles,’ he said. He had four papyrus rolls open. ‘You know that fucking Zopryon has managed to go and lose an entire army? To the Scythians?’ Hephaestion shook his head. ‘It defies belief.’ He raised his head and put his stylus down. ‘I’m not at liberty to discuss Philotas.’

  An hour later, as I sat by lamplight with Polystratus, Ochrid and four slave scribes, Black Cleitus came to the door. We had a long, warm embrace.

  ‘Missed you,’ I managed to say. I remember being proud of myself for getting it out. He grinned. Then he sobered. ‘I have orders for you. For the Hetaeroi.’

  He gave me two papyrus scrolls. By then, all orders came out in Persian and in Greek. I read the Greek.

  ‘Go and get Cyrus. Get all the troop commanders.’ I shook my head. Polystratus, who hadn’t seen his tent in four weeks, shook his head back and ran for the officers, and my new hyperetes, Theophilus, a Paeonian gentleman who had come to us with the Illyrian reinforcements, sounded ‘All Officers’.

  I was ordered to turn out the whole force of the Hetaeroi; Macedonian, Greek and Iranian – almost four thousand cavalrymen. And they were angry at being hauled from their sacks of straw and angrier when they found that we were marching east on a pointless two-day patrol. A four-thousand-man patrol? Leaving in the dark?

  We marched an hour later, and we slept hard and ate worse, because even the army’s logistics chief cannot conjure grain out of the air, in late autumn, in country already picked clean.

  Just before noon on the third day, I led them back into camp.

  Cleitus met me at the edge of camp.

  Philotas had been arrested for treason.

  Alexander arraigned him in front of the whole army. When Philotas was brought out, he shredded the accusation. I heard him. It was all nonsense – that Parmenio had plotted to sell them all to Bessus. There were boys involved, and sex – there’s sex in any plot that Macedonians make – but the charges as laid were absurd, and Philotas, in his flat drawl, mocked them, and the king.

  Alexander grew angry.

  Hephaestion took him away.

  Craterus then shocked me by making a speech reminding the army of what a snob Philotas was, and how often he’d done petty things to get his way. It turned the assembly into an ugly popularity contest.

  For Craterus, it was an excellent speech.

  And now I could see why I’d been sent away, and why I’d had with me every man in the army who might have stood with Philotas to prevent his arrest.

  I’d been used.

  That night, I lay with Thaïs and listened to a man being tortured. He was being tortured in a house not far from mine, and his screams rose and fell, not unlike the sounds of a woman giving birth, if the same woman might have had to bear six or seven children in one night. Thaïs held me hard – so hard her fingernails left marks on me.

  The next day, when the army assembled to consider sentence, we had another shock. Philotas – the ruin of Philotas – was brought out on a stretcher.

  He’d been tortured – he was broken. Utterly wrecked.

  Years later, I heard from a former pezhetaeroi that Philotas was tortured for twenty hours, and after just two was begging Craterus and Hephaestion to just tell him what
he needed to confess.

  Hephaestion certainly conducted the interrogation, and now he led the case against the accused. Philotas was accused of treason – a capital crime that had to be tried in front of the full Assembly.

  I was horrified. And the horror didn’t stop. Alexander got the army to execute Philotas – by stoning. And he threw them his cousin, Alexander of Lyncestis, who had been under arrest for years but never prosecuted.

  The death of Philotas was the end of reason. The end of the rule of law. Macedonians acted under the law to kill him, but the charges were foolish and the accusation was spurious, and the army knew it. And the army knew that Alexander had used Philotas’s greed and vanity against him. It is an interesting aspect of human behaviour; a leader can manipulate people to his own ends, but the people are perfectly aware when they’ve been manipulated.

  I didn’t know it for weeks, but Alexander also sent a messenger to Parmenio. When the messenger arrived . . .

  The old general was murdered in cold blood.

  Let me speak a moment, boy.

  Had the king done such a thing at Tyre, or Gaza, I’d have understood. To the best of my knowledge, Parmenio plotted actively to remove the king, or at least limit his power. To the end of his days, the old general thought we were all blind, and that Alexander was a parvenu boy, an amateur warrior, an actor playing at being king.

  But when Alexander killed him – he did it without any justice, after the old man’s fangs were pulled, and he acted through a man who thought he was the king’s trusted friend, a man Alexander ordered tortured.

  It was ugly.

  And I’d like to say that after Lake Seistan, nothing was the same.

  But nothing had been the same for a long time.

  It was late at night. In my memory, it was the night that we heard of Parmenio’s assassination, although to be honest, that whole period is a blur in my memory – a blur of betrayal, anger and drama, not least of which was Olympias’s attempt at suicide.

  I was standing with Eumenes, and we were determinedly not talking about Alexander. We were, I remember, looking at a local bow – a very fine example, picked up by Ariston’s patrols that afternoon. It was lacquered blue and green, and had gold and silver leaf, or perhaps paint, in intricate patterns all along it. It seemed to bend the wrong way, and we had to call one of the Saka slaves to string it.