God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  Sake make terrible slaves, but that’s another story.

  She came in, and her face was like a mask of rage, and her chiton was torn, and she had a dagger in her fist.

  ‘On your head be my death!’ she screamed at me.

  She brought the dagger down.

  Now, one of two things is true. Either she knew I’d stop her, because I am a professional soldier and she was an eleven-year-old girl, or she absolutely meant to kill herself. In fact, I suspect that both were true at the same time.

  I caught her hand, disarmed her and Eumenes threw her to the ground.

  She roared her tears, and Thaïs came hurrying from wherever she’d been, and Olympias struck her.

  ‘You whore! What do you care how many men rape me!’ Olympias screamed the words.

  But Thaïs only hugged her the more fiercely, and Eumenes and I left her to it like the cowards men can be.

  The stars were out when Thaïs reappeared.

  ‘A soldier put his hand under her chiton,’ Thaïs said wearily.

  ‘Bound to happen,’ Eumenes said with a chuckle.

  ‘If that’s all you have to say, you can say it somewhere else,’ Thaïs spat.

  It is interesting – I might have said the same thing myself, and with the same leering chuckle – soldiers are soldiers – except that hearing it from Eumenes, it sounded ugly, and pat.

  ‘I told her we’d send her back to Artemis,’ Thaïs confessed.

  ‘Ephesus,’ I proposed.

  Eumenes fingered his beard. ‘Well thought,’ he said. The Ionian cities all bore watching. Alexander had offered to rebuild the temple at Ephesus. It wouldn’t hurt us to have family there. And you have to think that way, when you are both a parent and the god of war’s chief of staff.

  A few minutes later, Thaïs brought Olympias to us, and she held my knees and wept and begged my forgiveness for her outrageous behaviour.

  Why on earth did we name her Olympias?

  At any rate, I promised to send her to Ephesus with the next convoy going west, and she kissed us both.

  When she left us with Bella, we all three breathed a sigh of relief.

  Eumenes watched her go. ‘I’m sending my children to Athens,’ he said quietly.

  Thaïs and he exchanged a glance.

  I was often the slowest of the three of us – people don’t call me Farm Boy for nothing. ‘What?’

  ‘Alexander had Parmenio killed,’ Thaïs said slowly, as if she were speaking to Eurydike.

  I nodded. We all glanced around. It was like that. We had heard – that day, I guess.

  I still hadn’t taken it all in.

  Thaïs leaned forward. ‘Alexander sent Polydamus – that little snake – to Cleander and Sitalkes and told them to kill Parmenio immediately. They stabbed him to death in his bed.’

  Polydamus was a junior officer of the Hetaeroi, and he even looked like a snake. The king used him for confidential missions.

  Eumenes looked at me. ‘Hephaestion and Cleitus get the Hetaeroi,’ he said. ‘You get Demetrios’s spot in the bodyguard.’

  I shrugged. I had been somatophylakes for years. The king tended to emphasise it at times, and forget it at others. It was absurdly symbolic that at this point he was going to announce my promotion to the army.

  Parmenio was dead. I couldn’t really get it through my thick skull.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Despite the army-wide depression that set in after the execution of Philotas – forty men threw javelins at him and the other conspirators until they died – we continued to plan a thrust to the east. I assumed the king would march in the spring, when there was grass in the valleys.

  I was wrong.

  At midwinter, we heard that Satibarzanes was back in Aria raising rebels, and Alexander sent Erigyus – recently returned to us. The Lesbian mercenary not only crushed the rebellion but killed Satibarzanes in single combat. In doing so, he won the praise of the army – and lost Alexander’s friendship.

  A sign of things to come. Alexander could no longer stand to have any sign of competition.

  It was five months since I’d had command of the main body of the army and rationalised the scouting system, but one afternoon Alexander came into the Military Journal tent and began reading through the entries from the days he’d been off in the north with the Aegema – that is, the entries Eumenes had made while I was in command. He paused and looked at me.

  ‘I gather you allowed the officers to salute you, while you were in command,’ he said. His tone was mild enough, but I’d known him from childhood.

  I just held his eyes. I knew how to handle him, as well as any man in the world except perhaps Hephaestion.

  He glared.

  I looked back at him.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘Well what?’ I asked.

  He stood there.

  ‘If you don’t trust me with the army,’ I said, fairly caustically, ‘then leave someone else in command.’

  He shrugged.

  I considered mentioning Parmenio, but I was smart enough not to. But when Craterus came with recruits, I sent Olympias and Eurydike – and that hurt – away to the coast. To Ephesus. To be safe, or at least, harder to use as hostages.

  At any rate, as soon as we had word that the revolt was beaten, Alexander ordered us to march – midwinter.

  We struck like lightning, and we had manoeuvred Bessus out of his impregnable position astride the Oxus river by the time the first grass was growing in the valleys. That is a strategist’s way of saying that we marched over four high mountain passes in heavy snow and lost almost a thousand veteran soldiers to weather, poor supplies and bad guides; to hubris and hurry.

  To be fair, fighting Bessus for the passes would have cost us more, and I know – I know – that we did all we could to prepare.

  We took Aornos. So many men were snow-blind that you could see a man leading another man to the army market by the hand. I gave up trying to supply the army – Alexander outmarched all supplies I’d arranged, dumped my carts, ordered my mules eaten.

  But Bessus lost Bactria without a fight, and his Bactrian tribesmen deserted him in a wave, and suddenly we had a Bactrian army.

  We pressed on into Sogdiana, across another desert. I sent Thaïs back to Susa, and she was happy to go. She handed over her networks – such as they were – to Eumenes. We stood together for a long time – she dressed as a man for riding, as straight as an arrow, her beautiful face lit by the dawn in the clear mountain air.

  ‘Don’t let him kill you,’ she whispered. We kissed, to the delight of the cavalry escort, and then she was gone.

  I’d have gone, too, if I had thought I could leave the army without being murdered.

  Alexander had never cared much for his troops, but that march set a new record. He himself changed horses daily, and he moved with the Prodromoi, covering more than a hundred stades a day to the Oxus. Men died so fast it seemed as if a plague had hit us. Men who’d been weakened in the snows died in the desert, or died of drinking too much water when we reached the Oxus. All told, from Lake Seistan to the Oxus, Alexander lost more pezhetaeroi and Hetaeroi than he’d lost in all of his battles combined, and when we reached the Oxus, we had fewer than twenty thousand men, and more than half were barbarian auxiliaries that even I didn’t trust.

  And many men had had enough. None of the veterans had been allowed to go home – home to Pella – for the winter. Of course, home was so far away that if they’d marched on the usual autumn Feast of Demeter, they’d still have been marching west on the date they were due back – but that’s not how angry soldiers think. And the army had just heard of Parmenio’s murder, as we lay on our sunburned backs along the Oxus and wondered how exactly the king planned to get us across.

  The Thessalians – those who were left, including a dozen troopers I’d convinced to stay with the Hetaeroi – demanded their pay and marched for home. Over a thousand veteran pezhetaeroi did the same.

  Alexande
r was so shaken he let them go. Or so uncaring. Every day, local chiefs brought their barbarous retinues in to join us. These weren’t Persians like Cyrus. These were utterly barbarous northerners who hid their womenfolk, swore oaths for everything and lied when they breathed.

  They were excellent light cavalry, though.

  Alexander made up his numbers from them. Then he ordered all our leather tents stitched into bladders, and we used them to float ourselves across the Oxus. It was midsummer, and terrifying, but the survivors of the army were by this time not so much hardened as indifferent.

  You can still find some of those pezhetaeroi – in my army, or on the streets of Alexandria. Look at them. Ask them.

  By the time they reached the Oxus, they no longer expected to live. They marched day to day. They didn’t even grumble. Nor did they drill, and discipline became a real problem, even in the elite corps. Officers were murdered. When recruits came in, they were treated brutally and ignored. The older veterans didn’t associate with them, or help them. In fact, mostly, the veterans just waited to see which of the new boys would die first.

  My old friend Amyntas son of Philip found me one day, just after we crossed the Oxus. I was trying to convince Ariston and Hephaestion to give me a thousand local cavalry to use to gather forage from the west, where we hadn’t been yet.

  They left me to find Alexander, and I was standing under some kind of tree – something alien to me, anyway. A thousand Macedonians were washing their chitons in the river, or swimming, or simply lying on the rocks watching the water trickle by.

  Philip came and saluted. He’d never saluted me before. I clasped his hand, and he smiled.

  ‘You never know, these days,’ he muttered.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ I asked. ‘I won’t ask how you are.’

  ‘Hah!’ he said. ‘I’m alive, that’s how I am. Alive to walk the earth.’ He sighed. And was silent.

  I offered him some wine, which he drank.

  ‘How’s your little girl?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I hope that she’s safe in Ephesus by now. Hermes protect her, and the Virgin Goddess stand by her side.’

  Philip smiled. ‘I love to hear you speak Greek,’ he said. ‘Virgin Goddess.’ He crossed his arms and hugged himself. ‘I’m too far from home,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you think the gods see us here as well as in Greece?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t really think they care. But here?’ He looked around – at the patches of scraggly grass, the rock, the barrenness, the trickle of water.

  My adopted son, despite his status as a priest, had become a passable cavalryman, and he was serving me as a messenger. He had a pair of fine horses – local stock. Horses loved him.

  I digress. Barsalus smiled at old Philip. ‘Of course the gods are here, friend,’ he said with his usual complete confidence.

  Philip nodded. He didn’t agree. ‘You know the recruits Craterus brought us?’ he said.

  I nodded. Amyntas son of Philip looked away.

  ‘The old boys stripped them. You know that? Took all their equipment, and made them take ours. They had good chitons and good spolas. Now we have them. And we beat the ones that complained. And Amyntas and his friends are wagering on them – on what they’ll die of, and when they’ll die.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m wagering, too. Fuck it all. He’s going to kill every one of us.’ He looked around. It was the new epidemic in the army – fear. Hephaestion, men said, had organised a corps of pages and serving soldiers as secret police. Myself – I had trouble believing it. But later, it proved to be true.

  When Amyntas son of Philip looked over his shoulder, I did too.

  That’s how it was.

  In effect, the army that had left Ecbatana ceased to exist. Alexander had yet another new army – a central Asian army with a few Macedonian and Persian officers. He made a new army out of the air, and we crossed the Oxus, again outmanoeuvring the supposedly mobile Bessus.

  Bessus’s nobles deposed him. In the East, men ruled by military competence, and Bessus had failed them three times – in Hyrkania, in Bactria and now at the Oxus. Many abandoned him, and his lieutenant, Spitamenes, offered to betray him and make submission to the conqueror.

  I was sent – with a major portion of the army – to take Bessus from Spitamenes. In fact, the wily bastard handed over a whole company of troublemakers – his former commander, a dozen untrustworthy chiefs and some captured Saka, including three women.

  One of whom was your mother, of course. I had no idea – I just saw trouble. I didn’t even find her modestly attractive at the time. Her glare of hate was enough to render her more murderous than beautiful, let me tell you. And she tried to escape.

  More than Bessus did. I dragged Bessus back, and at Alexander’s orders, he was tied naked to a post by the side of the road, and the entire army marched past him.

  I doubt most of the remaining pezhetaeroi even noticed him as they trudged on towards the horizon.

  With the submission of Spitamenes, even I thought we were done. Alexander was fascinated by the Amazons, as he insisted on calling them, and Hephaestion, who was growing more inhuman by the day, took one and tried to rape her into submission, and was badly injured as a result. No tears from me.

  But Alexander wanted to see what was north of us, and he had a notion that he could remount the Hetaeroi on the superb Saka heavy horses of the steppe. At the time, we thought – some men still do – that we were close to the Euxine. Our patrols had begun to spar with eastern Massagetae, the Saka that Cyrus the Great died fighting. Since we knew from experience that the Assagetae – your mother’s people – lived north of the Euxine and were cousins of the mighty Massagetae, the philosophers, like Callisthenes, came to the conclusion that we were close – that the Hindu Kush connected to the Caucasus mountains, that Hyrkania and Bactria were much closer than they were.

  We were wrong, but Alexander believed it, and your mother’s appearance seemed to clinch the deal – a western Assagetae in Sogdiana. We went north towards the Jaxartes, to gain the submission of the Saka, and a tribute in horses that we could use, so Alexander claimed, to conquer India.

  There comes a point when hubris is raised to an art form.

  We marched north.

  Spitamenes felt betrayed. We were, in effect, doing what we’d just told him we wouldn’t do – we were marching into his tribal areas.

  He didn’t withdraw. He raised an army, and attacked.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Anyone who served with Alexander that year calls it the same – the ‘Summer of Spitamenes’.

  Go down to the waterfront, find a soldier’s wine shop and offer to buy a round. Then ask the men with grey hair from Macedon who was the most dangerous enemy we ever faced. Memnon was brilliant, and daring. Darius was cautious, capable and resilient.

  To my mind, Spitamenes was brilliant, daring, capable and resilient. If he had known when to be cautious – if he had had any reliable troops . . .

  It was the year Cephisophon was archon in Athens. We had beaten every army in the world from Sparta to Persia.

  And then came Spitamenes.

  Just in time. Let me explain.

  We took Marakanda without a sword being loosened in its scabbard – the first town worthy of the name we’d seen north of the Oxus, and we were happy to use its markets. It was a major entrepôt, too, and I received two letters – long, lovely letters – from Thaïs, full of love and information. Olympias was safely ensconced in the great Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and enclosed a note begging my forgiveness. Thaïs was at Babylon, with a house and forty servants and all my treasure, bless her.

  I went out of my tent, I remember, and I built an altar with my own hands, out beyond the horse lines. Polystratus helped me, and Strako, and Eumenes the Cardian came when I was done. I invited Astibus and Bubares, Theophilus of the Hetaeroi, Philip the Red, Amyntas son of Philip from Craterus’s taxeis, and Ochrid, now not only a freeman but the head of
my household, my steward. My son sacrificed a white ram in the dawn, and I swore to wed Thaïs if I made it alive back to Babylon. I swore to Zeus-Apis to build a temple in Alexandria to his glory, and I have not been a laggard in that, have I? And the others swore similar oaths. It made every one of us feel closer to home, and Barsulas spoke to us in the new light as we roasted our shares of the ram over the ashes.

  ‘You think the gods have forgotten you,’ he said. ‘But they are here, all around us, every day, I promise you.’

  I think he was right – but I know he put heart into every one of us. Even the king loved him – and consulted him often enough that his seer and his other priests became jealous.

  But enough of my life. Our supply lines now ran from the coast of the Persian Gulf upriver and over two mountain ranges. A recruit coming from Macedon had to march from Pella to the Pontus, cross on a ship, march to Babylon, then down to the gulf, take ship to Hormuz, then march upcountry to the king. New armour, good swords, decent spearheads, long ash hafts for sarissas, any kind of olive oil, letters from home – everything had to crawl up this lifeline.

  Alexander was aware of it. He left four taxeis under Craterus, with ten squadrons of local cavalry, to hold Bactria behind us and he took the rest of the army north and farther east, to explore the northern borders of the Persian Empire.

  It made me happy just to hear him say the word border. A border implied a limit, and if we had a limit, then perhaps some day we’d all march home.

  The nightly drinking had reached epic proportions. It had started after Darius’s death – in fact, Alexander had always drunk too much when the mood was on him – but the last year, he was drunk every night.

  In fact, he was bored, in the first weeks of that summer.

  In a way – a distant, godlike way – it was interesting to study him when he was bored. He became increasingly irritable; he tended to focus on things of no importance whatsoever, which confused men who didn’t really know him, such as Callisthenes and Aristander. His focus could suddenly fall on exercise, on medicine, on the power of prophecy, on the colour of a man’s excrement as influenced by food. And then, for days, that focus would consume him.