God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

ONE

Macedon, 344–342 BC

It’s not my earliest memory of him – we grew up together – but it’s the beginning of this story, I think.

There were three of us – we must have been nine or ten years old. We’d been playing soldiers – pretty much all we ever did, I think. Black Cleitus – my favourite among the pages, with curly black Thracian hair and a wicked smile – had a bruise where Alexander had hit him too hard, which was par for the course, because Cleitus would never hit back, or never hit back as hard as the prince deserved. Mind you, he often took it out on me.

No idea where Hephaestion was. He and Alexander were usually inseparable, but he may have been home for his name day, or going to temple – who knows?

We were in the palace, in Pella. Lying on the prince’s bed, with our wooden swords still in our hands.

There was a commotion in the courtyard, and we ran to the exedra and looked down to see the king and his companions ride in – just his closest bodyguard, his somatophylakes. They were wearing a fortune in armour – brilliant horsehair plumes, Aegyptian ostrich feathers, solid gold eagle’s wings, panther skins, leopard skins, bronze armour polished like the disc of the sun and decorated in silver and gold, tin-plated bronze buckles and solid silver buckles in their horse tack, crimson leather strapping on every mount, tall Persian bloodstock horses with pale coats and dark legs and faces. Philip was not the richest or the best armoured – but no one could doubt that he was in command.

It only took them a moment to dismount, and a horde of slaves descended on them and took their armour and their horses and brought them hot clothes and towels.

That was dull for us, so we went back to Alexander’s room. But we had seen a dream of power and glory. We were quiet for a long time.

Cleitus scratched – he was always dirty. ‘Let’s play knucklebones,’ he said. ‘Or Polis.’

But Alexander was still looking towards the courtyard. ‘Some day they’ll be dead,’ he said. ‘And we’ll do what they do.’

I grinned at him. ‘But better,’ I said.

He lit up like a parchment lamp at a festival. He hugged me to him. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘But better.’

It’s odd, because that same day – at least in my memory – is the day that we heard Philip ordain the invasion of Asia and the war with Persia.

We must have been invited to the great hall. We weren’t old enough to be pages, yet, and we never went near the hall once the drinking started. So I’m going to guess that it was Alexander’s birthday, or just possibly the Feast of Herakles, the great one we celebrate in Macedon. I had lain on a couch to eat, with my pater at home, and I had been served by slaves, because my family was quite rich. But I had never seen the reckless rout for Philip’s soldiers, courtiers and minions. I lay on a couch with Prince Alexander, pretending to be as adult as I could, trying to be bigger and fiercer and taller and stronger.

After dinner, Philip, who was lying with his general, Parmenio, and a dozen other officers in a circle just to my right, began to carp at Parmenio about how long it was taking him to defeat Phokion and the Athenians, and Parmenio, who was a friend of my father’s and my hero, shot back that if Athens didn’t have free entry into the Persian ports . . .

Antipater – quite a young man at the time, and already the schemer of the staff – sat up suddenly on his couch. ‘To the war in Persia, and the end of Athens!’ he said, and poured wine on the floor. ‘I send these winged words to the gods.’

We had a dozen Athenians among us – mercenary officers, gentlemen rankers, courtiers, philosophers and a pair of ‘representatives’ from the ‘democracy’. Philip laughed aloud. ‘If I took Persia,’ he said, ‘I would be a god.’

At my side, Alexander, who sought, even at age ten, to be in all things the first and best, stiffened and raised himself on his elbows. I caught his eye.

‘We’ll miss it!’ he hissed.

‘No we won’t,’ I said with the total bravado of the very young. ‘No we won’t.’

And later that year, or perhaps the next – just before I became a royal page – Alexander came to one of our farms. We were among the first families in Macedon, and our wealth was old wealth – we had horses and land. Our stud farms were the best in Macedon, and perhaps the best in Hellas – my father imported stock from Thrace and Asia and even, once, a mare from Italia, and our horses were bred for war – big, tall, perhaps a trifle bony and heavy-faced for the purist, but tough, capable of carrying a man in armour and capable of surviving the Tartarus of horses, a summer on campaign. For that, a horse needs hard hooves – hard enough to stay hard in four days of rain, and hard enough to stay strong over roads that men have worn down to shards of sharp rock. A war horse has to be able to stay alive on the leavings of grass where a thousand horses have already grazed; has to survive a day in the sun without water, if its rider’s life depends on it. And it is a rare horse that can do all these things.

But we bred them, and it was my pater’s life. He was the old kind of aristocrat, the kind of man who hated the court and never left his own farms if he could help it. I won’t say everyone loved him, because he was a very difficult man when crossed, but he was fair, and fairness is all peasants and slaves ask of a master. They don’t love us, anyway – but they ought to be able to expect the same treatment and the same justice every day.

At any rate, Pater promoted and freed his slaves and made sure his freemen ended up on farms of their own if they did well for him, and that did as much for our horses as all our priceless bloodstock. Listen – let me tell you a story. It’s about Alexander, in a way.

Years after this, I was in Athens – you’ll get to that part later – and I went shopping for vases. I wanted to send something to my father and to other friends, and the ceramics of Athens are the finest in the world.

In the Keramaki – the ceramics quarter – were two shops next to each other. Both had big names, and both provided the sort of high-end wares I wanted – one specialised in scenes of gods and war, while the other specialised in scenes from plays.

Outside the latter, a man in a dun wool cloak was beating a slave with a stick. He was thorough and brutal. I passed that shop – interrupting a man beating his slave is like interrupting a man having sex with his wife. I went into the other shop, where two slaves behind the counter were burnishing the surfaces of finished pots with bone tools. Both were older men, clearly experienced, and they were chatting, laughing. At my entry, the nearer jumped up with a smile while the other continued burnishing. I watched him for a while, his quick, even strokes, and when I looked at a wine krater, I couldn’t find a spot that had been left unburnished. The surfaces were perfect – almost glossy.

I didn’t want scenes from plays, but I loved the sheer quality of the finishes.

Later, after a cup of wine with the master, I went back to the first shop, where the beaten slave, who proved to be the master painter, sat slumped in a corner. The master waited on me himself. His vases were fine, but the finishes were all sloppy.

He saw me looking at the surface. He grimaced. ‘You can’t get good slaves any more,’ he said, and shrugged.

I bought six vases, and all of them had scenes from Athenian drama. One is buried with my father. He loved it that much. In part, I gave it to him because he would have agreed. You can’t buy a good slave, but you can make him good with fair treatment, and in return, he’ll burnish the pot evenly. Understand me, boy?

But I digress.

Alexander came to our farm at Tyrissa, and stayed a week, riding our best horses and watching the running of a great estate with interest. He was not a farm boy by any means – I had been in the fields as soon as I could walk, because in Macedon, lords pick flax with peasants, and at haying, everyone gathers hay. Everyone but Prince Alexander, of course.

But he loved it. We sacrificed to Poseidon every day (every horse farm has a shrine to the Horse God) and we rode, fed horses, mucked out stalls, and watched grooms and pages schooling the next year’s cavalry mounts. On this one farm, with eighty slaves and six hundred head of horses, we provided almost a tenth of all the cavalry remounts that Philip demanded every year, because war eats horses far faster than it eats men. In one season chasing Phokion around the Dardanelles, King Philip lost two thousand horses to bad food, disease and exhaustion – and we had to find new ones. In a bad year, the three-year-olds intended to be the next year’s cavalry horses are sent out early, green and nervous and flighty. An epidemic or a military disaster could force a farm to use up its stock – the superb horses used for breeding – sent as cavalry horses, and lost for ever. Two straight bad seasons could wreck a farm. Tree straight bad seasons could wreck a farm. Three straight bad seasons could wreck a nation, leaving it without cavalry. Waves of disease – the arrows of Apollo – or bad water, or a long heatwave – and messengers arrived at our farms with letters from the king demanding horses.

I mention this not because Alexander’s visit had any long-term effect on his life, but because we are horse soldiers, and we loved horses. And used them and used them up. I have had three great horses, and Alexander had one – and my Poseidon was the best horse I’ve ever had between my legs. But great horses are as rare as great men, and as fragile, and need the care and attention that other men lavish on a lover or a best friend.

The last day Alexander was on our farm, we built a fort of grape stakes, and with a few of my friends, we challenged the Thracian boys – the children of our slaves – to come and take it from us.

There were twenty of them, and they hooted at us, unafraid as slave children are until they are beaten. They came at us without fear, with rocks and sticks, and we stood our ground with the same weapons, except that Alexander and I had small round shields made of wicker which we’d woven ourselves from old vines.

They attacked twice and we drove them off with some blood flowing, and then we looked out over the fields, with herds of beautiful horses in every field, and fences of woven hurdle between the herds.

‘Why are they separated?’ Alexander asked me.

I shrugged. ‘We have a mare from Arabia in that field, and we’re putting her with one of our best stallions – Big Ares, over there. He doesn’t think much of her yet,’ I said ruefully, because the stallion was at the far end of the field, ignoring the mare.

‘And over there?’ Alexander asked.

‘Pericles’s herd. The grey is Pericles – an old stallion, but still one of the best, with a healthy dose of Nisean in him from Persia.’

‘And nearer?’ he asked. He was clearly impressed with my knowledge. ‘They’re all different – large and small. Bay and black and white and piebald.’

‘Socrates, my father’s favourite. That field has a special purpose.’ I smiled. ‘It is a secret. Pater is breeding horses that are smart. Only smart horses go into that field.’

Alexander nodded. ‘I’m to have a tutor,’ he said. ‘To help me learn to rule men. And yet your horse farm seems to teach all the lessons I need.’

Later that afternoon, the Thracian children came for us again. But we were ready, and we beat them again, and then we chased them – a dozen of us.

I kissed my pater the next day, because I was going to court to be a page, and Alexander was taking me as a companion. We both knew I was in for a long, tough time. But I thought I wanted it, and he was a fine enough father to let me go. He gave me a fine ring, and a bag of money. I guess he’d been a young man, once.

I rode off, excited to be with my prince, excited to be going full-time to court, excited to be a royal page.

I only went back to the farms to live just once, and that was much later, in virtual exile, as you’ll hear. I never thought, that bright sunny morning, that I was giving up horses and love and friendship and beautiful mornings to spend the rest of my youth avoiding rape and murder while working like a slave.

A royal page.

Alexander’s new tutor was, of course, Aristotle. And almost as soon as I became a royal page, Philip moved Alexander’s household to the Gardens of Midas. We were told it was time for him to leave his mother behind. I’ll speak more of Olympias later, but she was more like a force of nature than a woman. And she tried to rule Alexander rather than guide him.

As a companion – almost a peer – I was educated with the prince. There were a dozen of us at any time, and I think only Amyntas, Cassander, Hephaestion, Black Cleitus and I went through the whole course with Alexander, although I may be missing somebody. At any rate, we sat through lessons together with Aristotle in the Gardens of Midas, and sometimes, when I was the favoured one, I sat beside Alexander on the stone bench – colder than you can imagine on an autumn morning – while the old oligarch explained exactly what Plato meant in the Gorgias, or the proper conduct of a gentleman in a symposium.

Aristotle was one of us, or close enough – he knew what we were – but he’d been away a long time, with foreigners on Lesbos, and he could be quite naive. He loved the symposium and all of its trappings – the proper wine bowls, the krater, the sieve and the silver ladle, the bowls of good companionship, the small talk and the wit. I experienced them all later, and came to know that the philosopher was talking about something real – delightful, in fact. But you must imagine that we heard him through a veil of our own experience as pages at court, and for us, wine meant trouble. When we were at Pella, all of us – except the prince – were royal pages, and we waited on the guests at the feasts in the great hall. And that was horrible.

Philip’s court had three groups. The first, and most dangerous, were the highlanders, the near-barbarians of the ancient upland kingdoms; Elimiotis in the south, Orestis in the west and Lychnitis by the lake, near Illyria. They didn’t like Hellenes, didn’t like Philip’s insistence on the trappings of Athenian culture and didn’t very much like Philip. They liked to steal cattle and kill each other and fuck.

The second group was just as dangerous and just as violent. Philip attracted mercenaries the way rotting corpses attract carrion crows. He had the best – and most expensive – captains in the world, and the two I remember best were Erigyus and Laomedon, descendants of Sappho’s daughter, from Mytilene on distant Lesbos. Despite their air of culture and their distinguished poetic pedigree, they were hard men, killers with no shame in them, and no page ever came close to them once the drink was flowing.

And the last group was the lowlanders, the courtiers, the great nobles and barons of the rich inner provinces of Macedon, men who had estates the size of small countries. They wore Greek clothing and most of them spoke excellent Greek, and they could speak intelligently about Plato. They were also as tough or tougher than their highland cousins, and their national sports were hunting wolves and regicide. My father was one of them, Lagus, son of Ptolemy. Our estates ran for parasanges – we owned people as Attic farmers own sheep, although, as I said, my pater was a fine leader and manager.

The leader of our faction at court was Parmenio, the general – Philip liked to joke that the Athenians managed to come up with ten generals every spring, while he’d only found one in his whole life – that was how much he valued Parmenio. Well he might.

At any rate, when men gathered to drink wine in the royal court at Pella, we pages served as quickly as we could and huddled together for safety under the eaves. Men died when the wine was flowing. And if anyone talked about Socrates or Heraklitus, I never heard it. Casual fornication was tolerated – slave girls and sometimes boys were used as freely as wine cups. One of my clearest memories of youth remains serving wine to Erigyus while he rode a girl on his couch. Beyond them, a highlander was kneeling on the floor, watching, incredulous, as his life ebbed away, blood all around him like spilled wine. He’d mocked Erigyus’s penis. The Lesbian cut his throat and carried on. That was the closest thing we knew to a symposium, and that was why it was sometimes difficult to understand what Aristotle was talking about.

I don’t mean to dwell on my own youth. I mean this to explain – to myself, if not to you – why we killed the king, in the end. But to understand Alexander, you have to understand everything, and as with Aristotle’s lessons, it can be hard to see Alexander through the haze of later events. And to understand the man, you have to see some of the boy.

I observed Alexander on dozens of hunts, but one sticks in my head. We’d been hard at it – lesson after lesson, swordsmanship and ethics, wrestling and spear-fighting and running and ethics, the lyre and ethics. The physical world – the bodies of men and women, with dissection; medicine, in detail – how to make drugs from herbs, how to grind powders, how to administer even the most complex concoctions. And political philosophy, too – we were, after all, the men who would rule Macedon, not a group of merchants’ sons, and we were being trained carefully.

Like any group of boys, we had an established pecking order and it was ruthless and yet curiously malleable, and boys went up and down the ladder swiftly. Alexander headed it – he was to be king, and that was that. Indeed, he was not the strongest, the fastest or the best swordsman – but he was almost the best in every category, and he was, without a doubt, the most intelligent of us. Sometimes it seemed to us that he alone understood what Aristotle was talking about, and certainly, when it came to swordsmanship, or spear-fighting, what he lacked in reach and leg length he often made up for in subtlety and practice.

Practice. I was busy sneaking over the wall of the boys’ compound every night to meet a girl – I loved her. I was fifteen, and her body was smooth and beautiful, and mine, as long as I was willing to risk heavy physical punishment and go for days without sleep, which most fifteen-year-old boys see as a small price to pay for the feel of two breasts under their hands. But I remember coming back from one of these expeditions, feeling like a king, and finding Alexander with a wooden sword in his hand, standing at the stake behind the barracks, practising the steps of a particular blow – hip rotation, right foot rotating around the left, then pushing forward, passing the left, and then another hip rotation that left you facing your opponent from a new angle. Our sword master – one of half a dozen men named Cleitus – had taught us the footwork the morning before, and here was the heir of Macedon in the first pale grey light of day, executing the move over and over. He’d placed white pebbles where he wanted his feet to go.

‘Join me,’ he said, without turning around.

No one refused a direct order from the prince. Once or twice, Hephaestion, his best friend, had smacked him for us, but none of us, even Hephaestion, ever refused him. So I squared off, tried the steps, stumbled.

‘Use the white rocks,’ he said quietly. ‘They help.’ He stepped around the pell and left me to his rocks. They did help, but what helped me more was watching him. He was executing the steps faster and faster, and then he began to throw cuts with his wooden sword as he moved his feet – one, two, three. The master hadn’t taught us cuts yet – at least, not the cuts that went with the steps.

It was always difficult to learn anything from Alexander – he learned things by observation, usually in one or two repetitions, and he never really understood that the rest of us needed to be shown things slowly and precisely.

I had the steps in ten repetitions. Alexander grinned at me, and we started to do them together, like peasants dancing for the gods, and I picked up his sword cuts just for the joy of doing them in perfect unison. The sun rose, a red ball cutting through the high morning fog. I got it. What he had reasoned out in the darkness – well, I’m no fool. I got it.

We dressed quickly and we were the first into the dining hall. Leonidas, the athlete, was already there, naked under a chlamys of coarse wool. He had a heavy staff in his hand. He rose and bowed his head to Alexander. He looked at me the way teachers look at boys – boys they know are guilty but haven’t caught yet.

‘Your pallet was empty, son of Lagus,’ he said formally.

‘He was with me, practising,’ Alexander said.

Leonidas narrowed his eyes, stuck a hand down the front of my chiton and felt the slick sweat on my chest. He nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said. What he meant was, Another time, boy.

That was the prince’s way, though. He didn’t say, ‘Ptolemy, Leonidas is on the hunt for you.’ He merely required me to attend him at practice and then dealt with the matter himself. So that if I made an excuse and avoided practising with him in the grey dawn, I would only punish myself.

At any rate, that morning, after we did drills in pairs, the sword master handed out the padded wooden swords and we stripped off our chlamyses and sparred. We were tough boys – indeed, other than in Sparta, I doubt you’d have found tougher – and most fights ended with the loser knocked unconscious, because it was reckoned faint-hearted to raise a hand and accept defeat without showing blood or falling into the deep.

By chance, I drew Amyntas – we were never friends. I hit him and he hit me, and welts were raised. He was cutting at my sword arm – perfectly legitimate, but my timing was off and he kept hitting the same place, and the lambskin wrapped on the oak sword was not enough to keep those blows from causing real pain.

‘Keep your sword down and behind your shield,’ Cleitus muttered. We weren’t using shields yet, but the chlamys was a standin for the shield. A good swordsman doesn’t show his opponent the sword until the cut is coming in. I was waving my sword about, sending Amyntas signals as clear as if I was shouting out when I meant to attack.

I got back into my stance, got my sword hand down so that my weapon was hidden by my chlamys, and swore to myself that I’d let him strike first.

I waited a long time. The little shit had learned his fancy arm cut and now he was determined to use it over and over.

We circled and circled. The other boys hooted – Hephaestion began to deride us both. Alexander wasn’t even paying attention. He was somewhere else in his head – I knew that look.

There were elements of swordsmanship that were exactly the same as elements of things at which I was very good – pankration, for instance, the all-in wrestling that the Greeks love. I’m big and my arms are longer than they ought to be, and I know my distances when I go for a throw. Amyntas was at a loss as to what to do, now that I wasn’t throwing attacks, and he was less willing to accept the taunts of the others than I was. I slid forward, closing the distance subtly while circling to the right.

I didn’t plan it. It was gods-sent. I did stamp my foot to draw him, and he did fall for it. The movement of my front foot drew his counter-cut at my arm. But my arm wasn’t there, and I did the steps – one-two-three. My sword cut down from his open side, I was at an odd angle to him, and I hit him so hard in the head that I might have killed him – I swear I never meant to cut so hard. He fell like an avalanche falls – every part of him together.

Cleitus narrowed his eyes. Shrugged. Gave me a curt nod. Like a tutor who thinks you’ve cheated on a test but can’t see how.

‘Next,’ he said. He looked back at me.

Alexander came forward, with my friend Cleitus, the one we called ‘the black’. He was the son of Alexander’s nurse, and not exactly a nobleman, but he was as loyal as a good dog to Alexander and, as I say, he was my friend. Nearly always, or at least that’s how I remember it.

I was covered in sweat, and while slaves dragged Amyntas off the palaestra and revived him, I put my cloak on – it was cold – and realized just how badly my arm was hurt.

I stood there, rubbing it and trying to look unhurt and victorious. Manly and aristocratic.

Alexander took Cleitus apart. It was quite an exhibition; Alexander had mastered the step and the associated cuts, and he proceeded to hit Cleitus over and over again. Cleitus scored occasionally – he wasn’t bad – but Alexander hit him again and again, smoothly moving through his cutting strokes as if on parade – right to left, bottom to top, as if this was a drill and having his opponent know which blow was coming was expected. But because Cleitus didn’t get the new rhythm or the fancy offset offered by the new footwork, the blows came in – one after another.

And then Cleitus’s dark face filled with blood. Maybe he thought he was being mocked – maybe one of the blows hurt more than the others. He grunted – it caught my attention, because, to be honest, watching one man carve the crap out of another is dull, and I’d stopped watching, but that grunt had hate in it. He stepped in, took Alexander’s blow on his shoulder and caught the prince’s elbow – and threw him to the ground. Classic pankration.

Alexander got to his feet, came on guard, measured the distance and knocked Cleitus unconscious. One-two-three. Black Cleitus crashed to the ground as if dead.

The sword master looked at him, and then flicked his glance over to me.

‘Well done, my prince,’ he said. ‘A little harder than it needed to be.’

Black Cleitus was not dead. He let out a great snort, and blood flowed from his nostrils, and then he snorted like a boar and got up on his knees and vomited.

Alexander held his hair – we all wore ours long. Then he came over and stood by me – according to our traditions, the winning boys stood together.

‘Did you see me?’ he said. ‘I used the new step.’

‘Me, too,’ I said.

He turned to me so fast I thought he had tripped. ‘You what?’

‘I put Amyntas down with the same blow you used on Black Cleitus,’ I said. I wasn’t paying attention to the signals – we were victors together, and I thought . . .

His smile came off his face like water draining from a dropped pot. He stood quivering with anger. ‘It was mine,’ he said. ‘Not yours. I should have been first.’

He had the same look in his eyes that Erigyus had when he punched his eating knife through the highlander’s throat-bole. I admit I stepped back.

When the sun was high, Aristotle came out to find us and take us to the cold stone benches. As always, he asked Cleitus and Leonidas to tell him what we’d done.

‘Alexander downed his opponent with the Harmodius Blow,’ Cleitus the sword master said. He wasn’t a clever man, and his flattery rarely went well with the prince. He was a good swordsman, though.

‘Every idiot knows how to do it,’ Alexander spat. He stood by himself, arms across his chest, the very image of adolescent anger.

Aristotle looked around. I fancied he caught my eye – perhaps it was just my imagination. ‘Victors should be gracious,’ Aristotle said.

‘I am gracious,’ Alexander retorted.

‘No,’ said Aristotle. ‘You are not.’

Their eyes locked, and all the other boys shuffled away.

‘You desire to be Achilles? You strive always to be first and best?’ His old tutor, Lysimachus of Acarnia, who had complete control of the younger Alexander before Aristotle came, called himself Phoenix, called Hephaestion Patroclus and called Alexander Achilles. Aristotle was human enough to resent the old tutor and his lickspittle ways.

Alexander looked away in angry silence.

Aristotle stepped closer. ‘Which boy did you put down with this Harmodius Blow, Prince?’

Alexander shrugged. ‘It does not matter.’

‘Ptolemy?’ Aristotle asked.

‘No,’ Alexander spat. ‘He . . .’ Then he lapsed into silence.

‘It was me, lord,’ Black Cleitus said. He was rueful. ‘Had it coming.’

Aristotle looked at Cleitus. Then at me.

Leonidas’s straight back and flared nostrils suggested that he was none too pleased by this intrusion of the academic into the athletic. ‘Held the boy’s hair. He was decent enough.’

Aristotle looked around again, like a good hunting dog catching the scent of a distant and elusive prey.

He looked at Amyntas, with a heavy bandage around his temples. The same bandage that Cleitus wore. ‘Who fought Amyntas?’ he asked.

‘I did,’ I allowed.

‘The same way?’ Aristotle asked, splaying two fingers on Amyntas’s head and measuring the blow.

I shrugged.

Alexander flushed.

Aristotle laughed. ‘Alexander, excellence lies in being better than other men – not in other men being worse than you. I can read you like a book, boy.’

Alexander looked as if he might cry.

What is hard to explain in this schoolboy reminiscence is that I could understand. Alexander felt I had betrayed him. He’d rescued me from Leonidas only to have me go first and throw his blow – a blow he’d risen in the dawn to practise.

So I stepped right up next to the prince and bowed my head. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

Alexander didn’t look at me. ‘No. I was not behaving well.’ His voice was choked, as if he’d just heard that a favourite was dead.

‘I’m sorry anyway,’ I said.

My pater used to say that if you truly want to know a man, spend a week with him in the wilderness. No one can hide his true self from the companions of the hunt. Freezing rain, stinging nettles, a bad cut from a spear-point, an unwanted offer of sex from one of the oldsters – all the tests of young manhood are waiting in the hills and deep woods, and that’s before you meet the boar or the wolf with nothing between you but an ash staff and a few inches of cold iron.

A few days after the sword incident, Erygius and Laodon came from Pella with some of the king’s companions – his Hetaeroi, friends and bodyguards and inner council of state all in one – to take us hunting. It was a test and a vacation all in one.

Macedonian nobles do not hunt like Greek aristocrats, and despite the many ways we copy them, in hunting we have our own ways.

We use dogs to locate the quarry, and other dogs to run it down, and we follow our dogs on horseback. Depending on terrain and the animal we’re after, we stay mounted with spears or dismount with spears. The height of courage is to take a boar on foot. Greeks do it the same way, but they don’t use horses, and that’s slower. And they don’t use a double-bladed axe to finish the boar, and that’s just foolishness. Trying to finish a boar with a spear is . . . well, it is a good way to reduce your supply of available noblemen.

It was autumn, and we went north and west, into Lychnitis. Lychnitis is beautiful – low hills that rise gently into mountains, and old forests that men have never cut, not even in the age of heroes. There’re trees lying on the forest floor that are as thick as a horse, and others as wide as a man is tall, so that to clamber over them is like climbing a low hill – and they’re just the downed trees. Giants rise on every side, green temples to the immortal gods, and every animal thrives there – the great deer, the elk and the boar. And the wolves.

And desperate men, of course.

We made our hunting camp in a long clearing that kings of Macedon had used for their hunting camps since the gods walked the earth. It was a defensible hilltop, high enough to give warning of approaches, low enough that the boys and the slaves didn’t have to go too far for the water that flowed across the northern base of the hill from the spring. The land about was scrubby, but rose to the west and north – to the north the camp was dominated by the first low mountain of Paeonia, and to the west the trees grew and grew, so that the Illyrians said a squirrel could jump from tree to tree from the hunting camp all the way to Hyperborea, where Apollo went to sleep.

The air was as clean and cold as a mother’s reproach. The animals were not afraid of men, and came right into camp to steal food. Our horses were skittish unless one of the boys was with them all the time. This was just a year after Alexander gained Bucephalus – a fine horse, though legend has improved him like it has polished his master. In fact, the prince had three big mounts for hunting and a palfrey for riding about. We all did – no one horse could keep going all day over that country, and we knocked them up badly. And that week, the rain fell as if Artemis disapproved of our slaughter – on and on, a light rain that never seemed to end, and in that kind of weather, horses get sick, go lame – die – as fast as children die in the same weather.

I had a horse I loved – a dark yellow golden coat, with blond mane and tail, tall and handsome and fast, which one of Pater’s grooms had rather impiously called ‘Poseidon’. But Poseidon he remained, and he had the god’s own strength, and in my eyes he was a better horse than Bucephalus or any other horse who’d ever lived. He was certainly faster than the mighty bay, but like the other boys, I was not foolish enough to show it.

We spent the first few days deer-hunting – for the meat. Boar-hunting and wolf-hunting are very noble, but they don’t feed the troops or the slaves, so a boar hunt usually starts with the massed slaughter of a deer herd. It wasn’t like sport at all, or even like war – more like a harvest, as the trained slaves and a handful of the king’s cavalry troopers wove screens of brush and set up a long alley of these hurdles, shaped like a giant funnel, between two hills. All the mounted men made a great line before dawn, and we picked our way across the hills, eyes watering with the effort of finding the next huntsman to the right and left in the rain and the dim light – I was off my horse twice on the first morning, flat on my face once and off Poseidon’s rump the other, caught looking the wrong way when he trotted under a low branch.

But we covered a lot of ground, driving the deer – and every other living thing – into the open end of the funnel. By full daylight, we closed the net tight. The first day was sloppy, and we pages were blamed for indiscipline. But on the second morning it was well done, and we drove fifty deer down the funnel into the older men, who killed them with swords and spears. Laodon was thrilling to watch, standing coolly with a short spear – a longche, just the height of a man, and heavy in the shaft. He killed a stag that charged him – stood his ground, shifted his weight and the animal was down, and then all the older men finished it. A few deer got past, of course, and soldiers with bows shot them down – shooting carefully, because hitting one of the king’s companions was a death sentence. Perhaps they were shooting too carefully, because one enormous stag, a monster as big as my horse, beloved of Artemis, burst through the archers and raced free up the hills and vanished into the deep trees.

Alexander cantered up. I’ve said he wasn’t the best at everything, and he wasn’t, but he was the finest horseman I’ve ever seen – years later, when we rode against the Sakje of the Sea of Grass, I remarked that he was as natural a rider as they. What always amused me is that he took this utterly for granted and would accept no praise for it – never told self-important stories about his riding prowess, never bragged about the horses he’d broken. Horses loved him, and I suspect that’s because he always knew exactly what he wanted.

Laodon was standing there, naked, wiggling his spear back and forth in the stag’s chest, trying to draw it free where it had lodged against bone. He looked up when he heard Alexander’s hoof beats, and waved a salute.

Alexander merely pointed at the rump and tines of the great stag galloping for the treeline. A few heartbeats later and the animal would have been gone. But Laodon saw what he had missed, and rage filled his face. He let go his spear haft and walked over to the archers. Words were exchanged, and a man struck to the ground.

Alexander pursed his lips.

Laodon came back and shook his head. ‘My apologies, Prince. That beast should never have slipped us.’

‘The will of Artemis,’ Alexander said. But the way he said it indicated that he meant the opposite. And Laodon knew it.

Next day we went out as scouts, all the pages, looking for the boars. I was with Laodon, and we rode from sun-up until high noon through the woods. The day was beautiful, with a golden autumn sun on red leaves and the most amazing, heady scent in the air of fresh-fallen leaves – the perfume of Artemis, Laodon called it.

I remember that I spent a good deal of time worrying whether he meant to rape me. Just to give you an idea of what Laodon was known for.

He was an excellent hunter, though, and his eye for the field sign was without error, and while I don’t remember why I was allowed to accompany him, it certainly wasn’t my looks. I was fit – we all were – but you can look at my profile on coins, can’t you? I am not a handsome man, and my friends called me ‘Georgoi’ or ‘Farm Boy’.

If it was a privilege, it was a scary one. I was on my guard, never within reach of his arms. That’s pretty much how we lived our lives – just so you know.

Noon came, and I was ravenous. What boy isn’t? We’d been mounted since dawn, and up and down from our mounts, looking at fewmets and tracks and traces and rubs, and then up again – riding down steep hills, up rocky defiles, or over the downed trunks of ancient trees that had stood like towers when Hector fought Achilles.

We came to a muddy ditch where the trail crossed a stream – the passage of men and animals had worn the end of the trail into the ditch. Laodon dismounted, handed me his reins, and looked into the ditch for a long time.

‘A great many men passed this way,’ he said, and scratched his beard. His eyes were alive, of a sudden, and he moved his head slowly around like a hawk does when searching for prey.

Then he shrugged. ‘I’m getting old, boy, and I see bandits behind every tree. What have you packed us to eat?’

I had a leather bag full of cheese and bread, and a pottery flask of good Nisean wine. I laid it out for him and stood back – pages don’t eat with knights.

He nodded curtly, ate some bread, drank some wine and grinned at me.

‘That’s good wine, young Ptolemy.’ He drank another sip from his horn cup and nodded.

I probably flushed with the praise.

‘Sit, boy. Eat.’ He indicated the food.

I guess my fears were obvious. I sat too carefully.

Laodon laughed. Like lightning, his hand was on the back of my neck, locking me to the ground. ‘If I wanted you,’ he said with a snort, ‘you’d be mine.’ He snickered. ‘Not my type, boy.’ He slapped my rump and picked up his horn cup, which he’d somehow set aside without spilling its contents while he put me on the ground with one hand.

I was shaken, but I managed to eat anyway. Oh, for a moment of that youth now! Beans make me fart, milk curdles in my stomach and too much wine goes to my head. At fifteen, I could go straight from fear and terror to eating without passing through any intervening stages. I remember how good the cheese was.

‘Have some wine, virgin,’ Laodon said, handing me his cup. He got to his feet. ‘I’m going to look around.’

I sat on a big rock by the stream and drank wine from his horn cup. He was an important man and a famous warrior, and to be allowed to drink from his cup was a compliment. My father loathed him – which, at fifteen, can make a man more appealing.

I was wondering whether his permission went as far as a second cup of wine when a hand came over my mouth and I was dragged off the rock.

‘Don’t make a noise, virgin,’ Laodon said. ‘There’s an Illyrian raiding party on the other side of the ridge. Can you find your way back to camp without me?’ His hand came off my mouth.

‘Yes, lord,’ I said.

‘You are absolutely positive? No horse shit?’ He turned my head. ‘Swear by Zeus?’

‘By Zeus, god of kings, and my ancestor Herakles,’ I said.

‘Good boy. Go! Warn the prince!’ he said. He helped me mount to save time. ‘Never take lunch by a stream,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You can’t hear anything.’

‘Are they after us?’ I asked him.

He shrugged and slapped my horse on the rump, and Poseidon sprang forward.

Almost immediately I faced a quandary. I was not lying – I knew how to get back to camp. But we’d come a great half-circle north and west around the high hill, and the only way back to camp that I knew for certain was to cast all the way back. Or I could cut the circle and ride north and east. Camp had to lie that way – across the shoulder of the high hill, maybe eight stades or a little more. But if I missed the ridge and the clearing – by Artemis, I’d go for ever and never find another man or horse.

I didn’t have a weapon, either. I had an eating knife – not really a useful instrument for killing, although you’d never know it from the number of men I’ve seen put down with eating utensils – but neither spear nor lance nor sword.

I headed across the circle, east by north.

The nerves didn’t start until I was over the shoulder of the hill. I’d convinced myself that when I rode over the shoulder, I’d see the meadow, at least from the top. But I couldn’t, and all I could see were trees – red, orange, evergreen, stretching in an endless parade to the north and west.

I reined in. Poseidon was edgy, and he fidgeted under me on the knife-edge ridge. I thought about it for as long as a man takes to run the stade – a good man – and then I turned Poseidon north and climbed higher on the ridge.

By the time I’d ridden for a hundred heartbeats, the awful truth was clear – I wasn’t on the right ridge. We’d come farther around the mountain than I thought. I wasn’t quite lost – but I didn’t know what angle to cast on to make it to camp.

I considered going back to Laodon. He might mock me, he might club me to the ground, but at least he’d set me on the right trail.

I kept Poseidon going up the ridge, dodging trees and cursing under my breath every so often. Fearing that I was going to be the death of my prince, because I was lost in the woods. That’s a worse fear than battle sickness or fear of a girl’s parents – fear of failing others. The worst. Better to die alone than to fail others.

Up and up. The ridge was quite steep now. The trees were thinning, and for the first time I could see for a few stades. I had to dismount and lead Poseidon across a rocky slope at the base of a high rock cliff – old volcanic rock like rotten cheese. Poseidon picked his way across the scree like a veteran, and I looked until my eyes burned for something I might recognise.

Of course, we put out our fires as soon as the day dawned. So there was no smoke.

But midway across the cliff face, I realised what I was seeing. Out of sight over the next ridge was something that drew a lot of carrion birds.

Dead deer, that’s what was drawing the crows.

I felt my heart start to pound. My hands grew cold. I made my feet go faster. Poseidon stumbled and I tried to haul him along the scree by force – never a good move with a horse. The horse always wins a contest of strength – my first riding master taught me that. But I was afraid. I made mistakes.

I think that the difference between great warriors and dead warriors is that the great ones survive their first mistakes.

I got across the scree and started down the second ridge. I could no longer see the carrion birds, but they were loud and raucous and I could hear them and I rode for them. I cantered where on any other day I’d have walked. I pictured in my mind all the pages butchered or sold as slaves, Alexander as a hostage. Because I’d failed.

Down the ridge – now I was committed because it’s easier to ride down a steep slope than to come back up, and once Poseidon got into the vale below, I wasn’t sure we’d get back up this high. I cursed under my breath, prayed, and got a lot of branches in the face. Then we came out of the trees.

There was the wall of hurdles – the deer trap. Slaves around the carcasses. I put my head down, clenched my knees and put my heels into Poseidon’s flanks, and we were off, canter and gallop and a desperate sliding stumble down another slope of loose rock above the camp, and men were looking at me.

‘The prince!’ I demanded as I reined in.

Philip the Red, one of the oldster pages, shook his head. ‘Alexander is off with Erigyus,’ Philip said. ‘What the fuck?’

‘Illyrians!’ I said. ‘A raiding party. Laodon sent me to warn the camp.’

Philip was a year older than me, a right bastard to the younger pages, an obsequious lickspittle to the older men. He looked around desperately.

There wasn’t a free adult male in camp. There were ten or twelve pages and fifty slaves and some flute girls.

Some men have it. Some men don’t.

‘Right,’ Philip said. I swear his face changed. He looked at me. ‘The prince went north. Go and warn him.’ He looked around again and saw Black Cleitus. ‘Arm the pages, Cleitus! Right now! And get every slave a bow!’

Simple orders. Obvious stuff, you say. But Philip the Red made the grade, right there. Even if he had beaten me to a pulp once.

I had a body slave – a sort of dog-of-all-work, a gift from my pater to go with my new horse – that I called Polystratus. He was older, a Thracian, and I tolerated him and he wasn’t all that fond of me. But as I turned Poseidon to head north, he was at my side with a spear and a bow. He put the spear in my hand.

Philip the Red wasn’t the only one making the grade.

Polystratus ran with my horse. It’s something city people don’t know – a horse isn’t that much faster than a man, especially over broken ground. The longer the two go on, the more even the race becomes. Over the course of a day, a man and a horse will about break even, except that over ten days, that man on the horse wins, because the man on foot is too tired.

Polystratus and I went north, over a low ridge. It was all very well for bloody Philip to tell me to find the prince, but I really had no idea how to go about it.

Polystratus did. He picked two more Thracian slaves as we went – men hauling deer carcasses into the clearing, big tattooed men with knives.

He looked up at me. ‘We follow water,’ he said. Shrugged. That was his plan – to follow the stream that fed the next meadow. It made sense – animals need water, and it was probably what Alexander had done. But he’d done it seven hours ago.

‘Listen, boys,’ I said, leaning down. ‘I’ll free all three of you if we live and find the prince. Got that?’

Grins all around. One Greek word every slave knows – Eleuthera. Freedom.

‘I’m going north of the stream. Polystratus stays on the stream. You two – spread out a stade – south of the stream and another stade farther south. And run. When you have to stop to breathe – shout!’ I looked under my hand into the sun to the west – saw riders on the crest of the distant ridge. ‘Tell the prince that there are Illyrian raiders to the north and the west. Philip the Red is organising a defence in the camp. Got it? Now go, by Hermes!’

They grunted – Thracians make Macedonians look very civilised indeed – and ran off, all together at first, and then separating by degrees as they crossed the marshy meadow.

I went due north, avoiding the meadow altogether. The first time Polystratus stopped to draw breath and shout, I heard him, and that put heart into me. Then I was back on the low mountain, riding through enormous tumbled rocks and that startling perfume of mighty Artemis, up and up again. I called and called.

After an hour I crossed a stream and realised that I was lost. The ridge had plateaued – in another marsh, and how marshes grow at the top of steep ridges is a bafflement to me still. I had to dismount to get Poseidon around the marsh, and then there was another hill to my left, and I was completely lost. Was this Polystratus’s stream? Or another stream?

I stopped at the edge of the meadow, remounted and turned Poseidon to look at the sun, and only that turn saved me.

I heard the buzz of the sling-stone. I knew it for what it was, but the information took far too long to percolate through my head. Then I put my head down and galloped for the treeline.

I crashed into the trees and looked back, and there were three men in skins – they looked like animals. Fur caps, fur leggings, furs worn as cloaks. Behind them were two men on horses – little ponies, really.

I remember saying fuck quite a few times.

One of the mounted men gave a whoop, and then both of them were flying across the meadow.

I kept going through the trees. I could easily outdistance their little ponies on flat ground, but in these woods they’d have the edge.

I remember thinking, quite reasonably, just as Aristotle taught us, that I had to kill them. I couldn’t chance losing a race. And I couldn’t chance leading them to the prince.

I was over the crest of the ridge with the marsh at the top, now, and going down a shallow slope. Off to the right, I saw one of the downed giant trees.

I rode for it, staking everything on gaining its cover before they saw me.

This giant had fallen recently – in the last hundred years – and the great ball of its roots was open to the sky like a natural cage, all the dirt washed away. I rode in among the roots.

Poseidon stopped, and his breath came in great loud snorts. I could just see my back trail. I gripped my short spear at mid-haft and waited. And waited.

When they came, they were loud and fast. But they had cast far to the west of my line – possibly because they were not fools, but Illyrians – and they passed a quarter of a stade from my ambush, robbing me of any surprise. So I let them pass. There was nothing else I could do, really, except charge them and die.

But I did follow them, moving from cover to cover on horseback the way we were taught, both hunting and scouting. Since the penalty for failure was almost always a heavy beating, doing it with the risk of losing one’s life wasn’t so bad.

The big downed trees were my salvation – that and my excellent horse, which never snorted and never lost his edge. We ranged along with them, half a stade distant, and went north and west. After half an hour, we crossed the track Laodon and I had used in the morning, and I knew where I was. I wasn’t sure quite what I was doing – but I had passed from prey to predator, and I was scouting, or so I thought.

The sun was well down in the sky when they came to a cross-track, and one of them dismounted to look at the ground. He frowned, and then he grew a spear in his back and flopped full length on the ground.

His partner whirled his pony.

Laodon was empty-handed, but he came straight at the man on his smaller horse. He took the man’s sword cut on his forearm – I winced, even as I pressed my knees into Poseidon’s sides – and his right hand grabbed the headstall and ripped the Illyrian’s bridle right off his horse’s head.

The Illyrian’s horse bolted. He threw his arms around the horse’s neck.

I put my spear into him as he went by. He probably never knew I was there until he fell from his horse. He hit the ground heavily and screamed – oh, such a scream as I hope never to hear again. And then he screamed again.

I’d never killed a man, and I’d lost my spear in the shock of the successful stroke, and Poseidon did not want to go near the writhing thing on the ground, covered in leaf mould and blood, bellowing and shrieking.

‘Finish him!’ Laodon shouted. ‘Or we’ll have all his friends on us!’

I had an eating knife.

I slid from my horse and my knees were so weak I slumped to the ground, and I had to stab him three or four times. Maybe more. I really don’t remember. What I remember is the silence and the blood all around me. And Poseidon, glaring at me from one wild eye, very unhappy.

My victim’s bowels relaxed into the sloppy, smelly embrace of death. His mouth fell open and his eyes were open too. I thought he was dead, but I threw up all over him to make sure.

Laodon came and retrieved my spear. He wiped it clean, then took my knife out of the dead man’s neck, wiped it clean and finally pulled the man’s sword belt over his head. He had a long Keltoi sword.

Laodon tossed it to me. ‘Wipe your face, lad,’ he said.

I wiped it with my chlamys. I didn’t have anything else. I got some of the blood off my hands and arms, but it stuck in my arm hair.

‘I have to know, boy – did you make camp?’ he asked.

‘Yes. I’m . . . I’m looking for the prince. Those two found me – I slipped them.’ It sounded foolish. ‘I was following them.’

Laodon nodded. ‘Well done. If the prince is alive.’

We collected the dead men’s ponies and headed south.

I had a sword.

Polystratus hadn’t found the prince. He found us, instead, coming down yet another ridge. Laodon sent him off on a new angle, and sent me back to camp, headed almost due south.

I found Hephaestion, less than two stades from camp and blissfully unaware that the world had gone to shit. Let me take a moment to say that Hephaestion and I were never close friends. He was Alexander’s favourite – his best friend, almost from birth. Alexander’s partiality blinded him to Hephaestion’s many failings. That’s the nicest way I can put it.

Hephaestion was a bitch queen, and Alexander loved him because he reminded him of his evil mother – that’s what I really think. And yet, to be fair, Hephaestion and I stood up for each other a number of times. He was loyal, and that alone was worth a lot.

Hephaestion panicked. Granted, his form of panic was to gallop off downhill to the south and west, looking for Alexander, abandoning the two younger pages he was supposed to be riding herd on – Cleomenes and Pyrrhus, a pair of useless sprites. He galloped off, and there I was with two eleven-year-olds.

Grinning like imps.

‘It’s an adventure, isn’t it, sir?’ said Cleomenes.

‘Shut up, you two.’ They had ponies. ‘Can you two find your way back to camp?’

‘Oh, yes, sir!’ Pyrrhus said in the child’s tone that conveys the very opposite of what’s said.

‘Oh, no, sir!’ said Cleomenes, who’d felt my wrath before. ‘It’s . . . that way, I think.’ He pointed off towards Macedon, wrong by a quarter of the earth.

‘Stay with me, then,’ I barked.

Want to rid yourself of fear? Taking care of others is the key. With Laodon I was the weaker – with Cleomenes and Pyrrhus I was the strongest. It might have been comic if it hadn’t been so forceful. I led them back over the first ridge and down to the treeline – and then I made them dismount while I looked at the camp.

All I saw was armed pages looking nervous. So I gathered my charges and rode hard into camp.

Philip was unable to keep still. ‘That’s all you found? Two brats?’

Then he saw the blood on my arms.

‘I found Laodon. He’s looking for the prince.’ I was handed a cup and I took it, drank from it and spluttered – it was neat wine.

‘Thank the gods.’ Philip paused, met my eye. ‘Will you . . . go back out?’

Command is hard. You have to make people do things that you could do better yourself – that might get them killed. Philip the Red, one of my many foes among the pages, was asking my permission to send me back out.

I finished the wine. ‘I need to change horses,’ I said.

Philip nodded. A slave ran for the horse lines.

‘Nice sword,’ Philip said.

‘Laodon did all the work,’ I managed. Suddenly we were men, talking about men’s things, and I was damned if I would boast like a boy.

Philip nodded. ‘I’ve got archers in the woods,’ he said.

‘I got in the north way without being challenged,’ I said as my second-string horse, a big mare that I called Medea, was brought in.

Philip gave me a hand up on to Medea’s broad back – as if I were his peer. ‘I’ll look at it,’ he said.

I took a different angle this time, and the shadows were long. In half an hour or less the red orb would be lost behind the flank of the mountain. Already it was cold – and time for the prince and his hunting mentor to be back.

I missed Poseidon immediately. I’d named the mare Medea for a reason – she was all love one minute and death on hooves the next, and she was in a mood. She made heavier work of climbing the ridges than Poseidon had done, and I had to spend more time dismounted, leading her. But before the sun was down a finger’s breadth, I was across the stream and marsh where I’d first left Polystratus, into new territory.

Medea was a noisier horse, too, and she gave a sharp whinny as I crested the second ridge. I put a hand on her neck, but she raised her head and let go a trumpet call, and I heard a horse answer.

I drew my new sword. There were several horses, all coming up the ridge at me. Running for camp was out of the question – we were drilled relentlessly about becoming the means by which an enemy might discover the camp, when we were scouting. In fact, we might have been training for this moment all our lives.

I tucked Medea in behind a stunted, bushy spruce and threw my chlamys over her head to shut her up. I could hear my own panicked breathing, and I assumed that every Illyrian in the woods could hear me, too.

I’d picked a poor hiding place, though. Always pick a place of ambush from which you can see. If you can’t see the enemy, chances are he can’t see you – but you can panic too, while you don’t know whether he’s outflanking you or wandering into your trap. I crouched there on Medea’s back, a hand well out over her head, keeping my cloak in place so she’d be quiet, and I had no idea where in Tartarus the Illyrians were.

But to move now – they had to be a few horse-lengths away.

The next few heartbeats were the longest of the day. And then the gods took a hand, and nothing was as I expected.

I waited. I could hear them moving, and I could hear them talking. They were quiet and careful and they knew that they were being watched. And I became aware that they’d sent men around the other side of my spruce thicket – so I was a dead man.

Best to charge, I decided. For the record, this is a form of fear that probably kills more men than running from an enemy. The need to get it over with is absurd.

I pulled my cloak off Medea’s head and got her under me, and we were at them.

Fighting on horseback is very different to fighting on foot, mostly because you are not on your own feet, but on someone else’s. It’s hard to wrong-foot a man in a fight – at least, in the open. But it’s not so hard to wrong-foot another man on horseback – if he’s got his spear on the wrong side of the horse, say. The first Illyrian had his spear in his right hand, held at mid-haft, slanted slightly down, and I burst from cover and he caught the spearhead in his pony’s neck strap.

I missed my overhand stab, but my spearhead slammed sideways into his head and he toppled.

Then Medea took a spear in the chest, and while I tried to slow her, another in the rump, and down we went. It was so fast I didn’t have time to hurt, but rolled free and got to my feet.

Got my back against a big tree.

The rest of the Illyrians were already relaxing – they’d thought it was a great ambush sprung on them, and now they were realising that they had one boy, not a Macedonian army.

A pair of them kneed their horses around the spruce thicket, but the rest turned into me.

I got my spear.

A boy my own age laughed, pulled a bow from a long scabbard under his knee and strung it.

So I threw the spear.

It was something we practised every day – if I hadn’t been able to hit him at that distance, I’d have had marks on my back like a bad slave.

That took the smiles off their faces. The boy with the bow died with a gurgle.

I drew my sword.

Let’s make this quick – they shot my horse, and then they beat me to the ground with spear staves. I don’t think I marked any of them. They were good. And thorough. They broke both my arms.

They bound me to a sapling like a deer carcass, and I screamed. It hurt a great deal.

Several of them spoke Greek, and the chieftain – at least, I assumed he was the chief, although he looked like a brigand with some gold pins – came and squatted by me.

‘So,’ he said. ‘You killed Tarxes’ boy. He wants to skin you.’ The brigand chief grinned. He was missing a great many teeth, and others were broken, blackened stumps. I was somewhere in a haze of pain between consciousness and unconsciousness. ‘You look like a noble brat to me, boy. And you have one of my swords on you. Tell me. Who are you?’

I’d like to say I was brave, but all I could do was mewl, spit and scream. The rawhide straps cut off all circulation to my legs but left plenty of feeling in my unset broken arms.

Broken Teeth watched me for a while. Then he took my eating knife out of his belt and rammed it through my bicep. ‘Talk, boy,’ he said.

I fainted. Thank the gods.

They unstrapped me and threw me into the icy stream at the foot of the ridge. So much for fainting. I couldn’t swim. I couldn’t even float. It occurred to me that the best thing I could do was fill my lungs with water and go down, but they hauled me clear, and anyway, I’m not sure I had the nerve.

It is a funny thing, but when you are tortured, you are a different person. Weaker, with no pride and no self. And yet you want to live. That’s the hold they have over you. The desire to live.

They knew quite a bit. They made the mistake of talking about it. They knew it was Alexander with the hunting party.

As soon as I heard that, I knew that one of the lowland lords was playing at regicide. Alexander was the king’s only heir.

That thought gave me power. Gave me back my self. Instead of being human garbage ready for sacrifice, I went back to being a royal page who had a master to protect.

See this, lad? That’s where they cut my right nipple off my breast. Oh, yes. That’s all scar tissue.

They enjoyed themselves. But they weren’t as good as, say, a Persian torturer.

I screamed out my name. Several hundred times. It was the only thing I’d say, but I must have said it quite a bit, because I can actually remember when no sound came out at all – just the shrill sound of vocal cords wrecked by overuse.

It would have been nice if I’d passed out again, but I didn’t and they tied me to a tree. Blood is sticky and cold. I was in shock, of course, and I shook so badly it hurt my arms. Shall I go on? Men came and beat me – quite casually. A fist in the face, a couple of kicks – they must have cracked every rib.

I’m trying to shock you, boy, and that’s unkind. On the other hand, you have the satisfaction of knowing that since I’m here wearing the crown of Aegypt, I must have survived, eh?

As darkness fell, half of them rode away west under Broken Teeth. The other half bedded down, with two alert and well-concealed sentries. Tarxes came and put his eating spike into my left hand and pulled it out a couple of times. See the scars?

Then he went off to check the sentries. I was far too aware of everything around me. I wanted to faint or die, but instead I was hyper-aware.

So I watched Laodon slit a sentry’s throat. I wasn’t sure it was real, because by then the night seemed to be full of ghosts and shadows. The moon was full. The Illyrian ponies began to fuss, and ghosts walked. When Laodon slit the man’s throat, taking him from behind with his hand as he’d grabbed me at the stream, I saw the ghosts lap at the fountain of black blood that flashed like a sword in the moonlight.

From my position in the middle of the camp, I saw Erigyus take the big axe that was meant for boars and cut the other sentry in half, or close enough. The axe made a noise like a man splitting a melon for water on a summer’s day.

Then the pages flooded the camp and began killing. There was no resistance – the Illyrians were taken by surprise and paid with their lives, and they died on their squalid pallets.

Laodon cut my bonds. I managed a shriek when he reached for my arms, and he lowered me to the ground.

‘By Aphrodite,’ he swore. ‘What have they done to you?’

And next I saw Alexander, his blond head outlined in fire. I can still see him – his profile sharply outlined. The pages must have thrown all the camp’s hastily gathered wood on to the fire, and the raging flames backlit him.

‘I will never forget this,’ he said, and kissed me on the forehead.

It is a hard way to become a royal favourite – to win the absolute trust of the king. My left hand was never good for much afterwards, and I’ve known women lose the desire to fornicate when faced with the ruin of my left breast.

But without those wounds, and those awful hours, I would not be King of Aegypt.

I was a year recovering. To be honest, it was more than a year – it took me a year to recover my body enough to begin training, and another year to train hard enough to recover my place among the pages. And more than that to recover . . . something that Tarxes cut out. Ambition. Aggression. Will.

I recovered for a while on my father’s estates, but as soon as I could walk and hold a stylus I was back with Aristotle, and it was then that I came to understand how much my station had changed. I was not Ptolemy, son of an aristocrat, royal page. Somehow I had become the Man Who Saved the Prince, and even my father treated me with respect.

I had to go back to the Gardens of Midas to know why.

Aristotle told me that Alexander saw me captured. That Polystratus – who lived to be free – found the prince and Erigyus, and was leading them to camp when they saw the whole fight – me against twenty Illyrians. Alexander ordered them to be silent. Later, Polystratus said he watched the whole incident like a craftsman watches his work – forging everything into his memory. Alexander and Polystratus didn’t depart until Broken Teeth took his men out of camp at nightfall, and they left Erigyus to watch – and came back with the pages and Laodon. As Aristotle explained it, the prince felt I’d sacrificed myself for him. Over the years many men would do the same, but he watched me do it. Sometimes the gods are kind.

Aristotle liked to use it as an example of how proper behaviour could result in immediate reward.

I was suspicious of that. It was my left hand that hurt as if it was newly injured every time it rained, not Aristotle’s. My smooth-skinned girl screamed when her hand found my scars and she woke her father.

I had nightmares. Still have them. Nothing I ever found on the great wheel of the earth ever terrified me like that night in the woods when the ghosts walked, Death prowled and I was in the doorway between this world and the next, my soul stretched thin on the ground, when men wandered out of the dark to hurt me.

But Alexander and the rest treated me like a hero. And that was, in fact, worth the cost.