God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

TWO

Macedon and Greece, 341–338 BC

My best memory of Aristotle is one of my most unhappy memories of myself.

We were wrestling. Before my injury, I had been the best pankrationist – and the best boxer. The effective loss of my left hand, which was just strong enough to grasp the reins and not much more, left me a much worse wrestler and a bad pankrationist. I didn’t do much to change that.

It must have been spring in the year that Alexander became regent. Greece was in ferment, Demosthenes was ranting against us every day in the Athenian Assembly, the Thebans were threatening war and nothing was as it had been in the outside world, or in the Gardens of Midas.

The pecking order among the pages was no longer malleable. Hephaestion was at the top, with Alexander – he had no authority of his own, but Alexander would always back him, and the rest of us had learned to avoid open conflict. On the other hand, while I had been on my father’s estates, my ribs knitting back together, my arms healing, Hephaestion had changed for the worse – he no longer stood up for the other pages against Alexander. I suspect they’d been lovers since they knew how to do it, but they were thicker than thieves after the hunting camp. Inseparable.

I was a distant third. I was not handsome, and that counted against me with Alexander. But like Black Cleitus, whose loyalty was beyond question, I had special rank, and no other page could touch me.

After us came the best of the other boys – Perdiccus, Amyntas, Philip the Red – by now all leaders in their own right, with their own troops of cavalry. Cassander, Antipater’s son, was there – a useless twit then and now – and Marsysas, who even as a young man played the lyre and wrote better poetry than we did; nor was his sword hand light. Indeed, even Cassander – the best of the worst, if you like – was a fair fighter, the sort of man that troopers could follow in a pinch, with a rough sense of humour and a good way with hunting dogs.

Then there was a pack of younger men and boys – the youngest was ten or eleven, and we treated them like slaves, for the most part, while trying to win their devotion at the same time, as older boys do to younger the world over. It was good practice for leadership – for war. Everything we did was practice for war.

At any rate, we were fighting unarmed in the palaestra – a cool spring morning, all of us oiled, naked and trying to pretend we weren’t cold.

I went up against Amyntas. I never tried – oh, Zeus, it hurts more to tell this than to tell of being tortured. I never even tried. I basically lay down and let him pin me.

No one said a thing. Because by then, I’d done it fifty times. In fact, I remember Alexander smiling at me.

But after we’d had a bite of bread moistened in wine, while Alexander and Hephaestion were fighting like desperate men – and by then we had seventeen-year-old bodies and a lot of muscle – Aristotle came and put a hand on my shoulder.

‘What I hate most about the Illyrians,’ he said, ‘was that they tortured your arete out of your body, and now you have no daimon at all.’

Sometimes you know a thing is true. I burst into tears.

Every man there turned and looked at me, and the pity in their eyes was like Tarxes’ eating spike driven into me again and again.

Aristotle took me by the hand and led me out into the garden.

‘Ptolemy,’ he said, and he put a hand on the back of my neck as if I might bolt, ‘you were the best of the pages. And now you are not even a man. You have the honour of the prince’s esteem – you saved him. You alone saved him – with your head and with your sword. Is that to be the sum of your acts? Will you lie on that bed of laurels until it is withered, or will you rise from it?’ He turned me to face him. He was not a particularly handsome man, but I’ve always maintained that his looks made men think of him as the philosopher – bushy eyebrows, deep-set, wide, clear eyes, a thin mouth, a high forehead – the very image of manly wisdom.

I’m ashamed to say that all I could manage was some sobs. It was all true. I’d lain down for every contest since I came back, and no one said me nay. I was an object of pity.

‘Let me tell you what I know of men,’ Aristotle said. ‘Most men are capable of greatness once. They rise above themselves, or they follow a greater man, or the gods lend a hand, or the fates – once, a man may make a fortune, may tell the truth despite pressure to lie, may have a worthy love who leads him to do good things. This taste of arete is all most men ever have – and they are better for it.’ He looked at me. ‘Stop blubbering, son of Lagus. I tell you – and I know – you are better than that. I expect better of you. Go and fight and lose. Lose fifty times to lesser men and you will be better for it. You have reached a point where there is no penalty for failure, and that is the worst thing that can happen to a young man. So here is your penalty – my contempt. And here is your reward – my admiration. Which will you have, son of Lagus?’

I’d like to say that I stood straighter, looked him in the eye and thanked him. What I did was to run off into the garden and bawl my eyes out.

And the next day, when we were to box, I faced off against a much younger page – and folded.

Aristotle just shook his head.

And over the next few days, I began to notice a certain want of regard among the younger pages. They had worshipped me when I returned, and that worship was falling off.

That hurt.

Cleomenes, the young sprig I’d rescued in the hunting camp, was my most loyal follower, and he sat on my tightly rolled war cloak in the barracks and glared at me. He had a black eye.

He wasn’t eleven any more, either.

‘Amyntas says you are a coward,’ he said with all the hot accusation that a thirteen-year-old can throw at a seventeen-year-old. ‘He says that the Illyrians cut your courage out, and we should treat you like a woman.’

‘If Amyntas thinks women are cowards, he should try birthing a baby,’ I said. One of my mother’s sayings. I sighed. ‘I’m not a coward,’ I said.

‘Prove it,’ Cleomenes said. ‘Beat the shit out of Amyntas.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because that’s what he did to me,’ Cleomenes said with a half-sob.

Life among the pages. Very nice.

It occurred to me to go to Alexander.

But after further thought, I realised that they were all right.

It is odd – I don’t think I was ever a coward. I just didn’t need to excel, and since the need was taken away, I coasted. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. I certainly had a great many nightmares, and my camp girl – I’ll explain that later – would wake me in the night with a hand on my cheek because I was screaming and waking the barracks.

I thought about it, and I came to a set of decisions – every one of them nested into the next. I needed to learn to be the man I had been. And I wasn’t going to learn with the pages.

Polystratus had become a foot companion – one of the elite infantrymen of the old king – and he had a farm not far from the gardens. So I asked for an hour’s leave and rode out to find him, and dragged him from his plough and made of him my sparring partner. His whole idea of fighting with a sword was to hit faster and harder – worthy objectives in themselves, but not a way to win a fight, unless your only goal is to smash your way through the other man’s shield. So, in order to arrange to practise myself, I spent two weeks training him.

Two weeks in which I must have interfered with his ploughing and his sowing, too. I all but lived in his hovel, and his wife – another freed slave – feared me. But teaching Polystratus to be a swordsman did more for my own fighting skills than anything I’d learned in the last year. In fact, I think it was those two weeks that put me on the path I’m still on. Somewhere in the teaching of Polystratus I realised – that there was a theory, a philosophy, to combat. That each motion of an attack, a defence, could be analysed like a problem of philosophy.

I was not the first Hellene to understand this. I may not have been the first seventeen-year-old to understand this. But it was like a key to unlock a trunk full of knowledge. Many, many things that I had learned by rote – steps, hip movements, overhand cuts, thrusts – came together in two weeks to form a sort of Thalian singularity, and if you don’t know who Thales was, young man, you will have to ask your tutor and report to me tomorrow.

I admit, it was easier with my former slave – easier to risk a contest against him, and unimportant to lose. Why? Because he was a man of no consequence, that’s why. What did I care if a former slave could best me?

Except that in those two weeks, Polystratus became a man to me. Since that time, I have seen this happen again and again – worthy men develop a kinship with their opponents, just as unworthy men come to loathe them. The worthiness resides in the competitor – if he brings with him an ability to emulate and admire his enemy, then he is a better man for it. Or so I think.

At any rate, after a fortnight of daily struggle in the mud of spring, Polystratus was a passable pankrationist, and probably the best swordsman in the foot companions – not that they ever fought with swords. But still.

All this time, every morning that I was paired with another man in a contest, I lay down – if not literally, then in effect.

Aristotle shook his head, and then, after another week, didn’t even bother with that.

But Alexander began to look at me curiously.

Cleomenes ceased to come and sit with me, or to flirt with my bed-warmer. I should put in here that Philip had become deeply concerned by Alexander’s little ways – with sex. It was known to every one of us that Philip thought that his son was soft – possibly effeminate. A gynnis. There had been loud words exchanged on the subject, and Olympias – never a subtle woman – sent Alexander a hetaera, a courtesan, named Calixeinna.

She was outrageously beautiful, with the sort of body – high, perfectly round breasts, a tiny waist, a long, sculpted face with small, thick lips for kissing and enormous eyes – the sort of body that drives men mad.

All of us – even the prince – lived in the Macedonian version of a Spartan barracks, in messes of ten boys – five oldsters and five youngsters. Some oldsters slept alone, some with each other, some with the younger boys. Some were just sharing cloaks for warmth. Eh? And some weren’t. Until Calixeinna came.

The poor thing was appalled to be the only woman in what must have seemed like an armed camp with academics. She was quite intelligent – she could recite great swathes of the Iliad – but the idea that she had no room of her own, that she had to dress and undress with forty boys, made her angry. She threatened to leave.

Alexander refused to live outside the barracks.

Aristotle bit his lips, cursed and found women for us all, or, if not all, at least a few per mess. Country girls – not prostitutes, no one’s father would have allowed that. The king offered them all dowries and regular pay, and I suspect there was no shortage of volunteers – we were good-looking, clean and noble.

Of course, this was also the occasion for his famous lecture on the life of hedonism versus the life of restraint and self-control, too.

The truth is that our barracks life improved immeasurably when the women moved in. The clothes were cleaner, the conversation was better, and the youngsters began to laugh and play – the women wouldn’t allow them to be abused. Women exert a subtle influence – not so subtle, sometimes. They will say things without fear that even a warrior might fear to say.

At any rate, I had a regular bed-warmer from the first. She was named Iphegenia – some parents need a better classical education – and she was pretty enough, with large hips and smooth muscles and breasts. She was scared the first time we were naked together, and after that, not – and she was never put off by my scars. I can’t say I loved her – she was the most selfish woman I’ve ever known well – but she took good care of me, bore my first bastard and my pater put her on a farm for me. I hope she lives yet.

Oh, I’m an old man. I love to think of Genny stripping for bed – the only sign I ever had that she was as eager as I was the way she’d incline towards my sleeping roll like a hunting dog pointing to the prey. Hah!

But Alexander appeared to want nothing to do with his courtesan. She was in his sleeping roll most nights, and a few times I saw her under his cloak, once even wrapped in his arms. He was gracious to her. But that was the limit, and Aristotle openly admonished him against her.

Olympias sent notes explaining how men and women had sex, and how much better sex with a woman was than sex with a man. Just picture getting this lecture from your mother, herself a famous beauty, a veritable avatar of Aphrodite. Zeus, god of kings, what a horror that woman could be, and how much of Alexander can be laid at her door. Sober, she was brilliant and scary, and drunk, she was a lascivious predator with no scruples and a poisonous memory. And her power to manipulate – she was quite brilliant . . .

She was very beautiful, with sparkling eyes and curly brown hair, tall, elegantly limbed – please don’t imagine her as somebody’s mother. She bore Alexander at the age of fourteen, and when I first met her – not first saw her at court at a distance, but actually stood in her presence – she was twenty-five years old, in the prime of her beauty. Her skin glowed, and she herself had a sort of radiant vitality that she passed unmarred to her son. I’ve known men who hated her, and I’ve heard magnificent tales of her debauchery, and I know some of them to be true, but let it be said – Macedonian men disliked powerful women, and she was a powerful woman who added to beauty and charm an indomitable will and an almost unbreakable bond with the king that allowed her to call the tune at court. She had many enemies.

She was fiercely protective of Alexander and her protection extended to his friends and companions, and despite having several skirmishes with her myself, as you will hear, I have to admit that she was often our ally against Philip and his companions – the older men who saw us first as children and later as dangerous rivals.

But I digress. That winter, she had got it into her head that Alexander needed a woman, and she decided that the woman of his dreams would also be a useful tool to manipulate him – this is a fine example of how her mind worked.

Anyway, she and Aristotle were adversaries. These days, it has become popular to suggest that Olympias and Philip were the enemies, but I never saw that. It seemed to me that Olympias and Philip were united in wanting their boy to grow up to be a good, solid, dependable Macedonian nobleman – something, I’d like to note, that Philip never was – and Aristotle wanted something more – a great king, an Athenian-style philosopher who had the mettle of Achilles and the mind of Socrates.

Calixeinna became their battleground. She could flirt, a talent wasted on young men, and she could play the lyre and the flute and recite poetry. She could also do geometry, and this fascinated Alexander and even Aristotle. She was not without weapons. Nor was Alexander indifferent to her. He loved beauty, and she was beautiful.

One day, Alexander was paired with me in a war game. We were to live without supplies for three days, stealing food from the kitchens or outlying farms. This was in emulation of the Spartan training, and deeply unfair – if we were caught, I would be beaten. Alexander was never beaten.

We were taken some miles from the Gardens of Midas, and our horses were taken by slaves. We were to live three days off the country, never being caught or even seen, and then we were to steal food from the manor itself, and finally, we were to surrender ourselves to Aristotle at a set time.

Alexander wanted to be paired with Hephaestion, but for whatever reason, he was paired with me. We were taken into the chora, the farmland west of the manor, and left at the edge of the forest without food, water or weapons of any kind.

Perhaps this sort of thing challenges Spartan boys. Alexander and I had a very pleasant three days. We lay up until dark, stole into the first farm and took the dog leashes off the wall of an outbuilding we’d observed at last light. We slept together for warmth and in the morning we unwove the hemp leashes and made slings. Instead of going into the chora, we went up into the hills and killed every rabbit we wanted. There were ripe berries on the bushes, and Alexander got us not one but two magnificent trout out of a stream by standing stock still in the freezing water until the trout trusted him – and then he abused that trust. He was very proud of his feat and I praised him extravagantly, both while I cooked the fish in clay and later, when my belly was full.

Trout, rabbit – by the gods, we ate more than we ate in the pages’ mess, and we slept as long as we wanted. It makes me laugh to think of it.

The second night, we were watching the stars come out. We’d been talking about war – as a generality.

‘I want to conquer Persia,’ he said, as if the stars had just told him.

My belly was full and I was sleepy. ‘I want a cup of good wine,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘Don’t be an ass,’ he said. ‘Pater is not going to get the invasion together until Athens is subdued. Athens can’t be subdued until the Chersonese is cleared. The Chersonese can’t be cleared until the Athenian fleet is neutralised. The Athens fleet can’t be neutralised until Persia is conquered. Persia can’t be conquered until Athens is subdued.’

He grinned, proud of his deliberately circular logic.

‘But this season he’s campaigning in Thrace, against the Scyths and the Thracians,’ I pointed out.

Alexander laughed. ‘You know as well as I that fighting the Thracians and the Scyths is merely an extension of fighting for the Chersonese.’

I did know that, so I laughed. ‘But we don’t have to beat Athens,’ I said suddenly.

‘Why not?’ the prince asked.

‘Athens is a democracy,’ I said.

Alexander nodded. ‘Good point.’

This was, I have to add, one of the chief features of discussing anything with Alexander. He was so intelligent that when you did make a good point, he always – or almost always – understood immediately, which had the boring effect of keeping the rest of us from ever getting to explain ourselves. What I had meant was, Athens is a democracy, and sooner or later one of their factions will screw up their alliance with Persia, or lose interest in the war, and then we’ll have them. And the moment I said it, Alexander understood.

It saved time in argument, anyway. But our conversations may have seemed stilted to outsiders. The insiders – Hephaestion, Cleitus the Black, me, Craterus – we could often have whole conversations in single words.

At any rate, he lay there and finally he said, ‘Until he defeats Athens, he can’t send all his force against Persia.’

‘True,’ I said.

‘I will need you, when I go to conquer Persia,’ he said. What he meant was, Philip will never finish with Athens, and I will have a turn.

I laughed. But he sat up and put a hand on my arm.

‘I am serious. There’s only a hand of you I really trust. I need you. And to be the man I need, you must stop surrendering in contests,’ he said. ‘Here, in the woods, you kill game, you cook, you find trails, you cut bedding – you are the perfect companion, afraid of nothing, quick with good advice – but among the pages, you lie down and let lesser boys triumph over you.’

I remember a hot flush of anger – which of us likes to have our innermost failings exposed? And the temptation to tell him that I was practising, that I meant to strike back, was like the pressure of a swollen river on a dam. But I resisted.

‘Aristotle has spoken to you about it,’ Alexander said.

‘Yes,’ I said, my voice thick. I wanted to say fuck of, or words to that effect.

‘Get it done. Our time is coming.’ Alexander sounded very sure of himself, but then, he always did.

I struggled for words. But none came, and suddenly he turned to me.

‘I know where Calixeinna bathes,’ he said. Again, it was as if the stars had spoken to him.

‘You can see her naked any time you want,’ I shot out, still full of emotions.

‘Isn’t there something terribly . . . ignoble, in giving orders to a woman purchased for you by your mother?’ he said. He shrugged. ‘I love to look at her. She has the most beautiful body I have ever seen.’ He shrugged again. ‘But I will not order her to disrobe for me.’

I shook my head. ‘Give her to me, then,’ I said. I meant to be playful, but he rolled over suddenly on our bed of grass and his face was inches from mine. ‘No,’ he said coldly. ‘She is mine.’

Never a dull moment with Alexander.

‘I want to go and watch her bathe,’ he said.

‘Let’s not forget what happened to Adonis,’ I mused, with the false levity that always follows a serious moment.

‘I am not Adonis,’ Alexander said. ‘She is not Artemis, and anyway, no one will catch me.’

He woke me while the stars were still a cold and distant presence, and we stretched, did some exercises and started down out of the hills. Far from sneaking across the plains, we ran – about thirty stades, I think. Ah, to be young! Alexander had thought it all through, and decided that Aristotle’s slaves, pretending to be guards, would not guard anything or patrol at all in the dark. So instead of creeping from tree to tree across central Macedon, we ran down the roads in the moonlight.

As the sky bgan to pale in the east, we ran past the manor house, bold as brass, and went down the orchard lane, past the olive groves and up the big hill to the west of the manor. There was a spring there, and we ran to the spring, drank water and prayed to the gods.

‘You must not look,’ Alexander told me. ‘Go and take a nap.’

So I snuck away, and he concealed himself in a tree. We were enacting his fantasy – I knew him well enough to understand that. He played the game according to his own rules, and this was his way.

But I was a boy on the edge of manhood myself, and I had no intention of letting him have her all to himself. So I found a little knoll of soft grass under an olive tree and lay down, knowing my man. He came soon enough. He was checking to see that I was asleep.

I pretended to sleep, and then, when he was gone and I had counted to a thousand, I went all the way around the hill and climbed up behind the spring.

Waiting in ambush is dull. I waited a long time. After perhaps a full hour, I guessed where Alexander was hidden from the behaviour of the birds and squirrels. And when the sun was well up and I was regretting my temerity and wondering why I hadn’t just gone for a nap, Calixeinna came.

She had three slaves with her, and they dropped their chitons by the pool and splashed each other, shrieking and calling names. I had a girl of my own – and some experience of women – but I remember being struck almost dumb by the four of them, all beautiful, all splendidly muscled and all very, very different. A dark-haired Thracian girl had short but beautifully muscled legs with heavy thighs, large breasts and a waist and hips that were all swooping curves. A Greek slave was taller and slimmer, with subtler curves, small breasts and a long, graceful back and a magnificent neck. The third woman, a Persian, had the most beautiful eyebrows I had ever seen, graceful hands, and breasts of a different shape from the other two, almost like wine cups. They were all women, all beautiful and all utterly different.

And then there was Calixeinna, who was tall and willowy, with a waist so small that I could have put my hands around it, lips that were the colour of dawn, hair that was a particular blushing shade of red-blond, and heavy, full breasts as yet untouched by age. Her hips were wide and her legs long, and she was perfect.

While her women shrieked and played, she swam in the small pool, really only about three times the length of her body, the water ice cold and black in the early sun under the great holm oak that shadowed the spring. When she emerged, it was like the rising of the sun, and when she reached her arms back to wring out her hair . . .

Oh, youth.

She played for a while with a turtle by the edge of the pool, and it occurred to me that she knew Alexander was there. I didn’t know much about women, but I knew they didn’t play naked by pools nearly as much as adolescent boys thought they did.

When she was done with the turtle, she lay on a rock, naked. The other nymphs continued to laugh and scream, and the longer I watched, the more like a performance it seemed.

Eventually, I had to wonder how often it had been repeated, and by what mechanism Alexander had been informed of it, and whether he’d been to the performance before.

Eventually, she put on her chiton – so prettily that one breast was free while a lost pin was found in the grass – and she and the Persian girl skipped away down the hill, arm in arm, and the other two stayed for a few minutes, filling jars.

I snuck back to my resting place, and went straight to sleep.

A little later, Alexander wakened me, looking as if he’d had a religious revelation. Then, in broad daylight, we climbed into the walled compound and went to the slaves’ quarters, where we sat to breakfast with the slaves – bad wine and stale bread and a little cheese and some dry figs. They all looked at us, of course. Alexander just smiled.

And we were in our usual places when Aristotle opened his class. The philosopher actually got several sentences into his lecture before he realised that we were supposed to be in hiding.

He was pleased with us.

We were pleased with ourselves.

And I never told Alexander that I had watched Calixeinna bathe. I think he’d have killed me.

My point is, he was very smitten, in his deeply self-controlled and selfish way.

I missed most of the by-play, because the next weeks were the weeks I was off drilling in the late afternoons with Polystratus. But Genny told me everything – sometimes too much of everything. Genny could chatter gossip at me even when her breathing was coming in gasps and her hands were locked behind my back and her nails were cutting into my muscles – ‘and then – ah! – she said – ah! – that he . . .’

It’s good to know that, even as king, I can raise a laugh.

I don’t remember what occasioned it. We hardly ever boxed – it was considered too Greek and effeminate – but when we did we wrapped our hands. That helped me – my left hand was ugly, and I was young, and having it wrapped helped steady me.

Old Leonidas stood wearing his chlamys and holding a heavy staff of cornel wood. I happened to be the first page out the barracks door with my hands wrapped. And Amyntas came out second.

‘Ptolemy, son of Lagus,’ Leonidas snapped. ‘Against Amyntas . . .’ His eyes wandered, and he shook his head. ‘No. A younger boy. Philip the Black.’

‘Oh, I’ll be gentle with him,’ Amyntas said. ‘He’s ugly, but maybe if I roll him over . . .’ He guffawed, and many of the other oldsters laughed.

Alexander looked hurt. And he gave me a look – the whole burden of his eyes. In effect, he said do it.

I must give the prince this – he was horrified when the other pages began to turn against me.

Hephaestion relished my discomfiture. ‘He’s the only oldster who competes against little boys,’ he said to Leonidas. ‘Make him fight Amyntas.’

‘Hephaestion!’ snapped Alexander.

‘I’d love to face Amyntas,’ I said. ‘But I’m no match for him.’

Amyntas laughed. ‘Put a bag over your head, Ptolemy!’ he said, and his little set laughed, but the other pages – especially Philip the Red, long ago turned from my tormentor to my friend – looked embarrassed.

Leonidas didn’t like it, but he put me in the ring of wands against Amyntas.

Losing can become a habit.

Amyntas put a fist in my gut and instead of twisting away – I had stomach muscles like bands of steel and it wasn’t that bad – I folded around his punch and lay down.

But when I rolled over, he was pushing his hips, pretending to fuck me for his little audience.

I did my very best to hide my rage. I’d had some practice, since the night with the Illyrians, at hiding my thoughts. I hung my head, rubbed my hip and squared off.

Leonidas struck Amyntas with his staff. ‘Don’t be a gadfly, boy,’ he said.

Amyntas turned on me, eager to have me on the ground again. But he stumbled as he took up his guard – the will of the gods and sheer hubris – and I had all the time in the world to strike him.

I needed it. Losing is a habit. Covering up is a habit, too – fighting defensively, waiting for the blow that will allow you to lose with honour, or at least some excuse and a minimum of pain. That’s how low I’d fallen – even after weeks of practice with Polystratus, faced with a real competitor, I was ready to lie down, I think, until that stumble. Ares was good to me.

He stumbled, and his chin came to my fist.

Instead of defending himself, he lashed out with his left and caught me on the nose, and it hurt. He didn’t break it – but he hurt me, and I saw red. Those two things saved me from myself – his stumble and that haze of pain.

Let’s make this brief. I beat him to a pulp. I broke his nose and blackened both of his eyes and made him beg me for mercy.

None of the other boys said a thing. Leonidas stood back and let it happen, and Aristotle . . .

. . . caught my eye and gave me the smallest nod of approbation.

When he was begging, I let him go. I had him under my left arm, his head locked against my body, and I was beating him with my elbow and fist. My hand hurt.

Leonidas waved for two boys to carry Amyntas off.

‘Since you are feeling better,’ he said, ‘you may face Prince Alexander.’

If losing is a habit, so is winning. Alexander always won – both because none of us wanted to beat him, and because he was awfully fast. And practised like a mad thing.

But that morning, in that place, I was bound to try. I was drinking water and I almost choked at the announcement. Cleitus the Black grinned – not an adversarial grin, but the grin of a man who has been there. So I grinned back, and just at that moment, the gods sent Calixeinna. She was not entering the palaestra – that would have been an appalling breach of etiquette – but she paused, going down the steps from the exedra, about thirty paces away. Owing to the way the columns and the buildings aligned, I’m pretty sure I was the only boy she could see.

She smiled at me. It was a beautiful, radiant, confident smile, and it wasn’t a brief flash.

Then she turned and went down the steps.

I shrugged off my chlamys and went to meet the prince.

My shoulders hurt and my left hand was a dead thing, and I was back to being embarrassed by the scar tissue on my left breast – competitors are supposed to be beautiful. But when the stick came up between us, I didn’t give ground but jabbed with my left – over and over, my left fist like an annoying horsefly.

My fourth or fifth jab connected. Alexander’s head snapped back and his lip was split, blood already welling. He was stunned, and I stepped in and gave him my right to the gut, jabbed a few more times, making some contacts, and then my right to the exposed side of his head and down he went.

The other pages were silent.

Alexander got up slowly, putting the cloth wrapping of his fists against his split lip to slow the flow of blood. His eyes met mine – glanced away – came back.

He winked.

And then his lightning-fast right jab slammed into my head, while I was still trying to understand the wink.

When I came to, Alexander was sitting by my bedside in the infirmary. He loved everything about medicine, and always told us that if he wasn’t king, he’d want to be a doctor. He meant it, too – he was always trying medicines on himself and others, and for years he kept a little journal detailing what he’d tried and with what effect, under what conditions.

He grinned at me when I was obviously aware of him.

‘Have I told you, Ptolemy, how much you are a man after my own heart?’ he asked.

I smiled. Who wouldn’t? He was the most charming man who ever lived, and that smile was all for me. ‘Why so, lord?’ I asked.

‘How long since you decided to come back to us?’ Alexander asked me. ‘Two weeks? Perhaps three?’ He nodded. ‘And you hid your intentions carefully, like a wily Odysseus with the suitors all around him.’ He leaned forward. ‘You’d already started training when we were up the mountain, and you never said a word.’

‘My lord does me too much credit,’ I said. But I was grinning, too.

‘Welcome back, son of Lagus,’ Alexander said. ‘There is nothing I love better than a man in control of himself.’

He gave me a hug, forced me to drink some foul tea that really did make me feel better – a tisane of willow bark, I think.

Calixeinna came and read to me. I’d never really met her, and she had a beautiful voice and her reading was as good as an actor’s – at least, the kind of actors who came to Pella. She read to me from a play of Aeschylus and then she read me some of Simonides’ poem on Plataea. And then she recited a long section of the Iliad – the time from when Patroclus dies and Achilles is disconsolate.

‘You are one of his friends,’ she said, interrupting herself in the midst of the hero’s rage. ‘I just heard today – how you saved him.’ She looked at me – at my hand. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You are too kind,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘No. I’m not. I’ve been used – I know what torture is.’ She squeezed my hand.

My heart fluttered.

‘I need help with him,’ she said. ‘Would you help me?’

I sat up. I really didn’t need to be in bed. And she gave off a perfume, and a feeling – some women exude sex, the way some men exude power. Perhaps it is the same. I wanted her, she knew it, it didn’t matter a damn to her, and she was prepared to use it against me.

I wasn’t a fool, you know. Just young.

She ran her hand casually up my left arm and on to the missing nipple, her nails unerringly just between pain and pleasure. ‘I could teach you things that would mean that no woman would ever care about your scars,’ she said. ‘I need to sleep with the prince. I need to see into his head. No one told me when I took this job that he was a Spartan.’

My loyalty to my prince was absolute – nor had I ever had enough trouble with women, despite my looks, to worry overmuch in that regard.

But to look at Calixeinna was to want her. ‘I’ll think on it,’ I said, and I meant it. I seized one of her hands and kissed it.

Her free hand slapped my left ear, boxed it hard enough to drive my wits from my head for a moment. She was off the bed and across the corridor.

Alexander was in the doorway.

‘He has a great deal of life left in him, I suspect,’ the prince said. He was smiling.

Calixeinna sank gracefully to one knee and rose again, her back straight. Then she moved away.

Alexander’s eyes never left her. I watched him watch her, when he thought that I was lust-raddled myself.

In the same kind of flash that had come to me over the fighting skills, I understood him in that moment. Calixeinna didn’t have a chance.

He wanted her.

But to take her at his mother’s insistence would involve a loss of a battle.

‘I would not poach your deer,’ I said.

‘You may have her,’ he said. His eyes said otherwise.

I shook my head. ‘Lord, if I were . . . in a moment of hubris, and even if she would part her legs for me – to take that woman, everyone would punish me for it.’ I shrugged. ‘Your father, your lady mother, Aristotle, the other pages – Aphrodite herself, no doubt.’

Alexander sat on my bed. ‘How’s your head?’

‘The tisane helped,’ I said, which made him happy. I took out a stylus and scratched a note on his wax tablet.

‘You want her,’ I said. Boldest thing I’d ever said to him.

He read the note. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. He sighed. ‘But I cannot. I think . . . do you understand, son of Lagus?’

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘A king must never surrender to his lusts. A man must never surrender to the views other men have of him. This would be both.’ Alexander nodded, having learned his lesson by heart.

He was very serious. Only an eighteen-year-old can be that serious. You should know.

‘Have her in secret – win her to your side and have her deny that you were ever together,’ I suggested.

‘When did you become so wily?’ he asked.

It occurred to me that in one blow I could become his confidant, undermine Hephaestion and help him with his mother and father. But that wasn’t my intention.

On the other hand, once I’d thought these things, I realised that I had become wily – at some point between the bandit’s knife and pulping Amantys. Odysseus, not Achilles, was always my favourite.

Alexander’s nails were pressed into his palms. He used pain quite a bit, to control himself – I’d seen it, and he was hardly alone in that regard.

‘Prince – you will be king. If you want the woman – let’s arrange it.’ I smiled.

He didn’t smile. ‘It is a wrong action,’ he said.

Aphrodite, the things Aristotle drilled into him. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Aristotle doesn’t want you to have any fun. And your father wants to make you behave like a beast. Surely there’s a middle road. Your own road.’

Alexander’s self-control was such that he almost never touched his face. Try it – try to go fifteen minutes without touching your face. I mention this because I remember that at that moment he put his chin in his left hand and gave me a long look. ‘How?’ he asked me.

It took me ten days. I felt a little like a pimp, to be sure.

And of the two, the less willing conspirator was the prince. He did not like to conspire. He wanted to be Achilles. I was listening when Aristotle talked, by this time, and I’d finally figured out why we all love Achilles – who is, let us admit it, venal, selfish and somewhat given to boasting and drama.

What we love is the freedom that comes with absolute mastery. Achilles can do whatever he wants – sulk for days in his tent, as we all wish to, or rage among his enemies, or mourn his dead friend, or take Briseis back from a great king. The limitations on his absolute freedom drive him almost to madness. And because the rest of us don’t live that way at all – because we submit to the will of others every day – we admire Achilles’ freedom.

Alexander wanted to be Achilles, and sneaking about in the dark was not his way.

As it turned out, my plan was over-complex and almost unnecessary.

My plan involved Cleitus the Black taking a beating from Philip the Red – they could both be trusted. That evening, Hephaestion was to take wine to Aristotle – it was his turn. Every evening, one of the oldsters took him wine and sat and practised ‘good conversation’ for a few hours.

Alexander would go to visit Cleitus – no unusual thing.

But instead of Cleitus, he’d find Calixeinna, waiting on the bed in the infirmary. Not bad, eh?

But on the day, Hephaestion had a virulent head cold and stayed in the barracks. And I was sent for by Aristotle.

Alexander was nursing his best friend – a little too much nursing, and Hephaestion drove him away with his blanket snapping at his friend’s head and threw a vial of medicine after him for good measure. Sometimes Aphrodite takes a hand.

I went to see Aristotle. I took a flask of good Chian – my father was rich, after all. This was the sweet Chian made from raisinated grapes. Sweet and strong. And instead of cutting it with water, I cut it with a mixture of wine and water I’d made in advance, and my tutor was as drunk as Dionysus by the time he’d finished his second bowl.

He had a wife – a nice enough woman – whom he largely ignored. His tastes didn’t go that way, and she managed his household and not much more. I can imagine him telling others that a wife was cheaper than a slave butler – that’s what he’s supposed to have said to Alexander. On this evening, she came in, and she was on to me in a moment – saw me pouring my watered wine mixture into the Chian.

She said nothing. Either Aphrodite was with us, or Aristotle’s wife was as happy to see him too drunk to move his legs as I was. Before he was done with me, though, he’d told me that I was the best of the pages again, and he tried to kiss me. He really was a moral man, but no man, no matter how controlled, can restrain himself with a jar of Chian under his belt. His wife took him to bed, singing a hymn to Ares of all things, and I cleaned up the wine-serving things – part of the training was learning what to mix and how to judge taste against quality of conversation.

I was never good at the subtleties, but I had just figured out how to knock a middle-aged philosopher out cold.

But I’m a worrier, and I cut across the compound, my slave laden with wine things, wondering if the prince had managed to make love to Helen of Troy, or whether some iron-clad principle had stood in the way.

I thought that I’d just have a look. I had as much right to take a peek at Cleitus as anyone.

I was sorry I looked. Not sorry, exactly. More . . . intrusive. Sensitive men do not last as household companions to princes – but at the same time, if you have no ability to read and feel other people, you’ll never be much of a battlefield commander, will you?

My prince was lying with his head on her chest in the light of the vigil lamp. He was asleep. Her eyes were open. They met mine, and the very smallest smile – the sort that Pheidias put on Aphrodite – flickered around the edge of her mouth.

I slipped away, mortified at his weakness – he looked like a boy sleeping on his mother.

What had I expected?

‘Lord, there’s a rider at the gate.’ That was my forgotten slave, Hermonius, a big barbarian from the north. He was laden with the wine service, and despite that he was alert enough.

‘Go and drop the wine things in a chest and wake . . .’ Herakles – the prince was in the wrong bed. ‘I’ll deal with it,’ I said.

I went to the gate, already wondering what could bring a messenger at this hour. Another way that the fight at the hunting camp had changed me – violence was real. Alone of the pages, or perhaps with Philip the Red, I realised that the Illyrians had intended to take or kill the prince and that meant he’d been betrayed. I’d only told two men – my father, and Aristotle. My father told Parmenio, or so he told me.

The man at the gate was Laodon.

‘My lord?’ I said, swinging the gate open. And wondering, all of a sudden, if Laodon could have been the traitor.

‘Hello, Ptolemy. I need the prince – we’re fucked, and that’s no mistake.’ He was covered in mud, wearing beautiful scale armour and a fine red cloak both fouled from the road. He slid from his horse and embraced me – that surprised me, and pretty much let him off the hook of treason in my mind. ‘Glad you are here. Get me the prince.’

‘Life or death?’ I asked.

Laodon paused just as Hermonius came out of the dark and started to untack his horse. ‘Yes,’ he said.

I grabbed his rolled cloak and led him to the infirmary. It was still dark – all I needed was some luck. ‘Swear on the furies you won’t say a word, lord,’ I said. ‘I stood my ground with you.’

Laodon shrugged. ‘He’s got that fool boy with him? Not my problem. This is the kingdom, boy – take me to the prince.’

I took his hand. ‘Swear,’ I said.

‘By the furies, damn you!’ Laodon said.

I took him into the infirmary. I got ahead of him, leaned over the bed – the oil lamp was still burning, and now they were both asleep.

I woke Alexander with a brush of fingers across his mouth – works on most folks – and he came up with a knife in his hand. But I’d been the duty page before and I knew his little ways.

‘News from Pella,’ I said. ‘Life and death. Gather your wits, lord.’

He looked past me and saw Laodon. Nodded to me. Rolled out of bed, naked but for a knife sheath on a string.

She was awake already. I lifted her, bedclothes and all, off the bed, and carried her out the back of the infirmary. I put her down on the porch – on her feet – and threw the end of the blanket over her head, and she smiled at me and ran. Problem solved.

As if we were in one of Menander’s comedies, Hephaestion came through the front door a heartbeat later. He was ready to be hysterical – he thought that he’d caught Alexander with Laodon.

I’d have laughed if it hadn’t been so sad, and if the news hadn’t been so bad.

Philip had lost a battle – and he was badly wounded. A combined force of Scythians and Thracians – not that the two are all that different – had caught him in the passes where he was carving out new territory, north and east of Illyria. He’d lost a lot of men – veterans – and part of his horse herd, and he’d taken a wound in the thigh.

Laodon shrugged when he was done with the barest relation. ‘He’s your da,’ he said. ‘So please accept my regrets. But I think he’s done – and the Thracians aren’t going to sit on the other side of the mountains and let us rebuild.’

‘My father’s going to die?’ Alexander asked. His voice had a curious timbre to it – hard to guess what he thought.

‘Almost dead,’ Laodon said.

Alexander didn’t raise his eyes from the rumpled bed – ‘Where’s Parmenio?’

‘Chasing Phokion in the south. Or being chased by him.’ Laodon shrugged.

‘Antipater?’ Alexander asked.

‘With your father, bringing the phalanx back as well as he can.’ Laodon was exhausted – I knew the signs. I poured him a cup of wine and water and he drank it off.

Alexander stood up, and he wasn’t just awake, he was quivering with energy.

‘I was afraid he would leave me no worlds to conquer,’ he said softly. ‘Ptolemy – all the pages over fifteen, with armour and remounts, in the courtyard at dawn.’

I thought that one through for fifty heartbeats. ‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Very good. See to it that the young person is suitably rewarded and silent, if you please.’ His eyes flicked back to the bed, but I knew who he meant. His voice was impersonal, military, like the better sort of Athenian orator. Like a king.

I like to think that if Alexander had lain with the courtesan and then had a good night’s sleep, it might all have been different.

By the time we cantered into Pella, our girths tight and our cloak rolls tighter, we looked like professional soldiers, the bodyguard of a king. We’d trained for it – and three days on the road moving at top speed tightened everything about us. Alexander had reached a new level of remoteness from us – he barely spoke, but when he did, his voice was light and he laughed with everyone.

He was working on a new version, a new mask. From ‘serious boy’ he was now on to ‘golden boy’.

When we reached Pella, the vanguard of the army was already coming in.

Macedon in those days was an armed camp, a state girded for war night or day, winter or summer – indeed, it was one of Demosthenes’ chief complaints about us that we made war all year long. Even the Spartans took the winter off, seemed to be the burden of his message.

But while Philip had certainly been beaten, and beaten badly – the Field of Crocuses comes to mind – Macedon was not used to defeat. Pella liked her victory celebrations, with rich, drunken pezhetaeroi swaggering through the streets and wild-eyed auxiliaries glutting themselves on wine and good bread and all the delights of civilisation.

But when we rode into Pella, War was showing his other face.

Philip’s companions brought him in. Every mouth was pinched, and every neck and shoulder bore the marks of ten days in armour and no rest. Men were missing helmets – helmets that had cost a year’s wages for a skilled man. Men were missing cloaks. Hardly a single knight had a spear, and some were missing their swords as well, and where there ought to have been four hundred noble cavalrymen, there were not many past two hundred.

The horses looked worse, first because so many knights were riding nags and scrubs and hill ponies instead of our best Persian-given bloodstock, and second because where you did see a charger, he was as knackered as his master, and many of them had more wounds than the men on their backs. So many men and horses were wounded that the whole column buzzed with carrion flies and the companions were too tired to brush them away, so that a wounded man, just keeping his saddle, might have forty or fifty flies on the open wound of his face, in the corners of his eyes.

Behind the companions came the pezhetaeroi, the ‘foot companions’. They had walked where the nobler companions had ridden, and they had lines like Keltoi work engraved on their faces, and their legs were mud to the thigh. Most of them wore quilted linen corselets, some leather, all splashed with mud and blood. Most of the infantry column had dysentery – not as uncommon as you might think, my lad – and some of them shat while they walked. Oh yes.

And behind the pezhetaeroi, the wounded. In baggage carts that had held officers’ tents and nobles’ spare horse tack – all abandoned to the foe. On blankets between two sarissas – our long spear, taller than two men. There’s a cruel Macedonian joke that every recruit wears the stretcher that will carry his corpse home – his infantryman’s cloak. There were quite a few wounded – later I learned that the pezhetaeroi had turned on the Thracians and stopped their last charge cold and then made sure of their wounded. Thracians torture any wounded they find – it is religious, for them, to test a man’s courage as he dies, but to us that is blasphemy.

I was sitting in the front rank, a few horses from the prince. Hephaestion was next to him – calm and professional. He was only a drama queen when his own interests were affected. Black Cleitus gave me a grim smile and walked his horse to my side. But I watched Alexander, and he watched Antipater.

‘Ready?’ Cleitus asked. He had the face of a loyal dog, a big hound that you send in after the bear, but he was as smart as any of us. He hid it from most men, but not from me.

I raised an eyebrow.

Alexander heard him. He couldn’t stop the smile from reaching his face.

But he was wrong. We all were.