God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

FOUR

The Maedi weren’t the wildest of the Thracians. They wore chitons, some of them, with their fox-skin hats – or badger or squirrel. The Maedi weren’t squeamish about what they killed – or wore.

But they did like Macedonian girls, and they’d come over the mountains in groups of fifty or five hundred – or five. Grab a girl – or pillage a twenty-mile swathe. They were seldom organised, and sometimes we’d find dead men where they had squabbled among themselves. Herodotus said that the Thracians would have conquered the world, if only they’d stopped fighting among themselves. Old Herodotus knew a thing or two.

Ever since the incident with the hetaera, Alexander had kept his distance from me – but promoted me, too, making me the right file leader of the pages.

By this time we had almost two hundred pages – perhaps we had more, but the pages weren’t the huge outfit they became later, under Alexander. A few of us were the scions of the great noble houses, but it’s important to note here that quite a few of my fellow pages were the sons of Philip’s ‘new men’. Philip trusted the new men – after all, they had no power and no place at court except what he gave them, and that meant that, as they would fall if he fell, they could be trusted. The rich men and great magnates of central Macedon were all potential rivals for the king, and their riches and power wouldn’t be changed if the king fell. It’s an old story – Persian kings and Athenian oligarchs often practise the same policy.

But that led to a double standard within the pages, too. We were all supposed to be equals under the prince, and we received stipends and much of our equipment was provided from the armouries so that we would all match and there would be no jealousy. But in truth, Alexander treated the noblemen’s sons very differently from the sons of new men. Alexander believed in breeding. That was the fault of all that Homer, I suspect, and Aristotle didn’t help, the aristocratic old fart.

At any rate, as we packed our war gear and looked to our weapons – for the first time, as a unit that would serve together – Alexander made his preferences plain. I got one troop, and Parmenio’s son Philotas got the other. Better young men, or those who’d already had some commands, like Philip the Red, were passed over.

I took Philip as one of my file leaders and Black Cleitus as the other. They were both older than I, and might have been jealous or sticky, but I had money and a fair amount of goodwill from the hunting camp and I used both. Philip’s father was a senior officer in the foot companions and I bought him a fancy Attic helmet from an Athenian vendor in the agora – first-rate work, it made him look like a hero. In fact, it was a better helmet than his father had.

Cleitus needed everything. One of Alexander’s failings was that the closer you were to him, the less he seemed to think about helping you – as if the very power of his proximity would cure financial woes. New friends, favourites and foreigners often got presents, while Cleitus had to look to me or Philotas (who also liked him) to get a new sword and a pair of riding spears better than the royal armouries provided.

And this was really all boyish nonsense. Our armoury provided excellent equipment. But if you know boys, you know that to carry a spear marked with the starburst of the armoury was an admission of poverty. It might be a superb spear – but boys are boys.

Worth noting, too, that boys also left the pages. It was a hard life – the younger pages did the work that slaves did – up all night in front of the prince’s door or the king’s – washing pots, feeding horses, carrying water. We were beaten when we failed – I was only beaten three times in my whole service, but it hurt my pride every time. And we never had enough sleep or enough food. Some boys couldn’t take it, and they left.

Some found other ways to leave. The handsomest of all the boys in my age group was Pausanias of Epirus, and he was as pretty as a girl. When he was sixteen, Philip took him as a lover, and when Philip marched away into the Chersonese, he took Pausanias as a royal companion – the youngest. To be fair, Pausanias was an excellent spearman – but it was his fair looks and his flute-playing ways that got him into the royal companions. He was the first to be promoted out of the pages and into Philip’s service, but hardly the last – after all, the purpose of the Basilikoi Paides was to train future soldiers and administrators.

Alexander was going to command the expedition, but Antipater was doing a great deal of the work, and I was lucky enough to be invited to attend him. I remember it as terrifying – he wasn’t the old monster he later became, but a handsome middle-aged man who’d seen a lot of war and who was Parmenio’s chief rival at court. I received orders to report to his quarters in the palace, and I went, newly shaved, scrubbed like a helmet, with more pimples than scars, as the Macedonians say, except that in my case, I actually had a few scars.

‘Well,’ Antipater said, looking down his long nose at me. His son Cassander was no friend of mine, and he had to know it. And had been passed over for command, serving as a mere file-closer. I was worried about this interview, and my hands shook.

I was in armour – I saluted.

Antipater returned the salute. ‘Well,’ he said again.

He looked at me for a long time. ‘Cage your eyes, damn you,’ he said. ‘If I want to be stared at by a child, I’ll tell you.’

I looked at the floor.

‘How much grain does a donkey eat in a day?’ he asked.

‘Eight pounds a day. More in the mountains.’ These were things I knew.

‘How much grain can you count on getting in the Thracian hills?’ he asked.

‘None, lord,’ I answered.

He scratched his beard. ‘How much for a warhorse?’

‘Twice as much, and as much again on a day he fights,’ I said.

He made a motion with his mouth – when I got to know him better, I knew it was disapproval. ‘Kill chargers with overfeeding,’ he said. ‘Don’t they teach you babies better than that?’

I looked at the floor.

‘How much grain does a man eat a day?’ he asked.

I’d run the pages’ mess for two years. I gave him amounts for boys, men, women . . .

‘You’ll do. You have a head on your shoulders and no mistake. What’s the most important thing about a campsite? Look at me, boy.’

I looked at him again. His face was grim.

‘Water,’ I said. ‘Water, high ground that drains in rain, defensibility, access to firewood, access to forage for horses, in that order.’

Antipater nodded. ‘You remember your lessons,’ he said. ‘I’m not coming on this expedition. So I’m sending Laodon with you, but you – you, young Ptolemy – are going to run the supplies. I’ll send you two of my own slaves, who’ve done this sort of thing before. They’re Greeks – they can do mathematics and they understand how to feed an army. Let me offer you this piece of advice, boy – war runs on scouting and food, not heroism and not fancy armour. Philotas is going to run the scouting and you are going to run the food.’

I nodded, but my annoyance crossed my face. Of course it did – I was seventeen.

‘You think you are a better scout and it’s the more dashing occupation?’ Antipater asked.

‘Yes,’ I answered.

‘Then you’re more of a fool than I took you for, and perhaps fit for neither. Yes, it is dashing, but a well-fed army will win a fight even when surprised, whereas brilliant scouting can’t get an unwilling army to cross a stream. Listen, boy. There’s trouble at court – you know it?’ He leaned towards me, and I leaned back. Antipater was scary.

And I never, never talked about court matters with adults – not even my father. I looked at him with my carefully calculated look of bovine placidity. ‘Huh?’ I said.

‘My son says you are dull.’

I shrugged. Looked at the ground.

‘Very well,’ he dismissed me.

I was still shaking when Philotas and Cleitus found me. They put a cup of wine into me, and thus emboldened, I collected my two new slaves – Antipater actually gave them to me. Myndas was the older and handsomer, and Nichomachus was younger and thin, too tall, with a dreadful wispy beard and pimples worse than mine.

‘Zeus, they look like shit,’ Philotas said. ‘Hey – who are you two and why is Antipater giving you away?’

They both looked at the ground, shrugged and shuffled, like slaves. Nonetheless, it was obvious to me that Myndas had been a free man once. And that Nichomachus never had.

‘I gather both of you can do mathematics?’ I said.

More shuffling.

But Myndas produced an abacus, and proceeded to rattle off some remarkable maths problems, muttering under his breath. Philotas, who liked cruel games, shot problems at him faster and faster – absurd problems, obscene problems.

‘If every soldier fucks his shield-bearer twice a day,’ Philotas said in his nasty, sing-song voice, ‘and if he needs a spoonful of olive oil to get it done each time, and if there’s two thousand footsloggers in the army, how much olive oil does the army need every day?’

Myndas didn’t raise his eyes. ‘How big a spoon, master?’ he asked.

‘Whatever you use yourself,’ Philotas answered, and Cleitus guffawed.

Adolescent humour. With boys, it is the humour of the stronger vented on the weaker, and nothing is weaker than a slave.

But they were my slaves, and I’d never owned a man besides my shield-bearer, so I shook my head.

‘Very funny. Myndas, don’t mind him – he can’t help himself. Some day he’ll get laid and stop talking about it.’ I grinned at Philotas to take out the sting, and got punched – hard – in the shoulder.

But he laid off Myndas. It’s important that your slaves see you as someone who can protect them, and since I was to command a troop, I needed Philotas to see that I had limits and would protect my own.

All fun and games, in the pages.

I needed horses, and so did Cleitus. My pater’s factor was in town with orders to give me anything I wanted – my pater was a distant man, but he did his best to equip me. So I spent his money on two more chargers to support Poseidon, and I gave my two old chargers to Cleitus. I put my two slaves on mules. I went out to Polystratus’s farm and offered him silver to march with me. He was a Thracian himself.

He looked at his wife, his new daughter and his farm – a few acres of weeds and some oats. A hard existence.

‘Double that,’ he said. ‘I need some money.’

‘That’s the pay of a royal companion!’ I said.

Polystratus shrugged. ‘I don’t have to go,’ he said. ‘My wife needs me, and my daughter. I could be starting on a son.’ He looked at her and she smiled, blushed, looked at the ground.

Of course I paid him. I gave him a mina of silver down, and then followed him around while he packed his kit, gave his wife a third of the money and then marched up the hill to the headman. I stood as witness while he used his advance of pay to triple his landownership and to pay the headman’s own sons to till the new land for him while he was absent.

Polystratus was not a typical Thracian.

We rode back together, and I bought him a pair of horses. It was all Pater’s money – what did I care? I got him a good leather spola and a nice helmet with heavy cheekpieces. He had his own spears and sword, and he spent his own money on a donkey. And by evening, he had a pais – a slave boy to carry his gear and do his work.

I had to laugh. But I did so where Polystratus couldn’t see me.

That evening, I found that Myndas was sitting in the courtyard of the barracks, and Nichomachus was writing his sums on wax and saying them back. Since I was the mess-master of the pages, I knew the numbers they were doing like I knew my name, so I stopped and stood with them. They didn’t make mistakes, but in a few moments I surprised them by knowing how to multiply one hundred and ninety-eight pages by six mythemnoi of grain.

This was the first of many generational differences between Philip’s men and Alexander’s men. They hadn’t had Aristotle. They’d learned enough maths to buy a slave to do the work, but I could work Pythagoras’s solutions to geometry in my head. And so could Cassander and so could Philotas and so could Cleitus, on and on.

Myndas kept his eyes down. ‘You . . . can you use this, lord?’ he asked, rattling his abacus.

‘Yes, if I had a mind to,’ I admitted. ‘But I can do most of the numbers in my head – especially any maths to do with the pages and feeding them.’ I slapped him on the back. ‘Has the prince set the army yet? I’ve been gone all day.’

The two slaves shook their heads.

‘You two been fed?’ I asked.

Both shook their heads.

I waggled a finger at Polystratus. ‘Myndas, this is Polystratus. He was once a slave and now he’s free – serving me. He is the head of my household, which you are now in. Polystratus, these two are scribes, so don’t break them cutting firewood. They haven’t eaten since before noon. See to them, will you?’

Polystratus nodded. ‘Scribes?’ he asked. Shrugged. ‘Buy ’em food, or get the cook to shell out?’ he asked me.

‘Buy it in the market today, and get them on the barracks list tomorrow,’ I said. This was the sort of detail you had to remember with an army or with your own slaves – I’d walked off to find Polystratus and left them with no way to get food. So much to learn. Zeus, I was young!

Three days of these preparations, and I spent the last two looking at carts and donkeys and mules, watching wicker baskets filled with grain, shouting myself hoarse at merchants, bellowing with rage when I found I’d been swindled on some donkeys . . .

The fourth morning, the sun still hidden in the east. Two hundred pages, a thousand foot soldiers, a hundred of Parmenio’s Thessalian cavalry leading the way and fifty tame Thracians in our rearguard – and we were off. My baggage carts and donkeys occupied about two-thirds of the column and moved slower than beeswax in winter, and everyone found occasion to mention as much to me as we crawled out of the capital and up into the hills.

The second day out of Pella, Alexander suddenly took all the older companions – except me – and headed off north and west. Cleitus cantered up to me where I was helping get a cart repaired – a broken wheel, the hub was rotten, and I’d bought the damned thing . . .

‘The prince says it will be winter before your carts get to the Thracians!’ he said.

What could I say? I’d been swindled in every direction. I had the worst donkeys in the market and I had apparently bought every old cart in Pella.

But Alexander rode off with Laodon and all the older pages to win glory, and left me with a thousand foot soldiers and the carts. In command.

I chose a campsite on the river – with water, firewood, forage and an easy defence. And when daybreak came, it was pouring with rain and I stayed in camp. I surveyed every cart, declared half a dozen unfit and sent Polystratus to get more from the local farms. Our estates were within half a day’s ride.

Then I took Myndas aside. ‘You let me buy those carts,’ I said.

He stared at the ground.

So I punched him in the head. ‘How much did they pay you, you fuck?’ I said.

He curled into a ball and waited to be hit again. But it was obvious to me that the military contractors had paid off my slave to give me crap.

I found a dozen footsloggers who knew which end of a spokeshave was which, and put them to fixing carts. I had the rest – a thousand of them – cut wood for fires. The rain was as heavy and cold as Tartarus, and we needed those fires. Then I had them cut spruce boughs for bedding. The officers backed me. I had the feeling I was in command exactly as long as I continued to give orders that they liked, but I didn’t get hubris from a few successes because I was still so angry about the carts.

Just at nightfall, Polystratus came in with eight light carts drawn by mules. He had another twenty mules – all the stock from one of my pater’s breeding operations. So the next morning, still wet, by the light of roaring fires, I put donkeys in the shafts of every cart. I gave the useless donkeys to the farmer whose fields we’d wrecked by camping there and we were away, moving almost twice as fast as we’d moved the day before.

One of the officers who was supposed to be ‘under’ me was Gordias, a mercenary from Ephesus. I’d never met him until we marched – now he rode with me. We were crossing flat ground, just short of the foothills of Paeonia, and he rode along, making jokes and observations, and I felt pretty competent.

‘You read Xenophon, lord?’ he asked me, out of nowhere.

‘The March to the Sea? Of course. And On Hunting, and The Cavalry Commander.’ I ran through all the titles I’d read.

‘Ever formed a box with infantry?’ he asked.

I had to laugh. ‘Gordias, when I ordered your phalangites to cut firewood yesterday, it was the first order I’ve ever given to grown men.’

He nodded. ‘You’re doing all right. Do more. Let’s drill a little – can’t hurt, and in bad weather, it’s best to keep the lads too busy and tired to think. Let’s form the box around your baggage and see how we do.’

So we did. And we didn’t do very well.

Not my fault. Nothing to do with me. But I felt their failure in my bones. They were not a regular taxeis, but a bundle of recruits with some veteran mercenaries with recent land-grants mixed in. The veterans hadn’t taken charge yet, but were still living their own way and ignoring the useless yokels they had as file partners, and the useless yokels were still too scared of the fire-eaters to ask them for help.

They’d never formed a hollow square as a group – the recruits had done it some time or other, and the veterans a hundred times, but never together. The first time, the left files folded in too fast and the front files formed the front face and walked off, leaving the rest of the box to form without them.

Halt, reform.

The second time, the rear face of the hollow square was left behind by the rest of us. And the baggage contrived to plug the road, so that reforming took an hour.

Halt, reform, lunch. Rain.

After lunch, we got the hollow square formed – pretty much by having every officer mount up, ride around and push groups of men, and sometimes individuals, into the spot where they had to go. For almost an hour, we marched across northern Macedon in a hollow square, with our baggage protected, and then the whole thing started to shred like a reed roof in a high wind – the left face of the square ran into a marsh and the right face just kept going.

I couldn’t believe how fast we fell apart.

And then I realised that the sun was dipping and I hadn’t chosen a camp.

Zeus! So much to remember. Luckily, Polystratus had taken a dozen Thracians and gone off on his own and found a campsite.

We got our tents up before last light, and fires lit, with four hundred men up on the hillsides gathering wood and another two hundred standing to, ready to cover them. The men were wet and tired and angry, and I heard a lot about myself I didn’t want to hear. Two days of cold rain would make the Myrmidons mutinous.

But when the fires were lit and roaring, when I had wine served out from the carts, when the woodpiles were as tall as houses – well, my popularity increased. The wine wasn’t very good, but in a cold rain on a windswept night, it was delicious. I’d been suckered on the wine, too.

Our tents weren’t much – just a wedge of linen, no front or back. They kept the water off your face, and we put four men in each – and no tents for slaves or shield-bearers. They were just wet. The footsloggers weren’t much better, and the younger pages – I’d been left with all the babies – were soaked to the skin and didn’t have the experience to stay warm or dry.

I was up all night.

The next day was the third day of hard rain, and we marched anyway – lighter and faster yet. More wheels had been built during the night – Gordias kept his wheelwrights at it, I guess. Anyway, now we had spare wheels in one cart, and the wheelwrights, instead of marching with their units, stayed with the carts, so that as soon as a tyre came loose or an axle cracked, we pulled that cart out of the line, surrounded it with Thracian auxiliaries and repaired it from spares while the rest of the column marched on.

We made excellent time that day – gravel roads, better carts, and we were already better at marching. Polystratus found a camp, and we were almost in the highlands. The rain let up for a few hours, and the tents went up on dryish ground – I put half the army out to cut pine boughs and gather last year’s ferns and any other bedding they could find, and I strung the pages across the hillsides as guards.

I had halted well before dark, having learned my lesson the night before. Besides, I was tired myself.

Gordias was so useful I began to suspect that my pater had sent him to watch me. Polystratus, too – he reminded me of things every minute, like a wife. But I was getting it done – I could see beef being butchered in the army’s central area, and the cooks collecting the beef in their kettles, and already I could see local farmers coming into the camp with produce to sell, which we’d missed the night before by making camp too late. It was all running well, and as I watched, the first fire leaped into being in the cooking area of camp, and there were lines of men carrying wood and bedding down the hillsides . . .

Down the valley ahead of us, more fires leaped into being, and they weren’t ours.

I had to assume that was Alexander and the pages and Thessalians. But at the same time, I’d be a fool not to act as if those fires were enemies’.

The headman of the Thracians was called Alcus. That means something like ‘Butthead’ in Thracian. But Alcus and Polystratus got along well enough. I sent Polystratus for him, and after a delay that seemed eternal, he rode up and I showed him the fires to the north and west.

He nodded, tugged his beard, looked at Polystratus.

‘You want us to go and look,’ he said finally.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think you are the best suited for it, you know this country. Besides . . .’

Gordias put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t explain,’ he whispered. ‘Just tell them what to do.’

Sigh. So much to learn!

‘Go any way you think best, but tell me who set those fires,’ I ordered.

Alcus pursed his lips, blew out a little puff and pulled his elaborately patterned cloak tighter around his shoulders. ‘Boys won’t be happy,’ he said.

I was freezing cold, I hadn’t slept in two days and I was scared spitless that I’d run into a Thracian army.

‘Fuck that,’ I snapped. ‘Get your arse down the valley and get me a report.’

The Thracian officer looked at me for a few heartbeats, spat carefully – not a gesture of contempt, more like contemplation – and said, ‘Yes, lord,’ in a way that might have been taken for an insult.

When he was gone, Gordias laughed. ‘Not bad, lord,’ he said. ‘A little temper goes a long way, as long as you control it and it doesn’t control you.’

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that Pater had hired this man as a military tutor. I never again ran across a mercenary so interested in teaching a kid.

An hour passed in a few heartbeats. In that time, I had to decide whether or not to keep the firewood and bedding collection going, or to call all the work parties in. If it turned out to be the prince up the valley, I’d look like a fool, and as the rain had started again, my men would have a miserable night. On the other hand, if five thousand Thracians were sneaking along the hillsides towards me, I’d lose my whole command when they swept us away in one attack – I had fewer than fifty men on guard in camp, and nothing else except the pages, and most of them were unblooded teenagers.

Command is glorious. I thought some hard thoughts about my prince, I can tell you.

I decided to keep my work parties at it. I sent Gordias to keep them going as fast as he could. In fact, he withdrew a third of the men and put them under arms.

I took the pages, spread them across the hillsides in a skirmish line facing north, and started probing.

It was a standard hunting formation, and I told every boy that I didn’t want them to fight, just to report if they saw Thracians, and then we were moving. It was last light, the sun was far off in the heavy clouds, and if we’d been in the bottom of the valley it would already have been night. It was horrible weather, too – sheets of rain. Our cloaks were soaked and sat on our shoulders like blankets of ice.

But the pages were trained hard, and now it paid off. We crossed a ravine in pretty good order – I remember being proud of them – and then the lightning started, and by the light of it – the Thunderer was throwing his bolts about pretty freely – we moved across the swollen watercourse at the bottom of the ravine and up the other side.

I found a trail running right along the top of the ridge. Not unexpected – if you spend enough time in the wild you get a sense for where animals and men like to walk. Trails are hard to find in the rain, but this one had some old stones along the north side, as if there had once been a wall.

Half a dozen pages huddled in behind me. The trail was so much easier than the hillside – it was natural enough.

There was a long peal of thunder, a brilliant double strike of Zeus’s heavy spear, and I was in the midst of fifty Thracians. They were all in a muddle, gathered around something on the trail.

A bearded man in a zigzag-decorated cloak had his helmet off. He looked at me in another lightning flash.

Athena inspired me.

I know a few words of Thracian.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ I bellowed over the rain. It’s something you say to slaves quite a bit.

That puzzled them.

‘What the fuck are you doing here!’ I bellowed again. And then I turned my horse and rode away, waiting for the feel of a javelin between my shoulder blades. I got my horse around, got back to the lip of the ravine, and my half-dozen pages were right on my heels – I prayed to Hermes that the Thracians hadn’t seen what a beardless lot they were. We slid down the ravine and our horses got us up the other side – it was full dark now, and in dark and rain your horse is pretty much your only hope to get anywhere.

Below me on the hillside, I heard the unmistakable sound of iron ringing on iron.

The closest page was Cleomenes, no longer quite a child. I grabbed him by the hair, got his ear close to my head – the thunder was deafening, or so I remember it – and ordered him to get back to camp and tell Gordias to stand to.

‘You know where camp is?’ I yelled.

He pointed the right way.

I let him go.

I rode off down the hillside, trusting to Poseidon to get me to the fighting. He picked his way, and I had to take deep breaths and wait. Patience has never been my strongest virtue. It seemed to take an hour to go half a stade, despite the fact that we were going down the hillside and that it was almost clear.

After some minutes, I was suddenly flat on my back – cold water running down my breastplate and under my back. I had thought I was wet – now I was in a stream or a rivulet and I was colder and wetter and everything hurt.

We’d gone over a log and Poseidon had missed the fact that there was a ravine on the other side of the log. By the will of Ares, he didn’t break a leg, but it took me another cold, wet, dark eternity to find him and get him on his feet – eyes rolling in the lightning flashes, utterly panicked.

Down again, now with me walking in front of him, holding the reins. There hadn’t been fighting in . . . well, I’d lost track of time, and was worried I’d been unconscious when I was thrown.

So much to worry about!

Down and down. And then . . .

The first Thracian I found was a horn-blower – he had the horn at his lips, the lightning flashed and I put my spear through him. The next flash showed scarlet leaking past his lips – he coughed. And died.

I crouched. I couldn’t hear a thing, and I couldn’t see anything, either. But that man I’d killed – I was queasy with it, but too busy to throw up – he’d been ready to blow a horn call. An attack?

They must be close around me.

So I froze, moved carefully to a big tree, stood with my hand over Poseidon’s mouth.

A long time passed. As the lightning played around us, I began to see them. I counted five men around me. But there had to be more – there may have been a thousand in the lightning-lit forest, with huge old trees that could hide an elephant.

Time in a crisis passes in its own way. You think of the most incongruous things. I remember thinking of kissing my farm girl at the Gardens of Midas. Her lips had a certain firmness that defined good kissing to me then – and now, for that matter. And I remember thinking that Philotas owed me a fair amount of money from knucklebones and would be delighted if I died here.

I also thought how many things I’d done wrong, including . . . well, everything. I was alone on the hillside with a bunch of Thracians and not in my camp with my army, for example.

I can’t even guess how long we were all there, and then the lightning storm began to pass over the ridge and the sound and intensity seemed to go with it. I think – it seems to me, without hubris – that we were in the very presence of the gods, because the air around me seemed charged with portent, and the noise and light were mind-numbing. When they went away, it was merely dark and cold – and I hadn’t really been cold for all the time the lightning played.

And suddenly it was dark.

I curled up against Poseidon. He was warm. Actually, he was cold, but he kept me warm.

I remained as still as I could.

Time passed.

Then I heard them. Two men were talking. They were very close indeed – maybe two or three big trees away, except that in the darkness, such things can be deceptive.

I could hear them talking, but I couldn’t understand even a single word.

Mutter mutter mutter.

Mutter.

Mutter mutter.

Growl. Mutter.

And then that stopped, too.

My hand was clamped so hard over Poseidon’s head that my wrist hurt.

I was ashamed of myself, afraid and I needed to piss.

Time marched on, one heavy heartbeat at a time.

I convinced myself that I had to move.

Of all the concerns on my shoulders, it was having to piss that made me move. Let that be a lesson to you. I looked and looked at where I’d heard the voices, and then I had the discipline to turn a circle.

And then the rain came. I’d thought it was raining before, but this was like a wall of water.

A wall of noise, too.

I took Poseidon by the halter and I moved. We stepped on branches and we slipped in mud, but I kept going. And by luck, or the will of the gods, in a few moments I caught a glimpse of my own fires – two stades away across open ground. I was right at the edge of the trees on the hillside.

I mounted before I thought it out, and Poseidon was away – stumbling, because although I didn’t know it until morning, he had a strain from the cold and rain and the fall. He wasn’t fast. And no sooner were we moving than a javelin struck me square in the back.

That’s why rich kids like me wore bronze. But it scared me and knocked the wind out of me. And when I reined in for the sentry line, I was shaking like a leaf.

One of the footsloggers materialised under Poseidon’s chest, his spear at my throat. But before he could challenge me, he knew me.

‘Lord!’ he said. ‘We thought you were lost!’

I rode into camp. Half the men were standing to in wet clumps with their sarissas in their hands. The rest were huddled around fires – enormous fires. The tents had mostly blown down.

War is so glorious.

My tent was one of those down. Polystratus took Poseidon, made sounds indicating that I was a fool and he was a mother hen, and he took me to his tent, which had a front and back wall of woven branches and a stool. He got my cuirass off, towelled me dry and told me that there were Thracians down the valley.

Nichomachus handed me a cup of wine. I drank it.

‘I know!’ I said, trying not to sound whiney. Gordias pushed into the tent.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Get lost?’

I drank more wine. ‘I got caught on the hillside with the Thracians,’ I said. ‘Did Cleomenes get to you?’

Gordias shook his head. ‘Which one is he? One of the pages? No – I had no word. And not all the troopers here are mine – I had some trouble giving orders.’

That’s the moment I remember best of the whole evening. I’d sort of collapsed on arriving in camp – acted like a cold, wet kid rescued by his servant. Polystratus was towelling my hair when I discovered that my message hadn’t got to camp.

‘Gordias, there’s Thracians within a stade of camp. An ambush on the road north, more coming across the ridge. Where are the pages?’

Gordias shook his head. ‘There’s twenty of the youngest here in camp. I thought the rest were with you?’

‘Ares’ prick,’ I swore. It was my father’s favourite oath. ‘Put my cuirass back on. Polystratus, get us both horses.’

Polystratus didn’t squawk. I put my sodden wool chiton back on – noticing that the dye had run and stained my hips. Gordias got my cuirass closed on me again – say what you will, the bronze is a good windbreak. Mounted on Medea, with Polystratus by me, I went back out into the remnants of the storm. Dawn wasn’t far away, and there was a bit of light, and if you’ve done this sort of thing, you know that the difference between a bit of light and no light is all the difference in the world. I got us up the ridge, found my game trail and there were a dozen of my pages, shivering like young beeches in a high wind – but all clutching a spear close to them, behind trees.

‘Good lads,’ I said – an old man of seventeen to young men of fourteen. ‘Back to camp now.’

‘They are right there,’ Philip Long-nose said. ‘Right across the ravine!’ He pointed, and an arrow flew.

‘Been there all night,’ said another boy.

Polystratus whistled.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Get back now – hot wine in camp.’

The pages started to slip backwards. This was the sort of thing we practised in hunting – observe the quarry and then slip away.

But one of the youngsters made a mistake, or maybe the Thracians were coming anyway. And suddenly they were scrambling across the ravine – fifty or a hundred, how could we know?

I had no idea how many pages I had under my hand.

‘Run!’ I ordered. ‘Camp!’

They ran.

Like a fool, I waited, shepherding them down the trail, and Medea got a spear in the side as a result. She tossed me and ran a few steps and died.

I’d been thrown twice in a night and I wasn’t too happy. But I rolled to my feet in time to have Polystratus grab my arms, and we were off down the trail with a tumble of arrows and javelins behind us.

They chased us right up to camp. We had no walls or ditches, and there was a dark tide of Thracians flowing across the barley fields. Their lead elements were a spear-cast behind Polystratus’s horse’s rump.

And as soon as the Thracians in the valley saw the Thracians on the ridge moving, they came, too.

First light – a general rush.

The pages routed, running past the raw infantry.

It should have been a bloody shambles, but for men like Gordias. The infantry let the pages through and then started to form the hollow square. It was patchy, but the Thracians were in dribs and drabs, not a solid rush – I know that now. At the time it looked like a wall of them, but in fact, there were never more than fifteen men coming at us at a time.

Polystratus got through the phalanx and dropped me in the army’s central square. Myndas, of all people – my least favourite slave – appeared with my third-string charger and a cup of wine and a towel. I dried my face, drank the wine and used his back to get mounted – I had hurt my hips falling.

The pages had no trumpeter and no hyperetes – both were with Alexander. Since the infantry seemed well in hand, I rode around gathering pages – three or four at a time – and leading them into the centre of the square. They were exhausted and most were terrified. But they were royal pages, and that meant they knew their duty. I got about a hundred of them together, formed them in a deep rhomboid and led them to the unthreatened corner of the square. Halted while the file leaders opened the corner for us.

‘We’re about to ride down the barbarians who kept us up all night!’ I called. ‘Stay together and stay on me, or I’ll beat you bloody!’

My first battlefield speech.

Met by silence.

We walked our horses out of the square and wheeled north. Gordias was on to me in a heartbeat – he began to wheel the ‘back’ faces of the square – the faces with no opponents – out on to the plain, unfolding the square like a ‘W’.

The Thracians hadn’t come for a field fight, and as soon as they saw us approaching them it was over, and they started to fade into the trees – first a few, and then the whole of their front.

Over on the west side of the valley was a squadron of horse – or, rather, some tribal lords on ponies. I aimed at them. They’d have a hard time riding into the trees, and I was going to get a fight. I was mad.

The Thracians didn’t want that kind of fight, and they turned their horses and rode for it, a few of them shooting over their horses’ rumps with bows, and one of my boys took an arrow and died right there – young Eumedes, a pretty good kid.

We were half a stade away. Too damned far. They turned like a flock of birds and ran.

I put my heels into my charger’s side. I had a fresh horse, a bigger, faster horse, and I was mad. I hadn’t even named my new chargers – that’s how much of my time oats and cartwheels took.

The Thracians were mostly gone into the trees. Nearer to hand, the chief and his retinue were beginning to scatter along the valley.

I got up on my charger’s neck and let him run. I ignored the followers and stayed on the chief. He turned, made a rude gesture at me and turned his horse into the sopping woods.

I didn’t give a shit, and followed him, closing the distance between us at every stride. I’d picked a good remount – this horse could move and had some brains, as well, and we were hurtling though the trees, never more than a heartbeat from being thrown or scraped off on a tree – just try galloping through open woods.

But my mount was eating the distance. The chief looked back at me – he was a bigger man, much older. He looked back, measured the distance, looked back again, and we both knew it was too late for him to turn his horse and fight. So he drew his sword and prepared to fight as I came up on him – jigging like a hare, trying to get me off his bridle-hand side.

I wasn’t having it. And my mount was smart – as I said. He turned on his front feet, right across the pony’s rump, and in a flash we were up with them and I got an arm round his neck and ripped him off the horse – just as the instructor taught. I never even let go of my spear.

He went down hard, rolled. Before he was on his feet, my spear was at his throat. His leg was broken, anyway.

He wasn’t the warlord. But he was the warlord’s sister’s son. And I got him back to camp, having collected my pages from their pursuit. We had a dozen prisoners, and Eumedes was our only loss.

I didn’t try and move. Our infantry had seen the Thracians off, and they were a lot better for it. I got a cheer as I rode in with the Thracian, covered in gold – he had a lot of gold on. I ordered all the prisoners stripped of their jewellery and all of it – and everything off the men killed by the infantry – put in a pile in the middle of camp. I had my herald announce that all the loot would be divided among the whole army, share and share alike.

And the sun rose. The low clouds burned off, and it was early summer at the edge of the hills instead of late autumn, and the men were warm. No one grumbled when I sent forage parties into the hills for more fuel.

Gordias slapped my back. ‘Well done,’ he said.

‘You mean I fucked almost everything away, but it came out well enough?’ I asked. I was feeling pretty cocky. But I knew I’d done almost everything wrong.

Gordias nodded. ‘That’s just what I mean, son.’ He shaded his eyes, watching the distant Thracians. ‘We have a word for it. We call it war.’

That night, I decided to press my luck. Gordian and Perdias, my other mercenary officer, were completely against it.

Even Polystratus was hesitant.

I decided to attack the Thracians in the dark. There was some moon. And we’d had forage parties out all day – there’d been steady low-level fighting, our woodcutters against theirs, all day. We’d had the best of it – mostly because our farm boys had chased their farm boys off in the early morning, and that sort of thing makes all the difference. And while they had a few tattooed killers, it seemed to me an awful lot of my opponents were as raw as my own troops.

No, I’m lying. That’s what Perdias said, and later in the day Gordias agreed. I didn’t have a clue – but once they’d said it, I took it as true.

At last light I put a minimum of men on watch and sent the rest to bed. Myndas had my tent back up and all my kit dry – there’s a hard campaign all in itself – and he’d built a big fire, built a drying frame – quite a job of work for a Greek mathematician. But he was still trying to overcome my anger, and he had a long way to go.

We stood at the fire – the two infantry officers and the commander of the Thessalians, a wild bastard named Drako, who wore his hair long like a Thracian, with twisted gold wire in it, and the Thracian auxiliary commander, Alcus. He and Drako were like opposites – Drako was slim, long and pretended to a false effeminacy, as some very tough men do; Alcus was short, squat, covered in thick ropes of muscle and heavy blue tattoos.

‘We’re going at them, across the ridge-top trail at moonrise,’ I said.

Gordias shook his head. ‘Son, you did well enough today—’

‘I’m not your son. We have them on the ropes—’

Alcus spat. ‘Thracians attack at night, not Greeks.’

I wasn’t sure which side he was supporting, but I chose to interpret it my way. ‘Exactly. They won’t even have sentries.’

Gordias sighed. ‘Listen – my lord. We’ve done well. But we don’t know where the prince is. This is his expedition. If we fail, we’ll be crushed. And – listen to me, my lord – if we succeed, Alexander may not be too thrilled. You know what I’m speaking of.’

I considered that for a few heartbeats. ‘Point made. We attack at moonrise.’

I heard an enormous amount of bitching when we woke the troops – the camp was too small for me to be isolated from their discontent. The only trooper more unwilling than a beaten man is a victorious man – he’s proved his mettle and got some loot, and he’d like to go home and get laid.

They went on and on – they were still bitching about my sexual habits, my incompetence and my errors of judgement when I roared for silence and marched the lead of the column off into the trees.

My plan was fairly simple. I sent the Thracians and the Thessalians down the valley – they were to start an hour after us, and make noise and trouble only after we struck. All the infantry were with me. The pages were staying in camp as a rallying point, and because they were so tired that most of them didn’t even wake up for the rallying call. Thirteen-year-olds – when they collapse, they’re like puppies, and it takes a day or two to get their strength back.

We crossed the ridge more slowly than I could believe – we seemed to be held up by every downed tree, and we lost the trail over and over, despite the moonlight. Finally I pushed up to the front of the column and led it myself – and immediately lost the trail. People say ‘as slow as honey in winter’, but really they should say ‘as slow as an army moving at night’.

After a couple of hours, the moon began to go down, the light changed and I discovered that I had perhaps two hundred men with me and the rest were gone – far behind, on another trail, or hopelessly lost.

But we were there. I could see the Thracian fires.

And I didn’t really understand how few of my men were with me because, of course, it was night. Really, until you’ve tried to fight at night, it seems quite reasonable.

I had Polystratus right at my heels – Gordias at my right shoulder.

I remembered my Iliad, so I whispered that every man was to pin back the right shoulder of his chiton. I waited for what seemed like half the night for this order to be passed and obeyed, and then we were moving forward again, bare arms gleaming faintly in the last moonlight.

We found that the Thracians weren’t fools – they had camped in a web of dykes, where in better times hundreds of cattle and sheep could be penned. Some of the ground between the dykes was flooded.

Really, I had a dozen opportunities to realise that I was being an idiot and call the whole thing off.

I led them along the face of the first dyke wall – over the berm, and down into the evil surprise of smelly waste water on the far side. Disgusting. And up, now smelling like a latrine – over the next dyke, and again I saw their fires. I was off by a stade, already turned around in the berms.

But now the system of dykes worked in my favour – we were inside the outer walls, and we moved west along the north side of a long earth wall, and there was no way a sentry could see us, unless he was right atop us.

I was right at the front, moving as fast as I could.

So, of course, I began to outpace all my troops, until Polystratus and Gordias and I were alone.

We stopped at the end of a long wall – almost a stade long. We didn’t need scouts to know that we were there – we could hear drunken Thracians calling one to another.

I poked my head over the berm.

There was the sentry, an arm’s length away. He roared, I stabbed at him, missed, his counter-thrust tangled in my cloak and I got my left arm around his spear, shoved it into his armpit, lifted it and slammed my fist into his face six or seven times, and he was down. Gordias killed him.

But every Thracian awake in that corner saw me, and there was a growl from the camp.

Gordias roared for the men to cross the dyke and charge.

I watched my beautiful plan fall to rubble. But since there wasn’t any alternative, I drew my sword and ran headlong into the Thracians at the foot of the dyke.

It was dark. I think I wounded or killed two or even three men before they began to realise what was happening.

There were Macedonians coming over the dykes. Just not all that many.

I still don’t know how many were still with me at that point. A hundred? Two hundred?

They made quite a bit of noise, though.

Gordias crashed into the knot of men where I was fighting, and Polystratus – who had had the sense to bring a shield – stood at my shoulder, and most of the men we were facing were awake enough, but they had eating knives and dirks – all their gear was somewhere else. (Try to find your gear in the dark when you are drunk.)

And of course they were drunk. They were Thracians.

This is a story about Alexander, not about me – but I love to tell this story, and it touches on Alexander in the end. That fight in the dark was perfectly balanced – a hundred fully armed Macedonian infantrymen against two thousand sleepy, drunk, unarmed Thracians.

Just when they should have swamped us, Drako swept over the wall behind us with fifty horsemen, looking like fiends from the Thracian hell, and they broke and ran off. Alcus bit into another group and then both my cavalry leaders – neither one of whom made any attempt to find or communicate with me – swept off into the dark. They got the pony herd and some stolen beef and headed back to camp.

By now, the sun was coming up, somewhere far to the east, and there was a line of grey on the far ridge and eye-baffling half-light. And more and more of my missing infantrymen were coming in – most of them from the wrong direction. By sunrise I had half a thousand men and full possession of their camp.

They formed in the middle of the valley – a dejected band of beaten men, most of them without spears. They knew they had to take the camp back, and their leaders were haranguing them.

My cavalry had begun to harass them with javelins.

I lined the dyke closest to them – every minute brought me more light and two or three more men, as they scrambled up the earth walls behind me. Most of my lost infantrymen had gone too far north in the dark.

The Thracians were game. They put their best-armed men in front, formed as tight as they could and swept forward to the base of the dyke, where they stood, roaring, getting their courage up. They still outnumbered my men four to one, and we didn’t have our sarissas – they were in camp. We had javelins – a good weapon, but not as useful in stopping an angry Thracian as a pike as long as three men are tall.

I walked up and down in front of my men – manic with energy, elated by my success, terrified of the next few minutes. I was at the right end of my line when a helmetless man leaped off his horse and ran lightly up the berm.

‘Well done,’ he said, and threw his arms around me. ‘Hold their charge and we have them.’

He gleamed like a god come to earth. It was, of course, Alexander.

‘We will, my prince!’ I said – torn between relief and annoyance. But relief won. It’s like being angry at your lover – and then seeing her after an absence. Suddenly, at the sight of her, you care nothing for her infidelities – you’re too young to know whereof I speak.

The Thracians came up to the base of the berm.

We stood at the top.

A chief roared something – I think he called, ‘Who are we!’

And they roared.

Three times, and then they came in silence, rushing up the dyke faster than I could imagine.

Gordias, on the other hand, kept his head.

‘Ready?’ he called. ‘Throw!’ he roared, and five hundred javelins swept like birds of prey on the huddled mass of unshielded, unarmed men.

And that’s as far as they got. So many men fell in the shower of spears that they turned to run, and Alexander was on them with the older pages and the professional cavalry – Alcus was there, and Drako, and all the younger pages from camp.

We were all around them, then, and with numbers, too. And weapons and armour.

Maybe a hundred of them lived. I doubt it, though. We offered no quarter, and Alexander meant to make an example in his first battle. The cavalry went in again and again, and they had nowhere to run – even our shield-bearers and camp slaves were out, with slings and rocks, lining the forest edge, so that if an armed man burst free of the melee, they shot him down.

Hephaestion said that Alexander killed the chieftain, and that’s possible, but when he went down, the rest as good as fell on their swords. All the fight went out of them, and we took fifty prisoners.

And then there was nothing but the vultures and the corpses and the stink of men’s excrement, and we went back to camp. We didn’t form and march back – nothing so organised. That level of efficiency came later. Instead, men simply couldn’t stand looking at the dead any longer – or men snatched up a gold ring or a torc and left, or wandered blank-eyed for a while and found themselves by a fire.

Gordias got some slaves organised and started collecting the rest of the loot. I found Philip the Red and got him to help me organise collection of the wounded – we had a few. We killed their wounded. I found that I was turning my head away.

It was horrible. But you know about that – I can see it in your eyes. And the animals – the dogs, the carrion birds.

Luckily it was daylight.

By noon, we had most of the army in camp. It was a young army, and most of the men simply sat, slack-jawed. Older men guzzled wine.

Alexander paced, like a caged lion.

‘We need to be at them,’ he said.

Laodon put an arm around his shoulders. ‘Sire, there is no “them” to be at. You have destroyed them.’

Alexander shrugged off his arm. ‘Do not be familiar, sir. And their villages are open – right now. Not for long – other tribes will protect them.’

Laodon shook his head. ‘Your army is exhausted.’

Gordias backed him up. ‘My men have been up all night, and fought two days in a row.’

Alexander flinched – a visible shudder. I knew him well, and knew that he was fighting off a temper tantrum.

Instead, he managed a smile. ‘Well, then,’ he said. He caught my eye. ‘Not bad for the baggage guard, eh?’ he said.

I grinned.

He grinned back.

‘I expected to find you besieged,’ Alexander said.

Laodon shrugged. ‘We were sent to fail,’ he said.

I stood in shock. ‘Antipater betrayed us?’

Alexander looked out at his battlefield and then back at me. ‘It makes no snese – but they were waiting for us. Laodon said they were, and they were. So we left you to fort up and went off to try and ambush their ambush.’

‘You might have said,’ I shot back. In Macedon, we’re not slaves.

Alexander rubbed the stubble on his chin. ‘I might have. But it was a hunch, and I might have been wrong. Or Laodon might have been the traitor.’ He shrugged, even as Laodon flinched. Smiled at me. ‘I knew it wasn’t you,’ he said to me. ‘That’s why you got the baggage.’

I didn’t really know what he was talking about. Thank the gods.

He slapped his knees. ‘Well, if the men need a rest, they need a rest. We march at dawn.’

And that was that.

The next day, Alexander took the oldsters and the Thracian auxiliaries and rode north-west, into Thracian territory, and proceeded to burn every village he came to. I moved along the valley floors, building small fortified camps or using the stock dykes the way the Thracians had, but with better sentries and sanitation. We covered fifty stades a day and Alexander covered three times that, and after three weeks he’d burned a swathe across Maetian Thrace as wide as the Chersonese and twice as long. Four weeks to a day after we’d broken their army, we stormed their log-walled city. Alexander put in a garrison of veterans from the infantry corps – two hundred men who got five times the land grants they might have expected. He called it Alexandropolis.

My last camp in Thracian territory had a stockade with three thousand slaves – mostly very saleable young women. The soldiers took their pick, and the rest went up for sale.

Horrible. But they did the same to us.

And then we marched home to Pella, with a fortune in gold and slaves, and Alexander gave an excellent speech, and handed out the whole of the loot to the infantry and the professional cavalry. The pages received nothing.

Antipater greeted us at the main gate, reviewed the army and embraced Alexander. The town cheered us.

It was very difficult to go back to being a page, after that. Three nights later, I was punished for being late to guard duty outside the prince’s door – publicly admonished by one of Philip’s somatophylakes, who didn’t seem to know or care that I had just won a night battle, killed my prince’s enemies, stormed a city and handed in my accounts for the logistics of the army and had them passed. Like an adult.

He hit me across the face with his hand, and ordered me to spend the night standing on my feet.

Which, of course, I did.

A month later Philip was back. Another failed siege in the Chersonese – another Athenian proxy victory, and now the Persian fleet was gathering, or so men said. It had been a summer of manoeuvre and near defeat for Macedon, and the rumour was that Thebes was ready to join Persia and Athens against us. And the western Thracians, unimpressed by Alexander’s near extermination of the Maeti, were threatening to close the passes of the north-east against us. Or perhaps hold them open for Thebes.

Amid all this, Philip came home. He embraced Alexander publicly and praised him to the skies – after all, as Philip was the first to admit, Alexander had won the year’s only victory, and turned a raw phalanx into a veteran one.

Then Philip took the new phalanx and marched it away, and changed Alexandropolis to Philipopolis, and we were left to wonder. And to raise fresh troops.

All winter, Philip marched and counter-marched – he lacked a fleet, and he had to keep the Athenians and their surrogates at arm’s length with his army. He sent letters – brilliant letters, full of advice for his son the regent. Some provoked a smile from the regent – and many a frown.

I read them to the prince, because I was one of the inner circle – my courage undoubted, my place secure, or so I thought. I would read him Philip’s letters while he wrote out his own correspondence – he had secretaries but preferred to write for himself. Philip’s advice, like that of most parents, could be internally contradictory – I recall one letter that admonished the regent for attempting to bribe the magnates of inner Macedon, and then in the next line recommended bribery as the tool to use with Thracians. And every time we managed to raise and equip a new corps of infantry, he’d summon them to his field army, leaving Alexander without the means to march against the renewed threat from the Thracians.

The second time this happened, when we’d stripped the countryside of farm boys to form a fourth taxeis of foot companions only to lose it, Alexander threw his ivory stylus at the wall, and it stuck in the plaster.

‘He wants everything for himself. He will leave nothing for me!’ he shouted.

Certainly Antipater was no longer allowed an army. Even Drako’s Thessalians were called away to the field army.

In the spring, Philip turned without warning and marched on the Thracians – a deeper raid than we had undertaken, and with no traitor to lure them out to easy victory, this time the Thracians stayed in their hill forts and fought for time. Philip captured a few towns and lost some others, and began to move out of the hills in three columns – but the centre column made a mistake, or moved too fast, and was ambushed. Philip got another spear in the thigh – the same thigh – and the line infantry got badly chewed up.

Philip came straight back from defeat to Pella. He hadn’t won a major victory in two years, and the vultures were gathering. Defeat at the hands of the Thracians was unthinkable – it gave his enemies ideas.

But Philip had gone after the Thracians while leaving Parmenio and Attalus, the king’s left-hand man, with his best troops – now he concentrated his armies, and in effect abandoned the campaign in the Chersonese. In later years we never admitted to this, but Athens had beaten us, or rather, Athens backed by the threat of Persia.

On the other hand, although Philip didn’t admit it to us at court, he’d decided to risk his empire on one blow. To go for the jugular, like a hunting dog facing a boar.

The Greeks like to maintain that Macedon was an oppressor, a barbarian force from outside marching through sacred Greece with blood and tyranny, but in truth, they hounded Philip unmercifully and left him little choice. Demosthenes and his renewed Athenian empire insisted on facing Macedon, where in fact we might have been allies. We might have unified against Persia. And we did, in the end. Our way.

In the autumn, when we heard daily rumours of a Persian fleet in the Dardanelles and an Athenian fleet ready for sea, Philip marched – not south and east to the Chersonese, although that’s what he told all the ambassadors gathered like vultures in the capital. He left Alexander to deal with them – and Alexander did. For days, Alexander sat beside his father’s throne and insisted that the army was on manoeuvres in the flat country by Amphilopolis – that his father would hold winter court at Pella, that they intended to dedicate a new set of statues at Delphi together. The statues were shown, the ambassadors sent their dispatches.

It was about this time that the affair of Pausanias came to a head for the first time. Let me say that we were all dissatisfied, as are all young men are who are made to behave as children when they are blooded warriors. We continued to be pages, and the old men at court treated us like pages. In fact, Attalus wanted us all sent back to the Gardens of Midas, even though Aristotle was gone. He said that we were vain, bad for the prince’s morals – he said a great many things. We said that fat old Attalus hated us because his own useless cousin Diomedes had been refused entry – another complex story in the web of intrigue that dominated court. Diomedes was a pretty boy, and events proved him a good enough fighter, but somehow he had a reputation as . . . well, as an effeminate. And the pages refused to have him. Attalus vented his outrage on us every way he could – I took a great deal of it, because Antipater employed me as a staff officer even while I still had to do all my duties as a page.

Young Pausanias had been one of us, and then he joined the royal companions and went off to serve with the men. And he was Philip’s bed-warmer on campaign – this was not held to be dishonourable, although it led to some malicious humour. At any rate, Pausanias was wounded in the fight against the Thracians.

In the same fight, Diomedes supposedly stood his ground over the king after he took a spear and went down – held his ground, saved the king’s life. Mind you, I never heard any man but Attalus tell that story. But however it happened, after the Thracian campaign Diomedes was invited to join the companions, and he replaced Pausanias completely in the king’s affections.

Yes – yes, this really is how Macedon was run. Hard as this may be to believe. Philip had a new favourite every week, sometimes. Men, women – jokes were made about his horses. But he was king, he was in his prime and he had no intention of living anything less than the fullest possible life.

But Pausanias was sent back to the pages. It shouldn’t have been possible. One was promoted to a regular regiment from the schoolroom, but no one could remember a man being sent back to the boys.

And we had Attalus at court, and he was poisonous to me, and meaner to Pausanias – insisted he get all the worst duties, made him cut meat for the cooks. A rumour went round that he had been paid money to service grown men among the companions. Not hard to guess where that rumour started.

I didn’t like Pausanias much. He was, in most ways, the instrument of his own destruction. He was vain, horribly fragile, weak and easily used. But I was one of the captains of the pages by then, and I did my best when drawing up the duty to soften the blows from Attalus, who, despite being the king’s left-hand man, was still nowhere near as big a magnate as my father. I went home for the Festival of Demeter and laid it all before my father, and he must have done something because for the moment, Attalus backed off me and mine.

But the pages hated being treated like boys when we knew we were men, and as we thought, so Alexander thought. Every letter full of advice from his father reminded him that he was regent under Philip’s will – and being stripped of troops seemed to be an insult, although from the distance of years, I wonder if Philip simply needed the troops. Hard to know, now.

Pella seethed. They were plotting – I could feel it when I spoke to my father by the hearth. It was the last time I saw him. I could tell from the way he held his tongue that he knew something. Even now, I’m not sure what he knew – not sure what the plots were. It is essential to understand this, to understand Alexander. The old families and the generals were plotting every minute – when Philip appeared weak. When he was strong, they fawned. That was Macedon. Our foes were gathering, Philip had vanished and Alexander wouldn’t say where he was, and the men of power were looking for a plot to save themselves, their rich farms and their hoards of gold. Attalus was part of it. Parmenio was not, I’d swear to it.

I was learning about court. Certainly I had grown up there, and I knew most of the dirt – but I was suddenly old enough to see other things, listen to mutterings under the eaves, watch whose slave appeared at whose door. There was political intrigue, there were love affairs . . .

I remember an evening in autumn. I was standing on the Royal Terrace, because I was about to go on duty, and the prince came out, alone. I had not been alone with Alexander in a month. He hardly spoke to me.

But that day, he grinned his famous grin and came across to me. ‘You know where my pater is, Ptolemy?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘Guess,’ he said. ‘It will be public knowledge in an hour.’

I shrugged. ‘Thebes,’ I said.

Alexander threw his arms around me. ‘You are intelligent,’ he said.

Indeed, while I was smarter than the Athenian ambassadors, I’m not sure everyone was fooled. But they were fooled enough to keep their troops waiting for us in the Chersonese and in the autumn, Philip caught them flat-footed, and occupied the passes west of the Gates of Fire.

Demosthenes rose in the Athenian Assembly and demanded an army to meet Philip in the field. It was the best speech of his career. Athens answered with ten thousand hoplites and another ten thousand mercenaries, and by a matter of days’ marching, beat Philip into the southern passes and kept him out of Boeotia. My guess about Thebes had been premature.

But Philip sat at his end of the passes and watched the Persian–Athenian détente crumble. The Persians wanted nothing more than to see Athens and Macedon and Thebes rip into one another, and the Persian gold was cut off, the Persian fleet went home and Macedon was saved. Demosthenes spent the winter egging Athens on to greatness, or so he claimed. But as I had predicted at the trout dinner, the democracy did much of the work to destroy the Persian alliance themselves.

Philip sent orders home that we should raise two more taxeis of infantry and train the pages harder. But he also ordered that the pages be promoted to royal companions. We were going to be adults. And when we’d trained the new recruits, we were to bring them to Philip in the field. Father and son were going to war together.

That winter, my father died, and I fell in love. I believe in love – many men don’t – and it had been my friend all my life. And my first love was linked to the death of my father.

Many men said then that I was Philip’s bastard son. That Philip put me on my mother – by rape, in an affair. And the gods know my pater was always fairly distant. On the other hand, he was closer than Philip ever was to me or to Alexander, for that matter. He didn’t have much time for me until I was eleven or twelve, but after that, when I was home from being a page, Pater listened to my tales of the hunt and the court, took me with him on business visits around our farms and we went hunting together ourselves. Some of my best memories are of sitting in the hall, on a stool by the hearth, surrounded by Pater’s great boar hounds. We talked about everything, solved many of the world’s problems, and Pater became quite a fan of Aristotle – actually bought two of his books and read them, which was quite a turn-up for a boar-hunting lord in the wilds of central Macedon.

Pater never discussed my birth directly. But once, when he was at court – a rare event in itself – Attalus made direct reference to it. And Pater smiled at him and rubbed his nose – his long hawk’s beak of a nose.

My nose, too.

My guess is that Mater and Philip were lovers – by his will, I suspect. But the child she bore her husband was theirs. He honoured her all her life, and there was a well-tended shrine to her after her death. Not that Philip ever visited it, either way. If he’d visited the graves of all his lovers, he’d have done nothing else.

Some time in late autumn, when there was snow in the passes and the snowline was creeping over the higher fields, when small farmers stayed in, weaving baskets and carving new handles for axes, and the great families had dangerous feasts where everyone drank too much, slept with the wrong people and killed each other with knives – word came to court that my pater was ill, and Alexander brought me the news himself. I was in Antipater’s rooms, copying documents like a scribal slave – lists of equipment issued to our new recruits. Dull stuff, but the very sinews of Ares, and Alexander insisted that it be done right.

He came in, a scroll rolled in his fist. ‘Ptolemy,’ he said, in that way of his that made you feel like you were his only friend, the centre of his world. He embraced me.

By Zeus, I loved him.

At any rate, he unrolled the scroll – even in a crisis, he couldn’t ever stop explaining his latest enthusiasm, and this was no crisis. ‘Have you read Isocrates?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said cautiously. It wasn’t always good to admit ignorance with Alexander.

‘Another Athenian – but oh, he has some beautiful ideas. He says it is time for a crusade of all the Hellenes against Persia.’ Alexander held up the scroll and read. He read well – he had a good voice.

Isocrates.

I had a soft spot for Isocrates, because he was a Plataean, and the Plataeans were, to me, the real heroes of Marathon and of all the subsequent campaigns against Persia. Aristotle used some of Isocrates’s speeches in training us. So I was, like any good friend, prepared to be pleased and to support Alexander’s latest passion.

And I have to say that, at that time, every side and every voice in the Hellenic world was advocating a crusade against Persia. First, the Persian court and Persian army and every satrapy in Asia were now full of Hellenes, growing rich, writing letters home to describe in detail the riches of Asia and the relative ease with which it could all be conquered. Every boy in the world – the Greek-speaking world – read Xenophon’s Anabasis at school, and every one of us saw Persia as the empire we would conquer. If our thoughts had carried physical manifestation (something Pythagoras apparently advocated at one time) then Persepolis would have had a bull’s-eye painted across its walls like a Cretan archery target a hundred feet tall.

In addition, every faction in Greece saw a universal crusade against the Mede as the salvation of the endless infighting – Athens against Sparta, Sparta against Thebes, Thebes against Thessaly against Macedon against Athens. Even Philip advocated such a war – as long as he could command it. And there, my friend, was the rub. Everyone imagined that we would all cooperate – even Athens and Macedon – if we could get to grips with the King of Kings, but no one wanted to play second flute, so to speak.

Alexander raced back to his quarters and reappeared with a whole bag of Isocrates. ‘Read these while you go to your father!’ he said.

Now by this point I’d been one of his inner circle for more than a year, and we hunted together – sometimes just the two of us – played Polis, threw knucklebones and sparred daily. I knew him pretty well – but the brilliance and brittleness of his moods still caught me by surprise. He could change topics faster than anyone I’ve ever met. Other men made allusions to femininity – women are supposed to have fickle minds, or so I’m told – but Alexander’s intellectual whims came with spear-points of iron and a will of adamantine, and there was nothing effeminate about them. Only lesser men ever thought so. What happened was that Alexander would finish a subject – often inside his head, with no reference to friends or other company – and move on. If you were up to his speed, you could reason out where he’d gone. If you weren’t, he left you behind all the time, and eventually stopped trying to talk to you.

In this case, all he’d done was share his passion for Isocrates first, and then remember that he hadn’t told me the reason for his visit to Antipater’s rooms. My pater was dying or already dead. I was requested.

‘Take all the time you want,’ Alexander said. ‘I know you love him – I’ve seen the two of you together.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I am envious.’

What do you say to that? He was envious. He and his pater were locked in a competition when they ought to have been pulling in harness like matched chariot horses.

‘I am lucky, lord,’ I said. ‘Pater has treated me as a man – since before I was one.’

‘Men say Philip is your father,’ Alexander said. He didn’t mean it to hurt. ‘Yet despite the slur, your father sees you as a . . . a person.’ He shrugged.

‘Lagus is my father.’ I was on dangerous ground here.

‘I agree. If Philip was your father, you’d be better-looking.’ Alexander smiled. ‘You are the only one of my close friends with his own estates and his own power – and yet you are completely loyal. Why?’

Chasms were opening at my feet, and legions of Titans preparing to rend me limb from limb. He had that look in his eye.

‘Habit?’ I answered, with a wink.

Alexander stopped, and his face became still for a moment, and then he barked a laugh. ‘By Herakles my ancestor, Ptolemy. Get you gone. Send your pater my respects, if he is alive to hear them, and tell him his son is somatophylax to the prince.’

‘I am?’ I said. I was delighted – for all his moodiness, he was my prince, and I wanted to serve.

He put a gold ring in my hand. ‘You are.’

I still wear the ring. I earned it a thousand times, and I never betrayed his trust. Until I killed him.

Pater was still alive when I arrived – on the mend, it appeared. So we dined by the hearth, all the old servants happy to have me home – Pater was an excellent master, had freed all the good slaves already and paid them wages, and men competed to go to our estates. It always baffled me that men had other ways of dealing with their slaves and serfs than Pater’s – he was hard but fair, quick to reward. Who thinks that there’s another way? I think it is like raising children. Good estate management takes a few more minutes than bad estate management, just as a little time and a few words are the difference between a good child and a bad one.

We had a good dinner, and I showed off my ring, and Pater beamed at me with approval. I saw him to bed, kissed him and gave him Alexander’s respects, and he frowned.

‘Your prince is mad,’ he said. ‘Steer a careful course, my son. He is no Philip.’

I didn’t lash out – I only said, ‘My prince is worth ten of Philip.’

Pater shook his head. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But Philip is already looking to be rid of him.’

That was like icy water down my back. ‘What?’

Pater shrugged, coughed and drank off a huge dollop of poppy juice. ‘I’ve said too much,’ he whispered. ‘But people tell me things – and I have some of Attalus’s slaves – they’ve run from him. He’s a dangerous man – more like a felon than a general.’ He nodded.

‘Where are these slaves?’ I asked.

Pater smiled. ‘Safe. Ask Heron.’ Heron was his steward. ‘You are an excellent son. Get a wife and make some more! That’s my only advice, lad. You have the rest in your hand. Oh – and don’t forget to breed Narcissa in the spring.’ Narcissa was a big mare – beautiful and wilful and not very interested in boys, but the largest, heaviest, fastest mare we’d ever had.

I held his hand, found myself choked with tears, reminded myself that he was going to be there for a few more nights at least, and let the nurse have him.

He was dead in the morning. He stayed alive for a few days on poppy and willpower to speak to me one last time.

I’m going to cry now.

The gods know I cried then. I wept for a couple of hours, and then I got up and went riding. I rode over our home farms – three farms that had been in the family for ever, since we were smaller men, I suspect – it was winter, and the leaves were off the trees and it was pissing rain, and I didn’t care.

I rode up the hill – we had a big hill in the middle of our property, with an ancient ruined stone tower from the old people at the top. I looked out over all of it – my land as far as my eyes could see, or close enough.

Then I rode back down and buried my pater. He was never a king, or a general. He spurned the court, and mostly he was interested in breeding horses and dogs and cattle and pigs. But he was an excellent father and husband and lord to his people.

Heron understood that there had to be changes. So I spent two weeks – right through the winter festival of lights – sitting in my pater’s chair. I dispensed some justice, walked some boundaries and talked to Heron about the future of the estates. The problem was that most men like me had some brothers or sisters – even bastards – to hold the home fort, so to speak. I was a close friend of the prince, and in twenty years I had every expectation of being a general, or a King’s Councillor, or something better. Satrap? Really, when I was seventeen, I saw no limit to my ambition.

Pretty accurate, as it turned out.

So I wasn’t going to run my estates myself.

Menander and all the ‘New Comedy’ is filled with bad stewards and rapacious managers stealing from lord and peasant alike. Those stereotypes exist for a reason. Heron didn’t want my unlimited trust. He wanted a system of checks and balances to keep him honest. He was a fair man, and he knew that if I rode away and ignored him – well, he’d be under strain.

So for two weeks we hammered out a new administration of my estates, with what was, in effect, a regency council. Heron ran the council, and I got his oldest son, Laodekes, a vacancy as a page. In effect, I ennobled Heron, and his son became my hostage.

That’s Macedon, friend.

At some point in my time at home, I met Nike. She was a house servant – by no means a slave, but rather the daughter of one of Heron’s closest friends, brought in to learn the management of a house before she had her own. She was fifteen, with Aphrodite’s figure and a nose that aimed at the outright conquest of her face. She was pretty sharp – she knew exactly the border between humour and disrespect to her lord, and she walked it carefully, teasing me a little, trying to get me to smile.

I was not doing very well, those weeks after Pater died.

But I liked her for trying, and all of a sudden, in less than a week, I was following her around the house while she did her work. She was the only person I really wanted to see. I’d never been in love before, so the whole thing rather took me by surprise.

I don’t remember how long into the week it was, but I remember standing on the terrace behind the kitchen. She had on a good chiton – good linen – with a zone of braided silk. She always looked like a lady – but the lines were not as clear, then, and her people were not peasants.

She had an apron on, and a scarf in her hair, and a heavy bronze knife in her fist. And what I remember is the moment she turned on me, knife in hand. ‘Shouldn’t you be working?’ she asked. ‘Your father worked all day on these estates.’

I didn’t know what to say, and so, in the best tradition of seventeen-year-old boys, I stammered a great deal.

She laughed – I remember watching her laugh, and there and then, I understood. I wanted her. Up to that moment, somehow I had thought I wanted us to be friends. Or just sought her good opinion.

‘I’ll go and work,’ I muttered – or something like it.

‘Good.’ She nodded. Then, almost sly, out of the corner of her mouth, with the slightest glance out of the corner of her eye – ‘I like to ride – when the work is done.’

A woman who liked to ride? Clearly the gods had made her for me.

We rode out every evening until I left for Pella. I was no blushing virgin, and she burned hot enough that I assume she was not, either. But we had more than lust. The son of Lagus was not going to marry a servant girl, but I went to her father, paid her bride price and when I left for Pella, she and a slave-maid rode with me. And Nike she surely was.

Somehow, I also found time to read Isocrates end to end. It was, after all, a royal command. I read it, and I caught fire. We could do this thing. It was the Thracian campaign writ large – the biggest challenge of men and logistics since the dawn of the world. I read and reread the philosopher’s words, and began to dream of a new world, where we younger men conquered Persia. I could see it.

The first night back in Pella, Alexander came to my rooms unannounced. This required explanation, too. In the last year, as we were promoted – first by experience, and then by decree – to the ranks of manhood and made royal companions rather than just pages, some of us received apartments in the palace. Other men stayed in the pages’ barracks, and others still bought houses in Pella or rented rooms – remember, some of our number were as poor as peasants.

I had two rooms in the palace. I kept them – they were close to the king and very useful when I was on duty, or when we were awake all night.

But after Pater died and I had Nike, I bought a house in town. I bought a big house – in fact, I bought the house that Aristotle vacated. I moved Nike in as my mistress – in effect, as my wife – and I enlarged the stables to hold twenty horses and invited Cleitus, Philip and my two other best friends among the pages – Nearchus and young Cleomenes – to come and live with me. None of them had any money, and all of them were, in effect, my men. Oh, that’s not fair – Cleitus had his own relationship with Alexander, and Philip the Red was never really mine, but we were all close, we shared loyalties, tastes and friends.

I set up housekeeping in a few hours, or, rather, my new chief of staff, Nike, did – she bought furniture, won over my useless slaves, bought food, bought a cook, found all my friends and moved all their kit into our house, assigned them rooms – all while I was on duty with Antipater.

We were deeply in love, but that love was aided by events and by the fact that we were good allies, too – she wanted to run a household, and I needed a household manager. And by the will of the gods, I got one. A brilliant one. She could find chicken stock in a desert – enough for as many guests as she wanted to have. She was delighted by my body every hour I wanted her – scars and all. She was happy enough to occupy herself when I was busy. She never fawned, and she could read.

I still don’t know what she saw in me.

I get ahead of myself. I was in my rooms at the palace, unbuckling my breastplate and contemplating the short walk ‘home’. In fact, I’d been there once and expected a shambles.

Alexander walked in without warning and started helping me with the buckles under my arms.

‘Did you read Isocrates?’ he asked. As if he’d been waiting for three weeks just to hear my opinion. Which, in a way, was probably true.

‘Every word,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’

He stopped fumbling with my buckles. ‘You mean it?’

I remember that moment. It was a week of changes for me, and any astrologer would have been able to tell me, I suspect. ‘We can conquer Asia,’ I said. ‘Your friends. Your team, if you like.’

He kissed me – he never kissed anyone, our golden-haired boy, but he kissed my cheek and pressed me to his chest. ‘Yes!’ he breathed in my ear. ‘I knew you would understand.’

I got out of my armour, stripped, wiped myself down and put on an old chiton and a warm chlamys for the walk home, while he babbled plans. Good plans – it wasn’t that he was babbling nonsense, but that human speech was too slow for the efficient transfer of everything he had to say.

But I had read Isocrates, so I could keep up with him, and nod or cut him short. I won’t bore you with this, but conversation often sounded like this, to an outsider:

Alexander: We need a navy.

Me (or Hephaestion or Philotas or anyone in the inner circle who could keep up): Ports. We have the wood.

Alexander: Oarsmen.

Me: Amphilopolis. But Athens!

Alexander (sometimes with a chorus of all of us together): It all comes down to Athens.

Me: Isocrates might help.

Alexander: A gift. But we can’t be seen—

Me: We need to find a way to bribe from strength.

Alexander: Good phrase. (So in the next conversation, we’d say ‘Bribe from strength’ without explanation – just as we didn’t need an explanation for the words ‘oarsmen’ because everyone in the inner circle knew that was a code for our complete lack of trained sailors, oarsmen, shipwrights – you get the picture.)

On that day, though, we weren’t with the others. Hephaestion – who knew where he was? He was always Alexander’s right hand, but he had begun to branch out himself – serving maids, boys with nice hair – basically anyone who was alive and wanted to fuck. Alexander was tolerant – amused. And not very interested.

And for whatever reason, Hephaestion never bothered to read Isocrates.

I’m taking my time telling this, because while it was the culmination of my career as a courtier, and in some ways the logical development of my career, it was also the moment at which the knucklebones were cast. For good or ill.

So – I had changed into plain clothes, arranged my armour on its stand, buffed a few flecks of dust off the bronze – I was waiting for Alexander to lose interest so I could go home. That doesn’t mean I wanted him to lose interest – I was a courtier as well as a friend – merely that in the normal run of things, my time would expire and he’d go back to Hephaestion or go to sit with Antipater or go and read letters from his father – listen to court cases, dine with ambassadors, what have you. I’d been back for three days and on duty the whole time, and while I loved having his attention – his entirely favourable attention – I was really looking forward to putting my mouth over Nike’s and feeling her breath in my chest.

Alexander was arguing both sides of the notion of starting the Hellenic conquest of Asia in Aegypt when he looked up. He was a little shorter than I, with tousled, leonine blond hair and darting eyes. My blond hair was darker, with some brown in it, but curly enough – I was taller, and had the big nose. Hah! Still do.

He grinned. ‘I’m hungry. Let’s go and steal some food in the kitchen.’

I didn’t even think. ‘Come to my house,’ I said. ‘I’m sure there’s food. Better than stealing from the companions’ cook!’ I shrugged. ‘It’s not one of Aristotle’s foolish exercises.’

Alexander’s eyes flicked away and then back. ‘You have a house?’ he asked.

‘Aristotle’s house,’ I said. ‘I bought it. My pater – well, I’m a rich man now.’

Alexander laughed. ‘Wait for me,’ he said.

A minute later, he appeared in a companion’s dun-coloured cloak. ‘Let’s go. I hope you didn’t buy Aristotle’s cook?’

‘I didn’t. But to be honest, I haven’t been home since I bought the place. It’ll be chaos. I invited Cleitus to come and live with me – but he’s on watch tonight. And Philip and Nearchus, I think . . .’ I remember yawning. Alexander walked along next to me – for a few minutes, we were two young men at large in Pella. And woe betide the bodyguard who was supposed to be on duty.

We walked the three streets in no time. We didn’t talk about anything that I remember, until he said, ‘Well, it’s lit up. That’s something. Your slaves knew you were coming.’

In fact, there were two slaves in the door yard – Nichomachus and another I didn’t know. Nichomachus saw me, saw Alexander and darted inside. The new boy just kept cutting apples.

‘I think we’re in luck,’ I said. The smell coming into the courtyard was excellent – lamb, fresh bread, something with herbs in it.

Alexander paused. ‘You are married,’ he said.

‘I have a housekeeper,’ I admitted. ‘I like her a lot.’

He gave a wry smile. ‘This I need to see.’

And he followed me into what proved to be my own house.

Philip and Nearchus and Cleomenes were standing by their couches – Nike was nowhere to be seen. There was furniture I’d never seen before, two Athenian vases of flowers at either end of the andron, and the empty niche in the entryway had statues of Aphrodite and Poseidon, flowers, a small spilled offering of wine. A brazier was burning to take the edge off the air, and it had something wonderful in it – myrrh.

‘My lord.’ Philip, as the eldest, bowed to welcome us. ‘We have had the fish course.’

‘Never eaten so well in my life!’ said Cleomenes, who was too young to be restrained, and always hungry.

Philip gave him a wry smile – the equivalent of tousling his hair and telling him to shut up.

Alexander sank on to the couch nearest the door and Myndas appeared and started taking his sandals. Myndas had never, in a year of serving me, helped me with my sandals.

But he did, when he was done with the prince.

Dinner sailed in and out like a well-ordered fleet – servants I’d never hired or paid for carrying dishes I’d eaten only at court or at home. In fact, it was plain enough – four removes, meat and bread and some eggs, but plenty of it, and everything with some little touch of culinary genius – saffron on the eggs, pepper on the lamb with sweet raisins.

Alexander ate sparingly like the ascetic he was, but he relished the bread, and when the sweets came in – nuts in honey – he ate himself to sticky excess. And he drank, too. It was all local wines – Macedon has no need to import wine, really, and our heavy reds are as good as any in the world. Off in the next room, someone was keeping the wine watered three or four to one, but Nearchus was bright red and the prince was loud.

He put his feet on the floor suddenly, and barked his laugh. ‘I want to see her!’ he said.

We all fell silent.

Alexander had a wine bowl. ‘To the mistress of this house, whosoever she might be. I haven’t eaten like this in my life.’

I said something about being at his service.

‘Then let’s see her!’ Alexander said.

I rose to my feet.

‘In my court we have many factions,’ Alexander said, his eyes a little wild. ‘Attalus believes all men are pigs. Parmenio wants us to make war for ever so he can keep his place – Antipater craves peace so he can keep his. Hephaestion would make love to the world.’ He grinned. ‘But you, my friend, are the only advocate of women. You like women. And now you’ve brought one home, and you are ashamed to show her to me?’ He beamed around. ‘Do you gentlemen know that he put a girl in my bed? Eh?’ he asked.

‘I’ll fetch her, by your leave, my prince.’ I headed for the door.

‘Don’t you find . . . Ptolemy, I’m asking you. Don’t you find that she makes you weaker? After you put that lady in my bed – I thought of nothing else for ten days. I could accomplish nothing. I was worth nothing. Are you a better man than I?’

Knock me over with a feather – he’d never shown a sign of being besotted. Of course, we’d ridden to rescue his father – for nothing, as it turned out.

I shrugged and went to the kitchen.

Nike wasn’t there. There was a cook, a big African I’d never seen before, with a gold earring and a faintly military air. Clearly a freeman – the earring was worth ten days’ wages. ‘Lady Nike?’

‘Changing clothes,’ he said, with one hand on a bronze pan and the other on some eggs. ‘Don’t bother me right now, lord.’

By the time I went back into the hallway, she was there, wearing a fine blue wool chiton in the old Ionian manner, pinned with some very plain bronze pins which I determined on the spot to replace with gold. I snatched a kiss, with spectacular success. Isn’t there something almost miraculous to kissing someone who wants to kiss you? Then she pulled free.

‘Don’t muss my hair,’ she said, and ignoring my attempts to stop her and give her advice, she walked into the andron.

Alexander was drinking again. Nearchus looked . . . frightened. Cleomenes was laughing and Philip was laughing with him. But they all straightened up when Nike came in. She was that kind of girl.

She made a low curtsy to Alexander – just the sort of curtsy she’d have made at one of the shrines.

He looked her over with an air that made me angry – as if she were unfit for human consumption.

‘The food is excellent,’ he said.

‘Thank you, lord,’ she answered.

‘You are a freewoman, I think,’ he said.

She nodded.

‘You can cook and weave, then? How about . . .’ He drawled the question – he meant to offend. ‘How about reading?’

‘I’ve read Isocrates,’ she said.

I’ve seen Alexander surprised a half-dozen times, I think. Maybe more. Not often, though. But when Nike said ‘Isocrates’ his eyes opened wider and his brows shot up. Even his mane of hair seemed to move.

‘Really?’ he asked. ‘And what did you gather from his works?’

She didn’t meet his eye. ‘That he’d like a place at your father’s court,’ she said. ‘And that it is time Macedon stopped playing with Greece and took Persia, instead.’ She had a matter-of-fact delivery that was like Aristotle’s – it was difficult to contradict her, as I learned early in our relationship, and love never stopped her from being ‘right’.

Alexander clapped his hands together, much in the way he might have done for a talking dog, I fear. You have to remember that Aristotle had no time for women at all, and Philip liked them only at the end of his cock, and even then he found them interchangeable with men. Alexander’s mother was too feminine, too much the avatar of Dionysian excess. He didn’t have any charming, witty, argumentative women in his life.

More’s the pity. Aristotle told him that pleasure came with cost, and distracted great men from great deeds, and he took that bait and swallowed it. Domestic happiness puzzled him utterly.

He interrogated her for as long as it took the brazier to burn down, and never asked her to sit. He asked her about her father, about her education, about her views of women as priestesses, as mothers – asked her whether she planned to be a mother.

At first I found it offensive, and then I found the explanation. She was suddenly the ambassador of the tribe of women to the court of Alexander. He’d never really had one to talk to before. And he always kept ambassadors standing because he forgot to ask them to sit – because questioning them about their alien lands excited him so much.

When I understood that, I drank a little to catch up, caught her eye and winked, and she stood calmly and answered him as best she could – some sharp answers, some witty answers, and some plain answers.

When she said that, yes, she wanted to have children, he smiled at her.

‘Ptolemy’s sons? Or will you wed some lesser man?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure that I can answer that,’ she said. ‘Nor would I, even if I knew.’ She met his eye, and for a moment the Prince of Macedon was eye to eye with a tiger. Neither shrank.

‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘I drink to you, my lady.’

And then he was finished with her. I took her by the hand and led her out, and she walked into our bedroom and threw up in a basin, and then tidied herself and went to the kitchen to see what had happened to the barley rolls. That was Nike.

I walked him home, with Nearchus and Cleomenes and Philip as guards – because people did want to kill him, and the streets of Pella after dark were an unbeatable opportunity.

He seemed sober. But just short of the palace, he turned to me. ‘I’m not sure that wasn’t the best dinner I’ve ever had,’ he said. ‘And I’m not sure what to think of that.’

‘You are welcome any time,’ I said.

‘Good. I’ll come the second day of every week. I may invite one or two others. See to it that the duty officer knows the way.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry, please ask the lady Nike if I might come every Tuesday.’

I grinned. ‘I will,’ I said.

Those dinners saved his life. And more. But that’s another story.