God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

NINE

Looking back, I think that it might all have been talk, if not for Pausanias. He hadn’t made many friends since he was the royal favourite – he’d been demoted back to page when his accusations against Attalus and Diomedes outraged the king. But he’d served well – even brilliantly – at Chaeronea, and he was well born, if only a highlander. He wasn’t a favourite of Alexander’s, or mine, or Hephaestion’s, but he was one of us, and there were young men in our pages’ group who we liked a lot less and still tolerated.

Pausanias had a remarkable way of saying the most dramatic thing instead of telling the truth, which made him untrustworthy as a scout or as a friend – a tendency to exaggerate, not just to make a story better, but because he craved excitement. This is not an uncommon failing in young men, but he had it to a degree I’ve seldom seen, and the saddest thing was that he had real accomplishments – he was a brilliant runner and a fine javelin-thrower. But he never bragged or exaggerated his real accomplishments.

I only mention this by way of explanation, because what’s coming is hard enough to understand.

We returned to Pella and had a public reconciliation with the king. He was entirely focused on the invasion of Asia, and he’d just appointed Attalus and Parmenion joint commanders of the advance guard – picked men, a whole picked army.

It was only then, I think, that Alexander discovered how advanced his father’s plans were for Asia. And his anger was spectacular – almost worthy of Ares himself.

I was there – dinner in the palace, with only men from our pages’ group at the couches, and Alexander was silent. Hephaestion tried to cheer him, called him Achilles, waited on him hand and foot and recited the Iliad.

Alexander was having none of it. I suspected what was wrong, the way all of us do when a favourite or a wife is silent and careful. When we are left to guess for ourselves just why the subject of our scrutiny is so silent. I watched Alexander, and I guessed that it was the preparations for the war in Asia. They were all around us, from the horse farms teeming with new geldings ready for war to the piles – literally – of new-cut ash poles outside the foot companions’ barracks. We’d done our part, signing Athens to the fight, but Philip had not wasted a moment, and all Macedon – and all Greece – was girding for the war we’d all known from birth would happen some day. The great adventure. The crusade.

And we were going to sit home in Pella and hear our elders tell of how it went.

I remember Hephaestion starting into the recitation of Achilles at the head of the Myrmidons when Alexander let out something very like a screech and stood up. ‘Fuck that!’ he roared. He flung his wine cup across the room and it was squashed flat with the power of the throw – gold with tin in it.

Alexander scarcely ever swore.

Silence fell over the room.

‘He’s going to go east and leave me with nothing,’ Alexander said. ‘Nothing.’

Hephaestion, who often misunderstood his hero, shook his head. ‘You’ll be regent—’

‘Regent?’ Alexander was almost crying. ‘Regent? I want to conquer the world! I will pull the Great King off his throne! It is my destiny. Mine! He is stealing my life, the old goat! The rutting monster!’

I haven’t mentioned it, but we couldn’t miss the fact that Cleopatra, the new wife, was once again heavily pregnant, nor that many nobles acted as if Alexander were already supplanted. Nor that Attalus, who, in Macedonian parlance, had the king’s cock by both ends – by which they meant that he was Cleopatra’s uncle and Diomedes’ as well – was to be commander in Asia for the initial campaigns.

At any rate, I remember Alexander standing there, eyes sparkling and nearly mad, his hair almost on end, his muscles standing out. He was possessed – if not by a god, then by something worse. But he was not human in that moment, and he meant business. Had his father entered the room just then, Alexander might have killed him himself.

It was not Philip who entered, but Alexander’s mother, Olympias. Who was supposed to be in exile at Epirus, but was mysteriously back in Pella.

She was hardly the monster that Kleithenes has proclaimed her, but she was capable of anything. Beautiful – Aphrodite gave her what men desire with both hands. Long, perfect legs, wide thighs and a waist so small that after birthing a child a big man could still get his hands around her tummy. Breasts not just beautiful to look at but curiously inviting – something about the texture of the skin between her breasts demanded that you touch it. It was smooth and yet never shiny. Her hair was as black as charcoal or a moonless night, and her eyes were seductive – deep, expressive, laughing – Alexander later claimed that she had lain with a god, and if anyone was god-touched, it was she.

Men claimed to have lain with her – or to know someone who had – she had a reputation as utterly wanton. I wonder. I never knew anyone who made the claim and seemed believable. I do know several who made the claim and had accidents afterwards.

But beyond her beauty, which was intimidating, was her brain, which was godlike. She never forgot a name. She never forgot an injury or a service. She knew every slave in royal service and every page who had ever served her son by name and family and value of service. She had a web of informers worthy of Delphi, and she usually knew who slept with whom and what the repercussions were, men and women both.

She couldn’t read. But she could recite the entire Iliad. She could create lyric poetry extempore, alluding to Sappho or Alcaeus or Simonides, even borrowing a line here and there . . .

She was brilliant. Alexander’s godlike genius probably came from her, and not from Philip.

Of course, she was almost completely devoid of human emotions, except lust for revenge and a desire to see her son, as an extension of her own will, succeed. They say a child is two years old before he realises that his mother is not actually part of him. Perhaps true – but Olympias never, ever realised that Alexander was not part of her. An extension of her. Those men at court who saw women only as mysterious possessors of alien sex organs – such men are common everywhere, and mythologise women in terms of sex; you know whereof I speak, young man? Good. Those men at court liked to claim that Olympias slept with her son.

Crap. She had no need to sleep with him. She lived through him, and consulted him from childhood on every aspect of her life. She was his priestess – he was her god. It was a deeply disturbing relationship, one that appalled even Alexander, and yet he was always helpless in her presence, unable to be a man or even a boy, usually just a toy to her will.

I did not like her. I avoided her as much as I could, and even now, knowing that she is safely dead at that thug Cassander’s hands, I still fear her. Men at court feared her as a witch, a woman, a beauty. They were fools. She was one of them to her finger’s ends, and they should have dreaded her as one dreads a boar turned at bay, or a royal Macedonian bent on achieving power.

Again, I tell this because without understanding her, nothing that follows makes much sense.

At any rate, there we were, in virtual exile still, even at the heart of Macedonian power, and we were to all intents under siege. She had been exiled, and if the king had recalled her, we never heard. She hadn’t followed us to Illyria, but she had suggested the move, arranged the marriage, given Alexander money . . .

Well, I for one assumed she was still in Epirus, and still in exile.

Apparently not!

She entered the room and Alexander turned pale. We were already silent, but the silence took on a new texture.

‘Whining about Philip?’ she said. She had a cup in her hand. She stopped near the door, bent with a dancer’s grace and plucked the ruins of Alexander’s gold cup from the floor. ‘Achilles was a petulant arse, too, my dear. That’s an element of his heroism I desire that you avoid.’

I remember thinking I would choke. That’s how she always struck me.

She sat on Alexander’s kline and this time she lay down, as if experimenting with the feel of a couch. She lay back – scandalous in itself. She had golden sandals and her feet were painted. Her feet were as beautiful as the rest of her – and really, she was fifteen years older than me. My lord’s mother.

She took a sip of wine. ‘Well?’ she asked the silence.

Alexander was choking. ‘This is a man’s feast, Mother.’

‘No, it is not. If you were a man, Philip would be cold rotting clay in the ground, or bleeding himself out in a pool of his own vomit. He is not, so you, my dear, are not yet a man.’ She smiled lazily. ‘I predict that soon enough, one of you will come upon a method of killing the king. And then we will take power, and proceed to rule well. Philip must die.’ She smiled. ‘I shock you. You are still such . . . boys. How dare I – a matron? A mother? Suggest that my husband must die? Listen, boys – he’s had a boy or a girl on the end of his cock every day since I first spread my thighs for him, and I laugh, because none of them can give him what I can. But now he wants to be rid of my son – my godlike son, his true heir. And me. And this is not Philip, great-hearted Lion of Macedon. This is little Philip, the lover of Diomedes and the lickspittle of Attalus. Best that he die, before all his greatness is forgotten.’

She got up. Smoothed the linen of her chiton, and handed Alexander her jewelled wine cup. ‘There, my dear. A new cup for your old one. Get it done, my dear. He means to rid himself of you and of me, too. Just this evening, one of my snakes died of something I was to have eaten.’ She smiled brilliantly at all of us. ‘I was tiring of Epirus. It was time to come back here and make Philip dine on his own vomit. Why are you shocked? I only say what you think.’ She rose on her toes to kiss her son, and I could see every inch of her body through the linen, silhouetted against the hearth fire, and I thought in that moment – what was Philip thinking? What man would want more than that?

And truly, I think that if she had not been cursed with such a sharp mind, he’d have loved her for ever. But I imagine that she ferreted out the truth once too often. Who likes to feel inferior in a marriage? Especially when one is the king.

On her way out, she paused by my couch and leaned far over. When my traitor eyes left her face to probe inside her linen to the very nipples of her breasts, she flicked her eyes over mine and her lips twitched with a familiar . . . contempt? Excitement?

‘Where is Pausanias, tonight?’ she asked.

Who knows what I choked out.

‘You have the best brain in this room, besides his,’ she said. ‘Find Pausanias. He is now in a position to help us all.’ She laughed, a horrible laugh. Later, I knew she was making a pun on the word position.

She straightened and cast her goddess-like smile around the room. ‘Be good, boys,’ she said, and glided out.

I grabbed Cleon and, I think, Perdiccas – and told them to find Pausanias. He hadn’t gone into exile with us, and we’d only seen him once since we returned. Rumour was he had allied himself with Attalus – one way you can tell when a man is pre-eminent is that his enemies start to become his friends because they have nowhere else to go.

Poor Pausanias.

Alexander was quiet after his mother’s visit – quiet and thoughtful. Since he wasn’t up to any mischief, I let him go, and threw knucklebones with Hephaestion and young Neoptolymos, one of the other highlander lords attached to the pages.

There was a disturbance down in the royal stables – loud shouting, someone screaming.

Alexander stepped behind his couch and drew his sword. That’s how close to the edge we all were.

Nearchus was on duty and sober. He took two pages in armour and raced off down the corridors towards the stables. We sent all the slaves away.

More shouting, some drunken, some sober. A weapons clash. A scream.

‘We’re Attalus’s men!’ clear as day. And another scream. The unmistakable sound of a man with a sword in his groin or guts.

Alexander was in his battlefield mode. His eyes met mine. ‘Go and find out,’ he said. He even managed a smile. ‘Don’t die.’

I grinned back, hopped over my kline and ran, barefoot, through the curtains, aware that there were slaves just outside the door, cowering out of my way, and more slaves all down the corridor – it was, after all, the main corridor that connected the king’s apartments with the prince’s. I could see a pair of his royal companions outside the king’s door – not at attention, but straining towards me like hunting hounds waiting to be released.

I waved my sword at them. They knew me. ‘If I find anything I’ll tell you!’ I called as I raced by. Hard to imagine they might actually be trying to kill me.

I got down to the stables without seeing another freeman. The screams were done – so was the shouting.

Perdiccas was just inside the stables, with two dead men-slaves – at his feet. Cleon the Black was holding another man – at first, I thought Cleon was ‘questioning’ him.

Perdiccas looked as if he was going to cry.

Cleon just looked angry and perhaps disgusted.

‘We found Pausanias,’ he spat.

The man he was holding in his arms was Pausanias. He was naked. Blood was running out of his anus – thick, dark blood. All over Cleon’s wool chiton and his legs. Cleon didn’t flinch.

‘They raped him,’ Cleon said. ‘Attalus and Diomedes, and every guest at the party. And then he was given to the slaves, and they raped him, too. Fifty men?’ Cleon’s words were thick with rage.

Pausanias was breathing. It sounded almost like snores – it took me a long time to realise he was sobbing without any voice left. He’d screamed his voice away.

‘He told you that?’ I asked.

Cleon jutted his chin at the two corpses. ‘They did. Attalus’s stable boys.’

Perdiccas had recovered his wits enough to clean his weapon. ‘If we’re found – fuck, it’s murder. We killed them.’

I nodded. The bodies were a problem. So was Pausanias. He was alive. He would tell his story.

Attalus meant him to live to tell his story.

Olympias, damn her, knew already what had happened. She’d as much as told us. So the story wouldn’t be secret. I stared around, trying to see through the endless dark labyrinth of Macedonian court politics. Attalus was making a statement – that Alexander was too powerless to protect his friends.

I thought of Diomedes a year before. Wondered if I had been intended for a similar fate.

It was a fate any Macedonian would dread – now that he’d been used as a woman by fifty men, Pausanias’s life was over. No matter that it had been done by force. No matter. He would be marked. As weak.

Even I felt a certain aversion. I didn’t want to touch him. I marvelled at Cleon’s toughness.

But even while I thought through the emotions, a colder part of my brain went throught the ramifications.

‘Right. Cleon – can you carry him?’ I asked.

As answer, Cleon rose to his feet and swung the older man on his broad shoulders. A drop of Pausanias’s blood hit my cheek and burned me as if it were acid – I felt his pollution. Or so I thought.

‘Take him to Alexander. Perdiccas and I will get rid of the bodies.’ I looked at Cleon. ‘Tell me the king is here, and was not at the party.’

Cleon shrugged.

Perdiccas and I carried the two thugs out of the royal stables. This may surprise you, but despite plots and foreign hatred, the palace itself was almost completely unguarded – two men on the king’s chamber, two on the queen’s, a couple of pages on Alexander and sometimes a nightwatchman on the main gate. We carried the dead men out one at a time, through the picket door used to clear manure out of the stables.

We carried them through the streets – streets devoid of life or light – and left them behind Attalus’s house. I put knives in their hands, as if they’d fought each other. I doubt that a child would have been fooled.

After that, it was open war in the streets – our men against theirs. Pausanias was sometimes a tart and always a difficult friend – but he was one of us, and the outrage committed against him was a rape of every page. We were unmanned together. As we were supposed to have been.

Diomedes led the attacks – sometimes from in front, and sometimes from a safe third rank. Cleon and Perdiccas were caught in the agora by a dozen of Attalus’s relatives, challenged and beaten so badly that Cleon’s left arm never healed quite right. They were baited with Pausanias’s fate. Anything might have happened, but a dozen royal companions intervened.

The next day, I was on the way to my house – my rebuilt house – with Nearchus beside me when Diomedes appeared in front of me.

‘Anyone able to hear poor Pausanias fart?’ he said. ‘Ooh, he wasn’t as tight as Philip said he was!’

There were men – Thracians – behind me.

I ran.

There’s a trick to the escalation of violence – most men, even Macedonians, take a moment to warm themselves up. Diomedes had to posture – both because he enjoyed it, and to get himself in the mood to murder me.

I turned and ran, grabbing Nearchus’s hand as I went.

I went right through the loose ring of Thracians behind me, and took a sword-slash across my shoulders and upper back – most of it caught in the bunches of fabric under my shoulder brooches, but some of the cut went home.

But most of the Thracians were so surprised that they stumbled over each other.

We ran along the street, back towards the palace.

‘Get them, you idiots!’ Diomedes shouted.

But they were foreigners, didn’t know the city and had riding boots on. I was a former page wearing light sandals, and I flew. Nearchus was with me, stride for stride – street, right turn, alley, under an awning, along an alley so narrow that the householders had roofed it over, up and over a giant pile of manure – euch – into a wagon yard that I knew well and north, along the high wall of the palace, and we were clear.

Diomedes bragged of our cowardice.

Two days later, despite orders to go in groups of at least ten, a gang of Attalus’s retainers caught Orestes and Pyrrhus and Philip the Red. They were stripping Orestes to rape him when Polystratus put an arrow into one of the men, a muleteer, and the would-be rapists ran.

Alexander was exact in describing what he would do to the next man who was caught. ‘I care what happens to you,’ he said carefully. ‘But you must care what happens to us all. They are trying to break us. To make us the butt of humour. Humiliated boys, in a world of men. Do you understand?’ he asked, his voice calm and deadly, and we did. I had seldom heard him sound more like his father.

Our wing in the palace became like a small city under siege, and out in the town, our slaves and our houses burned.

One of the slaves who tasted Alexander’s food died. In agony.

The next day, Alexander took me aside. ‘I want you to strike back,’ he said. ‘I can’t be seen to act in this. I must be seen to be the oppressed party. My father is openly contemptuous of me. So be it. But if we do not strike back, our people will lose heart.’

The next day, I had Philip the Red go to the royal companions’ quarters and ask for bread.

They refused. Some suggestions were made as to what Philip could do to get bread.

Philip lost his temper and told them what he thought of grown men behaving in such a way to their cousins and sons. And the whole mess of the royal companions laughed him out of their barracks.

Then I sent Polystratus to scout. On his return, he reported that every entrance to the palace was watched, and he’d been ‘allowed’ to go out.

Sometimes the best plan is to give your enemies what they expect. That night, while I was on guard, I poured wine for Alexander.

‘It will be tomorrow,’ I told him.

He nodded. ‘Don’t tell me any more,’ he said.

Later, coming off duty, I went to Olympias’s wing and visited Pausanias. The queen was sitting on his couch, singing to him quietly – one of the bear songs of Artemis. I stopped in the doorway. She caught my eye and shook her head, and I retreated.

The queen came out of the room into the corridor and I bowed.

‘He is not ready for visitors,’ she said. ‘Especially not men in armour.’

I wanted to ask her – Is he broken? Ruined? But I could not. She shook her head.

‘He is better. I will restore his wits. Women know more than men about this.’ She smiled, and her smile was terrifying. ‘Oh, if only men could be raped by women – the world would be more just.’

I had to reconsider my views on Alexander’s mother – because her care for Pausanias was genuine. All her women said she was with him every moment of her day. And this for a boy who had been her husband’s lover.

Then she caught my eye. ‘Be careful tomorrow,’ she said.

That sent ice down my spine.

She laughed. ‘Half my maids are missing chitons. I can guess.’ She nodded. ‘And if I can guess, so can Attalus.’

‘Since you know, would my lady condescend to give us some kohl?’ I asked.

Eight of us went out of the palace in the first light, dressed as female slaves, with a pair of carts. We left through the slave entrance and we had the same carts that they used every day to fetch bread. I had Orestes and Pyrrhus and Perdiccas, but not Black Cleitus or Philip the Red or any of the blooded men. Polystratus drove one of the carts, but in the first narrow street, he switched with me, pulled himself from the top of the cart on to the tiled rooftops and ran off into the darkness, no doubt cursed by every man and woman sleeping under the tiles.

Our little procession of carts and slaves rolled up the alleys and into the main market, then along the northern edge of the agora to the great ovens where bread was baked. If they were on to us, they gave no sign.

We loaded the bread. And the baker’s apprentices behaved so oddly that even if I hadn’t already been suspicious, I’d have been suspicious. I didn’t let any of my ‘girls’ get close to the baker’s boys, and I kept my distance and spoke low.

The lead apprentice watched the last round loaves loaded into the carts. ‘Hurry up,’ I said impatiently.

He gave me an insolent stare. ‘Fuck off, maiden.’ He laughed. ‘By the time you walk back to the palace, you’ll walk more like matrons, I wager!’

The other apprentices tittered.

We moved off with a noisy squeal of wheels. The sun was well up, the temples were opening their bronze gates and there were enough people in the streets that I wondered if Attalus would dare come at us, even if he knew who we were.

We took a different route back to the palace – farther west, through the wealthier neighbourhoods where the nobility had their town houses. They were big houses, two or three storeys, with tile roofs and balconies and exedra – Athens boasted thousands of such houses, and Pella had about two hundred.

We passed within two blocks of Attalus’s compound. Our strategy was to hide in plain sight, and baffle ambush by passing too close to Attalus for him to dare attack us.

Actually, that wasn’t our strategy at all. That was our apparent strategy.

In a street lined with high walls, the squealing wheel gave way, and our convoy had to stop.

Eight slave girls and a broken-down cart full of bread.

We worked on the wheel as slowly as real slave girls. The sun rose, and as far as I was concerned, our enemies had proved themselves too incompetent to live. I was just at the point of moving on – the wheel was fine – when Orestes froze at my side.

‘Now what have we here?’ Diomedes swaggered. He was on horseback. ‘Palace slaves?’ He laughed. ‘If you aren’t girls now, sweetings, you will be soon.’

He had a dozen retainers. Not Thracians, but men sworn to his family. When I looked back, there were at least as many at the other end of the block.

Far more than I had counted on.

Orestes made a pretty girl. He bowed deeply. ‘Lord, if you and your men would favour us . . .?’

He indicated the wretched wheel.

Diomedes rode in, laughing, and his fist knocked Orestes to the ground.

I wanted him, so I ran forward, bare legs flashing, almost under his horse’s hooves.

It is amazing how a woman’s dress blinds a man, even when the man suspects that he’s dealing with other men. Diomedes should never have let me in so close. On the other hand, he was too stupid to live.

I didn’t throw myself on poor Orestes, who had a broken jaw.

I sliced Diomedes’ horse from forelegs to penis with a very sharp knife and kept going under, grabbed one dangling foot and pulled him from the dying horse’s back.

One of his men was awake, and close at his master’s side. He cut at me, and I never saw the blow.

It fell on the shoulder of my scale corselet. We were all in armour, under our dresses.

I screamed something – the blow hurt, the opening of a bloom in spring exploding colour into the world, except faster, because it fell right on my wound of two days before. But the scales held, and my scream had the desired effect.

All my boys had swords, and they turned on anyone near at hand.

Our surprise was far from complete – Diomedes’ men must have expected it, because they were trying to keep their distance. Spears were thrown, and we were about to have a vicious street fight. A fight wherein my side was young, inexperienced and had no missile weapons.

Diomedes got his feet under him, and rage overcame any attempt at sense.

He drew, whirled his chlamys over his arm and came at me.

‘You seem to like the mud,’ I said. I got my woman’s chiton over my head in one pull – I’d practised – and around my arm. It was fine Aegyptian linen, and somewhere in the palace the owner was going to be none too happy with me.

They were two to one against us, and yet they hung back. That was human nature – they were freemen and thugs against nobles, and they feared both our superior training and the consequences even if they triumphed. I wanted to curse them. I wanted them to come in. But no plan is ever perfect.

As it was, the half-dozen who came at us from the north had no real notion of fighting mounted, and my pages were able to overcome them with simple adolescent ferocity.

I was aware of none of this, except as a distant set of blows and howls, because for all his failings, Diomedes was fast and mean and bigger than me. He was large enough that most of my superior skills were negated.

He hacked overhanded at me, and I had to step quickly to avoid getting my chlamys arm broken. His reach was the same as mine.

I needed to get inside his reach.

I crouched in my guard, flashed a glance behind me to see how the pages were doing – I was worried, by then – and Diomedes took advantage of my distraction to strike.

He went for a grapple. He was big, but he was not trained the way I had been trained. The moment he was in range, I punched my xiphos pommel into his teeth, passed my left foot over my right and threw my left hand into the needle’s eye between his sword-arm elbow and armpit. My weight slammed into him as I got my arm up – the gods were with me, and by pure sweet chance my little finger went deep into his nostril and he stumbled – and I had him.

Arm up, elbow locked, turned into the ground.

The simplest control hold in pankration, and I had him kneeling at my feet, my sword at his cheek.

His retainers froze.

And that’s when Polystratus and Philip the Red appeared over the walls on either side of the alley with a dozen more men, all armed with bows.

‘Lay down your arms,’ Philip shouted.

One of Diomedes’ thugs turned to run and Polystratus shot him dead.

They dropped their swords and clubs with a series of clatters and a soft thwop as the weapons went into the mud.

Diomedes grunted, and I put more pressure on his arm and he gave a little scream. I had his right arm just at the edge of dislocation. As it was, his arm would hurt for a week.

I didn’t hesitate to hurt him. In fact, I dragged Diomedes the length of the agora by his right arm, ruthlessly dislocating the shoulder.

To tell the truth, there was nothing ruthless about it. I enjoyed it. He screamed quite a bit.

The retainers were stripped naked and tied together by Philip’s men. In what we might call ‘revealing postures’. If this makes you feel queasy, try to remember that these were the men who had raped our friend.

My sword made a bloody little furrow in Diomedes’ cheek. I remember that best of all – the blood running down his cheek as he begged me to let him go.

I didn’t. I dragged him into the agora and up to the rostrum where merchants announced their wares and sometimes men accused other men of using false weights or selling bad horses.

In the middle of the agora, surrounded by Athenian merchants and Thessalian horse dealers, I stopped. It was possible that Attalus had grown powerful enough to kill me in broad daylight with fifty witnesses, but I doubted it.

I waited. Diomedes screamed. I thought of Pausanias, lying on a couch in the queen’s chambers, his face to the wall, and I twisted the bastard’s dislocated shoulder again. And again.

‘This man who is screaming like a woman dishonoured my friend,’ I shouted from the rostrum. ‘His name is Diomedes. He is the nephew of the king’s friend Attalus, and he is a faithless coward, a whore and a hermaphrodite. Aren’t you, Diomedes?’

And I rotated his shoulder, and he screamed.

Shall I leave the rest out?

But that’s how it was, in Macedon.

Eventually, the royal companions came, ‘rescued’ Diomedes and arrested me. That was the dangerous part – being walked to the palace, I wondered whether they’d let me be killed. But they were serious men, in armour, and Diomedes was a wreck of excrement and fear. He couldn’t even speak.

I was dragged before Philip, dirty, disarmed and with my hands tied behind me like a thief. Diomedes was, after all, the royal favourite.

Philip was sitting on an ivory stool, playing with his dogs. As I came in, he scratched his beard and growled, and for a moment he looked like one of his mastiffs.

‘Ptolemy,’ he grumbled. He looked deeply unhappy. ‘What the fuck have you been doing?’

I bowed. ‘Lord,’ I said, ‘Attalus is planning to murder us – the older pages. Diomedes tried to trap me in the streets. I fought back.’

Philip spat. ‘Attalus – Lord Attalus, the Commander of Asia – is plotting to murder some boys?’ He shook his head angrily.

I shrugged. ‘Do you know that he ordered Pausanias raped? By fifty men? By slaves?’ I asked.

‘I am your king, boy. You do not question me. I question you.’ Philip picked up a cup of wine, poured a libation on the floor like a farmer and drank the rest off. ‘Yes, I have heard that there was some matter involving Pausanias. But the boy always exaggerates everything.’

I shook my head and pointed towards the queen’s wing of the palace. ‘Go and see him,’ I said. ‘In this, he need say nothing. Just look at him and see if I exaggerate.’

Philip turned his head away. ‘Ptolemy,’ he began. Cleared his throat. ‘This is more complicated than you can imagine, boy.’

I raised my head and met him eye to eye. ‘Lord, your friend Attalus is trying to kill my friends – or rape them with slaves.’

‘I will deal with men who break my laws!’ Philip said. ‘You cannot take the law into your own hands!’

I shrugged. ‘If I had not ambushed Diomedes, his men would have killed me on the spot. Or worse.’

Philip gazed at a tapestry on the wall – the Rape of Europa, of all things.

I was not making any headway, and it occurred to me – for the first time, I think – that Philip could not actually accept what I was saying, because to accept it would have been to give up on a number of his cherished notions of how his court should function. Of his own power. Of his need to dispossess Alexander, although I’m not sure he ever admitted that to himself.

In fact, when you are a royal page, you are so deep in the court intrigue that it is like the blood in your body. And here, suddenly, I had to face the reality that the king himself didn’t really know what was going on.

‘Does my son plot to kill me?’ Philip asked, suddenly.

‘No,’ I said, although my heart beat so loudly that I was afraid the king would hear it in my chest.

‘Attalus says he has a plot – with that bitch his mother. Tell it to me, and I will see that you are protected and favoured.’ Philip was showing his old iron – telling me to my face that he knew that something was up.

I remember that, because up until then, I had tried to be loyal to Alexander and loyal to the old king, as well.

But in that moment, I had to choose.

I was smart enough to stay in my role – as an angry youth. I forced a sneer. ‘I’m sorry you think I look like the sort of man who informs on his friends,’ I said.

Philip grabbed my hands. ‘Look, you idiot – if Alexander tries for me and fails I’ll have to kill him. If he kills me, he’ll never manage to rule – he’s too weak, too womanish, too easily swayed. Someone like Attalus will drag him down. Tell him from me – I need the balance. So does he. Let it be as it is now.’ He released me.

I shrugged. ‘I’ll tell him,’ he said. ‘No idea what he’ll say.’

‘Does he know his own limitations?’ Philip asked the ceiling. ‘If I die, the whole thing is gone – Athens wins, and Macedon is a memory. None of the nobles will follow Alexander. He’s too . . . arrogant. Ignorant. Young.’

Philip saw his son only through a veil of his own failings. Very human, but surprising from the man who was King of Macedon. Philip couldn’t let himself imagine that Alexander could do without him.

Alexander couldn’t imagine that his father could conquer Asia without him.

I stood silent and judged them. On behalf of Macedon.

‘You will make a public apology to Diomedes at the wedding.’ He pointed at the door.

I bowed. ‘What wedding, lord?’

Philip laughed. ‘I am marrying young Cleopatra to my cousin, Alexander of Epiros. Olympias will be removed from the succession and I’ll be shot of her for ever.’ He smiled and poured more wine. ‘I’m inviting all of Greece, boy. Athens will be empty.’

I said nothing. Cleopatra was Attalus’s niece, remember. Not the same Cleopatra as Alexander’s sister, due to be married to Alexander of Epiros at Aegae. Pay attention, boy – it’s not my fault they were all inbred and had the same names.

‘And this time next year, I’ll cross into Asia. You could be with me, Ptolemy. I saw what you did at Chaeronea. You can lead. Men will follow you, despite that ugly mug you’ve got.’

Philip poured another libation. Drank more.

‘It’s like riding an unbroken horse,’ he said, after he had allowed himself a sip. ‘Sooner or later I’m going to slip and get thrown.’ He frowned. I wasn’t sure he knew I was there. ‘And then it all comes down. Fuck them all.’

I got out of the room as fast as I could.

I was one of the first at court to know of the wedding, but in a few days it was the only topic. The court was to be moved to the ancient, sacred capital at Aegae. The theatre had been rebuilt, there were two new temples and everything shone with marble, polished bronze and new gilt.

Philip was going to sponsor a set of festivities lasting fifteen days, to overawe Greece with his civilised power as much as his armies dominated their thoughts of war and violence. He had hired the best playwrights and the best poets, the best rhapsodes, the best musicians.

I’m telling this out of order, because it’s all jumbled up in my mind. I beat the living shit out of Diomedes and then, a week or so later, we rode north for Aegae and in that time, a great many things changed.

Cleopatra – the king’s fourth wife – gave birth to a son. A healthy son. Philip was openly delighted.

That night he threw a feast. All were invited – even Alexander and his men.

Pausanias rose from his bed in the queen’s wing of the palace and went to Philip to make a formal complaint. He did this before the entire court, two hundred of the most powerful men in Macedon and Thessaly, with fifty more highland noblemen of his own family to listen, most of the royal companions and every one of the pages of his own generation except me.

Alexander ordered me to stay in his rooms. He thought that Attalus would try to kill me if he saw me.

But Pausanias did something incredibly brave. He did what Attalus never imagined he’d dare to – he swore a complaint. He admitted that he’d been raped. In effect, he admitted his weakness, but at high political cost to Attalus, who thought that the man would suffer in silence.

Attalus pretended that nothing had happened, but they watched – I heard this from Nearchus and from Black Cleitus too – as they watched, Philip turned his back on his senior adviser.

Later – an hour later – when Attalus demanded my head on a platter, the king again turned his back on Attalus. He didn’t even respond.

But still later – and very drunk – Philip also dismissed the charges against Attalus, with a weak joke about how everyone knew that Pausanias was prone to exaggerate. The ‘joke’ carried – intended or not – the suggestion that Pausanias had wanted what happened.

Pausanias turned very pale. Nearchus, who was closest to him, said for the rest of his life that Pausanias stumbled as if he’d been struck.

The next day Philip attended the newborn’s naming ceremony. He held the squawking infant high in front of a thousand Macedonians and named him Caranus – the name of the founder of the dynasty, and thus a strong suggestion that he would be King of Macedon. Alexander held his tongue. But he was as pale as Pausanias that night. That part I saw. And the king kept his back resolutely to Attalus, who was forced to accept that the birth of his grand-nephew wasn’t going to save him from the king’s anger.

And that day – almost convenient, the timing was – we received a dispatch from Parmenio, who was already in the field in Asia, saying that he had taken Ephesus, the mighty city of Artemis, without a fight – that they had opened their gates to him – and that he had set up an image of Philip beside the image of Artemis in the great temple.

All the court applauded. Even the ambassadors applauded. Alexander spilled his wine and then apologised for his clumsiness.

But after two more days of it, Attalus gathered his staff and his picked men – and Diomedes – and rode away to Asia with recruits and reinforcements for Parmenio. He was supposed to have had a major role in the ceremonies at Aegae, but he left. I still think that the king ordered him to go. I think it was something of a working exile.

Alexander knew all about the dispatch from Asia, and he knew all about the preparations for the ornate wedding of his sister. He watched those preparations with the same anger he showed over the preparations for war in Asia. He watched the priests gather, watched Olympias arrange for a new gown with new, heavy gold jewellery, watched the musicians practise.

‘The Athenians, at least, will view us with the contempt we deserve.’ Alexander shrugged. He indicated a new statue of Philip in marble with bronze eyes, being loaded on a cart.

‘My father, the god,’ he said.

In fact, Philip seemed to have included himself in the pantheon – a sort of unlucky thirteenth god, but he’d built a small temple at Olympias that could be interpreted as a temple to Philip, and now, in the procession of the gods, he’d included an image of himself. And Parmenio had put his image in the Temple of Artemis. Which seemed to me like hubris.

On the other hand, I was inclined to think that the Athenians would think whatever they were told, at least until they’d rebuilt their fortunes. I had begun to experience that cynicism that comes easily to young people. And to anyone who has anything to do with politics.

We travelled north from Pella to the old capital. Pausanias travelled with us. No one could make a joke near him, but he was alive and apparently unbroken, although pale and subdued. If he had been prone to exaggeration before, now he was merely silent. His hands shook all the time.

We rode up to the old capital in a band, like we were going to war. All the older pages wore armour, and the younger ones too, if they owned any. We didn’t dare go to the armoury, which Attalus virtually owned. I, for one, thought his ‘exile’ was a ruse and suspected he was out in the countryside with a band of his retainers, ready to attack us. There was an agora rumour that he meant to kill the king and seize power.

I was concerned to see that Olympias and her household travelled with us. She was as big a target as we were, and Attalus had apparently stated – in his rage the day after I taught Diomedes a lesson – that Olympias had arranged the whole thing and he’d have her killed. Apparently Attalus told the king – repeatedly, right up until the moment he left for Asia – that Olympias and Alexander were plotting his death.

The glories of Macedon, eh?

But Attalus didn’t come with us to Aegae. And Parmenio, the steadiest of his generation except for Antipater, was in Asia. And Antipater was nowhere to be found – in fact, he, too, was in self-imposed exile, on his farms.

We rode through a summer landscape of prosperity that thinly covered a state in which we were near to civil war – nearer than we had been in fifty years. Rumours were everywhere.

I remember that on the second day out of Pella, we were alerted by Polystratus that there was a column of foreigners coming the other way, and we took up our battle stations – Attalus employed a lot of Thracians, and we were ready for an attack.

These weren’t Thracians, but Athenian traders on their way to Pella, where they imagined the court to be. Nearchus turned them around, brusquely enough, but when we discovered that they had a cargo of swords and sword blades, we asked them to open their bales, and we probably put them in profit on the spot – fifty of the richest young men in Macedon. The Athenians had Keltoi swords from north of Illyria, beautiful swords with long, leaf-shaped blades and deep central fullers – much stiffer and heavier than our swords or Greek swords, but easy in the hand, and the longer blades promised a longer reach on horseback.

One of the traders showed me how the Keltoi held their swords, with a thumb pressed into the hollow of the blade. I bought the sword, and rode north playing with it. It was a foot longer than my xiphos.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell. What I wanted to tell is that Pausanias came alive at the sight of the blades. He was poor, and I loaned him money, and he purchased a beautiful weapon – the size of a xiphos, but with that heavy leaf blade, sharper than a bronze razor and with an African ivory hilt worked like a chariot and a running team. Superb work.

For as long as he was buying the sword, Pausanias was animated and alive. Even his hair seemed to regain its vibrancy.

And then it was gone. And he sank back into himself, and his face went slack, as if he’d taken a death blow.

We reached Aegae about the same time as the Athenian embassy. I looked for men I knew – I had rather hoped to see Kineas or Diodorus. But the Athenians had not sent any of their great men, except Phokion, and he was a guest friend of the king. He was kind enough to remember me. He clasped my arm – warrior to warrior, a nice compliment.

‘Why are you wearing armour, son of Lagus?’ he asked.

‘Difficult times,’ I said, looking elsewhere. Great as was my respect for the Athenian strategos, I was not going to tell him about our internal squabbles.

Indeed, upon arrival at Aegae, we all breathed a great sigh of relief. Aegae was sacred ground – no one would defile it with treason. Alexander and Olympias and Pausanias and I should all be safe, at least for the next fifteen days. Or so we reckoned.

That night, I played knucklebones with Nearchus and Black Cleitus, drank too much, lost at Polis to Alexander. He was withdrawn, even by his own standards.

I offered to go and check on Pausanias, and Alexander shook his head and held out his wine cup to have it refilled. ‘Pausanias is with my mother, now,’ he said. He said it in much the same voice as a man might have said that another man had died.

The next day, the festivities began. The scale was unprecedented for Macedon, and had I never been to Athens, I think I would have been thrilled. As it was, I could only wince – our most lavish celebration, when placed next to, say, the Panatheneum, was like tinsel placed next to real gold. Philip’s crass lack of taste was like a physical blow, and the Theban envoys didn’t bother to hide their sneers.

But the Herald of Athens – not a man I knew – announced that all treaties had been ratified, and that any Macedonian criminal to be found in Athens would be handed over – a remarkable concession for Athens to make, and not even something for which we’d asked. It made me suspicious, and what made me more suspicious was that Phokion turned his head away while it was read aloud.

There was a feast that night. Philip let it be known that I was welcome – I put on my best, and my best was as good as the best the Athenians had – and lay on a kline with a Thessalian nobleman who was fascinated with everything from Athens.

Philip got very drunk and said a great many things that made all of us wince. He referred to the cities of Greece with the term we use for sex slaves, and he made slighting references to Athens and Sparta and the Great King of Persia. In fact, he sounded like a petty and insecure tyrant, and he scared me.

What hurt me most was that many of the older Macedonians ate this sort of crap up, as if Philip’s insults actually made Macedon greater or Athens lesser. And it was in looking around that hall that I realised how many of the older, wiser and better nobles were gone. Parmenio was gone, with Amyntas, in Asia. I hated Attalus, but he was the king’s friend, and he was gone. Antipater was present – but not in any place of favour, and none of his own inner circle was there, except me – if I even counted. The king had stripped himself of his closest and best men.

The men he had near him were inferior in every respect, and this crass racism was only the surface of it.

And Alexander watched them the way a hawk watches rabbits. He remained aloof – but it seemed that he might pounce at any moment.

We all drank too much. And Philip ended the evening when he stood up, his chiton open to the crotch, showing his parts, so to speak, and stood by his kline.

‘I am the King of Macedon!’ he said. ‘And this time next year, I’ll be the lord of Asia, and if I want to be a god, I’ll make myself one!’

He tottered away, narrowly missed falling, and two royal companions escorted him to bed.

Alexander may have said something, but his sneer was so palpable that no one needed to hear him. Thebans and Athenians and Thessalians – and Macedonians – noted it.

There were whispers that Philip needed to go. I heard them.

I walked Alexander back to his quarters that night. He was in a large semi-private house, something of a treasury for his family, and it rankled that he was not housed at the palace. It rankled doubly that we had Olympias. She seemed to be awake all the time, and when she wasn’t with Pausanias she seemed inclined to flirt with the pages and Hephaestion.

She was waiting for us, and demanded the story of the evening. Alexander told her, in the pained tones that sons keep for their mothers, and finally forced her to go to bed by refusing to talk any more. He was rude. She was not. She smiled.

‘Tomorrow, you will love me as you have never loved me before,’ she said.

Alexander turned his back on her. Crossed his arms.

She laughed. Then she stopped in front of me, and all the power of those eyes was on me. ‘When you had Diomedes at your feet,’ she said, ‘did his screams please you?’

I looked at the floor.

‘Now, now, my little man,’ she said. This from a woman whose eyes were at my chest. ‘No lies to the queen. Were you disgusted by his weakness? Elated at your own success? Did you force yourself to hurt him in memory of what he did to your poor friend?’ She smiled with real understanding. ‘Or was it delightful to inflict terror and pain on him?’

I stood with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.

‘Well, we both know, don’t we?’ she said. ‘Don’t you forget, or grow superior, eh, Ptolemy?’ She laughed at me. ‘Why do you lie to yourself ?’ And walked away, floating on air.

When she was gone, Alexander turned to a slave. ‘Wine,’ he said, snapping his fingers.

The slave, terrified, spilled wine. Alexander looked at the poor boy and he fled.

I picked up the pitcher. A little liquid still sloshed in the base, and I poured a kraterful and handed it to the prince, who poured a libation.

‘To Zeus, god of kings,’ he said.

I had never heard him invoke Zeus so directly.

I must have opened my mouth, because Alexander held up a hand. ‘Ask me nothing. I do not wish to speak, or play a game. I do not even wish to be alive, just now. Please leave me.’

Startled, I took the empty wine cup from him and went to withdraw.

‘Stop,’ Alexander said. ‘I owe you my thanks, Ptolemy. Your attack on Diomedes was brilliant.’

I bowed. ‘It almost went badly. I didn’t plan for everything . . .’

Alexander managed a grim smile. ‘Stop, you sound too much like the cook who always apologises for flaws in the dinner you’d never have found yourself. You humiliated Attalus and put him in the wrong – at just the moment. It all went as Mother said it would,’ he said. And shrugged. ‘She is . . . the very best intriguer I have ever known.’

It hadn’t occurred to me that my brilliant and lucky attack on Diomedes had been part of a larger plan. ‘The queen planned to have Attalus sent away?’ I asked.

Alexander shook his head. ‘You have my thanks,’ he said. ‘Now go away, before I say something I will regret.’

The next day, I had the whole corps of former pages on alert, and Hephaestion said that Alexander hadn’t slept all night. It wasn’t my duty day, but we were all to march in the parade – the ambassadors and all the nobles, led by Philip in a gleaming white chiton and gold sandals. It sounded like bad theatre to me, but we polished our best armour. Those of us who had been to Athens looked like gods. The rest merely looked like Macedonians.

Olympias appeared in white and gold, her dark hair piled in golden combs and strings of pearls on her head like a temple to Nike, who adorned her head at the pinnacle of her hair – and yet she carried it, weight and drama, as if born to it. Philip, despite his steady distaste for her scheming, came over to compliment her. He looked a little silly in his white and gold – but only until you caught his eye, and then he was Philip of Macedon.

But if anyone there looked like a god come to earth, it was she, not he.

He bent down to speak to her, where she stood surrounded by her women. She laughed at him, and he kissed her – just a peck on the cheek. And she laughed again, caught his head and pulled him down – not in an embrace, as I expected, but to whisper in his ear.

He nodded.

I was standing at the head of the former pages. Technically, we were all royal companions, but everyone sill called us ‘pages’.

‘Ptolemy,’ he said.

I bowed.

‘I wish to take Pausanias back into my personal guard,’ he said, and held out his hand.

Pausanias was standing close behind me. I hadn’t realised that he was there.

Philip smiled at him. In that smile, I read that he – a great king – was being magnanimous, and stating – as he could, because he was king – that whatever had happened, he would take Pausanias as a bodyguard. I’ll remind you that he was a forgiving man, when he was sober, and he assumed that the honour would wipe away the stains, and Pausanias – older and wiser – would rise to the occasion.

I could see Pausanias. He paled. And his eyes slipped away to Olympias. And he gave the king an unsteady bow and crossed the long twenty or so paces to where the king’s own companions stood.

How he must have feared to cross that gap. We were his friends – they were his tormentors. Or that’s how I saw it, because he walked with his head high, but with the gait of a nervous colt.

At the head of the procession, the formal statues on their ceremonial platforms were carried by the strongest slaves – eight slaves to a god. All carved of Parian marble with hair and eyes of pure gold. Aphrodite, decently clothed, and Hera, goddess of wives and mothers; Artemis, effeminate Dionysus, Ares and Apollo and Hephaestos and the rest, and Zeus at their head, a foot taller than the other gods. And next to him, a statue of Philip.

There was a gasp, even from the royal companions.

Philip rode it out and stood like a rooster, inviting compliment.

I admired his brazenness.

The Athenians didn’t. Even Phokion, who seemed to love Philip, turned away.

But the sun was rising, and the parade was ready, and we started towards the new theatre.

And then we stopped. It is the way with parades – they start and stop, and get slower and slower.

But what came back to us was an order from the king. He asked Alexander to come and enter the theatre with him.

Something terrible happened on Alexander’s face, then. His father had shown him no love at all for more than a year – had all but cut him from the succession. But here – all of a sudden – he was invited to walk with his father in the most important ceremonial of the most important two weeks of the year.

He had a difficult time getting his face under control, and twice he looked at his mother.

Then he walked forward, and he walked with the same nervous gait that Pausanias had used.

I thanked the gods for my own mother and father, that I had not been born to the Royal House of Macedon. And I didn’t know the half of it.

As we marched into the theatre, the royal companions entered after the statues and turned to the right, forming their ranks on the sand while the priests put the statues into their niches for the duration of the games. I was bored, and my left shoulder hurt, and I wondered if I would be any good. I had entered the pankration, and I was aware that a win would help restore me to Philip’s good graces. And the pain in my shoulder was a worry.

We were behind the king, and my squadron was to form to the left as we entered the theatre, while the king went to the centre and then Olympias and her ladies would enter with Cleopatra (the king’s wife, not that other one) and her ladies. Together, because it amused Philip to make them cooperate.

As we started to enter, Philip seemed to hesitate, as if someone had called his name. My front rank appeared to fall apart. I noticed that Black Cleitus, my left file leader, was hesitating. Well, we were cavalrymen being forced to march like hoplites, but I hated to make a bad show. I turned farther and heard the noise, turned back to where Cleitus was looking, and saw Perdiccas spring out of the second rank.

Pausanias went past us, his hand all covered in blood.

Perdiccas didn’t follow Pausanias immediately. He looked out on to the sands, turned, and then raced after Pausanias, followed by two more of my men – Leonatus and Andromenes, both highlanders. They were all three close friends, a tight group made tighter by shared blood and highland custom. I roared at them to halt, but they were stubborn bastards.

And only then did I realise that there was more wrong than the loss of cohesion in my ranks.

I had thought, I guess, that Pausanias had broken down and done himself an injury and his relatives were running to see to him.

If I thought anything at all.

But somewhere in that horrible moment I realised that Alexander was kneeling in the sand by Philip, who was lying in a growing pool of red, red blood, with a Keltoi sword sticking out of his gut, the ivory chariot team racing towards the heavens.

And only then did I realise what Pausanias had done.

‘Seal the exits!’ Antipater roared at my elbow.

Antipater – who I hadn’t seen to speak to in months – was suddenly at the head of the parade.

It was the right order. I turned and shouted it at my companions, and they snapped to.

But I could see that Philip was dead. Not dying. He was already gone.

And I remember thinking that I did not have the luxury to think. I know that makes little sense – but it all came together for me. Olympias, Pausanias and Alexander. And I knew – in a heartbeat – that it would mean my life to show a wrinkle of suspicion.

So I shouted for my men to close the exits, and Antipater got the royal companions into the northern half of the theatre.

The crowd was terrified.

Phokion was angry. It showed in his posture – the old warrior was stiff, hips set, ready to fight.

I did my duty, kept them in place and watched as Antipater cleared the theatre a bench at a time. Olympias and her ladies were already gone. They had never entered the theatre, and neither had Cleopatra.

Every foreign contingent was sent to their lodgings with a pair of guards – mostly royal companions – with orders to make sure that not so much as a slave got away until Antipater ordered them released.

I wrapped myself in my role and saw to it that the companions did their work. Slaves came and took the king’s corpse. No one pretended he was still alive.

That meant that Alexander was king.

We cleared the last of the seats, and for a moment, it was just me and Cleitus, way up at the top, watching the Theban embassy moved forcefully down the ramps.

‘Alexander is king!’ Cleitus said.

I nodded.

‘Pausanias killed the king,’ he said.

I nodded.

Cleitus caught my eye. ‘We know better, don’t we?’ he said bitterly.

I remember that moment well. Because I shrugged. ‘Philip was going to ruin us,’ I said. It was in every man’s heart – Philip had turned to hubris and self-indulgence. And in Macedon, when the king slips, you find a new king.

Cleitus thought for a long time. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Poor Alexander,’ he added.

And that’s all we ever said on the subject, except one night in Asia. And that was years and parasanges later, and I’ll tell that tale when I come to it.