God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

THIRTEEN

We marched for home. It was late in the year, and there was snow in the passes again, and the Greeks were happy to see us go.

Alexander was determined that we would march by way of Delphi so that he could consult the oracle. We marched two days through snow, and Poseidon’s mane got icy mud in it and it took me a day to comb it out, with Polystratus bringing pots of warm water. Poseidon was sick, and I didn’t want to lose him. He wasn’t getting any younger, though.

Delphi, and the Pythia, was not open for business. She only prophesies a few months a year – the Pythia then, an older woman named Cynthia, was quite well known and very intelligent. They are not always like that.

She had her priests send the king a respectful message explaining that she could not simply sit on the tripod and implore the god, as it was out of season. Alexander shrugged, dismounted and tossed his reins to a slave.

‘The men and horses need a rest, at any rate. We’ll be here two days.’ He looked at me. ‘Go and tell her that she will prophesy. Negotiate any way you wish, but get it done.’

I got all the glorious jobs.

So I took Thaïs, and went down to the village to visit the Pythia.

Really, she was a very ordinary woman – for a forty-year-old virgin who was well born and ferociously intelligent. We found her grinding barley behind her house. She was using a geared handmill – I’d heard of them, but never seen such a thing.

She took it to pieces in her enthusiasm to show me how it worked.

She and Thaïs were not immediately friends by any means – in fact, on balance, I could see I’d miscalculated, and this was a woman who lived and worked with men, and had little time for women. But Thaïs’s intelligence shone through, and her superlative social skills, and in an hour the three of us were drinking wine.

‘He needs you to prophesy,’ I said, finally. ‘Blessed Pythia, all Greece needs you.’

She smiled. ‘You know that the Great King is one of our patrons?’

I nodded.

She laughed. ‘He’s doomed. Do you know your Persian politics?’

I shook my head. ‘The only politics I know are those of the Macedonian court. Well – Athens. I know a little of Athens.’

Thaïs wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something bad. ‘Bagoaz is Grand Vizier,’ she said. ‘He rules by intrigue and murder. He killed Arses, who was Great King, and he’s replaced him with some minor nobleman.’

The Pythia smiled. ‘Well! Nicely put. Except that young Codoman just made Bagoaz drink poison and is now master in his own house. But he’s only a distant relation of the Great Kings of the past – and many of the eastern nobles do not accept him at all.’

I had never heard so much about Persia. To us, Persia was the great enemy, a magnificent unknown. I suppose that Parmenio knew such stuff, but up until then, I didn’t.

‘There has never been a better time to invade Persia,’ the Pythia said, sipping her wine. ‘I speak no prophecy, young man. Codoman has Greek mercenaries, Greek scribes, Greek administrators. He runs his household with Greeks. He is virtually at war with his own Mede nobles. Persia is divided internally, taxes are late coming in, and over a third of the total administration of the country is already in the hands of men sympathetic to your king.’

Thaïs smiled. ‘I would like to know more about such things,’ she said.

‘I will tell the king. But he sets enormous store by matters of religion, and he wants the blessing of the gods.’ I shook my head.

The Pythia nodded. ‘Then he can return in the spring, and I will prophesy for him.’ She finished her wine. ‘I have work to do. Tell the king that nothing save force of arms would get me to my tripod.’ She smiled, I smiled, and Thaïs finished her wine.

The Pythia forestalled her with a hand on her shoulder. ‘Stay with me a while,’ she said.

Thaïs smiled to herself and stayed.

I asked no questions. But I summoned Polystratus and sent him to the king with a message.

Alexander walked down to the Pythia’s house a few hours later with a dozen Hetaeroi and the duty hypaspitoi. I was reminded uncomfortably of the entourage that followed him to the visit with Diogenes. But it was bitterly cold, and we were all swathed in multiple chlamyses, and many men had fleece hats – all the hypaspitoi. We trooped to her door.

Alexander knocked politely.

Thaïs opened the door. She smiled. ‘The Pythia was expecting you.’

Alexander ducked through her doorway, went inside and bowed to the Priestess of Apollo. Then he picked her up in his arms and carried her out of her house.

She didn’t raise a squeal. She was not a small woman – she was well enough formed that I wondered at her virginity – but the king was in top shape and carried her easily, without unseemly grunting.

It is four stades from the town to the temple, and all steeply uphill.

He carried her all the way, even though we were all around him. Thaïs followed. She caught my hand.

I looked at her.

She blew me a kiss.

I was jealous – sure in my head that Thaïs had just lain with the Pythia. Angry. Resentful. Puzzled. She’d just gone with that woman. Not a glance, not a look.

So I followed Alexander up the hill, tormenting myself.

Thaïs was laughing.

Damn her.

We went up the hill all the way to the temple, and if Alexander was flagging, he never gave a sign. He carried her up the steps of the temple and in through the great bronze screens, which were open. Somebody had accepted a bribe.

He carried her to her tripod, which someone had set over the cleft.

But there were no priests. They were the required intermediary. I knew how it worked – the priestess breathed in the fumes from the cleft, and the god came to her, and she spoke, and the priests translated her words.

Alexander put her on the tripod and set her down. She gave a little squeak – the tripod had been set badly, and it wobbled and she shrieked as it began to topple – back, into the cleft.

Alexander’s right arm shot out and caught the tripod – a heavy bronze artifact that weighed as much as a strong man, and the Pythia was no small woman. He caught them both on the brink of the cleft – which was only a man’s shoulders wide but as deep as Tartarus – and pulled them back to safety, and the Pythia threw her arms around his neck.

‘You are invincible!’ she breathed.

But we all heard her.

Alexander beamed with joy like a boy on a feast day.

He set her on her feet and offered to carry her down the hill to her house.

She laughed. I don’t know how often the Pythia laughed in the temple, but I doubt it happened often. She looked around. ‘A most eventful day,’ she said. ‘If someone would lend me a cloak, I would return to my work.’

Thaïs handed her a long red cloak, which she held for a moment. ‘It has your smell,’ she said to Thaïs, and I felt a spear-prick.

Thaïs raised her two flawless eyebrows. ‘Keep it for my sake, then,’ she said.

Alexander turned aside to Thaïs. ‘I think you are the first woman to be allowed here, except for the priestess.’ He looked worried. I could read his mind – he knew that the ‘prophecy’ he’d just gained was irregular, and he was afraid that people would point at Thaïs as an aspect of pollution or sacrilege.

‘I?’ asked Thaïs. ‘I am not here,’ she said, and walked out of the precinct.

The next day, we rode together. I was still in turmoil. She had slept elsewhere that night, and that happened often enough, but I felt for her in the night. I was angry and hurt.

‘You do not own me,’ she said. Ares, she was angry.

This is the part I had not understood. I had made her angry.

I looked around, made a motion to Polystratus. ‘I do not own you. But I love you, and you slept with someone else. For nothing but the pleasure of it, I assume.’ Oh, I was being prim and proper and adult.

She shrugged. ‘Girls don’t make love. They just play. And she’s the Pythia. I am a priestess of Aphrodite. I cannot refuse the Pythia. And she was so lonely.’ She turned to me, and her eyes, despite some brimming tears, were hot with anger. ‘And you made me feel bad about it. Like a jealous boy. I don’t want to spend years with a jealous boy. I want to spend years with a noble man.’

‘Is that a clever, sophisticated, Athenian way of saying that you can spread your legs for whomever you please?’ I asked.

She spat. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Listen, Ptolemy. Let me tell you a harsh fact. I spread my legs for whomever I please. All freewomen do. Otherwise, we are slaves. If we can only open and close our cunts when you tell us, we are slaves. Period, end of story, no argument. If you want me, you must win me every day. Not just once, and then lock me away for future concubinage. If you cannot accept that,’ she sighed, ‘I have to face a long, cold journey back to Athens.’

I rode on, tight-lipped. Too hurt to speak.

She dropped back to her women.

Next day, I sent Polystratus to fetch her to my tent. It was colder than the blackest depths of Tartarus and I had a brazier going.

She came, which was a good sign, I felt.

‘I want you,’ I said.

‘Good,’ she said, and sat.

‘I need to negotiate a treaty with you,’ I said. ‘I cannot keep you – and win you every day. I cannot. I lack the time, and I have to live in a world of men.’

Thaïs laughed. ‘Do I get wine while we bargain?’

‘Hot wine, if Ochrid knows what’s good for him. First, I have considered your idea of freedom. Even if I accepted it in principle – and I’m not positive I do – I am a senior officer of the king, and a man in a world of warriors, and if you spread your legs for Nearchus I have to kill him.’

‘Nearchus?’ she asked. She shook her head. ‘He’s pretty, but he’s dumb.’

‘Perdiccas?’ I asked.

‘Spare me.’ She sighed. ‘You are saying that I cannot truly be free due to the constraints of your culture, in which I am choosing to live.’

I nodded. ‘Exactly!’

‘Did you consider that I might figure this out all on my own?’ she asked. ‘The Pythia . . . was lonely. And no one needed to know but us.’ She shrugged.

‘So I was being tested,’ I said.

She shrugged again. ‘If you like. You are not actually the centre of the universe, my love. Other people exist.’

‘Could you stop putting me in my place?’ I asked.

She laughed, drank some hot wine and quite suddenly got up, leaned over and kissed me. The scent of her – which I hadn’t smelled in two days – threatened to overwhelm me. My penis was instantly hard – I offer this vulgarity not to be salacious, young man, but to give you an idea of her power.

‘I will never offend you or yours,’ she said. ‘You are my friend, my heart. And you will not ever ask me questions. Because if you do, I will tell you the answers. My love, I am a hetaera, not a wife. If you want a kept virgin, go and get one, and leave me be.’

I nodded. ‘What if I ask you questions and I can stand the answers?’ I asked.

‘Then you will be unlike any man I’ve ever known,’ she said.

‘Did the Pythia please you?’ I asked.

‘Beautifully. She is a very skilled lover. Priestesses of Apollo always are.’ She shrugged. ‘And she is in a position to aid me. Delphi has powerful friends, and makes a powerful friend, too.’

I must have looked spectacularly dense. She made a motion with her hand – dimissal, annoyance. ‘Do you know that in every relationship, there comes a moment when I ask myself – Aphrodite, is he as dumb as he seems?’ Her eyes bored into mine.

Note that we were not having my conversation – the one where I tasked her with infidelity. I was on the defensive and losing ground more quickly than a badly ordered phalanx in a rout. ‘Well?’

‘She—’

‘I did not make love to her because she can help the crusade in Asia,’ Thaïs said. ‘But she can do us more service than ten thousand hoplites. Because Delphi is the clearing house of information for all of Hellas – and Asia, too. Do you understand?’

I’m sure I nodded. In truth, I didn’t understand. Not until much later.

But I was smart enough to know that I didn’t want to lose her, not for anything.

I nodded slowly. The spear-point was there, somewhere down in my belly, grating softly against my ribs, but I was going to learn to deal with it, because this was the woman I wanted.

‘She was better than me?’ my mouth asked before my brain could stop it.

Thaïs reached out a hand and caught my face in it. ‘I never, ever compare. Don’t ever ask me to again.’

I wanted to cry.

She shook her head. ‘I will teach you the rules, love. It will be worth it. Love, far from being scary, dangerous and horrid, is in fact a marvellous engine of energy and creation – but it needs a harness, and that harness is rules. Please?’ she asked, waiting for me to let her on to my lap.

I hesitated.

‘Ptolemy,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to play at this many times. If you cannot live with me as I am – let’s part now. Right now, this instant. Otherwise, let’s move on and make love. The talking is done.’ She smiled, and it wasn’t a hurt smile or a difficult smile – but it was a deeply knowledgeable one. ‘Choose.’

I looked into those remarkable blue eyes. ‘You mean, I can choose between sending you away, and having the best sex of my life?’ I sighed. ‘I don’t know. I need time to think,’ I said, while reaching my warm hands under her gown.

‘Humour,’ she said, through my kisses, ‘is your outstanding virtue.’

‘I thought it was my large penis,’ I said.

She laughed into my mouth. We were warm.

We spent the winter training north of Pella. This was new. As I’ve said, Philip always sent the army home for the winter. Alexander did not. He kept the entire force in the field – funded by the League of Corinth, at a drachma per soldier per day.

We climbed mountains in the snow.

We practised seizing ridges and passes. In the snow.

We charged lines of straw dummies with our lances. On horseback. In the snow.

We practised setting camp and setting fires, digging in, collecting forage – in the snow.

And we drilled.

Ares, it was endless.

Look, I’m good at drill. I love drill. I love the sort of ritual-team-dance aspect to drill – the stamp of a thousand perfectly timed feet sends a thrill down my spine. But that winter was absurd. We drilled and drilled and drilled, and I’m not sure that there’s any army in history that spent as much time practising the Spartan Counter-March as we did. Every day, five or six times a day – with wheeling, sprinting, breaking and reforming, marching to the left, right and rear by files, half-files and double files. On and on.

Every damn day.

The troopers cursed him. The aristocrats were good officers at first, but after two months – remember, we’d been at it all summer, too – people just wanted a cup of wine and a fuck.

I had to send Thaïs away, because men were starting to hate me for having her. Which was sad, because she loved it, and she kept people amused – she’d show up in the phalanx in armour and already know the drill, she’d ride a horse shooting a bow, she’d go off with the scouts until they caught her – she could easily pass for a man, but something often gave her away, too.

She had found a hobby. I didn’t know what it was and I knew I wasn’t allowed to ask, but she suddenly wrote a great many letters – on and on, really. Sometimes a dozen a day. And she bought a pair of Thracian slaves – and sent one home. Into the mountains. I didn’t understand that at all.

She smiled at me and dared me to ask.

At any rate, after a month I didn’t have to pay attention any more, because I had to send her to my estates. After that, the rest of the winter was a blur of marching and climbing and freezing cold – you climb a mountain in two feet of snow wearing open-toed boots. Go ahead. The pezhetaeroi were in sandals. I had a horse, most of the time – a sort of living leg-warmer.

I knew what we were doing. We were going to blow the Thracians right out of their northern kingdom and carve a road to the Danube – to buy Antipater a defensible border while we were away conquering Asia. It was a good plan, in a general, strategic way. But it was an obvious plan, and every man, woman and child on both sides of the nebulous border between Macedon and the wild Thracians knew we were coming as soon as the passes were free of snow.

Alexander did have one shaved knucklebone, though. He sent our fleet – twenty triremes and some supply ships – from Amphilopolis, around through the Dardanelles and into the Euxine Sea. In part it was exploration – the Macedonian fleet had never attempted to enter the Euxine. In part it was sheer daring – we knew nothing of the mouth of the Danube, although we found some Amphilopolans who had traded there. But it was a brilliant outflanking move. If it worked. The ships would leave well before the army marched. If the army marched.

One night, I lay in some straw between Cleitus and the king. We were passing a gourd full of wine. Outside, the wind howled. Alectus had just informed the king that we’d lost a little over a hundred men to exposure and the arrows of the Lord of Contagion that month.

I was keeping the Military Journal, by then – in effect, I coordinated everyone’s military reporting, and that had become my major job. Antipater did it for Philip, and he taught me – but I added to the job. I went around to all the regiments and appointed a record-keeping officer – sometimes with the help of the commander, and sometimes in spite of him. Perdiccas called my officers the ‘king’s spies’. The thing was, the king needed to know the truth. Bluster didn’t cut it when you needed a return of effective soldiers, or when we needed to know how many horses and how many riders were available for a particular mission, or which horses needed new tack before the army could march.

And at the same time, the king was paying – with League funds – for a gradual re-armouring of the whole Macedonian army. And that cost money, but it also required endless lists, inventories, record-keeping, tracking inventory . . .

It was all glory and arete, let me tell you.

At any rate, that’s why I was lying wrapped in my cloak in a pile of straw in a freezing-cold barn in northern Macedon, snuggled between the commander of the king’s bodyguard and the king himself, listening to Alectus tell us his figures on sick and injured, with every word sending plumes of mist rising from his mouth. It was cold.

Alexander dismissed him with a cup of hot wine and rolled over. ‘As soon as the passes are clear,’ he said dreamily.

‘Why don’t we go now?’ I asked. ‘I mean, as soon as I can put together a logistics head of food and fodder.’

Alexander laughed. ‘Because that trick will only work once, and I want to save it for a tougher opponent.’

Sometimes, he was scary.

But later, when Alectus was obviously still awake, I turned towards him.

‘What did you learn at Delphi?’ I asked him.

He laughed. ‘I learned that I will live a few years yet, and the king is going to be a god.’ He laughed again.

The passes cleared. Before they cleared, I had all the grain in north-west Macedon gathered in fifty new-built stone granaries that cost a fortune to build and required men to keep roaring fires going all day and all night to keep the ground soft and let the mortar harden without freezing.

All in a day’s work.

We marched from Amphilopolis, headed north, and we moved fast. We had preset camps with supplies waiting at every halt. We flew.

At Neopolis we joined up with our baggage train, and I was reunited with Thaïs, who was fresh and pink-cheeked and looked like a maiden. Most of the army’s wives and sweethearts – and prostitutes and sex toys – came to Neopolis and marched with us. We crossed the Nestus and marched all the way to Philipopolis. The Thracians were conspicuous by their absence.

Thaïs shared my tent and my cloak. Her field household was now reduced to three – her steward, Anonius, from Italy, a Thracian, Strako and a Libyan woman, Bella, a big, attractive black woman who drew the stares of half the army wherever she went. However, she seemed capable of taking care of herself.

The Thracian came and went, foraging and visiting. I warned Thaïs that he would desert, and she laughed.

‘Give me a little credit,’ she said. ‘I have a chain on him.’

The worm of jealousy gnawed at me. It must have showed.

She laughed in my face. ‘I don’t fuck slaves,’ she said, and walked out of my tent.

I hope I don’t make her sound like a harridan. She was not. But we had a spat every day – that’s how we were. She wanted to know every aspect of my business, and I wanted her to respect my privacy, and I didn’t see any need for her to know the inner workings of the Military Journal or the Hetaeroi.

Plenty of things to fight about. Making up was good, too.

Strako kept with us. That impressed me. After two weeks in enemy country, I rolled over, pinned her with a leg and said, ‘OK, I have to know. Why’s he loyal?’

She wasn’t angry – I never knew, with her. She laughed. ‘Well – since you’re keeping me so very warm . . .’ She kissed my nose. ‘I have his wife, child and brother at home. At your home. If he runs, they all die.’

Um. So soft. So beautiful. So funny, so warm.

So hard.

She also received as many letters as the king. I know that to be true, because I sometimes functioned as the Military Secretary, in those days. I certainly saw most of the king’s correspondence, and I saw all the messengers that came in from Pella – one a day, and sometimes two. She had at least two a day. Some were slaves, some were free, and once, her messenger was a Priest of Apollo.

Two more days, and we were at the Shipka Pass. And the wild Thracians were there – in huge numbers. They had thousands of warriors and more armed slaves, and they had a wagon lager of four wheeled carts lining the top of the pass, where it was about two stades wide.

The Prodromoi brought us word.

We rode forward and looked.

‘Impregnable,’ Hephaestion said. From his years of military experience.

But he was right. It was impregnable. Several of Philip’s campaigns had ended right here.

We made camp.

Just as the light was failing – it was late spring, and the days were getting long – Strako came into my tent. I hadn’t seen him in a day. He frowned at me and motioned at Thaïs.

Thaïs was under some cloaks, trying to get warm. She got up, and Strako began to talk while she put on boots.

‘He says the wagons aren’t for defence,’ Thaïs said.

‘How do you know about the wagons?’ I asked.

‘Strako was just up there. In their camp. Listen, love. Tell the king they plan to roll the wagons on you when you attack. And then charge you. They are hoping you’ll bring up artillery to shell the wagons. It is a ruse within a ruse.’ Thaïs listened to the man.

‘You speak Thracian?’ I asked.

‘It was a long winter,’ Thaïs insisted.

I heard the report to the end. And looked at my lover.

‘I can’t expect to be taken to Asia for my good looks,’ she said. ‘I have friends in every city, and the Pythia made me more friends. But there are other tricks – that anyone in politics knows. That anyone who has read Thucydides knows.’

I had heard of Thucydides, but I hadn’t read him. I made a mental note to rectify this.

‘We can trust this report?’ I asked.

‘Or I’m a complete fool,’ she said.

I took it to the king.

Cleitus woke me in the dark. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We’re going to attack. Get up.’

I was up like a shot. I knew Alexander – I knew we were going to attack.

I went for Polystratus and found Bella curled in his cloak. He was mightily embarrassed to be awakened.

‘It’s not what you think, lord,’ he said. ‘We were cold.’

I nodded. What do you say?

We armed each other in the light of a single lamp. It was cold.

Alexander was waiting for us by a huge fire near his pavilion.

‘We’ve drilled all winter at opening gaps in the ranks,’ he said. ‘We’ll win this one on simple discipline. It will be a good lesson for the pezhetaeroi. Tell them to open ranks to let the wagons through – if they are too packed together, tell them to lie flat with their shields over them and let the wagons run over them.’ He shrugged. ‘Once they drop the wagons on us, it’s just an infantry fight.’

He turned to Philip Longsword. ‘Straight up the right-side ridge until you are well above the pass – then down into their flank.’ He turned to Cleitus. ‘Take the mercenary archers and march to the left of the hypaspitoi – get into the rocks – those white rocks there – and start shooting. You’ll have them at open shields. Then it’ll all be over but the marching.’

It wasn’t a complex plan. It was, in fact, an obvious plan.

The thing is, most armies couldn’t have done it. It required that the hypaspitoi climb a mountain in full armour, with spears, and then traverse a long ridge and then come down in the enemy rear, while archers climbed the same ridge, took cover and lofted arrows two hundred paces into the Thracians. While the rest of us went right up the path into the carts and didn’t just die.

But we knew each other. Alexander dismounted a hundred Hetaeroi, and I led them as the right anchor of the phalanx, which was going straight up the throat of the pass. When we assembled in the first light of dawn, the hypaspitoi were already gone, the last files of archers were just leaving camp and the Thracians were awake, alert and lining their rampart of wagons.

Alexander walked down the line of the front rank. We were only a thousand paces from the top of the pass.

He stopped and shook my hand. Then embraced me.

He went along the front rank and he hugged, embraced, shook hands – a hundred times or more.

While the Thracians jeered, and the hypaspitoi climbed.

And then, when he was satisfied that the army loved him, he waved and ran off to the right. He was going with the hypaspitoi. In person, this time. Not like on Mount Ossa.

I buckled my chinstrap and led my friends up the pass.

The thing about plans is that they are rarely like the eventuality. The idea that we could drop files and half-files to the rear – as a phalanx always did when faced with, say, a small stand of trees in the middle of a plain – was excellent. But the fact was that when the Thracians started rolling the carts on us, they came at us like a ball flung by a child – all angles, no predictable path.

I’d say we were at three hundred paces when they released the carts.

As I said, my Hetaeroi were on the right of the line. We were crammed into the last ‘open’ ground in the pass, and our end files were virtually crushed against the low cliff that gradually sloped in from our right, narrowing the pass and packing us tighter and tighter.

At five hundred paces, I had six files – almost half my strength – doubled in behind the left files to make space, and there was no place for us to climb above the pass, or I’d have gone.

My point is, we weren’t eight deep, we were sixteen deep, and all along the front, phylarchs and taxitoi doubled files to cut their frontage and keep room to manoeuvre.

And then the carts came.

There was no way we could drop files back, because the carts had no predictable path. They bounced, slammed into each other, stopped, exploded against rocks – or hurtled at us like fists from Olympus.

It was a brilliant stratagem.

I’d say we had five carts on our frontage. The fact that the pass was ‘v’-shaped – an inverted ‘v’ like a lambda – with the point at the top of the pass, the narrowest part, and the floor of the pass vaguely rounded out by a small watercourse, meant that all the carts tended to run towards the centre.

Of the five rolled at us, two collided and stopped on the slope above us, and two deviated off towards the pezhetaeroi and vanished.

And one came right at us.

‘Lie down!’ I roared. It seemed like an insane thing to do, with a ton of cart roaring and bouncing down at us, but Aristotle and Alexander agreed that the wheels should pass over us so fast we’d be uninjured. I got down and put my aspis, sloped slightly, over my head and upper back.

The front right wheel hit my aspis and went over it, then right over my butt and missed my right leg. The rear wheel kicked my aspis hard enough to slam it into my head – my helmeted head – and then ran off down the slope and over the file behind me.

I got to my feet.

Aristotle, damn him, was completely correct. Behind me, Nearchus got to his feet, and then Cleomenes and then Pyrrhus.

The cart that hit us stopped in the seventh file, because the shields slowed it so much. Two files had to roll it off young Calchus. But he sprang to his feet.

In the whole army, men were getting to their feet.

Which was good, because the Thracians were charging.

‘Close up!’ I roared.

I wanted my men at the closest order – the synapsis, where the shields overlapped. I might as well mention that all the Hetaeroi in the assault had aspides, albeit the smaller, rimless type Iphakrates invented.

The way to achieve that close order was to move the half-files forward into the gaps between files. But what I wanted to do was to get the full files – my right files, my very best men – to move forward through the left files – remember, the right files were all pushed to the rear by the narrowing of the pass. Right?

I could see Cleitus. He could see me. And this is where the trust part – and knowing each other like brothers – came into it.

I caught his eye and yelled, ‘Files forward! Synapsis!’ Took a breath. ‘Not half-files – the rear files! Now!’

Cleitus had it from the first syllable. He was bellowing at his phylarchs, and my front phylarchs were pushing to the right and left to make room, and the Thracians were one hundred and fifty paces away and coming down the slope at a dead run.

Changing formation in the face of the enemy is the very worst thing you can do. It requires rock-solid confidence and enormous quantities of practice. Great officers and file leaders. And no errors, because at this point, two men tripping over each other could spell doom.

But we were Macedonians.

The Thracians were about thirty paces away when the rear files locked their shields to the front-file phylarchs.

I was on the left, by choice – I wanted to be in contact with the centre. So my full-sized aspis – call me old-fashioned – locked up with Laodon, who was commanding his pezhetaeroi from the right file, which was more the norm.

‘Spears – DOWN!’ I ordered, and Laodon roared the same words, almost at the same moment, and our front ranks put their spears at the ready and the rear ranks pushed forward, locking up so that every man had his shield pushed into the back of the man ahead of him, his spear either point forward, overhand, ready to kill, or, in the rear ranks, erect, the point at the sky, safe until needed. The pezhetaeroi had sarissas, eighteen feet long, but we Hetaeroi had our cavalry spears, just eleven feet long.

No matter.

The Thracians hit us.

Ares, they were brave.

The front men, those who had run the fastest to reach us, were the bravest of the brave, men who sought to make a reputation for ferocity among Thracians. They were coming down a steep slope and they were above us, and several men leaped into the air and fell into our ranks, seeking to break our wall of shields and spears, shatter our formations and make room for their friends to reap us like summer wheat.

A man leaped in front of me.

My spear took him in the air and slammed him to earth, and then it was a blur of bodies and edges and threats and parries. The sun was just rising, and cast a red light over everything, and the noise was everywhere, the full-throated roar of the brazen lungs of Areas, and men died, fell wounded, collapsed to earth all around me.

The pressure of the shield at my back was gone, and I stumbled back – downhill – looking for that reassuring pressure, and it wasn’t there.

My spear broke. I remember that, because it was disorienting suddenly to have no pressure behind me and no spear. I raised my shield to cover my head and took a full step back, reaching with my back foot.

Nearchus was down. I found his shield with my foot.

Got my hand on my sword.

Drew.

The Keltoi long sword doesn’t come free like the xiphos. A xiphos glides into your hand like a friendly snake, all under the comfortable cover of your shield, as fast as thought and just as safe, but the long sword has to be drawn all the way free of a scabbard almost twice as long. You have to roll your shoulders and raise the rim of the aspis. There’s a reason most men don’t carry them.

Lucky, or alert to my difficulties, a tribesman slammed into the face of my shield with his metal shield boss while I drew, and down I went, losing my weapon, cutting my hand on my own blade. I fell back down the slope, and for the second time that day my helmet absorbed a major impact – this time, when my head hit a rock.

But Tyche was with me, and my back came up against Nearchus’s aspis, so that I got my butt under me and then one foot before the Thracian could finish me, and I slammed my aspis into him two-handed, one hand in the porpax and the other holding the rim. He stumbled back.

I looked down, but couldn’t see my Keltoi sword or anything else.

He rifled his spear at me and I knocked it down.

Another thrown spear appeared and I knocked that down, too.

I backed again, still looking for a file partner, and now I was starting to panic – no weapon, and nobody behind me. Had the Hetaeroi really been broken? My helmet cut off my peripheral vision and my hearing, so I really didn’t know where the fight was.

I stepped back again. In my head, that meant I’d gone back four steps, and that was not good. But my booted heel was on something springy, and that meant my sword.

I knelt, put my right hand down and grabbed the hilt.

A flurry of blows hit the face of my shield. But a full-sized aspis is like a wall for a kneeling man.

A big red-haired man tried to push his spear over the top of the aspis, thrusting down into my neck, but I tilted my aspis and pushed to my feet, lifting his spear away and thrusting the long blade under my tabled shield, passing my right foot past my left to ram the thrust home, and he was dead.

I took a shattering blow to the head.

That’s what happens when you push forward too hard, or when men leave you. I never saw the blow, and it hit me hard enough to break my nose inside my helmet and leave me barely conscious, and another blow, from a spear, cut across the top of my bicep and by the will of Athena went in the front of my thorax instead of under my sword arm – so I got a nasty and very graphic cut across my pectoral muscle instead of a death wound under my arm.

Really, it should have been the end of me, and I stumbled.

A shield was pressed into my back. It steadied me – both physically and in spirit. Someone was there. It meant everything.

A shield slapped against the lower-left rim of my aspis. Someone was in the rank with me.

My eyes wouldn’t focus and I took a scraping blow along my helmet, and Cleomenes called, ‘Step back.’

It occurred to me that I’d been hearing that for a long time.

I nodded, rotated on my hips so that my body was inclined away from my opponent and shot my sword forward to cover my step. Cleomenes stepped up on my left, and I felt his shield wrap around my left as he muscled into place and his spear shot forward. And I was in the second rank, with blood running out from under my helmet and into my mouth. There was a lot of blood, a lot of pain.

On the other hand, I was alive.

I knelt and breathed. Spat blood.

Took a drink from my canteen in the third rank. Someone had pushed past me.

I found that I was kneeling by Nearchus. He was breathing, and had a lot of blood on his face, so I poured wine and water over his face and he spluttered. I ran my hand over his arm – his sword arm looked bad, with a long shallow cut – and he coughed again and gave a short scream just as I found where his arm was broken.

I got my chlamys out from under my aspis and wrapped his arm as tightly as I dared while he was out of it, and then the whole phalanx was moving. I was better – taking care of someone else is the sovereign remedy for pain – and I got my feet under me and pushed forward.

‘Let me through – front rank!’ I called. I’d fallen all the way back to the sixth or seventh rank. I pushed forward, replacing men who hadn’t fought yet and were – understandably – annoyed.

Some of Laodon’s men were in our ranks. I pushed past two pezhetaeroi to get to Cleomenes, who knocked a Thracian off his feet with a pretty move. I put my sword in the man’s throat to save Cleomenes the step, but that man must have been the last Thracian in the ‘zone’, the area where men fight. The rest were drawn up a few paces above us on the slope, throwing spears. When men settle down to throwing spears, the hard fighting is over.

We had held them.

‘Exchange!’ I croaked at Cleomenes. He shouted a war cry at the Thracians, and then peeked back at me, grinned and nodded, and we did the same dance we’d done earlier, in reverse – he pivoted back, I stepped up, and I was in his place.

Laodon was nowhere to be seen, and Pyrrhus was in the rank next to me, where there should have been a pezhetaeroi. In fact, I could see my own men for four or five files. This sort of thing happens in a hard fight, and with no disrespect to the phalangites of the pezhetaeroi, they weren’t trained men like the graduates of the royal pages. And my boys were. And they were eager – for a lot of the ‘new’ Hetaeroi, this was their first battle – certainly the first big fight on foot, where the heroes walked the earth.

Despite my pain and my wounds, I could feel their eagerness.

We were supposed to hold the Thracians here, so that the hypaspitoi could get around their flanks. If I attacked the Thracians, I’d be pushing them back up the slope, and making Alexander’s job harder.

Just then, while I thought about this and while Cleomenes, behind me, pushed against me aggressively and shouted, ‘Forward, take us forward’, and all the Hetaeroi started to take up the cry . . .

The archers got into position, and the shafts began to fall. I couldn’t even see the archers – but they had got past the flank of the Thracians, and their arrows fell on to unshielded backs. The Thracians began to look over their shoulders.

‘Take us forward!’ roared the whole right end of the battle line. It sounded to me as if the left end was still engaged, but I could see nothing over there.

There was no one to ask, either.

Cleitus told me later that I was grinning like a maniac. That’s not what I remember, but perhaps! At any rate, I stood straight and pointed my sword.

‘Silence!’ I roared.

The cries stopped as if cut off with a knife.

‘Forward!’ I called, and I took a step forward, and we fell up that hill like an avalanche. The Thracians stood, and we crashed into them, shield to shield, packed like sardines in a barrel, and then we were pushing – the rear-rank men pushing with their legs, the front-rankers trying to keep a shoulder firmly inside the aspis, so that the pressure from the rear ranks didn’t flatten them out and crush them – I’d heard of the othismos but I’d never been in it. We pushed, and they tried to stand, but we practised this and they did not, and in seconds we were pressing them back, and then they were stumbling and the pushing was over – we were cutting and thrusting with spear and sword, and they were tripping, falling, collapsing – and running. They didn’t have the cohesion to hold us. Dozens must have died there – men in my rear ranks killed the ones who tripped and fell with their saurouters.

I got an arrow in my aspis – the long iron head came right through the face and scratched my hand. One of our own.

I lowered my aspis slightly, and there was no one there.

I looked left, and the centre of our line was below me on the slope, fifty paces behind. Our left flank was even farther back.

And straight ahead, I saw Alexander leap down from the rocks – now lower and closer – into the rear of the fleeing Thracians, with Alectus and Philip Longsword on either side.

We’d won. Right there. So my new duty was to save as many of our infantry as possible. It looked to me as if the pezhetaeroi on our left were getting the worst of it.

In a flash, I had an idea, even as the hypaspitoi came pouring down from the top of the pass into the rear of the fleeing Thracians.

I pushed back into the middle ranks.

‘Forward! Phalanx forward! Half-files – halt and stand fast!’ I yelled.

That sent the pezhetaeroi and the Hetaeroi forward on the right – but men from the fifth to the eighth rank stood fast. My men were facing no resistance – they didn’t need deep files behind them to help ‘hold’ the enemy.

Then training told – long training in the snow. The half-file leaders – noble and commoner – stood fast, and as the front ranks peeled away, I had about sixty files of four men each left behind with enough space . . .

‘Half-phalanx will form from the right files to the left!’ I called. This was like rolling a carpet – the rightmost files – four files, to be exact – marched forward and wheeled smartly to the left, passing across the front of the new-formed half-phalanx, and every set of four files then wheeled up and joined the column as they passed, until my whole body was marching across the rear of the front files, into the gap opened by our rapid advance, and into the rear of the Thracians facing the centre and right of our army.

I do not claim that this was a brilliant manoeuvre. I merely claim that there was no other army on earth that could have done it.

Once we were clear of our own front files, we formed front – that is, the column formed a new phalanx at right angles to the old phalanx. The Thracians collapsed. It was almost instant, the moment we were formed, as if every Thracian saw the danger at the same moment – and perhaps they did, but an army has a remarkable level of non-verbal communication. They can ‘feel’ all together. It’s like the pressure of your buddy’s shield in your back – when it is gone, you ‘feel’ wrong.

We slaughtered them as they ran by us – packed against the far cliff, pushing with all their might to escape, even shedding their armour to climb the cliffs. More than a thousand of them died – some men say two thousand, a fifth of the fighting strength of their whole nation slaughtered in a few minutes.

Unfortunately, we could not pursue them on horseback. The downslope of the pass on the far side was too steep, had too many switchbacks, and even in panicked flight, Thracians were a redoubtable foe. Men threw spears, or stood at the bend in the road over the pass to cut at our feet. Had the ground been a little flatter, we might have ended the Thracians as a people for ever. As it was, they died and died, so that the streams that ran down both faces of the pass ran red.

I was carried along with the pursuit for a long way – maybe ten stades, all the way down the pass on the far side to a deep stream with steep banks where one of their princes made a stand with several hundred men in good armour. I could see him – he had a silk standard, some sort of windsock such as the Sarmatians use, and his helmet was covered in gold and jewels. They stood atop the bank on the far side of that icy stream, and we lost as many men trying to push them off the bank as we lost in the whole battle. Three times we crossed the stream, and three times we were thrown back.

Alexander led fifty hypaspitoi across the river farther down, where the water flowed like a torrent and an error meant certain death. He was the first across, and a dozen armoured Thracians ran at him, and he stood his ground, killed one, and then another, and then Alectus was with him.

He was the king. We threw ourselves across that stream to reach him, and the Thracians gave way, and we had all but bridged the torrent with bodies. I ran south, towards where I’d last seen the king, and I found him sore pressed – Alectus with him, Philip Longsword down, twenty more hypaspitoi trying to push him into the rear and fifty Thracians hammering at them.

He was unmarked, and he’d killed a third man, and he had a quiet smile on his face – the smile of a man who’s made a fine helmet, or carved a beautiful wood panel of Herakles, for example.

‘Ptolemy,’ he said warmly as I came up. ‘Well done.’

Behind him, the last of the Thracians went down, neither asking nor giving quarter, as half a thousand Macedonians buried them in blades. Alexander stepped up on a big rock as if he hadn’t been fighting for his life a moment before.

‘Just for a moment, I thought we’d have them all,’ he said. He started walking to where we’d fought our way over the stream. The chieftain, their prince, lay pinned to the earth with a pair of spears. His banner lay fallen beside him.

‘This one saved all his friends,’ he said. ‘A true hero. A worthy adversary.’

The man moaned.

Alexander smiled. ‘If he lives, sign him up,’ he said cheerfully. ‘How were the wagons? You look terrible.’

I laughed.

We didn’t even rest a full day. That afternoon, we plundered the Thracian camp carefully – it was a rich haul of gold and women and children – and sent everything back to the coast with our wounded and Laodon’s pezhetaeroi, who had fought brilliantly and were held to deserve the ‘vacation’.

We had about a hundred dead and twice that many wounded – a small enough bill for the victory, but still a visible percentage of our forces. Men were shifted back and forth, and the net result was two larger taxeis of roughly four thousand men each when we started down the mountains on to the plain of the Danube.

All of us assumed that the Thracians were beaten. Even Alexander assumed it. We kept guards and flankers out – we weren’t foolish – but as we marched towards the Danube, we assumed we’d broken the Thracians not just for now but for years to come.

We were wrong.

The Triballians retreated in front of us – the survivors of the battle reinforced by other tribesmen – with their livestock and their families – those we hadn’t taken at the pass. They retreated, and we pursued, eager to catch them. On the third day, the Prodromoi reported that the Thracians had started a boat lift to move their families to a big island in the Danube.

Alexander threw the hypaspitoi forward, leading them himself.

It was sheer luck that one of our Hetaeroi patrols – under Nearchus – tripped over an army of Thracians coming up behind us. They were half a day away, and we’d almost missed them.

The trap was closing. The Thracians behind us now held the pass at our rear and had at least another ten thousand men.

I sent a messenger for Alexander and halted the army, putting out a ring of scouts and dispatching the skirmishers – the Psiloi – to the rear to slow the enemy if they appeared. I asked Philip the Red – remember, I wasn’t the commander of anything except one squadron of Hetaeroi – to scout to our rear, and he agreed.

Hephaestion was with Alexander, Antipater was in Pella, and none of Parmenio’s precious family had arrived to take command of anything, so that our army had Alexander – and no level below him. In the next few hours, that showed. I was unwilling to take command – it wasn’t my job, and I felt the weight of Alexander’s displeasure here more than any other place. If I took command, there might be a price.

On the other hand, we all knew what to do.

Alexander came back after the sun was high in the sky. He approved all of our joint decisions, and then ordered the entire army to counter-march behind the Psiloi. He put the Prodromoi well out on to the flanks and we moved forward, leaving our baggage to the mercy of the Thracians behind us. I hated that decision, even as I understood it – that was Thaïs being left unprotected. He didn’t leave a single slinger behind.

Our Psiloi went forward into another ambush. The force behind us had formed up in a wooded valley that fed into the Danube, right across our line of march, with steep sides and heavy woods to cover them, and as the archers prowled forward along the open floor of the valley, arrows fell on them from the trees, and Thracian noblemen on ponies charged them and killed a dozen before they scattered.

An hour later, I sat beside Alexander as he looked up the pass. I was eating a sausage – I remember thinking how delicious it was, even though every bite hurt my jaw and my nose.

We were all hungry.

Alexander looked at the pass for a long time. It formed a shallow lambda with the point aimed at Pella – to the south.

It would entail a journey of a hundred stades or more, across unknown country, to go around.

‘Well,’ he said, after a long hundred heartbeats, ‘I don’t want to attack into that.’

I think we all sighed with relief. It looked like a death trap.

As if to underscore its peril, a Thracian arrow whispered out of the air and fell – well short, but close enough to make Poseidon shy.

Alexander looked around, and his eye fell on Cleitus, not me. ‘Cleitus,’ he said.

Cleitus grinned. ‘Uh-oh,’ he said, with mock despair.

Alexander nodded. ‘Take the Psiloi forward again. Far enough that they can almost cut you off. Make them taste their victory before you let the Psiloi run. Get them to chase you down their precious hills.’ He nodded at the rest of us. ‘Form in loose order – over here, behind the edge of the downslope. Spears down so we aren’t visible. If they pursue Cleitus, we’ll charge, and chance it. If we fail – don’t go more than a quarter of the way up the pass. Understand?’

Many men didn’t. Again, it was a simple plan. The Psiloi went forward as bait, and the rest of us formed a counter-ambush to attack the Thracians if they were stupid enough to bite down.

As with the first battle at the pass, the whole plan was in the details. Most of all, the Psiloi had to go forward with determination and put a volume of fire into the Thracians that would force them to react – and then stand their ground for far too long. It’s easy to describe. It’s damn hard to do, when you have no shield, no armour and no hope of surviving even a moment of fierce combat – especially when you are a scrawny Cretan looking at gigantic red-haired barbarians with swords as long as your body.

And for the rest of us – well, try hiding a phalanx in the open country by the Danube.

I will say that the magic began that afternoon, because we walked away from that command meeting without a mutter. When Alexander told us to lie down under our shields for the Thracian wagons, we muttered. There were some harsh jokes. But at the Woods Battle, we just went to our posts.

Cleitus went forward with the Psiloi, all the Toxophiloi and some of the Prodromoi, dismounted, as well as a few hundred mercenary slingers and a handful of the new crossbowmen. It is a common enough weapon now, but in the first year of the king’s reign, they were virtually unknown and we only had fifty of them. Some said Aristotle invented the crossbow, and others said it came, like all brilliant military engineering, from Sicily. Either way, a bolt from one of these small engines could go two hundred paces and penetrate a good bronze helmet. A Scythian or a Cretan archer could do the same, but took a lifetime to train, and couldn’t do either lying flat on his stomach.

Forward he went.

The Thracians let them come.

I had a ringside seat, on the right of the line. All my Hetaeroi were going to fight mounted, if we had a chance to fight. We were to be the horns of the bull. All my troopers stood beside their horses, well over the crest of the low ridge that separated our main body from the wooded valley – the killing zone.

I had climbed up the low ridge with Philip the Red, and we lay under our dun cloaks in the sunshine – sweating profusely, I suppose, although I don’t remember. I only remember my heart hammering in my chest as our archers began to shoot into the Thracians – Cleitus had taken them right up the valley, and boldly formed a deep ‘v’ where both lines of Psiloi had their backs to the stream.

Our archers outranged the Thracian archers, and were better. The Cretans especially were deadly.

I had never seen a contest of shot before. Our men had training and density of firepower, and the Thracians had the protection of brush and woods.

The protection was not enough. I could see men hit in the woods, and other men moving back up the slopes of the valley, and then there were horns blowing high on the crests of the hills, and sunlight glinted off spears and helmets as the main force of the Thracians moved.

Cleitus did not let his men slacken their shots. Nearer to us, we saw the Rhodian slingers begin to pound away at the exposed Thracians in the low, marshy ground at the nearest end of the valley. Archers can’t stand tight together to loose, and slingers are worse, needing a spear’s length around them; but when a hundred slingers throw all together, their pellets of lead tear at tree branches and pass through brush like a wicked wind. Men screamed.

The archers kept shooting. Philip, at my side, had begun to count arrows, as every archer had twenty-four. The Cretans had loosed sixteen when I saw the glittering might of the Thracian main host start down the ridge.

‘We’re hurting them,’ I said.

Alexander flopped down next to me. ‘Of course we’re hurting them,’ he said. ‘We have more archers and slingers than they’ve ever seen. They have to do something.’

We watched for as long as it takes a slave to start a fire, and then the Thracians began to charge the Psiloi. There was no order, and if anything the trumpet calls were to restrain them. But the wounds – and deaths – were literally driving them down the hill.

They broke cover and took casualties crossing the open ground, because Cleitus – in his first command – held them by sheer force of will for one more volley of missiles. He had so many archers – more than six hundred – they staggered the charge.

Just for a moment, I wondered if the archers could hold the line without us.

Then the Psiloi broke. They all ran together, like a flock of birds taking flight, every wing beating together.

The Thracians were right behind them.

Out at the point of the lambda, where Cleitus was, the Thracians caught the Psiloi and killed them.

The rest of the horse came pouring down the hills and into the gap, and our men died.

Alexander lay beside me, counting. ‘See the old chiton tied to the bush?’ he said.

That bush was less than a stade in front of me. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘When they pass that bush, stand up and wave.’ Alexander got to his feet well to the rear and ran down the slope to where a slave held Bucephalus.

I watched. Our Psiloi were dying in numbers now, running desperately, tangled up with each other. A rout is ugly, and what starts as a trained flight turns all too easily into a rout.

Thracians continued to pour down the slope. I assume – from the hindsight of history – that their king knew he was committed and decided not to send a half-measure. He sent his whole force.

Now they were flowing through the gap, out of the valley and on to the flat ground, up the shallow ridge that closed the southern end of the valley. The first fugitives were passing the chiton. Then more and more.

Behind me, Alexander had opened every tenth file in the phalanx, so that the Psiloi could run through. But the pezhetaeroi were still, for the most part, lying flat, except the men who had to move to open the files.

I don’t think that it mattered any more – the Thracians were committed to all-out attack.

The first Thracians passed the chiton. All the Psiloi who were going to be caught had been caught, by now. The weak. The injured. The unlucky.

I waited a few more breaths, until the main shield line reached the bush, and then I stood up.

I swear that as I stood, the whole Macedonian army rose to their feet. Alexander raised a fist and waved at me, and I raced for Poseidon like a sprinter. A sprinter in greaves and heavy armour.

Polystratus was kind enough to stand at Poseidon’s head and give my butt a push as I climbed on to his broad back. I got up in one go and rode to take my place at the head of my wedge.

Alexander raised his arm. Every man could see him – he was two horse lengths in front, and our whole army took up a little less than six stades.

He pumped his arm. His trumpeter sounded the charge.

And that was the sum total of the commands he gave.

We went up the hill in perfect order. And I don’t use the term ‘perfect’ lightly. Every battle has something I remember – every battle is its own mistress, its own dark partner, its own spectacle. For that battle, it was the moment when we emerged from the brush and started up the hill, and two giants could have drawn a hawser, if one were long enough, taut across the front of the phalanx and touched every man’s chest at the same time.

Just as we crested the low ridge, the flanks began to get a little ahead.

The Thracians were caught flat-footed, spread over two stades of ground, killing the Psiloi they’d caught in no kind of order. A few noble households were all together, shields locked, but most of them were well spread out and unprepared for ten thousand Macedonians to hit them all together.

Just in front of us, the main force of the Psiloi ran past us, eyes wide – registering delight as they crossed the crest and saw the army and the gaps, and men cheered them. Most of the Psiloi had probably never been cheered. Arms reached out in the phalanx and slapped their backs as they ran by, or pressed canteens full of wine on them. We already knew we’d won. And we knew we owed it to them.

I led my squadron of Hetaeroi from the right. The moment I saw the Thracians spread before me like a battle scene on a tapestry, I ordered the charge and we swept forward. Our wedge was unneeded – the wedge is a deep formation for penetrating an infantry block – and instead we passed through the Thracians left like a hot knife through cow’s butter. I doubt that we killed a hundred of them. But Perdiccas and I had the same notion – to get into the entrance to the wooded valley and plug the gap so that the pezhetaeroi could slaughter the Thracians against us, like a hammer against a very small anvil.

We cut our way to the edge of the woods and I wheeled the Hetaeroi right round – try that some time. Great moments in cavalry drill! We got the Hetaeroi around, and formed in shallow blocks – half-files, only four deep. We took up more space that way, and we didn’t need to be eight deep – much less in wedge – to kill Thracians trying to get away.

Then we rode forward slowly, into their rear, killing as we went.

I saw the hypaspitoi slam into a nobleman’s retinue – there was a cloud of dust, as if a giant had thrown a huge clod of earth at the retinue, and then they were gone, and the hypaspitoi went forward over them. The Thracians went from hunters to hunted in moments, but there was nowhere to go except back into our spears, and we killed so many of them that when the fight was over – and there’s nothing much to tell about that fight – my hand was stuck to my spear shaft, glued with other men’s blood, my hand locked closed from hours of gripping the shaft too hard.

It wasn’t glorious. But it was professional, and in three hours’ work, we’d broken the Thracian alliance at the cost of forty-one soldiers – a dozen cavalrymen from the first part of the charge, and thirty-nine Psiloi, and one – just one – pezhetaeros.

I have no idea how many Thracians we actually killed. I walked over the western end of the field and counted all the dead in one square a stade on a side, and then I measured the battlefield and multiplied by the number in the one square, and got four thousand, two hundred dead Thracians, which seemed high, so I put three thousand five hundred into the Military Journal. See? My handwriting. See the brown smear? I could barely write – and usually we put this sort of info on to wax and let the scribes copy it fair on parchment or papyrus, but that day the scribes were back with the camp and we were too far away to use them.

That evening, I got Alexander’s attention by the simple expedient of pushing into his tent, and asked to take the Hetaeroi back to cover the camp.

He had forgotten. He didn’t have Thaïs waiting for him. He was Achilles, lying by the fire with his loyal myrmidons all around him. Again, he’d led the hypaspists in person, and they lay around him like mastiffs. Was I jealous?

You bet I was. I missed them.

Alexander looked at me. Nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he said. He was going to say something more, and then I think the king took over from the man.

I took half the Prodromoi and all my squadron and rode off at the start of the sunset, and by full dark we were riding into our main camp, which we found terrified but sound. They’d seen some fugitive Thracians and been scouted by a mounted force, so I dismounted my troopers and sent Cleomenes back – alone – to warn Alexander. We spent a bad night on guard duty – two war parties brushed us and we held them.

At first light, the hypaspitoi came, led by Alexander in person. He looked at the signs of fighting and led the Prodromoi out himself, and came back two hours later.

‘They’re still out there,’ he said angrily. I think he felt that after two shattering defeats the Thracians might have the good grace to bend a knee and give in.

I was getting a different picture. What I saw was an enemy so diffuse and ungoverned that we couldn’t ‘beat’ them or intimidate them as a group. In effect, I was beginning to believe that we’d have to defeat every individual Thracian – at least once. Or perhaps just kill every one of them.

The next day, the army was reunited with the camp and we moved out to the north, to the banks of the Danube, where by Alexander’s usual combination of brilliant planning and ferocious good luck, the fleet lay rocking in the rapid current, tied to giant trees along the bank.

In the middle of the wide river, like a small ocean, lay the rocky shores of Pine Island, where eight thousand Thracians waited with their animals and their treasure. Beyond, at the very edge of sight, lay the far shore.

Right at our feet were the palings of the bridge that Darius had built in the years before Marathon, when he took a mighty army on to the steppes, and lost.

With a sinking feeling, I listened to the king and realised that he intended to march on – to take us on to Pine Island, crush the refugee Thracians there and then across the Danube, like Darius.

‘Darius lost!’ I found myself pointing out, later that evening.

No one else seemed to care, and a lot of wine was drunk. The appearance of the fleet, thousands of stades from home, was like a miracle, and it, combined with two fine victories, raised Alexander’s spirits to a fever pitch.

He ordered the cavalry to collect every boat and dugout canoe along the banks for two hundred stades, and I spent the next week riding up and down the river, ducking javelins, arrows and thrown rocks. The woods were full of Thracians, and I was in a fight nearly every day – my sword arm was a mass of scars.

The only day I remember was rainy. I was soaked to the skin when I rode back into camp, fifty canoes richer, and I stripped naked because Thaïs had a bath ready for me. She got me into the bath, helped me scrub the pain away and got the rolled linen off my sword arm in the hot water so that the pain was bearable, and then she told me she was pregnant.

I think that was the only time I’d seen her afraid. She was afraid of the pregnancy and afraid, too, of me.

I was delighted. But I remembered what had happened to Nike, and I was . . . afraid. So we had a fight – isn’t that what people do when they are afraid?

And in the midst of that fight – me in a tub of hot water, blood flowing from my arm, Thaïs and her woman trying to bandage me while we shouted at each other – Cleitus came in.

‘The king wishes you to attend him immediately,’ Cleitus said, his face deadpan.

‘Tell him I’m bleeding like a fucking sacrifice and naked as a baby,’ I shot back.

Cleitus shook his head. ‘No, Ptolemy. I will not. Come. Now.’

Things had changed a great deal. There had been a time when no one would have jumped like that for Alexander. We loved him – but we treated him as the first among equals. That was gone, now – even for Cleitus.

I got out of the bath, and Thaïs rubbed the water off me with her own chiton and pulled one of mine over my head. ‘Go,’ she said.

I really loved her. Then more than ever.

Alexander was sitting on a stool in his tent, with a low table made by two raw boards laid across two more stools – iron stools, taken as loot.

‘When I ask for you to come immediately,’ he said, and then he raised his head and saw the blood running down my right arm.

‘I was having my wound dressed, and having a fight with my hetaera, my lord. I apologise for being late.’ I suspect my sarcasm was all too evident.

He looked at me for a long time. His eyes were red, and he hadn’t slept, and Hephaestion looked like a corpse with a skull for a head.

‘I have fifty more canoes, and I lost three men over the last two days.’ I shrugged. ‘Aristotle would reduce this campaign to a mathematical equation. If we kill Thracians at this rate, we’ll still run out of highly trained Hetaeroi before they run out of ignorant savages.’

Alexander drank some wine. ‘You are dismissed,’ he said.

I turned and left the tent. I relate this to show that it was not all wine and roses. Alexander had launched four attacks against Pine Island – you won’t find this in the Military Journal – and been pushed off every time. The last time he’d got ashore in person, certain that his men would walk on water to save him. Instead, he’d almost been overrun, and twenty hypaspitoi had died saving him. Two full files. Dead.

Alexander probably summoned me to order me to lead the next assault. I was mouthy and he dismissed me and summoned Perdiccas, and he went and got wounded in the arm and the hip so that he was out for the rest of the campaign.

The next day it was Cassander’s turn. He went and got knocked unconscious by a blow to the throat that left him unable to speak for days. No great loss.

I brought in more canoes and lost another trooper in the endless fighting, out there in the woods. And I learned from prisoners that the Getae, the largest, fiercest and best-mounted tribe of Thracians – not really Thracians, but a sort of mixed bag of Thracians and Scythians – were present in force on the far bank, with a fortified camp and at least ten thousand horsemen. They were feeding the Thracians on Pine Island.

When I returned, I heard about Cassander, and I went to Alexander’s pavilion and was admitted.

‘I’m sure you have a great deal to tell me, Ptolemy,’ Alexander said bitterly.

I realised that he was drunk. But I told him about the Getae, anyway.

He snorted. ‘Barbarians. They won’t stop me. I’ll have Pine Island, I’ll build a bridge like Darius and we’ll march across.’

‘When do you send Hephaestion?’ I asked. ‘You’ve sent everyone else. When is it his turn to try for a miracle?’

‘You are dismissed. I should never have admitted you,’ Alexander slurred.

‘You’re drunk. That’s not your way, lord. And I’m here to remind you that it is not all arete. You have a kingdom.’ I was walking a sword edge.

He spat and drank again. ‘I am invincible,’ he said.

‘Just such a prophecy that the gods send to drive a man to madness. There’s more ways than one to win a battle.’ I shrugged. ‘We will never storm that island, not with ten thousand canoes.’

He shrugged.

Hephaestion glared at me. ‘I would be proud to lead tomorrow’s assault,’ he said. ‘I’m not afraid of it, like Ptolemy,’ he added.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid.’ I shrugged. ‘Lord, we need another solution. All the good we’ve done with those victories is being frittered away with these little actions.’

Alexander nodded. ‘Begone,’ he said.

So I went.

The next morning, Alexander called all his officers together and outlined his new plan. He was as fresh as a new-caught tuna, and his plan was all daring and no sense. We were going to take the fleet and as many soldiers as could be fitted into the canoes and boats, and we were going across the Danube. His point was that by holding both banks, we would force Pine Island to surrender. They couldn’t feed themselves.

It was a fine plan, except that there were ten thousand Getae on the far bank, just waiting for us. It sounded to me like hubris of the grandest kind.

But – it sounded better than battering Pine Island for another week while we ran out of food.

I spent two days gathering another forty boats. The banks were stripped bare. On a positive note, the Thracians had given up trying to ambush my patrols. Even they couldn’t take any more casualties.

The army was mutinous. It’s hard to believe, now, that Alexander’s armies were ever mutinous. In fact, they often were. He had a way of expecting superhuman effort too often, of making plans and not explaining them, or showing childish displeasure when the troops failed to achieve success against high odds – in fact, he didn’t understand them. When we were at the edge of battle, he understood them, because men at the edge of battle are more alive, more alert, smarter, better men – more like Alexander, in fact.

But the campaign was wearing them out. We’d marched far, and we were at the edge of the world. We were running out of wine and oil, and those were the key supplies for any army of Hellenes. Most of the cavalry and the hypaspists were fighting every day, in scrubby little actions against teenagers – warriors so young we could take no pride in killing them, but their sling stones and arrows hurt us. And the pezhetaeroi were making daily attempts at Pine Island, and failing. Failure is the canker that eats at an army, and two miraculous victories – as good as anything Philip ever won against the Thracians – were immediately offset by the daily defeats at Pine Island, because soldiers are as fickle as whores and twice as costly.

I tried to tell Alexander that. Twice.

The second time was worse. He looked at me – he had his helmet under his arm, and he was about to take the Prodromoi south to make sure our retreat was clear.

‘Are they children, to be cosseted?’ he asked. ‘See to it.’

‘Can we set a date for marching home?’ I asked. I managed all this under the guise of the sacred Military Journal.

Alexander was looking at the entries for the last few days, and carefully running the spatulate end of the stylus across the casualties for Pine Island. ‘Yes,’ he said. He was taking this seriously. He was no fool, and if I’m giving that impression, wipe it from your mind. He was as far above me as I am above most men. He just couldn’t think like them, and they were mysterious to him. He looked at me under those blond eyelashes and he gave me that rare smile – the look of his full attention.

‘How long do I have?’ he asked quietly.

‘Three weeks,’ I answered, because I’d prayed he’d accept my guidance and so I had an answer ready. ‘If I let it be known this morning, I think you’ll find the men a great deal more willing to try the Danube crossing. They think . . . they think we’re going to march off the edge of the world.’

‘How well they know me,’ he said with a gentle smile. ‘Let it be done.’ He looked at the Military Journal again and furrowed his eyebrows. ‘Every ambassador is going to end up reading this, Ptolemy. Keep that in mind when you write. I don’t ask that we seem perfect.’ He grinned. ‘Merely invincible.’

I must have grinned back. To be honest, I was relieved, myself – first, because we were not wintering here, which I had feared he’d try to do, and second, because this was the Alexander I loved. He’d been hard to find since the victories started to come.

That morning I summoned all my adjutants and gathered the entries for the day before, and then I passed the word – three weeks. The Feast of Demeter in the Macedonian festival calendar, and we’d march for hearth and home.

Ever work yourself to exhaustion?

And then eat a meal? And you can feel the power going into your limbs – you can feel the lifting of the fatigue? Eh? That’s how it was after I dismissed my adjutants. I could feel the change.

We loaded men into the boats. The cavalry went on the triremes, a trick we’d learned from Athens, and the infantry went in the canoes and fishing boats. It took us all day to cross the river, and we spent the night just offshore, a fleet of vulnerable dugout canoes overladen with men, armour and long spears. In the morning, we landed with the dawn, and marched inland through fields of oats and wheat that stood almost as high as a man, and we marched at open order, with every infantryman carrying his spear parallel to the ground so that the glinting heads wouldn’t give us away. The cavalry was last ashore, inside a great square protected by the infantry, and we got on our horses without incident. I led my squadron out to the right. Cleitus had the left squadron.

We came out of the fields about three stades from the riverbank, and we could see their fortified camp in the distance. Our element of surprise was total, and we swept towards them quickly, the cavalry well out on the flanks in extended lines, only two deep and ten horse lengths between men, looking for ambushes.

There were none.

We captured an undefended horse herd, and we overran the little makeshift port where they’d been supplying the island. We took four days’ supplies for the whole army and another two hundred small boats. The men loaded up with food and bad wine.

The Getae came out of their camp when we set fire to the boats.

Alexander rode along the line, his cloak billowing behind him, and we roared his name, and charged. It wasn’t a complicated battle. In fact, there was very little fighting, and we chased them into their camp.

We milled about outside their log rampart, and then I started to call insults to the men on the walls in my best Thracian.

They sent out a warrior.

That’s the trouble with challenging men to combat. Sometimes they take you up on it.

Alexander came over to me while I had my sword arm rebandaged. ‘You up to this, my friend?’ he asked.

The Getae warrior was sitting on his horse under the walls, shouting insults. On our side, my friends were offering me their swords, their spears and their horses.

I settled my helmet on my head, flexed my fingers and vaulted on to Poseidon’s broad back.

‘I am, Lord King.’ I think I was grinning. I was afraid and elated.

‘You’ll need to do better than last time,’ he said, with a grin. He had a point. Kineas had put me down.

Men slapped my back and told me I was lucky, and then I was trotting over the turf towards my adversary. I took a pair of heavy longche from Polystratus, rather than my usual lance.

I trotted forward and waved to my adversary, thinking we would agree on some rules.

He wasn’t interested in discussing anything. He came right at me, drew an arrow to his eye and loosed.

At sixty paces, that arrow went right into Poseidon’s chest.

Bless my dear horse, he paused and then sprang forward.

The Thracian was controlling his horse with his knees, and he turned away, fitting another arrow to his bow.

Poseidon was running with an arrow three fingers deep in his chest, but he ate the ground between us as the Thracian turned his smaller horse. I closed – fifty paces, forty paces – and then he turned at a gallop and headed due west, along the front of our army.

Poseidon turned to cut his path.

He turned and shot. It was a beautiful shot, and hit my helmet just above my eyes, but the slope of the bronze and the skill of the maker saved me. Two inches lower and he’d have won that fight, and I’d never have been King of Aegypt.

At ten paces he brought the bow up again, and I threw my javelin. Ten paces is nothing to a trained man, and Poseidon, the best horse I ever had, felt my throw coming and flowed into it, so that I threw on his off foot. I hit my target – his horse – in the neck with a heavy spear, and that horse died before I reached him, and my adversary was tangled on the ground with his broken bow.

The Macedonians cheered.

The man came up out of the wreck limping, and he had a sword. He stood his ground, and I slapped him in the head with the spear-point and knocked him unconscious. Then I dragged him by his own saddle rope, tied round his feet, across the front of our army to where the king sat on Bucephalus.

‘Was that better, my lord?’ I asked.

Alexander’s eyes sparkled. He handed me a cup of wine, embraced me and let me bask in the congratulations of all the other Hetaeroi. Say what you will of the former pages – we all respected success, and no one was ever petty enough to conceal admiration for a deed well done. Cleitus was smothered in it after the Woods Battle, and now it was my turn.

I untied the man and turned him over to Polystratus. ‘See if you can revive him,’ I said. ‘A drag across the turf shouldn’t have killed him.’

In fact, my head hurt, and Polystratus took my good cavalry Boeotian, shook his head and showed me the bowl. There was a dent as deep as a man’s thumb in the front just above the cranium, and the helmet was ruined. It had saved my life three times.

I lay down for a while but Thaïs, quite wisely, didn’t let me sleep, but prattled at me and made me walk about and fed me water and honey. When I could see straight and talk well, she let me have a nap.

When I woke, the Thracians had surrendered, and the sound of the army’s cheers brought me back to earth.

They didn’t actually surrender. But the Thracians on Pine Island agreed to evacuate and surrender one half of their herds, and the Getae agreed to allow them to come over the Danube to resettle, and Alexander forced them to agree that the lands between the pass and the Danube were his to dispose of.

I suspected that this agreement would be nullified the moment they couldn’t see our spears, and I was right, but it made Alexander happy – and we’d shown them that they wouldn’t be safe anywhere, and that was worth something. To be honest, I’m not sure that it was worth the body count. We lost fifty-eight cavalrymen – mostly Hetaeroi – and almost four hundred pezhetaeroi and hypaspitoi. They were fine men in the peak of training. They died, and we got very little in return.

And yet – looked at another way, we got everything in return, because we were building the reputation for invincibility that was better than ten thousand men.

And we did receive an amazing amount of loot and tribute. When we marched for home, we looked more like a nomad nation migrating than a Macedonian army on the march, and Alexander ordered us – the cavalry – to patrol aggressively, because he feared we were so overladen with beasts and gold that we’d be easy pickings for an Illyrian raid. It had happened to Philip years before – when he fought the Sakje of the Great Steppe. He beat them, but they weren’t beaten, and they ambushed him on the road home and took his gear and his cattle.

I’d forgotten – look here, it’s in the Military Journal – I’d forgotten the Keltoi. Our last day on the river, when all the deals had been made and all our men were glutted with spear-won beef, and Thaïs and I were, in fact, rutting like a stag and a hind in season in our tent, Cleitus came to our tent – he had the worst timing – burst in and turned as red as a Tyrian cloak. Thaïs was astride me, hands locked under my neck, mouth pressed against mine, and I could see Cleitus . . .

Oh, I’m a dirty old man. But I didn’t stop, and neither did Thaïs. She just grinned.

‘The king wants you,’ Cleitus said, staring at a hanging carpet.

‘I’m . . . a little busy, but I’ll . . . be along . . . shortly,’ I said.

‘Not too shortly,’ Thaïs said.

I used to make Cleitus blush just mentioning this incident – the best killer of men in the Macedonian army, the toughest bastard Alexander had, but he’d blush like a virgin. Hah! Fine man, Cleitus. But a little odd.

When I reached the king, he smiled and said, ‘I’ve been counting the minutes,’ and laughed. It was as close to a sexual joke as I ever heard him make, and all the officers around him laughed too.

The embassage of Keltoi was twenty men and as many women. They were tall – in fact, they were huge, many of them a head taller than me, and I’m not small. Most were blond, and all of them had beautiful long hair, wrapped and plaited in gold. The women had the largest breasts and the best figures of any race I’d seen – wide hips, tiny waists and blue eyes.

Their language was truly barbaric, but they had dignity and good manners.

They also claimed to rule an empire greater than ours, stretching all the way to Thule. I was derisive, but Alexander was fascinated.

They flattered him, lauding his victories over the Thracians, although they made it clear they’d smacked the Thracians pretty hard themselves.

Alexander nodded after listening patiently. ‘Are you, then, the overlords of these Thracian tribes?’ he asked.

The most noble-looking of the men, wearing a sword worth ten of my farms, shrugged. He spoke through a woman interpreter. She didn’t look like the rest of them – she was smaller and darker and very pretty, rather than displaying the normal somewhat ethereal beauty of the Keltoi. She smiled a great deal, too. She listened to him and then turned to the king.

‘He says – we are kings and lords to the Triballi, when we will it. Never the Getae,’ she added.

Alexander nodded. ‘I am now the lord of the Triballi and the Getae,’ he said.

All the Keltoi laughed.

Alexander snapped at her. ‘What are they laughing at?’

One of the Keltoi women pointed at the sky and said something and they all laughed again.

The interpreter looked as if she was afraid. The smiles were gone.

‘What did she say?’ Alexander demanded.

‘Nothing, lord,’ she said.

Alexander shook his head. ‘I demand to know!’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘She asked if you were also lord of the clouds.’

The Keltoi woman spoke again, with vehemence.

Alexander ignored her and turned back to the richest man. ‘Are you here to swear your allegiance to me?’ he asked.

There was much talk. Then the interpreter said, ‘They say – no.’ She shrugged.

Alexander pointed at his army. We, as an army, were not at our most impressive, as most of the infantry were busy loading spear-won wagons with spear-won loot, wool and hangings and carpets and furs and some gold.

‘You should fear my army, which I can march anywhere in the world,’ Alexander said.

The Keltoi talked among themselves, and then the interpreter shook her head and expostulated.

‘I think they are saying we should sod off,’ I muttered to Marsyas.

Marsyas grinned. In some strange way, it was entertaining to watch these rich barbarians be utterly unimpressed with us.

Finally, the dark woman stood in front of Alexander with her shoulders square as if she was ready to resist torture. ‘They say that if you brought an army this small to their lands, they might ignore it. If you brought a real army, they would bury it under the weight of their chariot wheels and the hooves of their horses and the steel of their swords. They say that you have no idea what is north of the Danube, while they know where Pella is and where Athens is. And Rome and Carthage, too, they say. And the queen asks – would you like to swear fealty to her? She says she will be a gentle overlord.’

I burst into laughter. I couldn’t stop myself. I slapped my thighs and roared, and Alexander looked at me. His anger dissipated, and he joined me. He laughed, and Perdiccas and Hephaestion laughed, and Marsyas laughed.

And all the Keltoi laughed.

Somehow it reminded me of the visit to Diogenes.