God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

FIFTEEN

Pella, 335 BC

We had no money.

Of course, that’s not true. The sale of all the Thebans, plus the loot from Thrace and Illyria, paid the crown of Macedon a little less than eight hundred talents of gold, which didn’t quite cover the arrears of pay to the army. Philip had died leaving the crown five hundred talents of gold in debt – in fact, like many an unlucky son, we had new creditors appearing every day, and Philip probably left Alexander more like a thousand talents in debt. A thousand talents. In gold. Remember that the King of Kings tried to buy Athens for three hundred talents . . .

We’d been home from our year of miracles for three days when I saw Alexander throw one of the worst temper tantrums of his life. It was horrible. It started badly and grew steadily worse.

I had the duty. There was a rumour – one of Thaïs’s sources – that Darius had put out money to arrange Alexander’ s murder, and the Hetaeroi were on high alert. In fact, I had Ochrid – now a freeman – tasting the king’s food because we’d been away from Pella a year and none of us trusted anyone in the palace.

So I was in armour, and I had just walked the corridors of the palace with Seleucus and Nearchus as my lieutenants, checking every post. I had almost sixty men on duty, and two more shifts ready to take over in turn. Alexander had just promoted almost a hundred men to the Hetaeroi – some from the Prodromoi, some from the grooms and some from other units, or straight from civilian life. They were a mixed bag. Perdiccas and I had shared them out like boys choosing sides for a game of hockey.

Of course we played hockey in Macedon. Do you think we’re barbarians?

Hah! Don’t answer that.

At any rate, putting my recruits into their places, making sure that every new man was on duty with a reliable oldster – it used up half my evening, and I was late to the great hall.

Olympias was there. I missed what had transpired, but I gathered from witnesses that Alexander had taken her to task for her wholesale massacre of young Cleopatra’s relatives, and she had told him to get more realistic about his approach to imperial politics.

As I entered, Olympias had just lain down on a couch – something Macedonian women most emphatically did not do, back then. ‘At any rate,’ she drawled, ‘you need their money, dear. You have none.’

‘Money is easy,’ Alexander said, and snapped his fingers. ‘I’ll act, and the money will come.’

Antipater shook his head. ‘We’ve reached a stable point,’ he said. ‘With the money from your last campaigns, which is just enough to pay most of your father’s debts. Disband the army, and we’re home free.’

You have to imagine the scene – forty senior officers and noblemen – Laodon and Erygius, Cleitus, Perdiccas, Hephaestion, of course – all the inner circle, dressed in their best, but relaxed, lying about the place drinking too much. We’d gone a year without a break, and the atmosphere was . . . festive. Even dangerous. Slave girls walked carefully, or bow-legged. Boys too.

Olympias downed her wine. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Disband the army, call Parmenio home where you can keep an eye on him, and we’ll be fine.’ She smiled demurely. ‘I’m sure we can live safe and happy, after that.’

Alexander stood up. Hephaestion knew him best and caught at his hand, but Alexander was too fast. His cup crashed to the floor a hand’s breadth from his mother’s head. ‘I am going to Asia!’ he shrieked. ‘I am not disbanding my army. I am not releasing one man.’ He was shaking. ‘I care nothing for the cost. My men will march without air if I march.’

Uh-oh. I knew that the pezhetaeroi had been home three days and they were already muttering about back pay, land grants, new clothes, sandals – all the things soldiers require.

Antipater had been away from the king too long, and had forgotten how to manage him. He took on a pompous tone. ‘Eventually, we can consider Asia, lord. But for now, we have to be realistic.’

Alexander stopped shrieking. He turned on Antipater, and his hands were shaking. ‘Listen, you,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t care if I have to have my mother murder every aristocrat in Macedon so that I can seize their estates. I am marching on Asia at the head of a magnificent army – all the allies – the crusade to avenge Xerxes.’ He walked carefully over to Antipater. ‘Do – you – understand?’

Antipater was shaken. We all were. Alexander had been on the edge of this sort of explosion before, but he didn’t actually cross a certain line.

Right then, he had his hidden dagger in his hand, and I thought he was going to kill Antipater. So did Antipater.

Olympias got to her feet – she came up to Alexander’s shoulder, or a little more – and took his hand. ‘There, there, my love,’ she said cautiously but firmly. She took the dagger from him and put her wine cup in its place.

He drank, but his eyes had more white than pupil, and he terrified all of us so much that we didn’t talk about it.

The next day, Antipater sent for Parmenio. He did it with Alexander’s permission and over the royal seal, but we knew who ordered whom, and again, I was afraid. I suspected that Parmenio and Antipater were now going to murder Alexander because they were afraid of him.

Parmenio arrived two days later. He’d already been on his way – or, as Thaïs suggested, he’d been near by, waiting for Antipater to arrange his arrival. Either way, his timing was propitious.

I’m going to pause in my historical account here to talk about Thaïs. We were ‘getting along’. Athens had poisoned something between us. It is difficult to explain, because I understood enough to worry and not enough to make it right. Had she been unfaithful with Alexander? What was unfaithfulness, in a hetaera? And had the situation – loyalty to me, to Alexander, to Athens – unbalanced her? What role had pregnancy played? Pregnant women can be deeply irrational. Men use this as an excuse to describe women as irrational as a tribe – unfair, stupid, vicious, of men, but let’s face it. Pregnant women can be very difficult.

Hey, you’d be difficult, too, if you were carrying a baby between your legs in a Greek summer.

At any rate, we avoided all these topics. We were like allies, not lovers. We lived together, we were intimate enough. I thought I’d outlast her anger.

Sometimes, I’m quite intelligent.

Parmenio’s welcome was tumultuous and magnificent. Alexander spared no effort for him, and he received much the sort of welcome we had received. He had, after all, taken and held the crossings into Asia, even though he’d lost most of the cities to Memnon, who had, let’s face it, outgeneralled Parmenio in each of three encounters. Something else you won’t find in the Military Journal.

Parmenio was a careful man, a professional soldier and not a courtier. He’d been Philip’s favourite, and he and Antipater were, I think, actually, genuinely friends, not just tolerant allies and rivals. As soon as Parmenio arrived and was welcomed, he and Antipater vanished into the part of the palace that functioned as the headquarters of the army and the secretariat of the king – the bureaucracy, if you like. They spoke for four hours, and Parmenio emerged smiling.

I say he emerged, because I was right there. Alexander had ordered me to provide Parmenio with a direct escort. He had a troop of Thessalian cavalry of his own – his ‘grooms’, if you like, although he was so famous that they were all knights – but they were not allowed in the palace (my new security cordon in effect) and I watched the great man myself.

When he came out of the ‘office’ wing, he looked around as my guards moved to surround him.

‘Young Ptolemy, I think? Last time I saw you, lad, you were naked and playing in the mud.’ He held out a hand. But despite his patronising words, he offered me the full hand and arm clasp of the warrior, and held it warmly. ‘Your father would, I think, be quite proud.’

‘From your mouth to the ears of the gods,’ I said. ‘The king is waiting for you, sir.’

He nodded. As we walked, he said, ‘I gather you and Nicanor had a disagreement.’

I nodded. ‘A misunderstanding, I think. My impression is that Nicanor and I are good, now. If not, let’s settle it. Your family and mine are old allies.’

‘By Zeus, lad, you speak just like your father. “Let’s settle it”. Herakles’ dick, Ptolemy, how do you survive here, if you speak the truth?’ Parmenio was like a force of nature. It was impossible – impossible – not to like him.

I grinned. ‘It’s my job. Ask the king. He’ll say the same. Hephaestion tells him what he wants to hear and I tell him what he doesn’t want to hear.’

Parmenio stopped. ‘Like what?’

I saw the pit yawning at my feet. ‘Best ask the king, sir.’

He nodded. ‘You want to go to Asia?’

Now I stopped. ‘Is this a trick question? I command a squadron of the Hetaeroi.’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know if we’re going to Asia, and I don’t know if I’m taking you, even if we go. If this talk is too straight for you, you tell me, son of Lagus.’

‘Meaning that I’m no longer commanding my Hetaeroi?’ I asked.

He looked at me. ‘We’ll see, lad. You did a fine job this summer, but you’re no veteran. And Antipater wants you.’ He looked around – an astounding gesture from a man so powerful. Creepy, almost. ‘You are a great landowner, not a penniless mercenary. Think about it.’

He nodded pleasantly to me and I passed him through the sentries, to the king.

I came off duty and was summoned to the king myself.

He was papyrus white, and his hands were shaking.

‘I am not the king,’ he said very quietly.

I made a face. ‘You are, lord.’

Alexander put his face in his hands. I had never seen him do any such thing. ‘I am not the king,’ he said again. Then, in a voice suddenly more rueful than angst-ridden, he said, ‘I don’t suppose that you have a secret sister you’d like me to marry?’

I pretended to take him seriously – stared off into space for a little while, shook my head.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

He managed a small smile for my performance. ‘Might I marry Thaïs, then?’

I shook my head emphatically. ‘No, lord.’

He smiled. ‘She’s one of the few women I actually fancy. But no – I am Achilles, not Agamemnon. I would never stoop to take your war prize.’ He smiled to show it was all in fun – a kind of fun at which he was not very good, and playing far too close to the bone for me. But he was trying to tell me something. I wasn’t seeing it.

‘Antipater and Parmenio have laid out for me the conditions under which they will allow me to cross over to Asia.’ He looked out of the window. ‘I am to marry and beget an heir.’

I laughed. ‘I’m not sure that Hephaestion can bear you a child,’ I quipped.

Alexander whirled. ‘How dare you presume!’ he said. ‘Hephaestion is a noble man, not some effeminate.’

Me and my big mouth. ‘I apologise, lord. I was attempting to lighten your mood, not to attack Hephaestion.’ I shrugged. ‘And – your comment about Thaïs hit me hard.’

It was his turn to pause.

He had a scroll in his hand, and he put it down carefully, came over to me and put his hands on my arms. ‘I am very fond of Thaïs. I don’t know of another woman who, six months pregnant, nonetheless makes me admire her.’ He looked into my eyes. ‘I have never lain with her.’

I didn’t like his choice of words. Too precise. But he was trying to convey . . . love, charm, trust – and I wanted it, so I nodded.

Alexander shook his head and let go of my arms. ‘I am the womanish one, today. I am sure you thought that was humour. I will try to keep my temper in check. Parmenio has changed every command in the army. That, too, is part of his price.’

I shrugged. ‘Well, I knew it was coming. Nicanor to the hypaspists, and Philotas to the Hetaeroi. Coenus? Where’s he going?’

‘He’s to have the Pellan regiment of pezhetaeroi.’ Alexander sounded angry, and well he might. The Pellans – the local boys – were the best regiment of pikes – the elite. Alexander looked at the floor. ‘But his men – his officers – my father’s officers. Asander has the Prodromoi.’

That annoyed me. I’d wanted the cavalry scouts for myself. Not that I’d ever asked.

‘You and Perdiccas both lose your squadrons,’ Alexander went on. ‘I’m sorry, Ptolemy.’

I stood silently, my lips trembling. I loved commanding the Hetaeroi. And I had done well at it. I didn’t want to whine. But this was . . . unfair. That adolescent word that adults never use.

‘Have I . . . failed you? Lord, I . . . by Zeus, King of the Heavens!’ I turned away from the king. I knew that I was going to cry.

Alexander came and put his arm around me. ‘I know!’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Ptolemy. But I’m paying, too. As soon as I have command – I’ll put you all back in your places. But as soon as that man walked into the palace – I was no longer king.’

I held my temper in check, although my stomach did flips and I remember the tears running down my cheeks.

‘You are still somatophylakes,’ he said. ‘And one of my royal huntsmen, for life.’

‘I want to hunt Persians,’ I said. ‘And I’ll go as a trooper, under one of Philip’s fart-sacks.’

Alexander smiled. It was like the sun coming through clouds. ‘You will?’

I frowned. ‘Of course.’

He nodded. ‘Well, we’ll find something for you to do. Antipater wants to keep you home.’

‘Antipater doesn’t trust me,’ I said.

Alexander laughed bitterly. ‘The opposite, Ptolemy. We all trust you, and that means you should be left at home. It’s the ones I hate that I have to take to Asia.’

The next day, Antipater began to sell the crown lands around Pella – for cash. Alexander wouldn’t discuss it.

I had handed all my palace keys to Philotas. He wasn’t bad – and neither was Nicanor. They were sitting together in what had always been my room. They rose when I entered. I was in armour.

‘My brother says you are like a lion,’ Philotas said, and held out his hand.

I didn’t feel much like smiling – but remember, my father and their father were old friends, and we all saw Parmenio as the head of our faction, the old aristocrats. I shook hands.

‘These are my keys to all the strong places in the palace,’ I said. ‘They are numbered and have tags on them with the name of the place they unlock.’

Philotas sat and read all the keys. ‘Perdiccas has a set as well?’

I shrugged. ‘Sorry, sir, you will have to ask him.’

Philotas shook his head. ‘Can we not have this as us against you? Parmenio’s men against Alexander’s men? That won’t defeat the Persians.’

I folded my arms over my chest. ‘You really want to have this conversation?’ I asked.

‘Try me,’ Philotas said.

‘Alexander doesn’t need you or your father to conquer Asia. You went out there and got your arses handed to you by Memnon while the king was reconquering Greece with a handful of men and the will of the gods. Now you and yours are taking control of an army we created and we trained. So – yes, sir, there is going to be some strain.’ I felt much better, having said it.

Nicanor smiled at me. He looked at his brother. ‘I told you,’ he said.

Philotas shook his head. ‘You kids are arrogant, I’ll give you that. We built this army, Ptolemy. My father and Philip and Antipater. I’ve been in harness with this army since I was twelve years old. I’ve trained more pezhetaeroi than you’ve had shits. I’ve pissed more water than you’ve sailed over. You kids have never seen a real battle – never fought an equal foe. And you have the gall to come here and tell me that you trained this army?’

I nodded. ‘Yes. That’s what I’m telling you. You were never a page, though – so you wouldn’t understand.’

‘One of Alexander’s butt-boys? That makes you special ?’ Philotas laughed. ‘Let’s just leave it there. I don’t want you in my squadrons, however much my brother seems to like you.’

I looked at Nicanor. ‘Philotas, I think you are making a real error. I don’t think that you understand the king. Or what he can do.’

Philotas shook his head. ‘That’s what Nicanor said.’ He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter, though. He’s a figurehead, now. Pater’s in charge. As he should be. Pater will fix everything, and we’ll have no more of these desperate, amateurish thrusts around Greece or anywhere else – we’ll fight like experts. Amateurs excel when their backs are against the wall – I’ll give you that. At any rate – you think I’m insulting you, and perhaps I spoke too strongly. You and the king did brilliantly this summer – but Pater would have done it all without leaving Pella. None of those battles needed to be fought. The campaigns cost more than just buying peace would have cost – you know that, right? You work with Antipater – you know that for a quarter of the cost, we could have bought the Illyrians and paid them to fight the Thracians.’

I remember all this – because I had, in my darker hours, thought it all on my own. The king loved war. And he needed it. He needed to be in the saddle every day – he needed to make all those decisions, and make them correctly, and lead us to victory, and be seen to be doing it. It was food and drink and sleep – and sex – to him. When he didn’t have war, he had temper tantrums and little addictions and he was on edge all the time.

So yes – we didn’t need to be in Thrace. Or Illyria. Or Thebes, for that matter. Who cared, in Macedon, if the king was hegemon of the League of Corinth?

And yet, and yet – if you give all that away – if you buy your enemies – if we don’t fight Chaeronea, or Thebes . . .

How long before there’s an Athenian army at Pella?

Who knows, eh?

But the king’s way was the Macedonian way.

‘You planning to conquer Asia that way?’ I asked.

Philotas turned red.

Nicanor laughed. ‘I warned you,’ he said. Although to which one of us, I wasn’t sure.

I saluted and left. Later, in my own house, I thought about how Nicanor had, in effect, taken my side against his own brother.

I was worried that Philotas and Parmenio would ‘allow’ Alexander to be murdered. That it would just ‘happen’. So I started a cabal before I left for my estates, and arranged that the two adjutants of the royal squadrons should control the rotations on duty. And I arranged to be notified – in my person as a somatophylakes – if anyone changed this arrangement.

And I told Antipater that I had done it. I walked into his office, smiled and laid it out for him.

He sat behind an enormous table, his chin in his hand, and his eyes burned from under heavy brows.

‘So now you distrust me,’ he said.

‘I have reason to believe that there’s a plot to kill the king,’ I said. ‘I assume you will back my preparations.’

‘Why not take your suspicions to Philotas?’ he asked.

‘Parmenio is the most likely culprit and has the most to gain,’ I answered.

He tried to stare me down.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Parmenio was your father’s friend. We expected better of you.’

‘It was Pater who warned me about Parmenio,’ I said. ‘I’m going to tell the king of my arrangements, and then I’ll be heading to my estates. As I no longer have a command.’

‘Is that your price? You want a command?’ Antipater shook his head. ‘Why not just say what you want, instead of all this posturing like a boy?’

I sighed. ‘I’m not posturing,’ I said. ‘I don’t have a price. I’m too rich to need to have a price. But Antipater – consider this. Attalus crossed me, and died for it. Philip – bless him – died, too. Perhaps you and Parmenio should treat us like adults.’

‘If you are declaring war . . .’ Antipater said slowly – and I could see I’d shaken him.

‘I’m not!’ I said. And laughed. Oh, the power of it – I had just threatened Antipater and made him twitch.

Court intrigue. Everyone says they are above such stuff, but no one is, and next to war, it is the greatest game.

So I laughed and shook my head. ‘I am not declaring war,’ I said. ‘I just want everyone to note that if something happens to Alexander, there will be a general bloodbath – which I am seeking to prevent. But if that bloodbath happens – well, I wish to suggest that neither you nor Parmenio would emerge unscathed.’ I leaned forward. ‘Or even alive.’

Antipater nodded. ‘I understood you the first time.’

I stood back. ‘Good. I’m going to see the king, and then, as I said, go to my estates. Glad we could have this discussion.’

Antipater leaned forward. ‘He’s insane, you know. You must know.’

I shook my head. ‘No. He’s king. You old men should get that through your heads.’ At this point, Thaïs and I had had this discussion fifty times, and we had hammered out a point of view. I shot it at Antipater, a prepared missile. ‘You think he’s insane because he’s convinced he’s invincible, and because he can see right through you and acts accordingly, and because he says what he thinks. I agree it’s not normal – but he is the king.’

Antipater raised a hand. ‘Listen: you think we are enemies – we are not. May I do you a favour?’

I was instantly alert. ‘If you will,’ I quipped.

He nodded. ‘The king is selling land. We need the money for Asia. I have four farms – all bordering yours. Between Europos and the Axios river – prime land, and twenty stades of royal forest on the river.’

I nodded. I knew the land – farms which actually broke up our holdings along the Axios. They were meant to – to keep landowners like us from becoming regional warlords.

As if.

‘For fifty talents of gold, I’ll see to it that you own them,’ Antipater said. ‘It’s for the war in Asia – none of it will stick to my fingers.’

That’s twelve years of all the profits of all our land, I thought. My lands made me about four talents a year – that’s without lots of other profits, like sales of horses and slaves, fish from the river and other projects. In fact, I could depend on a little more than ten talents of gold a year.

‘You have last year’s accounts for the farms?’ I asked.

Antipater shook his head. ‘Most aristocrats would just buy them – to have the land.’

‘For fifty talents?’ I asked. ‘Most aristocrats must be fools, then.’

Antipater got up and went to the vast closet of scrolls that represented the tax documents of the empire. Scrolls sat in baskets. Two slaves sat at a nearby desk and sorted outgoing and incoming scrolls.

He pulled down the central region basket, went through the scrolls and shook his head. ‘There’s no record.’ He shrugged. ‘Somebody forgot to note it. I imagine the farms and forest are worth . . . a talent a year. Perhaps more.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll talk to the king, but I doubt I’ll offer more than thirty, and even that is more to help the war effort than because the land is worth it.’

Antipater raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re going to bargain with the king?’ he asked.

I smiled and left him. Again, I mention this because to understand us – me and Alexander and Parmenio and Antipater – you need to understand who Alexander was – and who I was. And how important it was, even when I was in power, to manage my estates well.

The king had all the tax documents, of course. Antipater didn’t know the king – I did. If his precious war in Asia depended on finding money, I knew that Alexander would become an overnight expert at funding. And he did.

‘Antipater tells me you will buy the Axios estates,’ he said, as soon as I was admitted.

Well, well.

‘For thirty-five talents,’ I said.

Alexander sat back. ‘Perdiccas gave me ten talents yesterday.’

I nodded – taken aback and trying not to show it. ‘What does he get for it?’ I asked.

Alexander made a face. ‘My undying love? And command of a regiment of pezhetaeroi.’

‘What’re the Military Journal and the Agrianians worth?’ I asked.

Alexander nodded. ‘You’d have to share with Alectus – who I just promoted to the Hetaeroi, as well. Pater always put the best foreigners into the guards – I’m doing the same. We’re going to have ten squadrons of two hundred, and a reserve – Philip’s old men – three more squadrons.’

‘No wonder you need money!’ I said.

Alexander laughed. ‘Fifteen talents for the Agrianians and the Journal.’

‘Undying love?’ I asked.

He looked at Hephaestion, who made a moue. ‘As long as you don’t make any more jokes about me,’ Hephaestion said.

‘None? A steep price, but – Done. I’ll pay fifty talents for the estates. That’s thirty-five for them, and fifteen for you.’

Alexander’s tone lightened. ‘And I’ll have the use of the forest whenever I want it. Yes?’

‘For hunting? Done. Put it in the contract.’ I grinned, and we shook hands.

I took Thaïs home. Sent Heron with my grooms under Polystratus into Pella with fifty talents of gold – almost the whole of my father’s lifetime of savings, gone in an afternoon. On the other hand, Heron said it made him happy.

‘I’ve expected some bandit to come and kill us all for it – for years,’ he said.

Thaïs took another talent and poured money out into her spider’s web of contacts, and more news came back – more and more news.

Darius had ordered a fleet to combine at Miletus, in Asia.

He knew we were coming.

Memnon was raising a major army.

Darius himself was marching east with his household, to face a rebellion in Sogdiana, wherever that was.

Demosthenes was busy cooking trouble. Theban exiles were the new vector of rebellion throughout the league, and they spread like poison. Thaïs’s friends identified them in Corinth and Corcyra and Athens and Miletus.

Thaïs’s friends were electrified by recent events. The destruction of Thebes got rid of the mere hangers-on. It tested some loyalties, but others were either hardened as a stick is hardened in fire, or strengthened by fear.

But the other side – the anti-Macedonian faction, if you will – was also hardening. And since we were poor and Darius of Persia was rich, the mercenaries were all going his way.

I passed the reports on to Hephaestion. Thaïs stayed with me.

We spent months at the farms. I enjoyed putting my organisational skills to work on the royal farms I’d purchased. They’d been mismanaged for fifty years – no one ever manages a farm for the king as well as they’d manage it for themselves.

I appointed Heron’s oldest son to manage two of them, and left him to it, and took the other two for myself. I was determined to breed better horses, and make a killing on them. Or ride them myself. So Poseidon and my new Theban brute Ajax went to stud and passed a very happy winter.

Thaïs and I did too, for a while. She was due after the Winter Feast of Persephone, and she bore me a daughter virtually to the day she’d predicted – but then, she was a priestess of Aphrodite. We called her Eurydike, and she was pretty and plump and had cheeks you just wanted to kiss – or chew on. And thighs – and tiny fingers and toes.

I’ve forgotten to mention young Olympias, my Illyrian foundling. Thaïs took her into her household, and she grew up as a sort of older sister to Eurydike.

I should also mention that Thaïs and I kept separate establishments. Hers was run by old Chalke, a former smith and former slave, because she’d freed her Italiote, Anonius, and he’d returned to Italy. Chalke was old and tough and pretty much unafraid of anything or anyone – he had an eye gone, scars all over his chest – he was the kind of man everyone fears to meet in a dark alley.

Mine was run by Polystratus. Polystratus and Chalke were not friends – more rivals.

I mention this because Thaïs and I lived very separate lives, even after Eurydike was born, and we were too seldom together even when we wanted to be. She was, in many ways, a great lady – a person of as much importance as I was. Twice that winter she went into Pella without me, summoned by the king to deal with matters relating to her web. If I say she had no secrets from me, it’s because she had her private life and I mine. I don’t think that she had any other lovers – I know I didn’t – but I’d learned my lesson. I wasn’t going to ask.

After Eurydike’s birth, she informed me that the goddess required that she be celibate for two months, and that if I would join her in this sacrifice, Eurydike would be a healthier child.

Eurydike never had so much as a bad cold as a child, so I’m guessing that Aphrodite’s an honest goddess. So Thaïs was not in my bed for months after the birth of our daughter, and I saw less of her by day, as well. So I was shocked one day to walk into a barn on my home farm and find her and Bella lifting weights like men. Why was I shocked? And a month later, I found the two of them at the edge of one of my pastures, dancing to Chalke’s pipes, and I lay down and watched them, aching for her and amazed to see the rapidity of her movements, the near perfection of her speed and grace, the coordination of the two women, one black, one white, as they moved, naked, through a bewildering flurry of moves, covered in sweat.

It was truly like watching the gods. I snuck away through the trees. I know now that she was working very hard to get her body back – that this is another tribulation women bear, that they must lose months of conditioning in pregnancy and must train like athletes to return to shape. At the time, I simply missed her.

But two months after Eurydike’s birth, just after the early feast of Herakles, she and I shared a dinner, and after dinner, in the midst of a conversation about Menander’s latest play, she squeezed my hand. ‘I have a hankering,’ she said, ‘to sleep with a man with a big nose.’

Well, well.

Our whole relationship seemed to be restored in one night of love – not just sex, either. She came to me almost every night, for weeks. But it was rare for her to sleep with me – actually share my bed – never so often as to let it become familiar. She began to use different scents and wore different clothes and once shocked me by having a girdle of gold under her chiton, and another time she was painted – beautiful designs in red and black around her wrists and hips and running down into her loins.

No, I didn’t need to tup any slave girls. We’d started something different. We spent time together with our daughter. I remember one day dispensing justice for my tenants, with Eurydike curled on my lap. I was not planning to be my father.

After the Macedonian Feast of Zeus the King, Alexander summoned me to court. I had been gone three months, and I was softer, happier and less exercised than at any time in my life.

Happiness is so much harder to describe than war.

And you won’t find that in the Military Journal, either.

Antipater had either forgiven me, or never been offended. He and Alexander had summoned me back to court to help with the logistical planning for the march to Asia. That part is in the Journal, so I won’t bore you much, but I’ll use this opportunity to tell you what the king and Parmenio had chosen to take to Asia.

First, ten thousand pezhetaeroi in five regiments – Elimeotis, under Coenus; Orestae, under Perdiccas, and under Polyperchon the Tymphaeans – all collectively known as astHetaeroi, the men of Outer Macedon, as separate from the pezhetaeroi, who were in three regiments under Meleager, Craterus and Amyntas son of Andromenes, representing the men of Inner Macedonia. Old Macedonia. To further complicate this, we called all of them – all six regiments – pezhetaeroi. Got it?

Nicanor had fifteen hundred hypaspitoi. Alectus left the hypaspitoi for the Agrianians at this time, and took most of the Agrianians with him – not all, but most – and Nicanor drafted the very best men of the ‘Asian’ pezhetaeroi to replace them. It was a different set of hypaspitoi – but not worse, though it pains me to say so.

The Psiloi – the professional light armed troops, made up of men who could have fought in more equipment but were paid for specialist scout services (as opposed to the rabble of freed slaves and lesser men that Greeks used as Psiloi) consisted of six hundred Agrianians and four hundred archers – most of whom were recruited out of Attika and mainland Greece, although you’d never know it to look at them, as they dressed like Sakje or Thrake. But they were not mercenaries, but professional archers serving Macedon and looking to gain land grants and Macedonian citizenship. The archers (the Toxophiloi) and the Agrianians together were the Psiloi brigade, which was mine.

Then we had a little more than six thousand Thracians. The conquered chieftains each submitted a band in lieu of tribute – they were serving for plunder. They began to trickle in with the first melting of snow, and they were as excited as children before a feast, and you would never have known we’d beaten them like a drum the year before.

We had about the same number of Greeks – mostly small contingents from the smaller states, three hundred men each from places like Argos and Corcyra. Worth noting here that the Greeks weren’t worthless, but they were outnumbered by the Thracians – this in the Panhellenic crusade to avenge the destruction of Athens!

So that was the infantry, with five thousand mercenaries and Parmenio’s army in Asia (another ten thousand Macedonian foot in six more regiments). Altogether, we had about forty-two thousand infantry.

For cavalry, Alexander and Parmenio spent the winter expanding the Hetaeroi to almost two thousand five hundred, and we took three-quarters of them to Asia – eighteen hundred men with three horses each and full armour.

We had as many again – Thessalians. They served for pay, but under their own officers, as if Thessaly were a new set of Macedonian provinces, like Outer Macedonia. In effect, they were – they elected Alexander Archon for Life. So – eighteen hundred superb Thessalian cavalry.

Then the one really reliable contribution from the Greeks – six hundred splendid cavalry. Athens sent her best – the lead squadron of the Hippeis, all aristocrats, under my friend Kineas. But the other contingents weren’t bad, and they, unlike the hoplites, were friends of Alexander and willing to fight.

Parmenio had another thousand cavalry – mostly mercenaries – and then there were the Prodromoi, now augmented with Paeonians and with Thracians – a little short of a thousand light cavalry. All told, we had at least six thousand cavalry. The army totalled out just short of fifty thousand men, and we calculated rations and forage on fifty thousand, because it was easy, and because a surplus is a hedge against disaster. And besides, if you don’t already know it, that army had at least one slave for every soldier – probably more, and certainly many more after we started to gain Asia.

But I get ahead of myself.

Antipater and I went through all these figures, and then we started to draw things. Camps – laid out for one hundred thousand men. Forage – care to know what it takes to feed a hundred thousand men? It takes six hundred thousand pounds of food a day. Thirty thousand animals? Another three hundred thousand pounds of food. Call it a round million pounds of food a day.

Some of that can be found in grass. But that still leaves a lot to find.

And you can’t put a month’s worth of food in wagons. There just aren’t that many farm wagons in the world.

What you do is build magazines, and store food. Philip had started the process, and Alexander had, thank the gods, never stopped spending on his preparations so that the magazines were full at the two ports in Asia and all across Macedon and down the road to the Bosporus.

It was doubly good, because Antipater showed me the accounts. The magazines were full, and the troops were paid, and we had less than thirty talents in the treasury – cash for thirty days’ operations.

The men wouldn’t mutiny right away, of course – but it would only be a matter of time.

Memnon was reputed to be the best general of his generation, and a brilliant deceiver – and a careful strategist who never fought unless he had to. I began to sweat just thinking of what he could do to us by not fighting. Two months of avoiding us and we’d be broke.

Alexander flatly refused to marry. He’d accepted all of Parmenio’s appointments, and he’d accepted all of Antipater’s financial advice, but he was determined to march in the spring, unencumbered, and he referred to marriage in terms that left no one in any doubt of his views that marriage was profoundly unheroic. Achilles was mentioned a great deal.

Parmenio convinced me to talk to the king. On this topic, I agreed with the king’s mature councillors. An heir would make the kingdom more stable.

On the other hand, I saw through Antipater and I saw through Parmenio. Both had daughters – both seemed to feel that they would make fine fathers-in-law.

Ochrid was still alive, and no one had attempted to poison the king. My arrangements for his daily security were untouched.

Had I warned them off? Had the warning been a false alarm?

You never know, in this business.

I approached the king and asked if there was anyone he would marry.

He shrugged. ‘If Athens had a king, I’d marry that man’s daughter,’ he said. ‘If Darius offered me his sister, I’d consider it.’ He gave me his new, lopsided, man-of-the-people grin. ‘Otherwise, no.’

I nodded. ‘An heir would be good for the kingdom,’ I suggested.

‘I’d be dead the moment a son of mine put his head from between his mother’s thighs,’ he said.

I thought so, too.

So I went back to the old general and told him that Alexander would not marry.

He made a face, and dismissed me.

Kineas arrived with the Athenians. He kissed Thaïs, made much of Eurydike, and bought a house for himself and his friends. He was rich in a way that I’d never seen before – he refused all offers of help.

He still adored Alexander, but in private he told me that his father’s loyalty to the cause was costing him in the Assembly and in everyday business – that the anti-Macedon faction had unprecedented popularity.

That was sad. Athenians are fools, and democracy is an idiotic way to run a state.

Alectus came down from the hills and learned that we were to share the brigade of Psiloi. He came and had dinner with me, and we embraced and agreed to be good partners. In everything.

‘Which nights do I get Thaïs?’ he asked with a broad wink at her. In my home, she ate with my friends.

‘All the nights I don’t want her,’ I said.

Thaïs snorted. ‘All the nights I don’t want him,’ she said to Alectus with her dazzling smile.

But I got the better smile, and Alectus rolled his eyes.

‘It’s the tattoos, isn’t it?’ he said.

He was sixty if he was a day, and his abdominal muscles stood out like soldiers on parade. She ran a hand over his stomach.

‘Some people could learn a thing or two,’ she said wickedly.

I went back to training four hours each day.

Alectus laughed. But he always did.

Alexander recruited a small army of non-soldiers. Many were philosophers – men who studied plants and animals, who studied other men, who wrote about government. Their master was Aristotle’s nephew, Callisthenes, who had an even bigger mouth than I have and never hesitated to use it. I liked him fine. He made me look good.

Although it was never officially said, all those civilians came under my command – or rather, I was responsible for them. There were more than two hundred of them, with that many again in slaves, and not a fighting man among them, believe me. They had to be cosseted, protected and fed – marched about, saved from predators, kept warm – amid a constant stream of whiney abuse. Once, in the Trans-Oxiana, I wanted to kill them all myself, but that’s another story. Alexander was using them to make him famous. What they actually accomplished was, and is, so much more than any of us ever expected – well, that’ll come in time. But for the moment – in a way, they all helped me keep the Journal. Callisthenes began a History the moment he joined us, and he used to read it some nights. It was tougher than the Journal – sometimes more accurate, but nowhere near as detailed in military information. All the scrolls on the far side of the tomb are my copy of Callisthenes. He was a poor philosopher but a superb historian, and he did a better job than I. However, he was no soldier.

Later, let me add, the corps of scribes, as we called them, or the Philosophoi, filled up with two-obol hacks and con artists out to take Alexander, but at the start, the men who joined us were adventurers as much as we were, and the army had some respect for them. Later – well, later was later. Everything was different later, as you’ll see.

In early March, Alexander ordered me – and Perdiccas, Cleitus the Black and Marsyas – to organise a set of games to rival those of Nemea or Olympus. We were given thirty talents of gold to spend.

Perdiccas and I could take a hint – we each added ten more talents, and our games were as lavish as any ever given. We put them on down country at Aegae, and we rebuilt Philip’s stadium. We added a triumphal arch, we paid poets and actors from all over Greece – well, to be honest, mostly from Athens – acrobats, dancers – and athletes. The rest of the competitors came from inside the army.

Kineas, for instance, won a crown of gold laurel leaves boxing. He was superb. No one could touch him. He defeated two Olympic champions and all the Macedonian contenders.

We had horse races, foot races, races in armour, javelin throws ahorse and afoot, swordsmanship, spear-fighting and all the usual sports – pankration, boxing, wrestling, throwing the shield. And noble prizes for every one, crowns for the victors, handed out by Alexander himself.

The Homeric imagery was relentless. Alexander was Achilles, Hephaestion was Patroclus and every one of the somatophylakes had a Homeric name. We wore Homeric costumes, and the performers performed scenes from the Iliad.

Thaïs, to be honest, planned most of it. She was brilliant at this sort of thing, and it allowed her to bring in all of her friends from Athens and other cities – performers, some free, some slaves. Scene painters – fantastic chaps, men who could make a piece of flat hide look like a mountain.

Her seamstresses made the king his purple tent, large enough to allow a hundred guests to recline in comfort.

She planned the themes, and she watched the rehearsals. Alexander lost interest, sometimes – when the real war in Asia took over his head – but she stayed on target. She would come to meals with a stack of scrolls.

I remember one night, I went to dinner with Antipater. We were working together on the logistics for Asia, and for the games, and sometimes we shared a meal. We went to his house, where he ate in splendour, served by twenty slaves. His wife came through once, heavily veiled, to check on us.

I laughed. I was so used to my establishment, with a woman who had her own work and yet shared all of my life, that the glimpse of a ‘real’ Macedonian wife made me laugh.

I won’t say I hated the work, either. I’ll just mention that in many ways I was relieved when the opening ceremonies went off, and I’ll note that much of the conquest of Asia was easier. Destruction is much easier than creation. Eh?

And yet, we had fun. I remember a wild party at my house in Aegae, with Kineas and his friends and a crowd of Thaïs’s demi-monde friends – slaves and free, dancers, hetaerae, the scene painters, a sculptor and a crowd of actors. Altogether, there must have been fifty of us crowded into my andron.

The laughter went on and on, and Thaïs led them in an indecent retelling of the Iliad, which was hilarious – and which attacked Alexander in a hundred ways, and yet was hugely funny.

Kineas, always a man of immense personal dignity, laughed until wine and snot blew out of his nose.

Diodorus declaimed a long speech with an arm around one of Thaïs’s dancer friends. He was playing the part of Achilles, dying in his mother’s arms, but he managed to claim, in between stanzas, that as long as she would pillow his head on her breasts, he’d keep declaiming. This reached surprising heights of comedy – he was quite inventive – and every time he looked to expire, she rolled one breast or the other under his eyes, and he’d splutter and go on again, and we’d all laugh – oh, I remember that laughter as well as I remember anything in the whole crusade. I had thought Diodorus merely acerbic before that, but after that night, he and I were friends. We shared some love of laughter that transcended his dislike of Macedon and ‘my kind’. It went well for him – look at him now!

And when we had all laughed and laughed, Kineas threw a grape at Diodorus, who was running his tongue along the young lady’s flank, and yelled, ‘Get a room’ and she rose, took Diodorus by the hand and led him away. He looked back at us from the doorway.

‘Better a fiery death in glory than a long life and a dull end,’ he declaimed as she led him through the curtain.

Damn, that was the best exit line I’ve ever heard, and I still laugh to think of it.

And when most of the actors were gone, or asleep in the corners, and it was just Kineas and Thaïs and Diodorus and Niceas and, of all people, my Polystratus, sitting over a last cup of wine, Kineas got up (unsteadily) and raised his cup.

‘Let’s drink together – an oath to the gods, to remain friends always. We will conquer Asia together. Let’s drink on it.’

We all rose – no one mocked the notion – and we all drank, even Thaïs. Nearchus was there, and young Cleomenes, and Heron, and Laodon. The cup passed – we all drank.

‘I can feel the gods,’ Kineas said, in a strange voice – but no one laughed because, as Thaïs said afterwards, we could all feel them.

And indeed, I sometimes think that the gods are as drawn to laughter and happy drunkenness as they are to battlefields and childbirth – and if that is true, we must have had all Olympus by us that night.

The night before we were due to march, Olympias summoned Alexander to her. I was there when the summons came, and despite his love for her and his endless patience with her, he rolled his eyes like any teenage boy summoned by his mother. He was in a state of exaltation that was nearly dangerous – he was about to achieve the entire ambition of his life.

We shouted for him to go and come back, and he waved a hand, pressed Hephaestion to stay and keep the couch warm, and left us. I remember because I passed the time of the king’s absence by playing Polis with Cleitus, and I won, and Cleitus, who was drunk and in a mood, punched me, meaning only to give me a tap, but he hit me so hard that I had a bruise for a week, and only Nearchus kept me from hitting him back, or worse.

Alexander came back into the ruckus, and he was white, his lips were almost indistinct and he didn’t notice the tension – which dissipated instantly, because no little quarrel was as important as the king’s anger. He was angry – or worse.

In fact, he looked terrified.

Hephaestion took a look at him and ordered us all to bed. And we went – Alexander in one of his moods could be deadly.

Of course, nowadays, everyone knows what his mother told him – that he was not the son of Philip, but the son of Zeus Ammon, and that she had been made pregnant by the god.

It’s easy to be incredulous and cynical. But in Macedon, we take gods seriously. We’re not like fucking Athenians, who think the gods are so far away that they don’t exist. In Macedon, we credulous barbarians always believe that the gods are present in daily affairs. And every noble in Macedon is the direct descendant of one of the gods.

And Olympias was no madwoman. Say what you will of her – her only addiction was power, and she played the game better than almost anyone in her generation. She was brilliant, cunning and beautiful, and utterly without scruple, except when it came to defending her son. She used murder, the army and her body with equal facility. She could reason, cajole, threaten, seduce or eliminate. But she was not mad, and if she told Alexander that he was born of a god, it’s best not to dismiss the idea out of hand. Certainly Thaïs – a cynical Athenian hetaera – accepted the story at face value. Priests at Delphi accepted it. Aegyptian priests accepted it. It is fashionable now to say that Alexander was not half a god – merely a man. Very well. But I knew him, and I say that there was something beyond the human – something inestimably greater, and yet sometimes less than human, in him.

Regardless, Alexander believed her. The cynic might say that he had to – that having participated in the murder of Philip, he needed to be told that he was not Philip’s son. Perhaps – but again, Alexander was never so simple, and I never saw him betray the least guilt about Philip.

What I can say is that from that night, he never again referred to Philip as ‘my father’. And that, in turn, had consequences that none of us could have foreseen.

Next morning, we marched for Asia. We marched with forty thousand men, and we had our supplies sitting ready in magazines all the way down to the Asian shores, and Alexander was determined to march along the same route that Xerxes had used. And we did.

We made excellent time, passing from Amphilopolis along the coast route to Sestos in the Chersonese. But the tensions grew every day, and they made the trip harder and harder.

It was all but open conflict between the king and Parmenio.

Parmenio issued orders to the army without any reference to the king. Parmenio summoned army councils and sent the king an invitation. Parmenio changed the route of the march and the intended crossing-point without speaking to the king. Alexander had intended for the army to cross at Sigeon, near Troy, which was in our hands and had a protected port.

I had my own reason for anger. In the first three days it became increasingly clear that I was not to have command of the Psiloi. Attalus – another Attalus, one of Philip’s men – received the command from Parmenio. I received a verbal message from Alectus, asking me to meet him, and he insisted that we meet outside the camp.

It was a difficult meeting – Alectus got to tell me I’d been replaced, and I didn’t know how to respond – I lashed out at Alectus instead of saving my ire for the man responsible.

I went straight to the king, and pushed through his companions – as was my right – to where he was donning armour.

‘I have been deprived of my brigade,’ I said.

Alexander was just being put into his thorax. Hephaestion was holding it open for him, and he was pulling his heavy wool chiton into folds to pad the metal. ‘Good morning to you, too, son of Lagus,’ he said.

‘Parmenio has given my brigade to another of his old men,’ I said.

Alexander nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

I remember the feeling of horror I had as I realised that the king was not going to do anything. Either he could not or he would not.

I was reminded of Pausanias, somehow.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. Quietly, he added, ‘There’s nothing I can do. We are all young and inexperienced.’

I stormed out of his presence without asking permission, and I was allowed to go without rebuke.

I considered going home.

Thaïs checked me. ‘Sooner or later, Parmenio intends to kill him,’ she said. ‘Probably on campaign. Will you just ride off and leave him? He’ll die without you.’

It was an interesting role reversal, and it did our relationship a world of good. At Thebes, it had been I talking her into staying with the army – with Macedon. Now the situation was reversed, even if the minutiae were wildly different.

‘I’m staying,’ she said that night, with utter finality. ‘Go home if you like. I have sacrificed everything to be there when the king marches into Asia.’

Once I would have reacted to that. I would have attacked her for the suggestion that she had sacrificed everything. But I knew better, now.

She came and put her arms around me. ‘He’ll die without you,’ she said again. ‘Nor will I be very happy.’

She was in a position to know. With Parmenio in complete control of the army and the scout forces, Thaïs was the effective chief of the king’s intelligence service.

I continued to have charge of the Military Journal and attached functions, and what rankled me – perhaps more than anything else – was that Parmenio was unfailingly polite and cheerful, and acted as if nothing had happened. He insisted that his officers supply me with their daily reports, so that the Journal ran more smoothly than ever before. Even officers like Amyntas, who affected to despise me, were quick to send their adjutants to report on numbers and effectives and men sick, ground covered, and all the details that made war possible.

Acting as a glorified military secretary was not what I had in mind, however. It was perhaps four days after I discovered that I would not have command of the scouts, and I was in the headquarters tent, listening to Eumenes the Cardian – he’d been military secretary to Philip, and he was busy trying to take the Journal away from me. I didn’t really want it, but basic competitiveness and a deep inner knowledge of how courts work kept me from letting it go – and besides, Eumenes and I got along from the first, so that the struggle was surprisingly amicable and without the drama of some of Macedon’s other conflicts. He was a brilliant man, as his later campaigns show – a superb fighter, and a witty, educated man. I liked him.

In fact, I liked a great many of Philip’s former officers – some of whom had been my father’s friends and childhood companions. It wasn’t a simple case of old versus young. But as soon as I warmed to one of them, he’d make a slighting remark – an insistent remark – about Alexander’s sex habits or his ‘effeminism’. In fact, every day I had revealed to me where Demosthenes’ propaganda came from about the king. It came from Parmenio and his men – they had a low opinion of the king, and they weren’t afraid to show it. They treated him with a gentle, eternally condescending contempt. And I hated that.

At any rate, three or four days after I lost my command, Parmenio was in the headquarters tent, issuing rapid-fire orders – all simple stuff about our magazines and their replenishment, and tax relief for those districts charged with our food – Eumenes held up a hand. ‘Need a minute, here,’ he said. ‘Lot to write. You need this copied out fair?’

Parmenio nodded. ‘As soon as you can,’ he said. ‘Messenger for Pella is waiting.’

Eumenes went out to get another set of wax tablets, and Parmenio turned to me – ignoring a crowd of taxiarchs and under-officers.

‘Men tell me you are angry about the Psiloi brigade,’ he said. He held up a hand to forestall anything I might say. ‘Listen, lad – it was never yours. The king should stop being dishonest about it. When the king is older and more experienced, I’ll give him a share of the command appointments, and I am sure you’ll get one. But he does not have that authority right now, and you were a fool to accept such a commission from his hand. That sort of behaviour can lead to discontent and is bad for discipline. Understand?’

This was a glorious opportunity for me to show my hand and tell Parmenio just what I thought of him. On the other hand, if the king wasn’t taking him on, who was I to engage him? And Thaïs’s comments were ringing in my ears.

And he was still my childhood hero. Let’s not forget that.

So I swallowed it, and went back to commanding sixty troopers in the Hetaeroi – half a troop, in the new system. I was in Philotas’s regiment. Philotas was not a friend.

On the bright side, all the reports suggested that the Persian command was badly divided – that Darius had all his best troops in Aegypt, and all his personal troops out east subduing rebels, and we were going to land in Asia unopposed.

We were twenty days to Sestos, and we arrived in excellent shape, because Antipater and I had done a thorough job. The men were well fed and their wages were paid up, and the fleet – all one hundred and sixty vessels, the whole fleet of the League – was waiting for us.

At Sestos, Alexander showed his hand. He summoned Parmenio – I was there – and informed his general that he would be taking the elite of the army – the hypaspitoi, the entire Hetaeroi and his elite Agrianians and Thracian cavalry – and marching down the coast to Elaious, where he’d intended to trans-ship, and he requested that Parmenio send us sixty ships from the fleet to cover our crossing. Alexander pointed out that by spreading our crossing, we left the Persians with an insurmountable tactical problem – either force could get behind the flank of any enemy that opposed the other. He also made plain that he intended to make religious sacrifices at Troy.

Parmenio agreed to all of it with a good grace.

‘You are the king, after all,’ he said.

But an hour later, in the command tent, I heard him talking to many of his older officers. Amyntas made a comment I didn’t hear.

Parmenio sneered. ‘The boy is running off with his lover to play war.’ He laughed.

All the old men in the tent laughed with him. And Philotas spoke up. ‘How much longer do we have to put up with this?’ he asked.

Parmenio laughed again. ‘As long as it takes,’ he said.

We rode away with the feeling we were going on vacation.

Alexander rode ahead with his somatophylakes, and we enjoyed the ancient countryside and the monuments. While the Aegema moved into the prepared camp at Elaious, Alexander went and sacrificed to the hero Protesilaeius, reputed to be the first Greek ashore in the Trojan War, and the first to die.

Our squadron of warships arrived on time, and we crossed without opposition, and all the word from the northern crossing was that they were crossing well and on time. Alexander stood on the stern of our trireme and sacrificed a bull in the midst of the Hellespont – no mean feat of logistics and sheer nerve, let me tell you – and then poured a libation of fine wine from a golden goblet and threw the goblet into the water in conscious emulation of Xerxes. And the next day, when the army was ashore, he went off to Troy with his bodyguard and no one else, and he and Hephaestion sacrificed at the tombs of Achilles and Patroclus. It was a massive and expensive sacrifice. Since I wrote the Military Journal, I knew we couldn’t afford to do this. We didn’t have the funds to pay the troops. Now, Macedonian troops are used to being in arrears, but to launch an invasion of the mightiest empire in the history of the world with an empty treasury argues – well, hubris is not the least of it.

At the Temple of Athena in Troy – reputed to be the field temple that the Greeks set up inside their siege lines – Alexander dedicated his splendid silver and gold armour to the goddess, and left it hanging on the portico. But he took the armour of Achilles – ancient bronze nearly green with age, with patches of heavy gold plate over parts of it.

It was an ancient piece, that breastplate – magnificently made. And it fitted Alexander perfectly. If this was done to impress the army, it did so very well indeed. Soldiers are cynical bastards, but they love a good omen. That the armour of Achilles fitted the king who called himself Achilles seemed to please every man.

And this was what Parmenio didn’t understand. It’s funny – he had a far better understanding of the rank and file than Alexander ever did, but he had no sense of drama. Alexander was like a god. Parmenio was a good general.

Alexander wore the armour every day. It was odd to see him in armour covered in verdigris, but he made it look magnificent. He wore it under a leopard-skin cloak, with a gold helmet that sported the wings of a white bird set in gold on either side of his head.

That evening, he and Hephaestion ran a race around the tombs of the two great heroes. I think it had been years since Alexander ran in public, against a real opponent – and surprising as this may seem, Hephaestion never gave an inch in competition with Alexander. They raced like Olympians, and both of them flew – by the gods, they were magnificent. The Aegema watched them and applauded, and rumours of divine favour and even divine status began to sprout wings among the troops. Alexander won by the length of a man’s body over a long course, and afterwards, still naked, he poured another libation to Achilles and grinned like a boy.

I helped him strigil the dust off, and he kept laughing. ‘Did you see me run?’ he asked me, three times. ‘Wasn’t I magnificent?’

In fact, he had been superb – but why did he have to ask?

Thaïs had, by this time, heard the rumour of what Olympias had said to Alexander. He’d told Hephaestion, and Hephaestion told some favourite, and the word got around. It seemed to me hubris, at the time, and perhaps blasphemy – but it also seemed possible, at least at a distance.

From Troy we marched north to join up with Parmenio. He’d met up with his own garrison forces in Asia, and together we had almost fifty thousand men.

Memnon, the Greek mercenary, was no longer in command of the Persian forces. Arsites, the satrap of Phrygia, was gathering men, and he placed the brilliant Memnon in a subordinate position.

But Memnon had already done us serious damage. He’d retaken most of the towns of the Asian Troas – Lampsacus and Parium closed their gates to us. We had less than a month’s cash on hand, and everyone in Asia seemed to know it. Outside Lampsacus, the philosopher Anaximenes told Alexander and Parmenio point blank that he’d only pay a certain amount of a bribe to get us to leave his city alone – he knew that we didn’t have time to lay a siege. And he was right. We took his bribe and marched on, and our army was getting hungry.

Thaïs went to work. That night, with Anaximenes’s taunts burning in our ears, she sat by lamplight in my pavilion and wrote a dozen letters to leading men in Priapus, the next town on our route. And she sent Strakos and Polystratus with a dozen men.

It was her first attempt at a clandestine operation, and it ran well enough. They entered the city before the gates closed, and contacted her friends – the men of Alexander’s party, or in one case Leonatus, a Spartan exile and one of her personal friends. But this time, they were not simply gathering information.

Polystratus took twenty of my grooms and seized a gatehouse.

Strakos took half a dozen thugs and murdered three men – the leaders of the pro-Persian faction fingered by Leonatus.

The next day, when Alexander rode at the head of his brilliant escort to the town of Priapus, they opened their gates and welcomed him as their liberator. Alexander’s mood, already dangerously elated, rose to new heights. He said things – wild things – praised the citizens for their ‘Olympian wisdom’ and other flights of fanciful rhetoric that left them unmoved and apprehensive that they had backed the wrong horse. Strakos and Polystratus grinned like fiends.

Thaïs looked tired and stressed.

Just north of us, the Persians were gathering an army. Arsites was a capable commander, and he had a good name, and the Phrygians rallied to him in good numbers. Thaïs thought he had thirty-five thousand men, and Parmenio, with lower estimates, still thought he had twenty-five thousand real troops and another four thousand useless levies.

We were apprehensive. There were rumours that the Persian fleet was at sea, and since the Great King had just reconquered Aegypt and had absolute control of Tyre and Cyprus, too, we expected that he could put three hundred and fifty triremes on the water to our hundred and sixty. And his would have better mariners, or better than all but the contingent from Athens.

Worse, the money situation was so acute that we had a hard time buying provisions even with the willing help of the people of Priapus. We were down to ten talents of gold.

Parmenio was suspiciously willing to support the king.

Alexander had one simple answer – we were going to go along the coast by quick marches and force the satrap to battle and pay the troops and the campaign with the spoils of his camp.

It was becoming plain that all the Persians had to do to defeat us was refuse the battle.

What was worse, it began to look to me as if Parmenio was pushing the king to commit to whatever battle was offered. I didn’t like the way it was discussed in the headquarters tent, or the undertone of satisfaction to their predictions of doom.

And at the public officers’ meetings, to which Alexander was now always invited, Parmenio deferred to the king in everything, allowing him to make the operational decisions and encouraging his wildest flights of fancy. We were meeting on the portico of the Temple of Athena in Priapus when Alexander, looking at a dozen Phrygian cavalry just captured by his Thracians, commented that if these were the vaunted Asians, he could probably rout them with just his bodyguard.

Parmenio nodded. ‘Lord, you and your friends are all that will be needed – one gallant charge – like Achilles on the plains of Ilium. Scatter the Medes and win undying glory.’

Alexander flushed, laughed and tried not to look pleased by the apparent praise.

I wondered if Parmenio was contemplating using the Persians as a weapon to murder the king.