God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

TWENTY

When I rode into Gordia, I found something more – and less – than an army camp. Gordia in high summer is a nasty place, where waves of gritty dust roll on the slightest breeze and the sun pounds down like a white-hot aspis held a few arm’s lengths from your face. There’s not enough water and not enough greenery and everyone smells.

I had four thousand men behind me on the bad roads, strung out over fifty stades. My cavalry was at the rear, preserving their horses. I had plundered Caria for horses – with Queen Ada’s willing support – and my Hetaeroi had two or even three chargers apiece – and I meant to keep it that way.

The army camp was vast, reaching across the rolling valley to the north and west. At a glance I thought there were more than thirty thousand men in the valley.

And then there was the other camp.

I rode along the edge of it with the taste of grit in my mouth. There were more than two hundred great pavilions, towering edifices of canvas and silk.

Thaïs sneered. She had a very pretty sneer. She was dressed as a man and riding at my side, our preferred method of travel. With a scarf over her hat, she was invisible to most men. These days, she sometimes led her Angeloi in person, dressed this way.

‘Look at them,’ she said.

They were a new breed of courtiers, a breed of vermin never before seen in a Macedonian army camp. Artists, musicians, actors, prostitutes, politicians from twenty rival cities and every faction in Greece and some in Asia.

Thaïs shook her head. ‘Alexander must be winning,’ she said. ‘These vultures are usually in the Great King’s camp.’

I found Parmenio at the north end of the town, under the great ridge that rose above it. He was standing in the middle of a dozen Macedonian officers, watching two female slaves fight. They’d torn off most of their clothing and they were hard at it in the dust, and they both meant business.

To the Macedonian mind, this is about the highest form of entertainment.

I slid from Poseidon’s back and hobbled over to the old man. I’d been in the saddle for twenty days and I wanted wine, bread and oil, in that order. A massage. A bed with Thaïs in it, if she was clean.

Heh. Anyway, I got to Parmenio, and he turned at my approach and surprised me by throwing his arms around me.

‘There’s a proper Macedonian,’ he said.

Apparently we were few enough on the ground that we all loved each other. I filed that away.

‘Coenus has a letter for you from Antipater, and another from your factor.’ Parmenio held me at arm’s length. ‘Well done with Queen Ada, lad – brilliant campaign. When we heard that Memnon was landing troops, we wrote you off!’

I grinned. Praise is praise, and he was the greatest strategos of our day, for all that I thought he wanted to be rid of the king.

We even embraced.

‘I think all the troops I have are yours,’ I said. ‘I didn’t lose many and I picked up about eleven hundred. They’ll need a place to camp.’

‘So how many?’ Parmenio asked.

‘Five thousand foot, and five hundred cavalry. You already have Kineas back, eh?’ I said, looking around for him.

Parmenio flashed a grim smile. ‘There’s a good soldier. A little too Greek for my tastes, but a damn fine officer.’

Philotas shook his head. ‘Fucking Athenians think they’re better than us. All of them.’

I wondered what was going on in Thaïs’s head. She was standing right behind me.

‘I’ll assign you a campground. I’m delighted to have my mercenary infantry back. What did you think of them?’

I nodded. ‘First class, really. As good as the pezhetaeroi, in most cases. There’s a new officer – Isokles. I had him from Memnon. He’s Athenian, and a damn sight better than that clown Casides you left me with.’

‘Casides is a Spartan!’ Philotas said.

‘I doubt it, and if he really is, he’s from the bad side of Sparta.’ I made them laugh, always a good sign. ‘Anyway, they’re all yours again. Isokles will be here in an hour. I have the cavalry at the back. Where do I camp?’

Parmenio looked at Philotas, who frowned.

I couldn’t help but notice that Philotas was wearing a fortune in clothes – a silk chiton that must have cost the value of a good farm, Boeotian boots in red and gold with ivory eyelets, a scarlet felt hat. He had a brutish face with a pair of burning blue eyes that showed how smart he really was, and he always stood with his hands on his hips.

‘Why do you have your grooms in with your Hetaeroi?’ he asked. His tone was ignorant. He was looking for a fight.

So much for my homecoming.

‘The king gave me permission when he gave me my commission for Caria,’ I said.

Parmenio gave me an odd glance.

‘You provided me with some good information, last winter,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it.’

I nodded. In fact, Thaïs sent her best tidbits to both Alexander and to Parmenio, and I was, for once, privy to all of it, which was fun.

‘Your troop should be camped in my area,’ Philotas continued, as if his father had not spoken. ‘But I have no more space. Go and camp to the east.’

His tone was so disobliging that I couldn’t ignore it.

‘Philotas, I’ll camp where I please, if you take that tone with me,’ I said.

Philotas spat. ‘You need to learn to obey your superiors, lad.’

This from a man only ten years my senior.

I held his eyes and shrugged. ‘Never seen the need so far,’ I drawled. ‘Except the king. He has the right to give me orders.’

‘Fuck the king.’ Philotas spat again. ‘Being his butt-boy doesn’t make you immune to discipline.’

I looked to Parmenio for help. Parmenio slapped his son – pretty hard – on the arm.

‘What are you thinking, boy?’ he said. ‘If you treat your officers like this, you’ll have no friends.’

‘I don’t need friends,’ Philotas said. ‘Only obedient slaves.’ He ended the comment with a smile to me.

I started to tremble. I wanted to punch him, but I knew where that would end. So I shook my head. ‘You have neither, with me,’ I said. And turned on my heel.

My next stop was Alexander’s tent. He had a whole compound, now, I saw – five red silk tents all together, and the starburst of Macedon on every one in gold.

There was a low but solidly built palisade all the way around his enclosure, and there were four hypaspitoi on duty in full kit. I saluted, but they barred my way. I didn’t know three of them, but the fourth I did.

‘Bubares! I don’t know the password, I’ve been on detachment.’ I waited for the black man to recognise me. ‘I’m somatophylakes, and I’ve had a bit of a morning.’

He saluted. He met my eyes, and he was trying to tell me something. ‘You’ll have to wait for an equerry. It’s orders, and I don’t want to be beaten.’ He said this so quietly I wasn’t sure, at first, that he had spoken.

After ten minutes, a young man in a spotless white military chiton and boots appeared. He had a stick under his arm. He looked at me.

‘Yes?’ he asked.

‘Ptolemy, son of Lagus,’ I said with exaggerated courtesy. I knew him – he’d been a page until last year, and his name was Simonides.

‘You may not come before the king unless you are clean,’ he said. ‘Indeed, I’m surprised you would even—’

That’s as far as he got before I put him in the sand with a throw. Then I kicked him in the arse for good measure. Then in the balls. Then I raised his chiton, showing his bare arse to the camp.

Bubores laughed. When the young man had run for help, Bubores let the laughter take over. ‘I’ve wanted someone to do that for a long time, boss,’ he said.

‘I’ll come and have wine with you,’ I said. ‘How’s Astibus?’

Bubores positively glowed. ‘Alive, and well enough. Got himself a Persian girl at Granicus – he’s besotted.’ He bowed past me at Thaïs, who had watched the whole exchange impassively from mule-back.

‘My lady,’ Bubores said.

She laughed. ‘Most men can’t even tell who I am,’ she responded.

Bubores tossed his head a little impatiently. ‘I can hunt a fly on the ocean,’ he said.

Alectus appeared in armour, with twenty men and a rather rumpled royal officer. When he saw me, he laughed and we embraced.

He escorted me around the compound, and I saw more slaves than I thought existed in the palace at Pella, and more courtiers than soldiers, and a tent full of scribes busy writing, with Callisthenes, Aristotle’s useless nephew, leading them. Then I found the king, and walked in.

He was being massaged. Hephaestion was arming. He smiled when he saw me.

‘Look who’s back,’ Hephaestion said.

Alexander raised his head and smiled. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ptolemy. Well done. A little too well done. I dangled you to draw Memnon, but instead of drawing him, you singed his nose and then he died.’ Alexander smiled, and put his head back down. ‘Why did you go to Parmenio first, Ptolemy?’

‘I had his troops, and I needed to have a place for them to camp,’ I said.

‘You see?’ Alexander said. ‘Always an excellent explanation.’

I didn’t like that. ‘If I wanted to dissimulate, I’d tell you that it is difficult to gain access to the king. I was refused entry at the gate.’

Alexander raised his head again. ‘Then how is it you are here?’ he asked.

‘I cut the comb of a rooster who needed it,’ I said. ‘The hypaspitoi all know me.’

Alexander lay getting his back pounded for a long minute.

‘I will let this pass this time,’ he began.

I laughed. ‘No, my lord, I will let this pass this time. I am somatophylakes, and I have the right of access to you at all times of the day and night, and even you cannot restrict me.’

Alexander sat up. ‘Leave me,’ he said to the masseur. When the slave was gone, he frowned at me. ‘This is not Macedon,’ he said.

‘I can tell, because your tent is full of Greek prostitutes masquerading as politicians,’ I said. ‘But this is the army of Macedon, and we have laws. Parmenio wants to let you run free, lord, so you will let power go to your head and become an oriental, so he can depose you. Or so Thaïs and I think his thought tends.’ I shrugged. ‘I won’t let you drift, and neither will Hephaestion. You are not the Great King of Persia. You are the King of Macedon.’

‘I am your king, and I may decide who comes and goes from my enclosure!’ he said. He was angry, and red spots were forming on his cheeks.

I nodded. ‘Yes – with the exception of your closest friends and bodyguards.’ I shook my head. ‘This is foolishness, lord – I am, of course, your willing servant and officer, and you may strip me of my rank in a moment. But even you must obey the law.’

‘A few months of independent command have only increased your arrogance,’ Alexander shot back. ‘You are insufferable.’

‘He’s in a bad mood,’ Hephaestion said.

‘Fuck off!’ Alexander said.

‘Why?’ I asked Hephaestion, as if the king weren’t right there.

‘He’s going to face the prophecy this morning, and the whole camp is coming to see him do it,’ Hephaestion said. ‘He swore he could solve it, and everyone expects he can, and now he’s touchy—’

‘Get out of my sight, you ingrate,’ Alexander barked, and he was on the verge of tears.

‘Darius has sixty thousand men moving on the Euphrates, and he means business,’ Hephaestion said. ‘Although you must know that, since we had it from Thaïs. We don’t have that many men, and Darius has a whole second army forming in Ionia to hit Greece if we lose. Our supply lines to Macedon are largely cut by Pharnabazus and his fleet, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Athens is teetering on the brink of open rebellion, which will be the end of our fleet. But Golden Boy here had to mistreat their ambassadors yesterday, just to show them who’s in charge.’

‘Leave me!’ Alexander roared.

‘No!’ Hephaestion roared back.

They glared at each other.

‘Lord, your camp is full of vultures in silk and you have boys at your gate keeping men at bay. That needs to be fixed. It makes you appear weak.’ I bowed my head.

Alexander was crying.

Cleitus – Black Cleitus – caught me outside the pavilion and embraced me.

‘What in Hades is happening here?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘I just obey,’ he said. ‘He’s getting harder and harder to handle and he has all these new friends and a lot of useless tits.’ He looked around, clearly afraid he’d be overheard.

‘And he swore to everyone that he’d solve the Gordian Knot, today. The prophecy says that he who solves it will be Lord of all Asia,’ Hephaestion put in.

I made a face, and Thaïs giggled.

Cleitus looked at me. ‘What?’ he said. ‘It’s the prophecy.’

‘Was Cyrus the Great Lord of Asia?’ I asked. ‘Darius? Xerxes?’

Cleitus nodded and looked around. ‘Oh. You know, sometimes you remind me of fucking Aristotle, Ptolemy. With your snide laugh and all.’

‘I’m not well loved today,’ I admitted. ‘Was that Callisthenes I saw in the Military Journal tent?’

Cleitus nodded. ‘We call it the “School of Lies”.’

Ouch.

‘The Military Journal is now for public consumption in Greece and Macedon,’ Cleitus said bitterly. ‘So its contents now reflect our unvarying path to victory.’

‘Make that up yourself?’ I asked.

Cleitus barked his laugh.

‘Come on, and I’ll find you a place to camp,’ he said. ‘Maybe now that you’re back, everything will be all right.’

Cleaner and more richly dressed, I was in the middle of a long procession of soldiers, sycophants and priests processing up the ridge to the temple at the top. At the head of the procession was Alexander, who looked as scared as I’d ever seen him.

My invitation to attend had come too late to allow me to be up at the front with the other philoi. I assumed that was done on purpose. But Alexander looked so bad when I saw him that I began pushing forward through the crowds on the steps. I had Polystratus and his new sidekick Theodore at my heels, and we pushed pretty effectively. Most people got out of our way.

I caught up with the king at the base of the temple steps. His eyes passed over me without recognition. The whites showed all the way around his eyes, and if he’d been a horse, he’d have been on the edge of bolting.

Hephaestion caught my eye, and he was desperate, somehow.

I pushed through to the king’s side.

Alexander looked at me. ‘Ptolemy!’ he said.

I touched his shoulder. He didn’t always like to be touched, but sometimes he did, like a nervous horse when you need to get a pebble out of his hoof. When he didn’t flinch, I put my arm around his shoulder.

‘Cyrus the Great,’ I said. ‘Xerxes,’ I added softly.

He looked at me.

‘It’s all horseshit,’ I said. ‘Something to draw the credulous.’

Alexander had the oddest habit of clinging to superstitious nonsense – as if his mighty brain took rests from reason.

He glared at me, but I smiled resolutely, and he finally returned my smile and straightened his shoulders. I took away my arm and he looked around. In a moment, he was through the great bronze doors and into the temple.

Well – you know the story. Everyone does. There must have been five thousand men and women there to see it, crushing so close we could simply have trampled the Gordian Knot.

The old wagon – it wasn’t a chariot at all, but a four-wheeled wagon – had a long draught pole attached to the harness bar by a massive and very complex knot. The knot was done in an ancient rawhide, and whoever had done it – about eight hundred years earlier, was my guess – whoever had done it had had a lot of skill, and both ends of the rawhide strip were buried in the knot, and the rawhide, like all rawhide, shrank as it dried, so that the fastening was almost like a solid lump of rawhide, shiny and dense.

The king looked at it for a long time, and people began to mutter.

Alexander was no longer nervous. Of course not. In his head, this counted as combat, I’m sure. Now he was cool and professional.

‘Tell me the prophecy again,’ he said, aloud.

‘He who opens the Gordian Knot shall likewise be Lord of Asia,’ a priest intoned.

There was a buzz from the crowd. Alexander, the performer, waited it out.

They fell silent.

‘So it doesn’t really matter how I open it,’ he said. His eyes glittered.

The priests talked among themselves.

Alexander turned, drew his sword and slashed down, as hard as he would in cutting an armoured opponent.

The ancient rawhide shattered into a thousand dry fragments, and the yoke-pole crashed to the floor.

Alexander lifted his sword. People looked stunned, and he smiled. ‘I do not intend to take Asia by my wits,’ he said, ‘but by my sword.’

That night, I attended my first command meeting in almost a year. Parmenio was there, and Coenus and Philotas, but many men I knew were gone. Nearchus had his own command in Phrygia, Seleucus was sick, Alexander of Lyncestis was under arrest, Antigonus One-Eye was off in Paphlagonia.

There were new officers and, for the first time, Asian officers – mostly Phrygians, mixing with the Greeks and the Macedonians.

Alexander came in and we all saluted, and then he went to the head of a table on which lay a set of itineraries for the roads to the coast.

‘Darius is in the field with sixty thousand men,’ he said. He smiled. ‘It is my desire to bring him to battle at the earliest opportunity, smash his army and lay claim to Asia. One field battle, and we will be the masters here.’

There was an almost imperceptible murmur.

‘I’m sending Amphoterus to the coast to take command of the fleet in the Hellespont,’ he said. The gentleman in question bowed. Alexander smiled at us, and I knew he was about to say something meant to shock.

‘And then I’m cutting the cord, gentlemen. The way to defeat the Persian fleet is to hold all of their land bases. We’ve made a good start. This summer, we’re going for the coast of Syria. If Darius remains as indolent as he has been, we’ll work our way down the coast to Aegypt and close the sea to him for ever.’ He looked around, expecting opposition.

He got it. Parmenio shook his head. ‘You’ll be out of touch with Macedon, and if Amphoterus is beaten, we could lose Pella. What if Athens rises? Sparta? What if—’

Alexander’s grin was a wolf ’s grin. ‘Pella is not worth the effort of defending if we can win Asia, gentlemen.’

‘It’s our home!’ Philotas said.

Alexander shook his head. ‘It is a huddle of mud huts at the edge of the wilderness. We have Ephesus. We have Sardis. We have Halicarnassus.’

‘We had Miletus,’ someone said aloud.

‘We have Gordia, too,’ Parmenio said. ‘Lucky us.’

Alexander looked around. ‘We are here to conquer Asia. I have every confidence that Antipater can hold Macedon behind us, and in the worst case, if he fails’ – and here Alexander’s confidence sounded more godlike than brash – ‘if he fails, well, we’ll return and take it back next season.’

Parmenio shook his head. ‘Syria? How do you plan to get there?’

Alexander’s smile grew softer. ‘Ankyra – and the Cilician Gates.’

Parmenio put his hands on his hips. Now I saw where Philotas got that habit. ‘It cannot be done,’ he said. ‘A goat path through tall mountains. Fifty men could hold us for days.’

Alexander nodded. ‘It will be glorious,’ he said.

We lingered at Ankyra while the Prodromoi went far to the east, looking for Darius, looking for news, and while contingents from all of western Asia came in to make terms with the conqueror. I found their terms too lenient, and most of them were allowed to go with little beyond a promise of submission. The king was in a hurry, and when he was in a hurry, he didn’t bother with minutiae like the conquest of eastern Phrygia.

I took my Hetaeroi south and east, on to the broad, dry, dusty Cappadocian Plain. We moved fast, with no baggage, and we slept under the stars, with saddlecloths for pillows. Thaïs’s beautiful skin grew tanned, and she claimed that it would ruin her complexion, but she was developing a new persona, Thaïs the Amazon, and her Angeloi were developing into a miniature Prodromoi, complete with spears and swords. Our daughter had her second birthday in Asia, carried on a mule.

I had Philotas to my south and Kineas, of all people, to my north, and we swept east and south, looking for enemies and for news.

In every town, either Thaïs had people, in which case they reported to her, or she didn’t, in which case her Angeloi bought some. And she was teaching us – a few of us, Calchias of the Prodromoi and the Paeonian commander, Ariston and Cleander, from the so-called mercenary cavalry. Teaching us to use this network of spies carefully, to integrate it into our scouting. Thaïs knew a little of how to handle a cavalry patrol, and none of us knew how to suborn a town official, but together we made a powerful combination – the more so as we learned from each other.

As an example of how this might work, let me offer the race across the Plain of Cappadocia. It was Parmenio’s operation – remember, the king was still in Ankyra, and was determined not to march until he could move all the way to the Cilician Gates with his flanks covered. Given that we were abandoning our communications with Macedon, this seemed sensible.

I had the middle route – south from Ankyra, then south-east along the axis Gorbeus–Mazaka. I was confident that this would be the army’s actual route, but by sending Philotas along the southerly route and Kineas along the northerly route, we spread the most confusion and we gave the king options in the event of logistical or political troubles – water shortage, or hostile tribes.

On the second night, three of my best rode into Gorbeus with Strako and a half-dozen of the Angeloi – the town was six days by pack train from Ankyra, and still imagining itself safe from us. The next morning at dawn, Thaïs’s friends opened the gates and my whole squadron came in at a canter, raising dust all the way. The garrison – forty Persian archers under a drunken aristocrat – surrendered on the spot.

That’s how it was supposed to work. But the news was all good – the satrap of Cilicia had only three hundred men in the Cilician Gates. Arsames was raising his men on the other side of the barrier. Thaïs’s people said he was considering outright surrender.

‘Oh, if I were a man,’ she said bitterly. ‘Someone should go.’

We sent Polystratus with the former garrison commander’s signet ring and an offer – a thousand talents of gold to let us have the Gates without a fight. It was insanity – the gates were a hundred and fifty stades of goat tracks that even Persian levies could hold against us – but it was always worth trying Thaïs’s way.

In the morning, we were off across the parched plain, all volcanic rock and thin soil and people living so close to starvation that the girls were old hags at twenty-five and the men looked like bent-over old men.

I lost touch with Philotas and pushed on. A day out of Gorbeus, and there was no more water. Nor local people to help us.

We pushed on. Our canteens were full and we had packhorses. My two-year-old squawked a lot – she wanted more water than we had to give her.

Thaïs and I had the worst fight of our lives. She told me that I was a typical man and a poor father, because I would not send her back to the last water source with a detachment. I couldn’t spare the troopers, and she knew it.

For the first time I could remember I slept alone that night, and it was cold.

And my mouth was dry, for several reasons. I slept badly. I considered what would happen if my daughter died in the waste. What would die with her. How much I loved Thaïs.

In the morning I made her a public apology, and sent Polystratus’s sidekick Theodore and twenty men back to Gorbeus with Thaïs and our child. I was selfish. I loved being out on patrol with Thaïs, and at some remove I was jealous of the daughter that seemed to take up all her time.

But the desert is full of tests, and Thaïs kissed me before she left. ‘You are better at admitting you are wrong then most men,’ she said.

North of Mazaka, we ran into our first Persian cavalry patrol. They were good, and they’d laid an ambush for us at a waterhole. We, on the other hand, were exhausted and our horses were done in.

But we’d been fighting Memnon. No one gets sloppy against a master. The Angeloi – men dressed in local cloth, riding local horses – picked up the ambush a day in advance.

I triggered it myself, with fifty men in full armour, heads down against the sun. We rode over the ridge that defined the northern edge of the watered area and they hit us immediately. Poseidon was so far done that he ignored the fight and went for the water, which we could see – blue as blue in the distance.

We lost two men. I got Poseidon to see reason with some hard kicks to his ribs, and we turned into the attackers, most of whom had bows. They were shooting our horses, trying to dismount us for easy capture.

Then Pyrrhus appeared behind them with the rest of my force, and they didn’t stop to think about it. They were well trained. As soon as they saw their ambush broken, every one of them broke contact, changed horses and they were gone. We killed six and captured four more, all wounded.

We lost over a dozen precious horses and got none in return.

I didn’t bother pursuing them. They were desert men themselves, and I expect that they had a second ambush pre-prepared. I would have.

I was very cautious moving up to Mazaka, but I didn’t make another contact. Thaïs’s resident there refused to meet any of us – there’s the real world of spies, afraid of their own shadows – but a small boy brought us two parchments, covered in dense Aramaic, and one of my grooms, a Babylonian Jew named Jusef, read it well enough. It was an itinerary of the Cilician Gates, with notes of distance and troop locations, and it was just ten days old.

I sent it back to the king with Pyrrhus and ten troopers, and then I sat in Mazaka and waited for Philotas. He came up the next day, and I was happy to see him, and he to see me. Things are different, once the fur begins to fly.

Kineas was four more days, and all his horses looked as if they were going to die. He’d gone as far east as Tyana and had made two contacts with the Persian scouts coming over the mountains from the Euphrates Valley, far to the east. The Persians were closer than we hoped, though farther than our worst fears. Just like war.

Philotas wanted to go for the Gates with five or six hundred horse, but I restrained him gently. I appealed to his fear of failure.

The king crossed the desert in three days. He did it with night marches – always easier in the desert – and forward stores of water.

When he was a day away and we were in contact with the Prodromoi, Polystratus came back with a gold ring and a promise.

‘He’s a right bastard, and that’s no mistake, lord,’ Polystratus said. ‘He wants to play both sides – said he won’t openly go against the Great King, but that he’ll keep all but his advance guard out of the Gates and it’s up to us to get through them.’ Polystratus shrugged. ‘And that’s what we get for a thousand talents.’

But Alexander agreed like a shot, and then he sent the Thracians, the Agrianians and a company of hypaspitoi through the gates. The Cretan archers and the Macedonian crossbowmen moved along the high ground, slowly but thoroughly, and the Thracians tripped anything they came across, and the army marched in behind us – I was with the archers. Alexander was so confident that the advance guard didn’t even leave a day in advance. We moved at a slow walking pace, and we surprised the poor bastards at the break of the second day. It was red slaughter, professionals against amateurs. When the Thracians broke them, the Agrianians harried them along the ridges and the archers shot them down.

We were beginning to see what two years of Memnon had done to us. We had a team.

Three days of careful movement, advancing from one strong-point to the next, the two groups on either ridge supporting each other, and we were through. The plains around Tarsus were so green they seemed to burn green, and I could see the sea in the distance. Behind me, the army began to shout, ‘Thalassa!’ like Xenophon’s hoplites, and men hugged each other.

Arsames was burning the plains, scorching the crops to deny us food.

We picked up a bunch of angry peasants who claimed he was going to burn the city.

Parmenio was commanding the advance guard himself, and he told us to go for it. His assumption was that if the local people viewed us as liberators, the worst we’d get was a bloody nose.

Alexander was in the rear. Rumour was that he’d drunk too much the night before with Parmenio, and could barely ride.

Kineas’s Athenians were the first into Tarsus, because he went by road while I covered his flanks and two heavy troops of Thessalians covered mine. We found Arsames just north of the city and had a sharp skirmish, but he had no confidence, or he was a traitor, or whatever happened inside that kind of man’s head, and his troops ran. Kineas secured the north gate – more, he said later, by happenstance than by plan.

We took Tarsus intact, granaries and all. And Arsames rode off to the east to join King Darius, whom he had just betrayed, either by crass incompetence or by greed.

Alexander was one of the last men into the city. He’d spent the day, unaware we were fighting, driving the stragglers across the last of the desert and up into the Gates, making sure that no one lay down and died. It was noble of him, but when he came in through the north gate, he was tired, hot and surly, because we’d fought a nice little action, taken prisoners, seized a town, and all without him.

And we were through the greatest obstacle in Asia.

But he brightened up when he heard the tale, and he gave Kineas his hand and thanked him. Kineas adored the king. He didn’t see the flaws beneath the surface. To Kineas, Alexander was the hegemon of the League, leading us to revenge against Persia. And the hegemon’s thanks made him glow with joy.

Alexander rode along with Philotas, Kineas and Parmenio. I trailed behind. He rode down to the river, which flowed icy cold from the mountains we’d just traversed.

Kineas put his hand on the king’s bridle when Alexander moved to dismount. ‘I lost a horse to that river this morning, lord,’ Kineas said.

Parmenio laughed. ‘Don’t be such a nursemaid, Athenian! In Macedon, we swim in ice.’

The king stripped off his chiton and boots and dived into the clear water and surfaced, spluttering. Hephaestion leaped in after him, shrieked and swam back to the bank.

He crawled out, laughing. ‘Zeus! My balls are gone.’

We all joined him. I was stripping off my own chiton when I realised that the king wasn’t there. Everyone else realised it at the same time, and we charged into the water – me, Philotas, Seleucus, Black Cleitus, Philip the Red and Kineas. We found him floating just under the surface, and we hauled him to the bank. He was having some sort of fit, and his skin was dead white. He’d taken in some water, too.

Everyone assumed he’d breathed too much water, and we did what men do for a drowning victim – a blanket, and Hephaestion forced air into his lungs, and he breathed.

But an hour later, he was no better.

By nightfall, he was speechless and his eyes were closed and his breathing was rough.

Parmenio took command. Thaïs had agents here, and they reported that Darius was just ten or fifteen days to the east. We were too close to break off in safety. Parmenio held a command council the first night of the king’s illness and told us that, while he doubted the wisdom of facing the Great King, he was going to accept battle if he could get it on his own terms.

Perhaps I defame him, but I heard a man making his bid for the kingship. If he defeated Darius, no Macedonian would stand in his way. I think we all knew it.

After the meeting, I went to the king’s tent. The vultures were gone. I wondered if they were already clamouring for Parmenio’s attention.

I gave the password to the guards and entered the tent. Alexander was awake. He was pale in the lamplight, and only his head showed. His eyes were wild, and his hair was plastered to his forehead.

I sat down, and Hephaestion got up with an ill grace and made room for me.

‘I must get up,’ Alexander said.

I shook my head. ‘Parmenio is no fool. He’ll fight.’

But Alexander shook his head, and his whole body shook. ‘This is the battle!’ he said, with so much force that they must have heard him in the streets of Tarsus. ‘This is the battle. Not for Parmenio! For me!’ He all but writhed.

‘He just keeps saying that,’ Hephaestion complained. ‘I can’t get him to sleep.’

I took his hands. ‘There will be other fights, lord,’ I said. In fact, I had my doubts. The odds were long, and if we won, and Parmenio led us – well, I’ve said before that Alexander’s popularity with the troops was based on godlike demeanour and unbroken victory.

‘My battle!’ he said, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

Parmenio took the Thracians, all the light cavalry and his precious Thessalians and rode east. I should have gone, but Thaïs convinced me that Parmenio meant to kill Alexander with poison. Or that, rather, it was possible enough to warrant caution. But the king drank only water and ate only bread, and I didn’t see how he was getting poison.

Five days of this and the king was obviously losing weight, and his stomach had swelled in an odd and very bad way. His gut hurt all the time. He didn’t scream, but he lay on his camp bed and made grunting noises when he thought we couldn’t hear him.

He insisted on hearing every report, so that he knew that Darius was marching towards us by easy stages, a confident commander eager for battle, and that Parmenio had seized Issus.

There are only two passes over the mountains on to the plains of Cilicia from the headwaters of the Euphrates – the way the Great King was marching. To the north, there are the Amanic Gates, a good pass even for a large army and to the south, there is the pass of the Syrian Gates. Parmenio put scouting forces into both passes and then lay in wait at the Pinnacle of Jonah to see what Darius would do.

The news that Darius had a pontoon bridge over the Euphrates drove the king into a fever. He raged at his doctors, and none of them could agree what was wrong with him or how to fix it. And as more and more men suspected poison, the Greek doctors grew more and more afraid to take any action.

When Darius was estimated at five days’ march away, Parmenio came back for the army. He had the Great King where he wanted him, and he was ready to set his battlefield. He gathered all of us in the command tent, and laid out his plans of march. Like most of his plans, it was a simple one.

He was going to take the army to the Pinnacle of Jonah, with tripwire forces in both passes, and wherever the Great King went, Parmenio was going to meet him – in the pass where his superior numbers would be no match for our superior infantry.

I raised my hand. ‘Why would he fight us under those conditions?’ I asked.

‘Why does your foreigner do anything? Pride, foolish pride, young Ptolemy.’ Parmenio nodded. ‘Anyone else?’

Then he sent all the cavalry commanders away – except his sons. He kept Craterus and Philotas and Nicanor and Perdiccas, because this was to be an infantry fight.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the secret meeting, and I didn’t like the notion that Darius was a fool and would dance to our tune.

I went to the king’s tent, and found the king’s own physician, Philip of Arcarnia.

‘I won’t,’ he insisted as I entered the tent.

Alexander, remember, was in love with medicine. He’d studied it extensively under Aristotle, and if it had been one of us on that bed, he’d have been ordering concoctions by the cup.

Philip was standing with his arms crossed. Cleitus looked as if he’d been weeping, and Hephaestion had his jaw set.

I looked around.

‘I am your king. Do it.’ Alexander’s voice was so weak it barely registered.

Cleitus looked at me. ‘He’s ordered Philip to make him a powerful emetic. Kill or cure, he says.’

Alexander turned his head in my direction. I didn’t think he could see me. That’s how far gone he was.

‘Darius is five days away,’ he said, as clear as the sound of distant swordplay. ‘Parmenio will fail. I will not. This is my battle, and the Lord of Contagion will not keep me from it.’

Philip shook his head. ‘This is powerful, dangerous medicine,’ he said. ‘You will probably die.’

‘But if there’s something evil caught in my bowel, this will move it. Yes?’ Alexander said.

‘If you survive the experience. Yes.’ Philip sounded wary.

Alexander nodded. ‘This is my order. Do it.’

Philip looked at Hephaestion.

Hephaestion bit his lip and looked at me. But before I could say anything, he nodded. ‘It is what he wants,’ Hephaestion said.

He could be a nuisance, and a drama queen, our Hephaestion, and he was at best an average cavalry commander, but he made the right call that night.

Philip bowed. ‘You all heard him,’ he said.

The physicians were terrified, you see, because Darius had offered a fantastic reward – ten thousand talents of gold – for Alexander’s death. This is the same Darius who had tried to bribe Athens for three hundred talents, not three years earlier. Our price had increased.

Even old veterans in the pezhetaeroi openly joked about what they could do with ten thousand talents of gold.

It was such a staggering sum that it made me look at every man as a potential regicide, and I watched every flask of water, every pitcher of wine, every loaf of bread. I took samples from every one, as well. Thaïs wrote the labels for me.

I fed things to stray dogs.

The evening passed, and Parmenio came to visit the king.

‘Tell him I do not wish to see him,’ Alexander whispered, and Parmenio went away, but Hephaestion returned with a note.

‘Open it!’ Alexander urged me.

I still have it, right here, in my copy of the accurate journal. There’s the original, in the old man’s handwriting.

‘We understand you have urged Philip to make you a purge – it is poison. He has been bribed by the Great King. We beg you to throw out his medicine and order the false physician’s death.’

Alexander blinked a few times.

‘Damn,’ Hephaestion said.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Cleitus said.

‘Take no action,’ I said, and fled the tent. I went straight to Thaïs, who was writing in her tent, and gave her the note.

She took it, read it and then put it down with a sigh. She looked away from me.

‘Do not put this burden on me,’ she said.

‘So Parmenio is the traitor,’ I said.

‘You are far too intelligent for your face, Farm Boy,’ she said, and touched my hand. ‘That is why they always underestimate you. Yes. To me, this note merely proves that Parmenio poisoned him in the first place, and now fears that the king’s superhuman constitution, aided by some medicine, might yet triumph.’

I kissed her, and ran back to Alexander’s tent.

He was quite calm. I handed him the note, and he gave a slight smile. ‘What does your hetaera say?’ he asked.

‘She says that Parmenio is wrong,’ I answered.

Alexander took a deep breath, and released it slowly. ‘You know what that means, I think.’

I leaned over the king. ‘I think that right now, today, in the face of the enemy, it means nothing,’ I said.

Alexander gave a slow nod.

Philip came in with a horn cup.

Alexander sat up with Hephaestion and Cleitus to help him. Both of them stood as far from Philip as they could manage.

Philip didn’t like the atmosphere of the room. ‘I do not want to do this,’ he insisted.

I, for one, believed him.

He set the horn cup down on a side table.

Before I could pick it up, the king had it.

‘Let me test it, lord,’ I said.

Alexander smiled enigmatically and gave Philip the note from Parmenio to read.

Philip’s eyes all but bulged out of his head. His hands shook. But he stood straight and his voice was steady, by the gods.

‘I swear I would never harm you or any other man or woman, in the pursuance of my art,’ he said. ‘If you take that cup, it may kill you, but not by my will. You and I both know the risks. That would be dangerous medicine for a man in the peak of fitness.’

Alexander raised the cup in a mock toast, like the guest at a good Athenian symposium, and drank it off.

Then he took a deep breath, and screamed.

It was three days before the shit poured out of him with the sweat, and he fouled the bed three times in as many hours. Those were bad days, and I’ve no need to describe them. Our cavalry was in contact with the Persian cavalry all along the line of the passes, and we were going to fight, and the king lay in a sweat, unable to talk.

I put Polystratus on Philip, to protect him.

But mostly he stayed with the king, massaging his abdomen and groin and putting cloths on his head.

And then the fever broke and the king rose, smelling slightly of his own excrement, and walked.