God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

TWENTY-FOUR

I spent a significant portion of my life at Tyre. None of it is in the Military Journal.

After about six weeks, the Tyrians saw what was going to happen, and they became active in their defence. They flooded the sea in front of the mole with small boats, and shot arrows into the work parties. Cleomenes took an arrow through the bicep, and Marsyas stood over him with a pair of nested wicker baskets and kept him from death, and they were friends again. Thank the gods, they’d been tiresome as enemies, and Thaïs’s best efforts to reconcile them had failed on the twin rocks of pride and fatigue.

The next day, under fire, men from my taxeis, in full armour and with more men covering them with great hide-covered shields, erected two tall towers and built a wooden wall across the end of the mole. During the night we put heavy bolt-shooters into the towers, and by day the low wall was lined with Diades’ own specialists, the bowmen carrying gastraphetes and oxybeles, two-man crossbows.

The next time the Tyrians came out in their boats, we shot them out of the water. It was very satisfying, but it didn’t get the mole built, and now we had to push the towers forward every time we advanced the top of the mole any distance. That was harder than it sounds, and the towers had to be taken down in the dark and rebuilt, and Diades, who had the painful honesty of the professional engineer, reminded us that in a month we’d be in the range of their most powerful engines on the walls, and then they would be able to hit us while we worked and to cover their boats – and perhaps even batter down our towers.

Before that, however, the Tyrians tried their first serious sortie. They came at us in the dark. I wasn’t on the wall – I was sound asleep in the arms of exhaustion. Thaïs was in her eighth month and slept in a separate tent with slaves fanning her all night.

There was a rumour that Banugul put on armour and served in the ranks.

The Tyrians sacrificed a pair of ancient triremes, filling them with flammables and ramming them ashore against the mole before setting them alight. Then they bombarded the mole with showers of hot sand and gravel – red hot, glowing hot – so that we couldn’t fight the resulting fires.

I was awakened to light in the sky and screams. I slipped my sword belt over my head and ran for the head of the mole, with Isokles and Polystratus behind me. I ordered the taxeis to stand to, with phylarchs in armour and everyone else ready to work.

By the time I reached the mole, the end was an inferno. The Tyrians had packed those ships with oil and resin and old cloth and cedar. They burned so hot that they set the timber frame of the mole on fire, and it burned, and suddenly, about an hour before dawn, four weeks’ work collapsed. The end of the mole simply fell away into the sea with a massive cloud of steam that cut off the stars and then an explosion as the superheated rocks of what had been the surface of the mole fell into the water and shattered.

There was nothing we could do.

In the morning, we looked out and the mole wasn’t there any more. There were blackened timbers and occasional glimpses of rock. But we’d lost the work of two months in as many hours.

Alexander vanished into his tent. I didn’t see him for a week, and during that week, I heard discouraging rumours. Then, as the clean-up was under way and Diades was replanning the framework of his mole, I was summoned to the king’s side.

‘Ptolemy!’ Alexander said, as I entered. ‘How well muscled you are. I see too little of you!’

False bonhomie was never a good sign, with Alexander.

‘The mole takes all my time, lord,’ I said.

‘When we ride, I insist you ride with me so that we can catch up,’ Alexander said, as if I didn’t serve in his army. About what could we catch up? The minutiae of my taxeis?

‘Are we to go hunting?’ I asked.

Alexander bit his lip for a moment – then smiled. ‘No – I’ve decided to give up the siege. It’s dull, and it won’t get us anywhere. Tyre is not that important a city – and if we build even a small fort here on the mainland, we can deny them the ability to forage on the mainland, and they won’t be able to keep their fleet here, which is all I need.’

Well, I hated the siege, and I was considering just letting go, but I’ve never been good at keeping my mouth shut. ‘They can keep their fleet supplied in Tyre,’ I said. ‘They’re doing it right now. They just sail around us. Merchant shipping can keep them supplied.’

Alexander looked at me, and his mouth worked like a fish’s.

Hephaestion glared at me. ‘The king has made up his mind,’ he announced.

I shrugged. ‘Well, I could make an argument that we’re screwed either way. If we march away, Darius can say we’re beaten, and if we stay, we let Tyre soak up our efforts while Darius rebuilds his army.’ I gave the king a mocking, lopsided smile. ‘I know that I’d rather march away. Even if the siege is good for my physique.’

Alexander was looking at Hephaestion. Hephaestion was giving me his angry drama-queen look.

‘They will use ships to resupply their ships,’ Alexander said. ‘And be astride my rear when I march into Aegypt.’ He slumped. ‘Curses on this place. If I take it, I’m going to kill every person in it, free or slave.’

I didn’t like the sound of that – Alexander prided himself on being merciful.

We played dice for a while. And then we played Polis, and I entertained them with the tale of Marsyas and Cleomenes.

Hephaestion glowered. ‘Women only bring trouble. There should be none with the army. Nasty creatures, that dull a man and sap his strength.’

That sounded personal.

Alexander made a face. ‘Now, Hephaestion,’ he said, gently reproving.

‘If you spent less time between certain thighs, you’d be doing a better job prosecuting this siege.’ Hephaestion was all but pouting.

I chuckled, because it was funny, and the two of them turned to me as if their heads were controlled by one string.

‘It’s true!’ Hephaestion said, between anger and whining. ‘Ask him where he was the night the mole burned? Eh? Ask him.’

There’re times when it is best to think of another errand, but I was with the king, and I couldn’t think of an excuse to leave.

Alexander turned to me. ‘Do you think I’m avoiding my duties, Ptolemy?’ he asked, his voice as mild as a mother’s to a newborn.

What is the old joke? Have you beaten your wife, lately? Much the same.

‘That is too serious an accusation, lord,’ I said. ‘And I wouldn’t know. In fact, of the three of us, only you know whether you are fulfilling all your duties.’ There – the biter bit, and all that. Aristotle would have been proud.

When I left the tent, there was a very pretty boy in perfumes and powders waiting in the anteroom. I gathered from a chance-heard comment that he was a pet of Barsines, come to beg the king to attend her for music.

There was, too, a eunuch from the Queen Mother of Persia, also waiting.

When I emerged into the full heat of day, I noted that there were at least a hundred men and women waiting outside the command compound for audiences with the king, and not one of them was anyone I knew – or anyone to do with the army. Most of them were vultures.

We must be winning, I remember thinking. We must be winning, because all these useless mouths are following us.

I related the whole scene to Thaïs, to pass the time, because she was in the eighth month and distinctly unhappy. I don’t think any woman, no matter how well beloved, loves her heaviest month, and for Thaïs, one of the world’s beauties, to have to face Barsines every morning over sherbet – Banugul on her way out to riding with the king . . .

Thaïs was only human.

But that morning, I remember that she heard me out and sent for Barsines. I had no inkling of what she was after, so I went about my work.

It became clear in an hour that we needed a new source of timber and a great deal more rock. Helios showed me the numbers, and begged me to get Diades an audience with the king. Or even with Hephaestion.

Diades was afraid it was over. Everyone was.

I took both of them with me, picked up Perdiccas and Craterus for support, and marched the lot of them to Alexander’s pavilions, where the hypaspitoi admitted us without delay.

Astibus caught up with me as we crossed the Aegema’s parade square. ‘He has the Persian slut with him,’ he said. ‘One of them. The Greek one.’ He shrugged.

In fact, I’d have sworn that Astibus was jealous.

I brushed him off and we went to the door of Alexander’s pavilion. Hephaestion was standing outside, which never happened. I made to speak to him, but he raised a hand brusquely, and then – lest I be offended – cupped his ear.

He was listening.

‘I am not interested in your protestations of love,’ Barsines said. The words floated out of the tent, and her magnificent voice was as hard as rock.

Alexander sounded plaintive – a tone of voice I had only ever heard him use with his mother. ‘I seek only to please you,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Then take Tyre,’ she said.

Alexander was haughty. ‘I will choose to take it or not to take it as my strategy dictates.’

‘When a woman changes her mind on a whim, she does not pretend it is a strategy,’ Barsines shot back.

‘You go too far,’ Alexander spat.

Gods, he sounded just like a man. Not at all like a god.

Even the sentries were smiling.

‘You know nothing of war, nothing of strategy and nothing of how my mind works,’ he continued.

Barsines’ voice was a steel sword in a silk sheath. ‘My lord, I know none of these things. I only know that if my husband, Memnon, had set his mind to take this city, he would have taken it.’

Silence fell.

After a long, long hundred heartbeats, the most beautiful woman on the face of earth swept by me. She flashed me a small smile.

I turned my party around and marched them back out of the royal precinct.

‘Not a good time,’ I suggested to Helios and Diades, who were both deeply shaken.

But several hours later, as I went over Helios’s notes on wood consumption, Hephaestion poked his head into the command tent and grinned.

‘Back on,’ he said. He had the good grace to shake his head – he’d wanted to end the siege, but he was as much of a hero-mad fool as Alexander, and he did occasionally like to see the king taken down a peg.

And just like that, we were back to work.

We spent two weeks gathering new materials from new sources, and after the Athenian feast of Plunteria, we were back to work on the mole, and it went faster than before, because there was a broad base of gravel and rubble just below the surface to receive our work. It took us just two weeks to push the base of the mole out to where it had been before, and then we had a new enemy with which to contend. Because a stade short of the walls, the underwater ridge we’d used as the basis of our mole ran out, and we were now flinging rubble into deep water. It sank away out of sight, and after five days, we didn’t see any change.

Divers measured the distance to the bottom and said that it was over ten man-heights deep.

Diades rode away for three days while we stockpiled baskets and rubble and large stones, and he returned, gathered all the oxen and rode away again with a large force of Hetaeroi.

We worked. Alexander worked with us, and Hephaestion. Parmenio took ‘his’ half of the army and marched away south to clear more coastline. There was a rumour that Alexander had ordered him north, to reconquer Ionia, and Parmenio had refused the duty. Thaïs was days from delivery, and she wasn’t paying any attention at all.

Diades returned with four hundred great trees, all with their limbs and branches intact.

He had a plan, and it wasn’t what I expected at all. I sent him fifty men with bronze axes, and he sent them back. And then, in one long day and night, he threw all four hundred trees into the water at the end of the mole.

And we levered several thousand talents of gravel and rubble on top of them.

The Tyrians pounded us with their machines, because we were within a stade of the wall. But despite the work of their machines, we got the trees in the water. We’d pin each one we put in with rubble, and then put in another. We worked fast, and men died – men were pinned in the water by trees, or pinned to the mole by arrows. When it got dark, we worked by firelight.

The Tyrians landed parties on the beach behind us in tar-blacked boats and killed men going with empty baskets for more rubble. But I had ordered my phylarchs to come out each night in armour, and Craterus and Perdiccas did the same, and after the third night, the rest of the phalanx taxiarchs did the same, and the enemy raids slackened off.

The fourth night after the trees went into the water, I was leading a work crew on the edge of the mole itself. Every night, Diades begged us to work one more night without the protection of siege towers. His reasoning was excellent – as long as we could keep it up, we had men working on the whole forward edge of the mole – perhaps a stades wide, or the width of a hundred men lying on their backs, head to toe. As soon as we put up the towers and the wall, everything slowed down, and we had all seen how the mole narrowed because men didn’t like to work directly beneath the towers, which drew the most fire – so every few days, the width men worked got a little narrower. It was like tunnelling, in reverse.

The Tyrians came at us in boats – straight on. Thirty boats fired arrows into us – the thickest salvo of arrows yet, even in the dark, and my men fell. But another dozen boats full of marines rushed the head of the mole.

I had forty men in armour – all phylarchs, all veterans. I told the workmen to run as soon as I saw the boats come forward. Then the rest of us locked our shields.

It was ironic – in a deeply Olympian way – that we outnumbered the Tyrians about fifteen to one, but that there on the mole, they outnumbered us at least ten to one.

I remember it because it was bad fighting on bad footing, but also because I gave one of my best battlefield speeches. Remember, they weren’t all my men – we all took shifts, so I had men from every taxeis.

I said: ‘Remember that every man you kill here cannot face you from the top of their wall when the mole is done. Remember that we have thirty thousand Macedonians behind us, and we have only to hold these bastards for five minutes and we’ll have done a finer thing than any men have since the siege started. And remember,’ I shouted, as the boats grated against the mole, ‘that the only choice besides victory is death. I am betting victory is better!’

I received a heartening cheer. The worst feeling in the world is going into action with men who have no heart. These men cheered, and that gave the Tyrian marines pause. Then they started to form up.

‘Charge!’ I called to my own. Always better to be going forward, especially in the dark.

Our charge shattered them, even at odds of one to ten. About a third of them were out of their boats, and the arrows had stopped. What – did they think I’d just stand there and let them unload?

We crashed into the centre of their line, with only two ranks of our own. We didn’t have sarissas – most men had a pair of javelins, and a few had longer spears, like the Greek dory. They were on the bad footing where the rubble was fresh, and we had them with their backs to the illumination of the fires they had lit on their own walls.

Speaking only for myself, I have seldom killed so many men in a single fight. The first man I faced flinched at the contact and I rammed my new kopis over his shield – had I mentioned my new kopis? – and into his helmet and he was dead. There’s no coming back from that wound.

He fell off my sword and there were three of them facing me, but body posture said only one was a threat, so I put the knee of my greave down hard on the stone – one of the best reasons to wear greaves in a fight – and cut low. He cut high, and sheared my crest, and I cut right through his ankle bone and severed his foot and he screamed like a soul in torment – perhaps he was.

A really showy, brutal death can shake inexperienced troops, and that’s what happened to the Tyrians. The men on either side flinched away and I followed them. One fell back, into the water, and the other missed his footing, slipped and got my kopis in his throat.

All along the front, my men had pushed the Tyrians into the water – literally. And there were corpses everywhere. I think I’ve said it before, but in a night fight, armour and discipline are everything, and we had more and better of both. These men were marines and lightly armed.

And they had no place to run.

When I saw that their centre was gone, I left the fight with Polystratus at my heels and half a dozen other men who could think on their feet, and we ran for the northern flank, where it seemed that the Tyrians had the upper hand. We hammered into the flank of their charge, a wedge of eight men, and it being dark they never saw us coming, so that each of us downed a man or two from behind before they knew what was happening – and then they ran, pure panic, given the circumstance. Armed Macedonians were pouring on to the mole, and for a few ugly moments we hunted them around the surface like so many rabbits in a field. And we killed every man who had made it on to the mole.

But while we were butchering their marines, the enemy engineers were putting grapples into our underwater trees and pulling as hard as they could, with ships and from the wall. As soon as they realised that we had slaughtered their marines, they started to pound the mole with thrown gravel and red-hot sand and fist-sized rocks. We were too thick on the mole and we took hits. Red-hot sand – even when it has crossed a stade of cool night air – is horrible – it burns into your skin, so that Thaïs had to pick each grain out with tweezers, and all of the skin infected, which in salt air is horrible enough.

But we were Macedonians, not cowards. I saw the ropes and felt the mole move, and Diades was there, and Helios – and Alexander. And Craterus and Philotas, and together we led men with axes forward into the hail of stone and sand. Hephaestion was badly burned, and Craterus took a stone to the shield that broke his arm – but we got two of the ropes cut, and then Alexander got hit, and it was all we could do to keep him alive.

Those moments – in the dark, with a helmet on my head, the haze of the red-hot sand as it fell, sometimes still twinkling, the steam from the fires and the salt water and the screams – Alexander down, and Craterus screaming – they seemed to go on for ever. I just held on, my shield pressed against his body, my head covering his head, as more shit fell on us. It would have to go through me to get to him. He was the King of Macedon, and he was not going to die here, in the dark.

Sometimes, the gods send me this moment in my dreams, and I am stuck there, for a long time. In a dream, as in reality, you can tell yourself that it will end. But you don’t really know when it will end, and it seems to go on and on and on.

Then the hypaspitoi were coming up, and Bubores and Astibus came and dragged us off the king and got their shields over him, and we were all pulled clear of the killing zone. Alexander was alive, and virtually unhurt. I was covered in sand. The Tyrians mixed dog and pig shit into the sand to make it carry disease, and I missed the next month of the siege from the burns and the infection that came with them. Hephaestion was never quite so handsome again.

In fact, although I was screaming with the pain of my burns and didn’t know it at the time, they got their grapples deeply into the trees and dragged several of them from under our rebuilt mole, and caused almost half of our new work to collapse. They also managed to burn the machines we’d built on the mole, and a separate group of raiders burned the towers where they sat on the shore ready for deployment.

As I say, I missed all that. My recovery was slow, and our second child was born dead – just as I was starting to recover. The pregnancy had not been a good one; Thaïs had been depressed, anxious and sick, and her delivery was painful and hurt her in more ways than just the loss of blood and tissue . . .

And I was not really there to help. In fact, we were on two beds next to each other for a week. I was aware that she was hurt. But that was about all I could manage.

My fever broke eventually. I had lost a lot of muscle and a lot of weight, and my beloved was lying in a bed next to me, with a fever so hot you could feel her body from an arm’s length away. I fussed about uselessly, got in the way of Philip of Acarnia and a pair of midwives who were actually trying to help her, and eventually stumbled out of the tent into the brilliant sunshine of a late summer day in Syria.

Isokles found me immediately, and took me by the hand.

‘We were worried about you,’ he said. He gave me a wry smile, as if that was too much of a compliment and he thought I might bite him. ‘Hey – I’m an Athenian in a Macedonian army. No one likes me when you aren’t around. Except Kineas – and we try not to spend too much time together. It’s like committing adultery. You don’t want to give people ideas. Actually, it’s more like not committing adultery, but having your wife suspect you anyway.’

We walked from the officers’ lines across the camp. There was a heavy series of dust clouds running away north and east.

‘More trees?’ I asked. The dust made me cough, and the light made me blink and I was already tired. Everything seemed odd – off kilter. I’d been wounded before, but the hot sand – and the infection – was different. I felt weak.

Craterus was directing operations on the mole, and he embraced me carefully. ‘How are the burns?’ he said. ‘Lucky for you – you never had any looks to lose.’ He laughed.

People say the damnedest things.

He shrugged. ‘Hephaestion got sand all over his face,’ he said.

Then I understood.

I looked at the mole. There were four towers across the far end, and from where I stood in the heat shimmer, it seemed to be touching the walls of the city.

‘But we’re there!’ I said.

Craterus shook his head. ‘We haven’t made a yard in the last week. Rebuilding was hard enough. Alexander marched away, and both Hephaestion and Barsines taunted him for cowardice.’

I looked around. ‘I would like to have seen that,’ I said quietly.

Craterus shook his head. ‘No, you wouldn’t. Anyway, Diades kept us at it, and we rebuilt what we lost. But now there’s a deep channel – so deep our divers can’t find the bottom, and we’ve dumped . . . I have to think. Ten thousand talents of gravel? More? And trees, dirt, huge boulders—’

‘Where’s the king?’ I asked.

None of the officers on the mole would meet my eyes. ‘Hunting,’ Isokles said; because he was an Athenian, he didn’t have to care.

‘Hunting? As in, not here?’ I asked.

Men nodded.

‘Ares’ spear!’ I cursed. ‘With Barsines?’

‘Barsines is tending to Hephaestion,’ Craterus said, with a world-weary grin.

And then I fainted.

It was three more days before I left my tent again. I couldn’t take a great deal of sun, because of the burns on my head and arms. So I sat with Thaïs, whose fever had broken, fed her tea and learned a little about embroidery. I read to her – at first, the Iliad. But after a day, she looked at me, gave me a wonderful, sad smile and said, ‘No more war, love. Not the Iliad. I’m . . . living in the Iliad. And it isn’t so beautiful, from inside.’ She drank some iced water – provided by Philip.

So I began on the plays of Aristophanes, and we laughed ourselves silly over Lysistrata, the more so as Thaïs claimed descent from the lady herself – the high priestess of Athena in Socrates’ time. Laughter heals, too.

We were laughing – we’d just read:

Lysistrata: By the holy goddesses! You’ll have to make acquaintance with four companies of women, ready for the fray and well armed to boot.

Magistrate: Forward, Scythians, and bind them!

Lysistrata: Forward, my gallant companions; march forth, ye vendors of grain and eggs, garlic and vegetables, keepers of taverns and bakeries, wrench and strike and tear; come, a torrent of invective and insult! (They beat the officers.) Enough, enough! Now retire, never rob the vanquished!

Magistrate: Here’s a fine exploit for my officers!

Lysistrata: Ah, ha! So you thought you had only to do with a set of slave-women! You did not know the ardour that fills the bosom of free-born dames.

Magistrate: Ardour! Yes, by Apollo, ardour enough – especially for the wine-cup!

And for various reasons, the magistrate (that would be me) was laughing too hard to attend to the door of the tent, and the king came in.

Thaïs stopped laughing. Her look made me glance over my shoulder.

Alexander was angry.

‘In all my camp, there are only two voices laughing,’ he said. His voice was like ice, and his disdain was obvious. ‘And I find you reading that hateful play. Disgusting.’

I had to laugh.

His face flamed.

‘Is it hateful because it is against war?’ I asked.

‘Perhaps,’ Thaïs said, ‘it is the notion of women seizing political power?’

Alexander ignored her. ‘If you are well enough to read to her,’ he said, ‘you can be with your troops.’

‘Oh, I’m a well-known malingerer,’ I shot back. ‘I just lie around avoiding my duty, eh?’

It occurred to me that if I was sick and Hephaestion was wounded and Nearchus was up north ruling Lycia, there was no one supporting the king. Or keeping him out of trouble.

Alexander was so angry that I knew he would say anything – anything – to make me hurt. That’s how he was, when the darkness came on him.

‘Since this bitch came into your life, you have more time for her than for your duty,’ he said.

‘Is that what Hephaestion said to you about Darius’s wife? Or was it about Memnon’s women? I can’t remember.’ I smiled. I was good at this – I’d known him since birth, and if he wanted to trade insults, I was happy to oblige. ‘And how is Barsines? Or is it Banugul this week?’

He hit me. It took me by surprise and I crumpled into Thaïs’s chair, and the chair broke under us.

The left side of my face, where his blow landed, was where I’d got a patch of sand – so it was pebbly, shiny and painful. His punch sloughed off some flesh and I began to bleed.

Alexander stood there, and all the life seemed to go out of his eyes. His shoulders slumped.

I stood up and got Thaïs on to the bed. He turned and strode out of the tent. As soon as I saw that Thaïs was well enough, I pushed my feet into boots and followed him, pushing past Ochrid where he stood with some cowering slaves, throwing a light chlamys over my shoulder. It was hot – Thaïs and I had been sitting naked.

He was moving fast, headed for his own tent. Once there, he would, I suspected, order the hypaspitoi not to admit anyone, and go into the dark.

So I ran. I called his name – once, and then again, and heads turned all over the camp.

He all but ran away from me. He pulled a corner of his cloak over his head and got in between his guards, and Alectus stopped him, clearly meaning to ask him something – the password of the day, no doubt.

I came up.

‘Alexander!’ I shouted at him from an arm’s length away.

‘Do not admit that man!’ Alexander yelled.

I pushed right past the spears. Alectus was utterly loyal – and used enough to the wonderful ways of Macedon that I’m sure he saw me as capable of regicide. So he drew his sword and put himself between me and Alexander.

‘By Olympian Zeus, lord over kings and men, Alexander, if you do not turn and speak to me, I will go home to Macedon and leave you here!’ I shouted at his back.

He paused.

‘I will apologise,’ I said. ‘You should too.’ I paused. ‘You will feel better if you do.’

He turned. ‘Why don’t you say that I must apologise?’ he asked, his voice crabbed with disjointed emotion. ‘Tell me!’ he insisted.

I shrugged, through Alectus’s sword. ‘You are the king. No one can make you apologise.’

Alexander let his cloak fall from his head. He stood up straighter. But he couldn’t meet my eye. ‘It was unworthy of me to . . . hit a wounded man.’

I laughed in his face, pushed past Alectus, who didn’t know what to make of us, and threw my arms around him. ‘That is the lamest apology I’ve ever heard,’ I said. ‘I am sorry that you are in such a piss-poor mood that you had to come to my tent and vent your spleen on a wounded man and his mistress – both of whom have served you loyally every day for many years.’

He struggled to be offended. I could see it on his face. But my embrace enfolded him, and it is very difficult to be really angry with someone who is holding you. Try it.

I was, however, waiting to feel Alectus’s steel grate against my spine. It may have looked as if I was rushing the king. Darius had put ten thousand talents of gold on his head.

Many loyalties were being tried at the same time.

But suddenly, his arms were pounding my back, and he was crying. We stumbled a little, as men will do when locked in an embrace, and he cried on my shoulder, and I . . . looked over his.

I was in his private tent, of course, not his receiving tent. And there was the table he used as his desk, and on it was a letter written in golden ink on purple paper. I didn’t have to be a genius to realise that this had to be the original of Darius’s letter. Nor did I have to be a scribe to be able to read the first three lines, in which Darius greeted Alexander as ‘My brother, the King of Asia’.

Alexander began to make tearful apologies to me – for claiming that I was malingering, for causing me to fall on Thaïs, for a host of things for which he suddenly felt the urge to apologise. But he didn’t mention that he had falsified the letter from Darius. As I read it over his shoulder, I realised that the forged letter – for surely this was the real one – left me not angry but curiously empty.

Alexander means to fight for ever. I had never formulated the thought before, but here, in his arms, in his tent, I realised that it was not a simple pothos – he was not fighting to be lord of Asia, or King of Kings. He was fighting because war made him something that peace could never make him. What he wanted was war.

Not conquest.

Merely . . . war.

I accepted his apologies and made some of my own, my daimon all but extinguished by the same realisation that many of my pezhetaeroi had made months before.

There would be no end.