God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

TWENTY-SEVEN

In the aftermath of the capture of Tyre, I heard a great deal of ugly grumbling from the friends – the inner circle – about the last year. The murder of Batis shocked us all. The manner of it – the bloody-handed tyranny of it – shocked the aristocrats and the army’s leaders.

For the first time, I heard it suggested openly that the king was insane.

I didn’t think he was insane – if he had ever been sane by the standards of normal men, he still was. But the enormous wound he’d taken and the drugs Philip must have put into him to keep him on his feet – by Apollo’s bow, I still look for any excuse to cover him. He ordered almost fifty thousand men and women killed between Tyre and Gaza, and for nothing. Everyone else had already submitted. There was no example to be made. And the killing of Batis went clean against his code – except that more and more frequently, he seemed to be set on the annihilation of all resistance, rather than the honourable combat and complex warrior friendships of the Iliad.

It was a paradox – the kind on which Aristotle thrived – that Alexander seemed to want to create the world of the Iliad – a world of near-eternal war and heroism – and yet seemed to want to destroy all of his opponents so that they could not continue the struggle.

The public killing of Batis galvanised aristocratic Persian opinion, and any Persian who was not a snivelling lickspittle determined to resist Alexander to the last arrow. I hesitate to give voice to this theory – but it is possible that the king wanted the war to go on, and feared that the Persians would simply murder Darius and cave in. It is difficult for me, even as one of his closest confidants, advisers and perhaps even his closest friend – to say what went on inside his head.

The priests here in Aegypt are quite expert on matters relating to what happens inside a man’s head. They claim to be able to discern hundreds of illnesses that afflict a man and yet are invisible. Some are obvious – one man can drink wine all his life, get drunk when it pleases him and otherwise live a normal existence, while another man craves the drink in unseemly ways and ruins his life.

Others are harder to sort out, and I’ve met a priestess of Hathor who claimed that the sort of paradox I mentioned can drive a man to madness. Perhaps.

I think there are other factors. In all the years I knew Alexander, I never heard him once say the words ‘my fingers hurt’. Hurt fingers are the ultimate commonplace among soldiers. Every soldier hurts his fingers – the wooden sword catches them sparring, the fingers hurt from the jarring of constant use, they’re the first things injured in a fall. Soldiers bitch about them all the time.

Mine hurt every morning by the time I was twenty-one. And every morning, I pissed and moaned about them to my peers, who did the same in return. Add in shoulders, backs, hips, thighs when riding, old wounds, new wounds . . .

Aside from sex and money, pain is probably the third most common topic among veterans, rivalling the availability of wine and easily beating anything to do with warrior skills or tactics.

I never heard the king mention any of his wounds, or any other pain. Not true – on two occasions, I heard him mention his wounds. Both times he was virtually unable to speak from the pain. When he stood in his chariot, rolling across the plain below Gaza with Batis being dragged to death behind him, every bump of the bronze-clad wheels must have sent a lance of fire through his left shoulder. When he pushed the spear through the enemy’s ankles, the action must have torn at his wound, nearly blinding him with pain.

I say this not to excuse him – you will see my views more and more – but to explain why we did not rise as a body and murder him as unfit to be king. I, for one, was still absolutely loyal, and when men questioned his sanity and his fitness, I shouted them down and questioned their loyalties and their love of Macedon. What else could I do? If I had joined those questioning, where would I have gone from there?

I had a greater worry than the king’s sanity, and Hephaestion shared it, as did Parmenio. All three of us had begun to wonder what would happen if the king died.

The king’s sickness at Tarsus and his wound at Gaza revealed that the army would – with grave reservations – take orders from Parmenio. It would not take orders from Hephaestion. Or rather, everyone would obey orders from Parmenio up to a point, and the point was commitment to battle.

If Alexander died, we were going to melt away like snow on Mount Olympus in high summer, and all our conquests were going to be like smoke from a sacrificial fire – beautiful to smell, and gone on the first wind.

The pezhetaeroi cared nothing about it. Neither did the mercenaries. But from the time of the wound at Gaza, a few of us began very quietly to discuss the future of Macedon when the king died.

When, not if.

A last word on the subject.

Mazces surrendered Aegypt without a fight. Mazces was a worm where Batis had been an eagle, but as I have said before, it was never possible to look far into the labyrinthine corridors of the king’s godlike mind. Alexander killed fifty thousand at Tyre and Gaza. But Aegypt surrendered without a fight – Aegypt, the most populated place I’d ever been. While I grant that their soldiers – excepting only their superb marines – were not very good, had their populace chosen to resist, we’d still be fighting there.

But they did not. It is possible that the wholesale murders helped break their will to resist. I doubt it. The king might have thought so, but Thaïs’s letters suggested a country that was going to fall into our laps like a ripe grape. And so it proved.

We marched south from Gaza after a four-day rest. If any man in our army was sleeping well, I didn’t know him. I know that the night before we marched, Marsyas and I sat and got very drunk.

The fleet was waiting for us at Pelussium seven days later, and Mazces was waiting a few parasanges farther on to offer submission. We marched to Memphis – some of the army went downriver by ship and boat, and Alexander marched cross-country. He was starting to recover from his wound, and as the drugs wore off, he was surly and difficult.

Three weeks after the fall of Gaza, I happened to have the vanguard. We were two days out from Memphis, according to our scouts, and the country had submitted – but we’d learned from experts, and we took no chances. I had a double screen of light cavalry – I already had fast-moving parties in every village on the river for two or three parasanges in either direction, and behind these patrols and the thick screen came my pezhetaeroi in a three-sided box covering the archers and Agrianians ready to pounce on an ambush.

All routine, of course.

Alexander was driving his chariot. The roads in Aegypt were excellent – some of the best I’d ever seen – and the chariot was ideal for a man who wanted to be active but still suffered a lot of pain.

I trotted Medea over to the king. We were making a long march – a hundred stades – and the men were starting to flag. The same men, let me add, who had been in continuous combat for seventeen months.

‘Lord,’ I said, with a salute. There had been a time when the king’s friends didn’t need to salute, but I found that, since Gaza, I needed to show respect. Lest some draw the wrong conclusion.

Alexander looked up through the dust and nodded. ‘Ptolemy,’ he said.

We rode along for a stade or two – I offered him wine, he drank it. I got the impression that he was clamping down very hard to control himself. I suspected that the wound from Gaza still hurt a great deal more than he let on.

‘When are we celebrating some feasts?’ I finally asked. I had worked on a dozen methods of manipulating the king into this conversation, but although he virtually refused to speak, I wasn’t going to let go.

He looked at me, his brows furrowed and the lines around his eyes as stark as writing on paper. ‘Feasts?’ he asked.

I leaned down. ‘The army is exhausted,’ I said. ‘They need a rest.’

Alexander looked at me. I’m not one for reading into expressions – I like men to speak their minds, and women, too – but Alexander’s face was haggard.

‘You are driving yourself rather than give in to pain,’ I hazarded.

‘I am above pain,’ he said. The lines around his eyes contradicted him, although his voice was perfectly controlled.

‘Save it for the troops,’ I said. ‘The appearance of effortless control costs you. But they don’t know that. If you will play at being a god, they will take your sacrifices for granted. And curse your name.’

He looked away.

‘It is openly said that you are insane,’ I said.

His head shot around with the speed of a falcon’s.

‘I am not insane,’ he said. ‘All I do must be done.’

Well, well, thought I.

‘The army needs a rest,’ I insisted. ‘Don’t take my word for it. Ask Black Cleitus. Ask Hephaestion. Ask Parmenio.’

I watched his face close down.

‘You are dismissed,’ he said.

I’m sure we’d both like me better if, at this point, I offered him some more home truths, but sadly, I didn’t. I went off to make a show of tending to my advance guard.

Two days later, we arrived at Memphis. The king announced that he would take the elites upriver, and the rest of us could sit at Memphis for a month-long rest and sacrifice to Amon and Apis. He purchased every sacrificial animal in the city and gave them to the army, as well as a ‘donation’ that amounted to a little less than three months’ pay per man.

His status with the army changed overnight. Every wine shop and brothel in Memphis was packed to the rafters. The women of Aegypt were short, with short legs and heavy breasts and tawny skin, and they did not age well at all – peasant girls were young at twelve and old at twenty-four. But they were plentiful and warm and very alive – they could dance and sing, and a third of the men in the army acquired a wife, many through actual services conducted by the priests of Hathor. For we had seldom been welcomed as heroes before, but in Aegypt, among the common people, we were their liberators. Greeks had a fearsome, but in the main wholesome and heroic, reputation here as preservers of the people’s liberties, and we benefited from years of Athenian meddling.

That’s a convoluted way of saying that the women welcomed us with open legs. It is possible that some men were pleased, as well, but none of my soldiers was paying any attention whatsoever.

Thaïs and I wandered around the palaces. Alexander went to sacrifice to Apis as king, and we were invited to attend – women have greater participation in Aegypt than elsewhere, and Thaïs could attend as herself and without prejudice.

I’m a pious man, as soldiers go. I worship the gods, and I have learned to respect the gods other men worship, as well. As an Indian once told me, there is more than just one truth.

But at Memphis, I experienced the divine.

Oh, Aegypt, the land of gods.

We entered the temple of Osiris, which was old when Heraklitus taught, and old when Homer wrote, old when Troy fell, old when Herakles walked the earth. It chilled me – chilled us all, even in the blinding heat of Aegyptian summer – to feel the sheer age of the temple, and see the stains on the warm red-brown stone where thousands upon thousands of feet had trod the surface to perfect smoothness – a rippled effect that said more about worship than all the images of men and gods with the heads of animals around me.

The gods of Aegypt have the heads of animals – I expect you know that by now. Seen safely from a distance, this can be ugly or merely disconcerting – alien. But seen in rows, hundreds upon hundreds, or seen in colossal repetition, as in the great temple complex at Memphis – it forces you to ask the obvious question.

Why not the faces of men?

Or rather, are men any the less animals, when compared to the gods?

Apis is different. Apis has many statues, but all of them are men. Or many are men, and some are bulls. Some are bulls that walk on all fours, and some are bulls that walk erect like the Minotaur, and some are bull-headed men. And some are men. Those are the kings of Aegypt, who, through the mystical powers of Ptah and Osiris, rise again as gods – in Memphis they say Osiris-Apis, or Oserapis, as we say in Alexandria.

Thaïs was walking from statue to statue, touching every one in reverence, and the priests gathered around her – she was an acknowledged priestess of Aphrodite, which can be a joke among Greeks but gave her a very serious status in Memphis.

A senior priest walked beside Alexander, answering his questions.

His questions were concerned with exactly how reincarnation and rebirth worked.

‘Why only kings?’ he asked.

The priest shrugged. ‘Kings are part god from the first,’ he said.

I was leaning on the plinth of a statue, and when Alexander passed me to lean over an incised decoration on a tomb, I stumbled – sheer farm-boy clumsiness – and put my hand on the gold-encrusted hide of a mummified Apis bull.

Without warning I stood on an infinite plain. My first impression was desert, but there was no desert – simply blinding white light and an infinity of it, and no horizon.

A voice spoke in my head, a strong voice. ‘You will be king, here. Do what is right.’

I awoke with my head on Thaïs’s lap, and Alexander massaging my wrists. I was embarrassed, as any man is who shows weakness, and perhaps most remarkable, it was some time before I remembered what I had seen and heard, so that at first I imagined I’d just passed out.

Looking back, I have a difficult time recalling the dream, but no trouble at all recalling the deep confusion it engendered in me. Although I worship the gods, no god had ever spoken to me so directly. Indeed, when I saw Alexander sacrifice his chariot on the morning before Issus, I thought of that as the supreme moment of my religious life.

And now, an alien, foreign god had reached out and touched me.

I stumbled along through the rest of the tour.

The Apis bull is chosen from a herd of very ordinary black and white cattle. They’d look odd in Macedon, but not so odd that they wouldn’t fetch a decent price at market. However, it is different in Aegypt, where from the whole herd, one bull is chosen and taken to the temple, where he becomes king or, as they say here, pharaoh. That bull is king for twenty-eight years, and at the end of his reign, he is sacrificed – usually by the pharaoh and in the presence of the priests. Sometimes an older pharaoh orders a champion to do the deed for him, but then all of the priests and the king eat the flesh of the slaughtered bull and this ceremony, very secret and sacred, is symbolic of the renewal of life that Apis offers. The slaughtered bull is called ‘Apis-seker-Osiris’ and the Aegyptians call him ‘Living dead one’.

Pardon me for this Platonic lesson in cosmology, but what happened cannot be understood unless you know what Apis is.

When we had toured, and sacrificed, a Greek priest of Zeus was introduced to us – a pilgrim, come from the shrine of Zeus at Lampsacus to visit the shrines of Aegypt.

He bowed deeply. ‘Great King of Asia, I am Anaximenes of Lampsacus!’ he said with a flourish.

It is not often a man can combine the pomposity of a horse’s arse with the false humility of a false priest, but Anaximenes did both at the same time, to which he added a brilliant mind, a wit razor-sharp in the service of flattery and an actor’s ability to be all things to all men.

Hush, let me tell you how I really felt about him, the shite.

Alexander loved him.

And well he might. Anaximenes it was who knew that the Apis bull was due to be slaughtered – that, in fact, it was but two weeks until the ceremony was due. Anaximenes knew that Darius had forbidden the ceremony.

In hours, we were preparing to take part, and Alexander spent money like water to have his vestments and crown as the Great King of Aegypt prepared. The priests leaped to serve him, eager, I think, to have a king who might be their ally instead of their enemy, as the kings of Persia had been. He invited me to participate, and I was drawn to it, and I noticed that one of the priests – not the Greek, but one of the smooth-headed Aegyptian priests – seemed to follow me with his eyes.

While the details of the ceremony were discussed, a priest came to Thaïs, and after a brief conversation, she squeezed my hand and vanished. What followed was a secret – I will not tell you, even now, although if you, in your turn, should by the will of gods be a king, I cannot recommend to you too highly the worship of Apis – and we spent a long evening learning our roles.

Later, unfed, I fretted alone in the palace. I had sumptuous rooms, and they had the most remarkable furnishings – Aegypt was, and remains, the richest country I had ever seen, and even the palace guest rooms to house a foreign, barbarian general were superb. I summoned slaves and ate in solitary splendour, missing anyone – Marsyas, Cleitus – who might share the tolerable beer.

Unsummoned, a pair of attendants came and took me to a bath – a remarkably ugly bath, but enormous. It was as if someone had heard of a Greek bath but knew none of the details, and used sandstone rather than marble for the fittings. On the positive side, I emerged clean and fresh, and the towels were superb. On the negative side, I was not oiled, and so left the bath chamber feeling dry and scratchy.

I walked back along the corridors of the palace to my rooms, flanked by four bath attendants, and it was curious that there were no other men or women in the corridors. It gave the experience a slightly dreamlike air.

And Aegyptian architecture is heavy – to the point of ugliness – and I had a moment when I experienced something almost like vertigo, when I wanted to see something familiar – a Greek shape, a Greek column . . .

And then I was in my rooms.

Thaïs was sitting on a rather formal chair. It took me three heartbeats to know her, as she wore the disc of Hathor on her head and Aegyptian garments, with kohl-painted brows and lashes and henna on her hands and feet. Her eyes seemed huge, the whites white, the pupils enormous.

She stood and smiled at me. ‘I have had the most glorious experience,’ she said, and for some reason I bowed to her.

I must digress, because you are so young. When you fall in love, your lover is the most beautiful thing in all of creation. You cannot get enough of her. Her feet, her hands, the inside of a thigh, the perfume of her, the scent of her breath . . .

When you have been partnered for some years, neither of your bodies has any secrets left, no surprises, no wonder. This is not the death of love – far from it – but it is possible and human to long for that sense of wonder, that desire so strong it can bend steel.

My partner was reckoned, even after two pregnancies, one of the world’s most beautiful women. She added to that – her natural beauty – training in music, dance, singing, rhetoric – and sex. She was a superb horsewoman, and a fine archer.

And yet, I would lie if I say that either one of us excited the other then as we had in the first months we were together. We pleased one another. No woman I’ve ever lain with had pleased me as she could, or as easily, and I dare say I knew her as none of her other partners ever had.

And yet . . .

I bowed because, in her Aegyptian priestess’s costume, she was herself, and yet she was someone else. Her dignity – always asserted – was even more evident, and elegant.

And in that moment, I remembered clearly what the voice had said. It hit me – again – like a bucket of seawater on a hot day.

I think I stumbled.

She tilted her head a little to one side. ‘You, too, I think,’ she said.

I sat in the chair she had been in. It was still warm from her. ‘I . . . touched . . . the gods,’ I said. Indeed, as I said the words, I thought them. I had not allowed myself to think about it, simply walled it away.

She pursed her lips. She had some sort of wax, almost crimson, on her lips. I wanted to lick them.

‘A voice,’ I said. My voice was deepening, hoarse with emotion. ‘Told me I would be king here. And that I should rule well.’

And even as I spoke, and my voice grew hoarse with emotion – thickened – I felt a pressure on my body like the very personification of lust, and I pulled her lips against mine.

My hand found that she had nothing under her gown, and with a shrug, she lost it – but not her crown, not her regalia, not her paint.

I have never experienced anything like that night, and I will tell you no more. Except to say that it was not sex, but the sacred. Or perhaps all sex is merely another contact with the sacred.

Two priests instructed me the next day in every aspect of my function, because, owing to Alexander’s wounded shoulder, I was going to be his ‘champion’ and sacrifice the bull.

Hephaestion, it turned out, would not do it. He saw it as sacrilege. He wanted nothing to do with foreign gods.

Cleitus refused on other grounds. He was a man who feared failure more than he wished for success, and the notion of killing the sacred bull in front of an audience of a thousand, with the king’s success riding on his stroke – Cleitus passed.

I knew I was the king’s third choice. And the thought of performing it gave me the same shakes that it gave to Cleitus. But I was driven, a mere tool of the god. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before.

Those were two happy weeks. Something entered into my love of Thaïs – or returned to it – that had been lost with our second child. She once again looked at me with her secret smile lingering almost invisible in the corner of her mouth. She sang. I croaked back at her.

She teased me, and parodied my bad Aegyptian accent when I practised my lines, and when I reached to tickle her, she did not run shrieking like a young fool, but took my hands in her grip of iron and put me over her hip like an old and wily pankrationist, so that I had to roll on the floor. And dug her thumbs into my armpits until I bleated like a lamb, and we lay together . . .

Good times.

And other times, I left her to her new friends – and she had quite a few, the priestesses of Hathor – and I went into the lower town and drank expensive wine and cheap beer with Marsyas and Cleomenes and Alectus and Cleitus.

I remember one night, I had a slave from Marsyas inviting me for wine – Greek wine – at a tavern by the river. I dressed simply and left all my expensive jewellery and my good cloak, left a note on the cheap and available papyrus for Thaïs and ran down the palace steps like a schoolboy going on an adventure.

The slave led me to the rendezvous, and it was well lit, with oil lamps hanging in rows so that the walls seemed to have their own star fields. It was hot, and most of the patrons sat outside in the night air. The river smelled of silt and ordure – but it was a smell you got used to quickly, like manure in springtime. Men sat on benches and drank, played dice or knucklebones – a few barrack-room intellectuals played Polis or backgammon.

I was early, or the others were late, and I found myself sitting at a small table reserved, I expect, for those who looked likely to pay more, but wedged between an enormous potted plant in an urn carved from stone, and probably three thousand years old – and a trio of pezhetaeroi. Not mine – men of Craterus’s taxeis.

There was an old one, a middle-aged one and a young pup straight from the fields around Pella. I tried not to listen too hard, or look too hard, as they would recognise me and grow stiff and formal, and the last thing a good officer wants to do is to rain on the fun his men are having.

I had a scroll – Xenophon’s ‘On Hunting’. It fitted nicely in my bag, so I left it there, and sitting alone in a tavern in Aegypt with a bowl of wine that had cost me a day’s pay for a soldier, I leaned my stool back, tucked my shoulder into the enormous stone urn and read about boar spears.

If, in spite of javelins and stones, he refuses to pull the rope tight, but draws back, wheels round and marks his assailant, in that case the man must approach him spear in hand, and grasp it with the left in front and the right behind, since the left steadies while the right drives it. The left foot must follow the left hand forward, and the right foot the other hand. As he advances let him hold the spear before him, with his legs not much further apart than in wrestling, turning the left side towards the left hand, and then watching the beast’s eye and noting the movement of the fellow’s head. Let him present the spear, taking care that the boar doesn’t knock it out of his hand with a jerk of his head, since he follows up the impetus of the sudden knock.

‘’Scuse me?’ the oldest man was asking. He was polite – nodding at me, and pulling at his chiton. Drunk as a lord. ‘’Scuse me? Damme, you look familiar.’

I laughed, perhaps a little bit self-conscious.

‘Except it’s like this, see? Dion says that this chit, here,’ and the grizzled veteran of Philip’s wars caught the wrist of a serving girl, ‘has the best tits of any girl in this fine establishment.’ He nodded sagely. ‘Which she may, or may not.’

Like many Aegyptian women, the server had no garment north of her belly button, so modesty was hardly an issue. She wriggled. It was more than just an automatic gesture, and thus very winning.

I gave the veteran a smile and then looked at the woman’s breasts.

They were young and well displayed. Not a patch on Thaïs, but comparison is odious.

‘Lovely,’ I opined.

Veteran nodded. ‘That’s a fine answer. See? He’s not too hoity-toity to look at tits, now, is he? I said to them – he’s an officer, but he ain’t above us here.’

The youngest one shook his head. ‘I’ll take him off to bed,’ he said apologetically.

I made a face. ‘Why?’

Veteran nodded. ‘Exactly. Why? I may be fucking dead in a few days, if soldier-boy-the-war-god gets a hair up his arse and marches us to Hyperborea. Why can’t I sit and look at her tits? They’re fine, and she won’t come to no harm from me.’

The middle-aged soldier just glowered. Finally he said, ‘What’re you reading?’

I had to smile. ‘Xenophon. On hunting.’

Veteran roared. ‘You’re a fuckin’ officer. Look, lad – that’s a girl. For a tenth of the cost of that scroll – a hundredth – you can have what she offers. Feel alive.’

Middle-age shook his head. ‘The scroll gives him something for ever. That girl will be gone in the morning.’

‘At her age? She’ll be gone in ten minutes – off to another garliceater, eh? Moving from sausage to sausage?’ He laughed at his own witticism. ‘Who cares? When I sit and think—’

‘You fall asleep, old man,’ said Middle-age.

‘Yeah?’ Veteran shot back. ‘Who put the fucking Syrian in the dust when somebody was on his back at Gaza? Eh?’ The older man got up, and just for a moment he wasn’t a drunk fuck – he was a vicious predator with thin limbs and a grizzled beard, and eyes that burned with malice.

Then he subsided. But the other two had flinched.

He tossed a gold stater on to the table and laughed. ‘I’m all blather, boys. Don’t let me piss on your evening.’ His eyes flicked over to me, and I realised he wasn’t as drunk as he let on.

The serving girl came, her eyes drawn by the gold. When her hand reached out for it, Veteran pinned it to the table with his own, and pulled her on to his lap and neatly tucked his tongue inside her throat. She put her arms around his neck.

He came up spluttering and laughing, and gave her the coin. She skipped away, and he shook his head.

‘Where did it go?’ he asked. ‘A gold daric – where’d she put it? Eh? I ask you, gentlemen. I gave her a gold coin, and she made it disappear.’ He laughed, drank off his wine and got to his feet, and I realised that I’d been wrong again – he could barely walk. ‘Well, friends, I’m off to find it. If she hid it where I think.’ He leered. Looked at me. ‘You’re Ptolemy, I think.’

I nodded.

He nodded back. ‘King’s friend?’

I nodded again.

‘Tell him from me he can suck my dick if he thinks I’m doing any more forced marches in the desert for fuck all. Eh? That’s Amyntas son of Philip, phylarch of the third company of the taxeis of Craterus.’ He winked. ‘You think I’m kidding, eh?’

I shook my head. ‘No. I think you’re serious.’

‘You’re not bad, for an officer.’ He was swaying, and the girl, who, when bought, apparently stayed bought, had come back and caught his hand. He clasped hers. ‘He’s made us do some bad shit, eh?’ he said suddenly. ‘Storming a town’s one thing – right? Officer? Whatever you do in a town that refuses to surrender – that’s between you and the gods, eh?’

He spat.

‘But what we did at Gaza . . .’ He looked at the girl. ‘I killed one just like you, honey.’

The other two were taking his arms. I thought he might cry. But he didn’t. He grinned. ‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘Let me go.’

‘Let him go,’ I said.

The girl pulled his hand, and he laughed. It wasn’t a good laugh, but neither was it the laugh of a broken man.

‘Let him go,’ I said again.

He came back at me. ‘Give me a hug, eh, officer boy?’ he said.

I stood up, because I thought he was serious, and he was. He put his arms around me. ‘What’s it about, eh?’ he whispered in my ear. ‘I just want to know what the fuck it’s about, eh?’

Then he pushed himself away. ‘Sorry. I’m drunk. You smell good, officer. But not as good as my little friend here, who’s waited. Aphrodite, she stayed!’

He smiled at all of us, but most of all at her, and took her away into the dark.

Middle-age shook his head.

‘He’s saved my life ten times,’ he said. ‘Please – don’t report him.’

I sat back down. ‘Relax!’ I said. I caught the attention of another girl, whose breasts, to be frank, were not up to the standard of the first. ‘A krater of wine,’ I said. And then made gestures. Finally I showed her a large silver coin, and she bit it and smiled and ran off, showing her flanks very nicely.

A day’s wages for me. Wine for three.

Bad wine. But I poured for the two of them, as if they were guests in my house, and we drank.

‘He’s a great man, really,’ Middle-age said. ‘But he needs to go home.’

I shot my mouth off, too. ‘He can’t go home,’ I said. ‘Unless you want him to die as a bandit in the mountains. It would be like caging a wild boar.’

Middle-age nodded. ‘That’s what war has made him. It’s all he knows. All I’ll know, soon, too.’ He drank.

‘All they do is complain,’ the farm boy added. ‘It’s glorious serving the king. My pater served Philip and he was in two battles. I’ve already been in two great sieges and a battle.’ He shook his head. ‘Who gives a shit if we kill a bunch of barbarians?’

Middle-age shrugged. ‘You will, boy. Or you won’t. We have both kinds in the phalanx. Except that if you don’t give a shit about them, like enough in time you won’t care about anyone. Not even yourself. And then – you’ll die.’

‘You’re just old and burned out,’ Youth said.

‘Talk to me in twenty more fights, boy.’ Middle-age looked at me. He was half my age again – but I’d been fighting a long time. ‘If you live that long.’

Youth took a big drink, anger written on his face.

And fear.

I bought another round. I seldom thought much about my longevity, or my future. Despite Aristotle and Heron, I lived from day to day.

Some day, I would be King of Aegypt.

That hit me again, and I sat there drinking, my scroll forgotten.

Veteran came back, his girl in tow, and perched her on his knee and drank my wine. He was mellow now, and the girl ran her hands idly over his chest.

He looked at me and laughed. ‘Good hug,’ he said.

I pointed at the girl. ‘She does have the best tits in here,’ I agreed.

He laughed and laughed, and he was still laughing when Marsyas came in. He had Cleomenes and Philip the Red with him, and Kineas and Diodorus, and we embraced as comrades do, and then my three companions tried to escape.

‘They’re good companions,’ I said. ‘Let’s stay and drink with them.’

Marsyas, it proved, knew all of them, and their names – Amyntas son of Philip (one of a dozen I know) and Dion, and Charmides. Marsyas was a poet, and a drinker, and a rogue, and he knew everyone. And we sat and drank, and watched the girls.

That was Memphis.

I worried myself sick about the sacrifice. When it came, it was sacred, but my nerves fell away as if the god touched me, and perhaps he did.

The bull stood, undrugged, in the middle courtyard of the great temple, tethered to a ring but otherwise unconstrained. I had met him three times, so he would know my smell, and I walked up to him, and the crowd of priests and royal advisers and Alexander’s entourage – and Anaximenes, of course – knelt. All except Alexander, who stood just behind me, the only man standing.

The bull saw only me. He moved his head, and I walked very slowly up to him. Dignity has this added benefit – movement with dignity is an excellent practice for calming an animal, whether a horse or a bull.

When I was at his head, I drew the sword I had brought, purified by the priests and fresh from a night on Osiris’s altar, wiped clean to perfection with a cloth provided by the priestess of Hathor and smelling very strongly of Thaïs.

I drew it very slowly, and he rolled his eyes, and I wondered how many kings and champions had been lost this way. And I wondered if the high priest, if he disapproved of the pharaoh, or his champion, arranged for the bull to be in a mood. I wondered at a great many things, and then the tip of my sword – a heavy kopis – cleared the scabbard throat and I slowly raised the blade, placed my left hand on the great beast’s head just behind the horns, slowly rotated my hips and passed the sword back into the overhand guard position you see so often on vases. It’s there for a reason.

The bull raised his head, stretching his neck, and roared – a trumpet noise that made me jump, but with his neck muscles stretched like that . . .

I severed his head.

He fell forward on to his knees and pumped blood for a moment, and then sank to the ground and fell over, and the earth shook, and Alexander slapped my shoulder with his right hand.

‘Perfect,’ he breathed.

I felt empty. Hollow. And from the eye of the head on the floor came a last . . . something.

Rule well.

No one cheered, but many, many faces wore a broad smile. And men came to touch me. A priest – the one I had found staring at me, weeks before – came and took my sword from my hand. ‘It must be destroyed,’ he said, apologetically. ‘It has killed a god.’

I guess I understood.

That evening, Alexander gave a party. We drank too much and played stupid games, and Alexander treated the pages much as his father had treated us – which is to say, not very well, with some hard teasing and some innuendo that would not have made their mothers happy.

Anaximenes rose and toasted the king as the son of Apis, the God of Aegypt, and men roared. Bull gods are always popular. Hephaestion looked away in distaste.

‘Lord, I have spent months here, looking into the origins of Apis – and Zeus, and Amon.’ He paused, and his false humility was like bad incense – it choked me.

‘It is said in Greece that your mother claimed you as her son – by Zeus!’ he said, and I thought, What a charlatan. Alexander will have him gutted. And the silence at the party was so thick you might have thought a beautiful woman was naked.

But Alexander merely nodded.

‘Lord, the chief shrine of Amon is close – well guarded, and secret, but in Libya, across burning sands where no mere mortal man could survive the journey. But with you to lead us, we might go to the shrine of Amon. And there learn something of your parentage. With the benison of Apis upon you, and the most favourable sign he has vouchsafed to you . . .’ He threw his arms wide. ‘Your light be revealed to the world as the divine son of Zeus.’

I choked on my wine. In truth, I had no trouble seeing my king as a god. In many ways, he was greater than human, and in others, like the gods, he was merely inhuman. And yet, paradoxically, I also knew that whatever troubles Philip and Olympias had had, and they were legion, the bedchamber had not been one of them, and they had romped like bull and cow for many and many an afternoon and evening, until the lady was pregnant. I wasn’t there – but my father was, and many other men I knew.

Hephaestion turned his head away.

Black Cleitus frowned.

But Alexander nodded, his odd, eager smile coming to his face. Pothos again.

‘I have a gift to make to Aegypt,’ he said. ‘And then I will go and see my father, Amon.’

Every man knows the story of the founding of this city of Alexandria. I won’t belabour it. Alexander laid it out himself, and he used sacks of barley. The site was superb, and still is – and his eye took it in in one go, just as he saw battlefields, with an Olympian precision of thought that was not like other men’s. He looked, and saw, and thought, and the thing was done – the map of the streets was in his head. I know, because he told me.

He left the army at Memphis – to eat off the priests, he told us – and took only the elites north. But he asked me, because the ceremony of the sacrifice of the bull was important to him, and suddenly I was back in his inner circle. I wasn’t aware of having been excluded until I was put back. Running a regiment is a job that requires the same dedication as being a parent.

And Thaïs came downriver with us and sailed from Naucratis to Athens. She told me that she had to go – she wanted to see our daughter and our adopted boy, and she needed to sell her house in Athens.

I did not want her to go. I felt her loss keenly, and something told me I would never see her again. Despite which, I gave her ten talents of gold to spend on horses and equipment for me in Athens. New spears – new swords. Anything, really, to reawaken my interest in war, which, by the time the army reached Memphis, sickened me.

We marched from Alexandria – what would be Alexandria – and along the coast over sixteen hundred stades, and our horses grew thin, and the Hetaeroi grumbled as loudly as the Agrianians. We ate like a swarms of locusts, leaving the inhabitants rich with gold and destitute of grain wherever we travelled. Eventually, we had to send for the fleet to bring us food.

Having marched so far that some men expected to see the Pillars of Herakles, we turned south into the desert with native guides to lead us to the shrine of Amon.

We marched for ten days, until all of our water was gone. And then we marched for two more days, and the guides admitted they were lost.

Alexander rode bareheaded, the sun grilling him, his hair bleached almost white, while Hephaestion looked more and more like a statue of bronze, his skin and hair matching perfectly. Alexander roved the column on horseback until his horse died, and then he took my Medea. I offered her – he was the king. And he rode her to death, too.

And then we ate the horses and drank their blood, and marched again.

Sometimes, the blind faith that you are the son of a god is a good thing.

‘I am being tested,’ he said on the twelfth day. He smiled. ‘I won’t let you die,’ he added cheerfully, and rode away.

On the fourteenth day, men started to die – good men, hypaspitoi who had survived a dozen campaigns. I was marching with Alectus, and I had Bubores and Astibus off to my right – we were four abreast in the sand, and even the hypaspitoi were losing their formation, stumbling along, and the hot sun burned even our feet as we trudged, and the gravel got into our sandals and hurt like spear-points. None of which mattered a damn compared to the lack of water.

Men gave way to despair. There were suicides.

I had no unit, so I had returned to the hypaspitoi of the Aegema, where I lived, ate and soldiered. But after that night, I wandered among the men, because the only way to prevent despair is through action.

Alexander was everywhere.

‘Rest!’ he told the hypaspitoi. ‘Get sleep. We will find water, or it will come to us.’

Men said he was insane.

And the next day, it rained.

In the desert, in summer.

Two days of rain.

And when the rain cleared, priests from the shrine, led by portents, found us and took us to the oasis and the shrine of Amon.

Sometimes, I had to doubt whether it was Alexander who was insane.

It is hard, in retrospect, to choose when Alexander changed. I used to argue the point with Cleitus, and with Kineas. Each had a different answer. For Kineas, Alexander’s change began after the pursuit of Darius, while for Cleitus, it began as soon as he won Granicus.

Both are right, and both are wrong. To most of us, the change began some time before his sickness at Tarsus. Or perhaps at Tyre. But the change became set, like the hardening of concrete or mud bricks in the sun, during the visit to the shrine of Amon.