God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

TWENTY-EIGHT

Alexander went to the oracle alone. The oracle of Amon was famous in the Greek world, as well as in Aegypt, and was ancient – as ancient as Delphi or older.

Anaximenes says in his book that Alexander asked if all of the murderers of his father had been punished. If you consider that – if you look carefully at the question, and the man asking it – you have to face what a paradox Alexander lived. If Alexander didn’t wield the dagger himself – if Olympias arranged it without informing him – that was the very best he could claim, and I know better.

To ask such a thing from a sacred shrine – what can I say? Is it gross impiety, or a reckless craving that the past might be changed to suit the present? Alexander sought not to be a patricide. Not to be Oedipus, but Achilles.

Again according to that toad Anaximenes, Alexander was told that his question was impious. Because his father was Amon, Zeus Amon, and could never be killed. Was that what he was told? That’s what the lickspittle says.

Or was that what Anaximenes and Aristander cooked up when Alexander was told that his question was impious?

Or was the entire show managed from the first, so that Alexander could go on a quest to discover his parentage?

I cannot see clearly into his mind. I often try – and did then. Sometimes on matters of procedure, or war, or building, as with Alexandria, he would explain to me how he thought. But on something like this, I was left to guess.

And the paradox of the patricide seeking to avenge his father was not something I could understand, despite years of trying.

The only effect of the visit to the shrine of Amon was a hardening of Alexander’s resolve to be viewed and accepted as the son of a god and a god in his own right.

And the introduction of Anaximenes as a favourite.

We marched from the shrine of Amon with carts full of water skins and we made the coast and the fleet in good order, without any more deaths, as if, the drama done, Alexander needed to hurry. We reached the building site at Alexandria, and we had been gone only four weeks, but Alexander was angry that so little had been done. I think he had imagined that Zeus his father would build him a city in the desert while he visited Amon. I have no idea.

I wanted Thaïs, and now that I was not going to die in the desert, I thought about her constantly. But we marched from Naucratis upriver to Memphis, moving fast, as if the King of Kings was behind us and this was a desperate race.

In fact, I gathered from the grumblings of Callisthenes, who was considerably less happy with Anaximenes than the king was, that Darius had, in fact, used the year’s respite since Issus to rebuild his army. I had heard – through Thaïs and her endless network, and through military sources close to the king – that when we had entered Asia, the Great King had serious troubles on his own eastern frontier, far off in the lands we knew only by repute, such as India and Bactria.

Now it appeared that by concession and temporising, he had brought his eastern barons to heel, and we were, finally, to face the whole might of Persia.

Parmenio and his faction openly questioned the king’s strategy, and while they were loyal, their carping damaged morale. It is possible that, had Alexander plunged eastward after Issus, we might have taken Babylon and ended Darius, but as events were to prove, the empire remained the property of Darius for as long as he lived, and his bodyguard and his cousins were too realistic to leave him to die on a battlefield. And had we marched on Babylon from Issus – with the Persian fleet still alive behind us, with Aegypt as a base, with all the taxes and riches of Aegypt to support them – we might well have found ourselves cut off, alone and surrounded.

Whereas now, as the king gathered his forces at Memphis, we held all the ground west of the Euphrates. There were hold-outs and rebels, as Antigonus and Nearchus could attest. But in the main, we held the field, and we had continuous supply lines all the way back to Pella.

Which Antipater demonstrated by sending part of the fleet from Amphilopolis with fifteen hundred recruits for the various pezhetaeroi, a paltry six hundred more mercenaries and four hundred excellent Thracian cavalry, as well as more Thessalians. We divided the recruits among all seven taxeis, at about two hundred men each, which was excellent for me, and I took two hundred of the ‘mercenaries’ as well. They were a mixed bag of brigands, Peloponnesian defectors and other scum – all the good troops were fighting alongside Antipater – or fighting against him. Or we already had them with us. The truth was, every professional hoplite in the world of the Hellenes was in harness.

I cared, but not much, because my taxeis was as close to full strength as I could get it.

We marched by easy stages up to Pelusium, and then back to Gaza on the coast road, and then along the coast to Tyre. I dined with Alexander every night – with Craterus, Perdiccas and a dozen others from my boyhood. The king was more natural than I had seen him for a year. The only false notes were Anaximenes and Aristander, who were infinitely more obsequious than the most toady-like of the Macedonians – Nearchus, let us say.

When we were alone – almost alone, that is – when it was Alexander and Hephaestion, or Alexander and Cleitus – we talked about a final shake-up of the command structure of the army. Parmenio was never included in these discussions, which troubled me.

While we speak of paradox, let us remember that the whole army was in a state of paradox. Alexander commanded, and Parmenio was his second. When Alexander was sick, or wounded, Parmenio took command, and the reins slipped into his hands easily. And he never hesitated to hand the king back the reins when he rose form his sickbed.

And yet, by this time, they cordially detested each other. And as far as I could see, each schemed carefully for the destruction of the other – while, at the same time, acknowledging that the army and the kingdom were better for the continued existence of the other.

And if the Macedonian army seems to you a mighty thing, a monolith of military efficiency, let me tell you that inside the monolith, the edifice was plaster and wood, not stone; rats were gnawing at the thin ropes that held all the other stuff together. We had a lot of very mediocre mid-level officers, many of whom were Alexander’s friends and had been given commands owing to their loyalty to him.

And Alexander had reached a point where friendship with the king was not enough to secure command. I approved, but of course, I didn’t get the sack, either.

At Tyre, we had a long halt for the spring rains. Alexander had acted with foresight – we arrived to find a camp built by slaves and hired labour, vast magazines of food, and tents – new tents of heavy Syrian flax.

Alexander had actually thought about his army.

There were stockpiles of sarissas, well made by good smiths, and swords.

But mostly, there were water skins, baggage carts and barley. I whistled as we examined the stocks, and the horde of rats that came with them, but Alexander was angry.

It’s worth examining why, as an indication of how fast his mind was.

The grain stocks were held in sixteen enormous stone granaries, each of which was so new that you could smell the mud brick and the mortar. I was looking at the nearest in something not unlike awe, and Alexander said, ‘He’s short by a thousand mythemnoi. Perhaps five times that.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Get me the satrap of Syria,’ he said, grimly.

‘He’ was Menon, and his successor in office, a local man. Satrap of Syria. The man responsible for bringing in the grain as taxes and building the granaries. It was nothing to Alexander that he had built this camp, arranged to receive the shipments of everything from linen to weapons, hired the workers to build the granaries – all a miracle of organisation, by Eastern standards. Inside Alexander’s clockwork brain, what mattered was that he was more than a thousand mythemnoi of grain short for his projected march to Babylon.

He sacked the poor bastard on the spot, ignored his protests and appointed a new man.

And with that, I must digress again. The farther into this story I get, the more often I see, with my finger on a line of the Military Journal, that I have left out an important subplot that will suddenly emerge to bite me.

I have said almost nothing of Harpalus. He was a page with us, a young man with us, and he was fanatically loyal to the king. He was sent into exile when many of the rest of us were, and he was, for a long time, Erigyus of Mytilene’s lover. He was, like Marsyas, a fine fighter but a better brain, and had, quite early, taken to mathematics. He almost never accompanied us on campaign in the early years.

But he was, almost from the first ascension of Alexander to the throne, his chief treasurer. He was good at maths, but more importantly, he was expert at talking men into making donations, and he seemed to be able to conjure gold out of the air, so that, in the early days, he stood as a barrier between the king and his very real poverty.

In fact, I haven’t mentioned him because . . . how can I put this without seeming a cuckold? He never hid his admiration for Thaïs. And she liked him in a way she didn’t like me – as one brain to another, I think. They shared jokes – gossip – and secrets. Together. Without me.

To say I hated him is to do all three of us an injustice. But I confess that most of the time I tried to pretend he didn’t exist.

But he did.

While Alexander was sick – at Tarsus – he defected. He took an enormous sum of money, and left us – for Athens and Sicily. To me, it was good riddance.

Thaïs was pregnant, you recall, and delighted to be so. I was newly promoted to a taxeis, and all was well.

But when I spoke of him as a traitor, Thaïs would look at me – a look that always meant, ‘You are better than that.’

It made me think. After a while, I stopped referring to him as a traitor.

At Amon, the king included Harpalus, by name, in his prayers and sacrifices.

He was in Athens. And about the time the army arrived at Tyre, I realised that he was in Athens, and so was Thaïs.

There were two ways for me to read it. I could see the love of my life as despicable – capable of running off with another man, without so much as telling me where her feelings lay.

Or I could go back through all the conversations I’d ever had with either of them, and sort through for some facts.

I was, and am, intelligent enough to see that Thaïs was not the woman to behave that way. If she had left me for Harpalus, she’d have said so. Or so I had to believe, despite the recurring notion that her spectacular appearance as a priestess of Hathor was a form of farewell.

But the heart can be a dark place, and I could not conquer the image of Thaïs lying in his arms. In Athens.

We’d been camped at Tyre for a week when three ships came from Athens – the Athenian state galley Paralus and an escort, as well as a private ship, with them – Stratokles of Athens in his first Black Falcon.

I was drilling my taxeis on the wide plain when they came in, and an hour later, Polystratus rode up on a beautiful mare – a new one – and saluted.

‘The Lady Thaïs has arrived from Athens,’ he said. ‘She has a shipload of your goods, and requests your immediate presence.’

Polystratus slipped from the horse’s back while he spoke. ‘And this divine filly, and a pair of geldings for you. You lucky bastard.’ He patted her back. ‘Don’t keep the lady waiting.’

I could have kissed him. Instead, I vaulted on to the horse’s back – what a sweet horse – no war horse, but beautifully trained and responsive. A little small for me, but all heart.

I rode her down to the beach, enjoying every minute.

There was Thaïs.

With Harpalus.

I almost choked, but I am not a fool. If any of my unworthy suspicions were true, then they would not be standing on a beach together laughing. Or rather, they might, but only if Thaïs was a different woman.

So, not without effort, I dismounted, gave Harpalus a civil bow and opened my arms.

Thaïs moulded herself to me. There is no other way of describing what a woman can do with the man she loves, so that as much of the body is in contact as can possibly be managed. She raised her face and I kissed her. I think it was the first time I kissed her in public.

She laughed into my mouth.

Harpalus looked at me with a certain bewildered jealousy. I thought him a traitorous, fickle, high-strung idiot, and he, I suspect, thought me a clod. Still thinks it, I suspect.

There we go, then.

‘I have a few things for you,’ she said. She introduced me to Stratokles – father of the current politician – who looked at me with distaste. With him, and Harpalus, was a soldier – I knew him in a moment as one – well dressed, in the Athenian way.

‘I have all your armour,’ Thaïs said, delighted by her own success. What can be more wonderful for a man who has doubted his mistress than to watch her, in turn, be pleased at her ability to give pleasure? I didn’t need to hear the story to know that she had worked hard to get the armour shipment together.

I sent a slave to get the taxeis down to the beach. I had arrangements of my own to make – I needed a man to replace Isokles. I had asked Kineas, but he – and Diodorus – refused to leave their precious aristocratic Athenian cavalry. I wanted an Ionian or an Athenian to help me with the prickly sods I had from Memnon, but no one was forthcoming.

I digress, because of the association of ideas. The man with Harpalus and Stratokles the elder was Leosthenes, who had been elected an Athenian tribal general twice, and was as near a mercenary as you could be without carrying the name.

I was introduced to him. He looked familiar.

‘You served with us at Issus?’ I asked, as soldiers do.

He shrugged. ‘In the second line. Your king always puts men like me in the second line.’

He had the kind of charisma that Alexander had. It burned from his eyes. And he had a nice Ionian accent.

Thaïs laughed. ‘I brought him for you, dear. He goes with the horses.’

Leosthenes blushed. ‘I don’t like to seem a supplicant,’ he said.

Thaïs put a hand on his arm. ‘He has helped do the king a great service in Athens, and he needs a home for a few months.’

I held out my hand. ‘I need a company commander, and an Ionian one is ideal. I don’t suppose you have any way of qualifying as one of us? A Macedonian?’

Leosthenes laughed aloud. ‘My mother is Thessalian. The Athenian Assembly never tires of reminding me.’

By that time, Polystratus and Marsyas had brought the taxeis down to the beach, stripped to chitons.

I ambled the mare over to them and raised a hand for silence. ‘Listen, gents. I have spent a fair amount of gold to get you lot some new kit – so you can look like proper princesses when you go to the dance. Unload it from the ship, and we’ll have a feast tonight in the old way, and share it all out. This is my gift, lads – not an obol from your pay.’

Unlike Alexander, I knew what appealed to soldiers.

We unloaded that ship before the sun went down, and while we did, the regiment’s slaves built a dozen bonfires on the beach, and Leosthenes showed his skills by getting up fifty baskets of lobster. Just try to make fifty baskets of lobster appear. It takes skill and the will of the gods.

The slaves built the fires high and burned them down to coals, and we buried the brutes in the coals and roasted them. There were anchovies so fresh that some tried to get back into the sea, and Thaïs had brought wine. I suppose – no, I know – she brought good wine for the campaign, but I handed it all over to the troops, save a few lonely amphorae for us, and she rolled her eyes, but held her peace.

We had almost four hundred bales of goods, every bale wrapped in cowhide, with a layer of tallow, and then a couple of layers of linen canvas. When we had eaten, with all the mess groups in circles by their fires, and the officers all together – Marsyas and Cleomenes, the senior phylarchs, with the addition of Leosthenes, and Thaïs sitting with us as if the presence of a woman at a camp dinner was the most natural thing in the world – I took a sharp knife and started to open the bales.

By luck, I got the helmets first. They were Attic in style, as I had requested – but with a brim over the eyes, a close-fit skull and hinged cheek-plates that adapted to the shape of the face. They were good bronze, and every helmet had a crest box and a horsehair crest.

There might have been fifty men in the taxeis with better helmets than these, but I doubted it, and I started to give them out, starting with phylarchs, then demi-phylarchs, file closers, and on and on, so that senior men got them first – I had no idea how many there might be, and as this was the work of seventy or eighty armourers, I couldn’t make head or tail of all the bills of lading.

The officers joined me, and soon we had men formed in files, and we had all the bales open – men took their new thoraces, their new sandals, their new chitons. The helmets were magnificent, but the sandal-boots came in for the most comment.

It was a fine occasion, and we went to our tents late and full of good wine, and Thaïs and I cuddled and kissed and fell asleep. I imagine I told her that I had missed her a thousand times. She laughed.

That was her way.

Just before she fell asleep, she put a hand on mine. ‘You know that Darius’s wife is pregnant,’ she said, as if this was the sort of thing we discussed every day.

I was half asleep. It took me a moment to realise that Darius’s wife was in a tent not far from me, not in Babylon with the King of Kings. And that only one man could have made her pregnant.

But it didn’t really seem that important.

Maybe Harpalus was right. Maybe I am a clod.

Alexander arranged games. He put money and effort into them, and we had tracks and fields marked out in advance, and marvellous prizes – magnificent cloaks, gold cups, whole panoplies of fine armour.

I ordered my men to store their new equipment. The new chitons were fitted, sewn to shape and put away. There was some grumbling, but I promised we’d have a promotion parade before we marched and wear it all. Games are hard on equipment, and I wanted them to go out in their old gear. I fought with spear and shield in my battered helmet, and Alexander, while commenting on my skill, managed to take note of the helmet.

‘You are, I think, one of the richest men in the army,’ he said. ‘Treat yourself to a new helmet.’

Thaïs had brought it from Athens, and it sat on my camp bed – thickly plated in gold over iron and bronze, the same Attic design as my men’s helmets, but with blue and gilt over the whole outer face; the cheek-plates on springs, the brim a little more peaked and with a pair of bull’s horns flanking the rich crest.

I wasn’t sure what I thought of the horns.

Thaïs shook her head. ‘For the bull. See?’ She smiled. ‘I spent four days in the Chalcidean’s shop, making sure that the engraving was as I wanted it.’ Indeed, the entire cycle of the bull was on the helmet, and a depiction of Zeus enthroned on Olympus, but with bull’s horns.

I loved it for her, as I thought that it was a little more gaudy than I needed. But the thorax matched, with white leather pturges.

I like fine gear. What soldier does not?

She’d brought me a dozen spears, each finer than the last, all fine steel work with long heads and long sockets, elegant saurouters, some with pierced work, some gilt, and all with fine silk tassels at the base of the socket – to keep the blood off your hands.

As I say, I fought in the hoplitomachos. I was the only one of the taxiarchs to do so, although they were all excellent fighters. Perdiccas was always my match. Craterus, ten years older than I, was faster than most men.

It was odd, because despite the prizes, many of the contestants were mercenaries and professionals, and few of our hypaspitoi or our pezhetaeroi chose to match themselves. I suppose it was not so odd. We were the best fighters in the world, but few of our farm boys had the formal gymnasium training in wrestling and pankration that was the essential underpinning to being a truly formidable single fighter.

In the second pool of fighters, I faced Draco of Pella. He was one of ours. In fact, he was a pezhetaeros of my own taxeis, and, despite his youth, a canny, thoughtful fighter with long arms and a heavy hand. When his spearhead struck my shield, he cut pieces from the cover, or took chips from the rim, or bent the bronze. But I got past his spearhead and threw him to the ground and rested my saurouter on his thigh and he grinned at me.

And while I helped him up, I promoted him to phylarch.

I faced Leosthenes, as well, and he bested me. I never saw the blow that clipped my old helmet and tore my crest away. I had never faced a man so fast.

We put the judges in a quandary, because I had more wins than anyone in the competition except Leosthenes, but we were in the same pool. Or the judges were loath to disqualify a taxiarch and friend of the king. These things happen.

Either way, we both went on to the last round on the third day. I was elated because one of my many Philips had won the garland for the stade sprint, bringing honour to the regiment, and another man, an Ionian, had placed second in the wrestling to Kineas’s friend Diodorus. Kineas won the boxing easily, as the sport was not well known in Macedon. I lost the pankration fairly early, as the competition was worthy of the Olympics or the Nemean Games. There were big, well-trained men, such as Demetrios of Halicarnassus, and he dropped me on my head about as fast as I could tell it, although, like a good comrade, he held my feet so I didn’t injure my neck.

Alexander came and watched the final bouts of the hoplitomachos. Many men I knew were there, such as Kineas, wearing his garland, and Diodorus, wearing his.

The herald assigned every one of us a little metal badge, each one of which had a sign of one of the gods on it. I drew Zeus.

I prayed to Zeus-Apis. That’s how far my change had gone. Before, I would have prayed to Herakles before any contest, or perhaps Poseidon.

Zeus-Apis denied my prayer, which was that I not face Leosthenes.

We were matched immediately.

Let me tell you how you fight a man who is better and faster than you are.

You take your stance well out of reach of his spear, and you manipulate the measure – the distance – to mislead your opponent into making one of his lightning-fast attacks while still out of range.

We circled for so long that men started to hoot and call suggestions.

Leosthenes knew perfectly well what I was about, and he tried to push me, but I kept circling, using the angle of my movement to keep my distance while never getting backed against the wands that marked the edges of the competition area.

Round and round.

Had he been an impatient man, I’d have had him.

Leosthenes the Athenian was never impatient.

Let me add that we fought with bated spears, twice the height of a man. They hurt when they hit, but they didn’t punch through flesh.

I grew impatient.

Not the sign of an expert fighter, but I am a taxiarch, not a champion.

I shortened my grip, sliding my hand to the centre of my weapon, and I stepped in.

Leosthenes’ strike came like a levin-bolt, and I didn’t raise my shield. Instead, I caught it on my spear, near the tip, turned it into my shield and leaped forward.

Fast as thought, he leaped back. I wanted to close inside his spearhead, and he wanted to hit me in my rush. He didn’t want to fight me close in.

His feet crossed, and he fell. But even as he fell, he rolled on his shield shoulder and never let go of his spear, and he was as fast as a god. I closed the distance, but his roll changed the angle, and I had to brace, and he was on his feet. He thrust, and I caught his off-balance shot on the rim of my shield – Zeus, he was fast. I passed forward, sure I had won the fight, but he recovered his spearhead in the tongue-flick of a serpent, and he backed off two steps, as fast as a dancer at a symposium, avoiding the grabbing hands of clients – perhaps faster – and his spearhead licked out again, and just tagged my helmet.

I ducked my head and stepped in, spear across my body, and reached out to push him to the ground . . .

And stopped. It took a moment to realise he’d hit my helmet.

But I knew it.

I turned to the herald. ‘He hit me,’ I said.

The herald bowed.

The crowd began to roar.

Leosthenes bowed to me. ‘My back foot is out of the ring,’ he said. He spat the words, but by the gods, he was an honest man that day.

My rush had pushed him out of the limits.

The question we all had was – which happened first?

Alexander came down from his dais, and walked the sand with the heralds. He called the two of us together.

‘Leosthenes of Athens, you stepped out twice – two steps in a row.’ The king shrugged. ‘You are a brilliant fighter. Tyche was against you.’

I raised my hand. ‘Lord King, may I use this moment to crave a boon? May I ask that Leosthenes of Athens be considered a Macedonian, that I may have him as an officer in my taxeis?’

Alexander smiled one of his rare smiles of genuine amusement. ‘Is he at least as Macedonian as your Isokles?’ he asked.

Leosthenes stripped off his armour and went to stand with Kineas, whom he idolised, while I went on to win my next three fights. None of the other finalists was anything like as good as the Athenian.

Which the king acknowledged when he gave me my garland. Because he summoned Leosthenes and presented him with a garland as well, rather than the man who was, by points, the second.

Alexander could be fair, just and astute, when it suited him. As the judge of games, he was easy to love.

Alectus slapped me on the back when I received my garland. ‘He’d have killed you, if it was real,’ he said. ‘Don’t get cocky.’

There you have it.

But praise from peers is sweet. Bubores came, and Cleomenes, and Kineas, and a dozen other friends, and they poured wine over my head and slapped my back, and then a dozen of them picked me up and carried me to the beach and flung me into the sea – the sea that, a year before, we had dyed red with the blood of slaughtered Tyrians.

Alexander held a parade – one of the few I remember in any detail, although he held enough of them, in emulation of Xenophon’s Anabasis. My men looked forward to it eagerly, the last day of the games, because they knew they were going to dazzle the other pezhetaeroi, and even the hypaspitoi, with their new splendour.

Nor were we wrong. Leosthenes, Callisthenes, Marsyas and I worked overtime to arrange how to get ourselves and all our soldiers into our kit without the rest of the army seeing us. We put the kind of planning into it that we would have put into a military operation, and Leosthenes revealed what a cunning bastard he was in his brilliant misdirection plan.

In short, we were late for parade. All the taxeis competed to be first on parade, and we were deliberately last.

We had the front left file closer – Leosthenes now – carry a sarissa with every wreath and garland we had won as a body in the games tied to the spearhead with superb cloth-of-gold tape that Thaïs provided. We had a pair of slave aulos players, whom I freed for service.

We marched on, crossing the back of the parade to the tune of our flutes, marching in step.

We could hear the muttering in the ranks; ‘awkward sods’ was about the nicest thing we heard.

And then they saw us.

Heh. Another great moment.

There was no body of troops in that army of fifty thousand men who had matching helmet plumes, matching armour, matching spears, new chitons that shone like snow. We glittered.

And when I called ‘Ground your . . . spears!’ fifteen hundred saurouters crunched into the gravel with a single sound.

Alexander glanced at me. I had on my new panoply. I smelled like new leather and Thaïs’s perfume – I think she’d kept the armour awfully close during the sea voyage.

The king grinned.

Then he rode away to the head of the Royal Squadron, and we passed in review, marching past the king sixteen files wide, and in step, in a way that never really happened on the battlefield, and yet was a practical test of a regiment’s drill.

We marched up and down, and we marched past the king. And as the head of our regiment drew even with him – he was deep in conversation with Hephaestion – he touched his heels to Bucephalus and rode out to us.

‘Men of Outer Macedon!’ he shouted. Technically, that was our taxeis – the Taxeis of Outer Macedon.

He waited a moment or two.

‘YOU LOOK LIKE GODS!’ he roared.

They were still shouting his name when we went back to camp. They were willing to die for him, then.

Sometimes, he was easy to love.

Harpalus brought us detailed information on the war with Sparta and the threat to the League of Corinth in Greece. The night of the great review, when Craterus had pretended to punch me in the nose and Perdiccas had demanded that I tell him the source of my wonderful helmets (I told him), we discussed the war behind us – what Alexander later referred to as a war between mice.

They were dangerous mice. The Spartans were nothing like in their prime, but man for man they were still magnificent. And their king, Agis, understood strategy better, I think, than Darius. He struck immediately, and where we felt it most – he put a fleet to sea and took Crete, as I’ve mentioned above. Had we not won Tyre and Aegypt, Agis’s strategy would have crippled us, cut us off. So much for Parmenio’s views of the world.

But Tyre fell and the Cypriots came over to us, and the world changed faster than Darius and Agis were prepared for, and once again, Alexander was a step ahead.

As usual, everything depended on Athens. During the winter, while Alexander went to the shrine of Amon, our entire campaign teetered on the edge of extinction. Athens had three hundred ships. If Athens had joined Sparta, we would have faced a general uprising of all the states of Greece, and Antipater notwithstanding, the war would have been fought at sea, and in Macedon.

But Athens stayed loyal. Actually, Athens seethed with discontent, but stayed just the right side of betrayal. Or, as I have said before, the thetes couldn’t stomach siding with Sparta and Persia at the same time.

What role Harpalus played, I can only guess. His role was never vouchsafed to me. But Thaïs’s trip to Athens while Alexander went to the shrine of Amon . . . at the time, I never guessed it. She had apparently withdrawn from politics and spycraft, during her second pregnancy. Callisthenes took over her duties and ran her agents.

When I look back, now, I realise that she controlled Harpalus’s false defection, and ran him as a fisherman plays a fish. She was his lifeline and his paymaster, and the five thousand talents he ‘stole’ were used to bribe Athens. It was a brilliant move. I wish I could be certain whether Thaïs thought it through herself, or whether Harpalus designed it, or whether the king did – all three in concert, I think, but somehow, it has his stamp. Alexander’s mind . . .

Last year, I saw a device at the house of Ben Zion – a device that had been ordered by the Tyrant of Athens. It was a bronze and steel machine for predicting the movement of the planets. Have you seen one? If you rotate a lever, you can see the moon spin on its axis as it moves around the earth, passing through her phases, and you can watch Ares make his remarkable movements – forward, back, forward, like a man dancing the Pyricche.

You’ve seen one of these machines? Yes?

That is how I see the mind of Alexander. Except with an infinite profusion of those cogs and levers, calculating, calculating, so that unless his agents of information betrayed him with false data, he could see forward, not by prescience but by calculation, on the battlefield, in politics and perhaps even in friendships. So that, just as Demetrios of Phaleron’s machine could calculate a thousand years of eclipses, so Alexander’s mind could calculate three years of campaigns in Asia and all of Darius’s responses.

How dull the rest of us must have seemed.

At any rate, Harpalus returned, and the king felt his rear was secure. He restructured his commands to suit his campaign, and Parmenio didn’t quibble.

The two of them had a meeting, in private, with no witnesses. I can only guess, but I will. I think that the king promised him an honourable retirement and the satrapy of Persia proper. And Parmenio accepted, secure in the knowledge that he was being given a huge command and the Royal Treasury – and thus, that he could continue to provide patronage for the officers in his ‘family’.

Hephaestion was given his first large command. He took the elite cavalry – the Hetaeroi minus the royals, the Paeonians, the Thracians and some of the allies – such as Kineas – and the Agrianian skirmishers, and he vanished into the desert. He had what appeared to be a siege train. That accorded badly with the speed his column was supposed to maintain, but rumour said he was out of the area covered by the Prodromoi in a single day, so he must have moved like lightning.

You’ve no doubt heard the story from Diodorus, eh? How they raced to the Euphrates, and threw a pontoon bridge across.

Mazaeus, the best of the remaining Persian commanders, was there with three thousand horse, and the two forces fought every day – skirmish after skirmish on the banks of the Euphrates, up and down as Hephaestion sought to outflank Mazaeus, like two skilled men fencing with sticks. And Kineas won the day, racing south, finding a ford, fighting his way across with his Athenians in the face of a determined enemy, and turning Mazaeus’s flank, so that his whole force was rolled back and Hephaestion got the bridges across. That’s where your father won his magnificent Nisean stallion, and he rode that horse for years.

If you know your Anabasis, you know that Cyrus’s army took the same route we were on. And having won the crossings of the Euphrates and built a pair of bridges, we might have turned south towards Babylon and lunged at the Persians.

That’s what Mazaeus expected, and what Darius wanted us to do – march down the east bank of the Euphrates. Like Artaxerxes before him, Darius had ordered the land between the rivers scorched, the grain removed and the most populous place on the wheel of the world depopulated, so that when Alexander made his move for empire, he would have to cross a battlefield stripped clean of food and forage.

When we marched from Tyre, it was late in Hecatombion by the Athenian festival calendar, but we marched fast – up to two hundred stades a day. The men were fresh and well rested, and well fed. And even eager. We had water with us, and we marched across dusty plains at the height of midsummer.

When Kineas rolled Mazaeus up and forced him back on the road to Babylon, the rest of us – the main army – were virtually a dust cloud on the horizon. The next day, my taxeis and the hypaspitoi marched across the bridges yoked like oxen, carrying water, and behind us came the whole army. Mazaeus retreated south along the east bank of the Euphrates for two days, and Hephaestion, on what was probably the best day of his career, pursued just the right amount, and they fought another inconclusive action in the dust.

I was still marching.

We didn’t turn south to Babylon.

The wheels of the king’s mind had turned, grinding this campaign down to a few problems, and here’s the solution he reached, as best I understand it.

If we marched in spring, as soon as the ground was dry, then the rivers would be in spate, and crossing either the Euphrates or the Tigris would have been very difficult indeed. The marching would have been better for the soldiers, but that was never a great concern of Alexander’s.

But if the rivers were full to flood – if the spring rains came late – and the countryside was empty of crops, as every set of farms on earth is empty in late spring, when all the stores have been consumed – then we might reach the Euphrates bank and starve, or be trapped between the rivers.

As it was, although I think most of the army never saw the plan, his campaign worked better than he imagined. We shot east, crossed the two bridges mere hours after they were completed, and Mazaeus, by the sort of luck that comes with good planning, was pinned back south and couldn’t explore our dispositions. Two days later, when Hephaestion had withdrawn, Mazaeus’s elite cavalry came pounding north.

And found the crossing deserted, and our army – gone. Gone to the east.

By luck, good planning and the godlike far-sightedness of Alexander, we had broken contact, and our entire army was loose in the plains of Iraq.

Mazaeus raced south, leaving his best men to try and find us. Mazaeus had a head on his shoulders – he went in person to tell the Great King that Alexander had just shredded his operational plan and was now somewhere.

In fact, we marched for twenty days, moving as fast as men and horses could move. We were north of Darius’s scorched earth, and we were in the cool foothills and not in the Mesopotamian plains, and while ‘cool’ is a relative thing to a foot soldier who has been marching for ten hours with the sun pounding him like an enemy, we were not losing men.

The best of the Prodromoi swept south in small groups – ten or twelve men under a trusted officer or phylarch, covering huge distances with six or eight horses per man. By the time we reached the Tigris river, we were receiving the first reports of Darius’s army, as scouted by Agon’s men.

Alexander flatly refused to believe what he heard. Because what he heard was that Darius, the despicable and defeated Darius, had almost a hundred thousand men covering miles of ground, and that his army outnumbered ours nearly two to one.

The speed of the army was not good for everyone. The animals suffered in the heat and dust, and the women suffered worse than the men, even when they rode in litters, and one pregnant woman suffered worse than the rest.

I was with the main body when I heard her scream.

We had reached the Tigris river the night before, and our lead elements – today, Perdiccas and the Agrianians, backed by Thracian horse – punched across against no opposition. The Tigris, contrary to Callisthenes’ sensational account, was about four fingers deep over the rocks, and we scarcely cooled our feet in it as we went.

We were flanking the baggage, and I had the rotten job of making sure that the baggage carts made the crossing in good order. I was watching my officers check the cartwheels – because any old ones would break in the middle of the river, and any loose ones would come off. And the Great King’s wife began to scream.

I can’t pretend I knew who it was, but I was the officer in charge, and I rode to her cart – more like a broad pavilion mounted on a wagon bed.

There was so much blood that it was coming through the baseboards of the wagon.

I sent Polystratus for Thaïs, and then I climbed into the wagon. She was screaming, and her mother-in-law was holding her head, and two eunuchs tried to prevent my entering the wagon and I threw one out through the door.

‘You cannot enter here!’ the other said, desperately.

I ignored him and looked at Sisygambis, the Queen Mother. She didn’t meet my eye.

Leosthenes had been checking wheels. He popped his head in.

‘Fetch the king,’ I shot at him, and his head vanished.

Thaïs came. The eunuchs continued to try to remove me, but Sisygambis said something and they desisted. Thaïs put a hand on the woman’s forehead, reached down and flung the blood-soaked sheets back and caught my eye.

Miscarriage. I’m a country boy. I knew the signs.

Philip of Acarnia came first, and then Alexander. I’d have left the wagon, but I couldn’t get out, trapped in the press. Philip looked at her, felt her pulse and exchanged a glance with Thaïs. That was the worst thing – the conspiracy of silence. The poor woman. Imagine – trapped with fifty thousand enemy soldiers, pregnant with Alexander’s bastard and marching towards your husband, who will have you executed when he sees you. With only your mother-in-law and her ladies for company.

Then Alexander came.

Philip was blunt, as he always was. ‘Say your goodbyes,’ he said. ‘She won’t recover.’

Indeed, the poor thing was bleeding at such a rate that it didn’t seem possible a body could hold so much blood.

She cried out.

Alexander turned his head away in revulsion.

She flung her arms out.

Alexander stepped back.

‘She is unclean,’ he said.

‘I am cursed!’ the Queen of Persia cried out. ‘Oh, God of Light, why must I endure this!’

Alexander shot me a look of disgust. ‘Why exactly was I summoned?’ he asked.

‘You got her with child,’ I shot at him. I don’t think I had ever been so angry with him.

He didn’t meet my eye. This had never happened before, save once.

He turned and left the wagon.

Philip of Acarnia all but spat.

The Queen of Persia died in his arms, with Thaïs holding her hand and her mother-in-law holding her head.

Later, Callisthenes put it about that she died in an accident, and that’s the official version.

I followed Alexander from the wagon. I had her blood on my left hand and I let it dry there. I mounted my pretty mare, now Medea like the others, and I rode her hard to the head of the column, where Alexander sat with Hephaestion, watching the last of the main body cross.

I might not have done it, but Alexander turned as I came up. ‘The baggage is falling behind, and we have to move,’ he said.

I reached out and wiped her blood across his face. She was nothing to me – I had scarcely met her, and she openly despised us all. But I was his friend, not his slave, and no man worth a shit treats a woman like that.

He had no trouble meeting my eye. He held out his hand, and a slave put a towel in it. He wiped his face.

‘I gather you feel that needed to be done. I have other things on my mind than the troubles of women,’ he said. ‘Now get the baggage moving.’

Sometimes, he was easy to hate.