God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

THIRTY-ONE

If you’ve come to listen to the end, young man, you must know that most of the glory has gone out of the story, and only the tragedy remains. Have I convinced you, yet, that Alexander is not the king you should seek to emulate?

I will.

Guagamela was Alexander’s masterpiece. He realised the plan, and he executed it perfectly – with brilliant, lightning-like changes of direction and purpose that marked his genius – instant response to the changes on the battlefield.

I am an excellent general, and I have won my fair share of battles. I could have planned Guagamela. But through all the dust I could not have seen the moment when the King of King’s centre had drifted from his right, and thrust into it.

I awoke to pain and stupor – I’d been given poppy. Thaïs and Philip were waiting on me personally. My eyes opened, and Thaïs looked at me and a smile lit her face.

That’s a good way to come back from the edge of death.

Philip leaned over, looked into my eyes and nodded. ‘No concussion,’ he said.

I was in the king’s tent. The red-purple tinge, like fresh blood, was unmistakable. Outside, the sun must have been high in the sky, and the tent cast a wine-coloured pall over everything.

Somewhere to my right, I could hear the king.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘And immediately after I shattered their centre – could you see? There is no feeling like riding at the point of the wedge. The power! And the danger! Did you see it?’

Murmurs of appreciation.

Thaïs made a face. ‘Please wake up and recover,’ she said. ‘I’ve had two days of it.’

Philip’s lips made the slightest twitch, acknowledging – and agreeing.

It all came back to me in a single piece of memory. The fight in the dust. The message. The wedge.

Poseidon was dead.

‘What’s the butcher’s bill on my taxeis?’ I asked. ‘Could you get me Isokles?’

Thaïs wiped my mouth. ‘Isokles has been dead almost a year,’ she said.

‘Of course,’ I answered, confused momentarily. ‘Pyrrhus, too.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and looked away.

‘Callisthenes, then?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘He died here,’ she said.

‘Marsyas?’ I asked. ‘Leosthenes?’

‘Leosthenes is badly wounded and in the surgeon’s tents. Marsyas is collecting Persian women and writing poetry to them.’ Thaïs nodded to Philip. ‘I’m going to move him.’

Philip nodded back.

Marsyas came to see me a day later. I assume he’d tried and been turned away, but he’d done all that I could have done – he’d arranged burials, sent letters and even managed to retrieve and bury mighty Poseidon.

He told me that the Taxeis of Outer Macedon had lost two hundred and thirty dead and wounded not expected to recover. Other taxeis had fared worse. Craterus had lost almost five hundred men, and altogether we’d lost almost two thousand infantry, most of them from the taxeis with Parmenio.

Marsyas wasn’t going to tell me, but I saw through him.

‘Our taxeis is being broken for replacements, isn’t it,’ I said.

Marsyas nodded.

And that was like the death of a friend. Another death. I hadn’t started to mourn Callisthenes yet.

The rest of Babylonia fell without a fight.

That took months to play out. The welcome did not.

I was back to being a Hetaeroi. Because of my place in the battle, I was in favour, and because of my wound, I was still fevered, and I confess in advance that it added to the intensity of the experience. I was perpetually light-headed, and the sun had a quality to it that is hard to explain. It was brighter than I have ever known it, even in the endless Gedrosian desert. Even in Aegypt and Lydia. It burned into your eyes, and the grit – not really sand – rose to suffocate you, and the green of the trees was so green as to seem lurid. And the smell of human excrement, which they used for manure, fought the stink of naphtha fires and the omnipresent smell of incense. Men say that Aegypt is priest-ridden, but Babylon is god-ridden. They have gods everywhere, and they worship them to distraction.

Incense and naphtha. Smoke at the back of your throat, grit in your clothes. All the way south from Arabela to Babylon.

There was another kind of grit in my throat, and that was Mazaeus. Somehow, while I was recovering from my wound, he had come into our camp and made peace with Alexander, and he was suddenly the favourite – so much so that Hephaestion rode with me. Mazaeus had been one of Darius’s most trusted officers, and his defection was important. Because of him, Alexander received the homage of dozens of important Persian and Mede officers, and our way was made smooth.

Darius had fled the field – again – and I found it almost melancholy to hear from Mesopotamian peasants that they no longer considered him king. Greek peasants, I’m sure, would have maintained their allegiance a little longer.

Or perhaps not.

At any rate, Mazaeus was tall and handsome and dignified, long-limbed, a beautiful horseman and a fine warrior. He wasn’t ingratiating or obsequious.

But he did throw himself on his face every time he entered Alexander’s presence – the royal presence was suddenly becoming the Royal Presence. Because of his age and immense dignity, Mazaeus made the rest of us seem like clods, and he clearly thought we were – except Alexander, who he found a way to love.

Really, I have a hard time remembering how it all started. We didn’t go to war, on Alexander’s staff, about proskynesis and Persian customs for years. And yet, the whole argument, the whole cultural disagreement, could have been read on every Greek and Macedonian officer’s face, the first morning that Mazaeus made his reverence.

We rode south, away from Darius. I thought it was a mistake, and so did Parmenio. I felt that we needed to have Darius’s head on a spike, or we weren’t done. Parmenio agreed.

The old man was in a state of shock – not utter shock, but a sort of euphoric disbelief. He hadn’t expected us to win the battle, and he clearly hadn’t expected to survive the battle, and in the aftermath, he was quite naturally a little aloof, a little diffident, and genuinely generous to those who had played a role in the rescue of his wing – Diodorus, Kineas and the king. He was not hesitant in describing how desperate the situation had been.

This was not politics. This was just an honest old man thanking the team that saved him.

But Alexander’s faction didn’t hesitate to capitalise on his admissions of weakness, and Parmenio’s sons, who were not thankful and felt that Parmenio had been hung out to dry, so to speak, were in turn angered.

Two days out of Babylon, with rumours rife that the city would resist, that Darius had another army forming behind us, and that Bessus, the senior satrap who had escaped Arabela, was still in the field with all his cavalry – a force still larger than our army – Alexander ordained that all the officers would dine together.

A symposium.

I remember, because he had just promoted Astibus and Bubores to company commands in his recently expanded hypaspitoi, and they were on the next kline to mine. They were crowned in wreaths of gilded laurel. So was I, and so was Marsyas, who shared my couch. Kineas shared a couch with Diodorus, also crowned.

Whether by intention or not, half of the great circle wore crowns of valour. And the other half did not. Philotas did not have one, and neither did Nicanor, although he had led the hypaspists with flair and reckless bravery. The older men, the partisans of Parmenio, had no crowns.

Parmenio was on a couch to my left, well within earshot, and he shared the couch with Philotas.

On the third bowl of wine, Philotas sat up. ‘Why no crown for Mazaeus? He fought well enough!’

I must confess, I laughed too. It was funny. He was so ill at ease with us, in his long flowing robes. He’d probably never eaten lying on a couch, and he was desperately uncomfortable sharing his with Cleitus the Black, who glowered at him.

There were other Persian officers present. They did their best. It is almost impossible to be conquered with dignity, but they did it well enough.

But Philotas couldn’t let them go. ‘Why the long faces?’ he called. ‘We’ll all be in high hats and long robes soon enough.’

This quip was not greeted with the enthusiasm that his earlier jibe received.

The wine went instantly to my head, even well watered, and I went off to Thaïs and bed. After I left, the Persians were heckled until the king ordered the verbal attacks to stop.

Just one big happy family.

Babylon.

The morning after the symposium, we formed the entire army in battle order on the plain of Mesopotamia. Despite dykes and irrigation ditches, we could march unimpeded. Indeed, Mesopotamia was the ideal ground for infantry – three thousand years of tillage had levelled it as flat as a skillet.

We advanced on the city in battle order, and we made camp the next night within sight of the place, a great mound twinkling with lights in the middle distance. It had an air of unreality.

Babylon was, and is, one of the mightiest, if not the greatest, city on the wheel of the earth. No one knows how many people live in its mighty compass, but I have heard that it has a million inhabitants. The girdle of walls, mud brick, fired brick and stone has a greater circumference than that of any other city walls I’ve ever seen, and despite that, the suburbs spill out of the city gates like wine from a drunkard’s lips, so that there is a further girdle of intense habitation all around the city, many stades thick. The dense population is only possible because Mesopotamia has some of the finest soil and farmland in the world, and the two great rivers – the Tigris and the Euphrates – allow the produce to be floated directly to the city, which is also at the head of navigation, so that ocean-going ships can depart straight for the eastern seas from Babylon.

Babylon has ten times the population of Athens, the greatest city of our world.

Babylon could, all by itself, field a mighty army. Only sixty years before Marathon, a king of Babylon had challenged the whole might of Persia by himself, fielding a magnificent army of armoured cavalry and chariots. He had only narrowly been defeated.

I had a hard time sleeping. The fever was on me – the mosquitoes were like nothing I had ever seen. In god-ridden Mesopotamia, they didn’t have a mosquito god, which I found surprising. I would have done a great deal to propitiate such a god.

I eventually got to sleep, only to have a dream that took me high over the Great Pyramid at Chios, and then, as if driven by a catapult, I did not so much fall as was driven down and down, into the very top of the magnificent structure, and I awoke covered in sweat. I threw off Thaïs’s leg and my military cloak and stumbled out into the oppressive heat.

The only peace from the flies was by the fires, where the heat was worst.

A fever, high heat and bugs. I don’t think that man can know a greater torment, unless it is the pain of a bad wound and the sure knowledge of coming death.

I settled by the smoke of a fire. I had lost my way in the camp. I was lost, or uncaring. Even now, I scarcely remember it.

But Philip, the veteran phylarch of Craterus’s taxeis, came and sat by me in the smoke. He had wine, and I drank some.

‘Fucking bugs,’ he said. ‘I hate ’em.’

After some time he pointed at the distant, twinkling lights. ‘Think they’ll fight?’ he asked me.

‘No,’ I said. Thaïs was sure they wouldn’t fight. Her sources were new and untried, but we had the feeling that the Babylonians, inscrutable in their religious bigotry, hated the Persians far more than they hated us.

But a city of a million men could field an army of a hundred thousand. And again, as at Gaza, the army was tired. Victorious, but tired. The elite cavalry units had been in continuous combat since midsummer, and everyone – every single unit – had been engaged at Arabela.

I wasn’t exactly afraid.

Neither was Philip. He fingered his beard. ‘I’d rather they fought,’ he said.

‘Who?’ said another veteran, who plonked himself down by the fire and coughed in the smoke. ‘Fucking bugs. Ares, where do they come from?’

‘Farted out of Hades’ arsehole,’ Amyntas son of Philip said. A gross impiety, if you like, but it summed up what we all felt.

The other man held out his hand for the wine. ‘May I?’ he asked, and I recognised Draco, the man I’d faced – and lost to – in the pankration at Tyre.

We passed the wine and he drank, coughed, drank again. ‘Who would you rather we fought?’

‘Not we, damn it. I want to fight the Babylonians. I hear they aren’t worth shit as fighters, and if we fight them, we get to sack their city.’ He grinned. ‘Sack Babylon. Just think of it.’

Draco roared. ‘Good thought. Let’s sack it anyway. The king will forgive us eventually.’

‘What if it’s too big to sack?’ Amyntas son of Philip asked.

‘Let’s try!’ Draco said. ‘I’ve never fucked three women at once, either, and I might not be able to do it.’ He grinned. ‘But it wouldn’t hurt to try.’

The wicked old man glanced at me.

I was being teased. I was an officer, in their space, and they were having a little fun.

I sighed. ‘I don’t think we’ll get to sack Babylon,’ I said.

Draco nodded. ‘When exactly do we all get rich and march home?’ he asked. ‘Babylon? Susa? Persepolis?’

He grinned, but I thought he meant business.

I shrugged.

‘Well, if you don’t know, strategos—’

‘I don’t, friends. We’ll go home when Darius is beaten, I suppose, and the empire is ours.’ I noticed that there were a dozen men around the fire. We cycled almost unconsciously through the smoke – in, out, duck the bugs, get overheated, back to the bugs.

But their faces started to swim, and I began to see men who weren’t there – who couldn’t be there. Pyrrhus. Isokles. A dozen other men who had been my tent companions or my officers.

‘When will we go home?’ Pyrrhus asked.

‘My wife expects me for the planting,’ said a young spearman with a spearhead-sized hole in his chest.

‘What’s she planting, eh?’ asked Draco, with a laugh, and Isokles roared and slapped his thigh just below the groin, where blood flowed.

They were laughing, and my head was spinning . . .

Polystratus put a hand under my elbow and another under my arm and he got me on my feet and walked me back to my tent, where there wasn’t the hint of a breeze, and I lay in a wine stupor until I fell asleep.

I awoke to a pounding head, a face full of bug-bites and the thought that perhaps we had an army of our own ghosts following us across Asia, waiting to go home to Macedon.

Somehow, Ochrid got me up and dressed and armoured. I threw up twice – once the remnants of the wine, and again some bile. There was no cool water, and Ochrid didn’t like the smell of the water that the slaves had brought in the night before. I drank a little of the tepid local beer and kept it down.

And then I mounted my second war horse, a big gelding named Thrakos, and said a prayer to Poseidon. I missed the horse every time I rode. Intelligence is the most precious ability in horse or man – Thrakos was as dumb as a post.

We formed by camps, and we covered two parasanges, a great line with the cavalry wings thrown slightly forward and all the baggage in the rear. Remember, we’d taken all of Darius’s baggage at Arabela.

We marched on Babylon, and as the sun climbed the dome of the heavens, we saw a vast army forming to receive us – an unbelievable multitude that filled the horizon.

Alexander had the ‘All Officers’ sounded on the trumpet, and I responded without thinking. In fact, I was no longer commanding a phalanx; I had no command. On the other hand, no one tried to stop me.

Alexander was in full armour, with his lion’s-head helmet, and he sat on his charger’s back, hand on his hip, and watched the Babylonians with impatience.

‘Let’s get this over with,’ he said. ‘If they had an army worth anything, they’d have won their independence from Persia.’ He shook his head. ‘This is a waste of our time and manpower.’

The vast sea of enemies was coming at us across the endless plain of Mesopotamia.

We rested our right flank on the river and refused the left, under Parmenio, and began to move forward.

The Prodromoi went out to scout the face of the enemy army. Because we were already in formation, there was nothing else to do.

Ten stades apart, and the number of the enemy was unbelievable. They were deeper than we, and their main body was as great as ours. And they seemed to have three or four more bodies of like size, as well as dust clouds behind them as far as the smoke of the great city.

I was close to Alexander when Strakos rode straight into the command group and saluted. He was all but naked on his horse – like a Babylonian – deeply tanned, weaponless. I hadn’t seen him in a month. The Angeloi continued to function, although these days they mostly reported to Alexander’s permanent military secretary, Eumenes.

‘They aren’t armed,’ Strako called.

Immediately, Alexander stopped talking to Hephaestion and cantered to meet the Thracian. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘There are companies of armoured cavalry among them – but that’s not an army. It is’ – Strako grinned – ‘a welcoming mob, lord. We’re in contact with the high priest, who is with a great many dignitaries under that banner in the centre – you see – the huge red cloth? He hopes to meet you in person.’

I think we all breathed a little better.

No battle.

No fight for Babylon.

If Amyntas son of Philip was unsatisfied, he was virtually alone. You could hear the news spread through the ranks – you could see the ripple of spearheads as the men heard that there was not to be a battle.

Some men wept.

That’s where the army was.

And then we marched forward, into the welcoming arms of a million Babylonians.

Every citizen and slave in the city must have been in the fields awaiting us. I don’t think any of us had ever seen so many people together in one place in all of our lives, and it was, in its own way, terrifying. I rode next to Hephaestion, and as we passed into the belt of suburbs on a street wide enough for the phalanx to enter sixteen files wide despite the absolute crush of people, he turned to me and gave a thin smile.

‘If every one of them threw a rock, we’d be dead in a few heartbeats,’ he said.

It was true.

The sheer number of people in the streets and the fields transformed my idea of conquest. It occurred to me – for the first time – that conquest has an element of social contract to it. It was obvious to anyone there that the Babylonians outnumbered us fifty to one. Our army vanished into the city.

Who was conquering whom?

The city itself was like a feverish dream – a riot of plants and bright colours. Every house had great urns of trees and roof gardens, streets had shade trees and every available surface was plastered and painted garishly, or fired and glazed. Expensive houses were built of fired brick with the glazes fired in, amazing patterns that baffled the eye, or towering figures of their gods that filled a wall in shiny perfection.

And then we entered the walls – by the main gates; they were twice the height of the walls of Athens, with great gates of cypress and bronze that shone in the omnipresent sun, and the waves of cheering pounded at my head – on and on.

Alexander met the priests outside the city, and insisted that they walk with him in procession.

The men were tall, well fed and prosperous, tending a little to fat, with broad shoulders and tawny skin. The women were shorter than Greek women, and showed a great deal more skin, and wore gold ornaments in sufficient profusion to pay for the army for many days, and there were tens of thousands of bejewelled women.

Alexander rode with the priests through the heart of the city to the ruins of the temple of Bel, where he mounted a rostrum that had been provided by the Angeloi. They were very much in evidence in Babylon. They had prepared the way.

Alexander mounted the steps of the platform.

He took off his helmet.

He threw his arms wide, a sudden, sweeping movement that made his armour glitter in the sun, and the crowd roared like a living thing – a great beast with a million heads.

The army kept marching. The Prodromoi, by this time, had their orders, and the army wasn’t going to be camped in the midst of the city. But the Aegema stayed by the king.

He waited until the cheering died away. That took a long time.

‘I have come,’ he said, in a beautifully controlled voice, ‘to free Babylon from the Medes. And to restore your gods.’

At his side, Strako stood with the high priest of Bel, who spoke – loud, clear and high – to the crowd in Sumerian. They didn’t even let him finish, but roared and roared – the roars became chants, and I was deafened. My horse became skittish, and all around me the Hetaeroi had a hard time keeping their mounts under control.

They began an odd, keening chant. I think it was the name of Bel, sung in a high, nasal voice by a million throats, and it sounded – terrifying.

But it affected Alexander like a drug, and he seemed to grow in stature. Again he lifted his arms, and again they roared their approval.

Naphtha and incense. And shit.

That was Babylon.

The next day – we stayed in the royal palace, which effortlessly accommodated a thousand hypaspists and as many Hetaeroi and grooms – Alexander met the hierophants of every temple in the city. He confirmed every ancient privilege and restored the rights of the temples that had been taken away by Persia.

Babylon was utterly ours. While I’d lingered in fever, I now understood, Eumenes the Cardian, Alexander’s military secretary, had outmanoeuvred Callisthenes for control of the Military Journal, and Thaïs supported him. Harpalus was involved somehow, as well, and Babylon was their shared triumph. They had the priests from the first – Eumenes won over the nobles, and Harpalus brought the commons. I still find it interesting that the treasurer, the secretary and the hetaera took a city of a million men without a fight. I thought about things that Aristotle had discussed with us, things I’d relearned on the couches of Athenian symposia. About the contracts between governed and governing. About what victory and defeat are, in war.

But those were my private thoughts.

The next day, Alexander went to visit the temples. They were incredible – as old as those at Memphis, or older, and if Aegypt sent chills down my spine, Babylon was just scary. That day, at the Temple of Bel, Alexander was shown the scribal entry for the Battle of Arabela. It pleased him immensely, because, as the priest noted, until that date, Darius had been called ‘King of all the Earth’. But in that entry, Alexander was called ‘King of all the Earth’. And henceforth would be known as such, in Babylon.

Marsyas stood with me and with Black Cleitus. We were all staggered, by everything, but Marsyas’s intense curiosity never flagged. He walked over to the priests. The youngest was actually writing with a bronze stylus in clay. The hierophant stood with the king.

‘How far back does this record go?’ Marsyas asked, pointing at the rows of tablets that literally ran off into the dark, shelf after shelf running off to the north in the foundations of the great temple.

‘Ah!’ the hierophant said, his pleasure at the question evident. He was a great man – spoke Greek and Persian, Median, Aegyptian and Hebrew. Later – as you’ll hear – when I was laid low by fever, he helped tend me, and asked Thaïs thousands of questions about Athens and Greece and Aegypt.

At any rate, he led us off into the cavernous rooms under the temple – room after room, and in every room he lifted his torch so that we could see the neat baskets of clay tablets that lined the walls. After ten rooms, the baskets were so old that the tablets had deformed them. In twenty rooms, we saw new baskets.

I forget how many rooms there were, but by torchlight, in that endless undercroft, itself oppressive and musty, like some man-built intellectual Tartarus for burying old truths – my fever was returning, and the place terrified me, and still haunts my nightmares – eventually, the high priest raised his torch.

‘The First Room,’ he said to Alexander. The king nodded. This sort of thing engrossed him.

The hierophant walked along the shelves, looking carefully into the baskets at the left end of the top shelf, until he found what he wanted, and pointed to the last basket.

‘First Basket,’ he said. His own awe was evident.

‘But how old is it?’ Marsyas persisted. This had all taken what seemed like hours.

Reverently, two junior priests took down the First Basket and extracted the tablets, which were laid carefully on a portable table that was painted with images of their gods.

To the best of my feverish ability, I stared at the three tablets. I was alive enough to note that the style of the squiggles was identical to those on the tablet the youngest priest was inscribing out in the main temple.

‘This is the First Tablet of Record,’ the hierophant said, and he kissed it. ‘It records the events of the year, as it should – the rainfall, and the maintenance of the irrigation channels.’

‘How old is it?’ Marsyas asked. ‘Is it five hundred years old?’

The hierophant leaned down. He traced some marks with his fingers.

‘This was written down three thousand, four hundred and nine years ago, by the priests of this temple.’

‘By Zeus, that is before Troy!’ Alexander said.

Marsyas drew a deep breath. ‘That is before Troy was founded.’

The hierophant shrugged. ‘It is not our oldest record. Merely our oldest record in writing that is part of the Yearly Almanac. We have records of weather and river floods at least a thousand years before that.’

Babylon had a way of making all of us feel small.

Except Alexander, I think. And I think that seeing his name as King of all the Earth in that temple did . . . something.

Two days later, while the king held a review of the Hetaeroi for the Babylonians, I fell from my horse in a dead faint. When I returned to the world, a month had passed, and I was being tended by Marsuk, the hierophant of Bel, in person. He and Thaïs had become friends – they remained correspondents until his death. And there’s little doubt in my mind that he saved my life.

Alexander took the army east, headed for Susa. I missed an entire campaign, lying on my bed in the city of the hanging gardens. I lay about for almost three months, eating, making love to Thaïs and recovering. I read a great deal, and thought some deep thoughts. And talked them over with Thaïs. A very happy time for me.

Not part of this story, though.

When I was recovered, I took a party of recovered wounded, as well as sixteen hundred recruits and Greek mercenaries, and marched towards Susa. The rumour was that Alexander had stormed the Susian Gates, and was pursuing Darius through the Elymais hills.

As we moved up to Susa, recrossing the mosquito-infested marshes and the dry, dusty plains of southern Babylon, we began to encounter the wounded from Alexander’s attempt to storm the Susian Gates and his disastrous repulse. Another thousand phalangites lost; Marsyas wounded, and on his way to Babylon to recuperate.

I had left Leosthenes in Babylon, and he never rejoined us, for reasons that will become evident. My command was completely broken up, and I assumed – hoped – that the party of recruits and mercenaries I was taking up to Susa would become a taxeis.

I had forgotten what happened in the hours after the death of Philip. I had been away from Alexander for three months.

I caught up with him at a tiny village called Shakrak on the edge of a volcanic lake. Cleitus was the officer of the day.

I reported to him. He saluted me, embraced me, held a snap inspection of my reinforcements and immediately split them up among the existing taxeis. He didn’t ask Alexander, and he didn’t ask me, and when he was done and it was too late to do anything about it, I snapped.

‘That was my command,’ I said. I had intended it to sound humorous – it came out the way I really meant it, as bitter.

‘You don’t have a command,’ Cleitus said. ‘Neither do I. Nor do most of the old boys.’ He glanced around. ‘Ask yourself why. Or don’t. But don’t be surprised if you don’t hold any more commands.’

I tried not to shoot the messenger. ‘I’ll find the king,’ I said.

Black Cleitus shrugged. ‘Your funeral,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t.’

I did, anyway.

My timing was poor. I had entered Alexander’s marching camp on the heels of a dust cloud, and that cloud was the harbinger of a troop of Prodromoi with a pair of Persian traitors. The commander of the city of Persepolis – the very capital of the Persian Empire, no less – had offered to hand the city over to Alexander.

I entered the command tent. Alectus saluted me and smiled. Hephaestion looked up to see what the interruption was, and even he managed a smile.

Alexander was facing two handsome Persians. The one wearing a pound of gold foil was apparently named Darius, and he was the son of Tiridates, the commander at Persepolis.

‘My father says come now, and come quickly,’ the boy insisted. ‘Before there is looting.’

Men were turning – Philotas gave me a little wave, and Perdiccas grinned at me. Alexander looked up. His eyes went to me – and slid right off me.

‘Silence, there,’ he said. ‘Will your father recognise me as King of Kings?’

The young man gave Alexander the strangest look. ‘No. You are not the King of Kings, are you?’

Remember, Persians value telling the truth above all things. They don’t prevaricate well.

Alexander flushed. ‘I am the King of Kings. Are you Persians blind as well as deaf and dumb? I am the absolute master of Asia.’

Young Darius stepped back a pace. ‘My father,’ he said again, ‘bids you come as quickly as possible.’

Philotas shook his head. ‘Let me go, lord. It could be a trap. Where better? Their terrain, every peasant is one of theirs, and only this boy’s word on it.’

Alexander glanced at him. ‘Never fear, Philotas. You will go. With me.’

The Persian boy leaned forward and spoke quietly into Alexander’s ear.

Alexander’s eyes grew wide.

‘Stop!’ Philotas said. ‘Tell all of us!’ He was obviously angry, and just as obviously distrusted the Persians.

Alexander turned on him. ‘Desist. Do not give orders under my roof. Go to your tent – I will send for you.’

And Philotas went.

Zeus Soter, the world had changed while I was gone.

Alexander didn’t stop to greet me. He assembled his household cavalry and prepared to ride off to Persepolis.

But technically, I was still a troop commander in the royal Hetaeroi, and I mounted my horse – it was bitter cold, the very edge of a two-day snowstorm in the mountains. My troopers looked at me and laughed, or slapped my back – they were all men I knew. Polystratus took the trumpet from the troop hyperetes, and no one said a word. Philip the Red had been commanding my troop, and he simply clasped my hand and fell back a rank.

It touched my heart.

We rode like the wind. The bridge over the river gorge was gone, destroyed by Darius. We stripped a village of roof trees – in the depths of winter – and prepared to build our own bridge. A troop of enemy cavalry hovered on the far side of the winter torrent, but they only watched us. We put a line of horses across the stream to break the current, and then men – knights of the royal household, aristocrats and veteran soldiers – stripped naked and waded in, bellowing at the cold, carrying the roof trees of the stripped village on our shoulders. We got that bridge across in two hours, and not a single arrow was lofted at us.

We built big fires, warmed ourselves for half an hour and mounted up.

The cold river did something good for my hip and pelvis. I’d been in pain every mile of the ride through the hills, and now, suddenly, the pain was gone. At the time, I thought my balls might be gone, too, but they remained intact.

Up and up, into the hills.

Just before darkness fell, my troop was in the lead – the most aristocratic Prodromoi in history, I suspect. I had Polystratus and Theodore and all his former grooms – all of whom were Hetaeroi now, of course – prowling every track we passed, but it was snowing hard enough that I had reached the point old soldiers reach too often, where I didn’t particularly care if some enemy troopers wanted to ambush me. I was too cold and tired to care, and the snow was piling up on the shoulders of my thickest cloak and starting to melt through, so that trickles of freezing water snuck down my neck and back under my breastplate. You cannot get warm once that starts to happen.

Up and up.

No one ever thinks of Persia as cold.

And then, across the track in front of me, there were three men, like ghosts, or like some horrid set of masks. The light was odd – early sunset in heavy clouds and snow, an amber light with a grey edge to it, cold, hard and evil.

Polystratus reined in, but he’d missed them, or they were supernatural. He was past them.

Here we go, I thought. An ambush.

But the supernatural remained uppermost in my head. There was something wrong with them. I was half a stade away, and with the snow and the light, they looked like corpses. Closer and closer and the wrongness grew worse. The hair rose on the back of my neck. I checked the draw on my kopis.

I retrieved my spear. I had tucked it under my leg so I could keep my hands warm, and now I put it in my right hand and looked around.

Three horse lengths, and they still looked like raven’s food come to life, and my hands were shaking. Philip the Red, at my back, was praying, and he was not a pious man.

Polystratus turned his horse and came cantering back, his horse’s hooves throwing snow.

He was too late.

The middle figure raised an arm.

The arm had no hand, only a stump.

Close up, I saw that he did look like raven’s food. Neither he nor his two companions had either noses or ears.

I reined my horse in so hard that he reared.

‘Pardon, lord!’ the central figure said in Athenian Greek.

I was fighting to control Medea, who was spooked.

‘Greetings!’ said the next figure. Zeus, they were hideous.

They seemed excited. Even happy.

They spoke Greek.

‘Please say you are Greeks!’ the leader said.

I got my knees, frozen through, locked around Medea’s barrel and restored her to order. ‘Greek enough,’ I said. ‘Who might you be?’

‘I am Leonidas of Athens,’ the leader said. He raised a hood from his cloak and hid his face. His right hand was intact.

He moved carefully. The swirling snow made him more hideous than he might otherwise have been.

I realised that one of his legs was made of wood.

‘You—’ I began.

‘Artaxerxes ordered that all of us who had taken arms against him be mutilated,’ he said. ‘I have my lips. Many do not.’ He took Medea’s bridle in his good hand. ‘So it is true. You are here! Alexander is here to avenge us!’

‘Zeus!’ I muttered. ‘Were you taken in arms against the Great King?’

He nodded. ‘Most of us were taken in Aegypt,’ he said. ‘The old king kept us here. He would come to our village and watch us.’

He was crying by this time, and he tried to embrace my horse. My horse!

I cannot do justice to how hideous he appeared, and how his tears and those of his two wretched companions made him look worse.

‘It is true!’ he cried.

I dismounted, and forced myself to accept their embraces. They were not lepers. They were brave men who had fought the same enemies I fought, and had come to this bitter end.

I sent Polystratus for the king. I sent him with strict orders to warn Alexander what lay ahead, so that he was not taken by surprise.

The Greeks had built fires, and they took us forward to their village, which lined the Royal Road. They were despicable beggars, to the Persians, but they had prepared fires and food for us.

I warmed myself, and made myself accept the embraces and the thanks – the thanks! Of a hundred miserable wretches with no eyes, no lips, no noses, no ears, no hands or feet.

I watched them tend each other. They were like file mates – the man with no legs depended on his mate with two to fetch for him.

The king rode out of the snow.

He dismounted, threw his arms around Leonidas and walked through them, embracing these wrecks of men, and promising them that their troubles were over.

He did it well.

I thought it possible that these men would die of joy. I had never seen men to whom pleasure was so very painful.

And eventually, Alexander made his way to me.

‘You did well to send me word,’ Alexander said to me. He nodded. ‘This – it is for this that we march to destroy the rule of Persia.’

The falsity of his speech sickened me. I had never heard him sound so openly pompous.

Whatever passed over my face, he missed it, but Hephaestion didn’t. He looked at me with a special kind of pleading. The way a parent looks at another parent, begging that a child not be told something.

So I let it go.

In the morning, we rode on, to Persepolis.

Tiridates surrendered it. When we marched through the passes to the city over the next day, we couldn’t believe he hadn’t made even a token effort to hold it, but of course Alexander had massacred almost every man who held the Susian Gates, and that may have broken Tiridates’ will to resist.

We rode into the city of the Persians, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had seen Aegypt and Babylon – I don’t use that phrase lightly.

The magnificence of the city rolled on and on, so that the eye couldn’t drink in all the splendour at once, and skipped from detail to detail. It wasn’t like Athens – which I love – or Memphis – which I dream of – or Babylon. All three cities have a magnificent central focus that draws the eye and holds it, and any man or woman watching the sun set on the Acropolis has to ask if mere men built the Parthenon, yes? And the same with the temple complex at Memphis, or the Temple of Bel in Babylon. And Athens was ancient when Hector died at Troy, and Aegypt was ancient when Herakles walked the earth, and Babylon – by the gods, Babylon is just ancient.

But at Persepolis, there’s more than you can see at a glance, and so you try to look everywhere. Or you did. It is no longer a problem.

And it was all new-built, like the house of a parvenu rich man. The oldest building was perhaps two hundred years old.

The lower town populace stayed in their houses. A hundred Persian cavalrymen met us outside the gates, led by the traitor in person. We had almost two thousand cavalry with us, and Alexander ordered Philotas to take the gates with his personal troop.

And then we rode in.

I remember that at some point, after most of the column had passed the ceremonial gate, I looked back to make a comment to Philip the Red. I can’t even remember what I meant to say. But behind him, one of my gentleman troopers – Brasidas, a highlander – fumbled his helmet and dropped it. It struck the stone street pavings with a hollow clang that sounded as loudly as a hundred temple bells.

That is how silent Persepolis was as we rode through the streets.

I still do not understand how it was that Darius chose to leave it intact. Or why he abandoned his treasury.

We rode to the palace. And Alexander threw the reins of his horse to the slaves and grooms as if he were the owner, and walked into the palace, led by Tiridates, who took him to the throne room.

I knew what Alexander intended. Apparently, Tiridates did not.

Alexander went to the throne – the great throne, with the winged lions supporting it. And sat. He had to get a table to climb into it. I helped carry the table, and two Persian servants standing by, shocked, burst into tears when the alien usurper sat on the king’s throne.

Alexander turned and looked at them.

‘Now I am your king,’ he said.

The silence inside the palace was thicker, if anything, than the silence in the streets.

‘Now take me to the treasury,’ Alexander said.

Our footsteps were loud. And the palace was immense.

It was utterly different from Memphis. At Memphis, enthusiastic priests led us from room to room of a living palace.

Despite the presence of the full staff at Persepolis, we were looking at the corpse of a palace, and I could feel the hate from every servant, every eunuch – even the slaves.

We crossed the complex to the double tower that acted as the royal treasury. A pair of eunuchs made trouble, and then subsided, and their keys were taken from them. And the doors were opened.

I walked in, one of perhaps eight or nine men behind Alexander. I looked at him. He had stopped, transfixed, in the midst of a marble floor inlaid with black basalt. He had a look – like the Greeks. Raw joy. Hunger.

I lifted my eyes from him, and saw it – I can testify to what it looked like.

It looked like all the gold in the world.

A talent of gold will feed a peasant for his entire life.

We launched the invasion of Asia with forty talents in our war chest.

A hundred thousand talents was, in a very real way, all of the gold in the world. Every treasure that the Persians had taken from every empire that they conquered – from the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Jews, from Thrace, from Euboea in Greece, from Athens; from India, from the Saka, from the desert tribes of the East, from the hill tribes – here it was, the product of two hundred years of ruthless war. Melted down, refined, stacked in bars that reached to shoulder height in front of us and vanished on either side into the murk of the vault, with chests of jewels, swords, armour, mirrors of silver, nets of pearls, the tribute of a hundred kings to the might of Persia.

Alexander made a sound like a moan – the sound of a woman in the joy of love. In that place, a hideous sound.

In that moment, Alexander ceased to care about Macedon. Macedon was an appendage of his treasure room.

Because the veins of Ares are not full of ichor, but molten gold. War requires gold as a horse requires hay and grass. War consumes gold.

We had all the gold in the world, and our king moaned with pleasure to see that he could make war for ever.

We were four months in Persepolis. The army moved up to us, and then the baggage moved up, little by little.

The soldiers began to grumble. They knew the scale of the treasure we’d just seized. They wanted some of it. The older veterans – especially Parmenio’s oldest men – made it obvious that they thought it was theirs.

I was adapting to my lack of place with the king. He scarcely seemed to recognise me when I attended him, and I was never summoned to council. He did say my name from time to time – but usually only to put me in my place.

I might have been bitter, but I had lost my heart for it. There was a busy crowd around him, fighting for supremacy and power. Viewed from the outside, it looked . . . obscene.

But the near mutiny of the old soldiers was being ignored at every level. Men like Craterus were obviously afraid to bring it up with the king. You’ll note there’s not a whisper about it in the Military Journal.

I sent a note to Hephaestion, requesting a cup of wine with him. He was, as far as I could see, the last of the old crowd still close to the king.

I dressed carefully. I had a feeling that this was very important. That appearances now mattered more than reality. That somehow, we were becoming Persians, with their elaborate rituals and their empty honours.

When I entered Hephaestion’s tent, he wasn’t there, and his servants gave me a cup of wine and did not offer me a place to sit.

I waited for a long time.

It is odd how waiting affects you. I grew angrier and angrier, of course – who does not? But the oddest part was my inability to decide whether I should sit or not. The only place to sit was on Hephaestion’s bed, and it was not at a good height for sitting. I couldn’t help but think what I’d have done to Hephaestion if he’d kept me waiting when we were young.

But I remained standing.

My knees grew tired.

My hips hurt.

Eventually, he came into the tent, reading a scroll. He looked at me. He was puzzled, and then shook his head. ‘Oh – Ptolemy. Of course. I can give you two minutes. What do you want?’

We were only a few feet from Alexander’s great red-purple tent, and suddenly I heard the king’s voice. He was angry.

‘What do you mean, you will not?’ he shouted.

I knew that tone. He was enraged.

‘I am the Great King. I demand that you hold the spring festival.’ He was spitting – I could hear it.

Hephaestion glanced at me. ‘What do you want, Ptolemy?’ he asked brusquely.

I had had an hour to consider how I was going to put this, but all my good resolutions fell away.

‘I want the king to get his head out of his arse,’ I said.

That got Hephaestion’s attention.

‘Some of Parmenio’s men – most of the phylarchs in the four senior taxeis – are on the verge of mutiny,’ I said. ‘Do you know about it?’

Hephaestion froze.

‘The king has taken all the loot of Asia that you may remember he promised to the troops – soldiers don’t forget that sort of thing.’ I stepped across the tent towards him, and the bronze-haired bastard flinched. ‘He’s fucking around with some Persian festival and he’s bribing the magi – the Persian priests – and he’s all but told the army that we’re marching east, not west.’ I was close to Hephaestion now. ‘And none of you useless fucks seems able to tell him. They’re going to refuse to march. And the troops will back them.’ I was looking into his eyes. ‘Someone might decide that the easiest way to go back to Pella is over the king’s corpse.’

Hephaestion looked at me, took a breath and behind him the king screamed, ‘You will have the spring festival, and I will walk in it and take the part of the Great King, or by all the gods we both hold sacred, I will destroy you.’

‘The king has other troubles just now,’ Hephaestion said blandly. ‘Leave my secretary a list of the ringleaders and I’ll see it’s dealt with, and see to it you get appropriate credit.’

There is a difference between living a story and telling it. Even as I tell you this tale, I know that I foreshadow, I embellish and I explain. So that moment, when Hephaestion treated me as a minor court functionary – I have probably made it seem natural. I have probably prepared you for this, and you nod, and say, yes, the king has started to behave as a tyrant.

But I was stunned. ‘Hephaestion – there are no ringleaders.’ I remember shaking my head. ‘We are talking about – I don’t know – a thousand men. The very heart of the army.’

Hephaestion took a deep breath, and released it. ‘Very well,’ he said. He met my eye. ‘You tell him.’

And so I did.

Hephaestion took me to the king’s tent. The magi were nowhere to be seen. He was on his couch, staring at the roof.

‘Patroclus, why do the gods send me fools—’ he began. And then he saw me.

‘Ptolemy has news he deems serious,’ Hephaestion said carefully. Hedging his bets.

‘Achilles, sulking in his tent,’ I said.

Alexander sat up. He opened his mouth.

I shook my head. ‘Your veterans are on the edge of mutiny,’ I said. ‘Pay is late, and you have just seized all the gold of the empire – a mountain of gold. You made them help load the mules – they know to the talent how much you gained.’ I looked at Hephaestion, but he was no help. ‘They are talking mutiny in the streets.’

‘I asked him to give me the names of the ringleaders,’ Hephaestion said.

‘There are no ringleaders,’ I said. ‘Nor are there any dissenters.’

Alexander nodded, once, decisively, as he did on the battlefield. He assimilated what I was saying, matched it to other data and agreed that I must be right – as ruthless with his own notions as with enemy troops.

‘I see.’ He nodded. ‘Yes. And you will, as usual, tell me that I have been blind,’ he said, looking at me with a disarming smile.

But by the gods, a false smile, like an actor in a mask, or worse.

He nodded again. ‘Very well. We shall give them a bone, and perhaps send a warning to other quarters at the same time.’

‘A bone?’ I said. ‘You need those men. They are the officers and file leaders of your army.’

Alexander shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t need them. I can buy any army I want.’

‘Didn’t work for Darius,’ I said.

‘Darius was not me,’ he said. ‘Your concern is noted. Gather an army council, son of Lagus. And you have my thanks for this timely warning.’

It was still winter in the mountains. Hephaestion gathered all the spears of the army – all the Macedonian citizens. They came with spears, and with torches. They came ready, I still believe, to mutiny.

Alexander stood before them in the white and gold of a Macedonian king. He’d had a few hours to prepare, and he had with him on the besa a half-dozen of the disfigured Greek veterans.

‘Men of Macedon,’ the king said. ‘The time has come to avenge these men. Look at them well. Professional soldiers – men of Amphilopolis and Pella, of Athens and Sparta, of Ionia and Aeolia. Tortured and mutilated by the Persians. Look at what Persia really is.’

Even as he spoke, the poor miserable things shuffled through the crowd, and more of them emerged from behind the king to stumble or push themselves or drag themselves in among the Macedonians.

‘Don’t flinch!’ the king said. ‘Look at them. Had we been defeated at Issus or Arabela, we would have shared this fate. I would be dead, or I would have no lips and no ears. That is the peace we would have earned from Persia. Ask a Euboean. Ask an Athenian!’

He had them, and they had never even voiced their discontent.

‘Persepolis is the richest city in the empire,’ he said. ‘I give it to you, my loyal troops. I reserve only the temples and the treasury and the palace. Take the rest. Kill the men, and take the women for your own, and let every house be looted and the spoils shared as is the custom of the army.’

We had lived among these Persians for six weeks. Eaten their bread. Laughed at their children and tickled them.

But these men were Macedonians.

They roared.

And then they went and raped Persepolis.

I helped massacre the population of Tyre. I did not help at Gaza. But at Persepolis, I actually stood aside.

The hypaspitoi moved into guard positions around the treasury, the palace and the temples. The magi were carefully protected, as was our growing camp of collaborators.

Every other man in the city was butchered. Perhaps some escaped. I never met any.

It must have fallen like a bolt from Zeus. As I say, we’d lived among them for six weeks. And then, one night, with no warning, their town was sacked.

There was an orgy of destruction. I did not watch it.

But I’m sure you can imagine, if you put your mind to it.

And the next day, most of the lower town was burned flat. The temples and palaces remained untouched, somehow yet more noble for the ruins at their knees and feet. The wailing of women – the cry of absolute degradation and horror – could be heard everywhere in the temple complex. And in the palace. It was as if Persepolis itself wept.

Two days later, when Thaïs arrived with the mules returning from carrying the great treasure down to Susa, the town still smoked and the women were still weeping.

I embraced her, buried my face in her neck and kissed her, but when my hand sought the pins on her chiton, she pushed me away.

‘Raped women are an offence to Aphrodite,’ she said coldly. ‘I will not make love, even with you, while they weep for their dead and their virtue and the sanctity of their bodies outside my tent.’

What could I say? I nodded. Stepped back. ‘I took no part,’ I said.

‘Did you take action?’ she asked.

I turned away. ‘It is probably my fault,’ I said. ‘I wanted Alexander to see what the soldiers thought. Instead, he told them what to think – made them beasts, and rewarded them for it.’ I drank wine. I was drinking too much, in those days. ‘And all to pressure a handful of recalcitrant priests into holding some festival.’

‘The Festival of the New Year,’ she said. ‘I am sorry, Ptolemy. But my body cannot love while I listen to all that hate and despair.’ She crossed the tent to me and kissed me. ‘Why does he imagine that he will be allowed to celebrate the New Year festival?’

‘It’s about being the Great King,’ I said. ‘It is like Tyre. Only the Great King may accept the sanctity of Ahuru Mazda. If he’s allowed to celebrate the festival, that makes his rule legitimate.’ I shrugged. ‘Aegypt accepted him as Apis. Babylon accepted him as Serapis.’

She smiled. ‘Aegypt is older and wiser, and Babylon is the whore of cities.’ She motioned for me to pour her wine. ‘Persepolis has never been conquered before.’

‘We have a thousand Persian noblemen with us now,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘They will collaborate only until there is an alternative,’ she said. ‘Because Alexander thinks himself the ultimate power on earth, he cannot imagine the strength they can derive from their culture and their god. I have met with magi in Susa and in Babylon. They mean to resist.’

I shrugged. ‘He has done everything he can to appease them, and the Queen Mother.’

Thaïs shook her head, this time vehemently. ‘She hates him, now.’ She began to fiddle with her leg-wraps, and I knelt to help her get them off – we were having this conversation when she was no doubt cold and saddle-sore. She sat back. ‘I have missed you, son of Lagus. It’s harder and harder to get good help.’ She smiled at me. Then turned away. ‘He must be pushed away from the lure of Persia. If he makes himself Great King in fact, he will be a monster beyond the rich imagination of Plato or Socrates.’

A month in Babylon, and Thaïs had never been so direct.

Persepolis is where it all happened.

I was invited to ‘court’ more and more frequently. As if, having proved my usefulness again, I was welcome back once more. As if . . . nothing. That’s what had happened every time I left, and this time, my eyes were opened to the process. Out of sight, out of mind. In sight, rewarded.

It was chilling to talk to him. He had forgotten who I was. He spoke to me as if I were a stranger – with a false charm and a manicured sociability. In fact, he wooed me.

I didn’t want anything, and that made me dull.

Weeks passed, and I attended parties. Thaïs came and played her kithara. I tried not to be jealous that sometimes, when he’d had enough wine, the king treated her with the mixture of respect and mockery with which he’d once treated all his inner circle.

He no longer had an inner circle. Callisthenes was careful to flatter him, but increasingly, I think, disillusioned. Anaximenes was such a blowfish that he continued on his own path of subservience. But the former pages, such as Cleitus and Philip, and the older men, such as Craterus and especially Parmenio, found themselves alienated.

I had some excellent dinners with Kineas and his friends – Gracchus, Niceas, Diodorus, Coenus – gentlemen all, and we went hunting in the former royal parks. Alexander went hunting almost every day, but he took only his Persians and Hephaestion and some of the younger pages.

I found that I could not discuss the changes in the king with foreigners, even with Diodorus or Kineas.

And then the date of the Festival of the New Year approached.

Alexander stopped hunting in the hills.

A dozen talents’ worth of royal costume arrived by mule from Susa – rich vestments encrusted in gold, and a pair of towering headdresses, from the same priests who had made the costume for Darius.

I saw them on him. He modelled them for us, explaining with precision what each garment represented, how it symbolically linked the wearer to the sun god and to the ceremony.

He was still confident that the priests, the magi, had received the message of the destruction of the lower town.

They had.

On the morning of the festival, the complex was silent. Of course it was silent. The town was gone, and in its place was a population of soldiers.

When hypaspitoi went to the temples to fetch the magi, they were gone. Except the six chief magi, who had committed suicide.

For the first time in the history of mighty Persepolis, there was no feast of the new sun. The New Year was not praised. No King of Kings rode the sacred way, nor wore the high crown.

‘Bah!’ the king said. ‘Get me my friends. We’ll celebrate a feast of Dionysus, instead!’

But he fooled no one. His rage was as vast as his power, and unlike lesser men who succumb to rage, he had the power to act it out.

I saw that his hands shook, and his face was blotched, red and white.

He ordered couches brought to the high temple, where hours before the magi had stabbed themselves to death. And he assembled a hundred of his officers, and most of them were ordered to bring their partners – from great ladies of Macedon or Aegypt to prostitutes grabbed from the camp. Not a single of the new Persian officers – even the most trusted ones – was invited. In fact, I was present when Hephaestion ordered Nicanor to post men at their tents.

But every Greek in the army was invited – every Greek officer, Athenian, Ionian, Spartan and Megaran and Plataean, all the way down the ranks to phylarch. Kineas was invited. He brought a beautiful girl. I had seen her at parties – a girl who was somewhere between a prostitute and a courtesan, and Thaïs had invited her to our pavilion for wine, discussed her profession, admitted her to the lower priestess rank of Aphrodite. She was called Artemis, I remember, and she was slim and sharp and moved like a fighter.

But I digress, like an old man. Except I will tell you, lad, that the memories of beautiful women outlast all the foolish battles. Ashurbanipal had something, whatever Alexander said. Eat, drink and fuck. The rest is not worth a snap.

We ate venison and mutton with foreign spices, and we drank Greek wine. The Great King had vats of good Greek wine. There were stacks of barley rolls, as if we were in Athens.

Alexander knew what he intended from the very first. I suspected, but I don’t think anyone else did. But the theme of the dinner was revenge, and he ordered the entertainments to goad every officer attending.

The mutilated soldiers had couches, and they assembled at the beginning of the dinner – a truly hideous regiment – to receive grants of land and taxes to ease the burden of their lives.

Then Artemis rose and danced the Athenian Pyricche in armour. Every man was on his feet cheering her. She was magnificent. When she was done, she read from Herodotus, of the destruction of the temples of Athens.

When she had finished, Thaïs rose with her kithara, and played. She played the song of Simonides, about Plataea, and she played the lament for Leonidas, and she played the opening lines of the Iliad, and suddenly the king was weeping.

She finished, and every man there roared his approval, and all the Greek women, as well.

I suspect that Alexander had coached her, and Artemis, on what to do. Because the purpose of the entertainment, there amid the barbarian splendour, was obvious. The women said, ‘This is who we are. We are not these foreigners. We are Greek and Macedonian, and our ancestors were Hellenes.’

Women are the guardians of culture. And often, only women can say these things.

When she was done playing, Thaïs rose and walked from the chair, but the king leaped to his feet, the garland on his head askew, and put out an arm to stop her. ‘Ask me for anything, and it is yours,’ he said.

She smiled into his eyes, and I felt a pang – more like a dagger-stab – of jealousy. But she was what she was. The greatest courtesan of her generation.

‘You have offered me anything before,’ she said.

He was not used to being mocked. ‘Well?’ he said, puzzled. ‘I offer it again.’

She nodded.

Silence fell. Silence fell whenever anyone showed a sign of winning the king’s favour – or losing it. No one knew which Thaïs was doing, and so the silence was absolute.

‘Burn it all,’ she spat. ‘All this barbarian splendour. For Athens. For Euboea.’ She nodded. ‘For me. And most of all, Lord King, for yourself. Burn Persepolis, and let the flames have her. And march home.’

Alexander laughed. I’m sure all this was planned – to me, it had the feeling of bad drama, but others I know – Kineas, for example – were sure it was extempore.

Thaïs and Alexander wanted the same thing. Nor had she watched him from the shadows for five years for nothing. She knew him. She knew that he could not resist a challenge, nor refuse a dare, nor take back a favour. He had to be like the immortal gods.

He strode to the central brazier, where slaves roasted the ritual meat and lit new torches. There were fifty tallow torches waiting in neat stacks on the ground. Alexander seized one, put it into the brazier and lit it.

‘Burn it all!’ he shouted.

And we did.

Persepolis wasn’t really a city. It was really a monument to Persia. A symbol of triumph, of ten generations of struggle and victory. The entire place was a monument in stone.

But the roof trees were cedar, and they were dry.

We were just two hundred people, but we danced through the great and silent palaces, and as we passed, we took turns setting the hangings alight. That was all it took. The magnificent tapestries were like the wicks of a great candle – sheets of fire rose up them to the rafters and caught, and the floors caught, and the great square and rectangular buildings were like chimneys roaring their throats out to the gods in the heavens, and the fires rose higher and brighter – the royal palace, the shrine of Ahuru Mazda, the Chamber of Records – on and on. Before the beams fell in on the royal palace, we set the last of the buildings afire, and Persepolis burned like the sun.

I still do not know if he acted from policy or impulse. I only know that while Thaïs won the round, and her revenge as a woman and an Athenian, Alexander did not march back to Pella.

We destroyed Persepolis, and the fires in the temples there were the funeral pyres of Alexander’s ambition to be recognised formally as Great King.

Darius was preparing to throw the dice again in battle, to the north, at Ecbatana.

We marched, leaving ash behind us.

Again.

I began to be part of the inner circle again. This time, I didn’t crave it. In fact, I began to crave another command – for the independence, and because I enjoyed the exercise of authority. I was good at it. I helped keep my men alive and happy.

Not one of Alexander’s concerns.

All the way to Ecbatana, he forecast that the army was about to undergo another reorganisation. He’d done it at Tyre, when we marched to finish Darius off, and now he was preparing to sack several satraps and replace them, as well as changing the command structure of the army.

Darius was north and east of us, with nine thousand cavalry and four thousand veteran Greek infantry. Ariston rode in with a dozen Prodromoi, having made a broad sweep towards Ecbatana, to report that Darius was still gathering troops from the east.

I noticed that the Queen Mother was no longer travelling with us.

Thaïs asked around, and could not discover where she and her ladies had gone.

Thaïs couldn’t find her. So we assumed that Alexander had had her strangled, and all her ladies. Certainly, we never saw or heard of her again. Later we understood that they’d had an argument, but Callisthenes insisted that she and her whole family were in secluded retirement, receiving instruction in Greek.

Sure.

At any rate, about the time that Sisygambis went missing, Ariston returned from his cavalry sweep. I was there, sitting at my ease in the king’s tent. Polystratus was at my elbow, using tow and olive oil and some fine pumice from Lesbos to take a stain out of my good kopis. I was sewing on the leather lining to my scale shirt. There were slaves aplenty – but one of the things that drove our new Persian comrades to drink was the Macedonian habit of doing things ourselves. Do you really want to trust a slave with your armour? Your weapons?

Ochrid was serving warmed wine with spices. Hephaestion was working on a papyrus scroll that he was keeping from me, and I was trying to seem uninterested, although I was pretty sure that it was the army reorganisation. Callisthenes came in and sat in the entrance – a cold place to sit, but Callisthenes could pretend to be humble, when required.

‘Ariston is here with his report,’ Callisthenes said. He was scooping Eumenes, and he wanted everyone to know it.

Alexander had been reading the Iliad. He glanced up – bounced to his feet.

‘Well! Bring him in!’ he proclaimed. He took wine from Ochrid and reached down to tap my shoulder. ‘Like old times, eh?’ he said.

I didn’t think, by then, that Alexander even remembered any ‘old times’. I had begun to suspect that in the corridors of his mind, all the time before the death of Philip had been erased. He never referred to his childhood, or to his time with the pages.

But I smiled. I was happy that he was happy.

Ariston came in, covered in snow, red-cheeked and with a fresh cut on his bridle arm. He had Kineas with him, and a Persian, bundled in wool. Kineas spent as much time scouting as he could – it was a form of warfare he loved, and at which he excelled. As we were to learn!

Alexander offered them wine, Achilles to his very speech patterns. He had, after all, been reading the Iliad.

Kineas gazed at him the way a boy watches his first love. He annoyed me – I admired Kineas, and I wanted to tell him just how hollow his hero was, but I didn’t want to be the parent telling the child that fairies don’t come to take teeth, so I held my peace.

‘Darius has taken seven thousand talents from the treasury in Ecbatana and marched away,’ Ariston reported. ‘This gentleman has had enough of Darius and hopes that you will make use of him. Kineas picked him up – he’s called Cyrus.’

Cyrus bowed. ‘I was looking for your Greek army. I am indeed called Cyrus, after the great Cyrus who is my ancestor. Darius has forfeited the diadem. He will not fight you again. He is a broken reed, a torn scroll. He is over.’ The Persian knelt and then bowed to the floor.

We’d all seen the Persian proskynesis before, but it was a bit of a shock, right there, in the mountains, and in the midst of our attempt to reacquaint Alexander with Macedonian informality. He’d left Mazaeus behind as a satrap, and our other Persians were not causing trouble.

I smiled at the king. ‘I’ll bet that didn’t happen in the Iliad,’ I said.

But Alexander looked thoughtful. ‘You may rise,’ he said, holding out a hand to silence me.

Cyrus rose to his feet. He did it with dignity. This was a superb example of the way customs influence every aspect of culture. In Persian clothes, with trousers, the prostration can look elegant and refined. In Macedonian or Greek clothes, wearing only a chiton, a man usually looks as if he’s baring his buttocks – volunteering to take the woman’s part in sex. That’s the nicest way I can put it. The chiton rises up as a man lies down, and there he is – bare-arsed to the world.

Cyrus had none of those problems. He nodded. ‘Darius is fleeing east with Bessus. Bessus intends to betray him.’ Cyrus shrugged. ‘I will not be a part of it.’

Kineas nodded to the king. ‘I can attest that he came in of his own will, with fifty armoured horsemen and twenty more mounted archers. Diodorus met them and brought them to my camp under guard. They have not been any trouble.’

Alexander looked at Kineas. ‘You will vouch for him?’ he asked.

Kineas looked at Cyrus. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly.

Cyrus let out a breath.

Alexander turned to look at Hephaestion. ‘Aegema. And Kineas’s Athenians. Let’s grab Ecbatana and see what we get.’

He was elated.

He glanced at me. ‘I am the King of Kings,’ he said, and grinned. It was his old grin, but it had a new purpose, and one I could not like.

Alexander enjoyed seeing men bend their backs.

We rode like the wind. It’s a saying men use too often, but it was true of the race to Ecbatana. We had fifteen hundred cavalry on appalling roads. Every man – even the Athenians – had a pair of horses, and we moved two hundred stades a day despite the mountains and the treacherous rains.

We took Ecbatana by riding in. The treasury was looted, but the apples were in baskets along the road, waiting for the tithe-takers who never came. I remember stooping from the saddle and grabbing one, eating it as I rode under the marble lions.

There were Persian noblemen everywhere. They had come, not to fight, but to make submission.

Four thousand recruits and mercenaries reached us from the coast, having come up the road from Susa. Cleitus went back to Susa with the return messages, because he was so sick.

The word was that Darius was going to hold the Caspian Gates against us, up north, almost to Hyrkania. He was raising Hyrkania now, with Bessus. But increasingly, the Persians told us that Bessus meant to make himself king. Remember – Darius had faced revolt in the east before we ever came over the Hellespont. Now, after three lost battles, the east had had enough of him.

Alexander read the dispatches that came in from Greece and Antipater, and for the first time in a long time, I shared them, standing in yet another superb palace, under tapestries made so beautifully that you might have thought the figures would turn and speak to you. The kind we’d burned at Persepolis.

He frowned.

‘Antipater has defeated the Spartans,’ he said.

Hephaestion’s eyes widened. ‘Wonderful!’

Alexander’s eyes narrowed. ‘Nothing wonderful about it. We’re conquering Asia, and Antipater is conquering mice. Sparta is nothing.’

I winced. Nothing was allowed to compete with the king’s accomplishments, lately.

Thrace was in revolt. Under a Macedonian.

Zopryon, the satrap for Pontus, was, without consulting Antipater, or just possibly with his connivance, marching north to the Euxine coast.

‘Idiot,’ Alexander said. ‘He’d better win. If he loses I’ll have his head.’ It wasn’t clear whether Alexander meant Antipater or Zopryon.

After a three-day pause to move up some baggage carts and collect water and pack animals, Alexander left the rest of the army – just marching in through the western gates of the city – and we were off again.

We raced north and east, across the low hills to the east and down into the saltpan and dust of the Iranian plateau.

It was a nightmare. We never had enough water, and our horses suffered. My ‘new’ Medea died on the saltpan, and I had to switch to a country mare – the ugliest horse, I think, that I ever rode. But she got me to Rhagae, where we heard from Kineas, who’d managed to sweep north despite the lack of water, that Darius was three days ahead and going hard into the mountains of Hyrkania.

There was a Persian royal stud at Rhagae, and Polystratus looted it for me while I rode in on my hideous horse. By the time we had organised water and I’d gone back with fifty Hetaeroi to rescue the stragglers in the saltpan, Alexander had pressed forward, got lost in the mountains and come back – another day lost. I rode in on my mare, angry to have been left behind but happy enough to have found seventy men alive.

That’s when I discovered that I had Barsine’s sister riding with me.

I’d had a long day, and one of my troopers was sitting in the agora of the dusty town, while all the rest of them – aristocrats every one – dismounted and watered their horses.

I tossed my reins to Polystratus and walked over to the one man too proud to water his own horse. I need not mention at this point that although we all disdained trousers, every man of us now wore light Persian cloaks and headcloths against the sun.

‘Are you lazy, or stupid?’ I asked.

The man turned his head away.

‘Lazy or stupid! Get down from your mount this moment or I’ll throw you off.’ I put a hand under the rider’s foot. I meant business.

The rider turned back to me. ‘If I get down, every man here will know who I am,’ Banugul said. Her face was wrapped, so that only her eyes showed. Those eyes.

‘You!’ I said, or something equally witty. Now that I could see her legs, her sex was obvious, and I couldn’t believe I had been fooled.

Her eyes smiled. ‘Me,’ she admitted. ‘You know that we are Hyrkanians, eh?’

In fact, I didn’t. I might lust after her body – it was impossible, despite my deep love for Thaïs, not to look at Banugul without some lust – but I’d scarcely noticed her otherwise.

‘The king needs a guide. I need some help from the king, too, so I’m hoping we can arrange an exchange of favours.’ Her eyes smiled again, and I tried not to imagine what she might have in mind.

‘I will take you to the king,’ I said carefully. ‘But I cannot guarantee his reaction.’

‘I would be in your debt,’ she said. Her voice was level, and offered no seduction.

Alexander was bathing. Two slaves were attending to him with sponges.

‘What do you want?’ Alexander spat at me.

‘I have recovered the stragglers, as you ordered,’ I said. ‘I also picked up Barsine’s sister, who wishes to see you.’

‘Splendid,’ Alexander said. ‘Send her in.’

Another man might have leered, or made a gesture, but Alexander didn’t see the world that way. I doubt that he ever flirted in his life. His own nudity was neither here nor there.

‘She is Hyrkanian,’ I said. I’m not sure why I was inclined to help her – perhaps the oldest reason in the world.

Alexander turned to me for the first time. ‘By Zeus Amon my father! Of course she is! Well done, Ptolemy son of Lagus!’

No thanks for a day in the desert, chasing water mirages and finding men near dead of thirst. But for bringing him a guide for his latest pothos . . .

And of course, I had done nothing.

‘Your servant, Great King,’ I said. I was mocking him, and he didn’t acknowledge it. Or perhaps even then, he took it as his due and missed the mockery altogether.

Banugul entered. She made a noise.

‘Greeks don’t worry about nudity,’ I said. Everyone’s friend, that was me.

She unwrapped her hair and face, and fell on her knees, and then did the full proskynesis.

Alexander nodded. ‘You may rise, sister of Barsines. How may I help you?’

‘Reconquer my kingdom for me, lord. And I will guide you through the mountains.’

‘Are you bargaining with me?’ he asked, voice silky.

‘Never, lord. I answered your question. I will guide you, regardless!’ She sounded breathless, insistent, and very, very intense.

But Alexander’s horses were wrecked, and the hypaspitoi were at least a day behind us across the saltpan.

Alexander looked at Banugul – the coolest, most appraising look I suspect she had ever received, from a man. ‘How long to Hecatombion?’ he asked. That’s where our scouts and the Persian turncoats reported Darius to be.

Banugul pursed her lips. ‘Four days. Better to travel at night.’

‘You could guide me at night?’ he asked.

She simpered – you could see on her face that she was reaching for the sexual innuendo, and then realised that he meant none, and her face changed – a fascinating glimpse into her mind. ‘I could guide you blindfolded,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘Ptolemy?’ he asked, without taking his eyes off her.

‘Lord?’ I answered.

‘I need you to fetch in the hypaspitoi. Go fast. Take your pick of men and horses. I’m sending Coenus south for water and remounts.’ He finally turned. ‘I need to leave here tomorrow night. But I need men, animals and water.’

As he ordered, it was done.

I rode out before the sun was up, with twenty men – Polystratus and my own former grooms, most of them now remounted on the best Niseans, fresh from the royal stud, as well as Cyrus the Persian and ten of his best men. Kineas went north, with fifty of his men, and Philotas took the very best of the Hetaeroi and went due east.

I found six more men alive, on the trail, and left a party to bury three more I found dead. Before the sun was high, I’d made fifty stades, and I found Nicanor. I had forty water bags, and his men shared them – forty bags among a thousand men – and we marched.

I spent the day riding up and down the column, telling desperate men that they had a few stades to go and no more.

And falling in love with my new horses. Tall, strong, beautiful Niseans, both steel grey, both tall like goddesses, fast – I had never been so well mounted, though it was disrespectful to Poseidon to say as much. And there in the desert, when I stopped to change – for the tenth time – I spread my arms wide and sang the whole hymn to Poseidon, and cut a lock of my hair and burned it.

Cyrus watched me. He made me uneasy – he was so silent – but despite that, I was prepared to like him.

The column had escaped while I made my prayers, and we rode along at a fast walk – anything faster might have endangered the horses, in that vast and dreadful desert – moving as fast as we dared to catch up.

Cyrus turned to me after a few minutes. ‘That was religious?’ he asked.

I nodded.

He frowned, but nodded.

‘This is the first time I have seen a Hellene pray,’ he noted.

I shrugged.

‘Hmm,’ he said. After a stade, we caught up to some stragglers sitting, defeated, in the desert, and I swore at them and got them moving.

I was afraid that if I rode past them, they’d collapse again. One of them was one of my men from the first days – Amyntas son of Philip – and I was not going to let him die.

So we rode slowly behind the three men.

‘You worship the horse?’ Cyrus asked.

I shook my head.

He looked at me, annoyed. ‘What, then?’ he asked.

‘Poseidon,’ I said. ‘Lord of horses. I had a wonderful horse. A godsent horse. He died in battle. These are the first good mounts I’ve had since the battle, and I was thanking the god.’

We rode on for as long as it takes a man to make a brief oration.

‘That is good,’ Cyrus said. He rubbed his beard. ‘Yes.’

I left him to watch the three end men, and I rode up the column, and I felt as if I were on a Persian flying carpet – one of their legends. The pace – the gait – of the Nisean is like flying.

I found Nicanor, also by the end of the column. He looked terrible – grey-faced and tired, and he admitted to me that he spent far too much time vomiting. Like Cleitus. There was something nasty going around. Apollo had shot his deadly shafts into our army, and men were dropping fast.

But when I told him we were less than five stades from the town, he showed his mettle, pulled all his men together and made them march. Men who had been shuffling their feet, barely alive, suddenly raised their eyes and saw the town at the edge of the heat shimmer.

They began to sing. Bubores was there, at the head of his company, and Astibus.

Have you any idea

What we’re like to fight against?

Our sort make their dinner

Off sharp swords

We swallow blazing torches

For a savoury snack!

Then, by way of dessert,

They bring us, not nuts, but broken arrows, and splintered spear shafts.

For pillows we have our shields and breastplates,

Arrows and slings lie under our feet, and for wreaths we wear catapults

We marched into Rhagae like the elite veterans we were. Alexander emerged from his tent, and smiled.

He gathered all his officers an hour later. Nicanor looked as if he was going to die. The rest merely had sunburn. Water had restored them.

‘I have twelve hundred good horses. I need to go for six to ten days with no sleep and very little food so that we can carry enough water to keep going.’ He looked around. His eyes glittered with excitement – he was deep in the game he loved, overcoming tasks with Herculean strength and daring.

‘I need the very toughest men. The very best. Nicanor – three hundred of your best. And Ptolemy – choose me three hundred of the Hetaeroi. We will leave in four hours, and ride at night.’

I thought he made sense. Craterus and Philotas thought the risk was insane, but chose not to say so aloud.

I did not find this idea insane. Burning Persepolis – yes. Chasing Darius – well, we were close to the end. We were going to finish the last act, and be finished with Asia. We wanted to catch Darius, and our latest turncoats said that Darius’s army was on its last legs. Mazaeus’s son – Mazaeus, who was already a satrap for us in Mesopotamia – had come in while I was in the desert, surrendered, offered the proskynesis and told us that Darius had been deposed by Bessus.

Alexander had the oddest reaction to this. The fight between them – Darius and Alexander – had been very personal. Darius had wounded Alexander at Issus, and Alexander had sought across the battlefield at Gaugamela to avenge that – because he was living in the Iliad, if you ask me.

And now he vowed to avenge Darius, on Bessus.

It was difficult to credit, really. I couldn’t decide whether it was an act for our growing force of Iranian nobles, or whether Alexander had some deep fellow-feeling for Darius, or a mixture of both.

It’s worth mentioning how Cyrus’s arrival among us symbolised, to me, the change in the Persians. Up to a point, despite our victories, the Persians who came over to us were opportunists – traitors. Scum. And then – starting with Mazaeus, to be fair – they started to represent a different type of man altogether. The true Persians resented Bessus and his easterners. They didn’t all prefer Alexander but many did, and for a while we benefited from an ancient division – an east/west split in the empire – and the westerners – Lysians, western Persians, Phrygians – began to side with us of their own free will.

At any rate, just before darkness fell, we were off – six hundred men, twelve hundred horses. We had twenty carts with virtually every water skin the vanguard possessed, and we moved fast.

When we left Rhagae, Darius and his army were six days ahead of us, already through the Caspian Gates at Hecatombion.

We rode for three days. The less said about them, the better. We moved fast, and men died, and horses died. I looked after my own.

On the fourth day, we came across a dozen war bands still in a camp that had obviously held an army. They surrendered to Alexander as soon as he rode in, and told us that this was the camp where the king had been betrayed by Bessus. The Greek mercenaries had stood by Darius and offered to protect him. The irony of this threatened to make me vomit.

Kineas picked up the Great King’s interpreter, who was seventy years old and badly dehydrated. He told us the story of the betrayal.

Alexander grew angrier and angrier.

I began to think that, at some level, he identified with the king. Was it their shared role? Was Darius his other self ? Priests talk of such things. I cannot fathom them.

But we rode on. We were making a hundred stades a day through mountains and salt desert, and now, without resting, we went straight on, all day, reminding me powerfully of the Year of Miracles. Men who hadn’t been there commented that we were attempting the impossible, but Hephaestion and I laughed. Even Alectus, by now one of the oldest men in the army, laughed.

By noon, when we stopped to change horses and drink water, there were fewer than two hundred men with the king.

I decided that it was time somebody spoke to Alexander. I left my horses with Polystratus and walked to him, where he lay between Banugul and Hephaestion.

‘The raven of misfortune,’ Alexander said, ‘come to croak at me.’

I shrugged. ‘You know that we’re down to two hundred men,’ I said. ‘You know that, ten days ago, Darius had twenty-five thousand men.’

Alexander shook his head. ‘His army is breaking up – running for cover, like fish from a shark,’ he said. ‘I can feel it. No one will stop and fight now.’

I rubbed my chin. I had stubble at the edges of my beard, my face itched and, perhaps worst of all, Banugul looked every bit as perfect, tanned, fresh and beautiful lying in the dust beside the king as she did in a tent on the Syrian plains.

‘Lord, if they turn on us, your capture loses us everything.’ I shrugged. ‘I had to say it. I won’t shirk. I won’t stop. I’ll go where you go. But this is past daring.’

Alexander grinned – not at me, or Hephaestion, but at the Persian girl. ‘I know exactly what I’m doing,’ he said.

So we were off again.

Three hours later, we were sixty men on a hundred horses.

When darkness fell, we were fifty men on sixty horses, and Banugul stopped and threw up.

My two Niseans paced along, light as air. Poseidon bless and keep them.

Polystratus kept up, and Cyrus, and Kineas and Diodorus.

I had the strangest thoughts. I watched Craterus carefully, and Philotas, because it occurred to me that with this few men, anyone could kill the king.

At dawn, we were in a valley and we had a stream to water our horses. We had forty-six men left and one woman.

At noon, we came to a village. Bessus had come this way – the villagers had seen him.

Alexander sat on his charger, dejected – that rarest of his moods.

I saw Banugul master herself and ride to his side.

In five minutes, we were moving again. I had missed what had passed, but we turned off the road, with its sad trail of broken wagons and dead animals. Bessus’s retreat was easy to follow, and, exactly as Alexander predicted, the enemy army was disintegrating.

I could barely think. I drank a cup of water that a village elder offered me, filled my two canteens and rode off after the king.

We rode all night.

When the sun rose, we crested a ridge – our fourth ridge of the night. We had, by then, perhaps twenty Macedonians with us. But as we rode down the east side of the knife-back, we could see Bessus’s army spread before us on the plain . . .

Thousands of men.

Tens of thousands of camp followers, beasts and wagons.

From the height, we could see that they had come around the flank of the ridge and split into three columns. And we could see all three, extending from our very feet to the far horizon.

I reined in, took my canteen and drank. Spat. My water tasted of mud and defeat. We had failed. Darius had escaped – again. As with Issus, as with Gaugamela, as at Ecbatana. We couldn’t pursue into the plains with twenty men.

Alexander rode up beside me. Looked over the plain, sat straight and smiled.

‘Got him,’ he said.

He turned and beckoned to Philotas. ‘Get the stragglers,’ he said. ‘Bring them here and await my orders. The rest of you, on me.’

We attacked Bessus’s army.

We had twenty men, and one woman.

And once again, Alexander was right.

We hit them the way a flake of snow hits a mountainside – that is, it is the flake of snow that begins the avalanche. We rode down the ridge, changed horses and struck the nearest column, hitting the stragglers in the tail, and before anyone’s sword was red, we had a hundred prisoners and the column stampeded like cattle in a storm.

We rode down the column, picking up prisoners, demanding to know where the king was. Alexander’s only interest was Darius – I think that, had we found Bessus, he would have been killed. For whatever reason, it was all about Darius.

All morning, we went east, harrying the column – if twenty men can be said to harry fifteen thousand.

By noon, Philotas had five hundred more men together, and he joined us. It shouldn’t have made a difference, but it did, and we spread our nets wider. Exhausted, bedraggled Persians and Hyrkanians threw themselves on their faces – it was incredible to see. At one point, Polystratus, Cyrus and I captured so many men we couldn’t imagine why they didn’t take us prisoner.

We ranged farther and farther from the king – up and down the columns. The southernmost column was already gone – it held together better and moved too fast for us to follow, and the two northern columns were slowed by their own chaos. We rode unopposed through the final ruin of the Persian empire. Not an arrow threatened us. The squalor of the retreat was sickening in a way that even the slaughter at Gaza had not been sickening. Perhaps it was the utter abandonment of hope. Perhaps it was having Cyrus at my side – perhaps it was my growing respect for him, which made me share his humiliation that his country had come to this.

It was late afternoon when Polystratus sent a boy for me. I was sitting under the overhang of a ruined posting station, drinking water from the well. The boy was Hyrkanian, very blond and very dirty, and he all but crawled.

I mounted my new horse and followed him. It will give you an idea of how far gone we were that I was alone.

I rode through the rout. This part of the northern column was mostly slaves and servants, and they simply trudged on, waiting to be threatened or killed. No one challenged me, and no one tried to surrender. Mostly, no one even raised their eyes.

We crossed a main flow of refugees – perhaps six hundred people. And then climbed down the shallow slope of a stony gully. At the base of the gully was a big wagon, with six dead oxen. The grass here was so poor that Polystratus’s horse was not bothering to eat it. Blood dripped from the base of the wagon bed in slow, gloopy drops. Flies gathered in the blood. I could feel a curse in the air.

Polystratus’s head emerged from the wagon. A dog barked. ‘Send the boy for the king,’ he said.

I went and looked into the wagon. There was a man lying on his back, and the wagon bed was full of blood. He had two javelins in him.

I knew him at once, even though I’d only seen him at a distance.

He was Darius.

I looked at Polystratus. ‘Go and find Alexander,’ I said. ‘Cyrus should be at the posting station – less than a stade up the ridge. Look there first. Hurry. This will be very important to the king.’

Polystratus left me without a word. He grunted, once. He spat when he left the wagon bed – a Thracian way of averting a curse.

I took the King of King’s hand.

He gave my hand a squeeze.

Even an enemy is better company than dying alone.

I had wine and water. I offered him both, and he took a little and gasped.

I had some Persian, by then. So I understood when he thanked me.

I took off my officer’s cloak and did my best to bind his wounds. Removing the spears would kill him. So I did what I could without moving him much, and I gave him more wine. He’d lost so much blood that it flushed his face.

Cyrus came in.

He took the king’s other hand.

He kissed it.

I didn’t think less of him. It’s one thing to see that a cause is lost. Another thing to leave the man who led it. I think Cyrus loved Darius, the man.

At any rate, the next one into the wagon was Alexander.

Darius was barely alive. And drunk. But he had been waiting. I know that. I don’t know exactly how I know that, but I could feel him waiting, holding the spirit in his body.

Alexander came up, and I wriggled back to make room for him.

Alexander was weeping.

So was Cyrus.

I waited by Darius’s feet.

Alexander looked at Darius. He took his hand. ‘I will avenge you,’ he said.

Darius gave a minute shake of his head.

Alexander bent low. ‘I would give anything for you to live. I . . . what will I do without you?’

Darius had the will to smile. It set him very high in my opinion. He smiled, and his face had a gentle strength. ‘So . . .’ he said, very clearly. ‘So you are Alexander.’ His smile stayed, and he sighed, and with that sigh, his soul left his body.

‘No!’ Alexander screamed. ‘No! You will not slip away again! Damn you, Darius! What is there after this? What can possibly be worthy or great, after this!’ He was weeping, speaking wildly, and he took Darius’s head and held it in his lap. ‘Is this the end? The end of the story?’

I got out of the wagon.

After a time, Cyrus slipped out, too. He didn’t meet my eye.

And when Alexander came out, I wiped the blood from him, and we said nothing. But he put his arms around me, and cried. For once, I understood. Memnon had slipped away, and now Darius. That’s not what happens, in the Iliad. In the Iliad, Achilles is filled with rage, and he kills, and feels no remorse. When he hunts Hector round the city, he kills him, and drags him behind his chariot, and feels no remorse. Only when faced with Priam, Hector’s father – and with the reality of his own death – does Achilles feel anything.

Draw your own lesson. I’m a king, not a philosopher. Alexander loved the whole game. And when Darius died . . .

After a time – I couldn’t tell you how long – he stopped weeping.

‘Ptolemy,’ he said. There was a question in his voice. ‘Is this . . . all there is?’

Sometimes I wonder if he actually asked me that. Sometimes, I think that I read it into his tears and the tension in his body.

But I’m pretty sure he asked.

Because if he didn’t, then what I didn’t say wouldn’t still be stuck in my head, rattling around. I should have said it. I should have told him true.

I should have said, You’ve traded friendship and love for adulation and power. What did you expect?