God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

THIRTY-TWO

We straggled back into Ecbatana. Which occasioned the first time that Alexander himself altered the Military Journal.

Alexander wanted to pursue Bessus immediately. But despite our success – and taking Darius, even dead, was a victory, because we immediately inherited most of his loyalists, by the law of ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ that rules all civil conflict, all stasis – despite our success, our army, such as it was, was wrecked. The Hetaeroi were mostly dismounted, or their horses were ruined by the pursuit. The hypaspitoi were spread from the plains north of Ecbatana all the way beyond Hecatombion and into the Hyrkanian mountains by the pursuit, by fatigue, by the need to garrison the villages that were our lifeline to the rear.

And Alexander was barely functional. It was terrifying, because he didn’t have a mark on him. He ranted at Craterus about pursuing Bessus, and then sat on his horse and issued no orders.

None of us was senior. In fact, among the men who’d ended up on the point of the spear, the concept of ‘rank’ was meaningless. We were the king’s friends, his companions, and we didn’t agree about much except that we were king’s men.

I convinced Philotas to retreat. And when he went down with the dysentery, I led the retreat.

It was my only taste of what it must have been like to be Alexander. Now I had to ride up and down the column, looking for stragglers, issuing orders, seeing and being seen. Pretending to be calm and unruffled when in fact I was terrified that Bessus would turn and bite us – or that Alexander would snap out of his funk and kill me. He had ordered us to advance, and we were retreating, and that was my decision.

Ecbatana was twenty-five hundred stades behind us when we started. But that’s where the main army was, and to summon them forward with no preparation would have been foolish.

Or so I maintain.

We didn’t all retreat. I used our new Iranian allies and a hard core of hypaspitoi to hold every oasis and every village, to start building up water supplies and depots of baked bread, grain and water.

Craterus backed me up, and when we fell back on Rhagae and finally had enough healthy troops to fight if we had to face a force larger than twenty raiders, Craterus took command of it. I was exhausted.

Alexander continued to be silent. He made comments, and for some hours seemed to be in command.

But the only person he spent any time with was Banugul. Even Hephaestion was shut out.

At Rhagae, he recovered. It happened all in an hour, when dispatches came in from Ecbatana. He read them, shared them with no one and started firing off orders – mostly to do with Darius’s funeral.

He never mentioned the retreat, except that several days later, when we were already preparing the main body to march upcountry from Ecbatana, and Darius had had his burial, I was adding my notes to the Military Journal, because Eumenes was still with the headquarters back in Ecbatana.

Alexander came into the tent. He nodded to me, went to the main copy of the Journal and leafed through it.

He took a knife and cut the scroll at the death of Darius, and joined it to blank papyrus with a strip of linen. He did this himself. He looked at me, threw the scrap with fifteen days of retreat into the brazier, and walked out.

Read it yourself.

He’d never done it before. But he started to do it more and more.

Darius was dead, and the crusade in Asia was over. That was the tenor of the king’s message, and he gave a speech to the army that was not particularly moving and raised a great deal of resentment.

The long and short was that he was sending the allies home. Most of them were richly rewarded, and a great many of them were offered superb bonuses for staying on without their officers as our troops. Kineas, for example, was heartbroken. Alexander actually singled him out at a command meeting – a Macedonian-only meeting – when Parmenio, of all people, asked that he be kept on or even sent to the Prodromoi.

Alexander shook his head. ‘I need friends in Athens,’ he said. ‘And Kineas is not one of us.’

Further, he actively recruited the troopers – the rank and file men of the allied contingents.

He released the Thessalians. Parmenio’s household troops. Men who had served Philip and Parmenio and Attalus since the first light of Macedon’s dawn. Alexander gave them rich rewards, but he sent them home. Next to the Hetaeroi, they were our best cavalry.

I was at the staff meetings, and I knew the agenda – Alexander was clearing the army of rivals, and was preparing to function as the King of Kings. The Greeks – even Kineas – were the most intransigent about who they were, about being Hellenes. They had come to Asia to make war on Persia. To destroy the Persian Empire.

But Alexander was getting ready to become the Persian Empire.

He rid himself of dissent.

And he destroyed Parmenio’s power base. He paid off the veterans – with rich bonuses. He bought mercenaries. And he paid every pikeman who stayed with us a bonus – a two-talent bonus. Two talents of gold. Per man.

For old men like Philip, who asked where is my reward, this was the answer.

The army of Macedon – ably assisted by the Greek allies, backed by mercenaries – took Persia and conquered Asia.

The army that marched away from Ecbatana was Alexander’s army. It had no loyalties but those it owed to him. He was lord, god and paymaster.

I never saw Kineas go. He took his men and his gold and his horses and all the wreaths he’d won and packed and left. Polystratus saw him go – hugged Niceas, sent a letter home to his Macedonian wife. And Thaïs held the prostitute Artemis in her arms while the younger woman cried and cried. Because she wanted to follow the army to the ends of the earth. She didn’t want to go back to Athens and face . . . well, face an aristocrat’s family.

Thaïs sent letters home by Niceas, too. Letters asking that our child and our priestly ward be sent to us.

It’s worth noting that Athens stood firm – or at least stood hesitantly – and Sparta died alone, their gallant hoplites outnumbered by Antipater’s mercenaries. Their king died gloriously, but he died, and the revolt, if you can call it that, was over. And so was Sparta.

Alexander sent rewards to Athens, and treated her like the queen of Greece, which, in many ways, she was. But like Darius’s wife, she’d served her turn, and as we were all to discover, Alexander was done with her. And when he was done with things, he let them fall.

The last night in Ecbatana. We had a dinner – a magnificent dinner. Four hundred Hellenic officers and almost that many Persians – that is to say, Iranians, Cilicians, Carians and Phrygians. Medes. Aegyptians.

I had not received a command in the new army allotment. But I had received orders – to add Cyrus and two hundred Persian nobles to my troop of Hetaeroi, doubling it in size. In fact, we lost a great many Hetaeroi at Ecbatana, and on the pursuit of Darius. I’ll backtrack and say I tried to recruit Thessalian gentlemen from the disbanded regiments, and Athenian gentlemen from the Athenian contingent. I got a few.

Cyrus and his men were superb horsemen, well mounted, with fine armour and good discipline. But they were Iranians, and Philotas, for one, didn’t trust them at all.

As soon as I took Cyrus into my troop, I began to walk a knife’s edge, and because of it, I have more understanding of what the king faced than most men. The common story – Callisthenes’ story – is that the king was seduced by Persian tyranny and became a Persian tyrant.

Well – that’s not entirely untrue. Alexander was always impatient of limitations on his power, since he knew, with absolute certainty, that he was right about all decisions of rulership and the making of war. So Persian-style lordship appealed.

But by the time we rode out of Ecbatana the second time, I understood exactly why he did as he did.

Persian gentlemen were such excellent soldiers that you had to ask, after two weeks, how Darius had ever lost. Cyrus and his men were far more obedient than my Macedonians, who, being Macedonians, plotted, fought, lied, cheated, back-stabbed, sometimes literally and spent their spare time questioning every order I issued.

And they hated the mirror that the Persians held up to them, which quickly translated into hatred of the Persians.

I had a few Macedonians and a handful of Greek troopers who saw it differently – who made friendships across the line, or who found the time to listen. But I also found myself trying to be two different people – the fair and honourable commander of Cyrus and his men, and the quick-witted, argumentative king of the hill that the Macedonians expected.

I had four hundred cavalrymen.

Alexander had thirty-five thousand men.

There are things he did for which I cannot love him, but his attempt to rule Persia while remaining our king was a noble effort, and he did the very best with it that could be done. He made an effort to be all things to all men – an effort that he had made since he had been a boy, in many ways. Callisthenes and some of the other Hellenophiles argued, almost from the first, that Alexander was being corrupted.

I agree. He was being corrupted. But it wasn’t Persia that corrupted him. It was war, and the exercise of power.

The army rallied at Hecatompylos. Those were the next words in the Military Journal after the death of Darius, and they left out three weeks of supply-gathering and slow marching. And yet remained true. The contingents that Craterus, Philotas and I had left spread across southern Hyrkania were there still, and the hypaspitoi had remained well forward of the army, so that we might have been said to have ‘concentrated’ at Hecatompylos.

But despite the bribes and the bonuses, Hecatompylos was where the army discovered that we were marching east, to Bactria. Until then, most of the troops thought we were going to crush the mountain tribes. A fairly solid rumour said that we were going to restore Banugul to her little kingdom – as a lark – on the way to the Euxine and ships for home. And even Hephaestion, who usually read the king better than this, told me confidentially one night that we were going to march north into Hyrkania and then home via a campaign against the Scythians of the Euxine.

But at Hecatompylos, Alexander sent two full squadrons of the Hetaeroi and Ariston’s Prodromoi east, trying to re-establish contact with Bessus’s retreating columns.

It wasn’t mutiny, but by the gods, it was close. Our second morning in the clear air of Hyrkania, and I was awakened by Ochrid to be told that the pezhetaeroi were packing their baggage for the trip home. That they had voted in the night to march away and leave the king.

Once again, I was the one who warned him. Artemis – who had been Kineas’s lover, and left him to stay with the army – came to Thaïs in the night and told her that the pezhetaeroi intended mutiny. And old Amyntas son of Philip came to me at first light. He didn’t name names. He didn’t really meet my eye.

‘They mean business,’ he said. He shifted uncomfortably. ‘I can’t . . . I can’t stomach it. Though the Undying know I agree with ’em. The king’s mad with power. Ares. Ares come to earth, he is.’

So once again I went to Hephaestion.

Who took me to the king.

Alexander wasn’t angry. He was frightened.

He called the taxeis commanders one by one to his tent, and he interviewed them. Craterus knew everything, and Perdiccas. The others knew less, or admitted to less.

When they were gone, it was dawn. Alexander sat back on his stool and looked at me. ‘Any remarks?’ he asked.

‘You need to talk to them,’ I said. ‘Yourself. And not give them a town to pillage.’

He shrugged, as if he regretted the absence of a town to pillage.

I saw red.

‘They just want to go home!’ I said, suddenly. ‘They’ve crossed the whole gods-created world at your behest, and we’re in the arsehole of the universe, Hyrkania, and it’s going to go on for ever, and they know it!’

He laughed. ‘I love it when you, the aristocrat, remind me of what the common man wants,’ he said.

I shrugged.

He ordered Hephaestion and Philotas to form all the Hetaeroi. And then he summoned the taxeis, all together, and we met with them in a great stone bowl cut in a Hyrkanian hillside.

They stood muttering, and the stone carried their angry whispers like evil spirits. I stood close by the speaker’s pnyx and every whisper seemed to come to me from ten thousand men, and again, as at the fire by the Tigris, I felt as if I was listening to the dead as well as the living, fifty thousand corpses demanding to be taken home.

Perhaps I still had a touch of fever.

And then he came up the steps, bounding up two at a time. The whispers stopped.

He came up to the pnyx, in armour but without a weapon or helmet.

‘Friends!’ he shouted, and his voice cut across the whispers – smashed them flat. ‘I understand that you all want to go home!’

A roar greeted him.

‘What a simple lot you are, to be sure!’ He smiled. ‘You think that, because Darius is dead, the war is over? How many of you marched through Babylon? Through Susa? The Medes and the Babylonians will crush us if we let them out from under our heel. Even now, Bessus rides to the east with four times our number of cavalry. Do you want to see him facing us on the plains beside Pella? Do you want your sons to have to face the same foe – march over the same ground?’

He waited.

‘Now! Now is the time!’ he said, slowly but clearly.

Silence.

‘Now, when they feel beaten, we will finish them. I will follow Bessus to the ends of the earth, and I will kill him, and then – then, when Persia has no army but our army, and when all of this is ours – then, my friends, your farms are secure, your sons and daughters are secure, and then we can rest. But you owe it to your sons to finish this enemy now. We are so close.’

Some shouts, and some hoots.

‘Friends – do you hate me? Have I not led you to victory after victory? Have you ever been defeated when I was in your ranks?’ Alexander seemed to grow larger. ‘Are you ingrates, to forget what I have given you? The suzerainty of the earth – the mastery over every man and woman you will ever meet, the lords of creation! You were farmers in Pella and Amphilopolis, and now you stride the earth like giants! Will you go back to being peasants?’

Now they shouted. ‘No!’

‘Will you deny me my hour of triumph? Your king? The moment when I am undisputed master of Asia – a moment for which I have sacrificed everything and taken every risk?’

NO!

‘Or will you tuck your tails between your legs and leave a beaten Persian army to follow us, gnaw at our tail and take the war across the sea to our homes?’

NO!

‘Or rather, will you follow me again to the ends of the earth to preserve the virginity of Macedon – to keep her inviolate, to put fire into the homes of our enemies and steel in their breasts until we, and only we, rule the world? Will you?’

YES.

They shouted – they chanted his name.

And he turned to me, and smiled.

It wasn’t what he said. It was that he said it at all. He’d been even more distant than usual since Gaugamela, and that morning, he treated the pezhetaeroi like men – like his men.

Their opinion of themselves, and of him, soared.

Thaïs said it made him more human. I thought that it was all making him think he was a god.

Three things happened in Hyrkania – four, if you count Banugul.

We took the capital. Or rather, we marched into it. Banugul’s father had been satrap of Hyrkania, and she received troops and support to go and reconquer it. Hyrkania means the ‘Land of Wolves’, and the only wolves I saw there had two legs. They fight endlessly, but not very well, and Banugul retook her city with three thousand mercenaries, many of whom had just joined us – Darius’s last loyal men.

The vizier who helped murder Darius awaited us at Zadracarta, the capital, if such a dreadful place could be called capital of anything. Banugul left us, and Thaïs informed me that she was pregnant by the king, and I took that at face value. If she had influence with the king, I never saw it – he liked her, and she pleased him, and that had lasted a few months and no more.

But Nabarzanes, Darius’s vizier, received a full pardon in advance, and then joined us, and he brought Bagoas to replace her. He – I never checked, but I assume Bagoas was formed as a man – was the most effeminate man I have ever seen. He was beautiful – I loathed him, but I could see the beauty – and he moved with a carnal grace I had only seen until then in women. He knew exactly how to use his body. He was not a handsome man – he was a beautiful, wilful woman trapped in a man’s body. He had been Darius’s catamite, and now, in hours, he became the king’s.

By Ganymede, he was a horror. He blatantly manipulated the king’s generosity and his desire to be ‘godlike’, seizing money and small political powers for himself as fast as he could. Nicanor, Parmenio’s son, shared a couch with me one night, and he took a sip of wine, watched the Persian boy writhing next to the king and spat.

‘He sucks power with the same greed he sucks dick,’ Nicanor said.

I almost choked on my wine. And when I repeated it to Thaïs, she shook her head. ‘Men always make sex sound like a financial exchange,’ she said crossly. She was angry with me for a day.

Now, from the lofty height of my advanced years, I realise that it was the wrong joke to make to a courtesan.

But on balance, despite the number of men who maintain that Bagoas was directly responsible for all kinds of sins – the king’s increasing attraction to things Persian, the king’s occasional lapses of judgement, the king’s open flouting of his willingness to bed the boy – while all these charges are, at their base, true, none of them mattered. They were the grousing of a tired, battered army on the edge of mutiny, looking desperately for a reason that their king was suddenly alienating himself. Bagoas was no worse than any of Philip’s minions – he was prettier, anyway, and no less bitchy or demanding. Macedonians had a tolerance for such things. The king used the boy as a vacation from reality. The trouble was, the soldiers didn’t get the same vacation, and it was just too far to home.

Alexander retained genuine affection for Bagoas, and the boy returned it, so that years later, after India, their affair was renewed. That speaks a little in the boy’s favour.

But mostly, he was a horror.

Philotas led a set of punitive raids against the Mardians – mostly to seize remounts. Alexander grew bored with waiting for Ariston to return and led one of his own.

I went with him, because I was determined to separate him from Bagoas and keep his mind on his job – odd, and you’ll note that I was trying to make him function as god-king and keep him from being human, which was not my usual role.

We burned some villages, killed some women and children and got ourselves some fine horses. Our third night in the high valleys, and the Mardians raided us. They took Bucephalus. No other horse. Just Bucephalus.

Alexander sent us out to bring in prisoners. I brought in two, and Philotas six.

Alexander gathered them, had them bound and then stood over them.

‘I want my horse back,’ he said. He was not calm. He could scarcely breathe, he was so angry. I think he meant to make an elegant speech, but he couldn’t get it out. He stood there, breathing too fast, and finally, in an odd voice, he said, ‘If I don’t have my horse by this time tomorrow, I will kill every man, woman and child in these hills. I will use my entire army, and I will wipe your pathetic little race from the face of the earth. I won’t let my soldiers rape your women, because any children they had would allow your kind to continue to walk the earth. Do you understand?’

The interpreter, another former officer of Darius, was so scared that his voice shook and his knees trembled.

Coenus, on the other hand, merely laughed. He thought that Alexander was finally growing tired of the locals.

Bucephalus was returned immediately.

At Ecbatana, Alexander had left Parmenio as his satrap of Persia. While this seemed the ultimate honour, the army that marched into Hyrkania didn’t have Parmenio as chief of staff and planning officer, and we felt it. Little things seep through the cracks – just as an example, Bucephalus was only taken because no one had given the night guards a password, for the first time in about forty years.

Before we marched east after Bessus, Alexander divided the roles that had been Parmenio’s three ways. Craterus would become, to all intents and purposes, his deputy commander of the Macedonians, but for the moment he was far to the south, collecting reinforcements. Hephaestion continued to command the Aegema on occasion, but he became the de facto commander and liaison with the Iranian and satrapal forces – an increasingly important part of our army.

I became the chief of staff. I didn’t outrank either Coenus or Philotas or Nicanor or Hephaestion, but I could handle the mathematics and the planning. And Alexander trusted me – again. Who knows what clicked in his head? But it was odd – and almost eerie – to move my folding desk and my old wax tablets back into the striped tent that housed the Military Journal. Many years had passed since I had held this post, or one like it.

Immediately, I had to start laying out the route and the depots for the march east, into Bactria, which up until then was merely a name. I arranged for Ariston – for all scouts – to report directly to me. This, too, had a feeling of irony – there was Strako standing at my desk with his reports from the Angeloi, and there were Prodromoi I’d worked with on the plains of Caria.

They had, once, reported directly to Parmenio, and Alexander had taken that power from him – because we all feared Parmenio would use the scouting reports against the king. But I no sooner held the logistics in my hands than I realised how much I needed the scouting reports.

We had outrun Thaïs’s network of friends – they ended at Babylon. But she knew how to organise information, and she was bored. And she had worked with the Prodromoi before Tyre, with great success, and I encouraged her to take part.

The first news she brought us was that Satibarzanes, satrap of Aria, was ready to defect. We checked and double-checked with couriers and agents, and then we laid out a march route to Susia, sold the king on the plan and marched.

This was the way to make war. Our information was spot on, and our scouts covered our movements, our advance parties had water and food, and despite the terrain . . . Alexander’s army was used to terrain. There are mountains everywhere – or at least, everywhere Alexander wanted to go.

We marched off the edge of the world.

And we moved fast.

Whatever Satibarzanes may have thought, or planned, we were on him too fast for him to change his mind. Our cavalry seized every approach to his capital and then we ‘arrived’. It was Alexander’s plan, but Coenus and Hephaestion and I executed it, and I still look back on it with pleasure. Everyone was fed, everything moved on time and no one died. Good soldiering.

Satibarzanes was a snake – the very kind of Persian that Craterus and his Macedonians expected every Persian to be. Thaïs had enough evidence to hang him, but Alexander was in a hurry and he confirmed the man as satrap – when we had all his troops in our power.

That night, I lay beside Thaïs in my new pavilion – a magnificent tent of striped silk with a tall separate roof that held its walls up on wooden toggles – superb work, a piece of engineering as much as a bridge or a tower.

It is lovely to make love to your own intelligence chief – it makes staff meetings more secret and much more fun. We were both still breathing hard when she said, by way of love talk: ‘Satibarzanes will turn on us as soon as we turn our backs.’

I kissed her, and agreed.

‘I need money to spread around,’ she said, rubbing her hand down my legs and over my belly.

‘You know,’ I said, and I paused, unsure of whether my joke would be well received – ‘you know, I owe you four years of your fee as a hetaera.’

Her hand slipped along my thigh, over the hard ridge of muscle and then along the crease between groin and leg – the most ticklish part of my body. ‘Pay up, old man,’ she whispered.

‘I could marry you, instead,’ I said. I was perfectly willing. It came into my head just then. I was one of the most powerful men in the world, and I didn’t have to give a thought to the opinion of anyone but my peers and my soldiers.

She laughed. ‘To save money, you mean?’ she said, and that was that.

But two days later, I was planning provisions for the advance guard as Ariston scouted us a march route east. Into Bactria. And writing out a receipt for ten talents of silver to Thaïs.

Eumenes the Cardian came into the Military Journal tent. ‘Everyone out but Lord Ptolemy,’ he ordered.

The slaves fled, and Marsyas looked at me. He had a fine hand and an excellent understanding, and I used him as my own chief of staff. He gave me a long look, but I shook my head. He picked up the scroll he was checking and left.

Eumenes and I had got along for years without a skirmish, but I didn’t really know him at all. He was Greek – now that Kineas was gone, he tended to lead the ‘Greek’ faction on the staff. He’d worked for Philip, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, and Alexander had taken a long time – a long time – to trust him. Hephaestion still viewed him as a spy for Parmenio.

He poured wine from an amphora at his own desk and put the krater down between us.

‘You have a reputation as a straight arrow, my lord,’ he said. He drank and passed me the cup.

I raised it to him. ‘As do you,’ I said. I drank.

He nodded. ‘Good. Let us try and do this the man’s way. I don’t want to give up the Military Journal. I intend to prove myself to the king and get a military command of my own, and this is my office.’

I thought about that. ‘Agreed,’ I said carefully.

He brightened. ‘Yes? Then the rest is details.’

I must have brightened, too. ‘You thought I was after the Journal?’

He shrugged. ‘Callisthenes is still trying to get it back. You ran it very well – for an amateur. I’ve read all your entries.’

He was older, and he’d been Philip’s military secretary. So there was no need to take offence.

‘What about the collection of intelligence?’ he asked. ‘I’ve noted in the last ten-day that you have all the scouts reporting to you. Now, you are a king’s friend, an officer of the Hetaeroi, one of the inner circle. Of course they take your orders.’ He paused. ‘But it’s my job, and I need the reports, as you know.’

I thought about that. You have to appreciate his honesty. Instead of having a typical staff cat-fight – they can go on for years – he was laying it out.

I nodded. ‘I need the information. I plan all the march routes.’

‘So we need it together. Can we get it together? And on days when one or the other is busy, can we collect notes and pass them?’

This may be boring you, lad, but this is staff work. Eumenes was offering to help me, if I would help him. This is how we conquered the world – good logistics, good intelligence, good staff work.

I nodded.

He leaned forward and looked into my eyes. ‘Who is the chief of intelligence for the king?’

I smiled. ‘Thaïs,’ I said.

Eumenes shook his head. ‘No, I am. Thaïs gave the position up – if it was ever truly hers – back at Tyre.’

I began to grow angry.

‘If your paramour wants to run some agents, she can do it through me,’ Eumenes said.

‘No,’ I said.

He sat back. ‘Well, you’re honest.’

I crossed my arms. ‘What have you ever done, in terms of actual accomplishment? Thaïs gave us Memnon, took cities in Asia Minor and opened the Gates of Babylon.’

Eumenes narrowed his eyes. ‘I’ve never heard of any of these operations.’

I smiled.

He laughed. ‘Fair enough, Ptolemy. But we can’t have two separate intelligence services.’

I shrugged. ‘Why not? We have all the money in the world. And Thaïs says that two sources of information are always better than one.’

Eumenes turned away, and I could see he was on the point of a nasty verbal cut. But I’ve seen this before – mostly with rational Athenian gentlemen at a symposium – a man takes a verbal hit, and before he can shoot back, he absorbs the content, thinks it all through – realises the point is valid. Only a mature man or woman can do this.

The Cardian took another sip of wine. ‘Who collates the intelligence?’ he said.

I leaned forward. ‘Honesty for honesty. I can imagine that you and some other man might vie – racing to Alexander’s side with your latest scrap – the best traitor, the open gates,’ I said. I took the wine cup. ‘But Thaïs doesn’t need Alexander’s ear, and I have it all the time. So if you give credit where credit is due, I think Thaïs would be happy to send her news through you.’ I shrugged. ‘I’ll have to ask her.’

‘I would like to meet her,’ Eumenes said. ‘I’ve seen her at dinners. We’ve never spoken.’

‘And if you try to go behind her back . . . well,’ I said with a smile, ‘I see the king six times a day.’

Eumenes shook his head. ‘I know that,’ he said, a little peevishly.

‘Come and have dinner with us,’ I said. ‘Let’s talk this out together.’

And that was that. Five minutes of straight talk, and we avoided a clash. After that, I got steady reports from Eumenes, and Thaïs shared all her information with him. And we became friends – real friends. His wife was not always with the army, but when she was, Athenais became Thaïs’s closest female friend.

You have the look that all boys have when they find that war runs on gold and grain and rumour and intelligence, not blood and honour. Listen. In all of Aria there was just barely enough surplus grain to feed our army for three weeks. We could not linger. We needed to get out of the endless hills and down on to the fertile plains. That’s how war really works.

So we marched into Bactria. We had a flood of defectors, many of whom were the last of Darius’s loyalists who would never go over to Bessus. But some had just waffled – because they had fresh reports from Bessus, who was across the Oxus river, raising troops. He was rumoured to have forty thousand cavalry.

Alexander wasn’t just low on grain. He was genuinely worried that, having marched off the edge of the world, he was going to get stuck in a fight he couldn’t win. But he was elated – Bessus was proving to be a foe, and a foe meant challenge, opposition and conquest. We summoned the main army – Cleitus with the rest of the pezhetaeroi – and marched east.

Nicanor died two days east of Aria – he’d never grown stronger after the illness, and when the king gave Parmenio the satrapy, Parmenio made his two sons swear to hold their positions with the army. Nicanor commanded the hypaspitoi and Philotas commanded the household cavalry, and that meant that Alexander was still, to some extent, in the power of Parmenio.

Nicanor’s death was sudden. There was no reason to expect it – he was sick, but he was tougher than scrap bronze.

Alexander didn’t even halt the march, and when Philotas broke down – Nicanor was his brother – Alexander shook his head.

‘Stay and arrange the funeral, if that’s what suits you,’ Alexander said. ‘Bessus isn’t going to wait for us to hold games. Ptolemy – get them moving!’ he called to me, and we marched off.

I never had any time for Philotas, but Nicanor and I had long since made our peace and become friends. I left Polystratus to make my contribution.

Alexander gave me command of the Hetaeroi. I thought it odd – Philotas couldn’t be more than a day behind us.

But we were tired, hungry and I had all I could handle just getting the food arranged ahead of us. We were living day to day. Not the way the planning staff likes to live.

But two days after we entered Bactria, it was obvious that Bessus had the troops to stop us, and we had other problems. Craterus was twelve hundred stades to the south, marching with Black Cleitus and the four taxeis of the reserve army, and Bessus had more men. And worst of all, bloody Satibarzanes revolted, and so did his cousin in the south, Barseantes, the satrap of Drangiana.

Alexander took the Aegema and turned back. He sent me to lead the main army south, to the edge of Drangiana, to link up with Craterus’s column. Hephaestion went with him.

We smashed the two attempts Barseantes made to stop our march. Behind us, the king drove Satibarzanes across the Oxus and caught most of his army on a wooded mountain. Alexander surrounded the base of the mountain and set the woods on fire. It was brutal, but I can’t disapprove. He was in a hurry, had no rearguard, no base of operations, and he needed a quick victory with no losses.

I had troubles of my own, and I got a taste of what the coming years would hold, moving the main army over brutal terrain full of hostile – or sullenly apathetic – villagers, most of whom were hardy and dangerous. After just two weeks, I gave up on the notion that I could hold open a route to the logistics heads in Iran. I lost men trying to patrol the roads behind me, and leaving garrisons – well, if you have twenty thousand men, and you leave a hundred men each day in small towns in the mountains to watch your rear, how long until you have no army? You do the maths.

In the third week, I halted, recalled all my garrisons and then pressed forward. The next morning I had a staff meeting.

When I entered the Military Journal tent, Eumenes called ‘Attention!’ and most of the officers present snapped to their feet and stood as stiff as statues. It had never happened to me – although we’d all done it for Parmenio. And the king.

Cyrus bowed deeply, and so did his son and a handful of other Persian noble officers.

I decided to think about the implications later. ‘At ease,’ I called. ‘Listen up.’ I walked to the middle of the tent. Eumenes had an easel set up with a sheet of local slate. I had a piece of chalk, the kind tutors in Athens and Pella used to teach children in the agora.

‘First thing,’ I said. ‘We no longer have a road home behind us. All we have is the ground beneath our feet. All forward troops need to assume that every contact is a hostile contact. Rearguard, too. At the same time, foraging and logistics purchases will go better if we can form a market every night and get locals to come in of their own free will and sell us produce. Understand?’

I wrote the words Firm But Fair on the slate.

‘I need the Prodromoi to operate a day ahead of the army and I need the Angeloi two days ahead. At least. I need the Prodromoi to scout a box . . .’ I drew a rectangle on the board. ‘And then we can move from box to box. The Agrianians will handle security inside the day’s box, the Prodromoi scout the next one. Any questions?’

In fact, there were a hundred questions, but that became our doctrine for movement in hostile country. It changed a great many things – for one thing, Strako and the Angeloi began reporting directly to the Prodromoi, not to me – but it made our march routes far more secure, and it meant that even as we fought a battle, we already knew where our next camp would be, and it was already secure.

We fought six actions that summer, and the scouting units were in action every day or two. This sort of warfare is terribly wearing on troops, and after just two weeks, the Angeloi were exhausted and the Prodromoi had taken losses of a third and were no longer an effective unit. Again, the mathematics of war are relentless – if your scouts lose one man a day, even from bad water or accident, and there’s only a hundred of them . . .

So Eumenes began to rotate men, and later whole units, from the main body into the scouts. It was an excellent programme, and it allowed him to begin taking small commands himself. He was an honest man, but he was still a wily Greek.

We pulled all three columns together in early autumn, on the shores of Lake Seistan. Craterus and Black Cleitus came up from the south, and brought us our daughter and our newly made priest of Poseidon, fresh from Sounnion.

Olympias was fresh and lovely and just eleven years old, and she scarcely remembered us after two years in the Temple of Artemis. But that night she was curled in her foster-mother’s arms, and Thaïs was happier than I had seen her in a year.

The truth is that the woman who had sent her away to be educated was a different woman in many ways from the mother who welcomed her back. And I was a different man and a different father. I wanted them to have stable lives, but I wanted them close.

Barsulas was tall and handsome and very sure of his relationship with his god. Sounnion had sent him to us with a letter to the king.

So I promised him an interview with the king when he caught up with the ‘main’ army, and that night we talked for hours about the gods. About Zeus-Apis in Aegypt – about Poseidon.

Athenian notions of good conduct and the rational had not changed the inner boy. The boy who swam with dolphins. He was very easy to love.

But Olympias, after just a week in camp, threw herself at my feet one evening.

‘Please, Pater!’ she begged. Young Eurydike, our daughter, followed Olympias the way an acolyte follows a priest, because the young priestess was on the very threshold of adulthood and thus the ultimate object of Eurydike’s ambition. At any rate, when Olympias threw herself at what had once been a beautiful pair of Boeotian boots rather than a cracked and tangled mare’s nest of leather repairs, my daughter Eurydike threw herself down next to the older girl.

I tried to calm them both. Olympias’s tears seemed dramatic, and Eurydike’s were completely false – to me. Shows how little I knew about being a parent.

‘Please send me home!’ Olympias begged. ‘I hate it here! The Virgin Goddess will desert me here! There are no olive trees – no grass – men – all men . . .’ She wept.

My younger daughter beat the floor of my tent – a local rug, as I remember – and wept, too.

I thought this might pass, but Olympias was at it, day and night, and Thaïs was beside herself. Bella undertook most of Eurydike’s care, but Bella had no authority with this lovely young girl with the assurance of a well-bred Athenian aristocrat.

Thaïs lay next to me – it must have been a week after the first outburst. ‘The obvious answer is to marry her to someone,’ she said. But she shook her head against my chest. ‘She does not want to marry. And my life started with a marriage I did not want.’

I stared at the lamp burning above me in the roof of the tent, where it hung from a chain, suspended from the cross-beam. ‘She desires to be a priestess,’ I said.

‘And a virgin,’ Thaïs said. She said it with a sob that was half-laugh and half-cry. ‘She called me a porne – a prostitute.’

Yes. Children. Even the adopted kind.

The army had marched three thousand stades south from Sousia and Hyrkania, and Alexander gave them a rest while we poured scouts into the east and tried to find routes into Bactria that we could scout, hold open and supply.

I was busy stockpiling food – the harvest was coming in, all over the empire – when I realised that Cleitus’s arrival meant that Parmenio’s command had been stripped of troops. That struck me as odd – he was the satrap of Persia, at the centre of the vast web of the old empire, and while the ‘Persian’ satraps all seemed to be in revolt, Parmenio held the centre.

That night, I was again cuddling up to my intelligence chief, and I said – by way of small talk – that I wondered why Alexander had taken all the new Lydian and Thracian troops as well as all the taxeis under Parmenio’s command.

Even as I said it – my hand reaching for one of Thaïs’s breasts – I realised why Alexander had done it.

Thaïs frowned at me and moved my hand. ‘Parmenio’s days are numbered,’ she said.

‘You’ve said that before,’ I accused her.

She shrugged, which was very attractive, given the circumstances. ‘Perhaps. But in the past, he was a threat. Since Aegypt, he has offered no threat. After Arabela, he couldn’t have toppled the king with Zeus by his side.’ She turned her head. ‘I have no love for him. But there is something . . . poisonous about Macedon. And Athens. Why cannot old men be allowed to retire? Why must we kill them?’

Two day later, Philotas rejoined the army, having buried his brother.

He was a difficult man – given to dressing like a king, flaunting his riches and his father’s political power, and far, far too addicted to telling us that he and his father had made the king who he was.

He was also a brilliant officer, who could control a cavalry reconnaissance from the saddle, simultaneously riding, fighting and working out his campsites and his supply routes and his watch bill. He was foul-mouthed and he hated the Persians, whom he openly derided.

Cyrus hated him, and he hated Cyrus, which made Eumenes’ job of running the scouts more difficult, as more and more Cyrus and his Persians served directly with the Hetaeroi.

The day he returned to the army, I was coming in from the east with Cyrus, and Philotas had discovered that I commanded the Hetaeroi in his absence and came to find me.

He waved. ‘Ptolemy,’ he said. ‘Tell your Persian butt-boy to fuck off, and we’ll talk.’

I put my hand on Cyrus’s bridle. ‘Cyrus is my deputy,’ I said. ‘He serves the king.’

Philotas grunted. ‘Any way he can, I bet. He understand Greek? Hey, Persian, sod off, understand me?’

Cyrus’s face grew darker.

‘You are a fool, Philotas,’ I said. ‘Go and see the king.’

‘When I’m ready. I see you have my command.’ He spat.

I raised a hand. ‘Let’s try this again,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry Nicanor died. Has his shade gone to Elysium? Did you bring me Polystratus?’

Philotas looked away. Then he turned his horse and rode away without another word.

I went to the king, but he was with Bagoas.

I went to Hephaestion. ‘What’s happening with Philotas?’ I asked. ‘He wants his command back. I’m perfectly ready to give it up. I have all the grain to get in.’ I gave a bitter laugh. ‘The wily Odysseus, reduced to tracking grain shipments.’

‘The mighty Patroclus, reduced to writing orders for Achilles,’ he said. He had four papyrus rolls open. ‘You know that fucking Zopryon has managed to go and lose an entire army? To the Scythians?’ Hephaestion shook his head. ‘It defies belief.’ He raised his head and put his stylus down. ‘I’m not at liberty to discuss Philotas.’

An hour later, as I sat by lamplight with Polystratus, Ochrid and four slave scribes, Black Cleitus came to the door. We had a long, warm embrace.

‘Missed you,’ I managed to say. I remember being proud of myself for getting it out. He grinned. Then he sobered. ‘I have orders for you. For the Hetaeroi.’

He gave me two papyrus scrolls. By then, all orders came out in Persian and in Greek. I read the Greek.

‘Go and get Cyrus. Get all the troop commanders.’ I shook my head. Polystratus, who hadn’t seen his tent in four weeks, shook his head back and ran for the officers, and my new hyperetes, Theophilus, a Paeonian gentleman who had come to us with the Illyrian reinforcements, sounded ‘All Officers’.

I was ordered to turn out the whole force of the Hetaeroi; Macedonian, Greek and Iranian – almost four thousand cavalrymen. And they were angry at being hauled from their sacks of straw and angrier when they found that we were marching east on a pointless two-day patrol. A four-thousand-man patrol? Leaving in the dark?

We marched an hour later, and we slept hard and ate worse, because even the army’s logistics chief cannot conjure grain out of the air, in late autumn, in country already picked clean.

Just before noon on the third day, I led them back into camp.

Cleitus met me at the edge of camp.

Philotas had been arrested for treason.

Alexander arraigned him in front of the whole army. When Philotas was brought out, he shredded the accusation. I heard him. It was all nonsense – that Parmenio had plotted to sell them all to Bessus. There were boys involved, and sex – there’s sex in any plot that Macedonians make – but the charges as laid were absurd, and Philotas, in his flat drawl, mocked them, and the king.

Alexander grew angry.

Hephaestion took him away.

Craterus then shocked me by making a speech reminding the army of what a snob Philotas was, and how often he’d done petty things to get his way. It turned the assembly into an ugly popularity contest.

For Craterus, it was an excellent speech.

And now I could see why I’d been sent away, and why I’d had with me every man in the army who might have stood with Philotas to prevent his arrest.

I’d been used.

That night, I lay with Thaïs and listened to a man being tortured. He was being tortured in a house not far from mine, and his screams rose and fell, not unlike the sounds of a woman giving birth, if the same woman might have had to bear six or seven children in one night. Thaïs held me hard – so hard her fingernails left marks on me.

The next day, when the army assembled to consider sentence, we had another shock. Philotas – the ruin of Philotas – was brought out on a stretcher.

He’d been tortured – he was broken. Utterly wrecked.

Years later, I heard from a former pezhetaeroi that Philotas was tortured for twenty hours, and after just two was begging Craterus and Hephaestion to just tell him what he needed to confess.

Hephaestion certainly conducted the interrogation, and now he led the case against the accused. Philotas was accused of treason – a capital crime that had to be tried in front of the full Assembly.

I was horrified. And the horror didn’t stop. Alexander got the army to execute Philotas – by stoning. And he threw them his cousin, Alexander of Lyncestis, who had been under arrest for years but never prosecuted.

The death of Philotas was the end of reason. The end of the rule of law. Macedonians acted under the law to kill him, but the charges were foolish and the accusation was spurious, and the army knew it. And the army knew that Alexander had used Philotas’s greed and vanity against him. It is an interesting aspect of human behaviour; a leader can manipulate people to his own ends, but the people are perfectly aware when they’ve been manipulated.

I didn’t know it for weeks, but Alexander also sent a messenger to Parmenio. When the messenger arrived . . .

The old general was murdered in cold blood.

Let me speak a moment, boy.

Had the king done such a thing at Tyre, or Gaza, I’d have understood. To the best of my knowledge, Parmenio plotted actively to remove the king, or at least limit his power. To the end of his days, the old general thought we were all blind, and that Alexander was a parvenu boy, an amateur warrior, an actor playing at being king.

But when Alexander killed him – he did it without any justice, after the old man’s fangs were pulled, and he acted through a man who thought he was the king’s trusted friend, a man Alexander ordered tortured.

It was ugly.

And I’d like to say that after Lake Seistan, nothing was the same.

But nothing had been the same for a long time.

It was late at night. In my memory, it was the night that we heard of Parmenio’s assassination, although to be honest, that whole period is a blur in my memory – a blur of betrayal, anger and drama, not least of which was Olympias’s attempt at suicide.

I was standing with Eumenes, and we were determinedly not talking about Alexander. We were, I remember, looking at a local bow – a very fine example, picked up by Ariston’s patrols that afternoon. It was lacquered blue and green, and had gold and silver leaf, or perhaps paint, in intricate patterns all along it. It seemed to bend the wrong way, and we had to call one of the Saka slaves to string it.

Sake make terrible slaves, but that’s another story.

She came in, and her face was like a mask of rage, and her chiton was torn, and she had a dagger in her fist.

‘On your head be my death!’ she screamed at me.

She brought the dagger down.

Now, one of two things is true. Either she knew I’d stop her, because I am a professional soldier and she was an eleven-year-old girl, or she absolutely meant to kill herself. In fact, I suspect that both were true at the same time.

I caught her hand, disarmed her and Eumenes threw her to the ground.

She roared her tears, and Thaïs came hurrying from wherever she’d been, and Olympias struck her.

‘You whore! What do you care how many men rape me!’ Olympias screamed the words.

But Thaïs only hugged her the more fiercely, and Eumenes and I left her to it like the cowards men can be.

The stars were out when Thaïs reappeared.

‘A soldier put his hand under her chiton,’ Thaïs said wearily.

‘Bound to happen,’ Eumenes said with a chuckle.

‘If that’s all you have to say, you can say it somewhere else,’ Thaïs spat.

It is interesting – I might have said the same thing myself, and with the same leering chuckle – soldiers are soldiers – except that hearing it from Eumenes, it sounded ugly, and pat.

‘I told her we’d send her back to Artemis,’ Thaïs confessed.

‘Ephesus,’ I proposed.

Eumenes fingered his beard. ‘Well thought,’ he said. The Ionian cities all bore watching. Alexander had offered to rebuild the temple at Ephesus. It wouldn’t hurt us to have family there. And you have to think that way, when you are both a parent and the god of war’s chief of staff.

A few minutes later, Thaïs brought Olympias to us, and she held my knees and wept and begged my forgiveness for her outrageous behaviour.

Why on earth did we name her Olympias?

At any rate, I promised to send her to Ephesus with the next convoy going west, and she kissed us both.

When she left us with Bella, we all three breathed a sigh of relief.

Eumenes watched her go. ‘I’m sending my children to Athens,’ he said quietly.

Thaïs and he exchanged a glance.

I was often the slowest of the three of us – people don’t call me Farm Boy for nothing. ‘What?’

‘Alexander had Parmenio killed,’ Thaïs said slowly, as if she were speaking to Eurydike.

I nodded. We all glanced around. It was like that. We had heard – that day, I guess.

I still hadn’t taken it all in.

Thaïs leaned forward. ‘Alexander sent Polydamus – that little snake – to Cleander and Sitalkes and told them to kill Parmenio immediately. They stabbed him to death in his bed.’

Polydamus was a junior officer of the Hetaeroi, and he even looked like a snake. The king used him for confidential missions.

Eumenes looked at me. ‘Hephaestion and Cleitus get the Hetaeroi,’ he said. ‘You get Demetrios’s spot in the bodyguard.’

I shrugged. I had been somatophylakes for years. The king tended to emphasise it at times, and forget it at others. It was absurdly symbolic that at this point he was going to announce my promotion to the army.

Parmenio was dead. I couldn’t really get it through my thick skull.