God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

THIRTY-FOUR

Anyone who served with Alexander that year calls it the same – the ‘Summer of Spitamenes’.

Go down to the waterfront, find a soldier’s wine shop and offer to buy a round. Then ask the men with grey hair from Macedon who was the most dangerous enemy we ever faced. Memnon was brilliant, and daring. Darius was cautious, capable and resilient.

To my mind, Spitamenes was brilliant, daring, capable and resilient. If he had known when to be cautious – if he had had any reliable troops . . .

It was the year Cephisophon was archon in Athens. We had beaten every army in the world from Sparta to Persia.

And then came Spitamenes.

Just in time. Let me explain.

We took Marakanda without a sword being loosened in its scabbard – the first town worthy of the name we’d seen north of the Oxus, and we were happy to use its markets. It was a major entrepôt, too, and I received two letters – long, lovely letters – from Thaïs, full of love and information. Olympias was safely ensconced in the great Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and enclosed a note begging my forgiveness. Thaïs was at Babylon, with a house and forty servants and all my treasure, bless her.

I went out of my tent, I remember, and I built an altar with my own hands, out beyond the horse lines. Polystratus helped me, and Strako, and Eumenes the Cardian came when I was done. I invited Astibus and Bubares, Theophilus of the Hetaeroi, Philip the Red, Amyntas son of Philip from Craterus’s taxeis, and Ochrid, now not only a freeman but the head of my household, my steward. My son sacrificed a white ram in the dawn, and I swore to wed Thaïs if I made it alive back to Babylon. I swore to Zeus-Apis to build a temple in Alexandria to his glory, and I have not been a laggard in that, have I? And the others swore similar oaths. It made every one of us feel closer to home, and Barsulas spoke to us in the new light as we roasted our shares of the ram over the ashes.

‘You think the gods have forgotten you,’ he said. ‘But they are here, all around us, every day, I promise you.’

I think he was right – but I know he put heart into every one of us. Even the king loved him – and consulted him often enough that his seer and his other priests became jealous.

But enough of my life. Our supply lines now ran from the coast of the Persian Gulf upriver and over two mountain ranges. A recruit coming from Macedon had to march from Pella to the Pontus, cross on a ship, march to Babylon, then down to the gulf, take ship to Hormuz, then march upcountry to the king. New armour, good swords, decent spearheads, long ash hafts for sarissas, any kind of olive oil, letters from home – everything had to crawl up this lifeline.

Alexander was aware of it. He left four taxeis under Craterus, with ten squadrons of local cavalry, to hold Bactria behind us and he took the rest of the army north and farther east, to explore the northern borders of the Persian Empire.

It made me happy just to hear him say the word border. A border implied a limit, and if we had a limit, then perhaps some day we’d all march home.

The nightly drinking had reached epic proportions. It had started after Darius’s death – in fact, Alexander had always drunk too much when the mood was on him – but the last year, he was drunk every night.

In fact, he was bored, in the first weeks of that summer.

In a way – a distant, godlike way – it was interesting to study him when he was bored. He became increasingly irritable; he tended to focus on things of no importance whatsoever, which confused men who didn’t really know him, such as Callisthenes and Aristander. His focus could suddenly fall on exercise, on medicine, on the power of prophecy, on the colour of a man’s excrement as influenced by food. And then, for days, that focus would consume him.

We were south of the Jaxartes, in the brownest country I have ever seen. Thirty of us were lying on portable klines by a bonfire – it was the little Heraklion, and we’d had a day of contests. I hadn’t won anything, but I had that pleasant level of fatigue that comes with the agon.

Hephaestion came and lay down on my couch. I had avoided him since the torture of Philotas. He knew it. But he lay down.

‘Philotas was never one of us,’ Hephaestion said.

And at some horrible base level, that was true. I knew what he meant. He meant that he didn’t owe Philotas the kind of emotive loyalty that he owed me, or any of the other men who’d survived childhood at Philip’s court.

It was an olive branch.

‘No,’ I said. That was my dove back to him.

He nodded. His head was on his arms, and he was watching a trio of lewd slave girls writhe. They weren’t any good – they’d been used too hard, paid too little and they assumed men were brutes. It is one of the delightful, horrible complexities of the human condition – soldiers want girls who want them, not whores. They’ll take whores, but only if the whores behave as if they want the soldiers.

Makes you laugh, in a nasty way, doesn’t it?

Ares, you’re thirteen. My apologies, lad.

At any rate, he watched them. And then he grunted. Rolled over.

‘I need help,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to manage the king all by myself. He needs . . .’ Hephaestion made a sign of aversion – the peasant sign, with two fingers.

‘O phile pais, I’ve known Alexander since he was five,’ I said. Hephaestion had seldom asked me, or anyone else, for help before. So I put an arm around his shoulder and he let his head sink on his arms. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘The matter?’ Hephaestion looked at me, and his eyes held more rage than sorrow. ‘He’s fucking cut himself off from everyone, and doesn’t know how to get back.’

‘Does he want to get back?’ I asked.

Hephaestion hid his head. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘He just wants to be god.’

Hephaestion must have manipulated the king, one way or another, because I was promoted from king’s friend to the Persian equivalent of somatophylakes a day later, and suddenly Alexander wanted me to ride with him.

We were on the Oxus, and the day before I’d met a Sakje while on patrol and bartered a fine mare for a superb bow and fifty arrows in a gorytos. I’m not much of an archer, but I loved a thing well made and I’d just determined – back then – to write a book about my travels. I had my journal and the Military Journal, but I was not so different from the king, and I, too, wanted to know – Is this all there is? The idea of writing a travel book made me happy.

Perhaps you have to be fifteen thousand stades from home for this to make sense.

And the conversation with the Sakje man made me happy, perhaps because he met me with a grin, chose to trust my patrol and no one was killed. I had become so inured to killing every fucking stranger I came across that sharing the white horse milk that the Sakje think is delicious was fun. He ate our onion sausage, we ate his deer meat and he rode away richer by two horses and without one of his bows, and Cyrus, who was at my side the whole time, actually laughed. Out loud.

Never mind. You have to make war for a long, long time for a man’s laugh to seem alien. But these are the things that stick in my head.

I left my squadrons with Polystratus. He was an officer, now – increasingly, a trusted officer. No one doubted that he was an aristocrat. Think of it! From Thracian slave to Macedonian cavalry officer! Mind you, he was a superb officer – but such a thing would never have happened if our lines hadn’t been so long. Ochrid, my steward, now routinely gave orders to fifty slaves. He often helped me with the logistika and would casually order out a patrol for forage. No one doubted his place, although he had started out as my slave. What seemed like a lifetime before.

I rode along with the king, and he affected to be delighted to see me. By luck, his latest passion – dice – had burned itself out.

‘Nearchus is on his way to us,’ I said. I was handling the incoming letters. Eumenes was trying to establish even the most basic level of intelligence collection in Sogdiana and Transoxiana, and he had – in one of those role reversals impossible to enemies and simple to friends – asked me to run the Journal for a few days while he tried to get a network of agents in Marakanda.

‘Nearchus?’ Alexander looked at the mountains to either side for as long as it takes a man to breathe three or four times. ‘Ah! Nearchus!’

For a moment, you see, the king didn’t know of whom I was speaking.

‘Remember shooting bows, lord?’ I asked. My false innocence was glaring to Hephaestion, and he looked at me, but Alexander noticed nothing.

He glanced at me.

‘Look at this,’ I said, and held out my new bow.

He all but snatched it from my hands.

For nine days, we shot everything that moved. I gave him my fine bow, and Cyrus, bless him, took a patrol north of the Oxus and exchanged a dozen local horses for five good bows, so that the inner circle all had them.

The king had a dozen Sakje hostages, and he brought a woman out to see her shoot. He was intending to mock her, and he was already shooting well, although his forefinger and thumb were bleeding from the Sakje release, which Cyrus taught us. Cyrus used a leather thumb ring and had a thumb callus as deep as a coin, but Alexander was above such things.

‘Amazons!’ he laughed, as we rode along.

The woman who joined us, between two guards, was heavily pregnant. She was beautiful – in a deadly, feral way, and pregnancy neither softened nor diminished her. And she rode like a satyr – which is to say, the horse seemed part of her. The king had met her a dozen times, and she’d famously threatened to geld Hephaestion, which made her a bit of a favourite among the inner circle.

She spoke beautiful Greek – accented, but pure Athenian. Well, we both know why, don’t we?

The king had set a dozen targets by the trail – we were well in advance of the army, moving south along the Jaxartes. The first was about ten horse lengths from the rocky road, the next was a little farther, and so on, until the last was easily a hundred paces to the south of the road.

The king came up to the Sakje woman with her two guards – both, as it happened, men from Philotas’s former squadron.

‘My apologies, lady, but the guards say you begged to be allowed to ride.’ He smiled. ‘I thought perhaps you could show us some shooting.’

Hephaestion was smirking. This was for him – she was being humiliated to please the bastard.

Well, I know she was your mother, but at the time she was just some barbarian captive, and if that’s what it took to keep the king happy, I was willing enough.

She looked at Alexander with contempt. I suspect that wasn’t a look he received often. I wonder if the novelty of it drew him to her. She held out her hand for the bow he carried.

He held it out, but snatched it back, and we all laughed at her eagerness. Macedonian humour.

‘You want to kill us all,’ he said. ‘Please remember that we have your other ladies. They would not survive any dramatic performances. And neither would you.’ He pointed to where a pair of the army’s engineers stood with their crossbows.

She shrugged. He gave her the bow, and she flexed it. ‘Heavy,’ she said. And held out her hand for his quiver.

Alexander gave it to her with unaccustomed hesitation. ‘You will shoot the targets, and only the targets,’ he said. ‘Let’s see how many you can hit. Show us how the Sakje shoot. And perhaps – perhaps I’ll send you back to your husband.’

He smiled at her. He was used to the responses of men who lived and died at his whim, so his smile was expectant.

She laughed. ‘It amazes me that a man so foolish could have conquered so much,’ she said. And took his quiver.

She put her heels to the barrel of her horse the moment the strap of the gorytos touched her palm, and her horse – a small gelding – went straight to a gallop. And she screamed – a long, ululating yell. As she rode, she twisted her body, and the quiver fell down her arm and she buckled it into place, riding at a full gallop with no hands, the bow pinned under her right knee, and then it was back in her hand and an arrow leaped from her bow and shot through the king’s first target.

At that point, we’d been shooting that bow mounted for a week. None of us had even considered loosing arrows at a gallop.

Her second arrow went into the second target.

Her third arrow went into the third target.

She hit every target.

Then she turned her horse and rode back to us. Men were applauding, and Hephaestion had the good grace to join them.

She was coming at us at a gallop. I noticed that she had arrows in her fingers.

Suddenly, she angled her horse a little to the north, turned – remember, she was eight months pregnant.

She was shooting backwards.

Her first arrow was shot at the most distant target.

She drew and loosed, drew, loosed, drew and loosed, so fast that I couldn’t follow all the movements of her arm. She was still riding away from the targets at a dead gallop.

Drew and loosed and drew and loosed.

Her horse turned under her – a sudden turn on her bow side – and she loosed the arrow on the bow and drew and loosed again.

And again.

I was holding my breath.

Her first six arrows struck. She’d shot from farthest to closest, so that they all struck at the same time.

She cantered her gelding across the rocky slope, to the side of the king.

‘Good bow,’ she said, and handed it to him.

Later that same afternoon, a Corinthian athlete offered to demonstrate his skills as a hoplomachos. He’d made a claim about what a good fighter he was, and the king was in a foul mood, overheard the boast and ordered the man to dismount right there, strip and fight.

He looked around, and his eye fell on Coenus.

One of our very best.

Coenus dismounted and summoned a slave to help him take off his armour, but Alexander spat. ‘If he’s so very good, this Greek, he can fight naked with a club. Like Herakles. And you can wear your armour.’

The Greek was all but weeping with frustration. He was prepared to apologise, but the king was in no mood. The archery had ruined his day – he’d ordered the woman and her companions to be taken to Marakanda under escort.

Coenus was uneasy. He could be a brute, but the Greek – despite a superb physique – was not a big man, and he looked inoffensive – naked, with a club. Coenus looked at the king. The king shook his head. ‘Just kill him,’ he said.

The naked man was an Olympic athlete who had come all this way to train Alexander’s soldiers.

Coenus – our Coenus, not your father’s friend – wouldn’t have lasted this long if he hadn’t been absolutely obedient. He turned, drew his sword and set his shield.

The naked boy came forward, edging crabwise.

Coenus struck, thrusting his shield into the man’s body and cutting hard, overhand.

The Greek slid inside the cut, broke his arm and knocked him unconscious with his club in one blow.

Fight over.

Alexander drew his bow from the gorytos, nocked an arrow and shot the Greek. The arrow went in just over his kidneys, and he fell screaming.

His screams pursued us down the ridge.

Hephaestion looked at me, and I just shook my head at him. I couldn’t think of what to say, or do, but for the first time, I considered two things.

Riding away from the army and taking my chances with the king ordering me killed.

Or killing Alexander.

That night, six of us had a secret meeting. It was a conspiracy – we all knew we could be killed for having the discussion. I swore never to repeat what we said, or who was there. It was a desperate hour, and a desperate oath. So I won’t tell you – except that we discussed options.

When we were done, Hephaestion held me back. ‘Barsines or her sister,’ he said. ‘Bagoas turns my stomach, but he’d do, too.’

Well, it was better than regicide. I nodded. ‘But we have to get through the weeks until he finds a sex toy or we can import one,’ I said.

Hephaestion shook his head. ‘We need something as good as the bow was. And we need it to stay beautiful.’ His bronze hair glittered in the firelight. It was already cold in the mountains.

‘Horses? Playing Polis? How silk is made?’ I was talking to hear myself. I wanted Thaïs. I wanted to drink wine with Polystratus and Cyrus, or Marsyas. I wanted to stop being afraid.

Hephaestion shook his head. ‘He’s close to the edge,’ he said. ‘What do we do?’

I didn’t have an answer.

I went to bed.

Polystratus wakened me while the stars were still turning overhead. ‘Listen!’ he said. ‘The king wants you.’

I got out of my cloak, wrapped it back around me and ran for his tent – terrified, in a sleepy, cold way, that he’d done something. Killed Hephaestion.

But they were sitting together.

He was smiling, his face easy and unlined, his eyes glittering.

‘Listen, Ptolemy!’ he said. ‘Spitamenes is in revolt, and he’s slaughtered all seven of our new garrisons.’

Hephaestion looked at me. His eyes said everything.

Alexander went on, ‘He’s raised the whole province while we were playing at archery – and he’s cut us off from the main army. We’re surrounded. And our supply lines are cut.’ He fingered his beard. And smiled.

Hephaestion smiled.

Hades, I smiled myself.

Alexander looked up from the dispatch. ‘Gentlemen, I think we might have a war on our hands,’ he said.

We were saved.