God of War -The Story of Alexander the Great

We were the size of a small army when we rode out the next morning – fifty royal companions, more than a hundred retainers and grooms, ten baggage carts, grain, pork, jars of wine, casks of silver. But we were getting away clean, and any idea of pursuit was a day late. We slept in the open that night, and on one of my northern farms the next.

I think it was three days into our exile that we were all sleeping on the floor of the ‘hall’ of my poorest farm – a timber hall shorter in length than my great hall at home was wide. Our companions were packed in like salted anchovies from the coast. I sent twenty grooms ahead under Polystratus with all the slaves from the northern farms, to clear the road over the mountains, buy food and prepare the way.

It was pouring rain. Some of the slaves were weeping – their lives were hard already, and being driven out into the winter was pretty cruel. Of course, they didn’t know the half of it. If Attalus came here . . .

But the women wept. The rain fell. And Prince Alexander was sleeping on the floor of a frontier farm. He was between me and Hephaestion. I was lying there in my cloak, listening to the rain, and thinking – I remember this very well – of Thaïs. Not Nike. Such is the power of lust and time. I was imagining . . . well, never you mind.

Alexander was weeping.

I’d never heard him weep before.

So I tore myself from Taïs’s imagined embraces. ‘My lord?’

‘Go away,’ he whispered.

Hephaestion was sound asleep and no help.

‘Lord, we’re almost to the mountains and safety,’ I said.

‘Thanks,’ he said. Dismissively.

‘Lord—’

‘Fuck off,’ he hissed.

I rolled over, so that we were eye to eye. Once, I’d have let him go. But we had put too much behind us – together. ‘Talk to me,’ I whispered.

‘I’m going to die some fat old fuck at someone else’s court!’ he said. ‘I’ll wash up in Asia or Athens, and men will point at me and say – there’s the victor of Chaeronea. What happened to him? FuckPhilip! Maybe he isn’t my father. I should have killed him while he lay there. Then I’d be king. Now I will be no one.’

Well – what do you say to that? Eh?

‘You know what exiles are like? Hatching useless plots, to feel alive? Fondling slaves, because no free person will be with them? They become like family retainers, or old slaves – drones, feeding off the fat of the house and contributing nothing, with no excellence, no arete – nothing to offer.’ Alexander knew what he was talking about, because there were generations of exiles around the fringes of the Macedonian court – Persians, Athenians, even a Spartan. And we’d seen more of them in Athens. Thracians, Persians, even a Scythian prince from the far north.

His voice was thick with unshed tears.

I reached out, squeezed his shoulder hard – and said, ‘You don’t sound like Achilles, to me.’

Macedonians aren’t big on gentle.

He froze as if I’d stuck a dagger into him.

His breath shuddered in and out a few times. Then it steadied down.

I went to sleep.

In the morning, nothing more was said. Except that the man who vaulted into the saddle was the man who led the cavalry charge at Chaeronea.

EIGHT

We passed most of the winter in Epirus, at a court so barbarous that Pella seemed like Athens, and suddenly Olympias seemed a great deal less alien than before. She was a child of this world at the edge of chaos.

I tell this out of order, but I remember once when she came to visit us – she had her own court at Epirus, and as a princess of the blood she had the sort of loyalty there that she probably missed at home – men who would die for her. At any rate, Alexander had his own rooms, and we were having – that is, I was throwing – an Athenian-style symposium. We were lying on couches, and the subject of the debate was love, and I was thinking of Thaïs – not that I loved her, but that she was worthy of love.

Alexander smiled at Hephaestion. ‘I love Hephaestion, because he is me, and I am he,’ he said.

Truth to tell, we groaned aloud then threw things at him. Which was a good sign, because it meant we were starting to heal. Going into exile is like losing a battle, or taking a beating, or failing, or losing a loved one. It hurts, and the hurt can last a long time.

At any rate, we were lying on our couches philosophising, and she swept in without warning. So perfect was her intelligence net – it always was – that she got past our sentries with all her women – she knew when the guards changed, and when the sentries were lax, and when men went off for a quick fumble – perhaps withone of her maids.

The women entered first – a dozen of them, in beautiful wools, and their arrival froze our talk. Her arrival – her beauty, even her perfume – trapped us like bars of adamantine. No one moved.

She stood in the middle of the room – in fact, in my memory, she is alwaysat the centre of the room – and she looked around slowly. When her eyes met mine, she smiled.

‘Son of Lagus,’ she said warmly. ‘You do my son good service.’

Lovely words, but they chilled me to the bone. And despite that, as I’ve said before, I desired her.

She went and sat on Alexander’s couch. ‘You are safe here,’ she said.

He grimaced.

She slapped his side. ‘Don’t play your foolish boys’ Athenian games with me,’ she said. ‘This is Epirus, not Athens, and I can go where I want. Don’t pretend that I ca

Alexander was not happier for that.

She smiled at him, a little motherly superiority etched between her brows. ‘You so want to be men. But you are boys. It was well done, getting here, but now you need me. We will raise an army, and Philip will see reason. You will see. And everything will be as it was.’

Alexander looked at his mother, and for once he told her the truth. ‘I do not want it as it was.’

She laughed. But her laugh got no echo.

‘He will relent. As he gets older, it is harder and harder for him to see—’

‘I will kill him, if I must,’ Alexander said.

And she met his eye, and something passed between them. And she smiled. ‘If it comes to that,’ she said.

And he gri

She ruled Epirus. Not exactly ruled, but she did as she liked there, and we saw clearly what she came from, and what had made her so sure of herself, so like a goddess come to earth – I mean one of the less human, more vengeful sorts of goddesses.

Beyond Epirus, men wore skins and tattoos, and no one knew the rule of law. At the ‘court’ of Epirus, most of the warriors had never heard of Aristotle. Or Plato. Or the Iliad. There were men like rhapsodes, and they sang songs – endless tales of the borders, where one man killed another in a litany of violence. I admit that the Iliadcan sound that way, but it is the Iliad. These songs were long and dull and had no story beyond the blood, the infidelity of women, the perfidiousness of the cowardly, the greatness of the men of pure blood – come to think of it, this does sound like the Iliad, but the difference is that the Iliadis beautiful and powerful and these were dull. And monotonous.

There were Keltoi at Epirus – tribal barbarians from the north and west, with red hair, tattoos and superb swords and metalwork, and tall tales – better tales than the Epirote singers sang, about gods in chariots and beautiful women. One of the Keltoi mercenaries there made up a song that slighted Olympias, and she had him killed.

Remarkably, the other Keltoi took no offence.

It was there, at the ‘court’ of Epirus, that my lifelong love of writing really started. I had very little to do – for the first time in my life. We organised the companions and the grooms into a rotation of watches on the prince – but with fifty men at arms and a hundred grooms, we each only had a watch every ten days.