God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (107 page)

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.