God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (109 page)

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.