God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (114 page)

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.