God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (129 page)

There weren’t many children left.

I do not remember when it happened. I merely remember that one night Bubores came into my camp – I should explain. I was sitting on my saddlecloth, with my military cloak wrapped around me. Laertes and I were repairing our tack, to make our horses’ lives as easy as we could. We had no tents, no baggage of any kind – everything I owned was on my body or on Amphitrite’s rump. I’d killed my last riding horse the night before, for food, and from him I’d fed forty Hetaeroi and all the surviving Angeloi.

At any rate, Bubores came, and sat on his haunches in that African way in the dying light of the sun. He had a young boy with him, a wizened, dark-skinned boy of four or five.

Laertes held out a cup. ‘Share, friend,’ he said. He’d found us some water, and we didn’t ask him where. Ochrid had done the same, the day before.

Bubores took the cup and gave it to the boy. ‘You remember,’ he said, and his deep voice was strong and even, ‘when the hypaspitoi were new, and we marched on to your farm – and you had slaves and bronze kettles for every man?’ He grinned. ‘I wanted to thank you. Ever since then. I had never owned a slave before, nor had any man treated me that way.’

I laughed. ‘Bubores – you are a soldier of the Aegema, an officer, and you stand by the king. You can tell me this any time. Why now?’

Bubores rattled the necklace of bones he wore around his neck. ‘I will die soon. Perhaps tonight or tomorrow.’ He shrugged. ‘I am paying my debts. I owed you my thanks – never managed to tell you.’

I laughed. ‘Don’t be an irrational arse. You won’t die here.’

His bright eyes met mine, and his look was calm – and like the look new lovers give each other. Trust. Belief. ‘I will die soon,’ he said. ‘And so will most of us. Here? In the desert? Back at Babylon? What does it matter? The king will kill us all.’ He smiled, but it was a bitter smile. ‘It is a hard thing, to reach this point on this long road, and know that I am not the hero. I am the villain. I have killed a thousand men, taken a thousand women, enslaved ten thousand.’ He raised his hands. ‘What does that make me?’

I had never heard him speak this way.

Laertes shook his head and Polystratus, behind me, grunted. ‘Got that right,’ he said quietly.

‘This boy is my son,’ Bubores said. ‘The mother is dead now. The boy is a good boy, and all I have left – what treasure is worth a fuck, out here? Listen, Ptolemy. You are a great man – an aristocrat, a friend of the king. When there is no more food, you will have food. When there is no more water, you will have water for a few more days. I beg you, as an old comrade, to take my son when I am dead.’

Polystratus turned. ‘Just say yes, and don’t protest. Bubores, we’ll protect your son. You have my word.’

Bubores shook my hand, and Laertes’ and Polystratus’s. And then he and the boy went back into the silent darkness.

Two days later, while I walked next to Amphitrite, I saw him. He was walking at my mare’s tail.

I looked at him, and he met my eyes.

‘Pater dead,’ he said.

I gave him water and we walked on.

When we had been fifty days in Gedrosia, give or take a few days, I was with the king. The light was gone from his face. We were burned red brown, and we hadn’t had
any
water in four days. We were losing a thousand men and women a day. There were fewer than two hundred horses left.

We were marching only at night, which made it easier – if stumbling blindly across an endless waste of grit and rock, with no sandals and bleeding feet, bleeding gums, parched throat and no sweat – can be called
easier –
but the sun was rising and we were still going. Alexander was sure we were close to the capital of Gedrosia, called Poura.

We came over a rise, and entered a long valley – a barren, rocky valley that had ancient trees – myrrh trees, the largest any of us had ever seen, with myrrh gum so abundant that we crushed it under our feet as we marched, so that the whole valley smelled as if the gods had come to us. It was absurd, and beautiful, and the smell rose to the heavens, and we had very few dead that day. And I have hated the smell of myrrh ever since.

The next day, we were losing men so fast that I couldn’t stop to prod one without another falling over near by, and men had begun to die – literally, to
die
– on their feet.

I left Amphitrite and Bubores’ son with Polystratus and headed for the king at the very front.

He was walking quickly, using a spear as a staff. Perdiccas and a handful of his bodyguard were with him, and the rest of the army trailed away behind him like an army of spectres, spread, I expect, as far as three hundred stades – at the rate we were moving, there were still living men two weeks’ march behind us.

Again, we marched – or shuffled – all night, and kept going into the dawn.

I had intended to say something to the king. But now that I was following this slim figure into the dawn – with the print of blood from his reopened wounds clear on his chiton – I realised that there was nothing to say. The time to speak, or to act, was so long past . . .

Agrianians came out of the morning murk. There were half a dozen, without an officer, and they clustered around the king as I came up.

They had a Thracian helmet full of water.

It fixed our attention the way a beautiful woman can fix the attention of a hundred men in the agora. I noticed that it was not just water, but
cool
water, which formed condensation on the bronze of the helmet.

The Agrianians knelt, and their leader gave the helmet to Alexander, handing it over with head bowed.

Alexander looked into the bowl of the helmet for a moment. Then he looked around. By then, in the first light of day, there must have been a thousand men, perhaps three or four women, and Bubores’ son.

He smiled.

‘Did you bring enough for everyone?’ he asked.

The Agrianians shook their heads.

Alexander poured the water out on to the sand. ‘I will drink when everyone has drunk. Now lead us to the spring.’

Sometimes, he was easy to love.

On the fifty-ninth day since we had left Patala, we marched into Poura.

We did not march. We shuffled.

Men died from drinking too much water, or too much wine.

When we mustered, six days later, we had eleven thousand infantry, seven thousand cavalry and fewer than six hundred women. Eleven children. Thirty-one horses.

One was Amphitrite.

One of the children was Bubores’ son.

And there was a letter from Thaïs waiting for me. It was lovely – I still have it. It was like water in the desert. And I know what the phrase means.

As soon as we reached civilisation, the killing began again. It was Philotas and Callisthenes and Cleitus the Black, but at a new level of horror, and there were no attacks of remorse in the aftermath. Just a feast of crows.

Cleander died. Sitalkes was killed. A row of Persian satraps, whose principal guilt lay in assuming that their barbarian conqueror would never return. Apollophanes was arrested and dismissed and then executed for failure to supply us. He hadn’t even tried. He never offered an excuse, even under torture.

Astaspes was killed, and a host of men more junior found themselves arrested and murdered. Alexander informed us – and the army – that there had been a conspiracy against him – against all of us – and that the disaster in the Gedrosian was the result of their attempt to murder the army.

Not the result of one man’s hubris.

We marched into Persepolis. More satraps were executed.

What did I do? Heroically, I kept my head down, went to the king’s tent as seldom as possible and commanded my Hetaeroi.

I have not gone into detail about the king’s adoption of Asian ways – beyond asserting that, as always, he tried to please everyone and ended pleasing no one. But after the massacre of the satraps – with Cleitus dead, Nearchus terrified, Perdiccas and I in virtual in-army exile – after that, the king did whatever he liked. And what he liked was to become the King of Kings. He adopted the court costume. He hid himself in the midst of a vast horde of perfumed functionaries who had never held a piece of wood, much less a pike.

At Susa, he held a review of his new army. He had raised a new army – I think I mentioned it – thirty thousand pikemen, all Persians and Medes, trained to a degree of perfection in drill that was both beautiful and a little scary to watch. He reviewed them at Susa, and called them ‘Successors’.

The name meant just what it seemed to mean.

His Macedonians had served their turn, and he was through with them – those he hadn’t killed in the desert, that is. And when the phalanx – that is, the old, at least partially Macedonian phalanx – grumbled, he referred to the Successors by another name. Because the assembly of the pezhetaeroi was often called the ‘Tagma’. And Alexander called his Persian phalanx the ‘Antitagma’.

Another name that meant just what it seemed to mean.

It took months for the king to lay his plans, but when he acted, he did so with the thorough planning that characterised him on the battlefield.

He held the mass wedding – everyone knows the story – and thousands of his men took Persian wives. It was a magnificent ceremony.

It was also one of the truly good, well-thought-out, well-devised acts of his reign.

I was no longer needed for military planning, but at Susa, one afternoon, the king met Thaïs, recently come up from Babylon – or rather, he heard her unmistakable fingers on a kithara and invited her to help him plan the weddings. And she brought me.

Once again, the king looked at me over a military desk and smiled. ‘Too long since I have seen you,’ he said, and embraced me.

Again.

It required the kind of planning that a fortress requires, or a campaign. Ten thousand men, ten thousand brides. Gifts, priests of every religion required, dowries, food.

Twenty thousand people drink forty thousand amphorae of wine. Eat five thousand sheep and five thousand goats. Require twenty thousand slaves to wait on them, and the slaves have to be fed, too.

Ten thousand brides require ten thousand bridal dresses. Even if you want them to sew their own, the cloth has to come from somewhere. So does the jewellery.

Inside? What building can house this? Outside, what place is beautiful enough?

And so on.

The weddings were in the Persian manner, the men sitting in chairs, the women coming to stand by them. So we needed ten thousand chairs.

It might have been chaos, but the king put ten thousand talents of silver at our disposal, and we did the thing well. The king offered me a Persian bride, and I grinned.

‘I want to marry Thaïs,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I intend to marry Barsines,’ he said.

‘Barsines?’ I remember smiling. ‘Not Banugul? I thought you preferred her.’

He looked very human, then. Looked out over the mountains, towards Hyrkania. ‘Perhaps it is the very fact that she prefers to rule her little kingdom among the wolves,’ he said. ‘I generally prefer what I cannot have.’

I was still stunned by the self-knowledge evident in that statement when I reported it to Thaïs that night, as we lay, she half atop me, her head on my shoulder. She still smelled like herself, she still looked like herself . . .

‘He knows what he is,’ she said. ‘He merely ignores it, most of the time.’

I shook my head in the darkness lit by a single lamp. Her skin glowed.

As usual, I wanted her.

‘Will you marry me?’ I asked, when we had made love.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t charge you, either way,’ she mocked me.

‘If I don’t marry you, the king means to give me a Persian girl of fourteen years,’ I shot back.

‘I could use someone to help around the tent,’ she said, running her hand across my penis. ‘To watch Eurydike. Perhaps teach her Persian, since it will be
such
an
important
language when she is grown.’ She was matching actions to the rhythm of her words.

We giggled.

We made love again, which, after all my body had suffered over the last years, was a sort of Aphrodite-sent miracle in itself. And I asked her again.

‘Will you marry me?’

The lamp was out, and the tent was dark.

‘I really have to ask Bella,’ she said. ‘And what of all my other clients?’

‘Thaïs!’ I said.

She laughed and laughed.

And when I was slipping off into a sated sleep, she whispered, ‘Of course.’

The weddings were superb. The food was good, and the priests – all six hundred of them – were on time. Our adoptive children were officiants – both of them. Barsulas had sailed with Nearchus and had swum with whales in the eastern Ocean, and Olympias was a full priestess of Artemis and had come all the way from Ephesus with ten other priests of the goddess.

People today speak of the weddings as if they all passed off in one meadow, or one great temple, but in fact the weddings took over every part of Susa, and our part was at the Temple of Astarte, to which I gave two talents in gold for offerings and a great gold amphora that I’d taken in India and my son had got home by ship – because, if you are wondering, not a single coin of plunder made it across the Gedrosian Desert. And I sat in my Persian chair, in Persian dress – oh, a nice long coat, baggy trousers, the whole costume – because the king’s actual intention was to begin the acculturation of his Macedonian staff to the world of ruling the Persian Empire.

I sat in my chair, and Thaïs came, veiled in silk gauze, and after the Priestess of Aphrodite had said all the words, I rose, threw back her veil and kissed her lips, and her blue eyes stayed on mine for a long time.

I think that would be a good place to end. Thaïs and I, on thrones, and Polystratus and his Persian bride Artacama, Laertes and Theodore with their brides, Barsulas with his bride, a magnificent girl and a rich heiress named Artonis, and all of our friends who we could gather – all the survivors of my group of pages. Philip the Red was there, and he wed another beauty, Amastrine, who seemed shocked to be offered a cup of wine by a man not her husband. You see – we carried through the weddings in the Persian manner, because the king had commanded it, and he was paying.