God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (17 page)

Pella seethed. They were plotting – I could feel it when I spoke to my father by the hearth. It was the last time I saw him. I could tell from the way he held his tongue that he knew something. Even now, I’m not sure what he knew – not sure what the plots were. It is essential to understand this, to understand Alexander. The old families and the generals were plotting every minute – when Philip appeared weak. When he was strong, they fawned. That was Macedon. Our foes were gathering, Philip had vanished and Alexander wouldn’t say where he was, and the men of power were looking for a plot to save themselves, their rich farms and their hoards of gold. Attalus was part of it. Parmenio was not, I’d swear to it.

I was learning about court. Certainly I had grown up there, and I knew most of the dirt – but I was suddenly old enough to see other things, listen to mutterings under the eaves, watch whose slave appeared at whose door. There was political intrigue, there were love affairs . . .

I remember an evening in autumn. I was standing on the Royal Terrace, because I was about to go on duty, and the prince came out, alone. I had not been alone with Alexander in a month. He hardly spoke to me.

But that day, he grinned his famous grin and came across to me. ‘You know where my pater is, Ptolemy?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘Guess,’ he said. ‘It will be public knowledge in an hour.’

I shrugged. ‘Thebes,’ I said.

Alexander threw his arms around me. ‘You are intelligent,’ he said.

Indeed, while I was smarter than the Athenian ambassadors, I’m not sure everyone was fooled. But they were fooled enough to keep their troops waiting for us in the Chersonese and in the autumn, Philip caught them flat-footed, and occupied the passes west of the Gates of Fire.

Demosthenes rose in the Athenian Assembly and demanded an army to meet Philip in the field. It was the best speech of his career. Athens answered with ten thousand hoplites and another ten thousand mercenaries, and by a matter of days’ marching, beat Philip into the southern passes and kept him out of Boeotia. My guess about Thebes had been premature.

But Philip sat at his end of the passes and watched the Persian–Athenian détente crumble. The Persians wanted nothing more than to see Athens and Macedon and Thebes rip into one another, and the Persian gold was cut off, the Persian fleet went home and Macedon was saved. Demosthenes spent the winter egging Athens on to greatness, or so he claimed. But as I had predicted at the trout dinner, the democracy did much of the work to destroy the Persian alliance themselves.

Philip sent orders home that we should raise two more taxeis of infantry and train the pages harder. But he also ordered that the pages be promoted to royal companions. We were going to be adults. And when we’d trained the new recruits, we were to bring them to Philip in the field. Father and son were going to war together.

That winter, my father died, and I fell in love. I believe in love – many men don’t – and it had been my friend all my life. And my first love was linked to the death of my father.

Many men said then that I was Philip’s bastard son. That Philip put me on my mother – by rape, in an affair. And the gods know my pater was always fairly distant. On the other hand, he was closer than Philip ever was to me or to Alexander, for that matter. He didn’t have much time for me until I was eleven or twelve, but after that, when I was home from being a page, Pater listened to my tales of the hunt and the court, took me with him on business visits around our farms and we went hunting together ourselves. Some of my best memories are of sitting in the hall, on a stool by the hearth, surrounded by Pater’s great boar hounds. We talked about everything, solved many of the world’s problems, and Pater became quite a fan of Aristotle – actually bought two of his books and read them, which was quite a turn-up for a boar-hunting lord in the wilds of central Macedon.

Pater never discussed my birth directly. But once, when he was at court – a rare event in itself – Attalus made direct reference to it. And Pater smiled at him and rubbed his nose – his long hawk’s beak of a nose.

My nose, too.

My guess is that Mater and Philip were lovers – by his will, I suspect. But the child she bore her husband was theirs. He honoured her all her life, and there was a well-tended shrine to her after her death. Not that Philip ever visited it, either way. If he’d visited the graves of all his lovers, he’d have done nothing else.

Some time in late autumn, when there was snow in the passes and the snowline was creeping over the higher fields, when small farmers stayed in, weaving baskets and carving new handles for axes, and the great families had dangerous feasts where everyone drank too much, slept with the wrong people and killed each other with knives – word came to court that my pater was ill, and Alexander brought me the news himself. I was in Antipater’s rooms, copying documents like a scribal slave – lists of equipment issued to our new recruits. Dull stuff, but the very sinews of Ares, and Alexander insisted that it be done right.

He came in, a scroll rolled in his fist. ‘Ptolemy,’ he said, in that way of his that made you feel like you were his only friend, the centre of his world. He embraced me.

By Zeus, I loved him.

At any rate, he unrolled the scroll – even in a crisis, he couldn’t ever stop explaining his latest enthusiasm, and this was no crisis. ‘Have you read Isocrates?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said cautiously. It wasn’t always good to admit ignorance with Alexander.

‘Another Athenian – but oh, he has some beautiful ideas. He says it is time for a crusade of all the Hellenes against Persia.’ Alexander held up the scroll and read. He read well – he had a good voice.

Isocrates.

I had a soft spot for Isocrates, because he was a Plataean, and the Plataeans were, to me, the real heroes of Marathon and of all the subsequent campaigns against Persia. Aristotle used some of Isocrates’s speeches in training us. So I was, like any good friend, prepared to be pleased and to support Alexander’s latest passion.

And I have to say that, at that time, every side and every voice in the Hellenic world was advocating a crusade against Persia. First, the Persian court and Persian army and every satrapy in Asia were now full of Hellenes, growing rich, writing letters home to describe in detail the riches of Asia and the relative ease with which it could all be conquered. Every boy in the world – the Greek-speaking world – read Xenophon’s
Anabasis
at school, and every one of us saw Persia as the empire we would conquer. If our thoughts had carried physical manifestation (something Pythagoras apparently advocated at one time) then Persepolis would have had a bull’s-eye painted across its walls like a Cretan archery target a hundred feet tall.

In addition, every faction in Greece saw a universal crusade against the Mede as the salvation of the endless infighting – Athens against Sparta, Sparta against Thebes, Thebes against Thessaly against Macedon against Athens. Even Philip advocated such a war – as long as he could command it. And there, my friend, was the rub. Everyone imagined that we would all cooperate – even Athens and Macedon – if we could get to grips with the King of Kings, but no one wanted to play second flute, so to speak.

Alexander raced back to his quarters and reappeared with a whole bag of Isocrates. ‘Read these while you go to your father!’ he said.

Now by this point I’d been one of his inner circle for more than a year, and we hunted together – sometimes just the two of us – played Polis, threw knucklebones and sparred daily. I knew him pretty well – but the brilliance and brittleness of his moods still caught me by surprise. He could change topics faster than anyone I’ve ever met. Other men made allusions to femininity – women are supposed to have fickle minds, or so I’m told – but Alexander’s intellectual whims came with spear-points of iron and a will of adamantine, and there was nothing effeminate about them. Only lesser men ever thought so. What happened was that Alexander would finish a subject – often inside his head, with no reference to friends or other company – and
move on
. If you were up to his speed, you could reason out where he’d gone. If you weren’t, he left you behind all the time, and eventually stopped trying to talk to you.

In this case, all he’d done was share his passion for Isocrates first, and then remember that he hadn’t told me the reason for his visit to Antipater’s rooms. My pater was dying or already dead. I was requested.

‘Take all the time you want,’ Alexander said. ‘I know you love him – I’ve seen the two of you together.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I am envious.’

What do you say to that? He was envious. He and his pater were locked in a competition when they ought to have been pulling in harness like matched chariot horses.

‘I am lucky, lord,’ I said. ‘Pater has treated me as a man – since before I was one.’

‘Men say Philip is your father,’ Alexander said. He didn’t mean it to hurt. ‘Yet despite the slur, your father sees you as a . . . a
person.
’ He shrugged.

‘Lagus is my father.’ I was on dangerous ground here.

‘I agree. If Philip was your father, you’d be better-looking.’ Alexander smiled. ‘You are the only one of my close friends with his own estates and his own power – and yet you are completely loyal. Why?’

Chasms were opening at my feet, and legions of Titans preparing to rend me limb from limb. He had that look in his eye.

‘Habit?’ I answered, with a wink.

Alexander stopped, and his face became still for a moment, and then he barked a laugh. ‘By Herakles my ancestor, Ptolemy. Get you gone. Send your pater my respects, if he is alive to hear them, and tell him his son is somatophylax to the prince.’

‘I am?’ I said. I was delighted – for all his moodiness, he was my prince, and I wanted to serve.

He put a gold ring in my hand. ‘You are.’

I still wear the ring. I earned it a thousand times, and I never betrayed his trust. Until I killed him.

Pater was still alive when I arrived – on the mend, it appeared. So we dined by the hearth, all the old servants happy to have me home – Pater was an excellent master, had freed all the good slaves already and paid them wages, and men competed to go to our estates. It always baffled me that men had other ways of dealing with their slaves and serfs than Pater’s – he was hard but fair, quick to reward. Who thinks that there’s another way? I think it is like raising children. Good estate management takes a few more minutes than bad estate management, just as a little time and a few words are the difference between a good child and a bad one.

We had a good dinner, and I showed off my ring, and Pater beamed at me with approval. I saw him to bed, kissed him and gave him Alexander’s respects, and he frowned.

‘Your prince is mad,’ he said. ‘Steer a careful course, my son. He is no Philip.’

I didn’t lash out – I only said, ‘My prince is worth ten of Philip.’

Pater shook his head. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But Philip is already looking to be rid of him.’

That was like icy water down my back. ‘What?’

Pater shrugged, coughed and drank off a huge dollop of poppy juice. ‘I’ve said too much,’ he whispered. ‘But people tell me things – and I have some of Attalus’s slaves – they’ve run from him. He’s a dangerous man – more like a felon than a general.’ He nodded.

‘Where are these slaves?’ I asked.

Pater smiled. ‘Safe. Ask Heron.’ Heron was his steward. ‘You are an excellent son. Get a wife and make some more! That’s my only advice, lad. You have the rest in your hand. Oh – and don’t forget to breed Narcissa in the spring.’ Narcissa was a big mare – beautiful and wilful and not very interested in boys, but the largest, heaviest, fastest mare we’d ever had.

I held his hand, found myself choked with tears, reminded myself that he was going to be there for a few more nights at least, and let the nurse have him.

He was dead in the morning. He stayed alive for a few days on poppy and willpower to speak to me one last time.

I’m going to cry now.

The gods know I cried then. I wept for a couple of hours, and then I got up and went riding. I rode over our home farms – three farms that had been in the family for ever, since we were smaller men, I suspect – it was winter, and the leaves were off the trees and it was pissing rain, and I didn’t care.

I rode up the hill – we had a big hill in the middle of our property, with an ancient ruined stone tower from the old people at the top. I looked out over all of it – my land as far as my eyes could see, or close enough.

Then I rode back down and buried my pater. He was never a king, or a general. He spurned the court, and mostly he was interested in breeding horses and dogs and cattle and pigs. But he was an excellent father and husband and lord to his people.

Heron understood that there had to be changes. So I spent two weeks – right through the winter festival of lights – sitting in my pater’s chair. I dispensed some justice, walked some boundaries and talked to Heron about the future of the estates. The problem was that most men like me had some brothers or sisters – even bastards – to hold the home fort, so to speak. I was a close friend of the prince, and in twenty years I had every expectation of being a general, or a King’s Councillor, or something better. Satrap? Really, when I was seventeen, I saw no limit to my ambition.

Pretty accurate, as it turned out.

So I wasn’t going to run my estates myself.

Menander and all the ‘New Comedy’ is filled with bad stewards and rapacious managers stealing from lord and peasant alike. Those stereotypes exist for a reason. Heron didn’t want my unlimited trust. He wanted a system of checks and balances to keep him honest. He was a fair man, and he knew that if I rode away and ignored him – well, he’d be under strain.

So for two weeks we hammered out a new administration of my estates, with what was, in effect, a regency council. Heron ran the council, and I got his oldest son, Laodekes, a vacancy as a page. In effect, I ennobled Heron, and his son became my hostage.

That’s Macedon, friend.

At some point in my time at home, I met Nike. She was a house servant – by no means a slave, but rather the daughter of one of Heron’s closest friends, brought in to learn the management of a house before she had her own. She was fifteen, with Aphrodite’s figure and a nose that aimed at the outright conquest of her face. She was pretty sharp – she knew exactly the border between humour and disrespect to her lord, and she walked it carefully, teasing me a little, trying to get me to smile.