God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (4 page)

‘Socrates, my father’s favourite. That field has a special purpose.’ I smiled. ‘It is a secret. Pater is breeding horses that are smart. Only smart horses go into that field.’

Alexander nodded. ‘I’m to have a tutor,’ he said. ‘To help me learn to rule men. And yet your horse farm seems to teach all the lessons I need.’

Later that afternoon, the Thracian children came for us again. But we were ready, and we beat them again, and then we chased them – a dozen of us.

I kissed my pater the next day, because I was going to court to be a page, and Alexander was taking me as a companion. We both knew I was in for a long, tough time. But I thought I wanted it, and he was a fine enough father to let me go. He gave me a fine ring, and a bag of money. I guess he’d been a young man, once.

I rode off, excited to be with my prince, excited to be going full-time to court, excited to be a royal page.

I only went back to the farms to live just once, and that was much later, in virtual exile, as you’ll hear. I never thought, that bright sunny morning, that I was giving up horses and love and friendship and beautiful mornings to spend the rest of my youth avoiding rape and murder while working like a slave.

A royal page.

Alexander’s new tutor was, of course, Aristotle. And almost as soon as I became a royal page, Philip moved Alexander’s household to the Gardens of Midas. We were told it was time for him to leave his mother behind. I’ll speak more of Olympias later, but she was more like a force of nature than a woman. And she tried to rule Alexander rather than guide him.

As a companion – almost a peer – I was educated
with
the prince. There were a dozen of us at any time, and I think only Amyntas, Cassander, Hephaestion, Black Cleitus and I went through the whole course with Alexander, although I may be missing somebody. At any rate, we sat through lessons together with Aristotle in the Gardens of Midas, and sometimes, when I was the favoured one, I sat beside Alexander on the stone bench – colder than you can imagine on an autumn morning – while the old oligarch explained
exactly
what Plato meant in the
Gorgias
, or the proper conduct of a gentleman in a symposium.

Aristotle was one of us, or close enough – he knew what we were – but he’d been away a long time, with foreigners on Lesbos, and he could be quite naive. He loved the symposium and all of its trappings – the proper wine bowls, the krater, the sieve and the silver ladle, the bowls of good companionship, the small talk and the wit. I experienced them all later, and came to know that the philosopher was talking about something real – delightful, in fact. But you must imagine that we heard him through a veil of our own experience as pages at court, and for us, wine meant trouble. When we were at Pella, all of us – except the prince – were royal pages, and we waited on the guests at the feasts in the great hall. And that was horrible.

Philip’s court had three groups. The first, and most dangerous, were the highlanders, the near-barbarians of the ancient upland kingdoms; Elimiotis in the south, Orestis in the west and Lychnitis by the lake, near Illyria. They didn’t like Hellenes, didn’t like Philip’s insistence on the trappings of Athenian culture and didn’t very much like Philip. They liked to steal cattle and kill each other and fuck.

The second group was just as dangerous and just as violent. Philip attracted mercenaries the way rotting corpses attract carrion crows. He had the best – and most expensive – captains in the world, and the two I remember best were Erigyus and Laomedon, descendants of Sappho’s daughter, from Mytilene on distant Lesbos. Despite their air of culture and their distinguished poetic pedigree, they were hard men, killers with no shame in them, and no page ever came close to them once the drink was flowing.

And the last group was the lowlanders, the courtiers, the great nobles and barons of the rich inner provinces of Macedon, men who had estates the size of small countries. They wore Greek clothing and most of them spoke excellent Greek, and
they
could speak intelligently about Plato. They were also as tough or tougher than their highland cousins, and their national sports were hunting wolves and regicide. My father was one of them, Lagus, son of Ptolemy. Our estates ran for parasanges – we owned people as Attic farmers own sheep, although, as I said, my pater was a fine leader and manager.

The leader of our faction at court was Parmenio, the general – Philip liked to joke that the Athenians managed to come up with ten generals every spring, while he’d only found one in his whole life – that was how much he valued Parmenio. Well he might.

At any rate, when men gathered to drink wine in the royal court at Pella, we pages served as quickly as we could and huddled together for safety under the eaves. Men
died
when the wine was flowing. And if anyone talked about Socrates or Heraklitus, I never heard it. Casual fornication was tolerated – slave girls and sometimes boys were used as freely as wine cups. One of my clearest memories of youth remains serving wine to Erigyus while he rode a girl on his couch. Beyond them, a highlander was kneeling on the floor, watching, incredulous, as his life ebbed away, blood all around him like spilled wine. He’d mocked Erigyus’s penis. The Lesbian cut his throat and carried on.
That
was the closest thing we knew to a symposium, and
that
was why it was sometimes difficult to understand what Aristotle was talking about.

I don’t mean to dwell on my own youth. I mean this to explain – to myself, if not to you – why we killed the king, in the end. But to understand Alexander, you have to understand everything, and as with Aristotle’s lessons, it can be hard to see Alexander through the haze of later events. And to understand the man, you have to see some of the boy.

I observed Alexander on dozens of hunts, but one sticks in my head. We’d been hard at it – lesson after lesson, swordsmanship and ethics, wrestling and spear-fighting and running and ethics, the lyre and ethics. The physical world – the bodies of men and women, with dissection; medicine, in detail – how to make drugs from herbs, how to grind powders, how to administer even the most complex concoctions. And political philosophy, too – we were, after all, the men who would rule Macedon, not a group of merchants’ sons, and we were being trained carefully.

Like any group of boys, we had an established pecking order and it was ruthless and yet curiously malleable, and boys went up and down the ladder swiftly. Alexander headed it – he was to be king, and that was that. Indeed, he was not the strongest, the fastest or the best swordsman – but he was
almost
the best in every category, and he was, without a doubt, the most intelligent of us. Sometimes it seemed to us that he alone understood what Aristotle was talking about, and certainly, when it came to swordsmanship, or spear-fighting, what he lacked in reach and leg length he often made up for in subtlety and practice.

Practice. I was busy sneaking over the wall of the boys’ compound every night to meet a girl – I loved her. I was fifteen, and her body was smooth and beautiful, and mine, as long as I was willing to risk heavy physical punishment and go for days without sleep, which most fifteen-year-old boys see as a small price to pay for the feel of two breasts under their hands. But I remember coming back from one of these expeditions, feeling like a king, and finding Alexander with a wooden sword in his hand, standing at the stake behind the barracks, practising the steps of a particular blow – hip rotation, right foot rotating around the left, then pushing forward, passing the left, and then another hip rotation that left you facing your opponent from a new angle. Our sword master – one of half a dozen men named Cleitus – had taught us the footwork the morning before, and here was the heir of Macedon in the first pale grey light of day, executing the move over and over. He’d placed white pebbles where he wanted his feet to go.

‘Join me,’ he said, without turning around.

No one refused a direct order from the prince. Once or twice, Hephaestion, his best friend, had smacked him for us, but none of us, even Hephaestion, ever refused him. So I squared off, tried the steps, stumbled.

‘Use the white rocks,’ he said quietly. ‘They help.’ He stepped around the pell and left me to his rocks. They did help, but what helped me more was watching him. He was executing the steps faster and faster, and then he began to throw cuts with his wooden sword as he moved his feet – one, two,
three
. The master hadn’t taught us cuts yet – at least, not the cuts that went with the steps.

It was always difficult to learn anything from Alexander – he learned things by observation, usually in one or two repetitions, and he never really understood that the rest of us needed to be shown things slowly and precisely.

I had the steps in ten repetitions. Alexander grinned at me, and we started to do them together, like peasants dancing for the gods, and I picked up his sword cuts just for the joy of doing them in perfect unison. The sun rose, a red ball cutting through the high morning fog. I got it. What he had reasoned out in the darkness – well, I’m no fool. I got it.

We dressed quickly and we were the first into the dining hall. Leonidas, the athlete, was already there, naked under a chlamys of coarse wool. He had a heavy staff in his hand. He rose and bowed his head to Alexander. He looked at me the way teachers look at boys – boys they know are guilty but haven’t caught yet.

‘Your pallet was empty, son of Lagus,’ he said formally.

‘He was with me, practising,’ Alexander said.

Leonidas narrowed his eyes, stuck a hand down the front of my chiton and felt the slick sweat on my chest. He nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said. What he meant was,
Another time, boy.

That was the prince’s way, though. He didn’t say, ‘Ptolemy, Leonidas is on the hunt for you.’ He merely required me to attend him at practice and then dealt with the matter himself. So that if I made an excuse and avoided practising with him in the grey dawn, I would only punish myself.

At any rate, that morning, after we did drills in pairs, the sword master handed out the padded wooden swords and we stripped off our chlamyses and sparred. We were tough boys – indeed, other than in Sparta, I doubt you’d have found tougher – and most fights ended with the loser knocked unconscious, because it was reckoned faint-hearted to raise a hand and accept defeat without showing blood or falling into the deep.

By chance, I drew Amyntas – we were never friends. I hit him and he hit me, and welts were raised. He was cutting at my sword arm – perfectly legitimate, but my timing was off and he kept hitting the same place, and the lambskin wrapped on the oak sword was not enough to keep those blows from causing real pain.

‘Keep your sword down and behind your shield,’ Cleitus muttered. We weren’t using shields yet, but the chlamys was a standin for the shield. A good swordsman doesn’t show his opponent the sword until the cut is coming in. I was waving my sword about, sending Amyntas signals as clear as if I was shouting out when I meant to attack.

I got back into my stance, got my sword hand down so that my weapon was hidden by my chlamys, and swore to myself that I’d let him strike first.

I waited a long time. The little shit had learned his fancy arm cut and now he was determined to use it over and over.

We circled and circled. The other boys hooted – Hephaestion began to deride us both. Alexander wasn’t even paying attention. He was somewhere else in his head – I knew that look.

There were elements of swordsmanship that were exactly the same as elements of things at which I was very good – pankration, for instance, the all-in wrestling that the Greeks love. I’m big and my arms are longer than they ought to be, and I know my distances when I go for a throw. Amyntas was at a loss as to what to do, now that I wasn’t throwing attacks, and he was less willing to accept the taunts of the others than I was. I slid forward, closing the distance subtly while circling to the right.

I didn’t plan it. It was gods-sent. I
did
stamp my foot to draw him, and he did fall for it. The movement of my front foot drew his counter-cut at my arm. But my arm wasn’t there, and I did the steps – one-two-
three
. My sword cut down from his open side, I was at an odd angle to him, and I hit him so hard in the head that I might have killed him – I swear I never meant to cut so hard. He fell like an avalanche falls – every part of him together.

Cleitus narrowed his eyes. Shrugged. Gave me a curt nod. Like a tutor who thinks you’ve cheated on a test but can’t see how.

‘Next,’ he said. He looked back at me.

Alexander came forward, with my friend Cleitus, the one we called ‘the black’. He was the son of Alexander’s nurse, and not exactly a nobleman, but he was as loyal as a good dog to Alexander and, as I say, he was my friend. Nearly always, or at least that’s how I remember it.

I was covered in sweat, and while slaves dragged Amyntas off the palaestra and revived him, I put my cloak on – it was cold – and realized just how badly my arm was hurt.

I stood there, rubbing it and trying to look unhurt and victorious. Manly and aristocratic.

Alexander took Cleitus apart. It was quite an exhibition; Alexander had mastered the step and the associated cuts, and he proceeded to hit Cleitus over and over again. Cleitus scored occasionally – he wasn’t bad – but Alexander hit him again and again, smoothly moving through his cutting strokes as if on parade – right to left, bottom to top, as if this was a drill and having his opponent know which blow was coming was expected. But because Cleitus didn’t get the new rhythm or the fancy offset offered by the new footwork, the blows came in – one after another.

And then Cleitus’s dark face filled with blood. Maybe he thought he was being mocked – maybe one of the blows hurt more than the others. He grunted – it caught my attention, because, to be honest, watching one man carve the crap out of another is dull, and I’d stopped watching, but that grunt had hate in it. He stepped in, took Alexander’s blow on his shoulder and caught the prince’s elbow – and threw him to the ground. Classic pankration.