God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (5 page)

Alexander got to his feet, came on guard, measured the distance and knocked Cleitus unconscious. One-two-
three
. Black Cleitus crashed to the ground as if dead.

The sword master looked at him, and then flicked his glance over to me.

‘Well done, my prince,’ he said. ‘A
little
harder than it needed to be.’

Black Cleitus was not dead. He let out a great snort, and blood flowed from his nostrils, and then he snorted like a boar and got up on his knees and vomited.

Alexander held his hair – we all wore ours long. Then he came over and stood by me – according to our traditions, the winning boys stood together.

‘Did you see me?’ he said. ‘I used the new step.’

‘Me, too,’ I said.

He turned to me so fast I thought he had tripped. ‘You what?’

‘I put Amyntas down with the same blow you used on Black Cleitus,’ I said. I wasn’t paying attention to the signals – we were victors together, and I thought . . .

His smile came off his face like water draining from a dropped pot. He stood quivering with anger. ‘It was mine,’ he said. ‘Not yours. I should have been
first
.’

He had the same look in his eyes that Erigyus had when he punched his eating knife through the highlander’s throat-bole. I admit I stepped back.

When the sun was high, Aristotle came out to find us and take us to the cold stone benches. As always, he asked Cleitus and Leonidas to tell him what we’d done.

‘Alexander downed his opponent with the Harmodius Blow,’ Cleitus the sword master said. He wasn’t a clever man, and his flattery rarely went well with the prince. He was a good swordsman, though.

‘Every idiot knows how to do it,’ Alexander spat. He stood by himself, arms across his chest, the very image of adolescent anger.

Aristotle looked around. I fancied he caught my eye – perhaps it was just my imagination. ‘Victors should be gracious,’ Aristotle said.

‘I am gracious,’ Alexander retorted.

‘No,’ said Aristotle. ‘You are not.’

Their eyes locked, and all the other boys shuffled away.

‘You desire to be Achilles? You strive always to be first and best?’ His old tutor, Lysimachus of Acarnia, who had complete control of the younger Alexander before Aristotle came, called himself Phoenix, called Hephaestion Patroclus and called Alexander Achilles. Aristotle was human enough to resent the old tutor and his lickspittle ways.

Alexander looked away in angry silence.

Aristotle stepped closer. ‘Which boy did you put down with this Harmodius Blow, Prince?’

Alexander shrugged. ‘It does not matter.’

‘Ptolemy?’ Aristotle asked.

‘No,’ Alexander spat. ‘He . . .’ Then he lapsed into silence.

‘It was me, lord,’ Black Cleitus said. He was rueful. ‘Had it coming.’

Aristotle looked at Cleitus. Then at me.

Leonidas’s straight back and flared nostrils suggested that he was none too pleased by this intrusion of the academic into the athletic. ‘Held the boy’s hair. He was decent enough.’

Aristotle looked around again, like a good hunting dog catching the scent of a distant and elusive prey.

He looked at Amyntas, with a heavy bandage around his temples. The same bandage that Cleitus wore. ‘Who fought Amyntas?’ he asked.

‘I did,’ I allowed.

‘The same way?’ Aristotle asked, splaying two fingers on Amyntas’s head and measuring the blow.

I shrugged.

Alexander flushed.

Aristotle laughed. ‘Alexander, excellence lies in being better than other men – not in other men being worse than you. I can read you like a book, boy.’

Alexander looked as if he might cry.

What is hard to explain in this schoolboy reminiscence is that I could understand. Alexander felt I had betrayed him. He’d rescued me from Leonidas only to have me go first and throw his blow – a blow he’d risen in the dawn to practise.

So I stepped right up next to the prince and bowed my head. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

Alexander didn’t look at me. ‘No. I was not behaving well.’ His voice was choked, as if he’d just heard that a favourite was dead.

‘I’m sorry anyway,’ I said.

My pater used to say that if you truly want to know a man, spend a week with him in the wilderness. No one can hide his true self from the companions of the hunt. Freezing rain, stinging nettles, a bad cut from a spear-point, an unwanted offer of sex from one of the oldsters – all the tests of young manhood are waiting in the hills and deep woods, and that’s before you meet the boar or the wolf with nothing between you but an ash staff and a few inches of cold iron.

A few days after the sword incident, Erygius and Laodon came from Pella with some of the king’s companions – his Hetaeroi, friends and bodyguards and inner council of state all in one – to take us hunting. It was a test and a vacation all in one.

Macedonian nobles do not hunt like Greek aristocrats, and despite the many ways we copy them, in hunting we have our own ways.

We use dogs to locate the quarry, and other dogs to run it down, and we follow our dogs on horseback. Depending on terrain and the animal we’re after, we stay mounted with spears or dismount with spears. The height of courage is to take a boar on foot. Greeks do it the same way, but they don’t use horses, and that’s slower. And they don’t use a double-bladed axe to finish the boar, and that’s just foolishness. Trying to finish a boar with a spear is . . . well, it is a good way to reduce your supply of available noblemen.

It was autumn, and we went north and west, into Lychnitis. Lychnitis is beautiful – low hills that rise gently into mountains, and old forests that men have never cut, not even in the age of heroes. There’re trees lying on the forest floor that are as thick as a horse, and others as wide as a man is tall, so that to clamber over them is like climbing a low hill – and they’re just the downed trees. Giants rise on every side, green temples to the immortal gods, and every animal thrives there – the great deer, the elk and the boar. And the wolves.

And desperate men, of course.

We made our hunting camp in a long clearing that kings of Macedon had used for their hunting camps since the gods walked the earth. It was a defensible hilltop, high enough to give warning of approaches, low enough that the boys and the slaves didn’t have to go too far for the water that flowed across the northern base of the hill from the spring. The land about was scrubby, but rose to the west and north – to the north the camp was dominated by the first low mountain of Paeonia, and to the west the trees grew and grew, so that the Illyrians said a squirrel could jump from tree to tree from the hunting camp all the way to Hyperborea, where Apollo went to sleep.

The air was as clean and cold as a mother’s reproach. The animals were not afraid of men, and came right into camp to steal food. Our horses were skittish unless one of the boys was with them all the time. This was just a year after Alexander gained Bucephalus – a fine horse, though legend has improved him like it has polished his master. In fact, the prince had three big mounts for hunting and a palfrey for riding about. We all did – no one horse could keep going all day over that country, and we knocked them up badly. And that week, the rain fell as if Artemis disapproved of our slaughter – on and on, a light rain that never seemed to end, and in that kind of weather, horses get sick, go lame – die – as fast as children die in the same weather.

I had a horse I loved – a dark yellow golden coat, with blond mane and tail, tall and handsome and fast, which one of Pater’s grooms had rather impiously called ‘Poseidon’. But Poseidon he remained, and he had the god’s own strength, and in my eyes he was a better horse than Bucephalus or any other horse who’d ever lived. He was certainly faster than the mighty bay, but like the other boys, I was not foolish enough to show it.

We spent the first few days deer-hunting – for the meat. Boar-hunting and wolf-hunting are very noble, but they don’t feed the troops or the slaves, so a boar hunt usually starts with the massed slaughter of a deer herd. It wasn’t like sport at all, or even like war – more like a harvest, as the trained slaves and a handful of the king’s cavalry troopers wove screens of brush and set up a long alley of these hurdles, shaped like a giant funnel, between two hills. All the mounted men made a great line before dawn, and we picked our way across the hills, eyes watering with the effort of finding the next huntsman to the right and left in the rain and the dim light – I was off my horse twice on the first morning, flat on my face once and off Poseidon’s rump the other, caught looking the wrong way when he trotted under a low branch.

But we covered a lot of ground, driving the deer – and every other living thing – into the open end of the funnel. By full daylight, we closed the net tight. The first day was sloppy, and we pages were blamed for indiscipline. But on the second morning it was well done, and we drove fifty deer down the funnel into the older men, who killed them with swords and spears. Laodon was thrilling to watch, standing coolly with a short spear – a longche, just the height of a man, and heavy in the shaft. He killed a stag that charged him – stood his ground, shifted his weight and the animal was down, and then all the older men finished it. A few deer got past, of course, and soldiers with bows shot them down – shooting carefully, because hitting one of the king’s companions was a death sentence. Perhaps they were shooting too carefully, because one enormous stag, a monster as big as my horse, beloved of Artemis, burst through the archers and raced free up the hills and vanished into the deep trees.

Alexander cantered up. I’ve said he wasn’t the best at everything, and he wasn’t, but he was the finest horseman I’ve ever seen – years later, when we rode against the Sakje of the Sea of Grass, I remarked that he was as natural a rider as they. What always amused me is that he took this utterly for granted and would accept no praise for it – never told self-important stories about his riding prowess, never bragged about the horses he’d broken. Horses loved him, and I suspect that’s because he always knew
exactly
what he wanted.

Laodon was standing there, naked, wiggling his spear back and forth in the stag’s chest, trying to draw it free where it had lodged against bone. He looked up when he heard Alexander’s hoof beats, and waved a salute.

Alexander merely pointed at the rump and tines of the great stag galloping for the treeline. A few heartbeats later and the animal would have been gone. But Laodon saw what he had missed, and rage filled his face. He let go his spear haft and walked over to the archers. Words were exchanged, and a man struck to the ground.

Alexander pursed his lips.

Laodon came back and shook his head. ‘My apologies, Prince. That beast should never have slipped us.’

‘The will of Artemis,’ Alexander said. But the way he said it indicated that he meant the opposite. And Laodon knew it.

Next day we went out as scouts, all the pages, looking for the boars. I was with Laodon, and we rode from sun-up until high noon through the woods. The day was beautiful, with a golden autumn sun on red leaves and the most amazing, heady scent in the air of fresh-fallen leaves – the perfume of Artemis, Laodon called it.

I remember that I spent a good deal of time worrying whether he meant to rape me. Just to give you an idea of what Laodon was known for.

He was an excellent hunter, though, and his eye for the field sign was without error, and while I don’t remember why I was allowed to accompany him, it certainly wasn’t my looks. I was fit – we all were – but you can look at my profile on coins, can’t you? I am not a handsome man, and my friends called me ‘Georgoi’ or ‘Farm Boy’.

If it was a privilege, it was a scary one. I was on my guard, never within reach of his arms. That’s pretty much how we lived our lives – just so you know.

Noon came, and I was ravenous. What boy isn’t? We’d been mounted since dawn, and up and down from our mounts, looking at fewmets and tracks and traces and rubs, and then up again – riding down steep hills, up rocky defiles, or over the downed trunks of ancient trees that had stood like towers when Hector fought Achilles.

We came to a muddy ditch where the trail crossed a stream – the passage of men and animals had worn the end of the trail into the ditch. Laodon dismounted, handed me his reins, and looked into the ditch for a long time.

‘A great many men passed this way,’ he said, and scratched his beard. His eyes were alive, of a sudden, and he moved his head slowly around like a hawk does when searching for prey.

Then he shrugged. ‘I’m getting old, boy, and I see bandits behind every tree. What have you packed us to eat?’

I had a leather bag full of cheese and bread, and a pottery flask of good Nisean wine. I laid it out for him and stood back – pages don’t eat with knights.

He nodded curtly, ate some bread, drank some wine and grinned at me.

‘That’s good wine, young Ptolemy.’ He drank another sip from his horn cup and nodded.

I probably flushed with the praise.

‘Sit, boy. Eat.’ He indicated the food.

I guess my fears were obvious. I sat too carefully.

Laodon laughed. Like lightning, his hand was on the back of my neck, locking me to the ground. ‘If I wanted you,’ he said with a snort, ‘you’d be mine.’ He snickered. ‘Not my type, boy.’ He slapped my rump and picked up his horn cup, which he’d somehow set aside without spilling its contents while he put me on the ground with one hand.

I was shaken, but I managed to eat anyway. Oh, for a moment of that youth now! Beans make me fart, milk curdles in my stomach and too much wine goes to my head. At fifteen, I could go straight from fear and terror to eating without passing through any intervening stages. I remember how good the cheese was.

‘Have some wine, virgin,’ Laodon said, handing me his cup. He got to his feet. ‘I’m going to look around.’

I sat on a big rock by the stream and drank wine from his horn cup. He was an important man and a famous warrior, and to be allowed to drink from his cup was a compliment. My father loathed him – which, at fifteen, can make a man more appealing.