God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (62 page)

Regardless, Alexander believed her. The cynic might say that he had to – that having participated in the murder of Philip, he needed to be told that he was not Philip’s son. Perhaps – but again, Alexander was never so simple, and I never saw him betray the least guilt about Philip.

What I can say is that from that night, he never again referred to Philip as ‘my father’. And that, in turn, had consequences that none of us could have foreseen.

Next morning, we marched for Asia. We marched with forty thousand men, and we had our supplies sitting ready in magazines all the way down to the Asian shores, and Alexander was determined to march along the same route that Xerxes had used. And we did.

We made excellent time, passing from Amphilopolis along the coast route to Sestos in the Chersonese. But the tensions grew every day, and they made the trip harder and harder.

It was all but open conflict between the king and Parmenio.

Parmenio issued orders to the army without any reference to the king. Parmenio summoned army councils and sent the king an invitation. Parmenio changed the route of the march and the intended crossing-point without speaking to the king. Alexander had intended for the army to cross at Sigeon, near Troy, which was in our hands and had a protected port.

I had my own reason for anger. In the first three days it became increasingly clear that I was
not
to have command of the Psiloi. Attalus – another Attalus, one of Philip’s men – received the command from Parmenio. I received a verbal message from Alectus, asking me to meet him, and he insisted that we meet outside the camp.

It was a difficult meeting – Alectus got to tell me I’d been replaced, and I didn’t know how to respond – I lashed out at Alectus instead of saving my ire for the man responsible.

I went straight to the king, and pushed through his companions – as was my right – to where he was donning armour.

‘I have been deprived of my brigade,’ I said.

Alexander was just being put into his thorax. Hephaestion was holding it open for him, and he was pulling his heavy wool chiton into folds to pad the metal. ‘Good morning to you, too, son of Lagus,’ he said.

‘Parmenio has given my brigade to another of his old men,’ I said.

Alexander nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

I remember the feeling of horror I had as I realised that the king was not going to
do
anything. Either he could not or he would not.

I was reminded of Pausanias, somehow.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. Quietly, he added, ‘There’s nothing I can do. We are all
young and inexperienced
.’

I stormed out of his presence without asking permission, and I was allowed to go without rebuke.

I considered going home.

Thaïs checked me. ‘Sooner or later, Parmenio intends to kill him,’ she said. ‘Probably on campaign. Will you just ride off and leave him? He’ll die without you.’

It was an interesting role reversal, and it did our relationship a world of good. At Thebes, it had been I talking her into staying with the army – with Macedon. Now the situation was reversed, even if the minutiae were wildly different.

‘I’m staying,’ she said that night, with utter finality. ‘Go home if you like. I have sacrificed everything to be there when the king marches into Asia.’

Once I would have reacted to that. I would have attacked her for the suggestion that she had sacrificed
everything
. But I knew better, now.

She came and put her arms around me. ‘He’ll die without you,’ she said again. ‘Nor will I be very happy.’

She was in a position to know. With Parmenio in complete control of the army and the scout forces, Thaïs was the effective chief of the king’s intelligence service.

I continued to have charge of the Military Journal and attached functions, and what rankled me – perhaps more than anything else – was that Parmenio was unfailingly polite and cheerful, and acted as if nothing had happened. He insisted that his officers supply me with their daily reports, so that the Journal ran more smoothly than ever before. Even officers like Amyntas, who affected to despise me, were quick to send their adjutants to report on numbers and effectives and men sick, ground covered, and all the details that made war possible.

Acting as a glorified military secretary was not what I had in mind, however. It was perhaps four days after I discovered that I would not have command of the scouts, and I was in the headquarters tent, listening to Eumenes the Cardian – he’d been military secretary to Philip, and he was busy trying to take the Journal away from me. I didn’t really want it, but basic competitiveness and a deep inner knowledge of how courts work kept me from letting it go – and besides, Eumenes and I got along from the first, so that the struggle was surprisingly amicable and without the drama of some of Macedon’s other conflicts. He was a brilliant man, as his later campaigns show – a superb fighter, and a witty, educated man. I liked him.

In fact, I liked a great many of Philip’s former officers – some of whom had been my father’s friends and childhood companions. It wasn’t a simple case of old versus young. But as soon as I warmed to one of them, he’d make a slighting remark – an insistent remark – about Alexander’s sex habits or his ‘effeminism’. In fact, every day I had revealed to me where Demosthenes’ propaganda came from about the king. It came from Parmenio and his men – they had a low opinion of the king, and they weren’t afraid to show it. They treated him with a gentle, eternally condescending contempt. And I hated that.

At any rate, three or four days after I lost my command, Parmenio was in the headquarters tent, issuing rapid-fire orders – all simple stuff about our magazines and their replenishment, and tax relief for those districts charged with our food – Eumenes held up a hand. ‘Need a minute, here,’ he said. ‘Lot to write. You need this copied out fair?’

Parmenio nodded. ‘As soon as you can,’ he said. ‘Messenger for Pella is waiting.’

Eumenes went out to get another set of wax tablets, and Parmenio turned to me – ignoring a crowd of taxiarchs and under-officers.

‘Men tell me you are angry about the Psiloi brigade,’ he said. He held up a hand to forestall anything I might say. ‘Listen, lad – it was never yours. The king should stop being dishonest about it. When the king is older and more experienced, I’ll give him a share of the command appointments, and I am sure you’ll get one. But he does not have that authority right now, and you were a fool to accept such a commission from his hand. That sort of behaviour can lead to discontent and is bad for discipline. Understand?’

This was a glorious opportunity for me to show my hand and tell Parmenio just what I thought of him. On the other hand, if the king wasn’t taking him on, who was I to engage him? And Thaïs’s comments were ringing in my ears.

And he was still my childhood hero. Let’s not forget that.

So I swallowed it, and went back to commanding sixty troopers in the Hetaeroi – half a troop, in the new system. I was in Philotas’s regiment. Philotas was not a friend.

On the bright side, all the reports suggested that the Persian command was badly divided – that Darius had all his best troops in Aegypt, and all his personal troops out east subduing rebels, and we were going to land in Asia unopposed.

We were twenty days to Sestos, and we arrived in excellent shape, because Antipater and I had done a thorough job. The men were well fed and their wages were paid up, and the fleet – all one hundred and sixty vessels, the whole fleet of the League – was waiting for us.

At Sestos, Alexander showed his hand. He summoned Parmenio – I was there – and informed his general that he would be taking the elite of the army – the hypaspitoi, the entire Hetaeroi and his elite Agrianians and Thracian cavalry – and marching down the coast to Elaious, where he’d intended to trans-ship, and he requested that Parmenio send us sixty ships from the fleet to cover our crossing. Alexander pointed out that by spreading our crossing, we left the Persians with an insurmountable tactical problem – either force could get behind the flank of any enemy that opposed the other. He also made plain that he intended to make religious sacrifices at Troy.

Parmenio agreed to all of it with a good grace.

‘You are the king, after all,’ he said.

But an hour later, in the command tent, I heard him talking to many of his older officers. Amyntas made a comment I didn’t hear.

Parmenio sneered. ‘The boy is running off with his lover to play war.’ He laughed.

All the old men in the tent laughed with him. And Philotas spoke up. ‘How much longer do we have to put up with this?’ he asked.

Parmenio laughed again. ‘As long as it takes,’ he said.

We rode away with the feeling we were going on vacation.

Alexander rode ahead with his somatophylakes, and we enjoyed the ancient countryside and the monuments. While the Aegema moved into the prepared camp at Elaious, Alexander went and sacrificed to the hero Protesilaeius, reputed to be the first Greek ashore in the Trojan War, and the first to die.

Our squadron of warships arrived on time, and we crossed without opposition, and all the word from the northern crossing was that they were crossing well and on time. Alexander stood on the stern of our trireme and sacrificed a bull in the midst of the Hellespont – no mean feat of logistics and sheer nerve, let me tell you – and then poured a libation of fine wine from a golden goblet and threw the goblet into the water in conscious emulation of Xerxes. And the next day, when the army was ashore, he went off to Troy with his bodyguard and no one else, and he and Hephaestion sacrificed at the tombs of Achilles and Patroclus. It was a massive and expensive sacrifice. Since I wrote the Military Journal, I knew we couldn’t afford to do this. We didn’t have the funds to pay the troops. Now, Macedonian troops are used to being in arrears, but to launch an invasion of the mightiest empire in the history of the world with an empty treasury argues – well, hubris is not the least of it.

At the Temple of Athena in Troy – reputed to be the field temple that the Greeks set up inside their siege lines – Alexander dedicated his splendid silver and gold armour to the goddess, and left it hanging on the portico. But he took the armour of Achilles – ancient bronze nearly green with age, with patches of heavy gold plate over parts of it.

It was an ancient piece, that breastplate – magnificently made. And it fitted Alexander perfectly. If this was done to impress the army, it did so very well indeed. Soldiers are cynical bastards, but they love a good omen. That the armour of Achilles fitted the king who called himself Achilles seemed to please every man.

And
this
was what Parmenio
didn’t
understand. It’s funny – he had a far better understanding of the rank and file than Alexander ever did, but he had no sense of drama. Alexander was
like a god
. Parmenio was
a good general
.

Alexander wore the armour every day. It was odd to see him in armour covered in verdigris, but he made it look magnificent. He wore it under a leopard-skin cloak, with a gold helmet that sported the wings of a white bird set in gold on either side of his head.

That evening, he and Hephaestion ran a race around the tombs of the two great heroes. I think it had been years since Alexander ran in public, against a real opponent – and surprising as this may seem, Hephaestion never gave an inch in competition with Alexander. They raced like Olympians, and both of them flew – by the gods, they were magnificent. The Aegema watched them and applauded, and rumours of divine favour and even divine status began to sprout wings among the troops. Alexander won by the length of a man’s body over a long course, and afterwards, still naked, he poured another libation to Achilles and grinned like a boy.

I helped him strigil the dust off, and he kept laughing. ‘Did you see me run?’ he asked me, three times. ‘Wasn’t I magnificent?’

In fact, he had been superb – but why did he have to ask?

Thaïs had, by this time, heard the rumour of what Olympias had said to Alexander. He’d told Hephaestion, and Hephaestion told some favourite, and the word got around. It seemed to me hubris, at the time, and perhaps blasphemy – but it also seemed possible, at least at a distance.

From Troy we marched north to join up with Parmenio. He’d met up with his own garrison forces in Asia, and together we had almost fifty thousand men.

Memnon, the Greek mercenary, was no longer in command of the Persian forces. Arsites, the satrap of Phrygia, was gathering men, and he placed the brilliant Memnon in a subordinate position.

But Memnon had already done us serious damage. He’d retaken most of the towns of the Asian Troas – Lampsacus and Parium closed their gates to us. We had less than a month’s cash on hand, and everyone in Asia seemed to know it. Outside Lampsacus, the philosopher Anaximenes told Alexander and Parmenio point blank that he’d only pay a certain amount of a bribe to get us to leave his city alone – he knew that we didn’t have time to lay a siege. And he was right. We took his bribe and marched on, and our army was getting hungry.

Thaïs went to work. That night, with Anaximenes’s taunts burning in our ears, she sat by lamplight in my pavilion and wrote a dozen letters to leading men in Priapus, the next town on our route. And she sent Strakos and Polystratus with a dozen men.

It was her first attempt at a clandestine operation, and it ran well enough. They entered the city before the gates closed, and contacted her friends – the men of Alexander’s party, or in one case Leonatus, a Spartan exile and one of her personal friends. But this time, they were not simply gathering information.

Polystratus took twenty of my grooms and seized a gatehouse.

Strakos took half a dozen thugs and murdered three men – the leaders of the pro-Persian faction fingered by Leonatus.

The next day, when Alexander rode at the head of his brilliant escort to the town of Priapus, they opened their gates and welcomed him as their liberator. Alexander’s mood, already dangerously elated, rose to new heights. He said things – wild things – praised the citizens for their ‘Olympian wisdom’ and other flights of fanciful rhetoric that left them unmoved and apprehensive that they had backed the wrong horse. Strakos and Polystratus grinned like fiends.