God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (78 page)

Five days of this and the king was obviously losing weight, and his stomach had swelled in an odd and very bad way. His gut hurt all the time. He didn’t scream, but he lay on his camp bed and made grunting noises when he thought we couldn’t hear him.

He insisted on hearing every report, so that he knew that Darius was marching towards us by easy stages, a confident commander eager for battle, and that Parmenio had seized Issus.

There are only two passes over the mountains on to the plains of Cilicia from the headwaters of the Euphrates – the way the Great King was marching. To the north, there are the Amanic Gates, a good pass even for a large army and to the south, there is the pass of the Syrian Gates. Parmenio put scouting forces into both passes and then lay in wait at the Pinnacle of Jonah to see what Darius would do.

The news that Darius had a pontoon bridge over the Euphrates drove the king into a fever. He raged at his doctors, and none of them could agree what was wrong with him or how to fix it. And as more and more men suspected poison, the Greek doctors grew more and more afraid to take any action.

When Darius was estimated at five days’ march away, Parmenio came back for the army. He had the Great King where he wanted him, and he was ready to set his battlefield. He gathered all of us in the command tent, and laid out his plans of march. Like most of his plans, it was a simple one.

He was going to take the army to the Pinnacle of Jonah, with tripwire forces in both passes, and wherever the Great King went, Parmenio was going to meet him – in the pass where his superior numbers would be no match for our superior infantry.

I raised my hand. ‘Why would he fight us under those conditions?’ I asked.

‘Why does your foreigner do anything? Pride, foolish pride, young Ptolemy.’ Parmenio nodded. ‘Anyone else?’

Then he sent all the cavalry commanders away – except his sons. He kept Craterus and Philotas and Nicanor and Perdiccas, because this was to be an infantry fight.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the secret meeting, and I didn’t like the notion that Darius was a fool and would dance to our tune.

I went to the king’s tent, and found the king’s own physician, Philip of Arcarnia.

‘I won’t,’ he insisted as I entered the tent.

Alexander, remember, was in love with medicine. He’d studied it extensively under Aristotle, and if it had been one of us on that bed, he’d have been ordering concoctions by the cup.

Philip was standing with his arms crossed. Cleitus looked as if he’d been weeping, and Hephaestion had his jaw set.

I looked around.

‘I am your king. Do it.’ Alexander’s voice was so weak it barely registered.

Cleitus looked at me. ‘He’s ordered Philip to make him a powerful emetic. Kill or cure, he says.’

Alexander turned his head in my direction. I didn’t think he could see me. That’s how far gone he was.

‘Darius is five days away,’ he said, as clear as the sound of distant swordplay. ‘Parmenio will fail. I will not. This is my battle, and the Lord of Contagion will not keep me from it.’

Philip shook his head. ‘This is powerful, dangerous medicine,’ he said. ‘You will probably die.’

‘But if there’s something evil caught in my bowel, this will move it. Yes?’ Alexander said.

‘If you survive the experience. Yes.’ Philip sounded wary.

Alexander nodded. ‘This is my order. Do it.’

Philip looked at Hephaestion.

Hephaestion bit his lip and looked at me. But before I could say anything, he nodded. ‘It is what he wants,’ Hephaestion said.

He could be a nuisance, and a drama queen, our Hephaestion, and he was at best an average cavalry commander, but he made the right call that night.

Philip bowed. ‘You all heard him,’ he said.

The physicians were terrified, you see, because Darius had offered a fantastic reward – ten thousand talents of gold – for Alexander’s death. This is the same Darius who had tried to bribe Athens for three hundred talents, not three years earlier. Our price had increased.

Even old veterans in the pezhetaeroi openly joked about what they could do with ten thousand talents of gold.

It was such a staggering sum that it made me look at every man as a potential regicide, and I watched every flask of water, every pitcher of wine, every loaf of bread. I took samples from every one, as well. Thaïs wrote the labels for me.

I fed things to stray dogs.

The evening passed, and Parmenio came to visit the king.

‘Tell him I do not wish to see him,’ Alexander whispered, and Parmenio went away, but Hephaestion returned with a note.

‘Open it!’ Alexander urged me.

I still have it, right here, in my copy of the accurate journal. There’s the original, in the old man’s handwriting.

‘We understand you have urged Philip to make you a purge – it is poison. He has been bribed by the Great King. We beg you to throw out his medicine and order the false physician’s death.’

Alexander blinked a few times.

‘Damn,’ Hephaestion said.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Cleitus said.

‘Take no action,’ I said, and fled the tent. I went straight to Thaïs, who was writing in her tent, and gave her the note.

She took it, read it and then put it down with a sigh. She looked away from me.

‘Do not put this burden on me,’ she said.

‘So Parmenio is the traitor,’ I said.

‘You are far too intelligent for your face, Farm Boy,’ she said, and touched my hand. ‘That is why they always underestimate you. Yes. To me, this note merely proves that Parmenio poisoned him in the first place, and now fears that the king’s superhuman constitution, aided by some medicine, might yet triumph.’

I kissed her, and ran back to Alexander’s tent.

He was quite calm. I handed him the note, and he gave a slight smile. ‘What does your hetaera say?’ he asked.

‘She says that Parmenio is wrong,’ I answered.

Alexander took a deep breath, and released it slowly. ‘
You
know what that means, I think.’

I leaned over the king. ‘I think that right now, today, in the face of the enemy, it means nothing,’ I said.

Alexander gave a slow nod.

Philip came in with a horn cup.

Alexander sat up with Hephaestion and Cleitus to help him. Both of them stood as far from Philip as they could manage.

Philip didn’t like the atmosphere of the room. ‘I do not want to do this,’ he insisted.

I, for one, believed him.

He set the horn cup down on a side table.

Before I could pick it up, the king had it.

‘Let me test it, lord,’ I said.

Alexander smiled enigmatically and gave Philip the note from Parmenio to read.

Philip’s eyes all but bulged out of his head. His hands shook. But he stood straight and his voice was steady, by the gods.

‘I swear I would never harm you or any other man or woman, in the pursuance of my art,’ he said. ‘If you take that cup, it may kill you, but not by my will. You and I both know the risks. That would be dangerous medicine for a man in the peak of fitness.’

Alexander raised the cup in a mock toast, like the guest at a good Athenian symposium, and drank it off.

Then he took a deep breath, and screamed.

It was three days before the shit poured out of him with the sweat, and he fouled the bed three times in as many hours. Those were bad days, and I’ve no need to describe them. Our cavalry was in contact with the Persian cavalry all along the line of the passes, and we were going to fight, and the king lay in a sweat, unable to talk.

I put Polystratus on Philip, to protect him.

But mostly he stayed with the king, massaging his abdomen and groin and putting cloths on his head.

And then the fever broke and the king rose, smelling slightly of his own excrement, and walked.

TWENTY-ONE

T
he king spent three more days in bed while the Great King of Persia sat on the far side of his mountains and held exercises for his army, and then Alexander marched
north
against hill tribes that threatened his communications – subjects of the Great King who were waging a very successful guerrilla war against our supplies.

He was as weak as a new colt, and on the second day of that small campaign, I saw him fall off a horse for the one and only time in his life. But he laughed and got back in the saddle, and the tribesmen saw their villages burned, gathered their flocks and retreated north of the Taurus mountains – unbeaten, but less of a threat to us. The last two thousand of my troops marched along the coast road from the west, with Asander and Queen Ada at their head, and Alexander decreed three days of games at Tarsus. He sat with Ada throughout the games, and she smiled a great deal. On the last day, he distributed prizes, money and crowns. Ada presented him with a magnificent chariot, with four beautiful white horses and harness-work all solid gold, and he embraced her in public, something he had never done. He told me later it was the finest present of his life, and he loved driving it.

I was astounded to find that I received a gold crown as reward for my victories in Caria. Asander received one, as well. I had the right to wear the crown on any public occasion. It was the highest award a Macedonian could receive. Parmenio had three, but Philotas, for example, had none.

And – perhaps the joy of my life – he gave me a phalanx of my own, ostensibly Macedonian, although more than half of my two thousand men were Isokles and his Athenians whom I had captured. Craterus, who I thought disliked me, embraced me on the platform, and Perdiccas thumped my back.

Local commands could come and go, but in Macedon a phalanx command was for ever. My phalanx would bear my name. I could only be displaced by death or treason.

Old Parmenio took both my hands, the bastard, and embraced me. ‘You deserve it, boy.
Now
you are good enough to have a command.’

The temptation to put my fist in his eye almost spoiled the occasion. But it didn’t. I don’t have Alexander’s need for praise, but it is pleasant, and the unforced admiration of my peers – the men I’d marched and fought with for eight years already – was a heady wine, and I drank it Scythian-style.

Thaïs lay next to me that night, stroking my crown of gilded oak leaves. ‘What does it mean?’ she asked.

‘Glory!’ I said.

She shook her head.

I laughed. ‘You, my love, killed Memnon. You stormed the Cilician Gates. It’s really your crown.’

She smiled sadly. ‘Will you remember that when my belly is round and my breasts are flat and I have wrinkles?’ she asked.

I sat back and appeared to consider. I took a long time about it, until she gave a little shriek and rammed her thumbs expertly into my armpits. Much later, she told me that she was pregnant again.

It may not have been the greatest day of my life, but it has few rivals.

TWENTY-TWO

I
should tell you about the manoeuvrings before Issus, but I’ll have to keep it to a few sentences, because suddenly I was a taxiarch and not a cavalry officer. I wasn’t scouting, or running a temporary battle group just behind the scouting line – I was in the cloud of dust, plodding along the road with my men and their baggage carts. It’s a different view of war, I can tell you.

Of course, I had served on foot before, but the responsibility for two thousand pezhetaeroi was enormous and complicated, with everything from internal promotion to daily food, muster lists for the Military Journal (oh! how that boot was suddenly on the other foot!) and reports to Craterus on the progress of training.

In a way, I was lucky in that I had no predecessor. I’ve found that when you inherit a unit, either the man before you was a god, and you are constantly compared to him, or he was a fool, and you are constantly compared to him. Often both at the same time. Men do not really like to be disciplined – men detest taking orders. It’s easiest to focus that discontent on the man in charge, unless he has enormous talent, great wealth, good looks, charisma or birth. Best to have all of them, like Alexander, or Kineas.

Or me. I didn’t have the looks – but I had money, even by Asian standards, and a fair reputation, and I was getting a new taxeis, just raised from recruits and ‘mercenaries’ who were considered close enough to being Macedonians – Thessalians, Amphilopilans, men of the Chersonese. I was their first commander.