God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (95 page)

A senior priest walked beside Alexander, answering his questions.

His questions were concerned with exactly how reincarnation and rebirth worked.

‘Why only kings?’ he asked.

The priest shrugged. ‘Kings are part god from the first,’ he said.

I was leaning on the plinth of a statue, and when Alexander passed me to lean over an incised decoration on a tomb, I stumbled – sheer farm-boy clumsiness – and put my hand on the gold-encrusted hide of a mummified Apis bull.

Without warning
I stood on an infinite plain. My first impression was desert, but there was no desert – simply blinding white light and an infinity of it, and no horizon
.

A voice spoke in my head, a strong voice. ‘You will be king, here. Do what is right.’

I awoke with my head on Thaïs’s lap, and Alexander massaging my wrists. I was embarrassed, as any man is who shows weakness, and perhaps most remarkable, it was some time before I remembered what I had seen and heard, so that at first I imagined I’d just passed out.

Looking back, I have a difficult time recalling the dream, but no trouble at all recalling the deep confusion it engendered in me. Although I worship the gods, no god had ever spoken to me so directly. Indeed, when I saw Alexander sacrifice his chariot on the morning before Issus, I thought of
that
as the supreme moment of my religious life.

And now, an alien, foreign god had reached out and touched me.

I stumbled along through the rest of the tour.

The Apis bull is chosen from a herd of very ordinary black and white cattle. They’d look odd in Macedon, but not so odd that they wouldn’t fetch a decent price at market. However, it is different in Aegypt, where from the whole herd, one bull is chosen and taken to the temple, where he becomes
king
or, as they say here,
pharaoh
. That bull is king for twenty-eight years, and at the end of his reign, he is sacrificed – usually by the pharaoh and in the presence of the priests. Sometimes an older pharaoh orders a champion to do the deed for him, but then all of the priests and the king eat the flesh of the slaughtered bull and this ceremony, very secret and sacred, is symbolic of the renewal of life that Apis offers. The slaughtered bull is called ‘Apis-seker-Osiris’ and the Aegyptians call him ‘Living dead one’.

Pardon me for this Platonic lesson in cosmology, but what happened cannot be understood unless you know what Apis is.

When we had toured, and sacrificed, a Greek priest of Zeus was introduced to us – a pilgrim, come from the shrine of Zeus at Lampsacus to visit the shrines of Aegypt.

He bowed deeply. ‘Great King of Asia, I am Anaximenes of Lampsacus!’ he said with a flourish.

It is not often a man can combine the pomposity of a horse’s arse with the false humility of a false priest, but Anaximenes did both at the same time, to which he added a brilliant mind, a wit razor-sharp in the service of flattery and an actor’s ability to be all things to all men.

Hush, let me tell you how I really felt about him, the shite.

Alexander loved him.

And well he might. Anaximenes it was who knew that the Apis bull was due to be slaughtered – that, in fact, it was but two weeks until the ceremony was due. Anaximenes knew that Darius had forbidden the ceremony.

In hours, we were preparing to take part, and Alexander spent money like water to have his vestments and crown as the Great King of Aegypt prepared. The priests leaped to serve him, eager, I think, to have a king who might be their ally instead of their enemy, as the kings of Persia had been. He invited me to participate, and I was drawn to it, and I noticed that one of the priests – not the Greek, but one of the smooth-headed Aegyptian priests – seemed to follow me with his eyes.

While the details of the ceremony were discussed, a priest came to Thaïs, and after a brief conversation, she squeezed my hand and vanished. What followed was a secret – I will not tell you, even now, although if you, in your turn, should by the will of gods be a king, I cannot recommend to you too highly the worship of Apis – and we spent a long evening learning our roles.

Later, unfed, I fretted alone in the palace. I had sumptuous rooms, and they had the most remarkable furnishings – Aegypt was, and remains, the richest country I had ever seen, and even the palace guest rooms to house a foreign, barbarian general were superb. I summoned slaves and ate in solitary splendour, missing anyone – Marsyas, Cleitus – who might share the tolerable beer.

Unsummoned, a pair of attendants came and took me to a bath – a remarkably ugly bath, but enormous. It was as if someone had heard of a Greek bath but knew none of the details, and used sandstone rather than marble for the fittings. On the positive side, I emerged clean and fresh, and the towels were superb. On the negative side, I was not oiled, and so left the bath chamber feeling dry and scratchy.

I walked back along the corridors of the palace to my rooms, flanked by four bath attendants, and it was curious that there were no other men or women in the corridors. It gave the experience a slightly dreamlike air.

And Aegyptian architecture is heavy – to the point of ugliness – and I had a moment when I experienced something almost like vertigo, when I wanted to see something familiar – a Greek shape, a Greek column . . .

And then I was in my rooms.

Thaïs was sitting on a rather formal chair. It took me three heartbeats to know her, as she wore the disc of Hathor on her head and Aegyptian garments, with kohl-painted brows and lashes and henna on her hands and feet. Her eyes seemed huge, the whites white, the pupils enormous.

She stood and smiled at me. ‘I have had the most glorious experience,’ she said, and for some reason I bowed to her.

I must digress, because you are so young. When you fall in love, your lover is the most beautiful thing in all of creation. You cannot get enough of her. Her feet, her hands, the inside of a thigh, the perfume of her, the scent of her breath . . .

When you have been partnered for some years, neither of your bodies has any secrets left, no surprises, no wonder. This is not the death of love – far from it – but it is possible and human to long for that sense of wonder, that desire so strong it can bend steel.

My partner was reckoned, even after two pregnancies, one of the world’s most beautiful women. She added to that – her natural beauty – training in music, dance, singing, rhetoric – and sex. She was a superb horsewoman, and a fine archer.

And yet, I would lie if I say that either one of us excited the other then as we had in the first months we were together. We pleased one another. No woman I’ve ever lain with had pleased me as she could, or as easily, and I dare say I knew her as none of her other partners ever had.

And yet . . .

I bowed because, in her Aegyptian priestess’s costume, she was herself, and yet she was someone else. Her dignity – always asserted – was even more evident, and elegant.

And in that moment, I remembered clearly what the voice had said. It hit me – again – like a bucket of seawater on a hot day.

I think I stumbled.

She tilted her head a little to one side. ‘You, too, I think,’ she said.

I sat in the chair she had been in. It was still warm from her. ‘I . . . touched . . . the gods,’ I said. Indeed, as I said the words, I thought them. I had not allowed myself to think about it, simply walled it away.

She pursed her lips. She had some sort of wax, almost crimson, on her lips. I wanted to lick them.

‘A voice,’ I said. My voice was deepening, hoarse with emotion. ‘Told me I would be king here. And that I should rule well.’

And even as I spoke, and my voice grew hoarse with emotion – thickened – I felt a pressure on my body like the very personification of lust, and I pulled her lips against mine.

My hand found that she had nothing under her gown, and with a shrug, she lost it – but not her crown, not her regalia, not her paint.

I have never experienced anything like that night, and I will tell you no more. Except to say that it was not sex, but the sacred. Or perhaps all sex is merely another contact with the sacred.

Two priests instructed me the next day in every aspect of my function, because, owing to Alexander’s wounded shoulder, I was going to be his ‘champion’ and sacrifice the bull.

Hephaestion, it turned out, would not do it. He saw it as sacrilege. He wanted nothing to do with foreign gods.

Cleitus refused on other grounds. He was a man who feared failure more than he wished for success, and the notion of killing the sacred bull in front of an audience of a thousand, with the king’s success riding on his stroke – Cleitus passed.

I knew I was the king’s third choice. And the thought of performing it gave me the same shakes that it gave to Cleitus. But I was driven, a mere tool of the god. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before.

Those were two happy weeks. Something entered into my love of Thaïs – or returned to it – that had been lost with our second child. She once again looked at me with her secret smile lingering almost invisible in the corner of her mouth. She sang. I croaked back at her.

She teased me, and parodied my bad Aegyptian accent when I practised my lines, and when I reached to tickle her, she did not run shrieking like a young fool, but took my hands in her grip of iron and put me over her hip like an old and wily pankrationist, so that I had to roll on the floor. And dug her thumbs into my armpits until I bleated like a lamb, and we lay together . . .

Good times.

And other times, I left her to her new friends – and she had quite a few, the priestesses of Hathor – and I went into the lower town and drank expensive wine and cheap beer with Marsyas and Cleomenes and Alectus and Cleitus.

I remember one night, I had a slave from Marsyas inviting me for wine – Greek wine – at a tavern by the river. I dressed simply and left all my expensive jewellery and my good cloak, left a note on the cheap and available papyrus for Thaïs and ran down the palace steps like a schoolboy going on an adventure.

The slave led me to the rendezvous, and it was well lit, with oil lamps hanging in rows so that the walls seemed to have their own star fields. It was hot, and most of the patrons sat outside in the night air. The river smelled of silt and ordure – but it was a smell you got used to quickly, like manure in springtime. Men sat on benches and drank, played dice or knucklebones – a few barrack-room intellectuals played Polis or backgammon.

I was early, or the others were late, and I found myself sitting at a small table reserved, I expect, for those who looked likely to pay more, but wedged between an enormous potted plant in an urn carved from stone, and probably three thousand years old – and a trio of pezhetaeroi. Not mine – men of Craterus’s taxeis.

There was an old one, a middle-aged one and a young pup straight from the fields around Pella. I tried not to listen too hard, or look too hard, as they would recognise me and grow stiff and formal, and the last thing a good officer wants to do is to rain on the fun his men are having.

I had a scroll – Xenophon’s ‘On Hunting’. It fitted nicely in my bag, so I left it there, and sitting alone in a tavern in Aegypt with a bowl of wine that had cost me a day’s pay for a soldier, I leaned my stool back, tucked my shoulder into the enormous stone urn and read about boar spears.

If, in spite of javelins and stones, he refuses to pull the rope tight, but draws back, wheels round and marks his assailant, in that case the man must approach him spear in hand, and grasp it with the left in front and the right behind, since the left steadies while the right drives it. The left foot must follow the left hand forward, and the right foot the other hand. As he advances let him hold the spear before him, with his legs not much further apart than in wrestling, turning the left side towards the left hand, and then watching the beast’s eye and noting the movement of the fellow’s head. Let him present the spear, taking care that the boar doesn’t knock it out of his hand with a jerk of his head, since he follows up the impetus of the sudden knock.

‘’Scuse me?’ the oldest man was asking. He was polite – nodding at me, and pulling at his chiton. Drunk as a lord. ‘’Scuse me? Damme, you look familiar.’

I laughed, perhaps a little bit self-conscious.

‘Except it’s like this, see? Dion says that this chit, here,’ and the grizzled veteran of Philip’s wars caught the wrist of a serving girl, ‘has the best tits of any girl in this fine establishment.’ He nodded sagely. ‘Which she may, or may not.’

Like many Aegyptian women, the server had no garment north of her belly button, so modesty was hardly an issue. She wriggled. It was more than just an automatic gesture, and thus very winning.

I gave the veteran a smile and then looked at the woman’s breasts.

They were young and well displayed. Not a patch on Thaïs, but comparison is odious.

‘Lovely,’ I opined.

Veteran nodded. ‘That’s a fine answer. See? He’s not too hoity-toity to look at tits, now, is he? I said to them – he’s an officer, but he ain’t above us here.’

The youngest one shook his head. ‘I’ll take him off to bed,’ he said apologetically.

I made a face. ‘Why?’

Veteran nodded. ‘Exactly. Why? I may be fucking dead in a few days, if soldier-boy-the-war-god gets a hair up his arse and marches us to Hyperborea. Why can’t I sit and look at her tits? They’re fine, and she won’t come to no harm from me.’

The middle-aged soldier just glowered. Finally he said, ‘What’re you reading?’

I had to smile. ‘Xenophon. On hunting.’

Veteran roared. ‘You’re a fuckin’ officer. Look, lad – that’s a
girl
. For a tenth of the cost of that scroll – a hundredth – you can have what she offers. Feel alive.’

Middle-age shook his head. ‘The scroll gives him something for ever. That girl will be gone in the morning.’

‘At her age? She’ll be gone in ten minutes – off to another garliceater, eh? Moving from sausage to sausage?’ He laughed at his own witticism. ‘Who cares? When I sit and think—’

‘You fall asleep, old man,’ said Middle-age.