God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (96 page)

‘Yeah?’ Veteran shot back. ‘Who put the fucking Syrian in the dust when somebody was on his back at Gaza? Eh?’ The older man got up, and just for a moment he wasn’t a drunk fuck – he was a vicious predator with thin limbs and a grizzled beard, and eyes that burned with malice.

Then he subsided. But the other two had flinched.

He tossed a gold stater on to the table and laughed. ‘I’m all blather, boys. Don’t let me piss on your evening.’ His eyes flicked over to me, and I realised he wasn’t as drunk as he let on.

The serving girl came, her eyes drawn by the gold. When her hand reached out for it, Veteran pinned it to the table with his own, and pulled her on to his lap and neatly tucked his tongue inside her throat. She put her arms around his neck.

He came up spluttering and laughing, and gave her the coin. She skipped away, and he shook his head.

‘Where did it go?’ he asked. ‘A gold daric – where’d she put it? Eh? I ask you, gentlemen. I gave her a gold coin, and she
made it disappear
.’ He laughed, drank off his wine and got to his feet, and I realised that I’d been wrong again – he could barely walk. ‘Well, friends, I’m off to find it. If she hid it where I think.’ He leered. Looked at me. ‘You’re Ptolemy, I think.’

I nodded.

He nodded back. ‘King’s friend?’

I nodded again.

‘Tell him from me he can suck my dick if he thinks I’m doing any more forced marches in the desert for fuck all. Eh? That’s Amyntas son of Philip, phylarch of the third company of the taxeis of Craterus.’ He winked. ‘You think I’m kidding, eh?’

I shook my head. ‘No. I think you’re serious.’

‘You’re not bad, for an officer.’ He was swaying, and the girl, who, when bought, apparently stayed bought, had come back and caught his hand. He clasped hers. ‘He’s made us do some bad shit, eh?’ he said suddenly. ‘Storming a town’s one thing – right? Officer? Whatever you do in a town that refuses to surrender – that’s between you and the gods, eh?’

He spat.

‘But what we did at Gaza . . .’ He looked at the girl. ‘I killed one just like you, honey.’

The other two were taking his arms. I thought he might cry. But he didn’t. He grinned. ‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘Let me go.’

‘Let him go,’ I said.

The girl pulled his hand, and he laughed. It wasn’t a good laugh, but neither was it the laugh of a broken man.

‘Let him go,’ I said again.

He came back at me. ‘Give me a hug, eh, officer boy?’ he said.

I stood up, because I thought he was serious, and he was. He put his arms around me. ‘What’s it about, eh?’ he whispered in my ear. ‘I just want to know what the
fuck
it’s about, eh?’

Then he pushed himself away. ‘Sorry. I’m drunk. You smell good, officer. But not as good as my little friend here, who’s waited. Aphrodite, she stayed!’

He smiled at all of us, but most of all at her, and took her away into the dark.

Middle-age shook his head.

‘He’s saved my life ten times,’ he said. ‘Please – don’t report him.’

I sat back down. ‘Relax!’ I said. I caught the attention of another girl, whose breasts, to be frank, were not up to the standard of the first. ‘A krater of wine,’ I said. And then made gestures. Finally I showed her a large silver coin, and she bit it and smiled and ran off, showing her flanks very nicely.

A day’s wages for
me
. Wine for three.

Bad wine. But I poured for the two of them, as if they were guests in my house, and we drank.

‘He’s a great man, really,’ Middle-age said. ‘But he needs to go home.’

I shot my mouth off, too. ‘He can’t go home,’ I said. ‘Unless you want him to die as a bandit in the mountains. It would be like caging a wild boar.’

Middle-age nodded. ‘That’s what war has made him. It’s all he knows. All I’ll know, soon, too.’ He drank.

‘All they do is complain,’ the farm boy added. ‘It’s glorious serving the king. My pater served Philip and he was in
two battles
. I’ve already been in two great sieges and a battle.’ He shook his head. ‘Who gives a shit if we kill a bunch of barbarians?’

Middle-age shrugged. ‘You will, boy. Or you won’t. We have both kinds in the phalanx. Except that if you don’t give a shit about them, like enough in time you won’t care about anyone. Not even yourself. And then – you’ll die.’

‘You’re just old and burned out,’ Youth said.

‘Talk to me in twenty more fights, boy.’ Middle-age looked at me. He was half my age again – but I’d been fighting a long time. ‘If you live that long.’

Youth took a big drink, anger written on his face.

And fear.

I bought another round. I seldom thought much about my longevity, or my future. Despite Aristotle and Heron, I lived from day to day.

Some day, I would be King of Aegypt.

That hit me again, and I sat there drinking, my scroll forgotten.

Veteran came back, his girl in tow, and perched her on his knee and drank my wine. He was mellow now, and the girl ran her hands idly over his chest.

He looked at me and laughed. ‘Good hug,’ he said.

I pointed at the girl. ‘She does have the best tits in here,’ I agreed.

He laughed and laughed, and he was still laughing when Marsyas came in. He had Cleomenes and Philip the Red with him, and Kineas and Diodorus, and we embraced as comrades do, and then my three companions tried to escape.

‘They’re good companions,’ I said. ‘Let’s stay and drink with them.’

Marsyas, it proved, knew all of them, and their names – Amyntas son of Philip (one of a dozen I know) and Dion, and Charmides. Marsyas was a poet, and a drinker, and a rogue, and he knew everyone. And we sat and drank, and watched the girls.

That was Memphis.

I worried myself sick about the sacrifice. When it came, it was sacred, but my nerves fell away as if the god touched me, and perhaps he did.

The bull stood, undrugged, in the middle courtyard of the great temple, tethered to a ring but otherwise unconstrained. I had met him three times, so he would know my smell, and I walked up to him, and the crowd of priests and royal advisers and Alexander’s entourage – and Anaximenes, of course – knelt. All except Alexander, who stood just behind me, the only man standing.

The bull saw only me. He moved his head, and I walked very slowly up to him. Dignity has this added benefit – movement with dignity is an excellent practice for calming an animal, whether a horse or a bull.

When I was at his head, I drew the sword I had brought, purified by the priests and fresh from a night on Osiris’s altar, wiped clean to perfection with a cloth provided by the priestess of Hathor and smelling very strongly of Thaïs.

I drew it very slowly, and he rolled his eyes, and I wondered how many kings and champions had been lost this way. And I wondered if the high priest, if he disapproved of the pharaoh, or his champion, arranged for the bull to be in a mood. I wondered at a great many things, and then the tip of my sword – a heavy kopis – cleared the scabbard throat and I slowly raised the blade, placed my left hand on the great beast’s head just behind the horns, slowly rotated my hips and passed the sword back into the overhand guard position you see so often on vases. It’s there for a reason.

The bull raised his head, stretching his neck, and roared – a trumpet noise that made me jump, but with his neck muscles stretched like that . . .

I severed his head.

He fell forward on to his knees and pumped blood for a moment, and then sank to the ground and fell over, and the earth shook, and Alexander slapped my shoulder with his right hand.

‘Perfect,’ he breathed.

I felt empty. Hollow. And from the eye of the head on the floor came a last . . . something.

Rule well.

No one cheered, but many, many faces wore a broad smile. And men came to touch me. A priest – the one I had found staring at me, weeks before – came and took my sword from my hand. ‘It must be destroyed,’ he said, apologetically. ‘It has killed a god.’

I guess I understood.

That evening, Alexander gave a party. We drank too much and played stupid games, and Alexander treated the pages much as his father had treated us – which is to say, not very well, with some hard teasing and some innuendo that would not have made their mothers happy.

Anaximenes rose and toasted the king as the son of Apis, the God of Aegypt, and men roared. Bull gods are always popular. Hephaestion looked away in distaste.

‘Lord, I have spent months here, looking into the origins of Apis – and Zeus, and Amon.’ He paused, and his false humility was like bad incense – it choked me.

‘It is said in Greece that your mother claimed you as her son – by Zeus!’ he said, and I thought,
What a charlatan. Alexander will have him gutted.
And the silence at the party was so thick you might have thought a beautiful woman was naked.

But Alexander merely nodded.

‘Lord, the chief shrine of Amon is close – well guarded, and secret, but in Libya, across burning sands where no mere mortal man could survive the journey. But with you to lead us, we might go to the shrine of Amon. And there learn something of your parentage. With the benison of Apis upon you, and the most favourable sign he has vouchsafed to you . . .’ He threw his arms wide. ‘Your light be revealed to the
world
as the divine son of Zeus.’

I choked on my wine. In truth, I had no trouble seeing my king as a god. In many ways, he was greater than human, and in others, like the gods, he was merely
inhuman
. And yet, paradoxically, I also
knew
that whatever troubles Philip and Olympias had had, and they were legion, the bedchamber had not been one of them, and they had romped like bull and cow for many and many an afternoon and evening, until the lady was pregnant. I wasn’t there – but my father was, and many other men I knew.

Hephaestion turned his head away.

Black Cleitus frowned.

But Alexander nodded, his odd, eager smile coming to his face. Pothos again.

‘I have a gift to make to Aegypt,’ he said. ‘And then I will go and see my father, Amon.’

Every man knows the story of the founding of this city of Alexandria. I won’t belabour it. Alexander laid it out himself, and he used sacks of barley. The site was superb, and still is – and his eye took it in in one go, just as he saw battlefields, with an Olympian precision of thought that was not like other men’s. He looked, and saw, and thought, and the thing was done – the map of the streets was in his head. I know, because he told me.

He left the army at Memphis – to eat off the priests, he told us – and took only the elites north. But he asked me, because the ceremony of the sacrifice of the bull was important to him, and suddenly I was back in his inner circle. I wasn’t aware of having been excluded until I was put back. Running a regiment is a job that requires the same dedication as being a parent.

And Thaïs came downriver with us and sailed from Naucratis to Athens. She told me that she had to go – she wanted to see our daughter and our adopted boy, and she needed to sell her house in Athens.

I did not want her to go. I felt her loss keenly, and something told me I would never see her again. Despite which, I gave her ten talents of gold to spend on horses and equipment for me in Athens. New spears – new swords. Anything, really, to reawaken my interest in war, which, by the time the army reached Memphis, sickened me.

We marched from Alexandria – what
would
be Alexandria – and along the coast over sixteen hundred stades, and our horses grew thin, and the Hetaeroi grumbled as loudly as the Agrianians. We ate like a swarms of locusts, leaving the inhabitants rich with gold and destitute of grain wherever we travelled. Eventually, we had to send for the fleet to bring us food.

Having marched so far that some men expected to see the Pillars of Herakles, we turned south into the desert with native guides to lead us to the shrine of Amon.

We marched for ten days, until all of our water was gone. And then we marched for two more days, and the guides admitted they were lost.

Alexander rode bareheaded, the sun grilling him, his hair bleached almost white, while Hephaestion looked more and more like a statue of bronze, his skin and hair matching perfectly. Alexander roved the column on horseback until his horse died, and then he took my Medea. I offered her – he was the king. And he rode her to death, too.

And then we ate the horses and drank their blood, and marched again.

Sometimes, the blind faith that you are the son of a god is a good thing.

‘I am being tested,’ he said on the twelfth day. He smiled. ‘I won’t let you die,’ he added cheerfully, and rode away.

On the fourteenth day, men started to die – good men, hypaspitoi who had survived a dozen campaigns. I was marching with Alectus, and I had Bubores and Astibus off to my right – we were four abreast in the sand, and even the hypaspitoi were losing their formation, stumbling along, and the hot sun burned even our feet as we trudged, and the gravel got into our sandals and hurt like spear-points. None of which mattered a damn compared to the lack of water.

Men gave way to despair. There were suicides.

I had no unit, so I had returned to the hypaspitoi of the Aegema, where I lived, ate and soldiered. But after that night, I wandered among the men, because the only way to prevent despair is through action.

Alexander was everywhere.

‘Rest!’ he told the hypaspitoi. ‘Get sleep. We will find water, or it will come to us.’

Men said he was insane.

And the next day, it rained.

In the desert, in summer.

Two days of rain.

And when the rain cleared, priests from the shrine, led by portents, found us and took us to the oasis and the shrine of Amon.

Sometimes, I had to doubt whether it was Alexander who was insane.

It is hard, in retrospect, to choose when Alexander changed. I used to argue the point with Cleitus, and with Kineas. Each had a different answer. For Kineas, Alexander’s change began after the pursuit of Darius, while for Cleitus, it began as soon as he won Granicus.