God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (108 page)

‘Some of Parmenio’s men – most of the phylarchs in the four senior taxeis – are on the verge of mutiny,’ I said. ‘Do you know about it?’

Hephaestion froze.

‘The king has taken all the loot of Asia that you may remember he promised to the troops – soldiers don’t forget that sort of thing.’ I stepped across the tent towards him, and the bronze-haired bastard flinched. ‘He’s fucking around with some Persian festival and he’s bribing the magi – the Persian priests – and he’s all but told the army that we’re marching east, not west.’ I was close to Hephaestion now. ‘And none of you useless
fucks
seems able to tell him. They’re going to refuse to march. And the troops will back them.’ I was looking into his eyes. ‘Someone might decide that the easiest way to go back to Pella is over the king’s corpse.’

Hephaestion looked at me, took a breath and behind him the king screamed, ‘You will have the spring festival, and I will walk in it and take the part of the Great King, or by all the gods we both hold sacred, I will destroy you.’

‘The king has other troubles just now,’ Hephaestion said blandly. ‘Leave my secretary a list of the ringleaders and I’ll see it’s dealt with, and see to it you get appropriate credit.’

There is a difference between living a story and telling it. Even as I tell you this tale, I know that I foreshadow, I embellish and I explain. So that moment, when Hephaestion treated me as a minor court functionary – I have probably made it seem natural. I have probably prepared you for this, and you nod, and say, yes, the king has started to behave as a tyrant.

But I was stunned. ‘Hephaestion – there are no
ringleaders
.’ I remember shaking my head. ‘We are talking about – I don’t know – a thousand men. The very heart of the army.’

Hephaestion took a deep breath, and released it. ‘Very well,’ he said. He met my eye. ‘You tell him.’

And so I did.

Hephaestion took me to the king’s tent. The magi were nowhere to be seen. He was on his couch, staring at the roof.

‘Patroclus, why do the gods send me fools—’ he began. And then he saw me.

‘Ptolemy has news he deems serious,’ Hephaestion said carefully. Hedging his bets.

‘Achilles, sulking in his tent,’ I said.

Alexander sat up. He opened his mouth.

I shook my head. ‘Your veterans are on the edge of mutiny,’ I said. ‘Pay is late, and you have just seized all the gold of the empire – a mountain of gold. You made them help load the mules – they know to the talent how much you gained.’ I looked at Hephaestion, but he was no help. ‘They are talking mutiny in the streets.’

‘I asked him to give me the names of the ringleaders,’ Hephaestion said.

‘There
are no ringleaders
,’ I said. ‘Nor are there any dissenters.’

Alexander nodded, once, decisively, as he did on the battlefield. He assimilated what I was saying, matched it to other data and agreed that I must be right – as ruthless with his own notions as with enemy troops.

‘I see.’ He nodded. ‘Yes. And you will, as usual, tell me that I have been blind,’ he said, looking at me with a disarming smile.

But by the gods, a false smile, like an actor in a mask, or worse.

He nodded again. ‘Very well. We shall give them a bone, and perhaps send a warning to other quarters at the same time.’

‘A bone?’ I said. ‘You need those men. They are the officers and file leaders of your army.’

Alexander shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t need them. I can buy any army I want.’

‘Didn’t work for Darius,’ I said.

‘Darius was not me,’ he said. ‘Your concern is noted. Gather an army council, son of Lagus. And you have my thanks for this timely warning.’

It was still winter in the mountains. Hephaestion gathered all the spears of the army – all the Macedonian citizens. They came with spears, and with torches. They came ready, I still believe, to mutiny.

Alexander stood before them in the white and gold of a Macedonian king. He’d had a few hours to prepare, and he had with him on the besa a half-dozen of the disfigured Greek veterans.

‘Men of Macedon,’ the king said. ‘The time has come to avenge these men. Look at them well. Professional soldiers – men of Amphilopolis and Pella, of Athens and Sparta, of Ionia and Aeolia. Tortured and mutilated by the Persians.
Look at what Persia really is
.’

Even as he spoke, the poor miserable things shuffled through the crowd, and more of them emerged from behind the king to stumble or push themselves or drag themselves in among the Macedonians.

‘Don’t flinch!’ the king said. ‘Look at them. Had we been defeated at Issus or Arabela, we would have shared this fate. I would be dead, or I would have no lips and no ears. That is the
peace
we would have earned from Persia. Ask a Euboean. Ask an Athenian!’

He had them, and they had never even voiced their discontent.

‘Persepolis is the richest city in the empire,’ he said. ‘I give it to you, my loyal troops. I reserve only the temples and the treasury and the palace. Take the rest. Kill the men, and take the women for your own, and let every house be looted and the spoils shared as is the custom of the army.’

We had lived among these Persians for six weeks. Eaten their bread. Laughed at their children and tickled them.

But these men were Macedonians.

They roared.

And then they went and raped Persepolis.

I helped massacre the population of Tyre. I did not help at Gaza. But at Persepolis, I actually stood aside.

The hypaspitoi moved into guard positions around the treasury, the palace and the temples. The magi were carefully protected, as was our growing camp of collaborators.

Every other man in the city was butchered. Perhaps some escaped. I never met any.

It must have fallen like a bolt from Zeus. As I say, we’d lived among them for six weeks. And then, one night, with no warning, their town was sacked.

There was an orgy of destruction. I did not watch it.

But I’m sure you can imagine, if you put your mind to it.

And the next day, most of the lower town was burned flat. The temples and palaces remained untouched, somehow yet more noble for the ruins at their knees and feet. The wailing of women – the cry of absolute degradation and horror – could be heard everywhere in the temple complex. And in the palace. It was as if Persepolis itself wept.

Two days later, when Thaïs arrived with the mules returning from carrying the great treasure down to Susa, the town still smoked and the women were still weeping.

I embraced her, buried my face in her neck and kissed her, but when my hand sought the pins on her chiton, she pushed me away.

‘Raped women are an offence to Aphrodite,’ she said coldly. ‘I will not make love, even with you, while they weep for their dead and their virtue and the sanctity of their bodies outside my tent.’

What could I say? I nodded. Stepped back. ‘I took no part,’ I said.

‘Did you take action?’ she asked.

I turned away. ‘It is probably my fault,’ I said. ‘I wanted Alexander to see what the soldiers thought. Instead, he told them what to think – made them beasts, and rewarded them for it.’ I drank wine. I was drinking too much, in those days. ‘And all to pressure a handful of recalcitrant priests into holding some festival.’

‘The Festival of the New Year,’ she said. ‘I am sorry, Ptolemy. But my body cannot love while I listen to all that hate and despair.’ She crossed the tent to me and kissed me. ‘Why does he imagine that he will be allowed to celebrate the New Year festival?’

‘It’s about being the Great King,’ I said. ‘It is like Tyre. Only the Great King may accept the sanctity of Ahuru Mazda. If he’s allowed to celebrate the festival, that makes his rule legitimate.’ I shrugged. ‘Aegypt accepted him as Apis. Babylon accepted him as Serapis.’

She smiled. ‘Aegypt is older and wiser, and Babylon is the whore of cities.’ She motioned for me to pour her wine. ‘Persepolis has never been conquered before.’

‘We have a thousand Persian noblemen with us now,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘They will collaborate only until there is an alternative,’ she said. ‘Because Alexander thinks himself the ultimate power on earth, he cannot imagine the strength they can derive from their culture and their god. I have met with magi in Susa and in Babylon. They mean to resist.’

I shrugged. ‘He has done everything he can to appease them, and the Queen Mother.’

Thaïs shook her head, this time vehemently. ‘She hates him, now.’ She began to fiddle with her leg-wraps, and I knelt to help her get them off – we were having this conversation when she was no doubt cold and saddle-sore. She sat back. ‘I have missed you, son of Lagus. It’s harder and harder to get good help.’ She smiled at me. Then turned away. ‘He must be pushed away from the lure of Persia. If he makes himself Great King in fact, he will be a monster beyond the rich imagination of Plato or Socrates.’

A month in Babylon, and Thaïs had never been so direct.

Persepolis is where it all happened.

I was invited to ‘court’ more and more frequently. As if, having proved my usefulness again, I was welcome back once more. As if . . . nothing. That’s what had happened every time I left, and this time, my eyes were opened to the process. Out of sight, out of mind. In sight, rewarded.

It was chilling to talk to him. He had forgotten who I was. He spoke to me as if I were a stranger – with a false charm and a manicured sociability. In fact, he wooed me.

I didn’t want anything, and that made me dull.

Weeks passed, and I attended parties. Thaïs came and played her kithara. I tried not to be jealous that sometimes, when he’d had enough wine, the king treated her with the mixture of respect and mockery with which he’d once treated all his inner circle.

He no longer had an inner circle. Callisthenes was careful to flatter him, but increasingly, I think, disillusioned. Anaximenes was such a blowfish that he continued on his own path of subservience. But the former pages, such as Cleitus and Philip, and the older men, such as Craterus and especially Parmenio, found themselves alienated.

I had some excellent dinners with Kineas and his friends – Gracchus, Niceas, Diodorus, Coenus – gentlemen all, and we went hunting in the former royal parks. Alexander went hunting almost every day, but he took only his Persians and Hephaestion and some of the younger pages.

I found that I could not discuss the changes in the king with foreigners, even with Diodorus or Kineas.

And then the date of the Festival of the New Year approached.

Alexander stopped hunting in the hills.

A dozen talents’ worth of royal costume arrived by mule from Susa – rich vestments encrusted in gold, and a pair of towering headdresses, from the same priests who had made the costume for Darius.

I saw them on him. He modelled them for us, explaining with precision what each garment represented, how it symbolically linked the wearer to the sun god and to the ceremony.

He was still confident that the priests, the magi, had received the message of the destruction of the lower town.

They had.

On the morning of the festival, the complex was silent. Of course it was silent. The town was gone, and in its place was a population of soldiers.

When hypaspitoi went to the temples to fetch the magi, they were gone. Except the six chief magi, who had committed suicide.

For the first time in the history of mighty Persepolis, there was no feast of the new sun. The New Year was not praised. No King of Kings rode the sacred way, nor wore the high crown.

‘Bah!’ the king said. ‘Get me my friends. We’ll celebrate a feast of Dionysus, instead!’

But he fooled no one. His rage was as vast as his power, and unlike lesser men who succumb to rage, he had the power to act it out.

I saw that his hands shook, and his face was blotched, red and white.

He ordered couches brought to the high temple, where hours before the magi had stabbed themselves to death. And he assembled a hundred of his officers, and most of them were ordered to bring their partners – from great ladies of Macedon or Aegypt to prostitutes grabbed from the camp. Not a single of the new Persian officers – even the most trusted ones – was invited. In fact, I was present when Hephaestion ordered Nicanor to post men at their tents.

But every Greek in the army was invited – every Greek officer, Athenian, Ionian, Spartan and Megaran and Plataean, all the way down the ranks to phylarch. Kineas was invited. He brought a beautiful girl. I had seen her at parties – a girl who was somewhere between a prostitute and a courtesan, and Thaïs had invited her to our pavilion for wine, discussed her profession, admitted her to the lower priestess rank of Aphrodite. She was called Artemis, I remember, and she was slim and sharp and moved like a fighter.

But I digress, like an old man. Except I will tell you, lad, that the memories of beautiful women outlast all the foolish battles. Ashurbanipal had something, whatever Alexander said. Eat, drink and fuck. The rest is not worth a snap.

We ate venison and mutton with foreign spices, and we drank Greek wine. The Great King had vats of good Greek wine. There were stacks of barley rolls, as if we were in Athens.

Alexander knew what he intended from the very first. I suspected, but I don’t think anyone else did. But the theme of the dinner was
revenge
, and he ordered the entertainments to goad every officer attending.

The mutilated soldiers had couches, and they assembled at the beginning of the dinner – a truly hideous regiment – to receive grants of land and taxes to ease the burden of their lives.

Then Artemis rose and danced the Athenian Pyricche in armour. Every man was on his feet cheering her. She was magnificent. When she was done, she read from Herodotus, of the destruction of the temples of Athens.

When she had finished, Thaïs rose with her kithara, and played. She played the song of Simonides, about Plataea, and she played the lament for Leonidas, and she played the opening lines of the
Iliad
, and suddenly the king was weeping.

She finished, and every man there roared his approval, and all the Greek women, as well.