God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (130 page)

But the feasts that followed were pure Greek. I’d say Macedonian, except that among the thousand men and women dining on the portico of the Temple of Astarte at Susa, no boy was raped and no man’s gullet slit – so it can’t have been a Macedonian feast.

Thaïs played the kithara, and everyone was silent – the highest compliment that a crowd can pay a musician. We had performers – jugglers, and an old rhapsode, and then we danced – women with women and men with men, and Cyrus, my friend from Sogdiana, danced the Plataean Pyricche with Strakos and Amyntas and Polystratus and me. We were pretty drunk, but we did it well. And when the aulos pipes stopped and we were merely human again, we saw that the king had joined us.

Thaïs led the women out – Persian as well as Macedonian, more than twenty women with whom, we saw immediately, she had practised in secret – and they danced one of the dances of Artemis that all Greek women know. Olympias danced next to Thaïs, and the Persian women danced – and Cyrus smiled. We all smiled. Wine flowed, and people were happy.

It would be a good place to end this story.

But I will not end here.

A few weeks after the wedding, the king paid off the army’s debts. The men saw it as a favourable sign.

They were wrong.

He had himself declared a god. He assumed he had bought the army’s acceptance.

He was wrong.

He began to move the army – Aegema, Tagma and Antitagma all together – back to Babylon, and he paraded them at Opis.

It was a clear, dry day. The army bore no resemblance to the ragged horde that had stumbled out of the Gedrosian Desert. We had the new phalanx, magnificent in bronze armour, crisp, white chitons and the new helmets with Persian-style tiaras atop them. The old Macedonian infantry – fewer than ten thousand men, even with a recent infusion of recruits from home and a thousand Greek mercenaries – stood looking second-best. The hypaspitoi had absorbed more men out of the pezhetaeroi – yet they, too, had received drafts of the very best of the new Persians. They gleamed with gold. And they stood separate, more like a tyrant’s bodyguard than the elite of the army. Seleucus commanded them, but he had multiple lieutenants who were clearly there to watch him – new men, fresh out of Greece, and one from Lydia.

The Hetaeroi were more Persian than Greek. We had new horses and new armour and thousands of new men.

Alexander came out and sat on a throne, surrounded by advisers and functionaries, under an awning. Then he stood, and in a loud, clear voice, informed them of his plans.

‘It is my wish that the men who conquered the world,’ he said with an easy smile, ‘should have the retirement they deserve – that men who should long ago have gone home to Pella to plant their farms should go, richly rewarded, and live lives of ease and splendour.’

If he imagined that they would be pleased, he was wrong.

The ranks began to move – the Tagma writhed as if it had to face elephants. The pikes wavered.

The very air became still.

Alexander still had that smile fixed on his face.

Amyntas son of Philip stepped forward – he was the right file leader of the rightmost taxeis – the senior phalangites of the army. Every man knew him – every man knew he had declined to become the king’s shield-bearer, or the senior phylarch of the hypaspitoi. He stepped forward at parade-ground pace, until he was three paces in front of the taxeis.

‘Do you think you can just send us away?’ he roared. ‘We shat blood for you!’

Alexander watched him, the way a man looks at a snake that has suddenly appeared near his foot.

The phalanx began to shout abuse – at the king.

Alexander’s face grew red.

Amyntas raised his arm and pointed his spear at the Antitagma. ‘You plan to conquer the rest of the world with your
war dancers
?’ he shouted.

The Tagma took up the cry – War Dancers! War Dancers!

Men began to laugh.

Now spears in the Antitagma began to shake – with rage.

Alexander’s face was as red as the sun had turned it in the Gedrosian Desert. He raised his hand to speak.

But the Tagma was not cowed.

‘With your pretty boys and your father Amon!’ called another front-ranker, and men laughed.

They all laughed.

Every Macedonian in the army began to laugh at the king.

‘God Alexander!’ men laughed. ‘Father Amon! War dancers!’

Alexander walked rapidly up to Amyntas. He motioned to the hypaspitoi, and his personal guard detached themselves and ran to him. Not Bubores or Alectus, or Astibus – all dead. Men we didn’t know.

Amyntas saluted. He said something. I was too far away to hear it.

Alexander’s face became ugly – white and red, his mouth thin and set.

A hypaspist drove his spear into Amyntas, under the arm with which he was saluting the king.

He killed about fifty of them – veterans, every one. Later, in a fit of remorse, he held funerals, and a dinner to celebrate the friendship of Macedon and Persia.

And then he ordered all the veterans home. Oh, they were well paid. But he sent them under Craterus, with orders to displace – and murder – old Antipater.

And then Hephaestion died.

Alexander was almost human for a month after Hephaestion died. He died of a hard life under brutal conditions – of a love of excess and hard drinking. I suppose it is possible that he was poisoned. I don’t think so.

But his death revealed something to the king. Alexander looked around him like a man awakened from a dream – I think because Hephaestion, for all his failings, had helped to protect the king from the hardest truths, and without him, Alexander was like a man wearing armour without padding.

But Hephaestion had also been our last conduit to the king – our last way of protesting, of demanding that he remain a Macedonian. And after a funeral that alternated between high drama and darkest comedy, heavy drinking and flights of royal fancy that made me want to vomit – he was lost.

By the time we moved to Babylon, I had had enough. I sent Thaïs away, with the children, and all my men but Polystratus. They were discharged veterans now, anyway.

I sent them west, to Aegypt. Thaïs had her orders, and Laertes had his.

FORTY

A
fter Hephaestion’s death, all I could think of was Philip – Philip, the King of Macedon. The only excuse for his murder was hubris and tyranny. He had made himself a god, and begun to act like a selfish tyrant.

And Amyntas son of Philip – a ranker, a phalangite, a man who loved his king and marched to his wars, and died, spitted on a spear on the tyrant’s orders.

Oh, yes.

Bubores, dead in the desert. Astibus, at the foot of a wall that didn’t need to be stormed. Charmides, who shat himself to death in Bactria. Dion, who died at Guagamela.

And another million men and women.

It was me.

After Hephaestion died, I was invited to the banquets again. It was odd – it was as if the gods gave him to me. At the funeral banquet, he put a hand on my shoulder and called me his ‘last friend’.

Once I would have wept at those words.

I had no more tears to shed.

I sent Thaïs away, but I kept her things. I was a student of Aristotle, and a good one – I have a curious mind, and I like to read.

It is not difficult, if your target drinks unwatered wine. And Alexander drank more and more – more every night, and longer, while he planned his next extravagant conquest.

I am not ashamed to say that I tried twice. Twice, I went to his parties, lay on a couch near him, and I could not do it. I conjured the death of Cleitus – the death of Philotas, the death of Amyntas. The murder of Coenus. His attempt on my life. The march through the Gedrosian. The massacre of the Mallians.

It is hard to kill even the shell of something you love.

But some weeks after the funeral for Hephaestion, Cassander came. He was a nervous youth who was too used to having his own way too close to his school days. He came from Macedon – from Antipater – to negotiate. The old man knew Alexander wanted him dead, and with the same callous indifference to other men’s lives that he always showed, he stayed home and sent his young son.

Cassander is and was no man’s friend. He was a boy on a dangerous mission. He was a fool then and he’s not much better now.

But . . .

He came into the dining hall with a clatter, because he’d tripped over his own feet at the entrance, and the men near the door laughed at him. I was lying three couches from the king – Bagoas was sharing his couch, painted like a woman.

Cyrus – now a squadron commander in his own right – approached the king, and threw himself on his face – full proskynesis in order to approach and receive the kiss of a king’s friend.

Cassander laughed. It was a nervous, reedy laugh, but I suppose he meant it – he had never seen such a thing in all his life.

Alexander rose to a sitting position on his couch, and then kissed Cyrus and exchanged a comment or two, all the while beckoning to Cassander to approach. When the young man came, Alexander smiled at him – smiled and held his glance, still beckoning, until Cassander came close enough to kiss.

Alexander grabbed his ears and smashed his head into the marble floor – not once, but five or six times, until the blood poured from the boy’s scalp, and he shrieked and soiled himself.

Alexander rose to his feet and kicked him in the crotch, and then turned and ordered the body removed. His expression was one of mild distaste.

That night, I opened the gold container I had found among Thaïs’s belongings, and poured the powder of strychnos nuts carefully into the king’s wine after his taster sniffed it and set it at the king’s side on a low table by his couch.

He developed a high fever, went to the bathhouse and sweated it off.

I was haunted by the notion that he was, in fact, greater than human.

But I knew better. And I believed then, and still believe, that all that was greatest in Alexander – the part that was greater than merely human – left him after Hydaspes. Perhaps it was his apotheosis. And afterwards, only the bestial shell – less than human – was left.

Listen to me – the philosopher.

You can purchase anything in Babylon.

I purchased fresh nuts and ground them myself, as Alexander and I had learned to do at Aristotle’s hands. As I had seen Thaïs do, before Memnon died.

Instead of dry powder, I had a damp mush.

I dried it in the sun, and put it in his wine. He was drinking deep, unwatered wine straight from the amphora, and it was the work of a moment to brush the foul stuff into his cup.

Why wasn’t I caught?

Because the gods willed it so.

And because, by that summer in Babylon,
no one wanted him to live.

I thought of my conversation with Cleitus, the day Philip was murdered.

Of what could justify regicide.

Boy, if I ever act the tyrant that he was, you have my permission to kill me.

He lay near death for two days. The soldiers – the same Macedonians he had already disbanded and ordered home – crowded around the palace doors, openly praying for his survival.

Because that is how men are.

The old circle gathered by his bedside, and it was telling – I think we all thought it – that there were no Persians at all to attend his last days. He lay, barely able to move or speak.

When he asked for wine, I gave it to him.

With more poison.

Craterus was beside himself – he, alone of us, wanted to conquer more worlds, march farther. He was unchanged. His feelings for the king were unchanged. But he had missed the Gedrosian Desert.

He leaned over the king and asked, ‘Lord – who should inherit your kingdom? To whom should it go?’

There was silence for so long that we all, I think, assumed the king was too far gone to speak.

But he did not speak. He giggled.

His head rose a fraction, and his eyes met mine squarely. As if he knew . . . everything.

‘To the strongest,’ he said.

HISTORICAL NOTE

Writing a novel – several novels, now – about the wars of the Diadochi, or Successors, is a difficult game for an amateur historian to play. There are many, many players, and many sides, and frankly, none of them are ‘good.’ From the first, I had to make certain decisions, and most of them had to do with limiting the cast of characters to a size that the reader could assimilate without insulting anyone’s intelligence. Antigonus One-Eye and his older son Demetrios deserve novels of their own – as do Cassander, Eumenes, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Olympia and the rest. Every one of them could be portrayed as the hero and the others as villains.