God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (23 page)

We’d come pretty far – almost three stades – I’ve visited the spot since. The rout filled the pass, and men were forced up the sides like flotsam in a spring rain. My cavalrymen and Alexander’s were all through the rout, hopelessly mixed in with the enemy, killing, or in many cases merely riding along, taking prisoners, or sitting on the high ground, watching. There is, as I have said, a limit to what even the trained killer can make himself do. Until Chaeronea I had killed six men – after, I never counted again.

But Polystratus hadn’t reined me as a merciful gesture. He was pointing.

Virtually under my spear was a crouching man. His shield was gone, he had a light wound and somehow his chiton had got bunched into his zone so that his butt cheeks were showing – a pitiful sight. And he was weeping, begging me to spare him.

I fully intended to kill him in sheer disgust. But again Polystratus stopped me, pushing my spear away with his own.

‘You have ears, or what?’ he asked.

I swear that until he said that, the gods had quite literally closed my ears. I hadn’t heard anything for hours.

I must have shrugged, or something like. He grinned. ‘It’s their great man,’ Polystratus said. ‘He claims . . . well, listen to him!’

The crouching, bare-arsed man at my feet was Demosthenes the orator.

After that, I started taking prisoners. I was done killing – my whole body hurt, my right side was sticky and wet and cold with blood, and that reek – the reek of sweat and copper and excrement – was in my nose for a day – in the hair of my horse, in my own hair.

And I couldn’t kill any more men.

I just couldn’t.

I threatened, and some of them just pushed past me, as if they didn’t care either, or as if they knew I was past my limit. It’s almost like a failure of courage – your arm rises and falls, you kill and wound and maim, and then – and then, you can’t do it any more.

I gathered a dozen prisoners, and as far as I could tell, I was the southernmost Macedonian in the whole host – the rest of the pursuit had halted below me. I didn’t see Alexander anywhere.

And then the Athenian Hippeis showed what they were made of. Someone – not your pater, he was already down – kept a bunch of them together, and they came after me. I had to fall back along the rout, and as I went I picked up men – whole files, at times.

It was a curious form of war – I don’t think a single blow was struck. We were exhausted, and so were they, but they were willing to fight to protect their infantry, and we were
not
willing to fight them just to kill a few more of the fools.

And no sooner had the Athenians got formed than the best of the infantry started to form on them.

Not enough to prevent the aftermath, but enough to save their precious sense of honour, their arete. Myself, I wasn’t so impressed. Only later did I realise – when I was more of a veteran myself – what it took those tired, beaten men to stop running, find a little more courage, turn and stand their ground. I salute them. I didn’t know it then, but they were probably the bravest men on the field.

I found Alexander with his father, well back down the field. By then, there were thousands of dead Thebans and as many Athenians – heaps for the carrion birds. Greece died there – old Greece, the Greece of Aeschylus and Simonides and Marathon and Plataea. They spent three hundred years building a golden world. We killed it in a long afternoon.

I’ve never been happy about it. When I played Marathon as a boy, I never imagined that I would be there when the dream of Athens died in the dust of Chaeronea – nor that my hand would hold the sword.

More wine, here.

Mid-afternoon. Alexander was so elated that he was a danger to himself – when I rode up to him, he threw his arms around me and said, ‘Did you see me? Antipater says I won the battle. I did, too – Pater was getting beaten, and I saved us, and we won!’ He still had his sword in his hand, and his blue eyes had very faint white rims around them – he looked like a dog in the agora run mad in the heat. Hephaestion looked worried – deeply worried.

His sword beat against my breastplate when he embraced me, and he almost pulled me off Poseidon’s back.

‘Get him out of here,’ Antipater said to me.

I could see Philip, just a few horse lengths away. He had his back to us. His shoulders were slumped, and he looked old. He’d had a bad couple of hours.

‘He’s not making Philip happy.’ Antipater played the court game better than anyone, and I had just enough intelligence left to understand.

‘Come,’ I said into Alexander’s too-long embrace. ‘Bucephalus is trembling with fatigue, lord. We need to get these mounts rubbed down and fed – see to our men, too.’

He let go of my neck and his sword pommel slammed into my temple.

‘Oh!’ he said – almost a giggle.

‘Put that thing away!’ I snapped. ‘Better yet – give it to me!’

I took the blade closest to the hilt, tugged – and he kept hold of it.

‘It is stuck to my hand,’ he said, his voice a little wild.

It was, too. With blood.

‘Zeus Lord of Kings, and Ares of the Bronze Spear,’ I cursed. ‘Polystratus – water here.’

‘I just kept killing them,’ Alexander said. He was going to cry. I’d seen it with younger troopers. I’m a callous bastard myself – killing itself didn’t unman me like this.

Hephaestion got to us with a helmet full of water.

I poured it over his sword hand, and the sword came free, a little at a time. While Polystratus and Hephaestion got the sword out of his hand, I talked to him the way I would talk to a young trooper – to Nike when she cringed at thunder, the only thing that scared her – to Poseidon when he saw a snake.

‘There’s a good lad. Nothing to it – see the blood wash away? All gone. Let go, my prince. Well done – we won the day.
You
won the day.’ Voice pitched just so.

‘We did. I did.’ Alexander sighed. ‘They are so full of blood,’ he said.

‘May I invite you to dinner this evening, lord’?’ I asked.

He managed a wobbly smile – his mouth folded so that he seemed to smile and frown at once. But he was mastering himself – he had a will stronger than any man I’ve ever met.

‘I would be delighted, if it would not be too much trouble,’ he said, his face smoothing even as he spoke.

Hephaestion gave me a small nod. We seldom liked each other much – but when it came to Alexander, we could pull together. But when the sword came free from the prince’s fist, Hephaestion whispered in my ear –

‘Philip will have a victory dinner.’

I nodded. Alexander was sitting straight, eyes darting – the white rims gone.

‘One battle at a time,’ I muttered, and Hephaestion gave me a quick smile.

‘Let’s get cleaned up and see to our horses,’ he said to the prince.

I saluted, kneed Poseidon and cleared their path. Then I rode over to Philip. He was surrounded by sycophants – and officers. Older men, mostly.

They were telling him how brilliant his plan of luring the Athenians off the hill had been.

‘It was our counterstroke that broke them,’ Philip said to Laodon. ‘When we turned on them, they couldn’t stand.’

I remember thinking,
Oho, so that’s how it’s to be, eh?

‘Your boy thinks he won the battle himself,’ Nearchus the elder said.

‘Let him,’ said Philip with a hollow laugh. ‘Boys always think they are important. And the troops love him.’ He shook his head. ‘Cavalry against hoplites – what was he thinking?’

Saving your sorry arse
, I thought.

Attalus’s cousin Diomedes laughed a little too long. ‘He’s as mad as a dog in the heat, lord. We all know it.’

Philip turned and glowered at Diomedes. But he said no word, struck no blow. Something in this little scene told me that the words had been said before – that the catamite was playing a long game.

But Philip’s somewhat careless glare silenced Diomedes, although I noticed that he had a ‘cat’s got the cream’ smile on his over-thick lips. Then Philip noticed me.

‘Well fought, son of Lagus,’ he said, offering me his hand – a major favour, at court. He grinned – a genuine Philip grin. ‘Although you got off to a bit of a rocky start.’

I rubbed the goose egg on my head and smiled back.

‘Next time you represent Macedon in single combat, see that you win,’ he went on, and most of the older men laughed.

‘He was pretty good,’ commented Antipater. ‘Kineas son of Eumedes. I know him. His father’s my guest friend.’

Philip nodded. ‘One of Phokion’s boys – what do you expect?’ He clapped me on the back. ‘You look like a man with something to say.’

I couldn’t help but grin, despite my fatigue. ‘I have a gift for you, lord.’

Philip raised his eyebrows.

I motioned to Polystratus, and he led the wretched Demosthenes forward.

Philip smiled as a wolf smiles at a lamb.

I slipped away, duty done, and suddenly all I wanted was to sleep.

But the path to camp crossed the brow of the hill, and there I found Philip the Red and most of my own troop, still mounted.

They were picking up their wounded and dead, like good soldiers, and I joined them, like a good officer.

That took us an hour – killing the worst wounded and picking up the least wounded of both sides. Something turns over in you – you kill, you can’t kill any more, you help save one, and all you want to do is save them all. Men are complex beasts.

And I didn’t want to stop. If I stopped collecting the wounded, if I paused in getting water – well, I’d have to start thinking about it all. Besides, as long as Cleomenes and Philip were working, I was working.

Our grooms came out to help.

We got all of our own – there were only eight – and then we started collecting our own infantrymen, and enemy infantrymen. They lay in neat rows, or all muddled together – some men awoke as if from sleep when touched, to stumble to their feet, barely injured – others had screamed themselves to wheezing silence and lay as a deer lies when he has your arrow in his guts and he’s run as far as he can and the dogs have ripped his flesh and for some reason he’s not dead yet.

Every time I got another wounded man on to the litter made by my horse and Philip’s, I swore it would be the last.

But I kept going back. The younger companions were proving something, or saying something, or too young to know when to quit. I didn’t know which. But most of us were out there.

Philip’s victory dinner was starting – I could see the torches and the slaves – when I found your pater. He was lying almost alone in some high grass – I found out later that his friends had taken him out of the melee and laid him there, and then been caught up in the battle. He had three wounds – rather as I did, myself. Polystratus and I got him on the litter and took him back to the surgeons. He was deeply unconscious. And he’d lost his gorgeous lion’s-head helmet, which I rather fancied, I must confess.

I was done. Your pater was the last man I moved off the field. A young healer found me, ordered me to sit, and I went down like a sack of grain. He wrapped the wounds on my arms and my thigh, looked at my scalp and pronounced me fit enough.

‘Don’t drink wine tonight, lord,’ he said. He pointed at my scalp. ‘A blow to the head does not go with wine.’

So I stumbled back to my tent. To where Nike had stood waiting, as I heard it, for seven hours.

She embraced me, blood and guilt and all. I never loved her better – except when she washed me clean of the blood, wrapped me in a blanket and laid me on some straw she’d foraged like the miracle worker she was. I was out in a second. Show me a man interested in a tumble in the hay after a fight, and I’ll show you a madman. Men talk about it. Show me one who got laid after Chaeronea.

I slept.

For about an hour.

Nike woke me. ‘The king has asked for you. At his dinner. He means to honour you. So they say.’

I wasn’t stiff yet, and I was young enough that I was able to function, but I felt as if I’d been wrapped in felt and kicked a hundred times by giants. Everything seemed to come to me from afar – words, thoughts, gestures.

Nike was worried. Polystratus had a look – I didn’t like his look.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked him.

Just beyond the lamplight of my tent, someone was standing. The messenger from the banquet, I assumed.

‘Clean chiton,’ Nike said, laying a soft wool cloth over my arm. ‘Best gold pins. Myndas, get the sandals on him.’

Polystratus pitched his voice very low. ‘The king and prince are not doing well together,’ he said.

Nike fussed over my shoulder and the cuts on my arms. ‘It’s not fair. They can live without you.’

It was Cleitus. As soon as he moved at the edge of the lamplight, I knew it was Black Cleitus.

‘Alexander listens to you. He needs to go to bed and stop bragging.’ Cleitus shrugged. ‘It’s bad.’

I sighed. ‘He did win the battle.’

Cleitus looked as if I’d slapped him. His loyalties were deeply divided – he loved the king, and he owed everything to Alexander.

‘He’s not insane, Cleitus. Just vain and tired. He won the battle, and Philip can’t face it. I shouldn’t have passed out. Who let him go to dinner?’

Cleitus appeared ready to cry – an odd face on a man who always looked like the worst thug in a darkened street. ‘Philip ordered him. Hephaestion tried to stop him.’

I nodded, and Nike put my best cloak over my head, the pin already closed – tugged it, and planted a kiss on my lips. ‘He’s a grown man,’ she said.

‘He’s not,’ I answered, smiling, as I always ended up doing, even when we had a spat.

And then I headed off down the hill to find Hephaestion. Cleitus followed, begging me to come straight to the king.

‘Relax,’ I said. This is where being born a great noble with my own estates had its advantages. I could be late for the king – I could, if I had to, live comfortably
despite his displeasure.
So sod him.

I found Hephaestion standing in the door of the command tent under the old oak.

‘Come,’ I said.

‘I wasn’t summoned,’ he said. Shrugged.

‘I order you,’ I said. ‘On my head be it. Alexander needs us.’