God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (48 page)

THIRTEEN

W
e marched for home. It was late in the year, and there was snow in the passes again, and the Greeks were happy to see us go.

Alexander was determined that we would march by way of Delphi so that he could consult the oracle. We marched two days through snow, and Poseidon’s mane got icy mud in it and it took me a day to comb it out, with Polystratus bringing pots of warm water. Poseidon was sick, and I didn’t want to lose him. He wasn’t getting any younger, though.

Delphi, and the Pythia, was not open for business. She only prophesies a few months a year – the Pythia then, an older woman named Cynthia, was quite well known and very intelligent. They are not always like that.

She had her priests send the king a respectful message explaining that she could not simply sit on the tripod and implore the god, as it was out of season. Alexander shrugged, dismounted and tossed his reins to a slave.

‘The men and horses need a rest, at any rate. We’ll be here two days.’ He looked at me. ‘Go and tell her that she
will
prophesy. Negotiate any way you wish, but get it done.’

I got all the glorious jobs.

So I took Thaïs, and went down to the village to visit the Pythia.

Really, she was a very ordinary woman – for a forty-year-old virgin who was well born and ferociously intelligent. We found her grinding barley behind her house. She was using a geared handmill – I’d heard of them, but never seen such a thing.

She took it to pieces in her enthusiasm to show me how it worked.

She and Thaïs were not immediately friends by any means – in fact, on balance, I could see I’d miscalculated, and this was a woman who lived and worked with men, and had little time for women. But Thaïs’s intelligence shone through, and her superlative social skills, and in an hour the three of us were drinking wine.

‘He needs you to prophesy,’ I said, finally. ‘Blessed Pythia, all Greece needs you.’

She smiled. ‘You know that the Great King is one of our patrons?’

I nodded.

She laughed. ‘He’s doomed. Do you know your Persian politics?’

I shook my head. ‘The only politics I know are those of the Macedonian court. Well – Athens. I know a little of Athens.’

Thaïs wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something bad. ‘Bagoaz is Grand Vizier,’ she said. ‘He rules by intrigue and murder. He killed Arses, who was Great King, and he’s replaced him with some minor nobleman.’

The Pythia smiled. ‘Well! Nicely put. Except that young Codoman just made Bagoaz drink poison and is now master in his own house. But he’s only a distant relation of the Great Kings of the past – and many of the eastern nobles do not accept him at all.’

I had never heard so much about Persia. To us, Persia was the great enemy, a magnificent unknown. I suppose that Parmenio knew such stuff, but up until then, I didn’t.

‘There has never been a better time to invade Persia,’ the Pythia said, sipping her wine. ‘I speak no prophecy, young man. Codoman has Greek mercenaries, Greek scribes, Greek administrators. He runs his household with Greeks. He is virtually at war with his own Mede nobles. Persia is divided internally, taxes are late coming in, and over a third of the total administration of the country is already in the hands of men sympathetic to your king.’

Thaïs smiled. ‘I would like to know more about such things,’ she said.

‘I will tell the king. But he sets enormous store by matters of religion, and he wants the blessing of the gods.’ I shook my head.

The Pythia nodded. ‘Then he can return in the spring, and I will prophesy for him.’ She finished her wine. ‘I have work to do. Tell the king that nothing save force of arms would get me to my tripod.’ She smiled, I smiled, and Thaïs finished her wine.

The Pythia forestalled her with a hand on her shoulder. ‘Stay with me a while,’ she said.

Thaïs smiled to herself and stayed.

I asked no questions. But I summoned Polystratus and sent him to the king with a message.

Alexander walked down to the Pythia’s house a few hours later with a dozen Hetaeroi and the duty hypaspitoi. I was reminded uncomfortably of the entourage that followed him to the visit with Diogenes. But it was bitterly cold, and we were all swathed in multiple chlamyses, and many men had fleece hats – all the hypaspitoi. We trooped to her door.

Alexander knocked politely.

Thaïs opened the door. She smiled. ‘The Pythia was expecting you.’

Alexander ducked through her doorway, went inside and bowed to the Priestess of Apollo. Then he picked her up in his arms and carried her out of her house.

She didn’t raise a squeal. She was not a small woman – she was well enough formed that I wondered at her virginity – but the king was in top shape and carried her easily, without unseemly grunting.

It is four stades from the town to the temple, and all steeply uphill.

He carried her all the way, even though we were all around him. Thaïs followed. She caught my hand.

I looked at her.

She blew me a kiss.

I was jealous – sure in my head that Thaïs had just lain with the Pythia. Angry. Resentful. Puzzled. She’d just gone with that woman. Not a glance, not a look.

So I followed Alexander up the hill, tormenting myself.

Thaïs was
laughing
.

Damn her.

We went up the hill all the way to the temple, and if Alexander was flagging, he never gave a sign. He carried her up the steps of the temple and in through the great bronze screens, which were open. Somebody had accepted a bribe.

He carried her to her tripod, which someone had set over the cleft.

But there were no priests. They were the required intermediary. I knew how it worked – the priestess breathed in the fumes from the cleft, and the god came to her, and she spoke, and the priests translated her words.

Alexander put her on the tripod and set her down. She gave a little squeak – the tripod had been set badly, and it wobbled and she shrieked as it began to topple – back, into the cleft.

Alexander’s right arm shot out and caught the tripod – a heavy bronze artifact that weighed as much as a strong man, and the Pythia was no small woman. He caught them both on the brink of the cleft – which was only a man’s shoulders wide but as deep as Tartarus – and pulled them back to safety, and the Pythia threw her arms around his neck.

‘You are invincible!’ she breathed.

But we all heard her.

Alexander beamed with joy like a boy on a feast day.

He set her on her feet and offered to carry her down the hill to her house.

She laughed. I don’t know how often the Pythia laughed in the temple, but I doubt it happened often. She looked around. ‘A most eventful day,’ she said. ‘If someone would lend me a cloak, I would return to my work.’

Thaïs handed her a long red cloak, which she held for a moment. ‘It has your smell,’ she said to Thaïs, and I felt a spear-prick.

Thaïs raised her two flawless eyebrows. ‘Keep it for my sake, then,’ she said.

Alexander turned aside to Thaïs. ‘I think you are the first woman to be allowed here, except for the priestess.’ He looked worried. I could read his mind – he knew that the ‘prophecy’ he’d just gained was irregular, and he was afraid that people would point at Thaïs as an aspect of pollution or sacrilege.

‘I?’ asked Thaïs. ‘I am not here,’ she said, and walked out of the precinct.

The next day, we rode together. I was still in turmoil. She had slept elsewhere that night, and that happened often enough, but I felt for her in the night. I was angry and hurt.

‘You do not own me,’ she said. Ares, she was angry.

This is the part I had not understood. I had made
her
angry.

I looked around, made a motion to Polystratus. ‘I do not own you. But I love you, and you slept with someone else. For nothing but the pleasure of it, I assume.’ Oh, I was being prim and proper and adult.

She shrugged. ‘Girls don’t make love. They just play. And she’s the
Pythia
. I am a priestess of Aphrodite. I cannot refuse the
Pythia
. And she was so
lonely
.’ She turned to me, and her eyes, despite some brimming tears, were hot with anger. ‘And you made me feel bad about it. Like a jealous boy. I don’t want to spend years with a jealous boy. I want to spend years with a noble man.’

‘Is that a clever, sophisticated, Athenian way of saying that you can spread your legs for whomever you please?’ I asked.

She spat. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Listen, Ptolemy. Let me tell you a harsh fact. I spread my legs for whomever I please. All freewomen do. Otherwise, we are slaves. If we can only open and close our cunts when you tell us, we are slaves. Period, end of story, no argument. If you want
me
, you must win me every day. Not just once, and then lock me away for future concubinage. If you cannot accept that,’ she sighed, ‘I have to face a long, cold journey back to Athens.’

I rode on, tight-lipped. Too hurt to speak.

She dropped back to her women.

Next day, I sent Polystratus to fetch her to my tent. It was colder than the blackest depths of Tartarus and I had a brazier going.

She came, which was a good sign, I felt.

‘I want you,’ I said.

‘Good,’ she said, and sat.

‘I need to negotiate a treaty with you,’ I said. ‘I cannot keep you – and win you every day. I cannot. I lack the time, and I have to live in a world of men.’

Thaïs laughed. ‘Do I get wine while we bargain?’

‘Hot wine, if Ochrid knows what’s good for him. First, I have considered your idea of freedom. Even if I accepted it in principle – and I’m not positive I do – I am a senior officer of the king, and a man in a world of warriors, and if you spread your legs for Nearchus I have to kill him.’

‘Nearchus?’ she asked. She shook her head. ‘He’s pretty, but he’s dumb.’

‘Perdiccas?’ I asked.

‘Spare me.’ She sighed. ‘You are saying that I cannot truly be free due to the constraints of your culture, in which I am choosing to live.’

I nodded. ‘Exactly!’

‘Did you consider that I might figure this out all on my own?’ she asked. ‘The Pythia . . . was lonely. And no one needed to know but us.’ She shrugged.

‘So I was being tested,’ I said.

She shrugged again. ‘If you like. You are not actually the centre of the universe, my love. Other people exist.’

‘Could you stop putting me in my place?’ I asked.

She laughed, drank some hot wine and quite suddenly got up, leaned over and kissed me. The scent of her – which I hadn’t smelled in two days – threatened to overwhelm me. My penis was instantly hard – I offer this vulgarity not to be salacious, young man, but to give you an idea of her power.

‘I will never offend you or yours,’ she said. ‘You are my friend, my heart. And you will not ever ask me questions. Because if you do, I will tell you the answers. My love, I am a hetaera, not a wife. If you want a kept virgin, go and get one, and leave me be.’

I nodded. ‘What if I ask you questions and I can stand the answers?’ I asked.

‘Then you will be unlike any man I’ve ever known,’ she said.

‘Did the Pythia please you?’ I asked.

‘Beautifully. She is a very skilled lover. Priestesses of Apollo always are.’ She shrugged. ‘And she is in a position to aid me. Delphi has powerful friends, and makes a powerful friend, too.’

I must have looked spectacularly dense. She made a motion with her hand – dimissal, annoyance. ‘Do you know that in every relationship, there comes a moment when I ask myself – Aphrodite, is he as dumb as he seems?’ Her eyes bored into mine.

Note that we were not having my conversation – the one where I tasked her with infidelity. I was on the defensive and losing ground more quickly than a badly ordered phalanx in a rout. ‘Well?’

‘She—’

‘I did not make love to her because she can help the crusade in Asia,’ Thaïs said. ‘But she can do us more service than ten thousand hoplites. Because Delphi is the clearing house of information for all of Hellas – and Asia, too. Do you understand?’

I’m sure I nodded. In truth, I didn’t understand. Not until much later.

But I was smart enough to know that I didn’t want to lose her, not for anything.

I nodded slowly. The spear-point was there, somewhere down in my belly, grating softly against my ribs, but I was going to learn to deal with it, because this was the woman I wanted.

‘She was better than me?’ my mouth asked before my brain could stop it.

Thaïs reached out a hand and caught my face in it. ‘I never, ever compare. Don’t ever ask me to again.’

I wanted to cry.

She shook her head. ‘I will teach you the rules, love. It will be worth it. Love, far from being scary, dangerous and horrid, is in fact a marvellous engine of energy and creation – but it needs a harness, and that harness is rules. Please?’ she asked, waiting for me to let her on to my lap.

I hesitated.

‘Ptolemy,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to play at this many times. If you cannot live with me as I am – let’s part now. Right now, this instant. Otherwise, let’s move on and make love. The talking is done.’ She smiled, and it wasn’t a hurt smile or a difficult smile – but it was a deeply knowledgeable one. ‘Choose.’