God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (67 page)

To me, it was like hubris and blasphemy rolled together. But Cassander smiled, and Nearchus, and Black Cleitus could apparently stomach anything Alexander did.

He
had
been the best fighter in the army. I doubt that any man had put so many Persians into the darkness, and he had a wound – almost a death wound – to prove his valour.

But he would not shut up about it.

When his focus was elsewhere, I rose and went off into the darkness to find Poseidon. Polystratus was there, and Ochrid, poulticing the great horse’s arrow wound and a dozen lesser wounds, and he withstood their ministrations with the same remarkable intelligence – only men who understand the deep stupidity of many horses can fully appreciate what it’s like to have a war horse with intelligence.

I brushed him, where he wasn’t wounded, with a pair of marvellous Sakje brushes – woven horsehair – that Polystratus had picked up as part of the loot. Persians love their horses, and have the finest tack and equipment in the world, and next to them, we are mere barbarians.

Polystratus waved away the smoke from the resinated torch we were using and grinned. ‘And ten more like it – nosebags of linen, some halters that I think are silk, and horse blankets – beautiful stuff.’ He shrugged. ‘Seemed better than gold.’

Did I mention that Polystratus was a prince among servitors? And yet, he was no longer any kind of a servant, except where it came to my horses.

I was enjoying the beautiful things – horse things, as I say – when we heard screams. I froze, and then I realised it was the wounded out on the battlefield.

‘Scavengers moving in,’ Polystratus said.

We’d lost good men at Granicus – almost no infantry, but a fair number of cavalrymen. Seleucus was badly wounded, and I had some nasty cuts – Marsyas was in a coma (although, of course, he recovered) and Perdiccas had a wound, as well. Philip, the commander of the allied cavalry, was killed. So was the commander of the Thracians, one of Philip’s old men.

Alexander promoted men in all directions after Granicus. Parmenio’s brother got to be satrap of Phrygia, a powerful office that offered comfort and took him out of the command structure. The Thracians went to Alexander of Lyncestis, who’d proved himself relentlessly loyal since betraying his own brothers, and Alexander felt that he deserved it. And Alexander was loyal only to the king and
not
to Parmenio.

Likewise, Parmenio’s brother had commanded the Thessalian cavalry, and now that he was out of the way, Alexander gave the command to Philip the Red – Philip son of Meneleus, my boyhood enemy/friend from the pages.

Most of my friends didn’t see it happening, but Parmenio knew immediately what was going on, and so did I. Alexander was filling his staff with royalists, just as Parmenio had filled Alexander’s with his own people.

It was not a bad policy – a system of checks and balances. Except that this was Macedon, not Athens.

Phrygia fell easily, and we marched inland for Sardis after accepting the surrender of Cyzicus. Alexander led us quickly – the Aegema, which increasingly meant all the hypaspists, the Agrianians and all the Hetaeroi; he left the rest of the army to come more slowly under Parmenio with the baggage (including all the new baggage) and the siege train. Memnon fled the field at Granicus (doubtless muttering ‘I told you so’) and began gathering forces at Miletus. Alexander proclaimed his intention of following – but we didn’t take the coast road.

We raced across the mountains to Sardis. It’s a good road, but a brutal trip with an army, and we had minimal baggage and six thousand men and three times as many animals. Any mountain valley was bled white just to feed us. And Alexander cared for nothing but speed, so our movements had the effect of a plague of locusts – and we had the main army behind us.

But fifty stades north of Sardis, Mythrines, the satrap of Sardis, met us with two hundred noblemen at his tail and surrendered the city and the fortress – and the treasury. None of us could believe it – and the next morning, when we rode into our new capital of Asia, our incredulity was downright insulting. I could have held Sardis for six months. It was a richer city than Amphilopolis and Pella rolled into one – I could have fitted both of them into the Jewish quarter of Sardis. The treasury was full of gold, and the magazines were stuffed with grain and oil.

But Sardis’s surrender is part and parcel of how Darius failed. Mythrines was no friend of his, and there was very little racial pride among the higher Persians. They were like Greeks in that respect – they were happy to play traitor if it served their own ends. Or put another way, Mythrines hated Darius more than he hated Alexander. And after Arsites killed himself – news of which came to us about this time – there was no commander in West Asia until Darius granted the title to Memnon.

At any rate, Alexander was stunned by the craven surrender of Sardis. It had been his goal since the start of the expedition – he’d spoken of it often enough as the Troy of our crusade. But instead of an epic siege, it surrendered to his advance guard.

The army rolled into Sardis, exhausted and hungry, but the plains around Sardis were fecund, the barns were full and Lydia was almost mythologically rich, and our army ate themselves sick. Probably improved the local breeding stock, as well.

We were a month at Sardis. Spithridates, the actual satrap, died at Granicus, and Alexander didn’t trust Mythrines enough to give him the office, so he gave it to Parmenio’s brother Asander. Another promotion – another one of Parmenio’s old men moved out of the command structure.

But at Sardis we received news that one of the original plotters against the king was at Ephesus – Amyntas, son of Antiochus. And once Thaïs had enough reports compiled, she sent to the king and guaranteed to seize the city in his name if he’d pay the bill – twenty talents of gold.

Twenty talents of gold for the most famous Greek city in Asia.

Parmenio had taken the city a couple of years earlier, but he’d failed to hold it, and Memnon had taken it back without much of a struggle. There was a large pro-Macedonian party in place, and Thaïs fed it with money and hope.

Alexander sat in my house – my borrowed house, chosen and furnished by Thaïs and thus better than the king’s borrowed palace, a fine house with a courtyard and a rose garden – his chin in his hand. He was in my favourite of his moods – wry, human and intelligent. ‘I want a great siege!’ he said. He was mocking himself. Rare indeed. He had Hephaestion with him, and Callisthenes, Aristotle’s nephew, his new private secretary.

Thaïs rolled her eyes. ‘Play Achilles in your spare time, lord. Achilles didn’t set out to conquer Asia. Ephesus—’

‘Gives us the port we need,’ Alexander said. ‘We need a port for the allied fleet. And I need to rebuild the Temple of Artemis.’

Thaïs raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow. One of the most delightful aspects of living with (near, around) Thaïs is that she was many different women and one never had time to grow bored. In the mountains, she dressed in wool and sheepskin, her heart-shaped face and pointy nose peeping out from under a shepherd’s hat – the picture of an adventurous woman. But a week in Sardis and her hair had a glint of purple-red from some costly dye, her toenails were solid gold in her golden sandals and her eyes were rimmed with kohl. She smelled like . . . the danger of battle and the joy of love all rolled into one smell.

I know I can wax boring on Thaïs, but love is like that. We’d been together a year or more, but Sardis was special. She had provided Alexander with information before, and taken Priapus, but Ephesus was the first time she prepared an action with her own people – and launched it – with his acknowledgement and support. She looked like a queen, and when Alexander smiled at her, she smiled back – peer to peer.

‘Give me twenty talents of gold and I’ll give you Ephesus,’ she said. ‘My understanding is that you’ll have your Troy at Miletus. You know Memnon has sent his wife to Darius as a hostage?’

Alexander laughed. ‘Some men would see that as a double victory – to gain the king’s trust and be rid of a wife.’ He winked at Hephaestion. Callisthenes winced.

Thaïs smiled, and her smile held a thousand secrets. ‘She is reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the world,’ she said. ‘She or her sister. Some say one and some the other.’

Alexander shrugged. Thaïs was more interested in female beauty than Alexander. ‘Why would such a traitor have the veritable Helen?’ he asked.

Thaïs crossed her legs and looked away. She glanced at me for help and back at the window.

I cleared my throat. ‘Erygius and Laodon serve against their own cities, from time to time. Memnon is Ionian – and African.’

Alexander nodded. ‘Oh – very well. Let us buy the damned city. But I assume you’ll use the
demos
faction to overthrow the oligarchy – yes?’

Thaïs nodded.

Alexander shook his head and made a face. ‘That’s contrary to my policy in Greece. I worry that I’ll seem fickle.’ He glanced at Callisthenes.

Callisthenes frowned. ‘The better for us, if you liberate the cities of Asia for democracy,’ he said. ‘Excellent subject for a panegyric. And perhaps if you made the point that when the mainland cities can be trusted, they too will have democracies?’

Thaïs looked as if she’d eaten bad seafood. She could stomach double-dealing spies, but there was something about the self-serving nature of Alexander’s policies that stuck in her throat – or perhaps she was simply enough of an Athenian to be repulsed.

Callisthenes tried to kiss her hand when the king left. He also put a familiar hand on her bottom. ‘Are you available only to Ptolemy?’ he asked with a leer. ‘You must have some spare time.’

Thaïs drifted out of his hands. ‘None whatsoever, my lord,’ she purred. Her voice was so throaty and seductive that it took him precious seconds to realise he’d just been turned down flat. He flushed, but he was most of the way out of our door.

He turned. ‘You whore,’ he said, and spat on our step.

‘No,’ she said. ‘What you want is a whore. I can find you one, if that will please you.’

What amazed me was that he said this in front of me, although my relationship with her was known throughout the army. But he was an arrogant pup – and he was as much a fool about men’s feelings as the king himself. And the two fed on each other. Aristotle has a lot to answer for.

He made a rude gesture. ‘You open and shut like an oyster,’ he said. ‘And I’ll have you whether you like it or not.’

His contempt for her – for all women – blazed like a torch.

Ordinarily, I let Thaïs fight her own battles. After all – that’s what she wanted. And she was capable of punishing me for leaping to her defence in any way that seemed to her a slight on her capabilities.

But this had become an attack on me.

So I grabbed him and slammed his head into my doorpost.

Sometimes, the only answer to an arsehole is a good beating. Heh.

His slaves picked him up and carried him out the door, and I wiped my hands on a towel, and then I heard the sound of two small hands clapping. I turned to find Thaïs applauding me.

‘I didn’t love you for your strength or your temper,’ she said, ‘but it is sometimes lovely to see a man behave like a man.’

I won’t go into details, but we had each other on the spot – court clothes and make-up pots discarded in all directions, until she was naked except for her golden sandals and I except for my Aegyptian dagger. On the carpets in the portico. If our slaves were scandalised, they were discreet. She smelled like danger and love, and she said I smelled like violence.

Oh – Sardis. I remember Sardis through the curtain of her hair.

We marched as soon as Thaïs had a receipt for the twenty talents of gold, and the city opened its gates as we approached. Memnon’s garrison marched out through the Miletian Gate as we marched in through the Sardis gate, and Ephesus was Sardis all over again – another magnificent city, this one
grander than Athens
, surrendered without a fight, and even I felt a certain . . . sadness, if that’s the proper phrase.

Thaïs had no such heroic scruples, and though she entered the city with the baggage, on a mule, Alexander sent her a box – inside was a gold statue of Artemis holding a tiny key.

She kept it until she died. I wondered why Alexander found it so easy to admit publicly that she’d taken Ephesus, but couldn’t reward Cleitus for saving his life.

Ephesus was more dangerous to us than Sardis. Sardis was an alien, Persian city, and our troops knew they were in enemy territory. Ephesus was Greek through and through, and for all I claim that Macedonians hate Greeks – we love Greece, and we are Hellenes. Women in Ephesus looked like Greek women, and spoke Greek. The temples were to Greek gods. The stalls in the agora sold Greek goods and the shopkeepers spoke Greek.

And the artists and philosophers were Greek. Ephesus was the city of Heraklitus and of Thales – of Hipparchus the Comic Poet, and Archippos his son.

Apelles the Artist was living in Ephesus when we took it, and the purge instituted by Thaïs’s democrats had almost killed him. Alexander had the good fortune to rescue him personally from a crowd of democrats who didn’t, apparently, appreciate the new taste in art.

For a while, they were inseparable. Apelles was an agreeable man, I confess – and no sycophant, except out of pure sociability. He was an amiable man, gentle, brilliantly educated. Your father knew him.

Kineas had come down from Phrygia with a squadron of Athenian cavalry, because Alexander wanted to garrison the city with Greeks and Ephesus and Athens were old friends. It was the first time Alexander gave Kineas a direct command, as well – Kineas was the son of a great Athenian aristocrat, and as such was the right man to keep the democrats in line and guarantee to the (surviving) oligarchs that the rule of law would be preserved.

It was beautifully done, and typical of Alexander’s style. He let Thaïs’s partisans get carried away – and they killed almost everyone who might have resisted him. And then he ordered them to stop with a shudder of revulsion and appeared deeply contrite. And summoned his friend, an Athenian aristocrat, to put it all to rights, thus appearing even-handed and just – after ruthlessly exterminating opposition.