God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (7 page)

Grinning like imps.

‘It’s an adventure, isn’t it, sir?’ said Cleomenes.

‘Shut up, you two.’ They had ponies. ‘Can you two find your way back to camp?’

‘Oh, yes, sir!’ Pyrrhus said in the child’s tone that conveys the very opposite of what’s said.

‘Oh, no, sir!’ said Cleomenes, who’d felt my wrath before. ‘It’s . . . that way, I think.’ He pointed off towards Macedon, wrong by a quarter of the earth.

‘Stay with me, then,’ I barked.

Want to rid yourself of fear? Taking care of others is the key. With Laodon I was the weaker – with Cleomenes and Pyrrhus I was the strongest. It might have been comic if it hadn’t been so forceful. I led them back over the first ridge and down to the treeline – and then I made them dismount while I looked at the camp.

All I saw was armed pages looking nervous. So I gathered my charges and rode hard into camp.

Philip was unable to keep still. ‘That’s all you found? Two brats?’

Then he saw the blood on my arms.

‘I found Laodon. He’s looking for the prince.’ I was handed a cup and I took it, drank from it and spluttered – it was neat wine.

‘Thank the gods.’ Philip paused, met my eye. ‘Will you . . . go back out?’

Command is hard. You have to make people do things that you could do better yourself – that might get them killed. Philip the Red, one of my many foes among the pages, was asking my permission to send me back out.

I finished the wine. ‘I need to change horses,’ I said.

Philip nodded. A slave ran for the horse lines.

‘Nice sword,’ Philip said.

‘Laodon did all the work,’ I managed. Suddenly we were men, talking about men’s things, and I was damned if I would boast like a boy.

Philip nodded. ‘I’ve got archers in the woods,’ he said.

‘I got in the north way without being challenged,’ I said as my second-string horse, a big mare that I called Medea, was brought in.

Philip gave me a hand up on to Medea’s broad back – as if I were his peer. ‘I’ll look at it,’ he said.

I took a different angle this time, and the shadows were long. In half an hour or less the red orb would be lost behind the flank of the mountain. Already it was cold – and time for the prince and his hunting mentor to be back.

I missed Poseidon immediately. I’d named the mare Medea for a reason – she was all love one minute and death on hooves the next, and she was in a mood. She made heavier work of climbing the ridges than Poseidon had done, and I had to spend more time dismounted, leading her. But before the sun was down a finger’s breadth, I was across the stream and marsh where I’d first left Polystratus, into new territory.

Medea was a noisier horse, too, and she gave a sharp whinny as I crested the second ridge. I put a hand on her neck, but she raised her head and let go a trumpet call, and I heard a horse answer.

I drew my new sword. There were several horses, all coming up the ridge at me. Running for camp was out of the question – we were drilled relentlessly about becoming the means by which an enemy might discover the camp, when we were scouting. In fact, we might have been training for this moment all our lives.

I tucked Medea in behind a stunted, bushy spruce and threw my chlamys over her head to shut her up. I could hear my own panicked breathing, and I assumed that every Illyrian in the woods could hear me, too.

I’d picked a poor hiding place, though. Always pick a place of ambush from which you can
see.
If you can’t see the enemy, chances are he can’t see you – but you can panic too, while you don’t know whether he’s outflanking you or wandering into your trap. I crouched there on Medea’s back, a hand well out over her head, keeping my cloak in place so she’d be quiet, and I had no idea where in Tartarus the Illyrians were.

But to move now – they had to be a few horse-lengths away.

The next few heartbeats were the longest of the day. And then the gods took a hand, and nothing was as I expected.

I waited. I could hear them moving, and I could hear them talking. They were quiet and careful and they knew that they were being watched. And I became aware that they’d sent men around the other side of my spruce thicket – so I was a dead man.

Best to charge, I decided. For the record, this is a form of fear that probably kills more men than running from an enemy. The need to
get it over with
is absurd.

I pulled my cloak off Medea’s head and got her under me, and we were at them.

Fighting on horseback is very different to fighting on foot, mostly because you are not on your own feet, but on someone else’s. It’s hard to wrong-foot a man in a fight – at least, in the open. But it’s not so hard to wrong-foot another man on horseback – if he’s got his spear on the wrong side of the horse, say. The first Illyrian had his spear in his right hand, held at mid-haft, slanted slightly down, and I burst from cover and he caught the spearhead in his pony’s neck strap.

I missed my overhand stab, but my spearhead slammed sideways into his head and he toppled.

Then Medea took a spear in the chest, and while I tried to slow her, another in the rump, and down we went. It was so fast I didn’t have time to hurt, but rolled free and got to my feet.

Got my back against a big tree.

The rest of the Illyrians were already relaxing – they’d thought it was a great ambush sprung on them, and now they were realising that they had one boy, not a Macedonian army.

A pair of them kneed their horses around the spruce thicket, but the rest turned into me.

I got my spear.

A boy my own age laughed, pulled a bow from a long scabbard under his knee and strung it.

So I threw the spear.

It was something we practised every day – if I hadn’t been able to hit him at that distance, I’d have had marks on my back like a bad slave.

That took the smiles off their faces. The boy with the bow died with a gurgle.

I drew my sword.

Let’s make this quick – they shot my horse, and then they beat me to the ground with spear staves. I don’t think I marked any of them. They were good. And thorough. They broke both my arms.

They bound me to a sapling like a deer carcass, and I screamed. It hurt a great deal.

Several of them spoke Greek, and the chieftain – at least, I assumed he was the chief, although he looked like a brigand with some gold pins – came and squatted by me.

‘So,’ he said. ‘You killed Tarxes’ boy. He wants to skin you.’ The brigand chief grinned. He was missing a great many teeth, and others were broken, blackened stumps. I was somewhere in a haze of pain between consciousness and unconsciousness. ‘You look like a noble brat to me, boy. And you have one of my swords on you. Tell me. Who are you?’

I’d like to say I was brave, but all I could do was mewl, spit and scream. The rawhide straps cut off all circulation to my legs but left plenty of feeling in my unset broken arms.

Broken Teeth watched me for a while. Then he took my eating knife out of his belt and rammed it through my bicep. ‘Talk, boy,’ he said.

I fainted. Thank the gods.

They unstrapped me and threw me into the icy stream at the foot of the ridge. So much for fainting. I couldn’t swim. I couldn’t even float. It occurred to me that the best thing I could do was fill my lungs with water and go down, but they hauled me clear, and anyway, I’m not sure I had the nerve.

It is a funny thing, but when you are tortured, you are a different person. Weaker, with no pride and no
self.
And yet you want to live. That’s the hold they have over you. The desire to live.

They knew quite a bit. They made the mistake of talking about it. They knew it was Alexander with the hunting party.

As soon as I heard that, I knew that one of the lowland lords was playing at regicide. Alexander was the king’s only heir.

That thought gave me power. Gave me back my self. Instead of being human garbage ready for sacrifice, I went back to being a royal page who had a master to protect.

See this, lad? That’s where they cut my right nipple off my breast. Oh, yes. That’s all scar tissue.

They enjoyed themselves. But they weren’t as good as, say, a Persian torturer.

I screamed out my name. Several hundred times. It was the only thing I’d say, but I must have said it quite a bit, because I can actually remember when no sound came out at all – just the shrill sound of vocal cords wrecked by overuse.

It would have been nice if I’d passed out again, but I didn’t and they tied me to a tree. Blood is sticky and
cold.
I was in shock, of course, and I shook so badly it hurt my arms. Shall I go on? Men came and beat me – quite casually. A fist in the face, a couple of kicks – they must have cracked every rib.

I’m trying to shock you, boy, and that’s unkind. On the other hand, you have the satisfaction of knowing that since I’m here wearing the crown of Aegypt, I must have survived, eh?

As darkness fell, half of them rode away west under Broken Teeth. The other half bedded down, with two alert and well-concealed sentries. Tarxes came and put his eating spike into my left hand and pulled it out a couple of times. See the scars?

Then he went off to check the sentries. I was far too aware of everything around me. I wanted to faint or die, but instead I was hyper-aware.

So I watched Laodon slit a sentry’s throat. I wasn’t sure it was real, because by then the night seemed to be full of ghosts and shadows. The moon was full. The Illyrian ponies began to fuss, and ghosts walked. When Laodon slit the man’s throat, taking him from behind with his hand as he’d grabbed me at the stream, I saw the ghosts lap at the fountain of black blood that flashed like a sword in the moonlight.

From my position in the middle of the camp, I saw Erigyus take the big axe that was meant for boars and cut the other sentry in half, or close enough. The axe made a noise like a man splitting a melon for water on a summer’s day.

Then the pages flooded the camp and began killing. There was no resistance – the Illyrians were taken by surprise and paid with their lives, and they died on their squalid pallets.

Laodon cut my bonds. I managed a shriek when he reached for my arms, and he lowered me to the ground.

‘By Aphrodite,’ he swore. ‘What have they done to you?’

And next I saw Alexander, his blond head outlined in fire. I can still see him – his profile sharply outlined. The pages must have thrown all the camp’s hastily gathered wood on to the fire, and the raging flames backlit him.

‘I will never forget this,’ he said, and kissed me on the forehead.

It is a hard way to become a royal favourite – to win the absolute trust of the king. My left hand was never good for much afterwards, and I’ve known women lose the desire to fornicate when faced with the ruin of my left breast.

But without those wounds, and those awful hours, I would not be King of Aegypt.

I was a year recovering. To be honest, it was more than a year – it took me a year to recover my body enough to begin training, and another year to train hard enough to recover my place among the pages. And more than that to recover . . . something that Tarxes cut out. Ambition. Aggression. Will.

I recovered for a while on my father’s estates, but as soon as I could walk and hold a stylus I was back with Aristotle, and it was then that I came to understand how much my station had changed. I was not Ptolemy, son of an aristocrat, royal page. Somehow I had become the Man Who Saved the Prince, and even my father treated me with respect.

I had to go back to the Gardens of Midas to know why.

Aristotle told me that Alexander saw me captured. That Polystratus – who lived to be free – found the prince and Erigyus, and was leading them to camp when they saw the whole fight – me against twenty Illyrians. Alexander ordered them to be silent. Later, Polystratus said he watched the whole incident like a craftsman watches his work – forging everything into his memory. Alexander and Polystratus didn’t depart until Broken Teeth took his men out of camp at nightfall, and they left Erigyus to watch – and came back with the pages and Laodon. As Aristotle explained it, the prince felt I’d sacrificed myself for him. Over the years many men would do the same, but he
watched
me do it. Sometimes the gods are kind.

Aristotle liked to use it as an example of how proper behaviour could result in immediate reward.

I was suspicious of that. It was my left hand that hurt as if it was newly injured every time it rained, not Aristotle’s. My smooth-skinned girl screamed when her hand found my scars and she woke her father.

I had nightmares. Still have them.
Nothing
I ever found on the great wheel of the earth ever terrified me like that night in the woods when the ghosts walked, Death prowled and I was in the doorway between this world and the next, my soul stretched thin on the ground, when men wandered out of the dark to hurt me.

But Alexander and the rest treated me like a hero. And that was, in fact, worth the cost.

TWO

Macedon and Greece, 341–338
BC

M
y best memory of Aristotle is one of my most unhappy memories of myself.