Текст книги "God of War -The Story of Alexander the Great"

Автор книги: Christian Cameron

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After that, the factions were quiet. In fact, they were silent.

We had two immediate problems after settling the local population and killing the two possible immediate rivals. They were that the Greek states would almost certainly revolt, whatever their ambassadors said – and worst of all, Attalus, bloody Attalus, and Parmenio, whichever side he chose to be on, were in Asia with the cream of the army.

And Antipater predicted that every province would revolt except the home provinces.

Well, he was right. We were just starting to move the court back to Pella when the news came trickling in – two big Thracian raids and a string of insults from the Illyrians. The Boeotians expelled their garrison and abrogated the League of Corinth. Demosthenes made a tremendous show in the Athenian Assembly. His daughter had died less than a week before – but he threw off his mourning and went to the Assembly in white, wearing a garland of flowers and saying that Greece was saved.

Bad news travels fast.

There was nothing we could do immediately. Everything depended on timing, luck, the fortune of the gods – and the loyalty of the rump of the army.

Alexander took two steps immediately. We held a council the first night in Pella – Philip was seven days dead by then. Olympias was amusing herself by celebrating his death with more abandon than old Demosthenes. She had a sort of honesty to her, I’ll give her that. She decorated Pausanias’s body as if he were a hero, not a regicide.

Macedon, eh?

At any rate, we held an inner council the first night in Pella. Antipater was there, and Alexander the Highlander, who dealt pragmatically with the death of both his brothers. Olympias was excluded. Laodon was there – he’d been over the border in Thessaly, where Philip had sent him into exile, and he was already back. Erigyus was on his way and the actor, Thessalus, was recalled. So were some other favourites – mostly small men, but Philip had exiled quite a few of them when Alexander’s star began to wane at court.

Laodon had a trusted man – a Macedonian, a veteran, a man whom Philip had trusted as a herald and a messenger, but who had a special relationship with Laodon. Hecataeus was his name, and he’d been Alexander’s go-between with both Laodon and with Philip during his exile.

Hecataeus was a complex man – no simple image fits him. He was an excellent soldier, and because of it had made his way from the ranks to effective command of a taxeis under Amyntas. But he was both subtle and utterly honest – a rare and wonderful combination. Men – great men – trusted him. He was, in fact, the ideal herald – respected for his scars and war stories, trusted because he always kept faith, discreet with what he learned. I was not everywhere – I don’t know what the roots of his alliance with Alexander were.

But at the council, Alexander ordered him to go to Parmenio. ‘Bring him over to me, and order him to kill Attalus,’ Alexander said.

Antipater shook his head. ‘You may as well order the poor man to kill the Great King and conquer Asia,’ he said.

Alexander pursed his lips. ‘No, those things are for me to do,’ he answered, as if the comment were to be taken seriously.

Hecataeus smiled about one quarter of a smile. ‘My lord, what exactly can I offer Parmenio? He has the army.’

Again, there was something so . . . well, so reasonable about Hecataeus – it was not as if he was bargaining on behalf of a possible traitor. He was asking fair questions. He was a very able man.

‘Short of the kingdom, you may offer him anything,’ Alexander said.

Hecataeus shook his head. ‘I’m too small a man to make such an offer,’ he said. ‘I would go with concrete terms, if I must do this job.’

Alexander nodded. ‘Well said. Very good, then. Parmenio may have the first satrapy of the spear-won lands of Asia. The highest commands for his sons and himself – my right hand.’ He looked at Hecataeus.

The herald nodded. ‘That’s very helpful, lord. On those lines, I can negotiate.’

Alexander looked around. He was selling the commands of his kingdom to a man who’d either been a rival or held aloof. And we, his loyal inner circle, were clearly notgoing to get those commands.

Black Cleitus made a face. ‘I take it I shouldn’t get used to commanding the Hetaeroi,’ he said.

Alexander slapped his shoulder. ‘Parmenio owns the love of more of my subjects than I do,’ he said. ‘The man has most of the army, and most of the lowland barons. In time, Ptolemy can take over his faction, but for now, I need him. He’s sixty-five – he’ll be dead soon enough. In the meantime – yes. Make room, friends. The sons of Parmenio will be plucking the choicest fruits.’ He shrugged. Parmenio’s sons had not been pages. ‘I expect he’ll want Philotas as the commander of the Hetaeroi.’ He nodded to me and Cleitus. ‘But you two will command the squadrons.’

Then Alexander turned to me. ‘I have a mission for you, as well, son of Lagus, wily Odysseus.’

Well, who dislikes good flattery? ‘At your service, my king,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I’m sending you to the king of the Agrianians,’ he said. ‘Get me as many of his warriors as you can arrange. Psiloi and Peltastoi – light-armed men to replace all the light-armed men my pater has sent to Asia.’

That was our first intimation that the king intended an immediate campaign.

‘Are we going to war?’ I asked.

Antipater coughed. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘We are trying to negotiate from a position of relative strength, and a thousand light-armed men will make us look the readier to march.’

Alexander smiled. He looked around, caught every eye. ‘What he means is, yes, unless all my enemies miraculously knuckle under, I’ll be fighting all summer.’ His grin became wolfish. ‘I have cavalry, and enough heavy foot. Go and get Langarus to hand over some prime men. And hurry back.’

So I nodded. Even though I was again going to be absent while the big decisions were made.

In fact, I’d already seen the lay of the land. Alexander trusted us – his young inner circle – with the difficult missions. But it would be Antipater’s generation – Antipater and Parmenio and such men – who would lead the crusade into Asia. Not us.

I had a long ride into Illyria to ponder the ways of kings. I took my troop of grooms, and bandits fled at our approach. It was very gratifying. We swept the high passes clear. We practised climbing abovethe passes and closing both ends at once, so we could catch the bandits – and it worked twice (and not the other ten times!). Once, with Polystratus scouting, we took a whole band of them – scarecrows with armour – and executed all of them, leaving their corpses in trees as a warning to future generations.

So by the time we came down into mountainous Agriania, word of our exploits had run ahead of us.

Alexander’s young wife was pregnant. Her father quite happily called out a band of picked warriors – useless mouths, he called them. Many of them were his own bodyguard – the shield-bearers, he called them in his own tongue – in Greek, we called them hypaspists. He gave me almost six hundred men – well armoured, but light-footed. And he promised to come with his own army if Alexander summoned him.

That was a well-planned marriage. The girl beamed adoringly and waited to be summoned to Pella. For all I know, she’s still waiting.

We returned to Macedon by a different set of passes, and the Agrianians loved our game of climbing high above the passes and then closing both ends at once. In fact, they maintained – as a nation of mountaineers – that they’d invented it.

Their principal warrior was ‘Prince’ Alectus. He was no more a prince than I, but an old war hound. He was the hairiest man I’d ever seen – naked, he looked more like a dog, despite his heavy muscles. He had red-grey curly hair, even in his ears. To a Greek, he was impossibly ugly, with his wiry hair and his intricate tattoos.

He shocked me, the first night on the road home, by asking me if I was an educated man, and then debating with me about the gods. He was widely read, and yet he drew his own conclusions from what he read.

‘Ever think that all this killing might be wrong, lad?’ he asked me, that first night. He was drinking my wine in my tent. None of the Agrianians had a tent.

‘Of course I’ve thought it,’ I said. ‘All you have to do is look at a dead man’s widow.’

Alectus nodded. ‘Or his children, eh?’

‘Some men are evil,’ I said, drunkenly cutting across a whole lot of arguments. Aristotle would not have approved.

Alectus sneered. ‘And you only kill the evil ones, eh?’

That shut me up.

He was an old barbarian and he’d done a lot of killing, and he was beginning to doubt the whole game. ‘What if there’s nothingbut this world?’ he asked, on the fourth bowl of wine.

‘Oh?’ I asked. ‘And who made it?’

Alectus shrugged. ‘If a god made it, what does he want? I mean, if I make a shield, it’s because one of the lads needs a shield. Eh?’

‘Where are we going with this?’ I asked.

‘Talk goes with wine,’ Alectus said. ‘I like both. I used to like a good fight. But now, I’m beginning to wonder.’

‘Are all you hill men philosophers?’ I asked.

Alectus spat. ‘As far as I can tell, your philosophers ain’t interested in what’s good for men. They’re interested in sounding good and pompous, eh? None of them seems to be willing to tell me what the gods think of killing.’

‘Go to Delphi!’ I said. I had meant to say it with a sneer, but I’m afraid – then and now – that I have a great respect for oracles.

Alectus drank off his wine. ‘You may actually have the makings of a wise man, Macedonian. Will Alexander take me to Delphi?’

I shrugged. ‘No idea. But . . . if we march on Greece, we’ll have to go right past the shrine.’

Alectus lifted the whole bowl and poured a libation. ‘To Delphic Apollo and his oracle,’ he said, and drank some. ‘That was god-given advice, young man. I’ll pay more heed to you in the morning.’

And then he picked up his sword and walked off into the night.

I liked Alectus.

We were two weeks getting back to Pella and my farms fed the Agrianians. I met up with Heron for the first time in two years and he embraced me – and I freely gave him almost a quarter of my farms. Loyalty is rare, young man. It needs rich reward.

And when we reached Pella, I swore out a warrant at the treasury for the value of the food my farms had provided to the barbarian auxiliaries. That got me a two-year remission of taxes.

Which meant that I made a profit – if a small one – on bringing the Agrianians to Pella.

I won’t belabour this point. But I mention it so that you know that managing a great estate is a matter of constant work and constant alertness to opportunity. It is much easier to fritter a great estate away than to protect and expand it.

Pella was an armed camp. There were three taxeis of pikes outside the town – all the men of upper Macedon, townsmen of Amphilopolis and hardy mountain men, all billeted on Attalus’s estates. Alexander had ordered every nobleman to call up his grooms, so that we had almost four thousand cavalry. He left his father’s royal companions at home, and almost a thousand of the foot companions he retired to new estates – a popular move, and one that left him with a reserve of veterans, if we had a disaster.

Alexander picked the largest and best men from the foot companions (as had his father before him) and added them to the Agrianians, and created his own hypaspitoi. As I say, Philip had had his own – picked men of the phalanx, but they were the very veterans that Alexander had just settled on good estates. Did he distrust them? Or was the new broom sweeping clean?

I wasn’t consulted. Later, we had three regiments of hypaspists – the ‘Aegema’ and two regiments of elite infantry to go with them. They were our only infantry that wore harness all year and never went back to their farms – well, in the early days. Heh. Soon enough, no one was going home at all. But I get ahead of myself.

My grooms went with the cavalry, and my squadron of companions was commanded by Philip the Red, and no man was appointed to overall command of the Hetaeroi. But I found that I was the commander of the hypaspitoi – a job I held many times, and always enjoyed.

Alexander loved to blend. It was an essential part of his success that he thought that men could be alloyed just as metals were – and the early hypaspitoi were his first experiment. It was his theory that big, tough, well-trained Macedonians would serve to reduce the Agrianians to discipline, and that the hardy, athletic and wilderness-trained Agrianians would teach his elite Macedonians a thing or two about moving over woods and rocks.

Well, that’s what made him Alexander. I admit I thought he was mad. They’d only been joined an hour before we had our first murder.

Alexander heard of it, sent for me and asked what I planned to do.

‘Catch the culprit and hang him,’ I said.

Alexander nodded. ‘Good. Get it done by sunset.’ He looked at me. ‘We’re marching.’

I was stunned. ‘But Antipater . . .’ I’d just seen Antipater, who had reassured me that the magazines were full and we weren’t going anywhere.

Alexander frowned. ‘Antipater sometimes has trouble remembering who is king,’ he said.

So I rode Poseidon into my lines. It was easy to find the killer. He was one of my men, a pezhetaeroi file leader. He was standing in the courtyard of his billet, bragging to his friends.

Some of my best men. Six foot or taller, every man. Loyal as anything.

I had Polystratus and my grooms. ‘Take him,’ I said.

He didn’t even struggle until it was too late. All the way to the gallows tree he shrieked that he was a Macedonian, not a barbarian. His cries brought many men out of billets, and many Agrianians out of their fields. They watched him dragged to the tree, impassively.

Alectus came and stood in front of them. He nodded to me.

I did not nod back.

I ordered Philip son of Cleon – that was my phylarch’s name – to have a noose put around his neck.

I had almost a thousand men around me by then, and the Macedonians, as is our way, were vocal in their disapproval.

A rock hit Poseidon.

I had had other plans, but my hand was forced. The noose was tied to the tree, so I reached out and swatted the horse under my phylarch with my naked sword blade, and the horse reared and bolted, scattering the crowd, and before his fellow Macedonians could get organised, Philip son of Cleon’s neck snapped and he was dead.

And thatgot me silence.

‘Gentlemen,’ I said. It was silent.‘One law. For every man in the army. No crime against your fellow soldiers will be tolerated. You are one corps – one regiment. It is the will of the king. In a few hours, we will march to war. If you are angered, save it for the enemy.’

Then I sent for the phylarchs and Prince Alectus.

‘When we march tomorrow,’ I said, ‘we will not march as separate companies. There will be four Macedonians and four Agrianians in every file, and they will alternate – Macedonian, Agrianian, Macedonian. And across the ranks – the same. See to it.’

My senior phylarch, yet another man named Philip – Philip son of Agelaus, known to most of us as Philip Longsword – spat. ‘Can’t be done. Take me all night just to write it down.’

‘Best get to work, then,’ I said.

There are some real advantages to being a rich aristocrat. He couldn’t stare me down. Social class rescued me, and eventually he knuckled under with a muttered ‘Yes, m’lord’.

Alectus merely nodded.

‘Don’t be fools!’ I said. ‘You two don’t know the king and I do. He’ll kill every one of you – me too – rather than give up on this experiment. So find a way to work together, or we’ll all hang one by one.’

If I expected that to have an immediate effect, I was disappointed. They both glared at each other and at me, and they left my tent without exchanging a word.

All night, I wanted to go and see what they were doing. At one point, Polystratus had to grab me by the collar and order me into my camp-bed.

The Hetaeroi marched first, in the morning, and we were just forming, and the whole army was waiting on us. And every man in the army knew what had happened.

In retrospect, I gambled heavily on Alectus.

He and Philip Longsword stood at the head of the parade, and called men by name – one by one.

It took an hour. More. We had just slightly fewer than eleven hundred men, and it took so much time to call their names that all the other taxeis were formed and ready to march.

And when we’d formed our phalanx, what a hodge-podge we looked. No order, no uniformity of equipment or even uniformity of chaos – which is what the barbarians had. Instead, we looked like the dregs of the army, not the elite.

But we were formed. I ordered them to march by files from the right, and off they went up the road.

I found the king at my elbow. ‘My apologies . . .’ I began.

Alexander gave me his golden smile. ‘Not bad,’ he said. He nodded and rode away.

I remember that day particularly well, because I rode for a while and then dismounted and took an aspis from one of the hypaspists.

You hardly see them any more, the big round shields of the older men. They were better men – better trained, the Greek way, in gymnasiums, and those perfect bodies you see in statues and on funerary urns had a purpose, which was to carry a greater weight of shield and armour than we lesser men today. It was Philip’s notion – Philip the king, I mean – to arm his bodyguard in the old way.

You can’t just take farmers and tell them to carry the aspis. Well – you can if your farmers consciously train to carry it. But Macedonian farmers aren’t the heroes of Marathon, who were somewhere between aristocrats and our small farmers, with the muscles of working men allied to the leisure time of gentlemen. But by making the hypaspitoi full-time soldiers who served all year round and trained every day, Philip made it possible to maintain a body of professional hoplites like the men he’d trained with in Thebes when he was a hostage there.

Alexander wanted the same – but he wanted to add the aggressive spirit and woodcraft of those Agrianians. On the first day, we had a lot of big men of two races who hated each other and were miserably undertrained in carrying the weight of the damned shield. And only the front-rankers had armour.

Two hours into the march, my left shoulder was so badly bruised that I had my fancy red military chlamys tied in a ball to pad it, and I was sheathed in sweat and it was all I could do to put one foot in front of another. Men were falling out – both Agrianians and Macedonians.

I knew what I had to do. This is what the pages train you for. This moment. But it hurts, and all that pain – boy, do you know that pain gets worse as you get older? The fear of pain – the expectation of pain?

At any rate, I stepped out of the file and ran back along the ranks to the very back of the hypaspistoi. I didn’t know the men by name or even by sight yet, but I guessed there were at least a dozen men already gone from the ranks. I also noticed that the pezhetaeroi behind us were marching in their chitons, with slaves carrying their helmets, small shields, pikes and armour.

I felt like an idiot. Cavalrymen generally wear their kit, and I was a cavalryman. Of coursefoot soldiers marched with slaves carrying their kit.

On the other hand . . .

There was Polystratus, riding and leading my Poseidon. He looked amused. I hated him.

‘Get your sorry arse back along the column and find my stragglers,’ I barked.

‘Yes, O master,’ he intoned. ‘You could ride and do it yourself.’

I made a rude sign at him, sighed and ran back up the column. ‘You tired? Anyone want to run with me?’ I bellowed, and men looked up from their misery.

‘I’m going to run the next five stades. And then I’m going to rest. You can walk the next five stades and then keep walking, or you can run with me.’ I repeated this over and over as I ran from the back of the column to the front.

At the front, I took my place in the lead file – a muchmore comfortable place to march, let me tell you, than the middle files, where the dust clogs your scarf and turns to a kind of mud with your breath.

In my head I started playing with tunes. I could play the lyre, badly, but I could sing well enough to be welcome at an Athenian symposium, and I knew a few songs. Nothing worked for me just then, so I grunted at my file leaders.

‘Ready to run?’ I asked.

Sullen stares of hate.

Command. So much fun.

‘On me,’ I said, and off I went at a fast trot.

Let’s be brief. We ran five stades. We caught up to the Hetaeroi cavalry in front. By then, we were strung out along three stades of dirt road, because a lot of my hypaspitoi were breaking down under the weight of the shields – ungainly brutes.

But we made it, and I led the files off the road into a broad field – a fallow farm field. I dropped the aspis off my shoulder and, without meaning to, fell to the ground. Then I got to my feet, by which time most of the hypaspitoi who were still with me were lying on their backs, staring at the sun in the sky.

‘Hypaspitoi!’ I shouted.

Groans. Silence.

‘The men of Athens and Plataea ran from Marathon to Athens at night after fighting all day,’ I shouted.

Legends often start in small ways. And no one remembers, later, the moments of failure.

My hypaspitoi straggled into camp, and almost a third of my men – mostly, but not all, Agrianians – were among the last men into camp. I had to get my grooms together and use them as military police to collect up the slowest men. Forty men had to be dismissed – home to Agriania or back to the pezhetaeroi.

But none of my friends – or enemies – in the Hetaeroi really noticed that. What Hephaestion knew was that the hypaspitoi had caught up with the cavalry and he claimed we’d hooted at the horsemen and demanded to be allowed to run past. Horseshit. All I wanted to do was lie down and die, at that point. But that’s how a good legend starts.

I wanted to go and eat with my Hetaeroi, but I knew that wouldn’t work, so instead I put myself in a mess with Alectus and Philip Longsword, and we cooked our own food. Well – to be fair, all the phylarchs had slaves or servants, and we didn’t do a lot of cooking. But the work got done, and I do have some vague recollection of helping to collect firewood with two exhausted Macedonian peasants who were scared spitless to find their commander breaking downed branches with them. I had to teach the useless fucks how to break branches in the crotch of a living tree with a natural fork close to the ground. Apparently only lazy men know how to do this.

The next morning, I ordered the armour and aspides packed, and ordered the men to march in their chitons. And I collected the file closers . . .

You have never served in a phalanx. So let’s digress. A Macedonian phalanx is raised from a territory. In their prime, we had between six and nine taxeis, and each was raised in one of the provinces – three for the lower kingdoms, three for the upper kingdoms and three for the outer provinces, or close enough. Every taxeis had a parchment strength of two thousand, but in fact they usually numbered between eleven hundred and seventeen hundred sarissas. Every man was armed the same way – a long sarissa, a short sword or knife, a helmet. The front ranks were supposed to be well armoured, and sometimes they were – never in new levies, always in old veteran corps.

Veterans were supposed to rotate home after a set number of years or campaigns, and new drafts were supposed to come out to the army every spring when the taxeis reformed. All the phalangites – the men of the phalanx – were supposed to go home every autumn. Only the royal companions – the Hetaeroi – and the hypaspitoi stayed in service all year round.

Each taxeis was composed of files – eight men under Philip, and ten men under Alexander. At times we’d be as deep as sixteen or twenty, but that was generally for a specific purpose. Let’s stay with files of ten. A taxeis of two thousand men formed ten deep has two hundred files. Every file, at the normal order, has six feet of space in the battle line – six feet wide and as deep as required. That means that the frontage of a taxeis at normal order is twelve hundred feet. A little more than a stade.

But of course we almost never fight in ‘normal’ order, but contract to the synaspis, the shield-touching shield formation with ten pikes stacked over the front rank’s locked round shields. So that’s about three feet per man, two hundred files, six hundred feet width, or about half a stade. Still with me?

Every file has three officers – the file leader, who runs the group and leads it – literally – in combat and on the march. The file closer – the ‘last’ man; he’s the second-in-command, because if the phalanx faces to the rear he’s the front-rank man, and because he alone can prevent men from deserting or running away. And the mid-ranker. In many manoeuvres – especially Macedonian manoeuvres – men march by half-files, and suddenly the half-file leader is the leader of a short file. The half-file leader is the third-in-command. Finally, the most promising new man is the half-file closer – the fifth man back, who, if the file is split in two, will be the ‘last’ man in a file only five deep. See? It was never a real rank, but to be put in the fifth position was to be seen as the next to be promoted in the file.

But the hypaspitoi were more complicated. We were a little over a thousand men and only eight deep. Our eight-man files were clumsy, because no one had worked together. And the file isn’t just a tactical unit – a file of infantry builds shelters together, cooks together, eats together, goes to find whores together, kills innocent civilians together, steals cattle together, digs latrines together, uses them together, swims together. You get the picture.

My files had no cohesion. We’d forced a bunch of men together, and they were supposed to be elite, but mostly they were angry and unfed, because dysfunctional files meant no firewood, no shelter and no food.

Their other problem is that Alexander’s mixture of magnanimity and paranoia had resulted in his releasing allthe old hypaspitoi. If it had been me, I’d have released a third each campaign. My beloved king left me with precisely one veteran – Philip Longsword. If I had even a hundred – just one veteran per file – I’d have had someone to teach all the Agrianians how to live as soldiers.

I see your question, young man – how could all these picked men not know how to function as soldiers? Why weren’t those woodsy mountaineers clever enough to get firewood and cook?

I’m sure that alone in the mountains, they’d have had their shelters rigged in no time. But when you march with ten thousand soldiers and as many slaves and grooms – twenty thousand men and some prostitutes and hangers-on – foraging is a skill. Getting firewood is a skill. Cooking – quickly and well, with minimal wood use and very few pots or utensils – is a skill. Men going into the mountains take a pot – wealthy men have a copper or bronze pot. Soldiers need time and expertise to collect such things – they need to pool money and resources to get a slave, to buy a pot for that slave to carry, to find, buy or steal food to put into that pot . . .

We hadn’t given my boys time to do any of that. There were twenty messes without a cauldron of any kind. I know – I walked around and looked.

But I saw something that suggested that there was hope. I saw one file cook and then hand its cauldron over to another file. They ate late, but they ate.

The army was fed by markets – our own army agora. When we were on home ground, scouts – the Prodromoi – would ride out and warn the farmers for stades around the projected evening camp, and they would bring their wares to the camp before the soldiers even arrived. They’d be set up when the soldiers marched in, and one or two men from every mess would go to the market and buy food – a little meat, some grain for bread, some oil, a little wine.

A lucky or skilful mess had a slave or two. That would ease the process greatly, because the slave didn’t have to be with the column. In friendly country, a really good slave – a trusted slave – would go out on his own, buy food in the countryside (where the prices were lower) and maybe even have the fire going when the men marched in. A slave who has reason to believe that expert service will bring freedom – which is a Thracian concept of slavery and something Macedonians practise well – will do all this every day for a year or two. But in the end, the file has to free him, of course, and then they need to pool their cash and buy another.

Or just take one in battle.

And let’s just add to this. A victorious Macedonian army accreted slaves – bed-warmers, foragers, cooks, baggage-humpers. And the duty of the footslogger gets easier and easier. He’s got a slave to carry his gear, a donkey, two cook pots per mess to make the food more interesting, more cash to buy better food, wine every night and a girl. Or a boy. Or both.

One defeat, and all that is gone. If you lose a fight with the Thracians, they take your camp and all your slaves, all your baggage animals, all your bed-warmers. Gone. And you are back to humping your own gear.

That’s the life of an infantryman. I’ve embarked on this long discourse so that you understand that, despite their status as ‘household’ troops, my hypaspitoi were pretty much at the bottom of the barrel as we marched out of Pella. We had very few slaves, insufficient cook gear, no tents, no baggage animals at all.

So when my men marched in their chitons, they still had to hump all their gear on their own shoulders, and that was painful. I was not happy to carry my own kit, and my decision to do it allowed Polystratus a long laugh at my expense.

‘I dreamed of this, when I was your slave,’ he said.

I grunted.

Day two was worse than day one. Luckily, I really don’t remember any of it.

But towards afternoon, I took my new palfrey – a nice little Thracian mare with no good blood but lots of heart – and rode up the column, saluted the king and then went north with the Prodromoi. We were in my land, and we’d be camping on my farms. I rode into Ichnai with Polystratus, embraced Heron and sent out my orders.