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

Автор книги: Christian Cameron

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I reined in. Poseidon was edgy, and he fidgeted under me on the knife-edge ridge. I thought about it for as long as a man takes to run the stade – a good man – and then I turned Poseidon north and climbed higher on the ridge.

By the time I’d ridden for a hundred heartbeats, the awful truth was clear – I wasn’t on the right ridge. We’d come farther around the mountain than I thought. I wasn’t quite lost – but I didn’t know what angle to cast on to make it to camp.

I considered going back to Laodon. He might mock me, he might club me to the ground, but at least he’d set me on the right trail.

I kept Poseidon going up the ridge, dodging trees and cursing under my breath every so often. Fearing that I was going to be the death of my prince, because I was lost in the woods. That’s a worse fear than battle sickness or fear of a girl’s parents – fear of failing others. The worst. Better to die alone than to fail others.

Up and up. The ridge was quite steep now. The trees were thinning, and for the first time I could see for a few stades. I had to dismount and lead Poseidon across a rocky slope at the base of a high rock cliff – old volcanic rock like rotten cheese. Poseidon picked his way across the scree like a veteran, and I looked until my eyes burned for something I might recognise.

Of course, we put out our fires as soon as the day dawned. So there was no smoke.

But midway across the cliff face, I realised what I was seeing. Out of sight over the next ridge was something that drew a lot of carrion birds.

Dead deer, that’s what was drawing the crows.

I felt my heart start to pound. My hands grew cold. I made my feet go faster. Poseidon stumbled and I tried to haul him along the scree by force – never a good move with a horse. The horse always wins a contest of strength – my first riding master taught me that. But I was afraid. I made mistakes.

I think that the difference between great warriors and dead warriors is that the great ones survive their first mistakes.

I got across the scree and started down the second ridge. I could no longer see the carrion birds, but they were loud and raucous and I could hear them and I rode for them. I cantered where on any other day I’d have walked. I pictured in my mind all the pages butchered or sold as slaves, Alexander as a hostage. Because I’d failed.

Down the ridge – now I was committed because it’s easier to ride down a steep slope than to come back up, and once Poseidon got into the vale below, I wasn’t sure we’d get back up this high. I cursed under my breath, prayed, and got a lot of branches in the face. Then we came out of the trees.

There was the wall of hurdles – the deer trap. Slaves around the carcasses. I put my head down, clenched my knees and put my heels into Poseidon’s flanks, and we were off, canter and gallop and a desperate sliding stumble down another slope of loose rock above the camp, and men were looking at me.

‘The prince!’ I demanded as I reined in.

Philip the Red, one of the oldster pages, shook his head. ‘Alexander is off with Erigyus,’ Philip said. ‘What the fuck?’

‘Illyrians!’ I said. ‘A raiding party. Laodon sent me to warn the camp.’

Philip was a year older than me, a right bastard to the younger pages, an obsequious lickspittle to the older men. He looked around desperately.

There wasn’t a free adult male in camp. There were ten or twelve pages and fifty slaves and some flute girls.

Some men have it. Some men don’t.

‘Right,’ Philip said. I swear his face changed. He looked at me. ‘The prince went north. Go and warn him.’ He looked around again and saw Black Cleitus. ‘Arm the pages, Cleitus! Right now! And get every slave a bow!’

Simple orders. Obvious stuff, you say. But Philip the Red made the grade, right there. Even if he had beaten me to a pulp once.

I had a body slave – a sort of dog-of-all-work, a gift from my pater to go with my new horse – that I called Polystratus. He was older, a Thracian, and I tolerated him and he wasn’t all that fond of me. But as I turned Poseidon to head north, he was at my side with a spear and a bow. He put the spear in my hand.

Philip the Red wasn’t the only one making the grade.

Polystratus ran with my horse. It’s something city people don’t know – a horse isn’t that much faster than a man, especially over broken ground. The longer the two go on, the more even the race becomes. Over the course of a day, a man and a horse will about break even, except that over ten days, that man on the horse wins, because the man on foot is too tired.

Polystratus and I went north, over a low ridge. It was all very well for bloody Philip to tell me to find the prince, but I really had no idea how to go about it.

Polystratus did. He picked two more Thracian slaves as we went – men hauling deer carcasses into the clearing, big tattooed men with knives.

He looked up at me. ‘We follow water,’ he said. Shrugged. That was his plan – to follow the stream that fed the next meadow. It made sense – animals need water, and it was probably what Alexander had done. But he’d done it seven hours ago.

‘Listen, boys,’ I said, leaning down. ‘I’ll free all three of you if we live and find the prince. Got that?’

Grins all around. One Greek word every slave knows – Eleuthera. Freedom.

‘I’m going north of the stream. Polystratus stays on the stream. You two – spread out a stade – south of the stream and another stade farther south. And run. When you have to stop to breathe – shout!’ I looked under my hand into the sun to the west – saw riders on the crest of the distant ridge. ‘Tell the prince that there are Illyrian raiders to the north and the west. Philip the Red is organising a defence in the camp. Got it? Now go, by Hermes!’

They grunted – Thracians make Macedonians look very civilised indeed – and ran off, all together at first, and then separating by degrees as they crossed the marshy meadow.

I went due north, avoiding the meadow altogether. The first time Polystratus stopped to draw breath and shout, I heard him, and that put heart into me. Then I was back on the low mountain, riding through enormous tumbled rocks and that startling perfume of mighty Artemis, up and up again. I called and called.

After an hour I crossed a stream and realised that I was lost. The ridge had plateaued – in another marsh, and how marshes grow at the top of steep ridges is a bafflement to me still. I had to dismount to get Poseidon around the marsh, and then there was another hill to my left, and I was completely lost. Was this Polystratus’s stream? Or another stream?

I stopped at the edge of the meadow, remounted and turned Poseidon to look at the sun, and only that turn saved me.

I heard the buzz of the sling-stone. I knew it for what it was, but the information took far too long to percolate through my head. Then I put my head down and galloped for the treeline.

I crashed into the trees and looked back, and there were three men in skins – they looked like animals. Fur caps, fur leggings, furs worn as cloaks. Behind them were two men on horses – little ponies, really.

I remember saying fuckquite a few times.

One of the mounted men gave a whoop, and then both of them were flying across the meadow.

I kept going through the trees. I could easily outdistance their little ponies on flat ground, but in these woods they’d have the edge.

I remember thinking, quite reasonably, just as Aristotle taught us, that I had to kill them. I couldn’t chance losing a race. And I couldn’t chance leading them to the prince.

I was over the crest of the ridge with the marsh at the top, now, and going down a shallow slope. Off to the right, I saw one of the downed giant trees.

I rode for it, staking everything on gaining its cover before they saw me.

This giant had fallen recently – in the last hundred years – and the great ball of its roots was open to the sky like a natural cage, all the dirt washed away. I rode in among the roots.

Poseidon stopped, and his breath came in great loud snorts. I could just see my back trail. I gripped my short spear at mid-haft and waited. And waited.

When they came, they were loud and fast. But they had cast far to the west of my line – possibly because they were not fools, but Illyrians – and they passed a quarter of a stade from my ambush, robbing me of any surprise. So I let them pass. There was nothing else I could do, really, except charge them and die.

But I did follow them, moving from cover to cover on horseback the way we were taught, both hunting and scouting. Since the penalty for failure was almost always a heavy beating, doing it with the risk of losing one’s life wasn’t so bad.

The big downed trees were my salvation – that and my excellent horse, which never snorted and never lost his edge. We ranged along with them, half a stade distant, and went north and west. After half an hour, we crossed the track Laodon and I had used in the morning, and I knew where I was. I wasn’t sure quite what I was doing – but I had passed from prey to predator, and I was scouting, or so I thought.

The sun was well down in the sky when they came to a cross-track, and one of them dismounted to look at the ground. He frowned, and then he grew a spear in his back and flopped full length on the ground.

His partner whirled his pony.

Laodon was empty-handed, but he came straight at the man on his smaller horse. He took the man’s sword cut on his forearm – I winced, even as I pressed my knees into Poseidon’s sides – and his right hand grabbed the headstall and ripped the Illyrian’s bridle right off his horse’s head.

The Illyrian’s horse bolted. He threw his arms around the horse’s neck.

I put my spear into him as he went by. He probably never knew I was there until he fell from his horse. He hit the ground heavily and screamed – oh, such a scream as I hope never to hear again. And then he screamed again.

I’d never killed a man, and I’d lost my spear in the shock of the successful stroke, and Poseidon did not want to go near the writhing thing on the ground, covered in leaf mould and blood, bellowing and shrieking.

‘Finish him!’ Laodon shouted. ‘Or we’ll have all his friends on us!’

I had an eating knife.

I slid from my horse and my knees were so weak I slumped to the ground, and I had to stab him three or four times. Maybe more. I really don’t remember. What I remember is the silence and the blood all around me. And Poseidon, glaring at me from one wild eye, veryunhappy.

My victim’s bowels relaxed into the sloppy, smelly embrace of death. His mouth fell open and his eyes were open too. I thought he was dead, but I threw up all over him to make sure.

Laodon came and retrieved my spear. He wiped it clean, then took my knife out of the dead man’s neck, wiped it clean and finally pulled the man’s sword belt over his head. He had a long Keltoi sword.

Laodon tossed it to me. ‘Wipe your face, lad,’ he said.

I wiped it with my chlamys. I didn’t have anything else. I got some of the blood off my hands and arms, but it stuck in my arm hair.

‘I have to know, boy – did you make camp?’ he asked.

‘Yes. I’m . . . I’m looking for the prince. Those two found me – I slipped them.’ It sounded foolish. ‘I was following them.’

Laodon nodded. ‘Well done. If the prince is alive.’

We collected the dead men’s ponies and headed south.

I had a sword.

Polystratus hadn’t found the prince. He found us, instead, coming down yet another ridge. Laodon sent him off on a new angle, and sent me back to camp, headed almost due south.

I found Hephaestion, less than two stades from camp and blissfully unaware that the world had gone to shit. Let me take a moment to say that Hephaestion and I were never close friends. He was Alexander’s favourite – his best friend, almost from birth. Alexander’s partiality blinded him to Hephaestion’s many failings. That’s the nicest way I can put it.

Hephaestion was a bitch queen, and Alexander loved him because he reminded him of his evil mother – that’s what I really think. And yet, to be fair, Hephaestion and I stood up for each other a number of times. He was loyal, and that alone was worth a lot.

Hephaestion panicked. Granted, his form of panic was to gallop off downhill to the south and west, looking for Alexander, abandoning the two younger pages he was supposed to be riding herd on – Cleomenes and Pyrrhus, a pair of useless sprites. He galloped off, and there I was with two eleven-year-olds.

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 withis 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 watchedme 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. NothingI 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.