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

Автор книги: Christian Cameron

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TWO

Macedon and Greece, 341–338 BC

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

We were wrestling. Before my injury, I had been the best pankrationist – and the best boxer. The effective loss of my left hand, which was just strong enough to grasp the reins and not much more, left me a much worse wrestler and a bad pankrationist. I didn’t do much to change that.

It must have been spring in the year that Alexander became regent. Greece was in ferment, Demosthenes was ranting against us every day in the Athenian Assembly, the Thebans were threatening war and nothing was as it had been in the outside world, or in the Gardens of Midas.

The pecking order among the pages was no longer malleable. Hephaestion was at the top, with Alexander – he had no authority of his own, but Alexander would always back him, and the rest of us had learned to avoid open conflict. On the other hand, while I had been on my father’s estates, my ribs knitting back together, my arms healing, Hephaestion had changed for the worse – he no longer stood up for the other pages against Alexander. I suspect they’d been lovers since they knew how to do it, but they were thicker than thieves after the hunting camp. Inseparable.

I was a distant third. I was not handsome, and that counted against me with Alexander. But like Black Cleitus, whose loyalty was beyond question, I had special rank, and no other page could touch me.

After us came the best of the other boys – Perdiccus, Amyntas, Philip the Red – by now all leaders in their own right, with their own troops of cavalry. Cassander, Antipater’s son, was there – a useless twit then and now – and Marsysas, who even as a young man played the lyre and wrote better poetry than we did; nor was his sword hand light. Indeed, even Cassander – the best of the worst, if you like – was a fair fighter, the sort of man that troopers could follow in a pinch, with a rough sense of humour and a good way with hunting dogs.

Then there was a pack of younger men and boys – the youngest was ten or eleven, and we treated them like slaves, for the most part, while trying to win their devotion at the same time, as older boys do to younger the world over. It was good practice for leadership – for war. Everything we did was practice for war.

At any rate, we were fighting unarmed in the palaestra – a cool spring morning, all of us oiled, naked and trying to pretend we weren’t cold.

I went up against Amyntas. I never tried – oh, Zeus, it hurts more to tell this than to tell of being tortured. I never even tried. I basically lay down and let him pin me.

No one said a thing. Because by then, I’d done it fifty times. In fact, I remember Alexander smiling at me.

But after we’d had a bite of bread moistened in wine, while Alexander and Hephaestion were fighting like desperate men – and by then we had seventeen-year-old bodies and a lot of muscle – Aristotle came and put a hand on my shoulder.

‘What I hate most about the Illyrians,’ he said, ‘was that they tortured your arete out of your body, and now you have no daimon at all.’

Sometimes you know a thing is true. I burst into tears.

Every man there turned and looked at me, and the pity in their eyes was like Tarxes’ eating spike driven into me again and again.

Aristotle took me by the hand and led me out into the garden.

‘Ptolemy,’ he said, and he put a hand on the back of my neck as if I might bolt, ‘you were the best of the pages. And now you are not even a man. You have the honour of the prince’s esteem – you saved him. You alone saved him – with your head and with your sword. Is that to be the sum of your acts? Will you lie on that bed of laurels until it is withered, or will you rise from it?’ He turned me to face him. He was not a particularly handsome man, but I’ve always maintained that his looks made men think of him as thephilosopher – bushy eyebrows, deep-set, wide, clear eyes, a thin mouth, a high forehead – the very image of manly wisdom.

I’m ashamed to say that all I could manage was some sobs. It was all true. I’d lain down for every contest since I came back, and no one said me nay. I was an object of pity.

‘Let me tell you what I know of men,’ Aristotle said. ‘Most men are capable of greatness once. They rise above themselves, or they follow a greater man, or the gods lend a hand, or the fates – once, a man may make a fortune, may tell the truth despite pressure to lie, may have a worthy love who leads him to do good things. This taste of arete is all most men ever have – and they are better for it.’ He looked at me. ‘Stop blubbering, son of Lagus. I tell you – and I know – you are better than that. I expect better of you. Go and fight and lose. Lose fifty times to lesser men and you will be better for it. You have reached a point where there is no penalty for failure, and that is the worst thing that can happen to a young man. So here is your penalty – my contempt. And here is your reward – my admiration. Which will you have, son of Lagus?’

I’d like to say that I stood straighter, looked him in the eye and thanked him. What I did was to run off into the garden and bawl my eyes out.

And the next day, when we were to box, I faced off against a much younger page – and folded.

Aristotle just shook his head.

And over the next few days, I began to notice a certain want of regard among the younger pages. They had worshipped me when I returned, and that worship was falling off.

That hurt.

Cleomenes, the young sprig I’d rescued in the hunting camp, was my most loyal follower, and he sat on my tightly rolled war cloak in the barracks and glared at me. He had a black eye.

He wasn’t eleven any more, either.

‘Amyntas says you are a coward,’ he said with all the hot accusation that a thirteen-year-old can throw at a seventeen-year-old. ‘He says that the Illyrians cut your courage out, and we should treat you like a woman.’

‘If Amyntas thinks women are cowards, he should try birthing a baby,’ I said. One of my mother’s sayings. I sighed. ‘I’m not a coward,’ I said.

‘Prove it,’ Cleomenes said. ‘Beat the shit out of Amyntas.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because that’s what he did to me,’ Cleomenes said with a half-sob.

Life among the pages. Very nice.

It occurred to me to go to Alexander.

But after further thought, I realised that they were all right.

It is odd – I don’t think I was ever a coward. I just didn’t need to excel, and since the need was taken away, I coasted. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. I certainly had a great many nightmares, and my camp girl – I’ll explain that later – would wake me in the night with a hand on my cheek because I was screaming and waking the barracks.

I thought about it, and I came to a set of decisions – every one of them nested into the next. I needed to learn to be the man I had been. And I wasn’t going to learn with the pages.

Polystratus had become a foot companion – one of the elite infantrymen of the old king – and he had a farm not far from the gardens. So I asked for an hour’s leave and rode out to find him, and dragged him from his plough and made of him my sparring partner. His whole idea of fighting with a sword was to hit faster and harder – worthy objectives in themselves, but not a way to win a fight, unless your only goal is to smash your way through the other man’s shield. So, in order to arrange to practise myself, I spent two weeks training him.

Two weeks in which I must have interfered with his ploughing and his sowing, too. I all but lived in his hovel, and his wife – another freed slave – feared me. But teaching Polystratus to be a swordsman did more for my own fighting skills than anything I’d learned in the last year. In fact, I think it was those two weeks that put me on the path I’m still on. Somewhere in the teaching of Polystratus I realised – that there was a theory, a philosophy, to combat. That each motion of an attack, a defence, could be analysed like a problem of philosophy.

I was not the first Hellene to understand this. I may not have been the first seventeen-year-old to understand this. But it was like a key to unlock a trunk full of knowledge. Many, many things that I had learned by rote – steps, hip movements, overhand cuts, thrusts – came together in two weeks to form a sort of Thalian singularity, and if you don’t know who Thales was, young man, you will have to ask your tutor and report to me tomorrow.

I admit, it was easier with my former slave – easier to risk a contest against him, and unimportant to lose. Why? Because he was a man of no consequence, that’s why. What did I care if a former slave could best me?

Except that in those two weeks, Polystratus became a manto me. Since that time, I have seen this happen again and again – worthy men develop a kinship with their opponents, just as unworthy men come to loathe them. The worthiness resides in the competitor – if he brings with him an ability to emulate and admire his enemy, then he is a better man for it. Or so I think.

At any rate, after a fortnight of daily struggle in the mud of spring, Polystratus was a passable pankrationist, and probably the best swordsman in the foot companions – not that they ever fought with swords. But still.

All this time, every morning that I was paired with another man in a contest, I lay down – if not literally, then in effect.

Aristotle shook his head, and then, after another week, didn’t even bother with that.

But Alexander began to look at me curiously.

Cleomenes ceased to come and sit with me, or to flirt with my bed-warmer. I should put in here that Philip had become deeply concerned by Alexander’s little ways – with sex. It was known to every one of us that Philip thought that his son was soft – possibly effeminate. A gynnis. There had been loud words exchanged on the subject, and Olympias – never a subtle woman – sent Alexander a hetaera, a courtesan, named Calixeinna.

She was outrageously beautiful, with the sort of body – high, perfectly round breasts, a tiny waist, a long, sculpted face with small, thick lips for kissing and enormous eyes – the sort of body that drives men mad.

All of us – even the prince – lived in the Macedonian version of a Spartan barracks, in messes of ten boys – five oldsters and five youngsters. Some oldsters slept alone, some with each other, some with the younger boys. Some were just sharing cloaks for warmth. Eh? And some weren’t. Until Calixeinna came.

The poor thing was appalled to be the only woman in what must have seemed like an armed camp with academics. She was quite intelligent – she could recite great swathes of the Iliad– but the idea that she had no room of her own, that she had to dress and undress with forty boys, made her angry. She threatened to leave.

Alexander refused to live outside the barracks.

Aristotle bit his lips, cursed and found women for us all, or, if not all, at least a few per mess. Country girls – not prostitutes, no one’s father would have allowed that. The king offered them all dowries and regular pay, and I suspect there was no shortage of volunteers – we were good-looking, clean and noble.

Of course, this was also the occasion for his famous lecture on the life of hedonism versus the life of restraint and self-control, too.

The truth is that our barracks life improved immeasurably when the women moved in. The clothes were cleaner, the conversation was better, and the youngsters began to laugh and play – the women wouldn’t allow them to be abused. Women exert a subtle influence – not so subtle, sometimes. They will say things without fear that even a warrior might fear to say.

At any rate, I had a regular bed-warmer from the first. She was named Iphegenia – some parents need a better classical education – and she was pretty enough, with large hips and smooth muscles and breasts. She was scared the first time we were naked together, and after that, not – and she was never put off by my scars. I can’t say I loved her – she was the most selfish woman I’ve ever known well – but she took good care of me, bore my first bastard and my pater put her on a farm for me. I hope she lives yet.

Oh, I’m an old man. I love to think of Genny stripping for bed – the only sign I ever had that she was as eager as I was the way she’d incline towards my sleeping roll like a hunting dog pointing to the prey. Hah!

But Alexander appeared to want nothing to do with his courtesan. She was in his sleeping roll most nights, and a few times I saw her under his cloak, once even wrapped in his arms. He was gracious to her. But that was the limit, and Aristotle openly admonished him against her.

Olympias sent notes explaining how men and women had sex, and how much better sex with a woman was than sex with a man. Just picture getting this lecture from your mother, herself a famous beauty, a veritable avatar of Aphrodite. Zeus, god of kings, what a horror that woman could be, and how much of Alexander can be laid at her door. Sober, she was brilliant and scary, and drunk, she was a lascivious predator with no scruples and a poisonous memory. And her power to manipulate – she was quite brilliant . . .

She was very beautiful, with sparkling eyes and curly brown hair, tall, elegantly limbed – please don’t imagine her as somebody’s mother. She bore Alexander at the age of fourteen, and when I first met her – not first saw her at court at a distance, but actually stood in her presence – she was twenty-five years old, in the prime of her beauty. Her skin glowed, and she herself had a sort of radiant vitality that she passed unmarred to her son. I’ve known men who hated her, and I’ve heard magnificent tales of her debauchery, and I know some of them to be true, but let it be said – Macedonian men disliked powerful women, and she was a powerful woman who added to beauty and charm an indomitable will and an almost unbreakable bond with the king that allowed her to call the tune at court. She had many enemies.

She was fiercely protective of Alexander and her protection extended to his friends and companions, and despite having several skirmishes with her myself, as you will hear, I have to admit that she was often our ally against Philip and his companions – the older men who saw us first as children and later as dangerous rivals.

But I digress. That winter, she had got it into her head that Alexander needed a woman, and she decided that the woman of his dreams would also be a useful tool to manipulate him – this is a fine example of how her mind worked.

Anyway, she and Aristotle were adversaries. These days, it has become popular to suggest that Olympias and Philip were the enemies, but I never saw that. It seemed to me that Olympias and Philip were united in wanting their boy to grow up to be a good, solid, dependable Macedonian nobleman – something, I’d like to note, that Philip never was – and Aristotle wanted something more – a great king, an Athenian-style philosopher who had the mettle of Achilles and the mind of Socrates.

Calixeinna became their battleground. She could flirt, a talent wasted on young men, and she could play the lyre and the flute and recite poetry. She could also do geometry, and this fascinated Alexander and even Aristotle. She was not without weapons. Nor was Alexander indifferent to her. He loved beauty, and she was beautiful.

One day, Alexander was paired with me in a war game. We were to live without supplies for three days, stealing food from the kitchens or outlying farms. This was in emulation of the Spartan training, and deeply unfair – if we were caught, I would be beaten. Alexander was never beaten.

We were taken some miles from the Gardens of Midas, and our horses were taken by slaves. We were to live three days off the country, never being caught or even seen, and then we were to steal food from the manor itself, and finally, we were to surrender ourselves to Aristotle at a set time.

Alexander wanted to be paired with Hephaestion, but for whatever reason, he was paired with me. We were taken into the chora, the farmland west of the manor, and left at the edge of the forest without food, water or weapons of any kind.

Perhaps this sort of thing challenges Spartan boys. Alexander and I had a very pleasant three days. We lay up until dark, stole into the first farm and took the dog leashes off the wall of an outbuilding we’d observed at last light. We slept together for warmth and in the morning we unwove the hemp leashes and made slings. Instead of going into the chora, we went up into the hills and killed every rabbit we wanted. There were ripe berries on the bushes, and Alexander got us not one but two magnificent trout out of a stream by standing stock still in the freezing water until the trout trusted him – and then he abused that trust. He was very proud of his feat and I praised him extravagantly, both while I cooked the fish in clay and later, when my belly was full.

Trout, rabbit – by the gods, we ate more than we ate in the pages’ mess, and we slept as long as we wanted. It makes me laugh to think of it.

The second night, we were watching the stars come out. We’d been talking about war – as a generality.

‘I want to conquer Persia,’ he said, as if the stars had just told him.

My belly was full and I was sleepy. ‘I want a cup of good wine,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘Don’t be an ass,’ he said. ‘Pater is not going to get the invasion together until Athens is subdued. Athens can’t be subdued until the Chersonese is cleared. The Chersonese can’t be cleared until the Athenian fleet is neutralised. The Athens fleet can’t be neutralised until Persia is conquered. Persia can’t be conquered until Athens is subdued.’

He grinned, proud of his deliberately circular logic.

‘But this season he’s campaigning in Thrace, against the Scyths and the Thracians,’ I pointed out.

Alexander laughed. ‘You know as well as I that fighting the Thracians and the Scyths is merely an extension of fighting for the Chersonese.’

I did know that, so I laughed. ‘But we don’t have to beat Athens,’ I said suddenly.

‘Why not?’ the prince asked.

‘Athens is a democracy,’ I said.

Alexander nodded. ‘Good point.’

This was, I have to add, one of the chief features of discussing anything with Alexander. He was so intelligent that when you didmake a good point, he always – or almost always – understood immediately, which had the boring effect of keeping the rest of us from ever getting to explain ourselves. What I had meant was, Athens is a democracy, and sooner or later one of their factions will screw up their alliance with Persia, or lose interest in the war, and then we’ll have them.And the moment I said it, Alexander understood.

It saved time in argument, anyway. But our conversations may have seemed stilted to outsiders. The insiders – Hephaestion, Cleitus the Black, me, Craterus – we could often have whole conversations in single words.

At any rate, he lay there and finally he said, ‘Until he defeats Athens, he can’t send all his force against Persia.’

‘True,’ I said.

‘I will need you, when I go to conquer Persia,’ he said. What he meant was, Philip will never finish with Athens, and I will have a turn.

I laughed. But he sat up and put a hand on my arm.

‘I am serious. There’s only a hand of you I really trust. I need you. And to be the man I need, you must stop surrendering in contests,’ he said. ‘Here, in the woods, you kill game, you cook, you find trails, you cut bedding – you are the perfect companion, afraid of nothing, quick with good advice – but among the pages, you lie down and let lesser boys triumph over you.’

I remember a hot flush of anger – which of us likes to have our innermost failings exposed? And the temptation to tell him that I was practising, that I meant to strike back, was like the pressure of a swollen river on a dam. But I resisted.

‘Aristotle has spoken to you about it,’ Alexander said.

‘Yes,’ I said, my voice thick. I wanted to say fuck of, or words to that effect.

‘Get it done. Our time is coming.’ Alexander sounded very sure of himself, but then, he always did.

I struggled for words. But none came, and suddenly he turned to me.

‘I know where Calixeinna bathes,’ he said. Again, it was as if the stars had spoken to him.

‘You can see her naked any time you want,’ I shot out, still full of emotions.

‘Isn’t there something terribly . . . ignoble, in giving orders to a woman purchased for you by your mother?’ he said. He shrugged. ‘I love to look at her. She has the most beautiful body I have ever seen.’ He shrugged again. ‘But I will not order her to disrobe for me.’

I shook my head. ‘Give her to me, then,’ I said. I meant to be playful, but he rolled over suddenly on our bed of grass and his face was inches from mine. ‘No,’ he said coldly. ‘She is mine.’

Never a dull moment with Alexander.

‘I want to go and watch her bathe,’ he said.

‘Let’s not forget what happened to Adonis,’ I mused, with the false levity that always follows a serious moment.

‘I am not Adonis,’ Alexander said. ‘She is not Artemis, and anyway, no one will catch me.’

He woke me while the stars were still a cold and distant presence, and we stretched, did some exercises and started down out of the hills. Far from sneaking across the plains, we ran – about thirty stades, I think. Ah, to be young! Alexander had thought it all through, and decided that Aristotle’s slaves, pretending to be guards, would not guard anything or patrol at all in the dark. So instead of creeping from tree to tree across central Macedon, we ran down the roads in the moonlight.

As the sky bgan to pale in the east, we ran past the manor house, bold as brass, and went down the orchard lane, past the olive groves and up the big hill to the west of the manor. There was a spring there, and we ran to the spring, drank water and prayed to the gods.

‘You must not look,’ Alexander told me. ‘Go and take a nap.’

So I snuck away, and he concealed himself in a tree. We were enacting his fantasy – I knew him well enough to understand that. He played the game according to his own rules, and this was his way.

But I was a boy on the edge of manhood myself, and I had no intention of letting him have her all to himself. So I found a little knoll of soft grass under an olive tree and lay down, knowing my man. He came soon enough. He was checking to see that I was asleep.

I pretended to sleep, and then, when he was gone and I had counted to a thousand, I went all the way around the hill and climbed up behind the spring.

Waiting in ambush is dull. I waited a long time. After perhaps a full hour, I guessed where Alexander was hidden from the behaviour of the birds and squirrels. And when the sun was well up and I was regretting my temerity and wondering why I hadn’tjust gone for a nap, Calixeinna came.

She had three slaves with her, and they dropped their chitons by the pool and splashed each other, shrieking and calling names. I had a girl of my own – and some experience of women – but I remember being struck almost dumb by the four of them, all beautiful, all splendidly muscled and all very, very different. A dark-haired Thracian girl had short but beautifully muscled legs with heavy thighs, large breasts and a waist and hips that were all swooping curves. A Greek slave was taller and slimmer, with subtler curves, small breasts and a long, graceful back and a magnificent neck. The third woman, a Persian, had the most beautiful eyebrows I had ever seen, graceful hands, and breasts of a different shape from the other two, almost like wine cups. They were all women, all beautiful and all utterly different.

And then there was Calixeinna, who was tall and willowy, with a waist so small that I could have put my hands around it, lips that were the colour of dawn, hair that was a particular blushing shade of red-blond, and heavy, full breasts as yet untouched by age. Her hips were wide and her legs long, and she was perfect.

While her women shrieked and played, she swam in the small pool, really only about three times the length of her body, the water ice cold and black in the early sun under the great holm oak that shadowed the spring. When she emerged, it was like the rising of the sun, and when she reached her arms back to wring out her hair . . .

Oh, youth.

She played for a while with a turtle by the edge of the pool, and it occurred to me that she knew Alexander was there. I didn’t know much about women, but I knew they didn’t play naked by pools nearly as much as adolescent boys thought they did.

When she was done with the turtle, she lay on a rock, naked. The other nymphs continued to laugh and scream, and the longer I watched, the more like a performance it seemed.

Eventually, I had to wonder how often it had been repeated, and by what mechanism Alexander had been informed of it, and whether he’d been to the performance before.

Eventually, she put on her chiton – so prettily that one breast was free while a lost pin was found in the grass – and she and the Persian girl skipped away down the hill, arm in arm, and the other two stayed for a few minutes, filling jars.

I snuck back to my resting place, and went straight to sleep.

A little later, Alexander wakened me, looking as if he’d had a religious revelation. Then, in broad daylight, we climbed into the walled compound and went to the slaves’ quarters, where we sat to breakfast with the slaves – bad wine and stale bread and a little cheese and some dry figs. They all looked at us, of course. Alexander just smiled.

And we were in our usual places when Aristotle opened his class. The philosopher actually got several sentences into his lecture before he realised that we were supposed to be in hiding.

He was pleased with us.

We were pleased with ourselves.

And I never told Alexander that I had watched Calixeinna bathe. I think he’d have killed me.

My point is, he was very smitten, in his deeply self-controlled and selfish way.

I missed most of the by-play, because the next weeks were the weeks I was off drilling in the late afternoons with Polystratus. But Genny told me everything – sometimes too much of everything. Genny could chatter gossip at me even when her breathing was coming in gasps and her hands were locked behind my back and her nails were cutting into my muscles – ‘and then – ah! – she said – ah! – that he . . .’

It’s good to know that, even as king, I can raise a laugh.

I don’t remember what occasioned it. We hardly ever boxed – it was considered too Greek and effeminate – but when we did we wrapped our hands. That helped me – my left hand was ugly, and I was young, and having it wrapped helped steady me.

Old Leonidas stood wearing his chlamys and holding a heavy staff of cornel wood. I happened to be the first page out the barracks door with my hands wrapped. And Amyntas came out second.

‘Ptolemy, son of Lagus,’ Leonidas snapped. ‘Against Amyntas . . .’ His eyes wandered, and he shook his head. ‘No. A younger boy. Philip the Black.’

‘Oh, I’ll be gentle with him,’ Amyntas said. ‘He’s ugly, but maybe if I roll him over . . .’ He guffawed, and many of the other oldsters laughed.

Alexander looked hurt. And he gave me a look – the whole burden of his eyes. In effect, he said do it.

I must give the prince this – he was horrified when the other pages began to turn against me.

Hephaestion relished my discomfiture. ‘He’s the only oldster who competes against little boys,’ he said to Leonidas. ‘Make him fight Amyntas.’

‘Hephaestion!’ snapped Alexander.

‘I’d love to face Amyntas,’ I said. ‘But I’m no match for him.’

Amyntas laughed. ‘Put a bag over your head, Ptolemy!’ he said, and his little set laughed, but the other pages – especially Philip the Red, long ago turned from my tormentor to my friend – looked embarrassed.

Leonidas didn’t like it, but he put me in the ring of wands against Amyntas.

Losing can become a habit.

Amyntas put a fist in my gut and instead of twisting away – I had stomach muscles like bands of steel and it wasn’t that bad – I folded around his punch and lay down.

But when I rolled over, he was pushing his hips, pretending to fuck me for his little audience.

I did my very best to hide my rage. I’d had some practice, since the night with the Illyrians, at hiding my thoughts. I hung my head, rubbed my hip and squared off.

Leonidas struck Amyntas with his staff. ‘Don’t be a gadfly, boy,’ he said.

Amyntas turned on me, eager to have me on the ground again. But he stumbled as he took up his guard – the will of the gods and sheer hubris – and I had all the time in the world to strike him.

I needed it. Losing is a habit. Covering up is a habit, too – fighting defensively, waiting for the blow that will allow you to lose with honour, or at least some excuse and a minimum of pain. That’s how low I’d fallen – even after weeks of practice with Polystratus, faced with a real competitor, I was ready to lie down, I think, until that stumble. Ares was good to me.

He stumbled, and his chin came to my fist.

Instead of defending himself, he lashed out with his left and caught me on the nose, and it hurt. He didn’t break it – but he hurt me, and I saw red. Those two things saved me from myself – his stumble and that haze of pain.

Let’s make this brief. I beat him to a pulp. I broke his nose and blackened both of his eyes and made him beg me for mercy.

None of the other boys said a thing. Leonidas stood back and let it happen, and Aristotle . . .

. . . caught my eye and gave me the smallest nod of approbation.

When he was begging, I let him go. I had him under my left arm, his head locked against my body, and I was beating him with my elbow and fist. My hand hurt.

Leonidas waved for two boys to carry Amyntas off.

‘Since you are feeling better,’ he said, ‘you may face Prince Alexander.’

If losing is a habit, so is winning. Alexander always won – both because none of us wanted to beat him, and because he was awfully fast. And practised like a mad thing.

But that morning, in that place, I was bound to try. I was drinking water and I almost choked at the announcement. Cleitus the Black grinned – not an adversarial grin, but the grin of a man who has been there. So I grinned back, and just at that moment, the gods sent Calixeinna. She was not entering the palaestra – that would have been an appalling breach of etiquette – but she paused, going down the steps from the exedra, about thirty paces away. Owing to the way the columns and the buildings aligned, I’m pretty sure I was the only boy she could see.