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

Автор книги: Christian Cameron

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I mounted my new horse and followed him. It will give you an idea of how far gone we were that I was alone.

I rode through the rout. This part of the northern column was mostly slaves and servants, and they simply trudged on, waiting to be threatened or killed. No one challenged me, and no one tried to surrender. Mostly, no one even raised their eyes.

We crossed a main flow of refugees – perhaps six hundred people. And then climbed down the shallow slope of a stony gully. At the base of the gully was a big wagon, with six dead oxen. The grass here was so poor that Polystratus’s horse was not bothering to eat it. Blood dripped from the base of the wagon bed in slow, gloopy drops. Flies gathered in the blood. I could feela curse in the air.

Polystratus’s head emerged from the wagon. A dog barked. ‘Send the boy for the king,’ he said.

I went and looked into the wagon. There was a man lying on his back, and the wagon bed was full of blood. He had two javelins in him.

I knew him at once, even though I’d only seen him at a distance.

He was Darius.

I looked at Polystratus. ‘Go and find Alexander,’ I said. ‘Cyrus should be at the posting station – less than a stade up the ridge. Look there first. Hurry. This will be very important to the king.’

Polystratus left me without a word. He grunted, once. He spat when he left the wagon bed – a Thracian way of averting a curse.

I took the King of King’s hand.

He gave my hand a squeeze.

Even an enemy is better company than dying alone.

I had wine and water. I offered him both, and he took a little and gasped.

I had some Persian, by then. So I understood when he thanked me.

I took off my officer’s cloak and did my best to bind his wounds. Removing the spears would kill him. So I did what I could without moving him much, and I gave him more wine. He’d lost so much blood that it flushed his face.

Cyrus came in.

He took the king’s other hand.

He kissed it.

I didn’t think less of him. It’s one thing to see that a cause is lost. Another thing to leave the manwho led it. I think Cyrus loved Darius, the man.

At any rate, the next one into the wagon was Alexander.

Darius was barely alive. And drunk. But he had been waiting. I know that. I don’t know exactly howI know that, but I could feel him waiting, holding the spirit in his body.

Alexander came up, and I wriggled back to make room for him.

Alexander was weeping.

So was Cyrus.

I waited by Darius’s feet.

Alexander looked at Darius. He took his hand. ‘I will avenge you,’ he said.

Darius gave a minute shake of his head.

Alexander bent low. ‘I would give anythingfor you to live. I . . . what will I do without you?’

Darius had the will to smile. It set him very high in my opinion. He smiled, and his face had a gentle strength. ‘So . . .’ he said, very clearly. ‘So you are Alexander.’ His smile stayed, and he sighed, and with that sigh, his soul left his body.

‘No!’ Alexander screamed. ‘No! You will not slip away again! Damn you, Darius! What is there after this? What can possibly be worthy or great, after this!’ He was weeping, speaking wildly, and he took Darius’s head and held it in his lap. ‘Is this the end? The end of the story?’

I got out of the wagon.

After a time, Cyrus slipped out, too. He didn’t meet my eye.

And when Alexander came out, I wiped the blood from him, and we said nothing. But he put his arms around me, and cried. For once, I understood. Memnon had slipped away, and now Darius. That’s not what happens, in the Iliad.In the Iliad, Achilles is filled with rage, and he kills, and feels no remorse. When he hunts Hector round the city, he kills him, and drags him behind his chariot, and feels no remorse. Only when faced with Priam, Hector’s father – and with the reality of his own death – does Achilles feel anything.

Draw your own lesson. I’m a king, not a philosopher. Alexander loved the whole game. And when Darius died . . .

After a time – I couldn’t tell you how long – he stopped weeping.

‘Ptolemy,’ he said. There was a question in his voice. ‘Is this . . . all there is?’

Sometimes I wonder if he actually asked me that. Sometimes, I think that I read it into his tears and the tension in his body.

But I’m pretty sure he asked.

Because if he didn’t, then what I didn’t say wouldn’t still be stuck in my head, rattling around. I should have said it. I should have told him true.

I should have said, You’ve traded friendship and love for adulation and power. What did you expect?

THIRTY-TWO

We straggled back into Ecbatana. Which occasioned the first time that Alexander himself altered the Military Journal.

Alexander wanted to pursue Bessus immediately. But despite our success – and taking Darius, even dead, was a victory, because we immediately inherited most of his loyalists, by the law of ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ that rules all civil conflict, all stasis– despite our success, our army, such as it was, was wrecked. The Hetaeroi were mostly dismounted, or their horses were ruined by the pursuit. The hypaspitoi were spread from the plains north of Ecbatana all the way beyond Hecatombion and into the Hyrkanian mountains by the pursuit, by fatigue, by the need to garrison the villages that were our lifeline to the rear.

And Alexander was barely functional. It was terrifying, because he didn’t have a mark on him. He ranted at Craterus about pursuing Bessus, and then sat on his horse and issued no orders.

None of us was senior. In fact, among the men who’d ended up on the point of the spear, the concept of ‘rank’ was meaningless. We were the king’s friends, his companions, and we didn’t agree about much except that we were king’s men.

I convinced Philotas to retreat. And when he went down with the dysentery, I led the retreat.

It was my only taste of what it must have been like to beAlexander. Now Ihad to ride up and down the column, looking for stragglers, issuing orders, seeing and being seen. Pretending to be calm and unruffled when in fact I was terrified that Bessus would turn and bite us – or that Alexander would snap out of his funk and kill me. He had ordered us to advance, and we were retreating, and that was my decision.

Ecbatana was twenty-five hundred stades behind us when we started. But that’s where the main army was, and to summon them forward with no preparation would have been foolish.

Or so I maintain.

We didn’t all retreat. I used our new Iranian allies and a hard core of hypaspitoi to hold every oasis and every village, to start building up water supplies and depots of baked bread, grain and water.

Craterus backed me up, and when we fell back on Rhagae and finally had enough healthy troops to fight if we had to face a force larger than twenty raiders, Craterus took command of it. I was exhausted.

Alexander continued to be silent. He made comments, and for some hours seemed to be in command.

But the only person he spent any time with was Banugul. Even Hephaestion was shut out.

At Rhagae, he recovered. It happened all in an hour, when dispatches came in from Ecbatana. He read them, shared them with no one and started firing off orders – mostly to do with Darius’s funeral.

He never mentioned the retreat, except that several days later, when we were already preparing the main body to march upcountry fromEcbatana, and Darius had had his burial, I was adding my notes to the Military Journal, because Eumenes was still with the headquarters back in Ecbatana.

Alexander came into the tent. He nodded to me, went to the main copy of the Journal and leafed through it.

He took a knife and cut the scroll at the death of Darius, and joined it to blank papyrus with a strip of linen. He did this himself. He looked at me, threw the scrap with fifteen days of retreat into the brazier, and walked out.

Read it yourself.

He’d never done it before. But he started to do it more and more.

Darius was dead, and the crusade in Asia was over. That was the tenor of the king’s message, and he gave a speech to the army that was not particularly moving and raised a great deal of resentment.

The long and short was that he was sending the allies home. Most of them were richly rewarded, and a great many of them were offered superb bonuses for staying on without their officers as ourtroops. Kineas, for example, was heartbroken. Alexander actually singled him out at a command meeting – a Macedonian-only meeting – when Parmenio, of all people, asked that he be kept on or even sent to the Prodromoi.

Alexander shook his head. ‘I need friends in Athens,’ he said. ‘And Kineas is notone of us.’

Further, he actively recruited the troopers – the rank and file men of the allied contingents.

He released the Thessalians. Parmenio’s household troops. Men who had served Philip and Parmenio and Attalus since the first light of Macedon’s dawn. Alexander gave them rich rewards, but he sent them home. Next to the Hetaeroi, they were our best cavalry.

I was at the staff meetings, and I knew the agenda – Alexander was clearing the army of rivals, and was preparing to function as the King of Kings. The Greeks – even Kineas – were the most intransigent about who they were, about being Hellenes.They had come to Asia to make war on Persia. To destroy the Persian Empire.

But Alexander was getting ready to become the Persian Empire.

He rid himself of dissent.

And he destroyed Parmenio’s power base. He paid off the veterans – with rich bonuses. He bought mercenaries. And he paid every pikeman who stayed with us a bonus – a two-talent bonus. Two talents of gold. Per man.

For old men like Philip, who asked where is my reward, this was the answer.

The army of Macedon – ably assisted by the Greek allies, backed by mercenaries – took Persia and conquered Asia.

The army that marched away from Ecbatana was Alexander’s army.It had no loyalties but those it owed to him. He was lord, god and paymaster.

I never saw Kineas go. He took his men and his gold and his horses and all the wreaths he’d won and packed and left. Polystratus saw him go – hugged Niceas, sent a letter home to his Macedonian wife. And Thaïs held the prostitute Artemis in her arms while the younger woman cried and cried. Because she wanted to follow the army to the ends of the earth. She didn’t want to go back to Athens and face . . . well, face an aristocrat’s family.

Thaïs sent letters home by Niceas, too. Letters asking that our child and our priestly ward be sent to us.

It’s worth noting that Athens stood firm – or at least stood hesitantly – and Sparta died alone, their gallant hoplites outnumbered by Antipater’s mercenaries. Their king died gloriously, but he died, and the revolt, if you can call it that, was over. And so was Sparta.

Alexander sent rewards to Athens, and treated her like the queen of Greece, which, in many ways, she was. But like Darius’s wife, she’d served her turn, and as we were all to discover, Alexander was done with her. And when he was done with things, he let them fall.

The last night in Ecbatana. We had a dinner – a magnificent dinner. Four hundred Hellenic officers and almost that many Persians – that is to say, Iranians, Cilicians, Carians and Phrygians. Medes. Aegyptians.

I had not received a command in the new army allotment. But I had received orders – to add Cyrus and two hundred Persian nobles to my troop of Hetaeroi, doubling it in size. In fact, we lost a great many Hetaeroi at Ecbatana, and on the pursuit of Darius. I’ll backtrack and say I tried to recruit Thessalian gentlemen from the disbanded regiments, and Athenian gentlemen from the Athenian contingent. I got a few.

Cyrus and his men were superb horsemen, well mounted, with fine armour and good discipline. But they were Iranians, and Philotas, for one, didn’t trust them at all.

As soon as I took Cyrus into my troop, I began to walk a knife’s edge, and because of it, I have more understanding of what the king faced than most men. The common story – Callisthenes’ story – is that the king was seduced by Persian tyranny and became a Persian tyrant.

Well – that’s not entirely untrue. Alexander was always impatient of limitations on his power, since he knew, with absolute certainty, that he was right about all decisions of rulership and the making of war. So Persian-style lordship appealed.

But by the time we rode out of Ecbatana the second time, I understood exactlywhy he did as he did.

Persian gentlemen were such excellent soldiers that you had to ask, after two weeks, how Darius had ever lost. Cyrus and his men were far more obedient than my Macedonians, who, being Macedonians, plotted, fought, lied, cheated, back-stabbed, sometimes literally and spent their spare time questioning every order I issued.

And they hated the mirror that the Persians held up to them, which quickly translated into hatred of the Persians.

I had a few Macedonians and a handful of Greek troopers who saw it differently – who made friendships across the line, or who found the time to listen. But I also found myself trying to be two different people – the fair and honourable commander of Cyrus and his men, and the quick-witted, argumentative king of the hill that the Macedonians expected.

I had four hundred cavalrymen.

Alexander had thirty-five thousand men.

There are things he did for which I cannot love him, but his attempt to rule Persia while remaining our king was a noble effort, and he did the very best with it that could be done. He made an effort to be all things to all men – an effort that he had made since he had been a boy, in many ways. Callisthenes and some of the other Hellenophiles argued, almost from the first, that Alexander was being corrupted.

I agree. He was being corrupted. But it wasn’t Persia that corrupted him. It was war, and the exercise of power.

The army rallied at Hecatompylos. Those were the next words in the Military Journal after the death of Darius, and they left out three weeks of supply-gathering and slow marching. And yet remained true. The contingents that Craterus, Philotas and I had left spread across southern Hyrkania were there still, and the hypaspitoi had remained well forward of the army, so that we might have been said to have ‘concentrated’ at Hecatompylos.

But despite the bribes and the bonuses, Hecatompylos was where the army discovered that we were marching east, to Bactria. Until then, most of the troops thought we were going to crush the mountain tribes. A fairly solid rumour said that we were going to restore Banugul to her little kingdom – as a lark – on the way to the Euxine and ships for home. And even Hephaestion, who usually read the king better than this, told me confidentially one night that we were going to march north into Hyrkania and then home via a campaign against the Scythians of the Euxine.

But at Hecatompylos, Alexander sent two full squadrons of the Hetaeroi and Ariston’s Prodromoi east, trying to re-establish contact with Bessus’s retreating columns.

It wasn’t mutiny, but by the gods, it was close. Our second morning in the clear air of Hyrkania, and I was awakened by Ochrid to be told that the pezhetaeroi were packing their baggage for the trip home. That they had voted in the night to march away and leave the king.

Once again, I was the one who warned him. Artemis – who had been Kineas’s lover, and left him to stay with the army – came to Thaïs in the night and told her that the pezhetaeroi intended mutiny. And old Amyntas son of Philip came to me at first light. He didn’t name names. He didn’t really meet my eye.

‘They mean business,’ he said. He shifted uncomfortably. ‘I can’t . . . I can’t stomach it. Though the Undying know I agree with ’em. The king’s mad with power. Ares. Ares come to earth, he is.’

So once again I went to Hephaestion.

Who took me to the king.

Alexander wasn’t angry. He was frightened.

He called the taxeis commanders one by one to his tent, and he interviewed them. Craterus knew everything, and Perdiccas. The others knew less, or admitted to less.

When they were gone, it was dawn. Alexander sat back on his stool and looked at me. ‘Any remarks?’ he asked.

‘You need to talk to them,’ I said. ‘Yourself. And not give them a town to pillage.’

He shrugged, as if he regretted the absence of a town to pillage.

I saw red.

‘They just want to go home!’ I said, suddenly. ‘They’ve crossed the whole gods-created world at your behest, and we’re in the arsehole of the universe, Hyrkania, and it’s going to go on for ever, and they know it!’

He laughed. ‘I love it when you, the aristocrat, remind me of what the common man wants,’ he said.

I shrugged.

He ordered Hephaestion and Philotas to form all the Hetaeroi. And then he summoned the taxeis, all together, and we met with them in a great stone bowl cut in a Hyrkanian hillside.

They stood muttering, and the stone carried their angry whispers like evil spirits. I stood close by the speaker’s pnyx and every whisper seemed to come to me from ten thousand men, and again, as at the fire by the Tigris, I felt as if I was listening to the dead as well as the living, fifty thousand corpses demanding to be taken home.

Perhaps I still had a touch of fever.

And then he came up the steps, bounding up two at a time. The whispers stopped.

He came up to the pnyx, in armour but without a weapon or helmet.

‘Friends!’ he shouted, and his voice cut across the whispers – smashed them flat. ‘I understand that you all want to go home!’

A roar greeted him.

‘What a simple lot you are, to be sure!’ He smiled. ‘You think that, because Darius is dead, the war is over? How many of you marched through Babylon? Through Susa? The Medes and the Babylonians will crush usif we let them out from under our heel. Even now, Bessus rides to the east with four times our number of cavalry. Do you want to see him facing us on the plains beside Pella? Do you want your sons to have to face the same foe – march over the same ground?’

He waited.

‘Now! Now is the time!’ he said, slowly but clearly.

Silence.

‘Now, when they feel beaten, we will finish them. I will follow Bessus to the ends of the earth, and I will kill him, and then – then, when Persia has no army but our army, and when all of this is ours – then, my friends, your farms are secure, your sons and daughters are secure, and then we can rest. But you owe it to your sons to finish this enemy now. We are so close.’

Some shouts, and some hoots.

‘Friends – do you hate me? Have I not led you to victory after victory? Have you everbeen defeated when I was in your ranks?’ Alexander seemed to grow larger. ‘Are you ingrates, to forget what I have given you? The suzerainty of the earth – the mastery over every man and woman you will ever meet, the lords of creation! You were farmers in Pella and Amphilopolis, and now you stride the earth like giants! Will you go backto being peasants?’

Now they shouted. ‘No!’

‘Will you deny me my hour of triumph? Your king? The moment when I am undisputed master of Asia – a moment for which I have sacrificed everything and taken every risk?’

NO!

‘Or will you tuck your tails between your legs and leave a beaten Persian army to follow us, gnaw at our tail and take the war across the sea to ourhomes?’

NO!

‘Or rather, will you follow me again to the ends of the earth to preserve the virginity of Macedon – to keep her inviolate, to put fire into the homes of our enemies and steel in their breasts until we, and only we, rule the world? Will you?’

YES.

They shouted – they chanted his name.

And he turned to me, and smiled.

It wasn’t what he said. It was that he said it at all. He’d been even more distant than usual since Gaugamela, and that morning, he treated the pezhetaeroi like men – like his men.

Their opinion of themselves, and of him, soared.

Thaïs said it made him more human. I thought that it was all making him think he was a god.

Three things happened in Hyrkania – four, if you count Banugul.

We took the capital. Or rather, we marched into it. Banugul’s father had been satrap of Hyrkania, and she received troops and support to go and reconquer it. Hyrkania means the ‘Land of Wolves’, and the only wolves I saw there had two legs. They fight endlessly, but not very well, and Banugul retook her city with three thousand mercenaries, many of whom had just joined us – Darius’s last loyal men.

The vizier who helped murder Darius awaited us at Zadracarta, the capital, if such a dreadful place could be called capital of anything. Banugul left us, and Thaïs informed me that she was pregnant by the king, and I took that at face value. If she had influence with the king, I never saw it – he liked her, and she pleased him, and that had lasted a few months and no more.

But Nabarzanes, Darius’s vizier, received a full pardon in advance, and then joined us, and he brought Bagoas to replace her. He – I never checked, but I assume Bagoas was formed as a man – was the most effeminate man I have ever seen. He was beautiful – I loathed him, but I could see the beauty – and he moved with a carnal grace I had only seen until then in women. He knew exactly how to use his body. He was not a handsome man – he was a beautiful, wilful woman trapped in a man’s body. He had been Darius’s catamite, and now, in hours, he became the king’s.

By Ganymede, he was a horror. He blatantly manipulated the king’s generosity and his desire to be ‘godlike’, seizing money and small political powers for himself as fast as he could. Nicanor, Parmenio’s son, shared a couch with me one night, and he took a sip of wine, watched the Persian boy writhing next to the king and spat.

‘He sucks power with the same greed he sucks dick,’ Nicanor said.

I almost choked on my wine. And when I repeated it to Thaïs, she shook her head. ‘Men always make sex sound like a financial exchange,’ she said crossly. She was angry with me for a day.

Now, from the lofty height of my advanced years, I realise that it was the wrong joke to make to a courtesan.

But on balance, despite the number of men who maintain that Bagoas was directly responsible for all kinds of sins – the king’s increasing attraction to things Persian, the king’s occasional lapses of judgement, the king’s open flouting of his willingness to bed the boy – while all these charges are, at their base, true, none of them mattered. They were the grousing of a tired, battered army on the edge of mutiny, looking desperately for a reason that their king was suddenly alienating himself. Bagoas was no worse than any of Philip’s minions – he was prettier, anyway, and no less bitchy or demanding. Macedonians had a tolerance for such things. The king used the boy as a vacation from reality. The trouble was, the soldiers didn’t get the same vacation, and it was just too far to home.

Alexander retained genuine affection for Bagoas, and the boy returned it, so that years later, after India, their affair was renewed. That speaks a little in the boy’s favour.

But mostly, he was a horror.

Philotas led a set of punitive raids against the Mardians – mostly to seize remounts. Alexander grew bored with waiting for Ariston to return and led one of his own.

I went with him, because I was determined to separate him from Bagoas and keep his mind on his job – odd, and you’ll note that I was trying to make him function as god-king and keep him from being human, which was not my usual role.

We burned some villages, killed some women and children and got ourselves some fine horses. Our third night in the high valleys, and the Mardians raided us. They took Bucephalus. No other horse. Just Bucephalus.

Alexander sent us out to bring in prisoners. I brought in two, and Philotas six.

Alexander gathered them, had them bound and then stood over them.

‘I want my horse back,’ he said. He was not calm. He could scarcely breathe, he was so angry. I think he meant to make an elegant speech, but he couldn’t get it out. He stood there, breathing too fast, and finally, in an odd voice, he said, ‘If I don’t have my horse by this time tomorrow, I will kill every man, woman and child in these hills. I will use my entire army, and I will wipe your pathetic little race from the face of the earth. I won’t let my soldiers rape your women, because any children they had would allow your kind to continue to walk the earth. Do you understand?’

The interpreter, another former officer of Darius, was so scared that his voice shook and his knees trembled.

Coenus, on the other hand, merely laughed. He thought that Alexander was finally growing tired of the locals.

Bucephalus was returned immediately.

At Ecbatana, Alexander had left Parmenio as his satrap of Persia. While this seemed the ultimate honour, the army that marched into Hyrkania didn’t have Parmenio as chief of staff and planning officer, and we felt it. Little things seep through the cracks – just as an example, Bucephalus was only taken because no one had given the night guards a password, for the first time in about forty years.

Before we marched east after Bessus, Alexander divided the roles that had been Parmenio’s three ways. Craterus would become, to all intents and purposes, his deputy commander of the Macedonians, but for the moment he was far to the south, collecting reinforcements. Hephaestion continued to command the Aegema on occasion, but he became the de facto commander and liaison with the Iranian and satrapal forces – an increasingly important part of our army.

I became the chief of staff. I didn’t outrank either Coenus or Philotas or Nicanor or Hephaestion, but I could handle the mathematics and the planning. And Alexander trusted me – again. Who knows what clicked in his head? But it was odd – and almost eerie – to move my folding desk and my old wax tablets back into the striped tent that housed the Military Journal. Many years had passed since I had held this post, or one like it.

Immediately, I had to start laying out the route and the depots for the march east, into Bactria, which up until then was merely a name. I arranged for Ariston – for all scouts – to report directly to me. This, too, had a feeling of irony – there was Strako standing at my desk with his reports from the Angeloi, and there were Prodromoi I’d worked with on the plains of Caria.

They had, once, reported directly to Parmenio, and Alexander had taken that power from him – because we all feared Parmenio would use the scouting reports against the king. But I no sooner held the logistics in my hands than I realised how much I needed the scouting reports.

We had outrun Thaïs’s network of friends – they ended at Babylon. But she knew how to organise information, and she was bored. And she had worked with the Prodromoi before Tyre, with great success, and I encouraged her to take part.

The first news she brought us was that Satibarzanes, satrap of Aria, was ready to defect. We checked and double-checked with couriers and agents, and then we laid out a march route to Susia, sold the king on the plan and marched.

This was the way to make war. Our information was spot on, and our scouts covered our movements, our advance parties had water and food, and despite the terrain . . . Alexander’s army was used to terrain. There are mountains everywhere – or at least, everywhere Alexander wanted to go.

We marched off the edge of the world.

And we moved fast.

Whatever Satibarzanes may have thought, or planned, we were on him too fast for him to change his mind. Our cavalry seized every approach to his capital and then we ‘arrived’. It was Alexander’s plan, but Coenus and Hephaestion and I executed it, and I still look back on it with pleasure. Everyone was fed, everything moved on time and no one died. Good soldiering.

Satibarzanes was a snake – the very kind of Persian that Craterus and his Macedonians expected every Persian to be. Thaïs had enough evidence to hang him, but Alexander was in a hurry and he confirmed the man as satrap – when we had all his troops in our power.

That night, I lay beside Thaïs in my new pavilion – a magnificent tent of striped silk with a tall separate roof that held its walls up on wooden toggles – superb work, a piece of engineering as much as a bridge or a tower.

It is lovely to make love to your own intelligence chief – it makes staff meetings more secret and much more fun. We were both still breathing hard when she said, by way of love talk: ‘Satibarzanes will turn on us as soon as we turn our backs.’

I kissed her, and agreed.

‘I need money to spread around,’ she said, rubbing her hand down my legs and over my belly.

‘You know,’ I said, and I paused, unsure of whether my joke would be well received – ‘you know, I owe you four years of your fee as a hetaera.’

Her hand slipped along my thigh, over the hard ridge of muscle and then along the crease between groin and leg – the most ticklish part of my body. ‘Pay up, old man,’ she whispered.

‘I could marry you, instead,’ I said. I was perfectly willing. It came into my head just then. I was one of the most powerful men in the world, and I didn’t have to give a thought to the opinion of anyone but my peers and my soldiers.

She laughed. ‘To save money, you mean?’ she said, and that was that.

But two days later, I was planning provisions for the advance guard as Ariston scouted us a march route east. Into Bactria. And writing out a receipt for ten talents of silver to Thaïs.

Eumenes the Cardian came into the Military Journal tent. ‘Everyone out but Lord Ptolemy,’ he ordered.

The slaves fled, and Marsyas looked at me. He had a fine hand and an excellent understanding, and I used him as my own chief of staff. He gave me a long look, but I shook my head. He picked up the scroll he was checking and left.

Eumenes and I had got along for years without a skirmish, but I didn’t really know him at all. He was Greek – now that Kineas was gone, he tended to lead the ‘Greek’ faction on the staff. He’d worked for Philip, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, and Alexander had taken a long time – a longtime – to trust him. Hephaestion still viewed him as a spy for Parmenio.

He poured wine from an amphora at his own desk and put the krater down between us.

‘You have a reputation as a straight arrow, my lord,’ he said. He drank and passed me the cup.