Текст книги "God of War -The Story of Alexander the Great"
Автор книги: Christian Cameron
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Текущая страница: 61 (всего у книги 62 страниц)
The Hetaeroi were more Persian than Greek. We had new horses and new armour and thousands of new men.
Alexander came out and sat on a throne, surrounded by advisers and functionaries, under an awning. Then he stood, and in a loud, clear voice, informed them of his plans.
‘It is my wish that the men who conquered the world,’ he said with an easy smile, ‘should have the retirement they deserve – that men who should long ago have gone home to Pella to plant their farms should go, richly rewarded, and live lives of ease and splendour.’
If he imagined that they would be pleased, he was wrong.
The ranks began to move – the Tagma writhed as if it had to face elephants. The pikes wavered.
The very air became still.
Alexander still had that smile fixed on his face.
Amyntas son of Philip stepped forward – he was the right file leader of the rightmost taxeis – the senior phalangites of the army. Every man knew him – every man knew he had declined to become the king’s shield-bearer, or the senior phylarch of the hypaspitoi. He stepped forward at parade-ground pace, until he was three paces in front of the taxeis.
‘Do you think you can just send us away?’ he roared. ‘We shat blood for you!’
Alexander watched him, the way a man looks at a snake that has suddenly appeared near his foot.
The phalanx began to shout abuse – at the king.
Alexander’s face grew red.
Amyntas raised his arm and pointed his spear at the Antitagma. ‘You plan to conquer the rest of the world with your war dancers?’ he shouted.
The Tagma took up the cry – War Dancers! War Dancers!
Men began to laugh.
Now spears in the Antitagma began to shake – with rage.
Alexander’s face was as red as the sun had turned it in the Gedrosian Desert. He raised his hand to speak.
But the Tagma was not cowed.
‘With your pretty boys and your father Amon!’ called another front-ranker, and men laughed.
They all laughed.
Every Macedonian in the army began to laugh at the king.
‘God Alexander!’ men laughed. ‘Father Amon! War dancers!’
Alexander walked rapidly up to Amyntas. He motioned to the hypaspitoi, and his personal guard detached themselves and ran to him. Not Bubores or Alectus, or Astibus – all dead. Men we didn’t know.
Amyntas saluted. He said something. I was too far away to hear it.
Alexander’s face became ugly – white and red, his mouth thin and set.
A hypaspist drove his spear into Amyntas, under the arm with which he was saluting the king.
He killed about fifty of them – veterans, every one. Later, in a fit of remorse, he held funerals, and a dinner to celebrate the friendship of Macedon and Persia.
And then he ordered all the veterans home. Oh, they were well paid. But he sent them under Craterus, with orders to displace – and murder – old Antipater.
And then Hephaestion died.
Alexander was almost human for a month after Hephaestion died. He died of a hard life under brutal conditions – of a love of excess and hard drinking. I suppose it is possible that he was poisoned. I don’t think so.
But his death revealed something to the king. Alexander looked around him like a man awakened from a dream – I think because Hephaestion, for all his failings, had helped to protect the king from the hardest truths, and without him, Alexander was like a man wearing armour without padding.
But Hephaestion had also been our last conduit to the king – our last way of protesting, of demanding that he remain a Macedonian. And after a funeral that alternated between high drama and darkest comedy, heavy drinking and flights of royal fancy that made me want to vomit – he was lost.
By the time we moved to Babylon, I had had enough. I sent Thaïs away, with the children, and all my men but Polystratus. They were discharged veterans now, anyway.
I sent them west, to Aegypt. Thaïs had her orders, and Laertes had his.
FORTY
After Hephaestion’s death, all I could think of was Philip – Philip, the King of Macedon. The only excuse for his murder was hubris and tyranny. He had made himself a god, and begun to act like a selfish tyrant.
And Amyntas son of Philip – a ranker, a phalangite, a man who loved his king and marched to his wars, and died, spitted on a spear on the tyrant’s orders.
Oh, yes.
Bubores, dead in the desert. Astibus, at the foot of a wall that didn’t need to be stormed. Charmides, who shat himself to death in Bactria. Dion, who died at Guagamela.
And another million men and women.
It was me.
After Hephaestion died, I was invited to the banquets again. It was odd – it was as if the gods gave him to me. At the funeral banquet, he put a hand on my shoulder and called me his ‘last friend’.
Once I would have wept at those words.
I had no more tears to shed.
I sent Thaïs away, but I kept her things. I was a student of Aristotle, and a good one – I have a curious mind, and I like to read.
It is not difficult, if your target drinks unwatered wine. And Alexander drank more and more – more every night, and longer, while he planned his next extravagant conquest.
I am not ashamed to say that I tried twice. Twice, I went to his parties, lay on a couch near him, and I could not do it. I conjured the death of Cleitus – the death of Philotas, the death of Amyntas. The murder of Coenus. His attempt on my life. The march through the Gedrosian. The massacre of the Mallians.
It is hard to kill even the shell of something you love.
But some weeks after the funeral for Hephaestion, Cassander came. He was a nervous youth who was too used to having his own way too close to his school days. He came from Macedon – from Antipater – to negotiate. The old man knew Alexander wanted him dead, and with the same callous indifference to other men’s lives that he always showed, he stayed home and sent his young son.
Cassander is and was no man’s friend. He was a boy on a dangerous mission. He was a fool then and he’s not much better now.
But . . .
He came into the dining hall with a clatter, because he’d tripped over his own feet at the entrance, and the men near the door laughed at him. I was lying three couches from the king – Bagoas was sharing his couch, painted like a woman.
Cyrus – now a squadron commander in his own right – approached the king, and threw himself on his face – full proskynesis in order to approach and receive the kiss of a king’s friend.
Cassander laughed. It was a nervous, reedy laugh, but I suppose he meant it – he had never seen such a thing in all his life.
Alexander rose to a sitting position on his couch, and then kissed Cyrus and exchanged a comment or two, all the while beckoning to Cassander to approach. When the young man came, Alexander smiled at him – smiled and held his glance, still beckoning, until Cassander came close enough to kiss.
Alexander grabbed his ears and smashed his head into the marble floor – not once, but five or six times, until the blood poured from the boy’s scalp, and he shrieked and soiled himself.
Alexander rose to his feet and kicked him in the crotch, and then turned and ordered the body removed. His expression was one of mild distaste.
That night, I opened the gold container I had found among Thaïs’s belongings, and poured the powder of strychnos nuts carefully into the king’s wine after his taster sniffed it and set it at the king’s side on a low table by his couch.
He developed a high fever, went to the bathhouse and sweated it off.
I was haunted by the notion that he was, in fact, greater than human.
But I knew better. And I believed then, and still believe, that all that was greatest in Alexander – the part that was greater than merely human – left him after Hydaspes. Perhaps it was his apotheosis. And afterwards, only the bestial shell – less than human – was left.
Listen to me – the philosopher.
You can purchase anything in Babylon.
I purchased fresh nuts and ground them myself, as Alexander and I had learned to do at Aristotle’s hands. As I had seen Thaïs do, before Memnon died.
Instead of dry powder, I had a damp mush.
I dried it in the sun, and put it in his wine. He was drinking deep, unwatered wine straight from the amphora, and it was the work of a moment to brush the foul stuff into his cup.
Why wasn’t I caught?
Because the gods willed it so.
And because, by that summer in Babylon, no one wanted him to live.
I thought of my conversation with Cleitus, the day Philip was murdered.
Of what could justify regicide.
Boy, if I ever act the tyrant that he was, you have my permission to kill me.
He lay near death for two days. The soldiers – the same Macedonians he had already disbanded and ordered home – crowded around the palace doors, openly praying for his survival.
Because that is how men are.
The old circle gathered by his bedside, and it was telling – I think we all thought it – that there were no Persians at all to attend his last days. He lay, barely able to move or speak.
When he asked for wine, I gave it to him.
With more poison.
Craterus was beside himself – he, alone of us, wanted to conquer more worlds, march farther. He was unchanged. His feelings for the king were unchanged. But he had missed the Gedrosian Desert.
He leaned over the king and asked, ‘Lord – who should inherit your kingdom? To whom should it go?’
There was silence for so long that we all, I think, assumed the king was too far gone to speak.
But he did not speak. He giggled.
His head rose a fraction, and his eyes met mine squarely. As if he knew . . . everything.
‘To the strongest,’ he said.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Writing a novel – several novels, now – about the wars of the Diadochi, or Successors, is a difficult game for an amateur historian to play. There are many, many players, and many sides, and frankly, none of them are ‘good.’ From the first, I had to make certain decisions, and most of them had to do with limiting the cast of characters to a size that the reader could assimilate without insulting anyone’s intelligence. Antigonus One-Eye and his older son Demetrios deserve novels of their own – as do Cassander, Eumenes, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Olympia and the rest. Every one of them could be portrayed as the hero and the others as villains.
If you feel that you need a scorecard, consider visiting my website at www.hippeis.com where you can at least review the biographies of some of the main players. Wikipedia also has full biographies on most of the players in the period.
From a standpoint of purely military history, I’ve made some decisions that knowledgeable readers may find odd. For example, I no longer believe in the linothorax or linen breastplate, and I’ve written it out of the novels. Nor do I believe that the Macedonian pike system – the sarissa armed phalanx – was really any better than the old Greek hoplite system. In fact, I suspect it was worse, as the experience of early modern warfare suggests that the longer your pikes are, the less you trust your troops. Macedonian farm boys were not hoplites – they lacked the whole societal and cultural support system that created the hoplite. They were decisive in their day but as to whether they were ‘better’ than the earlier system . . . well, as with much of military change, it was a cultural change, not really a technological one. Or so it seems to me.
Elephants were not tanks, nor were they a magical victory tool. They could be very effective, or utterly ineffective. I’ve tried to show both situations.
The same can be said of horse-archery. On open ground, with endless remounts and a limitless arrow supply, a horse-archer army must have been a nightmare. But a few hundred horse-archers on the vast expanse of an Alexandrian battlefield might only have been a nuisance.
Ultimately though, I don’t believe in ‘military’ history. War is about economics, religion, art, society – war is inseparable from culture. You could not, in this period, train an Egyptian peasant to be a horse-archer without changing his way of life and his economy, his social status, perhaps his religion. Questions about military technology – ‘Why didn’t Alexander create an army of [insert technological wonder here]?’ – ignore the constraints imposed by the realities of the day – the culture of Macedon, which carried, it seems to me, the seeds of its own destruction from the first.
And then there is the problem of sources. In as much as we know anythingabout the world of the Diadochi, we owe that knowledge to a few authors, none of whom are actually contemporary. I used Diodorus Siculus throughout the writing of the Tyrantbooks – in most cases I prefer him to Arrian or Polybius, and in many cases he’s the sole source.
In this book I deal with the life of Alexander in detail. I owe a deep debt to Peter Greene, whose biography of Alexander I followed in many respects. However, I also used sources as widely separated as Arrian (whose hero worship makes him suspect) and the Alexander Romance (mostly fabrication, but with hidden gems), tempered by Plutarch despite his moralizing ways. I suspect that Alexander was the Adolf Hitler of his era, not the golden hero. I suspect that he was both a gifted general andthe beneficiary of some unbelievable strokes of luck.
For anyone who wants to get a quick lesson in the difficulties of the sources for the period, I recommend visiting the website www.livius.org. The articles on the sources will, I hope, go a long way to demonstrating how little we know about Alexander and his successors.
Of course, as I’m a novelist and only an historian on weekends, sometimes the loopholes in the evidence – or even the vast gaps – are the very space in which my characters operate. Sometimes, a lack of knowledge is what creates the appeal. Either way, I hope that I have created a believable version of the world of Alexander. I hope that you enjoy this book, and its companions, the Tyrant series.
And as usual, I’m always happy to hear your comments – and even your criticisms – at the Online Agora on www.hippeis.com. See you there, I hope!
Christian Cameron
Toronto, 2011
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’ve been accused – by friends – of only writing to recruit new people for re-enacting. This is not true. I write because I love it, and because it is the best job in the world – what other job allows me to travel to Greece to do research? Or travel to Finland to become a better long sword fighter – as research?
Besides, I have to write books to earn the money to be able to affordre-enacting.
That said, though, I am always recruiting. Right now, in 2011, we’ve just completed the first recreation of the Battle of Marathon. We had about 100 participants. When we do it again in 2014, I’d like to see five hundred. In 2020, when we go to Thermopylae and Plataea . . . a thousand? Two thousand?
That could be you.
Okay, let me try to convince you, in a roundabout way.
I approach every historical era with a basket full of questions – How did they eat? What did they wear? How does that weapon work? Books are only so useful. That is to say, books and learning are the ultimate resource, and professional historians rank among my favourite people – but there is no substitute for doing it. The world’s Classical re-enactors have been an enormous resource to me while writing, both with details of costume and armour and food, and as a fountain of inspiration. In that regard I’d like to thank Craig Sitch and Cheryl Fuhlbohm of Manning Imperial, who make some of the finest recreations of material culture from Classical antiquity in the world (www.manningimperial.com), as well as Joe Piela of Lonely Mountain Forge for helping recreate equipment on tight schedules. I’d also like to thank Paul McDonnell-Staff, Paul Bardunias, and Giannis Kadoglou for their depth of knowledge and constant willingness to answer questions – as well as the members of various ancient Greek re-enactment societies all over the world, from Spain to Australia. Thanks to the UK Hoplite Association for supporting my book talks in Britain. Thanks most of all to the members of my own group, Hoplologia and the Taxeis Plataea, for being the guinea-pigs on a great deal of material culture and martial-arts experimentation, and to Guy Windsor (who wrote The Swordsman’s Companionand The Duelist’s Companion, and is an actual master swordsman himself ) for advice on martial arts.
Speaking of re-enactors, my friend Steven Sandford draws the maps for these books, and he deserves a special word of thanks, as does my friend Dmitry Bondarenko, who draws the figures and borders on the maps. My friend Rebecca Jordan works tirelessly at the website and the various web spin-offs like the Agora, and deserves a great deal more praise than she receives.
Speaking of friends, I owe a debt or gratitude to Christine Szego, who provides daily criticisms and support from her store, Bakka Phoenix, in Toronto. Thanks Christine!
My interpretation of Alexander and his world – which is also Kineas’s world, and Philokles’s world, and Thais’s world, and Ptolemy’s world – began with my desire to write a book that would allow me to discuss the serious issues of war and politics that are around all of us today. I was returning to school and returning to my first love – Classical history. I am also an unashamed fan of Patrick O’Brian, and I wanted to write a series with depth and length that would allow me to explore the whole period, with the relationships that define men, and women, in war and peace – not just one snippet. The combination – Classical history, the philosophy of war, and the ethics of the world of arête – gave rise to the volume you hold in your hand.
Along the way, I met Professor Wallace and Professor Young, both very learned men with long association to the University of Toronto. Professor Wallace answered any question that I asked him, providing me with sources and sources and sources, introducing me to the labyrinthine wonders of Diodorus Siculus, and finally, to T. Cuyler Young. Cuyler was kind enough to start my education on the Persian Empire of Alexander’s day, and to discuss the possibility that Alexander was not infallible, or even close to it. I wish to give my profoundest thanks and gratitude to these two men for their help in recreating the world of fourth century BC Greece, and the theory of Alexander’s campaigns that underpins this series of novels. Any brilliant scholarship is theirs, and any errors of scholarship are certainly mine. I will never forget the pleasure of sitting in Professor Wallace’s office, nor in Cuyler’s living room, eating chocolate cake and debating the myth of Alexander’s invincibility. Both men have passed on now, since this book was written, but none of the Tyrant books would have been the same without them. They were great men, and great academics – the kind of scholars who keep civilization alive.
I’d also like to thank the staff of the University of Toronto’s Classics department for their support, and for reviving my dormant interest in Classical Greek, as well as the staffs of the University of Toronto Library and the Toronto Metro Reference Library for their dedication and interest. Libraries matter!
I couldn’t have approached so many Greek texts without the Perseus Project. This online resource, sponsored by Tufts University, gives online access to almost all classical texts in Greek and in English. Without it I would still be working on the second line of Medea, never mind the Iliador the Hymn to Demeter.
I owe a debt of thanks to my excellent editor, Bill Massey at Orion, for giving these books constant attention and a great deal of much needed flattery, for his good humour in the face of authorial dicta, and for his support at every stage. I’d also like to thank Shelley Power, my agent, for her unflagging efforts on my behalf, and for many excellent dinners, the most recent of which, at the world’s only Ancient Greek restaurant, Archeon Gefsis in Athens, resulted in some hasty culinary rewriting. Thanks Shelley!
Finally, I would like to thank the muses of the Luna Café, who serve both coffee and good humour, and without whom there would certainly not have been a book. And all my thanks – a lifetime of them – for my wife Sarah.
If you have any questions, wish to see more or participate (ah, we’re back to that . . . want to be a hoplite? A Persian Immortal?) please come and visit www.hippeis.com. Go to the ‘Agora’ (that’s Greek for forum, folks,) sign in and post to the welcome board. And let me recruit you for re-enacting. We call it living history. It makes history come to life.
And history matters.
Christian Cameron
Toronto, 2011
