God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

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, very unhappy.

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 with is 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