ends of the rawhide strip were buried in the knot, and the rawhide, like all rawhide, shrank as it dried, so that the fastening was almost like a solid lump of rawhide, shiny and dense.
The king looked at it for a long time, and people began to mutter.
Alexander was no longer nervous. Of course not. In his head, this counted as combat, I’m sure. Now he was cool and professional.
‘Tell me the prophecy again,’ he said, aloud.
‘He who opens the Gordian Knot shall likewise be Lord of Asia,’ a priest intoned.
There was a buzz from the crowd. Alexander, the performer, waited it out.
They fell silent.
‘So it doesn’t really matter how I open it,’ he said. His eyes glittered.
The priests talked among themselves.
Alexander turned, drew his sword and slashed down, as hard as he would in cutting an armoured opponent.
The ancient rawhide shattered into a thousand dry fragments, and the yoke-pole crashed to the floor.
Alexander lifted his sword. People looked stunned, and he smiled. ‘I do not intend to take Asia by my wits,’ he said, ‘but by my sword.’
That night, I attended my first command meeting in almost a year. Parmenio was there, and Coenus and Philotas, but many men I knew were gone. Nearchus had his own command in Phrygia, Seleucus was sick, Alexander of Lyncestis was under arrest, Antigonus One-Eye was off in Paphlagonia.
There were new officers and, for the first time, Asian officers – mostly Phrygians, mixing with the Greeks and the Macedonians.
Alexander came in and we all saluted, and then he went to the head of a table on which lay a set of itineraries for the roads to the coast.
‘Darius is in the field with sixty thousand men,’ he said. He smiled. ‘It is my desire to bring him to battle at the earliest opportunity, smash his army and lay claim to Asia. One field battle, and we will be the masters here.’
There was an almost imperceptible murmur.
‘I’m sending Amphoterus to the coast to take command of the fleet in the Hellespont,’ he said. The gentleman in question bowed. Alexander smiled at us, and I knew he was about to say something meant to shock.
‘And then I’m cutting the cord, gentlemen. The way to defeat the Persian fleet is to hold all of their land bases. We’ve made a good start. This summer, we’re going for the coast of Syria. If Darius remains as indolent as he has been, we’ll work our way down the coast to Aegypt and close the sea to him for ever.’ He looked around, expecting opposition.
He got it. Parmenio shook his head. ‘You’ll be out of touch with Macedon, and if Amphoterus is beaten, we could lose Pella. What if Athens rises? Sparta? What if—’
Alexander’s grin was a wolf ’s grin. ‘Pella is not worth the effort of defending if we can win Asia, gentlemen.’
‘It’s our home!’ Philotas said.
Alexander shook his head. ‘It is a huddle of mud huts at the edge of the wilderness. We have Ephesus. We have Sardis. We have Halicarnassus.’
‘We
‘We have Gordia, too,’ Parmenio said. ‘Lucky us.’
Alexander looked around. ‘We are here to conquer Asia. I have every confidence that Antipater can hold Macedon behind us, and in the worst case, if he fails’ – and here Alexander’s confidence sounded more godlike than brash – ‘if he fails, well, we’ll return and take it back next season.’
Parmenio shook his head. ‘Syria? How do you plan to get there?’
Alexander’s smile grew softer. ‘Ankyra – and the Cilician Gates.’
Parmenio put his hands on his hips. Now I saw where Philotas got that habit. ‘It cannot be done,’ he said. ‘A goat path through tall mountains. Fifty men could hold us for days.’
Alexander nodded. ‘It will be glorious,’ he said.
We lingered at Ankyra while the Prodromoi went far to the east, looking for Darius, looking for news, and while contingents from all of western Asia came in to make terms with the conqueror. I found their terms too lenient, and most of them were allowed to go with little beyond a promise of submission. The king was in a hurry, and when he was in a hurry, he didn’t bother with minutiae like the conquest of eastern Phrygia.
I took my Hetaeroi south and east, on to the broad, dry, dusty Cappadocian Plain. We moved fast, with no baggage, and we slept under the stars, with saddlecloths for pillows. Thais’s beautiful skin grew tanned, and she claimed that it would ruin her complexion, but she was developing a new persona, Thais the Amazon, and her Angeloi were developing into a miniature Prodromoi, complete with spears and swords. Our daughter had her second birthday in Asia, carried on a mule.
I had Philotas to my south and Kineas, of all people, to my north, and we swept east and south, looking for enemies and for news.
In every town, either Thais had people, in which case they reported to her, or she didn’t, in which case her Angeloi bought some. And she was teaching us – a few of us, Calchias of the Prodromoi and the Paeonian commander, Ariston and Cleander, from the so-called mercenary cavalry. Teaching us to use this network of spies carefully, to integrate it into our scouting. Thais knew a little of how to handle a cavalry patrol, and none of us knew how to suborn a town official, but together we made a powerful combination – the more so as we learned from each other.
As an example of how this might work, let me offer the race across the Plain of Cappadocia. It was Parmenio’s operation – remember, the king was still in Ankyra, and was determined not to march until he could move all the way to the Cilician Gates with his flanks covered. Given that we were abandoning our communications with Macedon, this seemed sensible.
I had the middle route – south from Ankyra, then south-east along the axis Gorbeus–Mazaka. I was confident that this would be the army’s actual route, but by sending Philotas along the southerly route and Kineas along the northerly route, we spread the most confusion and we gave the king options in the event of logistical or political troubles – water shortage, or hostile tribes.
On the second night, three of my best rode into Gorbeus with Strako and a half-dozen of the Angeloi – the town was six days by pack train from Ankyra, and still imagining itself safe from us. The next morning at dawn, Thais’s friends opened the gates and my whole squadron came in at a canter, raising dust all the way. The garrison – forty Persian archers under a drunken aristocrat – surrendered on the spot.
That’s how it was supposed to work. But the news was all good – the satrap of Cilicia had only three hundred men in the Cilician Gates. Arsames was raising his men on the other side of the barrier. Thais’s people said he was considering outright surrender.
‘Oh, if I were a man,’ she said bitterly. ‘Someone should go.’
We sent Polystratus with the former garrison commander’s signet ring and an offer – a thousand talents of gold to let us have the Gates without a fight. It was insanity – the gates were a hundred and fifty stades of goat tracks that even Persian levies could hold against us – but it was always worth trying Thais’s way.
In the morning, we were off across the parched plain, all volcanic rock and thin soil and people living so close to starvation that the girls were old hags at twenty-five and the men looked like bent-over old men.
I lost touch with Philotas and pushed on. A day out of Gorbeus, and there was no more water. Nor local people to help us.
We pushed on. Our canteens were full and we had packhorses. My two-year-old squawked a lot – she wanted more water than we had to give her.
Thais and I had the worst fight of our lives. She told me that I was a typical man and a poor father, because I would not send her back to the last water source with a detachment. I couldn’t spare the troopers, and she knew it.
For the first time I could remember I slept alone that night, and it was cold.
And my mouth was dry, for several reasons. I slept badly. I considered what would happen if my daughter died in the waste. What would die with her. How much I loved Thais.
