Alexander sat up with Hephaestion and Cleitus to help him. Both of them stood as far from Philip as they could manage.
Philip didn’t like the atmosphere of the room. ‘I do not want to do this,’ he insisted.
I, for one, believed him.
He set the horn cup down on a side table.
Before I could pick it up, the king had it.
‘Let me test it, lord,’ I said.
Alexander smiled enigmatically and gave Philip the note from Parmenio to read.
Philip’s eyes all but bulged out of his head. His hands shook. But he stood straight and his voice was steady, by the gods.
‘I swear I would never harm you or any other man or woman, in the pursuance of my art,’ he said. ‘If you take that cup, it may kill you, but not by my will. You and I both know the risks. That would be dangerous medicine for a man in the peak of fitness.’
Alexander raised the cup in a mock toast, like the guest at a good Athenian symposium, and drank it off.
Then he took a deep breath, and screamed.
It was three days before the shit poured out of him with the sweat, and he fouled the bed three times in as many hours. Those were bad days, and I’ve no need to describe them. Our cavalry was in contact with the Persian cavalry all along the line of the passes, and we were going to fight, and the king lay in a sweat, unable to talk.
I put Polystratus on Philip, to protect him.
But mostly he stayed with the king, massaging his abdomen and groin and putting cloths on his head.
And then the fever broke and the king rose, smelling slightly of his own excrement, and walked.
TWENTY-ONE
The king spent three more days in bed while the Great King of Persia sat on the far side of his mountains and held exercises for his army, and then Alexander marched
He was as weak as a new colt, and on the second day of that small campaign, I saw him fall off a horse for the one and only time in his life. But he laughed and got back in the saddle, and the tribesmen saw their villages burned, gathered their flocks and retreated north of the Taurus mountains – unbeaten, but less of a threat to us. The last two thousand of my troops marched along the coast road from the west, with Asander and Queen Ada at their head, and Alexander decreed three days of games at Tarsus. He sat with Ada throughout the games, and she smiled a great deal. On the last day, he distributed prizes, money and crowns. Ada presented him with a magnificent chariot, with four beautiful white horses and harness-work all solid gold, and he embraced her in public, something he had never done. He told me later it was the finest present of his life, and he loved driving it.
I was astounded to find that I received a gold crown as reward for my victories in Caria. Asander received one, as well. I had the right to wear the crown on any public occasion. It was the highest award a Macedonian could receive. Parmenio had three, but Philotas, for example, had none.
And – perhaps the joy of my life – he gave me a phalanx of my own, ostensibly Macedonian, although more than half of my two thousand men were Isokles and his Athenians whom I had captured. Craterus, who I thought disliked me, embraced me on the platform, and Perdiccas thumped my back.
Local commands could come and go, but in Macedon a phalanx command was for ever. My phalanx would bear my name. I could only be displaced by death or treason.
Old Parmenio took both my hands, the bastard, and embraced me. ‘You deserve it, boy.
The temptation to put my fist in his eye almost spoiled the occasion. But it didn’t. I don’t have Alexander’s need for praise, but it is pleasant, and the unforced admiration of my peers – the men I’d marched and fought with for eight years already – was a heady wine, and I drank it Scythian-style.
Thais lay next to me that night, stroking my crown of gilded oak leaves. ‘What does it mean?’ she asked.
‘Glory!’ I said.
She shook her head.
I laughed. ‘You, my love, killed Memnon. You stormed the Cilician Gates. It’s really your crown.’
She smiled sadly. ‘Will you remember that when my belly is round and my breasts are flat and I have wrinkles?’ she asked.
I sat back and appeared to consider. I took a long time about it, until she gave a little shriek and rammed her thumbs expertly into my armpits. Much later, she told me that she was pregnant again.
It may not have been the greatest day of my life, but it has few rivals.
TWENTY-TWO
I should tell you about the manoeuvrings before Issus, but I’ll have to keep it to a few sentences, because suddenly I was a taxiarch and not a cavalry officer. I wasn’t scouting, or running a temporary battle group just behind the scouting line – I was in the cloud of dust, plodding along the road with my men and their baggage carts. It’s a different view of war, I can tell you.
Of course, I had served on foot before, but the responsibility for two thousand pezhetaeroi was enormous and complicated, with everything from internal promotion to daily food, muster lists for the Military Journal (oh! how that boot was suddenly on the other foot!) and reports to Craterus on the progress of training.
In a way, I was lucky in that I had no predecessor. I’ve found that when you inherit a unit, either the man before you was a god, and you are constantly compared to him, or he was a fool, and you are constantly compared to him. Often both at the same time. Men do not really like to be disciplined – men detest taking orders. It’s easiest to focus that discontent on the man in charge, unless he has enormous talent, great wealth, good looks, charisma or birth. Best to have all of them, like Alexander, or Kineas.
Or me. I didn’t have the looks – but I had money, even by Asian standards, and a fair reputation, and I was getting a new taxeis, just raised from recruits and ‘mercenaries’ who were considered close enough to being Macedonians – Thessalians, Amphilopilans, men of the Chersonese. I was their first commander.
I spent my first day in command wandering around the army, looking for officers. I had Isokles, and he was first-rate, although as an Athenian he was widely distrusted. I had Polystratus, although I left him mounted. Marsyas was bored as a file leader in the Hetaeroi and an apprentice on the Journal – I made him a wing commander in the taxeis. Pyrrhus followed me as a matter of course, and Cleomenes was back from his wounds and bored as a trooper, and I gave him the other wing.
In fact, I ended up with more battalion officers than anyone else. I liked to subdivide, and I liked to have the ability to break my units up. So I had four companies – Isokles, Pyrrhus, Cleomenes and Marsyas – each a little shy of five hundred men. Every company commander had a tail of mounted men as messengers and a hyperetes with a trumpet.
Isokles had some excellent notions of drill. One was that his men should drill every day, the way we had in the hypaspitoi. He became our drill master. He was a professional who had fought everywhere, and he knew tricks I’d never seen – like reversing your deployment in camp so that when your column of files reached the battlefield, they could deploy left to right instead of right to left. I admit it’s an esoteric trick, but it had never occurred to me that I could reverse the order of my deployment just by ‘about-facing’ my men in camp and leading with the back of the column. I never won any battles with it, but there’s a habit to thinking outside the accepted drills – and that applies even to something as apparently rigid as the close-order drill of the phalanx.
By the fourth day after the games, we drilled well. Our recruits were above average in height and in strength, because the fringe districts where they’d been recruited were new ground to the recruiting officers. And our Athenian former mercenaries (every one of whom could now swear by Athena he’d been born in Amphilopolis, a former Athenian colony, and thus evade the prohibition on foreigners in the ranks) were excellent soldiers with as
