– Hephaestion, Cleitus the Black, me, Craterus – we could often have whole conversations in single words.
At any rate, he lay there and finally he said, ‘Until he defeats Athens, he can’t send all his force against Persia.’
‘True,’ I said.
‘I will need you, when I go to conquer Persia,’ he said. What he meant was,
I laughed. But he sat up and put a hand on my arm.
‘I am serious. There’s only a hand of you I really trust. I need you. And to be the man I need, you must stop surrendering in contests,’ he said. ‘Here, in the woods, you kill game, you cook, you find trails, you cut bedding – you are the perfect companion, afraid of nothing, quick with good advice – but among the pages, you lie down and let lesser boys triumph over you.’
I remember a hot flush of anger – which of us likes to have our innermost failings exposed? And the temptation to tell him that I was practising, that I meant to strike back, was like the pressure of a swollen river on a dam. But I resisted.
‘Aristotle has spoken to you about it,’ Alexander said.
‘Yes,’ I said, my voice thick. I wanted to say
‘Get it done. Our time is coming.’ Alexander sounded very sure of himself, but then, he always did.
I struggled for words. But none came, and suddenly he turned to me.
‘I know where Calixeinna bathes,’ he said. Again, it was as if the stars had spoken to him.
‘You can see her naked any time you want,’ I shot out, still full of emotions.
‘Isn’t there something terribly . . . ignoble, in giving orders to a woman purchased for you by your mother?’ he said. He shrugged. ‘I love to look at her. She has the most beautiful body I have ever seen.’ He shrugged again. ‘But I will not order her to disrobe for me.’
I shook my head. ‘Give her to me, then,’ I said. I meant to be playful, but he rolled over suddenly on our bed of grass and his face was inches from mine. ‘No,’ he said coldly. ‘She is mine.’
Never a dull moment with Alexander.
‘I want to go and watch her bathe,’ he said.
‘Let’s not forget what happened to Adonis,’ I mused, with the false levity that always follows a serious moment.
‘I am not Adonis,’ Alexander said. ‘She is not Artemis, and anyway, no one will catch me.’
He woke me while the stars were still a cold and distant presence, and we stretched, did some exercises and started down out of the hills. Far from sneaking across the plains, we ran – about thirty stades, I think. Ah, to be young! Alexander had thought it all through, and decided that Aristotle’s slaves, pretending to be guards, would not guard anything or patrol at all in the dark. So instead of creeping from tree to tree across central Macedon, we ran down the roads in the moonlight.
As the sky bgan to pale in the east, we ran past the manor house, bold as brass, and went down the orchard lane, past the olive groves and up the big hill to the west of the manor. There was a spring there, and we ran to the spring, drank water and prayed to the gods.
‘You must not look,’ Alexander told me. ‘Go and take a nap.’
So I snuck away, and he concealed himself in a tree. We were enacting his fantasy – I knew him well enough to understand that. He played the game according to his own rules, and this was his way.
But I was a boy on the edge of manhood myself, and I had no intention of letting him have her all to himself. So I found a little knoll of soft grass under an olive tree and lay down, knowing my man. He came soon enough. He was checking to see that I was asleep.
I pretended to sleep, and then, when he was gone and I had counted to a thousand, I went all the way around the hill and climbed up behind the spring.
Waiting in ambush is dull. I waited a long time. After perhaps a full hour, I guessed where Alexander was hidden from the behaviour of the birds and squirrels. And when the sun was well up and I was regretting my temerity and wondering why I
She had three slaves with her, and they dropped their chitons by the pool and splashed each other, shrieking and calling names. I had a girl of my own – and some experience of women – but I remember being struck almost dumb by the four of them, all beautiful, all splendidly muscled and all very, very different. A dark-haired Thracian girl had short but beautifully muscled legs with heavy thighs, large breasts and a waist and hips that were all swooping curves. A Greek slave was taller and slimmer, with subtler curves, small breasts and a long, graceful back and a magnificent neck. The third woman, a Persian, had the most beautiful eyebrows I had ever seen, graceful hands, and breasts of a different shape from the other two, almost like wine cups. They were all women, all beautiful and all utterly different.
And then there was Calixeinna, who was tall and willowy, with a waist so small that I could have put my hands around it, lips that were the colour of dawn, hair that was a particular blushing shade of red-blond, and heavy, full breasts as yet untouched by age. Her hips were wide and her legs long, and she was
While her women shrieked and played, she swam in the small pool, really only about three times the length of her body, the water ice cold and black in the early sun under the great holm oak that shadowed the spring. When she emerged, it was like the rising of the sun, and when she reached her arms back to wring out her hair . . .
Oh, youth.
She played for a while with a turtle by the edge of the pool, and it occurred to me that she knew Alexander was there. I didn’t know much about women, but I knew they didn’t play naked by pools nearly as much as adolescent boys thought they did.
When she was done with the turtle, she lay on a rock, naked. The other nymphs continued to laugh and scream, and the longer I watched, the more like a performance it seemed.
Eventually, I had to wonder how often it had been repeated, and by what mechanism Alexander had been informed of it, and whether he’d been to the performance before.
Eventually, she put on her chiton – so prettily that one breast was free while a lost pin was found in the grass – and she and the Persian girl skipped away down the hill, arm in arm, and the other two stayed for a few minutes, filling jars.
I snuck back to my resting place, and went straight to sleep.
A little later, Alexander wakened me, looking as if he’d had a religious revelation. Then, in broad daylight, we climbed into the walled compound and went to the slaves’ quarters, where we sat to breakfast with the slaves – bad wine and stale bread and a little cheese and some dry figs. They all looked at us, of course. Alexander just smiled.
And we were in our usual places when Aristotle opened his class. The philosopher actually got several sentences into his lecture before he realised that we were supposed to be in hiding.
He was pleased with us.
We were pleased with ourselves.
And I never told Alexander that I had watched Calixeinna bathe. I think he’d have killed me.
My point is, he was very smitten, in his deeply self-controlled and selfish way.
I missed most of the by-play, because the next weeks were the weeks I was off drilling in the late afternoons with Polystratus. But Genny told me everything – sometimes too much of everything. Genny could chatter gossip at me even when her breathing was coming in gasps and her hands were locked behind my back and her nails were cutting into my muscles – ‘and then – ah! – she said – ah! – that he . . .’
It’s good to know that, even as king, I can raise a laugh.
I don’t remember what occasioned it. We hardly ever boxed – it was considered too Greek and effeminate – but when we did we wrapped our hands. That helped me – my left hand was ugly, and I was young, and having it wrapped helped steady me.
Old Leonidas stood wearing his chlamys and holding a heavy staff of cornel wood. I happened to be the first page out the barracks door with my hands wrapped. And Amyntas came out second.
‘Ptolemy, son of Lagus,’ Leonidas snapped. ‘Against Amyntas . . .’ His eyes wandered, and he shook his head. ‘No. A younger boy. Philip the Black.’
‘Oh, I’ll be gentle with him,’ Amyntas said. ‘He’s ugly, but maybe if I roll him over . . .’ He guffawed, and
