God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

many of the other oldsters laughed.

Alexander looked hurt. And he gave me a look – the whole burden of his eyes. In effect, he said do it.

I must give the prince this – he was horrified when the other pages began to turn against me.

Hephaestion relished my discomfiture. ‘He’s the only oldster who competes against little boys,’ he said to Leonidas. ‘Make him fight Amyntas.’

‘Hephaestion!’ snapped Alexander.

‘I’d love to face Amyntas,’ I said. ‘But I’m no match for him.’

Amyntas laughed. ‘Put a bag over your head, Ptolemy!’ he said, and his little set laughed, but the other pages – especially Philip the Red, long ago turned from my tormentor to my friend – looked embarrassed.

Leonidas didn’t like it, but he put me in the ring of wands against Amyntas.

Losing can become a habit.

Amyntas put a fist in my gut and instead of twisting away – I had stomach muscles like bands of steel and it wasn’t that bad – I folded around his punch and lay down.

But when I rolled over, he was pushing his hips, pretending to fuck me for his little audience.

I did my very best to hide my rage. I’d had some practice, since the night with the Illyrians, at hiding my thoughts. I hung my head, rubbed my hip and squared off.

Leonidas struck Amyntas with his staff. ‘Don’t be a gadfly, boy,’ he said.

Amyntas turned on me, eager to have me on the ground again. But he stumbled as he took up his guard – the will of the gods and sheer hubris – and I had all the time in the world to strike him.

I needed it. Losing is a habit. Covering up is a habit, too – fighting defensively, waiting for the blow that will allow you to lose with honour, or at least some excuse and a minimum of pain. That’s how low I’d fallen – even after weeks of practice with Polystratus, faced with a real competitor, I was ready to lie down, I think, until that stumble. Ares was good to me.

He stumbled, and his chin came to my fist.

Instead of defending himself, he lashed out with his left and caught me on the nose, and it hurt. He didn’t break it – but he hurt me, and I saw red. Those two things saved me from myself – his stumble and that haze of pain.

Let’s make this brief. I beat him to a pulp. I broke his nose and blackened both of his eyes and made him beg me for mercy.

None of the other boys said a thing. Leonidas stood back and let it happen, and Aristotle . . .

. . . caught my eye and gave me the smallest nod of approbation.

When he was begging, I let him go. I had him under my left arm, his head locked against my body, and I was beating him with my elbow and fist. My hand hurt.

Leonidas waved for two boys to carry Amyntas off.

‘Since you are feeling better,’ he said, ‘you may face Prince Alexander.’

If losing is a habit, so is winning. Alexander always won – both because none of us wanted to beat him, and because he was awfully fast. And practised like a mad thing.

But that morning, in that place, I was bound to try. I was drinking water and I almost choked at the announcement. Cleitus the Black grinned – not an adversarial grin, but the grin of a man who has been there. So I grinned back, and just at that moment, the gods sent Calixeinna. She was not entering the palaestra – that would have been an appalling breach of etiquette – but she paused, going down the steps from the exedra, about thirty paces away. Owing to the way the columns and the buildings aligned, I’m pretty sure I was the only boy she could see.

She smiled at me. It was a beautiful, radiant, confident smile, and it wasn’t a brief flash.

Then she turned and went down the steps.

I shrugged off my chlamys and went to meet the prince.

My shoulders hurt and my left hand was a dead thing, and I was back to being embarrassed by the scar tissue on my left breast – competitors are supposed to be beautiful. But when the stick came up between us, I didn’t give ground but jabbed with my left – over and over, my left fist like an annoying horsefly.

My fourth or fifth jab connected. Alexander’s head snapped back and his lip was split, blood already welling. He was stunned, and I stepped in and gave him my right to the gut, jabbed a few more times, making some contacts, and then my right to the exposed side of his head and down he went.

The other pages were silent.

Alexander got up slowly, putting the cloth wrapping of his fists against his split lip to slow the flow of blood. His eyes met mine – glanced away – came back.

He winked.

And then his lightning-fast right jab slammed into my head, while I was still trying to understand the wink.

When I came to, Alexander was sitting by my bedside in the infirmary. He loved everything about medicine, and always told us that if he wasn’t king, he’d want to be a doctor. He meant it, too – he was always trying medicines on himself and others, and for years he kept a little journal detailing what he’d tried and with what effect, under what conditions.

He grinned at me when I was obviously aware of him.

‘Have I told you, Ptolemy, how much you are a man after my own heart?’ he asked.

I smiled. Who wouldn’t? He was the most charming man who ever lived, and that smile was all for me. ‘Why so, lord?’ I asked.

‘How long since you decided to come back to us?’ Alexander asked me. ‘Two weeks? Perhaps three?’ He nodded. ‘And you hid your intentions carefully, like a wily Odysseus with the suitors all around him.’ He leaned forward. ‘You’d already started training when we were up the mountain, and you never said a word.’

‘My lord does me too much credit,’ I said. But I was grinning, too.

‘Welcome back, son of Lagus,’ Alexander said. ‘There is nothing I love better than a man in control of himself.’

He gave me a hug, forced me to drink some foul tea that really did make me feel better – a tisane of willow bark, I think.

Calixeinna came and read to me. I’d never really met her, and she had a beautiful voice and her reading was as good as an actor’s – at least, the kind of actors who came to Pella. She read to me from a play of Aeschylus and then she read me some of Simonides’ poem on Plataea. And then she recited a long section of the Iliad – the time from when Patroclus dies and Achilles is disconsolate.

‘You are one of his friends,’ she said, interrupting herself in the midst of the hero’s rage. ‘I just heard today – how you saved him.’ She looked at me – at my hand. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You are too kind,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘No. I’m not. I’ve been used – I know what torture is.’ She squeezed my hand.

My heart fluttered.

‘I need help with him,’ she said. ‘Would you help me?’

I sat up. I really didn’t need to be in bed. And she gave off a perfume, and a feeling – some women exude sex, the way some men exude power. Perhaps it is the same. I wanted her, she knew it, it didn’t matter a damn to her, and she was prepared to use it against me.

I wasn’t a fool, you know. Just young.

She ran her hand casually up my left arm and on to the missing nipple, her nails unerringly just between pain and pleasure. ‘I could teach you things that would mean that no woman would ever care about your scars,’ she said. ‘I need to sleep with the prince. I need to see into his head. No one told me when I took this job that he was a Spartan.’

My loyalty to my prince was absolute – nor had I ever had enough trouble with women, despite my looks, to worry overmuch in that regard.

But to look at Calixeinna was to want her. ‘I’ll think on it,’ I said, and I meant it. I seized one of her hands and kissed it.

Her free hand slapped my left ear, boxed it hard enough to drive my wits from my head for a moment. She was off the bed and across the corridor.