God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

Hephaestion took him away.

Craterus then shocked me by making a speech reminding the army of what a snob Philotas was, and how often he’d done petty things to get his way. It turned the assembly into an ugly popularity contest.

For Craterus, it was an excellent speech.

And now I could see why I’d been sent away, and why I’d had with me every man in the army who might have stood with Philotas to prevent his arrest.

I’d been used.

That night, I lay with Thais and listened to a man being tortured. He was being tortured in a house not far from mine, and his screams rose and fell, not unlike the sounds of a woman giving birth, if the same woman might have had to bear six or seven children in one night. Thais held me hard – so hard her fingernails left marks on me.

The next day, when the army assembled to consider sentence, we had another shock. Philotas – the ruin of Philotas – was brought out on a stretcher.

He’d been tortured – he was broken. Utterly wrecked.

Years later, I heard from a former pezhetaeroi that Philotas was tortured for twenty hours, and after just two was begging Craterus and Hephaestion to just tell him what he needed to confess.

Hephaestion certainly conducted the interrogation, and now he led the case against the accused. Philotas was accused of treason – a capital crime that had to be tried in front of the full Assembly.

I was horrified. And the horror didn’t stop. Alexander got the army to execute Philotas – by stoning. And he threw them his cousin, Alexander of Lyncestis, who had been under arrest for years but never prosecuted.

The death of Philotas was the end of reason. The end of the rule of law. Macedonians acted under the law to kill him, but the charges were foolish and the accusation was spurious, and the army knew it. And the army knew that Alexander had used Philotas’s greed and vanity against him. It is an interesting aspect of human behaviour; a leader can manipulate people to his own ends, but the people are perfectly aware when they’ve been manipulated.

I didn’t know it for weeks, but Alexander also sent a messenger to Parmenio. When the messenger arrived . . .

The old general was murdered in cold blood.

Let me speak a moment, boy.

Had the king done such a thing at Tyre, or Gaza, I’d have understood. To the best of my knowledge, Parmenio plotted actively to remove the king, or at least limit his power. To the end of his days, the old general thought we were all blind, and that Alexander was a parvenu boy, an amateur warrior, an actor playing at being king.

But when Alexander killed him – he did it without any justice, after the old man’s fangs were pulled, and he acted through a man who thought he was the king’s trusted friend, a man Alexander ordered tortured.

It was ugly.

And I’d like to say that after Lake Seistan, nothing was the same.

But nothing had been the same for a long time.

It was late at night. In my memory, it was the night that we heard of Parmenio’s assassination, although to be honest, that whole period is a blur in my memory – a blur of betrayal, anger and drama, not least of which was Olympias’s attempt at suicide.

I was standing with Eumenes, and we were determinedly not talking about Alexander. We were, I remember, looking at a local bow – a very fine example, picked up by Ariston’s patrols that afternoon. It was lacquered blue and green, and had gold and silver leaf, or perhaps paint, in intricate patterns all along it. It seemed to bend the wrong way, and we had to call one of the Saka slaves to string it.

Sake make terrible slaves, but that’s another story.

She came in, and her face was like a mask of rage, and her chiton was torn, and she had a dagger in her fist.

‘On your head be my death!’ she screamed at me.

She brought the dagger down.

Now, one of two things is true. Either she knew I’d stop her, because I am a professional soldier and she was an eleven-year-old girl, or she absolutely meant to kill herself. In fact, I suspect that both were true at the same time.

I caught her hand, disarmed her and Eumenes threw her to the ground.

She roared her tears, and Thais came hurrying from wherever she’d been, and Olympias struck her.

‘You whore! What do you care how many men rape me!’ Olympias screamed the words.

But Thais only hugged her the more fiercely, and Eumenes and I left her to it like the cowards men can be.

The stars were out when Thais reappeared.

‘A soldier put his hand under her chiton,’ Thais said wearily.

‘Bound to happen,’ Eumenes said with a chuckle.

‘If that’s all you have to say, you can say it somewhere else,’ Thais spat.

It is interesting – I might have said the same thing myself, and with the same leering chuckle – soldiers are soldiers – except that hearing it from Eumenes, it sounded ugly, and pat.

‘I told her we’d send her back to Artemis,’ Thais confessed.

‘Ephesus,’ I proposed.

Eumenes fingered his beard. ‘Well thought,’ he said. The Ionian cities all bore watching. Alexander had offered to rebuild the temple at Ephesus. It wouldn’t hurt us to have family there. And you have to think that way, when you are both a parent and the god of war’s chief of staff.

A few minutes later, Thais brought Olympias to us, and she held my knees and wept and begged my forgiveness for her outrageous behaviour.

Why on earth did we name her Olympias?

At any rate, I promised to send her to Ephesus with the next convoy going west, and she kissed us both.

When she left us with Bella, we all three breathed a sigh of relief.

Eumenes watched her go. ‘I’m sending my children to Athens,’ he said quietly.

Thais and he exchanged a glance.

I was often the slowest of the three of us – people don’t call me Farm Boy for nothing. ‘What?’

‘Alexander had Parmenio killed,’ Thais said slowly, as if she were speaking to Eurydike.

I nodded. We all glanced around. It was like that. We had heard – that day, I guess.

I still hadn’t taken it all in.

Thais leaned forward. ‘Alexander sent Polydamus – that little snake – to Cleander and Sitalkes and told them to kill Parmenio immediately. They stabbed him to death in his bed.’

Polydamus was a junior officer of the Hetaeroi, and he even looked like a snake. The king used him for confidential missions.

Eumenes looked at me. ‘Hephaestion and Cleitus get the Hetaeroi,’ he said. ‘You get Demetrios’s spot in the bodyguard.’

I shrugged. I had been somatophylakes for years. The king tended to emphasise it at times, and forget it at others. It was absurdly symbolic that at this point he was going to announce my promotion to the army.

Parmenio was dead. I couldn’t really get it through my thick skull.

THIRTY-THREE

Despite the army-wide depression that set in after the execution of Philotas – forty men threw javelins at him and the other conspirators until they died – we continued to plan a thrust to the east. I assumed the king would march in the spring, when there was grass in the valleys.