God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

Makes you laugh, in a nasty way, doesn’t it?

Ares, you’re thirteen. My apologies, lad.

At any rate, he watched them. And then he grunted. Rolled over.

‘I need help,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to manage the king all by myself. He needs . . .’ Hephaestion made a sign of aversion – the peasant sign, with two fingers.

‘O phile pais, I’ve known Alexander since he was five,’ I said. Hephaestion had seldom asked me, or anyone else, for help before. So I put an arm around his shoulder and he let his head sink on his arms. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘The matter?’ Hephaestion looked at me, and his eyes held more rage than sorrow. ‘He’s fucking cut himself off from everyone, and doesn’t know how to get back.’

‘Does he want to get back?’ I asked.

Hephaestion hid his head. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘He just wants to be god.’

Hephaestion must have manipulated the king, one way or another, because I was promoted from king’s friend to the Persian equivalent of somatophylakes a day later, and suddenly Alexander wanted me to ride with him.

We were on the Oxus, and the day before I’d met a Sakje while on patrol and bartered a fine mare for a superb bow and fifty arrows in a gorytos. I’m not much of an archer, but I loved a thing well made and I’d just determined – back then – to write a book about my travels. I had my journal and the Military Journal, but I was not so different from the king, and I, too, wanted to know – Is this all there is? The idea of writing a travel book made me happy.

Perhaps you have to be fifteen thousand stades from home for this to make sense.

And the conversation with the Sakje man made me happy, perhaps because he met me with a grin, chose to trust my patrol and no one was killed. I had become so inured to killing every fucking stranger I came across that sharing the white horse milk that the Sakje think is delicious was fun. He ate our onion sausage, we ate his deer meat and he rode away richer by two horses and without one of his bows, and Cyrus, who was at my side the whole time, actually laughed. Out loud.

Never mind. You have to make war for a long, long time for a man’s laugh to seem alien. But these are the things that stick in my head.

I left my squadrons with Polystratus. He was an officer, now – increasingly, a trusted officer. No one doubted that he was an aristocrat. Think of it! From Thracian slave to Macedonian cavalry officer! Mind you, he was a superb officer – but such a thing would never have happened if our lines hadn’t been so long. Ochrid, my steward, now routinely gave orders to fifty slaves. He often helped me with the logistika and would casually order out a patrol for forage. No one doubted his place, although he had started out as my slave. What seemed like a lifetime before.

I rode along with the king, and he affected to be delighted to see me. By luck, his latest passion – dice – had burned itself out.

‘Nearchus is on his way to us,’ I said. I was handling the incoming letters. Eumenes was trying to establish even the most basic level of intelligence collection in Sogdiana and Transoxiana, and he had – in one of those role reversals impossible to enemies and simple to friends – asked me to run the Journal for a few days while he tried to get a network of agents in Marakanda.

‘Nearchus?’ Alexander looked at the mountains to either side for as long as it takes a man to breathe three or four times. ‘Ah! Nearchus!’

For a moment, you see, the king didn’t know of whom I was speaking.

‘Remember shooting bows, lord?’ I asked. My false innocence was glaring to Hephaestion, and he looked at me, but Alexander noticed nothing.

He glanced at me.

‘Look at this,’ I said, and held out my new bow.

He all but snatched it from my hands.

For nine days, we shot everything that moved. I gave him my fine bow, and Cyrus, bless him, took a patrol north of the Oxus and exchanged a dozen local horses for five good bows, so that the inner circle all had them.

The king had a dozen Sakje hostages, and he brought a woman out to see her shoot. He was intending to mock her, and he was already shooting well, although his forefinger and thumb were bleeding from the Sakje release, which Cyrus taught us. Cyrus used a leather thumb ring and had a thumb callus as deep as a coin, but Alexander was above such things.

‘Amazons!’ he laughed, as we rode along.

The woman who joined us, between two guards, was heavily pregnant. She was beautiful – in a deadly, feral way, and pregnancy neither softened nor diminished her. And she rode like a satyr – which is to say, the horse seemed part of her. The king had met her a dozen times, and she’d famously threatened to geld Hephaestion, which made her a bit of a favourite among the inner circle.

She spoke beautiful Greek – accented, but pure Athenian. Well, we both know why, don’t we?

The king had set a dozen targets by the trail – we were well in advance of the army, moving south along the Jaxartes. The first was about ten horse lengths from the rocky road, the next was a little farther, and so on, until the last was easily a hundred paces to the south of the road.

The king came up to the Sakje woman with her two guards – both, as it happened, men from Philotas’s former squadron.

‘My apologies, lady, but the guards say you begged to be allowed to ride.’ He smiled. ‘I thought perhaps you could show us some shooting.’

Hephaestion was smirking. This was for him – she was being humiliated to please the bastard.

Well, I know she was your mother, but at the time she was just some barbarian captive, and if that’s what it took to keep the king happy, I was willing enough.

She looked at Alexander with contempt. I suspect that wasn’t a look he received often. I wonder if the novelty of it drew him to her. She held out her hand for the bow he carried.

He held it out, but snatched it back, and we all laughed at her eagerness. Macedonian humour.

‘You want to kill us all,’ he said. ‘Please remember that we have your other ladies. They would not survive any dramatic performances. And neither would you.’ He pointed to where a pair of the army’s engineers stood with their crossbows.

She shrugged. He gave her the bow, and she flexed it. ‘Heavy,’ she said. And held out her hand for his quiver.

Alexander gave it to her with unaccustomed hesitation. ‘You will shoot the targets, and only the targets,’ he said. ‘Let’s see how many you can hit. Show us how the Sakje shoot. And perhaps – perhaps I’ll send you back to your husband.’

He smiled at her. He was used to the responses of men who lived and died at his whim, so his smile was expectant.

She laughed. ‘It amazes me that a man so foolish could have conquered so much,’ she said. And took his quiver.

She put her heels to the barrel of her horse the moment the strap of the gorytos touched her palm, and her horse – a small gelding – went straight to a gallop. And she screamed – a long, ululating yell. As she rode, she twisted her body, and the quiver fell down her arm and she buckled it into place, riding at a full gallop with no hands, the bow pinned under her right knee, and then it was back in her hand and an arrow leaped from her bow and shot through the king’s first target.

At that point, we’d been shooting that bow mounted for a week. None of us had even considered loosing arrows at a gallop.

Her second arrow went into the second target.

Her third arrow went into the third target.

She hit every target.

Then she turned her horse and rode back to us. Men were applauding, and Hephaestion had the good grace to join them.

She was coming at us at a gallop. I noticed that she had arrows in her fingers.

Suddenly, she angled her horse a little to the north, turned – remember, she was eight months pregnant.