receives a world of praise. Such self-important “fathers of their country” think they are better than other men. They are worth nothing!’
Alexander ripped his arms free from Perdiccas and Leonatus. And in one step, he had the spear – a short longche – from the hypaspist closest to him, and he plunged it to the socket through Cleitus, who was, of course, wearing no armour.
I saw the spear-point come through his back.
His mouth opened.
I’m told his eyes never left the king’s face.
And he died.
Coenus, Perdiccas and I were exiled a few weeks later to chase Spitamenes. That’s not how it was put to us, but that was the truth of it. Leonatus had already been sent away.
The king mourned for three days, until the weasel Anaxarchus told him that as he was a god, he was above the law. He justified the king’s actions, and the king accepted his word and moved on.
So much for his closest friend, the man who had stood by him since infancy.
After Cleitus died, we – the former inner circle – knew that no man was safe. Philotas, to some extent, had it coming – Parmenio had always been the king’s rival. But Cleitus was merely blunt – his loyalty had never been questioned, and without him, the king would have died. Several times.
I wanted no more of it. When I was sent to find and defeat Spitamenes, I went happily.
And we caught him. He had three thousand Dahae cavalry and several hundred of his Persian adherents, but the forts kept us informed by beacon, and too many villagers had had enough – or perhaps they were more scared of us than they were of Spitamenes. We cornered him in a deep valley, and while Perdiccas took his taxeis up the hillside to block their retreat, Coenus and I charged home. We broke the Dahae easily enough – they didn’t want our kind of fight – and most of the Persians surrendered. They had had enough.
In a matter of weeks, we had Spitamenes’ head. And that was the end of his revolt. Overnight, a man who had held us longer than Memnon
I was between Coenus and Perdiccas, riding slowly, because our column was tired and because we were done and our men weren’t in the mood to be hurried.
I took a breath, enjoying the mountain air for the first time in two years. ‘I think . . .’ I said, and Perdiccas grinned.
‘Do you?’ he asked. ‘I thought I smelled something.’
I punched him. ‘I think we have to make him go home now,’ I said.
Perdiccas nodded, the happy look wiped from his face. ‘Do you think – if we get him home . . .’
Coenus laughed. It was a desperate laugh.
I turned. ‘We can get him home,’ I said. ‘If we work at it.’
Coenus wiped his eyes for a moment. ‘We’re not going home,’ he said. ‘We’re invading India. In the spring.’
I was still in charge of the army’s food and supplies, and I hadn’t heard a word of it. But then, I’d been out of favour half a year.
In fact, it was another year before we marched on India. The king was careful about the reconquest of Sogdiana, and he developed a lust of heroic proportions (the only kind of lust he ever had, really) for the daughter of one of the Sogdian chieftains – Roxanne – or so he claimed. She probably saved a lot of lives with her superb face and lush, velvety skin.
We received drafts from home, and Alexander mustered our veterans – as many as he could. And he began to bring foreign officers closer in – he tried to appoint Cyrus to command half of the Hetaeroi in place of Cleitus, and Hephaestion talked him out of it.
I was scarcely paying attention. With the Prodromoi and all the intelligence I could muster, I was trying to figure out how to feed the army when it marched east, to India. The king arrested Callisthenes on a trumped-up charge, and I can’t pretend I’d ever loved him, although he was better than the lickspittle Anaxarchus. Alexander tried – repeatedly – to induce us to perform the proskynesis. Leonatus mocked any man who did, and Polyperchon was arrested in Alexander’s presence for direct refusal. And again, Hephaestion went to the king and begged him to relent.
A group of pages plotted to kill the king. But, in the best tradition of Philip’s court, they fell out among themselves – sex and dominance were involved. Alexander had them executed, and used the incident to justify moving against the Macedonian faction, which had been ‘proved’ disloyal, and after the fact he implicated Callisthenes in the plot and executed him.
He had become quite dangerous to be around.
I avoided him. I spent the year riding as far east as Taxila, the ruler of which was already an ally. I was laying in stores for thirty thousand men. I had given up on getting the king home. I was willing to get him into a war.
THIRTY-SIX
When we sat on the stone bench in the Gardens of Midas, Aristotle taught us about the shape of the world, and the shape of the universe. He taught us ethics and morals and ideals of rulership, and I dare say he was wrong about a great many things. After all, he was chiefly responsible for Alexander.
I like to think that he did better with me. For one thing, he felt free to correct me more often.
But I am dithering.
One of the things that Aristotle had quite horribly wrong was the geography of the East. And it is odd, when you are a grown man, the commander of armies, the lord of millions, how mistakes learned in your youth continue to shape your thinking, despite some intellectual awareness that all is not quite right. I knew a man once – a Persian slave who was freed in Athens. He had adopted Greek ways – he abjured the worship of Ahuru Mazda, and worshipped Zeus and Apollo. But he always turned to the sun to pray in the morning, regardless of circumstance.
Or put another way, all of us make the peasant signs for luck, for aversion of evil, even long after we accept that they are nothing but superstition.
And who does not remember their first lover with a sudden bolt of lust?
Hah! How would you know? But you will.
The point is, Alexander’s confusion about the shape of the world had profound consequences. And he continued to make strategic decisions based on those confusions, despite a constant stream of scouting reports and intelligence reports provided by trustworthy agents and edited by his staff. He believed that if we crossed the Jaxartes and travelled north, we would come to the Euxine. I knew better – but then I had met Kineas and Philokles, and they had
Likewise, Alexander believed, when we were relaxing at Persepolis, that Cyrus’s former province of India marked the edge of the world – that beyond the land of elephants and spices lay the ocean, and beyond that the rim of the world.
By the time we crossed the Kush, I knew better, and Craterus knew better, and Ariston certainly knew better. But Alexander either didn’t read our reports, or didn’t understand them – little possibility of that – or didn’t care.
He planned an invasion based on any number of false assumptions. He assumed that India was roughly the size of Bactria, and that it had a finite end – at the ocean.
As was often the case, his views communicated themselves to the army. And he reputedly said – I was not there – that India was the last, because it had been part of Cyrus’s empire, and Alexander felt that if he reconquered all of the mighty Cyrus’s possessions, he would be accepted by the Persians as a legitimate ruler.
And he was right.
We had most of the great nobles of the empire serving in the army by the time we crossed the passes. Alexander reorganised the army
