The Agrianians shook their heads.
Alexander poured the water out on to the sand. ‘I will drink when everyone has drunk. Now lead us to the spring.’
Sometimes, he was easy to love.
On the fifty-ninth day since we had left Patala, we marched into Poura.
We did not march. We shuffled.
Men died from drinking too much water, or too much wine.
When we mustered, six days later, we had eleven thousand infantry, seven thousand cavalry and fewer than six hundred women. Eleven children. Thirty-one horses.
One was Amphitrite.
One of the children was Bubores’ son.
And there was a letter from Thais waiting for me. It was lovely – I still have it. It was like water in the desert. And I know what the phrase means.
As soon as we reached civilisation, the killing began again. It was Philotas and Callisthenes and Cleitus the Black, but at a new level of horror, and there were no attacks of remorse in the aftermath. Just a feast of crows.
Cleander died. Sitalkes was killed. A row of Persian satraps, whose principal guilt lay in assuming that their barbarian conqueror would never return. Apollophanes was arrested and dismissed and then executed for failure to supply us. He hadn’t even tried. He never offered an excuse, even under torture.
Astaspes was killed, and a host of men more junior found themselves arrested and murdered. Alexander informed us – and the army – that there had been a conspiracy against him – against all of us – and that the disaster in the Gedrosian was the result of their attempt to murder the army.
Not the result of one man’s hubris.
We marched into Persepolis. More satraps were executed.
What did I do? Heroically, I kept my head down, went to the king’s tent as seldom as possible and commanded my Hetaeroi.
I have not gone into detail about the king’s adoption of Asian ways – beyond asserting that, as always, he tried to please everyone and ended pleasing no one. But after the massacre of the satraps – with Cleitus dead, Nearchus terrified, Perdiccas and I in virtual in-army exile – after that, the king did whatever he liked. And what he liked was to become the King of Kings. He adopted the court costume. He hid himself in the midst of a vast horde of perfumed functionaries who had never held a piece of wood, much less a pike.
At Susa, he held a review of his new army. He had raised a new army – I think I mentioned it – thirty thousand pikemen, all Persians and Medes, trained to a degree of perfection in drill that was both beautiful and a little scary to watch. He reviewed them at Susa, and called them ‘Successors’.
The name meant just what it seemed to mean.
His Macedonians had served their turn, and he was through with them – those he hadn’t killed in the desert, that is. And when the phalanx – that is, the old, at least partially Macedonian phalanx – grumbled, he referred to the Successors by another name. Because the assembly of the pezhetaeroi was often called the ‘Tagma’. And Alexander called his Persian phalanx the ‘Antitagma’.
Another name that meant just what it seemed to mean.
It took months for the king to lay his plans, but when he acted, he did so with the thorough planning that characterised him on the battlefield.
He held the mass wedding – everyone knows the story – and thousands of his men took Persian wives. It was a magnificent ceremony.
It was also one of the truly good, well-thought-out, well-devised acts of his reign.
I was no longer needed for military planning, but at Susa, one afternoon, the king met Thais, recently come up from Babylon – or rather, he heard her unmistakable fingers on a kithara and invited her to help him plan the weddings. And she brought me.
Once again, the king looked at me over a military desk and smiled. ‘Too long since I have seen you,’ he said, and embraced me.
Again.
It required the kind of planning that a fortress requires, or a campaign. Ten thousand men, ten thousand brides. Gifts, priests of every religion required, dowries, food.
Twenty thousand people drink forty thousand amphorae of wine. Eat five thousand sheep and five thousand goats. Require twenty thousand slaves to wait on them, and the slaves have to be fed, too.
Ten thousand brides require ten thousand bridal dresses. Even if you want them to sew their own, the cloth has to come from somewhere. So does the jewellery.
Inside? What building can house this? Outside, what place is beautiful enough?
And so on.
The weddings were in the Persian manner, the men sitting in chairs, the women coming to stand by them. So we needed ten thousand chairs.
It might have been chaos, but the king put ten thousand talents of silver at our disposal, and we did the thing well. The king offered me a Persian bride, and I grinned.
‘I want to marry Thais,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I intend to marry Barsines,’ he said.
‘Barsines?’ I remember smiling. ‘Not Banugul? I thought you preferred her.’
He looked very human, then. Looked out over the mountains, towards Hyrkania. ‘Perhaps it is the very fact that she prefers to rule her little kingdom among the wolves,’ he said. ‘I generally prefer what I cannot have.’
I was still stunned by the self-knowledge evident in that statement when I reported it to Thais that night, as we lay, she half atop me, her head on my shoulder. She still smelled like herself, she still looked like herself . . .
‘He knows what he is,’ she said. ‘He merely ignores it, most of the time.’
I shook my head in the darkness lit by a single lamp. Her skin glowed.
As usual, I wanted her.
‘Will you marry me?’ I asked, when we had made love.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t charge you, either way,’ she mocked me.
‘If I don’t marry you, the king means to give me a Persian girl of fourteen years,’ I shot back.
‘I could use someone to help around the tent,’ she said, running her hand across my penis. ‘To watch Eurydike. Perhaps teach her Persian, since it will be
We giggled.
We made love again, which, after all my body had suffered over the last years, was a sort of Aphrodite-sent miracle in itself. And I asked her again.
‘Will you marry me?’
The lamp was out, and the tent was dark.
‘I really have to ask Bella,’ she said. ‘And what of all my other clients?’
‘Thais!’ I said.
She laughed and laughed.
And when I was slipping off into a sated sleep, she whispered, ‘Of course.’
The weddings were superb. The food was good, and the priests – all six hundred of them – were on time. Our adoptive children were officiants – both of them. Barsulas had sailed with Nearchus and had swum with whales in the eastern Ocean, and Olympias was a full priestess of Artemis and had come all the way from Ephesus with ten other priests of the goddess.
People today speak of the weddings as if they all passed off in one meadow, or one great temple, but in fact the weddings took over every part of Susa, and our part was at the Temple of Astarte, to which I gave two talents in gold for offerings and a great gold amphora that I’d taken in India and my son had got home by ship – because, if you are wondering, not a single coin of plunder made it across the Gedrosian Desert. And I sat in my Persian chair, in Persian dress – oh, a nice long coat, baggy trousers, the whole costume – because the king’s actual intention
