five or six times. Turned to the herald.
‘Forgive my impiety, friend. Yes, of course great Athens may bury their dead. A three-day truce from now. And I have prisoners – Demades here will know their names. And more of your wounded with my surgeons. I seek no more war with Athens.’
Well.
I like to think that one of the signs of greatness is the ability to know when you’ve been an arse and apologise. But I’ve never seen it done so publicly, by such a great man. That was the measure of Philip, right there.
He tapped Diodorus on the shoulder as he passed him, walked over to Alexander and embraced him.
‘I might have lost without you today,’ he said. ‘Whatever spirit closed my mind to it – I see it now. Thanks, my son, for a field well fought.’
They were the right words, and I swear by all the gods he meant them.
About two hours too late.
Perhaps if I hadn’t had a nap. Perhaps if I’d stayed by Alexander, or Philip.
Or perhaps it was the will of the gods that two men, both so far above the common man, should demand each other’s esteem in a way that could only lead them to war.
The next day dawned bright and clean, despite the stacks of naked corpses. Philip forbade any further pursuit – suddenly he changed roles, and we were to act the saviours of Greece and not the tyrants.
He was always a merciful man—once he’d won his victory, the sort of man who instantly forgives any man he has beaten, in contest or in battle. And he was as changeable as his son, and usually unable to keep to the harsh lines he often set himself. In truth, a few more dead Thebans might have done everyone a world of good, including Thebes, which might yet stand.
I awoke as randy as a satyr, despite stiffness elsewhere and serious pain in my shoulder, and Nike satisfied me with a sort of impatient ‘I need to get on with my day’ response that moved me to work her pleasure until I made her squeak.
I was, you see, alive.
Alive is better than dead by a long, long way.
I went and saw to my troops and my horses, walked the lines, visited my wounded.
Kineas the Athenian was awake.
I took his hand. He knew me from the fight, and I remember laughing at his confusion, and we shook hands.
‘I imagine you’ll be with us for a while,’ I said. ‘Are you worth a ransom?’
He nodded. ‘A good ransom,’ he said.
I never saw a penny, of course, because Philip declared the Athenians free – even Demosthenes. The Thebans he kept – even sold a few as slaves – but the Athenians walked away.
But Kineas stayed with me while he healed. He and the mouthy Diodorus were fast friends, I discovered, and I included them in my mess, so that every night we ate together – Nike and Kineas and Cleitus and Diodorus and Nearchus and Philip the Red and Kineas’s hyperetes, Niceas, who was the boldest lower-class man I ever met. He and Polystratus got along like brothers, and Niceas’s open mockery of aristocrats everywhere got into Polystratus’s speech as well.
It was a good month. We ate and drank and threw javelins when we were healed – went for rides, sometimes all together, while the envoys went back and forth.
Philip sent Demades with his demands, and Athens sent him back with Phokion to stiffen his spine – Athens’ best general, their noblest soldier and my new friend Kineas’s mentor. The man was eighty. He was a stick figure of sinew and muscle who exercised constantly. Diodorus called him the ‘Living Skull’, but Kineas obviously worshipped him. He was guest friend to Philip, and one of the few men in the world who could lay claim to having beaten him in battle.
I didn’t see him the way Kineas did, but found him dour, rude and incredibly stubborn. Alexander, on the other hand, all but fell in love with him – sat at his feet, listened to his harsh remedies for men’s ills, agreed with his utter condemnation of all bodily pleasure . . .
Aphrodite! He was a dry stick. I left them to it and went riding. We had no duties except to move our camp when the men and horses had fouled the ground too much for it to be pleasant to live on – fifty thousand men do a lot of pissing in the dark. So do horses.
Kineas took us across the plains to Plataea. We already knew that Philip was going to restore Plataea’s independence – one of his little ploys to pose as the preserver of Greek freedom. Plataea welcomed us again, and ten of us spent days there – we stayed in a fine farm with a stone tower at the top of a low hill overlooked by Mount Kithaeron. Kineas’s family owned the farm, and he said that it was the ancestral home. That was a happy time – we ate too much, slept late in the mornings, went to the assembly of the Plataeans and were treated as great men. Nike’s belly started to swell.
Kineas ceased to be my prisoner early in the arrangement. We were well matched – he was as wealthy as I, well educated and well read, and he could ride. We raced horses, and talked and talked.
When you are a nobleman, there aren’t that many peers to talk to – most want something and the rest are potential rivals. I was never going into Athenian politics, and Kineas was never going to be in the royal court of Macedon. We could agree or disagree – we could enjoy the pleasure of saying ‘me too!’ in the security of knowing that, as equals, if we said ‘me too’ we meant it.
Kineas’s friend Diodorus had a wicked turn of phrase that I couldn’t get used to – like Niceas, he said things that were better left unsaid. And after the peace talks were under way, Kineas’s other friends appeared from Athens – Grachus, Lykeles and a few more. We went hunting behind Parnassus, and we spent a week holding an amateur set of military games, all of which was started by Diodorus’s claim that Athenians were better cavalrymen than Macedonians. We won. But not by much – and Kineas won most of the contests that he entered. To see him throw a javelin from horseback was to see how it was meant to be done.
And then – one night Nike had a sore stomach, the next she was apologetic about being in bed, and the third – she was dead, and our baby with her.
That’s when Kineas and I became friends, young man. I sat with her corpse for a long time – holding one of her hands. I didn’t really believe she wouldn’t come back to me. I was numb and angry at the same time. And the mound of her pregnancy seemed the harshest mockery – pregnant women are supposed to be immune to disease. And I considered self-murder. She was that much to me that I didn’t really see what I had to live for.
I sat there for two days, in her folding chair by her corpse. Alexander came and clutched my shoulder and kissed her. That meant a great deal to me. But he left, and then Kineas came, and left. Cleitus and Philip and Nearchus and Cleomenes came, sat with me, and left.
After a couple of days, Kineas came again. This time he was dressed for riding.
‘Come,’ he ordered me, and I simply rose and followed him. Don’t know why.
We rode through a long afternoon, and camped under the eaves of Kithaeron. He killed a deer and we ate it. I swear that in the whole evening he said only ‘Salt?’ and ‘Have another helping’.
In the cold mist of dawn, we rode on, up the mountain. Up and up. Until we were on the flat of the crest, with the sea a golden blue in one direction and all Boeotia spread beneath us in the other.
‘Bury her here,’ he said. ‘With my people.’
Then I wept, and then I nodded, and then I discovered that her corpse was in a wagon at the base of the mountain.
We burned her in the high place, and her ashes went into a pot with a maiden and a child painted on it, and then we put her at the top of the mountain with all those Plataean heroes.
And the next few days are lost to me. There’s nothing there.
But your father and I were ever friends from that day forward.
SIX
When I returned to the camp, it was to find that Alexander had been appointed ambassador to the
