God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

nightmare – we came to a drop of ten feet and a gulf perhaps two horse lengths wide – a side street.

Kineas didn’t hesitate, but leaped at full stride, and Alexander was with him, stride for stride.

That was the heir of Macedon, sailing through the air with a torch trailing white fire behind him.

Oh, there were gods, that night in Athens.

Another leap, and we were on Kineas’s street – I knew by the stables. We ran along the stable roof, and now Alexander lengthened his stride, and Kineas lengthened his.

At the courtyard of Eumenes’ house, they came to the end of the roofs.

Neither slackened stride.

I did.

Off the end of the stables, legs still flashing, Alexander a full body’s length ahead, the torches streaming fire . . .

A thirty-foot fall to the cobbled courtyard.

I didn’t even have time to call. Niceas did. He screamed.

And they were gone.

There was an enormous pile of straw below. And while I gather that Kineas knew that, I swear that Prince Alexander simply trusted that the gods would not let him die.

I slowed, stopped, heard no screams, looked, saw and jumped down.

Alexander rolled out of the straw, his torch out. ‘I win,’ he said, touching Eumenes’ andron door.

Kineas was laughing so hard he couldn’t get to his feet.

I went off and threw up.

Good party.

SEVEN

Pella, 337 BC

And then we were summoned home to Pella, and the party was over.

We had our treaty, and the Athenians had buried their dead with honour. My troopers stood in the pale winter sunshine as the ashes were lowered into a marble tomb, and I could not help but think that if the Athenians had put as much effort into fighting as they did to burying, we might have come off worse. Even as it was – when I looked around Athens, watched the great port of Piraeus, talked to the people – the more I looked at Athens, the more I saw to admire. I liked their pugnacious independence, and their desire to debate everything. And they were rich, and spent their money well.

I loved Kineas, and all he stood for. I was bred to war, the way a boar hound is bred to his life – little love, plenty of hardship and pain, to make sure that the object of your training never hesitates at the kill. Shed no tears – I made my life, and it’s been a glory. But Kineas, as good a soldier as any Macedonian, as events proved, was more than just a soldier. Where we had a veneer of education from Aristotle, Kineas could quote anything from Hesiod and the Iliad to the latest play of Menander. He could speak with ease of Thales or Pythagoras, and he could work out most of the problems of the new mathematics. His scholarly skills were not a veneer, and yet he could sit astride his horse like a Scythian and his spear skills – and his wrestling – were on a par with mine.

I mention this, because Kineas and his friends did something to me and my friends. I’m not sure – it was like some sort of beneficial spell, but after Athens my friends wanted more than cheap wine and fast sex. Because we knew that there was more to want.

And Pella, when we arrived, looked like a tinselled crown next to the solid gold of Athens. Alexander felt it keenly – perhaps even more keenly than Nearchus or Cleomenes.

We came over the last rise, to the point in the pass where outlying farms give way to the public buildings of the city. Except that Pella was no city, after Athens, but a provincial town. Attica had three or four towns the size of Pella. Amphilopolis, our major seaport (once an Athenian colony), was as large as Pella.

Alexander pulled his palfrey up short. He was riding between me and Hephaestion. He looked back and forth between us, and the look on his face was strained – almost like a mask of rage.

‘I feel like I have been a god on Olympus, and now I’m being forced to go back to being a pig in the sty,’ he said, and gave an uncharacteristically savage jerk to his reins.

Hephaestion raised an eyebrow. We were never truly close, but Athens deepened our alliance – I didn’t threaten him, and he admitted that I was part of the family. Together, we’d learned – through fifty symposia and a dozen dinner parties – to manage Alexander’s moods.

‘Storms at sea,’ he said.

I winked – thinking that it would all pass soon enough – and we rode down into the city.

The pigsty.

Pella was small, dirty and provincial. Want to understand what kind of society you live in? Look at a prostitute. In Athens, most of the prostitutes were self-owning – many were freemen and -women. They had houses and a guild. It’s rotten life, but they were clean and free. The first thing I saw in Pella was a very young girl – maybe fourteen – wearing nothing but a man’s chiton, begging for clients on the road. Her lip was split and she had two black eyes.

Pella.

Philip had changed. I saw it in his body language as soon as we arrived at the palace. He didn’t quite turn his back on Alexander, but he was distant, cold and very, very businesslike.

I didn’t even hear the exchange, it was so brief. Alexander asked where his mother was, and Philip replied that he had no idea.

So little information. And yet, all the information we should have needed.

I had a home to go to – a house that did not hold Nike. But that’s where my horse would be stabled, now, and my armour stowed. So I waited by the gate for dismissal, observing. Noting that Attalus stood with the king, and commanded the grooms as if he were the king himself. Our eyes met, and he smiled.

I felt a chill.

Alexander came over in person – uncharacteristic. ‘You can go home,’ he said.

Hephaestion was at his shoulder.

‘Take care, my prince,’ I said. ‘Something is wrong.’

‘Agreed,’ Alexander said. ‘I think my mother is in exile. I will dine at your house tonight, I think.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said. ‘Without Nike . . .’

Alexander smiled – a sad smile he’d learned in Athens. ‘I know you miss her,’ he said. ‘Now go.’

I had the feeling that Alexander was afraid.

That made my fingers cold.

I rode around the corner of my street and found that my house was burned. To the ground. The houses on either side were burned, too.

Gone.

Ten minutes of increasingly angry knocking at doors – Polystratus helped – revealed that no one knew anything, to a suspicious degree.

Polystratus grew more agitated.

‘I need to go home,’ he said.

We had Nearchus and Cleitus with us. Cleomenes was on duty.

‘Let’s go together,’ I said. We all loosened our swords in our scabbards, and we rode fast.

Polystratus’s farm was . . . gone. The house was erased. His fields were under tillage.

We rode to find the headman.

He hid in his house. His wife burst into tears, but barred the door.

And then, while we sat there, Diomedes appeared with a dozen outriders – Thracians. All well mounted and all armed.

‘Looking for something?’ the king’s catamite asked sweetly. ‘Lost something you value?’

Polystratus looked at me. It was up to me – we weren’t in Athens, and peasants don’t talk to lords in Pella.