God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

Philip the Red said that teaching Illyrians to be better warriors would prove to be an error. A wise man, Philip.

And we put on plays. Laodon had some scrolls of Menander and one of old Aeschylus – truly, I think it was the first theatre ever performed in Illyria. On the festival of Dionysus, the ‘Court in Exile’ put on The Persians. The Illyrians sat silent through most of it, but applauded wildly for the fight scene we put in – lots of sword-clashing, and Alexander cutting me (dressed as a Persian) down at the height of our ‘Battle of Marathon’. Not in Aeschylus’s original, of course. But we did some rewriting.

And then, before the Illyrian harvest could come in, word came from Philip inviting Alexander back to Pella.

Cleopatra had given birth.

To a daughter.

Sometimes, the gods must laugh. All Attalus’s careful planning, overturned by the chance of the womb. He begged Philip to wait – to spend another winter at Pella.

Philip would have none of it. He’d wasted a year, waiting for his son to be born. Possibly he’d seen the child’s birth as the will of the gods. He had the allies in line, the Greeks were quiet or downright willing, the omens for an attack on Persia were favourable. And Philip, like many men whose hair begins to thin, could hear the furies at his back. At any rate, he sent an ambassador to Illyria with his request, and that ambassador was old Antipater, and he would never have taken Alexander to a trap.

I’ve said before that Philip was a forgiving man. He often forgave enemies that other men would have killed – in this, he was truly great. As I’ve said before – once men were beaten and acknowledged him master – he was very forgiving.

I think that he assumed his son was cut from the same cloth.

We rode down the same passes we’d climbed in early spring. I was still so skinny that my armour didn’t fit, and my boots didn’t close correctly and my arms were more like sticks than like the arms of an athlete.

Alexander looked out over the first plains of Macedon. ‘I will be king,’ he said.

I nodded, or said something reassuring.

He looked at me and raised his eyebrow. ‘Listen to me, Odysseus. I need your wily ways and your sharp sword. He will do it again. When I’ve been home a week, or a month, he will remember that I am the better man and it will gall him again. He cannot abide my excellence.’ He looked at Laodon; the Lesbian man was preparing to leave us. He was still an exile, and he was going over the border to Thessaly with his retainers and some of my gold bars. ‘And he cannot abide the excellence of my friends,’ Alexander continued.

And you cannot stop showing it to him, I thought, but didn’t say.

‘We’ll guard you,’ I said.

Alexander shook his head. ‘No. The time for defending is over. I mean to have him dead, before he kills me.’

I can’t pretend I was even shocked. I’d had the same thought ever since we left him lying there unconscious. Patricide? Regicide? Listen, lad – when you are in the thick of a fight, there’s no morality – just kill or be killed. We had two choices – ride away and be exiles for ever, or put the king in the ground as soon as we could.

No other choice, really.

‘I’m with you,’ I said.

Alexander reached over and shook my hand. ‘Knew you would be,’ he said. ‘When I’m king—’

I laughed. ‘When you are king, you’ll need to buy off all your enemies,’ I said. ‘I’m the Lord of Ichnai and Allante. I don’t need rewards. I’m your man.’

So we rode down the passes into Macedon, and as we rode, we quietly plotted to murder the king.

PART II

The Path to the Throne

NINE

Looking back, I think that it might all have been talk, if not for Pausanias. He hadn’t made many friends since he was the royal favourite – he’d been demoted back to page when his accusations against Attalus and Diomedes outraged the king. But he’d served well – even brilliantly – at Chaeronea, and he was well born, if only a highlander. He wasn’t a favourite of Alexander’s, or mine, or Hephaestion’s, but he was one of us, and there were young men in our pages’ group who we liked a lot less and still tolerated.

Pausanias had a remarkable way of saying the most dramatic thing instead of telling the truth, which made him untrustworthy as a scout or as a friend – a tendency to exaggerate, not just to make a story better, but because he craved excitement. This is not an uncommon failing in young men, but he had it to a degree I’ve seldom seen, and the saddest thing was that he had real accomplishments – he was a brilliant runner and a fine javelin- thrower. But he never bragged or exaggerated his real accomplishments.

I only mention this by way of explanation, because what’s coming is hard enough to understand.

We returned to Pella and had a public reconciliation with the king. He was entirely focused on the invasion of Asia, and he’d just appointed Attalus and Parmenion joint commanders of the advance guard – picked men, a whole picked army.

It was only then, I think, that Alexander discovered how advanced his father’s plans were for Asia. And his anger was spectacular – almost worthy of Ares himself.

I was there – dinner in the palace, with only men from our pages’ group at the couches, and Alexander was silent. Hephaestion tried to cheer him, called him Achilles, waited on him hand and foot and recited the Iliad.

Alexander was having none of it. I suspected what was wrong, the way all of us do when a favourite or a wife is silent and careful. When we are left to guess for ourselves just why the subject of our scrutiny is so silent. I watched Alexander, and I guessed that it was the preparations for the war in Asia. They were all around us, from the horse farms teeming with new geldings ready for war to the piles – literally – of new- cut ash poles outside the foot companions’ barracks. We’d done our part, signing Athens to the fight, but Philip had not wasted a moment, and all Macedon – and all Greece – was girding for the war we’d all known from birth would happen some day. The great adventure. The crusade.

And we were going to sit home in Pella and hear our elders tell of how it went.

I remember Hephaestion starting into the recitation of Achilles at the head of the Myrmidons when Alexander let out something very like a screech and stood up. ‘Fuck that!’ he roared. He flung his wine cup across the room and it was squashed flat with the power of the throw – gold with tin in it.

Alexander scarcely ever swore.

Silence fell over the room.

‘He’s going to go east and leave me with nothing,’ Alexander said. ‘Nothing.’

Hephaestion, who often misunderstood his hero, shook his head. ‘You’ll be regent—’

‘Regent?’ Alexander was almost crying. ‘Regent? I want to conquer the world! I will pull the Great King off his throne! It is my destiny. Mine! He is stealing my life, the old goat! The rutting monster!’

I haven’t mentioned it, but we couldn’t miss the fact that Cleopatra, the new wife, was once again heavily pregnant, nor that many nobles acted as if Alexander were already supplanted. Nor that Attalus, who, in Macedonian parlance, had the king’s cock by both ends – by which they meant that he was Cleopatra’s uncle and Diomedes’ as well – was to be commander in Asia for the initial campaigns.

At any rate, I remember Alexander standing there, eyes sparkling and nearly mad, his hair almost on end, his muscles standing out. He was possessed – if not by a god, then by something worse. But he was not human in that moment, and he meant business. Had his father entered the room just then, Alexander might have killed him himself.

It was not Philip who entered, but Alexander’s mother, Olympias. Who was supposed to be in exile at Epirus,