God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

a fire. A fire, two donkeys and a slave.

It’s good to be rich.

After they’d eaten, I collected the whole regiment in a mob outside my tent. I had a tent and I was not going to go without it. There are limits.

‘Good evening, hypaspitoi!’ I shouted, and that night I got some response besides grunts. ‘How was the lamb?’

Shouts of approval. ‘More like mutton than lanb!’ said somebody. There’s always one.

‘Tomorrow, you can find your own!’ I shouted. ‘Those slaves are yours – to keep.’

One hundred and twenty prime male slaves. Even I felt that as an expense. And I’d just stripped four of my farms of workers.

But the grumble from my men had another tone entirely.

‘And the donkeys,’ I said. ‘And the cook pots.’

Cheers.

‘On the other hand,’ I shouted, and they laughed. ‘On the other hand, tomorrow we march in armour, with our shields on our shoulders.’ Silence.

I was standing on a big wicker basket stood on end. I raised my arms. ‘We’re going to be the elite of this army,’ I shouted. ‘We will march under arms every day, and we will run every day, and we will fight when called upon and still march and run, every day. Use the donkeys to carry your loot, my friends, because they will not be carrying your aspides. Tomorrow we will be the first taxeis on parade. Your slaves will waken you with hot wine when it is time. If you quarrel with them, you are quarrelling with me. Understand?’

We were back to grunts. And scowls.

So be it, I thought.

The fourth day out of Pella. My lads had their shelters built and their food cooked before darkness fell for the first time. I gathered them all under an old oak tree and shouted at them. I asked every mess to send me their best singer.

The phylarchs – a hundred and twenty of them – stayed behind when I dismissed my men to their blankets. Most of them had another man with them – the best singers of their files. Almost all Agrianians.

‘How many of you can read Greek?’ I asked, and the result was to cut my meeting from three hundred to about thirty in one go. I told the rest of them to go to bed.

I gave the thirty men left a speech from Mnesimachus. ‘Put it to music,’ I said. ‘We’ll make a song of it.’

That got a lot of nods.

‘Tomorrow, we’ll throw javelins after dinner,’ I said to the phylarchs. They groaned.

Have you any idea

What we’re like to fight against?

Our sort make their dinner

Off sharp swords

We swallow blazing torches

For a savoury snack!

Then, by way of dessert,

They bring us, not nuts, but broken arrows, and splintered spear shafts.

For pillows we have our shields and breastplates,

Arrows and slings lie under our feet, and for wreaths we wear catapults

As it turned out, Marsyas, one of the former pages, turned his hand to writing my song. Marsyas was always bookish – he was the one royal page besides Alexander himself who would happily debate Aristotle, and his lyre- playing was nearly professional in its polish and he played better than the king, who played better than anyone else in Macedon. Nor was he a poor soldier – in fact, his particular skills were raid and subterfuge, and he thought nothing of lying all night in an ambush, because he was a Macedonian, not some lily-handed minstrel. We were two years apart, so we’d never been close, but he was a good friend to my young scapegraces Cleomenes and Pyrrhus. Indeed, the three were inseparable.

And since I didn’t go to eat with my former mess, they came to eat with me. The next morning I had all three of them to breakfast when a hesitant Agrianian sang his version. It was rich and dramatic, but hopeless as a marching song, and sounded as if it had been sung through his nose. Still, it was a good effort, and I gave him a silver four-drachma piece.

Marsyas listened, picked up a lyre and began to tune it. Lyres take a lot of tuning, I always find, but Marsyas could tune them as fast as I could kill a deer – I’ve known him take an instrument down from the wall of some strange hold and tune it while talking and go straight to playing. I suspect that being that fast to tune an instrument is a significant skill – if I’d ever learned to tune a lyre, I’d be a far sight better at playing one, I’ll wager.

At any rate, he tuned the lyre – and started to play. He played a song, shook his head, played another, made a face, played a line or a snatch of a line.

He nodded to Philip Longsword, who was watching with rapt admiration. Everyone loves music, and it’s rare in a marching camp. It was still dark, and the slaves were packing, and here’s this Macedonian nobleman playing the lyre on the next stool – of course Philip was attentive.

‘Show me your marching pace,’ Marsyas said.

So Philip walked up and down a few times.

Marsyas nodded and tried other things. The only one I knew was the beat of the rhapsodes singing the Iliad. Who knew you could march to the Iliad?

Marsyas did.

Now you do, too.

That day, we were on parade with all the other taxeis, all our gear packed. There was some sarcastic applause from the veterans. And we were in all our kit, with spears and shields.

Twice that day, we ran a stade. Just one stade – it was enough. And then we marched, with those who knew the Iliad shouting the verses until our voices were shot. We concentrated on the first fifty lines. For some of the Agrianians, it was the first Greek they had ever learned.

That night, we made camp, lit fires, ate and threw javelins.

It was a pretty sad exhibition. The Agrianians made the Macedonians look really bad. No, that’s not fair. The Macedonians were really bad, and the Agrianians were better. The trouble was that in recruiting the biggest men, we’d taken more of the city boys who were rich and got meat every day, and fewer of the Pellan farm boys who could bring down a rabbit with a stone.

And the next day, we ran three times, a stade each time, and that night we threw javelins, and this time I offered a big silver four-drachma piece to each of the twenty best javelin men. We threw at marks.

I was the best javelin man. That made me happy. Still does. A thousand men, and I could throw farther, harder and more accurately.

The next day, we sang the first fifty lines of the Iliad again, as often as I had the wind to sing it, and we ran three times, a stade each time. And that night, the winners of the javelin throw each took twenty students and ran a javelin class. Alectus and Philip Longsword walked around preventing chaos and bad feeling. I taught a bunch of city boys.

I hit one with my fist when he was slow and stupid. He cried.

I hit him again. That’s what you did to pages who cried. You beat them until they didn’t cry any more.

That night – I think we’d been on the road a week – Polystratus lay next to me in the tent. I could feel that he had something to say, because he was lying on his back, not curling up at arm’s length.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘Say it.’

Polystratus shrugged in the darkness. Again, when you know a man – file partner or servant – or lover – you really don’t need to see them to feel their postures, do you?

‘That boy you smacked,’ Polystratus said. ‘He’s not the swiftest horse in the barn, is he?’

I sighed.

‘But lord, he’s not a royal page. And if I were you, I wouldn’t be using your precious pages as a standard of behaviour.’ He chuckled without mirth. ‘Beating children is foolish. You wouldn’t catch a Thracian beating a child, unless the child was very wicked or very foolish. Beating children breaks their spirits. Make their spirits strong –