God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

So I took Thais, and went down to the village to visit the Pythia.

Really, she was a very ordinary woman – for a forty-year-old virgin who was well born and ferociously intelligent. We found her grinding barley behind her house. She was using a geared handmill – I’d heard of them, but never seen such a thing.

She took it to pieces in her enthusiasm to show me how it worked.

She and Thais were not immediately friends by any means – in fact, on balance, I could see I’d miscalculated, and this was a woman who lived and worked with men, and had little time for women. But Thais’s intelligence shone through, and her superlative social skills, and in an hour the three of us were drinking wine.

‘He needs you to prophesy,’ I said, finally. ‘Blessed Pythia, all Greece needs you.’

She smiled. ‘You know that the Great King is one of our patrons?’

I nodded.

She laughed. ‘He’s doomed. Do you know your Persian politics?’

I shook my head. ‘The only politics I know are those of the Macedonian court. Well – Athens. I know a little of Athens.’

Thais wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something bad. ‘Bagoaz is Grand Vizier,’ she said. ‘He rules by intrigue and murder. He killed Arses, who was Great King, and he’s replaced him with some minor nobleman.’

The Pythia smiled. ‘Well! Nicely put. Except that young Codoman just made Bagoaz drink poison and is now master in his own house. But he’s only a distant relation of the Great Kings of the past – and many of the eastern nobles do not accept him at all.’

I had never heard so much about Persia. To us, Persia was the great enemy, a magnificent unknown. I suppose that Parmenio knew such stuff, but up until then, I didn’t.

‘There has never been a better time to invade Persia,’ the Pythia said, sipping her wine. ‘I speak no prophecy, young man. Codoman has Greek mercenaries, Greek scribes, Greek administrators. He runs his household with Greeks. He is virtually at war with his own Mede nobles. Persia is divided internally, taxes are late coming in, and over a third of the total administration of the country is already in the hands of men sympathetic to your king.’

Thais smiled. ‘I would like to know more about such things,’ she said.

‘I will tell the king. But he sets enormous store by matters of religion, and he wants the blessing of the gods.’ I shook my head.

The Pythia nodded. ‘Then he can return in the spring, and I will prophesy for him.’ She finished her wine. ‘I have work to do. Tell the king that nothing save force of arms would get me to my tripod.’ She smiled, I smiled, and Thais finished her wine.

The Pythia forestalled her with a hand on her shoulder. ‘Stay with me a while,’ she said.

Thais smiled to herself and stayed.

I asked no questions. But I summoned Polystratus and sent him to the king with a message.

Alexander walked down to the Pythia’s house a few hours later with a dozen Hetaeroi and the duty hypaspitoi. I was reminded uncomfortably of the entourage that followed him to the visit with Diogenes. But it was bitterly cold, and we were all swathed in multiple chlamyses, and many men had fleece hats – all the hypaspitoi. We trooped to her door.

Alexander knocked politely.

Thais opened the door. She smiled. ‘The Pythia was expecting you.’

Alexander ducked through her doorway, went inside and bowed to the Priestess of Apollo. Then he picked her up in his arms and carried her out of her house.

She didn’t raise a squeal. She was not a small woman – she was well enough formed that I wondered at her virginity – but the king was in top shape and carried her easily, without unseemly grunting.

It is four stades from the town to the temple, and all steeply uphill.

He carried her all the way, even though we were all around him. Thais followed. She caught my hand.

I looked at her.

She blew me a kiss.

I was jealous – sure in my head that Thais had just lain with the Pythia. Angry. Resentful. Puzzled. She’d just gone with that woman. Not a glance, not a look.

So I followed Alexander up the hill, tormenting myself.

Thais was laughing.

Damn her.

We went up the hill all the way to the temple, and if Alexander was flagging, he never gave a sign. He carried her up the steps of the temple and in through the great bronze screens, which were open. Somebody had accepted a bribe.

He carried her to her tripod, which someone had set over the cleft.

But there were no priests. They were the required intermediary. I knew how it worked – the priestess breathed in the fumes from the cleft, and the god came to her, and she spoke, and the priests translated her words.

Alexander put her on the tripod and set her down. She gave a little squeak – the tripod had been set badly, and it wobbled and she shrieked as it began to topple – back, into the cleft.

Alexander’s right arm shot out and caught the tripod – a heavy bronze artifact that weighed as much as a strong man, and the Pythia was no small woman. He caught them both on the brink of the cleft – which was only a man’s shoulders wide but as deep as Tartarus – and pulled them back to safety, and the Pythia threw her arms around his neck.

‘You are invincible!’ she breathed.

But we all heard her.

Alexander beamed with joy like a boy on a feast day.

He set her on her feet and offered to carry her down the hill to her house.

She laughed. I don’t know how often the Pythia laughed in the temple, but I doubt it happened often. She looked around. ‘A most eventful day,’ she said. ‘If someone would lend me a cloak, I would return to my work.’

Thais handed her a long red cloak, which she held for a moment. ‘It has your smell,’ she said to Thais, and I felt a spear-prick.

Thais raised her two flawless eyebrows. ‘Keep it for my sake, then,’ she said.

Alexander turned aside to Thais. ‘I think you are the first woman to be allowed here, except for the priestess.’ He looked worried. I could read his mind – he knew that the ‘prophecy’ he’d just gained was irregular, and he was afraid that people would point at Thais as an aspect of pollution or sacrilege.

‘I?’ asked Thais. ‘I am not here,’ she said, and walked out of the precinct.

The next day, we rode together. I was still in turmoil. She had slept elsewhere that night, and that happened often enough, but I felt for her in the night. I was angry and hurt.

‘You do not own me,’ she said. Ares, she was angry.

This is the part I had not understood. I had made her angry.

I looked around, made a motion to Polystratus. ‘I do not own you. But I love you, and you slept with someone else. For nothing but the pleasure of it, I assume.’ Oh, I was being prim and proper and adult.

She shrugged. ‘Girls don’t make love. They just play. And she’s the Pythia. I am a priestess of Aphrodite. I cannot refuse the Pythia. And she was so lonely.’ She turned to me, and her eyes, despite some brimming tears, were hot with anger. ‘And you made me feel bad about it. Like a jealous boy. I don’t want to spend years with a jealous boy. I want to spend years with a noble man.’

‘Is that a clever, sophisticated, Athenian way of saying that you can spread your legs for whomever you please?’ I asked.

She spat. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Listen, Ptolemy. Let me tell you a harsh fact. I spread my legs for whomever I please. All freewomen do. Otherwise, we are slaves. If we can only open and close our cunts when you tell us, we are slaves. Period, end of story, no argument. If you want me, you must win me every day. Not just once, and then lock me away for future concubinage. If you cannot accept that,’ she sighed, ‘I have to face a long, cold journey back to Athens.’

I rode on, tight-lipped. Too hurt to speak.

She dropped back to her women.