‘Parmenio and Attalus and Amyntas were negotiating just four months ago,’ Alexander said.
‘Fuck me,’ I said. I hadn’t known, and I wasn’t cynical enough, yet. It’s amazing how cynical you have to be to keep up with human behaviour.
Alexander nodded. ‘When we leave the circle of the mountains, it is at least possible that we march to face Parmenio at Pella.’ He looked at the entrance to the pass. ‘And it is at least possible that Nicanor is here to watch us and do what damage he can.’
I had little love for the arrogant bastard, but – ‘That makes no sense, lord,’ I said. ‘Parmenio – whatever his faults – loves his sons like he loves himself. He wouldn’t sacrifice one.’
Alexander gave me the look of a man to whom all other men were expendable. ‘I can’t trust to that,’ he said.
‘The lads need a rest soon,’ I pointed out.
‘So you always say,’ Alexander said.
‘We’ve marched seven thousand stades, according to the Military Journal. We’ve fought four major actions and two dozen skirmishes.’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘Lord, that’s four years’ worth of campaigning in one summer. They’re tired.
Alexander finished his wine. ‘I’m tired too,’ he said, very quietly. ‘But we’re not done. I can feel it.’
Three hundred stades south of Pellium we found Langarus and his little army of Agrianians marching to our relief. They had won two actions and burned a swathe through the home country of the northern Illyrian tribes, and the Illyrian confederacy was smashed to pieces.
But Langarus had opened the road to Macedon as he came up it behind us, and with him were a dozen couriers, elements of our camp, the siege train, and Thais.
Thais wasn’t showing, and she was riding astride, dressed as a man, with a big straw hat, and only her maidservant, the black woman. I embarrassed my friends by kissing her in public – most of them had no idea who she was in her men’s clothes, and the image of me kissing a groom in public was indelibly printed on them. I took a great deal of ribbing.
That was fine.
Thais had intelligence – dozens of reports, most of them from Athens.
I took her to the king, and left them together.
She told me that he listened to her, read the letters she had and then wrote a long letter to his mother – it took him an hour to write, and he did it entirely himself, with no secretary.
Alexander offered Thais anything she wanted – a rich marriage, an estate. She told him that when the time was right, she would ask her favour, and he kissed her and swore by Herakles.
We lay together that night. The sex was emotional but not very athletic. She was distant.
I prodded and pulled at her until she snapped.
‘It’s all coming apart,’ she said. ‘And friends of mine will pay. People I like are going to betray Alexander, and he will kill them, and I’ve chosen sides.’ She cried in my arms.
In the morning, she rode back down the hills to Pella, and I sent Polystratus and all my grooms to guard her.
Alexander was wrong. The Greeks had stabbed us in the back.
Demosthenes, that paragon among Hellenes, had arranged for a cloak to be shown, covered in blood, in Thebes and Athens. The story was that Alexander had been killed in a rout in the Thracian hills.
Thebes laid our garrison under siege and some Macedonians were murdered. Athens vacillated – Demosthenes was not universally trusted or popular, and men like Phokion and Kineas’s father were powerful enough to stop outright rebellion. But Athens was on the brink.
Sparta was calling up her allies.
But that was not the worst of it.
In Asia, the new King of Kings had finally reacted to Parmenio’s presence. He had sent his best general – Memnon, the brilliant mercenary officer – with a largely Greek army to turn Parmenio out of the Troad, a region bounded by the Dardanelles to the north-west, by the Aegean Sea to the west and separated from the rest of Anatolia by the massif that forms Mount Ida, drained by two main rivers, the Scamander and the Simois, which join at the area containing the ruins of Troy.
He crossed Mount Ida and almost caught Parmenio by surprise at Cyzicus, and then slipped past him and took one of his supply bases at Lampsacus. Calas, one of Parmenio’s brigadiers, lost an action and had to retire – in the messages, it sounded as if he’d been trounced. Parmenio had given up two years’ conquests in Ionia. And worst of all, Darius, this new and powerful King of Kings, had offered Athens and Demosthenes three hundred talents of gold to ally with him and Thebes against Macedon.
Athens and Thebes held few fears for us. Right or wrong, we were sure we could take them. But Athens and Thebes backed by internal rebellion inside Macedon and the Great King – especially if Parmenio was complicit . . .
‘Look on the bright side,’ I said. I was drinking wine with the king, Hephaestion and Langarus. ‘Parmenio isn’t waiting for us on the plain in front of Pella. He’s trapped in the Troad, and he can’t even get his army across the straits. The Great King has done us a favour.’
Alexander raised his cup in my direction, as if toasting to me. ‘Sometimes,’ the king said, ‘you and I share a thought. You are a deeper man than you appear, Farm Boy.’
Well, take that as a compliment if you want. Alexander had a way of being at his most offensive when it was his intention to compliment.
We marched next day, from deep in Illyria, almost due south. It was another brutal march, and there’s no great story to tell – but if you look at the Military Journal you can see that we averaged a hundred stades a day, in mountains.
That’s the stark fact. A hundred stades on mountain tracks – tracks pounded to slush, mud and rock after a hundred men went over them, tracks where no wagon wheel could go and where, sometimes, the cavalry had to go by a completely different route from the infantry. Most nights, we slept without fires in early-autumn conditions, wrapped in blankets, sleeping on rocks.
Sometimes the rocks held the heat of the day. There are some rocks that are quite comfortable. Ask any veteran.
There was no wood.
No grain for horses.
No wine, no oil, too little food and no fire to cook it.
And little things began to spiral into big things. Imagine the wear that our nailed sandals had taken. The thongs that bound them had probably all snapped and been replaced by the time we were south of Pellium, but in the mountains, the soles themselves began to give way. Men’s shoulder-bag straps broke. The porpakes on our aspides were bent, deformed, sometimes separating from the wood of the shields. Spear shafts all had a cast to them – every time a soldier leans his spear against a barn, it bends a little. Javelin heads rattled when you picked them up, because successive cold nights and warm days worked the rivets. The beautiful homespun wool of a good soldier’s chiton, made by his wife or his sisters, was threadbare and lacked warmth, or worn through to holes; his chlamys was filthy and brown and ragged like a beggar’s, and knife blades were dull – or snapped. There weren’t a thousand sharp razors left in the army, because men dumped their sharpening stones when they were tired. Swords were like iron clubs.
All of us were as skinny as children in a hill town and most of us had lice.
And we had
But we’d been living like this since before winter – and habituated as we were, men’s bodies were starting to break down. As an example – I began to pull muscles – in my sides – every day, just climbing and letting myself down the mountains. Just walking. I hadn’t had a massage in ten months.
But Alexander was at his best when he was desperate. He communicated to his men that this was a gamble, and that the throne and empire were at stake – and that he took their trust for granted and that he needed them. He went from mess group to mess group every evening, which was unlike him – he wasn’t aloof, he listened when common men talked, and he made them promises – promises of rest when Greece was returned to obedience. And promises of loot I didn’t think we could fulfil.
We rose in the dark and we didn’t get to sleep until darkness fell again. In between, we marched.
