Practice. I was busy sneaking over the wall of the boys’ compound every night to meet a girl – I loved her. I was fifteen, and her body was smooth and beautiful, and mine, as long as I was willing to risk heavy physical punishment and go for days without sleep, which most fifteen-year-old boys see as a small price to pay for the feel of two breasts under their hands. But I remember coming back from one of these expeditions, feeling like a king, and finding Alexander with a wooden sword in his hand, standing at the stake behind the barracks, practising the steps of a particular blow – hip rotation, right foot rotating around the left, then pushing forward, passing the left, and then another hip rotation that left you facing your opponent from a new angle. Our sword master – one of half a dozen men named Cleitus – had taught us the footwork the morning before, and here was the heir of Macedon in the first pale grey light of day, executing the move over and over. He’d placed white pebbles where he wanted his feet to go.
‘Join me,’ he said, without turning around.
No one refused a direct order from the prince. Once or twice, Hephaestion, his best friend, had smacked him for us, but none of us, even Hephaestion, ever refused him. So I squared off, tried the steps, stumbled.
‘Use the white rocks,’ he said quietly. ‘They help.’ He stepped around the pell and left me to his rocks. They did help, but what helped me more was watching him. He was executing the steps faster and faster, and then he began to throw cuts with his wooden sword as he moved his feet – one, two, three. The master hadn’t taught us cuts yet – at least, not the cuts that went with the steps.
It was always difficult to learn anything from Alexander – he learned things by observation, usually in one or two repetitions, and he never really understood that the rest of us needed to be shown things slowly and precisely.
I had the steps in ten repetitions. Alexander grinned at me, and we started to do them together, like peasants dancing for the gods, and I picked up his sword cuts just for the joy of doing them in perfect unison. The sun rose, a red ball cutting through the high morning fog. I got it. What he had reasoned out in the darkness – well, I’m no fool. I got it.
We dressed quickly and we were the first into the dining hall. Leonidas, the athlete, was already there, naked under a chlamys of coarse wool. He had a heavy staff in his hand. He rose and bowed his head to Alexander. He looked at me the way teachers look at boys – boys they know are guilty but haven’t caught yet.
‘Your pallet was empty, son of Lagus,’ he said formally.
‘He was with me, practising,’ Alexander said.
Leonidas narrowed his eyes, stuck a hand down the front of my chiton and felt the slick sweat on my chest. He nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said. What he meant was, Another time, boy.
That was the prince’s way, though. He didn’t say, ‘Ptolemy, Leonidas is on the hunt for you.’ He merely required me to attend him at practice and then dealt with the matter himself. So that if I made an excuse and avoided practising with him in the grey dawn, I would only punish myself.
At any rate, that morning, after we did drills in pairs, the sword master handed out the padded wooden swords and we stripped off our chlamyses and sparred. We were tough boys – indeed, other than in Sparta, I doubt you’d have found tougher – and most fights ended with the loser knocked unconscious, because it was reckoned faint-hearted to raise a hand and accept defeat without showing blood or falling into the deep.
By chance, I drew Amyntas – we were never friends. I hit him and he hit me, and welts were raised. He was cutting at my sword arm – perfectly legitimate, but my timing was off and he kept hitting the same place, and the lambskin wrapped on the oak sword was not enough to keep those blows from causing real pain.
‘Keep your sword down and behind your shield,’ Cleitus muttered. We weren’t using shields yet, but the chlamys was a standin for the shield. A good swordsman doesn’t show his opponent the sword until the cut is coming in. I was waving my sword about, sending Amyntas signals as clear as if I was shouting out when I meant to attack.
I got back into my stance, got my sword hand down so that my weapon was hidden by my chlamys, and swore to myself that I’d let him strike first.
I waited a long time. The little shit had learned his fancy arm cut and now he was determined to use it over and over.
We circled and circled. The other boys hooted – Hephaestion began to deride us both. Alexander wasn’t even paying attention. He was somewhere else in his head – I knew that look.
There were elements of swordsmanship that were exactly the same as elements of things at which I was very good – pankration, for instance, the all-in wrestling that the Greeks love. I’m big and my arms are longer than they ought to be, and I know my distances when I go for a throw. Amyntas was at a loss as to what to do, now that I wasn’t throwing attacks, and he was less willing to accept the taunts of the others than I was. I slid forward, closing the distance subtly while circling to the right.
I didn’t plan it. It was gods-sent. I did stamp my foot to draw him, and he did fall for it. The movement of my front foot drew his counter-cut at my arm. But my arm wasn’t there, and I did the steps – one-two-three. My sword cut down from his open side, I was at an odd angle to him, and I hit him so hard in the head that I might have killed him – I swear I never meant to cut so hard. He fell like an avalanche falls – every part of him together.
Cleitus narrowed his eyes. Shrugged. Gave me a curt nod. Like a tutor who thinks you’ve cheated on a test but can’t see how.
‘Next,’ he said. He looked back at me.
Alexander came forward, with my friend Cleitus, the one we called ‘the black’. He was the son of Alexander’s nurse, and not exactly a nobleman, but he was as loyal as a good dog to Alexander and, as I say, he was my friend. Nearly always, or at least that’s how I remember it.
I was covered in sweat, and while slaves dragged Amyntas off the palaestra and revived him, I put my cloak on – it was cold – and realized just how badly my arm was hurt.
I stood there, rubbing it and trying to look unhurt and victorious. Manly and aristocratic.
Alexander took Cleitus apart. It was quite an exhibition; Alexander had mastered the step and the associated cuts, and he proceeded to hit Cleitus over and over again. Cleitus scored occasionally – he wasn’t bad – but Alexander hit him again and again, smoothly moving through his cutting strokes as if on parade – right to left, bottom to top, as if this was a drill and having his opponent know which blow was coming was expected. But because Cleitus didn’t get the new rhythm or the fancy offset offered by the new footwork, the blows came in – one after another.
And then Cleitus’s dark face filled with blood. Maybe he thought he was being mocked – maybe one of the blows hurt more than the others. He grunted – it caught my attention, because, to be honest, watching one man carve the crap out of another is dull, and I’d stopped watching, but that grunt had hate in it. He stepped in, took Alexander’s blow on his shoulder and caught the prince’s elbow – and threw him to the ground. Classic pankration.
Alexander got to his feet, came on guard, measured the distance and knocked Cleitus unconscious. One-two-three. Black Cleitus crashed to the ground as if dead.
The sword master looked at him, and then flicked his glance over to me.