I never saw Kineas go. He took his men and his gold and his horses and all the wreaths he’d won and packed and left. Polystratus saw him go – hugged Niceas, sent a letter home to his Macedonian wife. And Thaïs held the prostitute Artemis in her arms while the younger woman cried and cried. Because she wanted to follow the army to the ends of the earth. She didn’t want to go back to Athens and face . . . well, face an aristocrat’s family.
Thaïs sent letters home by Niceas, too. Letters asking that our child and our priestly ward be sent to us.
It’s worth noting that Athens stood firm – or at least stood hesitantly – and Sparta died alone, their gallant hoplites outnumbered by Antipater’s mercenaries. Their king died gloriously, but he died, and the revolt, if you can call it that, was over. And so was Sparta.
Alexander sent rewards to Athens, and treated her like the queen of Greece, which, in many ways, she was. But like Darius’s wife, she’d served her turn, and as we were all to discover, Alexander was done with her. And when he was done with things, he let them fall.
The last night in Ecbatana. We had a dinner – a magnificent dinner. Four hundred Hellenic officers and almost that many Persians – that is to say, Iranians, Cilicians, Carians and Phrygians. Medes. Aegyptians.
I had not received a command in the new army allotment. But I had received orders – to add Cyrus and two hundred Persian nobles to my troop of Hetaeroi, doubling it in size. In fact, we lost a great many Hetaeroi at Ecbatana, and on the pursuit of Darius. I’ll backtrack and say I tried to recruit Thessalian gentlemen from the disbanded regiments, and Athenian gentlemen from the Athenian contingent. I got a few.
Cyrus and his men were superb horsemen, well mounted, with fine armour and good discipline. But they were Iranians, and Philotas, for one, didn’t trust them at all.
As soon as I took Cyrus into my troop, I began to walk a knife’s edge, and because of it, I have more understanding of what the king faced than most men. The common story – Callisthenes’ story – is that the king was seduced by Persian tyranny and became a Persian tyrant.
Well – that’s not entirely untrue. Alexander was always impatient of limitations on his power, since he knew, with absolute certainty, that he was right about all decisions of rulership and the making of war. So Persian-style lordship appealed.
But by the time we rode out of Ecbatana the second time, I understood exactlywhy he did as he did.
Persian gentlemen were such excellent soldiers that you had to ask, after two weeks, how Darius had ever lost. Cyrus and his men were far more obedient than my Macedonians, who, being Macedonians, plotted, fought, lied, cheated, back-stabbed, sometimes literally and spent their spare time questioning every order I issued.
And they hated the mirror that the Persians held up to them, which quickly translated into hatred of the Persians.
I had a few Macedonians and a handful of Greek troopers who saw it differently – who made friendships across the line, or who found the time to listen. But I also found myself trying to be two different people – the fair and honourable commander of Cyrus and his men, and the quick-witted, argumentative king of the hill that the Macedonians expected.
I had four hundred cavalrymen.
Alexander had thirty-five thousand men.
There are things he did for which I cannot love him, but his attempt to rule Persia while remaining our king was a noble effort, and he did the very best with it that could be done. He made an effort to be all things to all men – an effort that he had made since he had been a boy, in many ways. Callisthenes and some of the other Hellenophiles argued, almost from the first, that Alexander was being corrupted.
I agree. He was being corrupted. But it wasn’t Persia that corrupted him. It was war, and the exercise of power.
The army rallied at Hecatompylos. Those were the next words in the Military Journal after the death of Darius, and they left out three weeks of supply-gathering and slow marching. And yet remained true. The contingents that Craterus, Philotas and I had left spread across southern Hyrkania were there still, and the hypaspitoi had remained well forward of the army, so that we might have been said to have ‘concentrated’ at Hecatompylos.
But despite the bribes and the bonuses, Hecatompylos was where the army discovered that we were marching east, to Bactria. Until then, most of the troops thought we were going to crush the mountain tribes. A fairly solid rumour said that we were going to restore Banugul to her little kingdom – as a lark – on the way to the Euxine and ships for home. And even Hephaestion, who usually read the king better than this, told me confidentially one night that we were going to march north into Hyrkania and then home via a campaign against the Scythians of the Euxine.
But at Hecatompylos, Alexander sent two full squadrons of the Hetaeroi and Ariston’s Prodromoi east, trying to re-establish contact with Bessus’s retreating columns.
It wasn’t mutiny, but by the gods, it was close. Our second morning in the clear air of Hyrkania, and I was awakened by Ochrid to be told that the pezhetaeroi were packing their baggage for the trip home. That they had voted in the night to march away and leave the king.
Once again, I was the one who warned him. Artemis – who had been Kineas’s lover, and left him to stay with the army – came to Thaïs in the night and told her that the pezhetaeroi intended mutiny. And old Amyntas son of Philip came to me at first light. He didn’t name names. He didn’t really meet my eye.
‘They mean business,’ he said. He shifted uncomfortably. ‘I can’t . . . I can’t stomach it. Though the Undying know I agree with ’em. The king’s mad with power. Ares. Ares come to earth, he is.’
So once again I went to Hephaestion.
Who took me to the king.
Alexander wasn’t angry. He was frightened.
He called the taxeis commanders one by one to his tent, and he interviewed them. Craterus knew everything, and Perdiccas. The others knew less, or admitted to less.
When they were gone, it was dawn. Alexander sat back on his stool and looked at me. ‘Any remarks?’ he asked.
‘You need to talk to them,’ I said. ‘Yourself. And not give them a town to pillage.’
He shrugged, as if he regretted the absence of a town to pillage.
I saw red.
‘They just want to go home!’ I said, suddenly. ‘They’ve crossed the whole gods-created world at your behest, and we’re in the arsehole of the universe, Hyrkania, and it’s going to go on for ever, and they know it!’
He laughed. ‘I love it when you, the aristocrat, remind me of what the common man wants,’ he said.
I shrugged.
He ordered Hephaestion and Philotas to form all the Hetaeroi. And then he summoned the taxeis, all together, and we met with them in a great stone bowl cut in a Hyrkanian hillside.
They stood muttering, and the stone carried their angry whispers like evil spirits. I stood close by the speaker’s pnyx and every whisper seemed to come to me from ten thousand men, and again, as at the fire by the Tigris, I felt as if I was listening to the dead as well as the living, fifty thousand corpses demanding to be taken home.
Perhaps I still had a touch of fever.
And then he came up the steps, bounding up two at a time. The whispers stopped.
He came up to the pnyx, in armour but without a weapon or helmet.
‘Friends!’ he shouted, and his voice cut across the whispers – smashed them flat. ‘I understand that you all want to go home!’
A roar greeted him.
‘What a simple lot you are, to be sure!’ He smiled. ‘You think that, because Darius is dead, the war is over? How many of you marched through Babylon? Through Susa? The Medes and the Babylonians will crush usif we let them out from under our heel. Even now, Bessus rides to the east with four times our number of cavalry. Do you want to see him facing us on the plains beside Pella? Do you want your sons to have to face the same foe – march over the same ground?’