He waited.
‘Now! Now is the time!’ he said, slowly but clearly.
Silence.
‘Now, when they feel beaten, we will finish them. I will follow Bessus to the ends of the earth, and I will kill him, and then – then, when Persia has no army but our army, and when all of this is ours – then, my friends, your farms are secure, your sons and daughters are secure, and then we can rest. But you owe it to your sons to finish this enemy now. We are so close.’
Some shouts, and some hoots.
‘Friends – do you hate me? Have I not led you to victory after victory? Have you everbeen defeated when I was in your ranks?’ Alexander seemed to grow larger. ‘Are you ingrates, to forget what I have given you? The suzerainty of the earth – the mastery over every man and woman you will ever meet, the lords of creation! You were farmers in Pella and Amphilopolis, and now you stride the earth like giants! Will you go backto being peasants?’
Now they shouted. ‘No!’
‘Will you deny me my hour of triumph? Your king? The moment when I am undisputed master of Asia – a moment for which I have sacrificed everything and taken every risk?’
NO!
‘Or will you tuck your tails between your legs and leave a beaten Persian army to follow us, gnaw at our tail and take the war across the sea to ourhomes?’
NO!
‘Or rather, will you follow me again to the ends of the earth to preserve the virginity of Macedon – to keep her inviolate, to put fire into the homes of our enemies and steel in their breasts until we, and only we, rule the world? Will you?’
YES.
They shouted – they chanted his name.
And he turned to me, and smiled.
It wasn’t what he said. It was that he said it at all. He’d been even more distant than usual since Gaugamela, and that morning, he treated the pezhetaeroi like men – like his men.
Their opinion of themselves, and of him, soared.
Thaïs said it made him more human. I thought that it was all making him think he was a god.
Three things happened in Hyrkania – four, if you count Banugul.
We took the capital. Or rather, we marched into it. Banugul’s father had been satrap of Hyrkania, and she received troops and support to go and reconquer it. Hyrkania means the ‘Land of Wolves’, and the only wolves I saw there had two legs. They fight endlessly, but not very well, and Banugul retook her city with three thousand mercenaries, many of whom had just joined us – Darius’s last loyal men.
The vizier who helped murder Darius awaited us at Zadracarta, the capital, if such a dreadful place could be called capital of anything. Banugul left us, and Thaïs informed me that she was pregnant by the king, and I took that at face value. If she had influence with the king, I never saw it – he liked her, and she pleased him, and that had lasted a few months and no more.
But Nabarzanes, Darius’s vizier, received a full pardon in advance, and then joined us, and he brought Bagoas to replace her. He – I never checked, but I assume Bagoas was formed as a man – was the most effeminate man I have ever seen. He was beautiful – I loathed him, but I could see the beauty – and he moved with a carnal grace I had only seen until then in women. He knew exactly how to use his body. He was not a handsome man – he was a beautiful, wilful woman trapped in a man’s body. He had been Darius’s catamite, and now, in hours, he became the king’s.
By Ganymede, he was a horror. He blatantly manipulated the king’s generosity and his desire to be ‘godlike’, seizing money and small political powers for himself as fast as he could. Nicanor, Parmenio’s son, shared a couch with me one night, and he took a sip of wine, watched the Persian boy writhing next to the king and spat.
‘He sucks power with the same greed he sucks dick,’ Nicanor said.
I almost choked on my wine. And when I repeated it to Thaïs, she shook her head. ‘Men always make sex sound like a financial exchange,’ she said crossly. She was angry with me for a day.
Now, from the lofty height of my advanced years, I realise that it was the wrong joke to make to a courtesan.
But on balance, despite the number of men who maintain that Bagoas was directly responsible for all kinds of sins – the king’s increasing attraction to things Persian, the king’s occasional lapses of judgement, the king’s open flouting of his willingness to bed the boy – while all these charges are, at their base, true, none of them mattered. They were the grousing of a tired, battered army on the edge of mutiny, looking desperately for a reason that their king was suddenly alienating himself. Bagoas was no worse than any of Philip’s minions – he was prettier, anyway, and no less bitchy or demanding. Macedonians had a tolerance for such things. The king used the boy as a vacation from reality. The trouble was, the soldiers didn’t get the same vacation, and it was just too far to home.
Alexander retained genuine affection for Bagoas, and the boy returned it, so that years later, after India, their affair was renewed. That speaks a little in the boy’s favour.
But mostly, he was a horror.
Philotas led a set of punitive raids against the Mardians – mostly to seize remounts. Alexander grew bored with waiting for Ariston to return and led one of his own.
I went with him, because I was determined to separate him from Bagoas and keep his mind on his job – odd, and you’ll note that I was trying to make him function as god-king and keep him from being human, which was not my usual role.
We burned some villages, killed some women and children and got ourselves some fine horses. Our third night in the high valleys, and the Mardians raided us. They took Bucephalus. No other horse. Just Bucephalus.
Alexander sent us out to bring in prisoners. I brought in two, and Philotas six.
Alexander gathered them, had them bound and then stood over them.
‘I want my horse back,’ he said. He was not calm. He could scarcely breathe, he was so angry. I think he meant to make an elegant speech, but he couldn’t get it out. He stood there, breathing too fast, and finally, in an odd voice, he said, ‘If I don’t have my horse by this time tomorrow, I will kill every man, woman and child in these hills. I will use my entire army, and I will wipe your pathetic little race from the face of the earth. I won’t let my soldiers rape your women, because any children they had would allow your kind to continue to walk the earth. Do you understand?’
The interpreter, another former officer of Darius, was so scared that his voice shook and his knees trembled.
Coenus, on the other hand, merely laughed. He thought that Alexander was finally growing tired of the locals.
Bucephalus was returned immediately.
At Ecbatana, Alexander had left Parmenio as his satrap of Persia. While this seemed the ultimate honour, the army that marched into Hyrkania didn’t have Parmenio as chief of staff and planning officer, and we felt it. Little things seep through the cracks – just as an example, Bucephalus was only taken because no one had given the night guards a password, for the first time in about forty years.
Before we marched east after Bessus, Alexander divided the roles that had been Parmenio’s three ways. Craterus would become, to all intents and purposes, his deputy commander of the Macedonians, but for the moment he was far to the south, collecting reinforcements. Hephaestion continued to command the Aegema on occasion, but he became the de facto commander and liaison with the Iranian and satrapal forces – an increasingly important part of our army.
I became the chief of staff. I didn’t outrank either Coenus or Philotas or Nicanor or Hephaestion, but I could handle the mathematics and the planning. And Alexander trusted me – again. Who knows what clicked in his head? But it was odd – and almost eerie – to move my folding desk and my old wax tablets back into the striped tent that housed the Military Journal. Many years had passed since I had held this post, or one like it.