He turned away. His posture hardened. With a good athlete, you can read anger in every muscle, not just in a few in the arms, shoulders and neck. He had rage in his hips and in his lower back.
‘Remove yourself,’ he said.
‘Fuck you,’ I said. Not what Aristotle would have wanted me to say. ‘Call your companions and have me dragged out.’
Hephaestion came in in a hurry. I have no doubt he’d been listening. ‘You cannot address your king that way,’ he said. ‘Apologise!’
‘Alexander is going to pardon Attalus!’ I said.
Hephaestion hadn’t been listening as closely as I had thought. He stopped dead. ‘What?’
Alexander whirled. ‘Not you too! Listen. Attalus is a tool. I need him in Asia. I need all my father’s generals.’
Hephaestion made a moue of distaste and glanced at me, clearly caught between annoyance at the king and dislike of me. ‘Attalus,’ he spat.
I leaned forward. ‘My king, you do notneed Attalus to conquer Asia. You do not need Parmenio and you do not need Amyntas. You just conquered Greece in forty days – with your own men and your own army. And your own head.’ I shrugged. ‘And I stand on my statement. If you pardon Attalus, I will take my grooms and retire to my estates.’
Alexander paused and just looked at me.
‘My father did it,’ I reminded him. ‘I can live without all this.’
Alexander was as white as a new-woven chiton. ‘Leave me.’ He waved his hand quickly, like a man dying of suffocation. ‘Don’t argue. Go.’
I left the tent.
That was a bad day. I ordered my kit packed. I called Philip Longsword and told him the whole story – much as I’m telling you now, because my story went back to the hunt with Laodon and the rape of Pausanias. He heard me out, and shook his head.
‘Bad,’ he said. ‘But you shouldn’t have defied the king.’
I knew he was right. I knew that in a moment’s hot-headedness, I’d lost years of ground with Alexander, and maybe lost him altogether.
So I handed command to Philip, and said some goodbyes, and then sat down on a camp stool – our kit caught up with us that morning when the rest of the army marched in – and waited for the summons.
It didn’t come all day.
Men watched me – men who had been my own a few hours before. But they kept their distance. Philip Longsword had told them – on parade – not to come within a spear’s length of me, by my own order.
A long day.
As the sun was setting and the evening sacrifices were being made, Nearchus came with a full file of Hetaeroi. Before he could ask, I gave him my sword.
We walked back through a silent camp.
The king was with Hephaestion in his tent. No one else. I took that as a good sign. If he meant to execute me, he’d have to order it done before my peers, and they’d have to agree.
He kept his back to me.
Hephaestion did the talking.
‘The king requests that you resign the command of his household guards. And requests – as one man to another – that you withdraw the term bastard.’ I had expected Hephaestion to be delighted by my fall from grace, but he looked stricken.
‘My king, I deeply regret my show of anger, this morning,’ I said. ‘I withdraw the term bastard, and offer my apologies.’
Alexander turned around. ‘And trying to make me alter my policy?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, Alexander. But if you won’t give in on this, you will eventually die as your father did.’
Yes, I said that.
It was true. I loved him, and he was about to make a capital mistake at the very start. If he let Attalus live – do you see it, young man? If he let the bastard live, Cleomenes and Nearchus and Pyrrhus and Marsyas would begin to feel the germs of doubt. The kind of doubt that ends with a King of Macedon surrounded in bed by a ring of daggers held by men who were once his friends.
That’s the way it is, in Macedon.
Alexander had allowed himself to forget it. Not for the last time.
But he shook his head. ‘If I kill Attalus,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘I have to give everythingto Parmenio. I have no counterbalance to him. I hateAttalus – but that’s not important! I am king! I must do what is best!’
I shrugged. ‘I am notking,’ I said. ‘I will be sorry not to command the hypaspitoi. And I will – without any disloyalty – do my best to kill Attalus myself. To spare you.’
‘ Do not do this!’ Hephaestion spat. ‘ Do not seek to bend him to your will.’
Alexander nodded to himself. ‘Very well. I need a man I trust to go to Athens. You will go with the envoys we picked up at Delphi. I do not demand the head of Demosthenes, but I would very much like him to present himself to me as the ambassador of Athens.’
Even through the tension, I had to smile at that image.
‘Go and be my ambassador to Athens. They know me there. And you weren’t to keep the hypaspitoi, anyway. They love you too well, and they are my spear.’ He nodded coolly. ‘And I’ll no doubt have to give them to one of Parmenio’s sons.’ He grimaced. ‘Go to Athens for me. Get their agreement that I am the hegemon. Tell them that I require five hundred of their best cavalry. Get your friend Kineas.’ He was speaking a little wildly, trying to stumble back from the brink I’d brought us to.
That’s when I learned how much Alexander loved me. A little too late. And I burned some of that love, buying Attalus’s death.
Worth it.
Only a handful of men knew what had happened – the public story was that I was to return to command a squadron of Hetaeroi, and that while I held the ambassadorship to Athens, Philip Longsword would command the hypaspitoi. There was no punishment in public or private, except, in the days before I left for Athens, a certain distance with the king.
I missed the hypaspitoi the way a father misses his daughter, and I wept the first night I was back with the Hetaeroi.
Polystratus told me I was a fool.
I took my grooms and three Hetaeroi. Diodorus rode with me as if he were my hyperetes, and the other two envoys cowered in the rear. Despite their presence, we made excellent time across Parnassus, and on the second morning we were at the gates of Athens. I requested permission to enter, made sacrifice as a foreign ambassador and was allowed entry. Demosthenes was still in shock – Athens had known for less than a week that the Macedonian army was just two hundred stades away. Suddenly, all the tough talk ended.
I sought permission to lodge with your grandfather, Kineas’s father, and was accepted. I wish I had not. It was my fault that he was exiled later – my enthusiasm for his company, and his for mine, and Kineas’s open pleasure at having me in the city all conspired to seal his fate.
I should have been in the throes of exile and anger myself. I had been ill used by the very king I was striving to serve – had I not?
In truth, I was so sure that I had done the right thing – the good thing – that I was unconcerned by the result. Only young and naive people can act this way, but I was convinced that the king would see it my way in the end.
So I set myself to enjoy Athens. And that began with a visit to Thaïs.
I dressed plainly. It was late afternoon – her public receiving hour. I tipped the slave at her gate, and was escorted to her solar, a big, sunny room with a loom and a set of couches and chairs.
At the sight of her, a thrill ran through me, better than the thrill of a cavalry charge or the racing rush of a galley. How well does Sappho say it? I had not seen her in more than a year, and her immanence was like a breath of incense to a man working in manure.
Her smile was like sunrise. Or noon. Or something nice and poetic. It was beyond artifice, and that was the good part.