I was over the crest of the ridge with the marsh at the top, now, and going down a shallow slope. Off to the right, I saw one of the downed giant trees.
I rode for it, staking everything on gaining its cover before they saw me.
This giant had fallen recently – in the last hundred years – and the great ball of its roots was open to the sky like a natural cage, all the dirt washed away. I rode in among the roots.
Poseidon stopped, and his breath came in great loud snorts. I could just see my back trail. I gripped my short spear at mid-haft and waited. And waited.
When they came, they were loud and fast. But they had cast far to the west of my line – possibly because they were not fools, but Illyrians – and they passed a quarter of a stade from my ambush, robbing me of any surprise. So I let them pass. There was nothing else I could do, really, except charge them and die.
But I did follow them, moving from cover to cover on horseback the way we were taught, both hunting and scouting. Since the penalty for failure was almost always a heavy beating, doing it with the risk of losing one’s life wasn’t so bad.
The big downed trees were my salvation – that and my excellent horse, which never snorted and never lost his edge. We ranged along with them, half a stade distant, and went north and west. After half an hour, we crossed the track Laodon and I had used in the morning, and I knew where I was. I wasn’t sure quite what I was doing – but I had passed from prey to predator, and I was scouting, or so I thought.
The sun was well down in the sky when they came to a cross-track, and one of them dismounted to look at the ground. He frowned, and then he grew a spear in his back and flopped full length on the ground.
His partner whirled his pony.
Laodon was empty-handed, but he came straight at the man on his smaller horse. He took the man’s sword cut on his forearm – I winced, even as I pressed my knees into Poseidon’s sides – and his right hand grabbed the headstall and ripped the Illyrian’s bridle right off his horse’s head.
The Illyrian’s horse bolted. He threw his arms around the horse’s neck.
I put my spear into him as he went by. He probably never knew I was there until he fell from his horse. He hit the ground heavily and screamed – oh, such a scream as I hope never to hear again. And then he screamed again.
I’d never killed a man, and I’d lost my spear in the shock of the successful stroke, and Poseidon did not want to go near the writhing thing on the ground, covered in leaf mould and blood, bellowing and shrieking.
‘Finish him!’ Laodon shouted. ‘Or we’ll have all his friends on us!’
I had an eating knife.
I slid from my horse and my knees were so weak I slumped to the ground, and I had to stab him three or four times. Maybe more. I really don’t remember. What I remember is the silence and the blood all around me. And Poseidon, glaring at me from one wild eye, very unhappy.
My victim’s bowels relaxed into the sloppy, smelly embrace of death. His mouth fell open and his eyes were open too. I thought he was dead, but I threw up all over him to make sure.
Laodon came and retrieved my spear. He wiped it clean, then took my knife out of the dead man’s neck, wiped it clean and finally pulled the man’s sword belt over his head. He had a long Keltoi sword.
Laodon tossed it to me. ‘Wipe your face, lad,’ he said.
I wiped it with my chlamys. I didn’t have anything else. I got some of the blood off my hands and arms, but it stuck in my arm hair.
‘I have to know, boy – did you make camp?’ he asked.
‘Yes. I’m . . . I’m looking for the prince. Those two found me – I slipped them.’ It sounded foolish. ‘I was following them.’
Laodon nodded. ‘Well done. If the prince is alive.’
We collected the dead men’s ponies and headed south.
I had a sword.
Polystratus hadn’t found the prince. He found us, instead, coming down yet another ridge. Laodon sent him off on a new angle, and sent me back to camp, headed almost due south.
I found Hephaestion, less than two stades from camp and blissfully unaware that the world had gone to shit. Let me take a moment to say that Hephaestion and I were never close friends. He was Alexander’s favourite – his best friend, almost from birth. Alexander’s partiality blinded him to Hephaestion’s many failings. That’s the nicest way I can put it.
Hephaestion was a bitch queen, and Alexander loved him because he reminded him of his evil mother – that’s what I really think. And yet, to be fair, Hephaestion and I stood up for each other a number of times. He was loyal, and that alone was worth a lot.
Hephaestion panicked. Granted, his form of panic was to gallop off downhill to the south and west, looking for Alexander, abandoning the two younger pages he was supposed to be riding herd on – Cleomenes and Pyrrhus, a pair of useless sprites. He galloped off, and there I was with two eleven-year-olds.
Grinning like imps.
‘It’s an adventure, isn’t it, sir?’ said Cleomenes.
‘Shut up, you two.’ They had ponies. ‘Can you two find your way back to camp?’
‘Oh, yes, sir!’ Pyrrhus said in the child’s tone that conveys the very opposite of what’s said.
‘Oh, no, sir!’ said Cleomenes, who’d felt my wrath before. ‘It’s . . . that way, I think.’ He pointed off towards Macedon, wrong by a quarter of the earth.
‘Stay with me, then,’ I barked.
Want to rid yourself of fear? Taking care of others is the key. With Laodon I was the weaker – with Cleomenes and Pyrrhus I was the strongest. It might have been comic if it hadn’t been so forceful. I led them back over the first ridge and down to the treeline – and then I made them dismount while I looked at the camp.
All I saw was armed pages looking nervous. So I gathered my charges and rode hard into camp.
Philip was unable to keep still. ‘That’s all you found? Two brats?’
Then he saw the blood on my arms.
‘I found Laodon. He’s looking for the prince.’ I was handed a cup and I took it, drank from it and spluttered – it was neat wine.
‘Thank the gods.’ Philip paused, met my eye. ‘Will you . . . go back out?’
Command is hard. You have to make people do things that you could do better yourself – that might get them killed. Philip the Red, one of my many foes among the pages, was asking my permission to send me back out.
I finished the wine. ‘I need to change horses,’ I said.
Philip nodded. A slave ran for the horse lines.
‘Nice sword,’ Philip said.
‘Laodon did all the work,’ I managed. Suddenly we were men, talking about men’s things, and I was damned if I would boast like a boy.
Philip nodded. ‘I’ve got archers in the woods,’ he said.
‘I got in the north way without being challenged,’ I said as my second-string horse, a big mare that I called Medea, was brought in.
Philip gave me a hand up on to Medea’s broad back – as if I were his peer. ‘I’ll look at it,’ he said.
I took a different angle this time, and the shadows were long. In half an hour or less the red orb would be lost behind the flank of the mountain. Already it was cold – and time for the prince and his hunting mentor to be back.
I missed Poseidon immediately. I’d named the mare Medea for a reason – she was all love one minute and death on hooves the next, and she was in a mood. She made heavier work of climbing the ridges than Poseidon had done, and I had to spend more time dismounted, leading her. But before the sun was down a finger’s breadth, I was across the stream and marsh where I’d first left Polystratus, into new territory.