And the next day, when we were to box, I faced off against a much younger page – and folded.
Aristotle just shook his head.
And over the next few days, I began to notice a certain want of regard among the younger pages. They had worshipped me when I returned, and that worship was falling off.
That hurt.
Cleomenes, the young sprig I’d rescued in the hunting camp, was my most loyal follower, and he sat on my tightly rolled war cloak in the barracks and glared at me. He had a black eye.
He wasn’t eleven any more, either.
‘Amyntas says you are a coward,’ he said with all the hot accusation that a thirteen-year-old can throw at a seventeen-year-old. ‘He says that the Illyrians cut your courage out, and we should treat you like a woman.’
‘If Amyntas thinks women are cowards, he should try birthing a baby,’ I said. One of my mother’s sayings. I sighed. ‘I’m not a coward,’ I said.
‘Prove it,’ Cleomenes said. ‘Beat the shit out of Amyntas.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because that’s what he did to me,’ Cleomenes said with a half-sob.
Life among the pages. Very nice.
It occurred to me to go to Alexander.
But after further thought, I realised that they were all right.
It is odd – I don’t think I was ever a coward. I just didn’t need to excel, and since the need was taken away, I coasted. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. I certainly had a great many nightmares, and my camp girl – I’ll explain that later – would wake me in the night with a hand on my cheek because I was screaming and waking the barracks.
I thought about it, and I came to a set of decisions – every one of them nested into the next. I needed to learn to be the man I had been. And I wasn’t going to learn with the pages.
Polystratus had become a foot companion – one of the elite infantrymen of the old king – and he had a farm not far from the gardens. So I asked for an hour’s leave and rode out to find him, and dragged him from his plough and made of him my sparring partner. His whole idea of fighting with a sword was to hit faster and harder – worthy objectives in themselves, but not a way to win a fight, unless your only goal is to smash your way through the other man’s shield. So, in order to arrange to practise myself, I spent two weeks training him.
Two weeks in which I must have interfered with his ploughing and his sowing, too. I all but lived in his hovel, and his wife – another freed slave – feared me. But teaching Polystratus to be a swordsman did more for my own fighting skills than anything I’d learned in the last year. In fact, I think it was those two weeks that put me on the path I’m still on. Somewhere in the teaching of Polystratus I realised – that there was a theory, a philosophy, to combat. That each motion of an attack, a defence, could be analysed like a problem of philosophy.
I was not the first Hellene to understand this. I may not have been the first seventeen-year-old to understand this. But it was like a key to unlock a trunk full of knowledge. Many, many things that I had learned by rote – steps, hip movements, overhand cuts, thrusts – came together in two weeks to form a sort of Thalian singularity, and if you don’t know who Thales was, young man, you will have to ask your tutor and report to me tomorrow.
I admit, it was easier with my former slave – easier to risk a contest against him, and unimportant to lose. Why? Because he was a man of no consequence, that’s why. What did I care if a former slave could best me?
Except that in those two weeks, Polystratus became a man to me. Since that time, I have seen this happen again and again – worthy men develop a kinship with their opponents, just as unworthy men come to loathe them. The worthiness resides in the competitor – if he brings with him an ability to emulate and admire his enemy, then he is a better man for it. Or so I think.
At any rate, after a fortnight of daily struggle in the mud of spring, Polystratus was a passable pankrationist, and probably the best swordsman in the foot companions – not that they ever fought with swords. But still.
All this time, every morning that I was paired with another man in a contest, I lay down – if not literally, then in effect.
Aristotle shook his head, and then, after another week, didn’t even bother with that.
But Alexander began to look at me curiously.
Cleomenes ceased to come and sit with me, or to flirt with my bed-warmer. I should put in here that Philip had become deeply concerned by Alexander’s little ways – with sex. It was known to every one of us that Philip thought that his son was soft – possibly effeminate. A gynnis. There had been loud words exchanged on the subject, and Olympias – never a subtle woman – sent Alexander a hetaera, a courtesan, named Calixeinna.
She was outrageously beautiful, with the sort of body – high, perfectly round breasts, a tiny waist, a long, sculpted face with small, thick lips for kissing and enormous eyes – the sort of body that drives men mad.
All of us – even the prince – lived in the Macedonian version of a Spartan barracks, in messes of ten boys – five oldsters and five youngsters. Some oldsters slept alone, some with each other, some with the younger boys. Some were just sharing cloaks for warmth. Eh? And some weren’t. Until Calixeinna came.
The poor thing was appalled to be the only woman in what must have seemed like an armed camp with academics. She was quite intelligent – she could recite great swathes of the Iliad – but the idea that she had no room of her own, that she had to dress and undress with forty boys, made her angry. She threatened to leave.
Alexander refused to live outside the barracks.
Aristotle bit his lips, cursed and found women for us all, or, if not all, at least a few per mess. Country girls – not prostitutes, no one’s father would have allowed that. The king offered them all dowries and regular pay, and I suspect there was no shortage of volunteers – we were good-looking, clean and noble.
Of course, this was also the occasion for his famous lecture on the life of hedonism versus the life of restraint and self-control, too.
The truth is that our barracks life improved immeasurably when the women moved in. The clothes were cleaner, the conversation was better, and the youngsters began to laugh and play – the women wouldn’t allow them to be abused. Women exert a subtle influence – not so subtle, sometimes. They will say things without fear that even a warrior might fear to say.
At any rate, I had a regular bed-warmer from the first. She was named Iphegenia – some parents need a better classical education – and she was pretty enough, with large hips and smooth muscles and breasts. She was scared the first time we were naked together, and after that, not – and she was never put off by my scars. I can’t say I loved her – she was the most selfish woman I’ve ever known well – but she took good care of me, bore my first bastard and my pater put her on a farm for me. I hope she lives yet.
Oh, I’m an old man. I love to think of Genny stripping for bed – the only sign I ever had that she was as eager as I was the way she’d incline towards my sleeping roll like a hunting dog pointing to the prey. Hah!
But Alexander appeared to want nothing to do with his courtesan. She was in his sleeping roll most nights, and a few times I saw her under his cloak, once even wrapped in his arms. He was gracious to her. But that was the limit, and Aristotle openly admonished him against her.
Olympias sent notes explaining how men and women had sex, and how much better sex with a woman was than sex with a man. Just picture getting this lecture from your mother, herself a famous beauty, a veritable avatar of Aphrodite. Zeus, god of kings, what a horror that woman could be, and how much of Alexander can be laid at her door. Sober, she was brilliant and scary, and drunk, she was a lascivious predator with no scruples and a poisonous memory. And her power to manipulate – she was quite brilliant . . .