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 us if 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?’
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 ever been 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 back to 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 our homes?’
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.