Cyrus bowed deeply, and so did his son and a handful of other Persian noble officers.
I decided to think about the implications later. ‘At ease,’ I called. ‘Listen up.’ I walked to the middle of the tent. Eumenes had an easel set up with a sheet of local slate. I had a piece of chalk, the kind tutors in Athens and Pella used to teach children in the agora.
‘First thing,’ I said. ‘We no longer have a road home behind us. All we have is the ground beneath our feet. All forward troops need to assume that every contact is a hostile contact. Rearguard, too. At the same time, foraging and logistics purchases will go better if we can form a market every night and get locals to come in of their own free will and sell us produce. Understand?’
I wrote the words Firm But Fair on the slate.
‘I need the Prodromoi to operate a day ahead of the army and I need the Angeloi two days ahead. At least. I need the Prodromoi to scout a box . . .’ I drew a rectangle on the board. ‘And then we can move from box to box. The Agrianians will handle security inside the day’s box, the Prodromoi scout the next one. Any questions?’
In fact, there were a hundred questions, but that became our doctrine for movement in hostile country. It changed a great many things – for one thing, Strako and the Angeloi began reporting directly to the Prodromoi, not to me – but it made our march routes far more secure, and it meant that even as we fought a battle, we already knew where our next camp would be, and it was already secure.
We fought six actions that summer, and the scouting units were in action every day or two. This sort of warfare is terribly wearing on troops, and after just two weeks, the Angeloi were exhausted and the Prodromoi had taken losses of a third and were no longer an effective unit. Again, the mathematics of war are relentless – if your scouts lose one man a day, even from bad water or accident, and there’s only a hundred of them . . .
So Eumenes began to rotate men, and later whole units, from the main body into the scouts. It was an excellent programme, and it allowed him to begin taking small commands himself. He was an honest man, but he was still a wily Greek.
We pulled all three columns together in early autumn, on the shores of Lake Seistan. Craterus and Black Cleitus came up from the south, and brought us our daughter and our newly made priest of Poseidon, fresh from Sounnion.
Olympias was fresh and lovely and just eleven years old, and she scarcely remembered us after two years in the Temple of Artemis. But that night she was curled in her foster-mother’s arms, and Thaïs was happier than I had seen her in a year.
The truth is that the woman who had sent her away to be educated was a different woman in many ways from the mother who welcomed her back. And I was a different man and a different father. I wanted them to have stable lives, but I wanted them close.
Barsulas was tall and handsome and very sure of his relationship with his god. Sounnion had sent him to us with a letter to the king.
So I promised him an interview with the king when he caught up with the ‘main’ army, and that night we talked for hours about the gods. About Zeus-Apis in Aegypt – about Poseidon.
Athenian notions of good conduct and the rational had not changed the inner boy. The boy who swam with dolphins. He was very easy to love.
But Olympias, after just a week in camp, threw herself at my feet one evening.
‘Please, Pater!’ she begged. Young Eurydike, our daughter, followed Olympias the way an acolyte follows a priest, because the young priestess was on the very threshold of adulthood and thus the ultimate object of Eurydike’s ambition. At any rate, when Olympias threw herself at what had once been a beautiful pair of Boeotian boots rather than a cracked and tangled mare’s nest of leather repairs, my daughter Eurydike threw herself down next to the older girl.
I tried to calm them both. Olympias’s tears seemed dramatic, and Eurydike’s were completely false – to me. Shows how little I knew about being a parent.
‘Please send me home!’ Olympias begged. ‘I hate it here! The Virgin Goddess will desert me here! There are no olive trees – no grass – men – all men . . .’ She wept.
My younger daughter beat the floor of my tent – a local rug, as I remember – and wept, too.
I thought this might pass, but Olympias was at it, day and night, and Thaïs was beside herself. Bella undertook most of Eurydike’s care, but Bella had no authority with this lovely young girl with the assurance of a well-bred Athenian aristocrat.
Thaïs lay next to me – it must have been a week after the first outburst. ‘The obvious answer is to marry her to someone,’ she said. But she shook her head against my chest. ‘She does not want to marry. And my life started with a marriage I did not want.’
I stared at the lamp burning above me in the roof of the tent, where it hung from a chain, suspended from the cross-beam. ‘She desires to be a priestess,’ I said.
‘And a virgin,’ Thaïs said. She said it with a sob that was half-laugh and half-cry. ‘She called me a porne – a prostitute.’
Yes. Children. Even the adopted kind.
The army had marched three thousand stades south from Sousia and Hyrkania, and Alexander gave them a rest while we poured scouts into the east and tried to find routes into Bactria that we could scout, hold open and supply.
I was busy stockpiling food – the harvest was coming in, all over the empire – when I realised that Cleitus’s arrival meant that Parmenio’s command had been stripped of troops. That struck me as odd – he was the satrap of Persia, at the centre of the vast web of the old empire, and while the ‘Persian’ satraps all seemed to be in revolt, Parmenio held the centre.
That night, I was again cuddling up to my intelligence chief, and I said – by way of small talk – that I wondered why Alexander had taken all the new Lydian and Thracian troops as well as all the taxeis under Parmenio’s command.
Even as I said it – my hand reaching for one of Thaïs’s breasts – I realised why Alexander had done it.
Thaïs frowned at me and moved my hand. ‘Parmenio’s days are numbered,’ she said.
‘You’ve said that before,’ I accused her.
She shrugged, which was very attractive, given the circumstances. ‘Perhaps. But in the past, he was a threat. Since Aegypt, he has offered no threat. After Arabela, he couldn’t have toppled the king with Zeus by his side.’ She turned her head. ‘I have no love for him. But there is something . . . poisonous about Macedon. And Athens. Why cannot old men be allowed to retire? Why must we kill them?’
Two day later, Philotas rejoined the army, having buried his brother.
He was a difficult man – given to dressing like a king, flaunting his riches and his father’s political power, and far, far too addicted to telling us that he and his father had made the king who he was.
He was also a brilliant officer, who could control a cavalry reconnaissance from the saddle, simultaneously riding, fighting and working out his campsites and his supply routes and his watch bill. He was foul-mouthed and he hated the Persians, whom he openly derided.
Cyrus hated him, and he hated Cyrus, which made Eumenes’ job of running the scouts more difficult, as more and more Cyrus and his Persians served directly with the Hetaeroi.
The day he returned to the army, I was coming in from the east with Cyrus, and Philotas had discovered that I commanded the Hetaeroi in his absence and came to find me.
He waved. ‘Ptolemy,’ he said. ‘Tell your Persian butt-boy to fuck off, and we’ll talk.’
I put my hand on Cyrus’s bridle. ‘Cyrus is my deputy,’ I said. ‘He serves the king.’
Philotas grunted. ‘Any way he can, I bet. He understand Greek? Hey, Persian, sod off, understand me?’