‘Ephesus,’ I proposed.
Eumenes fingered his beard. ‘Well thought,’ he said. The Ionian cities all bore watching. Alexander had offered to rebuild the temple at Ephesus. It wouldn’t hurt us to have family there. And you have to think that way, when you are both a parent and the god of war’s chief of staff.
A few minutes later, Thaïs brought Olympias to us, and she held my knees and wept and begged my forgiveness for her outrageous behaviour.
Why on earth did we name her Olympias?
At any rate, I promised to send her to Ephesus with the next convoy going west, and she kissed us both.
When she left us with Bella, we all three breathed a sigh of relief.
Eumenes watched her go. ‘I’m sending my children to Athens,’ he said quietly.
Thaïs and he exchanged a glance.
I was often the slowest of the three of us – people don’t call me Farm Boy for nothing. ‘What?’
‘Alexander had Parmenio killed,’ Thaïs said slowly, as if she were speaking to Eurydike.
I nodded. We all glanced around. It was like that. We had heard – that day, I guess.
I still hadn’t taken it all in.
Thaïs leaned forward. ‘Alexander sent Polydamus – that little snake – to Cleander and Sitalkes and told them to kill Parmenio immediately. They stabbed him to death in his bed.’
Polydamus was a junior officer of the Hetaeroi, and he even looked like a snake. The king used him for confidential missions.
Eumenes looked at me. ‘Hephaestion and Cleitus get the Hetaeroi,’ he said. ‘You get Demetrios’s spot in the bodyguard.’
I shrugged. I had been somatophylakes for years. The king tended to emphasise it at times, and forget it at others. It was absurdly symbolic that at this point he was going to announce my promotion to the army.
Parmenio was dead. I couldn’t really get it through my thick skull.
THIRTY-THREE
Despite the army-wide depression that set in after the execution of Philotas – forty men threw javelins at him and the other conspirators until they died – we continued to plan a thrust to the east. I assumed the king would march in the spring, when there was grass in the valleys.
I was wrong.
At midwinter, we heard that Satibarzanes was back in Aria raising rebels, and Alexander sent Erigyus – recently returned to us. The Lesbian mercenary not only crushed the rebellion but killed Satibarzanes in single combat. In doing so, he won the praise of the army – and lost Alexander’s friendship.
A sign of things to come. Alexander could no longer stand to have any sign of competition.
It was five months since I’d had command of the main body of the army and rationalised the scouting system, but one afternoon Alexander came into the Military Journal tent and began reading through the entries from the days he’d been off in the north with the Aegema – that is, the entries Eumenes had made while I was in command. He paused and looked at me.
‘I gather you allowed the officers to salute you, while you were in command,’ he said. His tone was mild enough, but I’d known him from childhood.
I just held his eyes. I knew how to handle him, as well as any man in the world except perhaps Hephaestion.
He glared.
I looked back at him.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘Well what?’ I asked.
He stood there.
‘If you don’t trust me with the army,’ I said, fairly caustically, ‘then leave someone else in command.’
He shrugged.
I considered mentioning Parmenio, but I was smart enough not to. But when Craterus came with recruits, I sent Olympias and Eurydike – and that hurt – away to the coast. To Ephesus. To be safe, or at least, harder to use as hostages.
At any rate, as soon as we had word that the revolt was beaten, Alexander ordered us to march – midwinter.
We struck like lightning, and we had manoeuvred Bessus out of his impregnable position astride the Oxus river by the time the first grass was growing in the valleys. That is a strategist’s way of saying that we marched over four high mountain passes in heavy snow and lost almost a thousand veteran soldiers to weather, poor supplies and bad guides; to hubris and hurry.
To be fair, fighting Bessus for the passes would have cost us more, and I know – I know – that we did all we could to prepare.
We took Aornos. So many men were snow-blind that you could see a man leading another man to the army market by the hand. I gave up trying to supply the army – Alexander outmarched all supplies I’d arranged, dumped my carts, ordered my mules eaten.
But Bessus lost Bactria without a fight, and his Bactrian tribesmen deserted him in a wave, and suddenly we had a Bactrian army.
We pressed on into Sogdiana, across another desert. I sent Thaïs back to Susa, and she was happy to go. She handed over her networks – such as they were – to Eumenes. We stood together for a long time – she dressed as a man for riding, as straight as an arrow, her beautiful face lit by the dawn in the clear mountain air.
‘Don’t let him kill you,’ she whispered. We kissed, to the delight of the cavalry escort, and then she was gone.
I’d have gone, too, if I had thought I could leave the army without being murdered.
Alexander had never cared much for his troops, but that march set a new record. He himself changed horses daily, and he moved with the Prodromoi, covering more than a hundred stades a day to the Oxus. Men died so fast it seemed as if a plague had hit us. Men who’d been weakened in the snows died in the desert, or died of drinking too much water when we reached the Oxus. All told, from Lake Seistan to the Oxus, Alexander lost more pezhetaeroi and Hetaeroi than he’d lost in all of his battles combined, and when we reached the Oxus, we had fewer than twenty thousand men, and more than half were barbarian auxiliaries that even I didn’t trust.
And many men had had enough. None of the veterans had been allowed to go home – home to Pella – for the winter. Of course, home was so far away that if they’d marched on the usual autumn Feast of Demeter, they’d still have been marching west on the date they were due back – but that’s not how angry soldiers think. And the army had just heard of Parmenio’s murder, as we lay on our sunburned backs along the Oxus and wondered how exactly the king planned to get us across.
The Thessalians – those who were left, including a dozen troopers I’d convinced to stay with the Hetaeroi – demanded their pay and marched for home. Over a thousand veteran pezhetaeroi did the same.
Alexander was so shaken he let them go. Or so uncaring. Every day, local chiefs brought their barbarous retinues in to join us. These weren’t Persians like Cyrus. These were utterly barbarous northerners who hid their womenfolk, swore oaths for everything and lied when they breathed.
They were excellent light cavalry, though.
Alexander made up his numbers from them. Then he ordered all our leather tents stitched into bladders, and we used them to float ourselves across the Oxus. It was midsummer, and terrifying, but the survivors of the army were by this time not so much hardened as indifferent.
You can still find some of those pezhetaeroi – in my army, or on the streets of Alexandria. Look at them. Ask them.
By the time they reached the Oxus, they no longer expected to live. They marched day to day. They didn’t even grumble. Nor did they drill, and discipline became a real problem, even in the elite corps. Officers were murdered. When recruits came in, they were treated brutally and ignored. The older veterans didn’t associate with them, or help them. In fact, mostly, the veterans just waited to see which of the new boys would die first.
My old friend Amyntas son of Philip found me one day, just after we crossed the Oxus. I was trying to convince Ariston and Hephaestion to give me a thousand local cavalry to use to gather forage from the west, where we hadn’t been yet.