Alexander was aware of it. He left four taxeis under Craterus, with ten squadrons of local cavalry, to hold Bactria behind us and he took the rest of the army north and farther east, to explore the northern borders of the Persian Empire.
It made me happy just to hear him say the word border. A border implied a limit, and if we had a limit, then perhaps some day we’d all march home.
The nightly drinking had reached epic proportions. It had started after Darius’s death – in fact, Alexander had always drunk too much when the mood was on him – but the last year, he was drunk every night.
In fact, he was bored, in the first weeks of that summer.
In a way – a distant, godlike way – it was interesting to study him when he was bored. He became increasingly irritable; he tended to focus on things of no importance whatsoever, which confused men who didn’t really know him, such as Callisthenes and Aristander. His focus could suddenly fall on exercise, on medicine, on the power of prophecy, on the colour of a man’s excrement as influenced by food. And then, for days, that focus would consume him.
We were south of the Jaxartes, in the brownest country I have ever seen. Thirty of us were lying on portable klines by a bonfire – it was the little Heraklion, and we’d had a day of contests. I hadn’t won anything, but I had that pleasant level of fatigue that comes with the agon.
Hephaestion came and lay down on my couch. I had avoided him since the torture of Philotas. He knew it. But he lay down.
‘Philotas was never one of us,’ Hephaestion said.
And at some horrible base level, that was true. I knew what he meant. He meant that he didn’t owe Philotas the kind of emotive loyalty that he owed me, or any of the other men who’d survived childhood at Philip’s court.
It was an olive branch.
‘No,’ I said. That was my dove back to him.
He nodded. His head was on his arms, and he was watching a trio of lewd slave girls writhe. They weren’t any good – they’d been used too hard, paid too little and they assumed men were brutes. It is one of the delightful, horrible complexities of the human condition – soldiers want girls who want them, not whores. They’ll take whores, but only if the whores behave as if they want the soldiers.
Makes you laugh, in a nasty way, doesn’t it?
Ares, you’re thirteen. My apologies, lad.
At any rate, he watched them. And then he grunted. Rolled over.
‘I need help,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to manage the king all by myself. He needs . . .’ Hephaestion made a sign of aversion – the peasant sign, with two fingers.
‘O phile pais, I’ve known Alexander since he was five,’ I said. Hephaestion had seldom asked me, or anyone else, for help before. So I put an arm around his shoulder and he let his head sink on his arms. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘The matter?’ Hephaestion looked at me, and his eyes held more rage than sorrow. ‘He’s fucking cut himself off from everyone, and doesn’t know how to get back.’
‘Does he want to get back?’ I asked.
Hephaestion hid his head. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘He just wants to be god.’
Hephaestion must have manipulated the king, one way or another, because I was promoted from king’s friend to the Persian equivalent of somatophylakes a day later, and suddenly Alexander wanted me to ride with him.
We were on the Oxus, and the day before I’d met a Sakje while on patrol and bartered a fine mare for a superb bow and fifty arrows in a gorytos. I’m not much of an archer, but I loved a thing well made and I’d just determined – back then – to write a book about my travels. I had my journal and the Military Journal, but I was not so different from the king, and I, too, wanted to know – Is this all there is? The idea of writing a travel book made me happy.
Perhaps you have to be fifteen thousand stades from home for this to make sense.
And the conversation with the Sakje man made me happy, perhaps because he met me with a grin, chose to trust my patrol and no one was killed. I had become so inured to killing every fucking stranger I came across that sharing the white horse milk that the Sakje think is delicious was fun. He ate our onion sausage, we ate his deer meat and he rode away richer by two horses and without one of his bows, and Cyrus, who was at my side the whole time, actually laughed. Out loud.
Never mind. You have to make war for a long, long time for a man’s laugh to seem alien. But these are the things that stick in my head.
I left my squadrons with Polystratus. He was an officer, now – increasingly, a trusted officer. No one doubted that he was an aristocrat. Think of it! From Thracian slave to Macedonian cavalry officer! Mind you, he was a superb officer – but such a thing would never have happened if our lines hadn’t been so long. Ochrid, my steward, now routinely gave orders to fifty slaves. He often helped me with the logistika and would casually order out a patrol for forage. No one doubted his place, although he had started out as my slave. What seemed like a lifetime before.
I rode along with the king, and he affected to be delighted to see me. By luck, his latest passion – dice – had burned itself out.
‘Nearchus is on his way to us,’ I said. I was handling the incoming letters. Eumenes was trying to establish even the most basic level of intelligence collection in Sogdiana and Transoxiana, and he had – in one of those role reversals impossible to enemies and simple to friends – asked me to run the Journal for a few days while he tried to get a network of agents in Marakanda.
‘Nearchus?’ Alexander looked at the mountains to either side for as long as it takes a man to breathe three or four times. ‘Ah! Nearchus!’
For a moment, you see, the king didn’t know of whom I was speaking.
‘Remember shooting bows, lord?’ I asked. My false innocence was glaring to Hephaestion, and he looked at me, but Alexander noticed nothing.
He glanced at me.
‘Look at this,’ I said, and held out my new bow.
He all but snatched it from my hands.
For nine days, we shot everything that moved. I gave him my fine bow, and Cyrus, bless him, took a patrol north of the Oxus and exchanged a dozen local horses for five good bows, so that the inner circle all had them.
The king had a dozen Sakje hostages, and he brought a woman out to see her shoot. He was intending to mock her, and he was already shooting well, although his forefinger and thumb were bleeding from the Sakje release, which Cyrus taught us. Cyrus used a leather thumb ring and had a thumb callus as deep as a coin, but Alexander was above such things.
‘Amazons!’ he laughed, as we rode along.
The woman who joined us, between two guards, was heavily pregnant. She was beautiful – in a deadly, feral way, and pregnancy neither softened nor diminished her. And she rode like a satyr – which is to say, the horse seemed part of her. The king had met her a dozen times, and she’d famously threatened to geld Hephaestion, which made her a bit of a favourite among the inner circle.
She spoke beautiful Greek – accented, but pure Athenian. Well, we both know why, don’t we?
The king had set a dozen targets by the trail – we were well in advance of the army, moving south along the Jaxartes. The first was about ten horse lengths from the rocky road, the next was a little farther, and so on, until the last was easily a hundred paces to the south of the road.
The king came up to the Sakje woman with her two guards – both, as it happened, men from Philotas’s former squadron.