Cleitus got a hand free from me. I was trying to get anyone to help, but the men closest to the king on couches were sycophants, flatterers, vultures – not men who would help me, even if they had the courage to try.
‘Was I a coward at the Granicus? If my sword hadn’t been by you, you would have been dead there and twenty other places.’ Cleitus slammed his elbow into my stomach to get me off him, but I was ready – I rolled with the blow and got an arm around his neck.
‘It is by our blood, our wounds, that you have risen so high!’ Cleitus called. ‘You think that you did this, Alexander? You think that you won those victories? Your hubris disgusts every man here. Your father built this army – your father Philip. You pretend that a god is your father! It’s a lie! You are a man!’
‘That’s how you talk about me behind my back, isn’t it!’ Alexander said, quite clearly. And he wasn’t looking at Cleitus. He was looking at me. Perdiccas later told me that Alexander looked at him, too.
I believe it. I think, by then, the king wanted us all gone. All the boys of his childhood. All the ones who knew that he was a man, and not a god.
Alexander turned back to Cleitus, suddenly icy and calm. ‘I know the things you say behind my back,’ he said. He turned slowly, and pointed with his free hand – Lysimachus still had his left – at Cleitus. ‘You and your friends cause all the bad blood between my Macedonians and my Persians. Don’t imagine you are going to get away with it!’
Cleitus stood straight. Something in Alexander’s tone sobered him for a moment. ‘Get away with it?’ he asked. ‘We’re dying for you every day, Alexander. And the ones who live get to bow down like sodomites and show their arses like these Persian fucks! While you wander around in a white dress and a diadem like a play-actor!’
Alexander turned to Eumenes, who had joined the men trying to restrain him. ‘Don’t you feel that the Macedonians are like beasts? Any Greek is like a god by comparison.’
Cleitus punched me in the eye. It hurt, and he was about to launch himself at the king, so I swung hard and hit him in the head.
Alexander picked up an apple – it was the first thing under his hand – and threw it at Cleitus, hitting him in the face.
I think Cleitus confused the two blows. Either way, he went off his head, drink and pain combining to make him bellow like a bull. But by then Marsyas had his other arm, together with Philip the Red.
We began to drag him, step by step, from the tent.
Perdiccas got the king in a choke hold, and Leonatus – the king’s friend – took the king’s sword from its scabbard and hurled it across the tent as Alexander reached for it. He went for the knife he always wore around his neck, but Lysimachus beat him to it – the king was so enraged he was ready to knife the men who had hold of him. As he wrestled with three men, his inhuman strength bearing all three of them down, he shouted, ‘It is a plot! To me! They are trying to murder me! Sound the alarm!’
His hyperetes refused. He had his trumpet, and he shook his head, eyes narrowed – like a proper Macedonian, he could make his own decisions about the king’s state. He wasn’t a slave. And when one of the Persian vultures grabbed for the trumpet to blow it – to sound the alarm, and summon the hypaspitoi – the king’s hyperetes bashed the Persian with the trumpet and put him down.
I had Cleitus clear of the tent by then, and I wrestled him out into the cooler night air, and Marsyas, whose wounds were suddenly bleeding again – Cleitus was struggling as hard as the king – kicked Cleitus in the balls.
Cleitus bellowed again, and flattened Marsyas with one blow, breaking his nose. And I missed my hold, and Cleitus stumbled back into the tent, where the king was shouting ‘Turn out the guard!’ at the top of his lungs and Perdiccas was trying to get a hand over his mouth.
I was right behind Cleitus. He got all the way into the command tent, and drew himself up. ‘Alas!’ he roared. ‘What evil government is come to Hellas?’
The hypaspitoi surged in through the doors, and it was over – I could tell just looking at the men coming in, in full armour, that they had been warned. Their faces were set, and they didn’t move to surround the king – rather, they moved to prevent any further violence. Alexander sagged against his captors.
Cleitus held his arms wide. ‘When the public sets up a war trophy, do the men who sweated get the credit? Oh, no – some strategos takes all the prestige!’ He was quoting from Euripides’ Andromache. ‘Who, waving his spear, one among thousands, did one man’s work, but receives a world of praise. Such self-important “fathers of their country” think they are better than other men. They are worth nothing!’
Alexander ripped his arms free from Perdiccas and Leonatus. And in one step, he had the spear – a short longche – from the hypaspist closest to him, and he plunged it to the socket through Cleitus, who was, of course, wearing no armour.
I saw the spear-point come through his back.
His mouth opened.
I’m told his eyes never left the king’s face.
And he died.
Coenus, Perdiccas and I were exiled a few weeks later to chase Spitamenes. That’s not how it was put to us, but that was the truth of it. Leonatus had already been sent away.
The king mourned for three days, until the weasel Anaxarchus told him that as he was a god, he was above the law. He justified the king’s actions, and the king accepted his word and moved on.
So much for his closest friend, the man who had stood by him since infancy.
After Cleitus died, we – the former inner circle – knew that no man was safe. Philotas, to some extent, had it coming – Parmenio had always been the king’s rival. But Cleitus was merely blunt – his loyalty had never been questioned, and without him, the king would have died. Several times.
I wanted no more of it. When I was sent to find and defeat Spitamenes, I went happily.
And we caught him. He had three thousand Dahae cavalry and several hundred of his Persian adherents, but the forts kept us informed by beacon, and too many villagers had had enough – or perhaps they were more scared of us than they were of Spitamenes. We cornered him in a deep valley, and while Perdiccas took his taxeis up the hillside to block their retreat, Coenus and I charged home. We broke the Dahae easily enough – they didn’t want our kind of fight – and most of the Persians surrendered. They had had enough.
In a matter of weeks, we had Spitamenes’ head. And that was the end of his revolt. Overnight, a man who had held us longer than Memnon or Darius was gone, killed by his own wife, and we were, at last, masters of Sogdiana.
I was between Coenus and Perdiccas, riding slowly, because our column was tired and because we were done and our men weren’t in the mood to be hurried.
I took a breath, enjoying the mountain air for the first time in two years. ‘I think . . .’ I said, and Perdiccas grinned.
‘Do you?’ he asked. ‘I thought I smelled something.’
I punched him. ‘I think we have to make him go home now,’ I said.
Perdiccas nodded, the happy look wiped from his face. ‘Do you think – if we get him home . . .’
Coenus laughed. It was a desperate laugh.
I turned. ‘We can get him home,’ I said. ‘If we work at it.’
Coenus wiped his eyes for a moment. ‘We’re not going home,’ he said. ‘We’re invading India. In the spring.’
I was still in charge of the army’s food and supplies, and I hadn’t heard a word of it. But then, I’d been out of favour half a year.
In fact, it was another year before we marched on India. The king was careful about the reconquest of Sogdiana, and he developed a lust of heroic proportions (the only kind of lust he ever had, really) for the daughter of one of the Sogdian chieftains – Roxanne – or so he claimed. She probably saved a lot of lives with her superb face and lush, velvety skin.