Cassander laughed. It was a nervous, reedy laugh, but I suppose he meant it – he had never seen such a thing in all his life.
Alexander rose to a sitting position on his couch, and then kissed Cyrus and exchanged a comment or two, all the while beckoning to Cassander to approach. When the young man came, Alexander smiled at him – smiled and held his glance, still beckoning, until Cassander came close enough to kiss.
Alexander grabbed his ears and smashed his head into the marble floor – not once, but five or six times, until the blood poured from the boy’s scalp, and he shrieked and soiled himself.
Alexander rose to his feet and kicked him in the crotch, and then turned and ordered the body removed. His expression was one of mild distaste.
That night, I opened the gold container I had found among Thaïs’s belongings, and poured the powder of strychnos nuts carefully into the king’s wine after his taster sniffed it and set it at the king’s side on a low table by his couch.
He developed a high fever, went to the bathhouse and sweated it off.
I was haunted by the notion that he was, in fact, greater than human.
But I knew better. And I believed then, and still believe, that all that was greatest in Alexander – the part that was greater than merely human – left him after Hydaspes. Perhaps it was his apotheosis. And afterwards, only the bestial shell – less than human – was left.
Listen to me – the philosopher.
You can purchase anything in Babylon.
I purchased fresh nuts and ground them myself, as Alexander and I had learned to do at Aristotle’s hands. As I had seen Thaïs do, before Memnon died.
Instead of dry powder, I had a damp mush.
I dried it in the sun, and put it in his wine. He was drinking deep, unwatered wine straight from the amphora, and it was the work of a moment to brush the foul stuff into his cup.
Why wasn’t I caught?
Because the gods willed it so.
And because, by that summer in Babylon, no one wanted him to live.
I thought of my conversation with Cleitus, the day Philip was murdered.
Of what could justify regicide.
Boy, if I ever act the tyrant that he was, you have my permission to kill me.
He lay near death for two days. The soldiers – the same Macedonians he had already disbanded and ordered home – crowded around the palace doors, openly praying for his survival.
Because that is how men are.
The old circle gathered by his bedside, and it was telling – I think we all thought it – that there were no Persians at all to attend his last days. He lay, barely able to move or speak.
When he asked for wine, I gave it to him.
With more poison.
Craterus was beside himself – he, alone of us, wanted to conquer more worlds, march farther. He was unchanged. His feelings for the king were unchanged. But he had missed the Gedrosian Desert.
He leaned over the king and asked, ‘Lord – who should inherit your kingdom? To whom should it go?’
There was silence for so long that we all, I think, assumed the king was too far gone to speak.
But he did not speak. He giggled.
His head rose a fraction, and his eyes met mine squarely. As if he knew . . . everything.
‘To the strongest,’ he said.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Writing a novel – several novels, now – about the wars of the Diadochi, or Successors, is a difficult game for an amateur historian to play. There are many, many players, and many sides, and frankly, none of them are ‘good.’ From the first, I had to make certain decisions, and most of them had to do with limiting the cast of characters to a size that the reader could assimilate without insulting anyone’s intelligence. Antigonus One-Eye and his older son Demetrios deserve novels of their own – as do Cassander, Eumenes, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Olympia and the rest. Every one of them could be portrayed as the hero and the others as villains.
If you feel that you need a scorecard, consider visiting my website at www.hippeis.com where you can at least review the biographies of some of the main players. Wikipedia also has full biographies on most of the players in the period.
From a standpoint of purely military history, I’ve made some decisions that knowledgeable readers may find odd. For example, I no longer believe in the linothorax or linen breastplate, and I’ve written it out of the novels. Nor do I believe that the Macedonian pike system – the sarissa armed phalanx – was really any better than the old Greek hoplite system. In fact, I suspect it was worse, as the experience of early modern warfare suggests that the longer your pikes are, the less you trust your troops. Macedonian farm boys were not hoplites – they lacked the whole societal and cultural support system that created the hoplite. They were decisive in their day but as to whether they were ‘better’ than the earlier system . . . well, as with much of military change, it was a cultural change, not really a technological one. Or so it seems to me.
Elephants were not tanks, nor were they a magical victory tool. They could be very effective, or utterly ineffective. I’ve tried to show both situations.
The same can be said of horse-archery. On open ground, with endless remounts and a limitless arrow supply, a horse-archer army must have been a nightmare. But a few hundred horse-archers on the vast expanse of an Alexandrian battlefield might only have been a nuisance.
Ultimately though, I don’t believe in ‘military’ history. War is about economics, religion, art, society – war is inseparable from culture. You could not, in this period, train an Egyptian peasant to be a horse-archer without changing his way of life and his economy, his social status, perhaps his religion. Questions about military technology – ‘Why didn’t Alexander create an army of [insert technological wonder here]?’ – ignore the constraints imposed by the realities of the day – the culture of Macedon, which carried, it seems to me, the seeds of its own destruction from the first.
And then there is the problem of sources. In as much as we know anything about the world of the Diadochi, we owe that knowledge to a few authors, none of whom are actually contemporary. I used Diodorus Siculus throughout the writing of the Tyrant books – in most cases I prefer him to Arrian or Polybius, and in many cases he’s the sole source.
In this book I deal with the life of Alexander in detail. I owe a deep debt to Peter Greene, whose biography of Alexander I followed in many respects. However, I also used sources as widely separated as Arrian (whose hero worship makes him suspect) and the Alexander Romance (mostly fabrication, but with hidden gems), tempered by Plutarch despite his moralizing ways. I suspect that Alexander was the Adolf Hitler of his era, not the golden hero. I suspect that he was both a gifted general and the beneficiary of some unbelievable strokes of luck.
For anyone who wants to get a quick lesson in the difficulties of the sources for the period, I recommend visiting the website www.livius.org. The articles on the sources will, I hope, go a long way to demonstrating how little we know about Alexander and his successors.
Of course, as I’m a novelist and only an historian on weekends, sometimes the loopholes in the evidence – or even the vast gaps – are the very space in which my characters operate. Sometimes, a lack of knowledge is what creates the appeal. Either way, I hope that I have created a believable version of the world of Alexander. I hope that you enjoy this book, and its companions, the Tyrant series.
And as usual, I’m always happy to hear your comments – and even your criticisms – at the Online Agora on www.hippeis.com. See you there, I hope!
Christian Cameron