Philip sent orders home that we should raise two more taxeis of infantry and train the pages harder. But he also ordered that the pages be promoted to royal companions. We were going to be adults. And when we’d trained the new recruits, we were to bring them to Philip in the field. Father and son were going to war together.
That winter, my father died, and I fell in love. I believe in love – many men don’t – and it had been my friend all my life. And my first love was linked to the death of my father.
Many men said then that I was Philip’s bastard son. That Philip put me on my mother – by rape, in an affair. And the gods know my pater was always fairly distant. On the other hand, he was closer than Philip ever was to me or to Alexander, for that matter. He didn’t have much time for me until I was eleven or twelve, but after that, when I was home from being a page, Pater listened to my tales of the hunt and the court, took me with him on business visits around our farms and we went hunting together ourselves. Some of my best memories are of sitting in the hall, on a stool by the hearth, surrounded by Pater’s great boar hounds. We talked about everything, solved many of the world’s problems, and Pater became quite a fan of Aristotle – actually bought two of his books and read them, which was quite a turn-up for a boar-hunting lord in the wilds of central Macedon.
Pater never discussed my birth directly. But once, when he was at court – a rare event in itself – Attalus made direct reference to it. And Pater smiled at him and rubbed his nose – his long hawk’s beak of a nose.
My nose, too.
My guess is that Mater and Philip were lovers – by his will, I suspect. But the child she bore her husband was theirs. He honoured her all her life, and there was a well-tended shrine to her after her death. Not that Philip ever visited it, either way. If he’d visited the graves of all his lovers, he’d have done nothing else.
Some time in late autumn, when there was snow in the passes and the snowline was creeping over the higher fields, when small farmers stayed in, weaving baskets and carving new handles for axes, and the great families had dangerous feasts where everyone drank too much, slept with the wrong people and killed each other with knives – word came to court that my pater was ill, and Alexander brought me the news himself. I was in Antipater’s rooms, copying documents like a scribal slave – lists of equipment issued to our new recruits. Dull stuff, but the very sinews of Ares, and Alexander insisted that it be done right.
He came in, a scroll rolled in his fist. ‘Ptolemy,’ he said, in that way of his that made you feel like you were his only friend, the centre of his world. He embraced me.
By Zeus, I loved him.
At any rate, he unrolled the scroll – even in a crisis, he couldn’t ever stop explaining his latest enthusiasm, and this was no crisis. ‘Have you read Isocrates?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said cautiously. It wasn’t always good to admit ignorance with Alexander.
‘Another Athenian – but oh, he has some beautiful ideas. He says it is time for a crusade of all the Hellenes against Persia.’ Alexander held up the scroll and read. He read well – he had a good voice.
Isocrates.
I had a soft spot for Isocrates, because he was a Plataean, and the Plataeans were, to me, the real heroes of Marathon and of all the subsequent campaigns against Persia. Aristotle used some of Isocrates’s speeches in training us. So I was, like any good friend, prepared to be pleased and to support Alexander’s latest passion.
And I have to say that, at that time, every side and every voice in the Hellenic world was advocating a crusade against Persia. First, the Persian court and Persian army and every satrapy in Asia were now full of Hellenes, growing rich, writing letters home to describe in detail the riches of Asia and the relative ease with which it could all be conquered. Every boy in the world – the Greek-speaking world – read Xenophon’s Anabasis at school, and every one of us saw Persia as the empire we would conquer. If our thoughts had carried physical manifestation (something Pythagoras apparently advocated at one time) then Persepolis would have had a bull’s-eye painted across its walls like a Cretan archery target a hundred feet tall.
In addition, every faction in Greece saw a universal crusade against the Mede as the salvation of the endless infighting – Athens against Sparta, Sparta against Thebes, Thebes against Thessaly against Macedon against Athens. Even Philip advocated such a war – as long as he could command it. And there, my friend, was the rub. Everyone imagined that we would all cooperate – even Athens and Macedon – if we could get to grips with the King of Kings, but no one wanted to play second flute, so to speak.
Alexander raced back to his quarters and reappeared with a whole bag of Isocrates. ‘Read these while you go to your father!’ he said.
Now by this point I’d been one of his inner circle for more than a year, and we hunted together – sometimes just the two of us – played Polis, threw knucklebones and sparred daily. I knew him pretty well – but the brilliance and brittleness of his moods still caught me by surprise. He could change topics faster than anyone I’ve ever met. Other men made allusions to femininity – women are supposed to have fickle minds, or so I’m told – but Alexander’s intellectual whims came with spear-points of iron and a will of adamantine, and there was nothing effeminate about them. Only lesser men ever thought so. What happened was that Alexander would finish a subject – often inside his head, with no reference to friends or other company – and move on. If you were up to his speed, you could reason out where he’d gone. If you weren’t, he left you behind all the time, and eventually stopped trying to talk to you.
In this case, all he’d done was share his passion for Isocrates first, and then remember that he hadn’t told me the reason for his visit to Antipater’s rooms. My pater was dying or already dead. I was requested.
‘Take all the time you want,’ Alexander said. ‘I know you love him – I’ve seen the two of you together.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I am envious.’
What do you say to that? He was envious. He and his pater were locked in a competition when they ought to have been pulling in harness like matched chariot horses.
‘I am lucky, lord,’ I said. ‘Pater has treated me as a man – since before I was one.’
‘Men say Philip is your father,’ Alexander said. He didn’t mean it to hurt. ‘Yet despite the slur, your father sees you as a . . . a person.’ He shrugged.
‘Lagus is my father.’ I was on dangerous ground here.
‘I agree. If Philip was your father, you’d be better-looking.’ Alexander smiled. ‘You are the only one of my close friends with his own estates and his own power – and yet you are completely loyal. Why?’
Chasms were opening at my feet, and legions of Titans preparing to rend me limb from limb. He had that look in his eye.
‘Habit?’ I answered, with a wink.
Alexander stopped, and his face became still for a moment, and then he barked a laugh. ‘By Herakles my ancestor, Ptolemy. Get you gone. Send your pater my respects, if he is alive to hear them, and tell him his son is somatophylax to the prince.’
‘I am?’ I said. I was delighted – for all his moodiness, he was my prince, and I wanted to serve.
He put a gold ring in my hand. ‘You are.’