Cleitus narrowed his eyes. Shrugged. Gave me a curt nod. Like a tutor who thinks you’ve cheated on a test but can’t see how.
‘Next,’ he said. He looked back at me.
Alexander came forward, with my friend Cleitus, the one we called ‘the black’. He was the son of Alexander’s nurse, and not exactly a nobleman, but he was as loyal as a good dog to Alexander and, as I say, he was my friend. Nearly always, or at least that’s how I remember it.
I was covered in sweat, and while slaves dragged Amyntas off the palaestra and revived him, I put my cloak on – it was cold – and realized just how badly my arm was hurt.
I stood there, rubbing it and trying to look unhurt and victorious. Manly and aristocratic.
Alexander took Cleitus apart. It was quite an exhibition; Alexander had mastered the step and the associated cuts, and he proceeded to hit Cleitus over and over again. Cleitus scored occasionally – he wasn’t bad – but Alexander hit him again and again, smoothly moving through his cutting strokes as if on parade – right to left, bottom to top, as if this was a drill and having his opponent know which blow was coming was expected. But because Cleitus didn’t get the new rhythm or the fancy offset offered by the new footwork, the blows came in – one after another.
And then Cleitus’s dark face filled with blood. Maybe he thought he was being mocked – maybe one of the blows hurt more than the others. He grunted – it caught my attention, because, to be honest, watching one man carve the crap out of another is dull, and I’d stopped watching, but that grunt had hate in it. He stepped in, took Alexander’s blow on his shoulder and caught the prince’s elbow – and threw him to the ground. Classic pankration.
Alexander got to his feet, came on guard, measured the distance and knocked Cleitus unconscious. One-two- three. Black Cleitus crashed to the ground as if dead.
The sword master looked at him, and then flicked his glance over to me.
‘Well done, my prince,’ he said. ‘A littleharder than it needed to be.’
Black Cleitus was not dead. He let out a great snort, and blood flowed from his nostrils, and then he snorted like a boar and got up on his knees and vomited.
Alexander held his hair – we all wore ours long. Then he came over and stood by me – according to our traditions, the winning boys stood together.
‘Did you see me?’ he said. ‘I used the new step.’
‘Me, too,’ I said.
He turned to me so fast I thought he had tripped. ‘You what?’
‘I put Amyntas down with the same blow you used on Black Cleitus,’ I said. I wasn’t paying attention to the signals – we were victors together, and I thought . . .
His smile came off his face like water draining from a dropped pot. He stood quivering with anger. ‘It was mine,’ he said. ‘Not yours. I should have been first.’
He had the same look in his eyes that Erigyus had when he punched his eating knife through the highlander’s throat-bole. I admit I stepped back.
When the sun was high, Aristotle came out to find us and take us to the cold stone benches. As always, he asked Cleitus and Leonidas to tell him what we’d done.
‘Alexander downed his opponent with the Harmodius Blow,’ Cleitus the sword master said. He wasn’t a clever man, and his flattery rarely went well with the prince. He was a good swordsman, though.
‘Every idiot knows how to do it,’ Alexander spat. He stood by himself, arms across his chest, the very image of adolescent anger.
Aristotle looked around. I fancied he caught my eye – perhaps it was just my imagination. ‘Victors should be gracious,’ Aristotle said.
‘I am gracious,’ Alexander retorted.
‘No,’ said Aristotle. ‘You are not.’
Their eyes locked, and all the other boys shuffled away.
‘You desire to be Achilles? You strive always to be first and best?’ His old tutor, Lysimachus of Acarnia, who had complete control of the younger Alexander before Aristotle came, called himself Phoenix, called Hephaestion Patroclus and called Alexander Achilles. Aristotle was human enough to resent the old tutor and his lickspittle ways.
Alexander looked away in angry silence.
Aristotle stepped closer. ‘Which boy did you put down with this Harmodius Blow, Prince?’
Alexander shrugged. ‘It does not matter.’
‘Ptolemy?’ Aristotle asked.
‘No,’ Alexander spat. ‘He . . .’ Then he lapsed into silence.
‘It was me, lord,’ Black Cleitus said. He was rueful. ‘Had it coming.’
Aristotle looked at Cleitus. Then at me.
Leonidas’s straight back and flared nostrils suggested that he was none too pleased by this intrusion of the academic into the athletic. ‘Held the boy’s hair. He was decent enough.’
Aristotle looked around again, like a good hunting dog catching the scent of a distant and elusive prey.
He looked at Amyntas, with a heavy bandage around his temples. The same bandage that Cleitus wore. ‘Who fought Amyntas?’ he asked.
‘I did,’ I allowed.
‘The same way?’ Aristotle asked, splaying two fingers on Amyntas’s head and measuring the blow.
I shrugged.
Alexander flushed.
Aristotle laughed. ‘Alexander, excellence lies in being better than other men – not in other men being worse than you. I can read you like a book, boy.’
Alexander looked as if he might cry.
What is hard to explain in this schoolboy reminiscence is that I could understand. Alexander felt I had betrayed him. He’d rescued me from Leonidas only to have me go first and throw his blow – a blow he’d risen in the dawn to practise.
So I stepped right up next to the prince and bowed my head. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
Alexander didn’t look at me. ‘No. I was not behaving well.’ His voice was choked, as if he’d just heard that a favourite was dead.
‘I’m sorry anyway,’ I said.
My pater used to say that if you truly want to know a man, spend a week with him in the wilderness. No one can hide his true self from the companions of the hunt. Freezing rain, stinging nettles, a bad cut from a spear-point, an unwanted offer of sex from one of the oldsters – all the tests of young manhood are waiting in the hills and deep woods, and that’s before you meet the boar or the wolf with nothing between you but an ash staff and a few inches of cold iron.
A few days after the sword incident, Erygius and Laodon came from Pella with some of the king’s companions – his Hetaeroi, friends and bodyguards and inner council of state all in one – to take us hunting. It was a test and a vacation all in one.
Macedonian nobles do not hunt like Greek aristocrats, and despite the many ways we copy them, in hunting we have our own ways.
We use dogs to locate the quarry, and other dogs to run it down, and we follow our dogs on horseback. Depending on terrain and the animal we’re after, we stay mounted with spears or dismount with spears. The height of courage is to take a boar on foot. Greeks do it the same way, but they don’t use horses, and that’s slower. And they don’t use a double-bladed axe to finish the boar, and that’s just foolishness. Trying to finish a boar with a spear is . . . well, it is a good way to reduce your supply of available noblemen.
It was autumn, and we went north and west, into Lychnitis. Lychnitis is beautiful – low hills that rise gently into mountains, and old forests that men have never cut, not even in the age of heroes. There’re trees lying on the forest floor that are as thick as a horse, and others as wide as a man is tall, so that to clamber over them is like climbing a low hill – and they’re just the downed trees. Giants rise on every side, green temples to the immortal gods, and every animal thrives there – the great deer, the elk and the boar. And the wolves.