God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great by Christian Cameron Read Free Book Online Page B

He had a long Keltoi sword.
    Laodon tossed it to me. ‘Wipe your face, lad,’ he said.
    I wiped it with my chlamys. I didn’t have anything else. I got some of the blood off my hands and arms, but it stuck in my arm hair.
    ‘I have to know, boy – did you make camp?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes. I’m . . . I’m looking for the prince. Those two found me – I slipped them.’ It sounded foolish. ‘I was following them.’
    Laodon nodded. ‘Well done. If the prince is alive.’
    We collected the dead men’s ponies and headed south.
    I had a sword.
    Polystratus hadn’t found the prince. He found us, instead, coming down yet another ridge. Laodon sent him off on a new angle, and sent me back to camp, headed almost due south.
    I found Hephaestion, less than two stades from camp and blissfully unaware that the world had gone to shit. Let me take a moment to say that Hephaestion and I were never close friends. He was Alexander’s favourite – his best friend, almost from birth. Alexander’s partiality blinded him to Hephaestion’s many failings. That’s the nicest way I can put it.
    Hephaestion was a bitch queen, and Alexander loved him because he reminded him of his evil mother – that’s what I really think. And yet, to be fair, Hephaestion and I stood up for each other a number of times. He was loyal, and that alone was worth a lot.
    Hephaestion panicked. Granted, his form of panic was to gallop off downhill to the south and west, looking for Alexander, abandoning the two younger pages he was supposed to be riding herd on – Cleomenes and Pyrrhus, a pair of useless sprites. He galloped off, and there I was with two eleven-year-olds.
    Grinning like imps.
    ‘It’s an adventure, isn’t it, sir?’ said Cleomenes.
    ‘Shut up, you two.’ They had ponies. ‘Can you two find your way back to camp?’
    ‘Oh, yes, sir!’ Pyrrhus said in the child’s tone that conveys the very opposite of what’s said.
    ‘Oh, no, sir!’ said Cleomenes, who’d felt my wrath before. ‘It’s . . . that way, I think.’ He pointed off towards Macedon, wrong by a quarter of the earth.
    ‘Stay with me, then,’ I barked.
    Want to rid yourself of fear? Taking care of others is the key. With Laodon I was the weaker – with Cleomenes and Pyrrhus I was the strongest. It might have been comic if it hadn’t been so forceful. I led them back over the first ridge and down to the treeline – and then I made them dismount while I looked at the camp.
    All I saw was armed pages looking nervous. So I gathered my charges and rode hard into camp.
    Philip was unable to keep still. ‘That’s all you found? Two brats?’
    Then he saw the blood on my arms.
    ‘I found Laodon. He’s looking for the prince.’ I was handed a cup and I took it, drank from it and spluttered – it was neat wine.
    ‘Thank the gods.’ Philip paused, met my eye. ‘Will you . . . go back out?’
    Command is hard. You have to make people do things that you could do better yourself – that might get them killed. Philip the Red, one of my many foes among the pages, was asking my permission to send me back out.
    I finished the wine. ‘I need to change horses,’ I said.
    Philip nodded. A slave ran for the horse lines.
    ‘Nice sword,’ Philip said.
    ‘Laodon did all the work,’ I managed. Suddenly we were men, talking about men’s things, and I was damned if I would boast like a boy.
    Philip nodded. ‘I’ve got archers in the woods,’ he said.
    ‘I got in the north way without being challenged,’ I said as my second-string horse, a big mare that I called Medea, was brought in.
    Philip gave me a hand up on to Medea’s broad back – as if I were his peer. ‘I’ll look at it,’ he said.
    I took a different angle this time, and the shadows were long. In half an hour or less the red orb would be lost behind the flank of the mountain. Already it was cold – and time for the prince and his hunting mentor to be back.
    I missed Poseidon immediately. I’d named the