God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    And desperate men, of course.
    We made our hunting camp in a long clearing that kings of Macedon had used for their hunting camps since the gods walked the earth. It was a defensible hilltop, high enough to give warning of approaches, low enough that the boys and the slaves didn’t have to go too far for the water that flowed across the northern base of the hill from the spring. The land about was scrubby, but rose to the west and north – to the north the camp was dominated by the first low mountain of Paeonia, and to the west the trees grew and grew, so that the Illyrians said a squirrel could jump from tree to tree from the hunting camp all the way to Hyperborea, where Apollo went to sleep.
    The air was as clean and cold as a mother’s reproach. The animals were not afraid of men, and came right into camp to steal food. Our horses were skittish unless one of the boys was with them all the time. This was just a year after Alexander gained Bucephalus – a fine horse, though legend has improved him like it has polished his master. In fact, the prince had three big mounts for hunting and a palfrey for riding about. We all did – no one horse could keep going all day over that country, and we knocked them up badly. And that week, the rain fell as if Artemis disapproved of our slaughter – on and on, a light rain that never seemed to end, and in that kind of weather, horses get sick, go lame – die – as fast as children die