Antipater raised a hand. ‘Listen: you think we are enemies – we are not. May I do you a favour?’

I was instantly alert. ‘If you will,’ I quipped.

He nodded. ‘The king is selling land. We need the money for Asia. I have four farms – all bordering yours. Between Europos and the Axios river – prime land, and twenty stades of royal forest on the river.’

I nodded. I knew the land – farms which actually broke up our holdings along the Axios. They were meant to – to keep landowners like us from becoming regional warlords.

As if.

‘For fifty talents of gold, I’ll see to it that you own them,’ Antipater said. ‘It’s for the war in Asia – none of it will stick to my fingers.’

That’s twelve years of all the profits of all our land, I thought. My lands made me about four talents a year – that’s without lots of other profits, like sales of horses and slaves, fish from the river and other projects. In fact, I could depend on a little more than ten talents of gold a year.

‘You have last year’s accounts for the farms?’ I asked.

Antipater shook his head. ‘Most aristocrats would just buy them – to have the land.’

‘For fifty talents?’ I asked. ‘Most aristocrats must be fools, then.’

Antipater got up and went to the vast closet of scrolls that represented the tax documents of the empire. Scrolls sat in baskets. Two slaves sat at a nearby desk and sorted outgoing and incoming scrolls.

He pulled down the central region basket, went through the scrolls and shook his head. ‘There’s no record.’ He shrugged. ‘Somebody forgot to note it. I imagine the farms and forest are worth . . . a talent a year. Perhaps more.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll talk to the king, but I doubt I’ll offer more than thirty, and even that is more to help the war effort than because the land is worth it.’

Antipater raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re going to bargain with the king?’ he asked.

I smiled and left him. Again, I mention this because to understand us – me and Alexander and Parmenio and Antipater – you need to understand who Alexander was – and who I was. And how important it was, even when I was in power, to manage my estates well.

The king had all the tax documents, of course. Antipater didn’t know the king – I did. If his precious war in Asia depended on finding money, I knew that Alexander would become an overnight expert at funding. And he did.

‘Antipater tells me you will buy the Axios estates,’ he said, as soon as I was admitted.

Well, well.

‘For thirty-five talents,’ I said.

Alexander sat back. ‘Perdiccas gaveme ten talents yesterday.’

I nodded – taken aback and trying not to show it. ‘What does he get for it?’ I asked.

Alexander made a face. ‘My undying love? And command of a regiment of pezhetaeroi.’

‘What’re the Military Journal and the Agrianians worth?’ I asked.

Alexander nodded. ‘You’d have to share with Alectus – who I just promoted to the Hetaeroi, as well. Pater always put the best foreigners into the guards – I’m doing the same. We’re going to have ten squadrons of two hundred, and a reserve – Philip’s old men – three more squadrons.’

‘No wonder you need money!’ I said.

Alexander laughed. ‘Fifteen talents for the Agrianians and the Journal.’

‘Undying love?’ I asked.

He looked at Hephaestion, who made a moue. ‘As long as you don’t make any more jokes about me,’ Hephaestion said.

‘None? A steep price, but – Done. I’ll pay fifty talents for the estates. That’s thirty-five for them, and fifteen for you.’

Alexander’s tone lightened. ‘And I’ll have the use of the forest whenever I want it. Yes?’

‘For hunting? Done. Put it in the contract.’ I grinned, and we shook hands.

I took Thaïs home. Sent Heron with my grooms under Polystratus into Pella with fifty talents of gold – almost the whole of my father’s lifetime of savings, gone in an afternoon. On the other hand, Heron said it made him happy.

‘I’ve expected some bandit to come and kill us all for it – for years,’ he said.

Thaïs took another talent and poured money out into her spider’s web of contacts, and more news came back – more and more news.

Darius had ordered a fleet to combine at Miletus, in Asia.

He knew we were coming.

Memnon was raising a major army.

Darius himself was marching east with his household, to face a rebellion in Sogdiana, wherever that was.

Demosthenes was busy cooking trouble. Theban exiles were the new vector of rebellion throughout the league, and they spread like poison. Thaïs’s friends identified them in Corinth and Corcyra and Athens and Miletus.

Thaïs’s friends were electrified by recent events. The destruction of Thebes got rid of the mere hangers-on. It tested some loyalties, but others were either hardened as a stick is hardened in fire, or strengthened by fear.

But the other side – the anti-Macedonian faction, if you will – was also hardening. And since we were poor and Darius of Persia was rich, the mercenaries were all going his way.

I passed the reports on to Hephaestion. Thaïs stayed with me.

We spent months at the farms. I enjoyed putting my organisational skills to work on the royal farms I’d purchased. They’d been mismanaged for fifty years – no one ever manages a farm for the king as well as they’d manage it for themselves.

I appointed Heron’s oldest son to manage two of them, and left him to it, and took the other two for myself. I was determined to breed better horses, and make a killing on them. Or ride them myself. So Poseidon and my new Theban brute Ajax went to stud and passed a very happy winter.

Thaïs and I did too, for a while. She was due after the Winter Feast of Persephone, and she bore me a daughter virtually to the day she’d predicted – but then, she was a priestess of Aphrodite. We called her Eurydike, and she was pretty and plump and had cheeks you just wanted to kiss – or chew on. And thighs – and tiny fingers and toes.

I’ve forgotten to mention young Olympias, my Illyrian foundling. Thaïs took her into her household, and she grew up as a sort of older sister to Eurydike.

I should also mention that Thaïs and I kept separate establishments. Hers was run by old Chalke, a former smith and former slave, because she’d freed her Italiote, Anonius, and he’d returned to Italy. Chalke was old and tough and pretty much unafraid of anything or anyone – he had an eye gone, scars all over his chest – he was the kind of man everyone fears to meet in a dark alley.

Mine was run by Polystratus. Polystratus and Chalke were not friends – more rivals.

I mention this because Thaïs and I lived very separate lives, even after Eurydike was born, and we were too seldom together even when we wanted to be. She was, in many ways, a great lady – a person of as much importance as I was. Twice that winter she went into Pella without me, summoned by the king to deal with matters relating to her web. If I say she had no secrets from me, it’s because she had her private life and I mine. I don’t think that she had any other lovers – I know I didn’t – but I’d learned my lesson. I wasn’t going to ask.

After Eurydike’s birth, she informed me that the goddess required that she be celibate for two months, and that if I would join her in this sacrifice, Eurydike would be a healthier child.

Eurydike never had so much as a bad cold as a child, so I’m guessing that Aphrodite’s an honest goddess. So Thaïs was not in my bed for months after the birth of our daughter, and I saw less of her by day, as well. So I was shocked one day to walk into a barn on my home farm and find her and Bella lifting weights like men. Why was I shocked? And a month later, I found the two of them at the edge of one of my pastures, dancing to Chalke’s pipes, and I lay down and watched them, aching for her and amazed to see the rapidity of her movements, the near perfection of her speed and grace, the coordination of the two women, one black, one white, as they moved, naked, through a bewildering flurry of moves, covered in sweat.