Thaïs had, by this time, heard the rumour of what Olympias had said to Alexander. He’d told Hephaestion, and Hephaestion told some favourite, and the word got around. It seemed to me hubris, at the time, and perhaps blasphemy – but it also seemed possible, at least at a distance.

From Troy we marched north to join up with Parmenio. He’d met up with his own garrison forces in Asia, and together we had almost fifty thousand men.

Memnon, the Greek mercenary, was no longer in command of the Persian forces. Arsites, the satrap of Phrygia, was gathering men, and he placed the brilliant Memnon in a subordinate position.

But Memnon had already done us serious damage. He’d retaken most of the towns of the Asian Troas – Lampsacus and Parium closed their gates to us. We had less than a month’s cash on hand, and everyone in Asia seemed to know it. Outside Lampsacus, the philosopher Anaximenes told Alexander and Parmenio point blank that he’d only pay a certain amount of a bribe to get us to leave his city alone – he knew that we didn’t have time to lay a siege. And he was right. We took his bribe and marched on, and our army was getting hungry.

Thaïs went to work. That night, with Anaximenes’s taunts burning in our ears, she sat by lamplight in my pavilion and wrote a dozen letters to leading men in Priapus, the next town on our route. And she sent Strakos and Polystratus with a dozen men.

It was her first attempt at a clandestine operation, and it ran well enough. They entered the city before the gates closed, and contacted her friends – the men of Alexander’s party, or in one case Leonatus, a Spartan exile and one of her personal friends. But this time, they were not simply gathering information.

Polystratus took twenty of my grooms and seized a gatehouse.

Strakos took half a dozen thugs and murdered three men – the leaders of the pro-Persian faction fingered by Leonatus.

The next day, when Alexander rode at the head of his brilliant escort to the town of Priapus, they opened their gates and welcomed him as their liberator. Alexander’s mood, already dangerously elated, rose to new heights. He said things – wild things – praised the citizens for their ‘Olympian wisdom’ and other flights of fanciful rhetoric that left them unmoved and apprehensive that they had backed the wrong horse. Strakos and Polystratus grinned like fiends.

Thaïs looked tired and stressed.

Just north of us, the Persians were gathering an army. Arsites was a capable commander, and he had a good name, and the Phrygians rallied to him in good numbers. Thaïs thought he had thirty-five thousand men, and Parmenio, with lower estimates, still thought he had twenty-five thousand real troops and another four thousand useless levies.

We were apprehensive. There were rumours that the Persian fleet was at sea, and since the Great King had just reconquered Aegypt and had absolute control of Tyre and Cyprus, too, we expected that he could put three hundred and fifty triremes on the water to our hundred and sixty. And his would have better mariners, or better than all but the contingent from Athens.

Worse, the money situation was so acute that we had a hard time buying provisions even with the willing help of the people of Priapus. We were down to ten talents of gold.

Parmenio was suspiciously willing to support the king.

Alexander had one simple answer – we were going to go along the coast by quick marches and force the satrap to battle and pay the troops and the campaign with the spoils of his camp.

It was becoming plain that all the Persians had to do to defeat us was refuse the battle.

What was worse, it began to look to me as if Parmenio was pushing the king to commit to whatever battle was offered. I didn’t like the way it was discussed in the headquarters tent, or the undertone of satisfaction to their predictions of doom.

And at the public officers’ meetings, to which Alexander was now always invited, Parmenio deferred to the king in everything, allowing him to make the operational decisions and encouraging his wildest flights of fancy. We were meeting on the portico of the Temple of Athena in Priapus when Alexander, looking at a dozen Phrygian cavalry just captured by his Thracians, commented that if these were the vaunted Asians, he could probably rout them with just his bodyguard.

Parmenio nodded. ‘Lord, you and your friends are all that will be needed – one gallant charge – like Achilles on the plains of Ilium. Scatter the Medes and win undying glory.’

Alexander flushed, laughed and tried not to look pleased by the apparent praise.

I wondered if Parmenio was contemplating using the Persians as a weapon to murder the king.

SIXTEEN

Arsites chose to await us at the Granicus river.

It was like a miracle from the gods. We needed a battle. If the Persians had retreated and refused battle – well, I assume that Alexander would have done something. Or perhaps not – perhaps the gods took a hand, and Arsites, like some actor in a tragedy, had no choice but to stand and fight.

On the other hand, Alexander, for all his flights of fancy, understood the moral vector of war far better than Parmenio. Arsites was the satrap, and Alexander was marching about Asia in his leopard skin, taking cities and threatening to be taken seriously, and that embarrassed the satrap. He wanted to beat Alexander to win glory with the King of Kings. If you look at it, you can see wheels within wheels – our wheels of intrigue, their wheels of intrigue. The gods must laugh.

Their army was considerably smaller than ours, but Arsites had some superb cavalry – easily as good as ours, as you will hear. And he had Memnon – probably the best soldier in Asia, and many men alive today say he was the equal of Alexander in brilliance. Luckily for us, Arsites hated Memnon and ignored his advice.

We had problems of our own.

We got a late start out of Priapus – because Philotas bickered with Amyntas about the dispositions of the scouts. Six hours after marching out of Priapus, near the end of the marching day, late afternoon and the summer sun boiling us in our breastplates and helmets. I was virtually asleep, letting my new mare pick her way.

Suddenly there was a disturbance at the head of the column. Paeonian cavalry scouts galloped up, and their dust moved slowly across us after they drew rein. They were so close to me that I could hear them report that the Persian army was on the move and would probably beat us to the Granicus. The elder of the two reported in bad Greek that the ground was favourable to the Persians, with a ridge dominating the river ford. They reported to Amyntas (who in my book should have been as far forward as his courage allowed) and Philotas together.

I listened with mounting fury as Philotas reacted carefully, after a long conversation with Amyntas about the dispositions of the scouts. They lost minute after minute.

Alexander was too far to the rear in the column, and the column was too narrow and too long for him to come up. I wasn’t even sure he knew what was happening. He was with the main body of the cavalry – well back from the advance guard. Simply by the luck of rotation, I was at the front with the squadron assigned to provide an armoured fist to support the light-armed scouts.

It was like physical pain, listening to the cautious ‘professionals’ debate how to move up the narrow road and where to place the army. In short, Philotas conceded immediately that Arsites would gain the Granicus river line, and began to send Amyntas’s scouts to the right and left, looking for ground on which we could camp.

I knew exactly what Alexander would do – what I would do. I wanted to lunge for the river and beat Arsites there. I hadn’t seen the crossing, but it was not high water at any of the other streams we’d crossed – and I assumed that we would be able either to get there first, or fight our way across in the face of their vanguard before their main army came up.