‘Leave me!’ Alexander roared.

‘No!’ Hephaestion roared back.

They glared at each other.

‘Lord, your camp is full of vultures in silk and you have boys at your gate keeping men at bay. That needs to be fixed. It makes you appear weak.’ I bowed my head.

Alexander was crying.

Cleitus – Black Cleitus – caught me outside the pavilion and embraced me.

‘What in Hades is happening here?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘I just obey,’ he said. ‘He’s getting harder and harder to handle and he has all these new friends and a lot of useless tits.’ He looked around, clearly afraid he’d be overheard.

‘And he swore to everyone that he’d solve the Gordian Knot, today. The prophecy says that he who solves it will be Lord of all Asia,’ Hephaestion put in.

I made a face, and Thaïs giggled.

Cleitus looked at me. ‘What?’ he said. ‘It’s the prophecy.’

‘Was Cyrus the Great Lord of Asia?’ I asked. ‘Darius? Xerxes?’

Cleitus nodded and looked around. ‘Oh. You know, sometimes you remind me of fucking Aristotle, Ptolemy. With your snide laugh and all.’

‘I’m not well loved today,’ I admitted. ‘Was that Callisthenes I saw in the Military Journal tent?’

Cleitus nodded. ‘We call it the “School of Lies”.’

Ouch.

‘The Military Journal is now for public consumption in Greece and Macedon,’ Cleitus said bitterly. ‘So its contents now reflect our unvarying path to victory.’

‘Make that up yourself?’ I asked.

Cleitus barked his laugh.

‘Come on, and I’ll find you a place to camp,’ he said. ‘Maybe now that you’re back, everything will be all right.’

Cleaner and more richly dressed, I was in the middle of a long procession of soldiers, sycophants and priests processing up the ridge to the temple at the top. At the head of the procession was Alexander, who looked as scared as I’d ever seen him.

My invitation to attend had come too late to allow me to be up at the front with the other philoi. I assumed that was done on purpose. But Alexander looked sobad when I saw him that I began pushing forward through the crowds on the steps. I had Polystratus and his new sidekick Theodore at my heels, and we pushed pretty effectively. Most people got out of our way.

I caught up with the king at the base of the temple steps. His eyes passed over me without recognition. The whites showed all the way around his eyes, and if he’d been a horse, he’d have been on the edge of bolting.

Hephaestion caught my eye, and he was desperate, somehow.

I pushed through to the king’s side.

Alexander looked at me. ‘Ptolemy!’ he said.

I touched his shoulder. He didn’t always like to be touched, but sometimes he did, like a nervous horse when you need to get a pebble out of his hoof. When he didn’t flinch, I put my arm around his shoulder.

‘Cyrus the Great,’ I said. ‘Xerxes,’ I added softly.

He looked at me.

‘It’s all horseshit,’ I said. ‘Something to draw the credulous.’

Alexander had the oddest habit of clinging to superstitious nonsense – as if his mighty brain took rests from reason.

He glared at me, but I smiled resolutely, and he finally returned my smile and straightened his shoulders. I took away my arm and he looked around. In a moment, he was through the great bronze doors and into the temple.

Well – you know the story. Everyone does. There must have been five thousand men and women there to see it, crushing so close we could simply have trampled the Gordian Knot.

The old wagon – it wasn’t a chariot at all, but a four-wheeled wagon – had a long draught pole attached to the harness bar by a massive and very complex knot. The knot was done in an ancient rawhide, and whoever had done it – about eight hundred years earlier, was my guess – whoever had done it had had a lot of skill, and both ends of the rawhide strip were buried in the knot, and the rawhide, like all rawhide, shrank as it dried, so that the fastening was almost like a solid lump of rawhide, shiny and dense.

The king looked at it for a long time, and people began to mutter.

Alexander was no longer nervous. Of course not. In his head, this counted as combat, I’m sure. Now he was cool and professional.

‘Tell me the prophecy again,’ he said, aloud.

‘He who opens the Gordian Knot shall likewise be Lord of Asia,’ a priest intoned.

There was a buzz from the crowd. Alexander, the performer, waited it out.

They fell silent.

‘So it doesn’t really matter how I open it,’ he said. His eyes glittered.

The priests talked among themselves.

Alexander turned, drew his sword and slashed down, as hard as he would in cutting an armoured opponent.

The ancient rawhide shattered into a thousand dry fragments, and the yoke-pole crashed to the floor.

Alexander lifted his sword. People looked stunned, and he smiled. ‘I do not intend to take Asia by my wits,’ he said, ‘but by my sword.’

That night, I attended my first command meeting in almost a year. Parmenio was there, and Coenus and Philotas, but many men I knew were gone. Nearchus had his own command in Phrygia, Seleucus was sick, Alexander of Lyncestis was under arrest, Antigonus One-Eye was off in Paphlagonia.

There were new officers and, for the first time, Asian officers – mostly Phrygians, mixing with the Greeks and the Macedonians.

Alexander came in and we all saluted, and then he went to the head of a table on which lay a set of itineraries for the roads to the coast.

‘Darius is in the field with sixty thousand men,’ he said. He smiled. ‘It is my desire to bring him to battle at the earliest opportunity, smash his army and lay claim to Asia. One field battle, and we will be the masters here.’

There was an almost imperceptible murmur.

‘I’m sending Amphoterus to the coast to take command of the fleet in the Hellespont,’ he said. The gentleman in question bowed. Alexander smiled at us, and I knew he was about to say something meant to shock.

‘And then I’m cutting the cord, gentlemen. The way to defeat the Persian fleet is to hold all of their land bases. We’ve made a good start. This summer, we’re going for the coast of Syria. If Darius remains as indolent as he has been, we’ll work our way down the coast to Aegypt and close the sea to him for ever.’ He looked around, expecting opposition.

He got it. Parmenio shook his head. ‘You’ll be out of touch with Macedon, and if Amphoterus is beaten, we could lose Pella. What if Athens rises? Sparta? What if—’

Alexander’s grin was a wolf ’s grin. ‘Pella is not worth the effort of defending if we can win Asia, gentlemen.’

‘It’s our home!’ Philotas said.

Alexander shook his head. ‘It is a huddle of mud huts at the edge of the wilderness. We have Ephesus. We have Sardis. We have Halicarnassus.’

‘We hadMiletus,’ someone said aloud.

‘We have Gordia, too,’ Parmenio said. ‘Lucky us.’

Alexander looked around. ‘We are here to conquer Asia. I have every confidence that Antipater can hold Macedon behind us, and in the worst case, if he fails’ – and here Alexander’s confidence sounded more godlike than brash – ‘if he fails, well, we’ll return and take it back next season.’

Parmenio shook his head. ‘Syria? How do you plan to get there?’

Alexander’s smile grew softer. ‘Ankyra – and the Cilician Gates.’

Parmenio put his hands on his hips. Now I saw where Philotas got that habit. ‘It cannot be done,’ he said. ‘A goat path through tall mountains. Fifty men could hold us for days.’

Alexander nodded. ‘It will be glorious,’ he said.

We lingered at Ankyra while the Prodromoi went far to the east, looking for Darius, looking for news, and while contingents from all of western Asia came in to make terms with the conqueror. I found their terms too lenient, and most of them were allowed to go with little beyond a promise of submission. The king was in a hurry, and when he was in a hurry, he didn’t bother with minutiae like the conquest of eastern Phrygia.