Later, I gathered that the yogurt cost me a gold daric. The cost of a good donkey, at home.

Bubores was delighted by the provender, and deeply troubled. Astibus was less concerned, but he kept looking at the rain as he chewed his three-day-old bread, and both of them were damp and less than lively company.

Polystratus made room for Strakos, who pushed in under the shields like a dancer, carefully avoiding putting undue pressure on the supports or shaking water off the shields.

‘What news?’ Polystratus asked the Angelos.

Strakos laughed. ‘Darius has a huge army, and it is still raining,’ he said. He got his cloak off and threw it out into the rain.

Bubores looked at me from under his eyebrows. ‘It’s the wrath of the gods,’ he said quietly.

Astibus rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t start that crap again,’ he said. ‘It’s bad weather, and it is just as bad for the Persians.’

Bubores shrugged. ‘I know what I know,’ he muttered.

‘What do you know?’ I asked. Bubores had a reputation in Aegema as a seer and a bit of an astrologer – self-taught, but still respected.

He rocked back on his heels. He could sit on his heels more comfortably than any man I’d ever seen. ‘There’s a blood offence against the gods,’ he said firmly. ‘It must be expiated.’

This wasn’t just bad morale. This was a serious accusation. Ignoring this kind of thing is what got Parmenio into trouble. ‘Have you spoken to the king?’ I asked.

Bubores shrugged. ‘It is the king’s to answer,’ he said in his deep voice.

Astibus slapped his shoulder. ‘You and your dark premonitions! At Halicarnassus, you said—’

‘It’s the rain,’ Strakos said. ‘The Thracians are openly mutinous. Last night I heard a group of them preparing to desert to Darius.’

Polystratus nodded. ‘There’s men among the Paeonian cavalry who are suggesting the same.’

Polystratus handed me a cup of hot wine, and I drank it – rich with honey, the nectar of the gods. I passed it around. It was my job to tell them that this was all nonsense, and we’d be triumphant in the end, and I was just framing my reply when Cleomenes pointed to the beach below us.

‘Look at him,’ Cleomenes said, awe in his voice.

Alexander had ordered that his four-horse chariot be hitched on the beach. The horses were restless in the rain and thunder – but even in the rain, they gleamed with gold and animal magnificence. Alexander was practically at our feet – as I say, we were eating our barley in a dry cave on a steep hillside in the first light. The rain lashed us, the wind blew straight out to sea from the land, and the king’s pavilion was directly below mine.

Alexander emerged from it naked except for a wreath of gold. He had a good body – his legs were a little short for perfection, and his shoulders were a little narrow, but he was always in top shape, every ridge on his abdomen perfectly defined, and he never minded being seen naked. Now he leaped into his chariot and whipped his horses along the beach, and as he drove them along the front of the army, men stood up, despite the rain, and cheered him.

By the gods, he was the king.

He looked like a god, and the rain didn’t change that. Had he driven in a sodden purple cloak, he’d have looked like a fool, but naked he looked like Poseidon’s son, or Zeus’s, as much a creature of the weather as the horses.

I will never forget the sight. He was a god. What more can I say?

From the far end of the beach – the end closest to the Persians, about twenty-five stades away – he turned the chariot and drove it back along the army at a dead gallop, the wheels throwing sand, the horse’s hooves shaking the earth, so that we could feel his passage upon our ridge. His hair blew out behind him despite the rain.

And then he turned the chariot – right into the sea.

He drove his chariot, horses and all, until the horses were swimming. The weight of their harness dragged them down. They panicked when they were too deep to save themselves – there was a steep drop just off the beach, and the whole chariot, car, team, gold and all, vanished into the dark line of water just off the beach.

The whole beach was stunned into silence. We sat there. Thirty thousand men. Men coughed, and it disturbed the silence. That’s how quiet we were.

The rain stopped.

And just beyond the line where the dark water met the light water, a blond head, dark with wet and crowned with bright green kelp, surfaced.

The sun broke through the clouds.

I was there. The sun came out, and turned his hair to a fiery gold as he walked up the beach.

It was the greatest, most perfect sacrifice I have ever seen, and Poseidon gave us his favour immediately. I think of it every time I make sacrifice. Impiety is for the foolish, lad. I was there.

The army stood as one man, as if it was drill, and bellowed our cheers to Apollo Helios and to Zeus, and to Alexander, son of the gods, crowned by Poseidon.

Bubores was beaming like the sun, pumping his fist in the air, with Astibus pounding him on the back, and even Strakos, who never betrayed emotion, was grinning from ear to ear.

And then, in the light of the warm sun, we donned our sodden equipment and we marched towards Darius.

We marched out of the defile where we’d camped in a column of files. Alexander’s plan was as simple as one of Parmenio’s, with the difference that Alexander played with his plans constantly, so that a string of messengers altered our dispositions all the time.

I was at Issus, but my Issus was utterly different from everyone else’s. I’ve heard Alexander’s tale of the day, and Philotas’s, and Parmenio’s and Kineas’s, and Niceas’s – by Ares, I’ve heard a hundred versions and heard most of them told fifty times! And never heard the same story.

Darius was, as Parmenio expected, waiting for us at the Pindarus river. He had brought his finest troops, mounted and foot – we hadn’t had to contend with them at Granicus. He also had almost twelve thousand Greek mercenaries. They were notthe very best men – we had most of the best men in our army by then, or they lay dead. They were lower-class Greeks wearing the panoply, or Asians trained to look like Greeks. But they had Spartan and Athenian officers. Since everyone knows what happened at Issus, I won’t ruin my story if I say that those second-rate ‘Greeks’ almost wrecked our centre, and had they been Memnon’s men led by Memnon, I’d be dead. And so would everyone else from Macedon. Even as it was . . .

We went forward from camp in a column of files. We could see the Persian line by mid-morning, formed right across the beach where the beach and the farms of the plain were about twenty stades wide from the steep hills to the sea on our left. As the plain widened, the king kept ordering us to form to the right, and to double out into our battle formation. My taxeis was right in the middle of our line – the most junior position – and so we formed thirty-two deep by sixty wide early in the morning, when we were clear of the narrowest bottleneck; by the time we reached the Persian line, we were in normal order and just sixteen deep and one hundred and twenty wide.

Around noon, we were less than five stades from the Persians, and their line glittered with gold.

Alexander ordered us to halt and cook lunch. We had lost our baggage, remember – we’d lost all our slaves and all of our heavy equipment. What we hadn’t lost was our mess kettles, and old soldiers know that a hot meal matters, so most of my men, for instance, had gathered a dozen sticks before stepping off, and tied them inside their shields. We had food in minutes, our fires rising like sacrifices – or pyres.

The Persians didn’t even cross the river to scout us.

That made them seem cowardly. In retrospect, Darius had a polyglot army and he didn’t trust his commanders to cooperate, and now that I’ve had that experience, I feel for him, but at the time it made us confident.