And then there was Calixeinna, who was tall and willowy, with a waist so small that I could have put my hands around it, lips that were the colour of dawn, hair that was a particular blushing shade of red-blond, and heavy, full breasts as yet untouched by age. Her hips were wide and her legs long, and she was perfect.

While her women shrieked and played, she swam in the small pool, really only about three times the length of her body, the water ice cold and black in the early sun under the great holm oak that shadowed the spring. When she emerged, it was like the rising of the sun, and when she reached her arms back to wring out her hair . . .

Oh, youth.

She played for a while with a turtle by the edge of the pool, and it occurred to me that she knew Alexander was there. I didn’t know much about women, but I knew they didn’t play naked by pools nearly as much as adolescent boys thought they did.

When she was done with the turtle, she lay on a rock, naked. The other nymphs continued to laugh and scream, and the longer I watched, the more like a performance it seemed.

Eventually, I had to wonder how often it had been repeated, and by what mechanism Alexander had been informed of it, and whether he’d been to the performance before.

Eventually, she put on her chiton – so prettily that one breast was free while a lost pin was found in the grass – and she and the Persian girl skipped away down the hill, arm in arm, and the other two stayed for a few minutes, filling jars.

I snuck back to my resting place, and went straight to sleep.

A little later, Alexander wakened me, looking as if he’d had a religious revelation. Then, in broad daylight, we climbed into the walled compound and went to the slaves’ quarters, where we sat to breakfast with the slaves – bad wine and stale bread and a little cheese and some dry figs. They all looked at us, of course. Alexander just smiled.

And we were in our usual places when Aristotle opened his class. The philosopher actually got several sentences into his lecture before he realised that we were supposed to be in hiding.

He was pleased with us.

We were pleased with ourselves.

And I never told Alexander that I had watched Calixeinna bathe. I think he’d have killed me.

My point is, he was very smitten, in his deeply self-controlled and selfish way.

I missed most of the by-play, because the next weeks were the weeks I was off drilling in the late afternoons with Polystratus. But Genny told me everything – sometimes too much of everything. Genny could chatter gossip at me even when her breathing was coming in gasps and her hands were locked behind my back and her nails were cutting into my muscles – ‘and then – ah! – she said – ah! – that he . . .’

It’s good to know that, even as king, I can raise a laugh.

I don’t remember what occasioned it. We hardly ever boxed – it was considered too Greek and effeminate – but when we did we wrapped our hands. That helped me – my left hand was ugly, and I was young, and having it wrapped helped steady me.

Old Leonidas stood wearing his chlamys and holding a heavy staff of cornel wood. I happened to be the first page out the barracks door with my hands wrapped. And Amyntas came out second.

‘Ptolemy, son of Lagus,’ Leonidas snapped. ‘Against Amyntas . . .’ His eyes wandered, and he shook his head. ‘No. A younger boy. Philip the Black.’

‘Oh, I’ll be gentle with him,’ Amyntas said. ‘He’s ugly, but maybe if I roll him over . . .’ He guffawed, and many of the other oldsters laughed.

Alexander looked hurt. And he gave me a look – the whole burden of his eyes. In effect, he said do it.

I must give the prince this – he was horrified when the other pages began to turn against me.

Hephaestion relished my discomfiture. ‘He’s the only oldster who competes against little boys,’ he said to Leonidas. ‘Make him fight Amyntas.’

‘Hephaestion!’ snapped Alexander.

‘I’d love to face Amyntas,’ I said. ‘But I’m no match for him.’

Amyntas laughed. ‘Put a bag over your head, Ptolemy!’ he said, and his little set laughed, but the other pages – especially Philip the Red, long ago turned from my tormentor to my friend – looked embarrassed.

Leonidas didn’t like it, but he put me in the ring of wands against Amyntas.

Losing can become a habit.

Amyntas put a fist in my gut and instead of twisting away – I had stomach muscles like bands of steel and it wasn’t that bad – I folded around his punch and lay down.

But when I rolled over, he was pushing his hips, pretending to fuck me for his little audience.

I did my very best to hide my rage. I’d had some practice, since the night with the Illyrians, at hiding my thoughts. I hung my head, rubbed my hip and squared off.

Leonidas struck Amyntas with his staff. ‘Don’t be a gadfly, boy,’ he said.

Amyntas turned on me, eager to have me on the ground again. But he stumbled as he took up his guard – the will of the gods and sheer hubris – and I had all the time in the world to strike him.

I needed it. Losing is a habit. Covering up is a habit, too – fighting defensively, waiting for the blow that will allow you to lose with honour, or at least some excuse and a minimum of pain. That’s how low I’d fallen – even after weeks of practice with Polystratus, faced with a real competitor, I was ready to lie down, I think, until that stumble. Ares was good to me.

He stumbled, and his chin came to my fist.

Instead of defending himself, he lashed out with his left and caught me on the nose, and it hurt. He didn’t break it – but he hurt me, and I saw red. Those two things saved me from myself – his stumble and that haze of pain.

Let’s make this brief. I beat him to a pulp. I broke his nose and blackened both of his eyes and made him beg me for mercy.

None of the other boys said a thing. Leonidas stood back and let it happen, and Aristotle . . .

. . . caught my eye and gave me the smallest nod of approbation.

When he was begging, I let him go. I had him under my left arm, his head locked against my body, and I was beating him with my elbow and fist. My hand hurt.

Leonidas waved for two boys to carry Amyntas off.

‘Since you are feeling better,’ he said, ‘you may face Prince Alexander.’

If losing is a habit, so is winning. Alexander always won – both because none of us wanted to beat him, and because he was awfully fast. And practised like a mad thing.

But that morning, in that place, I was bound to try. I was drinking water and I almost choked at the announcement. Cleitus the Black grinned – not an adversarial grin, but the grin of a man who has been there. So I grinned back, and just at that moment, the gods sent Calixeinna. She was not entering the palaestra – that would have been an appalling breach of etiquette – but she paused, going down the steps from the exedra, about thirty paces away. Owing to the way the columns and the buildings aligned, I’m pretty sure I was the only boy she could see.

She smiled at me. It was a beautiful, radiant, confident smile, and it wasn’t a brief flash.

Then she turned and went down the steps.

I shrugged off my chlamys and went to meet the prince.

My shoulders hurt and my left hand was a dead thing, and I was back to being embarrassed by the scar tissue on my left breast – competitors are supposed to be beautiful. But when the stick came up between us, I didn’t give ground but jabbed with my left – over and over, my left fist like an annoying horsefly.

My fourth or fifth jab connected. Alexander’s head snapped back and his lip was split, blood already welling. He was stunned, and I stepped in and gave him my right to the gut, jabbed a few more times, making some contacts, and then my right to the exposed side of his head and down he went.

The other pages were silent.