Men nodded.

‘Ares’ spear!’ I cursed. ‘With Barsines?’

‘Barsines is tending to Hephaestion,’ Craterus said, with a world-weary grin.

And then I fainted.

It was three more days before I left my tent again. I couldn’t take a great deal of sun, because of the burns on my head and arms. So I sat with Thaïs, whose fever had broken, fed her tea and learned a little about embroidery. I read to her – at first, the Iliad.But after a day, she looked at me, gave me a wonderful, sad smile and said, ‘No more war, love. Not the Iliad.I’m . . . living in the Iliad.And it isn’t so beautiful, from inside.’ She drank some iced water – provided by Philip.

So I began on the plays of Aristophanes, and we laughed ourselves silly over Lysistrata, the more so as Thaïs claimed descent from the lady herself – the high priestess of Athena in Socrates’ time. Laughter heals, too.

We were laughing – we’d just read:

Lysistrata: By the holy goddesses! You’ll have to make acquaintance with four companies of women, ready for the fray and well armed to boot.

Magistrate: Forward, Scythians, and bind them!

Lysistrata: Forward, my gallant companions; march forth, ye vendors of grain and eggs, garlic and vegetables, keepers of taverns and bakeries, wrench and strike and tear; come, a torrent of invective and insult! (They beat the officers.) Enough, enough! Now retire, never rob the vanquished!

Magistrate: Here’s a fine exploit for my officers!

Lysistrata: Ah, ha! So you thought you had only to do with a set of slave-women! You did not know the ardour that fills the bosom of free-born dames.

Magistrate: Ardour! Yes, by Apollo, ardour enough – especially for the wine-cup!

And for various reasons, the magistrate (that would be me) was laughing too hard to attend to the door of the tent, and the king came in.

Thaïs stopped laughing. Her look made me glance over my shoulder.

Alexander was angry.

‘In all my camp, there are only two voices laughing,’ he said. His voice was like ice, and his disdain was obvious. ‘And I find you reading that hateful play. Disgusting.’

I had to laugh.

His face flamed.

‘Is it hateful because it is against war?’ I asked.

‘Perhaps,’ Thaïs said, ‘it is the notion of women seizing political power?’

Alexander ignored her. ‘If you are well enough to read to her,’ he said, ‘you can be with your troops.’

‘Oh, I’m a well-known malingerer,’ I shot back. ‘I just lie around avoiding my duty, eh?’

It occurred to me that if I was sick and Hephaestion was wounded and Nearchus was up north ruling Lycia, there was no onesupporting the king. Or keeping him out of trouble.

Alexander was so angry that I knew he would say anything – anything– to make me hurt. That’s how he was, when the darkness came on him.

‘Since this bitch came into your life, you have more time for her than for your duty,’ he said.

‘Is that what Hephaestion said to you about Darius’s wife? Or was it about Memnon’s women? I can’t remember.’ I smiled. I was good at this – I’d known him since birth, and if he wanted to trade insults, I was happy to oblige. ‘And how is Barsines? Or is it Banugul this week?’

He hit me. It took me by surprise and I crumpled into Thaïs’s chair, and the chair broke under us.

The left side of my face, where his blow landed, was where I’d got a patch of sand – so it was pebbly, shiny and painful. His punch sloughed off some flesh and I began to bleed.

Alexander stood there, and all the life seemed to go out of his eyes. His shoulders slumped.

I stood up and got Thaïs on to the bed. He turned and strode out of the tent. As soon as I saw that Thaïs was well enough, I pushed my feet into boots and followed him, pushing past Ochrid where he stood with some cowering slaves, throwing a light chlamys over my shoulder. It was hot – Thaïs and I had been sitting naked.

He was moving fast, headed for his own tent. Once there, he would, I suspected, order the hypaspitoi not to admit anyone, and go into the dark.

So I ran. I called his name – once, and then again, and heads turned all over the camp.

He all but ran away from me. He pulled a corner of his cloak over his head and got in between his guards, and Alectus stopped him, clearly meaning to ask him something – the password of the day, no doubt.

I came up.

‘Alexander!’ I shouted at him from an arm’s length away.

‘Do not admit that man!’ Alexander yelled.

I pushed right past the spears. Alectus was utterly loyal – and used enough to the wonderful ways of Macedon that I’m sure he saw me as capable of regicide. So he drew his sword and put himself between me and Alexander.

‘By Olympian Zeus, lord over kings and men, Alexander, if you do not turn and speak to me, I will go home to Macedon and leave you here!’ I shouted at his back.

He paused.

‘I will apologise,’ I said. ‘You should too.’ I paused. ‘You will feel better if you do.’

He turned. ‘Why don’t you say that I mustapologise?’ he asked, his voice crabbed with disjointed emotion. ‘Tell me!’ he insisted.

I shrugged, through Alectus’s sword. ‘You are the king. No one can makeyou apologise.’

Alexander let his cloak fall from his head. He stood up straighter. But he couldn’t meet my eye. ‘It was unworthy of me to . . . hit a wounded man.’

I laughed in his face, pushed past Alectus, who didn’t know what to make of us, and threw my arms around him. ‘That is the lamest apology I’ve ever heard,’ I said. ‘I am sorry that you are in such a piss-poor mood that you had to come to my tent and vent your spleen on a wounded man and his mistress – both of whom have served you loyally every day for many years.’

He struggled to be offended. I could see it on his face. But my embrace enfolded him, and it is very difficult to be really angry with someone who is holding you. Try it.

I was, however, waiting to feel Alectus’s steel grate against my spine. It may have looked as if I was rushing the king. Darius had put ten thousand talents of gold on his head.

Many loyalties were being tried at the same time.

But suddenly, his arms were pounding my back, and he was crying. We stumbled a little, as men will do when locked in an embrace, and he cried on my shoulder, and I . . . looked over his.

I was in his private tent, of course, not his receiving tent. And there was the table he used as his desk, and on it was a letter written in golden ink on purple paper. I didn’t have to be a genius to realise that this had to be the original of Darius’s letter. Nor did I have to be a scribe to be able to read the first three lines, in which Darius greeted Alexander as ‘My brother, the King of Asia’.

Alexander began to make tearful apologies to me – for claiming that I was malingering, for causing me to fall on Thaïs, for a host of things for which he suddenly felt the urge to apologise. But he didn’t mention that he had falsified the letter from Darius. As I read it over his shoulder, I realised that the forged letter – for surely this was the real one – left me not angry but curiously empty.

Alexander means to fight for ever.I had never formulated the thought before, but here, in his arms, in his tent, I realised that it was not a simple pothos – he was not fighting to be lord of Asia, or King of Kings. He was fighting because war made him something that peace could never make him. What he wanted was war.

Not conquest.

Merely . . . war.

I accepted his apologies and made some of my own, my daimon all but extinguished by the same realisation that many of my pezhetaeroi had made months before.

There would be no end.