by me. Thirty

Stadia

make a

Parasang

.

Taxeis

(Classical Greek) – The sections of a Macedonian

phalanx

. Can refer to any group, but often used as a ‘company’ or a ‘battalion’. My

taxeis

has between 500 and 2,000 men, depending on losses and detachments. Roughly synonymous with

phalanx

above, although a

phalanx

may be composed of a dozen

taxeis

in a great battle.

Xiphos

(Classical Greek) – A straight-bladed infantry sword, usually carried by

hoplites

or

psiloi

. Classical Greek art, especially red-figure ware, shows many

hoplites

wearing them, but only a handful have been recovered and there’s much debate about the shape and use. They seem very like a Roman gladius.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I am an author, not a linguist – a novelist, and not fully an historian. Despite this caveat, I do the best I can to research everything from clothing to phalanx formations as I go, and sometimes I disagree with the accepted wisdom of either academe or the armchair generals who write colourful coffee table books on these subjects.

And ultimately, errors are my fault. If you find a historical error, please let me know!

One thing I have tried to avoid is altering history as we know it to suit a timetable or plotline. The history of the Wars of Alexander is difficult enough without my altering it. In addition, as you write about a period you love (and I have fallen pretty hard for this one) you learn more. Once I learn more, words may change or change their usage. As an example, in Tyrant, I used Xenophon’s Cavalry Commanderas my guide to almost everything. Xenophon calls the ideal weapon a machaira. Subsequent study has revealed that Greeks were pretty lax about their sword nomenclature (actually, everyone is, except martial arts enthusiasts) and so Kineas’s Aegyptian machairawas probably called a kopis. So in the second book, I call it a kopiswithout apology. Other words may change – certainly my notion of the internal mechanics of the hoplite phalanxhave changed. The more you learn…

A note about history. I’m always amused when a fan (or a non-fan) writes to tell me that I got a campaign or battle ‘wrong.’ Friends – and I hope we’re still friends when I say this – we know less about the wars of Alexander than we do about the surface of Mars or the historical life of Jesus. I read Greek, I look at the evidence, and then I make the call. I’ve been to most of these places, and I can read a map. While I’m deeply fallible, I am also a pretty good soldier and I’m prepared to make my own decisions in light of the evidence about everything from numbers to the course of a battle. I may well be “wrong,” but unless someone produces a time-machine, there’s no proving it. Our only real source on Alexander lived five hundred years later. That’s like calling me an eye-witness of Agincourt. Be wary of reading a campaign history or an Osprey book and assuming from the confident prose that we know. We don’t know. We stumble around in the dark and make guesses.

And that said, military historians are, by and large, the poorest historians out there, by virtue of studying the violent reactions of cultures without studying the cultures themselves. War and military matters are cultural artefacts, just like religion and philosophy and fashion, and to try to take them out of context is impossible. Hoplites didn’t carry the aspis because it was the ideal technology for the phalanx. I’ll bet they carried it because it was the ideal technology for the culture, from the breeding of oxen to the making of the bowl, to the way they stacked in wagons. Men only fight a few days a year if that, but they live and breathe and run and forage and gamble and get dysentery 365 days a year, and their kit has to be good on all those days too. The history of war is a dull litany of man’s inhumanity to man and woman, but history itself is the tale of the human race from birth until now. It’s a darn good story, and worth repeating. History matters.

Why does history matter? I should spare you this rant, after all if you’re reading this part of the book, chances are you’re a history buff at least, possibly a serious amateur historian, maybe a professional slumming in my novels. But just for the record, a week after I finished the final page proofs of this book, I happened to read a Facebook post by a Holocaust denier. I’m still mad. It’s not just the tom-fool anti-Semitism, it’s the anti-history. A person who denies the Holocaust happened is denying that history exists; that research and careful documentation, eye-witness accounts and government archives have any meaning. In this kind of relativism, there is no truth. Pontius Pilate wins. And historical fiction is just fantasy without magic.

Well, I happen to believe that the past really happened. And that the more we know about it, the more we are empowered to deal with the present.

Finally, yes, I kill a lot of characters. War kills. Violence and lives of violence have consequences, then as now. And despite the drama of war, childbirth probably killed women of warrior age about twice as fast as it killed active warriors, so when we get right down to who’s tough . . .

Enjoy!

Contents

PART I: The Garden of Midas

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

PART II: The Path to the Throne

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

PART III: Asia

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

PART IV: King of Kings

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

PART I

The Garden of Midas

PROLOGUE

Satyrus had been in Alexandria only a few days when Leon took him to the Royal Palace to meet the King of Aegypt. After Antigonus and Eumenes and four months with a mercenary army, Satyrus should not have been nervous, but he was – Ptolemy was the greatest king in the circle of the earth, and his court kept great state, as befitted the ruler of a land that had recorded history going back five thousand years into the past, whose ancient gods still held sway over most of the Nile valley.

Ptolemy wore the crown of Lower Aegypt on his head, and a strange, un-Greek cowl that went with it, over a chiton of pure Tyrian purple. His sandals were white and gold. In his hand was the ankh – the sceptre of Aegypt. Leon’s hundreds of parental admonishments fled – Satyrus could scarcely remember how to bow.

The great king of all Aegypt leaned forward on his ivory throne. ‘Kineas’s son?’ he asked Leon.

‘Yes, great king,’ Leon answered.

‘Has the look. The nose. The chin. The arrogance.’ Ptolemy smiled at the boy. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, lad.’

Satyrus found his voice. ‘She’s not dead!’ he insisted. The loss of his mother had affected him more than even his sister. Rumour had her murdered on the banks of the Tanais river, but it was still possible that rumour was wrong.

Ptolemy smiled a sad smile. ‘Will you stay at my court, lad? Until you grow a little? And I’ll put a good sword in your hand and send you out to reclaim your own.’