Command is glorious. I thought some hard thoughts about my prince, I can tell you.

I decided to keep my work parties at it. I sent Gordias to keep them going as fast as he could. In fact, he withdrew a third of the men and put them under arms.

I took the pages, spread them across the hillsides in a skirmish line facing north, and started probing.

It was a standard hunting formation, and I told every boy that I didn’t want them to fight, just to report if they saw Thracians, and then we were moving. It was last light, the sun was far off in the heavy clouds, and if we’d been in the bottom of the valley it would already have been night. It was horrible weather, too – sheets of rain. Our cloaks were soaked and sat on our shoulders like blankets of ice.

But the pages were trained hard, and now it paid off. We crossed a ravine in pretty good order – I remember being proud of them – and then the lightning started, and by the light of it – the Thunderer was throwing his bolts about pretty freely – we moved across the swollen watercourse at the bottom of the ravine and up the other side.

I found a trail running right along the top of the ridge. Not unexpected – if you spend enough time in the wild you get a sense for where animals and men like to walk. Trails are hard to find in the rain, but this one had some old stones along the north side, as if there had once been a wall.

Half a dozen pages huddled in behind me. The trail was so much easier than the hillside – it was natural enough.

There was a long peal of thunder, a brilliant double strike of Zeus’s heavy spear, and I was in the midst of fifty Thracians. They were all in a muddle, gathered around something on the trail.

A bearded man in a zigzag-decorated cloak had his helmet off. He looked at me in another lightning flash.

Athena inspired me.

I know a few words of Thracian.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ I bellowed over the rain. It’s something you say to slaves quite a bit.

That puzzled them.

‘What the fuck are you doing here!’ I bellowed again. And then I turned my horse and rode away, waiting for the feel of a javelin between my shoulder blades. I got my horse around, got back to the lip of the ravine, and my half-dozen pages were right on my heels – I prayed to Hermes that the Thracians hadn’t seen what a beardless lot they were. We slid down the ravine and our horses got us up the other side – it was full dark now, and in dark and rain your horse is pretty much your only hope to get anywhere.

Below me on the hillside, I heard the unmistakable sound of iron ringing on iron.

The closest page was Cleomenes, no longer quite a child. I grabbed him by the hair, got his ear close to my head – the thunder was deafening, or so I remember it – and ordered him to get back to camp and tell Gordias to stand to.

‘You know where camp is?’ I yelled.

He pointed the right way.

I let him go.

I rode off down the hillside, trusting to Poseidon to get me to the fighting. He picked his way, and I had to take deep breaths and wait. Patience has never been my strongest virtue. It seemed to take an hour to go half a stade, despite the fact that we were going downthe hillside and that it was almost clear.

After some minutes, I was suddenly flat on my back – cold water running down my breastplate and under my back. I had thought I was wet – now I was in a stream or a rivulet and I was colder and wetter and everything hurt.

We’d gone over a log and Poseidon had missed the fact that there was a ravine on the other side of the log. By the will of Ares, he didn’t break a leg, but it took me another cold, wet, dark eternity to find him and get him on his feet – eyes rolling in the lightning flashes, utterly panicked.

Down again, now with me walking in front of him, holding the reins. There hadn’t been fighting in . . . well, I’d lost track of time, and was worried I’d been unconscious when I was thrown.

So much to worry about!

Down and down. And then . . .

The first Thracian I found was a horn-blower – he had the horn at his lips, the lightning flashed and I put my spear through him. The next flash showed scarlet leaking past his lips – he coughed. And died.

I crouched. I couldn’t hear a thing, and I couldn’t see anything, either. But that man I’d killed – I was queasy with it, but too busy to throw up – he’d been ready to blow a horn call. An attack?

They must be close around me.

So I froze, moved carefully to a big tree, stood with my hand over Poseidon’s mouth.

A long time passed. As the lightning played around us, I began to see them. I counted five men around me. But there had to be more – there may have been a thousand in the lightning-lit forest, with huge old trees that could hide an elephant.

Time in a crisis passes in its own way. You think of the most incongruous things. I remember thinking of kissing my farm girl at the Gardens of Midas. Her lips had a certain firmness that defined good kissing to me then – and now, for that matter. And I remember thinking that Philotas owed me a fair amount of money from knucklebones and would be delighted if I died here.

I also thought how many things I’d done wrong, including . . . well, everything. I was alone on the hillside with a bunch of Thracians and not in my camp with my army, for example.

I can’t even guess how long we were all there, and then the lightning storm began to pass over the ridge and the sound and intensity seemed to go with it. I think – it seems to me, without hubris – that we were in the very presence of the gods, because the air around me seemed charged with portent, and the noise and light were mind-numbing. When they went away, it was merely dark and cold – and I hadn’t really been cold for all the time the lightning played.

And suddenly it was dark.

I curled up against Poseidon. He was warm. Actually, he was cold, but he kept me warm.

I remained as still as I could.

Time passed.

Then I heard them. Two men were talking. They were very close indeed – maybe two or three big trees away, except that in the darkness, such things can be deceptive.

I could hear them talking, but I couldn’t understand even a single word.

Mutter mutter mutter.

Mutter.

Mutter mutter.

Growl. Mutter.

And then that stopped, too.

My hand was clamped so hard over Poseidon’s head that my wrist hurt.

I was ashamed of myself, afraid and I needed to piss.

Time marched on, one heavy heartbeat at a time.

I convinced myself that I had to move.

Of all the concerns on my shoulders, it was having to piss that made me move. Let that be a lesson to you. I looked and looked at where I’d heard the voices, and then I had the discipline to turn a circle.

And then the rain came. I’d thought it was raining before, but this was like a wall of water.

A wall of noise, too.

I took Poseidon by the halter and I moved. We stepped on branches and we slipped in mud, but I kept going. And by luck, or the will of the gods, in a few moments I caught a glimpse of my own fires – two stades away across open ground. I was right at the edge of the trees on the hillside.

I mounted before I thought it out, and Poseidon was away – stumbling, because although I didn’t know it until morning, he had a strain from the cold and rain and the fall. He wasn’t fast. And no sooner were we moving than a javelin struck me square in the back.

That’s why rich kids like me wore bronze. But it scared me and knocked the wind out of me. And when I reined in for the sentry line, I was shaking like a leaf.

One of the footsloggers materialised under Poseidon’s chest, his spear at my throat. But before he could challenge me, he knew me.

‘Lord!’ he said. ‘We thought you were lost!’