Free God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great by Christian Cameron Page B

meant to be playful, but he rolled over suddenly on our bed of grass and his face was inches from mine. ‘No,’ he said coldly. ‘She is mine.’
    Never a dull moment with Alexander.
    ‘I want to go and watch her bathe,’ he said.
    ‘Let’s not forget what happened to Adonis,’ I mused, with the false levity that always follows a serious moment.
    ‘I am not Adonis,’ Alexander said. ‘She is not Artemis, and anyway, no one will catch me.’
    He woke me while the stars were still a cold and distant presence, and we stretched, did some exercises and started down out of the hills. Far from sneaking across the plains, we ran – about thirty stades, I think. Ah, to be young! Alexander had thought it all through, and decided that Aristotle’s slaves, pretending to be guards, would not guard anything or patrol at all in the dark. So instead of creeping from tree to tree across central Macedon, we ran down the roads in the moonlight.
    As the sky bgan to pale in the east, we ran past the manor house, bold as brass, and went down the orchard lane, past the olive groves and up the big hill to the west of the manor. There was a spring there, and we ran to the spring, drank water and prayed to the gods.
    ‘You must not look,’ Alexander told me. ‘Go and take a nap.’
    So I snuck away, and he concealed himself in a tree. We were enacting his fantasy – I knew him well enough to understand that. He played the game according to his own rules, and this was his way.
    But I was a boy on the edge of manhood myself, and I had no intention of letting him have her all to himself. So I found a little knoll of soft grass under an olive tree and lay down, knowing my man. He came soon enough. He was checking to see that I was asleep.
    I pretended to sleep, and then, when he was gone and I had counted to a thousand, I went all the way around the hill and climbed up behind the spring.
    Waiting in ambush is dull. I waited a long time. After perhaps a full hour, I guessed where Alexander was hidden from the behaviour of the birds and squirrels. And when the sun was well up and I was regretting my temerity and wondering why I hadn’t just gone for a nap, Calixeinna came.
    She had three slaves with her, and they dropped their chitons by the pool and splashed each other, shrieking and calling names. I had a girl of my own – and some experience of women – but I remember being struck almost dumb by the four of them, all beautiful, all splendidly muscled and all very, very different. A dark-haired Thracian girl had short but beautifully muscled legs with heavy thighs, large breasts and a waist and hips that were all swooping curves. A Greek slave was taller and slimmer, with subtler curves, small breasts and a long, graceful back and a magnificent neck. The third woman, a Persian, had the most beautiful eyebrows I had ever seen, graceful hands, and breasts of a different shape from the other two, almost like wine cups. They were all women, all beautiful and all utterly different.
    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.