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descended from Achilles, which put him in a kinder mood when it came to sparing their people. Alexander had drunk his fill of Thessalian wine and boasted that there would be easy victories all the way down the peninsula.
    That was before he ran headlong into Thebes and its Sacred Band, the elite military unit who’d snubbed their noses at him and called him an upstart barbarian. Of course, that same unit’s warriors now lay rotting beneath the uncaring sun.
    Not that I was going to mention that to Alexander. The Sacred Band was past saving, but its city still stood.
    Thebes was an unwashed whore of a city, but I didn’t care to see the ancient stone polis razed as Alexander threatened just because they’d put up a good and honorable fight. This, the City of Seven Gates, had birthed my favorite poet, Pindar, yet I doubted whether I’d have time to sightsee at his former home or seek out his urn of ashes amid the looting and pillaging.
    I reined in, waiting as Alexander barked orders at his generals, motioning with succinct gestures where to deploy the cavalry, shield bearers, and foot soldiers to finish securing the city. The sun gleamed off his hair and his golden soldier’s belt, earned when he’d killed his first man in the earlier battle of Thebes with his father. Alexander roared in triumph from Bucephalus’ back, the leopard skin he sat upon gleaming gold and his lion helmet seeming to preen in the sunlight. “Put the city to the sword,” Alexander yelled. “Thebes shall be scourged from the earth today, a warning to those who would declare against me!”
    I might have pointed out then that these were Greeks , not cowardly Persians or stinking Latins, but being Alexander’s bodyguard meant keeping my mouth shut and perhaps impaling a few Thebans with a sarissa to keep them from stabbing him through his cuirass.
    I cursed the Thebans under my breath; the stupid bastards should have surrendered when they had the chance and left me to my crates of wine and my copy of Plato’s Republic .
    The cavalry and foot soldiers moved to the various districts they intended to plunder, black flags of dark smoke unfurling in the city’s western sections and making me shudder at the thought of what treasures the ravenous flames might be destroying. Alexander and I continued through to a newer neighborhood with less graffiti on the walls and fewer stray dogs lurking in the alleys, its wide avenues laden with twisting cypress trees and the polished marble facades of the well-to-do, similar to my father’s home in Macedon. A second of Alexander’s guards joined us: Ptolemy, officially the son of Lagus of Macedon but rumored to be one of Philip’s illegitimate sons, and a man with an appetite for women to rival even that of Zeus.
    My sword aimed in front of me, I pushed through the open gates of a particularly graceful estate. An overturned basket of peas lay near the kitchen entrance and my horse sidestepped a dead slave sprawled facedown in a pool of scarlet. My ear picked up something different here, the angry barkings of what might have passed as raving fishwives.
    “See what that’s about,” Alexander said with a wince. “Before my ears begin to bleed.”
    I gave an exaggerated salute and dismounted, leaving Ptolemy with Alexander as I entered the courtyard.
    “Throw her in with him!” a man yelled, standing next to two other mercenaries, thickheaded Thracians from the looks of their discarded crescent shields. The first gestured wildly toward a well situated at the corner of a tidy garden. The kyria of the house stood across from him, her lovely face an affectation of calm, yet the delicate matron clutched her ruined peplos at her shoulders, and two girls like miniatures of their mother cowered nearby. A trickle of blood from the corner of the mother’s mouth was already growing dark and her pale hair had fallen loose. The largest of the three Thracian brutes finished binding her wrists with a leather thong, then