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brought down their Pharos. A little more refinement, and I’m sure we’ll be able to use it more precisely.”
    Alexander nodded, turned to the man sitting next to Hephaestion. “Harpalus.”
    “My prince.”
    “What of the temple treasury?”
    “Secure,” replied Harpalus. “The Athenians fled too quickly to take it with them. It remains in the custody of the priests—”
    “Not for long,” said Alexander. “They’ve agreed to reimburse our expenses.”
    “Which are considerable,” said Harpalus. “And likely to climb higher as the full cost of this new war comes due.”
    “Don’t be so dramatic,” said Ptolemy. “Athens has far more to lose than we do. They survive on commerce. The loss of Egypt probably bankrupted half their merchants. I’d give a lot to see the hand-wringing that must be going on in that debate-club they call their Assembly.”
    “They still have plenty of resources to draw on,” said Hephaestion.
    “Like what?” asked Ptolemy.
    “The rest of the Mediterranean,” said Perdiccas dryly.
    “Which is why we need to push on Carthage,” said Craterus. Eumenes abruptly realized that what had looked like a joke earlier had actually masked serious intent. He said nothing though, waiting on the reaction of others.
    “That’s a thousand miles west of here.” Perdiccas was practically spluttering. “Maintaining our supply lines in the face of the Athenian navy—”
    “With the Greek fire, we can annihilate that navy if it ventures too close to the shore.” Craterus looked straight at his prince. “Alexander, how else are we to finish Athens? We can’t strike at her heart directly. Her walls remain impregnable.”
    “Don’t be so defeatist,” said Ptolemy.
    “I’m being realistic,” said Craterus. “We have to chop off the pieces of Athens’ empire like so many limbs, and we have to content ourselves with those portions we can get at without ships.”
    “We’ll have ships soon enough,” said Hephaestion. “And we already burnt two hundred of theirs in a single night.”
    “But they have two thousand more,” said Craterus. “Greek fire or no Greek fire, we can’t hope to match them on the ocean.”
    “Precisely why it would be rash to aim at Carthage,” said Alexander. Eumenes exhaled slowly, not realizing till that moment he’d been holding his breath. “Ptolemy’s right. Without ships, your supply line would on the knife-edge between ocean and desert.”
    “But the Greek fire—”
    “Doesn’t make us invincible. The Athenians could land marines in force at any point they like and long before we reached Libya, our whole army would be guarding its own supply-line. The risk of utter annihilation—”
    “So what would you have us do instead?” asked Craterus, and to Eumenes it sounded almost like a challenge. But Alexander, ever unpredictable, didn’t seem to take it as such. He simply looked around the room—looked almost like he was puzzled.
    “Are there no other ideas on the table, then?”
    “Keep building up our navy,” said Hephaestion. “We’ll be ready within a few years.”
    “Madness,” said Ptolemy. “You overestimate the difficulty of building and crewing a fleet that’s worth the name. And in a few years—”
    “We may not have that long anyway,” said Craterus.
    “Now that may be true, regardless,” said Harpalus.
    “Exactly,” said Alexander. “Say Athens learns how to replicate the fire? Say they have other secret weapons? Their Guilds must be working around the clock to devise them. Besides”—and here he smiled a smile of pure insouciance—“we’re still young. Fame and glory are fleeting. Why wait to destroy Athens when we’re old? Why not find a way to defeat them now?”
    Eumenes mulled this over. It was starting to sound like the move into Egypt wasn’t part of some larger plan. Alexander was a born opportunist, but this was taking opportunism to levels that bordered on hubris. Either that, or Alexander really