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shall be a noble world and uncorrupted.”
    This I said, and meant it. What I did not offer aloud was something other. In that moment, as my father made trial of me before his officers, I felt my daimon, my inhering genius. It entered as a ghost enters a room. The sensation was clarity and unshakable conviction. I perceived, as never I had before, that my gift exceeded my father’s by orders of magnitude. I seemed to look straight through him. He saw it. So did Parmenio at his shoulder, and Hephaestion and Craterus at mine. It was a moment between generations, one declining, the other in ascent.
    What did my daimon offer in that instant of exchange of gifts with the knight Coroneus? He showed a sword with double edges: the first of empathy, communion, even love; the second of stern Necessity. “They are slain already”—so spoke my genius—“these gallant corpsmen of Thebes. In taking their lives, Alexander, you enact only that dance ordained before earth’s foundation. Enact it well.”
    All next day the armies jigger and rejigger. At dawn the Sacred Band is posted as a unit at the Thebans’ extreme right. Six hours later I ride out; the Three Hundred are now distributed as a fore rank across the foe’s center and left. This game is far from idle, for where the Sacred Band takes station will give away, as much as such posting can, the foe’s overall scheme. My regiments rehearse countermoves, covering every contingency. Still no dispatch from my father. He has not yet sent the courier, stripping me of half my force. My spies in his tent report that word will come around midnight. I instruct my commanders to exercise all mounts lightly; no animal to be overwatered or overfed. The horses are strung tight, like we are; I don’t want their bellies going sour. Toward dark, our outposts take two prisoners. Black Cleitus brings them in. I should pack them straightaway to Philip, and I will, but . . .
    â€œLet me poke these birds, Alexander. I’ll lay they’ve got a song in ’em.”
    Cleitus is a true blackguard, sixteen years my senior and as arrant a rogue as my country, homeland of knaves, can produce. Later, in Afghanistan, he and Philotas (who would come to command the Companion Cavalry) were the only crown-rankers to balk at my example to crop their beards and take the clean-shaven mode I favored. Philotas refused out of vanity, Cleitus from loyalty to Philip. I could not hold it against him. Cleitus can fight. His balls are of iron. He was my father’s First Page—and lover—when I was an infant. It was Cleitus’s honor to bear me to my naming bath; he notes this in public every chance he gets. I find this simultaneously irritating and amusing. Cleitus is an expert with dagger and garrote; the king has enlisted his services on no few occasions. Hephaestion considers him a thug; my mother has twice tried to have him poisoned. But he is so fearless, both in debate and on the field, that I find myself not only listening but genuinely liking him. Hephaestion and I will rue the casualties we must inflict on the Sacred Band. Cleitus suffers no such delicacy. He can’t wait to get in there and start hacking off heads. That the enemy are better men than he only enlarges his pleasure. He is, as the playwright Phrynichus remarked of Cleon of Athens,

    a villain, but our own villain.

    We interrogate the prisoners for tomorrow’s posting of the Sacred Band. Both swear that the company will hold down their extreme right, against the river. I don’t believe them. “What trade do you follow?” I grill the elder. He claims he’s a tutor of geometry, a
mathematicos.
“Tell us, then,” I say, “in a right triangle, what is the relation between the square of the hypotenuse and the sum of the squares of the other two sides?” A fit of coughing seizes the fellow. Cleitus prods him at sword point. “You wouldn’t be an