There were two guards on duty before Alexandros’ tent, leaning sleepily on their spears at its entrance. They allowed me inside without challenge. Alexandros was awake and bristling with energy, pacing the length of his tent, which was larger than the one in which six of us guardsmen slept and furnished almost as handsomely as his quarters in the palace. As soon as he saw me he wordlessly took up a dark half-length cloak and fastened it across his shoulders.
“Do you have a hat or a hood?” I asked. “That golden hair of yours is a dead giveaway.”
He nodded and went to a chest at the foot of his cot. From it he pulled out a dark woolen cap and tugged it over his hair.
As far as the guards were concerned, the prince was going for a late-night stroll through the camp with his personal bodyguard. The sentries were a different matter. We had to slip past them without being seen.
“Follow me,” whispered Alexandros. “I scouted our own camp this afternoon.”
He led me to the little stream that meandered through the camp. Tangled bushes grew at its banks, except for the places where the soldiers had cut them down to get at the water. We waded knee-deep into the icy water and made our way out of the camp. When we came to sentries posted on either bank, we ducked low and let the shrubbery screen us. When the stream turned at an angle that hid us from the sentries’ sight, we clambered out, struggling through the thorny bushes onto bare dry ground.
Alexandros shivered, but I thought it was more excitement than the cold. He was happy as a little boy at play. We pressed on toward the enemy camp.
“We should tell Parmenio or one of the other generals that someone can sneak into our camp through that stream,” I whispered.
He made a grunt that might have been an affirmative.
Up ahead I could see camp fires, thousands of them. It looked as if the dark countryside had been visited by a plague of fireflies. But these lights did not dart and flicker through the shadows; they remained fixed in place. I knew that each of them represented anywhere from six to a dozen or more soldiers. There must be fifty thousand troops facing us, I figured.
Far in the distance a few other lights gleamed wanly. I touched Alexandros’ shoulder and pointed.
“That’s the town,” he whispered to me. “Chaeroneia.”
We went down on our bellies and crawled like beetles to get past the enemy sentries. It took a long time; we would inch along, then stop, wait, glance around to see where the sentries were and if they were looking our way. Then we dragged ourselves across a few more feet of the dusty hard ground.
At last we were deep enough inside the camp to get to our hands and knees and scamper behind the shelter of a decent-sized rock.
Alexandros was grinning. “We used to play at this when we were boys, Ptolemaios and Harpalos and I.”
He was little more than a boy now, I thought. But I said nothing.
Once inside the camp’s guarded perimeter it was almost easy to walk around. There were men from many different cities and tribes, and even though they tended to camp amongst their own, we saw that many others were walking through the camp, talking with friends or strangers or drifting alone with their thoughts, unable to sleep on the night before battle.
Alexandros could distinguish among them by their accents. He spoke to several men, low and brief in his words. I noticed that he used the Attic accent rather well, disguising his native Macedonian tongue.
Finally we were among the Athenians. I saw a very large tent, bright with candles within and guarded by half a dozen men in armor.
“Their generals must be there,” I said to Alexandros as we stood in the shadows between lesser tents. “Making their last-minute plans.”
“I wish we could get close enough to listen.” But even reckless Alexandros saw that it would be impossible. The area around the tent was cleared for a good fifty feet and lit at all four corners of the open space by watch fires. The guards could see anyone approaching the tent from any direction.