Virtues of War by Steven Pressfield Page B

wash off so easily. My mate turns back toward the ruin that is Thebes. “I would not, yesterday, have thought you capable of this.”
    â€œI was not capable of it,” I reply. “Yesterday.”

T
en
    HEPHAESTION
    T HE FIRST TIME I SAW HEPHAESTION, I WAS TEN YEARS OLD. He was eleven. He had just come down to Pella from his family’s estate in the highlands of Eordaea. Hephaestion’s father, Amyntor, represented the interests of Athens at my father’s court. This was a hereditary post, called
proxenos
, and one of great honor. However, with the abundant friction, not to say outright warfare, between our state and the Athenians’, Amyntor feared that the ire Philip sometimes felt toward him for his advocacy of Athens’s cause (though the two men had been brought up together and remained great friends) might prejudice the king against Amyntor’s young son and thus impede the lad’s career. So Hephaestion was held apart from court life until he turned eleven. It was only then that his father brought him to the capital, to prepare him for the School of Royal Pages, which he would enter, as I would, at fourteen.
    At that time I had a tutor named Leonidas. It was this man’s habit, as a means of “thickening my bark,” to wake me an hour before dawn and march me down to the river, where I must strip and plunge in, in all weathers. I hated this. The Loudias at Pella is bone-numbing even in summer; in winter its depth of cold is indescribable. I tried every trick to duck these dousings. Eventually it came to me that, rather than endure them beneath compulsion, which rendered them doubly abhorrent, I would elect to do them on my own. I began arising before my tutor, getting the chore over with while he lay yet in bed. Leonidas was much gratified by this evolution of my character, while, for my own part, the ordeal had been rendered tolerable, now that I could tell myself it was my own idea. In any event, one dawn, of a day so cold that one had to smash the ice on the river with a great stone just to get in, I was returning from my plunge, going past the Royal Riding School, when I heard hoof strikes within. I entered silently. Hephaestion was alone in the ring, mounted on a seventeen-hand chestnut, his own, named Swift, running up-and-backs, hands free, with the short lance. His teacher stood in the center of the arena, keeping up a running stream of instruction, to which Hephaestion responded with a focus that was at once keenly intense and thoroughly relaxed. I had never seen an individual, man or boy, so patient with his mount. He forced nothing, guiding the horse with legs and seat alone. He took Swift from canter to trot to canter to gallop, all the while preserving absolute straightness, even on a curved line. Advancing down the long axis of the ring, his horse was not “called to the wall” as mine was (not Bucephalus—I had not acquired him yet), and in the turns kept his legs beneath him, not lazily as my own animal, but collected, ready, with tremendous impulsion, so that when Hephaestion urged Swift to the canter and then to the gallop, the mount shot forward, dead straight and in balance, poised to respond to any command, to turn or wheel in any direction. Hephaestion himself sat the horse as if he were nailed to him. Spine erect, shoulders square, belly muscles working, he impelled the beast with a forward lean so subtle you could barely see it, and turned him with equal command, all with only his seat and legs. I flushed with shame to witness this, for it came to me, who till that moment had considered himself an accomplished rider for his age, how little of horsemanship I knew and what a complacent and ignorant brat I was. My father! Why had he set this addle-pated pedagogue Leonidas over me, to duck me in ice, when I should be learning
this
? But immediately my anger turned upon myself. I alone am master of my life! I vowed in that instant not only to