God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

SIXTEEN

Arsites chose to await us at the Granicus river.

It was like a miracle from the gods. We needed a battle. If the Persians had retreated and refused battle – well, I assume that Alexander would have done something. Or perhaps not – perhaps the gods took a hand, and Arsites, like some actor in a tragedy, had no choice but to stand and fight.

On the other hand, Alexander, for all his flights of fancy, understood the moral vector of war far better than Parmenio. Arsites was the satrap, and Alexander was marching about Asia in his leopard skin, taking cities and threatening to be taken seriously, and that embarrassed the satrap. He wanted to beat Alexander to win glory with the King of Kings. If you look at it, you can see wheels within wheels – our wheels of intrigue, their wheels of intrigue. The gods must laugh.

Their army was considerably smaller than ours, but Arsites had some superb cavalry – easily as good as ours, as you will hear. And he had Memnon – probably the best soldier in Asia, and many men alive today say he was the equal of Alexander in brilliance. Luckily for us, Arsites hated Memnon and ignored his advice.

We had problems of our own.

We got a late start out of Priapus – because Philotas bickered with Amyntas about the dispositions of the scouts. Six hours after marching out of Priapus, near the end of the marching day, late afternoon and the summer sun boiling us in our breastplates and helmets. I was virtually asleep, letting my new mare pick her way.

Suddenly there was a disturbance at the head of the column. Paeonian cavalry scouts galloped up, and their dust moved slowly across us after they drew rein. They were so close to me that I could hear them report that the Persian army was on the move and would probably beat us to the Granicus. The elder of the two reported in bad Greek that the ground was favourable to the Persians, with a ridge dominating the river ford. They reported to Amyntas (who in my book should have been as far forward as his courage allowed) and Philotas together.

I listened with mounting fury as Philotas reacted carefully, after a long conversation with Amyntas about the dispositions of the scouts. They lost minute after minute.

Alexander was too far to the rear in the column, and the column was too narrow and too long for him to come up. I wasn’t even sure he knew what was happening. He was with the main body of the cavalry – well back from the advance guard. Simply by the luck of rotation, I was at the front with the squadron assigned to provide an armoured fist to support the light-armed scouts.

It was like physical pain, listening to the cautious ‘professionals’ debate how to move up the narrow road and where to place the army. In short, Philotas conceded immediately that Arsites would gain the Granicus river line, and began to send Amyntas’s scouts to the right and left, looking for ground on which we could camp.

I knew exactly what Alexander would do – what I would do. I wanted to lunge for the river and beat Arsites there. I hadn’t seen the crossing, but it was not high water at any of the other streams we’d crossed – and I assumed that we would be able either to get there first, or fight our way across in the face of their vanguard before their main army came up.

Before you consider mocking me – keep in mind that our sense of superiority was our main weapon. Still is.

And Philotas and Amyntas were frittering it away.

I turned to Polystratus after fifteen minutes. ‘Get Alexander,’ I said. ‘Tell him he is needed here.’

Polystratus nodded, dismounted and ran off down the column. He was smart – a man can run where a horse cannot walk.

And then I sat and fumed. My nerves were transmitted to my horse, who became skittish and started nipping the other horses. I wasn’t on Poseidon – I was on Penelope, my new riding mare, and she had a temper as bad as Medea’s, and Polystratus said she should have been called Medusa. Ajax was home on my farms, helping to make little horses.

Philotas turned and glared at me. ‘Can’t control your horse, Ptolemy?’ he asked.

‘Like me, she’s eager to be moving forward,’ I said. See – not so bad. A gentle comment.

His face grew red. ‘You’re as bad as the king,’ he shot back. ‘You cannot charge everything. Stopping to think is an important part of warfare. Arsites already has the good ground.’

I shrugged. I may have made a derisive noise.

Philotas was turning away, and now he whirled back, pulling his horse by the bit in a rather brutish manner. ‘What was that, sir?’ he asked.

I shrugged again. ‘Whatever you like. My horse may have farted.’

The men around me chuckled. The men around Philotas grew as red as he.

‘If you have a comment to make, make it,’ he said.

‘Very well, since you invite it,’ I answered. ‘If Arsites is moving forward – let’s beat him to the good ground. If we lose the race – let’s take it from him.’ I looked around. ‘That’s what we call the “Macedonian Way”.’

I got approving grunts and a lot of nods.

Philotas was so red I was wondering if he’d turn purple.

Amyntas spat. ‘That’s why you puppies can’t be trusted to command,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ I nodded, ‘I’m not very good at caution,’ I said. And after a two-beat pause, I said, ‘But I’m quite good at fighting. So I don’t bother much with caution.’

‘One more word and I will send you to the rear,’ Philotas spat.

Polystratus appeared at my knee. ‘He’s right behind me,’ he said.

So I held my tongue.

Alexander came up with Parmenio at his elbow – but only because of the press on the road, not because they were together.

‘What’s going on here?’ Parmenio demanded.

‘Ptolemy is an insolent puppy,’ Philotas said.

‘Not pertinent to the tactical problem,’ I said. ‘Philotas is a cautious old woman who is sacrificing our needs to his pride.’

Parmenio glared at me.

‘Arsites is moving up to the Granicus river,’ Amyntas put in. ‘We’re seeing to our dispositions and looking for a campsite.’

‘We could beat him to the river,’ I put in. Yes – I was a very junior officer. But I was also an important nobleman and one of the king’s friends. In Macedon, that made me the equal of any man there. ‘Either we win the race and get some Hetaeroi across, or we lose the race and we punch across and take the high ground.’

Parmenio frowned. ‘What high ground?’

Philotas shrugged.

Amyntas pointed at the two scouts. ‘They say there’s a steep ridge behind the ford, with a broad top.’

In fact, they’d said that and I’d heard it, but as I suspected, Philotas had missed it.

Alexander got that look – the look that said he was thinking it out. ‘How high is the ridge?’

‘Have you seen it for yourself?’ Parmenio demanded.

‘No, they’ve sat here talking about it,’ I said.

Philotas gave me a look of pure hate.

Alexander looked around. ‘Give me the Paeonians, Ptolemy’s squadron and . . . the Thracians. I’ll see what can be done.’

Parmenio shook his head. ‘No . . .’ he began. And then he froze. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Philotas looked as if he was going to choke.

Parmenio managed a small smile. ‘At your command, lord.’

‘Send me every armoured cavalryman from the main body,’ Alexander said. While he was talking, I changed to Poseidon. Alexander looked around and grinned. ‘Right – forward.’

And we were off.

It was quite late – and Philotas had wasted at least a quarter of an hour dithering. Now we pelted down the road with a few hundred cavalrymen. Immediately – in the way of men everywhere – I began to question my own intentions. Parmenio’s about-face was suspicious. Was he realising who was in command? Or just betting that we’d go and get killed?

Too late to worry.

We headed almost due south along the coast, and the plain was opening before us. In the distance, less than twenty-five stades away to the south, we could see a great lake spread in rippling fire from the setting sun, and to the north lay the Propontis, the great inland sea between the Euxine and the Mediterranean.

As we came down a low ridge, I could see the Persians moving along the road to the east – and they were already leaving the road and expanding into a battle line, and doing it pretty well, I thought. I could see six . . . seven . . . eight cavalry regiments, their spear-points flickering like flame. Sixteen thousand cavalry – maybe more.

But their attempt to fan out from the road was slowed by ploughed fields. And while I could see horsemen along the river, there weren’t so many.

Just behind their cavalry was a phalanx. It didn’t look any smaller than ours, and it was already in formation.

Five stades away.

It was pretty clear to me that our three hundred cavalry, however bold, were too little and too late. Too late by about fifteen minutes.

The ridge the Thracians had described was lower – much lower – than I had imagined. But I could see that determined infantry atop that ridge would close the road, and that the lake to the south would cover the flank of the Persian army, meaning that their thirty thousand men would fill the field from the sea to the lake.

And if I could see it, Alexander was doubtless ahead of me.

He turned – he was ahead – and waved to me. ‘I need your Polystratus,’ he said.

I brought all my grooms forward.

Alexander reined in, snapped his fingers and a groom came up with Bucephalus. While he changed horses, he issued orders to Polystratus.

‘Straight back – find Parmenion. Tell him to march the phalanx to the right by sections – along the line of hills and around the lake to the south. Use the hills to screen the march. I’ll buy us some time at the ford and fix their attention there. And tell him to send me all the Hetaeroi.’

Polystratus nodded. ‘All the Hetaeroi to you, phalanx to the right, screened by those hills and around the lake.’ He raised an eyebrow.

I read his mind. ‘That’s forty stades, lord. They won’t make it before darkness falls.’

Alexander bobbed his head. He was up on Bucephalus, and his cheeks were bright crimson with anticipation, and Hephaestion was holding out his magnificent golden helmet.

‘If this works, they won’t be necessary, and if this doesn’t work, we fight tomorrow,’ he said. His eyes were fixed on the ford, now just three stades away.

The second and third squadrons of the Hetaeroi were coming up. Nearchus saluted. ‘Philotas is ten minutes behind me, lord,’ he said to Alexander. ‘He’s pushing the rest of the Hetaeroi up the column.’

Alexander nodded. ‘I won’t wait. Wedge!’

We formed behind the king – he insisted on being at the point of the wedge – and after all, he was King of Macedon. I fell into place behind him – with Black Cleitus on his right rear and me on his left rear.

And then we trotted for the ford.

The Persians saw us, but they took for ever to react. I’m going to guess that they didn’t expect us to cross. And they weren’t formed in a body, but a few hundred Persian nobles spread out across a stade of ground – some were even watering their horses.

We went from a trot to a canter, and our wedge began to spread out. The king was making no concessions to differences in horse flesh. He was watching something – I could see from the tension in his neck under the base of his helmet.

All the Persians began to point. The king was hard to miss. His green-bronze armour and his superb helmet shouted his presence. A messenger dashed back from the forward Persian troops, and they began to form.

We hit the ford. Our horses raised a curtain of spray and Alexander wasn’t slowing, so I dug my heels into Poseidon and hung on. Poseidon doesn’t love water.

A Persian – a noble in a bronze peaked helmet and a magnificent scarlet saddle – hurtled across our front on a big Nisean horse, moving like a grey streak, and he threw his javelin at the king, and Alexander caught it in the air with his own spear and parried it – a fine feat. Men cheered all along the faces of the wedge.

We started up the far bank. There were fifty Persians there, all throwing their spears, but none of them abided our onset, and they broke before us, and we were across.

Yet as soon as we were up the far bank, I could see that we’d charged into a nest of angry bees. Cavalrymen were coming up from the south and the east – even from the north – as far as the eye could see.

Alexander laughed. It was a mad laugh. He turned and his eyes glittered and his face was white, his cheeks and lips red as blood, and he looked like a dramatic mask – or like a god.

‘I think we have their attention!’ he shouted, and pointed the tip of the wedge at the nearest formed enemy body, two hundred Phrygian horse preparing to charge us. He raised his spear. ‘Ready, Hetaeroi? Charge!’ he roared, and my trumpeter picked up his command and sang it out.

The head of the wedge turned less than an eighth part of a circle, and then we were pounding forward up a slight incline, and the Phrygians came down at us with their longer spears. Their files spread as they charged, so that just before impact you could see the sunset between their men.

Alexander did his job as ‘wedge leader’ perfectly, taking the point of the wedge into the widest gap between enemy files – and he ducked the first enemy lance, a beautiful piece of horsemanship, perfectly judged, so that the lance-point passed a hand’s breadth over his back, and then he rose and his spear took the Phrygian on his right just below the throat – killing him and ripping him from his horse in one movement. The king’s spear snapped from the impact, and Alexander swung the butt of the spear into the next lance, parrying it off to his left across his horse’s head and then cutting back with his whole weight behind the staff – thunk, into the head of the second man on the left, and the man collapsed from the saddle – the king dropped his spear haft and unsheathed his sword, his body flat along the neck of his horse to evade the third lance . . .

It was beautiful. It made my heart ache to watch him.

And then I was fighting.

I was on the left, and the king had left the front-left man for me – I parried his spear with mine and ran my spearhead along his shaft, so that it slammed into his thorax and he was gone. I kept the spear, turned it and caught the next man with the butt close in – a clumsier blow than the king’s, but my man fell too. My horse’s haunches bunched and expanded and I was into my third man – Poseidon hit his horse, breast to breast, and knocked it to the ground, and Amyntas son of Amyntas struck me from behind – these things happen in a melee – and we got tangled, and the wedge was slowing – but the king was still pushing ahead, and I put my heels into Poseidon despite the ringing in my ears. I pushed forward into the press – the Phrygians were thickening like lentil soup in the pot, because another squadron had thrown themselves into the fight.

The king had three of them around him. In the glance I got, I saw him thrust his sword into one exposed side, and then, quick as a cat, draw back and flick a cut at the second and carry it around to the third.

He was like a god.

But he needed help.

Poseidon did his bit, pushing forward with heavy, massive, powerful surges from his hindquarters, so that I seemed to be rowing forward.

We were suddenly so close to the Phrygians that we were no longer threading between their files – now we were pushing in close, knee to knee, face to face, horse against horse, and now the horses began to fight each other, and I had to keep my knees all but locked and hang on with my arms to stay with my mount, because he was kicking, biting and pushing.

Hipposthismos, I remember thinking, in that way that your brain wanders off in moments of critical danger. Blows hit me – Persian spears – I got a slash across the top of my thigh, below the line of my tassets, and my bridle hand took its usual abuse – that’s why it looks the way it does, eh?

Othismos is the pushing and shoving and vicious infighting of the closest-packed melee. So you can guess—hipposthismos is the mounted version.

I came up against an officer – a high officer, with superb embroidery on his cloak and a sword with a hilt of gold – a sword I got to know very well, because he cut at my head, and I parried – sword to sword. Our blades cut into each other – that’s why you don’t use a sword to parry, lad! – and we bound up, and our horses pressed in, and there we were in a pushing match, hilts in front of our noses, legs crushed together, and I could smell his breath – and he mine.

I reckon he was a good officer, because as we struggled, he looked past me – trying to figure out, as I was, what in Hades was happening in the melee.

I dropped my reins, reached across my body with my left hand, put it under his right elbow and pushed – he twisted to keep his balance and his seat, and I got my hilt free and punched him with it . . .

And he was gone in the melee, and I was almost to the king. A blow rang off my backplate – I assume my erstwhile opponent backcut at me as the melee carried us apart – but it did me no damage, and I was almost there.

I had two or three heartbeats to look around – an eddy in the fight – and the Persians were coming at us from every side.

Alexander was putting Persians into the dust with almost every blow, but some of the feline grace was gone from his back and hips as he rode. Grace is the first thing to go as a man tires – we start to make slightly larger motions with the arms, the pelvis – anything to help the muscles work. Alexander was showing the very earliest sign of fatigue.

I got up to him as he caught a Persian spear in his bridle hand, pulled it from its owner’s grip and stabbed him with the butt-spike – all in a heartbeat.

My sword was bent. I hadn’t noticed it, but my fine Keltoi long sword was bent from the pushing match with the Persian officer, and it had a deep nick – almost a gouge – in the thick metal near the hilt.

I rang it off a Phrygian’s helmet, and it snapped.

‘Where is Philotas?’ Alexander asked, his tone almost conversational.

Here’s one of the differences between a normal, intelligent Macedonian and Alexander. I’d forgotten that Philotas existed. I was busy fighting for my life – Philotas was on a different plane of existence.

Alexander pulled on his reins and our horses lined up, head to head. But the Phrygians were done – they weren’t running yet, but they were falling back, riding clear of the melee or simply getting shy of combat.

Cleitus came up on Alexander’s left side.

He looked across at me, ignoring the king. ‘We need to get him out of here,’ he said.

I looked over my shoulder. We had Medes – or Persians – behind us, between us and the river – I could see their high hats and their bows.

And their arrows. Arrows were falling on the rear ranks of the wedge, and horses were screaming.

I think that until then we’d lost very few men, if any. We had good armour and excellent helmets – far better than the Phrygians or the Medes. And our horses were big – as big as theirs, if not as good as the Niseans. Our men were better trained in arms – the Persians don’t wrestle, and that’s a terrible disadvantage in a cavalry melee.

But we didn’t have bows, and their arrows were falling on the rumps of our horses. Horses were dying and their riders were left on the ground in a cavalry melee – a terrible place to be.

Had the Phrygians held on for another few minutes, they would have had us. As it was, they fell back, and Alexander ordered us to wheel around – easy enough for a small group of horsemen who had ridden together all their lives, and desperately hard for anyone else. The Medes never imagined we’d wheel – but the whole wedge spun on Alexander, men riding to the flanks in good order, as if this sort of fancy riding in the face of the enemy was an everyday thing. Which it was, for us.

We charged the Medes, and they came right at us – the Medes are the bravest nation on earth, except for ours, and they are never shy about a scramble. Our horses were blown and theirs were fresh, and they shot a flight of arrows at us from close in, and men fell – but nothing touched Alexander, and he had his spear two-handed, the butt clamped under his right armpit, and he wrenched it high just before contact, beating his opponent’s spear aside and thrusting. He must have missed – one of his few melee misses, I must admit – and the man’s spear rode down Alexander’s spear, skipped off Bucephalus’s coat and popped up into my line. I got a hand on it, slapped it clear of my body – and my opponent unhorsed himself, because he wouldn’t let go of his spear – a juvenile mistake.

Another Mede shot me from arm’s length – I had time to put my head down and my crest into his shot – it was like being punched in the head, and blackness came before my eyes – a haze at the edges, and another blow rang against the side of my helmet, and then I could see, and my spear had rammed through his chest and my spear-point was out through his back, and the weight of him broke the staff.

And then I was through, Poseidon gathering speed, and Alexander was trying to turn his horse to go back into the melee.

I gave Poseidon his head and gathered the king’s bridle in my hand as I trotted past – Bucephalus trumpeted his displeasure as his head was snapped round, but he had to follow Poseidon.

Alexander slammed his spear-butt into my side. ‘What . . .’

We were in the river. Persian cavalry was coming at the Hetaeroi from all directions, and men were down – at least a dozen, all king’s friends. Amyntas son of Amyntas was down, and Lagus son of Perdiccas, and other men I knew.

And Pyrrhus – young Pyrrhus, one of my own. I could see immediately that he was missing from my file, because when I burst out of the back of the melee, all my file followed me like good troopers, and there was Nearchus, and Cleomenes, but Pyrrhus was gone. Damn the boy.

But he was not the king.

I rode through the ford, and Alexander was screaming at me, but I had his reins.

Why, you ask?

Because in my one glimpse across the river I’d seen Philotas. He was sitting on his war horse, and he wasn’t moving to our aid. And I thought of Thaïs, and what she had said, and I made the decision – right or wrong – that it was my job to keep the king alive.

The Hetaeroi followed me.

The Medes didn’t pursue. They’d lost their prize – the king – and they could claim to have had the best of the melee, in that they held the ground. Another way of looking at it was that we’d broken through the Phrygian cavalry, whirled about and shattered the Medes, but perhaps that’s my bias speaking. Heh, heh.

I got Alexander up the Macedonian bank of the Granicus, and I turned to him – well short of the waiting squadrons of Hetaeroi, who looked angry, even at this distance. There was the margin of victory – six full squadrons, fifteen hundred Macedonian cavalry. Sitting.

‘Blame me,’ I hissed at Alexander. ‘Call me a coward, lord, but ask yourself, why is Philotas just sitting there?’

Alexander rode past me. He trotted his horse up the bank and turned to look back.

The Persians were still in disarray. But even as we watched, a magnificent regiment came up at a canter – a thousand noble Persians in fine armour – with scales, most of them, that gleamed like a million mirrors, like dancer’s bangles in the setting sun. Arsites in person, I assumed. They pushed their own Medes and Phrygians aside.

But they halted at the riverbank.

Our last files got across, pursued only by a handful of Mede arrows.

‘Not as easy as you thought, Ptolemy?’ Philotas shouted at me.

The king was angry with me, and the army would think I’d been a coward, and Philotas – I should have flashed with rage, but something inside me was tired, and cold. So I rode up the bank and right up to him.

Give him this much – he didn’t flinch or quail. I think he hoped I would strike him, so he could order me arrested.

I rode right up close. ‘You’re right,’ I said. I was only as loud as I needed to be for him to hear me. ‘But I didn’t expect to have to do it by myself.’

His eyes widened a little.

I rode past him and had my Polystratus, now my hyperetes, sound the recall from our place in the Hetaeroi line. I didn’t think that the Persians would come across the stream at us, but it would have been foolish to allow my squadron to continue to mill about in confusion.

We dismounted. All of the horses were blown – even Poseidon was tired.

Alexander left Bucephalus and came over to me. ‘I wish to apologise,’ he said.

I don’t think he’d ever apologised – at least to me. I just stood there with a foolish look on my face, no doubt.

‘But we put fear into them, did we not? Did you see me when I went through the front ranks of the Phrygians? I’ve never been so fast – I felt as if Achilles himself guided my arm.’

I was so relieved to have his forgiveness that I pressed his hand. ‘You were . . . like a god,’ I said.

Alexander’s eyes widened, just as Philotas’s had, but for the opposite reason. He positively beamed with pleasure. ‘Ptolemy! How unlike you!’ he teased me, and slapped me on the shoulder. ‘And then I missed my stroke against the Mede – did you take him?’

I smiled. In truth, the king’s need to refight his actions and praise himself was annoying – the sort of conceit you’d expect from a much lesser man. But I was relieved, strangely happy, even. ‘He unhorsed himself,’ I said. ‘I got his spear in my left hand and he fell off his horse.’

Alexander threw back his head and laughed – a high-pitched laugh that sounded utterly false.

He stopped mid-laugh.

Darkness was falling. And as if he’d become another man, the king suddenly turned his head.

‘We should be marching south,’ he said. ‘Or we’ll never reach their flank by morning.’

We’d lost more than twenty Hetaeroi, and in later years the king put up monuments to them. But we were alive, and the king was still king.

If Parmenio had another plan, he didn’t try to press it on the king. In later years, he insisted to anyone who would listen that the plan to go south around the lake was his plan, not the king’s – that all the king wanted was to ride forward and challenge Arsites to single combat.

Crap.

The king loved to fight, but we went forward to try to steal the ford from the Persians, and we missed by minutes – minutes that Philotas and Amyntas had wasted. To my mind, Parmenio only sent us forward in the hope that we’d die.

That said, though – the king propagandised his version, too. Look at what it says in the Military Journal. No mention at all of the battle at the ford. Eh? Nor any mention of Parmenio, even though it was Parmenio who marched the army off to the right behind the screen of hills and got them to the edge of the lake under cover of darkness – and into a cold camp without fires. When we rode into that camp, our horses were done, but there were grooms ready to take them, and men handed us cold food and wine and led us to our pallets to sleep – Parmenio had done a magnificent job.

Pyrrhus rode in after dark with four men. He had a claim to having been the bravest of the Hetaeroi, and the king embraced him – it turned out that he’d ridden through the Medes and kept going – with just half a file – sweeping through the Phrygians before realising that no one was behind him. He’d escaped down the Persian bank of the river, and he admitted that he’d been unpursued. The Medes had been shocked by the cavalry action.

We were up well before first light. We crossed the marsh south of the lake on trails marked by the Agrianians and pushed north – crossed the Granicus almost dry shod, where long bars of stony shale lay across the water like piers or bridges.

We were fast and silent, but Arsites was no fool, or perhaps it was Memnon. Either way, the lack of fires probably gave us away, and the Persians sent cavalry probes across the Granicus at first light, and these found us – they on our side of the river, and we on their side. They galloped off, and we couldn’t stop them, and the game was up.

So the king led us on faster. I was on Penelope, saving Poseidon for the last possible moment. Polystratus had him in the rear of my squadron. Philotas rode six files to my right – he was commanding the Hetaeroi, and I was reduced to a mere king’s bodyguard. He hadn’t said a word to me all morning. I’m certain we both had the same thought – no need to quarrel, when with a little luck the Medes would kill one of us.

Arsites formed his army to his own left – which is to say, he now formed with his Greek mercenary infantry on that low ridge, and the far right of his cavalry (the western end of his line) covered by the river, and his left-flank cavalry dangled at the eastern end, but because he had fifteen thousand cavalry to our six thousand, his left flank overlapped our right.

On our far right, in the bushy ground to the east, Alexander set the Agrianians and all the archers under Attalus. Next in line came Philotas with a thousand Hetaeroi, and then the king in the centre of the right, with his bodyguard, and then Arrhabaeus, the scrawny sod, another of Parmenio’s old men, with the rest of the Hetaeroi. To our left were the hypaspitoi and then all six taxeis of the pezhetaeroi – ten thousand of them, the largest phalanx I’d ever seen formed in one place.

And on the far side of the phalanx was Parmenio with all the Thessalian cavalry, all the Greek allies, including your father, and all the Thracians.

Opposite us, as we formed, we saw Arsites trot into position facing us. He moved twice, so insistent was he in lining up on Alexander. He had almost two thousand Persian noble cavalrymen – in effect, men as good as our Hetaeroi. The rest of his wing was composed of Hyrkanians and Phrygians, and on their far left they placed six hundred mercenary Greek cavalry under Memnon himself. Thebans, a lot of them, and Thessalian exiles and Athenian exiles – men with every reason to fight well.

Alexander rode along the front of the whole army as it formed, so that we appeared to be in a state of chaos, with regiments spread over forty stades in every direction. In fact, we had a standard formation and we’d practised it almost every day since we left Amphilopolis. Every man and every file knew his place, in rain, in snow, in fog. As soon as the order was given to the marching column to form line of battle, units marched to their places and pushed left or right to make sure they had room. Files opened and closed – cavalry units added or subtracted files to fit into the line.

And as this unfolded, the king rode from unit to unit, calling men by name and shouting encouragement. He didn’t restrict himself to units that loved him – he rode to every unit, even the taxeis that had been Parmenio’s in Asia, and to every group he called out, ‘Tonight we will be rich men!’ and they always cheered.

We rode with him, of course, and he rode fast, and I was glad I was still on my riding horse. We cantered from unit to unit, and then, when we’d reached Parmenio on the far left, we halted.

‘You ready, lad?’ Parmenio asked.

Alexander’s head snapped back as if he’d been hit.

‘Lad?’ he asked. ‘I’m your king.’

Parmenio smiled. ‘Your first real battle,’ he said.

Alexander sat back – spine straight, posture perfect, rein held loose. ‘Parmenio, if I win this battle, will you concede that I know my business?’ he asked.

Parmenio laughed. ‘Relax, lad. Take it easy. We have the numbers, and their Greek foot are no match for our pikes – our phalanx is twice the size of theirs. Nothing to worry you.’

‘When I beat them, I’ll execute every one of the traitors,’ Alexander said.

Parmenio smiled. ‘What a fire-breather you are, to be sure. Best get back to your wing. Arsites has decided to come at us.’

Sure enough, Arsites and his wing were advancing.

Alexander looked, turned his horse and we galloped across the whole front of the army.

No one else seemed to know we were late – men cheered just to see the king ride so beautifully, his cloak flying behind him, back straight, as if he were an equestrian statue brought to life. The rest of us followed as best we could – Black Cleitus, me, Nearchus, Marsyas; Laodon and Erygius, and older men like Demaratus of Corinth. In some ways, despite being a nation of innovators, Macedonians are very old-fashioned – in a big fight, we like to see a king go into battle surrounded by his closest friends. I’ve met dozens of Greeks who accuse Alexander of living like a hero in the Iliad – what they fail to understand is that all Macedonians live like heroes in the Iliad.

We hauled on our reins when we got back to the Hetaeroi. Polystratus was ready for me – I changed horses and buckled the cheek-plates on my helmet, and took my heaviest spear from Ochrid, who gave me a grin.

Arsites and his whole line were a stade away.

The king looked left and right down the line.

He pointed to Arsites, easily visible a stade or less away on a magnificent white horse.

‘Blow through them and the battle is won,’ he said. ‘Thank the gods that they were fools enough to fight.’ His personal priest and diviner, Aristander, offered a sacrifice and a libation, and exclaimed at the sight of the liver – he shouted aloud, he was so excited.

‘Victory!’ he shouted. He waved the bloody liver.

All the time Aristander was killing his beasts, the Persian line was advancing.

They weren’t Macedonians. Gaps began to open in their line as soon as they rolled forward. Indeed, the largest gap opened between the wing facing us and their cavalry in the centre. They’d put Paphlagonian or perhaps Phrygian cavalry in the centre – I couldn’t tell which – screening the Greek mercenaries to their rear. Why they placed cavalry in opposition to our phalanx I’ll never know.

But their cavalry had no intention of riding forward into our sarissas, so the centre lagged behind and Arsites’s wing plunged forward, and a gap began to open. An enormous gap.

The king waved to us, his bodyguard. ‘Hold here,’ he said.

He shouted orders to Philotas and waved at Arsites.

Philotas protested.

Alexander insisted.

Philotas shrugged, obviously angry, and barked orders at his trumpeter.

And our entire right division began to move.

Philotas didn’t want to do it. It was written in every line of his body – in the way he rode. But I don’t know what else he wanted to do.

He rolled forward with half our cavalry, and three horse lengths from the enemy, he flashed his sword and the Hetaeroi went straight to the gallop – a tactic we practised on a thousand strips of grass, in winter and summer – and the enemy were caught by surprise, suddenly turned from aggressive attackers to defenceless prey.

Then I could see nothing but the sudden onset of dust – the battle haze of the poet.

Arsites was no longer opposite us. Something else had caught his attention, and he’d taken his bodyguard out of the line. But we could still see Persian cavalrymen in beautiful tall helmets opposite us. They were rolling into the melee – fighting draws men like a magnet.

Cleitus pressed in close behind the king. ‘We should—’

‘Silence!’ Alexander said. He had one fist in the small of his back and his other hand holding the reins, legs dangling, and he was watching the enemy line where the gap had opened – watching it to the exclusion of all other things.

I watched the Persian line opposite me shred as the line of men threw themselves at Philotas.

The king turned and motioned to Arrhabaeus. The older man saluted.

‘Follow me,’ Alexander said.

Arrhabaeus saluted again and we started forward. I’d assumed that the king would take us into the flank of Philotas’s melee, where the Persians were fully committed, and Philotas was fighting against odds.

But that wasn’t the king’s intention at all.

He turned to all of us – his friends – and he had the secret smile we all came to know so well – I’d seen it before, and I knew it. ‘Now we win,’ he said. ‘Unless Philotas folds in the next thousand heartbeats, now we win. Follow me, and be heroes, and live for ever!’

I know no other man who could say such stuff with a straight face and mean it. My heart swelled to twice its size, and I felt the power of an Olympian suffuse me. And we went forward.

As soon as the king was clear of the leftmost squadrons of the Hetaeroi, he turned sharply towards the centre of the enemy line – towards the gap.

He was going for the gap.

Ares, we were going to ride past their unengaged men and plunge into the open ground between their cavalry line and their infantry.

As soon as the king saw that the Hetaeroi were forming on him and angled appropriately, he sat back and put his heels to Bucephalus and we were off at a gallop.

The Paphlagonians opposite us began to shred as soon as they saw we were going to outflank them. They lacked anything like our level of training, and they couldn’t respond in kind – they couldn’t wheel to cover the open ground, or extend files, so the end men began to ride back to cover the gap, and in a moment they were in flight, and not a blow had been struck.

I once watched a thatched roof blow to pieces in a wind storm. It was like that. First there was a solid enough line facing us, and then a few men riding to close a gap – and then, as if burned by a flash fire or blown away on the rising wind, the Paphlagonian cavalry was gone, and we were riding for the flanks of their centre division – all those Phrygians, already unwilling to face our pike men.

Arsites saw the crisis. He sent Darius’s own cousin, Mithridates, with his bodyguard and the best of his Mede cavalry, straight at us. And to our front, emboldened or perhaps harangued, a few hundred Phrygians suddenly went from vacillation to attack – and came right at us.

That was my last glimpse of the development of the battle. I never saw it, but on our left, their cavalry crashed into Parmenion and threw him back – but he didn’t break, and his Thessalians and Thracians gave ground slowly. To our right, Philotas fought against odds – heavy odds. But he had the senior squadrons of the Hetaeroi, men who had fought in the mountains and on the Danube and who believed. They held. They were even pushing the enemy back.

We crashed into the Phrygians, and Alexander killed his man, and then I was fighting, spear against spear – I went high, this time, at contact, and I remember being showered with the remnants of my man as my spear wrecked his head.

Alexander broke his spear a horse length ahead of me, and old Demaratus of Corinth gave his to the king – very sporting. But before we had time to savour our victory, we were fighting for our lives, and the king.

No sooner were we into the Phrygians than the Persians hit the right face of our wedge, and they drove straight for the king – cutting us off from Arrhabaeus.

The first I knew was an arrow in Poseidon’s flank. I whirled and saw a man behind me, nocking an arrow, and I didn’t have time to make complex decisions, my arm went back and I threw my heavy spear, and it hit his horse in the neck and knocked the horse down.

Poseidon turned on his back feet and I got my borrowed kopis out of the scabbard under my arm in time to parry a spear from a man in gorgeous armour – he might have been the King of Kings, he had so much gold on his body.

His spear scraped across me – it was that close – and he swept past me, even as Poseidon continued to turn – and the world stopped as he drove his spear into the king’s side.

Alexander’s speed and coordination were legendary among the former pages, and he leaned as far as he could, but the spear was driven hard by a man of great skill, and it hit Alexander’s green-bronze cuirass and punched through it, just as Poseidon crashed into the charging Persian’s horse.

Alexander reached down and caught the shaft of the spear in his side and pulled it free. Blood spurted.

Alexander took the spear, still wet with his blood, and threw it at the Persian, who was roaring his war cry – ‘Mithridates! Mithridates for Darius!’ in Persian.

Alexander’s throw was perfectly timed, and he caught the man high on his breastplate, where the bronze is thin, and it punched through the hardened bronze and rocked Mithridates in his saddle.

But it didn’t go deep – it cracked ribs, but it didn’t go deep into the Persian prince’s chest. Poseidon had made the Persian’s horse stumble, and as Mithridates drew his sword, Alexander swung his own spear – left-handed, no less – and caught the Persian in the face and stunned him.

I got my heels into Poseidon’s sides, and he reared over the Persian and I hit him with my kopis – a sloppy shot, but he was stunned and it cut his neck and blood sprayed and down he went.

But in moving to kill the great man, I’d left an opening in the ring around the king, and another Persian – I’d missed him – flew in like a thunderbolt and his backcut sheared the wings off the king’s helmet – cut through the bronze. I saw the blade go into his skull.

Alexander reversed his spear, took it just behind the haft with his right hand and rammed it up under the man’s armpit – with the man’s sword still sticking out of the crest of his helmet.

The Persian screamed.

But the Persian nobles were all around us like sharks around a stricken tuna. Alexander looked back at me – I was facing away from him, trying to stem the rush of the enemy’s elite – I took blows in my back, my side, my helmet, but by the grace of Zeus or Apollo or Ares none of them hit my unarmoured arms or face or neck. I backed Poseidon – I don’t really remember anything except the blows raining on me, the dust and Alexander looking at me, his mouth working, and the sword stuck in his helmet.

I saw Spithrakes – I only learned his name later – another of their great nobles. He came up behind the king in the fight – rode past Nearchus, fighting two men, and put Marsyas down with a heavy backcut, and then he had the king – he drew back his arm and Cleitus cut it off – one of the greatest blows I’ve ever seen – that man had the king’s life in his hands, and Cleitus saved him with one perfect cut, as if he’d waited his entire life for that moment to save the king’s life.

But the Persians were pressing in – another Persian got past Nearchus and his spear blow – sloppy – caught the king in the back and tipped him on to the ground.

We had never imagined that the king could fall.

I had two opponents, and I was not fighting to take them down, but rather to block the path to the king. When he fell, my purpose in the melee changed. Or rather, everything changed.

I let Poseidon go forward, and he sank his teeth into an enemy mare’s neck and she screamed, and my sword sheared off the top of the man’s skull and with my backcut, I blinded the other horse and spilled its brains, and then, ignoring the press of Persians, I whirled Poseidon on his forefeet and got him over the king’s body – looked down, and he was already on his hands and knees, and Black Cleitus was beside me – flank to flank, his horse nose-to-tail with Poseidon, and we had Alexander between us, and we cut outwards into the press.

Bucephalus was the horse Alexander said he was. He pushed in between us to stand by his master.

I cut a man’s hands off on his horse’s neck, and then I was just trying to stay alive – the spear-points never stopped coming, and I blocked them – up, right, high, anything to clear the iron from Poseidon and the king. I have no idea how long Cleitus and I held them – ten heartbeats? A hundred?

I know that the gods could have made the earth and the heavens in that time, raised a new race of men and made a new golden age. It was that long. It was like the first pangs of love. Like the last moments of severe pain. The intensity and speed of it rose to an intense pitch – there were blades everywhere and my kopis flew through the blocks and parries – I got a spear in my left hand, taken from an enemy or put there by a friend, and I used it to block thrusts at the king, who was off his knees and on his feet by this time, but I couldn’t risk a look – or he was face down in the muck and blood and dead. Either way, I had no means of knowing, because to risk a glance would be to die, and I was the last wall between the barbarians and the king.

Faster, and harder. I had never fought so well in my life. I was fighting three men – perhaps four – and holding them.

Like a god.

And then the biggest of my opponents – a giant man on a big black horse with a huge spear – baffled my parry, and I had that sickening moment – the one you get in practice when you know you’ve missed your parry, and pain is to follow – except this was the end.

His spear-point seemed to come forward slowly – but my attempt to reparry was even slower.

And then a spear came over my shoulder from behind, and the blow meant for my face sheared off into the crest of my helmet.

I rocked back and lost my kopis, but just like that, the fight was over.

The Persians had thrown everything at us – all their cavalry reserve – and while we fought four thousand men, our pezhetaeroi and our hypaspitoi had shattered their centre and our cavalry was gaining both flanks. Their first line was fleeing. Their second line expected the cavalry to rally there – but they didn’t, and the only reason I can offer is that three of their senior officers were lying under our horses’ hooves.

I sat there, shoulders slumped, looking vaguely at the ground.

Cleitus got a hand on the king’s arm and hauled him up on to Bucephalus’s back.

His helmet was gone, and there was blood pouring down the back of his neck.

He was looking at Hephaestion, face down in the blood under our hooves. His jaw was slack. I hadn’t seen the king’s closest companion go down, but he was down, and his horse was dead atop him.

But the pezhetaeroi were cheering their lungs out, and the Persian army was broken. Only the poor bloody Greek mercenaries stood their ground. They could see the king, and they sent us a herald – requesting that they be allowed to surrender.

He picked a bad time.

Alexander raised his eyes from his best friend lying in the bloody dust, and he pointed out the Greeks to his pezhetaeroi, who were close behind us, having to all intents and purposes rescued us from the Persian nobles.

‘Kill them all!’ he said, his voice harsh.

The pezhetaeroi needed no further urging.

We don’t really like Greeks, we Macedonians.

As it turned out, of course, Hephaestion wasn’t as badly hurt as the king, who had a cut in his scalp that ran right into the bone. I’d say he missed grim death by the width of a sword blade. Hephaestion had been knocked unconscious.

The Persians ran, leaving their Greek mercenaries to die. But they lost a lot of their finest men. They lost Mithridates, widely reckoned their finest fighter – he almost got Alexander.

But I got him. Heh. And they lost Pharnakes, another of their best – Rhodakes, Spithridates, and two more satraps – great men, relatives of the king, trusted stewards of great provinces of the empire. If the king had lost Hephaestion, me, Parmenio and a dozen more like us, it would have been even.

I’ll tell you two things about that fight, lad. One is, we voted the king the palm for the bravest in the army. It wasn’t some empty compliment. Watching him fight – both days – was inspirational. Ask any man who was there – ask any front-ranker in the pezhetaeroi what it’s like to watch your king work his way through a dozen enemies, a sparkling haze of metal and blood as he kills his way to victory. That’s what a King of Macedon is supposed to do. That’s why farmers from Pella will march to India. It’s not for his boyish good looks or his leopard-skin cloak.

He did it with elan. He looked like a god.

And when that fight was over, and he got remounted, helmet gone, blood flowing down his back, they cheered their lungs out and Parmenio could not understand why. All Parmenio saw was a reckless boy, foolish, arrogant, who had risked an easy victory for personal glory.

The pezhetaeroi saw a god.

The other is that, in many ways, that fight – those few minutes on the banks of the Granicus – were the fight for the Persian empire. The King of Kings lost most of his closest, most trusted warriors. He already had problems in the east, and he’d just lost all the men he could trust.

One more thing.

It was the closest they ever came to getting the king. I hated the bastards – they were the enemy, the barbarians, the Medes I’d waited my whole life to fight, but by all the gods, when they came for us they were heroes, and we were heroes, and it was the fight for ever after, around every campfire, in every cushioned hall where the somatophylakes lay with the king.

Well – except for Halicarnassus. Halicarnassus was horrible. But mostly, we didn’t talk about those awful days. We talked about Granicus.

Which only makes what happened later all the worse.