God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

EIGHTEEN

It was four days’ easy marching south from Miletus to Ephesus.

After a long argument with Parmenio, Alexander disbanded the fleet. He kept only the Athenians. The rest of the Greek ships he dismissed, and they ran home as fast as they could. The Persians couldn’t believe their luck – without a battle, they had deprived Alexander of his only hope of sea power.

Cynical armchair strategists tell me that Alexander didn’t trust them, and that he hated the sea, and that he couldn’t afford a defeat, and a dozen other notions. There’s a little truth in every one, but the greatest was this – Alexander trusted himself. He had a new plan for the defeat of the Persian fleet, and he was sure that he could effect it. And he didn’t understand the sea, and he disliked the extent to which he could not control it. On land, he could walk through the worst weather, the driest desert, the most afflicting blizzard. I know – because he did. Sheer will can overcome weather, on land.

At sea, you just die. Poseidon is, in many ways, the mightiest god, and when you commit yourself to his element, you admit your humanity and your deep helplessness. Alexander was not particularly gifted at such admissions.

But most of all, he wanted rid of the money they cost. Every ship had two hundred skilled oarsmen. The oarsmen cost more than his soldiers, and there were thirty-two thousand rowers to feed and pay. That’s why he disbanded the fleet. We were broke – we were literally living from town to town – and he needed to send all those oarsmen home.

Parmenio had learned not to argue that we should quit and go home – but in one season, we had conquered all Phrygia and Lydia and we were poised to take Caria, as well. I’m not sure that it was unrealistic of him to suggest that we march back from Miletus to Ephesus and take up winter quarters.

‘You seem to have liked it well enough,’ Parmenio said. ‘And you found that nice city site – wouldn’t you like to be there when they start to build?’

Alexander had, indeed, found a pretty site while hunting. I was there. It’s Smyrna, now.

But Alexander just shook his head.

‘All Caria,’ he said. ‘I will face Memnon now.’

Kineas and his squadron of Athenians were assigned temporarily to the Hetaeroi. This sort of thing happened all the time – we built temporary brigades for scouting, for flank guards, for night guards – all sorts of purposes. After Miletus, Alexander wanted to have all his Athenians together – where he could see them, I expect, because the most obvious strategy for Memnon was to spark revolt in Greece, as I’ve said.

And we didn’t make the march to Halicarnassus in four easy days. We made it in ten brutal days, because we didn’t take the coast road into Caria. Oh no.

We marched east, into the mountains.

Armies live on rumours, and as soon as we marched on a sunny early autumn day, I heard veterans suggesting that we were marching on Susa or Persepolis. We were obviously going east, and into the mountains – hence, to many soldiers, this must be the great march.

I couldn’t fight the rumour because, despite being a friend of the king, I had no more idea where we were going than they did. I knew that Parmenio was angry, and I knew that Philotas had attempted to block my very temporary promotion to command of the scouts. I had half the Agrianians and my Hetaeroi and Kineas and his Athenians, and we scoured the country ahead of the army, a broad ‘W’ with the Agrianians in the centre and the cavalry on the flanks. A ‘W’ is a superb way to counter potential ambushes – enemy troops close to a road or defile are caught by your outflung wings and exterminated.

Nothing like that happened. We entered the mountains and the arms of our ‘W’ came in closer and closer to the column, and eventually we halted and switched roles, with the hardy Illyrians out on the wings, climbing the ridges above us, and the cavalry close in.

Kineas loved it. He loved scouting and careful, professional cavalry work – he excelled at little details of tactics, such as keeping a file of horsemen over the crest of a ridge so that they were invisible as they moved. He was a keen hunter on horseback, and he used the skills from hunting very well.

Up and up, ridge after ridge, switchback trails on which the horses had to go two abreast – sometimes one abreast. And cold. A taste of winter.

Where in Hades are we going?

Up and up, and then down into a high valley – a magnificent valley that rolled away into an infinite distance – a hundred stades of high valley, with magnificent hills on either side, some already snow-capped, and beautiful farms laid out all along the valley floor.

The valley had a side door – a spur of the valley floor that ran off to the south, back towards the coast.

Locals called it the land of Herakles, in their own tongue. It looked remarkably like the best parts of Macedon, or southern Illyria.

We marched up the road, and came after two days of climbing to the mountain fortress of Alinda, reputed to be the strongest place in Caria, and perhaps in the world. The entire fortress was of stone – two outer walls, each the size of Pella, and separated by a bowshot, so that men on the high inner wall could support troopers on the outer wall, and then, towering over the inner wall, a great citadel like the stern of a ship rising over the so-called Carian Gate, itself protected by a pair of towers and with a magnificent carving over the lintel of an enormous lion snarling at visitors, very reminiscent of the stone over the lintel at Mycenae.

From the plain, we looked up and shuddered. I could see from the valley floor that the walls were too high above the plain for even our largest one-talent machines to reach them with enough force to dislodge stone.

‘What’s he thinking of?’ I asked Thaïs, who rode between me and Kineas.

Thaïs smiled. ‘He isn’t going to lay siege to it,’ she said. ‘He’s going to make love to it.’

She was at her most witty when she was enigmatic. So I smiled at her and kept my scouts moving.

I needn’t have bothered. Not a Carian mountaineer troubled us. The most excitement we had was when the Agrianians smoked a nest of bandits and we massacred them – good fun, but hardly a contest.

We camped below the citadel, and every Macedonian lord – certainly all the highlanders – looked up at it with something like lust. Alinda, the fortress, was a fine hold, and the man who had it would be comfortable, safe and powerful for ever.

It turned out that Thaïs and Alexander had been negotiating with the commander for weeks. Not quite the commander – rather, the semi-exiled queen of Caria, Ada. She had a few troops – all mercenaries – and she held the lower two circuits and had the Persian commander holed up in the citadel.

Thaïs took me with her when she and Alexander went to meet her. She was in her late thirties, and she had brown-grey hair, fine eyes – really startling, widely spaced and large – and was athletic rather than beautiful – slim-hipped and small-breasted.

How can I tell this?

Alexander fell in love with her. Right there, before my eyes.

She did have something of Atlante about her. She wasn’t shy, and she was not particularly feminine – she’d been in the field much of her life. She rode well, walked with purpose, and the word among her troops was that she was a fine sword-fighter and a good wrestler. She was twice the king’s age, or near enough.

I’ve done Alexander a disservice if I’ve made him sound like an effeminate. No Macedonian army would have tolerated such a man, and he was not, except in the propaganda of farts like Demosthenes.

Nor did he prefer boys to girls. The truth – a hard truth that men never wanted to believe – is that he was above such things. He didn’t particularly fancy anyone. Oh, a perfect beauty like Calixeinna moved him to possession and sexual satisfaction – but that was really a conquest, not a lust. He didn’t look.

I know. Despite being besotted with Thaïs for years – for most of my life – I look at every woman I see. If a woman bends over to pick up a basket, I’ll look at her breasts. If a woman walks away into the sun, I’ll look at the whole outline of her figure. Really – it is one of the joys of life. Women are always beautiful.

I’ve even seen beautiful men – a few. They don’t move me the same way, but there’s something truly admirable about a good body – hard and well trained and ready for war. Not as interesting, perhaps, as a woman’s body – but worth a look.

Alexander never looked. You could see it in him, if you took the time. You could parade hetaerae by him all day, and he’d only react to the beauty with a certain fascination – never with an obvious head-turn of the man. He was not a man.

He was more, and he was less.

But Ada, in her slim-hipped, hard-bodied, older and wiser way, pierced him.

There was an element of rich comedy to it from the first. She was a practical, unromantic woman, as hard as a sword blade, deeply suspicious of this foreign conqueror. Her face was more handsome than beautiful, aside from her eyes – her nose was too long, slightly curved in an Aramaic way, her skin was dusky and her lips were thin. She kept Alexander at a distance, distrusted the lot of us and tried to negotiate.

Alexander gave her anything she asked for.

Since she was neither romantic nor yet a tease, she had no idea of the effect she was having, and his besottedness confounded their negotiations.

Thaïs and I laughed ourselves to sleep, that first night.

Thaïs grabbed me and put a finger on a very sensitive place. ‘You have to help him,’ she said, stifling a giggle. ‘The goddess has him, and he can’t think.’

The things I’ve done for the king.

Next morning, I had the duty anyway. My little command had been broken up – we were clearly camping in this rich valley for a few days, and Philotas had the next turn on point. So I was back to bodyguard duty. I presented myself in armour.

Hephaestion was in a pout.

Alexander was having his hair brushed. ‘I want to look my best,’ he said to me as I came in. ‘Hephaestion’s being difficult, Ptolemy. And you could look better – when did you last polish that thorax?’

I made a face. ‘I think I was fourteen,’ I said. ‘Since then, I’ve had slaves to do it.’

That got me a smile.

‘Thaïs told me to have a talk with you,’ I said.

Alexander nodded. ‘She’s the most intelligent of women. Although Ada . . .’ He smiled again. ‘I keep saying her name.’

Hephaestion rolled his eyes.

I made a small motion with my thumb. Hephaestion read it and got to his feet. ‘I’m going to go and curry my horses,’ he said sulkily.

It’s funny. As I tell you this story, I keep insisting that Hephaestion and I were never friends, but I find that we cooperated awfully well – at least in the early days.

At any rate, he went out to the horse lines, and Nearchus – who was becoming the kind of yes-man who stands too close to the man in power, so close that the term ‘henchman’ comes to mind – Nearchus got the message and went out, looking back all the way, hoping to learn whatever deep secret was about to be related.

I took a cup of herbed wine and water from the duty slave. ‘Go and have a rest,’ I said. ‘Don’t come back for ten minutes.’

The slave beamed. And vanished.

Alexander looked around at his suddenly empty tent. ‘This is about Ada?’ he said, ready, I think, for a quarrel.

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Thaïs says I should tell you that this is falling in love, and you have no defence for it, and she’d like to take over the negotiations, please, before you make her Queen of Persia.’

Alexander spluttered.

Really, it was like talking to a stranger. He spluttered, he stammered, and he hadn’t a thing to say.

I put an arm around his shoulders. Alexander wasn’t much for human contact – but he submitted to my embrace. ‘She’s quite . . . handsome,’ I managed. ‘And I think she likes you.’

‘Really?’ he asked. ‘I feel like a buffoon. I talk too much, and she must think I’m a boy.’ He looked at me. ‘She’s so . . . mature. Almost godlike in her wisdom – when those eyes fall on me, I’m afraid I’ll babble.’

There was a gentle tap at the tent door, or rather the poles to support the door, and in came four slaves, all Hyrkanians, carrying two bronze kettles. They bowed very deeply, lifted the lids and the oldest man proclaimed, in a sing-song voice –

‘The queen sends these, the best food of her table, to her young friend. Eat, and be joyful!’

He bowed again, and withdrew.

Alexander needed no second urging. He ate.

I ate too. It was stewed antelope with raisins – delicious – and with wonderful bread.

We ate well, and I had our slaves take the cauldrons around the duty Hetaeroi as well – there was food for forty.

Thaïs met with the queen, using a pair of slaves as interpreters, and in two hours they hammered out an agreement. Ada became Alexander’s vassal, but more, she adopted him as her son.

Thaïs smiled. ‘She wanted to marry him,’ she said. ‘I knew she would. And he’d have done it.’

‘Zeus, god of kings,’ I muttered. ‘A forty-year-old barbarian queen? Blood everywhere. Civil war.’

‘Adoption seemed better,’ Thaïs said.

That night, we celebrated with a feast, and Alexander gave her two hundred men from the hypaspists to help her take the citadel after he marched away. She turned and kissed him.

We had sword dances, and Queen Ada danced the Pyricche with some of her soldiers. She danced very well.

Alexander drank far too much. I tried to stop him – he was drinking unwatered wine at the speed I was drinking it with three waters.

Finally I took the cup from him. Ada was gazing into his eyes and laughing. Wine made her far more feminine.

Alexander turned and looked up at me, and Ada rolled away and went decorously down off the dais – I assume off to piss. It was quite a party.

‘Give me my wine cup, Ptolemy!’ Alexander commanded, and then he giggled.

‘Planning to take her to your bed?’ I asked.

He blushed. Here’s how fierce his blush was – even in firelight, you could see it.

‘You can get drunk, or you can get laid,’ I said. ‘But you will almost never get drunk and do a good job of getting laid.’

Alexander shook his head. ‘So vulgar. Wine . . . has truth in it! Makes me happy. Please give me my wine.’

‘Let’s dance!’ Ada said, returning.

Some of the men were none too happy to see women at a dinner – Philotas, for example – and he spat. ‘The King of Macedon does not dance!’ he said.

Alexander would not have danced, otherwise. But he got up – barely able to walk.

‘I will dance,’ he said.

Then nothing would do for him but he must dance the Pyricche, and in his own equipment. So Ochrid was sent for his harness and spears, and then Ada admitted, coyly, that she had her own harness – gods, it was all I could do not to giggle and retch at the same time.

Philotas got up. ‘You’re making a fool of yourself with this old hag,’ he said. And stumbled off to bed. Macedonians had a habit of speaking their minds, especially when drunk.

But the musicians struck up the Pyricche, and although the Macedonian version was very different – and far more practical – Ada learned it as fast as I can describe the movements to you. She was imitating the king by the third cycle of the dance – leaping, ducking, menacing with her spear, hiding behind her shield – which was itself full-sized.

I was impressed. Even Thaïs was impressed. Ada could dance, and she had the kind of mind that perfectly controlled her body.

‘Is she a woman-lover?’ I asked.

‘How would I know?’ Thaïs said – with the slightest downturn of her lips. Indicating that this was none of my business.

Ada stamped, turned, clashed her spear on the king’s shield – and launched into doing the dance in opposition, the way I’d have done it if I was dancing with the king, so that instead of two dancers in perfect unison, now she thrust when he ducked, parried when he thrust, leaped in the air when his spear whirled low.

He was drunk, and she was untrained, and they were magnificent. They were so good that the musicians began to play faster.

Alexander seemed to grow with the music – he began to stretch himself. He was a superb warrior, and he knew the dance intimately, and now he began to embellish every movement with subtle additions – the sort of things that old Cleitus used to encourage us to do, to help us remember what the Pyricche was for – to make us better fighters. So Alexander began to make his cuts steeper and more dangerous – rolled his hips to snap his shield forward.

Ada copied him, and added a sinuous martial element of her own.

I only ever saw one other woman who struck me as being a real warrior – a fighter, the way I am. Perhaps there would be more if women weren’t so busy making babies, but Ada was the real thing, and she was breathtaking to watch.

I was afraid one of them would be killed. They were competing, now, to strike harder and faster, and the music was flying. Everyone was clapping. Sweat was pouring off them both, and their spears left trails of fire in the air. Remember that he had taken a cut to the head that bit into his skull at Granicus, and that we’d been marching for days.

I walked over to the musicians, my heart in my mouth, and made a spear-point with my fingers. The flautist nodded sharply.

They played through the tune once more at speed.

The pipes whirled, and they played more slowly, and then more slowly, the tide of the music rising to compensate for the decreased speed, and both the dancers drew back together; both cocked their spears back, together . . .

And as the music ended, they fell together, giggling, in a clash of armour. Thaïs took my hand. ‘Come,’ she said.

I followed her, and we caught the king and Ada, still leaning on each other, and we led them to the tower’s guest chambers. Slaves had taken the king’s clothes when he put his armour on, and they lay on a cedar chest.

I got his thorax off while he laughed, and his greaves, and I towelled him myself as if I were his slave. He ruffled my hair.

‘That was pretty good, wasn’t it?’ he said.

I hate being cast as a sycophant. On the other hand, it had been . . . magnificent. Almost unearthly. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ I said. Then I thought – Athena sent me the words – be generous. It was magnificent. ‘It was magnificent,’ I said.

‘What I love best about your praise,’ the king said, ‘is how unwillingly you give it.’

He had new bruises where his thorax bit into the top of his pectoral muscles.

A voice at the door said, ‘Wine for the king.’

I turned to find Thaïs, handing me wine. ‘Come!’ she said. ‘Leave him!’

So I handed him the wine. ‘I’m sure you can dress yourself,’ I said.

Thaïs reached through the door and pulled at my arm, and I fled, but not before I’d seen Ada come in the other door of the chamber, naked. Alexander had stopped noticing me, by then.

‘You are a wicked, wicked matchmaker,’ I muttered to Thaïs.

She laughed. ‘He’s not going to marry her – so what’s the harm?’ She laughed. ‘Wine makes men randy – even the King of Macedon.’

‘Even Ptolemy,’ I said, catching her against a wall hanging. I loved the feel of her naked hips under her chitons – there was something about lifting her skirts that always made me wild, even when I could have her naked. I was hard in a deep breath, and we were as busy as the king and the queen in another.

She laughed into my mouth, my busy little plotter.

And the next day, we marched for Halicarnassus down the high passes. We had to climb the mountains behind Ada’s castle, and we made Labraunda by dark the first day, Mylasa the second – days were getting shorter. The third night we were at Iasus on the coast, which had submitted to our Athenian flotilla, and where Alexander guaranteed their ‘ancient rights’ (the ink was not yet dry), and we met a young man who was considered a prophet of Poseidon. He was sixteen, and he could talk to the dolphins – they swam up to him eagerly. I saw this with my own eyes. One dolphin in particular followed him all over the town’s inner harbour. And my horses adored him – when he came (at my invitation, as Poseidon is my special god) to my tent for a cup of wine, Polystratus hurried in to see what had happened, because all the horses had begun to whinny.

He was a very special young man. His name was Barsulas, but we all called him Triton. I took him into my household as a priest. He could read and write, and to get ahead of myself, Thaïs had me send him to the Temple of Poseidon at Sounnion in Attika, and we sent our young foundling, Olympias, with him. We trusted the boy, and with good reason. They were, in many ways, like our family. We sent him to Sounnion to be trained as a priest of Poseidon, and we sent her to the Temple of Artemis to learn all the dances of the Bear. I made good donations to both temples, and they were only too happy to admit my ‘children’ and Thaïs’s.

Our daughter was eight months old, and Thaïs had a pair of nurses for her, because running Alexander’s special intelligence section was now a full-time job. And at Iasus, we were one day’s march from Halicarnassus, and she had no report to make.

I was at that meeting.

Thaïs hated to be defeated, but none of her agents had emerged from Halicarnassus to report. She’d sent three or four. We had friends in the town – by then, every town in Ionia had a faction who wanted Alexander to liberate them.

That night, Parmenio had another try at reasoning with the king. I was starting to change sides, by then. There was a nip in the air – autumn was coming. It had rained intermittently all day, and as usual we were ahead of our tents, so that our men were camping in fields – wet.

‘It takes three years to make a good soldier,’ Parmenio said, after dinner. We were in the local Temple of Ares, using it as a headquarters. ‘It takes three nights of rain to kill him. Lord, it is time to call it quits. Ada was a brilliant conquest. You will be lord of Caria in no time – well done. But let’s get back to Ephesus and get the troops under cover. You’ll want to send all the pezhetaeroi home for the winter – it’s their right – and you must be as tired as I am.’ Parmenio chuckled smugly.

Alexander shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not tired, and I’m going to take Halicarnassus from Memnon.’

Parmenio shrugged. ‘As you will, lord. But the weather is turning and this is not a fertile area. There’s not much fodder here, and little wine and less olive oil. What will the army eat, while we lay siege to Halicarnassus?’

‘We have a magazine at Miletus,’ Alexander said. ‘We can send convoys along the coast road.’

‘For water?’ Parmenio shot out. ‘You’ve never been to Halicarnassus. I have. There’s no water – all the water’s inside the town. We have thirty thousand men. They drink a great deal of water.’

Alexander looked around at the rest of us. ‘Anyone else of the same mind?’ he asked.

His voice gave away his opinion. He wasn’t asking. He was looking at dissent.

No one spoke up.

That made Parmenio angry.

‘Listen!’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, when we head up the coast, we’re going up against Memnon. He’s not some hill chieftain. He’s not the commander of a soft confederation and he’s not going to make any easy mistakes. He’s going to meet us on a battlefield of his own choosing, where he has a fleet at his back and an army of mercenaries – expendable men. You’ve sent our fleet away. He can get reinforcements – and food – whenever he likes. And if he doesn’t like the odds, he can sail away. And you won’t be able to stop him.’

Alexander took a deep breath. He nodded very slowly.

Some of the older officers began to let out their long-held breaths in relief.

‘I guess we’ll just have to be on our best game, then,’ Alexander said. ‘Because in the morning, we march for Halicarnassus.’

Philotas had the advance guard. His version was two hundred Thracian Peltastoi and a hundred Thracian cavalry, well spread out in front, backed with two full squadrons of Hetaeroi and two hundred archers. Philotas didn’t like my ‘W’, and he used a more linear advance-guard formation.

We entered the mountains again at Bargylia, with Mount Lyda on our left and the sea below us on the right – a road well cut, an old road, and one that offered no cover at all. Twenty stades south of Bargylia we left the sea and started overland on the last leg of the road, through a valley pass that climbed slowly, and was at least broad enough for the advance guard to shake out into formation.

It was raining. I felt old – my hand throbbed, and all my wounds hurt as if they were new, and Thaïs and I had had a fight – about Queen Ada. A stupid fight.

I was riding with the royal escort, well back in the column, and Parmenio was well behind us – pouting, or so it seemed. Seleucus was finally healed from his wounds at Granicus, and he was back with us, in armour. Nearchus was there, and Marsyas, and most of the rest of the old guard. Kineas was with us.

‘I wish Ada could see this,’ Alexander said.

‘Aphrodite’s tits, I’m tired of Ada,’ Hephaestion said.

‘You know I do not like blasphemy,’ Alexander said coldly. ‘Or vulgarity.’

‘Ada has tits,’ Hephaestion said reasonably. ‘I assumed that you’d want to hear about them.’

Alexander turned to glare at him.

‘Well, she does!’ Hephaestion insisted with his usual foolishness. ‘I mean, they’re not much bigger than mine, but she does have tits.’

Nearchus started to laugh, and Black Cleitus, and Alexander reined in.

‘Shut up!’ he barked, and raised his hand.

Hephaestion, always happiest with an appreciative audience, ignored the king. ‘And arm muscles! Bigger than mine!’

Alexander struck him. He had a riding whip – as long as his legs – in his hand, and he hit Hephaestion in the mouth – not hard, but fast. ‘Shut your foul mouth and listen,’ Alexander said.

Hephaestion put both hands to his mouth. ‘You bastard,’ he spat.

By now I could hear what the king was hearing. ‘They’re fighting!’ I said.

Alexander put his heels to his riding horse. None of us was on war horses, but we raced up the top of the pass, crowding around the hypaspists and the second Hetaeroi squadron.

‘Arm!’ I shouted as we pushed by. ‘Shields! Armour!’

Only the advance guard marched armed for battle.

We went over the top of the pass, and below us we saw Philotas entangled with an ambush.

There were enemy hoplites, immediately identifiable by their big, round shields, in among Philotas’s archers, and farther ahead, archers were dropping arrows from high above on the Prodromoi and the Thracians.

The Thracians panicked and broke, running back along the column, just as Alexander and Seleucus and I started to get a counter-attack together. It was my squadron of Hetaeroi, after all. They were to hand, and they were good, if I don’t say so myself.

Alexander watched the Thracians break, five stades away. He looked around.

Calm as a man in his andron – calmer – Alexander looked off to the north. ‘Philotas was not ready for this. Now, if Memnon is the great man people say he is, he’ll have cavalry. And cavalry can only be . . .’

Alexander was looking right at the low hill that dominated the craggy heights to our left, and as sure as cats make kittens, just as he said this, fifty Greek cavalry emerged from behind the hill.

I had maybe twenty of my own men, and Polystratus and a few grooms.

The Greek cavalry didn’t come at us pell-mell. They formed in a neat rhomboid a stade away, and Cleomenes had time to buckle his breastplate.

‘They look professional,’ Kineas said. He pulled the cheek-plates down on his helmet. Quietly, he said, ‘Shouldn’t the king go to the rear?’

I smiled. ‘He should,’ I agreed. ‘But he won’t!’

They came forward at us, and we had about the same numbers.

Alexander took the point. There was no stopping him. He saw Kineas and smiled. ‘More Athenians over there than here,’ he said.

‘Quality over quantity,’ Kineas said. He grinned at the king.

Alexander threw his head back and roared. ‘By the gods, you are a man after my own heart,’ he said. He tossed his javelin in the air and caught it. ‘Oh, I am alive.’

As soon as we started forward, I realised that the big man with the dark skin who was coming right at me had to be Memnon himself. And these cavalrymen would be his Theban exiles.

We smashed together at a fast trot. Neither side had time to get to a gallop. But because we were so slow, both sides were perfectly ordered, and we crashed together as if we were hoplites on foot.

Fights like that aren’t about skill, but about horse size and riding ability. We were evenly matched, and we were suddenly in our hipposthismos, pushing and cutting, and my spear was broken – I can never tell you how, it always just seems to happen.

I was sword to sword with Memnon – or rather, he cut at me with his kopis, and I blocked with the ash staff of my busted spear. I forced him to parry high, and I got my bridle hand on his elbow and started to push, and quick as a viper he put his head down and rammed my face with the crest of his helmet. But my nasal held, and he didn’t break my nose or my face. I went for my dagger, rammed it into his side and missed my blow – he caught my dagger in his bridle hand and disarmed me.

He was good.

‘Let me at him!’ Alexander shouted at my right hip.

I’d have laughed, if I hadn’t been so busy.

Memnon now had my right wrist and I had his. I had his with my left thumb down, so I started to rotate his hand by main strength and leverage. My riding horse didn’t help – too small and light for this kind of work, but she had lots of heart, and as she backed away from Memnon’s bigger stallion and took a bite to the face, she reared, and for a second I had the purchase, and I stripped the sword from Memnon’s hand, getting a slash across my neck in exchange.

He slashed a dagger at the back of my off leg, and scored deeply. When I tried to throw him to the ground, he punched me in the neck, under the helmet, and by luck, his instinctive punch was with the pommel of the dagger and not the blade, or I’d have had to end this story right there. I sagged back, and suddenly – without warning – the whole lot of them were cantering away from us, and it was all I could do to sit on my horse and breathe.

I’d never been hand to hand with another man who could wrestle on horseback as I can.

Kineas had a long cut down his sword arm, but he’d taken a prisoner.

Alexander slid from the saddle and picked up the sword at my horse’s front feet. ‘Memnon’s sword!’ he said. ‘An omen if ever there was one.’

Aristander proclaimed the omen throughout the camp that night, which was good, because the omen I saw was that Memnon’s ambush had killed a hundred archers, as many Thracians and more Hetaeroi than died at the Battle of the Granicus. And we found six bodies of his men, and Kineas took a prisoner. The worst of it was that his tiny cavalry force had only charged us to cover the rest of his ambush as they broke contact. I wasn’t an old veteran, back then, but I knew enough to be chilled at the professionalism of an ambush force that struck – and vanished. They didn’t hang around to let us bring up reinforcements – the failure of most ambushes.

Kineas’s prisoner was a Megaran aristocrat, and thus, by League law, a traitor to be executed. But all agreed he’d fought well – even when unhorsed – and Macedonians, unless their blood is up, don’t really hold with killing prisoners.

Kineas bowed to the king that night. ‘Lord, I can’t make him a slave. He’s a gentleman.’

Alexander nodded. He’d enjoyed the fight, and his mood was much better. ‘Recruit him, then,’ he told Kineas.

And that’s your friend Coenus, young man.

Fighting Memnon was the best training that the Macedonian army ever received. He was like a slap in the face – a lesson from a particularly nasty teacher.

It was good for Alexander. At the time, it was a nightmare.

We set our camp for the siege, and that night a hidden battery of engines rained rocks on us for half an hour while our camp dissolved into chaos. Memnon’s Greek engineers had time to break the machines down, burn the wood and carry the bronze parts back into the city. Only about a dozen Macedonians were killed – twice that many wounded and twice again in slaves lost – but the panic was incredible.

The second day, Memnon sent a daylight sortie – a daylight sortie. Everyone knows that you only sortie at dawn, dusk and in the light of the moon. The besieged – brave but doomed – sneak out a postern gate and try to set fire to a siege engine or two. It never works.

Memnon had two of Athens’ best commanders – Ephialtes and Thrasybulus – in his service. Thrasybulus took the picked hoplites of the garrison, waited for our noon guard change to be about one quarter complete and charged out the main gate.

I was a stade away, sitting on horseback with Kineas and Cleomenes. We were off duty, and we’d decided to go for a hunt in the hills. I’d never seen such a barren place, and I was minded to find another campsite – a place where the cavalry could camp closer to water, for example.

We’d just left the camp when the assault started – the noise alerted us. I saw the Greek hoplites teem out of the gate and slam into the pezhetaeroi, who were strung out over five stades of ground in no kind of formation. Guard duty was a formal thing. No one worried about fighting by day, in a siege.

They had fire in pots, and in moments a half-built siege tower was engulfed in flames, and a row of torsion engines went next. Cleomenes cursed. Those were all the machines we had. The Athenians and the transport fleet had the rest of the siege train, way north at Miletus.

Kineas laughed. ‘That’s Thrasybulus!’ he said. We were close enough to see helmet crests. Yellow with two red side plumes. Thrasybulus. ‘Alexander ordered him executed.’

I must have made a face.

Kineas shrugged. ‘Would you want a Macedonian exile to prove a coward?’ he asked.

The pezhetaeroi were completely defeated, and the Greek hoplite force formed up and marched back into the city, singing a hymn to Athena.

That stung.

Next day I took my grooms and rode cross-country to Miletus with orders for the fleet. The fleet, which consisted of twenty Athenian triremes and forty transport ships, against roughly four hundred Persian warships.

Nicanor, the fleet commander, made a face. ‘The Athenians don’t love Alexander,’ he said, as if I needed to be told that. ‘And all those oarsmen have relatives serving on the walls at Halicarnassus.’

‘The king needs the siege train,’ I said.

Thaïs and Alexander and I had cooked up a plan. Each of us contributed something, although I’m sure that Alexander thought of it as his plan and I’m quite sure it was really mine.

Thaïs arranged for a prisoner to escape with news that our fleet was going to raid Cos – a large island off the coast still loyal to Persia.

Alexander tried to assault the walls four nights in a row. It cost him men, but it kept Memnon busy – too busy to brew mischief.

Nicanor sent the Athenian squadron to appear off Cos and then sail south, as if going to Cyprus or Tyre or one of the other Persian bases.

And then, naked as a babe, the transports sailed before dawn on the fourth day from Miletus with our entire siege train – nipped round Point Poseidon and landed at Iasos. Did our brilliant trickery play any role? Who knows. But the Persian fleet left Halicarnassus and sailed – to Cos – and our siege train moved down the coast unmolested.

Day seven of the siege, and we were ready to start in earnest. We built the engines well to the rear, where no sortie could reach them, and the whole army spent two days moving earth – the miserable, sandy, scrubby soil of Halicarnassus – in sacks from the more fertile regions to the west. It was brutal, and because it was brutal, we all did it. Alexander made a point of carrying sacks of earth.

Parmenio did not. He was openly derisive of the effort.

Day eight – see here, in the Military Journal? At least this part is honest – four days of rain. Autumn had come, and the wind blew, and most of our precious soil was washed away. That taught us to keep our dirt and sand in sacks. Of course, the sacks for sandbags had to come from somewhere. Sieges are a delight, I tell you – a logistician’s dream.

Memnon, damn him, had everything – bags, quarried stone, full magazines, water, oil. His engines were as good as ours and a little higher on the walls – our first earth platforms were too low, because we hurried. His engines had our range to the dactyl, and before a stone was launched we’d lost engines to his engines.

But we were learning. We put all our earth in sacks, with every camp follower and whore in the army sewing like mad, and our next artillery platforms were higher than the walls and better sited, and in two more days (days eleven and twelve) we’d blown a breach in the wall.

Day thirteen – an exhausting day bringing more earth from the west and north. Every piece of fabric between Miletus and Halicarnassus was now in our earthworks, and Ada had sent us the whole cloth inventory of her realm – thousands of pieces of woven stuff, some quite costly.

And it rained.

And we built new mounds for the second battery.

The thirteenth night of the siege, the rain stopped a little after midnight. There was no moon.

Memnon came out with his picked men, all with their faces blacked, and they burned more than half our engines. The sentries were asleep. There was no one to punish, because they died to a man.

See what I mean about training? It was as if Memnon’s job was to punish us when we failed. His scouting and intelligence were excellent.

Thaïs began to worry that he had a spy in our headquarters. Her immediate suspect was Kineas.

‘Or you,’ I pointed out. ‘You are ideally placed, and Athenian.’

She nodded. ‘If I’m a traitor, you’d already be dead,’ she noted.

Both of us worried that Parmenio was so angry at the king that he’d sell us out just to get the campaign to end. It was hard to know what exactly Parmenio was playing for. I suspected him of plotting to be king, but if so, he was far more cautious a plotter than I would ever have managed. Thaïs felt that he only plotted to defend himself against the king – that he assumed that, in time, the king would try to kill him.

Macedon, eh?

The king moved our batteries to the south side of the city and we started all over again, with fewer engines tossing their stones against a narrower front of the wall. We worked all day on the fifteenth day and all day on the sixteenth, and on the morning of the seventeenth we started to pound the southern walls, and by nightfall we had four breaches.

We stood guard all night, waiting for the inevitable attack, because we’d blown huge holes in the walls and Memnon had to do something.

He did not.

I smelled the rat, but no one would listen to me, and at dusk on the eighteenth day, we formed up to assault the breaches. Alexander was going in person, and I was going with him – all of us were, all the king’s friends.

Dusk. The sun had burned all day, but in autumn, the evening has a bite in it, and the tireder you are, the colder it seems. My arms hurt, my abdomen hurt – I’m a cavalryman, by Poseidon! Not a dirt carrier. My thorax seemed to weigh fifty pounds, and my wrist bracers were like stones. My helmet weighed down on my neck.

And the start of the assault was slowed because Perdiccas’s taxeis was late getting into their assault positions.

Alexander stood near our bit of parapet, outwardly calm. When he saw Perdiccas’s men cutting across the ‘no man’s land’ between our works and the city wall, he frowned.

‘They’re announcing we’re coming,’ he said, and then, I could see, he was clamping down.

He kept looking up the steep ramp of rubble at the breach, which seemed to tower above us. But the breach seemed empty of men, so our surprise was still intact.

We were going first, of course. Right up the breach, all the way to the top. In one rush, with no rest and no slacking, in fifty pounds of armour.

Try it – climbing over pulverised rock in iron-shod sandals going up a forty-five degree slope into fire.

Their archers took a long time to wake up. That much of the plan worked. And Alexander had fires set – wet grass, brought from the hills to the east – and the smoke covered us for a while, although I, for one, choked on it. I threw up on the ramp. War is glorious.

So I was well behind Alexander at the top of the wall, but since he’s told me the story a hundred times, I can tell you. He was the first into the city. There was no resistance.

A dozen archers on the wall shot down into us. Men fell, but not many, and even they were only wounded. It’s awfully hard to kill an armoured man carrying an aspis with a missile from above.

Alexander ran over the rubble, light-footed as a god, spear at the ready, crested the breach and started down into the town. There appeared to be a row of houses in front of him, so he turned along the alley and ran south, towards the sea, with a dozen men at his heels. About this time I’d made it to the breach, and the pezhetaeroi were coming up the ramp behind us in big numbers, the sprinters already three-quarters of the way to the top.

Alexander was afire with the thought of being the first into the town – a great honour among Macedonians, and indeed among all Hellenes. I saw his helmet plumes ahead of me, going south, and I pushed through the hypaspitoi to get to him. I wasn’t worried about Memnon’s garrison – more fool I – but about murder. By then, I was convinced that Parmenio meant to kill the king.

I went south along the alley. I picked up the smell of new masonry – the smell of new-laid mud brick and mortar – as I ran.

Someone had walled up those houses – perhaps five days before.

We were in a cul-de-sac, and the whole attack was an ambush.

I ran as if my legs were powered by ambrosia and the gods were lifting my feet.

Alexander was standing at the head of the southern end of the alley, staring at a wall of new masonry and sandbags three men high. He only had a dozen men around him.

‘Trap!’ I screamed. ‘Run!’

That got their attention.

Hephaestion got his aspis up in front of Alexander’s head, and Nearchus put his over the king’s shoulder, and then the first volley of arrows hit – fired point blank from a few horse lengths.

Men went down. That close, and the Carian and Cretan longbows with their very heavy arrows punched through bronze. I took an arrow two fingers deep into my left shoulder and it stood clear of me like some sort of banner.

Alexander was hit four times, despite his friends covering him. There were that many arrows, and Memnon had predicted that he would be there. Memnon’s whole plan, in fact, was to kill the king.

I fell to one knee – I probably screamed. The pain was intense, and the sight of the king battered by arrows broke my heart.

I won’t soon forget that moment – the taste of vomit in my helmet, the searing pain in my shoulder, the sharp rubble under my knee.

Alexander stood straight as a blade. ‘Form the synapsismos!’ he called. There were hypaspitoi and pezhetaeroi mixed together in the breach and the alley behind it, but the king’s voice impelled instant obedience, and men formed ranks even as they died in the arrow storm. The closer they formed, the more shields there were to cover them, and the safer they were – but the requirement for discipline was incredible.

And they rose to it. There must have been a thousand men packed in the trap, and Alexander saved them – most of them.

‘Back step!’ he ordered. ‘Shields up!’

Step by step. I was in the second rank, with the arrow sticking out of my shoulder until Nearchus saw it and pulled it free. The barbs, thanks to Apollo, had caught in the leather lining of my shoulder armour and had not passed my skin.

Nearchus had a small, very sharp knife inside his thorax – we all did – and he used it to cut my pauldron free of my thorax even as another volley of arrows tore into us, but the gods were with me, or too busy elsewhere to care, and I was not taken.

I got my aspis on my bleeding shoulder, and the spirit of combat filled me and kept me from fainting, and we backed step by step across the rubble with their arrows pouring in on us and Alexander calling the step like a taxiarch. Step by step.

It took for ever. I still have dreams about it – the feeling of the rubble under my sandals, the grit inside them and inside my thorax, the feeling of blood and sweat turning cold in the morning air, the pain, and the king’s voice carrying us down the ramp a step at a time.

Memnon’s archers shot at the king. He was easy to spot, and they showered him with arrows, but the hypaspitoi and a few old sweats from the pezhetaeroi covered him with their shields and died for it. And no chance shaft killed him. He was hit again and again – I saw one shaft hit him square in the helmet crest and stick – and he continued to give orders as if on parade.

We got down the ramp, and the hypaspitoi gathered around him and carried him away to where his personal physician, Philip of Acarnia, waited with hot tongs and boiling water. Alexander had four wounds – three from arrows and a fourth where a friendly spear-tip had ripped across the back of his neck.

We all wore scarves – rolled tight and tucked into the top of our thoraces to catch the sweat and to pad the necks of our armour against our skin. When Philip pulled the king’s neckcloth off, an arrowhead fell with a clank to the wood floor of the tent. I saw this with my own eyes.

Every man present gasped. That arrow had penetrated the cloth of the neck pad, and somehow stopped against the king’s neck. There wasn’t a mark on him.

His four wounds were less onerous than my one. As soon as Philip had seen to the king, he put me on the table, gave me a leather billet to bite and cauterised my shoulder wound after cleaning it. That made me scream. But he had a light touch with the iron and his slaves were famous throughout the army, and I was on my feet the next day in time to see the King of Macedon send a herald to Memnon requesting permission to retrieve the corpses of our dead.

It was the only time Alexander ever had to do so, in all his life. In the Hellenic world, it was an admission of defeat – it entitled the other side to set up a trophy of victory. Memnon had beaten us, and worse, he’d killed three hundred veterans in the breach and rumour had it he’d lost just three men in exchange.

That morning, Parmenio openly proposed that we break the siege and march for Ephesus. ‘We can’t take this town this winter,’ he said. ‘Possibly not ever.’

He didn’t push it, however. In fact, to me, he sounded as if he was egging the king on, pushing him by teasing him. Perhaps I wronged him, but by then I had ceased to hold any affection for Parmenio.

The argument in the headquarters tent went on for hours – and was bitterly acrimonious. It was so nasty that it occurred to me that Alexander was king only by virtue of victory. I had never thought it before – but what I heard in that tent convinced me that if the king were to take a major defeat, these bastards would leave him in a moment. I was shocked, for a while.

The truth was, as usual, that Alexander’s near-inhuman perfection had a flaw. The flaw was that men doubted it, and waited to see him fail. In some perverse way, many men wanted to see him fail. And by the time of the siege of Halicarnassus the strain was beginning to show. Some of the pezhetaeroi were openly mutinous, being forced to serve past their appointed time. The harvest was in back at Pella, or nearly, and they weren’t home on their farms.

And the aristocrats were starting to realise that, under Alexander, there would only be war, followed by war. None of the delights of peace – such as plotting the king’s overthrow. They’d realised that he meant what he said – he meant to conquer all of Asia.

For four hours they yelled at each other, and then Perdiccas went off to set the guards – the two junior regiments of the pezhetaeroi.

I was not paying very close attention because my shoulder hurt, and I had reached a level of fatigue and injury that left me dull. I just knew that I’d had too much wine, my wound was throbbing, and suddenly most of the officers had left the tent, leaving Alexander and Hephaestion and Parmenio and Philotas.

Alexander stood with his arms crossed. ‘I’ll stay here all winter if that’s what it takes to take this city,’ he said.

‘You’ll burn the cream of your infantry and leave us nothing,’ Parmenio said, mixing his metaphors like mad. ‘Memnon is reading you like a book, boy.’

‘You are not welcome to call me boy, Lord Parmenio. Take yourself to bed. You are drunk, sir.’ Alexander spoke carefully. I thought he was a little tipsy himself.

‘I may be drunk, but you are young. The first duty of any strategos – never mind the King of Macedon – is to protect his army. To keep it alive. To fight another day. Halicarnassus is not a fair trade for the army your father and I spent twenty years training.’

Alexander shrugged. ‘Yes it is,’ he said. ‘I’ll do what I can for the pezhetaeroi, but I’ll trade them all for defeating Memnon. There’re more boys in Pella who can carry a sarissa.’

I would have shut him up if I’d been well. Hephaestion didn’t care – he shared the king’s delusions of grandeur.

Parmenio turned red.

Philotas spat. ‘Maybe if you had to train them yourself, you’d take more care with them.’

Alexander shrugged again. ‘At least I wouldn’t squander them in ambushes,’ he said.

Philotas reached for his sword, and even though I had no time for him, I managed to pin his arms against his side.

Alexander looked at him, and at Parmenio. ‘Did your son just reach for a weapon in the royal presence?’ he asked.

And I shook my head. ‘No, lord. He did not. Nor would I say he did in front of the Assembly.’ Cases of treason and lese-majesty were always tried in front of the Assembly of the freemen of the army.

Parmenio threw me a glance of thanks.

I didn’t want his thanks – I wanted the king to stop being an arse.

Alexander looked through me.

Parmenio did the right thing, took his son and his Thessalian officers and got out of the tent.

Alexander watched him go. ‘I didn’t expect you to side with Parmenio,’ he said to me in a chilling voice.

‘Lord,’ I said, and I turned on him, ‘I don’t need to protest my loyalty to you, do I? You risk an open breach with Parmenio in the middle of this siege. Is that what you want?’

‘Eventually I must clean my house,’ Alexander said.

I had missed it. He was drunk. He was telling the truth, as men often do, in their cups, but he was drunk.

‘Not right now, I think. Not while we are in the face of the enemy – a very competent enemy.’ Marsyas said that – bless him. The only courtier with enough balls to agree with me in the face of the king’s drunkenness.

‘Parmenio cannot be trusted,’ Hephaestion said.

I nodded, glad that I, at least, was sober. ‘Parmenio cannot be trusted,’ I agreed. ‘He may even try to kill the king,’ I added quietly. ‘But he is the second most powerful man in the army, and he has the loyalty of many, many men – men we need to conquer Asia. Now is not the time. We might have civil war.’

Marsyas nodded, and Black Cleitus looked at me carefully. But Alexander turned his back on me, leaned on Hephaestion, and walked from the tent.

About six hours later, while the sun was just a hint of orange-grey in the sky over the sea to the east, Memnon struck.

He sent a thousand men with buckets of pitch and blackened faces out of a secret postern gate. They ran silently across no man’s land, overwhelmed the young men on guard duty and plunged in among the war machines. Their pitch buckets and fire pots went straight to work, and in minutes they had all the engines on the north side of the city aflame.

It was brutal, and grim, and in those flames we read our doom. We had lost our entire siege train in fewer minutes than it takes words to tell it.

The pezhetaeroi rallied to counter-attack over the batteries and men formed up with buckets of water – scarce water, many men using what was in their canteens. The pezhetaeroi stormed forward in the dark, and met a fierce resistance – the black-painted men fought like demons. The pezhetaeroi were spear to spear and shield to shield with many of Greece’s best men, and it was dark. In many ways, the situation favoured the Greeks fighting for Persia.

When the pezhetaeroi bogged down – still well short of retaking the battery platforms – Memnon sprung the second part of his trap, and released another sortie from the main gate. Again. We still weren’t ready to see troops coming out of the main gate, but they did – a major force of hoplites and a handful of cavalry, led by the two Athenian strategoi. They slammed into the flank of the pezhetaeroi, catching them at open shields, and the execution they inflicted was horrible.

And then the gods took a hand.

It was at this point, when all was lost, the machines burned and Memnon’s masterstroke was unveiled, that I arrived on the scene – in armour, thanks to Polystratus’s and Thaïs’s efforts. My shoulder was stiff and painful and I ached all over, but the sound of disaster is unmistakable. I ran for the fighting, with my grooms and a dozen friends at my back.

I found Alexander in the gloom. He was waiting for the hypaspitoi to form up. He was watching the fighting – listening, perhaps.

Alectus was forming men as fast as they piled out of their tents, and I put my grooms and any man I could lay hands on in the ranks with them and ran to Alexander’s side.

‘Good morning, Ptolemy,’ he said.

‘How bad is it?’ I asked.

‘Oh – terrible. But not insurmountable. Memnon has made a mistake. Very unlike him, but a good lesson to all of us.’ Alexander turned to me, and he was smiling. ‘Memnon is really very, very good. When this campaign started, he was a better general than I, but by the time we’re done, I’ll have learned what he has to teach. He does everything by misdirection. Brilliant. We Macedonians too often bludgeon. Memnon always cuts with the fine knife.’ He nodded.

I could hear the pezhetaeroi dying.

‘Memnon’s made a mistake?’ I asked.

‘He has. His raid burned our engines and his masterstroke killed our counter-attack to rescue them.’ Alexander was, as always once the fighting started, calm and detached. ‘Had he broken contact at that point, and got his force back behind the walls, we’d have lost here. And not just here. Memnon’s strategy is brilliant – to wear me out here and then take his fleet and go to Greece.’ Alexander watched the fires of the siege engines burning, his dreams of conquest going up in pitch-soaked flames and the fires reflected in his eyes and the gold of his helmet. Behind us, Alectus was roaring at stragglers.

Alexander pointed with his chin towards Parmenio’s tent on the left of the army. ‘What he cannot understand is that we are fighting for Greece, right here. If Memnon leaves us defeated here – we’re done. Most of you cannot imagine how vast the Great King’s empire is. Nor how many times we’ll have to defeat it.’

‘Ready, Lord King,’ Alectus reported.

Alexander pointed at the gates. ‘But Memnon elected to commit his troops to his victory, and even now, more and more of his precious Greek hoplites are pressing through the main gates on to a chaotic battlefield where it is as black as pitch. On to the killing ground.’ He raised his voice so that the men behind him could hear. Next to us, a battalion of old men was forming. They weren’t even all from the same taxeis – it was a formation of veterans. Philip’s veterans. Hundreds of them.

Alexander pitched his voice appropriately, as he was always able to do. ‘They have burned our engines, but they have now sent so many of the garrison outside the walls that we have it in our power to win the city on the battlefield. The pezhetaeroi have fought like young lions – have not broken. Now – you veterans of Philip – go and show them what you learned from Phokion and Charmides and on a hundred other battlefields. We are not in Asia to survive. We are in Asia to conquer.’

The veterans let out a growl like a cheer and went forward, led – in person – by Parmenio. It was odd, and more than a little ironic. The very best thing he could have done for his own plans would have been to stay in his tent. But he was not that man. He was Parmenio – the best general in Macedon – and he led his veterans to save the day because that’s what he did. Most men – and women – can plot and scheme evil, but when it comes to the day and the moment, they will be staunch to what they believe in. Thus Parmenio, in that hour, could not leave his men to die to serve his policy of humiliating the king.

He roared the king’s name, and his phalanx answered, and they went forward into the firelit darkness.

We went farther north, skirting the fire. Alexander was sure there’d be another sortie out of the gate facing the new works, and he led the hypaspitoi there. I had Kineas the Athenian on one side of me and Hephaestion on my other side, and we went into the ditch that surrounded the city and caught the Persian levies that Memnon had been using as a labour force, now given weapons and released to cause havoc. We caught them leaving the gate and we slaughtered them.

I take no joy in slaughter. I like a good fight, now and then – I like to win and I hate to lose, but I like the fight to be . . . interesting.

This was a butchery of peasants, and it went on too long.

And then we pressed forward into the dark, with Alexander’s golden lion helmet burning like a beacon in the light cast by the flames from the walls and the burning machines. He glowed with power, and we ran through the night, falling over logs and stones, cursing the darkness.

The fight at the main gate was locked in stalemate. The old men – Philip’s men – had saved the phalanx and steadied it, but they could not beat the hoplites, who, man for man, were as good or better. And darkness aids no man. Darkness robs the best swordsman of his skill and the rawest recruit of his wits. Dawn was coming up, somewhere far to the east – Athens was probably already lit by sun, and Pella was at least burning pink, but under the walls of Halicarnassus, it was still as black as new-poured pitch, lit only by fires.

We slammed into the Greeks. We didn’t really catch them by surprise – the Athenian captains had turned to face us – Ephialtes himself, I heard later, one of their best.

But our arrival had an effect nonetheless. The Persian levies were dead or broken, and their survivors were glutting the gates in terror, and now we threw in our last reserve – and Memnon, who also had an elite reserve, couldn’t get men through the gates blocked by his useless peasants.

Don’t think the irony was lost on any of us, lad. We were saved – Macedon was saved from defeat by Athens under the walls of a city in Asia by the cowardice of Persian levies.

The fighting was desperate. All fighting is, but this was made nightmarish by the darkness. Inside my helmet, I could see nothing once I was engaged, and the worst of it was that our rear-rankers had no sense of the combat and kept pushing forward, grinding me relentlessly into the ranks of the hoplites I was fighting, so that I couldn’t fully control my weight or balance. More than once, an unintended shove from my file partner sent me to my knees or worse.

But unlike most men, Kineas and I were in full armour. I had greaves and a heavy breastplate, a full helmet, an aspis and a heavy spear, and Kineas was armed the same way, and details – long ‘feathers’ covering our upper arms, a full yoke covering the back of my neck in bronze – were lifesavers, because none of us could see a blow coming. I don’t know how many times I was hit, but I know that the next day I threw my beautiful helmet into the sea – too dented and cut up to be saved. Only the thickness of my cap and my hair saved me from death – there were shearing blows that penetrated the thick bronze.

I don’t remember a single fight. There’s nothing to remember – no vision to cling to – just the relentless weight of the men behind me and the ringing blows on my shield and all too often on my helmet. I took a bad blow – something, probably a spear shaft, hit my spear hand and suddenly I had no weapon and was almost weeping from the pain.

Pyrrhus and Kineas covered me while the tears flowed out of my eyes unbidden and I flailed about on the bloody ground for a weapon. My sword was gone, my spear was gone, and by the time my hand closed on the shaft of a spear I was disoriented. But I got my feet under me and found myself under Pyrrhus’s shield, safe – I got a breath in me and got my spear and shield up, and I was alive.

That heartbeat of complete disorientation on the dark battlefield with death all around – it still visits my dreams, like falling from a great height. That’s terror.

And then the Greeks began to back away.

In fact, I suspect they’d been backing away for some time, and I was just too busy to notice. But now I was moving forward at a brisk pace – by the standards of infantry combat – tripping over bodies and without someone’s spear trying to poke out my eyes.

Memnon ordered the main gates closed while more than two hundred of his hoplites were still trapped in the darkness. It was the correct decision, but it doomed them to death, and they knew it, and the whole combat developed a ferocity that I have seldom seen equalled. It is not for nothing that strategoi speak of the ‘Golden Bridge’ – the easy path of retreat we offer to a defeated enemy in most circumstances. Trapped men with nothing to lose are ferocious.

Those Greeks were monsters, and many of us died.

Of course, they all died.

Alexander was in the front of it, and his spear flashed like the bolts of Zeus, and he didn’t hesitate to go shield to shield with those raging monsters and slay them, and where he led, we followed, shouting his name.

But when the last Greeks were dying, we were still under the walls, the gates were still locked and they were pouring red-hot sand on us.

The Military Journal says that we lost one hundred and twelve pezhetaeroi and found six hundred bodies of the enemy.

In fact, we lost – dead and badly wounded – a little over nine hundred men, and we found about five hundred corpses.

Our machines were all burned, and we would have to start all over again.

In the morning, Memnon asked for a truce to retrieve his dead. This pleased Alexander immensely, as it meant that he could claim to have won a victory. He was difficult, that morning – elated, brash and far, far too talkative. Parmenio looked at him with something that seemed to me like loathing.

He was never his own best friend, Alexander. On the battlefield, he was solid, calm and brave, but afterwards, he was like a boy after his first girl – all bragging and no substance. How could the god become so very human?

He went on and on, that day, tiring every one of us – even Nearchus grew tired of his recitation of his own triumphs. He may well have killed the Athenian captain, Ephialtes, himself – he certainly claimed he had, and we found the body – but when he told the story of the fight with Iliad-like embellishment, we all knew he was a liar. No one among us could have seen a single thing, and his description was like a piece of theatre. The theatre of the inside of the king’s head.

Hephaestion tried to shush him, and failed.

Philotas left the tent, disgusted, and Parmenio walked out a little later. I was trying to pretend I was somewhere else – perhaps someplace involving a bath – when Parmenio came back.

‘You have won a noble victory,’ he said with rich sarcasm. ‘Come and see, great king.’

Alexander, when he was like this, didn’t even notice his sarcasm. He followed Parmenio out of the great tent, and up to the top of one of our northerly engine platforms.

Memnon was abandoning the city.

He was ferrying his entire force to the three island citadels that dominated the harbour mouth, and the Persian fleet was putting to sea.

He was keeping his army intact, and slipping away to fight another day. And we could do nothing to stop him.

Alexander nodded. Looked around, expecting approval. ‘We beat him,’ he said. ‘Every city in Greece will know we took Halicarnassus from Memnon.’

Parmenio watched his nemesis slipping away, and all we could hear was the sound of the slaves digging graves in the thin soil. The only smell was smoke, because as he left, Memnon set fire to the city. It burned for three days, and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

‘He intends to bleed us until we drop, and then destroy us,’ Parmenio said.

‘We made him ask for a truce to bury his dead,’ Alexander said.

‘We have no fleet!’ Parmenio said, disgusted.

‘I will deal with that. One victory at a time,’ Alexander said, his voice a little too bright.

‘Ten more victories like this one and we will have no more Macedonians!’ Parmenio shouted.

‘Calm yourself,’ Alexander said.

‘He is not beaten! He still holds all the citadels and he’s left the city an empty shell! By the gods, are you insane? Stop this! We cannot conquer Asia!’ Spittle flew from Parmenio’s mouth. ‘Even if by the will of the gods we were to war down Persepolis, we will never hold it all!’

Alexander looked around. ‘How many of you feel the same?’ he asked, ingenuously. You had to have grown up with him to know what mood he was in.

About half of the officers present raised a hand.

Most of them were older men, Parmenio’s friends.

‘Then I recommend you go home, every one of you.’ Alexander shrugged. ‘We’ll just have to carry on without you.’