God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

THIRTY

Other men have told the story of that morning. Read Callisthenes, or read the Military Journal, if you must.

He really did sleep late. He left the forming of the army to Parmenio. I think it was drama – I think he was awake and armed, awaiting his moment to come onstage. But perhaps not.

He formed us in a very similar manner to the traditional, Philip of Macedon formation. The phalanx was in the middle, with cavalry on the flanks and a strong second line posted to our rear.

The differences were subtle.

The second line was very strong.

The cavalry was equally balanced in numbers, but the right flank had our best shock cavalry and our best skirmishers.

And perhaps most interesting of all, we refused both flanks as soon as we began to march out of camp.

The old man did his part. Parmenio was up with the dawn, out with his own Thessalians, riding Darius’s carefully manicured battlefield. He dismounted and walked, counting his paces across the frontage that the field would have.

It was like fighting on a good wool blanket. It was flat. However, on Darius’s side of the field there was a patch of . . . I wouldn’t call it brush, but let’s say unmanicured ground that stretched from the ridge on our right down towards Darius’s centre. To be honest, on most battlefields it would have been considered good going, but here, where slaves with heavy rollers had rolled the anthills flat and other slaves with shovels had filled in the holes, the patch of untended ground leaped to the eye.

Darius’s left flank was going to rest on it. As if it was actually bad ground, brush or marsh. We could see that even at first light, because Darius, who did not have an army as well trained as ours (by a long shot), had unit markers already in place in the warm yellow light of early morning.

Parmenio counted off his frontage. He turned and looked at me. I was riding with Nicanor, because I was up and it soothed my nerves. To the south, a dozen Prodromoi covered us, and a little farther south, as many Persian cavalrymen watched them the way hawks watch distant prey.

Parmenio stopped walking.

‘Anyone have a tablet?’ he asked, and I did. That made me their secretary.

‘You here to spy on us?’ Parmenio asked.

I shook my head. ‘I’m here to fight Darius,’ I said.

Philotas chewed on a blade of late-summer grass. ‘If we lose here, none of us will make it home,’ he said quietly.

I shrugged. I wasn’t going to share my opinions with Philotas.

Besides, Parmenio began to call out numbers, and I scratched them in the wax.

My taxeis, at normal order, is eight deep and two hundred men wide, each man using about three paces, giving a frontage of six hundred paces. Roughly three stades. And we had seven front-line taxeis.

They alone took up twenty-one stades at normal order. If we closed to our tightest order, of course, we could almost halve our frontage.

But the Plain of Gaugamela is vast, a carpet of bronze-burned summer pasture grass and naked ochre earth that rolled away to distant ridges – room for all the soldiers in the world to fight, if the gods ordained it. The Greeks might have called Boeotia the dance floor of Ares, but the Plain of Gaugamela was surely laid down by the gods for war, and Darius had improved it.

When we reached the nominal position of the right marker of my taxeis, I dismounted and built a small cairn of stones.

Polystratus, mounted on a pony behind me, spat. ‘Fucking dust,’ he said. He pointed to where his plodding pony’s hooves were raising puffs of fine grit with every step the animal took.

‘This field will be one impenetrable cloud of dust from horizon to horizon as soon as we march on,’ I said.

Polystratus spat again and nodded. ‘I said that. You just used more words.’

It took us two hours, from sun-up to breakfast, to measure the battle front. Philotas calculated unit frontages, Parmenio paced them off in the dust and I marked the unit down with the final measurement on the wax. The wax got softer and softer as the sun climbed, until my stylus started to strip the wax off the boards.

When we reached the last nominal position on our left, we all turned our mounts and stared across the plain.

Our leftmost unit would match up with the centre of Darius’s right flank, to judge from the positions of his markers. Put another way, his right flank would overlap our left by at least six stades.

Parmenio looked back at me. ‘Still here to fight Darius, boy?’

I wrote down the last figures. The wax was growing too soft to hold the letters, and the morning was young.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Good looks and luck won’t win this,’ Parmenio said.

It is one of the oddities of my make-up that I could flare into rage at the slightest provocation from the king, but Parmenio never affected me that way. I merely shrugged.

‘He’s insane,’ Philotas said, suddenly at my elbow.

Medea fidgeted, and I curbed her.

‘He’s insane and he’s going to get us killed here,’ Philotas insisted.

Parmenio looked away, as if carefully detaching himself from the scene.

Polystratus coughed.

‘You don’t think any better of him than I do. I saw your face when the Persian woman died,’ Philotas said. ‘For the love of all the gods, Ptolemy! He’s not our king any more. He’s becoming a monster!’ Philotas read in my face that he’d gone too far. ‘We do all the work, and he’ll fuck it away,’ he said bitterly.

I glanced at Polystratus, who looked mad enough to punch Philotas, which wouldn’t have gone well.

‘We wouldn’t be here on this plain, ready to fight for the dominion of all Asia, unless Alexander brought us here,’ I said. ‘And the very power that renders him able to conquer Asia contains the set of flaws that make me angry at him.’ I turned from Philotas to Parmenio. ‘You, sir, are as blind as he, if you cannot see that he is leading this army and you are not.’

‘He makes messes, and I clean them up,’ Parmenio said angrily.

‘I’ll copy this fair for you,’ I said. I was done. They were edging towards treason. I would shout myself blind at him to get his attention, to find the spark of a man that he must still have burning, but I wasn’t going to side with the weasels.

‘He’ll destroy all he has built,’ Parmenio said. ‘Or rather, he can only destroy. He can’t build. He’s a war god, not a king.’

‘Tell them in Alexandria,’ I said.

I gathered my officers and we rode back to the battlefield. I had a bag of hot sausages across my thigh – the fat burned me. I ate them anyway. And Polystratus had pomegranate juice – gods know where he got that – and I drained his canteen.

I took them to my little cairn of stones, which itself took me five minutes to find. While we sat on our mounts and talked, Polystratus and Ochrid and a dozen camp servants built it up into a cairn that could be seen for two stades – waist-height, and broad. They put a spear into it, with all of our wreaths from the games at Tyre.

Leosthenes put his hands on his hips and turned slowly through a full circle.

‘Nothing to cover our flanks,’ he said.

Cleomenes looked at the Persians, slowly filtering on to the field. Alone of all their troops, their Greeks marched on, singing. The rest didn’t march – they just strolled to where their markers were waiting, and sat.

It was . . . odd. In a few hours, we’d be killing each other. At the same time, it seldom made sense to interrupt an enemy’s dispositions, as he’d just run away, and the whole thing would have to be done again.

I’m pretty sure Memnon would have sent cavalry to disrupt our planning.

‘We are in the centre,’ I noted. ‘Almost exactly in the centre. We have the hypaspitoi on our right and Craterus on our left.’

Callisthenes smiled. ‘We’ve moved up in the world.’

It was true. Alexander’s dispositions suggested we were now the most trusted of all the pezhetaeroi, standing between the hypaspitoi, the household and the rest of the sarissa-armed infantrymen.

Marsyas stole a sausage. ‘Maybe he just thinks we’ll look the best next to the hypaspitoi,’ he opined. ‘So – why are we here?’

I nodded at the cairn. ‘Dust or sun or pouring rain, when we reach this part of the field, I want to have to touch that cairn as I march through, because then all our dispositions will be right. If I’m already dead, you three make sure we hit it.’

They nodded.

‘We’re the one thing Alexander can absolutely count on,’ I went on. ‘We can beat his second-rate Greeks and we can eat his levies for breakfast. We must grind forward. It is the relentless advance that panics the Persians, and the knowledge that they cannot fight us to the front. Given the king’s dispositions, I think it is safe to say that he needs us to keep going forward. If I fall, see to it that the lads go forward. He’s going to spend the cavalry like money in a brothel to keep our flanks secure. Don’t get distracted. Keep rolling forward.’

I was solemn, and slow, and it would have been much more impressive, as a speech, if I hadn’t been so hungry that I chewed sausage constantly, and so nervous that I farted every third line.

But they got it. We all four clasped hands, and then we rode back to our camp. I saw Kineas and his friends ride by going the other way – probably on the same mission I’d just accomplished – and I waved.

Diodorus waved back, and then it was time to put my panoply on.

Beautiful armour is always a pleasure to wear. And on the day of battle, when your guts turn to water and all your body is ready to shake, a beautiful panoply is worth every obol you spent. When I was armoured, I looked, and felt, like a war god myself. And the shakes stopped.

Men are simple animals, really.

We marched off from our camp by companies on an eight-file front, and wheeled into line at double depth – one hundred wide and sixteen men deep – and formed on Craterus’s taxeis, already in line.

I was still mounted on Poseidon, who was still a fine horse, and that day had more spirit than he’d shown throughout the whole campaign. I rode over to Craterus and explained about my cairn, and he nodded.

‘Good thinking. We’ll march off from the right – so you’ll be at the head of the pezhetaeroi. Line up on your cairn.’ He smiled. It was a forced smile, but that’s what you get on the day of a battle. ‘One less thing about which I get to worry.’

And then, like soldiers since the world was born, we waited.

We were ten stades from the battlefield. We had offered no sacrifice, nor read the omens. The sun was rising in the sky. The whole army was waiting in parade formation.

If nerves had been visible, they would have been a pall of sparks, like the cloud a bonfire shoots out in the last light when men celebrate the feast of some god, and our line, all twenty stades of it, would have been lit like the Milky Way.

And we waited.

Some of Perdiccas’s men began to sing. We had a song – Philip’s men had coined it, long ago.

It is sung to the tune of the ‘Homeric Hymn to Ares’, and it sounds very martial, but the words are:

Why are we waiting?

Why are we waiting?

Oh, why are we waiting?

NOBODY KNOWS!

Perdiccas’s men started it.

My men took it up, and so did Craterus’s men, and even the hypaspitoi and some of the Hetaeroi. The sound filled the air.

It must have sounded scary, to the Persians.

It made us laugh, and laughter makes scared men relax.

We sang it again.

And Alexander came. In truth, he appeared none too pleased. But he brightened up when men started to cheer. The word was that Parmenio had had to go to his tent and wake him. As I’ve mentioned, that may be true, but his grooming was spotless, his armour was perfect and his hair, sometimes a grizzled mass of blond curls, was straight and well brushed, except that his forward curls over his ears had been teased up to look even more like horns, and he had his magnificent lion’s-head helmet on his saddle-bow. His cloak and his saddlecloth were leopard skin. All the fittings on his armour were gilded, and his scales had been buffed like a thousand mirrors. He rode bareheaded to the centre of the army, and so he was all but nose to nose with me.

‘Asia!’ he shouted, his voice perfectly pitched to carry. ‘Asia dangles at the end of your spears, yours for the taking. Darius has nothing but peasant levies and the same cavalry you have beaten before, many times. Carve your way through and Asia is ours. Fail, and we all die here in the dust.’

He drew his sword. ‘I know which I’d prefer,’ he said, and tossed the sword high in the air. I watched it, but I needn’t have worried. He caught it by the hilt. ‘Kill Darius, and the day is ours,’ he said, and they cheered him as if Zeus Soter had descended from Olympus.

He trotted Bucephalus over to me. He was calm, almost detached, but he managed a smile.

Parmenio trotted his horse over to us. He was old – I’d never seen him look older. The night had worn him, and the morning was ageing him before our eyes.

‘Have a good sleep?’ Parmenio said, and his tone betrayed his anger. ‘More importantly, do you have a plan?’ He looked around. ‘The army is restless. You plan to fight? Aren’t you just a little afraid?’

Alexander didn’t sneer. He turned his horse, ignoring me, and extended a hand to Parmenio. ‘Afraid? Parmenio, when we were marching around the northern part of the country, I was terrified – lest Darius refuse battle and hide behind his burned crops. This morning, he is right there and he has no possibility of retreat.’

His eyes sparkled.

He laughed, and his laugh carried conviction. ‘Darius is offering me a pitched battle. Herakles has put him in my hands.’

Parmenio hawked and spat. ‘Very well, son of Zeus.’ He made the soubriquet sound like a curse. ‘We’ll be outflanked – badly – on both sides. What exactly do you expect us to do?’

Alexander shrugged. ‘Is the arrowhead outflanked when it enters an enemy’s flesh, Parmenio? I expect you to fight your wing and avoid defeat, while I do the work and win the battle.’

Parmenio glowered. ‘When this is over, if we survive—’

Alexander laughed. ‘You are less a threat to me than Darius, and he is no threat to me at all. Listen, Parmenio! Is there one voice here shouting for you?’ He reared his horse, and my men roared his name, and the other phalanges took up the cry, so that I couldn’t hear what he said next, but Parmenio did, and his face grew red.

Alexander laughed. Then he turned his horse and rode over to me. And embraced me – one of perhaps five or six times I can remember when he embraced me.

‘I wish . . .’ he said. His hand slapped the back of my thorax. The soldiers roared his name.

That was the measure of the morning. Alexander needed a hug from a friend.

I never learned what he wished. But I count it as the second-to-last time I saw the man I loved.

He rode off to the left and we heard the volleys of cheers follow him, and then he rode back. His trumpeter sounded ‘All Officers’, and we rode out to him. He was in command of himself, and us, but by the time the sun was high in the sky, it was the war god who was among us, and not Alexander. Alexander was gone.

He didn’t even trouble to look around, or smile. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and he pointed at the Persians, ‘I intend to march directly to the fight – to form our front from a column, rather than forming it here and allowing gaps to develop. We will advance from the right on full frontages – I expect this to be done with no fuss. I’m leaving the Thracian Psiloi to cover the camp and I’m sending the Paeonians to screen us and raise some dust – Ariston, see to it that you do not use up your horses, and that you come back to the line.’

He looked around. ‘We will advance directly to contact. Unless something has changed, Darius will feel rushed by the speed of our advance and will attempt to encircle our flanks. We want him to encircle our flanks. I’m leaving Cleitus with the rear phalanx. He will reinforce our line and cover our rear – if necessary, he will face his phalanx to the rear and we will make a box, like Xenophon’s men in their retreat, except that we will attack – we will attack relentlessly. Whatever you do, if your men are advancing into the Persians and killing them, you are doing my will. We, not they, have the moral advantage. We have beaten them like a drum – they have never beaten us. We have a phalanx of bronze and they do not. Behind our phalanx is another! The phalanx will win the battle by pushing forward without pause.’ He looked around. ‘Do you understand?’

We did. It was, after all, something that we’d looked at a hundred times. And it would be executed using drills that the rawest new pezhetaeros had performed every day he had been in the ranks.

Aristander, dressed from head to foot in shining white wool and crowned in gold like the Great King himself, rode to the front of the army in Alexander’s chariot and offered sacrifice. The Persians were grilling in the sun, standing in their ranks, their army about two-thirds formed. Our men sat to watch the sacrifices, and grounded their spears.

Aristander was a greasy hypocrite, but he managed the sacrifices with sure-handed expertise. And that’s not nothing – try killing an animal with a knife while forty thousand pairs of eyes watch you. He didn’t flinch that morning, and he killed two rams and a bull – a great black bull. He held the bull’s heart above his head, and the blood ran down his arm, and the symbolism was obvious.

As one, forty thousand men rose to their feet and screamed their approval.

And then we marched.

It was daring, to manoeuvre in a column of regiments in the face of the enemy. Even more daring, Alexander made the first of several changes to his battle plan before the army had marched off from camp. He rode past me to Parmenio and told him something, and Parmenio immediately marched off in a parallel column led off by Craterus. And then Alexander rode to Cleitus, with the mercenaries, and he began to form a third column.

Columns are deceptive. The problem is that, like a xiphos, their deception is double-edged, because they can deceive their own strategos as effectively as they deceive the enemy.

The enemy really only sees the head of the column. Part of this is the problem of battlefield visibility. With cavalry raising dust, on a flat plain with no ridges or handy hills, the enemy strategos has a hard time seeing past the front five or six ranks. And unless he’s a magical combination of oracular wizard and mathematician, he cannot imagine how much space your column will eat when it turns into a line.

There’s the double-edged part. An inexperienced strategos can misjudge the width of his own line, which makes forming his line a disaster, as one end or the other collides with a river, a hill, rocky ground or some other obstacle and the whole line is disordered.

Multiple columns that have to fit together?

I’d never even seen it tried before.

Alexander rode back to me, his leopard skin already covered in dust. ‘You understand?’ he asked.

It’s good to be good at your job. ‘I understand that I’m now the linchpin in linking up with Craterus,’ I said. ‘We’ll form front by advancing obliquely?’

He gave me a curt nod – in terms of his present plan, what I asked must have seemed obvious and even impertinent.

‘I built a cairn on the plain to mark the point to which I should march,’ I said.

He turned and looked at me. Nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Well thought of. Leave the column the moment you see it and march on it, and the rest of the wing will conform to you.’

I mention this, because details such as this decide battles as surely as the sword arms of heroes.

We had twelve stades to march to the cairn, and they flew by. Time – I have heard a hundred philosophers say that time flows the same for all men. I saw Callisthenes, a year later, put a stick in the ground and mark off the quarters of the day, and time – the chariot of the sun – could be seen to pass in an orderly manner, from left to right, every quarter of the day the same length as every other.

That’s all very well, but the morning of the Battle of Gaugamela proved the opposite. Time crept by during the speeches and the sacrifices, and then we began to march, and I thought twelve stades would never pass, and then, five stades out, we could see the entire length of Darius’s line, and the army almost stopped marching. At five stades, the Persians were like a thick rope across the plain, a rope that lived and moved.

Most of us had never seen an elephant before. Darius had a dozen. Scythed chariots sparkled in the front rank of his centre. He had more cavalry over there than we had men in our entire army.

It took our breath away.

No one had ever seen such an army.

And despite the rate that a marching man may seem to accomplish on a normal day, that morning we seemed to hurtle at Darius’s line like a thunderbolt – a small, weak thunderbolt.

I managed to work up a good set of nerves about finding my cairn, and I left the column and rode out in the dust, alone. The Paeonians had already covered the ground and raised enough dust to mask our advance, and it took me some heart-pounding minutes to find the cursed rock pile with its gaudy spear.

Polystratus laughed at me.

I left him to watch the rocks and galloped back to the column. From two stades away, the column was nothing but a thin line of bronze and a haze of steel spear-tips in a dust cloud.

I rode back to my taxeis. ‘At my word, we will incline together to the left!’ I called out. I rode up and down my files until every man had heard me. Awkward sods on the left files began to incline and had to be swatted back into their spots with cries of, ‘Wait for it, you dickless fuck!’

I trotted back to the head of my part of the column. ‘Taxeis of Outer Macedon! To the left! INCLINE!’

I left Leosthenes in charge and rode back to the front until I could see Polystratus. Then I halted. Leosthenes knew his job – he guided the right front phylarch – another Philip – to moderate his incline step until he matched perfectly with my line and Polystratus and the cairn, after which he ordered them to face front and march forward.

Then I galloped. I put my head down and raced for the head of the right flank column. I found Hephaestion – Alexander was gone on another errand.

I pointed well behind him and to his left. ‘See my lads? They are on line.’

Hephaestion nodded. ‘Column! Halt and form front to the left! Look for Ptolemy’s taxeis to dress on!’

My men were marching forward all this time, so that they were already halfway from the rear of the right column to the front, a stade or more to our left. They were easily visible in their magnificent armour.

Hephaestion held out his hand. ‘This is it,’ he said.

I clasped his hand. ‘He’ll do it,’ I said.

Hephaestion nodded.

And then time sped up again.

I was back with my taxeis, and I sent my Poseidon to the rear and my view dwindled – the height of a horse makes an enormous difference on a flat, dusty plain. And then – then we were so close to them that I could see individual men, horses, helmets.

We were opposite the Persian Royal Guard. Again.

And the last time, they’d held us.

Well, the last time they’d had a man-high riverbank to help them.

Polystratus rode up and handed me my greaves, which I snapped on my shins while walking. I’m sure I looked like a clown, trying to get them on while walking, bouncing on one foot and then another, but only a fool goes into hand-to-hand combat without greaves.

Then I ran, and sprinted across my own front. We were, just in that moment, the very point of Alexander’s arrow. We were the lead element, and our right flank echeloned away to the right, so that the hypaspitoi were a little behind us but perfectly formed on our flank, and the Aegema – the household companions and then all the rest of the Hetaeroi – were formed on them, each squadron a horse length to the rear of the one before, and then, far out in the dust, I could see more horses, each squadron back from the last – less like an arrowhead than a bent bow, but from where I was I could see the men, the horses, or their dust.

We were two stades from the enemy, and Darius was getting his first look at our formation.

By Herakles, it was beautiful.

Of course, had some unit cocked it up, we’d have had a hole in our own lines.

I got a few yards in front. ‘Friends!’ I roared. ‘In a few moments, we will have the pleasure of ripping the guts out of Darius’s Royal Guard. The same bastards we saw at Issus. NEED I SAY MORE?’

And then Darius let loose his scythed chariots.

I’ve heard stories about those chariots. So here’s what I saw.

They were useless.

The speed of our approach caused somebody – probably Darius himself – to misjudge the moment of their release. Horses take time to get to a gallop, and horses won’t gallop at a solid wall of spears. They would have had to start while we were farther out in the plain – but then, of course, we weren’t a solid wall, we were in parallel columns, and there was nothing for the chariots to hit.

Moreover, our echelon allowed us to form gaps – quickly, and without fuss – in any direction, because each unit was ahead of or behind the next, so that we could all move to the flank. That scarcely mattered, because all the chariots on our front – the moment their drivers bailed out, and many jumped before their chariots were even moving – headed for the gaps that already existed, between the taxeis.

Craterus took the worst of it, because his taxeis was echeloned well back, giving the horses time to reach their gallop, and because bad manoeuvring by the taxeis on either flank left him with no place to go. Even there, however, he dropped four files to the rear – a brilliant manoeuvre – and another pair of files lay down with their aspides over their heads, as we had fighting the Thracians. Some men had arms broken. Two men died.

Two. Not to belittle their sacrifice, but Darius unleashed a storm of war horses and flashing bronze, and we lost two dead and about forty injured.

And most important, we paused, took the stroke and marched on.

We were picking ourselves up and dusting ourselves off – remember, I couldn’t see what happened to Craterus’s phalanx, I had to wait for word. The dust was as thick as smoke in a burning house.

Alexander came out of the dust, with his staff behind him.

‘Darius has a gap between his centre and his left,’ Alexander said, as if we’d been together all afternoon.

Never mind how he knew. The Paeonians must have reported it.

I wanted to say something like, ‘Hello to you too’, but he was too intent on the battle.

‘I am about to charge it,’ Alexander said. ‘The hypaspitoi will follow. You must hold the ground they give up. Cover our front. And press forward, or, at worst, give no ground.’ He glanced at me. I was not Ptolemy, his boyhood friend. Merely the commander of the Taxeis of Outer Macedon. Truly, I don’t think he could have told anyone my name at that moment.

I wanted to protest that my men would have to double their frontage. That we would be at most six deep, to fight Darius’s finest infantry.

But I was sure that my men could do it. And so was he. So there was no point in complaining.

‘Halt!’ I roared. ‘Right division – half files to the right! Turn! March!’

I tucked half my taxeis in behind the hypaspitoi. Now my men were six deep – four deep, in one place. I had expanded my front by one third.

While my phylarchs readjusted their files to balance the numbers and close up, so that we were as ready as we could be in this shallow formation, the Persians stood close enough that we could see the silver apples on their spears. But they didn’t loose an arrow.

And they didn’t charge us.

Listen, I could tell you what happened on the rest of the field. But I wasn’t there. On our left, Bessus, of whom more anon, led his Easterners in a well-timed attempt to turn our flank left. He sent his Sakje to raid our camp, which they did with ruthless joy.

On our right, Persian and Mede noble cavalrymen, backed by Bactrians and led by Scythians, tried to turn Alexander’s flank; racing to the edge of the unlevelled ground and then curving out and around our Paeonians and our veteran mercenaries under Menidas, they closed in. But they didn’t charge home – they came in as a skirmisher cloud, shooting their bows.

Menidas charged them, because he had no other choice. He kept his ranks closed up, took serious casualties in men and horses and dusted them back into the bad ground, and then the Paeonians pursued them.

In time, the reckless pursuit of the Paeonians was punished by the Scythians and the Persians, but it took time.

On the left, Bessus and Mazaeus were more determined and more reckless, and Parmenio was a little too cautious. But when the Albanians and the Armenians were in the rear of the second line and threatening to turn Craterus, who had had to halt to prevent his flanks from being penetrated, Kineas and the allied horse under Coeranus countercharged. Their triumph was short-lived. But it bought Craterus time, and it bought Parmenio time.

Of course, I knew none of this, but a god, watching from above with a magic helmet that allowed him to see through dust, might have noticed that the king’s battle plan was still intact. Our army would have looked like an embattled crab – with Persians almost all the way around us.

That’s what was happening elsewhere.

Here’s what happened where I was.

Alexander charged. But there was nothing simple about it, and while the troopers no doubt thought that it was all hard fighting, I could watch it unfold, and to me, it was all about precise manoeuvre.

As at Issus, he had formed two thousand Hetaeroi into a single wedge with himself at the head, sixty ranks deep at the centre, sixty files wide at the rear base of the triangle. The most manoeuvrable formation that you can achieve with cavalrymen.

Then he danced with it. The gap was off to his right, and Alexander faced his wedge to the right and trotted there, faster than the Persians could respond – possibly before anyone had noticed that the charge of the Persian left flank, intended to envelop our right, had opened this gap.

To genius, Alexander added patience and craftsmanship. He didn’t race to the gap and charge. He trotted past the gap and wheeled his wedge back, so that it formed an arrowhead pointing through the gap and back towards Darius. Alexander wasn’t just going to break the line. Alexander intended to kill the King of Kings. Himself. Just as he had told us.

I had time to watch it all. And I had time to watch the hypaspitoi under Nicanor wheel off by divisions to the right and reform.

My rear files then closed to the front on my line.

The hypaspitoi charged first. It is remarkable that every account – even the Military Journal – suggests that Alexander led the first, last and only important charge. I think it is a comment on what a bunch of subservient flunkies we became after Gaugamela that every man within a stade knew that Nicanor led the charge and Nicanor had his orders from the king.

Nicanor slammed into the Greek mercenaries – the best infantry Darius had, except possibly his Immortal Guards. His attack was executed faultlessly, at the double – the most difficult speed for formed troops, but devastating if delivered perfectly, and the hypaspitoi were the essence of perfection that day. They struck the Greeks, who were waiting at a stand, crumpled their front ranks and shoved their entire phalanx back ten horse lengths.

The Greeks held. But only just, and as soon as the pushing started, they were at a disadvantage – literally, rocked back on their heels.

Now every man in the Persian ranks opposite my taxeis was looking to his left, watching. Because suddenly the Persian Immortals were naked – their own left flank now hanging in the air.

I stepped forward. The Immortals were lofting arrows, but from a stade’s distance, they were more an irritation than a threat. And it told me that the Immortals were shaken.

‘Ready!’ I bellowed like a bull.

Sixteen hundred voices roared.

‘Spears! Down!’ I ordered. Two hundred and fifty files, covering more than a stade – only four or six deep. But the spears came down from the high carry to the attack.

I tucked myself back into my place. Latched my cheek-flaps. Now my view of the battle was cut again – from the panorama of the dusty line to the tunnel that led from me to the sun disc standard of the Immortals. Under their standards, they stood in perfect rows – sons of noblemen, in fine scale armour, with heavy spears and beautiful recurved bows; their alien trousers tucked into boots made of the finest leather; every man had on him enough gold to pay a file of Macedonian phalangites for a year. The officers had long beards like old-fashioned Greeks, and a few had them hennaed bright red.

‘Front! March!’ I called.

Opposite me, orders were being roared in Persian.

To my left, Coenus was matching his front rank to mine. He was eight deep, and would be more fearsome. His men overlapped the Persian guards and were facing more Greek mercenaries.

A few arrows came in, and then a volley, all loosed together – someone had fucked that up, as we were still well out.

‘At the double! March, march!’ I roared. I had not, until that moment, intended to duplicate the prowess of the hypaspitoi and charge at the double. But the early, sloppy volley of arrows gave me a slight edge. If we hurried. Perhaps Apis inspired me, or Herakles, my ancestor.

Had even one sarissa-man in the front rank tripped over a rock, or taken an arrow in the throat, it might have unravelled our front rank.

Ten horse lengths out. You can see men’s faces under their helmets.

Five, and all you feel is the gravel under your feet. There are no more thoughts, no more observations. You are no longer hot or cold, nervous, terrified, or even calm.

You are the spear. And the moment.

Men tell wonderful tales of combat. I do myself. Most of it is lies and impressions gathered up by the mind after the fact, with the lies of others added in for good measure. But I remember two parts of that fight.

Our line was well formed when we hit. That, by itself, was a miracle. So I was neither ahead of nor behind the rest of the rank when I struck, and because we slightly overlapped the end of the Immortals’ line where the Greeks had been shoved away from them, I passed the end of their line, ran a few paces and watched my men crash into the Immortals like a mighty wave on a calm beach which heralds the coming of a storm. Five or six files were with me, and we wheeled – an orderly not-quite-mob – into their left flank. A man’s left flank is his shielded flank, and ordinarily, this flank is not particularly productive to strike – especially as we were so few, just thirty men, and we couldn’t strike deep.

But the Immortals had kept their bows in their hands too long, and were still getting them back in their cases, and someone had ordered the rear ranks to keep shooting.

I had my best new spear in my hand, overhand as on the old vases, and I was killing men before I reached their line – shieldless men with too little armour. The overhand spear thrust comes down from above, into the throat, into the top of the thigh, into the breastbone, into the helmet. Without a shield, a man is all but helpless before it.

We were just thirty men, but we must have put twice that number on the ground in the time it took Perdiccas’s men to give our charge and Coenus’s three cheers. The Immortals were already jumpy – the Greek mercenaries had recoiled again – and they flinched from our attack into their flanks, and the front didn’t stand its ground.

I still had my eyes on that great golden disc. I didn’t know whether it was the king’s or just the banner of the Immortals, but I killed my way towards it.

I had a wonderful new sword – my favourite, I think, of all the swords I’d ever had. Thaïs gave it to me. It was a simple kopis, neither long nor short, not even fancy – but magnificently balanced, so that it felt like a feather – a deadly feather – in the hand. And yet, whatever I hit, parted. Flesh, leather, bronze – at one point, my beautiful sword cut through the iron rim of a Persian shield.

My Ionians were singing the paean. I had forgotten – we Macedonians don’t usually sing it after we leave camp. But it was beautiful. And the brashness of it killed the Persians as thoroughly as our spears.

A big man came out of the dust. A man with a hennaed beard – an officer with more gold on him than Thaïs wore as an Aegyptian priestess, and his first blow took the head off my best spear, and he hammered me with a long-handled axe, and his blows began to destroy my aspis.

I made myself push forward into his blows, but a blow from outside my field of vision knocked the sword from my hand. I got a hand on his right elbow and shoved him – turned him – hammered the rim of my aspis into the small of his back and he roared, and I got a leg behind his as he cut back into me, put his arse against my hip and flipped him with my sword arm, over my hip and into the dust – kicked him, and then fell on him with my dagger from my side, and he was leaking in the sand and I was up and moving.

Another man – smaller, with a hooked sword that scored past my dented aspis on my greave, but didn’t penetrate – hurt anyway – and I left my dagger in his guts. And by sheer luck and the will of Ares, or Zeus-Apis, my Athenian sword was lying so close to my feet that I all but cut my foot on the blade. I reached down and she came to my hand like a lover. I stood straight and looked around.

I’d left all my men behind. I’m a good strategos but sometimes a poor soldier. How often did phylarchs tell new men never to leave the ranks?

But the disc of the golden sun was right there. It was as if I could hear the king telling me: Whatever you do, if your men are advancing into the Persians and killing them, you are doing my will.

Off to the right, behind my head, the earth trembled. Two thousand horses went from a walk to a gallop, aimed at a gap only slightly wider than the base of Alexander’s wedge – but the shoulder of the gap was held now by the hypaspitoi, and the Persians could no longer move front-line men to fill the gap.

I’ve used this metaphor before – but it’s like that moment in a match, in pankration or wrestling, when you know – you know – that you have made an error, and it is going to hurt. You have bought a feint, or you have missed a hold, and now, before your heart beats again or you can do anything, his elbow is going to slam into your head. You know?

That’s what Darius must have felt. The battle proper was still less than half an hour old, and Darius must have known, right then.

The rear ranks of the Immortals were a bloody shambles, but they were game, and every one of them was struggling to push back the front-rankers, stabilise the formation and save the standard. My moment of calm was past, and I was all but buried in opponents. Spears rang off my aspis and my helmet, and I staggered.

But combat is a complex dance, and what can I say? I was lifted above myself. A blow pushed my helmet back against my face, and the pain transformed the fight – in an instant, I was a little faster for the rage, a little stronger . . .

My aspis swung at nose height, flat like a plate, and two men took its force, their faces crushed, and I was into the hole like water through a breaking dam, my kopis like a predatory bird taking insects at the edge of night, and I was above it, in it, through it. I remember no one cut, but the aggregate – for a few heartbeats, I was a god, seeing each opponent, seeing his intention, seeing his eyes, the minute shift of weight, baffling with my cloak, my shield, lying with the tip of my sword or telling a final truth with the blade or the grip. I suppose that blows fell on me but I didn’t feel them, and Coenus claims that he could see me move through the Immortals the way you can watch a mole moving underground. I love the metaphor, even though I suspect he was as busy as I was and didn’t see a fucking thing. It makes one hell of a good picture.

Under the disc were two giants.

I was alone.

I remember thinking, I can do this.

I swayed, like a child trying to evade his father in a game. Then I leaped forward to the left, and my two opponents failed to follow my movement, and now I had them aligned – not both facing me at once.

I hate fighting big men.

I had a sword that was too short to let me snipe, and my immediate opponent had a spear, and he rifled it at me. But his contempt betrayed him, and when he drew back and thrust again, I cut at the spearhead, swept his spear wide and powered forward under it, and my backcut went into his greave and his knee, and he fell like a tree in the forest, bellowing – and I got the sword clear of his leg, and the blade rose, I turned it edge on, where his partner was cutting at me, and severed all the fingers of his spear hand; they were like a shower of thrown grapes at a party as his point went past my head. Again I powered forward, and my backcut went through his crestless helmet and into his brain.

The great golden disc fell with a barbarous clang in the dirt, and they were on their way to Hades. It was like that. It was as if they stood still. Apis granted me that moment, and Herakles my ancestor. I had never been so good before, even before I took my wounds at Tyre, and I was never so good again.

But oh, the glory of it!

For the space of a hundred heartbeats, I was a god. And in those hundred heartbeats I learned what it might be like to be Alexander. What made him incomprehensible to other men was revealed to me – not in that moment, when there was nothing but the moment, but later, when I knew all the things I hadn’t thought while I was a god. I hadn’t doubted. I hadn’t cared. I had known.

My time of grace ended as the great golden disc crashed into the dust.

But by Apis, it was glorious.

Up until that moment, I’m not sure that Darius had made a mistake. It hadn’t all gone his way, but despite Alexander’s perfect timing and godlike assurance, our army was in mortal peril. We were, to all intents, surrounded. The Sakje were already sacking our baggage and razing our camp.

Thaïs was calmly shooting Sakje from their saddles with her bow, shooting out of the door of our tent. She received a Sakje arrow through her calf in return fire, but they gave up our sector of the officers’ lines as a bad job. Three hundred Thracian Psiloi and a thousand terrified, angry camp followers with spears and rocks were sufficient to keep the enemy out of the baggage wagons and the herds.

But the hypaspitoi and the Taxeis of Outer Macedon and the Taxeis of the North under Coenus crushed the front of Darius’s centre so fast that he chose to stabilise his front rather than counter Alexander’s cavalry charge.

A natural reaction, because when his horse guards charged me, I could see him, and he wasn’t so very far away. Alexander must have seemed like a distant threat.

They glittered and shone like all the flowers of the fields in the Hebrew book. Like every hero of the Iliad gathered into a single magnificent regiment. They were red and gold, purple and gold, black and gold. The only silver was the steel in their hands, thousands of folds of perfect steel, magnificent weapons that made the Athenian kopis in my hand look like a crowbar.

The best men of the whole empire.

Darius sent them into my taxeis, and I was standing about two horse lengths in front of my men, who were in no kind of order. We were in those last moments of a melee, when the losers die and the winners swirl in, faster and faster as the losers no longer have friends and file partners and men to watch their backs, and it all comes to an . . .

‘Cavalry!’ I roared.

Zeus, I was exhausted.

I set my feet. I didn’t even have a spear.

Some mighty Persian lord got his spear on to my aspis and knocked me flat, and then they rode over me.

By the will of the gods, I didn’t take a kick.

They had less than a tenth of a stade in which to launch their charge, and they were hampered by Coenus’s men and the hypaspitoi coming at them, and so they were – most of them – not much above a fast trot. And like good men the world over, they cared about their own kin in the Immortals, and so they rode too carefully.

That didn’t spare us much. But it might have been the edge between destruction and survival.

I lay in the dust and there were hooves all around me, the screams of frightened horses and maddened horses and war cries, and when they began to pack in together, I rose above my fear and the dust, got my legs under me between two horses and started cutting – heavy cuts, underhand, into the bellies of the animals and the legs of the lords.

I’ve heard versions of this story from other men – when you are deep in the enemy ranks, they are virtually defenceless. I got my feet under me, and men were off their horses and on their faces before they knew what had killed them.

Their formation was too open, as well. I went under horses’ bellies, got bitten on the thigh and kicked – a splendid bronze thorax ruined in one blow. The hoof of that horse collapsed the careful forming of the bronze-smith, and it then stayed in its new form.

I pissed blood for two weeks. At the time, I fell to my knees and urine ran from me into the dust, and I coughed blood – all from one inglorious kick from a big horse.

Above me in the melee, a Persian leaned down and thrust his spear at me, and the point skidded across my back and dug into my hip between the pturges.

That’s what happens when you are alone.

I retched. I couldn’t help it – the pain of the horse’s hoof was too much. And then I was flat on my face, and I had dust in my mouth – something hit me, or a horse stepped on me.

I lay there and waited for the end. I couldn’t see the wound on my back, but the blood coming out of my throat suggested that I was done. I felt clear-headed, but I couldn’t move my legs.

Clearly, through the forest of horses’ legs, I could see the golden wheels of a chariot.

I remember thinking – perhaps my clearest memory of the day – Fuck, I’m that close to Darius.

And the earth trembled.

The tone changed.

I can’t tell it any other way.

My legs moved.

The Persians above me in the melee had stopped raining blows on my corpse. They were looking somewhere else.

The earth shook.

The war god was coming. I could feel him.

I knew. Because I was almost under the wheels of the Great King’s chariot – Alexander was coming right here.

I got to my feet like an old man, but no one contested the ground with me.

Someone – someone who glittered – was shouting at the man in the chariot, and the man in the chariot, who had the look of greatness, calm, dignified – was remonstrating. The man who glittered tore the reins from the Great King’s hands. He was bellowing like a bull, demanding, begging, cajoling.

I had no idea what he was saying, but I’d guess he was begging the King of Kings to get the fuck out of there before the war god ate him.

And I imagine that Darius was yelling – But I’m winning! I’m collapsing his flanks!

He was, too.

He was fighting his cousin for the reins when he saw me.

One Macedonian. Two horse lengths from his offside lead horse. It was a four-horse chariot, and I could, if I’d had a spear, have killed one of the horses with a cast. And saved us all from tragedy, or not. Saved five years of my life, I suspect.

I didn’t even have a dagger.

Darius looked into my eyes. I looked into his. We were about as far apart as a man courting in Pella and his lady-love above him on the balcony of her exedra.

And in that moment, Marsyas got his shield over my exposed side and said, ‘You fuckwit.’

Cleomenes got his shoulder into my back, and his spear went over my head.

Leosthenes came up on my left and locked up on me.

And Darius looked at us, and his eyes moved from us to our right – to where the war god, heralded by the storm of hooves, was coming. He let his cousin take the reins, and raced for safety.

The Persian horse guards rallied, and charged Alexander.

And Alexander cut through them like a sword through straw. I saw it, while Polystratus put a bandage on my hip – that’s a nice way of saying that he ripped the chiton off his body and stuffed it, sweat-soaked, under my broken thorax to staunch the blood.

We weren’t doing much fighting, you’ll note. There was no need; Alexander swept past us, and we roared our approval, and then, so close I could almost touch Bucephalus, his wedge slowed in the thickening sea of Persians and I saw his rage – the lion baulked at his kill by a tribe of hyenas was never so outraged as Alexander cheated of Darius.

Even from the ground, I could still just see the golden wheels of Darius’s chariot slipping away in the press.

Alexander swung his sword like a priest cutting up the sacrifice – heavy, professional strokes without a lick of mercy. He didn’t shout any of his battle cries – no prayers to Zeus, no imprecations to Athena or Herakles or Amon.

He roared – in his curiously high-pitched, leopard-like cough – ‘Darius!’

And again.

‘Darius!’

And he locked his knees on his horse, cut a Persian nobleman almost in two from his eyebrow to his ribs – a superhuman stroke – rose to a position where he almost stood and roared so that his voice sounded over the whole battlefield.

‘DARIUS!’

Alexander was – in that moment – greater than mortal. He was not a man. Bucephalus was not a mortal horse.

‘FACE ME, DARIUS!’ filled the air.

Darius rode away, leaving his empire.

Alexander killed men as if he had the fire of the gods in him and had come to scorch the earth. But though he cut a swathe you could follow with your eye, Darius was clear of the melee, and the chariot was moving faster.

‘Ptolemy? Lord Ptolemy?’ sounded from behind us.

My men were in no sort of order. I seemed to have very few casualties. I was a mess, and couldn’t think.

It sounded like Diodorus the Athenian. He was pushing his horse through my ranks, shouting hoarsely for me.

Polystratus roared back, ‘Here! Here!’

Ranks parted. Men were trying to get back in the right file, or trying to find the spear they’d left in some Immortal, or trying to get that damned sandal lace where it should have been all day, or drinking all the water in their canteens. They were behaving like soldiers who have survived hand-to-hand combat.

Diodorus became visible in the battle haze, which was as bad to our rear as to our front. ‘Where is Alexander? Where is the king?’ he asked.

Polystratus gave him wine. Diodorus looked like I felt.

‘The left is collapsing,’ he said.

I pointed and Cleomenes said, ‘He’s in the thick of it – right there. In front of us.’

Polystratus grabbed my shoulder. ‘Can you ride?’ he asked.

A pezhetaeros brought me Poseidon, and I mounted – it took two sets of hands pushing my arse, and I screamed at one point when I had to bend the wrong way. But no one in the Hetaeroi knew Diodorus very well. And everyone knew me. Blood was flowing from under my cuirass.

‘Come,’ I said. ‘Leosthenes – find Coenus, link up, wheel to the left and push.’

All three of my officers saluted. It still makes me smile.

Men don’t salute on battlefields. Mostly they grunt.

I don’t know how long it took me to reach Alexander, but he’d halved the distance to Darius by the time we reached him. Darius was changing from the chariot to a horse, and we could see him.

Alexander spared me a single glance, and then looked back, anger written clearly on his face. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Another spear!’ he shouted back at his immediate companions.

His arms were both bleeding. I doubt he knew, or cared.

Bucephalus was a pale golden horse, and his legs were coated in blood to the top of his fetlocks. Alexander had fought for some part of the action with a spear held high in a two-handed grip – and his arms were coated in blood to the elbow. When he cut a Persian in half, the man’s insides had exploded over him, and he had blood on his face, his chest was coated in it and his thighs were matted with ordure.

He was the carrion god in person. Ares, come to earth. Why did Alexander ever imagine himself the son of Herakles or Zeus?

Even on that battlefield, I could smell the blood on him, copper and shit mixed together. And over all of that, his eyes glittered like blue ice.

‘What?’ he demanded of me again.

‘The left is collapsing,’ I said.

Diodorus said, ‘I come from Parmenio,’ and started to fall from his horse.

Philotas caught him.

Alexander looked at me. He might have been Darius a moment before – because he said, ‘But I’ve won the battle.’

I was on horseback, and the Persian horse guard was mostly dead, covering the flight of their king, and as far as I could see, the Persian centre was done for. And I could see a fair way – we were out of the worst of the battle haze and in the rear of the Persian line.

But even from here, you didn’t need to be Alexander to see that the enemy right wing was not in line with the enemy centre, and that the battle haze had a distinct kink in it.

There was a hole in our line.

If I could see it . . .

‘Fuck him,’ Alexander said, in a terrible voice. ‘My curse on him.’

He didn’t mean Darius.

He meant Parmenio.

The Hetaeroi were still under control. The wedge was still recognisable, and despite the fact that Darius was slipping away, no one was leaving the right face of the wedge to run him down.

Alexander looked. I had seen how very quickly he could read a battlefield, all my life since we were first in the field together, and I know he read that one ten times, looking for an alternative.

My men, and Coenus’s men, and the hypaspists, were changing direction – slowly, like a grain ship under oars. Hoplites can go forward quickly, but when they move to the flanks, by files or by wheeling, it is like watching a glacier move on a mountainside.

He turned his head back towards Darius.

Then his face set.

I hadn’t meant to join in, but Poseidon and I were swallowed by the wedge, and I was in the place just behind the king.

It was all I could do to ride. Blood was actually running over my saddlecloth. Philotas, who had no time for me whatsoever, looked concerned.

‘Follow me!’ he called to his wedge. Turned it decidedly to the right, angled back towards Parmenio.

Alexander looked back at me, and the smile on his face, the elation in the whole set of his body, outweighed his frustration at failing to get Darius. ‘Don’t you feel alive, when the trumpet sounds?’ he asked me, and then we were away.

We charged into the flank of Mazaeus’s triumphant cavalry just as they closed the noose around Parmenio’s throat.

How bitter the Persian must have been, as he ordered the retreat.

There are a thousand ironies to the Battle of Guagamela.

It is ironic that the Persians killed so very few of us, because they were moments from massacring our entire left and with it, perhaps, the whole rear phalanx. I expect that had Alexander been ten minutes later, Darius’s defection from the field would have been meaningless.

It is ironic that to Bessus and Mazaeus, Darius – their king – betrayed them by running. Ironic as I had watched him struggle to stay and make a fight of it. I can say with assurance that had Alexander botched his final attack, Bessus would have won the battle. Darius lost his empire when he turned and ran, and he would never have been king again after that moment.

It is ironic that Alexander blamed Parmenio for costing him his pursuit of Darius, because Parmenio, in my opinion, had the weakest part of the army, faced the cream of the Persian cavalry and fought for as long as anyone could have expected, and then for a while longer – long enough to ensure that Alexander won the grandest victory of his life, and did it well enough that the battle flowed almost exactly as the king had predicted. Yet the king never forgave Parmenio for his failure.

Ironic that in victory, Alexander was so powerful that his opinions were like laws. Even men who had served in the left flank said that Parmenio had failed.

And hubris? It fell from Alexander as blood runs from a mortal wound.

About the time that Mazaeus cursed the name of his king and ordered his victorious cavalry to retreat like dogs whipped off the corpse of a lion, I was one rank behind the king, deep into a melee with the aristocracy of Babylon and Mesopotamia. They had beautiful armour and they weren’t much as fighters, and I suspect that they could read the wind as well as Mazaeus. Given our reception in Babylon, I’m not even sure they were sorry to see the golden disc of the sun fall.

But one of them, a mass of gold and bronze with armour all the way down his arms and scale mail that covered his face, exchanged sword cuts with me, and his mate drove a spear through Poseidon’s neck. Poseidon didn’t fall – by his namesake, he rose on his back feet, snapped the haft of the spear, and his mighty iron-shod forefoot crushed the chest of his killer before he slumped to the earth. And I crashed down on the same hip that had taken the wound earlier, and as Homer says, darkness covered my eyes.