God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

THIRTY-THREE

Despite the army-wide depression that set in after the execution of Philotas – forty men threw javelins at him and the other conspirators until they died – we continued to plan a thrust to the east. I assumed the king would march in the spring, when there was grass in the valleys.

I was wrong.

At midwinter, we heard that Satibarzanes was back in Aria raising rebels, and Alexander sent Erigyus – recently returned to us. The Lesbian mercenary not only crushed the rebellion but killed Satibarzanes in single combat. In doing so, he won the praise of the army – and lost Alexander’s friendship.

A sign of things to come. Alexander could no longer stand to have any sign of competition.

It was five months since I’d had command of the main body of the army and rationalised the scouting system, but one afternoon Alexander came into the Military Journal tent and began reading through the entries from the days he’d been off in the north with the Aegema – that is, the entries Eumenes had made while I was in command. He paused and looked at me.

‘I gather you allowed the officers to salute you, while you were in command,’ he said. His tone was mild enough, but I’d known him from childhood.

I just held his eyes. I knew how to handle him, as well as any man in the world except perhaps Hephaestion.

He glared.

I looked back at him.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘Well what?’ I asked.

He stood there.

‘If you don’t trust me with the army,’ I said, fairly caustically, ‘then leave someone else in command.’

He shrugged.

I considered mentioning Parmenio, but I was smart enough not to. But when Craterus came with recruits, I sent Olympias and Eurydike – and that hurt – away to the coast. To Ephesus. To be safe, or at least, harder to use as hostages.

At any rate, as soon as we had word that the revolt was beaten, Alexander ordered us to march – midwinter.

We struck like lightning, and we had manoeuvred Bessus out of his impregnable position astride the Oxus river by the time the first grass was growing in the valleys. That is a strategist’s way of saying that we marched over four high mountain passes in heavy snow and lost almost a thousand veteran soldiers to weather, poor supplies and bad guides; to hubris and hurry.

To be fair, fighting Bessus for the passes would have cost us more, and I know – I know – that we did all we could to prepare.

We took Aornos. So many men were snow-blind that you could see a man leading another man to the army market by the hand. I gave up trying to supply the army – Alexander outmarched all supplies I’d arranged, dumped my carts, ordered my mules eaten.

But Bessus lost Bactria without a fight, and his Bactrian tribesmen deserted him in a wave, and suddenly we had a Bactrian army.

We pressed on into Sogdiana, across another desert. I sent Thaïs back to Susa, and she was happy to go. She handed over her networks – such as they were – to Eumenes. We stood together for a long time – she dressed as a man for riding, as straight as an arrow, her beautiful face lit by the dawn in the clear mountain air.

‘Don’t let him kill you,’ she whispered. We kissed, to the delight of the cavalry escort, and then she was gone.

I’d have gone, too, if I had thought I could leave the army without being murdered.

Alexander had never cared much for his troops, but that march set a new record. He himself changed horses daily, and he moved with the Prodromoi, covering more than a hundred stades a day to the Oxus. Men died so fast it seemed as if a plague had hit us. Men who’d been weakened in the snows died in the desert, or died of drinking too much water when we reached the Oxus. All told, from Lake Seistan to the Oxus, Alexander lost more pezhetaeroi and Hetaeroi than he’d lost in all of his battles combined, and when we reached the Oxus, we had fewer than twenty thousand men, and more than half were barbarian auxiliaries that even I didn’t trust.

And many men had had enough. None of the veterans had been allowed to go home – home to Pella – for the winter. Of course, home was so far away that if they’d marched on the usual autumn Feast of Demeter, they’d still have been marching west on the date they were due back – but that’s not how angry soldiers think. And the army had just heard of Parmenio’s murder, as we lay on our sunburned backs along the Oxus and wondered how exactly the king planned to get us across.

The Thessalians – those who were left, including a dozen troopers I’d convinced to stay with the Hetaeroi – demanded their pay and marched for home. Over a thousand veteran pezhetaeroi did the same.

Alexander was so shaken he let them go. Or so uncaring. Every day, local chiefs brought their barbarous retinues in to join us. These weren’t Persians like Cyrus. These were utterly barbarous northerners who hid their womenfolk, swore oaths for everything and lied when they breathed.

They were excellent light cavalry, though.

Alexander made up his numbers from them. Then he ordered all our leather tents stitched into bladders, and we used them to float ourselves across the Oxus. It was midsummer, and terrifying, but the survivors of the army were by this time not so much hardened as indifferent.

You can still find some of those pezhetaeroi – in my army, or on the streets of Alexandria. Look at them. Ask them.

By the time they reached the Oxus, they no longer expected to live. They marched day to day. They didn’t even grumble. Nor did they drill, and discipline became a real problem, even in the elite corps. Officers were murdered. When recruits came in, they were treated brutally and ignored. The older veterans didn’t associate with them, or help them. In fact, mostly, the veterans just waited to see which of the new boys would die first.

My old friend Amyntas son of Philip found me one day, just after we crossed the Oxus. I was trying to convince Ariston and Hephaestion to give me a thousand local cavalry to use to gather forage from the west, where we hadn’t been yet.

They left me to find Alexander, and I was standing under some kind of tree – something alien to me, anyway. A thousand Macedonians were washing their chitons in the river, or swimming, or simply lying on the rocks watching the water trickle by.

Philip came and saluted. He’d never saluted me before. I clasped his hand, and he smiled.

‘You never know, these days,’ he muttered.

‘What’s on your mind?’ I asked. ‘I won’t ask how you are.’

‘Hah!’ he said. ‘I’m alive, that’s how I am. Alive to walk the earth.’ He sighed. And was silent.

I offered him some wine, which he drank.

‘How’s your little girl?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I hope that she’s safe in Ephesus by now. Hermes protect her, and the Virgin Goddess stand by her side.’

Philip smiled. ‘I love to hear you speak Greek,’ he said. ‘Virgin Goddess.’ He crossed his arms and hugged himself. ‘I’m too far from home,’ he said.

‘Don’t you think the gods see us here as well as in Greece?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t really think they care. But here?’ He looked around – at the patches of scraggly grass, the rock, the barrenness, the trickle of water.

My adopted son, despite his status as a priest, had become a passable cavalryman, and he was serving me as a messenger. He had a pair of fine horses – local stock. Horses loved him.

I digress. Barsalus smiled at old Philip. ‘Of course the gods are here, friend,’ he said with his usual complete confidence.

Philip nodded. He didn’t agree. ‘You know the recruits Craterus brought us?’ he said.

I nodded. Amyntas son of Philip looked away.

‘The old boys stripped them. You know that? Took all their equipment, and made them take ours. They had good chitons and good spolas. Now we have them. And we beat the ones that complained. And Amyntas and his friends are wagering on them – on what they’ll die of, and when they’ll die.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m wagering, too. Fuck it all. He’s going to kill every one of us.’ He looked around. It was the new epidemic in the army – fear. Hephaestion, men said, had organised a corps of pages and serving soldiers as secret police. Myself – I had trouble believing it. But later, it proved to be true.

When Amyntas son of Philip looked over his shoulder, I did too.

That’s how it was.

In effect, the army that had left Ecbatana ceased to exist. Alexander had yet another new army – a central Asian army with a few Macedonian and Persian officers. He made a new army out of the air, and we crossed the Oxus, again outmanoeuvring the supposedly mobile Bessus.

Bessus’s nobles deposed him. In the East, men ruled by military competence, and Bessus had failed them three times – in Hyrkania, in Bactria and now at the Oxus. Many abandoned him, and his lieutenant, Spitamenes, offered to betray him and make submission to the conqueror.

I was sent – with a major portion of the army – to take Bessus from Spitamenes. In fact, the wily bastard handed over a whole company of troublemakers – his former commander, a dozen untrustworthy chiefs and some captured Saka, including three women.

One of whom was your mother, of course. I had no idea – I just saw trouble. I didn’t even find her modestly attractive at the time. Her glare of hate was enough to render her more murderous than beautiful, let me tell you. And she tried to escape.

More than Bessus did. I dragged Bessus back, and at Alexander’s orders, he was tied naked to a post by the side of the road, and the entire army marched past him.

I doubt most of the remaining pezhetaeroi even noticed him as they trudged on towards the horizon.

With the submission of Spitamenes, even I thought we were done. Alexander was fascinated by the Amazons, as he insisted on calling them, and Hephaestion, who was growing more inhuman by the day, took one and tried to rape her into submission, and was badly injured as a result. No tears from me.

But Alexander wanted to see what was north of us, and he had a notion that he could remount the Hetaeroi on the superb Saka heavy horses of the steppe. At the time, we thought – some men still do – that we were close to the Euxine. Our patrols had begun to spar with eastern Massagetae, the Saka that Cyrus the Great died fighting. Since we knew from experience that the Assagetae – your mother’s people – lived north of the Euxine and were cousins of the mighty Massagetae, the philosophers, like Callisthenes, came to the conclusion that we were close – that the Hindu Kush connected to the Caucasus mountains, that Hyrkania and Bactria were much closer than they were.

We were wrong, but Alexander believed it, and your mother’s appearance seemed to clinch the deal – a western Assagetae in Sogdiana. We went north towards the Jaxartes, to gain the submission of the Saka, and a tribute in horses that we could use, so Alexander claimed, to conquer India.

There comes a point when hubris is raised to an art form.

We marched north.

Spitamenes felt betrayed. We were, in effect, doing what we’d just told him we wouldn’t do – we were marching into his tribal areas.

He didn’t withdraw. He raised an army, and attacked.