God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

THIRTY-FIVE

Alexander’s reaction to Spitamenes was planned in one night and ran like lightning over the plains. He sent a relief column to break Spitamenes’ siege of Marakanda. Alexander placed Pharnuches, a skilled speaker of Persian and several of the Bactrian tongues, as commander; he got a troop of Hetaeroi, three hundred Macedonian pezhetaeroi mounted as cavalry, and two thousand mercenary infantry – good men, mostly Ionian Greeks. Alexander also gave him all the Amazon captives to escort into Marakanda. Spitamenes had sold them to us in the first place, and Alexander thought they might be useful as bargaining counters. He expected that Spitamenes would negotiate.

We marched for the Jaxartes. And we went hard and fast.

We took four forts in three days. In each case, we took the fort by storm, and the garrisons were slaughtered in the storming action. Alexander made it clear to the Bactrians that there were to be no survivors.

In every case, Alexander led the storming party in person.

This was not misplaced Homeric heroics. We had added thousands of barbarian auxiliaries to the army, and we were so short on ‘Macedonians’ that Illyrians and even Thracians had begun to seem like close friends. And morale among the Macedonian troops was low. Alexander made it clear that we were to lead from the front, and when the assault parties went in, the entire front rank of a taxeis might be, for instance, Hetaeroi officers.

That’s what it was taking to get our men into combat.

It was bloody work, but the Bactrian levies did their part, and that meant that they were ours. After killing their cousins in Spitamenes’ service, they weren’t going to go back to the steppe or join the revolt.

The Bactrians were better soldiers than any of us expected. They had enough tribal feuds and remembered hatreds to get them going, and they were still in awe of us. The problem was that as the Bactrians began to outperform the Macedonians, the bad feeling, already present, began to escalate.

There’s a belief, common among the sort of generals who fight their battles in the baths or lying on a comfortable kline at a party, that men who have fought in a number of battles are veterans and thus better soldiers. In the main, this is true. Veterans don’t die from preventable accidents. Veterans get fewer diseases, know how to dig a latrine and know how to find food. So they can indeed wager on how new recruits will die, in the field.

Veterans have learned a few things, and one of the things they learn is that people die in war or are horribly mutilated, and that the way to avoid these fates is to be careful and not take risks. Sometimes, in combat, the raw, unblooded troops are the better fighters.

The fifth of Cyrus’s forts on the Jaxartes – the one we called Cyropolis – was the worst.

Alexander had been wounded the day before, storming the Dakhas fort. He’d taken an arrow right through the shin – Philip had it out in no time, but it left the king out of the next action, against a fort that had a garrison of seven thousand men.

So there I was, with most of my friends and my own retainers. I had set out from Macedon with twenty grooms, and I had six left. Polystratus was now a gentleman and an officer – a phylarch. His second, Theodore, was now a hetaeros, a half-file leader in a gold-plated helmet. Ochrid, who had begun our campaigns as my body slave, was now my steward, as I have noted, and about this time started to serve as my mounted groom, and usually fought with the Hetaeroi, and any day now, I was going to have to put him in the ranks and add him to my roster. This is not a complaint – Ochrid was, it turned out, a warrior to his fingers’ ends. Most men are, if they are well led. Rather I mean it as an example of how desperate our manning problems were. The lines between master and man, between ‘Greek’ and ‘Macedonian’, between ‘mercenary’ and ‘professional’, were hopelessly blurred.

As the numbers of Greeks in our ranks increased – even in the Hetaeroi – the older Macedonians grew less and less inclined to accept the Bactrians and the Persians, as if the line had to be drawn somewhere.

But I digress. Cyropolis. The fort was two hundred feet above us, and I was standing in the front rank between Polystratus and Marsyas. I had four thousand men formed behind me, and another thousand Bactrians under Cyrus, ready to go up a dry gully to the south of the place. As far as I could see, the dry gully would get them within fifty paces of the position and the useless amateurs guarding the fort had missed it. I certainly hoped so.

My four thousand were all veterans. They were a mix of mercenaries and one of Parmenio’s former taxeis – Polyperchon’s Tymphaeans. Polyperchon was down with one of Apollo’s shafts in him, and his men – some of whom were survivors of Philip’s campaigns – were none too happy to be used as assault troops.

I could hear them behind me.

‘Let the fucking Medes do it,’ one old man said. ‘They seem to like it.’

But soldiers always said such things before a fight.

It was a calm, clear morning. I could smell the sharp smell of our morning fires, and while it promised to be hot, the early-morning air was still quite pleasant. The river made a low growl off to my right, and we had so many horses in our army that they made more noise than the enemy.

But not more noise than a battery of war engines. Twenty engines loosed their bolts and baskets all together, about a stade to my left, and their noise drowned the river and the horses – the whip-crack of the torsion engines, the louder, deeper thud as the catapults released their heavier payloads. The engineers had opened breaches the night before and kept the range, despite the workings of temperature and dew on the torsion ropes. Dust rose all along the top of the breaches, as the gravel and the larger stones struck home. Someone was hit – he lay in the breach screaming.

An archer on the wall tried a long shot. He must have been good – his first shaft struck a horse length from my right foot. But his second shaft fell shorter yet, and he stopped.

We weren’t exactly going to surprise them.

I exchanged embraces and arm clasps with my friends in the front ranks. Then I turned to the pezhetaeroi.

‘Let’s get this done,’ I said. Perhaps not my best speech.

All I got in return was a low growl, but that was fine. Professionals.

I looked at Laertes, another former groom who now carried the trumpet and acted as my hyperetes, because Theophilus had been promoted to decarch.

He nodded once and sounded it, and we were off.

I didn’t see any reason to hurry, since my real attack was going in with Cyrus, and the trumpet was his signal to start up the dry gully. We marched quite well. My shield hurt my shoulder. I was reaching an age when the accumulation of my wounds had begun to bother me almost every day. Thaïs had made me concoctions – they didn’t all work, but the thought was there. Now I had nothing but what Philip of Acarnia gave me. More and more, he used opium for everything. I didn’t want opium, so I put up with a lot of aches and pains.

Four thousand sets of boots, going up the gravel to the fort.

Arrows began to fall on us. They’d been lofted high to get over our shields.

The men behind me raised their shields.

I began to go forward faster. It is the natural reaction to incoming arrows.

I was almost to the base of the main breach. We’d pounded three of them at last light, and the batteries had opened up again at first light, pounding the mud-brick wall to dirt and wrecking the attempts at repair. Baskets of gravel had cleared the workers off the walls.

We were quite good at sieges, by the Jaxartes.

Even as I reached the ditch at the base of the devastated mud-brick wall, I saw that the pioneers had filled it in with fascine bundles, and crossbow bolts were going over my head into the archers on the walls shooting down at me. It didn’t make me feel safe, but it is reassuring to a soldier to know that the other parts of the machine are functioning to support him.

The poor bastard in the breach had been unlucky. A five-talent machine had hit his feet square on and effectively pulped them, and he lay in an immense pool of his own blood and screamed. His screams were horrible, because his fate represented exactly the sort of thing we all feared.

I should have looked back to call the troops forward, and I should have kept an eye on the archers shooting down from the embrasures, but I let my focus fall on the poor bastard screaming his guts out. I ran to him and killed him – spiked him in the head. He went out like a lamp being blown out.

May someone do as much for me.

Now I was halfway up the breach. Amyntas son of Gordidas, one of my former grooms, and Marsyas were right behind me, and Laertes and Polystratus were a pace behind, their shields full of arrows, and behind them were a dozen more officers and gentlemen.

The enemy tribesmen were lining the breach.

There was no one behind my officers.

The taxeis had stopped dead, about fifty paces out from the wall.

There comes a point in a charge when you can’t really go back. I was just beyond the spear range of the men in the breach. To turn and run back to the taxeis under the wall would be to turn my back on healthy enemies and run the gauntlet of their archery – again – this time with my back to them.

No thanks, I thought.

So I turned and charged the enemy. Or rather, fifteen or twenty of us charged a thousand or so of them.

I had assumed that when the taxeis saw us committed to the fight, they would come forward.

I was wrong.

It should have been easy. The enemy Sogdians were dismounted nomad cavalry, and they had neither shields nor armour nor real spears. They threw javelins with deadly force and excellent aim – but we were fully armoured men with heavy aspides. Their archery was deadly – but we’d survived that.

And they’d been chewed over pretty hard by our artillery.

It should have been easy, but the odds of fifteen fully armoured men against a thousand unarmoured archers were just too long, and we had no impact when we struck them. The breach we went up was only about ten men wide, and so, for a while, our little group held its own. A hundred heartbeats, perhaps.

The spear is a deadly weapon, when the wielder is armoured and shielded and his opponents are not. I must have wounded ten men in those hundred heartbeats.

But the Sogdians did something I had never seen before. They began to use their bows at point-blank range – releasing arrows from so close that there was no possibility of a miss. As they began to get around the ends of our little line, archers began to shoot into our unprotected thighs and backs, and in moments, half of my friends were down.

Marsyas gave a choked scream and dropped by my side.

Laertes fell atop him.

My spear hadn’t broken. I had a short spear that day – pikes are useless in a storming action, and I had one of my fine Athenian spears, all blue and gilt work, with a long, heavy head and a vicious butt-spike. The haft was octagonal, which allowed me to know where the edges of the spearhead were without looking, and I’d been practising with the thing for a year.

The proper Homeric thing to do was to die standing over my friends, but I elected to go in among the archers and live a little longer.

I leaped forward from where I had straddled Marsyas. The Sogdians’ use of archery to finish us off had caused them to draw back instead of pressing the last little knot of us, and that left me space that shock troops wouldn’t have given me. I let my shield fall from my arm – it was full of arrows, and one of them was in my lower bicep by a finger’s width.

Then I put my left hand near the head of my spear as if I were boar-hunting, and stepped into their ranks. I didn’t stop moving, and Ares lent me his strength, and for as long as it takes a man to drink his canteen dry, I rampaged through their ranks, too close to be shot, too fast to be tracked, and I thrust with the spear two-handed, and cut with the spearhead as if it were the point of a sword. I felt pain – I was taking blows, and my forearms burned, but to stop was to surrender to death.

Marsyas rose from the pile of our dead, his sword in his hand. I saw him – a flash, but a complete impression, because his armour was beautifully worked, and because his battle cry was ‘Helen’, of all things.

And then Hephaestion came up behind Marsyas, and behind him were the hypaspitoi. They ploughed over the Sogdians in the breach and I was swept along with them into a fort that had, by the time I was in control of myself, already fallen.

The hypaspitoi and the Bactrians under Cyrus, who had come up the gully unopposed and stormed the south wall, now butchered the garrison. No one tried to surrender, and the fighting went on and on – new pockets of resistance were found in alleys, on rooftops, and as the men began to break formation to loot and rape, they found men cowering in basements or tight-lipped in courtyards, and killed them.

Polyperchon’s men came late into the town. They had baulked, left me to die and then been threatened with decimation – death for one man in every ten – by Alexander in person, lying on a litter. I missed it, but he went mad, so I was told by Cleitus, spitting, calling them the sons of whores. Alexander, who never swore. Well, almost never.

When they came into the town, they went on an orgy of destruction and killing. The hypaspitoi had rounded up fifty or so women and some children – to be sold as slaves. Don’t imagine they were rescued for any altruistic purpose. Polyperchon’s men found them by the breach and killed them all.

And then they started killing Cyrus’s men.

At first, the Bactrians ran, or called for help, or pleaded that they were allies – friends.

Then they started fighting back.

I was sitting on a chair in the former agora – a looted chair. I had a nasty gash on my thigh and something was wrong in my lower back, and there was blood trickling from somewhere and running down my arse and my leg – all I wanted to do was sleep, or at least rest. And Polystratus, bless him, had found me some pomegranate juice – in the midst of a massacre, that’s a miracle. He’d been knocked out – clean unconscious – by a blow to the head, but taken no other wound.

I saw the fighting start across the square.

I cursed.

Got to my feet. And, I’m not ashamed to say, I finished my juice before I went to save Polyperchon’s men.

I was so angry that I didn’t bother to think. I walked up to the fighting, and I killed one of the Macedonians with a thrust to the face.

He was a phylarch, and he’d probably fought at Chaeronea. I didn’t particularly care. I put him down, and I stood over him and let my rage have voice.

‘You stupid fucks are killing our Bactrians!’ I roared.

They flinched.

I smacked one man who had his sword raised – I swung the spear so hard he moved a foot or two and fell in a heap, out cold.

‘Anyone else?’ I roared.

My friends – my own companions – began to close around me.

Alexander was there. He’d been carried into the fort on a litter, and had Hephaestion with him.

There wasn’t much I could say, standing there with the blood of a Macedonian officer on my spear.

Alexander was white with pain, but he nodded to me. ‘Your precious pezhetaeroi,’ he said. ‘The sooner have I replaced them . . .’

I had never heard him say it. Just at that moment, I was angry enough to agree, but even an hour later, I was calm, and I began to think of what it meant that Alexander no longer trusted his troops. I wondered if he even knew what was wrong.

They wanted to go home. And they hated our Persian and Bactrian ‘allies’.

And when Cyrus embraced me, he said, ‘I tell my men! That you are not like the others.’

In other words, our Bactrians and Persians didn’t love us, either.

Two days later, Alexander was off his litter and leading another assault. I was the one on the litter – it turned out that I had an arrow in my back. It had penetrated my thorax and the wool chiton under it, and gone in the distance of a man’s finger to the first joint, right over the fat that surrounds the kidney.

Most of the men who’d taken arrow wounds were raving. The Sogdians poisoned their arrows, and while only a few men died, the rest were in pain, groaning, screaming, with fevers and sweats.

I was, it turned out, suddenly very unpopular indeed with the army. My killing of a Macedonian made me one of ‘them’. One of the men who was against the old ways. No one seemed to care that the useless fucks had left me to die in the breach. Men I’d led at Gaugamela turned away when my litter passed them.

That’s how bad the army was getting.

Alexander was wounded again at the sixth fort. He took a rock – thrown from high on the wall – to the head, and went down.

Our Bactrians and our Persians stormed the fort with the hypaspitoi. Hephaestion stood over Alexander with his shield, and Black Cleitus got him clear of the fighting.

The seventh fort surrendered, with a garrison of six thousand men. But that day, a hundred men came in from the steppe and reported that Pharnuches had been ambushed by the Sakje, or the Massagetae, or possibly Spitamenes himself. He’d lost his entire command. Fewer than three hundred men had survived.

Alexander ordered the prisoners from the last fort to be executed. He had the most recent Sogdian recruits and the men of Polyperchon’s taxeis do it as a test, or a punishment. The Sogdians were killing their own brothers. The Macedonians were performing an ugly task, and they knew why.

Eumenes convinced him not to execute the survivors or Pharnuches’s column. But they were sworn to secrecy. Eumenes had joined the inner circle, and the conspiracy to keep Alexander sane.

But pain made the king savage, and the atmosphere of the camp reflected it.

After a week of recuperating, we raced west to rescue Marakanda, because its loss would sever our supply chain. Spitamenes melted away, and we relieved the city.

Craterus went off with a column to pursue Spitamenes – lost him at the edge of the steppe and managed to get into a fight with a party of Sauromatae and Sakje who had disciplined Greek cavalry with them. He lost, and retreated, abandoning his wounded – our third defeat in a month. We’d lost thousands of mercenaries in the forts, in the storming actions, to Spitamenes’ raids and now to the Sauromatae on the steppe.

Alexander’s wounds were so bad that he couldn’t see from time to time, and bone splinters were continually appearing from the leg wound and his collarbone. He was in so much pain that he stayed in his tent, and the Persians he’d surrounded himself with used the time to wall the rest of us off from the king.

Worst of all, Spitamenes was gathering men on the steppe.

Using Marakanda as a headquarters, the king devised a new strategy from his bed. He had the infantry move along the rivers, fortifying. We began to plant garrisons in every valley and on every hilltop, and using the wonderful horses we were taking as tribute from every chieftain we conquered, we mounted as many men as we could and divided the mounted army into five mobile columns. The infantry garrisoned the new forts we built over the winter and the cavalry swept between the forts.

Hephaestion had a column. Alexander had one for himself. Craterus had one. Coenus shared one with Artabazus. And I had one.

Spitamenes beat Coenus and took one of our border posts. I had a brush with your pater across the Jaxartes. I’m not ashamed to say I did everything wrong. My column was almost all Sogdians – recent converts – and I thought I was shadowing Spitamenes, but he’d slipped between our columns and raided south.

Instead, I caught a tiger. We fought in a dust storm – I’ve never seen the like – and it was virtually impossible to see across the battlefield. My men held the battlefield – but only because your pater wanted to slip away, and he did.

Your Spartan friend Philokles brought me in as a prisoner. Do you know this story? I said some unfortunate things to your father. I met your mother – not as a prisoner, but as a mother. I saw you at her breast.

You know, lad, when I sit here – beside his tomb – in the fullness of my power, King of Aegypt, Pharaoh of the Two Crowns – I can see them around the fire, at the edge of the great steppe. Your pater and his men. Philokles, who made me feel a complete fool – he still does – and your pater, who reminded me that he had been thrown away by Alexander and owed Macedon nothing. Your mother, who’d been our prisoner.

And yet I was happy to be with them. They were great men, and they were philoi. In my thoughts, I have often compared Kineas and the king. Your pater loved war – he loved the planning, the scouting, the organisation, the movement, the action. But he never loved the killing, nor did he ever tell me stories of his prowess. And when, on the banks of the river, he and Diodorus offered to let me join them – I should have been outraged. But I was tempted, because the king was losing his mind from hubris and from pain.

And because he loved war a different way, and he didn’t want the company of his peers. He wanted only to be the absolute master of all men.

Your pater released me, and Philokles rode me clear of the Sakje and down to the edge of the Jaxartes.

‘Last chance,’ he said. He smiled. ‘I know you won’t change sides. But I’d bet a cup of good wine you could just ride away.’

I smiled, because he had the right of it. I would never have betrayed the king, but I was tempted to use the moment and vanish. Harpalus did, later.

Philokles clasped hands with me. ‘Remember what Srayanka said,’ he added. ‘Tell Alexander not to cross the river. Spitamenes’ time is almost done. The Massagetae are tired of him.’

That was precious information.

I rejoined my command south of the Jaxartes and we swept east along the river, staying well away from the Massagetae. When we returned to the army, I gave the king a severely edited brief – I knew how to edit a scouting report.

Alexander could not sort out the Massagetae from Spitamenes. That is, he understood that they weren’t the same, that Spitamenes used Massagetae goodwill and manpower but didn’t actually control them. But Alexander wasn’t interested in listening to me. I’d been defeated, and I joined the ranks of the disgraced commanders.

He concentrated his columns around Marakanda and pushed north and east, and finally, east of Cyropolis, he faced the Massagetae confederation and all of Spitamenes’ Persians across the Jaxartes.

We neither won nor lost.

I fought all day – two charges in the morning and two in the afternoon at the head of my Hetaeroi. Alexander was wounded in the fighting by the river when the Sauromatae almost collapsed our right flank, and the Macedonian infantry – the phalanx – had to cover our withdrawal across the river. I think it was the worst day that the Hetaeroi ever had. We lost men – we lost horses.

But the Massagetae could make no headway against the phalanx, and Spitamenes’ men took a beating from our left-flank cavalry. I almost reached him myself. By the time we withdrew, the Massagetae may have felt victorious, but the Persian rebels had ceased to be an effective field force.

I’ve heard a hundred men who say we lost at Jaxartes river. But by Ares – we went across the river into the arrow storm, and we crushed Spitamenes. He mounted one more raid – one, and then he was through. Nor did the Massagetae want any more of fighting us.

Best of all, the situation forced our Macedonians to fight. They didn’t fight well, but as Alexander put them in a position where the choices were to fight or to die, they chose to fight. After Jaxartes, the pezhetaeroi began to regain discipline. We didn’t lose. Had we lost, we’d have been exterminated.

Alexander, however, was deeply affected by the battle. It was the closest he’d ever come to a loss, and he had never before failed to take the enemy camp, seize the enemy’s baggage, provide his army with the benefits of victory.

Combined with four wounds in as many months, his lack of victory made him all too human. The god was hidden.

The man was angry.

As I have mentioned, the greatest internal problem facing our army – since we marched into Hyrkania – had been the division between ‘old’ Macedonian officers and ‘new’ Persian officers. This is a gross oversimplification. First, the rift was built on the factions left over from Parmenio’s time. Alexander had begun to employ non-Macedonian officers from the first – Erigyus of Mytilene is a fine example. Philip did it as well. Philip was never afraid to employ Athenians, Spartans, Ionians – he’d hire whomever he could get, the best men, the most expensive.

Alexander merely continued that policy in Asia. He drafted Lydian cavalry after the Granicus, and as soon as we had Persian defectors, they were given rank and employment. Why not? I still cannot fully understand the anger of the ‘old’ faction.

But after Parmenio’s death, the question was complicated by Alexander’s attempts to be all things to all men – to be a Persian king for the Persians while remaining a Macedonian to us and being a Greek for the Greeks. He thought he was both clever and successful. He was not. And the worst of it was that none of us could tell him that he had failed – he never believed us. His hubris blinded him to the simple ignorant anger of his Macedonian phalangites, who wanted no part of putting Asians in the ranks of the phalanx.

The sad truth was that we knew – we, the officers – that there was nothing remarkable about Pella, or Amphilopolis – or Athens or Sparta. We could take young Bactrians or Persians or Lydians or Sogdians and make them passable pikemen. The phalanx – ours, not the Greek kind – won battles by walking forward relentlessly with courage, good training and really, really long pikes. Our veterans imagined themselves irreplaceable, but they were not.

We knew it, but again, the problem was far more complex than it appeared. Because the phalanx couldn’t be replaced. They were the heart of the army, and if they mutinied – well, they could turn on us. Alexander had taken them on a five-year rampage across Asia, and he’d taught them that anything can be taken at the point of the spear. Including the King of Macedon.

We’re still paying for that lesson. Eh?

At the same time, the king was losing touch with his staff. Even at Marakanda, even on campaign, he had a growing personal staff of subservient Asians. He liked it that way. Let’s not mince words. He didn’t want to be surrounded by the teasing and mockery of peers. He didn’t want sharp-tongued friends reminding him of the consequences of his actions.

He was not Kineas.

That summer, the conflict boiled over and people died.

So did friendships.

Alexander gave a dinner to celebrate the appointment of Black Cleitus as the satrap of Bactria. Cleitus deserved the post – ten years of absolute loyalty – and we were getting Nearchus back, so Alexander could spare Cleitus.

And Cleitus had developed an unfortunate habit on campaign – the habit of needling Alexander about his own failings. Cleitus didn’t have the brilliant mind that Alexander had, but he was thoughtful, penetrating – and as the man who had most often saved the king’s life, he was free to speak his mind.

Increasingly, he did. And thus it came as no surprise to me that Alexander was sending him away.

I was lying on my couch, far from the inner circle. No amount of hard fighting at Jaxartes could restore my reputation. I had lost a fight, even though I had had only Sogdian tribesmen in my command and had taken very few casualties. And as I say, the king was isolating himself from anyone who might have spoken out, and that included me.

Which, I must confess, was fine. I was sick of him.

That night, I had just decided to be unfaithful to my Thaïs. It was a funny sort of decision – we’d never pledged to each other and thus, I felt, my honour was fully engaged. She was free to take lovers – she was, after all, a courtesan, a matter of which she never ceased to remind me when she was angry. I hadn’t seen her in a year.

I’m making excuses. I had purchased a Circassian – fine-looking – as a slave. I hadn’t allowed myself to think what I was doing, but the longer I owned her – well, make your own conclusions. I lay on my couch in the dust, angry with myself and drunk and ready to behave badly. I was anxious to leave the dinner, go back to my tent and see how far her willingness would extend. I assumed that it would extend quite far.

I drank more. We are never worse than when we are about to behave badly. And conscience – I have to laugh. I could have fucked a slave a day, and no man in that army would have thought the worse of me.

Alexander was busy rehashing every battle he’d fought. He was talking about the enemy commanders he’d killed or maimed in single combat.

I’d heard it all before, and I tuned him out, until he mentioned Memnon.

I was daydreaming of my soon-to-be concubine – a mixture of salacious thoughts and anger at my own weakness – when I realised that the king had just claimed that he had killed Memnon at Halicarnassus.

I shook my head.

Black Cleitus laughed. He was lying on the king’s right, as was proper since it was his day. He snorted, as he used to do when they were boys and he thought that Alexander was getting above himself.

‘Memnon died of the flux at Mytilene,’ Cleitus said.

Alexander stopped. Who knew what went on in that head? But he shrugged. ‘Who are you to argue with me?’ he asked. He was very drunk. ‘I am the very god of war, and you are merely one of my warriors.’

Cleitus barked his snorting laugh again. ‘You’re a drunk fuck, and saying you are the god of war is blasphemy. Don’t be an arse!’

Alexander got to his feet, and then tripped over something on the floor and almost fell. The unaccustomed clumsiness made him angrier. ‘Zeus is my father! I have waded in blood and made war across the earth, and I don’t have to listen to you – what have you ever done for me?’

Cleitus had thus far played carefully, but this stung him, and he leaped from his couch. ‘Saved your useless life, ingrate!’ he roared.

Never tell the truth to the powerful.

Lysimachus rolled off his couch. Hephaestion got a hand on the king, and Lysimachus and Perdiccas both got between the king and Cleitus.

Alexander, in the hands of Lysimachus, leaned forward, his face red, and yelled, ‘Your sword couldn’t have kept a child alive! Name me a victory you have won? Any of you? Of the lot of you, I’m the only one who can fight and win.’

I’d got hold of Cleitus by then. I could see what was coming, and I was damned if I was going to allow Cleitus to lose his position in the army. But I couldn’t get anyone to help me and I couldn’t shut him up – a problem I’d had since childhood, to be frank.

‘You know who you remind me of ?’ Cleitus shouted. ‘Philip. Your fucking drunk father. It is a shameful thing, for you – the King of fucking Macedon – to humiliate your own men – who have followed you across the world – in the midst of these enemies and foreign traitors!’ Cleitus spat. ‘You insult your best men – who have been unfortunate – while jackals laugh at them, who have never faced an enemy sword!’

Alexander turned to Perdiccas. ‘I have never before heard cowardice described as misfortune,’ he said, intending to be heard. ‘Although now that I hear it so described, I suppose it is the bitterest misfortune a man can endure!’

Cleitus got a hand free from me. I was trying to get anyone to help, but the men closest to the king on couches were sycophants, flatterers, vultures – not men who would help me, even if they had the courage to try.

‘Was I a coward at the Granicus? If my sword hadn’t been by you, you would have been dead there and twenty other places.’ Cleitus slammed his elbow into my stomach to get me off him, but I was ready – I rolled with the blow and got an arm around his neck.

‘It is by our blood, our wounds, that you have risen so high!’ Cleitus called. ‘You think that you did this, Alexander? You think that you won those victories? Your hubris disgusts every man here. Your father built this army – your father Philip. You pretend that a god is your father! It’s a lie! You are a man!’

‘That’s how you talk about me behind my back, isn’t it!’ Alexander said, quite clearly. And he wasn’t looking at Cleitus. He was looking at me. Perdiccas later told me that Alexander looked at him, too.

I believe it. I think, by then, the king wanted us all gone. All the boys of his childhood. All the ones who knew that he was a man, and not a god.

Alexander turned back to Cleitus, suddenly icy and calm. ‘I know the things you say behind my back,’ he said. He turned slowly, and pointed with his free hand – Lysimachus still had his left – at Cleitus. ‘You and your friends cause all the bad blood between my Macedonians and my Persians. Don’t imagine you are going to get away with it!’

Cleitus stood straight. Something in Alexander’s tone sobered him for a moment. ‘Get away with it?’ he asked. ‘We’re dying for you every day, Alexander. And the ones who live get to bow down like sodomites and show their arses like these Persian fucks! While you wander around in a white dress and a diadem like a play-actor!’

Alexander turned to Eumenes, who had joined the men trying to restrain him. ‘Don’t you feel that the Macedonians are like beasts? Any Greek is like a god by comparison.’

Cleitus punched me in the eye. It hurt, and he was about to launch himself at the king, so I swung hard and hit him in the head.

Alexander picked up an apple – it was the first thing under his hand – and threw it at Cleitus, hitting him in the face.

I think Cleitus confused the two blows. Either way, he went off his head, drink and pain combining to make him bellow like a bull. But by then Marsyas had his other arm, together with Philip the Red.

We began to drag him, step by step, from the tent.

Perdiccas got the king in a choke hold, and Leonatus – the king’s friend – took the king’s sword from its scabbard and hurled it across the tent as Alexander reached for it. He went for the knife he always wore around his neck, but Lysimachus beat him to it – the king was so enraged he was ready to knife the men who had hold of him. As he wrestled with three men, his inhuman strength bearing all three of them down, he shouted, ‘It is a plot! To me! They are trying to murder me! Sound the alarm!’

His hyperetes refused. He had his trumpet, and he shook his head, eyes narrowed – like a proper Macedonian, he could make his own decisions about the king’s state. He wasn’t a slave. And when one of the Persian vultures grabbed for the trumpet to blow it – to sound the alarm, and summon the hypaspitoi – the king’s hyperetes bashed the Persian with the trumpet and put him down.

I had Cleitus clear of the tent by then, and I wrestled him out into the cooler night air, and Marsyas, whose wounds were suddenly bleeding again – Cleitus was struggling as hard as the king – kicked Cleitus in the balls.

Cleitus bellowed again, and flattened Marsyas with one blow, breaking his nose. And I missed my hold, and Cleitus stumbled back into the tent, where the king was shouting ‘Turn out the guard!’ at the top of his lungs and Perdiccas was trying to get a hand over his mouth.

I was right behind Cleitus. He got all the way into the command tent, and drew himself up. ‘Alas!’ he roared. ‘What evil government is come to Hellas?’

The hypaspitoi surged in through the doors, and it was over – I could tell just looking at the men coming in, in full armour, that they had been warned. Their faces were set, and they didn’t move to surround the king – rather, they moved to prevent any further violence. Alexander sagged against his captors.

Cleitus held his arms wide. ‘When the public sets up a war trophy, do the men who sweated get the credit? Oh, no – some strategos takes all the prestige!’ He was quoting from Euripides’ Andromache. ‘Who, waving his spear, one among thousands, did one man’s work, but receives a world of praise. Such self-important “fathers of their country” think they are better than other men. They are worth nothing!’

Alexander ripped his arms free from Perdiccas and Leonatus. And in one step, he had the spear – a short longche – from the hypaspist closest to him, and he plunged it to the socket through Cleitus, who was, of course, wearing no armour.

I saw the spear-point come through his back.

His mouth opened.

I’m told his eyes never left the king’s face.

And he died.

Coenus, Perdiccas and I were exiled a few weeks later to chase Spitamenes. That’s not how it was put to us, but that was the truth of it. Leonatus had already been sent away.

The king mourned for three days, until the weasel Anaxarchus told him that as he was a god, he was above the law. He justified the king’s actions, and the king accepted his word and moved on.

So much for his closest friend, the man who had stood by him since infancy.

After Cleitus died, we – the former inner circle – knew that no man was safe. Philotas, to some extent, had it coming – Parmenio had always been the king’s rival. But Cleitus was merely blunt – his loyalty had never been questioned, and without him, the king would have died. Several times.

I wanted no more of it. When I was sent to find and defeat Spitamenes, I went happily.

And we caught him. He had three thousand Dahae cavalry and several hundred of his Persian adherents, but the forts kept us informed by beacon, and too many villagers had had enough – or perhaps they were more scared of us than they were of Spitamenes. We cornered him in a deep valley, and while Perdiccas took his taxeis up the hillside to block their retreat, Coenus and I charged home. We broke the Dahae easily enough – they didn’t want our kind of fight – and most of the Persians surrendered. They had had enough.

In a matter of weeks, we had Spitamenes’ head. And that was the end of his revolt. Overnight, a man who had held us longer than Memnon or Darius was gone, killed by his own wife, and we were, at last, masters of Sogdiana.

I was between Coenus and Perdiccas, riding slowly, because our column was tired and because we were done and our men weren’t in the mood to be hurried.

I took a breath, enjoying the mountain air for the first time in two years. ‘I think . . .’ I said, and Perdiccas grinned.

‘Do you?’ he asked. ‘I thought I smelled something.’

I punched him. ‘I think we have to make him go home now,’ I said.

Perdiccas nodded, the happy look wiped from his face. ‘Do you think – if we get him home . . .’

Coenus laughed. It was a desperate laugh.

I turned. ‘We can get him home,’ I said. ‘If we work at it.’

Coenus wiped his eyes for a moment. ‘We’re not going home,’ he said. ‘We’re invading India. In the spring.’

I was still in charge of the army’s food and supplies, and I hadn’t heard a word of it. But then, I’d been out of favour half a year.

In fact, it was another year before we marched on India. The king was careful about the reconquest of Sogdiana, and he developed a lust of heroic proportions (the only kind of lust he ever had, really) for the daughter of one of the Sogdian chieftains – Roxanne – or so he claimed. She probably saved a lot of lives with her superb face and lush, velvety skin.

We received drafts from home, and Alexander mustered our veterans – as many as he could. And he began to bring foreign officers closer in – he tried to appoint Cyrus to command half of the Hetaeroi in place of Cleitus, and Hephaestion talked him out of it.

I was scarcely paying attention. With the Prodromoi and all the intelligence I could muster, I was trying to figure out how to feed the army when it marched east, to India. The king arrested Callisthenes on a trumped-up charge, and I can’t pretend I’d ever loved him, although he was better than the lickspittle Anaxarchus. Alexander tried – repeatedly – to induce us to perform the proskynesis. Leonatus mocked any man who did, and Polyperchon was arrested in Alexander’s presence for direct refusal. And again, Hephaestion went to the king and begged him to relent.

A group of pages plotted to kill the king. But, in the best tradition of Philip’s court, they fell out among themselves – sex and dominance were involved. Alexander had them executed, and used the incident to justify moving against the Macedonian faction, which had been ‘proved’ disloyal, and after the fact he implicated Callisthenes in the plot and executed him.

He had become quite dangerous to be around.

I avoided him. I spent the year riding as far east as Taxila, the ruler of which was already an ally. I was laying in stores for thirty thousand men. I had given up on getting the king home. I was willing to get him into a war.