God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

THIRTY-SIX

When we sat on the stone bench in the Gardens of Midas, Aristotle taught us about the shape of the world, and the shape of the universe. He taught us ethics and morals and ideals of rulership, and I dare say he was wrong about a great many things. After all, he was chiefly responsible for Alexander.

I like to think that he did better with me. For one thing, he felt free to correct me more often.

But I am dithering.

One of the things that Aristotle had quite horribly wrong was the geography of the East. And it is odd, when you are a grown man, the commander of armies, the lord of millions, how mistakes learned in your youth continue to shape your thinking, despite some intellectual awareness that all is not quite right. I knew a man once – a Persian slave who was freed in Athens. He had adopted Greek ways – he abjured the worship of Ahuru Mazda, and worshipped Zeus and Apollo. But he always turned to the sun to pray in the morning, regardless of circumstance.

Or put another way, all of us make the peasant signs for luck, for aversion of evil, even long after we accept that they are nothing but superstition.

And who does not remember their first lover with a sudden bolt of lust?

Hah! How would you know? But you will.

The point is, Alexander’s confusion about the shape of the world had profound consequences. And he continued to make strategic decisions based on those confusions, despite a constant stream of scouting reports and intelligence reports provided by trustworthy agents and edited by his staff. He believed that if we crossed the Jaxartes and travelled north, we would come to the Euxine. I knew better – but then I had met Kineas and Philokles, and they had come from the Euxine.

Likewise, Alexander believed, when we were relaxing at Persepolis, that Cyrus’s former province of India marked the edge of the world – that beyond the land of elephants and spices lay the ocean, and beyond that the rim of the world.

By the time we crossed the Kush, I knew better, and Craterus knew better, and Ariston certainly knew better. But Alexander either didn’t read our reports, or didn’t understand them – little possibility of that – or didn’t care.

He planned an invasion based on any number of false assumptions. He assumed that India was roughly the size of Bactria, and that it had a finite end – at the ocean.

As was often the case, his views communicated themselves to the army. And he reputedly said – I was not there – that India was the last, because it had been part of Cyrus’s empire, and Alexander felt that if he reconquered all of the mighty Cyrus’s possessions, he would be accepted by the Persians as a legitimate ruler.

And he was right.

We had most of the great nobles of the empire serving in the army by the time we crossed the passes. Alexander reorganised the army again at Alexandria-the-Farthest, our base in the endless mountains of Bactria at the head of the Khyber. This time, he put a squadron of Persian noble cavalry with every squadron of Hetaeroi. I got one of these pairs, with Cyrus and his retinue now promoted to command the other – we had been the experiment from the first, which, to be honest, I’d always suspected. I liked Persians – I was used as a test case for everything from acceptable rations (Greeks and Persians won’t always feel the same way about food) to matters of sex and cleanliness.

The Persian cavalry was excellent. Thaïs told me in a letter that Alexander had also recruited thirty thousand Persian and Mede youths as infantry, and they were receiving training. He used the old Kardakes system, and it ran well enough.

Before we departed Alexandria, we received drafts from home – recruits from Macedon and Greek mercenaries, as well as some Lydians and Phrygians. The Macedonians looked outlandish to all of us, in their clean white wool chitons, bare necks (we all wore the local scarves) and wide-eyed innocence – and these were men who had survived to march out to us from Macedon, so they were hardly new. By the time we headed south, we had almost sixty thousand men for the invasion of India – but fewer than fifteen thousand of them were Macedonians. We were, to all intents and purposes, a Persian army.

And Alexander was a Persian king, with a court, a harem he never visited, and priests, augurs and other useless mouths I had to feed. He wanted an audience for the conquest of one more province.

But from the height of the main pass into Taxila, any doubts the king may have had about the extent of India were dispelled. Aristotle had insisted that we would see the mighty outer ocean from the height of the Kush. Alexander kept asking men about the ocean – we knew that Scylax, the Greek explorer, had been to India by sea in the time of Marathon, and I had his book, which wasn’t especially useful, but it did name port cities in India.

We looked out from the height of the Khyber Pass and saw – India. Hill country, and folds of hills running away to the south, into a lower range of mountains at the edge of vision far away beyond the vale of the Indus.

Cavalry scouts who had been to Taxila and beyond reported that from the height of the Orminus range – the very limit of the geography of our Persian officers – you could see green fields stretching away south for five hundred stades, at least.

We were invading a country the size of Greece, at the very least, and perhaps the size of Europe. Or Asia.

I gathered the reports, and no one could tell me how big India was. I had one report from a merchant who said that to travel from one side of the country to another took more than a year. If this was true, then India was the size of Asia, and we were doomed to an eternal war.

I remember that I stopped my horse – a handsome Sakje mare that Kineas had given me and I still rode by preference – at the height of the pass. The column had been slowing and stopping all day as men paused to take in the view. I was with Perdiccas’s taxeis.

A familiar voice growled by my left foot.

‘Where’s the fewkin’ ocean, then?’ Amyntas son of Philip, phylarch of the third company of Craterus’s taxeis, was standing looking under his hand at the rolling brown hills of Tiausa.

I looked down. ‘A little farther,’ I said, the eternal staff officer.

Amyntas spat. Looked up. ‘How’s the daughter, then?’ he said.

‘Olympias will be ordained a full priestess at the Great Feast of Artemis,’ I said, and he grinned.

‘Good for her.’ He smiled wickedly. ‘And that nice priest boy?’

‘A stade away. A fine soldier.’

‘He is, at that,’ said the old bastard. ‘I see him all the time. And you, old man?’

‘Amyntas son of Philip, you dare call me old? Weren’t you at Marathon? Still alive?’ I took his hand. ‘And you are older, I think.’

He waved at the hills in the far distance. Men filed past us. And suddenly, he turned and said, ‘He’s fuckin’ insane, ain’t he? I mean, he’ll just march east until we all die – and then he’ll replace us with local sods, right? Am I right?’

Men around us were murmuring.

‘How’s Dion?’ I asked. Then I winced. I’d forgotten.

‘Dead at Arabela. Bloody flux,’ he said. ‘Told you that last year, when you held the sacrifice.’

‘And the young man? Charmides?’ I asked.

‘Dead – can’t exactly remember where. Hey, Red, where’d Charmides go to earth?’ he called out to a phylarch who was resting both hands on his spear and staring out over the earth.

‘After Marakanda?’ The man shrugged. There was a pause, and then he said, ‘I think. Aphrodite’s tits, Amyntas – he died – at . . . ?’

Amyntas shrugged. ‘Boys like him come and go so fast, we don’t bother to learn their names any more. The shit they send us from Pella – Zeus Soter, sir, are they out of men in Macedon?’ He looked at a dozen new recruits filling the two nearest files. They weren’t big men.

‘Antipater’s keeping the best for hisself,’ another man suggested. ‘Sending us thieves and urchins.’

‘I’m no thief!’ a young man protested with some spirit, and Amyntas stepped right up to him. His hand moved as if for a blow, but paused with perfect efficiency to stroke the boy’s cheek as gently as a mother.

‘No,’ he said, laughing. ‘If you were a thief, you’d have a useful skill. As it is, you’re not worth a fuck. And that’s the literal truth.’

The boy was shaking.

‘Go easy, soldier. You need him to press his shield into your back when we fight in India.’ I smiled at the new boy.

Amyntas spat. ‘Then I’m fuckin’ dead already, sir.’ But he laughed. ‘I’m the right phylarch, now.’ The senior file leader. The man responsible for the dressing of the battalion, the order of march – a very important man indeed.

‘Congratulations,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘All the people who could do the job better are dead. That don’t say much for me.’

The column had started to move out. Sweating bearers – servants of the common soldiers – were carrying enormous bundles on their backs and heads and heavy forked sticks on their shoulders like yokes. They marched with their masters, in files in between the soldiers’ files.

The bearers picked up their packs, the soldiers took one last gulp of water or wine, and the column began to move.

‘Of the ten men in my file, when we left Macedon, I’m the only one still alive,’ Amyntas said.

Those words stuck with me, all the way down the pass.

The next night, Alexander summoned a council. It was remarkably like the old days – consciously so – and no sooner was I handed a cup of wine than I saw that he was elated, his eyes glittering, his face almost unlined, the energy glowing in his skin.

He embraced me as soon as I had a cup of wine. ‘I have missed you, Ptolemy!’ he said.

An odd remark, if you consider that I briefed him twice a week on matters related to food and logistics – and more often still about geography and intelligence. But it is true, we had had little enough to say to each other as men since before Marakanda.

‘I’m right here,’ I said, or something equally inane – but Alexander, on his way to his next embrace, stopped, and looked back. Perhaps I’d put more emotion into my statement than I meant.

‘You sound bitter, Ptolemy.’ Alexander’s eyes met mine, and they were brimful of power. Not madness. Just will.

I shook my head.

Alexander greeted Perdiccas, Lysimachus, Coenus. But he made a point of coming back and standing by me.

‘Listen, then!’ he said, and the babble of gossip stopped.

It was years since I’d seen him look so well rested – and so happy.

‘India,’ he said. ‘Our last campaign together,’ he added, with a smile in my direction. ‘I suppose there will be some hill tribes to subdue. But this is Cyrus’s last conquest – and I know you all want me to go home.’

It took my breath away – that he said it right out, without whining, or crying, or killing someone.

And yet, the cynic in my soul whispered that a wine-bibber is always telling his wife he’ll quit, too.

But it made me happy. Of course, the wine-bibber’s wife is happy, too. For a little while.

He looked around, and my feelings were exposed on every face – even men like Craterus. Relief. Quiet joy, or merely exhaustion.

He nodded, as if he’d been talking to someone else. ‘But I have one favour to ask,’ he said. Nodded again. ‘I want you all to be at your very best. You think you are tired and far from home?’ He looked around. ‘We are living in myth. We are the cutting edge of an epic. We are the heroes of the Iliad. When we march home to Babylon and Pella, we will be leaving behind this – the existence that is greater than the merely mortal. If this is my last great campaign – make it your best. Eh?’

I don’t think his words reached Craterus. But Perdiccas met my eye. We were both smiling.

Alexander never gave speeches. Or when he did, they sounded a little forced.

Coenus was smiling, and Lysimachus, and Seleucus, now commanding the hypaspitoi.

‘I’m going to send Perdiccas and Hephaestion down the Indus, to pick off the cities on the river. Craterus, you and I and Seleucus will go north on the Choaspes. The rendezvous is Gandaris. The Raja of Taxila is our ally – Ptolemy is in contact with him already, and we have depots marked on your itineraries. The order of march is here. Any questions?’

People asked questions – Seleucus especially. He always did.

When they ran out of questions, Alexander looked around. He had set himself a Herculean task, and that put him on the plane of the gods. He was happy. He was also not wearing the diadem, not wearing a white robe. He was in a plain chitoniskos, dressed like any Macedonian aristocrat after a day of war, or hunting. First among equals.

‘Anything more?’ he asked. He looked around.

He was beaming.

‘Let’s go and conquer India, then,’ he said.

While Hephaestion took the main army straight downriver – straight being a remarkable thing to say of the upper Indus – and Alexander went off into the trackless wooded mountains of the Chaispes, I had a different role – as the linchpin between the two columns. I had my squadrons and Philip the Red with me, and together we kept the two columns in contact. I had the Paoenians and most of the Prodromoi and Ariston to command them, and all the Agrianians, who we’d mounted on mules, and Strako’s Angeloi, who’d been expanded with locals into a small squadron. It was one of my favourite commands – the perfect instrument for the job. We could cover hundreds of stades of ground – at one point I had men along both banks of the Indus all the way down to the plains below Taxila – or combine to fight. And the preponderance of scouts allowed me to gather information for the future while supporting the king and Hephaestion. And my central location allowed me to control supplies to both columns. I was in constant contact with Eumenes. Information flowed, logistics were put in place.

We were a superb instrument of war. Even if that meant we ate men’s souls.

From a purely military standpoint, the oddest thing about the Taxila campaign was that the Raja had already made submission, and his city provided us with supplies and convoys of grain, which came from in front. The usual problem of supply is bringing it up from the rear, and supplying our army over the Hindu Kush would have been brutal. But from the front – I never experienced anything like it – all I had to do was move my cavalry and cover the convoys.

Alexander plunged into the mountains with a fervor that verged on the reckless, and got an arrow in his arm leading the first assault on a hill town a week later. I arrived a few days after, with a convoy of wine and olive oil all the way from Syria – a convoy that had come over the Hindu Kush. Greek and Macedonian soldiers need wine and olive oil. Without them, they will function, but they won’t like it. With them, they may go without food, but they will fight.

At any rate, he was lying on a kline, reading one of my reports and eating grapes. He looked up and made a face.

‘Ptolemy!’ he said.

I had to grin. It was good to be liked and valued. Again.

‘I brought you wine,’ I said. ‘Good wine. There’s some Lesbian stuff and some Chian.’ I handed him a small amphora. ‘And this. Antipater sent it.’

Alexander raised an eyebrow.

‘What happened?’ I asked, pointing at the heavy bandage on his sword arm.

‘Hephaestion will scold me,’ he said. He rolled his eyes. ‘I led an assault and I got shot.’ He shrugged. ‘It was fun. And it is just a scratch.’ He sat up on his bed. ‘I don’t mean to make a scene, Ptolemy, but take that amphora out and smash it on a rock.’

I made a face. ‘I’ll take it and drink it,’ I said.

He turned. ‘Do not,’ he said. ‘It’s sure to be poisoned, and you are one of my few remaining friends.’

I was? Who knew? I was tempted to say as much, but instead, I shook my head. ‘Antipater?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure of it,’ he said. He shrugged, winced when he moved his right shoulder. Lay back. ‘Thaïs says so,’ he went on.

That was the first I had heard that Thaïs was continuing to provide the king with information. We exchanged our own letters.

I had freed the Circassian. Cleitus’s death had that good effect – I never bedded her. Funny – when I told Thaïs the story, she shook her head, touched my face and said I was a fool.

Am I a fool? I am what I am. And I suppose that Alexander would say the same.

I stayed with him for two days, while his siege engines pounded a high stone keep to flinders and Seleucus stormed it. Then we moved on, and Alexander’s shoulder was better, and at the next big stone keep – they seemed to grow on the mountains like mushrooms – Alexander insisted on leading the assault. Again.

‘I’ll go with you,’ I said.

Alexander nodded. ‘Of course you will,’ he said.

They should have surrendered. Mind you, no bandit chief on the wheel of the earth could have imagined that the Great King, King of Kings, would drag eighty war engines through the Hindu Kush and over the Khyber Pass simply to break the tyranny of the chiefs in the Swat hills.

‘This region has raided Taxila and the plains for generations,’ Alexander said as the men behind us fidgeted in the pre-dawn mist. ‘I intend to crush the warlords and break the war bands down into manageable sizes.’

I made a face. I assumed he couldn’t see me in the dark.

But we had grown up together, and he shook his head. ‘You’re thinking that it is a lot of trouble,’ he said. I saw his teeth gleam. ‘But it is worth doing well. War is a craft like any other – but you know that – you put the food in my army’s gullet.’

‘I try,’ I said. It was nice to have him talking. ‘What about the chiefs and their retinues?’

‘Shed no tears for them. Ask any peasant in the valley what it’s like to live under – literally under – these bandits.’ He sounded passionate. Interesting.

‘These people don’t even know who we are,’ I pointed out.

‘They will before morning,’ the king said.

We crept up the hill in the last darkness. We put ten ladders up against the wall, and then, far too late to save themselves, the defenders threw lit torches into the ditch and began to loose arrows at us.

Alexander was wearing greaves, but one of the arrows caught him in the ankle and he almost fell off the ladder. I pinned him against it. Then, because going down was out of the question, we went up.

He was the first on the wall, and he moved like the athlete he was, and his sword rose and fell and stabbed the way a skilled seamstress’s needle moves, with perfect economy. I was only heartbeats behind him, and still he had killed or mortally wounded three men before I had my feet over the parapet.

There was a rush along the top of the wall, and it came at my side. I turned, put my shield into my attackers and my aspis all but filled the catwalk. They pushed me back, and I cut under the shield – and then back over. My opponents were being pushed forward by their mates. I scored across one man’s thigh under my shield and raked another’s nose – no kills, but they flinched, and I backed up a full step and then pushed, caught one man off balance and he fell off the wall.

I couldn’t risk a glance, but I did wonder where in Hades the king was.

Behind me, I could hear him. He bellowed, ‘Spear! Throw it!’

I had my right thumb in the hollow of my blade – a nasty technique I’d been taught by a hoplomachos, a Keltoi trick, and one I used when I had to fight at night. With your thumb pressed into the blade, your blade becomes the perfect companion to a circular shield. Your hand and elbow allow the blade to travel around the edge – parrying and striking in the same action.

I cut low – cut all the way around my shield – and a man groaned and fell to his knees. I kicked him and the rest pushed me back.

Something hit the crest of my helmet.

I stepped back, and a spear came over my shoulder and punched into the throat-bole of the man in front of me. And then, fast as lightning, a thrown spear hit the man to my right.

I stepped forward into the space left by the sudden corpses, and cut overhand – feint, backhand.

Another man fell.

Alexander stepped up so close that his knee was against my hip as I crouched, and he shot his spear out overhand and caught another man in the thigh, and he went down, and the knot of men behind him broke and ran for the tower.

Without speaking, we chased them – two men against a dozen.

Some fool opened the iron-bound door of the keep to let them in, and we were on them, hacking, cutting, side by side – they slammed the door, but Alexander put his spearhead into the door jamb with godlike precision, and the spear-point stuck in the wood of the jamb as he intended, and the door smashed against it and bounced from the fine steel.

The courtyard was filling with blood-mad hypaspitoi, and Seleucus led them against the door. The men inside struggled to hold it.

They failed.

We killed everyone in the tower.

Then we walked down the hill, back to camp. Alexander was delighted. He kept slapping my back and telling me he had missed me.

I kept wanting to tell him to stop playing war. I was tired, and I had a long scratch down the inside of my leg that had almost touched my testicles, and I was not in a particularly good mood. Slaughtering men raising their hands to surrender – it always sticks in my craw, like the last bite of a meal that’s too big.

At the base of the hill, the sycophant Anaxarchus the priest stood with Anximander, the seer – brothers in crime, if you ask me.

Anaxarchus saw the blood flowing from the royal ankle. ‘Ah, ichor from the wound of an immortal god!’ he said. Always the man to go for the grossest flattery.

Alexander glanced at me. He flashed me a grin, and turned on Anaxarchus. ‘Blood,’ he said in weary disgust. ‘Just blood. Don’t blaspheme.’

All things to all people. Even me.

I loved him.

I went back to Hephaestion, coaxed a convoy over the brown ridges from Taxila, read reports on Porus, whose trans-Hydaspian kingdom was our immediate target south of the mountains, and was back with the king in time to see him open the siege of Nyasa. The town didn’t resist more than a day, and surrendered on terms. It was not a bandit hold, but a small town full of people who looked nothing like the other inhabitants – they had strange customs, but beautiful women; they hung their dead in cedar coffins, from trees, but they were the first people in Asia to make decent wine. The vines grew on the mountains behind Nyasa, and we celebrated the Feast of Dionysus there, and we were all royally drunk, and Alexander didn’t kill anyone.

I took another convoy north a week later, and Alexander was at the Rock of Aornus. The place was so high that the top was lost in clouds when I arrived – legend had it that Herakles and Dionysus had both failed to take the place.

Alexander refused to leave it alone. It was parasanges off our route, and we didn’t need it, as we had Nyasa, but the mere mention of Herakles and he was off, armed with a fresh pothos, to do his best to emulate or exceed the hero.

We set the siege engines, which loosed their first rocks. They went up and up, and at perihedron, they were still below the level of the walls.

A week later, and Hephaestion was at the rendezvous. He willingly took my advice and started to build a set of bridges over the Indus while the main army built a fortified camp and supply magazine – more to make work than because we needed such a thing.

Back at Aornus, I was stunned by the scale of the king’s ambition – I, who had known every one of his ambitions. He was building a trestle – a web of wood – that rose from the next mountain. It was immense.

It was almost complete. The troops were working like daimons.

Morale was incredibly high. Word was out – as the king intended – that this was the last campaign, and that the king had asked that every man do his best. It was a heady combination.

I went back south to meet another convoy from Taxila, then ordered Ariston to scout south of Taxila, and then I went back to the king.

Eight days after opening his siege, the engines mounted on the trestle of wood began to loose stones into the town. The effect was devastating, and the dry-stone wall that crowned the fortress collapsed in eight or ten hits.

We stormed the place in the morning, right over the new breaches. The defenders weren’t ready. Incredible, really.

We rolled south, linked up with Hephaestion and marched to Taxila.