God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

THIRTY-SEVEN

South of Taxila, the hills rise once more in a shield, and then fall away into the endless plain of the Indus. We already had scouts in the plains, and we picked them up as we advanced, and used them as guides. And the Raja of Taxila, towering in the howdah of his elephant, was there in person to direct us. It was for his alliance that we were marching to fight Porus.

We marched from Taxila to the banks of the Hydaspes in two days – because we heard at Taxila that Porus was forging alliances in the plains and had eighty thousand men and two hundred elephants.

The army was just growing accustomed to elephants. We had forty of them, and we drilled alongside them, and our horses were often picketed near them – horses can be spooked by elephants; both their noises and their smell can affront even a battle-hardened mount. But we had no notion what squadrons of elephants could be like. Forty seemed like an army.

We had no notion what rain was like, either, until the monsoons broke. The king intended to fight in the monsoon, presumably because the Indians didn’t and it would add to the sense of adventure. In fact, it reduced their archery to manageable proportions, which was good, as they had expert archers with great bows of bamboo that shot shafts heavy enough to penetrate a bronze thorax.

So we marched in rain so thick that at times it was difficult to breathe, and over roads that either became swamps or torrents. Despite that, we made eight to ten parasanges a day.

The Indians of the plains used chariots, too, which added to the Homeric element for all of us – enormous battle cars, with four or six horses yoked in a line, and four archers per swordsman and a pair of drivers. I encountered one in person on our third day after Taxila, when the Paeonians and a handful of our allied Indian cavalry ran into one of Porus’s patrols across the river. The enemy commander was in a chariot as big, it seemed, as an elephant. His cavalry outnumbered mine by two to one or more.

I sent scouts out into the fields on either side, and they reported that the ground was solid enough. So I closed up my column, prepped my officers and rode straight at my opponent.

He began to deploy his cavalry.

A little more than a stade from the head of his column, and the rain stopped. I pumped my fist in the air – my only order of the hour – and my column unravelled in heartbeats. My units never attempted to form a line. Instead, as soon as any unit came up, they charged. The Indians were hit with a rolling series of squadron charges – every impact had its effect, and by the time Cyrus’s second half-squadron of Persians rolled forward, the Indians were shattered.

We lost three troopers wounded and two dead, and we took fifty prisoners. Best of all, the action was over in the time it takes to sing a hymn. It was a small action – no empires fell – but I feel it shows where we were as a force – what we were capable of. Persians, Thracians, Greeks and Macedonians in one force, well trained, well disciplined, and I rather like to think well led. The Indians were good, but not like us at all. They couldn’t fight from a column on a road.

That night, I was huddling by a spitting fire in the rain, happy as only a victorious commander with low casualties can be, and Bubores came to me with a wreath of some local plant – from the king, for my victory. He gave me a hug, and stayed to drink my wine.

I remember because he asked me to tell him how the fight had gone, and I just shrugged. ‘Bubores, do you think this army has ever been a better weapon than it is right now?’

The Nubian looked into the fire – the coals, anyway – for a long time. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The drill—’

‘The high morale,’ I said.

‘The teamwork,’ Polystratus said at my shoulder. ‘It’s never been better.’

I nodded. ‘When it is like this,’ I said quietly, ‘I almost enjoy it. Hades, brothers – I do enjoy it. But those poor Indians never knew what hit them.’

Bubores nodded. ‘But it is only because he says he’ll go home, after.’

We all nodded, and the wine went around.

Anyway, I got a crown of laurel – or whatever India had that looked like laurel – because I captured their strategos’s chariot. I sent it to Alexander, who received it with delight.

But Porus had beaten us to the river, despite our best efforts. And five days after we left Taxila, we were staring across the river at an army with almost a hundred thousand men and two hundred elephants. Porus was no fool. He covered the fords, and all the fords for parasanges up and down the river.

The rain fell.

The army moved up, and built a camp. I doubt that anyone, from footslogger to the King of Macedon, was comfortable, but one of the advantages of years of campaigning in every climate in the world is that your men learn to construct shelters, and this time, since it was clear we might be here for months, we floated logs down the river and built huts.

In fact, the king kept the troops moving, marching up and down the river, building small forts and feinting at various crossings.

Sometimes his brilliance lay in being a thorough master of his craft. For three weeks, every time a detachment marched out of camp, Porus sent twice the number of his Indian cavalry to shadow it along the far side of the river. Our men were still eager, but the wine and olive oil were mostly gone, and we were stymied in an endless quagmire of mud by a foe who outnumbered us.

I kept my lights together as a division. I enjoyed commanding them, and I expected the king to break them up into task forces every day, but he did not, and so I kept them busy, scouting the riverbanks.

Ariston found Adama Island, four parasanges north of the army, outside of Porus’s patrol area. We poured men and supplies north once we’d found it, and all the engineers – twice they tried to bridge it, first with piling driven into the swollen banks, and the second time with a bridge of boats assembled on one bank and swayed across, as we’d done against the Thracians at the Danube.

The river was falling – the rains tapering off – but they couldn’t get a bridge across.

Another week passed. Every day, the king was more difficult to live with – nervous, anxious, quick to anger. He expected Porus to find the potential crossing site any day, and build a fortification to cover it.

I had volunteered to take command at the island and get the advance guard across, and I was on my way to take my leave – already up to my ankles in mud, standing in warm rain – when Hephaestion came out of the king’s tent, his face red and angry even in the watery light.

‘Good morning,’ I said.

He grunted. ‘Going to see him? Good luck to you, Ptolemy. I’m ready to go home to Macedon and leave him.’

I gave him half a grin and went into the tent.

Alexander was staring at a sketch of the river. He looked at me. ‘What?’ he shot at me.

‘I’m on my way upriver to try and get the bridge across.’ I saluted. ‘If it can be done, I’ll do it.’

‘If it can’t be done, we’re finished,’ he said with uncharacteristic candour.

‘So?’ I asked.

He pursed his lips.

‘Answer me this, Lord King – what difference does it make? Why are we fighting Porus?’

Alexander wrinkled his nose and made a face as if I’d asked a childish question. ‘He lies across our path and you ask this?’

I shook my head. ‘We’re invading his country.’ I laughed. ‘We could just march away and not invade his country.’

‘Perhaps I should send someone else to the island,’ he said, only half joking.

We set the next night for our attempt to force the river. Alexander’s plan was subtle, but simple. He was going to march the elites upriver – the Hetaeroi with their Persian counterparts, the hypaspitoi, three cavalry commands under Hephaestion, Perdiccas and Demetrios, as well as two big phalanx divisions with all the veteran Macedonians, and my command. We would cross, and try to turn Porus’s position. At first light, on a day that promised to be fair, Craterus was to lead the main army across the river.

I had gathered every boat for ten parasanges, and floated them to our bank, as we had at the Danube. I had sixty Agrianians across already, in four forward pickets with fires.

Alexander arrived before full darkness, with the hypaspitoi. Diades floated the pontoon bridge, Helios got it staked in hard to the far bank and we had some long moments in the torchlit, soaking darkness until it swayed out into the current and stayed put. And then it broke loose.

It was just too short, and came all the way around, breaking ropes, to land against our bank. Luckily, we had dozens of Greek sailors, and they fended the boats off and then pulled them back upstream. Ropes were shifted for another try, and four more boats were lashed on to the end of the pontoon platform, and we had lost an hour.

Diades begged the king’s forgiveness. Alexander sat bareheaded in the torchlight, surrounded by his officers, and watched, his eyes never leaving the ropes, the sailors and the boats.

Again they swayed the bridge out into the current. Again we saw Helios and his men drive in palings on the far side.

This time, they got their grapples into the far bank properly, and the bridge steadied in the current. The current took the bridge and slammed it downstream, but the hawsers held.

We waited.

They held.

I caught Cyrus’s eye. ‘Let’s go,’ I said, and led my household companions across the bucking bridge. But Alexander was ahead of me, with Seleucus and Lysimachus.

He cantered across the bridge. I rode more slowly.

The engineers began to hold men back, only allowing men to cross in tens, and meanwhile the infantry was embarking in the rafts and boats I had collected for a week.

The boards on the bridge were slick, the oils in the new wood combining with the water to make them treacherous. To make matters worse, the rain turned into a lightning storm, and bolts from heaven began to lash the column.

A bolt struck a file of phalangites, killing three men outright.

In midstream, with the river rushing under my horse’s feet like a live thing, the sky criss-crossed with purple lightning, as if Zeus had set up a trestle to lay siege to the sky, the banks on either shore lost in the darkness and the torrential fall of rain that was, itself, the negation of all sound, I felt as if I were no longer of this world, but had followed the king into the nether regions.

Indeed, when my charger got his forefeet on the far bank, with a loud whinny to announce himself to the waiting horses, or perhaps a prayer to Poseidon for his deliverance, the king spoke out of the flashing darkness.

‘Welcome to Tartarus,’ he said bitterly.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Follow me,’ he yelled. We could barely make ourselves heard.

It was a short ride.

The rising river had cut a new channel.

We were not on the far shore.

We were on a new island, and on the far bank, an enemy signal fire burned despite the torrential rain.

Sometimes, he was a god.

He turned to me and his face, streaming with water, was almost alight with his determination.

‘It can’t be very old,’ he shouted. ‘I’m going to try it. It can’t be deep.’

Before I could say anything, he made Bucephalus – perhaps, by then, the oldest horse in the army – jump into the water.

It was deep. But the horse swam well, and the water had almost no current to it – the channel was fresh, and had not yet cut deep. I saw no point in watching further, and urged my mount into the water – my Nisean, one of the army’s tallest horses. His feet touched the mud underneath – my feet got wet, but they were wet already. We were across in a hundred heartbeats, and we scrambled up the new far bank side by side, rode to the enemy watch fire, scattered it and killed the sentries.

My Paeonians were beginning to ford the river behind me. The Prodromoi were hard on their heels, and behind them came the Hetaeroi and their Persian equivalents.

There was an element of humour, sitting there with the king, watching them come. We were the first two across, and had the enemy been alert, Alexander’s conquest of the world could have ended in ignominious capture on the banks of the Hydaspes river.

But the rain was letting off, and the show of heaven’s wrath. Already, it was possible to hear the creak of oars. Already, men were singing the paean from the boats. The Paeonians and Prodromoi crossed and I sent them off into the darkness. The rest of the Agrianians crossed, and I followed them into the last of the rain. Behind us, the barges of the hypaspitoi and the pezhetaeroi were nudging the shore.

We were across. We had fourteen thousand men, to fight a hundred thousand men and two hundred elephants.

As the rain settled, Alexander took on a glow; never had I seen him so sure of himself. Suddenly he was everywhere – with Seleucus, getting the hypaspitoi moving off the riverbank, and forward with me, asking me for a report. My pathfinder Agrianians, who had been across for days, came in as soon as I lit the patterned signal fires in the locations I had briefed them on – men came from as far as four parasanges, men who had laid the trees at the edge of Porus’s camp, reporting on his troop movements. Now they told us that Porus’s son, Porus the younger, with two hundred chariots and two thousand cavalry, was coming at us out of the rain.

We manoeuvred in silence in the growing grey light. There was almost no cover, but we moved the Paeonians as far forward on the left as could be managed, and Hephaestion took the royal Hetaeroi forward on the far right, with Demetrius’s men forming the centre well back. There weren’t enough infantry across yet to make a difference.

The king himself insisted on leading the centre, and then we could see the Indians coming. They’d formed well – they probably formed right outside their camp, fearful of our speed, which shows how competent they really were. Young Porus was in a chariot, and he drove it across the front of his force, haranguing them. Then he charged our centre, and we charged his flanks. He was young and foolish, and he died. We killed or captured his entire force in about as long as it takes to tell the story, because they hadn’t expected us to outflank the ends of their line. Thorough, but not good enough. They had not faced Spitamenes, or Memnon.

We had.

When I rode up to the king, he was weeping, standing beside Bucephalus, who was putting his muzzle into the king’s hand. The old horse had four huge arrows, almost the size of javelins, in his body, and another in his neck. Even as I watched, he subsided to his knees with a sigh.

A white charger was brought up, and the king paused and kissed Bucephalus on the head. ‘Good horse,’ he said.

Better than Cleitus got.

Then he remounted, and we were off, southward.

We pursued the broken Indians as hard as we could, until we had three of the fords that the Indians had been holding for three weeks in our hands. The water was high, but Meleager and two other taxeis got across, the men soaked, their pikes unaffected.

The phalanx was starting to form.

Ahead, Ariston was watching Porus, and sending a stream of messages to the king. Porus had begun to form his battle line to our front, and he’d left adequate forces to keep Craterus bottled up across the river.

Alexander rode forward to see for himself, and I followed him. The sun was just emerging from the clouds – the first sun we’d seen in days.

I thought of Issus.

Scouts led us to a stand of acacia, where the king sat on his new charger with Ariston, Perdiccas, Coenus, Hephaestion and me, and watched Porus form his army, a seemingly endless crenellation of bow and long-sword-armed infantry as the wall, interspersed with elephants as the teeth.

Alexander sniffed. ‘There goes another one,’ he said. He meant messengers, but none of us got that. Yet. Porus was sending quite a few, and Alexander was watching them, but we hadn’t noticed.

At the flanks, Porus’s cavalry shifted. They didn’t seem to form well – especially on their right, our left, they kept moving – forward, back – it drew the eye.

Alexander watched under his hand. ‘You have to assume that his son was his most trusted commander,’ he said. ‘And hence, that he commanded the right-flank cavalry.’

He looked around, and his eyes glittered.

‘Watch the cavalry on the right. They are under an inexperienced commander, and one that Porus does not really trust.’ He smiled, watching intently.

I’ll be honest. I didn’t see anything like that. I saw a well-formed army, waiting to repel an invader. And I saw us about to fight a truly unnecessary battle.

I looked at the king. ‘How do you know the king mistrusts him?’ I asked.

Alexander laughed aloud. ‘Look! Watch!’ He looked at the battlefield. ‘And another one.’

Seleucus solved the riddle. ‘Messengers!’ he said.

‘Well reasoned!’ the king said. ‘Since I arrived in this patch of woods – no great time – Porus has sent five messengers to his right flank. Now, why does the right flank keep shifting?’

We were all silent.

Alexander slapped Seleucus on the back. ‘Some day, you will be a great general, lad. Listen, friends.’ He laughed – the sheer joy of his face made him seem like one of the deathless gods.

‘Porus is planning to pull all his cavalry off his right and use them all on the left, under a commander he trusts,’ he said.

Lysimachus grunted. I made a similar sound. He was the greatest military genius I’ve ever known or heard of, but it was an absurd conclusion to draw from the evidence.

‘Coenus – take your hipparchy and Demetrios, and all of you ride wide round our left. If Porus’s left-flank cavalry stand fast – charge them. If they cross his rear, follow them, ignoring the line of archers and elephants, and charge the rear of their cavalry.’ He nodded. ‘That’s what will happen. The right will ride around his rear to the left.’

Seleucus grinned. ‘Care to wager?’ he asked.

‘My career against yours?’ the king said, and Seleucus turned grey.

But Alexander laughed. ‘Your turn will come, young man.’

It was the first time he’d ever used that phrase in my hearing. Young man.

He turned to me. ‘Left of my line. Form your Hetaeroi, and put the Paeonians and Prodromoi behind you.’

I nodded. He was going to charge from the right in a cavalry column. As it turned out, we formed six squadrons wide and three deep – a formation not entirely unlike a wedge, except that it was more flexible.

As we came through the trees and formed, we were the only troops Porus could see. By the time the king’s squadron was forming, Porus was sending messengers to the flanks – right and left.

I had Cyrus with me, chewing on onion sausage, and Polystratus and Theodore and Laertes.

Even as we watched, squadrons from Porus’s right-flank cavalry began to wheel about and vanish behind his line of elephants and infantry.

I shook my head in disbelief. ‘I’ve known him all my life,’ I said aloud. ‘He still—’

Polystratus started to laugh, and then his face closed. ‘Company coming,’ he said, and then Alexander was there on his magnificent new white horse, almost as tall as my Triton. He had a dozen Persians around him, and no other Macedonians, and he wore the diadem on the crown of his helmet, but otherwise, he seemed himself.

He beckoned, and as I started forward, he turned his horse – merely by moving his hips, because he was part of any horse he rode – and I followed him.

When we were all together, Alexander pointed at the gathering mass of Indian cavalry.

‘As I may have mentioned,’ he said with insufferable smugness, ‘Porus is now moving all his cavalry to face me. The power of reputation and a really fancy helmet. Listen, my friends,’ he said, leaning forward, and his face was as open as I had ever seen it. ‘This is the last army between us and the ocean. The gods have graciously given me this one last great day – against great warriors and giant beasts, the like of which no Hellene has ever faced.’

He looked at us all. ‘I didn’t mean to make a speech,’ he said with a sudden flash of his rare humour. ‘I just wanted to say – if this is the last one, let’s make it magnificent.’

I know I grinned back at him. It’s facile to say we wanted the battle. I, for one, knew perfectly well that we were fighting an army that was merely defending its homeland. We didn’t even need to fight – the gods knew, we weren’t going to conquer all of India with sixty thousand men.

But he was infectious, like one of Apollo’s arrows, and I was infected. I wanted to be my best.

He rode that white charger to the middle of the line. Our infantry was just coming through the scrub – the Agrianians first, in skirmish order, and behind them the hypaspitoi in a long file on the right, closest to us, with the phalanx in the centre, and the left – empty. Coenus was out of sight beyond the line of poplars that seemed to demarcate the far left of our battle line.

The Indians thought we’d wait for our infantry.

I grabbed Laertes. ‘Ride to Briso with the archers. Tell him to pull all the lights back behind the phalanx and wait for orders. The Agrianians too.’

Laertes gave a nod and rode off into the grain fields. The soil underfoot was sandy, and despite days of rain, it was easy riding. And for the first time in my long military career, I was going to fight a battle with no dust.

Alexander raised his spear.

The Indians were not ready.

We were.

The king lowered his spear, and we rolled forward.

I remember a moment in that charge unlike any other charge I’ve ever been in, when I could see all the way across the front rank – remember, there was no dust. I could see Alexander, a little in advance of the line, his shoulders square, his posture relaxed, his spear-tip rising and falling a fraction with the canter of his great horse, and I could see Hephaestion just behind him, Lysimachus, far off on a magnificent bay – and our front rank, just at the edge of the gallop, was well closed up and the dress across the front was superb. The sun shone on our helmets and turned everyone’s armour to gold.

And I thought, This is all I want. And then I realised that I was seeing it as he saw it. Because I wanted something else entirely. I wanted home and a family, and he wanted – this. An eternity of this.

But in that moment, in the heart of the charge, I felt it, as one man may see, for a moment, why another man worships another woman or a god.

I had a long lance, for a change. I’d practised with it in Sogdiana, and now I held it two-handed, the way the Sauromatae use it, and we were moments from impact with a badly formed Indian squadron that compounded its doom by trying to cover more ground to our flank. They were only formed four deep, and their whole squadron vanished in a spray of blood, like an insect swatted by the hand of a god.

To resist a cavalry charge, enemy cavalry must be well formed, and, preferably, moving. Horses may well not charge a line of men – who can look like a wall or a fence, because horses are not smart – but a line of horses is merely a challenge to the manhood of a stallion. And a loosely formed line of horses is an invitation to a war horse. Like the king, our mounts lived for these moments.

We swept through their front-rank squadrons without losing our formation and crashed into their second line, which was better formed and moving forward, and I snapped my kontos gaffing a man who seemed to be wearing armour of solid gold, and used the butt-spike to smash another helmet, and then we were through them – I could see Cyrus’s squadron to my right, and Polystratus was at my heels, and I risked a glance back – full ranks at my back – and I put my head down, thumped Triton with my heels and we were pushing forward.

Alexander’s timing was, as usual, perfect.

We crashed into their third line of cavalry, and they held us – they were the right-flank cavalry, sent to finish us off, of course, and their ranks were no firmer than ours. And we were hopelessly intermixed with the enemy. The enemy cavalry began to press us back, and I could see the king killing his way forward, but he was virtually alone.

I was damned if I was going to let him go down alone.

I had my long kopis in my hand, and no idea when I’d drawn it, but it was a better sword than anything the Indians had – their steel was poor. And my horse was the largest horse in the melee.

So I pressed forward.

Behind me, Polystratus shouted ‘The king!’ and my Hetaeroi took up the cry, and then Cyrus’s men began to shout it, in Persian – ‘The king!’

We held them. Or perhaps they held us.

I had a rumble of thunder between my legs, the most powerful war horse I’d ever ridden, and this was his first real taste of the hipposthismos – the horse push. Suddenly, like a river freezing in deep winter, the melee began to gel, the friction of horse against horse slowing movement.

But like a strong swimmer against an adverse current, Triton pushed forward. And no horse could stop him. He bit, he strained, he kicked, and I was another horse length closer to the king.

And another.

I fought, but I fought to keep Triton alive, not to put men down. Alexander was truly alone. I have often wondered whether, having seen it was his last battle, he sought to die there. I only know he’d never outridden the line by so far. Perhaps his new horse was faster than he imagined . . .

And then I was at his back. And Polystratus was at mine – Lysimachus came up, and Hephaestion, just as his white horse reared and fell and I caught him, so that he got his feet clear of the wreck of his mount, and in heartbeats he was mounted again, as Hephaestion killed a man and dumped his body from his saddle. The Indian mounts were smaller and bonier than ours, but good horses, as we had reason to know. Alexander was on one.

The enemy threw in their last line of cavalry, and the whole melee shifted again, and I was facing a sea of foes.

Elbow to elbow with an Indian – we both cut, and his sword bent, but my beautiful Athenian kopis snapped at the hilt. He leaned back to cut at me, and I got my bridle hand under his elbow and then punched my right fist and the stub of my blade at his face until the blood gouted and he was dead. He fell into the sea of horses and was swallowed up.

And then, with a roar like a river in flood, Coenus fell on their rear.

Obedient to the king’s orders, he had ridden all the way around our left, and around the rear of the enemy, and now he fell on the cavalry melee with the finality of a lion bringing down an antelope.

The Indian cavalry broke in every direction. And the battle was won.

Unfortunately, no one had told King Porus.

As Porus’s cavalry streamed from the field with the Hetaeroi and the Persians in pursuit, the phalanx, formed at last – we’d been stades ahead of them on to the field, and our charge had been swift – elected to advance. I assume that Perdiccas thought to take advantage of the chaos of our cavalry victory to press Porus right off the field.

Alexander had given the pikemen a brief pre-battle speech, or so Perdiccas told me later – on how invincible the pike was.

When you are a god, men believe everything you say.

The wall of pikes and shields pressed forward down the field.

Porus – a giant of a man, seven feet tall, on an elephant that towered almost a full head above all the other monsters on the field – didn’t even glance at the wreck of his cavalry. He raised his goad, and his bull elephant trumpeted – a sound that reached above the neigh and screams of horses and men – and his crenellated line began to move slowly down the field towards our advancing phalanx. I could see him, about two stades away, and he looked huge at that distance.

Let no man doubt the courage of the Macedonian phalanx. Faced with a line of monsters, they walked steadily forward. For the first time in years, they sang the paean – we’d never had a field to sing on, in Sogdiana.

I was rallying my squadrons. I was never the strategos that Alexander was, but I had enough sense to see that our infantry might need help, and that help would have to come from the cavalry. But it was a mess – the Indian cavalry had mostly cut and run, but we were dreadfully intermixed, my front squadron had threaded through Coenus’s front squadron, and all the trumpets were sounding the rally. With the cries of the elephants and the tortured sounds of wounded animals, it took the will of the gods to get a man back to his place in the ranks.

I watched the two mighty lines close on each other. I waited for one or the other to flinch.

No one flinched.

When they met – when they met, it turned out that Alexander was wrong about the efficacy of the pike.

A lot of our men died, in the front rank. Veterans – men who had crossed the Granicus, men who had stood their ground at Chaeronea, stormed Thebes, crossed the Danube . . .

The men who made us what we were.

They died because elephants cared nothing for age, skill, armour, shields or the length of the spear. They snapped the spears, and their great feet crushed men, and their trunks grabbed men from their ground and lifted them high in the air, and their tusks, often sawn short and replaced with swords, swept along like the scythes on Darius’s chariots.

The taxeis were not in the same state of high training they had once been. The ranks were full of recruits and foreigners. When the phylarchs ordered whole files to double to the rear to make lanes, some taxeis, like that of Perdiccas, executed this flawlessly, and the monsters walked on, doing no harm. But in other taxeis, the attempt to manoeuvre in the face of the beasts led to chaos.

And collapse.

Meleager’s taxeis broke first. It didn’t run – because the better men weren’t capable of running. But the lesser men hesitated, the files fell apart and then suddenly the pikes were falling to the ground and men were falling back, or running, leaving their phylarchs and their half-file leaders to fight alone.

Attalus’s mob broke next. They unravelled faster, and by the time they started to go, I was in motion. I looked back for the king, and I couldn’t see him, so I acted on my own.

I led the Prodromoi forward into the flank of the Indian line. It wasn’t really a line so much as a thin horde. They were having trouble with their bows, which probably saved a lot of Macedonian lives, but they didn’t have any trouble with their long swords, and they were using them to batter through the front of the spear wall, where the elephants caused any hesitation.

Right on the end of their line, closest to me, was a hard knot of elephants – five of the brutes.

We charged them.

Our horses baulked.

A mahout swung his animal to face us, the men on the animal’s back showering us with darts and arrows. Above us in the swirl of a cavalry fight, they had a superb advantage. It is very hard to throw a javelin up. Especially when trying to control a panicked horse.

Indian cavalry had taken refuge with their elephants, and their horses weren’t panicked by the monsters – a matter of habituation.

An old Thracian, Sitalkes – I’d sat around a hundred fires with him – downed a mahout with his javelin. Most of the Paeonians saw it, and the cry went up to kill the drivers – because no sooner did the mahout fall from between the giant beast’s ears than the animal came to a dead stop.

But it was easier said than done, and most cavalrymen had only two or three javelins, and most had spent them in the cavalry fight. Before long, we were riding in among the animals, but doing them no harm – washing about their feet as the ocean washes against the pilings of a pier.

I rode clear of the fight.

There was the king, rallying his household Hetaeroi.

I rode up and saluted. He bellowed at his trumpeter, Agon – the same man who refused to summon the guard the night that Cleitus died, a fine man and a hero many times over – bellowed for Agon to sound the rally again.

He looked back at me.

‘We’re not having any effect,’ I shouted. ‘We need javelins. You need javelins. And the beasts panic our horses.’

Alexander watched the melee behind me for the space of twenty heartbeats.

‘Not true,’ he said. ‘Your men have pulled five elephants out of the line. That’s something.’

‘What do we do?’ I asked.

Alexander backed his beautiful white horse – his fourth mount of the day – and fought the stallion’s desire to fidget. ‘I’m thinking,’ he said.

From any other man, that would have promoted panic.

I turned my horse, intending to go back into the melee. Not because I wanted to. Fighting elephants is pure terror – fighting them on horseback is fighting the monster, fighting your own fear and the fears of a dumb animal who controls your fate.

Alexander grabbed my shoulder. ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘I need you.’

So I waited.

I had never had leisure, in the middle of a fight, to watch him. I had seen him at the height of battles – but never at the height of a battle in the balance.

He rode back and forth in front of the Hetaeroi. He was learning his mount – he walked, he trotted, he sat back, he rolled his hips. Meanwhile, his men were collecting javelins from the ground, and from corpses, and the last slackers were rejoining.

To our front, the elephants were surrounded by the Paeonians and the Prodromoi. Men were trying to cut the elephants with their swords, and failing. They were brave.

They were dying.

Beyond them, the elephants were pressing forward. Closest to me, Seleucus and the hypaspists were retiring slowly, in perfect order. A dead elephant testified to their prowess, and the Indians let them go.

They were retreating because the phalanx was gone. The five taxeis were huddled in the scrubby trees.

Porus and his elephants rumbled to a stop. His Indian infantry didn’t leave the shelter of the great beasts. They reformed their line and began to loft arrows at the hypaspitoi, the last infantry on the field.

Alexander grabbed my bridle.

‘Go to the centre and rally the phalanx,’ he said. ‘Get them back on to the field. They will not want to come. Make them move.’ His eyes glinted like polished silver, and he was smiling inside his helmet. ‘Look at the five monsters you charged.’

One elephant had simply wandered away, its mahout dead. The other four had stopped. They were confused by all the horses, by the pain of a thousand minor cuts, and now they were baulking at their mahouts’ commands, turning and moving away, into the flank of the Indians. Killing their own men.

‘Get the centre back,’ he said. ‘I’ll defeat the elephants.’

He sounded very, very happy.

I rode to Seleucus, first. He was on foot – his horse had dumped him as soon as the elephants closed, a young horse and not fully broken.

He looked stricken. ‘We . . . we’ve lost?’

I managed a smile. ‘Look at the king,’ I said. ‘Does he look beaten?’

Seleucus nodded. And grunted.

‘I’m going to try to get the pezhetaeroi back on the field,’ I said. ‘Retreat slowly, and when the centre comes back, go forward.’

Alectus laughed. ‘Forward, is it?’ He pointed at a pair of elephants, tusks dripping. They had a hypaspist – both had their trunks around him – and they were both pulling. Pulling him apart. Like cats playing with a mouse.

‘Forward when I come,’ I said.

I spurred Triton, who was delighted to ride away from the beasts.

Back among the scrub, there was a sight I had never had to see. The pezhetaeroi were angry, terrified and humiliated. Men were sitting on the ground, weeping, or staring dumbly. A few phylarchs were trying to form the men, but most were standing, watching disaster without any idea how to fix it. Rout was something that happened to other armies, not ours.

And a lot of our phylarchs were dead.

Meleager was at the rear of the mess, out on the open ground north of the woods, hitting men with the flat of his sword, herding them back into the woods.

I rode to him. ‘Alexander says get them back into the field,’ I said.

Meleager looked at me. ‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘They’re not going, and neither am I. Why don’t you go and face the elephants, and see how you like it?’

‘I already have,’ I said. ‘I can’t pretend I like it. But I’ll do it. And so will you.’

Meleager spat. ‘Fuck off,’ he shouted.

I left him to his despair and rode to Attalus.

Attalus had the nucleus of his taxeis formed behind the woods, and more men were joining the ranks, and the surviving phylarchs were appointing new file leaders. The awful truth of a rout like that is that the best men die. They’re the ones who stand. The lesser men run, and survive.

‘Alexander orders you back on to the field,’ I shouted.

As soon as men heard me shout, they started walking to the rear.

‘Are you insane?’ Attalus screamed at me. ‘It’s all I can do to hold them here!’

I rode on.

Just beyond the wreck of the phalanx, behind the centre of the woods – open oak woods, here – stood an island of order. Briso, with the Psiloi – the archers, the Agrianians. Right where I had left them.

‘Trouble?’ Briso asked.

Three hundred archers and six hundred Agrianians. And sixty of Diades’ own specialists, the bowmen carrying gastraphetes and oxybeles, the two-man crossbow, under Helios.

I motioned to Attalus – the Agrianian Attalus, not the Macedonian one. I slid from my horse’s back, and my muscles screamed in protest. There’s nothing worse – to me, because I am just a mortal man – than leaving combat, and then having to return to it. I had been in a mortal fight, survived, triumphed, faced the monsters and survived again. And now I had to steel myself to go back. Again. I had to lead other men.

I took several breaths while I dismounted. Then, to goad myself, I took my helmet off – my beautiful Athenian helmet – and threw it away. I needed a clear head and good vision.

Ochrid had followed me all morning, and now he appeared at my side and I took my two best javelins from him. Their blue and gold magnificence steadied me. It sounds childish, but their octagonal ash shafts were friendly to my hands.

I nodded to my officers.

‘We’re losing,’ I said.

They all looked as if I’d punched them.

‘Don’t fool yourselves,’ I said. ‘If we don’t do it, the army is done. So we’re going to go right up the field into the teeth of the fucking monsters and we’re going to kill them – close up. With everything we’ve got. If we can get in close, maybe the gastraphetes can shoot the monsters. Helios, that’s your job – to get the machines as close as can be managed. Attalus, cover the archers and press forward – right into them. We’ll go in among their legs and try for the crews. The mahouts – the drivers – are vulnerable. Get them. But mostly, don’t let the beasts into the archers.’

I looked at them. They were scared. That was fair enough – no one had ever faced anything like this before. And I was about to lead a thousand men to do what twelve thousand had failed to do.

‘We can do this,’ I said. ‘The one thing I’ve learned today is that the beasts are slow, and tire easily. If we have to retreat – then we’ll run.’ I moved my eyes from face to face. ‘And go back. Until the king has his counter-punch ready.’

Briso nodded, and Attalus took a deep breath, and Helios looked thoughtful.

‘We’re all he has left,’ I said.

That stiffened their spines.

Attalus formed the Agrianians in a long skirmish line behind the woods, and the Toxitoi formed behind them – one long, long rank, three hundred men long, with a horse length between men, so that our whole front covered six stades – almost the frontage of the phalanx. The crossbowmen stood in knots, or as individuals, where Diades assigned them, well behind the skirmish line.

We moved through the woods – and the wreck of the phalanx – to the sound of the hunting horns.

My last act before we went forward was to send Ochrid to the baggage with orders to fetch more bolts, arrows and javelins. Then I remounted, so that I could see to give orders, and followed.

The phalangites in the woods were angry, and they jeered at the Agrianians and the Toxitoi, taunting them that they were going to their deaths.

At the forward edge of the woods, the better men crouched and watched the enemy. Most of these men still had their sarissas, and so had never entered the trees.

And there was Amyntas, son of Philip. He had a nasty face wound – the skin on his scalp was ripped and his helmet was gone. But he had his aspis and he had his spear.

I raised my javelins to him.

‘Dress the line,’ Attalus roared. The hunting horns gave their low, mournful call.

The Agrianian line trotted out of the edge of the woods. The Toxitoi emerged behind them.

Amyntas trotted to my foot. ‘You are going forward?’ he croaked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If you can form any kind of a line, follow us.’

He nodded. He never really looked at me. His eyes were on the enemy.

‘Alexander says we are not beaten yet!’ I turned to the men hesitating at the edge of the woods. ‘Follow us. Form the phalanx. Let the Psiloi hurt the elephants. Come and protect us from the Indians. Come and be men!’

Men looked at me, and looked at Amyntas.

And stood where they were.

My curse on all of you, I thought.

And I went forward with a thousand men, to face the elephants.

It is very lonely, as a Psiloi.

There’s no comfort from your file mate, because he’s a horse length behind you. No comfort from your rank partners, your zuegotes, the men you are yoked to in the battle line. They’re too far away to touch, to look in the eye, to wink at or to moan at.

I had never realised how very brave the Psiloi were, until that day, against the elephants.

The Agrianians went forward fast, at a trot. The Indians made the same mistake we’d made. They thought that the battle was over. And they were probably contemptuous of the thin screen trotting down the field towards them.

I was huffing by the time we came within a long javelin throw of their line. The Agrianians, obedient to the shouts of Attalus, began to gather in loose clumps facing the pairs of elephants. They ignored the Indian foot soldiers and ran straight to the elephants.

The Indians began to loose arrows, but their aim was poor. Skirmishers are a difficult target for massed archery – especially skirmishers making a concerted dash forward.

The men they hit died, however. Their arrows were enormous.

Archers on the backs of the elephants shot, too.

The Agrianians went forward into the arrow storm, heads up, legs pumping them forward. Right into the monsters.

Off to my right, the hypaspitoi watched us come up, pass their front and move on. They cheered us, but they didn’t follow.

Farther to the right, I could see the king – far, far off, gleaming on his white horse. He had formed the Hetaeroi into four wedges, and that’s all I had time to see.

‘The king is coming!’ I called.

And then the Agrianians went in among the elephants, and the madness began.

The Indian infantry stopped being stunned by our reckless approach – really, a charge – and started forward, eager to crush our Psiloi.

I put my bare head down and rode for the hypaspitoi. But Seleucus waved me off, and I saw him march off his half-files to the left, doubling his front, and then the whole of the hypaspitoi started forward at the Indian infantry. They, naturally enough, flinched, and responded to the charge of the hypaspitoi.

Triton had decided that he could survive facing elephants. He shied, but he went where I pointed him, and now I pointed him at the largest struggle – fifty of my Psiloi and twenty archers against five or six elephants right in the centre of the field.

There were Paeonians there, too, because the Prodromoi and the Paeonians had filtered all the way along the Indian line by this time – the battle was breaking down into a desperate, every-man-for-himself engagement of a kind I had never seen. The Indians were surrounded, but so far their monsters were untouchable.

Even as I watched, an Agrianian punched his heavy javelin into the side of one of the towering beasts, and then threw himself at the shaft, stabbing deeper and deeper. The great animal bellowed, and its trunk licked out and caught him and ripped him free, throwing him over its head – but another man had a shaft in, and a bold pair of Toxitoi stood almost at its feet and shot – shot quickly and accurately, despite the bestial death that towered over them, and they cleared the crew off the beast’s back, and an engineer leaned in, almost touching the animal, and his bolt vanished into the behemoth’s guts and the animal screamed in agony.

The archers shot into its face, and their shafts bounced off its thick skull, and then a lucky shaft, Athena-guided, or moved by Apollo’s hand, went into an eye, and the creature stumbled, bowed its mighty head and slumped to its knees.

The other animals nudged it – it was somehow more horrible than anything to see their concern for their fellow monster.

And then they shuffled their great, flat feet and moved back, away from the pinpricks of the Psiloi.

I rode back down the field to the pezhetaeroi. ‘Come on, you bastards!’ I shouted.

And they came.

Meleager had a handful, when he first started back up the field. Antigenes and Gorgias had even fewer.

But Philip son of Amyntas, senior phylarch, had a lot of good men – men of all six taxeis. He ignored the officers. His full-throated roar was as loud as an elephant’s scream of pain, and carried across the field.

‘Get in the ranks! Get in the ranks! Pick up any spear you see and get in the fucking ranks! Are you cowards? Are the fucking barbarians better men? Are the archers better men? Get up!’ he screamed. Spittle shot from his mouth as I rode up to him, and he ignored me. ‘Get in the ranks! Fill in! Now. The king needs us!’

And they came.

They came in tens, and then they came in hundreds, and then it was like an avalanche of pikemen. They came with swords, with daggers, with broken spears, with stolen javelins, with bare hands.

I had never seen anything like it.

Gorgias and Meleager ran to the front to take command, but I cantered past them to Amyntas son of Philip.

‘Into the Indians!’ I shouted. ‘Stop their gods-forsaken archers from coming to grips with the Psiloi!’

He put a hand to his ear – an ear covered by the flaps of his helmet.

‘Forward!’ I shouted.

He grinned. It was a hard grin – an evil grin. ‘Here we come,’ he growled.

I galloped back to the elephant fight. Dozens – in some cases hundreds – of Indian archers were clearing our Psiloi off the beasts, pushing our men back, and back.

Until the hypaspitoi and the phalanx struck them, and crushed them. In three hundred paces, the battle was transformed and the Indian archers broke, running for the safety of their elephant line, which had retreated several hundred paces, the great beasts lumbering away and putting heart into our phalangites.

The Psiloi ran down the gaps between the taxeis, and reformed in the rear, drinking from canteens, and slumping to the ground in blank-eyed exhaustion. They had faced the monsters for about as long as a man and a woman make love. No longer. And they were spent.

Nonetheless, Ochrid arrived with a train of slaves bearing arrows, javelins, bolts and darts.

Briso was missing. Attalus was badly cut by a sword, and Helios was commanding all the Psiloi. I waved a javelin at him in thanks. ‘I think you’re finished,’ I said.

His look of relief said everything.

I turned Triton and rode for the front.

There was almost no fighting. The Indian infantry was lightly armoured and when they ran, our men couldn’t keep up, even if they broke ranks. All along the front, our men reclaimed fallen spears, some picking up shields. To be honest, men were still coming up from the woods, convinced by the victory that it was safe to emerge from their cowardice.

They were wrong.

Porus wasn’t beaten. Porus was regrouping.

The king had begun to throw his wedges into Porus’s flanks, but Porus, with real brilliance, countered them with elephants, sending companies of elephants into the point of the wedges, shredding their formation.

He had saved a squadron of giant chariots, and now he released them against the king’s flank, but that, at least, we were prepared for, and Alexander sent his tame Saka, Massagetae who had taken service and Sogdian nomads, to shoot the chariot horses. They destroyed the whole force – a thousand chariots – before the infantry had time to panic.

But, Porus rallied the bulk of his elephants, and placed himself in the centre. Any infantry that could be rallied – and they were brave men, those sword-armed archers – came forward on the flanks of a veritable phalanx of elephants, with the giant of giants leading the way.

It was a slow attack – scarcely a charge, but a shuffling, lumbering advance, slower than the march of a closed-up phalanx.

But our men were not going to stand it. They began to shuffle back.

And then the king was there.

He appeared out of the woods, and he rode unerringly to Amyntas’s side even as I reached him.

‘The infantry!’ he said. He smiled. ‘Just hold their infantry. Oblique right and left from the centre – avoid the elephants.’ Men heard him. The words ‘Avoid the elephants’ were wildly popular.

And his presence was like a bolt of energy.

The retreat stopped.

I remember the king looking at Meleager, who was not in the front rank, not in his proper station, and clearly not in command. His glance only lasted a heartbeat. He didn’t show anger, or pity.

Just a complete lack of understanding, like a man facing the sudden appearance of an alien god.

Then he turned his horse.

I didn’t wait for him. I knew what he needed. I just waved.

And rode for Helios.

‘One more time!’ I called.

Even the Agrianians – the bravest of the brave – shuffled their feet.

There are times when you yell at troops, and times when you coax them.

And sometimes, when brave men have already done all that you can ask – all you can do is lead them.

I rode to the front of them, and I raised my javelins, as yet unthrown, over my head.

‘I’m going,’ I said. ‘Do as you wish.’

And I pointed Triton’s head at the elephants and walked forward.

I didn’t look back. I had time to think of the hill fort, and the taxeis that left me to die. The Agrianians were men I’d served with for years – but they weren’t mine. I was best with troops who knew me. I didn’t have the magic Alexander had. I was the plain farm boy, and it took men time to love me.

So I let Triton walk forward, and the elephants were close – fifty of them, formed in a mass.

The phalanx had broken in two, and each half marched obliquely to its flank – or flowed that way like a mob. Discipline was breaking down. It was already the longest battle any of us had ever seen, and darkness was not so very far away, and the main lines were on their third effort.

There would be no fourth effort.

This, then, was it.

Alexander appeared at my bridle hand. He was smiling, and the sun gilded his helmet. He pulled it off his head, and waved it. ‘Nicely done, Ptolemy,’ he said, his eyes on the men behind me, who were following, formed in a compact mass roughly the width of the elephants to our front. The Toxitoi and the engineers and the Agrianians were all intermixed.

To my left, Amyntas was leaning forward towards the enemy as he walked behind his pike-head like a man leaning into a wind. To my right, Seleucus was almost perfectly aligned with us.

I could see men I knew, and men I had never seen before – Macedonians and Ionians and Greeks and Persians and Bactrians and Sogdians, Lydians, Agrianians. I think that I saw men who had been dead a long time – men who fell at the Danube, men who fell at Tyre, men who fell in pointless fights in Sogdiana.

I certainly saw Black Cleitus.

And next to me, Alexander made his horse rear. He laughed, and the sound of his laughter was like a battle cry, and the sarissas came down, points glittering in the last of the sun.

Alexander turned to me and laughed again. ‘Watch this,’ he said, as he used to when we were ten and he wanted to impress me.

He put his heels to his new horse, and he was off like a boy in a race – alone. We were close to the elephants, then. He rode at them all alone. I was too stunned to follow, for a moment . . .

He put his spear under the crook of his arm, and he put that horse right through the formation of enemy elephants – in a magnificent feat of horsemanship, passing between two huge beasts who appeared from three horse lengths away to be touching. But his reckless charge was not purposeless.

Oh, no.

He left his spear an arm’s length deep in the chest of the nearest elephant, and the great thing coughed blood and reared, dropping his crew to the ground and then trampling them to death.

The whole of Porus’s line shuddered, and the king rode out again, having passed behind the elephants, and he burst out of their left flank, still all alone, and rode along the front of the hypaspitoi.

That’s when the cheers started.

He killed an elephant. In single combat.

It was like the sound a summer thunderstorm makes as it rushes across a flat plain, driven by a high wind that you have yet to feel. It started well off to the right, among the royal Hetaeroi, who now launched themselves at the rallied Indian infantry.

ALEXANDER!

The hypaspitoi had the god of war himself riding in front of them, and their shouts rose like a paean.

ALEXANDER!

The pezhetaeroi picked it up, and the Agrianians, the Toxitoi. It spread and spread, and he rode to the centre, spinning a new spear in his hand, horse perfectly under control, head bare, and those horns of blond hair protruding from his brows.

ALEXANDER!

The sunset made his pale hair flare with fire, and the blood on his arms and hands glow an inhuman red.

ALEXANDER!

I happened to be in the centre of the line, and he rode to me – a little ahead of me. He paused and looked back at me, and his eyes glowed.

‘This is it!’ he shouted to me.

At the time, I think he meant that this was the end of the battle. In retrospect, I wonder if this was what his whole life had waited for. This was it – the moment, perhaps, of apotheosis. Certainly, and I was there, the gods and the ghosts were there – the fabric of the world was rent and torn like an old temple screen when a crowd rushes the image of the god, and everything was possible at once, as Heraklitus once said.

‘CHARGE!’ he shouted.

And we all went forward together.

The rest is hardly worth telling. I wounded Porus, and captured him – with fifty men to help me. Porus’s army broke, and ours hunted them, killing any man they caught – men who have been as terrified as ours show no mercy.

The carnage of that day was enough, by itself, to change the balance of the world.

If apotheosis came at Hydaspes, the end was near.

After the turn of the year, after Porus swore fealty (which he kept) and after the gods stopped walking the earth and went back to Olympus – after it was all over, and the slaves buried our dead – Alexander went back on his promise and marched east. We marched after the summer feasts, and we marched into more rain – rain and rain, day after day.

Victory gave us wings, for a few days. Alexander gave the troops wine, oil and cash, the takings of Porus’s camp, more women, more slaves.

Cities surrendered, and cities were sacked. We marched farther east. And three weeks later, on the banks of the Beas, the army stopped.

Amyntas son of Philip caught the king’s foot as he rode across the front of the army. The army was formed to march, but the pikes were grounded, all along the line, and the cavalry were not mounted, even though the men stood by their horses.

Amyntas pulled at the king’s foot.

The king looked down at him. ‘Speak,’ he commanded.

Amyntas didn’t grovel. He met the king’s rage with a level glance. It is hard to stare up into a man’s eyes and keep steady. But Amyntas had faced fire and stone, ice and heat, scythed chariots, insects and elephants, and the king did not terrify him.

‘Take us home, lord,’ Amyntas begged. But in that voice you could hear not terror, but steel.

Alexander tried to buy them. He ordered the army to disperse and plunder – two days of licence to rape, murder and destroy, rob, loot and seize, burn if they wanted.

They did.

And he assembled the camp followers – wives, slaves, sex toys, matrons, mothers – and promised them increased rations and better pay – manumission – anything they wanted, to convince their warriors to go east.

That night, we lay on our klines and listened to the endless rain fall outside. It was so wet that the falling rain gradually soaked the hemp fibre of the great tent, and there was a sort of mist of moisture even inside.

Hephaestion drank deep, and I heard him laugh. ‘They’re like dogs, lord. They’ll come to heel.’

Meleager laughed, and the Persians all nodded. Even Cyrus. Craterus smiled a thin smile.

Perdiccas looked at me.

I shrugged.

But Alexander caught my shrug. ‘Oh dear. Ptolemy thinks otherwise.’

He was close to the edge. I could tell. Hydaspes had taken him too high – I truly feared what was to come. I should have been careful.

I didn’t feel careful.

‘They will not change their minds. They are finished.’ I looked around. ‘They were finished years ago, but they comtinued. For you. Their god. Their living, breathing god.’ I shrugged, and my rage brewed up like the flames in a hearth when the door is opened and the wind sweeps in. ‘They are men, not dogs. They have given you everything and you give them a district to rape.’ I shook my head. ‘They are finished. They mean what they say.’

Alexander shook his head. ‘So eloquent. But you cannot imagine that I would turn back for them.’

And then Coenus shocked me. He stood up, as I was standing. ‘Then turn back for me,’ he said. ‘I am finished. I need rest, even if you do not.’

Alexander’s eyes might have burned a man, they were so hot.

But Perdiccas stood up. ‘I stand with Coenus and Ptolemy,’ he said. ‘I will fight for you until I die, but I want to stop marching east.’

Lysimachus stood.

Craterus looked from man to man. He was looking for the main chance. Looking for his moment.

Seleucus stood.

Nearchus stood.

The king rose, and hurled his golden cup across the tent, so that it struck the statue of Herakles and seemed to explode.

‘You cannot!’ he cried. ‘We are on the verge of immortality! After this, there will be nothing worthy, nothing great – merely the maintenance of an empire and bureaucracy, where I was a god.’

It was a plea.

‘You seek to limit me. But what limit should a man of the noblest nature put on his labours? I, for one, do not think there should be any limit, so long as every labour leads to noble accomplishments!’ He looked around. ‘We here are like the undying. I am going from triumph to worthy triumph!’

He was standing by his couch, in a swirl of muddy water and matted wet grass where the rising rains had flooded our camp. I mention this because Coenus looked at the floor.

‘Is this Olympus, then?’ he said with a snort.

‘If you just want to know when our wars will end,’ Alexander said, ‘we are not far from the Ganges. After the Ganges is the Eastern Sea. And the Eastern Sea will link to the Hyrkanian Sea, for Aristotle says the great sea girdles the earth.’

Of course, I knew from Kineas – who had sailed the Hyrkanian Sea – that it did not join with any other body of water. And I ran the scouts. I knew that no peasant we had met could tell me how far it was to the Ganges.

‘It is more than a thousand parasanges to the Ganges,’ I said into the silence.

‘You don’t know that!’ he shouted at me.

Craterus lay on his couch, and stared into the cup of wine in his hand as if it might tell him what to say.

Hephaestion sat up on his couch. But he didn’t stand. Nor did he speak.

Alexander looked at me, and the last time I’d seen that look was the night he killed Cleitus.

But I was tired, and I met his murderous glare with indifference. Only when you have killed as many men as I have, lad, and seen as many worthless victories, can you be truly indifferent. And nothing is more effective against hubris than indifference.

‘You traitors! Worthless weaklings!’ Spittle flew from his mouth.

It’s odd, but I thought of the pezhetaeroi huddled in the woods behind our lines, indifferent to my pleas that they go forward to win the battle. Indifferent.

Yes. They weren’t cowards.

They just didn’t have any more to give.

‘If we turn back now,’ he said, once more in control, ‘the warlike tribes of the East – every spearman in that thousand-parasange plain – will rise against us, and all our conquests will be pointless, or we shall have to undertake them again, and our sons will face these men.’

I might have said, So you agree that it is a thousand parasanges to the Ganges? Or I might have said, You used this argument about defeating Bessus, and then Spitamenes. Any of us might have refuted him.

But we had heard it all before, and like the drunkard’s proverbial wife, we shook our heads, tired of his lies.

He stormed from the tent.

Alexander spent two days alone, except for his slaves. He wouldn’t see Hephaestion, or Craterus, much less us, the mutineers.

Then he sent an ultimatum to the army via Agon, his hyperetes. March, or be left behind. Alexander threatened to go forward with only his Persian levies and his subject Indian troops.

Amyntas son of Philip came to my pavilion. My floor was a hand’s breadth deep in water. He sat on an iron stool that rusted as fast as Ochrid’s slaves could polish it, and he shook his head.

‘I want to tell him,’ Amyntas began.

I raised my hand. ‘I won’t conspire,’ I said. ‘Tell him yourself, or don’t.’

Amyntas shrugged and got to his feet in the water. ‘He’s fucking insane,’ he said.

He stood there, waiting for my reaction.

‘By Zeus the saviour of the world, Lord Ptolemy, he promised!’ Amyntas cried suddenly, in almost the same tone in which Alexander had pleaded that we would end as bureaucrats.

I remember that I nodded.

Amyntas left my tent and went to the king.

A day later, Alexander emerged, summoned the command council and announced that we were turning the army and marching for home.