God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

THIRTY-EIGHT

He never forgave any of us. Not the pezhetaeroi, and not the commanders.

What followed was horrible, and it made Sogdiana pale. Even now, I take no pleasure in the telling.

He tried to kill the army. He didn’t retreat along our lines of supply, but went down the Indus river to the sea.

Again, I return to the simile of the woman married to a drunkard. At first, we listened to the complex excuses he offered as to why we had to march down the Indus to the delta, and we affected to believe them. It scarcely mattered to us – we were going home. And I don’t think there were five hundred men in the whole army who didn’t feel the same.

But it turned out that marching down the Indus meant fighting our way through a vast, hostile plain. He wasn’t done – he was still on a binge.

And, in my opinion, he had determined to die, or achieve an even greater level of heroism, if that was possible, than he had achieved against the elephants.

He began well. He held an assembly and announced we would march back. Men applauded – men cheered him as they had cheered him when he charged the elephants. He ordered us to build twelve giant altars to the gods, and we sacrificed like the gods themselves, and we had games that went on twelve days. I did not win in a single event. My hands hurt so much when I awoke most mornings that I couldn’t hold a sword to spar. Men I’d never heard of won most of the events – recruits, just two years out from Pella, or Athens, or Amphilopolis, or Plataea.

One of Cyrus’s men won the archery.

Polystratus won the horse race, and received a golden crown, which he still wears at feasts.

His friend Laertes won the mounted javelin competition.

Then he made Porus, our erstwhile enemy, the satrap of India, and put the army to work as labourers, repairing dams and dykes and towns along the Indus. This was mostly make-work, as Nearchus and Helios and all the engineers spent the summer building triaconters – thirty-oared ships – to sail down the Indus, which we were told was navigable all the way to the great sea.

I remember that it was about this time that we met Kalanos and his disciple Apollonaris – that wasn’t his name, then. They were members of a sect that went naked but for their beards – serious ascetics, men dedicated to meditation and prayer and fasting. Hephaestion had the notion that they would make the king feel better, and brought their leader, Dandamis, to the king.

He was a great mind, and he and the king debated for hours – through interpreters—the nature of men’s souls, the size of the world, the purpose of creation. As Hephaestion had guessed, Dandamis filled a need in the king.

But the next morning, he was gone.

The king rode in person to fetch him from his camp. I wasn’t there, but I heard the story from Nearchus, and also from my son, who was there. The king found Dandamis sitting naked by a cold firepit. He sat on his horse for a while, looking down at the dirty, naked man, and then said, ‘Brother, come and follow me across the world, and we will learn together.’

Dandamis didn’t speak for a while, and the king repeated himself with great patience, according to my son.

But after the sun had moved in the heavens, the king’s horse began to fret, and the king sat up. ‘Come, philosopher,’ he said. ‘Follow the son of Zeus.’

And Dandamis laughed. ‘If you are the son of the greatest god, so am I!’ he said, and Barsulas says there was real mockery in his voice.

‘Are you a fool?’ Alexander asked. ‘You are naked, and I can clothe you – you have no fire, and I can feed you.’

Dandamis then looked at Alexander with pity. ‘You have nothing I want,’ he said. ‘Once, you might have made a passable philosopher, but now you value no opinion save your own. You wander because you cannot bear to be still – you conquer because you cannot bear to rule. Please go.’

Well, well.

But Kalanos and his disciple came with us – the young Chela, who became Apollonaris the Philosopher, here at court.

I hadn’t received a letter from Thaïs in a year, and I had no command and no real role. Craterus now worked the logistika directly. The king scarcely spoke to any of us, and never to me, and although I attended him daily, he never even turned his head towards me.

Of course, it might have been worse.

Coenus died of poisoning. Coenus, who had been with us his whole life. He died vomiting black bile. I held his head.

After that, Laertes and Ochrid found me a slave boy to taste all my food. About a week later, he died, vomiting black bile.

We found another.

Macedon, eh?

We had two thousand ships, crewed by our Aegyptians, our Carians, our Greeks – anyone who had ever even heard of a ship. Nearchus had the command, and we started downriver in autumn. Craterus had a third of the army, on the right bank of the river, and Hephaestion had almost half the army on the left bank, including all of our elephants. Alexander was very keen to get the elephants home – two hundred of them. Coenus had openly speculated that we weren’t going home via Sogdiana specifically because the king feared losing animals in the high passes. He may have been right.

We sailed along the banks of the Indus for a week. It was idyllic. Indians gathered on the banks and waved, or sang. Some knelt and prayed to Alexander as he passed, as a living god.

But where the Hydaspes and the Akesinos joined, there was a set of rapids, a narrow gorge and a whirlpool.

That is where I began to suspect that Alexander meant to kill us all. He ordered us to pass the rapids by rowing. In three days, we would have been able to unload, carry our ships across the portage and reload. We were the finest, most organised army on the face of earth, and we knew how to do such things.

He ordered us to row, and men died.

Ships were spun around, and collided with the rocks and capsized. Ships ran afoul of each other and capsized. Ships were simply sucked into the whirlpool.

We lost only seven ships, as Alexander mentioned with a laugh and a toss of his head that night, at dinner. He had the look of a smart boy who had pulled off a difficult prank.

Fifteen hundred men drowned.

South of the rapids, the river became broad and flat. We heard that the Malloi, a barbarian people, intended to resist. Alexander brightened up.

I was sitting on my bed, drinking too much, to be honest, when Theodore, Polystratus’s friend, came and banged my tent pole with his spear. ‘Message for Lord Ptolemy!’ he called.

I got up, threw a chlamys over my shoulders and went out into the brilliant sun. Even in evening, India is pounded by the sun.

Ochrid was just giving him a cup of wine.

Theodore drew himself up to attention when I came out. ‘I have a message from the king,’ he said.

I took it.

It was a wax tablet, and on it, in the king’s own writing, it said – ‘Ptolemy – too long have I missed your face over the rim of my wine bowl. Join me tonight, and stop sulking in your tent.’

Apis! He thought I was sulking?

I reported in a clean chiton, and the king beamed at me. ‘Did I offend you?’ he asked me, clasping both my hands.

What, exactly, do you say?

‘I’ve been unwell,’ I said, with utter cowardice. But Perdiccas laughed, and Hephaestion gave me a look – of thanks?

‘Are you fit for a command?’ he asked.

It turned out that I was to have half the Hetaeroi – Black Cleitus’s former command. A dream command – with Cyrus and Polystratus as squadron commanders, and some attached Indian cavalry.

We were to be the army rearguard.

With his usual brilliance, Alexander had worked out a plan of march that would allow us to travel at intervals – spread over a thousand stades – to minimise supply difficulties, and yet allow us to recombine in any direction. Alexander was using his Aegema to flush opposition, and Hephaestion and I were the anvils against which he would crush any who opposed us.

If you leave aside the morality of it, it was a well-thought-out plan, and just executing such a complex operation was heady stuff. And damn it, it was a pleasure to be in command again.

We swept south, into the Malloi.

They didn’t deserve what happened, but then, no one did.

We found their army just south and east of the river, and it broke before Alexander was on the field. I wasn’t there – I’ve heard of this from others. Hephaestion says that he watched it – a whole army shredding and fleeing rather than face Alexander. And why did they try to stand in the first place?

Men are fools.

Idealism was no doubt involved.

We got orders by messenger to close up to the main body, and we pressed on into the darkness, so that night we caught up with Hephaestion’s forces at a sort of muddy ditch that the Prodromoi claimed was a river. I watered my latest war horse in it – my horses were dying like flies on a cold day, and I was out of Niseans and Saka horses, riding only the local bony Indian nags. But I had one fine horse left – a beautiful Arab mare, the only mare I’ve ever ridden in combat. She was a genius among horses – like my Poseidon – and I called her Amphitrite. My adoptive son loved her, and blessed her every morning.

At any rate, I ignored my grooms and took Amphitrite down to the ‘river’ to water her. If we hadn’t been in a near desert, I wouldn’t have let her drink, and even as it was, I dismounted in the lukewarm water that smelled of human excrement and only let her drink in little nips.

At dawn, Alexander took the Aegema, every man carrying his helmet full of that awful water, and headed east after the fleeing enemy.

Why?

No idea.

We followed an hour later.

We literally ran them down. As we had learned, way back in the pages. We didn’t moralise. We simply drank our foul water and kept going, killing every Mallian who slowed, or stumbled, or gave up. The path of their retreat was lined with corpses, and eventually there weren’t enough vultures to eat the dead.

And still our pursuit continued.

Perdiccas had a dozen units under his command, and Alexander sent him to ring a major town. Then Alexander stormed another Mallian city – in an hour. I hadn’t even caught up yet. They were utterly broken as a people, and still we hunted them and killed them.

Alexander rallied what troops he had under his hand – his Aegema, and the light troops under Perdiccas. Remember, I was supposed to be the rearguard – behind Hephaestion. Hephaestion was by this time behind me, and the only time I saw Alexander that day, he cursed his best friend for tardiness because the crushing of the poor Mallians was his newest pothos.

We marched back towards the river, almost due south. My scouts were in touch with Perdiccas, but I had already lost the king ahead of me. Peithon, newly promoted to command, was sent farther south, on a sweep through the jungle to destroy any Mallians hiding there, and he exterminated them.

This was our fourth day of pursuit. We were all fighting a little and killing fleeing, desperate, tired men a great deal. It was wearing, hot, sweaty and horrible.

On the fifth day, I had lost Hephaestion behind me and I had lost the king altogether, although I had Peithon just south of me and we turned west together to get to the river faster. Our cavalry needed water – abundant water – and we needed some forage. I came across Peithon, who was standing by his foundered horse, a lovely Nisean who was dying in the brilliant sunlight, the blood at her nostrils startling in its intensity.

Peithon was younger than me, and he all but hid his head. ‘I didn’t want to kill her,’ he said, deeply affected. ‘I . . . Ptolemy, when will this stop?’

I had no comfort to offer. So I put a hand on his shoulder, found him another horse and rode on.

Hephaestion caught us at midday.

‘Where’s Alexander?’ he asked me as he rode up. Even his horse was exhausted, and he had access to the king’s horses. His pikemen looked exhausted. We were all done in – a five-day pursuit? Ares’ torment.

I pointed west. ‘My scouts say there’s a fight going on right now just across the river,’ I said. it was true. The report was fifteen minutes old. Strakos was sitting on another blown horse at the brow of a low hill to my left.

‘Ares wept,’ Hephaestion said.

We didn’t pause to reorder. I rode for the river, now just five stades away, and the closer I got, the more surely I knew that there was a battle.

Just at the edge of the river was a low ridge – really, just a mound. I rode to the top, and across the river I could see an army – fifty thousand men, at least.

I turned to Polystratus. ‘Sound the rally,’ I ordered. ‘Form wedge.’

Then I did what Alexander would have done.

I sat on my horse and watched the battle.

I couldn’t find Alexander. All his white horses were dead, and he was mounted on a bay, and that made him harder to find. But mostly, he was hard to find because he was herding fifty thousand men with about two thousand cavalry. He was fighting a battle of infinite pinpricks, the way a small, agile man fights an enormous giant in a sword fight. He had only cavalry, and the Mallians – if, indeed, these were Mallians – had five hundred elephants, but they couldn’t be everywhere and wherever they were not, Alexander was.

He had all the Hippo-toxitoi, the horse archers from Bactria and the Saka, and they were literally riding rings around the Indians.

I sent Theodore to find the king and tell him where I was, that I had four squadrons formed and ready to charge. Then I sent Laertes for Hephaestion, and told him that the king needed the pezhetaeroi. Immediately.

Then I led the formed wedges across the river in a column, a formation that was purely expedient and worked beautifully. The Indians had no idea of our force until I displayed a line of wedges – every wedge with a thousand elite cavalrymen.

Their front shuddered.

While my line of wedges was forming, the king appeared, as if by the will of the gods. He dismounted, snapped his fingers at Leannatos, one of my Hetaeroi, and took his horse.

He grinned at me. ‘I can always count on you, my friend,’ he said warmly.

Drunkard. Wife.

He pointed at the Mallians. ‘We are outnumbered ten to one. They have more elephants on this field than we have horses.’ An exaggeration, but not much of one. ‘And they are on the defensive! I beat them across the river, and now – thanks to you – we have them.’ He looked into the dust at the rear of my column. Cyrus’s Persians were just forming on our side of the river.

Pikes glinted in the sun.

‘Hephaestion is right behind me,’ I said.

Alexander laughed.

‘We will exterminate them!’ he said.

The Mallians were not waiting to be exterminated. As soon as they saw the pikes, their army broke, and our seven thousand cavalry were not enough to destroy them. Their elephants simply rode away, and their cavalry all escaped, and the infantry glutted the roads so that we had to cut a path – a literal statement, and a disgusting task.

Alexander didn’t hesitate. He took the cream of the Aegema and ploughed through them, racing for the gates of their city. He was just too late, but he stormed the outer wall with two hundred men.

I was three stades behind him, wondering what the fuck he thought he was doing, and then I put it together. He was reliving the pursuit of Darius.

I began to cut my way forward with vigour. He was going to die.

On and on. He was going to die.

I went over the wall, where a trio of wounded Hetaeroi told me he had gone over an hour before. The city was too damned big. And it was paralysed with fear, and yet full of fight – desperate men. Rats. Rats who outnumbered us by many hundreds to one. Remember that our army had been pursuing the Mallians for five days. Horses were foundering. Men were simply coming to a stop.

I had Polystratus and Leonnatus, who, by a quirk of fate, was astride the king’s winded horse. Which was such a fine animal that it just kept going. We all dismounted at the outer wall, and after that, we were running through narrow streets, trying to reach the king through a mob of armed and unarmed Mallians who wanted only to flee.

On and on.

I stopped killing the enemy, and just ran past them.

We came to the base of the citadel wall, and a group of hypaspitoi told us that he had gone off to the left, and we ran – ran – around the wall, gathering any Macedonian or Greek or Persian we found. There were shouts and screams ahead of us to the left.

It was like a nightmare, when you wander lost through a burning city and cannot find the king.

I have such nightmares.

And then we found five men, and I knew them, and they were trying to climb the stones of the wall using plants that grew there. A broken ladder lay at their feet.

‘He went over the wall!’ screamed one. ‘He’s going to die in there!’

I had perhaps sixty men at my back.

The citadel wall was six men tall and crenellated.

Abreas, the man screaming, kept pointing at the top of the wall.

Astibus lay dead, his body broken, where the ladder had collapsed.

Bubores . . .

I took a deep breath and looked around. There were no more ladders.

‘Climb it,’ I said. ‘Use your daggers as pegs.’

Had the top of the wall been defended, it would have been foolish suicide. But there wasn’t an enemy to be seen.

Men threw their daggers on the ground and Abreas was off, climbing the wall, and Leonnatus went behind him, handing him new daggers, and they went faster than I thought possible. Men brought billets of sharp wood, bronze rods, anything they could pillage . . .

Laertes came with a silk rope – some sort of decorative rope, but we got it up to Leonnatus.

‘The king lives!’ Abreas roared from the top of the wall, and he jumped down inside to aid the king.

Leonnatus paused to tie the silk rope to a stanchion, and then he, too, jumped down inside.

I took the rope in my hand and turned to Laertes. ‘No one climbs until I’m at the top,’ I said.

I went up the rope. Try it, lad – try climbing a narrow silk cord, in armour, in the heat of the sun, after five days without sleep.

I made it.

I looked down.

Alexander stood with Peukestas on one side and Abreas on the other, and Leonnatus was just rising, having taken an arrow in the thigh. Blood was spurting out of the king’s right side, under his arm.

Even as I watched, Abreas took an arrow in the throat.

They were facing a hundred men. Or more.

They were surrounded by corpses, and it was clear that the Mallians wouldn’t face them. They were, most of them, without bows, and they threw rocks, refuse – anything.

They had half a dozen archers with the great Indian longbows, and they were the most dangerous men.

I ran along the wall.

An archer saw me, and loosed. For a heartbeat, that arrow and I were all there was in the world, and then it hissed past me, and I reached the point I had selected on the wall and jumped.

Thirty feet.

I landed behind the archers, and I killed one before I knew I’d turned my ankle. Then I killed another.

Then I realised that I was between the enemy and their own gate.

I did the bravest thing of my life. The best thought-out. The most amazing.

I turned, and ran to the gate. Away from the king. Away from the fight. With my back to the remaining archers.

I lifted the bar, and a hundred Macedonians burst into the courtyard like an avenging flood. I turned and ran back towards the king, cursing my ankle, with the daimon of combat filling me, and there was Peukestas standing over the king with the king’s shield from Troy on his arm, and the king lay at his feet, and Leonnatus was on his knees, swinging a kopis as the Mallians tried desperately to kill all three.

I ran along the colonnade, and Hermes gave me wings.

I saw the spear meant for the king.

I threw myself between the spearman and his victim without thought, as if my whole life had been lived for this moment, to save the king from a death that he richly deserved.

The spear hit my aspis and skidded away.

The king’s eyes met mine, and he smiled.

And the king was saved.

He almost died.

We killed every man, woman and child in the town.