God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

THIRTY-NINE

We didn’t march south again until spring. The king teetered on the edge of death for two months, and blood from his lungs flowed over his breast whenever he took a deep breath.

The army became increasingly nervous, like a young horse facing an elephant. They realised that, without him, we probably wouldn’t make it home. It’s odd, but I had come to the same conclusion. We were sailing a sea of enemies. We had slaughtered so many people that we were universally feared and hated – there was no hope, now, of making an ally. And here, in the midst of the chaos he had created, if the god of war left us, we would all drown.

Or that’s how it looked, on the banks of the Indus.

He recovered around midwinter – emerged from his tent, spoke to the troops. Was cheered like a god. He ordered the surviving Mallians to build us more ships. He enslaved virtually the entire surviving population and put them to work, and in the spring, we sailed south, leaving a desert of destroyed farms, burned cities and corpses. I have heard angry young people tell me that war never changes anything.

Tell that to the Mallians.

I look at the pages of the Journal, and I see that we fought our way down the Indus. It’s a blur to me. We did not truly rest among the Mallians – no more than an exhausted man rests when he has three hours of sleep – and the spring campaign was more rapid marches and more killing. By late spring, no one in the Valley of the Indus would stand against us. Whole populations moved east, emptying towns before us.

There was one exception.

South of the land of the Osetae, we were marching – I was marching, anyway. The king had left Nearchus to command the river fleet, and the whole of the Aegema was travelling on the banks of the river, broad spring meadows carpeted in flowers. It was beautiful, unless you looked too closely and realised that these were supposed to be farm fields.

It was mid-morning, as I remember. I was riding with the king, and the Prodromoi came up to inform us that there were Indians – unarmed – in the fields ahead.

The Indians had an entire class of philosophers – fascinating men, like priests, except that they were born to their caste, and never left it – called Brahmins. Waiting in the fields were hundreds of Brahmins, dressed in the sombre colours of a funeral.

Alexander cantered over to them, with his bodyguards, fifty Hetaeroi of the household, and some hypaspists. I rode alongside him on my mare. We were a brilliant riot of colour – horses, gold and silver buckles, brilliant bronze breastplates, helmets, silk and wool and linen, strips and furs.

One man stood forth – a tall man with a long beard. As we approached, he and his companions began to stomp their feet on the ground.

Alexander laughed. He turned to one of our many interpreters – a Mallian slave. ‘Why are they stomping their feet? Is it some form of applause?’

The king’s interpreter rode forward, dismounted and touched his head to the ground respectfully. They spoke in the local language.

Then the Brahmin stepped forward. His Greek was not wonderful, but it was clear.

‘We own the ground under our feet,’ he said. ‘And you, conqueror, own no more than we.’

As a veteran of the Sogdian War, I knew we never owned any more than the ground under our feet. So I laughed.

The Brahmin glared.

Alexander nodded. ‘So very true,’ he said, with no interest at all. He turned to me. ‘Perhaps you should befriend him, Ptolemy, since his humour seems to suit you.’

We rode on.

By midsummer, we had taken Patala, the greatest city at the mouth of the Indus, and a few weeks later, I stood looking out at the Great Ocean.

It stretched, a dirty grey-white sheet of sun-sparkled seawater, to the horizon – stinking in the heat, rippled like a new-washed chiton of linen, and it was obvious to a child that this was an enormous body of water and that it did not flow into the sea near Libya or any other sea. It had tides – great tides.

I was with a cavalry patrol when I first saw it.

I remember reining Amphitrite in and sitting on her back, looking out at its white-hot immensity, and thinking that we were doomed.

But we were not doomed. We were merely very far from home. After a pause to gather supplies, Alexander reorganised the survivors, picked march routes himself without consulting any of the rest of us and marched us west towards Persia.

Morale was high, because any man who could see the sun could see that at last we’d turned west, into the setting sun, and we were marching home, or at least towards Macedon, as was evident to the meanest understanding.

Of course, they hadn’t heard of the Gedrosian Desert.

I had. I had patrols out all the time. And it was clear to me that we were about to undertake one of the labours of Herakles.

Let me be clear. We could have taken the route Craterus took, across the mountains. We knew how to do mountains, and most mountains have water.

We could have ferried the army home by sea, sending three lifts.

I was with the king, and Leonnatus, who was his new favourite (fair enough – he had saved the king’s life), lying on a couch with Perdiccas. Strako – now an officer of the Prodromoi – was going through the options.

And that useless fuck, the seer, stood and poured a libation. ‘Cyrus lost his entire army crossing the Gedrosian Desert,’ he said, the pompous fuck. ‘No army has ever crossed it, O King.’

‘My army will cross it,’ Alexander shot back. He looked around, and Leonnatus, who was another driven man, grinned.

‘Or die trying,’ Hephaestion said wearily.

‘Oh, as for that . . .’ the king said. He grinned. ‘They made me turn back. They can’t complain about my route home.’

I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach.

More men died in the desert than died at Hydaspes.

I ran the logistika for as long as we had any meaningful amount of supplies. I didn’t do it for the king. I did it for the army.

To be fair, he was, as usual, of two minds. He didn’t care if they died, but he wanted to get them across triumphantly. But I think he wanted enough of them to die to make it look Herculean.

He did order supplies to be gathered. He sent out members of Thaïs’s Angeloi on racing camels, headed north-west and due west, to the satraps, ordering them to prepare magazines for our march. I helped with this, and while I thought that the king was setting an impossible pace for his army, assuming that they could cross a hundred stades of desert a day, I nonetheless had to be satisfied with the other preparations. The satrap of Gedrosia was ordered to have fifty thousand mythemnoi of water at every depot – not enough for surfeit, but a realistic amount. The grain, the meat on the hoof, the remounts – I planned them all. Spare saddles, cloth for chitons, baskets to replace baskets, pack animals to replace dead pack animals.

I had three days, and I doubt I slept. When I closed my eyes, the Greek letters danced in front of my eyes, and when I awoke, it was with the thought that I hadn’t counted on the weight of water jars in my calculations for cartage.

Alexander had an air about him – of amusement, perhaps – that I found frightening. As if he knew that the result was a foregone conclusion, but insisted on playing his part with a light heart.

Nonetheless, he signed and sealed my orders for Apollophanes, satrap of Gedrosia, and for the satraps of Carmania and Archosia. We pillaged Patala for carts and draught animals, and when we formed to march west for good, we had forty-two thousand men and twenty-two thousand women and children, as well as a little over two hundred thousand animals. And that did not include Craterus with the elephants, who took another route, nor Nearchus with the fleet, which now ventured out of the river and on to the open sea.

Alexander imagined that the fleet would be in touch with us as we marched, but most of the coastline of Gedrosia is a single massive cliff, fifty men high, and barbed like a phalanx with spears.

For two days, we were still in the plain of the Indus.

On the third day, we began to climb, and the climate grew drier, although the air was humid. We reached a set of low hills, and when we climbed them, we found ourselves on a narrow plateau between the mountains – the endless, tall, barbed mountains of Archosia – with the cliff and the sea to our left.

An army of seventy thousand men and women and children, on a single march route, with a single track just wide enough for two wagons to travel abreast – in places, it narrowed to a single cart track.

So, a little mathematics. How long is an army of seventy thousand, if there is only room for four men to march abreast?

About a hundred stades. A hundred stades. And that’s without intervals between units and divisions, without stragglers, without a single broken cartwheel or dying horse blocking the path.

And never mind the corpses.

An army strung out over a hundred stades, which only marches fifty stades a day, has to travel in multiple divisions, and they must all form at the same hour and march at the same time, or they cause each other brutal traffic delays in the boiling sun.

All of which we did.

We had excellent march discipline, or we’d all have died. But after the first two weeks, we were losing a hundred men a day, and the officers knew we couldn’t turn back. And the rocky ground had no habitation to strip, no peasants whose water and food we could forage. Even in Bactria, there had been wells and streams. Gedrosia had nothing.

Alexander seemed delighted. Because it was so hard.

After the fourth week, the king had to move up and down the column constantly to keep people moving. We were all doing it, but he was the most active. I met him, repeatedly, and he’d always halt, accept my salute and smile.

‘Not as bad as it might be,’ he’d say, while a twenty-three-year-old Persian concubine died of heat exhaustion at the feet of his riding horse.

On and on.

In the fifth week, we were losing five hundred people a day, most of them at first light when they simply refused to march. The phylarchs had orders not to waste energy on the dying, but simply to keep the men moving. We were just a day or two from the first great depot, and Alexander felt our losses so far were acceptable. I could have spent my time in rage, but I was as hot and tired as the others, and my little Arabian mare was finally showing signs of wear, and I wanted her to live, so I gave her all my water that evening.

I barely slept. Once you have no water, everything goes wrong in your body.

The next day, Laertes forced me to drink a cup of his own water. Bless him. And we started again.

Alexander came up, saluted and informed me that he was riding ahead with the Hetaeroi of the royal household to the depot.

‘I’ll be back in three hours,’ he said. He looked around. ‘When I tell them it’s only six stades away, the men will perk up.’

I wasn’t sure that was true at all, but I let him go with a wave and started to rove the column. I saw Bubores threaten to kill a man who wanted to sit down, and I saw Amyntas carry a child.

The king didn’t return until sunset.

We made about twenty-two stades, by my reckoning. A poor march.

And we didn’t get to the depot.

I was standing with Hephaestion, where we’d gathered two hundred Hetaeroi to guard the two dozen water wagons that still held water. In the animal park, we had another twelve hundred empty carts – most drawn by oxen – and the draught animals were increasingly difficult. Oxen are too big to control, when they lose their heads, and my experience as a logistics officer told me that the oxen had been taken a few marches too far.

‘We’re not going to make it,’ Hephaestion said.

I was stunned by this pronouncement. ‘It can’t be more than a day’s march to the supplies,’ I said.

Hephaestion shook his head. ‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ he responded.

Perdiccas was watching a crowd of soldiers form near the baggage animals. ‘They may just decide to kill the animals in the lines,’ he said. ‘Blood is as good as water, if you can keep it down.’ He shrugged. ‘I learned that in Bactria.’

Philip the Red was dressing his troop of Hetaeroi, making a good show to overawe the pezhetaeroi and their women – women who were often as dangerous as the men – when the king rode up. He didn’t dash up to us – he rode slowly, and there were fewer than a dozen knights behind him.

We saluted.

He shook his head. ‘There’s no depot at Gelas,’ he said. ‘Not an amphora of wine, not a mythemna of water, nor of grain, not one bullock.’

We looked at him in silence.

He sat up straighter. ‘It is a betrayal. Someone wants this army dead.’ He shrugged.

We were silent. I couldn’t think what to say. Apollophanes was never much of a leader, but I didn’t see him as a traitor.

It didn’t matter, though. If there was no depot . . .

I rode over to the king’s side. ‘We must order the draught oxen slaughtered,’ I said. ‘They will provide food and drink – buy us some time.’

Alexander looked at me, and in the last light of the sun, his eyes burned like fire. ‘If only they hadn’t forced me to stop,’ he said. ‘We would all be comfortable in some marching camp on the Ganges.’

Oh, how I hated him, in that moment.

Perdiccas and I ordered the excess baggage animals slaughtered. The pezhetaeroi and their women killed them, drained their blood, and in the morning we marched, leaving a field of animal corpses, as if they had fought us, like the Mallians. And the men and women marched with brown blood flaking from their hands and mouths, because there was not one drop of water with which to wash.

Alexander took his bodyguard and rode for the coast, to find the fleet.

He came back four days later, and we were still moving. We had used up all the rest of the water, and he led us to the coast – three days out of our way – where he’d found a spring.

We marched along the coast for six days, and we filled the remaining sixty wagons with water in skins and jars and anything that would hold it, and men marched with their helmets in their arms, full of water, children tried to walk holding a poor cup of water.

There weren’t many children left.

I do not remember when it happened. I merely remember that one night Bubores came into my camp – I should explain. I was sitting on my saddlecloth, with my military cloak wrapped around me. Laertes and I were repairing our tack, to make our horses’ lives as easy as we could. We had no tents, no baggage of any kind – everything I owned was on my body or on Amphitrite’s rump. I’d killed my last riding horse the night before, for food, and from him I’d fed forty Hetaeroi and all the surviving Angeloi.

At any rate, Bubores came, and sat on his haunches in that African way in the dying light of the sun. He had a young boy with him, a wizened, dark-skinned boy of four or five.

Laertes held out a cup. ‘Share, friend,’ he said. He’d found us some water, and we didn’t ask him where. Ochrid had done the same, the day before.

Bubores took the cup and gave it to the boy. ‘You remember,’ he said, and his deep voice was strong and even, ‘when the hypaspitoi were new, and we marched on to your farm – and you had slaves and bronze kettles for every man?’ He grinned. ‘I wanted to thank you. Ever since then. I had never owned a slave before, nor had any man treated me that way.’

I laughed. ‘Bubores – you are a soldier of the Aegema, an officer, and you stand by the king. You can tell me this any time. Why now?’

Bubores rattled the necklace of bones he wore around his neck. ‘I will die soon. Perhaps tonight or tomorrow.’ He shrugged. ‘I am paying my debts. I owed you my thanks – never managed to tell you.’

I laughed. ‘Don’t be an irrational arse. You won’t die here.’

His bright eyes met mine, and his look was calm – and like the look new lovers give each other. Trust. Belief. ‘I will die soon,’ he said. ‘And so will most of us. Here? In the desert? Back at Babylon? What does it matter? The king will kill us all.’ He smiled, but it was a bitter smile. ‘It is a hard thing, to reach this point on this long road, and know that I am not the hero. I am the villain. I have killed a thousand men, taken a thousand women, enslaved ten thousand.’ He raised his hands. ‘What does that make me?’

I had never heard him speak this way.

Laertes shook his head and Polystratus, behind me, grunted. ‘Got that right,’ he said quietly.

‘This boy is my son,’ Bubores said. ‘The mother is dead now. The boy is a good boy, and all I have left – what treasure is worth a fuck, out here? Listen, Ptolemy. You are a great man – an aristocrat, a friend of the king. When there is no more food, you will have food. When there is no more water, you will have water for a few more days. I beg you, as an old comrade, to take my son when I am dead.’

Polystratus turned. ‘Just say yes, and don’t protest. Bubores, we’ll protect your son. You have my word.’

Bubores shook my hand, and Laertes’ and Polystratus’s. And then he and the boy went back into the silent darkness.

Two days later, while I walked next to Amphitrite, I saw him. He was walking at my mare’s tail.

I looked at him, and he met my eyes.

‘Pater dead,’ he said.

I gave him water and we walked on.

When we had been fifty days in Gedrosia, give or take a few days, I was with the king. The light was gone from his face. We were burned red brown, and we hadn’t had any water in four days. We were losing a thousand men and women a day. There were fewer than two hundred horses left.

We were marching only at night, which made it easier – if stumbling blindly across an endless waste of grit and rock, with no sandals and bleeding feet, bleeding gums, parched throat and no sweat – can be called easier – but the sun was rising and we were still going. Alexander was sure we were close to the capital of Gedrosia, called Poura.

We came over a rise, and entered a long valley – a barren, rocky valley that had ancient trees – myrrh trees, the largest any of us had ever seen, with myrrh gum so abundant that we crushed it under our feet as we marched, so that the whole valley smelled as if the gods had come to us. It was absurd, and beautiful, and the smell rose to the heavens, and we had very few dead that day. And I have hated the smell of myrrh ever since.

The next day, we were losing men so fast that I couldn’t stop to prod one without another falling over near by, and men had begun to die – literally, to die – on their feet.

I left Amphitrite and Bubores’ son with Polystratus and headed for the king at the very front.

He was walking quickly, using a spear as a staff. Perdiccas and a handful of his bodyguard were with him, and the rest of the army trailed away behind him like an army of spectres, spread, I expect, as far as three hundred stades – at the rate we were moving, there were still living men two weeks’ march behind us.

Again, we marched – or shuffled – all night, and kept going into the dawn.

I had intended to say something to the king. But now that I was following this slim figure into the dawn – with the print of blood from his reopened wounds clear on his chiton – I realised that there was nothing to say. The time to speak, or to act, was so long past . . .

Agrianians came out of the morning murk. There were half a dozen, without an officer, and they clustered around the king as I came up.

They had a Thracian helmet full of water.

It fixed our attention the way a beautiful woman can fix the attention of a hundred men in the agora. I noticed that it was not just water, but cool water, which formed condensation on the bronze of the helmet.

The Agrianians knelt, and their leader gave the helmet to Alexander, handing it over with head bowed.

Alexander looked into the bowl of the helmet for a moment. Then he looked around. By then, in the first light of day, there must have been a thousand men, perhaps three or four women, and Bubores’ son.

He smiled.

‘Did you bring enough for everyone?’ he asked.

The Agrianians shook their heads.

Alexander poured the water out on to the sand. ‘I will drink when everyone has drunk. Now lead us to the spring.’

Sometimes, he was easy to love.

On the fifty-ninth day since we had left Patala, we marched into Poura.

We did not march. We shuffled.

Men died from drinking too much water, or too much wine.

When we mustered, six days later, we had eleven thousand infantry, seven thousand cavalry and fewer than six hundred women. Eleven children. Thirty-one horses.

One was Amphitrite.

One of the children was Bubores’ son.

And there was a letter from Thaïs waiting for me. It was lovely – I still have it. It was like water in the desert. And I know what the phrase means.

As soon as we reached civilisation, the killing began again. It was Philotas and Callisthenes and Cleitus the Black, but at a new level of horror, and there were no attacks of remorse in the aftermath. Just a feast of crows.

Cleander died. Sitalkes was killed. A row of Persian satraps, whose principal guilt lay in assuming that their barbarian conqueror would never return. Apollophanes was arrested and dismissed and then executed for failure to supply us. He hadn’t even tried. He never offered an excuse, even under torture.

Astaspes was killed, and a host of men more junior found themselves arrested and murdered. Alexander informed us – and the army – that there had been a conspiracy against him – against all of us – and that the disaster in the Gedrosian was the result of their attempt to murder the army.

Not the result of one man’s hubris.

We marched into Persepolis. More satraps were executed.

What did I do? Heroically, I kept my head down, went to the king’s tent as seldom as possible and commanded my Hetaeroi.

I have not gone into detail about the king’s adoption of Asian ways – beyond asserting that, as always, he tried to please everyone and ended pleasing no one. But after the massacre of the satraps – with Cleitus dead, Nearchus terrified, Perdiccas and I in virtual in-army exile – after that, the king did whatever he liked. And what he liked was to become the King of Kings. He adopted the court costume. He hid himself in the midst of a vast horde of perfumed functionaries who had never held a piece of wood, much less a pike.

At Susa, he held a review of his new army. He had raised a new army – I think I mentioned it – thirty thousand pikemen, all Persians and Medes, trained to a degree of perfection in drill that was both beautiful and a little scary to watch. He reviewed them at Susa, and called them ‘Successors’.

The name meant just what it seemed to mean.

His Macedonians had served their turn, and he was through with them – those he hadn’t killed in the desert, that is. And when the phalanx – that is, the old, at least partially Macedonian phalanx – grumbled, he referred to the Successors by another name. Because the assembly of the pezhetaeroi was often called the ‘Tagma’. And Alexander called his Persian phalanx the ‘Antitagma’.

Another name that meant just what it seemed to mean.

It took months for the king to lay his plans, but when he acted, he did so with the thorough planning that characterised him on the battlefield.

He held the mass wedding – everyone knows the story – and thousands of his men took Persian wives. It was a magnificent ceremony.

It was also one of the truly good, well-thought-out, well-devised acts of his reign.

I was no longer needed for military planning, but at Susa, one afternoon, the king met Thaïs, recently come up from Babylon – or rather, he heard her unmistakable fingers on a kithara and invited her to help him plan the weddings. And she brought me.

Once again, the king looked at me over a military desk and smiled. ‘Too long since I have seen you,’ he said, and embraced me.

Again.

It required the kind of planning that a fortress requires, or a campaign. Ten thousand men, ten thousand brides. Gifts, priests of every religion required, dowries, food.

Twenty thousand people drink forty thousand amphorae of wine. Eat five thousand sheep and five thousand goats. Require twenty thousand slaves to wait on them, and the slaves have to be fed, too.

Ten thousand brides require ten thousand bridal dresses. Even if you want them to sew their own, the cloth has to come from somewhere. So does the jewellery.

Inside? What building can house this? Outside, what place is beautiful enough?

And so on.

The weddings were in the Persian manner, the men sitting in chairs, the women coming to stand by them. So we needed ten thousand chairs.

It might have been chaos, but the king put ten thousand talents of silver at our disposal, and we did the thing well. The king offered me a Persian bride, and I grinned.

‘I want to marry Thaïs,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I intend to marry Barsines,’ he said.

‘Barsines?’ I remember smiling. ‘Not Banugul? I thought you preferred her.’

He looked very human, then. Looked out over the mountains, towards Hyrkania. ‘Perhaps it is the very fact that she prefers to rule her little kingdom among the wolves,’ he said. ‘I generally prefer what I cannot have.’

I was still stunned by the self-knowledge evident in that statement when I reported it to Thaïs that night, as we lay, she half atop me, her head on my shoulder. She still smelled like herself, she still looked like herself . . .

‘He knows what he is,’ she said. ‘He merely ignores it, most of the time.’

I shook my head in the darkness lit by a single lamp. Her skin glowed.

As usual, I wanted her.

‘Will you marry me?’ I asked, when we had made love.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t charge you, either way,’ she mocked me.

‘If I don’t marry you, the king means to give me a Persian girl of fourteen years,’ I shot back.

‘I could use someone to help around the tent,’ she said, running her hand across my penis. ‘To watch Eurydike. Perhaps teach her Persian, since it will be such an important language when she is grown.’ She was matching actions to the rhythm of her words.

We giggled.

We made love again, which, after all my body had suffered over the last years, was a sort of Aphrodite-sent miracle in itself. And I asked her again.

‘Will you marry me?’

The lamp was out, and the tent was dark.

‘I really have to ask Bella,’ she said. ‘And what of all my other clients?’

‘Thaïs!’ I said.

She laughed and laughed.

And when I was slipping off into a sated sleep, she whispered, ‘Of course.’

The weddings were superb. The food was good, and the priests – all six hundred of them – were on time. Our adoptive children were officiants – both of them. Barsulas had sailed with Nearchus and had swum with whales in the eastern Ocean, and Olympias was a full priestess of Artemis and had come all the way from Ephesus with ten other priests of the goddess.

People today speak of the weddings as if they all passed off in one meadow, or one great temple, but in fact the weddings took over every part of Susa, and our part was at the Temple of Astarte, to which I gave two talents in gold for offerings and a great gold amphora that I’d taken in India and my son had got home by ship – because, if you are wondering, not a single coin of plunder made it across the Gedrosian Desert. And I sat in my Persian chair, in Persian dress – oh, a nice long coat, baggy trousers, the whole costume – because the king’s actual intention was to begin the acculturation of his Macedonian staff to the world of ruling the Persian Empire.

I sat in my chair, and Thaïs came, veiled in silk gauze, and after the Priestess of Aphrodite had said all the words, I rose, threw back her veil and kissed her lips, and her blue eyes stayed on mine for a long time.

I think that would be a good place to end. Thaïs and I, on thrones, and Polystratus and his Persian bride Artacama, Laertes and Theodore with their brides, Barsulas with his bride, a magnificent girl and a rich heiress named Artonis, and all of our friends who we could gather – all the survivors of my group of pages. Philip the Red was there, and he wed another beauty, Amastrine, who seemed shocked to be offered a cup of wine by a man not her husband. You see – we carried through the weddings in the Persian manner, because the king had commanded it, and he was paying.

But the feasts that followed were pure Greek. I’d say Macedonian, except that among the thousand men and women dining on the portico of the Temple of Astarte at Susa, no boy was raped and no man’s gullet slit – so it can’t have been a Macedonian feast.

Thaïs played the kithara, and everyone was silent – the highest compliment that a crowd can pay a musician. We had performers – jugglers, and an old rhapsode, and then we danced – women with women and men with men, and Cyrus, my friend from Sogdiana, danced the Plataean Pyricche with Strakos and Amyntas and Polystratus and me. We were pretty drunk, but we did it well. And when the aulos pipes stopped and we were merely human again, we saw that the king had joined us.

Thaïs led the women out – Persian as well as Macedonian, more than twenty women with whom, we saw immediately, she had practised in secret – and they danced one of the dances of Artemis that all Greek women know. Olympias danced next to Thaïs, and the Persian women danced – and Cyrus smiled. We all smiled. Wine flowed, and people were happy.

It would be a good place to end this story.

But I will not end here.

A few weeks after the wedding, the king paid off the army’s debts. The men saw it as a favourable sign.

They were wrong.

He had himself declared a god. He assumed he had bought the army’s acceptance.

He was wrong.

He began to move the army – Aegema, Tagma and Antitagma all together – back to Babylon, and he paraded them at Opis.

It was a clear, dry day. The army bore no resemblance to the ragged horde that had stumbled out of the Gedrosian Desert. We had the new phalanx, magnificent in bronze armour, crisp, white chitons and the new helmets with Persian-style tiaras atop them. The old Macedonian infantry – fewer than ten thousand men, even with a recent infusion of recruits from home and a thousand Greek mercenaries – stood looking second-best. The hypaspitoi had absorbed more men out of the pezhetaeroi – yet they, too, had received drafts of the very best of the new Persians. They gleamed with gold. And they stood separate, more like a tyrant’s bodyguard than the elite of the army. Seleucus commanded them, but he had multiple lieutenants who were clearly there to watch him – new men, fresh out of Greece, and one from Lydia.

The Hetaeroi were more Persian than Greek. We had new horses and new armour and thousands of new men.

Alexander came out and sat on a throne, surrounded by advisers and functionaries, under an awning. Then he stood, and in a loud, clear voice, informed them of his plans.

‘It is my wish that the men who conquered the world,’ he said with an easy smile, ‘should have the retirement they deserve – that men who should long ago have gone home to Pella to plant their farms should go, richly rewarded, and live lives of ease and splendour.’

If he imagined that they would be pleased, he was wrong.

The ranks began to move – the Tagma writhed as if it had to face elephants. The pikes wavered.

The very air became still.

Alexander still had that smile fixed on his face.

Amyntas son of Philip stepped forward – he was the right file leader of the rightmost taxeis – the senior phalangites of the army. Every man knew him – every man knew he had declined to become the king’s shield-bearer, or the senior phylarch of the hypaspitoi. He stepped forward at parade-ground pace, until he was three paces in front of the taxeis.

‘Do you think you can just send us away?’ he roared. ‘We shat blood for you!’

Alexander watched him, the way a man looks at a snake that has suddenly appeared near his foot.

The phalanx began to shout abuse – at the king.

Alexander’s face grew red.

Amyntas raised his arm and pointed his spear at the Antitagma. ‘You plan to conquer the rest of the world with your war dancers?’ he shouted.

The Tagma took up the cry – War Dancers! War Dancers!

Men began to laugh.

Now spears in the Antitagma began to shake – with rage.

Alexander’s face was as red as the sun had turned it in the Gedrosian Desert. He raised his hand to speak.

But the Tagma was not cowed.

‘With your pretty boys and your father Amon!’ called another front-ranker, and men laughed.

They all laughed.

Every Macedonian in the army began to laugh at the king.

‘God Alexander!’ men laughed. ‘Father Amon! War dancers!’

Alexander walked rapidly up to Amyntas. He motioned to the hypaspitoi, and his personal guard detached themselves and ran to him. Not Bubores or Alectus, or Astibus – all dead. Men we didn’t know.

Amyntas saluted. He said something. I was too far away to hear it.

Alexander’s face became ugly – white and red, his mouth thin and set.

A hypaspist drove his spear into Amyntas, under the arm with which he was saluting the king.

He killed about fifty of them – veterans, every one. Later, in a fit of remorse, he held funerals, and a dinner to celebrate the friendship of Macedon and Persia.

And then he ordered all the veterans home. Oh, they were well paid. But he sent them under Craterus, with orders to displace – and murder – old Antipater.

And then Hephaestion died.

Alexander was almost human for a month after Hephaestion died. He died of a hard life under brutal conditions – of a love of excess and hard drinking. I suppose it is possible that he was poisoned. I don’t think so.

But his death revealed something to the king. Alexander looked around him like a man awakened from a dream – I think because Hephaestion, for all his failings, had helped to protect the king from the hardest truths, and without him, Alexander was like a man wearing armour without padding.

But Hephaestion had also been our last conduit to the king – our last way of protesting, of demanding that he remain a Macedonian. And after a funeral that alternated between high drama and darkest comedy, heavy drinking and flights of royal fancy that made me want to vomit – he was lost.

By the time we moved to Babylon, I had had enough. I sent Thaïs away, with the children, and all my men but Polystratus. They were discharged veterans now, anyway.

I sent them west, to Aegypt. Thaïs had her orders, and Laertes had his.