God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (100 page)

The Queen of Persia died in his arms, with Thaïs holding her hand and her mother-in-law holding her head.

Later, Callisthenes put it about that she died in an accident, and that’s the official version.

I followed Alexander from the wagon. I had her blood on my left hand and I let it dry there. I mounted my pretty mare, now Medea like the others, and I rode her hard to the head of the column, where Alexander sat with Hephaestion, watching the last of the main body cross.

I might not have done it, but Alexander turned as I came up. ‘The baggage is falling behind, and we have to move,’ he said.

I reached out and wiped her blood across his face. She was nothing to me – I had scarcely met her, and she openly despised us all. But I was his friend, not his slave, and no man worth a shit treats a woman like that.

He had no trouble meeting my eye. He held out his hand, and a slave put a towel in it. He wiped his face.

‘I gather you feel that needed to be done. I have other things on my mind than the troubles of women,’ he said. ‘Now get the baggage moving.’

Sometimes, he was easy to hate.

TWENTY-NINE

W
e turned south.

We started to intercept spies – they weren’t very clever – with offers of vast riches for the murder of Alexander.

Darius was willing to do anything to avoid the trial of battle.

To cap his other efforts, he sent a deputation of nobles to try and make a treaty. This time, he was clever enough to make it very public indeed. This time, Alexander was not going to change the wording.

They offered him everything west of the Euphrates and a royal wife.

Again, Parmenio suggested we accept.

Alexander didn’t deign to reply. But later, we heard that he allowed the head eunuch of Darius’s wife’s household to escape with the embassy.

Because the news that his wife had been unfaithful with Alexander drove Darius into a rage of madness – a paroxysm of jealousy, or so I understood later, when most of the Persian officers were my own officers – the sort of frustrated rage that all men experience when nothing seems to go their way.

Just as Alexander intended.

And then there was no more talk of peace.

The War God was riding to Babylon.

Darius concentrated his army at Arabela, and offered battle on a plain of his own choosing, which he had his engineers improve with labour gangs of slaves until it was as flat as a well-wrought table.

We heard about this battlefield when we were still hundreds of stades to the north, and as we marched closer and the rumours of the enemy’s army size became ever more inflated, we were more and more derisive. The mere fact that Darius had attempted to negotiate showed how weak he was. Our best estimates from all sources suggested that even with some help form his eastern barons, he’d have a hard time gathering twenty thousand cavalry and as many infantry. Ariston nearly lost his job for reporting twice that many on a daily basis.

And then Darius moved north from Arabela, suddenly closing the distance with us.

It’s easy to fall into hubris. Easy to forget how smart an opponent is. Darius outgeneralled Alexander before Issus. He’d planned a fairly subtle campaign this time, too, and Alexander had outmarched him – something that all of our opponents always underestimated, as we could march roughly three times as fast as anyone we ever faced. But even faced with our speed, he changed his campaign plan and moved his army – and did unexpected things.

In an afternoon, we went from deriding Darius to the knowledge that he was a day’s march to the south. Reliable men reported that his army was ‘uncountable’.

Kineas of Athens came in person to tell the king that Darius’s army covered a hundred stades of camp.

The tone of command meetings changed.

Late that evening, the army moved up a low ridge. Scouts told us that the ridge we were occupying was less than two dozen stades from Darius’s new battlefield.

Alexander summoned the old crowd to ride out with him. There was Craterus, and there was Perdiccas, and there was Black Cleitus and there was Philip the Red. And Parmenio, and Philotas, and Nicanor.

And me. He came to my tent, as in the old days, and called me by name.

A dozen of us rode out of the camp, up the ridge.

The ridge rose well above the plains, and had a good view. Perhaps too good a view.

It looked as if the Valley of the Tigris was on fire.

I will
never
forget the sight of Darius’s army. Their camp filled the earth – as far as the eye could see to the south and east, there were fires.

‘Zeus my father,’ Alexander muttered.

Parmenio looked for a long time.

Then he shook his head. ‘We’re fucked,’ he said.

No one disagreed, and then, after a silence, he went on, ‘Throw Hephaestion out with the cavalry as a screen, and let’s get out of here. We can vanish into the mountains. We’ll lose some men, but not what we’ll lose if we go down on to that plain.’

What I remember best is the feeling that Darius had led us the way a pretty girl can lead a drunken soldier. The ugly feeling that we’d been had.

Alexander was white. And silent.

Twice I saw him touch his forehead, where I had smeared her blood.

He was terrified. I hadn’t seen it often, but often enough to know. Terrified not of dying, but of failing.

I’d love to say that I offered a brilliant plan, but I was terrified too. We’d outmanoeuvred Darius, but in the end it was like a little man dodging a giant. The giant doesn’t care about all that dancing around, because eventually, when it comes to the clinch . . .

When we rode back to camp, there was still a streak of summer light in the sky, red-pink and angry, and Alexander ordered the duty taxeis to dig in. Amyntas’s men – and they didn’t love it. Nor did mine, on duty next. We worked half the night, and we kept men awake.

Because I had the night duty, I knew that the king was awake. There was light in his tent.

But I didn’t go to him.

I’ve heard a hundred legends about that night, but I was there. He didn’t summon a council. He didn’t consult the auguries. He didn’t feast, and he didn’t drink wine.

Nor did he summon Barsines or her sister.

What he did was to lie awake, silent, on his camp bed, staring at the ceiling of the tent and the flies.

At some point, according to Hephaestion, he fell asleep, and son of god or not, he snored. We all heard it.

There is something immensely reassuring about the sound of your warrior king snoring in the face of the enemy.

I was about to rotate the duty with Alectus of the hypaspitoi when Ochrid came and told me that the king wanted the duty officer.

I entered his tent. He was awake.

‘Ptolemy,’ he said. ‘I’m glad it is someone intelligent. I have written down my dispositions for the morning. Please see that the army is formed. I will no doubt sleep late.’

The arrogance – the bored assurance – of his voice would have angered me at any time – but just then, his arrogance was rope in the hands of a drowning army.

‘Formed’ could only mean one thing. I nodded and took the parchment, and he smiled at me and lay down on the bed and was almost instantly asleep.

I cast my eye over the dispositions. But they only confirmed the word ‘formed’. We were going to fight.

We were going to fight.

My hands shook as I left his tent.

And yet – I took his orders to Parmenio, left them with a slave, disarmed myself and lay down with Thaïs, and I was asleep in a few heartbeats.

Odd.

THIRTY

O
ther men have told the story of that morning. Read Callisthenes, or read the Military Journal, if you must.

He really did sleep late. He left the forming of the army to Parmenio. I think it was drama – I think he was awake and armed, awaiting his moment to come onstage. But perhaps not.

He formed us in a very similar manner to the traditional, Philip of Macedon formation. The phalanx was in the middle, with cavalry on the flanks and a strong second line posted to our rear.

The differences were subtle.

The second line was very strong.

The cavalry was equally balanced in numbers, but the right flank had our best shock cavalry
and
our best skirmishers.

And perhaps most interesting of all, we refused
both
flanks as soon as we began to march out of camp.

The old man did his part. Parmenio was up with the dawn, out with his own Thessalians, riding Darius’s carefully manicured battlefield. He dismounted and walked, counting his paces across the frontage that the field would have.

It was like fighting on a good wool blanket. It was
flat.
However, on Darius’s side of the field there was a patch of . . . I wouldn’t call it brush, but let’s say unmanicured ground that stretched from the ridge on our right down towards Darius’s centre. To be honest, on most battlefields it would have been considered good going, but here, where slaves with heavy rollers had rolled the anthills flat and other slaves with shovels had filled in the holes, the patch of untended ground leaped to the eye.

Darius’s left flank was going to rest on it. As if it was actually bad ground, brush or marsh. We could see that even at first light, because Darius, who did not have an army as well trained as ours (by a long shot), had unit markers already in place in the warm yellow light of early morning.

Parmenio counted off his frontage. He turned and looked at me. I was riding with Nicanor, because I was up and it soothed my nerves. To the south, a dozen Prodromoi covered us, and a little farther south, as many Persian cavalrymen watched them the way hawks watch distant prey.

Parmenio stopped walking.

‘Anyone have a tablet?’ he asked, and I did. That made me their secretary.

‘You here to spy on us?’ Parmenio asked.

I shook my head. ‘I’m here to fight Darius,’ I said.

Philotas chewed on a blade of late-summer grass. ‘If we lose here, none of us will make it home,’ he said quietly.

I shrugged. I wasn’t going to share my opinions with Philotas.

Besides, Parmenio began to call out numbers, and I scratched them in the wax.

My taxeis, at normal order, is eight deep and two hundred men wide, each man using about three paces, giving a frontage of six hundred paces. Roughly three stades. And we had seven front-line taxeis.

They alone took up twenty-one stades at normal order. If we closed to our tightest order, of course, we could almost halve our frontage.

But the Plain of Gaugamela is vast, a carpet of bronze-burned summer pasture grass and naked ochre earth that rolled away to distant ridges – room for all the soldiers in the world to fight, if the gods ordained it. The Greeks might have called Boeotia the dance floor of Ares, but the Plain of Gaugamela was surely laid down by the gods for war, and Darius had
improved
it.

When we reached the nominal position of the right marker of my taxeis, I dismounted and built a small cairn of stones.

Polystratus, mounted on a pony behind me, spat. ‘Fucking dust,’ he said. He pointed to where his plodding pony’s hooves were raising puffs of fine grit with every step the animal took.

‘This field will be one impenetrable cloud of dust from horizon to horizon as soon as we march on,’ I said.

Polystratus spat again and nodded. ‘I said that. You just used more words.’

It took us two hours, from sun-up to breakfast, to measure the battle front. Philotas calculated unit frontages, Parmenio paced them off in the dust and I marked the unit down with the final measurement on the wax. The wax got softer and softer as the sun climbed, until my stylus started to strip the wax off the boards.

When we reached the last nominal position on our left, we all turned our mounts and stared across the plain.

Our leftmost unit would match up with the centre of Darius’s right flank, to judge from the positions of his markers. Put another way, his right flank would overlap our left by at least six stades.

Parmenio looked back at me. ‘Still here to fight Darius, boy?’