God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (103 page)

‘Front! March!’ I called.

Opposite me, orders were being roared in Persian.

To my left, Coenus was matching his front rank to mine. He was eight deep, and would be more fearsome. His men overlapped the Persian guards and were facing more Greek mercenaries.

A few arrows came in, and then a volley, all loosed together – someone had fucked that up, as we were still well out.

‘At the double! March, march!’ I roared. I had not, until that moment, intended to duplicate the prowess of the hypaspitoi and charge at the double. But the early, sloppy volley of arrows gave me a slight edge. If we hurried. Perhaps Apis inspired me, or Herakles, my ancestor.

Had even one sarissa-man in the front rank tripped over a rock, or taken an arrow in the throat, it might have unravelled our front rank.

Ten horse lengths out. You can see men’s faces under their helmets.

Five, and all you feel is the gravel under your feet. There are no more thoughts, no more observations. You are no longer hot or cold, nervous, terrified, or even calm.

You are the spear. And the moment.

Men tell wonderful tales of combat. I do myself. Most of it is lies and impressions gathered up by the mind after the fact, with the lies of others added in for good measure. But I remember two parts of that fight.

Our line was well formed when we hit. That, by itself, was a miracle. So I was neither ahead of nor behind the rest of the rank when I struck, and because we slightly overlapped the end of the Immortals’ line where the Greeks had been shoved away from them, I
passed
the end of their line, ran a few paces and watched my men crash into the Immortals like a mighty wave on a calm beach which heralds the coming of a storm. Five or six files were with me, and we wheeled – an orderly not-quite-mob – into their left flank. A man’s left flank is his shielded flank, and ordinarily, this flank is not particularly productive to strike – especially as we were so few, just thirty men, and we couldn’t strike deep.

But the Immortals had kept their bows in their hands too long, and were still getting them back in their cases, and someone had ordered the rear ranks to keep shooting.

I had my best new spear in my hand, overhand as on the old vases, and I was killing men before I reached their line – shieldless men with too little armour. The overhand spear thrust comes down from above, into the throat, into the top of the thigh, into the breastbone, into the helmet. Without a shield, a man is all but helpless before it.

We were just thirty men, but we must have put twice that number on the ground in the time it took Perdiccas’s men to give our charge and Coenus’s three cheers. The Immortals were already jumpy – the Greek mercenaries had recoiled again – and they flinched from our attack into their flanks, and the front didn’t stand its ground.

I still had my eyes on that great golden disc. I didn’t know whether it was the king’s or just the banner of the Immortals, but I killed my way towards it.

I had a wonderful new sword – my favourite, I think, of all the swords I’d ever had. Thaïs gave it to me. It was a simple kopis, neither long nor short, not even fancy – but magnificently balanced, so that it felt like a feather – a deadly feather – in the hand. And yet, whatever I hit, parted. Flesh, leather, bronze – at one point, my beautiful sword cut
through
the iron rim of a Persian shield.

My Ionians were singing the paean. I had forgotten – we Macedonians don’t usually sing it after we leave camp. But it was beautiful. And the brashness of it killed the Persians as thoroughly as our spears.

A big man came out of the dust. A man with a hennaed beard – an officer with more gold on him than Thaïs wore as an Aegyptian priestess, and his first blow took the head off my best spear, and he hammered me with a long-handled axe, and his blows began to destroy my aspis.

I made myself push forward into his blows, but a blow from outside my field of vision knocked the sword from my hand. I got a hand on his right elbow and shoved him – turned him – hammered the rim of my aspis into the small of his back and he roared, and I got a leg behind his as he cut back into me, put his arse against my hip and flipped him with my sword arm, over my hip and into the dust – kicked him, and then fell on him with my dagger from my side, and he was leaking in the sand and I was up and moving.

Another man – smaller, with a hooked sword that scored past my dented aspis on my greave, but didn’t penetrate – hurt anyway – and I left my dagger in his guts. And by sheer luck and the will of Ares, or Zeus-Apis, my Athenian sword was lying so close to my feet that I all but cut my foot on the blade. I reached down and she came to my hand like a lover. I stood straight and looked around.

I’d left all my men behind. I’m a good strategos but sometimes a poor soldier. How often did phylarchs tell new men never to leave the ranks?

But the disc of the golden sun was
right there
. It was as if I could hear the king telling me:
Whatever you do, if your men are advancing into the Persians and killing them, you are doing my will.

Off to the right, behind my head, the earth trembled. Two thousand horses went from a walk to a gallop, aimed at a gap only slightly wider than the base of Alexander’s wedge – but the shoulder of the gap was held now by the hypaspitoi, and the Persians could no longer move front-line men to fill the gap.

I’ve used this metaphor before – but it’s like that moment in a match, in pankration or wrestling, when you know –
you know
– that you have made an error, and it is going to hurt. You have bought a feint, or you have missed a hold, and now, before your heart beats again or you can do anything, his elbow is going to slam into your head. You know?

That’s what Darius must have felt. The battle proper was still less than half an hour old, and Darius must have known, right then.

The rear ranks of the Immortals were a bloody shambles, but they were game, and every one of them was struggling to push back the front-rankers, stabilise the formation and save the standard. My moment of calm was past, and I was all but buried in opponents. Spears rang off my aspis and my helmet, and I staggered.

But combat is a complex dance, and what can I say? I was lifted above myself. A blow pushed my helmet back against my face, and the pain transformed the fight – in an instant, I was a little faster for the rage, a little stronger . . .

My aspis swung at nose height, flat like a plate, and two men took its force, their faces crushed, and I was into the hole like water through a breaking dam, my kopis like a predatory bird taking insects at the edge of night, and I was above it, in it, through it. I remember no one cut, but the aggregate – for a few heartbeats,
I was a god
, seeing each opponent, seeing his intention, seeing his eyes, the minute shift of weight, baffling with my cloak, my shield, lying with the tip of my sword or telling a final truth with the blade or the grip. I suppose that blows fell on me but I didn’t feel them, and Coenus claims that he could see me move through the Immortals the way you can watch a mole moving underground. I love the metaphor, even though I suspect he was as busy as I was and didn’t see a fucking thing. It makes one hell of a good picture.

Under the disc were two giants.

I was alone.

I remember thinking,
I can do this
.

I swayed, like a child trying to evade his father in a game. Then I leaped forward to the left, and my two opponents failed to follow my movement, and now I had them aligned – not both facing me at once.

I hate fighting big men.

I had a sword that was too short to let me snipe, and my immediate opponent had a spear, and he rifled it at me. But his contempt betrayed him, and when he drew back and thrust again, I cut at the spearhead, swept his spear wide and powered forward under it, and my backcut went into his greave and his knee, and he fell like a tree in the forest, bellowing – and I got the sword clear of his leg, and the blade rose, I turned it edge on, where his partner was cutting at me, and severed all the fingers of his spear hand; they were like a shower of thrown grapes at a party as his point went past my head. Again I powered forward, and my backcut went through his crestless helmet and into his brain.

The great golden disc fell with a barbarous clang in the dirt, and they were on their way to Hades. It was like that. It was as if they stood still. Apis granted me that moment, and Herakles my ancestor. I had never been so good before, even before I took my wounds at Tyre, and I was never so good again.

But oh, the glory of it!

For the space of a hundred heartbeats,
I was a god
. And in those hundred heartbeats I learned what it might be like to be Alexander. What made him incomprehensible to other men was revealed to me – not in that moment, when there was nothing but the moment, but later, when I knew all the things I hadn’t thought while I was a god. I hadn’t doubted. I hadn’t cared. I had
known
.

My time of grace ended as the great golden disc crashed into the dust.

But by Apis, it was glorious.

Up until that moment, I’m not sure that Darius had made a mistake. It hadn’t all gone his way, but despite Alexander’s perfect timing and godlike assurance, our army was in mortal peril. We were, to all intents, surrounded. The Sakje were already sacking our baggage and razing our camp.

Thaïs was calmly shooting Sakje from their saddles with her bow, shooting out of the door of our tent. She received a Sakje arrow through her calf in return fire, but they gave up our sector of the officers’ lines as a bad job. Three hundred Thracian Psiloi and a thousand terrified, angry camp followers with spears and rocks were sufficient to keep the enemy out of the baggage wagons and the herds.

But the hypaspitoi and the Taxeis of Outer Macedon and the Taxeis of the North under Coenus crushed the front of Darius’s centre
so fast
that he chose to stabilise his front rather than counter Alexander’s cavalry charge.

A natural reaction, because when his horse guards charged me, I could see him, and he wasn’t so very far away. Alexander must have seemed like a distant threat.

They glittered and shone like all the flowers of the fields in the Hebrew book. Like every hero of the
Iliad
gathered into a single magnificent regiment. They were red and gold, purple and gold, black and gold. The only silver was the steel in their hands, thousands of folds of perfect steel, magnificent weapons that made the Athenian kopis in my hand look like a crowbar.

The best men of the whole empire.

Darius sent them into my taxeis, and I was standing about two horse lengths in front of my men, who were in no kind of order. We were in those last moments of a melee, when the losers die and the winners swirl in, faster and faster as the losers no longer have friends and file partners and men to watch their backs, and it all comes to an . . .

‘Cavalry!’ I roared.

Zeus, I was exhausted.

I set my feet. I didn’t even have a spear.

Some mighty Persian lord got his spear on to my aspis and knocked me flat, and then they rode over me.

By the will of the gods, I didn’t take a kick.

They had less than a tenth of a stade in which to launch their charge, and they were hampered by Coenus’s men and the hypaspitoi coming at them, and so they were – most of them – not much above a fast trot. And like good men the world over, they cared about their own kin in the Immortals, and so they rode too carefully.

That didn’t spare us much. But it might have been the edge between destruction and survival.

I lay in the dust and there were hooves all around me, the screams of frightened horses and maddened horses and war cries, and when they began to pack in together, I rose above my fear and the dust, got my legs under me between two horses and started cutting – heavy cuts, underhand, into the bellies of the animals and the legs of the lords.

I’ve heard versions of this story from other men – when you are deep in the enemy ranks, they are virtually defenceless. I got my feet under me, and men were off their horses and on their faces before they knew what had killed them.

Their formation was too open, as well. I went under horses’ bellies, got bitten on the thigh and kicked – a splendid bronze thorax ruined in one blow. The hoof of that horse collapsed the careful forming of the bronze-smith, and it then stayed in its new form.

I pissed blood for two weeks. At the time, I fell to my knees and urine ran from me into the dust, and I coughed blood – all from one inglorious kick from a big horse.

Above me in the melee, a Persian leaned down and thrust his spear at me, and the point skidded across my back and dug into my hip between the pturges.

That’s what happens when you are alone.

I retched. I couldn’t help it – the pain of the horse’s hoof was too much. And then I was flat on my face, and I had dust in my mouth – something hit me, or a horse stepped on me.

I lay there and waited for the end. I couldn’t see the wound on my back, but the blood coming out of my throat suggested that I was done. I felt clear-headed, but I couldn’t move my legs.

Clearly, through the forest of horses’ legs, I could see the golden wheels of a chariot.

I remember thinking – perhaps my clearest memory of the day –
Fuck, I’m that close to Darius.

And the earth trembled.

The
tone
changed.

I can’t tell it any other way.

My legs moved.

The Persians above me in the melee had stopped raining blows on my corpse. They were looking somewhere else.

The earth shook.

The war god was coming. I could feel him.

I knew
. Because I was almost under the wheels of the Great King’s chariot – Alexander was coming
right here.

I got to my feet like an old man, but no one contested the ground with me.

Someone – someone who glittered – was shouting at the man in the chariot, and the man in the chariot, who had the look of greatness, calm, dignified – was remonstrating. The man who glittered tore the reins from the Great King’s hands. He was bellowing like a bull, demanding, begging, cajoling.