God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (120 page)

I was between Coenus and Perdiccas, riding slowly, because our column was tired and because we were done and our men weren’t in the mood to be hurried.

I took a breath, enjoying the mountain air for the first time in two years. ‘I think . . .’ I said, and Perdiccas grinned.

‘Do you?’ he asked. ‘I thought I smelled something.’

I punched him. ‘I think we have to make him go home now,’ I said.

Perdiccas nodded, the happy look wiped from his face. ‘Do you think – if we get him home . . .’

Coenus laughed. It was a desperate laugh.

I turned. ‘We can get him home,’ I said. ‘If we work at it.’

Coenus wiped his eyes for a moment. ‘We’re not going home,’ he said. ‘We’re invading India. In the spring.’

I was still in charge of the army’s food and supplies, and I hadn’t heard a word of it. But then, I’d been out of favour half a year.

In fact, it was another year before we marched on India. The king was careful about the reconquest of Sogdiana, and he developed a lust of heroic proportions (the only kind of lust he ever had, really) for the daughter of one of the Sogdian chieftains – Roxanne – or so he claimed. She probably saved a lot of lives with her superb face and lush, velvety skin.

We received drafts from home, and Alexander mustered our veterans – as many as he could. And he began to bring foreign officers closer in – he tried to appoint Cyrus to command half of the Hetaeroi in place of Cleitus, and Hephaestion talked him out of it.

I was scarcely paying attention. With the Prodromoi and all the intelligence I could muster, I was trying to figure out how to feed the army when it marched east, to India. The king arrested Callisthenes on a trumped-up charge, and I can’t pretend I’d ever loved him, although he was better than the lickspittle Anaxarchus. Alexander tried – repeatedly – to induce us to perform the proskynesis. Leonatus mocked any man who did, and Polyperchon was arrested in Alexander’s presence for direct refusal. And again, Hephaestion went to the king and begged him to relent.

A group of pages plotted to kill the king. But, in the best tradition of Philip’s court, they fell out among themselves – sex and dominance were involved. Alexander had them executed, and used the incident to justify moving against the Macedonian faction, which had been ‘proved’ disloyal, and after the fact he implicated Callisthenes in the plot and executed him.

He had become quite dangerous to be around.

I avoided him. I spent the year riding as far east as Taxila, the ruler of which was already an ally. I was laying in stores for thirty thousand men. I had given up on getting the king home. I was willing to get him into a war.

THIRTY-SIX

W
hen we sat on the stone bench in the Gardens of Midas, Aristotle taught us about the shape of the world, and the shape of the universe. He taught us ethics and morals and ideals of rulership, and I dare say he was wrong about a great many things. After all, he was chiefly responsible for Alexander.

I like to think that he did better with me. For one thing, he felt free to correct me more often.

But I am dithering.

One of the things that Aristotle had quite horribly wrong was the geography of the East. And it is odd, when you are a grown man, the commander of armies, the lord of millions, how mistakes learned in your youth continue to shape your thinking, despite some intellectual awareness that all is not quite right. I knew a man once – a Persian slave who was freed in Athens. He had adopted Greek ways – he abjured the worship of Ahuru Mazda, and worshipped Zeus and Apollo. But he always turned to the sun to pray in the morning, regardless of circumstance.

Or put another way, all of us make the peasant signs for luck, for aversion of evil, even long after we accept that they are nothing but superstition.

And who does not remember their first lover with a sudden bolt of lust?

Hah! How would you know? But you will.

The point is, Alexander’s confusion about the shape of the world had profound consequences. And he continued to make strategic decisions based on those confusions, despite a constant stream of scouting reports and intelligence reports provided by trustworthy agents and edited by his staff. He believed that if we crossed the Jaxartes and travelled north, we would come to the Euxine. I knew better – but then I had met Kineas and Philokles, and they had
come
from the Euxine.

Likewise, Alexander believed, when we were relaxing at Persepolis, that Cyrus’s former province of India marked the edge of the world – that beyond the land of elephants and spices lay the ocean, and beyond that the rim of the world.

By the time we crossed the Kush, I knew better, and Craterus knew better, and Ariston certainly knew better. But Alexander either didn’t read our reports, or didn’t understand them – little possibility of that – or didn’t care.

He planned an invasion based on any number of false assumptions. He assumed that India was roughly the size of Bactria, and that it had a finite end – at the ocean.

As was often the case, his views communicated themselves to the army. And he reputedly said – I was not there – that India was the last, because it had been part of Cyrus’s empire, and Alexander felt that if he reconquered all of the mighty Cyrus’s possessions, he would be accepted by the Persians as a legitimate ruler.

And he was right.

We had most of the great nobles of the empire serving in the army by the time we crossed the passes. Alexander reorganised the army
again
at Alexandria-the-Farthest, our base in the endless mountains of Bactria at the head of the Khyber. This time, he put a squadron of Persian noble cavalry with every squadron of Hetaeroi. I got one of these pairs, with Cyrus and his retinue now promoted to command the other – we had been the experiment from the first, which, to be honest, I’d always suspected. I liked Persians – I was used as a test case for everything from acceptable rations (Greeks and Persians won’t always feel the same way about food) to matters of sex and cleanliness.

The Persian cavalry was excellent. Thaïs told me in a letter that Alexander had also recruited thirty thousand Persian and Mede youths as infantry, and they were receiving training. He used the old Kardakes system, and it ran well enough.

Before we departed Alexandria, we received drafts from home – recruits from Macedon and Greek mercenaries, as well as some Lydians and Phrygians. The Macedonians looked outlandish to all of us, in their clean white wool chitons, bare necks (we all wore the local scarves) and wide-eyed innocence – and these were men who had survived to march out to us from Macedon, so they were hardly
new
. By the time we headed south, we had almost sixty thousand men for the invasion of India – but fewer than fifteen thousand of them were Macedonians. We were, to all intents and purposes, a Persian army.

And Alexander was a Persian king, with a court, a harem he never visited, and priests, augurs and other useless mouths I had to feed. He wanted an audience for the conquest of one more province.

But from the height of the main pass into Taxila, any doubts the king may have had about the extent of India were dispelled. Aristotle had insisted that we would see the mighty outer ocean from the height of the Kush. Alexander kept asking men about the ocean – we knew that Scylax, the Greek explorer, had been to India by sea in the time of Marathon, and I had his book, which wasn’t especially useful, but it did name port cities in India.

We looked out from the height of the Khyber Pass and saw – India. Hill country, and folds of hills running away to the south, into a lower range of mountains at the edge of vision far away beyond the vale of the Indus.

Cavalry scouts who had been to Taxila and beyond reported that from the height of the Orminus range – the very limit of the geography of our Persian officers – you could see green fields stretching away south for five hundred stades, at least.

We were invading a country the size of Greece, at the very least, and perhaps the size of Europe. Or Asia.

I gathered the reports, and no one could tell me how big India was. I had one report from a merchant who said that to travel from one side of the country to another took more than a year. If this was true, then India was the size of Asia, and we were doomed to an eternal war.

I remember that I stopped my horse – a handsome Sakje mare that Kineas had given me and I still rode by preference – at the height of the pass. The column had been slowing and stopping all day as men paused to take in the view. I was with Perdiccas’s taxeis.

A familiar voice growled by my left foot.

‘Where’s the fewkin’ ocean, then?’ Amyntas son of Philip, phylarch of the third company of Craterus’s taxeis, was standing looking under his hand at the rolling brown hills of Tiausa.

I looked down. ‘A little farther,’ I said, the eternal staff officer.

Amyntas spat. Looked up. ‘How’s the daughter, then?’ he said.

‘Olympias will be ordained a full priestess at the Great Feast of Artemis,’ I said, and he grinned.

‘Good for her.’ He smiled wickedly. ‘And that nice priest boy?’

‘A stade away. A fine soldier.’

‘He is, at that,’ said the old bastard. ‘I see him all the time. And you, old man?’

‘Amyntas son of Philip, you dare call me old? Weren’t you at Marathon? Still alive?’ I took his hand. ‘And you are older, I think.’

He waved at the hills in the far distance. Men filed past us. And suddenly, he turned and said, ‘He’s fuckin’ insane, ain’t he? I mean, he’ll just march east until we all die – and then he’ll replace us with local sods, right? Am I right?’

Men around us were murmuring.

‘How’s Dion?’ I asked. Then I winced. I’d forgotten.

‘Dead at Arabela. Bloody flux,’ he said. ‘Told you that last year, when you held the sacrifice.’

‘And the young man? Charmides?’ I asked.

‘Dead – can’t exactly remember where. Hey, Red, where’d Charmides go to earth?’ he called out to a phylarch who was resting both hands on his spear and staring out over the earth.

‘After Marakanda?’ The man shrugged. There was a pause, and then he said, ‘I think. Aphrodite’s tits, Amyntas – he died – at . . . ?’

Amyntas shrugged. ‘Boys like him come and go so fast, we don’t bother to learn their names any more. The shit they send us from Pella – Zeus Soter, sir, are they out of men in Macedon?’ He looked at a dozen new recruits filling the two nearest files. They weren’t big men.

‘Antipater’s keeping the best for hisself,’ another man suggested. ‘Sending us thieves and urchins.’

‘I’m no thief!’ a young man protested with some spirit, and Amyntas stepped right up to him. His hand moved as if for a blow, but paused with perfect efficiency to stroke the boy’s cheek as gently as a mother.

‘No,’ he said, laughing. ‘If you were a thief, you’d have a useful skill. As it is, you’re not worth a fuck. And that’s the
literal
truth.’

The boy was shaking.

‘Go easy, soldier. You need him to press his shield into your back when we fight in India.’ I smiled at the new boy.

Amyntas spat. ‘Then I’m fuckin’ dead already, sir.’ But he laughed. ‘I’m the right phylarch, now.’ The senior file leader. The man responsible for the dressing of the battalion, the order of march – a very important man indeed.

‘Congratulations,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘All the people who could do the job better are dead. That don’t say much for me.’

The column had started to move out. Sweating bearers – servants of the common soldiers – were carrying enormous bundles on their backs and heads and heavy forked sticks on their shoulders like yokes. They marched with their masters, in files in between the soldiers’ files.

The bearers picked up their packs, the soldiers took one last gulp of water or wine, and the column began to move.

‘Of the ten men in my file, when we left Macedon, I’m the only one still alive,’ Amyntas said.

Those words stuck with me, all the way down the pass.

The next night, Alexander summoned a council. It was remarkably like the old days – consciously so – and no sooner was I handed a cup of wine than I saw that he was elated, his eyes glittering, his face almost unlined, the energy glowing in his skin.

He embraced me as soon as I had a cup of wine. ‘I have missed you, Ptolemy!’ he said.

An odd remark, if you consider that I briefed him twice a week on matters related to food and logistics – and more often still about geography and intelligence. But it is true, we had had little enough to say to each other as men since before Marakanda.

‘I’m right here,’ I said, or something equally inane – but Alexander, on his way to his next embrace, stopped, and looked back. Perhaps I’d put more emotion into my statement than I meant.

‘You sound bitter, Ptolemy.’ Alexander’s eyes met mine, and they were brimful of power. Not madness. Just will.

I shook my head.

Alexander greeted Perdiccas, Lysimachus, Coenus. But he made a point of coming back and standing by me.

‘Listen, then!’ he said, and the babble of gossip stopped.

It was years since I’d seen him look so well rested – and so happy.