God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (22 page)

Well, well. I’m an old man, and look! I’m maudlin. Cheer up. We’re coming to some good parts, and your pater’s in most of ’em.

We went forward at a trot, in a column of half-squadrons. The earlier shift of ground by the Sacred Band left a broad alley on their left, between their end file leader and the marsh that had been covering their flank. We trotted into the open ground, even as the farm boys to our right died like butchered animals. We could hear them die.

But they didn’t give much more ground than the space left when men fell. That’s what I meant before, when I said that sometimes inexperience is everything. They knew the cavalry was coming, they’d been told to hold for a minute, and as far as they knew, this is what happened when hoplites fought.

In fact, they were up against the worst nightmare in all the world of war, and they were standing their ground. Too stupid to run, really. But stupid or brave or what have you,
they
beat the Sacred Band. What we did was to kill them.

It was like the sort of thing you dream about, when you are thirteen, curling in a tight ball under your blanket trying to keep warm, back smarting from a whipping, and you want to go somewhere else in your head, be someone else, someone brave and noble and incredibly tough, who can never be whipped, never be beaten, never dirty or late for class or threatened with rape. Or at least, I dreamed of such stuff – of riding at the head of my troops, being in the right place at the right time, wheeling my squadrons, charging into the shieldless flank of my enemies and chewing them to red ruin before my invincible spear . . .

Come on, son – don’t you dream of such stuff?

Well, I did. Incessantly.

And here I was.

I raised my spear – someone’s spear . . .

‘Column will form line by wheeling by half-squadrons to the right!’ I roared. Just like that. Made you jump. Hah! I still have the voice.

And they did.

The Sacred Band must have known – right then – that they were dead men.

They got their end files faced my way.

You are too young to have been in a fight – let me tell this my way. Depth is everything, even when the men in the back aren’t fighting. They are your insurance against disaster, their weight at your back steadies you, and their spear-points guarantee that if the man next to you falls, there’s someone to step up into his place.

When we appeared on their flanks, the Sacred Band was fighting thirty-six files wide and eight deep. Chewing their way through three times their number in Macedonian recruits.

Then they faced their flank files. That meant that the whole left end of their formation had no support behind them – all those men turned to face me. Not to mention the miracle of discipline it is to face your flank files while fighting to the front. I had to do it later – several times – and only the best men can.

So immediately, some of the pressure slackened against our infantry. And you must remember – this is a big battle, the line six stades long, with each army almost two
thousand
files of eight to sixteen men wide – and I’m telling you about what was happening in the end forty files. Forty of two thousand – what’s that? One fiftieth, that’s how much of the battlefield I owned. And remember while I tell you this – the other forty-nine fiftieths of the line were also fighting. Somewhere, Philip was stumbling back, cursing, and somewhere else to his left, the foot companions were getting their butts handed to them by a bunch of pompous Athenians – in the middle, Alexander had burst through the back of the wreckage of the allied centre, and somewhere else again, the Theban line infantry was starting to give a little ground to the Macedonians and
none of us
knew that any of these things were happening.

Walk. As soon as my whole line was in motion, Erygius had his trumpeter blow
trot.
I angled my path across the front of the cavalry and raised my spear. I was damned if the Mytileneian veteran was going to lead this charge. This was my charge.

In the cavalry school, when you are a page, the instructors – all men with a lot of fighting behind them – say that the crucial moment in a cavalry charge is when you are five horse lengths from the enemy spear-points. They knew what they were talking about. There is some complex mechanism – the sort of thing Aristotle would have loved to analyse – whereby man and horse make a nested set of decisions. I suspect it is the distance at which the horse can really
see
the spears. The horse has to decide for itself – over, around, through, back. And the rider – at once master and passenger – can convey determination or indecision with the slightest shift of his arse. Horses
know.

I knew the moment I got out in front that the Sacred Band had their spear-points down and we were
not
going over them.

So I turned my horse and raced for the rear corner of their formation, as my charge dissolved behind me.

The companions baulked.

In storybooks, cavalrymen ride infantrymen down – crashing in through their spear-points, hewing to the right and left.

Not in real life. In real life, no horse will go through a formed, unshaken body of men – even if they are armed only with pitchforks or their fists. Daimon is
everything
in a fight between infantry and cavalry. The daimon that motivates men to fight, to stand, to flinch, to run – that daimon.

The Sacred Band were only eight ranks deep, so they had only eight files facing me.

The end two troops were actually well past the end of their line. I raced for them, caught the attention of their phylarchs and started them in a wheel – a broad sweeping wheel into the flank and rear of the Sacred Band.

Some of the men in the rear ranks turned, and some didn’t.

I’m a quick learner. Having halted once to dress my ranks and missed an opportunity, this time I didn’t wait for perfection. As soon as I saw that at least one troop leader had the idea, I led like a Macedonian should.

I set Poseidon’s head at a gap in the enemy ranks where the fourth and fifth men in the rear rank were arguing. The corner of the enemy body was a mess.

This is where horseflesh means a great deal, because Poseidon was smart, strong and well trained. So I let him go. I didn’t aim him – he aimed me.

And then – then, it was just me and the Sacred Band. About eight of them, at the right rear corner of their original formation – meaning that I was facing file closers and right file men, the very best of the best, except for the front rank.

I didn’t think of all that. I don’t think I thought of anything, except that it was good to be me.

Spears came up, but Poseidon had made his call and I made mine. I didn’t have a lance – they were never as popular then as they are now. I had a heavy hunting spear, a longche, which Polystratus had put in my hand, and I threw it. It went somewhere – who can tell in a fight?

I got my sword out
after
I hit their line. Poseidon got a spear in his hindquarters, and I got one right in the gut – a perfect shot, except that my cuirass turned the point and my knees were strong – I rocked, but I didn’t come off, and the point slid over my shoulder and the shaft rang my bell – remember, I had no helmet.

And then my sword was in my hand – a long, heavy kopis. I cut down and back – a school shot, the one you practise endlessly for mounted combat, and for a reason – and caught something. I remember thinking that this wasn’t so bad – that I was doing my duty.

And after that, it was all fighting. Poseidon slowed to a stop, and he reared every time I jerked the reins, but after the first ten heartbeats I couldn’t even back him. I’d made a hole in the corner of their phalanx and now other troopers were pushing into it.

I do remember the first man I know I put down, because he was right under my right foot, trying to throw me from the saddle. There’s a lot of wrestling in phalanx fighting, and his approach was correct – get me on the ground and kill me there. He got his shield shoulder under my right foot and started to lift, and I cut down – once, twice, a desperate third as my balance was going – cut chunks out of his aspis, and the sheer terror of being dismounted enabled me to get him, as the third cut went through shield rim, the visor of his Thracian helmet and in between his eyes, and he died right there. You don’t often see it, but I saw it – saw his shade pass his lips.

Old Heraklitus said it was the best way to go, your soul all fire, in the heat of battle. Compared to rape or torture or cursed sickness or coughing your lungs out – sure. But it was better to be
alive.
Achilles says it – better the slave of a bad master here than king of the dead.

No shit.

He’s the only one I remember. I yelled myself hoarse, probably shouting ‘Herakles!’ over and over, like half the men on that field. The next thing I remember is that the pressure on my knees eased – suddenly there were horsemen all around me, and just a few Thebans between us – and then, before my heart could beat three more times, there were none.

Just like that – a cloud of dust, the stink of death, and they were gone.

In fact, a whole pack of Sacred Banders were still alive and fighting – over by the Macedonian phalanx, where they were safe from the cavalry and we couldn’t tell one man on foot from another. But the
unit
was gone, and the whole flank of the Theban phalanx was open.

We never reformed, and we didn’t really charge again – we went into their flank files in dribs and drabs, a few at a time – in fact, I suspect most men don’t even remember a pause between fighting the Band and fighting the line infantry – but I was isolated at one end of the fight for a long time. Say, fifty heartbeats.

I got twenty men behind me in a small wedge and we rode to the right – our right – and we found another combat in ten horse lengths.

By then, the Theban line must have been coming apart. They were panicked to find us in their rear, and our Macedonian infantry was doing well enough at this end of the line.

I didn’t know anything about it. Where I was, there was the reach of my sword and the impacts of their spears on my chest, my back, my greaves – I must have taken fifty blows, and only two wounds. Even with my head bare. I was lucky – and of course, after the Sacred Band, I was mostly facing men who’d already lost the will to fight.

Polystratus stuck at my bridle hand and like most Thracians, he never relinquished his spear, but stabbed two-handed, holding on to his mount with his knees. He used a heavy spear with an odd chisel point – he could punch it right through a helmet or a breastplate. But mostly, he blocked blows coming up from my bridle side – in fact, he was a constant pressure on my left knee, his horse always there like a companion’s aspis in a phalanx fight.

After some time had passed, we could hear the cheers, and the men under our hooves weren’t making the least pretence of fighting back. But the duty of royal companions doesn’t end with victory – far from it.

The thing for which we train, the reason we’re brutalised as pages and ride all day, every day and hunt animals on horseback . . .

. . . is the pursuit.

Beaten men don’t defend themselves. They are easy to kill. But tomorrow, if you let them rally, they return to being grim-faced hoplites who will gut you if they can. There are a great many myths these days about the superiority of the Macedonian war machine. Perhaps. We had some advantages, some tactics, some technical knowledge and lots of good leadership.

But one thing Philip taught Macedon was to
pursue
ruthlessly. When Philip lost, his beaten troops usually slipped away covered by his cavalry, and when he won – well, men who faced him lost and usually died. They didn’t come back to fight again.

Pursuit is an art within the art of war – a cruel, inhumane, brutal art. It requires high conditioning and discipline, because all a warrior wants when he’s won a victory is to
stop.
And that’s true of every man on the field. The daimon can handle only so much danger, so many brushes with death, so many parries and so many killings. The fatigue of combat is such that most men are exhausted after just a hundred heartbeats of close fighting. Or standing under a shower of sling stone, unable to reply – men are exhausted. Fear, fatigue and pain are all somehow the same thing after the first seconds of a fight. The better-conditioned man lasts longer and is braver. And so on.

Philip trained us to be ready to go on after the fight was over. It was our main duty, in many ways. Alexander had been positioned behind the centre – with all the companions – not to win the battle with a lightning strike into the enemy centre, but to exploit the victory that Philip thought he’d win on foot. That was his plan.

Now that the Thebans were breaking, it was my duty to harry them to death.

I could scarcely lift my arms, and keeping my back straight to ride was beyond me – but I found one of the troop trumpeters and started sounding the rally, and before I could drain my canteen I had twenty files of cavalry at my back.

Erygius was there. He gave me a big smile, smacked my back. ‘You’re not bad!’ he said.

That made me blush.

‘We need to get into the rout and crush them,’ I said.

The veteran nodded. He shaded his eyes – did his trick of climbing a little higher on his horse and kneeling on his back. ‘Hard to tell – the Kerata Pass must be west.’ He waved towards what had been the centre of their army. ‘Where Alexander charged. No point in carving these fools up – they’re already trapped against the hills.’

Mostly, we had Boeotian dust and sunlight, and if it hadn’t been for dead trees at the edge of the marsh, I’d have been lost.

‘Let’s head west,’ I said.

He nodded.

Our horses were tired, but we keep our animals in top shape – by riding far and fast every day – and we swept across the back of the allied position, killing or scattering any opposition. Twice we turned to the south, on to rising ground – our objective was to block the Kerata Pass, not to fight every Theban soldier.

But far short of the foot of the pass, we found the rout, and then we became killers. The Thebans were utterly broken, and the Athenian hoplites weren’t much better, although some of their best men were staying together. We slaughtered the Thebans – there’s no better word for it – and I did so in a haze of fatigue. I was so tired that I didn’t fully recognise that I’d passed from killing helpless Thebans to killing helpless Athenians until Polystratus took my bridle and pulled me up so hard I almost toppled off my mount.