God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (52 page)

I waited a few more breaths, until the main shield line reached the bush, and then I stood up.

I swear that as I stood, the whole Macedonian army rose to their feet. Alexander raised a fist and waved at me, and I raced for Poseidon like a sprinter. A sprinter in greaves and heavy armour.

Polystratus was kind enough to stand at Poseidon’s head and give my butt a push as I climbed on to his broad back. I got up in one go and rode to take my place at the head of my wedge.

Alexander raised his arm. Every man could see him – he was two horse lengths in front, and our whole army took up a little less than six stades.

He pumped his arm. His trumpeter sounded the charge.

And that was the sum total of the commands he gave.

We went up the hill in perfect order. And I don’t use the term ‘perfect’ lightly. Every battle has something I remember – every battle is its own mistress, its own dark partner, its own spectacle. For that battle, it was the moment when we emerged from the brush and started up the hill, and two giants could have drawn a hawser, if one were long enough, taut across the front of the phalanx and touched every man’s chest at the same time.

Just as we crested the low ridge, the flanks began to get a little ahead.

The Thracians were caught flat-footed, spread over two stades of ground, killing the Psiloi they’d caught in no kind of order. A few noble households were all together, shields locked, but most of them were well spread out and unprepared for ten thousand Macedonians to hit them all together.

Just in front of us, the main force of the Psiloi ran past us, eyes wide – registering delight as they crossed the crest and saw the army and the gaps, and men cheered them. Most of the Psiloi had probably never been cheered. Arms reached out in the phalanx and slapped their backs as they ran by, or pressed canteens full of wine on them. We already knew we’d won. And we knew we owed it to them.

I led my squadron of Hetaeroi from the right. The moment I saw the Thracians spread before me like a battle scene on a tapestry, I ordered the charge and we swept forward. Our wedge was unneeded – the wedge is a deep formation for penetrating an infantry block – and instead we passed through the Thracians left like a hot knife through cow’s butter. I doubt that we killed a hundred of them. But Perdiccas and I had the same notion – to get into the entrance to the wooded valley and plug the gap so that the pezhetaeroi could slaughter the Thracians against us, like a hammer against a very small anvil.

We cut our way to the edge of the woods and I wheeled the Hetaeroi right round – try that some time. Great moments in cavalry drill! We got the Hetaeroi around, and formed in shallow blocks – half-files, only four deep. We took up more space that way, and we didn’t need to be eight deep – much less in wedge – to kill Thracians trying to get away.

Then we rode forward slowly, into their rear, killing as we went.

I saw the hypaspitoi slam into a nobleman’s retinue – there was a cloud of dust, as if a giant had thrown a huge clod of earth at the retinue, and then they were gone, and the hypaspitoi went forward
over
them. The Thracians went from hunters to hunted in moments, but there was nowhere to go except back into our spears, and we killed so many of them that when the fight was over – and there’s nothing much to tell about that fight – my hand was
stuck
to my spear shaft, glued with other men’s blood, my hand locked closed from hours of gripping the shaft too hard.

It wasn’t glorious. But it was professional, and in three hours’ work, we’d broken the Thracian alliance at the cost of forty-one soldiers – a dozen cavalrymen from the first part of the charge, and thirty-nine Psiloi, and one – just one – pezhetaeros.

I have no idea how many Thracians we actually killed. I walked over the western end of the field and counted all the dead in one square a stade on a side, and then I measured the battlefield and multiplied by the number in the one square, and got four thousand, two hundred dead Thracians, which seemed high, so I put three thousand five hundred into the Military Journal. See? My handwriting. See the brown smear? I could barely write – and usually we put this sort of info on to wax and let the scribes copy it fair on parchment or papyrus, but that day the scribes were back with the camp and we were too far away to use them.

That evening, I got Alexander’s attention by the simple expedient of pushing into his tent, and asked to take the Hetaeroi back to cover the camp.

He had forgotten. He didn’t have Thaïs waiting for him. He was Achilles, lying by the fire with his loyal myrmidons all around him. Again, he’d led the hypaspists in person, and they lay around him like mastiffs. Was I jealous?

You bet I was. I missed them.

Alexander looked at me. Nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he said. He was going to say something more, and then I think the king took over from the man.

I took half the Prodromoi and all my squadron and rode off at the start of the sunset, and by full dark we were riding into our main camp, which we found terrified but sound. They’d seen some fugitive Thracians and been scouted by a mounted force, so I dismounted my troopers and sent Cleomenes back – alone – to warn Alexander. We spent a bad night on guard duty – two war parties brushed us and we held them.

At first light, the hypaspitoi came, led by Alexander in person. He looked at the signs of fighting and led the Prodromoi out himself, and came back two hours later.

‘They’re still out there,’ he said angrily. I think he felt that after two shattering defeats the Thracians might have the good grace to bend a knee and give in.

I was getting a different picture. What I saw was an enemy so diffuse and ungoverned that we couldn’t ‘beat’ them or intimidate them as a group. In effect, I was beginning to believe that we’d have to defeat every individual Thracian – at least once. Or perhaps just kill every one of them.

The next day, the army was reunited with the camp and we moved out to the north, to the banks of the Danube, where by Alexander’s usual combination of brilliant planning and ferocious good luck, the fleet lay rocking in the rapid current, tied to giant trees along the bank.

In the middle of the wide river, like a small ocean, lay the rocky shores of Pine Island, where eight thousand Thracians waited with their animals and their treasure. Beyond, at the very edge of sight, lay the far shore.

Right at our feet were the palings of the bridge that Darius had built in the years before Marathon, when he took a mighty army on to the steppes, and lost.

With a sinking feeling, I listened to the king and realised that he intended to march on – to take us on to Pine Island, crush the refugee Thracians there and then across the Danube, like Darius.

‘Darius
lost
!’ I found myself pointing out, later that evening.

No one else seemed to care, and a lot of wine was drunk. The appearance of the fleet, thousands of stades from home, was like a miracle, and it, combined with two fine victories, raised Alexander’s spirits to a fever pitch.

He ordered the cavalry to collect every boat and dugout canoe along the banks for two hundred stades, and I spent the next week riding up and down the river, ducking javelins, arrows and thrown rocks. The woods were full of Thracians, and I was in a fight nearly every day – my sword arm was a mass of scars.

The only day I remember was rainy. I was soaked to the skin when I rode back into camp, fifty canoes richer, and I stripped naked because Thaïs had a bath ready for me. She got me into the bath, helped me scrub the pain away and got the rolled linen off my sword arm in the hot water so that the pain was bearable, and then she told me she was pregnant.

I think that was the only time I’d seen her afraid. She was afraid of the pregnancy and afraid, too, of me.

I was delighted. But I remembered what had happened to Nike, and I was . . . afraid. So we had a fight – isn’t that what people do when they are afraid?

And in the midst of that fight – me in a tub of hot water, blood flowing from my arm, Thaïs and her woman trying to bandage me while we shouted at each other – Cleitus came in.

‘The king wishes you to attend him immediately,’ Cleitus said, his face deadpan.

‘Tell him I’m bleeding like a fucking sacrifice and naked as a baby,’ I shot back.

Cleitus shook his head. ‘No, Ptolemy. I will not. Come. Now.’

Things had changed a great deal. There had been a time when no one would have jumped like that for Alexander. We loved him – but we treated him as the first among equals. That was gone, now – even for Cleitus.

I got out of the bath, and Thaïs rubbed the water off me with her own chiton and pulled one of mine over my head. ‘Go,’ she said.

I really loved her. Then more than ever.

Alexander was sitting on a stool in his tent, with a low table made by two raw boards laid across two more stools – iron stools, taken as loot.

‘When I ask for you to come immediately,’ he said, and then he raised his head and saw the blood running down my right arm.

‘I was having my wound dressed, and having a fight with my hetaera, my lord. I apologise for being late.’ I suspect my sarcasm was all too evident.

He looked at me for a long time. His eyes were red, and he hadn’t slept, and Hephaestion looked like a corpse with a skull for a head.

‘I have fifty more canoes, and I lost three men over the last two days.’ I shrugged. ‘Aristotle would reduce this campaign to a mathematical equation. If we kill Thracians at this rate, we’ll still run out of highly trained Hetaeroi before they run out of ignorant savages.’

Alexander drank some wine. ‘You are dismissed,’ he said.

I turned and left the tent. I relate this to show that it was not all wine and roses. Alexander had launched four attacks against Pine Island – you won’t find this in the Military Journal – and been pushed off every time. The last time he’d got ashore in person, certain that his men would walk on water to save him. Instead, he’d almost been overrun, and twenty hypaspitoi had died saving him. Two full files. Dead.

Alexander probably summoned me to order me to lead the next assault. I was mouthy and he dismissed me and summoned Perdiccas, and he went and got wounded in the arm and the hip so that he was out for the rest of the campaign.

The next day it was Cassander’s turn. He went and got knocked unconscious by a blow to the throat that left him unable to speak for days. No great loss.

I brought in more canoes and lost another trooper in the endless fighting, out there in the woods. And I learned from prisoners that the Getae, the largest, fiercest and best-mounted tribe of Thracians – not really Thracians, but a sort of mixed bag of Thracians and Scythians – were present in force on the far bank, with a fortified camp and at least ten thousand horsemen. They were feeding the Thracians on Pine Island.

When I returned, I heard about Cassander, and I went to Alexander’s pavilion and was admitted.

‘I’m sure you have a great deal to tell me, Ptolemy,’ Alexander said bitterly.

I realised that he was drunk. But I told him about the Getae, anyway.

He snorted. ‘Barbarians. They won’t stop me. I’ll have Pine Island, I’ll build a bridge like Darius and we’ll march across.’

‘When do you send Hephaestion?’ I asked. ‘You’ve sent everyone else. When is it his turn to try for a miracle?’

‘You are dismissed. I should never have admitted you,’ Alexander slurred.

‘You’re drunk. That’s not your way, lord. And I’m here to remind you that it is not all arete. You have a kingdom.’ I was walking a sword edge.

He spat and drank again. ‘I am invincible,’ he said.

‘Just such a prophecy that the gods send to drive a man to madness. There’s more ways than one to win a battle.’ I shrugged. ‘We will never storm that island, not with ten thousand canoes.’

He shrugged.

Hephaestion glared at me. ‘I would be proud to lead tomorrow’s assault,’ he said. ‘I’m not afraid of it, like Ptolemy,’ he added.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid.’ I shrugged. ‘Lord, we need another solution. All the good we’ve done with those victories is being frittered away with these little actions.’

Alexander nodded. ‘Begone,’ he said.

So I went.

The next morning, Alexander called all his officers together and outlined his new plan. He was as fresh as a new-caught tuna, and his plan was all daring and no sense. We were going to take the fleet and as many soldiers as could be fitted into the canoes and boats, and we were going across the Danube. His point was that by holding both banks, we would force Pine Island to surrender. They couldn’t feed themselves.

It was a fine plan, except that there were ten thousand Getae on the far bank, just waiting for us. It sounded to me like hubris of the grandest kind.

But – it sounded better than battering Pine Island for another week while we ran out of food.

I spent two days gathering another forty boats. The banks were stripped bare. On a positive note, the Thracians had given up trying to ambush my patrols. Even they couldn’t take any more casualties.

The army was mutinous. It’s hard to believe, now, that Alexander’s armies were ever mutinous. In fact, they often were. He had a way of expecting superhuman effort too often, of making plans and not explaining them, or showing childish displeasure when the troops failed to achieve success against high odds – in fact, he didn’t understand them. When we were at the edge of battle, he understood them, because men at the edge of battle are more alive, more alert, smarter, better men – more like Alexander, in fact.

But the campaign was wearing them out. We’d marched far, and we were at the edge of the world. We were running out of wine and oil, and those were the key supplies for any army of Hellenes. Most of the cavalry and the hypaspists were fighting every day, in scrubby little actions against teenagers – warriors so young we could take no pride in killing them, but their sling stones and arrows hurt us. And the pezhetaeroi were making daily attempts at Pine Island, and failing. Failure is the canker that eats at an army, and two miraculous victories – as good as anything Philip ever won against the Thracians – were immediately offset by the daily defeats at Pine Island, because soldiers are as fickle as whores and twice as costly.