Virtues of War (27 page)

Philotas duels Ariobates on Tigranes' left; he has slipped his rival's rush and aims a blow upon Tigranes. By now, Companions and Kinsmen have flung themselves into such a concentration on the site that the object of this tumult—Darius himself—has been all but forgotten in the frenzy.

Seeking him, I am carried apart from Tigranes. We battle through rank after rank. Cleitus shouts, pointing ahead. We can see Darius now. The king is less than fifty feet away, atop his chariot, wielding the
askara
, the two-handed lance, with furious valor against troopers of our Bottiaean squadron, the rightmost as we rushed, who have broken through the crush somehow and now hurl their horses and themselves upon the royal car. The thought that another will slay my rival nearly severs me from my reason. Only three ranks of enemy horsemen separate us from the king. I can see Carmanes, captain of the Household Guard, rally a company to break Darius's chariot clear. I drive Bucephalus forward, half-mad with fury and frustration. Suddenly from our rear appears a front of enemy heavy infantry. Patron's mercenaries, whom we ran around in our attack. Some must have slipped clear of our Big Wedge; now here they are. They break through our Bottiaeans. Their armor forms a defensive ring around the king. They will save him. I cry to heaven for wings, for strength, for anything that will get me across this press and onto my foe. My legs are so spent, I feel nothing below the waist. I drive again into the ruck. The ranks of defenders must buckle as their numbers drop and they see their king marshaling for flight. But this knowledge, when it comes, only summons the champions of Persia to more superhuman exertions. At the point of penetration, the defenders redouble their efforts, believing, one must imagine, that every moment they buy with their blood is another to speed their king clear. The foe retreats before us, always in order, always resisting. They are fresh. We are exhausted. Our line has already fought, through eight and ten ranks. Our horses have covered miles since descending to the battleground and have labored in a state of extremity for what feels like hours. I clash with a champion in iron mail, a left-hander, two ranks from the king. His lance misses the socket of my right arm by a whisker. I drive my saber into his gorge, thrusting with all my strength to propel the man from my path, but even in death, this knight interposes his person between me and his king; he pitches forward, onto my blade, to check me, by the weight of his failing flesh, from penetrating to Darius. By now I have lost all sensation in both arms. I am deaf from the din; blood frenzy makes my eyesight pulse.

I see the mercenary Patron, rallying his cohort around Darius. Carmanes' Household Guard clears a lane of flight. Their voices cry, but no sound carries; their whips crack, but no sensation reaches my ears. It is a nightmare. I am mired in tar. A double rank of defenders still shields the king; we hurl ourselves on them—Cleitus and I and the knights of the Royal Squadron—but our blows fall as if dealt underwater. I can't feel my hands. My saber lifts like a ton of lead.

“He flies!” Philotas bawls. Down the line, a hundred Macedonian throats take up the cry.

The fight goes on another two hours. My squadrons cannot break away to pursue Darius, so desperate is the struggle on both our wings, Parmenio's and Craterus's divisions on the left, Menidas's, Aretes', Cleander's, and Ariston's on the right, to whom succor must be brought at all costs, and in that interval I myself am nearly slain half a dozen times, while scores of my commanders—Hephaestion speared through the arm; Telamon shot through both legs; Craterus, Coenus, Perdiccas, and Menidas, riddled, all four, with arrow shafts—suffer desperate wounds. Of two thousand prime battle mounts, the Companions lose half to wounds or exhaustion, and the mercenaries and allies even more.

By nightfall I am on my ninth horse of the day, twenty miles southeast of the battlefield. The pursuit party is half the Royal Squadron, two quarter squadrons of Aretes' Lancers, and a patched troop of Ariston's Paeonians.

Darius has not fled south to his treasure cities of Babylon or Susa, as one might expect (apparently he has abandoned hope of holding them) but south and east to his camp at Arbela. He reaches this about midnight, we learn later from captives, leaving the bridge intact so his army in flight can cross, while he and his party flee east across the mountains, along the caravan route to Media. I chase his track till dark, rest horses and men till midnight, then press on to Arbela, reaching it next morning. Darius is hours ahead. The highway is an ocean of fugitives. We can't get through.

Aretes, who has wrung a lifetime's glory from this day's strife, reins-in beside me. His mount's flanks are caked solid with alkali; his own face, including his teeth, is black with blood and grime. “Let Darius go, Alexander. He is finished. He will never raise an army again.”

I will hear no call for cessation. We press on over the foothills. Tens of thousands flee before us; we can see parties stumbling into blind canyons, guideless as we are. One of Aretes' captains spies a muleteer on a track apart from the others. We dragoon him. I will make him a rich man, I swear, if he guides us across these mountains, or cut his throat if he plays us false.

For two hours our pursuit party snakes along a trace no broader than the stream of an ox's piss. Stone chasms yawn. Each time Cleitus applies his quirt to our guide's back, claiming the track smells, the man takes his oath by all of heaven's sages. “The trail is good, lord! Good!” He leads us up a final ascent, vowing that we'll see from the summit the caravan road by which Darius has fled. But when we come off the last pitch, the trace terminates in a blind spur.

The muleteer bolts. Our fellows run him down. The man is brought before me. I am not angry; I admire his resource and his guts. “You have preserved your king's life,” I tell him, “but forfeited your own.”

Trekking back, my mates give themselves over to elation. Nothing stands between us and Babylon and Susa. We shall pluck brides from Asia's harems and dine on plates of gold!

“The empire is yours, Alexander. Hail, Lord of Asia!”

My daimon looks on. He knows that with Darius's flight, I have vanquished one adversary, perhaps, only to have two more take his place. First Persia's empire, whose rule now becomes my burden. And my own army, who, fattening on plunder, will dream of ease and comfort and return grudgingly, if at all, to the road to glory.

I am inconsolable. Darius has gotten away again.

B
ook
E
ight

L
OVE FOR
O
NE
'
S
C
OMRADES

T
wenty-
S
even

KITES

B
ABYLON MEANS
“
GATE OF GOD.
”
Its walls are a hundred and fifty feet high and forty miles in circumference, erected, so the story goes, by Nebuchadnezzar himself. The citadel, where the Ishtar Gate ascends above the Euphrates, is five hundred feet tall, of burnt brick and bitumen. The city is sited on a blistering, magnificently ordered plain, whose canals and irrigation works are a wonder of the world, second only to the corps of tax collectors and agricultural administrators under whose supervision the land produces three harvests a year of sesame, millet, barley, wheat, and rye. The plain of Babylon is surely the most manicured tract of dirt on earth. Not a flower blooms that has not been seeded by the hand of man and does not flourish by his care and cultivation. Date palms grow in ordered ranks, in forests as dense as the pine woods of Thrace. These produce timber that will not rot underwater and, from their fruit, a type of beer that tastes pulpy (and so thick with lees, it must be sucked through a straw) but produces a keen and brilliant intoxication that does not leave a headache.

When Cyrus the Great took Babylon over two hundred years ago, he did it by diverting the Euphrates, which flows through the city, and attacking at night along the dry channel.

We have it easier. Before Gaugamela, scouts of our Paeonian Light Horse capture a number of Persians, including an extremely keen young captain named Boas, who speaks Greek and serves as an aide-de-camp to Mazaeus, commander of the Persian right and provincial governor of Babylonia. This excellent young officer has permitted himself to be taken, I am certain, on instructions of his superior. I order him released, to bear this message to Mazaeus: that, although I cannot as a gentleman urge him to betray his king in the coming fight, yet, should the affair turn out in my favor, I shall harbor no ill will to brave foes, but will look with kindness upon him who will accept my friendship. Mazaeus and his young captain fight with exemplary valor at Gaugamela, yet once Darius has fled, all allegiances are off. I send again to Mazaeus, extending my offer of accord. “You will find your answer,” the governor replies, “on the wind.”

When Babylon celebrates, she flies kites. In summer a hot dry wind beats across the plain, in currents that ascend powerfully at known places, such that the walls and irrigation stations fly great rafts of banners, the noble houses are made gay by snapping standards, and each dwelling, however humble, has its wind-borne jack and bunting. The kite masters of Babylon craft their creations of pressed flax dyed to brilliant colors, in every shape conceivable—swallows and butterflies, crickets and ravens, carp and perch—and soar them to unimaginable heights. The loftier a man's station, the grander his kites.

Kites sail in thousands as the army approaches Babylon. Our fellows whoop and cheer; children pave their path with petals and candies. Our host Mazaeus awaits us with his wives and children on a barge in the Royal Canal. A great entertainment has been prepared. For five miles above the town Mazaeus has had the road strewn with palm fronds and, within a mile, with wreaths and garlands. Ecstatic multitudes line the thoroughfares; silver altars burn frankincense in mounds big as handbarrows. Everything is ours. Herds of horses and cattle, cartloads of fragrances and spice; nothing is missing, down to talking crows and tigers in cages.

I have drawn up the army in battle order, to show the populace its new masters. Thessalian horse first, led by the Pharsalian squadron in burnished armor; Agrianes and Macedonian archers next; Balacrus's Thracian darters; then half the allied Greek and mercenary cavalry, Aretes' men, and Menidas's and Ariston's, the Lancers and Mounted Scouts. Those wounded, or who cannot walk or ride, remain in hospital camp north of the city, though I will bring them in as expeditiously as appearances permit. After the Lancers come Hephaestion's Royal Guard, Nicanor's Guards brigades, both in crimson cloaks with regimental sashes; then Cretan archers; allied Greek and mercenary infantry, led by Cleander's vet mercs. Behind these come the siege train and combat engineers, Diades' divisions, flanked by Andromachus's mercenary cavalry, and the other half of the allied Greek horse. The field baggage passes, to show the foe how little we need, and then, in the carriages in which we have captured them, the queen and queen mother of the empire and their retinue; Darius's young son Ochus I have mounted upon my own parade horse, Corona; he rides at my side. The ladies I have screened from sight within their carriages, which bear their royal serpents, fluttering on the air. Behind the baggage train advance in armor, sarissas at the upright, the six regiments of the phalanx, in order as they triumphed at Gaugamela—Coenus's, Perdiccas's, Meleager's, Polyperchon's, Amyntas's (under his brother Simmias), and Craterus's. Last, Sitalces' Thracians; Andromachus's mercenaries; the Greek cavalry under Erigyius; allied cavalry under Coeranus; Odrysians under Agathon; and the Achaean and Peloponnesian infantry under their home commanders.

On the second day I enter the city and sacrifice to Baal, chief deity of Babylonia, with Mazaeus and the Chaldean priests in attendance according to the holy law. Those rites of the ancient religion, which Darius has proscribed, I restore. I command that the Great Temple of Esagila, razed by Xerxes, be rebuilt. I do not permit the ladies of Darius's court to return to their apartments in the city but have them encamped, with the army on the plain of Ashai, east of the city, while I send detachments to occupy the citadels and disarm the royal guard.

On the third morning I enter Babylon to stay. The region that we know today as the province of Mesopotamia of the empire of Persia has been, centuries past, the empires of Chaldea, Assyria, and Babylonia, and the kingdoms of Ur, Sumer, and Akkad. Over these realms have ruled Semiramis, Sargon, Sennacherib, Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, Ashurbanipal. Scyths and Kassites have invaded, and Hittites and Medes and Lydians and Elamites. Cyrus the Great brought these lands under Persian rule two centuries ago, as now we of Macedon and Greece subdue his heirs and make his kingdoms subject to our might.

Where is Darius?

I call a council in the great Banquet Hall. Hephaestion commands our forward intelligence. He presides with his arm cinched in a sling, wounded from a spear thrust at Gaugamela. “Spies and deserters place the king in flight east toward Persepolis, capital of the empire, or north, on the track to Ecbatana in Media.”

The floor of the hall is a vast map of the empire. Hephaestion paces off the march from the site indicating Babylon, in the center, to Susa, east, then on to the other cities, while our generals observe with victors' satisfaction from their places at a great ebony table. We feast on the foe's meat and wine; business is interrupted again and again by toasts and cheers, which I cannot quell and do not wish to. “Both Persepolis and Ecbatana are a month and more of hard trek from here, and both are fronted by rugged, defensible mountains. Reports say Darius has thirty thousand men still with him. We will not overhaul him till midwinter, even if we start today, and this cannot be asked, if you want my opinion, of infantry who have just borne the sternest casualties of the campaign, or of cavalry whose men and horses have suffered even more severely.”

“Besides,” cries Ptolemy, “we have won!”

Perdiccas: “The men need gold—and time to spend it.”

“By Heracles,” adds Cleitus, “so do I!”

A chorus acclaims this.

“Indeed,” I agree, “diversion is the men's due. They have earned it.”

We will winter in Babylon. I need the time, in any event, to refit the army. In addition to severe casualties in men, we have suffered even graver losses in horses—over a thousand highly trained primary mounts and twice that in remounts. It will take months to acquire proper replacement stock and bring them to even minimal serviceability.

Our forces themselves need reconfiguring. The next push will be into the eastern empire. We'll be fighting not on open plains but in deserts, badlands, and mountains. We'll need lighter and faster units and, perhaps, a whole new manner of war.

“Will you hunt Darius this winter?” Parmenio inquires.

There is a difference, I suggest, between pursuit and hot pursuit. The king may flee, but he will not get away. And I indicate, on the mosaic floor, the site of Babylon. “For now, gentlemen, let us set this stable in order.”

We begin.

Our conquests have schooled us in the art of taking over a country. My commanders have learned from Egypt, Palestine, Gaza, and Syria. And the process seems to go smoothly here as well, save one incident, which at the time appears trivial but in retrospect takes on the odor of an ill omen. It has to do with Philotas.

After Gaugamela, I have assigned him to bring to Babylon the spoils of Darius's battlefield suite. This he does, including the horses, chariots, and apparatus used in the celebrated rite called the Procession of the Sun. This practice of the Persian monarchy requires a train of celebrants half a mile long—company upon company of priests and magi, crown-bearers and praise-singers, as well as the entire division of ten thousand Apple Bearers in full armor, with the king at the fore in his Chariot of the Sun.

Philotas gets it into his head to convene a mock procession and march it down the central thoroughfare of Babylon, both to gratify our conquerors' conceit and to show up, for the sport of it, the excess and extravagance of the empire we have overthrown. Philotas does this without informing me, so that I learn of the parade while at work in the palace, only by hearing from the street the barrages of scorn being heaped by our countrymen, and by the rabble of locals lining the Processional Way, upon the captives compelled by their participation in this spectacle to put on a show for their amusement. I stand out onto the gallery with Parmenio, Hephaestion, Craterus, and others, just as Philotas draws the pageant up beneath this stand. “Look here, Alexander!” he crows from horseback. “What do you think of this?”

Among the captives stand the remnants of Darius's royal guard, the Apple Bearers. The deficit of this noble corps, decimated by casualties from Gaugamela and stripped further by those loyal spearmen who have remained with Darius in his flight, has been made up, I note, by thugs and ruffians off the streets. The fabled Chariot of the Sun has had its gold sheathing stripped to the bare frame, while of the emperor's one thousand white stallions, so few remain that the deficiency has been restored by plugs and jades, and even asses. My eye lights upon one captain of the Apple Bearer Guard, a man of about fifty years, with a noble bearing and numerous wounds of battle. The binding of his boot, with splints laced tight to midcalf, is that which a physician applies for a broken lower leg.

“What do I think, Philotas? I think that these are good and worthy men whom you have shamed. And I command you to disband this spectacle at once and present yourself within doors before me.”

This is not, to put it mildly, the response Philotas has expected. I see him flush with outrage; he spurs toward the gallery on which I stand.

“And what do you accomplish by such reprobation, Alexander,” he calls up, loudly enough for all to hear, “save to humiliate other good men, myself not least among them, by whose blood and toil you have reaped these treasures?” A stir of the throng fuels his courage. “Whose side are you on?” he demands of me, leaving off all address of courtesy and respect.

I take one stride toward the platform's edge. “Plead pardon of your king!” Parmenio commands his son, moving instantly to my shoulder. Hephaestion and Craterus hold poised at my side. One glance from me and they will cut Philotas down where he stands.

“Give thanks to heaven,” I tell him, “that you have bled on the field of battle so few days past, or, for such insolence, you would bleed here now.”

Afterward in private, Craterus takes stern issue with me. “What can you have been thinking, Alexander? To humble your commander of Companion Cavalry in public, before the defeated foe? We don't need these Persians' love, but their fear!”

He is right of course. I am chastened.

But in my heart something has changed. I can no longer see the knights of Persia as enemies, nor their commons as chattel to be maltreated and misused.

With Hephaestion I tour the barley fields along the Royal Canal. It is lunchtime and two of Mazaeus's soldiers have snatched up a live goose. A farmer is beating at them with his rake and they are laughing. Our arrival breaks up the fracas. The soldiers point me out to the planter, expecting this to shut him up. But the old man displays no awe for his conqueror. “It's all the same to me,” he declares, “which of you villains seizes my crops and steals my goods. I remain poor either way.”

I am taken by the fellow's boldness and stop to talk. I tell him I intend to maintain order and let him farm in peace. “Yes,” he replies, “but you will take away this land I farm from the Persian prince who owns it now and absentee-farms it, and you will award it to one of your captains or colonels, who will farm it as an absentee in the same way. How has my lot altered? I remain enslaved to the same crop agent in town beneath whose heel I have labored all my life, who will now run the farm for a different faraway prince.” I ask exactly how destitute he is. He ticks it off on his fingers. “For every ten bushels, I furnish four to the king, two to the agent for his own use—otherwise, he will put me off the land—and keep four for myself, of which I donate one to the gods, one to the priests, one to my wife's family, and the last one I bake into bread, if I'm lucky.”

I ask the farmer what he would manage differently if he could. “Give me this land,” he replies, “and let me keep what I grow. And send the agent from town to work for me. I will make that fat bastard sweat!”