God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  The fourth morning, the sun still hidden in the east. Two hundred pages, a thousand foot soldiers, a hundred of Parmenio’s Thessalian cavalry leading the way and fifty tame Thracians in our rearguard – and we were off. My baggage carts and donkeys occupied about two-thirds of the column and moved slower than beeswax in winter, and everyone found occasion to mention as much to me as we crawled out of the capital and up into the hills.

  The second day out of Pella, Alexander suddenly took all the older companions – except me – and headed off north and west. Cleitus cantered up to me where I was helping get a cart repaired – a broken wheel, the hub was rotten, and I’d bought the damned thing . . .

  ‘The prince says it will be winter before your carts get to the Thracians!’ he said.

  What could I say? I’d been swindled in every direction. I had the worst donkeys in the market and I had apparently bought every old cart in Pella.

  But Alexander rode off with Laodon and all the older pages to win glory, and left me with a thousand foot soldiers and the carts. In command.

  I chose a campsite on the river – with water, firewood, forage and an easy defence. And when daybreak came, it was pouring with rain and I stayed in camp. I surveyed every cart, declared half a dozen unfit and sent Polystratus to get more from the local farms. Our estates were within half a day’s ride.

  Then I took Myndas aside. ‘You let me buy those carts,’ I said.

  He stared at the ground.

  So I punched him in the head. ‘How much did they pay you, you fuck?’ I said.

  He curled into a ball and waited to be hit again. But it was obvious to me that the military contractors had paid off my slave to give me crap.

  I found a dozen footsloggers who knew which end of a spokeshave was which, and put them to fixing carts. I had the rest – a thousand of them – cut wood for fires. The rain was as heavy and cold as Tartarus, and we needed those fires. Then I had them cut spruce boughs for bedding. The officers backed me. I had the feeling I was in command exactly as long as I continued to give orders that they liked, but I didn’t get hubris from a few successes because I was still so angry about the carts.

  Just at nightfall, Polystratus came in with eight light carts drawn by mules. He had another twenty mules – all the stock from one of my pater’s breeding operations. So the next morning, still wet, by the light of roaring fires, I put donkeys in the shafts of every cart. I gave the useless donkeys to the farmer whose fields we’d wrecked by camping there and we were away, moving almost twice as fast as we’d moved the day before.

  One of the officers who was supposed to be ‘under’ me was Gordias, a mercenary from Ephesus. I’d never met him until we marched – now he rode with me. We were crossing flat ground, just short of the foothills of Paeonia, and he rode along, making jokes and observations, and I felt pretty competent.

  ‘You read Xenophon, lord?’ he asked me, out of nowhere.

  ‘The March to the Sea? Of course. And On Hunting, and The Cavalry Commander.’ I ran through all the titles I’d read.

  ‘Ever formed a box with infantry?’ he asked.

  I had to laugh. ‘Gordias, when I ordered your phalangites to cut firewood yesterday, it was the first order I’ve ever given to grown men.’

  He nodded. ‘You’re doing all right. Do more. Let’s drill a little – can’t hurt, and in bad weather, it’s best to keep the lads too busy and tired to think. Let’s form the box around your baggage and see how we do.’

  So we did. And we didn’t do very well.

  Not my fault. Nothing to do with me. But I felt their failure in my bones. They were not a regular taxeis, but a bundle of recruits with some veteran mercenaries with recent land-grants mixed in. The veterans hadn’t taken charge yet, but were still living their own way and ignoring the useless yokels they had as file partners, and the useless yokels were still too scared of the fire-eaters to ask them for help.

  They’d never formed a hollow square as a group – the recruits had done it some time or other, and the veterans a hundred times, but never together. The first time, the left files folded in too fast and the front files formed the front face and walked off, leaving the rest of the box to form without them.

  Halt, reform.

  The second time, the rear face of the hollow square was left behind by the rest of us. And the baggage contrived to plug the road, so that reforming took an hour.

  Halt, reform, lunch. Rain.

  After lunch, we got the hollow square formed – pretty much by having every officer mount up, ride around and push groups of men, and sometimes individuals, into the spot where they had to go. For almost an hour, we marched across northern Macedon in a hollow square, with our baggage protected, and then the whole thing started to shred like a reed roof in a high wind – the left face of the square ran into a marsh and the right face just kept going.

  I couldn’t believe how fast we fell apart.

  And then I realised that the sun was dipping and I hadn’t chosen a camp.

  Zeus! So much to remember. Luckily, Polystratus had taken a dozen Thracians and gone off on his own and found a campsite.

  We got our tents up before last light, and fires lit, with four hundred men up on the hillsides gathering wood and another two hundred standing to, ready to cover them. The men were wet and tired and angry, and I heard a lot about myself I didn’t want to hear. Two days of cold rain would make the Myrmidons mutinous.

  But when the fires were lit and roaring, when I had wine served out from the carts, when the woodpiles were as tall as houses – well, my popularity increased. The wine wasn’t very good, but in a cold rain on a windswept night, it was delicious. I’d been suckered on the wine, too.

  Our tents weren’t much – just a wedge of linen, no front or back. They kept the water off your face, and we put four men in each – and no tents for slaves or shield-bearers. They were just wet. The footsloggers weren’t much better, and the younger pages – I’d been left with all the babies – were soaked to the skin and didn’t have the experience to stay warm or dry.

  I was up all night.

  The next day was the third day of hard rain, and we marched anyway – lighter and faster yet. More wheels had been built during the night – Gordias kept his wheelwrights at it, I guess. Anyway, now we had spare wheels in one cart, and the wheelwrights, instead of marching with their units, stayed with the carts, so that as soon as a tyre came loose or an axle cracked, we pulled that cart out of the line, surrounded it with Thracian auxiliaries and repaired it from spares while the rest of the column marched on.

  We made excellent time that day – gravel roads, better carts, and we were already better at marching. Polystratus found a camp, and we were almost in the highlands. The rain let up for a few hours, and the tents went up on dryish ground – I put half the army out to cut pine boughs and gather last year’s ferns and any other bedding they could find, and I strung the pages across the hillsides as guards.

  I had halted well before dark, having learned my lesson the night before. Besides, I was tired myself.

  Gordias was so useful I began to suspect that my pater had sent him to watch me. Polystratus, too – he reminded me of things every minute, like a wife. But I was getting it done – I could see beef being butchered in the army’s central area, and the cooks collecting the beef in their kettles, and already I could see local farmers coming into the camp with produce to sell, which we’d missed the night before by making camp too late. It was all running well, and as I watched, the first fire leaped into being in the cooking area of camp, and there were lines of men carrying wood and bedding down the hillsides . . .

  Down the valley ahead of us, more fires leaped into being, and they weren’t ours.

  I had to assume that was Alexander and the pages and Thessalians. But at the same time, I’d be a fool not to act as if those fires were enemies’.

  The headman of the Thracians was called Alcus. That means something like ‘Butthead’ in Thracian. But A
lcus and Polystratus got along well enough. I sent Polystratus for him, and after a delay that seemed eternal, he rode up and I showed him the fires to the north and west.

  He nodded, tugged his beard, looked at Polystratus.

  ‘You want us to go and look,’ he said finally.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think you are the best suited for it, you know this country. Besides . . .’

  Gordias put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t explain,’ he whispered. ‘Just tell them what to do.’

  Sigh. So much to learn!

  ‘Go any way you think best, but tell me who set those fires,’ I ordered.

  Alcus pursed his lips, blew out a little puff and pulled his elaborately patterned cloak tighter around his shoulders. ‘Boys won’t be happy,’ he said.

  I was freezing cold, I hadn’t slept in two days and I was scared spitless that I’d run into a Thracian army.

  ‘Fuck that,’ I snapped. ‘Get your arse down the valley and get me a report.’

  The Thracian officer looked at me for a few heartbeats, spat carefully – not a gesture of contempt, more like contemplation – and said, ‘Yes, lord,’ in a way that might have been taken for an insult.

  When he was gone, Gordias laughed. ‘Not bad, lord,’ he said. ‘A little temper goes a long way, as long as you control it and it doesn’t control you.’

  The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that Pater had hired this man as a military tutor. I never again ran across a mercenary so interested in teaching a kid.

  An hour passed in a few heartbeats. In that time, I had to decide whether or not to keep the firewood and bedding collection going, or to call all the work parties in. If it turned out to be the prince up the valley, I’d look like a fool, and as the rain had started again, my men would have a miserable night. On the other hand, if five thousand Thracians were sneaking along the hillsides towards me, I’d lose my whole command when they swept us away in one attack – I had fewer than fifty men on guard in camp, and nothing else except the pages, and most of them were unblooded teenagers.

  Command is glorious. I thought some hard thoughts about my prince, I can tell you.

  I decided to keep my work parties at it. I sent Gordias to keep them going as fast as he could. In fact, he withdrew a third of the men and put them under arms.

  I took the pages, spread them across the hillsides in a skirmish line facing north, and started probing.

  It was a standard hunting formation, and I told every boy that I didn’t want them to fight, just to report if they saw Thracians, and then we were moving. It was last light, the sun was far off in the heavy clouds, and if we’d been in the bottom of the valley it would already have been night. It was horrible weather, too – sheets of rain. Our cloaks were soaked and sat on our shoulders like blankets of ice.

  But the pages were trained hard, and now it paid off. We crossed a ravine in pretty good order – I remember being proud of them – and then the lightning started, and by the light of it – the Thunderer was throwing his bolts about pretty freely – we moved across the swollen watercourse at the bottom of the ravine and up the other side.

  I found a trail running right along the top of the ridge. Not unexpected – if you spend enough time in the wild you get a sense for where animals and men like to walk. Trails are hard to find in the rain, but this one had some old stones along the north side, as if there had once been a wall.

  Half a dozen pages huddled in behind me. The trail was so much easier than the hillside – it was natural enough.

  There was a long peal of thunder, a brilliant double strike of Zeus’s heavy spear, and I was in the midst of fifty Thracians. They were all in a muddle, gathered around something on the trail.

  A bearded man in a zigzag-decorated cloak had his helmet off. He looked at me in another lightning flash.

  Athena inspired me.

  I know a few words of Thracian.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ I bellowed over the rain. It’s something you say to slaves quite a bit.

  That puzzled them.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here!’ I bellowed again. And then I turned my horse and rode away, waiting for the feel of a javelin between my shoulder blades. I got my horse around, got back to the lip of the ravine, and my half-dozen pages were right on my heels – I prayed to Hermes that the Thracians hadn’t seen what a beardless lot they were. We slid down the ravine and our horses got us up the other side – it was full dark now, and in dark and rain your horse is pretty much your only hope to get anywhere.

  Below me on the hillside, I heard the unmistakable sound of iron ringing on iron.

  The closest page was Cleomenes, no longer quite a child. I grabbed him by the hair, got his ear close to my head – the thunder was deafening, or so I remember it – and ordered him to get back to camp and tell Gordias to stand to.

  ‘You know where camp is?’ I yelled.

  He pointed the right way.

  I let him go.

  I rode off down the hillside, trusting to Poseidon to get me to the fighting. He picked his way, and I had to take deep breaths and wait. Patience has never been my strongest virtue. It seemed to take an hour to go half a stade, despite the fact that we were going down the hillside and that it was almost clear.

  After some minutes, I was suddenly flat on my back – cold water running down my breastplate and under my back. I had thought I was wet – now I was in a stream or a rivulet and I was colder and wetter and everything hurt.

  We’d gone over a log and Poseidon had missed the fact that there was a ravine on the other side of the log. By the will of Ares, he didn’t break a leg, but it took me another cold, wet, dark eternity to find him and get him on his feet – eyes rolling in the lightning flashes, utterly panicked.

  Down again, now with me walking in front of him, holding the reins. There hadn’t been fighting in . . . well, I’d lost track of time, and was worried I’d been unconscious when I was thrown.

  So much to worry about!

  Down and down. And then . . .

  The first Thracian I found was a horn-blower – he had the horn at his lips, the lightning flashed and I put my spear through him. The next flash showed scarlet leaking past his lips – he coughed. And died.

  I crouched. I couldn’t hear a thing, and I couldn’t see anything, either. But that man I’d killed – I was queasy with it, but too busy to throw up – he’d been ready to blow a horn call. An attack?

  They must be close around me.

  So I froze, moved carefully to a big tree, stood with my hand over Poseidon’s mouth.

  A long time passed. As the lightning played around us, I began to see them. I counted five men around me. But there had to be more – there may have been a thousand in the lightning-lit forest, with huge old trees that could hide an elephant.

  Time in a crisis passes in its own way. You think of the most incongruous things. I remember thinking of kissing my farm girl at the Gardens of Midas. Her lips had a certain firmness that defined good kissing to me then – and now, for that matter. And I remember thinking that Philotas owed me a fair amount of money from knucklebones and would be delighted if I died here.

  I also thought how many things I’d done wrong, including . . . well, everything. I was alone on the hillside with a bunch of Thracians and not in my camp with my army, for example.

  I can’t even guess how long we were all there, and then the lightning storm began to pass over the ridge and the sound and intensity seemed to go with it. I think – it seems to me, without hubris – that we were in the very presence of the gods, because the air around me seemed charged with portent, and the noise and light were mind-numbing. When they went away, it was merely dark and cold – and I hadn’t really been cold for all the time the lightning played.

  And suddenly it was dark.

  I curled up against Poseidon. He was warm. Actually, he was cold, but he kept me warm.

  I remained as still as I could.

&n
bsp; Time passed.

  Then I heard them. Two men were talking. They were very close indeed – maybe two or three big trees away, except that in the darkness, such things can be deceptive.

  I could hear them talking, but I couldn’t understand even a single word.

  Mutter mutter mutter.

  Mutter.

  Mutter mutter.

  Growl. Mutter.

  And then that stopped, too.

  My hand was clamped so hard over Poseidon’s head that my wrist hurt.

  I was ashamed of myself, afraid and I needed to piss.

  Time marched on, one heavy heartbeat at a time.

  I convinced myself that I had to move.

  Of all the concerns on my shoulders, it was having to piss that made me move. Let that be a lesson to you. I looked and looked at where I’d heard the voices, and then I had the discipline to turn a circle.

  And then the rain came. I’d thought it was raining before, but this was like a wall of water.

  A wall of noise, too.

  I took Poseidon by the halter and I moved. We stepped on branches and we slipped in mud, but I kept going. And by luck, or the will of the gods, in a few moments I caught a glimpse of my own fires – two stades away across open ground. I was right at the edge of the trees on the hillside.

  I mounted before I thought it out, and Poseidon was away – stumbling, because although I didn’t know it until morning, he had a strain from the cold and rain and the fall. He wasn’t fast. And no sooner were we moving than a javelin struck me square in the back.

  That’s why rich kids like me wore bronze. But it scared me and knocked the wind out of me. And when I reined in for the sentry line, I was shaking like a leaf.

  One of the footsloggers materialised under Poseidon’s chest, his spear at my throat. But before he could challenge me, he knew me.

  ‘Lord!’ he said. ‘We thought you were lost!’

  I rode into camp. Half the men were standing to in wet clumps with their sarissas in their hands. The rest were huddled around fires – enormous fires. The tents had mostly blown down.