God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  Parmenio agreed to all of it with a good grace.

  ‘You are the king, after all,’ he said.

  But an hour later, in the command tent, I heard him talking to many of his older officers. Amyntas made a comment I didn’t hear.

  Parmenio sneered. ‘The boy is running off with his lover to play war.’ He laughed.

  All the old men in the tent laughed with him. And Philotas spoke up. ‘How much longer do we have to put up with this?’ he asked.

  Parmenio laughed again. ‘As long as it takes,’ he said.

  We rode away with the feeling we were going on vacation.

  Alexander rode ahead with his somatophylakes, and we enjoyed the ancient countryside and the monuments. While the Aegema moved into the prepared camp at Elaious, Alexander went and sacrificed to the hero Protesilaeius, reputed to be the first Greek ashore in the Trojan War, and the first to die.

  Our squadron of warships arrived on time, and we crossed without opposition, and all the word from the northern crossing was that they were crossing well and on time. Alexander stood on the stern of our trireme and sacrificed a bull in the midst of the Hellespont – no mean feat of logistics and sheer nerve, let me tell you – and then poured a libation of fine wine from a golden goblet and threw the goblet into the water in conscious emulation of Xerxes. And the next day, when the army was ashore, he went off to Troy with his bodyguard and no one else, and he and Hephaestion sacrificed at the tombs of Achilles and Patroclus. It was a massive and expensive sacrifice. Since I wrote the Military Journal, I knew we couldn’t afford to do this. We didn’t have the funds to pay the troops. Now, Macedonian troops are used to being in arrears, but to launch an invasion of the mightiest empire in the history of the world with an empty treasury argues – well, hubris is not the least of it.

  At the Temple of Athena in Troy – reputed to be the field temple that the Greeks set up inside their siege lines – Alexander dedicated his splendid silver and gold armour to the goddess, and left it hanging on the portico. But he took the armour of Achilles – ancient bronze nearly green with age, with patches of heavy gold plate over parts of it.

  It was an ancient piece, that breastplate – magnificently made. And it fitted Alexander perfectly. If this was done to impress the army, it did so very well indeed. Soldiers are cynical bastards, but they love a good omen. That the armour of Achilles fitted the king who called himself Achilles seemed to please every man.

  And this was what Parmenio didn’t understand. It’s funny – he had a far better understanding of the rank and file than Alexander ever did, but he had no sense of drama. Alexander was like a god. Parmenio was a good general.

  Alexander wore the armour every day. It was odd to see him in armour covered in verdigris, but he made it look magnificent. He wore it under a leopard-skin cloak, with a gold helmet that sported the wings of a white bird set in gold on either side of his head.

  That evening, he and Hephaestion ran a race around the tombs of the two great heroes. I think it had been years since Alexander ran in public, against a real opponent – and surprising as this may seem, Hephaestion never gave an inch in competition with Alexander. They raced like Olympians, and both of them flew – by the gods, they were magnificent. The Aegema watched them and applauded, and rumours of divine favour and even divine status began to sprout wings among the troops. Alexander won by the length of a man’s body over a long course, and afterwards, still naked, he poured another libation to Achilles and grinned like a boy.

  I helped him strigil the dust off, and he kept laughing. ‘Did you see me run?’ he asked me, three times. ‘Wasn’t I magnificent?’

  In fact, he had been superb – but why did he have to ask?

  Thaïs had, by this time, heard the rumour of what Olympias had said to Alexander. He’d told Hephaestion, and Hephaestion told some favourite, and the word got around. It seemed to me hubris, at the time, and perhaps blasphemy – but it also seemed possible, at least at a distance.

  From Troy we marched north to join up with Parmenio. He’d met up with his own garrison forces in Asia, and together we had almost fifty thousand men.

  Memnon, the Greek mercenary, was no longer in command of the Persian forces. Arsites, the satrap of Phrygia, was gathering men, and he placed the brilliant Memnon in a subordinate position.

  But Memnon had already done us serious damage. He’d retaken most of the towns of the Asian Troas – Lampsacus and Parium closed their gates to us. We had less than a month’s cash on hand, and everyone in Asia seemed to know it. Outside Lampsacus, the philosopher Anaximenes told Alexander and Parmenio point blank that he’d only pay a certain amount of a bribe to get us to leave his city alone – he knew that we didn’t have time to lay a siege. And he was right. We took his bribe and marched on, and our army was getting hungry.

  Thaïs went to work. That night, with Anaximenes’s taunts burning in our ears, she sat by lamplight in my pavilion and wrote a dozen letters to leading men in Priapus, the next town on our route. And she sent Strakos and Polystratus with a dozen men.

  It was her first attempt at a clandestine operation, and it ran well enough. They entered the city before the gates closed, and contacted her friends – the men of Alexander’s party, or in one case Leonatus, a Spartan exile and one of her personal friends. But this time, they were not simply gathering information.

  Polystratus took twenty of my grooms and seized a gatehouse.

  Strakos took half a dozen thugs and murdered three men – the leaders of the pro-Persian faction fingered by Leonatus.

  The next day, when Alexander rode at the head of his brilliant escort to the town of Priapus, they opened their gates and welcomed him as their liberator. Alexander’s mood, already dangerously elated, rose to new heights. He said things – wild things – praised the citizens for their ‘Olympian wisdom’ and other flights of fanciful rhetoric that left them unmoved and apprehensive that they had backed the wrong horse. Strakos and Polystratus grinned like fiends.

  Thaïs looked tired and stressed.

  Just north of us, the Persians were gathering an army. Arsites was a capable commander, and he had a good name, and the Phrygians rallied to him in good numbers. Thaïs thought he had thirty-five thousand men, and Parmenio, with lower estimates, still thought he had twenty-five thousand real troops and another four thousand useless levies.

  We were apprehensive. There were rumours that the Persian fleet was at sea, and since the Great King had just reconquered Aegypt and had absolute control of Tyre and Cyprus, too, we expected that he could put three hundred and fifty triremes on the water to our hundred and sixty. And his would have better mariners, or better than all but the contingent from Athens.

  Worse, the money situation was so acute that we had a hard time buying provisions even with the willing help of the people of Priapus. We were down to ten talents of gold.

  Parmenio was suspiciously willing to support the king.

  Alexander had one simple answer – we were going to go along the coast by quick marches and force the satrap to battle and pay the troops and the campaign with the spoils of his camp.

  It was becoming plain that all the Persians had to do to defeat us was refuse the battle.

  What was worse, it began to look to me as if Parmenio was pushing the king to commit to whatever battle was offered. I didn’t like the way it was discussed in the headquarters tent, or the undertone of satisfaction to their predictions of doom.

  And at the public officers’ meetings, to which Alexander was now always invited, Parmenio deferred to the king in everything, allowing him to make the operational decisions and encouraging his wildest flights of fancy. We were meeting on the portico of the Temple of Athena in Priapus when Alexander, looking at a dozen Phrygian cavalry just captured by his Thracians, commented that if these were the vaunted Asians, he could probably rout them with just his bodyguard.

  Parmenio nodded. ‘Lord, you and your friends are all that will be needed – one gallant charge
– like Achilles on the plains of Ilium. Scatter the Medes and win undying glory.’

  Alexander flushed, laughed and tried not to look pleased by the apparent praise.

  I wondered if Parmenio was contemplating using the Persians as a weapon to murder the king.

  SIXTEEN

  Arsites chose to await us at the Granicus river.

  It was like a miracle from the gods. We needed a battle. If the Persians had retreated and refused battle – well, I assume that Alexander would have done something. Or perhaps not – perhaps the gods took a hand, and Arsites, like some actor in a tragedy, had no choice but to stand and fight.

  On the other hand, Alexander, for all his flights of fancy, understood the moral vector of war far better than Parmenio. Arsites was the satrap, and Alexander was marching about Asia in his leopard skin, taking cities and threatening to be taken seriously, and that embarrassed the satrap. He wanted to beat Alexander to win glory with the King of Kings. If you look at it, you can see wheels within wheels – our wheels of intrigue, their wheels of intrigue. The gods must laugh.

  Their army was considerably smaller than ours, but Arsites had some superb cavalry – easily as good as ours, as you will hear. And he had Memnon – probably the best soldier in Asia, and many men alive today say he was the equal of Alexander in brilliance. Luckily for us, Arsites hated Memnon and ignored his advice.

  We had problems of our own.

  We got a late start out of Priapus – because Philotas bickered with Amyntas about the dispositions of the scouts. Six hours after marching out of Priapus, near the end of the marching day, late afternoon and the summer sun boiling us in our breastplates and helmets. I was virtually asleep, letting my new mare pick her way.

  Suddenly there was a disturbance at the head of the column. Paeonian cavalry scouts galloped up, and their dust moved slowly across us after they drew rein. They were so close to me that I could hear them report that the Persian army was on the move and would probably beat us to the Granicus. The elder of the two reported in bad Greek that the ground was favourable to the Persians, with a ridge dominating the river ford. They reported to Amyntas (who in my book should have been as far forward as his courage allowed) and Philotas together.

  I listened with mounting fury as Philotas reacted carefully, after a long conversation with Amyntas about the dispositions of the scouts. They lost minute after minute.

  Alexander was too far to the rear in the column, and the column was too narrow and too long for him to come up. I wasn’t even sure he knew what was happening. He was with the main body of the cavalry – well back from the advance guard. Simply by the luck of rotation, I was at the front with the squadron assigned to provide an armoured fist to support the light-armed scouts.

  It was like physical pain, listening to the cautious ‘professionals’ debate how to move up the narrow road and where to place the army. In short, Philotas conceded immediately that Arsites would gain the Granicus river line, and began to send Amyntas’s scouts to the right and left, looking for ground on which we could camp.

  I knew exactly what Alexander would do – what I would do. I wanted to lunge for the river and beat Arsites there. I hadn’t seen the crossing, but it was not high water at any of the other streams we’d crossed – and I assumed that we would be able either to get there first, or fight our way across in the face of their vanguard before their main army came up.

  Before you consider mocking me – keep in mind that our sense of superiority was our main weapon. Still is.

  And Philotas and Amyntas were frittering it away.

  I turned to Polystratus after fifteen minutes. ‘Get Alexander,’ I said. ‘Tell him he is needed here.’

  Polystratus nodded, dismounted and ran off down the column. He was smart – a man can run where a horse cannot walk.

  And then I sat and fumed. My nerves were transmitted to my horse, who became skittish and started nipping the other horses. I wasn’t on Poseidon – I was on Penelope, my new riding mare, and she had a temper as bad as Medea’s, and Polystratus said she should have been called Medusa. Ajax was home on my farms, helping to make little horses.

  Philotas turned and glared at me. ‘Can’t control your horse, Ptolemy?’ he asked.

  ‘Like me, she’s eager to be moving forward,’ I said. See – not so bad. A gentle comment.

  His face grew red. ‘You’re as bad as the king,’ he shot back. ‘You cannot charge everything. Stopping to think is an important part of warfare. Arsites already has the good ground.’

  I shrugged. I may have made a derisive noise.

  Philotas was turning away, and now he whirled back, pulling his horse by the bit in a rather brutish manner. ‘What was that, sir?’ he asked.

  I shrugged again. ‘Whatever you like. My horse may have farted.’

  The men around me chuckled. The men around Philotas grew as red as he.

  ‘If you have a comment to make, make it,’ he said.

  ‘Very well, since you invite it,’ I answered. ‘If Arsites is moving forward – let’s beat him to the good ground. If we lose the race – let’s take it from him.’ I looked around. ‘That’s what we call the “Macedonian Way”.’

  I got approving grunts and a lot of nods.

  Philotas was so red I was wondering if he’d turn purple.

  Amyntas spat. ‘That’s why you puppies can’t be trusted to command,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ I nodded, ‘I’m not very good at caution,’ I said. And after a two-beat pause, I said, ‘But I’m quite good at fighting. So I don’t bother much with caution.’

  ‘One more word and I will send you to the rear,’ Philotas spat.

  Polystratus appeared at my knee. ‘He’s right behind me,’ he said.

  So I held my tongue.

  Alexander came up with Parmenio at his elbow – but only because of the press on the road, not because they were together.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ Parmenio demanded.

  ‘Ptolemy is an insolent puppy,’ Philotas said.

  ‘Not pertinent to the tactical problem,’ I said. ‘Philotas is a cautious old woman who is sacrificing our needs to his pride.’

  Parmenio glared at me.

  ‘Arsites is moving up to the Granicus river,’ Amyntas put in. ‘We’re seeing to our dispositions and looking for a campsite.’

  ‘We could beat him to the river,’ I put in. Yes – I was a very junior officer. But I was also an important nobleman and one of the king’s friends. In Macedon, that made me the equal of any man there. ‘Either we win the race and get some Hetaeroi across, or we lose the race and we punch across and take the high ground.’

  Parmenio frowned. ‘What high ground?’

  Philotas shrugged.

  Amyntas pointed at the two scouts. ‘They say there’s a steep ridge behind the ford, with a broad top.’

  In fact, they’d said that and I’d heard it, but as I suspected, Philotas had missed it.

  Alexander got that look – the look that said he was thinking it out. ‘How high is the ridge?’

  ‘Have you seen it for yourself?’ Parmenio demanded.

  ‘No, they’ve sat here talking about it,’ I said.

  Philotas gave me a look of pure hate.

  Alexander looked around. ‘Give me the Paeonians, Ptolemy’s squadron and . . . the Thracians. I’ll see what can be done.’

  Parmenio shook his head. ‘No . . .’ he began. And then he froze. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Philotas looked as if he was going to choke.

  Parmenio managed a small smile. ‘At your command, lord.’

  ‘Send me every armoured cavalryman from the main body,’ Alexander said. While he was talking, I changed to Poseidon. Alexander looked around and grinned. ‘Right – forward.’

  And we were off.

  It was quite late – and Philotas had wasted at least a quarter of an hour dithering. Now we pelted down the road with a few hundred cavalrymen. Immediately – in the way of men everywhere –
I began to question my own intentions. Parmenio’s about-face was suspicious. Was he realising who was in command? Or just betting that we’d go and get killed?

  Too late to worry.

  We headed almost due south along the coast, and the plain was opening before us. In the distance, less than twenty-five stades away to the south, we could see a great lake spread in rippling fire from the setting sun, and to the north lay the Propontis, the great inland sea between the Euxine and the Mediterranean.

  As we came down a low ridge, I could see the Persians moving along the road to the east – and they were already leaving the road and expanding into a battle line, and doing it pretty well, I thought. I could see six . . . seven . . . eight cavalry regiments, their spear-points flickering like flame. Sixteen thousand cavalry – maybe more.

  But their attempt to fan out from the road was slowed by ploughed fields. And while I could see horsemen along the river, there weren’t so many.

  Just behind their cavalry was a phalanx. It didn’t look any smaller than ours, and it was already in formation.

  Five stades away.

  It was pretty clear to me that our three hundred cavalry, however bold, were too little and too late. Too late by about fifteen minutes.

  The ridge the Thracians had described was lower – much lower – than I had imagined. But I could see that determined infantry atop that ridge would close the road, and that the lake to the south would cover the flank of the Persian army, meaning that their thirty thousand men would fill the field from the sea to the lake.

  And if I could see it, Alexander was doubtless ahead of me.