God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  And the start of the assault was slowed because Perdiccas’s taxeis was late getting into their assault positions.

  Alexander stood near our bit of parapet, outwardly calm. When he saw Perdiccas’s men cutting across the ‘no man’s land’ between our works and the city wall, he frowned.

  ‘They’re announcing we’re coming,’ he said, and then, I could see, he was clamping down.

  He kept looking up the steep ramp of rubble at the breach, which seemed to tower above us. But the breach seemed empty of men, so our surprise was still intact.

  We were going first, of course. Right up the breach, all the way to the top. In one rush, with no rest and no slacking, in fifty pounds of armour.

  Try it – climbing over pulverised rock in iron-shod sandals going up a forty-five degree slope into fire.

  Their archers took a long time to wake up. That much of the plan worked. And Alexander had fires set – wet grass, brought from the hills to the east – and the smoke covered us for a while, although I, for one, choked on it. I threw up on the ramp. War is glorious.

  So I was well behind Alexander at the top of the wall, but since he’s told me the story a hundred times, I can tell you. He was the first into the city. There was no resistance.

  A dozen archers on the wall shot down into us. Men fell, but not many, and even they were only wounded. It’s awfully hard to kill an armoured man carrying an aspis with a missile from above.

  Alexander ran over the rubble, light-footed as a god, spear at the ready, crested the breach and started down into the town. There appeared to be a row of houses in front of him, so he turned along the alley and ran south, towards the sea, with a dozen men at his heels. About this time I’d made it to the breach, and the pezhetaeroi were coming up the ramp behind us in big numbers, the sprinters already three-quarters of the way to the top.

  Alexander was afire with the thought of being the first into the town – a great honour among Macedonians, and indeed among all Hellenes. I saw his helmet plumes ahead of me, going south, and I pushed through the hypaspitoi to get to him. I wasn’t worried about Memnon’s garrison – more fool I – but about murder. By then, I was convinced that Parmenio meant to kill the king.

  I went south along the alley. I picked up the smell of new masonry – the smell of new-laid mud brick and mortar – as I ran.

  Someone had walled up those houses – perhaps five days before.

  We were in a cul-de-sac, and the whole attack was an ambush.

  I ran as if my legs were powered by ambrosia and the gods were lifting my feet.

  Alexander was standing at the head of the southern end of the alley, staring at a wall of new masonry and sandbags three men high. He only had a dozen men around him.

  ‘Trap!’ I screamed. ‘Run!’

  That got their attention.

  Hephaestion got his aspis up in front of Alexander’s head, and Nearchus put his over the king’s shoulder, and then the first volley of arrows hit – fired point blank from a few horse lengths.

  Men went down. That close, and the Carian and Cretan longbows with their very heavy arrows punched through bronze. I took an arrow two fingers deep into my left shoulder and it stood clear of me like some sort of banner.

  Alexander was hit four times, despite his friends covering him. There were that many arrows, and Memnon had predicted that he would be there. Memnon’s whole plan, in fact, was to kill the king.

  I fell to one knee – I probably screamed. The pain was intense, and the sight of the king battered by arrows broke my heart.

  I won’t soon forget that moment – the taste of vomit in my helmet, the searing pain in my shoulder, the sharp rubble under my knee.

  Alexander stood straight as a blade. ‘Form the synapsismos!’ he called. There were hypaspitoi and pezhetaeroi mixed together in the breach and the alley behind it, but the king’s voice impelled instant obedience, and men formed ranks even as they died in the arrow storm. The closer they formed, the more shields there were to cover them, and the safer they were – but the requirement for discipline was incredible.

  And they rose to it. There must have been a thousand men packed in the trap, and Alexander saved them – most of them.

  ‘Back step!’ he ordered. ‘Shields up!’

  Step by step. I was in the second rank, with the arrow sticking out of my shoulder until Nearchus saw it and pulled it free. The barbs, thanks to Apollo, had caught in the leather lining of my shoulder armour and had not passed my skin.

  Nearchus had a small, very sharp knife inside his thorax – we all did – and he used it to cut my pauldron free of my thorax even as another volley of arrows tore into us, but the gods were with me, or too busy elsewhere to care, and I was not taken.

  I got my aspis on my bleeding shoulder, and the spirit of combat filled me and kept me from fainting, and we backed step by step across the rubble with their arrows pouring in on us and Alexander calling the step like a taxiarch. Step by step.

  It took for ever. I still have dreams about it – the feeling of the rubble under my sandals, the grit inside them and inside my thorax, the feeling of blood and sweat turning cold in the morning air, the pain, and the king’s voice carrying us down the ramp a step at a time.

  Memnon’s archers shot at the king. He was easy to spot, and they showered him with arrows, but the hypaspitoi and a few old sweats from the pezhetaeroi covered him with their shields and died for it. And no chance shaft killed him. He was hit again and again – I saw one shaft hit him square in the helmet crest and stick – and he continued to give orders as if on parade.

  We got down the ramp, and the hypaspitoi gathered around him and carried him away to where his personal physician, Philip of Acarnia, waited with hot tongs and boiling water. Alexander had four wounds – three from arrows and a fourth where a friendly spear-tip had ripped across the back of his neck.

  We all wore scarves – rolled tight and tucked into the top of our thoraces to catch the sweat and to pad the necks of our armour against our skin. When Philip pulled the king’s neckcloth off, an arrowhead fell with a clank to the wood floor of the tent. I saw this with my own eyes.

  Every man present gasped. That arrow had penetrated the cloth of the neck pad, and somehow stopped against the king’s neck. There wasn’t a mark on him.

  His four wounds were less onerous than my one. As soon as Philip had seen to the king, he put me on the table, gave me a leather billet to bite and cauterised my shoulder wound after cleaning it. That made me scream. But he had a light touch with the iron and his slaves were famous throughout the army, and I was on my feet the next day in time to see the King of Macedon send a herald to Memnon requesting permission to retrieve the corpses of our dead.

  It was the only time Alexander ever had to do so, in all his life. In the Hellenic world, it was an admission of defeat – it entitled the other side to set up a trophy of victory. Memnon had beaten us, and worse, he’d killed three hundred veterans in the breach and rumour had it he’d lost just three men in exchange.

  That morning, Parmenio openly proposed that we break the siege and march for Ephesus. ‘We can’t take this town this winter,’ he said. ‘Possibly not ever.’

  He didn’t push it, however. In fact, to me, he sounded as if he was egging the king on, pushing him by teasing him. Perhaps I wronged him, but by then I had ceased to hold any affection for Parmenio.

  The argument in the headquarters tent went on for hours – and was bitterly acrimonious. It was so nasty that it occurred to me that Alexander was king only by virtue of victory. I had never thought it before – but what I heard in that tent convinced me that if the king were to take a major defeat, these bastards would leave him in a moment. I was shocked, for a while.

  The truth was, as usual, that Alexander’s near-inhuman perfection had a flaw. The flaw was that men doubted it, and waited to see him fail. In some perverse way, many men wanted to see him fail. And by the time of the siege of Halicarnassus the strain was beginning
to show. Some of the pezhetaeroi were openly mutinous, being forced to serve past their appointed time. The harvest was in back at Pella, or nearly, and they weren’t home on their farms.

  And the aristocrats were starting to realise that, under Alexander, there would only be war, followed by war. None of the delights of peace – such as plotting the king’s overthrow. They’d realised that he meant what he said – he meant to conquer all of Asia.

  For four hours they yelled at each other, and then Perdiccas went off to set the guards – the two junior regiments of the pezhetaeroi.

  I was not paying very close attention because my shoulder hurt, and I had reached a level of fatigue and injury that left me dull. I just knew that I’d had too much wine, my wound was throbbing, and suddenly most of the officers had left the tent, leaving Alexander and Hephaestion and Parmenio and Philotas.

  Alexander stood with his arms crossed. ‘I’ll stay here all winter if that’s what it takes to take this city,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll burn the cream of your infantry and leave us nothing,’ Parmenio said, mixing his metaphors like mad. ‘Memnon is reading you like a book, boy.’

  ‘You are not welcome to call me boy, Lord Parmenio. Take yourself to bed. You are drunk, sir.’ Alexander spoke carefully. I thought he was a little tipsy himself.

  ‘I may be drunk, but you are young. The first duty of any strategos – never mind the King of Macedon – is to protect his army. To keep it alive. To fight another day. Halicarnassus is not a fair trade for the army your father and I spent twenty years training.’

  Alexander shrugged. ‘Yes it is,’ he said. ‘I’ll do what I can for the pezhetaeroi, but I’ll trade them all for defeating Memnon. There’re more boys in Pella who can carry a sarissa.’

  I would have shut him up if I’d been well. Hephaestion didn’t care – he shared the king’s delusions of grandeur.

  Parmenio turned red.

  Philotas spat. ‘Maybe if you had to train them yourself, you’d take more care with them.’

  Alexander shrugged again. ‘At least I wouldn’t squander them in ambushes,’ he said.

  Philotas reached for his sword, and even though I had no time for him, I managed to pin his arms against his side.

  Alexander looked at him, and at Parmenio. ‘Did your son just reach for a weapon in the royal presence?’ he asked.

  And I shook my head. ‘No, lord. He did not. Nor would I say he did in front of the Assembly.’ Cases of treason and lese-majesty were always tried in front of the Assembly of the freemen of the army.

  Parmenio threw me a glance of thanks.

  I didn’t want his thanks – I wanted the king to stop being an arse.

  Alexander looked through me.

  Parmenio did the right thing, took his son and his Thessalian officers and got out of the tent.

  Alexander watched him go. ‘I didn’t expect you to side with Parmenio,’ he said to me in a chilling voice.

  ‘Lord,’ I said, and I turned on him, ‘I don’t need to protest my loyalty to you, do I? You risk an open breach with Parmenio in the middle of this siege. Is that what you want?’

  ‘Eventually I must clean my house,’ Alexander said.

  I had missed it. He was drunk. He was telling the truth, as men often do, in their cups, but he was drunk.

  ‘Not right now, I think. Not while we are in the face of the enemy – a very competent enemy.’ Marsyas said that – bless him. The only courtier with enough balls to agree with me in the face of the king’s drunkenness.

  ‘Parmenio cannot be trusted,’ Hephaestion said.

  I nodded, glad that I, at least, was sober. ‘Parmenio cannot be trusted,’ I agreed. ‘He may even try to kill the king,’ I added quietly. ‘But he is the second most powerful man in the army, and he has the loyalty of many, many men – men we need to conquer Asia. Now is not the time. We might have civil war.’

  Marsyas nodded, and Black Cleitus looked at me carefully. But Alexander turned his back on me, leaned on Hephaestion, and walked from the tent.

  About six hours later, while the sun was just a hint of orange-grey in the sky over the sea to the east, Memnon struck.

  He sent a thousand men with buckets of pitch and blackened faces out of a secret postern gate. They ran silently across no man’s land, overwhelmed the young men on guard duty and plunged in among the war machines. Their pitch buckets and fire pots went straight to work, and in minutes they had all the engines on the north side of the city aflame.

  It was brutal, and grim, and in those flames we read our doom. We had lost our entire siege train in fewer minutes than it takes words to tell it.

  The pezhetaeroi rallied to counter-attack over the batteries and men formed up with buckets of water – scarce water, many men using what was in their canteens. The pezhetaeroi stormed forward in the dark, and met a fierce resistance – the black-painted men fought like demons. The pezhetaeroi were spear to spear and shield to shield with many of Greece’s best men, and it was dark. In many ways, the situation favoured the Greeks fighting for Persia.

  When the pezhetaeroi bogged down – still well short of retaking the battery platforms – Memnon sprung the second part of his trap, and released another sortie from the main gate. Again. We still weren’t ready to see troops coming out of the main gate, but they did – a major force of hoplites and a handful of cavalry, led by the two Athenian strategoi. They slammed into the flank of the pezhetaeroi, catching them at open shields, and the execution they inflicted was horrible.

  And then the gods took a hand.

  It was at this point, when all was lost, the machines burned and Memnon’s masterstroke was unveiled, that I arrived on the scene – in armour, thanks to Polystratus’s and Thaïs’s efforts. My shoulder was stiff and painful and I ached all over, but the sound of disaster is unmistakable. I ran for the fighting, with my grooms and a dozen friends at my back.

  I found Alexander in the gloom. He was waiting for the hypaspitoi to form up. He was watching the fighting – listening, perhaps.

  Alectus was forming men as fast as they piled out of their tents, and I put my grooms and any man I could lay hands on in the ranks with them and ran to Alexander’s side.

  ‘Good morning, Ptolemy,’ he said.

  ‘How bad is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh – terrible. But not insurmountable. Memnon has made a mistake. Very unlike him, but a good lesson to all of us.’ Alexander turned to me, and he was smiling. ‘Memnon is really very, very good. When this campaign started, he was a better general than I, but by the time we’re done, I’ll have learned what he has to teach. He does everything by misdirection. Brilliant. We Macedonians too often bludgeon. Memnon always cuts with the fine knife.’ He nodded.

  I could hear the pezhetaeroi dying.

  ‘Memnon’s made a mistake?’ I asked.

  ‘He has. His raid burned our engines and his masterstroke killed our counter-attack to rescue them.’ Alexander was, as always once the fighting started, calm and detached. ‘Had he broken contact at that point, and got his force back behind the walls, we’d have lost here. And not just here. Memnon’s strategy is brilliant – to wear me out here and then take his fleet and go to Greece.’ Alexander watched the fires of the siege engines burning, his dreams of conquest going up in pitch-soaked flames and the fires reflected in his eyes and the gold of his helmet. Behind us, Alectus was roaring at stragglers.

  Alexander pointed with his chin towards Parmenio’s tent on the left of the army. ‘What he cannot understand is that we are fighting for Greece, right here. If Memnon leaves us defeated here – we’re done. Most of you cannot imagine how vast the Great King’s empire is. Nor how many times we’ll have to defeat it.’

  ‘Ready, Lord King,’ Alectus reported.

  Alexander pointed at the gates. ‘But Memnon elected to commit his troops to his victory, and even now, more and more of his precious Greek hoplites are pressing through the main gates on to a chaotic battlefield where it is as black
as pitch. On to the killing ground.’ He raised his voice so that the men behind him could hear. Next to us, a battalion of old men was forming. They weren’t even all from the same taxeis – it was a formation of veterans. Philip’s veterans. Hundreds of them.

  Alexander pitched his voice appropriately, as he was always able to do. ‘They have burned our engines, but they have now sent so many of the garrison outside the walls that we have it in our power to win the city on the battlefield. The pezhetaeroi have fought like young lions – have not broken. Now – you veterans of Philip – go and show them what you learned from Phokion and Charmides and on a hundred other battlefields. We are not in Asia to survive. We are in Asia to conquer.’

  The veterans let out a growl like a cheer and went forward, led – in person – by Parmenio. It was odd, and more than a little ironic. The very best thing he could have done for his own plans would have been to stay in his tent. But he was not that man. He was Parmenio – the best general in Macedon – and he led his veterans to save the day because that’s what he did. Most men – and women – can plot and scheme evil, but when it comes to the day and the moment, they will be staunch to what they believe in. Thus Parmenio, in that hour, could not leave his men to die to serve his policy of humiliating the king.

  He roared the king’s name, and his phalanx answered, and they went forward into the firelit darkness.

  We went farther north, skirting the fire. Alexander was sure there’d be another sortie out of the gate facing the new works, and he led the hypaspitoi there. I had Kineas the Athenian on one side of me and Hephaestion on my other side, and we went into the ditch that surrounded the city and caught the Persian levies that Memnon had been using as a labour force, now given weapons and released to cause havoc. We caught them leaving the gate and we slaughtered them.