As usual, everything depended on Athens. During the winter, while Alexander went to the shrine of Amon, our entire campaign teetered on the edge of extinction. Athens had three hundred ships. If Athens had joined Sparta, we would have faced a general uprising of all the states of Greece, and Antipater notwithstanding, the war would have been fought at sea, and in Macedon.
But Athens stayed loyal. Actually, Athens seethed with discontent, but stayed just the right side of betrayal. Or, as I have said before, the thetes couldn’t stomach siding with Sparta and Persia at the same time.
What role Harpalus played, I can only guess. His role was never vouchsafed to me. But Thaïs’s trip to Athens while Alexander went to the shrine of Amon . . . at the time, I never guessed it. She had apparently withdrawn from politics and spycraft, during her second pregnancy. Callisthenes took over her duties and ran her agents.
When I look back, now, I realise that she controlled Harpalus’s false defection, and ran him as a fisherman plays a fish. She was his lifeline and his paymaster, and the five thousand talents he ‘stole’ were used to bribe Athens. It was a brilliant move. I wish I could be certain whether Thaïs thought it through herself, or whether Harpalus designed it, or whether the king did – all three in concert, I think, but somehow, it has his stamp. Alexander’s mind . . .
Last year, I saw a device at the house of Ben Zion – a device that had been ordered by the Tyrant of Athens. It was a bronze and steel machine for predicting the movement of the planets. Have you seen one? If you rotate a lever, you can see the moon spin on its axis as it moves around the earth, passing through her phases, and you can watch Ares make his remarkable movements – forward, back, forward, like a man dancing the Pyricche.
You’ve seen one of these machines? Yes?
That is how I see the mind of Alexander. Except with an infinite profusion of those cogs and levers, calculating, calculating, so that unless his agents of information betrayed him with false data, he could see forward, not by prescience but by calculation, on the battlefield, in politics and perhaps even in friendships. So that, just as Demetrios of Phaleron’s machine could calculate a thousand years of eclipses, so Alexander’s mind could calculate three years of campaigns in Asia and all of Darius’s responses.
How dull the rest of us must have seemed.
At any rate, Harpalus returned, and the king felt his rear was secure. He restructured his commands to suit his campaign, and Parmenio didn’t quibble.
The two of them had a meeting, in private, with no witnesses. I can only guess, but I will. I think that the king promised him an honourable retirement and the satrapy of Persia proper. And Parmenio accepted, secure in the knowledge that he was being given a huge command and the Royal Treasury – and thus, that he could continue to provide patronage for the officers in his ‘family’.
Hephaestion was given his first large command. He took the elite cavalry – the Hetaeroi minus the royals, the Paeonians, the Thracians and some of the allies – such as Kineas – and the Agrianian skirmishers, and he vanished into the desert. He had what appeared to be a siege train. That accorded badly with the speed his column was supposed to maintain, but rumour said he was out of the area covered by the Prodromoi in a single day, so he must have moved like lightning.
You’ve no doubt heard the story from Diodorus, eh? How they raced to the Euphrates, and threw a pontoon bridge across.
Mazaeus, the best of the remaining Persian commanders, was there with three thousand horse, and the two forces fought every day – skirmish after skirmish on the banks of the Euphrates, up and down as Hephaestion sought to outflank Mazaeus, like two skilled men fencing with sticks. And Kineas won the day, racing south, finding a ford, fighting his way across with his Athenians in the face of a determined enemy, and turning Mazaeus’s flank, so that his whole force was rolled back and Hephaestion got the bridges across. That’s where your father won his magnificent Nisean stallion, and he rode that horse for years.
If you know your Anabasis, you know that Cyrus’s army took the same route we were on. And having won the crossings of the Euphrates and built a pair of bridges, we might have turned south towards Babylon and lunged at the Persians.
That’s what Mazaeus expected, and what Darius wanted us to do – march down the east bank of the Euphrates. Like Artaxerxes before him, Darius had ordered the land between the rivers scorched, the grain removed and the most populous place on the wheel of the world depopulated, so that when Alexander made his move for empire, he would have to cross a battlefield stripped clean of food and forage.
When we marched from Tyre, it was late in Hecatombion by the Athenian festival calendar, but we marched fast – up to two hundred stades a day. The men were fresh and well rested, and well fed. And even eager. We had water with us, and we marched across dusty plains at the height of midsummer.
When Kineas rolled Mazaeus up and forced him back on the road to Babylon, the rest of us – the main army – were virtually a dust cloud on the horizon. The next day, my taxeis and the hypaspitoi marched across the bridges yoked like oxen, carrying water, and behind us came the whole army. Mazaeus retreated south along the east bank of the Euphrates for two days, and Hephaestion, on what was probably the best day of his career, pursued just the right amount, and they fought another inconclusive action in the dust.
I was still marching.
We didn’t turn south to Babylon.
The wheels of the king’s mind had turned, grinding this campaign down to a few problems, and here’s the solution he reached, as best I understand it.
If we marched in spring, as soon as the ground was dry, then the rivers would be in spate, and crossing either the Euphrates or the Tigris would have been very difficult indeed. The marching would have been better for the soldiers, but that was never a great concern of Alexander’s.
But if the rivers were full to flood – if the spring rains came late – and the countryside was empty of crops, as every set of farms on earth is empty in late spring, when all the stores have been consumed – then we might reach the Euphrates bank and starve, or be trapped between the rivers.
As it was, although I think most of the army never saw the plan, his campaign worked better than he imagined. We shot east, crossed the two bridges mere hours after they were completed, and Mazaeus, by the sort of luck that comes with good planning, was pinned back south and couldn’t explore our dispositions. Two days later, when Hephaestion had withdrawn, Mazaeus’s elite cavalry came pounding north.
And found the crossing deserted, and our army – gone. Gone to the east.
By luck, good planning and the godlike far-sightedness of Alexander, we had broken contact, and our entire army was loose in the plains of Iraq.
Mazaeus raced south, leaving his best men to try and find us. Mazaeus had a head on his shoulders – he went in person to tell the Great King that Alexander had just shredded his operational plan and was now somewhere.
In fact, we marched for twenty days, moving as fast as men and horses could move. We were north of Darius’s scorched earth, and we were in the cool foothills and not in the Mesopotamian plains, and while ‘cool’ is a relative thing to a foot soldier who has been marching for ten hours with the sun pounding him like an enemy, we were not losing men.
The best of the Prodromoi swept south in small groups – ten or twelve men under a trusted officer or phylarch, covering huge distances with six or eight horses per man. By the time we reached the Tigris river, we were receiving the first reports of Darius’s army, as scouted by Agon’s men.
Alexander flatly refused to believe what he heard. Because what he heard was that Darius, the despicable and defeated Darius, had almost a hundred thousand men covering miles of ground, and that his army outnumbered ours nearly two to one.
The speed of the army was not good for everyone. The animals suffered in the heat and dust, and the women suffered worse than the men, even when they rode in litters, and one pregnant woman suffered worse than the rest.
I was with the main body when I heard her scream.
We had reached the Tigris river the night before, and our lead elements – today, Perdiccas and the Agrianians, backed by Thracian horse – punched across against no opposition. The Tigris, contrary to Callisthenes’ sensational account, was about four fingers deep over the rocks, and we scarcely cooled our feet in it as we went.
We were flanking the baggage, and I had the rotten job of making sure that the baggage carts made the crossing in good order. I was watching my officers check the cartwheels – because any old ones would break in the middle of the river, and any loose ones would come off. And the Great King’s wife began to scream.
I can’t pretend I knew who it was, but I was the officer in charge, and I rode to her cart – more like a broad pavilion mounted on a wagon bed.
There was so much blood that it was coming through the baseboards of the wagon.
I sent Polystratus for Thaïs, and then I climbed into the wagon. She was screaming, and her mother-in-law was holding her head, and two eunuchs tried to prevent my entering the wagon and I threw one out through the door.
‘You cannot enter here!’ the other said, desperately.
I ignored him and looked at Sisygambis, the Queen Mother. She didn’t meet my eye.
Leosthenes had been checking wheels. He popped his head in.
‘Fetch the king,’ I shot at him, and his head vanished.
Thaïs came. The eunuchs continued to try to remove me, but Sisygambis said something and they desisted. Thaïs put a hand on the woman’s forehead, reached down and flung the blood-soaked sheets back and caught my eye.
Miscarriage. I’m a country boy. I knew the signs.
Philip of Acarnia came first, and then Alexander. I’d have left the wagon, but I couldn’t get out, trapped in the press. Philip looked at her, felt her pulse and exchanged a glance with Thaïs. That was the worst thing – the conspiracy of silence. The poor woman. Imagine – trapped with fifty thousand enemy soldiers, pregnant with Alexander’s bastard and marching towards your husband, who will have you executed when he sees you. With only your mother-in-law and her ladies for company.
Then Alexander came.
Philip was blunt, as he always was. ‘Say your goodbyes,’ he said. ‘She won’t recover.’
Indeed, the poor thing was bleeding at such a rate that it didn’t seem possible a body could hold so much blood.
She cried out.
Alexander turned his head away in revulsion.
She flung her arms out.
Alexander stepped back.
‘She is unclean,’ he said.
‘I am cursed!’ the Queen of Persia cried out. ‘Oh, God of Light, why must I endure this!’
Alexander shot me a look of disgust. ‘Why exactly was I summoned?’ he asked.
‘You got her with child,’ I shot at him. I don’t think I had ever been so angry with him.
He didn’t meet my eye. This had never happened before, save once.
He turned and left the wagon.
Philip of Acarnia all but spat.
The Queen of Persia died in his arms, with Thaïs holding her hand and her mother-in-law holding her head.
Later, Callisthenes put it about that she died in an accident, and that’s the official version.
I followed Alexander from the wagon. I had her blood on my left hand and I let it dry there. I mounted my pretty mare, now Medea like the others, and I rode her hard to the head of the column, where Alexander sat with Hephaestion, watching the last of the main body cross.
I might not have done it, but Alexander turned as I came up. ‘The baggage is falling behind, and we have to move,’ he said.
I reached out and wiped her blood across his face. She was nothing to me – I had scarcely met her, and she openly despised us all. But I was his friend, not his slave, and no man worth a shit treats a woman like that.
He had no trouble meeting my eye. He held out his hand, and a slave put a towel in it. He wiped his face.
‘I gather you feel that needed to be done. I have other things on my mind than the troubles of women,’ he said. ‘Now get the baggage moving.’
Sometimes, he was easy to hate.
TWENTY-NINE
We turned south.
We started to intercept spies – they weren’t very clever – with offers of vast riches for the murder of Alexander.
Darius was willing to do anything to avoid the trial of battle.
To cap his other efforts, he sent a deputation of nobles to try and make a treaty. This time, he was clever enough to make it very public indeed. This time, Alexander was not going to change the wording.
They offered him everything west of the Euphrates and a royal wife.
Again, Parmenio suggested we accept.
Alexander didn’t deign to reply. But later, we heard that he allowed the head eunuch of Darius’s wife’s household to escape with the embassy.
Because the news that his wife had been unfaithful with Alexander drove Darius into a rage of madness – a paroxysm of jealousy, or so I understood later, when most of the Persian officers were my own officers – the sort of frustrated rage that all men experience when nothing seems to go their way.
Just as Alexander intended.
And then there was no more talk of peace.
The War God was riding to Babylon.
Darius concentrated his army at Arabela, and offered battle on a plain of his own choosing, which he had his engineers improve with labour gangs of slaves until it was as flat as a well-wrought table.
We heard about this battlefield when we were still hundreds of stades to the north, and as we marched closer and the rumours of the enemy’s army size became ever more inflated, we were more and more derisive. The mere fact that Darius had attempted to negotiate showed how weak he was. Our best estimates from all sources suggested that even with some help form his eastern barons, he’d have a hard time gathering twenty thousand cavalry and as many infantry. Ariston nearly lost his job for reporting twice that many on a daily basis.
And then Darius moved north from Arabela, suddenly closing the distance with us.
It’s easy to fall into hubris. Easy to forget how smart an opponent is. Darius outgeneralled Alexander before Issus. He’d planned a fairly subtle campaign this time, too, and Alexander had outmarched him – something that all of our opponents always underestimated, as we could march roughly three times as fast as anyone we ever faced. But even faced with our speed, he changed his campaign plan and moved his army – and did unexpected things.
In an afternoon, we went from deriding Darius to the knowledge that he was a day’s march to the south. Reliable men reported that his army was ‘uncountable’.
Kineas of Athens came in person to tell the king that Darius’s army covered a hundred stades of camp.
The tone of command meetings changed.
Late that evening, the army moved up a low ridge. Scouts told us that the ridge we were occupying was less than two dozen stades from Darius’s new battlefield.
Alexander summoned the old crowd to ride out with him. There was Craterus, and there was Perdiccas, and there was Black Cleitus and there was Philip the Red. And Parmenio, and Philotas, and Nicanor.
And me. He came to my tent, as in the old days, and called me by name.
A dozen of us rode out of the camp, up the ridge.
The ridge rose well above the plains, and had a good view. Perhaps too good a view.
It looked as if the Valley of the Tigris was on fire.
I will never forget the sight of Darius’s army. Their camp filled the earth – as far as the eye could see to the south and east, there were fires.
‘Zeus my father,’ Alexander muttered.
Parmenio looked for a long time.
Then he shook his head. ‘We’re fucked,’ he said.
No one disagreed, and then, after a silence, he went on, ‘Throw Hephaestion out with the cavalry as a screen, and let’s get out of here. We c
an vanish into the mountains. We’ll lose some men, but not what we’ll lose if we go down on to that plain.’
What I remember best is the feeling that Darius had led us the way a pretty girl can lead a drunken soldier. The ugly feeling that we’d been had.
Alexander was white. And silent.
Twice I saw him touch his forehead, where I had smeared her blood.
He was terrified. I hadn’t seen it often, but often enough to know. Terrified not of dying, but of failing.
I’d love to say that I offered a brilliant plan, but I was terrified too. We’d outmanoeuvred Darius, but in the end it was like a little man dodging a giant. The giant doesn’t care about all that dancing around, because eventually, when it comes to the clinch . . .
When we rode back to camp, there was still a streak of summer light in the sky, red-pink and angry, and Alexander ordered the duty taxeis to dig in. Amyntas’s men – and they didn’t love it. Nor did mine, on duty next. We worked half the night, and we kept men awake.
Because I had the night duty, I knew that the king was awake. There was light in his tent.
But I didn’t go to him.
I’ve heard a hundred legends about that night, but I was there. He didn’t summon a council. He didn’t consult the auguries. He didn’t feast, and he didn’t drink wine.
Nor did he summon Barsines or her sister.
What he did was to lie awake, silent, on his camp bed, staring at the ceiling of the tent and the flies.
At some point, according to Hephaestion, he fell asleep, and son of god or not, he snored. We all heard it.
There is something immensely reassuring about the sound of your warrior king snoring in the face of the enemy.
I was about to rotate the duty with Alectus of the hypaspitoi when Ochrid came and told me that the king wanted the duty officer.
I entered his tent. He was awake.
‘Ptolemy,’ he said. ‘I’m glad it is someone intelligent. I have written down my dispositions for the morning. Please see that the army is formed. I will no doubt sleep late.’
The arrogance – the bored assurance – of his voice would have angered me at any time – but just then, his arrogance was rope in the hands of a drowning army.
God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great Page 76