God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Formed’ could only mean one thing. I nodded and took the parchment, and he smiled at me and lay down on the bed and was almost instantly asleep.

  I cast my eye over the dispositions. But they only confirmed the word ‘formed’. We were going to fight.

  We were going to fight.

  My hands shook as I left his tent.

  And yet – I took his orders to Parmenio, left them with a slave, disarmed myself and lay down with Thaïs, and I was asleep in a few heartbeats.

  Odd.

  THIRTY

  Other men have told the story of that morning. Read Callisthenes, or read the Military Journal, if you must.

  He really did sleep late. He left the forming of the army to Parmenio. I think it was drama – I think he was awake and armed, awaiting his moment to come onstage. But perhaps not.

  He formed us in a very similar manner to the traditional, Philip of Macedon formation. The phalanx was in the middle, with cavalry on the flanks and a strong second line posted to our rear.

  The differences were subtle.

  The second line was very strong.

  The cavalry was equally balanced in numbers, but the right flank had our best shock cavalry and our best skirmishers.

  And perhaps most interesting of all, we refused both flanks as soon as we began to march out of camp.

  The old man did his part. Parmenio was up with the dawn, out with his own Thessalians, riding Darius’s carefully manicured battlefield. He dismounted and walked, counting his paces across the frontage that the field would have.

  It was like fighting on a good wool blanket. It was flat. However, on Darius’s side of the field there was a patch of . . . I wouldn’t call it brush, but let’s say unmanicured ground that stretched from the ridge on our right down towards Darius’s centre. To be honest, on most battlefields it would have been considered good going, but here, where slaves with heavy rollers had rolled the anthills flat and other slaves with shovels had filled in the holes, the patch of untended ground leaped to the eye.

  Darius’s left flank was going to rest on it. As if it was actually bad ground, brush or marsh. We could see that even at first light, because Darius, who did not have an army as well trained as ours (by a long shot), had unit markers already in place in the warm yellow light of early morning.

  Parmenio counted off his frontage. He turned and looked at me. I was riding with Nicanor, because I was up and it soothed my nerves. To the south, a dozen Prodromoi covered us, and a little farther south, as many Persian cavalrymen watched them the way hawks watch distant prey.

  Parmenio stopped walking.

  ‘Anyone have a tablet?’ he asked, and I did. That made me their secretary.

  ‘You here to spy on us?’ Parmenio asked.

  I shook my head. ‘I’m here to fight Darius,’ I said.

  Philotas chewed on a blade of late-summer grass. ‘If we lose here, none of us will make it home,’ he said quietly.

  I shrugged. I wasn’t going to share my opinions with Philotas.

  Besides, Parmenio began to call out numbers, and I scratched them in the wax.

  My taxeis, at normal order, is eight deep and two hundred men wide, each man using about three paces, giving a frontage of six hundred paces. Roughly three stades. And we had seven front-line taxeis.

  They alone took up twenty-one stades at normal order. If we closed to our tightest order, of course, we could almost halve our frontage.

  But the Plain of Gaugamela is vast, a carpet of bronze-burned summer pasture grass and naked ochre earth that rolled away to distant ridges – room for all the soldiers in the world to fight, if the gods ordained it. The Greeks might have called Boeotia the dance floor of Ares, but the Plain of Gaugamela was surely laid down by the gods for war, and Darius had improved it.

  When we reached the nominal position of the right marker of my taxeis, I dismounted and built a small cairn of stones.

  Polystratus, mounted on a pony behind me, spat. ‘Fucking dust,’ he said. He pointed to where his plodding pony’s hooves were raising puffs of fine grit with every step the animal took.

  ‘This field will be one impenetrable cloud of dust from horizon to horizon as soon as we march on,’ I said.

  Polystratus spat again and nodded. ‘I said that. You just used more words.’

  It took us two hours, from sun-up to breakfast, to measure the battle front. Philotas calculated unit frontages, Parmenio paced them off in the dust and I marked the unit down with the final measurement on the wax. The wax got softer and softer as the sun climbed, until my stylus started to strip the wax off the boards.

  When we reached the last nominal position on our left, we all turned our mounts and stared across the plain.

  Our leftmost unit would match up with the centre of Darius’s right flank, to judge from the positions of his markers. Put another way, his right flank would overlap our left by at least six stades.

  Parmenio looked back at me. ‘Still here to fight Darius, boy?’

  I wrote down the last figures. The wax was growing too soft to hold the letters, and the morning was young.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Good looks and luck won’t win this,’ Parmenio said.

  It is one of the oddities of my make-up that I could flare into rage at the slightest provocation from the king, but Parmenio never affected me that way. I merely shrugged.

  ‘He’s insane,’ Philotas said, suddenly at my elbow.

  Medea fidgeted, and I curbed her.

  ‘He’s insane and he’s going to get us killed here,’ Philotas insisted.

  Parmenio looked away, as if carefully detaching himself from the scene.

  Polystratus coughed.

  ‘You don’t think any better of him than I do. I saw your face when the Persian woman died,’ Philotas said. ‘For the love of all the gods, Ptolemy! He’s not our king any more. He’s becoming a monster!’ Philotas read in my face that he’d gone too far. ‘We do all the work, and he’ll fuck it away,’ he said bitterly.

  I glanced at Polystratus, who looked mad enough to punch Philotas, which wouldn’t have gone well.

  ‘We wouldn’t be here on this plain, ready to fight for the dominion of all Asia, unless Alexander brought us here,’ I said. ‘And the very power that renders him able to conquer Asia contains the set of flaws that make me angry at him.’ I turned from Philotas to Parmenio. ‘You, sir, are as blind as he, if you cannot see that he is leading this army and you are not.’

  ‘He makes messes, and I clean them up,’ Parmenio said angrily.

  ‘I’ll copy this fair for you,’ I said. I was done. They were edging towards treason. I would shout myself blind at him to get his attention, to find the spark of a man that he must still have burning, but I wasn’t going to side with the weasels.

  ‘He’ll destroy all he has built,’ Parmenio said. ‘Or rather, he can only destroy. He can’t build. He’s a war god, not a king.’

  ‘Tell them in Alexandria,’ I said.

  I gathered my officers and we rode back to the battlefield. I had a bag of hot sausages across my thigh – the fat burned me. I ate them anyway. And Polystratus had pomegranate juice – gods know where he got that – and I drained his canteen.

  I took them to my little cairn of stones, which itself took me five minutes to find. While we sat on our mounts and talked, Polystratus and Ochrid and a dozen camp servants built it up into a cairn that could be seen for two stades – waist-height, and broad. They put a spear into it, with all of our wreaths from the games at Tyre.

  Leosthenes put his hands on his hips and turned slowly through a full circle.

  ‘Nothing to cover our flanks,’ he said.

  Cleomenes looked at the Persians, slowly filtering on to the field. Alone of all their troops, their Greeks marched on, singing. The rest didn’t march – they just strolled to where their markers were waiting, and sat.

  It was . . . odd. In a few hours, we’d be killing each other. At the same time, it
seldom made sense to interrupt an enemy’s dispositions, as he’d just run away, and the whole thing would have to be done again.

  I’m pretty sure Memnon would have sent cavalry to disrupt our planning.

  ‘We are in the centre,’ I noted. ‘Almost exactly in the centre. We have the hypaspitoi on our right and Craterus on our left.’

  Callisthenes smiled. ‘We’ve moved up in the world.’

  It was true. Alexander’s dispositions suggested we were now the most trusted of all the pezhetaeroi, standing between the hypaspitoi, the household and the rest of the sarissa-armed infantrymen.

  Marsyas stole a sausage. ‘Maybe he just thinks we’ll look the best next to the hypaspitoi,’ he opined. ‘So – why are we here?’

  I nodded at the cairn. ‘Dust or sun or pouring rain, when we reach this part of the field, I want to have to touch that cairn as I march through, because then all our dispositions will be right. If I’m already dead, you three make sure we hit it.’

  They nodded.

  ‘We’re the one thing Alexander can absolutely count on,’ I went on. ‘We can beat his second-rate Greeks and we can eat his levies for breakfast. We must grind forward. It is the relentless advance that panics the Persians, and the knowledge that they cannot fight us to the front. Given the king’s dispositions, I think it is safe to say that he needs us to keep going forward. If I fall, see to it that the lads go forward. He’s going to spend the cavalry like money in a brothel to keep our flanks secure. Don’t get distracted. Keep rolling forward.’

  I was solemn, and slow, and it would have been much more impressive, as a speech, if I hadn’t been so hungry that I chewed sausage constantly, and so nervous that I farted every third line.

  But they got it. We all four clasped hands, and then we rode back to our camp. I saw Kineas and his friends ride by going the other way – probably on the same mission I’d just accomplished – and I waved.

  Diodorus waved back, and then it was time to put my panoply on.

  Beautiful armour is always a pleasure to wear. And on the day of battle, when your guts turn to water and all your body is ready to shake, a beautiful panoply is worth every obol you spent. When I was armoured, I looked, and felt, like a war god myself. And the shakes stopped.

  Men are simple animals, really.

  We marched off from our camp by companies on an eight-file front, and wheeled into line at double depth – one hundred wide and sixteen men deep – and formed on Craterus’s taxeis, already in line.

  I was still mounted on Poseidon, who was still a fine horse, and that day had more spirit than he’d shown throughout the whole campaign. I rode over to Craterus and explained about my cairn, and he nodded.

  ‘Good thinking. We’ll march off from the right – so you’ll be at the head of the pezhetaeroi. Line up on your cairn.’ He smiled. It was a forced smile, but that’s what you get on the day of a battle. ‘One less thing about which I get to worry.’

  And then, like soldiers since the world was born, we waited.

  We were ten stades from the battlefield. We had offered no sacrifice, nor read the omens. The sun was rising in the sky. The whole army was waiting in parade formation.

  If nerves had been visible, they would have been a pall of sparks, like the cloud a bonfire shoots out in the last light when men celebrate the feast of some god, and our line, all twenty stades of it, would have been lit like the Milky Way.

  And we waited.

  Some of Perdiccas’s men began to sing. We had a song – Philip’s men had coined it, long ago.

  It is sung to the tune of the ‘Homeric Hymn to Ares’, and it sounds very martial, but the words are:

  Why are we waiting?

  Why are we waiting?

  Oh, why are we waiting?

  NOBODY KNOWS!

  Perdiccas’s men started it.

  My men took it up, and so did Craterus’s men, and even the hypaspitoi and some of the Hetaeroi. The sound filled the air.

  It must have sounded scary, to the Persians.

  It made us laugh, and laughter makes scared men relax.

  We sang it again.

  And Alexander came. In truth, he appeared none too pleased. But he brightened up when men started to cheer. The word was that Parmenio had had to go to his tent and wake him. As I’ve mentioned, that may be true, but his grooming was spotless, his armour was perfect and his hair, sometimes a grizzled mass of blond curls, was straight and well brushed, except that his forward curls over his ears had been teased up to look even more like horns, and he had his magnificent lion’s-head helmet on his saddle-bow. His cloak and his saddlecloth were leopard skin. All the fittings on his armour were gilded, and his scales had been buffed like a thousand mirrors. He rode bareheaded to the centre of the army, and so he was all but nose to nose with me.

  ‘Asia!’ he shouted, his voice perfectly pitched to carry. ‘Asia dangles at the end of your spears, yours for the taking. Darius has nothing but peasant levies and the same cavalry you have beaten before, many times. Carve your way through and Asia is ours. Fail, and we all die here in the dust.’

  He drew his sword. ‘I know which I’d prefer,’ he said, and tossed the sword high in the air. I watched it, but I needn’t have worried. He caught it by the hilt. ‘Kill Darius, and the day is ours,’ he said, and they cheered him as if Zeus Soter had descended from Olympus.

  He trotted Bucephalus over to me. He was calm, almost detached, but he managed a smile.

  Parmenio trotted his horse over to us. He was old – I’d never seen him look older. The night had worn him, and the morning was ageing him before our eyes.

  ‘Have a good sleep?’ Parmenio said, and his tone betrayed his anger. ‘More importantly, do you have a plan?’ He looked around. ‘The army is restless. You plan to fight? Aren’t you just a little afraid?’

  Alexander didn’t sneer. He turned his horse, ignoring me, and extended a hand to Parmenio. ‘Afraid? Parmenio, when we were marching around the northern part of the country, I was terrified – lest Darius refuse battle and hide behind his burned crops. This morning, he is right there and he has no possibility of retreat.’

  His eyes sparkled.

  He laughed, and his laugh carried conviction. ‘Darius is offering me a pitched battle. Herakles has put him in my hands.’

  Parmenio hawked and spat. ‘Very well, son of Zeus.’ He made the soubriquet sound like a curse. ‘We’ll be outflanked – badly – on both sides. What exactly do you expect us to do?’

  Alexander shrugged. ‘Is the arrowhead outflanked when it enters an enemy’s flesh, Parmenio? I expect you to fight your wing and avoid defeat, while I do the work and win the battle.’

  Parmenio glowered. ‘When this is over, if we survive—’

  Alexander laughed. ‘You are less a threat to me than Darius, and he is no threat to me at all. Listen, Parmenio! Is there one voice here shouting for you?’ He reared his horse, and my men roared his name, and the other phalanges took up the cry, so that I couldn’t hear what he said next, but Parmenio did, and his face grew red.

  Alexander laughed. Then he turned his horse and rode over to me. And embraced me – one of perhaps five or six times I can remember when he embraced me.

  ‘I wish . . .’ he said. His hand slapped the back of my thorax. The soldiers roared his name.

  That was the measure of the morning. Alexander needed a hug from a friend.

  I never learned what he wished. But I count it as the second-to-last time I saw the man I loved.

  He rode off to the left and we heard the volleys of cheers follow him, and then he rode back. His trumpeter sounded ‘All Officers’, and we rode out to him. He was in command of himself, and us, but by the time the sun was high in the sky, it was the war god who was among us, and not Alexander. Alexander was gone.

  He didn’t even trouble to look around, or smile. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and he pointed at the Persians, ‘I intend to march directly to the fight – to form our front from a column
, rather than forming it here and allowing gaps to develop. We will advance from the right on full frontages – I expect this to be done with no fuss. I’m leaving the Thracian Psiloi to cover the camp and I’m sending the Paeonians to screen us and raise some dust – Ariston, see to it that you do not use up your horses, and that you come back to the line.’

  He looked around. ‘We will advance directly to contact. Unless something has changed, Darius will feel rushed by the speed of our advance and will attempt to encircle our flanks. We want him to encircle our flanks. I’m leaving Cleitus with the rear phalanx. He will reinforce our line and cover our rear – if necessary, he will face his phalanx to the rear and we will make a box, like Xenophon’s men in their retreat, except that we will attack – we will attack relentlessly. Whatever you do, if your men are advancing into the Persians and killing them, you are doing my will. We, not they, have the moral advantage. We have beaten them like a drum – they have never beaten us. We have a phalanx of bronze and they do not. Behind our phalanx is another! The phalanx will win the battle by pushing forward without pause.’ He looked around. ‘Do you understand?’

  We did. It was, after all, something that we’d looked at a hundred times. And it would be executed using drills that the rawest new pezhetaeros had performed every day he had been in the ranks.

  Aristander, dressed from head to foot in shining white wool and crowned in gold like the Great King himself, rode to the front of the army in Alexander’s chariot and offered sacrifice. The Persians were grilling in the sun, standing in their ranks, their army about two-thirds formed. Our men sat to watch the sacrifices, and grounded their spears.

  Aristander was a greasy hypocrite, but he managed the sacrifices with sure-handed expertise. And that’s not nothing – try killing an animal with a knife while forty thousand pairs of eyes watch you. He didn’t flinch that morning, and he killed two rams and a bull – a great black bull. He held the bull’s heart above his head, and the blood ran down his arm, and the symbolism was obvious.