God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  My men, and Coenus’s men, and the hypaspists, were changing direction – slowly, like a grain ship under oars. Hoplites can go forward quickly, but when they move to the flanks, by files or by wheeling, it is like watching a glacier move on a mountainside.

  He turned his head back towards Darius.

  Then his face set.

  I hadn’t meant to join in, but Poseidon and I were swallowed by the wedge, and I was in the place just behind the king.

  It was all I could do to ride. Blood was actually running over my saddlecloth. Philotas, who had no time for me whatsoever, looked concerned.

  ‘Follow me!’ he called to his wedge. Turned it decidedly to the right, angled back towards Parmenio.

  Alexander looked back at me, and the smile on his face, the elation in the whole set of his body, outweighed his frustration at failing to get Darius. ‘Don’t you feel alive, when the trumpet sounds?’ he asked me, and then we were away.

  We charged into the flank of Mazaeus’s triumphant cavalry just as they closed the noose around Parmenio’s throat.

  How bitter the Persian must have been, as he ordered the retreat.

  There are a thousand ironies to the Battle of Guagamela.

  It is ironic that the Persians killed so very few of us, because they were moments from massacring our entire left and with it, perhaps, the whole rear phalanx. I expect that had Alexander been ten minutes later, Darius’s defection from the field would have been meaningless.

  It is ironic that to Bessus and Mazaeus, Darius – their king – betrayed them by running. Ironic as I had watched him struggle to stay and make a fight of it. I can say with assurance that had Alexander botched his final attack, Bessus would have won the battle. Darius lost his empire when he turned and ran, and he would never have been king again after that moment.

  It is ironic that Alexander blamed Parmenio for costing him his pursuit of Darius, because Parmenio, in my opinion, had the weakest part of the army, faced the cream of the Persian cavalry and fought for as long as anyone could have expected, and then for a while longer – long enough to ensure that Alexander won the grandest victory of his life, and did it well enough that the battle flowed almost exactly as the king had predicted. Yet the king never forgave Parmenio for his failure.

  Ironic that in victory, Alexander was so powerful that his opinions were like laws. Even men who had served in the left flank said that Parmenio had failed.

  And hubris? It fell from Alexander as blood runs from a mortal wound.

  About the time that Mazaeus cursed the name of his king and ordered his victorious cavalry to retreat like dogs whipped off the corpse of a lion, I was one rank behind the king, deep into a melee with the aristocracy of Babylon and Mesopotamia. They had beautiful armour and they weren’t much as fighters, and I suspect that they could read the wind as well as Mazaeus. Given our reception in Babylon, I’m not even sure they were sorry to see the golden disc of the sun fall.

  But one of them, a mass of gold and bronze with armour all the way down his arms and scale mail that covered his face, exchanged sword cuts with me, and his mate drove a spear through Poseidon’s neck. Poseidon didn’t fall – by his namesake, he rose on his back feet, snapped the haft of the spear, and his mighty iron-shod forefoot crushed the chest of his killer before he slumped to the earth. And I crashed down on the same hip that had taken the wound earlier, and as Homer says, darkness covered my eyes.

  PART IV

  King of Kings

  THIRTY-ONE

  If you’ve come to listen to the end, young man, you must know that most of the glory has gone out of the story, and only the tragedy remains. Have I convinced you, yet, that Alexander is not the king you should seek to emulate?

  I will.

  Guagamela was Alexander’s masterpiece. He realised the plan, and he executed it perfectly – with brilliant, lightning-like changes of direction and purpose that marked his genius – instant response to the changes on the battlefield.

  I am an excellent general, and I have won my fair share of battles. I could have planned Guagamela. But through all the dust I could not have seen the moment when the King of King’s centre had drifted from his right, and thrust into it.

  I awoke to pain and stupor – I’d been given poppy. Thaïs and Philip were waiting on me personally. My eyes opened, and Thaïs looked at me and a smile lit her face.

  That’s a good way to come back from the edge of death.

  Philip leaned over, looked into my eyes and nodded. ‘No concussion,’ he said.

  I was in the king’s tent. The red-purple tinge, like fresh blood, was unmistakable. Outside, the sun must have been high in the sky, and the tent cast a wine-coloured pall over everything.

  Somewhere to my right, I could hear the king.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘And immediately after I shattered their centre – could you see? There is no feeling like riding at the point of the wedge. The power! And the danger! Did you see it?’

  Murmurs of appreciation.

  Thaïs made a face. ‘Please wake up and recover,’ she said. ‘I’ve had two days of it.’

  Philip’s lips made the slightest twitch, acknowledging – and agreeing.

  It all came back to me in a single piece of memory. The fight in the dust. The message. The wedge.

  Poseidon was dead.

  ‘What’s the butcher’s bill on my taxeis?’ I asked. ‘Could you get me Isokles?’

  Thaïs wiped my mouth. ‘Isokles has been dead almost a year,’ she said.

  ‘Of course,’ I answered, confused momentarily. ‘Pyrrhus, too.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and looked away.

  ‘Callisthenes, then?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘He died here,’ she said.

  ‘Marsyas?’ I asked. ‘Leosthenes?’

  ‘Leosthenes is badly wounded and in the surgeon’s tents. Marsyas is collecting Persian women and writing poetry to them.’ Thaïs nodded to Philip. ‘I’m going to move him.’

  Philip nodded back.

  Marsyas came to see me a day later. I assume he’d tried and been turned away, but he’d done all that I could have done – he’d arranged burials, sent letters and even managed to retrieve and bury mighty Poseidon.

  He told me that the Taxeis of Outer Macedon had lost two hundred and thirty dead and wounded not expected to recover. Other taxeis had fared worse. Craterus had lost almost five hundred men, and altogether we’d lost almost two thousand infantry, most of them from the taxeis with Parmenio.

  Marsyas wasn’t going to tell me, but I saw through him.

  ‘Our taxeis is being broken for replacements, isn’t it,’ I said.

  Marsyas nodded.

  And that was like the death of a friend. Another death. I hadn’t started to mourn Callisthenes yet.

  The rest of Babylonia fell without a fight.

  That took months to play out. The welcome did not.

  I was back to being a Hetaeroi. Because of my place in the battle, I was in favour, and because of my wound, I was still fevered, and I confess in advance that it added to the intensity of the experience. I was perpetually light-headed, and the sun had a quality to it that is hard to explain. It was brighter than I have ever known it, even in the endless Gedrosian desert. Even in Aegypt and Lydia. It burned into your eyes, and the grit – not really sand – rose to suffocate you, and the green of the trees was so green as to seem lurid. And the smell of human excrement, which they used for manure, fought the stink of naphtha fires and the omnipresent smell of incense. Men say that Aegypt is priest-ridden, but Babylon is god-ridden. They have gods everywhere, and they worship them to distraction.

  Incense and naphtha. Smoke at the back of your throat, grit in your clothes. All the way south from Arabela to Babylon.

  There was another kind of grit in my throat, and that was Mazaeus. Somehow, while I was recovering from my wound, he had come into our camp and made peace with Alexander, and he was suddenly the favourite – so much so that H
ephaestion rode with me. Mazaeus had been one of Darius’s most trusted officers, and his defection was important. Because of him, Alexander received the homage of dozens of important Persian and Mede officers, and our way was made smooth.

  Darius had fled the field – again – and I found it almost melancholy to hear from Mesopotamian peasants that they no longer considered him king. Greek peasants, I’m sure, would have maintained their allegiance a little longer.

  Or perhaps not.

  At any rate, Mazaeus was tall and handsome and dignified, long-limbed, a beautiful horseman and a fine warrior. He wasn’t ingratiating or obsequious.

  But he did throw himself on his face every time he entered Alexander’s presence – the royal presence was suddenly becoming the Royal Presence. Because of his age and immense dignity, Mazaeus made the rest of us seem like clods, and he clearly thought we were – except Alexander, who he found a way to love.

  Really, I have a hard time remembering how it all started. We didn’t go to war, on Alexander’s staff, about proskynesis and Persian customs for years. And yet, the whole argument, the whole cultural disagreement, could have been read on every Greek and Macedonian officer’s face, the first morning that Mazaeus made his reverence.

  We rode south, away from Darius. I thought it was a mistake, and so did Parmenio. I felt that we needed to have Darius’s head on a spike, or we weren’t done. Parmenio agreed.

  The old man was in a state of shock – not utter shock, but a sort of euphoric disbelief. He hadn’t expected us to win the battle, and he clearly hadn’t expected to survive the battle, and in the aftermath, he was quite naturally a little aloof, a little diffident, and genuinely generous to those who had played a role in the rescue of his wing – Diodorus, Kineas and the king. He was not hesitant in describing how desperate the situation had been.

  This was not politics. This was just an honest old man thanking the team that saved him.

  But Alexander’s faction didn’t hesitate to capitalise on his admissions of weakness, and Parmenio’s sons, who were not thankful and felt that Parmenio had been hung out to dry, so to speak, were in turn angered.

  Two days out of Babylon, with rumours rife that the city would resist, that Darius had another army forming behind us, and that Bessus, the senior satrap who had escaped Arabela, was still in the field with all his cavalry – a force still larger than our army – Alexander ordained that all the officers would dine together.

  A symposium.

  I remember, because he had just promoted Astibus and Bubores to company commands in his recently expanded hypaspitoi, and they were on the next kline to mine. They were crowned in wreaths of gilded laurel. So was I, and so was Marsyas, who shared my couch. Kineas shared a couch with Diodorus, also crowned.

  Whether by intention or not, half of the great circle wore crowns of valour. And the other half did not. Philotas did not have one, and neither did Nicanor, although he had led the hypaspists with flair and reckless bravery. The older men, the partisans of Parmenio, had no crowns.

  Parmenio was on a couch to my left, well within earshot, and he shared the couch with Philotas.

  On the third bowl of wine, Philotas sat up. ‘Why no crown for Mazaeus? He fought well enough!’

  I must confess, I laughed too. It was funny. He was so ill at ease with us, in his long flowing robes. He’d probably never eaten lying on a couch, and he was desperately uncomfortable sharing his with Cleitus the Black, who glowered at him.

  There were other Persian officers present. They did their best. It is almost impossible to be conquered with dignity, but they did it well enough.

  But Philotas couldn’t let them go. ‘Why the long faces?’ he called. ‘We’ll all be in high hats and long robes soon enough.’

  This quip was not greeted with the enthusiasm that his earlier jibe received.

  The wine went instantly to my head, even well watered, and I went off to Thaïs and bed. After I left, the Persians were heckled until the king ordered the verbal attacks to stop.

  Just one big happy family.

  Babylon.

  The morning after the symposium, we formed the entire army in battle order on the plain of Mesopotamia. Despite dykes and irrigation ditches, we could march unimpeded. Indeed, Mesopotamia was the ideal ground for infantry – three thousand years of tillage had levelled it as flat as a skillet.

  We advanced on the city in battle order, and we made camp the next night within sight of the place, a great mound twinkling with lights in the middle distance. It had an air of unreality.

  Babylon was, and is, one of the mightiest, if not the greatest, city on the wheel of the earth. No one knows how many people live in its mighty compass, but I have heard that it has a million inhabitants. The girdle of walls, mud brick, fired brick and stone has a greater circumference than that of any other city walls I’ve ever seen, and despite that, the suburbs spill out of the city gates like wine from a drunkard’s lips, so that there is a further girdle of intense habitation all around the city, many stades thick. The dense population is only possible because Mesopotamia has some of the finest soil and farmland in the world, and the two great rivers – the Tigris and the Euphrates – allow the produce to be floated directly to the city, which is also at the head of navigation, so that ocean-going ships can depart straight for the eastern seas from Babylon.

  Babylon has ten times the population of Athens, the greatest city of our world.

  Babylon could, all by itself, field a mighty army. Only sixty years before Marathon, a king of Babylon had challenged the whole might of Persia by himself, fielding a magnificent army of armoured cavalry and chariots. He had only narrowly been defeated.

  I had a hard time sleeping. The fever was on me – the mosquitoes were like nothing I had ever seen. In god-ridden Mesopotamia, they didn’t have a mosquito god, which I found surprising. I would have done a great deal to propitiate such a god.

  I eventually got to sleep, only to have a dream that took me high over the Great Pyramid at Chios, and then, as if driven by a catapult, I did not so much fall as was driven down and down, into the very top of the magnificent structure, and I awoke covered in sweat. I threw off Thaïs’s leg and my military cloak and stumbled out into the oppressive heat.

  The only peace from the flies was by the fires, where the heat was worst.

  A fever, high heat and bugs. I don’t think that man can know a greater torment, unless it is the pain of a bad wound and the sure knowledge of coming death.

  I settled by the smoke of a fire. I had lost my way in the camp. I was lost, or uncaring. Even now, I scarcely remember it.

  But Philip, the veteran phylarch of Craterus’s taxeis, came and sat by me in the smoke. He had wine, and I drank some.

  ‘Fucking bugs,’ he said. ‘I hate ’em.’

  After some time he pointed at the distant, twinkling lights. ‘Think they’ll fight?’ he asked me.

  ‘No,’ I said. Thaïs was sure they wouldn’t fight. Her sources were new and untried, but we had the feeling that the Babylonians, inscrutable in their religious bigotry, hated the Persians far more than they hated us.

  But a city of a million men could field an army of a hundred thousand. And again, as at Gaza, the army was tired. Victorious, but tired. The elite cavalry units had been in continuous combat since midsummer, and everyone – every single unit – had been engaged at Arabela.

  I wasn’t exactly afraid.

  Neither was Philip. He fingered his beard. ‘I’d rather they fought,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’ said another veteran, who plonked himself down by the fire and coughed in the smoke. ‘Fucking bugs. Ares, where do they come from?’

  ‘Farted out of Hades’ arsehole,’ Amyntas son of Philip said. A gross impiety, if you like, but it summed up what we all felt.

  The other man held out his hand for the wine. ‘May I?’ he asked, and I recognised Draco, the man I’d faced – and lost to – in the pankration at Tyre.

  We passed the win
e and he drank, coughed, drank again. ‘Who would you rather we fought?’

  ‘Not we, damn it. I want to fight the Babylonians. I hear they aren’t worth shit as fighters, and if we fight them, we get to sack their city.’ He grinned. ‘Sack Babylon. Just think of it.’

  Draco roared. ‘Good thought. Let’s sack it anyway. The king will forgive us eventually.’

  ‘What if it’s too big to sack?’ Amyntas son of Philip asked.

  ‘Let’s try!’ Draco said. ‘I’ve never fucked three women at once, either, and I might not be able to do it.’ He grinned. ‘But it wouldn’t hurt to try.’

  The wicked old man glanced at me.

  I was being teased. I was an officer, in their space, and they were having a little fun.

  I sighed. ‘I don’t think we’ll get to sack Babylon,’ I said.

  Draco nodded. ‘When exactly do we all get rich and march home?’ he asked. ‘Babylon? Susa? Persepolis?’

  He grinned, but I thought he meant business.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Well, if you don’t know, strategos—’

  ‘I don’t, friends. We’ll go home when Darius is beaten, I suppose, and the empire is ours.’ I noticed that there were a dozen men around the fire. We cycled almost unconsciously through the smoke – in, out, duck the bugs, get overheated, back to the bugs.

  But their faces started to swim, and I began to see men who weren’t there – who couldn’t be there. Pyrrhus. Isokles. A dozen other men who had been my tent companions or my officers.

  ‘When will we go home?’ Pyrrhus asked.

  ‘My wife expects me for the planting,’ said a young spearman with a spearhead-sized hole in his chest.

  ‘What’s she planting, eh?’ asked Draco, with a laugh, and Isokles roared and slapped his thigh just below the groin, where blood flowed.

  They were laughing, and my head was spinning . . .

  Polystratus put a hand under my elbow and another under my arm and he got me on my feet and walked me back to my tent, where there wasn’t the hint of a breeze, and I lay in a wine stupor until I fell asleep.